The Role of Incongruent Counterparts in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

Abstract

Undoubtedly the most puzzling of Kant’s Critical views is his thesis that virtually all aspects of our experience of objects are contributed by the perceiving subject rather than by the things experienced, and are not features of these things as they exist independently of sensible perceivers. This position, which Kant calls transcendental idealism, is striking because nothing could be less commonsensical than the belief that things as they appear to us have nothing in common with things as they are independently of being perceived. From a more technical point of view the doctrine is perplexing because Kant apparently does not support it very well. Beginning with Kant’s contemporaries, critics have pointed out that among all the arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason, none apparently entails the conclusion that things in themselves cannot be like objects of sense experience in any way. So, for example, although Kant’s theory of synthetic a priori knowledge provides some support for transcendental idealism, there is nothing in the analysis of the synthetic a priori ruling out the possibility that features contributed to experience by the perceiving subject may correspond to characteristics of things in themselves, although we might never know this to be so. And even though Kant views transcendental idealism as the solution to the Antinomies, this is at best indirect support for the position. Moreover, Kant asserts the merely subjective character of sensible representations in 1770, long before he developed the theory of the Antinomies. Because transcendental idealism is so radical, it seems that Kant should provide especially strong reasons in its support.

This article is extracted from portions of my book, Space and Incongruence: The Origin of Kant’s Idealism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981), especially Chapters 3 through 5. Fuller discussions of the issues raised here as well as the literature on incongruent counterparts are presented there.