The World According to Kant

In this excellent book, Anja Jauernig provides an exceptionally clear and illuminating reading of Kant’s critical idealism. Jauernig is explicit from the beginning that she is concerned with Kant’s idealism as a metaphysical doctrine, with “Kant’s account of what there is in the world, understood as the sum total of everything that has reality, including, in particular, his account of appearances and things in themselves and their relation to one another” (xii). Thus, her approach stands in contrast to the more common practice of discussing Kant’s philosophy—especially the major themes of the first Critique—primarily from an epistemological angle. Her take on Kant’s idealism might raise the eyebrows of those who read Kant as a philosopher who completely abandons traditional metaphysical questions (in favor of purely epistemological or methodological inquiries). But Jauernig engages with and argues (to my mind, rather persuasively) against such deflationary interpretations. Her account of Kant’s critical ontology does not, as far as I can tell, rest on unusually controversial assumptions about Kant’s views on cognition and knowledge; when there are potential issues, she conscientiously calls them to the reader’s attention. She also notes that she is working on another book project that will be focused on Kant’s epistemology.In this short review, I cannot do justice to the wealth of interesting material contained in The World According to Kant. I will just highlight some distinctive aspects of Jauernig’s interpretation. In some cases, I shall raise—briefly and tentatively—some critical questions.Jauernig defends what she calls “a version of the classic two-world view” (16), according to which spatiotemporal appearances (empirical objects) and nonsensible things in themselves are numerically distinct entities. For Jauernig, both types of entities genuinely exist, even though appearances are fully mind-dependent: “empirical objects have all of their spatial and temporal determinations in virtue of being represented by finite minds to have them”; but “a mind-dependent fact” or “a mind-dependent existence ... is still a kind of genuine fact” or “a kind of genuine existence” (155–56). Jauernig further argues that Kant posits the existence of things in themselves because he holds a “basic,” “rock-bottom” (307) conviction that (for him) does not require any further justification: namely, the conviction that the human mind is finite, thus “ontologically uncreative” (316). This implies that there is an essentially passive or receptive element in our cognition of real existents: in order to cognize empirical (mind-dependent) objects, our minds require material-sensational input from nonsensible (mind-independent) things in themselves.Jauernig combines these points in her account of what constitutes the empirical reality and genuine existence of sensible appearances. Since empirical objects, qua mind-dependent, “essentially are intentional objects of experience” (122), the conditions under which they exist are also conditions under which our representations yield (an intersubjective, objective) experience of the spatiotemporal world. In Jauernig’s view, there are two such conditions. First, they must conform to Kant’s formal conditions of empirical objecthood, which means (among other things) that cognizing subjects must combine given sensible data into a coherent, unified experience; the product of this synthesis must conform to our spatiotemporal forms of sensibility and to conceptual rules deriving from categories such as substance and causality. Second, our representations must also be “grounded in things in themselves in a properly direct way” (156): “The empirical reality of empirical objects consists not only in the conformity of experience to Kant’s formal conditions of objectivity but also in the grounding of empirical objects in transcendentally real things. Mere coherence and lawfulness is not enough for experience; experience also depends on ‘friction’ supplied by entities that exist at the transcendental level of reality, as it were” (247).Jauernig here provides a subtle, original account of empirical reality. It does, however, raise an epistemological worry. For Jauernig, the two conditions are individually necessary but only jointly sufficient for empirical reality. Thus, even if it were epistemically transparent to us whether our representations satisfy the formal conditions of experience and empirical reality (which is not altogether clear), ascertaining whether these representations present empirically real objects rather than empirically ideal pseudo-existents (such as a hallucinated pink elephant) would require us to discern, in addition, whether our representations are properly grounded in things in themselves. This, however, is impossible since we have no immediate epistemic access to things in themselves. The second condition of empirical reality is thus not “usable as” an “epistemic criteri[on]” (189). It seems to follow that we cannot ascertain whether our representations have empirical reality. If so, Jauernig’s account of empirical reality threatens to generate a skepticism about external objects (bodies) that Kant desperately seeks to avoid. Jauernig argues that Kant’s Refutation of Idealism comes to the rescue here. Her discussion of the notoriously difficult Refutation argument (190–93) is (once again) original and intriguing, but it is unclear whether it can solve the epistemic issues raised by her conception of empirical reality. Notably, the epistemically problematic idea that things in themselves provide our representations of bodies with empirical reality does not figure in Kant’s Refutation.Jauernig’s second condition of empirical reality invites a further question. This condition concerns a rather specific grounding relation: our representations relate to empirically real objects only if they are grounded in things in themselves in a properly direct fashion. As Jauernig puts it, “empirical objects are properly directly grounded in things in