How they plucked God out of the sky and into our heads, on Kant & Descartes

Below I discuss Rorty and Bramdom's beef and solution to Deacartes's conception of mind and knowledge.

But first here David Bentley Hart explains how Descartes & Kant plucked a transcendent God, and all meaning, out there in the Cosmos, and gingerly placed a transcendental ego within our head, to explain how our mind comes to know things "out there".

The first move was made by Descartes by...

"....moving truth from the world in its appearing to the subject in its perceiving, secured reason's "freedom" perhaps, but also unveiled with extraordinary suddenness that "nihilistic" terminus that Heidegger saw (perhaps fancifully, perhaps not) as having been paradoxically but ineluctably determined in the eidetic science of Platonism.

"Now will I close my eyes," writes Descartes, "I will stop up my ears, I will avert my senses from their objects, I will even erase from my consciousness all images of things corporeal; or, at least ... I will consider them to be empty and false" (Meditations III).

Surely this austerely principled act of abnegation (or self-mutilation) was, if not the founding gesture ture of modernity, the supreme crystallization of its unsentimental logic.

Thereafter the trustworthiness of the world could be secured for reflection only within the citadel of subjective certitude, as an act of will."'

The transcendental turn in philosophy was a turn to instrumental reason as foundation; the truth of the world could no longer be certified by the phainein of what gives itself self to thought, but only by the adjudications of the hidden artificer of rational order: the ego.

Understanding, now indiscerptibly joined to the power of the will to to negate and establish, could not now be understanding of a prior givenness, but only a reduction of the exterior to what is answerable to and so manipulable by reason.

If philosophy begins in wonder, thaumazein, the dazzlement of a gaze lost in the radiance of the given - which provokes vision to ascend into its transcendent splendor, so as to convert wonder into wisdom - it can nonetheless end, it seems, in an anxious retreat from world to self, from wonder to stupefaction, from light to will.

The phenomena had to be made conformable to our gaze, rather than taken as the shining forth of being, provoking our gaze to a rapture beyond itself; wakefulness to transcendence had to be displaced by the "clear-sighted" and disenchanted chanted regime of a controlling scrutiny.

When the wakened gaze was transformed formed into the gaze that establishes, the world could be world only as the factum of my intelligence, and the indifferent region of my investigations. The phenomena, when allowed to return, could exist for me only as mensurable quanta; natural light - which has no power to reduce reality to proposition or calculation, but only the power to offer the world to recognition and illumine it as mystery - had no real probative value, but itself was found in need of transcendental certification.

...in this very discontinuity between empirical knowledge and the concept of the infinite, as he construed them, he gave eloquent expression to the prejudice, by his time quite pervasive, that immanent and transcendent truth are dialectically rather than analogically related, as the former embraces a world of substances that exhaust their meaning in their very finitude while the latter can arrive among these substances only as a self-announcing announcing paradox....

"This is the singular achievement of Kant. The transcendental project, in its inchoate and insufficiently "critical" form, could escape the circularity of knowledge - the ceaseless and aporetic oscillation of epistemic priority between understanding and experience, between subject and thing - only by positing, beyond empirical ego and empirical data alike, a transcendent cause.

But, as Kant certainly saw, this is simply to ground the uncertifiable in the infinitely unascertainable. 

Nor was it possible for him to retreat to the premodern language of illumination, which would resolve the seeming impossibility of correspondence between tween perception and the perceived by ascribing their harmony to the supereminent unity in which the poles of experience - phenomena and gaze - already participate; once the possibility of any real evidentiary gravity had been definitively situated within the knowing subject, such a "metaphysics" became came a critical impossibility, as it could not be established by the agency of reason son in any purely "voluntary" and irreducible sense, but could be seriously entertained as an ultimate answer only by a mind resigned to a condition of active passivity, a kind of humble surrender to the testimony of a transcendence that, by definition, cannot be delivered over to the certitudes of an autonomous ego.

And so Kant had no final choice but to arrive at the absolutely metaphysical decision to ground the circle of knowledge in a transcendental capacity behind or within subjectivity; this "transcendental unity of apperception" accompanying all the representations made available to the empirical ego was, of course, a metaphysical superaddition to the given, but it was one to which, given the limits its of modernity's conjectural range, there was no apparent alternative.

Moreover, it assured the subject a transcendence over and mastery of the theoretical, a supersensible freedom that is, as we have seen, announced in the rupture of the sublime. 

In a sense, Kant's "Copernican revolution" might better be called "Ptolemaic": if Copernicus overthrew the commonsense geocentrism of ancient cosmology by advancing the heliocentric thesis, displacing the center from "here" to "there," Kant (as an inheritor of the epistemological caesura such a revolution seems to introduce, more forcibly than Platonism, between sensibility and verifiable truth) enacted at the transcendental level an entirely contrary motion, reestablishing the order of knowledge by moving the axis of truth from the "sun of the good" to the solid, imperturbable fundamentum inconcussum of the subjectum (substrate, substance, ground) transcenden tale.

Now the phenomena would revolve around the unyielding earth of apperception; again, we would stand at the center."

The question that has haunted the modern world is, how do we know what the world is really like outside our heads ? A pseudo problem based on a misunderstanding, says Rorty. And here’s how that happened, according to Rorty as summed up by James KA Smith :

Descartes creates the field of epistemology by inventing “the mind.”‘ This “inner space” becomes the cinema for “ideas” and “representations” that play on the screen of consciousness as images of a world that is “outside” the mind(a“veil of ideas”).

The key to certainty is to“ground” or “found” ideas or representations of the outside in the foundation of the mind itself. Hence it is Descartes’s invention of “mind” that also gives rise to the foundationalist project—namely, securing our knowledge of the “outside” in something “inside.”

