“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.”
—James Joyce, Ulysses (45)
In the domain of social ontology, entities are typically split into two categories: social entities—those arising from social processes—and their complement, non-social entities, paradigmatically represented by natural entities of the kind studied by science. In this essay, I will argue that there are, in fact, no non-social entities—all entities arise from social processes. The level these social processes work on is that of the transcendental conditions of possibility of entities, that is, without social processes, no entities would be.
The strategy I will follow can be summarised as: (i) to remind us of our critical duty to ask the transcendental question, (ii) to pull the transcendental out of Kant's idealism and into the world we inhabit with Heidegger, thus (iii) historicising the transcendental, demonstrating that any entity must be conditioned by the socio-historical setting in which it is given, and so the distinction between social and non-social beings is a false one—all beings arise from social practices.
The structure of the essay is as follows. In section 1, I provide a brief exposition of Kant’s initial formulation of transcendental philosophy, including his diagnosis of traditional rationalist metaphysics as unjustifiable speculation, yet nonetheless concerned with a necessary and laudable pursuit. In section 2, I critique Kant’s solution to the transcendental question—that of locating the conditions of possibility of experience in the mind—demonstrating that it falls prey to his own critical method. In section 3, I explicate Heidegger’s two part ontology of the ontological and the ontical as a transcendental philosophy which properly grounds the conditions of possibility of entities in meaning, itself contingent on an historical and social milieu. With the positive argument done, and with all this theory under our belt, I take section 4 to respond to an objection by the materialist of the seeming disappearance of material reality. I argue, roughly, that their position remains unanswerable to the transcendental question—that their conception of brute physical reality, independent of any conditions of experience, floats free of any sure foundation. Reality is retained under the historicised transcendental, but not in some freestanding way, uncoupled from (social) history.
1.
Kant’s philosophy is situated, in many respects, at the narrow neck of the hourglass of western philosophy: there was European philosophy before Kant, which then all came together in a grand synthesis in his work, and finally an explosion of philosophical trajectories which followed it.
One area of philosophy for which Kant provided an historical turning point was metaphysics. In the preface to the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason he writes:
‘This [indifference with respect to metaphysics] is evidently the effect not of the thoughtlessness of our age, but of its ripened power of judgement, which will no longer be put off with illusory knowledge, and which demands that reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself.’ (100–1)
Kant here is responding to the dire situation metaphysics finds itself in in the late eighteenth century. He watches as metaphysics is attacked on multiple fronts, including by sceptics like Hume, empiricists like Locke and those ‘indifferentists’ who actually agree with most results of traditional rationalist metaphysicians but for reasons of “common sense”, eschewing any kind of systematisation. What’s more, the only remaining defenders of metaphysics, who Kant calls the ‘dogmatists’ (he is thinking primarily here of A.G. Baumgarten (2)) continually overextend reason into territory beyond any possible experience without securing any sort of foundation, ‘thereby fall[ing] into obscurity and contradictions’. (99)
But metaphysics for Kant is necessary, both as an extremal element of the practice of human reason (99) and for its potential to ground morality. (139) So he sets himself the project of fashioning a new metaphysics, this time on solid ground. The new science he creates to achieve this project is called the transcendental, and its main tool is the critique. A transcendental philosophy concerns itself not with objects, but with the a priori concepts governing those objects. It wields critique for negative effect, ‘serving not for the amplification but only for the purification of our reason, and for keeping it free of errors, by which a great deal is already won.’ (133) The role of critique in philosophy is to submit reason to the transcendental question: what must there be for it to be possible for us to experience the world as we do?
We should make a distinction here between the real conditions of the possibility of experience and the transcendental conditions of the possibility of experience. The real conditions are things like the right anatomy, the right environment, or the right evolutionary processes—conditions as objects or objective processes. The transcendental conditions, however, are conditions on concepts and the process of reason itself; they cannot concern themselves with objects as they come to us in experience, since they must be determined purely a priori. The transcendental concerns itself with rational thinking as such, investigated from within reason.
Kant answers the transcendental question by way of the human mind. For Kant, it is a certain structure of human cognition and perception which allows things to appear to us as they do. We have certain a priori categories (e.g. space, time, quantity, modality) which structure our sense-intuitions and provide us with understanding of the world. For Kant, these conditions are within us; we bring them to, and impose them on, experience. In the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ in The Critique, he states:
‘if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us.’ (185)
Since he is following his own edict to submit any purely a priori investigation to critique, he cannot claim to know that, for example, space and time exist in the world of things in themselves. But since they clearly exist—they are among the foundations of a posteriori judgements—Kant takes them to be on our side of the process of perception. It is this internalisation of the transcendental conditions which indicates the idealism of Kant’s transcendental idealism.
