Kant’s Logically Possible but Uncanny World Version

                                                           Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

 

         “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will.”  Why did Kant write such a thing? My children, for example, the music of Bach, the awesome beauty of the light on Hiddensee, or the poetry of Shakespeare – the list goes on – I would call good without qualification or condition. Good here means love-able in the end, worthy of love, its very existence a treasure and a gift.  That seems to me plainest common sense: the certainty that some things and people, at least, are good without reservations. For Kant common sense and I are mistaken. Only the good will – the will that informs our actions for moral reasons – is good without reservations. Why?

        For this reason, I think: Kant accepted classical mechanics (Newtonian physics) as the final word nature. When what we can know has been purged of the subjective, the poetic, the mythical, that was what remained. Classical mechanics understands nature as a closed, deterministic system. In the language of metaphysics, every change is the effect of a cause, a cause that can, in principle, be mathematically predicted or posited of the past. There is no indeterminacy in nature. Everything – my act of writing this – is just as predetermined as the orbits of the planets, part of a chain of events that stretches far back into the distant past and into a future that lasts as long as the world. That is almost everything we can know. Our emotional, ethical, and intellectual inner lives are part of this chain. If finding something good presupposes a capacity to love, and if the capacity to love is a link in a mechanical chain (evolution, ultimately physics), then no matter how intensely we experience it, it is not what it appears to be. The system of nature in classical mechanics is without intrinsic value – is neither good nor bad in itself. It is we who project value onto the mechanisms of nature, mechanisms that are indifferent to our hopes and fears. These projections are entirely subjective, poetic, mythical; they reveal aspects of our nature, of our mechanism, but tell us nothing of nature in itself.

    For Kant, as is well known, the nature that we can and (he believed) do know in the form of classical mechanics is not all there is to say. Indeed, the nature we know as a closed system is only nature as we can know it, and our knowing it bears the imprint of our minds. The world as we know it is our representation or modelling of it; it is pure appearance – not nature as it is in itself, about which we can know nothing. Space, time, causality, number, relation – all these things men once believed made up reality itself – are likewise projections of our reasoning powers, abstracted from our emotional and sensuous capacities. What is real beyond our subjective knowledge and poetic-symbolic projections of what is real is a big X – the unconceptualized reality in itself.

     By way of illustration:  To say that the tree is beautiful is, strictly speaking, wrong. Even to provide a scientific description of the tree, believing that description to be true of nature itself, is wrong. All we can do is to describe the various ways the tree appears to us – which tells us about how our mind works. It tells us nothing about that which is outside of our minds. Rather than saying ‘the tree is beauty’ we should be saying ‘the set of sensory impressions we call a tree appears to us in a way we emotionally respond to as beautiful.’ It might appear to a different species differently, or even a different culture or individual differently. The ways we experience the tree have nothing to do with the tree itself, which indeed is also an appearance and not real in a metaphysical sense. Still, what we can know, is objective in that it must be the same for you and me. The scientific description of the tree is objective. Emotive projections such as beauty may be fairly universal; but they are entirely subjective, lacking any possible ground in knowledge. Other emotion-laden projections – that a certain practice is just or unjust – conflict, and equally lack any possible ground in knowledge. But the scientific description is objective for Kant not because it corresponds to the independent reality of the tree but because such knowledge is grounded in objective structures of cognition stripped bare of all subjective, poetic, or mythical interpretations.

    Where does all this leave morals? Kant couldn’t live with the nihilistic implications of this world version. That they are nihilistic was recognized by many of his contemporaries. Here, for example, the reaction of Heinrich von Kleist (famous German playwright). He argues that it is beyond the capacity of any human being to define the truth because every individual’s definition of such will be tainted by his or her own perception of reality in the world in which they live.

 

If people all had green lenses instead of eyes they would be bound to think that the things they see through them are green…It is the same with our minds. We cannot decide whether what we call truth is truly truth or whether it only seems so to us.

