Kant’s efforts to limit metaphysics opened new lines for its development. He had thought that reason is established by being limited and that some truths are certain independent of anything that can happen in experience because experience is structured by the interpretive categories reflected in these truths. Thus, it is possible to be certain of the world in its general structure but only insofar as it is an experienced, or phenomenal, world—that is, a world known by man, not a world as it is in itself. Hegel, however, argued persistently that knowledge of a thing unknowable in itself is a contradiction and that reason can know all that is real if the mind first accepts the given thing as “always already within experience as other.” The mutual implication of knowing mind and reality known is accepted, and a science of self-consciousness that relates all categories and all reality to the knowing subject is envisaged. Thus, Kant’s mutual implication of knowing subject and phenomenal thing was given ultimate metaphysical validity by Hegel, and Kant’s reformulations of traditional dualisms—e.g., subject–object, appearance–reality, perceptual–categorial, immanent–transcendent, regulative–constitutive—became momentous for metaphysics. John Dewey
In this milieu, John Dewey, an American educational reformer and pragmatic philosopher, published his “Kant and Philosophic Method” in 1884 in the journal of a group known as the St. Louis Hegelians. Although Dewey later rejected the full-scale Hegelianism expressed in the article, he did so only after gathering up in a partial synthesis the thought of both Kant and Hegel. In this he sounded the thematic notes of much contemporary American and continental metaphysics. Whether or not this metaphysics is explicitly termed transcendental (that is, concerned with experience as determined by the mind’s conceptual and categorial makeup), it does two things: (1) it affirms Kant’s insight that physical particulars cannot first be identified and later interrelated by means of the categories, but, to be identified at all, they must be assumed to be already categorized, and reasoning must proceed to expose those categorial structures that make the actuality of knowledge possible; (2) it agrees with Hegel’s critique at least to the extent that Kant’s idea that the source of sensations is external to the mind in a noumenon is regarded as a transgression of Kant’s own doctrine that the categories, particularly that of causation, can be applied only within phenomenal experience. Dewey thought that Kant confused the empirical and transcendental standpoints by mixing analysis of the organism as sensationally responsive with analysis of mind. Kant forgot that it is only because the knowing subject already grasps the world through its categories that it can self-deceivingly regard its sensations as subjective and as caused by something not known. Thus, for Dewey, “The relation between subject and object is not an external one; it is one in a higher unity that is itself constituted by this relation.”
John DeweyEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
In Dewey’s extended later thought, metaphysics became the study of “the generic traits of existence.” Concern with God and immortality slips nearly from view, and this is typical of much contemporary philosophy. Even so, Dewey’s rethinking of the subject–object relation engenders a concept of a democratic and scientific community of persons, bound to each other through common ideals, which has religious overtones. Vague and ambivalent as this concept may be, it helps undermine the whole contrast between immanent and transcendent and leads metaphysics on new paths. William James
The work of William James, a leader of the Pragmatic movement, was typical of many contemporary tendencies, one of which was the attempt to locate the role of science in knowledge and culture. Trained in medicine, James hoped to protect the autonomy of psychology as a science by adopting a dualistic view of mind and matter. He “supposes two elements, mind knowing and thing known, and treats them as irreducible. Neither gets out of itself or into the other, neither in any way is the other.” He presumed that mental states could be identified independent of a commitment to the metaphysical status of the things known by them and that they could then be correlated to the brain. Ironically, his attempts to identify mental states involved him in commitments to the nature of the world as presented to mind. The only meaning that can be given things is in terms of the anticipated consequences of one’s actions upon these things in the world; this anticipation also supplies the meaningfulness of thoughts. This is the basis of the “instrumental” view of thoughts—i.e., reflecting upon thoughts as “tools,” or as “plans of action,” tells one something about the things known by them, the “tooled”; the converse also occurs.
Each realm of the world is experienced in terms of temporal standards of thought natural to that realm; e.g., standards of mathematics are peculiar because of their ideal, changeless objects. These criteria are not derived from mind alone or from things alone but from their relationship in what is termed experience. This is a “double-barreled” term—that is, an experiencing of experienced things. The mind cannot be specified independent of things that appear to the mind, and things cannot be specified independent of their modes of appearing to the mind. Phenomena regarded abstractly as singular, or “pure,” are neutral between mind and matter, which are different contexts of the very same pure experiences—contexts that comprise a single world.
James would not claim that his method is transcendental. Yet the fact remains that for him subject and object cannot be specified independent of each other, and James undercuts dualism and moves toward a transcendental explanation of the conditions of knowledge.
James tried to avoid what can be called logicism, physicalism, and psychologism. The last claimed that, because knowing is a psychical act, all that is known about must be subject to psychological laws. James replied that the known-about, the experienced, has its own autonomy, either as pure experience, a “specific nature” studied by philosophy, as a physical context studied by physics, or, finally, as a psychical context, a human history, studied by psychology. The latter two are both dependent, at least for their ultimate meaningfulness, upon the first. Physicalism attempts to infer the nature of the psychical directly from the physical, thus reducing it to the physical. Most logicisms claimed that pure reason can grasp the real in itself. James agreed that reason entertains ideal objects, the relations between which are fixed independent of the sequence of sensory experience, but he asserted that this experience must decide which necessary truths apply to the world. Although some always do apply, the ascertainment of what is categorial for the world is always incomplete. Just when the world “plays into the hands of logic” is decided in that endless interaction of “worlds” or “orders of experience”—such as the perceptual, the imaginary, the mathematical—occasioned by a thing experienced sifting through the orders trying to find one that can contain it without contradiction; Pegasus, for example, is a mythical creature just because it cannot find a place in the world of real horses. The world of perceptual things, experienced as experienceable by all and as existing simultaneously, serves as a paradigm of reality even though other orders of experience are not reducible to it. Existence is an unusual predicate for James; it means that practical relationship of doing and concern within which things must be able to stand to men if they are to be counted as fundamentally real. James was not giving a subjectivistic account of reality, however, because he included in the fundamentally real all that can be related spatially and temporally to what can stand over against men’s bodily selves. This was commonly forgotten by critics of James’s popularized theory of truth, Pragmatism, which was thus systematically misunderstood.