Meditation of Critical Philosophy or Transcendental Idealism (Kant, Schopenhauer)

I. Transcendental Idealism: Axiomatic propositions

 

1. “The world is my representation”

“The world is my representation” is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which everyone must recognize as true as soon as he understands it, although it is not a proposition that everyone understands as soon as he hears it.” 

 

2. We have no access to reality as it is apart from our experience.

For that the objective existence of things is conditioned by a representer of them, and that consequently the objective world exists only as representation, is no hypothesis, still less a peremptory pronouncement, or even a paradox put forward for the sake of debate or argument. On the contrary, it is the surest and simplest truth…. (World as Will and Representation, vol.2, p.5)

“Nothing is more certain than that no one ever came out of himself in order to identify himself immediately with things different from him; but everything of which he has certain, sure, and hence immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness. Beyond this consciousness, therefore, there can be no immediate certainty…”

True idealism…is not the empirical, but the transcendental. It leaves the empirical reality of the world untouched, but adheres to the fact that all object, and hence the empirically real in general, is conditioned by the subject in a twofold manner. In the first place, it is conditioned materially, or as object in general, since an objective existence is conceivable only in place of a subject and as the representation of the subject. In the second place, it is conditioned formally, since the mode and manner of the object’s existence, in other words, of its being represented (space, time, causality), proceed from the subject, and are predisposed in the subject. . . . This proves that the whole of the material world with its bodies in space, extended and, by means of time, having causal relations with one another, and everything attached to this – all this is not something existing independently of our mind, but something that has its fundamental presuppositions in our brain functions, by means of which and in which alone is such an objective order of things possible. For time, space, and causality, on which those real and objective events rest are themselves nothing more than functions of the brain; so that, therefore, this unchangeable order of things, affording the criterion and the clue to their empirical reality, itself comes first from the brain, and has its credentials from that alone.”

 

…things and their whole mode and manner of existence are inseparably associated with our consciousness of them. Therefore he who has clearly grasped this soon reaches the conviction that the assumption that things exist as such, even outside and independently of our consciousness, is really absurd.

 

GL: The thought is this: since we cannot transport ourselves outside of our conscious awareness, and compare our ideas (representations, Vorstellungen) of things (e.g. trees, people, the state, etc.) with the things as they are in reality, we have no basis for believing that our ideas of things conform to reality. On the contrary, our very idea of reality is conditioned by the way our brains have to represent reality if we are to have any experience at all. It is as though consciousness were enclosed in a submarine without windows or any direct access to the sea. All we can know is mediated through our instruments that relay data through electrical impulses to our instrument panels. We cannot get out of our submarines to compare what is on our instrument panels to the sea itself, and indeed, we have no basis for asserting that the ways our instruments (our sense, programmed by our brains) can translate what we call the sea (reality) at all into ideas/concepts. Thus our ideas/concepts reveal only the nature of our consciousness – not that of which we are conscious.

  Again, the core assumption is this: what we experience cannot ever in principle be taken for reality; it must always be assumed to be our subjective or intersubjective way of processing reality. Everything we experience, and the very conditions for experiencing anything at all – time, space, causality, object, plurality, unity, self, etc. – cannot be understood as real. Even our bodily life, even our experience of our conscious selves: not reality; nothing but appearance, phenomena.

   Everything we can possibly experience – except for the sublime (later) – is appearance. I cannot get outside my mind, which is in time, which experiences time flowing by, to check and see whether my experience of time matches the way reality is apart from my experience of it. That would be like asking a character in a Dickens novel, say, Scrooge, to get outside the novel to see whether his world is real. Or like asking someone in the Matrix to get outside the Matrix (well, that was possible in the movie: so to make the analogy right, you would have to exclude that possibility).

   Phenomenal and noumenal world, the world as it is beyond experience, the transcendental world: no time, so space, no matter or substance of any kind, no objects or plurality – in short, nothing that belongs to our experience of the world of appearances can be attributed to reality. No concept or idea applied to it, except negatively: reality is not in time or space; there is no cause and effect in the real world; there are no substances in the real world. Reality from our point of view is Nothing, No-thing. It is beyond Being.

   Within the phenomenal world of experience, as a condition of the possibility of any experience, the world must be experienced as objects existing in space and time, subject to the principle of causality (or sufficient reason). The appearances we take as the world – and as described by science – exist within a closed system: not because nature is a closed system, as physics assumes, but because our brains can only experience anything at all in such a way.  

     This turns everything on its head. For example, in classical mechanics (Newtonian physics), if the initial conditions of a system are known with sufficient precision and the laws of physics governing the system are deterministic (such as Newton's laws of motion), then the future evolution of the system can be determined with certainty – and the past as well. We can say whether there was a full moon or not when Ceasar crossed the Rubicon. But this is only because our brains are, as it were, programmed to experience the world in this way. For Schopenhauer it is all like a dream – the moon, time, space, causality – it all exists only in our minds.

     In classical thought, reality was believed to imprint itself on the unclouded mind. We could know what a thing was. The essence of a triangle was thought to lie in its defining characteristics, namely, having three straight sides and three angles that add up to 180 degrees. By grasping these essential features, one can understand what it means to be a triangle. But this is not the mind conforming itself to an independent reality for transcendental Ideality, but the mind becoming aware of part of its own programming – in this case, the program determining how space is experienced. A human being was an animal that was different from all other animals by being self-conscious, aware of itself in time and aware of its own mortality, language-using and symbol-creating, able to know to a certain extent a knowable universe, etc. Again, what is happening here is the mind examining how it has been programmed to produce and then experience an appearance of its own making.

