So that subject title is a little dramatic but I wanted to catch the attention of Kantians. I’m familiar with Kant insofar as I’m familiar with many of the philosophers that surround him in that period (Hume, Schopenhauer, Hegel, etc.). I still don’t get him. Every time I think I adequately understand what revolutionary things he brought to the table, I basically find the same things in rereading Hume.
Am I missing something? What did he basically say? What were his main ideas? Humans impose a basic perceptual order upon sensory info? Hume didn’t already say this?
Do I need to know German to truly understand him? It seems so cryptic when I attempt a dive into his work. I reminds me of postmodernists, or, worse, Heidegger.
Well, I certainly have no intentions of reading him myself – at least not in these next two decades. But I would like to at least know enough to respond to somebody if they were to ask me what he was all about instead of just shrugging.
Kant read Hume. That sent him down the path we’re all somewhat familiar with. What more could a man possibly have to say after a diligent reading of David Hume? I have never been inspired from his ideas to go out and add to them. All the 20th cent. philosophers have done is write whole books from basic tenets Hume passed over in his writings. See Popper, see Hayek, see Dennett, see Wittgenstein, see Ryle, see Polanyi, see Quine, etc.
I know Hume is my main man and all, so this all is a little biased. But I’m really trying to understand this German Idealist thing that hijacked the 19th cent. (What was up with that, guys?) I figure Kant to be the main culprit of this movement as is traditionally sustained. And even from that very initial point I have no idea what the fuck these guys were talking about. Certainly Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger are notorious for cryptic insaneness. So I won’t even bother with them. But what the hell was Kant on about? He’s like Bruce Springsteen; everybody seems to love him, but I just don’t get it.
“Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?” ~Walter Sobchak
I’ll give it a shot. If I’m wrong, I’d appreciate correction. And I’m going to miss huge chunks of Kant’s work and thought out, as I don’t have days to write this.
So: Hume said that reason wasn’t all that. That pure deductive reasoning led one to a solipsist prison of impressions, that the prejudices and passions philosophers try to cast off were after all integral parts of their thinking. That we’re not perfect thinking machines, but that we live with our imperfections because we have to.
Kant hated this. He was by all accounts a bit on the autistic side, and was religious, so to hear that we weren’t made with access to perfection and that emotions had to get involved was bad news for him. That’s not what he went into philosophy for. So, in a very densely-woven series of arguments, he showed that we could derive metaphysics from pure reason. He thought he did, anyway, and lots of people agreed and still agree with him.
He did it by denying the empirical basis of Hume’s philosophy, to simplify matters. Our sense-impressions aren’t what things are, they’re how our brains make sense of the things. The things in themselves are completely different, utterly unknowable except through our senses, which our mind makes something out of. In the sense that our brain works constructively rather than as a passive receiver of given information, I agree with him - the empiricists were wrong about that. His conclusion was thus that the world as we experience it is a product of our reason; everything we know, including all the things we assume are external, are rational constructs. This is transcendental idealism.
He then went on to say that there is a purely rational derivation of morality, the well-known categorical imperative “act only on that maxim you can at the same time will to a universal law”. This was pure deontology: “good” was the duty to reason, duty is the fundamental duty, for its own sake. This comes back a lot in subsequent political philosophies inspired by Kant - Hegel’s right-wing nationalism and Marx’ left-wing internationalism. Neither of which, in my view, led to very nice places; but they dropped Kant’s imperative to treat all humans as ends in themselves, not means. Then again, the categorical imperative changes according to precisely the context in which you frame your maxim, it doesn’t lead anywhere without an emotional stance behind it.
Schopenhauer took Kant’s work and incorporated will into it, which led on to Nietzsche. I have a lot of time for Schopenhauer; he also had a much more humane approach to morality than Kant. Hegel took Kant’s work and turned it into a load of militaristic old arse. Ot oversimplify after that: Idealism ruled philosophy internationally, from Kant until Russell and the positivists came along. Then it split along Anglo-US vs. “continental” lines.
