But what is meant by the phrase ‘transcendental philosophy’? The reader will be aware that, in the history of philosophy, the simple paradigm is common in which Rene DesCartes is the representative of ‘rationalist’ philosophy, while John Locke is the icon for ‘empiricist’ philosophy. Each of those two was joined by teammates. Alongside DesCartes were, e.g., Jacques du Roure, Geraud de Cordemoy, Francois Bayle, and Jacques Rohault. Locke’s fellow empiricists included, among others, David Hume and Thomas Reid.
The rationalist team distrusted empirical knowledge, arguing that sense-data was unreliable. The rationalists found certain knowledge in a priori reasoning.
The empiricists discounted a priori knowledge as largely vacuous, consisting mostly of tautologies like “a = a” and “all triangles have three sides.” They argued that meaningful content came from sensations.
A sort of stalemate between these two teams had emerged by Kant’s time. Kant hoped to find a third option in philosophy: his Transzendentalphilosophie.
Webster’s dictionary defines ‘transcendental’ as “of or relating to experience as determined by the mind’s makeup” or “transcending experience but not human knowledge.” Webster offers an important contrast between ‘transcendental’ and ‘transcendent’ — the latter being “beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge.”
Random House offers a similar distinction: ‘transcendent’ is “transcending experience, not realizable in human experience,” while ‘transcendental’ is “of, pertaining to, based on, or concerned with the a priori elements in experience that condition human knowledge.” Random House adds that ‘transcendental philosophy’ is “based upon the doctrine that the principles of reality are to be discovered by the study of the processes of thought.”
Likewise, the dictionary of Funk and Wagnalls defines ‘transcendent’ as “lying beyond the bounds of all possible human knowledge,” and explains ‘transcendental’ as “having an a priori character; transcending experience.” According to Funk and Wagnalls,
Intuitive truths are those which are in the mind independently of all experience, not being derived from experience nor limited by it, as that the whole is greater than the part, or that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. All intuitive truths or beliefs are transcendental. But transcendental is a wider term than intuitive, including all within the limits of thought that is not derived from experience, as the ideas of space and time.
Significantly, Funk and Wagnalls directed the reader to a reference work by Charles Krauth and William Fleming. This book went through several editions, with slight variations in the book’s title. Henry Calderwood seems to have been involved in one of earliest editions. It is usually cited as Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences. Fleming and Krauth give extensive discussions of the word ‘transcendental.’
Eric Kandel offers a glimpse into Kant’s philosophy of mind, and into Kant’s epistemology:
The view of the brain as a creativity machine that constantly uses inference and guesses to reconstruct the external world — the view advocated by Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich — was a dramatic shift from the naive philosophical realism of the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke that dominated thinking about mind at that time. Locke conceived of mind as receiving all the information capable of being gathered by the senses, a view in which mind simply mirrors the reality of the external world. Kris and Gombrich’s view of the brain was a modern version of Kant’s theory that sensory information allows reality to be invented by the mind.
Kant perhaps would not have phrased it as Kandel does, but the point is made: Kantian epistemology sees the mind as active. The mind doesn’t passively receive sense-data and then process them into perceptions. Even at the earlier stage of sensation, before perception, the mind is shaping the sense-data by placing it into space and time — or rather, by creating space and time around the sense-data.
Without using the word ‘transcendental,’ Eric Kandel describes the Kantian epistemological process:
The biological study of learning raises some familiar philosophical questions: What aspects of the organization of the human mind are innate? How does our mind acquire knowledge of the world?Serious thinkers in every generation have struggled with these questions. By the end of the seventeenth century, two opposing views had emerged. The British empiricists John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume argued that our mind does not possess innate ideas; rather, all knowledge derives from sensory experience and is therefore learned. By contrast, the continental philosophers Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and particularly Immanuel Kant argued that we are born with a priori knowledge; our mind receives and interprets sensory experience in an innately determined framework.
The definitions offered by Webster, Random House, and Funk and Wagnalls are compressed, intended for laymen, and somewhat simplified. They are not written by philosophers for philosophers. Eric Kandel is a brilliant and recognized neuroscientist, but his descriptions of Kant’s thought are not from the viewpoint of Kantian specialist and are not for an audience of Kant scholars.
A text coauthored by Julius Maria Roth and Paul Schulmeister points out that epistemology in general — and especially Kant’s epistemology in particular — is concerned not about what we know, but about how we know it, and the conditions which make knowledge possible:
Die Wende, die mit Immanuel Kants (1724-1804) Transzendentalphilosophie eingeläutet wurde, lässt sich am prägnantesten durch den Vergleich von Rene Descartes (1596-1650) und Kant nachvollziehen. Es handelt sich um den Unterschied zwischen Wissen und den Bedingungen von Wissen.
