I am currently working on a new ontological foundation of Marxism ( or let us call it autonomist thought) occasioned in part by Hannah Arendt's "The Life of the Mind". Due to family illness and travel, this is taking longer than it would normally, so I have thought to impose on our friends with these "notes" on the transition from Kant to Schopenhauer and the negatives Denken (negative thought) of Nietzsche and then Heidegger. These notes are difficult (and I apologise for that), but they provide an inchoate framework for the future pieces. Those friends who fear I may have abandoned writing on political economy should stick with us because I am also working on a review/critique of Hyman Mynsky's work.
Those friends who wish to deepen this "ontological" work may in the meantime care to peruse the two works linked beneath. Ciao a tutti!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/40403053/Merleau-Ponty-Reader (see especially the early part on "the phenomenology of perception" with discussion of Cartesian and Kantian transcendentalism).
From
Kant to Schopenhauer
In this context, the Machian foundations of
Austrian neoclassical theory (and, on the opposite side, the Austro-Marxist
‘Neo-Kantian’ response to them) constitute an attempt to remove “the obscure
veil” (Nietzsche) that Kant had interposed between esse et percipi, turning the
adaequatio rei et intellectus into an adaequatio intellectus ad rem. Once the
objective world is reduced to an inscrutable noumenon or “thing-in-itself”, it
is evident that all we have left for philosophical analysis is the world of
“phenomena”, of what we perceive - esse est percipi. This was the basis of
Schopenhauer’s critique, and the cause of Kant’s doubts in the ‘OpPost’
concerning “causality” and “the systematicity of physics”.
The principal point here is that the
“whence and wherefores” are substituted with the “what” (Sch., WWV, p108)
because the former are lost in the indefiniteness of “sufficient reason”. The
question is not one of ‘being’ but of ‘knowing’, and only the ‘being’ of the
“ideas” is determined. For Sch., Kant’s “grosste Verdienst ist die
Unterscheidung der Erscheinung vom Dinge an sich” (Appendix on Kant,
beginning). It is this “Unterscheidung” (we would say ‘Trennung’) that puts the
question of “nature and causes” beyond the purview of rational inquiry. We are
left with the empiricism of the causal relationship between events – just as
they appear. Morphology replaces aetiology; process replaces meaning; form
unseats substance; perception, rational inquiry. There are no more “qualitates occultae”
(p106), no “explanations” (108). Relativity and “exchangeability” triumph (cf.
Simmel, ‘S u N’, ch 2, esp. pp24, 27).
Kant had sought to preserve the
transcendental subject in the very consciousness/awareness by the thinking
entity of its “unity of apperception”. If indeed the identities of logic and
mathematics were independent of experience – in fact, as in the “divisibility”
of space, contradictory to it – and yet were inconceivable without experience,
then the “independence” of these “identities” necessitated the existence of a
noumenon, a human reason that could not be reduced to a “phenomenon” or a mere
inexplicable “appearance” that was reduced/relegated to could discover/recover
“autonomously” the independent causal relations and synthetic a priori
judgements that it derived from the “heteronomy” of mere empirical induction or
observation. (Cf. Forster’s ‘The Transition’ from his commentary on OpPost re
Kant’s Preface to 2nd edn of KRV mention of “giving back to nature
what we derive from it”).
For “negative thought”, such transcendence
(independence from experience) did not require the positing of, and stood in
op-position to (Gegenstand), a “reality”, a world of “things” or noumena that
lay “behind” the observable empirical phenomena. The subject is no longer
transcendental but mundane; it is “of the World”. Indeed, it is “in the World”
and it has become, through perception and the Vorstellung and the Verstand
identified with the World itself, the better to command it.
Kant’s hesitations in the ‘OpPost’ reveal
“the Gap” that allowed Schopenhauer to pour scorn on Kantian metaphysics as the
foundation of human experience and of science generally – particularly where
“the transition” to “the systematicity of physics” from natural science – hence
the principle of causation – was concerned. The illegitimacy of compounding
logico-mathematical rules with physical causation tormented Kant in his last
years. With Sch., it is impossible to conceive “the stars above me” as the
complement of a universe made meaningful and purposeful by Practical Reason
through the “freedom”/unconditionality of the Truth of its a priori judgements.