themselves, which gives them enough reality to count as existents” (116). But it is a bit unclear (to me, at least) what such ‘properly direct grounding’ amounts to, or how it differs from a supposedly indirect or ‘improper’ transcendental grounding. One might seek to explicate the notion of ‘properly direct grounding’ by forging a representational link between the things that do the grounding and the content of our representations. The model here would be contemporary views such as the causal theory of perception or some versions of epistemic externalism (such as reliabilism), where our perceptions qualify as objective since they are caused in a stable, nondeviant way by precisely those outer objects which our perceptions represent. But in Kant’s view, even our objective, veridical perceptions do not grasp the nonsensible things in themselves that ultimately ground them; rather, veridical perceptions represent sensible outer appearances, which (in Jauernig’s two-world view) are ontologically distinct from things in themselves. Now, if a representation fails to represent its ultimate ontological ground regardless of whether it counts as veridical or illusory, then the way in which the representation is grounded seems no better, no more proper or direct, in the veridical case. Even in dreams or illusions, our imagination recombines representational elements that are (ultimately) given to us via transcendental affection and thus are grounded in things in themselves. The epistemic impropriety of these combinations is due to the fact that our imaginative processing here violates the formal conditions of experience: it does not properly synthesize the representational elements according to the objective rules governing a spatiotemporal-categorial unity of experience. Thus, the impropriety here does not seem to concern the transcendental grounding relation itself but, rather, the way in which the material provided via transcendental grounding is taken up by the cognizing subject.Another interesting yet controversial thesis Jauernig defends in this context is the claim that the empirical world is determined by some actual, as opposed to merely possible, course of experience. “Actual experience” for Jauernig designates “the series of ... accounts” of what the empirical world is like “that the community of human minds develops throughout the course of history” (96). Jauernig’s penetrating analysis goes further and deeper than other scholarly treatments of this crucial topic that I am familiar with. I have always been attracted to the ‘possibilist’ view that what is empirically real depends on what human cognizers could encounter in the course of their experience, but her arguments against this view (see especially the one on p. 101) gave me real pause and shook my possibilist confidence. However, I am not quite persuaded by her actualist view, because it seems to have some strikingly counterintuitive implications. (Interestingly, Jauernig claims that it is rather the possibilist view which renders Kant’s idealism excessively counterintuitive; see her discussion on p. 99.) The central issue here is that the actual epistemic situation and development of human minds depends on a number of contingent, arbitrary circumstances; and on the actualist view, these circumstances also determine what really exists or happens in the empirical world. For instance, this view implies (if I understand it correctly) that if event E never figures in how the community of human minds happens to represent the empirical world (e.g., perhaps the one person who would have perceived E at time t1 got distracted by a fly just a moment earlier), it follows that E never occurs. In my view, biting this bullet makes Kant’s idealism violate our commonsense realist intuitions to a greater extent than possibilist accounts do. But, to reiterate, Jauernig raises intricate questions about whether the notion of possible experience (which the possibilist view requires) can be spelled out in a viable fashion that does not violate Kant’s overall commitments.My final comment concerns Jauernig’s two-world view that appearances and things in themselves are distinct entities. Questions about the relation between appearances and things in themselves have been the focus of much recent Kant scholarship. Jauernig’s discussion of these questions is characteristically subtle and illuminating, on both textual and philosophical grounds. But I am not sure that those who are attracted to (metaphysical, nondeflationary versions of) a two-aspect or one-object view need to be too strongly concerned about her arguments. Arguably, the claim that particular appearances or empirical beings can be strictly identified with particular transcendental beings (things in themselves or noumena) matters primarily (perhaps exclusively) with regard to human agents, where we want to say (among other things) that a free human being is morally accountable for its particular spatiotemporal actions, even though these actions are performed by the empirical self while the property of freedom belongs only to the noumenal or transcendental self. Here Jauernig’s account may well give proponents of one-object views everything they (should) want: for she allows that a “given empirical self and the corresponding transcendental self are both aspects” (or ontological parts) “of the same entity, namely, a particular human being” (289).I have briefly touched only on some select core themes in Jauernig’s rich and rewarding book. The World According to Kant provides a very careful, philosophically sophisticated, and textually rigorous treatment of Kant’s ontology that takes Kant seriously as a metaphysician whose thinking is shaped by but also departs from his intellectual tradition. I have learned a lot from it and strongly recommend it to anyone with interests in Kant, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, or the history of metaphysics

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Kantian Philosophy and Modern Interpretations · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History