Maverick Philosopher

On Anselmian or 'Perfect Being' Theology

Tom O. writes,

I was wondering if you have time to weigh in on the following problem. I take it you subscribe to perfect being theology as a constraint on our theorizing about God’s nature. For example, you write, “God is the absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is a contingent being. No absolute just happens to exist. it is built into the divine job description that God be a necessary being…”. Here, it looks to me like you’re endorsing a prior conception of what God must be like (‘absolute’) in order to infer that God must be a necessary being. 

 

Actually, Tom, I do not subscribe to 'perfect being' theology, as I explain below.   I do, however, have a prior conception of what God must be like to be 'worth his salt,' i.e., to satisfy the exigencies built into our concept of God.  God is the Absolute, and nothing could be the Absolute if it merely happened to exist. So God, if he exists, exists of absolute metaphysical necessity, and he has this necessity from himself, and not from another, a se non ab alio. It follows that if God does not exist, then he is impossible. Thus  what we should not say is that God necessarily exists, for this way of putting it implies that he does exist. We should say that God is necessarily non-contingent, i.e. necessarily such that, if he exists, he exists  necessarily (in all possible worlds in the Leibnizian patois), and if he does not exist, then he is impossible (exists in no possible world in the same façon de parler.) 

 

Now, suppose someone endorses a conception of God as a limited being. Maybe God is not all powerful, or he is dependent in some way (and so not a se in a strong sense- think pantheism) or he is contingent in some way. This view of God obviously parts ways with perfect being theology. But I want to know how the proponent of perfect being theology will argue that conceptions of God as a limited being are deficient. The very conception of God (as limited or absolute/perfect) is at issue here. So, the proponent of perfect being theology can’t assume God is the absolute to then argue a limited God is deficient. What criterion could he possibly appeal to in order to sort ‘genuine’ conceptions of God from ‘deficient’ conceptions?

 

In the context of this discussion there are three approaches to God that we ought to distinguish: the limited being approach, the perfect being approach, and  the beyond-perfect-being approach of Aquinas, Barry Miller, and myself, et al.  As for the limited being approach, I will just say for now that there might be one or more limited gods, but that they don't interest me. What interests me is whether there is an unsourced Source of the being, intelligibility, and value of everything other than it, a being of limitless perfection, return to which or fellowship with which, or participation in the being of which, would bring the ultimate in human felicity.  That is my concept of God, and not just mine.  My question then becomes: does anything in reality answer to that concept?  

I have no interest in limited gods. I have no interest in affirming them or denying them. There might even be one or more in addition to the unlimited God; they might serve as emissaries between the unlimited God and us.  But they would not be worthy of worship or worthy of my ultimate concern because my ultimate beatitude and need for final meaning could not be secured  by them.

My interest is whether we need to go beyond perfect being theology.  I say we do and that PBT is a limited approach to the divine.

The anthropomorphism of perfect being (Anselmian) theology

One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived."  God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections.  But what is a perfection?  A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property. Some of these properties admit of degrees while some do not. To say of God that he is the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect of all beings, is to say that he possesses all great- making properties, and of those that admit of degrees, he possesses them to the highest degree.

For example, power admits of degrees; so while Socrates and God are both powerful, only God is maximally powerful.  Wisdom too admits of degrees; so while both Socrates and God are both wise, only God is maximally wise.  And the same holds for love and mercy and moral goodness.  Many of the divine attributes, then, are maxima of attributes possessed by humans.

Are Socrates and God wise in the same sense of 'wise'?  This follows if wisdom in God is just the highest degree of the same attribute that is found in some humans.  Accordingly, the predicate 'wise' is being used univocally in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' despite the fact that God but not Socrates is all-wise.  Bear in mind that the sense of a predicate is not to be confused with the property (attribute) the predicate is used to express. Suppose we distinguish three 'planes': the linguistic, the semantic, and the ontic. Predicates inhabit the linguistic plane, senses the semantic plane, and properties the ontic plane. 

Thus a commitment to univocity appears to be entailed by the Anselmian or perfect-being approach.  The predicate 'wise' is being used in the very same sense when applied to Socrates and when applied to God. 

The polar opposite of univocity is equivocity.  The phenomenon of equivocity is illustrated by this pair of sentences: 'Socrates is wise,' 'Kamala is in no wise fit to be president.'  The meaning or sense of 'wise' is totally different across the two sentences.  Midway between univocity and equivocity there is analogicity.  Perhaps an example of an analogical use of 'wise' would be in application to Guido the mafioso.  He's a wise guy; he knows the score; but he is not a wise man like Socrates, though he is like the latter in being knowledgeable about some things.   But I mention analogy only to set it aside.

My thesis: an Anselmian approach to God and his attributes such as we find in Alvin Plantinga and T. V. Morris and the rest of the 'perfect being' theists is anthropomorphic. One takes God to have the very same great-making attributes or properties that (some) humans have, but to the maximal degree.  Socrates is benevolent and merciful; God is omnibenevolent and all-merciful.  And so on.  We could say that God is omni-qualified or omni-propertied with respect to the great-making properties. If we take this tack, we approach God from the side of man, assimilating God to man.  God is 'made' (conceptualized) in the image and likeness of man, as a sort of superman, but with defects removed and attributes maximized. 

This anthropomorphism is very different from the God-is-an-anthropomorphic-projection thesis of Ludwig Feuerbach.  Feuerbach's thesis entails the nonexistence of God. Perfect being anthropomorphism does not. 

Well, what is wrong with anthropomorphism?  The problem with it is that it fails to do justice to God's absolute transcendence and ineffability.  If the difference between creatures and God is only a matter of degree, then God would not be worthy of worship. He would be "the greatest thing around" and no doubt an object of wonder and admiration, but not an appropriate object of worship. (See Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God, U. of  Notre Dame Press, 1996, p. 3)

God is the Absolute.  I take that to be axiomatic. That God is the Absolute is built into the very concept of God whether or not anything in reality answers to that concept.  Starting from the concept, one cannot prove (demonstrate) that God exists. Kant is surely right that the ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus blosser Begriffen) is not valid. To understand what I just wrote you must understand that the concept of X is not to be confused with the nature of X. Natures (quiddities, essences) are situated on the ontic plane mentioned above; concepts are either finite-mind-dependent in which case they cannot exist in themselves but only in minds, or else,they exist in themselves on the semantic plane, which I distinguished above from the ontic plane. One could say that  the nature of God entails (or rather is) the existence of God.  That, I believe, is true. But that truth does not help us prove the existence of God unless we have a rationally coercive reason to think that our concept of God is an adequate concept, i.e., one that captures the essence or nature of God. But we have no such concept. The doctor angelicus will back me up on this.  In God, essence and existence are one. To capture God's essence in a concept, therefore, would require squeezing God himself into a concept. That would be like emptying the Pacific Ocean, or any ocean, into a hole in the sand at the seashore.

God is radically other than creatures.  His attributes cannot be 'in series' with human degreed attributes even if at the limits of these series.  God is not just another thing that exists  and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.   

How Could God be Ineffable?

The mystically inclined say that God is ineffable.  The ineffable is the inexpressible, the unspeakable. Merriam-Webster:

 Ineffable comes from ineffābilis, which joins the prefix in-, meaning "not," with the adjective effābilis, meaning "capable of being expressed." Effābilis comes from effārī, "to speak out," which in turn comes from ex- and fārī, meaning “to speak.”

But: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7) Does it follow that there is nothing ineffable, inexpressible, unspeakable? Some will draw this conclusion; Hegel is one. Ludwig the Tractarian, however, does not draw this conclusion: 

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (Tractatus, 6.522)

God is the prime example of das Unaussprechliche. But if we cannot say anything about God, then we cannot say any of the following: he exists; he does not exist; he is transcendent; he is immanent; he is all-knowing; he is not all-knowing; he has attributes; he has no attributes; he is ineffable; he is not ineffable; and so on.

Is this a problem? Maybe not.  

Consider any mundane thing, a rock, say.  Can you put it into words? Can you capture its existence and its haecceity (its non-qualitative thisness) in concepts?  You cannot. At most you can capture  conceptually only its quidditative determinations, all of which are multiply exemplifiable or repeatable. But the thing itself is unrepeatable and escapes conceptual capture.  The discursive intellect cannot grasp it. Es ist unbegreifbar.  It cannot be 'effed' linguistically or conceptually.  Individuum ineffabile est.

If you can see that the individual qua individual is conceptually ineffable, why do you balk at talk of the divine ineffability? If the haecceity of a grain of sand or a speck of dust cannot be conceptualized, then a fortiori for the super-eminent haecceity and ipseity of the super-eminent Individual who is not a mere  individual among individuals but Individuality itself.   

The Ineffable One cannot fall under any of our ordinary concepts. We can however, point to it by using a limit concept (Grenzbegriff).  A limit concept is not an ordinary concept. Note that we do have the concept of that which is beyond all concepts. (If we did not, this discourse would be nonsense when it plainly is not, pace Wittgenstein.) That smacks of self-contradiction, but the contradiction is avoided by distinguishing between ordinary and limit concepts. 

So, while remaining within the ineluctable discursivity of our discursive intellects, I am able to point beyond the sphere of the discursive intellect into the Transdiscursive.  You can understand this by analogy to the transdiscursivity of a stick, a stone, a dog, a bone, a bird, a turd, or any part thereof.

