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Transcendental idealism is a philosophical system[1] founded by GermanphilosopherImmanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant'sepistemological program[2] is found throughout hisCritique of Pure Reason (1781). Bytranscendental (a term that deserves special clarification[3]) Kant means that his philosophical approach to knowledge transcends mere consideration ofsensory evidence and requires an understanding of themind's innate modes of processing that sensory evidence.[4]
In the "Transcendental Aesthetic" section of theCritique of Pure Reason, Kant outlines howspace andtime are pure forms of humanintuition contributed by our own faculty of sensibility. Space and time do not have an existence "outside" of us, but are the "subjective" forms of our sensibility and hence the necessarya priori conditions under which the objects we encounter in our experience can appear to us at all. Kant describes time and space not only as "empirically real" buttranscendentally ideal.[5]
Kant argues that the conscioussubject recognizes theobjects of experience not as they arein themselves, but only the way theyappear to us under the conditions of oursensibility. This fits his model of perception outlined at the outset of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" by which he distinguishes the empirical reality of appearances studied by theempirical sciences from thenoumenal reality of things as they are in themselves, independent of empirical observation.[6] Thus Kant's doctrine restricts the scope of ourcognition to appearances given to our sensibility and denies that we can possess cognition of things as they are in themselves, i.e. things as they are independently of how we experience them through our cognitive faculties.[7] Kant mentioned happiness to be the goddess both epistemologically and in realistic dichotomy.
Although it influenced the course of subsequentGerman philosophy dramatically, exactly how to interpret this concept was a subject of some debate among 20th-century philosophers. Kant first described it in hisCritique of Pure Reason and distinguished his view from contemporary views ofrealism andidealism, but it remains the case that philosophers do not agree on how sharply Kant differs from each of these positions.
Transcendental idealism is associated, if not identified, with theformalistic idealism Kant discusses in hisProlegomena to any Future Metaphysics, although recent research has tended to dispute this identification. Transcendental idealism was also adopted as a label by the subsequent German philosophersJohann Gottlieb Fichte andFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling,Arthur Schopenhauer, and in the early 20th century byEdmund Husserl in the novel form of transcendental-phenomenological idealism.
Kant presents an account of how we intuit (German:anschauen) objects and accounts of space and of time. Before Kant, some thinkers, such asLeibniz, had come to the conclusion that space and time were not things, but only the relations among things. Contrary to thinkers, including Newton, who maintained that space and time were real things or substances, Leibniz had arrived at a radically different understanding of the universe and the things found in it. According to hisMonadology, all things that humans ordinarily understand as interactions between and relations among individuals (such as their relative positions in space and time) have their being in the mind of God but not in the Universe where we perceive them to be. In the view of realists, individual things interact by physical connection and the relations among things are mediated by physical processes that connect them to human brains and give humans a determinate chain of action to them and correct knowledge of them.
Kant was aware of problems with both of these positions. He had been influenced by the physics ofNewton and understood that there is a physical chain of interactions between things perceived and the one who perceives them. However, an important function of mind is to structure incoming data and to process it in ways that make it other than a simple mapping of outside data.[8]: 57 Gottfried Martin says:
If we try to keep within the framework of what can be proved by the Kantian argument, we can say that it is possible to demonstrate the empirical reality of space and time, that is to say, the objective validity of all spatial and temporal properties in mathematics and physics. But this empirical reality involves transcendental ideality; space and time are forms of human intuition, and they can only be proved valid for things as they appear to us and not for things as they are in themselves.[9]: 41
The salient element here is that space and time, rather than being realthings-in-themselves or empirically mediated appearances (German:Erscheinungen), are the very forms of intuition (German:Anschauung) by which we must perceive objects. They are hence neither to be considered properties that we may attribute to objects in perceiving them, nor substantial entities of themselves. They are in that sense subjective, yet necessary, preconditions of any given object insofar as this object is an appearance and not athing-in-itself. Humans necessarily perceive objects as located in space and in time. This condition of experience is part of what it means for a human to cognize an object, to perceive and understand it as something both spatial and temporal: "Bytranscendental idealism I mean the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only, not things in themselves, and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition..."[10] Kant argues for these several claims in the section of theCritique of Pure Reason entitled the "Transcendental Aesthetic". That section is devoted to inquiry into thea priori conditions of human sensibility, i.e. the faculty by which humans intuit objects. The following section, the "Transcendental Logic", concerns itself with the manner in which objects are thought.
