On Kant's Copernican Revolution

To imply that one’s contribution to a given field is in some way analogous to the one made by Copernicus is to feel that one has truly challenged and undone the received notions of the day, given the scope and meaning of the revolution in comparison. But what Copernicus did on scientific and cosmological grounds for the heliocentric model of the universe, Kant hoped to do on epistemic and metaphysical grounds for philosophy itself. His hope was to see the world in a way that, even if not commonsense, found encouragement from the fact that Copernicus faced the same sort of odds in proposing as he did his heliocentric model. However, a proper understanding of Kant’s revolution will establish the reference to Copernicus without overstating Kant’s contribution; without crediting more than is warranted. Kant’s revolution was leveled against the skeptics and dogmatists of his day, and specifically against the boldness of metaphysics, which often oversold its use of reason and ignored its speculative nature. Kant’s central move was one of skepticism, but not the philosophical skepticism of the day. Rather, it was one of skepticism about the ability of human reason to justify the claims of metaphysics a priori, splitting the horns of the dilemma between skepticism about necessary truth and dogmatic claims about the possession thereof.

Before Kant, there was of course Aristotle’s contribution to logic which stood untouched by either empirical evidence or human reason. But what it gave were primarily things true by definition, i.e., the laws of contradiction, of identity, of excluded middle and so on. Despite the truth of these laws, they gave little truth about the world, in much the same way as mathematics. On the contrary, however, were a mere list of contingent truths, things that could have been otherwise, things that merely happened to have happened, and therefore gave no necessary truth. This was where metaphysics hoped to step in, using pure reason to gain a priori the truth of propositions that had meaning in the world (propositions concerning, for example, God, immortality, and freedom of the will). The problem, according to Kant, was that this metaphysical dream was unjustified and did not answer the task of modern philosophy in establishing what could be known a priori with certainty. Furthermore, metaphysics could not use its own principles to justify itself, and hence the commonsense view held by many that human reason allowed for the objective look into such questions was rather like the view that the earth was the center of the universe. As intuitively obvious as it seemed, it took a totally new shift to see how it was that metaphysics was the wrong approach.

What Kant did was effectively switch the obvious notion that things are as we see them because we have that sort of epistemic access to them. This is of course a philosophical assumption which has to be taken as axiomatic or properly basic in order to proceed with metaphysics (at least as they were at the time). Kant, however, reversed the assumption and began with human cognition as the reason things seemed they way they did. In this way, we do not see the world as it is; rather, we make the world appear as we see it, given the structure of our minds and our reason. In order to have any knowledge a priori, Kant held that experience would first be necessary. If this is so, then the very notion of a priority is fundamentally a non-starter if it denies that experience is necessary in our formation of concepts. Kant did not necessarily overturn a position the way Copernicus did per se, but he sufficiently exposed the presupposition of metaphysics such that a sort of ‘Copernican Revolution’ in metaphysics and epistemology took place that yet gives pause to those who hope reason and cognition a priori might answer questions it might not be justified in answering.