Kant Against Kant V

From Appendix B of The Refutation of Kant

The reason Kant could not see this is that the new amphiboly was located at the foundation of the framework the Amphiboly chapter was built to protect. A diagnostic developed to catch one kind of confusion is not well-positioned to catch a confusion constitutive of its own foundation. Kant’s attention was directed outward, at rationalist metaphysics, and the framework he built to replace it incorporated the new amphiboly at the level of its first principles. From inside the critical philosophy, the move from Reading A to Reading B looks like a simple consequence of the transcendental conditions of knowledge. From outside, it looks like what it is: an unargued slide between a restricted claim and an unrestricted one.

This is a general pattern. The tool that fixes one error often introduces a new error at the level of the tool itself, and that error is the hardest to see precisely because it is constitutive of the framework that is doing the seeing. Kant saw that Leibniz’s error was invisible to Leibniz because Leibniz was working entirely within the framework the error generated. The same diagnosis applies to Kant. The master amphiboly was invisible to Kant because Kant was working entirely within the framework generated by the master amphiboly.

The post-Kantian tradition inherited the uncorrected amphiboly because the diagnostic that would have corrected it was believed to be complete and required no further review. Kant used it against Leibniz. He did not use it recursively. The Amphiboly chapter stood as a completed piece of philosophical housekeeping, not as a general method to be applied wherever a key term happens to be defined differently in two places. Had the Kantian tradition treated the diagnostic as a method rather than a result, the master amphiboly would have been visible from the start. The method was available, but the application was not made.

The irony is that the Neo-Kantians have collectively made the amphiboly progressively more visible in the course of presenting their various defenses of the Kantian framework over time. As you have seen, the standard defense against counterexamples to Reading B is to expand the phenomenal realm to absorb them. When the objector points out that gravity tracks a feature of reality, the defender replies that gravity is phenomenal. When the objector points out that molecular structure is independently confirmed across multiple instruments with different physical principles, the defender replies that molecular structure is phenomenal. When the objector points out that the rock falls whether you observe it or not, the defender replies that the unobserved falling is phenomenal too. The phenomenal expands. The noumenal contracts. But the defender continues to insist that Reading B holds and the thing-in-itself remains unknowable.

This defensive Neo-Kantian expansion is, by Kant’s own diagnostic, the amphiboly becoming visible under pressure. If the phenomenal can grow indefinitely to include everything we can observe, describe, predict, and independently confirm, then Reading A is doing all the work. Mediated access to real features of reality is exactly what the expanded phenomenal amounts to. Reading B, the claim of total inaccessibility, has been quietly evacuated; the noumenal has shrunk to an empty shell that consists of nothing, explains nothing, and makes no empirical difference to anyone. But the defenders maintain Reading B as a formal thesis even as their own expansions concede its substance. The expansion is an implicit admission that B was too strong, performed while continuing to assert B. This is not a viable defense. It is the amphiboly recapitulating itself under observation.

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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.