On Aug 11, 6:41 am, Michael Gordge <mikegor...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Quoting Dopey Kant
>
> "But we don't synthesize reality, make it up, it exists independently
> of us, and because reality exists independently of all possible
> experience it remains permanently hidden."
>
Kant firmly believed that there is an independent reality outside the
world of all possible experience, calling this the world of the
noumenal, the world of things as they are in themselves, and of
reality as it is in itself. The world of phenomena was the world of
things as they appear to us - the directly known world of actual
experience.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ikant.htm
Ewing outlines the debate between many of Kant's initial followers and
Kant himself. Many readers of Kant object to his doctrine of things in
themselves on the following grounds. Kant says that we can have no
knowledge about things in themselves but in stating this we must mean
something by "things in themselves." This implies knowledge about
things in themselves. Also, if physical objects are appearances of
things in themselves, things in themselves must be subject to the
category of reality. Ewing contends that Kant implicitly refutes these
objections. The way in which Ewing does this is by pointing out Kant's
distinction between determinate knowledge and indeterminate thought.
We have no knowledge of things in themselves, but it is useful to have
thoughts about them. These thoughts are not based on any positive
assumptions but rather on a lack of any features, spatial or tem****al,
that make up knowledge. Also sense human thought is subject to the
categories, our thoughts about things in themselves will be defined in
terms of the categories. I found Ewing's discussion of the issue to be
the most lucid and accessible thus far. This book gave me my initial
understanding of the issues, and was a most valuable introduction to
the field.
http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/modern/litrev/Kant-appearances.html
Kant's negative claim: we can know nothing about things in
themselves.
Kant's positive epistemological doctrine is explicitly designed to be
a response to skepticism. Yet at the same time Kant's view includes
some very skeptical-sounding claims. Indeed, although Kant argues
against both Humean skepticism and Berkeleian idealism, his view often
appears to me to be a rather odd combination of both.
Kant insists that all our knowledge is knowledge of what he calls
appearances. Appearance is usually contrasted with reality, and so
this sounds rather like a denial that we know anything about reality.
It is also reminiscent of Locke's claim that all our knowledge is of
the relations of ideas. But these apparent connections are at least
somewhat misleading, since Kant regards the entire empirical world as
a collection of appearances. Kant does not for a moment doubt that we
know a great many things about objects external to ourselves; both
mathematics and natural science, he believes, give us such knowledge.
The conventional distinction between appearance and reality, between
the way things look to us (sometimes mistakenly) and the way they
really are, is for Kant a distinction within the realm of
appearances.
And yet there is something ultimately subjective about appearances,
and thus about the whole empirical world, for Kant. The world of
appearances is partly our own creation, yet Kant thinks that standing
behind this world of appearances is a really real world that we have
nothing to do with, which is utterly independent of our knowledge. Our
world, the empirical world, the world of appearances, is objective in
the sense that it is the same for all of us: it is intersubjective.
But it is subjective in that it is a uniquely human world. Kant thinks
that there could be creatures with other sorts of intuition than ours.
(Does he think there could be creatures with other sorts of
understanding? I do not know.) Such creatures would not share our
world. But something, the external source of our experience, would be
the same for us and them. This, one is tempted to say, is the really
real world. At any rate, this external source comprises what Kant
calls the "things in themselves." A thing in itself is a thing as it
is independent of any human conceptualization. And Kant argues that we
can know nothing at all about things in themselves.
This suggests the following characterization of Kant's position. Think
of the problem of skepticism as the problem of how, given knowledge of
the way things appear to us to be, we can acquire knowledge of how
they really are (and remember Descartes' linking of the appearance-
reality and mental-physical distinctions, so that appearances are
thought of as mental and reality as physical). Then two main responses
to the problem are Berkeley's reductive response of insisting that
reality is really just a subdivision of the appearances so that a
properly sophisticated knowledge of the appearances is automatically
also knowledge of reality, and Hume's skeptical response of accepting
that reality is separate from appearance and denying that we can know
anything about reality. (Well, probably this isn't quite the right
characterization of Hume. Never mind.) Now, Kant seems to combine both
responses! He insists with Berkeley that (empirical) reality is just a
matter of appearance, so that knowledge of empirical reality is as
straightforward as knowledge of appearances. This is the positive part
of his doctrine. But he insists with the skeptic that we can know
nothing of the really real world, the world of things in themselves.
