/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12412440]

Explain his metaphysics to a complete pre-19th century philosopylet please!

[Anonymous No.12412483]

The question isn't how to perceive the real, but how our perception already structures the real in the first place. Basically, and very simply, Kant is saying it isn't the mind that "goes to" objects (perceives them in their truth and objectivity), but it is objects that appear (and can only appear) for a mind.

[Anonymous No.12412511]

The essence of objects isn't something we have to learn how to perceive, but is that perception (the structure it must necessarily confer on raw sense data) itself.

[Anonymous No.12412549]

>>12412511
>the structure it must necessarily confer on raw sense data

you're saying that perception itself must confer on the senses? what?

[Anonymous No.12412585]

You know how people in the early modern and medieval period like to talk about the world and its properties as if language is adequate to describing reality itself? The way that this ends up being formalized and practiced by the 18th century is through a form of rationalism and logic that assumes we can predicate about the world with "necessity," meaning, if our logical chains are necessarily and self-evidently true, and they describe the world, then what say say about the world is necessarily and self-evidently true, universally, of the rules/rationality of the world in itself.

The crisis of scepticism comes along and throws all this into doubt, by throwing into doubt whether we can predicate, with necessity, about reality at all. Hume is the poster child of this, for good reason. For example he asks, epitomizing the whole problem: How can we know that causation, which is intertwined with logical consequence, even holds universally for the world as it is in itself? Think about it: By necessity as finite beings existing in time, we only ever experience a finite number of contingent causes, from which we then claim to draw atemporal (in-finite) and universal inferences? In short, how can we be sure that what we observe in the world, as it is filtered through our perceptions and ideas of it (with all the mistakes we are liable to make), "holds true" for the world generally? How can we ever predicate about that GENERAL level of truth? And because predication itself rests on the assumption of causal necessity and determinacy, then how can we even be sure that our logic rests on firm foundations? Maybe tomorrow the sun will stop rising even though it "should" rise, and the laws of logic and causality will be abrogated. How can we say that "necessarily" won't happen, if we never OBSERVE necessity?

An important corollary to all this is: How can we continue building up systematic and mutually coherent natural sciences, if we can't be sure of their immutable foundations?

Kant says: I agree, we can't know the world as it is in itself; BUT our conceptions of it ARE coherent, necessary, and immutable. The systematicity and coherence that exists between sciences and our rational determinations of the world simply exist IN us, FOR us. We can't say what the world "really" is, but we can always already say what it must be for us, if it appears to us at all. And we can examine these "conditions of the possibility" of our experience, in the same way that metaphysicians previously tried to work out the conditions of things in themselves in general, with the added proviso that they are the conditions of things as they appear for us. That way, the sciences are saved, because coherence and logical consequence and causality are all saved - we wouldn't be able to think in the first place if those things weren't all necessary. Their bedrock is not "out there in the world," assumed but unproved by us. It's IN us, it's what allows us to see the world at all.

[Anonymous No.12412606]

>>12412549
terminology wasn't so exact, but kant's saying experiences have to have a certain structure to be experiences, and objects conform more to this structure than they do to some unfathomable inner essence

[Anonymous No.12412611]

>>12412585
Also, Kant did basically think that the world outside us was pretty much as we see it. Clearly there is a moon, clearly galaxies exist, and so on. He's not a solipsist. He just wanted to ward off the Humean logical problem of science and natural philosophy resting on "common sense" foundations that don't admit logical coherence. The latter people open the door to charlatans and Schwärmerei (religious enthusiasts, like mystics, who denigrate reason in favor of faith or ecstatic, extra-discursive forms of reason etc.). Kant was very afraid of those types, like most Enlighteners were.

Of course, if you are unsatisfied by his agnosticism about reality-in-itself, you aren't alone. Most people following Kant were. Most "Kantian" philosophers after Kant tried to claw their way back into the noumenal in some way or another, or to bring the noumenal inside the phenomenal.

[Anonymous No.12412670]

>>12412611
This is pretty great. Thank you. Do you happen to know about Rawls? He builds up on Kantian principles as well. If you know anything about him let me know.

