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Here Stephen Hicks draws the implications for education of a commitment to the full development of a child’s reason. This is from his Philosophy of Education course.
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This is Part 3 of Professor Hicks’s Philosophy of Education course, in which he discusses Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments.
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[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Epistemological solutions to Kant: Irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche
The Kantians and the Hegelians represent the pro-reason contingent in nineteenth-century German philosophy.
While the Hegelians pursued metaphysical solutions to Kant’s unbridgeable gap between subject and object, in the process altering reason into something unrecognizable to the Enlightenment, they had competition from the explicitly irrationalist wing of German philosophy. This line of development included major figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Denmark’s lonely contribution to the history of modern philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard.
The irrationalists divided over whether religion is true—Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard being theists, and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche being atheists—but all shared a contempt for reason. All condemned reason as a totally artificial and limiting faculty, one that must be abandoned in the bold quest to embrace reality. Perhaps Kant had prohibited access to reality—but he had shown only that reason could not get us there. That left other options open to us: faith, feeling, and instinct.
Schleiermacher (1768-1834) came of age in a Kant-dominated intellectual scene, and he took Kant’s cue for how religion could respond to the threat of the Enlightenment. Intellectually most active from 1799, with the publication of On Religion, Speeches to its Cultural Despisers, Schleiermacher more than anyone made happen the revival of Pietism and orthodox Protestantism over the course of the next generation. So great was Schleiermacher’s influence that, as theologian Richard Niebuhr put it, he “may justifiably be called the Kant of modern Protestantism.”[28]
As someone who came of age in the 1790s in Germany, Schleiermacher was broadly Kantian in his approach and embraced whole-heartedly the Kantian rejection of reason’s access to reality. Schleiermacher, like Kant, was deeply offended by the assault that reason, science, and naturalism had made on the true faith. Following Hamann, Schleiermacher held that feeling, especially religious feeling, is a mode of cognition, one that gives us access to noumenal reality. Except, argued Schleiermacher, these feelings are not so much directed outward as inward. One cannot grasp noumena directly, but one can phenomenologically inspect oneself, one’s deepest feelings, and therein find indirect senses of the divine ultimate.[29] As Hamann had stated, directly confronted religious feeling reveals one’s essential nature.
When one discovers one’s essential nature, the core self-feeling that one is forced to accept is that of absolute dependence. In Schleiermacher’s words, “The essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence. I repudiated rational thought in favour of a theology of feeling.”[30] One should strive to realize oneself by exploring and embracing this feeling of absolute dependence. This requires attacking reason, for reason gives one a feeling of independence and confidence. Limiting reason is thus the essence of religious piety—for it makes possible a fully-entered-into feeling of dependence and orientation toward that being upon which one is absolutely dependent. That being is of course God.[31]
In the next generation, Kierkegaard (“Hamann’s most brilliant and profound disciple”[32]) gave irrationality an activist twist. Educated in Germany, Kierkegaard was, like Kant, deeply worried by the beating religion had taken during the Enlightenment. So he was cheered—or at least as cheered as Kierkegaard could ever be—to learn from Kant that reason cannot reach the noumena.
The Enlightenment thinkers had said that individuals relate to reality as knowers. On the basis of their acquired knowledge, individuals then act to better themselves and their world. “Knowledge is power,” wrote Bacon. But after Kant we know that knowledge of reality is impossible. So while we still must act in the real world, we do not and cannot have the necessary knowledge upon which to base our choices. And since our entire destinies are at stake in the choices we make, we cannot choose dispassionately between options. We must choose, and choose passionately, all the while knowing that we are choosing in ignorance.
For Kierkegaard, the core lesson from Kant was that one must not try to relate to reality cognitively—what is needed is action, commitment, a leap into that which one cannot know but which one feels is essential to give meaning to one’s life. In accordance with Kierkegaard’s felt religious needs, what is needed is an irrational leap of faith. It must be a leap because after the Enlightenment it is clear that the existence of God cannot be justified rationally, and it must be irrational because the God that Kierkegaard finds compelling is absurd.
