Reflecting Judgments and another Kind of Metaphysics

I. Kantian Background

It is well known that Kant rejected traditional metaphysics, claiming that such metaphysics attempts to know that which "lies beyond the bounds of possible experience." Kant held that metaphysics' grand cognitive failure is due ultimately to the particular constitution of the human understanding.  

We are constituted epistemically by possessing two quite different elements, one spontaneous and one receptive. We have the spontaneous ability to work the world up conceptually. Such conceptual thinking constitutes the form by which anything is known.  When we think we are active in our thinking; we attempt to know by grasping and shaping that which we know.  

But knowing the world does not consist merely in an active, spontaneous, formal grasping of what is known.  There is something, after all, that must be present to be grasped and shaped.  Kant argues persuasively that this content to be shaped is received, i.e, it is an intuition, something given by outer sense, something that is not itself the result of our grasping and shaping. Of course, the matter is a bit more difficult than this. That which is given by outer sense is not the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, but is rather an appearance of that thing.  

I believe that the best way to interpret Kant here is by claiming that it is the same thing that is in itself and that appears to us. What appears is not what the thing is in itself, but rather what the thing in itself is for our intuitional capabilities.`The thing in itself as given to us is always patio-temporally formed by the pure forms of sensibility, that is the pure intuitions of space and time.  While we actively organize that which is by the forms of space and time, the entire spatio-temporal formed content is nonetheless received as an appearance of the supersensible thing-in-itself. 

When we are knowing the empirical world rightly, the pure concepts of the understanding are spontaneously applied to the manifold of intuitions, and we have from this the reality of empirical experience as such. Such experience is already given as knowledge with quantity, quality, relation, and modality built into it, as it were.  Most importantly, our empirical experience is always one where there are things that can change while remaining themselves (substances), and things that change because other things have changed (causality). Knowledge of the natural world is thus always mechanistic.  Because we organize the world according to the universal law of causality -- for every event x, there must be some y such that y causes x -- all natural events have some causal explanation such that there are necessary and sufficient conditions why those events happened.  

Our cognition of the natural world is discursive. Intuitions are received and actively organized by concepts. An object is thus that by concept of which the manifold of intuition is united.  Without intuitions, our concepts would be empty, and without concepts, our intuitions would be blind.  When we know anything we begin with the concept (a universal) and subsume intuitions (the particulars) underneath it.  While space "falls within" space and time "falls within time:, particulars "fall under" concepts.  Our judgments of the world are determinative, that is, when we judge something to be the case, we must actively engage in a synthesis, bringing particular percepts under universal concepts according to rules.  These rules actively constitute objects.  

We hear a sound, see a shape, feel a presence, and are confronted with an odor.  The sound, shape, tactile sensation, and odor are synthesized immediately into an experience of a dog.  The dog exists by perduring through time, taking on other qualities without relinquishing its individuality, its being that particular dog, a dog called 'Spot'.  We don't simply know the dog as a particular immediately, it is rather mediately given through application of concept to percept. Since we have no immediate access to the thing-in-itself, we cannot immediately intuit individuals. Such individuality is the result of synthesis and constitution.  

This is very bad news for traditional metaphysics. Such metaphysics had attempted to unhinge the conceptual apparatus of the understanding from its connectedness to intuitions, and allow it to operate purely formally, hoping, as it were, that by formal reflection using the law of non-contradiction, one might be able to fill in the content of the supersensible world.  Kant devotes half of the Critique of Pure Reason to showing that metaphysics falls prey to a transcendental illusion or subreption when it is tempted to think that what is necessary for thinking also displays the contour of reality itself. The problem is that the activity and spontaneity of the formal conceptual is no longer being applied to the passivity and receptivity of intuitional content.  

So it is that metaphysics, once the queen of the sciences, has fallen on hard times. Indeed, Kant believes that when the form of thinking is disconnected from the content to be thought, metaphysics ends in paralogisms and antinomies. Reason now unfettered from intuition can both prove that there is a first cause of the world and not a first cause of the world; it can prove that there is contra-causal freedom and there is no such freedom. Reason, in searching for the unconditioned, still dreams that it can make use of determinative judgment, that it can find in its grasping and shaping that which is ultimately the case.  

But it is a fool's mission. Traditional metaphysics cannot know what is ultimately the case because the very condition for knowledge is that the manifold of intuition must be synthesized according to the rules implicit in the pure and empirical concepts of the understanding. Since this epistemic condition is not met by traditional metaphysics, metaphysics, no matter how sophisticated, can merely spin its castles in the sky.  It cannot know. 

