Problems of Epistemology

The Problem of the Origin of Knowledge

Kant's Formalist Rationalism

The question at the heart of the debate between rationalism and empiricism, as articulated above, is this: does knowledge of objects exist a priori or through pure reason? Rationalism affirms this: through pure thought, we attain absolute knowledge of things that cannot be acquired through the senses. Empiricism, on the other hand, answers in the negative: our knowledge of objects is derived exclusively from perception, leading to the conclusion that we possess no absolute knowledge.

Kant's position involves taking the valid half from each of the opposing theories and uniting them into a new synthesis: against Humean empiricism, he reestablishes the old dogma of rationalism—knowledge of objects a priori does exist; against the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff, he adds that knowledge pertains only to things as they appear, not as they are in themselves. The connection between phenomenalism or idealism and rationalism is a distinctive feature of Kant's epistemology; thus far, rationalism has always been realistic, whereas empiricism, in the works of Berkeley and Hume, has become idealistic.

The first half of the Critique of Pure Reason—the aesthetics and analytics—aims to develop a new system of epistemology based on this synthesis. The second half, the dialectic, elaborates the relationship of the new philosophy to the old metaphysics: it reveals the impossibility of purely rational psychology, cosmology, and theology, essentially denouncing realistic rationalism after the first half has established the possibility of phenomenalist rationalism. Here, we are primarily concerned with the first half, the conditional restoration of rationalism.

According to Hume, there cannot be universal and necessary judgments about facts; all our natural laws—mechanical, chemical, and physiological, including the very law of causality—hold only presumptively universal significance. Kant argues that this represents a profound skepticism; if that is the case, then no genuine knowledge exists whatsoever; for knowledge, unlike the associations possessed by animals, is characterized by universality and necessity. Furthermore, Humean skepticism does not stop at physics and metaphysics; it necessarily extends to mathematics as well. In doing so, he leads himself to an absurdity; the actual existence of this science demonstrates that the foundations of empiricism are insufficient. The task, therefore, is to demonstrate how these sciences are possible: how pure mathematics is possible, how pure natural science is possible, and how metaphysics is possible. Or, to express the issue in a general formula: how are synthetic judgments a priori possible? That is to say, how are they possible in an epistemological sense, rather than a psychological one? To put it another way: how do judgments that do not derive from experience (a priori judgments) and which are not logical deductions (non-analytic judgments) acquire the right and dignity of objective knowledge (synthetic judgments)?

This is Kant's problem. His answer is as follows: such judgments acquire objective significance only insofar as the understanding itself produces the objects about which they make assertions; it knows objects a priori as it itself produces them. This occurs in mathematics, where the objects are constructed according to pure concepts of intuition. The properties and relations of lines, angles, triangles, and circles can be articulated in synthetic judgments a priori because these objects are produced by the mathematician. In a certain sense, the same applies to physics. The subjects of physics are the phenomena of nature; yet phenomena, in a certain way, constitute products of the subject to whom they present themselves, and as such, they are conditioned by the general nature and activity of the subject. Thus, if by nature we mean the totality of phenomena—and physics deals with nature only in this sense—then a priori knowledge of nature and all its objects can indeed exist, specifically from the perspective of their general form of manifestation. Conversely, knowledge of nature a priori cannot exist if we understand nature as an absolute reality, existing independently of the knowing subject. The understanding, of course, cannot know anything about things as they exist in themselves a priori. However, it cannot learn anything about them a posteriori either, for in order to know something about them, they would have to enter our representations, that is, become phenomena. Therefore, metaphysics, understood as knowledge of things in themselves, is altogether impossible. It is only possible if we understand it as nothing other than "pure natural science," that is, a universal phenomenology of nature.

Such is the line of thought in Kantian rationalism, as most clearly articulated in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, an explanatory and defensive work that appeared following the Critique of Pure Reason. In a certain way, this work most distinctly reveals the tendencies of Kant's thinking; it sharply delineates the opposition to Hume. This is the outcome of the reception that the Critique of Pure Reason received from contemporary Germans; they primarily noticed the idealistic and skeptical elements of the Critique, overlooking its rationalist aspects. They recognized in it only an opposition to their own thoughts, the prevailing school of philosophy, rather than an opposition to Humean empiricism. The latter was even unfamiliar to them; Hume's skeptical considerations had yet to disturb their satisfaction with the rational theology, cosmology, and psychology of Wolff's system.

