What is the "referent" for the term "noumenon"?
What is the "referent" for the term "noumenon"?
Can it have a referent?
Kant states that the noumenon is objectless (and also subjectless) beyond space, time and causality,
so how can there be any referent for "noumenon"?
if it is a concept, is it not then an object of thought? but if the noumenon is not an object, then we have contradicted ourselves...
Can it have a referent?
Kant states that the noumenon is objectless (and also subjectless) beyond space, time and causality,
so how can there be any referent for "noumenon"?
if it is a concept, is it not then an object of thought? but if the noumenon is not an object, then we have contradicted ourselves...
Comments (225)
Noumena. What happens when that which is trained to be an eye doctor, wants to use that training to be a structural engineer. It isnt as contradictory as it is misguided.
Understanding is misguided when it takes upon itself to think transcendentally, which it is fully entitled to do without self-contradiction, that object for which its cognitive training extends only to empirical referents.
It follows that to think noumena as a general conception is not contradictory, but to cognize a singular noumenal object as a referent for that general conception, is impossible, as it is for every transcendentally conceived object absent its intuitive representation.
Kant wrote in A249 of Critique of Pure Reason that noumena, aka things-in-themselves, are given to a priori intuition. Note that intuitions are not concepts, which are a different thing altogether.
A249 - Appearances, to the extent that as objects they are thought in accordance with the unity of the categories, are called phenomena. If, however, I suppose there to be things that are merely objects of the understanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to sensible intuition (as coram intuiti intellectuali),then such things would be called noumena (intelligibilia).
Kant wrote in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics 1783 that the category of cause and effect can be applied to things-in-themselves.
"And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something."
A noumena is an unknown something that causes an appearance. Therefore, the referent of a noumena is the unknown something that causes such an appearance.
Because Kant applies the category of cause and effect to things-in-themselves, although the thing-in-itself cannot be known, that there is something that caused the appearance can be known.
Great answer! However, is there a contradiction if we talk of a "something" (i.e., a "thing"), since noumenon is not an object for a subject...even if we replace "thing" with "reality", "an existence,"...still it must be a reality/existence for a perceiving subject?
Thanks!
but does that "general conception" actually act as an object (for a subject)?
Yes, with the caveat that an object of understanding is logical only, whereas an object of sense is empirical. Since both types of cognitions belong to a thinking subject, then it follows that the general conception acts as a logical object for whichever subjects thinks it. And, of course, first off, no mere conception of anything is sufficient for its existence, and second, very few of them bother.
Oh. And noumena are not thing-in-themselves, which are always real physical worldly objects. Noumena can never be an appearance to humans, according to transcendental philosophy, for otherwise a representation would follow, which it cannot insofar as noumena are nothing but objects the understanding thinks on its own, whereas representations from perception in humans, is always sensuous and never only intellectual. Other theories may have different conditions, but those are not being considered when Kant is the given author.
Nahhhh ..the text stipulates noumena may be treated as things-in-themselves, in that neither are subjected to the totality of the human intellectual system in the pursuit of knowledge a posteriori, but that does not make them the same. I mean, what warrant would there be to make the claim that they are, when it is impossible to know anything about either of them? Id be forced into the absurdity of claiming .it is impossible that I know what this is, but I know that is just like it. (Sigh)
This is the same problem with Direct Realism. For example, we see the colour red, yet science tells us the cause is a wavelength of 700nm.
In Kant's terms, our seeing the colour red is the appearance and the 700nm is the noumenon. If it weren't for science, just by seeing the colour red, we would have no idea that its cause was 700nm.
The mind has evolved to equate effect with cause, to equate appearance with its noumena. When seeing the colour red, the mind equates the appearance with its cause, such that the mind believes that the cause of our seeing red was the colour red. Yet we know that science tells us the cause was a wavelength of 700nm.
The noumenon is named after the appearance, in that, if the appearance is given the name "red", then the noumenon is also give the name "red", regardless of what the noumenon actually is.
Similarly with the other senses. If I hear a grating noise, I name its cause grating. If I smell an acrid smell, I name its cause acrid. If I feel something silky, I name its cause silky. If I taste something bitter, I name its cause bitter.
Therefore, any contradiction disappears, because when we talk about a "red post-box", we are not taking about something that exists in the world. We are not taking about a noumenon which we cannot know about. We are actually talking about how the something in the world appears to us, in that we are talking about an appearance.
From the frame of reference of human consciousness, the referent for both Noumenon and Thing-in-Itself is Nothingness. To intuit, perceive, or know either would require the ability to take a perspective outside of human consciousness, which is simply impossible. Also, any attempt to overtly, or covertly, use the principle of cause and effect, a category of the understanding, to answer this question contradicts itself.
Good post. Well thought out.
I am not the only one to notice that Kant's noumena have a lot in common with Lao Tzu's Tao. The Tao Te Ching is a whole book written to talk about that which can not be talked about. The first line of the first verse is "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Certainly Lao Tzu recognized the irony. I've always thought he laughed while he was writing.
Fact is, that irony is the whole point. It frames a particular understanding of reality that can't be expressed in language. The intellectual trouble we all have with the contradiction kicks us out of our normal, everyday reality to a place where we have to see everything differently. So... shrug your shoulders and live with the puzzlement.
Here's one of my favorite quotes from Chuang Tzu. I think it applies equally to noumena and the Tao - What things things is not itself a thing. Or from a different translation "making things of things but unable to be made anything of by any thing."
Perhaps, the "noumenon", that Kant distinguishes from a material object, is merely a mental concept (an idealization of the physical object). In Charles Pinter's book, subtitled How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things . . . ., he discusses the human "sensorium" in great detail. He says that body & mind are engaged in a two-way dialog : the sensory organs transmit coded data (about an object) which the Mind (mental function of brain) interprets into self-relevant Meanings. As far as the idealistic Mind is concerned, the immaterial function (purpose ; meaning) of the object is more important than its material substance. Yet, the idea refers (points) back to the object, and the object reminds us of the idea.
The sensory Appearances represent the object in terms of feelings (sight, sound, touch). And that superficial portrayal is all we ever know for sure (empirically) about the "real" object. But the core meanings are like an X-ray : abstracting away the surface material, to reveal the logical Form within. That notional structure defines both its primary, and its possible, functions in the world. If the observer is astute enough, she will then know something about the essence of the object. It's that Ideal Soul of the thing that Kant refers to as the "noumenon", which is an immaterial belief about*2 the object in its perfect form.
When we talk about a thing (e.g. a ball point pen ; plastic & metal), we imagine its function relevant to the user. You can write an essay with it, or twirl it in your fingers. Those functional uses are not physical things, but possible processes that may be beneficial to the observer. Conceptually, they are the essence of penness, the noumenal referent of the word "pen".
Plato imagined a whole realm of perfect Ideal logical structures (ghosts of objects) separated from the messy mundane Real things of the phenomenal world of appearances. Ironically, all we flesh & blood humans ever know are those appearances (sensory impressions). But we can imagine a Platonic referent in an ideal noumenal world of essences. :smile:
PS__I apologize if this post is opaque. I just wanted to jot down some ideas for my own future reference.
*1. Noumenon :
(in Kantian philosophy) a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.
*2. Aboutness refers to the central theme or conceptual logic of a referent object
Note -- Aboutness is a quality, it references an idea, not an object
Thanks. Preciate it.
Quoting T Clark
Marvelous subtelty in there as well.
The word itself is the neuter middle-passive present participle of noeîn, 'to think, to mean', which in turn originates from the word noûs, an Attic contracted form of nóos, 'perception, understanding, mind', often translated as 'intellect' (wikipedia). So originally the word meant 'a mental object' or 'an object of mind' -- something which could be grasped by the intellect, as distinct from by the senses. And that is the origin of the distinction between 'phenomena' (what appears) and 'noumena' (what truly is) or, put more simply, reality and appearance. Arguably, that is the fundamental dualism of Western philosophy (now there's an OP idea.)
In Kant's philosophy the use is more complicated, because of the equating of noumena with the 'thing in itself' (ding an sich) which may or may not be the same concept. A key phrase:
Quoting CPR, Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena
Schopenhauer criticizes Kant for adopting the term 'noumenal' for his own purposes without proper regard for the way it was used in earlier philosophy.
In most modern philosophy, with its implicit commitment to empiricism, 'phenomenon' is tacitly used to indicate 'everything that is', without regard to its origin as one of a contrasting pair of terms, resulting in a serious dilution of its original meaning.
Sounds straight out of Heidegger.
The epistemically unsurpassable limit ("boundary" Kant wrote, which Hegel disputed, IIRC) of any phenomenon as such.
Things that appear to us, cannot be things as they are in themselves. Upon affecting us, things are no longer in or of themselves.
Quoting Janus
Id have to say no. While it is the case these are never given as appearances, therefore can never be phenomena, doesnt thereby mean they are noumena. Space and time are not conceptions understanding thinks on its own accord, they are pure intuitions, so do not meet the criteria for noumena. Causality is a derivative manifestation of a category, which is a conception but not one understanding thinks on its own accord, insofar as it arises from a transcendental deduction of reason, the faculty of principles, so also does not meet the criteria for noumena.
The perceiving subject is unclassifiable, I think. Or maybe I just dont know to which class it belongs. Technically, subjects dont perceive, that being the domain of the senses. Subjects are that which comprehends, or that to which comprehension belongs, is about as far as Id go with what it is, but Id be ok with stipulating what it isnt, that being noumenon.
Tis a wicked game we play, innit? With our opinions?
Right, I understand that the things which appear to us are things in themselves, but of course their appearances are not.
Quoting Mww
So, can you give me an example of any kind of thing that would be classed as noumenal?
Quoting Mww
Trying to sort them out, get them right, is perhaps wicked in the sense of 'departing from the straight and narrow', but it does seem necessary...
Certainly how Kant tends to be viewed around here in my opinion.
I think that this is wrong as an understanding of the CPR, whose project was to determine the limits of pure reason. On the other hand, take into account the CPrR, and Kant's overall project can be understood to be aimed at determining the limits of pure reason to make way for faith (practical reason). We have no pure reason to believe in freedom Gid and immortality, but according to Kant we have practical reasons to believe in those things.
Absolutely not. Humans have an intuitive sensibility, which makes explicit the necessity for real physical things external to us, conditioned by space and time. Intuition is the means by which objects are represented in us; it follows that non-intuitive intelligences for us are incomprehensible. But noumena are not represented in sensuous intuition, if they were theyd be phenomena, being nothing but conceptions belonging to understanding alone, hence there is nothing whatsoever represented from intuition by them, hence nothing for which understanding to conjoin its otherwise empirical conceptions, hence nothing to cognize as object. Thought without content is void, remember?
This is why the title of the chapter is the division of objects into phenomena and noumena. The former is for those intelligences that have a sensuous faculty of intuitive representation conditioned by space and time, the latter is for those intelligences the sensuous faculty of which is non-intuitive and for which there may not even be any pure intuitions at all.
The purpose of the Critique is to show the proper limits of reason. But if Kant says I can think whatever I wish so long as I dont contradict myself what limits my thinking such that I cant contradict myself? That limit is the mere conception of noumena, in that I can think it as I wish, but I can do not the least damn thing with it, and if I try, I must contradict myself, insofar as I am attempting the impossible because I must use faculties I dont even have, or .whats worse .misuse the only ones I do have.
to read Quoting Janus
because I realized that it would not be possible to give an example of anything, but thought it may be possible to give an example of some kind of thing.
So, it seems noumena belong to an empty set, which cannot even be named or categorized?
At the risk of over-simplifying and misrepresenting, noumena is what is there before there is anything - before there is anyone to conceptualize. Lao Tzu calls it naming. Naming brings the multiplicity of the world into being out of the unnamable Tao.
Good question. The answer is...
[hide="Reveal"]Who the fuck knows.[/hide]
Kant says that intuition speaks of God but reason speaks of the world. "Wisdom is willing and unwilling to be called Zeus" (Heraclitus). Why should we assume there is something in reality, a noumena, tha we can not explore?
I can relate to that. But if multiplicity depends on naming and cannot exist without it, then it would certainly seem to follow that, unless animals practice naming, there can be no multiplicity for themthen should we pity the poor impoverished fuckers?
In simple terms there is no referent. That is basically the thrust of the point Kant was making in COPR.
Taoism is metaphysics, not science. It's not true, it's a useful way of looking at things.
Pretty much spot on, I think. At least so by humans, iff our intelligence is properly described by transcendental speculative metaphysics. I mean, the one responsible for all this . ambiguity, which may easily occasion great misapprehension .., never once listed or gave an example of a proper noumenal object. In short because we are not equipped with the means for the experience of them. That doesnt mean there are no such things as noumena, that noumena are impossible things, for we have no right to say what Nature provides, but only that experience of them is impossible for us, and strictly intuitive sensibilities in general.
Quoting Janus
So it should be clear now, it never was about kinds of things, but only about kinds of intellectual systems. Or maybe one could say, it isnt about the kinds of things we cant know, but only the kind of things we can, and THAT because of the kind of intellectual system we are supposed as possessing, and by which we know anything.
All this confusion simply because I can think whatever I wish ,
and I can think whatever I wish because ..
the understanding ( ) is quite unable to do one thing, and that of very great importance, to determine, namely, the bounds that limit its employment, and to know what lies within or without its own sphere ,
..and it may just be that Kant painted himself into a corner, insofar as if he limits understanding he immediately falsifies the proposition that I can think whatever I wish, a contradiction because I can in fact do just that ..like, you know ..non-natural causality, a.k.a. freedom, and Planck scales and oh, yeah: noumena. In order to alleviate the conundrum, he made it so instead of limiting understanding, he limited the other faculties from being influenced by its contributions, antecedently making intuition strictly sensuous, thereby being undisturbed by intellectual infringements, and, by making reason the faculty of principles by which understanding is subsequently legislated a priori, in which case reason effectively blocks knowledge, which manifests in us as either the mistakes of a forced judgement, or the mere confusion of a judgement inconsistent with prior experience. Perfectly in order with overall Kantian dualism: intuitive perception on the one hand, logical judgement on the other and ner the twain shall meet but work together they must for a common end, experience, or, which is the same thing, empirical knowledge.
Easy peasy. Plain as the nose on yer frontend skull covering.
Id agree, but what was said that enabled that thought of yours?
The issue here is the type of "intuition" which could receive the noumena. Notice that Kant distinctly states that there is an intuition which these objects of understanding called "noumena" are given to. This implies that the noumena are not foreign, or unintelligible to the intellect, as they are received through a type of intuition. The problem though, is that if we cannot identify the type of intuition which receives the noumena, then we don't seem to have the capacity to understand them at all.
The intuitions which receive sense phenomena are named by Kant as space and time, and from this Kant produces the categories by which phenomena are understood. And I think it is implied by Kant that neither of these intuitions, space nor time, is the intuition which apprehends the noumena, otherwise we might produce an understanding of them through those same categories.
So the type of intuition which receives the noumena is left as undisclosed by Kant. Furthermore, the exact nature of "intuition" in general is left as unclear. Each named category represents a determined intuition by which its object is received, so there must be a distinct intuition for each category. Each determined intuition is a judgement made. The intuition through which noumena are received has not been determined by Kant, so that is left as a judgement not made by him.
Ahhh gotcha. Thanks.
Alternatively, the referent of the noumena is simply a thought structure of a person who buys into the idea that phenomena are caused by things we can know nothing about. That is, one solution to Kant's implicit dualism is to simply say that the person thinking of noumenal is simply referring to their own delusions. If the noumena's being or not being are always and forever coidentical for all, why bother positing it.
This turn is normally credited to Fichte but IIRC Jacobi gets there first by recognizing how Kant's Copernican Turn re: the noumena can lead to nihilism. I might be wrong about that, I am not an expert in German idealism. What I find interesting though is that a lot of Nietzsche and later 20th century existentialist critics is already in Jacobi, just from a more critical point of view.
IMO, I have never really gotten the point of mixing assertions of the existence of the noumenal with anti-realism ala Kant.
A couple of thoughts.
Concept vs intuition
As there is a distinction between phenomena and noumena, for Kant, there is also a distinction between concept and intuition. In the third and fourth arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic of the CPR, he writes that our intuition of space is neither a concept of space nor a sensation of space. IE, as you write, we can have the concept of a chiiiagon without having an intuition of a chilliagon.
Categories
On the one hand he writes in B308 of CPR that the categories cannot be used to know the thing-in-itself:
"But the understanding at the same time comprehends that it cannot employ its categories for the consideration of things in themselves"
On the other hand he writes in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics 1783 that the category of cause and effect can be applied to things-in-themselves.