How do I gain epistemic access to a mundane particular such as a stick or a stone in its unrepeatable particularity?  By sensible intuition (sinnliche Anschauung in Kant's sense).  We do it all the time. And so, by a second analogy, we can understand how epistemic access to the Absolute and Ineffable One is to be had: by intellectual intuition or mystical gnosis. 

The Scariest Passage in Kant

Substack latest.

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:

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Considerations contra

Top o' the Stack

Dem-Fems for Kamala

Miranda Devine:

As polls show America’s young men are lurching rightward at a rapid pace, the Democratic brand has finally evolved into the party of scolding shrews, nagging Karens and “preachy females,” as Dem dinosaur James Carville calls them.

Its image is tied to a type of unserious, self-involved, neurotic, dogmatic Dem-fem who insists on telling you her pronouns and whose highest goal is abortion on demand right up until the moment of birth. 

She is terrified of men unless they are transgender or submissive “white dudes for Kamala” with man buns. 

Now that Scranton Joe is out of the picture and Kamala is at the helm, the feminizing trend is accelerating the party into certain electoral oblivion (with the obvious caveat for election fraud). 

I am glad that the astute Miranda threw in the caveat. After all, we know a priori that the Dems will cheat their  asses off come November. If the end justifies the means, why not? It worked last time, so they figure it will work again. Compare the race card. The Dems have been playing it for years despite all the respectful, careful, and eminently sane explanations by conservatives that our positions are in no defensible sense of the term 'racist.' Why then don't the lefties listen to sweet reason and stop playing the card? Why don't they be nice and play fair? Because it works for them in attaining and maintaining power and control, which is what they are out for first, foremost, and forever. Power to do what? To tear everything down, so that, somehow, by some magic, utopia will arise. 

For the same reason they can be expected to cheat in the upcoming election.  You need to wake up from 'woke' and realize that our political enemies are just that enemies. They are enemies not just of us, but of the attainable good. They are not good people. I am mainly referring to the cadre Left (the core or skeletal drivers of the movement comprising the true believers, in Eric Hoffer's sense, and the cynics) and not the much larger group of useful idiots, who are morally and intellectually obtuse mediocrities.

It is foolish to underestimate the Kamala crazies, as Newt Gingrich has pointed out.

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

If any Kant aficionados are lurking about, my use of a priori above is the relative sense of the term Kant refers to in the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787) at B2:

. . . it has been customary to say , even of much knowledge that has been derived from empirical sources, that we have it or are capable of having it a priori, meaning thereby that we do not derive it immediately from experience, but from a universal rule -- a rule which is itself, however, borrowed from experience. Thus we would say of a man who  undermined the foundations of his house, that he might have known a priori that it would fall, that is, that he need not have waited for the experience of its actually falling. But he still could not know this completely a priori. For he first had to learn through experience that bodies are heavy, and therefore fall when their supports are withdrawn. (NKS tr., p. 43)

Ayn Rand's Misunderstanding of Kant

Substack latest.

The piece ends: 

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.

Ultra posse nemo obligatur

Ought implies can. Not first with Kant!

Rise and Shine

I quit the bed of sloth at two this morning.  I slept in a bit. But I understand that not everyone prefers the monkish life. Kant arose at five. It's now 5:30 or so. Rise and shine with Manny!  Or at least with Boston.  If this '70s tune doesn't get you bangin' on all eight, you need a brain re-wire. 

And if this first post of the day is not yet meaty enough for you, there's more:

"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 nocturnal nest. 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 in the summer before Old Sol gets too uppity.)

2:30 became 2:00, the time the Trappist monks of Tom Merton's day got up. 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 given the ubiquity of decadence these days. But then 2:00 became 1:30 which is now my preferred time of arisal.  

I don't use an alarm clock. I have an alarm cat. Max, a husky tuxie, jumps over me as he did this morning, more for his benefit than for mine: he wants his treats.  He used to jump on my chest, but I cured him of that with a slap or two.

Back to Kant! The Aporetics of Appearance

Ed Buckner writes and I respond in blue:

1) The expression “this table” refers to something, i.e. has a referent.

BV: Yes.

2) What it refers to is extended in space and persists through time.

BV: No doubt. (1) and (2) are 'datanic claims' in my terminology. They simply must be accommodated by any theory worth its salt.

A Kantian will sum up (1) and (2) by saying that 'this table' refers to something empirically real. 'Empirically' means via the senses. To say that the table is empirically real is to say that it exists independently of any particular perceiver such as Ed and his mental states, and is given via the outer senses (sight, touch, etc.).  It follows, of course, that the table is not an object of inner sense. For if it were an object of inner sense, it could not be in space. Ed's perceivings, which he can become aware of by inner sense, are in time, but not in space. Because the table is in space, it is not in Ed's mind, i.e., it is not one of his mental states.

3) Kant claims that a thing in itself is not extended in space and does not persist through time.

BV: Kant does indeed say that, but what does it mean? On one interpretation, what Kant means by the above claim is that a thing such as a table, when considered as a thing in itself, and thus not as it appears to us under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us, is not extended in space and does not appear in time.

On this interpretation, promoted by such noted Kant scholars as Gerold Prauss and Henry Allison, there are not two tables, a phenomenal table and a noumenal table; there is one table considered in two ways. Phenomena and things in themselves are not two types of thing, but two different ways of considering the same things. It is not as if, 'behind' the phenomenal table, there is a 'table in itself': there is only one table  viewed either from the human (finite) point of view or from the absolute point of view of an intellectus archetypus.

One advantage of this interpretation is that it allows the accommodation of  Kant's repeated insistent claim that he is not a Berkeleyan idealist. For Berkeley, spatial things such as tables are in the mind. For Kant, they are not in the mind, for the following reason. What is in the mind is accessible to inner sense, but not to outer sense. Tables and such, however, are accessible only to outer sense. So tables and spatial things generally are not in the mind. They are in space outside the mind.  It must be understood, of course, that for Kant space is a mere a priori form of our sensibility, and thus one of the epistemic conditions above mentioned.

4) Therefore what “this table” refers to is not a thing in  itself.

BV: The validity of the inference is questionable. On the above interpretation, what "this table" refers to is not a thing as it would be when considered apart from the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us. It refers to a thing under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us. It could therefore be said that what "this table" refers to is indeed that table itself, albeit under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us.  These conditions include space and time, the a priori conditions of our sensibility (Sinnlichkeit), and the categories, the a priori forms of our understanding (Verstand).

I cannot fault these. In which case, what does “this table” refer to, for a Kantian?

BV: "This table," in line with the above interpretation, refers to a table under the epistemic conditions (space, time, and categories) under which alone it can appear to us. It thus refers to a phenomenon or appearance (Erscheinung). But this phenomenon is not a private mental content of a particular perceiver.  It is an intersubjectively accessible thing, the table in our example.  

So, from a Kantian point of view, 'this table' refers to a table which to employ a signature Kantian phrase, is "empirically real but transcendentally ideal." 

Pace Ed Buckner, and other English commentators, Kant is not a Berkeleyan idealist. This is not to say that that Kant's transcendental idealism is in the the clear. It remains problematic for reasons we cannot go into now.

Kant on Suicide

Substack latest, with quotations from the forgotten Paul Ludwig Landsberg.

Spherical Triangles as Incongruent Counterparts?

Over the last 24 hours I have been obsessing over Kant's spherical triangles.  He claims that they are incongruent counterparts.  Now I understand how a hand and its mirror image are incongruent counterparts.  (A right hand's mirror image is a left hand.) But it is not clear to me how Kant's spherical triangles are incongruent counterparts. Supplement the above diagram with a second lower triangle that shares its base (an arc of the equator) with that of the upper triangle and whose sides are two arcs whose vertex is the south pole.

David Brightly's comment is the best I received in the earlier thread. (He works in Info Tech and I believe he has an advanced degree in mathematics.) He writes,

Not clear to me either, Bill. Why does Kant resort to spherical triangles? [To show the existence of incongruent counterparts.] Consider first two right triangles in the plane with vertices (0,0), (3,0), (0,4) in triangle A and (0,0), (3,0), (0,-4) in B. In plane geometry A and B are considered congruent, not by translation or rotation in the plane but rotation out of the plane ('flipping') with their shared edge as axis. Now think of these triangles on the sphere with edges of length 3 along the equator and those of length 4 on a meridian. The lower triangle cannot be flipped into congruence with the upper---it curves 'the wrong way'. Congruence on the sphere is more restrictive than congruence in the plane. But they are mirror images of one another in the equatorial plane. Likewise, Kant's isosceles triangles cannot be flipped into registration. Has he just overlooked that they can be slid on the sphere into alignment?

As Brightly quite rightly points out, "The lower triangle cannot be flipped into congruence with the upper --- it curves 'the wrong way'."  That was clear to me all along.  My thought was that if you rotate the lower triangle through 180 degrees so that its southern vertex points north, it would fit right over the upper triangle. I think that is what David means when he writes, "they can be slid on the sphere into alignment."

In other words, the lower triangle needn't be rotated off the surface of the sphere with the axis of rotation being the common base, it suffices to slide the triangles into alignment and thus into congruence along the surface of the sphere.  

Therefore: Kant's spherical triangles are not incongruent counterparts or enantiomorphs.

Now David, have I understood you? I am not a mathematician and I might be making a mistake.

