BEYOND THE BOUNDS OF EXPERIENCE: TRANS-PHENOMENAL CAUSALITY OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL OBJECT VIS-À-VIS APPEARANCES

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure has generated a number of controversies. One of them is the charge of inconsistency regarding Kant's claim on the limited use of the categories. Kant holds that the categories of thought can only be used legitimately within the sphere of experience. They cannot be used beyond the world of nature because the categories are the preconditions required for experience to be possible. Nonetheless, Kant is accused of violating this limited application of the categories when he argues that the thing in itself or transcendental object is the cause of appearance. In other words, Kant applies the category of cause to a transcendental object which is not given in the realm of experience and this is where the contradiction lays. I show that this accusation is predicated upon a misinterpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. When the transcendental idealism is seen as positing two world of objects, then the problem of trans-phenomenal causality arises. I argue that this problem is a pseudo-problem because Kant's transcendental idealism does not posit two worlds with different sets of object. On the contrary, Kant talks of an object which can be considered from two perspectives. It is this two aspect approach that I favour since it represents Kant's position and also eliminates the problem of trans-phenomenal causality. Furthermore, the need to distinguish between the using the categories to “think” and also to “cognize” is fundamental. Through this distinction, one sees that the category of cause can be used to think but not to cognize the transcendental object, and this is consistent with Kant's use of the categories.