A Few Kant Quotes

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael,

Just one more thought to make sure I am absolutely clear.

If you want to paint a nude woman, you often hire a nude woman model and she poses. Then you paint her.

If an artist wishes to paint an inner mental experience he observes, he can't really hire a model to do that. He has to model for himself. And he paints that. (Good abstract artists do. Bad abstract artists do any old thing.)

It's like if you wants to paint a nude woman, but no model (or photo or painting) is available for what you have in mind. So you model her in your mind and struggle with it.

From your writing, I suspect you may not understand why an artist would wish to paint an inner mental experience as the subject if he is not poisoned by bad philosophy. I do. It's the same reason he would want to paint a nude woman as the subject.

In movie talk, call it framing and a close-up.

(One of my premises is that we think in image integrations just as much as we think in verbal concepts.)

Michael

[Newberry]

Michael,

You know, everyone is welcome to their thoughts, their aesthetics, and their view of Kant if they read him. On this thread Ellen and I came to some excellent understanding on a few points. Also, I came to some excellent interaction with Philip, Roger, Kyrel, Bill, Scherk, and Matus.

Sharing my aesthetics (even the rejected aesthetic ideas) with people has been my way give back the understanding, love, support, and respect that I have gotten over the years. BTW, almost all of my collectors and students are not Objectivists.

On the other hand, I have not been able to identify with what you, Jonathan, and Jim are expressing on this thread. Maybe it is semantics? Maybe the tone of voice? Maybe the dictionary or past experiences? Maybe the objective? But, it appears to be mutual, so it's no loss.

Cheers,

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael,

Just keep painting your beautiful paintings and that's cool.

No one can fit the ocean in their back yard swimming pool.

(I didn't mean to rhyme that. The rhythm's off, anyway. )

You should be proud to be Michael Newberry. I would be if I were you.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Michael wrote in post #191:

What a mistake it is to lay abstract art at the feet of Kant's influence. All anyone has to do is look at history and see that it develped in parallel with psychology. If one needed to cite intellectual influences, I would be more inclined to point to William James or Freud or people like that.

I promptly thought, Well, but pointing "to William James or Freud or people like that" doesn't negate Kantian influence, since Freud was directly influenced by Kant and Schopenhauer, and James can partly be seen as going all the way with the potentially subjectivist phenomenal world half of Kant.

I've been doing some Google searching for sources which discuss connections between Kant and Freud and James respectively. I'll post links and excerpts in four subsequent posts.

I also found a website -- here -- which gives a fairly brief overview of James' complex life and works and which provides some indications of James' connection to what the site calls "Modernism." The website has a Christian orientation and is non approving of "Modernism." I think that the description of James' theories isn't very good, but I was sufficiently amused by the critical remarks written in red, I decided to quote those (minus the red):

CRITICAL NOTE:  The only metaphysics consistent with James's theory of knowledge has to be based on a selection from among a multitude of opinions. This eclectic approach is clearly the negation of philosophy, for it does not lead to any absolute or to any certitude. James sought to avoid this difficulty and to reach the absolute and God by having recourse to the unconscious mind.

[....]

CRITICAL NOTES: James's discovery of the subconscious mind was surely a great contribution to psychology and won for James world-wide fame. But we cannot accept James's doctrine that the highest spiritual values originate in the subconscious mind, for the subconscious mind is irrational and therefore the highest spiritual values would be founded on irrationality -- a supposition which is absurd. James may justify in this way his stand as a liberal Protestant; he may be quoted as a father of Modernism; but no one can deny that his religious position is in complete opposition to the basic statement of his pragmatism -- for it does not lead to any solution, to any practical certitude, to any justification of the universe.

If the only road leading to the supreme spiritual reality is to be found in the analysis of psychological emotions, of religious sentiment, objective Christian dogma disappears. It is modified and replaced by the subjective exigencies of each individual, and thus every believer creates his own religion, his own truth. This, of course, is the central position of Modernism. The logical consequence is that even the nature of God will be understood differently according to various religious emotions. In fact the sincere religious tendency of James himself stumbles along and falls into a pluralistic conception of Divinity. God is finite, He exists in time -- a being among many beings, and like us, a creator of His own story.

How can any satisfaction be found in such a religion? Even from the viewpoint of Pragmatism, it cannot work, for in it none of the fundamental aspirations of mankind are fulfilled. There is no certitude, no hope, no absolute. How can such a limited God guarantee the order of the physical and of the human world? What is left of the world of spirits?

Religious Pragmatism is merely a shortsighted, emotional and irrational attempt to replace dogmatic, absolute and universal truth with the personal fancies of the man in the street. It is morally disastrous, for if truth depends upon subjective feeling, any action can be justified by virtue of the satisfaction it procures. Such a philosophy makes man his own judge and leads to total moral anarchy.

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Edited July 27, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

James tended to be curtly dismissive of Kant, but there are some who argue that there was -- or should be -- more of a relationship than James acknowledged.

