Interlude XLI. Foucault - part 21

The Order of Things + (Kant(Hume(Descartes)))

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XL. Foucault - part 20

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...

[After the political controversy of the “Manifesto of the 121” in 1960] ... Sartre’s prestige had never been greater... For the first time in over a decade, he was also at the center of philosophical debate, thanks to the publication earlier in the year of his long-awaited sequel to Being and Nothingness, the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

p137

In this interminable text, Sartre undertook a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism, which he declared to be the unsurpassable “philosophy of our time.” Even longer than Being and Nothingness (and far murkier, due, perhaps, to its slapdash composition under the influence of amphetamines), the Critique attempted to lay bare the manifold ways in which the freedom of the human being could be actively alienated, fettered by social forces of the human being’s own making and maintenance. By describing in detail the “dialectic” through which conscious individuals, acting in concert, could produce collective social structures at first glance utterly foreign to their conscious intentions, Sartre claimed to have put on a secure new footing “the Truth of history.” “we are attempting,” he solemnly declared, “to lay the basis for a ‘Prolegomena to any Future Anthropology.’”

These were large and sweeping claims, which doubtless attracted the attention of Foucault. For as it happens, the younger man had just finished a first draft of his own “Prolegomena to any Future Anthropology.“ This was his unpublished thèse complémentaire on Kant’s Anthropology -- the seed from which ultimately grew The Order of Things.

The Order of Things and Kant’s Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View.

... In a famous passage from his Logic, Kant himself suggested that anthropology might even be regarded as the fundamental issue of his philosophy, since all of the other questions he had tried to answer -- What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? -- could be incorporated into the general questions, What is Man?...

p139

...Kant maintained that our experience of the world could arise only on the basis of certain a priori categories: “Though all our knowledge begins with experience,” declared Kant, “it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.” The a priori categories he considered most essential to the ordering of experience -- cause and substance among them -- Kant took to be a product of the understanding, exercised in conjunction with the two other main human faculties, the imagination and sensibility (seeing, hearing, etc.). By thus focusing philosophy on the capacities of the human being, Kant abandoned the view, shared by thinkers as different as Plato and Locke, that our concepts and categories for understanding the world, in order to be “true,” must conform to some independently existing reality; it was part of Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in philosophy to argue instead that a number of the most essential categories of thought conform to a specific “lawfulness of cognition” (as Ernst Cassirer once put it). “to which a determinate form of objectivity (be it theoretical, ethical, or aesthetic in kind) is to be traced back.”

Kant had developed his new approach in an effort to secure the foundations of knowledge against skeptical attack [David Hume]. In trying to establish the limits of trustworthy knowledge, he felt compelled to draw a sharp line between the empirical knowledge that arose in the course of experience, and transcendental ideas, formed by speculative reason alone, of what lay beyond all possible experience. Of these “Ideas of Reason,” perhaps the most unsettling was that of free will. For the will, Kant supposed, though enigmatic, unprovable, and, strictly speaking, unknowable, nevertheless seemed to him able to put the transcendental into practice, turning certain “ideas” into objects of possible experience, and thus apparently bridging the chasm between the empirical and transcendental: How great a gulf may still have to be left between the idea {of reason} and its realization {in practice},” he wrote in the Critique of Pure Reason, “are questions which no one can, or ought to, answer. For the issue depends on freedom; and it is the power of freedom to pass beyond any and every specified limit.”

We’ve now arrived at the point I’ve been dreading... the point where sticking our fingers in our ears and humming loudly is no longer an adequate response to Emmanuel Kant. We must now delve into his thought and into the philosophical tradition from which he sprang. May God preserve our souls.

This should be divided into two (or more) posts, but I feel bad enough including it at all. I would strongly recommend reading through Descartes now, but then reading the Hume and the Kant at two separate reading sessions. But then the ideas aren't as adjacent -- you really can't win.

(Kant...

At the age of 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher. Much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the Inaugural Dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation and connection between our sensible and intellectual faculties—he needed to explain how we combine sensory knowledge with reasoned knowledge, these being related but very different processes. He also credited David Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumber" (circa 1771). Hume had stated that experience consists only of sequences of feelings, images or sounds. Ideas such as "cause", goodness, or objects were not evident in experience, so why do we believe in the reality of these? Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. He did not publish any work in philosophy for the next eleven years.
-Wiki

Somewhere, I think I alluded to how the history of philosophy has resembled a tennis match, between skeptics and people who have repeatedly attempted to place the orthodoxy of ideas on a firm foundation. Hume was one of the chief skeptics in these matches so we really need to say something about him before we can cover Kant's "return." 