Roth and Schulmeister argue that DesCartes sought certain knowledge which can’t be doubted, while Kant sought the prerequisite which made knowledge attainable. Both Kant and DesCartes were concerned with the formal mechanisms of epistemology, but under the interpretation of Roth and Schulmeister, DesCartes was driving toward specific contents of knowledge as well as the form of knowledge:
Descartes ging es darum, sicheres Wissen zu erlangen, das nicht mehr bezweifelt werden kann. Kant hingegen fragte nach der Bedingung der Möglichkeit von Wissen.
DesCartes proceeded from the assumption that knowledge was possible, and so his questions were “What can we know? What do we know? Do we know what we think we know?”
Descartes setzte die Möglichkeit von Erfahrung als gegeben heraus. Ihn interessierte deshalb die Wirklichkeit von Erfahrung. Seine Frage lautete: Sind die Dinge wirklich so, wie sie uns erscheinen?
Kant, in contrast to DesCartes, focused on this question: “Can we know? How can we know? What are the mechanisms which would, or which do, make experience possible?” Understanding how experience is structured, or constructed, also points to the centrality of space and time in Kantian thought. Without space and time, there would be and could be no experience, and accordingly, early in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Kant explores space and time.
Kant rückte jedoch genau jenen Aspekt in den Vordergrund, den Descartes als gegeben hingenommen hatte, nämlich die Möglichkeit von Erfahrung. Seine Frage lautete: Wie ist die Erfahrung überhaupt möglich?
The questions “How do I perceive objects? How do my experiences arise?” is closely related to the question “Why is it that my experiences and perceptions happen necessarily in a certain way?” The observer will note that it is not possible to have an idea of a physical object without having an idea of it in space. The mind finds it impossible to conceive of a physical object which is not in space. Likewise with time.
Kant’s exploration begins, not by asking about the objects in the world, but rather by asking about the mind which perceives them.
Bevor man wie Descartes danach fragt, ob die Dinge, wirklich so sind, wie sie uns erscheinen, lautet Kants Vorschlag, dass wir zunächst klären sollten, wie es überhaupt dazu kommt, dass die Dinge auf eine bestimmte Weise erscheinen. Mit Kant lernen die Philosophen, nicht gleich nach der Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit zu fragen, sondern zunächst das eigene Denken zu untersuchen. Genau das ist der Clou der Transzendentalphilosophie, die sich nicht vorschnell in metaphysische Gefilde vorwagen will, bevor nicht die Frage nach den Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von etwas geklärt ist.
The above summary of one part of Kant’s thought relies on Julius Maria Roth and Paul Schulmeister. The reader will ask, to which extent have those two authors accurately understood and expressed this part of the Kantian system?
Perhaps one of the main interpreters and advocates of Kant’s work is Carl Christian Erhard Schmid. Schmid is perhaps most responsible for explaining, and drawing attention to, Kant’s writings. Kant would have been much less well-known if Schmid hadn’t lectured and written about him.
Not only did C.C.E. Schmid offer a clear and influential exposition of Kant’s thought, but he is one of the few Kantian scholars to have published and lectured extensively during Kant’s lifetime. Schmid’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft im Grundrisse nebst einem Wörterbuche zum leichteren Gebrauch der kantischen Schriften appeared in 1786, one year prior to the second edition of Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. Schmid’s book about Kant went through several editions, the exact title changing slightly.
Schmid was writing and teaching about Kant, not only while Kant was still alive, but during Kant’s most productive years. It is left as an exercise to the reader to find primary source documents to answer questions about the extent to which Kant was aware of, and familiar with, Schmid’s writings — and questions about whether or not there was any direct communication between Kant and Schmid.
What is clear is that there was no objection from Kant about Schmid’s explanations of the Kantian system. In a hierarchy of reliability, therefore, Schmid would be near the top. To cite Schmid is arguably to cite one of the most dependable secondary sources on Kant.
Schmid’s Wörterbuch articulates a similar distinction between ‘transcendent’ and ‘transcendental’ and offers a lengthy entry on the latter word. The entry includes:
Transzendental bedeutet überhaupt eine Vorstellung (Anschauung oder Begriff), Urteil, Wissenschaft a priori, so fern sie sich doch auf Gegenstände bezieht, und darauf anwenden läßt; die Erkenntnis von dem objektiven Gebrauche, der rein a priori entsprungenen Vorstellungen und ihrer Vermögen.
Schmid’s detailed entry defining ‘transcendental’ merits detailed study, and is perhaps a powerful instrument for gaining insight in what is meant by the word Transzendentalphilosophie.