Here is a link to the beginning of an article titled

The prospects of transcendental pragmatism: Reconciling Kant and James

From: Philosophy Today  | Date:  October 1, 1997| Author:  Pihlstrom, Sami

The American pragmatist William James admired the "English spirit" in philosophy, but he did not much admire the greatest critical successor of the British empiricists, namely, Immanuel Kant. There are occasional references to Kant in James's major writings, but the brief treatment of Kant as an "intellectualist" or "rationalist" in Some Problems of Philosophy (1911) is perhaps James's most sustained published--albeit posthumous--attempt to refute Kantian idealism (see e.g. pp. 24, 48). Alterna...

You have to subscribe to a publication to read the rest.

Here is a link to another article titled

Hume and Kant in Their Relation to the Pragmatic Movement

G. B. Mathur

Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Apr., 1955), pp. 198-208 (article consists of 11 pages)

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

This one you either have to purchase or obtain through "a participating institution."

However, the first full page shows on the screen. It gives provocative indications:

[...] historical analysis has clearly established the dependence of James's pragmatism on anterior views and rejected its claims to novelty. And what is more [...] it is being gradually realized that there exists an inner contradiction in an exclusively pragmatic approach. The removal of this contradiction from the philosophy of pragmatism will either reduce it to the level of a limited but useful method, quite well-known and anticipated in the past, or transform it into something very different from what it intends to be.

We propose in this essay to show the relation of pragmatism to Hume and Kant by tracing some of its leading ideas back to Humian and Kantian thought. Both James and Schiller [...] first concede the similarities between their views and those of Hume and Kant, and then hasten to add that there is involved nothing more than a superficial parallelism. [....]

Obviously, this vacilating attitude accords ill with James's contention that there is "nothing new" in pragmatism and that he is simply re-emphasizing certain well-known facts and attitudes (cf. the sub-title of the book: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking). This equivocation merits an inquiry [...]. The truth is, as we shall see in the sequel, that the pragmatic movement as it took shape [...].

[And there, cliff-hangingly, the page ends...]

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[Ellen Stuttle]

Here is a link to an article titled

The “Regulative” Idea from Kant to William James

James Behuniak, Jr.

(University of Hawaii, USA)

No date is given.

You can access all 19 pages of this one. I'll type in a few excerpts.

The "regulative" idea referred to is that of God.

There are various routes that one might take in coming to understand American Pragmatism. Few routes, however, are as direct as that which departs from Kant and arrives at William James.  James, like Hegel, can be profitably understood as a direct response to Kant’s Idealism. America’s other great philosopher, John Dewey, spent his formative years deeply impressed by Hegelian Idealism, and admitted that Hegel left a permanent deposit on his thinking. James was not so profoundly [a]ffected by Hegel; instead, it was Kant with whom he labored to come to terms.

Kant’s first Critique marks a turning point in European thought, and its rejection of transcendental theology is among its most significant contributions.  Kant’s refutations of the traditional arguments for the existence of God culminate in his postulation of God as a "regulative" ideal. The notion of "regulative" ideation was truly original with Kant, and certainly an unknown quantity at the time of its conception. In the following century, "regulative" thinking was to echo across the Atlantic, find a voice initially in the "pragmatic" philosophy of Charles Sanders Pierce, and then reverberate in the thinking of William James. In what follows, we bypass Pierce and reestablish the direct route from Kant’s critique of transcendental theology to James’ pragmatic, pluralist epistemology. Our hope is that such passage demonstrates the continuity between America’s seminal philosopher and the early, German Idealist tradition. Kant and James each sought to overcome a similar brand of empiricism; and in doing so, each came to formulate a notion of "regulative" ideation. There is some similarity in their notions; but more significantly, a set of profound, interesting, and all-important differences.

[....]

Kant's critique of transcendental theology is a critique of a certain type of thinking. Transcendental concepts of God or the “most real being” are rejected when they are purported to exhibit characteristics of the "real." They are not entitled to such a designation according to Kant. Ideas cannot be objectively "real" only "immanent" in their employment. Any move that gives such ideas status as concrete realities is bound to be fallacious.  James shifts the criteria for the "real" and makes its more consistent with what Kant referred to as the "immanent."  James defines the "real" as anything "of which we find ourselves obliged to take account in any way."

This means anything that effects our transactions with the world: anything that regulates experience in any way. Under such criteria, James also finds concepts such as the "most real being" lacking in reality. [....]

[....] James' main concern is with a God that makes our lives more peaceful, more natural, and more secure. This is the meaning of God as a "regulative" concept for James. "'God'," he writes, "means that 'you can dismiss certain kinds of fear.'"

