Basic Questions for any Kantians
I have some simple questions I hope to find answers for without, hopefully, getting bogged down in too much detail. I am trying to understand an essential difference between Kant's version of idealism and versions of idealism which came before him. Berkeley would be the most prominent example for my purposes.
Questions are highlighted.
Berkeley maintained a philosophical monism wherein only minds and mental concepts exist. He posited a non-corporeal world sometimes known as immaterialism and I guess we might call this a version of an ‘all experience is consciousness’ theory.
In describing the noumenal world (which we do not know in any way) Kant seems to be saying that there is a real world (the world therefore is not entirely a product of our minds) but we are unable to perceive it directly.
Can Kant’s noumenal world to be understood to potentially have any kind of physical form (waves, for instance) which we cannot apprehend directly? Or is the use of the word ‘physical’ here entirely superfluous?
Following Kant, we obviously construct the phenomenal world we know out of the noumenal world in some way - presumably from the sensations which present themselves to our consciousness. Is there any simple way of describing how this is might be understood to actually work?
In the phenomenal world we are always operating from some kind of sense making schema. We make sense of the world we apprehend and choices based on this - which may have impact upon our very survival (don’t jump off that cliff, don't smoke, etc). Could dying then be taken as an example of receiving direct feedback from the noumenal world?
Questions are highlighted.
Berkeley maintained a philosophical monism wherein only minds and mental concepts exist. He posited a non-corporeal world sometimes known as immaterialism and I guess we might call this a version of an ‘all experience is consciousness’ theory.
In describing the noumenal world (which we do not know in any way) Kant seems to be saying that there is a real world (the world therefore is not entirely a product of our minds) but we are unable to perceive it directly.
Can Kant’s noumenal world to be understood to potentially have any kind of physical form (waves, for instance) which we cannot apprehend directly? Or is the use of the word ‘physical’ here entirely superfluous?
Following Kant, we obviously construct the phenomenal world we know out of the noumenal world in some way - presumably from the sensations which present themselves to our consciousness. Is there any simple way of describing how this is might be understood to actually work?
In the phenomenal world we are always operating from some kind of sense making schema. We make sense of the world we apprehend and choices based on this - which may have impact upon our very survival (don’t jump off that cliff, don't smoke, etc). Could dying then be taken as an example of receiving direct feedback from the noumenal world?
Comments (380)
I wouldn't call myself a Kantian, although I hope I understand some aspects of his philosophy.
The distinction he makes is between 'things as they appear to us' - as phenomena - and 'as they are in themselves' (the infamous ding an sich) which is often equated with the noumena. However opinion is divided as to whether 'the noumena' and 'things in themselves' really are synonymous - this is one of the things Schopenhauer criticized, saying he used both terms inconsistently.
Generally the distinction of phenomena and noumena is a form of the age-old distinction between appearance and reality which goes back to Plato and before. However Kant's approach is different to Plato's, even though it draws on it. Kant's original dissertation was on the Platonic forms, but later he repudiated the accepted understanding of their meaning.
So as to whether the noumenal can have physical form - it seems an odd question. Maybe someone else can answer that.
Quoting Tom Storm
It's never struck me as that difficult to grasp. Kant characterizes thinking as a form of synthesis - “the act of putting different representations together, and grasping what is manifold in them in one cognition” (A77/B103); it is a process that “gathers the elements for cognition, and unites them to form a certain content” (A78/B103). Part of those contents comprises sensory data - what is seen, heard, felt etc - which is then combined with the categories of the understanding (judgements of quantity, quality, modality, relation) which together produces a unified understanding both intellectual/rational and sensory/empirical. This was distinguished from either the empiricists (all knowledge comes from experience) and the rationalists (true knowledge is grounded in innate ideas) by combining elements from both. 'Concepts without percepts are blind, percepts without concepts are empty'. (That's what your fantastically elaborated hominid brain does with all that processing power. It creates a world, the only one you'll ever know.)
(I should maybe mention the first exposure I had to Kant was through T R V Murti The Central Philosophy of Buddhism which has extensive comparisons with the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism and idealist philosophies. As many have commented, there are a lot of parallels between philosophical idealism and Buddhist and Hindu non-dualist philosophy. But in Buddhism that is elaborated through meditation which is a discipline of getting direct insight into the way the mind constructs the world. Murti's book is unfashionable nowadays but it helped me find a way in to that understanding.)
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't think Kant posits that as a kind of stark dualism. I also don't think he ever says that the world is 'entirely a product of our minds'. He criticized Berkeley on exactly those grounds. I think he says, we don't see things 'how they truly are' but how they appear to us, as the kinds of beings we are, with the kinds of perceptual categories and faculties we have.
[quote=Schopenhauer]The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as ????????? [phainomena] and ???????? [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms ????????? and ???????? were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearance.[/quote]
My understanding is that 'noumenal' properly means 'object of nous' i.e. object of pure reason, like a mathematical proof or geometricl or logical axiom, however Kant doesn't see it that way. I think that's what Schop. is criticizing. I'm studying Schopenhauer's metaphysics at the moment and trying to get more clarity around this point.
Basic request to Kantians: Explain even a single concept that isn't the Hypothetical Imperative.
I don't think I have anything to offer, but I'll be reading along. Good idea for a thread.
Lol, this sentence pretty much sums up Kant's approach at ethics, except reorganized into unreadable, carefully fabricated terms that convey as little meaning as possible, so as to not have disclosed any evidence for having contributed nothing to the field.
This and your previous post are interesting and well-written. My plan is to learn everything I need to know about Kant without ever reading another word by him. After that, let's go on to all the rest of the pantheon.
Long story short, in Kant.....yes.
Kantian epistemology is a system, with integrated functions. When you ask if something can be understood, you are bypassing those functions in the system by which physical objects are represented through the senses. As such, thinking a physical form is possible, but that in itself can never be sufficient to establish the reality, and therefore the experience, of a corresponding physical object.
On the other hand, asking about a noumenal world in general presupposes it, in which case the ask becomes....can the physical forms of noumena be understood. Now the answer is incomprehensible, insofar as only real physical objects which affect the senses can be intuited, and these, being phenomena, as arrangement or synthesis of object matter into a logical form, are for that reason, not noumena but actual objects of knowledge. It is quite absurd, and mutually destructive, to attempt the cognition, and thereby the experience of two entirely different kinds of worlds at the same time under the same conditions.
End game: in Kant, there is no such thing as a noumenal world, as far as the human cognitive system is concerned. If there is one, merely from logical non-contradiction, our system does not admit the possibility of the experience of its constituency.
“.....I can think what I please, provided only I do not contradict myself; that is, provided my conception is a possible thought....”
“....understanding may be represented as (...) a faculty of thought....”
“....Now as the understanding possesses no other fundamental conceptions besides the categories, it takes for granted that an object considered as a thing in itself must be capable of being thought by means of these pure conceptions, and is thereby led to hold the perfectly undetermined conception of an intelligible existence, a something out of the sphere of our sensibility, for a determinate conception of an existence which we can cognize in some way or other by means of the understanding...”
That I can think whatever I want is the same as saying understanding can conceive whatever it wants. But consistency within the Kantian system cannot grant understanding powers of experience on its own accord, for if such were the case, there would be no need for the affects of objects on sensibility. So there is understanding that facilitates experience, and the same understanding that denies it. How that can happen, and maintain the explanatory predicates, however speculative they may be, of the system as a whole, is explained with noumena.
———-
Quoting Wayfarer
The criticism is warranted. Nonetheless, the Kantian text in which noumena are explicitly defined, distinguishes them from the physically real ding an sich. The thing-in-itself resides in the empirical world of things, noumena reside in the intelligible world of conceptions, but those without object or functionality belonging to them.
I think Kant means something along the following lines. If you put yourself in a particle's shoes it depends on the particles around you how you feel, and basically there is the feeling of to be with them or not to be with them (that's the question...). At the most fundamental level, massless charges feel so attracted by each other that they only can exist in massive triplets, which can have color and electric charge. The further colored triplets (quarks) are apart, the stronger they feel one another pull. Colorless states like protons, neutrons, electrons, and neutrinos are formed. An electron (a triplet of massless particles feeling hyperbolically attracted) has a will, a primordial consciousness, to be with, say, a proton. They reach out to other charged particles, and reaches out to an oppositely charged proton because it wants to be together with it. But how does that feel? An electron feels pure love for the proton and pure hate for another electron. The latter interaction mixes up the identities of both electrons. What love is supposed to do is actually achieved by hate on the fundamental level!
So fundamentally there are love and hate only. Without further embellishments. Love and hate defined as longing to be or not longing to be with other particles. There is no deeper reason for this primordial love affairs. You can describe them by in physical terms, like charge, emission and absorption of virtual particles in spacetime, but in doing so you don't really understand the nature of the fundamental states of (love) affairs. Two oppositely electrically charged particles literally feel attracted. They run towards each other but can't kiss as they combine in a neutral state in which they get close but never touch (real touching is achieved in the depths of black holes, but as soon as zillions of particles kiss simultaneously they get annihilated by negative energy particles, negative love, that is, so the perfect kiss only lasts the blink of an eye...).
The electron hops around the proton nervously, longing for the kiss. The proton watches amused and realizes he needs the electron just as much as she needs him. Only interference by other charges outside can end their happy relation. A rapid evil expansion of the space between them has the same disastrous consequence. So even if one happy pair has survived all universal turmoil, the evil expansion, speeding up and up, will break them up eventually. But... an electron and three quarks (uud) contain unequal amounts of matter and antimatter, so luckily for the electron and proton, this only happens in fairy tales with no happy ending. Imagine a single lonely electron looking for a lonely single proton in a vast inflating space... Reaching out in vain...
So what can we learn from this? Love is a noumenal entity, the expression and description by means of spacetime, charge, mediating fields, etcetera, the phainomenon counterpart. The phainomenon cannot be used to explain the noumenon. Matter cannot explain consciousness.
Not physical, no. But not mental either.
It's unknown grounds, according to him. One can read him as a neutral monist in this respect.
One amongst a number of salient points:
I am not sure how this observation fits in to the project of understanding Kant, but Berkeley can be read as the ultimate empiricist rather than as an idealist.
If one's ideas about causality have no bearing on what is outside of experience, then they cannot confirm or deny anything beyond it. The skepticism of Hume becomes an implacable barrier. It is like Hume on crack, to borrow a phrase.
Quoting Tom StormTo be clear, we don’t construct the phenomenal world out of the noumenal world, according to Kant; that is, noumena aren’t themselves the materials, i.e., the “matter” of appearances, that compose the phenomenal world. All of this is done/works by representing, or arranging under certain relations, such materials with respect to the a-priori forms of the sensibility & the understanding, i.e., with respect to space & time & the categories.
Quoting Tom StormWhether in this life, or the hereafter, Kant maintains that we can never have any kind of experience of noumena or things-in-themselves.
“It is indeed even then inconceivable how the intuition of a present thing should make me know a thing as it is in itself, as its properties cannot migrate into my faculty of representation.”
Schopenhauer’s philosophy has many inconsistencies with Kantianism (not to mention self-contradictions).
Firstly, he speaks of the “will” passing into the forms of space & time, or the “objectification of the will.” Yet this is inadmissible, as no thing-in-itself can enter into the forms of space & time, in Kantianism. That’s one inconsistency.
Secondly, he attributes causality to the “will,” or to something that’s independent of the subject; that is to say, he gives causality a transcendent application to something besides phenomena. This is also inadmissible, since causality is a mental category that’s only applicable to phenomena, in Kantianism. That’s another inconsistency.
Thirdly, he claims that the “will” can be known by means of our inner-consciousness; but whatever appears internally to us, must do so under the form of time; he therefore equates (temporal) phenomena with what’s supposed to be independent of such a form. This is, as well, inadmissible, because no phenomena can be equated with any thing-in-itself, in Kantianism. Thus, another inconsistency.
Schopenhauer is so inferior to Kant that I feel sorry for anyone who thinks otherwise (& this is coming from someone who read Schopenhauer way before ever opening a page of Kant).
Thanks and very interesting. Welcome.
Cheers - will try to source this. A problem for me is time for reading.
Thanks - too much fuckign reading. That's the problem.. What's the definition of a philosopher - one who can't stop reading....
Apologies, no idea what you were saying - when 'spacetime' enters a reply I generally experience a collapse of my wave function..
Quoting tim wood
Thanks Tim. I was being playful about the potential interrelationship of both realms at the point of death. Is death part of the phenomenal world? How does it relate to the noumenal world? That kind of thing. I guess it isn't.
Quoting Mww
Yes, I kind of figured this might be it. I've found I get nowhere in life without asking obvious questions. Thank's also for your thoughtful answers.
Goodness. You may be right about that.
Quoting Wayfarer
Good - thanks. What I need is a basic primer that articulates this in summary. I am not really a detail guy (and certainly no philosopher). My overall reason for asking all this is simply that Kant is influential and many projects have reacted against his ideas. I am also interested in getting more understanding of the the various versions of idealism posited. I was wondering if the noumenal world was Kant's philosophic construction of something like the realm of quantum waves. But I am no QM wanker...
Space is exactly what Kant was wrong about. There don't exist left and right handed gloves in an infinite empty space. And they certainly are not the same as he assumes. Space is an objective phainomenon. We are the noumena in it. Wiggling through half lit shadows, trying to balance in vain, and fighting the great Noun to no avail...
Positive noumena would include things like Leibnizian monads or Cartesian souls, things which we don't know if knowledge of them is even possible, nor how we could cognize them.
She says: "Understood in the negative sense, the concept [of noumena] simply involves thinking about spatio-temporal objects of our experience and abstracting what we know about the through the senses."
You're certainly entitled to that "opinon".
That's what I linked the Westacott article for. I know Kant is a lot of f****ing reading but that article is about 2,200 words and an excellent primer, by a philosophy prof. (If you want, here's a decent edition of the entire Critique of Pure Reason.)
Quoting Mental Forms
It was a paranthetical comment, not representative of what I think Kant says, but suggestive of an important point in its own right.
The way I see it, more or less irrelevant etymologies aside, is that Kant uses the term "noumenal" to denote what we might think of as the 'non or extra-phenomenal' reality of things (what they are over and above their (possible) appearances).
Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant in this, is that in calling the noumenal "things in themselves" he contradicts his denial that they could be spatio-temporal entities, since there can be no "things" without difference and no difference without spatial and temporal separation.
That is preserved and developed in later hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism. Schopenhauer says this was 'overlooked' by Kant (in this post). I'm still trying to get to the bottom of that subject. I bought the kindle edition of Kant's Theory of Normativity, Konstantin Pollok which explores this in more depth.
Bonus quote:
[url=https://www.amazon.com/Powers-Pure-Reason-Cosmic-Philosophy-ebook/dp/B00UOR4S6G/r]The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy, Alfredo Ferrarin
:up:
I was going to stay out of active participation in this thread because I'm not really familiar with Kant and I don't want to skew the discussion toward my own non-standard way of seeing this issue. But since @Wayfarer mentioned Buddhism and there seems to be a multiplicity of views of what Kant meant, I'll toss this in quickly but won't follow up unless someone else is interested.
You've shown an interest in Taoism in past threads, so I know you're at least familiar with the idea of the Tao. The first time I came across Kant's noumena, the similarities between that and Lao Tzu's idea struck me, although there are clearly differences. I'm not the first person to see that similarity, although it is clear Kant was not influenced by eastern philosophies.
To simplify, the Tao is what there was before there were people to see it and talk about it. But of course, that's not right, because, to Lao Tzu, before oneness was divided into a multiplicity, those things in a sense didn't exist. The Tao is called "non-being" and the multiplicity is called "being." It can't be conceptualized. It can't be spoken. Conceptualizing it is what turns the one into a multiplicity. This came to mind again when reading Mww's post:
Quoting Mww
Don't worry, Mww, I'm not assuming you agree with my way of seeing things, but I think you get at something basic.
Also, I really like this:
Quoting Wayfarer
I had never thought of it in those terms, but it has the ring of truth.
There are many such similarities and parallels explored in comparative religion and cultural history. 'The noumenal' is a cross-cultural conception (with the caveat that it ought not to be confused with 'the numinous' which comes from a different root even if the meanings somewhat overlap.) But I think you could argue that the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal is reflected in the distinction between the (nameless) Tao and the 'ten thousand things' in Taoist or Chinese philosophy (allowing for many other differences characteristic of the two divergent cultures).
Quoting T Clark
One of Kant's key insights is that we're not the passive recipients of sensations but knowledge is in part constituted by a priori or transcendental factors (contributed by the mind itself) imposed upon the data of experience 1.
As for the book I mentioned on the comparison of Kant and Buddhist philosophy see this chapter.
If the term is used to denote the Platonic forms the same criticism applies, since there are different forms, but then as far as I know it wasn't explicit in Plato that the forms do not exist in time and space (of some unknown ideal kind presumably).
Thanks, will read the article as soon as I can. I have, over time, read a number of papers on Kant and some slabs of the Critique. I am left with some basic questions and I wanted to hear from others.
Quoting T Clark
You may well be onto something and thanks. I fear I am one of those people who just can't discern all that much from those sorts of ideas. To me it all reads like cross word clues in search of a word that hasn't been coined yet. But I'm happy to keep looking into it. Is there a specific reference in the Tao you can point to that resonates with any aspect of Kant, or are you talking more in terms of tone of the work itself?
Quoting Mental Forms
I think this line, despite the new questions it generates, probably answers all my original questions.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, this is indeed an even more fascinating area of Kant - the preconditions which make intelligibility and knowledge possible...
When I started the "My favorite verses of the Tao Te Ching" thread about a year ago, I found myself dealing with the question of what my relationship with the Tao could be, given that I can't talk about it or understand it. Your thoughts about meditation feel like an insight into how that might work.
As for a priori factors, I am of two minds. First, I am skeptical of claims to a priori status. It is too often used to avoid having to justify beliefs. On the other hand, it's clear our minds are not blank slates. Human capacities for dealing with language, numbers, and even moral judgements have been shown to have a basis that is not dependent, or at least not only dependent, on experience. Not just our minds, but our eyes, ears, tongues, noses, and skin appear to have sensitivities consistent with categorization and classification of the oneness of the world into all the abundance we experience.
Baby's are born with a priori knowledge. If born blank knowledge gathering can't even start.
Which is what I said.
That's actually a salient point. I'm listening to Kastrup's Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics on Audible, and this idea is central. Schopenhauer's conception of the will is that it is one unified whole within which 'things' only exist for perceiving subjects. On the other hand as noted above, maybe Kant is not saying there literally is a separate thing in itself that we don't see, but that because we don't see things as they are in themselves, we only see them as they appear to us - in other words, that we don't see them from no viewpoint, but from a perspective. I never quite understand why that is such a controversial idea.
Quoting T Clark
That's where Kant faulted Locke and Hume. '“Every event must have a cause” cannot be proven by experience, but experience is impossible without it because it describes the way the mind must necessarily order its representations. We can understand Kant’s argument again by considering his predecessors. According to the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions, the mind is passive either because it finds itself possessing innate, well-formed ideas ready for analysis, or because it receives ideas of objects into a kind of empty theater, or blank slate. Kant’s crucial insight here is to argue that experience of a world as we have it is only possible if the mind provides a systematic structuring of its representations. This structuring is below the level of, or logically prior to, the mental representations that the Empiricists and Rationalists analyzed. '
That makes sense to me. I need to spend more time with the science.
But why are you skeptical about that?
Good little primer. Thanks again.
No. Let me find the only quote that matters here ...
"The concept of noumenon is, therefore, only a limiting concept, and intended to keep claims of sensibility within proper bounds, and is therefore only of negative use. But it is not mere arbitrary fiction; rather, it is closely connected with the limitation of sensibility, though incapable of positing anything positive outside the sphere of sensibility."
- B311,312/A256
In short there is no noumenon other than the concept used in relation to phenomenon applicable ONLY in a negative sense.
Thanks ILS but I am not really sure what that means.
Quoting I like sushi
Can you try this again? I'm sure it's my fault. From the Oxford Reference:
On a different view, the distinction merely reflects Kant's understanding that all knowledge is knowledge from a standpoint, so the noumenal is the fraudulent idea of that which would be apprehended by a being with no point of view. It is unclear how on Kant's own view we can mean anything by the term
Is this the same thing?
Our world, our entire world, is phenomenon. Noumenon in a positive sense isn't anything we have any relation to and as we are here talking about 'noumenon' it is only in the negative sense as a marker for the limitation of our sensible experience (sensible in the terms of how Kant uses the term 'sensible' ... experienced).
If there was noumenon then we wouldn't be able to refer to it or articulate it in any form. Think about it a little. The thing-in-itself cannot be referred to on those terms in any way that makes any sense. It is only our habit of inferring that leads to the belief in some 'otherness' that is beyond our realms of comprehension ... but if some said item is beyond our realm of comprehension then our merely stating the possibility of some item is referring to some item and that is contrary to the said item being 'beyond comprehension'.
We can talk of a square circle and conjure up some image merely by stating it. Stating something gives it authority even though it is a construct based on experience.
I cannot do much better than that without writing a helluva lot more ... I don't want to right now, so hope that gives you food for thought at least.
Cool. That's more than enough. I'm not a detail guy. Appreciated.
:100:
Quoting Tom Storm
I thought so. I've returned to it many times.
So, here's what is bothering me. I already quoted this:
Now in the Platonic sense, an intelligible object is something that is the object of rational judgement. In other words, it's a truth that can be arrived at by purely logical means or seen by reason alone. I'll give one of Feser's examples:
My bolds.
So that is the sense in which triangles are 'objects of thought' - a.k.a. noumena. So in the Platonist understanding, any actual triangle is an instance (or instantiation) of 'the (universal) idea of triangularity'. So in this case, the noumenal form, the object of thought, *is* the idea of the triangle (to use a trite example) - something grasped by reason alone.
But that is *not* what Kant means by 'the noumenal'. And I think this is why Schopenhauer says that Kant 'entirely overlooks the difference between the intuitive and the abstract.'
[quote=Rebecca Goldstein; https://www.edge.org/conversation/rebecca_newberger_goldstein-godel-and-the-nature-of-mathematical-truth]Gödel was a mathematical realist, a Platonist. He believed that what makes mathematics true is that it's descriptive—not of empirical reality, of course, but of an abstract reality. Mathematical intuition is something analogous to a kind of sense perception.[/quote]
Which is something that I don't think Kant seems to have seen, and I'm baffled as to why not.
I can see some parallels here. Noumena are non-being; it is itself a conception but cannot be conceptualized, which is to say there are no schema represented under it. For that reason, while noumena can be spoken, it is nevertheless, empty, content-less, hence cannot ever be a multiplicity.
Reflecting this on Kantian methodology, which makes explicit all humans reason exactly the same way, does not mean human reason is the only way to know the world, which at least makes room for the logical possibility of noumenal worlds. Understanding “...takes for granted....” the possibility of the logical form, but it is pure reason alone that prevents population of the form by its schema.
IknowIknowIknow.....hold the details, please (grin).
“....The conception of a noumenon, that is, of a thing which must be cogitated not as an object of sense, but as a thing in itself (solely through the pure understanding) ....”
(CPR, B310)
This reduces to the stipulation that noumena are to cognized in the same way the ding an sich is to be cognized, not that noumena are things in themselves. Both are cognized through the understanding alone, but that does not make them the same thing. Conception of noumena by the understanding does not give things in themselves, and conception of things in themselves by the understanding does not give noumena.
———-
“....for things in themselves, which lie beyond its** province, are called noumena for the very purpose of indicating that this cognition does not extend its application to all that the understanding thinks....”
**re: “sensible knowledge”
(Ibid, A255)
This reduces to the stipulation that the only reason to call things in themselves “noumena”, is to show both these conceptions abide by the same restrictions, but does not indicate they are the same thing.
Kant never meant noumena to be called.....understood as....things in themselves, even while interchanging object in itself with thing in itself. The text makes explicit the differences in them which should have prevented it. Things-in-themselves are empirical, laid out in the Transcendental Aesthetic, noumena are logical, laid out in the Transcendental Analytic. Every instance of the concept noumena referenced as a thing in itself, is in the context of pure logical thought itself, hence is never included in the Aesthetic.....because it isn’t an intuitive conception at all. One might even do so far as to say, you know....he certainly did differentiate the intuitive from the abstract, insofar as noumena are logically abstracted from phenomena, in keeping with his inherently dualistic paradigm.
Fast and loose with terminology? Yeah, maybe, but it’s not his fault if we mistake in the parts what he says as a whole.
Unless I got it all wrong, in which case, it’s entirely his fault.
I was specifically talking about a comparison between the Tao and noumena.
I've been thinking I should reread some of Alan Watts stuff on Taoism, which is more prosaic, less poetic, than the Tao Te Ching. You're a pretty prosaic guy. I see that as a good thing here on the forum where flights of fancy are constantly taking off. Rather than provide you with any quotes from the TTC, if I find something in Watts, I'll pass it along.
I don't understand your question.
No. Don't worry about holding the details. I might not understand it, but being exposed is a good thing.
Ehhhh....there’s a bunch of exposure already. Doubt there’ll be much more without specific inquiry.
Gotta say, though. There’s been some pretty respectable responses so far.
This makes sense to me. Kant’s pure reason demonstrates the limitation of human reason, beyond which is the capacity to differentiate between noumena and ‘ding an sich’. The TTC recognises that this limitation is evident in the structure of language and language use (a la Wittgenstein) - Kant’s attempt to speak about the noumena and Laozi’s attempt to speak about the Tao are employing a schema to effectively describe another schema.
The difference is that Kant is also bound by the pre-Darwinian Western notion that humanity is in a sense ‘super-natural’, so while Laozi strives to include humanity within both his schema and the Tao, Kant cannot but position humanity outside of the noumena, as an entity in relation to it, and to his schema. I think this is evident in a reliance on the ‘object’ in his third critique.
This seems to me to be a good description of the main difference between western and eastern philosophies. Eastern works from the inside and western from the outside.
I agree that we’re unable to consolidate anything positive about noumenon, but not that we’re incapable of experiencing the limitation ‘in itself’. Sensible human experience and understanding is not limited to language, but by language.
I think when we talk of a ‘square circle’ we’re not really conjuring up any particular image, if we’re honest, but experiencing our limitations with respect to understanding a relation between these two qualities. It’s like an event horizon, the difference between quantitative (relating to something as something other) and qualitative (inclusive relation). There is no way to distinguish a ‘square circle’ from one’s qualitative experience of limitations.
Naming something gives it potentiality in itself, whether quantitative or qualitative, stating the possibility of our understanding it, if not articulating that understanding as something apart from our experience. We are able to refer to ‘noumenon’ in potentiality, but unable to quantify it as something apart from our experience. For many of us, that’s a deal breaker.
That’s my current understanding, anyway.
I missed this until Possibility referenced it. I like the way you've expressed it. I agree, noumena, as described by Kant, are not things at all.
Again there’s some deep issue involving Kant’s distinction between sensory and intellectual perception. In the Platonic/Aristotelian understanding, we know the intelligible forms with certainty - which is to know their essence. We 'get their idea' so to speak. That is developed on Aquinas, even - google 'the union of knower and known'. (There's more than an echo here of non-dual insight.) So the 'noumenal object' is not something unknowable - rather it is the idea or principle of the object as perceived by nous. The idea is the form of the particular, determining its identity. I can't see how that is represented in Kant, though. I'm hoping to glean the answer from the Pollok book I mentioned.
Obviously a very thorny question. Whether I'll ever really get to the bottom of it, I don't know. But mundane concerns are going to elbow that aside as I'm moving house this week, after 21 years, which is a logistical challenge somewhat comparable to Napolean's invasion of Russia, so for the sake of my dear other, I am going to log out for the week and concentrate on packing, lifting and shifting. (Don't hold me to it, I'm generally hopeless at keeping away.)
Sounds promising. Well, if you're willing to do the research on this, great. This to me seems to be the gap we've been wondering about.
