On many occasions on this blog and elsewhere, I have observed that during my entire life what really matters to me has been thinking through complex ideas until they are clear and simple so that I can show them to my readers and to my students in their simplicity and beauty. Now that I am in the last phase of my life, I find that I wish to return to this activity. I do not really enjoy commenting on politics. I have no special insight into it, I merely gossip about it and speculate about it and fret about it. So I have decided that for the next while, at least, I shall leave the political realm to unfold in whatever way it chooses, and go back to some of the ideas that have given me pleasure over the course of my life. If those of you who have taken to reading this blog enjoy following me in this quest, I shall be pleased. If not, I apologize for taking my leave for a bit from the public world.
The first philosophical idea of this sort with which I
engaged came to me more or less unbidden in the late spring of 1953, when I was
finishing my undergraduate education at Harvard. In those days, students
seeking an honors degree were required to take a written general examination at
the end of their last semester. One of the questions on the exam that year was
a pretty standard compare– and–contrast question about the epistemological
theories of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. I had studied the Treatise of Human
Nature the previous year in Henry Aiken’s course, and had just completed C. I.
Lewis’s great course on the Critique of Pure Reason so I chose that question.
As I began to write my answer it occurred to me that Hume’s account in the
Treatise of the origins of our belief in causal inference and in the
independent existence of objects was not, as it was common to suppose in those
days, the polar opposite of the view put forward by Kant, but that in fact Hume
and Kant set forth strikingly similar views on the matter. Two years later, I
devoted my doctoral dissertation to exploring this insight. In April 1957 I
submitted a dissertation entitled “The Theory of Mental Activity in the
Treatise of Human Nature and the Critique of Pure Reason.” Eventually the
portion of the dissertation devoted to the thought of David Hume was published
as a journal article in the Philosophical Review and the portion devoted to the
thought of Kant, much elaborated and developed during my two semesters of
teaching Lewis’s old Kant course in the Harvard philosophy department, became
my first book.
The standard view of the relation between Hume and Kant was
of course that Hume raised devastating skeptical doubts about empirical
knowledge which Kant then felt called upon to respond to. Kant famously said
that it was Hume who had awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. Kant claims –
to put it is simply as I can – that the mind brings to its sensory experience a
system of categories which it imposes on its sensations, thereby producing
knowledge in the form of judgments that can be known to be true independently
of, or prior to, our sensory engagement with the world. Hume, by contrast,
describes our experiences consisting solely of sensations or as he calls them “impressions”
and of the copies of those impressions, which he calls “ideas.”
But Hume almost immediately discovers that he cannot explain
any of the phenomena that he wishes to make sense of unless he imputes to the
mind certain “propensities” to develop habits or “dispositions” of various
sorts. And it occurred to me, as I was writing my answer on the examination,
that the propensities to develop certain sorts of dispositions were,
structurally speaking, almost identical with what Kant called Categories.
This was the idea that I developed in my dissertation and
later on in the published article about Hume’s epistemological theories. Wherein then lies the difference between the
positions adopted by Hume and by Kant? The answer turns out to be the role
played in Kant’s philosophy by the premise of the unity of consciousness.
There was a very great deal more to be said about the
subject, of course, but it was this simple idea, that occurred to me while I
was writing my senior honors general examination, that served as the source and
foundation of my work both on Hume’s Treatise and on Kant’s First Critique.
20 comments:
This is deeply fascinating. My first non-survey philosophy class was a slow reading of The Critique of Pure Reason (we made it through maybe 200 pages), with the professor's Kant's Theory of Mental Activity and Norman Kemp Smith's commentary as secondary literature. I was never thereafter tempted by Kant, and it must have been at least partially as a result of the professor noting the similarity of the roles played respectively by propensities/dispositions and categories. One way of taking the similarity seriously would be naturalize the categories. Other related ways (I think these were the ways I took, stimulated by the professor) would be to treat the unity of consciousness as psychologically developmental (the way of Freud), or as socio-historical (Durkheim and Mauss), which then can in turn be submitted to ideological critique (Lukács's way in the reification essay). But the professor's way, as he has repeatedly said, is fundamentally aesthetic: the interest is in showing as clearly as possible the systematic inter-connectedness of the parts and their roles. Some few achieve a splendid whole ('simplicity and beauty')--Kant and Marx--, while others are shown to fail through inconsistency or unworldliness--Mill and Rawls. In the end wisdom pays homage to splendor.
Despite certain similarities in structure and content between Humean mental dispositions and Kantian categories of the understanding, isn't there still the all-important difference that our knowledge of the Humean mental states is resolutely a posteriori whereas our knowledge of the Kantian categories is resolutely a priori?
Addendum: I meant to be making a comment about what Hume and Kant CLAIM about the epistemic status of mental dispositions and categories, respectively.
The most extraordinary later development, in my opinion, was Karl Mannheim's claim that our perception of time is ideologically encoded. In my third YouTube lecture on ideological critique I undertook to extend that to the ideological encoding of space consciousness as well.
