History of contemporary psychology

Prelude (From Kant to Taylor)

Taylor has argued that practical reason has fallen into disrepute as the result of modernity’s moral skepticism (the fact that moral claims lack validity and cannot be arbitrated by reason) and been displaced by the epistemological (not what is known but how it is known). Taylor’s attempt to recover a role for practical reason is then a way of undercutting the priority of the epistemological while it is charged with demonstrating and clarifying the implicit assumptions held inviolable by all interlocutors of a position. What is remarkable about Taylor’s uncovering of practical reason is that he begins with Mill’s claim that question of ends are never amenable to proof but merely of assent or dissent and hence practical reason is a matter that follows an ad hominem rather than apodictic model of reason. As a critique of Kant might note, what is at stake in practical reason is the self.

Sensitive to the naturalistic fallacy (deriving “ought” from “is”), Taylor argues that moral claims, claims of practical reason, are other than what we desire, or believe to desire, but rather what we are committed to in his notion of “strong evaluation”. Thus, Mill’s claim that assertions of assent or dissent about questions of ends are not weakly ad hominem in the sense it is these and not those ends we desire and hence cannot reason about, for showing this does nothing to settle the question of whether or not we ought to desire these but not those ends. As Taylor notes, Mill understood the naturalistic fallacy well-enough and hence appealed to the intuition of competent judges to settle the question of the ends of desire. What Mill understood well-enough was that reason cannot resolve the conflict, or skepticism, or moral ends in apodictic terms – and hence he turned to the ad hominem argument. But Taylor asks why Mill did so and he argues that Mill as the inheritor of the Enlightenment relied on naturalism to provide an apodictic model of moral discourse including, paradoxically perhaps (subjectivism), our natural desires. In other words, naturalism was extended to include the subject’s desires and attitudes towards things which while this seemed a natural progression (to include desires among the things in this world that are “given”) does not mean, as Taylor notes, that the fact of desire is more right than any other desire.

The argument against naturalism derives in large part from examination of our actual practices of moral deliberation involving discourses which are never neutral regarding our desires or attitudes (which was of course Mill’s justification for invoking the ad hominem argument). Or to move straight to Taylor’s question, “Can a naturalist epistemology, invoking metaphysics of neutrality, override our self-understanding in strong evaluative terms?” The claim that it can and does is, according to Taylor, one reason for our contemporary derision of subjectivism and its accompanying moral skepticism. Naturalism dismisses the ad hominem argument and advocates an apodictic model of reason that would totally mischaracterize the human situation as understood in terms of traditionally meaningful practices and discourses inescapably strongly evaluative and purposive. Of course this is in contrast with the 19th c. which already demarcated between the natural and human sciences, a distinction which has in many ways been subject to the overriding power of epistemology as the only model of reason which can withstand the parochialism of traditionalism and the prejudicial attitudes of a peculiar subjectivist perspective on the world. Mill’s ad hominem argument for utilitarianism was intended to by-pass any such traditionalism and subjectivism with an appeal to the (“given”) nature of human desire and, presumably, this has been

utilitarianism’s strength namely in carrying foundationalism into the explanation of human nature and along with it also procedural reason (into the moral domain). Yet during this same century the evident ubiquity of ethical disagreement also led to the embrace of ethical relativism.

According to Taylor the demand that the apodictic model of procedural reason arbitrate moral claims is deeply mistaken precisely because the assumption is that arguments have criteria with the result that there can be no incommensurable positions. Taylor, MacIntyre, and others have argued that there are no such criteria but rather any effort to evaluate different moral stances or perspective always relies on some gain in historical understanding. Something very similar is at stake in various post-modern writers such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault. Taylor sets out three arguments in support to the claim that the foundationalist thesis is deeply mistaken in its appeal to criteria, and the effort to eliminate ad hominem models (i.e., empiricist) of practical reason.

1. Comparative judgments do not so much rely on criteria or invariant standards but on comparison or on relations among rival positions in evaluating anomalies.

2. Comparative judgments are transitional in that they are essentially historical judgments in evaluating rival positions. Here we find the 17th c. a distinction between understanding and explanation. The turn towards mechanism/Nature was deemed to require a very different sense of explanation than say the place of things in the meaningful order of Nature which relied on understanding. Pre-Enlightenment (Aristotelian) thinking requires no such distinction. However, this distinction between explanation and understanding yields even greater skepticism with respect to moral life even as it also demands that we think relationally about incommensurability such that we gain clarity in our pre-understanding and so extent our knowledge of the connections between incommensurables. Moreover, in thinking relationally we not only extend our grasp of knowledge among incommensurables we also extend our understanding of our purposes and effective practices (without invoking criteria). Thus while Taylor is sympathetic to, for example, Kuhn’s claim that there is no rational justification of transitions between incommensurables, Taylor also rejects radical incommensurability as the foundationalist account would have it. The risk here is that skepticism which accompanies explanation at the level of life as lived, also risks irrationalism in understanding historical transitions. But the connection between understanding and practice means that whenever we increase our social practices we also gain in knowledge.

3. Taylor, like Kant, begins phenomenologically, within human life, wherein understanding and practice dovetail each other. Understanding is enabling not in the sense that we are trying to convince others to change their minds but to show others that whatever assumptions they (others) adhere to cannot account for what we are urging in some moral domain. Incommensurability is then to be understood relationally in the sense that these are to be understood historically as transition between incommensurables, and as making explicit what was implicit in pre-understanding within traditions (immanent critique). Indeed, one such preconception that has confused our understanding and fostered skepticism is the foundationalist view of life as a closed system. But history and life knows no such a closed system. Not merely for the history of scientific theory but especially in the moral domain of life. As Taylor points out however none of this implies that there may well be disputes to that cannot be so resolved (i.e., ad hominem) and hence may well not allow for arbitration.

4. Obviously all efforts to uncover and make explicit assumptions in one’s interlocutor position assume that interlocutors in a dispute do share some understanding. Yet there is also a more radical move wherein there is no such sharing and where a transition between rival in a dispute involves some error-reducing move. Here the direction of the argument is reversed. Whereas from a foundationalist perspective transition is always a gain (whereas the reverse is not so), if the transition is one of reducing error then it is a gain.

In practical reason we identify a tension then try to understand that tension by dissipating a confusion which is due to some neglect in self-understanding. Understanding the tension re-situates the tension in making explicit some assumption, worn feelings, overlooked significances etc. I come to see the situation differently than I did before this self-understanding and hence the situation changes in some ways (see Taylor, 1985, Ch 2 in Phil Papers Volume 1: Agency and Language). .

In a way practical arguments (reason) are always ad hominem arguments. These arguments appeal to what the opponent is already committed to, perhaps implicitly, or at least what they cannot repudiate. The fact that we cannot convince people of the value of a premise may of course be grounds for despair and indeed practical reason may be powerless to resolve such disputes.

We can however expand the notion of practical argument by (1) identifying a common premise which would allow for debate especially in the

light of history, and(2) even where there is no such common premise, we might claim that a transition

from one premise to another is a gain, and both these are ad hominem.

Of course, just as we are never fully rational we never fully that an argument is true simpliciter. What we can claim is that an argument is a better account, and hence practical arguments are always comparative, in that it brings to light what the interlocutor cannot repudiate. A new account can make better sense of difficulties confronting alternative accounts, can explain what other accounts cannot, and is more error reducing than other accounts. Hence what practical reason attempts is to make implicit premises explicit, discern contradictions, and bring our facts that are seemingly anomalous. All of which extends the range of rational argument, assuming we appreciate that not all disputes are about fully explicit positions which they never are.

Even so not all disputes can be arbitrated in reason. Relativism has something going for it insofar as diversity and mutually incomprehensibility do mark moralities. For example we may understand little of human sacrifices and it is only our sophisticated pluralism that prevents us from making devastating judgments. Hence understanding may not be universal and may be markedly different in different cultures. Especially science and technology seem enormously influential compared to traditional sufficiency of reflection, contemplation, or understanding. Making and doing as a result of knowledge so changes our world as to alter whole ways of living. Yet we should not give up on reason in being intimidated by distance of incomprehensibility as grounds for adopting relativism.

Perhaps most relevant today is the difference in culture based on distance of cosmology. But even here even if we could demonstrate say the universality of individual rights, we may also lose something in defending universalism (equality) but this does not mean we should take an easy position on agnostic relativism. Moral arguments in our day lead to skepticism precisely because we adhere to relativism in grounding the way things are (ad

hominem a la Mill). Our naturalist temper is hostile to strong evaluation and hence to making any ad hominem arguments, instead we simply assume relativism in maintaining that there are cultural social and historical differences – an instance of the naturalistic fallacy.

Along with the adherence to naturalism comes the rejection of ad hominem arguments as illegitimate (this is part of universalism-relativism continuum). We loath to reason about fundamental commitments for then we would have to acknowledge that truth is something asserted/maintained. We limit reason for the sake of the empirical natural world as being the way it is…encapsulated universal rights even as we hold to the superiority of knowledge. As if universal rights were itself a product of empirical knowledge. This knowledge invokes foundationalism which deems reason to be reason about standards, criteria based on fully explicit positions and yielding absolute judgments of adequacy. But all this makes reason incomprehensible (limits of reason) insofar as reason is collapsed unto explanation.

Problem of other minds (Lecture 1)

You are talking to a friend; the talk is animated and involves all sorts of twists and turns in the conversation. Suddenly the conversation begins to stray into idle chatter and your attention wanders. But not entirely and with half your mind can still follow the talk but the other half of your mind is in a mood of detachment staring at the face and body of your friend as he talks. There is nothing odd about this; his is the same face, familiar and beloved as always. It is only that in looking at him your own mind has been invaded by an unusual question. His lips move, his eyes gleam, and his limbs move (gesture) all of which is quite usual. But your mind suddenly places these ordinary facts in a strange light…”is he really conscious behind all this physical appearing?” We all have these moments of passing schizophrenia - and we do not attaché much importance to them. But now consider that this passing mood is supported by a solid body of theory in psychology. Thus, there are numerous psychologists, and philosophers, who maintain that consciousness is something to be dispensed with in our explanations of human conduct. These theories may vary a good deal but they have in common one feature: we can proceed as if my consciousness of my friend does not exist and we find his bodily movements sufficient for the purpose of understanding him.

Why do we have this strange fear of consciousness? Why are we so uneasy about admitting consciousness as a clear fact in our human world? Of course, there is the problem of “other minds” – after all I do not “see” the consciousness of my friend or indeed my own consciousness; theory claims that consciousness is merely something I infer from his bodily movements. As an empiricist I cannot treat consciousness (his or

my own) as a basic datum in my hard-headed explanations of his conduct. I need not outright deny it of course but whenever my theoretical ingenuity can manage it, I must proceed “as if” this consciousness is not there.

Now the problem of “other minds” is a strictly modern one (thus we do not find it among the ancients or medievalists – whatever their other aberrations these older thinkers did not doubt that we live in a world shared by our own and other minds (a “spiritual world”). But in our modern age we feel compelled to raise doubts about our consciousness out of a spirit of what we imagine is theoretical exactness.

But surely there is something a little strange and foolish about this flight from consciousness. After all is consciousness is something we do expect to “see” in others/ourselves even if it cannot be a datum of science. We are fully aware of the minds of others in that we share in them. Other minds are fully a vital part of the flow of life that surrounds and sustains us. We are surrounded by a life larger than ourselves and of which we are an intimate part. Suppose for a moment, a moment of theoretical austerity, that we commit ourselves only to a minimal theory “as if” we had no mind and were not conscious but were only behaving bodies. Surely, this would be deranged, grotesque, schizoid…especially in a moment of passion, care, concern…this borders on madness.

In short there is a gap between theory and life, between reason and life. We entertain theories that we could not possibly live. Such gaps are not uncommon in our modern age but the one concerning consciousness is particularly ominous…

For example when we examine the first 6 years of this new millennium we are confronted by the nagging question of whether this civilization will survive (an old question). There is an apocalyptic note to every news event we read or hear which we cannot seem to escape. In fact, we seem in our culture to relish and indulge in this apocalypse (e.g., death metal music) and we use it to camouflage all sorts of political pleading. Whether this fear of the apocalypse is bogus or genuine it is revelatory; somehow it situates the past century and the present one. After all it is a very different apocalypse that people feared say in the year 1000!

What we now fear, at the turn of this millennium, are technology and science as central cultural events that characterize “modernity”. When did this modernity begin? Historical epochs merge into one another and it may be arbitrary to look for a beginning. Thus, when did the middle ages begin? When did they end? There is no absolute point of division between the past and the epochs that succeeded it. But there are times when we see clearly that something new has arrived and this something is bound to change humanity radically. I take the beginning of modernity to be the 17th c., the age that initiated modern science and its accompanying technology, and it is these two, science and technology, that characterize our modern age or what is sometimes called “modernity”.

What is modern science? What is that “event” that has transformed human life in the 17th c.? Whatever else science may be – and we will examine psychological science in some depth – it is above all the power of the human mind, of human freedom and originality, to construct concepts that are not merely passively found in nature but rather serve to organize our experience of nature. The existence of a body of knowledge we call science, and the activity of scientific inquiry (methods), is powerful evidence of the human beings in their freedom (to create, construct and act); in short of their consciousness.

Yet there is a curious paradox here. The “new science” of the 17th c. began with “mechanics” (meaning “many things” but above all decomposition, analysis, exact measurement, etc.) which was central to modern physics (“classical mechanics”). But mechanics soon became an ideology – mechanism – the human being is a machine just as Nature/universe is a machine. As our molecules go so do we go; the person is the gene’s way of making another gene! The human mind is, on this ideology, a passive and helpless pawn pushed around by forces of nature; freedom is an illusion and the entire ideology crescendos in the 19th c. in a pessimism that pervades the 20th c. psychological science (at least to those who understand it).

No sooner had the new science of the 17th c. entered the world and it becomes dogged by an ideology of scientism (its “shadow”). What is scientism (mechanism)? As a shadow of science it is not identical to the real thing. Scientism is pseudo-science or misinterpreted science drawing unwarranted conclusions/generalizations in pretending to be “philosophical”. But scientism is not philosophy if by philosophy we mean the effort to think soberly within the restrictions that human thought/reason/reflection must impose on itself. Scientism is neither science nor philosophy – it is a modern malady – it is ideology. It is an ideology like many ideologies is part of modernity. What is ideology?

The science which the 17th c sought was primarily physics/astronomy, namely the understanding of Nature/physical nature. But as the science of nature blossoms, the theories of the mind (now deemed to be a part of Nature) come to occupy philosophy in a way that generates paradoxes. It is as if the thinkers who had formulated the dazzling“new science” of nature (physics) were increasingly puzzled about the nature of the mind that produced this new science. In the four centuries or so since the new science and technology entered the Western world we have added immeasurably to our explanations of the Nature even as our understanding of the human mind/consciousness which produced this knowledge has become increasingly fragmentary and bizarre reaching a point today where we are in danger of losing any intelligent grasp on the human mind (consciousness) altogether.

I want to take a step backward and see how this situation came about. I am not going to treat you with heavy historical detail (although I warn you that historical amnesia is partly responsible for the current crisis of modernity - an age without consciousness is also an age without history); I want to treat only sufficient history to serve my effort at a thematic clarity – in relation to the science of psychology. I am not going to propose a new theory of the mind – you can find that in various psychological specializations – what I want to do is to simply lay hold of the fact that human consciousness has been lost in the modern world (psychology).

Lecture 2: the new science

The 17th c. was a strange century. It bristles with energy and genius but also with contradictions. However, it contained those contradictions and lived them in a way that we conclude that they are contradictions only on hindsight. The century created what we now know as modern science (which in some way has been as a great a revolution as has befallen humankind and yet the minds of the individuals who created this science were all firmly planted in the mind of God. It is necessary to begin with this salient fact.

The word revolution connotes violence but the revolution that was the beginning of modern science was silent. As Nietzsche observes great revolutions in thinking come “silently on dove’s feet”. In any case, the minds that originated modern science were immersed in theology and indeed the age was itself saturated in theology.

Consider the three greatest of these scientific geniuses: Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. They hardly viewed the world as our contemporary naturalists (say in the evolutionist traditions) view the world/universe. Kepler’s mind was fascinated by spiritual or angelic presences in the universe; while Galileo in his famous run-in with the church’s inquisition suggests, as Bertolt Brecht’s play “Galileo” would depict it, that he was a free-thinker, a dissident spirit in the style of the Enlightenment, yet Galileo would not have recognized himself in that light. His writings move within the mind of God, and the laws of nature he sought were for him the working of the divine mind in nature. Newton perhaps the greatest of the three in bringing expression to the outlines of a mechanical world-view that dominated Western science and technology to the present was a man/mind reposed with in the prophesies of Daniel; on which he spend more time than he did on mathematical physics. He left us a million and a half words on theology and in his personal life he was a man of steady an untroubled faith.

Despite this theological centeredness (the entire 17th c. was intensely pious) these founders of the new science were radically engaged in a way that would eventually tear Western civilization away from its religious moorings. They called the science they were creating “the new science” (however what they understood by this word “new” came to be understood only 150 years later by the philosopher Immanuel Kant). For they were deeply aware of their debt to the ancients: Euclid, Aristotle, Archimedes, and Pappus. The science they created could not have been “radical” or revolutionary had it not drawn on the ancients and medieval scholars. What T. S. Eliot said in the context of literature, namely that original creation draws always upon tradition even when it shakes up and transforms tradition, applies also to science. The whole body of science is a continuous stream from the beginnings of human consciousness, and genuine scientific creation is one that reaches most deeply into the body of this traditional thought in order to give it new direction.

If they were traditionalists, these founders of the new sciences were also radicals and rightly insisted on calling their science, the “new science”. But wherein did this newness

consists? It turns out that this is not an easy question to answer. In fact, we see that the answer is not forthcoming until Kant but meanwhile I want to say a few words by way of anticipation.

At first sight the newness of this new science was the fact that it was experimental. Whereas the ancients contemplated/speculated, the moderns experimented. Of course, no one experiments unless they also think about experimenting. If experimentation for these early founders of the new science involved the construction of machines which allowed for precise (quantitative) measurement (from the start science and technology go together – thinking and doing), they were also re-constructing Creation as Nature, that is creation as a machine. That is Nature itself must reflect the workings of the machines they constructed – mechanics became part of physics and physics became the whole of the new science. Nature became one interlocking machine – the machine of all machines.

What was so distinctive about mechanics that would give it such a special place? Mechanics is a science that deals with matter at rest or in motion. But this was not the matter that is sensuously and immediate before us, rather it is “matter” that has been abstracted and schematized mathematically (physicalism). The new science was first of all mathematical (the Renaissance recovered of Plato and his Pythagorean tradition) as much as it was experimental. This notion of matter as mathematical is not insignificant especially because on it hangs a philosophical lesson which is that the mind is central in the creation of the new science: the evidence for a mechanistic view of Nature is the mathematics that characterized the new science….and here is the first paradox that still haunts us today, namely the mathematics of the new science is the human mind (human consciousness) even as it gave rise to a mechanistic view of Nature which would eventually deem the human mind as feeble and unfree (totally determined by the mechanism that is nature).

Yet the founders of the new science felt no such uneasiness about the implications of their mechanistic worldview (that mechanism would eventually also embrace the mind) for their religious convictions. Indeed, they deemed this mechanistic view of Nature as the way that God managed his universe. What more intelligent way to arrange matter and the material universe than as a vast clockwork machine? The uneasiness about this machine-as-Nature when it did come was primarily among philosophers.

The scientific effort to found mechanics as the basis for physics quickly passed into a more general frame of mind – an attitude or disposition that the modern philosopher Alfred Whitehead aptly labeled “scientific materialism”. This was the conviction that the ultimate facts of Nature are bits of matter in space that all the phenomena of our experience are to be explained in terms of bits of matter. These bits of matter had only the properties that are in accord with mechanics: mass, extension, solidity, and movement in space. All other qualities of experience suddenly acquired as curious status: indeed, it seems rather curious that the nature of what we see/experience is not really there/real. Here we have the foundationalism which would come to characterize what philosophy later would call epistemology – and which I take to be the characteristic of “modernity”. Scientific materialism despite of its inherent paradoxes (e.g. nature is not what it appears to be – primary and secondary qualities – epistemology, and the mind is really not free/creative - anthropology - but is merely a conglomerate of bits of matter) was to become the dominant mentality for the next 300 years to the present. However, it was not, and still is not, so much an explicit philosophy as it was an unspoken attitude, habit, prejudice of mind. Even today, materialism is the unspoken basis of research and the

funding it receives. For the Christian believer of the 17th c. who was tempted by this reductionist view of Nature as bits of matter moving in space, there was always the exception, namely the soul. The soul was not a natural phenomenon; it stood outside nature/universe. But of course the effect of the scientific materialism was to leave this insubstantial soul precariously perched on the edge of matter in strange conjunction with the body (which was clearly “matter”). This precarious perch of the nature of the soul was to become very pronounced in the philosophy of the 17th c.