I’m with Kaufman. In “Discovering the Mind” he tells of a man who tried to read one of Kant’s several page sentences by placing a finger on the sentence’s parts. The man ran out of fingers. So, it appears that Kant’s mind was more populated wth adjectives and adverbs than with nouns and verbs. Like Hume, Kant was obsessed wth Newton’s “scientific certainty”. Kant thought philosophy, once it had established sufficient grounds for verifying or justifying our concepts, could achieve the same certainty. Post-Kantian philosophers asure us that this is not possible.
The (preferably monarchist) state corporation as highest, most refined body (below God) that was necessarily compelled to strive against its peers. He praised war fairly explicitly. I’m away from my home (and hence books) at the moment, but a quick Google gives: marxists.org/reference/archi … kainz7.htm
And that’s from a Marxist website, which you could expect to err on the side of apologism.
Fair question, he rejected a priori metaphysical knowledge as far as ontology and the like. I think pretty much outright, no? But his “thing in itself”, his ethics, and so on - these are metaphysics in the broad sense I meant.
I presume you are confining this term “metaphysics” to specifically western metaphysics. If not, let me know. Up to Nietzsche, I believe that western metaphysics was a viable philosophy, both old and modern. I think the consensus now is that western metaphysics was brought to an end with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and is either well and fully dead or, at the least, dying in its death throes.
The problem with pre-Nietzschean metaphysics is in the way it is defined. I can see how metaphysics influences or impacts other branches of philosophy and study, such as those of ethics, theology, poetics, psyschology, mind, and so on; but I think it’s not a good idea to include them under the aegis of metaphysics qua metaphysics. Do you see the problems that arise in doing so?
That depends on what you mean by “brought to an end.” If you mean that Nietzsche historically rendered metaphysics irrelevant, I would agree. But if you mean to say that Nietzsche was the first to validly argue metaphysics into a grave, you’d be wrong in ignoring Hume himself. The man systematically destroyed metaphysics. Only Humean can back me up on this with quotes and such, I’m sure. There are just so many sections and passages of his that give metaphysics as an inquiry a death blow that I can’t think of any off the top of my head that stands out the most.
I’ve always thought of metaphysics as dealing with radical dichotomies such as, e.g. cosmology and cosmogony, mind and matter, determinism and free will, etc. Meaning, I’ve always thought a metaphysical statement to assert an idea about the world that isn’t empirically testable. I suppose that under that definition everything is a metaphysical statement (saying that the sun will rise tomorrow isn’t truly empirically testable); but what the likes of Hume did was render these more abstract dualities particularly unworthy of discourse, or, at least, unworthy of anything beyond fanciful speculation.
What are we to consider Hume in this case? Historically speaking, he’s always been lumped into the empiricist camp, only to find independence from Locke and Berkley in recent times. Certainly you’d agree that Hume never considered the observer a purely passive one. Indeed, the whole thrust of his argument was that perceptions make sense from their impressive quality on the observer.
Hume realized that metaphysics is plagued by unnecessary dualities. However, in order to speak under metaphysical terms, he created the great ideas-impressions dichotomy. But by the end of Human Understanding and the Treatise he drops this dichotomy through its own conclusive ends, showing that there isn’t a permanent difference, so much as a useful difference insofar as it reaches his philosophical ends. In a very Wittgensteinian anticipation of pragmatism he shows that the analogies around which our reasoning develops serve, or should serve, purely useful ends (radically oppose to Kant’s deontology). So this can’t mean that Hume sees us as passive receptacles of information.
Also, Only Humean, Eno rules. :-" Check out his work with John Cale – highly underrated.
This is interesting. The dichotomies and a priori assumptions along the long path of western metaphysics have always been problematic in serving as the philosophical grounds of human study and action. It wasn’t a problem for the production of art in that the influence for that activity was not primarily philosophical but rather mythological or theological, I think, except where certain philosophical grounds that evolved into Neoplatonism became conjoined with the theological symbols and dogmatic strictures of Catholic theology. However, once the Age of Reason and Enlightenment thinking came to predominate in western consciousness, art pretty much separated from myth and theology and took its own turn. Human study and action moved on a different track as well, so it would make some sense that a philosopher as acute as Hume was might well take a more critical look at metaphysics and the history of philosophy. Since Hume was a strong influence on Kant, that is why I asked the question above: were they trying to philosophize Newton’s view of reason and the scientific method?
