J.N. Findlay

On the Kantian Subject

“It is also important to stress here that, for Kant, our own thinking selves, as the agents who perform all our perceptual and conceptual syntheses, and who present us with our picture of a coherent, real world, and of whose regular action we are at all times capable of being conscious, are themselves objects of which no intuitive, sensuous presentation is possible, and which are accordingly, in their non-apparent aspects, wholly beyond knowledge (CPR, B. 157-8).”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 2.

“And this unknowable, thinking subject must further be credited, in virtue of certain moral demands...with the power to initiate changes in itself and the world, to which no adequately determining, previously existent causal factor can be assigned.  Such a power is not only not illustrated by anything given to sensible intuition: it is also, in Kant’s view, incapable of being thus illustrated.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 3.

“Kant’s account of experience and knowledge therefore presupposes the existence of agents and acts that cannot be empirically known, since they are the preconditions of empirical knowledge, and it also presumes that we can form just notions of such agents and of them.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 5.

On Kant's Attitude Towards Metaphysics

“Kant, like Wittgenstein, admits that the notions of transcendent metaphysics have deep roots in our conceptual and linguistic apparatus, but he does not, like Wittgenstein, think that there is some sort of philosophical therapy which could exorcise them.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object,p. 200.

“There is a great deal of brash writing in the Critique of Pure Reason, and an exaggerated repudiation of the magnificent metaphysical tradition in which Kant grew up, and which is really always in the background of his thought.  But this brash writing has been greatly admired by many, particularly in recent times, and has been given a false importance which a careful study of Kant will dispel.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p 28.

“Unapparent objects behind appearances and experience are..part of the Leibnizian tradition, which as modified by Christian Wolff and his school, provided the true background against which all Kant’s teaching must be understood.  To Leibniz, as to Kant, space was only a well-founded phenomenon, the expression of parallelisms and affinities among monadic substances, some apperceptive and rational, some irrationally conscious, and some dizzily confused, which make up the true world.  To this view Kant always shows deference: it tells us, he says, what Things-in-themselves would have to be like if we could have any knowledge of them.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 17.

“Without some definite idea of the logical character of what could be independently real, we should not be able to characterize our experienced world as being merely phenomenal.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 24.

“Kant does not…forbid us to retain the conception of a persistent personal self-responsible for all we remember to have done and thought, and whatever we anticipate.  The postulation of such a self will, in fact, be shown to be unavoidable from a moral point of view.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 206.

On the Coherence of the Phenomenal World

"The phenomenal world is like some immense cocktail party, at which we and others are making our own contributions to the deafening clamour: it is only by qualities of voice and coherence in what is said, that we can sort out distinct speakers and conversations, and give each its appropriate due." Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 26

Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein on the Escape from the Cave

“Kant, however, tried to do away with philosophical theses, controversies, and antinomies in much the same manner as Wittgenstein, though Wittgenstein performed the slaughter more thoroughly than Kant.  For, if Plato placed men in a cave from which egress was with effort possible, Kant placed them in a cave from which escape was impossible in this life, though it remained thinkable and desirable.  Wittgenstein, however, constructed a habitation for hermits (or for a single hermit) from which escape was not only impossible, but neither thinkable nor desirable, except owing to a confusion.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p.376.

On Language Games

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“It is the view of the present author that Wittgenstein’s basic language-games are all covertly circular. Their teaching situations presuppose an understanding of the meanings of, for example, duration, potency, number, and so on, that they are held to teach, and throw no light on them at all. The ultimate transcendentals involved in our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world remain as unassailably problematic, and as antinomic as ever.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p 376.

Wittgenstein and Kant on the Transcendental and Mystical

“The views that Wittgenstein is here putting forward are in many respects profoundly analogous to those of Kant, in that he locates a whole realm of unknowable, simple unities beneath the complex objects which appear before us empirically, and takes it that their relations are in some unknowable manner translated into the relations of empirical things.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 371.

