Logos

by Tallis Raymond

Robert Grosseteste, De Luce. Full disclosure: I have spent some thirty years dreaming of, planning, writing, and not completing a vast poetic work – De Luce – that would capture the profundity of this thought. My alma mater Oxford University – of which Grosseteste was the first Chancellor – has as its motto, Dominus Illuminatio Mea, the opening words of Psalm 27.

  30.

  I owe what follows to a characteristically generous communication from Robert Jackson. Jackson suggested that perhaps I should call my proposed book (vide supra) De Sono rather than De Luce. Logos, he points out, which has as its primary meaning “word” probably comes from its nature as a collection of sounds rather than from the more indirect connection represented by the notion of a word as denoting a collection of visible objects.

  31.

  Valéry, “On Poe’s ‘Eureka’” in Volume 8 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, 171.

  32.

  Speech as “hot air” is a familiar – all too familiar – trope.

  33.

  The wind, of course, could also be seen as the principle of Chaos as well as of order. Arresting the advance of chaos, and indeed winnowing order out of Chaos is the essential role of technology.

  CHAPTER 3

  1.

  Plotinus, Enneads 1.6, “On Beauty” Para. 9. It is part of his argument to the effect that we could not experience things unless we were like them. Only beautiful souls can experience beauty, and one has to have something of the Divine in oneself to be able to see the Divinity in God.

  2.

  Redding, “Hegel”.

  3.

  The passage is from Sebastian Gardner’s excellent Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, 1–2. I am very grateful to Professor Gardner for a rich and detailed response to some of my criticisms of Kant. In particular, he cautions against talk of “individual minds” and “minds-in-general”, preferring “subjects of knowledge”. I am not sure that this entirely dispels the problem that I have set out below. He addresses my concern that Kant exploits what we might call “a constructive ambiguity” between “mind-in-general” and token minds. The contrast, he argues, is false because the faculties of mind are not individuated in tokens such as Mr Smith and Mrs Jones. The correct analogy is with “an understanding of the Italian language” which has “particular realizations that are not of the same order as the individuals that realize them. And they do not depend for their existence on the latter; remove all human beings and there is still an understanding of Italian … even if nobody has it” (personal communication).

  Gardner’s analogy does not seem to reach to the depths at which space and time are constructed. What is more, “realizations” require minds. Even so, I have a residual uneasiness that I may not have taken sufficient account of Gardner’s response to my critique of Kant.

  4.

  Kant, Critique, 92. The idea that the mind is entirely passive in receiving “impressions” (a term that reinforces this connotation of passivity) should not be allowed to pass without comment. It assumes that at a certain level the (material) world is self-intimating through interactions with the sense-endings; that Being makes itself Presence courtesy of interaction with, for example, a nervous system. We shall return to this in Chapter 4.

  5.

  Kant, Critique, 68 (A23/B37–8).

  6.

  Ibid., 82.

  7.

  Ibid. This striking claim is reiterated in Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic: “[W]e must not seek the universal laws of nature from nature by means of experience, but, conversely, must seek nature, as regards its universal conformity to the law, solely in the conditions of the possibility of experience that lie in our sensibility and understanding”. (AA 04:34) quoted in Pollok, “The Understanding Prescribes Laws of Nature”, 514. In short, the laws are not given in, or to, experience but imposed by the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience. If there were any doubt about how we should take this, Kant asserts that understanding has the function “of prescribing laws to nature, and even making nature possible” (Critique B159). This prompted G. E. Moore “to read Kant as holding that the psychological activity of the subject literally constitutes the non-psychological domain” (Gomes, “Kant, the Philosophy of Mind and Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy”, 17).

  8.

  Kant, Critique, 41.

  9.

  Kant was not unaware of this. Ironically, it was one of the key drivers to his Critique as is revealed in his famous letter to his friend Marcus Herz in 1772, at the start of his 10-year struggle to formulate his definitive position. He puzzled how “a representation that refers to an object without being in any way affected by it can be possible” (quoted in Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, 29). If the individual object, set in a particular place and a particular time, is not in some sense the source or occasion of the experience that locates it in a particular place and a particular time, then it is difficult to distinguish an hallucination from a veridical experience. For experiences truly to be of objects, the latter must affect us and affect us because of our spatio-temporal location. Kant himself was entirely open about the fact that (as Gardner – a sympathetic commentator – puts it): “The nature of the connection between the fact of the existence of things in themselves, and the fact of our being supplied with the material for constituting appearances, is something of which we have no idea” (Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, 289).

  Our natural inclination is to say that the thing-in-itself affects the mind, that it causes our experiences of it. If the representation of things were not caused by those things, then they would seem to be unanchored, even illusions. This view seems to be held by Kant himself, as glossed by Gardner: “the transcendental object [i.e. the noumenon] is the underlying ground or cause of inner and outer appearances” (ibid., 153).