Two questions arise as a result of the decline of western metaphysics. How does the resulting lack of a viable and coherent metaphysics affect human study and action to this present day? This is assuming that a stable metaphysical ground is a necessary predicate for all study and action, which I believe it is. Based on this assumption then, the second question would be: what sort of metaphysics would fill the vacuum? Then, as Nietzsche declared, if tragedy is also dead, then what kind of art would take its place?
That is good to hear. Dualism has caused more problems for western thinkers and for society than any other mental construct I can think of. However, I’m not sure I would put dualism in the realm of metaphysics, but maybe I’m thinking in too purist a fashion that metaphysics qua metaphysics deals with the question of being as being and the underpinnings of reality in relation to being.
I’m not familiar with Newton’s view of reason, so I can’t comment. Perhaps you could school me. All I know is that he revolutionized physics, mathematics, and astronomy and that he invented calculus (although Leibniz invented its more modern manifestation). I’m not a math guy.
Hume created the induction problem which revolutionized the scientific method, even if that historical occurrence didn’t properly follow suit until Popper and the critical rationalists. That’s the main blow to metaphysics: How can we make claims about extra-sensory, non-empirical entities if we can’t even verify with absolute certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow beyond mere assumption? Certainly this calls for a slight reevaluation of what we think we know with metaphysical issues like God and the thing-in-itself aside. So we can say that Hume observed the Truth to lie nowhere else but in logical consistency. Without blatantly saying it (since he was years before Darwin) he’s implying that scientific theories are subject only to the same evolutionary selection process that occurs in a critical environment. Theories die off like wildebeests. Thus the scientific method does not rely on induction but rather on deduction.
Metaphysics doesn’t “not survive” rigorous inquiry so much as it, by its very nature, disallows itself to be immersed in a critical environment that can properly evaluate it. Hume’s saying that metaphysics is essentially irrelevant in a purely scientific sense – whereby answers are wanton and subsequently gotten. It, as a speculative field, can serve other various uses, but can never be unanimously agreed upon through argumentation alone. That’s why most people believe in God while not reasoning their way to such a belief. And Hume says that that’s completely fine; we should just be diligent to keep scientific endeavors scientific. (Perhaps I’m speaking too much for him here, but his consistent logic lends itself quite nicely to subsequent applications – Hume isn’t the type of philosopher where one must constantly quote him to keep up his dogma. Once you read him, you basically know what to say in your own words; although his words are extremely elegant and poetic in themselves, and are oftentimes worth quoting for pure aesthetic purposes. I’m a clumsy writer compared to him.)
I don’t. More in a moment.
The first question assumes that metaphysics proper is necessary. The second assumes that if it were necessary, aesthetics is somehow the best alternative.
Let’s tackle the first. There’s a difference between knowing how and knowing that. You’re saying that in order to ride a bike, one must know all the technical, mechanical, and physical underpinnings of such a process. But obviously I don’t go to college to learn how ride a bike. I just practice and it comes naturally and tacitly. The same is happening in your argument for metaphysics proper to be the necessary antecedent of reason. We don’t need an a priori, extra-sensory system of ontology to explain how we reason. We just do it. So this is a large over-extension of logic beyond what it is meant to handle. Like Wittgenstein would explain, the problem isn’t what the question poses, it is the question.
For the second, it seems obvious that what we know of the psychology behind human reasoning is what makes metaphysicians cling so eagerly to aesthetics. It’s essentially a flagrant misinterpretation of the following Hume quote: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Some read this and say, “Okay, well, if we know that this is the case, then it follows that we should construct a metaphysical undergirding of reason that anticipates what our passions will inevitably lead to.” Aesthetics is usually the first tool these readers grab since it naturally lends itself to the passions. But the idea isn’t to indulge the passions, since this is a blatant misapplication of reason itself.