But such a leap into the absurd puts one in a crisis. It flies in the face of everything sensible, rational, and moral. So how should one deal with this crisis of both wanting and not wanting to leap into absurdity? In Fear and Trembling we find Kierkegaard’s panegyric to Abraham, a hero of the Hebrew Scriptures who in defiance of all reason and morality was willing turn off his mind and kill his son Isaac. Why? Because God ordered him too. How could that be—would a good God make such a demand of a man? That makes God incomprehensibly cruel. What about God’s promise that through Isaac the future generations of Israel would be born? The demand makes God a promise-breaker. What about the fact that it is killing an innocent? That makes God immoral. What about the immense pain that the loss of their son would cause in Abraham and Sarah? That makes God a sadist. Does Abraham rebel? No. Does he even question? No. He shuts down his mind and obeys. That, said Kierkegaard, is the essence of our cognitive relation to reality. Like Abraham, each of us must learn “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.”
Like Abraham, we do not know and we cannot know. What we must do is jump blindly into the unknown. Kierkegaard revered Abraham as a “knight of faith” for his willingness to “crucify reason” and leap into absurdity.[33]
Schopenhauer, also of the generation after Kant and a contemporary of Hegel, disagreed violently with the cowardly attempts to return to religion after the rejection of Enlightenment reason. While Hegel populated Kant’s noumenal realm with Dialectical Spirit and Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard felt or hoped desperately that God was out there, Schopenhauer’s feelings had revealed to him that reality is Will—a deeply irrational and conflictual Will, striving always and blindly toward nothing.[34] No wonder then that reason had no chance of comprehending it: Reason’s rigid categories and neat organizational schemes are wholly inadequate for a reality that is the opposite of that. Only like can know like. Only via our own wills, our passionate feelings—especially those evoked in us by music—can we grasp the essence of reality.
But most of us are too cowardly to try, for reality is cruel and frightening. This is why we cling to reason so desperately—reason allows us to tidy things up, to make ourselves feel safe and secure, to escape from the swirling horror that, in our honest moments, we sense reality to be. Only the bravest few have the courage to pierce through the illusions of reason to the irrationality of reality. Only a few individuals of special sensitivity are willing to pierce reason’s veil and intuit passionately the seething flow.
Of course, having intuited the cruel horror of the seething flow, Schopenhauer wished for self-annihilation.[35] This was the weakness that his disciple, Nietzsche urged us to overcome.
Nietzsche began epistemologically by agreeing with Kant: “When Kant says: ‘reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature,’ this is, in regard to the concept of nature, completely true.” All of the problems of philosophy, from the decadent Socrates[36] to that “catastrophic spider” Kant,[37] are caused by their emphasis on reason. The rise of the philosophers meant the fall of man, for once reason took over, men no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ![38]
And: “how pitiful, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless and capricious the human intellect is.” Being merely a surface phenomenon and dependent upon underlying instinctual drives, the intellect certainly is not autonomous or in control of anything.[39]
What Nietzsche meant, then, with his passionate exhortations to be true to oneself, is to break out of the artificial and constricting categories of reason. Reason is a tool of weaklings who are afraid to be naked in the face of a cruel and conflictual reality and who therefore build fantasy intellectual structures to hide in. What we need to bring out the best possible in us is “the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts.”[40] The yea-sayer—the man of the future—will not be tempted to play word-games but will embrace conflict. He will tap into his deepest drives, his will to power, and channel all of his instinctual energies in a vital new direction.[41]
References
[28] Niebuhr, in Schleiermacher 1963, ix.
[29] Schleiermacher 1799, 18.
[30] Schleiermacher 1821-22, Section 4.
[31] Schleiermacher 1821-22, 12.
[32] Berlin 1980, 19.
[33] Kierkegaard 1843, 31.
[34] Reality, Schopenhauer wrote, is a “world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible affliction, until they fall at last into the arms of death” (1819/1966, 349).
[35] Schopenhauer: “we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world, that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence” (1819/1966, Vol. 2, 576). As for mankind: “nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” (1819/1966, Vol. 2, 605).
[36] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” 1.
[37] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 11.
[38] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II:16.
[39] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 478.
[40] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I:7.
[41] In Beyond Good and Evil (252), Nietzsche shares the view that the deepest battle is the Enlightenment, with its roots in English philosophy, against the Counter-Enlightenment, with its roots in German philosophy: “They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of ‘philosophy’ for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant arose, and rose; it was Locke of whom Schelling said, understandably, je méprise Locke [I despise Locke]; in their fight against the English-mechanistic doltification of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer were of one mind (with Goethe)—these two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy who strove apart toward opposite poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other as only brothers wrong each other.” See also Daybreak: “The whole great tendency of the Germans ran counter to the Enlightenment” (Section 197).