"And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something."
IE, given an appearance, we can never know what in the world caused the appearance, though we can know that there is something in the world that caused the appearance.
Kant is saved from nihilism by his categories of understanding, which includes that of cause and effect.
He wrote in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics 1783 that the category of cause and effect can be applied to things-in-themselves.
"And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something."
As an Indirect Realist, having an innate belief in cause and effect, I may not know the cause of an appearance, but I know that there has been a cause.
I can only Kant understand through an analogy.
We perceive the colour red, yet science tells us the cause of our perceiving the colour red is a wavelength of 700nm. Science tells us that what we perceive as the colour red doesn't exist outside the mind. What exists outside the mind is a wavelength of 700nm.
Our knowledge that the cause of our perceiving the colour red is the wavelength 700nm comes indirectly through science. It is impossible for us to directly see the wavelength of 700nm.
It is also a fact that we are not able to imagine the colour red in the absence of seeing it. Only by being presented with a wavelength of 700nm can we ever perceive the colour red. The brain has the innate ability to perceive the colour red, but only when presented with a wavelength of 700nm
However, we are able to think about the colour red in the absence of being presented with a wavelength of 700nm through the use of concepts. I know that when a traffic light turns red, vehicles are required by law to stop, some roses are red in colour and the colour red has a wavelength of 700nm.
On the one hand, the brain has the ability to perceive the colour red but only when presented with the wavelength of 700nm, and on the other hand the brain can imagine the concept of red other than when presented with the wavelength of 700nm.
Summarising:
i) I have an innate belief in cause and effect, and although I may never know what caused my perceiving the colour red, I know something in the world caused me to perceive the colour red. The category of cause and effect can be applied to things-in-themselves, and phenomena are caused by noumena..
ii) We can never directly know what a wavelength of 700nm looks like. We can never directly know what a noumena looks like
iii) What we perceive as the colour red doesn't exist in the world outside the mind. Similarly, what we perceive as space doesn't exist in the world outside the mind. What we perceive as a phenomenon doesn't exist in the world outside the mind
iv) We can have the concept of the colour red in the absence of being presented with a wavelength of 700nm. We have concepts.
v) We have the innate ability to perceive the colour red, but can only perceive the colour red when presented with a wavelength of 700nm. We have intuitions.
Good post. I think, although I'm not sure, that Lao Tzu would say you can experience the Tao. You just can't conceptualize it or speak about it. .
Is this intended to be an example of "something we cant know" in the same sense noumena are? I don't think it's a good one. I can create a more or less accurate mental image of a chilliagon. Wait a second, I'll do it now... My mental images are never better than more or less accurate, even for something quotidian like a horse or my older brother's left thumb. Sorry, I've felt a need to use "quotidian" in a post for several days. In the same way, I could identify an example if you showed me one. What disqualifies my identification just because I have to count the sides to determine if it is a chilliagon or a chilliagon + 1?
Or have I misunderstood your point?
Im no Taoist, that's for sure, but in western philosophy generally and Enlightenment German idealism in particular, anything experienced has already been conceptualized, and therefore can be spoken about.
Experience is an end, not happening without the orderly means.
A mental image of a chiliagon cannot be clearly distinguished from a mental image of a 1,002-sided figure, or even from a mental image of a circle.The concept of a chiliagon is clearly distinct from the concept of a 1,002-sided figure or the concept of a circle. Likewise I cannot clearly differentiate a mental image of a crowd of one million people from a mental image of a crowd of 900,000 people. But reason easily grasps the difference between the concept of a crowd of one million people and the concept of a crowd of 900,000 people (from Ed Feser).
Many critics have observed that Kant's equivocation of 'noumena' with 'things as they are in themselves' is confusing. That's why the example I gave above is more in line with the pre-Kantian idea of noumenon as 'objects of reason'.
[quote=Schopenhauer]The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as ????????? [phainomena] and ???????? [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms ????????? and ???????? were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearances.[/quote]
Which is, it seems, that we can think whatever we like, but we do not know what the limits of understanding are, from which it follows that whatever thinking we like to do, we can have no idea about its soundness except it has empirical or logical justification.
Do you mean it is "useful" in the sense of being inspiring?
As @Mww has pointed out, and if he is right, things in themselves are not noumena. We know things via the senses, but whatever they are beyond our cognitions of, and cogitations about, them seems to be obviously beyond the scope of our experience and understanding.
So, we do not know "nothing" about them, but we know them only as they appear to us. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.
The alternative to thinking there is something "behind" phenomena would be phenomenalism, and to me that cannot explain how it is that we share a common world.
and the ability to reason.
Kant named the noumena such because all we can do is think about it. It is never in our direct experience. His phenomena is the contingent, the negative, change.
Why would it be?
Is that your argument?
I've been consulting ChatGPT on Kant's conception of the phenomenal-noumenal distinction. Abstract follows:
Kant argues that dividing objects into phenomena and noumena and the world into sensibility and intelligibility in a positive sense is not permissible. This is because noumena lack a determinate object corresponding to them, and as a result, they cannot have objective validity. If we abandon sensory input altogether, the application of the categories (the fundamental concepts of understanding) to noumena becomes inconceivable. Categories, according to Kant, require a possible intuition to be applied to an object. As we lack any conceivable intuition beyond sensibility, the application of categories to noumena becomes problematic.
By postulating noumena, the understanding extends its reach in a negative sense. It does not encounter a limit imposed by sensibility but, instead, limits sensibility by recognizing things as noumena, not merely as phenomena. However, the understanding also acknowledges its own limitations in comprehending noumena, as it cannot cognize them through the categories and can only consider them as "unknown somethings."
Then:
ref
So, do you think abstract reasoning is possible without language?
They seem very much of a piece don't they? That the evolution of language and reason would go hand in hand, would it not? That would not be a controversial claim would it?
I think this aspect of Kant's philosophy - his treatment of the noumenal - is a deficiency. I'm still working out why, but the outlines are becoming clearer.
This leads to the criticism that Kant's analysis cuts us off from the world, entrapping us in our own subjectively-modulated reality.
Contrast this with an account from a current neo-scholastic:
Quoting Joshua Hochschild, What's Wrong with Ockham?
Really? Do you think so? We claim to have sensations. We claim to have thoughts, and ideas. But do we have intuitions? "Intuition" appears to refer to a faculty or means by which we obtain knowledge directly, without the need for sensation nor reasoning. I assume "an intuition" would be an object of knowledge acquired through intuition.
But is it really appropriate to call something acquired through intuition, Knowledge? Don't we assume a separation between the cause and the effect, as if each of these refers to something distinct from the other? So if intuition is the means by which someone might obtain a specific type of knowledge, it would be the cause of this type of knowledge. Then why would we call the knowledge itself, as the effect derived from this cause, "an intuition"? Consider, "a thought" refers to a past act of thinking, which is the cause of the currently existing "thought", and this is way that "a thought" as an effect, is differentiated from the act of thinking, as the cause.
Yet without intuition you can't have faith, the act Kant considered the crown of practical reason
Yes. I think abstract reasoning and language are codependent; you could not learn to think in abstract terms without language, and you could not learn to employ language adequately without the ability to think abstractly.
So, I agree with what you seem to be suggesting: that rudimentary language which plausibly would have consisted in sounds or gestures used to indicate just particular things, moods and actions to begin with, probably would have evolved into the use of sounds or gestures to indicate types of things, moods and actions and so on, and that that would be the beginning of abstraction. Gestures might have resembled what they were meant to represent: this would be a kind of drawing with the hands and arms in the air, but sounds could only resemble other sounds, not visual phenomena.
It is generally accepted that writing came much later and probably at first consisted in pictographs, which convey meaning by resembling what they depict. Once this is possible, the ability to recognize general patterns must have already been in place. The question is whether animals have this ability to recognize general patterns, which I think they must, since they can obviously recognize their own kinds, their food or prey, water, shelter and so on. This is not yet abstraction, which would plausibly be a further development characterized by a symbol representing something which it does not actually resemble.
This is all just armchair speculation of course and it presents a probably grossly over-simplified picture of the evolution of language and the ability to reason abstractly.
Maybe I've misunderstood. Are you saying that the difficulty in picturing a chiiliagon is the same as that for picturing noumena? That's certainly not how I understand it.
I disagree that "anything experienced has already been conceptualized" is necessarily true. I think it is possible to experience reality - noumena or the Tao - directly without conceptualization.
I'm accepting what @Mww presented regarding Kant's intent, which does not equate noumena with things in themselves, but that leaves me wondering what, if anything noumena are. We know what things in themselves are inasmuch as they are thought to be what gives rise to phenomena. This means we do know things in themselves insofar as they appear to us, but we do not know what they are in themselves and can only speculate. Are they actual independent existents, or can the fact that we all see the same things be explained by our minds being connected with one another in some way we cannot be conscious of, or with some universal mind that "thinks" the objects we encounter every day? Or is there some other explanation we cannot even (at present or ever?) imagine?
Those are the kinds of metaphysical possibilities we can imagine, but we have no way to test them, or even to know if they have any relevance at all to the actual nature of what is happening. We don't know anything at all, metaphysically speaking, it seems.
Example - I think a materialist approach to reality is useful for doing science. Conceptually breaking the world down into pieces - analysis - allows us to grasp the pieces and manipulate them for our purposes. That doesn't mean materialism is true.
Another - An idealist approach is useful when doing mathematics. Seeing mathematical entities as real allows us to work with them without contradiction. I've read that mathematicians tend to be idealists. Again, that doesn't mean idealism is true.
But is it possible to say anything intelligible about that experience? (I'm not referring to poetic language here, I'm thinking of propositional intelligibility).
I can get what you are saying, but I don't doubt that an idealist can do science just as well as a materialist, or that a materialist can do mathematics as effectively as an idealist.
Kant can be a wordy, inconsistent, confusing philosopher. The same is true of Lao Tzu. They both use the same words to mean different things at different times to suit their purposes. I don't know Kant well enough to know whether he and I mean the same thing when we talk about "experience." I'm not even sure Lao Tzu and other Taoist philosophers would agree with me.
Quoting Quixodian
I do think that language is necessary for abstract reasoning.
Quoting Quixodian
I think any philosophy that doesn't address the unspeakable, unknowable foundation of reality is missing something. I like the way Kant has formulated it, made it such as prominent part of his philosophy, but there parts of his take I don't agree with or don't understand enough to disagree with.
Sure, but what gets said then is conceptualized. For me, that's the essence of the unspeakable - whatever it is, when you speak about it it becomes something different. It's important to recognize that, although I can process, conceptualize what I've experienced, it is not necessary that I do so.
Quoting Janus
I don't disagree, but I do think a materialist approach leads more naturally to a scientific understanding. It's also important to recognize that you can use more than one approach depending on the specific subject. You can see things materialistically when you're doing science and idealistically when you're doing math. We are not tied to a single metaphysical foundation.
I'm thinking more about my response. I didn't really answer your question. I didn't like your use of "inspiring" but as I think more I think there is truth in it, although I'm not sure "inspiring" is the right word. I think materialism greases the skids for scientific thinking. It makes it easier to think about scientific questions, at least as those questions are generally formulated in today's science.
Its given as an example of a concept that is easy to grasp in principle, but is almost impossible to form or recognise an image of. In its context it was provided to illustrate the difference between concepts and mental images. But it also serves to illustrate the idea of an object of mind i.e. you can understand it rationally even despite the difficulty of grasping its phenomenal depiction.
Remember the original distinction in question was between phenomenal (what appears) and noumenal (what is discerned by reason, therefore what truly is.) As noted Kant altered the meaning of noumena in line with his philosophical requirements.
I think youre expressing the predicament of modern culture. Thats exactly what it seems, and the modern philosophers, including Kant, are who made it that way.
In today's terms it's referred to as Innatism. Chomsky mentions it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
SEP - Innateness and Language
The philosophical debate over innate ideas and their role in the acquisition of knowledge has a venerable history.
Wikipedia - Innatism
In the philosophy of mind, innatism is the view that the mind is born with already-formed ideas, knowledge, and beliefs.
Faith is not a type of knowledge. Is it a cause of knowledge?
Quoting RussellA
Well, where is Chomsky when you need him?
Quoting RussellA
Here, "the acquisition of knowledge" is mentioned. But surely there is a difference between the conditions required for the acquisition of knowledge, and knowledge itself.
Quoting RussellA
I do not think that what might be called "innate knowledge" would classify as "knowledge" under a strict epistemological definition, like justified true belief. And since these two senses pf "knowledge" must be different, then there is ambiguity and the possibility of equivocation in any logical argument proceeding from the premise that we are born with "knowledge".
This is why Aristotle distinguished between different types of "potentials". We are born with the capacity to obtain knowledge, and this is a specific type of potential, as the capacity to learn. After we learn, we have a different type of potential, we've ascended to a higher level, which is the actual possession of knowledge. The two, what we are born with, and what we acquire, are in the same general category, as "potential", but they are very different in character because one is logically prior to the other, as a necessary condition for it.
If we use the very general category, "potential" to refer to them both, there is less chance of equivocation, because unless specified, "potential" refers to a very general category. "Knowledge", on the other hand is more often used in the more specific sense of epistemology. So talking about a type of "knowledge" which we are born with is more conducive to equivocation because many people think of :knowledge as what we acquire through learning and education, and something which is justified through the use of language. But we do not possess the skill of language when we are born, just an innate condition which inclines us with the desire to learn.
But that's exactly what the noumenal world is, and why some philosophers reject it in the first place. Saying our perceptions are somehow "knowing," these things begs the question. How could we possibly prove that our perceptions are actually "of" these noumena? If we can't, why bother positing it? Once you start positing unknowable entities, why stop at any one point? Why not posit an infinite number of shadow realms?
And, if noumena can be known by phenomena, then why do the attempts to map the noumenal world as such, the "view from nowhere," run into so many problems?
In any event, the other critique is of Kant's entire process. It isn't undogmatic, it jumps from judgement to assuming, dogmatically, all of Aristotle's categories. So there is a methodological critique as early we Fichte.
It's an alternative, I don't think it's the only one. Hegel's Absolute Idealism for example supposes there is something "above," not "behind" subjective experience, something that subsumes both experience and nature.
Sure, but just asserting that as so begs the question re: whether Kant is talking nonsense or not. Of course it isn't nonsense if the noumenal is the cause of the phenomenal. However, that's assuming the thing in question is already true. What epistemic grounds can Kant have for the proof of such noumena that don't rely on presuppositionson dogma? He can't have any empircal support for such things, by his own admission.
The question is about if Kant has any grounds at all for saying that the noumena exists. I don't think "how else could we all see the same things," works given his critical project. You can't pull an entire shadow realm out of your hat as an ad hoc explanation for a question brought to us by empirical experience. This falls victim to a form of the old John Edwards Cosmological Argument. Once we have things we can never know existing "behind," the phenomenological world, why stop with one set of things? Why not posit an infinity of inaccessible worlds sitting atop or below our own? This gets into Delarocca's 10,000 glass spheres sitting atop each other territory.
Put in more modern terms, we can ask whether the noumena has any explanatory power at all and why we should even consider it? I don't see a good "critical" argument in Kant. It's there as a dogmatic given by both our history and our faculties. If the noumena's existence or non-existence is the same, always and forever for all observers, then its being and non-being are coidentical for all observers, always and forever. So, why posit it?
Far be it from me to claim Im right, but I know what I read and Im pretty sure I understood what I read.
. things in themselves, while possessing a real existence . (Bxx)
. cogitated by the understanding alone, and call them intelligible existences (noumena). (B306)
Quoting Janus
Exactly. Empirical justification is experience, logical justification is non-contradiction.
Quoting Janus
Interesting. In what way would that be true?
Quoting T Clark
Absolutely. That proposition is merely a theoretical tenet, hence shouldnt be considered as necessarily true. It is still worthy of being considered nonetheless logically consistent and sufficiently explanatory.
Quoting Quixodian
Do you consider that a legitimate criticism?
Quoting Quixodian
Correctly stated in Descartes, its formal exposition found in Schematism of the Pure Understanding, for whatever its worth. It is actually quite impossible to prove with apodeictic certainty one has accurately constructed a complex image in complete homogenous correspondence to its mere thought.
The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that was brought to prominence in epistemology by Gilbert Ryle who used it in his book The Concept of Mind
As regards the concept of the colour red, which is descriptive knowledge, I know that vehicles need to stop at traffic lights on red . As regards the intuition of the colour red, which is procedural knowledge, the brain knows how to perceive the colour red when presented with a wavelength of 700nm.