Locke picks up the Cartesian model and starts fretting about the mechanics of mind—just how these ideas and representations “hook up” with and “correspond” to “reality.” At this
point philosophy just becomes epistemology oriented by a first and basic question:“How is our knowledge possible?”

The mind is a tablet on which impressions are inscribed, or, a mirror that reflects nature. However, Locke’s own answer to this question (empiricism) wasn’t characterized by the security of Cartesian certainty (spawning different responses inHume and Reid).

Enter Kant who “put philosophy ‘on the secure path of science’ by putting outer space inside inner space (the space of the constituting activity of the transcendental ego) and then claiming Cartesian certainty about the inner for the laws of what had previously been thought to be outer”.

 “Only Thought Relates” is Kant’s maxim—“there are no ‘qualified things’—no objects—prior to the ‘constitutive action of the mind’”.An object is always the result or product of synthesis. In other words, since we “constitute” the objects we know, and our ideas are certain, we can be certain about what we constitute.

So we’re all Kantians now, even if we spend our time railing against Kant.

In the process, philosophy takes as “given” what is contingent.

What epistemology takes as “given”—as what we “find” when we investigate our “experience”—is in fact, Rorty says, put there by our training in the epistemology language-game: what we“find”is what we’ve been trained to see.

For Rorty, we don’t“make contact” with reality (that assumes the inside/outside picture that negates the contingency of our social environment); rather, we deal with reality.

We make our way in the world by means of a know-how for which we are indebted to—and dependent upon—a community of meaning making. It is our social dependency as “knowers” (know-howers) that Rorty thinks is ignored by representationalist theories of knowledge.

Charles Taylor, too, suggests that this is primarily a shift in the location of meaning, moving it from “the world” into “the mind.”

Significance no longer inheres in things; rather, meaning andsignificance are a property of minds who perceive meaning internally. The external world might be a catalyst for perceiving meaning, but the meanings are generated within the mind — or, in stronger versions (say, Kant), meanings are imposed upon things by minds. Meaning is now located in agents. 

Only once this shift is in place can the proverbial brain-in-a-vat scenario gain any currency; only once meaning is located in minds can we worry that someone or something could completely dupe us about the meaning of the world by manipulating our brains. It is the modern social imaginary that makes it possible for us to imagine The Matrix.

Wittgenstein argues that meaning is primarily use rather than reference. We make our way in the world on the basis of a know-how that is acquired through practice, absorbed from our immersion in a community of practice that "trains" us how to grapple with the world rather than "mirroring" reality.

Knowledge is more like "coping" with the world, as Rorty puts it. Thus pragmatists reject referentialist or representationalist accounts of meaning and knowledge that posit a kind of magical hook between ideas "inside" my mind and things "outside" my mind. Instead, referential claims are understood as games we've learned to play from a community of practice.

Bramdom has a similar project he calls a “pragmatist direction of explanation,” in contrast to “a platonist strategy.” A platonist strategy is top-down: it thinks innate ideas planted in the mind, which is applied in practice.

For Bramdom it's the opposite, Concepts sort of bubble-up from the “skillful doings”: conceptual and our linguistic givings-and-takings.

Concept using is also one that assumes “the background of various other conceptual meaning—the traffic—is a distinctive kind of use, even wider web of our social practices content issomething “conferred” kinds of skillful unique sort of meaning, assumes a wider web of (nonconceptual) one that social practices.

This is an account of knowing (or believing, or saying) that such and such is the case in terms of knowing how (being able) to do something.

It approaches the contents of conceptually explicit propositions or principles from the direction of what is implicit in practices of using expressions and acquiring and deploying beliefs. ...The sort of pragmatism adopted here seeks to explain what is asserted by appeal to features of assertings, what is claimed in terms of claimings, what is judged by judgings, and what is believed by the role of believings (indeed, what is expressed by expressings of it)—in general, the content by the act, rather than the other way around.

He emphasizes the priority of know-how.

The “content” articulated in concepts and propositions is a way of making explicit what is implicit in our prediscursive know-how.

Bramdom focus on “Material” inferences, in contrast, are rules of inference that are bound up with the specific matter at hand. They are inferences that are bound up with, and dependent upon, the specific content of the concepts at issue.

What counts as a good (material) inference cannot be separated from familiarity with material realities, like where Pittsburgh is, where Princeton is, what lightning is, and how it relates to thunder. The truth of such inferences is not the sort that can be abstractly and formally reduced to P’s and Q’s in some universal syllogism.

Rules of material inference are bottom—up, not top-down. They don’t fall from some logical heaven, nor are they handed down from some Supremely Rational Being as veritable revelations to which our reasoning must conform. Instead, inferences that matter bubble up in two senses :On the one hand, they are material inferences that are constrained by matter, by the material conditions we inhabit—what Rorty called the “obduracy” of the things we bump into. On the other hand, these rules of inference are forged by the community of concept-mongering creatures, bubbling up from the know-how we’ve acquired coping with these material conditions.

It’s because “we” have inhabited material conditions that the concepts of “thunder” and “lightning” emerged, and it’s because of specific, obdurate material conditions that the rules of good inference about lightning and thunder have emerged. And now we hold one another responsible for making good inferences about thunder and lightning.

This should not be thought of representationally as the turning on of a Cartesian light, but as practical mastery of a certain kind of inferentially articulated doing: responding differentially according to the circumstances of proper application of a concept, and distinguishing the proper inferential consequences of such application. ...Thinking clearly is on this inferentialist rendering a matter of knowing what one is committing oneself to by a certain claim, and what would entitle one to that commitment.