Kant believed, however, that this state of affairs is not the end of the discussion, but merely the beginning. The self-legislation of the understanding which produces nature is at most only half of what is relevant to human beings. Human beings are, unfortunately, naturally metaphysical. We are concerned always with three focal notions: God, freedom and immortality.  If self-legislated nature was all there is, then there could be no God, freedom or immortality. In fact, the entire life of Decartes' res cogitans ("thinking thing") would simply be cut off, cast off, and ignored, as if the experience of the res cogitans were merely an illusion or mistake.  We would be a natural object among natural objects, and like other natural objects caused to be. We would be determined in the contour of our being as other natural objects are determined in the contour of their being. The natural metaphysical inclinations of humanity would need thus to be regarded as the leftovers of human childhood; they are an infantile wish. While we might yet long for God, freedom, and immortality, the world would not be the kind of place that could deliver these things. 

But, of course, the story cannot be that simple.  Kant, after all, is engaged in transcendental reflection, that is, he is looking for the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such, and such a looking seems quite disconsonant with there being no res cogitans at all.  

Had not Kant determined that a transcendental unity of apperception was needed to have a stable and consistent synthesizing of the manifold of sensation?  While this transcendental unity cannot be known to be a metaphysical res cogitans, that is, a metaphysical substantial transcendental ego, it is also not the kind of thing that is the result of the application of concepts to spatio-temporal particulars. The existence of the transcendental unity of apperception, and the possibility of transcendental reflection in general seems to cry out for a more comprehensive view of things. After all, if we are the authors of nature through application of the categories onto things, if empirical reality is the result of our self-legislation, then how can we simply halt our curiosity and say that nature is all there is? If it is we who make nature what it is, how can we ignore ourselves, the makers of nature? 

Thus, it is incumbent on Kant to search further to clarify and understand transcendentally what this transcendental subject is. Clearly, this subject is not the empirical subject of psychology, subject, as it were, to all of the psychological laws of conditioning. While psychology might find the psychological self to be determined, this determinism does not properly extend to the transcendental subject that can inquire into the conditions of the very possibility of the empirical psychological self being determined. When one reflects upon the project of transcendental reflection seriously, one realizes that the entire project presupposes something like judgment as it was conceived by Descartes. That great 17th century philosopher thought it a necessary condition to judge rightly or wrongly that one were free to judge. One must accumulate evidence as to why x might be the case or y might hold and on the basis of that evidence judge that x exists or y does. But how is that activity possible without freedom?  

Kant is concerned with the giving of evidence in his transcendental reflections. Such evidence-giving is what the transcendental deductions are all about. To provide a deduction in Prussian court of law is to give a valid  argument and evidence of title. Kant is interested in providing transcendental deductions that show that understanding is entitled to its claims that it does know the empirical world. As Newton thought, but Hume denied, we can have both universal and necessary knowledge of the empirical order. But this giving of transcendental evidence cannot be the result of the mechanism of nature, because the mechanism of nature only holds on the ground of proper application of transcendental reflection, a reflection that shows that human beings are entitled to claim that the can know nature objectively, in terms of both universalizability and necessity. 

But what else do we know about this transcendental subject? Is it merely a knower of the empirical order, or is it engaged in other matters? For Kant, the answer is quite obvious. Human being do not make merely empirical judgments about nature, but the make moral judgments about what ought to be done, and aesthetic judgments about what is beautiful. They make both moral judgments and judgments of taste. 

As it turns out, reason is not completely sidelined by its failure to use determining judgments in carving the beast of ultimate reality at its joints. Reason has other work to do rather than merely to know.  It must do as well. But what ought it to do? No amount of empirical knowledge of nature's is can ever help us determine what we ought to do. One cannot derive an ought from and is, after all. If the ought is to be understood, it won't be understood along the lines of nature, where concepts must synthesize the manifold of sensation into an experience of the world in which the universal law of causality holds. If we are to understand anything about the ought, we need to do it with reason, for such reason need not be mechanical in the way of the understanding. This is the reason that heeds reason!  But Kant had just argued that pure reason is not suited to mime the contour of the supersensible world. So what remains? 

Kant believes we do, in fact, employ reason practically rather than purely in dealing with moral questions. Given that we desire to do x, ought it be the case that we do, in fact, do x? In order to know what to do, we must consult moral law. Acting morally is acting due to this moral law. This acting presupposes freedom which is the condition for the possibility that consulting the moral law can determine the will. This determination of the will constitutes a desire to do x rather than y. Practical reason determines action by consulting the moral law on the basis of freedom. It thus constitutes a noumenal access to the supersensible, an access that allows for the very determination of the supersensible.  

