Seungmin Park PHIL 202 Park 1 Final Paper In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses his Second Analogy as a response against Hume’s skeptical claim against causality as something we are not justified in claiming as a real phenomenon. By creating a distinction between event and non-event, Kant redefines causality as an objective law that help shape our impressions rather than an inference we create from our experiences, which goes against Hume’s own construction of causality. However, Kant’s definition of causality as objective law seems to be contradicted by his own framework of time and space and create a seemingly opposing understanding of event that threatens the objectivity of causality. This paper examines how Kant defines objectivity through his framework of transcendental idealism, and how Kant actually challenges Hume, not by claiming casualty as a real phenomenon, but rather by raising the stakes for the Humean skeptic by forcing him to drop his empiricist view or accept causality as just as real phenomenon, eventually showing how one cannot create skeptical view of causality as something less real than one’s impressions. In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume presents his skeptical view of cause and effect by arguing that we are not justified in labelling causality as a real phenomenon that occurs in the world but rather an event that occurs in our mind. Hume’s argument goes like this: Because we do not see causality within the qualities of objects, we must find causality within the relations of objects. In studying the relations of objects, we notice that there is what Hume calls constant conjunction, which is an identical pattern of relations between certain objects such that it looks like an event is repeating itself. However, in order to label certain constant conjunctions as causality, Hume argues there are certain presuppositions we must accept. The three premises needed for causality that Hume gives is succession, which is that the objects must somehow interact with each other in time and space; priority,which is that we perceive an order to the relationship, such that cause always comes before the effect; and necessary connection, which is that we must believe the cause must necessarily lead to the effect, and that the two events occuring didn’t just happen due to coincidence. Hume argues that if these three things are required for us to justify that Park 2 causality exists in the real world, then there is no grounds for this belief given that necessary connection cannot be fully justified. Hume believes this because necessary connection is a complex idea that requires experiential synthetic knowledge in order to establish; we develop the idea of necessary connection between objects by experiencing how they interact with each other. However, because necessary connection is a concept that we must apply to events that have not occurred when trying to establish causality, Hume observes that necessary connection translates to a form of justified inference, in that we make an educated guess that causality will occur between two objects because of how we experienced their interactions in the past. After establishing that necessary connection is dependent on justified inference, Hume then shows that inferring a necessary connection between objects is itself unjustified, because in order to come to the conclusion that a necessary connection exists, one must use the Principle of Uniformity of Nature (PUN), which states that in order for causality to occur, nature must remain uniform such that there is no other force that impacts causality. Hume argues that humans wrongly apply this principle because we use this principle in the premise in order to legitimize its application in the conclusion, and therefore create a circular argument where it becomes impossible to justify the PUN. Because causality then becomes an idea that rests on an unjustified assumption, Hume concludes that we are not justified in believing that causality exists in the real world, and must redefine causality as a real phenomenon that occurs in the mind. It’s important to note that Hume’s skeptical view on causality seems at odds with the rest of his framework, where he takes more of an empiricist viewpoint, as he believes that we have real impressions that are caused by real objects in the world, and that we are justified in believing in our impressions. This plays a role in how Hume sets up the premises for causality; Hume believes that our idea of succession and priority are impressions that we are justified in believing, such that we are justified in believing in constant conjunction as a real phenomenon, yet only rejects the third aspect of causality, necessary connection, because he argues that we cannot get necessary connection from impressions. Thus, Hume Park 3 concludes that we ought to be more skeptical of the concept of causality more than our belief in other impressions, such as succession and priority. Kant argues against Hume’s skeptical viewpoint on causality through what he calls his Second Analogy in the Critique of Pure Reason, where he argues for causality as an objective law. Kant defends this claim by first pointing out the fact that there is a difference between our representation of objects and the objects themselves, and we can only understand our perceptions of objects, because “how things in themselves may be… is entirely beyond our cognitive