COMPUTERIZATION AS
ABUSE OF FORMAL SCIENCE:
(Computerization as Design
of Logic Acrobatics)
Possible sources in Kant's philosophy
by Kristo Ivanov, prof.em., Umeå University
April 2020 (revised 231208-1300)
https://archive.org/details/kant-gramont
http://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/KantGramont.html
CONTENTS
Main bibliographic background
First “Kantian”
impressions
Consequences, leading
to Gramont’s Kant
Gramont on the
Critique of Judgment
Rationality and
mental disorder
Modern geniuses and desperate logic
A case study of desperate logic
This is an attempt to explore the Enlightenment’s-origins of
"mathematical-logical acrobatics" in science in general, and in the
informational computer field in particular. Such acrobatics stands for the
belief that ultimate practical truth represented by science and common-sense
data must basically, if not exclusively, be framed in mathematical or logical
form, kept in separation from philosophical, metaphysical and theological
considerations, and therefore be amenable to processing by computers.
The impulse to make such an
attempt arose from my concerns expressed in my earlier texts on Belief and
reason, Chinese information systems: East and West, Information and debate, Information and theology, Computers as embodied mathematics and logic, and during my late study of a book (in French) bought more than twenty
years ago but requiring the time for research allowed only after retirement
from a university position dominated by administrative duties. The book is authored by Jérôme
de Gramont with the title Kant et la
question de l'affectivité: Lecture de la troisième critique, (Paris: Vrin, 1996, ISSN 0249-7913). My
translation of the title in English: Kant and the question of
affectivity: A reading of the third critique. In what follows I will
renounce until further notice to translate French into English because I cannot
bear such a burden, albeit indicating the possibility of an automatic on-line
translation.
My conclusion will be that I perceive the
philosopher Immanuel Kant’s work as being a compelling logical construction
based on partly hidden and therefore unchallengeable definitional and
“environmental” systemic premises. In doing so I further conclude that a proper
understanding of Kant must rely on a study of his later critics and on an
application of the criticism of the foundations of logic as suggested in my
earlier mentioned text on Computers
as embodied mathematics and logic.
My
ultimate conclusion is that the decisive enticing influence of Kant’s
philosophy on the Western enlightenment and thought underlines its split into
reliance on computation, to be supposedly balanced by aestheticism and
entertaining trendy creative “design”. This
is the meaning of the title of this essay, referring to the abuse of logic and
of a flawed concept of design
originating from a corrupted Kantian aesthetics. It must be countered since it
has promoted a defective if yet profitable science and technology by obscuring
its theological and intellectual presuppositions. It can be done starting with
diffidence or reluctance to believe in enticing logic as in natural
or artificial “intelligence” as treated in my further paper on Artificial General Intelligence
and ChatGPT, with consciousness of what is explained about “fact-nets”
in Leibnizian Inquiring Systems conceived
in the context of The Design of Inquiring Systems, and about How to Lie with Statistics”, implying
rhetorically the possibility to “prove anything”.
Why Kant and not something else in the
struggle with the philosophical problems implied by information and computers?
The philosopher Immanuel Kant is often considered to be at a crossroad of the
history of Western philosophy, or “to be its crossroad”. This accords also to
the often quoted affirmation that ”The safest general characterization of the European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. The great difference for me, between Kant and Plato, has
been my perceived possibility to read the complete works of Plato (and
Aristotle) set against my impossibility of doing something comparable with
respect to Kant. I perceive his texts to be nearly unreadable with the
discouraging conclusion that they work as an intelligence test, and they
uncover whether the reader is mentally disabled or very poorly gifted for intellectual
tasks. This may be then followed by the further conclusion that Kant, whose
work has been discussed during more than 200 years, must have been a genius that found a truth which is an alternative to, and possibly consistent
with both the latest scientific truth and Christian truth discussed in the last
2000 years.
So, “why Kant”? My early circumvention of
Kant came naturally by my following some of the developments out of Kant’s
crossroad, and in particular the influence of philosophical pragmatism of
William James as it appears in the work of West Churchman and his application of Kant in context of artificial intelligence – AI
- conceived in the book The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), chapter 5 on “Representations”.
After that, later in my reflections upon
the perceived hyped misuse and overvaluation of computers I began to suspect
that hype had been made possible by the psychological, more than the economic
impact of logic and mathematics. This prompted me to (try to) dwell into the
foundations of logic and mathematics, as expounded in my article on Computers as embodied mathematics and logic that I strongly recommend as background to
this present text. At the same time I
began wondering on the cultural source of this uncritical general fascination
that mathematics and logic exert on modern humans and particularly on
scientists. What did modern philosophers or at least their “canonized dean”
Kant say about that or, in particular, about the essential common essence
behind logic and mathematics, “Reason”?
Forgetting my earlier attempts to read
Kant’s original works I remembered having bought some twenty years ago a sort
of summary of his third
critique, of judgment, in the form of a commentary
in La question de l’affectivité (1996)
by Jérôme de Gramont. The Third Critique attempts to relate reason
to morals, representing Kant’s synthesis of his philosophy. After an
extenuating reading of it during four months I suddenly realized that I had
symptomatically forgotten that some 25-30 years ago I already had acquired and
read (and tried to understand!) what
now, even if not referenced, constitutes part of the background of my present
text authored by Kant himself. It is included here at the beginning only for
giving prospective readers the possibility of estimating whether they will be
able to understand and find my essay valuable for their purposes:
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of pure reason. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966 (trans.F. Max Müller). My page
references below are completed with original paginations of the first (A) and
second (B) editions.
Kant, I. Critique of practical reason.
Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996 (trans. T.K. Abbott).
Kant, I. Critique of judgment. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co.,1987
(trans. Wener S. Pluhar).
In retrospect I see that I have tried to
understand the above with the (also partially symptomatically forgotten) help
of the following interpreters, and one outright critic (Johann G. Hamann):
Carpi, Orlando. Kant – L’etica della ragione. Rimini: Panozzo Editore,
1989/2014.
Ferry, Luc. Homo aestheticus. L’invention du goût à l’age démocratique.
Grasset, 1990 (esp. pp. 53-110, 112, 125f., 171, 181, 188, 193, 197, 201).
Frank, Manfred; Larthomas,
Jean-Paul; Philonenko, Alexis. Sur la troisième critique. Combas: Éclat, 1994.
Gramont, Jérôme. Kant
et la question de l’affectivité: Lecture de la troisième critique. Paris: Vrin,
1996.
Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant. Gothenburg: Daidalos. 1988/1990. (Trans. to Swedish from Russian: HåkanEdgren). English translation: Immanuel
Kant.
(Birkhäuser, 1987)
Hamann, Johann G. Aesthetica in nuce: Métacritique du purisme de la raison pure. Paris: Vrin, 2001. (Trans. RomainDeygout).
Jung, Carl. Collected Works. Princeton University Press, 2000.
(Referred in my text as CW, Volume number, Paragraph number).
Williams, Garrath. “Kant’s account of reason”. Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008, 2017.
And for the purposes of the present text
of mine (below) I did consult the following texts, at different levels of
ambition:
Frierson, Patrick. “Kant
on mental disorder. Part 1: An overview”. History
of Psychiatry, 20 (3) 2009, pp. 267.289.
Frierson, Patrick. “Kant
on mental disorder. Part 2: Philosophical implications of Kant’s account”. History of Psychiatry, 20 (3) 2009, pp. 290-310.
Gammeter, Scott. “Was
C.G. Jung a Kantian?”. Quora, June 11, 2019.
Merritt, Melissa. “Emotion, reason and action in Kant”.
Review of Maria de Lourdes Borges’ book with the same title (Bloomsbury, 2019).
In Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2020.01.11.
O’ Flaherty, James Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia. Baltimore:
John Hopkins Press, 1967. (Esp. pp. 39, 46, 55, 105, 126).
Ross, Alison. “Introduction
to Monique David-Ménard on Kant and madness”. Hypatia Vol.
15, No. 4 (Fall 2000).
Saji, Motohide. “On
the division between reason and unreason in Kant”. Human
Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 201-223.
Varden, Helga. “Kant on Sex. Reconsidered”. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. Vol.
4, Issue 1 (2018), p. 1-33. Ref. to the book Sex, Love, and Gender.
And, finally, only two examples of
articles out of the immense amount of literature I do not consider
because it cunningly diverts attention from my issue. It shows the increasing
complexity that somehow tautologically or self-referentially” invades philosophical thought when trying to be critical of Kant by
partially referring to or departing from him:
McCoy, Robin. “Un-thought out metaphysics in analytical psychology: a critique of
Jung’s epistemological basis for psychic reality”. Journal
of Analytical Psychology, 2011, Vol. 56, pp. 492-513
Haran, Graham. “The only exit from modern philosophy”. Open
Philosophy, 2020; 3: 132-146.
FIRST
“KANTIAN” IMPRESSIONS
As I have argued in an earlier article on Computers as embodied mathematics and logic, computers can or even should be seen as implementing logical and
mathematical operations on given data. In that sense they are often considered
as symbols of rationality to the point that we witness a resurgence, after
several waves of optimism, of the hype of artificial
intelligence and the launching of so called technological singularity, now completed with
the hype of so called transhumanism advocating the
“transformation of the human
condition by sophisticated technologies that greatly enhance
human intellect and
physiology”. I was impressed by the fact that as early as in
1980 a young researcher in computer science felt skeptical about the scientific
meaning of his endeavor to the point of abandoning his career by writing a
farewell paper (in Swedish) with the title Why
I cannot be a computer scientist (orig. Varför jag inte kan vara datalog). More
than 20 years later I perceived an analog phenomenon when engaged in evaluating
a PhD dissertation dealing with computer science and Gnosticism.
The question arises of what is rationality
and intelligence. If one does not refer it to being equal to what has been
called the design of inquiring systems, one has to revert to the study of the philosophical terms of rationality
or reason in order to understand at a deeper level the “reason
for” the resistance to “inquiry” and to the understanding of what logic,
mathematics and computers are all about. For instance, in order to understand
that most of computers’ artificially intelligent “neural nets” and “learning”
are basically an implementation of good old Mill’s canons of induction that are the starting point of reflection
on the theory of experimental inference and
of what would come to be named the
systems approach and inquiring systems. The study of philosophical terms
such as rationality or reason risks to be the study of philosophy in general
and of Kant’s contribution in particular, which is outside my range of
competence and the scope of this present text. It only purports to present some
one-off, isolated, questions with the purpose of puncturing the confidence in
presently established philosophy including its support to modern technoscience,
and therefore the need for the contribution by something else to be intuited
later.
Beyond my suggestions in the
aforementioned article on computers as embodied… it is therefore interesting to
see what is said about reason, not mainly in
dictionaries but in the main Kant’s portal to Western philosophy
– Critique of pure reason. Despite the enormous amount of
literature by Kant and about Kant it is difficult to find some outright
definition of or treatment of what reason “is”. This to the point that
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outrightly states
Underlying the difficulty of
synthesizing and interpreting Kant’s account of reason is, of course, the
enormous question of what reason is. Many philosophers—both contemporary and historical figures—proceed as
if this were already clear. However, once this question is raised—the question
of reason’s self-knowledge, as Kant puts it—it is difficult to see grounds for
such confidence.
Indeed, if one investigates the text of
Kant’s prefaces to the the first and second edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, the question appears to be strangely elusive despite it being
the core of the title of the whole book, and its sequel in the Critique
of Practical Reason. Indirectly, however, something appears in such
sentences as “Common logic gives an instance how all the simple acts of reason
can be enumerated completely and systematically” (p. xxv, A:xi-xv). So, what is the difference between reason and
common logic? I will conclude later that ultimately the reader gets them
confounded in Kant’s work, despite his qualification that logic makes
abstraction of all objects of knowledge (whatever objects and knowledge are)
and except for the vagaries of the concept of reason, finally resulting in a
general confusion when interpreting his final attempt of synthesis in The
Critique of Judgment. This corresponds to the main issue of the present
article of mine.
At the beginning of the preface of the
second edition (p. xxviii, B.vii-ix) Kant writes “whether the treatment of
that class of knowledge with which reason is occupied follows the secure method
of a science or not, can easily be determined by the result”. So, a reader like
me thinks that undefined reason is “something” which “occupies itself” (with
the treatment, or the class, and whatever occupy, treatment and class mean)
with a “class of knowledge” (among so far unknown other classes of
knowledge, whatever knowledge means, including personal or tacit knowledge?) by following a “secure method” (whatever secure, method and
science mean, if part of the answer is not contained in that a science is
something that follows a secure method). Notwithstanding the question of how
such a thing can be “easily determined” by the “result”. It soon appears (p.
xxix, B:vii-ix), however, that logic from
the earliest times has followed that secure method, dispensing of historical
attempts to enlarge it by psychological, metaphysical or anthropological
considerations, for which (and for “dogmatic religion”) Kant in his work
repeatedly expresses diffidence and disapproval. Kant also considers (p.
xxx, B:ix-xiii) mathematics and physics as
having followed “the safe way of a science”, despite its safe way or “royal
road” was not as easy for as for logic, in which reason is concerned with
itself alone, since mathematics must take care of its “mathematical objects”.
All this has been convincingly claimed to
be wrong. What Kant affirms (p. xxix, A:xx—xxii; B:vii-ix),
that logic has followed the secure method since it may be seen that since
Aristotle it has not had to retrace a single step, and “to all appearances it
may be considered as completed and perfect”. West Churchman in his The
Design of Inquiring Systems
exposes (pp. 19ff.) the limitations of logic of the “fact net” and consequently
of confuse “logical information” of what he calls “Leibnizian inquiring
sytems”, an information (transmission) that today is probably still
misunderstood when concerning e.g. genetics and virology. He recalls (p. 129) that “since Kant’s times alternative arithmetics and
alternative geometries have been developed”, and that “there is a serious gap
in Kantian epistemology […] one that constitutes a fundamental weakness in his
approach to the design of inquiring systems”. Approach to reason and knowledge?
