Thoughts on the Empiricist / Rationalist debate and Kantian metaphysics

I have experienced an overwhelming concern with one primary intellectual debate for several years now, which I will introduce as the “rationalist vs. empiricist debate,” although I want it to be clear my concern is not limited to the scope of early modern Western philosophy. I am ultimately interested in what I find to be the most important philosophical inquiry — what is real, or what exists, an inquiry which I understand to be an “metaphysical” one. However, instead of attempting to jump into a manifesto in which I begin by defining by terms, which I have tried before, I am going to attempt to succinctly tell the story of my interest in this debate, and why it has become important to me.

My story begins with Catholicism. The first decade or more of my experience was defined by heavy exposure to a dogmatic idealism, one that spoke confidently of the reality of entities which I had never seen or experienced. This was foiled by a Montessori education that emphasized independent exploration and curiosity.

Curiosity led me to questions. The first metaphysical question I remember truly grappling with as a child was the existence of Hell. Is there really a place I could be conscious of after death in which I will experience pain? While this is not a topic which bears immediately on my current concern, it is important to my story because my question was directed towards a binary metaphysical conclusion — does this entity exist, or does it not? Is Hell real, or is it not real? I wanted to talk about the truth, which, as I understood it, was a statement that correctly describes what is real.

Any progress I felt I made as a child towards discerning truth took place, at the end of the day, in the realm of what I might call “intuition” — things ultimately either felt true or they didn’t — but there was obviously more to my investigation. It became obvious that the existence of Hell seemed contradictory to things I had been told by people who believed in it, as well as things I experienced in the world around me. In this sense it was both rationally problematic and empirically doubtful. However, because I was unable to produce some complete set of verifiable axioms or principles to found my conclusions on, they seemed to me to be “intuitive.” Another way I might try to describe this sense of understanding is “holistically appropriate” — a measure of how well a given statement about existence fit into the vast array of other statements I understood to correctly describe that same existence.

It is my understanding that the majority of early modern metaphysical literature begins from a similar starting point. Descartes, Leibniz, Locke and Hume (as examples I feel somewhat comfortable referring to) each seem to approach fundamental metaphysical principles on the basis of how well they resolved others truths each of them were previously committed to. It also became clear to me, however, that many of these same thinkers were (to varying degrees) interested in a sense of “epistemic humility.” These thinkers were ready to assume they could be wrong about at least some of their accepted beliefs.

I understand epistemic humility as the crux of the debate between early modern rationalism and empiricism. While I do categorize the greater inquiry at hand as a metaphysical one, the particular investigation done by European early moderns is clearly an epistemic one — what do we know, how do we know it? In the face of a scientific revolution (usually attached to Copernicus) that threatened the certainty of things like God and human freedom, it seems the Rationalists were eager to explore a sense of doubt about the material world, while the Empiricists, facing the same revolution, wanted to their philosophy to challenge the traditional rationalism/idealism inherited from ancient Western (Greek) philosophy, the tradition that was conveniently adopted by Medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas.

I hope to have successfully established a coherent picture of the rationalist/empiricist debate I am working with, and the sense in which it revolved around the idea of epistemic humility. Whether or not this humility was accomplished is another question. Following the story to this point, it is clear there was a disagreement about where to place a “humble” foundation for knowledge and understanding — some wanted sensory impressions, others a priori truths. The disagreement ultimately concerned the difficultly of making “true” statements about the material or phenomenal world — all of the early moderns I mentioned earlier grappled with an account of sensory experience as subjective (experience could be different for two people in the same environment) and limited (experience of the world was never exhaustive), and therefore weak. The early Rationalists were happy to take this as a sufficient reason for limiting the search for truth to the domain of ideas, understood as humble because it didn’t pretend to have insight into what was actually real. Hume, on the other hand, seems to stand firmly by his emphasis on the primacy and fundamental authority of sensory impression, but his exposition on induction leaves us humbled as well, with very little to work with if we are interested in rigorously justified truth statements.