  10.

  In this respect, it is analogous to the alternative universes in the “multiverse” interpretation of quantum mechanics. There is no way of accessing these alternative worlds as they are causally disconnected from any reality we could experience or know. Like the noumenal realm, they seem to have been generated by the need to continue beyond the point where intelligibility gives out. Their character is determined solely by the reasons for which they have been requisitioned. They are face-savers defined by the faces they save. To put this another way, the (experienced) world would be no different if the noumenal realm did not exist. (I owe this last point to Roger Jennings, personal communication.) At any rate, the featurelessness of the noumenal realm is jealously protected by Kantians, as if this were a positive feature, instead of a problematic one, given that it seems to remove the capacity of this ground to ground anything in particular.

  11.

  Tom McClelland (personal communication).

  12.

  In a lucid and intelligent brief summary of the Critique, Nathan Bjorge points out that I have experiences at particular times, which presupposes that (if they are not hallucinations) they have been triggered by encounters at particular times (“The Self as Noumenon”).

  If we propose that there is a division in the noumenal realm between those noumena of which objects are appearances and those which correspond to (transcendental) subjects, then we have a further problem of understanding how the items in these divisions interact. It looks as though we have the mind-body problem in a new guise. Schopenhauer – in his The World as Will and Idea – saw the self as a point of access to the noumenal realm: I directly experience a thing-in-itself in virtue of being a thing-in-itself. This is unlikely to have been a development of which Kant would have approved. As Gardner (Kant and the Critique, 298) points out, he opposed the idea that “we know ourselves as we are in ourselves”. At any rate, the idea of a transparent self that has immediate veridical knowledge of itself is highly suspect, as has been widely discussed in contemporary philosophy (we shall touch on it in Chapter 5).

  In fairness to Kant, we ought to mention that the empiricist
alternative does not fare any better. The notion of objects as logical constructions or (to use Quine’s phrase) “posits” out of sense data or sense experiences makes it difficult to understand the role (if any) that objects have in prompting and justifying the experiences that are had of them. Objects seem to appear twice: once downstream from experiences as fictions or at least theoretical constructed out of them; and a second time upstream of experiences as causing (veridical) experiences.

  13.

  Strawson, Bounds of Sense, 92–3.

  14.

  Gardner, Kant and the Critique, 302.

  15.

  Does this, perhaps, put the cart before the horse? There must surely need to be a self in place before ownership of perceptions can be ascribed to it and it can then gather itself up as a coherent sequence of experiences belonging to the same subject or story. The self in question is not, however, a substantive self – so Kant is not committing the cardinal sin of putting the Descartes before the horse – but “a form of consciousness by which we are aware of ourselves as the (single) subject of all our (conscious) mental states” (Gomes, “Kant, the Philosophy of Mind and Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy”, 7.)

  16.

  Quassim Cassam, turning Kant on his head, argues that “the subject of self-conscious experience must be conceived of as a physical object” and that “to be self-conscious one must be conscious of one’s self as a corporeal object among corporeal objects” (Self and World, 112). This view is further developed in Tallis, I Am, especially, 113–29.

  17.

  As Tom McClelland has suggested to me (personal communication).

  18.

  “Thus the understanding is something more than a power of formulating rules through comparison of experiences; it is itself the lawgiver of nature” (Critique, 148 (A126)).

  19.

  There is an important and interesting ambiguity here. Does Kant mean the laws as they have been hitherto discovered, which will be superseded as science progresses, or “laws of nature” as the ultimate goal, the asymptote or regulative idea, of science, laws not conditioned by the limiting context of a particular stage in the history of inquiry or the history of culture? It would seem that Kant erases the difference between provisional laws – such as those related to phlogiston – and more general and powerful laws closer to the asymptote tagged by the moniker “the theory of everything”. They are both products of the “synthetic activity of the mind”. And he also segues past the standing of the very idea of “laws of nature”. Are they items inherent in nature itself? This connects with the old question as to whether nature was an expression of Newton’s laws of motion before Newton discovered them.

  20.

  Kant, Critique, A114.

  21.

  Ibid., A125.

  22.

  There is another difficulty for Kant arising out of the co-emergence of the unity of the object and the unity of the self, or the unity of the world and the unity of the subject; namely that multiplicity is as important as unity. We have considerable discretion in how we divide the world. We can attend to the room, the chair in the room, the seat of the chair, the tear in the seat. As we adjust the acuity of our attention, so parts acquire the status of wholes or vice versa. What is more, the synthesis of parts into wholes has extra-mental constraints: the tear in the seat is an aspect of the fabric of the seat but we cannot see the tear as part of a city.

  23.

  Gardner, Kant and the Critique, 160.

  24.

  The discussion in the preceding paragraphs has been informed by a helpful paper by Siyaves Azeri, “Transcendental Self and Empirical Self”.

  25.

