Kant's Notions of Space and Time
In the Transcendental Aesthetic Kant presents an extensive epistemological discussion regarding the nature of space and time.
Question: Is the space Kant discusses in the Aesthetic the same space I experience and move through on a daily basis and is the time he discusses in the Aesthetic the same time I experience passing by on a daily basis?
Question: Is the space Kant discusses in the Aesthetic the same space I experience and move through on a daily basis and is the time he discusses in the Aesthetic the same time I experience passing by on a daily basis?
Comments (210)
If I remember correctly, Kant understood space and time to be things not manifested by the exterior world, but imposed on the world by our minds a priori. That makes sense to me, by which I mean it is consistent with the way I see the world, although I'm not sure it's true.
If Kant is correct, then the answer to your question would be "yes," Kant's space is your space. His time is your time.
But, then, am I to conclude that the mentally spatialized universe is somehow located in my mind?
I have not read a lot of Kant, but I was struck by his views on space and time. These Kant quotes are from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article "Kant's Views on Space and Time."
Quoting Kant - From the SEP article on Kant's views on space and time
Does the way Kant describes time and space mean that a "mentally spatialized universe is somehow located in my mind?" I'm not sure.
Kantian space and time are not experiences.
I have found that Transcendental Idealism is interpreted very differently depending on the person and Kant was a very poor writer (as far as I am considered) so it is hard to tell exactly what he meant (precisely); so here is my take.
Space and time are not something you experience (in the sense that Kant means it), as @Mww noted, but, rather, the necessary precondition of your experience. Space, for example, is not an entity which you encounter but, rather, is the pure form of your experience.
Now, if you are a realist about space and time, then it may be that the pure forms of one's experience corresponds or is governed by whatever laws affect them; but Kant is not claiming anything about that, as space and time beyond the forms of one's experience, would be something related to the things-in-themselves.
For example, Einstein famously held that Kant can't have space and time as synthetic and a priori; as he thought that there really is a space and time, of which we can empirically treat like entities, that are mind-independent. Is he right? I will leave that up to you and your metaphysics.
With respect to idealism, Kantianism paved the way for Schopenhaurian metaphysics that posits that the only space and time there is the pure forms of one's experience--as all there is are mind activities happening.
Last thing I will say is that time and space as originally proposed by Kant do not hold up to Einstein's special nor general relativity; as Kant, and Schopenhauer, held that we can be a priori certain of how they work and that the succession in space and time is universal for rational minds: both of which have been refuted by Einstein.
Bob
We cannot think of anything without time or space.
The most useful part of his text (for me) was how he discerned noumenon and phenomenon. It is so obvious that many misconstrue what he meant here - to the point that philosophers still argue about it today for some reason! ..l maybe I a wrong though :D
Note: Keep in mind that Kant argues for numerous opposing positions in Critique and you will often find people using quotes to back up one argument of their own that Kant himself refuted elsewhere in this particular text.
:up:
No, definitely not.
Crudely, he says that when we say that something exists physically, we normally mean that it is located in space and time "My greenhouse has been in my garden for the last two years; my lungs are in my chest and have been all my life." It follows, that we cannot locate space itself or time itself, and therefore they do not exist in the same way. Rather they are the categories by which we order experience.
And apart from that 'in my mind' is not a location, but another category.
Of course he didn't know about non-Euclidian geometry, and it turns out that these categories are not as 'necessary' as he thought, or at least they are capable of radical alteration. Nevertheless, it is a necessary condition of having any experience whatsoever that one has it here and now.
The SEP article on Kants Transcendental Idealism writes:
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues that space and time are merely formal features of how we perceive objects, not things in themselves that exist independently of us, or properties or relations among them. Objects in space and time are said to be appearances, and he argues that we know nothing of substance about the things in themselves of which they are appearances.
It seems that Kant is arguing that the space and time we perceive is not the space and time that exists independently of us.
The space and time we perceive we must also experience, otherwise we wouldn't be able to perceive it. The space and time that exists independently of us we can neither perceive nor experience.
Quoting RussellA
Correct, thats exactly what hes arguing.
Einstein thought Kant was wrong on that. Then again, he also thought quantum physics were wrong, on very similar grounds.
Does the moon . Etc
Correct, insofar as experience requires perception, and space/time is not an experience, just means neither is space nor time a perception.
Quoting RussellA
That which exists independently of us is that which can be an affect on our senses and is thereby a possible representation in us as phenomenon. Space or time, because they are not perceptions, are not affects on our senses, therefore are not possible as a phenomenon, therefore are not that which is known as an existence independent of us.
Quoting RussellA
Kant says we dont perceive space or time, space and time do not exist independently of us insofar as they do not exist at all, so your interpretation is not what hes arguing. To argue an objective validity is not to promote an existence.
Where the difficulty in understanding occurs generally, is the mediate conclusion derived in the transcendental thesis, that an objective validity without an empirical reality accompanying it, is the same as being an ideal. Further exacerbated by the method by which the former is necessary yet the latter is not even remotely possible, with respect to knowledge a posteriori, which seems contradictory. Which reduces to understanding exactly how, in Kant, the origin of space and time as ideal conceptions is accomplished, irrespective of their employment regarding the possibility of experience itself, and thereby granted as metaphysically legitimate conditions.
I am crossing a busy road and see a truck moving straight towards me. I perceive the truck and I perceive the truck moving through space and time.
If I wasn't able to perceive space and time, I wouldn't be able to perceive that the truck was moving straight towards me. It would appear stationary and not presenting an immediate danger.
My perceptions are my experiences. My perceptions of objects in space and time are my experiences of objects in space and time.
I clearly perceive objects, space and time in my mind.
How I am able to perceive objects, space and time in my mind is a subsequent question. Is Chomsky correct that humans are born with certain innate abilities, or is Skinner correct that the human is born a blank slate having no innate capabilities and everything is learnt from their environment or is Kant correct that humans have non-empirical intuition ?
Though it seems to me that Kant's non-empirical intuitions have similarities with Chomsky's innate abilities.
Quoting RussellA
Yes, sure seems that way, donnit? Conventionally speaking, its what Everydayman accepts as the facts. If youre ok with it .so be it.
Me, I reject that my mind perceives, preferring to leave such occupation to my senses, as Nature intended.
Building on what you said, we now know that both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries can be used successfully to try to explain the occurrence of certain physical phenomena.
The degree of success of the physical theories (paradigms) proposed to try to explain and predict the occurrence of certain physical phenomena is determined largely by the degree of appropriateness of the kind of mathematical/geometric tools which are selected for inclusion in the theories to try to accomplish such predictions and explanations.
This, I think, disproves the validity of Kant's explicit (testable) epistemic hypothesis that only Euclidean geometry must apply to the physical world because it is a transcendental (necessary and strictly universal) form of human sensible intuition.
However, can Kant's theory of sensible intuition be modified to better fit contemporary facts, or must it be completely discarded as a once very interesting, but now debunked, theory?
Might there not be, instead, objective multiverses, each functioning according to different kinds of mathematics and geometries, some already known others not, which have nothing at all to do with any transcendental forms of human sensible intuition?
I also think that Kant's notions of space and time are not the same as the space and time that I experience on a daily basis.
Einstein's notions of space and time are the dynamic ones that can be empirically verified through a wide range of experiments.
For example, empirical space bends in the presence of large masses and their strong gravitational fields; Kant's transcendental space is a static, rigid, container. Empirical time passes slower or faster depending on how near or far one is from a strong gravitational field, Kant's transcendental time flows uniformly everywhere for every person.
Kant's non-empirical intuition seems very similar in principle to today's Innatism.
From Wikipedia - Innatism
In epistemology, innatism is the view that the mind is born with already-formed ideas, knowledge, and beliefs. The opposing doctrine, that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses, is called empiricism.
From SEP - Kant's Views on Space and Time
Now what are space and time? Are they actual entities [wirkliche Wesen]? Are they only determinations or also relations of things, but still such as would belong to them even if they were not intuited? Or are they such that they belong only to the form of intuition, and therefore to the subjective constitution of our mind, without which these predicates could not be ascribed to any things at all? (A23/B378).
Unfortunately, when going to the dentist, it is my mind that perceives the pain of the cold water on a sensitive tooth. If only it was just my unconscious senses that perceived the pain.
As the Merriam-Webster dictionary writes, perception involves awareness:
Perception is the awareness of the elements of environment through physical sensation
. The schema of substance is the permanence of the real in time; that is, the representation of it as a substratum of the empirical determination of time; a substratum which therefore remains, whilst all else changes. (Time passes not, but in it passes the existence of the changeable. To time, therefore, which is itself unchangeable and permanent, corresponds that which in the phenomenon is unchangeable in existence, that is, substance, and it is only by it that the succession and coexistence of phenomena can be determined in regard to time.) .
(A143/B183)
The determinations of the changeable is the same everywhere for every person. Time is not that.
All Einstein did was show the determinations of the changeable is the same for everyone iff they are each in the same everywhere as the change being determined.
That the truck is moving straight toward you is a conclusion, not a perception. You perceive (sense) motion, and you make a judgement as to whether the truck is coming toward you or not. The judgement that it is coming straight toward you is not a perception, and is independent from the sensation that it is moving.
Quoting RussellA
You make a judgement that the cause of your pain is cold water, rather than that it is something else, like hot water. You do not perceive that the "water is cold", you decide this by way of judgement. You do not perceive that the "sky is blue", nor that the "grass is green". Those are all judgements, which in basic epistemology are called predications.
But according to Kant, you do perceive (sense) activity and motion. And this is why space and time, as a priori intuitions, are said to be prior to sensibility and sense experience in general, as necessary conditions for the possibility of sensation.
This is perhaps the fundamental difference between Hume and Kant. Hume represents sensations as static, states of existence, which change from one moment to the next. Kant represents sensations as active, according to the necessary requirements for sensation, those pure a priori intuitions, space and time. This is the means by which Kant places mind as prior to sense experience, as required for sensation, while Hume is empiricist. Hume would argue that change and movement are judgements derived from sense experience.
I agree I perceive something moving towards me and then judge it to be a truck.
But I cannot perceive an object moving without perceiving the manner in which it is moving. When I perceive a moving object, my perception includes the manner in which it is moving. I don't perceive an object moving and then judge it to be moving to the left. I perceive an object moving to the left.
I agree judgement is independent to perception, but when perceiving a moving object, the fact that the object is coming straight towards me is part of the perception, not part of a subsequent cognitive judgement.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree, I perceive pain and then judge the cause to be cold water.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree. Perhaps would be called Innatism today.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not necessarily.
It is true that Hume is described as an Empiricist, meaning he believed "causes and effects are discoverable not by reason, but by experience", such that the cornerstone of his epistemology was the problem of induction.
However, such a philosophy may be argued to be founded on Hume's belief in natural instinct, rather than reason, thereby discovering a strong link between Hume's inductive inference and Kant's non-empirical intuition.
The following is taken from James Hill's The Role of Instinct in David Hume's Conception of Human Reason
[i]In a detailed and enlightening discussion of Hume's conception of instinct, Bertram Laing maintains that a theory of instinct is fundamental and it underlies his other doctrines. Laing associates this implicit theory of instinct above all with the First Enquiry where, in contrast to the Treatise, a doctrine of instinct can be seen to stand out more prominently (Laing 1926). Let us set out this theory of instinct, starting with an enumeration of the different instincts that Hume attributes to man.
We should not be surprised to find the so-called primary appetites, such as hunger, thirst, and affection between the sexes, described as instincts (T 2.3.9.8/439; NHR Intro; EPM app. 2.12/301). Nor will we be surprised to learn that passions and desires such as love of progeny, love of fame,2 and a desire of the happiness or misery of others, according to the love or hatred we bear them, are all instincts for Hume (T 2.2.12.5/398; T 2.2.7.1/368; NHR Intro; EPM app. 2.12/301).
In addition to these low appetites and often turbulent passions, Hume follows Francis Hutcheson (1756: 292) in treating more elevated and humane dispositions of the soul as instincts.3 The moral virtues expressed in the calm desires of benevolence, compassion, generosity, appetite to good, aversion to evil are originally determined by nature and thus qualify as instincts (T 2.3.3.8/4178; L 38). This means that, like Hutcheson, Hume takes moral judgement, and conduct in accordance with it, as stemming from instinct not reason, although reason and reflection will still have a part to play in the final determination of this judgement and conduct.[/i]
IE, Hume often makes the case that natural instinct, rather than reason, is the foundation of human behaviour, of which induction is one example.
I agree. Kant, however, was more interested in our representative faculties and assumed, like a lot of people in his time, that newtonian physics would never be superseded. Obviously, many of his newtonian-based claims are stale; but his idea of there being transcendental truths seems still rather convincing.
I think the core of his theory is fine: we are representative beings who do have necessary a priori knowledge and synthetic a priori judgments. Just think of how your brain fills in the gaps constantly as it guesses what it is experiencing: it is adding something which is not there beyond phenomenal experience. Likewise, it seems rather convincing that the objects (or whatever the things-in-themselves are or thing-in-itself is) conform to our representative faculties: we dont get any direct knowledge of the world-as-it-is. Now, can be philosophically decipher what a priori synthetic conceptions we have? I dont think so: I will that up to neuroscience and the like.
Kant adamantly claims that we cannot know anything about the things-in-themselves; so his theory does not negate nor affirm the existence of a multiverse. He calls things-in-themselves purely negative conceptions, which are placeholders for whatever we are representing.
Personally, I dont a need to posit extra universes doing their own things in parallel with ours. All I see needing explanation is the reality in which we live, and it seems unparsimonious to posit extraneous realities.
I sort of agree. Space and time are not experienced, they are the necessary forms of your experience: our minds dont produce space and time but, rather, are conditioned by it; however, I think you are correct that they are not purely a priori (in the sense Kant wanted it to be), as we can gain more understanding of them via a posteriori investigations but they are still a priori insofar as they are the necessary preconditions of our experience (as the necessary forms thereof). In other words, their behaviors can be empirically investigated, but they are still only the form of your minds representations. I think Kant made the mistake of thinking that because something is synthetic a priori that it must be impossible to understand empiricallybut that simply isnt true.
I think the degree of use of Kantianism in ones view is just relative to the metaphysical theory one holds. A physicalist could hold that there is a phenomenal and noumenal space and time, such that the former is attempting to represent the latter; and many ideas from Kant will follow therefrom. However, they will deny that they synthetic.
As an analytic idealist, I salvage many of Kants and Schopenhauers metaphysical views; and, thusly, I hold time and space are synthetic a priori.
