Kant's three questions and how we should deal with them.

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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If I may slightly reformulate Kant in line with Kane’s interpretation, he said that there are three questions a philosopher can ask:

  1. What can I know?

  2. How should I live?

  3. What should I aspire to?

In a pre-modern context (and this includes philosophers like MacIntyre) these questions aren’t really separable but instead should be understood as a single question that the human mind needs to break down into more manageable bites. But with the sunderings of modernity, the three questions have become different questions whereby one can be understood in terms of another, so for example rationalists try to understand the second question in terms of the first whereas idealists attempt to understand the second question in terms of the third. That, of course, isn’t as serious as post-modernity where the three questions are seen as completely unrelated (and possibly uninteresting) and the sundering is complete.

So I would ask you how you understand the relationship between those three questions with respect to your tradition and how you feel you should proceed from that understanding. I ask because I’ve been thinking about it a lot. A philosopher whom I admire (to the point where I view my disagreements with him as failings of my own philosophy as opposed to failings in his) has clearly been influenced by two relatively polarized philosophers, one rational and one idealist. I’ve decided that he is more in line with the idealistic tradition (something I already suspected) so I’m doing my best to try and understand how I ought live with respect to that. But it has gotten me thinking that the divide between many of the posters here could be the two forms of modernity. I say that because I don’t see too many post-modernists in the religion section (most of the questions apt to be discussed here don’t make sense in a post-modern context) and since pre-modernity has been all but killed even those who find a great deal of appeal in that system are still biased by their previous model of viewing the world.

I mean, for me as a scientists I feel I ought be more in line with the rationalist position. But my views on epistemology at the end of the day drive me away from that position somewhat – but more importantly, my own intuition drives me away from that position. “What can I know” related quite directly to the efficient cause, there is no argument there, but I do not think it can be related to the final cause nearly as easily if at all. And what is religion if not a discussion of final causes?

So, anyway, where do you stand and why?

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It appears through your post that ‘dualism’ exists in the macro and micro lines of thought.

As for 1) What can I know? Translates to ‘What should I know?’ Since my philosophical views are steeped in Christianity, ethical guidelines direct me.

In regards to 2) How should I live? That translates to ‘How am I expected to live?’ God expects me to live a respectful, reverent life wherein I am a testament for others.

Then 3) What should I aspire to? Intereprets to ‘Why do my asperations point to God?’ This is so my life will have meaning and to share God’s message to those who will listen.

Anything else after that will take care of itself.

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These are enormous questions. :slight_smile:

“What can I know?” can only be answered by trusting implicitly that we can know. Given the question, there is no other way. If we fundamentally believed that we can’t know, then we wouldn’t explore anything - maybe we couldn’t even obtain food to eat. Truth and utility are intricately connected then. If we decide at some point that we can’t know, the falsity of that view will keep asserting itself to us. With that in mind, any further skepticism regarding knowledge can then be regarded as skepticism regarding false knowledge only. So our skepticism can be extremely broad, yet it is not fundamental. ‘The veil of misknowledge’ holds us back from relating directly to identification with the knowable.

“How should I live?” follows from the recognition of the connection between truth and utility. In Buddhism these are called ‘ultimate truth’ and ‘relative truth’ or ‘conventional truth’. Utility, or relative truth, is not the same as subjectivity any more than ultimate truth is the same as objectivity. There is no schism between the two. ‘Relative truth’ makes explicit that there is a proper relationship that can be obtained between how I live and truth that can be apprehended. ‘The veil of the conflicting emotions’ prevents us from effecting personal transformation and subsequently renders us far less capable of discovering truth.

It further follows that “what I aspire to” is to understand the nature of the entire project. Although the relative truth and the ultimate truth can be seen as two sides of the same coin, there is still a duality involved which can’t be logically posited as ultimate.

These three questions relate very easily to a fundamental schema in Buddhism - that of ‘ground’, ‘path’, and ‘fruition’. Dogmas (‘views’) in Buddhism are seen as provisional. The entire Buddhist path is conceived of as a series of provisionally held views which are eventually to be abandoned at the appropriate time. One of the highest views (the mahamudra view) considers the ‘ground’ as fundamentally identical to the ‘fruition’. The ‘path’ is simply a transformed relationship to reality. This is why ‘becoming a Buddhist’ is not a conversion. The ultimate insight is metaphorically conceived of as ‘to see one’s original face’, implying the ability to know what we think we can’t know, and return (so to speak) to a sense of wholeness, self-sufficiency and wisdom which has the strength and pliancy to deal with whatever we must relate to in life.

