Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (36 page)

The implication then is that we got into the problems of the last
two sections because we were looking for `things' to play certain roles: the role of objects standing behind and apart from powers
and forces, or the role of something responsible for causal and
physical laws. But if we can wean our understandings from this dependency on things, perhaps we can do better. Suppose instead we
see thoughts of causation and law, things in space and time, and
space and time themselves as necessary categories of thought. They
provide us with a framework of principles with which to organize
or systematize our experience. They do not provide a set of things
we `infer' from our experience. The idea here is very similar to the
ideas about the `self' that we took from Kant, and indeed form the
other side of the same coin. If we try to understand the self in sensory terms, as an object of experience, we meet Hume's problem,
that it is no such object. But if instead we think of the way a personal or egocentric standpoint organizes experience, the role of the
self as an element in our thinking becomes clearer-and so do illusions engendered by that role.

Kant's revolution is introduced in a famous passage at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason:

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must
conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge
of objec is by establishing something in regard to them a priori,
by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failtire. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have
more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better
with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have
knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in
regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be
proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the
movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that
they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he
might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can
be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects. If
intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do
not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but
if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the con-
stitutionofourlilcultyofintuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility.

This is the element that Kant calls `transcendental idealism: He is
very keen that it is not the`subjective idealism' of Berkeley. And obviously, it cannot be the `transcendental realism' of Locke. So what
is it?

It sounds as though in having experience we thereby `create' a
world that must conform to it. That is a very odd idea. It is the universe that created us after some thirteen billion years, not we that
create it. Kant is not intending to deny that. What he wants is an
understanding of the way in which concepts like those of things,
forces, space, time, causation determine the way we think (and
have to think) about the world. The intention is not to deny some
element of scientific understanding, or indeed common sense, but
to explain how those elements hang together in our thought. It is
those thoughts that structure what he calls the `phenomenal
world': the world that is both described by science, and is manifested to us in sense experience.

Kant certainly did not think that all sensory experience some how `creates' such a world. He did not think this about secondary
qualities, for example:

Colours are not properties of the bodies to the intuition of
which they are attached, but only modifications of the sense of
sight, which is afJected in a certain manner by light. Space, on
the other hand, as condition of outer objects, necessarily belongs to their appearance or intuition. Taste and colours arc
not necessary conditions under which alone objects can be for
its objects of the senses.

The idea being that space, unlike colour, is a `condition' under
which alone objects can be objects of the senses. Space has more
objectivity going for it than colour.

The central difficulty in interpreting Kant here is whether he actually advances as far as he seems to think beyond Berkeley. Suppose Berkeley thanks Kant for three insights:

(I) We must depart entirely from Locke's sensory view of
the understanding, and see the concepts with which we describe the world in terms of rules, principles, and organizing structures rather than as mental images.

(2) Our experience has to be orderly (in the phrase of the
contemporary philosopher Jonathan Bennett, there has to
be a 'speed limit') for us to be self-conscious at all.

(;) For it to be orderly we have to think of ourselves as occupying a standpoint in space, from which we perceive enduring objects in space and time, whose behaviour falls
into patterns determined by laws of nature.

This might all seem grist to Berkeley's mill. Berkeley himself knew that we interpret our experience in spatio-temporal, objective
terms. But he thought we had to `speak with the vulgar but think
with the learned': in other words, learn to regard that interpretation as a kind of fafon de parler, rather than the description of a
real, independent, objective world.

A factor confusing the picture is that Kant says things showing
considerable sympathy with a position not unlike Berkeley's subjective idealism. The `Copernican revolution' leaves him saying
things like this:

In our system, on the other hand, these external things,
namely matter, are in all their configurations and alterations
nothing but mere appearances, that is, representations in us,
of the reality of which we are immediately conscious.

The ingredient that sets Kant apart from subjective idealism is that
he thought that Descartes and his successors got hold of the wrong
end of the stick. They thought that `inner experience' remained
rock-solid, while the outside world became problematic. To do
better,

[t)he required proof must, therefore, show that we have experience, and not merely imagination of outer things; and this,
it would seem, cannot be achieved save by proof that even our
inner experience, which for Descartes is indubitable, is possible only on the assumption of outer experience.

`Outer experience' is here experience in which we are immediately
conscious of a reality that extends beyond us. The question of
whether, and how, Kant is successful is one of the great issues of
modern thought.

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

A true realist or opponent of idealism wants to contend for facts
and states of affairs that are entirely independent of the mind. The
idealist constantly reminds us of the work of the mind in selecting
and moulding our conception of the world we inhabit. The mind,
for the idealist, creates the world we live in, the'Lebenswelt' of our
thoughts, imaginings, and perceptions. Kant, of course, is in this
up to the elbows, since the entire framework within which we
think, our `conceptual scheme' of space, time, objects, causes, and
selves, is due to organizing principles of the mind.

Now, without being Cartesian dualists, we might still sympathize with this awareness of the work of the mind in generating
the only world we understand. In fact, most twentieth-century
thinkers (following a nineteenth-century trend) have picked up
Kant's ball and run with it even more enthusiastically than he did.
In particularly, they have celebrated what we have already met
under the heading of `paradigms': the idea of cultural and historically mutable lenses through which we see things, or conceptual
palaces or prisons of our own engineering.

