Give em something to refute man.
The Story of Philosophy
The Lives and Opinions of the Great Philosophers of the Western World
by WILL DURANT
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671739166/
[C] - The Critique of Pure Reason
What is meant by this title? Critique is not precisely a criticism,
but a critical analysis; Kant is not attacking "pure reason," except,
at the end, to show its limitations; rather he hopes to show its
possibility, and to exalt it above the impure knowledge which comes to
us through the distorting channels of sense. For "pure" reason is to
mean knowledge that does not come through our senses, but is
independent of all sense experience; knowledge belonging to us by the
inherent nature and structure of the mind.
At the very outset, then, Kant flings down a challenge to Locke and
the English school: knowledge is not all derived from the senses. Hume
thought he had shown that there is no soul, and no science; that our
minds are but our ideas in procession and association; and our
certainties but probabilities in perpetual danger of violation. These
false conclusions, says Kant, are the result of false premises: you
assume that all knowledge comes from "separate and distinct"
sensations; naturally these cannot give you necessity, or invariable
sequences of which you may be forever certain; and naturally you must
not expect to "see" your soul, even with the eyes of the internal
sense. Let us grant that absolute certainty of knowledge is impossible
if all knowledge comes from sensation, from an independent external
world which owes us no promise of regularity of behavior. But what if
we have knowledge that is independent of sense-experience, knowledge
whose truth is certain to us even before experience-a priori? Then
absolute truth, and absolute science, would become possible, would it
not? Is there such absolute knowledge? This is the problem of the
first Critique. "My question is, what we can hope to achieve with
reason, when all the material and assistance of experience are taken
away." The Critique becomes a detailed biology of thought, an
examination of the origin and evolution of concepts, an analysis of
the inherited structure of the mind. This, as Kant believes, is the
entire problem of metaphysics. "In this book I have chiefly aimed at
completeness; and I venture to maintain that there ought not to be one
single metaphysical problem that has not been solved here, or to the
solution of which the key at least has not here been supplied." Exegi
monumentum aere perennius! With such egotism nature spurs us on to
creation.
The Critique comes to the point at once. "Experience is by no means
the only field to which our understanding can be confined. Experience
tells us what is, but not that it must be necessarily what it is and
not otherwise. It therefore never gives us any really general truths;
and our reason, which is particularly anxious for that class of
knowledge, if roused by it rather than satisfied. General truths,
which at the same time bear the character of an inward necessity, must
be independent of experience,-clear and certain in themselves." That
is to say, they must be true no matter what our later experience may
be; true even before experience; true a priori. "How far we can
advance independently of all experience, in a priori knowledge, is
shown by the brilliant example of mathematics." Mathematical knowledge
is necessary and certain; we cannot conceive of future experience
violating it. We may believe that the sun will "rise" in the west to-
morrow, or that some day, in some conceivable asbestos world, fire
will not burn stick; but we cannot for the life of us believe that two
times two will ever make anything else than four. Such truths are true
before experience; they do not depend on experience past, present, or
to come. Therefore they are absolute and necessary truths; it is
inconceivable that they should ever become untrue. But whence do we
get this character of absoluteness and necessity? Not from experience;
for experience gives us nothing but separate sensations and events,
which may alter their sequence in the future. These truths derive
their necessary character from the inherent structure of our minds,
from the natural and inevitable manner in which our minds must
operate. For the mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of
Kant) is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write
their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name
for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ which
moulds and coordinates sensations into ideas, an organ which
transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered
unity of thought.*
*Radical empiricism" (James, Dewey, etc.) enters the controversy at
this point, and argues, against both Hume and Kant, that experience
gives u» relations and sequences as well as sensationi and events.
But how?
1. - Transcendental Esthetic
The effort to answer this question, to study tile inherent structure
of the mind, or the innate laws of thought, is what Kant calls
"transcendental philosophy," because it is a problem transcending
sense-experience. "1 call knowledge transcendental which is occupied
not so much with objects, as with our a priori concepts of objects."-
with our modes of correlating our experience into knowledge. There are
two grades or stages in this process of working up the raw material of
sensation into the finished product of thought. The first stage is the
coordination of sensations by applying to them the forms of perception-
space and time; the second stage is the coordination of the
perceptions so developed, by applying to them the forms of conception-
the "categories" of thought. Kant, using the word esthetic in its
original and| etymological sense, as connoting sensation or feeling,
calls the study of the first of these stages "Transcendental
Esthetic"; and using the word logic as meaning the science of the
forms of thought, he calls the study of the second stage
"Transcendental Logic." These are terrible words, which will take
meaning as the argument proceeds; once over this hill, the road to
Kant will be comparatively clear.
