NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

The Material A Priori Intelligibility of Nature: Kant, Dewey, and Adorno

Carl B. Sachs
Department of Philosophy
University of Alabama at Birmingham
csachs@uab.edu

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

The Material A Priori Intelligibility of Nature: Kant, Dewey, and Adorno

In our experiences of nature, whether aesthetic, spiritual, or scientific, we find ways of

making sense of nature. All these ways of making sense of nature presuppose that nature is

intelligible to us. But when we ask, in the reflective mood characteristic of philosophy, as to why

nature is intelligible at all, we find ourselves, in a way also characteristic of philosophy, less sure

of how to proceed. I begin examining the intelligibility of nature through Kant’s “problem of

affinity”. I shall then discuss two alternatives, John Dewey’s evolutionary metaphysics and

Theodor Adorno’s critical theory of society, and argue that each presupposes the other.

1. Kant Worries About Cinnabar

Kant’s “Copernican revolution” is a hypothetical gesture that turns towards an a priori

examination of our cognitive capacities “at least as an experiment” (CPR B xvi). Copernicus

asked, what would happen to astronomical calculations if we initially posit that the earth and

other planets revolved around the sun? Likewise, Kant asks, what would happen to metaphysics

if we initially posit that objects of possible experience conform to our a priori cognitive

constraints?1 Kant reverses the direction-of-fit that satisfies the correspondence relation: not how

our minds fit the world, but the world fits our minds. On Kant’s hypothesis, all objects of

possible experience must conform to the a priori forms of sensible intuition and to the unity of

apperceptive consciousness that can synthesize intuitions according to a priori rules. We can thus

eliminate the conflicts of reason with itself – the inability to adjudicate, a priori or a posteriori,

1
“If we now find there is agreement with the principle of pure reason when things are considered from this twofold
standpoint, but that an unavoidable conflict of reason with itself arises with a single standpoint, then the experiment
decides for the correctness of that distinction” (CPR Bxix).

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

between rival metaphysical doctrines – while rescuing the ordinary realism threatened by

skepticism.

Although initially Kant only alters the direction of fit, he thereby raises the question as to

whether there is any fit at all. The forms of sensible intuition and the categories of the

understanding constitute the form of all possible experience. But what of the content of

experience? Does the world get a vote in what we say about it? If it does not, then the noumena

are an amorphous blob until sensibility and understanding carve out objects from it. (If that were

the right picture, then sensibility and understanding could not be in the world, and Rorty would be

right to say that Kant’s view amounts to “the constitution of the knowable through the

cooperation of two unknowables”. The ineffable cannot be effed with.)

While many take this picture to be the heart of the Critique, and endorse or reject it

accordingly, it cannot be the complete Kantian picture. If it were, he would not have considered

the problem that Kenneth Westphal (2003) calls “the problem of the transcendental affinity of the

manifold”. The manifold of sensible intuition must have content in order for apperceptive self-

conscious thought to have a foothold. As Kant puts it:

If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy, if a human being were now

changed into this animal shape, now into that one, if on the longest day the land were

covered now with fruits, now with ice and snow, then my empirical imagination would

never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on occasion of the

representation of the color red.2 (CPR A 100-101)

The proper sensibles (red, black, light, and heavy) indicate that it is not enough for the manifold

of sensible intuition to have the right form to be synthesizable by the productive imagination. The

2
Cinnabar is mercury sulfide, an ore of mercury with the chemical structure HgS.

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

manifold must also have the right content such that, post-synthesis, the resulting judgment can

figure in our ever-evolving conception of a single, unified world of experience. If the sensible

qualities of cinnabar fluctuated wildly and randomly, we could not form judgments about

cinnabar that play a well-ordered role in our world-view. Kant remarks that, “the ground of the

possibility of the association of the manifold, insofar as it lies in the object, is called the affinity

of the manifold” (CPR A 113). The cautious relative phrase, “insofar as it lies in the object,”

suggests that the world must somehow cooperate with our cognitive capacities.

