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According to Kant, while thinking of empty concepts without intuitions, what do we synthesise?

Philosophy Asked on November 13, 2021

(This will be my last question on this book, for those of you getting bored of my questions).

Very briefly I will describe the method of Transcendental Deduction (TD) in an over-simplistic manner, and I want to know how do the indeterminate thoughts of metaphysics (God, Soul etc) are formed given TD is correct.

So there’s a transcendental unity of apperception which presupposes a synthetic unity of apperception ("I Think and all that given in para 16-17 in TD"). This synthetic unity requires intuition (understanding has to synthesize something – in this case a manifold of intuition), and since this unity is the condition for my self-identity, understanding should always accompany intuitions, otherwise they are empty and analytical. [Correct me if I am wrong here, this is an oversimplification of course].

Now, my question is, how are metaphysical statements even formed?

P1: Intuition is required for thinking (para 16-17 in TD as described above).
P2: We think metaphysical statements. 
C1: There must be intuition in these metaphysical statements.

But the whole reason why Transcendental Dialectics was written is because metaphysical statements do not have intuition.

What’s the missing piece of the puzzle? For me, if you disagree with P1, there goes the tedious explanation of Deduction, because I attribute these metaphysical thoughts to myself, and therefore synthesis DOES occur. Can there be synthesis of something other than intuition too, perhaps what Kant calls ‘psuedo-objects’? If that’s true, are these ‘psuedo-objects’ not intuited?

One Answer

You've pinpointed a very important but little understood aspect of the operation of the mind, not brain, (which serves as the data collection and storage mechanism and bodily functions management systems.) One thing, perhaps the only one which Spinoza and Berkeley agreed on is that all of our ideas have as their origin, either objects or events from the sensible world. This means that your observation that metaphysical ideas might have their origin in experience. Here by metaphysical is meant 'real'. No amount of space here would be enough to detail the entire process but either Berkeley's 'Metaphysics' or better yet, Spinoza's 'On the Improvement of the Underatanding' (43 pages), Will help. Most successful Spinozists agree that understanding his 'treatise' requires coming to it as a 'tabula rasa' Please do not impose today's definitions or logical prescriptions on Spinoza's writing. His logic does not involve the relations among hypotheses but rather the relationships among causes. He posited that our ideas are, when adequate, metaphysically 'real'. This would account for your important query about metaphysical ideas. Berkeley and Spinoza came to dialectically opposing conclusions about ideas. In fact Spinoza is the only philosopher in history to posit human's experience as real and not some form of contrivance manufactured by the mind's activity.

Answered by user37981 on November 13, 2021

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