Posts Tagged ‘David Hume’

Apr
02
2010

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831)

It has been said that all philosophy is simply a series of footnotes on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle.  It can also be said that all modern philosophy is a series of footnotes no the work of Emmanuel Kant.  Writing in the early Nineteen Century, G. W. F. Hegel inherited the philosophy of Kant and accepted the (Copernican) notion that the mind constructed the world but then proceeded to modify much that was Kantian in his own philosophical system. In The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), Hegel assumed the universe was rational and that through a progress of deduction, human beings would eventually find and agree upon the truth. The question was the starting point for the process of deducing the truth. Kant had introduced the notion of the Thing-in-Itself, a concept that Hegel found difficult to accept.  Like Plato, Kant assumed there were what Plato called “Forms” that were beyond the reach of human consciousness. The forms are unseeable and unknowable and exist only as ideas. Ideas are “beings” that produce the world.  All existence is Appearance and all appearance is dependent upon the world.  According to Plato, Things of the world are mere “copies” of Universals or Ideas.  Copies of the form/idea are made by and/or through Images of Ideas being stamped upon Matter by God(s).  Matter, for Plato was formless; matter was emptiness.  Matter is “not-being”, something that has not yet arisen from Idea.  Matter is primordial and independent.  The Thing comes into being only when matter is acted upon.

According to Aristotle, the Form, the Universal of a Thing, is also its End or Purpose.  The final cause (end) (thing) is identical with the formal cause (form).  A purpose must logically exist prior to the execution of the form.  This conclusion leads Aristotle to the distinction between potentiality and actuality.  Matter in itself is absolutely formless, the substrate of things.  In other words, matter is actually nothing but it is also potentially all things.  Matter gains actuality—becomes a “thing”—by acquiring Form.  Form is actuality, for Aristotle.  With the Greeks, the world process is crucial: there is the end, the form, and the universal. A “thing” is a combination of matter and form.  Without form, which must always be Universal, the thing cannot exist. Compared to the universality of form, the object/matter must be particular. All things strive towards their own ends.  Form molds matter and impels it to a higher state of existence.  The end must be present at the beginning; otherwise the end could not exert propelling force.  There is no new element, in other words, for the new must be present as a potentiality of the old.  The ancients considered development to be the process by which that which was latent or hidden came to light.  For the ancients, and for Plato and Aristotle, the world was driven by this dualism between idea and actuality, by these contradictions, which drive development.  These ancient ideas will be Hegel’s starting point and the source of his famous Dialectical Method, an invention that allowed him to ground truth and reality in the process of deductive Logic.

An idealist, who learned from Kant, Hegel accepted Kant’s Copernican Revolution or Kant’s concept of the self or Self as an enduring entity, that is independent of events and stands alone in a condition of self-awareness.  This “awareness” is the awareness of the object.  This recognition of the object results in the realization of the difference between the self and the “other”.  This moment is the origin of consciousness or being, an awareness of object as “other-than-me”.  Things are content, and Hegel distinguished between the object, as it is “in itself,” and the object as it is for an observer.  Although the concept of duality originated in ancient philosophy, modern philosophy credits René Descartes with the “Cartesian split.” Since Descartes, Western thought assumed a split between mind and matter. It was David Hume who questioned Greek idealism, exposing the inherent weakness of the dualism between mind and matter by returning to the question of how do we know reality?  Or what is knowledge?  Hume explored the most basic concept upon which all knowledge depends: cause and effect, both of which must be both universal and necessary. True, we experience what we name “cause” and then we experience what we call “effect.”  But we have done nothing more than placed a convenient label upon the events that transpired.  We have not established knowledge.   Experience in itself is never universal nor is experience in itself ever necessary.  The connection between cause and effect is an assumption and any “knowledge” is therefore illusionary.  Hume determined that knowledge could never arise out of experience and thus exposed the metaphysical base of philosophy.  Kant immediately understood the implications of Hume’s thought: once the metaphysics of philosophy had been revealed as a “faith based” system, any knowledge of the world was now impossible.  We knew nothing but our own beliefs and belief is not knowledge.