For one thing, it’s a category mistake, which is when one misascribes a property to a thing that it cannot possibly have. Metaphysics by its very nature cannot submit itself to empirical study; one cannot pretend this. Consider this quote from what I said above: “The same is happening in your argument for metaphysics proper to be the necessary antecedent of reason.” Does it make sense that we are creating an antecedent, an element of the reasoning process, for that very reasoning process? It’s as though a foreigner were being shown a baseball game. After being pointed out pitchers, batters, umpires, catchers, and outfielders, the foreigner asks: “Who is left to contribute the famous element of team-spirit?”
Secondly, it leads to Ryle’s regress which is defined here:
Now Kant might say something like this to this latter objection:
He’s making reason reside outside of the causative workings of the natural world. Why? Well that’s why I made this thread. I can see nothing that lends credence to this assertion; it smells pungently ad hoc and like another category mistake.
But even that reality-being relation is a duality.
I’m using it in the broader modern sense rather than the classical sense. I’d agree such terms need to be clarified.
Not purely passive, but he still held that sense data was in some sense meaningful - that all our knowledge came from direct sensory experience of the outside world. Actually our knowledge is inductively and constructively inferred from our senses; there’s a lot more going on than receiving an impression. Take the duckrabbit as an example:
Whether you perceive a duck or a rabbit depends on your conceptual approach; you can shift the nature of your perception prior to the perception itself. Cognitive psychology has libraries full of research showing that we don’t see what our eyes show us.
Also, Sellars’ Myth of the Given goes into some detail to refute the empiricist approach, and PI-era Wittgenstein’s dismissal of private language has also been used to attack it from another angle - that of language (and its effects on thought) belonging in the social sphere.
Not only I, but Rorty and others. Most philosophy since Newton has amounted to competitions between scientific notions of reality and philosophical speculations about the same. It’s a search for grounds of certainty, as Descartes recognizes in his “Meditations”.
Ok, i’ll buy that, it does seem to fit into his views of history - but i still don’t think it’s fair to imply that militarism was the end-all be-all of his thought - i read most of the Phenomenology (one of his major works of pure philosophy) and never came across anything that could really be interpreted as militarism - but, then again, much of it is so obtuse that it could probably be interpreted any way one likes . . .
I just always have a problem with blaming philosophers for the atrocities commited in the name of the political ideologies they may have influenced. Ideas are dangerous things when they fall into the wrong hands - but it’s not a philosopher’s job to keep quiet about what s/he thinks simply because others may take their ideas too far - i don’t think Hegel ever envisioned anything like the holocaust as being justified by his thought
anyway, that’s a contention for another thread, i suppose
If the discoveries and ideas of Newton serve as the springboard for The Age of Reason, then I think his underlying views on reason and mechanism can be seen as informing the age. It seems to be considered a given that this age ended with the French Revolution, but I think that view is a bit hasty. The overarching meme of rationalism morphed into a particularly vicious form of mechanism has been the dominant energy driving the industrial, technological, and political excesses of the western world even to this day. This meme is directly derived from rationalist philosophy beginning with Descartes, institutionalized and energized by Newton, and then taking up residence in the collective unconscious with such force that it literally drove out metaphysics and intuition, to our detriment I think, along with superstition and ignorance, to our benefit of course, in that it allowed humanity to develop all the branches of science to our evolutionary advantage. In other words, Reason did its job but too well.