Kant, Spherical Triangles, and Incongruent Counterparts

Buckner demands an argument from incongruent counterparts to the ideality of space. But before we get to that, I am having trouble understanding how the 'spherical triangles' Kant mentions in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, sec. 13,  are incongruent counterparts. Perhaps my powers of visualization are weak. Maybe someone can help me.

I understand how a hand and its mirror image are incongruent counterparts. If I hold up my right hand before a mirror what I see is a left hand.  As Kant says, "I cannot put such a hand as is seen in the glass in the place of its original; for if this is a right hand, that in the glass is a left one . . . ." (p. 13)  That is clear to me.

Now visualize a sphere and two non-plane 'spherical triangles' the common base of which is an arc of the sphere's equator. The remaining two sides of the one triangle meet at the north pole; the remaining two sides of the other at the south pole.  The two triangles are exact counterparts, equal in all such internal respects as lengths of sides, angles, etc.  They are supposed to be incongruent in that "the one cannot be put in place of the other (that is, upon the opposite hemisphere)." (ibid.)  That is not clear to me.

Imagine the southern triangle detached from the sphere and rotated through 180 degrees so that the south vertex is pointing north and the base is directly south. Now imagine the southern triangle place on top of the northern triangle.  To my geometrical intuition they are congruent!

So, as I see it, hands and gloves are chiral but Kant's spherical triangles are not.

Wikipedia:

In geometry, a figure is chiral (and said to have chirality) if it is not identical to its mirror image, or, more precisely, if it cannot be mapped to its mirror image by rotations and translations alone. An object that is not chiral is said to be achiral.

A chiral object and its mirror image are said to be enantiomorphs. The word chirality is derived from the Greek χείρ (cheir), the hand, the most familiar chiral object; the word enantiomorph stems from the Greek ἐναντίος (enantios) 'opposite' + μορφή (morphe) 'form'.

Notes on Idealism, Realism, Frege, and Prichard

Ed Buckner sent me a pdf the first couple pages of which I reproduce below. Bibliographical data here. Emphases added. My commentary is in blue. 

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

Twentieth Century Oxford Realism

Mark Eli Kalderon and Charles Travis

1 Introduction

This is a story of roughly a century of Oxford philosophy told by two outsiders.
Neither of us has ever either studied or taught there. Nor are we specially privy to
some oral tradition. Our story is based on texts. It is, moreover, a very brief, and
very highly selective, story. We mean to trace the unfolding, across roughly the
last century, of one particular line of thought—a sort of anti-idealism, and also a
sort of anti-empiricism. By focussing in this way we will, inevitably, omit, or give
short shrift to, more than one more than worthwhile Oxford philosopher. We will
mention a few counter-currents to the main flow of 20th century Oxford thought.
But much must be omitted entirely.

Our story begins with a turn away from idealism. Frege’s case against idealism, so far as it exists in print, was made, for the most part, between 1893 (in the preface to Grundgesetze volume 1) and 1918-1919 (in “Der Gedanke”). Within that same time span, at Oxford, John Cook Wilson, and his student, H.A. Prichard, developed, independently, their own case against idealism (and for what might
plausibly be called—and they themselves regarded as—a form of “realism”). Because of the way in which Cook Wilson left a written legacy it is difficult at best to give exact dates for the various components of this view. But the main ideas were probably in place by 1904, certainly before 1909, which marked the publication of Prichard’s beautiful study, “Kant’s Theory of Knowledge”. It is also quite probably seriously misleading to suggest that either Cook Wilson or Prichard produced a uniform corpus from the whole of their career—uniform either in content or in quality. But if we select the brightest spots, we find a view which overlaps with Frege’s at most key points, and which continued to be unfolded in the main lines of thought at Oxford for the rest of the century.

Frege’s main brief against idealism could be put this way: It placed the scope of experience (or awareness) outside of the scope of judgement. In doing that, it left us nothing to judge about. A central question about perception is: How can it make the world bear on what one is to think—how can it give me what are then my reasons for thinking things one way or another? The idealist answer to that, Frege showed, would have to be, “It cannot”.

BV: This is not at all clear. An example would be nice. Let me supply one. I see a tree. The seeing is a perceiving and this perceiving is a mental state of  me, the perceiver.  I see that the tree is green.  Seeing that the tree is green I come  to think that the tree is "one way or another," e.g., green as opposed to not green.  The authors seem to be asking the following question: How can perceiving something -- a tree in my example -- make the world give me the perceiver a reason for thinking the tree to be "one way or another," green for example?

This is a very strange question, one that has no clear sense.  Or at least I don't know what the authors are asking. If the question has no clear sense, then the supposedly idealist answer has no clear sense either. The authors are presumably defending some sort of realism about the objects of sense perception. If so, then it is not my perceiving that makes the world do anything. Their question ought to be: how do physical things in the external world, things that exist and have (most of) the properties they have independently of my or anyone's perceivings, make our perceivings of these things have the content that they in fact have? How does the green tree over there bring it about that I am now having an experience as of a green tree? Or is this perhaps the very question the authors are trying to ask their convoluted way?

But let's read on.

What, in Frege’s terms, “belongs to the contents of my consciousness”—what, for its presence needs someone to be aware of it, where, further, that someone must be me—cannot, just in being as it is, be what might be held, truly, to be thus and so. (This is one point Prichard retained throughout his career, and which, later on, he directed against others who he termed “sense-datum theorists”. It is also a point Cook Wilson directed, around 1904, against Stout (see section 4).

BV:  There is a solid point here, but it needs to be put clearly. The tree is in space and is green. No content of consciousness is in space or is green. Therefore, the tree is not a content of consciousness. This syllogism refutes a form of subjective or psychological idealism. But who holds it? Certainly not Kant. But let's leave Kant out of the  discussion for now. More important than Koenigsbergian exegesis is the deep and fascinating question of idealism versus realism.

What I said in the preceding paragraph needs a bit of refining. If I see a tree, then I am aware of something. That awareness-of or consciousness-of is an episode in my conscious, mental life.  So it is appropriately referred to as a 'content of consciousness.' Now consider that awareness-of just as such.  (Of course, you cannot consider my awareness, but you can consider your own similar but numerically different awareness.) Is it green? No. It is colorless. The awareness-of, as such, is not the sort of 'thing' that could have a color.  

The awareness of green is not a green awareness.  If it were green it would have to be extended in space. No color without extension. But the awareness-of, though it is in time, is not in space.  So here we have a content of consciousness that is neither colored nor in space. 

We should all will agree, then,  that a perceiving as of a green tree is not a green perceiving. This is so even if the perceiving is not merely as of the tree, but of it in the sense that implies that there exists a tree that is being perceived. Again, all colors are extended in space. But no mental act is extended in space. Ergo, no mental act is colored. A fortiori if mental acts  are as G. E. Moore once said, "diaphanous."  

What about the content of a mental act? It too is a 'content of consciousness.' Macbeth had an hallucinatory visual experience as of a dagger. The dagger-appearance is what I am now calling the content. It is clearly distinct (though not separable) from the hallucinatory experiencing.  The hallucinatory act/experiencing is not spatially extended.  What about the dagger-appearance?  Did it not seem extended to Macbeth? Don't pink rats look to be extended in space by that drunks who hallucinate them? Yes they do.  What we can say here is that while the dagger-appearance is phenomenologically extended, it is not extended in objective space. 

But there is a deeper reason for opposing subjective idealism. This I believe to be the solid point that Prichard makes.

If I judge a tree to be green, I judge it to be green whether or not I or anyone so judge it.  So if the tree is green, it is green in itself whether or not there are any perceivers.  The point is quite general: to judge of anything x that it is F is to judge that it is F in itself whether or not there are any judgers. It doesn't matter whether the judgment is true or false: a judgment that x is F purports to lay bare the way things are independently of judgers, whether or not in fact things are as the judgment states. 

So if I say that the perceiving is green, I thereby commit myself to saying that the perceiving is green in itself whether or not there are any perceivers.  But it is contradictory to maintain that something that can exist only as a content of consciousness, and thus cannot exist in itself, can also exist in itself apart from any consciousness.

What I am calling 'the solid point 'puts paid to any form of idealism that identifies physical objects with contents of consciousness if those contents exist only in contingent minded organisms such as human animals.   If there exists a tree that I perceive, it is as little in my consciousness as it is inside my head. But please note that the point just made presupposes the reality of the external world and thus begs the question against those forms of idealism that avoid the mistakes that subjective/psychological idealists make.

So, in particular, it was crucial to Frege that a thought could not be an idea (“Vorstellung”), in the sense of “idea” in which to be one is to belong to someone’s consciousness. The positive sides of these coins are: all there is for us to judge about—all there is which, in being as it is might be a way we could judge it to be—is that environment we all jointly inhabit; to be a thought is, intrinsically, to be sharable and communicable. All these are central points in Cook Wilson’s, and Prichard’s, Oxford realism. So, as they both held (early in the century), perception must afford awareness of, and relate us to, objects in our cohabited environment.

