Summer vacation with Leonard Peikoff

[seddon]

Summer vacation with Leonard Peikoff

by Fred Seddon

What did I do on my summer vacation you ask. I went to Galt’s Gulch, i.e., Ouray, Colorado. Since I drove, that means I had to find a way to use 36 hours of driving time for something more than watching white lines go by. So I took my IPod, filled with more music than I could listen to in two weeks, but, I also took Leonard Peikoff with me. Specifically, Volume Two of his The History of Philosophy, Kant to the Present. I got both volumes about 11 years ago and although I have listened to all 48 tapes at least twice, it has been a while since my last listening, so I decided now was the time, at least for Volume Two.

These tapes were made, according to the labels, in 1970 and Peikoff never sounded better. I first heard Peikoff on tape in 1966 and my first impression was that his voice was a cross between Daffy Duck (he has a slight lisp) and Bob Newhart—and I just loved the sound of his voice. On the trip, there were times when I actually preferred listening to LP than to music. Go figure.

I am going to focus on his Kant exegesis, and I want to start by telling how impressed I still am at his attempt to lecture to a group of non-graduate students on the “Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.” The “Forms of Intuition” would have been tough enough, but come on. I can’t believe that most in the audience could have followed the entire presentation.

After listening to the four tapes on Kant twice, I have several differences that I would like to note. Three to be exact.

(1) Reason can’t know reality; (2) “collective subjectivism” is still “subjectivism;” and (3) Kant is a primacy of consciousness philosopher.

Before I begin, I want to say that it is very frustrating to a scholar to have to deal with tapes. It’s almost impossible to give decent references and I’m not about to sit here and run, say, Lecture 2, Tape 1, Side A and time how many minutes and seconds it take LP to get to a particular topic. So there will be not quotations from him, just paraphrases. Almost all the material on Kant can be found in Lectures 2 and 3.

(1) Early on in his presentation, LP tells us that for Kant, “Reason cannot know reality.” Allow me to quote me from my article, “Uncle Kant: Enlightenment Hero and Proto-Objectivist.” published on the old SOLOHQ.

Here is what Kant says — if anyone cares to hear what the Enlightenment giant himself actually said. 1. We can have no theoretical knowledge of the noumena. 2. We can have practical knowledge of the noumena. 3. Items that we think in the noumena do serve the purposes of science in the following way — they provide us with a basic presupposition of rational inquiry, to wit: that we can systematize our knowledge into an integral whole. This is not something we discover through experience but rather a presupposition of that very experience. 4. And the concepts we use have a heuristic function rather than a constitutive one.

So there is a sense in which LP is right, reason cannot know reality if by reason you mean theoretical reason and if by reality you mean noumenal reality. But that doesn’t mean, and here is where LP is misleading, that we have no cognitive access to noumenal reality: we can have cognitive access in at least two ways: (1) practical knowledge and (2) we may “think” noumenal reality and use such thoughts as heuristic devices in order to do science.

(2) After presenting Kant's doctrine of categories, LP asks the question, does that mean that any individual can foist any category he wants on reality based on nothing but whim. To which he answers, correctly, “No.” Human nature is determined to have these twelve categories and it’s not a matter of individual whim what those categories are. So one might conclude that Kant is not a subjectivist. But LP doesn’t make that move. Instead he calls Kant a “collective subjectivist,” and says that, alas, that still make him a subjectivist since “collective subjectivism” is still subjectivism.

But I think there is an equivocation here. According to Rand, “Subjectivism is the belief that reality . . . can be altered . . . by the consciousness of the perceiver—i.e., by his feeling, wishes or whims.” But for Kant, man cannot alter his categories or reality at all, let alone “by his feeling, wishes or whims.”

(3) Kant is a primacy of consciousness philosopher. In order to assess the truth of this claim we must remember what Objectivism says the primacy of consiousness is. It is the rejection of the primacy of existence, which claims that “the universe exists independent of consciousness.” (PWNI 29) The primacy of consciousness turns the mind from the perception of reality to the creation of reality. Now I have answer this charge at length in my book AYN RAND, OBJECTIVISTS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, chapter 4. Suffice it to say here that it is the noumenal world that makes Kant into a realist, a primacy of existence philosopher. Before any kind of cognition can take place, even and especially perception, something has to be given to consciousness, which for Kant is an organ of receptivity. It is metaphysically passive vis-à-vis the matter of perception. For Kant, the mind provides only the form of perception. From this I can only conclude that Kant is not a primacy of consciousness philosopher.

What a vacation!

Fred

[Jerry Biggers]

Ummm, Fred....Why did you want to do this to yourself? Was this sort of an Objectivist equivalent of self-flagellation? Well, I suppose that somebody has to do it.

But wouldn't it have been more interesting if Leonard had been there with you, for some extended give-and-take, and it was all recorded for posterity! Now THAT would be a set of tapes that I would enjoy listening to!

But somehow, I just can't envision ARI offering the complete "Seddon/Peikoff exchange" tape sets for sale. Well, maybe after a little "editing," the kind of which ARI has become (in)famous for.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Fred,

I moved this topic here to "Chewing on Ideas" as it seemed more suited to this and not a criticism of Objectivism, like where it was.

I find your take on Kant fascinating, although I have not read any of his books yet. It is a good thing people like you are in Objectivism and keep the "me-too" denouncers who do not read honest.

As I understand what you were saying, the 12 categories of human nature is something Kant arrived at through rational induction. That is why it is not arbitrary (meaning that Kant made up the word noumena, said, "that's me," and started proclaiming stuff at whim that is descended from there). Is that correct? That would be a start on a new understanding I have of Kant.

He claimed that the existence of induction itself comes from the noumena, but not the use of it, which has specific rational rules to be valid. Is that correct?

I have other questions, but I need to read the stuff first.

Michael