Since the understanding is purely formal, judgment content must come from sensibility. Yet

the content cannot come from our contribution to sensible intuition, since we contribute only the

formal intuitions, Space and Time. Content enters into judgments with the “matter” of sensible

intuition, i.e. sensation. However, content cannot be transcendentally guaranteed, no guarantee

that the things in themselves will cooperate. Kant can neither rule out possible worlds in which

cinnabar fluctuates wildly, nor account for the fact that cinnabar does not fluctuate wildly. All he

can transcendentally guarantee is the form of experience: that all sensations must have a temporal

or spatio-temporal location, and that intuitions are synthesizable by the productive imagination.

Since Kant only accounts for the form of experience, he cannot account for the orderliness of

sensual content. That order cannot be synthetic a posteriori, discovered through empirical

investigation, since anything recognizable as experience already presupposes the orderliness of

sense-experience. Nor can it be synthetic a priori, because the synthetic a priori consists of

cognitive form alone. The intelligibility of nature requires a material, and not merely formal, a

priori, which Kant prohibits.

So far, I have been following Kenneth Westphal’s (2003) argument that the problem of the

affinity of the manifold afflicts all epistemological anti-realisms. On Westphal’s interpretation,

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

Hegel stands out as the first epistemological realist to distinguish transcendental argument from

transcendental idealism. While I agree that Hegel’s solution is attractive, I turn now to the

intelligibility of nature in two quite different twentieth-century philosophers, both of whom take

Hegel seriously and go beyond him: John Dewey and Theodor Adorno.

2. Dewey’s Darwinian Solution

Few major philosophers have taken Darwin as seriously as John Dewey, who consistently

explores the significance of a ‘Darwinian’ view of human nature and our place in the natural

world. In his “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (1910), Dewey argues that Darwinism

transforms our entire picture of empirical inquiry and its relation to the natural world. In

Experience and Nature (1929), Dewey examines various dualisms of modern philosophy: mind

and world, mind and body, intellect and passion, reason and nature, and so on. Once liberated

from these distorting dualisms, we will come to see that:

Only because an arbitrary breach has previously been introduced by which the world is

first conceived as something quite different from what it demonstrably is, does it then

appear passing strange that after all it should be just what it is. The world is subject-

matter for knowledge, because mind has developed in that world; a body-mind, whose

structures have developed according to the structures of the world in which it exists,

will naturally find some of its structures to be concordant and congenial with nature,

and some phases of nature with itself. … In ultimate analysis the mystery that mind

should use a body, or that a body should have a mind, is like the mystery that a man

cultivating plants should use the soil; or that the soil which grows plants at all should

grow those adapted to its own physico-chemical properties and relations. (E&N, 211-2)

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

If mind and world are external to each other, the affinity between our cognitive capacities and

perceptible object is brute and inexplicable; it is a mystery that “the world is subject-matter for

knowledge.” But the Darwinian vision of continuity between mind and nature dispels the

mystery: since our perceptual, cognitive, and affective capacities have gradually emerged within

the world, the affinity between those capacities and worldly propensities is no more mysterious

than that between plants and soil. We have always been at home in nature; we need not figure out

how mind and world fit together, because they have never been separated.

Still, does Dewey really solve the problem of affinity? If the problem of affinity requires that

mind and world are externally related to each other; then if we reject that picture, the problem

disappears. But the problem of affinity does not depend on that picture, because the question of

how our judgments acquire content arises in any account of mindedness. Rejecting Cartesianism

means that the problem is not to demonstrate that our thoughts are about the world, but to

understand how they can be about the world, given that they are. In that respect, Dewey does not

reject Kant’s hypothesis, but uses Darwinian conceptions of nature and science to provide just

such an understanding.

On the ‘naturalistic’ solution to the problem of affinity, the world itself has structures of its

own, independent of how any mind responds and interprets. Is Dewey committed to this? No

doubt, there is lively debate about whether Dewey held a “metaphysics of experience” or a

“metaphysics of existence”. Notice, however, that Dewey says such things as that, with

communication, “events turn into objects, things with a meaning” (EN 132) or that “Events that

are objects or significant exist in a context where they acquire new ways of operation and new

properties” (EN 137). By this, Dewey means that events are taken as objects by an organism

through the unfolding transactions between organisms and their environments. Dewey’s

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

evolutionary metaphysics yields something like “idealism” for objects, insofar as objects are

constructed by the perceptual, cognitive, and motor activity of a living organism-in-an-

environment. But the living organism-in-an-environment does not construct or constitute the

fundamental, underlying reality of events, and in that regard, there is something like “realism” in

the background of Dewey’s thought.