BV: The authors seem to be saying that it is not about ideas, Vorstellungen, contents of consciousness, etc. that we make judgments, but about the common physical environment in which we human animals live.  This remains vague, however, if we aren't told what "the environment" is.  Do they mean particular things in the physical world, or are they referring to the physical world as a whole? And while it is true that thoughts (either Frege's Gedanken or something very much like them) are communicable and thus sharable -- unlike contents of consciousness that are numerically different for numerically different people -- what does this have to do with "the environment"? Fregean and Frege-like thoughts are abstract objects; hence, not to be found in the physical "environment."  Of course, for Frege, thoughts/propositions are not contents of consciousness; it does not follow, however, they are in the "environment."  There are in Frege's third realm, that of abstracta. (I promise to avoid tasteless jokes about the supposedly anti-Semitic Fege and the Third Reich.) 

There is another point which Prichard, at least, shared with Frege. As Prichard
put it:

There seems to be no way of distinguishing perception and conception
as the apprehension of different realities except as the apprehension
of the individual and the universal respectively. Distinguished in this
way, the faculty of perception is that in virtue of which we apprehend
the individual, and the faculty of conception is that power of reflection
in virtue of which a universal is made the explicit object of thought.
(Prichard, 1909, 44)

Compare Frege:

A thought always contains something which reaches out beyond the
particular case, by means of which it presents this to consciousness as
falling under some given generality. (1882: Kernsatz 4) But don’t we see that the sun has set? And don’t we also thereby see that this is true? That the sun has set is no object which emits rays which arrive in our eyes, is no visible thing like the sun itself. That the sun has set is recognized as true on the basis of sensory input. (1918: 64)

For the sun to have set is a way for things to be; that it has set is the way things are according to a certain thought. A way for things to be is a generality, instanced
by things being as they are (where the sun has just set). Recognizing its instancing
is recognizing the truth of a certain thought; an exercise of a faculty of thought.

By contrast, what instances a way for things to be, what makes for that thought’s
truth, does not itself have that generality Frege points to in a thought—any more
than, on a different level, which Frege calls “Bedeutung”, what falls under a (first-level) concept might be the sort of thing things fall under. What perception affords is awareness of the sort of thing that instances a way for things to be. Perception’s role is thus, for Frege, as for Prichard, to bring the particular, or individual, in view—so as, in a favorable case, to make recognizable its instancing (some of) the ways for things to be it does. The distinction Prichard points to here is as fundamental both to him and to Frege as is, for Frege, the distinction between objects and concepts.

BV: Now things are now getting interestingly 'aporetic.' How do I know that the sun has set? I see the sun, and I see the horizon, but I don't literally see (with my eyes) that the sun has set. If the italicized words pick out an entity, it is an invisible one. As Frege says, "That the sun has set is no object that emits rays . . . ."

How do I know that the tree is green? I see the tree, and I see green at the tree, but I don't see that the tree is green. Why not? Well, 'That tree is green' is logically equivalent to 'That green tree exists.' So if I can see that the tree is green, then I can see that the green tree exists. But existence is not empirically detectable. I can sense green, but I cannot sense existence. So I cannot see that the green tree exists.  Therefore, I cannot see that the tree is green.  Existence and property-possession are invisible. More generally, they are insensible, and not because of our sensory limitations, but because existence and property-possession are not empirically detectable by any manner of critter or by any device. 

And yet I know that the tree is green and I know that the sun has set. But how? Frege's answer, "on the basis of sensory input" is lame.  Sure, there has to be sensory input for me  to know what I know in these cases, but how does it work? Such input is necessary, but it cannot be sufficient.  Here is what Frege says in Der Gedanke:

Das Haben von Sinneseindruecken ist zwar noetig zum Sehen der Dinge, aber nicht hinreichend. Was noch hinzukommen muss, ist nichts Sinnliches. (Logische Untersuchungen, 51)

To be sure, the having of sensory impressions is necessary for seeing things, but not sufficient. What yet must be added is nothing sensory.

Necessary, because seeing (with the eyes) is a sensory function that cannot occur without sensory data, which is to say, sensory givenness, sensory input. Not sufficient, because what I need to know to know that that the tree is green, is that the physical individual/object does in reality instantiate the concept/property. The problem is that I cannot see the copulative linkage in the green tree any more than I can see the existence of the green tree. For again, to see either the linkage or the existence I would have to be able to sense them when there is no sensory awareness of either.  

What Frege adds that is not sensory is the thought/proposition. But this item is off by itself in a platonic topos ouranios. How on Earth or in Plato's Heaven can Fregean thoughts avail anything for the solution of our problem? To know that the tree is green in reality I need to know the sublunary unity of thing and property here below. How is that knowledge aided by the positing of a 'ouranic' item, the thought/proposition, whose subject constituent is an abstract item as abstract as the thought itself? The Fregean thought brings together a subject-constituent, a sense, with a predicate-constituent, also a sense.  It does not bring together the concrete tree and its properties.

What the authors say above on behalf of Frege and Prichard is thus no answer at all. We are told, "Perception’s role is thus, for Frege, as for Prichard, to bring the particular, or individual, in view—so as, in a favorable case, to make recognizable its instancing (some of) the ways for things to be it does."  Are they joking?  This glides right past the problem.  What I need to know to know that the tree is green is the linkage or togetherness of individual and property in the thing in the external world. The thing is a this-such or a something-which. You cannot split the this from the such.  You cannot split perception from conception assigning to the first the job of supplying bare individuals and assigning to the second the job of providing universals.  For the problem, again, is 'methectical,' a problem of methexis: how do sensory individual and  intelligible universal meet to form the sublunary this-such?

Kant has an answer (whatever you think of it): the synthesis of individual and property/concept is achieved by the transcendental unity of apperception! 

I will have more to say about this in a later post.

Against H. A. Prichard and the 'Standard Picture' of Kant

 In an earlier post, drawing on the work of Henry E. Allison, I wrote:

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

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

In this entry I will expand upon the above by taking a close look at the stretch of text in H.A. Prichard's Kant's Theory of Knowledge (1909) in which he discusses the straight stick that appears bent when immersed in water.  This is a classical example of perceptual illusion.  It illustrates how an appearance (in one sense of the term) may distort reality (in one sense of the term).  Call the first the A1 sense and the second the R1 sense. My claim, of course, is that this empirical A1-R1 distinction is not the same as Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves, and that anyone who, like Prichard, thinks otherwise has simply failed to understand what Kant is maintaining.  Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves is the distinction between empirically real, intersubjectively accessible, public, causally interacting things in space and time, on the one hand, and those same things considered apart from the a priori conditions of our sensibility.  The Earth and its one natural satellite, the Moon, are examples of phenomena in Kant's sense.  Neither is a private, mental item in a particular mind as a modification of such a mind or an item internal to it. The Earth and the Moon are not mental phenomena in any Cartesian, Humean, or Brentanian sense, but empirically real, physical things. But though they are empirically real, they are transcendentally ideal when considered independently of the conditions of our sensibility.

In sum, there are two distinctions. The first is the distinction between private mental contents of particular minds and real things external to such minds. For example, Ed is enjoying a visual experience of his by-now-famous desk.  Neither the desk as a whole nor any part of it is literally in Ed's mind, let alone in his head. The desk, like his head and the rest of his body, is in the publicly accessible external world.  Now let 'A1' denote Ed's experience/experiencing whereby his desk appears to him, and let 'R1' denote the desk itself which is external to Ed's mind/consciousness. Prichard's mistake is to conflate this A1-R1 distinction with Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves. The R1 of the first distinction is the A2 of Kant's distinction which, again, is the distinction between intersubjectively accessible objects in space and time and those same objects viewed independently of the conditions of our sensibility.

I now turn to Chapter IV of Prichard's book. The chapter is entitled "Phenomena and Things in Themselves."  Prichard takes Kant to be saying that spatial and temporal relations are "relations which belong to things only as perceived." (p. 79.)  Prichard goes on to say, "The thought of a property or a relation that belongs to things as perceived involves a contradiction."  He brings up the submerged stick which is in reality straight, but appears to a perceiver as bent. Prichard then makes the unexceptionable point that 

. . . the assertion that something is so and so implies that it is so and so in itself, whether it be perceived or not, and therefore the assertion that something is so and so to us as perceiving, though not in itself, is a contradiction in terms. 

This is certainly true. After I explain why it is true, I will explain why it has nothing to do with Kant.  One cannot assert of anything x that it is F without thereby asserting that x is F in reality.  What one asserts to be the case one asserts to be the case whether or not anyone asserts it.  (Of course, it doesn't follow that what one asserts to be the case is the case. All that follows is that what one asserts to be the case purports to be the case independently of anyone's act of assertion.  Saying this I am merely unpacking the concept of assertion.) So if I assert of x that it is bent, then I assert that x is bent in itself or in reality whether or not there are any assertors or perceivers.  To assert that x is bent is to assert that a mind-independent item is bent. (Of course, it does not follow that there is a mind-independent item that is bent; all that follows is that if some item is bent or straight or has any property, then it is mind-independent.) Therefore, if I assert of an illusory appearance that it is bent, then I fall into contradiction. For what I am then asserting  is that something that is mind-dependent -- because it is illusory -- is not mind-dependent but exists in reality. 

This is what I take Prichard to be maintaining in the passage quoted. Thus charitably interpreted, what he is saying is (by my lights) true.  But what does this have to do with Kant? Kant is not not talking about private mental items internal to particular minds such as an illusory appearance as of a bent stick. He is not saying of such an appearance (Apparenz) or semblance (Schein) that it is the subject of spatial and temporal relations.  If he were, then he would stand refuted by Prichard's unexceptionable point. But it strains credulity to think that a great philosopher could blunder so badly. 