The ideal of God means something very different for Kant, at least in respect to his agenda in the first Critique. Here God must mean "the purposive unity of things," the guarantor of orderly progression along the road of rational investigation. In these two thinkers, we see God called upon to "regulate" experience in two very different spheres: for Kant, the scientific; and for James, the emotional. What an accurate reflection this is of the personal temperaments of these two philosophers! Confident, stable, and predictable is Kant; uncertain, temperamental, and often melancholic is James. And so it will go, contending with the "regulative" function of our most cherished ideals with and without a-priori foundations. Given such foundations, we can expect orderly progress towards greater and greater certainty. Without such foundations, we are at once given absolute control and absolute contingency. It is to James' credit that he overcame his doubts and, through his philosophy, extended the possibility of pursing a creative and fulfilling human life unsupported by certitude. It is to Kant's credit that, about a century earlier, he unknowingly laid the foundation.

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[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

If we are going to do indirect influences, let's take it all the way back to Plato or even further to the Sun God.

I never really understood why Rand called Kant more evil than Plato, nor understood why she thought he had more influence than Plato when she bashed them. If the game is going to be played according to an "indirect influence" standard, what are the measurements and rules? I have read and read her, but I was never clear on this.

Apropos, I am aware that Kant's little toe is in at the beginning of psychology.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Of relevance directly to the subject of art, while Googling for excerpts about connections -- in this case indisputably significant ones -- between Kant's and Freud's views, I came across a book titled

Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism : An Anthology

By Richard Kearney, David M. Rasmussen

Here is a link. I can't copy from the pdf which is displayed.

This book is described thus:

"This comprehensive anthology provides a collection of classic and contemporary readings in continental aesthetics. Spanning Romanticism through Modernism to Postmodernism, the volume includes landmark texts that have sparked renewed interest in aesthetics, including works by Schiller, Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Luk?cs, Habermas, Foucault, Kristeva, and Derrida."

The page which shows in the link is an excerpt from a book titled

Aesthetic Theory

By Theodor W. Adorno, Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann

Here is a link to that book. (Theodor W. Adorno I think is a fairly famous aesthetician.)

I also found -- link here -- a paper titled

Kant, Freud, and the ethical critique of religion

Author: DiCenso, James1

Source: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Volume 61, Number 3, June 2007 , pp. 161-179(19)

Publisher: Springer

Abstract:

This paper engages Freud's relation to Kant, with specific reference to each theorist's articulation of the interconnections between ethics and religion. I argue that there is in fact a constructive approach to ethics and religion in Freud's thought, and that this approach can be better understood by examining it in relation to Kant's formulations on these topics. Freud's thinking about religion and ethics participates in the Enlightenment heritage, with its emphasis on autonomy and rationality, of which Kant's model of practical reason is in many ways exemplary. At the same time, Freud advances Kantian thinking in certain important respects; his work offers a more somatically, socially, and historically grounded approach to the formation of rational and ethical capacities, and hence makes it more compatible with contemporary concerns and orientations that eschew the pitfalls of ahistorical idealist orientations.

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[Ellen Stuttle]

And ...

Here is an overview synopsis which I found very interesting on

Kantianism and Psychoanalysis

Modern Psychoanalytic

Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies

www.cmps.edu

Both Emmanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, his disciple and interpreter, had a profound influence on psychoanalysis, although their underlying theories sometimes need to be differentiated. Just as important, however, is the fact that psychoanalysis can be considered an avatar of Kantianism, if not of metaphysics in general.

References to Kant appear in Freud's work in three different contexts:

1 Freud presents Kant's "categorical imperative" as the "inheritor of the Oedipus complex."

2 Freud contested the universal and necessary character of the categories of space and time in human sensibility. These categories undergo a process of development that depends on the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.

3 Freud compares the unconscious and the thing-in-itself (Assoun, 1976). Although the first reference serves only to legitimate and anticipate Freudian theory, the other two references situate Freud's metapsychological reflections in terms of their differences from Kantian thought. Freud read Kant according to Schopenhauer's interpretation, which ties transcendentalism to anthropology.

Many of Freud's ideas (dreams and repression, the unconscious, sexuality, love, and death) are similar to those of Schopenhauer. Freud recognized a connection to some of his ideas, though he denied Schopenhauer's influence, which he is said to have come across late in life under the influence of Otto Rank. However, between 1830 and 1920 Schopenhauer's ideas were quite popular. The interpretation Schopenhauer gave to Kantian thought resulted in a "marriage between a neo-Kantian philosophic orientation and the scientific work conducted under the aegis of materialist psycho-physiology" (Assoun, 1976), a position held by Theodore Meynert, Johann Herbart, and others, who were well known to Freud.

Whatever the situation may have been, through his work with hysterics, Freud discovered transference, resistance, and the therapeutic framework. In spite of their shared pessimism, Freud was careful to distinguish himself from Schopenhauer in his conception of the death impulse. Also, Freud's metapsychology cannot be confused with a weltanschauung (worldview), which characterized Schopenhauer's work as far as Freud was concerned.