Knowledge can exist in the absence of consciousness, as with a knowledge-base.
The brain knows how to acquire knowledge. IE, the brain has the innate knowledge of how to acquire knowledge.
Oddly true, and slightly disappointing, in juxtaposition to ..
. even if the original meaning of the word has become somewhat uncertain, from carelessness or want of caution on the part of the authors of it, it is always better to adhere to and confirm its proper meaningeven although it may be doubtful whether it was formerly used in exactly this sensethan to make our labour vain by want of sufficient care to render ourselves intelligible . (A312/B369)
.and even if noumena wasnt an example of what he was saying, it remains that he is tacitly suggesting the original meaning of some words are not as they should have been, which justifies the robbery of a word in its original sense, and substitute for it a different sense, in order to render himself more intelligible than the original would have allowed.
I guess the point was better to rob an old word with its altered implications for which a reader might adjust himself, than to manufacture a new one for which he cant.
Indeed. The problem with making up a new vocabulary is that it acts as a barrier to communications. Although, using existing terms in a specialized, technical sense, especially if it's a compound phrase of multiple words, also tends to clog up our prose and make things less readable. I am not sure what the right play is here.
I originally thought one of the best arguments against the "presuppositionlessness" of Hegel's Greater Logic was that the language he is using necessarily presupposes many things. This brings to mind Nietzsche's critique that we allow the structure of grammar to shape how we think the world should be.
I have since decided that this argument against Kant, Hegel, and others, and the entire "linguistic turn," while it makes some good points, suffers from the tendency to expand theses into a maximalist version of themselves. The evidence for the "SapirWhorf hypothesis," the idea that the language that we speak fundementally shapes how we experience the world, turns out to be quite weak. Yeah, you have some statistically significant differences in how speakers of different languages can recall colors based on the way their language divides up the visible spectrum, but the distributions largely overlap and the effect is mild. Eskimos having so many words for snow is better explained by how their language is structured. The "cognitive shaping," of language turns out to look fairly mild. This seems like an instance of making a mountain out of a molehill; the Whorfian view was so readily embraced because people wanted it to be true.
Moreover, modern cognitive science suggests that the systems we use to understand language, to visualize prose, to glean syntax from incoming messages, is exactly the same systems we use for sense perception used in largely the same ways. Visualizing prose is done by running information through the same processing areas that we use for visualizing sight. Disorders like associative agnosia, where people can draw an object they see perfectly but can't recognize what the thing is, or is called, shows how modular cognition is, relying on a bunch of specialized systems.
This says to me that the division between "sense perception," and "language," is overblown, we have bleed through everywhere. Nor does there seem to be one "private language," of thought, but multiple "private languages," for different specialized systems to communicate between one another.
This doesn't counter the post-modern insight that the same messages mean different things to different people. That's true, it's just not true in virtue of the nature of language. The same message, same environments, also mean different things to us at different times to use based on trivial differences like being hungry, our emotional state, etc.
From the very birth of semiotics, with Augustine, there has been the question of how we can possibly communicate when we are all "locked in" to our own phenomenal bubble. Locke sees this same problem. Thus, I don't really think Kant changed much on this front, and fears of his dualism on the grounds that it "cuts us off from one another," seem misplaced. Nor does language "cut us off from one another," quite the opposite. Expressionist semiotics seems to miss that we essentially construct/hallucinate our enviornment, and we use the same natural processes to construct/hallucinate other's views of their enviornment when we communicate with them. It's not a categorical difference.
I think the answer is simpler. We all have human minds with similar capacities. Those minds are stuffed full of knowledge about the world and how it works, much of which is taught to us by other people. That's how our minds are connected with each other.
As I think it surely must be. Nature shapes, words express the shape.
I detest OLP with a passion. I relegate the doctrine to cover those that would find more value in talk than thought. And while it may indeed be the case humans talk all the damn time (yawn), it is even more the case they one and all think even more than they talk, so there ya go.
Your distinction between sensory Phenomena and mental Noumena, reminds me of a judicial distinction between observation and opinion : "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it"*1. That's similar to the difference between knowing an empirical fact, and feeling an emotional sentiment.
Phenomena are objective, but Noumena are subjective. So there is no particular real-world referent for an amorphous ideal-world concept. As justice Potter pragmatically concluded, all we can do is point to several real world instances, from which the other person can construct her own hypothetical Noumenon from her personal experience. :smile:
PS__Empirical evidence is recognizable for anyone with a human sensorium. But to cognize a rational Principle requires a philosophical background. Principles are not real, but ideal.
*1. The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
Note -- A scene of two people behaving like rutting animals in polite company, may be literally porno-graphic, but "obscenity" is a generalization from many different instances in various circumstances, including personal mores of the observer & opinionator. It's the principle of the thing.
Faith is a different, unique form of knowledge. Kant was in a bind because his reason could not prove there was something besides appearance and his intuition was locked unto the empirical. He spoje of faith but the leap was very great. The philosophers that came after him, starting with Fitche, wanted to go beyond understanding and beyond reason to intellect, a union of intuition and (abstract) thought. Kant keep his mental powers separate while others wanted a more holistic use of the mind
Yes, all I meant by "inspiring" was something like "being a catalyst for new ideas and feelings".
Quoting Quixodian
I can't see how it is not that way, discursively speaking, because the critical turn in thought has shown us that the only justifications we can find for propositional claims are either empirical or logical. Otherwise, we can exercise our imaginations and speculate as much as we wish, coming up with possibilities that cannot be ruled out provided they are not self-contradictory. But such speculations cannot be ruled in either.
I would say the modern situation is that we have lost faith in the ability of our mere imaginations to yield truth, to inform us about the actual nature of things. Is this a bad thing or a good thing? I'd say there are both positive and negative aspects to it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'll leave aside noumena, as I have no idea what they are, and just consider the question of "things in themselves". The way I look at this is that we seek to explain how it could be that the things we experience everyday are the same for everyone. By this I mean that if I see a red car parked in front of my house and point at it and ask you what you see there, you will almost certainly say you see a red car.
This is unquestionably the situation with the everyday world of objects; we all perceive the same things and since we are not aware of any "mind-melding" going on at all, we cannot but think that the objects of common experience must exist independently of us in some way. Is the independent existence of those objects physical or mental, or is that question itself really incoherent? We don't know, because there is no way of testing any of the speculative answers we can come up with.
So, we cannot but think that there is something causing us to all see the same things, since straight up phenomenalism seems absurd. The seemingly obvious conclusion is that whatever the things we perceive are in themselves, we can only know what they are as they appear to us.
Do we need to worry about "mapping the noumenal world", something which, by mere stipulation, is impossible in principle? Is it somehow demeaning to have to acknowledge our limitations?
Quoting Mww
First, I want to emphasize again that I am not saying that I believe all reasoning depends on symbolic language. Abstraction consists in making one thing stand in for another, where the thing that does the "standing in" does not resemble the thing it stands in for. So, a picture is not an abstraction but straight up representation of the pattern of thing being represented; the picture resembles what it depicts. So, we can think or reason employing images, but that thinking or reasoning is concrete, not abstract. We can also think or reason employing symbols and that is just what language is, whether "ordinary" lingo or mathematical or formal logical.
Quoting T Clark
I don't see that as being a sufficient explanation for the fact that we see the same things in our shared world. It can explain how we see things in human ways that differ from how other animals see them, but it cannot explain how we, and animals, judging from their behavior. see the same basic environmental details.
Disagree. Going back to the pre-Kantian idea of noumena as object of mind, the noumenal might be understood as something nearer the original meaning of the idea, form or principle (bearing in mind that form* *is nothing like* shape :brow: ) The way that I interpret it (me, not Kant!) is in terms of principles that can only be grasped rationally, but which are independent of your or my particular mind. Theres a dialogue between Einstein and Tagore, in which Einstein insists that the Pythagorean theorem is true independently of what anyone thinks about it. Which I agree with, but I think the overlooked point is that it can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. So its mind-independent in the sense of being independent of your mind or mine, but mind-dependent in that it can only be grasped by a mind. That I take as the basis of objective idealism. Thats why such principles are taken as subjective, or in the mind - but theyre not in any individual mind. Bertrand Russell describes it exactly: they are not thoughts, but when they are known they are objects of thought.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Dont know about that. Many animals have far superior sensory perception to h. sapiens but lack speech. Its a separate faculty, though obviously deeply intertwined. (By the way, have you encountered anything by Andrew Brook, who contends that Kant was the main precursor to cognitive science? A contestable claim, but seriously considered, several articles on Kant in the SEP were authored by him e.g. this.)
I still think that the distinction between what can be grasped through reason, as distinct from through sensory experience (that is, the a priori/a posteriori distinction) is valid, notwithstanding the 20th c effort to derail it as part of the effort of naturalising reason. As has been observed elsewhere, were in the cultural predicament where reason itself is treated with suspicion due to the cultural impact of empiricism.
Quoting Janus
That is precisely the import of A J Ayers Language, Truth and Logic, the seminal text of logical positivism. It too is one of the expressions of the predicament of modern culture and society.
Quoting Mww
Still considering it. It was a remark made in an online lecture I was listening to, but in the context it seemed a bit of a lightbulb moment to me.
Yes, but logical positivism goes too far in ruling out metaphysical speculation as being totally useless. And it was precisely here that both Wittgenstein and Popper, for their different reasons, parted company with the positivists.
Quoting jancanc
When Carl Sagan claims the material universe has no origin, he takes us into an environment wherein the analytical-reasoning mind needs a foundation of support for its compulsive pattern-recognition activity. That foundation is the noumenal.
The analytical-reasoning mind shakes hands non-locally with the noumenal each time it discovers an exploitable axiom, real-world referent of the noumenon.
Demanding acceptance on their own-terms-without-terms is noumenal haughtiness kicking subject/object analytic narratives to the curb.
The axiom stands aloof from the parsing of analytical_reasoning. It deals in the currency of things-in-themselves as self-evident proofs.
The universes of cognition kept aloft by the axiom jugglers are unsearchable causes most closely approached as the epiphenomena of necessary axioms.
Example the singularity that precedes the big-bang.
This makes no sense to me. There are many different shades of red, produced from many different combinations of wavelengths. We learn how to perceive the colour red by learning how to correctly apply the word "red". Without learning the word "red", we would perceive many different shades of colours without knowing any of them as "red". For example, the Japanese classify colours in a way completely different from us.
Quoting Gregory
But Kant posited something distinct from both reason and appearance, intuition.
Kant's contemporary Jacobi, in his famous Letters on Spinoza (1785), wrote: "Through faith we know we have a body, and that other bodies, and other thinking beings are present outside us." I believe he was in line with Kant except that he uses the word "faith" instead of "intuition". If they are distinct that would be too many faculties
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Kant was a Realist not an Idealist
The following is mainly taken from SEP - Kant's Transcendental Idealism
Kant is committed to Existence, Humility, Non-spatiality and Affection, where Affection is the principle that things-in-themselves causally affect us. Kant has the position that sensory content is not generated by the mind, but is generated by Affection with mind-independent objects, things-in-themselves.
Kant writes in A19 of CPR that cognition relates immediately to objects:
In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition. This, however, takes place only insofar as the object is given to us; but this in turn, is possible only if it affects the mind in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions; but they are thought through the understanding, and from it arise concepts. But all thought, whether straightaway (directe) or through a detour (indirecte), must ultimately be related to intuitions, thus, in our case, to sensibility, since there is no other way in which objects can be given to us
Kant is not an Idealist. In the Prolegomena Kant wants to distinguish his view from Berkeley's Idealism. Kant reinforces that his view is not Idealism. The Critique constantly maintains that bodies exist in space and time, and maintains that we have immediate non-inferential knowledge of them.
Kant is not a strong phenomenalist, in that his position is that there are objects outside the mind.
Kant argues that his idealism is a formal idealism. It is only the form of the object that is due to our minds, not their matter. Kant makes the point that sensory content is not generated by the mind, but is generated by affection with mind-independent objects, things-in-themselves. Using such sensory content, we can then cognize about objects by synthesising intuition and concept in the unity of apperception. IE, non-sensible spatio-temporal intuitions and concepts logically structured by the a priori categories of quantity, quality, relation, modality.
Therefore, Kant's epistemic grounds for the understanding of things-in-themselves is Affection, the principle that things-in-themselves causally affect us.
Therefore, ChatGPT's comment that Kant's things-in-themselves are entirely beyond our capacity to experience or comprehend is incorrect for the same reason, that of Affection, the principle that things-in-themselves causally affect us.
When someone looks at an object emitting a wavelength of 700nm they perceive a particular colour.
The English speaking world has determined that not only is the wavelength of 700nm named "red", but also the wavelengths 620 to 750nm are also named "red".
It is not true that we learn how to perceive the colour of the wavelength 700nm by knowing its name. I don't need to know the name of the wavelength 700nm in order to perceive it.
Kant called himself a 'transcendental idealist' and 'empirical realist', saying that the two perspectives were not in conflict:
[quote=CPR, A369]I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. (This is Kant's doctrine - Q). To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. [/quote]
Having distinguished between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, Kant then goes on to introduce the concept of empirical realism:
[quote=A370]The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. [/quote]
That concluding phrase ('that space itself is in us') should torpedo any suggestion that Kant was a realist tout courte.
He differentiated himself from Berkeley's idealism only after critics of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason accused him of setting forth the same basic doctrine. That was the source of his 'refutaton of idealism' which is discussed in SEP here.
Quoting RussellA
I never would regard ChatGPT as an authoritative source. What it does very well is paraphrase and summarise, and I believe it did so adequately in this case. That things are not percieved as they are in themselves is fundamental in the Critique.
Ahhhh ..of course youre quite right. I got stuck on language = ordinary lingo. (head explodes)
I agree, in principle, in that it is a legitimate criticism. Kants analysis generally concerns reason, which is internal to us and hence tacitly separates us from the world. Entrapping us is kinda harsh, but still true enough, beside the fact he pretty much admits to it, at A247/B303, insofar as ..paraphrased the proud name of ontology must give way to analysis. And it is easy to see why this is so, given that the human system works exclusively with internal representations of things, but not external things in themselves.
Quoting Quixodian
WHEW!!! I regard you as perhaps the most well-read participant herein, so to see you reference a glorified typewriter ..well, Nuff said.
As he writes in A370 of the CPR, "The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist", this suggests that the idea that Kant was a Realist cannot be torpedoed because of his belief in the a priori.
There is no contradiction in being an Indirect Realist, a belief that we perceive the world indirectly, and Innatism, a belief that the mind is born with certain ideas and knowledge.
As Innatism is the foundation to Indirect Realism, non-sensible intuition and the a priori categories are the foundation to Transcendental Idealism.
Note, however, that in the wake of the Feder-Garve review, Kant evidently felt that transcendental idealism may have been a poor choice of name. In the B Edition, Kant adds a footnote to his definition of transcendental idealism to remark that perhaps he should have called his position critical idealism.
Totally agree, and also a position held by the Indirect Realists.
However, this is different to ChatGPT's quote that "For Kant, noumena are things-in-themselves that exist independently of human experience and cognition."
If that were true, then how can we be discussing them.
As Kant is committed to the principle of Affection, whereby things-in-themselves causally affect us, things-in-themselves don't exist independently of human experience and cognition.
Apparently you have a more nuanced definition of the terms "phenomena", noumena", "objective" and "subjective" than mine. As usual, you have a much greater mastery of philosophical literature than I do. My knowledge of Kant is superficial. So my usage of his terminology is more like common knowledge, and does not pretend to know the Mind of God. For me, "objective" is perceived Reality, while "subjective" is conceived Ideality.
So, when I classified Phenomena as objective, I merely meant that they are what we see (things or events out there) with our physical eyes : hence, Objective Percepts. But Noumena are what we know (in here) via our inner eye of reason (classification, categorization) : hence, Subjective Concepts. "Objective" is common knowledge ; "Subjective" is private knowledge.
Your interpretation of "noumenon" seems to be Platonic, in the sense of Eternal Transcendent Principles that are more real (ideal) than Temporal Physical Percepts (appearances). Mine was intended to be more down-to-earth and pragmatic.
