Kant opens his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics with the question of whether or not metaphysics is even possible. Where in the preceding work, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant believed he treated the question synthetically, in Prolegomena he sets out to do so in a more analytic fashion. While Kant, who came from a background studying the premier rationalists of his day, credits empiricist David Hume for interrupting his “dogmatic slumber” ( p 8), he does not agree with Hume on all counts, for he believed (and I would agree) that the world cannot and should not be understood only through experience any more than it can or should be understood only through reason. Kant attempts to bridge the gap between rationalism and empiricism by introducing a new factor into the equation: intuition. For example, Hume argued in his Dialogues on Natural Religion that we cannot see causes; Kant agrees with this, but argues that we can use our intuition to connect the proverbial dots. If I see a rabbit in the snow, and observe that there are certain holes left in the snow after the rabbit has moved on, I can intuit that the rabbit made these tracks. Say later, I find tracks which are very similar. From a practical standpoint I cannot know for certain if I did not actually see the rabbit (maybe someone thought it would be fun to make fake rabbit tracks in the snow, or maybe some other animal makes similar tracks), but it’s not unreasonable for me to infer that these, too, were made by a rabbit.

Kant starts out by distinguishing between analytic and synthetic judgments, criticizing earlier “dogmatic philosophers, who always seek the source of metaphysical judgments in metaphysics itself ”for neglecting this “apparently obvious distinction” (sec 3, p 19). All propositions regarding metaphysics, he argues, have in the past been analytical -- that is, they added nothing new to the present body of knowledge. He also categorizes all judgments into three categories: judgments of experience, mathematical judgments, and judgments of metaphysics. Judgments of experience, he notes, “are always synthetical. For it would be absurd to base an analytical judgment on experience, as our concept suffices for the purpose without requiring any testimony from experience.” (sec 2 p. 15) By definition, of course, judgments of experience are also a posteriori. Mathematical judgments he deems synthetic a priori. Given that math is not my forte (to put it mildly), this argument was initially difficult for me to comprehend; I will return to this point momentarily. Metaphysical judgments “properly so called” (sec 2 p 18) Kant also categorizes as synthetic, although he distinguishes between “metaphysical judgments” and “judgments pertaining to metaphysics.”

That math is a priori is easy enough to agree with, because we can be perfectly assured that at least in pure math, one plus one will always equal two. We also have concepts of numbers that are difficult or impossible to find in nature, such as a googol and the even more absurd googolplex (ten raised to the power of a googol), and even imaginary numbers such as the square root of negative one. Math being synthetic, however, was slightly more difficult for me to grasp. I was talking with a friend about this, and he brought up some interesting arguments. He was thinking of all numbers as aggregates, e.g. the seven is seven ones. If that were the case, he argued, wherever you have seven, you also have both five (five ones) and two (two ones); thus the concept of five would be contained in the concept of seven, and so math would therefore be analytic. It is probably true, I think, that one cannot have a concept of seven (or any other number for that matter) without having a concept of one, and as my friend pointed out, if one is going to have a concept of seven, one has to differentiate it somehow from other numbers (even if we were to differentiate numbers by fractions, they would have to be fractions of something, namely one). But in my friend’s example, the very fact that one has to separate (mentally or physically) the five from the two within that seven indicates that there is another step involved, which is something other than the definition of seven per se. In all math, whether it’s so simple that it can be done in one’s head in a fraction of a second or a long and complicated equation which takes weeks to solve, there are intermediate steps needed to solve the problem. That, I think, is enough to show that synthesis is indeed involved.

Kant puts forth the argument that space and time are not things in and of themselves, but rather lenses, as it were, through which we see the world. It is difficult for me to wrap my head around the possibility that space is not inherent in the world. If I am standing two feet away from a particular tree, I can reach out and touch it, quite confident of its proximity to me. If there is another tree ten feet away, I would have to somehow move through space in the direction of that tree in order to touch it, and I would then be such a distance from the first tree that I would be incapable of reaching it unless I were to move through space once again back in the direction from which I’d just come. Would this not be the case if space were not something inherent in the world? Kant might counter this by saying that since I am perceiving them, both trees clearly exist (assuming that I am neither hallucinating nor dreaming), but that my perception of them filtered through this built-in “lense of space” is what causes it to seem that one is “here”(a perceived two foot distance) and the other “there” (a perceived ten foot distance). Perhaps, too, my perception of them being filtered through that “lense of time” contributes to this notion of “here” versus “there,” since I perceive -- consciously or not -- that it would take time to move closer to the tree I perceive as being “there.” It is inordinately difficult to imagine how we could possibly perceive the world without space or time. So is Kant right? At this point all I can say is that I do not know a way to prove him wrong.