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1)What can I know?

What I know is what I am conscious of. What I am conscious of is the phenomena of existence. I am defined by the world and I define the world in a reciprocating circle of interaction. My deepest intuition is that below the self-world split is being itself, the ground and source of myself and world. This ground of being I call God.

  1. How should I live?

I should live in a way that fosters peace with God and the world.

  1. What should I aspire to?

I should aspire to love God and my neighbor. My neighbor is everyone I come in contact with in the world.

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I think Aristotle answered this question,depends on how you view things of course

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I would change the order a bit, put #3 before #2.

What I know: There’s suffering in life.
What I aspire to: The cessation of suffering.
How should I live: By the path that reduces suffering.

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Great way to put it . What path do you think reduces suffering most ?

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Well, I didn’t make those up, they’re 3 of the 4 noble truths of Buddhism, which is the path that I’ve found has produced the most results for me personally. It’s not a new concept, a similar paradigm is found in the disease model of medicine: problem, cause, cure, means to the cure. It’s not for everyone, though, because I think it’s pretty difficult. But it suits me both intellectually and in a pragmatic sort of way, and has helped me to develop in ways that have been productive, so that’s the one I go with.

More specifically, the path according to the Buddha is this: right view, right intention, right speech, right discipline, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness (or attention), right consciousness (developed through meditation). The reason it’s called a path is that each of these is about actions to take, not just ideals or values that are to be believed and abided by. And it’s both progressive and comprehensive, as some are developed, the understanding of others may change. Like most of these things, it’s both straightforward and complex, depending upon the practitioner.

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Yes I knew what they were,just seeing if you did,thought you were going to say Buddhism

Its interesting,I sort of realized the deeper sigificance of that recently,realized why some Saddhus carry human skulls around with them,and it gave me a great sense of releif,wont bore you with the ins and outs though,just saying I understand what you mean

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My question was less how you understand and/or would answer the questions but rather how you feel that they relate to each other.

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I believe I have shown they are all relative to each other due to my concept of my existence.

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Well, there’s one word that’s common to all three of my answers. :slight_smile:

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OK, so we’ve got a lot of pre-mods here. That is in-line with what I was expecting.

So, this is open to everyone obviously, but I am particularly interested in how the pre-mods here overcome the fact/value distinction as well as the distinction between scientific inquiry and practical inquiry about the good and finally the separation of theory and practice?

It is pretty easy to see how these sunderings of modernity can be seen in light of Kant’s three questions. The distinction between fact and value is the gulf that is formed between questions 1 and 3. It can be read about here.

The distinction between scientific inquiry and practical inquiry about the good is a sundering of the first and second questions. I don’t think this needs too much explanation, but it basically boils down to an appeal to nature which is generally regarded as a fallacy.

The distinction between theory and practice is the separation between the second and third questions. After all, we know many people with very complex theories about how to live life but they then fail to actualize their system in remarkable ways. This runs from general hypocrisy that we all have in our day-to-day lives to some of the more spectacular examples we’ve seen as public figures have fallen from grace due to their failings.

Given what I set-up in the first post, I have to try to tackle the separation of theory and practice. Just as a disclosure, a lot of how I’ll synthesize this question is taken from Tu Weiming’s 1970 essay, “Unity of Knowing and Acting – A Neo-Confucian Perspective”. I chose this essay because I think the notion of the unity of knowing and acting is the same assertion as the unity of theory and practice.

Wang Yangming asserted that, “Knowing is the crystallization of the will to act and acting is the task of carrying out that knowledge,” meaning that the real nature of knowledge is its actual transformational power over our behavior. The will in this formulation is important since it has both a cognitive and affective dimension, meaning that in addition to our thought processes (that we can view as actions) we also have to take our environment into account. This is where the coextensive nature of the mind and the world becomes important. Were it not for this shared connection, a sundering as described above would happen with the affective dimension of our will blocking the cognitive dimension from being realized.