On this interpretation, Dewey solves the problem of the affinity of the manifold through a

naturalized idealism-cum-realism. We can explain the affinity of the sensible manifold with our

cognitive capacities by virtue of the fact that those capacities are among the results of billions of

years of evolution. Yet if we might still ask if any kind of transcendental realism is plausible. I

think that we can retain Kantian suspicions of dogmatic rationalisms if we can specify a version

of transcendental realism that overcomes Kant’s inability to illuminate fully the intelligibility of

nature. I now turn to a brief examination of Adorno on the intelligibility of nature in order to

indicate another aspect of the material a priori, a historical a priori.

3. Adorno’s Marxist Solution

Turning to Theodor Adorno’s critical theory of society, one should note that, like Dewey,

Adorno re-interpreted German Idealism in light of the challenge of naturalism. Of course,

Adorno’s naturalism is that of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, none of whom strongly influenced

Dewey, and modern evolutionary theory is absent from Adorno’s thought. Nevertheless, Adorno

can help us understand how our cognitive capacities make sense of the world. His contribution

underlies his Hegelian-Marxian critique of logical positivism:

Carnap, one of the most radical positivists, once characterized as a stroke of good luck the

fact that the laws of logic and mathematics apply to reality. A mode of thought, whose

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

entire pathos lies in its claims to enlightenment, refers, at this central point to an irrational

– mythical – concept, such as that stroke of good luck, simply in order to avoid an insight

that the supposed lucky circumstance is not really one at all, but rather the product of the

ideal of objectivity based on the domination of nature or, as Habermas puts it, the

‘pragmatistic’ ideal of objectivity. (Adorno, “Introduction” to Positivist Dispute in

German Sociology, p. 22).

Here, the affinity of a priori knowledge with the world is itself “a product of the ideal of

objectivity based on the domination of nature”. That is, we find nature to fit with our capacities

because we have made it fit by dominating nature for millennia. Both inner and outer nature, our

drives and the natural world, have been dominated by a mode of instrumental, calculative

rationality typified by “the exchange relation” (Tauschwechsel). Since the domination of nature

is in the background of our institutions and practices, what immediately occurs to consciousness

is surprise that the laws of logic and mathematics apply at all. This is, in the Marxian sense, false

consciousness: consciousness without insight into its own conditions of production. Positivism,

like the idealism it reacted against, is false consciousness for just this reason.

Adorno thereby motivates a compelling reading of transcendental idealism: on Adorno’s

interpretation, Kant suppresses his realization that nature in itself is not the dominated nature that

figures in our knowledge. Commenting on what he calls “the doctrine of the block”, the idea that

we cannot know things-in-themselves, Adorno writes:

it is a metaphysical experience implicit in the doctrine of the block in the Critique of Pure

Reason that the object of nature that we define with our categories is not actually nature

itself. For our knowledge of nature is really so preformed by the demand that we

dominate nature (something exemplified by the chief method of finding out about nature,

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

namely the scientific experiment) that we can end up understanding only those aspects of

nature that we can control. … there is a sense in which nature itself seems to keep

receding from us; and the more we take possession of nature, the more its real essence

becomes alien to us. (KCPR 175-6).

In other words, the Kantian restriction of transcendental guarantee to the form of experience alone

is inadequately vindicates the intelligibility of nature. Rather, the intelligibility of nature is both

the result of our cognitive activity and certain features of how nature must be, conceived

independently of our activity. Adorno would need to hold that what we take nature to be, in its

dominated and mutilated form, is not what nature ought to be for us. Correlatively, a nature freed

from domination would be knowable only by a correspondingly liberated human reason (“the

cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without

making it their equal” ND 10). Adorno’s late major works, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic

Theory, both express and analyze how mutilated reason itself has become, and to bring that

mutilation to self-consciousness. As Adorno puts it, philosophy “must strive, by way of the

concept, to transcend the concept” (ND 15) in order to liberate both reason and nature.