(Kant(Hume...

But Hume himself was responding to Descartes, so...

(Kant(Hume(Descartes...

While I salute René Descartes (1596–1650) for his Cartesian coordinate system, otherwise I have very little good to say about him. The following is from Wiki:

In his Discourse on the Method, he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called hyperbolical/metaphysical doubt, also sometimes referred to as methodological skepticism: he rejects any ideas that can be doubted, and then reestablishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist (Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy). Most famously, this is known as cogito ergo sum (English: "I think, therefore I am"). Therefore, Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist."

Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been unreliable. So Descartes determines that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is what he does, and his power must come from his essence. Descartes defines "thought" (cogitatio) as "what happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which the person is immediately conscious.

To further demonstrate the limitations of these senses, Descartes proceeds with what is known as the Wax Argument. He considers a piece of wax; his senses inform him that it has certain characteristics, such as shape, texture, size, color, smell, and so forth. When he brings the wax towards a flame, these characteristics change completely. However, it seems that it is still the same thing: it is still the same piece of wax, even though the data of the senses inform him that all of its characteristics are different. Therefore, in order to properly grasp the nature of the wax, he should put aside the senses. He must use his mind. Descartes concludes: “And so something that I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind.”

In this manner, Descartes proceeds to construct a system of knowledge, discarding perception as unreliable and instead admitting only deduction as a method. In the third and fifth Meditation, he offers an ontological proof of a benevolent God (through both the ontological argument and trademark argument). Because God is benevolent, he can have some faith in the account of reality his senses provide him, for God has provided him with a working mind and sensory system and does not desire to deceive him. From this supposition, however, he finally establishes the possibility of acquiring knowledge about the world based on deduction and perception. In terms of epistemology therefore, he can be said to have contributed such ideas as a rigorous conception of foundationalism and the possibility that reason is the only reliable method of attaining knowledge. He, nevertheless, was very much aware that experimentation was necessary in order to verify and validate theories.

I remember cursing to myself and throwing the book down the first time I read the Meditations on First Philosophy. Coming at the end of the Middle Ages, he was doing good work in trying to set philosophy on a foundation of reason rather than belief, but almost immediately he is arguing for something, God, for which there is no rational evidence. 

Just before the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the city completed, finally, the construction of a new city hall. It was an impressive looking structure but the walls were filled with rubble instead of anything with the kind of structural qualities you would want for a large building near an earthquake fault (built on top of a sand dune). Within moments the brand new edifice was a pile of rubble.

Descartes, by building the foundation of “modern” epistemology, and philosophy in general, on a rubble foundation of thinly disguised faith, constructed something very like that doomed city hall.

Descartes also wrote a response to scepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the "propensity" to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.

Again, arguing that God would not deceive us is just another leap of faith. According to this position, hallucinations, and possibly dreams, would also be "material" things.

Dualism. Descartes in his Passions of the Soul andThe Description of the Human Body suggested that the body works like a machine, that it has material properties. The mind (or soul), on the other hand, was described as a nonmaterial and does not follow the laws of nature. Descartes argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism or duality proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion. Most of the previous accounts of the relationship between mind and body had been uni-directional.

Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is "the seat of the soul" for several reasons. First, the soul is unitary, and unlike many areas of the brain the pineal gland appeared to be unitary (though subsequent microscopic inspection has revealed it is formed of two hemispheres). Second, Descartes observed that the pineal gland was located near the ventricles. He believed the cerebrospinal fluid of the ventricles acted through the nerves to control the body, and that the pineal gland influenced this process. Sensations delivered by the nerves to the pineal, he believed, caused it to vibrate in some sympathetic manner, which in turn gave rise to the emotions and caused the body to act. Cartesian dualism set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind–body problem for many years after Descartes' death.

It is interesting that someone who is trying to construct an edifice based on reason and deduction has his legs so quickly knocked out from under him by his interpretation of sense data -- in this case the human body. As with God, he makes assumptions based on preconceived notions that eventually just make him look foolish. How "mind" and "body" connects is a perpetual problem for Dualism.

In present day discussions on the practice of animal vivisection, it is normal to consider Descartes as an advocate of this practice, as a result of his dualistic philosophy. Some of the sources say that Descartes denied that animals could feel pain, and therefore could be used without concern. Other sources consider that Descartes denied that animal had reason or intelligence, but did not lack sensations or perceptions, but these could be explained mechanistically.

-Wiki

But this is the worst. Even his lovely geometry can’t make up for this insult to animals, which continues to have negative consequences to this day.

