Nietzsche once remarked that Immanuel Kant was a Catastrophic Spider. By this he meant that Kant's moral Philosophy sucked the life out of human beings, also reality itself.
Why ?
Well, firstly, because transcendental idealism excludes the possibility of knowledge about things in themselves, including the transcendental idealist’s own cognitive faculties, the theory is self-defeating .
Plus inherent in the very notion of transcendental idealism is the impossibility of discovering probability of Kant’s own theories being true, because we cannot have knowledge of our cognitive faculties or the processes that formed them as they are in themselves.
Kantians want to conceive of things in themselves as the causes of our sensations, while their own accounts of causal inference ruled that claim out.
Kantians want to conceive of things in themselves as the causes of our sensations, while their own accounts of causal inference ruled that claim out.
It certainly seems that, in abstracting experience into various kinds of ideal content – formal, mathematical, moral, aesthetic, and so on – the mind really does extract knowledge from what would otherwise be nothing but meaningless brute events.
It is easier to resolve the question of the correspondence between perception and the perceived by ascribing that correspondence to the supereminent unity in which the poles of experience—phenomena and gaze—participate - God or what have you, as said by Plotinus or Hegel.
Also, it makes human discourse a mockery,he has no explanation at all, and can in principle have none, of the miraculous fit between the structures we have im posed on the world, apparently independently of anything in the world, and the way the world responds to our practical action on it based on the predictions thought up by our minds-successfully coping with the challenges of nature, technology, etc.
Nor can he explain-in fact he never tries-how we can know other human beings as just as real as our selves and successfully exchange information with them ininterper sonal dialogue.
If it is really I that am structuring your being and the messages you seem to be sending in to me through my senses, then it follows that you are also structuring me and my messages-which cancels out into incoherence: both can't be true at once. We are open to truth-grounding communication about themselves from the real active beings that surround us, across the bridge of their self-expressive, self revealing action.
That is what it means to have a mind open to being.
I do know things as they really do manifest their existence and their natures by their real action on me. Action is precisely the self-revelation of being. Action that is indeterminate, that reveals nothing about the nature from which it proceeds, is not action at all. Hence, all action is necessarily essence-structured action.
Nor can he explain-in fact he never tries-how we can know other human beings as just as real as our selves and successfully exchange information with them ininterper sonal dialogue.
If it is really I that am structuring your being and the messages you seem to be sending in to me through my senses, then it follows that you are also structuring me and my messages-which cancels out into incoherence: both can't be true at once. We are open to truth-grounding communication about themselves from the real active beings that surround us, across the bridge of their self-expressive, self revealing action.
That is what it means to have a mind open to being.
I do know things as they really do manifest their existence and their natures by their real action on me. Action is precisely the self-revelation of being. Action that is indeterminate, that reveals nothing about the nature from which it proceeds, is not action at all. Hence, all action is necessarily essence-structured action.
And Bertrand Russel notes Kant's problem with Mathematics agrees :
“A similar argument applies to any other a priori judgement. When we judge that two and two are four, we are not making a judgement about our thoughts, but about all actual or possible couples. The fact that our minds are so constituted as to believe that two and two are four, though it is true, is emphatically not what we assert when we assert that two and two are four. And no fact about the constitution of our minds could make it true that two and two are four. “
“A similar argument applies to any other a priori judgement. When we judge that two and two are four, we are not making a judgement about our thoughts, but about all actual or possible couples. The fact that our minds are so constituted as to believe that two and two are four, though it is true, is emphatically not what we assert when we assert that two and two are four. And no fact about the constitution of our minds could make it true that two and two are four. “
And Kant out to have know this, without Cantor mathematics etc 2 physical objects and two other physical objects must make four physical objects, even if physical objects cannot be experienced.
As AE Taylor explains,
No element whatever supplied by sense enters into the mathematician’s concept of a circle, a parabola, an integer, or a real number. Kant overlooks this all-important point because he assumes throughout his whole reasoning that, before I can demonstrate a proposition in geometry,I must draw the figure, and similarly that, before I can say what the sum of two integers is, I must count the units of which he supposes the integers to consist. The erroneous character of this view has been sufficiently demonstrated by the subsequent history of mathematical science, but ought to have been clear to Kant himself.
