09.05.11
Posted in ethics, General, Kant at 12:41 pm by nemo
I scanned a passage from Korner’s book on Kant
Check Amazon for a cheap copy:
http://www.amazon.com/Kant-S-K%C3%B6rner/dp/B002QVOUDY/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315244333&sr=1-2
THE POSSIBILITY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE AND ITS
RELATION TO SCIENCE AND RELIGION
I. Moral Freedom and Natural Necessity
I F the experience of conflict between duty and desire is not an
illusion; if the judge’s familiar references to criminal responsi-
bility are more than indirect ways of describing the necessary
course of events; if man is subject to a self-imposed moral
law; then we must assume that man exists not only as a
part of the causal order of nature, but also outside it. We
must assume that he is an end in himself, that he is morally
free.
Before turning to Kant’s justification of thispositionit will
be well to recall once again the distinction between (I) Cate-
gories, which are a priori notions applicable to manifolds of
perception, and (2) Ideas, which are likewise a priori but not
similarly applicable. In the case of the Categories, the method
of showing the rightfulness of their use was by a Transcenden-
tal Deduction of them, i.e. by showing that a manifold of per-
ception becomes an object of experience only through the ap-
plication of the Categories to it. Any parallel treatment of an
Idea is impossible for the obvious reason that it is not thus
applicable; it does not refer to any manifold of perception and
consequently does not confer upon any such manifold that
objectivity which is characteristic of the objects of factual and
scientific judgements.
Kant’s justification for the assumption that man is morally
free proceeds by two main steps. The first has already been
taken. In the Critique of Pure Reason it has been shown that we
can think man a noumenon outside the causal order of nature, and
morally free. Moreover it has been shown that the two pro-
positions • Man as noumenon is free’ and • Man as phenomenon is
part of the causa! order of nature’ are compatible. Indeed,
Kant has argued that the Third Antinomy of Pure Reason can
only be resolved by admitting the joint possibility of both
these propositions, thereby accepting the position of transcen-
dental idealism, that whatever stands under the forms of space
and time and under the Categories • is empirically real and
transcendentally ideal’.
Within the field of mathematics and natural science – that is
to say, within the field of the critique of pure reason – the con-
cept of freedom has no positive content. There, freedom means
nothing beyond independence of the .causal order of nature. If
we keep this in mind we can regard it as a kind of causality
and contrast it, as moral or noumenal, with the positive notion
of natural or phenomenal causality, which is a schematized
Category of theoretical thinking.
We have established, now, the internal consistency of the
notion of freedom or moral causality. .But from the internal
consistency of a notion we cannot infer that there are any
actual instances of it whatsoever. From the internal consistency
of ‘centaur’, for example, it does not follow that centaurs
exist. No more can we infer from the internal consistency of
the notion • man as a noumenon’ that man as a noumenon exists.
If we wish to prove that man exists as a free being we need to
know something more; and the nature of the additional evi-
dence we require will determine in what sense we can attribute
to man existence as a free being.
This additional evidence comes from moral experience. In
appealing to it Kant is taking the second step of his proof that
man is free. According to him, it is the plain outcome of
ordinary moral experience that we apprehend the moral law
and our subjection to it. This implies freedom. If the assump-
tion (of our freedom) were self-contradictory there could be no
such implication; our apprehension of the moral law would
have to pass as an illusion and our moral judgements as mis-
takes. The assumption, however, we have found internally
consistent: so our apprehension of the moral law can be evi-
dence of freedom. There is, moreover, no evidence against it.
To give the position in Kant’s words:
‘The moral law shows its reality, in a manner which is suffi-
cient even from the point of view of the critique of theoretical
reason, in adding a positive characteristic to a causality which
so far has been conceived only negatively and the possibility
of which, although incomprehensible to theoretical reason,
had yet to be assumed by it. This positive characteristic is the
conception of reason as 0 immediately determining the will
(through the condition that a universal form can be given to
its maxims as laws). Thus, for the first time, the moral law can
give objective (though only practical) reality to reason which
always hitherto had to transcend all possible experience when
it put its Ideas to a theoretical use •• .’1
Thus, the categorical imperative implies that we are free;
while on the other hand the assumption that we are so is
(a) internally consistent and (b) compatible with the principle
- a fundamental principle of the Critiqtie of Pure Reason – that
all events are causally necessary. Thus we are justified in taking
our apprehension of the moral law as being what it seems to be
to our ordinary moral conscience – an absolute command
which we can fulfil in spite of our being part of the causal order
of nature. All this, however, does not mean that we can know
our moral freedom and its working in the same way as we
know instances of natural causality. There is, as Kant himself
insists, nothing in his argument, or indeed in his whole moral
philosophy, to alter the thesis that moral freedom is an Idea
of pure reason, and therefore unknowable. For the knowable
must be both thinkable and perceivable; while C a perceivable
instance of an Idea’ is, and remains, a-logical contradiction.
If all our thinking were scientific or if it belonged to the
region of that commonsense reflection which is rudimentary
science, then it would make no difference whether we were
naive realists or transcendental idealists. It makes an impor-
tant difference if our thinking includes reflection not only upon
matters of fact but also on moral obligation. This is because we
I. Pro OR. 48, Ab. 137.
The Possibility of Moral Experience 155
cannot in that case avoid being confronted with the prima
facie conflict between the causal necessity of our actions as
parts of the order of nature and our moral responsibility for
them as free agents. If we cannot reject, as being mere mis-
takes, either our apprehension of natural necessity or our
consciousness of moral freedom then we have no alternative
but to treat Kant’s theory with respect as one of the few
thorough attempts to do equal justice to both science and
morals.
Certainly the statistical conception of natural law does noth-
ing to reconcile the two standpoints. It is sometimes said that
since all laws of nature are merely statistical, science and
morality can no longer conflict. It might be argued in support
of such a view that if it were a statistical law that a certain per-
centage of action must always be done in violation of duty,
then the law would leave room for the freedom of the will,
since being merely statistical it would refer not to any particu-
lar action but merely to a certain proportion of actions. The
argument, however, implies that a law of nature would rule
out the possibility that all men should be able to do their duty
simultaneously and continuously. Our subjection to the moral
law, however, implies precisely this. The conflict between
causal necessity and moral freedom remains unresolved.
Another, and very frequent though no more successful,
attempt to solve the problem is found not only in philoso-
phical books but also in the criminal codes of civilized coun-
tries. It consists in distinguishing between causes identifiable
with the doer and causes which are outside his control. The
doer mayor may not be responsible. He is responsible accord-
ing to the theory if he is or ‘contains’ the cause of his action,
which is then, as it is put, ‘freely chosen’. But if we accept the
principle of natural causality, every event in time is caused
and every cause is part of a causal chain which started before
the birth of the doer. By receiving the title of C freely chosen’
a cause does not cease to have been caused. This way of tack-
ling the problem, e.g., by calling inner causes C free’ and external
causes C mechanical’, is no more than a way of ignoring it.