[Anonymous No.12412682]

>>12412606
>kant's saying experiences have to have a certain structure to be experiences

isn't that just the law of identity?

[Anonymous No.12412687]

>>12412606
>unfathomable inner essence
what does this mean?

[Anonymous No.12412874]

>>12412682
Somewhat, yes. Even thought has an identity - a structure - of its own, but only a formal self-identity, not a substantial one.

>>12412687
Basically, for the ancients, objects are appearances, but their is a kind of hierarchy of appearances, determined by their proximity to an object's "essence", what it really is in itself, in spite of the imperfections imposed on it by finite observers. Kant rejects this, the object's essence IS to appear - Deleuze puts it this way, the subject has FULL responsibility over his constitution of the world, not just, as the ancients believed, his subjective distortions of it, so you can see how liberating this must have been for people initially - anyways, appearances don't delineate some inner core, representations are representations and that's that, they are representations of SOMETHING, sure, but nothing we can meaningfully apply our logic to, because this logic can only ever be a property of our minds.

[Anonymous No.12412930]

>>12412440
Humans can not come know reality in itself (as it actually is). All we can truly know is it appears to us.

[Anonymous No.12412949]

>>12412585
What is Hegel's reply to this?

[Anonymous No.12412960]

>>12412930
By reality, is he referring to the outer objects around us, like the table in front of me? Or does it include other things too, of other natures? pls explain to a brainlet, desu

[Anonymous No.12412968]

>>12412960
The physical world.

[Anonymous No.12412977]

Tes

[Anonymous No.12413029]

>>12412440
Before kant, there were 2 schools of thought, rationalism which stated all knowledge comes from "reason" (from within our minds), and empiricism which stated all knowledge comes from "intuition" (here meaning experience or our senses). Kant argued that this is a false dichotomy, and that any knowledge we obtain of the world requires both reason and intuition. He states that intuition alone can not give us knowledge of the world because we only sense the "manofolds" of things, that being the qualities of them precievable to our senses, while the actual thing in itself remains unknown to the senses. Additionally, we cannot know the world through pure reason alone because reason comes from within us and doesn't know any properties of outside objects. Hence, we precieve the manifolds of objects via intuition to gain data about the world and our reason organizes the data into coherent knoledge. Intuition without reason can not yield knowledge since we would have no way of organizing the data we collect about the world, nor can we obtain knowledge of the world with reason without intuitioj, since then our faculties has nothing to organize into data.

Think of it as a car. To move we need not only a working engine, but fuel. Without both we can't move.

[Anonymous No.12413051]

>>12412968
My body, too?

[Anonymous No.12413092]

>>12413029
I'll ask you as well, what is Hegel's critique of it then? That we CAN actually know the thing itself, as it is a part of us?

[Anonymous No.12413119]

>>12412611
>Also, Kant did basically think that the world outside us was pretty much as we see it.

Right, as long as ''outside us'' is understood in a spatial sense, rather than mind-independency.

[Anonymous No.12413169]

>>12412611
>claw their way back into the noumenal in some way or another
my diary desu

[Anonymous No.12413213]

>>12413092
Not that anon but Zizek is helpful here, basically Hegel ontologizes what for Kant is just an epistemological dilemma, so instead of the subject being (epistemically) blocked off the noumenal, what Hegel says is that, precisely because the subject is aware of the noumenal as a "known unknown", that the Being as a whole (and not just subjectivity) can be nothing else but the dialectical appropriation/mediation with the very Outside that this movement ITSELF posits.

So simplified: if Kant says we can't know what is outside us, well, we still know that we don't know, so the subject - and being by extension - has to be just this process of dialectical negotiation with its Beyond (a Beyond, of course, that does not pre-exist this process, a Beyond that is INSIDE thought, instead of outside). Instead of a hard dualism between phenomena here and noumena there, noumena, in some sense, must be immanent to thought if we can know them as such.

[Anonymous No.12413242]

>>12412585

So basically, how we sense the world might not be how it is in reality and another being with different senses will interpret it differently.

Also, not a knock on you, but how come 'philosphers' tend to use big words to describe the most common sense bullshit?