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
In addition to the session on Ethics and the Financial Crisis, I am chairing a session on the theme of “Reason in Hayek and Rand” for the Association for Private Enterprise Education conference to be held April 11-13, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The rationale for the session: Two giants of twentieth-century thought — but few comparative studies have been done. The following panelists will discuss how Friedrich Hayek’s account of reason compares to Ayn Rand’s.
Reason in Hayek and Rand
Chair: Stephen Hicks, Rockford College
Jennifer Baker, College of Charleston
Title: “Buying and Value”
Abstract: F. A. Hayek and Ayn Rand have very distinct descriptions of consumer behavior. Rand describes consumers purchasing what they do as an acknowledgement of the value of the product. Hayek reprimands economists who make a similar description, as it is a clear “mistake.” What causes one account to differ from another on this matter? What is at stake when it comes to the rationality ascribed to consumer choice? In this paper I lay out the Randian and Hayekian alternatives and assess them against each other.
David Kelley, Atlas Society
Title: “Rand vs. Hayek on Abstraction”
Abstract: Both Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek understood that the political institutions of freedom rest on cultural foundations. Both thinkers held that individuals are influenced by the beliefs, values, and practice of their culture. Both believed that civilization has progressed from the tribalism of primitive societies toward the greater individualism of modern liberal society. At a deeper level, however, Rand and Hayek differ profoundly about the nature of culture and cultural change. Rand holds that cultural practices rest on ideas that are the product of reason and open to rational assessment. Hayek offers an evolutionary account in which ideas as well as practices are acquired by imitation and spread by a kind of natural selection.
This difference is in large part the result of more fundamental differences in their respective epistemological views. In this paper, I will discuss one central issue that I believe underlies many of the others. That issue concerns the nature of abstractions—our concepts for general kinds of their and their common attributes, and the abstract principles and rules that we form with our concepts. Rand held that we form abstractions from the observation of particular, concrete things. Hayek held the opposite view that abstractions are primary; some are innate, some acquired from our cultural environment, but neither can be independently supported by observation of concretes. Though Hayek’s view is in some ways more in tune with current theories of cognition, I will argue that it is both false and inconsistent with a fully individualist moral and political theory.
Tibor Machan, Chapman University
Title: “Hayek and Rand on Constructive Rationalism”
Abstract: F. A. Hayek was suspicious of constructive rationalism and this has sometimes been taken to amount to a diminution of human reason in Hayek’s eyes. Ayn Rand, in contrast, has embraced human reason as the primary means for people to grasp reality and to guide themselves as they conduct their lives.
Do Hayek and Rand disagree? Yes, Ayn Rand has been very harshly critical of Hayek, judging by her marginalia of The Road to Serfdom (see Robert Mayhew, ed., Ayn Rand’s Marginalia). But her focus in these comments was Hayek’s allegedly infelicitous writing and thus sloppy thinking, not so much his positions on various issues and even less his ideas concerning human reason. In other contexts Rand has been identified as a critic of rationalism, which could be taken as paralleling Hayek’s objection to constructive rationalism. I plan to explore these matters.
Alexei Marcoux, Loyola University Chicago
Title: “Hayek’s Epistemic Case for Entrepreneurial Capitalism”
Abstract: One case for entrepreneurial capitalism is straightforwardly philosophical. A handful of fundamental principles are announced and argued for. Then it is shown that an entrepreneurial capitalist social order follows from the principles announced and defended. Roughly, this is the approach of libertarian defenders of the market like Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand. Another case for entrepreneurial capitalism proceeds differently. It is based on an account of the epistemic limitations of human beings and what works to their advantage given those limitations. This is the approach of F. A. Hayek. In a long and prolific career that saw him make significant contributions to economics, psychology, and social and political philosophy, the common thread in Hayek’s thought is the limits of human cognition. Those limits undermine the prospects of socialist calculation and of the technocratic, managerial capitalism taught in university-based business schools and championed by thinkers like Alfred Chandler and J. K. Galbraith. The case based on epistemic limitations is contingent rather than necessary. For that reason (among others), it draws fire from other defenders of entrepreneurial capitalism for being insufficiently definite. Parallels in the thought of Michael Oakeshott will also be discussed.
