The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant presents a fascinating summary of Kant’s philosophy, which, otherwise, is quite difficult to understand. Here is the whole summary: Immanuel Kant and German Idealism
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Durant introduces Kant as follows:
NEVER has a system of thought so dominated an epoch as the philosophy of Immanuel Kant dominated the thought of the nineteenth century. After almost three-score years of quiet and secluded development, the uncanny Scot of Konigsberg roused the world from its “dogmatic slumber,” in 1781, with his famous Critique of Pure Reason; and from that year to our own the “critical philosophy” has ruled the speculative roost of Europe. The philosophy of Schopenhauer rose to brief power on the romantic wave that broke in 1848; the theory of evolution swept everything before it after 1859; and the exhilarating iconoclasm of Nietzsche won the center of the philosophic stage as the century came to a close. But these were secondary and surface developments; underneath them the strong and steady current of the Kantian movement flowed on, always wider and deeper; until today its essential theorems are the axioms of all mature philosophy. Nietzsche takes Kant for granted, and passes on; Schopenhauer calls the Critique “the most important work in German literature,” and considers any man a child until he has understood Kant; Spencer could not understand Kant, and for precisely that reason, perhaps, fell a little short of the fullest philosophic stature. To adapt Hegel’s phrase about Spinoza: to be a philosopher, one must first have been a Kantian…
Here is how Durant starts out with his summary of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
The Critique comes to the point at once. “Experience is by no means the only field to which our understanding can be confined. Experience tells us what is, but not that it must be necessarily what it is and not otherwise. It therefore never gives us any really general truths; and our reason, which is particularly anxious for that class of knowledge, is roused by it rather than satisfied. General truths, which at the same time bear the character of an inward necessity, must be independent of experience,—clear and certain in themselves.” That is to say, they must be true no matter what our later experience may be; true even before experience; true a priori. “How far we can advance independently of all experience, in a priori knowledge, is shown by the brilliant example of mathematics.” Mathematical knowledge is necessary and certain; we cannot conceive of future experience violating it. We may believe that the sun will “rise” in the west to-morrow, or that someday, in some conceivable asbestos world, fire will not burn stick; but we cannot for the life of us believe that two times two will ever make anything else than four. Such truths are true before experience; they do not depend on experience past, present, or to come. Therefore they are absolute and necessary truths; it is inconceivable that they should ever become untrue. But whence do we get this character of absoluteness and necessity? Not from experience; for experience gives us nothing but separate sensations and events, which may alter their sequence in the future. These truths derive their necessary character from the inherent structure of our minds, from the natural and inevitable manner in which our minds must operate. For the mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of Kant) is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ which molds and coordinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought…
Kant’s thoughts are the ultimate in philosophy at the moment. I shall be posting my comments based on this summary of Kant’s philosophy.
COMMENTS:
Mindfulness looks at mind as a sense organ that perceives mental objects. All knowledge is derived from physical and mental sense-experience. It is an arbitrary assumption that “pure” reason is to mean knowledge that does not come through our senses, but is independent of all sense experience.
Knowledge seems to exist as associations among data. This data may be perceived as being arranged in a matrix form. Each node of the matrix may be perceived as a matrix in its own right. This may keep on going to any number of levels. This is the inherent nature and structure of the mind.
Pure knowledge is characterized by continuity, harmony and consistency in this matrix at all levels. Knowledge does not become impure just by being sensed. Knowledge becomes impure to the degree it is discontinuous, disharmonious and inconsistent in its matrix.
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Comments
Durant writes,
Nevertheless, this certainty, this absoluteness, of the highest generalizations of logic and science, is, paradoxically, limited and relative: limited strictly to the field of actual experience, and relative strictly to our human mode of experience. For if our analysis has been correct, the world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost—one might say—a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its molding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli. (So we perceive the top of the table as round, whereas our sensation is of an ellipse.) The object as it appears to us is a phenomenon, an appearance, perhaps very different from the external object before it came within the ken of our senses; what that original object was we can never know; the “thing-in-itself” may be an object of thought or inference (a “noumenon”), but it cannot be experienced,—for in being experienced it would be changed by its passage through sense and thought. “It remains completely unknown to us what objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them; that manner being peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared by every being, though, no doubt, by every human being.” The moon as known to us is merely a bundle of sensations (as Hume saw), unified (as Hume did not see) by our native mental structure through the elaboration of sensations into perceptions, and of these into conceptions or ideas; in result, the moon is for us merely our ideas.