And to natural and artificial intelligence? What is said of
(alternative) arithmetics can be also said of (Aristotelian) logic as
it appears and is “glorified” in Kant’s work, not to mention in applications of
computers. Regarding physics Kant presents (p. xxxi f., B:xiii)
some penetrating insights into the experimental method that was applied by
Galilei and Torricelli: that “reason has
insight into that only, which she herself produces on her own plan”. Or,
“we [or reason? – my remark] ought to seek in nature [including our own human
nature?] whatever reason must learn from nature, and could not know by itself,
and that we must do this in accordance with what reason itself has originally
placed into nature. I wonder whether such a safe way to science forgets the
proverb that “what goes around comes around”, corresponding to the more
revealing Swedish saying
“Som man ropar i skogen får man svar” (as
you shout in the forest you get answers). Besides such a method seems to
invalidate all psychological and social science since they deal with humans and
not only “nature”. The researcher, in the best case, ends by getting answer to
his own biased questions, as Jan Brouwer notices in the foundations of mathematics applied to physics and
leading to environmental problems, not to mention the methods in (also
“alternative” as alternative arithmetics or logic) modern physics, mentioned in
an earlier paper of mine on Information and Theology.
By muddling through the word reason Kant
comes off the core question of what reason is. This is also illustrated in
prof. Allen
W. Wood’s review
in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews of the late recent book by the Kant-authority Henry E. Allyson, quoted in Wikipedia as being “the greatest English-language Kant scholar of the
postwar era“. Wood refers, for instance to: “Chapter 8, fully sixty pages in length, which also
resists summary, because it contains wide-ranging observations about Kant's
moral philosophy and moral psychology, as well as (or as part of) his account
of how the ‘fact of reason' provides the needed deduction of the moral law.”
Wood also refers to Kant-scholars’ scattering when it comes to saying what the mysterious
“fact of reason” is. I myself reflect that it is not mysterious, the Kantian
mystery being what reason itself is supposed to be in the first place.
In order to illustrate the way by which Kant begs the question I will show how
the definitional matter itself is
paradoxically obscured for the average serious reader who is not a logical
genius and therefore gets easily overpowered and silenced by smart and complex
logical constructions. (Regarding “logical genius”, if I can be excused, I
propose the jest of somebody who can conceive or immediately understand the
logic of OneCoin as
presented in Wikipedia accessed 8 May 2020). In a section on the “discipline of
pure reason in its dogmatical use” Kant paradoxically “defines” (not his use of
the word) definition by stating (p.473; B:753-756) that “To define, as
the very name implies, means only to represent the complete concept of a thing
within its limits and in its primary character”. “Completeness means
clearness and sufficiency of predicates; limits mean
precision, no more predicates being given than belong to the complete
concept; in its primary character means that the determination
of these limits is not derived from anything else, and therefore in need of any
proof, because this would render the so-called definition incapable of standing
at the head of all judgments regarding its object”. After a couple of pages of
dense reasoning (whatever reason is,
beyond logic?) Kant concludes (p.475, B:756-760) that “In philosophy, in fact,
the definition in its complete clearness ought to conclude rather than begin
our work”, and (his “subjective” definition? p. 479; B:764-767) that “…our
reason is itself a system, though in its pure use, by means of mere concepts, a
system intended for investigation only [cf. “inquiry”], according to the
principles of unity, to which experience alone can supply the
material”. The reader may ponder and add for himself, similarly to what I already
have done above: “whatever experience is”, but he may be sure
that Kant obviously muddles through even that word, since it is in some sense
basic and repeated in his book(s). This is an example of how a Kant’s reader
gets rhetorically “trapped” in Kant’s logic as soon one tries to oversee it on
its own premises.
In this way, a whole chapter 5 on
“Defining” in Russell Ackoff’s book Scientific Method (1962), which raises the justified enthusiasm of applied researchers,
becomes completely irrelevant since it does not deal with philosophy, since
the philosophical essence of reason (doubtful whether the
word essence happens to be justified here by Kant himself) may
be judged to be irrelevant in that context. Laymen may feel that all this
amounts to logic nitpicking. But in Kant it is not a question of only defining
reason. Melissa Merritt in her review of Maria Borges’ book Emotion, Reason and Action in Kant (2019) remarks that Kant does not have a single “genus term” (not to
mention definition) for “emotion” in his reasonable
or rational handling of the word:
Rather, he invokes a dizzying array of terms for mental states [whatever
“mental” means] that might - arguably – be thought of as varieties of
“emotion”. He speaks of affect (Affekten) and passions (Leidenschaften),
inclination (Neigung) and desire (Begjerde), feeling (Gefühl)
of various kinds, including several modes of moral feeling [whatever feeling
means]; he devoted half of a Critique [of Judgment] to the
particular ways in which we enjoy beauty and sublimity; he has interesting
things to say about epistemic feelings like admiration or wonderment (Bewunderung)
and astonishment (Verwunderung) and the pleasures of comprehension; he
ponders the disorienting effects of anger, and the soul-sapping forces of
hatred and ambition. But do these mental states share something in virtue of
which they can all be thought of as modes of human emotion? […] (The term Rührung,
perhaps most naturally rendered “emotion” in English, is narrowly associated
with the feeling for the sublime in Kant’s account)”.
The brackets are mine. I happened to read
the breakdown of logical thinking and requirements on definitions described
above after an exhausting reading of the aforementioned French book on La
Question de l’Affectivité, and I recognized my own motivations for
such a reading that confirms the reflections in the quotation. I conclude that
this is the price that Kant has to pay for his abuse of logic especially in the
first Critique, and the extreme self-confidence (a psychologist
might have called it “ego inflation”, leading to secularization) he displays in
it when writing in his first Critique (p. xliii and
xlvi, B:xxxiv-xxxix and B:xliv):
For pure speculative reason [this second edition] is so constituted that
it forms a true organism in which everything is organic, the
whole being there for the sake of every part, and every part for the sake of
the whole, so that the smallest imperfection, whether a fault or deficiency,
must inevitably betray itself in use. I venture to hope that this system will
maintain itself unchanged for the future also […]; the fact being, that an
attempt at altering even the smallest item produces at once contradictions, not
only in the system, but in human reason in general. […] Few only have the
pliability of intellect to take in the whole of a system if it is new; still
fewer have an inclination for it, because they dislike innovation. […] And if a
theory possesses stability in itself, then this action and reaction of praise
and blame, which at first seemed so dangerous, serve only in time to […] secure
to it, in a short time, the requisite elegance, if only men of insight,
impartiality, and true popularity devote themselves to its study.
The main thoughts above are
symptomatically repeated in Kant’s preface to the Practical Reason (p. 20) and seem to reveal his pride for a true
"logically acrobatic" achievement that also contributes to clarify
the title of the present essay. These thoughts may be seen as an additional
example of how a Kant’s reader gets trapped in Kant’s logic when trying to
challenge it on its own premises. It recalls in my mind what Plato in his
dialogues (famously avoiding "linear logic"), writes attributing it
to Phaedo in another context (Phaedo,101e,
trans. Hugh Tredennick, my italics):
You would not mix the two things together, by discussing both the
principle and its consequences, like one of the two destructive critics – that
is, if you wanted to discover any part of the truth. They presumably have no
concern of care whatever for such an object, because their cleverness enables them to muddle everything up without
disturbing their own self-complacence.
It is as if Kant, when affirming the
above, could free himself from all the problems of “contradictions” that I try
to survey in an earlier essay on Information
as Debate, perhaps reducing them to “The
discipline of pure reason in its polemical use” (Critique of Pure Reason, p.
479; B:764-767). I claim that the above quotation shows how Kant,
by using the prestigious vague terms “system” and “organic”, equates (possible
logical contradictions in) his pure reason with human reason,
indicating by means of reference to “contradiction” that reason in his system
is basically logic, and that criticism of it
indicates unpliability of intellect, and lack of insight and
impartiality (whatever pliability, insight and impartiality are), since in the
details of his text he praises “bold and clear heads” who have been able to master
his book (whatever boldness and clarity of head mean, and if clarity is not
sheer logical skill). It is as if an aged mature and cultured humanist or
social scientist were invited to challenge the structure of a computer software
for so called artificial intelligence.
CONSEQUENCES, LEADING TO GRAMONT’S KANT
The above considerations were focused on only some
main question such as reason or related to reason, but the details, beyond
Kant’s own vast early and later literary production have given rise to an
immense secondary literature that in the practice of Western philosophy - have
consecrated the author as a true glorified soul of the sacred Enlightenment.
What Kant writes on (critique of) pure
reason is later applied by him to (the critique of) practical reason, and finally of judgement. For a common educated layman who succeeded to read the
Pure Reason it is hard enough to follow the author’s reasoning already in the
preface of the Practical Reason
where, for instance, he refers (p. 19) to the objection of a “a truth-loving and acute critic […] always worthy of respect” of his prior
work on the Fundamental Principles of the
Metaphysics of Morals. This anonymously referred critic was later thought
to have been Christian
Garve who, symptomatically (for my investigation) was
philosopher and professor of mathematics and logic. Interestingly enough his
objection is mentioned to have been that in Kant the notion of good was not established before the moral principle that
for Kant is his famous categorical imperative “Act so that the maxim of thy
will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal
legislation”: this (Kant says) is the Fundamental
Law of Pure Practical Reason, where “pure reason is practical of itself
alone, and gives (to man) a universal law which we [Kant] call the Moral Law”,
and “this principle of morality […] is declared by the reason to be a law for
all rational beings” [p. 46ff.]. When
I try to follow Kant’s convolute reasoning that terminates in his conclusion I
conclude that (his!) Fundamental Law is, as he suggests “attending to the
necessity with which reason prescribes” (p. 45), the result of pure reason. As
such, however, I would rather say that what Kant demonstrates is part of what
Aquinas is credited for having done in relating the Christian message on mind
to Aristotle’s philosophy and logic (cf. Anthony Kenny’s Aquinas on Mind, e.g. p. 57). In doing so Kant even helps his own
reasoning with examples of what a man would do when confronted with a
life-threatening order “to bear false witness against an honorable man” (p.
45f.). Kant, however, does not remind or recall that this – what a man would do
- is a biblical
commandment, varying between
being number 8 and 9.
In the text and in a note referring to this issue (p.
19), Kant “trusts” that he has given a sufficient answer to Garve’s objection
in the “second part of the Analytic” contrasting to the “Dialectic” of pure
practical reason, which must be the chapter II (on the Concept of and Object of
Pure Practical Reason) in the book (pp. 76ff.) There, in my view (as often)
very cunningly, Kant dissects the concept of good itself redefining it
logically and semantically for his purposes, while lamenting the “poverty of
language”. In my view this is one additional example of tour de force with
logic, which recalls the author’s implicit extolling of logic. As I have
remarked in an
earlier text on logic and mathematics, logic is there
seen secondary to mathematics, and precariously extracted from the richness of
language, and it all has to do with the foundations of logic and mathematics,
which are submerged in challenges and cultural complexities as in Oswald
Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926,vol 1 p.125, 170). In the same note mentioned
above Kant also assures himself against possible unfair objections of not
having given the definitions of the “notions” of the faculty of desire, or of the feeling
of pleasure, unfair since he thinks that they might reasonably be
presupposed as given in psychology (as if it were an established safe science
that he himself distrusts in other occasions). A new tour de force allows then
Kant to what I perceive as further juggling with the purpose of evading Garve’s
objection with its theological implications. At the same time, while regretting
the poverty of language, Kant is able to foresee (p. 21) and reject the
possible reproach that he wishes to introduce a new language.
It recalls a phenomenon that the psychologist Carl Jung
would later reproach in the texts of Kant’s philosophical heirs Hegel and
Heidegger: (Collected Works, on Hegel
CW, vol. 8, § 359f., and on Heidegger
CW8, 360; CW11, 442ff): “Equation of philosophical reason with
spirit…peculiar high-flown language…terrific spellbinding words…bombastic
terminology…over-presumptuous philosophical standpoint…” and “what
schizophrenic patients call ‘power words’”. Cf. also (CW13, 155) on “bombastic style” full of neologisms, and that this
symptom “is observable in the psychiatric clinic but also among certain modern
philosophers”. Similar intuitions seem also to observable in hopeless debates
between main modern philosophers, as when John Searle is quoted in
commenting Jacques Derrida: “Searle
also wrote in The New York Review of
Books” that he was surprised by "the low level
of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the
wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of
profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often
turn out to be silly or trivial."[I would also add that this is also observable among
enthusiasts of AI (artificial intelligence) and in references to quantum
physics, e.g. in “Quantum
physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning”.
Jung probably spares Kant of such criticism since he
appears to be well knowledgeable of his philosophy (dozens of entries in the
index CW20) but only considers and
approves other parts of his work criticizing empiricism and materialism,
advancing the epistemological importance of the human subject with his reason.
This albeit Jung acknowledging that what Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason failed to do, was being accomplished by
modern physics: e.g. the axioms of causality (and
its intellectual applications) being shaken to their foundations (CW11, 967). It is bewildering to realize
that logic is analog to causality in the sense that a conclusion is “caused” by
a valid argument departing from given premises: an effect is caused by an
action performed in a given environment. If causality was shaken at its
foundation, contrary to Kant’s confidence, is analogously shaken at its
foundations by non-classical
logics, relaying the whole issue to the debate on the
foundations of logic and mathematics, especially as they are related their embodiment
in computers.
What seems to me to be Jung’s own failure is to only
claim that “the victory of Hegel over Kant dealt the gravest blow to reason […]
and ultimately to the European mind” (CW8,
358) without realizing that this is the calamitous consequence of what was
already embryonic in Kant’s own logical conception of reason (and of the
so-called Moral Law). In Jung’s own words (CW8,
359): “[T]he equation of philosophical reason with Spirit, thus making
possible that intellectual juggling with the object […] that hubris of reason
which lead to Nietzsche’s superman and hence to the catastrophe that bears the
name of Germany.” Jung believes that Hegel and followers had “apparently just
got the better of Kantian criticism and had restored, or rather reinstated, the
well-nigh godlike sovereignty of the human spirit – Spirit with a capital S”.