Through the transcendental unity of apperception, the autonomous transcendental subject legislates law into and onto the empirical order. While the supersensible ground of this legislation, the realm of the thing-in-itself, remains indeterminate with respect to this legislation, with respect to the moral sphere, the supersensible becomes determinate. The autonomous transcendental subject through practical reason also self-legislates, this time it legislates the moral law in accordance with the categorical imperative, and accordingly acts due to that moral law alone. This autonomous subject is free to do x or y because such freedom is presupposed by the experience of ought itself.  

So at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, we find Kant in a situation not wholly unlike that of Descartes. Descartes had left us with two disparate domains: one a realm of natural objects governed by mechanical natural law (the res extend), and the other a domain of the thinking subject free to think or do other than what one had thunk or done. This substance dualism of the mechanical deterministic alongside the purposeful and free could not, however, be conceived in such a way as to allow linkage between the two.  Descartes' dualistic causal interactionism seemingly depends upon a connection between the disparate, a connection that, on the grounds of dualism itself, would either need to be a corporeal or a non-corporeal connection. But if either of these, then would there not need to be another connection connecting these?  

Kant had two different self-legislations, one issuing in a domain of determinism and the other one of freedom. His linking of the two has more options than Descartes because while the latter was thinking that he had mined reality, Kant knew that the empirical world is just one of appearance. In his Third Antinomy in the First Critique Kant solves the problem of freedom and determinism simply by pointing that we are transcendentally free even though we are phenomenally determined. While the concept of the supersensible underlying nature is wholly indeterminate, we can nonetheless understand that the supersensible underlying our moral order is determinate in its freedom and it acts out of duty to the moral law.  

But there is a big problem for Kant. How is it possible that a human being that is corporeal and subject to determinism as a natural object, is nonetheless free to have done other than it might have done by choosing to do act x rather than act y because doing act x is acting due to the moral law? How is the kingdom of ends possible, the corporeally-instantiated association of moral agents having dignity on the basis of their freedom. Does this not seem like the ghost of Descartes has returned? The linkage between the autonomous moral agent and the natural product instantiating it must be an identity, but that leaves open the question of the properties that agent has.  Is she really free to do other than what she did do, or is she determined after all?  Saying that determination is merely an appearance and she really is free, means that much of nature will be erroneously said to be determined when it is not. After all, there are nearly 8 billion agents comprising the kingdom of ends, and that number is rising quickly. How can all of these have freedom, but nature in general not? So Kant believes he needs to provide some unity between the results of the two Critiques. 

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant is concerned with judgments of the agreeable, judgments of taste, judgments of the good, judgments of the sublime and teleological judgments. He clarifies considerably his notion of judgment in this critique, distinguishing between determining judgments (bestimmende Urteile) and reflecting judgments (rerflectierende Urteile).  The first cover the type of constitutive judgments Kant had assumed in both Critiques. In a determining judgment, the universal subsumes the particular under it.  In so doing, nature can be thought as being comprised of substantial natural objects which are instances of kinds and related to each other causally. Through such judgments we can think of a world of parts determining one another such as to constitute a whole. 

But a reflecting judgment is not constitutive.  It is rather like being regulative in the way that Kant spoke about this in the Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason.  Reason goes astray when it thinks its judgments have content.  Formally they move from the conditioned to the unconditioned ground of the conditioned, but they cannot establish causality, because the causal connection is a denizen of the empirical order. They can regulate how we think, but cannot fill in the content of what is to be thought. For that we need intuition. A reflecting judgment does not constitute by bringing particulars under universal, but regulates by thinking universals on the basis of given particulars. 

Reflecting judgments start with the given particular, and are free to discover universals that might apply to those particulars. In aesthetic judgments, beauty is ascribed on the basis of the presentation of particulars.  While Kant is sure to claim that beauty is not a property of the thing, it is nonetheless universally and necessarily ascribed on the basis of particular presentations that involve a proper stimulation of the imagination in its interconnectedness with the understanding, an interconnectedness producing a feeling of pleasure. Beautiful objects are thus experienced as purposive although they have no purpose. The purposiveness of the thing is merely formal, depending as it does on the particular interplay of the imagination and understanding, one in which the understanding is stimulated as thinking the parts of the presentation as a function of the whole. It is as if the beautiful object had a final cause determining its parts in accordance with its end. 

