Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in Philosophy

Introduction

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published his revolutionary book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), [1] where he falsified the idea that the Sun revolved around the Earth and instead proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. 

In 1781, after a decade of writing it, the German polymath Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) published his magnum opus Critique of Pure Reason, [2] and in the preface to the second edition of the book, he wrote, “We are here in a similar situation as Copernicus was in at the beginning,” comparing his theory in the Critique to Copernican heliocentrism. This comparison was made because Kant’s ideas inverted the widespread philosophic tradition of studying objects outside of a human subject (such as how in the pre-Socratic period, Heraclitus and Parmenides argued over whether objects of reality could ever change). [3] Kant proposed that instead of trying to understand those objects, we should instead look towards the human subject itself, in order to learn how we come to know of those objects in the first place. 

Kant’s “Copernican Revolution" in philosophy is typically only considered his publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, but since his other notions in different branches of philosophy (for example, the autonomy/heteronomy distinction in his ethics, and the concept of the sublime in his aesthetics) were derived from the Critique of Pure Reason, they could also be understood as part of his Copernican Revolution, but this essay will mainly focus on the Critique of Pure Reason and its impacts on the world. 

Kant is undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers to ever have lived, and is commonly thought of as the most influential modern philosopher. Nonetheless, to fully understand his philosophy, one must first understand the condition they sprouted from - Kant himself. Throughout his life, he had never left his hometown of Königsberg (which has been renamed to Kaliningrad) for more than 100 kilometres, and for most of his life, he systematically followed the same daily routine - which included a daily walk through Königsberg, drinking exactly half a bottle of red wine each day, waking up at 5 a.m. each morning, and leaving his house at exactly 8 o’clock every day, which led him to be nicknamed as the “clock of Königsberg”, and allowed him to live to the age of 79, which was considered exceptionally  long in his era. In addition, his life was full of innumerous hardships: for instance, both his parents had died by the time he was 22 years old, and he was sent to a strict, disciplinary school. [4] To quote Dostoyevsky, “The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.” [5] Hence, Kant’s life can be described as the passage from disorder to order, which appears to mirror the theory of apperception he put forward in the Critique, which we will examine in more depth later in this essay. 

Origins of Transcendental Idealism

During the Enlightenment, there were two main schools of thought in epistemology - rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists argued that all knowledge arises from rational thought (Kant terms this a priori, which loosely translates to “prior to experience”) whereas empiricists argued that all knowledge arises from experience (Kant terms this a posteriori, which loosely translates to “after experience”). In his life, Kant was extensively exposed to both rationalism and empiricism, being introduced to the beliefs of scholars like Aristotle, Leibniz and Wolff (who were all rationalists) during his studies at the University of Königsberg. He also had a personal interest in empiricists such as Hume, which is evident in how he wrote in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, “I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my ‘dogmatic slumber’ and gave me a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.” [6]

With his familiarity with both rationalism and empiricism, he decided to take aspects from both philosophies and merge them together into his own epistemology, and thus, transcendental idealism was born. Transcendental idealism, also known as Kantian idealism, generally refers to the entirety of the Critique of Pure Reason, which can be summarised and simplified into the statement “all human knowledge begins empirically (a priori), and is then understood rationally (a posteriori)”. The statement shows that Kant views knowledge as a process that both experience and reason contribute to. As he stated in the Critique, “Although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” This idea that the unity of experience and reason constitutes knowledge is similar to the Persian philosopher Avicenna’s theory of knowledge, who thought that knowledge is attained when one experiences the world and uses one’s experiences to form syllogistic arguments, which then allow for propositions, conclusions, and abstract concepts to be logically deduced. [7] Kant summarised his transcendental idealism in the Critique, stating, “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.” 

The “transcendental” in the word “transcendental idealism” is defined by Howard Caygill as “the conditions of possible experience”. [8] “Transcendental” should not be confused with “transcendent” (which is interchangeable with the term “a priori''), because whilst all transcendental concepts must be transcendent/a priori, not all transcendent/a priori concepts are transcendental.  

The concept of the transcendental also links to another idea of Kant’s from the Critique of Pure Reason - the noumena/phenomena distinction. Noumena (synonymous with the idea of “transcendental concepts”) are objects that are beyond sensory experience, while at the same time, are presupposed in and form a fundamental groundwork for phenomena (the realm of objects knowable by the senses). Therefore, noumena causally determine everything in the phenomenal world, leading Kant to suggest that free will was only possible in the noumenal realm, and thus, he thought that ethics must transcend the senses (unlike consequentialism). [9] Kant’s idea of positive noumena is very similar to a vast range of other beliefs around the world, including Aquinas’ “eternal law”, Schopenhauer’s “will”, “Brahman” in Hinduism, Plato’s “forms”, “Tao” in Taoism, etc… However, a common misconception about the idea of noumena is that the idea of a noumenon equates to the idea of the “thing-in-itself”, and that all noumena are unknowable. 