Kant calls it a ‘miserable makeshift’ and ‘petty verbal hair-
splitting’ .1
We usually regard a person as responsible for his action if
he could have chosen not to perform it. As G. E. Moore has
pointed out, the sense of the phrase ‘if he could have chosen
otherwise’ is difficult to determine. Indeed, however we take
it, we seem to leave the doer either always or never respon-
sible. On the one hand, the mere logical possibility of another
action, i.e. its non-contradictoriness, is not sufficient since it is
always logically possible to assume that an event fell out other-
wise than in fact it did. On the other hand to require factual
possibility (that a person, in order to be responsible, must have
been able to change the course of the causal sequences leading
to his action) is to require too much: for a person is never in
this position and so would neuer be responsible for his action.
To say that the possibility expressed by the phrase’ could have
chosen’ is neither logical nor causal, but sui generis, is, unless
qualified by further suggestions, of little use.
Kant’s answer, which follows from his distinction between
man as a phenomenon and man as noameno«, is that it is incom-
patible with the principle of causality for any causal sequence
to be changed. We cannot choose that an action be not the
effect of its causes. But he also holds that man as a noumenon
could have chosen differently since’ the whole chain of appear-
ances with respect to anything which concerns the moral law
depends on the spontaneity of the subject as a thing in itself.
Of the nature of this spontaneity, however, a physical explana-
tion is impossible.” .
For Kant the key to the understanding of the phrase ‘if he
could have chosen’ is the subject of the choice, which is man
as a noumenon or end in himself. The choice takes place on the
noumenal level of human existence. We can infer, from an’
adequate description of theoretical and moral experience, that
the choice takes place in the realm of noumena, but not how it
does so. Indeed how it takes place is, like everything noumenal
(non-phenomenal), unknowable.
I. Pro R. 96, Ab. 189. 2. Pro R. 99, Ab. 193.
The Possibility of Moral Experience 157
Kant’s solution of the conflict between causal necessity and
moral freedom implies, as he admits, ‘many difficulties’ and
‘is hardly capable of being clearly presented’. But, he rightly
asks, ‘is any other which has been or may be attempted, simp-
ler and more easily understandable?’1 The answer, I think,
must be an emphatic no, unless we regard it as a solution of
the problem to ignore either morality or science and refuse to
consider them together.
To Kant’s account of freedom it is often, and quite naturally,
objected, that our own observable actions and choices are car-
ried out in time whereas the ‘actions’ and ‘choices’ of the
noumenal self are outside time and unobservable. The appar-
ent mysteriousness of these notions seems to many too high a
price to be paid for the consistency of causal necessity with
moral freedom. According to Kant, however, we are faced
with the choice on the one hand of distrusting science,
moral experience, or both; on the other hand of trusting them
but accepting the fact that a crucial aspect of our being must
remain unknowable to us.
In one way Kant’s notion of a noumenal self and its choices
is no more mysterious than, e.g., Hilbert’s notion of infinity.
Both are ideal, limiting concepts by means of which we estab-
lish the internal consistency of a system of propositions: in
Kant’s case the system of moral and scientific propositions, in
Hilbert’s case the system of classical mathematics. Yet Kant’s.
notions of the noumenal self and its choices are considered by
him to demarcate the field of the knowable from an unknow-
able region beyond it; whereas Hilbert’s notion of infinity is
conceived as a highly ingenious and highly subtle technicality.
Kant’s thesis of’ the whole chain of appearances with respect
to anything which concerns the moral law’ being chosen by
the unknowable noumenal self operating outside time, is not
without other parallels. It reminds us, for example, of the
Platonic myth of Er according to which the soul after death
‘must choose a [new] life which she will have to realize of
necessity’.2 It also reminds us of various religious doctrines
within and outside the European tradition. It would, however,
be quite contrary to Kant’s conception of philosophy and to
his manner of inquiry to support his conclusions by making
use of either myth or the appeal to any special religious experi-
ence or authority.
The scientist qua scientist assumes that every event stands
under causal or, at least, statistical laws. The judge, and indeed
everybody who makes decisions and who is capable of feeling
guilt and remorse, assumes that men are morally responsible
and therefore free. It is the task of the philosopher to render
the relation between science and morality intelligible. In under-
taking this he must face problems different from those which
are peculiar either to science or to moral reflection. He can,
therefore, expect but little help from the pure scientists or the
pure moralists and would, I think, be unwise if he ignored
what Kant has to say on the way in which practical reason can
provide answers to questions which theoretical reason cannot
even properly ask.
Permalink
10.06.10
Posted in ethics, Kant at 4:13 pm by nemo
Just started looking through Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape. My previous sense of alarm has waned considerably: the book is a form of ‘scientism mud’ and so non-descript that I fail to locate an ethical thesis. The shelves of university libraries (I forget the number series, BL something?) are filled with shelf upon shelf of books on ethics, each one of interest, none of decisive merit. The reason for that, next to the flameout brilliance of Kantian ethics is hard to asses, or understand. Why did philosophy decline after Kant?
Harris would replace that philosophy with science, and the result will be even worse.
I will keep trying, but I may fail to be able to read this book, the Weberian venom courses the blood stream and I am paralyzed, like a victiim of blow pipe attack, as I lose consciousness in the Iron Cage. A hitech savage like Harris is, like all primitives, not be underestimated.
I reviewed Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred, and advocated the author hang. With Harris, who knows. But I have a severe ‘judge not lest..’ problem.
I should comment on the title, or subtitle, ‘how science can determine human values’. For scientists to wish to try to contribute to the question is fine by me, almost refreshing next to the sterility of religious confusion here, but the problem is that, as with Darwinism, pseudo-science will end up becoming a dogma, as the horde of Darwin fanatics, Dawkins cult groupies, and New Atheists enforce a public mentality that noone can challenge, because ‘experts’ have pronounced it science. This game is pernicious, and the subtitle to Harris’ book triggers a sense of dread, and frustration: here they go again. They won’t stop until the Iron Cage is completely enforced. Once this group has decided what science is, as its new Popes, they will propagandize the public in the name of science, and the harm done is incalculable.
I see no reason why science can’t deal with these issues, but is this the point here?
Kant, after all, created the all time classic here, with his thesis of rationality and ethics, yet none of this enters into Harris’ discussion. He doesn’t even acknowledge the potential for free will. So that should settle matter. The book is not about morality at all, hence the emphasis on a concealed utilitarian thesis. \
Constantly harping on Kant (who I don’t actually agree with in toto) can get boring, but I strongly recommend a look at Kant’s attempt to answer this kind of question, ‘how science can determine human values’: Harris is operating in the wasteland of post-kantian stragglers who can’t even recover the level of insight that Kant reached, in the midst of a curious success mixed with failure.
My issue with this book will therefore be brief: Harris never addresses morality as he doesn’t acknowledge either a human will, or a free will, and more than that, he is fixated by Darwinian evolution and its Just So Story on the evolution of ethics. He is unaware of the problem with these theories, how could he ever get any further? That pseudo-science blocks the first step Harris would wish to take.
I will keep reading, and we will see.
Permalink
10.04.10
Posted in ethics, General, Kant at 12:03 pm by nemo
Science Knows Best
By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH
We have discussed Harris’ views here critically, several times, now his book is out. Appiah exposes the problem right away, and one is left puzzled by Harris’ choice of utilitarianism for a science here.
