Kant Against Kant IV
From Appendix B of The Refutation of Kant
Now, since we know that Kant developed the amphiboly diagnostic and applied it to Leibniz, the question follows, how is it possible that he did not see the amphiboly in his own system? Is it possible that he was being dishonest, or disingenuous?
If one looks at the body of his work and the way in which the amphiboly was developed, it does not seem likely that Kant was being dishonest. His error appears to be more in the scope of its application than in its construction.
Kant’s diagnostic was oriented toward one specific kind of confusion: the rationalist tendency to treat concepts of pure understanding as if they applied directly to things in themselves without sensible mediation. His correction was the doctrine that the categories and the concepts of reflection apply only to objects of possible experience, not to things as they are in themselves apart from the conditions of experience. This is what Kant means by confining knowledge to the phenomenal realm. The categories structure experience; they do not reach beyond it.
Having installed this correction, Kant reasonably believed he had closed the door on the kind of error Leibniz committed. Leibniz extended concepts beyond their proper domain of application. Kant’s response was to draw the boundary of the proper domain and enforce it. The Amphiboly chapter is the enforcement mechanism. After it, the rationalist slide from concepts to things in themselves is, in theory, blocked.
What Kant did not see is that the correction itself introduced a new amphiboly at a higher level. The move from “the categories apply only to objects of possible experience” to “things in themselves are inaccessible to cognition” is structurally identical to the rationalist slide Kant criticized, performed in the opposite direction. Where Leibniz extended a principle valid within pure understanding to objects of experience without authorization, Kant extended a principle valid about the limits of categorical application to the total inaccessibility of reality without authorization. Both moves treat a restricted claim as if it licensed an unrestricted conclusion. Both moves perform the slide by stipulation rather than by argument. Both moves generate systematic philosophical confusion downstream.
The restricted claim Kant can demonstrate is that the categories of the understanding have their proper application only within possible experience, and that we cannot subtract the contribution of our cognitive apparatus from our experience to arrive at a representation of things as they are “in themselves” in the sense of things entirely independent of any cognitive mediation whatsoever. This is Reading A. It is correct. Every instrument has limits, and the contribution of the instrument cannot be subtracted from the result.
The unrestricted claim Kant asserts is that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, that no features of reality as it actually is are accessible to human cognition, that the phenomenal realm is all we can know and the noumenal realm is permanently sealed. This is Reading B. It does not follow from Reading A. The fact that we cannot know reality without any cognitive mediation does not entail that we cannot know reality at all. Mediated access is still access. Partial knowledge is still knowledge. The falling rock falls because gravity is a feature of reality, not because the categories of the understanding impose falling on raw noumenal data.
VERIPHYSICS: The Refutation of Kant: The Fault in the Foundation and the Key to the Closed Door by Vox Day is now available for Amazon Kindle, KU, and audiobook.