In order to correct David Hume and to put philosophy back on track, Kant proposed space and time as conditions that are both universal and necessary. The universal and necessary conditions of Space and Time give us objects.  Space and Time are a priori conditions, they preexist thought and make thought possible.  Space and Time are perceptions of our own minds and do not exist apart form us and are forms of our own perceptive faculty.  Space and time are Forms of sensations and these forms are filled with sense data.  The objects perceived by us through space and time are not real objects: they are Appearances.  Thought is conceptual and non-sense-based concepts—synthetic a priori judgments—are derived, not from experience, but from constructions made by the mind.  These concepts are the result of formal judgments of Logic.  We arrive at these concepts thorough the epistemological operations of the mind, Kant called “categories”, and there were twelve of them.  The twelve categories were subjective, and, because they were universal, were necessarily static, and unchanging.  However, as Hegel noticed, these categories were not deduced one from another and were therefore arbitrary models made up by Kant in order to show the way the mind worked. If the categories were not Logical, then the Reason-based philosophy of Kant was not on a firm base.  And this is the problem Hegel wanted to solve: to build a Logical base for the foundation of the Categories.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

Jan
29
2010

Kant and Reason

Kant and Reason

The Eighteenth Century British philosopher, David Hume, suggested that we believed that there is a connection between cause and effect.  For example. fire causes flame and results in an effect of smoke.  Were it not for this belief system, we would be surprised every time we lit a match, saw fire, and witnessed the fire burn an object. Kant replaced Hume’s charge that cause and effect were mere metaphysical constructs with the idea of the a priori: mental structures possessed by human beings that allowed people to logically order empirical experiences in a rational fashion. We understand that “smoke” means “fire” not because one observes the effect of a lit match upon a dry leaf, but because one carries a preconceived concept of cause and effect in the mind.  Thus Kant replaced Descartes’s blind faith that God would not delude him with human reason and the powers of rational thinking.  Kant removed God from the philosophical equation. In his critique of Western philosophy, Kant realized that much of the writings of his predecessors had rested upon this ultimate appeal to God–metaphysics–placing philosophy in the precarious position of having its efficacy based solely upon belief in God.

The preconceived concept or preexisting idea is the a priori, or a structure in the mind that organizes perceptions.  The procedure of critique is nothing less than a Copernican Revolution, a call to reason rather than to faith, a demand for self-knowledge rather than for dogma.  Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was concerned with epistemology, establishing the grounds of knowledge, and with refuting untenable metaphysics. God does not give us the world that we see and experience.  We understand the world through reason. Knowledge is a cooperative affair—the mind organizes sense data actively and imposes reality upon the world.  We, as humans, can never hope to “see” “reality” or the “thing-in-itself.” We construct reality with our minds, which are organized at the most basic and abstract level to structure the most basic experiences, our perceptions of time and space.

There are two kinds of judgment: a priori and a posteriori.  The a priori judgment is pure and transcendent and self-evident.  It is absolutely valid and strictly necessary.  This judgment is independent of experience and is expressed in a statement in which the subject is defined by its predicate: ”The rose is a flower,” which is an analytic statement.  For Kant, the real problem for philosophy is a posteriori statements that were synthetic, that is, statements in which the predicate is not contained in the subject.  Cause and effect would come under the concept of a synthetic statement: there was no necessary connection between cause and effect.  Kant had to make an argument for cause and effect being a synthetic a priori judgment, that is a judgment that is absolute and necessary without being self-evident.   Kant argued that the mind imposes patterns and the patterns themselves are necessary.  Because the patterns are necessary, they are also transcendental.  This Aesthetic is immediate and non-discursive and sensuous, but it can be ordered and constructed by the mind.  For example, the mind has an intuition, that an immediate and sensuous, apprehension of space that is sensuous or aesthetic.

This intuition must be a priori to account for our knowledge of objects.  Thus Space is an a priori representation that underlies all outer intuitions and validates all claims of geometry, which is a science of space.  “Space” is the way the mind organizes experience.  “Space does not represent any property of things in themselves; it is, therefore, solely from the human standpoint…” and is inner and outer.  Time, like space, is another “pure form of intuition” and is the temporal ordering of experience into before and after and simultaneous.  But time is only “inner space” and is part of a spatiotemporal ordering of contents: a synthetic ordering due to the active mind’s cognition of physical objects.  This is what Kant called transcendental logic, the “putting together” (synthetic) of perceptions.  This synthetic operation makes experiences of objects possible.