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Identifying Kant’s key assumptions
Kant’s strikingly skeptical conclusions depend upon philosophical assumptions that continue to inform contemporary debates between postmodernists and their foes. Most postmodernists take these assumptions to be solid, and many times their foes are at a loss to challenge them. Yet they are the assumptions that must be addressed if postmodernist conclusions are to be avoided. So it is worth highlighting them for future reference.
The first assumption is that the knowing subject’s having an identity is an obstacle to cognition. This assumption is implicit in many verbal formulations: the critics of objectivity will insist that the mind is not a diaphanous medium; nor is it a glossy mirror within which reality reflects itself; nor is it a passive tablet upon which reality writes. The assumption emerges when those facts are taken to disqualify the subject from awareness of reality. The assumption then is that for awareness of reality to occur, the mind would have to be a diaphanous medium, a glossy mirror, a passive tablet.[18] In other words, the mind would have to have no identity of its own; it would have to be nothing itself, and cognition would have to involve no causal processes. The mind’s identity and its causal processes are thus taken to be the enemies of cognition.
The diaphanous assumption is implicit in the relativity and causality of perception arguments that were part of the background problematic to Kant’s philosophy.
In the relativity-of-senses argument, the diaphanous assumption plays out as follows. We notice that one person reports seeing an object as red while another reports seeing it as gray. This puzzles us because it draws our attention to the fact that our sense organs differ in how they respond to reality. This is an epistemological puzzle, however, only if we assume that our sense organs should have nothing to do with our awareness of reality—that somehow awareness should occur by a pure stamping of reality upon our transparent minds. That is, it is a problem only if we assume our senses should operate diaphanously.
In the case of the causality of perception argument, the diaphanous assumption is involved if we are puzzled by the fact that consciousness requires that one’s brain be in a certain state, and that between that brain state and the object in reality is a causal process involving sense organs. This is puzzling only if we have previously assumed that awareness should be an unmediated phenomenon, that one’s brain being in the appropriate state should just somehow happen. That is, the causal process of perception is a puzzle only on the assumption that our senses should have no identity of their own but rather be a diaphanous medium.[19]
In the arguments based on the relativity and the causality of perception, the identity of our sense organs is taken to be the enemy of awareness of reality.
Kant generalized this point to all organs of consciousness. The subject’s mind is not diaphanous. It has identity: it has structures that limit what the subject can be aware of, and they are causally active. From this Kant inferred that the subject is prohibited from awareness of reality. Whatever we take our mind’s identity to be—in Kant’s case, the forms of sensibility and the categories—those causal processes block us. On the Kantian model, our minds’ structures are seen not as existing for the purpose of registering or responding to structures that exist in reality, but as existing for the purpose of imposing themselves upon a malleable reality.
The question to return to is: Is there not something perverse about making our organs of consciousness obstacles to consciousness?[20]
The second key assumption of Kant’s argument is that abstractness, universality, and necessity have no legitimate basis in our experiences. This assumption was not original to Kant, but had a long history in the traditional problem of universals and the problem of induction. Kant, however, following Hume, declared the problems to be in principle unsolvable on the realist/objectivist approach, and he institutionalized that declaration in the subsequent history of philosophy. In the case of abstract, universal concepts, the argument was that there is no way to account for their abstractness and universality empirically: Since what is given empirically is concrete and particular, abstractness and universality must be added subjectively. The parallel argument in the case of general and necessary propositions was that there is no way to account for their generality and necessity empirically: Since what is given empirically is particular and contingent, generality and necessity must be subjectively added.
Institutionalizing this premise is crucial for postmodernism, since what has been added subjectively can be taken away subjectively. Postmodernists, struck by and favoring contingency and particularity for a host of reasons, accept the Humean/Kantian premise that neither abstractness nor generality can be derived legitimately from the empirical.
References
[18] This is exactly Rorty’s key conclusion in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
[19] The diaphanous assumption is sometimes but not necessarily assisted by a lingering mind/body dualism in two ways. In one way, dualism encourages us to conceive of the mind as a ghostly, pure substance that somehow magically confronts and comes to know physical reality. In another way, such dualism posits a non-physical mind that is distinct from the physical sense organs and brain, and so immediately leads us to conceive of the physical senses and the brain as obstacles standing in the way of contact between mind and reality.