... Enough of Descartes)

... and back to Hume...

DAVID HUME (1711-1776) did not agree with Descartes on much. Hume’s position is that all of our thinking, our identity and truth is induction and assumption. This is like the Indian theory of skandas, ‘piles’ of sand, speaking of the mind and how all perceptions in it are just bundles of stuff that accumulate and then dissipate. Interestingly also like Indian thought, particularly Buddhism, Hume argued that human thought, identity and behavior are ruled by the passions, not reason which serves as a tool for desires. With Locke and Berkeley, the Berkeley for which the town and university get their name, Hume is one of the three British Empiricists.
-Introduction to Philosophy: Descartes vs Hume

I have "curated" the links in these Wiki quotes. I tuned many to take you directly to the relevant part of the entry and if I didn't think the link was worth taking, I omitted it.

“Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour. He also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. He argued that inductive reasoning and therefore causality cannot be justified rationally. Our assumptions in favour of these result from custom and constant conjunction rather than logic. He concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.

Hume advocated a compatibilist theory of free will that proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles, and expounded the is–ought problem. He held notoriously ambiguous views of Christianity, and famously challenged the argument from design in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1777).

The Self.
According to the standard interpretation of Hume on personal identity, he was a bundle theorist [not the same link as before], who held that the self is nothing but a bundle of experiences ("perceptions") linked by the relations of causation and resemblance; or, more accurately, that the empirically warranted idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle. This view is forwarded by, for example, positivist interpreters, who saw Hume as suggesting that terms such as "self", "person", or "mind" referred to collections of "sense-contents"...

Another interpretation of Hume's view of the self has been argued for by James Giles. According to his view, Hume is not arguing for a bundle theory, which is a form of reductionism, but rather for an eliminative view of the self. That is, rather than reducing the self to a bundle of perceptions, Hume is rejecting the idea of the self altogether. On this interpretation, Hume is proposing a 'No-Self Theory' and thus has much in common with Buddhist thought...

Practical reason.

Hume's anti-rationalism informed much of his theory of belief and knowledge, in his treatment of the notions of induction, causation, and the external world. But it was not confined to this sphere, and also permeated his theories of motivation, action, and morality. In a famous sentence in the Treatise, Hume circumscribes reason's role in the production of action:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

It has been suggested that this position can be clarified through the metaphor of "direction of fit". In this, beliefs, which are the paradigmatic products of reason, are propositional attitudes that aim to have their content fit the world. Conversely, desires, which Hume calls passions, or sentiments, are states that aim to fit the world to their contents...

-Wiki

Ethics: The is-ought problem.

Hume discusses the problem in book III, part I, section I of his book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739):

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.

Hume calls for caution against such inferences in the absence of any explanation of how the ought-statements follow from the is-statements. But how exactly can an "ought" be derived from an "is"? The question, prompted by Hume's small paragraph, has become one of the central questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position that such a derivation is impossible. This complete severing of "is" from "ought" has been given the graphic designation of Hume's Guillotine.

-Wiki

This would imply that “good” and “evil” are purely conventional... the moral equivalent of rules governing which side of the road cars should drive on. Cue Kant’s categorical imperative?

Design argument.

See also: Anthropic principle and Problem of evil

One of the traditional topics of Natural theology is that of the existence of God, and one of the a posteriori arguments for this is the argument from design or the Teleological argument. This is "the most popular, because the most accessible, of the theistic arguments ... which identifies evidences of design in nature, inferring from them a divine designer. ... The fact that the universe as a whole is a coherent and efficiently functioning system likewise, in this view, indicates a divine intelligence behind it."
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all produced teleological arguments... William Paley, in the 19th century, produced a popular argument in his watchmaker analogy. Such writers asked questions like: Is not the eye as manifestly designed for seeing, and the ear for hearing, as a pen for writing or a clock for telling the time; and does not such design imply a designer?

In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume wrote that the design argument seems to depend upon our experience, and its proponents "always suppose the universe, an effect quite singular and unparalleled, to be the proof of a Deity, a cause no less singular and unparalleled." In this connection, L. E. Loeb notes that "we observe neither God nor other universes, and hence no conjunction involving them. There is no observed conjunction to ground an inference either to extended objects or to God, as unobserved causes."
Hume also criticized the argument in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). He suggested that, even if the world is a more or less smoothly functioning system, this may only be a result of the "chance permutations of particles falling into a temporary or permanent self-sustaining order, which thus has the appearance of design".