As a matter of fact, Kant thought that there were two types of noumena, as he stated in the Critique, “If by a noumenon we understand a thing insofar as it is not an object of our sensible intuition, because we abstract from the manner of our intuition of it, then this is a noumenon in the negative sense. But if we understand by that an object of a non-sensible intuition, then we assume a special kind of intuition, namely intellectual intuition, which, however is not our own, and the possibility of which we cannot understand, and this would be the noumenon in a positive sense.” 

Noumena in the negative sense are hence the same as things-in-themselves (which is anything outside of human observation or experience), and these noumena still have the possibility of being known. For example, if one solves an algebraic equation, then they will have deduced a negative noumenon or thing-in-itself, because the variables and constants from the equation are “not [objects] of our sensible intuition”, as they are rooted in our minds to understand objects that are knowable through sensible intuition, and for that to be possible, they must transcend the realm of sensible intuition entirely. The algebraic equation can then be considered an example of Kant’s “pure reason”, which can be defined as reason or rational thoughts that are independent of the five senses. 

While negative noumena are knowable to humans, positive noumena are not, and Kant thought that we could not  even be sure of their existence (although Reinhold - a student of Kant - believed that the existence of positive noumena was necessary for Kant’s transcendental idealism to uphold itself). The only possible way to know of these postulated “positive noumena” is through “intellectual intuition”, which Kant thought only the  “primordial being” (Urwesen in German) could have. The concept of a “primordial being” is commonly interpreted as “divine intellect” or the Christian God, because even though Kant disproved various popular arguments for the existence of God in the Critique (which led some scholars to conclude that while Friedrich Nietzsche declared “God is dead” in The Gay Science, [10] Kant was God’s killer), [11] he was raised in a Pietist family and explicitly showed that he was a Christian in Critique of Judgement and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. [12] [13]

Space and Time

In the “Transcendental Aesthetic” part of the Critique of Pure Reason, although relatively brief, Kant came up with radical ideas concerning the concepts of space and time. 

He thought that space and time were “pure intuitions” of the mind, meaning that they did not exist in reality (i.e. the realm of noumena), but only as the conditions which made our understanding of representations possible in the realm of phenomena. Kant thought that we never perceived objects themselves (the thing-in-itself or Ding an sich in German), but only the representations of those objects. Kant’s usage of the term “representation” can be linked with Aristotle’s hylomorphism (which can be used to suggest that all representations are combinations of “matter” and “form”), except instead of “matter” and “form”, there is “phenomena” and “noumena”. [14] 

To borrow an analogy used by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy, Kant thought that we view the world through “rose-tinted spectacles”, where we do not see the world itself, but only the “rose-tinted image” of the world (or the representation). [15] These spectacles themselves are then made of the “pure intuitions”, because Kant argued in the Critique that sensory experience is not possible without the pure intuitions of space and time, and they regulated and ordered everything knowable through the senses. To validate this fact, one can ask the question “what would the world look like without space and time?” Soon, it would become apparent that one cannot conceive of a world without space and time, and therefore, they are fundamental to it, or rather, fundamental to our understanding of it. 

Therefore, space and time are subjective to individual humans, and do not exist in reality, as Kant said in the Critique, “[It is] only from the human standpoint that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc.”

Logic and Human Understanding

Kant thought that there were two kinds of logic: general logic and transcendental logic. General logic is synonymous with formal logic (including the systems in analytic philosophy), and he thought that Aristotle had uncovered everything there was to know about general logic - which deals only with the a priori. Transcendental logic, on the other hand, deals with both the a priori and the a posteriori, and is what Kant focused on. 

He adapted “Hume’s Fork” to suggest that there are three types of judgements/propositions: analytic (ideas that are self-evident, or true by definitions alone), synthetic (ideas that are not self-evident through definitions alone), and synthetic a priori (ideas that are synthetic and known a priori). The notion of a synthetic a priori judgement appears to be contradictory, because Hume thought that all synthetic propositions were empirical, [16] so Kant stated that the aim of his Critique was to show how synthetic a priori judgements were possible. Examples of synthetic a priori judgements include  “7 + 4 = 11”, “the shortest path from a to b is a straight line”, and “everything has a cause and effect”. All of these judgments are made a priori, yet are not analytic (i.e. their truth is not dependent on the definitions of their constituents), meaning that they are synthetic a priori. 