He seems to believe that (Kant’s) “epistemological criticism was on the one
hand an expression of the modesty of medieval man, and on the other a
renunciation of, or abdication from, the spirit of God and consequently a
modern extension and reinforcement of human consciousness within the limits of
reason.” I find that Jung is near the core of the issue, but it appears that he
misses the point in his only serious reference to the Critique of Practical Reason, (CW6,
66) where he absolves Kant by acknowledging that “he introduces God as a
postulate of practical reason resulting from the a priori recognition of ‘respect for moral law necessarily directed
towards the highest good, and the consequent supposition of its objective
reality’”. In doing so, Jung ignores the above-mentioned objection by Garve,
and the fact that Kant’s own juggling with logic, turns God, “postulated by
human reason” into a complete abstraction for common human beings who either do
not understand or are not moved or fascinated by the beauty or aesthetics of
logic (more on this about The Critique of
Judgment) but only blinded, overpowered and repelled by its glare. The
“juggling” with logic and mathematics is one origin of my analogy with
“acrobatics” in the title of this article, as also suggested by books such as
with the title of “Archimedes Revenge – The Challenge of the Unknown – The Joys
and Perils of Mathematics” written by Paul Hoffman who was once called “the
smartest man in the world". At a more sophisticated level of
"intelligence", other people could judge Lyndon LaRouche to have been
such smartest man in the world, based on his ideology and beliefs based on
"history
as a struggle between Platonism and Aristotelianism".
The reason for Kant having escaped with impunity
theological criticism, which, for instance, affected J.G. Fichte in the
so-called Atheism dispute, must be that Kant’s logical envelopment of his text,
together with his possibly well-meant rhetorical claims of pious religiosity,
made him as much invulnerable as today’s claims of AI seem to be for the
educated public because of blinding mathematical logic. As when Kant writes in
the preface to the second edition of Pure
Reason (p. xxxix-xli, B:xxvi-xxxiv): “I had to
remove knowledge in order to make
room for belief. For the dogmatism of
metaphysic, that it, the presumption that it is possible to achieve anything in
metaphysic without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source of all
that unbelief, which is always very dogmatical, and wars against all morality
[…] Thus, and thus alone can the very root be cut off materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, unbelief, fanaticism, and
superstition, which may become
universally injurious, and finally of idealism
and skepticism […]”. Regarding skepticism, in contrast, readers can guess
today’s skeptical chaos by reading an article (The Guardian, 13 Nov 2012) with the title “Skeptics
and skepticism”. My own experience indicates that splitting “games
of logic” are today played affecting the Catholic Church itself, as between Traditionalist
Catholicism, and in particular SSPX – the Society of Saint
Pius X – approaching the edge of Sedevacantism, and
the official Catholic
Church as represented in its organization. I have
experienced in this context games of logic as they center upon the
interpretation of differences as “Traditionalists’
claims of discontinuity and rupture”. When I
claimed that it all is a tendency to discuss the logic of texts including
comparisons for consistency (“discontinuity and rupture”), relegating to second
place support of pastoral care based on the example of Jesus Christ himself and
quotations with interpretation of the Bible, the traditionalists’ response was
to claim that “logic” is paramount because it is “LOGOS”. So much for
the catholic
understanding of Logos, driving a wedge among Catholics and friends, while
forgetting the tragedies of reformation, not to mention its other connotations
such as in connection with Eros, Pathos, and Mythos. St. Teresa of Avila, among
saints, did not become a saint through philosophical considerations despite her
story showing connections between Eros and Logos, which are
also elaborated in other
works. Kant obviously escapes all these matters, as well as
the meaning of dogmas against (abuses of) which he inveighs all the time,
ignoring the questions considered later by Jung (see Jung and Dogma, quotations, item #6, and especially
CW11, 170).
GRAMONT ON THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT
The question of Logos and its relation to morals, the
Greek concept of eros, its catholic expression in charity, and
agape,
lead us to ask how Kant finally takes care of it all, or to wonder what is lost
in the one-sided application of logic and ultimately in the application of
computers . From the beginning I was told that it was the purpose of the
Kantian synthesis of the Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason, as put
forward in the Critique of Judgment. As
I did not find an outright direct reference to Eros in that very (also)
intricate work I recurred commentaries, especially the previously mentioned
book by Gramont, Kant and the Question of
Affectivity, with the subtitle A
Reading of the Third Critique [my English translation of the title]. When I did not find or did not
identify any answer to my questions, I finally went on a search in an Internet
browser with the additional help of more direct keywords with such as (Kant
and) biography, madness, emotion, woman, love, sex, poetry. The search lead to
my selection of titles listed at the beginning of this article. The alternative
to this procedure would have been for me myself to write my own review or
“reading” of the Third Critique, but
this I consider it would have been a “trap” inasmuch as it is preposterous at
my age (into my 83rd year) to enter two centuries’ immense discussion by the
world’s professional philosophers, over a text that is so complex and outright
mindblowing, structured (from the original German’s long sentences) in such a
way that challenges even the formulation of elementary quotations. It is
therefore admirable that William
Turner, as many scholars, succeeds in writing an evaluation
of Kant
in the Catholic Encyclopedia which I will allow here to be sidelined. Paradoxically, Gramont’s French text
can also be perceived as mindblowing, the more so since the book seems to
contain extensive, minute notes on most of its 265 pages, which refer to or
quote comments of a legion of Kant scholars. The mass of text of the notes is
comparable to that of the main regular text on the pages. Nevertheless
somewhere I must stop “passing the buck”, or then give up my objections as I am
sure that many do, this being one reason for Kant’s glorification in a very
narrow professional philosophical Overton window (cf. Swedish Opinion corridor). It is a risk in which I
definitely do not incur. This is the reason why I wish at once to emphasize for
my readers one thing by borrowing a quotation from Kant himself, written in
April 1787 (in the preface to the Critique
of Pure Reason):
“I
cannot henceforth enter on controversies though I shall carefully attend to all
hints, whether from friends or opponents, in order to utilize them in a future
elaboration […] As during these labours I have advanced pretty far in years
(this very month, into my sixty-fourth year) I must be very careful in spending
my time […]”
Before going into Gramont let’s touch an illustrative
example of what may happen to difficult books. I bought my copy of Kant’s the Critique of Judgment (bibliographic data
above in my introduction) in 1997 and
read it carefully, with detailed own annotations. Symptomatically, when I
bought Gramont’s book some 10 years later I had forgotten that all, and
rediscovered it in my home after the reading of Gramont, while preparing to
write this article. I mention this in order to humbly submit myself to
criticism since it can also suggest my “cognitive” limitations, not to say
ineptitude: my forgetting because of not being able to really understand? Be as
it may, Kant’s book contains at its end (p. 383-441) his First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, to be contrasted
with the second Introduction at the
beginning of the book (p.9). Its second
section (p. 391) bears the subtitle On
the System of the Higher Cognitive Powers Which Lies at the Basis of
Philosophy. This second section begins in a way that could illuminate what Reason is for Kant, close to his
concluding of his prior work on Pure
Reason: (Translator’s clarifying additions in brackets)
Now
suppose we are concerned with dividing, not a philosophy but our ability [or power:
Vermögen] to cognize a priori through
concepts (our higher cognitive power), i.e. suppose we are concerned with
[dividing] a critique of pure reason, but of pure reason as regards only its
ability to think (i.e., leaving out of account [even] pure intuition): then the
systematic presentation of our ability to think turns out to have three parts.
The first part is understanding, the
ability to cognize the universal (i.e.
rules); the second is judgment, the
ability to subsume the particular under
the universal; and the third is reason, i.e.
the ability to determine the
particular through the universal (i.e. to derive [the particular] from
principles).
So, “reason is the ability to determine the particular
through the universal”? I mention this in order to show how the reading and
understanding of Kant presupposes to have been immersed in and to have accepted
his specialized philosophical language, beyond Aristotelian logic and its role,
which in turn implies a whole world view. If not, never mind to ask what is and
how to conceive “ability” (or “power”, and what is “cognition” and therefore
“higher” cognition (contrasted to what “lower” cognition, and to “think” or
having thought), and so on. In contrast to Plato and Aristotle it is not enough
to be an educated human being but one must be a schooled philosopher in order
to have a chance to grasp what is thinking, not to mention what is a
(postulated?) God. And it does not help to have prior to this already read the
first section of the Introduction (p. 385), which begins with
Philosophy
is the system of rational [Vernunft] cognition through concepts,
this [characterization] already suffices to distinguish it from a critique of
pure reason [Vernunft]. For though a
critique of pure reason contains a philosophical inquiry into the possibility
of such cognition, it does not belong to a system of philosophy as a part of
it, but outlines and examines the very idea of such a system in the first place.
If
we divide this system, we must start by dividing it into its formal and its
material part. The formal part (logic) encompasses merely the form of thought
in a system of rules, while the material (or real) part considers
systematically the objects we think about, insofar as we can have rational
cognition or them from concepts.
So, continue to never mind about what “rational” means
before having grasped what reason is, or what “system” is despite guessing that
it could mean a consistent logical (in
Aristotelian terms) body of
sentences, or what validates something to be called inquiry, and what is an
idea (of a system) contrasted to the system. And why “must” we divide into
formal and material, and what is “form” and “rule”, whether “material” means
“real” and the other way around, or what are “objects” if not material to
consider (what does it mean?) “systematically” (cf. F.C.S Northrop on
objects in The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities).
Finally, what is the relation between “rational”, “higher” and “lower”
cognition? Regarding “concept” (as well as some of my other questions) one
needs to read Kant’s collected works, which I estimate requires 10 to 100 more
logical aptitude and energy than to read Plato’s and Aristotle’s collected
works, as I have done with limited but satisfactory success. But I still do not
know what Kant means by reason, if not a universally and eternally valid sort
of Aristotelian logic, recalling nowadays the claims of an analogous
universally and eternally valid mathematical logic and mathematics implemented
in universally applicable computers that in turn are claimed to lead to super-human
intelligence. In view of common abuses of reason, Kant is very keen to prevent
explanations of experiences in terms of purposiveness, which (p. 295, my italics): “would deceive reason
with [mere] words – not to mention that with this kind of explanation we stray
into the transcendent, where our cognition of nature cannot follow us and where
reason is seduced by poetic raving,
even though reason’s foremost vocation is to prevent precisely that.”
What are we to make out of that or, better, what does
Kant himself makes out of that when he read the “poetic” parts of the Bible,
depending upon what poetic, and raving, mean? Please remark the synonyms given for
“raving” (unknown German original): berserk, fuming, irrational, ranting, wild,
delirious, frenzied, mad, phrenetic, violent). But most importantly: what do
you believe that most common educated laymen who appreciate Kant’s exceptional
intelligence make out of that when reading the Bible after Kant’s death? Let me
emphasize that the present text does not purport to criticize Kant after having
properly clarified him. Clarification, or attempt to clarify are, for instance
found everywhere in the whole Western post-Kantian philosophy, and e.g. for
readers of this text, starting with the foreword and introduction by the
translator of the particular edition of the synthesizing Critique of Judgment referenced here (pp. xix-cix, i.e. 90 pages
excluded selected bibliography pp
443-459, glossary and index, pp.461-576). Now, let us clarify that I am prone to believe that somewhere in
Kant’s immense philosophical production there are considerations that seem to
take care of most objections by means of what he calls his “system”. It is his
merit that he proudly foresees or announces to have built a whole stable
philosophical “system”, where as I understand it the (unexplained?) concept (or
idea?) of system is to be understood in logical terms, whatever logic is if not
in the Aristotelian terms, which are clearly praised by Kant. The systematic
logical terms are also imperceptibly praised by traditionalist Catholics
mentioned above who desperately are focused mainly on the consistency, seen as
if it were Logos, of selected
authoritative Catholic teachings while rejecting the authority of the Catholic
Church. This implies that such traditionalists rely on their
own conscience imperceptibly permeated by Kantian reason and its
problems. It should not be surprising, in view of many people’s, especially
Catholics, perception of an “apocalyptic” gradual secularization or
disintegration of the supposed system of “Reason” in the Western world?
I emphasize, this present text is not a preposterous
attempt to add to more than two centuries’ philosophical criticisms of Kant,
but rather a note on his probable influence on the legitimation of logic as it
can be perceived – not in all his critics – but rather in the disorientation of
some among his sympathizers. There is also disorientation in the superficiality
of some among his non-philosophical critics, but I will not develop that beyond
just referring the reader to one example of this: I refer the reader to a sermon at
the site of SSPX
Resistance condemning Kant by stating some truths, which however
logically can be easily counterproved by Kantians. I will not play back and
forth in such a logical game but, rather, dedicate the text that follows to
expressions by a particular sympathizer, at least to the point of dedicating to
his Critique of Judgment an
intellectually exhausting research requiring an equally exhausting reading: the
above mentioned Jérôme de Gramont.
Gramont’s book is presented as originating in the
author’s doctoral thesis (1994) under the direction of Jean-François
Courtine, historian of philosophy, specialist in history of
ontology. His thesis is in turn
presented as “une même question se
dessine, celle d'un rapport de l'humain au divin. L'émotion porterait ainsi la
marque de notre finitude, mais aussi de notre proximité à dieu.” [“The
same question emerges, that of a relationship between the human and the divine.
Emotion would thus bear the mark of our finitude, but also of our proximity to
God.] The interested reader is directed in what follows to try translations
through e.g. Google
translator]. Despite its ambitions the approach, which relates
nominally to the phenomenological
school, seems to stay closer to Martin Heidegger,
whose name carries most references in the word-index (p. 282). It does not follow the direction of Max Scheler who
had influenced Carol
Woyitila (later John Paul II) in his thesis An
Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of
the System of Max Scheler, leading to so called phenomenological
thomism. This probably
explains my perplexity in my reading of Gramont.
It all starts with Gramont profuse and repeated use of
delicate terms, mostly suggested by Kant, that are central to his analysis,
recalling the observation by Melissa Merritt that I
adduced above, in her review of Maria Borges’ book Emotion, Reason and Action in Kant .