I always recommend Kant here, despite the fact that his ethical discourses have often been criticized. The garbage spouted by religionists, i.e. Christians, confuses the whole discussion.
If you can’t critique and then repair Kant (trying to fly is also hard) you are not going to succeed a la Harris.
But Kant doesn’t cheat, and try to assume that neuroscience describes the mind. It might, one day, but at this point it never discusses the ‘will’,the first fundamental requirement of any ethics, the one thing scientists can’t manage.
So science isn’t even in the ball park on this issue. Small wonder Harris tries to fake it with some cheap imported ‘utilitarianism’.
Religion deals with questions about what Harris calls “meaning, morality and life’s larger purpose,” questions that have no scientific answers.
Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, holds the opposite view. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That’s because truths about morality and meaning must “relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures,” and science alone — especially neuroscience, his field — can uncover those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental life?
Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science — the right values being ones that promote well-being. “Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health,” he writes, “it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.”
But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.
In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what’s wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?
Permalink
08.31.10
Posted in Kant, Philosophy at 12:42 pm by nemo
Freedom Evolves
This issue is the classic snafu created by causal science. You would think that scientists with so many resources at their disposal would be able to snap out of it and at least read the history of this question.
What I find remarkable is the way that ‘scientific’ publics are unaware of the entire history of this issue, especially as it emerges in Kant. Everyone is kept locked in a box so that the work of people like Kant will not disturb the minds of the brainwashed science cadres.
When you are confronted with the way that a figure like Dennett will convince more than Kant (who is never even mentioned), you know with some sadness that science has failed culturally, and you can also realize why religion is making a comeback. Scientists seem to prefer that alternative, to the approach of Kant who was a friend of science and a critic of religion.
Scientists can’t seem to grapple with the issue. But Kant analyzed that psychology well, with his analysis of the ‘basic antinomies’ of reason.
Scientists are stuck in a mode of thought where their successes produce failure here.
But the options are clear. If you create a culture based on disbelief in free will, you will start in motion something ugly, if not impossible (e.g. the abolition of court law assuming criminal responsibility, etc). It is not a real option.
Kant tried patiently to deal with this issue in the context of science, apparently in vain. Complete idiots like Dennett get the name of philosopher, and we live in that especial case of philosophy in decline where mediocrities like Rorty (and Dennett) can claim to have refuted Kant.
You don’t even need to agree with Kant: simply follow the course of his analysis, and get beyond the willed nescience created by bad science education (indoctrination).
The real answer lies beyond even Kant, perhaps, (and Schopenhauer embraced the same framework as Kant, without agreeing on free will) in a realization that we simply don’t understand the universe. Physics may have confused us with a deceptive universalism of laws. Don’t quote me, however.
But Kant’s formulation clearly states the issues and proposes a way out.
In WHEE, btw, I have a tricky set of hybrids based on ‘self-consciousness’ which is the ‘donkey’ of free will and changes gears with higher and lower degrees of freedom.
Permalink
08.23.10
Posted in Kant, Science & Religion at 3:21 pm by nemo
Who cares if God exists?
This discussion, e.g. the claims about reality versus perception, is very much a case of watered down Kantianism. The issue is simple: the questions of god, soul, and free will, are insoluble, but rearise at all points as inescapable metaphysical entities. We can approach them in ways that are not standard forms of knowledge, to some degree. We can infer about them in larger contexts. The Kantian critique can help to maintain these concepts even as their metaphysical issues arise to haunt us.
Permalink
08.19.10
Posted in Evolution, Kant, physics at 1:06 pm by nemo
http://darwiniana.com/2010/08/19/the-unreasonable-stupidity-of-the-physics-cult/
I was a little unfair to this article, which is worth reading, and which shows that, ironically, physicists have a better ‘design’ argument than religionists–they just can’t quite get a handle on it.
I should note that Kant, with what success (?), tried to show that Newton’s laws were ‘a priori’, a task that has not found favor with later thinkers. But I think his point, although it derailed in the attempt, was profound. It is an aspect of our ‘widget’ consciousness, or tool thinking, which is so simple that we take it for granted: a force is required (by all space-time apes, etc…) to push/pull/crack coconuts, and in the absence of that force things proceed as per nothing much. Newton’s laws tweak our sense of this and often seem to state the obvious.
In any case, the Darwinian formulation is upside down. It is trying to create a law of force out of natural selection, and it won’t work. Because such a ‘force’ would seem like a designer at work. But the latter issue is not the point.
Permalink
08.02.10
Posted in ethics, Kant, Philosophy at 12:06 pm by nemo
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality.haidt.html: Haidt at Edge
Accusing Kant and Benthan of Asperger’s Syndrome to open a discussion of ethics is a bit much.
(btw, So what if they did have Asperger’s? It is almost a recommendation, quite apart from the groupie science at places like Edge.org, where everyone is a suckup trying to get a book deal)
Haidt must be worried by Kantian ethics here! It is the strongest challenge to reductionist theories of ethics. Kant’s thinking here was a work in progress and appears in several versions, and, in a way, that closer look is needed near the academic courses that teach his ethics in misaleding fashion.
But after all the problems none of these scientists, stuck on Darwinism, can get ethics right, next to Kant’s way of getting it right, at least as to basics.
Kant confronts the issue of freedom next to causality, and creates a framework where freedom is given its place in the discussion. Scientists constantly, over and over and over, get stuck here, and bloviate for us to no avail.
Kant’s ethical project, even if you disagree, points to something scientists can’t accomplish: ‘common ordinary morality’. Kant wished to assist in understanding the moral sense that is already the case. Perhaps his approach is incomplete, or fails, but he raises the issue that scientists bypass: describe morality before theorizing. Not so easy.
For Immanuel Kant, the case is not quite so clear. He also was a loner who loved routine, feared change, focused on his few interests, to the exclusion of all else. And, according to one psychiatrist, Michael Fitzgerald, who diagnoses Asperger’s in historical figures and shows how it contributed to their genius, Fitzgerald thinks that Kant would be diagnosed with Asperger’s. I think the case is not nearly so clear. I think Kant did have better social skills, more ability to empathize. So I wouldn’t say that Kant had Asperger’s, but I think it’s safe to say that he was about as high as could possibly be on systemizing, while still being rather low on empathizing, although not the absolute zero that Bentham was.
Permalink
07.25.10
Posted in History, Kant at 3:45 pm by nemo
The question of freedom (and causality) in history, thence in ethics, is raised in the first paragraph of Kant’s classic essay on history:
4.4 Kant’s Challenge
Permalink
07.21.10
Posted in Kant, Science at 11:44 am by nemo
Biology and free will
This post makes obvious that science education is crippled by its agenda of scientism. The issue of biology and free will was addressed by Kant two hundred years ago, and has a vast tradition of its own. But Big Science has completely censored all this.
Scientists think themselves omniscient. The sad reality is they are trained to be stupid.
In all fairness, part of the problem is the Christian attempted monopoly on all such issues, resulting in their being ruined by bad theology.