Remember, it was the ability of Pure Reason to discern a priori –
in-dependently of experience! – the validity of causation that made it
“necessarily” in-dependent/autonomous against the heteronomy of “the object of
perception” and “liberated” it as “practical Reason”. This is the “interior
realm” subject to the categorical imperative: “the starry sky above me and the
moral law inside me”. The “connection” of the Subject with the exterior world,
the Object that is also constituted by the community of “practical reason”,
gives Kant the hope (“What can I hope?”) that Practical Reason may follow the
path of Truth followed by Pure Reason in the sphere of causality in the
physical sciences where “Error” is routinely defeated. (Cf. Tsanoff’s
conclusions, pp19-20: 2 Kant regards speculative reason, however, as
incapable of attaining knowledge of ultimate
reality, and therefore he introduces the notion of practical reason.)
But with Sch., Reason has become purely
instrumental and functional, even if there is still a simulacrum of a nexus
between logic-mathematics and “science” (p82). Truth for Sch. is not what it is
for Kant where the very possibility of “truth” in a priori judgements leads
directly to the postulation of Practical Reason: “immediate perception is the
ultimate ground and source of truth” (p100), even when it is a priori, as with
mathematics. In Sch., Reason is only a higher level of conceptual abstraction,
different in degree but not in kind from the understanding, and easily confused
with it (error confused with illusion). We have therefore a wholly “functional”
notion of truth defined now not in terms of “whences and wherefores” but in
terms of “what”, that is in purely instrumental and functional predictive
effectiveness. That explains why Sch. has difficulty distinguishing
Vorstellungen from Begriffen (pp53-4). (One could argue therefore contra
Tsanoff [pp19-20 below] that it is Kant rather than Schop. who relies on rigid
distinctions for the sake of speculative thoroughness, whereas Schop.’s real
sin is, as he correctly puts it, “shallowness”:
“Kant's 'confusion' of the perceptual and
NATURE AND GENESIS OF EXPERIENCE. 21
the conceptual in experience is to be regarded, not as the failure
to discriminate ultimate differences, but rather as the imperfect
realization and the inadequate expression of the underlying
essential unity of concrete experience, which cannot be reduced
to merely perceptual or conceptual terms. Kant's confusion
is the confusion of depths
not yet clarified; Schopenhauer's
lucidity manifests
epistemological shallowness. Later idealism,
of course, brought to light much that escaped
Kant himself…”
Thus, for Schop., Reason is neither good
nor bad. Rational action and virtuous action are entirely unrelated (p113). And
the ultimate manifestation of “practical reason” is the aloofness of the
philosopher in his “reflection”, the differentiation with “brutes”, including
“inferior life forms” (pp111-4) even down to indifference to “suicide,
execution, duel, enterprises fraught with danger to life” (p112-3). The
objectification of the Will is the Body, which therefore shares no communion
with the rest of humanity. Even language occupies no special role in this
system. Truly Sch. is “the real prophet of the understanding” (Bosanquet quoted
in Tsanoff, p40 – and Heidegger follows with his reproach that Kant neglected
“the imagination” [sensibility]). And the Kantian antinomies can be easily
dispatched by Sch. now that all links with Dinge an sich have been severed –
that is Kant’s “great contribution/service” (Appendix).
Transcendental Reason
‘Negatives
Denken’ was not a return to solipsism or pure idealism – far from it. It was
simply the realization that the synthetic a priori judgements could be analysed
independently of a Transcendental Subject from which these judgements emanated
in opposition to the anarchy or autonomy of the noumenon-linked “phenomena”. In
other words, Kantian idealism exalted the Subject in op-position to a noumenal
“reality” that it could “govern” only mechanically or intuitively (like “sight”
and “touch” – hence thoughts without perception are empty; perception without
concepts is blind”) but could not “possess” and by which in fact it was
“conditioned” and “relegated” to a mere “unity of apperception”, and only
formally could aspire to transcendental status (akin to God) on which morality
[Sollen] and “judgement” [Urteilkraft] could be founded.
It is unfortunate,
though not difficult to explain, that
Schopenhauer,
whose keen criticism
of the doctrine of
the categories had
disclosed so many of its flaws,
should have overlooked one of
Kant's most questionable
distinctions, namely,
that which he
makes between 'constitutive'
and 'regulative'
principles. This
distinction is employed by Kant with little consistency,
although
the tendency is
to discriminate between: (a) the
fundamental
forms of intuition, the
productive imagination, and the functions
of thought, which
condition the possibility
of all experience and
'constitute' its organization; and {h) the rational
assumptions
which, while not
determining the actual form
of experience,
serve to rationalize the
moral order and the aesthetic
judgment.
