Maverick Philosopher

Defending Barry Miller Against Herman Philipse, Part I: Existence as a First-Level Property

In his Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews  review of Elmar J. Kremer's Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God, Herman Philipse presents the following sketch of  Miller's cosmological  argument  a contingentia mundi for the existence of God:

1. Existence is a real first-level accidental property of contingent individuals.

2. Concrete contingent individuals are distinct from their existence.

3. This distinction implies a paradox, unless:

4. All existing concrete contingent individuals are caused to exist by a necessarily existing and therefore uncaused individual that is identical with its existence, and this is God.

5. At least one concrete contingent individual exists, e.g., the dog Fido, or the universe.

6. Hence, God exists (from 1-5).

Philipse is unimpressed with the argument.  He rejects (1) as well as (2)-(4).  In this entry I will confine myself to a discussion of Philipse's rejection of (1), and indeed to just one of his arguments against (1).  

It is obvious that Miller's cosmological argument cannot get off the ground unless existence is a property of  contingent individuals in some defensible sense of 'property.'  This is what Philipse appears to deny.  He appears to endorse the Frege-Russell view according to which 'exist(s)' is always only a second-level predicate and never an admissible first-level predicate, where a first-level or first-order predicate is one that  stands for a property that is meaningfully attributable to concrete individuals.   On the Frege-Russell view, then,  existence is not a first-level property, but a property of properties, Fregean concepts, Russellian propositional functions or some cognate item.   But this dogma of analysis -- as I call it --  (i) flies in the face of the linguistic data and (ii) brings with it troubles of its own. (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75)

That we predicate existence of concrete individuals seems as obvious as anything.  That we do so is a datum that ought to be  presumed innocent until proven guilty of incoherence or contradiction.  We predicate existence of individuals using proper names, demonstratives, pronouns, and pure indexicals as in 'Socrates exists,' 'This exists,'  'She exists,' and 'I exist.'   'Socrates' is a proper name. 'This' is a demonstrative.  'She' is a pronoun. 'I' is a pure indexical.  Many of these first-level predications of existence are true.  And if true, or false, then meaningful.  This is evidence that 'exist(s)'  functions as a meaningful first-level predicate in singular sentences such as 'Scollay Square no longer exists' and 'Copley Square still exists.'   The linguistic data suggest that 'exist(s)' has a use as a meaningful first-level predicate in the the way that 'numerous' has no use  as a meaningful first-level predicate. 

(Bertrand Russell made a brave but unsuccessful attempt at assimilating existence to numerousness by arguing that, just as it would be the fallacy of division to argue that Socrates is numerous from the premises that he is a philosopher and that philosophers are numerous, it would also be the fallacy of division to argue that Socrates exists from the premises that he is a philosopher and that philosophers exist. Following Frege, he held that 'exist(s)' is never an admissible first-level predicate.)

Consider the Cartesian cogito ergo sum.   It terminates in the proposition, sum, I am, I exist. The proposition is true, hence meaningful. First-level predications of existence would thus appear to be meaningful.  When I think the thought that I exist, I attribute to myself the property of existence. This is prima facie evidence that existence is a property of individuals in a suitably broad sense of 'property.'  Of course, when I say of a thing that it exists, I am not adding to its description or to the list of its quidditative determinations. So existence is not a property of individuals in that sense.  The following is a non sequitur:

Existence is not a quidditative property of individuals.

Therefore

Existence is not a property of individuals at all, but a property of properties, the property of being instantiated.

It doesn't follow, because existence might be a non-quidditative property of individuals.  The premise is obvious and contested by no one; but one cannot leap straightaway from it to the Fressellian doctrine which removes existence from individuals entirely and installs it at the level of concepts/properties/propositional functions.  

It is well known, however, that certain puzzles arise if we treat 'exist(s)' as a genuine first-level or first-order predicate.  And so a defender of (1) needs to be able to rebut the arguments against the view that 'exist(s)' is a genuine first-level predicate and existence a genuine first-level property.  Philipse claims that  if even one of these arguments contra is sound, then (1) cannot be sustained. 

Let us consider a famous argument from Kant who is widely regarded as having anticipated Frege.  Philipse writes,

Finally, does Miller succeed in refuting the Kantian argument to the effect that existence is not a real property? According to this argument, it is always possible to assert of one and the same entity (described by a list of its properties) both that it exists and that it does not exist. It follows from this plausible premise that existence cannot be a property (Critique of Pure Reason, A600/B628). Miller answers by stipulating that although existence is a real first-order property of concrete individuals, it differs from all other properties in two respects. First, existence does not add anything to what the individual is, and second, it does not add anything to an antecedent reality (p. 38). In my view, however, this stipulation amounts to changing the ordinary meaning of the term 'property', so that Miller's reply to Kant commits a fallacy of ambiguity. I conclude that Miller does not succeed in establishing that existence is a real accidental first-level property of concrete individuals.

This response is a total misunderstanding.  Kant does not show that existence cannot be a property; what he shows, if he shows anything, is that it cannot be a real property where a real property is a determining property, and where "a determining predicate [property in contemporary jargon] is a predicate [property] which is added to the concept of the subject and enlarges it." (A598 B626) 

Let the concept be cat. This relatively indeterminate concept can be further determined and made more specific by adding  real or determining properties to it such as male, short-haired, black, five-years-old, and so on.  Kant's point is that existence is not a property that could be added to this, or any, concept to further determine it.  Existence is not a determining property. And in that sense it is not a real property.  To predicate it of an individual leaves its whatness (quidditas) unaltered. Existence is not a quidditative determination.

Suppose the process of determination were taken to the max such that our cat concept becomes fully determinate in the sense that if anything in reality were to instantiate it, exactly one individual would instantiate it.  The concept would then be so specific as to be individuating. But it would not follow that anything in reality does instantiate it.  And if anything in reality were to instantiate it, then that individual would be quidditatively indistinguishable from the concept.  The concept and its object, it there is one, would coincide quidditatively. (A599 B627)  This is why Kant says that "the actual contains no more than the merely possible." The concept expresses the mere possibility of a corresponding object; whether there is a corresponding object, however, is an extra-conceptual matter.   

You can see how this puts paid to the Cartesian ontological argument "from mere concepts." No doubt the concept of God is the concept of a being possessing all perfections. But even if existence is a perfection ( a great-making property in Plantinga's lingo) in God, existence is not contained in any concept we can wrap our heads around, and so cannot be analytically extracted from any such concept.  Hence we cannot prove the existence of God by sheer analysis of the God concept. No concept in he mind of a discursive, ectypal intellect, not even the concept of God,  is such that by sheer analysis of its content one could prove the existence of a corresponding object.  

The point that Philipse misses is that Kant's claim that existence is not a real, i.e., determining property of individuals is consistent with Miller's claim that existence is a real, i.e., non-Cambridge property of individuals. Philipse mistakenly thinks that if existence is not a determining property of an individual, then it is not a property of an individual.  That is the same non sequitur as was exposed above.  If existence is not a quidditative property of individuals, it does not follow that that it is not a property of individuals, but a property of properties.

Kant's argument does not refute Miller's (1) above.

The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason

With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:

Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss . . . . We cannot put aside, and  yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme among all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? All support here fails us; and the greatest perfection, no less than the least perfection, floats insubstantially before the merely speculative reason, which incurs no cost in allowing either the one or the other to vanish entirely.  (A613 B641, Norman Kemp Smith tr. corrected by BV)

God thinks to himself: I am a necessary being: I cannot not exist. What's more, I am unconditionally necessary: I do not derive my necessity from another like numbers and other abstracta; they derive their necessity from me, but I have my necessity from myself.  And yet, while my nonexistence is impossible, I can conceive of my nonexistence: the question Whence then am I? makes sense.  My nonexistence is thinkable without logical contradiction even if it is impossible. This is troubling.  I do not exist of merely logical necessity, but of metaphysical necessity, which is a species of real necessity, and the latter suggests some hidden contingency, some hidden dependence.

God thinks further to himself:  Am I truly unconditioned? I am who am: my nature is to be, to exist.  (Exodus, 3:14) I do not have existence like my creatures; I am existence itself in its primary instance.  As such, I cannot not exist, and I cannot cease to exist. I cannot commit suicide. I have no power over my own existence. I am bound to exist.  It is my nature to exist, and I have no power over my nature. How then am I absolutely sovereign?  I am bound by a condition over which I have no control. 

How then am I absolutely unconditioned?  I am not that than which no greater can be conceived.  For I can conceive a greater, a being that is not bound by existence but is free to enter nonexistence.  If I were absolutely unconditioned, then I would be beyond existence and nonexistence. I would be master of that distinction, and not subject to it. I would be beyond all duality.

As subject to the distinction between existence and nonexistence, I am not the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Unconditioned. I am merely the highest being. I am at the apex of the samsaric pyramid -- but still samsaric. The truly Unconditioned is beyond Being and Nonbeing.

With this, his final thought, God entered nibbana.

Love Untranslated

Love untranslated into action remains an emotion and in many cases a mere self-indulgence. One enjoys the warm feeling of benevolence and risks succumbing to the illusion that it suffices.  Benevolent sentiments are no doubt better than malevolent ones, but an affectless helping of a neighbor who needs help, if that is possible, is better than cultivating warm feelings toward him without lifting a finger.  We ought to be detached not only from the outcome of the deed, but also detached from its emotional concomitants.

I occurs to me that what I just wrote has a Kantian flavor: one acts from duty, not inclination. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) held that the moral worth of an action accrues from its being done from duty, whether or not inclination is along for the ride. It is a mistake to read him as saying that only acts done from duty alone, with no admixture of inclination, have moral worth.  Doing from duty what one is disinclined to do has no more moral worth than doing from duty what one is inclined to do.

