THE OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE
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By Marsigit, Yogyakarta State University, Indonesia
Email: marsigitina@yahoo.com

The Objective Form

Kant, 1788, claimed that reason is concerned with the grounds of determination of the will, which is a faculty either to produce objects corresponding to ideas, or to determine ourselves to the effecting of such objects whether the physical power is sufficient or not; that is, to determine our causality; and reason can at least attain so far as to determine the will, and has always objective reality in so far as it is the volition only that is in question. Kant  argued that Practical principles are propositions which contain a general determination of the will, having under it several practical rules. They are subjective, or maxims, when the condition is regarded by the subject as valid only for his own will, but are objective, or practical laws, when the condition is recognized as objective, that is, valid for the will of every rational being.  Further he indicated that the practical rule is always a product of reason, because it prescribes action as a means to the effect; but in the case of a being with whom reason does not of itself determine the will, this rule is an imperative that  expresses the objective necessitation of the action and signifies that, if reason completely determined the will, the action would inevitably take place according to this rule.

According to Kant, 1788, imperatives, therefore, are objectively valid, and are quite distinct from maxims, which are subjective principles. For Kant, the objectively valid either determine the conditions of the causality of the rational being as an efficient cause that is merely in reference to the effect and the means of attaining it; or they determine the will only, whether it is adequate to the effect or not and it would be hypothetical imperatives, and contain mere precepts of skill. Further Kant  noted that  reason may give laws it is necessary that it should only need to presuppose itself, because rules are objectively and universally valid only when they hold without any contingent subjective conditions, which distinguish one rational being from another. Kant, 1788, claimed that the principle of determination would still be only subjectively valid and merely empirical, and would not possess the necessity which is conceived in every law that is an objective necessity arising from a priori grounds; unless, indeed, we hold this necessity to be not at all practical, but merely physical in which our action is as inevitably determined by our inclination. Kant  argued that it would be better to maintain that there are no practical laws at all, but only counsels for the service of our desires, than to raise merely subjective principles to the rank of practical laws, which have objective necessity, and not merely subjective, and which must be known by reason a priori, not by experience. Kant claimed that even the rules of corresponding phenomena are only called laws of nature when we either know them really a priori or suppose that they would be known a priori from objective grounds if our insight reached further.

Kant, 1781, claimed that the categories have the function of prescribing the general form that this detailed order must take and belong to the very framework of knowledge; however, although they are indispensable for objective knowledge, the sole knowledge that the categories can yield is of objects of possible experience; they yield valid and real knowledge only when they are ordering what is given through sense in space and time.  In the "Transcendental Dialectic" Kant turned to consideration of a priori synthetic judgments in metaphysics and claimed that the situation is just the reverse from what it was in mathematics and physics. Kant argued that metaphysics cuts itself off from sense experience in attempting to go beyond it and, for this very reason, fails to attain a single true a priori synthetic judgment. To justify this claim,  Kant analyzed the use that metaphysics makes of the concept of the unconditioned. Reason, according to Kant, seeks for the unconditioned or absolute in three distinct spheres: first,  in philosophical psychology it seeks for an absolute subject of knowledge; second,  in the sphere of cosmology, it seeks for an absolute beginning of things in time, for an absolute limit to them in space, and for an absolute limit to their divisibility; and third,  in the sphere of theology, it seeks for an absolute condition for all things. Kant, 1788, summed up that on the ground that we have no knowledge of any other rational beings besides man, we should have a right to suppose them to be of the same nature as we know ourselves to be that is we should really know them; then we omit to mention that universal assent does not prove the objective validity of a judgement that is  its validity as a cognition and although this universal assent should accidentally happened, it could furnish no proof of agreement with the object; and on the contrary, it is the objective validity which alone constitutes the basis of a necessary universal consent.

Hegel, GWE., 1830, stated that Kant gives the name objective to what is thought, to the universal and necessary; thoughts, according to Kant, are only our thoughts that is  separated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge and the true objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from being merely ours, must at the same time be the real essence of the things, and of whatever is an object to us. Hegel clarified that the specific ground of the categories is declared by the Critical system to lie in the primary identity of the ‘I’ in thought what Kant calls the transcendental unity of self-consciousness. Kant  argued that the impressions from feeling and perception are a multiplicity or miscellany of elements and the multiplicity is equally conspicuous in their form; for sense is marked by a mutual exclusion of members and that under two aspects, namely space and time, which, being the forms, that is to say, the universal type of perception, are themselves a priori. Hegel noted Kant that this congeries, afforded by sensation and perception and must however be reduced to an identity or primary synthesis and to accomplish this the ‘I’ brings it in relation to itself and unites it there in one consciousness which Kant calls ‘pure apperception’ that is the specific modes in which the ego refers to itself the multiplicity of sense are the pure concepts of the understanding that is the Categories. Kant, 1788, designated that for it is every man's own special feeling of pleasure and pain that decides in what he is to place his happiness, and even in the same subject this will vary with the difference of his wants according as this feeling changes, and thus a law which is subjectively necessary  is objectively a very contingent practical principle, which can and must be very different in different subjects and therefore can never furnish a law; since, in the desire for happiness it is not the form that is decisive, whether we are to expect pleasure in following the law, and how much. Principles of self-love may, indeed, contain universal precepts of skill, but in that case they are merely theoretical principles.

