Maverick Philosopher

Can One Copulate One's Way to Chastity?

John B. writes,

I'm a regular reader of your blog and I've written very occasionally, but not for a few years.  Here's another comment. 

 

I enjoy your periodic return to the question of whether one can philosophize one's way to a release from philosophy.  But I think that, to split hairs, you're wrong to say that one can't copulate one's way to chastity.  After a manner of speaking, one can.  It's true that one can't copulate one's way to virginity . . . . But isn't "copulating one's way to chastity" at the heart of marriage as the remedium concupiscentiae?  When the Apostle Paul tells his readers that it is better to marry than to burn with lust, he seems to have in mind something like copulating one's way to chastity.

 

Think of a bachelor who has unruly sexual desires, some of which he may act on.  He then falls in love and gets married, agreeing to an exclusive sexual relationship with his wife.  Over the course of his marriage, his inclinations are tamed and re-structured so that, while he may still experience fleeting moments where, sure, he notices that another woman is very pretty, his sexual desire as such is exclusively, or nearly exclusively, for his wife, whom he loves more and more.  Actually having frequent sexual intercourse with his wife is part of this transformation, since having sex with the same partner, in the context of a loving relationship, has powerful psychological effects.  It might be an oversimplification to say that the man in question "copulated his way to chastity," but it would also be an oversimplification to say that he didn't.

 

Take that for whatever it's worth, and keep up the good work.

 

I see your point, John, but if the question is whether one can achieve chastity by sexual intercourse, I would say no.  One cannot copulate one's way to chastity either in marriage or outside of marriage. But if the question is whether being married helps one avoid unchastity, the answer is a resounding yes.  And that, I take it, is the point you succeeded in making.  Marriage channels and directs sexual energy in a licit and productive way even if no procreation results.  It is therefore indeed remedium concupiscentiae. We need the remedy and the mitigation. We are naturally concupiscent from the ground up, and the decadent, sex-saturated society we live in exacerbates the natural tendency,  pouring gasoline on the "fire down below." 

 

The logically prior question is: what is chastity?  "Chastity is the virtue which [either] excludes or moderates the indulgence of the sexual appetite." (Catholic Encyclopedia, here.) It is a form of temperance, one of the four cardinal virtues. Chastity is either absolute or relative depending on whether it excludes indulgence in the sexual appetite or merely moderates it.  Absolute chastity is called continence and is classed as a "counsel of perfection." As such, it is not morally obligatory but supererogatory. The supererogatory is that which is good but above and beyond what is morally required.  Absolute chastity is not required of those in the marital state; relative chastity is.  So the exercise of the virtue of chastity is compatible with at least some forms of the indulgence of sexual appetite in marriage.

 

Chastity in marriage is extremely difficult to achieve. Who would have the temerity to claim that he has achieved it on a regular basis? It is obviously not enough to refrain from sexual relations with partners other than one's spouse.  Suppose you are having sexual intercourse with your wife while thinking lustful thoughts about your neighbor's wife.  That would count as a violation of chastity in marriage. Am I right about that, John?

 

Moral collapse has proceeded so far that discussions such as the above will strike the majority as quaint and absurd and out of all relation to anything 'real.' When the Pope allows a 'devout Catholic' supporter of abortion on demand for any reason at any stage of fetal development to receive Holy Communion in Rome, then we are fast approaching the end.

 

Related: Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

Berkeleyan and Kantian Idealism: How Do They Differ?

The good bishop, as Kant called him, held that reality is exhausted by "spirits" and their ideas. Thus on Berkeley's scheme everything is either a spiritual substance or mind, whether finite or infinite (God), or else an idea 'in'  a  mind. Ideas are thus modes or  modifications of minds.  As such they do not exist independently of minds. That's what 'in' conveys. If everything is either a mind or an idea in a mind, then bodies are not substances given that a substance is an entity capable of independent existence.  Berkeley's ontology is thus a one (type of) substance ontology. This makes for a contrast with Descartes' dualism of substances, thinking and extended. 

Now the gross facts are not in dispute and no (sane) philosopher is in the business of denying them. So every sane person will agree that there are rocks and trees, tables and turnips. You haven't understood Berkeley if you think that he is an eliminativist about such things. That is why you cannot refute him by kicking a stone.  Anyone who thinks that he can be so refuted is utterly bereft of philosophical aptitude. The question is not whether there are bodies, trees and such; the question is what they are, and what the good bishop is telling us is that they are coherent, cohesive, bundles of ideas. Trees and such exist alright; it's just that their esse est percipi, their being/existence is (identically) their being perceived by some spirit.  

The standard picture assimilates Kant to Berkeley, as I wrote earlier:

P.F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere. The standard picture makes of Kant an inconsistent Berkeley who limits knowledge to appearances, these being understood as "mere representations" (blosse Vorstellungen), while at the same time positing an unknowable  realm of things in themselves.  Mere representations are assimilated to Berkeleian ideas so that when Kant states that we know only appearances, what he is telling us is that we know only the contents of our minds.

The standard picture shows a failure to grasp what Kant intends with his transcendental idealism. (Note, however, that whether Kant achieves what he intends is an entirely different question.)  When I taught Kant in the 1980s I used the following three-level schema in order to clarify what Kant means by 'appearance' (Erscheinung) when he is using it in his special transcendentally idealist sense.  There are at least three senses of 'appearance' in Kant. We may call them the manifest, the scientific, and the transcendental. The empirical embraces both the manifest and the scientific and stands opposed to the transcendental. Correspondingly, there are three senses of 'reality,' the manifest, the scientific, and the transcendental.   

Level One: We start with the ordinary 'manifest image' appearance-reality distinction. One day I was hiking Jacob's Crosscut along the base of Superstition Mountain. Off in the brush I espied what appeared to be some big black dogs. In reality, however, they were black bears as a closer look revealed.  This is a familiar sort of case. An initial appearance is shown to be a perceptual mistake, one correctable and in this case corrected by further perception.  The initial, non-veridical appearance was not nothing, but its 'reality' was merely intra-mental, a momentary private datum not amenable to public verification, or even ongoing private verification.  It was a mere seeming or semblance, an instance of what Kant calls Schein and distinguishes from Erscheinung.  Kantian appearances are not private mental data. 

Let 'A1' denote an appearance at Level One, and 'R1' a reality or real thing at Level One. An A1 may or may not be veridical. If I jump back from what I take to be a snake but is in reality a tree root, then the A1 is non-veridical. But when I see a tree root and my partner confirms that what I saw was a tree root, then my A1 and his numerically different A1 are veridical.  So an A1 need not be illusory.  Every A1 purports to be of or about an R1, but the purport does not always 'pan out.'

At A 45 = B63, Kant gives his rainbow example. He tells us that a rainbow may be called a mere appearance and the rain the thing in itself.  This is an example of the Level One appearance-reality distinction. In that same obscure passage,  the careful reader can discern the Level  Three appearance-reality distinction.  For he tells us that the rain drops, together with such primary qualities as shape,  are themselves appearances of a "transcendental object" that "remains unknown to us."  It follows that the rainbow is an appearance of an appearance. The empirical object (rain water refracting sunlight) that is the reality behind the rainbow is itself an appearance of something that does not appear to us as it is in itself.

Level Two.  We now wheel the primary versus secondary quality distinction onto the field. An R1 at Level One has both primary and secondary qualities.  The tree I see when I look out my window has both primary and secondary qualities. To mention just two of its primary qualities, it has a size and a shape. To mention just one of its secondary qualities it is green in color.  At Level Two, R1 is stripped of its secondary qualities, and left with its primary qualities alone. We are now operating within the 'scientific image.'  What was R1 at Level One is now A2 at Level Two.  The real extra-mental tree of Level One is now taken to be an appearance of a deeper reality R2 at Level Two.  Thus:

A1 -------------------> R1 

                                       (R1 = A2) --------------------> R2

                                              

A1 is a representation 'in' the mind of a psychophysical being, a human animal for example. The arrows stand for the representing relation. There is difference between the two relations depicted, but I cannot go into this now. What A1 represents (or presents, stellt vor) is an empirical object R1 endowed with primary and secondary qualities. The secondary qualities are perceived at the object even though, at Level Two, they are understood to be merely relational properties of R2 due to the affection (causal impact) of the thing R2 upon the sensory receptors of the psychophysical subject.  Thus R2 in itself is not colored, etc.  But R2 is in space and possesses a location, a size, a shape, a volume, etc. It is either at rest or in motion which implies the possibility of translation and rotation, etc. which motions bring  objective time into the picture.  