“Wittgenstein, however, like Kant, has his various transcendentals which, in the sort of speech that enables us to state the relations of ordinary empirical objects, cannot be spoken of at all, but which, wince he does in fact speak of them, must be capable of being spoken of in some other manner.  Kant’s introduction of what can and must be thought of, but not known, is wholly parallel.  The Wittgensteinian subject, or cosmic speaker, is such a transcendental; and so is the whole world conceived as a whole, whether in the abstract guise of ‘everything that is the case’, the totality of the macro-facts or micro-facts that there are.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 373.

“Our freedom and deathlessness lie in another, non-factual dimension altogether. In the same way, the beauty of certain objects, and the excellence and blessedness of a certain way of life, and of the whole world seen in the light of these things, go beyond all the facts of the world, and belong to a mystical stratum that cannot be uttered as empirical facts are utterable.  Wittgenstein in all these utterances is providing a close analogue to the practical postulations of Kant.  It is an immense pity that those who have commented on the highly metaphysical and mystical Tractatus have, in the main, been deep-dyed barbarians as far as metaphysics and mysticism are concerned.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 374.

On Kant and "Knowledge" of the Transcendental

“Kant certainly uses the word ‘knowledge’ eccentrically in holding that what we regard as a necessary condition of a certain sort of knowledge is not itself capable of being known; but for Kant we can never be said to know what we only conceive emptily and without fulfilling intuition.  We cannot therefore be said to know that there is a Transcendental Subject or that there are Transcendental Objects, though both are necessary to the existence of empirical knowledge.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 7.

“It is, however, all-important to stress that Kant believes that there absolutely is such a sensitive, perceptive, thinking subject, before which objects display themselves in experience, and that is present and active even when we are much too object-absorbed to be conscious of it, and that there are properties that it has ‘in itself’, with which we are necessarily unacquainted.  It may even, as far as we can tell, be the very same being that appears to us as the brain or the nerves in the body (see, e.g., CPR, B 72.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 10.

“We have, Kant holds, some sort of immediate sense of our own spontaneous causality in acts of free choice, particularly in those of moral decision, but the sort of freedom of which we are then conscious is nothing that we can clearly understand (e.g., CPR, B. xxix), and of which he only once or twice dares say that we can have knowledge.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 11.

“Kant’s whole procedure is, therefore, such as to suggest, and at one or two crucial points to assert, a thoroughgoing correlation between the structures of phenomenal givens and those of their transcendent structures.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 15.

Kant on Freedom of the Will

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Kant...defined freedom purely in negative terms: it is a form of causality in which there is no prior inclination which precisely determines what is done or chosen, or determines whether there is an endorsement of a given inclination, or contrary decision to abide by the moral law.  To use such a notion in explanation demands, however, that we should give it a positive meaning, and this, in the sense of being able to illustrate it intuitively, is something that we cannot do.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 304.

“Freedom is not an ordinary concept of which plain illustrations can be given: it is rather a Transcendental Idea whose possible cases transcend illustration.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 304.

“Beings endowed with a will therefore necessarily think of themselves as free, and take themselves to be free, and this is so even if the Idea of freedom has nothing corresponding to it in intuition, and in fact transcends all possible experience…it gives to a transcendent power a definite place in the phenomenal order, even if only in the thought of rational agents.  To be obligatorily thinkable seems, in fact to be the characteristic manner in which the transcendently real insinuates itself into phenomenal experience.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 305.

“Kant comments on the strange circle, which obliges us to believe in our freedom, that is, our non-pathological self-determination, in order to understand the possibility and the necessity of moral laws; but which also obliges us to accept the possibility and necessity of unconditional moral laws in order to understand the possibility and necessity of such freedom (p. 450).  The two concepts are in fact equivalent: a will free to determine its direction without the pressures of particular interests must necessarily follow laws of the purest generality—it cannot dispense with all laws since it is a rational power—and a will governed by laws of the purest generality must necessarily be able to resist determination by particular interests.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 305.