Arthur Schopenhauer takes Kant's transcendental idealism as the starting point for his own philosophy, which he presents inThe World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer described transcendental idealism briefly as a "distinction between the phenomenon and the thing in itself", and a recognition that only the phenomenon is accessible to us because "we know neither ourselves nor things as they are in themselves, but merely as they appear."[11] In volume 1 of theParerga and Paralipomena ("Fragments for the History of Philosophy"), Schopenhauer writes:
Now in the first place, Kant understands bytranscendental the recognition of thea priori and thus merely formal element in our knowledgeas such, in other words, the insight that such knowledge is independent of experience, indeed prescribes for this even the unalterable rule whereby it must turn out. Such insight is bound up with the understanding why such knowledge is this and has this power, namely because it constitutes theform of our intellect, and thus in consequence of its subjective origin ...Transcendental is the philosophy that makes us aware of the fact that the first and essential laws of this world that are presented to us are rooted in our brain and are therefore knowna priori. It is calledtranscendental because itgoes beyond the whole given phantasmagoria to the origin thereof. Therefore, as I have said, only theCritique of Pure Reason and generally the critical (that is to say,Kantian) philosophy are transcendental.
— Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. I, "Fragments for the History of Philosophy," § 13
Further on in §13, Schopenhauer says of Kant's doctrine of the ideality of space and time: "Before Kant, it may be said, we were in time; now time is in us. In the first case, time isreal and, like everything lying in time, we are consumed by it. In the second case, time isideal; it lies within us."
Schopenhauer contrasted Kant's transcendental critical philosophy with Leibniz's dogmatic philosophy.
With Kant thecritical philosophy appeared as the opponent of this entire method [of dogmatic philosophy]. It makes its problem just those eternal truths (principle of contradiction, principle of sufficient reason) that serve as the foundation of every such dogmatic structure, investigates their origin, and then finds this to be in man's head. Here they spring from the forms properly belonging to it, which it carries in itself for the purpose of perceiving and apprehending the objective world. Thus here in the brain is the quarry furnishing the material for that proud, dogmatic structure. Now because the critical philosophy, in order to reach this result, had to gobeyond the eternal truths, on which all the previous dogmatism was based, so as to make these truths themselves the subject of investigation, it becametranscendental philosophy. From this it follows also that the objective world as we know it does not belong to the true being of things-in-themselves, but is its merephenomenon, conditioned by those very forms that liea priori in the human intellect (i.e., the brain); hence the world cannot contain anything but phenomena.
— The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, Appendix: "Critique of the Kantian Philosophy"
InThe Bounds of Sense,P. F. Strawson suggests a reading of Kant's firstCritique that, once accepted, forces rejection of most of the original arguments, including transcendental idealism. Strawson contends that, had Kant followed out the implications of all that he said, he would have seen that there were many self-contradictions implicit in the whole.[12]: 403
Strawson views the analytic argument of thetranscendental deduction as the most valuable idea in the text, and regards transcendental idealism as an unavoidable error in Kant's greatly productive system. In Strawson's traditional reading (also favored in the work ofPaul Guyer andRae Langton), the Kantian termphenomena (literally, things that can be seen—from Greek:phainomenon, "observable") refers to the world of appearances, or the world of "things" sensed.[13]: 99–101 They are tagged as "phenomena" to remind the reader that humans confuse these derivative appearances with whatever may be the forever unavailable "things in themselves" behind our perceptions. The necessary preconditions of experience, the components that humans bring to their apprehending of the world, the forms of perception such asspace and time, are what makea priori judgments possible, but all of this process of comprehending what lies fundamental to human experience fails to bring anyone beyond the inherent limits of human sensibility. Kant's system requires the existence ofnoumena to prevent a rejection of external reality altogether, and it is this concept (senseless objects of which we can have no real understanding) to which Strawson objects in his book.