Level Three.  At this level we arrive at the phenomenon or appearance in the specifically Kantian sense. Space and time (and thus all primary qualities) are now stripped from R2 and made out to be a priori forms (or schematizations of such forms), forms that characterize the standpoint of an ectypal intellect, one whose sole mode of intuition (Anschauung) is sensible and thus receptive unlike the intellectual and thus non-sensible mode of intuition of the archetypal intellect whose intuition is creative of its objects.  What exactly this standpoint of the ectypal is is a vexing question. We can say this much with assurance: it is nothing internal to the mind of a psychophysical being such as a human animal, nor is it necessarily dependent on the existence of psychophysical beings.  Extending the above diagram:

 

(R1 = A2) --------------------> R2

                                                    (R2 = A3) -----------------------> R3 (negative noumenon)

(R2 = A3) is an intersubjective object.  It is the objective correlate of the epistemic standpoint of an ectypal intellect.  Nature for Kant is the sum-total of all such phenomena as intersubjective objects. The objectivity of R3, by contrast, is not intersubjective but absolute as befits the objective correlate of the absolute mind of the archetypal intellect, "which all men call God," to adapt a phrase from Aquinas.

The above schema leaves us with a lot of thorny questions.  One such concerns double affection (Erich Adickes). Do both R3 and R2 cause sensations in psychophysical beings?

The main point, however, it is that no one who understands what Kant is trying to do could possibly assimilate his idealism to Berkeley's. There is much more to be said.

How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues

Here is a possible attitude for examination.

Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from the proximate, and unfits one for the only life that is sure. Accept finitude, for we are not made for anything more.

But even this train of thought is dangerous. To ride it is already to forsake short views and to speculate fruitlessly about views and about which is best. That view alone is truly short which is accepted thoughtlessly and thus not as a view. The truly short view is no view. If you so much as ask whether the life lived in sensuous immediacy is the truest or best, the worm of inquiry  -- call him Skepsis -- has already entered your head. Or perhaps he was there all along and now you are feeding him.  

But it is too late. You are on the path of inquiry and there is no turning back. Forward you shall go to points unknown. Will you proceed resolutely or in the desultory way of wishy-washy worldlings?

But is it really too late? Why can't one just stop? The trick is to do so without explanation or justification. The example of Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that this is impossible. Philosophical Investigations,  309:

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all the inconclusiveness and endlessness that that entails. He should have just walked away from philosophy.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It is not clear that it can be done, but you can try.  I'm not saying it should be done.  On the contrary.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  That would be like copulating your way to chastity.  For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

Just walk away, Rene.

Is Art Political?

Some say that art is inherently political because man, by nature, is a political animal (Aristotle), and humans make art. By that reasoning, everything humans do is political. But if everything from mathematics to entomology to rabbit hunting is political because done by the political animal (zoon politikon), then it doesn't mean much of anything to say that art or anything else is political.

 

Art is inherently political only for totalitarians, whether of the Left or the Right, for whom everything is political. 

Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Divine Simplicity

Dominik Kowalski has a question for me about footnote 3 in Peter van Inwagen's "God's Being and Ours" in Miroslav Szatkowski, ed., Ontology of Theistic Beliefs, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 213-223. (Van Inwagen's essay is right after my "Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?, pp. 203-212. I managed to upstage van Inwagen, but only alphabetically.) Here is footnote 3:

Catholic philosophers have often said not that God’s existence is a consequence of his nature but that his existence and his nature are identical. This doctrine is one of the many implications of the more general “doctrine of Divine Simplicity”, according to which phrases like ‘God’s power’, ‘God’s wisdom’, ‘God’s love’, ‘God’s nature’ and ‘God’s existence’ all denote one and the same thing, namely the Divine Substance – that is, God, God himself, God full stop. The doctrine of Divine Simplicity, however, presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute (for present purposes, “Aristotelianism”). From the point of view of a Platonist like myself, the doctrine of Divine Simplicity is wrong simply because it presupposes Aristotelianism, and Aristotelianism is false.

Here is Dominik's question:

Where does that idea come from? [The idea that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology.] Seriously, I don't understand. It might be disputable whether we can reconcile Plotinus' understanding of the way the One exists with a Thomistic view about God, but divine simplicity is a core pillar of (Neo-)Platonist arguments, e.g. the argument from composition. As said, perhaps the identification of God with existence is a newer concept due to development by philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition, but prima facie I think formulating the dispute the way van Inwagen does, muddies the water. Divine Simplicity mustn't be identified with an explicitly Thomistic formulation, this just undersells the disputes the doctrine has historically surrounded [undersells the disputes that have historically surrounded the doctrine].

1) Kowalski is right  that the ontological simplicity of the Absolute is at the core of Platonism and Ne0-Platonism. The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, and the God of Aquinas are all ontologically simple.  The theology of Aquinas quite obviously incorporates this neo-Platonic element, along with other elements, some of which do not comport well with the neo-Platonic element.  No Absolute worth its salt can fail to be simple, and the God of Aquinas is the Absolute in his system. For Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. Literally translated, God is self-subsisting To Be.  Intellectual honesty demands that we admit that this God concept teeters on the brink of unintelligibility.  But it is defensible as a Grenzbegriff, a boundary or limit  concept. See The Concept GOD as Limit Concept.

 

God is not a being among beings, but Being itself.  In this respect God is like the One of Plotinus. There is no Many in which the One is a member.  The ONE is not one of many. Similarly, in Aquinas there is no totality of beings in which God is a member.  God is not one being among many. He is utterly transcendent like the One of Plotinus and the Good of Plato. And yet, God is not other than every being, every ens, for he himself is. If God were other than every being, then he would be other than himself, which is impossible. This distinguishes the God of Aquinas from Heidegger's Being. For Heidegger, das Sein ist kein Seiendes, Being is other than every being, everything that is. For Aquinas, Gott oder das Sein ist selbst seiend, God or Being is himself being. Or, as I say in my existence book, The Paradigm Existent, the Unifier, is not a being (which would imply that it is a being among beings), but the being, the one and only being (ens) that is identical to its Being (esse) .  That is indeed one of the entailments of DDS: there is no real distinction in God as between God and Being and between God and his Being.

 

2) As for Peter van Inwagen, he, like so many hard-core analytic types, uses 'Platonism' and related expressions in a loose and historically uninformed way.  He calls himself a Platonist but he certainly does not accept 'into his ontology' -- as these types say -- Platonic Forms or Ideas (eide), Platonic participation (methexis) of phenomenal particulars in Forms, and the rest of the conceptual machinery which naturally within Plato's system implies levels/grades of Being and modes of Being which Dominik, as a German speaker, can understand as Seinsweisen or Seinsmodi. In the essay in question, van Inwagen comes out unequivocally against modes of Being.  (I employ the majuscule 'B' in 'Being' so as to mark the crucial distinction between Being and beings, esse et ens/entia, das Sein und das Seiende. Observing that distinction is initium sapientiae in ontology.)

 

Van Inwagen's main man is Willard van Orman Quine who contributed to the misuse of the good old word 'abstract' with his talk of 'abstract objects.' So-called abstract objects are not products of abstraction.  Van Inwagen buys into this lapse from traditional usage along with his colleague Alvin Plantinga. Accordingly, there are properties, but they are 'abstract objects' which exist just as robustly (or just as anemically) as 'concrete objects.' So-called abstract objects are, besides being outside of space and time, causally inert.  So it is no surprise that Plantinga and van Inwagen reject the DDS claim that God is identical to each of his omni-attributes or essential properties.  To their way of thinking, that identity claim makes of God a causally inert abstract object, which of course God, as causa prima, cannot be.

