How
can we know?
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There are stars, which have ceased to exist
for more than 2000 years, but we still receive their light. If you
think of it, everything else is just fine.
|
Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
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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