"Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have, is almost enough to make me think so too. Better be without sense, than misapply it as y"Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have, is almost enough to make me think so too. Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do." - Emma, Jane Austen
"Come now, let us reason together / Sanity is found in the mountain of the Lord's house on the / horizon of the soul that eternally recedes" � 4.48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane
I've lived with this book for over four years. For most of that time the Critique of Pure Reason (COPR) stubbornly resisted comprehension. The first barrier to entry was the sheer intensity of the writing—its sprawling, metastasized sentences that become page-swallowing paragraphs; the labyrinthine specialization of terms; the self-reflexive, ouroboros tendency in Kant's argumentation, the subordinate clauses piling on top of each other until thoughts become concrete. That is not all. The Penguin Classics COPR is fine, but have you ever seen the Cambridge edition? The weight of the thing is absurd. Just holding it becomes challenging, a physical reminder of the breadth of topics here. Kant invites epistemology to gorge itself: ethics, aesthetics, ontology, metaphysics especially—almost everything philosophy has to offer is fed to the gaping maw of Kantian critique. Deleuze and Guattari wrote: "It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality." Well, here be dragons.
Over 200 years after the COPR, just how Kantian are we? On the one hand, who is surprised anymore to hear the idea that the world is a procedurally generated simulation in our minds? Or that we ourselves are nothing but the coded reflection of broadly unconscious cognition? Or that cognition itself is constitutive of experience? Thanks to the cultural saturation of Freudian psychoanalysis, pop neuroscience, Matrix-inspired simulation theory, and all the other memes that swam in Kant's wake, the ideas Kant presents in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic broadly only elicit "duh" where they're intelligible and bewildered muttering where they aren't—and look, I don't want to get carried away, but the Transcendental Deduction is one of the most painful things I've ever read, and any reader of the COPR has to go through it twice because Kant figured he fucked up in the first edition and wanted to give it another shot. Even now I don't know how to explain it. Want to see me try, though?
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On the Circuitous Exposition Concerning the Doctrine of the Transcendental Deduction: A Quandary Investigated by a Confounded Aspirant in Kantian Inquiry
The basic idea here is that we're describing what must be true for human experience to be possible. Kant says we have intuitions (sense-impressions of objects) and concepts (intellectual apprehensions of sensory input that allow us to understand what we're seeing). Famously, Kant said concepts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind. Note that you can't even imagine a non-conceptual intuition. The closest you can get is to look up one of those disturbing "simulated stroke" images (google it if you don't know). Anyway, for human experience to be possible Kant argues that we must posit:
1) The unity of apperception: All of my experiences belong to one unified consciousness. 2) Rule-based synthesis: Categories of the understanding like causality and necessity are structuring and universally valid laws of possible experience. Likewise, the way objects show up for us in accordance with sensory rules are universal. You don't see an apple when I see a bottle because these appearances aren't arbitrarily generated. We know this because we experience consistency and continuity in perceptions. 3) Objective validity: Because my experiences are unified in one consciousness which generates a world-model according to fixed rules, my experiences have "objective validity". I can do science, I can believe in causality, etc., because I have the kind of mind that structures reality that way.
If you say "prove it" to any of the above, Kant thinks you should have your head kicked in. You are welcome to go hungry in Simulated Stroke World, wondering whether that bowl of baked beans is actually a shoe or the soil-poisoning colour from outer space, watching your smashed glass reassemble itself on the countertop, and generally dying from exposure to the icy winds of the noumena. But since you aren't doing any of that, and are instead having a necessarily ordered, causal, spatiotemporal experience, you must accept that quadruped Aristotelian categories govern the operations of your mind, that the "I think" accompanies all your representations, and also something-something-ideal-circle, something-something-concept-of-roundness, schematism, synthesis of recognition, ooh what a nice house you have, etc.
Here marks the end of the circuitous exposition.
