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Kant and the Reach of Reason (Rescher, 2000)

Studies in Kant's Theory of Rational Systemization

Nicholas Rescher

"Kant maintains that the mission of systematization is the origination of knowledge... As Kant saw it, adequate understanding can be achieved only through the systemic interrelating of facts."

JLJ - Rescher's philosophy has a foundation in Kant. Let's see what he has to teach about the German deep-thinker.

However deeply Kant dissects human thought, what we obtain is not useful for strategy, business, warfare or competition in general, because in these cases we are interested in tricks or schemes that usually work, or in case studies of packaged wisdom which can be applied in similar situations to turn predicaments in our favor. Rationality in itself does not equate to (or replace) profound wisdom - in how to proceed when the way is not clear. Perhaps it indicates no more than we should 'do' what ought to 'work.'

In my (much simpler) philosophy, the human mind is simply a collector (an observer, as well as ponderer) of tricks that work. Such 'tricks' are subconsciously categorized into conditions where they are likely to work, and are intelligently recalled at precisely the moments and predicaments where they are or might be useful, and likely to work. Specifically, what comes to mind consciously - what emerges from the subconscious - are tricks that 'might' work, or 'ought' to work.

In such a way we can now 'go on' - armed with our 'bag of tricks' that we can execute, and a cognition which acquires them and brings them to our attention at the right moments. It is subtle 'cues' in the environment which we attend in order to select one trick over another. A cue might not be a thing-in-itself, but if it helps us decide how to 'go on,' it is nevertheless useful and for all practical purposes 'real' because we have 'pre-decided' that such appearances are useful.

Famously or not, youtube 'fail' videos capture people trying tricks that ought to work, by some kind of flawed logic, which happen not to work, at the moments recorded. 'Tricks' that 'work' over and over we can reuse - these can be intelligently and practically packaged and elevated (dare I say through wisdom) to 'schemes', which we merely 'execute,' since we have already deemed them - 'pre-decided' in fact - to be useful and applicable.

When machines 'play' complex games of strategy, we see the 'execution' of schemes - 'tricks' which programmers have made to 'work' in tournaments of games against strong opponents and therefore are (or become) effective for 'playing' opponents of all types and of any skill or ability. Such tricks might be as simple as heuristically asking 'how might I proceed?' followed by 'how much should I care about that?' - effectively building adaptive capacity against the emergence of unforeseen positions down the road by mobilizing pieces or other tokens into effectively coercive positions.

Or ditch my philosophy and read about Kant and his things-in-themselves and noumena - whatever they are.

vii This book gathers together various essays on the philosophy of Kant that I have written over a period of some thirty years.

p.3 The general theme of the approach to Kant taken in these pages is that of demystification.

p.4 Systematization is pivotal both in Kant's thought about the nature of knowledge and also for Kant's philosophy itself, whose central formative concept mechanism it provides.

p.6 For Kant, human thought proceeds at three (closely interrelated and interconnected) levels, corresponding to the three major faculties of the human mind:

1. Sensibility, which conforms our sense perception of objects to the (characteristically human) "forms of sensibility," namely space and time.
2. Understanding (Verstand), which conforms our various individual judgments regarding objects to the (characteristically human) categories of thought.
3. Reason (Vernunft), which conforms the collective totality of our judgments regarding objects to certain structural requirements of systemic unity.

Their interrelation is crucial in Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself.

p.8 The thing-in-itself is accordingly a creature of understanding... a product of abstraction - arrived at by prescinding from the conditions of sensibility.

p.11 to be fully objective and authentic, an appearance must be an appearance of something; there must be an underlying something that does the appearing - that grounds it in an extraphenomenal order.

p.12 The "thing" at issue with the thing-in-itself is "a concept without an object," a mere ens rationis that is the mere shell of an object without content, without reality, indeed without as such being genuinely possible, "although they must not for that reason be declared also to be impossible"

p.12 But of course knowledge is not the only cognitive modality at our disposal. For one thing, there is assumption and hypothesis. And, for another, there is positing and postulation. On this basis, the availability of the things-in-themselves emerges as a postulate of the human understanding and the conception thereof as its indispensable tool.