This is true; but I think it only demonstrates that:
1. Even the form of our experience can be empirically investigated;
2. It can behave differently than we would initially intuit (upon empirically studying it);
3. Newtonian physics doesnt work anymore; and
4. They are governed by objective laws (and are not purely subjective productions of our minds).
However, this doesnt mean that they arent synthetic (i.e., add something to the world that isnt already there) nor that they are not a priori (i.e., that they are the necessary preconditions for the possibility of our phenomenal experience). For me, without a perceptive being, there is not extension (space) nor temporality (time) other than the ideas pertaining thereof in the mind of God.
Bob
I don't think that this is right at all. Think about how sensation works. Sight and hearing receive the activity of waves. But people were seeing and hearing long before they knew the manner of this motion. And the other senses perceive the activities of molecules, but the perceptions which result do not include anything about the manner in which the molecules are moving.
This is to say that the percept, the sense image, or whatever you want to call what your mind apprehends, is nothing at all like, or similar to the motion which is actually being sensed. So your mind creates for you an image of an object moving, but this is not even similar to the manner of motion which the senses are sensing.
Quoting RussellA
This is the issue which Hume had difficulty with. To determine which direction the object is moving, requires sensing it over an extended period of time. For him this meant a number of distinct sensations of the object at different locations, a conclusion as to the direction it has moved, then a cause/effect assumption that it will continue to move in a similar way in the future.
In reality, the conclusion that the object is coming straight towards you requires what is known as "quick thinking". When someone is capable of ducking from a rapidly approaching flying object, we say that the person has demonstrated "quick thinking". You'll notice that human beings are much better at this quick thinking than other animals.
Quoting RussellA
But the point is that Hume describes sensation as apprehending distinct states, then using what you call "natural instinct" to infer that motion has occurred between these distinct states. This is completely different from Kant who places the intuitions of space and time as necessary for the possibility of sensation. For Kant then, motion is already inherent within the sensation as those intuitions are prior to and necessary for sensation, but for Hume motion is inferred from the sensation of distinct states, so this "natural instinct" operates posterior to sensation making judgements about motion from the sensations..
But even if motion is already inherent within sensation, this does not validate your claim that sensation provides for you the judgement as to which way the motion is going. We sense change as motion, activity, without knowing where the change is headed toward.
It is true that I may perceive an itch on my hand, but the itch does not represent what caused it. This has been my argument in the past against Direct Realism. The Direct Realist's position is that just knowing an effect, say an itch, this would automatically enable them to know its cause, say a thistle.
At one moment in time I may perceive two objects spatially separated, say one to the left and one to the right. But perception is not only spatial, it is also temporal, in that I may perceive an object at one moment in time to the right and at a later moment in time to the left. Not only does perception allow spatial separation but perception also allows temporal separation. If that weren't the case, all my perceptions would be frozen in time, making life unworkable.
In driving along a busy road through a city centre, if all me perceptions were of instants of time, and I had to connect these frozen perceptions by cognitive judgement, I would have crashed my car within the first five minutes. No amount of quick thinking would allow the human to successfully succeed in any task requiring a quick response - such as driving through a city centre, playing tennis, reading a novel, cooking a meal, engaging in conversation - if they had to constantly consciously reason how one event at one moment in time is connected to a different event a fraction of a second later.
Humans, as animals, have evolved such that their perceptions are not only spatial but also temporal. As Kant said, humans have a unity of the manifold of intuition imposed by the unity of consciousness.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is an object to the right of my field of vision, and one second later there is an object to the left of my field of vision. Hume induces that there is only one object and it is moving from right to left.
One can ask where the human faculty for induction came from. Is Innatism true, whereby humans are born with certain innate abilities, ie "natural instincts", or is Behaviourism true, whereby humans are born a blank slate having no innate abilities and everything is learnt from their environment.
Is the human faculty for induction an innate "natural instinct" or learnt from the environment.
There is evidence that Hume believed that not only animals but also humans are born with "natural instincts", ie, a form of Innatism. Kant argued for non-empirical intuitions, ie, in today's terms, a form of Innatism
In this regard, it can be seen that both Hume and Kant have an acceptance of what would be called today, Innatism.
What would be called today, perhaps, insofar as Innatism, being a rather more psychological formalism, had no standing in Enlightenment metaphysics. Nevertheless .
.. Now, how can an external intuition anterior to objects themselves, and in which our conception of objects can be determined à priori, exist in the human mind? Obviously not otherwise than in so far as it has its seat in the subject only, as the formal capacity of the subjects being affected by objects, and thereby of obtaining immediate representation, that is, intuition; consequently, only as the form of the external sense in general
...gives the impression of a form of standing henceforth classified as Innatism. On the other hand, one must be cautioned against obtaining Innatism as a formal capacity of the subject in general, from the formal capacity of the subjects being affected by objects. I think Kant would attribute pure reason and pure practical morality as innate formal capacities in subjects as such, leaving the formal capacity of being affected by objects, to sensibility.
From the Wikipedia article on Innatism, Innatism refers to the philosophy of Descartes.
[i]Innatism and nativism are generally synonymous terms referring to the notion of pre-existing ideas in the mind. However, more specifically, innatism refers to the philosophy of Descartes, who assumed that God or a similar being or process placed innate ideas and principles in the human mind.
Nativism represents an adaptation of this, grounded in the fields of genetics, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics. Nativists hold that innate beliefs are in some way genetically programmed in our mindthey are the phenotypes of certain genotypes that all humans share in common. Nativism is a modern view rooted in innatism. The advocates of nativism are mainly philosophers who also work in the field of cognitive psychology or psycholinguistics: most notably Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor.[/i]
Descartes' (1596 - 1650) rationalist system of philosophy is one of the pillars on which Enlightenment (1685 - 1815) thought rests.
Kant (1724 - 1804) came after Descartes, so we can assume that Kant was aware of the concept of Innatism.
Our friend Chomsky (b. 1928) is a contemporary supporter of Innatism against the Behaviourism of Skinner (1904 - 1990).
As regards Kant's non-empirical intuition, if such intuition is non-empirical, then where is the source of such intuition if not innate ?
Just as the itch requires more than its sensation for the determination of its cause, so too must an objects relation to you, that it is left or right, that it is above or below, that it is this or that, require more than its mere perception.
Quoting RussellA
Cmon, man. If Innatism, indicating a dedicated doctrine in itself .it is an -ism, is it not??? . was so much a part of historic philosophy, why is not the term nor the doctrine as such, found in it? That there are innate ideas or notions or subjective conditions in the human intellect goes as far back as rational discourse, but as a topic in its own right, it is modern psychology. Those that followed, deemed historic philosophers to be intimating Innatism, even if they themselves never described it as an -ism.
. It is quite possible that someone may propose a species of preformation system of pure reasona middle way between the twoto wit, that the categories are neither innate and first à priori principles of cognition, nor derived from experience, but are merely subjective aptitudes for thought implanted in us contemporaneously with our existence .
I, speaking only for myself, would never be so presumptuous as to suppose ..well, this is what he said, but this is what he really meant.
Quoting RussellA
Understanding. Plain and simple. Its all in the text. Not in wiki. Space and time are irrefutably merely representations, all representations are products of either sensibility as phenomena, or thought as conceptions. Both sensibility and cognition insofar as they are active processes of the human intellect, are not themselves innate, thus it follows that neither are their respective products. That humans can sense and can think may indeed be innate, but the process by which these are done, which implies a system, is not that by which they are possible, which is given from a certain kind of existence alone.
Following the yellow brick road gets you to the conclusion there is no such thing as a non-empirical intuition; such is pure a priori, which only denotes the mode of the cognition for its place in the system, and not its function.
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Your claims are not groundless, I must admit ..
. It is therefore from the human point of view only that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc. If we depart from the subjective condition, under which alone we can obtain external intuition, or, in other words, by means of which we are affected by objects, the representation of space has no meaning whatsoever. This predicate is only applicable to things in so far as they appear to us, that is, are objects of sensibility. The constant form of this receptivity, which we call sensibility, is a necessary condition of all relations in which objects can be intuited as existing without us, and when abstraction of these objects is made, is a pure intuition, to which we give the name of space .
.in which it does seem as if the subjective condition is itself innate. But dont confuse a subjective condition from which departure is possible hence is contingent, re: the means by which we are affected by objects given a different theoretical system, for a necessary one from which no departure is possible, re: the logical predicates of one particular system. Which just says .if this then that necessarily, but your this may be different than mine.
You have no argument here, because each of your examples requires practise. The exercise must be learned, and in the learning process the activity is nowhere near as smooth and fluid as you make it out to be here, in the case of an individual who is well educated and practised.
Quoting RussellA
The problem with this approach is that we expect to see the object move from right to left, if we watch it. And if the object suddenly jumps from right to left, without me seeing it move, this is very suspicious to me. It is suspicious because we naturally sense movement, so to see something jump from point A to point B without moving there looks unnatural, as if magical or supernatural. We assume that the eyes can keep up with any movement that the object can make, even if it's just a blur, so for it to instantaneously go from being at one spot, to being at another, would appear very suspicious.
So Hume's explanation is not consistent with our natural sensation which is to see the object moving from right to left, in a manner of spatial-temporal continuity of the object. In other words, we expect to see the spatial-temporal continuity of the object, including its motions, that is intuitive. So Hume's starting point, the assumption that we see the object at point A and then at point B, is not consistent with our intuitions. It starts from a broken spatial-temporal existence, one which would appear like magic, or supernatural if we ever saw it in the way he proposed.
It comes down to the meaning of perception.
From the Wikipedia article on Perception
[i]Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. Perception is not only the passive receipt for of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention.
Many philosophers, such as Jerry Fodor, write that the purpose of perception is knowledge. However, evolutionary psychologists hold that the primary purpose of perception is to guide action. They give the example of depth perception, which seems to have evolved not to aid in knowing the distances to other objects but rather to aid movement. Evolutionary psychologists argue that animals ranging from fiddler crabs to humans use eyesight for collision avoidance, suggesting that vision is basically for directing action, not providing knowledge.[/i]
Perception is more than sensation. Perception is what interprets sensations. Perception is what gives us the spatial relationship between objects, whether to the left or to the right, whether above or below.
Perhaps this is why one reads in the SEP article on Kant's Views on Space and Time that
[i]But leaving that complication aside, it is surely very surprising to hear that intuition, which in some regards is akin to perception (Parsons 1992, 6566; Allais 2015, 147ff), can also be empirical or a priori in character.
According to Lockes view, a version of which was also defended by Hume (Treatise, 1.2.3), we obtain a representation of spacenot of places, but of the one all-encompassing space, which may be akin to geometric spacefrom the perception of spatial relations.[/i]
It is our perception of the world that allows us to distinguish left from right, above from below.
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Quoting Mww
From SEP - Kant's Views on Space and Time
[i]Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. A23/B38
Finally, transcendental idealism, in so far as it concerns space and time, has the following essential component: we have a non-empirical, singular, immediate representation of space. Part of Kants innovation is to introduce into the philosophical lexicon the very idea that we can have non-empirical intuition.[/i]
As you say, the ability to think is probably innate. The question is, is what we think, our understanding, limited or not by our "natural instincts".
For Kant, our non-empirical intuition of time and space doesn't come from observation, doesn't come from any perception of the world, but comes from pure cognition in our minds.
The question is, what is the link between the innate ability to think and what is thought. Even if we accept Innatism, that the mind is born with already-formed ideas, knowledge, and beliefs, is it possible for our thoughts to be independent of such ideas, knowledge and beliefs. Does our innate ability to think determine what we think, or can what we think be independent of such innate ability of thought.
Any thoughts we have must be expressed in the physical state of the brain. There must be some correspondence at any moment in time between what we are thinking and the physical state of the brain. Any new thought must require an altered state of the physical brain. But any physical change requires a physical cause, in that a physical state cannot spontaneously change without a preceding physical cause. An effect needs a cause.
Summing up, any new thought requires a change in the state of the physical brain, but any change in the state of the physical brain requires a preceding physical cause. But in its turn, any preceding physical cause must require its own preceding physical cause, and so on, leaving no possibility that our thoughts have not been determined by a pre-existing physical state of the brain.
IE, understanding cannot be free of the physical state of the brain. Cognition is a function of the state of the physical brain, not something that can be achieved free of the state of the physical brain.
So in answer to my question, regarding Kant's non-empirical intuition, if such intuition is non-empirical, then where is the source of such intuition. The source can only be the momentary physical state of the brain, which has been determined by the preceding physical state of the brain, and so on, eventually leading back, to the innate ability of humans to think. In other words, Innatism.
Hume writes in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
When we say, therefore, that one object is connected with another, we mean only, that they have acquired a connexion in our thought, and give rise to this inference, by which they become proofs of each other's existence: A conclusion, which is somewhat extraordinary; but which seems founded on sufficient evidence.
I would have thought that Hume based his theory of constant conjunction on our natural sensations, not on some abstract philosophical reasonings.
Oh. Well alrighty then. Which state would that be, that relates to the representation of space, and to no other representation in the least? From which neural pathway would that originate? There are 3.6b neural connectors per mm3 in the human brain, any one considerable as being itself a state of the brain.
So what we have heah .in best Strother Martin imitation .is a tautological truth: everything a human does mentally reduces to a brain state, which, of course, tells us not a damn thing regarding what we really want to know.
And brain states arent Innatism; theyre cognitive neuroscience. Or quantum biology maybe. Sure as hell aint proper metaphysics.
Quoting RussellA
Yes, as I said. Pure cognition in our minds, is understanding.
Quoting RussellA
As it should. Since it is Kants notion of space and time being discussed, we would use Kants notion of perception. Which is ?
I wouldn't classify the mind-body problem, the debate between Dualism and Monism, and the debate between Innatism and Behaviourism, as not proper metaphysics.
Quoting Mww
As regards Kant's notion of perception, the the IEP article on Kant: Philosophy of Mind writes:
One has a perception, in Kants sense, when one can not only discriminate one thing from another, or between the parts of a single thing, based on a sensory apprehension of it, but also can articulate exactly which features of the object or objects that distinguish it from others. For instance, one can say it is green rather than red, or that it occupies this spatial location rather than that one. Intuition thus allows for the discrimination of distinct objects via an awareness of their features, while perception allows for an awareness of what specifically distinguishes an object from others.
From B147 of Critique of Pure Reason
Things in space and time, however, are only given insofar as they are perceptions (representations accompanied with sensation), hence through empirical representation.
For Kant, perception allows us to not only distinguish green from red, left from right, etc, but also to be aware of what distinguishes green from red, left from right, etc.
Good onya for the reference. Exactly the one I would have used.