InKant's Transcendental Idealism,Henry E. Allison proposes a new reading that opposes, and provides a meaningful alternative to, Strawson's interpretation.[14] Allison argues that Strawson and others misrepresent Kant by emphasising what has become known as the two-worlds reading (a view developed byPaul Guyer). This—according to Allison, false—reading of Kant's phenomena/noumena distinction suggests that phenomena and noumena are ontologically distinct from each other. It concludes on that basis that we somehow fall short of knowing the noumena due to the nature of the very means by which we comprehend them. On such a reading, Kant would himself commit the very fallacies he attributes to thetranscendental realists. On Allison's reading, Kant's view is better characterized as a two-aspect theory, where noumena and phenomena refer to complementary ways of considering an object. It is the dialectic character of knowing, rather thanepistemological insufficiency, that Kant wanted most to assert.
Allison's two-aspect interpretation also serves as an at least partially successful defense of transcendental idealism, particularly within anglophoneanalytic philosophy. Although his interpretive position is contested among Kant scholars, includingAnja Jauernig in her 2021 monographThe World According to Kant,[15] Allison'sKant's Transcendental Idealism uncontroversially helped start the late-20th century revival of contemporary interest in Kant's metaphysical, or as Allison describes it 'metaepistemological', transcendental idealism.[16]
Opposing Kantian transcendental idealism is the doctrine ofnaïve realism, that is, the proposition that the world is knowable as it really is, without any consideration of the knower's manner of knowing. This has been propounded by philosophers such asHilary Putnam,[17]John Searle,[18] andHenry Babcock Veatch.[citation needed] Naïve or direct realism claims, contrary to transcendental idealism, that perceived objects exist in the way that they appear, in and of themselves, independent of a knowing spectator's mind.[citation needed] Kant referred to this view as "transcendental realism", which he defined as purporting the existence of objects in space and time independent from our sensibility.[19]
This is one of the first conclusions of'transcendental idealism', Kant's own name for his philosophical system, and we need to pause to consider it carefully to avoid some standard misunderstandings.
Kant prefaces theCritique with a lament about the sad state of metaphysics. But his program for reform is thoroughly epistemological. It is only by working our way to a better understanding of the sources and limits of human knowledge that we will be able to figure out what metaphysical questions can fruitfully be asked.
Because of the unusual nature of his enterprise, Kant gave it a special name:'transcendental' philosophy. The goal of transcendental philosophy is to investigate the necessary conditions for knowledge with a view to showing that some of those necessary conditions area priori, universal and necessary features of our knowledge, that derive from the mind's own ways of dealing with the data of the senses. The term'transcendental' has often been a source of confusion, because it includes three not obviously related ideas: (1) the idea that some conditions are necessary for knowledge and (2) the idea that some claims area priori, in stating necessary and universal features of the world, and (3) the idea that some features of our knowledge area priori, in the sense that they do not derive from sensory evidence, but from our minds' ways of dealing with sensory evidence. What is distinctive about Kant's philosophy is his belief that some of the necessary conditions for knowledge are alsoa priori, in all four sense of that term: they are universal, necessary, cannot be established by sensory experience, and reflect the mind's ways of dealing with sensory experience; the term'transcendental' constantly draws attention to that complex doctrine.
The effort to answer this question, to study the inherent structure of the mind, or the innate laws of thought, is what Kant calls 'transcendental philosophy', because it is a problem transcending sense experience. 'I call knowledge transcendental which is occupied not so much with objects, as witha priori concepts of objects'—with our modes of correlating our experience into knowledge.
[Kant] distinguishes transcendental idealism from transcendental realism: 'To this [transcendental] idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances [...] as things in themselves [...], which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding.'