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The certainty of absoluteness is actually tautological and relative because what it may be compared to is ‘beyond perception’ or ‘unknowable’. We may label what is beyond perception as “thing-in-itself” but that would simply be another word for unknowable.
All we have is a “manifestation-perception” system to study.
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Ah, back on track. I was getting queasy.
LOL!
Mindfulness keeps one straight and steady. It seems to have the property of self-equilibrium because it is ultimately a tautology.
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Durant writes,
Not that Kant ever doubts the existence of “matter” and the external world; but he adds that we know nothing certain about them except that they exist. Our detailed knowledge is about their appearance, their phenomena, about the sensations which we have of them. Idealism does not mean, as the man in the street thinks, that nothing exists outside the perceiving subject; but that a goodly part of every object is created by the forms of perception and understanding: we know the object as transformed into idea; what it is before being so transformed we cannot know. Science, after all, is naive; it supposes that it is dealing with things in themselves, in their full-blooded external and uncorrupted reality; philosophy is a little more sophisticated, and realizes that the whole material of science consists of sensations, perceptions and conceptions, rather than of things. “Kant’s greatest merit,” says Schopenhauer, “is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.”
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We (internal) and ‘external’ world seem to be arbitrary categorizations. There doesn’t seem to be any internal-external division. There only seems to be a manifestation-perception system. There is manifestation. It is proved by the existence of perception. On the other hand, perception seems to mold manifestation. Combined together ‘manifestation-perception’ appears to be tautological.
When the argument is made that there must be a separate “perception-point” looking at all this, it is superfluous because that consideration should actually be integral to the perception aspect of this system. We may also say that “perception-point” is a mental object. It is considered logically only. It has no existence outside of one’s logic. We run into a tautology again.
Kant seems to assume implicitly that there must be a separate perception-point. This is a chink in the armor of Kant’s philosophy.
All we need to concern ourselves is with the tautological structure of the “manifestation-perception’ system. Sensation-perception-conception-manifestation and any consideration of perception-point, all lie within this system.
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Durant writes,
It follows that any attempt, by either science or religion, to say just what the ultimate reality is, must fall back into mere hypothesis; “the understanding can never go beyond the limits of sensibility.” Such transcendental science loses itself in “antinomies,” and such transcendental theology loses itself in “paralogisms.” It is the cruel function of “transcendental dialectic” to examine the validity of these attempts of reason to escape from the enclosing circle of sensation and appearance into the unknowable world of things “in themselves.”
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Here is the UNKNOWABLE that I have referenced to many times elsewhere on my blog. It is a theoretical absolute, of course, the purpose of which is to contain “tautologies of existence” within it. Nothing can be said about it. Only self-contradicting speculations may be made about it.
The ‘sensation-sensibility’ has to be a self-contained tautology.
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Agreed. Our only hope for increased understanding is to do something about the “limits of sensibilities.” If we can expand that, if man can evolve his mind, then we can increase in truer understanding of the world. The problem is that I cannot tell if man is any different a creature from tens of thousands of years. Our technology is increasing. Sure this helps because we invent tools to increase our sense perceptions. But I do not necessarily see man selecting toward the brightest and best in order to increase the mental capacity of mankind.
My approach is to make mindfulness popular.
It is taking one baby step at a time.
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Agreed so long as we don’t end up with another strict ideology.
That would be an inconsistency.
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Vin: That would be an inconsistency.
Chris: Yes, but ideologies are sneaky so I don’t want to be overconfident and want to remain vigilant.
Good! You keep me on guard.
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. . . and you me.
Durant writes,
Antinomies are the insoluble dilemmas born of a science that tries to overleap experience. So, for example, when knowledge attempts to decide whether the world is finite or infinite in space, thought rebels against either supposition: beyond any limit, we are driven to conceive something further, endlessly; and yet infinity is itself inconceivable. Again: did the world have a beginning in time? We cannot conceive eternity; but then, too, we cannot conceive any point in the past without feeling at once that before that, something was. Or has that chain of causes which science studies, a beginning, a First Cause? Yes, for an endless chain is inconceivable; no, for a first cause uncaused is inconceivable as well. Is there any exit from these blind alleys of thought? There is, says Kant, if we remember that space, time and cause are modes of perception and conception, which must enter into all our experience, since they are the web and structure of experience; these dilemmas arise from supposing that space, time and cause are external things independent of perception. We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.