 

3) When van Inwagen says that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute, what he says is true inasmuch as said ontology is a constituent ontology (C-ontology). This is what he, as a self-styled 'Platonist' objects to. I explain C-ontology in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on DDS.  See section 3. Here is part of what I say in that section:

Since a Plantinga-type approach to ontology rules out DDS from the outset, no sophisticated adherent of the doctrine will adopt such an approach. The DDS defender will embrace an ontology that accommodates an ontologically simple being. Indeed, as Nicholas Wolterstorff (1991) notes, classical proponents of DDS such as Aquinas had a radically different ontological style, one that allowed for the coherent conceivability of DDS. They did not think of individuals as related to their properties as to abstracta external to them, but as having properties as ontological constituents. They, and some atheist contemporaries as well, think in terms of a “constituent ontology” as opposed to what Wolterstorff calls a “relation ontology” or what might be called a “nonconstituent ontology”. Bundle theories are contemporary examples of constituent ontology. If properties are assayed as tropes and a concrete particular as a bundle of tropes, then these tropes or abstract particulars are parts of concrete particulars when suitably bundled. Properties so assayed are brought from Plato’s heaven to earth. The togetherness or compresence of tropes in a trope bundle is not formal identity but a kind of contingent sameness. Thus a redness trope and a sweetness trope in an apple are not identical but contingently compresent as parts of the same whole. A model such as this allows for an extrapolation to a necessary compresence of the divine attributes in the case of God. Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval proponents of DDS, is of course an Aristotelian, not a trope theorist. But he too is a constituent ontologist. Form and matter, act and potency, and essence and existence are constituents of primary substances. Essence and existence in sublunary substances such as Socrates are really distinct but inseparably together. Their unity is contingent. This model permits an extrapolation to the case of a being in which essence and existence are necessarily together or compresent. Constituent ontology, as murky as it must remain on a sketch such as this, at least provides a framework in which DDS is somewhat intelligible as opposed to a Plantinga-style framework on which DDS remains wholly unintelligible. The arguments for DDS amount to arguments against the nonconstituent ontological framework.

Combox open. I invite Dominik to tell me whether I have answered his question to his satisfaction.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Substack latest. 

Is it consistent to support both fetal rights and the moral acceptability of capital punishment? There are two senses of ‘consistency’ at issue, and in neither sense is there any inconsistency.

Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

New and improved! Originally posted in October, 2015. For a longish review and critique of the Butchvarov volume mentioned below, see my "Butchvarov on the Dehumanization of Philosophy," Studia Neoaristotelica, vol. 13, no. 2 (2016), pp. 181-195. Butchvarov and Husserl are clearly related to my present and ongoing rehearsal of the problematic of Kantian transcendental realism. 

............................................................

From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox.  Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism (PA) discussed by Panayot Butchvarov, as I construe it, where  the numerals in parentheses refer to pages in his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund Husserl in his  last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation.  Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

PHS:  How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too.  What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ?    (179-180)

What is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that we are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world.  This by itself is not paradoxical.  For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process.  Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the a priori categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world.  For then the entire vast cosmos would depend for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.  Butchvarov above mentions the intelligibility of physical reality. If this intelligibility is not intrinsic to nature but imposed by us, then this too would be absurd if we are but physical parts of the physical cosmos.  Butchvarov again: "The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna." For one thing, before we miserable human animals came on the evolutionary scene, the physical cosmos was 'already there.' So the cosmos could not possibly depend for its existence on the existence of measly parts thereof who, in addition, made the scene rather late in the game.  As for intelligibility, the understandability of the cosmos has as a necessary though not sufficient condition its regularity.  The laws of nature are at least regularities. Now if regularity is imposed or bestowed or projected by specimens of h. sapiens, then the universe would have to wait for us to arrive before it could be cosmos as opposed to  chaos. And that is plainly absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity.  For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung)  humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.'   For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive. (I leave out of consideration putatively non-intentional states of awareness such as felt pain and felt pleasure.)  For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical/noumenal/transcendental egos somehow associated with human animals.  It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites.  It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object.   Consciousness is subject-less.  So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects.  It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness.  The influence of both David Hume and Jean-Paul Sartre on Butchvarov is unmistakable. 

Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison

Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I)  with the following triadic Cartesian shema:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum 

Subject --------------------> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely the noema of that very noesis.  Got that?)

Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):

------------------------------->objects.

For Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, and thus other than every object, not in the world, and hence not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species.  It is not restricted to them because not embodied in them. It is not a property of human animals, or something going on in their brains, or something supervenient upon, or epiphenomenal to, or emergent from intracranial goings-on.  Consciousness, again, is a "wind blowing towards objects," a wind that blows from Nowhere and Nowhen. It blows without a blower. Someone might think of God as the Cosmic Blowhard who blows the bubble of space-time-matter from a 'place' outside of space and time, and keeps the bubble inflated for as long as he likes. But of course that is not what Sartre and Butchvarov mean. There is no blower of the intentional wind.  The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects.  (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")

Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.

Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' a nugatory nothing, ein nichtiges Nichts (to borrow a phrase from Heidegger) inasmuch as consciousness, which is no-thing,  is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone or something.  It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.'  Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear.  This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's mind merely apparent.  (Via private communication.) It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism.  It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution. 

How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity? 

Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, sec. 54, p. 183:

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings?  After all, the epoché  has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoché  has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries.  Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoché, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoché and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.

Contra Husserl

Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable.  On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature.  For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual  thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans.  As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung).  The Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world  (ein kleines Endchen der Welt)  from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question. 

Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes,  one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing  in itself independently of consciousness.    Everything objective succumbs to the epoché.  No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence.  Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself.  If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche.  He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something absolutely transcendent and indubitable.  For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoché." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.")  In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung?  Does it exist?   And in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen).  But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot existent transcendently either.  

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that was himself as thinking thing. He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein.  Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well.  But then nothing is left over.  We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating.  To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction.  It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos. 

Here is another approach to the problem.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective.  This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature.  But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'?  How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum?  In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'?  How does he know that it is anything like a person?

After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.

Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences

1.  Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.

2.  Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.

3.  Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness. 

4.  Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)

5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.

6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)

7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.

8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.

9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.

10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to.  For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things.  Butchvarov's  theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:  "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633)  There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.

11. Husserl and  Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way."  (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.

12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego.  Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness.  And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'

There is much more to be said, later.  

Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity

The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a  contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment.  The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical. As opposed to what? As opposed to a life in which praxis is paramount.

Question: Is the life of the monk the highest life for the Christian? Is the monastic life the highest form of  imitatio Christi?  Christ was no anchorite.  He did not flee from the agitation of the cities and from the people except for relatively short periods. He associated with the canaille, with publicans and prostitutes. His ministry was among them where he risked everything and in human terms lost everything.

Despite their drastic differences, Socrates too moved among the people  and met a predictable fate. He lived in no ivory tower where he could think and write in peace and in leisurely retirement. He wrote nothing. His academy was the agora. His was the dialectic of the streets, not that of the learned essay. A battle-hardened soldier, he knew how to translate military valor into civil courage. Among his interlocutors were powerful and vicious men.  He took risks, offended them, and was executed by the State.  But back to Christ.  Let us hear St. Neilos the Ascetic. This is from his Ascetic Discourse in the Philokalia, that marvellous compendium of Patristic teachings.

For philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both His life and His teaching. For by the purity of His life He was the first to establish the way of true philosophy. He always held His soul above the passions of the body, and in the end, when His death was required by His design for man's salvation. He laid down even His soul. In this He taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life's pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body: he must not overvalue even his soul, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.

The apostles received this way of life from Christ and made it their own, renouncing the world in response to His call, disregarding fatherland, relatives and possessions. At once they adopted a harsh and strenuous way of life, facing every kind of adversity, afflicted, tormented, harassed, naked, lacking even necessities; and finally they met death boldly, imitating their Teacher faithfully in all things. Thus through their actions they left behind a true image of the highest way of life.