Permalink
06.30.10
Posted in Kant, Philosophy, Schopenhauer at 2:11 pm by nemo
We have already linked today to: An Agnostic Manifesto, but the essay is worth reading.
I was often over time ‘a sort of atheist’ without realizing it, and this position was really closer to agnosticism than atheism. With the arrival of the New Atheists, vacating the atheist position becomes an necessity since this cultic brand is highly intolerant and contains an entire bible of related beliefs.
The problem is that, philosophically, theism can revinvent itself constantly in ever new guises, in a manner that, while not truly convincing, is dialectically alive. Much atheism arises from the silliness and infantile deterioration of theism into a degenerated theism. A spate of atheism is often a negation of this perverted theism, and as such healthy for the mind.
But the real idea of ‘god’ is not so simply dismissed because it is not so simply defined. And very powerful antinomies of reason, as clearly portrayed by Kant, haunt both the affirmation and/or negation of ‘god’.
This often takes the form of the antinomies of the beginning in time/no beginning in time (The manifesto linked to has a version of this in its question about creating something from nothing).
The mind will be like a dog chasing its tail as it wobbles between theism and atheism. The search to still the mind might be found in an agnostic position.
Beyond that, the transcendental idealism of Kant, seemingly theistic in the case of the latter, and atheistic (or agnostic) in his great successor Schopenhauer, gives us the truest ground for agnosticism, contra Kant, in its reminder that the noumenal is beyond knowing, behind the phenomenal. We cannot ‘know god’ (save that ‘gnostics’ in another sense do so claim) either as a positive or a negative.
Unfortunately Kant muddied his position by reintroducing a redefined version of ‘faith’ to posit an ‘atheist’s redefined god’ somewhere in the vicinity of his ethical discourses. Schopenhauer in a way swept all this aside in his streamlined agnostic transcendental idealism. One problem is that Schopenhauer is almost Buddhist in his strain of pessimism and his concealed metaphysics of the will. But, whatever the case, the great insight into transcendental idealism starting with Kant reminds us that agnosticism confronts the noumenon as it is.
Transcendental idealism, despite its confusing and misleading name which doesn’t mean what it seems, is a highly useful non-belief system constructed as an extension/commentary to Newtonian physics and is highly adaptable to a modified science.
Again, the question of ‘god’ is never simple. Note that the Israelites did not use this word, but instead IHVH, as something to point to beyond simple theism.
Permalink
06.14.10
Posted in Kant, religion at 3:26 pm by nemo
James comment on Pantheism
James said,
June 14, 2010 at 2:59 pm ·
“Of all religious or spiritual traditions, Pantheism – the approach of Einstein, Hawking and many other scientists – is the only one that passes the muster of the world’s most militant atheist.”
Actually, I still don’t think Pali Buddhism has been bested here. The almost Kantian critique directed at the Upanishads obsession with “oneness” and “manyness” by the Buddha should remind us that Pantheism didn’t hold up in ancient times either.
(We should probably bring in Stuart Kauffman here, with his badly flawed Reinventing the Sacred, if only to skewer his version, also)
I am suddenly a little uninformed here, as to your reference to a critique of the Upanishads. More homework needed, or give us some leads. But your basic point is good.
But in general modern pantheism is a favorite lifeboat for refugess from strict monotheism. Disillusion tends to set in after a brief or long marriage. It is all a replay of the Spinoza/Kant duet, wherein Kant ‘redualized’ the monistic flavor of Spinoza by stubbornly demanding free will from causality, and pulling transcendental idealism out of hat to make his point. The result is a severe challenge to Spinozism. And yet Hegel seems to have re-’monized’ Kant and resurrecterd Spinoza. But I think Kant’s point is profound despite the howls of protest over his ‘dualism’.
I might note that, strangely, the same protest over the dualism of Samkhya animated the ancient Indian traditions. It is an old game, the sparring for and against such dualisms.
The problem is the way in which the New Atheists have made anything but a narrow kind of scientism the basis of their views. They are incapable of appreciating the ‘atheism’ of the Buddhists or Jains (what to say of the Hindus, before a public front of queer monotheism was concocted to save their skins from monotheists). That atheism of the primordial Indian tradition was also a strange kind of agnostic polytheism.
Permalink
06.07.10
Posted in Booknotes, ethics, Kant at 3:48 pm by nemo
Review of Epstein’s Good Without God
The idea that morality requires no theism is actually a Kantian idea.
In fact dogmatic theists and dogmatic atheists are equally a problem for moral discussions. Atheists who wish to discuss ethics need to have a clear discussion of Nietzsche and not bluff their way through on the way to nihilism.
This book express (unwittingly) one of the classic strains of philosophy in the discussion of morality: the idea that morality stands beyond divinity is a Kantian one, and it is important to consider that the idea of morality without god was first proposed by religious thinkers, if Kant can be considered a religious philosopher (along with being a secularist par excellence). The idea that a divine agent muust enforce morality by divine decree was long seen to make the whole of morality problematical.
I think that an equal confusion can arise from a purely atheist insistence on the basis of morality. We must completely detach the idea of morality from discussions of atheism/atheism. One of the problems with much contemporary discussion from figures such as the New Atheists is that morality is made to vanish under the canons of scientism, reductionism, and Darwinian evolutionism. This is as destructive of morality as the authoritarian theism foundationalizing religious morality. So it is ironic that authoritarian theism and scientific reductionism are both a problem for moral thinking, which must be founded on the idea of the freedom of the individual to be a moral agent.
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05.16.10
Posted in Evolution, Kant, Philosophy at 12:47 pm by nemo
My previous post was very hard on Ruse. There is one consolation: Ruse is not the only second-rate philosopher these days.
EVERY philosopher, post-Kant is somehow second-rate, a world historical puzzle in itself.
Since Kant’s work is egregiously complex, you might read the books of Bryan Magee on Schopenhauer and/or philosophy and/or Wagner to get his take on this, an adolescent vision of Kant’s antinomies. We live in the era of Darwin, and Rorty. Rorty on Kant is a bit of a comedy. I see no problem with pygmies trying to take down Kant, but succeed, where Rorty failed completely.
In general the issue of Kant and pragmatism is a quagmire for young students. I can’t handle pragmatism, myself, why I know not, but perhaps i am fortunate.
I am also fortunate I am not philosopher, leastwise a Kantian, nor have I followed the academic tracks of Kantstudien. But I have been blessed with a kind of vision of Kant’s critique of metaphysics (Magee also describes such a thing in his life, pondering the antinomies at night in bed as a youth) which has helped me beyond measure in understanding science, and evolutionism.
If you study the eonic effect (history and evolution dot com) you will see ‘Kant in action, or applied Kant’, a spectacular insight into historical evolution and the philosophy of history, and that philosophy is a non-random field of emergence in world history (note its connection to the Axial Age, and the eonic effect in general), and what’s more Kant appears eerily at the so-called Great Divide in the eonic series as depicted by me. Study the logic or non-randomness in world history that I provide, and it might become clear why Kant overshadows those who come after him. Very strange, very very strange.
I think biologists might learn from Kant and his successors the teleomechansists. Their work is a bit old-fashioned and needs an uprade, but their basic points are of fundamental importance in the mess of current biology.
