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Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves
In this refreshing and exceptional work, Rae Langton offers a new interpretation and defense of Kant's doctrine of "things in themselves." Kant distinguishes things in themselves from phenomena, thus making a metaphysical distinction between intrinsic and relational properties of substances. Langton argues that his claim that we have no knowledge of things in themselves is not idealism, but epistemic humility; we have no knowledge of the intrinsic properties of substances. This interpretation vindicates Kant's scientific realism and shows his primary/secondary quality distinction to be superior even to modern day competitors. And it answers the famous charge that Kant's tale of things in themselves is one that makes itself untellable.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
246 pages, Paperback
First published March 29, 1998
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120 people want to read
About the author
Rae Langton
7 books18 followersRae Langton is a Professor of Philosophy at Newham College, Cambridge. She gave the 2015 John Locke lecture and the 20th annual lecture of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. She has a particular expertise the history of philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. In 2014 she was elected as a fellow of the British Academy.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 23, 2020
I've been in love with Kant's First Critique for a few years now, and have been resisting reading any secondary literature, for fear of having my loving memories of him distorted. Langton's Kant is a huge shocker. This is probably because her interpretation is already considered controversial or unconventional by the general Kantian scholarship; and in addition to that, my interpretation of Kant might be on the opposite extreme to her's (I read Kant after having read Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger). In this shock, I feel like I don't know who my beloved Kant is anymore! :,(
Langton argues that Kant is pretty much a straightforward metaphysical realist; his main contribution is to argue that we just cannot have knowledge of intrinsic properties of objects. Langton's Kant is a metaphysical realist in this way: it is an indubitable fact that the universe consists in substances that possess properties. Some properties are intrinsic; the properties that a substance still possesses, if cut off from interaction with anything else, are intrinsic. Other properties are relational or dispositional; these are properties that would vanish once a substance is cut off from its interactions with other substances.
Langton's Kant holds that we, in principle, are barred from access to these intrinsic properties, and instead can encounter only relational properties. This is because our perception of objects is receptive; objects must exert effects on us, and we receive those effects, in order for us to become aware of them. These effects of objects are not grounded in, or they do not exist in virtue of, the intrinsic properties of objects. This is because intrinsic properties of objects, holding when the object is taken in isolation, cannot be responsible for the interactions between objects (I didn't follow the argument for this premise... couldn't intrinsic properties be responsible for interactions and nonetheless exist independently of those interactions?). Instead, the interactions between objects must be super-added; there must be laws of nature that are external to these objects that account for and govern these interactions.
So the effects objects exert on us, and our receptive perception and knowledge of objects, are grounded in these laws that are external to the intrinsic properties of objects. Thus, the effects of objects that we access do not supervene on and cannot be reduced to the intrinsic properties of objects, and so we cannot use these effects as clues or windows through which we might access those intrinsic properties. This is what Langton's Kant means by that we cannot know things-in-themselves and are instead stuck with phenomenal appearances.
Langton's Kant also holds that phenomenal appearances are real things, as real as things-in-themselves are. The former consist in relational properties, while the latter in intrinsic properties; these are just two different sets of properties of the same substances; all properties are equally metaphysically real.
So I found Langton's Kant so bizarrely unlike the Kant I know. I take Kant's chief contribution to be that to do straightforward metaphysics is an entirely futile and misleading endeavor; and that Kant provides a revolutionary, new vision of what metaphysics is, and how it is to be done. Kant argues that the very notion of substances and properties is dependent on transcendental conditions of our experience; if we subtract humans from the world, substances and properties would not exist at all, but only the noumena (which we can say and know nothing about, and which is a contributing substrate to the substances and properties we know and love) would remain.
For Kant, the difference between phenomena and things-in-themselves is not one of each picking out a different set of properties of the same substances. The difference is much more complicated and radical than that. Phenomena are first-personally accessible and are necessarily constituted by our cognitive capacities. Things-in-themselves are unknowable; all we can know (we must posit this out of explanatory necessity) is that they 'underpin' or provide an underlying causal grounds of our phenomena.
