Olson TowardaFinallyScientificMetaphysics Libre

8/11/2019 Olson TowardaFinallyScientificMetaphysics Libre

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TOWARD A FINALLY SCIENTIFIC METAPHYSICS:

KANT, THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION, AND THE OBJECT

OF METAPHYSICS

MICHAEL J. OLSONDEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY

Despite the fact that it is often taken as a kind of useful cipher for his tran-scendental idealism as a whole, Kants so-called Copernican revolution is perhapsone of the most misleading analogies of the Critique of Pure Reason. Whether

Kants invocation of Copernicus in the B Preface bears any significance at all has,in fact, been an issue of some debate throughout the last century. 1 Even amongthose who hold that the references in the B Preface do indeed indicate a significantparallel between the Copernican revolution in astronomy and Kants attemptedtranscendental turn in metaphysics, what exactly the content of this similarity is isfurther disputed.2 This scholarly disagreement is due, at least in part, to the strik-ing paucity of explicit references to Copernicus in Kants writings.3 Given this,

1See, for example F.L. Cross, Kants So-Called Copernican Revolution, Mind, vol. 46, no. 182(April, 1937) 214-217; and Norwood Russell Hanson,Copernicus Role in Kants Revolution,

Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 20, no. 2 (April, 1959) 274-281.2The party line understanding of the significance of the Kants Copernican revolution explains thatboth Copernicus and Kant abandon an intuitive perspective on a problem (the relation between our

terrestrial position and celestial motions and the relation between objects and their true conceptual

representation, respectively) in favor of a counter-intuitive but scientifically productive hypothesis(heliocentrism, transcendental idealism). This view is found, for example, in H.J. Paton, KantsSo-Called Copernican Revolution, Mind, vol. 46, no. 183 (July, 1937); Henry Allison, KantsTranscendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press,2004) 36; and Paul Guyer,Kant and the Claims of Knowledge(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987) 1-2. Other commentators, including Norman Kemp Smith in The Meaning of Kants

Copernican Analogy, Mind, vol. 22, no. 88 (October, 1913) 549-551; and Dennis Schulting inKants Copernican Analogy: Beyond the Non-Specific Reading, Studi Kantiani, vol. 22 (2009)

39, 65, argue, however, that the analogy Kant saw between himself and Copernicus should notbe indexed primarily to a hypothetical change in perspective (from geo- to heliocentrism, for

example). As I will argue b elow, the real significance of the Copernican revolution in metaphysicscan only be properly identified once we abandon what Schulting calls the alternative hypothesisreading of the analogy.3As far as I can determine, Kant refers explicitly to Copernicus only eight times. The most wellknown references occur in the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Boston:Bedford/St. Martins, 1927) at Bxvi and Bxvii n. Later in the CritiqueKant attempts to clarify

his understanding of the distinction between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilisthrough a distinction that refers to the Copernican system at A257/B313. We find two pre-

critical references in the marginal notes of Kants copy of BaumgartensMetaphysica(1756 edition)in R 4918 at AA 18: 28.14 and in R 5064 at AA 18: 77:13-14, each of which relates Copernicusto other astronomers (Tycho Brahe and Philolaus). Two late references, b oth of which address

the proper use of hypotheses are found in R 2680 at AA XVI: 468.17-20 and in the J asche Logicat AA IX: 86.02-05. Finally, Kant uses the Copernican hypothesis of the stationary position of

the sun as an analogy for the unchanging perspective of reason in the Conflict of the Faculties atAA VII: 83.23-26.


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some measure of interpretive force is required in order to pry out the significanceof the Copernican analogy within Kants works andas I will argue belowfor thecontemporary continuation of metaphysics.