Your entire post and some of the others could be explained in plain english but is written in the most confusing way to appear to be smart.

>inb4 brainlet

[Anonymous No.12413256]

>>12413242
>So basically, how we sense the world might not be how it is in reality and another being with different senses will interpret it differently.

No, his more refined point is a world can only appear perspectivally, that minds have an intrinsic structure to them that prevents us from making any extrapolations about the world as it in-itself not because they just "appear differently" for different people, but because for a world to even appear in the first place means it is always-already not the thing-in-itself, and a really a whole host of (anti-)metaphysical assumptions about thought and the world that could take a lifetime to excavate and this whole obsession with dopamine-fried, YT soundbite """philosophy""" is more a reflection of the inability to think than it is Kant just thinking too much.

[Anonymous No.12413263]

>>12413213
I really like your explanation, thanks.
Would you happen to know how Rawls is related to Kantianism?

[Anonymous No.12413274]

>>12413051
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK? YES OF COURSE!

[Anonymous No.12413279]

>>12413256
Not him, but why did Kant even think that the world is appearance, and not really what it is? As I asked above, if the outer reality is merely appearance, would our bodies not be included too? Did Kant align with said sentiment?

[Anonymous No.12413280]

>>12413263
I'm glad it makes sense. Explaining this stuff to someone feels like putting together and invisible car. And I'm afraid I don't.

[Anonymous No.12413301]

>>12413274
So if the body is what is knowing, how could it be an appearance, even to itself? If all were under the passage of change, and the body was what is knowing, there could not be constant knowledge.

If the body is not what is knowing, then what is knowing must be beyond the influence-of-time which applies to the body and other objects which appear.

[Anonymous No.12413302]

>>12413279
He doesn't mean appearance as in, illusion, non-existent, he means appearance as it can only appear to us within a set of particular conditions, namely, the (a priori) conditions of possibility for experience, these set of criteria that experience has to meet to be experience, and it is these conditions, precisely because they're properties of our minds: that is, they're what our MINDS have to do to make sense of the WORLD, than it is anything about the WORLD in and of itself, independent of observers.

So remember, this is transcendental idealism, Kant says, of course space and time exist, but only FOR US, they do have an objective existence as the FORM OF OUR SUBJECTIVITY (space being the form of exteriority, time the form of interiority, but that might be a little too ahead of ourselves)

[Anonymous No.12413303]

>>12412440
The human brain is an engine with an exhaust that feeds back into the intake, primarily fueled by an inaccurate perception of reality. There's no way for the engine to improve the quality of primary fuel, but the fumes that are getting pumped back into the tank along with additional fuel allow the engine to improve performance.

[Anonymous No.12413312]

>>12413303
>the mind is a klein bottle

Noice. Recall, also, Hegel's vision of Spirit as something like a "self-digesting stomach".

[Anonymous No.12413318]

>>12413242
>common sense

you're never gonna make it

[Anonymous No.12413320]

>>12413280
Would you happen to know by chance how Marx' epistemology relates to Kant's philosophy, anon?

[Anonymous No.12413331]

>>12413302
Yeah, okay, I get you my friend. I just completely disagree with his entire notion of there being some "world beyond our experience" and the very notion of "space-time as categories" which our experience is underpinned by. I believe reality to be ourselves, and our experience to be reality.

[Anonymous No.12413340]

>>12413331
>I believe reality to be ourselves, and our experience to be reality
The narcissism required to truly believe this is phenomenal.

[Anonymous No.12413358]

>>12413331
Well Hegel laughed at Kant for thinking the human being is like a spotlight that "shines" time and space onto some kind of weird, unextended, timeless noumenal field, so yes I can see why you'd think that.

>>12413320
I do not actually but it's an interesting question I'd like to read an article on it

[Anonymous No.12413367]

>>12413301
I'm not the lad you're asking (who reveals himself to be quite the dabbler) but the phemenal body must, in the end, be conceived as an appearence to a noumenal mind.

>If the body is not what is knowing, then what is knowing must be beyond the influence-of-time which applies to the body and other objects which appear.