Not so good in calling out red and left as things given to us in perception. What sensation do you get from left? What does up feel like? Why does a thing look red to you but the very same thing look some crappy shade of pink to me?
Quoting RussellA
Perception allows for awareness, is just another way of saying perception is that by which awareness is possible, but says nothing whatsoever of what that awareness entails. We would never be physically aware of things if we didnt have a sensation of them through perception.
Youve admitted the sensation of an itch doesnt give you the cause of it. An itch is the perception which serves as awareness of an object. But you cant distinguish from the sensation what the object is, only that there is one.
And finally, the one thing that specifically distinguishes one thing from another, is the one thing that doesnt belong to either, and is not perceived in our awareness of the sensation the thing gives us.
Anything with the slightest hint of anthropology or psychology isnt proper metaphysics.
[quote = BGE]... And others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs!
[/quote]
[quote=Kant]
Whatever is given us as object, must be given us in intuition. All our intuition however takes place by means of the senses only; the understanding intuites nothing, but only reflects. [T]he senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances, which are mere representations of the sensibility, we conclude that 'all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.'
[/quote]
The problem is of course that the sense organs are mere appearance and yet these merely apparent sense organs are the bedrock of the system.
[quote=Kant]
Now,if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible.[/b] As little as the man who admits colors not to be properties of the object in itself, but only as modifications of the sense of sight, should on that account be called an idealist, so little can my system be named idealistic, merely because I find that more, nay,
All the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance.
The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself.
[/quote]
As far as I can make out, the vision at the base of this reasoning is of a brain, locked in the cave of the skull, constructing the world from inputs to the sense organs and concepts. But this is of course (at least) spatial reasoning. Where could ideas of the brain and its sense organs come from in the first place if not from their untrustworthy 'mere appearance' in (merely apparent) space and time ?
In ordinary life, we see people seeing. We model what they know by their spatial position relative to an event, etc. In short, common-sense time-and-space everyday experience of the bodily role in knowledge is unwittingly appealed to and used as the foundation for a system which calls this role, its own foundation, unreal -- mere appearance.
https://gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52821/52821-h/52821-h.htm
An unorthodox hypothesis to address your concerns:
Suppose that two or more hence, at least two instantiations of individuated awareness co-occur. In other words, suppose solipsism to be false. (This shouldn't be that hard to hypothesize.)
The awareness-resultant time and space (one could add causality to the list as well) that is requisite of these multiple instantiations could then either be a) strictly relative to the instantiation of awareness addressed or b) equally applicable to all instantiations of awareness that in any way interact.
That space, time, and causality which falls under (b) would not be partially applicable to any but, again, would be equally applicable to all concerned. It would hence be completely impartial objective in at least this sense such that its occurrence would be fully independent of any one instantiation of awareness.
The process by which this objective space, time, and causality manifest could not here be that of causality. I would instead need to be the outcome of material causes in Aristotelian terms. In this case, where the ultimate constituents are these very instantiations of awareness: in this hypothetical, the cosmoss prime matter. Its not a relation in which that which determines occurs before that determined as causality is but instead is one in which the two necessarily occur simultaneously.
The greater the quantity of these individuated instantiations of awareness, the more stable would their commonly shared objective world of space, time, and causation be. For example, in presuming that only humans are awareness endowed, there currently co-occur over 7 billion instantiations of awareness on Earth. Assume all life is so endowed and one gets the picture.
In such a universe, there would then be an objective world that is perfectly impartial to the whims of any one instantiation of awareness that is in this sense perfectly independent of individual minds. Nevertheless, this very objective world could not however occur in the absence of Kantian categories.
That said, in such a world, that which is objective would then necessarily inform each individual instantiation of awareness skipping over a minefield of details, such that in humans the objective human brain informs, and in turn gives form to, the instantiation of first-person awareness we term our conscious selves. No brain, no instantiation of awareness; yet awareness at large, when globally conceived, remains to keep such a universe going.
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This is only a very rough sketch of just one possible account regarding Kantian categories and the objective world. Other accounts might also be possible to envision such that they make sense of the two. All the same, though there obviously would be innumerable details to yet work out, I so far dont see any self-contradiction in the hypothetical just provided.
Ive provided it only to illustrate that ways of accounting for both an objective world and the Kantian categories are not impossible to devise.
It's a bit like conspiracy theory. One seems to performs a daring skepticism but that skepticism is directed selectively indeed. At the base is a 'positive' attachment to a doctrine (equivalent to a persona) that fails to genuinely address the criticism of actual skeptics.
'The truth is there is no truth' is presented as the truth. 'There is a no world' is a presented as a fact about the world. The temptation is probably to push an awareness of individual bias to the extreme.
Clearly, Hume's understanding of "our natural sensations" was somewhat off the mark, as I explained. Therefore what he took as being "our natural sensations", was really just some abstract philosophical reasoning.
Anyway, unless they are specifically scientific, aren't all theories about natural sensations just abstract philosophical reasonings?
I think there's an error in your reasoning here. Recognising that the brain synthesises sensory inputs with pre-existing knowledge is not 'spatial reasoning', but comes from direct analysis of how cognitive processes and reason operate together. That analysis doesn't comprise, for instance, literally looking at how areas of the brain react to various types of stimuli, as neuroscience does, which would clearly take place in the objective domain.
A priori knowledge - things that are known by reason alone - doesn't arise from experience, as a matter of definition for Kant. (I understand that Quine and other current philosophers have called this into question but I'll leave that aside for now.) Instead, that faculty is required for us to make sense of experiences, to understand the relations between the different data of experience, and to sequence them as existing in time and space. The mind (or the brain) does all of this, as is nowadays well-attested in cognitive science. The key point is, contra empiricist philosophy, the mind is not a passive recipient, a tabula rasa, receiving impressions from the pre-existing world, but an active agent who synthesises impressions with existing knowledge to generate a unified world-picture (this is the topic of the 'subjective unity of experience').
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That is not what Kant is saying. Distinguishing between the world as it appears to us, and the world as it is in itself, doesn't say that the former is merely illusory or non-existent or dream-like. It's simply a statement about an inherent limitation of what we know as embodied rational creatures. Kant recognises that you can be at once an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist.
The two key paragraphs are these:
Having carefully distinguished between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, Kant then goes on to introduce the concept of empirical realism:
I believe that is untrue. Kant as I remember it, acknowledges that all knowledge begins with experience. The synthetic a priori is knowledge which has been synthesized by reflection on and generalization from experience, and which, once acquired, is henceforth independent of experience for its validation.
@Mww?
a posteriori knowledge, also known as empirical knowledge, is acquired through experience and observation of the external world. It is contingent on particular sensory perceptions and is derived from specific instances or examples.
Kant argued that both a priori and a posteriori knowledge are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the world. He believed that while a posteriori knowledge provides us with factual information about the empirical world, a priori knowledge enables us to have synthetic judgments, which go beyond mere analysis of concepts and provide us with genuine knowledge of the world.
How could you have an understanding of space or time if you had never been embodied in a spatiotemporal realm? Reason and logic alone are empty and by themselves can give us nothing, being as they are merely formal codifications of the rules that govern "correct" thinking.
But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience. This is from the CPR.
It's a subtle point but I take it to mean that a priori knowledge is not directly apprehended in experience but is derived by reflecting on its general characteristics. For example, we might say that we do not directly experience space and time, but we do experience objects as always being spatially extended and temporally enduring. This re-cognition can then be generalized to the a priori principle that all experiences must be given either temporally or spatially or both.
Without prior experience to reflect upon (without memory in other words), how would we ever be able to discover such principles? The only way then would be to examine present experience, and see that, yes, all the objects in my field of vision are spatially and temporally extended although the temporal part might be a bit difficult to realize without any memory at all.
I'm open to the possibility of an intricate tale that absorbs this piece of Kant and saves it from immediate self-cancellation. But this is an extremely low bar ! In the same way, maybe the God of Abraham did create the world, about 6000 years ago, and put in all kinds of misleading stuff like the 'wrong' amount of radioactive carbon, etc., for who knows what reason.
I'm trying to emphasize the huge gap between the distantly maybe possible (with lots of effort) and that which we can fairly confidently take for granted as we discuss more outlandish possibilities. Kant is offering something that's supposed to be foundational, but it's outlandish, and he doesn't even see the issue I addressed (at least I am not aware of him addressing it.)
I think you nailed it. I project what I learn from the past into the future. So I know (or think I know) some things about events that haven't happened yet. The knowledge is prior to the experience of those events, not to experience in general.
I know (I have license to assert and expect) that any 3-sided polygons I stumble upon will have angles that sum to [math] \pi [/math] ( radian measure). But I know this because of the study of Euclid in the past.
I remember various appreciators of Kant stressing his realization of how actively the mind projects hypotheses. Isn't the updated version basically the denial of the blank slate ? Without the absurd denial of the reality of brain, thankfully.
It occurs to me that any such sketch is aimed at describing the world. Your words are understood to be relevant to me. Communication that intends truth assumes (tacitly) a single world that encompasses all participants, and any relatively private subspaces (personal imaginations, maybe qualia) that might be allowed to them, as well as a set of shared semantic-logical norms. I see all this as a unified phenomenon.
More on this here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13308/our-minimal-epistemic-commitment-fixing-descartes-cogito/p1
Youre both right. There is a priori knowledge derived from extant experience, but in Kant, the stipulation is made that when he talks of a priori knowledge, he means absent any and all experience. The first is impure, the second, pure, and the second is the meaning throughout. This stipulation is on the first pages of the entire treatise, indicating its importance.
.. Knowledge à priori is either pure or impure. Pure knowledge à priori is that with which no empirical element is mixed up. By the term knowledge à priori, therefore, we shall in the sequel understand, not such as is independent of this or that kind of experience, but such as is absolutely so of all experience. Opposed to this is empirical knowledge, or that which is possible only à posteriori, that is, through experience....
The synthetic/analytic dichotomy, however, relates to judgement alone, insofar as these distinguish only the relative content of conceptions in a proposition to each other, which is a function of understanding. We can say we have knowledge based on synthetic a priori cognitions, but that is not to say we have synthetic a priori knowledge. Case in point, that every change universally and necessarily presupposes a cause, is a synthetic proposition understood purely a priori, but change is itself an empirical conception entirely dependent on intuitions, which makes explicit any knowledge derived from it, is empirical.
And if that doesnt work for you, check out his simple arithmetic brainstorm.
Hope that helps, at least a little .
Yes, precisely so.
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Theres a lot to the link youve shared. Descartes was a man in search of infallible knowledge. Im one to believe such cannot be had. This ala Cicero et al. the very folk Descartes wanted to disprove. My fallible reasoning for upholding fallibilism? Our lack of omniscience entails that no one can ever prove that, in the span of all remaining time, no one will ever find valid reason for why some proposition X which is currently held by us as true might, in fact, not be true thereby mandating that proposition X can only technically remain liable to being wrong, this irrespective of what it might be: including I am and 1 + 1 = 2. But this is not to deny that our fallible knowledge comes in a wide array of different strengths: that 1 + 1 = 2 is not on a par to it will rain tomorrow (both of which can well be knowledge claims).
At any rate, this epistemological issue of fallibilism vs. infallibilism aside, there remains this question:
If there are universals among, at the very least, all human beings to include identical aspects of our cognition as a species, the occurrence of other humans, and the reality of an objective world commonly shared by all how might these universal truths be discerned or discovered without any investigation into what is in fact actual relative to the individual subject? This such as that which Kant engaged in in his discovering of the categories.
And for this, the individual subject must first be evidenced to in fact be.
:up:
I think we agree on fallibilism.
Quoting javra
Just to be clear, I didn't expect you to read all of that thread. I think many philosophers have tried to establish a safe base of operations, a relatively certain center from which to speculate.
My suggested 'core' (which I think is what Karl-Otto Apel was getting at) is what you seemed to accept also.
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To deny this leads to performative contradiction, so it's something like non-emprical knowledge (approximately analytic). As philosophers ( I claim) we can rule out self-contradiction right away. Personally I tend to also rule out fancy words that merely hide ignorance. The classic example is explaining the existence of the world, very complex already, with an even more complex god which itself is left unexplained. In other words, I vote for open-mindedness within the limits of telling a coherent story and recognizing and avoiding pseudo-explanations. I think we agree on an awareness of ignorance --on keeping the darkness visible.
I don't mean anything fancy by spatial reasoning. I mean the most barbarically obvious common sense of brains being inside skulls, connected to the spinal cord. I mean realizing that the optic nerve runs from the eye to the brain. I mean looking at other human beings and seeing their sense organs and understanding that their awareness (reports of beliefs and feelings) is a function of (among other things) the spatial and temporal relationship between sense organs and events and objects in the world. Barbarically obvious common sense. Nothing fancier.
And let me stress that I'm not averse to challenging common sense. But one cannot, if one cares about developing a rational system of beliefs in the first place, simultaneously use commonsense to argue against that same common sense. The following is absurd : 'Sense organs are mere appearances (not real) because sense organs are so real that they create reality.'
It says something about us humans that we so easily tell ourselves such confused stories. We take a sensible awareness of the importance of the individual human nervous to ridiculous self-cancelling extremes. (Others pretend they can do without the world-encompassed nervous system in the opposite 'antispiritual' direction.)
Yes, there most certainly is agreement here. If I were to nitpick, Ive at least so far found that addressing the totality you've just outlined leaves one with few options to then proceed in formulating conclusions from this - what we both find to be - sound premise. Such as in manners that could stand up to those who find doubt for the given affirmation, in part or in whole. That said, to each their own paths in enquiry just as in life.
In relation to this, although maybe coming out of left field: Though I dont have tremendous respect for the person who said it, I can jive with the aphorism, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Its just that, in the non-solipsistic world we in fact inhabit, I find this implicitly entails that there are consequences to everything we will sooner or later, in one form or another. Hence, action and consequence; cause and effect. But this isnt pivotal to the topic at hand. Still, I do like the aphorism. In a way, it reminds me of the better aspects of Nietzsche.
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In agreement here as well. And very well said.
In a similar way, I think there's a worthy insight wrapped up in Stirner's work. From Brandom I get the idea that the autonomy project is at the very heart of the Enlightenment. Lucifer is the light bringer. Socrates questions everything. Presuppositionless is the freedom of a god.