Now just what is meant by sensations and perceptions?-and how does the
mind change the former into the latter? By itself a sensation is
merely the awareness of a stimulus; we have a taste on the tongue, an
odor in the nostrils, a sound in the ears, a temperature on the skin,
a flash of light on the retina, a pressure on the fingers: it is the
raw crude beginning of experience; it is what the infant has in the
early days of its groping mental life; it is not yet knowledge. But
let these various sensations group themselves about an object in space
and time-say this apple; let the odor in the nostrils, and the taste
on the tongue, the light on the retina, the shape-revealing pressure
on the fingers and the hand, unite and group themselves about this
"thing": and there is now an awareness not so much of a stimulus as of
a specific object; there is a perception. Sensation has passed into
knowledge.
But again, was this passage, this grouping, automatic? Did the
sensations of themselves, spontaneously and naturally, fall into a
cluster and an order, and so become perception Yes, said Locke and
Hume; not at all, says Kant.
For these varied sensations come to us through varied channels of
sense, through a thousand "afferent nerves" that pass from skin and
eye and ear and tongue into the brain; what a medley of messengers
they must be as they crowd into the chambers of the mind, calling for
attention! No wonder Plato spoke of "the rabble of the senses." And
left to themselves, they remain rabble, a chaotic "manifold,"
pitifully impotent, waiting to be ordered into meaning and purpose and
power. As readily might the messages brought to a general from a
thousand sectors of the battle-line weave themselves unaided into
comprehension and command. No; there is a law-giver for this mob, a
directing and coordinating power that does not merely receive, but
takes these atoms of sensation and moulds them into sense.
Observe, first, that not all of the messages are accepted. Myriad
forces play upon your body at this moment;; a storm of stimuli beats
down upon the nerve-endings which, amoebalike, you put forth to
experience the external world: but not all that call are chosen; only
those sensations are selected that can be moulded into perceptions
suited to your present purpose, or that bring those imperious messages
of danger which are always relevant. The clock is ticking, and you do
not hear it; but that same ticking, not louder than before, will be
heard at once if your purpose wills it so. The mother asleep at her
infant's cradle is deaf to the turmoil of life about her; but let the
little one move, and the mother gropes her way back to waking
attention like a diver rising hurriedly to the surface of the sea. Let
the purpose be addition, and the stimulus "two and three" brings the
response, "five"; let the purpose be multiplication, and the same
stimulus, the same auditory sensations, "two and three," bring the
response, "six." Association of sensations or ideas is not merely by
contiguity in space or time, nor by similarity, nor by recency,
frequency or intensity of experience; it is above all determined by
the purpose of the mind. Sensations and thoughts are servants, they
await our call, they do not come unless we need them. There is an
agent of selection and direction that uses them and is their master.
In addition to the sensations and the ideas there is the mind.
This agent of selection and coordination, Kant thinks, uses first of
all two simple methods for the classification of the material
presented to it: the sense of space, and the sense of time. As the
general arranges the messages brought him according to the place for
which they come, and the time at which they were written, and so finds
an order and a system for them all; so the mind allocates its
sensations in space and time, attributes them to this object here or
that object there, to this present time or to that past. Space and
time are not things perceived, but modes of perception, ways of
putting sense into sensation; space and time are organs of perception.
They are a priori, because all ordered experience involves and
presupposes them. Without them, sensations could never grow into
perceptions. They are a priori because it is inconceivable that we
should ever have any future experience that will not also involve
them. And because they are a priori, their laws, which are the laws of
mathematics, are a priori, absolute and necessary, world without end.
It is not merely probable, it is certain that we shall never find a
straight line that is not the shortest distance between two points.
Mathematics, at least, is saved from the dissolvent scepticism of
David Hume.
Can all the sciences be similarly saved? Yes, if their basic
principle, the law of causality-that a given cause must always be
followed by a given effect-can be shown, like space and time, to be so
inherent in all the processes of understanding that no future
experience can be conceived that would violate or escape it. Is
causality, too, a priori, an indispensable prerequisite and condition
of all thought?