Finally, there is also the tension that suddenly emerged in the consciousness of this 17th c. namely that while the century was theologically grounded in God, these founders of the new science were discovering (uncovering) the strangeness of human presence in the universe now conceived as the machine-of-Nature – that is, the new science was discovering a vastness to the universe that was unimaginable to the medieval and ancient scholars. Copernicus had dislodged for once and for all the earth, humanity from its privileged position in the cosmos. Not just that we lost our position but also that in an infinitely extending universe we seemed but random and accidental (incidental) beings. We were not at the center and we were not at the edge: we were nowhere, just brute fact – part of the “throw-ness” (as Heidegger calls it) of existence. This unbelievable fact led to profound feelings of alienation perhaps best expressed by the greatest mind of the century, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and can even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened, and I am astonished at being here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me.

Alienation has become a dominant fact of modern life and of the 20th c. (perhaps explaining why the concept of anxiety has become so pronounced psychology). Of course, we have come to trivialize the meaning of “alienation” by customarily using for social alienation as the early Marx. But the most profound form of alienation is cosmic alienation inherent in our human consciousness of itself in relation to cosmic vastness. As we became conscious of this vastness of the universe so we became troubled by our being in it or part of it. Myth, magic, religion, and philosophy all seek to deal with this condition in different ways. In point of fact, philosophy only began to take note of this alienation in the 19th c when the structures of religion were pretty well eroded (with the “death of God” and the resulting “perspectivalism”). Whether philosophy by itself as a purely rational effort of mind can heal our alienation remains to be seen. Surely no one cares much for philosophy today – remarkably because surely “scientific materialism” that is characteristic of modern science is the ideology that made us astutely aware of but offered no solution to our alienation.

All this is not the usually picture we get about the 17th c. Usually the 17th c. is seen as the century of rationalism (Enlightenment), the shedding of a dogmatic past, the emergence of the “new science” perhaps retaining some remnant of religion (supra-natural) which would, however in the steady progressive march of science eliminate all such superstition and assure the advancement of knowledge in order to bring about Francis Bacon’s glorious vision of the betterment of humankind (we didn’t need Marx to tell us about that utopia). But this view of a fixed line of progress is no longer valid. Every era has its own aspirations and complexities; every era is whole and even with all the apparent

contradictions remains fertile. The line of progress that our historical consciousness has projected is an abstraction and a construction that fits a certain telos (an ideology of endless progress). The 17th c. was what it was and not some way-station between the medieval period and our scientific age. History is itself fundamentally an adventure in human consciousness and cannot be fixed in some abstract time-line. If I begin with the 17th c. it is because that age is not yet over and has not yet vanished; it is still present with all its paradoxes and tensions, its uncertainties and malaise (malady) of our modern consciousness. Indeed, perhaps at some future time we may regret that our minds are not as Newton’s was preoccupied with the Prophesies of Daniel or some other religious matter.

Lecture 3: Descartes

The alienation between us (our selves) and the machine-of-Nature - between subject and object – is something the 17th c bequeathed our age. We sometimes think of this rift as a Cartesian (subjective) whim but in fact the rift was one already put in place by the new science – “scientific materialism” which then forced Descartes to make this split between mind and body (that is, to rescue the mind). For consider, what is to become of me (my consciousness and freedom) in a universe (Nature) wholly determined by law? Only anguish, as Pascal lamented. No other species feels this anguish, or the implications of this scientific materialism as do human beings who cannot find sufficiency in their instincts, genes, or brains (the 20th c. notwithstanding).

But more than this insufficiency of instincts, the “I” that thinks also drags with it a history/tradition, memories/hopes, feeling/emotions that I cannot separate from my thinking. I am aware of all this in my body (as “lived”) which is the habitus wherein I live. For eons the universe existed without me and will continue to do so without me, and measured against the vastness of space and time, I am aware of my finitude – I will vanish and this reality, of my finitude, is incomparable to any other. For what meaning

does my mortality (wealth, fame, fortune, etc. or lack thereof….) have in the vastness of time and space? What meaning does my particularity have (in relation to others)? The answer of the “new science” alienates me even more from others. There is no “I” without this habitus – and it was Descartes who thought about this density of “I” and habitus (embodiment, tradition, history, others, and the vastness of the universe in space and time).

It was Descartes (1596-1650) who discerned in this density, this consciousness, my consciousness (solitary) of the thinker sitting besides the fireplace alone in his room…..paradoxically, this solitary consciousness is anything but solitary – for Descartes was man of his time (passionate about mathematical reason and the new science, a man who fought in the wars) a man of action. When he goes off at age 33 to a bar in Amsterdam to find seclusion he comes to reflect on himself, the ego which thinks, which lights up his solitude as he takes refuge from life. For in life, the 17th c not only brings the new science (certitude) but at the same time the new science brings uncertainty and doubt. Why? Because the new science doubted the world of the senses (Copernicus and others trusted reason/mathematics) and it was Descartes who confronted certainty with uncertainty of the new science (in this sense Descartes is not an Enlightenment thinker but the culmination of the medieval era). For even if Descartes reflections on life in a bar in Amsterdam shows that life is not what it appears to be (in accord with the new science), there is no doubt that his consciousness experience perceives it all as real. That is, if we are going to be deceived (by the senses) then we must possess consciousness – and so consciousness has priority of over matter – science – and as such consciousness must be the starting point of all reflection/thinking (philosophy) also about science. This was a bold step….to return to the certainty of consciousness of the “thinking I” at a time when all that was perceptually evident was in doubt. Descartes’ move in recovering the “thinking I” also recovered the certainty of subjectivity. If Hegel applauded Descartes’ habor (“thinking I”), in our own time we find hardly anyone willing to applaud Descartes’ idealism/dualism/rationalism. In fact, both of the 20th c major philosophical movements, analytic philosophy (and positivism) and phenomenology, however different one from the other, lament Descartes’ error (e.g., Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger). In this sense the 20th c. has rejected any concern with subjectivity and consciousness in an abiding concern with the impersonal (objectivity) of matter or being (whether of matter or of Being).

The question is whether Descartes’ prioritizing of consciousness of the “I think” did in fact prioritize the concrete subject/person as the point of certainty. Was the “I” of Descartes’ “I think” the habitus of embodiment, memories, hopes, emotions, etc.? Was Descartes a psychologist who tried, at the time of the new science, to recover something of the subject/person so as to forego the alienation that the rejection of all authority (God, cosmos/creation, church) gave rise to?

Descartes concern was for certitude in a world made uncertain by the new science (e.g., distinction between primary and secondary qualities first proposed by Galileo and later by John Locke). However, this “I” was for Descartes a merely an “instrument” (means/way/methodos) for finding an indispensable starting point (arche) for his method of systematic doubt which would isolate a certain (absolute) point of departure for thinking. I can doubt all that given to the senses and understanding, but I cannot doubt the consciousness (“I”) that doubts. Descartes turns the “I” back unto itself, doubting all, except itself as doubting. But this Cartesian “I” is itself an abstraction from the world; it is merely a (metaphysical) arche (and a methodological tool) required for his method of

systematizing doubt (which the new science had already begun) and in finding a place to stand (a point of certitude) quoting Martin Luther.

But once he abstracted the “I” as the beginning point of his method of systematizing doubt, Descartes was faced with the problem of getting the “I” back into the world (which had been suspended in his method of systematic doubt). If his laborious doubt left Descartes with a painful sense of his own finitude and imperfections, the certain “I” of consciousness that he postulated also has an idea of a supreme and perfect Being who embraces all reality, and this idea could not come from me but must come from this perfect Being (and, hence, who then must exist). This is the ontological argument for God’s existence (first proposed by St Anselm in the 11th c. 1033-1109). Of course, it is not an argument but rather an intuition compelling as soon as we reflect on the mystery of our own existence – it is a certainty as certain as my own existence – this is religious feeling (Descartes was Freud’s first victim – his ontological argument may be understood as a rationalization/a reaction formation in dealing with his own finitude and doubt).

In a way, God becomes an epistemological tool for grounding the knowledge we posses of the world through the senses – since God would not create beings (“I think”) that are deceived about their world – and if we use our faculties properly we can come to true knowledge. The problem is that what is so restored is not the concrete person but the “I” (ego cogito) and this is Descartes dualism (his answer to the scientific materialism of the new science) between the arche of the “I think” and the world of bits of matter moving in space. But we must also remember that Plato already knew that the soul is much more than “thinking” and Freud in our century only confirmed that Descartes’ “I” is anemic. The rational self or mind which Descartes made the essence of the soul (psyche) has no body, no habitus, no history, is solitary and knows no other minds or people. Yet, paradoxically enough, it is not this notion of soul as mind as reason that is the problem; rather Descartes problem is the body – pieces of matter – that cannot accommodate the soul/mind but remains external to it. Descartes body is not the lived body (habitus) but the body as matter (the mathematical abstraction of the physicist). But the body is never so removed from the soul (as Plato and Freud knew so well). Flesh and blood, feeling and emotion, and reason exist together in a corruptible unity. As long as we have an inadequate sense of the body (as lived) we cannot deal with the integrity (wholeness) of mind and body adequately. We are reminded that Descartes wrote a treatise on the passions – all the senses are seen through the privileged position of the “I”. Hence all that is given to the senses becomes “objective” to be known by way of thought, and hence, not is not “lived” but is object. Here Descartes’ dualism is carried into the person where we have the “I think” (distinguished from the “I lived”) and the body/world and it is this dualism that we have inherited: between mind (“I think” = soul) and the self as lived in the body (habitus). This dualism would constitute the supremacy of reason (certitude) in a world distinguished from the un-certainty the senses (but losing the person with others in the world).

Now the fact is that for Descartes, the “I think” is still the Christian unity of soul and body – although seemingly a very faint image of it. Scientific materialism had crucified this soul which Descartes tries to rescue by (1) splitting the person between mind=reason and every other psychic experience of consciousness especially as this relates to the “lived” body, and (2) by grounding the mechanism-of-Nature of the new science in the freedom of this mind=reason. Note the tensions here. In identifying mind/reason/freedom with the soul, and giving the soul priority to everything else that is known/experienced (which was threatened to be subsumed by the science machine), he (1) split the subject from the object and (2) split the person within him/herself. (Discuss psych-somatic illness

– e.g., psychoanalysis.) Descartes picture of the mind/soul as reason was in the 20th c. placed into doubt by psychoanalysis’ claim that reason was itself but a thin veneer of civilization, that reason was invaded by desire (forces unknown) – as indeed psychoanalysis was preceded by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others in the 19th c.

If today we no longer split reason/soul off from Nature, and indeed assimilated the whole psyche/self/person/subject to Nature (naturalism), we also have lost the sense of (1) soul/consciousness (in favor of a narrow conception of mind as reason), (2) made reason instrumental (in coming to know the world), (3), lost the integrity of the body/self/person (in favor of dualism), (4) lost the transcendental (in favor of ontological intuition), and (5) finally lost consciousness (in favor of instrumental reason).

Lecture 4: Leibnitz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) comes two generations after Descartes (1596-1650) and in this period the framework for the new science had already taken shape, and Leibnitz calls attention to the philosophical shadows that lurk about the Newtonian picture of Nature as machine.

Leibnitz would have been an extraordinary figure even in his own time; in a century of genius he stands out as its most many-sided mind. He addressed science, mathematics, philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and history. He was well acquainted with the works, besides the ancients, of Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes; he was also in touch with the best minds of his time notably Malebranche (the great Cartesian), Pascal (Leibnitz improved on his calculating machine), Locke, and Huygens (who stimulated his interest in optics) and with them maintained a massive correspondence; he visited the Royal Society in England (all under the reign of Louis XIV). Leibnitz was thoroughly conversant with the new science: he was the co-creator with Newton of calculus enormously important for the new science, and he was also thoroughly acquainted with Christian theology. He was a “speculative metaphysician” (against which Kant warned us) but he was also one of the last great Christian philosophers and believed that thought/reason required the fullness of the Christian life. He accepted the life of faith in a way that say Kant, 75 years later, could no longer do.

More importantly, Leibnitz was the best educated philosopher of his time (Descartes was educated in philosophy by the Jesuits at La Fleche; Leibnitz educated himself by reading seemingly everything he could especially from the medieval period, and the Greeks, strongly convinced that the past could bring understanding to the new science’s “scientific materialism”). Remarkably, Leibnitz disagreed with almost all of the founders and systematizers of the new science, especially Locke’s empiricism and Descartes dualism.

Leibnitz radically revises Descartes’ thinking about the soul (recall what was wrong with Descartes dualism was his thinking about the body). Descartes’ conception of matter was simply that of extension (it fills space), but Leibnitz bridles at this view and maintains that extension is simply bits of matter external to very other bit of matter, and he asks the important question: “what unifies these bits of matter?” In answering this question,

Leibnitz moves from an inert notion of matter to a notion of energy. Real that for Descartes the problem was that reason/mind confronted matter and this raised the question just how this was possible. But for Leibnitz perception (senses) did not merely operate mechanically; perception was itself permeated with reason and hence not just a physical events but a psychological one involving human consciousness – and consciousness was never matter.

Similarly, Leibnitz in reply to Locke’s “Essay concerning human understanding” (1690) writes “New essays on the understanding” (1765). The publication was post-humus as it was first completed in1704 but Locke had died that year and Leibnitz did not deem it proper to reply to or argue with the dead. In opposition to Locke’s claim that the mind was a tabula rasa, Leibnitz gave the classical rationalist reply namely that the mind must be prepared to receive experiences.

Locke in Book II of the Essay began with the claim that has become central to all empiricists:

“Suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience”

In reply to Locke’s claim that “nothing exists in the intellect that was not first in the senses” (a statement that Dun Scotus attributes to Aristotle), Leibnitz writes “nothing except the intellect itself”. In the Essays, Leibnitz constructs a conversation between Philalethes (friend of sleep –an empiricist) and Theophilus (friend of God – rationalist). Here Leibnitz gives Philalethes the role of Locke and himself takes the role of Theophilus and argues that experience is not necessary in order for the soul to have ideas and what experience provides is a context for our thoughts and direction for out ideas. It is impossible for experience to produce an idea for the very simple reason that it involves a physical confrontation between sense organs and matter, and ideas have nothing to do with these mechanical processes. But, agues Leibnitz, perception is not merely a mechanical process but always involves reason and so lead to ideas.

Theophilus is made to say: “This tabula rasa, of which so much is said, is in my opinion a fiction. Which nature does not admit ….Uniform things and those which contain no variety are never anything but abstractions, like time, space, and other entities of pure mathematics. There is no body whatever whose parts are at rest, and there is no substance whatever that has nothing by which to distinguish it from every other…those who speak so frequently of this tabula rasa, after having taken away the ideas, cannot say what remains……Experience is necessary, I admit, in order that the soul be determined to such and such thoughts, and in order that it take notice of the ideas which are in us; but by what means can experience and the senses give ideas? Has the soul windows, does it resemble tablets, is it like wax?

Leibnitz is clearest on his critique of Locke and Descartes in his Monadology written two years before his death, where he spells out his own metaphysics.

Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds… And supposing there were a machine, so

constructed as to think, feel, and have perceptions; it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work upon one another and never anything by which to explain perception.

Perception is a unique psychological event; it is that of which we are conscious. It is qualitative in a way that no purely quantitative material phenomenon can imitate. As we walk through the great mill of the mind, observing the spinning wheels and crashing hammers, we find nothing by which the mill could have perception; not that the mill does not have such perceptions, or is not aware of itself but that nothing in its moving parts could convey such.

Thus, the mind-body interaction advanced by Descartes is confused and Leibnitz claims meaningless. Mind is simply a monad, a simple substance, not reducible to anything and not deriving its character from any source outside itself (it is not extended).As with all simple substances it is understood as quality not quantity. It is intensive not extensive.For example, a point is not a very short line or a very small fraction of a line; rather, it is the idealized limit as extension (line) approaches zero and this limit is quality not quantity. Similarly, as quantity is stripped of its extensive features, there is a limit beyond which further reduction is not possible – this is the quality of being and not an extension of magnitude. The limit of the body is also a simple substance: it is a monad.

The body as it is perceived is a composite whose extension rises from an assembly of simple substances. No two simple substances are alike. Each monad not only has a distinguishing quality but it is the very “unit” of quality. Being dimensionless it is not subject to change from the outside. There is nothing to penetrate it. Hence, all speculation as to mind and body makes little sense as each is properly conceived of as unique, independent, and ultimately unextended. The relation between mind and body is not causal but one of harmony. Leibnitz writes: if a note is sounded in the presence of two resonators, we do not ask which of the two resonators establishes the sympathetic vibrations in the other. The two resonate in parallel –as do body and mind; they are in pre-established harmony with each other. The action of mind/body is not caused by the other body/mind as a mechanistic account requires; nor is the action of each reconciled to that of some third, external, time-keeper (occasionalists) such as to make sure all the clock are on time.

The universe is then a collection of simple substances (monads) which are created in harmony prior to their coming into being. Harmony is, as Leibnitz writes, God’s modality. If monads change it must be through some inner principle. This inner principle through which monads change is called “petite perception”. These petite perceptions are different from apperception which also implies consciousness. To the extent that every monad has an internal organization, it perceives (petite perception) and is open to change. When a monad allows both perception and memory it is called a soul. So that animals have souls but they do not have rational souls (minds) because while they are able to perceive and even retain traces of consecutive perceptions, they are unaware of necessary truths. “Human beings too, insofar as their perceptions are united by memory, ac like lower animals, resembling empiricists whose methods are those of mere practice without theory. In fact, in ¾ of our actions we are nothing but empirics…. It is only in knowledge of rule, of necessary relationship, that we display the uniquely human quality of human life.” This is consciousness.

Leibnitz was one of the first to write about the problem of the unconscious. His notion had however little to do with motivation or psychopathology. Rather Leibnitz employs the notion of the unconscious to support his position that monads are indestructible, that perception (petite perceptions) are distinguished from consciousness, and on the difference between “just” monads and monads of the rational (conscious) mind (soul). Even in sleep monads perceive but since it is not accompanied by memory it is not conscious (subliminal). A number of unconscious, insensible, perceptions when stored in the mind can add up such as to break through into consciousness. Leibnitz suggested that there is a gradual scale separating sleep from other states of awareness and these are constituted by thresholds. For example we might retain a great deal in memory and yet not be explicitly aware of it. This threshold phenomenon means that the present is big with the future and laden with the past….

It is not easy to cave a niche for Leibnitz in the history of psychology. He is an enemy of empiricism and materialism and as such he cannot be easily located in the history of psychology as an experimental science. Leibnitz writings make clear that he believe that most of what psychologists have dealt with could be deduced from common experience.

Leibnitz contributed to the concept of sensory thresholds via his petite perceptions, he noted the role of memory in consciousness, he also distinguished consciousness from perception on the one hand and memory on the other, but his major influence is his critique of Cartesian dualism and this by way of his critique of Descartes’ metaphysics, replacing two kinds of substance with one, and replacing causation with harmony. Of course, much of the early psychology (physiological psychology) while accepting Leibnitz critique of Descartes forgot about his monadology - it smacked too much of pantheism.

In fact Leibnitz did little to restore idealism to philosophical significance (in fact there is little relation between Leibnitz and say, later, Hegel. But Leibnitz emphasis on activity (of monads as energy) and unity (both features of every simple substance or monad) can be found in the psychologies of James, Brentano, and Gestalt psychology. Leibnitz’ monism also influenced the biological oriented psychologist who might believe that in order to understand mind one would need to investigate brain. Indeed, his insistence on animal souls, and the continuous evolution of levels of organization/complexity of monads also influenced comparative animal research in the later Darwinian tradition.

Inertial universes are always in motion whereas energetic universes have beginnings – energetic universes are self-generating. This notion especially when applied to minds means that minds are active and not merely passive receptors/processor. But from whence comes this energy/activity? Here we have Leibnitz’ monadology.

Leibnitz begins not with matter (bits of matter) that float in space/void bouncing off each other (motion), but with spirits (souls) or units that Leibnitz calls monads, or centers of energy at different levels of spirit and energy. A universe of communicating monads; the self as a monad; communities of peoples; the environment; the entire cosmos – all as layers of self-originating activity, or monads. It is a fantastic vision. But what are we to make of monads that now take the place of atoms?

Obviously this is not an easy substitution. Monads generate their own energy and destiny. Frankly they are not empirical (even as atoms were not in Democritus’ or Newton’s day) but they are a rational concept that can direct empirical research. According to Leibnitz, monads have “windows” in the sense that they are not only the origin of energy but also

direct their destiny/movements (purpose and not self-encased) towards other monads. Here Leibnitz has the unconscious and the conscious working together, the latter embedded in the former, and in this way the self is psychophysical unity (wherein body and mind are both abstractions from this unity) and the body is no longer alien to the soul as it was for Descartes. Leibnitz spiritualizes the body and soul in this psychophysical unit of monadic energy – we cannot tell where the body leaves off and the mind begins – below the level of consciousness (but then so is the atom below the level of consciousness). On this view the body is no longer a chunk of matter on which the soul precariously perches; rather, the body is spiritualized and it is here that honoring the soul might begin.

On the one hand, Leibnitz extraordinary metaphysical imagination gives us a universe of “organisms within organisms” and, on the other hand, he has the unique capacity for simplicity and logical incisiveness. The latter is evident in the manner he deals with the argument for the existence of God. Consider the question with which he begins:“why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?” This question lurks behind all the traditional arguments for the existence of God in a tradition that begins with Aristotle (who was not particularly religious) whose “prime mover” was tied to the concentric spheres of a finite universe that was Greek cosmology. The 17th c. broke with that tidy universe and imagined a much larger possibly infinite universe. Leibnitz speaks from the center of this new consciousness of an infinite universe and asks “why is there anything at all rather than nothing?” This is the question of all questions (Heidegger) that permeates our lives even in our ordinary moods – in which we are metaphysical (why was I born?).