The Presumptuousness of Blogging

Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties/Der Streit der Fakultäten, tr. Gregor (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 177:

To want to entertain others with the inner history of the play of my thoughts, which has subjective importance (for me) but no objective importance (valid for everyone), would be presumptuous, and I could justly be blamed for it.

There is no doubt about it: we bloggers are a presumptuous and vain lot. We report daily on the twists and turns of our paltry minds. In mitigation, a couple of points.

First, I don’t force my posts on anyone. If you are here, it is of your own free will.  Second, there is something fascinating to me about the origin of my own and others' ideas and how they in their abtractness percolate up out of the concretion of their authors' Existenz. The blogs of most interest to me combine the existential with the theoretical, the autobiographical with the impersonal. The question of the origin of ideas must not be confused with the question of their validity or lack thereof.  But both questions are fascinating, and how exactly they connect is even more so. Now if I find the intertwinement of the existential and the theoretical interesting, then perhaps you do as well; herein may reside some justification for reports on "the inner history of the play of my thoughts."

I oppose the nomenclature whereby individual weblogs (as opposed to group weblogs) are referred to as ‘personal’ weblogs. This blog is more impersonal than personal and I fret over the ratio. Objektive Wichtigkeit should predominate over subjektive. But by how much?

By the way, Streit der Fakultäten is a fascinating book. I’m an old Kant man; I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of the transcendental unity of apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason. That was back in 1978. But it was only in 2008 that I cracked my copy of The Conflict of the Faculties. This is a nice edition: German Fraktur on the left, good English translation on the right.

Is Assertion External or Internal to Logic? A Note on Irad Kimhi

The main point of Peter Geach's paper, "Assertion" (Logic Matters, Basil Blackwell, 1972, pp. 254-269) is what he calls the Frege point: A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition. This seems unassailably correct. One will fail to get the Frege point, however, if one confuses statements and propositions. An unstated statement is a contradiction in terms, but an unasserted proposition is not. The need for unasserted propositions can be seen from the fact that many of our compound assertions (a compound assertion being one whose content is propositionally compound) have components that are unasserted.

To assert a conditional, for example, is not to assert its antecedent or its consequent. If I assert that if Tom is drunk, then he is unfit to drive, I do not thereby assert that he is drunk, nor do I assert that he is unfit to drive.  I assert a compound proposition the components of which I do not assert. I assert a relation between two propositions without asserting either of them.

The same goes for disjunctive propositions. To assert a disjunction is not to assert its disjuncts. Neither propositional component of Either Tom is sober or he is unfit to drive is asserted by one who merely asserts the compound disjunctive proposition.

On one view of logic, it studies propositions and the relations between them  such as entailment, consistency, and inconsistency in abstraction from the concrete mental acts in which the propositions are accepted, rejected, or merely entertained. Logic is thus kept apart from psychology. If so, then assertion, as a speech act founded in the mental act of acceptance, is external to logic.  If this were not the case, then how would one account for the validity of the following obviously valid argument?

a) If Tom is drunk, then Tom is unfit to drive
b) Tom is drunk
Therefore
c) Tom is unfit to drive.

For the argument to be an instance of the valid argument form modus ponendo ponens, the protasis of (a) must be the same proposition as is expressed by (b). But then the assertoric force that (b) carries when the argument is given by someone cannot be part of the proposition. For the assertoric force  is no part of the proposition that is the protasis of (a).

So if formal logic studies propositions in abstraction from the concrete episodes of thinking in which they are brought before minds, then assertion is external to formal logic.

But according to the NYT, a philosopher with a cult following among the cognoscenti rejects the above view:

[Irad] Kimhi argues that this view is wrong, and that the distinction between psychology and logic has led our understanding of thinking astray. Consider that the following statement does not, according to the standard view, constitute a logical contradiction: “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” Why? Because the first part of the sentence concerns a state of affairs in the world (“it’s raining”), whereas the second part concerns someone’s state of mind (“I don’t believe it’s raining”).

Kimhi wants to rescue the intuition that it is a logical contradiction to say, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” But to do this, he has to reject the idea that when you assert a proposition, what you are doing is adding psychological force (“I think … ”) to abstract content (“it’s raining”). Instead, Kimhi argues that a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an “I” — is internal to logic. For him, to judge that “it’s raining” is the same as judging “I believe it’s raining,” which is the same as judging “it’s false that it’s not raining.” All are facets of a single act of mind.

I haven't read Kimhi's book, and I am not sure I should trust the NYT account, but Kimhi seems to be recycling Kant in a confused way. At B 132 of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, "It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me." (NKS tr.)

Consider a propositional representation.  One's awareness that it is raining need not be accompanied by an explicit act of reflection, the one expressed by 'I think that it is raining,' but it must be possible that this reflection occur. Thus there is a necessary connection between the propositional representation 'It is raining' and Kant's  transcendental unity of apperception. The latter could be described as " a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an “I” — [that] is internal to logic." But it is a transcendental I, one common to all cognitive subjects, and not the psychological I of a particular cognitive subject. Kimhi seems to be speaking of the latter.

Kant's Ich denke points us back to Descartes' cogito. The Frenchman discovers that while he can doubt many things, he cannot doubt that he is doubting these things. He can doubt the existence of the cat he 'sees' -- using 'see' in a strictly phenomenological way -- but he cannot doubt the existence of his 'seeing' as a mental act or cogitatio. His doubting is a thinking, but it is not a believing.  The Dubito ergo sum is but a special case of the generic Cogito ergo sum.  His doubting that he has a body is not a believing that he has a body but it is a thinking in the broad Cartesian sense that subsumes all intentional states or mental acts.

Accordingly, the 'I think' that must be able to accompany all my representations does not have the specific sense of 'I believe.' Belief is one type of mental act among many. One who believes does not doubt, and conversely. But both think. The 'I think' expresses an explicit reflection on the occurrent intentional state one is in, whether one is doubting, believing, wishing, hoping remembering, etc.

So there is a defensible sense in which there is an I internal to logic, but this is the transcendental I of the original synthetic unity of apperception, not the I of the psychophysical subject in nature.   If there is an I internal to logic, it is the I of the transcendental prefix,  the 'I think ___' which must be able to accompany all my representation.  But this 'I think ___' of the transcendental prefix does not have the sense of the ordinary language 'I think so' which means 'I believe so.' 

One consequence of Kimhi’s view is that “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining” becomes a logical contradiction. Another consequence is that a contradiction becomes something that you cannot believe, as opposed to something that you psychologically can but logically ought not to believe (as the traditional cleavage between psychology and logic might suggest). A final consequence is that thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law.

In other words, the distinction between psychology and logic collapses. Logic is not a set of rules for how to think; it is how we think, just not in a way that can be captured in conventional scientific terms. Thinking emerges as a unique and peculiar activity, something that is part of the natural world, but which cannot be understood in the manner of other events in the natural world. Indeed, Kimhi sees his book, in large part, as lamenting “the different ways in which philosophers have failed to acknowledge — or even denied — the uniqueness of thinking.”

The above strikes me as based on a confusion of the transcendental 'I think' with the psychological 'I believe.'  It seems to me that one can have a reflective awareness as of rain falling without believing that rain is falling. What is impossible, and contradictory, is to have a reflective awareness as of rain falling without thinking (in the broad Cartesian sense that subsumes specific types of mental act) that rain is falling. 

The transcendental I's thinking is governed by logical law, but not the thinking of the empirical I in nature. So the distinction between psychology and logic does not collapse. To the extent that I can make sense of what Kimhi is saying on the basis of the NYT article he seems to be trying to naturalizer Kant's transcendental ego.  Good luck with that.

Perhaps talk of a transcendental I is nonsense if it is supposed to be a real entity that thinks; but only a transcendental I could be internal to formal logic.

If anyone has read Kimhi's book, his comments would be appreciated. 

A Note on Beccaria and Kant on Capital Punishment

Here:

According to [Cesare] Beccaria, punishment has two fundamental objectives: to restrain the criminal from committing additional crimes and to deter other members of society from committing the same crime. The first purpose is served by imprisonment, so we are left with the issue of deterrence.

Not so fast! Imprisonment obviously does not prevent criminals from committing additional crimes since criminals continue to commit all sorts of crimes in prison, including murder. Execution of murderers, however, is a most effective means of restraining them from committing additional crimes. It works every time.

Just as dead men tell no tales, dead men commit no crimes.  Does it follow that we ought to exterminate humanity to prevent crime? I don't think so!  

The topic of deterrence raises the following question.  Suppose the execution of a murderer has no deterrent effect whatsoever. Would the execution be nonetheless morally justified?  I should think so, on retributivist grounds. Retribution, impartially administered by the state apparatus, is not revenge, but a form of justice.  Immanuel Kant takes this line in perhaps its most rigoristic form. 

Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):

[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members--as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world--the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.

Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')

Here is another interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.

Memo to self: bone up on this!  See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. 

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 40 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 40 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 294th birthday. Sapere aude!

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

On a Putative Counterexample to 'Ought Implies Can'

I have long subscribed to Kant's famous meta-ethical principle according to which our moral obligations cannot outrun our abilities. 'Ought' implies 'can.' If I am under a moral obligation to do X, then I must be able to do X. We are concerned here with moral not legal oughts, and we understand 'ought' in accordance with the principle that if one morally ought to do X, then one is morally obliged/obligated to do X. 

Roughly, if you ought to do something, then it must be possible for you to do it, not just logically, and not just nomologically; it must be possible for you to do it given your actual abilities at a particular time and in definite circumstances.  With a bit more precision:

OC. Necessarily, if agent A ought to do X at time t in circumstances C, then A is able to do X at t and in C.

So if I ought to come to your aid, then I am able to do so.  By contraposition, if I am unable to come to your aid, then it is not the case that I ought to, and I am not subject to moral censure if I fail to. 

