Abstract
This chapter focuses on a famous expression in the first Critique, “the conditions of the possibility of experience,” in order to set out some features of Kant’s conception of transcendental philosophy. It is then suggested that transcendental philosophy does not essentially transcend the limits that it sets to this knowledge. In the first Critique Kant regards experience as a mere “possibility.” The Critique also explains that the human understanding cannot conceive of an absolute possibility, but only a relative one, namely a possibility that is tied to conditions. And possible experience as a whole is no exception here. This also means that experience, as a mere possibility, is “contingent.” The most important transcendental conditions for this experience, that is the dynamic principles, are then themselves “contingent.” Consequently, these transcendental conditions are not unconditioned. Kant renounces the standpoint of the absolute for his philosophical discourse.
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- 1.
Letter to Markus Herz, AK 10:131. Kant focuses his question here on the “intellectual representations.”
- 2.
B289, B219, and B165–6.
- 3.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica (4th edition, 1757), §15, reproduced in AK 17:29.
- 4.
Kant, Vorlesungen über Metaphysik (Volckmann), 1784–85, AK 28:406; A324–6/B380–2; A232/B284.
- 5.
A324–6/B381–2. In Reflexion 4297, Kant even goes so far as to claim that “Was in aller Absicht möglich ist, ist wirklich” (AK 17:499). See on this topic Burkhard Hafemann, “Logisches Quadrat und Modalbegriffe bei Kant,” Kant-Studien 93, no. 4 (2002): 415.
- 6.
A232/B285.
- 7.
A613/B641. See Toni Kannisto, “Modality and Metaphysics in Kant,” in Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Akten des XI. Kant-Kongresses 2010, ed. Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca, and Margit Ruffing (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 639.
- 8.
A228/B280; Reflexion 4005, AK 17:382.
- 9.
A326/B382. “Die hypothetische Möglichkeit [ist], als eine kleinere Möglichkeit zu betrachten, weil sie immer nur unter Restriktion statt findet” Kant, Vorlesungen über Metaphysik (v. Schön), 1780?, AK 28:488.
- 10.
A222–3/B269–70.
- 11.
A158/B197, my emphasis. As their titles indicate, the following studies deal with the same topic as the present chapter, but they do not adopt the approach proposed here: A. R. Raggio, “Was heisst ‘Bedingungen der Möglichkeit’?,” Kant-Studien 60, no. 2 (1969): 153–65; Peter Struck, “Kants Formel von den Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von…und die Ableitung der transzendentalen Einheit des Selbstbewusstseins,” Prima Philosophia 6 (1993): 257–66; Arthur Collins, Possible Experience: Understanding Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). However, in the collection of essays edited by Eva Schaper and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl under the title Bedingungen der Möglichkeit: “Transcendental arguments” und transzendentales Denken (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), there is an interesting contribution from Rüdiger Bubner on the self-referentiality of Kant’s transcendental argumentation entitled “Selbstbezüglickeit als Struktur transzendentaler Argumente,” 63–79. This is in effect the perspective that I adopt here, although I do not develop it in the same way as Bubner does; he applies it to the different levels of “synthesis” in Kant’s transcendental deduction. For my part, I see self-referentiality in Kant’s applying mutatis mutandis the restrictions on the use of the categories in experience to his own transcendental argumentation. In any event, the general conception of self-referentiality laid out by Bubner in an earlier version of his thesis remains valid for my own undertaking:
According to Kant the cognitions that may be called transcendental are only those in which cognition is treated in relation to its specific possibilities. Consequently, the cognition that is called transcendental thematizes together with the universal conditions of cognition the presuppositions of its own emergence and functioning. Self-referentiality is characteristic of the transcendental argument. If one can show that the reasoning on factual forms of cognition and the explanation of their presuppositions is impossible without having recourse to certain elements of these very forms of cognition, then not only at the level of the factuality of cognition will a state of affairs be demonstrated, but at a higher level the constant validity of these universal forms of cognition will be confirmed. (Transzendental dürfen Kant zufolge nur Erkenntnisse heissen, in denen die Erkenntnis in bezug auf ihre spezifischen Möglichkeiten Thema ist. Wenn dies gilt, so thematisiert die transzendental genannte Erkenntnis mit den allgemeinen Erkenntnisbedingungen auch die Voraussetzungen ihres eigenen Entstehens und Arbeitens. Für das transzendentale Argument ist die Selbstbezüglichkeit kennzeichnend…Wenn sich zeigt, dass das Räsonnement über faktische Erkenntnisformen und die Aufklärung von deren Voraussetzungen ohne Benutzung gewisser Elemente jener Erkenntnisformen unmöglich ist, so wird nicht bloss auf der Ebene der Faktizität von Erkenntnis ein faktischer Umstand demonstriert, sondern auf einer Metaebene die ungebrochene Geltung allgemeiner Formen des Erkennens bestätigt.)