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05.10.10
Posted in Kant at 4:57 pm by nemo
With respect to Hedges’ essay, discussed already today: Kant is in many ways a better transit point for the refugees of Christianity than Nietzsche. Nietzsche is filled with egregious nonsense painted up to look brilliant and to make himself look original in the wake of German Classical philosophy. And his nihilism is foreseen and addressed directly in the generations before Nietzsche.
Kant (read his biography) shows the transition from the Protestant Reformation to secularism directly through the stages of his life and his background in Pietism. It seems old-fashioned now to some, but most fail to see that the post-Enlightenment is more of a decline from that peak than an advance. His critique of metaphysics is far more appropriate to the trapped religionist than the metaphysics in reverse of scientism. And his challenge to the Newtonians with the issue of freedom is really the stage of the completion of the scientific revolution in the context of modernity and secularism. Further, Kant is not yet confused or corrupted by the vulgar Darwinism to come, which will become the dishwater substitute for a world view, with its latent violence, social darwinist ideology, economic legerdemain, and plain bad science.
In fact, he gave birth to a school of biology, the teleomechanists, that saw before the fact the confusions of reductionism evolutionism.
Nietzsche is celebrated as some brilliant genius, but his theme of the will to power is a vulgarization of Schopenhauer, and of transcendental idealism, that he knew would play to gallery in its oulala style much better than the hard work of uphill philosophical study required for the German classics of the Kant era.
Kant is one of the severest critics of Christianity, and yet does not attempt to deal out the joker of simplistic atheism.
You might argue that his ethics is problematic, and that is a secondary issue in the study of Kant’s more seminal foundation prior to that later study of ethics, but even so the attempt itself is so instructive as to be the best way to reckon with the collapse of ethics in a positivistic age.
Meanwhile the painted face of Nietzsche’s influence on fascist antimodernism and outright Nazism and its eugenics is a ticking time-bomb behind the whole game. His nonsense about the ‘overman’ is a ridiculous low gear monstrosity of the path of self-transcendence seen in religions such as Buddhism.
The added bonus in Kant is the study of liberalism and its foundations, as the keynote of the modern transition. By contrast Nietzsche is stuck in a strange reactionary pose as a supposedly profound critic of liberal civilization. For what? Nietzsche seems to think the age of the barbarians and Aryan tribesman was the age of some kind of superior man. We should note that these Aryans were totally ignorant invaders and destroyers of the real ‘overman’ tradition in Inida. He is incapable of understanding the Old Testament, and most uncomprehending of the real achievement of classical Greece, which invented liberalism. It is a peculair narrowness and lack of insight or imagination in a uniquely eloquent stylist who confused his public with artistic flourishes that are empty. And his aesthetics can hardly match that of the less flashy Kant.
Check out:
Nietzsche: Prophet of Nazism
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05.09.10
Posted in ethics, Kant at 3:24 pm by nemo
Harris’ Toward a scince of morality
Harris seems to equate the moral issue with maximizing well-being.
My sense that he is doomed from the start seems confrimed.
I should add that there is absolutely nothing wrong with such an attempt,
pioneered in a different way by Kant (if not Plato).
The danger here, though, is that, as with Darwinism, one lie leads to an increased ease in promoting another. Science has not produced ‘reason’ but credulity on evolution in its public. Finishing the game off with a pseudo-ethics is the liability of Harris’ project and will likely succeed as gesture of publicity and scientism, to the confusion of and harm done to many.
As I read his essay, which acknowledges his many critics, I realize that i am being slightly unfair: he is so surrounded by nihilist skeptics of scientism who think the value domains is ‘woo’ that his project seems to be a heroic effort in progress to rescue science from its amorality.
I can’t fully judge a book that isn’t out yet, so I must wait. But I suspect that Harris’ effort is going to be false from the beginning, especially given the hints of ‘utilitarianism redux’ in progress.
The attempt to create a science of morality is something that can’t be rejected out of hand. The most magnificent attempt is the ethics of Kant, who some think failed to reach the result. If Harris is going to try to adapt neuroscientism to this task, his failure will be a parody of Kant.
Beyond the success or failure (and not a little obscurity that makes his work hard to approach) of the Kantian version lies a solid foundation of transcendental idealism in which the issue of freedom, the foundation of morality, is given a place. Kant’s ethics of the ‘categorical imperative’ is deeply suggestive, but seems to spawn logical contradictions, or exceptions that require an extended version of his thinking. The question of transcendental idealism was a great success, and is almost more important than the specified ethics, among many, that might exist in the context of TI.
I will bet a nickel (not much, I may lose the bet, I hope) that Harris plans to simply ignore all this, construct ethics on the basis of passive causal logic in which maximizing ‘well-being’ is the mainline project. Worse, then, than a parody of Kantian ethics. That’s a project for the final stages of Iron Cage, the same point in Pharaonic pyramid constuction where the mummy has to be locked in forever so no tomb robbers can find it.
There is hope: we can always break into the Iron Cage.
The Iron Cage still has some exit points, one of them being the glaring absence of the idea of freedom, thence ethics.
Harris, I fear, means to make us amnesiac about what is missing.
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Posted in Kant, Philosophy at 2:20 pm by nemo
Relink to ‘Soul Talk’
No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown us that there’s no there there.
To say that philosophers should reject ‘soul talk’ may be good positivism, but it is not good philosophy.
This kind of article picks all of the aspects of the question easy to discredit, and makes no effort to deal with the super-hard questions of soul.
Positivism has done nothing here except play ostrich.
A better scientific approach would be to weed out the endless confusion here and study the classic themes on the subject from Plato to the Tibetan book of the Dead.
But most of all, if philosophy is the topic, then the issue of the ‘philosophy of soul’ might focus on the Kantian discourse on the ‘noumenal’ and educate students in the undecidability of the question of soul.
Kant is helpful here because he points to the metaphysical dilemmans of the noumenal, but doesn’t go so far as to deny realities that might be beyond our ken.
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05.08.10
Posted in Kant, Philosophy, Schopenhauer at 12:16 pm by nemo
Soul talk
No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown us that there’s no there there.
This article, in the Chronicle of Higher Education no less, is a revealing snapshot of the way that scientism has overtaken philosophy and destroyed it.
If anyone wants to argue against the ‘soul’, that is one thing, but to speak as a philosopher with such overconfidence, and to a class of students, is shocking, and a reminder that scientism is killing off the universities.
I have many problems with ‘soul’ philosophies, but, all in all, the issue of soul won’t go away, and hasn’t been touched even by postivists and, laugh all you want here, their ‘scientific philosophy’.
Has this professor never read Kant?
The best way to see the danger of negating soul is to read a philosopher like Schopenhauer who had little patience with religious soul verbiage but who reinvented ‘soul’ beliefs all over again in his manner of discussing transcendental idealism, in the wake of Kant: if out categories of perception are the source of the space-time matrix then it follows that some part of the mind stands beyond space and time. Even if this Kantian, and then Schopenhauerian, logic is flawed, it should remind us that ‘soul’ beliefs are their own worst enemy and veil the reality, which is that they can revive in the twinkling of an eye, most prodigiously via the unwitting efforts of great philosophers.