What is particularly interesting about reflecting judgments is how they can be used teleologically, and how they might be applied in a more thoroughgoing way. Used teleologically, the judgments allow us to grasp in a more comprehensive form certain empirical processes and laws, particularly of a biological nature.  

It does seem, after all, as if there are processes whose best explanation makes use of functional or purposeful explanations. What is the best way to explain the bird's behavior under the gutter on the house? The bird can be seen flying to and fro with small pieces of straw or little twigs or blades of grass in its beak. To offer an explanation of this flying and selecting of appropriate twigs with which to fly without mentioning that the bird is building a nest is very difficult. Imagine giving an explanation of this behavior by appealing only to mircophysical particles and the relevant laws of nature governing them.  

Kant lived at a time where there was no scientific explanation for how life, no matter how primitive, could arise from inanimate, material conditions. There simply was no way to account for the behavior of purposive beings by appealing to mechanistic laws. I think, however, that while trying to understand nature in Kant's time without appealing to teleological explanations would have been impossible, it is still quite difficult for us today.  

Imagine the bird in the process of building a nest. Let us call the bird and its beak, twigs and flying a supervening level of description with its appropriate ontology. There are birds, and nests, and twigs, etc.  Let us in faithfulness to reductionism claim that there is an ultimate subvenient base such that two molecule-by-molecule replicas at the subvenient level would result in the same state of affairs at the supervening level of the bird. Will will not be type reductionists here but only token reductionists or more fashionably, non-reductive physicalists. We shall claim that for each and every event at the supervenient level there is some state of affairs at the subvenient level such that we can draw a function from the subvenient to the supervenient.  

So does the subvenient level explain the supervening level?  Clearly, the answer is "No, it does not." The subvenient level metaphysically realizes the supervenient level but does not explain it -- at least not yet. So what is the explanation for the bird flying the twigs to a spot under my gutter? One might say now that the best explanation is simply that the bird is behaving as it does because it wants to bring about the building of its nest. But is such an explanation in terms of purpose the same as that of Kant? 

Kant would probably say that there is some slight of hand here. One would need to specify the explanation of why the higher level would supervene upon the lower.  Clearly, it is the case that the bird exerts purposive behavior and that behavior is realized physically, and that the bird thus makes use of fundamental particles and laws in its behaving. But one cannot simply leave it at that, assert an asymmetrical dependency relation and claim that the subvenient ultimately determines the supervenient. That is to smuggle what Kant would call the mechanistic explanation in the back door without explaining how it might actually be that apparent purpose arises from an underlying mechanism.  

My point here is that it is really quite unclear that if Kant were here he would change his mind on the need for real teleological explanations in nature. He might say that his position on teleological explanation was that he used such explanations when mechanistic ones were inadequate. Recalling #77 and #78 in the Critique of Judgment he might say, "I can imagine a being other than I or you who might have different cognitive equipment and might thus be able to understand particulars immediately, not as worked up through concepts. Such a being could perhaps see that there is some deeper mechanism that we will never be able to grasp because of the constitution of our epistemic equipment. Although this fact should be faced squarely, we should in our cognitive lives simply use teleological explanations in nature and afford them truth-conditions and ontological status, for we do not have such intellectual intuition." 

While Kant knows that reflecting teleological judgments likely give the best explanation for natural processes as they were understood in his day, it seems that he wants more out of reflecting judgment. He is searching in his reflecting judgments for both simplicity and unity. He discusses his architectonic task in the Critique of Pure Reason and other places. He is clearly interested in a vision of the world that might fit our natural metaphysical aspirations, a world where God, immortality and freedom are present; a world which is unified and coherent.  He wants to use reflecting judgment to unify his critical philosophy. Kant knows that this unification will not come from the bottom-up as the more basic stuff in the universe determine determine what is at the top.  Instead this must be top-down vision of the world, one where the synthetic universal at the level of the Idea can take us what is disparate and disunited and place it into a unity.

Kant has a story about how this might happen, but it is not deeply worked out. Below I provide the beginning of my own story. 

II. Another Kind of Metaphysics

I think Kant was on the right path in his treatment of reflecting judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Such judgments are a matter of taste and they are made on the basis of intellectual pleasure, that is, they concern beauty.  Kant knew that we had no way of knowing the ultimate metaphysical contour of reality, but he did not simply ignore the problem of the human inclination to do metaphysics.  After all, we are by our very nature interested in the questions of God, immortality and freedom. 