It'd be good to see some kind of diagram constructed out of this model.
Good luck with the move - watch you don't do in your back!
Kant Bxxvi-xxvii.
What ‘object’?
One of my favorite quotable passages. Seems pretty easy to decipher, but there’s more to it than the words, especially considering the footnote that accompanies it.
Bingo! There has to be some preinstalled software (MS DOS) to get the computer (brain/mind) started and ready for action! Bootstrapping!
Nature, art, etc.
The base structure of Kant’s schema is the subject-object relation, with the subject bracketing out sensation, or affect/desire, as if it is irrelevant. Only what can be attributed to the object - either as concept or as aesthetic - is discussed with regard to the ability (of the subject) to make judgements in relation to an object. I would argue that beyond the fourth moment, where the artist or genius refrains from judging, there is no subject-object distinction, only inclusive relation.
The TTC, on the other hand, acknowledges affect/desire as the directional flow of energy through the entire schema, and advocates the disciplined practice of aligning this aspect of ourselves with that of nature in order to understand the Tao.
Our approach to understanding language is our approach to understanding everything - there is a necessary practical or relational aspect which cannot be attributed along subject-object or sensation-cognition lines.
It is probably one of the most common misconceptions of Kant's work I come across and some people just cannot see it likely because it is so blindingly obvious and they don't see the importance of stating something so obvious. Others are just atheists or theists trying to force views upon others by taking his words and terms out of context to justify some silly political view.
[i]Kant also makes a distinction between positive and negative noumena:[22][23]
If by 'noumenon' we mean a thing so far as it is not an object of our sensible intuition, and so abstract from our mode of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the term.[24]
But if we understand by it an object of a non-sensible intuition, we thereby presuppose a special mode of intuition, namely, the intellectual, which is not that which we possess, and of which we cannot comprehend even the possibility. This would be 'noumenon' in the positive sense of the term.[24]
The positive noumena, if they existed, would be immaterial entities that can only be apprehended by a special, non-sensory faculty: "intellectual intuition" (nicht sinnliche Anschauung).[24] Kant doubts that we have such a faculty, because for him intellectual intuition would mean that thinking of an entity, and its being represented, would be the same. He argues that humans have no way to apprehend positive noumena:
Since, however, such a type of intuition, intellectual intuition, forms no part whatsoever of our faculty of knowledge, it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further than to the objects of experience. Doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities corresponding to the sensible entities; there may also be intelligible entities to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever; but our concepts of understanding, being mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not in the least apply to them. That, therefore, which we entitle 'noumenon' must be understood as being such only in a negative sense.[25][/i]*
^ Kant's words bolded
So Kant apparently rejects intellectual intuition; the kind of intuition which Plato claims gives access to the Forms.
What I obviously don’t understand, is how the ability to grasp novel facts through mathematics is not intellectual intuition.
Think of Dirac positing antiparticles purely on the basis of them ‘falling out of the equations’ only later to be empirically confirmed. The many predictions made by the theory of relativity which could only be confirmed decades later with the invariable headline EINSTEIN PROVED RIGHT AGAIN. How are these NOT examples of intellectual intuition? What am I not seeing? Anyone?
As to mathematics, our understanding of it may be explained as rule following, or abstracting from empirical experience. It's obviously a complex subject, to which much more thought might be given.
One the one hand, in the SEP entry on Kant's philosophy of mathematics says this:
But in another entry on Kant's view of mind and consciousness, we also read:
This seems a contradiction to me, because mathematical physics is reliant on and intertwined with mathematics in modern science. So I think there's something basic that I'm not getting here, maybe I'll put this up on Philosophy Stack Exchange (after I finish moving house anyway.)
Quoting Dijkgraf
Our neonatal brains are evolved feedback systems endowed with aptitudes that develop competences for adaptively interacting with their environments like any other encephalized species. A biophysical (i.e. empirical) process – not a "transcendental condition of the possibility..."
Our brains are much more like a 'neural net wetware micro-subsystem' (of an environmental macro-system) than a monadic-modular hardware-O/S-software difference engine. No "pre-installation" necessary, like e.g. (Darwinian) cellular automata, autopoeisis, etc.
WTF? :chin:
Cool. Objects in general. Not the particular object. The hint was there; just making sure I understood it.
————
Quoting Possibility
With respect to the “....speculative metaphysics of Nature...” ** in the acquisition of “....theoretical knowledge of all things....” **, yes, absolutely. The judgements here are discursive, concepts relate to intuition, the imagination is “...reproductive...”, pure reason being the logical arbiter.
(**A841/B869)
————
Quoting Possibility
In Kant, “directional flow of energy” aside, this affect/desire is separable, as affects on the subject, and desires of the subject, differences in principles, origins and manifestations being rather obvious, I should think. The judgements here are aesthetic, concepts relate to each other, the imagination is “...productive...”, practical reason being the logical arbiter.
Aligning ourselves with Nature arises from....
“....If pleasure is bound up with the mere apprehension of the form of an object of intuition, without reference to a concept for a definite cognition, then the representation is thereby not referred to the object, but simply to the subject; and the pleasure can express nothing else than its harmony with the cognitive faculties which come into play in the reflective Judgement, and so far as they are in play; and hence can only express a subjective formal purposiveness of the object...”
(CJ, Intro, VII)
.....which just say Nature has an affect on our subjective condition as well as our cognitive system.
The subjective desires, on the other hand, arise from a different causality that Nature, such that its manifestations are not merely affects on the subjective condition, but outright determinations of it. As such this is the domain of the Kantian metaphysics of morals, under the purview of principles derived from pure practical reason, as opposed to the affects of Nature on us, which is the domain of the metaphysics of Nature, which is under the purview of principles derived from pure speculative reason.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave......when we really can’t prove a damn thing.
I don't know if you saw my previous emails about the similarities between Kant's noumena and the Tao as described in the Tao Te Ching. I think my familiarity with Lao Tzu makes me open to your way of seeing things.
Truth....
As he must, at least in humans, in keeping with his admitted metaphysical dualism. When he states that intuitions are sensible representations given from matter, and conceptions are intellectual representations given from thought, then intuitions cannot be intellectual without negating the very dualism on which his speculative metaphysics is constructed.
—————
....or Dare:
Intellectual intuition is merely a euphemisn for some possible phenomenon the understanding thinks a priori, in order to justify the construction of a conception it also thinks.
We wish to know about Nature;
Nature is composed of objects;
No object, hence Nature, can be known without being subjected to the categories;
One of the categories is quantity;
We know quantity relates to objects but we know quantity is not itself an object;
We construct objects a priori representing quantity, called schema, such that the relation can be determinable;
One schema of quantity is number, another is any general geometric figure, which are universal representations of a particular which is also a possible phenomenon;
That constructed schema is a “non-empirical intuition” ** by its a priori form alone, residing in imagination, having nothing whatsoever to do with sensibility, and the conception synthesized with it in understanding becomes a constructed conception, as opposed to a spontaneously generated concept arising from apperception;
As soon as the schematic object we imagine becomes an object in the world, it is no longer a “non-empirical intuition”, thus not subject to the categories alone but also to sensibility, and becomes a phenomenon;
Construction of conceptions in this way are synthetic a priori cognitions, and makes the science of mathematics, and the physical sciences grounded on it, possible.
** A714/B742
The mental image of a line as non-empirical intuition represents the line as a conception; the mental image of a number as a non-empirical intuition represents a unit of quantity as a conception, insofar as the certainty is given that the drawings on a piece of paper conforms exactly to both the images in imagination and the conceptions in understanding.
This is mathematical reasoning writ large, itself possible only from the category of quantity, from which its apodeitic certainty arises. There is no contradiction at all possible, from conceptions constructed from only a single category, just as there is no possible contradiction of identity, when matter is reduced to a single substance, the category in this case being quality. In Kant, these two are termed mathematical regarding their respective certainty, the other two are dynamic, regarding their respective contingency.
Can we call “non-empirical intuitions” intellectual intuitions? Sure...why not. While so doing removes the connection from Kant, it doesn’t do any real damage, as long as one is aware of the difference.
That certainly seems to be a possibility.
Quoting Mww
It is certainly arguable though that it could be an abstraction derivative of empirical intuitions. It seems to be one of those "chicken and egg" problems. Do you think we learn to see things as things via being taught to as well as possessing evolved constitutional aptitudes? As 180 says "seeing as" relies on a consitutional capacity for "gestalting". I don't think there's much question that animals also do it.
The term 'synthetic a priori' suggests that Kant thought these a priori intuitions are synthesized, which begs the question as to what 'material' they are synthesized from. It seems they become a priori only after the fact (of empirical experience), so to speak.
In any case when considering the question of intellectual intution, we are considering more abstruse (metaphysical) intuitions, such as Platos' Forms, Spinoza's one substance and Hegel's absolute spirit, and I think it's fair to say Kant had no truck with that kind of metaphysical intellectual "intuition" (speculation).
Doesn't that negate applied mathematics, which is so fundamental to science?
Nowadays, it seems being taught is all we consider in the acquisition of knowledge, which is the same as “how we see things”, I’m guessing. Which is precisely why both Kant and Schopenhauer had such a hard-on for the schools, because any formal, rote instruction, including parental, neglects the means for the sake of the ends. But teach yourself something completely devoid of extant experience, or learn what no one else knows, by invention or accident, it becomes clear mere instruction is self-limiting, in that it turns reason into a mere passive skill rather than an active faculty.
The U.S used to rank first in the world for high school mathematical comprehension. Now we are 15th.
—————-
Quoting Janus
Perhaps, but not in keeping with transcendental philosophy, in which is said, “intuition cannot think, and understanding cannot intuit”. If intuition is predicated on synthesis of empirical conditions, re: matter and form, given from sensibility, than intuition cannot think its representation, thinking is the properly the synthesis only of conceptions. It follows that if understanding cannot intuit, it cannot employ empirical conditions to abstract from.
So the question then becomes...why can’t understanding abstract from phenomena, which are the result of sensible empirical conditions. If this were the case, then we wouldn’t need to think the schema of the categories, because they would already be given as objects of perception. And even if there are numbers in the world, it is only because we put them there, which makes explicit their primal origin is in pure reason.
On that alternate view the conceptual dimension of the empirical is not given transcendentally, but immanently. The transcendental view seems to rely on the existence of something otherworldly or divine; which would mean that the distinction between transcendentality and transcendence is moot. (Of course in its '"ordinary" sense, as something not empirically observable 'transcendental' retains its coherence). No way to prove any of this, but it's an alternate view.
And if we make definite claims about the occulted nature of the empirical and of empirical intuitions, then we would seem to be overstepping our bounds and indulging in the kind of speculation, which is neither emprically (obviously) or rationally justified, that Kant would want us to eschew.
In short, applied mathematics is demonstration of mathematical reasoning. Doing the math which grounds the physical sciences presupposes the axioms and definitions from which those sciences are even possible, and which can only develop a priori. You are well aware, it goes without saying, that while we observe relationships in Nature, the laws which explain that relationships are not given by the observation alone.
They're deductive. Synthetic a priori, yes?
Does this relate to Wigner's 'unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences'?
I know I'm grasping at straws.
Quoting Janus
I'm sure that that is not what Kant means by transcendental. Doesn't he go to the trouble of differentiating 'transcendental' from 'transcendent' to avoid that implication?
Layman's explanation: what is transcendental is what is always already the case, what must be assumed to be so by any supposition, what is implicit in experience without being visible to it.
THAT conception? Not sure what conception you mean. If you mean my exposition of non-empirical intuitions, that is not a conception of the transcendental. The categories on which mathematical quantities are based are conceptions deduced transcendentally, but employed immanently, with respect to possible knowledge.
Empirical intuitions are not always conceptually mediated. All intuitions, as sensuous representations, depend on affections, which is the same as saying empirical intuitions are mediated by sensation. But yes, prior to conceptions becoming explicit, which occurs in the synthesis by imagination of phenomena to thought. We are not aware of the synthesis of matter and form that become phenomena; we only become aware of objects as particular empirical entities when they are thought under the explicit conceptions understanding thinks as belonging to them.
———-
Quoting Janus
By alternative view you mean Plato, Spinoza and Hegel?
Quoting Janus
Nor is it in Kant. The empirical is conditioned by the transcendental, by the categories, but the conceptual dimension is given from the spontaneous representations arising under the unity of apperception. Thinking. There is thinking transcendentally, but thinking is not itself transcendental.
Quoting Janus
Yes, even in Kant, immanently taken to indicate having to do with possible experience.
————
Quoting Janus
Sometimes, maybe, but not in Kant, who is quite adamant that the transcendental is not to be confused with the transcendent, which properly is otherworldly or divine.
————
Quoting Janus
Dunno about ordinary, but in Kant-speak, transcendental basically refers to the possibility of pure a priori principles, judgements and/or cognitions. So rather than “not empirically observable”, which is a partially correct, it would actually be not empirically possible. Technically, transcendental is the term applicable to the kind of reason which gives only a priori objects. Of all the terminology in Kant, that one warrants the most care.
I am not saying Kant didn't make the distinction, but I am questioning whether the distinction holds in light of the implications of his philosophy. Think about the differences between phenomenology as presented by Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau Ponty and Kant's philosophy.
Phenomenology posits the "transcendental reduction", which, as I read it, is transcendental in the "ordinary" sense as I outlined in brackets in the previous post.The objects of sense are understood, in their pre-experiential rawness, as transcendental, which renders the empirical as not separate from the transcendental, and undermines the notion of a duality of ideality and reality that lingers in Kant despite his refutation of idealism.
For example the purely formal notion of the transcendental subject in Kant is replaced in Husserl with the embodied subject, thus establishing the a priori nature of materiality.
Secondly, Schopenhauer is actually the one who contradicts himself in that respect. He claims that differences & multiplicity are spatiotemporal, & yet he posits that there are “eternal Ideas” or “Platonic Ideas.”
[b]“..., Art, the work of genius. It repeats or reproduces the eternal Ideas grasped through pure contemplation, ... .”
“Time is only the broken and piecemeal view which the individual being has of the Ideas, which are outside time, and consequently eternal.”
“The pure subject of knowledge and his correlative, the Idea, have passed out of all these forms of the principle of sufficient reason: time, place, the individual that knows, and the individual that is known, have for them no meaning.”[/b]
Thus, Schopenhauer not only asserts that an Idea has “passed out of all these forms of the principle of sufficient reason: time, place,” but he also says that there’s a multiplicity of them when he speaks of “Ideas” in the plural form. Schopenhauer therefore maintains that there is a multiplicity of things that are “outside time” & have “passed out of all these forms of the principle of sufficient reason: time, place, ... .” In other words, he maintains that there are differences & multiplicity that transcend space & time; consequentially contradicting himself when claiming that difference & multiplicity is spatiotemporal.
Quoting Tom StormGlad to hear that I could help you in finding any answers.
Yet to that point of yours. If, according to you, the brain constructs the world, then wouldn’t that brain itself have to already exist in order to do so? For, what’s non-existent can’t create, let alone do, anything, right? Consequentially, if so, the world, or both the materials out of which the brain is constructed & with which the brain interacts, would already exist & it couldn’t itself be a construction of the brain.
To try to understand Kant’s subject of the pure forms & concepts as the “hominid brain” completely undermines what Kant means when stating that we construct the phenomenal world.
For, in Kant’s sense, both the material & the formal elements of phenomena depend on such a subject & can’t exist without it; so that the subject is essential to the very creation, construction, or coming-into-being of such phenomena. Whereas in the sense of how the “hominid brain” is commonly understood, the world, or both the materials out of which the brain is constructed & with which the brain interacts, already exists independently of the brain; & therefore the world, or both the materials out of which the brain is constructed & with which the brain interacts, wouldn’t be a creation, construction, or come-into-being, because of the brain.
I completely agree with your point. I'm not in the least a materialist-reductionist or a brain-mind identity theorist. I might well have said 'the mind constructs....' but was making the point with respect to the brain, because of the acknowledged fact that the human brain is the most complex and sophisticated known natural phenomenon. Read the next comment again: 'It creates a world, the only one you'll ever know'. By that I mean, the mind synthesises and creates the only world you will ever know, but by pointing to the acknowledged complexity and sophistication of the brain, was making a rhetorical point.
So:
Quoting Mental Forms
Is exactly what I was getting at, and something I often say myself.
But the issue I'm having with Kant's philosophy of mathematics is another thing altogether.
Yes. The ubiquitous analogy......just from seeing five rocks here, and seeing four rocks there, it is impossible to cognize a certain totality of rocks from just those two observations alone. As well, the sensation on the back of your neck, an effect, allows you a cause via Hume-ian inference, but the sensation alone does not tell you what the cause is.
————
Sorry to take so long, but I have trouble unpacking that comment. It seems so backwards to me. I mean...for our experiences and therefore our minds. Experience is determined by the mind, experience presupposes mind (or, more accurately, reason), mind is always antecedent to experience, so it should be, our minds, and therefore our experiences.
To be as they are....
We cannot say how they are, but only how this relates to that, iff they each work a certain way, according to a theory. Maybe...to be as they seem?
The way our experience is tied together....
Experience isn’t tied together. This and that are tied together in order for there to be an experience. Maybe...the way our experiences are tied to each other?
Must reflect the way that says how objects in the world are tied together....
From this armchair, that’s just wrong on transcendental accounts, even if it apparently holds in phenomenological accounts. We never can properly say how objects in the world are tied together, but only how reason ties the representations of them together in accordance with observations. It is my understanding that phenomenology regards objects in themselves as that of which experience concerns itself, the finer theoretical tenets of such a metaphysic being unfamiliar to me. From that point of view, I suppose it is reasonable to say, the way our experiences are tied together says how objects in the world must be tied together. Still, where is the room for pure a priori cognitions, therefore where mathematical reasoning, in a paradigm where objects in themselves are the objects of experience? Hume’s Dilemma in spades, methinks.
Anyway.....probably much ado about nothing, that is, my misunderstanding the comment, yet still spending time talking about it.
Quoting Mww
Physics does that, though. And chemistry. In such a way that their behaviours - the behaviours of objects - can be explained and predicted through mathematical and symbolic analysis. We predict from the laws of motion how two objects will react if they collide. That prediction is what I presume Kant would call synthetic a priori. I posted a question about this on philosophy stack exchange.
Quoting Mental Forms
I didn't say that Kant claimed that. Concepts differ in their semantic content; I was referring to the supposed differences between "things in themselves", which if they exist, are not concepts but real things. We cannot conceive of differences between real things that are not spatio-temporal differences.
The reason why Kant fails to understand noumena is because he is bound to the rigidity of categorical thinking. He is quite "manichean" on this: the world we can know is boundaried and closed to possibilities beyond the definitions allowed by the simple understanding that sensual intuitions are blind without concepts and concepts are empty without sensual intuitions. This is what you get when logic rules theory absolutely. All that matters is clarity. Kant would have made a good banker (or better, a good anglo-american analytic philosopher. Kant started both traditions, the analytic and the continental philosophies).
But this noumena, what are its boundaries? He imposes limitations on human knowing reasoning that since there are no sensual intuitions, there is nothing for a concept to be about, but why is this true? For surely the only reason he had to posit noumena is because he had no choice: representations had to be OF something. Look a little closer and you see that noumena must be posited only because there is something in the phenomenal presentation that insists. Now look at noumena and what it "is". There is nothing it is not, for how is there to be a line drawn? His my apperception of my hand in this occurrent event of typing to be excluded from the encompassment of noumena?
Kant doesn't see that noumena is just a term for what is in the phenomenological "presence". Experience itself is thoroughly noumenal. There is an insight here that is elusive, slippery. One way to say it is this: we live an breathe metaphysics. We think of metaphysics as being impossibly remote (like Kant does in the transcendental dialectic) but this is all wrong, simply put.
What stands in the way of realizing this in the perceptual encounter itself is, in philosophy, this Kantian intractability.
What is called wisdom is far remote from what professional philosophers do.
Hmmm.....I see I’ve unintentionally inflicted an ambiguity. Yes, we can properly say, in accordance with the proper test methods and practices we invent, contingent on the temporal currency of our knowledge. Which accounts for our mistakes in our relatively proper sayings.
But, still, if we are not allowed knowledge of things in the world as they are in themselves, how can we be allowed to know how the things in the world are properly tied together? Which is the term “properly” being used irreducibly, in its strictest sense.
Practical reason does seem to be the ‘logical’ arbiter, but only to the extent that humans act logically - we can, but we rarely do, particularly when available attention or effort is limited.
But it seems like you’re quantifying ‘affects’ (effects?) or ‘desires’ as different properties attributable to the subject, where I’ve used ‘affect/desire’ in reference to a directional aspect of experience, as potential energy - attention/effort in a relation. It isn’t so much separable as reducible - alignment with Nature as described in the TTC is a step beyond Kant’s idea of ‘harmony’, recognising affect/desire for what it is: the flow of energy through an empty schema of logical and qualitative relations, of which the reader/observer is a part. Affect has a purposeful absence from the TTC - how we interpret the text, directing the flow of energy (attention/effort) through the schema, is precisely what is missing from that schema in relation to reality: ourselves.
Kant’s schema on the other hand, cannot account for the human limitations of affected, relative logic. It categorises affect as either ‘effects’ or ‘desires’, and reduces the harmony of being at one with Nature to an observed interplay between consolidated subject and object. Such are the ‘logical’ constraints of language, which positions the reader/observer always outside any description of reality (even when the subject is ‘I’). There is no room in Kant’s schema for the affected, relative reader/observer.
‘Directional flow of energy’ aside, indeed.
What a tantalising response. Can you say more about experience itself being noumenal?
This is true, but Kantian metaphysics has nothing to do with the logical restraints of language, per se. It is not concerned with the reader/observer, but of the thinker. The logical restraints of reason, now, which has no need of language, is itself sufficient causality for the thinking subject to be the immediate describer of reality, or, in fact, anything at all, hence cannot be outside such descriptions.
The TTC, as it’s called, is all well and good, but I think of a different paradigm. I don’t really know anything about it, so I shouldn’t even think that far.
That would be mysticism, no? Meister Eckhart wrote, help me God to be rid of God. Something in the former obstructed by the latter. What would that be?
But in the "contradiction" between finitude and infinity, one looks for the ground where the finite simply ends, and off everything goes to infinity. Given the finite, the limited, the well structured and familiar, I see no "place" where this can stand apart from infinity. Infinity does not have its termination anywhere, but rather "runs through" all that is. If infinity is taken as a mere extension of the familiar, as in a sequence of negative time moments that has no end or a spatial extension of "further ons" with no end (both Kant denies in any way describes noumena, of course) then all we have is a concept of infinity that is, if you will, finitized, made finite. Pointless to even bother taking seriously if this is the best one can do, and Kant thought this the case. Clearly not what Eckhart had in mind with God. With him there is something entirely Other. And this Other is not the vacuous noumena of Kant.
I think the thinking on this leads to a focus on the nature of finitude. What is it that makes a thing separate from its eternity?
And yet the thinker, even as the immediate describer of reality, is to an extent other than their description. Inclusive reality consists of schema + description + describer. Kant’s describer, the thinking subject, is at times logical, affected and relative. I think the key to his philosophy (in light of the TTC) is to recognise that when we describe a logical reality, we do so from an affected position, using a relative schema. To the extent that we claim a logical position ourselves as describer, our resulting description is also relative, affected. So long as we approach reality with this understanding, then Kant’s philosophy can guide us to think, intend or feel with clarity. But that’s not how most people read Kant.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Mysticism I am familiar with but I have no idea what the rest of what you say means but will read it again later and see if I can unravel it. I am not a philosopher and the idea of infinity has never captured my attention.
Which is to say, consciousness is other than its content. I think this an unnecessary reduction. A describer that does not describe is a contradiction, and a description that does not arise from a describer, is impossible. Parsimony, and good philosophy, suggests the thinker and his thoughts are, if not identical, than at least indistinguishable.
————-
Quoting Possibility
How would a logical reality even be recognized as such, if the system that views it isn’t itself logical? It would appear then, we do not describe a logical reality, but rather, we describe a reality logically. This method permits reality to be whatever it is, and grounds all descriptions on a relation between it, and the cognitive system that thinks about it.
————-
Quoting Possibility
A key to the empirical part of his philosophy, yes, and even if we describe reality logically, we do so from an affected position, yes. But I’m not sure what is meant by relative schema, in light of the TTC. And I for sure don’t wish to get into the whole Kantian schematism transcendental morass.
————-
Quoting Possibility
Which I take to be tacit admission we in fact do cognize logically. I’m guessing you mean to say our descriptions are nevertheless relative to the logic, which seems rather tautological, doesn’t it? Overlooking that, I don’t see where “affected” comes into play. Not sure how a resulting description can be affected, other than to say a result is affected by its antecedents. But that’s just a lame appeal to logical conditions, as it doesn’t tell us anything the syllogism......reality/affected position/resulting description......didn’t already inform.
But, as I said, I’m not familiar with what appears to be your philosophy-of-choice, so you’ll have to cut me some interpretive slack.
An addendum: There is today a strain of philosophy that think's Husserl opened up an extraordinary kind of thinking that is not simply theoretical, but revelatory (speaking of noumenal presence within imminence). From Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, where he gives some light to his "phenomenological reduction" (epoche) :
But perhaps, with the Cartesian discovery of the transcendental ego, a new idea of the grounding of knowledge also becomes disclosed: The idea of it as a transcendental grounding. And indeed, instead of attempting to use ego cogito as an apodictically evident premise for arguments supposedly implying a transcendent subjectivity, we shall direct our attention to the fact that phenornenological epoch lays open (to me, the meditating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience.
I don't know if any of what follows has already been covered but Kant's idealism is "transcendental". By transcendental he means the conditions for the possibility of experience. Transcendental idealism is not a claim about the world but about us.
Quoting Tom Storm
Things as they are in themselves are not accessible to us, only things as they are for us. Although they are not accessible to us they are an essential part of experience. In short, they do have physical form.
Quoting Tom Storm
The manifold of sensations are processed according the structure of the mind, what he calls the "categories of the understanding".
Quoting Tom Storm
I think he would regard this as a metaphysical question and perhaps he might address it as an antinomy. Reasoning on one side for consciousness continuing in death and on the other that death is the end of consciousness. If death is the end of consciousness then there would be no awareness or feedback. If consciousness survives death then it is either a continuation of our consciousness, in which case no noumental apprehension, or, it is a transformation of consciousness that allow direct apprehension. But this possibility cannot be determined by reason.
Quoting Fooloso4
Indeed and not just this question. :wink:
Quoting Fooloso4
So this is my understanding too. I am curious about what structures of the mind can mean when understood more deeply.
Quoting Fooloso4
Can we say from this that Kant's idealism is a form of naturalism?
Yes, there is disagreement. I am no pro, but I have read these and I will say this: Husserl can be very detailed, but also very direct. But when he is direct, it still takes some getting use to, and this is something of an understatement. What I mean is that in order to understand his epoche, you have to see it as a method, a very different way to actually "observe" the world, for it is not a matter of taking up things with their purposes and their familiar meanings "ready to hand" if you will; and it is certainly not the kind of thinking an empirical scientist does. Not at all, and this is hard for most people to understand. It is not a theory in the usual sense. It has an altogether different subject matter, and that is perception itself. Before a scientist sits down at her microscope, she has before here, prior to any application of all that science's paradigms provide, the perceptual field itself, which is complicated, because it is not just Kant's sensual intuitions. It is inherently eidetic as well (as Kant said long ago" intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty). Objects in the world are not objects at all until you understand that they are "predicatively structured". this means that the perceptual field that lays before you has an eidetic intuitive presence as well, and this is to be taken as an intuitive presence.
