On one hand I agree; most of the time it is zealots purposefully, or otherwise, misinterpreting a philosopher’s doctrine as a subterfuge (such as in the case of, say, the Nazis and Nietzsche – he even expressed outward preference for Jews to most Germans). But we can’t be arbitrary either. Certainly there are philosophers, such as Julius Evola or, arguably, Karl Marx, who would accept whatever consequences their doctrines would entail. Whether or not this was the expectations of Hegel is irrelevant; he isn’t to blamed for these atrocities, but he is to be blamed for being sloppy, obscure, and an all around bad philosopher. If you can’t anticipate what your audience might read from your texts, you’re either dense, or being intentionally nebulous and self-indulgent to the extent that you’re practically masturbating on paper with each line. I don’t know which category Hegel falls into. But I think Kant is of the moron kind. He had good intentions when saying: “Do what is right though the world should perish; do what is right though the sky should fall.” But then again, most dimwits mean well.
I’m with Only Humean; it would take an outright autistic person to be as inconsiderate of the reader as Kant was. In such a case, one can’t help if the audience doesn’t properly understand what one is saying. It makes sense to just spew all of one’s ideas on paper with such little regard. But that innocently unskilled practice started a trend amongst the Germans. Thank God Nietzsche came about to stop such nonsense, even if he was as much a product of the problem as his predecessors.
The basis for Kant’s philosophy is a delusion. He tried using philosophy to give the world of science a foundation, but he didn’t realize that the future of humanity wouldn’t need a foundation for science - as science is its own foundation.
However, maybe back in the 18th and 19th centuries, intellectuals required it - atleast to trick themselves into thinking that religion and science would co-exist peacefully. Not to say that they can’t coexist peacefully, but Kant’s philosophy allowed them to think that their mutual existence (between Science and religion) could be calculated (such that it wouldn’t have to be learned through experience, and could just be “taught”).
So although it was important in the past, it isn’t really important now.
The thrust of this sounds pretty legit, that last line especially. Although “too well” can connote that what Reason did was a bad thing. Let’s not be neo-luddites.
I for one find personal affinity with the Eastern philosophies, particularly as of late. I’ll have to digest this paragraph more; it’s very … postmodern. Let me see if I get you correctly: Metaphysics is no longer collectively moving our nations along – since WWII, individualism has dominated our human scene. Personal metaphysics are all that individuals can cling onto since there is to be found no motivating force in reason since reason alone is, as Hume said, inert. I would agree with this in general, but isn’t this a good thing? Isn’t it better that we individually try to figure out our lives like Thoreau and the Buddha did rather than gang up and wage war in the name of the Aryan race or the proletariat like a bunch of mad chimps? I agree that one needs a personal, phenomenological motivating force – a metaphysics, if you will – but philosophy won’t reveal any answers. That’s got to come from within the individual. My suggestion to most people is meditate more.
No problem.
And in case anyone is wondering, I’m honestly & sincerely giving my opinion while being unbiased. Or at least as unbiased as “self-proclaimed unbiasedness” can be - perhaps not in the words I used, but in the perception being communicated.
When I first started reading Kant, I truly wanted to like his philosophy. I WANTED it to be accurate, I WANTED to be inspired by it, but my expectations just turned out to be pipe-dreams.
He introduces the reader to inspiring concepts (such as a priori and a posteriori), but then does a very poor job at giving an explanation of those concepts - revealing to the reader how bad his philosophy actually is.
This phrase describes him pretty well:
“He can’t, but he thought that he could.”
And then the reader realizes that, if you think about it, Kant’s concepts were already common sense to begin with - and there is no practical purpose for them in philosophy.
So again, although Kant’s philosophy may have been significant in the 18th and 19th centuries, they are nothing now but either “Common sense & a waste of the reader’s effort” or “Bait to draw in delusional over-analyzers who want to be famous”
I’m not trying to discourage delusional over-analyzers; there isn’t a fine line separating “delusional over-analyzer” from “good philosophy writer” - but I strongly suggest that a person be damn sure (literally, DAMN sure) that they actually have something to contribute to the world of philosophy, and aren’t just going to be spewing out drivel (and a wall of text supporting that drivel).
I am guilty of doing this sometimes, so I blame it on amphetamine. What’s your excuse?
For every legendary philosopher there was, there have been a thousand schizophrenics before them who failed at trying to say the same thing. Which one do you want to be?
