Kant's Idealism

I/ The difference between Kant's and Hume's ideas in the necessary connection between cause and effect:


"Hume says that the necessary connection between cause and effect is the product of a habit of the mind. Kant claims to have removed Hume's doubts about causation, but for him too the necessary connection between cause and effect is only in our minds. Kant's position is therefore no real improvement over Hume's." This criticism is partly correct because both Kant and Hume say that the necessary connection between cause and effect is related to our minds, but is not totally correct because Kant's idea is a significant improvement over Hume's idea. First of all, Hume's causal knowledge of knowing future is related to matters of facts and to what he calls the psychology of belief, and this psychology of belief is a product of custom and habit, or the product or our minds that are formed based on our habits. Habits are experiences that we have, not concepts or a priori relation of ideas; however, when the mind forms a belief based on these habits, the mind uses a reasoning which is known as an inductive reasoning, and thus, the belief is a conception formed by experience. Hume says in his An Enquiry that:

I say then that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. This variety of terms, which may seem so unphilosophical, is intended only to express that act of the mind which renders realities, or what is taken for such, more present to us than fictions, causes them to weigh more in the thought, and gives them a superior influence on the passions and imagination. (509)

Thus, we see that according to Hume, belief is a conception; however, in my opinions, although belief is formed on experience, it is a constant conception which may be contrast with experience, and in that case, it is definitely a product of the mind. For example, I have an experience that riding a bicycle is a good exercise because it increases heart beats, develops muscles, and makes me become supple and strong, and this experience has formed such a belief that "riding bicycle is an excellent exercise." But in fact, do everyday in which I ride my bicycle, I always feel healthy and strong? No, if one day I have an accident on the road while riding the bicycle, or if one day, I practice it too much and get a hear attack? But saying so is not denying that my belief is true because the belief that riding the bicycle is an excellent exercise contains the whole conception about health, physiological and medical matters, etc. in that belief, not just the act of riding a bicycle. Thus, we now understand why belief is the product of a mind which is based on a physical habit because through the habit of riding a bicycle, we form a good conception about it.

But is it true that for Kant, the necessary connection between cause and effect is only in our mind as the above statement said? Yes, but Kant's theory about cause and effect is more complex than Hume's theory of belief. Recall that Hume defines that causal knowledge is not a relation of ideas but a statement of matters of fact. For example, what causes us to think that we will perform better on a test if we study? Why do we reason that way? Because to Hume, in the past, studying hard has improved our performances on tests; thus, when we reason that way, we are reasoning about the future based on the past. And a belief is a concept that is derived from this reasoning; that is why we believe that when we study hard, we do better on a test. Thus, Hume's causal knowledge about cause and effect is a posteriori judgement; however, Kant asserts something different than Hume's idea about a priori or a posteriori judgment; that is the concept of what Kant calls "synthetic judgment" that is different from Hume's analytic judgment. Hume's judgment is a priori relation of ideas that states that a proposition whose truth can be known by simply inspecting the ideas to see whether denying it involves a contradiction. For example, the definition "a triangle has three sides," or "two plus two is four" whose truths involve the contradictions of the definitions. The important point about those judgments is that they are analytic because the properties of a triangle are used to judge what a triangle is, and the property of three sides expresses nothing else in the predicate of that judgment about a triangle except what has been thought in the definition of that subject which is a triangle. Kant's judgment is a synthetic one which adds more features or more information than what is already contained or thought about the subject. For example, "a physician who is a medical doctor makes more money than a teacher" is a synthetic judgment because it shows that a medical doctor not only has a purpose of curing people but also has a purpose of getting rich. It is synthetic because not every doctor likes to get rich more than to help people, but there is a truth that many people want to become medical doctors to get rich. The concept of getting rich says something more than what is contained in the concept of being a doctor; it contains a synthetic concept. Understanding only the philantropic concept of a doctor is not sufficient to determine the truth of the above two synthetic-ideas judgment about a medical doctor. Thus to know the truth of the above proposition would amplify our knowledge of doctors beyond what we know about them. Another example about synthetic judgment is the following mathematical theorem that "the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to the sum of two right angles." Thus, by knowing and analyzing the definition that a triangle has three sides will not help us understand the above additional property about a triangle; therefore the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is a synthetic judgment. Kant says in Prolegomena:

Now special and time are the intitution that pure mathematics lays at the foundation of all its cognition and judgments that arise as both apodeictic and necessary. For mathematics must first present all its concepts in intuition and pure mathematics must do the same in pure intuition; that is, it must construct them. If it proceed in any other way, it would be impossible to make any progress, for mathematics does not proceed analytically by dissection of concepts, but synthetically, and if pure intuition were lacking, there would be nothing in which the matter for synthetic a priori judgments could be given. (592)

What Kant means is that from intuition, we can build more theorems revolving a definition of a mathematical objects, and these theorems are synthetical propositions such as the theorem about the sum of the interior angles of a triangle. But that is to explain how mathematical synthetics is possible. For the question of how natural science is possible, Kant says, "if nature is supposed to signify the existence of things in themselves, we could never recognize it either a priori or a posteriori." And,

The cognition of what cannot be an object of experience would be hyperphysical and we are not concerned here with hyperphysical things, but rather with the cognition of nature whose actuality can be confirmed by experience, although it is possible a priori and precedes all experience. (598)

What he means is that we can only have a priori judgments for things that are not in themselves but are presentations such as objects of experience - objects that we can observe in scientific experiments or in natural life experience. Thus, to Kant, a judgment of experience can be a priori judgment while Hume's a belief which is a judgment of experience is a posteriori judgment. Kant says additionally:

But it has just been shown that the laws of nature can never be recognized a priori in objects insofar as they are considered not in reference to possible experience, and the sum of these is what we properly call nature. (598)

Furthermore, a priori judgment must be universally valid because object validity and necessarily universal validity are equivalent concepts, and this answers the next question that:

II/ Explain Kant's argument for the objective validity of the category of causation, which he sees as sucessfully responding to Hume's challenge. Is Kant's a priori necessity the same thing as Hume's psychological necessity? In other words, is this fictional criticism of Kant justified?

Kant says:

I think it will be understood that I do not mean here the rules of the observation of nature that is already given, for these already presuppose experience. I do not mean we can study the laws of nature (through experience) -- for in that case they would not be a priori laws and would not yield us a pure natural science -- but rather how a priori conditions of the possibility of experience are at the same time the sources from which all universal laws of nature must be derived. (598)

And,

All our judgments are initially mere judgments of perception; they are valid only for us (i.e., for our subject) and only later do we give them a new reference (to an object) and desire that they shall always be valid for us in the same way for everybody else; for if a judgment agrees among themselves, and thus the objective validity of the judgment of experience signifies nothing other than its necessary universality. (599)

Thus, to Kant some synthetic judgments are a priori judgments that express a necessary or universally valid truth (apodeictic), and he asserts that experience comes from knowledge or understanding but experience does not lead us to knowledge. Hence, we see that Kant's causal knowledge is different from Hume's causal knowledge because Hume's causal knowledge is the reasoning of matters of fact that are true or false a posteriori judgments. Here, I think I should give specific examples to explain more explicitly about causal knowledge and how it is considered as objective or subjective as well as why it is considered universally valid or not. In an experiment that ball A hits ball B, we see that ball B moves after being hit. To Hume, the fact that ball B moves can be explained also that it is previously hit by another ball, ball C; this means that when we see ball B moving it is not necessary that ball A hits it because it could be hit by any other balls. Another better example is that people say "I eat because I am hungry", but in fact when we see somebody eating something, it can be not true that he or she is hungry; he eats because he sees a new food that he wants to try, or he eats because he goes to a food party. It is not true that he must be hungry in order to go to a party. Thus, we can't always say that we eat because we are hungry. To Hume, the statement "he eats because he is hungry" is not valid in all cases; thus there is no necessary connection between eating and being hungry. To kant, that statement is universally valid in all cases because Kant thinks that when we hungry we must eat; thus to kant, it is universally valid if we consider it as a principle that can apply in common cases. In Hume's case, the statement is observed by an individual; thus, it is subjective, but in Kant's case the statement is a principle of a causal knowledge. To Kant, a causal relation is a necessary relation or a necessary connection because it is true that we eat because we are hungry; the most necessary cause of eating is hunger and they are the cause and the effect that are necessarily related. To Hume, he doesn't consider it be universally valid because he is considering in a posteriori experience where a specific effect has a specific cause; in other words, there is not always a necessary relation between an effect and a cause as the above example pointed out. Here is what a critic says about the difference between Hume and Kant:

For all we have in perception is the temporally and/or spatially associative concatenation of sensory images and the like. And, as Hume demonstrated, connection such as Kant takes to be essential ingredient in our ordinary conception of causation. But for Hume no further resources are available from which our concept of cause is an a priori concept, which, in virtue of its necessary application to all of our intuition, renders objective experience possible. ( Scott-Kakures, 269)

In Part two of the Trancendental Problem: How is natural science possible? Another idea is added by Kant that is called "subjective validity" or judgment of perception. According to Kant, judgments of experience possess what he calls "objective validity" while so-called judgments of perception possess only "subjective validity". Kant says,

Let's illustrate the matter: that the room is warm, sugar sweet, and wormwood bitter, are merely subjectively valid judgments. I do not at all expect that I or everyone else shall always find it as I do now do; each judgment merely expresses a relation of two sensations to the same subject, namely myself, and that only in my present state of perception; for that reason they are not valid of the object. I call them judgments of perception... For that reason I express all such judgments as subjective valid. For instance, when I say that the air is elastic, this judgment is initially only a judgment of perception, since I simply refer two of my sensations to one another. However, if I want to call it a judgment of experience, then I require that this connection stands under a condition that makes it universally valid. Thus, I desire that I and everybody else should always necessarily connect the same perceptions under the same circumstances. (599)

For Kant, to say that judgments of perception have only subjective validity is to say that any issue of the legitimacy or correctness of the judgment can in no way depend on how things are outside the subject's own subjective experience. However, subjective validity is sometimes necessary to an objective validity because judgments of perception and judgments of experience may be complementary to each other, or a judgment of perception may be used to combine with a judgment of experience since Kant says that " all our judgments are initially mere judgments of perception; they are valid only for us (i.e., for our subject) and only later do we give them a new reference (to an object) and desire that they shall always be valid for us in the same way for everybody else. (599)

The way Kant uses the term 'concepts of understanding' and the way Kant thinks that experience rests upon a priori concepts of understanding show that Kant doesn't want to rely only on perceptions as the only foundation for a judgment or a reasoning to be laid upon. Some of Kant's synthetic judgements don't rely on perception if they are a priori understanding of knowledge; other synthetic judgments rely on perception if they are a posteriori judgments while all Hume's judgments are not synthetic and cause and effect connection. That's why Kant says that a judgment of perception is what comes before a judgment of experience, and I think that the following statement is a very important one in Kan't Prolegomena:

All our judgments are initially mere judgments of perception; they are valid only for us (i.e., for our subject) and only later do we give them a new reference (to an object) and desire that they shall always be valid for us in the same way for everybody else; for if a judgment agrees with an object, all judgments concerning the same object must likewise agree among themselves, and thus the objective validity of judgment of experience signifies nothing other than its necessary universality. (599)

By the above statement, Kant means that if we want our judgment to be objectively valid, we must see that it is first valid by ourselves, and this means that a judgment cannot be accepted to be valid by others if I, the subject, who see an object cannot accept the validity of that object that I am perceiving. Moreover, my perceptions are subjectively valid only to myself because I am the only one who is having the perceptions. So, to make my perceptions become objectively valid I must make them become valid by others. Thus, we see that Kant's judgment of experience is not a posteriori judgment like Hume's judgment because even experience comes from perceptions, making it objectively valid is a process that turns experience into universal concepts and principles because it is no longer valid only to the person who perceives it but valid to all persons regardless whether they perceive it or not. And this is a big difference between Kant and Hume because Hume is an empiricist who would want to rely only on experiment or a posteriori judgment and reasoning from matters of fact to make judgments, especially judgments that are related to causal knowledge, and Hume thinks that all judgments concerning cause and effect are judgments of matters of fact while Kant thinks all judgments concerning causal knowledge are a priori judgments.