Note the logical difference between 'It is not the case that A ought to do X' and 'A ought not to do X.'  To confuse those two would be to commit an operator shift fallacy by importing the negation operator into the negatum.  So the contrapositive of 'ought' implies 'can' is not 'cannot' implies 'ought not,' but 'cannot' implies 'not ought.'  Better still: 'not can' implies 'not ought.'

Now suppose I promise to drive you to the airport at six in the morning. So promising, I morally obligate myself to so doing, i.e., I ought to drive you to the airport at six.  It follows by (OC) that I can drive you to the airport in a very concrete sense of 'can,': I know how to drive; I know how to get to the airport; I have access to a car, no one is preventing me from driving, etc.  Obviously, a carjacking would absolve me of my moral obligation.

My ability in this concrete and specific sense is a necessary condition of my being morally obligated to drive you to the airport.

Putative Counterexample 

Suppose that the night before the airport run I get drunk, sleep through the alarm, wake up late and hungover, and forget to fill up the gas tank in my vehicle.  As a result we run out of gas and you miss your flight.  I am unable to deliver on my promise, and do what the promise obligated me to do, but it seems that I am nonetheless morally responsible and indeed open to moral censure. In this case it seems that 'not can'' does not imply 'not ought.'  It seems that my inability to get you to the airport on time does not absolve me of my moral obligation to perform than very action. For I did something blameworthy by getting drunk the night before.

I am not impressed by counterexamples of this sort.  Touching only the letter, but not the spirit of Kant's great principle, they merely invite a reformulation thereof.  To wit,

OC*. Necessarily, if agent A ought to do X at time t in circumstances C, then A is able to do X at t and in C subject to the proviso that around t and in C A has not done anything to impair his abilities or factors contributing to his abilities.

Kant on Suicide

Is suicide ever morally permissible?

Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures on Ethics (tr. Infield, Hackett Publishing, no date), the great champion of autonomy seems to recommend abject heteronomy: 

God is our owner; we are His property; His providence works for our good. A bondsman in the case of a beneficent master deserves punishment if he opposes his master's wishes. (154)

It is hard to see how this coheres with Kant's talk of persons as ends in themselves in  Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 428). For Kant, rational beings, whether biologically human or not, are persons. Persons, unlike things, are ends in themselves. As such, they may not be used as mere means. I may not treat another person as a mere means nor may I so treat myself. For Kant there are duties to oneself and they take precedence over duties to others since "nothing can be expected from a man who dishonours his own person." (118) The highest duty to oneself is that of self-preservation. Suicide is contrary to this highest duty and is therefore morally impermissible in all circumstances. The prohibition against suicide is exceptionless.

But how can a person be an end in itself if finite persons are created by God for his purposes? How can persons be ends in themselves if God owns us and we are his property?  Is suicide wrong because it violates God's property rights? If anyone has property rights in my body, it would have to be me wouldn't it?  Is man God's slave? So man is both free and enslaved?

Furthermore, if it is morally permissible for God to use finite persons as mere means to his end, self-glorification, say, then how could it be wrong for a person to treat himself as a mere means when he commits suicide?

We can put the underlying puzzle as a aporetic dyad:

1) My dignity, worth, autonomy, freedom, and irreplaceable uniqueness as a person derive from my having been created in the image and likeness of an absolutely unique free being who is the eminently personal source of all Being, truth, and value.  My higher origin and destiny elevate me infinitely far above the rest of creation.  I am animal, but also a spirit, and thus not merely an animal. I cannot be understood naturalistically as merely a more highly evolved animal.

2) If I am created by God both as a material being and as a person, then I cannot be an end in myself possessing autonomy and the other attributes mentioned.  For if God creates and sustains me moment by moment in every aspect of my being, then also in my being a subject, a self-determining person. 

What I have just sketched is a form of the ultimate paradox of divine creation. 

Note that the freedom mentioned in (1) is not the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" as Kant derisively calls it, but the freedom of a (noumenal) agent who has the power to initiate a causal chain ex nihilo by performing an act that he could have refrained from performing, and is therefore morally responsible for performing.  This rich non-compatibilist notion of freedom implies a god-like power in man that no merely natural (phenomenal) being possesses or could possess. This freedom points to a divine origin and is the respect in which we bear the image of God within us.  The freedom of the human creature mirrors the freedom of the creator.

But how is this freedom and dignity and personal uniqueness, which we cannot possess except as God's creatures, logically compatible with our creature status? Presupposed is  a robust conception of creation as creatio continuans according to which the entire being of the creature is sustained ongoingly by divine power  (Any less robust a conception would injure the divine sovereignty.) How can the inviolable interiority of a person maintain itself in the face of God's creative omniscience?

Some will say that the paradox is a contradiction and both limbs cannot be true. Other will say that the paradox is a mystery: both limbs are true, but we cannot in this life understand how they could both be true.

The paradox is at the root of Kant's uncompromising attitude toward the morality of suicide. He prohibits it without exception despite man's freedom and autonomy because of their derivation from God. We are ends in ourselves, which implies that it is wrong for anyone, including God, to treat us as mere means; yet we are God's property and for this reason not morally justified in disposing of ourselves.

Kant's Exceptionless Prohibition of Suicide as Essentially Christian and Unjustifiable Otherwise

Christianity too issues a total and exceptionless prohibition against suicide. The classical (philosophical as opposed to theological) arguments of Augustine and Aquinas against suicide are, however, uncompelling, as the Christian Paul Ludwig Landsberg shows.  Thus he maintains that 

. . . the total prohibition of suicide can only be justified or even understood in relation to the scandal and the paradox of the cross.  It is true that we belong to God, as Christ belonged to God. It is true that we should subordinate our will to His, as Christ did.  It is true that we should leave the decision as to our life or death to Him.  If we wish to die, we have indeed the right to pray to God to let us die.  Yet we must always add: Thy will, not mine, be done.  But this God is not our master as if we were slaves.  He is our Father.  He is the Christian God who loves us with infinite love and infinite wisdom.  If He makes us suffer, it is for our salvation and purification.  We must recall the spirit in which Christ suffered the most horrible death. 

Here, perhaps, is the key to our puzzle. The puzzle, again, is how the Sage of Koenigsberg, the Enlightenment champion of human freedom and autonomy, can maintain that, no matter how horrific the circumstances, one may never justifiably take one's own life. The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.

What I am suggesting is that if we read Kant's suicide doctrine in the light of Christianity it makes a certain amount of (paradoxical) sense, and that if one refuses to do this and reads it in a wholly secular light, then there is no justification for its exceptionless prohibition of suicide. I hope to test this thesis in further posts.

Landsberg again:

All that we can say to the suffering man who is tempted to commit suicide, is this “Remember the suffering of Christ and the martyrs.  You must carry your cross, as they did.  You will not cease to suffer, but the cross of suffering itself will grow sweet by virtue of an unknown strength proceeding from the heart of divine love.  You must not kill yourself, because you must not throw away your cross.  You need it.  And enquire of your conscience if you are really innocent. You will find that if you are perhaps innocent of one thing for which the world reproaches you, you are guilty in a thousand other ways.  You are a sinner.  If Christ, who was innocent, suffered for others and, as Pascal said, has also shed a drop of blood for you, how shall you, a sinner, be entitled to refuse suffering?  Perhaps it is a form of punishment.  But divine punishment has this specific and incomparable quality, that it is not revenge and that its very nature is purification.  Whoever revolts against it, revolts in fact against the inner meaning of his own life.”

Paul Ludwig Landsberg, geboren 1901 in Bonn, wurde 1927 Ordinarius für Philosophie und emigrierte 1933 zunächst nach Spanien, dann nach Frankreich. Der Schüler von Max Scheler und Edmund Husserl war während der französischen Emigration eng mit dem Collège de Sociologie verbunden und starb 1944 im Konzentrationslager Oranienburg.

 

 

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Of Coulter and Kant, Screwed Pooches, and Milked He Goats

Ann Coulter:

Everyone who screwed the pooch on this one better realize fast: All that matters is immigration. It's all that matters to the country, and it's all that matters for winning elections.

She's right: read what she has to say. 

What caught my eye, however, was the expression 'screw the pooch.'  I now send you to Slate for an explanation of its meaning, thereby proving that that site is good for something.

The irrepressible Coulter also avails herself of the expression, 'milk a he-goat':

We'll have to watch helplessly as "establishment Republicans" fight "anti-establishment Republicans" over the right to milk a he-goat. Both sides will lose, and Democrats will sweep Congress and destroy our country.

Now that's a very old expression; I first encountered it in Kant in a particularly delightful form at A 58 = B 83 of his Critique of Pure Reason:

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if the question is absurd in itself and demands unnecessary answers, then, besides the embarrassment of the one who proposes it, it also has the disadvantage of misleading the incautious listener into absurd answers, and presenting the ridiculous sight (as the ancients said) of one man milking a he-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath.

The true Kant aficionado will of course know that Kant invoked this simile already in his pre-Critical period in his 1770 Latin Inaugural Dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis.  See, for the Latin, Daniel S. Robinson, "Kant and Demonax--A Footnote to the History of Philosophy," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 10, No. 3 (Mar., 1950), pp. 374-379.

Below, Professor Robinson misspells Norman Kemp Smith's name. In an age of literary irresponsibility we need more pedants like me. Or maybe not.

The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason

With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:

Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss. . . . We cannot put aside, and  yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme among all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? (A613 B641)

Interpretation later.

