Kant, Incongruent Counterparts, and the Priority of Space

Abstract

Consider this. A right and a left glove are the same size and shape, but fitting a right hand into a left glove is impossible. They differ in some respect, but what is it in virtue of which they differ? Kant was the first philosopher to devote extensive attention to this question. He calls objects which are perfectly similar in size and shape but differ in spatial orientation ‘incongruent counterparts.’ He believes that the fact that one cannot fit into the space that the other occupies tells us something about the nature of space itself. And to this day, philosophers discuss what left- and right-handedness is semantically, metaphysically, and physically. It remains a puzzle. Is there anything about what we call ‘left’ and ‘right’ hands that justifies this denomination? Are things constituted or composed in a way such that handedness occurs? And would this tell us something about the nature of space itself?

My dissertation concerns a proper account of Kant’s arguments from incongruent counterparts. Unfortunately, there is little agreement in the literature over what Kant’s arguments state and if they successfully establish their conclusions. At the core of the disagreement lie two main interpretive issues. First, if Kant is making a claim about the metaphysics of spatial individuals, it is unclear what this claim is. Kant’s arguments are ambiguous in crucial respects. He repeatedly claims that incongruent counterparts differ due to some unknown “inner ground.” Some interpreters have taken this to mean that incongruent counterparts are epistemically obscure to us. Second, Kant’s views on the ontological status of space itself has changed dramatically over the years. In Kant’s first discussion of incongruent counterparts, he argues that space is absolute, a substance that exists independently of spatial objects and the relations between them. In his mature philosophy, on the other hand, he claims that space is neither relational, nor absolute, but ideal. How could Kant have appealed to incongruity to make such opposite claims?

I argue that Kant consistently appealed to incongruent counterparts to support the claim that space is ‘metaphysically prior’ to the objects, relations, and systems of objects occupying it. Because of this priority of space, it can partially account for intrinsic and relational spatial properties. This holds for space, whether it is a substance or an idea. I argue that the difference between left and right, as Kant understands it, is possible because different parts of space are occupied, even when we cannot epistemically access the difference between left and right as an “inner” or intrinsic property. While previous commentators have picked up on this fact, my dissertation offers new insight into the meaning of this Kantian claim by examining how the priority of space is articulated at different points and how the scope and nature of this claim varies. I bring to bear recent literature on Kant’s notions of ground to show that many changes in this series of arguments result from changes in Kant’s general views on metaphysical dependence or ground, and in his special views on “what grounds what” so to speak. It has been suggested by Kant (and in the secondary literature) at various places that space can play a grounding role, it has not been explained extensively how it does so. The notion is simply complicated and sometimes stands in the way of clarifying what Kant meant. I isolate a specific dependence relation - the priority relation - as a guiding thread through the arguments to articulate a unified view of Kant’s incongruent counterparts arguments.

In the introductory chapter, I argue that there is a textual and interpretive dependence puzzle across the different iterations of arguments that feature incongruent counterparts. I explicate and justify the guiding hypothesis of my view: that advances in the recent literature on Kant’s notions of ground can aid our better understanding of the arguments. 

Chapter two concerns Kant’s first argument from incongruent counterparts given in 1768. In my view, Kant’s argument turns on how absolute space grounds the difference between incongruent counterparts because it alone can make possible that incongruent counterparts occupy different parts of space. I propose to advance our understanding of this argument by fleshing out how his pre-critical notion of determining ground can and does apply to space as a subject matter. I thereby rule out a class of views on which Kant’s argument is vulnerable to the worrying objection that the left or right-handedness of certain similar objects does not show anything because it need not depend on anything, that it could be indeterminate, brute, or non-brute, yet, intrinsic to the shape of objects. 

In my third chapter, I examine Kant’s 1770 claim that incongruent counterparts are not conceptual or accessible to the intellect and that such objects thereby support the view that space is what he calls a “pure intuition,” a mental item that has qualities of perceptual objects but that is not produced by our intellect nor derived from sensation. It is the condition of such perceptual qualities. This claim is not well-understood on most views of what ‘nonconceptuality’ means for Kant (not surprising given that they mostly treat of the critical philosophy). Kant is neither making a claim about the semantics of ‘left’ and ‘right’ nor merely about the mereological structure of perception. I argue that the argument succeeds if we presuppose that space is prior to the objects in it in at least two respects: it is mereologically prior to objects in it but it is also itself orientable which makes possible how we perceive the diversity of location. I show that Kant portrays dependence in pure intuition as way in which intuitions are embedded into a prior space as contrasted with dependence as a means by which our intellect orders cognitions into grounds and consequences.

My chapter on the Prolegomena argument from incongruent counterparts now finds itself in the territory of transcendental idealism. I attempt to show in a first step that Kant argues that certain features of space ground the difference between incongruent counterparts because the form of intuition, the lawlike mode by which intuitions are presented to is space as the form of sensible intuition. In the Amphiboly chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that the ‘real ground’ of directions can only be found in sensibility. However, Kant claims in the Prolegomena that no understanding can access the difference between incongruent counterparts, and that therefore, space and time are not things in themselves. According to the majority view on the matter, violates strictures on the unknowability of what is spatial in things in themselves. I argue that we can make sense of this claim if we presuppose Lucy Allais’ view that the ideality of space follows from its intuitive and a priori nature, but that we have to ascribe to pure intuition a primitive orientability evident in the mode of how we apprehend perceptual particulars. 

In my concluding chapter, I explore whether Kant took certain features of space as well-founded, that is, whether these features of space, rather than space itself, are fundamentalia that explain the possibility of our cognition of spatial individuals. The features in question are the part-whole structure, orientability, and infinite extension of space. In the critical theory, Kant argues that these features become evident in the lawlike, necessary structure by which our mind organizes given perceptual particulars. I discuss recent work in Kant scholarship that assigns to Kant a faculties-first approach, on which his critical philosophy involves grounding cognitions (or facts) in our cognitive faculties.

These five chapters jointly support the thesis that for Kant, the difference between incongruent counterparts can only be understood by reference to the priority of space, which, as I argue, is a primitive, ontologically independent feature of his notion of space, whether Kant believes space to be a substance or a structure of our minds.