Although all Christians should have modeled their own life on this image, most of them either lacked the will to do so or else made only feeble efforts. There were, however, a few who had the Strength to rise above the turmoil of the world and to flee from the agitation of cities. Having escaped from this turbulence, they embraced the monastic life and reproduced in themselves the pattern of apostolic virtue. They preferred voluntary poverty to possessions, because this freed them from distraction, and so as to control the passions, they satisfied their bodily needs with food that was readily available and simply prepared, rather than with richly dressed dishes. Soft and unnecessary clothing they rejected as an invention of human luxury, and they wore only such plain garments as are required for the body. It seemed to them a betrayal of philosophy to turn their attention from heavenly things to earthly concerns more appropriate to animals. They ignored the world, being above human passions.

I draw your attention to the third paragraph. Christ did not flee from the agitation of the cities. He did not ignore the world and its turmoil. He was not above human passions. The God-Man was fully human. He did not die like a Stoic sage. He experienced to the full the brutality of the brutal Romans, dying like a man in utter agony of body and in despair of spirit, abandoned.

So the question is: Is the monastic way a way to evade true imitation of Christ? I myself am of the monkish disposition and not at all inclined to go into the agora like Socrates  or into the temple with its moneychangers like Christ. Luther I find repellent; the anti-rational but also anti-mystical Kierkegaard fascinating but wrongheaded; the Roman church wishy-washy despite its deep depths of mysticism; it is the East and the mystical depths of Orthodox Christianity that attract me. Athens is closer to Constantinople than to Rome.

And so I ask my question in the spirit of Socratic self-examination. I do not have an answer.  The unexamined life is not worth living, and the highest examination is the examination of one's own life.

Related:

Kierkegaard: "To Hell with the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

Word of the Day: Cack-Handed

Substack latest.

Short. Entertaining. Makes important points about language and male-female relations.  Improve your vocabulary. Read it!

Leftists, especially those of the 'woke'-Orwellian stripe, do not want you to have a large vocabulary. They do not want you to be able to think in a nuanced manner. 

On Thinking for Oneself

You must think for yourself while never forgetting that the wild and troubling and contention-stoking diversity of opinions abroad in the world is due to people thinking for themselves. The herd animal may be stampeded into a slot canyon where he drowns; the maverick may end up in the same place and meet the same fate on his own.

If only there were an utterly reliable teaching authority available to us here and now. Some say there is. See my longish entry, Michael Liccione on Private and Collective Judgment.

Keep Your Own Counsel

One alone has 'skin in the game' of one's own life. This helps explain why the advice of others, however well-intentioned, is often useless or worse. Listen to the advice of others, but at last keep one's own counsel. And:

I Know My Limits

I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know.   Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. 

(Note how 'I' is used above.  It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is being used as a universal quantifier. As above used, 'I' does not have an antecedent; it has substituends (linguistic items) and values (non-linguistic items). The above use of 'I' is a legitimate use, not a misuse.)

Nota Notae Est Nota Rei Ipsius, Kant, and the Ontological Argument

This is a re-post, redacted and re-thought, from 22 July 2011. I dust it off because something caught my eye the other morning in the Translator's Introduction to Kant's Logic. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz tell us that for Kant the principle of all inference or mediate judgment is the rule Nota notae est rei ipsius nota. (p. xlii). I'm guessing that C. S. Peirce got wind of the principle from Kant. As for Hartman, I remember hearing good things about him and his work in axiology from Hector-Neri Castañeda. I also recall Hector saying that Hartman died young. Details of Hartman's eventful life here. He died at age 63, which is young for a philosopher.  Hector died at 66.

.........................................................................

"The mark of a mark is a mark of the thing itself." I found this piece of scholasticism in C. S. Peirce. (Justus Buchler, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce, p. 133) It is an example of what Peirce calls a   'leading principle.'

Let's say you have an enthymeme:

   Enoch was a man
   -----
   Enoch died.

Invalid as it stands, this argument can be made valid by adding a premise. (Any invalid argument can be made valid by adding a premise.) Add 'All men die' and the argument comes out valid. Peirce writes:

     The leading principle of this is nota notae est nota rei ipsius.
     Stating this as a premiss, we have the argument,

     Nota notae est nota rei ipsius
     Mortality is a mark of humanity, which is a mark of Enoch
     -----
     Mortality is a mark of Enoch.

But is it true that the mark of a mark is a mark of the thing itself? There is no doubt that mortality is a mark of humanity in the following sense: The concept humanity includes within its conceptual content the superordinate concept mortal, which implies that, necessarily, if anything is human, then it is mortal. But mortality is not a mark, but a property, of Enoch. I am invoking Gottlob Frege's distinction between a Merkmal and an Eigenschaft. Frege explains this distinction in various places, one being The Foundations of Arithmetic, sec. 53. But rather than quote Frege, I'll explain the distinction in my own way using a totally original example.

Consider the concept bachelor. This is a first-order or first-level concept in that the items that fall under it are not concepts but objects. The marks of a first-order concept are properties of the objects that fall under the concept. Now the marks of bachelor are unmarried, male, adult, and not a member of a religious order. These marks are themselves concepts, concepts one can extract from bachelor by analysis. Given that Tom falls under bachelor, he has these marks as properties. Thus unmarried, etc. are not marks of Tom, but properties of Tom, while unmarried, etc. are not properties of bachelor but marks of bachelor.

To appreciate the Merkmal (mark)-Eigenschaft (property) distinction, note that the relation between a concept and its marks is entirely different from the relation between a concept and its instances. A first-order concept includes its marks without instantiating them, while an object instantiates its properties without including them.

This is a very plausible line to take. It makes no sense to say of a concept that it is married or unmarried, so unmarried cannot be a property of the concept bachelor. Concepts don't get married or remain single. But it does make sense to say that a concept includes certain other concepts, its marks. On the other hand, it makes no sense to say of Tom that he includes certain concepts since he could do such a thing only if he were a concept, which he isn't. But it does make sense to say of Tom that he has such properties as being a bachelor, being unmarried, being an adult, etc.

Reverting to Peirce's example, mortality is a mark of humanity, but not a mark of Enoch. It is a property of Enoch. For this reason the scholastic formula is false. Nota notae NON est nota rei ipsius. The mark of a mark is not a mark of the thing itself but a property of the thing itself.

No doubt commenter Edward the Nominalist will want to wrangle with me over this slight to his scholastic lore, and I hope he does, since his objections will aid and abet our descent into the labyrinth of this fascinating cluster of problems. But for now, two quick applications.

One is to the ontological argument, or rather to the ontological argument aus lauter Begriffen as Immanuel Kant describes it, the ontological argument "from mere concepts." So we start with the concept God and analyze it. The concept God includes omniscience, etc. But 'surely' existence is also contained in the concept God. For a god who did not exist would lack a perfection, a great-making property; such a god would not be id quo maius cogitari non posse. He would not be that than which no greater can be conceived. To conceive God, then, is to conceive an existing God, whence it follows that God exists! For if you are conceiving a nonexistent God, then you are not conceiving God.

Frege refutes this version of the ontological argument -- not the only or best version I hasten to add -- in one sentence: Weil Existenz Eigenschaft des Begriffes ist, erreicht der ontologische Beweis von der Existenz Gottes sein Ziel nicht. (Grundlagen der Arithmetik, sec. 53)  "Because existence is a property of concepts, the ontological argument for the existence of God fails to attain its goal." What Frege is saying is that the ontological argument "from mere concepts" rests on the mistake of thinking of existence as a mark of concepts as opposed to a property of concepts.  No concept for Frege is such that existence is included within it. Existence is rather a property of concepts, the property of having an instance.

The other application of my rejection of the scholastic formula above is to the logical question of the correct interpretation of singular propositions. The scholastics treat singulars as if they are generals.  But if Frege is right, this is a grave logical error since it rides roughshod over the mark/property distinction. To drag this all into the full light of day would take many more posts.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Obscure '60s Psychedelia

The Monterey Pop Festival was 55 years ago, yesterday. Your humble correspondent was in attendance.

How many of these do you remember?   If you were too much of the '60s then you probably don't remember anything assuming you still animate the mortal coil; if you were too little of the '60s then you won't remember any of these for a different reason.  But among the latter are some very beautiful songs from that amazingly creative time.

Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises

Fever Tree, San Francisco Girls

Love,  Alone Again Or

Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey

Moby Grape, Omaha

Moby Grape, I am not Willing

H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship

Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man

Related: The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman

Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises

Fever Tree, San Francisco Girls

Love,  Alone Again Or

Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey

Moby Grape, Omaha

Moby Grape, I am not Willing

H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship

Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man

Related: The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman

What Does Kant Mean by 'Appearance'?

This from the Comments. The numerals are my intercalation.

But the question remains, exactly what does Kant mean by ‘appearance’ (Erscheinung)? [1] Can I speak of this Appearance? [2] Is this Appearance the visible surface of my desk? [3] Is it numerically identical to what F sees when she looks at the desk? (Surely it is, since you claim it is “public, intersubjectively accessible” – and [4] in what passage does Kant say that Appearances are ‘public’ and ‘intersubjectively accessible’? What are the German terms corresponding to the English?)

Ad [1]. Yes, in the same way that you can speak of your desk or this desk. 

Ad [2]. No, the appearance or phenomenon is the empirically real desk itself with all its parts (and their parts . . .) and properties.  Notice that I wrote 'desk itself,' not 'desk in itself.'  The desk itself is a phenomenon, not a noumenon; it is an empirically real object of "possible experience" (moegliche Erfahrung). The visible surface you see is not identical to the desk itself.

Ad [3].  The desk itself is a Kantian phenomenon and therefore intersubjectively accessible via outer perception. So when F is in your study, she sees the same desk that you see. But your mental states are numerically different from hers, and hers from yours.  Your epistemic access is via your mental states and her access is via hers. You can introspect yours but not hers and vice versa. If A1 is your act of visual perceiving at time t, and A2 is her act of visual perceiving at time t, then it is obvious that A1 is not identical to A2.  It should also be obvious that what A1 presents to you and what A2 presents to her are typically different aspects of the same desk.  Suppose you are looking at the desk from above and she is underneath the desk looking up at its underside.   

Since 'appearance' is causing you confusion, let's use 'phenomenon.'  The Kantian  phenomenon is the desk with all its parts and properties. But this one desk appears differently to you and your wife.

Ad [4].  Carefully read section 32 of the Prolegomena.  There we learn that appearances = things of sense = phenomena. Phenomena are sensible things such as your desk. They are full-fledged denizens of the mundus sensibilis. Phenomena are the empirically real objects of sensory intuition (Anschauung).  They are obviously public in that two or more empirical subjects can have knowledge of one and the same phenomenon such as your desk. The main thing here is that phenomena are not private mental data. It therefore should be obvious that Kant is not promoting a form of subjective idealism. The world of phenomena for Kant is an intersubjectively knowable world.  

Study also Prolegomena, section 13, Remark II wherein Kant explains why he is not an idealist.

And then there is CPR A45-46/B62-63.  Do you have the Akademie Ausgabe in your library? If so, check out Ak. XX, 269. That's a passage from Fortschritte.

The Standard Picture of Kant's Idealism

This entry draws on Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Yale University Press, 1983. "According to the standard picture, Kant's transcendental idealism is a metaphysical theory that affirms the unknowability of the 'real' (things in themselves) and relegates knowledge to the purely subjective realm of representations (appearances)." (p. 3)  P.F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere. The standard picture makes of Kant an inconsistent Berkeley who limits knowledge to appearances, these being understood as "mere representations" (blosse Vorstellungen), while at the same time positing an unknowable  realm of things in themselves.  Mere representations are assimilated to Berkeleian ideas so that when Kant states that we know only appearances, what he is telling us is that we know only the contents of our minds.

The standard picture opens Kant to the devastating objection that by limiting knowledge to appearances construed as mental contents he makes knowledge impossible when his stated aim was to justify the objective knowledge of nature and oppose Humean skepticism. Allison reports that Prichard "construes Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves in terms of the classic example of perceptual illusion: the straight stick that appears bent to an observer when it is immersed in water." (p. 6)  But then knowledge is rendered impossible, and Kant is reduced to absurdity.

Anyone who studies Kant in depth and in context and with an open mind should be able to see that his transcendental idealism is not intended as a subjective idealism. A related mistake is to think that subjective idealism is the only kind of idealism. The "standard picture" is fundamentally mistaken. Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz between appearance and illusion/semblance. Because of this distinction, appearances cannot be assimilated to perceptual illusions in the way Prichard and the "standard picture" try to assimilate them.

For Kant, the world of phenomena or appearances is a world of  public, intersubjectively accessible, objects.  If you don't understand this you will never understand what Kant is maintaining. So the straight stick lately mentioned is for Kant a phenomenon, a public object, not a private mental item, whereas its seeming bent is an illusory private content of those particular embodied minds who, because of accidental factors, are unable to perceive the stick as it is in empirical reality.

The publicly accessible objects of the outer senses are said to be "empirically real, but transcendentally ideal." To understand this signature Kantian phrase, one needs to understand two distinctions, that between the ideal and the real, and that between the empirical  and the transcendental. The ideal is that which is 'inside the mind' and thus mind-dependent whereas the real is that which is 'outside the mind' and thus mind-independent. The inverted commas signal that these phrases are not to be taken spatially. 

What is ideal is either empirically ideal or transcendentally ideal. The empirically ideal embraces the "private data of an individual mind." (Allison, p. 6) Included therein are what are normally taken to be mental contents and "ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense." The empirically real embraces the totality of public, intersubjectively knowable objects in space and time.  In a word, the natural world.  Kant's claim that he is an empirical realist, but not an empirical idealist, amounts to the affirmation that  that "our experience is not limited to the private domain of our own representations . . . ." (7).  It should now be perfectly obvious that Kant is not espousing a subjective idealism.  

The planets and indeed everything in nature are empirically real. What then could it mean to say that these objects are transcendentally ideal?  It is to say that they are subject to certain "epistemic conditions" -- I borrow the phrase from Allison -- that make possible our knowledge of them.  Kant is clearly committed to there being a set of epistemic conditions without which empirical knowledge of empirically real objects would not be possible. Now in my humble opinion, Kant's theory of these epistemic conditions leaves a lot to be desired and is indeed without one univocal sense.  But this is not the issue at present. The issue is solely whether Kant's intent is to affirm a form of subjective idealism. The answer is that he is not. That is not his intent despite the existence of some passages that invite a subjectively-idealist reading. The proof that Kant is not promoting a subjective idealism is that his epistemic conditions, whatever they are, are not psychological or physiological.  

A psychological condition is

. . . some mechanism or aspect of the human cognitive apparatus that is appealed to in order to provide a genetic account of a belief or an empirical explanation of why we perceive things in a certain way. [. . .] Custom or habit, as used by Hume in his account of causality, is a prime example of such a psychological condition. As is well known, Kant was insistent in claiming that, although the appeal to such factors may be necessary to explain the origin of our beliefs and perceptions, or even of our knowledge "in the order of time" (der Zeit nach), it cannot  account for its objective validity. In Kant's terms it can answer the quaestio facti but not the quaestio juris.  The latter is the proper concern of the Critique, and this requires an appeal to epistemic conditions. (Allison, p. 11)

It should now be quite clear that Kant is not promoting a subjective or psychological idealism. His project, or rather a large part of it,  is to secure the objectivity of our knowledge of nature in the teeth of Humean skepticism, and to do so without a deus ex machina, without bringing God into the picture as both Descartes and Berkeley do.  (The other main part of his project is to show that rationalist metaphysics is not a source of objective knowledge.) Whether Kant succeeds in his project is a further question. I don't believe he does.

But if the question is whether Kant is espousing a subjective or psychological idealism, the answer is a resounding No.

And Then Along Came the 'Sixties

I can easily see
How Merton lost his way
By exposing himself
To events of the day.

The Dialogue Form

Scott Johnson, Learning from Euthydemus:

The dialogue form is conducive to venturing otherwise forbidden thoughts in a time of persecution. The form might usefully be employed to address the shibboleths shoved down the throats of students like Euthydemus in our own day. Let us have our best teachers turn to the dialogue form with students touting “equity” versus equality, “affirmative action” and racial preferences versus equal treatment, the history of the founding of the United States versus the 1619 Project, the quandary of “reparations,” and so on.