The question demands an answer. After all to ask “why” is to seek a reason or cause – all being is contingent and Leibnitz then adds to this contingency his principle of sufficient reason – a principle that reflects the mind’s seeking a cause, reason, explanation, restlessly driven to the unconditional, absolute, and non-contingent. So long as we remain within the realm of the contingent we will never answer the question “why”. We are then faced by two alternatives:

(1) that there is no reason and things are just as they are because they happen this way (Nietzsche: the world is absurd including our existence). This is no merely atheistic answer, it bears the weight of enormity; a universe without reason.

(2) we can confirm a cause/reason outside of contingent being by positing another order/ground, a necessary being, which exists and assumes a mystery (religious answer which of course Nietzsche rejected). Here too the leap is audacious (as Kierkegaard recognized a century later).

It was again Kant who was later to clarify this dilemma (by making God a condition of possibility of moral action).

Lecture 5: Empiricists

The British distrusted this continental rationalist tradition of Descartes and Leibnitz. The British mentality professes a certain distrust of intellectuals and the intellect. The British are a practical people preferring commonsense to the intricacies of reason in the Germans or French (divide between the continentalist and the empiricist/pragmatist traditions). Whether or not it was this gift for practicality that was responsible, it was clearly at work in the greatest creation of British genius: liberal democratic government. The triumph of this British character was not merely that it conceived of the idea of free but that it also embodied it in institutions (even though it took a hundred years of turmoil including civil war to achieve it). England had firmly laid down the structures of a free society which continued to develop for the next two centuries.

John Locke (1932-1704) was the philosopher of the British political revolution and still remains the spokesperson for classical liberalism. But my interest in Locke is his more devious route through the intricacies of the human soul. He will express the same British trait here, of plain speech, common sense, and the sense of fact. He tells us that his method is the “plain historical method” and he traces the operations of the mind from sensations to ideas to the association of ideas. All our ideas come from sensations and are tested against sensations. This is the core of British empiricism.

But from the very start empiricism ran into snags. For one thing sensations provide us with the material of thought, but the mind seems to do something with these materials: combining and recombining them. Is the mind merely passive, a receptor for sensations, or is the mind active doing something of its own before the flood of sensations come in? This is a cardinal question and the question turns not only on how we know, and what we can know, but also on human freedom. If the mind is active forming its own judgments, can it also initiate actions consequent on those judgments? Locke’s answer is ambiguous. He tends towards the passivity of the mind and this is the empiricist tendency more generally especially when the doctrine of the association of ideas is proposed as the mechanical deterministic combination of sensations.

What is this “mind” such that the empiricists claim is bombarded by sensations and then mechanically processes these into ideas? What are the sensations that correspond to the ideas in the mind? How are sensations grasped by the mind? Do sensations themselves exemplify the mind?

Since Locke is a Christian he believes in an immortal soul which he claims is outside his empiricist framework. In a sense this notion of the soul is a barrier to the mind and hence there are limits on empiricism. Yet the soul must also in some sense touch the mind. In a way, empiricism bifurcates the world into two the regions, one where empiricism holds good (the mind is a passive machine that processes sensations into ideas), the other being the traditional doctrine of the soul. Thus, Locke’s empiricism is somewhat half-hearted.

But there is also a graver split within Locke and this comes from the opposite direction than his religious faith: it comes from the new science. This is Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities (inherited from one of the originators of the new science - Galileo) cementing a distinction between the objective (extension) and subjective (experience). But this distinction is an odd one given that empiricism is after all supposed to take what is in experience seriously. Rather what we see here is that Locke’s empiricism is not merely an appeal to what is experienced but his empiricism follows the speculations of scientific materialism. In other words, Locke begins not with experience (his “plain historical method”) but with the purportedly metaphysically “real” as defined by the new science (that is his empiricism is informed by what the new science says is real – namely bits of matter). Thus, this distinction between primary and secondary qualities implies a bifurcation between the experiential world and the world of science (which would dictate the nature of Locke’s empiricism). In other words, Locke’s empiricism is no less an abstraction from experience than is Descartes’ reason (”I think) an abstraction from the personal “I”=habitus). British empiricism is not an open reliance on experience (it is not genuinely “empirical”) but rather is a disciplined reliance on what the new science maintains is real (matter). Thus, for example, sensations are never experienced (they are an abstraction from perception in accord with what we know how the senses work – as processors of matter – photons hitting the retina: how the physical/biological body works.)

It is this bifurcation of the latter two worlds that the Irishman George Berkeley (1685-1753) understood so well. If matter (of scientific materialism) determines how the mind works (as Locke would have it) then the mind is not free – it is merely a machine. Berkeley defend Locke’s everyday experiential (empirical, not “empiricist”) world, but the world as it appears in experience is not subjective as Locke held, rather experience is the real and it is the real of physics (senses) that is an abstraction. Berkeley maintains that not only secondary qualities but also primary qualities are relative to observers and

Berkeley knocks down Newton’s claim to absolute space in which bits of matter bounce up against each other. The latter is, he notes, an instance of misplaced concreteness. Locke had stripped the world of its color, sound, odors etc., and his argument had been that these secondary qualities were relative of the observer/perceiver and therefore were not objective. But if secondary qualities were relative to the observer then so are primary qualities, argues Berkeley. Here Berkeley introduces the relativity of all observation in a through-going way such as was not to emerge again until Einstein in the 20th c. Locke held that taken the new sciences’ claim that reality consisted only of bits of matter in motion or at rest as absolute (objective) because there was the absolute space of Newton in which these bits of matter moved or remained at rest. But Berkeley audaciously rejects one of the sacred pillars of the Newtonian world – namely absolute space. Newton’s absolute space is an abstraction far removed from our perception (empirical world). For Berkeley who stands in the empirical world of plain ordinary commonsense, empiricism is enslaved to scientific materialism. According to Berkeley, experience (both primary and secondary qualities) is always dependent on mind (even if we are not aware of this) – we cannot escape mind – all reality is permeated by mind. We cannot grasp any reality outside of the mind (even the computer). Immanuel Kant was later to take over this perspective and built upon it.

Nevertheless, Berkeley’s plain commonsense runs into trouble when he encapsulates his position in the phrase “esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived). Does reality really depend on our perceiving it? Surely reality cannot be so fickle. Surely the tree that falls in the forest does make a sound even if there is no one to hear it!

How can Berkeley as an arch-commonsense-empiricist, even as he is more critical than Locke, ensure that the real is real without invoking a perceiver? Berkeley introduces God. It is God that maintains reality when there are no observers. But this move proves disastrous for an empiricist (after God is not there to be perceived) even as Berkeley’s also claims that it is the mind that perceives (after all, the mind cannot be perceived). How can Berkeley appeal to the mind or to God since neither is given in sensuous experience?

Berkeley does so because he believes we have direct access to our own mind, when we are conscious of something we are also conscious that we are conscious and, on analogy of the finite and infinite, we can speak of God’s mind. Thus while our human mind is imperfectly grasped God’s mind grasps perfectly.

Leaving aside God for the moment, are we aware of ourselves as minds? Here we come to a crucial divide among empiricists. The ordinary person says, of course, I am aware of my own mind, I am aware of the table but I am also aware that I am aware of the table; I am aware of having the experience of the table and I am aware that it is I who has this experience of the table. But there are some empiricists who doubt this primary fact of consciousness. If Locke’s sensations are clear and distinct (like Descartes ideas), hard and fast, and objective data of consciousness, then surely in comparison the mind is a fleeting and unwarranted ghost (in the machine). William James divided empiricists between “tender-minded” and tough-minded”, where the first are empirical including the experience of intuition and consciousness, whereas the second are “tough-minded” empiricists allowing only what the new science permits namely sensations.

It is the tough-minded position that is adopted by the Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776) who is an archetypal sensationist and the precursor of positivistic thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. If Berkeley reduced Locke’s bits of matter (sensations) to a bundle of

perceptions, Hume seeks to reduce Berkeley’s mind to a heap of sense impressions and this is as far as empiricism can take us (unless we can reduced impressions further to something else like nerve impulses). Discuss decomposition/analysis.

David Hume takes a giant step forward from Berkeley in defining the modern mind (even as his conception of mind was curiously at odds with our ordinary experience). If the 17th c was still implanted mind in God (Descartes appealed to God/soul as did Locke, and Berkeley), Hume began what the 18th c. – the age of Reason - adopted as a strictly modern secular conception of the new science by removing God in what later was to become 20th c. positivism (in the work of Wittgenstein it became “logical positivism” – Hume’s impressions plus mathematical logic). For Hume experience was now a succession of sense impressions (impressions, including sensations, of the body) and the world was mechanically constructed out of these. Life is a stream of impressions that are simply given to us by the world, and hence, all ideas, for example, cause and effect relations are themselves only impressions. What happens here is that the new science (knowledge of the world) is grounded in habit (or psychology: the repeated co-occurrence of two impressions leads us say, by habit, that one is the cause of the other). Little wonder that Hume is so important for empiricist psychology – his empiricism looked “exact” - exactness that the new science admired so much and did so much to get it started.

We might note right off that Hume was not a good psychologist for he collapses under the label impression both sensations (outer) and feelings (inner). But surely my feeling of sadness is not so distinct it may well infuse all my other impressions – something Hume failed to appreciate. Furthermore, it was Hume’s “atomism” that led to his celebrated skepticism about such concepts as cause and effect and all other such ideas which could not be grounded in impressions. If cause and effect is nothing but the co-occurrence of two events (contiguity of sensory impressions) then we are never logically justified in speaking of the necessity of cause and effect, merely of psychological habit. All knowledge now becomes psychology – which is surely nonsense. It would be altogether stunning if the new science were nothing but habits of mind and bundles of impressions.

What follows from Hume’ sensationalism is skepticism! If the self is merely a set of impressions then the self also is merely a repository of the impressions – consciousness becomes then nothing else than this set of impressions – the self is a “ghost in a machine”. There is strange alienation evident here – a third person perspective – where I stand outside myself in order to see myself. Sense data and logic was Russell’s adumbration of Hume.

It is easy to see why this would happen to Hume. Consciousness is for him something that just happens when we have impressions. The entire notion of experience is corrupted here in this empiricism. Things in the world including my own body are merely sensations/impressions and the mind/soul/self is nowhere evident in these impressions.

One is reminded here that Hume might be engaged in a “category mistake”: he is like the man who goes outside of his house and looks through the window to see if he is home. It is a spectator (3rd person view) view of the mind forgetting that it is “I” whose impressions these are. Hume stands outside himself and looks for himself in some kind of sensory datum.

Bertrand Russell in the 20th c. tries to rescue Hume’s empiricism by adding a bit of modern logic. The self now becomes an aggregate of sense data which is then given a verbal appellation – as if language is merely labelling - but Russell never says how such aggregates are formed. Moreover, how do I know that yesterday’s aggregate of impressions is like that the impressions I experience now? How does one compare memories?

In a way Hume the empiricist finds himself aligned with Descartes the rationalist. For while Hume’s consciousness (as a set of impressions) is very different from Descartes’ consciousness as innate reason, both the empiricist and the rationalist would have the mind sit precariously external to the body. For neither men is the mind embedded in the body or the body animated by the mind; the one remains external to the other.

Finally, this psychological philosophy of mind also presumes that reason/association of idea is strictly instrumental and hence an individual phenomenon. Reason and association of ideas occurs in my “head” alone….and then trick is to get the knowledge in my head to others…..we then get endless speculation on the designative nature of language.

Lecture 6: Immanuel Kant

Kant (1724-1804) is the last great thinker in whom the intellectual unity of the Western “mind” (rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz; and empiricists: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) still held together. After Kant this unity began to fall apart, diverge into a number of irreconcilable directions (e.g., Idealism of Hegel and Marx; Positivism, pragmatism, existentialism). Of course, Kant preserved the unity of a still fundamentally theistic civilization (his thought always ends with God), yet this unity is a precarious one, more precarious than Kant imagined. It was Kant the pietist who in fact departed farther from God (in undermining all the reasoned theological argument for God) than he realized.

Kant called his philosophy “critical philosophy” and in this separated himself from the dogmatism of his predecessors: the dogmatism of speculative metaphysics and theology in Leibnitz on the one hand, and the dogmatic skepticism of Hume on the other hand. Kant insists everywhere on the limits and conditions under which the mind must operate – conditions that is to say under which the mind operates effective and productively. Even in matters of religion and God, in fact perhaps there most of all, we have to be aware of the limits op reason with which our human nature endowed. Kant’s century, the 18th c. “Age of Reason”, was also the age of the bourgeois and the voice of bourgeois was one of sobriety, prudence and caution.

Kant comes on the scene in Western civilization just Galileo’s “new science” had come into its own and Kant launches the next wave – a wave in which we still live. Thus, Kant has before him not only the edifice of the “new science”, which was framed by the rationalist Descartes and Leibnitz and the empiricist Locke and Hume, but which originated in the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, but his distance on this edifice was sufficient long (over 100 years) that he could reflect on its implications. Kant genius was the genius of reflection; he is the first thinker to grasp the implications of the new science at a level of depth that was not again reached until Martin Heidegger in the 20th c.

See the map:

Rationalism plus empiricism yield Kant, which in turn, in the 19th c., yields idealism, positivism, pragmatism, and existentialism

Note that what is at the center of this historical map is philosophy. Why?

Why should philosophy and the contending schools of philosophy be at the center of this historical map of Western thought?

The answer is the traditional one: philosophy is the effort by the human mind to know itself, and to take stock of (our knowledge of) the universe and out place in it. The doubt we might have today about the centrality of philosophy is in part because the small space philosophy seems to occupy in our culture. Philosophers seem not to discover anything, talk only to each other, and are mostly concerned with esoteric questions that, even if they were or could be answered, yield no pay-off. Philosophers seem only critical, clever, in making difficult what is easy.

Even if we allow that philosophy is not useless, the question arises whether philosophy is only about reflection; whether philosophy merely reflects its time, or whether philosophy also does something permanent, something that generates consequences for society, culture or the individual. Yet, in anticipation of Kant has to say, we must remember that the mind pervades society, reality, at its most mundane levels – the level of experience. Reflection is here not merely passive contemplation (like Descartes in his armchair in his bedroom away from everyone else) on something already formed (like the new science); on the contrary, philosophy gives shape and form to what we experience (it articulates and so makes real); it lends vision to the assumptions and consequences to how we live and how we think (science included). Recall that my entire course is based on the intuition that reflection and understanding of the human historical world is an activity of the utmost importance.

We might speculate that there is something deeper than philosophy. That is religion. I have not placed religion into my historical map because philosophy in our modern epoch (the epoch of the “death of God” or the dying of God) has been in continuous dialogue with religion (even today when leading cognitive and evolutionary thinkers are still very busy refuting God). We can argue that religious questions are at the center of philosophy even if only by way of its rejection and, even if today there are many philosophers who do not engage religious questions this says more about philosophy and the state of our Western civilization than it does about religion. In any case, it took a lot of philosophy to prepare the human mind for this matter-of-fact state of godlessness.

There is also art (aesthetics) which captures a kind of truth, which philosophy must take note of and which it can not itself produce. Art should also occupy a central place, just as religion should, in our historical map. Aesthetics and art were an integral part of Romantic philosophy and even of the idealists. Indeed, I think of art as typifying an age or epoch in a way that philosophy, religion or science cannot do. Artistic expression is much overlooked as a source of truth, also in psychology, in favor of intellectual expression of the human mind about itself that I characterized as the task of philosophy.

There is also science of course. Curiously, it is not represented by any philosophical school but it is something that concerns them all, often as something to be absorbed and transcended, or fought against and rejected. I referred to this science in quasi-philosophical terms (i.e., metaphysics) as scientific materialism a movement that floats around all thought, especially the sciences. It is not usually professed as an explicit commitment; rather it is part and parcel of the triumph of the sciences/technology. The achievements in the physical sciences/technology become the measure of scientific materialism – and the ghostly insubstantial individual human soul and common human spirit seems almost childish by comparison. Scientific materialism is the terrain in which the historical map, above, plays itself out. Such materialism need not be explicitly professed as a creed, rather it is the de facto philosophy of an era reaping the great triumph of the physical sciences and in technology and pushing more and more of its energies into those fields. The achievements of the physical sciences and technology become the invisible standard – and sometimes not so invisible – by which to measure all thinking in whatever domain. However much we may hide this scientific materialism in our philosophical study, we are caught up in its flow as soon as we step outside into the actual world. If we in our time want to come to terms with its most troubling questions, it will only be when it comes to terms with scientific materialism.

In fact, Kant’s critical philosophy is hardly read today (except by philosopher of the history of philosophy). Hence we have to retrieve Kant – and when we do, we find his

reflections rather contemporary – in a way that all philosophy is eternally contemporary….

The terrain is scientific materialism; it is implicit in the new science. Thus, the question is “can mind be reduced to matter?” But in this form this question is unanswerable. It is, as Kant might say, an effort at “bad metaphysics” and we cannot “know” one way of the other. Instead we might ask the phenomenological (experiential) question “what role does the mind play in human life?” This way of asking the question has the virtue of confronting both metaphysical materialism, and indeed scientific realism, and it was Immanuel Kant who brought out more clearly than any other philosopher the active organizing role of the mind in human experience.

The British empiricists (from Locke to Hume) had stressed the mind’s passivity: “ideas are imprinted on the mind,” “the mind is a blank slate on which experience writes” etc. But when one turns to experience first, then one finds that the mind does something much more than the empiricists give it credit for.

For example, if we turn to one of the most significant events in the history of our species: the construction of numbers we find the mind exemplary in “doing”. Mathematics is one of clearest examples of the power of the mind to bring order into our experience. We all participate in mathematics and when we do we realize that we are involved in elementary operations (adding, subtracting etc.). It is interesting that today we think of “reason” as endlessly distorting and concealing but it is remarkable that in case of mathematics we see the legitimacy of the power of the mind/reason. We know from anthropology that ancient cultures had only a rudimentary conception of the number system. Thus, however astute the ancients were in their sensory capacities yet they were unable to even formulate an elementary conception of numbers. This state of affairs when there were no numbers, should give us, especially philosophers of mathematics, some food for thought. Before we had a number system “were there numbers?” Did numbers subsist perhaps in some Platonic heaven plucked down by some Promethean mind? Even if there were such a Promethean figure, s/he would have to go through the operation of constructing numbers as Kant suggests. Or look towards some future and consider that through some unimaginable disaster the human species lost all its knowledge (forgetting or amnesia is, according to Heidegger, still very prevalent), including our knowledge of mathematics. But suppose that textbooks on mathematics survived this disaster so that people could point at math books in libraries and say “this is mathematics” without understanding what mathematics was about. (Mathematics as marks on paper is mathematics only if there are minds to give these marks meaning.)

How did the ancients or how do people following this disaster rediscover mathematics? We are reminded of Plato’s cave, when suddenly someone announces that “today the sun rose and I am going to scratch a mark on the side of the cave wall, and tomorrow when the sun rises again, I will make another mark… and so each day afterward.” Bit by bit as the marks gather, we notice that the place of each mark in the sequence is given a name… its number name. Note that the mind is here directed to both the future and the past, and synthesizes the past and future perspectives in the present a pattern that lies at the root of the number system. This kind of synthesis is not a simply “association” (conditioned response); rather it is the construction of a structure that give rise to a very different meaning – an active construction of a meaningful order.

What is involved here is a continuity of consciousness; and “I” that accompanies, or that enables, the synthesis taking into account past and future in the present. What kind of “I”

is this that can synthesize past and future into the present? Kant is cautious: he claims that there is as much “I” (ego) as is required to give continuity and meaning to particular processes of thought – this “I” is what he calls a “transcendental ego”, an ego that synthesizes.

This was a decisive step beyond Hume even as we may not be satisfied with Kant’s answer. Remember Hume’s conception of the “I” as a bundle of perceptions/impressions – such an “I” could not even count up to 5. A bundle of perceptions does not have the continuity of consciousness necessary for synthesis. The question is whether Kant’s transcendental ego is in fact the concrete self (“I”) that we need in order for the imaginary person in Plato’s cave to construct numbers? Hardly (any more than Descartes’ “ego cogito”)! In fact, Kant turns his critical philosophy in the same direction as Hume - in fact, he is more rigorous than Hume - in dismissing the theological conception of soul or mind as pure immaterial substance which we cannot “know” (i.e., of which we cannot have scientific knowledge). In other words, Kant’s transcendental ego is a very minimal self, one necessary to allow for the synthesis required in constructing mathematics (reason) but no more than that. Thus, Kant rejected the possibility of a science of psychology since psychology on his view dealt with the mind which was non-substantial.

Kant’s insight is essentially that mathematics is a construction. Not only does mathematics deals with entities that are constructed by the mind – there are no numbers, straight line, points, etc. in nature – but its methods are constructive throughout. Thus, mathematics is not merely substituting one set of symbols for an equivalent set, but in fact it constructs new cases or mathematical entities that bring forward the properties under investigation. The geometrician draws lines; the arithmetician builds up a new number complex and if s/he has to prove that there is no last prime number, s/he does so not by contemplating the meaning of the essence of “prime” or of “number” but by actually constructing a last prime number and then showing that it leads to contradiction.