When Jacques Lacan attempted to define an ethics of psychoanalysis, he questioned Kant's conception of morality. Although he, like Kant, tried to ground ethics in something unconditioned that is distinct from the Sovereign Good, he rejected the Kantian choice between duty and the categorical imperative. Similarly, he rejects the notion that an ethics of psychoanalysis should be a morality of the superego. For Lacan, the truth of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason is found in the marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom (1990) and, more particularly, in his long theoretical chapter "One more try for the republicans" (Lacan, 1966). The Sadean imperative of enjoyment, "You should seek enjoyment," is a fulfillment of the Kantian categorical imperative. For Lacan, enjoyment is beyond pleasure, or rather, it is the extreme of pleasure, "to the extent that this extreme consists in forcing access to the 'Thing' (das Ding)" (Lacan, 1986), that is, the absolute Other of the lost subject. Hence, the ethics of psychoanalysis needs to be grounded somewhere else: in desire itself. If there is a law of desire, Lacan's associated imperative would be, "Do not give in to your desire." It remains to be determined what this desire is: pure desire, desire of castration, desire of death (Guyomard, 1992)?

For a number of philosophers who want to bring psychoanalysis within the fold of the metaphysics of subjectivity, Kant and Schopenhauer are two links in a chain that, by way of Spinoza and others, joins Freud and Lacan to Descartes (Henry, 1993; Vaysse, 1999).

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[Ellen Stuttle]

I never really understood why Rand called Kant more evil than Plato, nor understood why she thought he had more influence than Plato when she bashed them. If the game is going to be played according to an "indirect influence" standard, what are the measurements and rules? I have read and read her, but I was never clear on this.

As best I recall, Rand didn't call Plato evil at all. I've wondered about that, too. Hypotheses: (1) Plato was a hell of a writer, a poet of language; Rand's writing sensibilities couldn't become ireful with someone who could write that well; (2) Plato was Greek, and thus she considered him at least partly reality and reason oriented. I think she did say something someplace along those lines.

The issue with Kant, however, isn't one of a particular link in a chain of influences. Instead, it's one of changing the enterprise -- major watershed mark.

The whole course of Western thought post-Kant was affected by Kant in one way or another. Henry Veatch used to whimsically describe the situation as "the Kantian swerve." Even Aristoteleans -- such as Veatch -- had to adjust to the altered problem-set in a way which addressed Kant.

I think that Rand was correct in the extent of the importance she gave to Kant, though not in her moral assessment, or in the uni-causal status -- or even in her interpretation of what he was saying.

Ellen

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[Jonathan]

Michael,

You know, everyone is welcome to their thoughts, their aesthetics, and their view of Kant if they read him. On this thread Ellen and I came to some excellent understanding on a few points. Also, I came to some excellent interaction with Philip, Roger, Kyrel, Bill, Scherk, and Matus.

Sharing my aesthetics (even the rejected aesthetic ideas) with people has been my way give back the understanding, love, support, and respect that I have gotten over the years. BTW, almost all of my collectors and students are not Objectivists.

On the other hand, I have not been able to identify with what you, Jonathan, and Jim are expressing on this thread. Maybe it is semantics? Maybe the tone of voice? Maybe the dictionary or past experiences? Maybe the objective? But, it appears to be mutual, so it's no loss.

Cheers,

Michael

I have a few questions.

First, about the "excellent interaction" that you had with Matus, in your post #208 you thanked him for his "refreshing" posts, including his post #207. What was refreshing and "spot on" about that post?

Was it his misrepresentation of Burke's views (and Janson's reporting of Burke's views) on the sublime (Matus claimed that Burke believed that the sublime "was the highest type of beauty")? Do you think that such a misrepresentation is worthy of praise because you want it to be true despite the fact that it is clearly not?

Or was it Matus's misrepresenting of Kant's views on the sublime when he claimed that, to Kant, "the sublime was the feeling associated with the recognition of something objectively great, but ONLY when it was felt for no particular reason the feeler could identify and only when EXPLICITLY disconnected from reality"? (Kant's view was that we experience a mixture of pain and pleasure in the sublime: first pain at the recognition of our inadequacy to grasp an infinite magnitude, but then pleasure in the recognition that our faculty of reason has been stimulated by the effort to comprehend. Kant's notion of the sublime isn't about being "disconnected from reality," but about experiencing pure reason, and about measuring ourselves against the overwhelming power of nature and feeling our "capacity for resistance" and our freedom to adhere to our "highest principles" regardless of what nature may throw at us.)

Second, you never commented on my post #149, in which I quoted Kamhi on Kant. Do you have a response?

Third, Kamhi mentioned Cohen and Guyer. What do you think of Guyer's view (from his Kant, amazon.com "search inside" of page 320) that "Kant assumes that all works of art are mimetic, that is, that they have a representational content or theme" based on Kant's belief that "the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing"?

J

[Ellen Stuttle]

AH, light dawns, maybe! At least, I think it does in regard to what you take to be the point under dispute. Although I disagree that "to say that God does not exist is not making a positive claim." To say that God does NOT exist is to assert. To say that positive evidence would be needed to make a claim FOR God's existence is what I would call "the null hypothesis" in the circumstance. Do you see the difference between an assertion of a negative (God does not exist) and a statement that evidence would have to be adduced for the positive (God does exist)?