Husserl thought that when one achieves this phenomenological reduction, suspending all that is assumed and functional in normal affairs, and having before one only a "residuum" of the apperceptive foundation, one actually apprehends the transcendental ground of all experience. Let him tell it:
F[i]or the sake of further clarification, however, it should be added that we must distinguish "straightforwardly" executed grasping perceiving, remembering, predicating, valuing,
purposing, etc., from the reflections by means of which alone, as grasping acts belonging to a new level, the straightforward acts become accessible to us. Perceiving straightforwardly, we grasp,
for example, the house and not the perceiving. Only in reflection do we " direct" ourselves to the
perceiving itself and to its perceptual directedness to the house.[/i]
Heidegger would call what Husserl is talking about "presence at hand": When you pull away from the familiar use of things and just look at them and describe them. I read John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics and he says Heidegger thought Husserl believed in "walking on water" and this is a very big point: Husserl thought one could withdraw from the world's familiarity and behold the actual structures of the presence of the world (what Derrida will later call the metaphysics of presence). A very strong position to take. One might say close to a God's eye view, no? But there is something, frankly, truly spooky about this. I read in a letter from Husserl to I think it was Rudolf Otto, he wrote how his students were becoming Christian converts in their studies of phenomenology.
Anthony Steinbach wrote "Phenomenology and Mysticism" where he tries to defend radical spiritual interpretation of the epoche. These days, there is in the French post Husserlians like Michel Henry (The Four Principles of Phenomenology), Jean Luc Nancy Marion and others; prior to these there was ewmanuel Levinas, Husserl's student, I believe.
Anyway, you can tell where my tendencies lie--with Husserl. Heidegger was for me a profound reading. Nothing to equal, really, reading Being and Time. Changed the way I think about everything at the basic level. But Husserl made him possible and I do lean toward his radical what I call "revelatory" view on this. this pulling away from everydayness into a no man's land creates an unbridgeable chasm between the world and something Other.
I'm not sure what you are getting at. Since you say "understood more deeply" I assume you are not inquiring about what the categories are. Is it Kant's claim that they are the universal a priori condition for experience that needs to be examined? Or perhaps whether this is a claim about the mind as it is in itself, that is, noumentally.
Quoting Tom Storm
Properly qualified, I think we can. It makes no claims about or relies on anything supernatural. But some will object that it does not tell us how things really are, only how things appear to us.
Well, Kant did say this:
In due course, Kant lays out his 'determination' and says:
"Accordingly, we shall here be concerned with experience only and the universal conditions of its possibility, which are given a priori. Thence we shall define nature as the whole object of all possible experience." (299)
Therefore, objective truth is a special kind of experience:
So it is by this repeatability that we can have an objective reality and it eat it too. It is transcendental in the suggestion that we couldn't possibly be putting on such a fine show by ourselves.
In Kant’s day, naturalism was indicative of the sciences, from which he says....
“....Whether the treatment of that portion of our knowledge which lies within the province of pure reason advances with that undeviating certainty which characterizes the progress of science, we shall be at no loss to determine....”
....which implies the impending transcendental philosophy, in order to gain the respect of the sciences, must adhere to the same theoretical conditions. But it cannot be said Kant’s idealism is by that claim alone, a form of naturalism. Furthermore.....
“....Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences which have to determine their objects a priori. The former is purely a priori, the latter is partially so, but is also dependent on other sources of cognition....”
.....from which it should be clear, that while Kant’s idealism adheres to the same general principles for its exposition as the natural sciences, re: cause and effect, space and time, etc., it is very far from being a form of it. In fact, it is proved that the sciences themselves are predicated on the conceptions advanced by the metaphysics of pure reason, which reduces to.....no science is ever done without first being thought.
All that from the very beginning, and from the ending, is the conclusion that metaphysics proper is not and cannot be, a science in a domain of naturalism.
That is the essence of it. Thought is presupposed in everything "natural". This plays out extensively in phenomenology. But the real issue with this is with its rationalism, for 'thought' itself is also a particle of language that has the synthetic function of gathering particulars under a general. It is by abstraction from what is given that we arrive at our conceptualized world and all that is in it. But the whole from which reason and its categories is derived is a generative mystery (see, if you have interest, Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation where Fink takes Kant to a deeper level of analysis; see his "enworlding"), however, we have to (as Kant does, of course) extrapolate from what is before us to what has to be the case in order for this "representation" to be what it is, and reason is just one part of this, a formal part, empty. Far, far more interesting and important is the non rational nature what is in the world. The extraordinary affectivity is where we find the substance of our existence.
Kant took the formal logical nature of our judgments and played them out all the way to their impossible "beginnings" (logical beginnings, that is, impossible because beyond our judcgments are not able to apprehend, nor even conceive the possibility of their own genesis)-- but what happens when we do this with the other dimension of meaning?: The aesthetic, affective, the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, the passions and their depths, and so on?
Objectivity is universal subjectivity.
Why should that be? Why care what the non-ration nature of the world includes, if it must still be met with our particular, human, method of understanding it? Even if we can say we find the substance, or, that there is substance found, by its affectivity on us, it remains a condition of human nature to determine both what it is, and how it relates to other substances.
That non-rational nature is indispensable is given, but it isn’t all there is.
Thanks, yes, poor language use on my part, sorry. I should have written: What has Kant said about the structure of the mind that allows it to make sense of the noumenal world and 'construct' our phenomenal world? I was thinking more about its cognitive architecture, but perhaps this is too big a question. I have just skim read the SEP account of Kant's view of mind and it's very detailed and dense.
I know this is probably a silly question, but I can't help but wonder why Kant thought the world was divided in this way, between appearances and reality.
A quick answer. I have other things to do that my family things are more important. The pizza won't make itself.
Two things: First, he recognized that both those who argued for realism and those who argued for idealism had a point. He combines them in a synthesis. Second, he believed that reason had limits.
We know our descriptions are logically constructed, but we don't know whether what we describe, prior to our descriptions of it, is logically constructed.
So the question is, when considering the genesis of logic, on the assumption that we are not separable from the world in which we have our own genesis, is it more plausible that we arbitrarily impose logical structure on something that totally lacks it, or that the logical structure of our descriptions reflects a logical order in the precognitive nature of things?
The above is assuming that our orientation is naturalistic. If we wish to evoke some kind of super-naturalism, or transcendent realm, than that is a whole different kettle of unknowable fish.
Of course, if we don't want to answer that question, and wish to rest content with not deciding either way, what does it matter, what could it matter?
(BTW, when I speak of naturalism I don't mean it in the sense of the naturalism that is rejected by phenomenology; which is the idea that everything about human experience can be explained in the "third person" reductive or mechanistic terms of cause and effect).
Reason is empty. Necessary for dividing the world up into things and their properties, but without intuitions, empty, as Kant said. Add sensory intuitions and it is still empty. Interesting to imagine a world without value. No gratifications, but a landscape of variegations. One could still make logical propositions, true and false, and conversations could be paragraphs and pages long. But no caring, no interest, no experience of something being "good" or "bad". I imagine AI could be like this. Beneath the skin, I think cognitive scientists are closet Kantians, looking for a way to produce rational "functions" and thereby duplicating human intelligence.
But human intelligence isn't like this at all. Dewey had it right: our experiences are all "consummatory", that is, inherently aesthetic as well as pragmatic/rational.
Anyway, if one is looking for the essence of being human, it is not reason that drives our affairs. It is meaning-in-affectivity (which you mention above). Reason makes us more than "blooming and buzzing' infants, true. But affectivity is what is at stake, and the real question is Wittgenstein's: is there any value in the value of the world? It is a metaethical problem. Is what is good, Good?
A thinker is not identical to his thoughts, and any thinker who is unable to recognise this lacks a degree of self-awareness in my book. But either this is ‘an unnecessary reduction’, or it lacks parsimony - it can’t be both, can it?
A description does not arise wholly from a describer, but consists of the relation between describer and schema. To clarify, I’m not suggesting that describer, description or even schema exist without the other two. Reality is triadic - that’s my point. Any description of reality is in necessary relation to both describer and schema - neither of which are wholly included in that description, or its only source, for that matter.
Kant’s description is purely logical only beyond the fourth moment - beyond judgement, imagination and reason - when describer is pure affect and schema is pure relation. This is where the genius, the artist, resides. FWIW, the TTC proposes a purely logical schema in a relational description, most accurate when the describer is pure affect. This is the where the sage resides.
Taoism isn’t so much a ‘preferred philosophy’ for me as enlightening in relation to Kant. Kant’s CofJ explores the limitations of a purely logical description, where his first critique explored the limitations of a purely logical describer, and his second explored the limitations of a purely logical schema. What he didn’t appear to realise was that it was never a matter of the subject in a dyadic relation to object. Each critique highlighted an error in how we process knowledge, rendering affect/desire and qualitative relation indistinguishable, to some extent, in the name of parsimony.
No, we don’t, but there comes from the possibility, that damnable, cursed transcendental illusion, in that we know we construct logically predicated on our intelligence, then it follows that if reality is logically constructed, reality is its own form of intelligence. And then we are forced into that aforementioned kettle of unknowable fish we want to stay a country mile away from.
But wait!!! That reality may be constructed logically does not necessarily imply reality is its own intelligence, when it could just as possibly be that reality is constructed logically by an intelligence that so constructs in its own right. Now we’re up to two country miles.
And an additional mile for each and every instance of infinite regress which follows.....errr.....logically.
Quoting Janus
Bingo.
Hmmm. I won’t attempt to argue your assertion; you are quite welcome to it, and may even be able to justify it. But the qualified assertion is wrong. Kant says concepts without intuitions are empty. Actually, void, but, not quibble-worthy.
Quoting Astrophel
Momentarily granting the assertion, reason being empty with or without intuitions merely makes explicit the alleged emptiness of reason is unaffected by intuitions, which is correct, insofar as reason is unaffected by intuitions whether or not it is empty.
What do you mean by empty, and what do you think reason is, such that it could be empty?
————
Quoting Astrophel
Kant also accounts for that duality. So if Dewey got it right, but Kant got it right first.....
In which case, “I think” is an anomaly? A genuine falsehood? If it is not “I” that thinks, or, if it is not thinking that the conception “I” represents, then how is it possible to arrive at conclusions which demand such an unimpeachable origin? If “a thinker is not his thoughts” is a conclusion derived from your own thoughts, in keeping with the truth of the assertion, you are then left with the necessary implication that you are not a thinker. I wonder.....what degree of self-awareness am I missing, such that I do not recognize that this seemingly inescapable subterfuge, is of my own making?
—————
Quoting Possibility
The content is the synthesis of related schema, but it is the describer that synthesizes. Because it is absurd to suggest schema relate themselves, a rational consciousness in the form of a describer....for lack of a better word.....is absolutely necessary, otherwise the synthesis, the relation of schema to each other, thereby the description itself, never happens. A description is, after all, and for all intents and purposes, merely an empirical cognition.
————-
Quoting Possibility
While the first is true enough, the second implies the general tripartite human cognitive system is part and parcel of reality. I think this an altogether too loose rendition of the established definitions, myself. I think the empirically real holds with a different qualification than the logically real. If logically valid is substituted for the logically real, the dichotomy becomes false and immediately disappears, and reality indicates merely the naturally real. From which it follows necessarily, that the tripartite human cognitive system, being a metaphysical paradigm, is never found in natural reality. Which leaves the question, how is reality triadic, unanswered.
————-
Quoting Possibility
To be honest, I can see where this comes from. At the same time, however, it is reminiscent of the dreaded Cartesian theater, an abomination to pure speculative metaphysics. I mean....how would it be proved, that describer, and by extension, the subject itself, is affect? And affect on what? Pure in what way?
————
Quoting Possibility
Of course he did, and yes, it certainly is. The realization that the subject views objects a priori as possible objects he can think, and also views objects a posteriori as given objects he can perceive, is the very ground of transcendental philosophy, regardless of whose name it is used under.
Anyway....ever onward.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. That is a quote. This is really the basis of the transcendental dialectic. Quoting Mww
This would be a challenge to the idea that all you need is sensory intuitions and concepts and therefore you have meaning. Sensory intuitions as such have no value. My camera that monitors the front door could produce qualitatively then same thing: the knowledge of a machine, and we would all be very complex organic machines. This is if there were no value introduced into the knowledge experience. Without value, no caring, interest, meaning.
So, an agency of epistemic cognition that can synthesize intuitions into principles is an entirely empty affair. That agency has to be a valuating, valorizing agency to be human. Our world's most salient feature is that things matter. An analog might be that of a vehicle, full all the essential parts and functions, but altogether without the possibility of actual transportation.
Quoting Mww
Frankly neither of them understood the aesthetic. Wittgenstein did. Note that he was not simply a gifted intellectual. He was a true aesthete had all of the passionate complications that go with this. Three brothers committed suicide. He himself considered this. A wealthy family of great musical prodigality.
I like Dewey though, because he insists that we cannot analytically divide our world into the rational and other parts that are not rational. It is all one, and analysis is an abstraction with no independent ontology. But with him, the aesthetic is reduced to a pragmatic experience.
OK...couple things here of relative importance. First, and least important, insofar as yours is equally a direct quote, this to support my “concepts without intuitions” remark:
“....extension of conceptions beyond the range of our intuition is of no advantage; for they are then mere empty conceptions...” (B149, S23 in Guyer /Wood and Kemp Smith, S19 in Meiklejohn)
Second, your quote is found in the intro to Transcendental Logic, A51/B75 the claim that it is the basis of the Transcendental Dialectic, is doubly confounding. You see my reference to empty concepts is found clear up at B149, which is at the Transcendental Deduction but still in the Analytic. Dialectic doesn’t even begin until A293/B350. There’s a veritable bucketful of information between those three points.
Third, and most important, this part arose because you said reason is empty. Not knowing how such a claim could stand, I moved empty to concepts, because that is something Kant actually said. I can’t find a reference for reason being empty, and without a citation, I have nothing by which to judge your assertion, mostly because I don’t think Kant said anything of the sort. If he did, it would probably be in the Dialectic, I’ll give ya that much.
Quoting Astrophel
Ok, so if you’re saying reason is empty of meaning, I’d go along with that. Judgement gives meaning, at least to objects, in subsuming cognitions under a rule. Reason then, merely concludes the cognition and the rule conform to each other, from which is given knowledge. Understanding is the lawyer, judgement is the jury, reason is on the bench overseeing the whole process.
This business of operating from different philosophies is hard work.
Quoting Mww
I don't think it would necessarily follow from the real being logically constructed that it therefore must be either intelligent itself or constructed by an intelligence. So, I don't count those as the two lone possibilities; the real might simply be logically constructed.
Of course as we both agree, we don't and cannot conceivably know, and it doesn't really matter anyway, so...
Quoting Mww
If 'reason' is considered synonymous with 'logic', then reason would be empty, in the sense that it has no inherent content, but is merely a set of rules governing form; consistency being the main criteria.To say that nature might be, completely independently of us, logically structured would be, at minimum, only to say that it is consistent throughout and doesn't break it's own rules. Law-like behavior, in other words.
Well, this is all academic.
Quoting Mww
This synthesis of concepts and intuitions is basic to the Critique. Read the Dialectic and you find the speaks the same language. The reason you can't talk in good faith about the metaphysics of god, the soul and freedom is because these lack the sensory intuitions that is essential for making sense.
Quoting Mww
Well, concepts are empty without intuitions. Reason the synthetic function of concepts. Reason qua reason is empty. Hume said this earlier.
Quoting Mww
I am looking at what gives meaning to our world, and it isn't reason. Reason deals with principles and the form of judgment. Since when did the fact that a judgment is in the affirmative or a negation or a universal or a conditional have any meaning? These are empty, as modus ponens is empty, of content. Substance, call it sensory intuitions (the givenness of representations. Substance is really a vacuous term) does not deliver experience from vacuity. What does this is affectivity. Caring, despising, adoring, taking pleasure in, and so on.
The term meaning can go two ways. One is the dictionary definition, the other is the aesthetic or valuative. the former is what Kant has in mind. The latter is what I have in mind.
Quoting Mww
It isn’t derived from thoughts, but from practical self-awareness - when we can recognise thoughts as they emerge then we understand the ‘I’ that thinks is not identical to the ‘I’ that is aware of thought - but it isn’t true to assert that they are distinct conceptions, only that they are not identical.
Understanding consists of more than what can be asserted, let alone proven.
Quoting Mww
Your understanding of describer, schema and description here is limited to mind, with describer elevated to an encompassing rational consciousness. What I’m suggesting here is that this triadic relation extend to include human reason instead of appointing it outside arbiter - an additional Copernican Turn, as it were. The resulting description, more than merely an empirical cognition, would be a five-dimensional ‘geometric figure’ of potentiality, ‘drawn’ as a relation between consciousness and potential schema (within six-dimensional ‘meaning’).
I’m not suggesting schema relate themselves, but that the idea of schema need not be limited by logic. Nor the ideas of describer or description, for that matter. Once we recognise the limitations of human knowledge/potential set out by Kant, we can strive to better understand the reality beyond it - as Copernicus (and then Newton) did with human observation/measurement in relation to time.
Quoting Mww
It probably is too loose. I’m suggesting that the general tripartite human cognitive system is a model for a similarly triadic system of reality that is inclusive of human cognition, rather than limited by it. I agree that the empirically real (4D) is qualitatively different to the logically real (5D), but the correlation is not all that difficult to navigate as a geometrical schema. You cannot accurately describe the human cognitive system from an assumed rational consciousness within it, just as you cannot accurately describe the solar system from an assumed stationary location within it.
I think that the inaccuracy of Kant’s system comes from assuming a central, immovable position to ‘rational’ human consciousness. I would argue that if we go back and follow a similar process to Kant’s Copernican Turn in light of Darwin’s (temporal) de-centralisation of human experience, it can allow for an alternative reading of Kant. I would suggest that logic is one of three conditions for human understanding (wisdom), alongside natural affect and qualitative relativity. Surely ‘good’ philosophy strives towards this level of wisdom, and is not limited to only what can be logically asserted or proven?
Quoting Janus
Quoting Mww
Crap. My bad. I went from describing to constructing, without due diligence. Let’s just go back to the point where we agreed, and let it go at that, or, continue on but talk about one thing at a time.
———-
Quoting Janus
Reason isn’t the set of rules, rules being the purview of the understanding, the only purely logical faculty in this particular speculative metaphysical system.
Logic in and of itself, being the form of thought, is empty of determined content, but still contains the rules for determining experience itself, which is the overall endgame of the cognitive system as a whole, that is, an explanation for the acquisition of knowledge from a transcendental point of view.
Reason isn’t synonymous with logic, but stands as the terminus of an established, albeit philosophical, logical system:
“....reason (is) the whole higher faculty of cognition, the rational being placed in contradistinction to the empirical....”
“....In every syllogism I first cogitate a rule (the major) by means of the understanding. In the next place I subsume a cognition under the condition of the rule (and this is the minor) by means of judgement. And finally I determine my cognition by means of the predicate of the rule (this is the conclusio), consequently, I determine it a priori by means of reason....”
.....in other words, for any object of experience, this is a description of how the process is represented when we talk about it. Gotta think it without all the silly words; we think, we feel, we know, we guess.....all those are innate in us, so how they arise as conditionals, and how they condition each of us as individuals, can be demonstrated in a theory. Simple as that.
A posteriori:
First, the aesthetic representation:
Perception of an object;
Synthesis of sensation with intuition, giving a phenomenon;
Second, the analytic of the aesthetic representation:
Synthesis of a phenomenon with a category (the rule), giving one or more conceptions (the conditions of the rule), represented by “I think”;
Subsume the given synthesis under the various schema of the conceptions, giving a cognition, represented by “I’m thinking (of, or, that);
Judge the cognition by the relation of its content, represented by “the of, or, that I’m thinking, is....” ;
Determine a priori whether or not the object perceived and the object cognized conform to each other according to the rules, represented by “the of, or, that I cognize, I know as.....”.
Which reduces the whole process to....that which I first perceived has become an experience.
So it is clear...reason is never empty. If it is, experience is impossible, an absurd contradiction. Nevertheless, just because reason can never be empty with respect to this philosophy, does not eliminate reason from being empty with respect to some other philosophy. And that other philosophy would necessarily define reason as befits it, which immediately makes that reason different from this one. Hence, the question about what reason is, such that it could be empty, for which there was no satisfactory answer.
————-
Needless to say, metaphysics is not susceptible to empirical proof. None of the above, being 250 years old, may be even close to the case, in fact. Yeah.....and??????
A question for non-Kantians.
What would a thought emerge from, and with what do we recognize it as such?
Can I ever think, and be unaware that I think? If not, then when I think I am necessarily, and simultaneously, aware of it. Even granting that as practical self-awareness, it remains that it is only the singular “I” that thinks and is at the same time the very same “I” that is aware of thoughts.
But you are correct in one regard, insofar as the passive consciousness of thought in general is not the same as actively thinking about things, in such case awareness moves to the objects thought, and not the thinker of them. So in regard to this difference, let it be that conscious self-awareness is a different conception than the “I” that thinks objects and is aware of objects thought. A conception which fits the former is represented by “ego”.....technically transcendental ego.....and the latter conception is represented by “I”.
Now it is possible to relegate “I think” to a particular cognitive faculty, that is, understanding, while the ego that is self-aware of thought in general remains merely a representation of a conception of pure reason itself, simply labeled “consciousness”. Doing so answers the question from where do thoughts emerge, and they are recognized as such merely from that emergence. An added bonus, because thought is a manifold of occurrences, bundling them all together in one representation eliminates multiple iterations of “I”, each one thinking its own particular object. This way, the “I” that thinks a thing is the same “I” that thinks all things.
————
Quoting Possibility
And I admit that everything I write that is not a quote, is nothing but opinion. I ain’t no scholar myself.
Actually, in good faith is the only way these things can be talked about. We just can’t know anything empirically about them, because they are never accompanied by sensory intuitions, hence can never be phenomena. Intuitions are not necessary for making sense in a purely logical domain. You know.....“abolish knowledge to make room for belief...”.
“.....Of far more importance than all that has been above said, is the consideration that certain of our cognitions rise completely above the sphere of all possible experience, and by means of conceptions, to which there exists in the whole extent of experience no corresponding object, seem to extend the range of our judgements beyond its bounds. And just in this transcendental sphere, where experience affords us neither instruction nor guidance, lie the investigations of reason, which, on account of their importance, we consider far preferable to, and as having a far more elevated aim than, all that the understanding can achieve within the sphere of sensuous phenomena....”
We can, after all, talk about the metaphysics of justice sensibly. After that, we can be directed to its intuitive examples.
————
Quoting Astrophel
That’s fine; it isn’t reason’s job to give meaning.
Quoting Astrophel
That’s fine, too. Not sure what a theory constructed to demonstrate it would look like, but then....I don’t have to. Affectivity may very well be the ground for modernizing extant theories, which in general happens all the time, but I’d be very surprised to see a metaphysical paradigm shift because of it.
At the moment I've lost track of what we were agreeing, and what we were disagreeing, about
anyway. Maybe it'll resurface later...
Quoting Mww
You're right; I wasn't thinking deeply enough. Reason (considered as the activity of reasoning) is not restricted to the merely logical, it may be analogical, imaginative, associative, metaphorical, poetic or even irrational.
I really like this post of yours and want to follow up on an idea I'm exploring. I noticed in the Wiki entry on noumenon that the original derivation is 'an object of nous'. In the original sense that means something very different from the way that Kant uses the term - which is why Schopenhauer complains that Kant treated the word as if it had never been defined previously. The quoted passage from Schop. upthread seems to nail the issue.
But I want to explore just what is an 'object of intellect'? Here I want to suggest a somewhat novel definition and would like you to criticise it. I am of the view that numbers, logical principles, and natural laws (to name a few) are examples, in that they are real, but are only perceptible to a rational intellect. In other words, you and I, as sentient rational beings, are able to grasp concepts such as the concept of prime or the Pythagorean theorem, whereas a dog or a monkey cannot. And that is what I understand 'intelligible objects' to be. (See Augustine on Intelligible Objects, which has influenced my thinking considerably on this question.)
You see, this is derived from the Platonist conception of noumenon, in which the 'objects of intellect' are pure concepts. But the mistake that is often made is to believe that this says that such objects exist in an ethereal, other-worldly realm - which in my view is an error both profound and ancient. It is even a mistake that I think the Aristotelian objection to Platonic forms falls into. But nevertheless, I find the hylomorphic conception of objects as matter combined with form to be generally congruent with this understanding.
The upshot is, or one of them, that sentient rational beings such as ourselves parse experience in light of these intellgible objects. Generally we do that quite unconsciously (which is another meaning of 'transcendental' in Kant) - like, the mind calls upon these internalised forms in order to interpret what anything means. So in this understanding, the sensory element of perception perceives the material form of particulars, but the intellect grasps the form/essence/idea. Which is actually very close to classical hylomorphism (but not so much to phenomenology which is where your interests seem to lie.)
I'm reading a very interesting book Kant's Theory of Normativity, which goes into Kant's appropriation of hylomorphism in depth, maybe I'll find some answers there. But as it stands, I'm considering the (rather shocking) notion that Kant doesn't really understand the classical sense of the term 'noumenal' as I've tried to outline it ('shocking' because of the temerity of someone like myself suggesting that Immanuel Kant could be wrong about something of this magnitude.)
Metaphysics of justice? I don't know what this is about. Kant doesn't go in this direction at all. He is not a metaphysician. Your quote refers to the transcendental dialectic where he covers God, freedom and the soul without compunction. Quite devastating, really.
Quoting Mww
Then Kant is not the place to look for it. Not that I don't enjoy reading him, and he is very important, and opened lots of doors for more than century of dominance. But rationalism of any kind will have to deal with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche et al.
Quoting Mww
That would be Existentialism.
I really don't think like this at all. If I were to say what it is I disagree about it, it would get rather involved. I read philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, and onward. I like the French Husserlians like Michel Henry and Jean luc Marion., as well as Emanuel Levinas. Others, too.
But regarding Augustine's thinking: One objection is that reason simpliciter, that is, considering it apart from all else, is an abstraction, lifted out of palpable experience for analysis, but the analysis does not make itself an independent ontology from the palpable whole out of which is was abstracted. We conceive of what is rational by identifying the structures of judgment and thought, BUT: these structures are themselves the product of the processes that cannot be identified. As Wittgenstein said, logic shows itself only, but not in a way that allows for an analytic of its own nature. Logic, and this is straight from Kant, is at the most basic analysis, transcendental.
Another objection lies in the revealed nature of the way things appear: What is the "value" of reason? When Augustine argues that reason is what sets us apart from fence posts and dogs and cats, and from God, it is the "rational mind" he sets forth as what makes the determination. But what has to be shown is how reason is by its nature worthy of being determinative in this way: Reason is entirely without content. In Kant's terms, it is "empty". It has no meaning whatever until empirical contents are there to be synthesized with it. That we are able to grasp the Pythagorean theorem shows reason to be useful! But usefulness to what end? Meaning is derived not from reason, but from the world and its value. If I were to think of what God is, it would certainly NOT be a hyperrational entity, for reason qua reason has no value at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Since you asked, my thinking has a progression:
Level one, reason is an abstraction derived from the pragmatic operations of the mind. Walk into a room, and a proper analysis of all you see lies in the way you would deal with them in a practical way. You "know" a blackboard for what you can do with it, same goes for lights, stairs and furniture and everything. The existnece of a blackboard, the "isness" of it is this pragmatic relationship. Language is essentially pragmatic, useful, and yes, we are better at it than cats and dogs who do not think symbolically. But two things: First, agency. What am I if not significantly a logocentric agent whose very self is a language structure? Second, language seems essential to carry one to higher expressions of existence. What THIS is about takes the argument to its next level.
The entire issue turns to what the self is and what it experiences. A phenomenological analysis of value, the self and language.
Intriguing declaration, that. Care to enlighten?
———
Quoting Astrophel
That just implies Kant talks of nothing but reason, and doesn’t talk about where meaning might be given. As big a deal as philosophy was in his day, it boggles to think he didn’t address it in some fashion. If it can be said meaning is synonymous with, or reducible to, value, there’s a veritable plethora of Kantian references for these. And of course, meaning in its common sense of mere relation, is covered extensively in his epistemology.
