Transcendental

In his German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (p. 138-9), Frederick Beiser offers this lucid explanation of “the transcendental” in Kant: “Rather than reducing experience down to the level of individual consciousness, the critical philosophy makes both the subjective and objective- understood as the representations of inner and outer sense – equal and coordinate parts of a single intersubjective structure or form. This normative order is neither mental nor physical but transcendental, the necessary condition for the possibility of any rational being equipped with a human sensibility. Its extramental and extraphysical status becomes apparent as soon as we recognize that it is the condition under which we identify anything as mental or physical, as an object of either inner or outer sense. In other words, as the norm that governs or regulates the mental and physical, it cannot be mental or physical itself. Indeed, its normative status remains unaffected whether it governs what is inside me in time or what is outside me in space. Both spacial objects outside me and temporal objects inside me are equal instances or cases of its neutral and inescapable laws.”

This helps Kant, he thinks, overcome the problem of subjectivism:

“If the transcendental consists merely in the subjective – the ideas or consciousness of the perceiver – then the question still remains how we know the subjective corresponds with the objective. This problem cannot be resolved simply by pointing to the order among the ideas of the subject, for on subjectivist premises this order too consists in nothing more than just another set if ideas. Though the ideas are relational and of a higher order, they are still ideas . . . so that the correspondence of this set of ideas with reality still stands in need of demonstration.”

Assuming that the transcendental is normative rather than subjective, however, then “both the subjective and objective . . . become parts of a single experience. The subject’s ideas correspond to its object because the interaction of these appearances conforms to one universal and necessary structure, one common system of interconnected laws . . . . To guarantee the correspondence between . . . distinct kinds of appearances there must be . . . some higher intelligible form that governs both. Transcendental idealism is an empirical dualism precisely because the normative status of the transcendental explains the interconnection between the very different appearances of inner and outer sense.”

As Beiser goes on to note (164), there is considerable debate about the status of “the transcendental.” Kand “uses the term . . . to refer to all the necessary conditions of experience, whether they are they a priori forms of understanding (the categories) or the a priori forms of sensibility (space and time),” and he “gives only the sketchiest account of the meaning of the term” in the first Critique . Beiser raises the question that occupies Kant’s followers: “How are we to understand these conditions for a priori knowledge? Are they psychological, metaphysical, or logical?” Schelling and Hegel take the metaphysical rout, viewing the transcendental as “intelligible structures, forms, or archetypes behind experience.” Others have understood the transcendental, and particularly the categories of understanding as “laws of thought.”

Beiser (169) emphasizes that, whatever interpretation is placed on Kant’s term, it must be consistent with Kant’s own definition of the transcendental as a “second-order” discourse. Kant said, “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this mode is to be possible a priori.” Even this is ambiguous, since the second-order discourse could be epistemological or logical. Beiser thinks the logical interpretation is preferable: “What the critique investigates are claims to knowledge, and . . . its central concern is with the justification for some of our beliefs. Hence the main issue for Kant seems to be whether we have sufficient evident for some of our fundamental principles . . . . his central concern is not with the activities of knowing, and still less with the origins or causes of these activities, but with the truth or falsity of judgments, and more specifically synthetic a priori judgments” (170).