A Note on Ayn Rand's Misunderstanding of Kant

Ayn Rand has some interesting things to say about the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in her essay, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World” (1960) in Philosophy: Who Needs It (Signet, 1982, ed. Peikoff, pp. 58-76). Here is one example:

 

He [Kant] did not deny the validity of reason – he merely claimed that reason is “limited,” that it leads us to impossible contradictions [as opposed to possible contradictions?], that everything we perceive is an illusion and that we can never perceive reality or “things as they are.” He claimed,in effect, that the things we perceive are not real because we perceive them. (p. 64, italics in original)

Although the quotation is suggestive of Kant's views, anyone who really knows Kant knows that this is a travesty of Kant’s actual views. It is either a willful distortion, or a distortion based on ignorance of Kant’s texts. First of all, notice how Rand runs together three separate ideas in one and the same sentence, the first sentence quoted. We ought to distinguish the following Kantian claims.

K₁: Reason is limited in its cognitive employment to the sense world: there is no knowledge by reason alone of meta-physical objects, objects lying beyond the bounds of sense, such as God and the soul.

K₂: When reason is employed without sensory guidance or sensory input in an attempt to know meta-physical objects, reason entangles itself in contradictions.

K₃: For knowledge, two things are required: sensory input and conceptual interpretation. Since the interpretation is made in accordance with categories grounded in our understanding, the object of knowledge is a phenomenon rather than a noumenon (thing-in-itself). Since phenomena are objects of objectively valid cognition, a phenomenon (Erscheinung) is distinct from an illusion (Schein). (Cf. Critique of Pure Reason B69-70 et passim)

This is a quick but accurate summary of central Kantian theses. The question before us is not whether they are true, or even whether they are reasonably maintained; the question is solely whether Rand has fairly presented them. Comparing this summary with what Rand says, one can see how she distorts Kant’s views. Not only does Rand misrepresent K₁, K₂, and K₃, she conflates them in her run-on sentence although they are obviously distinct. Particularly outrageous is Rand’s claim that for Kant, objects of perception are illusory, given Kant’s quite explicit explanations (in several places) of the distinction between appearance and illusion.

More importantly, Rand gives no evidence of understanding the problem with which Kant is grappling, namely, that of securing objective knowledge of nature in the teeth of Humean scepticism. One cannot evaluate a philosopher’s theses except against the backdrop of the problems those theses are supposed to solve. The very sense of the theses emerges only in the context of the problems, arguments, and considerations with which the philosopher is grappling.

To give you some idea of the pitiful level Rand operates from, consider her suggestion near the bottom of the same page that logical positivists are “neo-mystics.” Old Carnap must be turning over in his grave.

On p. 65, we find another slam at Kant, this time against his ethics:

What Kant propounded was full, total, abject selflessness: he held that an action is moral only if you perform it out of a sense of duty and derive no benefit from it of any kind, neither material nor spiritual; if you derive any benefit, your action is not moral any longer. This is the ultimate form of demanding that man turn himself into a 'shmoo' -- the mystic little animal of the L'l Abner comic strip, that went around seeking to be eaten by somebody. (Italics in original.)

This too is a travesty of Kant’s actual position. To appreciate this, we need to draw some distinctions.  Kant distinguishes duty and inclination. (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Akademie-Ausgabe 397 ff.) This distinction must be made since there are acts one is inclined to perform that may or may not be in accordance with duty, and there are acts one ought to perform which one is definitely not inclined to perform. An inclination to behave cruelly contravenes one’s duty, while an inclination to behave in a kind manner is in accordance with it.

Kant also distinguishes between acting from duty and acting in accordance with duty. One acts from duty if one’s act is motivated by one’s concern to do one’s duty. Clearly, if one acts from duty, then one acts in accordance with duty. But the converse does not hold: one can act in accordance with duty without acting from duty. Suppose Ron is naturally inclined to be kind to everyone he meets. On a given occasion, his kind treatment of a person is motivated not by duty but by inclination. In this case, Ron acts in accordance with duty but not from duty.

There are thus two distinctions and they cut perpendicular to each other. There is the distinction between duty and inclination, and there is the distinction between acting from and acting in accordance with duty/inclination. This makes for four possible combinations: acting from duty and in accordance with inclination; acting from duty and contrary to inclination; acting from inclination and contrary to duty; acting contrary to both inclination and duty.

Kant held that an act has moral worth only if it is done from duty. Contra Rand, however, this is obviously consistent with acting in accordance with inclination and deriving benefit from the act. Suppose -- to adapt one of Kant’s examples -- I am a merchant who is in a position to cheat a customer (a child, say). Acting from duty, I treat the customer fairly. My act has moral worth even though I derive benefits from acting fairly and being perceived as acting fairly: cheating customers is not good for business in the long run. I may also enjoy reflecting on my probity.

One can see from this how confused Rand is. She thinks that an act performed from duty is equivalent to one that runs counter to inclination, or counter to one’s own benefit. But nowhere does Kant say this, and nothing he does say implies it. An act done from duty may or may not run counter to inclination. Either way, the act has moral worth. If Jack and Jill are married (to each other!) and Jill asks Jack for sex, then Jack has a duty to engage in the act with Jill. Presumably, Jack will be strongly inclined by his animal nature to engage in the act. But if he acts from duty, then the act has moral worth despite the natural inclination. The difficulty of determining whether or not Jack acts from duty or from inclination is not to the point.

Again, the question is not whether Kant's ethical doctrine is true or reasonably maintained; the question is simply whether Rand has fairly presented it. The answer to that is in the negative.

So I persist in my view that Rand is a hack, and that this is part of the explanation of why many professional philosophers accord her little respect.

That being said, I'll take Rand over a leftist any day.

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Can Kant Refer to God?

 Ed Buckner raises this question, and he wants my help with it.  How can I refuse?  I'll say a little now, and perhaps more later.

Kant was brought up a rationalist within the Wolffian school, but then along came David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.  This awakening begins his Critical period in which he struggles mightily to find a via media between rationalism and empiricism.  The result of his struggle, the Critical philosophy, is of great historical significance but is also an unstable  tissue of irresolvable tensions. As a result there are competing interpretations of his doctrines.

I will propose  two readings relevant to Ed's question.  But first a reformulation and exfoliation of the question.  

Can one think about God and meaningfully predicate properties of him?  For example, can one meaningfully say of God that he exists, is omnipotent, and is the cause of the existence of the natural world?  Or is it rather the case that such assertions are meaningless and that the category of causality, for example, has a meaningful application only within  the realm of phenomena but not between the phenomenal realm as a whole and  a putative transcendent causa prima?  Are the bounds of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) also the bounds of sense (Sinn), or are there senseful, meaningful assertions that transgress the bounds of sensibility?

Weak or Moderate Reading.  On this reading, we can think about God and meaningfully make predications of him, but we cannot have any knowledge of God and his attributes. We cannot have knowledge of God because knowledge necessarily involves the interplay of two very different factors, conceptual interpretation via the categories of the understanding, and sensory givenness.  God, however, is not given to the senses, outer or inner.  In Kantian jargon, there is no intuition, keine Anschauung, of God.  All intuition is sensible intuition.  The Sage of Koenigsberg will not countenance any mystical intuition, any Platonic or Plotinian visio intellectualis, at least not in this life.  That sort of thing he dismisses in the Enlightenment manner as Schwaermerei, 'enthusiasm' in an obsolete  18th century sense of the English term.

But while Kant denies that there is knowledge of God here below whether  by pure reason or by mystical intuition, he aims to secure a 'safe space' for faith:  "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." (Preface to 2nd ed. of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1787, B xxx.)  Now if God and the soul are objects of faith, this would imply that we can think of them and thus refer to them even if we cannot have knowledge of them.

The soul is the object of the branch of metaphysica specialis called rational psychology.  Since all our intuition is sensible, there is no sensible intuition of the soul.  As is well-known, Kant denies that special metaphysics in all three branches (psychology, cosmology, and theology) is possible as science, als Wissenschaft.  To be science it would have to include synthetic a priori judgments, but these are possible only with respect to phenomena.

Kant's key question is: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?  He believes they are actual in mathematics and physics, and would have to be actual in metaphysics if the latter were a science.  To put it quick and dirty:  synthetic a priori judgments are possible in math and physics because the phenomenal world is our construction.  The dignity and necessity of the synthetic causal principle -- every event has a cause -- is rescued from the jaws of Humean skepticism, but the price is high: the only world we can know is the world of phenomena.  Things in themselves (noumena in the negative sense) are beyond our ken.  And yet we must posit them since the appearances are appearances of something (obj. gen.).  This restriction of human knowledge to the physical rules out any knowledge of the metaphysical.

On the moderate reading, then, Kant restricts the cognitive employment of the categories of the understanding to phenomena but not their thinking employment. We can think about and refer to the positive noumena, God, the soul, and the world as a whole, but we cannot have any knowledge of them. (And the same goes for the negative noumena that correspond to sensible appearances.)  We can talk sense about God and the soul, and predicate properties of these entities, but we cannot come to have knowledge of them.  Thus we can meaningfully speak of the soul as a simple substance which remains numerically self-same over time and through its changing states, but we cannot know that it has these properties.  

The arguments against the traditional soul substance of the rationalists are in the Paralogisms section of KdrV, and they are extremely interesting.

Strong or Extreme Reading.  On this reading,  we cannot talk sense about positive or negative noumena: such categories as substance and causality cannot be meaningfully applied beyond the bounds of sensibility.  Riffing on P. F. Strawson one could say that on the strong reading the bounds of sensibility are the bounds of sense.  This reading wins the day in post-Kantian philosophy.  Fichte liquidates the Ding an sich, the neo-Kantians reduce the transcendental ego to a mere concept (Rickert, e.g.), the categories which for Kant were ahistorical and fixed become historicized and relativized, and we end up with a conceptual relativism which fuels a lot of the nonsense of the present day, e.g., race and sex are social constructs, etc.

How's that for bloggity-blog quick and dirty?

So my answer to Ed Buckner's title question is:  It depends.  It depends on whether we read Kant in the weak way or in the strong way. 