A lot of Nietzsche fans can agree that there are sections of Nietzsche’s writings where he is rambling or going too in-depth on something – and if it wasn’t for the good aspects of his philosophy, he might have never become famous. All the excess crap is a result of him (as well as Kant) trying to be “absolutely sure of something” before they write it out.
And coincidentally, you’ll be doing the same thing as you write out your philosophy.
Can you see the pattern?
When you spend the majority of your time idolizing dead people, you accept becoming a dead person yourself.
This is the nature of post-humous philosophers - there is a reason they turned to philosophy: the answers to their problems couldn’t be accepted by other people in their lifetime, so they sacrificed themselves to spare future generations from those problems.
Exactly how many philosophers do you think there have been who thought they could do the same thing but didn’t succeed? Even today, how high do you think that number is? How often did somebody “score a hit” while taking a shot in the dark compared to all the people who missed and landed in Hell?
Possibly; I’m a little wary of extrapolating meaning from the insights of subsequent philosophers in the same vein; I don’t think Kant would have approved of Marxism, although thousands of Marxists I’m sure would disagree. Hume indeed took induction seriously; construction I’m not so sure about, it’s been a few years since I read the Enquiry. I don’t recall it, though.
Joe Meek I’ve heard of, Telstar and all that. I’ll check it out.
Here I think it’s good to realize or remember that Hume could only write and think within the limitations of the knowledge and the assumptions of his time. Thus, thinking only in terms of deductive and inductive reasoning would lead a good thinker to the same conclusions about faith and science, and about the ability of metaphysics to answer questions within its own non-rational, non-scientific mindset. Many of those limitations no longer signify in our present world, and even the good sense in keeping science and faith separate becomes one of applying that separation simply as a tool in relevant domains instead of thinking of it as a universal dictum for everyone in every situation or modality of thought or study – particularly when the boundaries between “science” and “metaphysics” have blurred significantly and the former distance between two branches of study has narrowed nearly to the point of merging. And this is happening just at the time when the ironlock of rationalism and mechanism has rusted to the point of breaking and disintegrating, which in a way is perfect timing in the event of a resurgence of formerly dismissed or destroyed paradigms such as intuition, holism, multi-sensory phenomena, and the questions around what reality really is.
OK, I should qualify. I believe that a viable and coherent metaphysics provides a qualitatively better and healthier grounding for all human action, study, and expression than the lack of one does.
To your first repy, I would agree that metaphysics proper isn’t necessary for the production of art, but that without it aesthetics becomes meta-aesthetics, meaning that art becomes basically art about art, and with no outside or objective grounding, self-conscious of itself in a way that is not healthy because it involves a constraining solipsism that over time results in a kind of inbred or incestuous growth based only on its creation of self. You could envision it as putting that self in front of a series of mirrors in such a way that each mirror is warped and eventually all you see are differently shaped and sized versions of an ever-increasing number of the same selves.
To your second reply, that somehow aesthetics would be the best alternative to a dead metaphysics, I never said or implied that. My remarks were designed to question what kind of aesthetics would follow in the wake of the death of western metaphysics and tragedy. I don’t see aesthetics as being capable of replacing the vacuum left by the hole Nietzsche dug in order to bury metaphysics.
As for the idea that aesthetics would simply be relegated to the world of passions or emotions, thus separated from that of reason and logic and, hence, existing as a separate modality in its own milieu, I would just say that it always did. That is a total non-starter and totally irrelevant to my points above.
Whatever you might think of Kant’s writing style, he was no dimwit or moron. He was a brilliant and enlightened intellectual who happened to write in a style that is difficult, but certainly not impossible, to read. He stands strong as the thinker who was able to contradict some of the rationalist and mechanistic nonsense of the Enlightenment, and his notions on morality, duty, and the categorical imperative also stand strong to this day.
What I find interesting is that there seems to have been no conception of critical peer review or editorial constraint on these guys. They all needed it in the worst way, including Nietzsche. It makes me think that there was a way that these intellectuals held an elitist position akin to a monarch over his subjects, putting them outside the bounds of criticism. It’s also possible that the epistemological foundations for linguistics and style had not been developed, though certainly they must have studied rhetoric in their classics/philology training. Clearly, it didn’t take when it came to writing or thinking in German.
