That's not knowledge at all, it's merely a tautology.

But would it also be abstracted from space. time, mass, shape, number, relation and so on? — John

The reason the view from nowhere is not abstracted from those things is because they're not subject to perceptual relativity or creature dependance, far as we can tell. They have an objective quality to them.

Thus, some people are hopeful that communication with aliens is possible, should we ever make contact, because they will have come to realize the same objective features of the world. In Sagan's Contact book (and the movie based on it), the detection of an alien signal is based on the prime number sequence from 2 to 101. And the main character expresses the view that math is the universal language.

All instances of knowledge rely on a tautology of self-defintion. I'll reverse the question to show you what I mean.

How do you know, for example, that the noumenal isn't present in front of our eyes? How it is that you know noumenal is not empirical? How do you (and Kant) know you have perfect knowledge of the noumenal such that you can be sure it isn't present empirically?

f there is a God, and if He has a view, then it would seem that it must consist in the sum total of the views of all His creatures. — John

This sounds close to Berkeley's idealism. What I gather from your interpretation of Kant is that the following philosophical positions are wrong: Materialism, essentialism and realism qua universals.

If essentialism or real universals were the case, then we would have a way of matching our conceptions with the way the world is. If materialism were the case, then there would be a way to world was, independent of how we or any creature thinks about it or perceives it.

Do something about it !?

Like what, cryogenically freeze myself for millennia until the triviality of modern civilization has melted away? Only problem there is that humans 1k+ years from now would have no reason to wake me up in the same way that advanced aliens have no reason to presently contact us... — VagabondSpectre

Come now, life is but a damp squib without a bit of action and surely cryogenics is merely an excuse you are using to not do something since it is clearly ridiculous. I'm not saying change the world; start small and influence the next generation and there are a multitude of ways anyone can do this. I get your pain, the world seems to be repeating itself and the repetition is pure idiocy. 99% of humanity is suffering incredibly and then you have a strange minority getting plastic surgery and mindless morons following the herd and you think that there is simply no hope. How do you get those morons to wake up? Using that fire within brings me joy because I HATE injustice, and I mean with a passion so fighting the good fight has brought some amazing changes in my community but also within me too.

What bothers me isn't that the world is facing trivial problems, it's that what comes afterward is sure to be much more interesting and current climates are a source of delay. My contribution is to spread awareness of problems and possible solutions as I see them, and that's appropriate for my station, but no amount of hard work or dedication will get me to the other side of them. The only way there is through time. — VagabondSpectre

(Y) But it depends on how far your influence can reach and thus the arrow of time can easily be shortened. Never underestimate the power you have as a good and intelligent man with a strong voice. There have been many and in that passion have influenced huge changes, even if they come from very humble backgrounds. Don't get disillusioned.

Kant does not, so far as I can tell, have arguments for the position that we can't get outside of our faculties. To be sure that's something he says many times. That might be because of my unfamiliarity with, or lack of understanding of, the text. But I've read CPR, so if I'm too stupid even to find that there are arguments, I don't know what reading again would help me to do.

Kant's style is generally one of outlining and repetition – he's more like a world-builder than an arguer. He does provide a few arguments, such as the refutation of idealism, and some truncated syllogisms about why representations of things cannot be things in themselves. But the broad picture seems to be one of making a big frame, repeating it, and letting the reader acclimate themselves.

I know I already mentioned it, kinda, but I think Kant's position makes perfect sense as a response to British Empiricism and Newtonian physics taken together. I don't think his reasoning is simply bad. I think it's solid reasoning, for a reason set down among the limited concepts and problems of a limited tradition.

Maybe that's another avenue to go down. If we, as a species, are bad at philosophy, that's in part because we have to work within a tradition. Even if we break with that tradition, we have to, at least in part, define ourselves in opposition to it.