The distinction, otherwise
expressed, is between
the mechanical
42 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM
OF KANT.
categories of the Understanding, which Kant calls 'constitutive,'
and the teleological
categories, the postulates of
Practical Reason
and of the
Esthetic Judgment,
which he regards as 'regulative.'^
The incompatibility of
this hard and fast distinction with any
interpretation of experience which attempts to
do justice to its
organic character is amply illustrated in
Kant's own technical
procedure. The teleological
categories are declared to
be merely
'regulative,' because not 'constitutive' of experience
mechanically
considered. But are the mechanical
{i. e., 'constitutive')
categories constitutive of
moral and aesthetic experience? Such
considerations, which Kant would have been
the last to take
lightly, should have
warned him of the untenability of a distinction
that negates the immanent unity of experience,
which is the fundamental postulate
of the Critical philosophy.
This dictatorship
of Reason that had started with Descartes also became the subject of
Heidegger’s “Destruktion” of Kant. Indeed, one may agree with Heidegger that
Kant’s aim in the Critique is not to erect an epistemology but rather establish
by “formal” means the ‘being’ of a “reason” that is a “noumenon” that can
“order” the noumena op-posite to it (Gegenstande). Kant’s interest is not in
the “things-in-themselves” but rather in the Vernunft/Verstand (Under-standing)
hierarchy from perception to conception, which must lead to a ‘causa noumenon’
(in Aristotelian fashion, causa causans) “free” from the “heteronomy” of
causation and the physical world. This “freedom” or autonomy then becomes “the
Will”, with its “Ethik des reinen Willens”, an aspect of “praktische Vernunft”.
From here it is a very short step to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – and to
Heidegger, who is not in the least concerned with the possibility of “synthetic
a priori judgements” or “meta-ta-physica” in that Aristotelic sense, but rather
with the “Grund” of meta-physics, which is “the Being” of those “beings” that
Kant (and Schopenhauer) had left to “themselves”.
The “pessimism” (Schopenhauer) that
followed had to do with the need to remove the “teleological” and
“eschatological” aspirations/delusions of Kantian idealist formalism and at the
same time eliminate the (bourgeois) “antinomies” (cf. Lukacs) occasioned by the
opposition between noumena and phenomena, the “rupture” or chasm that occurred
and the “projectio per hiatus irrationalem” that it called for and that Kantian
practical reason hoped to bridge (Brucke from immanence to transcendence, see
T. below).
Empiricism did this in its Machian form by
eliminating even the possibility of “ruptures” or “salta” in the perception of
“phenomena” by encompassing them in a psychological sequence, a “pictographic”
or “psychological” representation of reality (Cacciari, p40) that goes back to
Locke, then Hume (association of ideas, impressions) and Berkeley (ideas in
God’s mind, similar to Leibnitz’s monads). Note also that with British
empiricism the “realism” of Platonic and Scholastic philosophy is refuted both
in its “temporal” (always psychological in any case) and its “spatial”
dimension (contra Descartes’s and Spinoza’s “extension”). In this sense,
empiricism already questions Newton ’s
universe (cf. even Smith’s “Hist.ofAstr.” so dear to the Austrians).
31
Relationships Since
a cause and a beginning of
existence are distinct ideas, according to the first part of the separability thesis, it follows that they are also distinguishable
ideas. (Bayne)
The empiricist “pictographic” or
“sequential” (one would say “kinematic”, slide show) notion of “causality”
paved the way to Hume’s skepticism and Berkeley ’s
empiricist “idealism”.
For
Hume, ideas and impressions are genuinely similar to each other. They are similar in two main ways. First of
all, both ideas and impressions are imagistic—that is,
both impressions and ideas can be thought of as being a type
of picture.9 (Bayne, ‘Kant on Causation’, p5).
Now, this can also be turned very quickly into an
argument that Kant cannot allow both intuitions and concepts to be imagistic. Kant makes
it clear that he believes that images are not themselves
general, and thus in the Schematism Chapter Kant writes:
No
image [gar kein
Bild] of a
triangle would ever be adequate to the concept of a triangle in general. For it
would not attain the generality of the concept, which
makes it valid for all triangles, . . . Still even less does
an object of experience or an image of the same ever attain the empirical concept. (A141/B180) (ibid., p7).
In
general, according to Kant, concepts serve as rules that are used to organize (unify) our thought. Sensible
intuitions, however, can be thought of as being imagistic (pictorial) representations. Now,
when the question of application arises (Which
intuitions, if any, are subsumed under this concept? Which
concept[s] does this intuition fall under?) we may be at a loss for direction. Intuitively we might think that I must somehow compare
some concept to some sensible intuition in order to see
whether the content of the concept, which is represented
discursively in the concept, stands in the appropriate relation to the content
of some intuition, which is represented pictorially in the intuition. Yet this
may not be so easy.(p8)
From Hobbes’s “man-machine” to Berkeley’s
“idealism” the approach to “reality” is mechanically subjective in the sense
that the Subject is “estranged” from the Object and views it “in
contemplation”, from afar. This obviously originates with Descartes’s
methodical doubt which puts “external reality” on a par with “dreams”. Only the
“consciousness” of the “doubting” can persuade the Subject of its own reality.