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I like this statement: “Antinomies are the insoluble dilemmas born of a science that tries to overleap experience.” This nicely explains the case of what is going on with the String Theory. There is lot of noise only.
Infinite does not mean a very large number or magnitude, because numbers can be infinitely close to zero. Infinite simply means no limit (indefinite).
The blind alleys of thought exist only within a dimension. The only escape is to another dimension. But then that dimension will have its own blind alleys.
Space, time and causes are used to define aspects of the tautological ‘manifestation-perception’ system.
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Vin: I like this statement: “Antinomies are the insoluble dilemmas born of a science that tries to overleap experience.” This nicely explains the case of what is going on with the String Theory. There is lot of noise only.
Chris: I think it has to be this way. Science that overleaps experience is what we call “science fiction.”
Science fiction is within the realm of experience.
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Good science fiction is good storytelling underpinned by technology which is on the cusp or beyond the cusp of experience.
Science fiction does not do any conjecturing beyond the ‘manifestation-perception’ system. It just recombines the manifestations in a different way using logic derived from this system.
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Science fiction seems to encompass the scope and limit of what can be achieved beyond experience. There is no example of man’s technology, knowledge, or wisdom reaching beyond what can be recombined from the raw material of this universe.
Science fiction is a projection from what is known.
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There is any other type of projection?
A projection is a projection. I am sure you’ll like that. 🙂
And then there is intuition, which is not a projection.
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vin: And then there is intuition, which is not a projection.
Chris: Please say more.
Intuition has nothing to do with logical association among existing perception. It is a totally new ‘manifestation-perception’ out of the blue.
Projection is based on logical association among existing perception.
Vin: Intuition has nothing to do with logical association among existing perception. It is a totally new ‘manifestation-perception’ out of the blue.
Chris: You may be right, but why would you give this credit to intuition? Say more?
Intuition is pure perception. No filters come about as a side effect of logical associations..
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Input, output, or you don’t make a difference?
‘You’ is a construct. I am sure it came about as a result of intuition.
Intuition is more ancient than logic.
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Vin: ‘You’ is a construct. I am sure it came about as a result of intuition. Intuition is more ancient than logic.
Chris: I saved this to look at since last night? This morning? But I am not tracking. I think it is because I don’t understand what you mean by intuition.
Intuition = no-logic = recognition and acceptance of what-is more deeply.
We can’t explain by logic
(1) How does anything appear?
(2) Why appearance-disappearance seems to be the most fundamental phenomenon (the manifestation-perception model).
So, we have to accept that and start from there until we get a deeper intuition.
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Vin: The blind alleys of thought exist only within a dimension. The only escape is to another dimension. But then that dimension will have its own blind alleys.
Chris: And tautologically on we go!
Vin: Space, time and causes are used to define aspects of the tautological ‘manifestation-perception’ system.
Chris: You said a mouthful!
Vin: Infinite does not mean a very large number or magnitude, because numbers can be infinitely close to zero. Infinite simply means no limit (indefinite).
Chris: This statement of yours is very important to me. No amount of time spent understanding these few words will be wasted.
Durant writes,
So with the paralogisms of “rational” theology-—which attempts to prove by theoretical reason that the soul is an incorruptible substance, that the will is free and above the law of cause and effect, and that there exists a “necessary being,” God, as the presupposition of all reality. Transcendental dialectic must remind theology that substance and cause and necessity are finite categories, modes of arrangement and classification which the mind applies to sense-experience, and reliably valid only for the phenomena that appear to such experience; we cannot apply these conceptions to the noumenal (or merely inferred and conjectural) world. Religion cannot be proved by theoretical reason.
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I like the phrase “noumenal (or merely inferred and conjectural) world.”
The outer layer of the onion of reality is made of a noumenal layer. It is merely inferred or conjectural. This is where one finds such things as, Soul, will, God, cause and effect. These are all mental objects.
This onion would also represent the tautological ‘manifestation-perception’ system.