Note also that to read Kant as if his phenomena (Erscheinungen) in space and time are private mental phenomena is to impute to him the sophomoric absurdity that mental data which are unextended are extended as they must be if they stand in physical relations. Such an imputation would be exegetically uncharitable in excelsis.

Finally, if space and time and everything in it is mental in Prichard's sense, and internal to particular minds like ours, then the upshot would be an utterly absurd form of subjective idealism. 

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

Further tangential ruminations.

How do I know that the visual datum is an illusory appearance? If I know that what appears to me -- the immersed-stick visual datum -- is illusory, then I know that what appears to me cannot be bent or straight or have any spatial property. For what is illusory does not exist, and what does not exist cannot have properties. But how do I know that the visual datum does not exist?

That is precisely what I don't know in the cases of perceptual illusion in which I am really fooled -- unlike the classic stick case above that fools no adult. No adult is 'taken in' by acquatic refraction phenomena. "Damn that boatman! He gave me a bent oar!"  Here is a real-life example.

Hiking in twilight, I experience a visual datum as of a rattlesnake. I jump back and say to my partner, "There's a rattler on the trail."  I assert the visual datum to be a rattler, which of course implies that in reality there is a rattler.  (And that I jumped back shows that my assertion was sincere.) A closer look, however, shows that I mistook a tree root for a snake. What I initially saw (in the phenomenological sense of 'see') was only an illusory appearance. If I then say that the illusory appearance is a rattler or is venomous, etc. then I fall into contradiction. The point is that illusory appearances do not exist and therefore cannot have properties: they cannot be bent or straight or venomous or of the species crotalus atrox, etc.

 

Guest Post: Buckner on Prichard on Kant

PRICHARD ON KANT: IN DEFENCE OF THE ANGLOSPHERE

D.E. Buckner

Bill Vallicella discusses here the ‘standard picture’ of Kant ’s transcendental idealism as a theory that affirms the unknowability of the ‘real’ (things in themselves) and relegates knowledge to the purely subjective realm of representations (appearances), adding that “P. F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere”. He argues that “Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz: between appearance and illusion/semblance.” He develops this theme in another post here, in the context of Kant’s ‘rainbow argument’ (A45/B63).

 

Bill does not explain the Anglospheric reading. In this post, I shall outline Prichard’s objection to the rainbow argument, as set out in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, pp. 94 ff). He objects, in effect, that the rainbow argument is an argument by analogy. Just as a rainbow is to the raindrops which create the illusion of a rainbow during a sunny shower, i.e. as appearance stands in relation to reality, so the raindrops are to the ‘things in themselves’. “Not only are the raindrops mere appearances, but even their circular form, nay, even the space in which they fall, are nothing in themselves but mere modifications or fundamental dispositions of our sensuous perception; the transcendental object [i.e. the thing in itself], however, remains unknown to us” (B62-3)." My emphasis.

 

But the analogy is a poor one. Prichard says (p.97) that we can only distinguish something as the thing in itself from an appearance, “so long as we mean by the thing in itself what Kant normally means by it, viz. something which exists independently of perception and is not an appearance at all.” I.e., the relation between rainbow and raindrops is not analogous to that between raindrops and things in themselves, because ‘thing in itself’ signifies something absolute and not relative, namely what the scholastics called a per se being, a thing that exists independently of any other thing, and particularly of any sentient thing. If a raindrop really is a per se being, then it exists independently of any other such being, so cannot be an appearance of something. If on the other hand it is not a per se being, then the analogy collapses: we cannot say that just as a rainbow stands to raindrops, so raindrops stand to raindrops-in-themselves.

 

Kant’s argument thus depends on a sleight of hand. “He reaches it by a transition which at first sight seems harmless … while he states the problem in the form ‘Are things in themselves spatial or are they only spatial as appearing to us?’ he usually states the conclusion in the form ‘Space is the form of phenomena’, i. e. phenomena are spatial. A transition is thereby implied from ‘things as appearing’ to ‘appearances’” (pp. 73-4).

 

Underlying the mistake, says Prichard, is the identification of perception with judgement. Our apprehension of what things are is essentially a matter of thought or judgement, and not of perception. “We do not perceive but think a thing as it is”. For example, the proposition “the portion of the great circle joining two points on the surface of a sphere is the shortest way between them via the surface” expresses a judgment that is valid for everyone.

 

Kant, however, treats the judgement as a perception; for if we apply his general assertion to this instance, we find him saying that what we judge the portion of the great circle to be essentially belongs to the perception of it, and is valid for the sensuous faculty of every  human being, and that thereby it can be distinguished from what belongs to the same perception of a great circle accidentally, e. g. its apparent colour, which is valid only for a particular organization of this or that sense. In this way he correlates what the great circle really is, as well as what it looks, with perception, and so is able to speak of what it is for perception. But, in fact, what the great circle is, is correlated with thought, and not with perception; and if we raise Kant’s transcendental problem in reference not to perception but to thought, it cannot be solved in Kant’s agnostic manner. For it is a presupposition of thinking that things are in themselves [my emphasis] what we think them to be; and from the nature of the case a presupposition of thinking not only cannot be rightly questioned, but cannot be questioned at all.

 

Simply put, a proposition is true or false depending on whether it agrees with reality or not.

 

As I shall argue elsewhere, this ‘Anglospheric’ point by Prichard marks a turning point in the philosophy of perception, indeed in philosophy itself. For nearly 300 years, beginning with the discovery of Descartes and others that the process of vision begins with the retinal image, the focus of philosophy was on perception, i.e. images, and not on language. Indeed, it is hard to find any informed linguistic analysis in the writing of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Kant and other. Church regarded Hegel’s Logic as marking the very lowest point of the history of logic. In the twentieth century Anglosphere, by contrast, the philosophy of perception is marked by a ‘linguistic turn’ to focus on language and philosophical logic. But that is a separate issue, as is the question of why philosophy on the Continent, much or all of it in the tradition that originates with Brentano and Husserl, took such a different turn.

 

Animal Awareness: Aristotle, Galileo, Kant

This just over the trans0m from Edward Buckner. I have added my comments in blue.

Aristotle: Even if all animals were eliminated and thereby all perceptions (since only animals perceive), “there will still be something perceptible—a body, for example, or something warm, or sweet, or bitter, or anything else perceptible.”

BV: Evaluation of the above requires that we get clear about the sense of 'perceptible.' There are at least the following three senses:

1) X is perceptible₁ =_df it is logically possible that x be perceived.

2) X is perceptible₂ =_df it is nomologically possible that x be perceived.

3) X is perceptible₃ =_df x is able to be perceived by some sentient being.

I suggest that (3) is what we normally mean by 'perceptible.'  What (3) says is that for a thing to be perceptible, there must be at least one existing perceiver with the ability to perceive the thing.  On (3), then, Aristotle is mistaken. So on a charitable interpretation, he probably means something like (2): many if not most natural things are such that, if there were an able-facultied perceiver on the scene, one or more natural things would be perceived, and would be perceived as having in themselves such qualities as being warm, bitter, or sweet. Aristotle is a realist about what we now call secondary qualities.

Galileo: “tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”

BV: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) belongs to the modern period which he helped inaugurate, along with Rene Descartes (1596-1650).   The main point to note for present purposes is that Galileo reduces the sensory qualities that Aristotle viewed as properties of things themselves to perceiver-relative 'secondary qualities.' So if "living creatures were removed," then at least the secondary qualities would be "removed" along with them. That's quite the contrast with Aristotle.  The Stagirite is a realist about warmth, etc,; the Italian is an idealist about warmth, etc.

What would Kant’s view be? Does he think that if all perceiving beings ceased to exist, then appearances would cease to exist? But appearances, according to him, are things like trees and rocks. Does he then think that if all perceiving beings ceased to exist, trees and rocks, and all other non-sentient things, would cease to exist? We should be told.

BV:  Underlying Ed's questions is the question: Who or what is the knowing subject for Kant?  For Aristotle, the knowing subject is the concrete man embedded in nature, a hylomorphic composite in which anima forma corporis. For Kant, however, the concrete man, the man of flesh and blood embedded in nature, with both animal body and animal soul, is blosse Erscheinung, a mere appearance or phenomenon, and thus an object of knowledge, but not the subject of knowledge, i.e., not the knowing subject.  For Kant, the knowing subject is transcendental.  This is Kant's view whatever you think of it. It is undoubtedly fraught with difficulties, but my sketch is accurate albeit superficial. 

And so the answer to both of Ed's questions is in the negative.

Berkeleyan and Kantian Idealism: How Do They Differ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A1 -------------------> R1 

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

                                              

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's say you have an enthymeme:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Does Kant Mean by 'Appearance'?

This from the Comments. The numerals are my intercalation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Standard Picture of Kant's Idealism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A psychological condition is

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

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

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

Idealism: Subjective, Objective, Transcendental

This from a recent comment thread:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hume and Kant on Sense Perception

Another round with Ed Buckner who writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Impressions are mental items.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have I misunderstood Kant? 

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

There is also the following excerpt from a different entry:

Kant

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Pure Concepts of Reason as Limit Concepts

 

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

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Immanuel Kant was born on this date in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 44 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 44 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 I say to my young friends: finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Finish it before your standards become too exacting. 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 298th birthday. Sapere aude!

