THE "COPERNICAN REVOLUTION" IN PHILOSOPHY: Kant’s answer to Hume’s question – what is the origin and justification of our knowledge – is as shocking in its simplicity as it is revolutionary in its novelty: objects conform to our way of knowing.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. 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 t them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’s primary hypothesis. (BXVI). This proclamation invites immediate scorn. “So,” one is inclined to say, “Kant believes that objects must conform to our experience – which are often fantastic and illusory -- regardless of the way things are ‘in themselves.’ Truth is a matter of thought (experience) conforming to being (object), not the other way around, as Kant would have it.” Notice, however, that this response to Kant’s Copernican Turn presupposes an absolute or “god’s eye” viewpoint that locates itself above both thought (experience), on the one side, and being (object), on the other, to compare knowing with known. The traditional notion of truth is known as the “correspondence theory of truth,” the idea that the mind passively “reflects” or “mirrors” the way the world is in itself. This model of knowledge as a “reflection,” “mirroring,” or “picture” of a ready-made, given world underwrites this scorn of Kant’s suggested reversal. Kant denies, however, that the correspondence theory of truth – the idea of a god’s eye comparison of experience and object -- makes sense. The theocentric model – the idea of our ability to assume a god’s-eye assessment of the “fit” between mind and world -- presupposes that we can stand outside the totality of human experience to assess its correspondence to things in themselves. Kant points out that whenever we correct another’s experience of an object, we do so on the basis of another experience. We never gain access to the object directly, as if we were a god who could summon an object to stand completely and utterly exposed directly before our gaze. We can never, so to speak, slip outside our skin (experience) to gain access to the object without the mediation of experience. The idea of any such “experience free” hold upon the object implicitly assumes a type of thinking (intellect) that creates or summons the object of thought. This intellect would be infinite. Our intellect, however, is finite or “discursive.” Our experience is receptive to the object, but we can’t experience the object unless it is there. The object must be present for us to have an experience of it; our experience can not summon the object.
In the first instance, the Copernican Turn is simply the recognition that we do not have immediate and direct access to things in themselves but only through experience. The philosophical question then becomes how such experience is possible. Kant’s radical answer to the question of how experience is possible is that the subject of knowledge is an active, form-legislating subject that determines the way in which the object can be experienced. Experience is made possible, according to Kant, because the knowing subject actively combines its sensory data into the experience of an object. From Kant’s perspective, the object of experience is something like an accomplishment – an object-ive -- of our conceptual abilities to make sense of (process) the hurly-burly parade of colors, sights, sounds, touches, tastes, and feels. The key to understanding Kant is to appreciate his novel conceptualization of “object.” One can think about all manner of objects that one can’t experience, but this is fruitless and vain pursuit when one is concerned with the question of What can I know? Instead, Kant turns to experience of objects and asks what forms of intuition (perception) and understanding (concepts) come into play in humans’ making sense of the world. Kant finds that humans universally and necessarily experience the world in terms of linear time and Euclidean space. He also finds that experience is inextricably connected with our taking our experiences as caused by underlying substances. For instance, my experience of the wax as at one time hard (when cold), then soft (when mildly heated), then liquid (when melted), and finally gas (when superheated) depend upon my processing sensory data according to rules: substance = same thing in different form, causality = changing perceptions are not due to me but the object. The key idea here is that our experiential “hold” upon an object is owing to our forms of perception (linear time & Euclidean space) and conception (substance, causality, etc.). In this way, Kant ushers in the “cognitive processing model” of human experience: the subject is an active form (rule)-legislating activity.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL RESTRICTION: Given Kant’s claim that experience is made possible by our form-legislating activity, it’s crucial that we “restrict” our claims to knowledge. We do indeed have knowledge of objects, but we can’t move from the premise that we experience objects as, for instance, (universally and necessarily) causally determined that, therefore, objects in themselves are such. We can certainly think that different types of beings might have radically different forms of experience, and this means that we can consider the object in abstraction from how it can be given to us. This is all Kant means by “thing in itself”: it’s the same thing that we experience, considered or thought about in abstraction from the modes of our experience. Do not think that the “thing experience” and “thing in itself” are two different types of things. Instead, think of it as the distinction between two ways of considering one and the same object: namely, as conforming to our experiential abilities, on the one hand, and as something that may be differently experienced. Kant famously claims that he has found it necessary to restrict knowledge to make room for faith. What he means by this is that he restricts knowledge to our perceptual and conceptual abilities to make room for our being able to consider something “in itself” – that is, in abstraction from its being an object of knowledge. The most important result of Kant’s theory of knowledge is that we can consider a human being from two different perspectives: as an “appearance” – that is, as a natural object subject to the laws of nature – and as “thing in itself” – that is, as the same person but now thought of as being a free agent in a social world not subject to the laws of nature. Kant’s central intention here is to establish that it is legitimate to consider a human being from two such different perspectives: as a natural things (physiological determinism) and social agent (free to act on the basis of moral principles. By distinguishing two ways of taking one and the same thing, Kant combines the natural sciences and their objectifying approach to human life, on the one hand, with our conception of ourselves as agents with freedom and responsibility.