(also worth nothing that Kant def thought we could get outside our faculties, that they could be severely disrupted, and that that would afford us novel and powerful insights and experience. But that's Critique of Judgment stuff, so it doesn't get as much attention. I think Kant, in works like CPR, simply wasn't tackling the things the exceed his philosophy, because his philosophy wasn't meant to deal with them, because it was meant simply to deal with newtonian objects. (& I personally think the noumena as limiting concept is still really powerful and good and probably right. It's still big, today, of course- it just morphed into 'Otherness' and got some new soil)

Another way to put is that Kant may not have futzed around with something like, say, Heideggerean being-in, because being-in was already taken for granted, it was background. To philosophize about anything, something has to remain in the background, while something else is foregrounded. The history of philosophy, maybe, could be seen as a series of changes among the background-foreground relationship. But there will always be something in the background, blurred, to make the foreground stand out. The foreground, for ppl at Kant's time, was 'Ideas' and 'objects' (billiard-ball level stuff w/ mass) etc.

So is reading Kant like reading the Bible, where the cultural context is often lost on the modern reader?

I wouldn't put it that strongly, but, yeah, I think a lot of context is lost.

This sounds close to Berkeley's idealism. What I gather from your interpretation of Kant is that the following philosophical positions are wrong: Materialism, essentialism and realism qua universals.

If essentialism or real universals were the case, then we would have a way of matching our conceptions with the way the world is. If materialism were the case, then there would be a way to world was, independent of how we or any creature thinks about it or perceives it. — Marchesk

I don't think it is like Berkeley's idealism. Perhaps you could explain why you do.

I think materialism is wrong because materiality is applicable only to a restricted range of phenomena, not to substance itself (although we do talk about 'material substances' but that is a different sense). Some phenomena are mental for example. However I don't believe this implies substance dualism. I find Spinoza's picture the most convincing of the substance ontologies that I have come across (which is not say that I am convinced of the veracity of the notion of substance beyond its logical uses).

So, on Spinoza's view substance has infinite attributes (which he probably means in terms of both quantity and quality). Two of those attributes are thought and extension. The mode of extension is materiality. From this it certainly does not follow that substance is material; it has infinite attributes, remember. For the same reasons it obviously does not follow that substance is mental, either.

I don't see how essentialism or real universals being the case would enable us to match our experience directly with anything beyond it. Perhaps you could explain how that would work. How could we know that essentialism or real universal "are the case", for a start. I'm not sure what that could even mean.

There is a lot of apparent ambiguity in Kant. Whether that is due to the difficulty of the issues he is trying to address, or to his limitations as a writer; or to something else, I think that cultural context would be low down on the list of possible candidates.

There is a whole industry of Kant interpretation and much disagreement among scholars as to just what he wanted to say about the phenomenal/noumenal distinction. I have noticed that people who want to promote idealism for reasons to do with their own cultural or "spiritual" agendas frequently quote Kant as though what he meant is unambiguously in accordance with what they want him to have meant.

I do note that in your response to Marchesk you dropped the word "cultural" though.

Sure, people of all stripes and creeds selectively quote anyone with perceived cachet to support their viewpoints. That's what people do!

In any case, I don't think I'm making that controversial a point. Kant's philosophy makes much more sense in the milieu of Newtonian physics, British empiricism & (I forgot to add) the (post-)cartesian rationalism to which that empricism responded (and with which it remained engaged ( Locke vs the 'innatists' etc) )

Wittgenstein makes much more sense if you're conversant with logical positivism. Heidegger makes more sense if you're versed in Husserlian phenomenology (which in turn makes more sense if you're versed in the psychologism debates of the time.)

Why are you skeptical of the importance of intellectual context?

From this it certainly does not follow that substance is material; it has infinite attributes, remember. For the same reasons it obviously does not follow that substance is mental, either. — John

Spinoza defended a form of neutral monism? Interesting.

I don't see how essentialism or real universals being the case would enable us to match our experience directly with anything beyond it. — John

Well, I suppose this all goes back to Plato and his realization that you need the forms for knowledge to make sense of the flux of the world. Empiricism focused on the flux, while Kant recast the forms as categories of thought.

It would seem that both trap us in a world of human perceptions and thoughts. And yet the world continues to surprise us.

