What can we know: a brief examination of Immanuel Kant’s maps.

Jan 30 2007
Gary Jaron

Let me begin with the premise that Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason is basically right, the maps he in detailed described are correct.  What does this mean?

First off Kant posited a ‘Copernican Revolution’ which is the following.  Before Kant’s Critique philosophers, scientists and all the rest of us believed that we could know the external world of the things around us.  Those things of the external universe were the center of our perspective and focus.  Kant said ‘No, this is not correct.’  Kant’s revolutionary idea is that we are the center of our experienced universe.  We know our own experience of the universe and the things in it.  All we can know is the ‘Phenomenon’, the appearances, and that is it.  We can never know anything, directly or indirectly of the ‘Things-In-Themselves’, the ‘Noumenon’, the stuff that makes up the universe.  Period.

Next Kant goes on to explain that there are certain ideas that we know, and additionally that we can not and did not deduce them from experience.  These ideas we have to have in order to have any sense of the universe and to in any way comprehend the incoming sense data that we are experiencing.  These ideas he called ‘A-Priori’, these include Space, Time and Causality.

Now what?  Where are these ‘A-Priori’ ideas, are they in some Platonic realm of ideas existing in the ‘ether’?  Kant never says.

But I will.

First off I will acknowledge an important point overlooked by Kant.  That point is the central key to unlocking knowledge.  This point is that we have an intimate connection with a very specific ‘Thing-In-Itself’ which we call our human body.  Our human body is made up of the same stuff as the rest of the Universe.  We are a ‘Thing-In-Itself’ that is trying to understand ourselves and the rest of those ‘Things-In-Themselves’.  The A-Priori ideas are inherent in the very structure of our human body.  It is because we are so intimately aware of our bodies that we build the ideas of Space, Time and Causality out of the experience that we have of having a body.  Kant acts like he is a disembodied mind.  Hence his failure to be able to say where and why the A-Priori ideas are real.  Once we acknowledge that we are an embodied mind then the A-Priori ideas become the metaphoric results of our experience of having a mind within a body.

To further understand the significance of this embodied perspective let me use a metaphor of maps and territory.  The Territory is Alfred Korzybski’s label for Kant’s ‘Things-In-Themselves’.  The Map is Korzybski’s label for our creative efforts to understand and explain our experience of and our exploration of those ‘Things-In-Themselves’.  The Territory is Kant’s Noumenon.  The Map is Kant’s Phenomenon.  We, humans are map makers and map users.

Now, we can not have direct knowledge of the Territory but we can have indirect knowledge.  This is where Kant got it wrong.  It is because we have a body, we are a mind inside of a Thing-In-Itself’ that we can know the A-Priori ideas.  We know that the Territory is mapable!  We can make reliable maps!  Hence we know indirectly that the Territory is ordered and has structure.  Our knowledge of the A-Priori ideas is indirect knowledge of and stems out of this order and structure that all ‘Things-In-Themselves’ possess.

Korzybski also noted that the word is never the thing, but it can be a useful tool to map out and point towards those ‘Thing-In-Itself’ when we communicate with ourselves or others.  Words and things, maps and territories, these are two sets of relations that Korzybski uses to explore and understand what Kant calls the Noumenon, to indirectly learn something about that pre-verbal and beyond verbal existence of the ‘Thing-In-Itself’.

Lao Tzu also said it well when he began The Tao Te Ching:

“The Tao [Map/Phenomenon] that can be spoken is not the True Tao [Territory/Noumenon/Thing-In-Itself].

The name [Word/Appearance/Phenomenon] that can be named is not the True Name [Noumenon/Thing-It-Self].”

Bibliography
1) Sebastian Gardner, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, 1999
2) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, 1999
3) Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933, 1957.
4) Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Translators: Jonathan Star, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English, Lok Sang Ho, Wing-Tsit Chan, R.L. Wing, and Red Pine.