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I wish Durant had the opportunity to blog with us. His voluminous works, I believe, would shorten.
Hahaha! Durant’s language is beautiful and very insightful!
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But I do think his works might shorten. Or maybe he would just be short with me.
Agreed. Not putting him down . . . just saying he might fair well with us and we with him.
I think we are long way away from meeting Durant’s literary standards. We may have some groundbreaking ideas, but they are not in a lucid enough form for general public. We have a lot more work to do.
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Neither is Durant’s work in a form for general public. Not sure where you are going with these critiques. I’m in a bad mood for looking up to philosophy and philosophers at the moment. Men may have routinely leveled their own consistencies but when they write about their experiences and observations, the result falls short for others. It is not their looking which levels for me, but my own looking. I have a few heroes but I know better than to look too closely at them for it is not their lives which inspire and enlighten but rather their clues.
Basically, I am looking at putting the Section 3 of my book together, and it seems to be a dreadful task at the moment.
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Durant writes,
So the first Critique ends. One could well imagine David Hume, uncannier Scot than Kant himself, viewing the results with a sardonic smile. Here was a tremendous book, eight hundred pages long; weighted beyond bearing, almost, with ponderous terminology; proposing to solve all the problems of metaphysics, and incidentally to save the absoluteness of science and the essential truth of religion. What had the book really done? It had destroyed the naive world of science, and limited it, if not in degree, certainly in scope, — and to a world confessedly of mere surface and appearance, beyond which it could issue only in farcical “antinomies”; so science was “saved”! The most eloquent and incisive portions of the book had argued that the objects of faith—a free and immortal soul, a benevolent creator—could never be proved by reason; so religion was “saved”! No wonder the priests of Germany protested madly against this salvation, and revenged themselves by calling their dogs Immanuel Kant.
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Kant’s “thing-in-itself” is simply another word for unknowable. Within this background of unknowable rests the tautological universe of the ‘manifestation-perception’ system. There is no manifestation or perception beyond this system. Any expectations, speculations or assumptions describing ‘beyond this system’ are actually a part of the system in form of mental objects.
All science must be confined to the ‘manifestation-perception’ system.
All religion must be confined to the ‘manifestation-perception’ system as well.
There is no God beyond the ‘manifestation-perception’ system.
In fact there is no ‘beyond the system.’
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This is what I would label a self-evident truth. Now I will bookmark it and put it on the shelf and pull it down to show anyone who comes to visit.
LOL! Now that we have reached the bottom of the barrel, we have to map the barrel while going back up.
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Vin: LOL! Now that we have reached the bottom of the barrel, we have to map the barrel while going back up.
Chris: Good way of putting it. However, once you map it; make a map; make a model; next comes the ideology and then those who won’t look will mistake the metaphor for the thing in itself and back around the track we go again.
How to avoid this?
Ideology will come only in the absence of mindfulness.
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Until we or someone makes an ideology out of mindfulness. Don’t scoff. Smart money would be on that happening. Same with all extant spiritual technologies. Although your approach is positive. The next level would be to begin telling people what to be mindful of. Then off we go.
The effort here is to put mindfulness in the hands of people so they can use it freely to help themselves like Buddha did in his time. Buddha kept the ideology out of it and it remained out for at least a good part of thousand years.
I find the mindfulness exercises from Buddha to be least structured but most difficult to do. KHTK exercises based on Idenics seems to have the most optimum structure and ease of practice for today’s society. Exercises based on Scientology has the most chance of being converted into an ideology, so I have to be careful how I present them.
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Well, we could look at what is it about us that loves ideology — a structured and conditioned mind.
The iterative-mechanic churns out structure and it churns it out in every direction. Something about us gives significance to the forms thus arranged. Either that or another possibility would be that the significance arises and appears in a recursive and self-similar way as the dots forming a string of DNA.
I am with Katageek on this one. There is room in the universe for free will or not and both can look the same.
The only way we can go towards less structure is by understanding the structure which exists right now.