KANT’S MORAL THEORY
GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS

In Chapter One, Kant begins with the proposition: “It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will” (61). It’s important to understand Kant’s concept of the human will to appreciate his claims regarding freedom, dignity, and morality.

Everything in nature works in accordance with law. Only a rational being has the power to act in accordance with the conception [Vorstellung] of laws — that is, in accordance with principles — and only so has he a will. Since reason is required in order to derive actions from laws, the will is nothing but practical reason. (80)

The contrast Kant presents with this formulation is the basic distinction between “things” and conscious “agents.” A being with a will is not a mechanism or physical system whose various states are simply the causal effect of prior states. The concept of a rational, natural being is one that contains the idea of a being who acts “in accordance to the conception of law” -- i.e. on the basis of thought or insight into a law. The basic idea here is that the actions of a rational agent are not simply the effect of its strongest drives, urges, desires, needs, or conditionings. Henry Allison calls this model of agency the “battle ground” model, because the “strongest” desire determines the outcome or action of the will. According to the “battle ground model of agency,” attributed to David Hume, the will consists of a number of competing desires of varying degrees of strength that drive the agent in various possible practical directions -- toward the satisfaction of those drives. This is the model of agency that Freud envisions in his early works, of a biological being whose existence is determined by its various drives. The strongest desire drives the organism toward what will satisfy it -- say, food or sex. Against this conception of a single plane or arena of erotic drive conflict, Kant here introduces a quite different, “juridical” model of agency. Kant’s basic idea is that a rational will consists of two tiers or levels, the first indeed consists of a multiplicity of possibly competing desires, but the second stands like a judge to whom such desires offer petition, who must, in response, offer a hearing and judgment, acting only under a ruling or “conception” of what such a course of action would consist in. Allison calls this the “Incorporation thesis,” because desires (first level) must be taken up or incorporated by a judge (the agent) under a rule — a ruling, articulation, or clarification of what such a course of action would be — and it is the conception of such rules that determines the will, not the desires as such. Allison presents the incorporation thesis as defining Kant’s model of rational agency:

In fact, the Incorporation Thesis is best seen as a general thesis about how motives function in the case of finite rational agents or an arbitrium liberum, as contrasted with an arbitrium brutum. The latter, as Kant indicates in numerous places, is not merely sensuously affected, but also sensuously determined or necessitated. In other words, a subject with an arbitrium brutum is causally conditioned to respond to the strongest stimulus or desire, with this valuation placed upon it by the subject. Such a subject is, therefore, more properly characterized as a patient rather than an agent. By contrast, although a finite rational agent is still sensuously or “pathologically” affected, that is to say, it finds itself with a set of given inclinations and desires, which provide possible motives or reasons to act, it is not causally necessitated to act on the basis of any of them. For such a agent, the, one can no longer speak simply of being moved to act by the strongest desire, as if desires came with pre-given strengths, independently of the significance assigned to them by the rational agent by virtue of its freely chosen projects. Instead, the Incorporation Thesis requires us to regard the agent as acquiescing to the desire, granting it, as it were, honorific status as a sufficient reason to act. (IF, 130-131)

Kant’s model of agency reflects the basic tenor of his Copernican turn to an active, form-legislating subject:

Consequently, in acting on the desire, I am also committing myself to that rule, and such a commitment must be viewed as an act of spontaneity on my part (of self-determination, if you will), which is not reducible to the mere having of the desire. It is, then, in this commitment and incorporation, which is inseparable from the practical use of reason, that we find the locus of agency. (IF, 131).