And this negative part of his doctrine, while admittedly it does not
threaten any of our practices (as Humean skepticism also did not),
seems as skeptical as the hardest-core skeptic could wish.
It is useful to distinguish three related doctrines of Kant's. There
is, first, the doctrine that we cannot have knowledge of anything we
cannot experience. Anything beyond the reach of experience is
unknowable. (But we must be careful to construe the reach of
experience broadly enough; we may not be able to directly experience
dinosaurs or quarks, but they are systematically related to things we
do directly experience, and that is good enough.) In this Kant is the
heir of the empiricists and the precursor of the positivists. The
second doctrine is that we can have no experience of things in
themselves. Of course it follows from the first and second doctrines
together that we can know nothing about things in themselves, but many
who accept the first doctrine will want to reject the second. Finally,
Kant's third doctrine is that God, freedom and immortality all belong
to the realm of things in themselves, and thus to the realm of things
about which we can know nothing. About this third doctrine I would
like to assert dogmatically that I think it entirely unjustified. It
seems to me that our knowledge of these matters is no less direct than
our knowledge of the more theoretical parts of physics or the more
remote parts of history. In my view, if there really is a distinction
between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between appearances and
things in themselves, then God and related matters are thoroughly
phenomenal, a part of the world of appearances. --Though of course if
they exist then like everything else they have noumenal underpinnings.
But given that much of Kant's motivation for insisting on the
unknowability of things in themselves has to do with protecting God
from the failure of arguments for his existence, and with protecting
freedom from the law of causality, accepting my assertion might leave
him with little reason for insisting on his sharp distinction between
knowable phenomena and unknowable noumena.
http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/modern/kant.html
> Sooo what dopey Kant is saying there is;
>
> You are blind to things in reality because you have eyes, you are deaf
> to things in reality because you have ears, you cant touch things in
> reality because you have hands, you cant smell things in reality
> because you have a nose and you cant feel things in reality because
> you have nerve endings.
>
Representations of something are not the thing representented, thats
like saying that a picture of an object [representation] is the object
the picture was taken of, which is absurd. But it is funny when you
get all aroused about Kant. You should cross-post to
alt.philosophy.kant and get some good responses to.
lest you is looking at your representations,but even then your
representations of your representations are not the thing represented
right?
> Ignore your eyes ears nose touch and feel because reality is
> permanently hidden even from those experiences.
>
> Man's faculty of sense, Kant is saying, play no part at all in man's
> ability to help him determine the real from the imagined.
>
> Meaning, accordng to Kant, determing reality from fiction is all 100%
> up to your mind, (because reality is always hidden even from your
> exprience, i.e. your eyes are painted on) which is why the mystics saw
> and see no threat to their own god stupidity from anything dopey Kant
> ever regurgitated.
>
> The mystics claim god cant ever be known (but how they know that they
> cant explain) and Kant claims reality remains permanently hidden even
> from your senses / experience (but how he knows that he cant explain,
> why? because the dopey prick invented it).
>
> So just how Kant can claim to know for certain, all about something
> (reality) that he claims is always hidden even from his experiences,
> is something you just have to trust him on and obviously many Kantian
> mystics do, poor sods.
>
> It must be also noted that Kant also said, [sic].. that all of man's
> knowledge begins with experience of that there is no doubt", but
> obvioulsy not his knowledge of reality, because reality is always
> hidden even from his expriences, which leaves one wondering just what
> the **** Kant meant by knowledge.
>
> Michael Gordge
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