But the empiricists were quick to deny not only the Cogito (a syllogistic non
sequitur on any plane) but also the very “id-entity” of the Subject, as
famously dis-abused by Hume. Search as I may about a notion of “I”, I cannot
find it, except by reference to some other “empirical impression or idea”. The
unity of the Subject is dis-solved, and so is the possibility of causality,
even before we start enquiring about the relationship between things in
themselves. The “cinematic sequence” is broken because only a unified Subject
can re-compose it.
So it turns out that neither mathematical concepts nor
empirical concepts stand in immediate relation to sensible
intuitions, but like pure concepts they too are “always
directly related to the schema of the imagination” (A141/B180). (P8)
Schemata for mathematical and empirical concepts are
rules for producing spatial images that are correlated with the concept. It is
this spatial image,
derived from the concept through its schema, that can then be directly compared with sensible intuitions. Schemata for pure concepts, on the
other hand, are not rules for producing spatial images.
For “the schema of a pure concept of understanding is
something that cannot be brought into any image at all”
(A142/B181). Rather than being correlated with a spatial image, a pure concept is correlated with a transcendental time determination. That
is, the pure concepts are correlated with distinct
temporal structures or relationships—temporal images if you like.14 (p9)
Unfortunately,
when it comes time to spell out the details of how images, pure shapes in space, or transcendental
time determinations are produced from concepts via
schemata Kant waves his hands and mentions something about
the Schematism being “a hidden art in the depths of the human soul” (A141/B181). (p11)
In the Transcendental Deduction
Kant believes he has shown that a consciousness cannot be conscious of a
representation unless that representation is unified—that is,
the representation is one organized unit. It cannot be an
14 KANT ON CAUSATION
unorganized set of various unconnected parts.
Furthermore, Kant argues that a representation must get its unity
from the understanding because there is no combination
in representations apart from the understanding.17
This is the problem, the hiatus irrationalis, that Kant inherits. He
seeks “to bridge” it through a series of “categories” (Schematismus), from
human intuition to the Verstand to Pure Reason, that seek “to govern”
apodictically the Object through the a priori synthetic judgements that must
culminate in the “unconditionality” of Pure Reason because a phenomenon cannot
“explain” a sequence of phenomena, however long, and must therefore be toto
genere different from that “causally necessary” sequence: it must be
“unconditioned” and of a different order from both the Dinge an sich and the
world of possible experience or perception. Tsanoff (p44):
The unconditioned is
unthinkable; and
Kant himself, of
course,
does not claim objective validity for the conception. He does,
however, regard the demand
of reason for the unconditioned
as
a regulative principle,
"subjectively necessary. "^
In the third Critique Kant stresses the difference
between what is required for nature and what is required for an o rd e r of nature. Those
things required
for nature are constitutive while those things required to produce an order of nature will be regulative. The constitutive things are again
categories and principles—things that are required for
the possibility of experience. Kant often calls these
“universal [allgemeiner] laws of nature.” In
addition to this, understanding develops rules for explaining
particular aspects of nature.
20 KANT ON CAUSATION
For example, one of the rules from the discussion on the
paths of comets above: planets have circular orbits. These rules are ones
we come to know through experience, but because of a
further requirement, understanding “must think these
rules as laws (i.e., as necessary).”26This further requirement is that understanding
“also requires a certain order of nature in its particular rules”27 (CJ,184).(Bayne, “K.on Causation’.)
As we
saw back in chapter 1, a regulative principle “is not a principle of the possibility of
experience and the empirical cognition of objects of
sense, consequently not a principle of understanding” (A509/B537). Whereas a constitutive principle of understanding deals with the
requirements for the possibility of experience, a regulative principle of
reason deals with “only the unique way in which we must proceed
in the reflection about the objects of nature with the
intention of representing a thoroughgoing
159
Conclusion
connected experience” (CJ, 184).