Roughly speaking, Stirner's points about the radically free ego are like Hegel's points about a community that's transcended its alienation. That alienation is the 'illusion' (necessary like training wheels, for awhile) that the species has to ethically account for itself to something outside it. To be sure, our environment constrains us practically, but that's a different issue. Stirner recaptures (reiterates in a new lingo) what was already in Romantics like Schlegel --the idea of an infinite irony, the transcendental buffoon. I suppose some of this is in DADA too. We'd probably agree that it feels bad to be cruel or petty. So the person aware of 'insane' freedom tends even to be nice. A sense of the infinite puts one in a good mood. I speculate that maybe even the Buddha saw such freedom but didn't bother talking much about 'the dark side of the force.'
Yeah, Nietzsche's golden passages are transcendent and joyous and sweetly wicked.
To finally reply to this (though I think you and I have already come to agreement on it) [ so this might be redundant for those who have grasped the point already ] :
My approach can't talk the madman out of his madness. What I'm trying to do is find the assumptions (often tacit) that must have already been made in order to play the game of philosophy in the first place.
So I respond to the person who makes certain claims by pointing out that their claims are a performative contradiction. The person who doesn't believe in a world that encompasses us both and a language we can discuss it in is (if somehow sincere and actually thinkable) simply insane -- cannot even count as a philosopher. In short, the very concept of philosophy implies/assumes a encompassing-shard world-language that individuals can be wrong about (or more or less correct about, etc.)
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Couldn't help but given a joyful smile at this. Something about Nietzche's own aphorism of a beast of burden which, upon taking too large of load, transmutes into a predatory carnivore fighting off the monster or "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" which, upon liberating itself of this monster, again transmutes into a babe newly birthed into the world ... one of his insights that has always stayed with me. As far as I know, it certainly fits the mythos of the Buddha underneath the tree in the wilderness. And it doesn't strike me as the only mythos to which it could apply.
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You ever looked into Finnegans Wake ? It's a wild wheel that's built on archetypes. It's as if Joyce had studied so many plots that they all bled together. Language itself had to melt to capture the liquidity of symbolic reality. He wanted to share a timeless consciousness. Jung's essay on Joyce's Ulysses is also profound. Starts negative but gets more and more complimentary and insightful, as if he was grokking it as he griped.
Fair enough! Still, there are some who do maintain that the philosopher, as an individual subject (subjected to the very same world of objects and logic to which everyone else is an equal subject of), is strictly illusion ... a view which, once analyzed, I so far find leaves the universality of this shared world in shambles. This though such philosophers wholeheartedly disagree. What can one say. One tries as a self-purported and always imperfect lover of wisdom to discern what is true from what isn't as best one can.
Here, though, the brain could easily have been replaced with the mind which is not so amenable to that kind of description.
Sense organs in situ are not objects in the world, unless youre studying them as an optometrist, for example. They are fundamentally elements of experience - theyre referred to in Buddhism as sense-gates. Theyre provide the perceptions which are constitutive of experience and perception.
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What confused story are you referring to? Kants Critique of Pure Reason?
No, not yet at least. I tried Joyce's Ulysses but - just as with Virginia Woolf - though I recognize the genius in the work, it so far hasn't spoken to me. Maybe I'll check out Jung's analysis though, sounds quite worthwhile.
Only one of us said that :-)
My retort to them would be: please explain what illusion can even mean without a person in a world they can be wrong about.
If you like Jung already, you'll probably enjoy it. His ambivalence is fascinating. Mercy of a Rude Stream also gives an outside perspective on how shocking Ulysses was to its contemporaries. I suspect that most people forget or were never quite aware of how far Joyce went in that book. The 'Satanism' in Emerson is also seemingly forgotten. Fame obscures their continuing power, just as there's an 'idle talk' declawed sentimental version of that old corruptor of youth, who went walking along with his demon, asking embarrassing questions.
Cool. As to my liking for Jung, yea, so so. Some of his concepts are interesting to me - and, maybe even pragmatic in certain contexts for some - but, notwithstanding, not analytical enough for my general tastes. Notions such as that of synchronicity and the universal unconscious come to mind. Well, this when considered from a panpsychistic perspective; or, at least, something close enough to it. As I said, interesting but in no way definitive.
Eyes, olfactory bulbs, the machinery of the ear -- in situ ( 'in the original position') are not objects of the world ? I don't have to be an optometrist to shake the water out of my ears when I go swimming, to worry that so-and-so overheard me gossiping.
Objects of experience, eh ? We do see the eyes of others, yes, by using our own eyes.
I'm truly surprised that you can't see the dependence of concepts like experience on our ordinary existence in the lifeworld with other people. You haven't addressed (maybe haven't grasped) the objection yet, that the sense organs are treated as both illusions and the source of illusions.
No, they're not. Your eyes are organs of sight, but your eyes are not what you look at, unless you have some cause to do so. Yes, you can see the eyes of others, and in some metaphorical sense see 'with the eyes of others' (like 'standing in another's shoes'), but they're not objects, unless you're wanting to examine the eye or other sense organs objectively.
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What is that an objection to? Who is treating the sense organs as illusions?
Yeah, he gets too far out for me also at times. But I really valued his concept of the shadow. Probably the best idea I got from him was : Whatever is unconscious is projected.
I connect this with the ferryman in Hesse's Siddhartha and 'nothing human is alien to me.' It also gels with the better part of Nietzsche. Resentment tends to be connected to self-righteousness which tends express an ignorance of the evil in one's own self. Roughly, the fucked up world is just a mirror of the contradictions in my own depths ---which can, fortunately, be relatively harmonized --perhaps by (among other things) integrating the shadow, which boils down to expanding the self-image toward the infinite, giving up on phony purity poses, etc.
I'm not averse to discussing some of the complexities of sensation, but your denial that eyes are objects in the world is indulgent -- contrary to ordinary English. 'Wanting to examine them objectivity' is way too fancy here. Kant himself invokes the sense organs. That's the context.
An object is (first definition) something perceptible by one or more of the senses, especially by vision or touch; a material thing. I see others' eyes directly, my own in a mirror. I'm not being metaphorical.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=objects&atb=v379-1&ia=definition
I suspect you want to skip to some profound point about metaphysical subjectivity. Maybe we'll get there, but not if you absurdly deny the existence of eyes.
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I find this is a good ideal to live by. But, of course, it's never perfectly actualized by any self. I've often enough thought that an important aspect of this otherwise quite elusive, maybe even mystical, term "wisdom" consists in being able to simultaneously entertain different perspective such that one's thoughts and actions satisfies all these otherwise disparate perspectives with the same breath, so to speak. But yea, a detective, for one example, likely wouldn't be worth squat without this ability or relating and understanding other - including that other with which one is in an antagonistic relation to.
Need to take off for now. But really good chatting with you!
Yes, I know. But s argument is just as valid in its own right. The major difference being, the one, yours, relates to and supports transcendental philosophy, the other, not so much.
Now Kant is pretty clearly using our ordinary experience of sense organs and presumably contemplating the way some kind of 'raw' experience of Reality is automatically and unconsciously 'cooked' for us by our cognitive system, sense organs and our conceptuality (I'd say hardware and software). For Kant, what we see (even the framework of space and time) is largely our own creation. We can never see around it (the instrument, the transforming lens) and recover 'raw' (true) Reality. Hegel famously drags the limits of this metaphor into the light.
The problem here is that Kant, following Hume and others in the tradition of MS, took the ordinary experience of the body with sense organs for granted -- while his own theory says that the very framework of space and time, and of course also the ordinary experience of sense organs (eyes on your mother's face), is mere appearance. So he's built his system on the very thing he calls mere appearance. He saws off the branch he is sitting on.
:up:
This reminds me of Keats writing about Shakespeare -- and the way that Joyce and Harold Bloom in their own ways treat him as a 'spiritual' figure.
Of course eyes are objects, but it is not as objects that they are significant. The significant factor is sense perception and its interpretation. Plainly we are subject to illusions, for instance optical illusions. More subtly, we are subject to delusion - misinterpreting what the senses tell us - and even more subtle errors, such as errors of judgement.
Sure, and illusions and delusions depend upon an actual world, something taken as real. Presumably "we are subject to illusions, for instance optical illusions" is offered as a truth about the world we both live in. As I said before, reasonable and in fact crucial considerations of fallibility are push to absurd extremes, stretched until they snap into nonsense.
I think the problem is related.
We are social beings, primarily accountable to one another, offering reasons for our actions and beliefs. We have a strong and grounded concept of individual bias and delusion. It makes very good sense (plays a vital role in our lives) to model the bias of others in our tribe. I 'translate' the report of Larry who always lays it on thick or of Sally who always minimizes. I try to look through their reports to see what's really going on (what I'll believe anyway.)
But things get wacky and confused when we pretend we can see around the human nervous system altogether. I don't think it makes sense for us to see around our 'species bias.' This concept of species bias is problematic, possibly a version of the round square, since we'd have to be on both sides of a line at once. It's way too easy for humans to write checks they can't cash, which Kant himself emphasized ! That's the spirit of his work, right ?
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There would not seem to be many proponents of the blank slate these days. The salient question seems to be whether it is merely capacities or tendencies which are innate (like Chomsky's idea of a genetic capacity in humans to learn language) or whether there is also innate knowledge (along the lines of anamnesis, I guess).
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Right.
Related point and pet theory : Any position that is defined in terms of an opponent has about the same amount of complexity as that opponent. We betray ourselves or honor ourselves in the enemy we choose (sounds like Nietzsche, no?) Sherlock, once his character has been sketched, is given an anti-Sherlock to contend with, as a climax. The 'infinite' position is its own shadow (Hamlet or something.)
Quoting javra
You too! Till next time...
Right, and really that makes sense. Just the fact that our eyes are in the front is no small thing. Even if I build a general purpose neural network, I have to choose the number and width of layers. It's almost absurd to think that the mind is without structure. I suppose the empiricists were primarily trying to wipe out some cobwebs and got carried away.
Far be it from me to think I am an expert Kant interpreterI just interpret in terms of what makes sense to me. So, I cannot see how Kant could justify thinking there could be any knowledge at all prior to. or absent any previous, experience.
You said there was a priori knowledge which is pure and that which is impurecan you give an example of pure a priori knowledge and explain how it could be gained in the absence of any prior experience?
I'm beginning to think I may have interpreted Kant in ways which make sense to me, and I'm hoping not to have to discover that he advocated for ideas which are bound to seem absurd.
...the nature of which is the point at issue.
The 'nature of which' implying a fact of the matter. The very idea of a 'nature' invokes a fact about a world that includes and transcends both of us.
It seems to me that you are stubbornly picking a bad 'hill to die on.'
One needs to commit to very little indeed, seems to me, to avoid outright contradiction. But denying that there is a truth of the matter is a palpable absurdity. The truth is you see there is no truth. Or maybe there really isn't such a thing as the truth of the matter. Sounds profound and openminded but it's silly upon examination.
A measured appreciation of what the subject contributes is maybe the essence of philosophy. But claiming there is only subject is as empty as claiming there is left without right.
Of course I accept that there is a truth, but I conceive of it in Buddhist terms - to apprehend it requires going beyond the ego oriented worldview that we are naturally disposed to. Hence the convergence I mentioned between Kant, Schopenhauer and Buddhism (subject of an appendix in Magee's book on Schopenhauer).
Are you familiar with Kant's expression of his 'Copernican revolution in philosophy'? (Here's a crib.)
Mathematics. And because not only are its conceptions created by us, but so too are the objects subsumed under the conceptions. Not the rote instruction in mathematics you got since you learned to keep the pointy end of the pencil down, but rather, the principles legislating mathematical operations, which to know you must think.
Quoting Janus
What else could you do? Same as everyone, right?
Another way would be to say that the practice of going through the rule-based procedures of calculation is itself a form of empirical input.
Would you agree that thinking space and time as the "pure forms of intuition" and discovering the categories of judgement do both entail reflection on experience?
Quoting Mww
True that!
I've read several of Beiser's excellent books on German philosophy, which sketch the intellectual scene of Kant in great detail. Also read with great pleasure A Thing of This World, which traces Kant's revolution through a great historical sequence of modifications. Kant => Hegel => Heidegger is one important path.
Personally I'd choose Popper as a great 'updated' Kant who does justice to the 'active knower.' While we depend upon our embodiment in the world to do so, we largely construct our knowledge of the world. Creativity plays an absolute central role. To me that's the essence of the Kantian Copernican revolution.
That was what I thought you were taking issue with.
Consider that we are in the world, so we don't construct the world ex nihilo. But the world is for or through our human sense organs, brain, and culture, so talking about a world without an embodied cultural subject is also a mere abstraction (a useful fiction.)
To me it's (metaphorically speaking) topologically weird, something like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle
You're getting closer to what I understand the issue to be. What I think the issue to be is the apparently commonsense notion that the world exists just as it is, without any observer.
Remember that the passage from Schop that you reacted against was an argument against materialism. He is arguing against the mind-independent reality of the objects of perception. That mind-independence of objects is sine qua non for scientific realism (SEP: 'Metaphysically, realism is committed to the mind-independent existence of the world investigated by the sciences.') The common-sense view is that the world exists, just so, even if nobody is around to observe it. After all, it is common knowledge that h. sapiens has only been around for the metaphorical wink of an eye whilst the Universe is 13-odd bilion years old. But what the realist doesn't appreciate it is that for the word 'to exist' to be meaningful, the subject of the proposition 'it exists' has to be distinguished or singled out - that is part of the meaning of 'exist' ('ex' - outside of, apart from, -ist', to be or to stand.) So the idea of the world with no h. sapiens in it, whilst an empirically valid observation, overlooks the role of the subject in any meaningful notion of 'what exists'. It interprets an heuristic - an interpretive stance regarding mind-independence - as a metaphysical truth, which it is not. The truth is that the mind actually 'brings the world into being' in some fundamental sense - not that things literally go into and pass out of existence depending on the observer.
So it's actually not legitimate to suppose that the world exists in the absence of any observer - there's always an implicit perspective in that supposition, and without that perspective, there is not even an abstraction. This has become apparent even in science (and I've quoted the following umpteen times):
[quote=Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271]The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. [/quote]
There's a great youtube video of Linde discussing 'the role of consciousness' with Robert Lawrence Kuhn on Closer to Truth. He's a serious figure in modern cosmollogy, although I'm sure many scientists look askance at this idea of his, as he himself acknowledges in this rather amusing interview.
As I see it, you are trying to do justice to the entanglement of subject and substance. I think it's better to talk of equiprimordiality. Self, language, community, and world are all co-given -- aspects of a single 'fused' lifeworld. The 'proof' of this is almost analytic : denials of it are performative contradictions.
I suggest that the embodiment of mind should be stressed to do justice to the world.