Now instead of competition between the two dimensions of our will, we can see that they are instead involved together in the process of manifesting our thoughts as actions whereby our mind is shaped by the constraints of reality but since we can only understand reality in a hermeneutic manner we also create our reality as we understand it and therefore interact with it. This interaction propels us along a teleology that is entirely of our own making as the two modify each other, even if we don’t have control over the situation we find ourselves in now. Within that present, we perceive ourselves as acting outside that teleology that we have created for ourselves but our will shows this perception to be an artifact of a misconstructed reality that we have made out of accord with our will.

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A very long and interesting (so far - I probably won’t finish it) article which explores the relationship of questions 1-3:

progressiveregulation.org/ar … inbeck.pdf

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Here are some thoughts focusing on the fact/value distinction but spilling over into the question of “the distinction between scientific inquiry and practical inquiry about the good” as well…

It seems to me that there is no value inherent to matter. There are no facts inherent to mind. A ‘fact’ in terms of mind is an obstruction to further knowledge of either mind or matter. A ‘value’ in terms of matter can only be applied to it by mind. Thus, understanding mind is more primary than and in some ways (though not necessarily) could be seen as a pre-requisite to understanding matter. We have this basic dualism.

Although ‘facts’ may be theoretically valueless in and of themselves, the ability to discern and make sense of facts is dependent on the mind. Likewise, the facts of the mind’s nature and context necessarily affect the valuing process. So although we make distinctions between fact and value, and matter and mind, (and all the way up to nature and culture) - we can see that those distinctions are not fundamental. All aspects of the problem involve mind and therefore values. How do we ‘know’ facts, or relate to values with any sense of non-biased discernment?

Although according to Buddhism this dualistic outlook is a product of fundamental ignorance of our ‘true’ or ‘original’ nature, it is said that the ‘veils’ which obscure our fundamental wisdom are adventitious and therefore removable, or able to be purified. So ‘is’ and ‘ought’ are fundamentally related. ‘Ought’ need not be a process of moving in the opposite direction from a falsely conceived ‘is’. Focusing on ‘is’ need not castrate the tendency to conceive of ‘ought’.

The Tibetan teacher Kalu Rinpoche conceives of four ‘veils’ to fundamental knowing (jnana, or ‘wisdom’, as opposed to inferential prajna, or ‘knowledge’) in which a synthesis between dichotomies such as fact/value, mind/matter etc. are understood as the ground of reality as opposed to the end goal of a grand project. It should be pointed out that the descriptions of these four veils are from the point of view of delusion, rather than from the point of view of wisdom. From a wisdom point of view the entire process is said to be transformed into ‘enlightened activity’ – in other words a fundamentally altered relationship to knowledge, values, and behavior. As he says below, " At the pure level, sensitivity is the immediacy and multiplicity of enlightened qualities, but in ignorance, those qualities are replaced by endless dual relational possibilities."

The Four Veils:

1.) The veil of ignorance
Fundamental ignorance. The mind does not recognize what it truly is.

2.) The veil of basic propensity (dualistic grasping)
The mind, ignorant of its openness, engenders the delusional experience of an “I”. The mind, ignorant of its clarity, experiences a sense of the “other” instead of the mind’s self-aware quality. “Other” things are of 2 kinds: appearances of the outside world and mental phenomena.

3.) The veil of the passions
The mind, ignorant of its openness and its clarity is immersed in duality. Then, ignorance of mind’s sensitivity gives rise to all the relationships that exist between the 2 poles of this dichotomy’s subject and object. At the pure level, sensitivity is the immediacy and multiplicity of enlightened qualities, but in ignorance, those qualities are replaced by endless dual relational possibilities. Beginning with taking external objects as real through ignorance, we experience attraction, aversion, and indifference, which correspond to the 3 poisons - desire, hatred, and ignorance. On the basis of these 3 poisons, numerous other mental or emotional afflictions multiply, the 3 poisons branching into the 6 passions. These subdivide into 84,000 passions.

4.) The veil of karma
The various passions lead to a large variety of dualistic actions that can be, in terms of karma, positive, negative, or neutral. They condition the mind and cause it to take birth in one of the 6 realms.

Kalu Rinpoche: “The non-dual state of emptiness, lucidity, and unobstructedness splits up into subject-object duality and acts out of the perception. From emptiness arises the me-subject, from lucidity arises the sense of otherness, and from unobstructedness arise all relationships based on attraction, repulsion, and ignorance.”

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Albert Einstein Quotes on Philosophy of Religion, Theology, God

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.” (Albert Einstein)