What Is the Story Behind Kant’s Hundred Thalers?

What’s the Story with Kant’s One Hundred Thalers?

At last, the grades for last semester’s courses finally all came out. Political Theory and the general elective were both3.0; both courses in religious studies were3.7; General History of Science, Research on Globalization Issues, and Popper’s Philosophy of History were all4.0. All in all, it was still very satisfying. Who would have thought that the grade for the last course to appear—Metaphysics—was only2.0, instantly canceling out the0.03 points ofGPA I had so painstakingly clawed my way up to.

The reason this course’s grade came out so late was that the teacher’s grading was generally too generous, so generous that the rate of excellent grades far exceeded the university’s standard, and thus the grades could not be entered. Unfortunately, I was obviously not one of the beneficiaries of the teacher’s kindness. But I had long had a premonition about this course’s grade. In fact, getting this score was not unjust, because I had skipped far too many classes in the first half of the semester; receiving this result was also retribution.

The final exam for Metaphysics had only one question, and I, someone who had not studied seriously, actually dared to answer it in deliberate and complete opposition to the teacher’s line of thought. Of course, I had long since steeled myself for getting this score.

So what exactly was the question? It was something like this:

The question gave a short passage from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and asked us to analyze it on the basis of the discussions in class:

“[B627]:……, the real does not contain anything more than the merely possible. One hundred real thalers do not contain the least more than one hundred possible thalers. For since the latter signify the concept, while the former signify the object and its positing in itself, if the object contained more than the concept, my concept would not express the whole object, and would thus not be its adequate concept. But in my financial situation, one hundred real thalers contain more than their mere concept (that is, the concept of their possibility). For the object is not contained merely analytically in my concept of it, but is added to my concept (which is a determination of my state) synthetically; and yet, by this existence outside my concept, these conceived one hundred thalers are not themselves in the least increased.”

This course, and the teacher’s book Analysis of Metaphysics, were entirely concerned with metaphysical issues in the context of analytic philosophy. The teacher also did not discuss Kant’s passage at much length; he only mentioned it briefly, roughly saying that “Kant’s thinking here is confused.” In the exam room, the teacher also hinted that the reason he wanted us to analyze this passage was that it “has a problem”—the very first sentence already has a problem… The teacher’s idea was that we should use what we had learned and discussed in the course to analyze exactly how this passage was wrong. The teacher also, with a trace of contempt, remarked that if someone wanted to write that Kant was right, that of course would be fine. But the tone made it clear that he basically did not believe anyone could analyze this passage by Kant as correct.

Indeed, Kant’s passage really does seem to have some problems, and many scholars therefore regard it as an example of “adding flowers to brocade”—an unnecessary embellishment. The first half says, “One hundred real thalers do not contain the least more than one hundred possible thalers,” but then the second half says, “one hundred real thalers contain more than their mere concept.” One moment it is “not more than,” the next it is “contain more”—isn’t that self-contradictory?

To ask me to discuss the issue of “existence” from an analytic-philosophical standpoint was certainly possible, and that was what I had prepared for before the exam. But who told me I was a devotee of Kant? I am by no means saying that every sentence Kant wrote is correct, but to say that the error Kant made is this obvious, and then to hold up this so-called obvious error as a target for classmates to attack in a chorus of denunciation, is really somewhat unbearable.

And just the day before, when I was flipping through BEING and the Western Philosophical Tradition, I happened to see an article by Xu Youyu that mentioned the relevant issue, and I also had this book with me during the exam (it was, after all, an open-book exam), so I felt a bit more confident. Xu Youyu said this: “I want to point out that when Kant says existence is not a predicate, he has a definite view and standard for what counts as a predicate. When analytic philosophers use methods of distinction and comparison, they have either not taken Kant’s standard into account or have forgotten it, and the counterexamples of Peirce and Strawson, if measured by Kant’s standard, do not really count as counterexamples. Of course, we do not necessarily have to adopt only Kant’s standard, but I think that if analytic philosophers want to grasp Kant’s claims precisely and clearly, they should carry out a deep analysis of Kant’s standard—develop it, revise it, or reject it. Instead, they simply distinguish, compare, and clarify, all the while departing from Kant’s original standard. They seem not to realize this deviation, and therefore it is hard to say whether their revisions of the original proposition count as a development of Kant’s claim.” (p. 1141)