For your own more detailed investigation, to exemplify
these delicate terms I return to my annotations of the French terms as
translated from their German original, followed in parentheses by the page
number where they appear, and by the German original in italics, whenever it
happens to be mentioned by Gramont, and sometimes followed by adjacent
qualifiers:
Affect (113 de
Monde);
Affection (26, #8);
Affectivité (61, 62
“modalité affective”, 224 et pensée);
Affectivité
primordial (79);
Âme (10, 32, 33,
51, 60, 89, 127, 146, 150, 159, 196 ou chair, 233);
Amour (79, 201);
Antéprédicatif (135);
Appétits (218);
Attente (28);
Attrait (212);
Cerveau (27);
Coeur (158);
Conscience (77);
Corps (208);
Disposition (130
innée, 230 primitive, 243 de l’âme);
Émotion
transcendentale (57);
Émotions, (9, 11, Affekt, Rührung, 26, 53, 55 Empfindung, 75, 90, 105, 156, 192, 195,
264-5);
Entendement (16,
128 et sensibilité, 150, 197);
Enthousiasme (34);
Éros (79, 201);
Esprit (17, 32, 91,
114 Gemüt, 130, 149, 160, 186, 194-5,
223, 232, 249 presque Dieu);
Étonnement (37);
Facticité (137);
Fait (130);
Forme (83-84);
Humanité (225);
Idée (23);
Images (27);
Imagination (16,
52, 95, 195);
Inspiration (34);
Intellect (106
intellectus archetypes;
Intellection (26);
Intelligence (39);
Intelligible (132);
Intérêt (234);
Interpreter (30);
Intimité (192 de la
liberté, de l’âme;
Intuition (16, 28,
38, 39);
Joies (38, 245);
Monde (103, 125,
243);
Nature (105,
111,156-158, 212, 233, 264 et Dieu, passim);
Objet (19, 243);
Peines (38);
Pensée (10, 15, 27,
29, 145 et sentiment, 152 reflection interpretation, 184, 224 affectivité, 263
et émotion);
Phenomenalité (77);
Plaisir (10, 38);
Pressentiment (156);
Raison (17, 185
croyance de, 203 besoin de la, 212 et sensibilité);
Réflexion (29, 90,
105);
Remercier (245
reconnaissance);
Respect (215);
Schwärmerei (107,
122, 140, 147,213-4, 214);
Sens (28, 153 dans
le sensible)
Sens commun (29);
Sensation (11, 38,
55);
Sensibilité (11,
39, 65 transcendentale, 128, 212 et raison, 214, 231);
Sentiment (9, 10,
38, 55, 62, 76, 101 modes de, 123, 138, 156, 212, 223 dialectique de, 233, 234
religieux, 243 religieux);
Sentiment immédiat
de la vie (59);
Sentiment
réfléchissant (245);
Sentimentalité (63,
79, 243 figures);
Subjectivité (25);
Talent (28, 29);
Théologie (245 et
esthétique);
Ton (stimmen, 67 fondamental);
Tonalité (62-63
fondamentale, 64 affective);
Tonalité
fondamentale (64, 223);
Transcendantal
(138 philosophe);
Volonté
(27, 203).
Please note that most words remain undefined in the
book, and some of them require for their definition or understanding a lecture
of Kant’s complete works. Note especially which terms are more recurrent, like Âme, Esprit, Monde, Nature, Sentiment.
Gramont’s and my reading of especially Kant’s mention of “Nature” suggests a
nearly pantheistic feeling for it. It also suggests a Kantian endorsement, if
not origin, of the “phenomenological twist” that today allows use and misuse of
the adjective “existential” as a synonym of or substitute of “religious”. In
Gramont this rise of phenomenology may be intuited in many places in the text
(pp. 76, 81f., 105, 110, 131, 176, 187).
I have no ambition of completeness, and only partially
this list of few purposefully selected terms may be used as a restricted word
index. My main purpose is to emphasize words that under my reading of the book
spontaneously called for a definition or clarification, which only in part can
be found in or deduced from Kant’s collected works. I wish also to emphasize
that these are mostly “soft” terms, which today belong to a sort of
psychological domain that was not developed at Kant’s time (1724-1804). This
also can explain his recurring disdaining references to psychology which
pertained to the domain of philosophy, an attitude still alive today in the
contempt implied by the use of the daily term “to psychologize”. To give and
idea it is enough to mention that there was not yet established knowledge about
the nature of “air” and “fire” while still struggling about the phlogiston theory. It
is also useful to realize that Kant’s understanding of the philosophical
context of what today sounds psychological is comparable with his ignorance of
alternative logics and arithmetics, as well as of foundations of mathematics
and logic, not to mention modern physics. Kant’s knowledge of psychology, as
for many of today’s professional philosophers in certain universities and their
schools of thought may be seen as being at the stage of the phlogiston theory
in physical chemistry.
One consequence of all this is the invalidation of
Kant’s Third Critique in what
concerns his project of merging the obscure “Reason” and “Moral Law” of his
first and second Critiques by means of their unholy alliance with an aesthetics
of “sublimity” at
the edges of theology, with the consequence of aesthetics becoming a substitute
of religion in the Western world. The flaws if not cracks of this construction
are visible but unnoticed today in the abuse of logic and mathematics, moreover
systematized in the computerization of the whole society as driven by profit
and undefined effectiveness reduced to plain productivity of whatever. In our
intellectual context here, however, symptoms of these flaws are visible and can
be noticed in Gramont’s text when it displays a language that can be qualified
by an adjective close to “bombastic” mentioned above,
meaning somehow overblown, inflated or grandiloquent. An example (p. 238f.,
remember the possibility of translation, and
for problems of character encoding choose among your browser’s preferences
between Unicode
UTF-8 and Western ISO Latin 1):
La majesté de la
Loi ne tient à aucune provenance divine, mais à la loi elle-même. Et l’homme
qui lui obéit n’a pas besoin d’imaginer d’autre maître que soi. Il y a bien une
théologie kantienne, mais qui s’emploie d’abord à sauvegarder notre pleine
autonomie. Il y a bien une sainteté de la loi, comme il y a une destination
divine de notre humanité, mais en un sens cette dimension religieuse de notre
existence s’impose à la seule vue (ou à la seule écoute) de notre liberté. Et
peut-être le sacré parle-t-il à l’homme même en l’absence de Dieu lui-même,
simplement parce que l’homme , livré à lui même,
respecte encore la Loi, et par ce seul fait, entrevoit le sublime de sa propre
destinée. Est-ce peu, est-ce beaucoup? Pourtant s’est divinement déjà que cette voix nous
atteint ou que le sentiment de notre dignité nous ravit. Il n’y a d’autre voix
pour nous appeler à la moralité que celle de l’homme, la nôtre, et pourtant
c’est divinement aussi qu’elle nous appelle: comme si elle était la voix de Dieu.
Kant le dit d’une parenthèse, mais cette parenthèse aura tout dit: la majesté de la loi est semblable à celle du Sinaï.
L’appel de la loi ne nous donne pas d’entendre la voix de Dieu, mais elle nous
la fait imaginer. Qu’on n’attende pas au respect (ou du sublime) l’image de
celui qui ne se lasse représenter en aucune image – un autre rapport se met en
place, plus subtil, délicat, où la majesté de la loi nous éveille à la gloire
de Dieu, une sorte de présentation négative où l’appel de la loi certes ne
vient pas de Dieu mais vient divinement. Et de même, si l’homme ne se sent pas
transporté vers Dieu, c’est divinement qu’il se sent ravi par sa propre
destinée. Le Dieu kantien reste un Dieu caché, qui se révèle non dans l’image
du sublime, spectaculaire, mais, indirectement, dans notre manière de vivre
notre humanité, dans cette manière pour notre liberté d’obéir à la Loi et se
tourner vers sa propre destination.
This text, then, illustrates for me how a devote
scholar captures Kant’s final great synthesis of Reason and Morals in the
Judgment of Sublime Beauty, while (perhaps?) perceiving God in his sort of own
divine humanity. For innocent, and more so for faithful, laymen the step is
short to a perceived divinization of man (and of “Nature” as it will be seen
further below) and its expression in a particular “humanism” guaranteed by
“freedom” as a counterpart to the religious “dogmatism” that is often condemned
by Kant. It illustrates how complex but arid logical constructions that are
ultimately grounded in man’s “freedom” (lacking a sympathetic
deeper criticism of Kant) tend paradoxically to become a misleading
sentimental rhetoric among “psychologizing” words such as most in the list above. And today we may see the final
result in the form of the reduction of (Kantian) aesthetics, paradoxically
seduced by “poetic raving”, to the hype of “Design”,
consecrated by The Design Society. This recalls
Gramont’s own foreboding when he remarks in his own conclusion (p. 261) that
Dans ses leçons de Munich
sur l’histoire de la philosophie moderne, Schelling présente la CFJ [Critique de la Faculté de Juger] comme “ l’oeuvre la plus
profonde de Kant, celle qui aurait sans doute donné une autre orientation à
toute sa philosophie si, au lieu de finir avec elle, c’est par elle qu’il avait
pu commencer”. [In Schelling, Zur Geschihte der neueren Philosophie, SW X, p. 177.]
If the Critique
of Judgment is indeed his deepest work this is certainly also because of
its theological implications in the pretended synthesis of all his previous
work. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). I would like to have been able
to afford further research into whether and how its potential for secularism
has worked through history from his time on, e.g. through Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger (all
of them knowledgeable about Kant), affecting the German culture as related to
problems exemplified in Wikipedia under
the title Heidegger and the Nazi Party. A
plain comparison between Schleiermacher’s and Carl Jung’s psychology with which
I am familiar, indicates the impossibility of the task, and this is a reminder
of why Kant’s (own psychology of) “Reason” continues to thrive along with Heidegger’s
“philosophy without God” (quotation from Karl Löwith in John Macquarrie’s Heidegger and Christianity,
p.6). A philosophy without God, appears already in Kant. Compare Gramont’s
quotation (p. 234) from the end of Kant’s Third
Critique here below, followed by its English translation by Werner Pluhar
(p. 377, § 482, note 105, both translations with my italics):
“L’admiration de la
beauté ainsi que l’émotion produite par des fins de la nature
si diverses, qu’un esprit qui réfléchit est capable de ressentir, avant
même de posséder une claire représentation d’un auteur raisonnable du monde,
ont en effet quelque chose qui ressemble
à un sentiment religieux. C’est pourquoi elles semblent d’abord agir par une sorte de jugement, analogue au
jugement moral, sur le sentiment moral
(de reconnaissance et de veneration
envers la cause qui nous est inconnue) et agir par suite sur l’esprit en
suscitant des idées morales, quand
elles inspirent cette admiration qui
est liée à un intérêt beaucoup plus grand que celui que peut provoquer une
simple contemplation théorique” (Remarque générale sur la téléologie, p.
482/483 note)
“The
admiration of [the] beauty [of nature], as well as the emotion aroused by the
so diverse purposes of nature, that a meditative mind is able to feel even
before it has a clear conception of an intelligent author of the world, have something about them similar to a religious
feeling. Hence, when they inspire in us that admiration which is connected
with far more interest than mere theoretical contemplation can arouse, they
initially seem to affect the moral
feeling (of gratitude and veneration toward
the cause we do not know), because we [then] judge [nature] in a way
analogous to the moral way, and therefore they seem to affect the mind by
arousing moral ideas.”
Never mind for now in the comparison between the
translations whether mind is spirit, the relation between religious and moral feelings or “ideas”, what
is the “thing” which is similar to a feeling, the meaning of feelings of gratitude towards and veneration of a
“cause” (or beauty of “nature”). I wish to state the case that in more vulgar
contexts a popular understanding and reaction to the text above could be that
it is clear “bullshit”. Or, more sophisticatedly, it could be balderdash aimed
to aid Kant in his struggle against religious “dogmatism” and in defense of
human undefined freedom (of undefined willful reason – and from dogmas?). Worse
than that, in an essay by Alison Ross (cf. the bibliography above) she reviews the work by Monique
David-Ménard on “Kant and Madness”, in particular La folie dans la raison pure: Kant, lecteur
de Swedenborg (“Madness in pure reason: Kant, reader of Swedenborg”, 1990),
and suggests (p. 78) that Kant’s philosophy has a therapeutic function in his
confessed struggle with his own “mild madness” of hypochondria and “melancholic
disposition” with “retreat from the transience of the world into principles”.
(No objection should be raised of ad
hominem, based on Charles
Taylor’s arguments for the understanding of moral issues.)
RATIONALITY
AND MENTAL DISORDER
In Kant on
mental disorder. Part 1, Patrick Frierson (cf. bibliography above) makes the very same observation (p. 276) in the
context of a comprehensive overview of Kant’s thought, culminating (p. 273) in
a table over the “higher” and “lower” faculties and powers of the “soul”. They
are seen as consisting of cognition (including
reason that apparently is nicely
defined, understanding and judgment that correspond to his three
Critiques), feeling (including
intellectual and sensory pleasure and displeasure), and desire (including
choices based on maxims/principles, vs. based immediately on instincts or
inclination). Most interesting and important for my purposes is Frierson’s
conclusion (p. 287, my italics), that despite Kant’s (mainly) overwhelming
(logical) “systematic taxonomy” in the discussion of mental disorders, the kinds of empirical detail, taxonomy and
application, however, “have the potential
to challenge contemporary understanding of these principles [sic] within psychology and psychiatry.
Moreover, both the specifics of Kant’s account and even the general fact of
mental disorders raise serious problems
for Kant’s own Critical philosophy, precisely because it is the
universalism in both epistemology and morals that makes that Critical
philosophy so important today.” This is similar to the conclusion of another
essay by Motohide Saji (On the Division
Between Reason and Unreason in Kant, p. 221, my italics, see bibliographic data above) that
One
of the most important issues (or perhaps the most important issue) for Kant is
to define the nature of reason.
Accordingly, Kant’s treatment of the division
between reason and unreason should be a topic that needs to be carefully
examined. Nevertheless, it has been under-researched in current Kantian
scholarship. Understanding that Kant undermines the division complicates and
enriches Kantian scholarship by prompting a reconsideration of Kant’s view on
the nature of reason.
Any contemporary professional psychologist does not
need to apply the complexities of analytical psychology required for a deeper
understanding of Kant’s mind, in order to at least superficially and initially
associate the text above to the phenomenon of The savant syndrome surveyed
by Darold A. Treffert in the Philosophical
Transactions of The Royal Society B (27 May 2009), or in more popular form
in Wikipedia, where the relation to child prodigy suggests the “blasphemy” of the analogy of seeing
Kant as the genius of a “Mozart of philosophy”.
No surprise, then to see how in the more than 200
years of development in light of Kant, logically structured conception of
aesthetics, nowadays often reduced to “design” in the illusion of matching a
flawed use of logic, has tended to be seen in the West as replacing religion in
general and Christianism in particular. It is very possible that it is this
divinization of man and his logic as represented by Kant, combined with the
aesthetical beauty of powerful logic and mathematics, that opens the way for
the misplaced feeling of “gratitude and veneration” for human intelligence. It
is exemplified by the controversial “Ashkenazi
Jewish intelligence” at a link in HandWiki corresponding
to a former link https://handwiki.org/wiki/Unsolved:Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
(akin to “Are Jews smarter than everyone else?”)
that symptomatically was obscurely deleted from Wikipedia. Or it is exemplified by (in Swedish) by a blog insert on
Israel – a success story, or by a Wikipedia
“List
of Jewish Nobel Laureates” which is
said to not depend on “smartness” (whatever that is) but
upon Jewish “Orthodox learning later translated
brilliantly into secular learning”. Or, exemplified still more by
computer science and computers with their capability to design or “create” so
called “Superintelligence”.