Yes, Kant is subject to a significant paradox here: the notion of 'underpinning' or any sort of causal role depends on the category of causation, a transcendental condition of experience, and so is strictly phenomenal. Kant failed to address this paradox in his work. But we can grant him that the interaction between things-in-themselves and our phenomenal realm does happen, but in a noumenal manner that we cannot fathom. And it can still hold that things-in-themselves are of an entirely other category than anything phenomenal; the former are in principle unfathomable, and the latter in principle exhaust everything we can experience and think up, and also provide the conceptual framework that is necessary for us to even acknowledge the notion of a thing-in-itself.
It's amazing to see how Kant can be reworked to appear to serve such utterly different traditions. Langton's is an analytic metaphysical tradition, and mine is a existential-phenomenological tradition. Despite this bewilderment, I appreciate having read this book. This bewilderment forces me to think harder about the differences between my view and Langton's; I now have more work to do in clarifying my view. More generally, Langton is a wonderful writer; she is concise and crystal clear. I'd recommend this work to readers interested in how to make sense of the special sort of idealism that Kant inaugurated; or whether Kant is reconcilable with scientific realism.
Langton argues that Kant is pretty much a straightforward metaphysical realist; his main contribution is to argue that we just cannot have knowledge of intrinsic properties of objects. Langton's Kant is a metaphysical realist in this way: it is an indubitable fact that the universe consists in substances that possess properties. Some properties are intrinsic; the properties that a substance still possesses, if cut off from interaction with anything else, are intrinsic. Other properties are relational or dispositional; these are properties that would vanish once a substance is cut off from its interactions with other substances.
Langton's Kant holds that we, in principle, are barred from access to these intrinsic properties, and instead can encounter only relational properties. This is because our perception of objects is receptive; objects must exert effects on us, and we receive those effects, in order for us to become aware of them. These effects of objects are not grounded in, or they do not exist in virtue of, the intrinsic properties of objects. This is because intrinsic properties of objects, holding when the object is taken in isolation, cannot be responsible for the interactions between objects (I didn't follow the argument for this premise... couldn't intrinsic properties be responsible for interactions and nonetheless exist independently of those interactions?). Instead, the interactions between objects must be super-added; there must be laws of nature that are external to these objects that account for and govern these interactions.
So the effects objects exert on us, and our receptive perception and knowledge of objects, are grounded in these laws that are external to the intrinsic properties of objects. Thus, the effects of objects that we access do not supervene on and cannot be reduced to the intrinsic properties of objects, and so we cannot use these effects as clues or windows through which we might access those intrinsic properties. This is what Langton's Kant means by that we cannot know things-in-themselves and are instead stuck with phenomenal appearances.
Langton's Kant also holds that phenomenal appearances are real things, as real as things-in-themselves are. The former consist in relational properties, while the latter in intrinsic properties; these are just two different sets of properties of the same substances; all properties are equally metaphysically real.
So I found Langton's Kant so bizarrely unlike the Kant I know. I take Kant's chief contribution to be that to do straightforward metaphysics is an entirely futile and misleading endeavor; and that Kant provides a revolutionary, new vision of what metaphysics is, and how it is to be done. Kant argues that the very notion of substances and properties is dependent on transcendental conditions of our experience; if we subtract humans from the world, substances and properties would not exist at all, but only the noumena (which we can say and know nothing about, and which is a contributing substrate to the substances and properties we know and love) would remain.
For Kant, the difference between phenomena and things-in-themselves is not one of each picking out a different set of properties of the same substances. The difference is much more complicated and radical than that. Phenomena are first-personally accessible and are necessarily constituted by our cognitive capacities. Things-in-themselves are unknowable; all we can know (we must posit this out of explanatory necessity) is that they 'underpin' or provide an underlying causal grounds of our phenomena.
Yes, Kant is subject to a significant paradox here: the notion of 'underpinning' or any sort of causal role depends on the category of causation, a transcendental condition of experience, and so is strictly phenomenal. Kant failed to address this paradox in his work. But we can grant him that the interaction between things-in-themselves and our phenomenal realm does happen, but in a noumenal manner that we cannot fathom. And it can still hold that things-in-themselves are of an entirely other category than anything phenomenal; the former are in principle unfathomable, and the latter in principle exhaust everything we can experience and think up, and also provide the conceptual framework that is necessary for us to even acknowledge the notion of a thing-in-itself.
