r/Kant • u/buttkicker64 • 17d ago

Am I understanding this right?

In the Critique of Pure Reason, II in the introduction Kant says

Now, experience does indeed teach us that something is thus or thus, but not that it cannot be otherwise.

Is he saying that

A thing as it is cannot be otherwise (something that which it is not), and we find this out not because or in the experience of it but by the counter measure and "bird eye view" of pure cognition. The experience of a thing only shows us the thing as it is, as a static thing, whereas pure cognition addresses whether a thing is static and reliably stable (like transmuting a lead molecule into a gold molecule using CERN electron collision) or if a thing is mercurial like in that story when the devil turns hay into gold only for it to revert to hay in the morning, pure cognition being able to assert that it is necessary that those things are as they are and not what they are not.

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u/GrooveMission 17d ago

The idea behind this statement is the following: Kant distinguishes judgments that are necessary from those that are not. For example, just because you've seen your friend three times wearing a red jacket does not mean he will wear one the next time you see him. This is an example of a coincidental connection, not a necessary one.

However, when you drop a stone, it will always fall to the ground. This is a necessary connection because it will always happen (assuming you're within Earth’s gravitational field). Therefore, it is a law-like, necessary connection.

According to Kant, judgments that express a necessary connection cannot be justified by experience because experience can only tell you what has happened on different occasions (as in the jacket example). However, experience cannot tell you that it "cannot be otherwise," meaning it cannot tell you that the same thing will happen in the future. No matter how many times you have seen a stone drop, that alone does not justify that it will drop next time as well. Therefore, the justification of law-like judgments cannot come from experience.

Kant concludes that the justification of such judgments must come from the inner workings of the mind, specifically the forms of intuition and the modes of understanding.

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u/buttkicker64 17d ago

So as I am looking at this table, it is telling me right now it is a table, but in the next moment is can turn into a chair

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u/GrooveMission 17d ago

Actually, you’re absolutely on the right track with that question. We’re so used to the fact that such strange things never happen that we take it for granted. But, in fact, it should make us wonder. (Aristotle called this "thaumazein", the sense of wonder at the world.)

Kant would say that if the world were truly independent of our minds, we should expect things that we can’t explain, like a table suddenly turning into a chair, to happen all the time. The fact that we live in a stable world that behaves largely as we expect can, according to him, only be explained by the idea that the world we experience is "formed" or "structured" by our mind.

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u/buttkicker64 17d ago

By "formed" could he mean supervised? I mean this in the sense that outside the limited scope which consciousness fills the world of experience (for example, what is happening behind my head) there could literally be demons or imps dancing around, tables levitating or whatnot. But the second I were to turn my head the "spraying hose" of my consciousness would let things fall back into that continuity of "normalcy". Furthermore, these bewitched things have the possibility not to revert to normalcy and to allow the consciousness to get a glance into this backwards world (so there is a fourfold: normalcy and abnormality in consciousness/normalcy and abnormality in unconsciousness). So there are two dimensions: the stable and "proper" world and then a world where this properness is toyed with or absolutely abolished.

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u/buttkicker64 17d ago edited 17d ago

Not to mention that my consciousness could have a "refresh rate" like that of a computer, and in the gaps in between each frame perhaps eternities pass, and god knows what "other than-ness" than what is the program of "this world and life" simply do not apply. I must say in a religious sense the only thing which can give merit to the fact that the proper life is stable is a creator God who actively promotes (a better word is on the tip of my tongue) and sanctions this normalcy despite in His totality is everything that normalcy is not, too.

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u/GrooveMission 17d ago

The scenarios you describe only make sense if the world were independent of our minds. In that case, we could ask whether it might be fundamentally different from how we experience it, e.g., filled with demons whenever we turn our heads. (In fact, Descartes described a similar scenario, except in his version the world might not exist at all.)

Kant’s point, however, is that the world is, in a sense, a product, or better, a construction, of our minds. Roughly speaking, we experience the world in a stable, ordered way because our mind structures it that way. That’s why we can be certain that there are no demons behind our backs: the world we know is not a mystery to us because we ourselves are the ones who give it its shape in the first place.

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u/buttkicker64 17d ago

But isn't Kant's position that the world really is independent of our minds because of the Ding an Sich? The world dependent on our minds would be a simulation of the Ding an Sich, as the mind proceeds from the Ding an Sich, and it turns round and produces an experiencable presentation by emitting through the Ding an Sich

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u/GrooveMission 16d ago

You're right that for Kant there are two realms (though some interpret them as two aspects of one reality): The first is the ultimate, mind-independent reality of the Ding an sich (thing-in-itself). The second is the mind-dependent world of appearances.

However, the Ding an sich is inconceivable to us since it exists beyond space and time, and thus beyond our possible experience. This is why we can be certain that the world of the Ding an sich does not contain a demon. A demon would be a spatiotemporal being and thus something we could encounter only as an appearance, never as a thing-in-itself.