Here Kant’s view of mathematics is connected with his distinction between analytic and synthetic employment of the human understanding. An analytic statement is one in which the predicate adds nothing to the subject of the predicate (“a bachelor is an unmarried man”); here the predicate merely explicates what is already in the subject (a tautology). In contrast a synthetic proposition is one where the predicate add to our knowledge of the subject (“a man is an animal with a bivalvular heart”) where the predicate adds to our knowledge of what a man is). Kant’s distinction is open to criticism today because he relies on a subject-predicate logic which is not sufficiently rigorous compared to modern mathematical logic. Be that as it may, Kant’s distinction was an effort of considerable significance.

Thus, mathematicians regularly speak of trivial, significant, and really new results, depending on whether the results of their work obviously merely what is already known or whether it adds something new to mathematics. But if we consider modern mathematical logic, we find that for example Russell reduced mathematics to logic, where logic is tautological and hence where mathematics becomes tautological and hence new results in mathematics merely means that mathematicians do not see all the logical implications of their work at once. The reason for this, Russell claims, is that the human mind is finite – if our minds were infinite we would seem all the logical implications at once –i.e., tautologies – and there would be no new results in mathematics. Of course, this is a rather strange tack by Russell and other positivists in explaining mathematics as an analytical endeavor since appeal to an infinite mind (even as a form of argument) is obviously not an empirical entity.

In this regard Kant was a down-to-earth philosopher: our mind is radically finite but we cannot see except from a framework of finitude. We cannot have any adequate concept of the infinite mind (as Russell suggests we do); rather, all we can have is a vague and numinous idea of mind (nothing sufficient for use in a scientific understanding of mathematics). It is this finite mind, according to Kant, that produces mathematics by constant constructions and inventions. Is calculus a logical tautology or is it a new invention, namely the construction of the idea of a limit?

Kant cites the evidence of history in support of his claim that mathematics is a construction of mind. He claims not since Aristotle has there been any progress in logic, while mathematics has progressed rapidly especially in the two centuries preceding Kant (i.e., in the “new science”). Russell comments that Kant is simply ignorant of modern mathematical logic and in this Russell is both right and wrong. True enough Kant did not know the mathematical logic but he would have no difficulty assimilating modern mathematical logic: modern logic has been productive, Kant would claim, precisely because it is mathematical logic. Systematic symbolic notation (characteristic of mathematical logic) permitted forms of construction not available to the older logic, and symbols may be numbered, and so the resources of arithmetic may be ingeniously used giving rise to Godel’s theorem (which depends on numbering the expressions of language).The latter’s proof is that there will always be theorems or axioms in mathematics that cannot be proven from within the system of mathematics itself (incompleteness theorem). (This theorem has also been used to refute any pretension of computational language to stand alone, or be complete.)

The usually textbook after introducing elements of the logical calculus presents 20 or 30 simple which are reformulations of axioms. If the Lowenheim-Skolem or Godel’s theorems are mentioned it is usually overlooked that the latter are very different from the simple theorems that are reformulations of axioms. The Lowenheim-Skolem and Godel theorems are however of a very different order than those theorems obtained by a mechanical substitution of the axioms; the former produced new and disturbing knowledge.

Kant was also limited by being attached to Euclidean geometry. Kant lived prior to the formulation of non-Euclidean geometries. But even here Kant’s views of mathematics as grounded in free constructions of an active mind would not be surprised by the inventions of non-Euclidean geometries that are after all not confined to Euclidean (absolute) space.

All this stuff about mathematics and logic may well seem trivial relative to Kant’s major contributions to philosophy. Yet this stuff while technical ties directly to other major concerns in science. For example, the foundations of mathematics remains disturbingly unsettled and contested and here Kant still remains very relevant in reminding us that thinking (reason) if it is not to be empty must be aware of the elementary intuitions from which it starts in experience.

Modern science

Of course, the most dazzling example of the constructive power of the mind was the whole edifice of the “new science”. Here Immanuel Kant’s insights proved to be decisive…and remain so today. Galileo was deeply conscious of the fact that when he introduced the phrase “new science” he was making a break with the wisdom of the

ancients. By Kant’s time the “new science” was well-established and in his 1st Critique (1786), almost 100 years after Newton, Kant writes:

When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane; when Torricelli made air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to a definite column of water, a light broke upon the students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answers to questions of reason’s own determining.…Reason holding in one hand its principles, according to which alone concordant appearances can be admitted as equivalent to laws, and in the other hand the experiment which it has devised in conformity with these principles, must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not however do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated. Even physics, therefore, owes the beneficent revolution in its point of view entirely to the happy thought, that while reason must seek in nature, not fictitiously ascribe to it, whatever as not being knowable through reason’s own resources has to be learnt, if learnt at all, only from nature, it must adopt as its guide, in so seeking, that which it has itself put into nature. It is thus that the study of nature entered on the secure path of a science after having for so many centuries nothing but a process of merely random groping.

Kant points here to the intrinsic relation between science and technology. The mind is not passive (not merely a sensory receptor that reflect, like a mirror, nature or the facts) but active in constructing models which are not found in experience (but in the human imagination even if the mathematical imagination) and then to proceeds to impose those models on nature. Moreover, those models are first of all conceptually constructed before being materially translated in apparatus of the laboratory.

In fact, Kant could have used Galileo’s construction of the concept of inertia as a simpler example. The concept of inertia was new and the entire science of mechanics, the basis for the whole of the “new science”, depended on it. What does Galileo do? He does not passively record facts, instead he constructs a concept that is never precisely found in nature at all (in fact it is in some sense contrary to what we do find in nature). Imagine, Galileo tells us, a body on a perfectly frictionless plane, now if motion is imparted to this body, it will move infinitely in a straight line unless of course it is impeded and altered by some countervailing force. But there are no frictionless planes in nature or any plane with infinite extension. What Galileo constructs is a model that is counterfactual to nature as we experience nature. He constructs an idealization, a standard, in approximation to which the actual (factual) situation may be calculated. Here the basic concept of science is mind-made and never copies nature; it is a profound human artifice and therefore a technical construct as fully as a piece of material apparatus might be. Science is technological at its core – and it is the basis of the formation of its concepts (and hence technology is not something that happens after science as an application).

It is this intimate connection between science and technology which Bacon foresaw in his claim that knowledge is power (to change and control the world). But for Bacon this power was the result of science; in contrast Kant sees clearly that technology is the very

basis of science. Once seen by Kant, this connection spreads through the entire edifice of the science throughout the 19th c. The more advanced the science the closer the connection between its own technology and the more every part of the science joins with every other part in a unity of the whole (contrast psychology). This does not mean that one can say beforehand just what particular discovery becomes a part of or serves to join other parts, but the history of the natural sciences has been the surprising discoveries of such connections, even where they were not first suspected. So too with a particular technical device, no matter how isolated its function or principle of operation at first appears to be, it may become indispensable to the structure of science as a whole. During the past 350 years, “science-technology” has played itself out as a single human project.

This project was both daring and deep, for as Kant remarks it is a turn in human reason and hence a transformation of our attitude towards the world: away from a passive, receptive, and contemplative towards an active, projective, and enactive struggle with nature. We have to master nature; not drift with it. Kant employs some key words: human beings impose their models upon nature; human beings compel nature to answer their questions; the inquirer is in a position to demand of nature. All these are words of power; and Kant knew it. He had read Francis Bacon carefully (“knowledge is power”) even as Kant parts company with Bacon when the latter demands that “nature be placed on the rack” – as if tortured to give answers – and suggests that we have power over nature.

Kant was more insightful and more humble than Bacon. Knowledge is power in that knowledge enables us to deal with nature but more than that knowledge is itself a step in power for knowledge is intimately tied to doing – thinking/reason and doing. In the very concepts constructed (and not literally founding the world) we have already taken a step beyond nature in order to subsequently understand it and deal with it. It is in the construction of concepts that the human mind comes to its fullness. In this sense the project of science-technology which launched modernity is a genuine transformation of our human being. If at times during the last 350 years this knowledge-power coupling gave rise to an optimistic (progress, endless progress) vision that was almost utopian (as it is sometimes today), it has also become far less optimistic – creating despair, passivity, nihilism towards the future.

What Kant foresaw in his philosophical reflections was that this edifice of science-technology coupling exemplified the constructive power of the mind even as this very knowledge-power coupling threatened to denigrate the human mind. Its success in the natural sciences led to an attitude of scientific materialism, according to which the mind becomes merely a passive play-thing of material forces. It is as if the offspring turns on its parents (Oedipus) – we today have forgotten Kant, namely that the mind is everywhere imprinted on this body of science/technology and that without the founding imagination of mind there would be no science. (Thus there is no “logic of discovery”, a la Reichenbach, which a machine could compute,) This is not merely something to be assented to and perhaps enjoyed (this, “the mind is nothing but” empiricist position) – it is also a terrible existential reality – for doubt about the mind (as in scientific materialism) has profound consequences and provides one of the ordeals that have beset modernity (in our day when the mind has becomes a cognitive machine, what happens to our freedom and individuality?).

Let’s turn to Kant solution in noting the limitations on, and finitude of, the mind that he brings out so sharply.

It would seem an easy matter to grasp our finitude in time (birth-life-death) and space (vastness of the universe). But such finitude is largely quantitative. But Kant’s notion of finitude is different; his is a qualitative finitude, one that maintains that the human mind is constituted in a way that the understanding cannot grasp conceptually those matters that are of ultimate significance to us. This mode of our finitude is an uncanny fact about our human nature, namely, that we must bring ourselves to reflect again and again to see just how far we can carry our understanding (Leibnitz’: why is there anything and not nothing?)

But what can we understand when we say, or hypothesize, that space or time is infinite….how can we bring this before our mind? We can only do so as a process to which there is not last term…no end.

Kant’s point is that the legitimate or meaningful understanding of a concept can only come about through intuition – particularly, to make some kind of mental picture of a concept on risk that otherwise our words become empty verbalisms. But from where do these intuitions come, asks Kant. Only from sense perception and these only come always within the framework of space and time. Our thinking must work within that framework of space and time wherein perception occurs. The mind can synthesize and organize (sometimes brilliantly as in modern science) but only within that framework of sensory-intuition-space-time.

Contrast this with our usually view, inherited from the Greeks, that thinking begins where sensory experience leaves off. The mind if you will produces from this welter of perceptions, inductively, an idea, and then this sensible mind aspires to an intelligible world – the world of knowledge (“real” of the world of forms) – leaving behind the sensory/perceptual world of experience (“flux”). In contrast, for Kant, thinking does not leave the world of sensory experience; rather thinking is always already involved, by organizing and synthesizing sensory intuition, in experience. Just as the number system is a human construction (a magnificent one) but for that reason does not lead us out of this world of experience for in numbers we organize the world of sensory experience.

Thus, we can say that Kant’s view of the mind is “pragmatic” (Kant is in some way the “father” of what later in the late 19th c an early 20th centuries became known as “pragmatism”), meaning that the mind has the practical function of organizing and synthesizing sensory intuition so as to yield the world of experience. Thus, the mind is the mind-in-use – essentially tying knowledge to doing (technology). Mental pictures are transformable into mechanical designs… From an evolutionary point of view we might say that the mind (its use in conceptualizing) is an extension of our sensory intuition – in giving us a world of experience (and experience is always meaningful). [Of course, for Kant this is not the whole function of mind (as we will see below); there are also other functions of mind where reason or understanding, our conceptual capacities, cannot help.]

For readers of Kant in their time the most important impact of his work was that he destroyed any possibility of proof for the existence of God. That is, in limiting reason to sensory intuition, Kant in one fell-blow demolished traditional rational theology and thereby placed God in a problematic light. Kant’s critique in the 1st Critique was to limit the role of reason to experience – and all concepts that referred to that which is not part of experience is an illegitimate extension of reason where it should not, in fact cannot go, at least if reason is to full it legitimate role in constructing meaningful (cognitive=knowledge) concepts. That is, for Kant, unlike Leibnitz, metaphysics (and rational theology going back to St. Aquinas) was the result of the illegitimate extension

of reason beyond the confines of sensory intuition. Metaphysics cannot give us knowledge (which does not mean that metaphysical questions are non-sense or meaningless as the later 20th c. positivists held, but just that these questions could not yield knowledge in their answers.

Remember Leibnitz’ reasoning about God. Leibnitz begins with the contingent beings of the world around us (contingent here means that beings come into existence and pass out of existence, and are causally conditioned by other beings. All we can know through experience (senses and understanding) is this flux of beings. Even the ever-lasting hills were begotten by geological convulsion and worn away through weather and time. Nature is a chain of contingent beings, or many chains of interlocking and perhaps infinite chains upon chains of beings. Why are there such chains? In asking this question we come upon the awesome question that inevitably confronts the human mind when it pushes thought far enough: why does anything at all exist, rather than nothing? (Leibnitz’ question). Leibnitz then he invokes his principle of sufficient reason which tells that nothing that exists can exist without a reason. There is nothing obscure about this principle so long as it functions within experience, pushing ever farther backwards in the chain(s) of nature. That is, when we experience nature as change (contingent) and we use the principle of sufficient reason to move backward to the origin of the contingent in the non-contingent (or the necessary) – this is the whole rationalist tradition from Aristotle to the “new science”. Of course, Leibnitz intended this question to lead us outside the chain of being to some unconditioned, non-contingent or necessary Being (God) I this way Leibnitz remained solidly within the tradition of rational theology.

But Kant’s refutation is sharp. The mistake Leibnitz makes is that he extends the principle of sufficient reason beyond the sphere of our possible experience. Leibnitz extends reason beyond where it can go, beyond the framework of space and time. Kant argues that we are creatures within space and time and the power of the human mind (as in the achievements of science) is to synthesize perceptual intuition which is always found within space and time. Experience only has meaning within that framework and all proof/disproof of our concepts and theories occur within that framework. If we seek to push reason beyond the framework of space and time, the framework Kant calls the apriori conditions of possibility of experience, in other words if we try in reason to transcend experience (to move beyond the apriori conditions of possibility of experience) we preclude the possibility of proof or disproof of our theories, explanations, and concepts.

Kant even raises the question of whether Leibnitz’ “Necessary Being” is meaningful…we can of course provide a verbal definition – since we know what contingent being is we can always say that a Necessary being is a non-contingent one. But when we give this definition is there any content to our definition (concept)? Or is it merely a verbal formula, as Kant warns is the case of all metaphysics?

Kant’s point is fundamental here. When Kant says that Leibnitz’ Necessary Being is a concept that has no positive content he is not saying that it is meaningless (as the positivists do, and the positivists take Kant to be saying just that). Kant maintains that Necessary Being has no positive content his claim is that it is not a clear-cut concept like the concepts in science about which admit of proof and disproof. Here Kant introduces a distinction between idea and concept. The ideas of God, infinity, and freedom are not meaningless just because these ideas cannot become concepts as in science; rather, these ideas belong to another order of mind and lays claim on other portions of our being

human. Indeed, as human beings we exist within the question of God and freedom; we can never escape these questions although we can clearly turn out backs upon them.

So in the matter of proofs of God, then, who is right Kant or Leibnitz? On very practical grounds Kant seems to be right that there is no proof of the existence of God, or infinity or freedom, or the mind, otherwise these words would not be the perennial problem they are.

The same is true for numbers theory in mathematics (Godel’s theorem) and there are limits to scientific proof especially with respect to foundational questions. Yet Leibnitz cannot so easily be dismissed. After all we cannot evade his question “why is there anything rather than nothing?” We may fall back on the need for faith here but even without faith this question is one our intellect must confront. For consider that even if our civilization was to continue indefinitely and science would continue to make progress indefinitely, the question would still confront us. At least Kant’s refutation serves the religious in assuring them that science can never answer all the questions we ask especially those which most deeply concern us (about the meaning of existence). In other words, Kant assures them that science can never take the place of religion, perform its functions, or answer its questions.

The intellect simply cannot cope with this question (and others like it) conceptually; and it is this limit of reason which is its radical finitude. We usually think of finitude as an endpoint of a line but for Kant finitude is right up front – it is gap hole in the middle of reason. This reason is not of the kind to answer all questions it brings to us (i.e., we ask ourselves). We can spin a brilliant web – the new science – yet we cannot step beyond it (scientific materialism). We continue to ask question which cannot be conceptualized and subjected to proof or disproof.

We must take care to understand Kant carefully. He is easily subject to misinterpretation (as indeed the positivist of the 19th misinterpreted Kant). The 1st Critique is divided into three parts (1) sensibility or sensory intuition, (2) understanding or the conceptual/scientific intellect, and (3) reason dealing with transcendent ideas), but we must take care not to think of these three part as three stories. It is not that understanding (apriori conditions of the possibility of experience) is added to sensibility, and then reason is added to the understanding. Rather, all three categories function within the framework of sense experience. I do not have sense impression/perceptions (Hume) to which I then add the concept of substance or then concept of cause and effect. Rather, the notion that we are surrounded by substantial things and that things causally affect each other are analyzed out of the whole of experience. Instead of stacked stories we need to see Kant’s three parts as concentric circles and even this is not enough for the outer circles of reason and understanding penetrate the inner circle of sensibility. In other words all three parts are analyzed out of experience. Experience is never just sensibility; rather, experience is permeated by understanding (concepts) and reason (ideas). This is why experience is so rich and why, in contemporary science including psychology, experience is replaced by “observation/perception” (in an effort to restrict or reduce experience to what is observably present - empiricism) but of course whatever we come to know by way of strict observation must return to experience (external validation of scientific findings).

In experience we are always thrown back to the question of “why?” and scientific questions and answers are restricted to the “how”. For Kant we cannot escape from

asking the question of God (it is a metaphysical question that arises within experience even as we cannot conceptually understand it or evade it though we try).

Nor are we pushed to ask the transcendental question only in moments of speculative questioning (sort of “philosophizing”, with all the negative connotations when contrasted with scientific questioning). In fact sometimes just a mood swing, an event, will lead us to ask about the meaning of “my” life or just about the meaning of life. Such questions cannot be answered at a conceptual level of understanding as Kant calls it. (The concept of “understanding” after Kant changes its meaning in favor of “explanation” even as we might allow that both involve “reason”.) For this question of the meaning of my life, and other such questions, cannot be assuaged by fame, fortune, achievement, health, family, and friends, (e.g., Tolstoy’s “My Confessions” cf. Confessions by St Augustine and Rousseau are all about the lack of certitude in life) and just perhaps science or analytic philosophy (which would relegate such question as meaningless because they are not answerable conceptually). Psychology in the 20th c. has a long history of trying to ban those questions because they are not answerable – the reality is however that people do ask those questions and psychology as a discipline surely must be interested in thw questions people ask themselves and others.

Perhaps the human mind is larger than sensibility and understanding (in Kant’s sense); perhaps such questions lay claim to a sense of cosmos inaccessible to reason – even as Kant as a thoroughgoing rationalist, a child of the Enlightenment would never assent to that. Nevertheless, Kant provided another way to God (to answering such questions) besides the speculative intellect (reason); that way lies through (1) our experiences of being moral agents, and (2) of being sensitive to the beauty of nature and the sublime of reason. Let’s briefly examine both.

Duty and beauty

Kant was not merely the first thinker to understand the full impact of the new science, but he was also the first to split the human mind itself (Descartes had split the mind off from the body but Kant split the mind within itself). This split is evident in one of his more famous passages:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within me.

Here he draws a distinction between the inner and outer, and natural world and the moral world, the phenomenal and noumenal world. The starry heavens open the expanse of the universe, system beyond system, in confrontation with which my personal significance is but an infinitesimal and borrowed bit of matter that in the end must return to the universe. On the other hand, moral law grips my conscience and so my dignity as a person is exalted. As a spiritual being, I am no longer but a bit of matter, nothing in an indifferent universe; rather, the moral law commands me inwardly in a way that seems to open upon a fuller destiny than being a mere bit of matter.

The difference between these two perspectives is irreconcilable; as we lean towards the one or the other our human nature is radically split. If Kant is far more explicit in articulating this split, it is the same one as haunted Pascal when he writes: “the eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me”. It is this same alienation that runs through all of modernity. It is resolved only when or if the universe is believed to have some

meaning in harmony with our own (inward) spiritual and moral aims – the (re)discovery of God/transcendental.

Kant follows the tradition in this regard but in a non-traditional way. Before examining this let me briefly comment on what happened here: a separation of the natural and moral; the separating of human being as moral agent and a non-moral universe (a Machine of Nature).

For the ancients there was no such separation between the natural and moral. For Aristotle morality is the fulfillment of human nature; virtue means excellence. Just as our physical virtue or excellence is the perfection of the body, so our moral virtues are the perfection of our living together, as social beings, in community. [Just maybe Aristotle gazing at the Mediterranean sky is very different from Kant gazing at the Konigsberg sky – the former is ablaze with light and life suggesting the habitat for spirit.] Similarly, for the Christian medieval era the universe was the creation of a loving God and hence entirely congenial for our moral nature which was part of God’s creation. Christians added theological virtues to Aristotle’s scheme which Aristotle had planted in our human nature – loving our neighbor while not our inclination is surely a divine command. But then suddenly with the emergence of the new science, the Enlightenment, the harmony between cosmic and human vanished. Modern science, the new science, in a few short centuries put forward another image of the universe as a machine indifferent to human purposes. If Kant grasped the implications of this new science in terms of its methods and concepts, Kant also understands its consequences for moral and aesthetic life.