So (in summary) the [s]human nervous system[/s] living human body is one 'object' in the world among other objects, but it's an extremely special object, one that is always with us, a condition for the possibility and experience. You might say that it's neither 'mind' nor 'matter.' Probably flesh is a great word here for the subject, because it stresses entanglement with world and the visceral-sensual aspect of being an individual.
You might like:
The properties of things that we take to be real and objective also tacitly assume a reference to the bodys norms and its adoption of levels. An objects true qualities depend on the bodys privileging of orientations that yield maximum clarity and richness. This is possible because the body serves as a template for the style or logic of the world, the concordant system of relations that links the qualities of an object, the configuration of the perceptual field, and background levels such as lighting or movement. In this symbiosis or call-and-response between the body and the world, things have sense as the correlates of my body, and reality therefore always involves a reference to perception. Yet, to be real, things cannot be reducible to correlates of the body or perception; they retain a depth and resistance that provides their existential index. While each thing has its individual style, the world is the ultimate horizon or background style against which any particular thing can appear.
...
The perspectival limitations of perception, both spatially and temporally, are the obverse of this worlds depth and inexhaustibility. Through an examination of hallucination and illusions, Merleau-Ponty argues that skepticism about the existence of the world makes a category mistake. While we can doubt any particular perception, illusions can appear only against the background of the world and our primordial faith in it. While we never coincide with the world or grasp it with absolute certainty, we are also never entirely cut off from it; perception essentially aims toward truth, but any truth that it reveals is contingent and revisable.
[i]Rejecting analogical explanations for the experience of other people, Merleau-Ponty proposes that the rediscovery of the body as a third genre of being between the pure subject and the object makes possible encounters with embodied others (PP: 407/366). We perceive others directly as pre-personal and embodied living beings engaged with a world that we share in common. This encounter at the level of anonymous and pre-personal lives does not, however, present us with another person in the full sense, since our situations are never entirely congruent. The perception of others involves an alterity, a resistance, and a plenitude that are never reducible to what is presented, which is the truth of solipsism. Our common corporeality nevertheless opens us onto a shared social world, a permanent dimension of our being in the mode of the anonymous and general someone. The perception of others is therefore a privileged example of the paradox of transcendence running through our encounter with the world as perceived:
Whether it is a question of my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is always to know how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them. (PP: 422/381)
This fundamental contradiction defines our encounters with every form of transcendence and requires new conceptions of consciousness, time, and freedom.[/i]
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[i]Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot separate the certainty of our thoughts from that of our perceptions, since to truly perceive is to have confidence in the veracity of ones perceptions. Furthermore, we are not transparent to ourselves, since our inner states are available to us only in a situated and ambiguous way. The genuine cogito, Merleau-Ponty argues, is a cogito in action: we do not deduce I am from I think, but rather the certainty of I think rests on the I am of existential engagement. More basic than explicit self-consciousness and presupposed by it is an ambiguous mode of self-experience that Merleau-Ponty terms the silent or tacit cogitoour pre-reflective and inarticulate grasp on the world and ourselves that becomes explicit and determinate only when it finds expression for itself. The illusions of pure self-possession and transparencylike all apparently eternal truthsare the results of acquired or sedimented language and concepts.
Rejecting classic approaches to time that treat it either as an objective property of things, as a psychological content, or as the product of transcendental consciousness, Merleau-Ponty returns to the field of presence as our foundational experience of time. This field is a network of intentional relations, of protentions and retentions, in a single movement of dehiscence or self-differentiation, such that each present reaffirms the presence of the entire past that it drives away, and anticipates the presence of the entire future or the to-come (PP: 483/444). Time in this sense is ultimate subjectivity, understood not as an eternal consciousness, but rather as the very act of temporalization. As with the tacit cogito, the auto-affection of time as ultimate subjectivity is not a static self-identity but involves a dynamic opening toward alterity. In this conception of time as field of presence, which reveals the subject and the object as two abstract moments of a unique structure, namely, presence (PP: 494/45455), Merleau-Ponty sees the resolution to all problems of transcendence as well as the foundation for human freedom. Against the Sartrean position that freedom is either total or null, Merleau-Ponty holds that freedom emerges only against the background of our universal engagement in a world, which involves us in meanings and values that are not of our choosing. We must recognize, first, an authochthonous sense of the world that is constituted in the exchange between the world and our embodied existence (PP: 504/466), and, second, that the acquired habits and the sedimented choices of our lives have their own inertia. This situation does not eliminate freedom but is precisely the field in which it can be achieved.[/i]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#NatuPercStruBeha
Quick question: I can see merit in this and have a modest interest in phenomenology, but could it not be argued that this account is just words used as a kind of magic spell? A conjuring move to make the Cartesian conundrum appear to vanish. We can choose to describe our reality any which way we want and hold these accounts as foundational axioms - dualism, monistic idealism - or your equiprimordial, phenomenological construct above.
But how do we demonstrate the veracity of such models and of what use are they? Are they a variety of poetry, or are they something deeper which can be tied in some way to reality?
Quoting plaque flag
On this I am simply unable to tell what fits. I find both 'I think' and 'I am' problematic. Even Merleau-Ponty's account seems to require a kind of faith.
I was hoping it was pretty well in line with the OP. Even including Linde.
Sure. Thinking about the doing, and setting the doing to theory, is one thing.The actual doing, in and of itself, as an intrinsic modus operandi, is quite another.
Nature is the boss, no doubt, and our experience is governed by it, which has never been contested. We still wish to understand what it is to experience, what may be the conditions by which it is possible for us, which puts us in somewhat of a jam, insofar as we ourselves determine those conditions, but whatever we come up with cannot be in contradiction with Nature.
Are there pure intuitions? Probably not, but experience informs us that objects have a relation to each other and to us. Are there pure conceptions of the understanding? Probably not, but experience informs us of quantities, of causes, of intensities, and so on. Or, does understanding inform experience of the specifics of all those because our intelligence is naturally disposed to recognize the universal form of each of them? It can only be one or the other and however we seek to explain all that makes no difference, as long as Nature remains uncontested.
..The understanding gives to experience, according to the subjective and formal conditions, of sensibility as well as of apperception, the rules which alone make this experience possible .
There probably arent any of the metaphysical conceptions. No such thing as reason, judgement, knowledge and whatnot. Theyre inventions, meant to explain in the absence of truth, but never intended to prove in the absence of fact. Im sure you must see the problem, that historically takes so much care in exposing, in that it is we that propose to Nature the rules by which it operates, but in doing so, we should have prohibited ourselves from the capacity for proposing, re: the absolute determinism of natural law with respect to the brain, should not allow the indeterminate possibility of subjective inference.
Were left with doing the best we can, in not making more of a shitstorm of things than we already have.
Are you essentially saying that we have constructed little conceptual 'prisons' for ourselves out of theory and intellectual models?
Quoting Mww
Can you clarify this by putting it slightly differently, I'm not entirely clear on this?
Id call it limitations. One hardly subjects himself to inescapable imprisonment, but one can willingly acknowledge his limitations.
In one respect Id agree, though. Not to do with conceptual explanation, but with logical necessity are we imprisoned, insofar as we in ourselves cannot escape its legislative authority.
You and I are both human beings, with the same intellectual abilities in general, given the same natural operation of a brain we each possess as a physical organ. Yet you detest, e.g., Brussels sprouts but I find them delicious. You think you heard a firecracker but I know that sound as from a .38 stub-nose, probably pre-1954. That sensation is explicitly identical for both of us, yet we treat it differently. Natural law, by which both our brains work, should not allow such dissimilar treatments.
Cognitive neuroscience of course, has much to say about this, relying on massive brain complexity which it can demonstrate as sufficient reason for means, but cannot prove as necessarily the case as ends. Which, ironically enough, is precisely the limitations imposed on metaphysical speculation.
Yes, it could be argued, but I claim there would be a performative contradiction in such an argument.
'This account is just words' attempts to say something about this account in our world --- it reaches out beyond the ego of the speaker. It is offered as intelligible assertion in our language. It suggests that another claim, my lifeworld thesis, might go too far, be wrong, be a magic spell or illusion. In other words, it implies something like a ground truth. It also implies that the other claim is sufficiently meaningful to be recognized as a claim and challenged according to logical/epistemological norms.
I grant that I can't talk someone out of madness or solipsism. My point only has relevance for those wearing the philosopher hat --- who showed up for a conversation to assert themselves. I hold up a mirror and show them, in outline, what they always already assume when they try to tell me about the world.
I agree that we have a big space to play around in. For most of us here, this talk is (whatever else it is) a kind of conceptual music. Or puppies wrestling. Discussion of the best Chess openings. The folding of paper swans. Behind the scenes/screens, we have to chew food, be nice, pay bills.
FWIW, I'd say that there is only a tiny core that can't be denied without performative contradiction : 'we are in a world and a language together'. The details are intentionally left unspecified, for that's what we debate, the nature of the world, never (without absurdity) its existence. The other phenomenological stuff is relatively tentative, but the ideal is not theory construction so much as a pointing-out what's already there and not being noticed (famously including my blind knowhow as I hammer or drive and the strange being-kind of tools-in-use.)
I grant that one can't prove such (relatively internal) things. It's like proving that a love poem gets it right. I can say that such words sound about right to me and listen for input from others.
Cool thanks. I'll continue to mull over this.
Cool. Bear in mind the examples were superficial. Taking it down closer to the bone, you know just as well you dont like Brussels sprouts as you know two straight lines cannot enclose a space. Two different kinds of knowing, two different ways of knowing.
Quoting plaque flag
Can you, plaque flag, explain to me, the principles by which you distinguish a subject from an object? For example, notice in the second quote above, that you draw this analogy, the subject/object relation is like the left/right relation. So we have principles to distinguish left from right, face north and right is east, left is west, or something like that.
Notice in the first quote, you say that an eye is an object. Is an eye a part of a subject? If so, are all objects parts of subjects?
I would not say that an eye in its natural state qualifies as an object. This is because I think that "object" implies a degree of independence from its environment. That independence is what allows objects to move, and be moved freely. Eyes do not have the independence required of "object", in my opinion. However, an eye can be removed from its natural place, and treated as an object, but this removal denies its function, so it is not a natural eye anymore after being removed from its proper place. Therefore, to treat an eye as an object is to make it something other than what it really is, and that is to deny its dependence on something else (as a part of something else), thereby giving it independence as an "object". That act of giving it independence, to make it an object, robs it of its function, which makes it no longer "an eye" when "eye" is defined by what it does.
I would say that both, subjects and objects have this in common, independence from their environment. This independence is what allows them to move and be moved freely. What principles would you refer to, to argue that there is a difference between an object and a subject, like the difference between left and right?
Since this OP originally concerned Kant, the principle I would reference to argue that there is a difference between object and subject is as follows:
Sensible and intellectual characteristics of the experienced object which exhibit necessity and strict universality have their originating source in the sensibility and understanding of the subject (they are transcendental and a priori in Kant's meaning of the term), while any sensible and intellectual characteristics of the experienced object which do not exhibit necessity and strict universality have their originating source in the object per se (they are empirical and a posteriori in Kant's meaning of the term).
But are we not natural beings, with a natural capacity to reflect on experience and arrive at generalized ideas about the nature of that experience and the judgements we make about it?
For example, is there significant controversy over Kant's categories of judgement?
So Kant's categories are divided into four sets of three: (1) quantity: unity, plurality, totality;
(2) quality: reality, negation, limitation; (3) relation: substance- and- accident, cause- and- effect, reciprocity; (4) modality: possibility, existence, necessity.
Can we think of any other sets or extra members of the four sets, or can we argue that some do not belong?
How could there be such a thing as a "sensible and intellectual characteristics of the experienced object which do not exhibit necessity and strict universality"? If it's a sensible and intellectual characteristic, isn't it necessarily universal?
The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy
Alfredo Ferrarin
Plato's Ideas are both sensible and intellectual, yet they do not exhibit necessity and strict universality and, thus, are not transcendental conditions for the possibility of the entirety of human experience.
They necessarily apply to only some, but not to all the objects of human experience. For example, the Idea Elm Tree applies necessarily to only some trees, but not to all trees.
In fact, most of Plato's Ideas exhibit only a limited necessity and a restricted universality.
For example, in the context of the Form 'tree,' it would represent the ideal and perfect essence of what a tree is, encompassing all trees' fundamental characteristics. This Form 'tree' would not be limited to a particular type of tree like a pine tree or elm tree, but it would be the ultimate archetype that all trees in the physical world attempt to imitate or participate in to varying degrees of perfection.
It was Aristotle who later introduced the idea of species and many other refinements and elaborations which were to lay the groundwork for the science of classification (which reached its modern form under Linnaeus in the 16th c)
Sure it can be done, but then it isnt the same philosophy. According to Kant, his is the definitive list, even moreso than Aristotles, but there are a veritable plethora of conceptions subsumed under them, which he calls schema, the majors for each category detailed in the text. I think the minors continue being filled in, as science goes on, which he says we are welcome to do on our own. For instance, under quantity is numbers, under numbers is fractions, etc., but nowadays, under numbers is also Hawkings imaginary time, probability distributions .ooooo, and my all-time favorite ..Schrodingers negative entropy. And with all that, makes one wonder why folks still quibble over whether 1 + 1 = 2. (Gasp)
Biggest issue I suppose, is the fact he doesnt show how the pure conceptions come about, other than to posit that they reside transcendentally .make of that as you will .. in understanding, to serve as rules for the reduction of the diversity of representations in intuition to that which ties them all together under a conception.
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Quoting Janus
Absolutely we are. And there are as many ways to reflect and generalize as there are theories as to how we do it. While the categories are necessary for one theory, they may not be for another. Whether fact or fiction, Kants theory is nothing if not the most drudgingly complete of all. I mean .wannabe theories abound, but none have 800 pages of technical support. Hell, he even wrote a CPR for Dummies!!! Gave it a title no dummy would understand, and upon seeing it wouldnt read the essay anyway, but still ..
I have no objection to what you said. In fact, I agree with most of what you said. But I think you missed my point. To use your example, the Form/Idea Tree may be a necessary and universal exemplar with respect to all species of tree, but the Form/Idea Tree is not a necessary and universal condition with respect to any other experienced entities in the sense of being, not their ideal exemplar, but a transcendental condition for the possibility of their existence which originates in the understanding.
Also, what precludes one from proposing an exemplary Form/Idea for Pine Trees and another exemplary Form/Idea for Elm Trees, etc.? Can't one argue that an exemplary form exists for any experienced entities that share a common set of characteristics?
Right, using the categories of understanding without making them explicit seems to obviously come before reflecting on our experience and judgement and recognizing and making explicit the categories we do use.