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Durant writes,
And no wonder that Heine compared the little professor of Konigsberg with the terrible Robespierre ; the latter had merely killed a king, and a few thousand Frenchmen—which a German might forgive; but Kant, said Heine, had killed God, had undermined the most precious arguments of theology. “What a sharp contrast between the outer life of this man, and his destructive, world-convulsing thoughts! Had the citizens of Konigsberg surmised the whole significance of those thoughts, they would have felt a more profound awe in the presence of this man than in that of an executioner, who merely slays human beings. But the good people saw in him nothing but a professor of philosophy; and when at the fixed hour he sauntered by, they nodded a friendly greeting, and set their watches.”
Was this caricature, or revelation?
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I think that God can be adequately and appropriately replaced by mindfulness.
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Vin: I think that God can be adequately and appropriately replaced by mindfulness.
Chris: Already done.
Durant’s writing is classic. I wish I could match it even remotely.
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Vin: Durant’s writing is classic. I wish I could match it even remotely.
Chris: Your own writing is beautiful, especially when you have written about your experiences. There is a candor and a simplicity which is very artful.
When I wrote about my experiences, I did not have to think about them at all. Those experiences were right there as mental objects in front of my mind’s eye. I just had to describe them.
Here I am building up a model of reality. I have to build that model up with sufficient details, so that I can visualize it clearly without difficulty. Only then I would be able to write about it lucidly. I am not up to that point yet.
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Vin: Here I am building up a model of reality. I have to build that model up with sufficient details, so that I can visualize it clearly without difficulty. Only then I would be able to write about it lucidly. I am not up to that point yet.
Chris: We should take a look at that. I am not convinced that is the way to go. Everything you wrote here is fine and consistent. Consistency — TV snow — now that’s pretty consistent. Scientology made perfect sense to me. It is quite consistent within its own context. But having been disabused of the idea that Scientology is a TOE outside its own carefully designed and defined world, I’m not ready to put a lot of effort into creating better models. Scientology already did that. Catholicism did that. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism have all done that. For instance, when you are arguing for Buddhism and Hinduism, I feel you are using the same true Scotman argument as everyone does when they are arguing for their own world view. What’s good is true and what’s unworkable and destructive is not true.
I won’t be satisfied until I have found consistency in all knowledge, and not just there being pockets of consistencies like Scientology.
I would look for inconsistencies between Christianity and Islam, for example, and would like to discover factors that are leading to those inconsistencies. Such knowledge is required to resolve inconsistencies in knowledge.
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Consistency has a harmonious feeling to it possibly like some potential wave-function condensing into an electron particle. We have to challenge this as a road to truth, for remember that truth is conditioned, relative and impermanent.
A backdrop of potential seems more consistent to me than any type of condensation. We have to look at and fathom what it is that we are going for and why. Using the metaphor of children playing with their toys and imagination, provides for me a consistent model for the world around me. My thoughts are expressed as “Pimples on the Skin of Consciousness”. Alas, this is a conjecture (not a speculation, haha).
Personally, I don’t care about consistencies. I simply want to resolve inconsistencies as I come across them.
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Durant writes on Kant,
IV. THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON
If religion cannot be based on science and theology, on what then? On morals. The basis in theology is too insecure; better that it should be abandoned, even destroyed; faith must be put beyond the reach or realm of reason. But therefore the moral basis of religion must be absolute, not derived from questionable sense-experience or precarious inference; not corrupted by the admixture of fallible reason; it must be derived from the inner self by direct perception and intuition. We must find a universal and necessary ethic; a priori principles of morals as absolute and certain as mathematics. We must show that “pure reason can be practical; i.e., can of itself determine the will independently of anything empirical,” that the moral sense is innate, and not derived from experience. The moral imperative which we need as the basis of religion must be an absolute, a categorical imperative.
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Religion should be based on ‘what is’, for that is the truth in now. The more is the consistency in now, the higher is the truth. This is mindfulness. Proper morals shall follow by themselves as a result of intuition.
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Vin: Proper morals shall follow by themselves from intuition.
Chris: Durant’s words read like one of our blogs. I don’t think he completed his own model either.