Of course, even in our everyday life we find that the moral and natural are not always conjoined – witness our efforts to move against our inclinations or against circumstances; how difficult is obedience even if were so inclined. But if learn morality through instruction or example, Kant claims it would be a mistake to think that we can define the moral in terms of social-psychological conditioning. In fact, Kant’s ethics is one of the most sharply drawn non-naturalistic (psychological) theories. There is no set of natural predicates (whether social cultural, psychological etc.). However thorough our social conditioning, we can always move against the social order. In fact, we may find that the call of our conscience is precisely that it moves against the social-political order of tradition (however much we may respect that tradition).

Kant claims that the fundamental situation in ethics is that the individual asks himself “what ought to do?” But “ought” can never be defined in term of “is”. Thus the factual case of what “is” can never guide to us what moral case of “what ought to be”, even if in some unusually and happy situations the two happen to coincide (where desire and ideal coincide). Human beings are the only animals in nature that submit to the call of the “ought”. How do we explain this demand/power of the call of the “ought”, of duty? Kant answer here is divided:

(1) On the one hand we are creatures haunted by the feeling of spiritual destiny beyond the material order – this is the call to duty, of conscience, or the voice of God within us. (2) On the other hand, Kant in the rationalist tradition demands a purely formal explanation in terms of the moral imperative. This dual answer once again exemplifies the division within the mind: moral and religious consciousness is on its way to being secularized by the rationalism of the new age.

For example, Kant claims that we have a moral obligation not to lie. Ye life often carries us into dilemmas such that we do lie and we feel ashamed/guilty perhaps especially when

the lie is trivial. From where comes this power of the command “thou shalt not lie?” Kant tells us that the command is planted in our very reason (like the apriori categories of understanding in case of our knowledge about the world) and so, for Kant, lying becomes a formal contradiction of our reason. The question is of course whether this is so…Kant makes a strong argument that we should always act such that we can will others to act as well….but can reason can bear the load of spiritual values? Take for example lying in the context of a promise: in the act of promising I also think that I have no intention of carrying out the promise - this does look like a formal contradiction of reason (i.e., I will do it and I will not do it, p and not p). Yet if we just take these two propositions in themselves they do not actually give us the situation of the lie. For consider “I say aloud I will do it” while “I think to myself I will not do it. But this is not a formal contradiction, however morally reprehensible they may be.

Lying is not merely a formal contradiction in logic. For one thing why should we feel ashamed or guilt on lying if it merely involved a formal contradiction? I might feel embarrassed at my stupidity in reasoning (cognitive dissonance) but surely not guilty. Indeed, psychologically the aftermath of a lie is particularly potent and this would be very odd if it were a mere formal contradiction. There is a contradiction involved in lying of course but it is not a formal one. Language is an open realm and in using language to speak I enter this realm. When I lie I shut myself off from this realm of the open, and so from others. In lying I shut myself off from others, from the community of speakers, from their communal reality. It is this sense of community that lies at the basis of our ethics. It is community that is the apriori condition of our normal sense of guilt when we fail to heed the command of duty. If we lie we sever ourselves from this apriori condition. If I ought to do something then I am bound to do it at least if I am to have a place in community, and hence humanity.

Indeed Kant was later to acknowledge what he calls the kingdom of souls or kingdom of ends, in the context of his effort to give religious justification of morality. But for the moment he proceeds as if morality were a matter of formal reason – of the categorical imperative – act so that you can will others act in the same way. But as I said, the call of duty reposes on the notion of a community – rather than as individuals – and it is community that is the apriori condition of the possibility of morality and ethical action. The latter is the existential side of Kant that was to carry forth in the 19th c. and focus on practical reason (as opposed to theoretical reason or understanding).

Beauty

The split between the natural (starry heavens) and the moral (moral law) world needs somehow to be healed. Indeed in everyday experience the rift often seems to be overcome. As purely sensory being we do enjoy the beauties of nature in a way that does away with the bifurcation between the physical world and the moral world in what seems to some at least a spiritual harmony between them. But as usual, Kant maintains that when there is such tendency towards harmony we must submit this harmony to rational critique or reflection so as to establish its proper limits. If the reason as theoretical understanding is limited to natural world, and reason as practical understanding is limited to the moral world, then reason as aesthetic appreciation involves bringing together theoretical and practical reason in a harmony of nature and spirit (morality).

Aesthetic appreciation harmonizes the moral practical reason and natural theoretical understanding.

But Kant is no aesthete (i.e., one who gives too little to moral duty and too much to the cultivation of refined aesthetic sensitivity). For Kant insists that the experience of beauty be understood within nature. Beauty is not simply the captivation of our senses but it is also morally uplifting. Thus he who gives himself to beauty in nature is also likely to be a morally good person (i.e., s/he will not be an aesthete). Here Kant rebels against the Renaissance which was filled with aesthetic desperados, connoisseurs of art who were capable of slitting another’s throat without a moment’s afterthought (e.g., Robert Browning’s My last Duchess).

Kant’s view of beauty may strike others as unduly moralistic – and therefore old-fashioned (why should the creator of beauty – aesthetic objects - also be a morally good person?). We moderns have through upheavals in art have dispensed with the beautiful in nature. Rather, for us, what is most present in modern art is its separation from nature. Art has become simply a human artifice, ingenious, technologically immense, but having little to do with nature (which we deemed to be a mere machine, perhaps more so that Kant or before him the originators of the new science did).

In aesthetic theory, there immediately arises, following Kant, a reversal in the philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) Kant’s position with regard to beauty. I will deal with Hegel later but for now Hegel claims that in matters of aesthetics, nature is not the proper topic (as Kant held). Rather, Hegel claimed that we must restrict ourselves to beauty as he finds beauty in acts of human expression – a purely human product. Importantly, Hegel was no positivist; on the contrary he is a philosopher of the most sweeping metaphysical speculation (which Kant warned against) and he was critical of Kant’s rationalism (especially of Kant’s placement of limits on reason in rejecting metaphysics) and instead Hegel absorbs nature into the domain of the moral or historical, thereby removing consciousness even further away from nature.

The philosopher Whitehead speaks of the bifurcation of nature as fundamental to modern thought in the 19th c. Experience is now split into two domains: the immediate qualitative and the conceptual quantitative, the subjective and the objective – something Kant tried to avoid following Hume’s skepticism. Of course, the immediate qualitative make up the domain of aesthetic intimacy with nature, but now that domain is shut up in the individual human mind. Hegel’s assignment of aesthetics to purely human making moves in this same direction, away from nature. But we should note that:

The beauty of the sunset remains. It is not merely in our individual minds. There does seem to be a harmony of nature and human spirit in the setting sun. Even positivists will have to acknowledge that even as it somehow doesn’t belong to nature-as-known. Kant understood that feeling; he respects the cosmic dimension and would preserve it. At the same time he is a critical philosopher and he cannot just let the feeling stand as proof: proof for Kant consisted of determinate concepts (not feelings however exalted these might be).

Kant is consistently ambivalent. He destroys traditional rational arguments for God, beauty, truth, and makes us profoundly aware of the vastness of the universe relative to our own status. However, he is also persistently sensitive to moral and aesthetic experience that seem to point beyond our finite status. He attempts everywhere to make room, to limit reason to its appropriate domain, in order that he might well remain faithful to experience (and not now to sensory impressions or observation).

Kant’s aesthetics softens the stern picture of nature from which he sets out. Those austere starry heavens above which dwarf our human being, are juxtaposed by the beauty of nature that charms the senses and in its more sublime aspects lifts us to moral exaltation, leading us gently to the transcendent idea of God. Yet Kant remains a moralist, the validity of our aesthetic response depends our moral seriousness. Therefore the act of faith remains for him a solemn and solitary commitment of the individual soul as a full moral being. In fact, Kant describes this act of faith with a kind of drama and severity that is rather startling.

Granted that the pure moral law inexorably binds every man as a command (not as a rule of prudence), the righteous man may say “I will that there be a God; that my existence in this world be also an existence in a pure world of the understanding (reason) outside the system of natural connections, and finally that my duration be endless. “I stand by this and will not give up this belief, for this is the only case where my interests inevitably determines my judgment because I will not yield anything of this interest; I do so without any attention to sophistries, however little I may be able to answer them or oppose them with others more plausible.

“I will that there be a God”… these are fearful words of self-assertion. To be sure Kant surrounded these words with all the conditions of piety, and the claim can be made only by someone like Kant who has submitted to the command of morality. This morality would not make sense however unless there were some divine order in this world, and beyond that, the possibility of immortality to round off the disorders of our mortal lives. God’s existence then is an argument from morality. We might note that self-assertion is one the chief characteristics of the modern mind - it is the language that takes the place of language of faith. “I will that there be a God” (note Nietzsche’s “I will that there is no God”) is hardly the language of St Augustine. The latter approaches God with humility and hunger/desire. Even Luther who wrote a treatise on the human will would have reminded Kant that for man to will God into existence is the reverse of the natural order, and furthermore I could only will such if my will were already submitted to God.

Kant’s philosophy however was to take over German thought on the will. Not that Kant shares much with, say, Nietzsche or Schopenhauer; Kant is a rationalist and a follower of the Enlightenment. And hence he does not share in the passion, the storm and stress, of the Romantics. But that is why his language is even more startling, and that these words do not belong to the tradition of faith of the humble and contrite heart. These words do not bow before God; rather, they assert the power of the human will/reason to invoke God into being (a necessary apriori condition of the possibility of morality). In this sense Kant’s words do portend Nietzsche’s “will to power”. Everything turns on the resolute will/reason of the individual. Here God recedes even as Kant was still living a pietistic existence of traditional theism. Kant would have been horrified by Nietzsche denial of God (I will that God does not exist); Kant would have thought Nietzsche’s atheism demonic. Still if one reduces faith to self-assertion, as Kant does, if one leaves the free will dangling before its own power (of reason), might it not take the opposite course as it does in Nietzsche?

What is so remarkable about Kant is that he was able to balance science, morality, and religion in what was in the 19th c. to fall complete apart. Kant has piety but not passion (in this is he is not an Augustine or a Pascal); he teaches awe and respect for religion, but not the passion of worship; he teaches the freedom of the will to give itself reason, but he is

not one to understand community. His thought is already secular, a secularity that was to be the hallmark of the 19th c.

In 1804 when Kant died he had set foot into a century that was alien to him. Kant’s thought belongs to the 18th c.

If we return to my central theme: namely the fate of the mind/consciousness and to how we understand the mind/consciousness (ourselves) and its power to know our place in the universe, we have to ask what did Kant contribute to our understanding of the human mind?

1. The mind is not additive as it was for Hume and the other empiricists. Mind is not a heap of impressions or perceptions, nor is it an aggregate faded traces (ideas) left behind by sense impressions. In fact, what is different in Kant is that he does not proceed additively by adding part to part, rather he proceeds “structurally” and proceeds from the whole (experience) to its parts. We can understand sense impressions only insofar as we grasp them as (meaningful) “phenomenon” within the wider context of consciousness. For example Hume would claim that we have an idea of space additively from experience with many spaces and then imaginatively come to infinite space. Kant points out that this procedure is caught in its first step. The first space, say of this room, is already in fact a particular part of the whole of space. The whole is implied in the part. [which was part of the later 19th c. hermeneutics.]

2. Kant is the archenemy of the atomistic reductive habits of thought that have overtaken much of our thinking today. If we try to construct consciousness out of mental atoms – sense impressions, perceptions, or cognitive processes – we find that these isolated atoms always imply a more inclusive structure of mind in which they are found. Even ordinary sense perception already implies structures of space and time and the various categories of understanding (substance, cause and effect, etc.). The part has meaning only within the whole. Of course sometimes this implication of the whole in the part is not so obvious. For example, if we begin with the idea of duty, our first task is to understand the meaning of right and wrong, and then proceed to the particular things/events that are right and wrong. Hence we proceed to an analysis of particular duties (in this situation or that). But as Kant points out, our ethical task is not to make a list of rights and wrongs (which may well tell us of particular duties) for this does not tell us what our moral being is as a unitary phenomenon. Kant anticipates Heidegger’s distinction between beings and Being here; we do not get the idea of Being as an aggregate of particular beings, for as soon as we refer to a particular beings we have already in mind the idea of Being as such. According to Kant the task of ethics is not understandable unless we ask the question of our moral nature as a whole. We are moral creatures in a universe that dwarfs us. Yet we continue to struggle and toil to lead a moral existence. For what purpose or just what is the meaning of this toil? Is trying to be moral not merely one more item of absurdity in the vastness of this universe? But as Kant points out, the moral person in the performance of his/her duty – the performance itself in meeting one’s obligation already answers this question. An ethical conviction of rightness of an act already implies the conviction that this act makes a difference and hence must have meaning in being part of the larger scheme of things.

3. Kant’s argument therefore always begins in experience and then tries to uncover the conditions necessary for the experience to be the experience it is. These conditions are not necessarily open to us (in reflection or introspection) hence we

must recover these pre-conditions in what Kant calls the transcendental argument. Thus, Kant claims that the categorical imperative itself has as its precondition the existence of God, belief in the free will, etc., which does mean that we can prove God’s existence, or our free will, etc., but we act as if there is a spiritual order in which our lives are embedded. Now we may detect here in Kant something of his personal beliefs (his psychology), but we should be careful in this accusation for it misses the point of his philosophical argument. Our beliefs about the nature of the universe do enter into our view of morality and our ethical being is projected against some imaginative cosmos as a whole. But this is true for the atheist as well as the theist; for Nietzsche as well as Kant. Nietzsche “death of God” is spoken against the background of a vision of a cosmic order.

4. We can slough off all this and try to construct a logically self-contained ethics (as modern philosophy tries to do). But this effort is self-defeating for these effort address ethical questions of action but they do not address the question of the nature of an ethical being. In other words, these efforts never address concrete experience of concrete individual human beings who ask ultimate questions. The cosmic dimensions of mind are, if you will, pushed aside in the interest of specialization (analysis, decomposition, and reductionism). The focus is entirely instrumental (in reason: calculating the best, most moral, choice) and in doing so these ethicists never talk of person, moral beings but of their choice of actions in situations (behaviorist or formalists as in analytical philosophy and much of contemporary ethics). Here we compartmentalize the mind and fragment the person into his/her actions/motivations etc. all without the whole context. Kant warns us against the effort of the empiricists who try to understand the mind atomistically as a heap of sensations, and he also warns us in trying to understand ethics procedurally which would fragment the person in trying to understand the person in terms of his/her functions.

5. What is lacking in Kant? What is lacking in Kant no less than in Hume is a grasp of the concrete self, of the “I” that each one of us experiences. Kant’s analysis remains formalistic and transcendental and he does not come to grips with the ego/self/”I” that underlies the will that gives itself reason (conditions of possibility conceived now as formal reason). Of course, Kant does acknowledge that there is an “I” or ego that accompanies all our thoughts. There are no free-floating impressions or ideas; consciousness does not simply float around in the air; it must be someone’s consciousness. We might in moments of intense activity forget ourselves but we always return and are brought back to ourselves. Kant rejects Hume’s desubstantialization of consciousness - the self is essential for consciousness if it is not to result in fragmentation of the self into its capacities, functions, etc. Our contemporary fear of “substance” (unless it is “matter”) - the reduction of meaning to matter as in operationalization – is strictly a fear of wholeness, of the conviction that knowledge comes only in denying anything that cannot be broken into “bits of matter moving”.

6. Kant claims that this “I” must be capable of accompanying all our thoughts. Here Kant yields too much to Hume. He wants to confine himself to the minimalist empiricist assertion: that the “I” must be capable of accompanying its reason. But surely the “I” is stronger than that. Commonsense would hold that the self (“I”) persist as an identity over time – an identity that is concrete or substantial – the soul as substance! This pronouncement would horrify psychologists today even those who are not necessarily reductionists. But perhaps we should look back to a time when this substantial self first became suspect.

7. For Aristotle, a primary substance is a concrete individual object and characteristic of such a substance is that it has a separate existence. When the

immortality of the soul was still central this substantial nature of the soul was emphasized (capable of surviving the body). But Aristotle also takes note of the fact that substance remains identical through change – and it is this characteristic that we need –persistence through change in body and mind are part of what we mean by the identity of the self. The fact that we have a personal identity through time/change is so overwhelmingly part of everyday experience that it is hard to understand why philosophy, and later psychology, would pass it by. Philosophy seems to think that the self is spending time in a lonely chamber, in solitary introspection, hunting for a fugitive and ghostly identity (Descartes, the empiricists but also Kant). But as Aristotle and the Medievals understood we live in community were personal identity is a bedrock fixture of the world that it hardly seems to need comment.

8. Why then is it such a problem for philosophy and psychology, why for Kant? In Kant’s case the puzzle results from his epistemological stance. According to Kant, we know only the appearance of thing (phenomena never noumena). This is also the case for the self/mind as a persisting entity (we can never know the mind/self “in-itself”). As Kant indicated, I cannot make intellectual concept of the self/mind; hence it cannot be known. Kant pushed the requirements for knowledge too far; as a cautiously critical philosopher he leaned too heavily on Hume’s skepticism thereby blurring the epistemological and the existential (reason and life). He was focused on the requirements of strict knowledge even as he also did heed the claims of existence. But to have knowledge of something we need not have strict knowledge, a complete conceptually transparent explanation, of something. It is almost as if we must have scientific knowledge or else we know nothing….. this is the trend today of course when everyone does “research” pretending that the results of research constitute strict knowledge….

After Kant, philosophy disperses; as indeed does the self, even Kant’s minimal self/mind is dispersed. This has come about through specialization but with specialization comes fragmentation (witness the numerous fields of psychology) and often the absence of communication (other than information). Amid specialization and fragmentation, it also becomes increasingly difficult to keep or have a sense of personal identity – and this situation is made much worse when we do not have a culture that presents a conception and idea or a faith in the stable self (“I”/self). Indeed, our scientific theories in the social-psycho-neuro- sciences present the opposite…no self at all.

It is Hegel who carries Kant to a full-fledged idealism and is then, in turn, confronted by an existentialist revolt in Kierkegaard who laments that the self has almost disappeared in Hegel and replaced by a vaporous notion of “spirit” (modern “spirituality”). Ironically, 20th c. existentialist figures such as Sartre and Heidegger have concocted theories of self as fragmented in their deconstruction of the self and its community.

Lecture 6.2 (Elaboration of Kant’s 2nd Critique practical reason)

Kant took for granted our ordinary knowledge of objects and our scientific knowledge of them. Physical science meant Newtonian science, the new science. Given science, Kant’s task was to analytically distinguish between the apriori (formal) and aposteriori (material) elements of theoretical knowledge of the world.

Of course, besides the object world, there is also our sense of moral knowledge. For example, we “ought to tell the truth”, but what kind of knowledge is this “ought” in contrast to what is knowledge as to how to behave? This knowledge too is apriori in the sense that it does not depend on what we actually do (behave). Even if everyone told lies, we would still know that we ought to tell the truth (that is “ought” is independent of what in fact we do). The moral philosopher should try to isolate the apriori element in our moral knowledge – are synthetic apriori statements possible?

This does not mean that we have to discover an entirely new system of ethics. Rather it means discovering apriori elements in analogous to the apriori categories of understanding/judgments. Not that these categories were to be new categories, rather he

wanted to demonstrate that our practical reason about behavior is grounded in reason such that when we judge morally we do so in accord with principles given by reason to itself. Not of course that we are aware of these apriori principles, for if we were then the task of the philosopher is finished.

What is practical reason: Reason in its practical use (i.e., moral use). Thus while there is ultimately only one reason dealing with objects in two ways (1) as given in sensibility (theoretical, or cognitive, knowledge), and (2) itself the source of objects, in moral choice. That is, the practical use of reason is reason to make moral choices/decisions in accord with principles that proceeds from itself [practical, or conative (determination of the will), knowledge]. The latter is the power of producing objects corresponding to ideas (whether we have the physical power to do so or not) in accord with the moral law/principles. Hence, the will is a rational power not merely a blind drive. In the exercise of the will we can then distinguish between the cognitive and voluntary aspects involved in moral action. The two belong together: the cognitive (knowledge of moral principles) and the voluntary (choice or will); for practical reason produces choices (cognitive) and actions (will) in accord moral principles.

Thus, the moral philosopher in using reason in its practical sense must find in practical reason the source of the apriori element in moral judgment. Hence, the moral philosopher is not expected to derive the whole of moral law (both form and content) from practical reason alone – only the formal aspect. Thus, we have the concept of moral obligation and we must distinguish this from the particular conditions of duty. Moreover, when Kant speaks of practical reason or the rational will as the origin of moral law, he is thinking of practical reason as such and not of practical reason as actually, empirically, found in finite human beings. Thus, he is concerned with moral imperatives antecedent to actual human moral choices (which are always concerned to take into account empirical human conditions). For example, “thou shall not commit adultery” implies the empirical institution of marriage, and hence Kant distinguishes between “pure ethics” or metaphysics of morals (obligation) and applied ethics which applies moral principles/obligations to the empirical conditions of human nature (practical anthropology).