In a typically Enlightenment fashion, Kant conceptually “built” an architectonic structure that would contain philosophy within a model.  Based upon reason, knowledge comes from thinking, which comes from judging.  All effective knowledge is the result of experiences of concrete sense data ordered by conceptual thinking.  According to Kant, “…thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind…” Kant was the first philosopher to distinguish between precepts and concepts, after the Cartesian duality of mind and body had proved to be untenable.  Kant then set out to establish categories of judgments, based upon Aristotelian logic.  Each form of judgment is an a priori conceptual category and the categories correspond to types of judgments.  Kant calls his arrangements the metaphysical deduction of the categories: each judgment presupposes one or another twelve synthetical (putting things together) categories or operations (such as cause and effect).

The categories are transcendental because they are rules.  These rules are not empirically observable but are necessary, because they make synthesis possible.  In other words, successive messages of data must be organized or held together into an experience or a unity of consciousness, which is the unity of self.  Experience is a combination of the self that experiences objects as a result of a priori acts of synthesis.  The human experience of objects consists of unified representations, producing objects of representation.  All knowledge demands a concept and the form of the concept must be universal and must serve as a rule.  Self and object are reciprocal.  Kant asked, “What conditions make experiences possible”?  and stated that experience is a combination of a priori concepts and empirical concepts.  The necessary conditions for “experience” is the object—sense experiences, put together into unity—and self—a collection of desires, memories, expectations, feelings, attitudes that unifies the data.  The self is also an object.  The putting together is a transcendental synthesis: objects-for-a-self.  The object is a synthesis of data of outer sense/space and the self is the synthesis of inner sense/space.

Thus, for Kant, empiricism is rehabilitated, cause and effect becomes a rule, and the function of concepts is to order the manifold of sense into meaningful and stable patterns.  The key to knowledge is order and rule that makes experience possible.  Order, in other words, must be presupposed (a priori) to make experience possible.  The world as experienced reflects patterns or categories.  Two important categories are substance and causality for human experience would not be human experience without an order that is indifferent.  We never experience these substances or the necessary connections; we experience only succession (synthesis).  Kant attributed our understanding of objects to a priori concepts through which our minds order experience with a notion of permanence and regular sequence.  His conclusions are an advance on the fallback position of Descartes that is that God “implanted” helpful innate ideas that give us reality.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

Jan
22
2010

Kant and the Critique of Philosophy

Kant and the Critique of Philosophy

This concept of critique was central to post-Enlightenment philosophy, coming from the Greek word “krinein”, meaning to “separate” or to “discern”, which is the origin of the word crisis.  Whereas the Greeks took the concept of critique and applied it to texts, Kant used “critique” to re-conceptualize Western philosophy at a time of crisis.  The Enlightenment had been caught between the demystification or disenchantment of a once sacred world and the secularizing of a thoroughly modern and material world, based upon scientific analysis.  For the Enlightenment philosophers, “critique” and “reason” were indivisible and Kant began a search for the conditions, which governed reasoned criticism.  Critique is a concept central to Kantian thought and is an internal analysis of a concept in its own terms. A critique, by definition, cannot be conducted from the outside, looking in; an exercise, which would be more precisely called “criticism.”  A proper critique, in contrast, must always examine given concepts and not impose ideas, alien to the argument, from the outside. The examination or interrogation of an idea—a critique—is rational and based upon the process of logical deduction and the result is the creation of an architectonic structure, an argument that is “built” systematically. The critique is a form of analysis and deduction.  Contemporary audiences are probably more familiar with the use of “critique” by the American art critic, Clement Greenberg who “interrogated” or critiqued painting, seeking its intrinsic qualities.  Through a logical analysis of what was irreducible to painting, Greenberg deduced that for painting to be pure it must be purged of alien or outside elements.  Painting, stripped of extrinsic elements, could be revealed in its basic structure, or definition, as a flat surface covered with pigment arranged in a design. As the Nineteenth Century progressed, the question shifted from how to use critique to question the nature of art to which art is worthy of critique.   A critique of philosophy is nothing less than a search for the fundamentals of how humans create knowledge.