Tsanoff doubts
the validity of the distinction:
It is unfortunate,
though not difficult to explain, that
Schopenhauer,
whose keen criticism
of the doctrine of
the categories had
disclosed so many of its flaws,
should have overlooked one of
Kant's most questionable
distinctions, namely,
that which he
makes between 'constitutive'
and 'regulative'
principles. This
distinction is employed by Kant with little consistency,
although
the tendency is
to discriminate between: (a) the
fundamental
forms of intuition, the
productive imagination, and the functions
of thought, which
condition the possibility
of all experience and
'constitute' its organization; and (b) the rational
assumptions
which, while not
determining the actual form
of experience,
serve to rationalize the
moral order and the aesthetic
judgment.
The distinction, otherwise
expressed, is between
the mechanical
42 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM
OF KANT.
categories of the Understanding, which Kant calls 'constitutive,'
and the teleological
categories, the postulates of
Practical Reason
and of the
Esthetic Judgment,
which he regards as 'regulative.'^
The incompatibility of
this hard and fast distinction with any
interpretation of experience which attempts to
do justice to its
organic character is amply illustrated in
Kant's own technical
procedure. The teleological
categories are declared to
be merely
'regulative,' because not 'constitutive' of experience
mechanically
considered. But are the mechanical
{i. e., 'constitutive')
categories constitutive of
moral and aesthetic experience? Such
considerations, which Kant would have been
the last to take
lightly, should have
warned him of the untenability of a distinction
that negates the immanent unity of experience,
which
is the fundamental
postulate of
the Critical philosophy.
[Note that grosso
modo equilibrium is regarded by Mises as a “regulative” principle to deduce a
priori “human action” – a “category” or “form” of action. Hayek would see it as
“constitutive” – a heuristic “goal” or “guide” for action.]
But here Kant has gone too far and too fast
in at least two respects: the first
is that a priori synthetic judgements do not pertain to the physical world, to
causation, but rather to logico-mathematical id-entities that remain firmly in
the “domain” of reason, not in the mechanical one of “objects” – however much
these judgements might arise only with “experience”.
Kant
is committed to holding that
through conceptual analysis alone it is not possible to
prove the causal principle. According to Kant, the causal principle although a priori is synthetic not analytic. Something more than the
analysis of concepts is required
for the proof of a synthetic judgment.
According
to Hume, if the causal principle is not a relation of ideas, then it must be a matter of fact.
According to Kant if the causal principle is not
analytic, then it must be synthetic. For a synthetic claim the concept of
the predicate is not contained within the concept of the
subject. That is to say, concept of the predicate
extends (goes beyond) the concept of the subject. Whether
or not the concept of the predicate is rightly applied to the concept of the subject cannot be determined by simply examining the content
of either or both of the two concepts. Since the
correctness of a synthetic judg- ment cannot be
determined solely by the content of one or both of the two concepts, something else is required for determining correctness. In
order to prove a synthetic claim, we need some “third
thing” to test our claim against. Typically, we need
some intuition in which the subject and the predicate are connected as claimed.(Bayne, p32)
But then this “something more”, this
“experience” must mean “being” tout court, “intuition”, and not just conscious
perception. In other words, a priori synthetic judgements alone contain already
all the elements of what Kant himself styled as “the Gap” (Forster), the
“hiatus irrationalis”, the chasm between Subject and Object, being-in-itself
and for-itself (consciousness). We need not go further into “Naturgesetz”, the
“laws” of physics to find this hiatus. All the “bridges” or “projections” in
the world will not help us trans-port ourselves, will allow this “Transition”
(Ubergang) from the sphere of “immanence” to that of “trans-scendence”, from
the Object to the Subject and vice versa. Kant’s “formalistic method”, which in
the end boils down to Cartesian rationalism, simply will not do. Tsanoff:
Kant says: "As
in this way everything is arranged
step by step
in the understanding, inasmuch
as we begin with judging problematically,
then proceed to an assertory acceptation, and finally
maintain our proposition as inseparably united with
the understanding,
that is as
necessary and
apodictic, we
may be allowed
to call these
three functions of modality
so many varieties or
momenta of thought."^
The three characteristic stages in the
logical progression might
well indicate three
points of view in the
self-organization of experience, and in this
sense Kant may be
justified in distinguishing
three categories of Modality.
Never
40 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM
OF KANT.
theless Kant's distinctions
are too sharp and abstract: while he
suggests a process of logical development in
the passage just
quoted, he fails
to explain the matter adequately and clearly to
emphasize the essential
interdependence of
these 'momenta of
thought,' which involve
each other in the systematic organization
of experience.^
(Of course, that is Hegel’s starting point.) The second difficulty
follows from the first, because if logico-mathematical id-entities are
attributed to an “unconditioned” pure reason rather than confined to
“instrumentality”, then we introduce a formalistic distinction between Vernunft
and its concepts and Verstand as the intuitive unity of experience and by so
doing we introduce a “regulative principle” that smacks of teleology. For
Schopenhauer, Vernunft is simply the ability to connect ideas or concepts, not
a “higher” faculty distinct from Verstand. It follows that “causality” is
essentially subjective and the role of science is simply to organize perception
in a predictable formula.