2.
Kant’s positing of the transcendental question and his tool of the critique have been undoubtedly fecund sources for philosophy. However, the solution he provides to the transcendental question, that of locating the conditions for the possibility of experience in the mind, has two core problems, one intrinsic and one extrinsic.
The intrinsic problem relates to Kant’s universal transcendental subject. Kant understands metaphysics to be both inevitable and necessary. But from this existence, he incorrectly concludes a uniqueness. That is, if it is the case that a metaphysics is necessary, that does not necessitate one singular metaphysics, universal for all humans across all space and time. Indeed, Kant’s manoeuvre—highly dubious to me—to save the universality of the fundamental structures of experience (previously ensured by objective reality in pre-critical metaphysics) is to claim the existence of a priori cognitive faculties which are universal among humans:
‘What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which therefore does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being.’ (185)
But with this move, he transgresses his own ban on dogmatic metaphysical practice: what grounds this universal claim? Kant is already aware of the gap between inductive and deductive truths—indeed it is Hume’s argument that causality is a ‘matter-of-fact’ and hence not necessary which initially provokes Kant to question his rationalist upbringing (2)—so it cannot be from experience with the world. And if he would appeal to the universality of particular necessary objects of a metaphysics—God, freedom, immortality—this still does not require one singular metaphysical theory.
On the other hand, the extrinsic problem with Kant locating the transcendental structures in the human mind is his view of knowledge as always initially private. With his positive account of the world of appearances (phenomena), the world of things in themselves (noumena), and their mediation in the human mind, Kant famously reverses the traditional priority of metaphysics over epistemology:
‘Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition’. (110)
Yet he frames this in terms of cognition, a clear limitation given the many contemporary theories of epistemology which base knowledge in more than just cognition. Knowledge is not given to us simply through cognition, but relies on a culturally and linguistically embedded system of concepts and signs. If we were to replace ‘cognition’ in the above passage with ‘knowledge’—as indeed some translators have actually done! (Kemp Smith xvi)—we might begin to adjust Kant’s solution to a more contemporary understanding of knowledge. We will see Heidegger, in the next section, perform a replacement similar to this when he takes structures of meaning, not cognition, to provide an answer to the transcendental question.
3.
In Being and Time, Heidegger’s project is to gain an understanding of what existence actually is—what is the factor (‘Being’) which lets entities (‘beings’) present themselves to us as entities? Following in the philosophical tradition of his teacher Husserl, Heidegger takes a phenomenological approach—the study of the first-person experience of consciousness, a branch of philosophy in Kant’s legacy—in an attempt to understand what it means to exist in our own case. This human mode of Being Heidegger terms Dasein (literally ‘being-there’), and it is Dasein’s everyday encounters with entities which form our primary access to the ‘fundamental ontology’—the Being of beings. (21–35)
Although Heidegger takes some important cues from Husserl in his philosophy, their theoretical relationship (not to mention their personal one) was complex and strained. Husserl works in Kant’s wake, accepting Kant’s psychological answer to the transcendental question, but increasing the destructive power of critique. Husserl takes up Kant’s positive account of noumena and phenomena, and argues that since noumena are inaccessible, we cannot guarantee they exist and so we should just set them aside and simply describe things as they are given in our conscious awareness. In particular, for philosophy this means that any theorising not done from the first-person perspective constitutes overstepping the bounds of pure reason. (Investigations 156–70)
Heidegger critiques Husserl by identifying the problem at the base of his philosophy: how are we being in the world before we have concepts? That is, how can the pre-predicative state exist? Heidegger claims that the ‘givenness’ of entities in our perception is already theoretical, it already must rely on some pre-theoretical conditions for its existence. This focus on ‘givenness’ comes from his innovative reading of Aristotle as demonstrating—perhaps against Aristotle’s own intentions—that the essence of the human is a meaningful presence of objects to its perception: a being in its field of vision presents itself as, say, a rock, or as a cat—it is this as which indicates the meaning of the presence. Sheehan notes that, for Heidegger’s Aristotle, ‘[m]an’s uniqueness among living beings is that with him there arrives meaning. Indeed that he has access to beings only in terms of their articulated presence [to him.]’ (93, my emphasis) For Heidegger, it is this meaning of presence to perception—with its inherent variation and potential for revision—which requires grounding; a grounding which cannot come wholly from the mind.
