How can we know?

 

 

I suspect nobody who is reading philosophy is actually “choosing” his philosopher. It is more a matter of love on first sight, a chance encounter that will stay with us, even after we learn about the groom’s false teeth and the hairpiece. We toy with ideas and by throwing them out hit and miss in the process. For me Immanuel Kant is like an acquaintance from the neighborhood. The Critique seems an easy read, not because philosophy is easy, but Kant spoke the dialect of people from my mother’s neighborhood, a patois close to the superincumbent dialect of Oldenburg, and it colors the cumbersome turn of the phrases meandering through his book.

It is true, if you are unprepared, Kant’s Cimmerian abuse of the language can make it an ordeal to read him. He was in his sixties when after a gestation period of twelve years he finally sat down and wrote the Critique of pure Reason.

He wrote it down in one sitting.

In the short span of nine months Kant produced a brick of a book that can not only stop a door but derail a train. So the style shows all the flaws of old age, the syntax is often convoluted, the book is distinctly lacking in conveyance and grace, but Kant had still enough presence of mind to produce a well organized draft of 800 pages in print. The man knew he was in his autumn - Kant was to suffer from Alzheimer in his late seventies - and he felt he had to do something before the result of eleven years of hard thinking was going to slip away.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a bit of a nerd, actually he was the nerd personified. He never left his hometown, not even once. He was a celibate, attached to male friends, but for all we know, asexual. The people in Koenigsberg used to set their clocks when they saw the man on his way to work passing under their windows.

Without fail, every morning at 5.30 a.m., Kant’s valet - an invalid veteran from King Frederick’s guard - would awake the philosopher with the words: “It is time!” Kant rose, perfunctorily washed, prepared with his own fair hands the mustard for the dinner later in the afternoon, and after a cup of coffee - you had to do the roasting of the beans yourself in those days and the King of Prussia’s coffee sniffers levied a steep tax on this luxury - he set out for his lecture at the university. Without fail he walked the same streets at the exact same time every morning. His work at the Alma Mater ended at noon and Kant would go for a turn into the countryside, a brisk walk towards a distant crossroad virtually in the middle of nowhere. Here his closest friend, an English merchant with stores in Koenigsberg, would pick him up in his horse carriage and the two would trundle back to the philosopher’s home.

It was an exact schedule and only in one instance Kant had missed the rendezvous by a few seconds; from the distance the Englishman could see the philosopher storming along with flying coat tails, but stoically and without looking at him, he passed by and left the stumped Immanuel standing in the rain, dripping under a Chinese parasol.

Apparently the incident did not affect their friendship; the very next day, Kant was picked up as if nothing had happened and, as always, after arriving at Kant’s house, the philosopher went in to set up the menu for dinner and then went back to the conservatory where his friend had already pulled out a chair and was peacefully asleep. After a look at his friend, Kant took another chair and almost instantly nodded off as well. About 4.00 p.m. the first guests arrived and either joined the sleepers in the conservatory or went in to peruse Kant’s extended library. About five dinner was served and the party passed the next four hours in animated conversation. At nine p.m. sharp, the philosopher then went to bed and read by candlelight until eleven.

Only once he broke this routine and read the hefty tome of Jean-Jaques Rousseaus’s Emile in one sitting all the way through to the morning. It was the night before the missed rendezvous.

And that is about all we need to know of the man - his life was uneventful. That there might have been a different side to the pedantic lecturer can only be guessed from his adolescent years, an adolescence that in this case stretched well into Kant’s early thirties. People remembered to have seen him hustling in the pool halls; he seemed to have been an excellent billiard player and for a long time subsisted on a slim income; the progress of his career was steady but slow.

His new book caused a sensation, and not only in academic circles. As a version of Berkeley without Berkeley’s excesses, Kant postulated that the human mind at least to some extent participates in experiences as much as an originator as it is a passive recipient. He realized that the input from our senses must be cogitated in some way, or it would be just noise, "less than a dream and nothing to us,” because “thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind” (Kant). Our senses and a combination of language and cognitive operating rules cooperate and sometimes conspire to create in our mind the kind of illusion which we commonly address as “reality.”

Accordingly our notions of time and space are embedded in the logic that enables us to process perceptions and turn them into a representation of the world. And because the information that filters in from our senses can only be communicated in a sequence of images or words, we can’t help to mentally map out its representation as well as an event that stretches through time and space. It is unavoidable. It is the way the medium of cogitation, our semantic memory, is compelling us “a priory” to string together the items from our episodic memory. The result of this operation produces a picture that agrees with our intuition; but the world may have a few more aces up its sleeves than we are able to detect on the first sight. "Indisputably we can't help it but be possessed by figments of a void space without Universe and void time before the world, if we allow ourselves to think in terms of cosmic boundaries relatively to space or time," says Kant.

Some of his students, who understood the implication, responded with despair, one even grew suicidal.

They thought it would turn the testimony of our senses to a lie if the truth of Kant’s “synthetic” propositions before all experience had to be accepted and we would bring a priory notions of expanse and duration into the composition of a percept. If the justification for being there is nothing but our mental toolbox, didn’t we act like the man wearing tinged eye shades and seeing none of the real colors that are “out there?”