Contingency is relative, just as necessity
is relative, and for
the same reason.
Every thing, every event in the actual world
"is always at
once necessary and contingent; necessary in relation
to the one condition which
is its cause; contingent in
relation to
everything else."^ The
absolutely contingent would
be something
out of all
relation: a
thought as meaningless, Schopenhauer
insists, as the absolutely necessary, dependent upon nothing else
in particular. In both necessity and
contingency the
mind turns
PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION IN EXPERIENCE. 39
back in search
of explanation ; the necessary and
the contingent
thus mean merely
the relevant and
the irrelevant in the process
of organization.
And this is what prompts Schop. to abolish the Kantian separation of
Subject and Object implicit in the distinction of bloss Erscheinung and Ding an
sich. There are no “mere” appearances (bloss Erscheinungen), but rather
different “stimuli” that constitute the Vorstellungen connected by the
Understanding-Reason – esse est percipi in this sense; “existence and
perceptibility are convertible terms” (p4). It is no longer a question of
“knowing” the Vorstellungen, but of intuiting their “being”, because the
“knowing” is in their immediate perception and a priori knowledge of causality
(Sufficient Reason). Tsanoff:
Kant's argument is
summarized by
Schopenhauer as
follows: "If the conditioned
is given, the
totality of its
conditions must
also be given, and
therefore also the
unconditioned, through which
alone that totality
becomes complete. "^
But, Schopenhauer argues, this 'totality
of the conditions of everything conditioned' is
contained in
its
nearest ground or
reason from which it directly proceeds,
and
which is only
thus a sufficient reason
or ground.* In the alternating
series of conditioned
and conditioning states, "as each
link is laid
aside the chain is
broken, and the claim of the
principle
of sufficient reason
entirely satisfied,
it arises anew because the
condition becomes the
conditioned."^ This is
the actual modus
43
44 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM
OF KANT.
operandi of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason.
"Only through
an arbitrary abstraction," Schopenhauer says, "is a series of
causes and effects
regarded as
a series of causes alone,
which
exists merely on account of
the last effect, and is
therefore
demanded as its
sufficient reason."^
“Sufficient Reason” defined by Kelly (‘Kant’s Ph. As Rectified By
Schop.’):
CHAPTER VI
Schopenhauer's principle of the sufficient ground
The definition of
this Principle is :—" Nihil est
sine ratione cur potius sit
quam non sit." There
is nothing without
a ground for its being
so.
AS RECTIFIED BY SCHOPENHAUER 31
The Root of
this Principle
Our cognitive consciousness, appearing as outer
and inner sensibility
(receptivity), intelligence,
and reason, is
divided into subject and object, and
contains nothing more. To
say that a thing is
an object of
the subject^ means that it
is our
presentation, and that all our
presentations
are objects of the subject. It
will be seen
that all our
presentations are
connected together
by certain laws, which,
so far as the form
is concerned, are
a priori determinable, and that,
in consequence of
this connection, nothing existing
separately and detached
from the others can
become an object for us.
This connection is
what the Principle
of the sufficient Ground in
its generality expresses,
and assumes a different
form for the
different classes
of objects without
altering its general
character. The
word " root"
is used to
indicate the relations
that underlie
each class. It must
be understood, however,
that there are
not four distinct roots for
the
four different classes
of objects, but that there
is a common root manifesting itself
in four
different forms. In other
words, the root is
a fourfold one.
Sch. relegates reason to the sphere of
immanence quite simply by abolishing the “dualism” of Erscheinungen and Dinge
an sich, by “mixing” the two together into a “Doppelcharakter” (the object
implies the subject implies the object) that makes the Erscheinungen
immediately “ordered” by the Verstand/Vernunft, without the need to postulate a
“Gap” between Subject and Object and between Verstand and Vernunft that needs
to be “bridged”. Tschauschoff (p26):
Die
objektive Anschauung ist nach Schopenhauer durch und durch
eine
kausale Erkenntnis, d. h. eine Verstandeserkenntnis oder, wie
er sich
anders ausdrückt, „die ganze Wirklichkeit ist für den Verstand,
durch
den Verstand, im Verstände" (W.a.W.u. V.§ 4. S.43).