[20] See Kelley 1986 for an extended analysis and response to the diaphanous and Kantian theses.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Why Kant is the turning point
Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitutive mechanism. He held that the mind—and not reality—sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosophy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard.
Wait a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about that? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason. That Kant was in favor of consistency and universality is of derivative and ultimately inconsequential significance. Consistency with no connection to reality is a game based on subjective rules. If the rules of the game have nothing to do with reality, then why should everyone play by the same rules? These were precisely the implications the postmodernists were to draw eventually.
Kant was thus different from previous skeptics and religious apologists. Many earlier skeptics had denied that we can know anything, and many earlier religious apologists had subordinated reason to faith. But earlier skeptics had never been as sweeping in their conclusions. Earlier skeptics would identify particular cognitive operations and raise problems for them. Maybe a given experience is a perceptual illusion—thus undermining our confidence in our perceptual faculties; or maybe it is a dream—thus undermining our confidence in be distinguishing truth from fantasy; or maybe induction is only probabilistic—thus undermining our confidence in our generalizations; and so on. But the conclusion of those skeptical arguments would be merely that we cannot be sure that we are right about the way reality is. We might be, but we cannot guarantee it, the skeptics would conclude. Kant’s point was deeper, arguing that in principle any conclusion reached by any of our faculties must necessarily not be about reality. Any form of cognition, because it must operate a certain way, cannot put us in contact with reality. On principle, because our minds’ faculties are structured in a certain way, we cannot say what reality is. We can only say how our minds have structured the subjective reality we perceive. This thesis had been implicit in the works of some earlier thinkers, including Aristotle’s, but Kant made it explicit and drew the conclusion systematically.
Kant is a landmark in a second respect. Earlier skeptics had, despite their negative conclusions, continued to conceive of truth as correspondence to reality. Kant went a step further and redefined truth on subjective grounds. Given his premises, this makes perfect sense. Truth is an epistemological concept. But if our minds are in principle disconnected from reality, then to speak of truth as an external relationship between mind and reality is nonsense. Truth must be solely an internal relationship of consistency.
With Kant, then, external reality thus drops almost totally out of the picture, and we are trapped inescapably in subjectivity—and that is why Kant is a landmark. Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one then enters a different philosophical universe altogether.
This interpretive point about Kant is crucial and controversial. An analogy may help drive the point home. Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a woman’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices—whether to cook or clean, whether to cook rice or potatoes, whether to decorate in blue or yellow. She is sovereign and autonomous. And the mark of a good woman is a well-organized and tidy kitchen.” No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of woman’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. He gives reason lots to do within the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason. The point for any advocate of reason is that there is a whole world outside our skulls, and reason is essentially about knowing it.
Kant’s contemporary Moses Mendelssohn was thus prescient in identifying Kant as “the all-destroyer.”[21] Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason—objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty—Kant rejects objectivity. Once reason is so severed from reality, the rest is details—details that are worked out over the next two centuries. By the time we get to the postmodernist account, reason is seen not only as subjective, but also as incompetent, highly contingent, relative, and collective. Between Kant and the postmodernists comes the successive abandonment of the rest of reason’s features.
References
[21] Quoted in Beck 1969, 337.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
After Kant: reality or reason, but not both
Kant’s legacy to the next generation is a principled separation of subject and object, of reason and reality. His philosophy is thus a forerunner of postmodernism’s strong anti-realist and anti-reason stances.
After Kant, the story of philosophy is the story of German philosophy. Kant died early in the nineteenth century, just as Germany was beginning to replace France as the world’s leading intellectual nation, and it was German philosophy that set the program for the nineteenth century.
Understanding German philosophy is crucial to understanding the origins of postmodernism. Continental postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida will cite Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel as their major formative influences—all of them German thinkers. American postmodernists such as Rorty emerged primarily from the collapse of the Logical Positivist tradition, but will also cite Heidegger and pragmatism as major formative influences. When we look to the roots of Logical Positivism we find cultural Germans such as Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle. And when we look at pragmatism, we find it to be an Americanized version of Kantianism and Hegelianism. Postmodernism is thus the supplanting of the Enlightenment with its roots in seventeenth century English philosophy by the Counter-Enlightenment with its roots in late eighteenth-century German philosophy.