Subjectively, I might think that my personal Ideas & Ideals are more perfect --- purged of the dross --- hence, closer to the true eternal essence (Form), than those of the common crowd. Others may disagree. :cool:
Percept : an impression of an object obtained by use of the senses
Concept : something conceived in the mind : thought, notion
What is objective vs subjective? :
Here's a trick to help you remember the difference between subjective and objective. Subjectivity is self-centered and based on speculations, sentiments, and experiences. Objectivity is outward-focused and based on observable facts and data that can be proven true.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/objective
Phenomenon synonyms : occurrence, event, happening, fact, experience, appearance, thing
Noumenon synonyms : concept, idea, essence, spirit, and substance. Other related terms include the metaphysical, the transcendent, and the ineffable.
Phenomena are the appearances, which constitute the our experience; noumena are the (presumed) things themselves, which constitute reality.
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5g.htm
Yes - I think that's a good way of saying it.
Sure, that's the dominant modern interpretation of Kant today (at least in English), so it's no surprise that Chat GPT spits that out. What I'm pointing out is that it is unclear if the positions here:
...are incoherent or contradictory when paired with the rest of his philosophy. That it might be incoherent is a critique offered up by Kant's contemporaries. This is how Prichard, Strawson, Bennett, and Wolff can contend that Kant was a subjective idealist (although I think they are wrong here). "Kant was a Realist not an Idealist," is, of course, still debated, but my point is more about whether he has an opening to call himself a realist without resorting to dogma. I'll allow that I think he does want to be a realist.
So, Kant is an indirect realist of sorts. My question would be: "should he be? Can he justify that position and remain consistent?" I am not sure he can.
(Also: being a realist does not preclude being an idealist. Not all idealism is subjective idealism. Hegel is definitely a realist, but also definitely an idealist. )
Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit Dorrien
And hence we have the rest of German idealism seeing itself as a way to "clean up" Kant's dualism problem here. My view would be that Kant absolutely did not want to fall into subjective idealism, and seems aware of his problems in his revisions.
-Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit Dorrien
The second problem is this: is Kant actually progressing critically and undogmatically as he claims? Fichte and Hegel thought not, and this is where they think the problem starts.
-Houlgate - The Opening of Hegel's Logic
-Houlgate - The Opening of Hegel's Logic
Wow! Thanks for sharing, Gnomon. Thats the definition of objective and subjective I urgently need.
I am currently having a debate on this matter with @Bob Ross and we are trying to find out a definition of both concepts. Your post made it clearer and helped me to have a more precise comprehension. :up:
Thats some good stuff right there, and thank you for it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
. This critical science is not opposed to the dogmatic procedure of reason in pure cognition; for pure cognition must always be dogmatic, that is, must rest on strict demonstration from sure principles à prioribut to dogmatism, that is, to the presumption that it is possible to make any progress with a pure cognition, derived from (philosophical) conceptions, according to the principles which reason has long been in the habit of employingwithout first inquiring in what way and by what right reason has come into the possession of these principles .
It seems to me, that given the three listed problems of pure reason, for which no conclusions are to be obtained, he proves it is not possible to make any progress with at least some pure cognitions. On the other hand, while stipulating what those sure principles a priori actually are, he doesnt say how reason comes into possession of them. Reason being the faculty of principles, I suppose were left with a rather loose end.
Which is why, in the end, metaphysics can never be a proper science.
A lot of the difficulties stem from trying to work out what Kant meant by that 'unknown something'. I still see that in online discussions about Kant (and I know Kant is an exceedingly difficult philosopher to understand.) There's this impulse to peek behind the curtain, so to speak, to understand what the dickens is the ding an sich. As if by understanding what it really is, we will have dispelled the mystery of existence.
But Kant only introduced the concept of the thing in itself to refer to the world as it is independently of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the thing in itself as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble (Emrys Westacott). And I think if it is understood in that spirit, it is still a perfectly understandable principle. "We do not see things as they truly are, but only as they appear to us".
I actually agree with you in disliking OLP: they are like anally retentive thought police who reject the creativity involved in the idea that words can possess novel and interesting associations to be discovered, associations which may yield fresh insight.
The idea of meaning as use also begs the question: "whose use"?
Quoting T Clark
Cheers, mate...
Quoting Quixodian
That's right and it is not merely that we do not see things as they truly are, but that we cannot see things as they truly are, a corrective to the human tendency to intellectual hubris.
But look, it's said "Through faith we know...". This implies that faith is the cause of that knowledge. Faith is not the knowledge itself. So we still have the question of how faith or intuition can cause knowledge.
Quoting RussellA
But all sorts of combinations of wavelengths are also correctly called "red"
.Quoting RussellA
We're not talking about perceiving the colour of the wavelength 700nm, which is just one specific instance of red, we are talking about perceiving the colour red, in the general sense. "Red" in the general sense cannot be reduced 700nm, nor 620 to 750nm. Your examples are just an attempt to avoid the issue because explaining what it means to perceive one specific type of red does not explain how we perceive red in the general sense.
This is the same problem as to how we are able to perceive any concept, such as triangles, the colour red, mountains, love, giraffes, tables, apples, democracy, etc. Things that exist only the mind and not outside the mind, unless one believes in Plato' Forms.
If I could explain how the brain processes concepts I would be well on the way to solving some of the deepest problems in philosophy today, including the mystery of consciousness.
However, it seems a sensible evolutionary advantage to have limit our concepts of colour to seven: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. If the human could only distinguish one colour, they couldn't distinguish between an edible green apple and a rotten brown apple. If the human could distinguish 1,000 colours, this would probably give the brain too much information to satisfactorily process. Therefore, the concept of 7 colours seems a good, middle-of-the-road evolutionary solution.
Kant (1724 to 1804) unfortunately didn't have the advantage of Darwin's book On the Origin of Species 1859, so couldn't include the theory of evolution in his philosophy.
As an Indirect Realist, something I definitely agree with.
Indirect Realism is the view of perception that subjects do not experience the external world as it really is, but perceive it through the lens of a conceptual framework, as opposed to Direct Realism, the view that conscious subjects view the world directly.
As Indirect realism was popular with several early modern philosophers, including Descartes (1596 - 1650), Locke (1632 - 1704), Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and Hume (1711 - 1776), each born before Kant (1724 - 1804), Kant would have been familiar with the concept.
Catastrophically irrelevant.
How would that have mattered?
As an Indirect Realist, yes. I believe that space and time existed independently of the human mind for at least the 10 billion years before life began on Earth.
Quoting Quixodian
It has been said about Kant that he is dogmatic about us having a priori pure intuitions and categories of concepts, yet without explaining where they came from.
It seems clear with with hindsight, in part the debate between Innatism and Behaviourism, that a suitable candidate from their origin in the human mind is that a priori knowledge offers evolutionary advantages.
In what way is pointing out that Kant didn't have the advantage of knowing about evolution irrelevant to when it comes to finding a solution to the problem of infinite regression as laid out in the quote by Stephen Houlgate in his book The Opening of Hegel's Logic.
Fichte maintains that Kant himself does not derive the presumed laws of the intellect from the very nature of the intellect, but abstracts these laws from our empirical experience of objects, albeit via a detour through logic (which itself abstracts its laws from our experience of objects). In Fichtes view, therefore, Kant may assert that the categories and laws of thought have their source in the spontaneity of the intellect, butbecause of the way he proceedshe has no way to confirm that the laws of thought he postulates actually are laws of thought and that they are really nothing else but the immanent laws of the intellect. The only way to confirm this, Fichte tells us, would be to start from the simple premise that the intellect actsthat the intellect is a kind of doing and absolutely nothing moreand to show how the laws of thought can be derived from this premise alone.
How can the question as to the source of our a priori non-sensible intuitions and categories of concepts be properly answered without reference to a modern understanding of Innatism ?
We are not living in 1781 when the Critique of Pure Reason was first published.
Do we have in mind noumenon in a negative sense or in a positive sense? Are we to think of noumena in singular or in plural? Are we to think of them as grounding relations or mere epistemic postulates about the limits of reason?
All of these are hard questions, which merit discussion and clarification. Absent this, we may be acting somewhat prematurely in attempting to find a reference relation.
It depends what is being meant by realism and idealism. It comes down to definition, which are difficult to pin down, especially when there was even a thread on the Forum titled "Definitions have no place in philosophy". The SEP articles on Idealism and Realism are a start.
===============================================================================
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A sensible acknowledgement that for the 10 billion years before life began on Earth, there was possibly no phenomenal realm.
===============================================================================
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In another passage Hamann attacks Kant for elevating Reason into a universal Platonic ideal rather than being something grounded in a specific language and cultural context. An unwarranted criticism, in that a philosopher should not to be forced to make judgements unduly swayed by short term pressures from the particular society that they happen to live in.
===============================================================================
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is still a problem that Indirect and Direct Realism grapples with 200 years after Kant's death.
===============================================================================
[quote="Count Timothy von Icarus;826022"Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There is no problem of self-reference in Kant. It is not the case that thoughts can only be about thoughts.
For Kant, we think about objects of sensible intuition using the categories. The category doesn't determine what particular object is being thought about, although it is true that the categories limit what particular objects can be thought about.
It is true that the fact that I have the ability to see the colours red and green but not the colour ultra-violet does limit me in which colours I can see, but it does allow me to distinguish between the colours (of sensible intuition) that I am able to see.
Although Kant distinguished between positive noumena and negative noumena, as he didn't think positive noumena were possible, because they would require intellectual knowledge of a non-sensible intuition, the term noumena is assumed to mean a negative noumena, aka thing-in-itself, aka Dinge an sich selbst .
Yes, that is my understanding too. That doesn't mean that positive noumena are impossible, just that we can't comprehend how they could exist, or even if they could exist at all, but the possibility of such a thing remains open.
Kant sometimes oscillates between the "thing-in-itself" and "things in themselves", and these, obviously, are different in an important respect, in that one presupposes individuation, the other does not.
I'm still reading Charles Pinter's book, subtitled : How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things . . . .. In his chapter on Realism, he distinguishes between "direct realism" (naive realism) --- which equates the world with the appearances created by the mind to represent physical features --- and philosophical realism --- which is supposed to be more self-aware, taking into account the observer's contribution to reality. Presumably, Direct Realism & Materialism ignore the Me in the middle of the sensation/cognition equation.
That's the same conclusion quantum physicists came to when they discovered that the expectations & presumptions of the observer seemed to have some effect on the transformation of holistic entanglement into the particular objects of sub-atomic reality. John A. Wheeler called it the "observer effect"*1. Since such self-consciousness was not allowed in the objective/reductive scientific method, they turned to Eastern philosophy (e.g. Buddhism) for ways to account for the meddling man-in-the-middle.
The Buddha advised his followers to seek true reality by ignoring the mis-interpreting Self. He referred to "pure" & "impure appearances". He seemed to presume that intro-spection was more pure than extro-spection. Quakers, sitting quietly in church, are also seeking the Inner Light, that presumably comes directly from God. We may get closer to "pure" Truth by quieting the constantly processing brain. But do we really commune with God, or with our naive (child-like) model of reality?
Pinter said Kant "claimed that what we experience is never the thing in itself, but always as it is represented in our mind". It's the observer's self-interest that muddles our "impure" view of things-as-they-are from God's unbiased "pure" perspective. He also says "Kant was perhaps the first philosopher to draw a real distinction between properties which things have in themselves, and the experiences they produce in us". Empirical material properties are innate, but abstract essential qualia are attributed.
Pinter goes on to note that "the animal mind . . . envisions a world of features, aspects, and appearances, but those things don't exist outside the mind". Also, "without a living subject looking at a thing, it has no specific features, nothing it 'looks like' " {my bold} That observer effect may be what Nagel meant by his challenge to the Mind-Body problem : "What is it like to be a bat?" All minds take-in sensory information from the environment, then process & code the data into "cognitive" mental representations, that are meaningful to the observing Self.
On this forum, we often contrast Realism/Materialism with Supernaturalism/Idealism. But that black vs white dichotomy also overlooks the flesh & blood man-in-the-middle : the cogitating Brain/Self. Likewise, the Phenomena/Noumena polarity may miss the real world conjunction of Brain/Mind, which translates Real sensations into Ideal experiences. :smile:
*1. Observer Effect :
The surprising implications of the original delayed-choice experiment led Wheeler to the conclusion that "no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon", which is a very radical position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%27s_delayed-choice_experiment
It seems "things in themselves" refer to several objects of experience, whilst "thing in itself" refers to one object of experience.
From the CPR:
B xxvi Yet the reservation must also be well noted, that even if we cannot cognize these same objects as things in themselves, we at least must be able to think them as things in themselves.
A30 For in this case that which is originally itself only appearance, e.g., a rose, counts in an empirical sense as a thing in itself, which yet can appear different to every eye in regard to colour.
From the SEP article on Kant's Transcendental Idealism, Prauss (1974) notes that, in most cases, Kant uses the expression Dinge an sich selbst rather than the shorter form Dinge an sich. He argues that an sich selbst functions as an adverb to modify an implicit attitude verb like to consider. He concludes that the dominant use of these expressions is as a short-hand for things considered as they are in themselves
I guess the whole point is that we don't know that there are things in themselves, only that we believe that there are. The "selbst" indicates a mental attitude to something rather than the physical state of something.
Thanks for the clarification.
Nevertheless, isn't Kant making an assumption by saying there are "things in themselves"? This includes plurality, how do we know if there is such a thing?
(A270/B326, in Meiklejohn 1855)
Hmmmm. Round peg, round hole; square peg, square hole.
Got it.
Next?
But Kant does not, and was not 'an indirect realist' in the sense you're indicating, although you're actually articulating scientific realism, I think.
There's a passage I will often refer to, from a book by Paul Davies, the popular science author, which illustrates the role that the mind plays in the construction of the universe.
Quoting Gnomon
That's where Frithjof Capra hit the jackpot with the Tao of Physics.
Quoting Gnomon
Bingo. And without that observing self, which is never amongst the objects being observed, nothing whatsoever exists.
Nope. The rest of that thinking/cognizing quote reads: . For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears, which would be absurd .
Not knowing what a thing-in-itself is, is very far from knowing that there must be a thing-in-itself.
Oh. And how the HELL can that which is originally itself only appearance have a name?
.. It is, then, the matter of all phenomena that is given to us à posteriori ( ) .the undetermined object of an empirical intuition . . When he fills in with e.g., a rose hes already considered the time between the appearance of the undetermined object, and the name for understanding the phenomenon representing the appearance.
Matter, as such, cannot have a name, which is a representation derived from the synthesis of conceptions, hence given from thought, not sensation.
What if the human eye could distinguish a million different coulors?
[quote=https://www.pantone.com/articles/color-fundamentals/how-do-we-see-color#]HOW MANY COLORS CAN HUMANS SEE?
Researchers estimate that most humans can see around one million different colors. This is because a healthy human eye has three types of cone cells, each of which can register about 100 different color shades, amounting to around a million combinations. Of course, this will vary for people who have a color impairment (or are colorblind).
In terms of shade variation, the human eye can perceive more variations in warmer colors than cooler ones. This is because almost 2/3 of the cones process the longer light wavelengths (reds, oranges, and yellows).
While millions of potential colors may seem overwhelming, color guides and tools like Pantone offer users different ways to organize and manage colors. There are also so many ways to describe the colors we see. Check out our guide to the characteristics of color for more.[/quote]
Colour is not wavelength.
If what I've read on this is accurate the human can distinguish about 10 million colours, although for simplicity we don't have many different names for them.
Quoting Janus
The visible spectrum is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye. A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to about 750 nm The average number of colours we can distinguish is around a million.
English has 11 basic colour terms: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and grey.
It is part a problem of terminology. On the one hand, a wavelength of 420nm is a different colour to a wavelength of 470nm, but on the other hand, even though we can distinguish them, we perceive them both as the single colour blue.
The interesting question is how we can perceive the wavelengths of 420nm and 470nm as two different things yet at the same time perceive them as a single thing.
Note that this is cultural. Russians have no word for blue*. Light and dark blue, goluboy and siniy, are seen as different colours, as different as red and orange.
*The word you get if you Google Translate it corresponds only to dark blue, i.e., it is untranslatable into Russian.
I can only speak from general knowledge, but whilst I agree that colour has different linguistic and social meaning between different cultures, I don't agree that humans within different cultures would not have the same subjective perception of different wavelengths.
The Wikipedia articles on Color and Color Terms writes that whilst English has 11 basic colour terms, other languages have between 2 and 12. How the spectrum is divided into distinct colours linguistically is a matter of culture and historical contingency. Colours have different associations in different countries and cultures.
Even though a Russian and a Scot have different linguistic terms for colours, if you showed the Scot and the Russian the three wavelengths of 420nm, 470nm and 700nm, my belief is that they would both agree that there was a common feature between 420nm and 470nm but not between 420nm and 700nm
IE, colour perception is not just cultural, it is human, common across different cultures.