How could we know that essentialism or real universal "are the case", for a start. I'm not sure what that could even mean. — John

I don't have a good answer for this right now. Maybe because I'm bad at philosophy. All of this seems to be elaboration on Man being the measure. Which definitely has it's selling points. But there are three things that always bothered me about it:

1. We might not be alone in the universe.

2. The world is much bigger and older than we are.

3. It sounds like the reverse of the Copernican revolution, which removed us from center of the universe. Everything in science has dethroned humans as being central to creation, and yet many philosophers would put us back at the center when it comes to knowledge.

That the tradition prevents me from understanding Kant as he would have been understood in the 18th century I think is a very charitable way to look at it, and maybe we always should read charitably, even where the author doesn't deserve it, to make our criticisms as effective as possible.

But I don't think I actually believe it. Kant's comments, for example, on Locke and Berkeley seem to be outright misinformed – he either did not know, or was lying about, what Berkeley actually thought, and his case that he is doing something Locke has not with his notion of the thing-in-itself as opposed to Lockean substance is simply not convincing. The idea that the project of critiquing reason to find its limitations, and the panic over 'destroying metaphysics' in the process, etc. were things that Locke already accomplished, so far as I can tell. Maybe the German readership just wasn't familiar with these British developments? Locke's insistence that all things come form experience mirrors Kant's that all things begin in experience: and Locke's insistence on the shape of the mind forming the sorts of concepts one is capable of acquiring mirror Kant's discussion of the forms of intuition and thought. The thing-in-itself is then simply the Lockean 'I know not which,' which, well.

So my question is: if Kant seems on the face of it to be so ignorant of his own tradition, to which he is directly responding, why am I then to trust him to know what he's doing down the line? It may be of some use to treat such philosophers as if they were better reasoners than they actually were, to make the tradition less embarrassing. But whether they actually were good reasoners is another matter.

--

One way of thinking about what I'm saying is that your reading of philosophy may be more fruitful if you do not approach a text with the presupposition that its author is a genius, as we're generally taught.

You animus about Kant reminds me of this wonderful passage by Raymond Guess - a political philosopher, in fact!:

"I think ... the Kantian system is a machine infernale of enormous dimensions and extremely intricate internal structure of innumerable elaborate gears, flywheels, sprockets, bell, and whistles. The system operates and gains plausibility by inviting the unwary in and exhibiting a truly fascinating internal structure so that one loses perspective on the project as a whole. To change the metaphor, if one tries to shake hands with the Kantian, one can easily find one has lost an arm. In my opinion one needs to see Kantianism at virtually infinite distance ... I also think that seeing it clearly in this way will make it difficult to find it plausible, although obviously not everyone will agree with me about this."

One way of thinking about what I'm saying is that your reading of philosophy may be more fruitful if you do not approach a text with the presupposition that its author is a genius, as we're generally taught. — The Great Whatever

Do you think any philosophers you've read are geniuses, or at least, good at philosophy?

The best philosophy I've seen is that which accumulates a tradition and tries to respond to it as thoroughly as possible, like the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Single authors that try to present sweeping visions tend to be disappointing. If it's true people aren't good at philosophy, we need to be aware of and catalogue banal mistakes and solve problems piecemeal over time. This isn't a new idea – it's just what Russell thought. And in truth, someone like Russell contributed a lot more with his technical developments, the force of which we still feel today, then say someone like Wittgenstein, who ultimately I think ended up wasting everyone's time by piling a series of retarded aphorisms on the tradition that now everyone has to write Ph.D. theses about, forever. Yet Wittgenstein is 'the genius,' and for that reason, more of an idiot.

One of the problems is I think that you get the sense from writers like Kant that they're convinced they're smart – Kant thought he had solved all the problems of metaphysics in one book! If, contra this, Kant wasn't that smart, because people generally are bad at philosophy, this revises the way we think about doing philosophy, so that it can be done with a little patience and rigor instead. The questions are all real, just hard – too hard, maybe, but I think we can tell that certain arguments are bad.

then say someone like Wittgenstein, who ultimately I think ended up wasting everyone's time by piling a series of retarded aphorisms on the tradition that now everyone has to write Ph.D. theses about, forever. Yet Wittgenstein is 'the genius,' and for that reason, more of an idiot. — The Great Whatever

I'm curious about your critique of Wittgenstein's main contention that language is the chief cause of philosophical problems. I take it you don't agree with this at all. That most long standing philosophical puzzles exist not because language has fooled us, but because they are genuine puzzles.

