This essay was written about 9 months ago and then just re-written a couple of weeks ago (August 9th, 2008). Now, I am re-addressing the essay for a third and hopefully final time. However, perhaps with a hopefully better and better knowledge of Kant in the months or years to come, I will have to rewrite this essay again at some future point. Time will tell. This essay is based on new information I am presently getting about Kant.
-- dgb, Aug. 23rd, 2008.
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From Wikipedia...on the internet...see Kant...
Immanuel Kant (IPA: [ɪmanuəl kant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Enlightenment.
His most important work is the Critique of Pure Reason, a critical investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics and epistemology, and highlights Kant's own contribution to these areas. The other main works of his maturity are the Critique of Practical Reason, which concentrates on ethics, and the Critique of Judgement, which investigates aesthetics and teleology.
Kant’s metaphysical and epistemological priorities were to find out whether metaphysics, the science of ultimate reality, is possible. He asked if an object has certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can only think in terms of causality -- which he concluded that it does -- then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this, that it is possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, and so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside of experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. And so the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind.[1]
In this sense, Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists and the rationalists. The former, according to Kant, believe that knowledge necessarily comes from experience, and that experience can yield only imperfect laws of nature, that past events do not predict future events. Therefore, there is no sound foundation for science. Knowledge of our selves, the external world and causality are off limits. The latter believed that reason alone provides us with certain truths that can provide a sound foundation for science. Kant said we can know some things through reason, but these things are only of how the world appears to us, and that the world we know is objective, compromising with the empiricists. But he also said that what we know through pure reason can only be applied to experience, and that it is through experience that we get most of our knowledge, compromising with the rationalists.
Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany while he was still alive, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer all saw themselves as correcting and expanding the Kantian system, thus bringing about German Idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy to this day, influencing both Analytic and Continental Philosophy.
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From Wikiquote...on the internet...see Kant...
Critique of Pure Reason (1787)
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer. (Preface, A vii)
Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short. (A xviii)
Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public. (Preface to 2nd edition, B xxxiv)
There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. (B 1)
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. (B 8)
Thoughts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. (B 75)
Sometimes paraphrased: "Concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are blind."
A plant, an animal, the regular order of nature—probably also the disposition of the whole universe—give manifest evidence that they are possible only by means of and according to ideas; that, indeed, no one creature, under the individual conditions of its existence, perfectly harmonizes with the idea of the most perfect of its kind—just as little as man with the idea of humanity, which nevertheless he bears in his soul as the archetypal standard of his actions; that, notwithstanding, these ideas are in the highest sense individually, unchangeably, and completely determined, and are the original causes of things; and that the totality of connected objects in the universe is alone fully adequate to that idea. (B 374)
Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality. (B 395)
Human reason is by nature architectonic. (B 502)
Thus all human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas. (B 730)
All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? (B 832-833)
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Kant vs. DGB Philosophy: Kant Re-visited
I will say this about Immanuel Kant: for me, he is the most difficult philosopher that I have ever had the cognitive pain -- or shall we say the cognitive exercise -- of trying to understand, of trying to figure out just exactly what he said and what he meant. Let us make the dualistic, and dialectic, distinction -- as Kant himself is most famously known for -- between: 1. Kant-the-person-in-himself-and-what-he-believed; vs. 2. my subjective understanding of the-either-knowable-and/or-unknowable-so-called-objective-Kant-and-what-he-believed.
Did you follow that distinction? This is as difficult as epistemology gets -- or at least it is where Kant took it, and where I am trying to follow. The 'subjective/objective' problem is arguably one of the two or three most difficult metaphysical problems in the history of philosophy. I put it right up there with the 'mind/body' dualism and the 'religion/atheism' dualism.
Now to be a 'dialectic philosopher' in the sense that I mean being a dialectic philosopher means that we seek to integrate or synthesize all dualities or apparent paradoxes/contradictions/polarities/conflicts/impasses. And so this is what we shall aim to do here.
Complicating the problem here, is the separate problem of 'sound and/or visual bites'.
I have read different authors -- different interpreters of Kant -- and come away with different interpretations of what Kant said and what he meant. This problem is critical to what we are trying to do here because if my understanding of Kant and what he said/meant is wrong, then everything that I write here is also wrong and subject to both re-interpretation and re-evaluation. Similarily, with anything I might have written previously about Kant and this same problem of the 'subjective/objective split'.
At the heart of the matter is this philosophical question: Can we directly know what is in our 'objective world'(Kant's outdated term for 'objective' was 'noumenal') and/or is it colored by the subjective nature of our own 'cognitive-evaluative processing brain-mind-psyche' -- specifically, the unique individual combination of our senses, percepts, power of reasoning/logic, understanding of 'causality', time, space, and structure, concepts, generalizations, abstractions, value-judgments...anything we use to help us (or hinder us) to better understand our 'objective world' and/or the 'thing-in-itself'?
This question -- the Kantian epistemological question -- encompasses two rather large 'semantic time-bombs' that turn the question into a 'epistemologist's living nightmare'. I think the question messed up a lot of people's minds back in Kant's day, as it is still at least partly doing today. Focus too hard on the question and your mind might explode. It will take you on one of those 'magic carpet rides' that I keep writing about relative to any philosopher who wants to 'fly high with you and not return you to the ground -- to the stability of the earth beneath your feet.' Certain philosophers -- to name a few -- Parmedines, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein... -- have been very good at taking us on 'fly-high-with-me-magic carpet rides'. When reading them -- if we are dialectically bound by the cognitive interplay between the sky and the earth, between the abstract and the concrete particularities, then there comes a time when we are reading these philosophers when we have to blow the whistle on them, and tell them to either take us back to earth again -- or we are taking over the controls. Back to earth we go.