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

Duty and Inclination

It is one's duty to control one's inclinations despite the strong inclination to dismiss one's duty.

The Concept GOD as a Limit Concept

The concept GOD is the concept of a being that cannot be constituted in consciousness in Husserl's sense of 'constitution,' a being that cannot be a transcendence-in-immanence, but must be absolutely transcendent, transcendent in itself, not merely for us.  It follows that there cannot be a phenomenology of God. At best, there can be a phenomenology of such of our experiences as purport to be of or about God.

We know that the concept GOD is the concept of something absolutely transcendent, and we know this by purely conceptual means. We have the concept GOD and we analyze it: we simply unpack its meaning. Whatever the origin of this concept, it is there in us and available for analysis. Of course, we cannot learn by conceptual analysis that God exists, but we can know something about what God cannot be like, if he does exist.  We can know, for example, that God, if he exists, is not a concept.  No surprise here, and nothing that distinguishes God from my chair, since my chair is not a concept either.  (One cannot sit on a concept.)  The difference between the concept CHAIR and the concept GOD is the difference between an ordinary concept and a limit concept (Grenzbegriff).* 

This is the distinction between those concepts that can capture (mirror, represent) the essences or natures of the things of which they are the concepts, and those concepts that cannot. Call the first type ordinary concepts and the second limit concepts. Thus the concept CUBE captures the essence of every cube, which is to be a three-dimensional solid bounded by six square faces or sides with three meeting at each vertex, and it captures this essence fully.   The concept HELIOTROPIC PLANT captures, partially,  the essence of those plants that exhibit diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts in response to the direction of the sun.  Concepts are mental representations.  Essences are extra-mental.

Now the concept GOD cannot be ordinary since this concept cannot capture the essence of God. For (i) in God essence and existence are one, and (ii) there is no ordinary concept of existence.

Ad (i). That in God essence and existence are one follows from the fact that nothing could count as the Absolute if it were a composite of essence and existence.  And we know by conceptual analysis that God is the Absolute: the concept GOD is the concept of 'something' absolute.  This is the case whether or not God exists.

Ad (ii).  When I say that there is no ordinary concept of existence, I mean that there is no ordinary (non-limit) concept that is adequate to existence. (There are bogus concepts of existence such as Quine's.) There is no ordinary (non-limit) concept of existence because the existence of a thing, as other than its essence, cannot be conceptualized.  Why not? 

This is because each existing thing has its own existence.  Thus the existence of Al is Al's existence, the existence of Bob is Bob's, and the existence of Carla is Carla's.  For the existence of a thing is that which makes that very thing exist.  Existence cannot be a property like being human, being sentient, being sunburned.  These properties are multiply instantiable; existence, however, is not multiply instantiable. There are no instances of existence.  

Now if each thing has its own existence, then existence is implicated in the irreducible singularity of each existing thing. Irreducible singularity, in turn, cannot be conceptualized by minds like ours which trade only in the general and multiply instantiable. It's an Aristotelian point. If Aristotle wrote in Latin it would go: individuum qua individuum ineffabile est. The individual as such, the singular as such,  is ineffable and cannot be conceptualized.  The Peripatetic tells us that science is never of the particular as particular but only of the particular as exhibiting general or repeatable features. The particular as such is unrepeatable.   But of course there are no individuals (particulars) bare of properties. Every finite individual is a this-such. This is a law of metaphyica generalis. So, while the individual as individual cannot be conceptualized, the individual as bearer of properties can be conceptualized as an instance of those properties.  If  I think of Mary as an instance of lovable properties, then I abstract from the haecceity (thisness) that makes her different numerically from her indiscernible twin Sherry.  So if I love Mary precisely and only as an instance of lovable properties, then it will make no difference to my so loving her whether Mary or Sherry is its object. It will, however, make a difference to Mary. "I want that you should love me for what makes me me, and not for what I have in common with her!"  I explain this all in great detail in Do We Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?

The crucial point here is that when we think of an individual as an instance of properties, we abstract from (leave out of consideration) the individual's thisness and its existence.  I am not saying that the existence and the thisness of a concrete individual are one and the same; I am saying that that they go together as a matter of metaphysical necessity.  

Ad (i + ii).  In God there is no real distinction between existence and nature. That was the first point. The second was that no ordinary (non-limit) concept captures the individuality of the thing of which it is the concept. Therefore, since God is (identically) his nature, there can be no ordinary concept of God, whence it follows frat GOD is a limit concept.

There is, then, a  clear sense in which God is unconceptualizable or unbegreiflich: he cannot be grasped by the use of any ordinary concept. But it doesn't follow that we have no concept of God.  We do. The concept GOD is a limit concept: it is the concept of something that cannot be grasped using ordinary concepts.  Our cognitive architecture is such that we can grasp only the general, the repeatable, but never the irreducibly singular.  The concept GOD, however, is the concept of 'something' absolutely and irreducibly singular.  God is one without a second, one without even the possibility of a second. Any god that doesn't satisfy this metaphysical exigency just isn't worth his salt.

The concept GOD is the concept of something that lies at the outer limit of discursive intelligibility, and indeed just beyond that limit. We can argue up to this Infinite Object/Subject, but then discursive operations must cease. We cannot penetrate the divine essence since this essence is one with existence, and existence cannot be conceptually penetrated. We can however point to God, in a manner of speaking, using limit concepts. The concept GOD is the concept of an infinite, absolute and wholly transcendent reality whose realitas formalis so exceeds our powers of understanding that it cannot be taken up into the realitas objectiva of any of our ordinary concepts.

Now if you have followed that, then you are in a position to see that the following objection is a 'cheap shot' easily dismissed.  "You contradict yourself. You say that God cannot be conceptualized but at the same time you operate with a concept of God as unconceptualizable."  But no contradiction arises once we distinguish ordinary from limit concepts. 

If the critic accuses me of inventing a distinction ad hoc to save the ineffability and transcendence of God, then my reply will be that there are numerous other examples of limit concepts.  See the aptly appellated category, Limit Concepts. 

________________

*The term Grenzbegriff first enters philosophy in 1781 in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Curiously, he uses the term only once in the works he himself published. The term surfaces a few more times in his Nachlass.  The sole passage in the published works is at A255/B311 where Kant remarks that the concept noumenon is a Grenzbegriff.

Among the Riddles of Existence

Among the riddles of existence are the riddles that are artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. This is one way into philosophy. It is the way of G. E. Moore. What riddled him was not the world so much as the strange things philosophers such as F. H. Bradley said about it.  

If the Moorean way were the only way, there would be no philosophy. Moore was very sharp but superficial. Yet you cannot ignore him if you are serious about philosophy.  For you cannot ignore surfaces and seemings and the sense that is common. Bradley, perhaps not as sharp, is deep.  I am of the tribe of Bradley. Temperament and sensibility play major roles in our tribal affiliation as our own William James would insist and did insist in Chapter One of his Pragmatism with his distinction between the tender-minded and the tough-minded.

The entry to which I have just linked has it that the tender-minded are dogmatic as opposed to skeptical. Bradley, though tender-minded, is not. He is avis rara, not easily pigeon-holed. He soars above the sublunary in a manner quite his own.  On wings of wax like Icarus?  Like Kant's dove?  Said dove soars through the air  and imagines it could soar higher and with less effort if there were no air to offer resistance.  But the dove is mistaken.  The dove on the wing does not understand the principle of the wing, Bernoulli's principle.  Is the metaphysician  like the dove? The dove needs the air to fly. Can the metaphysician cut loose from the sensible and sublunary and make the ascent to the Absolute?

In the face of temperament and sensibility argument comes too late. 

Bradley and James seem to agree on the latterliness of argument. In the preface to Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, Bradley quotes from his notebook:

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct. (p. x)

But why 'bad'? If I could speak to Bradley's shade I would suggest this emendation:  

Metaphysics is the finding of plausible, though not rationally compelling, reasons for what we believe upon instinct . . . .

Nietzsche too can be brought in: "Every philosophy is its author's Selbsterkenntnis, self-knowledge." 

As for Moore, is he the real deal? My young self scorned him. No true philosopher! He gets his problems from books, not from the world! The young man was basically right, but extreme in the manner of the young.   I have come to appreciate Moore's subtlety and workmanship.

Who is Caius?

Robert Paul Wolff 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 on Capital Punishment

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 an 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. 

Kant's Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772

The brief missive to Herz sheds considerable light on Kant's Critical project.  Herewith, some notes for my edification if not yours.

1) How is metaphysica specialis possible as science, als Wissenschaft? Having been awakened by David Hume from his "dogmatic slumber," Kant was puzzling over this.  It occurred to him that the key to the riddle lay in raising and answering the question:

On what ground rests the relation of that in us which we call representation to the object?

Representations 'in us,' i.e., 'in' our minds, are of or about objects 'outside of' our minds. What makes the representation of an object about the very object of which it is the representation? For example, what makes my visual awareness of a particular tree an awareness of that very tree?

There are three cases to consider.

2) If the representation in the subject is caused by the object, Kant thinks that an easy answer is forthcoming: the representation is of or about the object in virtue of its being caused by the object.  The tree, or the light reflected by the tree, affects my eyes, thereby causing in me a representation of that very tree.  We set aside for the time being the question whether this easy answer is a good answer.