2. - Transcendental Analytic
So we pass from the wide field of sensation and perception to the dark
and narrow chamber of thought; from "transcendental esthetic" to
"transcendental logic." And first to the naming and analysis of those
elements in our thought which are not so much given to the mind by
perception as given to perception by the mind; those levers which
raise the "perceptual" knowledge of objects into the "conceptual"
knowledge of relationships, sequences, and laws; those tools of the
mind which refine experience into science. Just as perceptions
arranged sensations around objects in space and time, so conception
arranges perceptions (objects and events) about the ideas of cause,
unity, reciprocal relation, necessity, contingency, etc.; these and
other "categories" are the structure into which perceptions are
received, and by which they are classified and moulded into the
ordered concepts of thought. These are the very essence and character
of the mind; mind is the coordination of experience.
And here again observe the activity of this mind that was, to Locke
and Hume, mere "passive wax" under the blows of sense-experience.
Consider a system of thought like Aristotle's; is it conceivable that
this almost cosmic ordering of data should have come by the automatic,
anarchistic spontaneity of the data themselves? See this magnificent
card-catalogue in the library, intelligently ordered into sequence by
human purpose. Then picture all these card-cases thrown upon the
floor, all these cards scattered pell-mell into riotous disorder. Can
you now conceive these scattered cards pulling themselves up,
Munchausen-like, from their disarray, passing quietly into their
alphabetical and topical places in their proper boxes, and each box
into its fit place in the rack,-until all should be order and sense
and purpose again? What a miracle-story these sceptics have given us
after all!
Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation,
conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge,
wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and
sequence, and unity. Whence this order, this sequence, this unity? Not
from the things themselves; for they are known to us only by
sensations that come through a thousand channels at once in disorderly
multitude; it is our purpose that put order and sequence and unity
upon this importunate lawlessness; it is ourselves, our personalities,
our minds, that bring light upon these seas. Locke was wrong when he
said, "There is nothing in the intellect except what was first in the
senses"; Leibnitz was right when he added,-"nothing, except the
intellect itself." "Perceptions without conceptions," says Kant, "are
blind." If perceptions wove themselves automatically into ordered
thought, if mind were not an active effort hammering out order from
chaos, how could the same experience leave one man mediocre, and in a
more active and tireless soul be raised to the light of wisdom and the
beautiful logic of truth?
The world, then, has order, not of itself, but because the thought
that knows the world is itself an ordering, the first stage in that
classification of experience which at last is science and philosophy.
The laws of thought are also the laws of things, for things are known
to us only through this thought that must obey these laws, since it
and they are one; in effect, as Hegel was to say, the laws of logic
and the laws of nature are one, and logic and metaphysics merge. The
generalized principles of science are necessary because they are
ultimately laws of thought that are involved and presupposed in every
experience, past, present, and to come. Science is absolute, and truth
is everlasting.
3. - Transcendental Dialectic
Nevertheless, this certainty, this absoluteness, of the highest
generalizations of logic and science, is, paradoxically, limited and
relative: limited strictly to the field of actual experience, and
relative strictly to our human mode of experience. For if our analysis
has been correct, the world as we know it is a construction, a
finished product, almost-one might say-a manufactured article, to
which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing
contributes by its stimuli. (So we perceive the top of the table as
round, whereas our sensation is of an ellipse.) The object as it
appears to us is a phenomenon, an appearance, perhaps very different
from the external object before it came within the ken of our senses;
what that original object was we can never know; the "thing-in-itself"
may be an object of thought or inference (a "noumenon"), but it cannot
be experienced,-for in being experienced it would be changed by its
passage through sense and thought. "It remains completely unknown to
us what objects may be by themselves and apart from the re-ceptivity
of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them; that
manner being peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared by every
being, though, no doubt, by every human being." [If Kant had not added
the last clause, his argument for the necessity of knowledge would
have fallen.] The moon as known to us is merely a bundle of sensations
(as Hume saw), unified (as Hume did not see) by our native mental
structure through the elaboration of sensations into perceptions, and
of these into conceptions or ideas; in result, the moon is for us
merely our ideas. [So John Stuart Mill, with all his English tendency
to realism, was driven at last to define matter as merely "a permanent
possibility of sensations."]
