Debate: Langton on Things in Themselves: Critique of Kantian Humility

Kantian Review

Volumn 5, Issue , 2001, Pages 49-64

  Falkenstein, Lorne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85012552604     PISSN: 13694154     EISSN: 20442394     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1369415400000637     Document Type: Article

References (7)

1. Rae Langton, Kantian Humility” Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998; paperback edn., 2001). Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, CT” Yale University Press, 1983).
2. Kantian Humility, pp. 66-7. To back this claim up, Langton cites a sentence from Kant's unpublished notes.
3. To back this claim up, Langton cites a sentence from Kant's unpublished notes., pp. 2-3, 211. The closest she comes to repairing this neglect is over the closing 8 pages of her book, where she raises the question of how Kant's views on the subjectivity of space and time could be reconciled with the realism she wants to attribute to him. But her goal here is not to attempt a reconciliation but a divorce-to insist that what Kant has to say about the subjectivity of space, time, and the spatio-temporal properties of things carries no implications for the nature of our knowledge of causes, forces and powers.
4. However, when the unknowability problem is probed further, and questions are raised about why Kant supposed that we cannot know the absolutely inner or intrinsic properties of things, Langton's approach ends up being much less elegant. In fact, it flounders. More will be said about this later in this article.
5. The alternative that our cognitive constitutions stand in reciprocal causal relations to objects outside of us leads to a kind of absolute idealism according to which the subject constitutes not merely the internal world of its own experiences, but the external world as well.
6. ’. the Kantian philosopher completely abandons the spirit of his system when he says that objects make impressions on the senses, arouse sensations, and so produce impressions. For according to the Kantian doctrine the empirical object, which is only just an appearance, can neither be found outside of us nor be anything other than a representation, whereas, again according to this doctrine, we do not know the least thing about the transcendental object.’ Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, David Hume uber den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus (Breslau” G. Loewe, 1787; repr. in facsimile” New York” Garland, 1983), p. 220.
7. Langton takes this more obviously controversial first premiss to be a direct consequence of the claim that we can only have sensory experience through being affected. She claims that, if we must be affected to have experience, then what our experience must be of is the very powers or forces that affect us-which are all relational (p. 139). As alluded to earlier, this invests B67 with a direct or naive realist thesis that the text does not obviously endorse. B67 only talks about the nature of what we come to know through being affected, not about the nature of the affecting object.