But this.....
Quoting Astrophel
....makes explicit you consider meaning is in fact reducible to value, which is fine by me. Then it becomes a question of whether value itself is reducible, to what, and in what sense. And more importantly, with respect to this thread anyway, is whether the sense of meaning reduced to the sense of value is found in Kant, and the form in which it is found. But from your point of view, the significance would reside in the possibility that the sense of value found in Kant is also found in existentialism.
Those questions, I think, in accordance with proper dialectic decorum, would mandate their own separate discussion.
:100:
@180 Proof
The question would then be whether we are part of the world.
If so, a claim about us would be one also about the world.
If no, what does it mean if we are thought separately from the world.
The transcendental idealist Gerold Prauss would say that transcendental idealism makes claims about both the world and us.
What do you do with that chasm that manifestly separates me from this coffee cup? Cup there, me here. But then we have to deal with the entanglement of "me" and the cup, and "me" deserves double inverted commas because it does not show up on our perceptual radar. But clearly the difference is there.
Moving towards an apophatic approach. The questions is, what Makes the difference. Keeping in mind that the perceptual act comesbefore any supervening physicalist reduction.
It must be a difference within a unity.
Yes, but what is the difference in the unity? The only way to discover this is by observation and description. One has to step into Husserl's epoche. This is radical departure from the usual discursivity. One takes the world as it is laid out as an intuitive landscape. If interested, take a look at his Cartesian Meditations.
Gerold Prauss has an interesting approach in this respect:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GermanIdealism/comments/ke93ks/gerold_prauss/
It is a claim that as part of the world we do not have access to other things in the world as they are in themselves. It is always as they are for us.
There is a transcendental-idealistic approach, by the already mentioned Gerold Prauss, who has similarities with Fichte, and who refrains from the traditional thing-in-itself, and there are only things apprehended in themselves as objective things.
Here is a small introduction to it:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/654753
Thanks for the link. I took a quick look. Do you consider him a "Kantian"?
He is considered at least one of the most important Kant experts. But he goes beyond Kant. So he is not a Kantian in the traditional sense, but a transcendental idealist.
He recently received the Kant Prize in Oslo from the German Kant Society.
I consider Prauss to be the most important idealist at present. He combines Kant's pioneering insight into the fundamental spontaneity of subjectivity and Aristotle's forms or formal causation.
He always views consciousness as intentionality. In principle, Prauss starts from only two concepts: Point and Extension. From these two concepts, an impressive pantheistic-idealistic worldview is rigorously developed.
A point that extends itself first to temporality (A = extension within the point) then to spatiality (B = extension outside the point); a temporal point (A), therefore, that finally extends itself to three-dimensional space (B).
This, in short, is Prauss transcendental geometry, which structures all consciousness.
This is what I am getting at. How much of what you say sheds light on the "Basic Questions for any Kantians"?
What would human civilization and culture amount to without it? What is it that enables discovery of novel facts?
Quoting Astrophel
This, I don't understand. What of pure mathematics? Isn't it an entire discipline solely dependent on reason?
One philosopher I've noticed, but have not yet been confident to tackle, is Sebastian Rodl. Of his most recent book, the abstract reads:
If by "us" what is implied is "the transcendental mind" (or "ego" as per Husserl) instead of 'the phenomenal mind', then that aspect of "us" is not "part of the phenomenal world". Kant, it seems to me, begins with Platonic assumptions (supersensible forms) which he transforms into "categories of reason", etc.
Well, I don't see how insofar as "us" is "transcendental" and only inferred from phenomena like "noumena" (re: non-phenomenal "world"). Kant explicitly argues that noumena (i.e. pure reasons) are inaccessible to experience. Anyway, Prauss isn't advocating / critiquing Kantianism, so I don't see the relevance of his opinion.
Possibly not all that much but it is interesting to read about Prauss. I have a superficial interest in idealism in general - in appreciating its attractions and logic.
I did not mean to imply that he is not worth reading. But if one wants a better understanding of Kant, the old complaint applies: too much to read and too little time. As I indicted, I quickly glanced at the article and cannot say whether it is a good source for understanding the basic questions for Kantian or not.
Not true. He criticizes Kant in the sense of making his ideas argumentatively tenable.
Prauss is presented in a book calledKantian Subjects Critical. Philosophy and Late Modernity by KARL AMERIKS
An important essay by him is also included in a collected volume on Kant's legacy: Gerold Prauss - The Problem of Time in Kant. In: Kant's Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck. Edited by Predrag Cicovacki
Prauss's main works contain a constant engagement with Kant's transcendental aesthetics, logic, and also ethics.
Karl Ameriks also says: "I will also indicate how those aspects are related to Prauss's work on Kant, and thus how they contribute to an epistemology that manages to be both genuinely Kantian and of contemporary significance" (Karl Ameriks - Current German epistemology: The significance of gerold prauss)
Look at his ethics. The good will, duty, the categorical imperative, no, Kant is a rationalist for a good reason: he doesn't understand the value foundation of being human.
Quoting Mww
Not reducible to value. I think it is very important to understand that when analyze experience as experience, we are not going to generate anything that is what experience is. Analysis is an abstracting from the given preanalytic actuality, dividing it into parts and ways experience presents itself. the actuality of experience is transcendental. these functions we witness in judgment we call logic, co0ncepts, principles, and so on, but this is just taking up something AS a particle of language. The actuality itself is not this. There is no actuality called logic; rather, logic is a term "made" from observations of judgment and thought.
So value, reason, pragmatics, all terms that are abstractions of an original whole whcih is not reducible to anything. So when I say value is far more important (for it is a word that signifies importance itself) in describing a human being I don't mean say nothing else matters. Just that, if you will, this business of mattering, matters more than what else can be said. I think any undertaking one can take on, the value question is always begged: why bother at all to proceed? The question that haunts metaphysics is, why thrown into a world with this powerful dimension of affectivity? A rational inquiry into reason is certainly interesting and useful, but would be nothing at all if no one cared.
This is to some extent my own instinctive sense of reason. I find it interesting how many believers with a philosophical bent still attempt to use reason to demonstrate that a belief in God is rational and necessary. But then what? Even if reason demonstrates that God is necessary, could it not be that a responsible human says 'fuck off' to the deity?
Quoting Astrophel
This also resonates with me. Some might argue that reason is at war with affectivity and that the latter must be tamed by rationality as it too readily leads to conflict and reactive behaviours with ourselves and others. Affectivity is surely the prime mover behind the best and worst in human behaviour as it tends to activate a transcendence of personal and cultural limitations and allows us to make 'impossible' choices for good or ill.
The so-called "Copernican Revolution" turns out to have been shown to be a singularly brilliant, epoch-making 'solution in search of a problem' which, I think, in very recent contemporary terms in the wake of the Kantian critiques of Kantianism mentioned above, has been put to bed for good by 'speculative realists' (i.e. post-correlationists, e.g. Q. Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, G. Harman et al). Heresy! :scream:
I don't mean it this way. I mean, reason as such has no value, just like musical score without the performance.
Quoting Wayfarer
So there you are, studying pure mathematics. What would a full analysis tell you about this event? What drives it? One is not driven by the logical structure of the event. One interested, has a desire to know, is fascinated by the elegance of the complexity of mathematics, and so on. One might be tempted to call this will to power. But keep in mind that Nietzsche was a very sick man who spent his life seeking the power to overcome his many illnesses. His "aggressive metaphysics," if you will , and contempt for Christian passive metaphysics compromised his objectivity. But this leads to a discussion about affectivity and its analyses, for there are many kinds emotions, attitudes, moods, desires, drives.
To me, the whole issue rests with this: a study of affectivity and its aesthetics. Therein lies the final philosophical work, for "the beautiful" and "the good" as well as their darker counterparts are terms (see the brief above) that are, see the above, derived from a primordial transcendental whole (one way to say, nothing escapes noumena).
Put to bed, yes, by good parents, good believers in the efficiency of parenting, exhausted by the demands of an errant "child".
————-
Quoting Astrophel
Rationalist for good reason, because the conditions intrinsic to a pure subjectivity, are the only possible ground from which representations for value foundations for being human are to be found, which are, the moral feeling, conscience and respect. See “The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics”, XII, A., 1780, in Thomas Kingsmill Abbot, at Gutenberg.
To say he didn’t understand a thing because it doesn’t conform to a different criteria is mere disagreement. To say he didn’t understand a thing at all, when the exposition in which it is given is unknown to the claimant, is acceptable. To say he didn't understand a thing, in disregard of the exposition of it by the claimant, is dishonest.
———-
Quoting Astrophel
As my ol’ friend Phoebe would say.....well, DUH!!!!. To take apart a house doesn’t give you a house. When experience, or anything else conditioned by something, is analyzed, all that’s determinable is that which makes those things possible. How important can it be to understand such a proposition, when the act of it is its own apodeictic proof?
Quoting Astrophel
Which supports the notion that, neurobiology/physics aside, human mental machinations adhere to a representational theoretic. Representations presuppose that which is represented, which makes this......
Quoting Astrophel
.....a perfect example of it, in that words merely represent the something taken up. Humans cannot communicate with that which makes communication possible, just as you say, the actuality itself (communication) is not this (communicating).
An aside: consider that the only reason there are words, is because it is impossible to communicate in the images of pure thought.
—————
Quoting Astrophel
Given the concession above, let it be that reason fulfills the initial condition antecedent to all that reduces to it, but the reducibility of which is itself unintelligible. It is clear, in this sense, that to analyze reason the faculty gives the antecedents which makes the faculty possible, but to analyze reason the condition, gives nothing, insofar as there are no antecedents for it.
Of course, those who reject uncaused causes, while still unable to prove a sufficient cause, find themselves in an awkward position indeed. Maybe best to just stick a finger in the dike, and accept that even if the cause, in this case reason itself, was actually known, it wouldn’t make any difference.
————
Quoting Astrophel
Not if the value question has its answer in the very domain from which it is asked. Every otherwise rational, cognizant human, values, which makes every value question, answerable.
Quoting Astrophel
This in incoherent. There’s something missing. What haunts metaphysics is the impossibility of its empirical proofs, but the rest....dunno.
————
So.....your turn. Where does powerful dimension of affectivity fit in all the above?
If that deity is simply a metaphysical embodiment of reason (??) then I suppose we would have to do what "it" said, I mean, this would be an analytic truth, for this god would really KNOW what it is that knowing is all about, so to defy what it says would be a willful contradiction, which, by this weird standard, would be what sin is reduced to....and tautology would be the df. of God's grace?? The massive absurdity of this revealing, I think. A perfect world without meaning beyond the agreement of concepts.
"Fuck off?" Enter Dostoevsky's Underground Man. This grand struggle we are thrown into is nothing so utterly and stupidly trivial as a Kantian philosophy suggests. (Kant, so against metaphysics, yet draws up in his antimetaphysics a sterilization of our humanness.)
Quoting Tom Storm
I think something like this is right, and Kant would agree. For him, a moral act must be born of duty, and I do have some respect for this: Our greatest philanthropists, like Bill Gates and his foundation, do make a big difference in the world and I am impressed by what money can do, by by them I am not impressed in the least. Those that are truly impressive are the ones who go into the worst environments to help. Doctors without Borders, for example.
But those I really admire are certainly NOT dispassionate and Kantian. They are DRIVEN in the best possible way. Often Christian (bad metaphysics forgiven here. They are not metaphysicians), but their hearts powerful engines of motivation. It doesn't bother me that their theology has holes.
Metaphysical Elements of Ethics is a good one. Thanks!
I had to read around a bit to make sure I gave Kant his due. Duty rises from the absence of sentiment and motivation or anything outside the pure call of reason. But elsewhere he makes some concessions, but these seem incidental. "Disinterested benevolence" and "all duty is necessitation and constraint" are the ways Kant talks about feelings. It is our duty (that issues from pure reason) to do good whether we love others or not, and by love we can put any of the outreaching emotional attitudes.
**I find myself behind this very strong claim: Reason is the handmaiden of affect; it is a tool, and I am close to saying "and nothing more" but since I think our intellectual constitution is bound up with human agency itself (that is, to be a person at all, one must have a rational constitution which is essential for having an identity; this is another very interesting argument) that allows us to act on affect (here, compassion, empathy, caring, sympathy, love, commiseration, and the like), and think through to its realization, I cannot do this. Kant gives reason for this privileged position, but reason is empty (as he makes very clear repeatedly), and as "pure" all the more so (because explicitly so; indeed, I believe you will find that his concessions to feelings and conscience are only because they are necessary in the service of pure morality against the weakness of our own imperfect moral agency. We are not angels! if holy is defined as rationally perfect).
I am afraid I am quite on the opposite end of this from Kant.
Quoting Mww
I said he doesn't understand the value foundation of being human. Not that he doesn't understand a thing. If I said something like this, it was in context (or, I was being rhetorical?).
Quoting Mww
Kant would like to divide the world and I do not abide by divisions. What I say our analyses do not give us the world on a given analysis' terms I do not mean to endorse the Kantian phenomenon/noumenon division, as if language cannot possibly be about a thing in itself, but only about a representation. I rather mean to say that language fails in its useful grasp of things to tell us what a sensible intuition is. The real "behind the real" is not a remote noumena, but an immanent one.
Language has its own interpretational possibilities, bound up with culture and history, and interpretations come and go. But then there is the intuition as presence. This is a Husserlian point and it reveals something I think is essential to the matter of foundational philosophy: An idea may be false, but the presence of the false idea is real in the construction of an occurrent experience (like my writing this on the computer now) and is no less real than the sensory intuitions that ideas synthesize with to make the experience. So the error of language may lie in its interpretation, but, says Husserl, the actual language event as an intuited presence is apodictic.
The point of this goes to my claim that Kantian noumena need to be delivered from the dark reaches of the impossible (where analytic philosophy happily puts it. Dennett calls it "pre personal"). Noumena has no limits. Language is noumenal.
Quoting Mww
Then what does one do with this? That is, which way will you take, the analytic road or the continental road? Analytic philosophy simply resigns itself to this impossibility, and after a hundred years or so of tearing Kant apart, simply decides to give philosophy to science. Continental philosophy got very interesting.
Taking something AS is Heidegger's jargon.
Quoting Mww
I don't know what an image of pure thought could even be. Sounds like the purity of the thought would have to be first understood. But what could this be? Kant doesn't talk like this as he maintains the pure reason can only be witnessed in an embodied form.
Quoting Mww
I think there is an end to this, and that lies with Derrida. At the point where we start circling round and round, and the hermeneutic tail of the serpent is grasped in its own jaws, we have to say uncle and admit that the error lies in our interpretative pov. The way out is to drop a pov. This is what Buddhists and Hindus do (not to put too fine a point on it). The one in the west to discover this is Derrida. Language at this level of analysis is indeterminate. It can be very determinate once contextualized, but when contexts run thin, or run out altogether (uncaused causes?? When this steps into thinking, then apodicticity itself has been abandoned), one has to pull back and see if something has changed in the world in light of this impossibility. Kirkegaard called this a collision between reason and actuality.
I say, Husserl was right, and I can't say what this is because it would take too long. You find throughout existential thought this motif of the qualitative movement (which started with Kierkegaard, though he was an amalgam of so much prior). Sartre called it reflective consciousness, Heidegger called it authenticity, Levinas talks about totality and infinity; and so on. But Husserl and his epoche mostly explicitly makes the idea clear.
Quoting Mww
By domain I guess you are referring to a context in which values are conceived. But these are not at issue. At issue is what makes value what it is. The question of value has an independent analysis. It begins with G E Moore and the non natural quality of value in ethics. This is a discussion of metaethics.
Quoting Mww
For this, a discussion of metaethics is needed. When you say empirical proofs, there is in this the ethical dimension of experience. What is this? It is value. What is this? A proof, a transcendental analysis, is called for, keeping in mind what Kant had in m that was beyond analysis, the pure forms. Here, it is the "pure" value, the good. But where pure reason is empty, the good (and the bad) is palpable.
In a way, yes. When I think what I am aware of is thought and its phenomenal effects. But thought is the result of thinking - when I am aware of thoughts, thinking is inferred. So I predict what that thinking would most likely be, based on existing conceptual structures. Time is not an issue here - all awareness at this five-dimensional cognitive level is simultaneous.
If we’re honest, it is thought and not thinking that we’re aware of in most cases when we say ‘I think’. The ‘I’ that thinks is aware of thoughts, but not directly aware of thinking. When we talk about ‘thinking’ as philosophers, mostly we’re using our existing concepts to substantiate the inference from an awareness of thoughts. Awareness of thinking involves much more than an isolated cognitive system - a more complex and interconnected ‘I’.
By practical (transcendental) self-awareness I’m referring to meditative practices or deep philosophical self-reflection, beyond conceptualisation. This awareness is practical in the sense that it’s temporally located, whereas awareness of thought need not be. We entertain some correlations by thinking (forming connected ideas), integrate plenty of others unexamined, and ignore, isolate or exclude the rest according to affectivity.
Because Kant’s system brackets out this affectivity and strives to isolate the cognitive system, it is largely ignorant of the broader context in which thinking occurs. Hence the question:
Quoting Mww
Thoughts emerge from correlations and connections between qualitative (non-conceptual) ideas. We recognise thoughts as a form of connected ideas with our capacity for understanding beyond cognition: an awareness that thinking is not the only method for correlating ideas - nor necessarily the best. Kant barely touches on this capacity in CofJ - but in backing away from it reveals his own affect: a personal preference for pure reason over the good. This capacity for human understanding that looks at the world as an embodiment of the Good and the Beautiful - from a position of pure, non-judgemental logic - is Kant’s event horizon.
I find myself somewhere in between, proposing a triadic model. Kant claims that pure reason has primacy as the structure of reality; you claim the substantiation of reality is affectivity. Both of you then appear to direct humanity towards embodying the good - an impossible task thwarted by this apparent opposition.
But it’s only an opposition if we want it to be. When we view these positions in terms of a triadic model - pure reason (logic), affect (energy) and the good (quality) - then what was a dichotomy is now a stable triadic system in which human experience is capable of embodying (and further purifying our understanding of) each position in turn, providing the necessary checks and balances to human knowledge.
I am thoroughly enjoying your discussion here with Mww, by the way. There’s so much there.
A couple of things. One is, energy is not another word for affect. In fact, I don't know what energy is, and neither do physicists beyond something blatantly question begging. Affect designates the emotional and attitudinal and even valuative phenomena in general and this takes one directly to the intuition of a pain or a feeling of contentment and this kind of thing. My first priority to clarity in thinking philosophically is recognize that there is only one authority and that is intuited presence of the world and its objects. Everything there is to talk about is there first.
The good as quality: Okay, but how is this demonstrated in the world? What is the context, that is? We talk about good couches and bad shoes all the time, and the standards are variable: maybe I want uncomfortable shoes (recall the Chinese practice of foot binding). Most think this variability demonstrates a variability in ethics, and this shows ethics has no foundation beyond the vagaries of subjectivity.
But this thinking is absurd. What we really want to know at the basic level is when a person says something is good, what does this mean in a non contingent way, just as we ask about reason what it is in a way that sets aside its incidentals (we are all rational about different things). This requires a transcendental deduction of affectivity.
I like this stable triadic system, but I think to stabilize something, one has to clearly reason through its parts, that is, what is there, in the world, and for this we need a kind of reduction that will allow for things to seen as they are in themselves. This is Husserl (e.g., Cartesian Meditations).
Our duty to do good, which is predicated on practical reason, is not the same as duty itself, which has nothing to do with reason.
“....Duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law....”
—————
Quoting Astrophel
“....a conception without an object (ens rationis), like noumena, which cannot be considered possible in the sphere of reality, they must not therefore be held to be impossible...”
True enough, insofar as noumena are objects of understanding alone, and understanding being the faculty of thought, and...
“....I can think what I please, provided only I do not contradict myself...”
Quoting Astrophel
Yes they do: noumena I think that cause me to contradict myself.
Quoting Astrophel
Language is limitless so therefore language is noumenal? But noumena are limited, so language is limited. We already knew that; language is limited by the conceptions they represent, and conceptions are limited to that which the understanding can think. Coincidentally enough, returning us right back where we started. Worse, actually. If noumena are conceptions without an object, and the object belonging to a conception is its name, what name can a conception have that has no object?
We can think noumena as a conception of a discursive understanding and named as such, in juxtaposition to phenomena; we cannot think a noumenon representing that conception. Kant never uses the noumenal adjective as a descriptor. There is nothing to describe.
Quoting Astrophel
The real behind the real. We don’t even know the extent of the real, so we should complicate matters by trying to find out what’s behind what we don't know? Those who wish that, are those that wish Kant, et. al. had never spoken to the irrationality of it.
—————
Quoting Astrophel
And yet, the human brain gives them to us constantly, always noticeably in dreams, generally unnoticed in the repetitive conscious state, usually noticed on the occasion of newly experienced conscious states, but always present nonetheless. The irreducible ground of subjectivity, the transition from neurological physical predicates to the appearance of images. The images are the fundamental ground that allows us to talk about what the brain does.
—————
Quoting Astrophel
No, he would not. The world is, period, undivided. It is we, who are divided. Don’t abide the divisions in the world, but you must the divisions of us. The perfectly natural human dualism demands it.
Quoting Possibility
A division abided. One half of the natural dualism.
—————
Quoting Astrophel
Why not adopt a pov that recognizes the roundy-roundy for what it is, and shows how to not go there?
Can’t prevent it from happening, as it is the wont of reason by its own nature. We will always ask ourselves questions we can’t answer, but recognizing and turning away from it, is the next best thing.
—————
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Astrophel
And with that little self-contradictory tidbit, I find my interest waning.
Not that it hasn’t been fun......
Hmmm...but mustn’t I think, in order for there to be thoughts to be aware of? Can’t infer that which has happened.
Quoting Possibility
True enough, and transposing, we have.....I am aware of the emergence of correlations and connections. But that which correlates and connects is still required.
Quoting Possibility
Are you aware of having more than one thought at a time? I submit you are not, because thought is singular and successive, which makes them temporally located, if only in respect to each other.
Quoting Possibility
This is the ground for moral, as opposed to epistemological, philosophy. Freedom, will, duty, interests, pleasure/pain, imperatives, and so on, are still conceived by understanding, and cognitions related to them are used in discussions about moral philosophy, but the doing of it, the determining of the moral worth of actions, and the moral worthiness of individuals because of them, do not.
Quoting Possibility
The CofJ does not address moral philosophy itself; only the kind of judgement, that is, aesthetic, whereby the determinations of the will relieve their subjective approval. THE good, good in and of itself, is found in “The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals”, 1785.
Kant doesn’t say much about good in itself, except to say there is only one of its kind, that being the will. Tough pill to swallow for some, who mistake the goodness of a thing to represent the good in itself. In which case, the will has absolutely no power whatsoever, and consequently, deontological moral philosophy disappears. Those that mistake are the same that joyously wave bye-bye, I’m sure.
In fact, moral philosophy in Kant has more power than the epistemology of pure reason, so he doesn’t prefer pure reason over the good.
“...The superior position occupied by moral philosophy, above all other spheres for the operations of reason. (...) Now moral philosophy alone contains a code of laws—for the regulation of our actions—which are deduced from principles entirely a priori....” (A840/B868)
Much more to this of course; I’m just making a point in refutation.
—————
Quoting Possibility
....I think, would be psychology. Even in its infancy back then, he foresaw both its impending growth, and metaphysical uselessness, all the same.
I can see your point. ‘Energy’ is a placeholder for the possibility from which affect emerges. I use ‘energy’ precisely because we don’t know what it is, and yet what affect does corresponds to what energy does: designates attention and effort across spacetime interaction. Except energy in physics is free from qualitative valuation, whereas affect is limited by it. So affect, as I see it, is a localised, logical reduction of energy by way of quality.
Quoting Astrophel
This is where I tend to depart from traditional Western philosophy: recognising only one authority renders thinking clearer within language constraints, sure - but I find it lacks the accuracy required for wisdom. I prefer accuracy of understanding over clarity of thinking - this makes it difficult to write about my philosophy from a static perspective, granted, but much easier to practice it. I’m working on that.
Quoting Astrophel
‘The good’ refers to a localised, logical reduction of quality by way of ‘energy’. Ethics is limited by (relative to) affect: the attention and effort each of us is prepared to designate anywhere at any moment. The Chinese practice of foot binding is painful for the wearer, not so much for the parent who inflicts it, and even less for the future husband who values apperception of its results.
'Affect' in a precognitive phenomenological sense would precisely be energy, since there is no affect without change and no change without energy, so I think you should stick to your guns..
Quoting Astrophel
That is a very Buddhist observation.
Quoting Astrophel
As is that. This is something that seems to come across from some of your remarks.
Quoting Astrophel
Recall the origin of classical metaphysics with Parmenides. He was an axial age philosopher, contemporary of the Buddha. Parmenides is where the reality of the idea of the forms was first considered, so is the origin of metaphysics proper. (I suppose it is this that is the subject of Heidegger's criticism of Western metaphysics, although I've yet to study that in detail.)
Quoting Astrophel
Most famously, Edith Stein, who became a nun and was canonized a saint.
I note your appeals to 'pure presence' and (I think) the pre-rational sense of being, which is somehow opposed to the rationalist view or the appeal to reason, of which you are generally dismissive. And I am intuitively sympathetic to that, as I did an MA in Buddhist Studies 10 years ago, and have pursued Buddhist meditation.
I reconciled some of my thoughts on the relationship of Buddhism and Platonic Realism on a thread on dharmawheel - see especially this post (only if you're interested.)
Quoting Astrophel
The point about pure mathematics, is only that it is a real subject, something about which can be completely wrong, yet it contains no empirical percepts whatever. It is a vast area of knowledge - not even to mention applied mathematics, which has had such enormous consequences for our age. And that is the theme of the often-discussed essay by Nobel Laureate, Eugene Wigner, called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - actually one of the first articles I encountered via philosophy forums.
And I'm still not seeing how Kant's philosophy of mathematics does justice to this subject, as I put it in this post, although I also recognise that nobody seems to understand what I'm talking about.
So - yes, I understand this approach I'm pursuing is different to yours, and also different to the general preoccupations of phenomenology. I'm trying to understand Platonic realism, which I think is real. I'm heartened by the fact that one of the pre-eminent scholars in that field, Lloyd Gerson, has recently published a book called Platonism and the Possibility of Philosophy, which 'contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world, and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy.' All of which is, I suppose, tangential to Kant, but nevertheless Kant is central to it.
On “a kind of sense perception”:
Empirical intuitions of sense perceptions is the arrangement of the matter of objects according to forms contained a priori in the sensuous faculty of representation. For objects of thought, which are conceptions and not sense perceptions, the matter becomes the conceptions, and the arrangement of the concepts follows according to the same rules as objects of sense, such that both kinds of objects can be phenomena, hence objects of cognition, hence, experience.
“....or take the proposition: "It is possible to construct a figure with three straight lines," and endeavour, in like manner, to deduce it from the mere conception of a straight line and the number three. All your endeavours are in vain, and you find yourself forced to have recourse to intuition, as, in fact, geometry always does. You therefore give yourself an object in intuition...” (***)
Now, the proposition brought forward by its being thought, stands in stead of the object perceived, the concepts in the proposition, re: line, three straight, represent what would be the matter of the object, the arrangement of those concepts of the proposition, becomes a non-sensuous phenomenon, subsequently conceived as “triangle”.
Now the notion of a kind of intuition that is purely mathematical is granted, but only from the notion of intuitions themselves. As to whether it is as well a kind of sensuous perception remains, insofar as sensuous perceptions do in fact give empirical intuitions but do not give mathematical intuitions, which makes explicit a form of perception not sensory is required, in order to give a kind of phenomenon that is not empirical. It suffices nicely, that to give yourself an intuition is to give yourself something, which can be called an image, and that without self-contradiction. So it follows that the arrangement of the matter of the proposition, according to the rules contained in it, that is, a figure must be possible, is imagining them into a construct that conforms to the predicates the proposition seeks to verify, an enclosed space. Hence, no incursion of mere trial and error, or common sense, or Hume-ian nonsense of consigning stuff to the flames without knowing what’s being burned, from which is given the apodeictic certainty of all mathematical principles.