What is the error that led Wittgenstein to think this?

What is the error that led Wittgenstein to think this? — Marchesk

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He had a narrow philosophical upbringing, and those he learned from dealt with linguistic problems. He wasn't satisfied unless he had a tool to solve every problem, and the only tools he had were linguistic ones. Ergo, every problem must be a linguistic one (for if it weren't, I wouldn't be able to [dis]solve it).

The linguistic view of philosophy is stupid. Questions about the ocean are not questions about the word 'ocean' – why anyone would think this about knowledge, truth, and so on is something we should diagnose as a historical error in reasoning, not as a philosophical position we take seriously.

The linguistic view of philosophy is stupid. Questions about the ocean are not questions about the word 'ocean' – why anyone would think this about knowledge, truth, and so on is something we should diagnose as a historical error in reasoning, not as a philosophical position we take seriously. — The Great Whatever

Here's why he did it in his own words:
"What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."

Wittgenstein sort of culminates an analytical approach which removes the world. Everything is turned into a (language) game, where no philosophical problems bear upon the world or logic.

He's, of course, superficially correct: if anyone is fooled, it's in their language. They lacked the right way of speaking to avoid the problem. If only they had thought a different way, they wouldn't be haunted by a conundrum.

It just doesn't get to the substance of any philosophical problem. Yes, one can get themselves out of any problem by speaking the right language, but it's really just ignoring it. One hasn't really answered the question of what's right, wrong, coherent or incoherent, etc. They've just spoken a language in which the problem doesn't register.

Spook'd

What I'm trying to convey is that, in my understanding, CPR is dealing very specifically with the cognition of objects (and their relations.) It's about what is required to experience an object as an object, and about how we're led astray if we try to treat, as objects, things that don't lend themselves to that kind of treatment (the cosmos as a totality etc.) It makes sense that he's focusing on the experience of objects (especially the visual experience of objects) because that's what everyone else was focused on. That was the thing to figure out. I don't disagree that there are echoes of Locke, but I think it is very clearly wrong to say that Kant was accidentally re-doing Locke for an audience who didn't know him.(Do you really think this?)

But there all sorts of cracks in the harmonious machinery of the faculties and Kant himself makes those cracks features of his thought in other works. I don't think Kant is right on everything, and I agree that the facticity of the faculties is a big problem, but I am definitely skeptical of the idea that Kant was basically dumb and that people only find his thought worthwhile because they're told he's a genius by cultural arbiters.

We're always least kind to those positions we once held tenaciously but have come recently to disavow. It's a solipsistic kernel in Kant you're objecting to, right?

but I think it is wrong to say that Kant was accidentally re-doing Locke for an audience who didn't know him — csalisbury

I guess I don't think he was that innocent. Kant seemed to be engaged in a project of permanently entrenching certain prejudices (religious, scientific, or otherwise), and was apparently under the delusion that metaphysics would remain unchanged after the CPR (there is no humor in the CPR, so apparently he was not kidding – what possible psychological circumstances result in such an assertion?). I think that is ultimately what he was interested in: stopping time and inquiry at him, who would figure everything (in metaphysics) out. There is even a kind of mastery of time itself, by insisting that the mechanisms proposed literally cannot be subject to time, since time is subject to them. You can speculate about why I think philosophers have the impulse to do this – I don't have much new or kind to say about it.

We're always least kind to those positions we once held tenaciously but have recently come to disavow. It's a solipsistic kernel in Kant you're objecting, to, right? — csalisbury

I think solipsism is a consequence of transcendentalism, and Kant is far from alone in this. But I think transcendentalism comes from a desire to have the entire universe under control. That desire already might contain the kernel of solipsism. In Kant's case, the fear that the world was too big to know manifests in a desire to close off the world to a subspace of it, and say that this was really the only thing that we had ever been concerned with anyway (and its structure guarantees a kind of certainty within it). But then you still need German Protestantism to be true, so you leave some room outside for spooky stuff (stuff that rather than compounding uncertainty leads to even greater certainty, of salvation and so on).