What is "positive evidence" , AFAIK there is only evidence?

Right. The "positive" is redundant. I'll edit it in the original post.

Also, my sentence about "the null hypothesis" isn't good. To use the idea of "null hypothesis" in regard to the example is a stretch from the technical meaning, which is explained briefly here:

Null Hypothesis

A null hypothesis is a statistical hypothesis that is tested for possible rejection under the assumption that it is true (usually that observations are the result of chance). The concept was introduced by R. A. Fisher.

The hypothesis contrary to the null hypothesis, usually that the observations are the result of a real effect, is known as the alternative hypothesis.

The applicable principle in this situation is that the burden of proof is on the person who asserts the positive.

I agree with DF, saying "God does not exist" is tantamount to saying "there is no evidence that God exists". If someone wants to assert the opposite then they must provide some evidence.

I do not agree that the two statements are the same, and I consider the first statement epistemologically inadmissable, since it's the assertion of a negative which is impossible to demonstrate.

Ellen

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Edited July 27, 2008 by Ellen Stuttle

[tjohnson]

I do not agree that the two statements are the same, and I consider the first statement epistemologically inadmissable, since it's the assertion of a negative which is impossible to demonstrate.

__

I have never heard of this, "epistemologically inadmissable", who says so?? Personally, I don't see anything wrong with asserting a negative.

[BaalChatzaf]

I do not agree that the two statements are the same, and I consider the first statement epistemologically inadmissable, since it's the assertion of a negative which is impossible to demonstrate.

___

One can easilty prove that the square root of two is not the ratio of integers. You can't get any more negative than that.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Newberry]

J: "I have a few questions."

Perhaps you could inspire my further participation by relating to, comprehending, and understanding a few bits of insights/knowledge I offered here. If you cannot do that, what is the point of asking for clarification on an additional issue? And I don't mean in a cynical tone, I just tune out then.

BTW, your question about Kahmi passage of Kant, I have discussed the significance of the difference between Kant's concepts of Beauty and the Sublime, that would be not a bad place to understand what I have been talking about.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael,

There is one tendency in many Objectivist intellectuals that bothers me and you just demonstrated it. I want to step outside the different ideas a moment and talk about a method of reasoning and discussing. I mention this because I had to discipline it in myself and in no way am I trying to be hostile.

Jonathan challenged your praise of a person who was not accurate and he cited where the inaccuracies and misrepresentations were. (And it went way beyond the game of "Gotcha!") You let the inaccuracies and misrepresentations slide with your endorsement because you identify with the poster's attitude.

I can't think of anything that weakens an Objectivist argument more than this kind of rhetorical behavior. What it communicates between the lines is:

"I don't care if he's wrong. He's one of mine and he struck a blow for truth (etc. etc. etc.), so to hell with the facts. Facts are not all that important. You don't need to acknowledge them."

Within a context of ideas, this transmits that reason is not the governing value in the discussion, but the tribe is.

I also see Objectivists defend this tribal behavior by calling certain questions dishonest and using that as an excuse not to answer them. (You don't do that.)

Nowadays, I hold as a personal standard that anytime anyone questions the accuracy of what I state or what I endorse, I check it. Accuracy is a premise that always needs checking. It is never a waste of time.

Then I comment on the charge of inaccuracy. It is either correct or incorrect. If it is correct, I alter my statement or endorsement and if it is incorrect, I tell the person he/she is wrong and show where. If the person is merely playing "Gotcha!" and word games, I say that, too, and bow out.

I see an enormous difference intellectually between the following two attitudes:

QUESTIONER: You endorsed so-and-so, yet he was wrong here and here and here and here and here. [Gives quotes and examples.] Are you endorsing those wrong facts?

PERSON: The real issue is the following: [fill in the blank with anything but what was asked].

QUESTIONER: You endorsed so-and-so, yet he was wrong here and here and here and here and here. [Gives quotes and examples.] Are you endorsing those wrong facts?

PERSON: You're right. So-and-so gets his facts screwed up. He should work on that and I certainly do not hold his wrong facts as right. But I like his attitude and that's the part I endorse.

I see Attitude 1 as tribal and weak. I see Attitude 2 as putting concern with reason first. It is strong without ceding ground (if you are of a competitive nature). It separates the cognitive from the normative for correct identification and analysis.

I'm a bit of a stickler for accuracy. The more I live, the more I tune out arguments that are based on inaccurate facts, even when they are right (for the wrong reasons).

I have learned to use my own mind in the following manner (I actually chose this): get the facts right, then evaluate.

I have seen too many instances for comfort of Objectivists doing the following (I used to do this): instantly evaluate, then fudge the facts.

The present case is one of those instances. It's just not necessary to fudge facts. Fudging facts weakens arguments to everyone but a small clique.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I do not agree that the two statements are the same, and I consider the first statement epistemologically inadmissable, since it's the assertion of a negative which is impossible to demonstrate.

Ellen,

I can't resist.

I got the following one from here and I got a kick out of it:

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room retorted, "Yeah, right."