On the other hand, in this exposition, the initial ideas are somewhat distorted in places. If mathematics and physics are sometimes presented as existing and actual sciences that fundamentally do not require epistemological justification for their possibility, this contradicts Kant's original view. The starting point of critical philosophy is rather as follows: these sciences indeed exist, but their objective significance is threatened by Humean skepticism. The task, then, is to preserve them, that is, to justify their objective significance. Their factuality signifies nothing other than that certain propositions, claiming universal and necessary character, simultaneously assert objectivity. Take, for example, the proposition that matter is neither created nor destroyed. This assertion presents itself as a universal and necessary judgment; therefore, if it is indeed so, it must be a priori, since experience does not lead to universality and necessity—a point on which Kant fully agrees with Hume. On the other hand, it is a judgment claiming objectivity, meaning it states that the creation and destruction of matter cannot occur in reality. This is not an analytical judgment, such as "every body is extended, divisible," or "a part is less than its whole," but rather a synthetic judgment, an existential proposition. Similarly, the statement "nothing happens without a cause" claims to be both a universal and necessary judgment and a statement of objective significance. The same applies to the axioms of geometry; a physicist, without further argumentation, attributes objective significance to them. Likewise, he assumes that the theorems developed from definitions and axioms, and produced through their calculation, are valid not merely in a mathematical sense but also in reality—that the nature of things conforms to mathematical knowledge. How can this assumption be justified? How can it be proven that these propositions about the conservation of matter, or about universal natural laws, are not merely presumptions of presumptive universal significance, as Hume suggests, but genuinely necessary and universal laws of nature?

Kant addresses this by invoking a correction in the notion of experience. The ordinary conception, logically articulated in sensationalist theories, understands experience as the passive reception of impressions produced by reality. The soul is represented, in Locke's terms, as a blank slate upon which things inscribe their marks. Certainly, the slate cannot know a priori which marks it will receive; and if the soul is such a thing, and if experience consists of such a process, then a priori knowledge, along with the universality and necessity of knowledge, is impossible. But this assumption is false. Knowledge, even empirical knowledge, is not passively received content from the external world; it is the product of the spontaneous activity of the soul. Certainly, it is not absolutely spontaneous activity: the impetus for this activity comes from the environment; yet "experience" arises only because "affections" are processed and formed by the mind. Experience is not a haphazard heap or a "swarm" of sensations, but a system of phenomena linked according to principles; thus, we envision nature, the subject of experience, as a unified system of facts governed by laws.

And thus, the fact that nature represents something more than a mere accumulation of sensations—red, sweet, hard, liquid, a variety of qualities and quantities—is not an action of sensation or the merit of impressions; rather, it is the work of the mind. The mind, with its dual aspects of sensibility and understanding, comprehends and shapes, distributes and dissects the given diversity in impressions through its inherent activities, which may be designated as functions of synthesis, uniting the dispersed and diverse into a whole. These functions of the mind must, of course, be present at every point in their manifestation, experience, as its formal determination; thus, from the perspective of form, nature can be known a priori. Just as the form of things prepared according to the same template is known a priori, so too can all products of the human mind—that is, all of nature and all objects within it—be known a priori by their form.

To discern what occurs in nature as a result of the formative activity of the mind, one can look for uniformity within the diversity. The filling of space with resisting forces varies for different places and at different times; qualities change, yet space with its determinations remains the same everywhere and always, such that any location can substitute for any other. Likewise, time remains the same everywhere and always, despite the variability of its content. The overarching structure of reality is likewise consistent throughout; causes and effects may vary, yet the relationship of causality remains constant in all times and places. Similarly, another fundamental scheme of reality emerges in the relationship between substance and accident, the constant and the changing.

Following this formal aspect of experience and paying attention to the identical constructive factors present in every experience, Kant arrives at two types of elements of form: he calls them the forms of intuition and the forms of thought. The forms of intuition are the aforementioned two: space and time; the forms of thought, which he refers to as categories, he reduces to a round number of twelve through formal logic and its classification of judgments. Therefore, space and time are neither actual realities nor actual orders of existing things in themselves but are rather functions of synthesis inherent in the subject, synthesizing the diverse content of sensations. All sensations coalesce into a singular whole within the flow of time, such that each relates to the other in terms of simultaneity or a specific interval of time. All sensations of the external senses are unified in a connection we term the spatial world. Thus, through the functions of placement in space and time, a unified intuitive world of phenomena emerges. In this same sense, the functions of thought are forms of the distribution of intuitions, specifically their distribution in time. The foundational general premise asserts: all phenomena, in their existence, are governed by a priori rules determining their mutual relationships in time. Thus, it asserts further that the law of substantiality, in particular, contains in itself the constant as the very object and the changeable as its simple determination; and the law of causality states that everything that occurs (comes into being) presupposes something that it follows in accordance with the rule. It becomes more challenging for him to demonstrate how the remaining ten categories serve as structural elements of reality; most of them function merely as placeholders for empty spaces.

