A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography P. F. STRAWSON   Most of what I have to say under the heading of intellectual autobiography has already appeared in the Library of Living Philosophers volume published in 1998.1 But perhaps I can add something bearing mainly, though not exclusively, on my attitude to the work of Kant. Instead of coming at this directly, I would like to begin by recalling Kantrelated episodes in the lives of two other English philosophers of this century. In a well-known passage in his autobiography2 R. G. Collingwood relates that at the age of 8 he read Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, presumably in an English translation. He did not, he says, understand it; but he knew at once that this was for him; that the climate of this kind of thinking was to be his climate, the air of philosophical thought the air he must breathe; as he did (though not exclusively, since he was also an eminent historian). The other episode concerns a younger philosopher; namely, A. J. Ayer. His biographer3 reports that while sailing to Africa in 1943 to undertake a special-operations exercise Ayer undertook to reread Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and, in the early stages of sunstroke, underwent a remarkable epiphany during which he understood for the first time the full force of Kant’s argument. Unfortunately, once he had recovered from his fever he was unable to regain the insight. Sympathetic though one may find both these Kant-inspired experiences, I cannot myself report any close parallel to either. Nevertheless, Kant, or more exactly Kant’s first Critique, does have a distinctive place in my own intellectual history, such as it is, in a way I will try to make clear. For some years after my first academic appointment just after the war the questions I was 1 L. E. Hahn (ed.), The Library of Living Philosophers, xxvi, The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1998). 2 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). 3 B. Rogers, A. J. Ayer (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999). mainly concerned with fell in the general area of philosophy of language and logic: questions about reference, truth, entailment, the constants of formal logic and their natural-language counterparts, analyticity, etc. Wrestling with these problems, one had, of course, to wrestle with the work of those philosophers whose views on the questions concerned were at the time, and sometimes still are, influential or even dominant—most notably Russell, Quine, and Austin. Indeed, it was sometimes precisely the views that one or another of these had expressed that fired my concern with the question. Nevertheless, closely as one might study the relevant passages in the writings of the philosopher concerned, it was precisely and only because of their relevance to the question at issue that those passages demanded and received such close attention. It was not because those passages were, or seemed to be, an integral part of some wider system of thought associated specifically with the name of that philosopher, perhaps because initiated by him. And this is where the difference with my relation to Kant or, to be more exact, to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason comes in. It was that complete work itself, rather than any of the many particular issues with which it deals, that became the focus of my concern. Indeed, it is the only work, and Kant the only author of such a work, of which, and of whom, I can say this. The reasons for it are, of course, largely internal to the work itself; but also, I must confess, partly historical—to do, in fact, with the structure of the PPE school in Oxford before the war. Anyone reading for that school at that time who wanted to specialize in philosophy was offered no choice of philosophical special subjects; there were just two on offer, and no more: Logic and Kant, the latter to be studied in just two works, the first Critique and the Groundwork. The Groundwork, though like Collingwood I found it deeply impressive, conceived its subject, as I thought then and still think, altogether too narrowly, whereas in the Critique of Pure Reason I found a depth, a range, a boldness, and a power unlike anything I had previously encountered. So I struggled with parts of it as an undergraduate, and later as a college tutor teaching those few pupils intrepid enough to take it on, until finally, having been subtly and in part consciously influenced by it in my own independent thinking about metaphysics and epistemology (in Individuals4), I decided I must try to get to grips with the work as a whole. So I began to give a regular series of lectures on it, a series that ultimately issued in the publication of The Bounds of Sense.5 In that book I tried to preserve and present systematically what I took to be the major insights of Kant’s work, while detaching them from those parts of the total doctrine that, if they had any substantial import at all, I took to 8 Strawson 4 P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959). 5 P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966). be at best false, at worst mysterious to the point of being barely comprehensible. My book was, you might say, a somewhat ahistorical attempt to recruit Kant to the ranks of the analytical metaphysicians, while discarding those metaphysical elements that refused any such absorption. My position on all this I have subsequently sought to elaborate or clarify a little, particularly in the first two of the four Kantian studies included at the end of the collection Entity and Identity.6 Of course I am not foolish enough to suppose that I have got all or any of these things quite right; and I am sure that there are plenty of philosophers willing to show me where I have gone wrong. But I can take some comfort in the thought that, when I have erred, I have done so in the company of most, if not all, of those who have been brave enough to undertake the interpretation and criticism of Kant’s critical philosophy. I shall not here and now undertake anything by way of further elaboration, modification, or defence of the views advanced in my book or the subsequent articles. Instead I should like to consider briefly a recent and, I think, novel attempt to elucidate and defend a central Kantian thesis: the thesis, namely, that we are and must remain ignorant of the nature of things as they are in themselves. I refer to a book published in 1997 by Rae Langton, which is called Kantian Humility7 and which is certainly a most interesting, impressive, and scholarly exercise in Kantian interpretation. Early on in the work she refers, effectively by way of comparison and contrast with her own, to another philosopher’s solution of the problem posed by the Kantian doctrine of our necessary ignorance of things as they are in themselves. The view in question is Professor Allison’s, and, as she rightly remarks, his solution is both elegant and ingenious. It also has what in her view are distinctive merits. It preserves the objective reality of the natural world as studied by the physical sciences; and it disposes completely of the picture of two distinct realms of being: the one the realm of supersensible things in themselves, the other the realm of phenomena, however conceived. But also—and this is where her approval ends—it completely draws the sting of the doctrine of necessary ignorance, rendering it harmless, anodyne, even trivial. For it does not have the consequence that there must be anything real at all of which we are necessarily ignorant, though of course there may be much of which we are and may remain contingently ignorant. And this is where Professor Langton jibs. For in her view it is an essential part of Kant’s doctrine that there really is something substantial of which we are necessarily ignorant and of which our necessary ignorance is a source of necessarily vain, but humanly natural, regret. Things in themselves affect our sensibility and thereby make knowledge possible; but they affect us in virtue A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography 9 6 P. F. Strawson, Entity and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 7 R. Langton, Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). of their extrinsic, relational, causal properties, which are essentially forces constituting the natural world, phenomenal substance, the subject matter of physical science. But these forces, phenomenal substances with which we are acquainted and of which we can have knowledge, though real enough are but extrinsic, relational properties of things in themselves; and as subjects of these relational properties—substances in the pure sense—things in themselves must also have intrinsic properties; and these intrinsic properties are necessarily unknown to us, since it is only the matter-constituting forces of which we can become sensibly aware. So, though we have knowledge of their relational properties that constitute nature, of things as they are in themselves or intrinsically we remain necessarily ignorant. Of course these few sentences of mine are only a sketch—possibly, though I hope not, a travesty—of what is a very subtly and carefully worked-out position. It is a position, moreover, that Professor Langton skilfully supports with an impressive array of references, not only to the Critique itself and Kant’s other writings, but also, and often in a critical vein, to the work of his philosophical predecessors, most notably Leibniz; and to that of many commentators.