That seems fairly obvious. I was just correcting your anglocentric assumptions.
In what way is my belief that humans across the world subjectively perceive colour in a similar way Anglo-centric ?
Pillock, a stupid person. I will have to remember to use that term in the future on the Forum.
In British English its only very mildly insulting. You got off lightly :wink:
Science tells us the Universe began about 13.8 billion years ago, and life began on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago.
Is Davies saying that as the Universe can only exist if there are observers to observe it, life must have begun 13.8 billion years ago.
I meant to say that isn't he making an assumption that things in themselves, are plural? The fact that he is referring to plurality by speaking of "things" adds individuation, which is an additional attribution to the general idea of the "thing-it-itself".
I'm not questioning that something like the thing in itself exists, I think such a postulate is quite necessary.
This was one of Schopenhauer's criticisms of Kant.
Guess Im missing something here. If for every thing there is the thing in itself, therefore for a plurality of things it follows necessarily that there are a plurality of things in themselves. Just doesnt seem like an assumption.
-
What??? Two of you? What do you guys know that I cant seem to get a grip on?
That's right, I think on this point Schopenhauer was correct.
I think you are starting from the wrong end. We see plurality, much the same way we see color, we can't help but see them in objects. Doesn't mean the object has color, or that the objects are in fact separate from something another object.
We identify a tree from the surrounding ground (both as representations, of course), but that's something we apply to the environment, it could be considered a single thing.
For two reasons, common sense and textual.
Common sense
What kinds of objects are things in themselves.
From A29 of CPR: For in this case that which is originally itself only appearance, e.g., a rose, counts in an empirical sense as a thing in itself, which yet can appear different to every eye in regard to colour.
From A272: Of course, if I know a drop of water as a thing in itself according to all of its inner determinations, I cannot let any one drop count as different from another if the entire concept of the former is identical with that of the latter.
By common sense, does anyone not believe in the existence of roses, drops of water, houses, camels, trucks, etc. Would anyone crossing a busy road and seeing a truck bearing down on them actually think that the truck, the thing in itself, doesn't exist in reality but only as a figment of their imagination. Wouldn't everyone make sure they quickly got out of the way. Doesn't everyone believe in that things in themselves exist independently of their own thoughts of them.
Would Kant have not worked at the University of Königsberg for 15 years if he thought that the thing in itself, the University, only existed in his imagination and not in reality.
Can anyone argue from common sense that Kant was not a Realist.
He was clearly not a Direct Realist, as the Direct Realist believes they have direct and immediate knowledge of the thing in itself.
His philosophy, as @mww writes "Matter, as such, cannot have a name, which is a representation derived from the synthesis of conceptions, hence given from thought, not sensation" is that of Indirect Realism, the view of perception that subjects do not experience the external world as it really is, but perceive it through the lens of a conceptual framework.
Textual evidence for the existence of the thing in itself
Kant makes numerous statement against the charge of Idealism.
In the CPR Anticipations of Perception, sensation can be understood both as stemming from the object of experience as well as the thing in itself. This duality may only be understood if the transcendental is distinguished from the empirical. Kant's Theory of Affection allows for two different explanations, though together make a coherent whole account of human knowledge.
It would be a mistake to conclude that because a thing in itself remains indeterminate it cannot exist. Common sense tells us that there is something behind an appearance, even if we don't know what it is.
Kant wrote in A536 of the CPR that appearances must have grounds that are not appearances.
If ... appearances are not taken for more than they actually are; if they are viewed not as things in themselves, but merely as representations, connected according to empirical laws, they must themselves have grounds which are not appearances. The effects of such an intelligible cause appear, and accordingly can be determined through other appearances, but its causality is not so determined. While the effects are to be found in the series of empirical conditions, the intelligible cause, together with its causality, is outside the series. Thus the effect may be regarded as free in respect of its intelligible cause, and at the same time in respect of appearances as resulting from them according to the necessity of nature.
We know that objects of experience, although they are mere appearances, are given to us. If the appearance has not been generated by the knowing subject, then an external cause must exist, even if the external cause is unknowable. The thing in itself allows for the very possibility of appearance.
There are many passages in the Fourth Paralogism where the thing in itself is declared as the cause of appearance, and even in the Second Analogy, the thing in itself is described as the source of affection.
Summary
Kant is clearly a Realist, and in today's terms an Indirect Realist. Kant's Theory of Affection
may be read as not only that sensation stems from the object of appearance but also from the thing in itself, not a contradictory position, but two parts of a coherent whole.
I thought we were talking about the plurality of real existences, which phenomena are not but representations of real existences.
Categories apply to the thought of things, which would include those which appear in whatever quantity, which in turn presuppose the thing-in-itself from which each are given.
Quoting Manuel
Do we? Or do we think it, in connection to a series of relations?
Is the best place to find Schopenhaurs objection in the Appendix for WWR? Dont recall the argument, but Im old and forget shit all the time, donchaknow.
I don't know if PSR fixes the problem. The question is "do the noumena exist and do the noumena cause appearances?" Not do "appearances have causes?" You can maintain PSR and deny that noumena make any sense or have any explanatory value. Appearances can have causes in reference to other appearances, or we can say that appearances simply what there is, which is true in naive realism, logical empiricism, absolute idealism, etc.
[Reply="RussellA;826587"]
This is a false dichotomy. The question is IF we should say there are inaccessible things in themselves that are suis generis that cause appearances, not "does the external world exist." It's a false dichotomy to claim that rejecting noumena means rejecting the reality external world. To say the noumena IS accessible in that is must be the cause of appearances is to beg the question.
For Kant, sure, but is this the best way to look at it? If the world is not intelligible than we are forced to accept radical skepticism. If the world is intelligible, logical, than why should categories only apply to thought. From whence this viel of ignorance? How can we say to what degree our categories have any correspondence to being qua being? Moreover, why should we assume, as Kant does, that the categories of classical logic from Aristotle just so happen to be the ones implicit in thought?
Another way to put it is this: "the world is rational, to reject this is to embrace radical skepticism. Both the structure of our minds and our experiences do not suggest the world is unintelligible. Thus, if appearances map to the external world at all then there must be isomorphisms between them, and the categories are a good place to start looking for these morphisms, but ONLY if we derive the categories from necessity, not from dogma.
Further, if the world is intelligible, it must be so by necessity, since it must be a logical place. Thus, the categories, whatever we actually find them to be, should be built up from logic. With this in hand, the categories need not be only be descriptions of experience, only applicable to appearances. Rather, they can be applied to being qua being, being simpliciter? Why? Because we build them up from logic, excluding prior dogmas. We examine bare thought and see what must necessarily spring from it in the speculative moment. That is, we construct not only a logic of thought but also the objective logic. We examine how the existence of one thing may imply others, as when a proof one one object applies others, adjoint modalities, implicit definition, etc.
The rational is the bridge between the subjective and objective. Moreover, we have no reason the believe either of these are suis generis. There is one actuality, and so we should be looking for the description of the whole, not simply a relation between entirely distinct parts."
E.g.,
Quantity : discreteness ? continuity
The adjoint modality in a local topos is that given by flat modality ? sharp modality
? ? ?
Capturing discrete objects/codiscrete objects. The corresponding unity transformation is
?× ? × ? ?×
According to (Lawvere 94, p. 6) this unity captures the duality that in a set all elements are distinct and yet indistinguishable, an apparent paradox that may be traced back to Georg Cantor.
Looking through Hegels Science of Logic at On discreteness and repulsion one can see that matches with what Hegel calls
(par 398) Quantity is the unity of these moments of continuity and discreteness.
I agree that when sleeping and dreaming, appearances have not been directly caused by things external to the mind. The question is that when awake, is it also the case that appearances have not been caused by things external to the mind. An Idealist would say yes, a Realist would say no.
Regarding Idealism, it is either the solipsism of my mind or Berkeley's mind of God. I exclude the first possibility as I doubt I wrote War and Peace. I exclude the second possibility because of Occam's razor, in that there being no God is a simpler explanation than there being one.
This leaves Realism, in that there is a world outside the mind, and appearances can be caused by things external to the mind.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If it is possible for there to be an external world without things in themselves, what would make up this world ?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think a Direct Realist would say that things in themselves are directly accessible, whereas an Indirect Realist would say that they are only indirectly accessible.
He's an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. Kant has some very acute and critical things to say about common sense, incidentally, though the comments I have in mind appear in his Prolegomena, not the Critique.
We might think it or think it and perceive it or maybe imagine it - this is terminological, which is not to say it does not matter, it does.
The point is that individuation is an extra step, as applied to the concept of "things-in-themselves", it adds something to what would otherwise be singular, the thing-in-itself.
If we want to attribute only what is strictly necessary to such an idea as the negative noumenon, then it is simpler to assume the existence of a single "thing", than to attribute many things, and say all these several things each have a thing-in-itself as the grounds of the representation.
Maybe plurality is correct. It's not so clear to me.
As for the specific page in Schopenhauer, I do not recall, he probably does mention it in the Appendix, but I believe he also mentions it in both volumes, more so in the second one.
My memory isn't pristine either, though it's not an age issue. Limited "software" as it were... :wink:
I wouldn't agree with this though. A person in a vacuum disintegrates, there is no mind without interaction with the environment. Our dreams are caused by the external world. If we are stressed out, we might have stress dreams about our problems. If we are cold in our room we feel cold in our dreams, etc.
This gets at my main problem with Kant. His system seems inclined towards positing an implicit sort of mind-world dualism that I think is inappropriate.
This seems to be an terminology issue. What you are describing here is subjective idealism. Objective idealism allows that the external world exists and causes our subjective experiences, they just deny that that world is suis generis, of a different substance or type. For them, substance dualism and type dualism go to far, predicate dualism perhaps not far enough.
For example, Kastrupt's analytical idealism is not subjective idealism: https://iai.tv/articles/reality-is-not-what-it-seems-auid-2312#:~:text=An%20analytic%20idealist%20infers%20that,merely%20of%20our%20perceptual%20states.
See the link above for a fairly straightforward example of how this works. I don't like Kastrupt's system for a number of reasons but it is much easier to summarize and explain than those of Hegel, Bradley, etc.
Right, but these are just perspectives on how we come to know the world. The existence of a noumenal realm is an ontological claim over and above this. One can just as well deny that there is being as being but also deny that an individual's subjective experience is equivalent to what exists. The world might best be described as the sum of all subjective experiences, across all times, as they unfold.
Berkeley's bold assertion, "esse est percipi", did not make sense, without some qualification. For example, as someone noted above : "the universe appears to have existed for 10 million years before the emergence of any perceiving creature". If so, in what sense can we say that anything --- say a 20 million year old rock on an uninhabited planet in a distant galaxy --- exists? Who or what is the percipient?
Is physical Existence*1 a necessary essence or a contingent attribution*1? If the latter, then Berkeley's observing God-in-the-quad*2 is a logically necessary inference, to explain the beingness of anything & everything in our world model. Hence, for anything contingent to exist in space-time Reality, something self-existent, perhaps in timeless Ideality, is obligatory. That mysterious absolute being is what insightful humans call "God". But how can we know that the named concept*3 exists, if we can't perceive anything existing without the limiting conditions of physics?
Physicists have inferred the existence of sub-sub-atomic particles called "quarks". They even envision families of invisible intangible Quarks, and assign necessary properties to those imaginary objects, that are not perceptible even by cutting-edge technology. We only know they exist fundamentally, because they must be there, to logically support all other aspects of our physical world-model. But, do they exist as percepts, or as concepts, or as metaphysical objects? In what sense does a Noumenon exist? Is conceptual existence real being? :smile:
*1. To Exist : have objective reality or being.
Note --- To Perceive is to attribute subjective being. Hence, objective existence must be inferred, not observed.
*2. Berkeley Limericks :
[i]There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
Yours faithfully, God
If objects depend on our seeing
So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing,
Then my question is: Who
Is the one who sees you
And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir,
You reason most oddly.
To be's to be seen for the bod'ly.
But for spirits like me,
To be is to see.
Sincerely,
The one who is godly.[/i]
http://faculty.otterbein.edu/AMills/EarlyModern/brklim.htm
*3. [i]The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.[/i]
https://researchers.usask.ca/gordon-sarty/documents/tao.html
Ok, I get that. Without a minimal content, any conception is empty hence meaningless. The idea, or in Kant-speak, the notion, of the thing-in-itself, is a simple concept, the strict necessity of which would be only its negative relation to things that are met with intuition. Such is a function of logic.
But there are still a multiplicity of examples that conform to the notion, and dont contradiction the rule that the experience of them as objects is impossible. A single example may well suffice for the idea, but it wont hold for the affects of things on our sensibility.
Just for the record, there is the argument that the strict necessity for an idea, is the comprehension of the relation of the conceptions contained in its definition. I would agree, under this condition, that to say things-in-themselves, the plurality of the idea, adds to the conception that which is superfluous. Does this get us on the same page?
I believe it does. All I'm claiming, is that I believe the idea of the "thing-in-itself" is more coherent, for the type of limiting notion Kant was introducing.
It could be that "behind" or "supporting" the representations, there are a plurality of things. That's an additional thought, that is, it adds an extra notion to the idea of "thing-in-itself", which as stated, is singular.
Granted, saying this "solves" almost nothing, there is still stuff left to iron out, that is what kind of grounding relation exists, how does multiplicity arise, are we postulating the simplest possible thing, etc.?
I believe Kant would say that we can't answer these questions, as we would be entering the idea of "positive noumena", and fair enough.
My intuition (in the non-technical sense) is that this idea can be worked on at the margins anyway.
Ok, Ill buy it. Lets finalize: what limiting notion does the thing-in-itself represent?
I take it to be the notion that beyond this postulate (negative noumenon, thing(s)-in-themselves), we cannot know the nature of reality.
We can study representations, not noumena.
Edit:
In fact, Kant goes so far as to argue against Leibniz' monads, precisely because Leibniz was introducing these as positive noumena (not that Leibniz used these terms), the fundamental and complete nature of reality.
And Kant argues, correctly, in my view, that we don't have access to this type of knowledge.
Cool. Noumena limits a priori what can be thought with respect to the nature of reality, the ding an sich limits a posteriori what can be experienced of it.
Once a dualist always a dualist, right?
Yep! Can count on you to put it in that sophisticated formulation.
Quoting Mww
Hah.
Well man, what can I say? We eliminate as much as we reasonably can. Whatever remains, call it what you will, is what we have to work with.
Ooooo .a metaphysical reductionist. Aint you just fulla all kindsza surprises.
Gonna have to amend my Christmas card list. You know after I start one.
I'm not a fan of reductionism.
I'm a rationalistic idealist, like Descartes or Cudworth or Chomsky - along those lines, though not metaphysically dualist.
We probably agree on like 90%+.
Now that I have been informed that I am getting a Christmas card, I have to do one for you...
Sigh.
Fair enough. :cool:
Well then. Here we go again. A proponent of reasonable elimination, but not of reductionism.
Sorta like eating soup with a fork, innit?
Agreed on +/- 90%; the rest here is just filler. Not important.
Haven't tried it?!?
I am shocked frankly. It's so much more efficient... :halo:
Not being familiar with Cudworth, I went to SEP, and it starts off by saying his philosophy defies classification. Is he the root of your rational idealist tendencies, cuz hes the earliest? Minor contributor?
He's the guy Chomsky always references instead of Kant, because he says he finds his ideas to be "richer" (the ideas, not the theoretical side), which people rarely ask about and nobody reads. Me being astonished with Kant and Schopenhauer, simply had to find out why he says this and if it was true that someone said what Kant did before him.
I believe I may be one of the 5 or so that did bother to read him, maybe less.
His main work is a mostly unreadable theological-laden trilogy, which, with some effort, sections and pages of pure gold can be found. Luckily, after he died, he left an unpublished manuscript called A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, which is mostly about epistemology, and is amongst the richest books in innatist epistemology in the history of philosophy.
Far more than Descartes or Leibniz, in my opinion.
The name "rationalistic idealism" is given by historian Arthur Lovejoy referring to Cudworth and Henry More, in his Kant and the English Platonists, I believe. I think you've read that. I can't really think of a better label.
Defies categorization? In some respects, sure. But he certainly in the rationalist camp.
Current science, always subject to revision - there have been murmurings about it possibly being twice as old, suggested by JWST data. That is in the scope of empirical facts.