Hegel, GWE., 1830 elaborated that Kant therefore holds that the categories have their source in the ego and that the ego consequently supplies the characteristics of universality and necessity; if we observe what we have before us primarily, we may describe it as a congeries or diversity and in the categories we find the simple points or units, to which this congeries is made to converge. According to Kant,  the world of sense is a scene of mutual exclusion: its being is outside itself that is the fundamental feature of the sensible; however, thought or ego occupies a position the very reverse of the sensible, with its mutual exclusions, and its being outside itself. Kant held that the ‘I’ is the primary identity at one with itself and all at home in itself and expresses the mere act of bringing that is to-bear-upon-self and whatever is placed in this unit or focus is affected by it and transformed into it. Kant  claimed that the ‘I’ is as it were the crucible and the fire which consumes the loose plurality of sense and reduces it to unity and called this process as pure apperception in distinction from the common apperception, to which the plurality it receives is a plurality still; whereas pure apperception is rather an act by which the ‘I’ makes the materials that is mine.

Further, Hegel, GWE., 1830,  maintained that Kant’s meaning of transcendental may be gathered by the way he distinguishes it from transcendent and the transcendent may be said to be what steps out beyond the categories of the understanding that is a sense in which the term is first employed in mathematics and thus in geometry we are told to conceive the circumference of a circle as formed of an infinite number of infinitely small straight lines. Hegel then specified that, according to Kant, characteristics which the understanding holds to be totally different, the straight line and the curve, are expressly invested with identity and another transcendent of the same kind is the self-consciousness which is identical with itself and infinite in itself, as distinguished from the ordinary consciousness which derives its form and tone from finite materials. He noted that Kant called that unity of self-consciousness as transcendental only; and Kant meant thereby that the unity was only in our minds and did not attach to the objects apart from our knowledge of them.

Hegel, GWE., 1830 indicated that Kant’s categories may be viewed in two aspects that are by sensing the perception their instrumentality to objectivity and experience and by uniting these notions to our consciousness merely in which they are consequently conditioned by the material given to them, and having nothing of their own they can be applied to use only within the range of experience; the categories originate in the unity of self-consciousness that any knowledge which is gained by their means has nothing objective in it, and that the very objectivity claimed for them is only subjective as well as that common type of idealism known as subjective idealism. According to Hegel, Kant simply considered the abstract form of subjectivity and objectivity, and that even in such a partial way that the former aspect, that of subjectivity, is retained as a final and purely affirmative term of thought and in the second part, however, when Kant examines the application, as it is called, which reason makes of the categories in order to know its objects, the content of the categories, at least in some points of view, comes in for discussion: or, at any rate, an opportunity presented itself for a discussion of the question.

Hegel, GWE., 1830, also elaborated that in The Practical Reason, Kant defined a thinking Will as that that determines itself on universal principles in which its office is to give objective, imperative laws of freedom laws, that is, which state what ought to happen. According to Kant,  the warrant for thus assuming thought to be an activity which makes itself felt objectively, that is, to be really a reason, is the alleged possibility of proving practical freedom by experience, that is, of showing it in the phenomenon of self-consciousness. According to Hegel, Kant perceived that this experience in consciousness is at once met by all that the necessitiest  produces from contrary experience, particularly by the sceptical induction from the endless diversity of what men regard as right and duty that is from the diversity apparent in those professedly objective laws of freedom. Kant  claimed that there must be no contradiction in the act of self- determination; however, the Practical Reason does not confine the universal principle of the Good to its own inward regulation; it first becomes practical, in the true sense of the word, when it insists on the Good being manifested in the world with an outward objectivity, and requires that the thought shall be objective throughout, and not merely subjective.