In addition, there are some important terms that Kant uses in his texts; they are 'subject', 'appearance', and 'transcendental idealism'. The terms 'transcendental idealism' itself is not a common term but an allusion of what Kant means beside the literal concepts that he establishes and tries to explicate especially using scientific areas such as mathematics and natural sciences. His main theory still focuses on what he calls the problem of metaphysics. Many times in the Prolegomena, Kant has asked repeatedly the questions: "How metaphysics is possible?" and "What kind of cognition which can alone be called metaphysical?" And this is the topic that I think is the most important one in Kant's works. After the Preface, and before the Main Transcendental Problem: Part One, Kant talks about the sources of metaphysics; he says,

First, as concerns the sources of metaphysical cognition, its very concept implies that they cannot be emperical. Its principle (including not only its fundamental propositions but also its basic concepts) must never be derived from experience. It must not be physical but metaphysical cognition, namely cognition lying beyond experience. It can therefore have for its basis neither outer experience, which is the basis of emperical psychology. It is therefore a priori cognition from pure understanding and pure reason. (584)

That is why we can see that even when dealing with mathematical problems, Kant still thinks about synthetic judgments in the propositions as ones that can insert additional subjective characteristics onto the subject of propositions, and this is related to what he calls "transcendental idealism'. By using these terms, Kant wants to concentrate on subjects and subjective perceptions, and this is a metaphysical idea. In "The Main Transcendental Problem: Part Three", Kant says, "the objective reality of these concepts and the truth and falsity of metaphysical assertions cannot be discovered or confirmed by any experience.' (612) Other important statements that Kant writes are:

Judgment may be twofold -- I may merely compare perceptions and connect them in a consciousness of my state; I may connect them in consciousness in general (599)

And,

The former judgment is merely a judgment of perceptions and is to this extent of subjective validity only: It is merely a connection of perceptions in my mental state without reference to the object. (600)

What Kant means by idealism in a strong transcendental meaning is that: Anything that pertains to the material world beyond mentality is wholly a product of the mind, and what Kant means by idealism in a weak transcendental meaning is that: There are certain aspects of the material world including material qualities that are imposed by the mind, and this theory asserts that there is a reality that exists independent of the mind which the mind somehow relates to it. However, all the characteristics that are used to impose on the material objects are created by the mind and hence they personify that independent reality only for the outer appearance but not for the objects themselves or the inner characteristics. If we take space and time as temporary conditions necessary for the connection of the natural objects then Kant is the philosopher who thinks that space and time are dependent upon the mind.

Thus, there are two main aspects of transcendental idealism; one talks about idealism as a theory that asserts that the physical world or the material objects are dependent upon the understanding activities of the mind in perceiving them that is also called experience. The other talks about how a person can be certain about the appearance of the external world, the object independent of the mind, if a person only understands or has consciousness directly of the objects in his mind. Kant calls the immediate perception of the object as 'appearance' or 'representation' and they exist only in the moments being perceived and the only natural characteristics of them are the ones that they are perceived to have. Kant also thinks that idealists consider that space and time are objects in their minds and the physical objects that are extended in space and time exist independently of our understanding of them.

Thus, the answer for the question that how an idealist can be certain that objects that are outside the mind can exist is that: the physical objects along with space and time which are their positions are their only 'outer appearance' and are considered as representations but not as objects that are in themselves. During the explanations in the two texts, Kant also alludes about the importance of the impact of a subject on the material objects that the subject is observing, and that subjective validity is a judgment so important that without it, universal validity is impossible because objective validity is equivalent to universal validity, and they are equivalent concepts. What he means is that we cannot make a judgment universally valid if it is not first subjectively valid.

References

Kant, Immanuel. "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science (1783)." Modern Philosophy - An Anthology of Primary Sources. Eds Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. 1998. 579-633.

Scott-Kakures, Dion et al. History of Philosophy. New York: Harper-Collins Publisher. 1993.