3) We also have an easy answer to the above question if representations are active with respect to their objects, as opposed to passive as in the case of my seeing a tree. Suppose  the object itself were created by the representation, as in the case of divine representations. In cases like this, Kant tells us, "the conformity of these representations to the object could be understood." (82)

4) Now for the third case, the hard case. What are we to say about the pure concepts of the understanding, the categories? These conceptual representations, being pure, are not caused by sensation. But neither are they creative with respect to their objects. What then gives them objective reference? 

As pure concepts, the categories have their seat in our understanding. They are thus subjective conditions of thinking, not categorial determinations of things.  What gives these subjective conditions of thinking and judging -- to think is to judge -- objective validity?  That is the problem which Kant sets forth in his letter to Herz.  But he does not in that letter propose a solution.

5) He gives his solution in 1781 in the Critique of Pure Reason. Can I sketch it in a few sentences?

I touch a stone. I receive a sensation of hardness and warmth. No judgment is involved.  Judgment enters if I say, "Whenever the sun shines on the stone, it becomes warm." But this is a mere Wahrnehmungsurteil, a subjective judgment of perception. It lacks objective validity. It records one perception following another in a subjective unity of consciousness, as opposed to a consciousness in general.  The judgment does not record causation, assuming that causation involves necessitation, as Kant does assume. All we have at the level of perception are Hume's spatiotemporal contiguity of perceived events and their regular succession: the sun's shining on the stone followed by the stone's becoming warm.  Kant is of course convinced that there has to be more to causation than regular succession.

But if I say, "The sun warms the stone," then I make an Erfahrungsurteil, a judgment of experience which is objectively valid.  I am not merely recording a succession of perceptions, but an instance of causation in which the cause necessitates the effect.  The necessary connection is not out there among the things; it enters via the understanding's imposition of the category of cause on the sequence of perceptions.  The objective or transcendental unity of apperception, as the vehicle of the categories does the job. Just don't ask me how exactly. Here is where things get murky. This is what I wrote my dissertation on.

6) I am now in a position to answer in a rough way the question  of how the pure concepts of the understanding have objective validity. They have objective validity because the objects of experience are products of the categorial formation of the sensory manifold within a "consciousness in general," a transcendental, not psychological, unity of apperception.  It follows that the world of experience is an intersubjectively valid but merely phenomenal world and not a world of things in themselves.  The "highest principle of all synthetic judgments" is that "the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience themselves, and thus possess objective validity in a synthetical judgment a priori."

Since "the understanding is the lawgiver of nature,"  Human skepticism bites the dust, but so also does Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism. This is because the Copernican revolution, at the same time that it validates  synthetic a priori  judgments in mathematics and physics for phenomena, restricts them to phenomena and disallows them for noumena such as God, the soul, and the world as a whole, the objects of the three disciplines of metaphysica specialis.

Unfortunately, Kant's system raises as many questions as it answers. But that is the fate of every philosophy in my humble opinion.  The dialectical nature of reason, which gives rise to dialectical illusion with respect to noumena, unfortunately infects everything we do in philosophy even when we draw in our horns and stick to phenomena.

Can Kant Refer to God?

This is a re-working of an entry from 19 September 2016.  It relates to present concerns about limit concepts and whether and to what extent God can be subsumed under our concepts.

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

Ed Buckner raises the title 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 began 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 it is also an unstable  tissue of apparently 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 clarification 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.  For intellects of our type, 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.

As for the soul, it 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 that they are actual in mathematics and physics, and would have to be actual in metaphysics if the latter were a science.  Kant concludes that  synthetic a priori judgments are possible in mathematics and physics only because the world of experience (Erfahrung) is not a world of things in themselves whose existence, nature, and law-like regularity are independent of our mental contribution, but a merely phenomenal world to whose construction (transcendental) mind makes an indispensable contribution. 

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.  This is not a world of illusions, but a world of intersubjectively valid objects of experience. But while objective in the sense of intersubjectively valid, these objects do not exist in themselves. Things in themselves (noumena in the negative sense) are beyond our ken.  Yet we must posit them since the appearances are appearances of something (obj. gen.).  And it is presumably the affection of our sense organs by these things in themselves that gives rise to the sensory manifold that is then organized by a priori forms (categories and forms of sensibility) on the side of the subject.  The restriction of human knowledge to phenomena secures the objectivity (intersubjective validity) of our knowledge, but by the same stroke rules out any knowledge of the objects of special metaphysics (God, the soul, the world as a whole). 

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 weak reading is represented by the following argument:

1) A necessary condition of knowledge is intuition (Anschauung).

2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

Therefore

4) God is unknowable by us. (1, 2, 3)

Nevertheless

5) God is thinkable by us. (3)

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 to God, the soul, angels, libertarianly free noumena agents, the world as a whole, or even things in themselves. 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 as social constructs, etc.

The strong reading is represented by the following argument:

1*) A necessary condition of meaningful objective reference is intuition.

2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

Therefore

4*) God cannot be meaningfully referred to by us.

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.  Read in the weak way, Kant is saying that the categories of the understanding  have no cognitive employment in the absence of sensory input, but they do have an empty logical employment and objective reference/meaning.  Read in the strong way, the categories are devoid of objective reference/meaning in the absence of sensory givenness.  If so, the concept of God is a limit concept in the negative sense: it merely marks a limit to our understanding, but does not point beyond that limit. At best, the concept of God is a regulative Idea whose employment is purely immanent.

First and Second Intentions: Buckner on Zabarella, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein

The following two quotations are from the Facebook Medieval Logic forum.

 

Giacomo Zabarella (1533 – 1589). “Now first intentions are names immediately signifying realities by means of a concept in the soul, for instance, animal and human being, or those concepts of which these names are signs. But second intentions are other names imposed on these names, for instance, genus, species, name, verb, proposition, syllogism, and others of that sort, or the concepts themselves that are signified through these names.”

Edward Buckner comments:

 

The distinction [between first and second intentions] is rediscovered in various ways by subsequent philosophers. I see something like it in Kant’s distinction between concepts which are ‘pure’, and concepts which are not, in Frege’s distinction between concept and object words, and possibly in Wittgenstein, who viewed logic as a sort of scaffolding through which we conceive the world, a scaffolding which cannot be described in words. (4121 “Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them”). If I understand Wittgenstein, it is that there can be no science of second intentions in Zabarella’s sense, for such a science would be a futile attempt to represent logical form. The Tractatus of course is such an attempt, which is why he says (654) his propositions, while nonsensical, can be used as steps [in a ladder] to climb up beyond them, then throw away the ladder.

 

Kant

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Pure Concepts of Reason as Limit Concepts

 

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

 

Frege

 

I also think Ed is wrong about Frege.  But I'll leave that for later. Wifey wants to go out to dinner. Philosophy before bread, but happy wife, happy life!

 

As for Wittgenstein, I think Ed is on the right track. 

 

 

What is a Limit Concept? The Example of Prime Matter

In an earlier entry I suggested that the concept God is a limit concept or Grenzbegriff.  I now need to back up a few steps and clarify the concept limit concept and give some non-divine examples.  If I cannot supply any non-divine examples, then I might justifiably be accused of ad-hoc-ery.

Terminological note: The term Grenzbegriff first enters philosophy in 1781 in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Curiously, he uses the term only once in the works he himself published. The term surfaces a few more times in his Nachlass.  The sole passage in the published works is at A255/B311 where Kant remarks that the concept noumenon is a Grenzbegriff.

In the earlier post I distinguished between ordinary concepts and limit concepts. I said in effect that ordinary concepts 'track' essences and are more or less adequate 'captures' of the essences of things encountered in experience.  Limit concepts, I said, 'point beyond' ordinary experience. Thus the concept of God does not and cannot represent the essence of God but it can serve to conceptualize God as that which lies beyond ordinary conceptualization.  The concept of God is a limit concept that points beyond itself to something real that cannot be subsumed under ordinary concepts.

But there is an ambiguity here that I glossed over in the earlier entry. Can't there be limit concepts that simply limit without 'pointing beyond'? How do I know that the concept of God is not like this? (This is connected with the question whether the concept of God might just be a regulative ideal in Kant's sense.)

The trailhead is where the road ends. But further locomotion is possible  on foot or in some other non-motorized manner (horse, mountain bike, pogo stick . . .) The limit in this example has a this-side and an accessible far side. The limit points beyond the paved road to the unpaved trail. But let us say that I have reached the end of the road figuratively speaking: I have just died.  Assuming mortalism, my death is a limit to my life beyond which there is nothing. Some limits are such that the this-side has a far-side; others have only a far-side.

So we should distinguish between limit concepts that simply limit and limit concepts that both limit and point beyond.

Example: Prime Matter

The concept of prime matter is clearly a limit concept. For prime matter is matter at the lowest level of hylomorphic analysis.  Now does this concept point beyond itself to something real, prime matter in itself?  Or does this concept simply mark a limit to the hylomorphic analysis of the real? 

To pursue this question, a  little primer on hylomorphism is needed.

Given that thought sometimes makes contact with reality, one can ask: what must real things be like if thought is to be able to make contact with them? What must these things be like if they are to be intelligible to us? A realist answer is that these mind-independent things must be conformable to our thought, and our thought to them. There must be some sort of isomorphism between thought and thing. Since we cannot grasp anything unstructured, reality must have structure. So there have to be principles of form and organization in things. But reality is not exhausted by forms and structures; there is also that which supports form and structure. In this way matter comes into the picture.  Forms are determinations.  Matter, in a sense that embraces both primary and secondary matter, is the determinable as such.