On 'Stuff' and 'Ass'

A Substack language rant. Excerpt:

'Ass' is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will 'ass' become an all-purpose synecdoche? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl's father for her ass in marriage? In the expression, 'piece of ass' the reference is not to the buttocks proper, but to an adjoining area. 'Ass' appears subject to a peculiar semantic spread. It can come to mean almost anything, as in 'haul ass,' which means to travel at a high rate of speed. I don't imagine that if one were hauling donkeys one could make very good time. So how on earth did this expression arise? (I had teenage friends who could not refer to a U-Haul trailer except as a U-Haul-Ass trailer.)

Facebook

I gave it up for Lent. Lent came and went. I debated with myself whether to return.  Sugar Mountain  and his bots are a scrofulous crew, but FB's a  good place to offload interesting links and political animadversions so as not to clutter MavPhil.  It also brings people to my Substack articles.  If you can keep your FB time down to 30-60 minutes per day, it probably won't do too much damage to your mind and soul. There's some good stuff there. It is not all kitty kat pix and what-I-had-for-dinner.  By the way, my use of 'stuff' always carries  a slightly pejorative connotation.

Idealism: Subjective, Objective, Transcendental

This from a recent comment thread:

I think we should all agree on what counts as ‘subjective idealism’. I characterise it as the view that the objects we commonly take to be physical objects are in some way, or wholly, mind dependent. This a reasonable interpretation of Kant.

Let's leave the interpretation of Kant for later. The definition on offer raises questions.

1) Does the 'in some way' render the definition vacuous? I see a tree. The tree exists whether or not I am looking at it. But while I am looking at it, the tree has the relational property of being seen by me.  This property depends on my seeing which is a mental act of my mind.  (An act is not an action, but an intentional, or object-directed,  experience.) So there is a way in which the tree is mind-dependent.  It is dependent on me for its being-seen. There is a whole range of such  properties. The tree is such that: it is deemed beautiful by me; falsely believed by me to be a mesquite; thought by me to have been planted too close to the house, thought by you to have been planted just the right distance from the house, etc.  

Or consider money. What makes a piece of paper or a piece of metal money? Obviously, money to be money, i.e., a means of exchange, depends on minded organisms who so treat it.

2) If, on the other hand,  physical things are wholly mind-dependent, then that presumably means that trees and such are dependent on one or more minds for all of their properties, whether essential or accidental, whether monadic or relational, and also dependent on minds for their very existence.  This leads ineluctably to the question as to who these minds are.  Surely the physical universe in all its unspeakable vastness does not depend on my mind or yours or any finite mind or any collection of finite minds.

So the question arises: has there ever been a subjective idealist (as defined above) among the 'name' philosophers?  George Berkeley, you say? But the good bishop brought God into the picture to secure the existence of the tree in the quad when no one was about:

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
since observed by, Yours faithfully, God

If the other spirit in question is God, an omnipresent being, then perhaps his perception can be used to guarantee a completely continuous existence to every physical object. In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley very clearly invokes God in this context. Interestingly, whereas in the Principles, as we have seen above, he argued that God must exist in order to cause our ideas of sense, in the Dialogues (212, 214–5) he argues that our ideas must exist in God when not perceived by us.^[20] If our ideas exist in God, then they presumably exist continuously. Indeed, they must exist continuously, since standard Christian doctrine dictates that God is unchanging. (SEP Berkeley entry)

Now if the ultimate subject of subjective idealism is God, who exists of absolute metaphysical necessity and who creates and ongoing sustains in existence  everything other than himself, then such an idealism is better described as objective. 

Kant's brand of idealism is neither subjective nor objective, but transcendental. What this means I will explain later. 

When Politics Comes to be Like Philosophy

Trouble is on the way.

Substack latest. Short, incisive, 'on target.' To the range tomorrow!

A Kantian Aporia?

This just in:

I know you like puzzles in aporetic form, so here you are.

1. My perception involves (though is not necessarily limited to) the immediate awareness of mental phenomena.

2. When I look at the visible surface of this desk, all I am immediately aware of is the visible surface of this desk.

3. The visible surface of this desk is not a mental phenomenon.

All three cannot be true. If (1) is true then my perceiving the desk involves the awareness of mental phenomena. Note that this does not assert that the visible surface of this desk is a mental phenomenon, only that, if it is not, then I must be immediately aware of some mental phenomena in addition to my awareness of the desk.

But (2) says that the visible surface of this desk is all I am immediately aware of. Hence (3) cannot be true.

Likewise, if (2) and (3) are true, (1) is false, and if (1) and (3) are true, (2) is false.

Nicely presented. I agree that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. But there is an interesting problem here only if the propositions are, in addition,  individually plausible.  The more plausible, the tougher the problem. 

(3) is plausible to a high degree. (Plausibility, unlike truth, comes in degrees.)  A desk is a physical thing. The surface of a desk is a physical part of a physical thing. A mind, its states, and its contents are none of them physical.  An occurrent episode of visual perceiving is a mental phenomenon.  So, yes, (3) is highly plausible and I would rank it as the most plausible of the three propositions.  

(2) is the least plausible of the three. It is true that when I look at my desk I do not see my visual perceiving of the desk or of some part thereof.  But it does not follow that I am not aware of my perceiving.  Right now, as I stare at my desk, I am not only visually aware of  (part of) the desk; I am also aware of being visually aware of it.  This is what Franz Brentano calls innere Wahrnehmung, inner perception, which he distinguishes from innere Beobachtung, inner observation. This ongoing inner perception, or rather perceiving, is a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary 'outward' visual awareness of the (surface of) the desk.

This inner awareness of being outwardly aware of something is not the same as full-blown reflection which one could, but need not, express by saying 'I am now seeing the surface of a desk.'  It also must be distinguished from the type of awareness in which I am outwardly aware of something without being aware of being aware of it at all. Suppose you have been driving for some time, stopping at the red, going at the green, negotiating turns, etc. when you suddenly realize that you have no memory of doing any of those things. And yet your present physical integrity shows that you must have been aware of all those traffic changes. You were outwardly aware via the five outer senses without being explicitly aware of being aware or implicitly aware via Brentano's inner perception. 

And so I solve the above problem by rejecting (2).  (2) is the least plausible of the three and a very strong case can be made for its being false.

(1) leaves something to be desired as well. Later on this.

So we don't have an aporia in the strict sense, an intellectual impasse, or insoluble problem.  And even if we did, it is not clear what this has to do with Kant.

From Hagiography to Pathography: Yates and Kerouac

I'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve:

I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers.  Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed “pathography,” which she defined as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin.”  Its motifs are “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.”

Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it.  While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books.  Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac.  In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted.  And what he did, was that he wrote.  I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward.  Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”

I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more.  Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking.  In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article.  “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me.  “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels.  What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”

Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect?  One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties.  Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the  Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.  

But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.

While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me.  Literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all. So far I have found nothing in three of Yates' novels and a couple of his short stories  like this:

Here is Jack Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus  with his mother:

Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.

Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.

Why I Want to Live Long

I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?" 

And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not possible before. The young man's dong is a magic wand that conjures and weaves the web of maya the better to ensnare him and keep him tied to the transient. The old man who makes good use of his old age sloughs off the illusions of earthly love that were always more hydraulic in provenance than pneumatic.  He now has a good shot at moral and spiritual improvement. But will he take it?

Or will he essay to prolong his dong and with it the web of lies it weaves? Nothing is more pitiful than the decrepit oldster who keeps himself jacked up Hefner-style.  But despite the Viagra and the nubile nymphs cavorting for his delectation, poor Hef could not rise to the occasion and was reduced to manual mode. 

Live long for the end of life's day in wait for the the owl of Minerva who spreads her wings at dusk.  There are still things to be learned and things to be done that can only be learned and done here below.   As for you workers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft,  "Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät," as I once heard Hans-Georg Gadamer say.  "A scholar's harvest years come late."