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The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov's Solution

In his highly  original Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism (Walter de Gruyter 2015)  Panayot Butchvarov argues that philosophy in its three main branches, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, needs to be freed from its anthropocentrism. Philosophy ought to be “dehumanized.” This entry will examine how Butchvarov proposes to dehumanize metaphysics.  These Butchvarov posts are exercises toward a long review article I have been commissioned to write for a European journal.

Anthropocentrism in Metaphysics

In metaphysics, anthropocentrism assumes the form of antirealism. Antirealism is the view that the world, insofar as it is knowable, depends on us and our cognitive capacities. (6) Bishop Berkeley aside, metaphysical antirealism has its source and model in Kant's transcendental idealism. Contemporary antirealism is “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189) On Butchvarov's view there can be no return to a pre-Critical, pre-Kantian metaphysics. (225) But surely the world cannot depend on us if 'us' refers to human animals. Butchvarov's task, then, is to develop a version of metaphysical antirealism that is free of anthropocentrism. A central question is whether the characteristic antirealist thesis that the world depends on us and our cognitive capacities can be upheld without 'us' being understood in an anthropocentric way. To answer this question is to resolve the Paradox of Antirealism (PA), a paradox that I would maintain is endemic to every form of transcendental philosophy from Kant, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Butchvarov:

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)

Some will reject the paradox by rejecting its first limb.  But that would be to reject antirealism.  It would be to dissolve the problem rather than solve it.  Let's see if Butchvarov can solve the paradox while upholding antirealism.  But what version of antirealism does Butchvarov espouse?

Butchvarov's Metaphysical Antirealism

Metaphysical antirealism is so-called to distinguish it from antirealism in ethics and in epistemology. It is the view that “The world insofar as it is knowable by us depends on our capacities and ways of knowing, our cognitive faculties.” (111) I would have liked to have seen a more careful unpacking of this thesis, but I take the point to be, or at least to imply, the substantive (non-tautological) proposition that the world is not intrinsically knowable as an Aristotelian realist would maintain but knowable only in virtue of certain contributions on our part.  If this is not the point, then it is difficult to see how contemporary antirealism could be “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189)

Metaphysical antirealism divides into cosmological antirealism and ontological antirealism. A cosmological antirealist denies the reality of the world, but needn't deny the reality of the things in the world. Note that 'world' has multiple meanings and that now we are distinguishing between the world as a sort of totality of what is and the world as the members of the totality.

Butchvarov takes his cue from proposition 1.1 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus wherein Ludwig Wittgenstein stipulates that by 'world' he means the totality of facts (die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen), not of things (nicht der Dinge). Now if the world is the totality of facts, then one who denies the reality of facts denies the reality of the world, and is thereby a cosmological antirealist. (113) Such an antirealist need not be an ontological antirealist, i.e., one who denies the reality of things. Since Butchvarov does not question the reality of things (169), he is not an ontological metaphysical antirealist. He is a cosmological antirealist who advocates a form of logical antirealism according to which (i) “there are no logical objects even though logic is present in all thought” (114), and (ii) the “cognized world” depends on the logical expressions of our language rather than on our “mental faculties” as in Kant. (189)

At a first approximation, when Butchvarov says that there are no logical objects what he means is that the logical connectives, the quantifiers, the copula 'is,' and whole declarative sentences do not designate or refer to anything. In old-fashioned terminology, they are syncategorematic or synsemantic expressions. Consider the sentence, 'Tom is tall and Mary is short.' As I understand Butchvarov, he is maintaining that the sentence itself, both occurrences of 'is,' and the single occurrence of 'and' are all logical expressions while the proper names 'Tom' and 'Mary,' and the predicates 'tall' and 'short' are non-logical expressions. There are no logical objects corresponding to logical expressions. (This bald assertion needs be qualified in a separate post on semirealism. Butchvarov takes a semirealist line on facts, the logical objects corresponding to some sentences.) That there are no logical objects is perhaps obvious in the case of the propositional connectives. Few will say that 'and,' 'or,' and 'not' designate objects. The meaning of these words has nothing to do with reference. But while there are no logical objects, there can be no “cognized world” without language, or rather human languages. With this we are brought back to the Paradox of Antirealism. Even though the things in the world do not depend on human animals, the world itself does so depend inasmuch as there would be no world at all without language.

Consider the generic sentence, 'Men are taller than women.' For Butchvarov, many generic sentences are true, but there is nothing in the world that makes them true: they have no corresponding logical objects. And yet without truths like these, and other sorts of truths as well, there would be no world. In this sense, the world, but not the things in it, depends on language-users. Butchvarov's position is roughly similar to Kant's. Kant held that one can be both a transcendental idealist and an empirical realist. Butchvarov is like a transcendental idealist in that he holds that the world depends on language and thus on us; but he is like an empirical realist in that he holds that the things in the world do not depend on us. Like Kant, however, he faces a version of the Paradox of Antirealism: surely it is as absurd to maintain that the world depends on the existence of human animals as to maintain that the things in the world depend on human animals.

Butchvarov's Solution to the Antirealism Paradox

The solution involves a re-thinking of the role of the personal pronouns 'I' and 'we' as they function in philosophical as opposed to ordinary contexts. (See article referenced below.)  The idea is that 'I' and 'we' as they figure in the realism-antirealism debate do not refer to anything in the world, and so they do not refer to human beings; these grammatically personal pronouns refer impersonally to a view or "cognition" of the world, one that is not owned by any person or group of persons.  This view of the world, however, just is the world.  Therefore, the world does not depend logically or causally on the view of the world or on us: "the world and our cognition of it . . . are identical." (191)  To grasp the thought here, you must realize that "cognition" is subjectless: it is not anyone's cognition.

Now let's dig into the details.

Butchvarov's theory can be divided into negative and positive theses.  On the negative side, he claims that (i)  "there is no such entity as the philosophical, metaphysical, self or ego." (191)  Nor (ii) is there any such thing as consciousness as a property or activity of the metaphysical self, or as a relation (or quasi-relation) that connects such selves to their objects. (191) (ii) is a logical consequence of (i).  For if there is no self, then it cannot have properties, stand in relations, or exercise activities.  It also follows from (i) that (iii)  there is no  act-object distinction.  Butchvarov would claim phenomenological support for the first and third claims:  no self appears and no mental acts appear.  Phenomenologically, he is right.  But this doesn't decide the matter since there is also a 'dialectical' assumption at work, something like a Principle of Acquaintance:

Only that with which we are or can become acquainted, only that which can be directly experienced or singled out as an object, can be credited as real and as a possible subject of true and false predications. 

This Principle of Acquaintance (my formulation) is a bridge principle that connects phenomenology to ontology, and makes of phenomenology more than a study of 'mere appearances.'  It would therefore be fair to classify Butchvarov as a phenomenological ontologist along with Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre.  As opposed to what?  As opposed to what could be called a metaphysical ontologist who essays to peer behind the phenomenal scene into a realm of 'positive noumena' to use a Kantian phrase, where God and the soul count as positive noumena. Butch of course will have no truck with positive noumena, nor even with Kant's negative noumenon, the unknowable Ding an sich.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Butchvarov neither affirms nor denies the negative noumenon.

One sort of move that the Butchvarovian approach rules out is a transcendental inference from what is given to transcendental conditions of the given's givenness that cannot themselves be brought to givenness.  Someone might say this:

Granted, the subject of experience does not itself appear as just one more object of experience.  But this failure to appear is precisely what one ought to expect: for as a necessary condition of any object's appearing it cannot itself appear as an object.  The fact that it does not and cannot appear is no argument against its existence.  For it is precisely a transcendental condition of objectivity.  Just as there must be an 'accusative of manifestation,' something that appears, there must also be a 'dative of manifestation,' an item to which an appearing object appears, but which does not itself appear.

To which Butchvarov might respond that this begs the question by its rejection of the Principle of Acquaintance. The principle disallows any posits that cannot be brought to givenness.  No ego appears, and so there is no dative of manifestation.  And since there is no ego, appearing is non-relational: it is a monadic feature of that which appears.  Objects appear, but not to anything.

But of course this does not end the discussion since one can ask what validates the Principle of Acquaintance.  Why should we accept it given that it cannot be brought to givenness?  Hume claimed that all meaningful ideas derive from sensory impressions.  But what about that (propositional) idea? Is it meaningful?  Then which sensory impressions does it derive from? It appears that  here we end in a stand-off.

Butchvarov's Sartrean position is opposed to the triadic Cartesian schema that Husserl presupposes:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum.

For Butchvarov, there is no ego and there are no cogitationes; there are only the cogitata and their appearing.  He speaks of objects and their "lightening" and "revealing." (205)  He mentions Sartre by name but alludes to Heidegger as well for whom the world is not the totality of things or the totality of facts but the illuminated space wherein things appear. 

For Butchvarov, then, the structure of consciousness is not triadic but dyadic: there is just consciousness and its objects.  But it is impersonal: it is not anyone's consciousness.  It is the sheer revelation of things, but not to anyone.  Consciousness is exhausted in its revelation of objects: it has no inner nature.  This is a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness.  Butchvarov is a Sartrean externalist about consciousness.

If this externalist view is correct then one can understand why Butchvarov thinks he has solved the Paradox of Antirealism.   If consciousness is no-thing, then it is no thing upon which anything else can depend either logically or causally.   The paradox arises if the things in the world are made dependent for their existence, nature, or intelligibility on any transient parts of the world such as human animals.  The paradox vanishes if consciousness is no thing or things.

Toward a Critique

But wait a minute!  What has now become of the first limb of the paradox?  The first limb reads: 

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) 

Surely consciousness as no-thing, as a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects, as Mooreanly diaphanous, emanating from nowhere, without a nature of its own, not anchored in a Substantial Mind or in a society of substantial minds, or in animal organisms in nature, ever evacuating itself for the sake of the revelation of objects  -- surely consciousness as having these properties cannot do any shaping or forming.  It cannot engage in any activity.  For it is not a substance.  It is only in its revelation of what is other than it.  All distinctions and all content fall on the side of the object: none come from consciousness itself.  On a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness/mind, it can't do anything such as impose categorial forms on the relatively chaotic sensory manifold.