It is now appropriate to look forward from the origin of this debate. Admitting some inability to categorize and discuss these thinkers well, my education has taught me to trace the continuing progression of this debate immediately to Kant, and then to Hegel, Marx, and later Continental philosophy on one side, and analytic philosophy on the other (with certain exceptions). Kant obviously plays a fundamental role in each of these progressions. Kant seems to be the latest respected thinker in the analytic tradition who still worked within the parameters of the original Empirical-Rational disagreement, and undoubtedly influenced his continental successors as well. For this reason I have identified that his philosophy is of significant importance to my inquiry, and while I can certainly not claim thorough understanding, I will now attempt to briefly reconstruct Kant’s contribution to the debate.

The heart of Kant’s contribution to the epistemic concern at hand surrounds his proposal of “synthetic a priori knowledge.” Kant’s suggestion is appealing because he creates a rigorous foundation for statements that, within the parameters of his system, can be necessarily true and yet still be “judgements of amplification,” adding something useful or meaningful to a concept. Kant wants his truth statements to be more than tautologies. If his system can be accepted, both science and mathematics have a stable epistemic basis. Kant’s maintenance of a priori knowledge lets mathematics (as he conceives it) be what he wants it to be, and his limitation of “empirical” knowledge to spatiotemporal appearances lets science do what it wants to do, while still maintaining an appearance of humility. Moreover, under Kant, it seems the Church could continue to maintain authority over deeper metaphysical truths as it traditionally had. Kant’s epistemic humility is presented as one that avoids “stepping outside the realm of our own understanding.”

I want to draw attention to the fact that the epistemic commitments which Kant makes to make synthetic a priori knowledge possible have serious implications for our relationship to the real. I am pointing to the separation Kant draws between the phenomena and noumena. Kant’s phenomena are subject-dependent — they have no reality without the subject, and simultaneously represent the exhaustive set of foundations for knowledge about the world. In the context of any intellectual or philosophical inquiry informed by Kant, it seems there is no longer any real recourse to something outside the subject, something we might call objective. His philosophy is not solipsistic, because his priori truths are accessible by and relevant to all subjects (and in this way there are plenty of “objective” truth statements), but these strictly pertain only to things that exist in the human mind.

I have always been “intuitively” inclined towards Kant’s efforts at developing a detailed sense of what universality might look like among subjects, but the more I focus on Kant, the same intuition tells me that Kant is wrong. Instead of following over a hundred years of analytic scholarship that attempts to find some flaw in Kant’s argument, I would like to begin to make my case against him by discussing a number of consequences I have identified in the Kantian worldview.

First, however, I would like to orient the reader towards the basis of my own positive intuitions about this subject. I have always been inclined to agree with Hume’s contributions to the Rationalist-Empiricist debate. Again admitting some inability to appeal to the literature, I understand Hume’s epistemic conclusions to be fairly straightforward. To Hume, all non-tautological knowledge is empirical, and all concepts and conceptual understanding can be traced back to sensory impression. Hume’s efforts at describing the human inclination towards “causality” while arguing that our understanding of it is built on induction and therefore never necessarily true were the most eye-opening to me. My reading of Hume’s Enquiry convinced me that he was certainly not a hard skeptic or nihilist. He acknowledged that it would be absurd for an individual to act as if causation was not somehow at play in his environment. I understand Hume as epistemically skeptical of causation but not metaphysically so. This attitude has become the inspiration for many of my own convictions, so I will attempt to unpack it a little more.

In many ways, I understand Hume to be sympathetic to the idea of “faith” in causation. In other words, it seems to me that Hume realizes that an overwhelming commitment to necessity is essentially impractical and therefore unadvised. Kant speaks of Hume as “waking him from dogmatic slumber,” but turns around and writes the Critique, hundreds of pages almost entirely oriented towards necessity. I understand why necessity is important — the Critique is ultimately concerned with metaphysics, and philosophy has historically understood the metaphysical as those universal, necessary truths about reality man has always been eager to make. And yet it seems Kant’s undying search for necessity within the “limits of human understanding” essentially throws out the real (we have zero access to the noumena) — which seems like a really terrible way to do metaphysics.

One might ask: If you’re not committed to necessity, where does that leave metaphysical truth? In response: I’m not sure. I’m not suggesting we should assume all of our own personal sensory impressions and structures for understanding them are completely accurate representations of reality. Instead, I want to be adamant that our inability to make necessary statements about reality should not prompt us to separate ourselves from it.

(unfinished, to be continued)