Schopenhauer on death
But the issue here in a Kantian vein is not arguing for the existence of soul so much as realizing that the noumenal aspect of mind is lost to the students of empiricist dogma. We cannot prove anything about soul, one way or the other.
This article goes off on the tangents of junk talk on ‘soul’. But that is pointless.
And it also shows the way, visible in the depiction of his students, that soul beliefs in all their confusion are naturally endemic and a normal aspect of human evolutionary psychology. They cannot and should not be excised. Instead one can try to rescue them from confusion.
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05.07.10
Posted in Kant, New Age, Schopenhauer at 4:02 pm by nemo
MBFM comment on Karmapa
MBFM raises the issue of the right ‘Buddhist dharma’ to pursue in the modern world. Original Buddhism is so elegant and simple that the steps would seem transparent, but they are not. Westerners rarely succeed at meditation, while Indians seem to know it all first hand. Deepak Chopra talks a good game, but he knows he is an idiot, and, running scared, gets up to meditate two hours a day in fine Indian style. I don’t recommend that or anything one way or the other, you can’t imitate such people, you are not an Indian, but consider the confusion of the situation.
The tradition as received is not really accurate history anymore, and the techniques may fail on a modern body type. I have seen one person from the New Age who spent five years trying to learn to sit in full lotus, and failing in disgust, to abandon sadhana forever. Rare is the westerner who can do that. Who cares. Sit with legs loose on in half lotus or nothing. Don’t be distracted by such nonsense. That’s a good example of the way the obvious will fail, when it is so ancient. Yet Buddhism has a truly modern tone to its core. What a pity. Many Buddhists have understood this and the prophesy of the new Buddha have been many, only to result in a thorgoughly hopeless idiocy of pretenders. Many ancients Buddhists, and Tibetans, saw the new age effect, but their solution isn’t destined to succeed.
I should note that Schopenhauer produced a good part of the answer to translating the issues into modern thought two centuries ago at the dawn of the New Age movement, which he witnessed. It is a reminder that few really understand ancient sutras, even those born in Tibet or India. As the sufis say, the tradition is not reborn in time, but beyond time, verbiage with a point, in their sugary mystical language. But be wary of Schopenhauer: it was not his intention to create a religion or a spiritual path. You can also get hung up on his metaphysical slant. He, and Kant, simply clarified the language of spirituality, lost to most traditionalists, and certainly to most, all!, Christians, who try to get sustenance from religious propaganda of the late Roman empire.
I should note that James, a earlier frequent commenter here, was often prone to links to various Buddhist groups from Thailand, the Hinayana stronghold.
I can’t really advise anyone here, save to note that the pitfalls pointed to at The Gurdjieff Con are horrific. But that way is vital and still alive. Almost.
The answer to these questions is comically simple: the Hinduism/Buddhism/Jainism of the Axial Age were already recreations of ancient lost teachings, and got many things wrong. But they did succeed in producing a new cycle. Modernity can do the same. But it is not a question of New Age reactionaries destroying modernity.
Modern man is a different body type. Try this: if you are allergic to meditation try meditating five minutes or so a day for two years. An absurd exercise, but if the alternative is nothing, then… And the alternative is almost always nothing for Westerners. Five minutes a day is a steady reminder that you are not meditating, or are you? It forces the issue of what mediation is. Don’t discuss it with people. This is also good if you are busy in modernity. You can’t graft meditation onto modernity armed with New Age cliches. You don’t have an hour a day to spare from the prison of the modern economy. Take five minutes a day, something that can succeed, to reflect on you situation in a sitting posture. One day the right way to proceed will appear to you, willy nilly. There are many variants to this procedure. Five minutes is hardly meditation, whatever that is, but what is, and this is a ‘good question’, as they say, in you existence, one that is absent from many of the fashionable New Age meditation retreats that make a mechanical hodgepodge of meditation.
That five minutes will remain a good question, spare you wasted time on psedo meditative gymastics, and induce a slowly rising panic that your life has been a waste, so long sucker. Then you can hopefully proceed to something real. As real, maybe, as meditating five minutes a day.
After that you can order a five ton Shiva Lingam like the kind in Jain temples for your back yard from India. With its economy booming the way it is you can probably have one shipped UPS. Cash or creditcard, maybe even via the Internet. It can be a real come on for your Tantrik path, the successor to your five minute good question phase.
A far better starting point is to reflect on the self-consciousness behind your ordinary consciousness. That is the real point, along with the arduous task of coming to understand your human software, a very difficult thing to do. It is sad but we usually spend 90% of our life trying to understand our human software, and then barely succeed. But it need not be hard. It is not however a puzzle you can solve by thinking about it.
You cannot get it from current scientific psychology, and you cannot get it from Christianizing religion, and you cannot easily get it from the sutras of antiquity, but the odds improve. That’s often the key to meditation, don’t know, just sit and wait.
All you can do is reflect on consciousness, will, and the power of attention, and look at the way that Nature in its strange wisdom has planted a spiritiual (bad word, wrong word) path dead center in modernity, built around the question of your self-consciousness, an evanescent state momentarily real in the act of attention. That’s it, the whole sutra.
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
I am not a guru, and don’t propose anything, but the ground of self-consciousness is the universal ground of human evolution, an invariant at all times and places, and religions have no monopoly on it, if they have any connection to it at all. Ancient men at the dawn of human speciation must have had the first taste of it, perhaps even stronger that what is common in modern men. In that sense man as man is what he always was, strangely stuck between two worlds, with a mysterious software that has flowered in uncommon times and places. Alfred Wallace came to understand something of this and quite briskly trotted away from his original view of evolutiion (which Darwin plagiarized).
In the issue of self-consciousness secularism is the ground for a truer higher religious non-religion of the future.
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05.02.10
Posted in Booknotes, Kant, The Eonic Effect at 2:55 pm by nemo
I review a book of essays, from Cambridge University Press on Kant’s essay on history: The mystery of Kant’s challenge and the evolution connection
It is a bit outrageous that this book was written without reference to my solution to ‘Kant’s Challenge’ from that essay, but then again it was probably no accident. The Darwin Establishment has reached the Kant community, it seems, and turned them all into stone, mum on the Darwin question. Kant could hardly have been a Darwinist, so we have Kant’s scholars pretending otherwise, or otherwise silent on controversial questions.
One more reason why it requires outsiders to do the work of frozen academics.
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04.26.10
Posted in Evolution, Kant, Philosophy, Science & Religion at 3:22 pm by nemo
Book Review–Troy Jollimore on Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Review of Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit
By Troy Jollimore
Nussbaum’s book looks interesting and I will track it down stat.
I think, however, that the situation calls for something more than trying to revive the Humanities. As culture reaches the final stages of existence in the Iron Cage, more is needed than mere literary flourishes. We need a full blown collision of dialectic between the Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, a Romantic Movement rasied from the dead, German Classical Philosophy using assault and (philosophic) battery on the mindless generation of idiots raised in the Flatland of scientism.
We could have a kickoff with Kantians taking on the Darwinists, followed by further such collisions routing the Know Nothings of contemporary Big Science.