Kant disagreed with the pure idealist view that all we see might be created in the mind; he believed that the appearances themselves are enough to show that the corresponding physical objects do exist. At the same time, however, while he agreed with Hume that there exist physical objects which correspond to our perception, he argued that we cannot perceive the “noumena” (p 60), the objects in and of themselves; we can only perceive the phenomena or appearances. This is like what is illustrated in René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images: underneath a painted image of a pipe is the sentence Ceci n’est pas une pipe, “this is not a pipe,” reminding us that we are looking at a painting of a pipe (and what we actually perceive is the image of a painting of a pipe). I agree with Kant completely on this. Not only are there inherent limits to human perception (e.g, forms of light we cannot see and sound frequencies we cannot hear), but we cannot “get inside of” things in the world to actually know them as they are. (And as was discussed in class, even getting to know oneself is extremely tricky; how much more so, then, something other than oneself?) I would further add that Anaïs Nin also had a valid point that we often see things not as they are, but as we are. At the very least, we often attach meanings to the things we perceive that may not necessarily be inherent in them (subjective synthetic judgments). A woven piece of cloth dyed in certain colors in a certain pattern is just that, but people can look at this piece of cloth and see a powerful symbol -- and even then, the interpretation of that symbol can vary greatly depending on the observer.

If all we can perceive are the phenomena, and cannot get at the things in themselves, where does that leave us when we cannot even look to perceptible phenomena, i.e., when we are dealing with metaphysics? Kant makes it clear that we can have no experience of pure concepts, and points out that we cannot, say, posit the existence of an eternal soul because death is the end of all experience, and without experience, we cannot know anything. Where the sphere of our perception intersects with all that can be experienced is what we can know; what lies beyond our experience or beyond our perception cannot be known. (This is one of the reasons that I am wary of any attempt to universalize any principle; if we are ever going to approach any semblance of ultimate truth, assuming that such exists, it is not going to be arrived at by only one narrow mindset, particularly not one which comes from a single cultural viewpoint, coming from people with only a very narrow scope of experience. Thus from what we’ve discussed in class about this, I would probably find much to criticize in Kantian ethics.)

By the end of the book he almost seems to answer his initial query (is metaphysics even possible?) with an unequivocal “no.” “Reason,” he proclaims, “through all its concepts and laws of the understanding...finds in it no satisfaction, because ever-recurring questions deprive us of all hope of their complete solution” (sec 57 p 102). Metaphysics asks questions about not the appearances (which is what science deals with), but things in themselves -- things which, according to Kant, we cannot know. He does, however, acknowledge that the likelihood of human beings giving up “metaphysical researches is as little to be expected that we, to avoid inhaling impure air, should prefer to give up breathing altogether.” (p. 116) Indeed, it is human nature to be inquisitive, to want to know the unknown, although I might suggest that sometimes in our quest for knowledge, we might cross ethical boundaries which are best left untouched. We should also be wary of speculating on "reasons" (beyond simple causation) for certain events in life. I find it hard to swallow that there are deep cosmological reasons for my mother dying at age 51, or other unspeakable atrocities such as genocides and mass extinctions, or even natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis. Jerry Falwell might speculate that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to punish the "sin" in New Orleans, and that might fit in just fine with his limited worldview, but that how he sees it, not what actually is.

Yet Kant does not in fact reject metaphysics outright. Certainly, reason asks questions which it cannot answer, but the fact that reason has its limitations implies that something lies beyond those limitations, and perhaps if we remember that there is a difference between what we perceive and what actually is, we can attempt to learn the relationships between the former and the latter, thereby increasing our knowledge, while at the same time reminding us how much is still unknown. I would argue, again in agreement with Kant, that it might also be healthy to admit that maybe -- just maybe -- that there exist things in this world which we ultimately cannot know. But the more we understand the world, with the caveat in mind that we don’t have all the information, we can keep our knowledge in perspective.

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