Heidegger’s innovation in the transcendental comes from relocating it out of the mind, into a meaning of presence. The question of the Being of beings—that is, what is that Aristotelian ‘meaning’ which accounts for the particular beings in my purview?—is precisely a question about which interpretation of beings I have. Put another way, giving meaning to Being fixes the beings which ‘show up’ in my perception.
This discussion—about the Being of being—Heidegger sees as the proper stuff of ontology, but something unfortunately forgotten within western philosophy since Plato. What metaphysics has been preoccupied with—even critical metaphysics prior to Heidegger—he terms the ‘ontical’: a mere investigation of facticity. Questions such as ‘what is the self like?’ or ‘what constitutes freedom’ presuppose an ontology which is left unexamined. It is the job of philosophy to uncover the interpretation of beings which undergirds such ontical investigation, that is, to discover their conditions of possibility.
So although Heidegger sticks with Kant’s (and Husserl’s) first-person perspective as the window into metaphysics, he detaches the transcendental conditions from it. Meaning, attained through interpretation, is the home of the transcendental.
However, meaning is itself conditioned by the socio-historical. In “The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger investigates the ontology which underlies the ontics of modernity. His aim is to uncover the interpretation of beings which undergirds modernity as an age, and by doing so he demonstrates the contingency of meaning on both social and historical contexts.
In an amazingly clear yet condensed passage, Heidegger draws out the connection between meaning and history for metaphysics in particular:
‘Metaphysics grounds an age in that, through a particular interpretation of beings and through a particular comprehension of truth, it provides that age with the ground of its essential shape. This ground governs throughout all phenomena distinctive of the age.’ (207)
This shows the power of meaning as precondition for phenomena and that meaning is subject to revision and replacement over time. Each age has its own interpretation of beings, and thus different understanding of bodies, place and the nature between them. (209)
Thus since meaning is conditioned by the socio-historical, the transcendental conditions must be too. Hence any beings, arising from their transcendental conditions, arise from the social.
4.
Let us now turn to a possible objection to the present thesis by the materialist. The objection is possible to state in many forms, although its core remains the same: “everything cannot arise from social processes—what about the material world independent of humans?” Or, “if everything is socially constructed, how do you account for my causal interactions with the material world?”
Such objections rest on the existence of a material world, independent of any conditions of its intelligibility or perception. But Heidegger has shown us that there are no beings before interpretation; there are no objective entities, pre-divided, already differentiated from each other. It is the human act of interpretation which brings meaning, and hence the transcendental conditions for the possibility of any beings. Thus the a priori assumption of the existence—ahistorical and sense-independent—of such a material realm is an improper application of pure reason; it must be pruned by the tool of critique.
A materialist rejoinder might be that here we are talking of interpretations and understandings, not reality itself. Reality is material, they would say, and thus necessary—your understanding of it is not. But the materialist has missed the observation that they are in fact giving meaning to Being when they state their position. They are dogmatically applying an ontics to an ontological problem; Theirs is just one interpretation of beings among many possible—it is not necessary.
What about the causal effects of the material world, they might say. But is it any surprise that this question is cashed out in terms of causality, a relation between material objects? This question is still working with the dominant interpretation of being of the modern age—i.e. materialism itself. An interpretation of beings might seek to ground itself as the one true image of beings, and it may believe itself successful within its historical purview, but it cannot escape its own contingency when viewed from the transcendental perspective. Only the fundamental ontology, a transcendental project, can claim the universality necessary for metaphysics.
* * *
All entities arise from social practices. The transcendental conditions for entities to ‘show up’ to us are relative to a socio-historical moment—entities qua entities are contingent on socio-historically embedded conditions.
What is more, when social ontologists divide entities into those arising from social practices, and those which exist independently, this division is predicated on, in Heidegger’s language, a particular interpretation of beings. So we can see this question arising from the social and historical conditions of modernity, and answered by philosophical tools developed in those same conditions (though surely in reaction to early modern conceptions of the social and the non-social—an antithesis).
Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” 1938. The Heidegger Reader, edited by Günter Figal, translated by Jerome Veith, Indiana UP, 2009, pp. 207–23.
——. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Basil Blackwell, 1962.
Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Northwestern UP, 1970.
——. Logical Investigations. Translated by John Niemeyer Findlay. Routledge, 2001.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Penguin, 1992.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Alan Wood. Cambridge UP, 1998.
Kemp Smith, Norman, translator. Critique of Pure Reason. By Immanuel Kant, Macmillan, 1929.
Sheehan, Thomas J. “Heidegger, Aristotle and Phenomenology.” Philosophy Today (Celina), vol. 19, no. 2, 1975, pp. 87–94.