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Very funny, ha, re the double negative, Michael. (It's a quip I've seen before, btw.)

However, the issue here isn't one of grammar and of double negatives. It's an issue of what can and cannot be demonstrated.

The issue is at the basis of English jurisprudence in the form of "innocent until proven guilty." Here's an example of why this principle is so important for jurisprudence:

Prove that you never committed a murder.

How would you go about proving that?

Instead, there has to be evidence linking you to a particular murder before you can be investigated for the particular crime. (At least that's how our legal system is supposed to work.)

Ellen

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[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

I know that stuff about not proving a negative (even Rand stated this on explaining why atheism is not a fundamental concept or axiom in Objectivism), but it's good to say it again for newbies. I agree with you.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

In post #224, Neil writes regarding "Peikoff's claim that Kant was the cause of Nazism".

His [Kant's] name rarely pops up in books on Nazi Germany or biographies of Hitler. In fact, it appears they rather disliked the guy.

They did -- although they liked Hegel.

I hope I'm not going to be greeted by accusations of such simplistic causal thinking as Peikoff displayed if I proceed to post some things which intimate a more direct relationship between Kant and Nazism. I became curious to see what might be found. Material isn't easy to dig up -- or at least I'm not finding it with ease. A lot of the sources I located are articles of which you can only get the first paragraph without either paying a fee or subscribing to a publication's archives.

AR -- and LP -- aren't the only ones to have seen a connection. The main other places I'm finding where a direct connection is proposed is in articles by, on the one hand, Christians, and on the other by what's called The Frankfurt School of Marxism-influenced thinkers and, interestingly, by some admirers of Foucault.

There are a number of Christian writers who draw connections. Their antipathy to Kant is along similar lines to Rand's -- the wiping out of the grounds of certainty, including moral certainty.

Here is a link to the section on Kant from a long article which appeared in the National Catholic Register in 1988:

The Pillars of Unbelief

by Peter Kreeft

National Catholic Register

Jan-Feb 1988

The article opens with:

Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers with an enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the Christian mind:

• Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

• Kant - subjectivizer of Truth

• Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"

• Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"

• Marx - false Moses for the masses, and

• Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

The section on Kant begins:

Few philosophers in history have been so unreadable and dry as Immanuel Kant. Yet few have had a more devastating impact on human thought.

Kant's devoted servant, Lumppe, is said to have faithfully read each thing his master published, but when Kant published his most important work, "The Critique of Pure Reason," Lumppe began but did not finish it because, he said, if he were to finish it, it would have to be in a mental hospital. Many students since then have echoed his sentiments.

Yet this abstract professor, writing in abstract style about abstract questions, is, I believe, the primary source of the idea that today imperils faith (and thus souls) more than any other; the idea that truth is subjective.

The simple citizens of his native Konigsburg, Germany, where he lived and wrote in the latter half of the 18th century, understood this better than professional scholars, for they nicknamed Kant "The Destroyer" and named their dogs after him.

He was a good-tempered, sweet and pious man, so punctual that his neighbors set their clocks by his daily walk. The basic intention of his philosophy was noble: to restore human dignity amidst a skeptical world worshiping science.

This intent becomes clear through a single anecdote. Kant was attending a lecture by a materialistic astronomer on the topic of man's place in the universe. The astronomer concluded his lecture with: "So you see that astronomically speaking, man is utterly insignificant." Kant replied: "Professor, you forgot the most important thing, man is the astronomer."

Kant, more than any other thinker, gave impetus to the typically modern turn from the objective to the subjective. This may sound fine until we realize that it meant for him the redefinition of truth itself as subjective. And the consequences of this idea have been catastrophic.

___

[Newberry]

Michael,

There is one tendency in many Objectivist intellectuals that bothers me and you just demonstrated it. I want to step outside the different ideas a moment and talk about a method of reasoning and discussing. I mention this because I had to discipline it in myself and in no way am I trying to be hostile.

Jonathan challenged your praise of a person who was not accurate and he cited where the inaccuracies and misrepresentations were. (And it went way beyond the game of "Gotcha!") You let the inaccuracies and misrepresentations slide with your endorsement because you identify with the poster's attitude.

I can't think of anything that weakens an Objectivist argument more than this kind of rhetorical behavior. What it communicates between the lines is:

"I don't care if he's wrong. He's one of mine and he struck a blow for truth (etc. etc. etc.), so to hell with the facts. Facts are not all that important. You don't need to acknowledge them."

Within a context of ideas, this transmits that reason is not the governing value in the discussion, but the tribe is.

I also see Objectivists defend this tribal behavior by calling certain questions dishonest and using that as an excuse not to answer them. (You don't do that.)

Nowadays, I hold as a personal standard that anytime anyone questions the accuracy of what I state or what I endorse, I check it. Accuracy is a premise that always needs checking. It is never a waste of time.

Then I comment on the charge of inaccuracy. It is either correct or incorrect. If it is correct, I alter my statement or endorsement and if it is incorrect, I tell the person he/she is wrong and show where. If the person is merely playing "Gotcha!" and word games, I say that, too, and bow out.

