05.09.11
The evolution of freedom
From Fisher’s Lament To Kant’s Challenge
The use of Kant in WHEE has confused a number of people who might think they need to sit down and read Critique of Pure Reason to get the point! NOT! (I was always wary of CPR, and arrived at TI (transcendental ideaism), like Shopenhauer, by a different route. There is also the Platonic route, but you can end up in historical philosophy bliss and some confusion there.
In any case the only material needed in WHEE from Kant is a quick read, and reflection on Kant’s so-called Third Antinomy (and a bird’s eye view of its place in his works) and the first paragraph of his essay on history:
The philosophy of history is born, reborn, at the dawn of modernity as a fellow traveler, becoming visible as early as the sixteenth century and finds its classic realization in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his essay Idea For A Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View:
Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment
Instead of trying to decipher Kant (which you should do anyway, must!) find the problems he is trying to think about/solve. The paragraph above is simple and intuitive but contains a ton of dynamite hidden in its simple language. How do we talk about free will and a science of history? We don’t: Kant’s antinomies enter and demand a new approach.
So, instead of a science of history, we look for a ‘science of the evolution of history’, and in that context a something that can demonstrate the evolution of freedom.
Free will and freedom, please note, could be virtual entities still evolving! But, whatever the case, that first paragraph contains the basic schizophrenic breakdown, permantently
The evolution of freedom said,
May 9, 2011 at 12:26 pm
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