p.12 Our understanding is committed to the postulate or supposition that things-in-themselves have a place in an experience-external nonsensuous noumenal realm, however little we may know about them... Noumena are "things the understanding must think"... given the modus operandi of the human mind. Our understanding cannot operate without supposing things-in-themselves, any more than our sensibility can operate outside the space-time framework at the perceptual level.

p.13 In sum, the conception of a thing-in-itself is a thought tool: what we have here are validatable thought objects, theoretical entities that we can and must make use of in order to make sense of a knowable reality of which they themselves are emphatically not a determinable part.

p.15 We accordingly not only can have credence in things-in-themselves - can think them as actual - but we must do so... We not only can endorse the conception of things-in-themselves, but we must do so to operate within our "conceptual scheme."

p.18 Things-in-themselves are the creatures of mind, or rather (and perhaps more exactly), the conception of things-in-themselves is a mental contrivance to which our reason finds itself unavoidably committed... a thing-in-itself... something created by the understanding in its in-built insistence upon operating with a conceptual scheme of objective, mind-external foci of knowledge.

p.19 The thing-in-itself is the product of our mind's commitment to thinking about the phenomena (the items of our experience) as mere phenomena, as appearances - which, of course, can only be done on the basis of a commitment to the idea that there is something that appears, seeing that an appearance must, by the very meaning of the term, be an appearance of something. It is the conception of things-in-themselves that counts

p.19 The Kantian thing-in-itself is to be understood not as part of the furniture of the real world as such, of nature, but rather as an instrumentality of our thought about this real world. And such a thing-in-itself... is the product of an intellectual insistence upon - that is, a postulation of - a certain way of thinking about things, the product of a certain "conceptual scheme" to which our reason stands committed... Paradoxical though it may sound, things-in-themselves are - as Kant saw it - not in the final analysis real things at all, but thought things, whose legitimacy lies in their being not fictions, but inherent and inevitable commitments of the human understanding.

p.20 Kant's things-in-themselves form part not of the furniture of a realm of mind-independent reality, but rather of the machinery of thought. The Kantian thing-in-itself is, in effect, an ens rationis, a postulate of reason based on the fact that our human mind does and must think of the things of everyday experience in a certain sort of way.

p.22 while things-in-themselves "can never be known by us except as they affect us"... they nevertheless represent "a transcendental object, which is the cause of appearance and therefore not itself appearance"

p.23 The key to a proper understanding of the role that Kant maintains for the things-in-themselves lies in his insistence that reason itself compels us to accept their acceptance

p.34 the Principle of Sufficient Reason... does not establish the real existence of things-in-themselves and their causal operation, but rather commits our mind to the concept of a thing-in-itself... as a conceptual resource that is both available and applicable.

p.64 The concept of "system" is perhaps the most portentous idea of Kant's theory of knowledge.

p.65 Kant maintains that the mission of systematization is the origination of knowledge... As Kant saw it, adequate understanding can be achieved only through the systemic interrelating of facts.

[JLJ - Here is where I need to point out that in certain cases understanding is not critically essential to deciding how to 'go on.' If the high-level goal of cognition is to understand, it is for the purposes of determining how to 'go on' from within the current predicament. When I drive on the highways and roads of the Washington DC area, I do not in perfect and intricate detail have a 100% understanding of the positions, velocities, intentions and actions of 100% of the drivers in my immediate area. I put my car and therefore myself in a tactically and positionally acceptable posture that has great promise to adapt to changing conditions and indirectly help me maneuver in an environment that I attend to, yet do not understand in complete detail.]

p.135 the equator... the North Pole... the international date line... the continental divide... Their reality, such as it is, involves the element of idealization. They are not observable objects accessible to the senses, to touch and sight, but rather thought objects - fictions, if you will. But they are not idle fictions... They play a serious role in our cognitive endeavors and make an essential contribution to our comprehension of the world... these products of... human thought... secure an objective legitimacy through their essential role in helping us to organize and coordinate our knowledge about those real features of the world. It is through this instrumental utility for the organization of our knowledge that such thought constructions secure a claim to objectivity and cognitive legitimacy.