So let's think about doing another kind of metaphysics. Let's think of metaphysics in terms of looking about for some universal that we might be able to apply to given particulars. I am not thinking merely about the particulars of empirical objects or special science specific laws, but all of the facets of existence that are given to us, and which appear prima facie disparate.  We might think of this as a metaphysical theory, but we are not looking at either traditional explanation or prediction from our theory.  We look rather for something more akin to an artistic vision which might both apply to and be adequate to the most abstract features of concrete experience as such. These most abstract features would be the theory's particulars. Our goal is simply to think reality coherently and consistently.  

Let us call M a metaphysical vision, schema or understanding of things which is internally consistent, coherent and parsimonious, and applies to, and is adequately to all of our experience. M would be concerned with unity and would seek an understanding of the parts such that the the human inclination to search for metaphysical knowledge of God, freedom and immortality counts as much in the vision as successful mechanistic scientific explanation. Instead of playing down moral and aesthetic experience, M would seek regulatively to balance that experience alongside of empirical experience. Instead of denigrating certain subjects as not being truth-apt and thus noncognitive, M would assume that there is a way to unify the more truth-apt and the less truth-apt disciplines. The various disciplines in which humans engage, and the natural, social and cultural aspects of human life would all be the data of M.  

Clearly, there are many ways to cast M, but this is to be expected. If constructing M is done correctly, there are likely few disconfirming instances of it. If we are dealing with the most abstract features of concrete experience, and these features are exemplifications of M, then M is necessary. That is not to mean, that holding M as a vision of the world is necessary, only that M exists as a schema that has no disconfirmations given the present state of our empirical knowledge. 

What would be the use of having M? It would give us a way of seeing things that would involve the interplay of imagination and understanding as Kant thought, a way of seeing things that would produce in us a feeling of intellectual pleasure. The reflecting judgment that produces M realizes that there can be many Ms, both synchronically and diachronically. More than one object can be beautiful, after all.  However, M will make the demand of the aesthetic ought on all those capable of understanding.  

If we honestly engage in the reflecting project of providing M, we would, I think, find ourselves doing systematically what we are doing confusedly today. After all, something like a reflecting judgment is at work when we learn a little physics, a little literary theory, get a dash of German social theory, learn something from the news, reflect on the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, watch a crisis in Africa, think about global CO2 levels, and listen to jazz. We are always engaged in unifying our experience, even if the unification produces a view of thing that is chaotic, dissonant, and ultimately pessimistic, a view that downgrades the natural inclinations in us for the ideal and assigns the motives of moral decision-making to psychological egoism, or maybe to a privileged class or race consciousness. Not only individually, but as a culture, we are engaged in unifying experience by suppressing some features of it and highlighting others. What might be the result if we could step back and in an act of critical distantiation see the various features and elements of experience for what they are, and then seek to appropriate what we see in the building of an M that would grant us a view of things that would meet the standards of taste?   

Clearly, very few people would do this, and many would wonder why they should attempt it. But for some the intellectual satisfaction involved with conceiving a world that is consistent, coherent, simple, unified, and applicable and adequate to our deepest yearnings of the human heart might be worth the effort in casting it.  Why would one who could think M not ascribe beauty to it? If we find beauty in the fine arts and music, why could we not find it in a metaphysic that could deliver a view of things that made sense to us? 

This metaphysics is not theology, of course, but it would be concerned with some of that with which theology deals. It would take seriously the wonder of existence itself, and the tragedy of human dwelling in time. It would not abstract away from the questions of guilt, sin, and death, and our desire to find security in the great ideas of God, freedom and immortality. M cannot, of course, fail to deal with God, whose appearance in M ultimately motivates the very project of the casting of M. God appears in M formally as the ultimate theoretical entity for reflecting judgment. It is that which finally makes M coherent; it gives M the very possibility that the parts of M can mutually presuppose themselves.  God is thus at the depth of being; God is the sine qua non for the possibility that M can be cast in a way that cannot be disconfirmed by particular concrete experience.  

The God of M is not, of course, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Reflection cannot, I think, get us to the Trinity or to the Incarnation.  However, neither is the God of M the "God of the philosophers." M does not seek to cast about for a determining metaphysics for natural theology, but simply opens a path for a reflecting metaphysics of a theology of nature. Christian symbols can be exhibitions of M, I think, but other religious symbol systems are possible too.  

If Kant is correct about our cognitive powers, our powers of determining judgments, we can no more grasp the nature of the supersensible than Luther could find the hidden God. The supersensible is essentially mysterious, showing us any determinacy only in moral judgment.  However, reflecting judgment does perhaps make the supersensible determinable, and maybe that is enough for us yearning for beauty in our brief sojourn within the fields of time.