Humanism Lecture Seven

Humanism – Lecture Seven 21/11/05

Remember: we left Kant where he was trying to discover if there could be such a thing as a synthetic a priori statement.

(quote 1)

Some kinds of ‘synthetic a priori’ statements:

every straight line is the shortest distance between two points

in all changes of matter in the universe the quantity of matter remains unchanged

all men are free to choose

The last statement “all men are free to choose” is a metaphysical statement – the first one is a mathematical statement – and the third one is a physics statement.

Kant thought that if synthetic a priori statements were justifiable in mathematics and physics that they must also be justifiable in metaphysics.

And remember: Kant wanted to philosophize about those things outside of experience – God, beauty, freedom, goodness –things that he felt Hume had taken away from him with his empiricist philosophy.

Kant solved this problem of the synthetic a priori by: creating a new relationship between the mind and its objects.

If we assume a relationship between mind and its object – Hume believed that the mind is passive and that simply receives its information from the objects – from this it follows that the mind would have information only about that particular object.

But the mind makes all kinds of judgments and decisions about objects that it will never experience – it can also make judgments about objects that it hasn’t experience and about the ways in which they will behave in the future.

This kind of knowledge cannot be explained by Hume’s theory of knowledge.

Kant’s theory was the reverse of Hume’s.

(quote 2)

The mind does not conform to the mind – BUT objects conform to the mind!

“failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest.”

“hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all our attempts to extend our knowledge by establishing something in regard to them a priori by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must, therefore, make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge … If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility.”

Kant did not mean that the mind creates objects – rather that the mind brings something to the objects it experiences.

Kant agrees with Hume that our knowledge begins with experience – but Kant thought that the mind was an active agent doing something with the objects it experiences.

That is: thinking involves not only impressions through our senses – but we also make judgments about what we experience.

Just as someone who wears coloured glasses sees everything in that colour – so every human being thinks with the natural structure of the mind.

The Structure of Rational Thought

(quote 3)

“there are two sources of human knowledge, which perhaps spring from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding. Through the former objects are given to us; through the latter they are thought.”

Knowledge is cooperation between the knower and the thing known – but even though I can know the difference between myself as knower and the thing I know – I can never know the thing in itself – why? – because the moment I know it – I have to know though the structure of my mind – I can never know the thing in itself.

My mind always brings ways of thinking to things – and this always affects my understanding of them.

The question that Kant then wanted answered:

(quote 4)

What does the mind bring to the given raw materials of our experience?

Categories of Thought and Forms of Intuition

The work of the mind is unify and synthesize our experience – it does this by putting on our experiences in certain forms of intuition: space and time.

We perceive things as in time and space – space and time are NOT ideas that we get from experience.

Space and time are a priori – space and time are the glasses through which we see all objects.

But there are other ‘intutions’ - apart from space and time - though which we see the world:

(quote 5)

quantity (we have in mind one or many)

quality (we have in mind negative or positive)

relation (we have in mind cause or effect)

modality (we have in mind possible or impossible)

All of these intuitions are what let us make sense of the world out of numberless sense impressions.

The Self and the Unity of Experience

What makes it possible for the world to make sense to us from a infinite number of impressions?

From his examination of the mind – Kant came to the conclusion that there must be a self that senses an object, remembers its characteristics, puts the forms of space and time, and cause and effect – all of these functions must happen in the one self – because if one self sensations, and other self had only memory, and so on there could never be a unified understanding of the infinite impressions.

(quote 6)

Where and what is this single self that brings all these infinite impressions together?

Kant calls it: “transcendental unity of apperception” – or “transcendental ego”

He uses the word “transcendental” because we never experience – but we know that it must be there – in other words, it is a priori.

Kant would say that it has to be there for us to be having any kind of experience.

As the world is unified – we also have a sense of our own unification.

I bring to myself the same glasses when I experience myself (quote 5) – as I do when I look at the world.

Phenomenal and Noumenal Reality

Phenomena and noumena

The importance of Kant’s philosophy is that it says that human knowledge is forever limited.

(quote 7)

Kant’s limitation of knowledge takes two forms:

(1) Knowledge is limited to the world of experience.

(2) Our knowledge is limited by the “glasses” that we see it through.

Phenomenal reality – the world as we experience it.

Noumenal reality – the world ‘as it is’ – before we perceive it through our “glasses”.

Kant said that we can never experience ‘noumenal reality’.

In other words, there is a reality that exists independently of us which we can never experience.

Transcendental Ideas of Pure Reason as Regulative Concepts

There are three ideas important to us because the help to unify or make sense of the world for us – these ideas are a priori:

(quote 8)

Self (source)

World (place)

God (cause)

These ideas – like noumenal reality – are things that we can never experience. Kant said that they are transcendental because that are not objects in our experience.

These are the metaphysical subjects to which the rationalists argued proofs for – the mistake Kant says that they made was to think that they were transcendent and not transcendental

(quote 9)

“there is a great difference between something given to my reason as an object absolutely, or merely as an object in the idea. In the former case our concepts are employed to determine the object [transcendent]; in the later case there is in fact only a scheme for which no object, not even a hypothetical one, is directly given, and which only enables us to represent to ourselves other objects in an indirect manner, namely in their systematic unity, by means of their relation to this idea. Thus, I say, that the concept of a highest intelligence is a mere idea [transcendental] …”