Kant and Nietzsche on the Active in Knowledge

So how can we possibly know the laws of nature a priori? It's not a problem, says Kant: we make them, after all. We "legislate" the laws of nature.

How is that so? Well, of course we don't make the sense-impressions bouncing of our sense-intuition, nor the laws according to which they bounce around. But in order to be properly thought of as experience, these sense-impressions must be subjected to an active synthesis under the concepts of our understanding-- and these concepts constitute the a priori laws of nature, where "nature" can only mean "the totality of our experience." (Thus, the statement "every event has a sufficient cause" is an a priori law of nature because it is an aspect of the synthesis which creates the possibility of any experience at all.)

The binary active / passive is very important here. Sensibility is passive: it receives impressions from objects external to itself. Understanding is active: it organizes these impressions according to its own laws. Sensibility relates us in some way to the things-in-themselves, but always only passively and so only to a secondary effect, not to the thing in itself. The understanding bears no relation to the thing-in-itself; its structure is entirely produced by the human intellect. For this very reason, the understanding is the only possible locus of a priori truth about nature. Because the sensibility is passive its testimony is always uncertain: sensation could always be different tomorrow, it is subject to the arbitrary will of the world. Nothing it tells us can be necessarily and universally true. Only that which we produce ourselves and actively impose on the world via the understanding possesses this kind of validity.

What would it mean, according to Kant, to know the thing-in-itself, to directly understand the noumenon? This would be to have "intellectual intuition"-- to "perceive" the essence of things the way we now "perceive" their effects. For Kant, a being who had this faculty would be a god: someone whose thinking was directly creative, who produced the object he intuited. Only such a being could fully grasp an object, since no passive perception of an object could every understand it in itself. For Kant, to know something as it is in itself one must create it.

In his reading of Kant's "What is Enlightenment?", Foucault links the Kantian critical project to the project of autonomy in the following way: the critique marks the limits of both truth and freedom, since in transgressing the bounds of what we know we are bound to fall into heteronomy. If we want to seek metaphysical truths out beyond the boundaries of what reason can teach us we'll be forced to take as our guides the metaphysical dogmas of our society, since no autonomous guide can lead us beyond the bounds of critique. I want to suggest a somewhat mroe internal relationship between critique and freedom here: the first Critique marks the things-in-themselves as off-limits because the autonomy and spontaneity of reason (freedom) is the condition of necessary and universal truth. As long as we remain in the world that we create through the synthesis of reason, we remain in the truth; to the extent that we venture beyond the bounds of our creation we venture outside the possibility of truth.

Okay, sorry, I'll get to Nietzsche next post. Roughly: Nietzsche's philosopher has intellectual intuition.