On whether an individual is identical to its existence

This just over the transom:

Good day Dr. Vallicella,

 

I was reading your book on existence, and on page 71, there is this argument for the real distinction between an individual's essence and its existence:

 

"[I]f in a essence and existence are identical, then a's essence entails a's existence. But that is to say that a is a necessary being... [this] implies that every individual is a necessary being, which is absurd."

 

I've reconstructed this as follows, and it seems one can object to premise (2):

 

(1) If a's existence is identical to a's essence, then a's essence entails a's existence. 

(2) If a's essence entails X, then a is necessarily X. 

(3) Therefore, if a's existence = a's essence, then a necessarily exists. 

(4) a is a contingent being. 

(5) No contingent being can exist necessarily. 

(6) Therefore, a's existence is not identical to a's essence.

 

(2) seems ambiguous. We can say that a can be necessarily X absolutely or conditionally. Put in terms of possible worlds, a is necessarily X absolutely if a is X in all possible worlds, while a is necessarily X conditionally if a is X only in all worlds where a exists. 

 

BV: I accept your distinction, but I would couch it in different terms, terms in keeping with standard practice. Let the free variable 'x' range over individuals.  To say that x is essentially F (where 'F' is a predicate that picks out a property) is to say that x is F in every possible world in which x exists. To say that x is accidentally F is to say that x is F in some, but not all, of the possible worlds in which x exists. To say that x is necessarily F is to say that (i) x is essentially F, and that (ii) x exists in every possible world.  

If we read (2) in terms of absolute necessity, then (2) is false–just because a triangle's essence entails being three-sided, it doesn't follow that triangles exist in all possible worlds. 

 

BV:  If you are talking about  particular  material triangles, a triangular piece of metal for example, then it it is true that they do not exist in all worlds.  And this despite the fact that every triangle is essentially three-sided.  But what I mean by the essence of a concrete contingent individual such as a triangular piece of metal is the whatness or quiddity of that very individual minus its existence. Recall that I distinguish between wide and narrow senses of 'essence' on p. 68:

 

'Essence' is here employed in a wide sense to denote the conjunction of those properties that make up what a thing is, and not in the narrow sense according to which a thing's essential (as opposed to accidental) properties are those it cannot fail to possess. Thus in the wide sense of 'essence' being sunburned now is part of my essence, even though I might not have been sunburned now. Thus [both] narrowly essential and accidental properties (whether monadic or relational) are part of my wide essence. 

So consider that triangular piece of metal. It exists, and it exists contingently, which is to say -- avoiding possible worlds jargon -- that it is possibly such that it does not exist. It might not have existed: there is no metaphysical necessity that it exist.  But if the existence of x and the wide essence of x are one and the same -- as the 'no difference theory' implies -- then our triangular piece of metal exists just in virtue of its being what it is. That is equivalent to saying that its possibility entails its actuality, which is the definition of a necessary being. But that piece of metal is surely no necessary being. So I conclude that there is a real distinction between wide essence and existence in it and in every contingent being.  What I argue in the book is that the metaphysical contingency of a contingent being is rooted in the real distinction.

If we read (2) in terms of conditional necessity, then (2) is true–a triangle is three-sided only in worlds where it exists–but this would render (6) false, since something can exist necessarily in a conditional sense and still be a contingent being.

 

It is certainly true -- to put it my way -- that a thing can have an essential property and "still be a contingent being."  But this is not relevant to what I am saying.

 

You must bear in mind that I deny  that existence is a property where P is a property =_df P is possibly such that it is instantiated.   Your argument above seems to miss this important point. You seem to be assimilating existence to a property.  We rightly distinguish essential and accidental properties, but existence is neither an essential nor an accidental property.

 

The existence of x  is just too basic to be a property of  x, but not so basic as to be identical to x!

Is this a fair reconstruction of your argument, and if so, how can the above objection be addressed?

 

I would say that you haven't grasped by argument. Comments are enabled in case you have a rejoinder. 

 

Thank you for your time.

Best,

M. L. Pianist

 

Thank you for writing, M. L.

 

 

For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue

I unpack the saying in my latest Substack article.

Mark Granza Interviews Blake Masters: 'Woke' Capitalism and Kyle Rittenhouse

(Related: my Substack article, The Trial of Kyle.)

Here is the interview.  A couple of excerpts:

Mark Granza: A decade ago most people would have considered ‘Woke Capitalism’ a contradiction, and probably laughed at the idea. Today, nobody questions its existence. Do you think there are there inherent characteristics within Capitalism that transform it into a progressive machine, or are corporations simply responding to the ideological demands of the political class?

Blake Masters: Capitalism works. It’s a really good system for generating wealth. The problem with capitalism is that can work too well in a sense, it can create the conditions for people to grow complacent, which ultimately, as Ross Douthat has written, contributes to the sort of decadence we’re experiencing today. Capitalism’s an incredible engine of material progress, but it’s not a self-contained moral system. It has its own incentives, but those incentives aren’t always necessarily correlated with a conception of the good. Companies under capitalism just respond to profit incentives. If you act on them you’ll generate a lot of wealth, but it won’t tell you what to do with that wealth, which is why a parasite like Wokeness can basically spread and take over. An example is offshoring. Maybe it’s good for GDP, but if you have too much of it, that’s clearly really bad for the country and most people living in it. It crushes the middle class by sending jobs overseas by the millions. But such are the incentives that the capital owners are responding to. So I think problems like Woke Capitalism, or ‘globalization’, are actually much older and bigger problems than people think. Because you can’t just be a capitalist country, because a country is not just an economy. You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture. And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.

BV: The last three sentence are very important. A country is not just an economy. Do libertarians understand this? Not to my knowledge. They want to reduce everything to economics when it is the history, heritage, and culture of a nation that provides the framework within which a successful economy can operate. Or is the rule of law an economic concept?  How about the concept of citizen?

Mark Granza: I’d like to move from here to the issue of Justice in America. You were a vocal supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse before and during the trial. What do you think the fact that Kyle (as opposed to someone like Gaige Grosskreutz) was the one being prosecuted says about the US justice system?

Blake Masters: I think we’re very close to a two-tier justice system, if we’re not there already. Look how differently loyalists and dissidents are punished today. The Kyle Rittenhouse case was simple. The ruling class hated that a young man defended himself with an AR-15 because it contradicts their official narrative. And so they did everything they could to punish Kyle. The FBI literally withheld high-resolution version of the footage from Kyle’s lawyers, because it basically clearly exonerated Kyle and they found that inconvenient. Now I think the jury’s decision to acquit Kyle of all charges showed that you can still get sort of a fair trial in America, that there’s hope. But again, that only happened because in this case, there happened to be extremely clear video evidence in his favor. If there weren’t, Kyle would be in jail for life. So this case is a wake-up call. It’s crazy that Rittenhouse, and not his attackers, was on trial at all. Contrast that to how the BLM and Antifa looters and rioters who committed violent mayhem during the summer of 2020 – nothing happened to them! And on the off-chance one of them did get arrested, then-Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was there with her bail fund, just waiting to bail them out. Meanwhile, the January 6 protestors, many of whom were not violent at all, are treated like terrorists, with some being held without trial in solitary confinement and others getting sentenced to many years in prison. If we don’t do something now, the rule of law will soon be gone forever. Anyone who questions the left’s narrative is going to be hunted down. I truly believe that. That’s what we’re fighting against.

BV: Again I say that the last three sentences are very important. 

^{Blake Masters gives a speech next to Donald Trump, December 2021.}

Hume and Kant on Sense Perception

Another round with Ed Buckner who writes,

Meanwhile I continue to struggle through Kant, and I point out what seems to be a fundamental and insuperable difficulty below. (I may be wrong).

Start with Hume, and with what he means by ‘impressions’. As I write, I am looking at what I take to be the black surface of my desk. Note “what I take to be”. Assume that what I take to be the surface is the surface. But what then does Hume mean by an ‘impression’? He says “Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul”. Ideas are ‘the faint images’ of the impressions in thinking and reasoning.