This distinction between pure ethics and applied ethics is analogous to the distinction between metaphysics of nature and empirical physics. Yet Kant admits that evening the metaphysics of morals we have to take into account human nature as such in order to exhibit the consequences of universal moral principles. Bu if this is so then moral practical philosophy becomes a study of the subjective conditions favorable or not for acting in accord with moral principles (e.g., moral education).

Thus, on the one had there is a need for a metaphysics of morals (that prescinds from empirical conditions) to get at the formal apriori conditions that make ethical judgments possible, and yet there is also the recognition that such an endeavor replies on actual conditions of human life (practical anthropology). Thus, for example, if “thou shalt not lie” is apriori (that is, independent of how people actually behave), it is questionable whether this principle is actually apriori in the sense that it does not depend on anthropology, i.e., is valid only for human beings as they live).

Kant’s point is that the basis of obligation (universal principles) must not be sought in human nature as lived in the world, but must be apriori simply in concepts given by reason to itself (“pure ethics”). It is in reason that we must search for these obligations (apriori judgments) which presumably make possible synthetic apriori judgments of

morals. Hence, Kant is not concerned to deduce all morals precepts simply from an analysis of pure practical reason – this cannot be done. Yet moral law must be grounded in reason alone – meaning that we must not consider empirical human circumstances (this distinguishes Kant from say the utilitarian). Thus, we cannot found these moral principles in moral education (Montaigne), physical feeling (Epicurus), in political constitution (Mandeville), in moral feelings (Hutchinson), or in religious faith. None of these can provide the foundations for morality. Nor can morals be based on natural theology because for Kant religious belief was founded in morality.

In his Groundwork of metaphysics of morals, Kant opening words are the following: “It is impossible to conceive of anything in the world, or indeed out of it, which can be called good without qualification save only a good will”. Kant does not believe he is saying anything new here – rather he claims to be saying what is implicit in our ordinary moral knowledge. However it is becoming on him to say what he means when he says that a “good will is the only good without qualification”.

For one thing is a good will not good by definition (analytically true)? A will that is good is presumably good in and of itself without relation to anything else. Thus, we usually say something is good in relation to something else, for example, the benefit, such as happiness, it brings. Moreover, the will that is good is a will that is good no matter what the circumstances that may prevent me from doing my will.

In order to clarify the meaning of good (when applied to the will) Kant turns to duty which he takes to be most salient feature of moral consciousness. A will that acts for the sake of duty is a good will. Now of course God’s will is good but God does not act for the sake of duty (God’s will is a “Holy Will”), and hence, when Kant writes that the will that acts for the sake of duty he implies that the concept of duty or obligation at the very least involves the possibility of overcoming the self (as in self conquest or overcoming obstacles). So that the will that acts for the sake of duty is one that is good.

Kant then distinguishes between action done for the sake of duty and action done in accord with duty, and he maintains that only actions done for the sake of duty are of moral worth. To preserve one’s life is a duty and most people have the immediate inclination to do so. If I preserve my life simply because I am inclined to do so my doing so has no moral worth (although preserving my life not immoral). Similarly, if as a philanthropist I give away my money because I empathize with those who do not have money, my action while not immoral has no moral worth even as Kant also claims that it is better to do one’s duty cheerfully. Of my doing so because I have a beneficent temperament is virtuous but properly speaking it is not moral. In fact, Kant maintains that to more my acting for the sake of duty involves overcoming my inclination to not do my duty, acting against myself for the sake of duty, the greater the moral value of my action. This leads to the strange conclusion that the more I hate doing my duty the better, provided we do our duty. Thus the more inclined we are not to do our duty, the higher our moral worth when we in fact do our duty. This notion is odd because it runs counter to the idea that in the more integrated personality inclination and duty tend to coincide. In any case, the moral ideal is that when acting for the sake of duty coincides with our inclination to do our duty (this comes closest to the “Holy Will”).

But what is meant by acting for the sake of duty? Kant says that it means acting out of reverence for the law, that is, the moral law. Duty is then the necessity of acting out of reverence for the law. What is meant by law? Law here is universality admitting of no exceptions. Now while we physically necessarily conform to natural law, only as rational

being can we act out of reverence for law. Thus, our actions are not moral because of their (intended or unintended) consequences, rather they are moral is performed out of reverence for the law. Hence, the good will is manifested in acting for the sake of duty and duty means acting out of reverence for law (universal).

How does this apply to life?

Before answering this question, Kant distinguishes between maxims and principles. By principle he means a fundamental objective moral law grounded in pure practical reason – it is for the sake of principle that human beings would act if they were fully rational agents. A maxim is a subjective principle of volition – one on which an agent acts as a matter of empirical fact which determines his decision. Maxims may or may be in accord with principles. Kant further distinguishes between empirical or material maxims and apriori or formal maxims: empirical maxims refer to desired ends or desired consequences, whereas apriori maxims refer to the universal moral law.

So how do we apply this formula to life? I am never to act otherwise than so that I can also will that my maxim should become moral law. That is, I am never to act otherwise than that my empirical maxim (by inclination or by consequence) should become moral law. Reverence for law which gives rise to the formal maxim of acting in obedience to law as such demands that we should bring our material/empirical maxims under the form of universal law.

Imagine a man in distress who can extricate himself from the distress by making a promise which he has no intention of fulfilling. That is, he lies. May he do so? If so, then his maxim is that he may extricate himself from distress by lying. We may now ask: can he will this maxim to become universal law? If so, then everyone who is in distress may extricate himself from this distress by promising what s/he has no intention to fulfill. According to Kant this universalization cannot be willed. For this would mean that lying should become a universal law. But then no promises would ever be believed. But in fact, in the example, the man’s maxim postulates belief in promises. Hence, he cannot adopt this empirical maxim and at the same time will that it become universal law. Thus, the maxim cannot assume the form of universality - or become a principle.

In practice we all act in accord with maxims –subjective principles of volition. But a finite will cannot be good unless it is motivated by reverence for universal law. In order that our will may be morally good we have to ask whether our maxims, subjective principles of volition, should become universal laws. If we cannot do so, then we must reject the maxim. If we can do so, then our maxim can become a possible principle in the universal moral realm. In sum, the principle of duty is that I ought never to act otherwise than so I can also will that my maxim should become universal law – and this is Kant’s first approximation of the categorical imperative.

Kant’s distinction between maxims and principles allows that my subjective principles of volition may be at odds with objective principles of morality – giving rise to the experience of obligation. In so far as our wills are not Holy Wills, the moral law therefore necessarily takes on the form of an imperative. Pure practical reason commands and it is our duty to overcome our desires (for outcomes) which conflict with these commands. Now Kant distinguishes between commands and imperatives: the universal objective principle is called a command (of reason) whereas an imperative is a command of reason to the will which, by because it is subjective, is not necessarily determined by the command. This makes clear that the will does not necessarily follow the command of

reason with the result that the command seems to an agent as a constraint pressuring the will. In this sense then the law may be said to be an external force on the will.

There are three kinds of imperatives corresponding to three different senses of good action but only one of these is the moral imperative.

(1) If you wish to learn French or become happy you ought to take these means. These actions are good with respect to a certain end, namely to learn French (hence not for their own sake). These Kant calls hypothetical imperatives.

(2) Not everyone wants to learn French or become a successful burglar and therefore if you wish to learn French or become a successful burglar then you should take these means. This imperative Kant calls problematic hypothetical imperative – an imperative of skill. [Kant seems somewhat cavalier about dismissing teleological ethical theories. For example, Aristotle’s eudaimonia is regarded as an objective actualization of human potentialities and the actions to bring this about are not external to the end. In this case Kant would say this ethics is based on the idea of the perfection of human nature and though while the idea of morally relevant, it cannot support a moral imperative.]

(3) What then is a moral imperative? It is purely apriori in the sense that it commands conformity to law in general. It commands that all our maxims which serve as principles of volition conform to universal law. Therefore there is only one categorical imperative: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law. Or, act as if the maxim of your actions were to become through your will a universal law of nature.

Now Kant does not intent that concrete rule of conduct can be deductively derived from the categorical imperative. Thus, the categorical imperative is not intended to be a premise for the deduction of rules of conduct but rather a criterion for judging the morality of concrete rules of conduct.

For example, suppose that I give money to a poor person in great distress where there is no one else who has greater claim on my money. The maxim (subjective principle of volition) of my action is that “I will give money to any person who needs my assistance when there is no one else who has a prior claim on my money.” Now I can ask myself whether I can will my maxim to be a universal law valid for all. I decide that I can so will. Thus, my maxim is morally justified. But note here that the moral which I will cannot be deduced from the categorical imperative. For the maxim contains ideas not contained in the categorical imperative. But I can say that my maxim can be said to be derived from the categorical imperative.

Since practical moral law is universal (i.e., the form of the law), all concrete principles of conduct must partake in this universality if they are to be called moral. But what does it mean to “be able” or “not able” to will one’s maxim to become universal law? It may mean that there would be a logical contradiction between maxim and universal law, or it may mean that there is a contradiction within the will. An example of the second is given below.

For example, a man enjoys great prosperity and he sees that others are in misery and he could help them. But the man adopts the maxim to not to concern himself with other people. Now can he turn this maxim into a universal law? Obviously where he to do so, it would not lead to a logical contradiction – for there is not contradiction in a law that those with prosperity should mind those in distress. But Kant maintains that this man

cannot will this maxim to be universal law without contradiction within his own will. The reason is that the maxim is an expression of selfish disregard for others even as it is accompanied bya desire that he should obtain help from others should he ever be in a state of misery – a desire which would be contradicted if his maxim became universal law.

An example of the first is as follows. A man needs money and he can obtain it only by promising to repay it, though he knows very well that he will be unable to do so. He cannot turn this maxim (when I am in need of money, I will borrow it and promise to repay it though I well know I cannot do so) into a universal law without contradiction for a universal law of this kind would destroy all faith in promises whereas the man’s maxim presupposes faith in promises.

According to Kant there is only one categorical imperative: “act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law”, but in this above example we also have another formulation: act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law”.

In considering these two examples, we are left with a question: what is the relation between the universal command (imperative) and our maxims governing our actions such that practical reason is obliged to judge their maxims in terms of universal command? If there is a relation then there must be a synthetic apriori connection between the will of a rational being and the categorical imperative. No Kant claims that that which serves the will as objective ground of self-determination is the end. If there is an end assigned by reason alone (not desire) it will be valid for all rational beings and therefore serve as the ground for a categorical imperative binding the wills of all rational beings. This end cannot be relative but must have absolute value. Is there such an end? Kant suggests that human being, any rational being, is an end in itself. It is rational being (human being) that therefore serves to as the ground for the supreme principle of law.

Hence, rational nature exists as an end in itself, and following the practical imperative,

Act to treat humanity, whether your own person, or in that of any other person, always at the same time as an end and never merely a means.

This version of the categorical imperative has some interesting consequences:

1. The suicide who destroys himself to escape from his pain uses himself as a mere means to a relative end namely to maintain a tolerable conditions up the end of his life.

2. The man who makes a promise to obtain a benefit and yet has no intention of fulfilling his promise (or knows he cannot) using the man to whom he makes the promise as a mere means to a relative end.

3. The monarch who uses soldiers in aggrandizing his own standing or that of his country uses rational beings as mere means to his desired end. Kant advocated that all standing armies be abolished.

The idea of respecting every rational will as an end in itself and not treating it as a means to satisfying one desire leads to the idea of “the will of every rational being as making universal law” and this is the principle of the autonomy of the will. Thus the moral will which obeys the categorical imperative must never be determined by interest, inclination etc. So the idea of a categorical imperative contains implicitly the idea of the autonomy

of the will and this autonomy can be expressed explicitly in the categorical imperative. We then have the principle:

Never act on any other maxim than the one you could without contradiction be also universal law, and accordingly always act so that the will could regard itself at the same time as making the universal law through its maxim.

Or

So act that the maxim of your will could always at the same time be valid as a principle making universal law.

Therefore it is easy to see why Kant speaks of the autonomy of the will as the “supreme principle of morality” – and the sole principle of all moral laws and corresponding duties. Heteronomy of the will is the source of all spurious morality. In this Kant presupposes a distinction between human beings as rational beings and human beings as subject to desires etc.; it is as rational beings that we legislate our desires.

The idea of rational beings as ends in themselves coupled with the idea of the rational will, practical reason as morally legislating, brings us to the concepts of “the kingdom of ends” whereby Kant understands the systematic union of rational beings through common laws. As individuals we belong to the kingdom of ends either (1) by legislating laws, or/and (2) by being subject to laws. Hence every rational being is both member and sovereign.

Now the kingdom of ends is thought of on the analogy to the kingdom of nature: the self imposed rules in the former are like the laws in the latter. Now the categorical imperative states that all rational beings ought to act in a certain way; thus, the imperative states an obligation – but is according to Kant a synthetic apriori proposition. That is, the obligation cannot be obtained from the mere analysis of the concept of rational will (hence it is not analytical), on the other hand the subject is necessarily connected with the subject - it obliges the will. In fact, it is a practical synthetic apriori proposition: thus, it does extend our theoretical knowledge of the world rather it is directed toward the performance of certain actions good in themselves independent of our desires etc. (i.e., apriori) yet binding us (i.e., synthetic).

In what sense is the predicate binding on the subject? We require here a third term which cannot be one in the sensible world (otherwise we risk heteronomy of the will) and Kant finds it in the idea of freedom. That is the idea of obligation and acting for the sake of duty in accordance with the categorical imperative relies on the idea of freedom. Freedom cannot be proven. Practical reason or the will of a rational being must regard itself as free; that is the will of such a being cannot be its own will unless it is free. Thus, the idea of freedom is a practical necessity as a condition of the possibility of morality – hence it is not a fiction.

The idea of freedom means also that we regard ourselves as belonging to the phenomenal world of sensibility (and causality) and the noumenal world of intelligibility. We can view ourselves from two points of view. As belonging to the world of natural law (heteronomy) and the world of freedom (autonomy of reason).

In addition to freedom, practical reason also postulates the existence of God and immortality. Here Kant reintroduces metaphysics which he had earlier rejected as the

illegitimate transcendence of reason but he does so in considering reason in its practical use.

Here we must be mindful of the difficulty Kant faced. If our actions belonging as they do to the world are subject to natural law, they are also free at least if they are moral. Can they be both at the same time? Kant was well aware of the difficulty.

If we want to save freedom there is no other way than to ascribe the existence of a thing, so far as it is determinable in time, and therefore also its causality according to the law of natural necessity, to appearance alone; and to ascribe freedom to precisely the same being as a thing-in-itself. So how can an individual be completely free at the same moment and in regard to the same action in which he is subject to inevitable natural necessity?

The answer is that insofar as my existence is subject to time conditions (temporality) my actions are a part of nature and causally determined. But I am also conscious of myself as a thing-in-itself and deem my existence to transcend time and as determined solely by laws that I give to myself through reason; this is freedom. This is not as strange as it sound, for consider than when I look at my actions contrary to moral law in the past (time), I attribute them to causal factors. But the feeling of guilt remains and the reason is that my transgression-in-time is of moral law-beyond-time (belonging to super-sensible existence outside of time): noumenally free yet phenomenally determined with respect to the same actions.

Now reason even in its practical function seeks an unconditioned totality. That is, it seeks a summum bonum –conceived as (1) a highest good (itself not conditioned) or (2) a perfect good (not part of the greater whole). Now virtue is the supreme unconditioned good but it does not follow that it is a perfect good in the sense that it is the total object of the desires of rational beings and, in fact, Kant claims that happiness must be included in the concept of perfect good. Hence, the summum bonum must include both virtue and happiness. However, the relation between virtue and happiness is not a logical one but a synthetic (empirical) one: happiness assumes virtue.

For can we possibly claim that virtue produces happiness? While practical reason demands a connection between virtue and happiness, it is certainly not the case that virtue causes happiness. Kant’s way of dealing with this is as follows. The claim that virtue produces happiness is only conditionally false – that is, it is false only on the condition that we take existence in this world to be the only sort of existence that a rational being can have (hints or immortality). The claim that virtue causes happiness is true if I am justified in thinking that I exist not only as a phenomenal being in nature but also as a noumenal being in the super-sensible world – that is that the moral law in inseparably connected with freedom demands that I believe this. The realization of the summum bonum is possible (virtue produces happiness), if not immediately, then mediately through the agency of God.

If I just referred to the existence of another world, but Kant actually approaches the postulate of immortality through an analysis of virtue. The moral law requires that we promote the perfect good which is the necessary object of the rational will. Obviously this does not mean that the moral law commands us to pursue virtue because is brings us happiness, rather we are commanded by practical reason to pursue virtue which causes happiness. The virtue we are commanded to pursue is the complete accordance of will and feeling with the moral law – and this would be, as we have seen, Holiness which no rational being in this sensible world is capable of attaining – hence it is an endless

process of pursuing an ideal. But this endless process is possible only on the supposition of an unending duration of existence and personality which is called the immortality of the soul. Therefore the attainment of the first element of the summum bonum (the pursuit of virtue command by moral law) is possible only on the supposition of the immortal soul and hence the immortality of the soul is a presupposition of practical reason. It is not demonstrable in a theoretical sense but a condition of possibility of free moral action.

This same practical use of reason in obeying the command to attain Holiness also leads to the postulate of the existence of God as the condition for a synthetic connection between virtue and happiness. Happiness is the state of a rational being in the world in whom in the totality of his existence everything goes according to his wish and will. It depends therefore on the harmony of nature with the free will. But of course rational beings are not the authors of nature nor can we discover a causal connection between virtue and happiness. If therefore there is a synthetic apriori connection between virtue and happiness, we must postulate of a cause of the whole of nature which is distinct from nature and which is the ground of an exact harmony between happiness and virtue (morality). But this cause of nature must be capable of acting such as to apportioning happiness to morality according to the conception of law. This requirement means that such a cause of nature must be rational (intelligent) such that his causality be his will. This is God – omniscient because in apportioning happiness according to virtue he must know all our inner states such that his world can apportion happiness with virtue.

Note that Kant is not merely metaphysically invoking God (which he denies was possible), rather God is a condition of possibility of moral action – and hence an admission of practical reason – and this admission is an act of faith. Hence faith is based on moral law.

Now do these three postulates (freedom, immortality of the soul, and God) proceeding from the principle of morality (law) increase our knowledge? Yes but only from a practical point of view and not from the view of intellectual intuition (which human are not capable of). Now once we invoke these postulates as a condition for moral practical reason theoretical reason we can think these postulates using the categories of understanding and ideas (which for speculative reason were only regulative) now become intelligible in taking on definite form (become constitutive) – and we can think these ideas even as we can never conceptualize them. It is interesting to consider that if this is so than practical reason is primary and theoretical reason secondary, but only if practical reason does not deal with empirical (desire) or sensible objects otherwise we get fantasy. If practical reason is taken as pure reason in its practical capacity, as judging in accord with apriori principles, then theoretical reason must attempt to deal with the claims of practical reason. If we do not accept this primacy of practical reason we must conclude that reason is in conflict within itself for pure practical and pure theoretical reason are one.

For Kant morality doe not presuppose religion; that is one need have the idea of God to recognize his duty. At the same time morality does lead to religion: through the idea of the supreme good the moral law leads to religion which is the recognition that all duties are divine command, not as alien sanctions, but as the law of the free will which however must be looked on as the command of a supreme being because it is only from a morally perfect (holy and good) and all powerful will that we can attain the harmony of highest good and happiness -and the hope for happiness therefore begins with religion.

True religion then for Kant consist in this that in all our duties we regard God as the universal legislator who is to be revered. This reverence consists in obeying moral law, acting for the sake of duty. Note the individualism here in Kant (he disregards creeds, practices, liturgy, rituals, institutions, and hence Kant’s conception of religion is moralistic and rationalistic.

It is easy to understand how Hegel could reject Kant moral theory as abstract and intellectualistic. With respect to Kant’s view of religion, it follows the Enlightenment in rejecting traditions and Hegel was later to rectify this. What Kant did do was to reconcile the new science with individual freedom – he thereby rescues the individual from being absorbed in the scientific materialism (nothing but… position). But what connection is there between pure and practical reason (they are after all One) or between determinism and freedom? For this we have Kant’s 3rd C.

3rd Critique of Judgment

If we are to find some reconciliation between the world of theoretical reason and practical reason, between nature and freedom, it must be possible to think nature in such a way that it is compatible with the attainment of end sin accordance with the laws of freedom. Kant here turns to the study of judgment (Urteilskraft) as mediating between cognition (Verstand; understanding) and desire (Vernunft; pure reason). We saw that with respect to theoretical use of reason, the categories of the understanding exercised a constitutive function in making possible a knowledge of object; in the practical use of reason, we say that the ideas of reason exercised a regulative function in regulating desire. Can judgment mediate between understanding and reason? And can judgment have its own apriori principles (of feeling) and are these apriori principles constitutive or regulative?

By judgment Kant means thinking the particular in the universal. Kant distinguishes between determinant and reflective judgments and it is the latter we are concerned with. In reflective judgment the scientist for example is always concerned in constructing a system of laws – i.e., he is guided in his inquiry by a concept of nature as an intelligible unity – that under the assumption that nature were the work of divine command. The latter does not imply that the scientist must believe in God; rather, that he presumes the unity of nature as if it were an intelligible system adapted to our cognitive faculties. It is on this principle that reflective judgment proceeds. Obviously the principle is apriori since it cannot be found in nature. But it is not a priori principle in the sense that it is not a necessary condition for there being objects of experience. It is rather a heuristic principle guiding scientific inquiry.