*
Of course, reducing the Aesthetic and the Analytic to "stuff we all know without Kant" and "unintelligible systematizing" isn't quite fair. There's a reason Kant makes you watch him build the intellectual cathedral from start to finish, which is that he wants you to form more than just a vague sense that we play a key role in generating our experience of the world. He wants you to have (and I hate to repeat such an ugly phrase) "apodictic certainty". The Aesthetic argues that space and time are not things we can talk about in-themselves, but instead are the forms of intuition we bring to the table. Our model of the world is always spatial (that is, objects of perception must be arranged relative to us and each other in space), and always temporal (that is, experiences are by definition sequenced.) Space and time, for Kant, are not something we discover—they are the preconditions of any sensory experience. Of course, space and time are not sufficient to define the human experience. For that, we also need the categories, which is the argument of the Analytic. The categories, such as the law of causality, are "transcendental": this means they are not derived from experience (as Hume would have it) but they give experience its character.
"That's nice and everything," you might say, "but where is he going with that?"
Oh, only liquidating the grounds for any possible proof of real human agency, of the origins of the universe, of an ordered and necessary material totality, that sort of thing.
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The basic idea is that these organizing concepts of the understanding, while valid for empirical experience, produce phantasms when escorted by reason to the suprasensible realm. Take, for instance, the concept of causality. We all know that all things have a cause. Your parents were the cause of you, their parents theirs, and so on, until we're talking about the evolution of homo sapiens as a species, all the way back to the genesis of life, itself ultimately an effect of the solar flux, the sun being a consequence of the combination of elements under gravitation, etc. That's all what Kant calls empirical regress and it's just fine. But have you ever wondered what the ultimate cause is? Where it all began? How it is possible that such a causal train should have ever arisen in the first place?
Well, you know, don't. Don't do that. Because the ultimate cause of things cannot be given in a possible empirical experience (since it would necessarily precede time and space and all natural laws) and our concepts of the understanding are built only to understand empirical experience. We can fool ourselves that we have a rigorous and logical idea of a God, of a first cause, of a beginning of the universe in time, etc., but these are only illusions that prevail where reason’s reach exceeds its grasp.
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If those topics seem airy and remote, they aren't. Rationalised, capitalised industrial society abounds with the sort of metaphysical illusions that Kant farts and shits on in the COPR. Every time some nerd tries to wow you with the so-called "simulation hypothesis", remember that reason's proper sphere is empirically possible experience, and its tendency to overextend itself beyond the bounds of any possible experience produces sophistry the moment it tries to prove its fantasies. Likewise, while Kant himself was a bourgeois moralist, the COPR argues rigorously that you and I, in so far as we appear to ourselves, are the effects (and not the causes) of a transcendental (unconscious) process, putting the lie to the Enlightenment conception of volition as a spontaneous and freely chosen faculty. This belief is the engine of our theories of "politics" and "economics", of crime and punishment, of guilt and sin, etc.
In its most potent instrumentalisation, especially if we ignore Kant's cringeworthy attempts to reassure the (presumed) Christian reader, the Kantian universe is devoid of real subjects, of real morality, of real agency, etc. It’s a shadow play, its “subjects� are puppets of an unknowable transcendental object, the effects of the world proceed in one great chain, the deeds of its actors derive from an intricate clockwork mechanism—the origins of which can never be recovered. Plato's cave could at least be escaped by philosophers; Kant discovers an epistemic event horizon that we are destined to attempt to cross but never will. We know nothing about the ultimate nature of life or the world. It must be admitted that Kant leaves plenty of room "for faith". He insists to the reader that this faith should provide them comfort despite his efforts to remove from us any certainty that this world must be the best possible. Kant was welcome to believe in the immortality of the soul and the benevolence of God (or Nature), of course, but dear Reader, do you?
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Of course, the positive goal of the system was to ensure the validity of natural science and of the fruits of the empirical use of reason. The Kantian hypothesis: If the world is a veil of illusions, it is nonetheless real in the only way that matters: it expresses architectonic internal consistency. This rigour at the core of Kant's critique is the source of its brilliance. Even now, Kant's system lets us properly situate scientific models as models and not as metaphysical realities without falling into the irrationalist trap of saying "well they're just theories", and to set this distinction on a rigorous basis. The Kantian evil eye burns through all forms of transcendental woo, but gives the empirical eye the respect it deserves.
As another Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviewer I'm quite fond of once said: I hate this book. Five stars....more
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