Once more, though, I shall introduce the moderns via a classic,
and once more we can start with Berkeley. In the first of the Three
Dialogues there is this celebrated passage, with Philonous representing Berkeley himself:

PHlLONOus.... But (to pass by all that bath been hitherto
said, and reckon it Jirr nothing, if you will have it so) I ant content to put the whole upon this issue. If you can conceive it
possible for any mixture or combination of qualities, or any sensible object whatever, to exist without the mind, then I will
grant it actually to be so.

HYLAS. If it comes to that, the point will soon be decided.
What more easy than to conceive a tree or house existing by itself, independent of and unperceived by any mind whatsoever? I do at this present time conceive them existing after that
manner.

PHIL. How sayyou, Hylas, can you see a thing which is at the
same time unseen?

HYL. No, that were a contradiction.

PHIL. Is it not as great a contradiction to talk of conceiving a
thing which is unconceived?

HYL. It is.

PHIL. The tree or house therefore which you think of is conceived by you.

HYI.. How should it be otherwise?

PHIL. And what is conceived is surely in the mind.

HYL. Without question, that which is conceived is in the
mind.

PHIL. How then came you to say, you conceived a house
or tree existing independent and out of all minds whatsoever?

HYL. That was, I own, an oversight; but stay, let me consider
what led me into it. It is a pleasant mistake enough. As I was
thinking of a tree in a solitary place, where no one was present
to see it, methought that was to conceive a tree as existing unperceived or unthought of not considering that I myself conceived it all the while. But now I plainly see, that all I can do is
to frame ideas in my own mind. I may indeed conceive in my
own thoughts the idea ofa tree, ora house, ora mountain, but
that is all. And this is far from proving, that I can conceive
them existing out of the minds of all spirits.

PHIL. You acknowledge then that you cannot possibly
conceive how any one corporeal sensible thing should exist
otherwise than in a mind.

HYL. I do.

PHt t.. And yet you will earnestly contend for the truth of that
which you cannot so Hutch as conceive.

HYL. I profess I know not what to think, but still there are
soine scruples remain with me.

Hylas is probably right to retain some scruples, for Philonous's argument has attracted a great deal of criticism, and even contempt.
We might try applying to it some of the weaponry deployed against
the ontological argument, wondering if Philonous is surreptitiously misunderstanding phrases like'in the mind'. We might also
raise the question of the strength of Philonous's conclusion. For although he thinks Hylas cannot conceive how a house or tree
should exist otherwise than `in' a mind, the argument looks equally
set to prove the appallingly strong conclusion that Hylas cannot
conceive how a house or tree should exist otherwise than in Hylas's
own tnind. And this is too radical even for Berkeley.

Nevertheless, as usual with the great thinkers, we might worry
that there is some grain of truth in Philonous's position. Here is
one way of sympathizing with it. Suppose we think of Hylas as
seeking to show that he can understand the realist notion of an object 'independent' of his actual modes of comprehension. He undertakes to `abstract' away from contingencies of his own
perceptual experience or contingencies of his own modes of
thought, or his own conceptual choices. Then we can see Berkeley,
in the person of Philonous, reminding him that this feat of ab straction is impossible. Whatever he succeeds in imagining or conceiving, he is doomed to bring his own perspective to it.

For example, perhaps Hylas imagines his tree to have a brown
trunk and green leaves. Then it is open to Berkeley to insist that this
is not meeting the challenge of imagining an object from outside
the human perspective, since the colours of things are artefacts of
that perspective. The point is clearest with secondary qualities, but
by this point in the first Dialogue Berkeley has softened the reader
up for applying it more generally. A nice thought-experiment that
illustrates his position is this. Suppose I ask you to imagine a room,
with a mirror on one wall, and a table some way in front of it on
which there is a bowl of flowers. I warn you not to imagine yourself
in this room. You believe you can do it. Now I ask you whether the
bowl of flowers is in the mirror. If you say `yes, then you are surreptitiously occupying one perspective, and if you say `no' you are
occupying another (for the flowers will be in the mirror from some
angles and not from others). You can hardly say `neither, and neither can you escape by saying that they come and go, since that corresponds to moving your point of view around the room.You seem
to be trapped-the point of view comes in all unbidden, as soon as
you exercise your imagination.

Berkeley is reminding us of the universal influence of our own
perspective on what we imagine or comprehend. We can see the
strength, and the importance, of his position if we consider for a
moment a philosopher who ignored it, namely G.E. Moore. Moore
undertook to refute the idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder-in other words he undertook to defend realism about
beauty. He argued for it by an `isolation' thought-experiment. Moore asks us to imagine two worlds. One is full of fluffy clouds,
green trees, running streams, and other pastoral delights. The
other is a heap of cinders and garbage. Now we specify that there is
nobody in either of these worlds. They are unobserved. But surely
one is more beautiful than the other? And doesn't that show that
beauty is independent of the eye of the beholder?