That is exactly right, and a major difficulty in Kantian philosophy as well.

[Anonymous No.12413378]

>>12413340
Yeah, no, I'm just a nondualist who believes this all to be a dream, unlike all the "intellectuals" here positing there to be a reality beyond the subject experiencing, yet couldn't ever tell me even a single attribute of said reality because everything is known in the subject and the subject can never speak of something which they are not connected to themselves. You haven't realized that consciousness is the uncontained container of everything known, that there isn't even a dualism between yourself and any phenomena which you have ever encountered (sights, sounds, etc), that all of reality consists of a dialectic of yourself to yourself, and that you are not some sort of blind creature thrust by "reality" into some strange reality which this same "reality" programmed you to only be able to experience through certain conditions, and that this life you walk through is merely a grasping after the true reality which said "reality" designed you not to be able to ever grasp. Yeah, that makes more sense to me.

[Anonymous No.12413392]

>>12413279
Kant thinks that our internal perception of our own bodies and he "inside of our minds" is itself a structured form of perception, that is, we don't even have direct access to what WE really are, because that would still be access to a thing in itself (a soul, a personal essence, whatever). He calls this inner sense.

What you want sounds closer either to what Kant was rejecting pretty eloquently in the first Critique, namely that "inner sense" involves unproblematic knowledge of some (our own) essence, or possibly what Merleau-Ponty was trying to do with his phenomenology of perception in his two books, Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception. But note that Merleau-Ponty only arrived at the non-naive form of what you possibly want through an incredibly sophisticated understanding of Kant and Husserl's own arch-Kantian transcendental philosophy.

[Anonymous No.12413394]

>>12413378
Okay Zhuangzi, have fun being a butterfly.

[Anonymous No.12413404]

>>12413378
Reality is not a dialectic, oh enlightened one. The wisdom of man is foolishness.

[Anonymous No.12413417]

>>12413367
>That is exactly right, and a major difficulty in Kantian philosophy as well.

Can you expand, was the anon touching on the "how can noumena 'cause' perceptions of causality is just another category" debacle?

>>12413378
Kant did more to subjectivize Western philosophy than you realize, this guy here knows what's up >>12413392


I think of Kant this way: he understands there is the only the eye and its seeing, and the modality that "sight" (thought) itself is, while mystics, non-dualists, they're more concerned with making that eye see itself (the essence that Kant denies can be an object of knowledge). Kantians start shrieking at this point but again, the guy's brilliant but I don't think he really is in any position to refute thousands of years of metaphysical thought.

[Anonymous No.12413444]

>this thread
modern philosophy is a joke

[Anonymous No.12413458]

nothing but mental games and word play
pathetic.

[Anonymous No.12413516]

>>12413392
Thanks for the response, anonfren. Okay, see I'm glad to know he thought about his system more deeply than what I said, though I still disagree with him from the outside. That said, I'll read him properly before criticizing him, it's just that from my position his epistomology seems to be flawed from all angles. Again, I'm not criticizing him and recognize I haven't read him yet - these are just my kneejerk reactions, as an outsider to his system of thought.

>>12413394
More of an Atman-Brahman kinda n*gga, desupai.

>>12413417
Oh, okay, thanks too anonfren. Yeah, to clarify my position, I'm not a subjectivist or solopsist, rather, I hold every perceiver to be an "objective unit" of reality, as a droplet of water is an objective unit of the ocean it is part of - identical to it in substance, albeit of minute size.

[Anonymous No.12413544]

>>12413444
trips confirm

[Anonymous No.12413564]

>>12413444
>>12413458
>/pol/ for smart people

[Anonymous No.12413573]

>>12413516
Right, I know what you're saying, not to meme him but you might like Whitehead, he understands the universe can only appear in minds, but nevertheless those minds do objectively comprise an objective field, instead of being solipsistic ourobori or something - which, to be fair, isn't really Kant's position but still.

Think of Whitehead like this: he's like a Kantian who prioritizes perception - space and time - over cognition, so in other words, he thinks what is first, is not the transcendental conditions of thought, but exactly the subject as a formal unit that both constitutes space and time in a Kantian sense, but is also constituted BY it (instead of the subject being a spatializing/temporalizing spotlight that Hegel mocks Kant for believing)

I think Kant is halfway to these realizations you're talking about, Whitehead goes a little further.