TA-DAAAAA!!!!!
———-
On the “unreasonable certainty of mathematics”:
“....This transcendental principle of the mathematics of phenomena** greatly enlarges our a priori cognition. For it is by this principle alone that pure mathematics is rendered applicable in all its precision to objects of experience, and without it the validity of this application would not be so self-evident...”
** The principle being, “...Empirical intuition is possible only through pure intuition (of space and time); consequently, what geometry affirms of the latter, is indisputably valid of the former....”
————-
(***) This exposition serves to deny noumena on the one hand, and to exemplify them as “the limitations of sensibility” on the other. You cannot give yourself an object in intuition (the limit) based on the schema of a conception understanding thinks, when that conception has none. There is, then, nothing in the conception of noumena to be arranged in intuition, hence can never be cognized (the denial), which makes experience of them impossible. For us.
Like all words, it requires context to understood, and then the values kick in. This is why functional concepts like 'material substance" are so vacuous when they are used in philosophy: they are supposed to be some kind of underlying substratum for all thinks, but all things presents a contextless state of affairs, which is not a state of affairs at all. But talk about material physics makes perfect sense. What is yarn? Well, it is a soft material of woven fabric, and so on.
Right, free of both qualitative and quantitative valuation.
Quoting Possibility
Accuracy of understanding over clarity? Absolutely! The world is NOT "clear". I don't know what you are reading, but I have wasted enough time on anglo american analytic philosophy to see that clarity for clarity's sake is a complete failure. Good if one is fascinated by puzzles (e.g., those Gettier problems) I guess, but dreadful if one has a passion for truth. Passion and philosophy have become such enemies, and foundational thinking handed over to hyperintellectuals with a gift for logic.
Analytic philosophy is dead. See Robert Hanna on this: Analytic Philosophy From Frege To The Ash Heap of History (I have a massive library of of philosophical works, btw. All are welcome to these pdf files if they conceive of how they might be sent with all due privacy)
Then I read Husserl. Then Heidegger, and onward. Changed everything. This IS philosophy.
Quoting Possibility
True. It is the localization of this I take issue with. When value is localized, then arguments get very involved and unwieldy. Foot binding can actually be defended as a cultural practice. Those who inflicted the suffering on children were conditioned to believe that this was proper, and an entire society's beliefs backed this, and so on. Not that foot binding a good idea, but what are good ideas removed fromt he culture in which good and bad ideas are conceived?
Good question, I say, because it is here philosophical thinking begins, this process of "bracketing" culture to focus on things essentially true. Take this to its logical limit, and you find yourself face to face with the "pure phenomenon". This pain in the foot, not as good or bad "for" anything. But it itself, what is it?
Value is, in my thoughts, the final frontier. I borrow from Kant the idea of a transcendental deduction of value: Kant had to prove that pure concepts were not just a fiction, that these had to be posited in order to explain the possibility of the way actual judgment and thinking work. Value needs just this. So, what is it that is there in experience that requires a transcendental argument? Of course, good and bad. Empirically, the good is used as an instrumental term. Something is good because of such and such, this such and such is never stand alone, but is embedded in a body of contingency, like the justification for foot binding.
And so the argument moves forward toward absolutes or transcendental foundations, tha t is, toward a determination that they have an actuality beyond contingency.
That's exactly right. In general, it's good to be clear and precise. But some people try to be so precise they end up saying nothing at all.
On the other hand - and this applies to Kant - one should be able to express these sophisticated ideas in a manner that most people would at least get a "flavor" of, if they wished to get the gist of the topic.
One can, I think, express Kant's basic notions without much verbiage, which is something he is guilty of. Look at Schopenhauer, for instance, he states many of Kant's ideas in a very clear manner (most of the time).
Right. And it never was the prerogative of language to BE what language talked about. The trap is hermeneutical: Can language ever talk about something other than language? For all my words have their meanings bound to one another, and without this "difference" among terms, meaning falls apart.
But deconstructing meaning leads to disillusionment with language, or, language's culture, history, science paradigms and so on, and a turn toward the presence of the world itself.
Miraculous, literally, that we can do this, because impossible. Meaning is supposed to be what can be said, and if being said is simply this contingent, assailable kind of thing, and if language is this "totality" that makes the world toe the line, then there is no hope for the understanding to step beyond this.
But this kind of thinking misses the point completely. The given actuality of the world is not given in language, but is given intuitively. It is language that has to toe the line to the world, and the world is magnificent, intractable, powerful, eternal, and note how words like this are so elusive, intellectually fuzzy. Analytic philosophers would NEVER talk like this. Hence, the failure of analytic philosophy.
Quoting Wayfarer
The flower blooms and fades, but the idea of the flower endures. Which is more real? This is where Plato started. I know Heidegger thought very highly of the Greeks, especially Parmenides and Heraclitus who he considered "primordial" philosophers. He was very interested in making fundamental changes in t he way we think and going back to these beginnings were part of this. But this idea that something deeply important has been lost through the ages of bad metaphysics is a good one. But for Heidegger the answer rested with language, as he thinks language carries forth meaning. But have never read that he could make that really interesting transition from language to intuition, which is one way to talk about what Buddhism is about. Putting aside the details and the mountains of academic work, Buddhism is THE primordial grounding for discovery. Of this I have no doubt at all.
I'm reading Heidegger's Parmenides now. He is always interesting, always leads us away from beaten paths.
Quoting Wayfarer
On this that you wrote, apologies for getting carried away, but it is an interesting idea:
Vert sticky wicket. As with all philosophical questions, first, I say, drop the science. It has no place, nearly, in philosophy. Nominalists that I have read are generally guided by the lack of the "real" presence of concepts, numbers, but once this real is no longer defined in terms of physicality or materiality (whatever these could possibly mean; to me, they are just the reification of a scientist's perspective, an attempt to "solidify" science's claims into a foundation for all issues. But as foundational, they are instantly refutable), then ontological standards are turned on their head: the "out thereness" of physical objects yields to the "presence" of meaning. "Out thereness" doesn't vanish, it is simply understood as a contextually determined concept, which is often used. The salt is "over there" and Jupiter is many miles away.
Anyway, what does this have to do with numbers, concepts and ideas? Keeping in mind that even by a typical physicalist/nominalist's thinking, numbers exist, it's just that they are not numbers. They are reducible to, say, neurological events. I mean, a nominalist has to admit that thinking about a number is not the same as not thinking at all. But your realist (contra nominalists, adn this seems to be your position) wants to say numbers exist AS numbers. I agree with this, for I am convinced that if the number two is not real as the number two, than neither is a house or a chair, for a house is not a house apart from its "eidetic" constitution. The attempt to say the house has a physicality a number doesn't have forgets physicality is just a scientist's biased way of looking at things, and has no real meaning here, and has no foundational justification. Numbers have meaning, and further, meaning is the only real standard for ontology.
But then, all concepts are in essence interpretative entities, and so, a house is not eternally, platonically, a house. It is, as an "intuition of a house", apodictically real, but not in the Platonic sense of forms vs things that "have a share" of the forms. the former simply reduces my thought, talk, remembering, planning about houses, to the actual event of talking, thinking etc. The event did occur! And this is beyond doubt, this actuality of occurrent thinking is absolute. The taking up the givinness of sensible intuitions AS a "house" is no less real than anything one can imagine. BUT, in the way this thinking expresses truth, this becomes arbitrary. Truth in the everyday sense is pragmatic.
You say:
The Buddha (and the Bodhisattvas) are the archetype of all wisdom. And archetypes are, in fact, 'universals', of which individuals are examples or instances. And to my mind, that is how come the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas are real beyond their particular, individual existence (which I certainly believe is so).
While you can see by the above I don't agree with the Stanford article that says, "universals are occult pseudo-entities that should not be taken seriously by a responsible thinker concerned with ontology," but I do think your claim needs more. Being an archetype of wisdom is something thick with questions, isn't it?
My thinking is very concrete, but the concrete is CERTAINLY NOT what science and its nominalist's take it for.
Quoting Wayfarer
But Plato is metaphysics, Kant tries not to be. He doesn't think, as far as I've read (and this is certainly not everything) we can say anything about our mathematical truths issues from eternity. Plato says the world of becoming has a share of the eternal world of forms. Plato gets awkward when you pull away from things like virtue, justice, the good; see the "third man" arguments, e.g. Is there an eternal form of a cow? A toaster?
But I do see some light on universals in the Platonic sense, but it is not clear to me yet. The argument goes to agency, that is, being a person as an agent that can be aware in the essential way for enlightenment. There IS such a thing as enlightenment, but for this to occur, one has to experience a break with the world. This is another matter.
The meticulous mind is very useful, but becomes fascinated by the turning of its own wheels. Thinking becomes inherently entertaining. But on the other hand, some of the most verbose philosophers are extremely insightful. For me, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and others. Verbose, did I say? Certainly. Sometimes after pages and pages, and you then get it, and then, why does he have to say it like that?
Of course it can; it talks about the world all the time.
That is a tough call. There are those who think explanations are all references to other explanations, not to put too fine a point on it. The proof lies in the way the answers to questions about any and all things in the world are provided in more language. What is a bank teller? A cat? Your understanding does not reach into the world and grab a cat. It produces definitions, descriptions, talk of properties, contexts, and all of this is language. Of course, we assume there is something out there that is a cat, but the meanings that id the cat are not out there at all.
Heidegger has his own philosophy which depends on the use of language, it's a kind of description of the world attached to a way of thinking. Kierkegaard too, to a lesser extent.
Yet look at Dreyfus' interpretation of Heidegger, it's very clear. Some may debate how accurate it is, but it can be quite useful.
I think Aristotle is verbose and Locke isn't a good writer, yet both have much to say.
Descartes and Hume, are quite clear, though Hume is harder to understand because the topic he's speaking of is quite abstract in certain areas.
The point here being that these topics are already hard, verbosity only makes it harder without necessity (in the vast majority of cases). Of course, some people simply lack style or the capacity for clear expression. That's fine.
Once you enter Hegel territory, I'm very suspect much of substance is being said.
I occasionally go back to The Phenomenology of Spirit. I have to if I want to understand Kierkegaard, and it is not entirely nonsense, though it's not like he's not trying. I certainly do not understand him well, but K considers that Hegel didn't understand Hegel very well, which is the real problem.
Some of Heidegger is presented to us from his lectures, and these can be rambling, like his Parmenides, which I am reading now. Kierkegaard is frankly the worst offender. His style is filled with irony and metaphor and cleverness, combined with an extensive knowledge of the thinkers of his day.
All of the pre Kantians are pretty accessible compared to what came after. I just don't read them. Descartes is important, succinct. Should be read if one is going after Husserl and beyond. Everyone has a bone to pick with Descartes because his res cogitans and res extensa are so challenging. Now he was clear, I think.
If you and I were in the presence of a fairly ordinary looking cat I can say 'look at the cat, what colour and pattern would you call that, tabby or tiger?' and I can be confident that the answer you give will be sensible and understandable. You won't say 'it's purple, no pattern at all'.
If that's not talking about something in the world, what would count?
Quoting Astrophel
I don't even know what that means. It seems to be some sort of weird inapt analogy between grasping with the hand and grasping with the mind; I'm not seeing the relevance.
I think he's saying that your understanding of the cat is constructed by mind, not the thing itself...
How would a phenomenologist describe the nature of a person's experience of a cat?
1. The thing in itself (noumenon)
2. The perceiver/subject/consciousness.
The two interact (perception/phenomenon)
Question: Is it possible for perceptions/phenomena to occur in the absence of noumena (hallucinations). Idealism! There's nothing out there, it's all in our heads.
The existence of noumena is uncertain; its existence can't be confirmed and so we're left studying/analyzing appearances (phenomena).
Question: How would we prove/disprove that noumena and phenomena are the same thing! Impossible? It seems a bit extravagant and paranoid to hold that noumena and phenomena differ.
Based on what? All you have is your awareness of those thoughts as evidence, and your understanding that thought = evidence of thinking. This does not amount to an awareness of thinking, but an inference. You can infer that which ‘has happened’ beyond your conscious awareness - remember, the awareness of thought and inference of thinking are simultaneous.
Quoting Mww
This is letting language structure limit understanding. There is an existing possibility of interconnectedness and correlation between all ideas. All that is required is attention and effort directed towards qualities. Correlations and connections refer to potentialities, not actions. The intention of a subject is not required.
Quoting Mww
But can you be aware of more than one thought at a time? I submit that you can - because once I’m aware of thought, it ceases to be a temporal entity. What I guess I’m trying to say here, though, is that awareness of thought need not be preceded by awareness of the thinking behind it.
Quoting Mww
Sorry, you lost me here.
I’m not a fan of moral philosophy as such - I don’t think it’s useful at all for us to try and determine the moral worth of anything but our own intentions. Freedom, will, duty, interests, pleasure/pain, imperative, etc - all of these conceptions exist relative to affect, and so any cognitions related to them are necessarily distorted by this, filling any discussion with relational inaccuracies. You can see it in almost every thread on these topics, despite the best intentions of posters. An accurate understanding of pleasure/pain, for instance, must take into account the relativity of reason, both to ‘the good’ and to affect as limitations to human knowledge, but not to understanding. An accurate discussion of pleasure/pain needs to at least initially refrain from both concept consolidation and judgement - rendering all expressions of feelings valid, worthy. But this is not how most philosophy is done. Reductionist methodology invariably kicks in well before all available information is gathered.
Quoting Mww
Acknowledging power or superior position is not the same as personal preference. Kant only critiques practical reason in relation to a ‘good will’, as if the will and the good were a singular entity which gives power to reason. Kant’s understanding of the relationship between reason, the will and the good is distorted by the fixed central position he gives to human experience. It is only when we decentralise this experience and consider a broader understanding of these aspects (beyond the object-subject distinction) that the relationship becomes clearer.
Regardless of moral philosophy, will is the faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action - or more broadly, by which all change is determined and initiated. It consists of three ‘gates’: awareness/ignorance, connection/isolation and collaboration/exclusion.
Energy, quality and logic all influence the capacity of the will. Kant’s idea of a ‘good will’ is the maximal capacity for awareness, connection and collaboration of any one person at any one time. This is highly variable in terms of energy availability, which affects attention and effort. So, any judgement that someone else should (or should not) have acted in a certain way doesn’t take into account any difference in the energy available to a ‘good will’.
But all eyes are on the process that produces the understanding. It's not like a person is some kind of epistemic mirror of transparency of the world such that the cat is there and I receive the cat in the relation. Quite the opposite: when I observe a brain's physicality, I see there can be nothing more opaque. If that brain can "see" the world as it is, so can a fence post. Yes, the lens in the eye allows light to pass through, and so on. But a brain is a thick organic mass. Nothing out there gets in here. (So how does one affirm the brain to talk about brains and their opacity if to observe a brain requires transparency? It does not.....or does it? Go with the latter, and you are inviting mysticism.)
Quoting Janus
You would have to consult Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". He started it with his "Copernican Revolution". The matter turns on what he calls synthetic apriori judgments: The structure of the world is apriori.
But you don't really need Kant for this. Just ask in the most earnest and insisting way: how does anything out there get in here (pointing to the brain)? This would be a question that a physicalist/materialist would have to ask, framed like Neil DeGrasse Tyson would frame it. A brain is a physical thing. How can an epistemic relation exist between it and objects out there? It just makes no sense at all.
I stand by what I wrote - but I can see why the argument was made. Phenomenology acknowledges its affected position. Energy = affect when understood from beyond affect.
Ok. Thanks.
Yes. I'm currently reading Descartes now and I have to say, most of the criticism hurled at him is extremely unfair. He was eminently reasonable, clear and persuasive, he was doing the best he could with what he had.
And to his credit, he treats "ordinary people" with much respect and even admiration, which is contrary to what a lot of the other figures did.
Whether Husserl goes "beyond" Kant, is a matter of taste. Fair or not, we haven't really moved beyond the framework made popular by Kant. We have to modify some of his ideas, such as "spacetime" instead of space and time and most of us would say that his categorical imperative is impossible to live up to.
But had he been a better writer, I think it would have been better for everyone. At least his Prolegomena is pretty accessible, all considered.
This one I find curious. Is reason relative? Judgments are, but not in their form, rather in their content.
That IS a loaded paragraph. For one, "spacetime" is an empirical concept. That is, its justification is traced back measurements of physical events, their quantities, relations and so on. Kant's thinking is strictly apriori: in order to even think about space and time at all, one has to have certain conditions in mind. It is the "presuppositions" of space and time, not how they are theorized about in science.
That's right.
But Kant's a-priori presuppositions are, strictly speaking, false. We may individuate space and time as being different things, but they're not. We can't envision space without time, and maybe even time without space.
It's crucial to remember that Kant was a Newtonian, he took Newton's concepts of space and time to be a-priori, but these were empirical postulates made by Newton.
This doesn't mean that there's nothing a-priori, on the contrary, likely most things are, in some sense. But they're not obviously evident to discover, I don't think.
But then, he wasn't talking about what is "really" there. His was an analysis, and he would be the first to say that such analyses are not true noumenally. They are true in analysis, and this of course is a conceptual matter about the intuitive structure of (representational) experience. Spacetime, on the other hand, is meant to be an a theoretical construct of physics.
Ask Einstein (who read Kant early on, I know) about the essential intuitions of time and space that are presupposed in putting together his theories and he will tell you this is apples and oranges.
I would say the phenomenologist is not concerned with noumena. Remember Husserl's injunction to "return to the things themselves". The cat is the thing itself. The cat looks the way it looks to anybody that looks at it (either tabby, ginger, tortoise-shell, male or female, relatively large or small, and so on), so the way it looks cannot be constructed by my mind, even though it is mediated by the kind of mind and sensory setup I have.
Doesn't affect feel like energy to us though? Something moves us, and we know from our embodied experience that all movement requires effort (energy); we feel the energy of that movement. What is emotion if not e-motion?
Fair enough. So for a phenomenologist Kant's metaphysics and idealism in general is of no particular value?
I don't know enough to give an adequate answer to that. I have often read that Husserl's phenomenology owes a lot to Kant (as does just about every movement in modern philosophy in one way or another I guess). I think Husserl rejects the coherency of the notion of things in themselves, but I'll need to look into that more closely.
[i]Husserl rejected Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves and wanted “to radically deracinate the false transcendence that still plays its part in Kant's 'thing-in-itself' doctrine and to create a world concept that is purely phenomenological” (Husserl, 2008, p. xxxix, my translation). Thus, for him, a physical thing is not an appearance of an incomprehensible thing in itself. Instead, Husserl (1983, p. 92, see also 2003, p. 67, 2004, p. 129) saw it as “fundamentally erroneous to believe that perception […] does not reach the physical thing itself.”
Second, Husserl rejected Kant's route of access to knowledge about a priori structures. Kant (1999, A 35/B 52) stated that “no object can ever be given to us in experience that would not belong under the condition of time.” If, however, all intuitions and experiences we can have are already temporal, we cannot intuitively study how temporality and sense intuition become interwoven in the first place. As a result, Kant's access to the processes preceding our experience is speculative. Kant's (1999, A 91-92/B 123–124) was well aware of this, as he clearly rejected establishing causality's necessity based on experience (a posteriori). He pointed out that his entire system is ultimately a thought experiment that aims to achieve verification by means of being thinkable without contradiction (see Kant, 1999, B xviii–xix).
Husserl (1970, p. 115) took issue with these speculations about intuitively inaccessible processes allegedly shaping our actual experience. He complained that Kant resorted to a “mythical concept formation. He forbids his readers to transpose the results of his regressive procedure into intuitive concepts […]. His transcendental concepts are thus unclear in a quite peculiar way.” Husserl consequently sought to intuitively explore the conscious processes shaping experience as we know it.
One important feature that Husserl (1960, p. 144, 1970, p. 199) did accept was Kant's so called “Copernican turn.” In order to explain how we, as subjects, can have knowledge about objects, Kant (1999, B xvi-xvii) suggested that we conceive of the object's appearance based on forms that we find in ourselves as experiencing subjects. In line with this, Husserl (1960, p. 114) postulated an“‘innate' Apriori, without which an ego as such is unthinkable.” This explains why he (see Husserl, 1968, pp. 250, 300, 328, 344) assumed our world experience is relative to an absolute, transcendental subjectivity that constitutes it.
Husserl likewise accepted Kant's (1999, A 51/B 75) claim: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Adopting this means that one always needs to look out for the proper correlation between any given intuition and concept, as only together can they be meaningful. Kant (1999, A 240/B 299) elucidates further: “[I]t is also a requisite for one to make an abstract concept sensible, i.e., to display the object that corresponds to it in intuition, since without this the concept would remain (as one says) without sense.” As the categories are concepts, this transfers to them as well. Thus, in a similar vein, Husserl (2001b, p. 306) wrote:“It lies in the nature of the case that everything categorial ultimately rests upon sensuous intuition, that […] an intellectual insight […] without any foundation of sense, is a piece of nonsense.” Husserl always asked for a sensory foundation when a priori (eidetic) structures are to be explored phenomenologically.[/i]
Bolded parts are quoted from Husserl.
From here:
That was interesting. Thanks.
From a phenomenological standpoint, the cat looks the way it does as a function of a subjective constituting process that also involves an intersubjective aspect. To say it is constituted does not mean ‘invented’ out of whole cloth by a subjectivity. Rather, there is an indissociable interaction between subjective and objective poles of the perception.
It depends on how general you mean this statement to be. In a very general sense, Kant didn’t really move beyond the framework make popular by Descartes. I would argue that Husserl moved at least as far from Kant as Kant did from Descartes, especially regarding his concept of time.
The involvement of an inter-subjective aspect would only be possible on account of agreement. If the cat were not a certain way: tabby, ginger, male, female, etc,. there would be no possibility of inter-subjective agreement.
By saying "there is an indissociable interaction between subjective and objective poles of the perception" I take it that you mean that subjectively "seeing as" is dependent on inter-subjectively evolved categories of being? I would agree with this, but would add that what is seen as whatever it is must have its own contribution to make.
Kant’s understanding of reason is logic relative to human experience. From our perspective, there’s no reason to consider logic beyond reason, and no real capacity to talk about it. But I would argue that an accurately practical understanding of reality is inclusive of unreasonable logic. It’s a further Copernican turn away from Kant.
It’s more than just feeling energy, though. You’re referring to affect as positive energy, but affect is also inclusive of what holds us back, what renders us ignorant or non-responsive - and even this language inaccurately implies a force acting on us, when that isn’t the case. Not just energy, not just emotion, but also the lack thereof; Sometimes movement consists of more than just where effort is directed, but where it isn’t, or where it’s redirected from. Same with attention.
Consider change as a localised 3D relation of energy, effort as a localised 4D relation of energy, and affect as localised 5D relation of energy. It’s a matter of perspective.
Hey Joshs :cool: There's no wavey icon here, so that'll do instead.
Eh, it becomes tricky. I think this depends on how one thinks about rationalism actually, and how much Descartes to Hume could be said to be aware of "things-in-themselves".
Of course, though "synthesizing" rationalism and empiricism, one would have to say that, on the whole, Kant is very much in the rationalist camp in so far as he attributes to our mental powers so much more than Locke and Hume.
Though proceeded by others - clearly - the phenomena - things-in-themselves distinction is crucial here, as is the reigning in of speculative metaphysics. These arguments cause lots of arguments in favor and against.
Then you have, roughly, Humean, "empiricists", of a (to me) poorer quality than Hume's.
Descartes, generally, is not much praised these days, with few outliers, like Husserl and Chomsky.
The important thing to me and what I think makes Kant such an important figures, is that up to Kant, almost everyone agrees who the great philosophers were. Beyond him, there is no agreement, with the possible exception of the major American Pragmatists.
Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Husserl, Heidegger, Quine, Carnap, Whitehead and others are extremely polarizing.
Right, affect can be considered to be something acting upon us, primordially speaking, even unconsciously. It can also be considered to be a felt impulse or emotion. In the cases where what holds us back is not a negative affect it would seem to be a lack of affect. I would also say that there is a sense in which lack of affect amounts to a force restraining us; think about depression, for example.
But the cat is a certain way for me differently that it is for others. Each has their own perspectives on a changing experience. For me to expereince this changing flow of senses as ‘this cat’ is already for me to form an abstraction, an idealization, a single unitary ‘this’ out of what is only ever experienced as this changing flow. My own experience of this flow as a unified object is an idealization, since my actual experience of the ‘thing’ never completely fulfills this identity.
Then for me to take into account the similar but distinct perspectives on the ‘same’( it isnt actually the identical but only the similar phenomenon for them as it is for me) cat that other experience is to form an empirical
object out of it. It is empirical when we form a richer , intersubjectivitely shared idealization and claim that it is an empirical object that is the same for all of us, which we are simply seeing different aspects of.
“ Each individual, as a subject of possible experiences, has his experiences, his aspects, his perceptual interconnections, his alteration of validity, his corrections, etc.; and each particular social group has its communal aspects, etc. Here again, properly speaking, each individual has his experienced things, that is, if we understand by this what in particular is valid for him, what is seen by him and, through the seeing, is experienced as straightforwardly existing and being-such. But each individual "knows" himself to be living within the horizon of his fellow human beings, with whom he can enter into sometimes actual, sometimes potential contact, as they also can do (as he likewise knows) in actual and potential living together. He knows that he and his fellows, in their actual contact, are related to the same experienced things in such a way that each individual has different aspects, different sides, perspectives, etc., of them but that in each case these are taken from the same total system of multiplicities of which each individual is constantly conscious (in the actual experience of the same thing) as the horizon of possible experience of this thing.
If one attends to the distinction between things as "originally one's own" and as "empathized" from others, in respect to the how of the manners of appearance, and if one attends to the possibility of discrepancies between one's own and empathized views, then what one actually experiences originaliter as a perceptual thing is transformed, for each of us, into a mere "representation of" ["Vorstellung von"], "appearance of/' the one objectively existing thing. From the synthesis these have taken on precisely the new sense "appearance of," and as such they are henceforth valid. 'The" thing itself is actually that which no one experiences as really seen, since it is always in motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one's own and those of others.” (Husserl, Crisis Of European Sciences)
I agree that identity is an idealization; the thing in front of us is a cat, not an identity. And of course there are differences in the ways the cat will be for each of us. But there also recognizable commonalities like colour, sex and so on, which, even though they too may be different for each of, the fact of their existence is arguably independent of any subjective act of constitution.
What is to be explained is that we all see the ginger male cat as a ginger male cat. This cannot be explained wholly by the role of subjective or inter-subjective constitution, even though such constitutions play a role on our perceptions. How would you explain, for example, that a dog also sees a cat there, judging from its behavior?
For Husserl affect is directed both from the subject side of an intentional experience and from the object side. The object exerts an attractive pull on the subject and the subject turns toward the object. We notice the object when it stands out from a field, and draws our attention. From the side of the subject there is an affective pull also, a drive or striving to know the object better, that is , to anticipate its future appearances.
From both the objective and subjective sides, what is key for Husserl is that the affective meaningfulness of an experience is linked to how similar we can perceive it to be with respect to previous experience. So affect isnt simply a neutral or mechanical
energy, it is inextricably linked with the relevance of objects for a subject. Fundamentally, the way that I am affected by the world is a function of its relevance to me, and it’s relevance is a function of my ability to assimilate it on some basis of similarity and recognizability.
These features that you mention are all considered by Husserl to be relative and contingent. They could be otherwise than they are, so it makes no sense to claim their reality as existing somewhere apart from their appearance in the way they appear to a subject. .And most fundamentally, they appear only once in time as what they to the subject, never to be captured identically again.