It's amazing to see how Kant can be reworked to appear to serve such utterly different traditions. Langton's is an analytic metaphysical tradition, and mine is a existential-phenomenological tradition. Despite this bewilderment, I appreciate having read this book. This bewilderment forces me to think harder about the differences between my view and Langton's; I now have more work to do in clarifying my view. More generally, Langton is a wonderful writer; she is concise and crystal clear. I'd recommend this work to readers interested in how to make sense of the special sort of idealism that Kant inaugurated; or whether Kant is reconcilable with scientific realism.
September 17, 2015
There are famously two sides to Kant's metaphysics. He is a 'transcendental idealist' in relation to the existence of the external world, but a representational realist in relation to the phenomenal world of our senses. Langton claims that humility derives from our inability to know given objects as they are in themselves, but she is also forceful in making a case that Kant is a scientific realist. This is in line with contemporary 'structural realist' interpretations of Kant, in which science furnishes us with explanations of the relations between objects rather than knowledge of the nature of the objects themselves. Thus we can remain neutral over the exact nature of unobservable scientific entities such as electrons and quarks while at the same time crediting them as 'real'.
For the scientific realist, mind-independent primary properties of objects such as extension, mass and charge are the business of science. Secondary qualities such as colour and texture are caused by primary properties and have no existence outside of the human mind. Langton believes that an opposing phenomenalist reading of Kant, in which primary and secondary qualities are on an equal footing and nothing but representations in us, is mistaken. What Kant actually thought is that the primary secondary distinction holds within the phenomenal realm. Phenomenal objects have the (often unobservable) properties that physics ascribes to them; and they do not have colours and tastes. Secondary properties should be identified with powers to produce the sensations in us, which they achieve through causation.
I am not enough of an expert on Kant to know what he really meant to say and it is probable that his views evolved over time. What I will say is that I share Berkeley's abhorrence of a scientific rationalism that denies reality to our rich sensible world of ripe strawberries, leaden skies and the smell of cut grass. We cannot conceive of objects without these secondary qualities. The essence of colour is that it is unquantifiable and not reducible to primary causes. Moreover, physical properties and the laws that relate them are abstractions from this manifest world. The law of gravitation states what happens to bodies upon which no other forces are acting; but there are no such bodies in the actual universe, and so strictly speaking it cannot be true of anything.
For the scientific realist, mind-independent primary properties of objects such as extension, mass and charge are the business of science. Secondary qualities such as colour and texture are caused by primary properties and have no existence outside of the human mind. Langton believes that an opposing phenomenalist reading of Kant, in which primary and secondary qualities are on an equal footing and nothing but representations in us, is mistaken. What Kant actually thought is that the primary secondary distinction holds within the phenomenal realm. Phenomenal objects have the (often unobservable) properties that physics ascribes to them; and they do not have colours and tastes. Secondary properties should be identified with powers to produce the sensations in us, which they achieve through causation.
I am not enough of an expert on Kant to know what he really meant to say and it is probable that his views evolved over time. What I will say is that I share Berkeley's abhorrence of a scientific rationalism that denies reality to our rich sensible world of ripe strawberries, leaden skies and the smell of cut grass. We cannot conceive of objects without these secondary qualities. The essence of colour is that it is unquantifiable and not reducible to primary causes. Moreover, physical properties and the laws that relate them are abstractions from this manifest world. The law of gravitation states what happens to bodies upon which no other forces are acting; but there are no such bodies in the actual universe, and so strictly speaking it cannot be true of anything.
September 22, 2019
Langton reads Kant with Leibniz and makes an excellent case for it. Among other things, this book clarifies the relationship between German Idealism and then-contemporary science (i.e. Force). One of the best secondary texts on the first critique.
November 10, 2025
very good. ameriks has taught us to be suspicious of any short argument to idealism as interpretation of kant. still, this is a very strong case, one which appealingly draws together considerations pertinent to the contemporary metaphysician with a little about kant's physical monadology and metaphysical physics of force. if you want opposition to phenomenalist readings of kant, or those which would render him a merely post-berkeleyan locke, this provides more of a figure of scientifically realist metaphysics. and that's to be applauded, as interpretation and position
July 6, 2017
My favourite book this year, it is set out well and the methodical approach to the topic means that the reader is able to understand with seeming ease the topic that is laid before them. This book is, in my opinion, necessary for any who have indulged in Kantian philosophy.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews