History of contemporary psychology
Prelude (From Kant to Taylor)
Taylor has argued that practical reason has fallen into disrepute as the result of
modernity’s moral skepticism (the fact that moral claims lack validity and cannot be
arbitrated by reason) and been displaced by the epistemological (not what is known but
how it is known). Taylor’s attempt to recover a role for practical reason is then a way of
undercutting the priority of the epistemological while it is charged with demonstrating
and clarifying the implicit assumptions held inviolable by all interlocutors of a position.
What is remarkable about Taylor’s uncovering of practical reason is that he begins with
Mill’s claim that question of ends are never amenable to proof but merely of assent or
dissent and hence practical reason is a matter that follows an ad hominem rather than
apodictic model of reason. As a critique of Kant might note, what is at stake in practical
reason is the self.
Sensitive to the naturalistic fallacy (deriving “ought” from “is”), Taylor argues that
moral claims, claims of practical reason, are other than what we desire, or believe to
desire, but rather what we are committed to in his notion of “strong evaluation”. Thus,
Mill’s claim that assertions of assent or dissent about questions of ends are not weakly ad
hominem in the sense it is these and not those ends we desire and hence cannot reason
about, for showing this does nothing to settle the question of whether or not we ought to
desire these but not those ends. As Taylor notes, Mill understood the naturalistic fallacy
well-enough and hence appealed to the intuition of competent judges to settle the
question of the ends of desire. What Mill understood well-enough was that reason cannot
resolve the conflict, or skepticism, or moral ends in apodictic terms – and hence he turned
to the ad hominem argument. But Taylor asks why Mill did so and he argues that Mill as
the inheritor of the Enlightenment relied on naturalism to provide an apodictic model of
moral discourse including, paradoxically perhaps (subjectivism), our natural desires. In
other words, naturalism was extended to include the subject’s desires and attitudes
towards things which while this seemed a natural progression (to include desires among
the things in this world that are “given”) does not mean, as Taylor notes, that the fact of
desire is more right than any other desire.
The argument against naturalism derives in large part from examination of our actual
practices of moral deliberation involving discourses which are never neutral regarding
our desires or attitudes (which was of course Mill’s justification for invoking the ad
hominem argument). Or to move straight to Taylor’s question, “Can a naturalist
epistemology, invoking metaphysics of neutrality, override our self-understanding in
strong evaluative terms?” The claim that it can and does is, according to Taylor, one
reason for our contemporary derision of subjectivism and its accompanying moral
skepticism. Naturalism dismisses the ad hominem argument and advocates an apodictic
model of reason that would totally mischaracterize the human situation as understood in
terms of traditionally meaningful practices and discourses inescapably strongly
evaluative and purposive. Of course this is in contrast with the 19th c. which already
demarcated between the natural and human sciences, a distinction which has in many
ways been subject to the overriding power of epistemology as the only model of reason
which can withstand the parochialism of traditionalism and the prejudicial attitudes of a
peculiar subjectivist perspective on the world. Mill’s ad hominem argument for
utilitarianism was intended to by-pass any such traditionalism and subjectivism with an
appeal to the (“given”) nature of human desire and, presumably, this has been
utilitarianism’s strength namely in carrying foundationalism into the explanation of
human nature and along with it also procedural reason (into the moral domain). Yet
during this same century the evident ubiquity of ethical disagreement also led to the
embrace of ethical relativism.
According to Taylor the demand that the apodictic model of procedural reason arbitrate
moral claims is deeply mistaken precisely because the assumption is that arguments have
criteria with the result that there can be no incommensurable positions. Taylor,
MacIntyre, and others have argued that there are no such criteria but rather any effort to
evaluate different moral stances or perspective always relies on some gain in historical
understanding. Something very similar is at stake in various post-modern writers such as
Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault. Taylor sets out three arguments in support to the claim
that the foundationalist thesis is deeply mistaken in its appeal to criteria, and the effort to
eliminate ad hominem models (i.e., empiricist) of practical reason.
1. Comparative judgments do not so much rely on criteria or invariant standards but
on comparison or on relations among rival positions in evaluating anomalies.
2. Comparative judgments are transitional in that they are essentially historical
judgments in evaluating rival positions. Here we find the 17th c. a distinction
between understanding and explanation. The turn towards mechanism/Nature was
deemed to require a very different sense of explanation than say the place of
things in the meaningful order of Nature which relied on understanding. PreEnlightenment (Aristotelian) thinking requires no such distinction. However, this
distinction between explanation and understanding yields even greater skepticism
with respect to moral life even as it also demands that we think relationally about
incommensurability such that we gain clarity in our pre-understanding and so
extent our knowledge of the connections between incommensurables. Moreover,
in thinking relationally we not only extend our grasp of knowledge among
incommensurables we also extend our understanding of our purposes and
effective practices (without invoking criteria). Thus while Taylor is sympathetic
to, for example, Kuhn’s claim that there is no rational justification of transitions
between incommensurables, Taylor also rejects radical incommensurability as the
foundationalist account would have it. The risk here is that skepticism which
accompanies explanation at the level of life as lived, also risks irrationalism in
understanding historical transitions. But the connection between understanding
and practice means that whenever we increase our social practices we also gain in
knowledge.
3. Taylor, like Kant, begins phenomenologically, within human life, wherein
understanding and practice dovetail each other. Understanding is enabling not in
the sense that we are trying to convince others to change their minds but to show
others that whatever assumptions they (others) adhere to cannot account for what
we are urging in some moral domain. Incommensurability is then to be
understood relationally in the sense that these are to be understood historically as
transition between incommensurables, and as making explicit what was implicit
in pre-understanding within traditions (immanent critique). Indeed, one such
preconception that has confused our understanding and fostered skepticism is the
foundationalist view of life as a closed system. But history and life knows no such
a closed system. Not merely for the history of scientific theory but especially in
the moral domain of life. As Taylor points out however none of this implies that
there may well be disputes to that cannot be so resolved (i.e., ad hominem) and
hence may well not allow for arbitration.
4. Obviously all efforts to uncover and make explicit assumptions in one’s
interlocutor position assume that interlocutors in a dispute do share some
understanding. Yet there is also a more radical move wherein there is no such
sharing and where a transition between rival in a dispute involves some errorreducing move. Here the direction of the argument is reversed. Whereas from a
foundationalist perspective transition is always a gain (whereas the reverse is not
so), if the transition is one of reducing error then it is a gain.
In practical reason we identify a tension then try to understand that tension by dissipating
a confusion which is due to some neglect in self-understanding. Understanding the
tension re-situates the tension in making explicit some assumption, worn feelings,
overlooked significances etc. I come to see the situation differently than I did before this
self-understanding and hence the situation changes in some ways (see Taylor, 1985, Ch 2
in Phil Papers Volume 1: Agency and Language). .
In a way practical arguments (reason) are always ad hominem arguments. These
arguments appeal to what the opponent is already committed to, perhaps implicitly, or at
least what they cannot repudiate. The fact that we cannot convince people of the value of
a premise may of course be grounds for despair and indeed practical reason may be
powerless to resolve such disputes.
We can however expand the notion of practical argument by
(1) identifying a common premise which would allow for debate especially in the
light of history, and
(2) even where there is no such common premise, we might claim that a transition
from one premise to another is a gain, and both these are ad hominem.
Of course, just as we are never fully rational we never fully that an argument is true
simpliciter. What we can claim is that an argument is a better account, and hence
practical arguments are always comparative, in that it brings to light what the interlocutor
cannot repudiate. A new account can make better sense of difficulties confronting
alternative accounts, can explain what other accounts cannot, and is more error reducing
than other accounts. Hence what practical reason attempts is to make implicit premises
explicit, discern contradictions, and bring our facts that are seemingly anomalous. All of
which extends the range of rational argument, assuming we appreciate that not all
disputes are about fully explicit positions which they never are.
Even so not all disputes can be arbitrated in reason. Relativism has something going for it
insofar as diversity and mutually incomprehensibility do mark moralities. For example
we may understand little of human sacrifices and it is only our sophisticated pluralism
that prevents us from making devastating judgments. Hence understanding may not be
universal and may be markedly different in different cultures. Especially science and
technology seem enormously influential compared to traditional sufficiency of reflection,
contemplation, or understanding. Making and doing as a result of knowledge so changes
our world as to alter whole ways of living. Yet we should not give up on reason in being
intimidated by distance of incomprehensibility as grounds for adopting relativism.
Perhaps most relevant today is the difference in culture based on distance of cosmology.
But even here even if we could demonstrate say the universality of individual rights, we
may also lose something in defending universalism (equality) but this does not mean we
should take an easy position on agnostic relativism. Moral arguments in our day lead to
skepticism precisely because we adhere to relativism in grounding the way things are (ad
hominem a la Mill). Our naturalist temper is hostile to strong evaluation and hence to
making any ad hominem arguments, instead we simply assume relativism in maintaining
that there are cultural social and historical differences – an instance of the naturalistic
fallacy.
Along with the adherence to naturalism comes the rejection of ad hominem arguments as
illegitimate (this is part of universalism-relativism continuum). We loath to reason about
fundamental commitments for then we would have to acknowledge that truth is
something asserted/maintained. We limit reason for the sake of the empirical natural
world as being the way it is…encapsulated universal rights even as we hold to the
superiority of knowledge. As if universal rights were itself a product of empirical
knowledge. This knowledge invokes foundationalism which deems reason to be reason
about standards, criteria based on fully explicit positions and yielding absolute judgments
of adequacy. But all this makes reason incomprehensible (limits of reason) insofar as
reason is collapsed unto explanation.
Problem of other minds (Lecture 1)
You are talking to a friend; the talk is animated and involves all sorts of twists and turns
in the conversation. Suddenly the conversation begins to stray into idle chatter and your
attention wanders. But not entirely and with half your mind can still follow the talk but
the other half of your mind is in a mood of detachment staring at the face and body of
your friend as he talks. There is nothing odd about this; his is the same face, familiar and
beloved as always. It is only that in looking at him your own mind has been invaded by
an unusual question. His lips move, his eyes gleam, and his limbs move (gesture) all of
which is quite usual. But your mind suddenly places these ordinary facts in a strange
light…”is he really conscious behind all this physical appearing?” We all have these
moments of passing schizophrenia - and we do not attaché much importance to them. But
now consider that this passing mood is supported by a solid body of theory in
psychology. Thus, there are numerous psychologists, and philosophers, who maintain that
consciousness is something to be dispensed with in our explanations of human conduct.
These theories may vary a good deal but they have in common one feature: we can
proceed as if my consciousness of my friend does not exist and we find his bodily
movements sufficient for the purpose of understanding him.
Why do we have this strange fear of consciousness? Why are we so uneasy about
admitting consciousness as a clear fact in our human world? Of course, there is the
problem of “other minds” – after all I do not “see” the consciousness of my friend or
indeed my own consciousness; theory claims that consciousness is merely something I
infer from his bodily movements. As an empiricist I cannot treat consciousness (his or
my own) as a basic datum in my hard-headed explanations of his conduct. I need not
outright deny it of course but whenever my theoretical ingenuity can manage it, I must
proceed “as if” this consciousness is not there.
Now the problem of “other minds” is a strictly modern one (thus we do not find it among
the ancients or medievalists – whatever their other aberrations these older thinkers did not
doubt that we live in a world shared by our own and other minds (a “spiritual world”).
But in our modern age we feel compelled to raise doubts about our consciousness out of a
spirit of what we imagine is theoretical exactness.
But surely there is something a little strange and foolish about this flight from
consciousness. After all is consciousness is something we do expect to “see” in
others/ourselves even if it cannot be a datum of science. We are fully aware of the minds
of others in that we share in them. Other minds are fully a vital part of the flow of life
that surrounds and sustains us. We are surrounded by a life larger than ourselves and of
which we are an intimate part. Suppose for a moment, a moment of theoretical austerity,
that we commit ourselves only to a minimal theory “as if” we had no mind and were not
conscious but were only behaving bodies. Surely, this would be deranged, grotesque,
schizoid…especially in a moment of passion, care, concern…this borders on madness.
In short there is a gap between theory and life, between reason and life. We entertain
theories that we could not possibly live. Such gaps are not uncommon in our modern age
but the one concerning consciousness is particularly ominous…
For example when we examine the first 6 years of this new millennium we are confronted
by the nagging question of whether this civilization will survive (an old question). There
is an apocalyptic note to every news event we read or hear which we cannot seem to
escape. In fact, we seem in our culture to relish and indulge in this apocalypse (e.g., death
metal music) and we use it to camouflage all sorts of political pleading. Whether this fear
of the apocalypse is bogus or genuine it is revelatory; somehow it situates the past
century and the present one. After all it is a very different apocalypse that people feared
say in the year 1000!
What we now fear, at the turn of this millennium, are technology and science as central
cultural events that characterize “modernity”. When did this modernity begin? Historical
epochs merge into one another and it may be arbitrary to look for a beginning. Thus,
when did the middle ages begin? When did they end? There is no absolute point of
division between the past and the epochs that succeeded it. But there are times when we
see clearly that something new has arrived and this something is bound to change
humanity radically. I take the beginning of modernity to be the 17th c., the age that
initiated modern science and its accompanying technology, and it is these two, science
and technology, that characterize our modern age or what is sometimes called
“modernity”.
What is modern science? What is that “event” that has transformed human life in the 17th
c.? Whatever else science may be – and we will examine psychological science in some
depth – it is above all the power of the human mind, of human freedom and originality, to
construct concepts that are not merely passively found in nature but rather serve to
organize our experience of nature. The existence of a body of knowledge we call science,
and the activity of scientific inquiry (methods), is powerful evidence of the human beings
in their freedom (to create, construct and act); in short of their consciousness.
Yet there is a curious paradox here. The “new science” of the 17th c. began with
“mechanics” (meaning “many things” but above all decomposition, analysis, exact
measurement, etc.) which was central to modern physics (“classical mechanics”). But
mechanics soon became an ideology – mechanism – the human being is a machine just as
Nature/universe is a machine. As our molecules go so do we go; the person is the gene’s
way of making another gene! The human mind is, on this ideology, a passive and helpless
pawn pushed around by forces of nature; freedom is an illusion and the entire ideology
crescendos in the 19th c. in a pessimism that pervades the 20th c. psychological science (at
least to those who understand it).
No sooner had the new science of the 17th c. entered the world and it becomes dogged by
an ideology of scientism (its “shadow”). What is scientism (mechanism)? As a shadow of
science it is not identical to the real thing. Scientism is pseudo-science or misinterpreted
science drawing unwarranted conclusions/generalizations in pretending to be
“philosophical”. But scientism is not philosophy if by philosophy we mean the effort to
think soberly within the restrictions that human thought/reason/reflection must impose on
itself. Scientism is neither science nor philosophy – it is a modern malady – it is ideology.
It is an ideology like many ideologies is part of modernity. What is ideology?
The science which the 17th c sought was primarily physics/astronomy, namely the
understanding of Nature/physical nature. But as the science of nature blossoms, the
theories of the mind (now deemed to be a part of Nature) come to occupy philosophy in a
way that generates paradoxes. It is as if the thinkers who had formulated the dazzling
“new science” of nature (physics) were increasingly puzzled about the nature of the mind
that produced this new science. In the four centuries or so since the new science and
technology entered the Western world we have added immeasurably to our explanations
of the Nature even as our understanding of the human mind/consciousness which
produced this knowledge has become increasingly fragmentary and bizarre reaching a
point today where we are in danger of losing any intelligent grasp on the human mind
(consciousness) altogether.
I want to take a step backward and see how this situation came about. I am not going to
treat you with heavy historical detail (although I warn you that historical amnesia is
partly responsible for the current crisis of modernity - an age without consciousness is
also an age without history); I want to treat only sufficient history to serve my effort at a
thematic clarity – in relation to the science of psychology. I am not going to propose a
new theory of the mind – you can find that in various psychological specializations –
what I want to do is to simply lay hold of the fact that human consciousness has been lost
in the modern world (psychology).
Lecture 2: the new science
The 17th c. was a strange century. It bristles with energy and genius but also with
contradictions. However, it contained those contradictions and lived them in a way that
we conclude that they are contradictions only on hindsight. The century created what we
now know as modern science (which in some way has been as a great a revolution as has
befallen humankind and yet the minds of the individuals who created this science were all
firmly planted in the mind of God. It is necessary to begin with this salient fact.
The word revolution connotes violence but the revolution that was the beginning of
modern science was silent. As Nietzsche observes great revolutions in thinking come
“silently on dove’s feet”. In any case, the minds that originated modern science were
immersed in theology and indeed the age was itself saturated in theology.
Consider the three greatest of these scientific geniuses: Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.
They hardly viewed the world as our contemporary naturalists (say in the evolutionist
traditions) view the world/universe. Kepler’s mind was fascinated by spiritual or angelic
presences in the universe; while Galileo in his famous run-in with the church’s
inquisition suggests, as Bertolt Brecht’s play “Galileo” would depict it, that he was a
free-thinker, a dissident spirit in the style of the Enlightenment, yet Galileo would not
have recognized himself in that light. His writings move within the mind of God, and the
laws of nature he sought were for him the working of the divine mind in nature. Newton
perhaps the greatest of the three in bringing expression to the outlines of a mechanical
world-view that dominated Western science and technology to the present was a
man/mind reposed with in the prophesies of Daniel; on which he spend more time than he
did on mathematical physics. He left us a million and a half words on theology and in his
personal life he was a man of steady an untroubled faith.
Despite this theological centeredness (the entire 17th c. was intensely pious) these
founders of the new science were radically engaged in a way that would eventually tear
Western civilization away from its religious moorings. They called the science they were
creating “the new science” (however what they understood by this word “new” came to
be understood only 150 years later by the philosopher Immanuel Kant). For they were
deeply aware of their debt to the ancients: Euclid, Aristotle, Archimedes, and Pappus.
The science they created could not have been “radical” or revolutionary had it not drawn
on the ancients and medieval scholars. What T. S. Eliot said in the context of literature,
namely that original creation draws always upon tradition even when it shakes up and
transforms tradition, applies also to science. The whole body of science is a continuous
stream from the beginnings of human consciousness, and genuine scientific creation is
one that reaches most deeply into the body of this traditional thought in order to give it
new direction.
If they were traditionalists, these founders of the new sciences were also radicals and
rightly insisted on calling their science, the “new science”. But wherein did this newness
consists? It turns out that this is not an easy question to answer. In fact, we see that the
answer is not forthcoming until Kant but meanwhile I want to say a few words by way of
anticipation.
At first sight the newness of this new science was the fact that it was experimental.
Whereas the ancients contemplated/speculated, the moderns experimented. Of course, no
one experiments unless they also think about experimenting. If experimentation for these
early founders of the new science involved the construction of machines which allowed
for precise (quantitative) measurement (from the start science and technology go together
– thinking and doing), they were also re-constructing Creation as Nature, that is creation
as a machine. That is Nature itself must reflect the workings of the machines they
constructed – mechanics became part of physics and physics became the whole of the
new science. Nature became one interlocking machine – the machine of all machines.
What was so distinctive about mechanics that would give it such a special place?
Mechanics is a science that deals with matter at rest or in motion. But this was not the
matter that is sensuously and immediate before us, rather it is “matter” that has been
abstracted and schematized mathematically (physicalism). The new science was first of
all mathematical (the Renaissance recovered of Plato and his Pythagorean tradition) as
much as it was experimental. This notion of matter as mathematical is not insignificant
especially because on it hangs a philosophical lesson which is that the mind is central in
the creation of the new science: the evidence for a mechanistic view of Nature is the
mathematics that characterized the new science….and here is the first paradox that still
haunts us today, namely the mathematics of the new science is the human mind (human
consciousness) even as it gave rise to a mechanistic view of Nature which would
eventually deem the human mind as feeble and unfree (totally determined by the
mechanism that is nature).
Yet the founders of the new science felt no such uneasiness about the implications of
their mechanistic worldview (that mechanism would eventually also embrace the mind)
for their religious convictions. Indeed, they deemed this mechanistic view of Nature as
the way that God managed his universe. What more intelligent way to arrange matter and
the material universe than as a vast clockwork machine? The uneasiness about this
machine-as-Nature when it did come was primarily among philosophers.
The scientific effort to found mechanics as the basis for physics quickly passed into a
more general frame of mind – an attitude or disposition that the modern philosopher
Alfred Whitehead aptly labeled “scientific materialism”. This was the conviction that the
ultimate facts of Nature are bits of matter in space that all the phenomena of our
experience are to be explained in terms of bits of matter. These bits of matter had only the
properties that are in accord with mechanics: mass, extension, solidity, and movement in
space. All other qualities of experience suddenly acquired as curious status: indeed, it
seems rather curious that the nature of what we see/experience is not really there/real.
Here we have the foundationalism which would come to characterize what philosophy
later would call epistemology – and which I take to be the characteristic of “modernity”.
Scientific materialism despite of its inherent paradoxes (e.g. nature is not what it appears
to be – primary and secondary qualities – epistemology, and the mind is really not
free/creative - anthropology - but is merely a conglomerate of bits of matter) was to
become the dominant mentality for the next 300 years to the present. However, it was
not, and still is not, so much an explicit philosophy as it was an unspoken attitude, habit,
prejudice of mind. Even today, materialism is the unspoken basis of research and the
funding it receives. For the Christian believer of the 17th c. who was tempted by this
reductionist view of Nature as bits of matter moving in space, there was always the
exception, namely the soul. The soul was not a natural phenomenon; it stood outside
nature/universe. But of course the effect of the scientific materialism was to leave this
insubstantial soul precariously perched on the edge of matter in strange conjunction with
the body (which was clearly “matter”). This precarious perch of the nature of the soul
was to become very pronounced in the philosophy of the 17th c.
Finally, there is also the tension that suddenly emerged in the consciousness of this 17th
c. namely that while the century was theologically grounded in God, these founders of the
new science were discovering (uncovering) the strangeness of human presence in the
universe now conceived as the machine-of-Nature – that is, the new science was
discovering a vastness to the universe that was unimaginable to the medieval and ancient
scholars. Copernicus had dislodged for once and for all the earth, humanity from its
privileged position in the cosmos. Not just that we lost our position but also that in an
infinitely extending universe we seemed but random and accidental (incidental) beings.
We were not at the center and we were not at the edge: we were nowhere, just brute fact –
part of the “throw-ness” (as Heidegger calls it) of existence. This unbelievable fact led to
profound feelings of alienation perhaps best expressed by the greatest mind of the
century, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before
and after, the little space which I fill, and can even see, engulfed in the infinite
immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am
frightened, and I am astonished at being here rather than there, for there is no
reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me
here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?
The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me.
Alienation has become a dominant fact of modern life and of the 20th c. (perhaps
explaining why the concept of anxiety has become so pronounced psychology). Of
course, we have come to trivialize the meaning of “alienation” by customarily using for
social alienation as the early Marx. But the most profound form of alienation is cosmic
alienation inherent in our human consciousness of itself in relation to cosmic vastness.
As we became conscious of this vastness of the universe so we became troubled by our
being in it or part of it. Myth, magic, religion, and philosophy all seek to deal with this
condition in different ways. In point of fact, philosophy only began to take note of this
alienation in the 19th c when the structures of religion were pretty well eroded (with the
“death of God” and the resulting “perspectivalism”). Whether philosophy by itself as a
purely rational effort of mind can heal our alienation remains to be seen. Surely no one
cares much for philosophy today – remarkably because surely “scientific materialism”
that is characteristic of modern science is the ideology that made us astutely aware of but
offered no solution to our alienation.
All this is not the usually picture we get about the 17th c. Usually the 17th c. is seen as the
century of rationalism (Enlightenment), the shedding of a dogmatic past, the emergence
of the “new science” perhaps retaining some remnant of religion (supra-natural) which
would, however in the steady progressive march of science eliminate all such superstition
and assure the advancement of knowledge in order to bring about Francis Bacon’s
glorious vision of the betterment of humankind (we didn’t need Marx to tell us about that
utopia). But this view of a fixed line of progress is no longer valid. Every era has its own
aspirations and complexities; every era is whole and even with all the apparent
contradictions remains fertile. The line of progress that our historical consciousness has
projected is an abstraction and a construction that fits a certain telos (an ideology of
endless progress). The 17th c. was what it was and not some way-station between the
medieval period and our scientific age. History is itself fundamentally an adventure in
human consciousness and cannot be fixed in some abstract time-line. If I begin with the
17th c. it is because that age is not yet over and has not yet vanished; it is still present with
all its paradoxes and tensions, its uncertainties and malaise (malady) of our modern
consciousness. Indeed, perhaps at some future time we may regret that our minds are not
as Newton’s was preoccupied with the Prophesies of Daniel or some other religious
matter.
Lecture 3: Descartes
The alienation between us (our selves) and the machine-of-Nature - between subject and
object – is something the 17th c bequeathed our age. We sometimes think of this rift as a
Cartesian (subjective) whim but in fact the rift was one already put in place by the new
science – “scientific materialism” which then forced Descartes to make this split between
mind and body (that is, to rescue the mind). For consider, what is to become of me (my
consciousness and freedom) in a universe (Nature) wholly determined by law? Only
anguish, as Pascal lamented. No other species feels this anguish, or the implications of
this scientific materialism as do human beings who cannot find sufficiency in their
instincts, genes, or brains (the 20th c. notwithstanding).
But more than this insufficiency of instincts, the “I” that thinks also drags with it a
history/tradition, memories/hopes, feeling/emotions that I cannot separate from my
thinking. I am aware of all this in my body (as “lived”) which is the habitus wherein I
live. For eons the universe existed without me and will continue to do so without me, and
measured against the vastness of space and time, I am aware of my finitude – I will
vanish and this reality, of my finitude, is incomparable to any other. For what meaning
does my mortality (wealth, fame, fortune, etc. or lack thereof….) have in the vastness of
time and space? What meaning does my particularity have (in relation to others)? The
answer of the “new science” alienates me even more from others. There is no “I” without
this habitus – and it was Descartes who thought about this density of “I” and habitus
(embodiment, tradition, history, others, and the vastness of the universe in space and
time).
It was Descartes (1596-1650) who discerned in this density, this consciousness, my
consciousness (solitary) of the thinker sitting besides the fireplace alone in his
room…..paradoxically, this solitary consciousness is anything but solitary – for
Descartes was man of his time (passionate about mathematical reason and the new
science, a man who fought in the wars) a man of action. When he goes off at age 33 to a
bar in Amsterdam to find seclusion he comes to reflect on himself, the ego which thinks,
which lights up his solitude as he takes refuge from life. For in life, the 17th c not only
brings the new science (certitude) but at the same time the new science brings uncertainty
and doubt. Why? Because the new science doubted the world of the senses (Copernicus
and others trusted reason/mathematics) and it was Descartes who confronted certainty
with uncertainty of the new science (in this sense Descartes is not an Enlightenment
thinker but the culmination of the medieval era). For even if Descartes reflections on life
in a bar in Amsterdam shows that life is not what it appears to be (in accord with the new
science), there is no doubt that his consciousness experience perceives it all as real. That
is, if we are going to be deceived (by the senses) then we must possess consciousness –
and so consciousness has priority of over matter – science – and as such consciousness
must be the starting point of all reflection/thinking (philosophy) also about science. This
was a bold step….to return to the certainty of consciousness of the “thinking I” at a time
when all that was perceptually evident was in doubt. Descartes’ move in recovering the
“thinking I” also recovered the certainty of subjectivity. If Hegel applauded Descartes’
habor (“thinking I”), in our own time we find hardly anyone willing to applaud
Descartes’ idealism/dualism/rationalism. In fact, both of the 20th c major philosophical
movements, analytic philosophy (and positivism) and phenomenology, however different
one from the other, lament Descartes’ error (e.g., Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger). In
this sense the 20th c. has rejected any concern with subjectivity and consciousness in an
abiding concern with the impersonal (objectivity) of matter or being (whether of matter
or of Being).
The question is whether Descartes’ prioritizing of consciousness of the “I think” did in
fact prioritize the concrete subject/person as the point of certainty. Was the “I” of
Descartes’ “I think” the habitus of embodiment, memories, hopes, emotions, etc.? Was
Descartes a psychologist who tried, at the time of the new science, to recover something
of the subject/person so as to forego the alienation that the rejection of all authority (God,
cosmos/creation, church) gave rise to?
Descartes concern was for certitude in a world made uncertain by the new science (e.g.,
distinction between primary and secondary qualities first proposed by Galileo and later
by John Locke). However, this “I” was for Descartes a merely an “instrument”
(means/way/methodos) for finding an indispensable starting point (arche) for his method
of systematic doubt which would isolate a certain (absolute) point of departure for
thinking. I can doubt all that given to the senses and understanding, but I cannot doubt
the consciousness (“I”) that doubts. Descartes turns the “I” back unto itself, doubting all,
except itself as doubting. But this Cartesian “I” is itself an abstraction from the world; it
is merely a (metaphysical) arche (and a methodological tool) required for his method of
systematizing doubt (which the new science had already begun) and in finding a place to
stand (a point of certitude) quoting Martin Luther.
But once he abstracted the “I” as the beginning point of his method of systematizing
doubt, Descartes was faced with the problem of getting the “I” back into the world
(which had been suspended in his method of systematic doubt). If his laborious doubt left
Descartes with a painful sense of his own finitude and imperfections, the certain “I” of
consciousness that he postulated also has an idea of a supreme and perfect Being who
embraces all reality, and this idea could not come from me but must come from this
perfect Being (and, hence, who then must exist). This is the ontological argument for
God’s existence (first proposed by St Anselm in the 11th c. 1033-1109). Of course, it is
not an argument but rather an intuition compelling as soon as we reflect on the mystery of
our own existence – it is a certainty as certain as my own existence – this is religious
feeling (Descartes was Freud’s first victim – his ontological argument may be understood
as a rationalization/a reaction formation in dealing with his own finitude and doubt).
In a way, God becomes an epistemological tool for grounding the knowledge we posses
of the world through the senses – since God would not create beings (“I think”) that are
deceived about their world – and if we use our faculties properly we can come to true
knowledge. The problem is that what is so restored is not the concrete person but the “I”
(ego cogito) and this is Descartes dualism (his answer to the scientific materialism of the
new science) between the arche of the “I think” and the world of bits of matter moving in
space. But we must also remember that Plato already knew that the soul is much more
than “thinking” and Freud in our century only confirmed that Descartes’ “I” is anemic.
The rational self or mind which Descartes made the essence of the soul (psyche) has no
body, no habitus, no history, is solitary and knows no other minds or people. Yet,
paradoxically enough, it is not this notion of soul as mind as reason that is the problem;
rather Descartes problem is the body – pieces of matter – that cannot accommodate the
soul/mind but remains external to it. Descartes body is not the lived body (habitus) but
the body as matter (the mathematical abstraction of the physicist). But the body is never
so removed from the soul (as Plato and Freud knew so well). Flesh and blood, feeling and
emotion, and reason exist together in a corruptible unity. As long as we have an
inadequate sense of the body (as lived) we cannot deal with the integrity (wholeness) of
mind and body adequately. We are reminded that Descartes wrote a treatise on the
passions – all the senses are seen through the privileged position of the “I”. Hence all that
is given to the senses becomes “objective” to be known by way of thought, and hence,
not is not “lived” but is object. Here Descartes’ dualism is carried into the person where
we have the “I think” (distinguished from the “I lived”) and the body/world and it is this
dualism that we have inherited: between mind (“I think” = soul) and the self as lived in
the body (habitus). This dualism would constitute the supremacy of reason (certitude) in a
world distinguished from the un-certainty the senses (but losing the person with others in
the world).
Now the fact is that for Descartes, the “I think” is still the Christian unity of soul and
body – although seemingly a very faint image of it. Scientific materialism had crucified
this soul which Descartes tries to rescue by (1) splitting the person between mind=reason
and every other psychic experience of consciousness especially as this relates to the
“lived” body, and (2) by grounding the mechanism-of-Nature of the new science in the
freedom of this mind=reason. Note the tensions here. In identifying mind/reason/freedom
with the soul, and giving the soul priority to everything else that is known/experienced
(which was threatened to be subsumed by the science machine), he (1) split the subject
from the object and (2) split the person within him/herself. (Discuss psych-somatic illness
– e.g., psychoanalysis.) Descartes picture of the mind/soul as reason was in the 20th c.
placed into doubt by psychoanalysis’ claim that reason was itself but a thin veneer of
civilization, that reason was invaded by desire (forces unknown) – as indeed
psychoanalysis was preceded by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others in the
19th c.
If today we no longer split reason/soul off from Nature, and indeed assimilated the whole
psyche/self/person/subject to Nature (naturalism), we also have lost the sense of (1)
soul/consciousness (in favor of a narrow conception of mind as reason), (2) made reason
instrumental (in coming to know the world), (3), lost the integrity of the body/self/person
(in favor of dualism), (4) lost the transcendental (in favor of ontological intuition), and
(5) finally lost consciousness (in favor of instrumental reason).
Lecture 4: Leibnitz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) comes two generations after Descartes (15961650) and in this period the framework for the new science had already taken shape, and
Leibnitz calls attention to the philosophical shadows that lurk about the Newtonian
picture of Nature as machine.
Leibnitz would have been an extraordinary figure even in his own time; in a century of
genius he stands out as its most many-sided mind. He addressed science, mathematics,
philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and history. He was well acquainted with the works,
besides the ancients, of Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes; he was also in touch with
the best minds of his time notably Malebranche (the great Cartesian), Pascal (Leibnitz
improved on his calculating machine), Locke, and Huygens (who stimulated his interest
in optics) and with them maintained a massive correspondence; he visited the Royal
Society in England (all under the reign of Louis XIV). Leibnitz was thoroughly
conversant with the new science: he was the co-creator with Newton of calculus
enormously important for the new science, and he was also thoroughly acquainted with
Christian theology. He was a “speculative metaphysician” (against which Kant warned
us) but he was also one of the last great Christian philosophers and believed that
thought/reason required the fullness of the Christian life. He accepted the life of faith in a
way that say Kant, 75 years later, could no longer do.
More importantly, Leibnitz was the best educated philosopher of his time (Descartes was
educated in philosophy by the Jesuits at La Fleche; Leibnitz educated himself by reading
seemingly everything he could especially from the medieval period, and the Greeks,
strongly convinced that the past could bring understanding to the new science’s
“scientific materialism”). Remarkably, Leibnitz disagreed with almost all of the founders
and systematizers of the new science, especially Locke’s empiricism and Descartes
dualism.
Leibnitz radically revises Descartes’ thinking about the soul (recall what was wrong with
Descartes dualism was his thinking about the body). Descartes’ conception of matter was
simply that of extension (it fills space), but Leibnitz bridles at this view and maintains
that extension is simply bits of matter external to very other bit of matter, and he asks the
important question: “what unifies these bits of matter?” In answering this question,
Leibnitz moves from an inert notion of matter to a notion of energy. Real that for
Descartes the problem was that reason/mind confronted matter and this raised the
question just how this was possible. But for Leibnitz perception (senses) did not merely
operate mechanically; perception was itself permeated with reason and hence not just a
physical events but a psychological one involving human consciousness – and
consciousness was never matter.
Similarly, Leibnitz in reply to Locke’s “Essay concerning human understanding” (1690)
writes “New essays on the understanding” (1765). The publication was post-humus as it
was first completed in1704 but Locke had died that year and Leibnitz did not deem it
proper to reply to or argue with the dead. In opposition to Locke’s claim that the mind
was a tabula rasa, Leibnitz gave the classical rationalist reply namely that the mind must
be prepared to receive experiences.
Locke in Book II of the Essay began with the claim that has become central to all
empiricists:
“Suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without
any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store,
which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with almost endless
variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I
answer, in one word, from experience”
In reply to Locke’s claim that “nothing exists in the intellect that was not first in the
senses” (a statement that Dun Scotus attributes to Aristotle), Leibnitz writes “nothing
except the intellect itself”. In the Essays, Leibnitz constructs a conversation between
Philalethes (friend of sleep –an empiricist) and Theophilus (friend of God – rationalist).
Here Leibnitz gives Philalethes the role of Locke and himself takes the role of Theophilus
and argues that experience is not necessary in order for the soul to have ideas and what
experience provides is a context for our thoughts and direction for out ideas. It is
impossible for experience to produce an idea for the very simple reason that it involves a
physical confrontation between sense organs and matter, and ideas have nothing to do
with these mechanical processes. But, agues Leibnitz, perception is not merely a
mechanical process but always involves reason and so lead to ideas.
Theophilus is made to say: “This tabula rasa, of which so much is said, is in my
opinion a fiction. Which nature does not admit ….Uniform things and those
which contain no variety are never anything but abstractions, like time, space, and
other entities of pure mathematics. There is no body whatever whose parts are at
rest, and there is no substance whatever that has nothing by which to distinguish it
from every other…those who speak so frequently of this tabula rasa, after having
taken away the ideas, cannot say what remains……Experience is necessary, I
admit, in order that the soul be determined to such and such thoughts, and in order
that it take notice of the ideas which are in us; but by what means can experience
and the senses give ideas? Has the soul windows, does it resemble tablets, is it
like wax?
Leibnitz is clearest on his critique of Locke and Descartes in his Monadology written two
years before his death, where he spells out his own metaphysics.
Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are
inexplicable on mechanical grounds… And supposing there were a machine, so
constructed as to think, feel, and have perceptions; it might be conceived as
increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into as
into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts
which work upon one another and never anything by which to explain perception.
Perception is a unique psychological event; it is that of which we are conscious. It is
qualitative in a way that no purely quantitative material phenomenon can imitate. As we
walk through the great mill of the mind, observing the spinning wheels and crashing
hammers, we find nothing by which the mill could have perception; not that the mill does
not have such perceptions, or is not aware of itself but that nothing in its moving parts
could convey such.
Thus, the mind-body interaction advanced by Descartes is confused and Leibnitz claims
meaningless. Mind is simply a monad, a simple substance, not reducible to anything and
not deriving its character from any source outside itself (it is not extended).As with all
simple substances it is understood as quality not quantity. It is intensive not extensive.
For example, a point is not a very short line or a very small fraction of a line; rather, it is
the idealized limit as extension (line) approaches zero and this limit is quality not
quantity. Similarly, as quantity is stripped of its extensive features, there is a limit beyond
which further reduction is not possible – this is the quality of being and not an extension
of magnitude. The limit of the body is also a simple substance: it is a monad.
The body as it is perceived is a composite whose extension rises from an assembly of
simple substances. No two simple substances are alike. Each monad not only has a
distinguishing quality but it is the very “unit” of quality. Being dimensionless it is not
subject to change from the outside. There is nothing to penetrate it. Hence, all speculation
as to mind and body makes little sense as each is properly conceived of as unique,
independent, and ultimately unextended. The relation between mind and body is not
causal but one of harmony. Leibnitz writes: if a note is sounded in the presence of two
resonators, we do not ask which of the two resonators establishes the sympathetic
vibrations in the other. The two resonate in parallel –as do body and mind; they are in
pre-established harmony with each other. The action of mind/body is not caused by the
other body/mind as a mechanistic account requires; nor is the action of each reconciled to
that of some third, external, time-keeper (occasionalists) such as to make sure all the
clock are on time.
The universe is then a collection of simple substances (monads) which are created in
harmony prior to their coming into being. Harmony is, as Leibnitz writes, God’s
modality. If monads change it must be through some inner principle. This inner principle
through which monads change is called “petite perception”. These petite perceptions are
different from apperception which also implies consciousness. To the extent that every
monad has an internal organization, it perceives (petite perception) and is open to change.
When a monad allows both perception and memory it is called a soul. So that animals
have souls but they do not have rational souls (minds) because while they are able to
perceive and even retain traces of consecutive perceptions, they are unaware of necessary
truths. “Human beings too, insofar as their perceptions are united by memory, ac like
lower animals, resembling empiricists whose methods are those of mere practice without
theory. In fact, in ¾ of our actions we are nothing but empirics…. It is only in knowledge
of rule, of necessary relationship, that we display the uniquely human quality of human
life.” This is consciousness.
Leibnitz was one of the first to write about the problem of the unconscious. His notion
had however little to do with motivation or psychopathology. Rather Leibnitz employs
the notion of the unconscious to support his position that monads are indestructible, that
perception (petite perceptions) are distinguished from consciousness, and on the
difference between “just” monads and monads of the rational (conscious) mind (soul).
Even in sleep monads perceive but since it is not accompanied by memory it is not
conscious (subliminal). A number of unconscious, insensible, perceptions when stored in
the mind can add up such as to break through into consciousness. Leibnitz suggested that
there is a gradual scale separating sleep from other states of awareness and these are
constituted by thresholds. For example we might retain a great deal in memory and yet
not be explicitly aware of it. This threshold phenomenon means that the present is big
with the future and laden with the past….
It is not easy to cave a niche for Leibnitz in the history of psychology. He is an enemy of
empiricism and materialism and as such he cannot be easily located in the history of
psychology as an experimental science. Leibnitz writings make clear that he believe that
most of what psychologists have dealt with could be deduced from common experience.
Leibnitz contributed to the concept of sensory thresholds via his petite perceptions, he
noted the role of memory in consciousness, he also distinguished consciousness from
perception on the one hand and memory on the other, but his major influence is his
critique of Cartesian dualism and this by way of his critique of Descartes’ metaphysics,
replacing two kinds of substance with one, and replacing causation with harmony. Of
course, much of the early psychology (physiological psychology) while accepting
Leibnitz critique of Descartes forgot about his monadology - it smacked too much of
pantheism.
In fact Leibnitz did little to restore idealism to philosophical significance (in fact there is
little relation between Leibnitz and say, later, Hegel. But Leibnitz emphasis on activity
(of monads as energy) and unity (both features of every simple substance or monad) can
be found in the psychologies of James, Brentano, and Gestalt psychology. Leibnitz’
monism also influenced the biological oriented psychologist who might believe that in
order to understand mind one would need to investigate brain. Indeed, his insistence on
animal souls, and the continuous evolution of levels of organization/complexity of
monads also influenced comparative animal research in the later Darwinian tradition.
Inertial universes are always in motion whereas energetic universes have beginnings –
energetic universes are self-generating. This notion especially when applied to minds
means that minds are active and not merely passive receptors/processor. But from
whence comes this energy/activity? Here we have Leibnitz’ monadology.
Leibnitz begins not with matter (bits of matter) that float in space/void bouncing off each
other (motion), but with spirits (souls) or units that Leibnitz calls monads, or centers of
energy at different levels of spirit and energy. A universe of communicating monads; the
self as a monad; communities of peoples; the environment; the entire cosmos – all as
layers of self-originating activity, or monads. It is a fantastic vision. But what are we to
make of monads that now take the place of atoms?
Obviously this is not an easy substitution. Monads generate their own energy and destiny.
Frankly they are not empirical (even as atoms were not in Democritus’ or Newton’s day)
but they are a rational concept that can direct empirical research. According to Leibnitz,
monads have “windows” in the sense that they are not only the origin of energy but also
direct their destiny/movements (purpose and not self-encased) towards other monads.
Here Leibnitz has the unconscious and the conscious working together, the latter
embedded in the former, and in this way the self is psychophysical unity (wherein body
and mind are both abstractions from this unity) and the body is no longer alien to the soul
as it was for Descartes. Leibnitz spiritualizes the body and soul in this psychophysical
unit of monadic energy – we cannot tell where the body leaves off and the mind begins –
below the level of consciousness (but then so is the atom below the level of
consciousness). On this view the body is no longer a chunk of matter on which the soul
precariously perches; rather, the body is spiritualized and it is here that honoring the soul
might begin.
On the one hand, Leibnitz extraordinary metaphysical imagination gives us a universe of
“organisms within organisms” and, on the other hand, he has the unique capacity for
simplicity and logical incisiveness. The latter is evident in the manner he deals with the
argument for the existence of God. Consider the question with which he begins:
“why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?” This question lurks behind all the
traditional arguments for the existence of God in a tradition that begins with Aristotle
(who was not particularly religious) whose “prime mover” was tied to the concentric
spheres of a finite universe that was Greek cosmology. The 17th c. broke with that tidy
universe and imagined a much larger possibly infinite universe. Leibnitz speaks from the
center of this new consciousness of an infinite universe and asks “why is there anything
at all rather than nothing?” This is the question of all questions (Heidegger) that
permeates our lives even in our ordinary moods – in which we are metaphysical (why
was I born?).
The question demands an answer. After all to ask “why” is to seek a reason or cause – all
being is contingent and Leibnitz then adds to this contingency his principle of sufficient
reason – a principle that reflects the mind’s seeking a cause, reason, explanation,
restlessly driven to the unconditional, absolute, and non-contingent. So long as we remain
within the realm of the contingent we will never answer the question “why”. We are then
faced by two alternatives:
(1) that there is no reason and things are just as they are because they happen this way
(Nietzsche: the world is absurd including our existence). This is no merely atheistic
answer, it bears the weight of enormity; a universe without reason.
(2) we can confirm a cause/reason outside of contingent being by positing another
order/ground, a necessary being, which exists and assumes a mystery (religious answer
which of course Nietzsche rejected). Here too the leap is audacious (as Kierkegaard
recognized a century later).
It was again Kant who was later to clarify this dilemma (by making God a condition of
possibility of moral action).
Lecture 5: Empiricists
The British distrusted this continental rationalist tradition of Descartes and Leibnitz. The
British mentality professes a certain distrust of intellectuals and the intellect. The British
are a practical people preferring commonsense to the intricacies of reason in the Germans
or French (divide between the continentalist and the empiricist/pragmatist traditions).
Whether or not it was this gift for practicality that was responsible, it was clearly at work
in the greatest creation of British genius: liberal democratic government. The triumph of
this British character was not merely that it conceived of the idea of free but that it also
embodied it in institutions (even though it took a hundred years of turmoil including civil
war to achieve it). England had firmly laid down the structures of a free society which
continued to develop for the next two centuries.
John Locke (1932-1704) was the philosopher of the British political revolution and still
remains the spokesperson for classical liberalism. But my interest in Locke is his more
devious route through the intricacies of the human soul. He will express the same British
trait here, of plain speech, common sense, and the sense of fact. He tells us that his
method is the “plain historical method” and he traces the operations of the mind from
sensations to ideas to the association of ideas. All our ideas come from sensations and are
tested against sensations. This is the core of British empiricism.
But from the very start empiricism ran into snags. For one thing sensations provide us
with the material of thought, but the mind seems to do something with these materials:
combining and recombining them. Is the mind merely passive, a receptor for sensations,
or is the mind active doing something of its own before the flood of sensations come in?
This is a cardinal question and the question turns not only on how we know, and what we
can know, but also on human freedom. If the mind is active forming its own judgments,
can it also initiate actions consequent on those judgments? Locke’s answer is ambiguous.
He tends towards the passivity of the mind and this is the empiricist tendency more
generally especially when the doctrine of the association of ideas is proposed as the
mechanical deterministic combination of sensations.
What is this “mind” such that the empiricists claim is bombarded by sensations and then
mechanically processes these into ideas? What are the sensations that correspond to the
ideas in the mind? How are sensations grasped by the mind? Do sensations themselves
exemplify the mind?
Since Locke is a Christian he believes in an immortal soul which he claims is outside his
empiricist framework. In a sense this notion of the soul is a barrier to the mind and hence
there are limits on empiricism. Yet the soul must also in some sense touch the mind. In a
way, empiricism bifurcates the world into two the regions, one where empiricism holds
good (the mind is a passive machine that processes sensations into ideas), the other being
the traditional doctrine of the soul. Thus, Locke’s empiricism is somewhat half-hearted.
But there is also a graver split within Locke and this comes from the opposite direction
than his religious faith: it comes from the new science. This is Locke’s distinction
between primary and secondary qualities (inherited from one of the originators of the
new science - Galileo) cementing a distinction between the objective (extension) and
subjective (experience). But this distinction is an odd one given that empiricism is after
all supposed to take what is in experience seriously. Rather what we see here is that
Locke’s empiricism is not merely an appeal to what is experienced but his empiricism
follows the speculations of scientific materialism. In other words, Locke begins not with
experience (his “plain historical method”) but with the purportedly metaphysically “real”
as defined by the new science (that is his empiricism is informed by what the new science
says is real – namely bits of matter). Thus, this distinction between primary and
secondary qualities implies a bifurcation between the experiential world and the world of
science (which would dictate the nature of Locke’s empiricism). In other words, Locke’s
empiricism is no less an abstraction from experience than is Descartes’ reason (”I think)
an abstraction from the personal “I”=habitus). British empiricism is not an open reliance
on experience (it is not genuinely “empirical”) but rather is a disciplined reliance on what
the new science maintains is real (matter). Thus, for example, sensations are never
experienced (they are an abstraction from perception in accord with what we know how
the senses work – as processors of matter – photons hitting the retina: how the
physical/biological body works.)
It is this bifurcation of the latter two worlds that the Irishman George Berkeley (16851753) understood so well. If matter (of scientific materialism) determines how the mind
works (as Locke would have it) then the mind is not free – it is merely a machine.
Berkeley defend Locke’s everyday experiential (empirical, not “empiricist”) world, but
the world as it appears in experience is not subjective as Locke held, rather experience is
the real and it is the real of physics (senses) that is an abstraction. Berkeley maintains that
not only secondary qualities but also primary qualities are relative to observers and
Berkeley knocks down Newton’s claim to absolute space in which bits of matter bounce
up against each other. The latter is, he notes, an instance of misplaced concreteness.
Locke had stripped the world of its color, sound, odors etc., and his argument had been
that these secondary qualities were relative of the observer/perceiver and therefore were
not objective. But if secondary qualities were relative to the observer then so are primary
qualities, argues Berkeley. Here Berkeley introduces the relativity of all observation in a
through-going way such as was not to emerge again until Einstein in the 20th c. Locke
held that taken the new sciences’ claim that reality consisted only of bits of matter in
motion or at rest as absolute (objective) because there was the absolute space of Newton
in which these bits of matter moved or remained at rest. But Berkeley audaciously rejects
one of the sacred pillars of the Newtonian world – namely absolute space. Newton’s
absolute space is an abstraction far removed from our perception (empirical world). For
Berkeley who stands in the empirical world of plain ordinary commonsense, empiricism
is enslaved to scientific materialism. According to Berkeley, experience (both primary
and secondary qualities) is always dependent on mind (even if we are not aware of this) –
we cannot escape mind – all reality is permeated by mind. We cannot grasp any reality
outside of the mind (even the computer). Immanuel Kant was later to take over this
perspective and built upon it.
Nevertheless, Berkeley’s plain commonsense runs into trouble when he encapsulates his
position in the phrase “esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived). Does reality really
depend on our perceiving it? Surely reality cannot be so fickle. Surely the tree that falls in
the forest does make a sound even if there is no one to hear it!
How can Berkeley as an arch-commonsense-empiricist, even as he is more critical than
Locke, ensure that the real is real without invoking a perceiver? Berkeley introduces God.
It is God that maintains reality when there are no observers. But this move proves
disastrous for an empiricist (after God is not there to be perceived) even as Berkeley’s
also claims that it is the mind that perceives (after all, the mind cannot be perceived).
How can Berkeley appeal to the mind or to God since neither is given in sensuous
experience?
Berkeley does so because he believes we have direct access to our own mind, when we
are conscious of something we are also conscious that we are conscious and, on analogy
of the finite and infinite, we can speak of God’s mind. Thus while our human mind is
imperfectly grasped God’s mind grasps perfectly.
Leaving aside God for the moment, are we aware of ourselves as minds? Here we come
to a crucial divide among empiricists. The ordinary person says, of course, I am aware of
my own mind, I am aware of the table but I am also aware that I am aware of the table; I
am aware of having the experience of the table and I am aware that it is I who has this
experience of the table. But there are some empiricists who doubt this primary fact of
consciousness. If Locke’s sensations are clear and distinct (like Descartes ideas), hard
and fast, and objective data of consciousness, then surely in comparison the mind is a
fleeting and unwarranted ghost (in the machine). William James divided empiricists
between “tender-minded” and tough-minded”, where the first are empirical including the
experience of intuition and consciousness, whereas the second are “tough-minded”
empiricists allowing only what the new science permits namely sensations.
It is the tough-minded position that is adopted by the Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776)
who is an archetypal sensationist and the precursor of positivistic thought in the 19th and
20th centuries. If Berkeley reduced Locke’s bits of matter (sensations) to a bundle of
perceptions, Hume seeks to reduce Berkeley’s mind to a heap of sense impressions and
this is as far as empiricism can take us (unless we can reduced impressions further to
something else like nerve impulses). Discuss decomposition/analysis.
David Hume takes a giant step forward from Berkeley in defining the modern mind (even
as his conception of mind was curiously at odds with our ordinary experience). If the 17th
c was still implanted mind in God (Descartes appealed to God/soul as did Locke, and
Berkeley), Hume began what the 18th c. – the age of Reason - adopted as a strictly
modern secular conception of the new science by removing God in what later was to
become 20th c. positivism (in the work of Wittgenstein it became “logical positivism” –
Hume’s impressions plus mathematical logic). For Hume experience was now a
succession of sense impressions (impressions, including sensations, of the body) and the
world was mechanically constructed out of these. Life is a stream of impressions that are
simply given to us by the world, and hence, all ideas, for example, cause and effect
relations are themselves only impressions. What happens here is that the new science
(knowledge of the world) is grounded in habit (or psychology: the repeated co-occurrence
of two impressions leads us say, by habit, that one is the cause of the other). Little
wonder that Hume is so important for empiricist psychology – his empiricism looked
“exact” - exactness that the new science admired so much and did so much to get it
started.
We might note right off that Hume was not a good psychologist for he collapses under
the label impression both sensations (outer) and feelings (inner). But surely my feeling of
sadness is not so distinct it may well infuse all my other impressions – something Hume
failed to appreciate.
Furthermore, it was Hume’s “atomism” that led to his celebrated skepticism about such
concepts as cause and effect and all other such ideas which could not be grounded in
impressions. If cause and effect is nothing but the co-occurrence of two events
(contiguity of sensory impressions) then we are never logically justified in speaking of
the necessity of cause and effect, merely of psychological habit. All knowledge now
becomes psychology – which is surely nonsense. It would be altogether stunning if the
new science were nothing but habits of mind and bundles of impressions.
What follows from Hume’ sensationalism is skepticism! If the self is merely a set of
impressions then the self also is merely a repository of the impressions – consciousness
becomes then nothing else than this set of impressions – the self is a “ghost in a
machine”. There is strange alienation evident here – a third person perspective – where I
stand outside myself in order to see myself. Sense data and logic was Russell’s
adumbration of Hume.
It is easy to see why this would happen to Hume. Consciousness is for him something
that just happens when we have impressions. The entire notion of experience is corrupted
here in this empiricism. Things in the world including my own body are merely
sensations/impressions and the mind/soul/self is nowhere evident in these impressions.
One is reminded here that Hume might be engaged in a “category mistake”: he is like the
man who goes outside of his house and looks through the window to see if he is home. It
is a spectator (3rd person view) view of the mind forgetting that it is “I” whose
impressions these are. Hume stands outside himself and looks for himself in some kind of
sensory datum.
Bertrand Russell in the 20th c. tries to rescue Hume’s empiricism by adding a bit of
modern logic. The self now becomes an aggregate of sense data which is then given a
verbal appellation – as if language is merely labelling - but Russell never says how such
aggregates are formed. Moreover, how do I know that yesterday’s aggregate of
impressions is like that the impressions I experience now? How does one compare
memories?
In a way Hume the empiricist finds himself aligned with Descartes the rationalist. For
while Hume’s consciousness (as a set of impressions) is very different from Descartes’
consciousness as innate reason, both the empiricist and the rationalist would have the
mind sit precariously external to the body. For neither men is the mind embedded in the
body or the body animated by the mind; the one remains external to the other.
Finally, this psychological philosophy of mind also presumes that reason/association of
idea is strictly instrumental and hence an individual phenomenon. Reason and association
of ideas occurs in my “head” alone….and then trick is to get the knowledge in my head to
others…..we then get endless speculation on the designative nature of language.
Lecture 6: Immanuel Kant
Kant (1724-1804) is the last great thinker in whom the intellectual unity of the Western
“mind” (rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz; and empiricists: Locke, Berkeley,
and Hume) still held together. After Kant this unity began to fall apart, diverge into a
number of irreconcilable directions (e.g., Idealism of Hegel and Marx; Positivism,
pragmatism, existentialism). Of course, Kant preserved the unity of a still fundamentally
theistic civilization (his thought always ends with God), yet this unity is a precarious one,
more precarious than Kant imagined. It was Kant the pietist who in fact departed farther
from God (in undermining all the reasoned theological argument for God) than he
realized.
Kant called his philosophy “critical philosophy” and in this separated himself from the
dogmatism of his predecessors: the dogmatism of speculative metaphysics and theology
in Leibnitz on the one hand, and the dogmatic skepticism of Hume on the other hand.
Kant insists everywhere on the limits and conditions under which the mind must operate
– conditions that is to say under which the mind operates effective and productively.
Even in matters of religion and God, in fact perhaps there most of all, we have to be
aware of the limits op reason with which our human nature endowed. Kant’s century, the
18th c. “Age of Reason”, was also the age of the bourgeois and the voice of bourgeois was
one of sobriety, prudence and caution.
Kant comes on the scene in Western civilization just Galileo’s “new science” had come
into its own and Kant launches the next wave – a wave in which we still live. Thus, Kant
has before him not only the edifice of the “new science”, which was framed by the
rationalist Descartes and Leibnitz and the empiricist Locke and Hume, but which
originated in the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, but his distance
on this edifice was sufficient long (over 100 years) that he could reflect on its
implications. Kant genius was the genius of reflection; he is the first thinker to grasp the
implications of the new science at a level of depth that was not again reached until Martin
Heidegger in the 20th c.
See the map:
Rationalism plus empiricism yield Kant, which in turn, in the 19th c., yields
idealism, positivism, pragmatism, and existentialism
Note that what is at the center of this historical map is philosophy. Why?
Why should philosophy and the contending schools of philosophy be at the center of this
historical map of Western thought?
The answer is the traditional one: philosophy is the effort by the human mind to know
itself, and to take stock of (our knowledge of) the universe and out place in it. The doubt
we might have today about the centrality of philosophy is in part because the small space
philosophy seems to occupy in our culture. Philosophers seem not to discover anything,
talk only to each other, and are mostly concerned with esoteric questions that, even if
they were or could be answered, yield no pay-off. Philosophers seem only critical, clever,
in making difficult what is easy.
Even if we allow that philosophy is not useless, the question arises whether philosophy is
only about reflection; whether philosophy merely reflects its time, or whether philosophy
also does something permanent, something that generates consequences for society,
culture or the individual. Yet, in anticipation of Kant has to say, we must remember that
the mind pervades society, reality, at its most mundane levels – the level of experience.
Reflection is here not merely passive contemplation (like Descartes in his armchair in his
bedroom away from everyone else) on something already formed (like the new science);
on the contrary, philosophy gives shape and form to what we experience (it articulates
and so makes real); it lends vision to the assumptions and consequences to how we live
and how we think (science included). Recall that my entire course is based on the
intuition that reflection and understanding of the human historical world is an activity of
the utmost importance.
We might speculate that there is something deeper than philosophy. That is religion. I
have not placed religion into my historical map because philosophy in our modern epoch
(the epoch of the “death of God” or the dying of God) has been in continuous dialogue
with religion (even today when leading cognitive and evolutionary thinkers are still very
busy refuting God). We can argue that religious questions are at the center of philosophy
even if only by way of its rejection and, even if today there are many philosophers who
do not engage religious questions this says more about philosophy and the state of our
Western civilization than it does about religion. In any case, it took a lot of philosophy to
prepare the human mind for this matter-of-fact state of godlessness.
There is also art (aesthetics) which captures a kind of truth, which philosophy must take
note of and which it can not itself produce. Art should also occupy a central place, just as
religion should, in our historical map. Aesthetics and art were an integral part of
Romantic philosophy and even of the idealists. Indeed, I think of art as typifying an age
or epoch in a way that philosophy, religion or science cannot do. Artistic expression is
much overlooked as a source of truth, also in psychology, in favor of intellectual
expression of the human mind about itself that I characterized as the task of philosophy.
There is also science of course. Curiously, it is not represented by any philosophical
school but it is something that concerns them all, often as something to be absorbed and
transcended, or fought against and rejected. I referred to this science in quasiphilosophical terms (i.e., metaphysics) as scientific materialism a movement that floats
around all thought, especially the sciences. It is not usually professed as an explicit
commitment; rather it is part and parcel of the triumph of the sciences/technology. The
achievements in the physical sciences/technology become the measure of scientific
materialism – and the ghostly insubstantial individual human soul and common human
spirit seems almost childish by comparison. Scientific materialism is the terrain in which
the historical map, above, plays itself out. Such materialism need not be explicitly
professed as a creed, rather it is the de facto philosophy of an era reaping the great
triumph of the physical sciences and in technology and pushing more and more of its
energies into those fields. The achievements of the physical sciences and technology
become the invisible standard – and sometimes not so invisible – by which to measure all
thinking in whatever domain. However much we may hide this scientific materialism in
our philosophical study, we are caught up in its flow as soon as we step outside into the
actual world. If we in our time want to come to terms with its most troubling questions, it
will only be when it comes to terms with scientific materialism.
In fact, Kant’s critical philosophy is hardly read today (except by philosopher of the
history of philosophy). Hence we have to retrieve Kant – and when we do, we find his
reflections rather contemporary – in a way that all philosophy is eternally
contemporary….
The terrain is scientific materialism; it is implicit in the new science. Thus, the question is
“can mind be reduced to matter?” But in this form this question is unanswerable. It is, as
Kant might say, an effort at “bad metaphysics” and we cannot “know” one way of the
other. Instead we might ask the phenomenological (experiential) question “what role does
the mind play in human life?” This way of asking the question has the virtue of
confronting both metaphysical materialism, and indeed scientific realism, and it was
Immanuel Kant who brought out more clearly than any other philosopher the active
organizing role of the mind in human experience.
The British empiricists (from Locke to Hume) had stressed the mind’s passivity: “ideas
are imprinted on the mind,” “the mind is a blank slate on which experience writes” etc.
But when one turns to experience first, then one finds that the mind does something much
more than the empiricists give it credit for.
For example, if we turn to one of the most significant events in the history of our species:
the construction of numbers we find the mind exemplary in “doing”. Mathematics is one
of clearest examples of the power of the mind to bring order into our experience. We all
participate in mathematics and when we do we realize that we are involved in elementary
operations (adding, subtracting etc.). It is interesting that today we think of “reason” as
endlessly distorting and concealing but it is remarkable that in case of mathematics we
see the legitimacy of the power of the mind/reason. We know from anthropology that
ancient cultures had only a rudimentary conception of the number system. Thus, however
astute the ancients were in their sensory capacities yet they were unable to even formulate
an elementary conception of numbers. This state of affairs when there were no numbers,
should give us, especially philosophers of mathematics, some food for thought. Before
we had a number system “were there numbers?” Did numbers subsist perhaps in some
Platonic heaven plucked down by some Promethean mind? Even if there were such a
Promethean figure, s/he would have to go through the operation of constructing numbers
as Kant suggests. Or look towards some future and consider that through some
unimaginable disaster the human species lost all its knowledge (forgetting or amnesia is,
according to Heidegger, still very prevalent), including our knowledge of mathematics.
But suppose that textbooks on mathematics survived this disaster so that people could
point at math books in libraries and say “this is mathematics” without understanding what
mathematics was about. (Mathematics as marks on paper is mathematics only if there are
minds to give these marks meaning.)
How did the ancients or how do people following this disaster rediscover mathematics?
We are reminded of Plato’s cave, when suddenly someone announces that “today the sun
rose and I am going to scratch a mark on the side of the cave wall, and tomorrow when
the sun rises again, I will make another mark… and so each day afterward.” Bit by bit as
the marks gather, we notice that the place of each mark in the sequence is given a name…
its number name. Note that the mind is here directed to both the future and the past, and
synthesizes the past and future perspectives in the present a pattern that lies at the root of
the number system. This kind of synthesis is not a simply “association” (conditioned
response); rather it is the construction of a structure that give rise to a very different
meaning – an active construction of a meaningful order.
What is involved here is a continuity of consciousness; and “I” that accompanies, or that
enables, the synthesis taking into account past and future in the present. What kind of “I”
is this that can synthesize past and future into the present? Kant is cautious: he claims that
there is as much “I” (ego) as is required to give continuity and meaning to particular
processes of thought – this “I” is what he calls a “transcendental ego”, an ego that
synthesizes.
This was a decisive step beyond Hume even as we may not be satisfied with Kant’s
answer. Remember Hume’s conception of the “I” as a bundle of perceptions/impressions
– such an “I” could not even count up to 5. A bundle of perceptions does not have the
continuity of consciousness necessary for synthesis. The question is whether Kant’s
transcendental ego is in fact the concrete self (“I”) that we need in order for the imaginary
person in Plato’s cave to construct numbers? Hardly (any more than Descartes’ “ego
cogito”)! In fact, Kant turns his critical philosophy in the same direction as Hume - in
fact, he is more rigorous than Hume - in dismissing the theological conception of soul or
mind as pure immaterial substance which we cannot “know” (i.e., of which we cannot
have scientific knowledge). In other words, Kant’s transcendental ego is a very minimal
self, one necessary to allow for the synthesis required in constructing mathematics
(reason) but no more than that. Thus, Kant rejected the possibility of a science of
psychology since psychology on his view dealt with the mind which was non-substantial.
Kant’s insight is essentially that mathematics is a construction. Not only does
mathematics deals with entities that are constructed by the mind – there are no numbers,
straight line, points, etc. in nature – but its methods are constructive throughout. Thus,
mathematics is not merely substituting one set of symbols for an equivalent set, but in
fact it constructs new cases or mathematical entities that bring forward the properties
under investigation. The geometrician draws lines; the arithmetician builds up a new
number complex and if s/he has to prove that there is no last prime number, s/he does so
not by contemplating the meaning of the essence of “prime” or of “number” but by
actually constructing a last prime number and then showing that it leads to contradiction.
Here Kant’s view of mathematics is connected with his distinction between analytic and
synthetic employment of the human understanding. An analytic statement is one in which
the predicate adds nothing to the subject of the predicate (“a bachelor is an unmarried
man”); here the predicate merely explicates what is already in the subject (a tautology).
In contrast a synthetic proposition is one where the predicate add to our knowledge of the
subject (“a man is an animal with a bivalvular heart”) where the predicate adds to our
knowledge of what a man is). Kant’s distinction is open to criticism today because he
relies on a subject-predicate logic which is not sufficiently rigorous compared to modern
mathematical logic. Be that as it may, Kant’s distinction was an effort of considerable
significance.
Thus, mathematicians regularly speak of trivial, significant, and really new results,
depending on whether the results of their work obviously merely what is already known
or whether it adds something new to mathematics. But if we consider modern
mathematical logic, we find that for example Russell reduced mathematics to logic,
where logic is tautological and hence where mathematics becomes tautological and hence
new results in mathematics merely means that mathematicians do not see all the logical
implications of their work at once. The reason for this, Russell claims, is that the human
mind is finite – if our minds were infinite we would seem all the logical implications at
once –i.e., tautologies – and there would be no new results in mathematics. Of course,
this is a rather strange tack by Russell and other positivists in explaining mathematics as
an analytical endeavor since appeal to an infinite mind (even as a form of argument) is
obviously not an empirical entity.
In this regard Kant was a down-to-earth philosopher: our mind is radically finite but we
cannot see except from a framework of finitude. We cannot have any adequate concept of
the infinite mind (as Russell suggests we do); rather, all we can have is a vague and
numinous idea of mind (nothing sufficient for use in a scientific understanding of
mathematics). It is this finite mind, according to Kant, that produces mathematics by
constant constructions and inventions. Is calculus a logical tautology or is it a new
invention, namely the construction of the idea of a limit?
Kant cites the evidence of history in support of his claim that mathematics is a
construction of mind. He claims not since Aristotle has there been any progress in logic,
while mathematics has progressed rapidly especially in the two centuries preceding Kant
(i.e., in the “new science”). Russell comments that Kant is simply ignorant of modern
mathematical logic and in this Russell is both right and wrong. True enough Kant did not
know the mathematical logic but he would have no difficulty assimilating modern
mathematical logic: modern logic has been productive, Kant would claim, precisely
because it is mathematical logic. Systematic symbolic notation (characteristic of
mathematical logic) permitted forms of construction not available to the older logic, and
symbols may be numbered, and so the resources of arithmetic may be ingeniously used
giving rise to Godel’s theorem (which depends on numbering the expressions of
language).The latter’s proof is that there will always be theorems or axioms in
mathematics that cannot be proven from within the system of mathematics itself
(incompleteness theorem). (This theorem has also been used to refute any pretension of
computational language to stand alone, or be complete.)
The usually textbook after introducing elements of the logical calculus presents 20 or 30
simple which are reformulations of axioms. If the Lowenheim-Skolem or Godel’s
theorems are mentioned it is usually overlooked that the latter are very different from the
simple theorems that are reformulations of axioms. The Lowenheim-Skolem and Godel
theorems are however of a very different order than those theorems obtained by a
mechanical substitution of the axioms; the former produced new and disturbing
knowledge.
Kant was also limited by being attached to Euclidean geometry. Kant lived prior to the
formulation of non-Euclidean geometries. But even here Kant’s views of mathematics as
grounded in free constructions of an active mind would not be surprised by the inventions
of non-Euclidean geometries that are after all not confined to Euclidean (absolute) space.
All this stuff about mathematics and logic may well seem trivial relative to Kant’s major
contributions to philosophy. Yet this stuff while technical ties directly to other major
concerns in science. For example, the foundations of mathematics remains disturbingly
unsettled and contested and here Kant still remains very relevant in reminding us that
thinking (reason) if it is not to be empty must be aware of the elementary intuitions from
which it starts in experience.
Modern science
Of course, the most dazzling example of the constructive power of the mind was the
whole edifice of the “new science”. Here Immanuel Kant’s insights proved to be
decisive…and remain so today. Galileo was deeply conscious of the fact that when he
introduced the phrase “new science” he was making a break with the wisdom of the
ancients. By Kant’s time the “new science” was well-established and in his 1st Critique
(1786), almost 100 years after Newton, Kant writes:
When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had previously determined, to
roll down an inclined plane; when Torricelli made air carry a weight which he
had calculated beforehand to be equal to a definite column of water, a light broke
upon the students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that
which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be
kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings, but must itself show the way with
principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answers
to questions of reason’s own determining.…Reason holding in one hand its
principles, according to which alone concordant appearances can be admitted as
equivalent to laws, and in the other hand the experiment which it has devised in
conformity with these principles, must approach nature in order to be taught by it.
It must not however do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything
that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the
witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated. Even physics,
therefore, owes the beneficent revolution in its point of view entirely to the happy
thought, that while reason must seek in nature, not fictitiously ascribe to it,
whatever as not being knowable through reason’s own resources has to be learnt,
if learnt at all, only from nature, it must adopt as its guide, in so seeking, that
which it has itself put into nature. It is thus that the study of nature entered on the
secure path of a science after having for so many centuries nothing but a process
of merely random groping.
Kant points here to the intrinsic relation between science and technology. The mind is not
passive (not merely a sensory receptor that reflect, like a mirror, nature or the facts) but
active in constructing models which are not found in experience (but in the human
imagination even if the mathematical imagination) and then to proceeds to impose those
models on nature. Moreover, those models are first of all conceptually constructed before
being materially translated in apparatus of the laboratory.
In fact, Kant could have used Galileo’s construction of the concept of inertia as a simpler
example. The concept of inertia was new and the entire science of mechanics, the basis
for the whole of the “new science”, depended on it. What does Galileo do? He does not
passively record facts, instead he constructs a concept that is never precisely found in
nature at all (in fact it is in some sense contrary to what we do find in nature). Imagine,
Galileo tells us, a body on a perfectly frictionless plane, now if motion is imparted to this
body, it will move infinitely in a straight line unless of course it is impeded and altered by
some countervailing force. But there are no frictionless planes in nature or any plane with
infinite extension. What Galileo constructs is a model that is counterfactual to nature as
we experience nature. He constructs an idealization, a standard, in approximation to
which the actual (factual) situation may be calculated. Here the basic concept of science
is mind-made and never copies nature; it is a profound human artifice and therefore a
technical construct as fully as a piece of material apparatus might be. Science is
technological at its core – and it is the basis of the formation of its concepts (and hence
technology is not something that happens after science as an application).
It is this intimate connection between science and technology which Bacon foresaw in his
claim that knowledge is power (to change and control the world). But for Bacon this
power was the result of science; in contrast Kant sees clearly that technology is the very
basis of science. Once seen by Kant, this connection spreads through the entire edifice of
the science throughout the 19th c. The more advanced the science the closer the
connection between its own technology and the more every part of the science joins with
every other part in a unity of the whole (contrast psychology). This does not mean that
one can say beforehand just what particular discovery becomes a part of or serves to join
other parts, but the history of the natural sciences has been the surprising discoveries of
such connections, even where they were not first suspected. So too with a particular
technical device, no matter how isolated its function or principle of operation at first
appears to be, it may become indispensable to the structure of science as a whole. During
the past 350 years, “science-technology” has played itself out as a single human project.
This project was both daring and deep, for as Kant remarks it is a turn in human reason
and hence a transformation of our attitude towards the world: away from a passive,
receptive, and contemplative towards an active, projective, and enactive struggle with
nature. We have to master nature; not drift with it. Kant employs some key words: human
beings impose their models upon nature; human beings compel nature to answer their
questions; the inquirer is in a position to demand of nature. All these are words of power;
and Kant knew it. He had read Francis Bacon carefully (“knowledge is power”) even as
Kant parts company with Bacon when the latter demands that “nature be placed on the
rack” – as if tortured to give answers – and suggests that we have power over nature.
Kant was more insightful and more humble than Bacon. Knowledge is power in that
knowledge enables us to deal with nature but more than that knowledge is itself a step in
power for knowledge is intimately tied to doing – thinking/reason and doing. In the very
concepts constructed (and not literally founding the world) we have already taken a step
beyond nature in order to subsequently understand it and deal with it. It is in the
construction of concepts that the human mind comes to its fullness. In this sense the
project of science-technology which launched modernity is a genuine transformation of
our human being. If at times during the last 350 years this knowledge-power coupling
gave rise to an optimistic (progress, endless progress) vision that was almost utopian (as
it is sometimes today), it has also become far less optimistic – creating despair, passivity,
nihilism towards the future.
What Kant foresaw in his philosophical reflections was that this edifice of sciencetechnology coupling exemplified the constructive power of the mind even as this very
knowledge-power coupling threatened to denigrate the human mind. Its success in the
natural sciences led to an attitude of scientific materialism, according to which the mind
becomes merely a passive play-thing of material forces. It is as if the offspring turns on
its parents (Oedipus) – we today have forgotten Kant, namely that the mind is
everywhere imprinted on this body of science/technology and that without the founding
imagination of mind there would be no science. (Thus there is no “logic of discovery”, a
la Reichenbach, which a machine could compute,) This is not merely something to be
assented to and perhaps enjoyed (this, “the mind is nothing but” empiricist position) – it
is also a terrible existential reality – for doubt about the mind (as in scientific
materialism) has profound consequences and provides one of the ordeals that have beset
modernity (in our day when the mind has becomes a cognitive machine, what happens to
our freedom and individuality?).
Let’s turn to Kant solution in noting the limitations on, and finitude of, the mind that he
brings out so sharply.
It would seem an easy matter to grasp our finitude in time (birth-life-death) and space
(vastness of the universe). But such finitude is largely quantitative. But Kant’s notion of
finitude is different; his is a qualitative finitude, one that maintains that the human mind
is constituted in a way that the understanding cannot grasp conceptually those matters
that are of ultimate significance to us. This mode of our finitude is an uncanny fact about
our human nature, namely, that we must bring ourselves to reflect again and again to see
just how far we can carry our understanding (Leibnitz’: why is there anything and not
nothing?)
But what can we understand when we say, or hypothesize, that space or time is
infinite….how can we bring this before our mind? We can only do so as a process to
which there is not last term…no end.
Kant’s point is that the legitimate or meaningful understanding of a concept can only
come about through intuition – particularly, to make some kind of mental picture of a
concept on risk that otherwise our words become empty verbalisms. But from where do
these intuitions come, asks Kant. Only from sense perception and these only come
always within the framework of space and time. Our thinking must work within that
framework of space and time wherein perception occurs. The mind can synthesize and
organize (sometimes brilliantly as in modern science) but only within that framework of
sensory-intuition-space-time.
Contrast this with our usually view, inherited from the Greeks, that thinking begins where
sensory experience leaves off. The mind if you will produces from this welter of
perceptions, inductively, an idea, and then this sensible mind aspires to an intelligible
world – the world of knowledge (“real” of the world of forms) – leaving behind the
sensory/perceptual world of experience (“flux”). In contrast, for Kant, thinking does not
leave the world of sensory experience; rather thinking is always already involved, by
organizing and synthesizing sensory intuition, in experience. Just as the number system is
a human construction (a magnificent one) but for that reason does not lead us out of this
world of experience for in numbers we organize the world of sensory experience.
Thus, we can say that Kant’s view of the mind is “pragmatic” (Kant is in some way the
“father” of what later in the late 19th c an early 20th centuries became known as
“pragmatism”), meaning that the mind has the practical function of organizing and
synthesizing sensory intuition so as to yield the world of experience. Thus, the mind is
the mind-in-use – essentially tying knowledge to doing (technology). Mental pictures are
transformable into mechanical designs… From an evolutionary point of view we might
say that the mind (its use in conceptualizing) is an extension of our sensory intuition – in
giving us a world of experience (and experience is always meaningful). [Of course, for
Kant this is not the whole function of mind (as we will see below); there are also other
functions of mind where reason or understanding, our conceptual capacities, cannot help.]
For readers of Kant in their time the most important impact of his work was that he
destroyed any possibility of proof for the existence of God. That is, in limiting reason to
sensory intuition, Kant in one fell-blow demolished traditional rational theology and
thereby placed God in a problematic light. Kant’s critique in the 1st Critique was to limit
the role of reason to experience – and all concepts that referred to that which is not part of
experience is an illegitimate extension of reason where it should not, in fact cannot go, at
least if reason is to full it legitimate role in constructing meaningful
(cognitive=knowledge) concepts. That is, for Kant, unlike Leibnitz, metaphysics (and
rational theology going back to St. Aquinas) was the result of the illegitimate extension
of reason beyond the confines of sensory intuition. Metaphysics cannot give us
knowledge (which does not mean that metaphysical questions are non-sense or
meaningless as the later 20th c. positivists held, but just that these questions could not
yield knowledge in their answers.
Remember Leibnitz’ reasoning about God. Leibnitz begins with the contingent beings of
the world around us (contingent here means that beings come into existence and pass out
of existence, and are causally conditioned by other beings. All we can know through
experience (senses and understanding) is this flux of beings. Even the ever-lasting hills
were begotten by geological convulsion and worn away through weather and time.
Nature is a chain of contingent beings, or many chains of interlocking and perhaps
infinite chains upon chains of beings. Why are there such chains? In asking this question
we come upon the awesome question that inevitably confronts the human mind when it
pushes thought far enough: why does anything at all exist, rather than nothing? (Leibnitz’
question). Leibnitz then he invokes his principle of sufficient reason which tells that
nothing that exists can exist without a reason. There is nothing obscure about this
principle so long as it functions within experience, pushing ever farther backwards in the
chain(s) of nature. That is, when we experience nature as change (contingent) and we use
the principle of sufficient reason to move backward to the origin of the contingent in the
non-contingent (or the necessary) – this is the whole rationalist tradition from Aristotle to
the “new science”. Of course, Leibnitz intended this question to lead us outside the chain
of being to some unconditioned, non-contingent or necessary Being (God) I this way
Leibnitz remained solidly within the tradition of rational theology.
But Kant’s refutation is sharp. The mistake Leibnitz makes is that he extends the
principle of sufficient reason beyond the sphere of our possible experience. Leibnitz
extends reason beyond where it can go, beyond the framework of space and time. Kant
argues that we are creatures within space and time and the power of the human mind (as
in the achievements of science) is to synthesize perceptual intuition which is always
found within space and time. Experience only has meaning within that framework and all
proof/disproof of our concepts and theories occur within that framework. If we seek to
push reason beyond the framework of space and time, the framework Kant calls the
apriori conditions of possibility of experience, in other words if we try in reason to
transcend experience (to move beyond the apriori conditions of possibility of experience)
we preclude the possibility of proof or disproof of our theories, explanations, and
concepts.
Kant even raises the question of whether Leibnitz’ “Necessary Being” is meaningful…we
can of course provide a verbal definition – since we know what contingent being is we
can always say that a Necessary being is a non-contingent one. But when we give this
definition is there any content to our definition (concept)? Or is it merely a verbal
formula, as Kant warns is the case of all metaphysics?
Kant’s point is fundamental here. When Kant says that Leibnitz’ Necessary Being is a
concept that has no positive content he is not saying that it is meaningless (as the
positivists do, and the positivists take Kant to be saying just that). Kant maintains that
Necessary Being has no positive content his claim is that it is not a clear-cut concept like
the concepts in science about which admit of proof and disproof. Here Kant introduces a
distinction between idea and concept. The ideas of God, infinity, and freedom are not
meaningless just because these ideas cannot become concepts as in science; rather, these
ideas belong to another order of mind and lays claim on other portions of our being
human. Indeed, as human beings we exist within the question of God and freedom; we
can never escape these questions although we can clearly turn out backs upon them.
So in the matter of proofs of God, then, who is right Kant or Leibnitz? On very practical
grounds Kant seems to be right that there is no proof of the existence of God, or infinity
or freedom, or the mind, otherwise these words would not be the perennial problem they
are.
The same is true for numbers theory in mathematics (Godel’s theorem) and there are
limits to scientific proof especially with respect to foundational questions. Yet Leibnitz
cannot so easily be dismissed. After all we cannot evade his question “why is there
anything rather than nothing?” We may fall back on the need for faith here but even
without faith this question is one our intellect must confront. For consider that even if our
civilization was to continue indefinitely and science would continue to make progress
indefinitely, the question would still confront us. At least Kant’s refutation serves the
religious in assuring them that science can never answer all the questions we ask
especially those which most deeply concern us (about the meaning of existence). In other
words, Kant assures them that science can never take the place of religion, perform its
functions, or answer its questions.
The intellect simply cannot cope with this question (and others like it) conceptually; and
it is this limit of reason which is its radical finitude. We usually think of finitude as an
endpoint of a line but for Kant finitude is right up front – it is gap hole in the middle of
reason. This reason is not of the kind to answer all questions it brings to us (i.e., we ask
ourselves). We can spin a brilliant web – the new science – yet we cannot step beyond it
(scientific materialism). We continue to ask question which cannot be conceptualized and
subjected to proof or disproof.
We must take care to understand Kant carefully. He is easily subject to misinterpretation
(as indeed the positivist of the 19th misinterpreted Kant). The 1st Critique is divided into
three parts (1) sensibility or sensory intuition, (2) understanding or the
conceptual/scientific intellect, and (3) reason dealing with transcendent ideas), but we
must take care not to think of these three part as three stories. It is not that understanding
(apriori conditions of the possibility of experience) is added to sensibility, and then
reason is added to the understanding. Rather, all three categories function within the
framework of sense experience. I do not have sense impression/perceptions (Hume) to
which I then add the concept of substance or then concept of cause and effect. Rather, the
notion that we are surrounded by substantial things and that things causally affect each
other are analyzed out of the whole of experience. Instead of stacked stories we need to
see Kant’s three parts as concentric circles and even this is not enough for the outer
circles of reason and understanding penetrate the inner circle of sensibility. In other
words all three parts are analyzed out of experience. Experience is never just sensibility;
rather, experience is permeated by understanding (concepts) and reason (ideas). This is
why experience is so rich and why, in contemporary science including psychology,
experience is replaced by “observation/perception” (in an effort to restrict or reduce
experience to what is observably present - empiricism) but of course whatever we come
to know by way of strict observation must return to experience (external validation of
scientific findings).
In experience we are always thrown back to the question of “why?” and scientific
questions and answers are restricted to the “how”. For Kant we cannot escape from
asking the question of God (it is a metaphysical question that arises within experience
even as we cannot conceptually understand it or evade it though we try).
Nor are we pushed to ask the transcendental question only in moments of speculative
questioning (sort of “philosophizing”, with all the negative connotations when contrasted
with scientific questioning). In fact sometimes just a mood swing, an event, will lead us
to ask about the meaning of “my” life or just about the meaning of life. Such questions
cannot be answered at a conceptual level of understanding as Kant calls it. (The concept
of “understanding” after Kant changes its meaning in favor of “explanation” even as we
might allow that both involve “reason”.) For this question of the meaning of my life, and
other such questions, cannot be assuaged by fame, fortune, achievement, health, family,
and friends, (e.g., Tolstoy’s “My Confessions” cf. Confessions by St Augustine and
Rousseau are all about the lack of certitude in life) and just perhaps science or analytic
philosophy (which would relegate such question as meaningless because they are not
answerable conceptually). Psychology in the 20th c. has a long history of trying to ban
those questions because they are not answerable – the reality is however that people do
ask those questions and psychology as a discipline surely must be interested in thw
questions people ask themselves and others.
Perhaps the human mind is larger than sensibility and understanding (in Kant’s sense);
perhaps such questions lay claim to a sense of cosmos inaccessible to reason – even as
Kant as a thoroughgoing rationalist, a child of the Enlightenment would never assent to
that. Nevertheless, Kant provided another way to God (to answering such questions)
besides the speculative intellect (reason); that way lies through (1) our experiences of
being moral agents, and (2) of being sensitive to the beauty of nature and the sublime of
reason. Let’s briefly examine both.
Duty and beauty
Kant was not merely the first thinker to understand the full impact of the new science, but
he was also the first to split the human mind itself (Descartes had split the mind off from
the body but Kant split the mind within itself). This split is evident in one of his more
famous passages:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the
oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above and the
moral law within me.
Here he draws a distinction between the inner and outer, and natural world and the moral
world, the phenomenal and noumenal world. The starry heavens open the expanse of the
universe, system beyond system, in confrontation with which my personal significance is
but an infinitesimal and borrowed bit of matter that in the end must return to the universe.
On the other hand, moral law grips my conscience and so my dignity as a person is
exalted. As a spiritual being, I am no longer but a bit of matter, nothing in an indifferent
universe; rather, the moral law commands me inwardly in a way that seems to open upon
a fuller destiny than being a mere bit of matter.
The difference between these two perspectives is irreconcilable; as we lean towards the
one or the other our human nature is radically split. If Kant is far more explicit in
articulating this split, it is the same one as haunted Pascal when he writes: “the eternal
silence of those infinite spaces frightens me”. It is this same alienation that runs through
all of modernity. It is resolved only when or if the universe is believed to have some
meaning in harmony with our own (inward) spiritual and moral aims – the (re)discovery
of God/transcendental.
Kant follows the tradition in this regard but in a non-traditional way. Before examining
this let me briefly comment on what happened here: a separation of the natural and
moral; the separating of human being as moral agent and a non-moral universe (a
Machine of Nature).
For the ancients there was no such separation between the natural and moral. For
Aristotle morality is the fulfillment of human nature; virtue means excellence. Just as our
physical virtue or excellence is the perfection of the body, so our moral virtues are the
perfection of our living together, as social beings, in community. [Just maybe Aristotle
gazing at the Mediterranean sky is very different from Kant gazing at the Konigsberg sky
– the former is ablaze with light and life suggesting the habitat for spirit.] Similarly, for
the Christian medieval era the universe was the creation of a loving God and hence
entirely congenial for our moral nature which was part of God’s creation. Christians
added theological virtues to Aristotle’s scheme which Aristotle had planted in our human
nature – loving our neighbor while not our inclination is surely a divine command. But
then suddenly with the emergence of the new science, the Enlightenment, the harmony
between cosmic and human vanished. Modern science, the new science, in a few short
centuries put forward another image of the universe as a machine indifferent to human
purposes. If Kant grasped the implications of this new science in terms of its methods and
concepts, Kant also understands its consequences for moral and aesthetic life.
Of course, even in our everyday life we find that the moral and natural are not always
conjoined – witness our efforts to move against our inclinations or against circumstances;
how difficult is obedience even if were so inclined. But if learn morality through
instruction or example, Kant claims it would be a mistake to think that we can define the
moral in terms of social-psychological conditioning. In fact, Kant’s ethics is one of the
most sharply drawn non-naturalistic (psychological) theories. There is no set of natural
predicates (whether social cultural, psychological etc.). However thorough our social
conditioning, we can always move against the social order. In fact, we may find that the
call of our conscience is precisely that it moves against the social-political order of
tradition (however much we may respect that tradition).
Kant claims that the fundamental situation in ethics is that the individual asks himself
“what ought to do?” But “ought” can never be defined in term of “is”. Thus the factual
case of what “is” can never guide to us what moral case of “what ought to be”, even if in
some unusually and happy situations the two happen to coincide (where desire and ideal
coincide). Human beings are the only animals in nature that submit to the call of the
“ought”. How do we explain this demand/power of the call of the “ought”, of duty? Kant
answer here is divided:
(1) On the one hand we are creatures haunted by the feeling of spiritual destiny beyond
the material order – this is the call to duty, of conscience, or the voice of God within us.
(2) On the other hand, Kant in the rationalist tradition demands a purely formal
explanation in terms of the moral imperative. This dual answer once again exemplifies
the division within the mind: moral and religious consciousness is on its way to being
secularized by the rationalism of the new age.
For example, Kant claims that we have a moral obligation not to lie. Ye life often carries
us into dilemmas such that we do lie and we feel ashamed/guilty perhaps especially when
the lie is trivial. From where comes this power of the command “thou shalt not lie?” Kant
tells us that the command is planted in our very reason (like the apriori categories of
understanding in case of our knowledge about the world) and so, for Kant, lying becomes
a formal contradiction of our reason. The question is of course whether this is so…Kant
makes a strong argument that we should always act such that we can will others to act as
well….but can reason can bear the load of spiritual values? Take for example lying in the
context of a promise: in the act of promising I also think that I have no intention of
carrying out the promise - this does look like a formal contradiction of reason (i.e., I will
do it and I will not do it, p and not p). Yet if we just take these two propositions in
themselves they do not actually give us the situation of the lie. For consider “I say aloud I
will do it” while “I think to myself I will not do it. But this is not a formal contradiction,
however morally reprehensible they may be.
Lying is not merely a formal contradiction in logic. For one thing why should we feel
ashamed or guilt on lying if it merely involved a formal contradiction? I might feel
embarrassed at my stupidity in reasoning (cognitive dissonance) but surely not guilty.
Indeed, psychologically the aftermath of a lie is particularly potent and this would be
very odd if it were a mere formal contradiction. There is a contradiction involved in lying
of course but it is not a formal one. Language is an open realm and in using language to
speak I enter this realm. When I lie I shut myself off from this realm of the open, and so
from others. In lying I shut myself off from others, from the community of speakers, from
their communal reality. It is this sense of community that lies at the basis of our ethics. It
is community that is the apriori condition of our normal sense of guilt when we fail to
heed the command of duty. If we lie we sever ourselves from this apriori condition. If I
ought to do something then I am bound to do it at least if I am to have a place in
community, and hence humanity.
Indeed Kant was later to acknowledge what he calls the kingdom of souls or kingdom of
ends, in the context of his effort to give religious justification of morality. But for the
moment he proceeds as if morality were a matter of formal reason – of the categorical
imperative – act so that you can will others act in the same way. But as I said, the call of
duty reposes on the notion of a community – rather than as individuals – and it is
community that is the apriori condition of the possibility of morality and ethical action.
The latter is the existential side of Kant that was to carry forth in the 19th c. and focus on
practical reason (as opposed to theoretical reason or understanding).
Beauty
The split between the natural (starry heavens) and the moral (moral law) world needs
somehow to be healed. Indeed in everyday experience the rift often seems to be
overcome. As purely sensory being we do enjoy the beauties of nature in a way that does
away with the bifurcation between the physical world and the moral world in what seems
to some at least a spiritual harmony between them. But as usual, Kant maintains that
when there is such tendency towards harmony we must submit this harmony to rational
critique or reflection so as to establish its proper limits. If the reason as theoretical
understanding is limited to natural world, and reason as practical understanding is
limited to the moral world, then reason as aesthetic appreciation involves bringing
together theoretical and practical reason in a harmony of nature and spirit (morality).
Aesthetic appreciation harmonizes the moral practical reason and natural theoretical
understanding.
But Kant is no aesthete (i.e., one who gives too little to moral duty and too much to the
cultivation of refined aesthetic sensitivity). For Kant insists that the experience of beauty
be understood within nature. Beauty is not simply the captivation of our senses but it is
also morally uplifting. Thus he who gives himself to beauty in nature is also likely to be a
morally good person (i.e., s/he will not be an aesthete). Here Kant rebels against the
Renaissance which was filled with aesthetic desperados, connoisseurs of art who were
capable of slitting another’s throat without a moment’s afterthought (e.g., Robert
Browning’s My last Duchess).
Kant’s view of beauty may strike others as unduly moralistic – and therefore oldfashioned (why should the creator of beauty – aesthetic objects - also be a morally good
person?). We moderns have through upheavals in art have dispensed with the beautiful in
nature. Rather, for us, what is most present in modern art is its separation from nature.
Art has become simply a human artifice, ingenious, technologically immense, but having
little to do with nature (which we deemed to be a mere machine, perhaps more so that
Kant or before him the originators of the new science did).
In aesthetic theory, there immediately arises, following Kant, a reversal in the
philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) Kant’s position with regard to beauty. I will
deal with Hegel later but for now Hegel claims that in matters of aesthetics, nature is not
the proper topic (as Kant held). Rather, Hegel claimed that we must restrict ourselves to
beauty as he finds beauty in acts of human expression – a purely human product.
Importantly, Hegel was no positivist; on the contrary he is a philosopher of the most
sweeping metaphysical speculation (which Kant warned against) and he was critical of
Kant’s rationalism (especially of Kant’s placement of limits on reason in rejecting
metaphysics) and instead Hegel absorbs nature into the domain of the moral or historical,
thereby removing consciousness even further away from nature.
The philosopher Whitehead speaks of the bifurcation of nature as fundamental to modern
thought in the 19th c. Experience is now split into two domains: the immediate qualitative
and the conceptual quantitative, the subjective and the objective – something Kant tried
to avoid following Hume’s skepticism. Of course, the immediate qualitative make up the
domain of aesthetic intimacy with nature, but now that domain is shut up in the individual
human mind. Hegel’s assignment of aesthetics to purely human making moves in this
same direction, away from nature. But we should note that:
The beauty of the sunset remains. It is not merely in our individual minds. There does
seem to be a harmony of nature and human spirit in the setting sun. Even positivists will
have to acknowledge that even as it somehow doesn’t belong to nature-as-known. Kant
understood that feeling; he respects the cosmic dimension and would preserve it. At the
same time he is a critical philosopher and he cannot just let the feeling stand as proof:
proof for Kant consisted of determinate concepts (not feelings however exalted these
might be).
Kant is consistently ambivalent. He destroys traditional rational arguments for God,
beauty, truth, and makes us profoundly aware of the vastness of the universe relative to
our own status. However, he is also persistently sensitive to moral and aesthetic
experience that seem to point beyond our finite status. He attempts everywhere to make
room, to limit reason to its appropriate domain, in order that he might well remain
faithful to experience (and not now to sensory impressions or observation).
Kant’s aesthetics softens the stern picture of nature from which he sets out. Those austere
starry heavens above which dwarf our human being, are juxtaposed by the beauty of
nature that charms the senses and in its more sublime aspects lifts us to moral exaltation,
leading us gently to the transcendent idea of God. Yet Kant remains a moralist, the
validity of our aesthetic response depends our moral seriousness. Therefore the act of
faith remains for him a solemn and solitary commitment of the individual soul as a full
moral being. In fact, Kant describes this act of faith with a kind of drama and severity
that is rather startling.
Granted that the pure moral law inexorably binds every man as a command (not
as a rule of prudence), the righteous man may say “I will that there be a God;
that my existence in this world be also an existence in a pure world of the
understanding (reason) outside the system of natural connections, and finally that
my duration be endless. “I stand by this and will not give up this belief, for this is
the only case where my interests inevitably determines my judgment because I will
not yield anything of this interest; I do so without any attention to sophistries,
however little I may be able to answer them or oppose them with others more
plausible.
“I will that there be a God”… these are fearful words of self-assertion. To be sure Kant
surrounded these words with all the conditions of piety, and the claim can be made only
by someone like Kant who has submitted to the command of morality. This morality
would not make sense however unless there were some divine order in this world, and
beyond that, the possibility of immortality to round off the disorders of our mortal lives.
God’s existence then is an argument from morality. We might note that self-assertion is
one the chief characteristics of the modern mind - it is the language that takes the place of
language of faith. “I will that there be a God” (note Nietzsche’s “I will that there is no
God”) is hardly the language of St Augustine. The latter approaches God with humility
and hunger/desire. Even Luther who wrote a treatise on the human will would have
reminded Kant that for man to will God into existence is the reverse of the natural order,
and furthermore I could only will such if my will were already submitted to God.
Kant’s philosophy however was to take over German thought on the will. Not that Kant
shares much with, say, Nietzsche or Schopenhauer; Kant is a rationalist and a follower of
the Enlightenment. And hence he does not share in the passion, the storm and stress, of
the Romantics. But that is why his language is even more startling, and that these words
do not belong to the tradition of faith of the humble and contrite heart. These words do
not bow before God; rather, they assert the power of the human will/reason to invoke
God into being (a necessary apriori condition of the possibility of morality). In this sense
Kant’s words do portend Nietzsche’s “will to power”. Everything turns on the resolute
will/reason of the individual. Here God recedes even as Kant was still living a pietistic
existence of traditional theism. Kant would have been horrified by Nietzsche denial of
God (I will that God does not exist); Kant would have thought Nietzsche’s atheism
demonic. Still if one reduces faith to self-assertion, as Kant does, if one leaves the free
will dangling before its own power (of reason), might it not take the opposite course as it
does in Nietzsche?
What is so remarkable about Kant is that he was able to balance science, morality, and
religion in what was in the 19th c. to fall complete apart. Kant has piety but not passion
(in this is he is not an Augustine or a Pascal); he teaches awe and respect for religion, but
not the passion of worship; he teaches the freedom of the will to give itself reason, but he
is not one to understand community. His thought is already secular, a secularity that was
to be the hallmark of the 19th c.
In 1804 when Kant died he had set foot into a century that was alien to him. Kant’s
thought belongs to the 18th c.
If we return to my central theme: namely the fate of the mind/consciousness and to how
we understand the mind/consciousness (ourselves) and its power to know our place in the
universe, we have to ask what did Kant contribute to our understanding of the human
mind?
1. The mind is not additive as it was for Hume and the other empiricists. Mind is not
a heap of impressions or perceptions, nor is it an aggregate faded traces (ideas)
left behind by sense impressions. In fact, what is different in Kant is that he does
not proceed additively by adding part to part, rather he proceeds “structurally”
and proceeds from the whole (experience) to its parts. We can understand sense
impressions only insofar as we grasp them as (meaningful) “phenomenon” within
the wider context of consciousness. For example Hume would claim that we have
an idea of space additively from experience with many spaces and then
imaginatively come to infinite space. Kant points out that this procedure is caught
in its first step. The first space, say of this room, is already in fact a particular part
of the whole of space. The whole is implied in the part. [which was part of the
later 19th c. hermeneutics.]
2. Kant is the archenemy of the atomistic reductive habits of thought that have
overtaken much of our thinking today. If we try to construct consciousness out of
mental atoms – sense impressions, perceptions, or cognitive processes – we find
that these isolated atoms always imply a more inclusive structure of mind in
which they are found. Even ordinary sense perception already implies structures
of space and time and the various categories of understanding (substance, cause
and effect, etc.). The part has meaning only within the whole. Of course
sometimes this implication of the whole in the part is not so obvious. For
example, if we begin with the idea of duty, our first task is to understand the
meaning of right and wrong, and then proceed to the particular things/events that
are right and wrong. Hence we proceed to an analysis of particular duties (in this
situation or that). But as Kant points out, our ethical task is not to make a list of
rights and wrongs (which may well tell us of particular duties) for this does not
tell us what our moral being is as a unitary phenomenon. Kant anticipates
Heidegger’s distinction between beings and Being here; we do not get the idea of
Being as an aggregate of particular beings, for as soon as we refer to a particular
beings we have already in mind the idea of Being as such. According to Kant the
task of ethics is not understandable unless we ask the question of our moral nature
as a whole. We are moral creatures in a universe that dwarfs us. Yet we continue
to struggle and toil to lead a moral existence. For what purpose or just what is the
meaning of this toil? Is trying to be moral not merely one more item of absurdity
in the vastness of this universe? But as Kant points out, the moral person in the
performance of his/her duty – the performance itself in meeting one’s obligation
already answers this question. An ethical conviction of rightness of an act already
implies the conviction that this act makes a difference and hence must have
meaning in being part of the larger scheme of things.
3. Kant’s argument therefore always begins in experience and then tries to uncover
the conditions necessary for the experience to be the experience it is. These
conditions are not necessarily open to us (in reflection or introspection) hence we
4.
5.
6.
7.
must recover these pre-conditions in what Kant calls the transcendental
argument. Thus, Kant claims that the categorical imperative itself has as its
precondition the existence of God, belief in the free will, etc., which does mean
that we can prove God’s existence, or our free will, etc., but we act as if there is a
spiritual order in which our lives are embedded. Now we may detect here in Kant
something of his personal beliefs (his psychology), but we should be careful in
this accusation for it misses the point of his philosophical argument. Our beliefs
about the nature of the universe do enter into our view of morality and our ethical
being is projected against some imaginative cosmos as a whole. But this is true
for the atheist as well as the theist; for Nietzsche as well as Kant. Nietzsche
“death of God” is spoken against the background of a vision of a cosmic order.
We can slough off all this and try to construct a logically self-contained ethics (as
modern philosophy tries to do). But this effort is self-defeating for these effort
address ethical questions of action but they do not address the question of the
nature of an ethical being. In other words, these efforts never address concrete
experience of concrete individual human beings who ask ultimate questions. The
cosmic dimensions of mind are, if you will, pushed aside in the interest of
specialization (analysis, decomposition, and reductionism). The focus is entirely
instrumental (in reason: calculating the best, most moral, choice) and in doing so
these ethicists never talk of person, moral beings but of their choice of actions in
situations (behaviorist or formalists as in analytical philosophy and much of
contemporary ethics). Here we compartmentalize the mind and fragment the
person into his/her actions/motivations etc. all without the whole context. Kant
warns us against the effort of the empiricists who try to understand the mind
atomistically as a heap of sensations, and he also warns us in trying to understand
ethics procedurally which would fragment the person in trying to understand the
person in terms of his/her functions.
What is lacking in Kant? What is lacking in Kant no less than in Hume is a grasp
of the concrete self, of the “I” that each one of us experiences. Kant’s analysis
remains formalistic and transcendental and he does not come to grips with the
ego/self/”I” that underlies the will that gives itself reason (conditions of
possibility conceived now as formal reason). Of course, Kant does acknowledge
that there is an “I” or ego that accompanies all our thoughts. There are no freefloating impressions or ideas; consciousness does not simply float around in the
air; it must be someone’s consciousness. We might in moments of intense activity
forget ourselves but we always return and are brought back to ourselves. Kant
rejects Hume’s desubstantialization of consciousness - the self is essential for
consciousness if it is not to result in fragmentation of the self into its capacities,
functions, etc. Our contemporary fear of “substance” (unless it is “matter”) - the
reduction of meaning to matter as in operationalization – is strictly a fear of
wholeness, of the conviction that knowledge comes only in denying anything that
cannot be broken into “bits of matter moving”.
Kant claims that this “I” must be capable of accompanying all our thoughts. Here
Kant yields too much to Hume. He wants to confine himself to the minimalist
empiricist assertion: that the “I” must be capable of accompanying its reason. But
surely the “I” is stronger than that. Commonsense would hold that the self (“I”)
persist as an identity over time – an identity that is concrete or substantial – the
soul as substance! This pronouncement would horrify psychologists today even
those who are not necessarily reductionists. But perhaps we should look back to a
time when this substantial self first became suspect.
For Aristotle, a primary substance is a concrete individual object and
characteristic of such a substance is that it has a separate existence. When the
immortality of the soul was still central this substantial nature of the soul was
emphasized (capable of surviving the body). But Aristotle also takes note of the
fact that substance remains identical through change – and it is this characteristic
that we need –persistence through change in body and mind are part of what we
mean by the identity of the self. The fact that we have a personal identity through
time/change is so overwhelmingly part of everyday experience that it is hard to
understand why philosophy, and later psychology, would pass it by. Philosophy
seems to think that the self is spending time in a lonely chamber, in solitary
introspection, hunting for a fugitive and ghostly identity (Descartes, the
empiricists but also Kant). But as Aristotle and the Medievals understood we live
in community were personal identity is a bedrock fixture of the world that it
hardly seems to need comment.
8. Why then is it such a problem for philosophy and psychology, why for Kant? In
Kant’s case the puzzle results from his epistemological stance. According to Kant,
we know only the appearance of thing (phenomena never noumena). This is also
the case for the self/mind as a persisting entity (we can never know the mind/self
“in-itself”). As Kant indicated, I cannot make intellectual concept of the
self/mind; hence it cannot be known. Kant pushed the requirements for knowledge
too far; as a cautiously critical philosopher he leaned too heavily on Hume’s
skepticism thereby blurring the epistemological and the existential (reason and
life). He was focused on the requirements of strict knowledge even as he also did
heed the claims of existence. But to have knowledge of something we need not
have strict knowledge, a complete conceptually transparent explanation, of
something. It is almost as if we must have scientific knowledge or else we know
nothing….. this is the trend today of course when everyone does “research”
pretending that the results of research constitute strict knowledge….
After Kant, philosophy disperses; as indeed does the self, even Kant’s minimal self/mind
is dispersed. This has come about through specialization but with specialization comes
fragmentation (witness the numerous fields of psychology) and often the absence of
communication (other than information). Amid specialization and fragmentation, it also
becomes increasingly difficult to keep or have a sense of personal identity – and this
situation is made much worse when we do not have a culture that presents a conception
and idea or a faith in the stable self (“I”/self). Indeed, our scientific theories in the socialpsycho-neuro- sciences present the opposite…no self at all.
It is Hegel who carries Kant to a full-fledged idealism and is then, in turn, confronted by
an existentialist revolt in Kierkegaard who laments that the self has almost disappeared in
Hegel and replaced by a vaporous notion of “spirit” (modern “spirituality”). Ironically,
20th c. existentialist figures such as Sartre and Heidegger have concocted theories of self
as fragmented in their deconstruction of the self and its community.
Lecture 6.2 (Elaboration of Kant’s 2nd Critique practical reason)
Kant took for granted our ordinary knowledge of objects and our scientific knowledge of
them. Physical science meant Newtonian science, the new science. Given science, Kant’s
task was to analytically distinguish between the apriori (formal) and aposteriori (material)
elements of theoretical knowledge of the world.
Of course, besides the object world, there is also our sense of moral knowledge. For
example, we “ought to tell the truth”, but what kind of knowledge is this “ought” in
contrast to what is knowledge as to how to behave? This knowledge too is apriori in the
sense that it does not depend on what we actually do (behave). Even if everyone told lies,
we would still know that we ought to tell the truth (that is “ought” is independent of what
in fact we do). The moral philosopher should try to isolate the apriori element in our
moral knowledge – are synthetic apriori statements possible?
This does not mean that we have to discover an entirely new system of ethics. Rather it
means discovering apriori elements in analogous to the apriori categories of
understanding/judgments. Not that these categories were to be new categories, rather he
wanted to demonstrate that our practical reason about behavior is grounded in reason
such that when we judge morally we do so in accord with principles given by reason to
itself. Not of course that we are aware of these apriori principles, for if we were then the
task of the philosopher is finished.
What is practical reason: Reason in its practical use (i.e., moral use). Thus while there is
ultimately only one reason dealing with objects in two ways (1) as given in sensibility
(theoretical, or cognitive, knowledge), and (2) itself the source of objects, in moral
choice. That is, the practical use of reason is reason to make moral choices/decisions in
accord with principles that proceeds from itself [practical, or conative (determination of
the will), knowledge]. The latter is the power of producing objects corresponding to ideas
(whether we have the physical power to do so or not) in accord with the moral
law/principles. Hence, the will is a rational power not merely a blind drive. In the
exercise of the will we can then distinguish between the cognitive and voluntary aspects
involved in moral action. The two belong together: the cognitive (knowledge of moral
principles) and the voluntary (choice or will); for practical reason produces choices
(cognitive) and actions (will) in accord moral principles.
Thus, the moral philosopher in using reason in its practical sense must find in practical
reason the source of the apriori element in moral judgment. Hence, the moral philosopher
is not expected to derive the whole of moral law (both form and content) from practical
reason alone – only the formal aspect. Thus, we have the concept of moral obligation and
we must distinguish this from the particular conditions of duty. Moreover, when Kant
speaks of practical reason or the rational will as the origin of moral law, he is thinking of
practical reason as such and not of practical reason as actually, empirically, found in
finite human beings. Thus, he is concerned with moral imperatives antecedent to actual
human moral choices (which are always concerned to take into account empirical human
conditions). For example, “thou shall not commit adultery” implies the empirical
institution of marriage, and hence Kant distinguishes between “pure ethics” or
metaphysics of morals (obligation) and applied ethics which applies moral
principles/obligations to the empirical conditions of human nature (practical
anthropology).
This distinction between pure ethics and applied ethics is analogous to the distinction
between metaphysics of nature and empirical physics. Yet Kant admits that evening the
metaphysics of morals we have to take into account human nature as such in order to
exhibit the consequences of universal moral principles. Bu if this is so then moral
practical philosophy becomes a study of the subjective conditions favorable or not for
acting in accord with moral principles (e.g., moral education).
Thus, on the one had there is a need for a metaphysics of morals (that prescinds from
empirical conditions) to get at the formal apriori conditions that make ethical judgments
possible, and yet there is also the recognition that such an endeavor replies on actual
conditions of human life (practical anthropology). Thus, for example, if “thou shalt not
lie” is apriori (that is, independent of how people actually behave), it is questionable
whether this principle is actually apriori in the sense that it does not depend on
anthropology, i.e., is valid only for human beings as they live).
Kant’s point is that the basis of obligation (universal principles) must not be sought in
human nature as lived in the world, but must be apriori simply in concepts given by
reason to itself (“pure ethics”). It is in reason that we must search for these obligations
(apriori judgments) which presumably make possible synthetic apriori judgments of
morals. Hence, Kant is not concerned to deduce all morals precepts simply from an
analysis of pure practical reason – this cannot be done. Yet moral law must be grounded
in reason alone – meaning that we must not consider empirical human circumstances (this
distinguishes Kant from say the utilitarian). Thus, we cannot found these moral principles
in moral education (Montaigne), physical feeling (Epicurus), in political constitution
(Mandeville), in moral feelings (Hutchinson), or in religious faith. None of these can
provide the foundations for morality. Nor can morals be based on natural theology
because for Kant religious belief was founded in morality.
In his Groundwork of metaphysics of morals, Kant opening words are the following: “It
is impossible to conceive of anything in the world, or indeed out of it, which can be called
good without qualification save only a good will”. Kant does not believe he is saying
anything new here – rather he claims to be saying what is implicit in our ordinary moral
knowledge. However it is becoming on him to say what he means when he says that a
“good will is the only good without qualification”.
For one thing is a good will not good by definition (analytically true)? A will that is good
is presumably good in and of itself without relation to anything else. Thus, we usually say
something is good in relation to something else, for example, the benefit, such as
happiness, it brings. Moreover, the will that is good is a will that is good no matter what
the circumstances that may prevent me from doing my will.
In order to clarify the meaning of good (when applied to the will) Kant turns to duty
which he takes to be most salient feature of moral consciousness. A will that acts for the
sake of duty is a good will. Now of course God’s will is good but God does not act for
the sake of duty (God’s will is a “Holy Will”), and hence, when Kant writes that the will
that acts for the sake of duty he implies that the concept of duty or obligation at the very
least involves the possibility of overcoming the self (as in self conquest or overcoming
obstacles). So that the will that acts for the sake of duty is one that is good.
Kant then distinguishes between action done for the sake of duty and action done in
accord with duty, and he maintains that only actions done for the sake of duty are of
moral worth. To preserve one’s life is a duty and most people have the immediate
inclination to do so. If I preserve my life simply because I am inclined to do so my doing
so has no moral worth (although preserving my life not immoral). Similarly, if as a
philanthropist I give away my money because I empathize with those who do not have
money, my action while not immoral has no moral worth even as Kant also claims that it
is better to do one’s duty cheerfully. Of my doing so because I have a beneficent
temperament is virtuous but properly speaking it is not moral. In fact, Kant maintains that
to more my acting for the sake of duty involves overcoming my inclination to not do my
duty, acting against myself for the sake of duty, the greater the moral value of my action.
This leads to the strange conclusion that the more I hate doing my duty the better,
provided we do our duty. Thus the more inclined we are not to do our duty, the higher our
moral worth when we in fact do our duty. This notion is odd because it runs counter to
the idea that in the more integrated personality inclination and duty tend to coincide. In
any case, the moral ideal is that when acting for the sake of duty coincides with our
inclination to do our duty (this comes closest to the “Holy Will”).
But what is meant by acting for the sake of duty? Kant says that it means acting out of
reverence for the law, that is, the moral law. Duty is then the necessity of acting out of
reverence for the law. What is meant by law? Law here is universality admitting of no
exceptions. Now while we physically necessarily conform to natural law, only as rational
being can we act out of reverence for law. Thus, our actions are not moral because of
their (intended or unintended) consequences, rather they are moral is performed out of
reverence for the law. Hence, the good will is manifested in acting for the sake of duty
and duty means acting out of reverence for law (universal).
How does this apply to life?
Before answering this question, Kant distinguishes between maxims and principles. By
principle he means a fundamental objective moral law grounded in pure practical reason
– it is for the sake of principle that human beings would act if they were fully rational
agents. A maxim is a subjective principle of volition – one on which an agent acts as a
matter of empirical fact which determines his decision. Maxims may or may be in accord
with principles. Kant further distinguishes between empirical or material maxims and
apriori or formal maxims: empirical maxims refer to desired ends or desired
consequences, whereas apriori maxims refer to the universal moral law.
So how do we apply this formula to life? I am never to act otherwise than so that I can
also will that my maxim should become moral law. That is, I am never to act otherwise
than that my empirical maxim (by inclination or by consequence) should become moral
law. Reverence for law which gives rise to the formal maxim of acting in obedience to
law as such demands that we should bring our material/empirical maxims under the form
of universal law.
Imagine a man in distress who can extricate himself from the distress by making a
promise which he has no intention of fulfilling. That is, he lies. May he do so? If so, then
his maxim is that he may extricate himself from distress by lying. We may now ask: can
he will this maxim to become universal law? If so, then everyone who is in distress may
extricate himself from this distress by promising what s/he has no intention to fulfill.
According to Kant this universalization cannot be willed. For this would mean that lying
should become a universal law. But then no promises would ever be believed. But in fact,
in the example, the man’s maxim postulates belief in promises. Hence, he cannot adopt
this empirical maxim and at the same time will that it become universal law. Thus, the
maxim cannot assume the form of universality - or become a principle.
In practice we all act in accord with maxims –subjective principles of volition. But a
finite will cannot be good unless it is motivated by reverence for universal law. In order
that our will may be morally good we have to ask whether our maxims, subjective
principles of volition, should become universal laws. If we cannot do so, then we must
reject the maxim. If we can do so, then our maxim can become a possible principle in the
universal moral realm. In sum, the principle of duty is that I ought never to act otherwise
than so I can also will that my maxim should become universal law – and this is Kant’s
first approximation of the categorical imperative.
Kant’s distinction between maxims and principles allows that my subjective principles of
volition may be at odds with objective principles of morality – giving rise to the
experience of obligation. In so far as our wills are not Holy Wills, the moral law therefore
necessarily takes on the form of an imperative. Pure practical reason commands and it is
our duty to overcome our desires (for outcomes) which conflict with these commands.
Now Kant distinguishes between commands and imperatives: the universal objective
principle is called a command (of reason) whereas an imperative is a command of reason
to the will which, by because it is subjective, is not necessarily determined by the
command. This makes clear that the will does not necessarily follow the command of
reason with the result that the command seems to an agent as a constraint pressuring the
will. In this sense then the law may be said to be an external force on the will.
There are three kinds of imperatives corresponding to three different senses of good
action but only one of these is the moral imperative.
(1) If you wish to learn French or become happy you ought to take these means.
These actions are good with respect to a certain end, namely to learn French
(hence not for their own sake). These Kant calls hypothetical imperatives.
(2) Not everyone wants to learn French or become a successful burglar and therefore
if you wish to learn French or become a successful burglar then you should take
these means. This imperative Kant calls problematic hypothetical imperative – an
imperative of skill. [Kant seems somewhat cavalier about dismissing teleological
ethical theories. For example, Aristotle’s eudaimonia is regarded as an objective
actualization of human potentialities and the actions to bring this about are not
external to the end. In this case Kant would say this ethics is based on the idea of
the perfection of human nature and though while the idea of morally relevant, it
cannot support a moral imperative.]
(3) What then is a moral imperative? It is purely apriori in the sense that it commands
conformity to law in general. It commands that all our maxims which serve as
principles of volition conform to universal law. Therefore there is only one
categorical imperative: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same
time will that it should become universal law. Or, act as if the maxim of your
actions were to become through your will a universal law of nature.
Now Kant does not intent that concrete rule of conduct can be deductively derived from
the categorical imperative. Thus, the categorical imperative is not intended to be a
premise for the deduction of rules of conduct but rather a criterion for judging the
morality of concrete rules of conduct.
For example, suppose that I give money to a poor person in great distress where there is
no one else who has greater claim on my money. The maxim (subjective principle of
volition) of my action is that “I will give money to any person who needs my assistance
when there is no one else who has a prior claim on my money.” Now I can ask myself
whether I can will my maxim to be a universal law valid for all. I decide that I can so
will. Thus, my maxim is morally justified. But note here that the moral which I will
cannot be deduced from the categorical imperative. For the maxim contains ideas not
contained in the categorical imperative. But I can say that my maxim can be said to be
derived from the categorical imperative.
Since practical moral law is universal (i.e., the form of the law), all concrete principles of
conduct must partake in this universality if they are to be called moral. But what does it
mean to “be able” or “not able” to will one’s maxim to become universal law? It may
mean that there would be a logical contradiction between maxim and universal law, or it
may mean that there is a contradiction within the will. An example of the second is given
below.
For example, a man enjoys great prosperity and he sees that others are in misery and he
could help them. But the man adopts the maxim to not to concern himself with other
people. Now can he turn this maxim into a universal law? Obviously where he to do so, it
would not lead to a logical contradiction – for there is not contradiction in a law that
those with prosperity should mind those in distress. But Kant maintains that this man
cannot will this maxim to be universal law without contradiction within his own will. The
reason is that the maxim is an expression of selfish disregard for others even as it is
accompanied by
a desire that he should obtain help from others should he ever be in a state of misery – a
desire which would be contradicted if his maxim became universal law.
An example of the first is as follows. A man needs money and he can obtain it only by
promising to repay it, though he knows very well that he will be unable to do so. He
cannot turn this maxim (when I am in need of money, I will borrow it and promise to
repay it though I well know I cannot do so) into a universal law without contradiction for
a universal law of this kind would destroy all faith in promises whereas the man’s maxim
presupposes faith in promises.
According to Kant there is only one categorical imperative: “act only on that maxim
through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law”, but in
this above example we also have another formulation: act as if the maxim of your action
were to become through your will a universal law”.
In considering these two examples, we are left with a question: what is the relation
between the universal command (imperative) and our maxims governing our actions such
that practical reason is obliged to judge their maxims in terms of universal command? If
there is a relation then there must be a synthetic apriori connection between the will of a
rational being and the categorical imperative. No Kant claims that that which serves the
will as objective ground of self-determination is the end. If there is an end assigned by
reason alone (not desire) it will be valid for all rational beings and therefore serve as the
ground for a categorical imperative binding the wills of all rational beings. This end
cannot be relative but must have absolute value. Is there such an end? Kant suggests that
human being, any rational being, is an end in itself. It is rational being (human being)
that therefore serves to as the ground for the supreme principle of law.
Hence, rational nature exists as an end in itself, and following the practical imperative,
Act to treat humanity, whether your own person, or in that of any other person, always
at the same time as an end and never merely a means.
This version of the categorical imperative has some interesting consequences:
1. The suicide who destroys himself to escape from his pain uses himself as a mere
means to a relative end namely to maintain a tolerable conditions up the end of his
life.
2. The man who makes a promise to obtain a benefit and yet has no intention of
fulfilling his promise (or knows he cannot) using the man to whom he makes the
promise as a mere means to a relative end.
3. The monarch who uses soldiers in aggrandizing his own standing or that of his
country uses rational beings as mere means to his desired end. Kant advocated
that all standing armies be abolished.
The idea of respecting every rational will as an end in itself and not treating it as a means
to satisfying one desire leads to the idea of “the will of every rational being as making
universal law” and this is the principle of the autonomy of the will. Thus the moral will
which obeys the categorical imperative must never be determined by interest, inclination
etc. So the idea of a categorical imperative contains implicitly the idea of the autonomy
of the will and this autonomy can be expressed explicitly in the categorical imperative.
We then have the principle:
Never act on any other maxim than the one you could without contradiction be also
universal law, and accordingly always act so that the will could regard itself at the same
time as making the universal law through its maxim.
Or
So act that the maxim of your will could always at the same time be valid as a principle
making universal law.
Therefore it is easy to see why Kant speaks of the autonomy of the will as the “supreme
principle of morality” – and the sole principle of all moral laws and corresponding duties.
Heteronomy of the will is the source of all spurious morality. In this Kant presupposes a
distinction between human beings as rational beings and human beings as subject to
desires etc.; it is as rational beings that we legislate our desires.
The idea of rational beings as ends in themselves coupled with the idea of the rational
will, practical reason as morally legislating, brings us to the concepts of “the kingdom of
ends” whereby Kant understands the systematic union of rational beings through
common laws. As individuals we belong to the kingdom of ends either (1) by legislating
laws, or/and (2) by being subject to laws. Hence every rational being is both member and
sovereign.
Now the kingdom of ends is thought of on the analogy to the kingdom of nature: the self
imposed rules in the former are like the laws in the latter. Now the categorical imperative
states that all rational beings ought to act in a certain way; thus, the imperative states an
obligation – but is according to Kant a synthetic apriori proposition. That is, the
obligation cannot be obtained from the mere analysis of the concept of rational will
(hence it is not analytical), on the other hand the subject is necessarily connected with
the subject - it obliges the will. In fact, it is a practical synthetic apriori proposition: thus,
it does extend our theoretical knowledge of the world rather it is directed toward the
performance of certain actions good in themselves independent of our desires etc. (i.e.,
apriori) yet binding us (i.e., synthetic).
In what sense is the predicate binding on the subject? We require here a third term which
cannot be one in the sensible world (otherwise we risk heteronomy of the will) and Kant
finds it in the idea of freedom. That is the idea of obligation and acting for the sake of
duty in accordance with the categorical imperative relies on the idea of freedom.
Freedom cannot be proven. Practical reason or the will of a rational being must regard
itself as free; that is the will of such a being cannot be its own will unless it is free. Thus,
the idea of freedom is a practical necessity as a condition of the possibility of morality –
hence it is not a fiction.
The idea of freedom means also that we regard ourselves as belonging to the phenomenal
world of sensibility (and causality) and the noumenal world of intelligibility. We can
view ourselves from two points of view. As belonging to the world of natural law
(heteronomy) and the world of freedom (autonomy of reason).
In addition to freedom, practical reason also postulates the existence of God and
immortality. Here Kant reintroduces metaphysics which he had earlier rejected as the
illegitimate transcendence of reason but he does so in considering reason in its practical
use.
Here we must be mindful of the difficulty Kant faced. If our actions belonging as they do
to the world are subject to natural law, they are also free at least if they are moral. Can
they be both at the same time? Kant was well aware of the difficulty.
If we want to save freedom there is no other way than to ascribe the existence of a thing,
so far as it is determinable in time, and therefore also its causality according to the law of
natural necessity, to appearance alone; and to ascribe freedom to precisely the same being
as a thing-in-itself. So how can an individual be completely free at the same moment and
in regard to the same action in which he is subject to inevitable natural necessity?
The answer is that insofar as my existence is subject to time conditions (temporality) my
actions are a part of nature and causally determined. But I am also conscious of myself as
a thing-in-itself and deem my existence to transcend time and as determined solely by
laws that I give to myself through reason; this is freedom. This is not as strange as it
sound, for consider than when I look at my actions contrary to moral law in the past
(time), I attribute them to causal factors. But the feeling of guilt remains and the reason is
that my transgression-in-time is of moral law-beyond-time (belonging to super-sensible
existence outside of time): noumenally free yet phenomenally determined with respect to
the same actions.
Now reason even in its practical function seeks an unconditioned totality. That is, it seeks
a summum bonum –conceived as (1) a highest good (itself not conditioned) or (2) a
perfect good (not part of the greater whole). Now virtue is the supreme unconditioned
good but it does not follow that it is a perfect good in the sense that it is the total object of
the desires of rational beings and, in fact, Kant claims that happiness must be included in
the concept of perfect good. Hence, the summum bonum must include both virtue and
happiness. However, the relation between virtue and happiness is not a logical one but a
synthetic (empirical) one: happiness assumes virtue.
For can we possibly claim that virtue produces happiness? While practical reason
demands a connection between virtue and happiness, it is certainly not the case that virtue
causes happiness. Kant’s way of dealing with this is as follows. The claim that virtue
produces happiness is only conditionally false – that is, it is false only on the condition
that we take existence in this world to be the only sort of existence that a rational being
can have (hints or immortality). The claim that virtue causes happiness is true if I am
justified in thinking that I exist not only as a phenomenal being in nature but also as a
noumenal being in the super-sensible world – that is that the moral law in inseparably
connected with freedom demands that I believe this. The realization of the summum
bonum is possible (virtue produces happiness), if not immediately, then mediately
through the agency of God.
If I just referred to the existence of another world, but Kant actually approaches the
postulate of immortality through an analysis of virtue. The moral law requires that we
promote the perfect good which is the necessary object of the rational will. Obviously
this does not mean that the moral law commands us to pursue virtue because is brings us
happiness, rather we are commanded by practical reason to pursue virtue which causes
happiness. The virtue we are commanded to pursue is the complete accordance of will
and feeling with the moral law – and this would be, as we have seen, Holiness which no
rational being in this sensible world is capable of attaining – hence it is an endless
process of pursuing an ideal. But this endless process is possible only on the supposition
of an unending duration of existence and personality which is called the immortality of
the soul. Therefore the attainment of the first element of the summum bonum (the pursuit
of virtue command by moral law) is possible only on the supposition of the immortal soul
and hence the immortality of the soul is a presupposition of practical reason. It is not
demonstrable in a theoretical sense but a condition of possibility of free moral action.
This same practical use of reason in obeying the command to attain Holiness also leads to
the postulate of the existence of God as the condition for a synthetic connection between
virtue and happiness. Happiness is the state of a rational being in the world in whom in
the totality of his existence everything goes according to his wish and will. It depends
therefore on the harmony of nature with the free will. But of course rational beings are
not the authors of nature nor can we discover a causal connection between virtue and
happiness. If therefore there is a synthetic apriori connection between virtue and
happiness, we must postulate of a cause of the whole of nature which is distinct from
nature and which is the ground of an exact harmony between happiness and virtue
(morality). But this cause of nature must be capable of acting such as to apportioning
happiness to morality according to the conception of law. This requirement means that
such a cause of nature must be rational (intelligent) such that his causality be his will.
This is God – omniscient because in apportioning happiness according to virtue he must
know all our inner states such that his world can apportion happiness with virtue.
Note that Kant is not merely metaphysically invoking God (which he denies was
possible), rather God is a condition of possibility of moral action – and hence an
admission of practical reason – and this admission is an act of faith. Hence faith is based
on moral law.
Now do these three postulates (freedom, immortality of the soul, and God) proceeding
from the principle of morality (law) increase our knowledge? Yes but only from a
practical point of view and not from the view of intellectual intuition (which human are
not capable of). Now once we invoke these postulates as a condition for moral practical
reason theoretical reason we can think these postulates using the categories of
understanding and ideas (which for speculative reason were only regulative) now become
intelligible in taking on definite form (become constitutive) – and we can think these
ideas even as we can never conceptualize them. It is interesting to consider that if this is
so than practical reason is primary and theoretical reason secondary, but only if practical
reason does not deal with empirical (desire) or sensible objects otherwise we get fantasy.
If practical reason is taken as pure reason in its practical capacity, as judging in accord
with apriori principles, then theoretical reason must attempt to deal with the claims of
practical reason. If we do not accept this primacy of practical reason we must conclude
that reason is in conflict within itself for pure practical and pure theoretical reason are
one.
For Kant morality doe not presuppose religion; that is one need have the idea of God to
recognize his duty. At the same time morality does lead to religion: through the idea of
the supreme good the moral law leads to religion which is the recognition that all duties
are divine command, not as alien sanctions, but as the law of the free will which however
must be looked on as the command of a supreme being because it is only from a morally
perfect (holy and good) and all powerful will that we can attain the harmony of highest
good and happiness -and the hope for happiness therefore begins with religion.
True religion then for Kant consist in this that in all our duties we regard God as the
universal legislator who is to be revered. This reverence consists in obeying moral law,
acting for the sake of duty. Note the individualism here in Kant (he disregards creeds,
practices, liturgy, rituals, institutions, and hence Kant’s conception of religion is
moralistic and rationalistic.
It is easy to understand how Hegel could reject Kant moral theory as abstract and
intellectualistic. With respect to Kant’s view of religion, it follows the Enlightenment in
rejecting traditions and Hegel was later to rectify this. What Kant did do was to reconcile
the new science with individual freedom – he thereby rescues the individual from being
absorbed in the scientific materialism (nothing but… position). But what connection is
there between pure and practical reason (they are after all One) or between determinism
and freedom? For this we have Kant’s 3rd C.
3rd Critique of Judgment
If we are to find some reconciliation between the world of theoretical reason and practical
reason, between nature and freedom, it must be possible to think nature in such a way that
it is compatible with the attainment of end sin accordance with the laws of freedom. Kant
here turns to the study of judgment (Urteilskraft) as mediating between cognition
(Verstand; understanding) and desire (Vernunft; pure reason). We saw that with respect
to theoretical use of reason, the categories of the understanding exercised a constitutive
function in making possible a knowledge of object; in the practical use of reason, we say
that the ideas of reason exercised a regulative function in regulating desire. Can judgment
mediate between understanding and reason? And can judgment have its own apriori
principles (of feeling) and are these apriori principles constitutive or regulative?
By judgment Kant means thinking the particular in the universal. Kant distinguishes
between determinant and reflective judgments and it is the latter we are concerned with.
In reflective judgment the scientist for example is always concerned in constructing a
system of laws – i.e., he is guided in his inquiry by a concept of nature as an intelligible
unity – that under the assumption that nature were the work of divine command. The
latter does not imply that the scientist must believe in God; rather, that he presumes the
unity of nature as if it were an intelligible system adapted to our cognitive faculties. It is
on this principle that reflective judgment proceeds. Obviously the principle is apriori
since it cannot be found in nature. But it is not a priori principle in the sense that it is not
a necessary condition for there being objects of experience. It is rather a heuristic
principle guiding scientific inquiry.
Nature as a system intelligently adapted to human cognitive capacities is the concept of
the purposiveness or finality of nature. The purposiveness of nature is thus an apriori
concepts which has its source in reflective judgment (purposiveness is a transcendental
principle - concerns empirical knowledge in general and is not itself based in empirical
observation. The fact that it is transcendental is evident when we consider the maxims to
which it gives rise: Nature takes the shortest way, nature makes no leaps, etc which are
themselves not empirical observations. Note that this principle is not constitutive but
regulative. It makes nature possible not with respect to our knowledge of it (for this is the
work of the categories) but with respect to our knowledge of its lawfulness. Hence, Kant
is not making some metaphysical claim, namely that there are final causes operating in
nature but rather that nature is treated as though involves an empirical system of laws
unified through their common grounds in intelligence other than our own.
Of course the discovery of this unified nature is a contingent matter open to discovery
(which is the task of the understanding). This finality of out knowledge of nature is
represented in two ways: (1) the form of the object with the cognitive faculty; that is, the
pleasure (form) which comes from representing the object, and when we judge that
pleasure is necessarily derived from that form we have an aesthetic judgment (the object
is beautiful). (2) the finality of an object can be represented as an accordance of its form
with the possibility of the thing itself according to a concept of the thing which grounds
the form - and the things with respect to its form is fulfilling an end or purpose of nature
–we have a teleological judgment.
Aesthetic judgments are subjective in the sense that it is a judgment about the accordance
of the form of an object (natural or artificial) with the cognitive faculties on the basis of
feeling cause by the representation of the object (not the concept). Teleological
judgments are objective in the sense that the object given fulfils a conceived end or
purpose of nature.
The purposiveness of nature as an apriori regulative concept serves as the connecting link
between nature and freedom. For while the purposiveness of nature neither constitutes
nature nor legislates action, it does enable us to think nature as not entirely alien to us.
Aesthetic judgments allow us to see phenomenal objects of art as expressions of
noumenal reality of value; and teleological judgments enables us to conceive the
possibility of an actualization of ends in nature in harmony with nature’s laws.
Judgment in virtue of its apriori principles of for judging nature leads us to consider
noumenal reality, within and outside of us, as determinable by means of the intellectual
faculty which represents nature as the phenomenal expression of noumenal reality. And
in virtue of its apriori practical law, determines noumenal reality in showing us how to
conceive of it – hence we have a transition between the concept of nature and the concept
of freedom.
Kant notes that in the history of philosophy there have been different ways of explaining
the purposiveness of nature: idealism and realism. Idealism maintains that such
purposiveness is undersigned (Greek atomists – laws of motion, Spinoza – fatalism)
while realism maintains that purposiveness is designed (hylozoism – or world soul).
While this is an odd use of idealism and realism, Kant’s contention is that theism is
superior to other explanations. The trouble is that it cannot be proven (nor of course can it
be disproved). All we have are regulative judgments as to the unity of nature and its
intelligent cause. If we cannot understand how the mechanistic (efficient) and the final
causes are to be reconciled (how things are subject to two kinds of law), the possibility
that they are reconciled at the “supersensible substrate” level to which we have no access
remains. Theism provides the best framework for thinking the universe even as the truth
of theism cannot be scientifically known.
Lecture 7: After Kant
The 19th c is one from which we are still struggling to extricate ourselves. It was a
century of overwhelming materialism and positivism and with both the mind was given
short thrift. Yet in philosophy at least the first part of the century was to witness an
bacchanalian celebration of “consciousness: in the form of German idealism the principle
figure of which was Hegel. This remarkable flowering of metaphysical speculation at the
beginning of the 19th c. professes to solve the riddle of the universe and the meaning of
human existence.
True enough before the death of Schelling in 1854 (who along with Fichte and Hegel) are
the prime figures of this movement) Auguste Comte in France had already published his
Course of positive philosophy in which he presented metaphysics, along with religion, as
merely a passing stage in the history of human thought, and Germany was to have its
own positivist and materialist movements which would force philosophers to redefine
their work relative to the sciences, yet early on in the century speculative philosophy
exhibited a period of unprecedented growth –here we find superb confidence in human
reason and the scope of philosophy as all embracing wherein the entire life of “selfexpression”, including science, could be subjected to philosophical reflection. They
believed that the nature of reality could finally be fully revealed to human consciousness
–something which Kant had left in a lurch.
Today we understand this idealism as belonging to another world, another climate of
thought. With the death of Hegel in 1831 this epoch of absolute idealism ended (it was
short but its yield was powerful). Hegel’s faith in the immense sense of the power and
range of speculative thought (reason) has never been regained since. Even if little remains
of this absolute idealism today, it constituted a magnificent and influential view of a
unified conceptual mastery of reality and experience as a whole.
Today philosophers totally reject any effort on the part of scientific philosophy to gain
such an overall view of reality (it simply is not the task of philosophy to do so). Indeed,
we are seemingly more humble in not allowing the human mind ever to aspire to such an
effort (ironically we now leave it to science!). But Hegel did and we should recognize
this effort for while some of his thinking is almost fantastic, there is also much that is
absolutely brilliant and continues to offers us cause for reflection.
The question for me is not the demise of idealism but why did it arise at all when it did?
As the immediate background to idealism we have Kant who, as you will recall, attacked
metaphysics as the illegitimate extension of reason – we cannot think the real – the real is
always the phenomenal. On the other hand, the idealist also considered themselves
followers of Kant. Hence, we have to consider how it is that metaphysical idealism could
develop out of the system of thought (Kant’s) which rejected the possibility of
metaphysics – other than to know the apriori structures of the mind (and these were not
know but these were conditions for the possibility of) in attaining knowledge and
experience.
Perhaps the easiest place to start is with Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself. Fichte
viewed Kant’s stance as impossible. Thus, if Kant asserts that the thing-in-itself
(noumenal which we could not know) was cause of sensibility, he obviously would be
guilty of inconsistency since the concept of cause cannot be used to extend our
knowledge beyond the phenomenal world. On the other hand, if Kant simply wanted to
retain the thing-in-itself as a limiting notion this is tantamount to retaining a ghostly relic
of the very dogmatism which it was his mission, the mission of critical philosophy, to
overcome. For Fichte Kant’s Copernican revolution was a great step forward and there
was no going back to Hume or Descartes and hence we must move forward, meaning we
must rid ourselves of the thing-in-itself because on Kant’s own view there was no room
for some such occult entity as the thing-in-itself. Hence, Fichte thought that critical
philosophy has to be transformed into a consistent idealism – things had to be regarded as
products of thought – there was no world without mind.
Obviously this did not mean that the physical/material world could be brought about in
simply thinking it…In ordinary consciousness there is a world of objects which affect me
and which I come to think about as existing independently of my thinking and willing.
Hence idealist will, like Leibnitz and Kant, have to go beyond/behind consciousness and
retrace the process of the unconscious activity which grounds our ordinary consciousness
of the world. But more than this, we have to recognize that the world cannot be attributed
to individual consciousness at all. For if it were the product of individual consciousness
then we would have the problem of a finite mind (even an unconscious mind) bringing
about a world – this is solipsism (everyone would bring forward his own world). Idealism
is therefore compelled to go behind the finite individual/subject to a supra-individual
intelligence, or an absolute “subject”.
The word “subject” is not really appropriate here; it is really an ultimate productive
principle that resides on the side of thought (reason) not the side of the sensible object.
On this view, subject and object are correlative terms, and the ultimate productive
principle is itself without object. In fact, it grounds the subject-object distinction/relation
but itself transcends the distinction//relation. Subject and object both emanate from the
ultimate productive principle.
Post-Kantian idealism is therefore necessarily metaphysical. Fichte began by
transforming Kant’s “transcendental ego” (which also could not be known but belonged
to his apriori condition of possibility of practical knowing) into a metaphysical or
ontological principle. Fichte explained what he meant by this was the absolute ego and
not an individual ego. This word “ego” later disappears and is replaced in Hegel with the
infinite reason or Spirit. We can say generally that in idealism reality (all there is) is the
process of the self-expression/manifestation of infinite reason or thought, or Spirit.
Again this does not mean that the physical world is simply a product of (individual)
thought. Infinite reason or what Hegel calls the Absolute is an activity of production
which posits or expresses itself in the world (leaving the world with all the reality we see
it to possess). Thus idealism is not the claim that reality consists merely in subjective
ideas; but it involves the vision of the world and human history as the objective
expression of creative reason (productive principle in Fichte or the Absolute in Hegel) -
and this was the inevitable interpretation of German idealism. The trouble comes in when
we try to understand what this means and here there is room for various interpretations.
Fichte was more aware of Kant’s influence than were Schelling and Hegel, and each
depended on the prior thinker… yet all three presuppose Kant’s critical philosophy.
Hegel’s account of the history of modern philosophy depicts Kant as an advance over
everyone else and he demanded that Kant’s system of thought itself be developed. This
was Hegel’s task, and one way to do so was to transform Kant’s critical philosophy of the
thing-in-itself into metaphysical idealism (eliminating this ghostly entity of the noumenal
world). But there were also other Kantian influences on the idealists (other than the
problem of the thing-in-itself).
Kant’s primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason made a profound difference to
Fichte’s ethical outlook. Thus Fichte assumes that his absolute ego is infinite practical
reason which posits nature as an instrument for moral (human) action. Fichte emphasizes
the concepts of action, duty, and moral vocation and we might say that Fichte turned
Kant’s 2nd C into metaphysics while employing the 1st C as the means for doing so.
Theoretical knowledge was secondary to practical knowledge and, in fact, scientific
knowledge was only there to serve practical moral action. In contrast, Schelling begins
with the philosophy of art (as exemplary of “expression”) and the role of genius and
aesthetic intuition and hence this links him up with Kant’s 3rd C of judgment.
The desire was to form a coherent and unified interpretation of reality and this may be
considered natural at least to the reflective mind. For example in the post-medieval era if
one wanted to construct an all-embracing interpretation of reality one had to grapple with
reconciling scientific materialism with religious consciousness. This was Descartes’
problem. And it was also Kant’s problem. But Kant dealt with it in a way his
predecessors could not and this left him with a bifurcated reality (the phenomenal world
known by Newton, and noumenal world of individual freedom and God lived by the self)
and there is no reason that the phenomenal world is the only reality (although it is the
only realty we can conceptually know – for Kant). The trouble is that the noumenal is a
matter of faith (moral consciousness) and not knowledge. While Kant then tries to bridge
theoretical and practical knowledge of the 1st and 2nd C in the 3rd C it is entirely
understandable that this was not to everyone’s satisfaction. And it was not to the German
idealists. Their assumption was straightforward, if reality is the unified process by which
the absolute reason manifests itself then it is fully intelligible. And it is intelligible by the
human mind provided that the human mind can be regarded as a vehicle of absolute
thought reflecting on itself.
Obviously, this condition (that the human mind is a vehicle of absolute thought) is
important if there is to be any continuity between Kant’s metaphysics of the future – i.e.,
transcendental critique of human experience and knowledge, and idealist metaphysics.
Kant’s view is that the human mind reflects on its own spontaneous activity and then sets
out to ask what this spontaneous presupposes or must presuppose as a precondition of
possibility for this activity (knowledge moral action etc.). However, in metaphysical
idealism (having eliminated the thing-in-itself) we can say that reflection is productive in
the fullest sense and this activity in of reflection or reason is not that of the individual
mind but rather of absolute thought and reason. Hence, philosophy which is reflection by
the individual human mind cannot be regarded as absolute thought’s reflective awareness
of itself unless the human mind is capable of rising to an absolute point of view and
becoming the vehicle, as it were, of absolute thought, or reasons reflective awareness of
its own activity. It this can occur then there is some continuity between Kant’s only
possible scientific metaphysics and the idealist conception of metaphysics. Of course the
latter is clearly also an “inflation” –that is, Kant is inflated to a metaphysics of reality
which is far beyond where Kant went (and therefore not a reversion to pre-Kantian
metaphysics).
The transformation of Kant’s theory of knowledge into a full-fledged metaphysics of
reality carries with it some important changes. (1) Eliminating the thing-in-itself, the
world becomes the self- manifestation of mind/thought/reason – and Kant’s distinction
between apriori and aposteriori loses its absolute character. (2) The categories of
understanding instead of being like subjective conceptual modes of reason
(understanding) now become categories of reality itself. (3) The teleological judgment is
also no longer subjective for in metaphysical idealism the idea of purposiveness in nature
is not merely a regulative principle of the individual mind (useful but not theoretically
provable); rather, if nature is the expression or manifestation of reason in its movement
towards a goal, the entire process of nature becomes teleological.
What in Kant was a modest proposal for the scope of metaphysics with the idealists
metaphysics became total. Kant himself repudiated Fichte’s demand that critical
philosophy become pure idealism by eliminating the thing-in-itself. Moreover, late in the
19th c. Neo-Kantians tried hard to rid themselves of this kind of idealism and return to
Kant.
Of course, the post-Kantian idealists were not subjective idealists in the sense of Berkeley
– namely that the human mind (1) could only know its own ideas as distinct from extramental things, or (2) that all objects of knowledge were the product of the finite human
mind. Fichte’s use of the word “ego” tended to give that impression but in fact Fichte
insisted that this “ego” was the “absolute ego”, the transcendental, supra-individual
productive principle. Schelling and Hegel followed suit even if these three thinkers had
complexly evolving systems of thought which differed from one another.
But inasmuch as reality is looked on as self-expression or self-unfolding of absolute
thought or reason, German idealism assimilated causal relations to logical one of
implication. That is, for example, that Fichte and Schelling believed that the world stand
in relation to the ultimate productive principle as consequent to antecedent – the ultimate
productive principle has logical not temporal priority. The Absolute spontaneously and
inevitably manifests itself in the world. Here there is no idea of creation in time – as there
is no first moment in time.
This notion of reality as the self-unfolding of absolute reason helps to explain why the
idealist insisted on “system”. For if philosophy is the reflective reconstruction of the
structure of a dynamic rational process, it should be systematic, in the sense that it should
begin with a first principle and exhibit the essential rational structure of reality as flowing
from this first principle. The idea of a purely theoretical deduction does not occupy an
important place in metaphysical idealism as the foregrounding of “dialectical process” in
Fichte and Hegel suggest, and the reason is that the conceptual reconstruction of a
dynamic activity is namely the self-unfolding of infinite life and not an analysis of the
meaning and implications of initial premises. However, the general worldview implied in
the idea of the world as the process of absolute reason’s manifestation of itself, means
that philosophy must give a systematic explication of this idea, reliving the process, as it
were, reflectively (conceptually). Hence while it is possible to begin in the empirical
world and work backwards to absolute reason, metaphysical idealism usually follows a
deductive exposition – tracing this teleological movement.
If we assume reality is a rational process and that its essential dynamic structure is
understandable by philosophy, this assumption is quite naturally accompanied by a
confidence in the scope and power of metaphysics. In this sense metaphysical idealism is
very different from Kant’s much more modest estimate of just what we can achieve by
way of knowledge. Hegel especially was unequalled by any philosophy in his view of
just what reason was capable of. Yet there is, as I said, some continuity between Kant and
metaphysical idealism, and we can say that the closer metaphysical idealism remained to
Kant’s scientific metaphysics (theoretical knowledge) the more confident philosophy was
about the power of reason (not unexpectedly). Consider:
If we assume that philosophy is reason’s reflective awareness of its own
spontaneous activity, and if we now substitute idealist metaphysics for Kant’s
theory of human knowledge/experience, we then have the idea of the rational
process which is reality becoming aware of itself through human philosophical
reflection. In this case, it is the history of philosophy which is the history of
absolute reason’s self-reflection. In other words, the universe knows itself in and
through the human mind – and it is philosophy that then is the self-knowledge of
the Absolute.
This statement is more Hegel than Fichte who insisted that the Absolute is Divine which
transcends human thought, or Schelling who emphasized the idea of a personal God who
reveals himself to human beings. It was Hegel who maintained the philosopher’s
conceptual mastery of all reality and the understanding of this mastery as self-reflection
of the Absolute. But this simply means that metaphysical idealism attained its most
comprehensive statement in Hegelianism.
A word about the relation between metaphysical idealism and theology is in order
especially when we consider Fichte and Schelling. Thus, it is important to understand that
metaphysical idealism was not merely the transformation of critical philosophy into
metaphysics. All three, Fichte (Jena), Schelling, and Hegel (Tubingen) began as students
of theology, and while they quickly turned to philosophy, theology played a significant
role in German idealism (Nietzsche’s claim that idealism was concealed theology wasn’t
all off).
In contrast Kant was always interested in science (although he was not a professional
scientist) and his primary concern was with the conditions that made scientific knowledge
possible. Hegel began as a theologian and thought that it was the task of philosophy to
address the nature and being of God and His relation to the world – hence, the question of
the relation between the finite and infinite. Hegel tried to resolve this distance between
the finite and infinite and at first he thought this distance could be bridged in “love” from
which he drew the conclusion that philosophy must ultimately yield to religion. As a
philosopher he tried to bridge this distance conceptually and tended to the view that
philosophical reflection was the highest form of understanding.
Likewise Fichte who while not concerned with the finite and infinite (since he was
primarily concerned to complete Kant’s deduction of consciousness (which Kant held to
be not “knowable” but an apriori condition of possible for knowledge) but later Fichte
comes to the idea of the infinite and the religious aspects of his work are developed.
Schelling in contrast did not hesitate to address the relation between the Divine infinite
and finite as deemed it to be the chief problem of philosophy.
All in all, the three idealists as philosophers tried to conceptually bridge the relation
between the finite and infinite and they viewed the bridge on the analogy of logical
implication. Certainly Hegel and Fichte both rejected the idea of a personal (infinite and
transcendent) God as illogical and unduly anthropomorphic. Hence God becomes the
Absolute- all comprehensive totality. Even so the idealist had no intention of denying the
finite. Hence, their problem was to include the finite in the infinite without however the
finite of its reality. Much of the ambiguity in idealism is due to this seemingly impossible
task especially as they tried to relate their philosophical endeavor to theism on the one
hand and pantheism on the other.
Nietzsche’s claim that the idealists were simply theists is partly correct (see above) but
also very wrong. They were not trying to reintroduce orthodox Christianity; on the
contrary, they wanted to substitute metaphysics for faith, and conceptual grasp the
mysteries of Christianity bringing it within the realm of speculative
reason…”demythologizing” religion (see Kierkegaard).
At the same time there is no reason to doubt Hegel’s sincerity when he referred to St.
Anselm and to the process of faith seeking understanding. While early on Hegel showed
considerable hostility towards Christianity, later he took Christianity under his wing. But
he was assuredly no an orthodox Christian even so he compared the relation of
Christianity to Hegelianism as being that of absolute religion to absolute philosophy
namely two ways of apprehending the same truth...by substituting reason for faith and
philosophy for religion Hegel no doubt saw himself defending Christianity.
There is also the historical question of the relation of idealism to Romanticism. Certainly
the claim often made that idealism is the philosophy of Romanticism is open to objection.
(1) The suggestion that idealism was simply the expression of Romanticism is wrong as
both Fichte and Schelling wielded considerable influence over Romanticism. (2) the three
idealists stood in very different relation to Romanticism: Schelling was very much a
Romantic; Fichte was very critical of Romanticism; Hegel had no interesting
Romanticism. (3) The “philosophy of Romanticism” is better given to Friedrich Schlegel,
and Novalis.
Romanticism
Yet there was a connection between idealism and Romanticism. The Romantics spirit
was an attitude (Lebenseinstellung or Lebensgefuhl) towards life rather than a systematic
philosophy. Just what Romanticism is difficult to define but in contrast to the
Enlightenment’s focus on analytical and scientific understanding (reason), Romanticism
exalted the power of the creative imagination, feeling and intuition: the artistic genius
rather than le philosophe; the free development of the personality and the enjoyment of
the wealth of human experience, stressing originality rather than what is common to all
humanity - leading to an ethical subjectivism (deprecating moral laws while valuing
individuality).
Both Schlegel and Novalis were inspired by Fichte. Fichte transformed Kant’s
philosophy into pure idealism by taking Kant’s transcendental ego to be the ultimate
creative principle as unlimited activity. This systematic deduction or reconstruction of
consciousness made copious use of the creative imagination. Novalis took these ideas and
took Fichte as opening a view to the wonders of the creative self. But Fichte was
concerned with explaining on idealist principles the situation in which the finite subject
finds itself in a world of objects which are given to the subject and affect it is various
ways. The productive imagination when it posits as affecting the finite self takes place
below the level of consciousness. By transcendental reflection the philosopher can be
come aware of this unconscious activity but neither the philosopher nor anyone else is
aware of this activity as it is taking place. For the positing of the object is prior to all
awareness or consciousness and it is certainly is not modifiable at will by the finite self.
However, Novalis depicted the activity of the productive imagination as modifiable by
the will. Just as the artist creates works of art so everyman’s power of the will to change
things not only operates in the moral sphere but in the sphere of nature as well. Thus,
Novalis, the Romantic, turned Fichte transcendental idealism into a magical idealism of a
poetic and romantic’s extravaganza – to exalt the unlimited power of the creative self.
The Romantics turned especially to Schelling since it was he who laid stress on the
metaphysical significance of art and artistic genius. When the romantic Schlegel asserted
that there was no greater world than the world of art and that it was the artists who
exhibited the Idea infinite form, and when Novalis asserted that the poet is the true
magician, the embodiment of the creative power of the self, they were speaking in ways
more attune to Schelling that the ethical outlook of Fichte.
Emphasis on the creative self was only one aspect of Romanticism; another aspect was
the Romantics’ conception of nature. Instead of a “machine” (which would force them
into a Cartesian position) the Romantics looked on nature as an organic whole which was
akin to spirit clothed in beauty and mystery (romanticizing Spinoza). This view of nature
as an organic whole was Schelling. Schelling’s view of nature as the “slumbering spirit”
below human being, and the human spirit as the organ of nature’s consciousness was
romantic through and through. Holderlin, the poet, who was a friend of Schelling at
Tubingen, viewed nature as a comprehensive whole and this deeply influenced Schelling.
The Romantic’s sympathy with Spinoza was shared by the theologian Schleiermacher but
it was certainly not Fichte’s who disliked any divinization of nature which for Fichte was
simply the field and instrument of free moral activity. In this respect Fichte was most
certainly not a romantic.
This romantic attachment that the idea of nature as an organic living totality was
complemented by their view of human nature as free creative personality – human spirit
was the culmination of nature. Therefore the romantics held to the view that there was a
strong continuity between nature and history and that the spirit unfold historically. Thus
Holderlin had a romantic enthusiasm for ancient Greece (he shared this with Hegel).
Moreover, there was also a special enthusiasm for the medieval period which was at the
time deemed to the “dark night”, preceding the Renaissance and the mergence of le
philosophes, in human civilization. But for Novalis the middle ages represented, even if
imperfectly, the ideal of organic unity of faith and culture – an ideal which we should
recover. Thus there was also in the romantics a strong sense of the idea of the spirit of a
people (Volkgeist) and the manifestation of this spirit for example in the German
language.
Of course the idealists shared in this romantic joy in historical continuity and
development of the human spirit. History was for the idealists the working out in time of
the spiritual idea or telos. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all had “philosophies of history”.
While Fichte looked on nature as an instrument of moral action, he naturally focused on
the historical sphere of human spirit as the realization of an ideal moral order. Schelling’s
philosophy of religion saw history as the return of God to a fallen humanity – to man who
was alienated from then true center of his being (as a result of scientific materialism).
With Hegel the idea of the dialect of national spirits plays a prominent role although he
also emphasized world historical individuals (great man). For the idealists, history as a
whole is depicted as a movement towards the realization of human freedom. Moreover, in
general the idealists deemed their current era as the time in which the human spirit
reached its apex in being conscious of its own activity and the meaning and significance
of that activity in the historical process (i.e., Romanticism).
Above all else the romantics longed for the infinite. Their ideas of nature and human
history were brought together in a conception of both as the manifestation of one infinite
life – as aspects of a Divine poem. The infinite Life was the unifying factors in the
romantic world-view. Now the romantic emphasis on Volkgeist would appear at first to
contradict the romantic emphasis on the free development of the individual. But there is
no incompatibility: thus, the infinite totality was conceived as infinite Life which
manifested itself in and through finite beings but not annihilating them or reducing them
to mere mechanical instruments. And the spirit of a people (Volkgeist) was conceived as
manifestation of the same infinite Life as relative totalities which required for their full
development the free expression of individual personalities which were the bearers of
these spirits. The same then may be said for the political state which was the political
embodiment of the spirit of a people (Volkgeist).
The Romantics conceived of infinite totality in aesthetic terms, namely as an organic
whole with which the individual felt him/herself to be one – meaning that apprehending
this unity was not a conceptual matter but one of feeling and intuition. The trouble with
conception here is that, as in Kant, it always seeks limits whereas the romantics dissolved
limits and boundaries in the infinite flow of Life. Hence, the feeling for the infinite was
not infrequently the feeling for the indefinite – dissolving boundaries between science
and religious, art and science, philosophy and poetry, etc.
So that Schlegel for example regarded philosophy akin to religion; and to art as the artist
also sees the infinite in the finite. This repugnance for limits led Goethe to say that the
classical period was healthy but the romantic was diseased; indeed there were romantics
who tried to put some shape on their intuitive vision of life in combining the nostalgia for
the infinite and for the free expression of individual personality in, for example, locating
their vision in the Roman Catholic Church (Schlegel).
This feeling for the infinite was common ground between the romantics and the idealists.
The infinite absolute conceived as infinite Life is part of Fichte’s later philosophy, and
the Absolute is central in Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Moreover, the idealists
did not think of the infinite as set over against the finite but as the infinite manifesting
itself in and through the finite. Hegel especially tried the mediate between the finite and
the infinite, to bring them together yet without dismissing either. The totality lives in and
through particular manifestation – whether this totality is the infinite totality, the
absolute, or some relative totality such as the political state, or the individual person.
Yet there are also profound differences between the romantics and the idealists. The
romantics in their effort do undo all boundaries placed great emphasis on intuition and
feeling (whether for the totality, the universe, or the absolute) and this intuition can only
ever be exemplified or displayed in the poetic. In contrast, the idealist, say Hegel as the
absolute idealist, we find insistence on conceptual thought rejecting any appeal to
intuition or feeling. Hegel was concerned to think the totality, with the expression of the
absolute in relation to the finite. It is true that he saw philosophy had the same subject
matter as art and religion, namely absolute spirit, but he also insisted that their treatment
of the infinite-finite relation was expressed very differently.
On the other hand Fichte and Schelling both emphasized an intellectual, religious, or
aesthetic intuition was needed to apprehend the absolute. Hegel’s dialectical logic as the
logic of movement designed to exhibit the inner life of the Spirit and overcoming
conceptual antitheses (which renders things fixed), in which human life passes restlessly
through successive historical periods is also a romantic outlook. If Hegel’s logic was
alien to the romantic spirit, his vision of the totality was certainly romantic.
It is enough to assert that the idealists were concerned with systematic thought whereas
the romantics emphasized intuition. In this the idealists kept philosophy distinct from art,
religion, and science. Philosophy is knowledge of knowledge, the basic science of all
sciences; philosophy is not the attempt to say what cannot be said (intuition/art/worship).
The philosopher’s business is to understand reality (not a matter of apocalyptic utterances
or poetic rhapsodies) and to make others understand it (and to edify it).
The idealist transformation of critical philosophy implied that reality had to be seen
as a process of productive thought/reason; that is, being had to be identified with
thought. Idealism had as it program to exhibit the truth of this identity of being and
thought/reason/meaning and it tried to do so by means of a deductive reconstruction
of the inner dynamic structure of the life of the absolute (reason or thought).
Furthermore, if Kant’s conception of philosophy as reason’s reflective awareness of
it sown spontaneous activity (experience) was to be retained, then the idealist’s
philosophical reflection had to be represented as the self-awareness/consciousness of
absolute reason in and through the individual human mind. This too was part of the
idealist effort to exhibit.
The difficulty in completing this program of idealist philosophy was the divergence of
views.
1. Fichte begins by refusing to go beyond consciousness (i.e., refuses any postulate
beyond consciousness). Thus his first principle is the ego manifested in
consciousness as an activity. But then the demands of his transcendental idealism
force him to push to a reality beyond consciousness – in postulating an absolute
infinite ego or being that transcends thought.
2. With Schelling this process is reversed. He asserts the existence of the Absolute
which transcends human thought, and then tries to reconstruct reflectively the
inner life of this personal deity. At the same time however he abandons any idea
of deducing in an apriori manner the existence and structure of empirical reality
by emphasizing God’s free self-revelation. While he does not altogether abandon
the idea that the finite is a logical consequence of the infinite, once he introduces
the idea of a free personal God, he also leaves the goals of transcendental
idealism.
3. It is with Hegel that we find the most sustained effort to fulfill the idealist
program in philosophy. Hegel takes the rational to be real and real to be rational.
Thus, it is wrong to view the human mind as merely finite and so question its
power to understand the self-unfolding life of infinite Absolute. The mind has
finite aspects but it also is infinite in the sense that it can rise to the level of
absolute thought, at which stage the absolute’s knowledge of itself and human
knowledge are One. Hegel makes a magnificent move to demonstrate how the
reality (historically) is the life of absolute reason in its movement to self-
knowledge thereby becoming what it is in essence namely “self-thinking
thought”. The more Hegel identifies the absolute’s knowledge of itself with
human knowledge of the absolute, the more he fulfills the idealist’s program,
namely, that philosophy is the self-reflection (in history) of absolute
thought/reason. Note that this program would not succeed if the absolute were
God enjoying self-awareness outside of the human spirit for then human
knowledge would be an outside view. If however the absolute is all reality, the
entire universe interpreted as the self-unfolding of absolute thought (which attains
self-reflection through human thought) then human knowledge is the absolute’s
knowledge of itself, and philosophy becomes productive thought thinking itself.
Now we can ask: what is productive thought? This is the universe considered
teleologically - namely as a process moving towards self-knowledge, which in effect is
nothing but human beings developing a knowledge of nature, of human nature, and of
history (everything which means that there is nothing outside this totality). But in this
case there is nothing behind the universe; i.e., no thought or reason which expresses itself
in nature and history in a way say that an efficient cause expresses itself in its effect.
Thought is teleologically prior in the sense that human knowledge of the world-process is
represented as the goal of the process and as giving it its significance but what is actually
historically prior is Being (in the form of objective Nature). On this view, the entire
transformation of Kant’s philosophy changes for on Kant’s view would be one where
infinite thought would produce an objective world, whereas the idealist picture suggest
merely a world interpreted teleologically. The telos is depicted as a process whereby the
world (totality) self-reflection is mediated through human reflection. The goal of
identifying being and reason is thus never complete or achieved.
Another aspect that diverges from the natural pattern of post-Kantian idealism (F. H.
Bradley) is that the concept of God inevitably passes into the concept of the absolute.
Thus, if the mind tries to think the infinite, it must acknowledge that in the end it is
nothing but the universe of being, reality as a whole, the totality. With this
transformation of God into the absolute religion disappears. If God and the absolute are
distinct they are also identical: God is the imaginative and intuitive form in which the
absolute reveals itself to religious (opposed to philosophical) consciousness. Thus is
metaphysical idealism is to be preserved, then we must admit that in the long run
religious consciousness must be a halfway house between the anthropomorphism of
polytheism on the one hand and the idea of an all-inclusive absolute other on the other
hand.
Without any clear notion of being, the idea that the finite being is distinct from the
infinite being becomes an impossible distinction. In any case transcendental idealism is
as post-Kantian idealism, thoroughly anthropomorphic. For the pattern of human
consciousness is transferred to reality as a whole. Let us assume that the human ego
comes to self-consciousness only in relation to something other than itself – directed that
is to the non-self. This non-self has to be posited by the ego – not in the sense that the
non-self has to be created by the ego, but in the sense that it must be recognized that if
consciousness is to arise at all it must be in relation to the non-ego. The ego can then turn
backward and reflect on its own activity. Hence, the absolute ego/reason is regarded as
positing in an ontological sense the objective world of nature as a necessary condition for
returning to itself in and through the human spirit. Clearly this transformation of Kant’s
philosophy is a grand inflation of Kant’s theory of knowledge into a cosmic metaphysics
and this involves interpreting reality as a whole in terms of the pattern of human
consciousness – and this is anthropomorphism. This point is important because it is often
asserted that absolute idealism is less anthropomorphic than theism (but it is clearly not).
Now if there is a spiritual reality which is prior to nature and which become selfconscious in and through human beings, how are we to conceive of it? If we conceive of
it as unlimited activity which is not itself conscious but is merely the ground of
consciousness, then we have Fichte’s so called absolute ego.
But the concept of ultimate reality which is at the same time spiritual and unconscious is
not so easily understood. And it surely does not bear any resemblance to the Christian
God. If however we along with Schelling that the spiritual reality which lies behind
nature is a personal Being, then idealism changes considerably since presumably we can
no longer maintain that this ultimate spiritual reality becomes conscious in and through
the comic process. If we also consider that Schelling outlived Hegel by some 20 years,
we can conclude that idealism become after Kant a philosophical theism (wherein later
God becomes transformed into the absolute). For Schelling the reverse happened: he
transformed the absolute into the idea of a personal God and this theosophical speculation
is rather different from both Fichte and Hegel.
We can also consider a third possibility. We can eliminate the idea of a spiritual reality
(whether conscious or unconscious) which produces nature but we can retain the idea of
the absolute becoming self-conscious – where the absolute means the totality of the
universe. Here we have a picture of human knowledge of the world and of his history as
the self-knowledge of the absolute. This is Hegel’s absolute idealism. Here Hegel adds
nothing to the empirical world except a teleological account of the world-process. He
postulates no transcendent Being: the universe is merely interpreted as a process moving
towards an ideal goal, namely complete self-reflection in and through the human spirit.
Now this claim is hardly one that can be understood as equivalent to the empirical
statements that in the course of history have been formulated, and that human beings are
capable of merely increasing their knowledge of this world, themselves, and their world
(the common scientific story). The reason is that none of us whether materialists or
idealists, whether pantheists, theists, or atheists, would hesitate to accept that claim. At
the very least, the interpretation is meant to suggest a teleological pattern, a movement
toward human knowledge of the universe, considered as the universe’s knowledge of
itself. But unless we are prepared to admit that this is the only possible way to understand
world- process (an intellectual prejudice that favors knowledge for the sake of
knowledge, we have to claim that the universe moves by some inner necessity toward
self-knowledge in and through human beings. But what grounds do we have of making
such a claim unless nature itself is unconscious mind (or in Schelling’s terms a
“slumbering spirit”) which then posits nature as a necessary precondition for attaining
consciousness in and through the human spirit? If we accept either of these alternatives
then we transfer to the universe the pattern of human consciousness – and this is no less
anthropomorphic than philosophical theism.
So far I have considered German idealism as a set of theories about reality as a whole, a
self-manifesting absolute. But of course the idealists were very much concerned with
human nature.
This Fichte held that the absolute ego is unlimited activity which can be seen as striving
towards consciousness of it sown freedom. But consciousness only exists in the
individual; hence the absolute ego necessarily expresses itself in a community of finite
subjects/selves each of whom strives towards true freedom. Inevitably, therefore morality
comes to the fore. Fichte essentially espouses a dynamic ethical idealism.
For Hegel the absolute is definable as spirit or self-thinking thought. Hence it is more
adequately revealed in the human spirit and its life than it is in nature. Therefore greater
emphasis must be placed on the human spirit than on nature.
For Schelling who asserts the existence of a personal and free God, he concurrently
occupies himself with freedom in the human beings, and with human being’s fall from
and return to God.
Freedom is conspicuous in all idealism: whether of God, absolute, or man. This does not
mean of course that the word freedom means the same for all three idealists. For Fichte
the emphasis is on individual freedom as manifested in our action and hence Fichte
concern with human temperament. For Fichte individuals are a system of natural drives,
instincts and impulses, and from this perspective there is no freedom. But as spirit
human beings is not so tied to their desires. Rather individual as spirit can direct their
activity toward an ideal goal and act in accordance with the idea of duty. As with Kant,
Fichte’s idea of freedom is to act against impulse in favor of reason and moral duty, and
we are free to the extent that in acting against impulse towards moral order we are free.
But how do we live in the idea of moral freedom? We do so by assuming life as a moral
vocation and while such a vocation includes a series of action largely determined by the
society in which we life (family, society, state) in the end we have a vision of a
multiplicity of moral vocations which converge towards a common ideal, namely the
establishment of a moral world-order. Fichte was a strong supporter of the French
Revolution which he saw as liberating individuals from the bonds of social and political
life which hindered their free development. But what form of social-political organization
is moral? In this case Fichte went for a unified German State (rather than the French
aftermath of the Revolution) wherein individuals could find free activity and
development, and which, if human beings would attain full moral development, this
German state would wither away.
In Hegel we find a very different attitude. Hegel too was influenced by the French
Revolution and its drive to freedom. Hegel defined freedom as human history in its
process of the realization of freedom. But Hegel sharply distinguishes between positive
and negative (absence from constraint) freedom. Kant saw moral freedom as obeying that
law which reason gives to oneself as a rational being. But for Hegel the rational was
universal, and positive freedom involves identifying oneself with ends that transcend
one’s individual and particular desires. It involves identifying one’s individual will
Rousseau’s “General Will” which finds expression in the State (as the greater organic
whole). Hence moral law involves getting its content from the State. However, for Hegel
the State cannot be fully rational unless it recognizes the value and finds room for
individual freedom. By focusing on the State, Hegel intended to remove freedom from
the inwardness of the individual and Hegel clearly saw the important role of institutions
as a necessary basis of higher spiritual life of art, religion, and philosophy in which
freedom reaches its supreme expression.
We see that both Fichte and Hegel overcome Kant’s formalistic ethics by placing
morality in a social setting. But Fichte places the emphasis on individual freedom and
moral action (vocation) is in accordance with duty mediated by personal conscience.
Hegel places the emphasis on the general whole of the State.
But what is clearly missing in Fichte and Hegel is a theory of moral values. In Fichte all
the talk about activity for activity’s sake and freedom for freedom’s sake may show an
awareness of the unique character of human moral vocation, but it also runs the risk of
emphasizing the creative personality and hence the uniqueness of individual moral
vocation at the expense of the universality of moral law. If with Hegel we now socialize
morality and avoid the ethical formalism of Kant, we also run the risk of that moral
values are simply relative to culture and society.
Schelling by contrast to Hegel and Fichte, sometimes held, with Fichte, that moral
activity created a second nature of a moral world-order, but Schelling also added
aesthetic intuition to this moral activity. With Fichte all the emphasis was on moral
struggle and free oral action, but with Schelling’s emphasis on aesthetic intuition it was
the artistic genius who was also the moral hero. Later Schelling would claim along
religious lines that freedom was the power to choose between good and bad, and the
fulfillment of freedom came in the emergence of the personality in sublimating our lower
nature and subordinating it to the rational will. All this within the context of his
theosophical speculations where freedom and personality were intimately tied to the
nature of God, and this nature of God was in turn are complemented by his view of
human nature.
Hegel was no doubt the greatest German idealist. His analysis of society and history were
impressive not only that he drew on these for his idealist philosophy but that idealism
itself was dependent on our understanding social, political and moral consciousness:
“The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only with the falling of the dusk and that when
philosophy spreads her grey on grey then has the shape of life grown cold”. That is,
philosophy must not canonize social and political forms of life which were about to
pass away. For it is at point, at dusk, that philosophical reflection (understanding) comes
into its own… understanding is all important of course, yet it is also at just this point that
Life moves forward…
Anticipating Marx who believes that understanding is always in service of change; Hegel
looks backwards whereas Marx looks forward. This is the difference between the great
idealist and the great revolutionary. If any one idealist was like Marx it was Fichte. Fichte
believes passionately that philosophy could save society; whereas Hegel was burdened by
history and too sophisticated to believe that there was any finality to history in a
philosophically, rationally, formulated utopia.
EXAM QUESTIONS
1. Briefly describe the intellectual influences that were efficacious in Wundt’s
establishment of the academic discipline of experimental psychology in Leipzig in
1870s.
2. “Introspection” has had various meanings before Wundt employed it as
“systematic introspection” in experimental psychology. Describe the various
activities involved in these different meanings of introspection (what might we do
when we introspect?) and focus on Wundt’s final formulation of introspection in
experimental psychology. (Remember that Wundt who was a mentalist would
have been horrified to be classed as an “introspectionist”.) What might
introspection mean and what is it we do when we introspect? Can introspection
ever be (part of) a method of a science of psychology. Why? Why not?
3. Wundt deemed his “physiological psychology” to be only a small part of a much
wider conception of Psychology as an academic endeavor. Describe this wider
Psychology and explain why it could not be experimental in nature. Was Wundt
justified in his view? Why? Why not?
4. I suggested (tediously some might add) that the methods of psychology were
forms of “social organization for producing consensus about facts”. What does
this conception of method as “social organization” imply about the nature of the
facts collected and the “object” about which the facts are collected?
5. I distinguished among three distinct methods that evolved in the course of the
establishment of psychology in the 20th c. Describe these three methods and argue
for the advantages of each.
6. I suggested that from the very beginning there was a tension between method and
subject matter (“object”) in psychological research (a tension that remains to the
present). Briefly describe various aspects of this tension and suggest how it might
be overcome, if at all.
7. One major problem that precluded Wundt from extending his newly “minted”
physiological psychology to “higher mental processes” was that there was no way
to control the “stimulus”. Describe the nature of this problem and also the
correlative problem of “language”.
8.
I spoke of the “rhetoric of experimental identities” in referring to subject
identities in psychological research reports. This phrase has much to do with the
essential function of the human “data” source in Psychology as it does with the
kind of intellectual discipline Psychology deems itself to be. Comment and
elaborate.
9. I argued that experimental psychology was concerned to establish the kind of
knowledge about human beings that would be a-historical and universal. I also
suggested that in order to obtain this kind of knowledge psychologists had to
reply on historically defined human data sources using investigative contexts that
too were historical specific. How did Psychology deal with this paradox?
10. I have argued that the Galtonian method of mental testing which assumed that all
individuals possessed (psychological) characteristics, albeit in different quantities,
actually eliminated individual differences by reducing them to the abstraction of a
collection of points in a set of aggregates. So instead of being interested in how
individuals were different one from another this entire methodological movement
in 20th c Psychology was concerned with how well individuals conformed to
social standards of performance. Comment and elaborate.
11. I have argued that the “method” of experimental psychology is one that is ideally
suited for establishing knowledge claims about the relationships between abstract
external influences and equally abstract organisms. But I have also argued that
these kinds of knowledge claims are those of “scientific materialism” wherein
individuals are stripped of their social, cultural, and historical identities. What are
we to do?
12. Freud’s critique of religion was an effort to understand the restlessness and
discontent (desire) of the human heart (St Augustine) in scientific terms. To
accomplish this formulated an elaborate theory of desire as explanatory not only
of the individual (neurosis) but of (the neurosis of) human history. This tie-in of
history and psychology is what I admire in Freud and it is also what sets up
intellectual standards of what psychological science could be (if it gave up its
hegemony as a natural science). Comment and elaborate.
13. Freud was deeply pessimistic concerning the gap between the innocence
(polymorphous perversity) of childhood and our compulsive (repressed)
commitment to cultural progress. How can the ideal of cultural progress possibly
be the innocence of childhood? Never mind that, does the historical movement of
humanity have an “aim” and if so would it make a difference in how we do
psychology. If it does not have an aim (i.e., the course of human history is
aimless) what possibility is there of avoiding the (neurotic) implications of
endless and restless desire?