Kant for beginners

Kant for Beginners*

The empiricists said that the mind was a tabula rasa or blank slate that was filled up as life goes on by ideas, which are basically copies of objects transmitted to the mind via the senses. The mind is like a sort of camera or photocopy machine, copying what exists out in the world. There are some problems with this view, though:

1. If all the mind ever knows is its own ideas, as the empiricists believe, then how do we know its copies are accurate?

2. For that matter, how do we even know they are copies and not originals (since, to repeat, supposedly all we ever actually perceive are these 'copies')?

3. There is quite a difference between a blank slate and a camera or photocopier. An actual blank slate would not do the work of the mind (slates are neither conscious nor intelligent). So the mind must be more like a machine. It must have its own complex structure and function accordingly. And it must be more complex than a photocopier, since it processes not only visual input but also sounds, tastes, smells, etc. So perhaps we should think of the mind not as a blank slate or even a photocopier but more as something like a radio, television, or computer.

This brings us to Kant. To keep things simple, let's start with the idea of a radio. You can throw a lot of stuff at a radio. Some of this stuff will break the radio, some will bounce off it, some will be turned by the radio into meaningless crackling sounds and hisses, and some will produce sounds that make sense to us (words and music). These sounds that come out are quite different from the radio waves that go in (that's why we need radios, to convert these waves into sounds we can hear). So radios ignore most of what they are bombarded with, but turn some of it into coherent, meaningful sounds.

Kant thinks the mind is a bit like this. It gets bombarded with who knows what and turns some of it into the sounds, sights, smells, tastes, etc. that make up our world. The bombarding stuff he calls noumena and the sights and sounds (etc.) he calls phenomena.

It is with the mind that we make sense of the world, that otherwise meaningless data (or bombarding stuff) gets turned into information that makes sense to us. By thinking about what we can make sense of and what we cannot, we can find out something about how the mind works, i.e. what it does.

For things to make sense they must take a certain form, Kant argues. There is a difference between experiencing something (which involves things making a certain amount of sense to you) and just being there (unconscious or completely uncomprehending or tripping). For instance, are you seeing a) lots of colors swirling around or b) three-dimensional objects moving in space? If you answered a, you are tripping. If you answered b, you are having experience. Here's another example: are you a) living in an eternal now with no before and no after, or b) living in a world of time and history, in which one event follows another? If you answered a, you are tripping. If you answered b, you are having experience.

Kant does not, of course, talk about tripping, but this is pretty much what he has in mind. In this way he identifies key features of experience, and therefore key features of what the mind does in producing the phenomena that we experience, i.e. the things that make up our world.

The two fundamental forms of our experience are space and time. If your 'experience' is not of three-dimensional objects (i.e. things in space) doing things one after another (i.e. in time) then your mind is not working properly. So space and time are features of what the mind does, not features of the noumenal world.

What else does the mind do? A bunch of things. It brings together the different kinds of sensory information and presents them to us as objects (not just 'patches' of color or sound or whatever) that interact causally (not just randomly or even regularly) and so on. So when we see a Dalmatian dog, for instance, the mind puts the black and white bits together and presents them as one thing, and it puts the barking noise together as something not just happening at the same time but as something caused by the dog, etc.

That, roughly, is what the mind does. But what is the mind? We can only know the mind as it presents itself to us. That is, the mind must bombard itself with itself and then process this data into information we can make sense of. So we can only know the mind as a phenomenon. The noumenal mind is unknowable. This gives us a certain amount of freedom to think about it any way we like.

Kant believes that the noumenal mind is in fact an immortal soul that will be judged after death. This belief, he thinks, inspires us to be ethical, and so is a good belief even though we can never know whether it is true.

Kant also believes that the noumenal mind is free to make its own choices, and is therefore responsible for the actions it produces in the phenomenal world. Again, this belief supports our ethical practice of holding people accountable for their actions, even though every event in the phenomenal world is determined (i.e. caused, since one of the key things the mind does is to present phenomenal events to us as caused). So Kant believes in noumenal freedom and phenomenal determinism.

Just as the noumenal mind is responsible for our phenomenal actions, Kant also believes that a noumenal God is responsible for the existence of the entire world. Again we can never know whether this is true, but it helps make sense of the idea of judgment after death and is one way to explain why anything at all exists. In this sense religious belief is rational, Kant argues.

*N.B.: This is Kant for beginners, not Kant as he is in himself. It is a reading of Kant that is not a million miles away from some respectable interpretations of his work, but that is not to say that it is actually correct. In particular, I talk here as if noumena were objects of a special kind. There is good reason to believe that this is not what Kant means. On the other hand, a case can be made that that is what he means. People coming to Kant for the first time are not ready for the debates about this issue, and the view presented here is, I think, easier to grasp than the most obvious alternatives.