A century later the idea of order without design was rendered more plausible by Charles Darwin's discovery that the adaptations of the forms of life are a result of the natural selection of inherited characteristics.[99] J. F. Sennett and D. Groothuis write, "Suffice it to say that Hume, rivaled only by Darwin, has done the most to undermine in principle our confidence in arguments from design among all figures in the Western intellectual tradition."
Finally, Hume discussed a version of the Anthropic Principle. "According to the anthropic principle, we are entitled to infer facts about the universe and its laws from the undisputed fact that we (we anthropoi, we human beings) are here to do the inferring and observing." Hume has his sceptical mouthpiece Philo suggest that there may have been multiple universes, produced by an incompetent designer that he called a "stupid mechanic".

Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out: Much labour lost: Many fruitless trials made: And a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages of world-making.

This mechanical explanation of teleology anticipated the notion of natural selection.

-Wiki

... That's it for Hume) and Descartes)

... so finally to Immanuel Kant himself...

We have to start with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Here's a Wiki quote with the links "curated" to lead to the pertinent passages:

When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique was largely ignored upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted no significance to the work. Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality... he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form which could be analyzed... Its density made it, as Johann Gottfried Herder put it in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer"...Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views.
-Wiki

So even in a tradition of impossible to decipher texts, Kant stands out as being "convoluted," dense, and a "tough nut to crack." Good to know it isn't just me...

Before Kant (1724–1804), David Hume (1711–1776) accepted the general view of rationalism about a priori knowledge. However, upon closer examination of the subject, Hume discovered that some judgments thought to be analytic, especially those related to cause and effect, were actually synthetic (i.e., no analysis of the subject will reveal the predicate). They thus depend exclusively upon experience and are therefore a posteriori [see also Concept]. Before Hume, rationalists had held that effect could be deduced from cause; Hume argued that it could not and from this inferred that nothing at all could be known a priori in relation to cause and effect. Kant, who was brought up under the auspices of rationalism, was deeply disturbed by Hume's skepticism. "Kant tells us that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers." Kant decided to find an answer and spent at least twelve years thinking about the subject...

Kant's work was stimulated by his decision to take seriously Hume's skeptical conclusions about such basic principles as cause and effect, which had implications for Kant's grounding in rationalism. In Kant's view, Hume's skepticism rested on the premise that all ideas are presentations of sensory experience. The problem that Hume identified was that basic principles such as causality cannot be derived from sense experience only: experience shows only that one event regularly succeeds another, not that it is caused by it. In section VI (The General Problem of Pure Reason) of the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains that Hume stopped short of considering that a synthetic judgment could be made 'a priori'. Kant's goal was to find some way to derive cause and effect without relying on empirical knowledge [repeat]. Kant rejects analytical methods [I would prefer "the mayor is a politician" as an example of analytic a priori] for this, arguing that analytic reasoning cannot tell us anything that is not already self-evident (Bxvii). Instead, Kant argued that it would be necessary to use synthetic [see also Epistemology] reasoning. However, this posed a new problem — how is it possible to have synthetic knowledge that is not based on empirical observation — that is, how are synthetic a priori truths possible?

I will admit that I've always had trouble with the distinction between analytic a priori and synthetic a priori. Doing some more research (see Here), I think I may have hit on an example that works for me. The proposition, "Light is either a wave or a particle," would seem to be true by definition and thus a priori, but neither "wave" nor "particle" are necessarily implied by the word "light," so this is not an analytic statement but a synthetic one. Of course this example appeals to me because it also turns out, empirically, to be false unless you elaborate a bit more.

That empirical knowledge can disprove an a priori statement, is a whole other problem. We only thought we understood what a particle and a wave were but we were mistaken, so our statement was also mistaken.

Synthetic a priori judgements
...For Kant then, mathematics is synthetic judgment a priori. This conclusion led Kant into a new problem as he wanted to establish how this could be possible: How is pure mathematics possible? This also led him to inquire whether it could be possible to ground synthetic a priori knowledge for a study of metaphysics, because most of the principles of metaphysics from Plato through to Kant's immediate predecessors made assertions about the world or about God or about the soul that were not self-evident but which could not be derived from empirical observation (B18-24). For Kant, all post-Cartesian metaphysics [different link] is mistaken from its very beginning: the empiricists [repeat] are mistaken because they assert that it is not possible to go beyond experience and the dogmatists [rationalists? repeat] are mistaken because they assert that it is only possible to go beyond experience through theoretical reason.