So, the question of the origin of the categories would be transcendental in the sense that it cannot be empirically established, but I don't see that it follows that the origin is transcendental in the sense of its coming from a transcendent "realm". I had always thought that is precisely the traditional kind of metaphysical thinking Kant is ruling out.
Beats me. My study of Plato's forms is still (and will probably always remain) incomplete. I was just responding to your post above, which I think is dubious, for the reasons given. Although I will add that I think it's very easy to confuse 'form' with 'shape' - the original, 'morphe' doesn't mean exactly that. I think it's something nearer to a principle i.e. 'the principle of tree-ness', that which all trees have in common. But as soon as you start to go down the path of analysing that, difficulties multiply, so I won't press the point (and besides it's only tangentially relevant to the OP).
I don't see your point. We always apply such restrictions in the case of any universals. "Elm" has its restrictions, "tree" has its restrictions, "plant" has its restrictions, "living" has its restrictions, "being" has its restrictions, etc.. If there was a universal which did not have any restrictions it couldn't have any real meaning, because the lack of restrictions would allow it to have any meaning whatsoever, therefore no specific meaning and incomprehensible.
So even when we apprehend "space" and "time" as universals, and propose these as the names of categories, they still have restrictions, as is the case with categories. These restrictions which characterize the category may be provided by definitions. Therefore the presence or non-presence of "restrictions" is not the distinguishing factor here as any such named categories must have restrictions.
I believe that the difference you are alluding to is to be found in the nature of the restrictions. Some definitions (restrictions) are produced from (empirical) descriptions, while others are produced from stipulations (like the axioms of pure mathematics). The former obviously cannot be "transcendental conditions for the possibility of the entirety of human experience". And the latter, since they are stipulated by human beings which are already engaged in experiencing, surely cannot be the transcendental conditions for human experience either.
Therefore, I think it is misdirected to try and categorize the "transcendental conditions for the possibility of the entirety of human experience" as some sort of universal idea. The transcendental conditions are not categories, conceptions, or universals. There doesn't seem to be any evidence for the existence of that sort of "idea", so we should not think of these conditions as ideas. Therefore, if "space" and "time" are proposed by Kant as "transcendental conditions for the possibility of the entirety of human experience", we need to understand these terms as referring to something other than universals, ideas, or conceptions. I think Kant calls them "intuitions".
Remember Kant for the dualist he admitted to being. As such, empirically, we first sense then cognize then experience an object, but after that, rationally, we can still cognize that object without it having met with sensibility. We conventionally say we draw such objects from memory, whereas technically we cognize from the content of consciousness by means of the unity of apperception represented by I think. But never mind all that.
We sense objects from which experience follows, but we can also think an object, which alone affords no experience, yet later sense it and from that, experience follows. The question here is then .how is it that some object of sense, and the very same object of thought, contain enough of the same representations such that the judgement made on the one, which is always a posteriori, doesnt conflict with the judgement made on the other, which is sometimes purely a priori, and from which the cognitions of identical representations is sustained, and the knowledge of that object stands in the one case or obtains on the other. In other words, what is it that conditions both the sensing of objects and the thinking of them, such that the contradiction of one by the other is either eliminated, or, demonstrated and then corrected, in accordance with rules. As it must be, otherwise the very notion of knowledge itself on the one hand, and possible knowledge on the other, becomes suspect, which, under certain circumstances, is altogether and utterly absurd. So it now becomes a matter of not so much what makes this or that possible, but rather, what is it that prohibits this and that from contradicting each other. The answer to that must be that there is that which conditions the human intellectual system in its entirety.
It isnt really so much how do these contain the same conceptual representations, because they are put together ..synthesized ..under their respective happenstance by the same faculty, re: understanding. So what is it about understanding, by which representation of sensed objects in precise conformity to objects of mere thought, receives its consistency? Or, put another way .what are the rules? It is a fact objects can be conceived no one has ever experienced; theyre called inventions. But how does the one who didnt invent understand the invented object as sufficiently proximate to the inventor himself? No other way than iff all humans have the same basic conceptual capacities, abide by the same cognitive rules. But having them isnt enough; how did we get them, or even, what are they?
Well, we just dont know, do we. We know the ends, insofar as there is cross-species agreement on some considerations, but havent a clue to the means in the same empirical manifestation as the end agreement. That which we dont empirically know, which underlies what we do, which can only happen iff there is that which underpins the entire system, has been called transcendental. The transcendental has that which follows from it, re: all a priori representations and their respective offspring, and by which general speculation is logically validated, but it is fruitless to seek what comes before, insofar as continuous regressive speculation has no validation at all. With respect to the average smuck on the street .folks like me ..there is nothing gained with respect to knowledge of things, by asking about what comes before the transcendental ideality of space. And there is nothing gained from the necessary truth of the principle of cause/effect by asking about the time before relations.
Quoting Janus
As you can see, it doesnt follow. The origin of the transcendental is buried somewhere in a particular kind of intellect. The transcendent realm just represents what lies outside that intellect. So, e.g., transcendent principles, just means those that only work on things of transcendent origin, which we wouldnt know anything about, so are useless to us.
Perhaps you see the evolution from Renaissance philosophy, in which the principles corresponding to our thought do originate in the transcendent realm of deities and such, graduating to the Enlightenment precept of limiting fundamental understanding to the subject himself rather than being force-fed by gods or the community, but still leaves the origin of the grounding conditions quite unknown, even if the place of them is credited as entirely internal to the subject. So the transcendent, which isnt the origin, became the transcendental, which is. If the gods get dumped, gotta fill the void with something, right? And no one could use the term transcendent for that which resides internally in the subject, for then he would be considerable as are gods, which just might have been frown upon by organized religion, and all this philosophical evolution was happening during still-religious times, Galileos predicament still fresh in the minds of academia.
It might just be that Kant coined the term transcendental in order to grant the Church its notion of transcendent supremacy and thereby its raison detre in the exposition for it, but at the same time, he absolutely required the very same notion, a sort of unconditioned be-all-end-all explanatory device, albeit on a rather lesser scale, with respect to the critique of reason. He stipulates we can think anything we wish, which is decidedly god-like, so we need the conditions which permit it, but at the same time, we are not gods therefore cannot think whatever we wish and then expect to get what we want out of it. To think whatever we wish allows access to the transcendent realm; the limitations of transcendental reason remove the expectations, which makes such transcendent thought a waste of time, and THAT, is the critique in a nutshell.
Everybody wins: the Church gets to retain its version of absolute supremacy, Everydayman gets to see how he can let it go.
Anyway ..food for metaphysical indigestion.
Berkeley argued, quite forthrightly and successfully I think, that SUBSTANCE functioning as a substratum for anything is equivalent to it being a superfluous NOTHING.
In other words, Berkeley's detailed analysis showed that SUBSTANCE and NOTHING have the same meaning.
So, claiming that SUBSTANCE is a permanent substratum that supports time is the same as claiming that NOTHING is a permanent substratum that supports time.
Which is saying NOTHING!
Wouldnt that be a necessary precondition for the claim that all knowledge is of ideas imprinted on the senses? So saying, he has no need to prove substance as the substratum that supports time, but only the permanence of the real of ideas, in time.
From there he goes to minds as the perceivers of those ideas, and its off to the rodeo ..
Yes, it would be a necessary pre-condition. And, yes, for Berkeley to be is to be perceived by a plethora of contingent, conscious frames-of-reference (minds) which, in turn, must be perceived by a necessary, all-encompassing, conscious frame-of-reference (MIND). It seems to me that Berkeley's ultimate "substance" is the latter; viz., the Ultimate Necessary Perceiver. A really unique argument for the existence of God, don't you think?
Yeah, considering the starting premises. Just as in any argument, change the initial premises, or the relation of words to conceptions, and any unique argument falls apart.
The problem for some of his successors was his affirmation of real things, but denial of matter, or as he calls it, unthinking substance, as the ground of real things. Note the concession to Descartes, re: thinking substance.
Anyway, ol George had some good stuff to say, setting the stage for later and rather more involved idealisms.
However, it is controversial whether Kant treats space and time identically, concerning the property of representation itself. Kant explicits that space-order of representations is a property that the mind merely represents representations as having, not one that they actually have. However, representations appear to have temporal position and order themselves. Thus many reading of Kant has argued that Kant concedes to reality of the temporal property of representations while temporal property of the objects in representations is given by human's mind, the representations/experience itself have metaphysically real temporal property.
The debate is reviewed by Andrew Brook in his Kant and Time-order Idealism. It's a good essay.
I do not believe that, as you assert, "the doctrine extends to every property." Does the subject's spatial and temporal organization of an entity extend to and encompass every property of the entity? Can't "what" the entity is, its nature, its meaning, be considered a non-spatial and non-temporal autochthonous objective property of the entity? Plato seemed to think so and so did Edmund Husserl.
Quoting charles ferraro
And this is exactly thing-in-itself in Kant, which have no spatial, temporal and other properties, or at least we human can not get knowledge of.
When I ask "what" a spatio-temporal entity is that I am experiencing, its "what," its "nature" cannot be a thing-in-itself precisely because I am able to experience it.
However, the entity's what, its nature, that which makes the entity be what it is rather than something else, is itself not a spatio-temporal property of the entity. It is the entity's meaning.
The meaning of the perceived spatio-temporal entity, which is grasped intellectually, may be, for example, a neutron star, a supermassive black hole, a horse, a galaxy, a flower, etc.
Also, the meaning or nature of entities is itself empirical, not transcendental like space, time, and the categories, and can only be experienced, determined, and verified in an a posteriori fashion.
I submit that Kant's epistemological theory is incomplete precisely because he neglected to address this important matter and how it would fit into his theory.
Why do you say that? Kant allowed for empirical knowledge; justifying scientific knowledge was one of his major concerns.
You misunderstood me.
I am focusing on our non-scientific a posteriori everyday experience of the "nature" of empirical objects.
Where in his works does Kant clearly and convincingly explain precisely how the "nature" of a given empirical object of everyday a posteriori experience can be generated by human sensibility and understanding simply applying space, time, and the categories to what he calls the given manifold of sensation? Kant needs more than just a given manifold of sensation.
The closest he came to trying to address this matter, I think, is in the section of the CPR concerning the Schematism which, in my opinion, is a complete failure.
Our everyday experience consists of images, sensations and impressions, which we model as a world of empirical objects. Do we say that modeling is a part of our experience or our judgement? The "nature" of those objects, as far as we can know, is given by their observed attributes and relations, including their differences from and similarities to other objects.
Kant acknowledges that we cannot know how our experience of a world of objects is engendered by a given manifold of sensation. What we are precognitively affected by, including what we precognitively are, is simply not available to consciousness. This is what is denoted by noumena and the ding an sich.
When you say that we "model" a world of empirical objects do you mean that we deliberately "create" a world of empirical objects out of the raw sense data by our brains synthesizing the raw sense data into particular empirical objects of our own choice?
Or do you mean that we are spontaneously guided by and follow empirical rules of sensory organization imbedded in, inherent in, the raw sense data when our brains synthesize the raw sense data into particular objects not of our own choice?
In my opinion, we do not have to have immediate recourse to transcendent things-in-themselves or noumena to explain sensory organization. They explain nothing.
We simply have to posit the possible existence of empirical rules of sensory organization embedded in the sense data which spontaneously guide our brains' synthesizing activities.
Of course not: for it to count as a deliberate act we would need to be precognitively aware of our own primordial affections.
Quoting charles ferraro
We might assume that there is some lawlike process that entails that our models are naturally isomorphic to what affects us; but we don't and cannot know that, because we cannot compare what we are conscious of with what we cannot be conscious of.
Quoting charles ferraro
It is not just your opinion, we do not have recourse to what is transcendental to our experience. The ding an sich and the noumena are explicitly understood, or stipulated to be, that way by Kant.
Quoting charles ferraro
We don't have to; we can just acknowledge our ignorance and be content with dealings with things as they appear to us.
You have a sensory experience of an object - i.e. you see it - but your categorisation of it ('it's a tree') etc is dependent on your prior knowledge of what such objects are. Both the sensory apprehension and the apperception are elements of experience but both are needed to interpret the meaning of objects, in line with the maxim 'percepts without concepts are blind, concepts without percepts are empty.'
Quoting charles ferraro
or the 'form', 'principle', or 'idea'.
Quoting charles ferraro
But is it? Identifying something as a black hole, for instance, might require empirical evidence (i.e. an image or observation of refracted light) but you will only know to look for it, and know how to interpret the data, because of theory. You could not have even begun to look for a black hole, prior to the theoretical basis on which they were projected (which was wholly mathematical).
If this were the case, then..
Quoting charles ferraro
..that would follow.
But it isnt, so it doesnt. Our experience is of representations of empirical objects, from which follows the rules cannot be embedded in the sense data, which are not representations, but only mere appearances.
Rules imply a logical form. If the faculty of sensibility from which sense data is obtained has no logical predication, then rules, principles or a priori legislation of any kind, cannot reside therein.
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Quoting charles ferraro
He goes to a relatively minor extent to expose the error in doing exactly that, the clearly, convincingly and precisely being judgements as subjective as the readers willingness to accede to the tenets of the work as a whole.
The nature of a given empirical object from which its matter alone is given a posteriori, is nothing more than an undeterminable change in our sensory condition, or, which is the same thing, the manner in which the senses are affected by the presentation of that object to them. That by which the matter is arranged, and by which the object is determinable, cannot be contained in the sensation, but must reside a priori in intuition. From which follows it isnt the nature of the given empirical object, but the nature of the representation of that object, that is our experience. In short, it is we that say what that nature is, in accordance with the kind of intelligence incorporated in our nature.
Nevertheless, youre kinda right, in that his implementation of imagination in both the faculties of sensibility and cognition, for which he admits (A76/B103) as having no clear, convincing, precise exposition, leaves one to either grant the necessity of it logically, or ..you know, like question the very ground of the theory itself.
Same as it ever was ..
Do humans encounter Being directly, or indirectly.? Does Being present itself directly to humans, or do humans have to re-present being?
For example, Brentano, Husserl and Sartre (intentionality, pre-reflective Cogito, and nihilation) on the one hand, versus Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer (transcendental idealism) on the other hand.
For me, this remains the perennially unresolved issue.
Only things are presented, being is not a thing so is not presented. And while things that are presented presuppose the necessity of their existence, or if one wishes to say the necessity of their being, there is nothing gained by exchanging one for the other.
Cogito I understand. What is pre-reflective cogito?
What does "things that are presented presuppose the necessity of their existence" mean? Are you claiming that human beings presuppose that all things (entities) that present themselves to them are the cause of their own existence (i.e., that they are necessary, rather than contingent things)?