Kant, 1788, claimed that the reality of the concept of freedom is proved by an apodeictic law of practical reason, it is the keystone of the whole system of pure reason, even the speculative, and all other concepts which, as being mere ideas, remain in it unsupported, now attach themselves to this concept, and by it obtain consistence and objective reality; that is to say, their possibility is proved by the fact that freedom actually exists, for this idea is revealed by the moral law. Kant  insisted that as far as speculative reason is concerned, is a merely subjective principle of assent, which, however, is objectively valid for a reason equally pure but practical, and this principle, by means of the concept of freedom, assures objective reality and authority to the ideas of God and immortality. Kant further denied objective reality to the supersensible use of the categories in speculation and yet admited this reality with respect to the objects of pure practical reason. Kant  specified that there is a contradiction to try to extract necessity from a principle of experience and to try by this to give a judgment true universality without which there is no rational inference, not even inference from analogy, which is at least a presumed universality and objective necessity. Kant  then insisted that to substitute subjective necessity, that is custom for objective, which exists only in a priori judgments, is to deny to reason the power of judging about the object that is of knowing it, and what belongs to it. Kant concluded that as to attempting to remedy the want of objective and consequently universal validity by saying that we can see no ground for attributing any other sort of knowledge to other rational beings, if this reasoning were valid, our ignorance would do more for the enlargement of our knowledge than all our meditation.

Kant, 1788, claimed that the principle of determination would still be only subjectively valid and merely empirical, and would not possess the necessity which is conceived in every law that is an objective necessity arising from a priori grounds; unless, indeed, we hold this necessity to be not at all practical, but merely physical in which our action is as inevitably determined by our inclination. Kant  argued that it would be better to maintain that there are no practical laws at all, but only counsels for the service of our desires, than to raise merely subjective principles to the rank of practical laws, which have objective necessity, and not merely subjective, and which must be known by reason a priori, not by experience. Kant  claimed that even the rules of corresponding phenomena are only called laws of nature when we either know them really a priori or suppose that they would be known a priori from objective grounds if our insight reached further.

The Subjective Forms

Chignell, 2004, described that in the Critique of the Transcendent Method, Kant asserted that the subject is endowed with a priori form is of thought or categories; while Kant notified of not acknowledging forms of existence in the external world and when we examine them well, we realize that there are forms of existence that correspond to the forms of thought. Therefore, Chignell, concluded that the form of time and space is not only a subjective form, but an objective form as well. In term of aesthetics, Kant makes clear that these are the only four possible aesthetic judgments, as he relates them to the Table of Judgment from the Critic of Pure Reason; they are purely subjective judgments, based on inclination alone. According to Kant,  the beautiful and the sublime occupy a space between the agreeable and the good, therefore they are  as "subjective universal" judgments.

Kant, 1790, in The Critique Of Judgment, claimed that in a judgment of taste the universality of delight is only represented as subjective. Kant supported this argument by elaborated that the particular form of the universality of an aesthetic judgment is a significant feature for the transcendental philosopher. Kant  said that the taste of reflection has often enough to put up with a rude dismissal of its claims to universal validity of its judgment and capable of demanding this agreement in its universality; such agreement it does in fact require from every one for each of its judgments of taste the persons who pass these judgments not quarreling over the possibility of such a claim, but only failing in particular cases to come to terms as to the correct application of this faculty. Kant  specified that a universality which does not rest upon concepts of the object does not involve any objective quantity of the judgment, except that it is subjective. Kant  noted that the universality that is the expression of general validity, denotes the validity of the reference of a representation, not to the cognitive faculties, but to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure for every subject.

Kant, 1790, claimed that a judgment that has objective universal validity has always got the subjective also, that the judgment is valid for everything  which is contained under a given concept, it is valid also for all who represent an object by means of this concept. Kant  maintained that we feel to be associated in the mind with the representation of the object is nothing else than its subjective finality for judgment; since judgment can only be directed to the subjective conditions of its employment in general, it follows that the accordance of a representation with these conditions of the judgment must admit of being assumed valid a priori for every one. Kant said that in order to be justified in claiming universal agreement an aesthetic judgment merely resting on subjective grounds, it is sufficient to assume: first,  that the subjective conditions of this faculty of aesthetic judgement are identical with all men in what concerns the relation of the cognitive faculties; and second, that the judgment has paid regard merely to this relation.


Note:

  Kant, I., 1788, The Critic of Practical Reason, http://www.google.search
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  Kant, I., 1781, Critic of Pure Reason, Translatedby J.M.D. Meiklejohn
  Hegel, GWE., 1830, THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY: Part One
Hoover, A.J., 2004, Arguments for the Existence of God
http://www.ditex.com/index.html
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  Kant, I., 1788, The Critic of Practical Reason, http://www.google.search
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
 Chignell, A., 2004, The Problem of Particularity in Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, Aesthetics and Philosophy of the Arts, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/MainAest.htm
  Kant, I., 1790, The Critic of Judgment, translated by James Creed Meredith
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  Ibid.