[JLJ - I would say that such objects are part of a conceptual system that is useful for orienting oneself in determining how to 'go on'.]

p.143 Ideas are cognitive products of practical reason - not fruits of observational knowledge, but artifacts of reason whose validation lies in the productive guidance of the development of such knowledge. Their objectivity is not a matter of direct apprehension, but only indirect through their capacity to facilitate the work of reason.

p.145 the unity of reason is thus not an accomplished fact, but an ongoing project, a work in progress.

p.146 Against this background it becomes clear that the ideas do not represent constitutive parts of the real. They are not substantively descriptive. Rather, they reflect operational (functional) methodology with reference to which our constitutive picture of the world is developed.

p.147 Accordingly, the ideas which encapsulate the unity of reason do not relate to objects of secured knowledge, but rather to procedural principles:

p.148 What is at issue is a procedural stance, a matter of proceeding as if:

p.149 Of course such procedural principles in the modality of as if cannot be objectified; they cannot be transmogrified into existing things:

[JLJ - unless they represent critical insight relating to the way to 'go on' in a predicament - then they become something so essential that they function as if they were fact. In the game of baseball, the location of the various field markings such as the batter's box, first base, the foul line, take on meaning because they represent critical elements of a game. They are or become meaningless when a game is not being played, or when the stadium is later converted to a parking lot.]

p.150 We must always bear in mind that the use of an operationally effective organizing principle is one sort of thing and the discovery of substantive fact another. One is a matter of process, the other of product. Conflation of the two would be a fateful error - that of reifying a procedural device. (Think again of the equator!)

[JLJ - see my notes for p. 135]

p.151 ideas are... thought instrumentalities which, from the conceptual point of view, are no more than schematic glimmerings that just cannot be passed off as concrete objects.

[JLJ - Kant and Rescher keep missing that ideas are tied in with the predicament and the constant need to determine how to 'go on.' As part of a sense-making scheme they are as close to real as they can get. The human mind is constantly asking itself, 'is the scheme I am currently executing in this predicament appropriate, what else could I possibly do, and what do I need to pay attention to, in order to determine how to go on?' Many things that are real do not tell us how to 'go on,' and so therefore do not deserve excessive amounts of our attention - the squirrels that invade my yard and dig holes are real and an irritant, but there is nothing I can do about them, and so I forget about them. The Dow Jones average is a metric and not physically real, but it deserves my attention when I consider my financial planning efforts. Just because something is not a concrete object does not mean it is not worthy of our attention. The human mind should concern itself with executing the present scheme to go on, as well as with the details of other potentially useful schemes, in case things change and one needs to approach life differently. Whether something is real or not is, in the end, not critically important (a useful metric may not be real), as long as one has an effective scheme that one can execute - that positions us for effective action, that generates adaptive capacity and therefore is useful for determining how to 'go on.']

p.151 With Kant, ideas function appropriately at the level of the sort of virtual reality that preoccupies reason. They are inappropriate only insofar as we become so careless as to envision them to function at the level of observational (i.e., physical) reality.

p.151 The difference between physical objects and ideas is not that of mental versus nonmental, but simply turns on the issue of which department of mind is involved - namely, sensibility-cum-understanding or reason.

p.153 The reality of it is that illusion is as unavoidable for our minds as optical illusions are for our eyes... However, this need not prove harmful, and need not issue as an outright delusion, as long as we are mindful of the need to avoid hypostatization's leap to actual objectification

p.154 despite their lack of objective reality, ideas have an objective validity that renders their application in the setting of cognitive transactions not only useful, but even necessary if reason's work is to be effectively pursued.

[JLJ - for me, ideas become important parts of the cognitive scheme to understand in order to - or to the degree necessary to - effectively 'go on.' This could be as simple as a mechanism or process for constructing a diagnostic test in order to form a posture against both the known and the unknown.]

p.156 ideas are not products of cognitive (or speculative/theoretical) reason, but rather products of practical reasoning.