J. Rapko,
I recall that Nozick in Anarchy, State and Utopia, before proceeding to rip into Rawls, has some sentences in which he praises Rawls for, among other things, having integrated his points into a "beautiful whole" (I believe the quote is accurate though I don't have ASU readily to hand). So "beauty" in these matters would seem to be very much in the eye of the beholder, so to speak.
Further to Mannheim’s observation about ideology’s effect on the space-time continuum, take a look at the church belonging to the late Ulster preacherman Ian Paisley, the Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church. This is a remarkably ugly red-brick affair, the front of which features a big clock accompanied by the words TIME IS SHORT.
In my previous comments, I stated that causality does not and cannot exist. (Hume called it "constant conjunction".) This is because of continuous creation, which means that there is no causal glue to bind events together. I'd forgotten to mention that continuous creation is known not just by revelation, but also known experientially.
For Sufis, followers of the mystical branch of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad's ascension mentioned in the 17th Surah of the Qur'an is the prototype of their own ascension. Here, Al-Ghazali, who I believe Dave Hume was channeling, describes the ascension of the gnostics (note how they verify by experience that which the Qur'an describes is happening):
"From here the gnostics climb from the lowlands of metaphor to the highlands of reality, and they perfect their ascent. Then they see--witnessing with their own eyes--that there is none in existence save God and that "Everything is perishing except His face" [Qur'an 28:88]. [It is] not that each thing is perishing at one time or at other times, but that it is perishing from eternity without beginning to eternity without end. —Mishkat Al-Anwar (The Niche Of Lights)
Incidentally, the earliest source for the doctrine of continuous creation that I've found is in a Buddhist sect known as the Sautrânkitas. To wit:
It has already been suggested (ch. 5), that the Islamic atomistic theory of time may have been the result of Indian influence. In discussing this possibility, MacDonald has drawn attention to an article on 'Atomic Theory (Indian)' by Hermann Jacobi.1 In it Jacobi referred to the theory of the momentariness of all things formulated by the Sautrânkitas, a Buddhist sect which originated in the second or first century BC. According to that theory everything exists for only an instant and is then replaced by a facsimile of itself, so that it is but a series of momentary existences like the successive frames in a cine-camera film. The concept of entities that appear for only an instant and then disappear was used by Buddhists to prove that all is merely appearance and that absolute reality does not fall within the domain of the intellect. But how and why this atomistic temporal concept, which Buddhism used for its own purposes, was adapted to the very different objects of Islam remains an open question.
Continuous creation appears here with the Calvinists, which sounds a lot like the quote above:
Oliver Crisp summarizes [Jonathan] Edwards's view: "God creates the world out of nothing, whereupon it momentarily ceases to exist, to be replaced by a facsimile that has incremental differences built into it to account for what appear to be motion and change across time. This, in turn, is annihilated, or ceases to exist, and is replaced by another facsimile world ... and so on."
A quote on Edwards:
Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was an American revivalist preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist theologian.
A leading figure of the American Enlightenment, Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians.
For those of you who are Jewish, and so you don't feel left out, a description of the above-mentioned ascension mentioned similarly in the Babylonian Talmud, with explanation to follow:
FOUR ENTERED AN ORCHARD
"Four entered an orchard and these are they: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva said to them: "When you reach the stones of pure marble, do not say `Water! water!' For it is said: `He that speaketh falsehood shall not be established before mine eyes.' " Ben Azzai gazed and died. Of him, Scripture says: "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints." Ben Zoma gazed and was stricken. Of him Scripture says: "Hast thou found honey? Eat as much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it." Aher cut the shoots [that is, became a heretic]. Rabbi Akiva departed in peace."
The Sufis have a saying: "The metaphor is the bridge to reality." First, here is a Wikipedia link to the story above:
Pardes (legend)
Now, here is another link but this time to its exegesis:
Pardes (exegesis)
You'll note in the second article that the word used for "orchard" is actually the word "Pardes", and that word contains four letters (PRDS), which indicate the idea of the metaphor being the bridge to reality. For example, I recognize the second letter, i.e., R (Remez), because it's exactly the same word and meaning in Arabic.
Remez (רֶמֶז) – "hints" or the deep (allegoric: hidden or symbolic) meaning beyond just the literal sense. In the version of the New Zohar, Re'iah.
Anyway, I encourage you to click on the links and read the articles.
As an aside, Rabbi Akiva mentioned in that story above is my favorite Jew. According to this Wikipedia page, his grave is Tiberias, Israel (picture is in the article):
Rabbi Akiva
Continuous creation, this time from Descartes:
The doctrine of continual creation was inducted into the Cartesian tradition by Descartes himself, who famously notes in the Meditations:
[A] lifespan can be divided into countless parts, each completely independent of the others, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now, unless there is some cause which as it were creates me afresh at this moment—that is, which preserves me. For it is quite clear to anyone who attentively considers the nature of time that the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment or its duration as would be required to create that thing anew if it were not yet in existence. (CSM II, 33)
As I may have commented in an earlier post, I certainly understand and share the intellectual commitment to working out complex ideas. What I don’t understand and can’t relate to is the subsequent desire to communicate these complex ideas in a simpler way to others. I have done plenty of teaching and supervising myself, and there’s a certain arrogance and pretentiousness to the proposition that anyone is the right person to teach others. This is not a criticism of anyone, let that be clear; it’s just a topic that I would like to see discussed.