And a reform of education might help. That is part of the reason why science is stuck on Darwinism, unable to see where the problem is, and why the New Atheists have muddled both religion and atheism with an ignorance of the history of religion that is almost puzzling, next the bad to awful theories of the evolution of religion. People overspecialized in science training, with no other exposure to educational resources, should be considered suspect of bad thinking, the kind we see at work in the evolution debate, and the debates over the ‘god gene’, etc… Such people are overvalued and armed-and-dangerous.
As a professor in a large state university system, I am quite familiar with the current state of American liberal arts education, at least in our public institutions of higher learning. And I am here to tell you: The news is not good. The public universities in general are in a sorry state, languishing under constantly dwindling funding and lack of public support. Class sizes are growing even as instructors are being let go. Funds for research and other intellectual activities are rapidly disappearing. Many instructors are not being paid their full salaries. And many universities have responded to the situation, or are considering responding, by slashing if not entirely eliminating humanities and arts programs—programs frequently regarded as expensive, nonessential luxuries, in a world increasingly focused on the economic bottom line.
As a result, an ever smaller number of students have at any point during their university careers the special, indeed irreplaceable experience of sitting in a room with a small number of their colleagues and discussing difficult ideas—ideas, in many cases, that are foundational to our civilization—with an instructor who is willing to challenge them and who has the time and energy to take their thoughts seriously. The anonymity and alienation of the large lecture hall or the online course has largely replaced the person-to-person interaction that was once considered the apotheosis, if not indeed the core, of the college experience.
Individual students often fail to realize, of course, just how much of a raw deal they are getting compared to their predecessors; since they spend only four years or so on campus, they are not aware of how much more crowded their classrooms are, or how much less attention their work and intellectual progress receive from their ever more put-upon instructors. But we professors, who tend to stay around for longer, are more vividly aware of the steepness of the decline. It has been true for a while, sadly, that quite a few students were pretty much illiterate when they entered public universities. What is becoming more and more true is that many students are still essentially illiterate when they leave.
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04.17.10
Posted in atheism, Booknotes, Kant, Philosophy, Science & Religion at 1:17 pm by nemo
In the Spirit of Hegel (Paperback)
~ Robert C. Solomon
Watching the new atheists, I often think of this book by Robert Solomon, a humanist yet student of Hegel, and his tome on Hegel’s classic that attempts to claim that Hegel was an atheist.
Others have thought so, and the same, for Kant.
The point is only that atheism was truly born in the generation of Kant and his successors, as the metaphysical Illusion of religion and false empiricism both came home to the generation of the Enlightenment.
To call Hegel an atheist is provocative, but I doubt many students of Hegel will agree or endorse this nonetheless interesting work, which might caution the new atheists against the superficial anti-theism that the ‘real atheists’ of the Kant generation embraced and then transcended. Hegel is a lost cause at this point, but musing over his ‘atheism’ might help to see that theism and atheism are equally empty.
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04.10.10
Posted in History, Kant at 12:38 pm by nemo
Post at History & Theory listserve on the ‘laws of history’ debate, and Kantian antinomies:
The antinomies here are actually a staged debate, so I am delighted in your excellent response, and welcome the vigorous effort to sense the original meaning of Kant’s essay, and to really consider the implications of the Third Antinomy (which the paragraph from Kant’s essay resembles).
Read the rest of this entry »
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03.30.10
Posted in ethics, Kant, neuroscience at 12:13 pm by nemo
Moral confusion in the name of ‘science’
by Sam Harris, Project Reason
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5343
from dawkins site
Last month, I had the privilege of speaking at the 2010 TED conference for exactly 18 minutes. The short format of these talks is a brilliant innovation and surely the reason for their potent half-life on the Internet. However, 18 minutes is not a lot of time in which to present a detailed argument. My intent was to begin a conversation about how we can understand morality in universal, scientific terms. Many people who loved my talk, misunderstood what I was saying, and loved it for the wrong reasons; and many of my critics were right to think that I had said something extremely controversial. I was not suggesting that science can give us an evolutionary or neurobiological account of what people do in the name of “morality.” Nor was I merely saying that science can help us get what we want out of life. Both of these would have been quite banal claims to make (unless one happens to doubt the truth of evolution or the mind’s dependency on the brain). Rather I was suggesting that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want—and, perforce, what other people should do and want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind. As the response to my TED talk indicates, it is taboo for a scientist to think such things, much less say them public.
Most educated, secular people (and this includes most scientists, academics, and journalists) seem to believe that there is no such thing as moral truth—only moral preference, moral opinion, and emotional reactions that we mistake for genuine knowledge of right and wrong, or good and evil. While I make the case for a universal conception of morality in much greater depth in my forthcoming book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values , I’d like to address the most common criticisms I’ve received thus far in response to my remarks at TED.
Harris’ claims here are not clear yet, but we should be extremely suspicious of this clear vaulting ambition to complete the ‘iron cage’ mentality of scientism now current.
On the other hand, Harris’ project was clearly prefigured by Kant in another mode: deriving ethical action from rational premises, a project both brilliant and flawed, but properly founded in the framework of transcendental idealism.
Harris superficial substitute will probably be more scientism, never challenge the dogmas of Darwinism, and be more wishwashy ‘ethics as the search for happiness’ bullshit.
The danger here is of bestseller idiots like Harris et al. creaing a public mood of fanaticism, as with Darwinian propaganda.
The trick here is to claim that ‘future research’ will solve the question, and that therefore it has solved the question. This trick is part of what made Darwinism a dogma of science, even as the failure to produce evidence for the claims of natural selection was phased into the background.
Scientists are angry they can’t reduce morality, and are lusting to make it a corner of scientism.
Keep in mind these idiots can’t get Darwin straight, ethics, well, they are overwheening in their ambition
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02.25.10
Posted in cosmology, Kant, Science & Religion at 4:30 pm by nemo
Coyne blog on Ruse
It seems that Ruse can’t quite get his argument tuned to what he is feeling about the New Atheists. This kind of ‘something is wrong with Dawkins’ atheism pitch’ feeling has hit a lot of people. But Ruse can’t quite figure out how to proceed. I can’t really help since, while I understand his feeling, I don’t agree with his approach.
But OK, Ruse’s point is good: monotheists (naively?) were sensitive to first cause argument, and at the fountain source of theism that argument is extremely powerful.
Or is it? The problem is the failure to graps a kind of Kantian antinomy involved in first cause arguments. As Kants so eloquently dissolves the logic here, on both sides, we cannot do with, or do without the first cause logic.
So the problem with Dawkins is that he proposes a simple reversal of the antinomy, in all seriously, oblivious to the double aspect to the Kantian antinomy.
Ruse on the First Cause argument:
“You know, and I know, that Christians (St. Augustine, certainly St. Thomas) spent a hell of a lot of time—I mean, they knew this—what they were trying to do, was articulate a notion of God who would be First Cause: you know, the whole notion of a Satiety Aseity, God as a Necessary Being. You know, God’s essence is His existence.”
. . . Christians have got some grown-up responses to these sorts of things, and I think that Dawkins does a serious disservice to the cause of nonbelief by not being prepared to take seriously the kinds of things that believers believe in.”