There may be also a similarity with the case of Marx, who was venerated because
of the depth of the thoughts displayed in his books, which most of his
followers had not read and even less understood but were impressed by their
extensive considerations of matters that others seemed to ignore.
And there is similarity to the reverence for
computers, for their models and their “intelligence” since most people do
understand neither how they work and their limitations but are impressed by
their apparent universal applicability, or rather application. This is in turn
worsened by educational initiatives that focus the interest or curiosity of
students of mathematics and computer science on, for instance, the concept of “infinity” in geometry without they having
a minimal chance of culturally understanding, say, Paolo Zellini’s book A Brief History of Infinity. And they could also be misled by the popular
“educational” works of theoretical physicist Carlo
Rovelli (whom I have already considered in an earlier
articles on mathematics and theology) to
sterile daydreaming about the nature and “existence” of time, space, and
reality while reason (or was it intellect?) falls apart in society. This in
turn reminds that half-truth is not truth but may turn out to be sheer falsity.
In my own teaching I have a personal experience that some if not many students
exploit their exposure to having been instructed about great concepts such as
systems in order to claim publicly that they already “know” and have the
authority to ignore or downplay the message by paying lip service to it. It is
also to be the matter of Plato’s famous Seventh Letter where one finds (341d-e, 342a) that fixing thought in writing (paradoxically
as I do here) is damaging since it produces illusions in the minds of students,
who either despise what they do not understand or become arrogant about their
superficial learning. In the process, students are taught to focus on
other (formal and therefore supposedly “spiritual”) matters rather than on
those considered in this article, while still believing that they have learned
truths about “Spirit” in inquiry. All this while not suspecting that later they
may have to choose between to study and get lost in Rudolf Steiner’s Spirit of anthroposophy or
Jacques Derrida’s book “Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question”. Never minding about Spirit in the Bible.
All this while the scientifically minded Western world
paradoxically is busy combating what is perceived as insinuations by advocates
of “Intelligent
design”. This is going on since even those who have deeper
insights, such as Gramont, either excuse themselves and pay their academic
tribute to Kant for the purpose of their academic survival, or express
themselves in such a diplomatic, convolute and reverently devote manner that
their criticism is imperceptible for most readers. Such a masterpiece,
logically consistent with the legitimate pious expectations from the author’s
association with the Catholic University of Paris, (Institut
Catholique de Paris) is the following (Gramont, pp. 245f. My emphasis
in italics):
La reconnaissance
est bien le dernier mot (théologique) d’une esthétique qui déchiffre dans le
beau ou son exclamation sublime la réceptivité et la spontanéité de l’esprit
humain – et même si elle est le dernier mot d’une histoire que l’oeuvre
kantienne devine plus qu’elle ne la décrit. La réflexion kantienne semble bien
ici ouvrir un chapitre qu’elle n’écrit
pas – elle semble au moins réouvrir le chapitre de l’argument
physico-théologique autour de cette indication:
l’admiration pour la Nature ou la faveur
de la Nature nous donne à remercier. *(Un tel chapitre serait à écrire à la
croisée de l’esthétique et de la théologie.)
(En lieu et place de ce chapitre, Kant écrivit plutôt une Critique du jugement
téleologique où l’entendement reprenait ses droits et dépossédait le
sentiment.)
La beauté de la
Nature n’est pas seulement symbole de la moralité […] mais également signe de
la divinité:
invitation à la reconnaissance. Dans la beauté de la Nature ou l’émotion du
monde naissant (l’exclamation sublime), l’homme reconnaît aussi l’appel de Celui de qui provient toute beauté, et
peut-être toute joie.
[* Here Gramont inserts a note which starts with the
sentence that follows the asterisk]
Those who do not reach a critical insight which forces
them into an academically diplomatic language can limit themselves to enumerate
the “full range of negative and positive emotions in Kant’s work, including
self-control, compassion, sympathy, as well as anger”, as Melissa Merritt’s
summarizes in her review of Maria Borges’ book mentioned above. They can
discuss his logical puzzle of theory of emotion including “gendered nature of
emotion, that women’s innate morality disciplined men’s tendency to behave in
immoral ways”, a conception which may have contributed to the later rise of the
romantic conception of woman and of feminism.
In general, this stuff of emotion, whatever it is,
introduces an important aspect of the problem of evaluating the essence of
Kant’s work and its impact. Recalling the association of Kant to the savant
syndrome I wish to terminate by focusing to an aspect of Kant’s personal life
as it relates to love scarcely mentioned and still less considered in his work,
beyond the previously mentioned hypochondria and with due regard to the equally
mentioned warrant of exemption from the accusation of ad hominem.
Before dwelling into the personal “biographical” of
the question, let us see how Kant’s mention of the matter and (pantheistic?)
emotional divinization of “Nature” is captured by Gramont. Kant is perceived as
expressing that love is awakened by the beauty offered by Nature. A beauty - I
dare to add - that Kant does not see (or does not dare to mention as seeing) in
the natural beauty of woman:
(p.
79f.) “Nous pouvons considerer comme une faveur que la nature a eue pour nous
le fait d’avoir répandu en plus avec une telle abondance sur ce qui est utile
la beauté et le charme et nous pouvons l’aimer pour cette raison… La faveur de
la nature (l’Événement du beau comme don) ne disposerait ainsi l’être humain à aimer
que dans la mesure où l’amour déjà aurait libéré ce possible avènement du
beau”.
(p.121) L’oubli de
soi dans le beau ne préparait rien d’autre que la stricte mise en évidence
d’une communauté des esprits à laquelle Kant peut donner son nom propre: sensus
communis … ou plus tard: humanité … *[Note: Humanité signifie d’une part le sentiment universel de sympathie,
d’autre part la faculté de pouvoir se communiquer d’une manière intime et
universelle...]. L’effacement de l’individu en sa singularité…ouvrait ainsi à
Kant le domaine de l’intersubjectivité (l’universalité du jugement). La
violence qui s’exerce au moment du sublime se révèle plus forte encore, au
point d’apparaître comme la force même qui l’emporte sur toute résistance […].
(p.
196): “Aimer, contempler, ne serait-ce pas cela? Répondre dans le silence à ce
qui appelle notre jugement, y répondre dans le silence ou le balbutiement qui
retourne bientôt au silence, dans ce frémissement qui est indifféremment de la
chair ou de l’âme.”
(p.
201f.) “[...] chez Kant cette percée de l’amour, moment essentiel d’une
esthétique qui ne cesse pourtant de rejeter dans l’inessentiel toute figure
pathologique (l’émotion, l’éros).
Comme une pensée de pointe de l’esthétique: la liberté
humaine culminant dans l’amour, mais ne trouve à s’écrire que dans sa marge […]
Que l’amour ne se commande pas, nombreux sont les textes de Kant pour le dire –
mais l’amour n’échappe sans doute à l’impératif moral que pour inventer ici une
autre modalité de la nécessité, celle d’une liberté s’imposant au-delà du
concept de la loi, plus impérieuse encore que toute raison en nous.
(p. 209): “[...] la
vie sans le sentiment du corps n’est que conscience de son existence, et non
sentiment du bien-être ou de son contraire, c’est-à-dire de la stimulation ou
de l’arrêt des forces vitales: c’est que l’esprit est en soi-même uniquement
vie (c’est le príncipe vital lui-même), si bien qu’il faut chercher les
obstacles et les secours en dehors de l’esprit dans l’homme lui-même, par
conséquent dans l’union de l’âme et du corps.”
One gets the impression, I think, that Kant is
continuously evading the universal meaning of eros and eroticism, not
to mention the older classical pathos. Indeed, a note
by Gramont (p. 202) on Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, remarks that if it tries to “sauvegarder le
commandement évangelique (aimer son prochain, même son ennemie) c’est au prix
d’une revision du concept d’amour qui l’arrache à sa dimension essentielle […]
étonnante description d’un amour vidé de sa substance”: that is (for once, in
English translation, if it tries “to safeguard the evangelical command (to love
one's neighbor, even one's enemy) it is at the cost of a revision of the
concept of love which tears it away from its essential dimension […] an
astonishing description of a love emptied of its substance”. Kant believes that
his conception is of a “practical”, opposed to “pathological” love. My humble
opinion: it is instead Kant’s love that is pathological in the dictionary
sense of “altered or caused by disease”. That is, if it is
a disease to be unable surrender in
love, not to mention enforced surrender in old
age and death about which he seemed
to have nothing to say. He seemed to not be able or not be “willing” to
surrender the reason of his own
psyche to the Christian transcendental as suggested by the theological question
of Credo ut intelligam ("I believe so that I may
understand") and by what he could have seen
as a “poetic raving” by T.S. Eliot (Collected Poems 1909-1962, p.
78f.):
The
awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which
an age of prudence can never retract
By
this, and this only, we have existed
Which
is not to be found in our obituaries
Or
in the memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or
under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In
our empty rooms
This unless we are to regard Kant as a proponent of
chastity as a catholic priest, or espousing a most severe Christian view of
marriage as hinted e.g. in an article by Alan Soble’s Kant and sexual perversion, in matters
that symptomatically seem to have been neglected in Kant’s biographies. Let us
shortly investigate some secondary consequences of the influence of Kant’s
understanding on present Western culture at the edge of technological singularity
and computerized superintelligence. But before I continue let me pause here,
referring to the Eliot’s quotation above on “surrender”. I think that
“reasonable surrender” is ultimately a question of the theological dimension of
love. For the rest such surrender is related to the Catholic theological
meaning of Credo quia absurdum and
controversial Sacrifice of the intellect, with analogs in the Bhagavad Gita and in analytical psychology’s surrender of the Ego to the Self. In
my experience I have also noted that extremely “intelligent” logical minds tend
to be paranoid,
believing in conspiracy
theories which definitionally are characterized by exclusive
reliance upon consistent complex logical networks and naïve empiricism combined with a lack of trust, which
otherwise is indispensable even for fruitful advanced business
relations.
One main, if not the main article addressing directly
Kant’s view of sex and erotic love is Helga Varden’s Kant on Sex. Reconsidered (see
bibliographic data above). The article
can be seen as a step in the research for the later book on Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory (Oxford U. Press, 2020). The author displays very early in the article a sympathetic use
of both Kant’s philosophy and of the LGBTQIA-agenda, where the acronym is often
understood as an ongoing gradual extension of the still more established LGBT, being composed
of the initials of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, queer, intersex, and
asexual. The article is presented as addressing:
Part
1 (“Kant on Sex”) sketches Kant’s account of human nature (1.1) and of the
union between unreflective and reflective elements of the emotionally healthy,
morally good human self. In 1.2 I then explore how Kant envisions the
imagination— especially the principles of the beautiful and the sublime—as
informing and enabling human sexuality. Part 2 (“Reconsidering Kant on Sex”)
develops important elements of Kant’s own account, arguing that a more
plausible account of morally justifiable, emotionally healthy human sexuality
that encompasses also the sexual identities and orientations of LGBTQIA can be
found without abandoning Kant’s basic philosophical framework.
In the introduction Varden summarizes Kant’s severe,
rigorous view of sexuality, relieving me from the burden of dedicating my no
longer available years to the task. My
main remark is that despite Kant’s clear position on these matters, a
philosophical scholar like Varden is able to make it consistent with and
conclude the opposite standpoint. By the way, it is remarkable that Varden
does not seem to consider that Kant’s own logic in his Critiques has been seriously used by the notable Otto Weininger’s in
(not the least for Varden herself) controversial analyses of sexuality in his
on Sex and Character (especially
chap. VII on Logic, Ethics and the Ego). As a quotation in Wikipedia puts it: “the duty of the male, or the masculine
aspect of personality, is to strive to become a genius, and to forgo sexuality
for an abstract love of the absolute, God, which he finds within himself”.
Weininger seems also to have seen it consistent with his decision to commit his
famous suicide at the early age of 23, which I read somewhere could have been
contingent to his grievance for not being able to reach an asexual “love of the
absolute”.
All this is in turn consistent with my hypothesis that
logic, as Kant’s logic, or statistics and computer models, can be used or
abused to “prove anything” as I claimed that
modern debates tend to do, not the least in infected matters as feminism and
counterfeminism reduced to psychological phenomena of animus (or anima) possession that I consider in a paper on Information and psychology. It may the
case of Varden’s mentioned new book. Kant’s dazzling synthesis in the Third Critique, can be used and abused
for “not proving anything” as the case may be of recommending The Design Way, or a
“design-driven way to approach the world”, when it promotes false conclusions
and promises false expectations. It can also be the case of the brilliant
intellectual endeavor by Baldine Saint-Girons’ of breeding a sort of new
philosophy out of Kant’s prolific philosophy, in Fiat lux - Un philosophie du sublime (1993). It
advances (p, 34) the thesis that “with the sublime,
aesthetics becomes philosophy.” Saint-Girons, for instance, suggests there (p.
346f.) that Kant evades accusations or self-criticism for incurring into Schwärmerei (cf.
the list of Gramont’s terms above) in his
“fanatic” defense of Reason. This is done by means of his logical subterfuge of
differentiating between downplayed risks of his enthusiasm (avoiding to mention its etymological meaning of “inspired by god”)
that definitionally still stay under the control of reason, and Schwärmerei that is defined as a
sickness, a raving or delirium of judgment. In this way religion is
imperceptibly, logically done away once more for the purpose to support Kant’s
own apotheosis of logical reason disguised in an aura of devout sublimity.
(Parenthetically: definitional manipulations in order to rescue logic are also
found in the earlier mentioned greatest
English-language Kant scholar of the postwar era, Henry E. Allison, in
his mind-blowing defense of Kant’s treatment of Free Will in his recent book Kant’s conception of freedom, 2020, reviews here and
in Swedish Lychnos 2020 pp. 325-327, omitting 2000 year’s
discussions on the matter that are assumed to having been
summarized by Kant’s genius.)