Sorry to point it out, but there is another headline spelling problem: "favOrites"
I was under the impression that Kant's statement about Hume's awakening him from his slumbers related to Hume's moral philosophy, that what we deem to be moral is that which we approve. Kant, my impression (no pun intended) was that this led Kant to develop the categorical imperative.
To David Palmeter:
I don't think it was a reaction to Hume's moral philosophy that awakened Kant from his "dogmatic slumber," but rather his reaction to Hume's views on causation and to his epistemology in general.
Perhaps Professor Wolff can throw soe light on this.
"The most extraordinary later development, in my opinion, was Karl Mannheim's claim that our perception of time is ideologically encoded. In my third YouTube lecture on ideological critique I undertook to extend that to the ideological encoding of space consciousness as well."
I consider whether it is anthropologically encoded. There is evidence that time and space consciousness has expanded during the evolution of homo sapiens. For example, the evidence of certain fertility rites can be interpreted to mean that people did not establish a causal relationship between the act of procreation and the woman's pregnancy and the birth of the child. Spatial awareness may have been linked in evolution to the handling of certain tools, that is, to the development of "hand tools" to ranged weapons that expanded the space of influence.
Apart from phylogenesis; what happens in ontogenesis?
Right, Prof. Zimmerman, the "dogmatic slumbers" line is about halfway into the opening of the Prolegomena - here it is on Wikisource.
Anonymous, a couple quick reactions: As with any charitable activity, it's possible to see teaching as "really" motivated by vanity, but it's also possible to see teaching as a generous service - or as a complicated mixture of the two, as e.g. when the teacher takes pride in their work, feels good about themselves for sharing something valuable.
I'm not sure whether the desire to share something good you've found, rather than allow it to perish with you, is something that really allows for informative explanation - it might be too basic, a sort of ground-level principle you can invoke in explaining more specific behaviors, which cannot itself be explained. One would apparently have to shrug and say something like, "It's just part of being human."
I'm reminded (and I don't intend this as an insult, only a comparison): As someone who wants to connect with and relate to others, but normally struggles, I've had moments of exasperation where, as if sensing the futility of this desire, I've puzzled over how one might "account for" people's desire to be mutually understood and valued at all - why not just do life alone? (I didn't get very far with this question.)
David Z and Michael
Thank you.
@Robert Paul Wolff. Regarding Mannheim's claim that time consciousness is ideologically encoded (and your spatial version too, which I've enjoyed listening to in your Ideology lectures as well), I’ve always felt unmoved by this on Kant's behalf. Wouldn’t Kant just say that Mannheim’s claims - while interesting - concern forms of time consciousness less basic than what he (Kant) is concerned with, and wouldn’t he be right? I.e., all of Mannheim’s claims seem to concern relatively sophisticated varieties and specifications of time consciousness - ones that already presuppose, and do not explain, the representation of bare succession (‘this then that’) that Kant is concerned with. Maybe it’s true that any actual instance of time consciousness will necessarily involve an ideological aspect/specification, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also presuppose a pure aspect of the sort Kant thinks it does (namely the bare representation of succession)..?
Far be it from me to speak for Kant, but you may well be right. Nevertheless, I find it extraordinary that one can identify ideological components to the experience of space and time themselves.
I have done plenty of teaching and supervising myself, and there’s a certain arrogance and pretentiousness to the proposition that anyone is the right person to teach others.
Actually, no.
You know you're the right person to teach others when people tell you that you've made that which is difficult, easy to understand.
"I have done plenty of teaching and supervising myself, and there’s a certain arrogance and pretentiousness to the proposition that anyone is the right person to teach others."--On teaching others: Paul Feyerabend told the story that when he was first hired to teach, he had no idea what to do. Someone told him: 'Write down everything you know about the subject.' Feyerabend did, and it comprised a single page. The person then said: 'See that first sentence? That's your first lecture. The second sentence? That's your second lecture.' Feyerabend said it worked fine, since he could fill up the lecture's hour as needed with stories and wisecracks.--I suspect that Feyerabend held a very different conception of teaching from the professor's 'clear presentation of complex ideas' conception. Feyerabend suggested that it was more like planting seeds, and one of the best such seeds is an image or a story that exerts a certain mysterious fascination, that lodges in the students' minds, and exerts a sub-conscious influence. In my own small experience, it seemed that every time I ran into a student years after a class, and they said that something in the class had been important to them, it turned out it was a joke or an aside of which I had no recollection.
Post a Comment