In addition to the two most famous and fully developed Copernican references inthe B Preface, I will focus in this paper on a marginal note in Kants copy of Baum-gartens Metaphysica, which Kant consistently used as the textbook for his coursesin metaphysics. This almost universally neglected note4 contrasts Copernicus withPhilolaus of Croton and encourages us to consider Kants engagement with Coper-nicus in a new light. In relation to this reference to Philolaus, Kants Copernicanrevolution appears less concerned with a reversal of perspectivefrom dogmatismto criticismthan with the role of epistemic justification or proof.5 When we placethis emphasis on proof in relation to the analysis of the intellectual revolutionsthat preceded and prepared the way for his own critical revolution in metaphysicswe can see that Kants Copernican revolution is, at base, a transformation of theobject of metaphysical inquiry. The means for determining the epistemic validity

of ones knowledge of this new object of metaphysics is, I contend, an element ofthat object itself. Before saying any more about the rather peculiar reflexivity ofthe object of Kantian metaphysics, however, I will turn to the texts that lead usthere.

In the margins of BaumgartensMetaphysica, next to a passage about the relationbetween error and the justificatory grounds of knowledge claims Kant draws acontrast between Copernicus and Philolaus that sheds considerable light on theway Kant thought of the scientific significance of the Copernican revolution inastronomy.6 In this note from the late 1770s Kant makes the familiar critical claimthat knowledge cannot be reduced to conceptual analysis, and so must exhibita fundamentally synthetic character. The analysis of concepts that we alreadyhave does not much suffice to a knowledge of things in concreto, he writes, wemust, through a synthesis in which we observe the concept in many instances

in concreto, collect many things which essentially belong to the concept but arenot contained within it.7 A mere analysis of concepts in the absence of concreteempirical manifestations, Kant continues, can only ever be empty. Such speculation

4Schulting acknowledges this passage in a footnote addressing Aristarchus as a forerunner of Coper-nican heliocentrism, but does not offer any commentary on its significance (Kants Copernican

Analogy 55 n).5Schulting convincingly argues against what he calls the perspectivism reading because of itsbroader idealist implications:

Perspectivism falsely implies a psychologistic reading of Kants representation-alism and of his notorious thesis of the ideal nature of objects, as if the most

important result of Kants revolution in metaphysics lie in an acknowledgementof the limitation of our cognition of things. Inevitably, perspectivism issues incognitive relativism. This is conveyed by the strongly phenomenalist (read:

Berkeleyan) interpretation of Kants idealism. (Kants Copernican Analogy

47)

Although I agree wholeheartedly with Schultings insistence that we recognize the importanceof epistemic justification for Kants Copernican revolution, my own account of the necessity of

identifying a new object of metaphysics has the advantage of being able to account for the struc-tural similarity of Kant identifies between the intellectual revolutions in mathematics and naturalscience and their philosophical appropriation in his own work.6See page XL of the Metaphysica in AA 17: 17.15-28. I would like to thank Jim Wetzel and JimMcCartney for their assistance with Baumgartens Latin.7Kant, R 5064, AA 17: 77.8-11.

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is not necessarily incorrect just because it is empty; it does not, however, rise tothe dignity of knowledge justified by conceptually synthesized empirical content.Vacuous speculation should not be rejected as false, then, but treated with guardedsuspicion. As if to illustrate the point, Kant concludes the note with a commentthat is particularly relevanthere: Just as when Philolaus said that the earth moves,and Copernicus proved it.8

Philolaus of Croton, the fifth century Pythagorean, was perhaps the first to as-sert that the earth does not occupy a central position in the universe, and indeedCopernicus identifies Philolaus as a precursor to the heliocentric position elabo-rated in De Revolutionibus.9 According to Kant, though, Philolaus did not knowthat the earth moved; Philolaus claim was not based on proof, but on speculation.Copernicus, on the other hand, genuinely knew the truth of heliocentrism becausehis claim was accompanied by some species of synthetic proof.10 There are twothings I would like to highlight here. First, Philolaus speculation, although notincorrect in this instance, is dangerous precisely because this kind of empty spec-