  There is another fundamental problem that is worth noting: that Kant seems himself to transcend the boundaries he places on the possibility of knowledge. Whereas, it is acceptable for the categories of the understanding to make visible the forms of sensible intuition, there does not seem to be any mental faculty that makes visible the categories of the understanding and their role in organizing experience. They should be as beyond reach as the noumenal realm. It has been suggested to me (Tom McClelland, personal communication) that we can know the categories through their synthetic activity. This would presuppose that we can know a process through its products but such “backward transparency” does not seem to be the way of the world. The analogy with the idea of knowing God through His works has little to commend it to one of a secular disposition.

  It seems, therefore, that Kant trespasses beyond his own self-imposed limits by claiming to know that there are real and permanent constraints on the understanding and that these are imposed by the mind. His rejection of the metaphysics of predecessors such as Leibniz seems to illustrate something that F. H. Bradley said: that a philosopher who “is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible … is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles … To say the reality is such that our knowledge cannot reach it, is to claim to know reality; to urge that our knowledge is of a kind that must fail to transcend appearance, itself implies that transcendence” (Appearance and Reality, 1).

  26.

  The problem with (e.g., Lockean) atomism as a prompt to the development of Kantian modes of unification of the world is lucidly set out by Mark Sacks in Objectivity and Insight.

  27.

  Heidegger, Being and Time, 249.

  28.

  For a more detailed discussion, see Tallis, A Conversation with Martin Heidegger. Jan Patocka has highlighted this point from a different angle. It is “on the basis of their corporeity” that “humans are not only the beings of distance but also the beings of proximity, rooted beings, not only innerworldly beings but beings in the world” (Body, Community, Language, World, 178). Patocka criticizes Heidegger not for denying corporeity, “or denying that we are also objectively among objects” but because “he does not … recognise it as the foundation of our life, which it is” (176). Interestingly, Patocka notes another problem with Heidegger’s thought, namely that there is “too much that is anthropological” and “an excessive emphasis on what is close to humanity” (168) and a relative neglect of “the primordial, natural world, the world which is not constructed by our mind, by our explicit cognitive activity, the world as it is given” (167). The same could be said of Kant, except that for the latter this was central to his entire system.

  29.

  The “observer” who seems to be placed at the centre of relativity theory and quantum mechanics is in fact a set of numbers or a mathematical structure (see Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, especially “The Erasure of the Observer”). This makes it plausible to interpret the notion that the ultimate reality is “information”, as a refashioning of transcendental idealism. Interestingly, macroscopic objects – necessary for the experiments upon which quantum field theory is based – elude quantum subject dependency. The ghost that haunts subatomic spaces deserts objects such as pebbles, trees and tables.

  30.

  Nagel, View from Nowhere, 9. Nagel’s observation is a distant echo of Alfred North Whitehead’s reference to “the muddle of importing the mere procedures of thought into the facts of nature” (The Concept of Nature, 20).

  31.

  I have not discussed the idea of “pre-established harmony” according to which – despite the lack of causal relationship between them – mind and body, mind and world are in harmony (so that mind gives a veridical account of the world) because they are programmed at the Creation to be coordinated. This seems less like an explanation than an abdication of the duty to explain.

  32.

  Describing all conscious content as “inner” does not capture the fact that some elements seem “more inner” than others. My gut sensations (that have minimal intentionality) and my thoughts and memories (that have intentional objects that lack a clear location in any outside – in the sense of extra-corporeal space) seem more inner than vision – a revelation of the seen world whose inwardness is efface
d by the outwardness of what seeing sees.

  The fact that much of my body is outside – even that part of it which is hidden from me because it is inside (for example, my spleen) – reveals how complex is the boundary between inside and outside. There could be no more intimate inside than my body in my clothes but my socked feet or my gloved hands can be relocated outside by being employed as tools. The inside/outside contrast in the shared world – the world of the match in the matchbox – does not map onto subject (inside)/outside (object) contrast.

  33.

  The sequence of events is also internalized, being organized according to the “inner sense” that is time. The contrast between the “outer sense” of space – that locates things out there and side-by-side – and the “inner sense” of time would be problematic if it were taken literally. It would suggest a) space is “outside” time; b) that temporal sequences are even more intimately internal than spatial arrays.

  34.

  Quoted in Gardner, Kant and the Critique, 185.

  35.

  We should not be entirely satisfied with Heidegger’s notion of our being “thrown” into the world. As Patocka noted (see note 27) Heidegger’s world is “anthropomorphic”, which does not encompass “the primordial dark night of existents”, including “brute existents” such as “a hunk of lava on the moon” (168). Morgan makes an interesting comparison between Kant and Heidegger: “If Kant is looking for the conditions of the possibility [of] objective empirical knowledge, Heidegger is looking for the conditions of possibility for the fact that reality shows up at all” (The Kantian Catastrophe?, 86).