Spinoza defended a form of neutral monism? Interesting. — Marchesk

The Stanford entry on neutral monism suggests that, rather, his was double-aspect monism, and that's how I understand it. (Stanford entry)

I am not sceptical of intellectual context, or cultural context. I reject the idea that cultural context is a bar to the ability to understanding Kant is all. Of course understanding the context of the ideas and philosophies that he is working within and against will obviously help to understand the dialectical development of his ideas, that goes without saying.

The specific idea of Kant's that has been discussed in this thread apropos the question of the 'view from nowhere' and which relates to the other thread that Marchesk started entitled 'Can Humans Get Outside Their Conceptual Schemas' is an idea about human experience that purports to be universal; that all perception is also necessarily conception. So the question, in itself, is a general one, and has nothing specifically to do with cultural context or even intellectual context.

This idea of Kant's is echoed by Hegel: "the Rational is the Real", and arguably, in various ways, by all the other philosophers you mentioned, even Wittgenstein: "the world is the totality of facts".

It would seem that both trap us in a world of human perceptions and thoughts. And yet the world continues to surprise us. — Marchesk

I don't understand why the world of human perception and thought should be thought of as a trap. It seems to me it can better be thought about as part (perhaps not the greatest part, if there are other beings in the universe with greater perceptual and conceptual capacities than the human) of the process of the universe becoming aware of itself. Without percipients nothing at all would appear or be known; the universe would be utterly 'blind', there would be no world as Heidegger emphasizes, which would be a 'condition' that could be thought to be as good as being nothing at all.

1. We might not be alone in the universe. — Marchesk

I think the idea is that rational percipients are the measure, because it is only via rational percipients that the universe appears and becomes known. If there are rational percipients with perceptual and conceptual faculties that are superior to ours, then the most rational and perceptive of all would be the measure.

2. The world is much bigger and older than we are.

Heidegger draws a nice distinction between the universe and the world; which is arguably along similar lines as Kant's distinction between the noumenal and the empirical. Heidegger says that without human be-ing (Dasein) there is no world. The idea of a world is the idea of an encompassing totality; kind of like an overarching horizon of perception.

3. It sounds like the reverse of the Copernican revolution, which removed us from center of the universe. Everything in science has dethroned humans as being central to creation, and yet many philosophers would put us back at the center when it comes to knowledge.

I always thought there was an odd kind of irony in referring to Kant's "Copernican Revolution". We know we are not central to the vast universe; we occupy a vanishingly tiny corner. And yet if we are the only rational percipients in the Universe, then the whole vast story is being featured only in our tiny local cinema. Elsewhere there is nothing at all currently showing.

I'm sympathetic to a psychological reading of Kant's system, and it definitely gibes with the biographical info we have about the guy - how he never left Leipzig, observed strict daily routines etc etc. I think it's true that you need a guy with death/outside anxieties as deep as Kant, to so seriously and painstakingly work out such a system.

But I also think Kantian thought makes sense, given what it responds to.

In broad strokes, I think the story is something like this:

- Descartes, through radical doubt, opens the possibility of utter solipsism. But he avoids it by bringing in a benevolent God who guarantees a harmony between mind and world.

-Cartesian thought, initially radical, becomes the new standard. This or that 'rationalist' may disagree with this or that cartesian point, but they accept the broad framework. So: it calcifies and what was once radical, begins to become dogmatic.

- The British empiricists react against this, the pendulum swings, and they emphasize experience and impressions. However, in giving up the god-mind-world system, they re-open the possibility of radical doubt that Descartes tried to foreclose.

- The gap is filled this time w/ habit and custom. Anything we know about the physical world (as opposed to relations of ideas) is utterly contingent.

- Yet here's Newton with his iron-clad physical laws that seem absolute, to hold for any rational observer whatsoever. There's something distinctly mathematical about them. They seem universal and necessary (any rational natural scientist would have to agree with them)

- Kant


I don't claim this story is original, but I think it's compelling. If the context is ignored, then its easy to miss that the motivation for for such protracted treatment of the synthetic a priori is largely one of explaining agreement, and the focus, ironically, becomes the image of an isolated self producing its own experience.