Apparently his students, especially before the arrival of Charles Darwin, failed to fully appreciate the power of such propositions in providing a cognitive playing field for our responses to the empirical world. There is nothing wrong with a priory propositions. In the end even the most introvert solipsist must step out of his meditative nirvana and interact with the world. His inner projection is put to the test and will be corrected should he get it wrong. But first there has to be something that can be tested. Without actually throwing, whether stones or ideas, we won’t hit anything. Our mind is a priory constituted to do just this. This also stands to illustrate Kant’s contention that in actual fact we are incapable of intuitively comprehending the true nature of the phenomenon - in Kant’s parlance the “nuonemon” - and much of the world at large.

We comprehend what we are capable to hit, we know, that cannot be wrong; our senses are not lying to us, otherwise we wouldn’t be around. But whenever left to merely thinking without testing, Immanuel Kant became convinced, that, as a matter of logic, the very features which underpin our operational intuition can't help but goad us into contradicting conclusions.

As he saw it, it is not a quirk of our mental capacities, nor a failure of the logic employed, but inevitable if intuition has no empirical data to go by. Human reasoning then has a propensity to stray into more than one direction. In his infamous "antinomies" Kant gives in a nutshell the problems caused by the subjective character of our intuition when we ponder matters like time and space.

Kant pitted against each other the mutually exclusive ideas that "the world has a beginning in time, and is also limited in regard to space," and  that “the world has no beginning, and no limits in space, but is, in relation both to time and space, infinite, and then demonstrated that both assumptions are logically coherent and without contradiction. Later the mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) would explain that in an infinite set of integers every selection of a class, for instance all the prime numbers, when taken out from the total of members, represents itself as an infinite set of integers. Once somebody thought of it, this is easy to understand. Immanuel Kant didn’t address this, and possibly wouldn’t have, even if he had known set theory, because he speaks about our intuition and nothing of Cantor’s mathematics is intuitive, not even for its discoverer. Kant understood this. He explains: “Space is merely a form of intuition for the external, but not a real object in itself; it is not a correlate of phenomena, it is the form, our faculty of perception uses, to present phenomena to our understanding.“

Obviously, this is worlds apart from modern mathematics and physics, but firmly entrenched in the procedural logic of our intuition. And it wouldn’t be there if it didn’t work. In his book Critique of Pragmatic Reasoning, Kant already betrayed an inkling of the Darwinian concept of the "survival of the fittest," it is easy to understand, but the messiness of the process was against Kant’s inner nature.

Kant was a man of the rococo, the age of playful architecture, of elegant furniture design and of mechanic marvels. Like the great mechanics of the period who provided the British navy with precision chronometers he set out to disassemble our cognitive equipment to the last cogwheel and see for himself. The result of his efforts was his famous table of categories.

On the paper it looks neat, but even devoted Kantians couldn’t suppress a snigger. Arthur Schopehauer venerated Kant almost as his guru, but in his Parerga and Paralipomena he dismisses Kant’s table of categories as a “glittering palace” and Lord Russell joins in the dismissal: “Kant holds that the mind orders the raw material of sensations, but never thinks it necessary to say why it orders it as it does and not otherwise.”

Somebody here was in a rush and didn’t read the philosopher’s numerous caveats.

Immanuel Kant was the last of the rationalists before the spirit of romanticism took over the seminars of philosophy; he never doubted that logic lies at the foundation of our cognitive faculties. It is actually quite simple. Whenever we piece together a sentence, nobody would understand what we are saying, if we not, either explicit or implicitly, give expression to at least three of the following categories:

(1)   quantity [unity, plurality, totality],

(2)   quality [reality, negation, limitation],

(3)   relation [substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, reciprocity]

(4)   modality [possibility, existence, necessity]

Kant’s term of “judgments a priory” has nothing to do with “inborn ideas.” Instead Kant identifies a pattern of procedural logic. It also means that “order” and “chaos” are entirely a matter of perception. In the world beyond our senses, there is no “order,” “chaos,” “time,” or “space,” these terms apply only to the mesh and fabric of the net we are casting out to catch a fact.

Then what is out there? Perhaps it is the ongoing flow of Heraclit’s river into which, "we never step twice" (Heraclit 535-480 BC.). A river that presents itself to our perception in the categories of entropy and hallucination. Sometimes though, we seem to catch a glimpse. In his book A History of Time, Professor Stephen Hawking describes the evolution of the universe from “big bang,” towards maximum expansion and the contraction back into a singularity where the physical laws as we know them “collapse” as an event that permanently happens. Not as a cycle of repeated expansions and collapses but as a permanent one off.

If one travels along the geodesics of Earth the longitudes will lead from the pole (symbolizing big bang) away to the equator, the area of maximum expansion, and further on to the other pole, the point of collapse, without actually stopping there. We continue on our travel, reach again the equator and then the other pole, and so on, infinitely. By reaching the pole the Earth doesn’t suddenly disappear underneath our feet - we continue traveling the geodesic. Time in this picture, applies only to the traveler who traverses the distance from point “A” to point “B,” but for the globe in its entirety there is no distance - it is just there, removed from our notions of "time" and "space."

 

© - 1/2/2008 – by michael sympson,

2,300 words, all rights reserved