The process is also noted by Frierson (in Kant on mental disorder. Part 2, p.299, cf. bibliography above):
“By labelling Schwärmerei as a form
of mental illness Kant is freed from the need to provide a philosophical
defense of it, and his critique can even provide a crucial antidote to it”. It should be read as: “and he can even claim to
have provided a crucial antidote to it”. That is: what modern psychotherapist
label as a patient’s defense mechanism by
means of rationalization,
which must have been Kant’s own way to cope with his illness (cf. quotation at ibid. p. 294). And note that Frierson
(p. 301) remarks that one of the most important reasons for Kant’s account of
mental disorder is its role in combating religious Schwärmerei and his First Critique
aims to “sever the very root of…Schwärmerei” (Bxxxiv), and one of the main
forms of loss of human autonomy, “any form of morality that ties the authority
of moral rules to their foundations in the ‘will of God’”. Somebody could answer
back: “better than the Reason of God is then the Reason and will of Kant in his
moral law?”. To which Kant, who can be seen indeed as “raving with reason”
could have answered with what he himself if quoted by Frierson (p. 308) as
insisting with respect to the serious mental illness of dementia:
I have never
seen anyone who has been cured of this disease (for to rave with reason is a
special predisposition). However, they are not to be reckoned among the
hospital buffoons; for, being concerned only with themselves, they direct their
supposed craftiness only to their own preservation, without putting others in
danger and therefore do not need to be locked up for reasons of safety.
Obviously, even if there are those who see Kant as
having put others in danger by means of his enticing philosophical “rave with
reason”, nobody dares to associate him with the image of a despised “hospital
buffoon”, despite Frierson’s earlier reassurance (p. 303) that Kant does not
intend his work to apply to a small “club” of philosophers (as it may indeed be
the case!) covered by his magisterial use of “we” in his first Critique. Ultimately, however, Kant’s
unknown psyche and motives do not matter if one applies the hermeneutical
principle that what is said is a function of what is generally understood by
educated readers who are not devout philosophical scholars, still less Kantian
enthusiasts, but are able to read e.g. Plato or Aristotle. Else there is no
supreme judge to define “misunderstanding”, still less of a dead author. And,
if you will: “there is no good tree which produces bad fruit” (Luke 6:43-45).
Let us recollect that this is not a scholarly addition
to thousands of philosophical comments and criticism of Kant or of logic. It is
rather a highly targeted specific intervention in order to point out one main
possible origin of misunderstandings about the functions of logic, related
mathematics, and of aesthetics reduced to design. Since I could not avoid to
enter into an abstract language I am tempted to use some loose analogies (that
ultimately must of course break down) in order to explain why logic is
ultimately necessary for communication but is not the most important aspect of
inquiry, despite Kant’s provision of the necessity of communication for proper
functioning of reason through “sensus communis”
(one additional example of his logical water-proof network):
Logic can be seen as analog to the air for breathing
and the water for drinking. Logic is especially necessary for communication as
simplification of ordinary language, still more simplified in mathematical
logic as in the computer field that paradoxically seems to complicate it by
borrowing the prestige of mathematics in natural science. Air and water are
basically necessary for life, and their purity may be most important for health
if Aristotle was right (Politics, §1330b17).
But they are not the most important things to strive for in life. Life itself
is not the most important thing “in life”, as suicides testify, and analytic
psychology tries to explain. Another analogy which approaches
the similarities between logic and statistics is to imagine a computerized
worldwide follow-up of a pandemic in the form of “big data”. It
can include logically related rates of morbidity, mortality and the rest,
allowing forecasts and collation of statistics and “data mining” on
the basis of misunderstood concept of probability (cf. Theory of Experimental Inference, chap. VII and Prediction and optimal decision,
chap. 6) but lacking a theory for control of input data and for optimal policy
and treatment, and possibly presuming
an unspoken utilitarian philosophy for social priorities. The mere
possibility of How to lie with statistics depends upon and proves the power of conviction of
superficial logic when its hidden presuppositions are false, e.g. regarding the
characteristics of the statistical population and its sampling. A similar case may be made for a network of
surveillance of citizens with the explicit purpose to ensure law obedience or
prevent terrorism, or computerized networks that constrain the forms of
citizens’ communications with government and its agencies. The latter is
exemplified by the human-computer
interaction - of Swedish site
“Healthcare
Guide 1177”, assuring that “in this manner, the general public is assured consistent,
uniform advice” that also happens to prevent free questions. See details in my
coming paper on human-computer
interaction. Furthermore, the shortcomings of most sophisticated modern
software for artificial intelligence – AI – and for scientific-technical applications
such as suggested by the Simulation Hypothesis or for control of space-missions or climate-simulation (that followed The limits of growth) have a complexity and public inscrutability
comparable to the logic of Kant’s philosophy: I guess also that the time may
come for some “super-intelligent” research project aiming at a paradoxical
computer simulation of Kant’s philosophy that would show its problematic
nature. In the meantime, artificial intelligence promises increased
productivity and profits, relegating to the future all social, political and
moral problems of responsibility, distribution, self-determination reduced to
power, and welfare as they have been surveyed in the philosophy of technology,
and suggested in the politics of Technocracy and the American dream. Comprehensive logic also stands behind the success in
terms of profit of many computer oriented companies, but its shortcomings are
the source of, for instance, the controversies involving the Amazon multinational technology company.
Mathematical-logical engineering minds tend to be interested of neither
philosophy of technology nor in religion. It is then turned into politics as I
did outline in a text of information and theology.
They rather hope that the problems of responsibility, self-determination and
welfare, like risks of global warming (cf. my weblog), will be technocratically
and democratically solved by others later “in the future” by means of either
“more of the same” (industrial techno-science and logic), or then by what they happen to read into the logic of Marxism, ignoring its critics.
I propose that these are reminders of the challenges
that Kant’s philosophy encounters when it relies on the rigorousness of its
logical structure related to “Reason”, coupled to vastness of ambitions with
its anchoring in historic literature. It may have been a “Copernican
revolution” in philosophy that, however, incurs in a similar
type of error that Copernicus met, in the sense that Kant sees his specific
human Reason as the sun at the center of our psyche as Ptolemy saw the Earth at
the center of the universe. Kant himself hoped he had created and included in
his philosophy the psychology of the eighteenth century. The next challenge
will be to develop it in order to include and evaluate later developments. My
choice in view of the particular raised in this article is Analytical psychology, which
except for it having been abused in the New Age and
the Sixties counterculture, has been downplayed because of cultural
“enlightenment”. Yet, it experiences some revival in the present societal
debate associated to Jordan
Peterson. (See further in Internet-browser: <“analytical
psychology”+”jordan peterson”>.)
I claim that such a revival is also justified by the
need for it, as it can deduced from the earlier mentioned late abuses of Kant’s
Third Critique in the present
promotion of a philosophy of “design”. The causes of this promotion can be read
in the following comments by Friedrich Schiller in his paper Sur les limites nécessaires dans l’usage des
belles formes [On the limits necessary in the use of beautiful forms], French translation of the German
original in vol. XXI, 3 in the Nationalausgabe
(ed. Helmut Knopmann & Benno von Wiese), and published in Friedrich
Schiller, Textes Esthétiques, Paris:
Vrin, 1998, pp.71-90, 191-193; quoted from pp. 82-83, 86f. (A Swedish
translation is found in Gunnela
Ivanov’s doctoral dissertation, in Swedish, Better things for everyday life –
Design for everybody?, pp. 303-305.). In lack of the German original, here follows my
translation from French to English:
"It is therefore certainly to taste that the
form is entrusted, in the communication of knowledge, with the restrictions
that I have mentioned so far, but on the express condition that it does not
interfere with the content. It must never forget that it is carrying out a
foreign mission and that it is not conducting its own business. Its whole role
must be limited to placing the soul in a tone favorable to knowledge: but in
all that concerns the thing itself it must in no way pretend to any
authority.
If it does this - if it gives supremacy to a law,
which is nothing else than to satisfy the imagination and to give it pleasure
in contemplation - if it applies this law not only to the treatment but also to
the thing and, in accordance with the prescriptions of this law, does not only
order the matters but also chooses them, it not only oversteps his mission but
also betrays it and falsifies the object which it was supposed to restore
faithfully to us. One does not ask then what things are but how they recommend
themselves most favorably to the senses. The strict coherence of the thoughts
which should have remained dissimulated, is rejected like a cumbersome
obstacle, the perfection is sacrificed to the pleasant one, the truth of the
parts to the beauty of the whole, the intimate essence to the external
expression. Now where content must be oriented to form, there is no content at
all; the presentation is empty, and instead of having increased one's
knowledge, one has merely indulged in an entertaining game.
Writers who possess more ingenuity than
understanding and more taste than Science are only too often guilty of this
deception, and readers who are more accustomed to feeling than thinking are
only too willing to forgive them. Generally speaking, it is a dubious practice
to give taste its completed formation before one has exercised the understanding
as a thinking faculty and enriched the head with concepts. Because, since the
taste constantly considers only the treatment and not the thing, all objective
difference in things is lost there it is the only judge. One becomes
indifferent to the reality and is finally attached only to the form and the
phenomenon.
Hence the spirit of superficiality and frivolity
that one very often sees in states and circles that otherwise boast, not
without reason, of the highest refinement.
[...]
As long as man is still a savage, as long as his
impulses tend simply towards material objects and as long as an egoism of the
crudest kind leads his actions, sensibility can only be dangerous for morality
by its blind force and resist the prescriptions of reason as a power, [...].
But if he exchanges this wild natural state for the
state of refinement, if taste ennobles his impulses, if he assigns to them more
worthy objects in the moral world, if he tempers their brutal explosions by the
rule of beauty, it may happen that these same impulses, which before were only
terrible by their blind violence, become by an appearance of dignity and a
pretended authority of the character much more dangerous still and exert under
mask of the innocence, the nobility and the purity, a tyranny much more serious
on the will.
The man of taste voluntarily subtracts himself from
the coarse yoke of instinct. He subdues his tendency to pleasure to reason and
intends to have the objects of his desires determined by the thinking mind. Now
the more the case is renewed where the moral judgment and the aesthetic
judgment, the moral feeling and the feeling of beauty coincide in the same
object and meet in the same sentence, the more reason inclines to hold an
impulse which is so spiritualized for one of its own and to entrust to it
finally the rudder of the will, with full powers without any limit. [....]"
This extensive quotation does not imply my endorsement
of Schiller’s complicated
relation to Kant’s thought but is rather a summarizing illustration of how a
Kant-connoisseur denounces an enticing understanding or misunderstanding of
Kant’s trendsetting Third Critique.
The quotation fits better my purposes with this paper, despite my impression
that a better criticism and recasting of Kant’s philosophy may be found in
(among others as Fichte, Schopenhauer, Baader, Bergson,
etc.) F.W.J.
von Schelling. See his “philosophical religion” and talk about the
necessary submission of reason, as advanced by M-C Challiol-Gillet, Schelling, (Paris:PUF, 1996, esp. pp. 100ff). The quotation from
Schiller shows, however, how Kant can morally lead astray via the interplay
between a dim reason and judgement, and a reduction of aesthetics to doubtful
conceptions of design, and of logic seen as nearly equivalent to reason. The
reduction of aesthetics to the hype of “design” in the modern world may be
motivated by the wish to ignore the exigences and the problems of aesthetics in
Kant’s Third Critique. A flawed
interpretations of doubtful Kantian art & aesthetics may also corrupt its
application in economics as well-willingly proposed by the a Swedish economist,
Pierre
Guillet de Monthoux, but disastrously implemented, as documented in
the film on "WeWork:
or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn" as well
as in text (e.g. in Wikipedia and The Guardian).
All the above applies to this article of mine inasmuch
as logic, like mathematics and exquisite language of apparently splendid
literature in “good” books, also has a beauty
that involves judgment, a “powerful” beauty bestowing a dignity that masks
shortcomings of both reason and
morality. It recalls that highly educated nazi German officers could appreciate
refined art including musical concerts in the middle of Holocaust operations,
and the recurring question of how the disasters of the second world war,
starting with an intellectual disaster, could originate in such a highly
cultured and advanced country.
MODERN
GENIUS & DESPERATE LOGIC
Intellectual disasters in societal computerizations
can in the long run appear in the unbridled technology of a highly secularized,
prosperous, rational world. Such “blasphemous” thoughts are usually absent from
discussions of information technology, except for under the label of “morality”
in the books of certain authors such as Richard Stivers, for instance in his The culture of cynicism – American morality in decline. He
remarks there (p. viii f.) that every culture possesses aesthetical and ethical
dimensions, but since the nineteenth century, the tendency has been to regard
the aesthetical dimension as the dominant if not exclusive dimension of
culture, explaining how a technological civilization greatly diminishes the
opportunity for ethical action. It implies strong sociopsychological tensions,
which become publicly obvious only in particular exceptional circumstances such
as historically with the Luddites, and further with the “Unabomber” terrorist and
anarchist Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future. Not
to mention the early consequences in terms of socialism and communism launched
definitively after the work of Karl Marx, based on his witnessing of effects of
rising technology-driven capitalism seen from London and Manchester.
Societal computerization appears to me as implying a
risk for “acrobatic” use and misuse of logic and mathematics dealing “formally”
with misunderstood “objects”, in the perspective of my earlier
text on Brouwer on the foundations of these formal sciences. It turns
into an over-exploitation of people’s mental inclination misunderstood as
“intelligence” equated with a misunderstood reason, a mephistophelic Faustian bargain
about undoubtable advantages for mankind. Its roots may already have already
called some attention under the labels of Theology and Technology, Prolegomena to a Theology of Technology, Connecting with a Theology of Technology, and
later Theology and Information Technology.
That these matters are not recognized for what they
are may lead to further misunderstandings among (logically!) gifted people who
paradoxically hope for and suggest reforms of “logic” and innovations in
mathematics in order to adjust them to perceived shortcomings in modern
applications. All this while my claim is that a misunderstood logic and ignored passionate mental
“inclinations” are taking over reason, intellect, mind, soul, spirit, psyche or
whatever, like the old good brain. In due time perhaps
it will be claimed that all these concepts will be resumed in a supposed CAN or
“cognitive-affective neurosystem”.
Ultimately, in present times, have
appeared creations like “Cognitive
Neuroscience” and the like, a task for ostensibly gifted polymaths
or contemporary renaissance geniuses that raise the question of what intelligence is or should be, exemplified by
the phenomena of e.g.
