Absolute Real Modality and Kant’s Amodalism Regarding Noumena

Abstract

Abstract This final chapter focuses on the two theses Kant introduces in §76 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment: the epistemic thesis that while it is a necessary feature of our discursive understanding to distinguish between the merely possible and the actual, an intuitive or divine understanding would cognize only actual objects, and the metaphysical thesis that things in themselves do not have modal properties. Both theses are rooted in Kant’s revolutionary theory of modality. Modal categories express only the various ways in which the representations of objects are related to the cognitive subject, and thus do not signify anything in isolation from this representational relation. Modalization is thus an exclusive feature of a discursive mind to which representations of objects can be related in various ways, as opposed to an intuitive mind which would represent the whole of everything all at once and thus only in one way.