In addition to his adaptation of Hume’s Fork, he thought that judgements could be further distinguished in the following ways:

                              Figure 1

Similarly, he thought that we know of the objects of the world through a table of “categories” (or pure concepts of the understanding). This solves the “problem of universals” in philosophy, by showing that properties common throughout objects (such as colour) do not exist outside of those objects, and are only part of the human unconscious:

        Figure 2

Kant contended that all human understanding began in what he called the “manifold” - a disorganised array of information presented empirically to the mind. Objects in a manifold are then organised and understood by the mind vis-à-vis the categories. This “ordering of the manifold” is known as the “synthetic unity of the manifold”, which forms a large part of Kant’s theory of apperception mentioned earlier. Apperception can be understood as an individual’s amalgamation of their subjective ideas (e.g. pure intuitions and the categories) with the objective representations of objects from the manifold. 

He then proposed that human understanding had limits, namely, the “paralogisms and antinomies of pure reason”, which Kant gives several examples of and analyses them. A “paralogism of pure reason” can be thought of as a “fake limit”, in that it is not actually a limit of the human understanding. Paralogisms can also be understood as either “falsidical or veridical paradoxes” in W.V. Quine’s terminology, meaning that paralogisms are paradoxes that are either fallacious or have counterintuitive yet true conclusions. [17] Antinomies of pure reason are “real limits”, where perfectly logical reasoning on both the thesis and antithesis of an idea leads to a contradiction, and Kant thought that these antinomies demonstrated the flaws in human logic and the limits of human understanding. The antinomy is also the precursor to Hegel’s method of dialectic (which is significant, because the “Lordship and Bondage Dialectic” was used as the foundation for communism, which evidently, had world-changing impacts), meaning that Kant may have been the “great-grandfather of communism”. [18] 

Kant’s Legacy

Kant certainly left behind a great legacy, since the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason is itself epochal. His transcendental idealism led to the creation of at least three different schools of thought: German idealism, American transcendentalism and Husserl’s phenomenology. [19] Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is also considered a rewriting of the Critique of Pure Reason, implying that Kant influenced the entire postmodern movement. [20] Kant’s ideas on space and time inspired Bergson’s theory of “duration” (which showed that free will was possible in the phenomenal realm) and arguably influenced Einstein’s theory of relativity (as it suggests that space and time are relative and subjectively known, which is similar to Kant’s theory). [21] [22] Kantian idealism has also led to societies and institutions dedicated to it, including the North American Kant Society (which I personally joined in order to develop my interest in Kant) and the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. [23] [24] Additionally, Kant’s ideas in general have had lasting effects on modern society - ranging from law to politics, which is why the German media company DW called him “the most influential thinker of the Modern Age”. [25]

To conclude, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his ideas that stemmed from it really do constitute a “Copernican Revolution" in philosophy, as they completely changed the course of philosophy and went against notions which had been accepted for millennia, teaching the central idea that in order to understand the world around us, we must first look inwards at ourselves and attempt to know of our very nature.  

Bibliography

[1] Copernicus, Nicolaus, and Owen Gingerich. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri VI: Nuremberg, 1543. Octavo, 1999.

[2] Kant, Immanuel, et al. Critique of Pure Reason. Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1966.

[3] Laks André, et al. Early Greek Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 2016.

[4] Scruton, Roger. Kant. Herder, 2004.

[5] Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, et al. Crime and Punishment. Modern Library, 1950.

[6] Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783). Alex Catalogue, 2001.

[7] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu/avicenna-ibn-sina/.

[8] Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary. Blackwell, 2008.

[9] Kant, Immanuel, and Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Compass Circle, 2019.

[10] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, et al. The Gay Science. Dover Publications, Inc., 2020.

[11] Colli, Ilario. “Kant and the Death of God.” Thought Gymnasium, Thought Gymnasium, 20 Dec. 2021, www.thoughtgymnasium.com/articles/kant-and-the-death-of-god.

[12] Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Clarendon Press, 1952.

[13] Kant, Immanuel, et al. THE ONLY POSSIBLE ARGUMENT IN SUPPORT OF A DEMONSTRATION OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (1763). In D. Walford (Ed.), Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770 (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, pp. 107-110). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[14] Aristotle, and Laura Maria Castelli. Metaphysics. Clarendon Press, 2018.

[15] Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy. Routledge, 2004.

[16] Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Encyclopædia Britannica, 1977.

[17] Quine, W. V. The Ways of Paradox: and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 1997.

[18] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, et al. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press, 1977.

[19] Ameriks, Karl, et al. The Impact of Idealism: the Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

[20] Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

[21] Bergson, Henri, and Frank Lubecki Pogson. Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Routledge, 2014.

[22] Einstein, Albert. Relativity the Special and General Theory ; a Popular Exposition. Routledge, 1993.

[23] North American Kant Society - Home, northamericankantsociety.org/.

[24] “Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.” Home - Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, 10 Aug. 2022, eng.kantiana.ru/.

[25] (www.dw.com), Deutsche Welle. “‘Kant Is the Most Influential Thinker of the Modern Age’: DW: 12.02.2004.” DW.COM, www.dw.com/en/kant-is-the-most-influential-thinker-of-the-modern-age/a-1111992.