 

This is where the goodness of the good will comes into play for Kant. In the experience of acting out of a sense of duty, so Kant, we have a direct experience of something outside of nature, outside the causal chain that must determine all other phenomena that we can objectively experience. When we act from a sense of duty, we act against all the natural causes that impinge on our will – emotions, cultural rules, religious prohibitions . . . everything. We experience a moment of radical freedom in which we act upon a purely rational maxim, a maxim that does not belong to nature as we know it. It is like a leak from the real (transcendent) realm. We experience directly something otherworldly, non-natural – something that cannot be explained in terms of a closed system.  We experience reality as it is in itself, and not merely as it appears to us. Act so that your action conforms to a universal maxim; act so that other human beings are always bearers of dignity (ends-in-themselves) and never merely a means to some end. That is not written into the laws of classical mechanics or any system based on cause-and-effect. It is sublime, an eruption of something sacred into the closed system of phenomenal nature, of which we are a part. Thus Kant. For Kant, the good will remains outside of nature because nature is Newtonian physics and it is outside Newtonian physics. Nature is Newtonian physics because our minds are constructed so as to perceive and know nature as Newtonian physics, leaving open conceptual space for the eruption of something sublime – outside nature – into our experience. (Kant thus leaves a window open for God and the immaterial soul as well.) In any case, given what he believes about nature, the idea of the good will being the only thing that is unconditionally good makes more sense.

      Now I see no reason why I must share Kant’s assumption that nature is reducible to classical mechanics – even modern physics is not that reductive. I see no reason to describe my experience of freedom as sublime in that sense, as I do not see nature as a mechanism driven by causality. Nor do I see the need to see it as unique. I know the tree is beautiful just as surely as I know that I can act freely (and not only in the sense of acting from duty against inclination). Beauty and freedom are both part of nature; otherwise, my experience of self and nature makes no sense.

        This is no refutation of Kant. He knew he was turning the world on its head. Whether I am projecting beauty onto the tree or freedom onto my fatherly acts, or whether beauty belongs the reality of the tree and freedom belongs to my fatherly acts – metaphysically it might be like the famous drawing of the rabbit and the duck:

                                                 

When metaphysics becomes the attempt to see the world as from nowhere in it – from God’s perspective – as Kant’s and modern philosophy since Descartes proposes, then there is no point outside of the metaphysical constructions from which to see it. You can point out internal contradictions or counter-intuitive consequences for our common sense understanding of the world. But you can’t refute it from a perspective within a competing metaphysical world version. (see the next meditation for an example). Kant can’t step out of his metaphysics, Spinoza out of his, and Hume out of his, and then compare the three with reality as it is unconceptualized – as if the metaphysical world versions were like scientific theories being tested against neutrally defined data. Metaphysical world versions determine what the data are and are not. No possibility of a neutral definition of data, theory, reason, evidence, truth, or knowledge exists since what such key critical concepts mean depends on what world version you use. You may as well be looking at a painting of an icon, of Rembrandt, and of Chagall with a view to determine which painting is the true understanding of the world.

       Nevertheless, all things being equal, a metaphysical world version that denies truth to our experience of love, goodness, truth, responsibility – all the pieces of the puzzle of our mind and spirit – well, prima facie we can’t live in it. I suppose in science fiction we can imagine a culture in which all attributions of intrinsic value are missing. Perhaps the inhabitant of such a culture might muse about how strange it is that this bundle of sense impressions that people call a tree seems so real, and indeed beautiful. Or that his compassion for human or animal suffering seems to be evoked by something real ‘out there’ and is not just a program he inherited from evolution. However, that is no form of life that is livable for me or anyone I know, no form of life that most of us would recognize as human. That is as close as we can get to a metaphysical refutation.

 

      

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afterthought on Kant

 

        For Kant any response to a situation that involved emotions was a natural response. If a response is natural for Kant, it belongs to the closed, machine-like system of cause and effect. The response is, therefore, unfree. If a response is unfree, then it has nothing to do with morality; it is not a morally good response. If an only if a response occurs solely for rational-moral reasons – if I respond to a situation in such a way that any rational creature would have to – is the response morally good. The only time a person can be sure he acted morally is when they have no inclination to do the right thing – i.e. know that nature is making no contribution – but do it anyway out of a pure sense of duty, contra the natural chain of cause and effect. This is absurd – but not logically refutable.