What I said does not “connote” that “what Reason did was a bad thing.” It is a very direct, forceful position without equivocation, while at the same time recognizing the need for The Age of Reason and the energy of science to deal with the problems of superstition, ignorance, bad health practices, and social ills. The drive towards technology was, then, not in itself an energy destined for bad results; but the way that the pernicious brand of Cartesian dualism aligned with an awe of machines turned into mechanism as THE driving force of western science and society has led to some of the worst excesses and abuses of humans and by humans as our separation from and opposition to nature has progressed. If this makes me a neo-luddite to the technocrats, so be it; but I actually believe it makes me a critical non-rationalist who can see both the benefits of science and technology while also being able to see the downside in its dominance over the inherently holistic nature of the world and humans’ place in it.
That is not a bad segue from what I was saying. Here in America we do have a longstanding tradition of individualism and non-conformity, allied with eastern metaphysics and the transcental philosophy of Emerson; and we also have an equally tough and lasting tradition of anti-intellectualism and conformity to narrow protestant values that imbues much of our nation. These conflicting traditions were each independently vital for awhile, but over the years they became co-opted by mechanism allied with the uncontrolled energy of selfish materialism and greed concretized now in “corporate personhood.” This scenario is what led me to say that there is no foundational metaphysics or myth driving art these days, so that art has become basically an endlessly morphing and repeating meta-art always trying to outdo itself and really getting nowhere in terms of original and aesthetic growth. The true originality and sense of aesthetic growth is not dead across the world though, and I suspect that wherever there is high energy for a genre, great art can be found. I suspect it grows out of a sense of the absurd and the surreal, in a comic fashion and not a tragic one. There is real potential for more greatness there, too.
In some ways, I’m a philosophical idiot… meaning no, I haven’t read Foucault or much of anyone in the modern and postmodern tradition. I have dabbled in Wittgenstein for literary purposes, but that’s about it. If I sound postmodern, I expect it’s totally accidental, but who knows…
That’s why I’ve always thought the best philosophers to be those who cause the reader to shut their trap. None of my favorite philosophers stimulate or inspire me to dive into philosophy. Rather, it’s where a lack of a philosopher makes me say, “Damn, I guess somebody’s got to lay down the last word on that matter to shut these assholes up.”
I just finished reading Human Understanding for the second time, and now reading Principles of Morals for the first, so a bit high on Hume fumes. I think I’ll start a “Was Hume an empiricist?” thread – one in which I hope you attend – as soon as I get the chance.
Really? Are you taking on the milieu argument against science (if we are to, here, consider philosophy a scientific enterprise)? Surely you don’t agree with Kuhn that cultural paradigms and cultural paradigms alone dictate our logical methodology. Dipped into an acidic field of criticism, Hume’s ideas, though battered and bruised, emerge relatively unscathed. What are you defining this “pool of criticism” as?
Just because our only justification for, say, Newton’s Laws is only one of coherence with regard to other steadfast beliefs and essentially that of pragmatism or use, doesn’t make for an anything goes scientific arena. Scientists teach induction of the utmost degree of cautiousness. This borders on the Popperian deductive understanding of scientific progress; however, a scientist can understand how science evolves while committing to reasonable induction-based theories without having to mix categories. Just like I can remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday without referring to a knowledge of how memory is stored and extrapolated from the hippocampus. How are science and metaphysics morphing, exactly? The “Science Wars” between the postmodernists and scientists of the '90s hasn’t much changed the way in which most sciences are conducted; it bred books, academic scandal, and fuel for gossip, but science is doing and will keep doing what it’s been doing. Yea or nay?
I’d agree that these things do, and always have, helped us live our lives. People forget that how people live their lives is even the basis of scientific inquiry; such investigation isn’t made by robots. But when has that never been the case? Intuition plays an immense role in medical diagnosis; that doesn’t mean we should, let alone can, systematize intuition. A blind man doesn’t reason his way through a tunnel, nor does he solely feel his way through it; he uses both faculties to his advantage.
On a collective basis, I disagree, at least as it is a predicate that is supposed to lead us somewhere more reasonable. I do think that that is the case for individuals.
Can’t that “incest” become a metaphysics? Your mirror analogy sounds like a cool painting. You aren’t denying that art is transcendental (as are most things) and that what you perceive as a rut is just a phase that will lead it elsewhere, are you?