“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking.
But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself.
But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)
“The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as
something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense.”
I can see how it would seem that way. But I would argue that ‘affect’ considered as something acting upon us is inaccurate. Affect is part of us, part of our awareness, connection and collaboration with the world. It refers to an ongoing distribution of attention and effort. When what we experience appears to be a ‘lack of affect’, it translates to insufficient attention and/or effort directed towards a particular aspect of experience, rather than a generalised lack. Depression can appear to be a force restraining us, but it, too, may be more accurately described as an ineffective distribution of attention and effort.
This is the problem with affect=energy that I think Astrophel was pointing out. Perhaps take a look at Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made.
What is the world? We certainly know it, but what is it that we can know it?
I suggest affect isnt an inner response to an outer world. Words like attention and effort split off the subject’s ‘inner’ workings from the world, but affective meaning, relevance and mattering are the direct way that world affects us.
What makes attention possible? Husserl argues that it isn’t just the effort of shining a spotlight on something already there, it is a creative act, the making of something.
“Attention is one of the chief themes of modern psychology. Nowhere does the predominantly sensualistic [empiricist] character of modern psychology show itself more strikingly than in the treatment of this theme, for not even the essential connection between attention and intentionality--this fundamental fact: that attention of every sort is nothing else than a fundamental species of intentive modifications-- has ever, to my knowledge, been emphasized before.” “Dazed by the confusion between object and mental content, one forgets that the objects of which we are ‘conscious', are not simply in consciousness as in a box, so that they can merely be found in it and snatched at in it; but that they are first constituted as being what they are for us, and as what they count as for us, in varying forms of objective intention...One forgets that.... an intending, or reference is present, that aims at an object, a consciousness is present that is the consciousness of this object. The mere existence of a content in the psychic interplay is, however, not at all this being-meant or being-referred-to. This first arises when this content is ‘noticed', such notice being a look directed towards it, a presentation of it. To define the presentation of a content as the mere fact of its being experienced, and in consequence to give the name ‘presentations' to all experienced contents, is one of the worst conceptual distortions known to philosophy.”
Quoting Possibility
Or perhaps it is better understood as a way in which the world appears relevant to us in our darkness. In other words, not some
inner constraint on engagement with the world , but a way of being situated in the world that is neither simply due to inner nor outer causes.
Thanks Josh. An interesting spotlight on Husserl. This is what I mean by the complication of a subject-object dichotomy in language use, and the relativity of affect. I don’t consider affect to be mechanical - for me that’s effort. If we dispense with this subject-object dichotomy for a moment, then energy has a neutral possibility only in the context of infinite interconnectedness. Affect is not that, either.
What I think Husserl shows here is that affect is a relative aspect of both subject and object - suggesting that there is more to affect than we can understand by assuming either of these two cognitive positions.
Quoting Joshs
Affect is relative to human experiences of logic and quality. Quantum mechanics makes the most sense to us when effort is logically quantitative and attention is qualitatively practical - but few physicists work across both areas. Rather, they focus on one and take the other as given. Attention, then, is often thought of as the qualitative, intentional aspect of affect - and confined to the domain of psychology. In quantum physics, it is attention that complicates our logically quantitative descriptions of reality with qualitative evidence of entanglement, spin direction and indeterminacy.
I like the idea of attention as a creative impetus - the qualitative value of any perceived relation. What makes it possible, I think, is this idea of qualitative interconnectedness: the mere possibility of a ‘oneness’ to the relational structure of reality.
This works in psychology, sure - and without destroying any illusion of ‘individuality’. So yes, it is affectively ‘better understood’. I was going for accuracy.
Check out the new Lexus. Part of the warning system is....push this button, bells and whistles indicate oncoming complications to opening your door. So rather than tell yourself to just look in something so plain and simple as a mirror, you now have to tell yourself to push something so plain and simple as a button, that overcomplicates the human-kind of looking in mirrors, yet tells you exactly what you would have seen had you simply looked in the mirror.
Taste resides in which simple thing one wishes to indulge. Indulgence itself, then, must be the residence of complication. If Husserl went beyond Kant, who’s to say he didn’t accomplish anything for us as human rational intellects, that didn’t merely overcomplicate the simple.
Clearly "taste" is the wrong word, I'd have to say, it's a matter of one's own philosophy.
As to the Lexus example, and the bells and whistles, there's something to that in some phenomenology.
I tend to agree with your view and it's not many people who would claim that Husserl went beyond Kant.
Here is what Eugene Fink (Husserl's protégé) had to say at the beginning of his 6th Cartesian Meditation:
.......instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity. W e have, however, not yet exhibited the constitutive becoming of the world in the sense performances of transcendental life, both those that are presently actual and those that are sedimented,- we have not yet entered into constitutive disciplines and theories.
It is a radical thing to say. " Transcendental subjectivity" is an intuitively powerful concept. I don't agree with the attempt to "totalize" (Levinas) the world to make it make sense. One has to allow the world "its" freedom to present itself, and this requires a "turn" that radicalizes Kant's turn (noumena? what, I ask, is NOT noumenal?) Once the Cartesian turn has been examined for what it is, an attempt to discover an "absolute" ground in our existence and the world's, one is driven deeper into discovery on the interior side of the equation. "Absolute" deserves those inverted commas, of course. Language, the moment it is deployed, both cheapens and reveals.
How so?
Just a general comment, when I was finishing my studies, a portion of my teachers were into phenomenology, often following the thought of some of the lesser well known figures.
In so far as I followed such arguments, I rarely found them convincing or persuasive. Parts of Husserl and Heidegger are good, but a lot of it looks to me to be what you mention, making obvious things really, really complicated.
Way beyond, really:
...an infinite realm of being of a new kind, and a sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience......a universal apodictically experienceable structure of the ego (Cartesian Meditations)
Husserl thinks one can experience something transcendental, not merely postulate it. This is why there is so much interest in the his reduction in the recent French Theological turn, so called. Michel Henry puts it like this: "So much appearing, so much Being...... (but then) appearing is everything, being is nothing. Or rather, being only exists because appearing appears and only to the extent that it does."
Henry takes the phenomenological reduction where it leads, to the primacy of the given. What is there and what can only be (as Kant would agree) but what appears before us, and any claim about what might not BE this can only have its basis in what appears. It sounds a bit like transcendental idealism is now clarified to transcendence IN the ideal, but the 'ideal" as a concept is obviated, for there is nothing to play against it, there is no Cartesian res extensa, nor is there a noumenal Other. The Other is appearance itself.
This is the final and radical relief from those absurd dualisms that haunt ontology.
Sure, those guys and the rest are good, each in is own way, if only for examples of philosophical progress.
You mentioned the Prolegomena, in which the introductions states.....
“....Making plans is often the occupation of an opulent and boastful mind, which thus obtains the reputation of a creative genius, by demanding what it cannot itself supply; by censuring, what it cannot improve; and by proposing, what it knows not where to find....”
....and if making plans is overburdening an extant speculative metaphysics, than phenomenology perfectly exemplifies unconvincing and unpersuasive philosophical progress.
And to hide it behind Transcendental Idealism??? Robbery, I say. Sheer, abominable ROBBERY!!!
(Laughing maniacally)
Ah yes, Henry. I'm not a fan, nothing against him personally, but I really don't see what big contribution he made. One of my professors knew him personally, so he was frequently talked about in my program. Never managed to connect with his thought at all, but many others did, so, maybe I'm missing out.
As for the given, C.I. Lewis talks about it quite interestingly. As does Raymond Tallis.
These are reactions to Kantian conclusions. Or else going back to empiricism, of a kind Hume or Locke would likely not accept.
I wouldn't be as harsh, as it's not clear to me that phenomenology is metaphysics of the transcendental kind. But there's truth in what you say.
As for TI, I think the basic framework or outline, is rather clear. But if you say "things in themselves" are meaningless, or don't exist or are empty signifier, then you're borrowing a name which has little to do with the actual thought proposed.
It really does depend on what a person is looking for at the outset. Phenomenology has this whole mysterious side that can be either be ignored or elaborated. It's not philosophical (wince!). Heidegger though Husserl was trying to walk on water (gotten from Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics).
I am guilty of this, too. I think being in the world rests of nothing but water, and we all are trying walk. (Wince, with emphasis!)
Yeah, I was being somewhat melodramatic. I trust your sense of clarity in this regard, insofar as my prejudices are too embedded.
Still, it shouldn’t be denied that Kantian transcendental idealism establishes sufficient ground for the validity of subsequent speculative philosophy, and if phenomenology is speculative philosophy, then.....you know.....walks like a duck, squawks like a duck.......
————
Quoting Manuel
Absolutely. That and that stupid farging noumena. Christ-on-a-crutch, how people can convolute that damn thing....like Savery’s ca.1620 dodo bird painting representing something the guy never once laid eyes on.
So what else is new?
Decent article here:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/husserls-legacy-phenomenology-metaphysics-and-transcendental-philosophy/#:~:text=Husserl%27s%20transcendental%20idealism%2C%20according%20to%20Zahavi%2C%20then%20accounts,objects%20within%20the%20world%2C%20can%20appear%20to%20us.
But the concept of noumena is not a fiction. But not Kant, rather Husserl et al.
And if I'm not mistaken, I believe Husserl thought something similar about Heidegger after Being and Time was published, in the sense that he thought Heidegger was kind of psychologizing phenomenology. I think they're focusing different aspects of a similar project.
Not bad prejudices to have, as far as I can see.
There is value to be found in prior-to-Kant speculative metaphysics and even in some post-Kantian speculative metaphysics, such as Whitehead. But they can always be charged with going beyond possible experience, and that's not so easy to refute.
Tough question. Adherents would say phenomenology is the most concrete philosophy, others may doubt this...
Maybe we should follow Wittgenstein’s suggestion.
“We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk; so we need friction. Back to the rough ground.”
More specifically, he thought Heidegger was turning phenomenology into an anthropology, by which he meant that Heidegger was stuck in the natural attitude, rather than going all the way with the transcendental reduction.
I dont think Husserl understood what Heidegger was aiming at. Heidegger’s work was as transcendental as Husserl’s ( not in the Kantian sense) but more radically so.
Heidegger more radical than Husserl? I wonder if you would say a few words about this.
I suppose not. Theory and all.
No, it isn’t.
Husserl’s notion of intentionality fragments the holistic weave of our frame of intelligibility into separated elements.
“It could be shown from the phenomenon of care as the basic structure of Dasein that what phenomenology took to be intentionality and how it took it is fragmentary, a phenomenon regarded merely from the outside. But what is meant by intentionality-the bare and isolated directing-itself-towards-must still be set back into the unified basic structure of being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in. This alone is the authentic phenomenon which corresponds to what inauthentically and only in an isolated direction is meant by intentionality.”
Berkeley's idealism differs from Kant's in the same way that Fichte's idealism differs from Kant's. Ostensibly, both Berkeley and Fichte seemed to have successfully eliminated Kant's Thing-in-Itself as a material cause, but both ultimately were forced to reinstate it as an Absolute Mind.
You think Heidegger is more radical than Husserl? I don't know about this literature much, have read a few things though.
On the other hand, I've spoken to Husserlians who think Heidegger is basically being arbitrary in his choosing "dasein" as the main mode of being in the world.
In any case, I think it's a bit misleading to call Husserl's later philosophy "transcendental idealism", given that he denies "things in themselves", as I've understood the topic. But, feel free to correct it.
I think if someone borrows the term, the basic differences should be accepted, though of course they can be modified, as Schopenhauer and Mainlander did.
Quoting Astrophel
[quote=Meaning and the Problem of Universals, Kelly Ross;https://www.friesian.com/universl.htm]The modes of necessity are interrelated with the modes of contingency, so that perfect necessity is contingent in relation to a priore necessity, a priore necessity is contingent in relation to logical necessity, and logical necessity is contingent in relation to an "ur-contingency" that would transcend non-contradiction. Each mode of contingency, in turn, represents the possibility of something different from what we see in each subsequent mode of necessity. The very possibility that, in time, we can open the window or make some other alteration in reality is a case where we deal with the contingency of present time and our ability to bring about some new possibility. What this adds up to for universals is that as forms of necessity they represent the rules and guideposts that limit and direct possibility: Universals represent all real possibilities. Thus, what Plato would have called the Form of the Bed, really just means that beds are possible. What would have seemed like a reductio ad absurdum of Plato's theory, that if there is the Form of the Bed, there must also be the Form of the Television (which is thus not an artifact and an invented object at all, but something that the inventor has just "remembered"), now must mean that the universal represents the possibility of the television, which is a possibility based on various necessities of physics (conditioned necessities) and facts (perfect necessities) of history.[/quote]
Regard it as a footnote.
No transcendental idealism, transcendental subjectivity, which not an idealism.
You haven't addressed my points as far as I can tell. Doesn't the cat have its own life,nature and attributes, which contribute to constituting anyone's perception of it?
Quoting Possibility
Don't you accept that we are affected by the world below the level of our conscious awareness? If you want to say that we construct the world, that each one of us constructs our own worlds, and that we are not affected by anything unconsciously or other than ourselves, that would be pure idealism and then we should know just how we construct the world. But we do not and the idea seems incoherent and absurd.
You say "collaboration with the world" which is pretty much what I've been saying, but then when you claim that we are not affected in the sense of being acted upon by things other than ourselves, you seem to be denying that very collaboration.
You say that depression may be "more accurately described as an ineffective distribution of attention and effort"; as though it all relies on the willing subject, and I can only say that if you had ever suffered from severe depression you would not say that. Depression can result from "abnormal" brain chemistry, and that fact is uncontroversial.
Also I haven't said that affect is nothing but energy. Everything is energy of one kind or another, but it doesn't follow that anything is nothing but energy.
Quoting Astrophel
So you admit that we know the world and that we can say things about the world it seems. Is the question as to what the world is meaningful? If I say the world is X, are you not then going to ask "What is X"? The world is many things and everything, so how could it makes sense to ask what it is, as if you are seeking some kind of essence or ultimate definition? The world does not exist, as Markus Gabriel says, in the sense that it can never become an object of perception.
Interesting - Bernardo Kastrup calls it Mind at Large. Inspired, it seems by "Will" from Schopenhauer.
But if we take the view that brain is simply what mind looks when seen form a certain perspective, then are we are faced with a chicken and egg question?
That's a good question: only if we want to think of one or the other as prior I guess, so the problem with what I said is that it should have been 'depression may be correlated with abnormal brain chemistry'. The question would be then whether there could be the kind of abnormal brain chemistry associated with severe depression, and yet no severe depression. Or whether there could be severe depression in the absence of abnormal brain chemistry.
Perhaps childhood psychological trauma could cause chemical imbalances in the brain. So some cases of depression may have purely physical causes and others may have emotional causes.
'Mind' would do.
I’m going to be lazy and hide behind the following quotes. Let me know if they answer your question.
Ratcliffe says:
“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”
Zahavi concurs with Ratcliffe:
“Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our
conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.”
It is care that unifies dasein. This is from The History of the Concept of Time, and I read the chapter and can see here why Heidegger might be accused of psychologizing in the way he deals with urges, propensities, love, drives and so forth. Seems convoluted but that is only because it takes a lot to get familiar; but so full of surprising entanglements as with with Augustine and the fable of Hyginus. What an extraordinary thinking person.
Still though, Husserl believed in a transcendental experience, as if, as I see it, if one were in the pov of divine omniscience, one would see it thusly.
I'll have to read it. Just a bit...
Well, that depends on what you consider ‘the world’ to be, as distinct from ‘we’. At what point do we end and the world begins? My point is that affect refers to a relative aspect of energy at the level of potentiality. Language structure insists on a subject-object distinction, describing the relation of ‘affect’ as a verb - but I think this can limit our understanding of what affect is in potentiality. The more we understand the broader scope of affect in potentiality, the more self-consciously we can collaborate in the process.
Quoting Janus
For me, there is a subtle but important qualitative difference between ‘collaborating with’ and ‘being acted upon by’. It goes back to the Tao Te Ching, and the idea of wu-wei, or ‘acting as’. Collaboration refers to a direction of intentionality rather than just effort. It’s about our capacity to anticipate the most efficient and effective directional flow of energy through our ‘being in the world’. So it isn’t that “we should just know how we construct the world”, but that we are at least capable of more accurately understanding how we can participate in the ongoing creative process.
Quoting Janus
But again, I am suggesting that we put aside this subject-object distinction in order to more accurately understand ideas such as affect, reason and value beyond the limitations of language structure or a subjective will. I’m not sure what you’re offended by: there is nothing in my description as it’s written to identify subject in relation to object, so you’re imposing your own assumptions here. ‘Abnormal brain chemistry’ is one way to describe what ‘causes’ depression, but the fact that such a description relies on Big Pharma to ‘fix what’s wrong’ with someone doesn’t sit well with me. Personally, I suspect the growing prevalence of depression has more to do with an evolution of ‘brain chemistry’ (towards greater variability) than any apparent ‘abnormality’ (which is a value judgement), but I’m not really in any position to back this up.
Quoting Janus
We are agreed here, at least.
It is confused, therefore hardly exactly right. In Berkeley, Kant’s thing-in-itself wasn’t eliminated; it was never considered in the first place, hence whether a material cause, is moot.
From Berkeley, speaking as Philonous contra Hylas......
“....I am of a vulgar cast, simple enough to believe my senses, and leave things as I find them. To be plain, it is my opinion that the real things are those very things I see and feel. These I know, and finding they answer all the necessities and purposes of life, have no reason to be solicitous of any other unknown beings...”
....it is clear Berkeley’s and Kant’s foundational epistemology is well-aligned, in that the source of empirical knowledge is entirely predicated on real things met with the senses. Furthermore, Berkeley’s “unknown beings” are very far from Kant’s unknowable things.
It is only upon the consideration of a representational cognitive system, which Berkeley as Philonous of “vulgar cast” doesn’t invoke, does the thing-in-itself obtain any meaning, and then, only in such case, can the thing-in-itself be eliminated as a material cause, that is, of sensation.
Just sayin’.....can’t eliminate that which was never the case.
Or did I miss something?
Well, I read most of it, and I know this history, though not as well as Kelly Ross. I don't get it, this is the kind of thing a Buddhist should run a mile from .
A Buddhist, and I am not consulting text on this, is first someone who practices a method (you can argue against all of this, of course), and that method is a withdrawal from conditions of normal experience, that day to day business with one's affairs. A radical withdrawal, not simply relaxing the mind; the kind of withdrawal that makes profound changes in the way the world is perceived, at the level of perception itself. This method has an end, which is the annihilation of time. Time is the everydayness of our affairs (not some absurd Kantian intuition). It is not the taking the trash out, making the dental appointment, and so on; it is the "taking" of the taking the trash out AS the real; it is the reification of our practical world into an ontology. By ontology I do not mean to discuss Plato or Aristotle or any of that philosophical heritage at all. As I see it, that presumptuous talk causes all of philosophy's problems.
Wondering if universals are real certainly does beg that impossible question, what do you mean by 'real'? Such question stops all inquiry in its tracks. If a particular or a universal is real, then 'real' has to have meaning in order for the proposition to make any sense. This brings the inquiry to unproblematic occasions of the real, and this leads to what is apprehended "most directly". This then is an obvious Cartesian turn, for what is MOST direct is what is immediate, unquestioned, intuitive, such that nothing can stand between the affirmation and what is being affirmed.
To me, this is where Buddhism begins. Buddha, the ultimate phenomenologist, who "reduces" the observable environment to what simply appears before one as it appears, and not as it is anything else. All else in meditation is radically suspended, and by this I mean annihilated. Time is annihilated, for though one may analyze the condition in terms of Kantian time (certainly the apriority of the succession of events certainly holds, if you want to talk like that) this analysis is suspended along with everything else. The radically reduced world looms large with all presuppositions in abeyance.
In the west we have phenomenology. Consider what Husserl says in his Cartesian Meditation about his method:
[i]I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing[/i]
Absolute poverty, of course, is never achieved here or in his Ideas nor in Heidegger, or anywhere else Only in Buddhism (and Hinduism. I drop the metaphysics and the "differences" it makes. I have little patience for the way people invent issues with religion and philosophy. Sit, observe the world. What you seek is a method, not an argument).
Berkeley's system is coherent only because he postulates the existence of a Transcendent Master-Mind.
Kant's system is coherent only because he postulates the existence of a Transcendent Thing-in-Itself.
Fichte's system is coherent only because he postulates the existence of a Transcendent Absolute Ego.
Schopenhauer's system is coherent only because he postulates the existence of a Transcendent Will.
Can any system of philosophy be coherent without having to postulate the existence of some kind of Transcendent Factor?
And with respect to each system, what is it precisely that needs to be explained by the Transcendent Factor? Is it something peculiar and unique to each system, or something common to all the systems?
Has any thinker formulated a complete system of philosophy that did not necessitate postulating the existence of a Transcendent Factor?
Tom, any conjectures as to the "incomplete ideas" which might be unique to each system, or common to them all?
For example, Berkeley needed a transcendent Master-Mind to preserve, maintain, and explain the existence and inherent organization of ideas if and when they were not being perceived by any human mind.
Caspar Hare?
I'd say what needs to be explained is the commonality of experience. I see a cat, and others will also see it just where I do. Even my dog will see it, judging from his behavior.
What I was agreeing with was the positing as outlined by Charles in his most recent post, of God, Absolute Ego, the thing in itself and will in the respective philosophies. As to their respective roles in explaining commonality of experience, I think Kant's and Berkeley's work best. Either there are things in themselves that explain our commonality of experience or else Berkeley's "God does it". Fichte's "absolute ego" and Schopenhauer's "will" are too nebulous to be explanatory of that commonality, at least as far as my understanding of them goes, which admittedly isn't all that far in the case of Fichte.
But perhaps "others" report seeing a cat because you expect them to. Maybe there are no others.
Who said that? :gasp:
Haw haw. Just playing devil's advocate. Actually, I'm a physicalist.
But that points out why I find immaterialism so ridiculous : either the immaterialist is essentially claiming solipsism to be true, or they are just giving another name to the transcendent.
RGC, what is the written work of Caspar Hare titled wherein he sets forth his system of philosophy which does not need to reference a transcendent factor?
Exactly. That's what I mean. The sorts of questions these expressions of idealism raise for me are: If everything is mind then why can't we change the world mentally? Why is there so much consistency between the experience of people? Why can't I read minds or be read? How does the 'physical' world remain stable? It seems clear that an overarching mega-mind is needed as the ground of all experience.
The notion of a Big Mind or cosmic consciousness which is not metacognitive seems intriguing to me. Berkeley has a version of Big Mind that is essentially God, so his idealism is guided and I imagine in some kind of reflective dialogue with all that is.
It's a little bit of a stretch, but Hare's egocentric presentism in On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects. It's the closest work I could think of.
Thanks. Will take a look at it.
Be that as it may, it is nothing but a commentary on the intellect that does philosophy, rather than the philosophy being done by it. In any case, either the intellect thinks that which is a condition for its antecedents, in which case it is already unconditioned and serves as the means, or, thinks that which is conditioned by its antecedents, in which case it becomes the unconditioned and serves as the ends. No big deal; just logic writ large.
———-
Yeah....I guess I’m too literal. When presented with a proposition worth thinking about (Berkeley and Fichte seemed to have successfully eliminated Kant's Thing-in-Itself as a material cause), I limit myself to what the propositions says, not some possible hidden conjecture it may or may not imply. Regarding the parenthetical herein, Kant’s thing in itself never was a material cause, which tends to make the claim for its successful elimination as exactly that.....incoherent.
The Berkeley quote was meant to show the basis of at least part of his epistemology to have no concern for the thing in itself in the first place, whether or not it ever was supposed to possess material causality.
Fichte, on the other hand, writing contemporaneously with Kant, at first accepted Kant’s thing in itself as Kant intended, but then suffered a serious change of mind, mostly in his revamped theory of science, 1795-6, thereby rejecting it. Whether or not he ever conceived the thing in itself as material causality, thereby setting the ground for denying it as such, I have no idea.
That’s all I’m saying.
The other point is that to "eliminate" the thing in itself is to posit an alternate necessary condition for the appearance of phenomena. So, for Berkeley this is God; things in themselves are things as God "thinks" them. Thinks can still be (our) mind-independent physical existents, but they are not the bare "physical existents" of physicalism because their existence depends on their having their being in God. For Fichte it is not something physical at all but "Absolute Ego"; the problem being that it is not clear what such a thing could be. And Schopenhauer;s "Will" cannot account for differentiation or order.
Maybe they are one of two necessary conditions:
"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”
To say something occurs 'in the mind' is not the same as to say it occurs in your mind or my mind alone. Consciousness is a collective. Through language, enculturation, and common standards we each are an aspect of a collective consciousness. This is made explicit in Jung's doctrine of the collective unconscious and the archetypes.
We do change the world intentionally. Look around you - every single thing you see is a product of the human mind. It needn't be as dramatic as pyschokinesis or spoon-bending! Even psychosomatic medicine is an indicator of 'mind over matter'. (I don't totally discount the existence of psychic powers but I never go into bat for them, as it's always such an acrimonious subject.)
One analogy I have given before is like this. Imagine if mountains were conscious. Because their life span is hundreds or millions of years, a mountain could not comprehend a mountaineer - the span of a human life would be infinitesmally small in comparison. A river, you could understand, because it hangs around long enough to make an impression, so to speak.
At the other end of the scale, imagine an intelligent microbe. It's lifespan might be minutes or hours. The mountaineer's size and time-scale would be incomprehensible to it, on the other end of the scale.
That serves to illustrate how our 'species consciousness' determines the kind of world we see. I think something like that underlies Kant's notions of the 'primary intuitions' of space and time. They are architectonic to our experience of reality, which is reality.
So humans have both a cultural and biologically-determined consciousness, and that is not yours or mine. We're all participants in it, but we don't personally originate it. That is very much like Hegel's view, although you also find it in Ken Wilber's spiral dynamics. We're not atomic individuals, completely separated from others or from the world, but participants in the evolution of consciousness.
[quote=Dan Zahavi]Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.” [/quote]
:100:
The problem with this is that Jung did not posit a collective consciousness, but a collective unconscious. In any case the idea of either is nebulous, what could such a thing be? Are human minds connected at some deeper level, or only in the sense that we participate in a common culture?
And the reason it's nebulous, is because it's not a thing. Our culture only prepares us to deal with things, and if it's not a thing - why, it must be nothing!
I was simply restating the questions Kastrup himself has said are the key questions we need to resolve if we are going to fully apprehend the idea of idealism and a Universal Mind.
The idea of a collective unconscious (I'm very familiar with Jung) doesn't of itself really answer the questions Kastrup has raised. Positing the notion of the human as dissociated alters goes some way to make sense of it more fully. Then all you have to do is explain dissociated alters, and so on...
Kastrup argues that Jung was an idealist and that the collective unconscious (Jung I think describes it as a primordial reservoir we all draw from) is a version of Mind at Large. You'll note that Jung stated these images were shared across all human cultures. Hence Joseph Campbell's book A Hero with A Thousand Faces which draws together the collective imagery and narrative traditions of the world's hero myths via Jungian archetypes. The basis of the scripts for Star Wars...
OK, these ontological positions are not the bare phenomenological position of the epoché; wherein the question is bracketed for methodological reasons.
So, "the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has [s]ontological[/s] priority over an objective/causal description" for the purposes of phenomenological investigation, but not for the purposes of scientific investigation.
As to Zahavi's "What we call "reality""; we call many things reality depending on what we are investigating or what our ontological commitments are. There is no "ultimately" about it; it remains contextual, unless you want to posit some ultimate ontological truth; but then many different ultimate ontological truths are posited by many different thinkers of different stripes.
In assessing the plausibility of any metaphysical or ontological position, I think the one thing which must be explained is the commonality of experience between humans and even between humans and animals, so I don't think appealing to "mind-and language- dependent structures" is going to cut it, unless you are opting for some kind of idealism which posits a collective mind. In the case of animals of course the "language" part must be omitted.