ulation does not possess the means of evaluating the truth or falsity of its claims.And so, alongside what turns out to be the truth of heliocentrism, Philolaus alsoasserted, for example, that the moon was populated by people approximately fif-teen times the size of terrestrial humans, and that these moon people had no needto defecate. And then there is his claim that the center of the universe is occupiedby a great fire encased by a glass sphere.11 Its not clear that heliocentrism is themost unlikely of these claims, but it does happen to be correct. Speculation, then,is a threat to knowledge precisely because it is occasionally correct, and becausecommon sense is an insufficient measure of its truth. Second, we should notice thatthe method of synthetic proof that distinguishes Copernican science from Philolaicspeculation is not immediately clear. In Kants mind, it has something to do withsubsuming empirical content under conceptual thinking. There was surely someempirical experience, however, that led Philolaus to postulate the existence of a

great fire at the center of the universe, so we cannot without testing credibilitysuggest that his heliocentrism was a product of unadulterated conceptual analysisexecuted in isolation from experiential epistemic motivation. Thus, the presenceof empirical instances that motivate conceptual thinking is not in itself sufficient

8Kant, R 5064, AA 17: 77.13-14.9See Nicholas Copernicus, The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, ed. Stephen Hawking(Philadelphia: Running Press, 2002), 4, 13.10Michael Friedman explains that the truth of heliocentrism was only truly provided when Newton

devised an argument based on calculations concerning the universes center of mass. For more,see Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1998) 170. Hans Blumenberg also marks this fact and so adduces that Copernicus prefiguration

of the transcendental turning consists precisely in the fact that he had to present a hypothesiswithout being able to undertake to prove it ( The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert

M. Wallace [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987] 600). Although Blumenberg is no doubt a betterhistorian of science than Kant, the note I am now discussing clearly indicates that Kantrightly

or wronglyconsidered Copernicus to have proven his hypothesis. For an alternative account ofthe structure of the proof deployed by Copernicus (and Kant as well, he argues), see Schulting,Kants Copernican Analogy 62-64.11It is this last claim that evidently disqualifies, at least in Sir Thomas Heaths eyes, Philolausfrom claiming the title of the Ancient Copernicus. See Thomas Heath, Aristarchus of Samos:The Ancient Copernicus (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004). For what is perhaps the most colorful

scholarly history of Philolaus, see Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (New York:Routledge, 1982) 297-311.

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to account for the kind of proof that separates science from madness. More workmust be done, in other words, to determine what things belong to a concept essen-tially, and which merely appear to do so. Kants more substantial analysis of themetaphysical relevance of the Copernican revolution in science in the first Critiquewill allow us to determine more precisely how scientific proof can be distinguishedfrom speculative plausibility.

Kant begins the Preface to the 1787 second edition of the Critiquewith a dis-cussion of the possibility of imparting the rigor of the sciences to the ideologicalbattlefield of metaphysics. If metaphysics cannot be rendered scientific, it oughtto be abandoned; and if it is to become scientific, it must find its paradigm inthe intellectual revolutions by which the two undisputed sciences, mathematics andphysics, themselves became scientific. In each of these cases, Kant argues, the meregroping (herumtappen) characteristic of prescientific exploration gave way to a sys-tematically organized and universally valid science through a revolution in its wayof thinking (Denkungsart). By isolating what the revolutions in ancient mathemat-

ics and modern physics have in common, we can see that Kants own revolutionin metaphysics has less to do with the specific content of Copernicus heliocentricreversal than it does with the necessity of identifying a new object of metaphysicalinquiry. This new object, like the proper objects of the mathematical and phys-ical sciences, allows for the possibility of providing a kind of critical proof ratherthan mere dogmatic assertion in matters that outstrip the possibility of empiricalverification.

Mathematics became a science, Kant explains, when, thanks to the happythought of a single man,12 mathematicians ceased taking as their object eitherthe empirical figures of geometric diagrams or the conceptual definitions of geomet-rical objects. Abstraction from a series of empirical diagrams cannot provide thecharacteristic universality of mathematical results, and formal analysis alone can-not secure their exemplary veracity. The revolutionary moment in mathematics,

according to Kant, comes when Thales, or perhaps it was someone else, [brought]out what was necessarily implied in the concepts that he himself had formed apriori, and had put into the figure in the construction by which he presented it tohimself.13 Mathematics becomes a true science, that is, when it realizes the ob-

jects of its investigations are neither empirical figures nor conceptual definitions, butconstructions. Mathematics neither generalizes from particular figures nor unpacksconventional definitions; it analyzes the synthetic content of spatio-temporal con-structions. Such constructions account for the universality of mathematics throughtheir necessary rules and its veracity through the production of a sensible figure.