No element whatever supplied by sense enters into the mathematician’s concept of a circle, a parabola, an integer, or a real number. Kant overlooks this all-important point because he assumes throughout his whole reasoning that, before I can demonstrate a proposition in geometry,I must draw the figure, and similarly that, before I can say what the sum of two integers is, I must count the units of which he supposes the integers to consist. The erroneous character of this view has been sufficiently demonstrated by the subsequent history of mathematical science, but ought to have been clear to Kant himself.
Even if all geometry, as he tacitly assumes, were metrical geometry, he ought to have seen that Descartes' invention of co-ordinates had already made the drawing of figures in principle superfluous in geometrical science.
His conception of arithmetic is even more superficial-in fact, on a level with Aristotle’s.
As Couturat has correctly observed, Kant’s examples are all drawn from the demonstration of singular propositions (such as 7 + 5=12).
If he had asked himself how any general truth in the theory of numbers is proved (how, e.g., we prove Fermat's theorem), he would have seen at once the inadequacy of his own theories. Indeed, mere consideration of a singular proposition which does not relate to integers (e.g., the proposition 2 x 5 + 3x6=6x16) might have taught him that arithmetic is not the same thing as counting, and even suggested to him that an integer is not a ‘ collection of units.”
Gilson, an existential Thomist, proves the ultimate failing of Kant’s epistemology. To summarize Gilson’s argument:
“...by reducing knowledge to the univocity of the intellectual, the a priori categories of the mind Kant’s system collapses in on itself; for the veracity of knowledge, through the synthetic a priori judgments which occur within natural philosophy and mathematics, requires the union of two distinct sources of cognition—the categories of reason and the intuitions of the senses (or at least, in the case of mathematics, the pure intuition of space)—the positing of a cause for which union seems to transgress the very principles of Kant’s epistemological system…
I end with David Bentley Hart’s rumination upon the subject :
As DBH says,
“to discover, as Kant did, how much is known before it is known, how much is presumed a priori in every posterior act of knowledge, is not necessarily to have determined how consciousness constitutes its world - nor, certainly, to have arrived at the vast machinery of the schematism of perception and the synthesizing energy of imagination - any more than it is to discover how much of my knowing and how much of the known transcend the consciousness they shape; indeed, such a discovery more properly, with fewer metaphysical leaps of logic than Kant's epistemology requires, merely declares again, even more emphatically, that all being and knowing is the work of an irreducible givenness…”
Of course, it is asking too much of transcendental philosophy that it recognize this: what the transcendental ego can understand is so much more limited than the reality visible to the soul. But before modern subjectivity had fully evolved and emerged from the waters, a person was indeed conceived as a living soul, swimming in the deeps, participating in the being of the world, inseparable from the element he or she inhabited and knew; and the soul, rather than the sterile abstraction of an ego, was an entire and unified spiritual and corporeal reality; it was the life and form of the body, encompassing every aspect of human existence, from the nous to the animal functions, uniting reason and sensation, thought and emotion, spirit and flesh, memory and presence, supernatural longing and natural capacity; open before being, a permeable and multiplicit attendance upon the world, it was that in which being showed itself, a logos gathering the light of being into itself, seeing and hearing in the things of the world the logoi of being, allowing them to come to utterance in itself, as words and thought.
The soul was the simultaneity of faro and intus, world and self, faith and understanding. Perhaps such language seems, from the post-Kantian vantage, somewhat less than rigorous; but it certainly requires nothing so elaborate (nor so arbitrary and unconvincing) as the Kantian architectonics of knowledge to sustain it.
In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or "adequate" a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic. Every act of knowledge is, simultaneously, an act of faith (to draw on Hamann's delightful subversion of Hume); we trust in the world, and so know it, only by entrusting ourselves to what is more than ourselves; our primordial act of faith meets a covenant that has already been made with us, before we could seek it, in the giving of the light.
No one can shut his eyes to that splendor, or seal his ears against that music, except as a perverse display of will; then, naturally, knowledge can be recovered again only as an exertion of that same will. But one then has not merely lost the world momentarily, so as to receive it anew as "truth:' One has lost the world and its truth altogether, and replaced them with a phantom summoned up out of one's need for a world conformable to the dimensions of one's own power to establish meaning - a world that is nothing but the ceaseless repetition of otherwise meaningless instantiations of that power."
No comments:
Post a Comment