We are part of the world of course. But it doesn't seem that the world depends on us, on our perceiving it, in order to exist. Of course to exist in the form in which we (uniquely) perceive, it does depend on us, but even there we also depend on it, or at least that seems most plausible.
I agree that we might think that ultimately, or primordially, experience is prior to the subject-object distinction; but there we would be feigning to dip into the pre-cognitive ocean of being, and I think we can only hint at that, because all we can propositionally say remains firmly in the cognitive realm of subjects and objects.
So, I meant to say that we are affected pre-cognitively, and that 'affect' in this sense signifies some process prior to perception whereby our senses collaborate with the world (as part of, or not separate from, the world, of course) to give rise to sensory phenomena and the conscious and unconscious affects (or responses) we experience in respect of those.
It's a long time since I've read Jung or The Hero With a Thousand Faces, but what you say seems right to me; that Jung, along with Campbell, posits a cross-cultural commonality of mythical and religious themes.
It never seems to be spelled out though, just what this "storehouse" of archetypal imagery is supposed to be. In that sense it is, for me, a nebulous idea like Platos' realm of the forms, the Buddhist notion of the "alaya-vijnana" or storehouse consciousness, the theosophical and anthroposophical idea of "akashic records' and Sheldrake's "morphogenetic fields".
I think all these kinds of ideas fall apart and fail to make much sense without a further positing of a universal mind or God.
[quote=SEP;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/]To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. CPR 369
Kant calls transcendental realism the “common prejudice” (A740/B768) and describes it as a “common but fallacious presupposition” (A536/B564; cf. Allison 2004: 22). Transcendental realism is the commonsense pre-theoretic view that objects in space and time are “things in themselves”, which Kant, of course, denies.
Quoting Janus
Strange. I think it is the nebulous idea par excellence.
I don't know why you would say that in view of the existence of a very long history of theology. God is not a determinate object, obviously, but people can, have and do think quite coherently about the idea of God. Can you say the same about the ideas of Plato's forms, the collective unconscious, etc.?
I have no idea why you posted that quote from the SEP. I haven't anywhere said that things in themselves are "objects in space and time". When I say "world" I am not referring to the world as perceived, to such objects as perceived, but to whatever it is that, in collaboration with our senses, gives rise to such objects.
I am saying that whatever that is, everything we know seems to tell us it must be independent of our perceptions; i.e., that it would still exist regardless of whether we perceive it. To deny that would be to deny the existence of anything prior to the advent of humans, which seems quite absurd.
But there is vast disagreement about that. The Great Schism between Orthodox and Catholic for starters. Theistic personalism v classical theology. List could go on indefinitely, let's not get bogged down in that.
Quoting Janus
Which is exactly the point made in that passage, which is why I referenced it: 'The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding.'
The italicized phrases mean the same, do they not?
The fact that people can think different things about God is not relevant to the point, though. We can think about God was the point.
You're partly on the money here I think but I'm somewhat struck by this as I have never thought the idea of a god was coherent, unless you opt for a Protestant anthropomorphic, personal god, which to me would seem somewhat unsophisticated and lacking in plausibility. Is god 'energy' or the ground of being.... what can it mean? Theology may well amount to great scholarly edifices made of paying cards for all we know.
Nevertheless, I think god seems more graspable than Platonic forms on the basis of god's centrality to our culture despite its supposed secularism. Think of all the movies, TV shows and art featuring god/s. Comedian George Burns played god in a hit movie back in the 1970's, but who would you get to play the collective unconscious or the Platonic realm? It would have to be Daniel Day Lewis or Toni Collette...
Actually, the ding an sich is necessary for perception, the passive impression on the sensory apparatus. Post-impression, it is the active faculties of representation that intuits the sensation, which gives phenomenon. You know the drill.....“arranges the matter of the object according to rules”.
Epistemological juxtaposition: the thing we represent to ourselves, the ding an sich is the thing we don’t. Not to be thought of from an ontological perspective at all; the ding an sich certainly exists....as whatever it is. The whatever it is we know as something.....is the thing.
————
Quoting Janus
Except there is no need to posit an alternative, when the one posited is both necessary and sufficient in its own right. Technically whatever the necessary condition would be, would have to be applicable only to things as they are intuited by us, under the assumption the human cognitive system is in fact representational. So, if anything, the thing in itself would be posited as that to which the intuitions could not apply. Eliminated, if you will, from being conditioned by space and time.
As I’ve understood the theory anyway. That, and a buck/50......
Tricky. The way I put it is that such ideas are coherent within a domain of discourse. Within such a domain, there is a shared understanding of key terms, texts and practices which makes it meaningful to speak of a concept or idea.
But on the other hand there is in spiritual/religious discourse, the principle of a non-conceptual understanding. Obviously that sounds vague, but a snippet from Karen Armstrong might cast some light. She says in relation to traditional spirituality that:
But even when they're realised by practitioners, they may still not be understood on the conceptual level. That's what philosophers and scholars do, or attempt, but the gist might be something that those who practice it are incapable of describing verbally, other than by what they do.
Apropos of the conversation generally, I googled 'Husserl Natural Attitude' and the top return was a pretty decent blog post at a university-run site.
A relevant excerpt:
The fact that people can think different things about God is not relevant to the point, though. We can think, and many things have been thought, about God was the point. Same cannot be said for the collective unconscious, karma, akashic records and so on.
Quoting Wayfarer
No they do not. I haven't said that "outer appearances" could exist independently of us. It is whatever it is that presents to us as outer appearances that exists independently of us. Anything we say about what it is will be classed as an appearance for us, and yet if we want to say that those things existed prior to the emergence of humans (which seems obviously to be the case) then we can only refer to them as "things as they exist in themselves" or some such.
This is just what Kant describes as 'transcendental realism'.
Yes, I agree that this is what I think Kant means.
Quoting Mww
Right, exactly what I've been saying to @Wayfarer above; but he seems to think it amounts to transcendental realism. I have made this point before; when we think of the empirical from our perspective it is real ( because accessed via the senses) and when we think about the transcendental from our point of view it is ideal ( because it is whatever is beyond what can be accessed via the senses, and thus can only be (more or less) thought about, imagined.
If we reverse this and think about the empirical from the "point of view" of the transcendental, it is ideal because it is conditioned and formed by our ideas and judgements, and thinking about the transcendental from this perspective it is real, because it is whatever it is in an absolute sense independently of our cognitions. This is the same as if we posited the situation from how we can imagine God's perspective.
Of course all of this is us thinking, but we are able to put ourselves in "other shoes" via the imagination. It's the best we can do, so it will have to suffice.
It's true; there are many conceptions of God from impersonal deistic conceptions to personal theistic ones. And I agree it could all be "edifices made of playing cards", just mere imagination pointing to nothing beyond itself. That is why such things are always, and always must remain, matters of faith in my view.
:lol: Daniel Day Lewis or Toni Collete as the collective unconscious or the platonic realm. Very imaginative, and somehow apt!
I've quoted this before but it remains on point.
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy, p106]'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.
Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices.[/quote]
Is it therefore merely imaginary or is it real? If it is real then that amounts, in another sense, as I have already explained, to transcendental realism; i.e. that the transcendental is ultimately real (even though ideal to us).
If you are going to comment please address what I have actually said and point out what you think is wrong with it. If you can't do that then we can't have a satisfying discussion and neither of us will learn anything.
Idea exist in flesh when they are thought, or on paper or in magnetic memory. Ideas implicit, processes built into the nature of any and all existence, such as causality, exist in dynamic, physical processes. Nothing exists without Matter.
There is no such thing as an Infinitude, or an Infinite Being; everything is bounded, that is the nature of being an Object, Body, Thing, what have you.
Consciousness is itself proof of the Objective Extant, Physical Universe, as there is absolutely no way to create a Consciousness except through Evolution in a Material Universe; and to such who would suggest we could have been created by a Divinity, that's just an appeal to mysterious magic, and ignores the infinite regression Creator Creators.
Give it up: what you see is what you get, and any Philosophic experiment, be it in Thought or otherwise, needs to operate within the parameters of the Standard Model of Cosmology accepted by the worlds' physicists, or it is just fantastic speculation.
Transcendence is a psychological state; it is the Imagination leaping superior to its own knowledge as it, often, assists the Subject to new perspectives on his or her or their studies; but it still is a material phenomenon of the Subject's brain and other physiological systems.
Like, I said, can someone Conceive of another way of creating consciousnesses except through Evolution?
The other logical possibility is that consciousness is uncreated.
I have been sincerely trying to do that on each occasion. It seems you're not understanding what I'm trying to convey. I think you're approaching it from the natural attitude (beginning from 'From a phenomenological perspective....')
Quoting Janus
Now you're speaking my language.
Uncreated? Forever extant? Huh?
How many neurotransmitters does it take for a ‘57 DeSoto? Which particular pathway are they on? What’s the maximum permissible distance of the channel? How would one ever find out? Why would he care, if the image is given without ever knowing any of those material conditions?
Maybe it’s like the sum over histories...we don’t know how many or which way, and any attempt to find out disrupts exactly what we’re trying to discover, so it is logical that it is ever neurotransmitter going in every possible way. Which, of course, teaches us not a damn thing about how neurotransmitters give us mental objects.
Quoting Michael Sol
Excellent advice.
(Sigh)
"How many neurotransmitters does it take for a ‘57 DeSoto? Which particular pathway are they on? What’s the maximum permissible distance of the channel? How would one ever find out? Why would he care, if the image is given without ever knowing any of those material conditions?"
Um, I don't know any of the specifics about the volume of blood, diameter of my veins and arteries, nor the specific oxygen content of my blood cells when leaving the lungs, yet I am confident that all of those material processes exist and can be measured by scientists. And a simple google search will show you that there are many of the latter doing just that.....
"if the image is given..." Huh? If I see a Desoto or its picture, I obviously know that designers thunk it, capitalists built a factory to make it, and all sorts of people were employed to build and sell it... Obviously, the physical conditions, whether in the factory or in the heads of those involved in the vehicle's production, are all implicit in the image...
Again, as I say, as we cannot even conceive of a Consciousness that did not come into being except through Evolution, isn't our own Consciousnesses proof of the Objectively Extant, Material Universe that bred it?
In Kant, transcendental realism only means space and time, while still the forms of objects, resides in them as intrinsic properties. By transferring space and time to intuition as pure representations, they are removed as properties of, by making them merely the necessary conditions for, objects of perception. Sheer genius......space and time are both incontestably infinite, and no empirical knowledge is at all possible of objects with infinite properties, so investigating the possibility of empirical knowledge necessarily begins by removing that which prevents it.
Are space an time pure intuitions? Dunno...maybe not. But if they can be, and in conjunction with the rest of the speculative system predicated on logic alone, at least it works out well enough for its intended purpose.
———-
Quoting Janus
Correct. In Kant, transcendental merely indicates that which is given from a priori pure reason alone, having many conceptions subsumed under it.
Yet you insist the specifics are necessary. In any case, if you don’t know the specifics, you cannot say with any authority, or prove with any certainty, what the specifics actually do. You can draw logical inferences til Doomsday, and be either right or wrong with equal opportunity.
Quoting Michael Sol
Exactly. And, of course, implicit in, is very far from proof of. Same for consciousness, insofar as consciousness ne’er was any kind of being except a conceived being, as opposed to a material being.
But I grant that without evolution the human species would not have advanced enough to conceive such an abstract being as consciousness. At the same time, however, such grant must be given, because that’s apparently what happened. But that does not, in itself, immediately eliminate every other means by which consciousness could have been conceived.
In a way, evolution defeats itself, in that our intellectual advancement by means of it, has also enabled us to consider the possibility that our abstract consciousness was given to us by some external something-or-other. It’s just simple logic, man. If we don’t know the specifics that cause a thing, we are at liberty to allow something else as cause for that same thing. Been that way since mud huts and fig leafs.
No, I disagree, Mww. Implicit truth is still truth. The Axiom of Identity is utterly proven, a priori, by the conception of all Objects.
You cannot even conceive of Matter that is not governed by Causality; and you keep saying there are alternatives to Evolution, but I doubt that, as it is an extraordinary process that takes billions of years. Nor has anyone offered an alternative to modifying animal behavior except through the pain/pleasure mechanism.
And while mankind has considered the possibility of a Creator, no one can explain how that Creator operates if not through material cause and effect in a dimensional universe, nor how that Creator was created, whereas if we simply admit that Consciousnesses are unalterably paired to Evolutionary Environments, we have a complete Thought Experiment that is proven by the Fossil Record.
So I say again, Consciousness proves the existence of a Material Universe.
Ok, so let’s not worry so much about making propositions, then. Let’s understand language as a logical structuring of qualitative ideas relative to affect. Let’s recognise this relativity even in our relation to propositions, rather than taking them on face value, as if subjects and objects exist unaffected. Because only pre-cognitive language structures such as traditional Chinese ideograms exist free from affect. Word concepts do not.
FWIW, I don’t believe this relativity is impossible to navigate, just complex and uncertain. But then, so is life, if we’re honest.
:up:
Categorical error. The axiom of Identity is derived a priori. That which is analytic, such as the axiom of identity in the form A = A, is a self-evident truth, a tautology, which informs of nothing but itself. No conception can be connected to another without a mediating condition, and since A = A incorporates only a singular conception, no synthesis with conceptions of objects is at all possible.
Synthetic principles, on the other hand, in which one conception is connected with another, can only sustain the extant truth of axioms. It is quite absurd to render a proof for that which is already apodeitically certain.
With respect to consciousness, an entirely irreducible metaphysical conception, and certainly having no necessary empirical antecedents, is an axiom of Identity insofar as consciousness can never identify with anything but itself, but it is, as well, an a priori[/i ] synthetic principle derived from pure reason alone, insofar as consciousness as [i]a priori conception, has schema subsumed under it, or, which is the same thing, has conceptions contained in it.
—————
Quoting Michael Sol
True enough. Now all that’s required is to prove consciousness is conceived as matter, in order for causality to govern it. Here met with an aberration, in that causality itself is an entirely metaphysical conception. Ever gone to Home Depot to perused the shelves for some quantity of causality?
Disagree as you wish, but metaphysical entities cannot be empirically proven. Only other metaphysical entities can validate metaphysical entities, and not a single one of them can ever be proved in the same manner as falling trees can be proven to wreck your house.
Tom, one could ask: How precisely does Kant's thing-in-itself differ from Berkeley's (actually Locke's) substance, or matter? That "something, I know not what " underlying sense impressions.
I submit that they do not really differ at all because, bottom line, each can be characterized best as a "NOTHING," as that which, in principle, could never be perceived by human beings.
For what else would one be left with to perceive but a "NOTHING" if one could eliminate all empirical and transcendental characteristics from the object?
To still insist that something perceivable remains would be sheer nonsense.
Notice how the tactics used by Fichte to discredit the legitimacy of Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself (see Fichte's The Vocation of Man) are nearly identical to the tactics used by Berkeley to discredit the legitimacy of Locke's conception of substance, or matter (see Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge & Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous).
Certainly, as Kant claimed, the transcendental forms of intuition and the transcendental categories of the understanding without sensations are empty and the sensations without the transcendental forms of intuition and the transcendental categories of the understanding are blind.
But the purported thing-in-itself, being transcendent to both the sensory and the transcendental, is NOTHING from the framework of human consciousness.
I hear what you are saying about nothing, but what's it all mean, what's your conclusion?
Mww:
You said:
Categorical error. The axiom of Identity is derived a priori. That which is analytic, such as the axiom of identity in the form A = A, is a self-evident truth, a tautology, which informs of nothing but itself. No conception can be connected to another without a mediating condition, and since A = A incorporates only a singular conception, no synthesis with conceptions of objects is at all possible.
I think you are misreading Kant. The Axiom is derived a priori, from one's a priori concept of Bodies' and as a foundational Truth for Consciousnesses, it is Fundamental.
You said:
True enough. Now all that’s required is to prove consciousness is conceived as matter, in order for causality to govern it. Here met with an aberration, in that causality itself is an entirely metaphysical conception. Ever gone to Home Depot to perused the shelves for some quantity of causality?
Disagree as you wish, but metaphysical entities cannot be empirically proven. Only other metaphysical entities can validate metaphysical entities, and not a single one of them can ever be proved in the same manner as falling trees can be proven to wreck your house.
Consciousnesses are unfailingly the product of Evolution in a Material Universe. We have a complete a priori theory in Evolution, and in General Relativity, and since no one has ever provided an alternative theory to those of causal matter cycles and evolution, we have no reason at all to believe that there are any alternatives.
If a Consciousness infallibly denotes evolution in a Material Universe, then the Physical is the Metaphysical.
And you ask me to prove Matter can be a Consciousness? What? Who are all these Zombies then?
Everyone keeps saying it doesn't have to be that way, we've got alternatives to material reality here somewhere, I know we do. Except guys like George Ellis and Alan Coley and the like...
I’m more than happy to be corrected.
Direct references from relevant texts mandatory, of course.
Kant's epistemology never really explains satisfactorily where sensations come from before they are synthesized by the transcendental forms of intuition and the transcendental categories of the understanding.
To say that the transcendent thing-in-itself, or the transcendent noumenon, are the original sources of pre-synthesized sensations (that they stimulate sensations), is basically no different than saying that the pre-synthesized sensations are caused by NOTHING.
Ultimately, Kant's epistemology lacks explanatory power. I conclude that it fails.
Tom. I don't think there are any deliberate conspiratorial machinations or plots at work here or in any other grand materialist or idealist epistemological systems. I just think all epistemic theories are destined to have contradictions and shortcomings inherent in them by their grandiose natures and aspirations.
No, I'm not approaching from "the natural attitude". Your attempt to dismiss what I have said, without addressing it on it's own terms, by labeling it as coming from "the natural attitude" is facile, and shows your lack of ability to participate in open discussion in good faith. When you are ready to address what I say on its own terms, then come back to me. Until then I am done trying to engage with you.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, I'm merely expressing a logical possibility. I know that for you it is an article of faith; personally I don't have an opinion either way. As I've tried to explain to you, considering consciousness as prior is a methodological approach in phenomenology, and considering the physical as prior is a methodological approach in science. Neither need to be adopted as beliefs in order to practice the respective disciplines, they are merely methodological starting assumptions.
You seem to be saying that we should recognize that true and false propositions are so only contextually, not absolutely. If that is what you are saying, then I heartily agree.
Quoting Possibility
:100:
Agreed. So, do you think any knowledge of objects with infinite properties is possible at all, or are we confined to examining the logical implications (the a priori) if any? The other possibility that has been imagined is gnosis, or perhaps something less bold, like Spinoza's "intellectual intuition" or seeing "sub specie aeternitatis" (under the aspect of eternity).
Quoting Mww
I agree with that summation.
I agree, I was just satirizing one of the views out there.
Personally, I don’t think objects with infinite properties are even possible. Given that an object is the sum of its parts describable by properties, then an object of infinite parts is immediately impossible because the sum of them is impossible. It follows that knowledge of impossible objects is itself impossible. But then....how do we know the objects we experience don’t have properties we can’t describe? And, if we don’t know how many of those there may be, we don’t know there aren’t an infinite series of them.
Quoting Janus
That, if anything, I think. If the infinite is a logical premise, then it seems only logical conclusions can be possible from it.
Leave it to a human, to wish to know everything, and then come up with something, all by himself, he can’t know anything about. Sometimes I think we got away from throwing rocks at each other, by sheer accident.
“....For pure speculative reason has this peculiarity, that, in choosing the various objects of thought, it is able to define the limits of its own faculties, and even to give a complete enumeration of the possible modes of proposing problems to itself, and thus to sketch out the entire system of metaphysics...”
Idealism in general...perhaps. This particular idealism, according to its author, is at least a logically complete model of a human cognitive system.
“....common logic presents me with a complete and systematic catalogue of all the simple operations of reason...”
That which arises from itself must be complete, and exchanging the completeness of that, for the language used to represent it, explains why the books that tells us about it, are hundreds of pages long.
“...Hence, too, metaphysics has this singular advantage—an advantage which falls to the lot of no other science which has to do with objects—that, if once it is conducted into the sure path of science, it can then take in the whole sphere of its cognitions, and can thus complete its work, and leave it for the use of posterity, as a capital which can never receive fresh accessions. For metaphysics has to deal only with principles and with the limitations of its own employment as determined by these principles. To this perfection it is, therefore, bound, as the fundamental science, to attain...”
It isn’t a question of being a complete model, but rather, whether it is accepted as such. So it is that either the model is complete but wrong insofar as it begins from the wrong path, or it is incomplete insofar as it disregards that which doesn’t belong to it, but should.
As are sensations disregarded, as having nothing whatsoever to do with metaphysics proper, and a logical model for it, other than their mere physical presence for its initiation.
Schopenhauer’s criticism is abysmally inept as well, with respect to Kant’s neglect of his cherished principle of sufficient reason, in that the metaphysical principles of pure reason have to do with principles of universality and absolute necessity, which, when logically given, are themselves immediately sufficient for that which follows from them.
Food for thought. It's certainly not my subject, so I defer to your reading on this. It seems to me that there are a number of things that remain unclear or incomplete (certainly to me) - the nature of the noumenal world for one (which by definition is unknowable but is this an acceptable position?) and it seems to me the nature of Big Mind not well understood in Kant or Schopenhauer. Does that make sense?
It is unknowable, and that position is acceptable, iff considered by Kant’s standards. To say the way Kant talks about it is misleading or wrong is fine, but to show how it is those, requires a different set of standards.
It is still the case, though, that in Kant, there is no noumenal world, from a human perspective, so to even talk about in connection with him, is technically inappropriate.
I hear you. I sometimes wonder how we can know if something is unknowable in perpetuity?
This reminds me of Spinoza, who understood God/Nature as being one substance possessing infinite attributes of which only two "extensa" and "cogitans" are accessible to us. Since encountering the idea, I always wondered whether "inifinite attributes" should be interpreted as " infinitely many attributes" or "attributes which are infinite", that is, attrbutes which are not finite or in other words, not determinable.
Quoting Mww
Haha. Yes, what's the alternative? God did it, I guess.
But when you say this:
Quoting Janus
you're speaking from the natural attitude. It's the taken-for-grantedness of the separate reality of the world which we generally start from. It's natural to do that. Hence the description.
"From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts."
And there's an element of that in what you're writing. It's insufficiently radical, if you like. That's all I'm saying. This is *not* my taking shots or trying to belittle you or score points, which is how you seem to be interpreting it, or even my trying to dismiss what you're saying. I'm trying to show what I think is the issue, but you say that this always comes across as if I'm equivocating, changing the subject, not addressing the question, or not speaking on your terms. So probably, we're talking past each other, and I ought to cease and desist.
No, it's not correct to say that I'm speaking from the natural attitude. If you think I am then you are misunderstanding what I'm saying. I don't say that the world doesn't depend on us; I say that it seems, according to our experience, that the world doesn't depend on us. And then I make the distinction between the world considered as it is "in itself", and the world as it is known by us, the latter of which, insofar as it is represented by our ideas, obviously does depend on us, by definition.
But then we can further question what "depends on us" really means. Do we create ourselves? Do we "depend (only) on us" in the final analysis? If it were so, then we should automatically understand everything about us, and the world of our experience that depends on us.
If we and our experience do not depend exclusively on us, then there must be "something" which sustains our being and experience and that does not depend on us or our experience at all. The salient question is as to what that something is. I say that since it is outside our realm of experience and control it is unknowable; which means that if we want to commit to some view about it, that view will be based on faith, not reason or observation.
I think this is where Jacques Maritain locates the intuition of being. 'is a perception direct and immediate …. It is a very simple sight, superior to any discursive reasoning or demonstration [… of] a reality which it touches and which takes hold of it; (Preface to Metaphysics, 1934 [1939: 50–51]). Maritain believed that this escaped Kant, so I won't pursue it further here, but I see some common ground between that, and the Buddhist prajna (see God, Zen and the Intuition of Being.)
That said I would change "scientifically demonstrable" to 'empirically demonstrable'. The other point is that there is nothing wrong with having faith; we all do it one way or the other, since the scientific worldview as a metaphysical position is itself not empirically demonstrable, however plausible it might seem.
And logic actually tells us nothing about what is really the case it just tells us what form things must be in in order to be the case. I would also add in there "phenomenologically demonstrable". since even though phenomenological truths are not strictly empirically verifiable, they are I think obvious to anyone with an open mind who is willing to reflect on the ways in which we experience.
I think, once again, that this can only be a logical claim, which would stand insofar as if something is impossible to know, it will be unknowable for all time. Stuff like....can we know of an effect that has no cause, can we know a conception that does not immediately include its own negation....weird stuff like that, predicated merely on the kind of intellect in play.
On the other hand, and maybe even weirder, is “Rumsfeld’s Ditty”, which implies that of which we don’t know we don’t know, is already unknowable in any time. Technically, though, this reflects on the Kantian category of possibility, which states that a thing must be possible in order to be known, so if there is a thing for which we don’t know the possibility, that is exactly the thing for which there can never be any knowledge.
But still, to think any object is to presuppose its possibility, insofar as it is impossible to think an impossible object. Or, which is the same thing, to think an impossible object is a contradiction. It follows that an unknowable object is an impossible object, but we cannot think an impossible object, so how in the HELL did we ever come up with asking if we can know of something the thought of which can never happen?
Hence, the critique of pure reason. Humans do this kinda stuff all the time, but there's no answers in the doing, or, the answers are in conflict with the questions, rather than satisfying them.
“....Now the transcendental (subjective) reality at least of the pure conceptions of reason rests upon the fact that we are led to such ideas by a necessary procedure of reason. There must therefore be syllogisms which contain no empirical premisses, and by means of which we conclude from something that we do know, to something of which we do not even possess a conception, to which we, nevertheless, by an unavoidable illusion, ascribe objective reality. Such arguments are, as regards their result, rather to be termed sophisms than syllogisms, although indeed, as regards their origin, they are very well entitled to the latter name, inasmuch as they are not fictions or accidental products of reason, but are necessitated by its very nature. They are sophisms, not of men, but of pure reason herself, from which the Wisest cannot free himself. After long labour he may be able to guard against the error, but he can never be thoroughly rid of the illusion which continually mocks and misleads him....”
It’s fun to think about human thinking, but it’s soooooo much more fun, to think about how hay-wire it can go.
Quick reaction from a non philosopher. So often in philosophy argument seems to come down to the view that we require transcendental justification for morality or aesthetics for them to be meaningful. Values can't be coherent or even brought into being without either God and/or a version of idealism. In other words, idealism or god are the necessary requirement for ineligibility. The logical absolutes and even the existence of language could be claimed to be dependent on this too.
The idealism of our present time seems to be this notion of inter-subjective communities of agreement which help us to establish shared but subjective truths. In the era of the dead metanarrative this seems as optimistic as we are able to be about truth, beauty and goodness.
I think the latter approach resonates stronger for me but I understand the powerful narrative and tradition of the first. The first seems to say that right and wrong and notions of beauty are a kind of magic that are inaccessible to secular thought. I certainly know that there are Christians with presuppositional apologetics who would argue that atheists are indeed able to tell right from wrong, but only because God wrote this knowledge 'upon their hearts.' Perhaps another vestigial trace of the Logos in Neo-Platonist guise.
What keeps leading back to this trail is the reality of intelligible objects, which I've just posted about in the thread on non-physical realities. (I've been corresponding with Kelly Ross, he's quite an approachable fellow. I don't agree with all his analyses but they certainly help me get my head around a lot of difficult issues.)
This is the first paragraph in the introduction:
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 1)]Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.[/quote]
What the observer brings is the picture:
[quote=(p. 67)]When we open our eyes and observe the world around us, we don’t see a smooth, evenly distributed continuum, but a scene that is sharply and unambiguously divided into separate objects. Each of these objects is familiar to us, we know their identities, and we are able to name them. To the animal [i.e. sensory] mind, the world is subdivided into separate, discrete things. Without a separation into independent parts, nothing would be comprehensible, there could be no understanding, and thought would not be possible.