Now incorporating into our scheme the theory of this new rationalism, we can state the following. In response to the nature of the beginnings of rational knowledge, Kant asserts: they exist as manifestations of activity, as synthetic functions performed by the mind in a consistent manner everywhere and always. The aforementioned mathematical and physical axioms are formulas expressing these functions, and thus they constitute the beginnings of knowledge a priori. These functions are not innate; rather, like all functions, they are developed throughout life. However, this does not imply that they arise from external impressions; impressions are merely a contingent cause of their development. This is the conclusion that Leibniz arrived at in his "New Essays on Human Understanding," which he posited against Locke's "Essays." "Nihil est in intellectu, quod non antea fuerit in sensu," thus speaks empiricism, and it is entirely correct in this; yet one must add: "nisi intellectus ipse." All arises from experience, only not the capacity to experience.

This also provides an answer to the second question, which was: how can propositions not arising from experience still possess objective significance? The transcendental deduction, which, however, is by no means a model of precision and clarity, tortuously derives its answer from given assumptions: propositions that express the synthetic functions of our sensibility and understanding possess, by virtue of this, the significance of the laws of nature, as we understand by nature precisely what the whole world designates with this term: the totality of phenomena. Space and time, as forms of our intuition, simultaneously constitute the necessary forms of nature; nothing can be the object of our intuition that is not situated in space and time. All phenomena are extensive magnitudes, thus states the first foundational proposition of experience, the "axiom of intuition"; and therefore, the continuation could assert that all that can be demonstrated about extensiveness in general—its continuity and homogeneity, its unboundedness and infinite divisibility—holds true equally for the actual world. Similarly, all that mathematics develops regarding the relationships of space and time is true without further consideration for all things insofar as they possess spatiality and magnitude. Likewise, all that transcendental logic proves about the nature of understanding is applicable to things insofar as they exist for understanding; if the law of causality is a law of pure understanding, then it is simultaneously a law of nature. "The understanding does not draw its laws from nature but prescribes them to the latter."

In the preface to the second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason," Kant aptly compares the turn he has given to the theory of knowledge to the turn Copernicus gave to the astronomical worldview. Previously, phenomena in the heavens were explained by the movement of celestial bodies around the Earth; Copernicus simplified this by positing the motion of the observer. Similarly, empiricism explained knowledge as the impact of things upon the mind; Kant, in contrast, constructs knowledge based on the "rather strange" assumption that things conform to our concepts. Objects, by their form, are produced primarily by thought. Therefore, it is precisely this latter that can know them from this perspective even a priori and formulate its knowledge in universal and necessary propositions. The axioms of geometry and the law of causality possess necessary and universal significance for all objects of our experience.

This simultaneously provides the additional half of this rationalism: there cannot be rational knowledge where such determination of objects by understanding does not occur. "Things in themselves" are certainly not subject to the synthetic functions of our mind, and thus metaphysics in the old sense—that is, as rational knowledge of absolute reality—is impossible. The development of this theme, which is already posed everywhere in the analytic, constitutes the content of the second half of the "Critique"—the dialectic. With many almost unbearable inaccuracies and violence in presentation, it shows how in rational psychology, cosmology, and theology all attempts to apply understanding and its forms of thought to the determination of the very essence of things must have failed.

This is not the place to delve further into all this, nor into attempts to grant a "regulative" significance to the "ideas" that have lost their "constitutive" meaning for speculative reason and practical significance for will.

On the contrary, I would like to characterize Kant’s perspective with a concluding formula, which is common in his own work, although, as far as I know, he never articulates it expressively: the human mind stands in the middle between the animal and the divine mind. The knowledge of the animal consists of a "swarm of sensations," between which there exist accidental associative relations; yet it never reaches the opposition of subject and object, self and nature, and is thus not objective, not pertaining to objects; consequently, it is not true knowledge at all but merely a subjective sequence of representations. Neither is divine knowledge objective: divine understanding—so we conceive this notion—through its thought is the creator of reality; the latter does not stand before it as something alien, something given; the intellectus archetypes is a "contemplating understanding"; its thoughts are actual, concrete ideas, not abstract concepts; the soul of man is the "thought" of God. The thought of a creative artist can elucidate this concept; as here, so in God, all thoughts stand in an inner aesthetic-teleological connection. Human knowledge, however, is objective knowledge; it is a comprehending construction of some given. From the given diversity in sensation, the human mind, through its characteristic synthetic functions of intuition and thought, constructs a unified, law-governed system of objects, which we call nature. Objects exist in their form solely thanks to understanding; in being, however, the subject acknowledges their independence from itself and positions itself to them as an object among objects, in a naturally lawful relation.