      The best analogy might be the creation of virtual worlds by game designers, such as Minecraft. The world as it appears on the screen, the events that happen and can happen in that world, the kinds of objects that can appear in that world – all this is the function of the programming, and it is the programming that determines what we can experience in that virtual world. We know the world on the screen in virtual but suffer from the illusion that our everyday world and the world as revealed by science is somehow real. It is just as virtual as Minecraft, even if we can’t identify the source of the programming.

    This is not crazy. All of our access to the world comes through our senses. Our senses without exception pass information to the brain through electrical impulses that the brain translates into images and experience. If an engineer could mechanically feed the brain with the right electronic impulses, that engineer could make us experience whatever he wanted. It is the electrical impulses that the brain directly interprets and not the objects in the world. How can we know that the brain’s interpretation corresponds to anything real given that we cannot get outside of the brain to compare?

    Kant and Schopenhauer were aware that his implied – all things being equal – metaphysical skepticism. We can know nothing about reality. Everything we know is confined to what we can experience, to the world of appearances generated by our programming.  But they at least thought the phenomenal world was basically the same for everyone: Euclid described the programming used to produce and experience space, Newton the programming used to produce and experience nature, etc. At least we could be aware of the programming. But now we believe that space can be programmed in a vast variety of ways, from non-Euclidean geometries to the works of Escher and the surrealists; nature from Einsteinian physics to Van Gogh. Etc. Cultural and artistic variety in the human species means much of our experience is determined through cultural and even individual software working to interpret the hardware components of space, times, cause, object, etc. Reality – that which is unconceptualized, uninterpreted, undescribed – doesn’t force anything on us (though the practical needs of survival might).

      Nelson Goodman draws the logical conclusion of this way of thinking in Ways of Worldmaking: reality cannot serve as a foundation to which our various world versions can be compared to see which one is right. The idea of reality – a real world existing undescribed, undepicted, unperceived – is an empty concept, an X as Kant put it. There are as many worlds are there are world versions, one of which can be considered reality. All are phenomena, appearances. If you – within certain logical constraints – want to live in a world with 72 genders or 2, reality will not stand in your way. It’s like you – whatever that means, for the self is also an appearance, a “construct” in the parlance of our times – have just agreed to have different experience-software downloaded into your brain.

 

I am not finished with this; I want to say something about the different ways Kant and Schopenhauer thought within this framework and show its influence on contemporary culture. But I will pause here. I agree that the mind cannot simply mirror reality; that our concepts cannot be like wax imprinted by reality so that they copy reality somehow. But I reject any philosophy that cuts us entirely off from reality, that makes the world absolutely phenomenal, appearance. There is a position in between the mind-as-a-mirror-of-nature and the mind as the producer of nature. Schopenhauer himself gives a couple of excellent metaphors that support what I think and, as I believe, work against the transcendental idealism that I have crudely sketched here.  

    

Just as we know of the earth only the surface, not the great, solid masses of the interior, so we know empirically of the things of the world nothing at all except their appearances, i.e. the surface.

We complain of the darkness in which we live out our lives: we do not understand the nature of existence in general; we especially do not know the relation of our own self to the rest of existence. Not only is our life short, our knowledge is limited entirely to it since we can see neither back before our birth nor out beyond our death, so that our consciousness is as it were a lightening-flash momentarily illuminating the night….  (“On the Antithesis of Thing in Itself and Appearance,” from the essays).  

 

Now if transcendental idealism is right, a radical metaphysical skepticism follows. We cannot know reality, and thus we must give up philosophy as it was traditionally conceived. Like castaways on a deserted island who find a message in a bottle washed up on shore, believing it from the outside world, only to find that they themselves had written the message (Peter Kreeft). We can become aware of the programs that run our experience, but not what the world is like outside of our programmed experience.

   But Schopenhauer’s metaphors, we do know something, the surface of things, the world as revealed in a flash of lightning. The surface is not appearance; what we see in the lightning flash is not appearance. Thus I deny the axiom that the world is not but my representation, or rather, that my representation cannot reveal anything of the world, even if it can’t reveal the whole.

     We cannot know all of reality from a point outside it, outside our consciousness, from God’s point of view; but we can experience the surface. And that is not nothing. I experience my children through my senses but also my love for them. I don’t know if they were accidents of nature, creatures of God, or what. But I do know they are real and loveable. I know that a world version, a metaphysics, that denied their reality, that saw them as nothing but appearance, or nothing but a collection of atoms in space and time, would be missing something essential even. This would be my counter philosophy that I need to unpack.

   But I would start off like this. A bee sees this:

A human sees this:

Which is the true way of seeing? That probably makes no sense. But we and the bee both see something, a flower, a poppy. If the poppy were an illusion, the bee couldn't get its nectar or transport its pollen. The thing itself is what we both see. It is not virtual. But we both see it from a finite perspective. What we can't achieve is the vision (knowledge) of a perfect, absolute consciousness - God.