[Anonymous No.12413591]

>>12413516
>Speech hath been measured out in four divisions, the Brahmans who have understanding know them.
>Three kept in close concealment cause no motion; of speech, men speak only the fourth division.
ऋग्वेद 1.164.44-45

Kant only wants to keep the fourth division in its proper house. He is agnostic about the other three fourths, and worried about those who mistake the fourth for the other three fourths.

[Anonymous No.12413596]

>>12413417
>Can you expand, was the anon touching on the "how can noumena 'cause' perceptions of causality is just another category" debacle?

Indeed, but more so the utter impossibility of conceiving how this takes place in a non-temporal matter -- the impossibility of which is of course to be expected, even explained, by the same Kantian epistemic principles that cause it. The ignorance regarding such basic operations that results once you accept the principles is, for many, a good reason to bin them.

[Anonymous No.12413622]

>>12413591
This is interesting anon can you expand?

>>12413596
All right I got you. Right so my own basic intuitions kind of align with this, I'm with Kant right up until he affirms noumena as "non-temporal" as you say, which kind of deflates his system somewhat. I'm glad I'm on the right track

I read a post on here that said Kant doesn't deny space and time noumenally, he says they could exist "out there", we just can't ever know and it's useless to speculate, is this right? Is he trying to have his cake and eat it too?

[Anonymous No.12413683]

>>12413622
>I read a post on here that said Kant doesn't deny space and time noumenally, he says they could exist "out there", we just can't ever know and it's useless to speculate, is this right? Is he trying to have his cake and eat it too?

Kant is very explicit about the non-spatiotemporality satus of the noumenal. There is disagreement amongst scholars whether he was entitled to do so , i.e. whether his own philosophy allowed room for such a claim. The answer to this questions depends on the way you believe Kant to argue for this non-spatiotemporality -- an exegetical issue.

[Anonymous No.12413690]

>>12413683
All right thanks mane, if you happen to have any good advanced articles on this stuff I'd love to have them

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » No.12414096]

>>12413242
Brainlet

[Anonymous No.12414153]

>>12412440
Kantianism is the parasitism of the brainstem of a timegod become didgeridoo found-recording now in a post-post greentext synthesized into pre-hegelian post-descarteseanism: which is computerized by a cosmological acid reflux presupposed in the pre-computer subcosmos: Pure Reason is the deprogrammed programming of a stenchbug valorised into tautological sentience recurring of Pseudo-Augustine Vedic Meta-Acclimation: German idealism is the idealistic germination of the cosmos writ smallest.

[Anonymous No.12414174]

>>12413573
Very interesting anonpai. I'll try to look into him in the future, even though his being memed so heavily on here had otherwise turned me off from even checking him out, lol. I also want to give Kant credit now for his position of cognition itself being within time and therefore thinking deeper on the matter than I had, which I only just now thought about after re-reading these posts on him. I better understand, now, what he was on about, from my outsider position. I still, however, think there are many holes in his approach, and fundamentally with his rejection of the subject-itself as being the thing-in-itself, which by it's nature has true knowledge of its very own self, instead only being able to be a "representation" to itself (assuming I understood that correctly). That said, thanks for the further elucidation again.

This was a good thread, in my opinion. Some nice discussions were head, desupai.

[Anonymous No.12414182]

>>12414174
discussions were had* gosh dangit

[Anonymous No.12414209]

>>12414153
The categorical imperative is the Achillean heel turned as post-ontological bildungsromanised volksgemeinschaft: prefigured by a Xerxes now in the Constantinople of the void: which is a capital-form kitchen display of the sky in Berkeley's unbecoming of billboard-waxed Crypto-Pseudo Procluseanistisminism. And that's a good thing.

[Anonymous No.12414217]

>>12414209
>>12414153
I don't like this Nick Land memery

[Anonymous No.12415728]

>>12414217
No one cares about your feelings. Especially the schizogod of sentient capital.