• Sam Altman,
presented as American entrepreneur and investor, CEO of OpenAI, generally
considered as a computer wizard who has revolutionized the computer field in
AI through the launching of ChaGPT,
becoming “world-famous” in the coverage of the his sacking and reinstatement as
CEO in November 2023. Educated at prestigious Stanford University, but notably
“dropped out”.
• Sam Harris who,
also apparently, can deal
simultaneously with “rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience,
meditation, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial
intelligence”. Or
• Nick
Bostrom, known for his
views on existential risk,
the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, and
the reversal test: apparently a whole set of new “disciplines”.
Another name in the same spirit is
• Luciano Floridi for
whom it is said that key to his area of work is computer ethics and the claim
that ICT (Information and Communications Technology) is
radically re-engineering or re-ontologizing the infosphere,
where each of these terms seems to require a recourse to Wikipedia. Or
• Max Tegmark,
also dealing with artificial intelligence, consciousness, effective
altruism, a cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics, the mathematical universe hypothesis or theory of everything (TOE), and predicting for
instance that “In 50 years, you
may be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the
unified laws of our universes". Or
• Jaron Lanier, symptomatically
impossible to classify and already mentioned in essay on Information
and theology, and on Wikipedia
democracy), described as an
American computer philosophy writer, computer
scientist, visual artist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Or
•
Peter Shor, professor of applied mathematics that known for his work on quantum computation applied to financial risk analysis, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially
faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer.
(cf. Stefan Woerner, and below on collateralized debt
obligation - CDO). Or
• Brian
Greene, presented as
multi-gifted in theoretical physics, mathematics and string theory (candidate
for a theory of quantum gravity), and involved in the mission of cultivating a
“general public informed by science, inspired by wonder, convinced of its
value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future”, including,
as in a video, the meaning of life
on the basis of “radical atheism”, or investigating “mind, matter and the
search for meaning” in another
video. Or
• Martin
Hägglund, professor of
comparative literature and humanities who is said to "have taken the U.S.
by storm" launching also radical atheism with political recommendations
while offering a novel account of "thinking of time and space, life and
death, good and evil, self and other." It also indicates an ego-ambition
of Kantian dimensions which are further detailed in his personal website and give an idea of what is going on in today's
Western intellectual world. In the exclusively German sphere we have
• Sven Kuch who is said to show
how systemic "meaningful" information is created, showing what is
energy, spirit or consciousness. And lately, I saw that the phenomenally smart
“existential physicist”
• Sabine
Hossenfelder, in weird video on Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics that I treat in a
related essay, refers to the
apparently mathematical genius
• Roger Penrose who has written books
on “the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal)
consciousness” that is supposed to interpret physical experiments, arguing that
a new physics he proposes is necessary since the known laws of physics are
inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. And Hossenfelder refers
also to
• Christof
Koch, that Wikipedia
introduces as known for the neural correlates of consciousness, and active in
the fields of neurophysiology, computational neuroscience and biophysics,
having worked with the Giulio
Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory – IIT (sic !) which tries to explain why human brains
are conscious. And
• Silvio Meira, a computer
science prophet in his own home country Brazil (biblically "for once"). In one and half hours interview in 2023 (in
Portuguese, here and here) he answers questions
from selected questioners in the Brazilian television network TV
Cultura in its traditional
program Roda Viva. Focusing the
future of AI and artificial general intelligence AGI and gifted with an inborn natural, instead of
artificial, sort of "large
language model" in his mind he
handles optimistically all questions that are imperceptibly conceived as
science reduced to the politics of the
mythical god "Democracy". Its
"corrosion" (mentioned here) is in turn unconsciously framed in terms of a need
for "education" (earlier "ethics") and "regulation"
(here). And let me terminate with a real sort of scientific
genius who has not worked in computer science:
Charles H.Townes (1915-2015), a famous
physicist who performed a broad range of scientific activities but is most
known for work in quantum electronics and the Nobel prize in physics for mainly
the development of the maser and laser. He is reported to have believed that “growth
of religious understanding will modify, but not make us abandon, our classic
religious beliefs”, a quotation that could
have been a misspelling of “the growth of scientific understanding…”. In a
55 minutes documentary produced in 2022, with the title of The
Marriage of a Scientist (also here). An interesting thing in our
context here is that people asked him all sort of questions, including what he
thought about the future of humanity, obviously believing that a superior
intelligence in natural science also had general godly wisdom-qualities.
I believe that it this
kind of apparently bombastic super-thinking that bedazzles the common educated
scientist, not to mention the common educated layman. As in the case of the
financial empire of Bernard Madoff it is a matter of
exquisite charismatic "powerful" logical-mathematical combinations.
That is, combinations or networks of logical chains or fact nets, which in the context of design of inquiring systems have
been called the aforementioned Leibnizian
inquiring systems, and in our context amount to an abuse of logic
and mathematics They are well adapted to the specialized logical "small, unimportant part of the brain"
of certain minds as indicated by Brouwer and expounded in my related essay. It recalls in my mind
the likewise polymath Lyndon
LaRouche, mentioned earlier in
this text: what could he have achieved today if active in the computer field,
by a kind of universal philosophy combining Platonism with Aristotelianism.
My point is that the
expectations raised by of all these kinds of polymaths and “logic” mentalities
also characterize the societal drive towards computerization and
super-intelligence. It is a point that escapes even the cultural historian Peter
Burke’s “monumental” book The polymath. Swedish readers can appreciate its review in “Vart tog alla universalgenier vägen?”, ("Where did all the universal geniuses
go?" in Svenska Dagbladet 26
nov. 2020). The text culminates in the symptomatically unexplained historic
divorce between humanities and natural sciences. Others instead, such as
suspicious philologists and psychologists, may see many modern polymaths as
cases of e.g. good old Greek classical hubris, or ego inflation and narcissistic personality disorder, or Icarus complex.
Warnings were issued by most commentators and critics
of Kant that I read, including those referenced among the bibliographic
background at the beginning of this essay. For instance, Manfred
Frank et al. (1994, p. 9) among many references quote warnings about the
problem of “irrationality” (cf. “Reason”!) and of the abysmal freedom of the
exercise of judgment which can burst into arbitrariness and irresponsibility. I
think that such a turbulent process paradoxically can be illustrated by the
Marxist (and controversially Stalinist) philosopher and aesthete Georg Lukács –
paradoxically because of its corrupt inversion of the problem of irrationality,
illustrated by the title of his book The Destruction of Reason. Further examples of turbulence may be seen in Gregory Chaitin’s
weirdly denominated “digital philosophy”, advertised through its prestigious
relation to computer science, claimed to contribute to the “metaphysics and
epistemology of mathematics”.
Also Stéphane Lupasco’s Du devenir logique et de l’affectivité
(Paris: Vrin, 1935/1973), long before the computer age, sensed shortcomings in
the use of logic and investigated (chap. III) Kant’s First Critique at a bold level of detail which I would not be able
to afford. He presented intricate suggestions for a reformed logic (esp. chaps.
IX-XI) that later were picked up by Joseph E. Brenner in “The
Philosophical Logic of Stéphane Lupasco (1900-1988)” (Logic and Logical Philosophy, Vol 19,
2010, pp. 243-285), and later with co-author Kun Wu in Philosophies (October 2017)
, in “Philosophy
of information: Revolution in philosophy”. The attempts
to reform logic are matched by analog attempt to hunt and catalogue numerous logical fallacies, exemplified
by one not yet catalogued, the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy that has been see to be used for ensuring political
correctness and opinion corridors as noted
August 4th, 2021 in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. The false assumption being, in my view, that a
hunt down of logical fallacies will ensure a correct reasoning and inquiry, an
assumption based on a false view of the essence, unction and limitations of
logic.
The dead end of logic is also visible in the
speculations around the Moravec's
paradox, comparing how much "computation" is
required in artificial intelligence and robotics for "reasoning"
compared with "sensorimotor skills". This is supplemented by the
observation that "the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are
those unconscious." After
reflections on what reason is compared computation and with sensorimotor
skills, further compared with the unconscious (skills) I have no more words for
expressing my powerless desolation in face of the "state of the art",
which is also apparent in summarized form in Wikipedia's article on artificial
intelligence.
I am convinced that attempts to reforms of a logic
that Kant believed to be eternally safely true are a symptom of a total final
breakdown of reason. This in the sense that reason is again, ultimately
identified with logic or one among alternative reformed variants that were not
foreseen by Kant. This without considering what characterizes logic and what it
means, if it is not vaguely or unconsciously identified with logos. I
believe that this becomes most visible in the field of human-computer
interaction, especially
in its ambitious summary by Gerhard Fischer in his paper on User
Modeling in Human-Computer Interaction (2000): logic
breaks down into separate fragments of whatever. It recalls what I already
quoted from Jan Brouwer’s Life, Art and
Mysticism in my earlier essay on Computers as embodiment of mathematics and logic:
Every
branch of science will therefore run into deeper trouble; when it climbs too
high it is almost completely shrouded in even greater isolation, where the
remembered results of that science take on an independent existence. The
"foundations" of this branch of science are investigated, and that
soon becomes a new branch of science. One then begins to search for the
foundations of science in general and knocks up some "theory of
knowledge". As they climb higher and higher confusion grows until they are
all completely deranged. Some in the end quietly give up […]
Regarding such reforms or extensions of logic, weirdly
running laterally with the social trends of computerization, the reader can
check for himself at sites dealing with logic, such as Philosophy of logic, illustrated
at Logicism, Categorical logic, Many-sorted logic, and Deflationary theory of truth, together with their respective sections at “See also”
and hints at “Further reading”.
Other intuitions relating to Kant get trapped by and
lost in Kant himself as I warn above in this text, exemplified by so called Critical Systems Heuristics. It originates in one Kantian chapter (chap.6) of
Churchman’s The Design of Inquiring systems, but
ignores the rest of the book’s message. It entrenches itself in Kant’s First Critique and in its heir Jürgen Habermas’
“theory of communicative action” ignoring its problems and the consequent
failure of the synthesis in the Third
Critique. It also ignores the critique of Habermas as in Axel van den Berg
“Habermas
and modernity” (Current
Perspectives in Social Theory, 1990, vol.10, esp. pp. 183ff.) Habermas’ shortcomings in our context
are most evident, as in Kant, in his handling of eros and agape. As Nicholas
Adams, professor of philosophical theology expresses it in
his book Habermas and Theology (p. 243) touching upon the problems already considered
above:
Consensus
can be measured, and to that extent is an appropriate object of a theory like
Habermas’. Friendship is altogether more confusing, and even the most
sophisticated philosophical accounts of it somehow repeat the absurdity of the
hopeless lover who tries to persuade the other to love him by using arguments.
Such intuitions may perceive the problem as
originating at the logical base of the understanding of Reason, and they take the road of Logic and Ontology as already addressed in my paper on computers
and logic. This
also may be the reason for sudden
violent or silent disruptions of friendships as I myself witnessed being done,
among others, by a Habermas enthusiast along the pattern I described in a
section of my weblog with the title Swedish friendship and its ending. And things get even worse in the
context of debates, be they Habermasian or Kantian or not, if as I already
noted elsewhere, we
consider Plato’s insight (in Protagoras, 337b,
The Collected Dialogues,
eds. Hamilton & Cairns): "Let your conversation be a discussion, not a
dispute. A discussion is carried on among friends, with good will, but a dispute
is between rivals and enemies."
Or then such intuitions may perceive, as Berg suggests
(p. 184) that subjecting oneself only to the binding force of a
(incomprehensible) “reason” depends of one’s background cultural knowledge that
most basically includes religion beyond the gods of Profitable Technology and
of the Democracy of Public Opinion. Such insights are furthermore in harmony
with analytical psychology and even esoteric treatments of logic such as
Frithjof Schuon's critique of Kant's Critiques in Logic
and Transcendence (1970/2009). A recent extremely ambitious attempt to
question the reason in computer science by relating it to Gnosticism was presented in year 2003 in a doctoral
dissertation at Lund university. A danger to be avoided is the choice
of “impossible” complex venues (or dead ends) of contextualizing Kant, as the
still more complex labyrinth of Hans Blumenberg
(presented as philosopher and intellectual historian) in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
(1985/1976), referred as building upon the, in my view, hopeless Hegel-Heidegger scale. He senses (p.
429-431) Kant’s failure in grasping private (passive) vs. public (democratic)
reason but, while rejecting “method” and other than Freudian psychology, uses
his own one reason that cannot be other than logic, in a massive crushing text
of 669 pages where he conjures away reason and truth by looking for an equally
obscure “legitimacy”. One sample regarding the “knowledge of God” (p.537):
Mathematics
helps us the most toward comprehension of the differentness of the divine […]
The advantage of the matematicalia [mathematical
things] as against the naturalia [things
in nature], in illustrating the knowledge of God lies in the fact that as
products of human construction, they are “deformable” by following specific
rules, like that of making the radius of a circle infinite – that is, it lies
in the fact that man is not bound to a pregiven essential form that he has to
respect.
More facile venues of escape from the Kantian view of
reason from logic, are exemplified by Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the
Concrete by Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert, a
suggestion coming from a marriage between visionary AI and credulous
psychoanalysis, dreaming of breakthroughs from an unspecified "study of
the unconscious". It is represented by the following quotations (p.19f.):
Emergent AI does not suggest that the computer be given rules to follow but
tries to set up a system of independent elements within a computer from whose
interactions intelligence is expected to emerge. Its sustaining images are
drawn, not from the logical, but from the biological. Families of neuron-like
entities, societies of anthropomorphized subminds and sub-subminds, are in a
simultaneous interaction whose goal is the generation of a fragment of mind. We
noted that these models are sometimes theorized in notions of "mind as
society," where negotiational processes are placed at the heart of all
thinking. […]
We believe that the three intellectual movements we have noted -- feminism,
ethnography of science, and computation -- are elements of a sea change that
would not only recognize concrete thinking as important, but promote it to an
object of science in its own right.