See his “Zur Struktur eines transzendentalen Arguments,” in Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Teil 1, ed. Gerhard Funke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 23, 25. I have also published on this subject: “Self-Referentiality in Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy,” in Proceedings of the 8th International Kant Congress, Book 2.1, ed. H. Robinson (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995), 259–67; and “La dimension autoréférentielle du discours sur les ‘conditions de possibilité,’” in Kant, ed. Jean-Marie Vaysse (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2008), 191–211.
- 12.
B25. See Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet, “De l’ontologie à la philosophie transcendantale: dans quelle mesure Kant est-il wolffien?,” in Kant et Wolff: Héritages et ruptures, ed. Sophie Grapotte and Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 160.
- 13.
AK 4:470.
- 14.
See P 373: “the word ‘transcendental’…does not signify something passing beyond all experience but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make knowledge of experience possible” (my emphasis); Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis White Beck, in Philosophic Classics, ed. Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann, vol. 3, Modern Philosophy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 581.
- 15.
A96.
- 16.
A58/B82.
- 17.
A146/B185.
- 18.
A221–2/B269.
- 19.
A157/B196.
- 20.
See P 274 (Kant, Prolegomena, 526):
In the Critique of Pure Reason I have treated this question synthetically, by making inquiries into pure reason itself and endeavoring in this source to determine the elements as well as the laws of its pure use according to principles. The task is difficult and requires a resolute reader to penetrate by degrees into a system based on no data except reason itself, and which therefore seeks, without resting upon any fact, to unfold knowledge from its original germs.
On this topic see also Manfred Baum, “Die Möglichkeit der Erfahrung und die analytische Methode bei Reinhold,” in Philosophie ohne Beynamen, ed. Martin Bondeli and Alessandro Lazzari (Basel: Schwabe, 2004), 104–18.
- 21.
A737/B765.
- 22.
A218/B265–6.
- 23.
A225/B273.
- 24.
According to Giuseppe Motta, the postulate of necessity has priority over the two others. See his “Qu’est-ce qu’un postulat? Considérations sur l’anti-constructivisme de Kant,” in Kant et la science: La théorie critique et transcendantale de la connaissance, ed. Sophie Grapotte, Mai Lequan, and Margit Ruffing (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 142–3.
- 25.
A220/B267.
- 26.
“The a priori conditions of a possible experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience” (A111).
- 27.
“There are two conditions under which alone the cognition of an object is possible; first, intuition, through which it is given, but only as appearance; second, concept, through which an object is thought that corresponds to this intuition…All appearances therefore necessarily agree with this formal condition of sensibility…The objective validity of the categories, as a priori concepts, rest on the fact that through them alone is experience possible (as far as the form of thinking is concerned)” (A92–3/B125–6, my emphasis).
- 28.
B203; see also A165–6.
- 29.
“I would be able to compose and determine a priori, i.e., construct the degree of the sensation of sunlight out of about 200,000 illuminations from the moon. Thus we can call the former principles constitutive” (A178–9/B 221).
- 30.
A160/B199.
- 31.
A160–1/B199–200. In their own specific way, all the principles of Kant’s table “anticipate” experience. See for example A246/B303, A762/B790.
- 32.
A160/B199, my emphasis.
- 33.
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 27, 33, 35, 41–2.
- 34.
B290; A459/B487.
- 35.
B288–91.
- 36.
