Can Objectivity Exist Without Objects?
In any case the Kantian critical stance, and its revolutionary epistemology, in which his critical-transcendental idealism is combined—as we have seen—with an original form of empirical realism, was deeply misinterpreted, at least in accordance with two different interpretations.
A first interpretation—developed by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi—attributes in fact, mistakenly, to Kantian criticism the assumption of the existence of objects which would be found outside any possible experience, with the known result, paradoxically, that “without the thing itself no one can enter Kantian criticism, but with the thing itself no one can remain within it.” Thus, with the notion of the Ding an sich, we would be facing an eminently antinomical outcome, because on the one hand the concept of phenomenon can only refer to something that would be situated behind the known phenomenal object; on the other hand this noumenal object is defined as something which, in principle, goes beyond all possible experience. So Jacobi concludes that Kant's philosophy necessarily leads to the noumenon, whose assertion is a total denial of the whole criticism, since the notion of a phenomenon always involves a reference to the noumenon, which is, however, out of the reach of any possible knowledge. Kantianism would lead to a sophisticated form of scepticism which denies men any actual knowledge of reality. On the other hand in Kant's criticism other commentators—especially those with a metaphysical orientation—have found the perpetuation of that antithetical realism of the metaphysical “dualist gnoseology” introduced by Descartes with his cogito arising from the metaphysical opposition between res cogitans and res extensa. In this way Kant would have done nothing but perpetuate a metaphysical form of the traditional dualistic realism, becoming embroiled, therefore, in a problem which appears to be unsolvable by its very conceptual approach in principle. According to this interpretation the Kantian phenomenon is thus reduced to mere appearance, ending up even coinciding with the secondary qualities of which Galileo had already spoken, contrasting them to definitely measurable primary qualities on which the necessary, universal scientific knowledge was indeed based.In contrast with these two typical and classic misinterpretations of Kantian criticism it is clear that Kant precisely tried to safeguard the possibility of forming a new conception of the objectivity of knowledge which does not deprive it at all of the ability of referring cognitively to real objects on which different scientific disciplines are focusing in their investigations and studies. In this sense, the stance of Kantian criticism is in full agreement with the position held by a scientist like Galileo who, though denying that science could grasp the underlying metaphysical essence of reality, was equally sure, however, that scientific knowledge was indubitably able to speak to us of the passions of the physical world, i.e. its real features, actual and intrinsic (though not substantial, in the sense of the traditional metaphysical ontology) (see Minazzi 1992: passim and Agazzi 1994). But this interesting and fruitful realistic harmony between Kant and Galileo was instead systematically denied by those who misinterpreted Kantian criticism, believing that, for the philosopher from Konigsberg, “objective” merely implies a reference to a universal notion, necessary and independent from individual subjects. However, from this point of view, the misinterpretation of Kantian criticism appears to be in complete harmony with the overall evolution of scientific thought, which during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, not to mention the early twentieth century, for reasons deeply connected with the development of different scientific theories, progressively abandoned any strong pretension to “realism”, thus undoubtedly relinquishing the notion of objectivity for the weaker notion of mere intersubjectivity.
Two different meanings of objectivity have emerged: a strong (or substantial) conception which has gradually and historically been confronted by a weak (or formal) conception. Thus the formal characteristics of knowledge (universality, necessity and independence from the subject) have ended by engulfing the essential characteristics, precisely those which involved a precise reference to the object which thus was comprehended cognitively.The paradoxical notion of objectivity without objects was thus established, progressively, mainly in the development of the physical sciences—especially in the crucial phase at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, during the transition from Newtonian physics to relativistic physics and, even more, to quantum physics —also favouring a misinterpretation of Kantian criticism that intertwined with the Romantic idealist deformation of Kantianism which, in the name of the Ich Denke requirements, ended with absorbing Kant's empirical realism into a decidedly idealistic and metaphysically absolutist perspective. The general misinterpretation of Kantianism put down its roots precisely within this convergence between the development of scientific thought and the development of philosophical thought which has finally created the paradoxical image of objectivity without objects.
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