My ultimate conclusion is that the decisive enticing influence of Kant’s
philosophy on the Western enlightenment and thought underlines the reliance on
computation, to be supposedly balanced by entertaining “design” (cf. above
Blumenberg’s “products of human construction, they are “deformable”). This is the meaning of the title of this essay, referring to the abuse
of logic and of a flawed concept of design
originating from a corrupted Kantian aesthetics, and flourishing everywhere
including computer science since the seventies and eighties. It must be
countered since it has promoted a defective if yet profitable science and
technology by obscuring its theological and intellectual presuppositions. It
can be done starting with diffidence or reluctance to believe in
enticing logic as in natural or artificial “intelligence”, even at the cost of
societal and personal sacrifice as many religious people do believe to be
possible, and as even secularized climate activists otherwise do,
notwithstanding their doubts
and problems. All this should ethically be done because
computerization and AI cover up and petrify reasons and ways for doing things –
cf. the earlier mentioned canons of induction - and affect the possibilities of
evaluating unforeseeable, imperceptible and uncontrollable consequences. For
those who think in mainly economic terms all this is exemplified by the case of
misunderstood logic and mathematics in mathematical statistics and in erratic
“intelligent” computer models as applied to the financial sector (as also to
the climate
warming), leading to and allowing the creation of
the mind-blowing, collateralized debt obligation (CDO) and
contributing to the systemic worldwide Financial
crisis of 2007-2008.
Abuse of enticing logic and mathematics
without understanding their essence and place in inquiry has effects on the
human psyche such as its exercise of creativity beyond causality and
induction-deduction, as well as effects on the essence of human work, which
stands at the bases of ethics in its relation to politics such as socialism and
liberalism vs. religion. And they include the basis of the criticism of bureaucracy's logical "rules and regulations" implied by computerization,
which are not "another
story" leading too far from the subject of this present text. They stand
at the core of the doctrine of Legal
Positivism, e.g. typical of the Swedish school of philosophy of law. It
allows public servants to consider themselves as disinterested objective
administrators of “divine” justice, i.e. of the general will of
the people (cf. Kant’s sensus communis above) as represented by a
democratically elected government. In a lay culture they consequently endorse a
“Kantian” status of “priests”, or cardinals if they happen to be members of
Supreme Court, as exemplified in my review of Swedish state individualism and in an interview (in Swedish) of a former
member of the Supreme Court of Sweden.
A CASE STUDY OF DESPERATE LOGIC
As a case study of desperate logic or
jammed rationality we can consider the attempts and the impossibility of
paradoxically countering by logical means the problem below, seen as an analog
to the problems of computer
security and of quality-control
of information.
WHY FAKE ACCOUNTS DOMINATE INSTAGRAM
This is the title of
a video is presented on Youtube (here, here, or here) as follows.
Why fake accounts
dominate Instagram - VPRO documentary.
Why is Instagram dominated by fake accounts? What is
fake, what is real on Instagram? Since Instagram was founded followers and
accounts have grown insanely. But how can you see on Instagram which accounts
and followers are real, and which are fake? A documentary that investigates why
and how fake followers dominate Instagram. This documentary is a cross-media
research into the economy that has emerged since Instagram has been
established: sometimes creative and innovative, but sometimes also very
shadowy. As a viewer, you follow Nicolaas Veul and the making of the account
@followme.doc. He tries all the tips and tricks to gain popularity, interviews
key players and influencer and reflects on his findings.
Nicolaas Veul looks into the financial world behind
Instagram. A completely new revenue model has emerged on this social platform:
likes and followers have become strong competitors.
What kind of shadow economy is created as a result? What is real and what is
fake? How do you fight the algorithm? Who are the winners and who are the
losers? And what do you notice when you scroll through your feed? With #followme the VPRO produces the first
documentary about Instagram on Instagram.
In #followme Nicolaas Veul wonders who the
winners and who the losers are in this new industry. How do you fight the
algorithm? He talks with various influencers and with the Amsterdam Agency for
Digital Influencer Marketing: IMA. They know better than anyone how the
Instagram industry works. In addition, he travels to Russia where home-bound
young mothers write comments for money. In America, he meets social media
software developer Dovetale who developed an instrument to recognize fake
followers and bots. Travel influencer Sara Melotti reports in Milan about her -
she says - violent relationship with the medium. And a wholesaler in fake
followers anonymously opens a book about fraud on Instagram. There seem to be
no rules in this new economy: welcome to the Wild West called Instagram.
Yes, the question was
“how do you fight the algorithm?”. But what do you fight for, and how do you
fight mathematics without understanding what it is in relation to logic,
science, and the human mind from which it was divorced by its embodiment in the
computer?
The video must be
seen and heard in order to understand that it shows where our western
"civilization" is going, with the support of computational technique.
In parallel we must also read and understand that we being run over by
mind-blowing Cryptocurrencies and the Non-fungible Tokens that
also must be read and studied in order to see how they in turn lead to computer
science’s Block-chaining technique, and
further to the reasoning in Byzantine Fault Tolerance, which in turn can be seen as a development of the
equally undermined, problematic Game theory. As if the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as the earlier more general Cold War (here, here and here) could have been solved by means of game theory,
which symptomatically also had a classical genius of computer science John
von Neumann, among its main
innovators.
Such crippled reasoning that some see as
“argumentation” is related to the by now forgotten concept of TRUTH that I
believe many people on the Internet who apply this reasoning forget when they
send to others some links obtained from “reliable but anonymous” sources or
send political fake videos or old videos that some may interpret as being
recent, and such. Unfortunately, all this is difficult for normal people to
understand: only good computer experts think that they understand. As quantum
physics is only for expert quantum physicists, as I illustrate in a special essay on quantum
physics and psychology. While nuclear weapons, however, are built upon
quantum physics are for all and anybody.
What it happening now with this strand of
digitalization of society and its web of communication is a cultural disaster
for those who do not strive mainly for entertainment, whatever it is or should
be. The cultural disaster implies that studies are rare of the impact of social
media on like “Why
the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid”
(The Atlantic, 11 April 2022) the problem, when perceived, is not related
to its possible basic causes. And the same basic causes, “empty logic” working
in separation from ethically and theologically grounded philosophy of science,
are also working in what many perceive the undermining
of the mission of education and universities.
EPILOGUE
– ChatGPT?
As an illustrative tribute to the genius and naivety
of the celebrated great engineer Vannevar Bush, I
will terminate with conclusions out of a quotation of his most famous prophetic
article “As we
may think” in The
Atlantic Monthly issue of July 1945, that I recommend to the readers for
getting a time perspective on the drive for computerization:
It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate
premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay
circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it
will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with
logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding
machine.
Our questions should be: whose and which
were the so-called premises, in whose
machine - and who, and how, should be allowed to use the conclusions? What Vannevar Bush did not know and
perhaps could not know is that he was advocating what came to be called the
already above mentioned logical “fact nets” or Leibnizian Inquiring Systems. In doing so he fell prey to what I
perceived in the academic teaching of the book The Design of Inquiring Systems. It is that the relatively few
people who try to read the book cannot reach an understanding of more than the
chapter 2 just on the AI-oriented Leibnizian I.S, and possibly chapter 5 on
empiricism, out of its 16 chapters. And yet feel that they claim to have read
and understood the whole of it. Vannevar Bush was short-circuiting some hundreds
of centuries of human thinking, as illustrated by the analogy to understanding
only the above mentioned 2 out of 16 chapters portraying western philosophy and
western culture. And today the ultimate consequence of this thinking is the
recent and by now famous ChatGPT, which probably few computer scientists seem as yet to understand what
they are doing in terms of logical fact nets or Leibnizian Inquiring Systems. They are basically logical operations
performed on the contents of the assumed “facts”, including facts and about
functions of devices that are stored and retrievable from the total Internet.
I think that those who feel
compelled by their conscience to unravel this tragic mental confusion can only
do this by relating computer science to mathematical
logic and empiricism, or logical
empiricism, along the guidelines outlined by West Churchman in
his The Design of Inquiring Systems repeatedly
mentioned here, for good reasons. In
particular it is a question of what follows from the conceptions of chap. 2 on Leibnizian Inquiring System: Fact nets
(logical networks), and chap. 5 on Lockean
Inquiring Systems: Consensus. That is, consensus within the community of
Pre-Trainers (PT
of GPT), which establishes the sources of facts to be or not to be networked
and Generatively Transformed). The former fact nets are intertwined linguistic
manipulations, and the latter consensus is the manipulated factual
sentences, declarative
knowledge that in turn will trigger physical devices when it
all happens to be politically trusted wherever found in the Internet by those
who can afford the search for their own entertainment, profit or purposes. And
the first purposes, unfortunately, and
ultimately will be the purposes of automated warfare, and lethal autonomous weapons (see also here) that
will be called defense. That is the core of GPT & Co, which is supposed to
revolutionize and save or at least to win the world, it all seasoned with more
or less intellectually and politically naïve thoughts on “Existential
risk from artificial general intelligence”.
Not knowing or understanding what intelligence
is or should be, the door is open for limitless fantasies about the next if not
ultimate hype of Artificial General Intelligence including
the construction of the above mentioned Theory of everything (and
its philosophical counterpart here). Therefore, many will start
hoping not only to be able to ask any question and get the answer, but also to ask the computer to do anything and having it done, such as trusting self-driving
vehicles without even having understood the
problems of auto-pilots or problems of scientific experimentation and theory-building, or
technocratic planning being replaced by a sort of ex-post pre-training as in the elaborations of GP - Generative
Pre-Training. Whose
training and responsibility? In terms of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine it is like asking ChatGPT or Bing what to do in order to solve and stop the conflict by applying a
thinking that I have provocatively and rhetorically called Logic as Rape in the form of a ChatGPT instead of an inquiring system. Cf. West Churchman’s “Logic:
A Theory of Reality, or Kant for Planners” in his The Systems Approach and its Enemies (chap.
IV). In other words, a revival of the fantasies about the HAL 9000 fictional AI “character” or of the older idea of Frankenstein ‘s
monster. All this without understanding what it
all is about, as illustrated in Jordan Peterson’’s short video on ChatGPT with
the title of The dark side of AI. If
one has the time it is possible to extend the experience by comparing it with
Chris Hrapsky’s video on The limits of ChatGPT and discovering a dark side. It
is not a question of increasingly faulty intelligence as suggested in an
ambitious essay: The age of stupidity.
(It is written in Portuguese, but with one main reference in English about The negative Flynn effect). It is more than so, it is a gradually increasing cultural crisis,
affecting the population’s intellect, becoming more visible in the affluent western
world where it is not masked by material privations. Ultimately, we can
consider interaction in terms of the sort of “archetype” of interaction mentioned
in my essays on Reason and Gender and Computerization. A CNN news report on a related event, The man who married a hologram related
to the phenomenon of Nijikon may give a hint of what is to come, stating that “Researchers
say such events are indicative of broader technological trends and social phenomena”.
The late and perhaps ultimate consequence
of short-circuiting the human and social element in the increasingly inclusive
logical processes is the expanding phenomenon of misunderstandings, conflict
and violence. They could follow from the ChatGPT’s sociopsychological choking
of debate by forcing strong secularized Lockean
consensus. In its bland realistic and immediate form it may be disinformation and ransomeware and, in particular, Ryuk under the general labels of Cyberattacks and its counterpart Computer
security.
The labels cover also advanced political
spyware games with such products as Pegasus, repeatedly noticed by the Swedish public
service television and radio. For those who understand what all this is about, these consequences
are also an ultimate warning about consequences of not understanding the
meaning of computerization or digitalization of society and “artificialization”
of intelligence. In an era on increasing fake
news they are also the consequences of substituting (computer or data)
security for quality-control
of information and its extension in my book (in Swedish)
on systems development and rule of law, abused
today in talking about international law, war crimes and crimes against
humanity. The cultural consequence of
all this is the advent of the hype of disinformation
and fake news, broadly practiced
by mass media and political intelligentsia as suggested in my discussion of the
conflict between Russia and Ukraine mentioned above. It also presents the only and final “solution” as the
same problem appears in the discussions about national security in face of
terrorism and war, the more so when they undermine democracy at its base of the
freedom of expression, as I illustrate it Wikileaks & Information. Those who understand Swedish can
appreciate the undermining of western mass-media in face of the expansion of
NATO in Europe, as discussed by the Swedish Public Radio in a recording
(available until further notice) of the program
Konflikt on April 1 st,
2023. They can even more appreciate the
computerized general undermining of the world’s mass and social media in the
recording of the very same Swedish Public Radio Konflikt on April 22, 2023. It explains the ultimate
developments with the appearance of “fake news” as even warned in the UNESCO
report Growing up in the age of fake news, security
companies that ally deep knowledge of security issues with the offer of fake
news services to lobbyists, politicians, governmental and non-governmental
organizations, including help to influence democratic elections. In the
discussion there are references to the investigations by Forbidden Stories, “a non-profit organization with the mission "to continue and publish the
work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder." It refers in
turn to Team Jorge, “an outfit of
Israeli contractors specialized in the use
of malign cyber activities (forget the original meaning of cyber in cybernetics) including hacking, sabotage and bot farm-run social media
disinformation campaigns to manipulate the outcomes of elections”. It refers
also to Percepto International that presents itself as “Public
Perception company. Expertise in Strategy, Influence, Intelligence & Cyber”
and is eager to captivate the visitors at its hyped home page leaving it clear
that they are registered-identified as visitors at a given date. It does not
refrain from making it clear that it is also involved in politics as testified
in its several blog-inserts and articles about the conflict between Russia and
Ukraine whose complexity I struggle in my essay on its above
mentioned information crisis, including
the “industrial” production of fake information.
I do not know of any ex-post "after-the-event" corrective except an absurd de-coupling from the Internet and a
patchwork of smart back-ups and the hopeless hodgepodge of the indefinitely
expanding "security industry" including FDIR - Forensic Digital Incident Response, to be considered as a sub-field of FDI -
Fault detection and isolation. As ex-ante preventive I can only naively
idealistically think of the above-mentioned de-coupling from the net and quality-control
of information plus the related book on systems development
and rule of law and the conclusions about the mentioned above Russia-Ukraine
conflict. More on this in my article
on Human-computer interaction, which includes reference to the increasing threats to the security of privacy, especially digital privacy in digital
marketing. Readers who understand Swedish can until
further notice listen to an ambitious radio
program on 15 April 2023 in the series “Konflikt” [Conflict] at
the Swedish public radio, which illustrates the problem. They are hopeless
problems that are not understood because it is not understood what embodied
logic and mathematics are in the context of human inquiry and
activities. For the rest, after writing the main of this text, most of all
these thoughts have been gathered and summarized in an essay on Artificial General Intelligence and ChatGPT.