Kant contrasts the concept of an infinite or divine will — one determined by reason alone, absolutely free from any sensuous determination whatsoever — from the concept of a finite will — one that is both rational and sensible. As finite, the human will is both sensible and rational. As natural beings, we are equipped with sensibility, by means of which we are able to intuit both natural objects and our own biological condition — that is, our needs, desires and emotions. As rational beings, on the other hand, we are equipped with reason, by means of which we are able to raise the question of what end we ought to pursue. This dual rational-empirical nature defines our finitude; unlike a purely rational will, whose thought alone determines action. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant demonstrates how this model of rational agency -- articulated in the Incorporation Thesis -- is presupposed in our ordinary understanding of morality. He will then raise another fundamental claim regarding human action: namely, that freedom and morality reciprocally imply one another. First, however, Kant ties the notion of the goodness of an action to the will that acts from a rule or “maxim” of duty. The goodness of the will is not derived from the goodness of its results. Three propositions about the relation between a good will and duty follow:

• An act is deemed morally good, not because it is done from inclination (Neigung) — whether out of self-interest (“selfishly’) or in the interest of others (“altruistically”) — but because it is done for the sake of duty. This is Kant’s first proposition regarding duty.
  
• Kant’s second proposition about duty is this: “An action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon; it depends therefore, not on the realization of the object of the action, but solely on the principle of volition in accordance with which, irrespective all object of the faculty of desire, the action has been performed.” (68/13).
  
• “Our third proposition,” Kant writes, “as an inference from the two preceding, I would express thus: Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law.

With these three propositions, Kant claims to be merely unpacking our ordinary understanding of the goodness of an action. The first proposition is illustrated in Kant’s famous example of the honest grocer, who refrains from cheating customers because he wants a long-term profitable business. Such honest acts accord with duty but are not done for the sake of duty. As such, they are, according to Kant, morally worthless. Likewise, the acts of a philanthropist who gives because of a natural feeling of generosity are likewise morally worthless, because they merely conform to duty without being done for the sake of it. The philanthropist who has lost all such feeling but who nevertheless helps others in need because it is the right thing to do — i.e. from duty — is indeed morally praiseworthy. The third introduces the notion of reverence, a particular type of feeling, which Kant distinguishes from other emotions in the following way:

Yet although reverence is a feeling, it is not a feeling received through outside influence, but one self-produced by a rational concept, and therefore specifically distinct from feelings of the first kind, all of which can be reduced to inclination or fear. What I recognize immediately as law for me, I recognize with reverence, which means merely consciousness of the subordination of my will to a law without the mediation of external influences on my senses. Immediate determination of the will by the law and consciousness of this determination is called ‘reverence’, so that reverence is regarded as the effect of the law on the subject and not as the cause of the law. Reverence is properly awareness of a value which demolishes my self-love. Hence there is something which is regarded neither as an object of inclination nor as an object of fear, though it has at the same time some analogy with both. The object of reverence is the law alone — that law which we impose on ourselves but yet as necessary in itself. Considered as a law, we are subject to it without any consultation of self-love; considered as self-imposed it is a consequence of our will. In the first respect it is analogous to fear, in the second to inclination. All reverence for a person is properly only reverence for the law (of honesty and so on) of which that person gives us an example. Because we regard the development of our talents as a duty, we see too in a man of talent as sort of example of the law (the law of becoming like him by practice), and this is what constitutes our reverence for him. All moral interest, so-called, consists solely in reverence for the law. (69/16-17).

Notice several things about this passage. First, the feeling is “self-produced” by our imposing the law on ourselves. Second, as self-produced, reverence is distinct from inclination or fear, although analogous to the former in being “self-imposed” and to the latter in being “necessary in itself.” The “immediate determination of the will by the law and consciousness of this determination” -- in short, our sense as agents of being able to act for the sake of duty or solely to do the right thing -- “demolishes my self-love,” according to Kant. The idea here is that “reverence” is the intuition we have of ourselves, of our being able to act “according to the conception of law.” But what type of law is this?
Kant writes:

But what kind of law can this be the thought of which, even without regard to the results expected from it, has to determine the will if this is to be called good absolutely and without qualification? Since I have robbed the will of every inducement that might arise for it as a consequence of obeying any particular law, nothing is left but the conformity of actions to universal law as such, and this alone must serve the will as its principle. That is to say, I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law. (70)

This is Kant’s most famous contribution to moral theory, his formulation of the “categorical imperative.” To act on the basis of “self-love” or self interest would be to take as a general rule or maxim some course of action that satisfies a desire that I happen to have as a particular agent. When I want X, then I will do Y. The problem with such a maxim or rule is that, while it affirms my own particularity, it can not be rule for all rational agents, who may well differ in regard to their own desires It does not, then, affirm what I have in common with other human beings, namely freedom.

The core of Kant’s moral theory is a claim that is now called the “Reciprocity Thesis”: “freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other” (Kpr V 5:28;29). The basic claim is that I am free if, and only if, I am bound by the moral law. This is the central claim of a “deontological” moral theory, and the central concept of this moral theory is the notion of autonomy (“Auto” = “self” and “Nomos” = “law”; hence, a being capable of binding itself to its own legislation). The essential idea is that I am a law unto myself -- in other words, that I impose laws upon myself -- if and only if the moral law -- the categorical imperative -- is binding. The best way to appreciate this is to see that the bindingness or validity of the moral law is the only way I can ever become cognizant of my freedom, understood as autonomy or the ability to impose law upon myself. Only if I can “universalize” my maxim — that is, act on a maxim that I can at the same time will to be a maxim for all rational agents — can I realize my autonomy, my freedom from the desires that I just happen to have as a particular being. In short, I am first cognizant that I am free from the particular desires, drives or tendencies I happen to have as an empirical being when I bind myself to the moral law, which requires me to ask whether all rational beings could will some maxim.

If I act “autonomously,” then I act on a rational basis, on the basis of a self-imposed law, on the universal condition of rational agents and not on the basis of my own contingent particularity. If I act on the basis of some “material” condition of my particular existence — that is, on the basis of some desire that nature or social conditioning has given me — then I act “heteronomously,” since the “law” or rule of action originates, in effect, “from outside,” as an accident of nature, not from “inside” me, my essential condition as a choosing or “spontaneous” agent. The upshot is simply this: Kant’s notion of freedom is freedom from our natural condition as what determines our actions.

THE SPLIT OR ‘DIREMPTED” SELF: KANT’S REVOLUTIONARY ORIENTATION TO SELF KNOWLEDGE:Kant’s analysis of experience or knowledge begins by raising the question of how experience is possible in the first place. As we have seen, the key to understanding Kant’s “model of mind” is the discovery that the self is active, form-legislating, synthesizing self or “I.” Kant first distinguishes intuitions – the immediate “representations” or, better, presentations – from concepts – the mediate “representation” or, better, grasping or taking of intuitions as something. As Pinkard notes,

In encountering something as humdrum as a stone, Kant pointed out, we are conscious of it in two ways: as an individual thing and as possessing certain general properties. The stone is this stone, but we can also note that it shares, for example, a color with another stone. We are intuitively, sensuously aware of the individual stone, and we make conceptual judgments about it when we characterize it in terms of its general features … we are directly aware of the individual thing and only indirectly (conceptually) aware of the general properties it has. After all, intuitions, as Kant himself put it, put us in an “immediate relation” to an object, whereas concepts only put us in a mediated relation to them; indeed Kant even says that a judgment is a “representation of a representation” of an object – that is, a combination of an intuitive representation of an object and conceptual representation of that intuitive representation, or what Kant (following the logical vocabulary of his time) call a synthesis of representations. Our experience, therefore, seems to consist of two types of “ideas” or “representations”: There are the intuitive representations of things as individuals and the conceptual representations of them in terms of their general features [25]

He then points out that the flow experience would not count as experience at all unless the experiencer or “I” could “attach itself to each of its representations. The basic idea is that such a flow of discrete representations would have to belong to one and the same experiencer to even begin to count as one’s experience rather than a disbursed bundled of free-floating data. This is the famous “transcendental unity of apperception,” which identified when Kant raises the “deceptively simply” question of how there could be a relation between an experiencer and experienced – that is, an “I” relating to a “thing” or a subject before an object:

THE INTERNALIZATION OF THE OBJECT WITHIN THE REPRESENTATION: The guiding question behind the “Transcendental Deduction” was itself deceptively simple: what is the relation of representations to the object they represent? … the conditions under which an agent can come to be self-conscious are the conditions for the possibility of objects of experience – that is, all the relevant questions in metaphysics can be given rigorous answers if we look to the conditions under which we can be self-conscious agents, and among those conditions is that we spontaneously (that is, not as a causal effect of anything else) bring certain features of our conscious experience to experience rather than deriving them from experience. A crucial feature of our experience of ourselves and the world therefore is not a “mirror” or a “reflection” of any feature of a pre-existing part of the universe, but is spontaneously “supplied” by us [27].

“Spontaneity” is Kant’s key characterization of the “I,” which must actively synthesize or unify its representations in order to taken them as appearances of something that it is not. In other words, “spontaneity” is Kant’s term for the basic activity that defines what it is to be a “viewpoint” or “perspective” upon the world. Only an active “I” that takes or synthesizes its representations as about or “of” something that it is not could count as the subject of experience.

Kant took the key to answering his basic question (“What is the relation of representations to the object they represent?”) to hinge on how we understood the respective roles played by both intuition and concepts in judgments and experience. Abstracted out of the role they play in consciousness as a whole, sensory intuitions – even a multiplicity of distinct sensory intuitions – could only provide us with an indeterminate experience, even though as an experience it implicitly contains a multiplicity of items and objects. However, for an agent to see the multiplicity of items in experience as a multiplicity, those items must, as it were, be set alongside each other; we are aware, after all, not of an indeterminate world but of a unity of our experience of the items in that world. We are aware, that is, of a single, complex experience of the world, not of a series of unconnected experiences nor a completely indeterminate experience; and, moreover, our experience also seems to be composed of various representations of objects that are themselves represented as going beyond, as transcending, the representations themselves.” [27]

As we have seen, the transcendental deduction leads to “epistemological restriction”: that is, the necessity of limiting our knowledge to that which conforms to our intuitive and conceptual forms. We do have experience of things, but we must distinguish between two ways of considering such objects of experience. First, they are appearances of objects or, said equivalently, phenomena (things that “show” themselves), but we must also recognize that another being – a god for instance – might not have such forms. We have to consider one and the same thing, then, from two different perspectives: i.e. as phenomena (Things-in-appearance) and noumena (Things-in-themselves).

Kant’s conception of the self is subject to the same epistemological restriction. If we experience the self as an natural object, then we do so as something that appears in time and space, as causally situated within a surrounding nature, as an causally determined “internally” as animal with needs, desires, motility, sensibility, physical abilities and limitations, etc., etc. Moreover, as social animals, we are raised up in social settings that have a palpable effect upon what we see, say, do, and feel, and the cultural circumstances in which we live also have effects upon our person that are studied as Anthropology, widely understood as the empirical study of what shapes human beings. These empirical studies, however, must be limited to the human self insofar as it appears as a natural object. The human “I” is also, however, the subject or “seat” of experience, and it is this “logical” subject that cannot be understood as a natural thing. Kant is forced by his epistemological restriction to distinguish, then, two different senses of the self. As Kant notes, “That I am conscious of myself is a thought that already contains a two-fold I” (WP, pp. 73 & 270).

The transcendental I is, Kant writes, a “mere prefix [designating] a thing of indeterminate signification” (MF, p. 543, p. 103). As a “completely empty representation ‘I’,” Kant writes, “we cannot even say that this is a concept, but only that it is a bare consciousness which accompanies all concepts” (CPR, A 436/B 404). As Caygil notes, “It is but the logical terminus of a process of abstracting from the predicates of knowledge to a postulated, ultimate subject which underlies them and which cannot be further specified.” (Caygil, p. 234). In one of the most famous passages of CPR, Kant states, “this I, he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X” (CPR, A 346/B 404).

Now, the epistemological restriction prohibits the illicit conflation of the logical I of thought and action with any substance or thing in the world. If one treats the transcendental subject as the object of knowledge – that is, as phenomena or substantial thing – then we would commit what Kant calls a “paralogism”: that is, a (transcendental) logical fallacy of conflating something that is subject to the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of the understanding, on the one hand, with something that is necessarily distinct from any such thing: namely, the “empty” logical subject of experience and action.