“An afterlife for a silverfish” (The first *Critique*)

The central question of Kant’s famous work The Critique of Pure Reason is: “How do you know you’re not already dead?” Kant’s own formulation “How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?” is less perspicuous for some reason, but as I will explain the basic notion is the same. Now, Kantian idealism about the “realm of appearances” differs from Cartesian skepticism in two ways: even if we don’t really know which is which, waking life and dreams are discontinuous, and the cogito can not provide a foundation for empirical knowledge — Descartes’ answer to that problem in the Meditations, that material objects which can be clearly and distinctly conceived can be created by God, essentially anticipates that of the occasionalists (and suffers from the same drawbacks).

The question of whether I myself have actually ceased to live, and if my current experiences (which seem continuous with those I’ve had over my lifetime) are actually the work of a Creator in an afterlife of some sort, is one that comes to my mind sometimes; I think it’s a question really worth reflecting on, as the seemingly real character of one’s existence is not necessarily a guarantee of its reality. Or is it? Actually, Kant’s basic answer to the question is something like this: “In distinction to a priori truths that must hold in any case possible, the coherence of one’s impressions of physical objects in space — and thoughts about those objects and thoughts about those thoughts through the time of one’s life — is the only possible criterion of experience’s validity, and thusly the foundation of experiential invariants.”

If one’s experiences fail to have a “lawlike” character (perhaps in the moral realm as well as the physical, eh?) they are non-genuine and anything may very well be possible, including that you are dead or losing your mind while dying. However, some people have disputed the neatness of these distinctions, and one might view Hegel’s adaptation of this postulated Kant in the Phenomenology as a way of coping with the fact that “coherentist” accounts of experience are continually being undone by various forces — sometimes quite completely — and the possibility that people are already well on the way to an Elysium he secretly didn’t believe in.