Трансцендентални идеализам

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Kant’s transcendental idealism is best understood through his alternative name for the theory: formal idealism (e.g. Critique of Pure Reason, B-edition, 518n). According to Kant, every representation has a form and a matter: matter is what is represented, form is how it is represented.

Think of an ordered number pair, say (2, 3), i.e. numbers 2 and 3 together in this order. We can represent this in a coordinate system as a spatial point. The ordered number pair is the matter of the coordinate point – what it represents – whereas the xy-coordinate plane is the form of it – how it is represented.

We can represent different matter (e.g. (4, 5)) in the same form and we can represent the same matter (2, 3) in a different form – for example in a spherical coordinate system or using something else than coordinates altogether (it could, perhaps, represent the amount of a product and its cost in a database).

When Kant says that his idealism is formal, he means to say that the form of our representations (specifically experience or sensory representation) is mind-dependent, given to objects by our own capacity to represent them and not inherent in them, whereas the matter, i.e. what our experience is of, is mind-independent or given from the outside. He contrasts this with e.g. Berkeley’s materialidealism, the view that the matter of experience or what the object is about is itself mind-dependent or mind-internal. A transcendentalrealist in turn would view also the form of objects as mind-independent.

More specifically, Kant argues that space and time are neither mind-external containers for objects (like Newton held) nor inherent properties of objects or their relations (like Leibniz held), but are rather the subjective forms of our sensibility, i.e. the “coordinate system” we use to represent objects. Thus all objects of experience are appearances, i.e. objects as they appear to us under these forms or when represented in our “coordinate system”, and how the things are in themselves apart from our way of representing them spatiotemporally, we do not know. In addition, also the ontological concepts known as the categories are such forms (just not sensible, like space and time, but conceptual). Thus e.g. causality is a way for us to represent objects – their conceptual form.

Just like the numbers 2 and 3 in themselves are not spatial, and are indeed completely different from their appearance as a spatial point (2, 3) in a coordinate plane, the thing in itself is not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different from the appearance – it is not, like realists maintain, that our experiential knowledge, including scientific knowledge, approximateshow things “really” are in themselves, but that this experiential knowledge, due to the formal component, is completely and utterly different from the mere matter of experience. Still – and this is the lure of transcendental or formal idealism compared to material or ordinary idealism – our experience is about that object and not some figment of our brain.

I put “really” in quotes because formal idealism in fact re-defines what is real: like the coordinate point is equally real as the ordered number pair, just represented in a specific way, the appearances are real objects – or as Kant says, empirically real. Our experience is about the real world, and so is science, even if it is about that world represented in a specific way or in a specific coordinate system. The standard accusation against Kant, that he indeed takes reality away, is actually question begging, for it lets the transcendental realist define what “real” means. (Kant himself distinguishes here between a rainbow as an empirical appearance, i.e. as something not real in a way but illusory, and the scientific explanation of it as the empirical thing in itself, i.e. what really exists is light diffracted in a certain way in rain. (See Critique of Pure Reason, A 45–6/B 62–3.)

This is why transcendental idealism is often said to be, at bottom, a realist theory. Kant himself thought so too, taking transcendental idealism to prove empirical realism, where empirical realism is the kind of material realism that people in fact seek (Critique of Pure Reason, A 369–70). (Kant maintains that before him no one had thought of separating the transcendental and the empirical, and hence when philosophers distinguished between realism and idealism, they did so solely on the empirical level). This is also why Kant has a section in the Critique of Pure Reason called “Refutation of Idealism” (Critique of Pure Reason, B 274–, cf. A 367–). Finally, according to Kant it is “really this transcendental realist who afterwards plays the empirical ideal­ist” (Critique of Pure Reason, A 369), either because with transcendental realism one cannot prove empirical realism (whether like Hume one is aware of this or like Descartes oblivious to it) or because, knowing this (like Berkeley), one falsely embraces empirical idealism as the only possible standpoint.

To summarise, transcendental idealism maintains that how we represent objects, i.e. the form in which we represent the data or matter given to our experience, is mind-dependent, i.e. our way of representing objects. Empirical idealism takes also the given data to be mind-dependent or mind-internal, whereas transcendental realism takes the form to belong to the objects in themselves. Kant claims that only transcendental idealism can ground empirical realism, i.e. the realism that philosophers and scientists long for.

P. S. The term “transcendental” Kant uses to signify the boundary of what can be known, i.e. the necessary formal conditions of (experiential) knowledge. This term has rightly been considered confusing. We could understand it in the terminology above as the view that the fundamental forms of objects or necessary conditions for the possibility of objects are given to them by our mental faculties (idealism) rather than inhering in the objects themselves (realism).

 

https://www.quora.com/What-is-Kantian-transcendental-idealism

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http://consc.net/papers/ontology.pdf

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