Thus, for Schopenhauer, the distinction
between Verstand as the moment of unifying perception, as intuition, and
Vernunft as the awareness of this ability (a kind of consciousness-in-itself
and for-itself) simply evaporates. There is no need for this “object of
experience” to stand as an “obscure veil” between the Vernunft/Wille and the
perception of causality, the faculty of experience or “intuition”. (Tsanoff,
pp20-2, but good summary on pp23ff.)
Furthermore, there is also no need to
distinguish between the “perception” of causal events and their
“conceptualization” by the Verstand – because this is assumed to be “immediate”
in the unity or “equi-valence” or “interchangeability” or “conversion” (WWV,
p4) of esse and percipi.
Kant’s impossible task lay in his original
“rationalist” assumption that perception of Erscheinungen
(“appearances/phenomena”) must be ordered rationally and already
transcendentally by an entity that he will ultimately call “Pure Reason” –
though he tries to dis-guise this with a
whole chain of intermediate categories and faculties (Intuition,
Verstand).
For better or worse, when we consider the meaning of
the phrase “object of representations” in the transcendental sense we will have
to focus on representations. For transcendentally
speaking an object “is no thing in itself, but rather only an appearance, i.e., representation” (A191/B236).
If this is true, then how can objects, which are
themselves representations, be “that
which ensures that our cognitions are not haphazardly or arbitrarily determined” (A104). Kant’s answer is that in order for
representations to be objects in this sense they themselves must not be
associated in a haphazard or arbitrary way. That is, the representations must
themselves be connected according to rules. In other words, representations, in so far as they are in these relations
(in space and time) connected and determinable according
to the rules of the unity of experience are called objects. (A494/522) (Bayne, p109)
“Now
admittedly one can call everything, and even every representation, in so far as one is
conscious of it, an object, but what meaning this word
has with regard to appearances, not in so far as they (as
representations) are objects, but rather only in so far as they signify an object, is a matter for deeper investigation. (A189–90/B234–35)”
(Kant quoted in Bayne, p108)
The
circularity in Kant’s reasoning or “Transcendental Deduction” from
“objects” to “representations subject to rules” is evident – because the
“rules” themselves will be what turns “representations” into “objects”! Bayne
cannot escape the difficulty:
Kant’s
point is straightforward. The object is that which grounds the objectivity of cognition. If I take some
set of my representations to have an object, then I
represent my cognition in this case as having been constrained by the features of the object.1 (p109).
But the ineluctable question remains: how
can representations themselves be “constrained by the features of the object”?
Clearly, at all times Kant is positing a “Realitat”, a solid reality of Dinge
an sich that lies “behind” or “beneath” the “ordered consciousness” of the
Subject from Intuition all the way to Pure Reason. By so doing, Kant is also
then presupposing not only the transcendental a priori character of experience,
but also the ability of pure reason to lend a “systemic order” to the
individual, separate, empirically “dis-covered” laws of physics: “…there must be something like an a priori
‘elementary system’ of the moving forces of matter if physics is to be possible
as a systematic science,” (Forster, ‘Kant’s Final Synthesis’, p11).
Earlier, in the KdU, Kant had observed that
“Nature, for the sake of judgement, specifies its universal laws to empirical
ones according to the form of a logical system,” (in Forster, ‘K’sFS, p6). And
in the Preface to the 2nd edn of the KRV there is the famous
reference to “giving back to nature” what we have found empirically in it: in
other words, the “discovery” of regularities in nature from the constitutive
principles must then correspond to a unity of reflective judgement or
regulative principles that gives “systematicity” to the natural laws themselves
(yet another bolster to Kant’s mythical “architectural symmetry” derided by
Schop., “alles gute sind drei”). Shortly
before this formulation, Kant describes Galileo’s experiments (ball and slide)
virtually as a Machian “thought-experiment”, that is an empirical demonstration
(“that which reason must seek in nature, not fictitiously ascribe to it”
[Forster, p11]) of regularities or laws that have already been “projected” by
reason and regulative principles. The OpPost was intended to supply the
“Transition” (Ubergang), the “bridge” or “projectio per hiatus irrationalem”
between observation and generalization, between perception and concepts.
Oftentimes when Kant discusses rules, he writes of them
as being the means
by which unity is produced in something. For example, when Kant is comparing reason(Vernunft) with understanding(Verstand) he states that the understanding may be a faculty[Vermögen] of the unity of appearances by means of
rules, so reason is the faculty[Vermögen] of the unity of the rules of understanding under principles. (A302/B359)
(Bayne, p108).