That Kants account of the activity of mathematics is simply incapable of ac-counting for the majority of what belongs to the science of mathematics should notbother us for now.14 What is important for my purposes is not whether Kant iscorrect, either about the proper object of mathematics or the historical develop-

ment of the field, but how he introduces his own proposed metaphysical revolutionas a repetition of the structure of earlier scientific revolutions. The result of theshift of mathematical object away from figures or concepts toward constructions is

12Kant,CPR Bxi.13Kant,CPR Bxii.14For a canonical criticism of Kants philosophy of mathematics, see Bertrand Russell, The Prin-ciples of Mathematics (New York: Norton, 1996), chapter 52.

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that the mathematician can thereby avoid ascrib[ing] to the figure anything savewhat necessarily follows from what he has himself set into it in accordance withhis concept.15 The meaning of this extraordinarily important and contentiousphrasewhat he has himself set into it in accordance with his conceptwillcome into greater relief after reviewing Kants analysis of the experimental revolu-tion in modern physics.

The revolution of empirical science indexed to Bacons methodological interven-tion follows, centuries later, roughly the same pattern, according to Kant, as theGreek mathematical revolution. Physics elevated itself above the disorganized grop-ing of mere curiosity, Kant explains, when it took the experimental manipulation ofnatural phenomena, rather than nature as it is commonly available to observation,as its object of study. The central development of physics, like that of mathe-matics, is essentially tied to the recognition of a new object and the new methods(Denkungsarten) that object demands. Kants three admittedly haphazard exem-plary physicists each produce results by observing nature in decidedly unnatural

circumstances:Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previouslydetermined, to roll down an inclined plane; . . . Torricelli made theair carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equalto that of a definite volume of water; . . . Stahl changed metals intooxides, and oxides back into metal, by withdrawing something andthen restoring it. . . 16

What is important in each of these cases, Kant says, is the resolutely artificialobject of investigation. Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl each produce a very specificexperimental situation, which indicates that they learned that reason has insightonly into that which it produces after its own plan.17 Had Galileo not carefullyproduced balls of different masses, he would not have discovered the universality of

gravitational force.The physicist cannot identify the laws of nature, whose universal necessity makeher enquiry a science, if she doesnt begin by placing demands upon the phenomenashe intends to describe. Reason, Kant writes,

holding in one hand its principles, according to which alone concor-dant appearances can be admitted as laws, and in the other handthe experiment which it has devised in conformity with these prin-ciples, must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It mustnot, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to ev-erything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judgewho compels the witnesses to answer questions which he himselfhas formulated.18

To systematically investigate the laws of nature physics requires at least two things:the principles or hypotheses supplied by the physicist herself and an experimental

15Kant,CPR Bxii.16Kant,CPR Bxii-xiii.17Kant,CPRBxiii. Whether this is how these scientists thought of their own research is ultimately

of little concern. As Hanson rightly suggests, Kant may be telling us something about these greatscientists which even theydid not know (Copernicus Role in Kants Revolution 279).18Kant,CPR Bxiii.

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apparatus that forces nature to respond to these principles. It is only by aban-doning nature as an object of study and turning its attention to the systematicexperimental constraint of nature that physics articulates laws of nature. It is inthis context, and not against the backdrop of Berkeleyan idealism, I argue, that weshould read Kants occasional claims that we can only comprehend in nature whatwe have first inserted into it19. As he understands it, physics, like mathematics,can only produce unified, general results if it first produces its own object. Mathe-matics, whether it knows this or not, produced the concept of a construction, andphysics produced the concept of an experimental system.20