Not that Kant ever doubts the existence of "matter" and the external
world; but he adds that we know nothing certain about them except that
they exist. Our detailed knowledge is about their appearance, their
phenomena, about the sensations which we have of them. Idealism does
not mean, as the man in the street thinks, that nothing exists outside
the perceiving subject; but that a goodly part of every object is
created by the forms of perception and understanding: we know the
object as transformed into idea; what it is before being so
transformed we cannot know. Science, after all, is naive; it supposes
that it is dealing with things in themselves, in their full-blooded
external and uncorrupted reality; philosophy is a little more
sophisticated, and realizes that the whole material of science
consists of sensations, perceptions and conceptions, rather than of
things. "Kant's greatest merit," says Schopenhauer, "is the
distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself."
It follows that any attempt, by either science or religion, to say
just what the ultimate reality is, must fall back into mere
hypothesis; "the understanding can never go beyond the limits of
sensibility." Such transcendental science loses itself in
"antinomies," and such transcendental theology loses itself in
"paralogisms." It is the cruel function of "transcendental dialectic"
to examine the validity of these attempts of reason to escape from the
enclosing circle of sensation and appearance into the unknowable world
of things "in themselves."
Antinomies are the insoluble dilemmas born of a science that tries to
overleap experience. So, for example, when knowledge attempts to
decide whether the world is finite or infinite in space, thought
rebels against either supposition: beyond any limit, we are driven to
conceive something further, endlessly; and yet infinity is itself
inconceivable. Again: did the world have a beginning in time? We
cannot conceive eternity; but then, too, we cannot conceive any point
in the past without feeling at once that before that, something was.
Or has that chain of causes which science studies, a beginning, a
First Cause? Yes, for an endless chain is inconceivable; no, for a
first cause uncaused is inconceivable as well. Is there any exit from
these blind alleys of thought? There is, says Kant, if we remember
that space, time and cause are modes of perception and Conception,
which must enter into all our experience, since they are the web and
structure of experience; these dilemmas arise from supposing that
space, time and cause are external things independent of perception.
We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in
terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any
philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of
interpretation and understanding.
So with the paralogisms of "rational" theology-which attempts to prove
by theoretical reason that the soul is an incorruptible substance,
that the will is free and above the law of cause and effect, and that
there exists a "necessary being," God, as the presupposition of all
reality. Transcendental dialectic must remind theology that substance
and cause and necessity are finite categories, modes of arrangement
and classification which the mind applies to sense-experience, and
reliably valid only for the phenomena that appear to such experience;
we cannot apply these conceptions to the noumenal (or merely inferred
and conjectural) world. Religion cannot be proved by theoretical
reason.
-------------------------
So the first Critique ends. One could well imagine David Hume,
uncannier Scot than Kant himself, viewing the results with a sardonic
smile. Here was a tremendous book, eight hundred pages long; weighted
beyond bearing, almost, with ponderous terminology; proposing to solve
all the problems of metaphysics, and incidentally to save the
absoluteness of science and the essential truth of religion. What had
the book really done? It had destroyed the naive world of science, and
limited it, if not in degree, certainly in scope,-and to a world
confessedly of mere surface and appearance, beyond which it could
issue only in farcical "antinomies"; so science was "saved"! The most
eloquent and incisive portions of the book had argued that the objects
of faith-a free and immortal soul, a benevolent creator-could never be
proved by reason; so religion was "saved"! No wonder the priests of
Germany protested madly against this salvation, and revenged
themselves by calling their dogs Immanuel Kant.
And no wonder that Heine compared the little professor of Konigsberg
with the terrible Robespierre; the latter had merely killed a king,
and a few thousand Frenchmen-which a German might forgive; but Kant,
said Heine, had killed God, had undermined the most precious arguments
of theology. "What a sharp contrast between the outer life of this
man, and his destructive, world-convulsing thoughts! Had the citizens
of Konigsberg surmised the whole significance of those thoughts, they
would have felt a more profound awe in the presence of this man than
in that of an executioner, who merely slays human beings. But the good
people saw in him nothing but a professor of philosophy; and when at
the fixed hour he sauntered by, they nodded a friendly greeting, and
set their watches."
Was this caricature, or revelation?