Durant writes on Kant,
Now the most astounding reality in all our experience is precisely our moral sense, our inescapable feeling, in the face of temptation, that this or that is wrong. We may yield; but the feeling is there nevertheless. Le matin je fats des projets, et le soir je fais des sottises; (“In the morning I make good resolutions; in the evening I commit follies.”) but we know that they are sottises, and we resolve again. What is it that brings the bite of remorse, and the new resolution? It is the categorical imperative in us, the unconditional command of our conscience, to “act as if the maxim of our action were to become by our will a universal law of nature.” We know, not by reasoning, but by vivid and immediate feeling, that we must avoid behavior which, if adopted by all men, would render social life impossible. Do I wish to escape from a predicament by a lie? But “while I can will the lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all.” Hence the sense in me, that I must not lie, even if it be to my advantage. Prudence is hypothetical; its motto is, Honesty when it is the best policy; but the moral law in our hearts is unconditional and absolute.
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What Kant speaks of as ‘moral sense’ is actually the inherent sense of consistency. What is inconsistent is immediately sensed even when one might suppress it.
“We know, not by reasoning, but by vivid and immediate feeling, that we must avoid behavior which, if adopted by all men, would render social life impossible.”
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And when that consistency is structured by and compared to a structured ideology we have to be careful of dozing off while in the midst of that consistency. Be careful my spidey sense is tingling . . .
The spidey sense is inherent. That is the sense one must never suppress.
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I plan to use and listen to it always! 🙂
That is mindfulness. 🙂
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Hi boys, I´m trying to catch up with you but you are too fast!!
In the meantime,I agree with Chris here, when the model looks too consistent is the moment to start looking for a more basic inconsistency which might have been passed over.
I agree that perception is the proof of manifestation in the case of mental objects, but in the case of material objects I´m not so sure. Some mental patents cannot distinguish between mental objects and material ones, and there is always some mental aspect we add to the material objects and we cannot be certain to which degree this is happening…….
Good one Rafael.
Rafael: I agree that perception is the proof of manifestation
Chris: . . . and vice versa.
So, too consistent = inconsistency… hmmm…
There seems to be a gradient from material to mental objects and not a sharp divide. This need to be looked at closely.
It is the filter, which adds to whatever is perceived.
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Durant writes on Kant,
And an action is good not because it has good results, or because it is wise, but because it is done in obedience to this inner sense of duty, this moral law that does not come from our personal experience, but legislates imperiously and a priori for all our behavior, past, present, and future. The only thing unqualifiedly good in this world is a good will— the will to follow the moral law, regardless of profit or loss for ourselves. Never mind your happiness; do your duty. “Morality is not properly the doctrine how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.” Let us seek the happiness in others; but for ourselves, perfection—whether it bring us happiness or pain. To achieve perfection in yourself and happiness in others, “so act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of another, in every case as an end, never only as a means”:—this too, as we directly feel, is part of the categorical imperative. Let us live up to such a principle, and we shall soon create an ideal community of rational beings; to create it we need only act as if we already belonged to it; we must apply the perfect law in the imperfect state. It is a hard ethic, you say,—this placing of duty above beauty, of morality above happiness; but only so can we cease to be beasts, and begin to be gods.
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This inherent sense of consistency seems to be a law unto itself. From this come the sense of right and wrong (morality), and the inner sense of duty. Interestingly enough, this sense acts only when there are inconsistencies. It acts to resolve those inconsistencies. When everything is consistent, this sense is inactive.
When inconsistencies are ignored, it doesn’t mean that this sense is not there; it means that this sense was overridden. Restoration of integrity requires listening to this inherent sense and simply following it. There is no logic involved here.
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This is my favorite of the Durant quotes that you’ve posted. But for me it raises more questions about the iterative-mechanic. I will write using iteration in place of manifestation. Can I get away with that? Reason is that manifestation and perception are twinned together. Each is the other is the other is the other. 1. The lack of any iteration seems to be the most consistent of all. 2. Any iteration is less consistent than no iteration. 3. In a mass if iterations, there may be harmony and there may be discord. 4. Iterations in harmony are recognized for being consistent. 5. Discordant iterations pop up as disharmonic in a backdrop of harmony. 6. A preponderance of disharmonic iterations is recognized as a confusion; possibly as randomness; possibly as chaos.
When we talk of duty and of morality of right and of wrong; are we assigning good to the more consistent backdrop, and assigning bad and wrong to inconsistencies? Because if so, then that would be an arbitrary. In a den of thieves, it may be inconsistent to practice charity.
Are you saying.
iteration = inconsistency?
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I think so. Or possibly that what is iterated (the dots) becomes inconsistent as it tends away from its native set. This metaphor seems useful.