Kant is the main man here as Butch well appreciates.  Kant's thinking operates under the aegis of a form-matter scheme.  Space and time are the a priori forms of sensibility, and the categories are the a priori forms of the understanding.  These forms are imposed on the matter of sensation.  The vehicle of this imposition is the transcendental unity of apperception.  All of this is our doing, our transcendental doing, whatever exactly this means (which is part of the problem).  Our making of the world is a transcendental making: it is not an immanent process within the world such as a literal making of something out of pre-given materials -- which would presuppose the world as the where-in of all such mundane makings and formings.  Nor is this transcendental making a transcendent making by a transcendent deity.

Now who is it, exactly, who does the forming of the sensory manifold?  Who imposes the categorial forms on the matter of sensation?  It cannot be human animals or their brains.  It cannot be anything in the world.  Nor can it be anything out of the world either.  And what, exactly, is this activity of forming?  It cannot be an empirical process in the world.  Not can it be a transcendent process such as divine creation.  What then?

These problems are part and parcel of the Paradox of Antirealism.  The paradox cannot get off the ground without the notions of forming, shaping, imposing, etc. whereas Butchvarov's solution to the paradox in terms of an impersonal, subjectless, non-substantial consciousness without a nature does away with all forming, shaping and imposing.  Mind so conceived cannot impose forms since all forms, all distinctions, all content determinations are of the side of the object.  How can Mind be spontaneous (a favorite Kantian word) and active if Mind is not a primary substance, an agent?

My suspicion, then, tentatively proffered, is that Butchvarov does not solve the Paradox of Antirealism; he dissolves it by in effect rejecting the first limb. It is clear to me how he removes anthropocentrism from metaphysics; what is not clear to me is hgow what is left over can still be called antirealism.

There is also the question of whether the philosophical uses of 'I' and 'we' that are essential to the formulation of the realism-antirealism debate are really impersonal uses.  To that issue I will return in a later entry.

Related articles

Personal and Impersonal Uses of the First-Person Singular Pronoun

More Liberal Insanity: 'Trigger Warning' for Kant's Critiques

A tip of the hat to London Karl for bringing the following to my attention.  Karl writes, "I love your country, but it gets more absurd by the day."

It does indeed.  Contemporary liberals are engaged in a project of "willful enstupidation," to borrow a fine phrase from John Derbyshire.  Every day there are multiple new examples, a tsunami of folderol most deserving of a Critique of POOR Reason.

Here is a little consideration that would of course escape the shallow pate of your typical emotion-driven liberal:  If Kant's great works can be denigrated as products of their time, and as expressive of values different from present day values, then of course the same can be said a fortiori of the drivel and dreck that oozes from the mephitic orifices of contemporary liberals.

For my use of 'contemporary liberals,' see here.

Addendum:  These scumbags have attached the same warning to the U. S. Constitution.  

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Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 37 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 37 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 291st birthday. Sapere aude!

Cartoon borrowed from site of Slobodan Bob Zunjic

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

Who is Caius?

Robert Paul Wollf here replies with wit and lefty snark to a charming request by one Pamela N., a personal assistant, who wants to know who Immanuel Kant is referring to when he writes, "Caius is a man; man is mortal; therefore, Caius is mortal."  Pamela confesses,

I will admit, I have not read Kant's works. I have, however, spent the last couple of hours combing through post after post after post about this particular quote from the book and cannot find a single soul who would say who they think Caius is.

In reading these many posts, I have come to the conclusion that Kant is probably referring to Pope Caius as he has been venerated by the Catholic Church as a Saint. Given that title, and the fact that Saint's [sic] are given to [sic] a quasi-immortal status [sic], I have ascertained that this is who Kant is most likely referring to. My question for you is, do you think that my assumption is correct? or do you have a deeper insight into who he is referring to?

Kant, Supererogation, and Imperfect Duties

Can Kant's ethical scheme  accommodate the supererogatory?

If obligatory actions are those that one is duty-bound to perform, a supererogatory action is one that is above and beyond the call of duty. Michael A. Monsoor's throwing himself on a live grenade to save his Navy SEAL buddies is a paradigmatic example. But in a wide sense, a supererogatory act is any act, however trifling, that is in excess of what is morally required, any act that is morally good but the nonperformance of which is not morally bad.

(show)

One idea worth exploring is that there is room for supererogatory acts in Kant's scheme under the rubric of imperfect duties. Kant tells us that ". . . by a perfect duty I here understand a duty which permits no exception in the interest of inclination . . . ." (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AA 421, fn) A perfect duty can be either towards oneself or towards another. Kant gives the prohibition of suicide as a perfect duty to oneself and the prohibition of deceitful promises as a perfect duty towards others. These are proscriptions that admit of no exception, and I take it that perfect duties are perfect in that they are exceptionless: in no circumstance may one take one's own life, and in no circumstance may one make a deceitful promise. If so, then imperfect duties are prescriptions that admit of exceptions. This interpretation fits the examples Kant gives (423-424). There is the duty to oneself of cultivating one's talents, and the duty to to others of benevolent assistance. Both of these duties are prescriptions and both admit of exceptions. My general duty to cultivate my talents is not a duty to cultivate all my talents, or even any particular talent. And the duty of benevolent assistance cannot be a duty to assist everyone. Paul Guyer's reading is similar:

In the Groundwork, Kant's principle of morality gives rise to a fourfold classification of duties, resulting from the intersection of two divisions: between duties to oneself and to others, and between perfect and imperfect duties. Perfect duties are proscriptions of specific kinds of actions, and violating them is morally blameworthy; imperfect duties are prescriptions of general ends, and fulfilling them by means of performing appropriate particular actions is praiseworthy. The four classes of duty are thus: perfect duties to oneself, such as the prohibition of suicide; perfect duties to others, such as the prohibition of deceitful promises; imperfect duties to oneself, such as the prescription to cultivate one's talents; and imperfect duties to others, such as the prescription of benevolence (4: 422-3, 429-30 ). It is straightforward what a perfect duty prohibits one from doing; it requires judgment to determine when and how the general ends prescribed by imperfect duties should be realized through particular actions.

Note that Guyer states that the fulfilling of imperfect duties is praiseworthy. Now it is the supererogatory that we praise: it is inappropriate to praise people for doing what they are obligated to do. How morally absurd to praise a pater familias for paying the rent and putting food on the table! That is what he is supposed to do, what he morally must do. The failure to do such is blameworthy, but the performance is merely required, hence not praiseworthy. Since the fulfilling of imperfect duties is praiseworthy, it seems we can conclude that in Kant the class of supererogatory acts either is or is a proper subclass of the class of imperfect duties.

Further support for this interpretation comes at Grundlegung 429-430 where Kant speaks of "necessary or obligatory duties to others" and a "contingent (meritorious) duty to oneself." In English, 'obligatory duty' smacks of pleonasm, but that might not be the case for Kant's schuldige Pflicht. If duties divide into the obligatory (schuldigen) and the meritorious (verdienstlichen), then we can say that Kant accommodates supererogatory acts under the rubric of imperfect or meritorious duties.

There is more to it than this, of course, and there is a technical literature on this topic only a small amount of which I have read; but I think I can safely say two things: (i) a case can be made for Kant's being able to accommodate the supererogatory, and (ii) Kantians are more hospitable to the supererogatory than are utilitarians.

Related articles

When Praise is Out of Place

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Michael Slote on Supererogation

Praise and Supererogation

The Obligatory, the Supererogatory, and Two Moral Senses of 'Ought'

Dispute About Kant Erupts into Gun Fire

Travel Disruptive, but Good for the Soul

For me, travel is disruptive and desolating. A little desolation, however, is good for the soul, whose tendency is to sink into complacency. Daheim, empfindet man nicht so sehr die Unheimlichkeit des Seins. Travel knocks me out of my natural orbit, out of the familiar with its gauzy filters, into the strangeness of things.  Even an overnighter can have this effect. And then time is wasted getting back on track. I am not cut out to be a vagabond. I Kant hack it. I do it more from duty than from inclination. But I'm less homebound than the Sage of Koenigsberg.

More on travel in the Travel category in which you will find Emersonian and Pascalian reasons against it.

Dispute About Kant Erupts in Gunfire

Story here. 

The Russian boys were lined up for beer; perhaps one of them couldn't wait his 'transcendental' turn and the other, forsaking duty for inclination, shot him categorically albeit phenomenally.  Or maybe the shooter was attempting to demonstrate that the transcendentally ideal can also be empirically real.  Or perhaps the shooter was a Randian hothead and the man shot was a Kantian.

This is what comes of ignoring 'motorist' Rodney King's rhetorical question, 'Kant we all just get along?'

For Ayn Rand and her followers, Kant is the devil incarnate.  I don't dispute that Rand made some good points, but her tabloid outbursts anent the Sage of Koenigsberg aren't worth the hot air that powered them.  Despite her frequent invocations of reason, her work would be a worthy target of a Critique of Poor Reason. 

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Unreasonable critique of Kant leads to man being shot in Russian shop

No sign of reason as dispute over Immanuel Kant results in shooting

Saying and Showing

Again, show what?  'There are objects' is nonsense.  One cannot say that there are objects.  This is shown by the use of variables.  But what is shown if not that there are objects?  There, I've said it!

Ray Monk reports on a discussion between Wittgenstein and Russell.  L. W. balked at Russell's 'There are at least three things in the world.'  So Russell took a sheet of white paper and made three ink spots on it.  'There are three ink spots on this sheet.'  L. W. refused to budge.  He granted 'There are three ink spots on the sheet' but balked at the inference to 'There are at least three things in the world.'