Nature as a system intelligently adapted to human cognitive capacities is the concept of the purposiveness or finality of nature. The purposiveness of nature is thus an apriori concepts which has its source in reflective judgment (purposiveness is a transcendental principle - concerns empirical knowledge in general and is not itself based in empirical observation. The fact that it is transcendental is evident when we consider the maxims to which it gives rise: Nature takes the shortest way, nature makes no leaps, etc which are themselves not empirical observations. Note that this principle is not constitutive but regulative. It makes nature possible not with respect to our knowledge of it (for this is the work of the categories) but with respect to our knowledge of its lawfulness. Hence, Kant is not making some metaphysical claim, namely that there are final causes operating in nature but rather that nature is treated as though involves an empirical system of laws unified through their common grounds in intelligence other than our own.

Of course the discovery of this unified nature is a contingent matter open to discovery (which is the task of the understanding). This finality of out knowledge of nature is represented in two ways: (1) the form of the object with the cognitive faculty; that is, the pleasure (form) which comes from representing the object, and when we judge that pleasure is necessarily derived from that form we have an aesthetic judgment (the object is beautiful). (2) the finality of an object can be represented as an accordance of its form with the possibility of the thing itself according to a concept of the thing which grounds the form - and the things with respect to its form is fulfilling an end or purpose of nature –we have a teleological judgment.

Aesthetic judgments are subjective in the sense that it is a judgment about the accordance of the form of an object (natural or artificial) with the cognitive faculties on the basis of feeling cause by the representation of the object (not the concept). Teleological judgments are objective in the sense that the object given fulfils a conceived end or purpose of nature.

The purposiveness of nature as an apriori regulative concept serves as the connecting link between nature and freedom. For while the purposiveness of nature neither constitutes nature nor legislates action, it does enable us to think nature as not entirely alien to us.Aesthetic judgments allow us to see phenomenal objects of art as expressions of noumenal reality of value; and teleological judgments enables us to conceive the possibility of an actualization of ends in nature in harmony with nature’s laws.

Judgment in virtue of its apriori principles of for judging nature leads us to consider noumenal reality, within and outside of us, as determinable by means of the intellectual faculty which represents nature as the phenomenal expression of noumenal reality. And in virtue of its apriori practical law, determines noumenal reality in showing us how to conceive of it – hence we have a transition between the concept of nature and the concept of freedom.

Kant notes that in the history of philosophy there have been different ways of explaining the purposiveness of nature: idealism and realism. Idealism maintains that such purposiveness is undersigned (Greek atomists – laws of motion, Spinoza – fatalism) while realism maintains that purposiveness is designed (hylozoism – or world soul). While this is an odd use of idealism and realism, Kant’s contention is that theism is superior to other explanations. The trouble is that it cannot be proven (nor of course can it be disproved). All we have are regulative judgments as to the unity of nature and its intelligent cause. If we cannot understand how the mechanistic (efficient) and the final causes are to be reconciled (how things are subject to two kinds of law), the possibility that they are reconciled at the “supersensible substrate” level to which we have no access remains. Theism provides the best framework for thinking the universe even as the truth of theism cannot be scientifically known.

Lecture 7: After Kant

The 19th c is one from which we are still struggling to extricate ourselves. It was a century of overwhelming materialism and positivism and with both the mind was given short thrift. Yet in philosophy at least the first part of the century was to witness an bacchanalian celebration of “consciousness: in the form of German idealism the principle figure of which was Hegel. This remarkable flowering of metaphysical speculation at the beginning of the 19th c. professes to solve the riddle of the universe and the meaning of human existence.

True enough before the death of Schelling in 1854 (who along with Fichte and Hegel) are the prime figures of this movement) Auguste Comte in France had already published his Course of positive philosophy in which he presented metaphysics, along with religion, as merely a passing stage in the history of human thought, and Germany was to have its own positivist and materialist movements which would force philosophers to redefine their work relative to the sciences, yet early on in the century speculative philosophy exhibited a period of unprecedented growth –here we find superb confidence in human reason and the scope of philosophy as all embracing wherein the entire life of “self-expression”, including science, could be subjected to philosophical reflection. They believed that the nature of reality could finally be fully revealed to human consciousness –something which Kant had left in a lurch.

Today we understand this idealism as belonging to another world, another climate of thought. With the death of Hegel in 1831 this epoch of absolute idealism ended (it was short but its yield was powerful). Hegel’s faith in the immense sense of the power and range of speculative thought (reason) has never been regained since. Even if little remains of this absolute idealism today, it constituted a magnificent and influential view of a unified conceptual mastery of reality and experience as a whole.

Today philosophers totally reject any effort on the part of scientific philosophy to gain such an overall view of reality (it simply is not the task of philosophy to do so). Indeed, we are seemingly more humble in not allowing the human mind ever to aspire to such an effort (ironically we now leave it to science!). But Hegel did and we should recognize this effort for while some of his thinking is almost fantastic, there is also much that is absolutely brilliant and continues to offers us cause for reflection.

The question for me is not the demise of idealism but why did it arise at all when it did?

As the immediate background to idealism we have Kant who, as you will recall, attacked metaphysics as the illegitimate extension of reason – we cannot think the real – the real is always the phenomenal. On the other hand, the idealist also considered themselves followers of Kant. Hence, we have to consider how it is that metaphysical idealism could

develop out of the system of thought (Kant’s) which rejected the possibility of metaphysics – other than to know the apriori structures of the mind (and these were not know but these were conditions for the possibility of) in attaining knowledge and experience.

Perhaps the easiest place to start is with Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself. Fichte viewed Kant’s stance as impossible. Thus, if Kant asserts that the thing-in-itself (noumenal which we could not know) was cause of sensibility, he obviously would be guilty of inconsistency since the concept of cause cannot be used to extend our knowledge beyond the phenomenal world. On the other hand, if Kant simply wanted to retain the thing-in-itself as a limiting notion this is tantamount to retaining a ghostly relic of the very dogmatism which it was his mission, the mission of critical philosophy, to overcome. For Fichte Kant’s Copernican revolution was a great step forward and there was no going back to Hume or Descartes and hence we must move forward, meaning we must rid ourselves of the thing-in-itself because on Kant’s own view there was no room for some such occult entity as the thing-in-itself. Hence, Fichte thought that critical philosophy has to be transformed into a consistent idealism – things had to be regarded as products of thought – there was no world without mind.

Obviously this did not mean that the physical/material world could be brought about in simply thinking it…In ordinary consciousness there is a world of objects which affect me and which I come to think about as existing independently of my thinking and willing. Hence idealist will, like Leibnitz and Kant, have to go beyond/behind consciousness and retrace the process of the unconscious activity which grounds our ordinary consciousness of the world. But more than this, we have to recognize that the world cannot be attributed to individual consciousness at all. For if it were the product of individual consciousness then we would have the problem of a finite mind (even an unconscious mind) bringing about a world – this is solipsism (everyone would bring forward his own world). Idealism is therefore compelled to go behind the finite individual/subject to a supra-individual intelligence, or an absolute “subject”.

The word “subject” is not really appropriate here; it is really an ultimate productive principle that resides on the side of thought (reason) not the side of the sensible object. On this view, subject and object are correlative terms, and the ultimate productive principle is itself without object. In fact, it grounds the subject-object distinction/relation but itself transcends the distinction//relation. Subject and object both emanate from the ultimate productive principle.

Post-Kantian idealism is therefore necessarily metaphysical. Fichte began by transforming Kant’s “transcendental ego” (which also could not be known but belonged to his apriori condition of possibility of practical knowing) into a metaphysical or ontological principle. Fichte explained what he meant by this was the absolute ego and not an individual ego. This word “ego” later disappears and is replaced in Hegel with the infinite reason or Spirit. We can say generally that in idealism reality (all there is) is the process of the self-expression/manifestation of infinite reason or thought, or Spirit.

Again this does not mean that the physical world is simply a product of (individual) thought. Infinite reason or what Hegel calls the Absolute is an activity of production which posits or expresses itself in the world (leaving the world with all the reality we see it to possess). Thus idealism is not the claim that reality consists merely in subjective ideas; but it involves the vision of the world and human history as the objective expression of creative reason (productive principle in Fichte or the Absolute in Hegel) -

and this was the inevitable interpretation of German idealism. The trouble comes in when we try to understand what this means and here there is room for various interpretations.

Fichte was more aware of Kant’s influence than were Schelling and Hegel, and each depended on the prior thinker… yet all three presuppose Kant’s critical philosophy. Hegel’s account of the history of modern philosophy depicts Kant as an advance over everyone else and he demanded that Kant’s system of thought itself be developed. This was Hegel’s task, and one way to do so was to transform Kant’s critical philosophy of the thing-in-itself into metaphysical idealism (eliminating this ghostly entity of the noumenal world). But there were also other Kantian influences on the idealists (other than the problem of the thing-in-itself).

Kant’s primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason made a profound difference to Fichte’s ethical outlook. Thus Fichte assumes that his absolute ego is infinite practical reason which posits nature as an instrument for moral (human) action. Fichte emphasizes the concepts of action, duty, and moral vocation and we might say that Fichte turned Kant’s 2nd C into metaphysics while employing the 1st C as the means for doing so. Theoretical knowledge was secondary to practical knowledge and, in fact, scientific knowledge was only there to serve practical moral action. In contrast, Schelling begins with the philosophy of art (as exemplary of “expression”) and the role of genius and aesthetic intuition and hence this links him up with Kant’s 3rd C of judgment.

The desire was to form a coherent and unified interpretation of reality and this may be considered natural at least to the reflective mind. For example in the post-medieval era if one wanted to construct an all-embracing interpretation of reality one had to grapple with reconciling scientific materialism with religious consciousness. This was Descartes’ problem. And it was also Kant’s problem. But Kant dealt with it in a way his predecessors could not and this left him with a bifurcated reality (the phenomenal world known by Newton, and noumenal world of individual freedom and God lived by the self) and there is no reason that the phenomenal world is the only reality (although it is the only realty we can conceptually know – for Kant). The trouble is that the noumenal is a matter of faith (moral consciousness) and not knowledge. While Kant then tries to bridge theoretical and practical knowledge of the 1st and 2nd C in the 3rd C it is entirely understandable that this was not to everyone’s satisfaction. And it was not to the German idealists. Their assumption was straightforward, if reality is the unified process by which the absolute reason manifests itself then it is fully intelligible. And it is intelligible by the human mind provided that the human mind can be regarded as a vehicle of absolute thought reflecting on itself.

Obviously, this condition (that the human mind is a vehicle of absolute thought) is important if there is to be any continuity between Kant’s metaphysics of the future – i.e., transcendental critique of human experience and knowledge, and idealist metaphysics. Kant’s view is that the human mind reflects on its own spontaneous activity and then sets out to ask what this spontaneous presupposes or must presuppose as a precondition of possibility for this activity (knowledge moral action etc.). However, in metaphysical idealism (having eliminated the thing-in-itself) we can say that reflection is productive in the fullest sense and this activity in of reflection or reason is not that of the individual mind but rather of absolute thought and reason. Hence, philosophy which is reflection by the individual human mind cannot be regarded as absolute thought’s reflective awareness of itself unless the human mind is capable of rising to an absolute point of view and becoming the vehicle, as it were, of absolute thought, or reasons reflective awareness of its own activity. It this can occur then there is some continuity between Kant’s only

possible scientific metaphysics and the idealist conception of metaphysics. Of course the latter is clearly also an “inflation” –that is, Kant is inflated to a metaphysics of reality which is far beyond where Kant went (and therefore not a reversion to pre-Kantian metaphysics).

The transformation of Kant’s theory of knowledge into a full-fledged metaphysics of reality carries with it some important changes. (1) Eliminating the thing-in-itself, the world becomes the self- manifestation of mind/thought/reason – and Kant’s distinction between apriori and aposteriori loses its absolute character. (2) The categories of understanding instead of being like subjective conceptual modes of reason (understanding) now become categories of reality itself. (3) The teleological judgment is also no longer subjective for in metaphysical idealism the idea of purposiveness in nature is not merely a regulative principle of the individual mind (useful but not theoretically provable); rather, if nature is the expression or manifestation of reason in its movement towards a goal, the entire process of nature becomes teleological.

What in Kant was a modest proposal for the scope of metaphysics with the idealists metaphysics became total. Kant himself repudiated Fichte’s demand that critical philosophy become pure idealism by eliminating the thing-in-itself. Moreover, late in the 19th c. Neo-Kantians tried hard to rid themselves of this kind of idealism and return to Kant.

Of course, the post-Kantian idealists were not subjective idealists in the sense of Berkeley – namely that the human mind (1) could only know its own ideas as distinct from extra-mental things, or (2) that all objects of knowledge were the product of the finite human mind. Fichte’s use of the word “ego” tended to give that impression but in fact Fichte insisted that this “ego” was the “absolute ego”, the transcendental, supra-individual productive principle. Schelling and Hegel followed suit even if these three thinkers had complexly evolving systems of thought which differed from one another.

But inasmuch as reality is looked on as self-expression or self-unfolding of absolute thought or reason, German idealism assimilated causal relations to logical one of implication. That is, for example, that Fichte and Schelling believed that the world stand in relation to the ultimate productive principle as consequent to antecedent – the ultimate productive principle has logical not temporal priority. The Absolute spontaneously and inevitably manifests itself in the world. Here there is no idea of creation in time – as there is no first moment in time.

This notion of reality as the self-unfolding of absolute reason helps to explain why the idealist insisted on “system”. For if philosophy is the reflective reconstruction of the structure of a dynamic rational process, it should be systematic, in the sense that it should begin with a first principle and exhibit the essential rational structure of reality as flowing from this first principle. The idea of a purely theoretical deduction does not occupy an important place in metaphysical idealism as the foregrounding of “dialectical process” in Fichte and Hegel suggest, and the reason is that the conceptual reconstruction of a dynamic activity is namely the self-unfolding of infinite life and not an analysis of the meaning and implications of initial premises. However, the general worldview implied in the idea of the world as the process of absolute reason’s manifestation of itself, means that philosophy must give a systematic explication of this idea, reliving the process, as it were, reflectively (conceptually). Hence while it is possible to begin in the empirical world and work backwards to absolute reason, metaphysical idealism usually follows a deductive exposition – tracing this teleological movement.

If we assume reality is a rational process and that its essential dynamic structure is understandable by philosophy, this assumption is quite naturally accompanied by a confidence in the scope and power of metaphysics. In this sense metaphysical idealism is very different from Kant’s much more modest estimate of just what we can achieve by way of knowledge. Hegel especially was unequalled by any philosophy in his view of just what reason was capable of. Yet there is, as I said, some continuity between Kant and metaphysical idealism, and we can say that the closer metaphysical idealism remained to Kant’s scientific metaphysics (theoretical knowledge) the more confident philosophy was about the power of reason (not unexpectedly). Consider:

If we assume that philosophy is reason’s reflective awareness of its own spontaneous activity, and if we now substitute idealist metaphysics for Kant’s theory of human knowledge/experience, we then have the idea of the rational process which is reality becoming aware of itself through human philosophical reflection. In this case, it is the history of philosophy which is the history of absolute reason’s self-reflection. In other words, the universe knows itself in and through the human mind – and it is philosophy that then is the self-knowledge of the Absolute.

This statement is more Hegel than Fichte who insisted that the Absolute is Divine which transcends human thought, or Schelling who emphasized the idea of a personal God who reveals himself to human beings. It was Hegel who maintained the philosopher’s conceptual mastery of all reality and the understanding of this mastery as self-reflection of the Absolute. But this simply means that metaphysical idealism attained its most comprehensive statement in Hegelianism.

A word about the relation between metaphysical idealism and theology is in order especially when we consider Fichte and Schelling. Thus, it is important to understand that metaphysical idealism was not merely the transformation of critical philosophy into metaphysics. All three, Fichte (Jena), Schelling, and Hegel (Tubingen) began as students of theology, and while they quickly turned to philosophy, theology played a significant role in German idealism (Nietzsche’s claim that idealism was concealed theology wasn’t all off).

In contrast Kant was always interested in science (although he was not a professional scientist) and his primary concern was with the conditions that made scientific knowledge possible. Hegel began as a theologian and thought that it was the task of philosophy to address the nature and being of God and His relation to the world – hence, the question of the relation between the finite and infinite. Hegel tried to resolve this distance between the finite and infinite and at first he thought this distance could be bridged in “love” from which he drew the conclusion that philosophy must ultimately yield to religion. As a philosopher he tried to bridge this distance conceptually and tended to the view that philosophical reflection was the highest form of understanding.

Likewise Fichte who while not concerned with the finite and infinite (since he was primarily concerned to complete Kant’s deduction of consciousness (which Kant held to be not “knowable” but an apriori condition of possible for knowledge) but later Fichte comes to the idea of the infinite and the religious aspects of his work are developed. Schelling in contrast did not hesitate to address the relation between the Divine infinite and finite as deemed it to be the chief problem of philosophy.

All in all, the three idealists as philosophers tried to conceptually bridge the relation between the finite and infinite and they viewed the bridge on the analogy of logical implication. Certainly Hegel and Fichte both rejected the idea of a personal (infinite and transcendent) God as illogical and unduly anthropomorphic. Hence God becomes the Absolute- all comprehensive totality. Even so the idealist had no intention of denying the finite. Hence, their problem was to include the finite in the infinite without however the finite of its reality. Much of the ambiguity in idealism is due to this seemingly impossible task especially as they tried to relate their philosophical endeavor to theism on the one hand and pantheism on the other.

Nietzsche’s claim that the idealists were simply theists is partly correct (see above) but also very wrong. They were not trying to reintroduce orthodox Christianity; on the contrary, they wanted to substitute metaphysics for faith, and conceptual grasp the mysteries of Christianity bringing it within the realm of speculative reason…”demythologizing” religion (see Kierkegaard).

At the same time there is no reason to doubt Hegel’s sincerity when he referred to St. Anselm and to the process of faith seeking understanding. While early on Hegel showed considerable hostility towards Christianity, later he took Christianity under his wing. But he was assuredly no an orthodox Christian even so he compared the relation of Christianity to Hegelianism as being that of absolute religion to absolute philosophy namely two ways of apprehending the same truth...by substituting reason for faith and philosophy for religion Hegel no doubt saw himself defending Christianity.

There is also the historical question of the relation of idealism to Romanticism. Certainly the claim often made that idealism is the philosophy of Romanticism is open to objection. (1) The suggestion that idealism was simply the expression of Romanticism is wrong as both Fichte and Schelling wielded considerable influence over Romanticism. (2) the three idealists stood in very different relation to Romanticism: Schelling was very much a Romantic; Fichte was very critical of Romanticism; Hegel had no interesting Romanticism. (3) The “philosophy of Romanticism” is better given to Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis.

Romanticism

Yet there was a connection between idealism and Romanticism. The Romantics spirit was an attitude (Lebenseinstellung or Lebensgefuhl) towards life rather than a systematic philosophy. Just what Romanticism is difficult to define but in contrast to the Enlightenment’s focus on analytical and scientific understanding (reason), Romanticism exalted the power of the creative imagination, feeling and intuition: the artistic genius rather than le philosophe; the free development of the personality and the enjoyment of the wealth of human experience, stressing originality rather than what is common to all humanity - leading to an ethical subjectivism (deprecating moral laws while valuing individuality).

Both Schlegel and Novalis were inspired by Fichte. Fichte transformed Kant’s philosophy into pure idealism by taking Kant’s transcendental ego to be the ultimate creative principle as unlimited activity. This systematic deduction or reconstruction of consciousness made copious use of the creative imagination. Novalis took these ideas and took Fichte as opening a view to the wonders of the creative self. But Fichte was concerned with explaining on idealist principles the situation in which the finite subject finds itself in a world of objects which are given to the subject and affect it is various

ways. The productive imagination when it posits as affecting the finite self takes place below the level of consciousness. By transcendental reflection the philosopher can be come aware of this unconscious activity but neither the philosopher nor anyone else is aware of this activity as it is taking place. For the positing of the object is prior to all awareness or consciousness and it is certainly is not modifiable at will by the finite self. However, Novalis depicted the activity of the productive imagination as modifiable by the will. Just as the artist creates works of art so everyman’s power of the will to change things not only operates in the moral sphere but in the sphere of nature as well. Thus, Novalis, the Romantic, turned Fichte transcendental idealism into a magical idealism of a poetic and romantic’s extravaganza – to exalt the unlimited power of the creative self.

The Romantics turned especially to Schelling since it was he who laid stress on the metaphysical significance of art and artistic genius. When the romantic Schlegel asserted that there was no greater world than the world of art and that it was the artists who exhibited the Idea infinite form, and when Novalis asserted that the poet is the true magician, the embodiment of the creative power of the self, they were speaking in ways more attune to Schelling that the ethical outlook of Fichte.