Kant, Vorlesungen über Metaphysik (v. Schön), AK 28:499. See also Kant, Preisschrift über die Fortschritte der Metaphysik, AK 20:329–30.
- 37.
A635/B663; A227/B279.
- 38.
“That the proposition ‘Everything contingent must have a cause’ may be evident to everyone from mere concepts is not to be denied; but then the concept of the contingent is already taken in such a way that it contains, not the category of modality (as something, the non-existence of which can be thought), but that of relation (as something that can only exist as the consequence of something else), and then it is, of course, an identical proposition: ‘What can only exist as a consequence has its cause’” (B289–90, my emphasis). See also Giuseppe Motta, Die Postulate des empirischen Denkens überhaupt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 62.
- 39.
If the General Note on the System of Principles establishes that we cannot understand contingency except when the contingent event is to be explained through a “cause” that precedes it in time, then Kant cannot have recourse to the schematized category of causality in his philosophical investigation, which describes the conditions of experience from without. Nevertheless, the restriction imposed upon contingency is maintained insofar as reference is still made to a “condition” (even if it is not a cause in time).
- 40.
A160/B199–200, my emphasis.
- 41.
A160/B199, my emphasis.
- 42.
Kant, Vorlesungen über Metaphysik (Dohna), 1792–93, AK 28:647.
- 43.
Kant, Vorlesungen über Metaphysik (Mrongovius), 1782–83, AK 29:844 : “Viele Ursachen, sofern sie zu einem caussato gehören, heissen concaussae, die sind entweder sibi subordinatae, wenn eine vermittelst der andern caussa caussati ist—oder coordinatae, wenn keine als caussa remota, sondern alle als immediate anzusehen sind.” Karl Ameriks has drawn attention to these multiple causes in Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2003), 155 n.42.
- 44.
“I do not see how one can find so many difficulties in the fact that inner sense is affected by ourselves…In such acts the understanding always determines the inner sense, in accordance with the combination that it thinks, to the inner intuition that corresponds to the manifold in the synthesis of the understanding” (B156–7 n, my emphasis).
- 45.
B138–9, my emphasis. See also B135.
- 46.
B156.
- 47.
See Ameriks, Interpreting Kant’s Critiques, 157. See also Nicholas Stang, “Did Kant Conflate the Necessary and the A Priori?,” Nous 45, no. 3 (2011): 467 n.16. In this note Stang explains that there are so many passages in Kant referring to the affection by the thing in itself that it would be disingenuous to deny them.
- 48.
See B157, B277.
- 49.
B422. On Kant’s recourse to the term “das Substantiale” in order to explain the dialectic production of the “fiction” of a transcendent spiritual substance, see my “Die Entstehung der Illusion in den Paralogismen,” in Über den Nutzen von Illusionen: Die regulativen Ideen in Kant’s theoretischer Philosophie, ed. Bernd Dörflinger and Günter Kruck (Hildesheim: Olms, 2011), 47–58.
- 50.
Here arises a similar problem to the one we encountered in the case of contingency. Kant frequently uses the word “ground” (Grund) in order to explain the affection stemming from the thing in itself. But sometimes he uses the word “cause” (Ursache), as Aenesidemus-Schulze noted. It goes without saying that this dynamical category is not schematized here and thus does not apply to an appearance within experience. It is instead used to articulate the conditions of possible experience as a whole. But, as opposed to the dialectical use of the category, it still respects the constraints stated in this principle: at first only the effect is known and the principle simply stipulates that there must be some cause or other, which is at that stage totally “indeterminate” (A179/B 222; A199/B244). The only thing that is certain, according to the principle of causality, is the cause’s existence, since the principle cannot anticipate anything of its essence. Yet the unschematized category of causality used by Kant for the thing in itself clearly complies with the indeterminateness mentioned in the principle. And again, its ultimate justification is the possibility of experience, which by definition relates such a cause to the possibility of an “empirical intuition.” See my “Kant and the Problem of Affection,” Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2004): 275–97.
- 51.
A737/B765.
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Piché, C. (2016). Kant on the “Conditions of the Possibility” of Experience. In: Kim, H., Hoeltzel, S. (eds) Transcendental Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40715-9_1
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