W's perspective is broadly Kantian.  The transcendental conditions of possible experience are not themselves objects of possible experience.  They cannot be on pain of infinite regress.  But he goes Kant one better: it is not just that the transcendental conditions cannot be experienced or known; they cannot be sensibly talked about. Among them is the world as the ultimate context of all experiencing and naming and predicating and counting.  As transcendental, the world cannot be sensibly talked about as if it were just another thing in the world like the piece of paper with its three spots.  And so, given that what cannot be said clearly cannot be said at all but must be passed over in silence, one cannot say that the world is such that it has at least three things it it.  So W. balked and went silent when R. tried to get him to negotiate the above inference.

What goes for 'world' also goes for 'thing.'  You can't count things.  How many things on my desk?  The question has no clear sense.  It is not like asking how many pens are on my desk.  So Wittgenstein is on to something.  His nonsense is deep and important.

Pleonasm of the Day: 'Negative Attack Ad'

I once heard John McCain use the phrase, 'negative attack ad.' As opposed to what? Positive attack ad? You may enjoy this Kant attack ad.

Kant on Ignava Ratio, Lazy Reason

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, p. 25:

     Theology cannot serve to explain the appearances of nature to us.
     In general it is not a correct use of reason to posit God as the
     ground of everything whose explanation is not evident to us. On the
     contrary, we must first gain insight into the laws of nature if we
     are to know and explain its operations. In general it is no use of
     reason and no explanation to say that something is due to God's
     omnipotence. This is lazy reason. . . .

As Kant remarks in a footnote to A 689 = B 717 of the Critique of Pure Reason, ignava ratio was the name given to a "sophistical argument" of the "ancient dialecticians," the so-called Lazy Argument. 

Diligent reason attempts to account for all natural phenomena in natural terms. The role of God is accordingly attenuated. He becomes at most a sustaining cause of the existence of nature, but not a cause of anything that occurs within nature. See my earlier discussion of divine concurrence. The squeeze is on, and it is no surprise that Schopenhauer squeezes God right out of the picture by rejecting the very notion of causation of existence, as I explain in Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument.

This is relevant to my series on Plantinga's new book.  The crucial question is whether there is any room for divine guidance of the evolutionary process.

Kant on Peccatum Originale Originans and Peccatum Originale Originatum

1. An important distinction for understanding the doctrine of original sin is that between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum).  This post will explain the distinction and then consider Immanuel Kant's reasons for rejecting originated original sin.  It is important to realize that Kant does accept something like original sin under the rubric 'radical evil,' a topic to be explored in subsequent posts.  It is also important to realize that Kierkegaard's seminal thoughts about original sin as expressed in The Concept of Dread were influenced by Kant, and that Reinhold Niebuhr's influential treatment is in turn derivative from Kierkegaard.

2. So what's the distinction?  According to the Genesis story, the Fall of Man was precipitated by specific sinful acts, acts of disobedience, by Adam and Eve.  The sins of Adam and Eve were originating original sins. They were the first sins for the first human beings, but also the first sins for the human race.  Their sin somehow got transmitted to their descendants inducing in them a state of sinfulness.  The sinfulness of the descendants is originated original sin. This originated original sin is hereitary sin:  it is inherited and innate for postlapsarians and so does not depend on any specific sin of a person who inherits it.     Nevertheless it brings with it guilt and desert of punishment.  Socrates, then, or any post-Adamic man, is guilty and deserving of punishment whether or not he commits any actual sins of his own.  And so  a man who was perfectly sinless in the sense that he committed no actual sin of his own would nonetheless stand condemned in virtue of what an earlier man had one.  This doctrine has the consequence that an infant, who as an infant is of course innocent of any actual sin, and who dies unbaptized, is justly excluded from the kingdom of heaven.  Such an infant, on Catholic doctrine at least, ends up in limbo, or to be precise, in limbus infantium.  A cognate consequence is that a perfectly sinless adult who lives and dies before Christ's redemptive act is also excluded from heaven.  Such a person lands in limbus patrum.  (See here for the Catholic doctrine.)

3.  The stumbling block is obvious:  How can one justly be held morally accountable for what someone else has done or left undone?  How can one be guilty and deserving of punishment without having committed any specific transgression?  How can guilt be inherited?  Aren't these moral absurdities? Aren't we morally distinct  as persons, each responsible only for what he does and leaves undone?  There might well be originating original sin, but how could there be originated original sin?  It is worth noting that to reject originated original sin is not to reject originating original sin, or original sin as such.  There could be a deep structural flaw in humans as humans, universal and unameliorable by human effort, which deserves the title 'original sin/sinfulness' without it being the case that sin is inheritable.

Again I revert to my distinction between the putative fact of our fallenness and the various theories about it.  To refute a theory is not to refute a fact.

4.  Kant rejects the Augustinian notion of inherited sin.  Sinfulness, guilt, desert of punishment -- these cannot be inherited.  So for Kant there is no originated original  sin.  Of the various explanations of the spread of moral evil through the members and generations of the human race, "the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents." (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trs. Greene and Hudson, Harper 1960, p. 35)  But this is not to say that Kant rejects the notion of original sin.  He himself speaks of peccatum originarium, which he distinguishes from peccatum derivatum.  (26)  For Kant, original sin is a propensity in us toward moral evil which is universal and logically prior to specific immoral acts.  I hope to say more about this in a subsequent post.

5.  But what is Kant's argument against hereditary guilt and originated original sin? Kant as I read him accepts it as a fact that in all human beings there is radical moral evil, a peccatum originarium that lies deeper than, and makes possible, specific peccata derivata.  What he objects to is the explanation of this fact in terms of a propagation of guilt from the original parents.  The main point is that a temporal explanation in terms of antecedent causes cannot account for something for which we are morally responsible.  If we are morally responsible, then we are free; but free actions cannot be explained in terms of temporally prior causes.  For if an action is caused, it is necessitated, and what is necessitated by its causes cannot be free. 

What is true of actions is true of moral character insofar as moral character is something for which one is morally responsible.  Therefore our radically evil moral character which predisposes us to specific acts of wrongdoing  cannot be explained in terms of temporally antececent causes.  Hence it cannot be explained by any propagation of guilt from the original parents to us.  Thus there is no originated guilt.  Our being guilty must be viewed "as though  the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." (36)  Thus all actions which make us guilty are original employments of the will. All original sin is originating original sin.

Perhaps we can put it this way.  Adam has nothing over Socrates.  It is not as if Adam went directly from a state of innocence into a state of sin while Socrates inherited sinfulness and was never in a state of innocence.  If there is such a thing as original sin then both are equally originative of it.

The Genesis account gives us a temporal representation of a logical and thus atemporal relationship.  The state of innocence is set at the temporal beginning of humanity, and the fall from innocence is depicted as an event in time.  But then we get the problems raised in #3 above.  The mistake is to "look for an origin in time of a moral character for which we are to be held responsible . . . ." (38)  We make this mistake because we want an explanation of the contingent existence of our radically evil moral predisposition.  An explanation, however, is not to be had.  The rational origin of the perversion of our will "remains inscrutable to us." (38)

6.  Kant thus does accept something like original sin.  We have within us a deep propensity to moral evil that makes us guilty and deserving of punishment.  But there is no deterministic causal explanation for it.  So while there is a sense in which our fallenness is innate, it is not inherited.  For it is morally absurd to suppose that I could be guilty of being in a state that I am caused to be in.  Each one of us is originally guilty but by a free atemporal choice.  This makes the presence of the radical flaw in each of us inscrutable and inexplicable.  The mystery of radical evil points us to the mystery of free will.  On Kant's view, then, there is only originating original sin.  Each of us by his own free noumenal agency plunges from innocence into guilt!

We shall have to continue these ruminations later.  Some questions on the menu of rumination:

Q1.  Is Kant's account with its appeal to atemporal noumenal agency really any better than Augustine's biological propagation account?

Q2.   How can guilt be innate but not inherited, as Kant maintains?

Q3.   Why believe in radical evil in the first place?  If the evidence for it is empirical, how can such evidence  show that radical evil is both universal (and thus inscribed in man's very nature) and ineradicable by human effort?

From the Mail: Bryan Magee on Kant and the Theistic Proofs

Dear Dr. Vallicella,

I am of the understanding that one of your post-graduate degrees focussed on Kant. With your knowledge of said philosopher I wonder if I might trouble you to answer a few questions for me?

These questions pertain to Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument for God's existence. I know that this argument comes in three basic forms: Leibnizian, Thomistic, and Kalam. Did Kant direct criticism to all three versions? Brian Magee has stated, "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God." (Confessions of A Philosopher, p.198) Many other credentialed philosophers make similar claims. In your view, is Magee's strident assertion justified? Do any of Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument still have force today, or are you of the opinion that the work of recent philosophers has blunted the arguments of the Prussian?

Of course, I don't expect you to provide any counter-arguments to Kant. I am merely curious as to your take on the questions I have asked and I am quite happy for your answer to be brief. Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Stephen Lewin

Dear Mr. Lewin,

Thank you for writing and for reminding me of that delightful book by Bryan Magee.  Unfortunately, the sentence you quote  I do not find on p. 198.  But on p. 156, we read that Kant's philosophy ". . . demolishes many of the most important religious and theological claims . . . ."  On the same page Magee bestows upon Kant the highest praise.  He is "the supreme understander of the problem of human experience," "the supreme clarifier," and "the supreme liberator." For Magee, Manny is the man!

A little farther down on the same page we find your quotation:  "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God."