4. Dewey and Adorno as Complementary

Dewey emphasizes the natural-scientific fact that our cognitive capacities have evolved

within, not created from outside, the natural world. Adorno emphasizes the historical fact that the

social project of dominating nature, through laboratory and field experiments, controlled

observations, and careful measurements, yields a conception of nature that fits our logical and

mathematical categories. Yet each solution requires the other. The domination of nature

presupposes that our capacities meet up with the affordances of nature; otherwise, instrumental

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

rationality would be idle and vain instead of catastrophically effective. Conversely, the natural-

scientific facts are achievements of particular men and women, working under the constraints of

particular socially-transmitted assumptions and in the context of particular institutions made

possible by capitalist and late-capitalist modes of production. Hence the affinity of mind and

world has two different dimensions, a natural dimension and historical dimension, and that their

entanglement too is itself, as both Adorno and Dewey would acknowledge, both natural and

historical.3

If both ‘nature’ and ‘history’ solve the problem of affinity, then ‘nature’ and ‘history’ jointly

indicate the material a priori. The conditions of possible experience consist of both an

evolutionary history that explains how our cognitive capacities were shaped through adaptive

pressures and a cultural history that explains how our conceptions of the world were shaped by

technological manipulation. Thus, ‘nature’ and ‘history’ function as principles of a materialized

transcendental logic, as distinguished from a purely formal one.

If we abandon a purely formal approach to transcendental philosophy, we can retain the

Copernican revolution by distinguishing between two kinds of metaphysical realism: strong

metaphysical realism (STR) and weak metaphysical realism (WTR). Putnam (1981) characterizes

metaphysical realism, what I call strong metaphysical realism, as follows: reality has a precise,

determinate structure, such that there is a possible description of reality that exactly corresponds

to that structure. The failure of strong metaphysical realism led Putnam to internal realism, just as

the failure of dogmatic rationalism led Kant to transcendental idealism.

3
For Adorno’s acknowledge of the entanglement, see his “The Idea of Natural History”, trans. Hullot-Kentor and
republished in his Things Beyond Resemblance. For Dewey’s acknowledgment of the entanglement, see his The
Quest for Certainty.

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

Yet neither Kant nor Putnam appreciated weak metaphysical realism. WMR holds that reality

in itself has a determinable or structurable content: different ways of sense-making sense yield

different determinate structures. WMR is a transcendental condition of the possibility of the

intelligibility of nature as a natural occurrence within the part of nature that we are; it is also the

condition of the possibility of the knowledge of nature through techno-science. (Whether that

knowledge is nature as ‘dominated’ or as ‘liberated’ depends on whether technology is governed

by the imperatives of capital.) If some on-going “structuration” were not already at work, our

cognitive practices would have nothing to latch onto. Likewise, changes in our cognitive

practices disclose correspondingly different structures. WMR also yields a different orientation

towards those structures, namely, one that recognizes that every structure is provisional and open-

ended. We can say that the world in itself is not structured, but it is ‘structurable’ or ‘structuring’,

and that our cognitive architecture is embedded within, and participates in, that on-going

“structuration”.

To understand the intelligibility of nature with both Dewey’s evolutionary metaphysics and

Adorno’s critical theory of society is to see that the world was not made for (or by) us, nor us for

the world, but we are at home in it, however much we have alienated ourselves from it. Thus it

lies within the scope of human powers to determine what determinations of the undetermined, but

determinable, will further promote the flourishing of both human and more-than-human nature.

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NTPA Submission Nature_Intelligibility

Bibliography

Adorno, T. “Introduction” in The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, trans.Glyn Adey and
David Frisby (Heinemann, 1976), 1-67.

Adorno, T. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Stanford University Press, 2001).

Adorno, T. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton (Continuum, 1973)

Adorno, T. “The Idea of Natural History”, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor in Things Beyond
Resemblance (Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 252-269.

Dewey, J. Experience and Nature. The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston
(Southern Illinois University Press, 1981).

Dewey, J. The Quest for Certainty. The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 4. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston
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Hegel, G. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977).

Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge
University Press, 1997).

Putnam, H. Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Rosenberg, J. “The Elusiveness of the Categories, the Archimedean Dilemma, and the Nature of
Man,” in Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Studies in Honor of Wilfrid Sellars, H.-N.
Castañeda (ed.) (Bobbs-Merill, Inc, 1975).

Sellars, W. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in Science, Perception, and Reality
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Westphal, K. Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit

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