Living a quiet and retiring life of a college professor in Weimer, Kant was, by his own account, awakened from his academic “slumber” by a challenge to Reason from an unexpected quarter.  An English philosopher, the ultimate empiricist, David Hume, who in his Treatise of Human Reason and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding pointed out that reason, like religion, is only another instrument for establishing relations among ideas.  Reason, therefore, can tell us nothing about the world.  There is no evidence that the “order” of reason is necessary and this order and “pattern” actually has no rationale in nature, which is only an object upon which we have imposed our needs.  Cause and effect were a belief system that we lived by but could not prove. If reason is only a concept and not an intrinsic quality of human thinking, if cause and effect  are unexamined assumptions then we are back to metaphysics.

As Roy Strong in The Creation of the Modern World.  The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment expressed it,

“The concept of causation was doubtless the basis of all knowledge, but causality was not itself a demonstrable fact.  Experience showed the succession of events, but did not reveal any necessity in that succession—it was habit, which created the expectation that one event would invariably follow another.  Custom was not knowledge, however, and did not strictly justify projections from the past to the future, from the known to the unknown.  Causality was thus not a principle definitively derived from the order of things but a mental postulate.”

Hume’s arguments were immediately recognized by Kant as a destructive attack on reason.  When Hume attacked the concept of cause and effect by pointing out that “cause and effect” were only a concept, not a reality, the Enlightenment was effectively over.  Rational thinking alone could not make it so.  As a believer in the powers of reason, Kant realized that he had to restore reason to its rightful place.  To refute Hume, he had to create a system for reason.

In his Critique of Pure Reason (1789), Kant discussed what he called “The Copernican Revolution” in which critique was shifted from an external focus on dogmas to a focus on the inner workings of understanding.  The scientist, Nicolas Copernicus, questioned the assumption, which was received wisdom that the sun revolved around the earth.  One could see this “truth” with one’s own eyes.  There was no discernable reason to disbelieve what seemed plain to see.  In 1530, in De Revolutionibus, Copernicus revolutionized scientific (and philosophical) thinking by putting forward the revolutionary hypothesis that the earth revolved around the sun.  This extraordinary theory, inverting general knowledge, was based upon pure abstract reasoning or deductive thinking, based upon a hypothesis that was tested and provided proof of accuracy.  The mathematics of planetary movements made sense only if one threw out the belief that the sun revolved around the earth and substituted another theory that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun. Seeing may be believing, but any belief has to be tested and proven.  Scientific reasoning is based upon theory: one formulates a hypothesis that functions as a theory that is never proved and is always provisional.  Any theory will stand until it is disproved.

For Copernicus, his new theory was far too dangerous to publicize—he would be under instant interdiction from religious authorities, and he was the kind of person who sought perfection and could never release his theory. Although in the time of Kant, two centuries later, De Revolutionibus was still on the list of books forbidden by the Catholic Church, the ideas of Copernicus were not only accepted but were “proved”.  The “revolution” in thinking about the sun and the earth was the disregard of Copernicus of empirical evidence, which suggested that the sun revolved around the earth, and his faith in a hypothesis was based upon reasoned considerations.  Like Copernicus, Kant proposed that raw observation of raw experience was insufficient as an explanation of the world and argued that the human mind was capable of ordering perception through a priori conceptions.  The rejection of the notion of the passive receptive mind was Kant’s version of the Copernican Revolution: the mind ordered the world, not vice versa.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Philosophy | No Comments »

Sep
11
2009

The Enlightenment: Introduction

The Enlightenment: Introduction

Like any great cultural change, the Enlightenment was long in gestation.  By the Eighteenth Century, a critical mass of philosophical thinking and social custom had emerged, and, with it, certain famous intellectual heroes.  The Enlightenment can be understood precisely in terms of its entomology–that which sheds light: light into the darkness of religious “superstition”.  The principal conflict of the Enlightenment was the contest between established religious beliefs and a growing body of scientific knowledge that grounded knowledge, not in the will of God, but in an exercise of empirical evidence.  Upon this dialectic, struggles for social, political, and economic parity would be launched and would last to this very day. It is important to remember that the Enlightenment way of thinking is very Western and is a singular result in a particular place due to the impact of science and technology, resulting in the “death of God.”  Other areas of the world, such as Africa, were left out of technological progress and its benefits, and other areas, such as the Mid-East chose to not follow the secular path of the Europeans.  The result, two centuries later, would be a world split between those who took part in “Modernism” and those who did not.  The Enlightenment was a Western phenomenon, which established not only new philosophical ideas concerning the grounds of knowledge but also new ideals, such as “liberty, equality and fraternity,” “all men are created equal,” and the “inalienable right” of the “pursuit of happiness.”  These ideals would not be forgotten, but it would take time for the Enlightenment to become more than the ideals of speculative philosophers and to become a gradually unfolding reality.