I see an enormous difference intellectually between the following two attitudes:

QUESTIONER: You endorsed so-and-so, yet he was wrong here and here and here and here and here. [Gives quotes and examples.] Are you endorsing those wrong facts?

PERSON: The real issue is the following: [fill in the blank with anything but what was asked].

QUESTIONER: You endorsed so-and-so, yet he was wrong here and here and here and here and here. [Gives quotes and examples.] Are you endorsing those wrong facts?

PERSON: You're right. So-and-so gets his facts screwed up. He should work on that and I certainly do not hold his wrong facts as right. But I like his attitude and that's the part I endorse.

I see Attitude 1 as tribal and weak. I see Attitude 2 as putting concern with reason first. It is strong without ceding ground (if you are of a competitive nature). It separates the cognitive from the normative for correct identification and analysis.

I'm a bit of a stickler for accuracy. The more I live, the more I tune out arguments that are based on inaccurate facts, even when they are right (for the wrong reasons).

I have learned to use my own mind in the following manner (I actually chose this): get the facts right, then evaluate.

I have seen too many instances for comfort of Objectivists doing the following (I used to do this): instantly evaluate, then fudge the facts.

The present case is one of those instances. It's just not necessary to fudge facts. Fudging facts weakens arguments to everyone but a small clique.

Michael

It would be more helpful if you were more clear. You seem to be calling me tribal, a bullshitter on facts, and thoughtless in my evaluations. Let me know if I didn't understand you correctly.

[Ellen Stuttle]

Another strand of seeing Kantian influence on Nazism comes through neo-Marxist thought -- especially, I gather, through what's called "The Frankfurt School."

The chain of influence from Kant to Hegel to Marx is well-known, and Hegelian influence has I think been implicated pretty often in the rise of Nazism. (Also the influence of Luther on Hitler.)

See, e.g., these entries which I get as the first to appear when I Google "Hitler Hegel" (without the quote marks):

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

In later years, a fellow German, Adolf Hitler, rose to this Hegelian bait. If one needs an example of a philosophy which can lead millions of people into ...

www.blupete.com/Literature/ Biographies/Philosophy/Hegel.htm - 15k

Hegel: Philosophy and history as theology.

Hegel had an immense influence on German thought - not always positive. Some of his ideas had a clear aftermath stretching down to Hitler: his insistence on ...

members.aol.com/pantheism0/hegel.htm - 20k

Hegelian Dialectics and Conspiracy

Both Marx and Hitler have their philosophical roots in Hegel. From the Hegelian system of political thought, alien to most of us in the West, ...

www.biblebelievers.org.au/bb970219.htm - 46k

But I think that the suggestion that Kant's own work had a direct relationship isn't common in the academic tradition.

However, I came across a link to part of a discussion thread from a weblist of Foucault adherents.

Lo and behold, there's a criticism raised of Kant (to the surprise of at least one of the list members) as being implicated in the rise of Nazism.

http://www.foucault.info/Foucault-L/archive/msg01519.shtml

The criticism is from the contrary angle to Rand's. She sees Kant's effect as anti-reason. The person speaking against Kant here is critical of what he calls Kant's "totalism" in regard to reason.

Mentioned is earlier critique by the Frankfurt School along the same lines.

So...I did some searching trying to find out details about the history and views of that group.

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

One source I found on the Frankfurt School -- link -- is an anthology of readings titled:

The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers

edited and with an Introduction by Eduardo Mendieta

Here's an excerpt from the Introduction:

Introduction

Religion as Critique

Theology as Social Critique and Enlightened Reason

Eduardo Mendieta

Copyright © 2005 by Routledge

[three paragraph breaks added]

This anthology provides the reader with an overview, as well as samplings, of the contributions that the Frankfurt School made to the study and critique of religion. The Frankfurt School was not the original name of the school, nor was it a school per se. Rather, this intellectual institution and school of thought began in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and was affiliated with the Goethe University in the city of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The director of the Institute was also to be appointed to the university faculty. During the early 1920s, the Institute for Social Research was affiliated with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and contributed to the publication of the up to then unknown Marx manuscripts. 

With the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933, the Institute went into exile, first in Switzerland, where an affiliated office had been established, and then in 1934 to New York. During World War II, the Institute set up offices in a building next to Columbia University, where it proceeded to engage in empirical research on "prejudice" and "anti-Semitism." In 1951 the Institute for Social Research returned to Frankfurt. 

Fredrick Pollack, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno returned to conduct research under the auspices of the Institute, to teach at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and to have a very active public intellectual life in Germany, while most of the other members remained in the United States, notably Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer. 

These are the most elemental historical facts, but they hardly begin to tell us anything about the profound and epochal mark that the Institute for Social Research has left on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first certuries.

___

[Dragonfly]

The issue is at the basis of English jurisprudence in the form of "innocent until proven guilty."