sphere” (306). After establishing this fact, Kant then claims that our perception of objects is constantly in succession. By this Kant means that we experience objects in time, and that our perception is always then connected to time. Kant seems to introduce this as an intuitive claim; it seems ludicrous for humans to perceive objects and events independent of time. This isn’t to say that real objects cannot exist independent of time, but given that we cannot know anything about the actual real objects, we cannot comment on the actuality of that claim but only about our perception of them. Given that our perception of objects must be in some form of succession, Kant then moves onto distinguishing between different types of succession. The first type is what Kant labels as “subjective sequence of apprehension”, which he demonstrates with an example of a house. Kant claims that a person perceiving a house would perceive its parts in succession. For example, if I walked around the house and looked at its side, I would be viewing the north, east, south, and west side in a particular succession because I am examining the parts of house through time. However, Kant points out that this succession is arbitrary; I could’ve chosen to reverse directions and view the west side after the north side instead of walking towards the east side. In other words, this type of succession is a subjective sequence because there is no necessary order that I must follow in order to perceive the house as an object. Therefore, there is no rule that dictates how I must view this object. Kant then moves onto a different example to illustrate another type of succession. Kant asks us to consider the example of a ship moving down a river from upstream to downstream. In this case, Kant Park 4 argues that our perception of its position is not arbitrary, but rather that the “sequence of the perceptions in apprehension is therefore here determined” (307). In other words, we can’t help but perceive the position of the ship going from upstream to downstream, for it is impossible, Kant argues, to perceive this ship going the opposite direction. Kant argues that this inability to perceive the event in multiple subjective ways hints that there is a rule in our perception of objects and their relations that is necessary in explaining this type of succession. Kant then creates this rule by arguing that there must be a reason why there is a difference in our ability to perceive objects in a subjective sequence and some objects only in what Kant calls an “objective sequence”. Kant argues this as the rule of causality, given that the objective sequence of succession occur during events (such as the movement of the ship), while the subjective sequence of succession occur during perceptions of non-events (like the stationary house). While Kant doesn’t explicitly define the distinction, one can think of an event as alterations in space and time while non-events are simply no changes in the object through space as it exists through time. In other words, events examine the change in an object or the relation between two objects, and because there must be a law that dictates the difference between an event and a non-event, Kant argues that this law is causality, and therefore causality must exist as an “objective law” in order for us to make sense of our different types of successions in perception. This pushes back against Hume because Kant is claiming that causality exists as an objective and necessary law in order for us to make sense of our impressions, and therefore we are justified in believing causality as a real law instead of rejecting it in favor of skepticism. Reexamining Hume’s framework now through a Kantian lens better illustrates Kant’s attack on Hume. As stated before, Kant writes that for the objective sequence of successions, we can’t help but perceive the event in that particular order, because it is impossible to perceive it in another manner. Because we can’t help but perceive it in that way, we can’t help but be impacted and acknowledge the causal law that forces us to have that particular impression, Park 5 and therefore causality becomes something that is a definitional characteristic, maybe not of the object itself, but of the movement of the object such that causality is somewhat captured in our impression of the relation of objects. In other words, because causality is no longer an a posteri knowledge that is created from and applied to impressions, but rather an a priori law that shapes our impressions in the first place, Hume loses the framework to claim that we have no justification to claim causality as a real phenomenon and therefore can no longer justify his skeptical framework, given that Kant has established causality as an objective law. The initial concern that rises from Kant’s argument is the issue that he uses the concept of an event in order to justify causality as an objective law. In Kant’s own foundational work, he advocates for transcendental idealism, where the idea is that the general forms of objects are mind-dependent, while claiming that objects are empirically real, in that our perception of objects are universal among those who have the same way in which they perceive objects. Kant connects these two seemingly opposing claims by elaborating on how his transcendental idealism rests on the basis of space and time, and that the way in which we view objects through space and time are mind-dependent, as