Let’s be honest: Nietzsche thought he had a cool alternative to nihilism. But he was wrong. So let’s not idolize the man as the murderer of metaphysics as his image so suggests. Nihilism is silly simply because it is skepticism gone crazy; Hume proffered a tentative philosophy of skepticism that’s very much the trend these days. Nietzsche’s remedies to nihilism haven’t been taken seriously since the World Wars. Why? Because there was never a nihilism to combat in the first place. Reason isn’t going to implode within itself. Think of it as biologically impossible. We not worry about such matters; we aren’t obligated to carry forward a certain legacy consciously. In fact, we don’t need to do a lot of things consciously, simply because we already don’t do much of anything in a purely conscious way in the first place.
The seat of nihilism Nietzsche was most concerned about was Christianity. I think he did present a viable alternative - atheism. It wasn’t exactly in vogue among philosophers at the time. Hume was an atheist, but he didn’t concentrate on the ramifications of a Godless Universe as specifically or thoroughly as did Nietzsche. Hume was a sneaky atheist. Nietzsche was out of the closet.
Hegel murdered metaphysics with his Idealism gone crazy - he finished it off after Kant got it dazed and confused enough to make it an easy target. Nietzsche was important only because not everyone got the memo. Everyone hasn’t gotten it still.
Well, there are more overt atheists in academia than there were. I’m not saying that Nietzsche gets all the credit, but to say that remedies to the nihilism he was talking about aren’t taken seriously is just not true.
It did that already, in Kant and Hegel. Not “reason”, of course, but Rationalism.
Jonquil is feeling very misread and misunderstood. I’m just saying that Hume was limited and constrained by the limits of knowledge up to his time. I never did like Hume for being a rational empiricist anyway. But even so, I’m not making a “milieu argument against science” and never was. How you could read what I said that way and then extrapolate from that to an assumption that has no grounding in sensible logic is most telling. You got your pro-Humean buttons pushed and just reacted without doing much thinking. And no, I don’t hold that cultural paradigms alone dictate the formation of philosophy necessarily; however, in some cases they do and Hume is one of those cases. Consider, though, that it was a self-imposed, self-enforced constraint that he put on himself for the simple reason that he could not abide by metaphysics or religion in developing a philosophy that would by its nature uphold science, reason, and the scientific method as the only parameters in which a philosophy could be expounded. That’s what I mean by limits.
You are basing your arguments on the assumption that philosophy is science; you have conflated these two distinct modalities and I haven’t. Thus you are essentially misreading what I write and then formulating arguments that make no sense because of that conflation. I have no problem with science or reason per se. I do have a problem with the attempt to philosophize science because I don’t think that science can be philosophized; it just is what it is. In the same vein, I don’t think that philosophy can be scientized, that is, if science as a modality and a methodology is confined to the logical positivist realm of observible, verifiable, sensory experience. I presume that that is the science that Hume was philosophizing and limiting himself to.
I don’t really know anything about the “science wars” you speak of. However, I do know that science is only as good as the scientist who practices that discipline. Now, there is a problem for the philosopher to consider. What makes science which in practice, using the scientific method and good logical reason, should yield the same results no matter who the scientist is – what makes that science yield different results, conclusions, or heuristics depending on the scientist/s involved? Now we enter into the philosophical realms of morality, ethics, politics, consciousness, and … gasp … metaphysics. To stir even more contention into the mix, as I said before, science and mysticism (including the paranormal, the multi-sensory phenomena, the miracles, metaphysics, and so on) are moving closer and closer together, the boundaries are blurring, and even the notion that science can only deal with phenomena under positivist constraints is crumbling and no amount of reason can save it because it was never founded on anything but illusion in the first place. Many philosophers, mystics, metaphysicians, and theologians have spoken to this illusion and the nature of reality as revealed to them through their experiences; these men and women, then, could well be said to be those who were not constrained by their milieu. In fact, some of them suffered and died because they were not.