Well, as many have pointed out, I’m neither a philosopher nor a theologian, but these highly sophisticated defenses of the First Cause Argument seem to me merely intellectualized versions of the assertion, “My kind of God did too exist forever!” Perhaps real philosopher/theologians like Eric MacDonald can weigh in here.
Anyway, here, according to a new survey by the Pew Forum, are some of the things that Americans do believe (proportion of respondents who accept the notions):
Bible as the word of God: 63%
Bible as the literal word of God: 33%
Life after death: 74%
Heaven: 74%
Hell: 59%
Miracles: 79%
Angels and demons: 68%
Own religion is the one truth path that can lead to eternal life: 24%
Many religions can lead to eternal life: 74%
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02.12.10
Posted in Kant at 9:52 pm by nemo
Comment on Ethics, Freedom to Act and Scientific Naturalism/Scientism
James said,
February 12, 2010 at 2:00 pm ·
A Kantian perspective would be insightful, but I think his philosophy is impossible to clarify in contemporary times. It has become so mixed up with the ideas of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc. that few people can come to any understanding of his genuine views.
Kant can be a frustrating thinker to study. I should point out that I never studied him academically, and had the supreme good fortune of coming to some kind of understanding via the eonic effect which provides a perfect model to understand the basics of his thinking. I was able to enter his thought stepping backwards, unwittingly stumbling on the gist of his system. Only then did I bother to read the first critique.
People who study him directly end up having to pass a series of barriers, the space-time chapter, then the transcendental deduction, etc…
As many have noted it might be better to enter via the dialectic and the study of the antinomies. Such a pity this situation.
Look at the absurdity of the debate over the Big Bang, cosmology and design issues. Only students ignorant of Kant could end up in such a silly dispute.
Having said this I have no idea if I have approached his real core or understood his ‘ideas’. But the issue is broader than exact interpretations. The basics of transcendental idealism, as a complement to the physics of Newton, doesn’t necessarily require Kant expertise. It only requires understanding of Kant, rather than knowledge of Kant.
I am not a Kantian, or one of his expositors. But as I examine history in the large I confront the miracle of the modern transition, the Great Divide, and the sudden appearance of Rousseau, Kant and then the whole phenomenon of German Classical philosophy just at the point, with eerie timing, is a glimpse into another world.
I hate to say it, but philosophy has never recovered from Kant, and the whole subject has been in decline ever since. Puzzling, and the later ‘philosophers’ seem helpless to deal with the situation.
http://history-and-evolution.com
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02.11.10
Posted in ethics, Evolution, Kant, Science & Religion at 2:20 pm by nemo
Previous post: end of id….
Granting the abuse of the design argument by its proponents, the fact remains that scientists have obscured the question with their own methodology which leaves all discussion paralyzed. The design debate simply confuses the issue, so consider a different question, the nature of ethics, its relation to science, the nature of its evolution, and its status in the context of so-called naturalism. Natural selection arguments are not going to explicate ‘freedom to act’ (which may or may not be taken as ‘free will’ exactly. Free will is categorical. Some part of ethics can be based on the more general potential ‘freedom to act’, broken down into cases perhaps, etc…). So scientists are in worse trouble than designists here.
Scientists wish to do science, assume that naturalism is defiined by their method, and throw everything into that sausage machine, and refuse to listen to any problems in this approach.
But the whole game fails.
The reason is very simple: science, apparently, must confine itself exclusively to causal argument and analysis. But ethical behavior by definition is about non-causal issues, the freedom to act, and the will associated with that freedom.
This, by definition, is not science, and yet a crucial aspect of man, his culture and evolution. And yet science can’t handle it, even as is gets stubborn and attempts to eliminate ethics by looking solely at the causal explanations for ethical behavior. Scientists are devious here, because they pretend that they think ethical behavior is real, even as they tacitly eliminate the key property of freedom.
This behavior gets tiresome, and finally destructive, and it is small wonder that religious folks simply say goodbye to science.
What is unfortunate is the non-religious secularists fritter away their modernits foundations by assenting to scientism here.
The question was carefully analyzed by Kant, and a resolution in the context of science came into being.
But scientists are so stubbornly stupid that they don’t even want a solution to this issue. They want universal causal reductionism, the elimination of ethics, and the freedom to act, even as they deny (they must deny) in public that this is what they are doing.
Is the freedom to act beyond nature then? You can see the silliness of the whole framework. We wouldn’t really want to take that position, but scientific thinking is so crippled that, evidently, the freedom to act is supernatrural, and therefore doesn’t exist, etc, etc..
Unless scientists can do better than this religious types will bug them ad infinitum, without mercy.
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Science idiots who wish to adopt this lifestyle will have to do so. Everyone else needs to step around this idiocy and adopt a different perspective. If they dislike religious confusion here, a Kantian perspective is a good place to start. So simple, eminently secular, with or without theistic obsessions, atheistic obsessions.
Scientists ridicule religious critics of their methods, or of evolution. But their own stance is completely confused and unreasonable, worse, they cannot grasp the difficulty such is the rigidity of scientific thinking and training.
Stupidity in people with high IQ’s is a most regrettable state of affairs, because it seems to prevent feedback or learning.
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01.03.10
Posted in Evolution, History, Kant at 1:49 pm by nemo
For the connection of evolution, philosophy and Kant check out this selection (and the one that follows): Kant’s Challenge
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12.28.09
Posted in Kant, liberalism, The Eonic Effect at 1:19 pm by nemo
Do Human Rights Require Religious Beliefs?
What difference would it make if we accepted what Bernard Williams has called “Nietzsche’s thought”–”there is, not only no God, but no metaphysical order of any kind”?
One consequence, Nietzsche suggested, is that we could no longer believe that human beings were created by God in His Image and thus endowed with equal dignity. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: “The masses blink and say: ‘We are all equal.–Man is but man, before God–we are all equal.’ Before God! But now this God has died.” The modern morality of human equality is secularized Christian morality that cannot be continued after the death of God.
It seems that Darwinists are condemned to be Nietzsche suckers, unable to extricate themselves from the multiple fallacies that animate his thinking.
Nietzsche is so extreme that he wishes to decree a universe that guarantees his atheism, but that tactic backfires (and it evident in the New Atheists_).
If we examine the eonic effect we can see that without any theism or atheism (both tend to be sterile thought orphans) we can find an ‘idea for a universal history’ that demonstrates the evolutionary emergence of liberalism (and rights philosophies) in a non-random fashion. This powerful evidence simply can’t enter the narrow psyches of those brainwashed by Nietzsche’s oversimplifications, and second-rate travesty of Schopenhauer (thence Kant, with his powerful concepts of liberal rights)
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12.17.09
Posted in Kant, Science & Religion at 7:20 pm by nemo
Visions of a Ghostseer
Our discussion of a Biocentrism critique derailed on the idealism issue, and one can only recomment a some Kant (or Schopenhauer) here: his approach is neitehr idealism, as such, or about the transcendental in the usual sense. This label scares people away, but Kant is the best critique of scientism, although those raised in the current sci-education scene are incapable of such a gesture.
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