Kant at the Bar: Transcendental Idealism in Daily Life
Patrick Cannon uses a popular setting to explain Kant’s metaphysics.
It’s Friday night and you’re at the bar. It’s packed. You snake through the sea of bodies.
“Ah! There’s a free spot!” exclaims your friend, pointing to some stools across the counter. You part your way through a boisterous group of young women, sit down, and catch the bartender’s eye. “Two beers, please,” you say, holding up the peace sign.
“IDs please,” she responds skeptically, holding her hand out.
“Uh!” you both harmonize, and dig through your wallets. She examines the two cards, carefully comparing each of you to your state-approved appearance. Finally, the incredulous bartender trades your IDs for two golden glasses of beer.
You toast your friend. You’re glad the week is over, glad you didn’t finally throw your perpetually-jammed printer out the window. Taking a drink of the amber liquid, the carbonation tickles your mouth. There’s a mild burn as you swallow. A group of men are playing pool in the next room, and billiard balls can be faintly heard cracking into one another through the ambient noise. A country song plays on the digital jukebox, but all that can be heard through the fogbank of conversation is a rhythmic drumming and a faint fiddle.
What you might not know is how much the moment is loaded with Kantian philosophy. Sitting at the bar, drinking a beer, thinking about the bartender who just carded you, are all perfect illustrations of Immanuel Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’. For example, the bartender examining the correlation between you and your driver’s license photo was wondering if the appearances laid before her – concerning both you and your ID – are an informative portrayal of reality. In other words, does either the appearance of you being over twenty-one, or your ID saying that you are, genuinely reflect whether you are actually over twenty-one? In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant was challenged with a similar question: ‘Is appearance a reasonable reflection of reality?’ He asked this on the way to answering the further question, ‘Can we know what things are like beyond their appearance to us, that is, in and of themselves?’ Kant is famous for concluding ‘No’ – that despite what we might think, there’s very little we can know about what reality is like in and of itself, either from its appearance to us, or from any other source.
But what does this mean, ‘reality in and of itself?’
The word Kant uses for a thing in and of itself, is ‘thing-in-itself’ (‘ding-an-sich_’); and the collective word for _reality as it is in itself is ‘noumenon’, taken from the Greek word ‘_nous_’ roughly meaning ‘intellect’ or ‘pure thought’ or ‘pure reason’ (because Kant thinks what little we can know about it we can only know in terms of pure reason). This noumenal world is reality as it really is, divorced from or independent of our sense perceptions of it. Our sense perceptions of the world – the feeling of the cold glass in your hand, the taste of the beer, the smell of it as it nears your lips, the gold color of the liquid – are referred to by Kant as ‘phenomena’.
This way of dividing the world is both very interesting and very troubling. Take the mahogany bar counter before you. When you see the table, the dark topography of engrained lines, you experience phenomena, or sense experiences: color, shape, sound when you set down your glass, and tactile feelings as you lean against it. While one may be inclined to believe one is simply experiencing the table as it is in and of itself, that would be mistaken. These phenomena we experience are not the ultimate cause of the experience. For example, if I look up at the sky I can’t change it from blue to pink just by thinking about it, which might be thought possible if all that existed were the experiences themselves. Instead, Kant was convinced that there was something beyond our immediate sensations causing these phenomena. There’s something out there, insisted Kant, the source of these sense perceptions: something behind or beyond them called the noumenal world.
But aye, there’s the rub. Kant maintained that although there is a noumenal world that is the initial cause of our subjective (phenomenal) experience of the world, we can never access that noumenal world directly. What then can we know directly? Kant thought that all we could know directly were our phenomena. But there’s more to experience and reality than this. He maintained that the world as experienced is the product of a ‘Matrix’.