In this second installment of our Postmodern Epistemology series, we will turn to the other significant modern precursor to postmodern thought: Immanuel Kant.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Admittedly, Kant’s inclusion among the figures that we identify as historical precursors to postmodernism may indeed raise some eyebrows. After all, was not Kant still very modern with his idealist attempt to save knowledge and make room for faith?

It is true that in many respects Kant is very much the modern figure (and from merely a historical standpoint he certainly is). Nevertheless, there are features of his philosophy (especially as it pertains to epistemology) which paves the road for a postmodern crisis of epistemology.

When Kant enters the philosophical fray (roughly 150 years after Descartes), it is clear that Cartesian foundationalism has failed to carry the day. Recall that there is at this time an ongoing debate between the British empiricists and the Continental rationalists, and Kant (after being awakened from his dogmatic slumber by David Hume), attempts to borrow from the best of both in order to construct an entirely new epistemological edifice.

Over and against both groups, however, Kant insists that the scientific method of acquiring knowledge needs to be informed by both empirical and rational data. This explains why he is so interested in establishing the transcendental condition for the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments (judgments made apart from experience but which contribute something new to the realm of knowledge).¹

Kant develops a new kind of correspondence theory of truth in so far as he insists that truth must not to be conceived as merely an “agreement of the mind with an already existing state of affairs.”² Rather, Kant argues, the mind’s objects must “agree” with the mind and its structural concepts and categories.

This, he thinks, is an approach to epistemology that is so radically new and different from anything prior that it merits the august “Copernican revolution” designation. Indeed, just as the sun replaces the earth as the center of the planetary system in Copernicus’ hypothesis, so too the activity of the mind replaces the primacy of objects as the center of the knowledge transaction in Kant’s hypothesis.

Sapere aude – dare to know! – becomes the slogan of liberation from the self-incurred (or is it -imposed?) tutelage of the mind in Kant. Knowledge for Kant is clearly a cooperative enterprise of both mind and object, each of which contributes, so to speak, to the truth.

Over and against the empiricists (such as Locke who claims that the mind of man is a tabula rasa and hence completely passive), Kant considers the mind to function absolutely autonomously (and this in an active and even constitutive fashion).

He writes, “The intellect does not derive its laws (a priori) from nature but prescribes them to nature.”³ What we have, according to Kant, is an unintelligible (or, for all we know, non-existent) mass of chaos and “brute facts” - until the mind autonomously applies its rational categories onto the intuitions of space and time in order to come up with systematized data that now qualifies as knowledge proper.

Kant presents his agenda as one that is very much amiable to theism. In fact, he claims that he has even made room for faith by limiting science (i.e., by relegating scientific endeavor to where it belongs, the realm of facts).

We must ask ourselves, however, what facts? Unfortunately, there is no explicit philosophy of facts in Kant. Rather his implicit philosophy of facts is that bare and brute facts are the datum with which the epistemic enterprise begins.

Kant makes no metaphysical claim about the independent existence of objects. Rather than follow the Cartesian route (from object to sense perception to idea) he begins with experience and works his way backwards to transcendentals (i.e., the conditions that make experience possible). “Instead of hypostatizing self and its objects as independent entities, Kant held that self and objects are both ordered elements in our experience.”⁴

Neither the self nor the object is ultimate in Kant, but both are elements of experience. What ultimately makes knowledge possible then is order - the order imposed on reality [constructively] by the categories of the mind.

Since the categories of the mind only apply to the phenomenal realm of time and space, we are therefore “forever excluded from knowledge of noumena,”⁵ - God, self, and the Ding an sich.⁶ For all that we know, these things might have an independent nature of their own, but we simply cannot call this “knowledge” in the proper sense. Hence, the noumena have only regulative value as limiting concepts.

To the realm of the phenomenal, Kant attributes knowledge - to the realm of the noumenal, Kant attributes “faith.” With this move, he not only rules out all “substance” (or ”essence”) thinking with regard to God but he also establishes a wide chasm between knowledge and faith that has held Western philosophy captive well into the twentieth century and beyond.⁷

With the relegation of God into the realm of the noumena, of limiting concepts, it is quite simply a natural consequence that God eventually becomes nothing more than a value⁸ or even a principle of morality.⁹ On Kantian terms, the gospel is not true in the sense that it is empirically (i.e., phenomenally) true, but only true in the sense that it is an inner and non-cognitive religious experience of freedom and morality.

In a section of his book, God in the Wasteland, entitled “From Kant to Rorty,” David Wells states:

“Kant established the modern rules for discussing how it is that someone knows the external world, and in doing so he initiated the breakdown of the old distinction between subject and object.”¹⁰

No longer then is the thinking subject to be thought of quite distinctly from a “given” object. The Cartesian dualism that results from the dichotomy between subject and object is therefore, in principle, overcome.

“[Kant] argued that the mind is active in and a constitutive part of what is known. […] Once the mind was seen as itself a source of knowledge, knowledge that was then superimposed on the data of the outside world, and once this knowledge was cut loose from control in the knowledge of God, a juggernaut was launched.”¹¹

This Kantian emphasis on the activity of the subject (and especially the mind) on the constitution of meaning (or rather, meanings) has in recent decades been translated into different approaches to literary theory.

Wells summarizes our final point well:

“In literature this inescapable pluralism has been pursued by the post-modernists with purposeful vengeance. In their different ways, such post-modern critics as Jaques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Fish have each made the argument that texts have no stable, unchanging meaning, that they mean only what individual readers perceive them to mean. […] The contexts that are crucial for meaning reside not in the sentences and paragraphs of the texts but in the reader’s internal psychology, in the ways the reader is inclined to understand life. Thus the subjective triumphs completely over the objective.”¹²

1. Over and against analytical judgments, where the property under consideration is already included in the definition.↩
2. Jones, History, 19↩
3. Immanuel Kant, “Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysics That May Be Presented As a Science”, in The Philosophy of Kant, ed. Carl Friedrich (New York: Modern Library, 1949), 91.↩
4. Jones, History, 43.↩
5. Ibid., 63.↩
6. Note the dramatically different starting point from Descartes for whom the self was no unknowable noumenon but rather the metaphysical and epistemological starting point (“cogito”).↩
7. Ibid., 68.↩
8. Ibid., 94f.↩
9. One could even surmise that the stage was set by Kant for Schleiermacher to inform us that religion is nothing but the “Gefühl schlechthinniger Abhängigkeit” (feeling, or rather awareness, of utter dependence).↩
10. David Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 104.↩
11. Ibid., 104.↩
12. Ibid., 105.↩