final, unifying synthesis filling space and time with ‘the continuous and uniform
production’ of ‘things in themselves (thinghood, reality)’. Without this final
operation of the sensing, synthesizing mind, consciousness – of things in themselves,
of one’s self, of the whole world as a thing in itself – would not be possible.^70 Kant’s
philosophical stance is radically constructivist. In giving form to the world, the mind
makes the world real – in our heads. And yet the world appearsto exist, more or less
as we sense it, outside the mind.
Kant’s constructivism is also radically incomplete. In Kant’s model, we are solitary
souls imprisoned in cells of our own construction. Indeed, there is no we. To escape
our solitary confinement, weneed an additional model – one that grants inter-
subjectivity, or sociality, to the Kantian subject. Our faculty for language would
appear to do the job.
No longer is the question of fit between model (as something you and I ‘see’ in
our respective mind’s eye) and world (as something independent of us both), but
between your words (formulating a model in a public, standardized symbolic format)
and my words (formulating a similar model in much the same format). Whether we
reallyhave escaped our solitary cells is impossible to say conclusively. As Nietzsche
remarked, language is a prison-house. Reality resolves into a constant proliferation,
and no less an infinite regression, of models seen and heard. Such is the world we
have talked into existence. Some models converge, some conflict, some are
superseded and some forgotten, some are only distantly related, some we all seem
to be able to count on. Every proposition we utter performs an operation on some
kind of model and thereby affects the world as we know it.
Jonathan Joseph has called this model of mine ‘models all the way down’ to point
up the relevance of enduring disputes between idealists and materialists and to
indicate the difference between my model and Waltz’s ‘phenomenalist’ model,
which (in Joseph’s model) uses sensory evidence alone to explain what happens
in the world.^71 What happens, in my model, is that agents make models with
institutional effects by resorting to models with institutional effects. I fail to see why
Waltz would not come to the same conclusion once he conceded the constructivist
underpinning of his structural model. Waltz’s model of models is surely not
materialist in the usual sense attributed to political realists (only an empiricist deserves
this charge), or even ‘rump materialist’ in the sense that Wendt advocates.^72 Instead
Waltz’s strong positivism ends up making him a structural idealist in a deeper, more
consistent sense than Wendt is.
As positivists, Friedman and Waltz resisted the claim that theoretical notions such
as form, cause, structure and agent, not to mention space and time, have a reality
independent of the observer. Post-Kantian constructivism offers an alternative.
Qualified along the lines I have just suggested, constructivism escapes the solipsism
implicit in Kant’s stance. Observers can get into each other’s minds, as agents, by
using models to invent and exchange models; intersubjectivity ensues.
Friedman’s defence of as ifformulations – ‘firms can be treated as ifthey are
perfect competitors’ – is distinctly Kantian.^73 Kant himself defended empirical
realism for most practical purposes: our world is more or less as we experience it.^74
Structure? What structure? 101