Therefore, Kant proposes a new basis for a science of metaphysics, posing the question: how is a science of metaphysics possible, if at all? According to Kant, only practical reason, the faculty of moral consciousness, the moral law of which everyone is immediately aware, makes it possible to know things as they are. This led to his most influential contribution to metaphysics: the abandonment of the quest to try to know the world as it is "in itself" independent of sense experience. He demonstrated this with a thought experiment, showing that it is not possible to meaningfully conceive of an object that exists outside of time and has no spatial components and is not structured in accordance with the categories of the understanding, such as substance [don't miss this and this] and causality. Although such an object cannot be conceived, Kant argues, there is no way of showing that such an object does not exist. Therefore, Kant says, the science of metaphysics must not attempt to reach beyond the limits of possible experience but must discuss only those limits, thus furthering the understanding of ourselves as thinking beings. The human mind is incapable of going beyond experience so as to obtain a knowledge of ultimate reality, because no direct advance can be made from pure ideas to objective existence.

Kant writes, "Since, then, the receptivity of the subject, its capacity to be affected by objects, must necessarily precede all intuitions of these objects, it can readily be understood how the form of all appearances can be given prior to all actual perceptions, and so exist in the mind a priori" (A26/B42). Appearance is then, via the faculty of transcendental imagination, grounded systematically in accordance with the categories of the understanding. Kant's metaphysical system, which focuses on the operations of cognitive faculties, places substantial limits on knowledge not founded in the forms of sensibility. Thus it sees the error of metaphysical systems prior to the Critique as failing to first take into consideration the limitations of the human capacity for knowledge. According to Heidegger, transcendental imagination is what Kant also refers to as the unknown common root uniting sense and understanding, the two component parts of experience. Transcendental imagination is described in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason but Kant omits it from the second edition of 1787.

It is because he takes into account the role of people's cognitive faculties in structuring the known and knowable world that in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant compares his critical philosophy to Copernicus' revolution [but note last paragraph] in astronomy. Kant writes: "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge" (Bxvi). Just as Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by taking the position of the observer into account, Kant's critical philosophy takes into account the position of the knower of the world in general and reveals its impact on the structure of the known world. Kant's view is that in explaining the movement of celestial bodies Copernicus rejected the idea that the movement is in the stars and accepted it as a part of the spectator. Knowledge does not depend so much on the object of knowledge as on the capacity of the knower.

Kant's transcendental idealism [see also here] should be distinguished from idealistic systems such as that of George Berkeley. While Kant claimed that phenomena depend upon the conditions of sensibility, space and time, and on the synthesizing activity of the mind manifested in the rule-based structuring of perceptions into a world of objects, this thesis is not equivalent to mind-dependence in the sense of Berkeley's idealism. Kant defines transcendental idealism:

"I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that time and space are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility)." (CPR, A369)

Kant's approach

In Kant's view, a priori intuitions and concepts provide some a priori knowledge, which also provides the framework for a posteriori knowledge. Kant also believed that causality is a conceptual organizing principle imposed upon nature, albeit nature understood as the sum of appearances that can be synthesized according to a priori concepts.

In other words, space and time are a form of perceiving and causality is a form of knowing. Both space and time and conceptual principles and processes pre-structure experience.

Things as they are "in themselves" — the thing in itself or das Ding an sich — are unknowable. For something to become an object of knowledge, it must be experienced, and experience is structured by the mind—both space and time being the forms of intuition, "Anschauung" in German, (for Kant, intuition is the process of sensing or the act of having a sensation) or perception, and the unifying, structuring activity of concepts. These aspects of mind turn things-in-themselves into the world of experience. There is never passive observation or knowledge.

According to Kant, the transcendental ego — the "Transcendental Unity of Apperception" — is similarly unknowable. Kant contrasts the transcendental ego to the empirical ego, the active individual self subject to immediate introspection. One is aware that there is an "I," a subject or self that accompanies one's experience and consciousness. Since one experiences it as it manifests itself in time, which Kant proposes is a subjective form of perception, one can know it only indirectly: as object, rather than subject. It is the empirical ego that distinguishes one person from another providing each with a definite character.

-Wiki

And now we can wrap things up with a little about the people who came after Kant and about Kantian ethics. 

The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by those who came after Kant. It was argued that since the "thing in itself" was unknowable its existence could not simply be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real," as did the German Idealists, another group arose to ask how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.

For all the reservations I have about Kant, I do salute him for the notion that reality, as we perceive it, is merely an internal construction or display of an underlying reality (of "things in themselves") that we can not experience directly.

With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself [see also Deonology]. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity – understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others – as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons. [See also Categorical Imperative.]

-Wiki

That's it for (Kant(Hume(and Descartes)))

Next: Interlude XLII. A break, almost.