Exactly. You are innocent until proven guilty, one doesn't say: "well, I don't know, I can't prove that you are innocent, nor that you're guilty, so according to the epistemologists I may not say that you're innocent, that would be a positive statement that I cannot prove." In the same way we may say that God does not exist if it hasn't been proved that he does exist. Now I have the suspicion that people will have seldom problems with this if they are asked whether Zeus exists or whether a teapot is orbiting Pluto, saying that they're agnostic about that as you can't prove that these statements are not true.

[Ellen Stuttle]

Another item I found -- here -- reverts to the subject of Kant and aesthetics.

This is a review of a book titled:

Kant and the Power of Imagination

by Jane Kneller, Cambridge University Press, 2007

The review is by James Schmidt, Boston University

and appeared in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2008.07.05

I recommend reading the whole review, since it provides a fairly straightforward and brief explication of how Kant's aesthetics relates to his total work.

Kant tends to be viewed as one of the most stalwart defenders of the Enlightenment, Romantic writers like Novalis have long been cast in the role of the Enlightenment's most vigorous critics, and the relationship of German idealism to Kant's philosophy has always been troubled -- though Fichte saw himself as completing Kant's system, Kant rejected his efforts in no uncertain terms. Not the least of the virtues of Jane Kneller's fine study is that it unsettles the conventional picture of late eighteenth-century German thought by introducing readers to a Kant who had far more in common with Novalis and his colleagues than with Fichte and his. Along the way she explores the ambiguous function of the imagination in Kant's critical enterprise, untangles the philosophical commitments of the first generation of Romantics, and sheds a good deal of light on the extent to which the Jena Romantics might be seen as advancing at least some of the ideals associated with the Enlightenment.

[....]

[....] Unlike Fichte, who sought to construct his system on the basis of an analysis of the subject, Novalis and his colleagues shared Kant's doubts about the capacity of the subject to provide a complete account of itself (29-30, 33-34, 35-36). At the same time, they were also intrigued by the suggestion, sketched by Kant in the third Critique, that aesthetics might provide something more than an account of the category of "taste": it pointed the way towards "a theory of imagination as a creative force in human motivation and in nature" (36).

Over the next four chapters, Kneller explores the role of imagination in Kant's thought, beginning with a discussion of the place of the Critique of Judgment within the broader discussion of the idea of freedom in eighteenth-century political philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Kant, she notes, was unique among Enlightenment aesthetic theorists in his rejection of the "rationalist view that the ultimate purpose of art is the perfection of humanity" (45): he argued that aesthetic reflection was not subject to "the legislation of the understanding (i.e. to the categories)" and, as a result, is free from any "cognitive determination -- it does not involve predicating empirical concepts of the object" (43). It is likewise free of all "moral determination" since aesthetic reflection does not concern itself with the question of whether the objects it considers are morally good or whether they may promote moral virtues (43). Yet despite Kant's concern to distinguish aesthetic reflection from moral or cognitive judgments, the Critique of Judgment still held out the possibility that the freedom enjoyed by the imagination might offer something more than "a temporary respite from a morally hostile world":

[....]

The third chapter takes a closer look at Kant's aesthetic theory, focusing on analogies between the role of the category of "interest" in Kant's moral theory and his aesthetics.

[....]

But though Kant continued to be fascinated by the persistence with which the imagination sought to transcend the limits of the understanding, he was unwilling to grant this inherently unruly faculty "a status equal to that of the 'law-governed' branches of human experience" (120). That step was left for the first generation of Romantics and it is to their thought that Kneller turns in the final two chapters of her book.

[....]

The book's final chapter takes stock of the relationship between Kant and Novalis, arguing that they were as one in the conviction that a "longing and striving for the absolute, the unconditioned, was an essential characteristic of human reason that neither could nor should be entirely suppressed" but that actual knowledge of such an absolute could never be achieved. They regarded those who -- like Fichte -- claimed to have secured such knowledge as victims of "transcendent delusions" (159-160). What differentiated them, Kneller argues, was the stance they took towards their recognition of the limits of human reason. Kant was "relatively sanguine", while Novalis was less so: hence his persistence in pursuing the implications of Kant's account of the imagination along lines that Kant left unexplored.

[....]

The resemblance between Kant's account of the "unconscious ideation" that guides the performer of the fantasia and the discussion of the mental capacities that constitute "genius" in the Critique of Judgment points, in Kneller's view, to a capacity that all human beings share: "the ability to produce aesthetic ideas -- 'inner intuitions to which no concept can be completely adequate.'" This ability, she argues, offers a possibility of "surpassing nature" and entering into "a realm of what ought to be as opposed to what is." [....] there can be no question about the importance of Kneller's work in clarifying how Novalis and others of his generation -- who took very seriously the problem of the split that Kant was seen as having opened between the domains of nature and freedom -- read Kant. The first generation of German Romantics have, for much too long, been consigned to the ranks of the so-called "Counter-Enlightenment." The great virtue of Kneller's study is that it helps us to see how they could have regarded themselves, for better or worse, simply as good Kantians.

___