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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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Reference: Manifesto of Communist Party

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A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.

All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

COMMENT: Karl Marx was observing the dissatisfaction of common people of his time. The powers knew that such dissatisfaction could be inflamed to create problems for them. The Communist agitators could do it.

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Two things result from this fact.

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

COMMENT: With the advent of the Industrial Age, considerable destabilizing forces were unleashed into the society of the time. Communism was a reaction to this situation. Karl Marx set out to formulate a philosophy to explain that reaction.

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I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

COMMENT: The assumption of class struggle is based on the conflict between those who exploit and those who are exploited. In the absence of exploitation there is no class struggle. In this manifesto, the bourgeoisie (the wealthy middle class) is identified with exploiters and the proletariat (the industrial working class) is identified with those exploited.

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Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

COMMENT: The problem is with greed and exploitation on one hand and with lack of education and indolence on the other. It is not a universal problem with classes. It may only appear to be so in certain societies at certain times.

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In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

COMMENT: The occurrence of classes in a complex society is natural because many different functions become necessary. People also have different ambitions, education and skills. Not everybody is alike. When ambition, education and skill are matched with functions in the society, and appropriate compensation is provided to meet the needs for different stations, then there remains no cause for any conflict or struggle.

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The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

COMMENT: Here I see a complex situation being oversimplified, instead of being broken down to its basic parts, so logic could be applied. Logic cannot be applied in crude black and white form to complex situations as such. Like the binary principle of computer logic, it may only be applied after breaking a complex situation down to its basic parts. 

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From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

COMMENT: These are good observations made by Karl Marx. There were definitely big changes in the European societies as raw material poured in from colonies in the undeveloped world, and steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. Feudal societies gave way to industrial societies. World market came about with overall increased prosperity. Capitalism seems to be the natural outcome of these factors.

The purpose of capital was to fuel the engine of progress when there were plenty of resources and entrepreneurs.

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Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

COMMENT: Here feudalism is being described as “natural” and bourgeoisie as an aberration that is motivated by cold, calculated self-interest. This resulted in the large scale exploitation of proletarians. Marx is equating bourgeoisie with free trade, and free trade with exploitation.

Marx seems to be aware of the power that the exploited proletarians could exercise if they could only be united in their dissatisfaction.

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The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

COMMENT: Marx is reacting against the fast pace of constant change in the modes of production that seem to be destroying the traditional character of society. This was quite unsettling and was looked upon as dilution of the quality of life.

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The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

COMMENT: Marx is reacting against the globalization of industry and commerce that seem to be destroying the national industries and threatening the self-sufficiency and the boundaries of individual nations.

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The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

COMMENT: Marx seems to be lamenting the loss of the traditional independence. He sees globalization resulting in increasing inter-dependence. This mode of production is leading to concentration of property in the hands of a few. The situation is moving toward political centralization.

It seems that Marx did not want the very conditions, which then came about in Russia and China under the name of Communism. This contradiction points to the  weakness of the conjecture of class struggle, which this philosophy starts out with. We are dealing with complex human nature that cannot be addressed through simplistic conjectures, such as, class struggle.

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Conclusion

As pointed out above,

The problem is with greed and exploitation on one hand and with lack of education and indolence on the other. It is not a universal problem with classes. It may only appear to be so in certain societies at certain times.

What happened in Russia and China under the name of communism did not alleviate the problem identified above.

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Solution

The solution of this problem is a universal application of Mindfulness. The following processes are recommended.

1. The Intention to Harm

2. Subject Clearing

3. Viewpoint Expansion

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[Italics below denote the quotes from Wikipedia Article on Descartes]

Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to provide a philosophical framework for the natural sciences as these began to develop.

I have great admiration for Descartes for both his mathematical and philosophical works.

 

Emily Grosholz. Cartesian method and the problem of reduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198242506. “But contemporary debate has tended to…understand [Cartesian method] merely as the ‘method of doubt’…I want to define Descartes’s method in broader terms…to trace its impact on the domains of mathematics and physics as well as metaphysics.”

I understand Descartes Method to be a lot more than just a method of doubt. His method helps determine points of certainties.

 

In his Discourse on the Method, he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called hyperbolical/metaphysical doubt, also sometimes referred to as methodological skepticism: he rejects any ideas that can be doubted, and then reestablishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.

That is a wonderful goal set by Descartes for himself. My personal passion is to make knowledge simpler to understand, starting from fundamental ideas that are on very firm footing. I’ll be ecstatic if I can spot a gap or inconsistency in Descartes’ reasoning. My object for doing that would be  to discover possible simplicities.

 

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist (Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy). Most famously, this is known as cogito ergo sum (English: “I think, therefore I am”). Therefore, Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting; therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. “The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist.”

Yes, one can be certain about the existence of thought. I wrote the essay The Nature of Thought to express my ideas on this subject. I can see that thought cannot be separated from me if “me” is looked upon as part of thought. Therefore, “I” would exist as thought. But I doubt Descartes’ conclusion that “I” is the doer and that thought originates from “I”. It is quite possible that essence of thought is independent of “I”, and “I” may simply act on it the way a magnifying glass acts on rays of light.

 

Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been unreliable. So Descartes determines that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is what he does, and his power must come from his essence. Descartes defines “thought” (cogitatio) as “what happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it”. Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which he is immediately conscious.

“Thought is visualization. The purpose of thought is to give form to the unknowable.” The essence of thought could come from some unknowable dimension that is independent of “I”. Thought, “I”, and body exist in the dimension of form. A “thinking thing” could be a “modulating thing” that may be modulating part of some “dimension of no form” into this dimension of form. There is no reason to believe that “thought” and “I” are the fundamental principles of existence.

 

To further demonstrate the limitations of the senses, Descartes proceeds with what is known as the Wax Argument. He considers a piece of wax; his senses inform him that it has certain characteristics, such as shape, texture, size, color, smell, and so forth. When he brings the wax towards a flame, these characteristics change completely. However, it seems that it is still the same thing: it is still the same piece of wax, even though the data of the senses inform him that all of its characteristics are different. Therefore, in order to properly grasp the nature of the wax, he should put aside the senses. He must use his mind. Descartes concludes:

“And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind.”

One is looking at change. Form changes. Is there a constant underlying this changing form perceived by the senses? Descartes concludes it is the faculty of judgment. This is what I have referred to as the ability to consider. But does this ability reside in this dimension of form? I doubt that it does.

 

In this manner, Descartes proceeds to construct a system of knowledge, discarding perception as unreliable and instead admitting only deduction as a method. In the third and fifth Meditation, he offers an ontological proof of a benevolent God (through both the ontological argument and trademark argument). Because God is benevolent, he can have some faith in the account of reality his senses provide him, for God has provided him with a working mind and sensory system and does not desire to deceive him. From this supposition, however, he finally establishes the possibility of acquiring knowledge about the world based on deduction and perception. In terms of epistemology therefore, he can be said to have contributed such ideas as a rigorous conception of foundationalism and the possibility that reason is the only reliable method of attaining knowledge.

Perceptions originate from one’s consideration of what is out there. Perceptions on the surface are changing all the time, but the considerations that underlie them become more and more persistent in their form as one dives deeper into thought. But even those deepest considerations are, ultimately, arbitrary. It is the consistency of such considerations which makes them so persistent. Deduction is simply diving deeper toward increasingly persistent (unchanging) considerations. If there is God, it does not lie in this dimension of form. Viewing from this dimension, God is simply unknowable. Any speculations or lasting considerations about God are simply modulations of thought. Knowledge could be a rigorous system consistent within itself, even when the foundations are arbitrary. Those foundations have only to be firmly set. From then on it is consistency that forms the basis of reason.

 

In Descartes’s system, knowledge takes the form of ideas, and philosophical investigation is the contemplation of these ideas. This concept would influence subsequent internalist movements as Descartes’s epistemology requires that a connection made by conscious awareness will distinguish knowledge from falsity. As a result of his Cartesian doubt, he viewed rational knowledge as being “incapable of being destroyed” and sought to construct an unshakable ground upon which all other knowledge can be based. The first item of unshakable knowledge that Descartes argues for is the aforementioned cogito, or thinking thing.

There is nothing fundamentally true or false. But there are fundamentals regarded as true because of their firmness. Any relative inconsistency with respect to those fundamentals, and their derivatives, would then be regarded as falsity. None of the consistency, which underlies reasoning itself, can ever be destroyed because its power comes from the firmness of the fundamentals. Descartes views the premise of “thinking thing” as that fundamental firmness, even when it can be shown to be arbitrary. The fundamentals are only as firm as one considers them to be.

 

Descartes also wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the “propensity” to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.

The firmness of the external world is simply a reflection of the firmness of one’s fundamental beliefs that one may not be fully aware of. Hence they seem to come involuntarily. Thus, the external word seems to provide evidence to an internal “programming” that one is not aware of.

 

Descartes was also known for his work in producing the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies. This can be most easily explored using the statement: “This statement is a lie.” While it is most commonly referred to as a paradox, the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies states that at any given time a statement can be both true and false simultaneously because of its contradictory nature. The statement is true in its fallacy. Thus, Descartes developed the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies, which greatly influenced the thinking of the time. Many would-be philosophers were trying to develop inexplicable statements of seeming fact, however, this laid rumors of such a proposition impossible. Many philosophers believe that when Descartes formulated his Theory of Fallacies, he intended to be lying, which in and of itself embodies the theory.

A problem persists as long as one is not aware of the solution. Confusion persists as long as one is not aware of the stable data. The moment one becomes aware of the solution or the stable data, problems and confusions disappear. Thus, underlying anything that is persisting, there is something unknown. It is the absence of that knowledge, which produces the persistance. This is how the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies may be best explained.

The Cartesian approach is a shorter version of my favorite “neti, neti.”

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