You ask whether Magee's confident claim is justified.  No, but first a comment on 'demolishes' as it occurs in the above quotations.  Magee uses it in connection both with claims and with arguments.   But to demolish a claim is not the same as to demolish an argument.  Presumably, to demolish a claim such as the claim that God exists would be to show that it is obviously false because ruled out on broadly logical grounds, or else ruled out on the ground that it is inconsistent with some well-known empirical fact or set of empirical facts.  Clearly, Kant does not demolish the claim that God exists in this sense of 'demolish.'  Ditto for the claim that the soul is a simple substance.  Nor is it his intention to demolish these claims.  At most he shows them to be unknowable or unprovable.  And he thinks that is a salutary thing to have shown.  "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith," Kant famously remarks in the preface to the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Bxxx).  I suggest that Magee is being sloppy when he speaks of demolishing theological claims.  He may be confusing 'show to be false' with 'show to be unknowable or unprovable.'  I receommend a careful reading of the 1787 preface as a counterbalance to Magee's Kant interpretation as der Alles-Zermalmer, the all-pulverizer.

Now what would it be to demolish an argument?   To demolish an argument is to expose a clear mistake in it such as a formal fallacy or a plainly false premise. I believe that Kant demolished the ontological argument "from mere concepts" which is essentially Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument.  Kant did this by isolating a presupposition of the argument which is plainly false, namely, the proposition that  some concepts are such that, by sheer analysis of their content, one can show that they are instantiated. Surely Kant is right that no concept, not even the concept of God, includes existence.  Interestingly, Aquinas would agree with this. 

But there are modal versions of the ontological argument that are immune to the Kantian critique.  See my "Has the Ontological Argument Been Refuted?" Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  As for the cosmological argument, Kant thinks that it depends on the ontological argument and collapses with it.  This is an intricate matter that I cannot go into now.  If you are interested, see my article, "Does the Cosmological Argument Depend on the Ontological?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 2000), pp. 441-458. 

Another idea of Kant's is that there cannot be a First Cause because the category of causality has no cognitive employment beyond the realm of phenomena.  Schopenhauer borrows this notion and pushes it for all its worth.  Relevant here is my post, On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument.  But it cannot be said that either Kant or Schopenhauer demolished the cosmological argument because their critiques rest on their own questionable metaphysical systems.

And as you suggest above,  there are Kalam and Thomist versions of the CA that Kant doesn't even consider.  Kant's knowledge of the history of philosophy was meager and the metaphysics he criticized was that of the Wolffian school which derives from Leibniz.

Finally, I refer you to my article, "From Facts to God: An Onto-Cosmological Argument,"  International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 48 (2000), pp. 157-181.

 

Rise and Shine With Manny

For, "The bed is a nest for a whole flock of illnesses." (Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Gregor, p. 183)

I read Kant and about Kant at an impressionable age, and it really is a pleasure plowing through his texts again as I have been doing recently. I suspect my early rising goes back to my having read, at age 20, that Kant was wont to retire at 10 PM and arise at 5 AM.

Soon enough, however, I was out-Kanting Kant with a 4 AM arisal from the bed of sloth. And when I moved out here to the Zone, 4 became 2:30. (A Zone Man must make an early start especially on outdoor activities before Old Sol gets too uppity.) I've tried 2 AM, the time the Trappist monks of Merton's day got up, but I couldn't hack it. 2:30 is early enough. (I don't know whether the Trappist regimen is as rigorous today as it was in the '40s and '50s, and I'm not sure I want to know.)

Immanuel Kant Versus Israel?

Old Kant man that I am, I have added a question mark to the title of an extremely interesting piece by Daniel Pipes.  In it, Pipes summarizes and comments upon an article by Yoram Hazony,  "Israel Through European Eyes."  Worth careful study.

More with Mason on Miracles

Franklin Mason e-mails (mid-June 2007):

I'd meant to get back to a little point you'd made a few days ago.

You said this: "I think of creation as an ongoing 'process': God sustains the world in being moment by moment. But at each moment, the totality of what exists is completely determinate: for each individual x and for each property P, either x has P or x has the complement of P. I would say that all and only the complete exists. Creation is bestowal of existence. So if at time t God is sustaining the world in existence, and what exists is complete, it is hard to see how God could add anything to it. The world at t is complete; anything added to it would precipitate a contradiction."

I agree with everything you say, but it doesn't seem to me to rule out the possibility of an input of new energy into space-time. It would of course be a contradiction if God were to both sustain the world at a time such that no new energy was anywhere present and, by a special act of will, bring it about at that time that there was new energy. But the creation of new energy at a time need not entail this contradiction. Rather, if there's new energy at time t, its existence is part of the complete world-whole at t; and God does not, at up to and at t, sustain the world-whole such that no new energy is present. Completeness does not imply a lack of novelty. Rather all that it implies is that novelty, when it occurs, is part of the world-whole at the time of its introduction and thereafter.

Kant on Divine Concurrence and Miracles as Complementa ad Sufficientiam

The question concerning the possibility of miracles is connected to a wider question concerning the relation of secondary or natural causes and the causa prima, God. How do these two 'orders' of causation fit together?

1. One extreme position is occasionalism according to which all causal power is exercised by God. For the occasionalist, God is all-powerful not just in the sense that he can do all that is (broadly) logically possible, but also in the sense that he exercises all the power that gets exercised. For the occasionalist, God is the only genuine cause and all secondary causes are mere occasions for the exercise of divine power. Although I have defended occasionalism elsewhere ("Concurrentism or Occasionalism?" Am Cath Phil Quart, Summer 1996, 339-359), I will not be assuming its truth here.

Kant on Miracles

Earlier posts uncovered epistemic as opposed to ontic conceptions of miracles in Augustine and in Spinoza; but Immanuel Kant too seems to favor an epistemic approach. "If one asks: What is to be understood by the word miracle? it may be explained . . . by saying that they are events in the world the operating laws of whose causes are, and must remain, absolutely unknown to us." (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Harper Torchbooks, p. 81) There is no talk here, as in Hume, of a miracle as involving a "transgression" of a law of nature. The idea is that in the case of miraculous events there are laws of nature operating but these laws are unknown to us. This seems to imply that the miraculousness of a miracle is an appearance relative to our ignorance. If we knew the laws, there would be no miracles.

Kant on Abraham and Isaac

What I said about Abraham and Isaac yesterday is so close to Kant's view of the matter that I could be accused of repackaging Kant's ideas without attribution. When I wrote the post, though, I had forgotten the Kant passage. So let me reproduce it now. It is from The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), the last book Kant published before his death in 1804 except for his lectures on anthropology:

. . . if God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure that the voice he hears is not God's; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion. (115)

A footnote to this paragraph reads:

We can use, as an example, the myth of the sacrifice that Abraham was going to make by butchering and burning his only son at God's command (the poor child, without knowing it, even brought the wood for the fire). Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: "That I ought not kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God — of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even is [read: if] this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven." (115)

Here is what I wrote yesterday:

Which is more certain, that I should not kill my innocent son, or that God exists, has commanded me to kill my son, and that I must obey this command? That I must not kill my innocent son is a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense. But wouldn't a command from the supreme moral authority in the universe trump a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense? Presumably it would — but only if the putative divine command were truly a divine command. How would one know that it is?

Kant's argument, put as concisely as possible, is that:

1. It is certain that one ought not kill one's innocent son.
2. It is not certain that a seemingly divine command to kill one's innocent son is truly a divine command.
Therefore
3. One ought to trust one's moral sense and not the putative divine revelation.
Therefore
4. ". . . if it [a scriptural text] contains statements that contradict practical reason, it must be interpreted in the interests of practical reason." (65)

Whether or not one accepts this argument that I am attributing to Kant — you are invited to note that I cobbled it together from disparate passages — you must, if you are rational, see that there is a problem here, one that cannot be ignored, namely, the problem of adjudicating between putative personal and Biblical revelation, on the one hand, and (practical) reason on the other. Something has to give. My judgment is that Kant is right in the passage just quoted, and that our sense of the moral law trumps any contra-moral personal revelation (e.g. a voice commanding an immoral act) and also any Bible passage that seems to endorse the acquiescence in a personal revelation that commands an immoral act.

But why not the other way around?  Why not say that the Bible passage trumps our sense of the moral law? The short answer is that our sense of the moral law has superior epistemic credentials. If we know anything about morality, we know that we ought not kill our innocent children. If we don't know that, then we don't know anything about morality. But a voice commanding one to kill an innocent child has no claim on our belief.

Infirm as reason is, it is yet a divine spark within us, an element in the imago Dei.  Insofar forth, it is inviolable.

 

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 31 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 31 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.  Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 285th birthday. Sapere aude!

Cartoon borrowed from site of Slobodan Bob Zunjic

Kant's Paean to Sincerity

As a prelude to forthcoming posts on hypocrisy  as seen by Kant and Hegel, here is a Kantian hymn of praise to sincerity.  From Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (trs. Greene & Hudson), p. 178, n. 2:

 O sincerity! Thou Astraea, that hast fled from earth to heaven, how mayst thou (the basis of conscience, and hence of all inner religion) be drawn down thence to us again? I can admit, though it is much to be deplored, that candor (in speaking the whole truth which one knows) is not to be found in human nature. But we must be able to demand sincerity (that all that one says be said with truthfulness), and indeed if there were in our nature no predisposition to sincerity, whose cultivation merely is neglected, the human race must needs be, in its own eyes, an object of the deepest contempt. Yet this sought for quality of mind is such that it is exposed to many temptations and entails many a sacrifice, and hence calls for moral strength, or virtue (which must be won); moreover it must be guarded and cultivated earlier than any other, because the opposed propensity is the hardest to extirpate if it has been allowed firmly to root itself. And if now we compare with the kind of instruction here recommended our usual mode of upbringing, especially in the matter of religion, or better, in doctrines of faith, where fidelity of memory in answering questions relating to these doctrines, without regard to the fidelity of the confession itself (which is never put to the test) is accepted as sufficient to make a believer of him who does not even understand what he declares to be holy, no longer shall we wonder at the lack of sincerity which produces nothing but inward hypocrites.