      Of course, duty has its place. I don’t feel like reading to my children every day, but since it is part of their life and a good part, I feel obligated to read to them whether or not I feel like it. Kant would be pleased – I act out of pure duty against all natural inclinations. I thereby lift myself out of nature and put myself on the discontinuous rational-moral plane. But surely a man who never has any desire to read to his children, who has no joy in it, but does it as an unpleasant duty is not a moral saint and is not superior to a father who loves reading to his children. This father feels pleasure rightly, a pleasure or happiness that emerges from affectionate love. Kant sees both the affectionate love that informs the one father’s reading and the absence of pleasure in the other basically as winds blindly (by chance of nature) pushing the wills of the two fathers in different directions. The both pleasure and its absence are morally neutral, natural forces. The goodness of the reading is measured by the extent to which it is informed by the rational will, by a sense of duty, by a moral requirement. This flies in the face of what we know, an example of a metaphysical theory turning the world on its head.

          The affectionate father who reads with enthusiastically will not only be a better reader, but will communicate the love he bears his children more profoundly – and love is the morally salient relationship; not duty. To love one’s children and care for them out of rational duty alone might be better than outright abuse, but I think most of us would agree that such loveless love is a form of abuse, and thus on the wrong side of morality. The difference from Kant is that natural love – however it may have evolved and whatever the biological aspect – is a spiritual response to its object i.e. one’s children. Or with other words, it is a recognition of what one’s children, natural beings all, mean. (This is what the father who acts from pure rational duty must fail to grasp.) Through love alone the children are disclosed as the beings they are: as loveable, which is to say, as creatures whose existence is wonderful. Through it alone to we know children. It is natural and spiritual; not like the wind but not pure rational will either.

          We are of nature, flesh and blood;  and we are beings whose being is disclosed not through some blind evolutionary instinct but through a felt-recognition that this particular natural being, our child, calls forth love, is worthy of love, which in turn is a recognition that the child is good, meaning that its existence is good. This is what Kant could not imagine or admit: that creatures of flesh and blood are at the same time creatures capable of spiritual recognition. As flesh and blood, as matter, Kant thought we are subject to the same laws of physics and biochemistry as a snail, an amoeba, or a volcano. As we are. But we also transcend that kind of being every second of our lives. Kant could only imagine that an immaterial ghostly substance, a form of non-matter, made spiritual life possible, but that was a metaphysical idea that had no cognitive (i.e. scientific) content. But the idea of a ghostly, immaterial substance loving our child in radical separation from nature and the body – well, is that easier to belief than the simple fact that we are creatures of flesh and blood who can read lovingly to our children? Or, denying the coherence of the ghost-in-the-machine hypothesis (as I certainly do), is believing that the experience of lovingly reading to your children is an illusion because you are matter and matter (as understood by science) is incapable of spiritual act – is that any easier than believing a truth so obvious no one except modern philosophers and scientists forgetting their science and engaging in philosophical speculation would ever think to deny it?

        That we are nature and we can genuinely love, wonder, do good, do evil, and even do physics – some of us, at least. That obvious fact, which can be doubted only in thought experiments but not in life, is the ground of the philosophy that I can take seriously. This is not a logical refutation of Kant. From within our experience of life we may not be able to doubt that we are nature and that we transcend nature as conceived by modern science. But we can’t get out of our skins to compare it with our reality as not lived and experience. (To believe science gets outside of all experience is wrong.) Perhaps we are all living in the Matrix or perhaps Descartes’ evil demon is causing an illusory experience of self and world. Such a purely speculative perspective on the world – the perspective of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant and beyond – is truly beyond the limits of reason. But I see no reason to take seriously the possibility that we live in a Matrix, that my body is a machine and nothing else, that a ghostly substance does or does not coexist with that machine, or that the full truth of nature rules out the reality of our inner lives.