So what? This has nothing to do with what I was writing about.
I guess Sartre was mis-speaking when he provided detailed descriptions of how both BEING-in-iself and BEING-for-itself present themselves to human beings.
Sartre's explanation of the pre-reflective cogito can be found in The Transcendence of the Ego and in Being and Nothingness.
Hint:
One can study the object as an object, or
One can study the subject as an object, or
One can study the subject as a subject.
Ok. Thanks.
Any empirical entity I encounter is given to my perception as a complex of sensations that has already been completely organized according to a principle which always precedes and is unrelated to any subsequent, deliberate effort on my part to attempt to conceptually categorize or classify the entity.
Hypothetically speaking, a person encountering an empirical entity for the first time has no prior knowledge of what such an entity is, and this prior knowledge is not required to function as an indispensable condition for that person to be able to perceive the entity presenting itself, in the first place, as an organized complex of sensations - as a clearly delineated finished product, so to speak.
Only later, at a more sophisticated level, does theory development and predictive guidance come into play.
Ah, but that's not the point. That's an 'instinctively empiricist' view - you're assuming the prior reality of the object. Kant's philosophy is about how we make sense of experience, without making that assumption.
Yes, that is precisely the point.
In my opinion, Kant's epistemology never successfully demonstrated how the subsequent reality of any empirical entity could be generated by simply applying the transcendental forms of intuition and the transcendental categories of the understanding to a given manifold of sensation. Kant's chapter on the Schematism, which was supposed to demonstrate this, was and still is a dismal failure.
That is my reasoned view and, rest assured, there's nothing "instinctive" about it!
What do you mean 'subsequent' reality? Subsequent to what? In this online edition, do you mean the chapter 'Of the Schematism at of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding'?
Take a read of Schopenhauer's Critique of the Kantian Philosophy to understand what I am trying to get at.
Yes, that's the chapter.
Taking vision as paradigmatic, what you seem to be saying is that we can, prior to any learning or influence of culture and language, see things and that how those things merely appear, as opposed to what we think of them as being, is not modified by cultural or linguistic accretions.
In order to see something it must stand out from its environment, or if you prefer, from the whole visual field. What is it that makes objects stand out, such that humans and animals alike arguably see the same things in the same places?
An intriguing, rather unique answer to your figure/ground question can be found in Sartre's explanation of how human pre-reflective consciousness (also called Being-for-Itself) constantly and spontaneously uses the process of Nihilation, that is, actually uses Nothingness, to try to distance itself from itself and to distance itself from that which is not itself (Being-in-Itself), in order to make already existing objects emerge or stand out from their ground (Being-in-Itself). Again, there is no deliberation involved in this process, it is spontaneous and occurs constantly.
No, does not apply to animals.
Maybe my interpretation of his theory did not do it justice.
Many explanations and theories that fall outside the accepted paradigm(s) will, of course, "make no sense" upon first reading.
Why not read Sartre's original works before passing judgement.
I already have too many things of interest to read and too little time; why would I consider reading a philosopher of little interest to me?
Your first statement is a presumptuous non-sequitur.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
So be it.
Best of luck.
You don't seem to know what 'non sequitur' means. So, you don't accept the premise that we are basically animals evolved from other animals?
As I said, best of luck!!!
I don't think I'm the one who needs it...
Good for you!
I think he 'illegally' takes for granted the commonsense realism that grasps in the usual way the causal relationships between eyes and apples and trombones and ears. This same commonsense realism is absurdly denied by simultaneously (tacitly) being appealed to. Kant inherited the methodological solipsism from others. Philosophers generally took it as obvious, despite its serious shortcomings, because of its genuine advantages.
Is the illegality found in the categorical error of at once denying and affirming the same thing?
Or is the illegality a logical fallacy exhibited in some propter hoc iteration?
Or is methodological solipsism merely the occassion of denying while affirming common sense realism?
Assuming at least one of those is a sufficiently reasonable interpretation, how do you figure Kant does any of those three things?
And even if none of those are sufficient interpretations, what is it about taking for granted, which reduces to presuppositions, that makes such taking illegal, which reduces to logical law?
It seems as though youre just saying Kant contradicts himself, regarding the notion of causal common sense realism, or perhaps just in his employment of the conception itself.
What is the usual way that common sense realism grasps the causal relation between objects and sensory apparatus? If Kant takes the way the relation is grasped by common sense realism for granted, but takes it for granted illegally, then it must be the case he is not in fact grasping the causal relation in the way of common sense realism at all, but has instead inflicted onto it that which doesnt belong to it.
If he takes for granted common sense realisms grasp of the relation between objects and sensory apparatus is the case, which is its affirmation, how can he at the same time deny it?
All objection disappears with the exclusion of simultaneously, insofar as he does grant the object/sensory apparatus causal relation common sense realism professes to endorse, but does not grant that relation as a legally sufficient condition for what subsequently occurs because of it.
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He did inherit from others the so-called methodological solipsism ..how could he not, being immersed in academia .but he moreso expanded it, by inventing a new one, to which, of course, it is doubtful he would have given that doctrinal or theoretic name or acceded to its implication.
Indeed, and I myself think there's something profound in MS, but it must be applied to the species as a whole. Part of it is true 'locally,' in that the world is only given perspectively. But the time-binding sociality of reason must be acknowledged. Even given perspectively the world is given to a cultural being that sees a shofar or a tobacco pipe, not some random shape.
I am me because there are others who are not me. I am 'inside' because there's stuff on the outside I'm not responsible for or in control of in the same way. My internal monologue is 'one' (mono) because 'one is one around here.' I am held responsible as a single body for keeping my story straight. Two or three souls per body would make reward and punishment difficult.
More to the point you mention, our common sense understanding of sense organs and brains and worldly objects is what inspires the thesis of mediation. An image between us and Reality is postulated --an iron curtain. So now the eyes and ears and brain are mere representations of who knows what. Yet they inspired the very hypothesis that negates their evidentiary value. Note that all else that makes a subject meaningful as such is also mere representation of who knows what.
***
I don't think it makes sense to doubt as a philosopher and not a madman the conditions of possibility for rational conversation. So we gotta be in the same world, gotta be talking about the same objects and not private representations of them. We gotta mostly have concepts in the same way. Things can be blurry and imperfect. Direct realism doesn't mean no mistakes. Your eyes are better than mind. Joey is deaf. Timmy didn't grasp the drama of the situation. Indeed we never exhaustively see even familiar objects. So I think we see eyes and not representations of eyes, though I don't doubt the complexity of the seeing process. But the 'I' that sees is a discursive social self, best understood perhaps in terms of responsibility for the claims it makes --instead of via the red herring of biological details, as if I'm in my own skull, waiting for electric signals to get to me. Though electric signals are just representational illusion, so what am I talking about ? I might not have a brain, etc. [ I'm not saying this is your belief. I'm reacting to common hyperskeptical indirect realisms that appear on the forum -- also arguing for direct realism by arguing against the rival.]
I am me because it is impossible I am not, regardless of others.
Mww, your statement "I am me because it is impossible I am not, regardless of others" is a nice variation on Descartes' performative "Cogito Sum" insight.
In other words, while I am thinking in the first person present tense mode, it is existentially inconsistent and existentially self-defeating (impossible) for me to claim, simultaneously, that I do not exist. And the occurrence of this indubitably certain intuition does not at all depend upon my being aware that there are others who are not me.
The problem is semantic. What is this 'I' ? The unity of a monologue ? How is such an assumption justified ? Why do we not just have a stream of words ? Or why isn't it 17 people arguing who gets to control the hand ? And what meaning can justification have in the absence of a community ? Or in the absence of the world that is other than me that I can be wrong about ?
The whole framework of autonomous rationality is smuggled in without apology, as if personhood wasn't essentially and fundamentally normative, discursive, and social.
To me the Cartesian move (if executed at the level of the single human and not the species) tacitly assumes the absurdity of a private logic, a private semantics, the intelligibility of truth or justification in the absence of an transcending other (encompassing community, encompassing world.)
The problem is not semantical.
The "Cartesian move" as you call it can, in fact, be performed by any person who makes up the human family who wishes to perform it. And the truth of the Cogito Sum can be verified by any person who wishes to verify it in the first person present tense mode.
The welfare and progress of the human community is dependent upon the "I" of the creative genius, not the other way around. Thank goodness for autonomous personal creativity. May it always prosper.
All ideas that are truly original have never been created through community deliberations.
Also, history shows that out-of-control communities can be quite dangerous as totalitarian systems, since they seek to define who the persons must be.
It's well known that Augustine articulated a similar argument to Descartes':
[quote=Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 ]But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything. [/quote]
I agree that the argument is apodictic, that it can't be plausibly denied. But when you ask 'what is this "I"?, if you're seeking an objective response to that question, there won't be one, as the self is never an object of cognition (save for in a metaphorical sense of being an 'object of enquiry'. I take that as the meaning of the 'transcendental ego' in Kant and Husserl.)
It may be of interest that Husserl criticises Descartes on similar grounds, by rendering the ego in naturalistic terms as something existent, 'a little tag-end of the world' : "naturalising consciousness as just another region of the world, as indeed contemporary programmes in the philosophy of mind deliberately seek to do. True phenomenology will grasp the original givenness of consciousness precisely as modes of self-givenness rather than as entities in any naturalistic sense" (Routledge intro. to phenomenology p139)
Why say the 'I' is never an object of cognition ? You are making claims about it. Much of philosophy is an attempt to clarify the discursive self. Still more is about whether the world is given directly or indirectly the subject --- the kind of being awareness has. In this context, I claim that the subject is a the world from a perspective, and that we know only of a world which is given through perspectives in this way.
My point is that this 'pure' subject is a circle without a perimeter --- semantically broken, however tempting. It's a sci-fi trope that's entertaining but doesn't make sense.
As living embodied discursive subjects, you and I indeed find it absurd to deny ourselves. Karl-Otto Apel fixes the old move: we critically examine our situation, therefore we are (we exist) in an encompassing world together with a working language. Descartes assumed too little.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922
I claim that the concept of philosophy itself has intense ontological implications. Human normative conceptuality is not outside looking in but the conceptual structure or aspect of reality. The alternative is irrationalism, if not obviously so.
I don't think you understand me. Of course we currently living ( embodied ) subjects can make that move. The issue is whether some isolated worldly tribeless bodiless ghosts makes sense. I claim that it's just science fiction with a serious plot hole. We can imagine ourselves with no brains in our skull --but only when and because there is a brain in our skull. We can imagine a radically isolated bodiless subject, but only because we are genuine subjects. We can say 'round square' and 'circle without a perimeter,' but we can't take these phrases to the bank. We end up unwittingly babbling like mystics, sure that we are the opposite of credulous, accidentally pushing our skepticism into reckless fantasy -- not seeing that our fear of error is the error itself.
Because it's not. Even the source you quote, David Hume, says that he never discerns a self, but only a stream of thoughts. Every object I can now perceive - let's see: computer monitor, speakers, pile of books, keyboard, desk upon which computer sits....all of those are objects of perception to me. But the self who is writing this post is not amongst them, he is that to whom they are objects.
(I am dubious of the fourth premise, of the unity of self as being an 'object of experience'. I would categorise it as amongst the 'conditions of experience'.)
You quote David Hume to argue that David Hume does not exist.
I get it. I understand what's potent in Hume's attempted reduction of us to a stream of thoughts, but that seems to help my point more than yours. Why should a stream of thoughts be taken as (understand itself as ) a unified self-referential self ? This is where Brandon's take on Kant is so useful. The discursive self (you and me and David Hume doing philosophy) is temporally organized by a responsibility to keep its story straight. Ethics is [ part of ] first philosophy.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/reason-in-philosophy-animating-ideas/
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/From_German_Idealism_to_American_Pragmat.pdf
Nice. And let me say that I count myself as a transcendental philosopher. Like you, I'll quote to clarify my meaning.
As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Ywhere then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/
My latest thread is an attempt to let Y be the claim that 'I am a philosopher (an ontologist.)' Then X is everything that must come along with that, for Y to make sense. The enabling conditions of the ontologist are the necessary beginnings of his ontology.
More locally, I'm arguing that 'I am a subject' does not makes sense outside of all context. The notion of an interior depends on an exterior. That sort of thing.
The mistake I'm arguing against is precisely the 'naturalisation of reason' i.e. regarding the rational subject (you and I) as the object of natural science.
.'...we may be surrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined b nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual I.'
The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy
Alfredo Ferrarin
To me the same kind of thing is maybe be said by being is not a being (the famous ontological difference.) Both Husserl and Heidegger had their own version of this. I prefer to say that subjectivity is the world (being) from/through a perspective. But I suspect you, like me, are aiming at the 'ineffable' (tautological) thereness of the there.
I can at least agree that approaching the discursive self as a mere piece of clockwork (a cog in the amoral machine or causal nexus of Nature) is a performative contradiction in its absurd cancellation of the normative dimension of reality that makes science science to begin with. Psychologism is tempting and common and ... self-undermining.
To be sure, there are contexts where we are practically motivated to think of others as machines, but a serious ontology must be holist ( honest ! not leave out something crucial ) and avoid this self-subverting ignorance of its own normative intention.
. The first pure cognition of understanding, then, upon which is founded all its other exercise, and which is at the same time perfectly independent of all conditions of mere sensuous intuition, is the principle of the original synthetical unity of apperception .
In the first it is said the unity of apperception is an achievement by means of a process, in the second it is said the unity of apperception is that by which processes are achieved. While each of these are or may be the case in their respective philosophies, they are not compatible with each other.
. if I investigate more closely the relation of given cognitions in every judgement ( ) I find that judgement is nothing but the mode of bringing given cognitions under the objective unity of apperception. .
This just shows distinctions in the domains of such unity. In the objective the cognitions are presupposed insofar as there is consciousness that their representations are already united, in the synthetic the unity is only the consciousness that those representations can be united.
Brandoms Kant may well infuse responsibility and whatnot into a purely transcendental systemic methodology, but Kant himself does not. There is a natural sense of responsibility and commitment in the general human condition, but they do not reside in principles contained a priori in understanding. It is absurd to suppose one is responsible or committed to that which is necessarily mandated for him exclusively by his intellectual constitution, however speculative it may be.
Nahhhh ..the unity of apperception isnt an achievement, even in the loosest sense. Pretty hard to achieve a fundamental principle. On the other hand, if the unity of apperception is an achievement, than it isnt a view to which Kant is committed.