Professor Han, like many analytic philosophers, classifies Kant’s ontology as belonging to the “Kant—Frege—Russell” line of thought. Thinkers such as Peirce and Strawson, by contrast, are regarded as opposing views. Yet although Frege’s and Russell’s claims were indeed directly inspired by Kant, and indeed are broadly similar to what Kant said, one point that is often overlooked is this: the entire context of Kant’s philosophy differs from that of analytic philosophy. In fashionable terminology, Kant possessed a theoretical “paradigm” different from that of modern philosophers. That is to say, they were exploring problems within different conceptual systems and theoretical frameworks; the concepts and terms Kant employed, his way of thinking, and the problems he addressed were not the same as those of analytic philosophy.

We often say that Kant carried out a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy, and from Kuhn’s perspective, the so-called Copernican revolution was precisely a paradigm shift. Of course, philosophy under different paradigms can still communicate, but it ultimately possesses a certain “incommensurability”: for example, understandings of terminology and concepts, habits and rules of argument, standards of reasonableness, and so on cannot simply be identified with one another. The lineage inherited by analytic philosophy runs from empiricism to logical empiricism; it does not adopt Kant’s line of transcendental philosophy. When understanding Kant’s philosophy, one must absolutely not simply extract two sentences from Kant and directly place them in an analytic-philosophical setting for discussion. Once Kant’s entire theoretical system is set aside and one looks only at isolated phrases, then of course it becomes very easy to discover absurdities, errors, self-contradictions, and so on. Doing scholarship in this way is probably too hasty.

Some people say that philosophers are not afraid of absurdity, only of inconsistency. That is very penetrating. To say that a philosopher’s view is absurd may actually be to praise him, because a philosopher’s strength lies in transcending his age and being able to think what ordinary people dare not think. But if one says that a philosopher is self-contradictory, then that is a fatal blow. A qualified philosopher, even if he has not consciously set out to construct a system, should still possess a thought-system that is internally consistent from beginning to end; even for philosophers like Nietzsche who consciously opposed systematization, I imagine they would certainly not be pleased by self-contradiction.

And Kant, as one of the most典型 and most outstanding philosophers in the history of philosophy who consciously constructed a system, in one of his most important works, to which he devoted the most energy, actually produces in a single passage something like a mismatch between beginning and end, “confused thinking,” “adding flowers to brocade,” “self-contradiction”—a low-level error that even some first-year undergraduates can expose through analysis? Is that possible? Of course, Kant is not a god; it is not impossible that he occasionally became confused or added an unnecessary flourish. But rather than believing in this possibility, wouldn’t it be better first to reflect on whether I myself have been thinking too simplistically?

Kant’s ontology may indeed have problems, but even if it does, one still cannot, and should not, strip one or two isolated phrases out of his philosophical system and analyze them in a completely different context. If one really wants to analyze Kant’s problems, one must either examine whether this passage fits with the surrounding text and with Kant’s transcendental philosophy—in which case one should use the conceptual framework and overall line of thought of transcendental philosophy to examine the passage, rather than applying an analytic-philosophical framework; or one must discuss whether Kant’s entire line of transcendental philosophy is workable at all. However, our course did not discuss transcendental philosophy, and using the things we discussed in class, it is impossible in any case to analyze Kant’s “faults”!

Of course, to insist on the above point of mine, the first thing that must be argued is that Kant’s passage about one hundred thalers does not self-contradict within the framework of his transcendental philosophy. On that point, I also wrote some things during the exam, but because I had no further preparation and insufficient accumulated knowledge, the argument was not very well developed. The grade of2.0 that I was given leaves me with no real grounds for complaint. But still, after all, I really can’t swallow it! So this semester I signed up again for Lao Yang’s “Studies in Ontology,” hoping to take this opportunity to look carefully once more: what exactly is going on with Kant’s one hundred thalers.

March 1, 2007, 10:36 p.m.