It is the mirror in front of the mirror.
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Durant writes on Kant,
Notice, meanwhile, that this absolute command to duty proves at last the freedom of our wills; how could we ever have conceived such a notion as duty if we had not felt ourselves free? We cannot prove this freedom by theoretical reason; we prove it by feeling it directly in the crisis of moral choice. We feel this freedom as the very essence of our inner selves, of the “pure Ego”; we feel within ourselves the spontaneous activity of a mind molding experience and choosing goals. Our actions, once we initiate them, seem to follow fixed and invariable laws, but only because we perceive their results through sense, which clothes all that it transmits in the dress of that causal law which our minds themselves have made. Nevertheless, we are beyond and above the laws we make in order to understand the world of our experience; each of us is a center of initiative force and creative power. In a way which we feel but cannot prove, each of us is free.
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There is in an inherent sense that likes to maintain consistency. From time to time inconsistencies do arise, and along with that there arises the tendency to restore back to consistency. From that comes the inherent sense of duty.
The invariable law seems to be the restoration of balance… neither too inconsistent, nor too consistent.
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Durant writes on Kant,
And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—-in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed, and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundred-fold?
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Perception is what makes us feel alive. As long as we perceive we feel that we are alive. When there is no perception, we don’t even know that there is no perception.
We get to realize that this life is an ongoing drama. There are no hard and fast rules of right and wrong. But our actions are guided by an inherent sense of equilibrium beyond our will.
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Durant writes on Kant,
Finally, and by the same token, there is a God. If the sense of duty involves and justifies belief in rewards to come, “the postulate of immortality . . . must lead to the supposition of the existence of a cause adequate to this effect; in other words, it must postulate the existence of God.” This again is no proof by “reason”; the moral sense, which has to do with the world of our actions, must have priority over that theoretical logic which was developed only to deal with sense phenomena. Our reason leaves us free to believe that behind the thing-in-itself there is a just God; our moral sense commands us to believe it. Rousseau was right: above the logic of the head is the feeling in the heart. Pascal was right: the heart has reasons of its own, which the head can never understand.
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We do not understand everything because understanding has to do with logic. What is beyond logic is also beyond our understanding. We may call that “matters of the heart,” or “God,” because it is unknowable from the viewpoint of logic and understanding.
We just have to accept it.
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Durant writes on Kant,
V. ON RELIGION AND REASON
Does this appear trite, and timid, and conservative? But it was not so; on the contrary, this bold denial of “rational” theology, this frank reduction of religion to moral faith and hope, aroused all the orthodox of Germany to protests. To face this “forty-parson-power” (as Byron would have called it) required more courage than one usually associates with the name of Kant.
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“Rational” theology = Rationalization of the unknowable spiritual factor.
Kant’s Morality = That underlying natural impulse that goes beyond logic and which strives for balance.
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Durant writes on Kant,
That he was brave enough appeared in all clarity when he published, at sixty-six, his Critique of Judgment, and, at sixty-nine, his Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason. In the earlier of these books Kant returns to the discussion of that argument from design which, in the first Critique, he had rejected as an insufficient proof of the existence of God. He begins by correlating design and beauty; the beautiful he thinks, is anything which reveals symmetry and unity of structure, as if it had been designed by intelligence. He observes in passing (and Schopenhauer here helped himself to a good deal of his theory of art) that the contemplation of symmetrical design always gives us a disinterested pleasure; and that “an interest in the beauty of nature for its own sake is always a sign of goodness.” Many objects in nature show such beauty, such symmetry and unity, as almost to drive us to the notion of supernatural design.
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In some ways beauty has to do with the absence of what one considers to be inconsistent. Everything seems to flow without any jarring or interruption. Everything just seems to go together in perfect balance.
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That is a good way to put it. I also see beauty that way.
Durant writes on Kant,
But on the other hand, says Kant, there are also in nature many instances of waste and chaos, of useless repetition and multiplication; nature preserves life, but at the cost of how much suffering and death! The appearance of external design, then, is not a conclusive proof of Providence. The theologians who use the idea so much should abandon it, and the scientists who have abandoned it should use it; it is a magnificent clue, and leads to hundreds of revelations. For there is design, undoubtedly; but it is internal design, the design of the parts by the whole; and if science will interpret the parts of an organism in terms of their meaning for the whole, it will have an admirable balance for that other heuristic principle—the mechanical conception of life—which also is fruitful for discovery, but which, alone, can never explain the growth of even a blade of grass.
