All in the Mind

 

To me Immanuel Kant (1724 ­­– 1804) is more like an old mate from the neighborhood. His Critique seems an easy read; not because his philosophy is easy, but Kant expresses himself in the patois I’ve heard my mother speaking, a dialect somewhere towards Oldenburg and further east. It is true; Kant’s Cimmerian abuse of the language can make it an ordeal reading him. Kant was in his sixties when he composed the Critique of pure Reason. In the short span of nine months he wrote it down in one sitting. It is a brick of a book and could derail a train. Writing it down had become a matter of urgency. The results of eleven years of hard thinking began slipping away under the onset of Alzheimer.

Living the life of a celibate, Immanuel Kant never left his hometown and never missed work. The people of Königsberg used to set their clocks when they saw him passing under their windows. Every morning at 5.30 a.m., Kant’s valet – an invalid veteran from King Frederick’s army – would wake up the philosopher with the words: “It is time!” Kant rose, perfunctorily washed, prepared with his own fair hands the mustard for today’s dinner, and left home after a cup of coffee. The coffee bean was on the royal revenue’s list of imported luxuries and in those days one still needed to do the roasting at home. Many turned for their supply to the friendly smuggler from the neighborhood. The King had a habit of sending out coffee-sniffers to patrol the streets and knock at the door when smelling your roast, in order to levy a steep tax on this little indulgence.

Kant finished lecturing at noon and he 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 town, picked him up in his horse carriage and brought him back home. It was an exact schedule and only in one instance Kant missed the rendezvous by a few seconds. From the distance the Englishman must have seen the philosopher storming along with flying coat tails, but stoically and without as much as giving him a look, he passed by and left the stumped Immanuel standing in the rain. The incident did not affect their friendship. The next day, Kant was picked up as if nothing had happened, and on arrival at Kant’s house, the philosopher first went in to set up the menu for dinner before coming back to the conservatory where his friend had already pulled out a chair and was soundly asleep. Kant planted another chair next to him and 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. At five, dinner was served. The next four hours passed in animated conversation. At nine p.m. sharp, the philosopher then excused himself, went to bed and read by candlelight until eleven; a routine he broke only once, reading the hefty tome of Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s Emile cover to cover in one go. It was on the morning before the missed rendezvous. Kant’s only known diversion was billiard; people used to remember his appearances in the pool halls.

The Critique of pure Reason caused a sensation, and not only in academic circles. Kant postulated that the human mind is as much the originator as it is the passive recipient of our perceptions. Immanuel Kant took particular pride in his table of cognitive categories. His critics mocked the idea as a "glittering palace" (Schopenhauer), but Kant saw it as the key to his philosophy. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) adopted this view, with the important correction, that these categories actually are laying at the bottom of our linguistic toolbox.

Every statement and every sentence, in order to make sense, can't do without semantic markers implicit to its structure. No matter how short or elaborate a statement, whether embedded in context and situation – as in: “Let’s go!” – or standing alone as a self-reliant pronouncement, a sentence must implicitly refer to one element each of at least three of the following four categories.

Quantity: (Do matters belong together? Are they separate entities? Or is it about the totality of everything?)

Quality: (Is it real? Contrary to facts? Or due to conditions?)

Relation: (Is it the incidental offshoot from previous conditions? Is it an effect following a cause? Or is it a matter of mutual reciprocity?)

Modality: (Is it possible to exist? Does it actually exist? Is it necessary to exist?)

We are speaking here of categorizations implicit to the process of forming a sentence, a mostly subconscious activity of slotting in into the appropriate categories without even knowing that there is such a thing as categories. This process even carries across the language barrier. Despite of differences in word-structure and syntax, a translation answers to the same set of categories that seem universal to all languages. Without such universality, translations could be well nigh impossible. In terms of cogitation, this did lead Kant to the realization that the input from our senses must be going through some form of procedure, 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 the cognitive faculties cooperate and sometimes conspire to create in our mind the kind of illusion we commonly take to be a reflection of surrounding “reality.”

Our instincts about time and space, finality and infinity, are the offshoot of the logic that enables us to cogitate perceptions. And because the information filtering in from our senses can only be processed as a string of stimuli, we map out the images and words as a sequence stretching through time and space. It is the way our semantic memory is compelling us “a priory” to assemble the items gathered in our episodic memory. This doesn’t necessarily put a limit on our understanding, but it 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.” Our senses are not lying to us, the prey wouldn’t survive the chase if it didn’t spot the predator, but the very features which underpin our operational intuition can't help but goad us, as a matter of logic, into absurd and contradictory conclusions when we start reasoning about matters without the support of empirical data. In his infamous "antinomies" Kant illustrated what must happen when we try to get a handle on matters like time, space and infinity, if purely guided by procedural logic.

Kant pitted against each other two mutually exclusive ideas:

(1) "The world has a beginning and is of limited extent," and 

(2) “The world is infinite with no beginning, and no limits in space.

Kant then proceeded to demonstrate that both assumptions are logically coherent and without contradiction. “Space,” Kant explained, “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.“ The result of this operation produces a perception that appears to be very intuitive. In the words of the philosopher: "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." But this would be a misunderstanding, as Kant repeatedly has pointed out in his numerous and often ignored caveats.

When we bring an “a priory” notion of expanse and duration into the composition of the percept, this “a priory” stems from the logic of the process, the cogitation. It is not referencing an inborn element or preconceived idea somehow magically planted into the mind of the unborn.

Kant’s contribution is the understanding that even terms like “order” and “chaos” are entirely a matter of perspective. The empirical world beyond our senses, does not know “order” and “chaos,” “time” or “space.” These terms apply only to our cognitive categories.

One of Kant’s students thought it would turn the testimony of our senses to a lie if the truth of Kant’s “synthetic” propositions before all experience has to be accepted. If what we perceive is just a configuration according to our mental toolbox, doesn’t it make us beholding the world like someone who is never taking off his sunglasses? We see the thing, but never in its “real” nature. Being not one of the most stabile characters, the thought made Heinrich von Kleist grow suicidal. On November 21, 1811, he shot himself and his girlfriend on the shore of the Wannsee near Potsdam. Apparently he failed to appreciate the power of such “synthetic” propositions before all experience as a cognitive testing ground. Eventually the inner projection is put to the test and will be corrected should we get it wrong. But first there has to be something that can undergo such test. Without actually throwing – be it a stone or an idea – we will never know whether we hit or miss.

© – 2/26/2009 – by michael sympson, 1,600 words, all rights reserved