Emphasis on the creative self was only one aspect of Romanticism; another aspect was the Romantics’ conception of nature. Instead of a “machine” (which would force them into a Cartesian position) the Romantics looked on nature as an organic whole which was akin to spirit clothed in beauty and mystery (romanticizing Spinoza). This view of nature as an organic whole was Schelling. Schelling’s view of nature as the “slumbering spirit” below human being, and the human spirit as the organ of nature’s consciousness was romantic through and through. Holderlin, the poet, who was a friend of Schelling at Tubingen, viewed nature as a comprehensive whole and this deeply influenced Schelling. The Romantic’s sympathy with Spinoza was shared by the theologian Schleiermacher but it was certainly not Fichte’s who disliked any divinization of nature which for Fichte was simply the field and instrument of free moral activity. In this respect Fichte was most certainly not a romantic.

This romantic attachment that the idea of nature as an organic living totality was complemented by their view of human nature as free creative personality – human spirit was the culmination of nature. Therefore the romantics held to the view that there was a strong continuity between nature and history and that the spirit unfold historically. Thus Holderlin had a romantic enthusiasm for ancient Greece (he shared this with Hegel). Moreover, there was also a special enthusiasm for the medieval period which was at the time deemed to the “dark night”, preceding the Renaissance and the mergence of le philosophes, in human civilization. But for Novalis the middle ages represented, even if imperfectly, the ideal of organic unity of faith and culture – an ideal which we should recover. Thus there was also in the romantics a strong sense of the idea of the spirit of a people (Volkgeist) and the manifestation of this spirit for example in the German language.

Of course the idealists shared in this romantic joy in historical continuity and development of the human spirit. History was for the idealists the working out in time of the spiritual idea or telos. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all had “philosophies of history”. While Fichte looked on nature as an instrument of moral action, he naturally focused on the historical sphere of human spirit as the realization of an ideal moral order. Schelling’s philosophy of religion saw history as the return of God to a fallen humanity – to man who was alienated from then true center of his being (as a result of scientific materialism). With Hegel the idea of the dialect of national spirits plays a prominent role although he

also emphasized world historical individuals (great man). For the idealists, history as a whole is depicted as a movement towards the realization of human freedom. Moreover, in general the idealists deemed their current era as the time in which the human spirit reached its apex in being conscious of its own activity and the meaning and significance of that activity in the historical process (i.e., Romanticism).

Above all else the romantics longed for the infinite. Their ideas of nature and human history were brought together in a conception of both as the manifestation of one infinite life – as aspects of a Divine poem. The infinite Life was the unifying factors in the romantic world-view. Now the romantic emphasis on Volkgeist would appear at first to contradict the romantic emphasis on the free development of the individual. But there is no incompatibility: thus, the infinite totality was conceived as infinite Life which manifested itself in and through finite beings but not annihilating them or reducing them to mere mechanical instruments. And the spirit of a people (Volkgeist) was conceived as manifestation of the same infinite Life as relative totalities which required for their full development the free expression of individual personalities which were the bearers of these spirits. The same then may be said for the political state which was the political embodiment of the spirit of a people (Volkgeist).

The Romantics conceived of infinite totality in aesthetic terms, namely as an organic whole with which the individual felt him/herself to be one – meaning that apprehending this unity was not a conceptual matter but one of feeling and intuition. The trouble with conception here is that, as in Kant, it always seeks limits whereas the romantics dissolved limits and boundaries in the infinite flow of Life. Hence, the feeling for the infinite was not infrequently the feeling for the indefinite – dissolving boundaries between science and religious, art and science, philosophy and poetry, etc.

So that Schlegel for example regarded philosophy akin to religion; and to art as the artist also sees the infinite in the finite. This repugnance for limits led Goethe to say that the classical period was healthy but the romantic was diseased; indeed there were romantics who tried to put some shape on their intuitive vision of life in combining the nostalgia for the infinite and for the free expression of individual personality in, for example, locating their vision in the Roman Catholic Church (Schlegel).

This feeling for the infinite was common ground between the romantics and the idealists. The infinite absolute conceived as infinite Life is part of Fichte’s later philosophy, and the Absolute is central in Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Moreover, the idealists did not think of the infinite as set over against the finite but as the infinite manifesting itself in and through the finite. Hegel especially tried the mediate between the finite and the infinite, to bring them together yet without dismissing either. The totality lives in and through particular manifestation – whether this totality is the infinite totality, the absolute, or some relative totality such as the political state, or the individual person.

Yet there are also profound differences between the romantics and the idealists. The romantics in their effort do undo all boundaries placed great emphasis on intuition and feeling (whether for the totality, the universe, or the absolute) and this intuition can only ever be exemplified or displayed in the poetic. In contrast, the idealist, say Hegel as the absolute idealist, we find insistence on conceptual thought rejecting any appeal to intuition or feeling. Hegel was concerned to think the totality, with the expression of the absolute in relation to the finite. It is true that he saw philosophy had the same subject matter as art and religion, namely absolute spirit, but he also insisted that their treatment of the infinite-finite relation was expressed very differently.

On the other hand Fichte and Schelling both emphasized an intellectual, religious, or aesthetic intuition was needed to apprehend the absolute. Hegel’s dialectical logic as the logic of movement designed to exhibit the inner life of the Spirit and overcoming conceptual antitheses (which renders things fixed), in which human life passes restlessly through successive historical periods is also a romantic outlook. If Hegel’s logic was alien to the romantic spirit, his vision of the totality was certainly romantic.

It is enough to assert that the idealists were concerned with systematic thought whereas the romantics emphasized intuition. In this the idealists kept philosophy distinct from art, religion, and science. Philosophy is knowledge of knowledge, the basic science of all sciences; philosophy is not the attempt to say what cannot be said (intuition/art/worship). The philosopher’s business is to understand reality (not a matter of apocalyptic utterances or poetic rhapsodies) and to make others understand it (and to edify it).

The idealist transformation of critical philosophy implied that reality had to be seen as a process of productive thought/reason; that is, being had to be identified with thought. Idealism had as it program to exhibit the truth of this identity of being and thought/reason/meaning and it tried to do so by means of a deductive reconstruction of the inner dynamic structure of the life of the absolute (reason or thought). Furthermore, if Kant’s conception of philosophy as reason’s reflective awareness of it sown spontaneous activity (experience) was to be retained, then the idealist’s philosophical reflection had to be represented as the self-awareness/consciousness of absolute reason in and through the individual human mind. This too was part of the idealist effort to exhibit.

The difficulty in completing this program of idealist philosophy was the divergence of views.

1. Fichte begins by refusing to go beyond consciousness (i.e., refuses any postulate beyond consciousness). Thus his first principle is the ego manifested in consciousness as an activity. But then the demands of his transcendental idealism force him to push to a reality beyond consciousness – in postulating an absolute infinite ego or being that transcends thought.

2. With Schelling this process is reversed. He asserts the existence of the Absolute which transcends human thought, and then tries to reconstruct reflectively the inner life of this personal deity. At the same time however he abandons any idea of deducing in an apriori manner the existence and structure of empirical reality by emphasizing God’s free self-revelation. While he does not altogether abandon the idea that the finite is a logical consequence of the infinite, once he introduces the idea of a free personal God, he also leaves the goals of transcendental idealism.

3. It is with Hegel that we find the most sustained effort to fulfill the idealist program in philosophy. Hegel takes the rational to be real and real to be rational. Thus, it is wrong to view the human mind as merely finite and so question its power to understand the self-unfolding life of infinite Absolute. The mind has finite aspects but it also is infinite in the sense that it can rise to the level of absolute thought, at which stage the absolute’s knowledge of itself and human knowledge are One. Hegel makes a magnificent move to demonstrate how the reality (historically) is the life of absolute reason in its movement to self-

knowledge thereby becoming what it is in essence namely “self-thinking thought”. The more Hegel identifies the absolute’s knowledge of itself with human knowledge of the absolute, the more he fulfills the idealist’s program, namely, that philosophy is the self-reflection (in history) of absolute thought/reason. Note that this program would not succeed if the absolute were God enjoying self-awareness outside of the human spirit for then human knowledge would be an outside view. If however the absolute is all reality, the entire universe interpreted as the self-unfolding of absolute thought (which attains self-reflection through human thought) then human knowledge is the absolute’s knowledge of itself, and philosophy becomes productive thought thinking itself.

Now we can ask: what is productive thought? This is the universe considered teleologically - namely as a process moving towards self-knowledge, which in effect is nothing but human beings developing a knowledge of nature, of human nature, and of history (everything which means that there is nothing outside this totality). But in this case there is nothing behind the universe; i.e., no thought or reason which expresses itself in nature and history in a way say that an efficient cause expresses itself in its effect. Thought is teleologically prior in the sense that human knowledge of the world-process is represented as the goal of the process and as giving it its significance but what is actually historically prior is Being (in the form of objective Nature). On this view, the entire transformation of Kant’s philosophy changes for on Kant’s view would be one where infinite thought would produce an objective world, whereas the idealist picture suggest merely a world interpreted teleologically. The telos is depicted as a process whereby the world (totality) self-reflection is mediated through human reflection. The goal of identifying being and reason is thus never complete or achieved.

Another aspect that diverges from the natural pattern of post-Kantian idealism (F. H. Bradley) is that the concept of God inevitably passes into the concept of the absolute. Thus, if the mind tries to think the infinite, it must acknowledge that in the end it is nothing but the universe of being, reality as a whole, the totality. With this transformation of God into the absolute religion disappears. If God and the absolute are distinct they are also identical: God is the imaginative and intuitive form in which the absolute reveals itself to religious (opposed to philosophical) consciousness. Thus is metaphysical idealism is to be preserved, then we must admit that in the long run religious consciousness must be a halfway house between the anthropomorphism of polytheism on the one hand and the idea of an all-inclusive absolute other on the other hand.

Without any clear notion of being, the idea that the finite being is distinct from the infinite being becomes an impossible distinction. In any case transcendental idealism is as post-Kantian idealism, thoroughly anthropomorphic. For the pattern of human consciousness is transferred to reality as a whole. Let us assume that the human ego comes to self-consciousness only in relation to something other than itself – directed that is to the non-self. This non-self has to be posited by the ego – not in the sense that the non-self has to be created by the ego, but in the sense that it must be recognized that if consciousness is to arise at all it must be in relation to the non-ego. The ego can then turn backward and reflect on its own activity. Hence, the absolute ego/reason is regarded as positing in an ontological sense the objective world of nature as a necessary condition for returning to itself in and through the human spirit. Clearly this transformation of Kant’s philosophy is a grand inflation of Kant’s theory of knowledge into a cosmic metaphysics and this involves interpreting reality as a whole in terms of the pattern of human consciousness – and this is anthropomorphism. This point is important because it is often

asserted that absolute idealism is less anthropomorphic than theism (but it is clearly not). Now if there is a spiritual reality which is prior to nature and which become self-conscious in and through human beings, how are we to conceive of it? If we conceive of it as unlimited activity which is not itself conscious but is merely the ground of consciousness, then we have Fichte’s so called absolute ego.

But the concept of ultimate reality which is at the same time spiritual and unconscious is not so easily understood. And it surely does not bear any resemblance to the Christian God. If however we along with Schelling that the spiritual reality which lies behind nature is a personal Being, then idealism changes considerably since presumably we can no longer maintain that this ultimate spiritual reality becomes conscious in and through the comic process. If we also consider that Schelling outlived Hegel by some 20 years, we can conclude that idealism become after Kant a philosophical theism (wherein later God becomes transformed into the absolute). For Schelling the reverse happened: he transformed the absolute into the idea of a personal God and this theosophical speculation is rather different from both Fichte and Hegel.

We can also consider a third possibility. We can eliminate the idea of a spiritual reality (whether conscious or unconscious) which produces nature but we can retain the idea of the absolute becoming self-conscious – where the absolute means the totality of the universe. Here we have a picture of human knowledge of the world and of his history as the self-knowledge of the absolute. This is Hegel’s absolute idealism. Here Hegel adds nothing to the empirical world except a teleological account of the world-process. He postulates no transcendent Being: the universe is merely interpreted as a process moving towards an ideal goal, namely complete self-reflection in and through the human spirit.

Now this claim is hardly one that can be understood as equivalent to the empirical statements that in the course of history have been formulated, and that human beings are capable of merely increasing their knowledge of this world, themselves, and their world (the common scientific story). The reason is that none of us whether materialists or idealists, whether pantheists, theists, or atheists, would hesitate to accept that claim. At the very least, the interpretation is meant to suggest a teleological pattern, a movement toward human knowledge of the universe, considered as the universe’s knowledge of itself. But unless we are prepared to admit that this is the only possible way to understand world- process (an intellectual prejudice that favors knowledge for the sake of knowledge, we have to claim that the universe moves by some inner necessity toward self-knowledge in and through human beings. But what grounds do we have of making such a claim unless nature itself is unconscious mind (or in Schelling’s terms a “slumbering spirit”) which then posits nature as a necessary precondition for attaining consciousness in and through the human spirit? If we accept either of these alternatives then we transfer to the universe the pattern of human consciousness – and this is no less anthropomorphic than philosophical theism.So far I have considered German idealism as a set of theories about reality as a whole, a self-manifesting absolute. But of course the idealists were very much concerned with human nature.

This Fichte held that the absolute ego is unlimited activity which can be seen as striving towards consciousness of it sown freedom. But consciousness only exists in the individual; hence the absolute ego necessarily expresses itself in a community of finite subjects/selves each of whom strives towards true freedom. Inevitably, therefore morality comes to the fore. Fichte essentially espouses a dynamic ethical idealism.

For Hegel the absolute is definable as spirit or self-thinking thought. Hence it is more adequately revealed in the human spirit and its life than it is in nature. Therefore greater emphasis must be placed on the human spirit than on nature.

For Schelling who asserts the existence of a personal and free God, he concurrently occupies himself with freedom in the human beings, and with human being’s fall from and return to God.

Freedom is conspicuous in all idealism: whether of God, absolute, or man. This does not mean of course that the word freedom means the same for all three idealists. For Fichte the emphasis is on individual freedom as manifested in our action and hence Fichte concern with human temperament. For Fichte individuals are a system of natural drives, instincts and impulses, and from this perspective there is no freedom. But as spirit human beings is not so tied to their desires. Rather individual as spirit can direct their activity toward an ideal goal and act in accordance with the idea of duty. As with Kant, Fichte’s idea of freedom is to act against impulse in favor of reason and moral duty, and we are free to the extent that in acting against impulse towards moral order we are free. But how do we live in the idea of moral freedom? We do so by assuming life as a moral vocation and while such a vocation includes a series of action largely determined by the society in which we life (family, society, state) in the end we have a vision of a multiplicity of moral vocations which converge towards a common ideal, namely the establishment of a moral world-order. Fichte was a strong supporter of the French Revolution which he saw as liberating individuals from the bonds of social and political life which hindered their free development. But what form of social-political organization is moral? In this case Fichte went for a unified German State (rather than the French aftermath of the Revolution) wherein individuals could find free activity and development, and which, if human beings would attain full moral development, this German state would wither away.

In Hegel we find a very different attitude. Hegel too was influenced by the French Revolution and its drive to freedom. Hegel defined freedom as human history in its process of the realization of freedom. But Hegel sharply distinguishes between positive and negative (absence from constraint) freedom. Kant saw moral freedom as obeying that law which reason gives to oneself as a rational being. But for Hegel the rational was universal, and positive freedom involves identifying oneself with ends that transcend one’s individual and particular desires. It involves identifying one’s individual will Rousseau’s “General Will” which finds expression in the State (as the greater organic whole). Hence moral law involves getting its content from the State. However, for Hegel the State cannot be fully rational unless it recognizes the value and finds room for individual freedom. By focusing on the State, Hegel intended to remove freedom from the inwardness of the individual and Hegel clearly saw the important role of institutions as a necessary basis of higher spiritual life of art, religion, and philosophy in which freedom reaches its supreme expression.

We see that both Fichte and Hegel overcome Kant’s formalistic ethics by placing morality in a social setting. But Fichte places the emphasis on individual freedom and moral action (vocation) is in accordance with duty mediated by personal conscience.Hegel places the emphasis on the general whole of the State.

But what is clearly missing in Fichte and Hegel is a theory of moral values. In Fichte all the talk about activity for activity’s sake and freedom for freedom’s sake may show an awareness of the unique character of human moral vocation, but it also runs the risk of

emphasizing the creative personality and hence the uniqueness of individual moral vocation at the expense of the universality of moral law. If with Hegel we now socialize morality and avoid the ethical formalism of Kant, we also run the risk of that moral values are simply relative to culture and society.

Schelling by contrast to Hegel and Fichte, sometimes held, with Fichte, that moral activity created a second nature of a moral world-order, but Schelling also added aesthetic intuition to this moral activity. With Fichte all the emphasis was on moral struggle and free oral action, but with Schelling’s emphasis on aesthetic intuition it was the artistic genius who was also the moral hero. Later Schelling would claim along religious lines that freedom was the power to choose between good and bad, and the fulfillment of freedom came in the emergence of the personality in sublimating our lower nature and subordinating it to the rational will. All this within the context of his theosophical speculations where freedom and personality were intimately tied to the nature of God, and this nature of God was in turn are complemented by his view of human nature.

Hegel was no doubt the greatest German idealist. His analysis of society and history were impressive not only that he drew on these for his idealist philosophy but that idealism itself was dependent on our understanding social, political and moral consciousness: “The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only with the falling of the dusk and that when philosophy spreads her grey on grey then has the shape of life grown cold”. That is, philosophy must not canonize social and political forms of life which were about to

pass away. For it is at point, at dusk, that philosophical reflection (understanding) comes into its own… understanding is all important of course, yet it is also at just this point that Life moves forward…

Anticipating Marx who believes that understanding is always in service of change; Hegel looks backwards whereas Marx looks forward. This is the difference between the great idealist and the great revolutionary. If any one idealist was like Marx it was Fichte. Fichte believes passionately that philosophy could save society; whereas Hegel was burdened by history and too sophisticated to believe that there was any finality to history in a philosophically, rationally, formulated utopia.

EXAM QUESTIONS

1. Briefly describe the intellectual influences that were efficacious in Wundt’s establishment of the academic discipline of experimental psychology in Leipzig in 1870s.

2. “Introspection” has had various meanings before Wundt employed it as “systematic introspection” in experimental psychology. Describe the various activities involved in these different meanings of introspection (what might we do when we introspect?) and focus on Wundt’s final formulation of introspection in experimental psychology. (Remember that Wundt who was a mentalist would have been horrified to be classed as an “introspectionist”.) What might introspection mean and what is it we do when we introspect? Can introspection ever be (part of) a method of a science of psychology. Why? Why not?

3. Wundt deemed his “physiological psychology” to be only a small part of a much wider conception of Psychology as an academic endeavor. Describe this wider Psychology and explain why it could not be experimental in nature. Was Wundt justified in his view? Why? Why not?

4. I suggested (tediously some might add) that the methods of psychology were forms of “social organization for producing consensus about facts”. What does this conception of method as “social organization” imply about the nature of the facts collected and the “object” about which the facts are collected?

5. I distinguished among three distinct methods that evolved in the course of the establishment of psychology in the 20th c. Describe these three methods and argue for the advantages of each.

6. I suggested that from the very beginning there was a tension between method and subject matter (“object”) in psychological research (a tension that remains to the present). Briefly describe various aspects of this tension and suggest how it might be overcome, if at all.

7. One major problem that precluded Wundt from extending his newly “minted” physiological psychology to “higher mental processes” was that there was no way to control the “stimulus”. Describe the nature of this problem and also the correlative problem of “language”.

8. I spoke of the “rhetoric of experimental identities” in referring to subject identities in psychological research reports. This phrase has much to do with the essential function of the human “data” source in Psychology as it does with the kind of intellectual discipline Psychology deems itself to be. Comment and elaborate.

9. I argued that experimental psychology was concerned to establish the kind of knowledge about human beings that would be a-historical and universal. I also suggested that in order to obtain this kind of knowledge psychologists had to reply on historically defined human data sources using investigative contexts that too were historical specific. How did Psychology deal with this paradox?

10. I have argued that the Galtonian method of mental testing which assumed that all individuals possessed (psychological) characteristics, albeit in different quantities, actually eliminated individual differences by reducing them to the abstraction of a collection of points in a set of aggregates. So instead of being interested in how individuals were different one from another this entire methodological movement in 20th c Psychology was concerned with how well individuals conformed to social standards of performance. Comment and elaborate.

11. I have argued that the “method” of experimental psychology is one that is ideally suited for establishing knowledge claims about the relationships between abstract external influences and equally abstract organisms. But I have also argued that these kinds of knowledge claims are those of “scientific materialism” wherein individuals are stripped of their social, cultural, and historical identities. What are we to do?

12. Freud’s critique of religion was an effort to understand the restlessness and discontent (desire) of the human heart (St Augustine) in scientific terms. To accomplish this formulated an elaborate theory of desire as explanatory not only of the individual (neurosis) but of (the neurosis of) human history. This tie-in of history and psychology is what I admire in Freud and it is also what sets up intellectual standards of what psychological science could be (if it gave up its hegemony as a natural science). Comment and elaborate.

13. Freud was deeply pessimistic concerning the gap between the innocence (polymorphous perversity) of childhood and our compulsive (repressed) commitment to cultural progress. How can the ideal of cultural progress possibly be the innocence of childhood? Never mind that, does the historical movement of humanity have an “aim” and if so would it make a difference in how we do psychology. If it does not have an aim (i.e., the course of human history is aimless) what possibility is there of avoiding the (neurotic) implications of endless and restless desire?