The possibility of experience is thus that which gives all
our cognitions
a priori objective reality. Now experience is founded on the synthetic
unity
of appearances, i.e., on a synthesis according to concepts of the object of appearances in
general, without which it would not even be cognition,
but only a rhapsody of perceptions that would not fit to- gether in any context according to rules of a thoroughly connected
(possible) consciousness, consequently it would also not fit
into the transcendental and necessary unity of
apperception. Experience thus has principles of its form a priori lying at the foundation,
namely, general rules of the unity in the synthesis of
appearances. (A156–57/ B195–96) (Bayne, p108).
[Kant
and ‘Judgement’]
Schopenhauer does away with the Ubergang
altogether. Instead he replaces Kant’s “dualism” of noumena/phenomena, of
subject/object, of perception/concept, of Verstand/Vernunft with the unity of
the Vorstellung, which already encapsulates the logical interdependence of
subject and object. Thus the Erscheinungen occasioning Vorstellungen are sui
generis and immediately causally connected qua Vorstellungen to the Verstand
and thence to the Vernunft. There is no “mediation” between these categories;
no “obscure veil” separates experience from “Realitat” which now becomes all
“active” as “Wirklichkeit/Actuality”. Tschauschoff again (p27):
Dieser
Prozess der Objektivation, den der Verstand an den
Empfindungen
vollzieht, die uns durch die Sinne zugeführt werden,
ist kein
bewusst reflektierender, sondern ein intuitiver, unbewusster
Prozess.
Im Anschluss daran unterscheidet Schopenhauer eine intuitive
und
eine diskursive Erkenntnis.
And Tsanoff:
This is the way Schopenhauer reads his
Kant. The Critique
of Pure Reason, he thinks, treats
experience as the result of the
conceptualizing of the perceptual material,
by which process this
material of sensation first becomes
organized and real. Now he
finds perception in no need of such
conceptual transformation,
for it possesses in itself all the concrete
reality that is possible
in experience. Thinking owes its whole
significance to the perceptual
source from which it arises through
abstraction. " If we
hold firmly to this, the inadmissibleness
of the assumption becomes
evident that the perception of things only
obtains reality
and becomes experience through the thought
of these very things
18SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT.
applying its twelve categories. Rather in
perception itself the
empirical reality, and consequently
experience, is already
given; but the perception itself can only
come into existence
by the application to sensation of the
knowledge of the
causal nexus, which is the one function of
the understanding.
Perception is accordingly in reality
intellectual, which is just
what Kant denies."^
It
follows that the Dinge an sich cannot consist of “objects” or a “Realitat” that
lie “behind or beneath” or “at the end” as a quaestio occulta (or causa
finalis) of experience. The Dinge an sich must be an entity toto genere
separate and different from the realm of experience and reason, from perception
and conception, which are entangled in the Veil of Maya. (Hegel will have a
different answer.)
It is in positing this “distance” between
the “thing-in-itself” and the rational a priori awareness of it in Pure Reason
– a “gap” that no Schematismus or Ubergang can “bridge” - that Kant (Tsanoff,
p18) prepares the ground for Schopenhauerian pessimism and the “unfoundedness”
of the world of possible experience (Kant) or the “World of Vorstellungen”
(‘illusionism’ or mysticism in Schop.) in that Practical Reason cannot be “the
necessary implication of the unconditioned coming from the perception and
conception of the conditioned” (Tsanoff, p38), and consequently it too is
“conditioned” by the veil of Maya or “the wheel of life”. Only the Will can
“comprehend/envelop” the World of Vorstellungen – and thus become the ultimate
Ding an sich – the obverse and the ground of the world of immediate perception.
Like Janus again, Will enters where Vorstellungen exit and it exits where they
enter. But even Heidegger attacks Kant on the “autonomy” of Reason in its
metaphysical moment and also as Will subject to formal rational and logical
Imperatives in its ethical aspect.
Above all, Sch. lays the foundations of
Machism (Tsanoff, p26). (Tsanoff proceeds, pp26ff, to argue why the two
“moments” of reason need to be distinguished categorically in that
consciousness-in-itself already contains the for-itself but as a separate
“moment” [Kant’s “momenta of thought” mentioned on p40] that goes beyond the
“perception” and becomes aware of the “conceptualized form” of “perception”
itself – inevitably, he quotes Hegel, p28. Schopenhauer is identified thus as
“the real prophet of the understanding”, as does Hegel, p40.)
Because Reason is not separable from the
Understanding, even the Will in its objectification as body, though not in its
character as the objectification of the Ding an sich, is part of the
“causality” it “understands” – so that the Will-as-body is immersed in the
World and is subject to its “causation”, to the Law of Sufficient Reason, like
any Vorstellung.
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