Taken together, the reorientation and accompanying remarkable productivityof mathematics and physics offer a model for the restoration of the dignity ofKants real interest, the now long deposed queen of the sciences. The examplesof mathematics and natural science, which by a single and sudden revolution havebecome what they now are, seem to me, Kant writes,

sufficiently remarkable to suggest our considering what may have

been the essential features in the changed point of view by whichthey have so greatly benefited. Their success should incline us, atleast by way of experiment, to imitate their procedure, so far asthe analogy which, as species of rational knowledge, they bear tometaphysics may permit.21

To follow in the footsteps of these revolutions, I argue, means, first, to reorganizemetaphysical research according to the proper object of that science, an object thathad previously been misidentified.22 What Kant identifies as the proper object ofmetaphysics is not being as such, the principles or causes of things, or the highestbeing. The conceptual creation that will deliver metaphysics from its gropingamong mere concepts,23 the new object of a transformed metaphysics capable, not

19In addition to the passages already cited on this point, see also CPR A125.20For more on the concept of an experimental system and how it serves as the object of exper-imental natural science, see, for example, Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans.

Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon, 1984) and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Toward a History of

Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1997).21Kant,CPR Bxv-xvi.22For Kant the primary misidentification of objects of metaphysics are treated in the Transcen-dental Dialectic. There Kant argues that metaphysics renders itself impossible insofar as it takes

its objects to be the soul, the world as a whole (the cosmos) and God. The other traditionalmetaphysical interests in substance, causality, necessity, and possibility can only be properly un-derstood, Kant claims, when recognized as objects of synthetic a priori knowledge.

Blumenberg suggests, to the contrary, that the object of metaphysics need not change as part ofthe Copernican revolution in metaphysics: In comparison to the objects mentioned up to this

point [those of logic, mathematics, and physics] the object of metaphysics appears as that of the-orys oldest interest, which would still survive even if all the rest were swallowed up in the abyss

of an all-destroying barbarism (The Genesis of the Copernican World596). I fail to see, though,how Kants insistence that the proud name of ontology. . . must give way to the more modest titleof a transcendental analytic (CPRA247/B304) and Heines exemplary identification of Kant as

the Robespierre of metaphysics (see Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophyin Germany, trans. Howard Pollack Milgate, in On the History of Religion and Philosophy inGermany and Other Writings, ed. Terry Pinkard [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007]79) do not indicate, in addition to the evidence I have presented here, just such a change.23Kant,CPR Bxv.

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only of speculation, but of demonstration and epistemic validation is: the object ofsynthetic a priori knowledge.

The objects of metaphysics must be known synthetically, as Kant indicated in thenote about Copernicus and Philolaus I discussed earlier, in order to give them someconceptual content susceptible of proof and to guard against the danger of merespeculation. The objects of metaphysics must be known a priori in order to guardagainst the ideological contamination of merely local experience masquerading asuniversal. The synthetic character of our knowledge of the objects of metaphysicssecures their rational certainty, the a priori character their universality; togetherthese features of a properly scientific metaphysics afford the characteristic episte-mological rupture that Kant claims separates science from aimless groping.

The object of metaphysical knowledge produced through Kants Copernican rev-olution is not, then, an object as it is in itself. The object of a finally scientificmetaphysics, the object of synthetic a priori cognition, requires, a more complicatedstructure. The object of metaphysics is not exclusively objective; it also contains a

reference to the conditions of its knowability. Metaphysical knowledge must containboth an objective claim and an account of the epistemic legitimacy of that claim.Metaphysics is that science, then, whose conditions of epistemic legitimacy are aproper part of its object. Thus, following Kants analyses of the scientific revolu-tions in mathematics and natural science, we should see this as the real contentof Kants Copernican revolution. What distinguishes Copernicus from Philolaus isreal epistemic legitimation. What makes such legitimation possible is, accordingto Kants history of scientific revolutions, the identification of an object of studythat immanently contains the means for determining the veracity of our accountsof it. The task of metaphysics today, then, remains the same as it was 230 yearsago when Kant presented an idealist response to his own question regarding theproper object of metaphysics.

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