The title of this post is borrowed from a chapter title in Robin Collingwood's Essay on Philosophical Method. In this tour de force of logic, Collingwood argues that philosophy deals with abstract entities which exist categorically (as opposed to hypothetical entities in the exact and empirical sciences). Slightly modifying the original meaning of the word, these categorically existing abstract entities may be called simply the categories.
The categories are "thoughts" existing in an objective way. In ordinary language, "objective" means "outside of the mind." However, here, categories are both objective and subjective. Again, common sense would interpret this proposition as saying that there is an objective category "out there" which is "represented" by the mind and turned into a subjective thought, or, conversely, that a subjective thought is "projected" onto the external world and thus turned into an objective category. This is a rather misleading way of describing the matter, since the categories are both subjective and objective at the same time as one unified entity. Whether it is expressed in the form "I think x" or in the form "there is x" the category, designated by "x," is one and the same category.
An important qualification here is that categories are abstract entities, things which in ordinary language we call "thought." Therefore, the usual objections do not apply here. For example, one might object that "I think a unicorn" and "there is a unicorn" cannot always have the same truth value. This is true, but that is because a unicorn is thought of as a spatio-temporal object. If "unicorn" is taken to be "a thought of a unicorn," then "I think a unicorn" and "there is a (thought of a) unicorn" always agree in their truth value.
Moreover, what is remarkable is that a thought of a unicorn exists in the world. This is remarkable not because the thought is about an object which does not exist in nature, but rather because that which is existing in the world is thought itself. How is it that an abstract entity, without spatio-temporal being, nonetheless instantiates itself at a particular point in space and time? One motivation behind beginning philosophy from the very beginning, i.e. from the study of the categories themselves, is to come to a richer and truer theory of what it means for abstract entities to be localized in space and time.
I have written above that the propositions "I think x" and "there is x" have the same truth value when it comes to the categories. This is not to say that an account of the categories needs to be indubitable. A very plausible interpretation of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, presented by Bernard Williams in his Descartes and the Project of Pure Enquiry, would suggest that arriving at the indubitable is the epistemological ambition of modern philosophy. However, Kant has restored the role of empirical intuition into philosophy in a major way, and Collingwood has completed what Kant has begun by stating clearly that for a philosophical theory to be true, it needs to be consistent with empirical facts.
Empirical facts play a key role in the method of philosophy, which, following Kant, we can call the metaphysical method. Descartes already had an idea of the method, as Collingwood points out in the Essay. For Kant, empirical facts are "given." Philosophy then asks what must be the case for such empirical facts to be possible and, perhaps more profoundly, for such empirical facts to be knowable. For example, it is an empirical fact that blood cells transport oxygen and collects carbon dioxide in the human body during respiration. For this fact to obtain, categories such as relation, subsistence and causation must exist. These categories in turn presuppose other categories such as thinghood, unity, multiplicity, repetition, identity, difference, reality, negation, being and nothing. These and many other categories are instantiated locally in the case of respiration in the human body.
Hegel's Science of Logic takes this method a step further. Empirical facts undoubtedly play a role in verifying the truth of a theory of the categories. However, not all empirical facts instantiate the same categories. It is an empirical fact that a book can be stacked on top of another book. This fact does not presuppose many of the richer categories which we saw earlier in the case of respiration. Causation, for example, is absent. What this shows is that starting from empirical facts limits the theory within a boundary which is arbitrarily drawn due to the arbitrariness in the choice of the empirical facts. Hegel tried to remove this arbitrariness by trying the begin the inquiry from a description of the categories themselves. That is, Hegel argued that an argument taking a metaphysical form is possible not only from objects to concepts but also from one concept to another.
There is still much to be said about the method for the study of the categories. In particular, I would like to focus more on the transcendental part of the inquiry in order to explain why it is important that the categories have to be subjective as well as objective, and how, despite this, and despite Kant's own definition of the transcendental, the categories must nonetheless be "out there" or be "mind-independent" too.
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