In the text, Descartes stipulates that the I exists .as a thinking thing. The common iteration of that stipulation only states I am, which does not necessarily indicate an existence. And even if reducing the I that exists to the I that is, merely because it is the very same as the I that thinks, re: I am that which thinks, still doesnt say much about what that I is. Cognitive representation, and its coalescence into a system, had yet to become a speculative doctrine predicated on logic alone.
I take it -- and I'm hoping you do too --that the point of the philosophical enterprise is getting clearer on reality. Paraphrasing Kant is related to this task, inasmuch as we find his work helpful, but given that Kant scholars don't agree on the details, it's not exactly newsworthy that you find something to object to in how Brandom transforms this or that piece of his work. But then who can't find something to object to in Kant's work and what he made of his own influences ? Kant makes sense organs their own product, does backflips trying to save his God from Newton. I've read a couple of Beiser's fat books on that era, so I'm not tempted toward anything like hero worship or scripture quoting, though I do count Kant as a hero. Let me stress that I don't think either of us are here to quote scripture.
I vote for Kant (and Brandom and Husserl) as possibility rather than substance. I mean we should look to their radical intention and forgive them their absurdities, build on what is strongest and purest in their work. I know you hate OLP, and I'll join you and Popper in my insistence on looking through imperfect expressions to charitably finding illuminating concepts. Lots of linguistic issues are probably just people being antisocial --not wanting to play nice.
Brandom's scorekeeping notion of rationality (or at least his shrewd emphasis on this notion) looks like a breakthrough to me. The judgment and not the concept is semantically fundamental because it's the minimum unit one can be responsibly for. Fucking illuminating, I say. Inferentialist semantics is also brilliant and a true continuation of the Copernican revolution in philosophy. The subject ( the criticial-rational ontological community )is not on the outside eavesdropping at some closed door like a servant. Our own normative conceptuality is profoundly entangled with (or even simply is ) the conceptual dimension or aspect of being / reality/ world.
Tis vain hope, I must say, although you are nonetheless welcome to take that point.
Descartes, in the same fashion as the ontological argument brings in the goodness of God as a guarantor that we are not deceived in thinking that I am a thinking substance; the cogito alone does not suffice to do the job.
Philosophy gets us clearer on empirical reality perhaps, and I think that is the only reality that @plaque flag allows.
:up:
Quoting Janus
You nailed it. I'm with Hegel on this issue, in spirit if not to the letter. I'm not saying that I can't or won't be surprised, but to me that's just incomplete knowledge of the only Reality worth acknowledging as such, the Reality that I can't help but know as a central participant -- a protagonist who didn't ask for the part but found himself in the costume, condemned to clarify the script in front of live studio audience.
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But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the countrys rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world truth, he replied with the question what is truth? in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit.
Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14] It can indeed be said that, ever since philosophy first began to emerge in Germany, the condition of this science has never looked so bad, nor has such a view as this, such renunciation of rational cognition, attained such [a degree of] presumption and influence. This view has dragged on [into the present] from the period before our own, and it stands in stark contradiction to that worthier [gediegenern][104] feeling and new, substantial spirit [of today]. I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit, and I address myself to it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content [Gehalt] and when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity [Not] and is inherently [für sich] capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is at home, which it [itself] constructs, and which we share in by studying it.
If one holds with the position that it is we who decide what reality is, or, perhaps, how the reality that is, is to be known as such, that says more about the decision-maker than what is decided upon.
Philosophy gets us clearer as subjects, yes, regardless of that to which we as subjects direct ourselves.
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. But whoever thinks he can learn Kant's philosophy from the exposition of others makes a terrible mistake. Nay, rather I must earnestly warn against such accounts, especially the more recent ones; and indeed in the years just past I have met with expositions of the Kantian philosophy in the writings of the Hegelians which actually reach the incredible. How should the minds that in the freshness of youth have been strained and ruined by the nonsense of Hegelism, be still capable of following Kant's profound investigations? They are early accustomed to take the hollowest jingle of words for philosophical thoughts, the most miserable sophisms for acuteness, and silly conceits for dialectic, and their minds are disorganised through the admission of mad combinations of words to which the mind torments and exhausts itself in vain to attach some thought. No Critique of Reason can avail them, no philosophy, they need a medicina mentis, first as a sort of purgative, un petit cours de senscommunologie, and then one must further see whether, in their case, there can even be any talk of philosophy .
(WWR, Preface, xxvii, 1844)
Then, they start posting on Forums.
all too often with the inverse quantity/quality ratio.
Quoting Mww
I'd say maybe beware of such nakedly self-flattering arrogance. The fool says in his heart: I'm not one of the fools. Both of you like me spend plenty of time on unworldly 'nonsense.'
Given my understanding of the conceptions the words unworldly nonsense represent, it is safe to say Ive never spent one second of time on it.
If it is indeed the case there is all too often, which necessarily includes just once, a quantity/quality inverse ration on forums, or any trans-communicative medium, how is it self-flattering arrogance to state that case?
The criteria for arrogance cannot be contained in the necessity that all judgements are subjective.
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The Democracy of Objects is interesting, and offers clues on your writing style.
I tend to think that when it comes to thinking about the empirical, about how things appear to us to be, and to work, we can get clearer and that that is not all about us, the "deciders", but also, it seems plausible to think, reflects how we are affected pre-cognitively. That said we cannot become conscious of that pre-cognitive affecting that is prior to the emergence of the shared empirical world, but it would seem to warrant being called "real" in itself, whatever it might be, even though it remains ideal, a matter of mere ideas, for our consciousness.
On the other hand, I think you are alluding to getting clearer via philosophy (critical thought) about our ideas in all domains, even the more speculative ones, and I would agree with that too.
I hear ya.
My getting us clearer as subjects, is probably more closely related to metaphysics, which in turn is closer to your mention of critical thought.
What do you mean by .what would it be like to be affected pre-cognitively?
Do you mean getting clearer via critical thought as to just what can be knowable and justified metaphysically speaking?
I probably didn't express myself very clearly; don't think being affected pre-cognitively can be like anything, because we cannot be conscious of it. It seems to me that we cannot but think that we are so affected though...or in other words that there are processes that are, or "something" that is, that we cannot be aware of creating this shared world of things we inhabit.
I meant the curtailment the extravagances of thought without stifling it. The subject imagining freely, but understanding he can only go so far with it.
Quoting Janus
Cool. Just what I was hoping to hear.
Quoting Janus
There very well may be those processes. I just figure if we not only arent, but couldnt possibly be, aware of them, it makes no difference to us whether there are or not. How would we ever be able to tell? Correct me if Im off-base, but isnt that what the doctrine of phenomenology posits? Those processes creating this shared world we may be able to know about?
I agree with this; I am all for unfettered imagination, and the "curtailment" I advocate consists in not taking those flights of imagination as being knowledge.
Quoting Mww
I agree that such possible processes are, in the domain of what we think of as knowledge, discursively useless, but I think the very fact that we must posit an unknowable "in itself" defines our condition and is far from irrelevant.
So, I am disagreeing with those who think that either there is no unknowable, or that even if we do not only face the knowable but also the unknowable, that fact about us is irrelevant and not worth consideration. On the contrary, I think it is central to what it means to be human, and that it does, as Kant asserts, open up all the possibilities of imagination and faith.
Oh absolutely. Simple complementarity principle: if we insist there is that which is knowable, that which is unknowable in itself is given immediately.
If my memory serves me right (often it doesn't), Kan't space and time is non-physical entities, which are the pre-condition of perception i.e. what makes perception possible.
If perception is predicated on physiology, wouldnt perception be possible even without things to perceive? Wouldnt the senses still work, even if there wasnt anything to sense? Otherwise, it would have to be the case, e.g., the mechanics of sight are caused by things rather than the physical structure which makes them eyes in the first place. If it is really the various physiologies that make the various corresponding perceptions possible, space and time do not.
Might I suggest Kant meant for space and time to be the pre-condition for experience? They are that which makes experience possible?
Yes, great point thanks.
It is definitely written in CPR as "precondition for experience" - Norman Kemp Smith Abridged Edition 1952 MacMillan & Co Ltd, London CPR p.44
But I am wondering if Experience is a far too wide concept even covering the other mental activities and perceptions which take place with the internal mental contents such as memories and imaginations which don't associate with space and time.
It may be too wide for all that the human intellect can do, sure. But with respect to space and time, experience is only ever going to be whatever they allow.
If we think about the cases when the object of perception are the mental contents such as images in the past memories or imagination, which doesn't need space and time as precondition for the process to happen. In these cases, space and time cannot be the preconditions for the experience. Or maybe Kant said, or would say that space and time still applies to the memories or imaginations for their content? (I am not sure on this point.)
Would you not agree that space and time only applies as the precondition of perception, only when the objects of the perception are the external material objects?
I might have pasted this in before, as I frequently refer to it. It's a Closer to Truth interview with Andrei Linde, who is one of the founders of the current model of cosmology. This particular interview is about the role of consciousness in the construction of space-time. I think it makes a similar point.
Acc. to Kant we can't have experience about ideas like "society", "freedom" etc. We can think these ideas but we don't have knowledge about them. We have "only" beliefs concerning them. "Society" can't be appearance in space and time. This means also that ideas like that are outside the realm of verification or falsification. The idea of freedom can't be verified or _falsified_ scientifically.
Very interesting point. I had been thinking that way at one point, but was wondering, if I was being too idealistic.
Would they belong to "Ding-An-Sich"? or would they be just invention of human mind? What do we have to do or what can we do with Thing-in-itself?
I think that the distinction between appearances and thing itself doesn't apply to them? Is the noumenon somehow beyond this distinction? Then they would be noumenons. I think Kant in fact calls ideas like that noumenons.
Every object of perception, no matter its name after its perception, is conditioned by space and time and is a mental content. Images in memory were once objects of perception, hence so conditioned. Objects of imagination may or may not be conditioned by space and time, insofar as objects of the productive imagination reside in intuition, hence are, but objects of the reproductive imagination found in understanding do not, hence are not.
Quoting Corvus
Yep. Almost just like that. Got to keep all this in relation to time. An object in memory was at one time an experience, but as a post hoc memory, it is not. In that case, it is a thought alone, the object which was an experience a posteriori is then of consciousness a priori. Imagination is quite different, as noted above.
Quoting Corvus
I see what you mean. Were not going to perceive anything that isnt an external material object or caused by it. But still, there are external material objects that are not objects of perception, which sort of demands they be disassociated from each other. And when connected to the strictly internal intuitions of space and time, dialectical consistency demands that to which they apply be internal as well. External material objects are not internal ..DUH!!!!! ..so the disassociation must arise somewhere else.
In Kant, then, the external material object is that which appears, and the object of perception is the sensation afforded by that which has appeared. Now perhaps it is clear space and time have nothing to do with any of this, insofar as all that has happened thus far are simply physical manifestations, not yet subjected to intelligence.
So .no, I do not agree space and time apply to the preconditions of perception, nor that the objects of perception are external material objects.
Does perception not require time? Can anything happen, even a thought or image, in the absence of time?
I would read Kant as saying that space-time is unreal thus that the subject with its experiences, perceptions and sensation is unreal. At any rate, this would be the 'perennial' view. .'Unreal' here would mean ideal.and reducible.
I'm not sure it would be possible to doubt the reality of time without doubting the reality of the entire phenomenal world. Clearly it's a real appearance, but metaphysics does not endorse the idea it is any more real than this, and according to skilled meditators neither does experience. . . .
Not metaphysically, it doesnt, with which the thread topic is concerned. We perceive a thing, or we do not. Perception requires an object, and even if the object requires time for its relations, it does not follow that the mere perception of the object does.
Quoting FrancisRay
Agreed. But that doesnt say much. We dont doubt the world, and if time is a necessary condition for the manifold of phenomenal representations of that world, the the reality of time is given. But, real in what sense?
I'm not sure what it means to say that perception doesn't require time metaphorically. It seems indisputable to me that perception requires time in order in order to to happen. Are you suggesting this isn't the case? . . .
This is the crucial issue. I'd suggest time is real in the same sense as the phenomena in our dreams. This is what is discovered by meditators. Meister Eckhart. for instance, tells that becoming entangled in time is the source of all our problems and advises us to become disentangled. .
It's a difficult idea but as it has yet to be refuted it must be considered.
. .
Ok. What do you think perception is?
I believe it is a process, and as such requires time. Is this arguable? . .
From some speculative points of view, it is. Objects are given to us via perception, The most we need to say, is there is a time of perception and a time of no perception, which tacitly denies time belongs to the perception itself, but rather, to that which the perception effects.
From a physical science perspective, regarding the translation of energy by the sensory apparatus, time is an element of the process, agreed. But the human intellect doesnt perceive scientifically, but treats perception as a mere occasion for the application of a speculative metaphysical knowledge system.
Just like that, yes.
You think seeing something is a simple task because it happens so rapidly and automatically, but beneath the surface it is as if a thousand high-powered scientists are labouring away. What you experience is the end result of an intensive assembly line of computational processes.
Colin McGinn
The Making of a Philosopher
If there is a time of no perception and a time of perception then would this not suggest the necessity of time? If there were no time then our perception would be fixed in the present moment and would never change. We would be permanently frozen in a single unchanging moment of perception. .
I see what you mean in saying that the actual moment of perception is timeless, but this argument would apply to all events and processes. If we look at any individual moment it is timeless.
Awareness might be said to be timeless but perception is a process. Could it be that you're talking more here about awareness than perception? Or accidentally conflating the two? .
Were talking about perception, which is the initiation; hes talking about experience, which is the end, of knowledge acquisition. Experience is indeed a process in which time is a necessary element; perception is not.
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Quoting FrancisRay
Absolutely. But the question is to whether time belongs to perception ..
Quoting FrancisRay
..which implies time as a condition of perception itself, rather than as a condition of that which perceives. Taken a step further, if we say perception is that which happens to us, we have no need of the time element of it, insofar as all we are concerned with, is that it did or did not happen. When taken in such sense, it is more existence than time, which holds as primary condition. Notice also, that existence is a category, by which perception of things is even possible, but time is a mere intuition, which only makes possible distinguishing the co-existent or the successive perceptual representation of things from each other, for which the existences are already affirmed.
Nahhhh .not your fault, so much as a difference in conceptual domain, perhaps. I think of perception as a mere effect, without regard to a internal process of its own. For whatever it is we think of as empirical knowledge, all perception is for, is to be the occasion by which we become aware there is something lending itself to being known.
Perception doesnt think, judge or cognize, doesnt experience. its just a bridge, from the outside to the inside.
An eye doctor, or a general physicist, may beg to differ.