Proximate matter can be encountered in experience, at least in typical cases. The proximate matter of a chair consists of its legs, seat, back. But this proximate matter itself has form. A leg, for example, has a shape and thus a form. (Form is not identical to shape, since there are forms that are not shapes; but shapes are forms.) Suppose the leg has the geometrical form of a cylinder. (Of course it will have other forms as well, the forms of smoothness and brownness, say.) The cylindrical form is the form of some matter. The matter of this cylindrical form is wood, say. But a piece of wood is a partite entity the parts of which have form and matter. For example, the complex carbohydrate cellulose is found in wood. It has a form and a proximate matter. But cellulose is made of beta-glucose molecules. Molecules are made of atoms, atoms of subatomic particles like electrons, and these of quarks, and so it goes.

Hylomorphic analysis is thus iterable. The iteration cannot be infinite: the material world cannot be hylomorphic compounds 'all the way down,' or 'all the way up' for that matter. The iteration has a lower limit in prime or primordial or ultimate matter (materia prima), just as it has an upper limit in pure form, and ultimately in the forma formarum, God, the purely actual being. Must hylomorphic analysis proceed all the way to prime matter, or can it coherently stop one step shy of it at the lowest level of materia secunda? I think that if one starts down the hylomorphic road one must drive to its bitter end in prime matter. (Cf. Feser's manual, p. 173 for what I read as an argument to this conclusion.) Ultimate matter, precisely because it is ultimate, has no form of its own. As John Haldane describes it, it is "stuff of no kind." (“A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind” in Form and Matter, ed. Oderberg, p. 50) We could say that prime matter is the wholly indeterminate determinable. As wholly indeterminate, it is wholly determinable.

The Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter

While it is easy to appreciate the logic that leads to the positing of prime matter, it is difficult to see that what is posited is coherently thinkable. Here is one consideration among several. Call it the Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter. It may be compressed into the following aporetic dyad:

1. Prime matter exists.

2. Prime matter does not exist.

Argument for limb (1). There is real substantial change and it cannot be reduced to accidental change. All change is reduction of potency to act, and all change requires an underlying substrate of change that remains self-same and secures the diachronic identity of that which changes. The substrate of a change is the matter of the change. What changes in a change are forms, whether accidental or substantial. Without the potency-act and matter-form distinctions we cannot accommodate the fact of change and avoid both the Heraclitean doctrine of radical flux and the Eleatic denial of change. Or so say the scholastics. In the case of accidental change, the subject or substrate is secondary matter (materia secunda). But substantial change is change too, and so it also requires a substrate which cannot be secondary matter and so must be prime matter. Given what we must assume to make sense of the plain fact of both accidental and substantial change, “prime matter must exist.” (Feser's manual, p. 172) It must exist in reality as the common basis of every substantial change.

So if substantial change occurs, prime matter exists!

Argument for limb (2). Prime matter is pure potency. It has to be, given the exigencies of accounting for substantial as opposed to accidental change. As pure potency, prime matter is wholly indeterminate and wholly formless. In itself, then, prime matter does not exist. It does not exist actually, as is obvious. But it also does not exist potentially: prime matter does not have potential Being. This is because the principle of the metaphysical priority of act over potency requires that every existing potency (e.g., the never actualized potency of a sugar cube to dissolve in water) be grounded in something actual (e.g., the sugar cube). The pure potency which is prime matter is not, however, grounded in anything actual. (Note that one cannot say that prime matter is a pure potency grounded in each primary substance. Prime matter is the ultimate stuff of each primary substance; it is not potency possessed by these substances.) Therefore, prime matter does not exist. It does not exist actually and it does not exist potentially. This is also evident from the first of the twenty-four Thomistic theses:

Potency and act are a complete division of being. Hence whatever is must be either pure act or a unit composed of potency and act as its primary and intrinsic principles. (Quoted by Feser, Schol. Metaph., p. 31)

If so, prime matter does not exist. For prime matter is neither pure act nor composed of potency and act. It is interesting to observe that while purely actual Being can itself be by being something actual, purely potential Being cannot itself be by being something potential (or actual). God is actual Being (Sein, esse) and an actual being (Seiendes, ens). But prime matter is neither potential nor actual. So prime matter neither is actually nor is potentially.

It thus appears that we have cogent arguments for both limbs of a contradiction. If the contradiction is real and not merely apparent, and the arguments for the dyad's limbs are cogent, then there is no prime matter, the very concept thereof being self-contradictory.  But the concept does seem to make sense.  To solve the above dyad, then, we may simply deny that prime matter exists. (And let the scholastics worry about how to account for substantial change.)  If we deny that prime matter exists, we are left with the concept, but nothing to which it 'points.'   The concept of prime matter would then be a limit concept that merely marks a limit to our hylomorphic analysis of the real, but does not refer beyond itself to anything real.

Of course, I am not maintaining that the concept of God is like this.  I am merely giving an example of a non-divine limit concept and explaining the difference between limit concepts that are 'immanent' and merely regulate our thinking activity, and those that are 'transcendent' and point beyond.

Summing Up the Dialectic

Some claim that God is inconceivable.  According to a stock objection, this is either false or meaningless. It is false if the claimant is operating with some concept of God, and meaningless if with no concept of God.  I replied to the objection by distinguishing between ordinary and limit concepts.  If the concept of God is a limit concept, then it can be true both that we have a concept of God and that God is nonetheless inconceivable in that he falls under no ordinary  concept.

What I have yet to show is the concept of God is a limit concept in the positive or transcendent sense or 'pointing' sense and a not a limit concept that merely limits us to the this-side.  The concept of prime matter is most plausibly viewed as a limit concept in the negative or immanent sense.  Why isn't the God concept like this?

 

 

Equality is a Norm, not a Fact. Does it Have a Ground or is it Groundless?

As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically.  By no empirical measure are people equal.  We are naturally unequal.  And yet we are supposedly equal as persons.  This equality of persons as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment.  Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for example, insists that every human being, and indeed very rational being human or not, exists as an end in himself and therefore must never be treated as a means to an end.  A person is not a thing in nature to be used as we see fit.  For this reason, slavery is a grave moral evil.  A person is a rational being and must be accorded respect just in virtue of being a person.  And this regardless of inevitable empirical differences among persons.   Thus in his third formulation of the Categorical Imperative in his 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.  (Grundlegung 429)

In connection with this supreme practical injunction, Kant distinguishes between price and dignity. (435)  "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity."  Dignity is intrinsic moral worth.  Each rational being, each person, is thus irreplaceably and intrinsically valuable with a value that is both infinite -- in that no price can be placed upon it -- and the same for all. The irreplaceability of persons is a very rich theme, one I explore, with the help of the great Pascal, in Do I Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?

These are beautiful and lofty thoughts, no doubt, and most of us in the West (and not just in the West) accept them in some more or less confused form.  But what do these pieties have to do with reality?  Especially if reality is exhausted by space-time-matter?

Again, we are not equal by any empirical measure.  We are not equal as animals or even as rational animals.  We are supposedly equal as persons, as subjects of experience, as free agents.  But what could a person be if not just a living human animal (or a living 'Martian' animal).  And given how many of these human animals there are, why should they be regarded as infinitely precious?  Are they not just highly complex physical systems?  Surely you won't say that complexity as such confers value, let alone infinite value.  Why should the more complex be more valuable than the less complex?  And surely you are not a species-chauvinist who believes that h. sapiens is the crown of 'creation' just because we happen to be these critters.

If we are unequal as animals and equal as persons, then a person is not an animal.  What then is a person?  And what makes them equal in dignity and equal in rights and infinite in worth?

Now theism can answer these questions.   We are persons and not mere animals because we are created in the image and likeness of the Supreme Person.  We are equal as persons because we are, to put it metaphorically, sons and daughters of one and the same Father.  Since the Source we depend on for our being, intelligibility, and value is one and the same, we are equal as derivatives of that Source.  We are infinite in worth because we have a higher destiny, a higher vocation, which extends beyond our animal existence: we are created to participate eternally in the Divine Life.

Most of the educated cannot credit the idea of a Supreme Person.

But if you reject theism, how will you uphold the Kantian values adumbrated above?  If there is no God and no soul and no eternal destiny, what reasons, other than merely prudential ones, could I have for not enslaving you should I desire to do so and have the power to do so?

Aristotle thought it natural that some men should be slaves.  We find this notion morally abhorrent.  But why should we if we reject the Judeo-Christian God?  "We just do find it abhorrent."  But that's only because we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  What happens when the fumes run out?

It is easy to see that it makes no sense, using terms strictly, to speak of anything or anybody as a creature if there is no creator. It is less easy to see, but equally true, that it makes no sense to try to hold on to notions such as that of the equality and dignity of persons after their metaphysical foundations in Christian theism have been undermined.

So here you have a Nietzschean challenge to the New Atheists.  No God, then no justification for your classically liberal values! Pay attention, Sam Harris.  Make a clean sweep! Just as religion is for the weak who won't face reality, so is liberalism.  The world belongs to the strong, to those who have the power to impose their will upon it.  The world belongs to those hard as diamonds, not to those soft as coal and weak and womanish. Nietzsche:

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, What is Noble?, Friedrich Nietzsche    Go to Quote

More quotations on strength and weakness here.

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.

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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