Kant is central to that story. By the time of his death Kant’s philosophy had conquered the German intellectual world,[22] and so the story of German philosophy became the story of extensions and reactions to Kant
Three broad strains of post-Kantian philosophy emerged. What shall we do, members of each strain asked, about the gulf between subject and object that Kant has said cannot be crossed by reason?
1. Kant’s closest followers decided to accept the gulf and live with it. Neo-Kantianism evolved during the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century two main forms had emerged. One form was Structuralism, of which Ferdinand de Saussure was a prominent exponent, representing the broadly rationalist wing of Kantianism. The other was Phenomenology, of which Edmund Husserl was a prominent representative, representing the broadly empiricist wing of Kantianism. Structuralism was a linguistic version of Kantianism, holding that language is a self-contained, non-referential system, and that the philosophical task was to seek out language’s necessary and universal structural features, those features taken to underlie and be prior to the empirical, contingent features of language. Phenomenology’s focus was upon careful examination of the contingent flow of the experiential given, avoiding any existential inferences or assumptions about what one experiences, and seeking simply to describe experience as neutrally and as clearly as possible. In effect, the Structuralists were seeking subjective noumenal categories, and the Phenomenologists were content with describing the phenomena without asking what connection to an external reality those experiences might have.
Structuralism and Phenomenology came to prominence in the twentieth century, however, and so my focus next will be on the two strains of German philosophy that dominated the nineteenth century. For those two strains, Kant’s philosophy set a problem to be solved—though one to be solved within the constraints of Kant’s most fundamental premises.
2. The speculative metaphysical strain, best represented by Hegel, was dissatisfied with the principled separation of subject and object. This strain granted Kant’s claim that the separation cannot be bridged epistemologically by reason, and so proposed to bridge it metaphysically by identifying the subject with the object.
3. The irrationalist strain, best represented by Kierkegaard, was also dissatisfied by the principled separation of subject and object. It granted Kant’s claim that the separation cannot be bridged epistemologically by reason, and so proposed to bridge it epistemologically by irrational means.
Kantian philosophy thus set the stage for the reign of speculative metaphysics and epistemological irrationalism in the nineteenth century.
References
[22] See, e.g., Wood, in Kant 1996, vi; also Meinecke 1977, 25.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Kant’s skeptical conclusion
Immanuel Kant is the most significant thinker of the Counter-Enlightenment. His philosophy, more than any other thinker’s, buttressed the pre-modern worldview of faith and duty against the inroads of the Enlightenment; and his attack on Enlightenment reason more than anyone else’s opened the door to the nineteenth-century irrationalists and idealist metaphysicians. Kant’s innovations in philosophy were thus the beginning of the epistemological route to postmodernism.
Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats.[2] That is a mistake.
The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality—or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality—or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality—real, noumenal reality—is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products. Reason has “no other purpose than to prescribe its own formal rule for the extension of its empirical employment, and not any extension beyond all limits of empirical employment.”[3] Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself. Contrary to the “dogmatists” who had for centuries held out hope for knowledge of reality itself, Kant concluded that “[t]he dogmatic solution is therefore not only uncertain, but impossible.”[4]
Thus Kant, that great champion of reason, asserted that the most important fact about reason is that it is clueless about reality.
Part of Kant’s motivation was religious. He saw the beating that religion had taken at the hands of the Enlightenment thinkers, and he agreed strongly with them that religion cannot be justified by reason. So he realized that we need to decide which has priority—reason or religion. Kant firmly chose religion. This meant that reason had to be put in its proper, subordinate, place. And so, as he stated famously in the Second Preface to the first Critique, “I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”[5] One purpose of the Critique, accordingly, was to limit severely the scope of reason. By closing noumenal reality off to reason, all rational arguments against the existence of God could be dismissed. If reason could be shown to be limited to the merely phenomenal realm, then the noumenal realm—the realm of religion—would be off limits to reason, and those arguing against religion could be told to be quiet and go away.[6]
References
[2] E.g., Höffe 1994, 1.
[3] Kant 1781, A686/B714.
[4] Kant 1781, B512/A484.
[5] Kant 1781, Bxxx.
[6] Kant 1781, Bxxxi.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
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