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Yes, the consistency of magnificent design and beauty is there; but there is also the inconsistency of chaos and suffering. Thus, we do not have a conclusive proof for Providence. Theologians should not blindly promote Providence, nor should scientists blindly deny it.
There is design and chaos, beauty and suffering. The mechanical conception of life is useful in discovery but it is limited to the understanding of the parts only. It can never explain the whole system.
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Durant writes on Kant,
The essay on religion is a remarkable production for a man of sixty-nine; it is perhaps the boldest of all the books of Kant. Since religion must be based not on the logic of theoretical reason but on the practical reason of the moral sense, it follows that any Bible or revelation must be judged by its value for morality, and cannot itself be the judge of a moral code.
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This is a very bold statement, indeed. Religion cannot be based on speculation. Religion must cater to practical need.
We see that there is an inherent sense of balance in us. When that balance is upset we feel disturbed even so very slightly. We may call that the beginning of an inconsistency. Then it becomes a practical need to resolve the inconsistency.
True religion helps one restore that sense of inner balance. From this comes the sense of practical morality. Bible, or any scripture, serves as a practical guide for developing such morality. This leads to inner harmony.
To prescribe some absolute moral code based on theoretical reasoning based on Bible is not the way to go about it.
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Durant writes on Kant,
Churches and dogmas have value only in so far as they assist the moral development of the race. When mere creeds or ceremonies usurp priority over moral excellence as a test of religion, religion has disappeared. The real church is a community of people, however scattered and divided, who are united by devotion to the common moral law. It was to establish such a community that Christ lived and died; it was this real church which he held up in contrast to the ecclesiasticism of the Pharisees. But another ecclesiasticism has almost overwhelmed this noble conception, “Christ has brought the kingdom of God nearer to earth; but he has been misunderstood; and in place of God’s kingdom the kingdom of the priest has been established among us.” Creed and ritual have again replaced the good life; and instead of men being bound together by religion, they are divided into a thousand sects; and all manner of “pious nonsense” is inculcated as “a sort of heavenly court service by means of which one may win through flattery the favor of the ruler of heaven.”
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The purpose of the Church is to assist the moral development of the race, and not to set up its own ecclesiasticism.
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Durant writes on Kant,
Again, miracles cannot prove a religion, for we can never quite rely on the testimony which supports them; and prayer is useless if it aims at a suspension of the natural laws that hold for all experience. Finally, the nadir of perversion is reached when the church becomes an instrument in the hands of a reactionary government; when the clergy, whose function it is to console and guide a harassed humanity with religious faith and hope and charity, are made the tools of theological obscurantism and political oppression.
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The purpose of the Church is to dispel ignorance and bring the clarity of knowledge and understanding, which is consistent with experience.
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Vin: and bring the clarity of knowledge and understanding, which is consistent with experience.
Chris: But what we see religion doing is routinely reversed of that.
Then when we look closely, we get down to the cause vs effect and chicken vs egg arguments and find a dichotomy without any meaningful way to order the two.
We need to know the ideal scene.of religion and the Churches. Kant did a good job of working that out.
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Durant writes on Kant,
He had published, in 1784, a brief exposition of his political theory under the title of “The Natural Principle of the Political Order considered in connection with the Idea of a Universal Cosmopolitical History.” Kant begins by recognizing, in that strife of each against all which had so shocked Hobbes, nature’s method of developing the hidden capacities of life; struggle is the indispensable accompaniment of progress. If men were entirely social, man would stagnate; a certain alloy of individualism and competition is required to make the human species survive and grow. “Without qualities of an unsocial kind… men might have led an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony, contentment, and. mutual love; but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in their germ.” (Kant, therefore, was no slavish follower of Rousseau.) “Thanks be then to nature for this unsociableness, for this envious jealousy and vanity, for this insatiable desire for possession and for power… Man wishes concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species, and she wills discord, in order that man may be impelled to a new exertion of his powers, and to the further development of his natural capacities.”
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Kant is putting his own opinion here. The fact is that there is harmony as well as strife, and no further justification is needed.
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agreed.