space and time are mind-dependent relations, but the actual objects we view in space and time are empirically real, given that we all share the way in which we view these objects (i.e. we view them through space and time). However, by advocating for transcendental idealism, he seems to contradict himself when he uses events to justify an objective law, given that Kant’s definition of an event is a change in space and time, which he claims are mind-dependent. It seems then, if Kant is creating a law that dictates how we observe space and time, it seems only reasonable that we are only justified in labelling that law just as mind-dependent as space and time itself. In fact, a Humean skeptic may argue that Kant simply proves Hume’s point that causality is a mind-dependent phenomenon and only strengthens Hume’s argument. Given this contradiction, what does Kant acutally mean when he claims that causality is an “objective law”? Park 6 It’s important to note once again that Kant talks about causality in terms of things that we perceive, rather than the object as itself. In fact, Kant concedes that we cannot know anything about the real world out there. With this in mind, if one revisits Kant’s claim, it seems like the only statement that Kant is making is that causality is just as real as our perception of objects. If our perception of objects line up with the objects as themselves, then Kant’s claim is that our causal law must line up in the same real way. It is in this sense that Kant pushes back against Hume, not by claiming that causality is a real phenomenon, but rather pushing back against Hume’s conclusion that we must be more skeptical about causality than we do about our impressions. In other words, Kant is raising the stakes for a Humean empiricist by challenging the claim that other aspects of our impressions, such as succession, can be assumed to be more real than causality. One can better understand this line of reasoning by going back to examine Kant’s First Analogy, where he claims that substance persists through alterations. Kant’s arguments goes like this: given that all of our perceptions of objects are grounded in time, we can experience objects through simultaneity and succession, where simultaneity is the concept that one can see two distinct objects at one point in time, and succession is experiencing the same object persist through multiple points in time. Kant then argues that in order for succession to occur, there must be something real, which he calls the substance, that lasts through alterations, i.e. a change in time. Consider this example: you see a bird flying in the sky as it flies down, goes behind a tree, and then soars up into the air afterwards. You simultaneously see the tree and the bird right up until it flies behind the tree, and then you only have an impression of the tree for that period of time until you see the bird once again. However, how can you know that it is the same bird moving in succession from one point in time to another? Why do we not assume that it is a second identically looking bird that decides to fly out from behind a tree right after the first bird goes behind it? Kant’s argument here is that we assume the existence of substance as we have an impression of substance that cannot stem from impressions itself. Consider another example of a magic trick, where the magician Park 7 uses an identically looking coin to fool the audience while hiding the initial coin. Despite getting the same impression of a coin, there is a mental process outside of empirical observation that lead us to conclude that the substance of the coin did not persist in this case. Thus, Kant’s First Analogy isn’t to prove that substance is a real thing in the real world, but rather to show that even succession, which Hume argues is gained solely through impressions, is a process that is mind-dependent due to our needed assumption that the things we perceive has substance in order to claim that succession exists in the first place. Through the First and Second Analogy, one can now see how Kant raises the stakes for the Humean skeptic. Through Kant’s framework, the Humean skeptic cannot claim that one can be more skeptical of causality than one’s impressions, because Kant has shown how other processes, such as succession, is just as mind-dependent as causality. Rather, Kant builds his case by assuming that the Humean skeptic, given his empiricist framework, would find the idea of succession as a mind-dependent phenomenon a ludicrous claim and would be forced into then accepting that causality is just as must of an objective phenomenon as succession itself. In conclusion, Kant creates the more compelling argument by showing how Hume creates a contradiction in his own argument by coming to the conclusion that one ought to be more skeptical of causality than his impressions. Kant traps Hume into either rejecting his own empiricist framework by accepting that all impressions are mind-dependent and don’t tell us anything about the objects as themselves, or accepting causality as just as much of a real phenomenon as other impressions by illustrating how causality must be an objective law that we use when trying to distinguish our different impressions of events and non-events. Either way, by breaking down Hume’s framework, Kant proves how one cannot be more skeptical of causality than one’s other impressions, thus effectively breaking down Hume’s opposing conclusion.