Again, you are misreading me. Science can be a useful tool, and reason is a necessary predicate for the scientific method and for living one’s life well. My argument is that reason alone, and the use of science under the guiding meme of mechanism, are breaking down – as the must, because humans are not machines but rather organic holistic entities. Mechanism institutionalized through the apotheosis of science treats people like automatons, as though each human is made up of parts that can be studied, discovered, and treated separately; and mechanism institutionalized in the assembly-line mentality of industrialism and now corporatism, treats people as numbers, expendable and exploitable units. And if these units break down and need fixing, then we can just look to science to give them the pill or the treatment to fix them. That reason and science in the service of a mechanistic worldview will have a seriously detrimental impact on nature is pretty much a given, based on the evidence around us; and that this impact will provoke a reaction from nature is equally obvious. And since people are not machines, but organic whole living in a holistic world, then there is no way that any human society can sustain the rationalist delusions for long. I guess you could call this a paradox, that living according to a rationalist paradigm is in essence irrational; and that living organically in accord with nature, which is not inherently rational but rather intutive, would be rational.
Even a society as a collective needs a grounding myth or metaphysical belief system. Now, I suppose you could construct a metaphysics which says that within the collective it would be a summum bonum for people to individuate and find their own path. Oh wait… that’s what Jung said, didn’t he?
No. Just as science and philosophy/metaphysics are separate modalities, so are metaphysics and art. Also, I never said that I perceived art as being in a rut, just that art without a myth or metaphysical basis becomes solipsistic and turned in on itself, so that it ends up competing with itself for the next expression which is just some sort of mirror image magnified or warped through the many mirrors of its history. We have what we call art in this society, but very little of it has an energy growing out of a metaphysical or mythical ideal; the muses, in essence, are dead. I would propose that any art produced out of that “rut” has its grounding somewhere else and is basically not American or formed in the rational tradition. Take Irving Norman, for instance; his art is grounded in American symbology and scenes, but has as its foundation a strong metaphysical base, which includes the entire history of western art which is also contained within his art. The same can be said for artists from other countries, such as Frida Kahlo and Pavel Tchelitchev (sic?).
Sorry, I don’t see how your remarks on nihilism follow as a sequitur to anything I said. Not only that, but I don’t see Nietzsche as a nihilist, just a mystic totally confused by German protestant strictures trying to figure things out by looking at the Greeks and, somehow, extrapolating from his conclusions about the Greeks to admonitions and exhortations for his modern contemporary Germans. Nietzsche’s philosophy is basically a mess when he tries to construct a metaphysics out of Greek myth and art; but when he sticks to aesthetics and the history of art, when he speaks as a kind of preacher or prophet/poet, he has much to offer.
As for reason, it is imploding around us as we speak. Human activity in the world, neither individually or collectively, is now driven by reason. If you think it is, you haven’t been paying attention. This is not to say that all individuals have lost the ability to reason, just that reason as the guiding force of the age is dead or at the least dying a horrible, nasty death. What will take its place is the big question; and hopefully, whatever that energy is, it will serve humanity and the planet better than the overarching energies of reason and mechanism have done.
B) If he was an atheist in the traditional sense, he was so for reasons far different than Hume. He objected to God’s existence because of what it indelibly meant for humans and how humans lived – it was an ethical, if not an aesthetic, contention.
Hm. So do you think that the “Dark Ages” resulting from Kant’s misguided ideas was necessary? Would it be too much to ask of the world to pick up precisely where Hume left off, without that accursed century in between?
I think Darwin’s infinitely more reason for atheism’s academic legitimacy today. Nietzsche may have cleared the cultural underbrush to make sure there were no sudden pitfalls, but Darwin is the one who came in with industrial saws the size of Volkswagons. Before evolution, atheism couldn’t properly explain everything. Hence, the popularity of deism. Atheism served more a negative approach than a positive one. It was obstinate to be an atheist at that time, and understandably so. But evolution changed everything.
My criticism isn’t that his remedies to nihilism aren’t taken seriously, but that all remedies to nihilism in general are not. What need is there for a remedy for an illness that doesn’t exist? I’m a nihilism-atheist.
I’m not talking about capital lettered words of any sort – just reason. Reason is an ability. All abilities get better with practice; to say that reason has imploded is to say that I washed so many dishes that I forgot how to wash dishes. Usually an ability is lost from lack of practice, not it’s overuse. Obviously the “reason imploded” hypothesis stands upon a narrative that comes to a head where reason is at its maximum employment.
Probably so, but I don’t disagree too much with many of his premises. Let’s not forget the sentence before that one: “[W}e aren’t obligated to carry forward a certain legacy consciously.”
I think I’ll start a “Was Hume an empiricist?” thread – one in which I hope you attend – as soon as I get the chance.