The crux of the semantic problem with the Kantian epistemological question are these two words: Can we directly know...?
That is the semantically loaded, time-bomb part of the question -- the part that will quite possibly drive you to drink, take you over the deep end, and/or cognitively blow your mind, if you focus too hard on it, and you don't see the potential 'double meaning contradiction' in the question.
Kant's epistemological question is very simlar to this one: Is the glass half full or half empty -- which is it?
If you fall for the question -- then you have been epistemologically trapped -- with no way out of this apparent epistemological conundrum.
Back up a moment -- and approach the question properly -- and you can become untrapped.
You answer the epistemological question the same way you answer the 'half-full, half-empty drink' question.
It depends on your perspective.
Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
Are you a Humean epistemological skeptic and pessimist; or are you a Hegelian epistemological idealist?
Or are you a Bainian multi-dialectic 'skeptic-pessimist-optimist'?; a Bainian multi-dialectic 'epistemological realist-idealist'?
Let's look at it this way. Every person's sensory-perceptual-conceptual-evaluative system is different -- and some are better than others. But even this is relative over time. Let me explain.
When I was 20 years old I could hit an 80 mile an hour fastball. Today, I would be lucky to hit a 50 mile an hour fastball.
What's changed? The efficiency of my senses have changed. At 20 years old, my eyesight was 20/20. It certainly isn't today. In the words of one dominant scientific theory today, 'oxidation' has eroded the sensorary efficiency of my eyes relative to the biological function they are supposed to be performing for purposes of my survival. I made better 'sensory maps' of my environment back when I was 20 than I do now.
So to answer Kant's epistemological question in a way that I don't know whether he would have agreed with me or not (He would have been confused by the 'baseball analogy' because baseball hadn't been invented yet.) -- I say, we can partly directly, partly indirectly, know our objective world through our imperfect senses, some people of whom have better sensory systems than others, all of us subject to the oxidation and erosion of our senses over time, and all of us subject to the very imperfect and narcissistically biased nature of our logical-reasoning-evaluation process as well.
Thus, in relative to any particular situation, our 'epistemological glass' may range anywhere from 'almost completely empty' (no knowledge and/or very bad knowledge) to 'almost completely full' (very good knowledge). To change the analogy a bit here, based on the quality of our epistemological knowledge relative to a particular situaion, we could be running on a relatively full tank of gas or a relatively empty one.
Now on the other side of the 'younger vs. older' polarity -- an epistemological polarity that is very relavent to the Obama vs. McCain election competition -- I'd have to say that my overall experience and knowledge is much superior now to what it was when I was 20. It usually comes down to this: the younger the adult we are, the greater our energy level and sensory efficiency is; whereas the older we are, the greater our experience, knowledge, and wisdom is likely to be -- at least until our cognitive faculties start to seriously erode.
In Obama's defense, as others have pointed out before me, more experience does not always lead to better judgment.
And then -- like a dirty shirt -- there is always the factor of 'narcissistic bias'.
This is where Nietzsche's version of 'relativistic, post-modern, deconstructive epistemology' comes into effect.
For many of us, we hold up 'scientists' and 'doctors' as being our 'epistemological idols'. However, if a particular pharmaceutical company is a paying a particular scientist or group of scientists a lot of money to present a particular 'epistemological position' to the FDA or to the general public regarding the 'safety' of a particular medication -- and this 'epistemological position' is tainted/corrupted/pathologized by 'conflict of interest' -- the money the scientist is getting -- then obviously this type of 'epistemological knowledge is worse than useless, it's downright dangerous, and criminal.
This priniciple of 'narcissistic bias' and 'conflict of interest' also applies to philosophers who are being paid and/or threatened by kings and/or religious institutions; it applies equally to politicians who are being paid, directly or indirectly, a great deal of money by lobbyists who are lobbying for something important that they want (usually at the expense of the general public); and it applies equally to people who are paid or cajoled into 'altering the information on passports and birth certificates' which again reflects all of the following: narcissisic bias, conflict of interest, and 'cheating' and/or criminal intent.
From an epistemological and a narcissistic bias point of view, there is a lot less to worry about in the question: What are you sitting on? (A chair.) than there is in the question: Were the Chinese gymnasts under 16 years old? (Let's just say that probably like most of the rest of you, I have my strong suspicions that narcissistic bias has probably raised its ugly side, and had its dominant power influence -- again. We shall see what unfolds. Who was it Bonds, Palmeiro...? 'No, I've never taken steroids -- or at least knowingly. How about unknowingly, then? I know -- you thought you were taking vitamins. Or maybe you didn't want to destroy your career -- and your chances at the hall of fame and being a baseball legend -- by admitting to what you knew you were taking? How about that one? That one fits for me.)
Call me a 'post-Kantian' if you wish. Or maybe partly or mainly -- an 'anti-Kantian'. It depends on how you interpret Kant and his famous/infamous 'Critique of Pure Reason'.
For myself -- I've done enough interpreting for today.
-- dgb, Aug. 23rd, 2008.