But that is not the point. Review again: '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.' Absent an observer, how can there be measurement? 'A year' is defined by man, as the period of time of the Earth's orbit around the sun. When you confidently state that Konisberg exists, roses, water drops, camels, and the whole inventory of the encyclopedia exist - of course all of these things exist. That too is a matter of empirical fact. But existence itself implies and requires a perspective. Things don't exist from no point of view, they exist within a context, and the mind provides that context. But we don't notice that, because we're looking from it, not at it. As mentioned in another thread yesterday on a similar point '(Philosopher Edmund) Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place.'
In Berkeley's case, the only qualification required is that God sustains the Universe in existence, although personally I have no need of that hypothesis. Pleased you reprinted the well-known Berkeley Limerick, no thread on Berkeley would be complete without it.
Cool. So is innatist epistemology an offshoot of, or derived from, the rational idealist doctrine, or implicitly contained in it? Or is it the other way around?
I'd say contained within rational idealist doctrine. It's not as if it's an established school like Rationalists and Empiricists, but I think Lovejoy's label is accurate.
Things don't exist from any particular point of view; they are perceived from points of view. They don't even exist for us from any particular point of view. How could we possibly know whether they exist absent us? Well, the fossil record tells us they did, and if the Universe is older than the human race then it follows that it existed prioir to us and our points of view.
So the quoted statement from you above is just a bold, groundless claim or stipulation on your part.
Quoting Quixodian
I introduce quotations from other sources to illustrate that the point being made is not idiosyncratic or peculiar to myself. And here's another, which I refer to from time to time, that addresses the above argument.
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107] Everyone knows that the earth, anda fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was (that) the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.
Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them.[/quote]
Bolds added.
If we say that the organisms and animals that have been preserved as fossils, lived at different times, millions of years apart, and at the same time say that they did not exist at those different times, and in fact did not exist at all, then we are simply contradicting ourselves.
So, we cannot say what the "in-itself existence of those organisms and animals was, any more than we can say what the in itself existence of the world we experience today is: all we can say is that if we had been there at those various times in the past we would have seen the organisms and animals of those times.
It's pretty clear what he says, and has already been quoted in this thread:
Transcendental realism, according to this passage, is the view that objects in space and time exist independently of our experience of them, while transcendental idealism denies this.
***
Quoting Janus
Which is why he makes this point:
[quote=Bryan Magee]the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration[/quote]
So I acknowledge that it *seems* absurd, right? But it's not a claim that fossils, or the past, or anything else, literally cease to exist if unperceived. The 'conditions of the experience of perception' are the same whether concerning an ancient fossil, or the computer you're viewing this on. Hence the question I asked earlier in this thread, where to draw the line?
Magee's text goes on:
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy]Since all imaginable characteristics of objects depend on the modes in which they are apprehended by perceiving subjects, then without at least tacitly assumed presuppositions relating to the former (subject) no sense can be given to terms purporting to denote the latter (object). In short, it is impossible to talk about material objects at all, and therefore even so much as to assert their existence, without the use of words the conditions of whose intelligibility derive from the experience of perceiving subjects. Again, then, and for a reason that goes deeper than those which had been given the last time this point was made, transcendental realism cannot be stated*. It is 'the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself'. But 'just as there can be no object without a subject, so there can be no subject without an object, in other words, no knower without something different from this that is known.... For consciousness consists in knowing, but knowing requires a knower and a known. [/quote]
*Kant calls transcendental realism the common prejudice (A740/B768) and describes it as a common but fallacious presupposition (A536/B564). Transcendental realism is the commonsense pre-theoretic view that objects in space and time are things in themselves, which Kant, of course, denies (SEP).
I sense your objections are based on what Kant is calling 'transcendental realism - the natural, common sense point of view. I really do get it, I'm sympathetic.
If you have no need for the God hypothesis, how do you explain the contingent existence of the space-time world, that appears to have a singular point of beginning into being? The cosmic clock seems to be ticking down to the ultimate Entropy of non-existence. Do you assume that the physical universe --- which we temporal humans perceive into conceptual being --- is actually self existent : requiring no external percipient (creator) to begin & sustain its beingness?
Apparently, Materialists assume that the world, or Multiverse, "just is", without any need for an external cause or perceiver. But, Charles Pinter, in his chapter on Reality, refers to it as the "mind-made firmament". Apparently, the mind is constrained by the organization of the brain to perceive the world in terms of Substance & Form. Yet, he goes on to say that "we are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that every material object has substance and form . . . . Once again, we are misled by common sense".
From that perspective, Materialism is simply common sense. Likewise, I would infer that the Flat Earth notion is common sense. We see, with our normally reliable eyes, that the Earth stretches out horizontally in all directions. And its topological curvature is not apparent from a viewpoint near the surface. Hence, it's a disk, not a sphere.
On the other hand, Pinter seems to view Idealism as un-common intelligence. Our mind-made concepts allow us to see the logical structure underlying the superficial substance of objects, and to imagine an objective perspective different from that of our own earth-bound eyes. Even so, Pinter says "the material universe outside the purview of any observer has no such thing as form"*1. Then he notes, "we imagine the universe as if we were looking at it, and find it is very hard to picture a reality in which we are totally absent".
That may be why Berkeley had to imagine an as-if scenario, with a super-human observer who could see the Cosmos from the outside, in its totality ; perhaps as a sphere seen from a 4D perspective, from all sides simultaneously. Physically, it might look like a shining star radiating energy in all directions; or an invisible black hole sucking-up all available energy; or just a featureless gray sphere. Yet, the super-objective Observer is not just perceiving the world, but also conceiving it into existence ; complete, down to the last quark.
Did I mis-understand the implication of your assertion, that "I have no need of that hypothesis". Other than the traditional creation event, or self-existent Reality, the only alternative theory I can imagine is that each of us imaginative Idealists is a world creator --- forming a unique world as a "mind-made firmament"*3. Yet, like sociable deities, we like to share our art-works with other gods. Not directly mind-to-mind though, but over the internet. :smile:
PS___Perhaps, once begun on its trajectory through time, what "sustains" the world is simply Momentum. But what abstains the world is Entropy. So, we have no need for the religious word "sustains". :joke:
*1. Form : "an object's form is an aspect of the object as an undivided whole, viewed from outside the object" -----Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order
*2. To Conceive : form or devise (a plan or idea) in the mind. ___Oxford
*3. How We Create Our Reality :
Its not pseudo-science: youre already doing it.
I create reality by taking an idea in my mind and bringing it into existence.
https://medium.com/an-idea/how-we-create-our-reality-7fc29fc899c
I'm afraid that explaining the existence of the world is quite beyond my capacity. But do consider the Buddhist approach, which doesn't begin with the origin of everything, but with the origin of suffering (dukkha). What is it that drives us to continue to suffer? That's also a very deep question! But you can see how situating the question in those terms changes the terms of reference, so to speak.
Culturally, the West is in a situation where science apparently has displaced biblical religion as an account of the origin of the Universe. But then, the Biblical tradition had been an enormous stimulus to finding out the 'why' of existence, especially in combination with the Greek philosophical heritage. That framework provided the whole context for the emergence of science in the first place (for which see e.g. God's Philosophers, James Hannam). Without going into the whole vast question of the role of religion in the history of ideas, suffice to notice that Christian monotheism is one of the fundamental sources of today's culture.
But Buddhism operates outside that frame of reference as it originated and developed quite separately from it (although not without some influences. There is a myth of origin in Buddhism, but it is obscure and rarely referenced.) Regardless it is just as opposed to philosophical materialism as is Christianity, albeit on different grounds. In fact there is very deep and profound school in Buddhism called Yog?c?ra (or Vijñ?nav?da) which has many resemblances to the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley (although also significant differences). For a reasonably short, if dense, introduction, see What Is, and Isn't, Yog?c?ra, Dan Lusthaus. There's also a book I often mention on this forum, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti, published 1955. It is nowadays criticized for its Euro-centrism and over-emphasis on Western philosophy but it draws many detailed parallels between Mah?y?na philosophy and Western philosophical idealism (including extensive commentary of the phenomenal/noumenal.)
You'll know that I am a big admirer of Charles Pinter's book, I've often sung its praises here. Seems to me it hasn't attracted the attention it deserves, because the author is not known in philosophy or cognitive science, which is a pity, because it's a great book.
I take this to be referring to the space and time we intuit, the subjective intuition of space and time. I think he's saying that we cannot rightly extrapolate that beyond the context of our perceptual intuition and understanding.
You should not forget that there are different schools of thought within Kant scholarship, and just what his transcendental idealism entails is not a given.
One way of looking at time is simply as change, and it seems impossible to reconcile the current scientific stories about the evolution of the cosmos and of life with a claim that absent us there would be no change. We cannot begin to imagine how a changeless cosmos lacking any difference or diversity could give rise to an experienced world of unimaginable complexity and diversity.
What motivation could there be for asserting such an incoherent idea?
Quoting Quixodian
One interpretation of transcendental idealism may deny this. As I said my reading is that things in themselves do not exist in our perceptual space and time, which is an assertion that seems to be virtually self-evident or true simply by stipulation. Beyond that we cannot make any assertion about the in itself.
The following, including the passage you quoted is from the SEP article on Kant's transcendental idealism
[i]In the first edition (A) of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, Kant argues for a surprising set of claims about space, time, and objects:
Space and time are merely the forms of our sensible intuition of objects. They are not beings that exist independently of our intuition (things in themselves), nor are they properties of, nor relations among, such beings. (A26, A33)
The objects we intuit in space and time are appearances, not objects that exist independently of our intuition (things in themselves). This is also true of the mental states we intuit in introspection; in inner sense (introspective awareness of my inner states) I intuit only how I appear to myself, not how I am in myself. (A378, A42)
We can only cognize objects that we can, in principle, intuit. Consequently, we can only cognize objects in space and time, appearances. We cannot cognize things in themselves. (A239)
Nonetheless, we can think about things in themselves using the categories (A254).
Things in themselves affect us, activating our sensible faculty (A190, A387).[1]
In the Fourth Paralogism Kant defines transcendental idealism:
I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances [Erscheinungen] the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves [nicht als Dinge an sich selbst ansehen], and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves [als Dinge an sich selbst]. (A369; the Critique is quoted from the Guyer & Wood translation (1998))
Ever since 1781, the meaning and significance of Kants transcendental idealism has been a subject of controversy. Kants doctrines raise numerous interpretive questions, which cluster around three sets of issues:
(a)
The nature of appearances. Are they (as Kant sometimes suggests) identical to representations, i.e., states of our minds? If so, does Kant follow Berkeley in equating bodies (objects in space) with ideas (representations)? If not, what are they, and what relation do they have to our representations of them?
(b)
The nature of things in themselves. What can we say positively about them? What does it mean that they are not in space and time? How is this claim compatible with the doctrine that we cannot know anything about them? How is the claim that they affect us compatible with that doctrine? Is Kant committed to the existence of things in themselves, or is the concept of a thing in itself merely the concept of a way objects might be (for all we know)?
(c)
The relation of things in themselves to appearances. Is the appearance/thing in itself distinction an ontological one between two different kinds of objects? If not, is it a distinction between two aspects of one and the same kind of object? Or perhaps an adverbial distinction between two different ways of considering the same objects?[/i]
So, to me your claim that what Kant meant is "pretty clear" seems ill-informed. I think it would pay you to read the entire article in order to get a better, more nuanced grasp of the subtleties and inconsistencies involved in Kant's views, which have led to the controversial nature of Kantian scholarship.
I say it's controversial because it challenges realism, which is the ingrained tendency of the natural outlook. Plenty of people dispute the interpretation of that passage in Kant, but it supports the argument I made on that basis, and there are others who support that. Like with any of these questions, it's beyond adjutication.
The other passage quoted in support was that about the cosmologist Andrei Linde a couple of days back. It is about the role of the observer in the perception of time. It's really worth the listen to his Closer to Truth interview about the subject (although I guess now that I posted something about it, you will only watch it to work out what's wrong with it :-) )
To me that seems to be a tendentious and poorly informed psychological explanation for a controversy which is understandable in a difficult area of philosophy that is about trying to determine the limits of our knowledge and understanding.
You seem to me more in the business of looking for support for how you want things to be than you are coming to these questions with an open mind.
Quite the contrary, I post materials and ideas from many different sources in support of idealist points of view, and for more than ten years, your only response has been to shoot them down. I give considerable time to addressing your criticisms, often to the response that I've 'changed the subject' or 'not addressed the question'. Maybe we should call it quits, Janus, I'm quite happy to do that.
It calls this attitude into question:
My theory is that secular culture works very hard to normalise this attitude, and to discourage anything that calls it into question. And as a staunch defender of secular values and common-sense realism, you feel duty bound to follow suit. Fair comment?
This is not true at all. What you call "shooting them down" I call "raising legitimate questions about them". From my perspective it seems you very often just stop responding when the questions become too penetrating or difficult to address.
You should know by now that I'm not pushing any particular view but rather raising what I see to be the salient and often difficult question entailed by any view. I give as much critique of naive realism as I do of naive idealism.
Quoting Quixodian
There is no one "secular culture" in philosophy in my view. Or to look at it another way, I think theology is not philosophy, or at least it is only one small area of philosophy. I am not at all a "staunch defender of commonsense realism" and your saying that makes me think that you don't actually pay attention to what I say. I support neither realism nor idealism; I see them as the two main imaginable metaphysical speculations, both of them under-determined by evidence or logic.
I understand that you personally believe in intellectual intuition, which is fair enough, but I think it cannot but be a faith-based view. I'm not saying it's wrong to hold faith-based views, we all do, but I do think it's wrong to assert that such views can be supported by evidence or logic, and it is mainly such attempts that I call out when I see them.
The point though, is that no specific named colour can be defined simply with reference to a particular set of wavelengths. This is because the sensation of colour is far more complex than simply detecting particular wavelengths. The richness and aesthetic beauty of colour is a feature of combined wavelengths, just like harmony in music. Add to this, the way that the eyes have evolved to break down the combined wavelengths into distinct parts, and then the brain reunites the distinct parts in a form of synthesis, to produce one colour, and you have a very complex system for sensing color.
Clearly, we do not perceive two different colours as "the single colour blue". We perceive them as different colours, and call them by the same name, "blue". It is a matter of categorizing the two as the same type, not a matter of perceiving them as a single colour.
It seems to me that we living human beings now, when we think of the time before human cognition, can only project the-world-for-us in a way that doesn't exactly make sense. Part of the messy issue seems to be that world-for-us is (must be) just the world. It's as if we tend to talk around what seems like an inescapable anthropocentrism. The world that we know and talk about is the one that's given through sense organs and brains that are strangely part of that same world.
I guess I reject scientific realism if understood in terms of a truly independent object. I challenge it as semantically troubled.
Thats getting close to what Ive been trying to say. Its the tendency to forget that scientific realism still relies on an implicitly human perspective. (Which is very much something Husserl was saying, isnt it?)
So my argument is not that the universe doesnt exist sans perspective, but that any meaningful sense of existence entails a perspective, so its a mistake to take it as an invariant truth, as a truly observer-independent reality. That is the assumption of naturalism, not a metaphysical principle.
Yes, I think we agree that some philosophers don't give subjectivity its due. [ On the other hand, many go too far, till the subject is no longer intelligible as such. ]
Quoting Quixodian
Let me offer a quote from §52 in Ideas. (I add emphasis to sense as meaning near the end and break up a long paragraph for clarity.)
[quote=Husserl]
We carried out the last series of our deliberations chiefly with respect to the physical thing pertaining to the sensuous imaginatio and did not take due notice of the physical thing as determined by physics, for which the sensuously appearing (the perceptually given) physical thing is said to function as a mere appearance, perhaps even as something merely subjective.
Nevertheless it is already implicit in the sense of our earlier statements that this mere subjectivity ought not to be confused (as it is so frequently) with a subjectivity such as characterizes mental processes, as though the perceived physical things, with respect to their perceptual qualities, and as though these qualities themselves were mental processes.
Not can it be the true opinion of scientific investigators of Nature (particularly if we keep, not to their pronouncements, but to the sense of their method) that the appearing physical thing is an illusion or a faulty picture of the true physical thing as determined by physics. Likewise the statement that the determinations of the appearance are signs of the true determinations is misleading.
Are we then allowed to say, in accordance with the realism which is very widely accepted: The actually perceived (and, in the primary sense, appearing) should, for its part, be regarded as an appearance of, or an instinctive basis for, inferring something else, intrinsically foreign to it and separated from it? May we say that, theoretically considered, this something else should be accepted as a reality, completely unknown by acquaintance, which must be assumed hypothetically in order to explain the course of mental appearance- processes,
Already, on the basis of our general presentations (which will be greatly deepened and undergo continual confirmation by our further analyses), it becomes evident that such theories are possible only as long as one avoids seriously fixing ones eyes on, and scientifically exploring, the sense of a physical thing-datum and, therefore, of any physical thing whatever, a sense implicit in experiences own essence the sense which functions as the absolute norm for all rational discourse about physical things. If anything runs counter to that sense it is countersensical in the strictest signification of the word; and that, without doubt, is true of all epistemological theories of the type indicated.
...
The perceived physical thing itself is always and necessarily precisely the thing which the physicist explores and scientifically determines following the method of physics.
[/quote]
To me this is something like a sophisticated direct realism. The scientific image is not 'under' everyday objects. For Husserl (roughly, from my reading so far), reality makes no sense except in relation to human experience. We don't know what we are talking about otherwise.
In my opinion, the tricky part here is the relationship between the individual human and the time-binding cultural community that (in some sense) thinks through or with the brain of the individual. Culture is software that runs on the crowd, and knowledge is a social product. The scientific image (and arguably the philosophical image) is intentionally independent of any contingent human being. That's it's job. To be the truth, not just your truth or mine.
But it's all too easy to let this image float away from subjectivity altogether. I mean we can lose ourselves in our models and forget their dependence on a living brain and the thousands of years of transmitted research and development that went into training it. [Husserl's later work wrestles with cultural sediment and how it matters in the subject's coconstitution of reality, or so I'd put it at this moment. I am made of ghosts and mud.]
The issue with the (modern) scientific image is the assumption of separation between observer and observed. That itself is not a product of science but a consequence of the tendency towards modern individualism which was a defining feature of the culture gave rise to science. But the way that it showed up in modern science, was that the subject was excluded by the process of separating primary and secondary attributes - the primary being just those attributes measurable by the sciences, the secondary being associated with qualitative perception. That was the modern scientific equivalent of the 'self-abnegation' of the sage or mystic but with the cardinal difference that the latter maintained the qualitative dimension, whereas in the scientist, the qualitative dimension was equated with the (merely) subjective, and the separation of subject and object was the basic stance (leading to the state of 'cartesian anxiety').
So when you say 'the truth, not just yours or mine', that's what I mean when I refer to THE mind, not your or my mind. You and I are examples or instantiations of the cultural- and species mind. Individuation is an attribute of only the very topmost level of that mind. But that is the mind which the world is not independent of or apart from - not your mind or mine, but THE mind. It's almost like 'mind at large' but it's important not to objectify or reify it.
Quoting plaque flag
[quote=Gen2:7] And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul[/quote]
-
Apparently, the physical thing determined by physics is other than the perceptually given thing of mere appearance.
What does it mean for the actually perceived to be regarded as an appearance of something else?
How can that appearance of something which is or should be accepted as a reality, at the same time be completely unknown ..by acquaintance?
While it may be the case the physical thing is separate from its mere appearance, it does not follow from the separation, that it is intrinsically foreign to it, which casts dispersions on the claim the appearance is of something else than the physical thing determined by physicists.
If theories for the course of mental appearance-processes hypothetically assumes the reality of the something else of mere appearances, a sense implicit in experiences own essence, which presupposes it must be known by acquaintance, to then claim the perceived physical thing itself be always and necessarily the thing the physicist explores, is self-contradictory.
Husserl 1929: the origin of transcendental logic is predicated on the content of judgements being genuine objects which mental appearance-processes require, re: phenomenology;
Kant 1787: the origin of transcendental logic is predicated on form alone, irrespective of the empirical content mental appearance-processes would require, re: pure a priori synthetic propositions.
And so it goes .
I take Husserl to understand the scientific image as a mere enrichment of the manifest image. It should not be understood as a mathematical analogy for something that lurks under or behind the manifest image. The table is the one I got from my uncle, and it's also made of atoms. The table is a 'transcendent' object that is never given to my eyes all at once. Nor do I grasp its essence all at once. Reality has depth and horizon, not given immediately in all of its fullness, but we are not cut off from it. Sense organs are real and not absurdly their own product.
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We need only understand it correctly. By no means ought we to fall into either the picture-theory or the sign- theory, the fundamentally wrong theories which we considered ear lier without particular regard to the physical thing as determined in physics and which we likewise refuted in a radically universal manner.66A picture or a sign refers to something lying outside it which would itself5be seized upon were we to go over into a different mode of objectivation, into that of presentive intuition. In themselves, a sign or a picture do not make known the designated (or depictured) affair itself.67 The physical thing as determined by physics, however, is nothing foreign to what appears sensuously in person; rather it is something which makes itself known originaliter in it and, more particularly, apriori (for indefeasible eidetic reasons) only in it. Accordingly, even the sensuous determination-content of the X which functions as bearer of the determinations ascribed in physics is no clothing foreign to these determinations and hiding them: rather, only because the X is the subject of the sensuous determinations is it the subject also of the determinations ascribed in physics which, for their part, make themselves known in68 the sensuous determinations. According to what has been set forth in detail, it is necessary that a physical thing, and precisely the physical thing of which the physicist speaks, can be given only sensuously in sensuous modes of appearance; and the identical appearing in the changing continuity of these modes of appearance is what the physicist subjects to a causal analysis69 in its relationship to all experienceable (thus perceived or perceivable) concatenations which can be considered as circumstances, an exploration with respect to its necessary real connections with them. The physical thing which he observes, with which he experiments, which he continually sees, takes in his hand, puts on the scale or in the melting furnace: that physical thing, and no other, becomes the subject of the predicates ascribed in physics, such as weight, temperature, electrical resistance, and so forth. Likewise, it is the perceived processes and concatenations themselves which become determined by means of concepts such as force, acceleration, energy, atom, ion, etc. The sensuously appearing thing, which has the sensuous shapes, colors, odor- and taste-properties, is thus anything but a sign for some other thing; rather it is, so to speak, a sign for itself.
Only this much can be said: The physical thing appearing with such and such sensuous determinations under the given phenomenal circumstances is, for the physicist, who has already carried out in a universal manner for all such physical things, in phenomenal concatenations of the sort in question, their determination by means of concepts peculiar to physics, an indicative sign of a wealth of causal properties belonging to this same physical thing which, as causal properties, make them selves known in phenomenal dependencies of familiar sorts. What makes itself known here by being made known in intentional unities pertaining to mental processes of consciousness is obviously something essentially transcendent.
According to all this it is clear that even the higher transcendency characterizing the physical thing as determined by physics does not signify reaching out beyond the world which is for consciousness, or for every Ego functioning as a cognizing subject (singly or in an empathic context).
Indicated in a universal way, the situation is this, that the thinking pertaining to physics establishes itself on the foundation laid by natural experiencing (or by natural positings which it effects). Following the rational motives presented to it by the concatenations of experience, it is compelled to effect certain modes of conception, certain intentional constructions required by reason, and to effect them for the theoretical determination of sensuously experienced things. Precisely because of this there arises the contrast between the physical thing as object of the sensuous imaginatio simpliciter and the physical thing as object of the physicists intellectio; and, for the latter side, all the ideally inherent ontological formations produced by thinking accrue which become expressed in the concepts peculiar to physics and which draw, and should draw, their sense exclusively from the method of natural science.
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Note that Husserl uses transcendent in his own way. The object transcends all of its adumbrations as something like their intentional unity. I walk around the same tree but what is given to my eyes is constantly different as I keep looking at it in its singularity.
I wrote a little essay on my biolinked website that casts the embodied species-essence as the [ entangled ] genuine transcendental subject. I say that we are forced by logical decency to 'reify' it in the sense of understanding it as flesh in an encompassing world. Möbius striptease.
Subjectivity is meaningless apart from embodiment in an environment. The whole tradition of methodological solipsism (Hume, Kant, ...) absurdly makes the sense organs their own product and misses that the intelligibly of a subject which is only given a mediated reality depends upon taking ordinary reality as unmediated and mostly trustworthy.
The task is to do justice to the genuine importance and even centrality of subjectivity without going too far and talking nonsense.
I like the quote from Genesis. Timebinding sentient mud. As Feuerbach saw, the qualities of reason are not-so-coincidentally the qualities of God. [He also saw the importance of sensation and how the individual mattered even though thinking is essentially done trans-individually (by the inherited software or ghosts.)]
['Theology itself is God']
Our flesh has evolved so that we are capable of hosting a kind of immortal time-binding 'species self' ('reason') that depends on no particular body but very much depends on bodies in general. Human culture runs on human flesh. Immortal ontology needs a series of mortal ontologists as hosts.
Ok. One problem solved. The second just says the first should not be allowed.
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It is clear that the physical thing determined by physics as obviously something transcendent yet at the same time does not signify reaching out beyond the world which is for consciousness .disregards the concept of immanence, insofar as the domain in question herein, is determined physical things.
How does that which is made known in intensional unities pertaining to mental processes of consciousness, signifying a conjunction with such processes, have at the same time a higher transcendent characterization? There is no real difficulty, as long as one understands the use of transcendent as a characterization under certain conditions, conforms to the notion of transcendental characterization under generally similar conditions, albeit from a greater specificity regarding the method for appearance-processes, re: A288/B344.
Nahhhh .the real problem arises from the former, transcendent, characterizes determinations by physics hence contained in consciousness, whereas the latter, transcendental, denies the very possibility of any determination, hence to consciousness.
Husserl justifies the noumena Kant prohibits, by assigning a different quality and domain to transcendental logic.
I see. When I read your remark about not needing a genesis hypothesis, I was reminded of Laplace's well-known rejoinder that his mathematical Science intentionally avoided any supernatural theories*1. Hence, my questions about alternative theories of origins --- other than "it is what it is". In the year 1784, Laplace could reasonably assume that the logical structure of the material world just exists eternally, with no need for an origin story. But today, our sky-watching scientists have inadvertently reopened the original can of worms, with their mathematical evidence for a time with no time or space --- nothing to measure. Thus, raising philosophical "why?" questions, where Laplace only saw practical "how?" questions.
Although I respect your Buddhist avoidance of vexing ultimate metaphysical questions --- focusing instead on proximate reflective Psychology --- my own approach to philosophy is closer to Cosmology than to Theology. So, I wasn't thinking in terms of traditional pre-scientific magic myths to explain how we came to be sentient beings in a world of both suffering and flourishing. Instead, I'm intrigued by the failure of scientists to devise plausible explanations for the contingent existence of the world. Multiverse & Many Worlds & Inflation theories merely assume, as did Laplace, that the temporal material world just-is (Nontology?), needing no further elucidation.
But philosophy is all about such imponderables, taking nothing for granted. So, for me, it's just a question of impractical curiosity : "Why" questions are about Purpose & Causation & Reason. Any answer to such queries is not likely to end the suffering of sentient creatures*2, but it allows us to scratch the itch of observations without reasons ; just irksome never-ending ellipsis . . . . .
For example, why not accept sensory Phenomena as-is, without grasping for extra-sensory Noumena? The elusive butterfly of imagination. Pragmatic scientists may be satisfied with naming what meets the eye, but philosophers are tantalized by what is not apparent, but seems to be logically necessary. For example, an on-going physical world without an initial impetus to impart momentum. Is without ought.
I doubt that conjuring hypothetical explanations for the existence of the world is beyond your capacity. It's just a story to give meaning to the ellipsis. What's hard is actually conjuring a world from nothing. How could that happen? My un-scientific hypothesis begins with "let there be information (logic, form, causation)". :smile:
*1. Laplace's Mathematical World :
"a famous statement by the French mathematician Laplace is constantly misused to buttress atheism. On being asked by Napoleon where God fitted into his mathematical work, Laplace, quite correctly, replied: 'Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.' Of course God did not appear in Laplace's mathematical description of how things work, just as Mr. Ford would not appear in a scientific description of the laws of internal combustion. But what does that prove? That Henry Ford did not exist? Clearly not. Neither does such an argument prove that God does not exist. Austin Farrer comments on the Laplace incident as follows:'Since God is not a rule built into the action of forces, nor is he a block of force; no sentence about God can play a part in physics or astronomy ..
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/Laplace.html
*2. How do animals deal with suffering?
In simpler animals with small numbers of neurons, such signals activate behaviors through reflex actions that are tuned to escape or defend against harm. In larger-brained animals, things get considerably more complicated.
https://www.aaas.org/why-do-animals-experience-suffering
Note -- In humans, we often treat our suffering by thinking about something else. Psychogenic pain can be ameliorated by "going to your happy place". Meditation & Prayer may be means of avoiding conscious awareness of suffering, by distracting attention from bodily sensations to dis-embodied imagination. Temporarily insentient.
While Husserl himself may not be entirely consistent or definite in his meaning, in my experience those strongly committed to some kind of 'indirect realist' dualism (as perhaps you are) have trouble understanding what I'd call a phenomenological direct realism, which is not naive but sophisticated, as in the Hegelian reaction to the absurdity of a Reality that is essentially hidden from us. Kant makes the sense organs their own product. He's still a genius, but like all of us mortals (and like Husserl), there are blunders and rough edges.
I still very much stand with the critical spirit of Kant (as opposed to the metaphysical trying to save the essence of his religion somehow.) The gist worth polishing is, in my view, roughly an anthropocentric ontology that sees how easily humans spew out stuff that sounds good but is semantically challenged, museum of round squares and fuzzy liquids, magical gems like the cognition of objects as they 'really' are apart from human cognition, or their description as they are apart from all description. We know nothing of a world apart from the one given to our timebinding cultural flesh, though this same flesh can daydream about pure ur-matter or pure fleshless subjectivity, forgetting itself as a condition of possibility for that daydream -- often for 'good' reasons in a practical sense where the individual subject is usefully transparent.
Which reflects back on that age-old dilemma .the body is certainly necessary, but it is not itself sufficient for such subjectivity. What is given to the cultural flesh is useless without that which has the capacity to do something with it, and even if cultural flesh is merely a euphemism for the brain, the knowledge how regarding subjectivity, is still as missing as it ever was.
I get my realism directly, Im here to tell ya, got the scars and assorted blemishes to prove it, which is very much the same as reality not being hidden from me. How it is understood may be incorrect, but I can still go through the motions.
Yes. We humans reify our own subjective perspective with the noun label "Self". Since the Self exists invisibly & implicitly inside a vehicle of mud matter, we have no cause to worry about its substance or provenance : the Self is simply Me, and always has been. Moreover, my embodiment is known directly via internal perception (proprioception -- the sense of self-ownership).
What is cause for questioning though is other beings that behave as-if they know what they are doing (self-awareness). Yet, we don't know what is going on inside that other animal, so we cannot experience its self-sensation or self-concept first-hand. But, we can reason that, due to superficial similarities in flesh & behavior, the other body must also possess a motivating Self : a source of causal Will power, to move & guide the body toward its own self-interest within the non-self environment.
Acknowledgement of that other Self/Soul obligates us to treat its mud-made apparatus as-if it too represents an invisible Subjective experiencer of objective Reality. Thus the moral rule of "do unto other selves as-if they are your-own-self". Morally, the immaterial sensing Self is more important than the animated body, but since the essence is dependent upon the substance, we have no alternative to treating Body & Self as a unique composite entity : matter/life, brain/mind.
However, we learn from scientific experience that dissection of a frog results in cessation of froginess. So, we induct a general rule that body/self is an integrated system, with holistic qualities (Life & Mind) that don't exist, in any meaningful sense, in the isolated body parts. The matter is still there, but where did the mind, self, soul disappear to? The Body without the Self is simply meaningless meat. Yet, some imagine that the meat is the more important partner in the Game of Life. :smile:
PS___But important to whom : the Self, the Body, or the Other?
:up: I agree.
I can only aspire not to be stupid about it, and hope that I'm not being (too) stupid about it. :smile:
Nice. Ever look into Meillassoux ? I disagree with him, but he's fascinating.
In this book, Meillassoux argues that post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by what he calls "correlationism", the theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans. In Meillassoux's view, this theory allows philosophy to avoid the problem of how to describe the world as it really is independent of human knowledge. He terms this reality independent of human knowledge as the "ancestral" realm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux
Perhaps Meillassoux is correct in France, where the influence of Heidegger is strong. But in my experience our (?) correlationism is not subjective enough for some and not objective enough for others. As I see it, I'm a true empiricist. I know nothing of experience independent of this mortal flesh --of experience without an experiencer. Though I naturally model the world in terms of objects that will survive me, remaining mostly as they are for humans that survive me.
In my view, the self is primarily and not incidentally flesh. But (to be fair), the timebinding cultural aspect of the self, largely its linguistic aspect, is a graveleaping ghost. Metaphorically speaking, this or that individual body is its temporary host. As a philosopher, I, as mortal self, take up the grand conversation as I inherit it and hopefully push it along, leave a worthy footnote. We seem to operate both cooperatively and adversarially. We cooperate by challenging one another in rationality's second-order ontological tradition. We expect to be corrected. We expect to synthesize various partial truths into a less partial truth, etc.
Quoting Gnomon
:up:
I agree in the sense that Milton said that bookburning was worse than murder. I don't think the human spirit is truly immaterial anymore than our data on the cloud is. But it is so mobile, leaping from server to server, that it's as thin as the air that rattles the leaves on the trees. The philosopher learns how to die by learning how to live more and more in Popper's World 3 or its analogue. Disidentification with the petty self looks to be an honorable flight from death into the only plausible (and only relative) immortality.
I think the self is composite in the sense of having different aspects. As I see it, all reality is one in some important sense. But as practical sense-making beings we need our distinctions, our imaginary atomizations (useful fictions).
Just to be clear, I don't deny the strangeness of subjectivity. We aren't just meat. The world 'depends' in an elusive way on our subjectivity.
At the moment, I like to think of consciousness as the being of the world for an individual subject. I am aware of the world and not of my image of the world. Others who doubt my claims may talk of my perspective. This metaphor is reasonable. We all look on the same world through or with eyes that are in different places. What I think we can't talk about is the world as it is apart from us. We know nothing of such an entity. It's a mere fantasy.
But this does not make the world-for-us a mere dream, for our subjectivity only makes sense if understood as localized in world-encompassed flesh. Hence the radical bone-deep entanglement of subject and object and something like Hegelian direct realism.
Ehhhh ..subjectivity is just another in a series of useful fictions and makes sense only in speculative metaphysics, a useful fiction which has its location in pure reason, a useless fiction itself .and the fictional circle is enlarged and self-sustained by the quantity of useful fictions contained by it. As such, its locality is irrelevant .even metaphorically .when elucidation of its purpose is all that can be expected of it.
Quoting Janus
Aye. You, me, and hopefully all those who rise to the height of speculation.
It's hard to make sense of your talk of all of those useless fictions. Is anything real ? If not, then 'fiction' is meaningless.
Are you really (earnestly) claiming that human bodies experiencing the world aren't real ? What can 'real' even mean in such a context?
Of course. Just shouldnt mix the empirically real with the logically valid.
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Human bodies are real;
Experience is a condition of an intelligent subject;
The body is not an intelligent subject;
Bodies do not experience.
OK. I take it that you endorse something like an [s]immaterial[/s] discursive subject ?
Correlated with the body ? Or what ?
Speaking more carefully, I'd say the subject is just a person, a total human being. We typically say a person 'has' a body because of our profound timebinding conceptuality and, as Brandom takes from Kant, the profound normativity of the discursive subject. Basically the personal subject lives, as discursive and rational, in a ( normative ) space of reasons.
So I'll concede that, strictly speaking, bodies do not experience.
Poetically expressed. But I'm not sure what you are implying. "Graveleaping ghost" sounds like reincarnation. I've seen that notion portrayed fictionally in movies : for example a man's soul gets transplanted into a woman's body, and has to learn to deal (comically) with the different physicality of its new host. But I'm not aware of any real-world souls escaping the flesh prison, and taking up residence in some other soul's body. Such ideas make amusing fiction & fantasy, but is there a factual basis? Is my soulful dog the new body of an expired blues musician? If so, how would I know?
Of course cultural immortality is a common way to speak of a writer's or artist's mind, as incarnated in objective forms, continuing to "live-on" in the minds of other embodied souls. But such an unexperienced "life" may be cold comfort to the dead or disembodied soul, with no sensory organs plugged into the non-self system. :smile:
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.
? Woody Allen
And of course that's precisely what I'm referring to.
Quoting Gnomon
The issue is perhaps whether one identifies more with the cultural self or its host. To read a great writer is to assimilate, to some degree, the spirit crystallized in the work. I think the marks are themselves 'dead,' but as traces of life they can guide living flesh [or the discursive normative self 'inside' this flesh ] to the same insights that inspired their inscription.
Like anyone, I'm attached to my own flesh. But I can make a respectable empathetic leap as I imagine a young man, with fresh sense organs [my eyesight ain't what it used to be], coming to certain glorious realizations all over again. Maybe, if the gods love me [just an expression --- if I'm lucky, I mean ] , I can even contribute a little footnote to the canon of worthy traces, a slight clarification of the essentially social and universal ontological enterprise -- a noble-seeming aspiration at least.
So no subject/object dualism?
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So tacit acknowledgement of subject/object dualism?
There is no right or wrong here. Just whatever one favors, er ..subjectively.
I am comfortable distinguishing between persons and their encompassing world. But it seems that the world is only for or through such persons. We know nothing about a human-independent world anyway. Folks talk of round squares, to be sure. They abstract/ignore 'functioning subjectivity' within this same 'functioning subjectivity.' In other words, as living persons they fantasize about a world without living persons, but naturally in terms of how that world is given to the human nervous system -- in terms of their experience as living persons in the familiar (life-)world.
Note that the world is independent of any particular individual subject (my mother was here before me), but not of all of them at once. So my 'transcendental ego' is the entire human species.
Do these not contradict each other? Or, how do these not contradict each other? Can a thing be both for and through, and independent of that for which it is for and through?
To whose transcendental ego have you favored as your own?
I use the word 'entangled.' It looks to me like a Mobius strip. What's weird about my view is its stubborn and intense anthropocentrism. Apparently I disagree with early Husserl here in a serious way. It's not about cheerleading the species but rather a fidelity to a genuine empiricism. We are humans, and if roses look red to us...then they just are bloody red. Folks can talk of round squares and 'seeing around' human seeing. We both like Kant. We both know how easy it is to talk nonsense without realizing it. And I am aware that I'm on the edge here myself, trying to juggle hatchets and alligators.
We have no possible experience of world without us. Tautological. The only world that wecan speak about meaningfully (without bluffing) is the one that we've seen with or through our sense organs and timebinding concepts --- the lifeworld.
The donut and the donut hole exist simultaneously and interdependently. This seems to me at the moment like the best way to do justice to both the subject and the object -- and to avoid the absurdities resulting from treating either as absolute or unfounded.
Feuerbach, following Hegel, perhaps demystifying Hegel, writes pretty well on this stuff. The main idea, beyond our sharing the same sense organs and mammalian feelings, is that we are symbolic-cultural beings. As Husserl puts it, we have categorial intuition. I see an apple as an apple, not as a blob of red. I hear my mom call, not indeterminate noise. Though I can also hear a noise as indeterminate. ' I heard the strangest noise.' We swim in conceptuality like fish in water. And we also live and move and have our being in normativity. We pay debts, keep promises, and keep our stories, try to agree with ourselves at least if not with others. We are fundamentally discursive, temporal, and normative beings. We are also profoundly social, and 'I' am largely 'we,' perhaps even primarily the 'we' of hundreds of long [not-so-]gone generations in terms of the changes they wrought on my current concept system -- the hand-me-down intelligible-discursive structure of my lifeworld even. As Heidegger puts it, the living past leaps ahead as the character of our expectant interpretation. Thrown projection.
Note that the local subject (individual person) matters (Dramaturgical Ontology), but it depends on its community, at least to become a discursive normative being, after which it might become a hermit and write ontology to be published posthumously (or thrown in the fire every morning).
Im a firm supporter of the relation between the human intellect, and the method by which the world is understood by means of it. Its not weird at all, its impossible that is could be otherwise.
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YIKES!!! A Young Hegelian?!?! Schopenhaurs favorite targets, and he twerent proper gentlemanly about it, neither.
:up:
Well I shouldn't be surprised. I think we both appreciate Kant and (in my case, anyway) the Kantian 'intention' or project in general. Positivism and phenomenology are 'basically' Kantian, seems to me. Perhaps all [ critical ] philosophy is.
Quoting Mww
Feuerbach is underrated, I think.
Usually philosophy is critical of something, but Kantian philosophy on the other hand, is critical of philosophy itself. Or maybe the general metaphysical discipline specifically.
Positivism, that is plain ol basic positivism, re: Compte, 1844, if it actually does deny knowledge not derived from experience, cannot be Kantian.
Phenomenology ..ehhhhh, I dunno. Not sure whether, or even how, the Brentano/Husserl doctrine relates to Kantian phenomenalism. I think the doctrine of intentionality towards an object attributes more to human intelligence than it deserves, beside the fact the origin and methodological placement of Kantian phenomena is not a conscious state of the subject, whereas in Brentano/Husserl it is insofar as it is much more related to experience itself.
Disclaimer: I have but cursory familiarity with those P philosophies. Maybe just enough to get me into trouble if I say too much.
Well I admit I'm speaking a high and fuzzy level of generality. But I take critical philosophy to be interested in articulating the limits of speculation, the boundary between sense and nonsense.
I actually had the later positivists (Vienna circle) in mind. I think Popper's great, and he was on its circumference, reliably sober and realistic, in my view, while they sometimes went too far.
Husserl: the tricky thing is that experience in a direct realist framework is just being. But Husserl is not simply or obviously or consistently a direct realist. (I can't help but blur him with Heidegger, too, and also keep from doing my own damned ontology.) And I'm only looking more deeply into him recently. So I don't pretend to expertise. Extremely prolific/creative guy. I can say that much.
Cool. Id go as far as to take it a step further, and call it the limits of reason. But then, I suppose speculation presupposes reason, so .close enough.
:up:
Yours may be better. I also like to think about critical rationality explicating its own nature. The self-investigation of reason, which is naturally applied to this very investigation. Feedback. It's very beautiful and difficult and 'foolish.' One 'should' get rich using intelligence more productively. But I can't help it. Some people gotta play saxophone. I gotta try to do philosophy.
Feedback. The charitable expression of circularity, which is indeed foolish, yet at the same time, inescapable. Using reason to investigate reason. Like .no problem there, right?
Humans. The only species known to confuse themselves and simultaneously insist theyre not.
(Sigh)
:up:
Hermeneutic circle comes to mind. Also early Heidegger's talk on 'prescience' about coming into the circle the right way. It'd be weird maybe if first philosophy wasn't circular.
Sorry, I persist in giving you credit for more explanatory powers than your modest evasion would imply.
Speaking of persistence in the form of general "existence" --- in the context of Phenomena and Noumena --- I just read the chapter In Search of Reality in Charles Pinter's Mind & Cosmic Order. On the topic of Facts, he says "our words cannot refer to things in the world, because those things don't really exist in the world. They only exist when they have been individuated, separated out, and noted in mind". (Internal Realism : word to world mapping)
That would make sense to me if he had said "in my world model". But the quote sounds like the counter-intuitive Idealist notion that there is no objective "real" world out there, only a subjective "ideal" model in symbolizing minds. Hence, Idealism seems to use the word "exist" differently from the usual objective meaning. Perhaps, "to be" from God's cosmic perspective vs "being" as seen from my local point of view.
Pinter goes on to note that "commonsense wisdom holds the opposite view : it holds that facts exist in the universe regardless of whether anyone notices them . . ." That is indeed my own sense of the word "to exist" : being a thing in the territory prior to becoming noted in a map. Is that disparity between "commonsense" existence and "idealistic" existence defined in the literature of Idealism? Is there a more accurate term of being to distinguish between Noumenal existence versus Phenomenal extant?
I understand that things don't exist for me --- in my imaginary world model --- until I have named them with a label attached to a personal meaning. However, my "commonsense" model of reality includes animals of the canine species, even before any human had named that type of animated matter as "canus" or "dog". For example, I assume that there were large ruminants --- that we now call "moose" roaming the American continent long before the so-called Indians migrated into their territory, and labeled that species as "moosu" (twig-eater).
Are Idealists, like Pinter & Kastrup, saying that there was no such thing (fact) as a Moose --- in the mind-independent world --- until a classifying human mind realized its existence? Pinter says that "the mind-independent world is not naturally divided into individual parts". Yet Plato's notion of "carving nature at its joints" seems to assume that the division into parts pre-existed the carving by a mind. Am I missing something here?
Even though my Information-centric world-model is similar in some ways to Platonic Idealism, it does not deny the existence of human-mind-independent Reality. Instead, it attempts to "explain the existence of the world" in terms of shape-shifting Forms that are (exist) both real and ideal, both Phenomenal and Noumenal. Does that notion of straddling the subjective & objective worlds make any sense to you? :smile:
BEING :
[i]In my own theorizing there is one universal principle that subsumes all others, including Consciousness : essential Existence. Among those philosophical musings, I refer to the "unit of existence" with the absolute singular term "BEING" as contrasted with the plurality of contingent "beings" and things and properties. By BEING I mean the ultimate ground of being, which is simply the power to exist, and the power to create thing-beings.
Note : Real & Ideal are modes of being. BEING, the power to exist, is the source & cause of Reality and Ideality. BEING is eternal, undivided and static, but once divided into Real/Ideal, it becomes our dynamic Reality.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
"I'm afraid that explaining the existence of the world is quite beyond my capacity." Quixodian
Speaking of persistence in the form of general "existence" --- in the context of Phenomena and Noumena --- I just read the chapter In Search of Reality in Charles Pinter's Mind & Cosmic Order. On the topic of Facts, he says "our words cannot refer to things in the world, because those things don't really exist in the world. They only exist when they have been individuated, separated out, and noted in mind". (Internal Realism : word to world mapping) --- Gnomon
As I continued to read the Facts and Information chapter, I began to see how Pinter was using the term "exist" in his idealistic worldview. First, he makes the same differentiation as I do, between Shannon's use of "information" --- defining the physical carrier instead of the metaphysical content of a message --- and the traditional meaning of the word as "informative" (meaningful) content. He says "wherever there is some variation or modulation of a physical medium, there is potential information". {my bold} Then he further distinguishes the physical carrier (e.g. energy pulses) from the metaphysical content (meaning). "We shall regard information as a non-material 'something' "
Pinter goes on to define "Form" (the root of information) in terms of Structure : "aspects of an object that are accessible only to observers able to see in Gestalts". That is, to separate the meaningful Pattern from the noisy foggy background. Next comes the introduction of substance/property dualism : "every fact consists of two separate pieces of reality". One piece is A> the general material-world background --- including the not yet discerned Object --- and B> the specific logical structure (Form) that the observer interprets as meaningful to the Self.
Further down, he notes that things "outside the view of any sentient observer are latent and unrealized. They become actualized when living observers individuate them by assigning features and structure to them, and perceiving them as wholes". {my bold} I would prefer to substitute "conceiving" as the interpretation of parts into wholes (Gestalt images). "Objects do not exist outside the purview of minds" That is not a universal Ontology, but a personal meaning of Being.
Next, he makes the assertion that I found counter-intuitive : "If this [gestalt] information is absent from the universe, then the object does not exist" {my bracket} It does not exist for the viewer until defined (from meaningless background) by an act of conception. The brain perceives raw data, which the mind conceives into personally meaningful Gestalts (words). "To put it another way, the information which brings an object or fact out of the background in which it is immersed . . ."
As I understand his view of contingent "existence", clumps of matter (e.g. stars) only exist as a noisy meaningless background, but the concept of a star (Gestalt object) comes into existence when an observing sentient Mind defines it as a particular thing. An object may have potential Form when unobserved, but it only takes on actual formal Meaning in the mind of a Subject.
"Prior to the existence of conscious awareness, there were physical processes, but they were virtual [potential] and not actual because they were not impressed on any aware observer". Of course, that statement of fact is true only if you ignore the contribution of Berkeley's universal Observer. But that outside awareness may be the only way to "explain the existence of the world", as defined against the background of nothingness. :smile:
A Precis of Enformationism :
"This is a powerful and far-reaching proposal. What it claims is that all of reality is divided into two very different branches. There is the purely material aspect of reality which encompasses matter and energy playing by the rules of physics. In addition, there is information --- or rather knowledge --- which is immaterial . . . ." ----Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order
Note 1 --- BothAnd dualism = material & immaterial exist, but in different forms : substance + property
Note 2 --- Monistic Existence = both Physical and Metaphysical = universal Ontology
Note 3 --- The non-traditional vocabulary & counter-intuitive nature of this BothAnd worldview makes it difficult to convey without lots of parenthetical diversions.
DO YOU PERCEIVE A CAMOUFLAGE BACKGROUND OR CONCEIVE A "DAZZLE" OF ZEBRAS ?