Whatever we call “metaphysics” today clearly has no relation to the metaphysics that was undercut by Hume and brought to its death by Nietzsche. That is why I was asking: what kind of postmodern “metaphysics” has replaced the modern (old) metaphysics of western philosophy? It looks to me as though metaphysics has been variously reinvented depending on the idiosyncratic perspectives of thinkers/philosophers based on other branches of study such as architecture, linguistics, consciousness, aesthetics, performance art, and so on. Thus, one arrives at metaphysics vicariously through readings on what these persons have to say about other specialized branches of study. My personal theory is that society as a whole is so fragmented and mechanized that metaphysics proper can find no place of its own from which to grow. Those who inherently reject mechanism and specialization do not look to the west for their metaphysical foundations or guidance but rather to the east. In eastern metaphysics, then, lies the underpinnings for the development of those branches of study and human activity that, in my view, need a strong metaphysical foundation in order to find their natural expression. Thus, each of these branches would not serve as a backdoor entrance to metaphysics sought through turning the analysis of their expression into some sort of metaphysical vehicle, but instead the expression of each modality would derive its essence from a quintessential metaphysical energy. If that energy derives from a coherent and intuitive eastern metaphysics, then the vacuum left by the death of western metaphysics and tragedy would be filled perhaps by the rebirth of comedy, as someone influenced by reading Bachelard and Merleau-ponty put it: “a “rebirth of comedy,” in the fullest sense of that word. I’m not talking about the modern cynicism that parades as comedy. The comedy I am referring to is embodied in the boddhisattva’s smile, it dances along the razor’s edge between grief and joy and waltzes between terra firma and disaster like the tarot Fool on the cliff’s edge. It is capable of being detached and engaged at the same time. In the interview I heard, Khyentse Norbu displayed those qualities sublimely. Comedy is metaphysically far more challenging, intricate, subtle and provocative than tragedy. And in a much more hopeful way it too breaks open the mouth and the face, dissolving the illusions of difference and separation. What’s even better, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Think of all those prancing trickster shamans, pulling faces and sticking out their tongues at demons.”
In my view, this thought has serious potential, but I am not so optimistic. I think that western society has become so fragmented in its thinking that expressions themselves have turned into something akin to meta-expressions or displays for the sake of display – hence the need or the effort to shock, to excesses of violence for the sake of violence, blood for the sake of blood, war for the sake of war, torture for the sake of torture, iconoclastic art for the sake of iconoclasm, and so on. I expect that this gives many humans a feeling of psychic claustrophobia and alienation, so that much of the very fine art that comes our way tends towards the genres of futurism, fantasy, and science fiction. Yes, there are the “comedic” art forms like the Cirque du Soleil, and of course we can look to the great harlequinesque comedies from a very rich past; but I suspect that the truly great comedic art comes from Asia and the Middle East. I don’t say this with an air of certainty, though, because my experience and knowledge of expressions across the world is limited at best; but I wouldn’t be too surprised if I were not right about this, and I wouldn’t mind being corrected on it either.
In fact, I could be playing The Fool here for all I know since I’m reasonably certainly that I generally go through life that way, happily tripping along a path not realizing there’s a cliff edge waiting for my next foolish step. … So, if I occasionally find myself falling with the prospect of a rather uncomfortable thud or splat at the end, then the trick would be to fall as though it were a climb in place, where one is creating an endless well or rabbithole out of nothing for the perennial Alice to set her feet against in the illusion of a walled dream. Perhaps that is also the essence of comedy.
I’m sure he didn’t! I don’t like his political stuff principally because I’m deeply suspicious of any philosopher who uses the powers of logic to arrive at the status quo I don’t get much from him besides the dialectical method, to be honest.
But Hume would agree. He even comments on the inevitable instinct of induction in our perceptions. That’s sort of the thrust behind custom and habit for him, right? Induction is present only as an abbreviation of what is actually a trans-generational deduction process (i.e., mutating principles to see if they apply). If we are to assume Popper and Ryle as continuations of Hume’s logic, we’ll notice that Hume extrapolates meaning out of how we sense certain things, not that we sense certain things. So if we aren’t committing ourselves to psychological/psychiatric discourse, facts concerning brain activity and mental states offer little bearing upon the more abstract discourses in philosophy. To apply what we know from physiological dissection of the brain to these extremely abstruse discussions would be to commit a category mistake. I hope I’m not bullshitting here.
I happen to harbor a great deal of useless information when it comes to two things: philosophy and music. I’m even seriously thinking of becoming a rock critic. If you ever need a music recommendation, I’m the guy to see. If you dig Eno and Cale, check out Joe Meek & The Blue Men; Joe was like the British Phil Spector. Except he went Crime & Punishment one day and killed his landlady and then himself. Nonetheless, I Hear a New World is an incredibly ahead-of-its-time album. (Sorry. I really geek out when it comes to music. )
… So, if I occasionally find myself falling with the prospect of a rather uncomfortable thud or splat at the end, then the trick would be to fall as though it were a climb in place, where one is creating an endless well or rabbithole out of nothing for the perennial Alice to set her feet against in the illusion of a walled dream. Perhaps that is also the essence of comedy.
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