This is not clear at all. By ‘impression’ Hume means either that which I (perhaps wrongly) take to be the surface of the desk, or something else. Suppose the former. Hume makes it clear that the impression makes its appearance in the soul, and it is clear from everything he says later that an impression is a mental item. But the desk is not a mental item, hence the surface of the desk is not a mental item. Which is absurd.

Or he means the latter. Then the ‘impression’ must be something other than what I take to be the surface of the desk. But I am aware of no such thing. In looking at the desk I am aware of nothing corresponding to a perception which enters “with force and violence”. Nor, when I shut my eyes and think of the surface of the desk, am I aware of anything but a faint memory of seeing the surface itself, rather than the faint image of any ‘impression’.

So both interpretations are problematic. Either my desk and its surface are mental items, which is absurd. Or it is impossible to say what Hume means by ‘impression’. So Hume’s position makes no sense.

I agree with the above analysis. It is clear and convincing. We can also display the problem in my preferred way as an aporetic polyad, in this case a tetrad:

1) Impressions are mental items.

2) The surfaces of physical things are not mental items.

3) What we know when we have sensory knowledge are impressions.

4) We have sensory knowledge of the surfaces of physical things.

These propositions are collectively inconsistent.  So at least one of them must be rejected. As I read Hume, he is committed to (1), (3), and (4), and so he must reject  (2). But this leads to a subjective idealism that both Ed and I find intolerable.  No physical thing such as Ed's desk is a bundle of sense impressions.  Sense impressions are 'in the mind' and no desk or part thereof is in anyone's mind.

The Humean solution is worse than the problem.  Another solution is to reject (3). One might hold a representational theory of mind according to which what we know via the outer senses are, in the typical non-illusory cases,  mind-independent things and some of their parts, but we know them via mental representations.  Enter the epistemic intermediary: contents in the mind mediate between mind and external thing.  

There are other putative solutions such as Husserl's and Butchvarov's. They too have their difficulties. I won't go into them because Ed hasn't read these philosophers.

The next question is whether Kant’s position makes any sense, given that his position here seems closely connected with that of Hume. He speaks of ‘sensible sensations’, ‘the world of the senses’, ‘the field of appearances’ etc etc. What does he mean by these terms? Does he mean the sorts of things that e.g. I take to be parts of material objects? But then it seems to follow from everything else he says that either material objects are mental items, or that I am wrong in thinking that what I take to be part of a material object, is in fact such. Both positions are absurd.

Have I misunderstood Kant? 

To assimilate Kant to Hume is a mistake. There are many crucial differences between the two. For one thing, Kant is not a subjective idealist. He does not hold that physical things are bundles of impressions.  He would reject (3) in the tetrad above.  To explain this is impossible in a few sentences.  I refer Ed to Kant's Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772 which may help. 

There is also the following excerpt from a different entry:

Kant

 

I think Ed is wrong above about Kant.  For Kant, the pure is the opposite of the empirical. Every concept is either pure or empirical and no concept is both. A pure concept is one that is not drawn from experience, ein solcher der nicht von der Erfahrung abgezogen ist, but originates from the understanding in respect of both form and content, sondern auch dem Inhalte nach aus dem Verstande entspringt. The form of all concepts, including pure concepts, arises from reflexion Reflexion, and thus from the understanding. Empirical concepts arise from the senses, entspringen aus den Sinnen,  by comparison of the objects of experience. Their content comes from the senses, and their form of universality, Form der Allgemeinheit, alone from the understanding.

 

If Buckner is telling us that Kant's pure-empirical distinction runs parallel to Zabarella's first intention-second intention distinction, then that can't be right. For Zabarella's animal and human being, which are first intentions for him, count as empirical concepts for Kant. 

 

Any comparison of Zabarella (1533-1589) the Aristotelian and Kant is bound to be fraught with difficulty because of the transcendental-subjective turn of modern philosophy commencing with Descartes (1596-1650).  For Aristotle, the categories are categories of a real world independent of  our understanding; for Kant, the categories are precisely categories of the understanding (Verstandeskategorien) grounded in the understanding both in their form and in their content.  The categories of Aristotle are thus objective, categories belonging to a world to be understood, and not subjective, categories whereby a mind understands the world.

 

Pure Concepts of Reason as Limit Concepts

 

Kant also speaks in his Logic and elsewhere of Ideas which are pure concepts of reason, Vernunft, and not of understanding, Verstand. Die Idee ist ein Vernunftbegriff deren Gegenstand gar nicht in der Erfahrug kann angetroffen werden. (Logik, sec. 3)  The objects of these pure concepts of reason cannot be known by us because our form of intuition, Anschauung, is sensible, not intellectual. We can know only phenomena, not noumena. Among these Ideas, which are plainly limit concepts, are God, the soul, the world-whole, and freedom. And they are not merely negative limit concepts. Free will, for example, is objectively real despite its not being obejctively knowable. But more on this later.

Globalist Greenies Go after Cryptomining in New York State

Story here. To understand the issue,  bear in mind that bitcoins are not literally mined, they are 'mined' using supercomputers  which consume a lot of electricity.

Anthony Flood sent me the hyperlink. He comments:

Bitcoin threatens globalist/statist "green" agenda . . . and everything else on their to-do list. No monopoly on money via fiat central banking? Then no "democratic" imposition of lower living standards. With respect to achieving global decentralization, the spontaneous, market-based decentralization of money "moves the needle." It's happening slowly, almost imperceptibly so, but it's in a race with globalist countermoves.

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats

I was once a Democrat. They changed for the worse; I changed for the better.

Substack latest.

Climate Coloniality

More totalitarian wokery.

Could Free Will be an Illusion?

Science journalists shovel a lot of bull crap anent this topic. I debunk their sophistry.

Substack latest.

Marx and Work

Physical work is good for the soul if you are working for yourself and have time for other things. So I have long felt a certain sympathy for a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):

 

. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. 

 

With all due respect to talk show host Dennis Prager, Marx did not envisage a society in which people do no work, but one in which their work was non-alienating and fulfilling. If you have ever worked a factory job where you are required to perform a mindless repetitive task for low wages for eight or more hours per day, then you should be able to sympathize somewhat with Marx. But the sympathy is not likely to survive a clear recognition of the absurdity of what Marx is proposing above.

 

First of all, it is silly to say that "each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes." Could Saul Kripke have become a diplomat or a chauffeur or an auto mechanic if he wished? PeeWee Herman a furniture mover or Pope? Einstein a general? Patton a physicist? Woody Allen a bronco-buster? Evel Knievel a neurosurgeon?

 

And if Marx had actually done any 'cattle rearing,' he would have soon discovered that he couldn't be successful at it if he did it only once in a while when he wasn't in the mood for hunting, fishing, or writing Das Kapital.

 

So despite my sympathy, I judge that what we have above is utopian, reality-denying nonsense. Dangerous, murderous, leftist nonsense. Incoherence: dictatorship of the proletariat, classless society, worker's paradise. Cuba? North Korea? Communist China? Dictatorship of the dictator (Stalin, Mao, Fidel . . .). Classlessness by reduction of the people to one class, that of the impoverished and oppressed, lorded over by apparatchiks vastly UNEQUAL in power, perquisites, and pelf to those they lord over. So in the end two classes: oppressed and oppressors.

 

The incoherence of socialism in a nutshell: The achievement of the desired-for equality requires the suppression of dissidents and the inequality of the revolutionary vanguard who, once enjoying a taste of their unequal power, will never give it up, until the whole house of cards collapses as did the USSR.

 

But this leaves us with the problem of the millions of Americans who work repetitive, boring jobs for lousy pay. One thing that could be done that would drive up the pay scale is something that RINOs and 'liberals' refuse to do, namely, stop the influx of illegal aliens. RINOs want cheap labor while the 'liberals' want to alter the demographics of the nation so as to assure the permanent ascendancy of the Left. These two unsavory groups are in tacit cahoots.

 

To hell with them both. Not that they are equally bad. It is hard to beat the scumbaggery of a 'liberal' or leftist who delights in smearing his political opponents with such epithets as 'xenophobe' and 'racist.'  The typical RINO is either a useful idiot or someone who lacks the civil courage to stand up for what he knows is right. But at least he falls short of an all-out assault on the English language.