...Common sense has us believe that the world really does consist of separate objects exactly as we see it, for we suppose that nature comes to us ready-carved. But in fact, the animal visual system does such a thorough job of partitioning the visual array into familiar objects, that it is impossible for us to look at a scene and not perceive it as composed of separate things.[/quote]
He makes the point that the scientific 'view from nowhere' comprises nothing more than, or apart from, the formal relationships of objects and forces without any features:
[quote=p.118]with no color, appearance, feel, weight or any other discernible features. In fact, every feature which might impact the senses—hence produce an impression of some kind—is absent because in this hypothetical universe there is no life and there are no senses. Everything material may be there, but not the senses. As Kant said about the noumenal world (which is the same as the mind-independent world), nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist.[/quote]
So in this usage 'the noumenal' actually conforms with its dictionary definition, that being a 'pure object of thought' (with the caveat that 'thought' here means 'quantitative expression'.) He points out that the formal objects of science do not comprise any kind of image:
[quote=Pp118-120]When you speak of a straight line in science, you must suppress the image of the taut string in mind. You must force yourself to forgo any mental picture of what a straight line looks like, and instead, think of it as nothing but an empty word. When you use that word, you may hold the image of the taut string in mind, but that’s for your own benefit: It may guide your intuition but should not participate in your reasoning. ...If that were permitted, then the laws of science would depend on the meanings we attach to concepts—on the mental images we hold in mind.[/quote]
He says that science proceeds by the 'addition of simples' meaning the discovery of the simplest quantitative elements which can combine to produce complexity. But the structure of complex phenomena are brought to them by the perceiver:
[quote=p124]Newton’s equations, which apply to pairs of bodies in space, determine the trajectories of planets around the sun. However, these trajectories are meaningful only to beings who see and conceive in Gestalts. The shape of an orbit, though it exists only in the eyes of a Gestalt observer, is a direct consequence of Newton’s laws, and no further principle is needed to account for it. Although the shapes of orbits are fully determined by the underlying physics (that is, by addition of simples), orbits exist only in the scheme of reality of Gestalt observers. The reality which a Gestalt observer perceives is quite different from that of the underlying physical world. In the Gestalt whole, the observer sees patterns—and these patterns do not exist in the ground reality because patterns emerge only in spread-out wholes and exist only in Gestalt perception.[/quote]
However, thoughts are real, but in a different sense to the formal objects of scientific analysis:
[quote=(p. 52).] Sensations, beliefs, imaginings and feelings are often referred to as figments, that is, creations of the mind. A mental image is taken to be something less than real: For one thing, it has no material substance and is impossible to detect except in the mind of the perceiver. It is true that sensations are caused by electrochemical events in a brain, but when experienced by a living mind, sensations are decisively different in kind from electrons in motion. They are indeed “figments” because they exist nowhere except in awareness. As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience.[/quote]
Pinter advocates for a form of dualism but it's exceptionally clear and quite simple. And it does dovetail quite well with Kant's transcendental idealism except that he doesn't go into the nature and structure of reason, as such - although that would have made it a completely different book. One of the main advantages of this book is its clarity and focus. It has really helped me to understand the sense in which the world is 'mind-generated' - not the world in its entirety, not the whole vast universe of space and time, but 'world' as, and insofar as it is, a meaningful whole - which is the meaning of 'cosmos' - and in which the mind plays a fundamental part.
Thank you - this is helpful. Food for thought. I can see how this is all compatible with phenomenology. I guess the aspect left out of this - the nature of and structure of reason - probably does also need to be engaged with to make the entire 'vision' coherent.
He does say that 'the animal sensorium' is present in even the most simple of sentient creatures - the example he gives is an insect type called fairyflies, which are tiny, 0.13 and 0.25 mm, but which have organs for digestion, reproduction etc. His view is that from the earliest species, animals form gestalts of their environment in order to negotiate it, so that what is meaningful to a species are the gestalts that are shaped by their purposes, which in turn are shaped by the exigencies of survival. He discusses Donald Hoffman for several pages.
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (pp. 12-13). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
More on Hoffman's theories can be found here.
Don't miss the main point.
No, Pinter does not try and explain the origin of mind. Wise choice, I think.
I read Hoffman's book recently. It's pretty good. I was a little disappointed that it didn't go into any of the research on the way information about the noumenal makes it into the mind. Information theoretic approaches cover this quite well IMO, even if they can't solve the hard problem, so it seemed like a bit of a hole.
In my post about Pinter’s book above, I specifically mention where in his account he says the noumenal enters the picture. It’s not at all as I would have thought - not some ghostly backstage thingimy, but the purely quantitative attributes of the ‘simples’ of scientific analysis.
My philosophical interpretation is close to what Pinter hints at: that sentient beings bring meaning into a meaningless universe, they open up an experiential dimension to existence which is otherwise absent. (That's why we're called 'beings'!) The fundamental problem with modern philosophy and science is in regarding beings as objects, rather than recognising that their nature as beings will always elude objective analysis, and the concommitant belief that the universe depicted by science is the only real universe, thereby forgetting the role of the observing mind in bringing meaning to it. (I think this is what Heidegger means by the 'forgetfulness of being'.)
It’s also close to what Nagel says:
Quoting Thomas Nagel, Core of Mind and Cosmos
So then, like Kant, his account of "noumenon" begs the question.
You'll have to help me. I got this.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Tom Storm
I would say that Kant's noumenal world cannot have any kind of physical form, on pain of contradiction.
On that, though, I think Kant thinks action is the bridge between phenomenal reality and noumenal.
But what his actual philosophy says -- no. It's not possible.
If we follow Kant I don't think this is obvious -- I think it's an easy inference which makes sense of his writings, but it's not obvious. And I say it's not obvious because you're tripping across a conceptual bump Kant kind of didn't address, or at least tried to address and didn't satisfy.
If we are consistent with Kant's words, then we have no role in constructing a world out of the noumena. We construct phenomena.
Here I'd say yes, funnily enough. Mostly because Kant puts immortality (the soul) as one of the Ideas which are permanently sought after by Reason. A way of expressing Kant's thoughts on the soul are -- well, you won't know until you die. And then -- you'll either really really know in the same way you know you have a hand. Or won't exist at all. (basically saying the question is worthless to explore, on a scientific level of knowledge)
I'll have to check it out. Seems like similar conclusions to Hoffman's as far as the noumenal world is concerned, at least in that the reality of the 'view from nowhere' would be an objectless world, quite indescribable to us. One of the more interesting theories Hoffman had was that elements of how we perceive three dimensional space might be an artifact of an error correcting code used in perception. This might explain how we have observations supporting the Holographic Principal, but don't experience a two dimensional world, or at least it explains it more plausibly than some of the other ones I've heard.
I do think his arguments on how evolution shaped perception do a good job explaining why we insist on thinking about very small things as just paired down versions of the sorts of "medium sized objects" we have around us. We have evidence that some of our "deepest" measures of physical reality are subjective at heart (e.g., entropy re: the Gibbs Paradox), and this subjectivity flows from thinking about small objects as just being shrunk down large objects. For example, if haecceity is simply a property of the statistical tendency of very large collections of small things not to become completely indistinguishable from one another, then a great deal of how we measure potential microstates, the use of extensive formulas, is arbitrary and the result of how we evolved to deal with very large collections of "stuff," not how that stuff actually appears to work at the scales we are investigating. So, we also get non-extensive forms of entropy, Tsallis entropy, etc. and end up with situations where entropy is different if we know we have mixed two different gases than it is if we do not know this fact (i.e. subjective). But this seems like a problem when we are defining time using this same measure.
The main analogy used in Against Reality is that of a computer desktop screen. On a desktop, you see icons representing a trashcan you can drag files into. You rearrange files in folders. All this is completely unlike how the changes are actually processed within the computer, as adjustments of microscopic logic gates. We experience an email dragged into a trash can. We can also pull the email back out of the can. In reality, all that goes on is a very large number of changes in a few different types of logic gates relative to others. The idea is that our senses similarly provide us with a useful "desktop" interface. The "real world" might be as far from our sensory models as the electrical activity of a microprocessor is from dropping one file into another. In which case, a lot of our deep scientific problems might stem from the projection of the logic of our "desktop interfaces," into the world.
For Hoffman it is ludicrous to talk of "neurons giving rise to minds," as such because "neurons" only exist in the minds of human beings. Our idea of neurons might have some relation to the noumenal, but it is by no means very direct.
Having read Becker's What is Real? on quantum foundations just before The Case Against Reality, I found this to be more reasonable than I might have before. After all, we have this huge issue of an arbitrary classical/quantum divide hanging over our sciences that seems less and less supportable. We also have all sorts of holes that have emerged in the conventional model of relativistic space-time, such that space-time looks to be in similar shape to Newtonian space and time circa the later 19th century (i.e. ready for replacement).
We know our laws are just gross approximations. Newton's Laws don't actually describe how physics works, they describe an idealized system with only two bodies, where those bodies do not have composite parts and are in isolation. The issue is that we mistake predictive power and usefulness for veracity, which is falling into the very same trick as when we assume our senses must report the world "as it is," because they are useful. But selection for usefulness is a different criteria than selection for truth.
Indeed, in Deacon's Steps to A Science of Biosemiotics its pointed out that life has to filter out truth, as actual representations of the truth would entail bringing in so much entropy into the organism that it would dissolve.
My own personal view is that the 'view from nowhere" or "God's eye view" is a sort of demon haunting the sciences. It makes no sense in the context of our physics. Things only have and exchange information in relation to other things. We need descriptions that have this baked into the cake. A thing is what it is for something else. Fichte was totally right to write off the "thing in itself," as nonsense.
We also need to recognize that, within a single phenomena we want to examine, a thing might fit into any of the three points of a semiotic triangle. Vision might have the object seen as the referent, the patterns of photoreceptor activation sent down the optic nerve as symbol, and the brain as interpretant. But within the context of the entire phenomena it may be that a pattern of neuronal activation in one region of the brain is the referent, the symbol is another pattern of activation within neurons connecting the referent area to another processing area, and the interpretant is this new processing area, which may itself be a symbol or referent in another set of parallel relationships. These relationships, and the definition of systems themselves, are necessarily arbitrary subjective abstractions. That's fine, it turns out entropy is too. It will still pay to have a way to formalize these subjective relationships somehow.
Information, when defined as the "difference that makes a difference," changes in context. Objects that may be synonyms in one type of relationship might be distinct in another.
I feel like this is sort of inevitable. You have to assume the noumenal exists from the outset. Otherwise you can always just see science as a description of how mental objects interact. You can't fully exorcise radical skepticism, but plenty of good works have been done to talk people down off the ledge of skepticism (the Phenomenology of Spirit being the example I always look to).
Kastrupt's Idea of the World, while advancing a less than convincing idealist ontology, has a very succinct overview of the seemingly intractable problems facing realism and particularly physicalism. But the interesting thing to me is that the same arguments he uses can be easily flipped around to show how, assuming that physicalism is true, we would still have these same intractable issues anyhow.
Science will always have a problem explaining the characteristics of subjective experience because you're asking a set of abstractions that exist as a subset of the world of experience to explain all of experience. Its asking something ontologically derivative to explain its ontological primitive. However, it would seem to hold that this would be a problem even if physicalism were the case, so in a way it's a helpful explanation of physicslism's apparent failings and only damaging to certain formulations of naive realism.
This seems like a real benefit. Parts of the Hard Problem can be chalked up to the same sorts of epistemological issues that keep solipsism and radical skepticism viable. This I find far more convincing than arguments that try to tell you that experience isn't actually real to deal with the issue, which always seemed like a giant bait and switch to me.
Can you say a little more? Why do you find Kastrup's Analytic Idealism less than convincing? I ask out of interest, and am personally not invested in his ontology.
I don't think so. Hegel completely rejects Kant's noumenon / thing-in-itself – he doesn't "have to assume" it and neither do we (pace Schopenhauer).
Yeah, bit of a red herring on my part. I mentioned the Phenomenology only because it's a good work arguing against radical skepticism. I see the two things (moving past radical skepticism and adopting realism) as somewhat related in that I don't think there is a way to resolve all objections to them completely to anyone's satisfaction based on logic alone. Decarte's Demon could always be feeding you any evidence you think you get from experience, there is no way to rule that out (or to totally rule out Hume's arguments against induction, same sort of issue), but there are obviously benefits to moving on from that place of skepticism.
I thought it was unconvincing because the explanation of how there can be multiple minds within a larger, universe sized-mind seemed fairly ad hoc. He uses disassociative disorders and multiple personality disorders as the model for his explanation and there just doesn't seem to be any reason to think this big ontologically basic mind would reflect these disorders.
Then he has living things as being the possessors of these disassociated minds. He then claims that AI will never be minded because minds are unique to things that are alive. But the line between living and nonliving is not clearly defined today, so this seems fairly fuzzy at best, open to an argument along the lines of Hemple's Dilemma at worst.
These two parts seemed quite ad hoc to me.
Edit: I should note, this was "The Idea of the World," I haven't read his others.
That's an argument I've pursued on this forum myself. The entire problem with physicalism is the meaning of causation or 'giving rise to' when proposing a causal relationship between the brain and the mind, even though it is so widely assumed as an obvious truth. Kastrup puts it like this:
Quoting Bernard Kastrup, Consciousness Cannot have Evolved (paywalled)
Which is precisely why Dennett wants to eliminate it ;-) (And actually, there's a connection between that insight, and the 'argument from reason', which likewise argues that to reduce reason to an evolutionary adaptation is to undermine its sovereignty.)
I read Adam Becker's book also, but I thought it got tangled in the weeds towards the end - longing for a realist conclusion which is not there to be found. Manjit Kumar's book Quantum is better IMO. I'm also impressed by QBism, which Pinter mentions.
Charles Pinter's book is an unsung classic in my view. I think it helps that he's outside academic philosophy - he's a mathematician with a long interest in neural modelling. But it's a model of clarity and conciseness and I recommend it.
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (pp. 86-88). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
He has studied evolution, game theory, brains and so on to arrive at his theory; but then according to his theory evolution, game theory and brains cannot be anything like what and how we think they are, which, if accepted, seems to lead inexorably to the conclusion that his theory is completely without ground.
Through reason and experimental observation. He calls his theory 'conscious realism' - objective reality is something in the minds of conscious agents. But because we're all immersed in the same milieu, the experiences of those agents will sync to a very high degree. It there a reality 'outside of' or 'apart from' that? Well, how could you tell? You can't stand outside your own cognitive apparatus to determine that.
[quote="Donald Hoffman;https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/#:~:text=of%20the%20world.-,The%20idea,-that%20what%20we%E2%80%99re" ]The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.[/quote]
That is compatible with QBism (not to mention a lot of the ideas that Apokrisis brings in).
[quote="Chris Fuchs; https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/#:~:text=is%20mind%20stuff%3F-,QBism%20would%20say,-%2C%20it%E2%80%99s%20not%20that" ]QBism would say, it’s not that the world is built up from stuff on “the outside” as the Greeks would have had it. Nor is it built up from stuff on “the inside” as the idealists, like George Berkeley and Eddington, would have it. Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of what each of us encounters every living moment — stuff that is neither inside nor outside, but prior to the very notion of a cut between the two at all.[/quote]
Which is also what Charles Pinter is saying.
(It's also what I've tried to say many times over the years in saying that reality has a subjective pole or element that is not noticed or hidden, which for some reason you kept insisting was obvious.)
Thanks for the clarification. I hear you.
But if reality were nothing like what we experience, no kind of observation would be telling us anything that we could justifiably base any theory on. For example the idea of evolution is based on the fossil record; and observation of plants and animals and their similarities and differences, and also on studying DNA profiles but according to his theory all that could tell us nothing about how species evolved, and indeed the very idea of species evolving and sharing traits and DNA would be groundless.How do you think he could address this problem?
He's not saying that. I don't think you've taken in what he's saying. I would say (although he doesn't say) that what he and Chris Fuchs are both calling into question is the assumption of a mind-independent reality.
What do you think he's saying?
Quoting Donald Hoffman
So, if it were true that your apple is nothing like mine. leaving aside the fact that we can both reliably point to the apple and agree that it is an apple, we can also agree about it's colour and unique features. Say it's a red apple with three yellow spots and I point to where I see the yellow spots and ask you what you see there. I would wager my house that you would say you see three yellow spots. How would Hoffmann explain that, if the apple you see and the apple I see were not "relevantly similar"?
[quote=Donald Hoffman] The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science. [/quote]
Reality is not 'just an experience'. It's a constructive activity which synthesises elements of sensory data with the categories of the understanding to generate the phenomenal experience. What's being called into question is the existence of what is purportedly 'outside of' or 'independent of' those gestalts.
Kastrup (a different idealist thinker) simply argues that all we experience is real - it just isn't physical. So signs and fossils and DNA and an oncoming bus - are all important readings on a dashboard that hold real consequences. They are mind when observed from a different perspective. But this stuff is very elusive and cannot be demonstrated other than undermining materialist ontologies.
Quoting Wayfarer
The interesting part of this for me is unpacking what these 'categories of understanding' are. Not wanting to race ahead but I am assuming that here you would subscribe to a Platonist model of ideas, right?
That doesn't answer the question, though. All we know is experience, and we can argue that how we experience things is mediated by our physical constitutions, our sensory apparatuses, and to some extent by cultural conditioning. But that whole story is derived from our experience of a world full of objects of sense and people who agree on what they sense. Same goes for physics. All the experiments its theory is based on are done with "publicly accessible objects"; we rely on the measurements and results they show to derive the theory in the first place.
The basic sketch I give is ultimately Kant's - his categories were adopted from Aristotle as can be seen here. Of course it is true that the ancients, and Kant for that matter, had no idea of what modern science would discover but unlike many others here, I don't accept that this has rendered classical philosophy obsolete. Rather they're in need of commensuration - interpreting them in such a way that they're intelligible in today's context.
They're not, though. That is the whole point of the 'observer problem'. That is why Einstein had to ask his friend Michael Besso, 'doesn't the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking at it?' It is precisely the status of the observer-independence of the objects of physics that has put this all into question.
I agree that we can kind of coherently imagine the world of publicly accessible objects being ultimately, fundamentally either mind or matter, or neither, but some kind of hybrid. But we don't even know if our ideas about mind and matter, which are conceptions derived from ordinary everyday experience are relevant beyond that everyday experience. This is the notorious "language on holiday" phenomenon that Wittgenstein says we are bewitched by.
So, we can make up our stories about mind independently existent physical objects or ideas in the mind of God or collective unconscious or whatever, but they are all just stories we tell ourselves, some of us preferring one and others preferring others. For all intents and purposes we know there are publicly accessible objects, whatever their "ultimate constitutions" might be; and we don't even know if that idea of ultimate constitution is coherent.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's a separate question, and as a metaphysical question ultimately unanswerable (obviously) question. We're are talking about objects that are being looked at such as the instruments of measurement used in physics experiments. If physicists did not absolutely reliably discover the same readings, no physics would be possible. Same goes for the whole of science.
You're just talking out of your comfortable assumed realism. Science suggests otherwise. Anyway - duty calls, I have a commercial assignment to start, so I'll bow out for now. Cheers.
You're misunderstanding me. All I'm saying is that for the purposes of human experience and understanding there are publicly accessible objects and that physics and all of science, and really everything about human life, relies on that fact for their coherence and even for their very existence.
I'm not making any claim as to their ultimate reality, because such "ultimate" claims based on our everyday experience, which as I said includes all of science, cannot be shown to be justified or even shown to be coherent. Anyway happy working on your publicly accessible commercial assignment... :wink:
Very nicely put and reasoned.
There are no objects publicly accessible or otherwise outside the cognition of sentient beings. Science makes no assumptions about the matter, but Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman and Chris Fuchs are scientists. Pinter's only other books are on algebra and set theory. No need to bring in God, 'ultimate truth' or Wittgenstein, it is one of the things that has become apparent through 20th C science itself.
[quote=Arthur Eddington]We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! it is our own.[/quote]
Hoffman's impetus for his book was the idea that our perceptions of "how the world is' are what may be holding us back in science. If we assume the world we experience closely resembles the world that actually is, chances are (at least if you buy the research he cites) that we're wrong, possibly at a very fundemental level. Evolution has left us with a perceptual and conceptual tool kit entirely at odds with the goals of science.
We already see this with how difficult it is for us to wrap our minds around the way very large and very small things work. So it might be that to take the next step we need to challenge even more deeply engrained ideas, for example, the idea of discrete objects and systems, the idea of linear cause and effect, the idea of three dimensions + time representing a faithful interpretation of how the world is.
I don't think these ideas get you off into the territory of unanswerable metaphysical questions; they're still very much in the realm of questions science attempts to answer. The world we see in physics, with non-locality, informational content corresponding to 2D surface area, not volume, complimentarity, the creation of mass, etc. suggests he's on the right track.
There is no science outside the cognition of sentient beings, so our science is no more placed to make pronouncements about what might purportedly lie "beyond" human cognition than anything else. You can't have it both ways.It seems safe to assume, given the reliable commonality of human cognition, that for every object of perception there is "something" relatively stable and invariant that explains that commonality.
It is really just a preference for different locutions that determines whether we refer to "somethings' or just use the names of the perceived objects instead. Bottom line is we don't and cannot know, so it comes down to what strikes us as plausible, or, since it is of no consequence anyway, we can just rest comfortable in our ignorance.
It doesn't? I won't pretend to be an expert on these things, but I've read enough histories of physics and recent books by physicists to know that problems with our replacement for Newtonian absolute space and time began to show strains almost as soon as it replaced to former paradigm. The idea that we are stuck and need a conceptual transformation to move forward seems quite common in the field.
Polls of of physicists show not a single interpretation of quantum mechanics has majority support among practicing physicists. The theory with the most support, Copenhagen, is considered incoherent non-sense by most of the physicists who more closely study quantum foundations. That seems like a pretty serious problem.
Despite plenty of evidence that Copenhagen is incoherent and that quantum events don't stop occurring at arbitrary scales, we still have deep problems with projecting our inherited world view onto the world. E.g. the double slit experiment being done with large macro molecules, entanglement involving 15 trillion + atoms, macroscopic drumheads being entangled, quantum activity being involved in photosynthesis and other biological phenomena formerly marked off as safely classical, non-locality (supposedly not violating the speed of light only because a suspect definition of information has been inserted into relativity as an ad hoc fix), observed FTL propagation in quantum tunneling, observed instances of violations of the conservation of energy, etc.
Indeed, sets of experiments using photons to test a modified version of the Wigner's Friend thought experiment seem to suggest that the entire idea of a publicly available objective truth is suspect. Our world of discrete objects and systems that exhibit haecceity seems like it might just be a trick of data compression and heuristics selected for by evolution without veracity in mind. The apparent truth we experience would then be merely the result of probabilistic trends, our science a profound set of misconceptions that nonetheless gets enough right to have idealized laws that allow for useful estimations. Which is of course, something that has proved true before. A core assumption of Newton's Laws is that matter is conserved. We know this to be a false assumption at the very core of the paradigm, but it still gets enough right to be useful; the issue then becomes mistaking useful for true (a problem evolution also seems to have in shaping perception).
In his book "The Lightness of Being" Frank Wilczek talks about how many profound discoveries in physics have resulted from taking known formulas that describe phenomena and restating them in various ways in order to think about them differently. In these cases the big discovery is not the discovery of a new pattern in nature, it's taking a pattern we've known about, in some cases for a very long time, and flipping it in ways that cut against our intuition, but nonetheless end up giving us new insights.
I think this is what Hoffman is getting at. If we don't take into account the fact that the world "out there" is very different from the world we experience, and don't allow for the fact that our models are selected for based on how well they fit our intuitions, which themselves were not selected for on the basis of accuracy, we risk getting stuck.
Science arbitrarily cutting chunks of being into "systems," is a good example here. We talk of neurons giving rise to minds often without much more than a footnote explaining "well yes, brains actually do no thinking without a body, which has an amazing amount of influence on cognition through the endocrine system and other mechanisms, neurons don't create a mind without the myriad poorly understood activities of glial cells (The Other Brain is a good book on this), and brains also don't create minds without interactions with the enviornment." But since the phenomena we care about doesn't exist without these other factors, they seem like poor exclusions. The discrete objects/systems schema we inherited, which finds little support in science, remains ubiquitous. Even more ubiquitous is the idea that "the laws of physics," are these rock solid descriptions of how the world "out there," works. They aren't, and we know this. They're idealized models we find easy to work with because of the inherited nature of how our minds work. Add a third body into our models of gravity and they fall apart.
Or, to sum up: he problem being diagnosed is that we appear to have a significant problem of mistaking a map tailored to the way our minds work for the territory itself. As Hoffman would put it, "the Moon isn't there when no one looks because the Moon is essentially a desktop icon on the screen of perception."
This is a good question to me because Kant's biology is explicitly anti-Darwinian, while his physics are pro-Newtonian. (he's actually skeptical of chemistry, too, which made me laugh given my job)
I have no idea how he'd resolve these problems, in fact, but from a charitable perspective I'd imagine he'd try to integrate new scientific discoveries. After all, his attack on Hume is based on what he takes to be undeniable: Science says shit about causation, and what it says is true. Hume makes a good argument against that belief. So how to counter the argument while preserving the science?
The science always mattered to Kant, though. I mean, the dude tried to invent terms to turn metaphysics into a science -- but then argued against it. But it was at least an interest of his.
It's fairly speculative to think what Kant might think of our modern scientific world, ultimately. Especially given the diversity of opinions on Kant's thoughts on teleological judgment and how that sort of offers a way for reasonable individuals to still be, well... spiritual. Or whatever.
The crux of the issue is unchallenged assumptions about the way the world is that arise as part of our fundemental nature (some analogy to Kant's categories can be made here). But we may find that these categories are not absolute, but rather the products of natural selection, in which case the Fitness vs. Truth theorem dictates that these categories are vanishingly unlikely to correspond to things in reality.
But we don't see this view in much of science. Mainstream models of how vision works assume sight is essentially processing "what photons bouncing of surfaces is like," at some fundemental level that corresponds to a "view from nowhere." Ironically, we seem less committed to our sense of smell. We don't seem overly committed to the idea that cooked meat or freshly cut grass has a smell that exists outside of our perceiving it. But sight is more closely aligned with our model of 3D space, and we very much do tend to assume that objects in space like the Moon do exist within this space when no one is looking. The question is: is talking about the location of the Moon "in space" when no one is watching as silly talking about the smell of Mars when no one is around to sniff it.
Had we evolved with olfactory and visual faculties closer to flies (who apparently don't see surfaces), we might have a very different physics. Perhaps a physics that handles distances better but has a hard time dispelling the idea that fundemental particles must have an essential odor. "The quark is a fundementaly mathematical entity, we need to stop modeling it based around concepts of aroma," might then show up in theoretical papers.
These all occuring within space-and-time, they are a part of the form of intuition -- part of the given. Anything empirical -- thereby subject to the categories -- is real, ala Kant.
Quantum theory and relativity are said to be the two most successful theories ever in terms of accuracy of prediction.
In any case, a "conceptual transformation" is not contingent on the ability to visualize anything as both quantum theory and relativity demonstrate, I think. These theories came about through a combination of mathematical and experimental advancement.
Of course imagination is also needed but imagining something like the warping of spacetime does not equate to being able to visualize it, but rather on the contrary consists in being open enough to explore the idea that something we cannot visualize could nevertheless be real.
Quoting Moliere
Good point! We just don't know what he would think. I think much of the animus against science is based on the belief that it reduces us to biological robots and thus eliminates ideas of human freedom and spirituality. I don't see that problem myself and I think it is based on an older more Newtonian mechanistic conception of materiality.
In any case I agree with you and tend to think Kant would adapt his philosophy to modern science if he was alive today.