A complex phenomenon, the Enlightenment was defined by one central question: how can life be lived and understood without God?  If God was “dead,” as Friedrich Nietzsche proposed, then the Deity was certainly an animated corpse, going to its demise, kicking and screaming, and becoming reanimated at unpredictable intervals.  The Enlightenment was confronted with Counter-Enlightenments, such as Romanticism and Catholic revivals, but politics, society and economics continued their inexorable march down the secular path.  Over time, Christianity came to occupy a smaller place in Western culture and ceased to be the basis for society’s belief system.   Once religious faith had permeated Western life and the answer to all questions was “God’s will.”  Unquestioning belief in God was challenged by two forces that proved to be critical to Enlightenment thinking.  First, was the idea  of “natural rights,” that is, the notion that people were created free and equal and had, as human beings, certain rights that could not be violated.  The concept of “natural rights” would be articulated by Enlightenment philosophers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Thomas Jefferson but it dated back to the Twelfth Century and was present in a nascent from during the Medieval era.  The second was the explosion of scientific experimentation and hypothesis that shattered doctrines supported by the Church. Although there were certain scientific discoveries that particularly irked the religious authorities, such as the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, the combined weight of empiricism and the scientific method undermined the ability of religion to insist upon unquestioning belief.  Doubt entered into society.  Western culture shifted decisively towards secular questions and secular answers.

The result of secularism was a ripple effect that questioned the validity of the “divine right to rule,” creating a question of how could society be governed without God.  It was not just a question of government in the sense of whether or not to continue with Kings and Emperors but government in the sense of self-governance.  Without religious edicts telling people what to do, what kind of system would take the place of God’s law?  Just as scientists rewrote the knowledge of the universe, philosophers sought a new epistemology or ground for social relations. But even more urgent was the problem of knowledge.  Without God, what was knowable and how?  A new epistemology of knowledge also had to be established.  The new philosophical system proposed a new society and a new form of knowledge that would have profound impact upon art and artists, creating new ways of defining both art and artist and developing an entirely new branch of philosophy called “aesthetics.” The idea of “artistic freedom” is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment introduction of the concept of the “individual.”  The idea of the defiant artist, challenging the establishment and shocking the conservative public is an Enlightenment concept of rethinking received wisdom.

The profound secularization that is the Enlightenment has installed suspicion of authority, tradition, and divine right to rule…at least in the West.  Using the deductive and logical practices of science, rational thinking, and the powers of human reason discovered universal laws, which appear to have taken the place of God, the Enlightenment ended eighteen hundred years of spiritualized thinking.  As Thomas Carlyle said, “Philosophers strove to sink the supernatural to the natural”.  The concepts of “Nature” and “Natural Law” and “Natural Rights” and “Progress” could be used as powerful weapons against traditional powers that once ruled by “divine right.”  The Enlightenment also had a dark side.  The proponents of this unsettling upheaval in society were able to go only so far in their thinking.  The concept of “nature” or the “natural” could be used as powerful weapons to deny participation and power to those declared to be outside the confines of progress, such as women and people of color who were tied to Nature and therefore were beyond the forces of History and thus, the democratic fruits of the new social system.  Emmanuel Kant once stated, “If someone asks are we living in an Enlightened Age today?  The answer would be, ‘No,’ but we are living in an age of Enlightenment.”  The Enlightenment could not guarantee fully enlightened thinking, but the alternative to the Enlightenment, with all of its a prorias was, as David Hume, remarked, “..stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance”.  The men who made the new laws were bold, brave and even arrogant, quite capable of using enlightened modes of thinking to justify slavery and imperialism, all in the name of European superiority.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Culture | No Comments »