Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Was Kant really that skeptical?

Some readers of Explaining Postmodernism object that I over-interpret Kant’s skepticism. Some prefer a gentler, more objectivity-friendly Kant. So while I quote Kant a lot in making the argument that Kant’s philosophy is radically subjectivist and the critical step down the road to postmodernism, not everyone is convinced.

So I am grateful to Quee Nelson for the following fine collection of quotations from various of Kant’s works, all supporting the Kant-as-subjectivist thesis. The quotations are included in the Appendix to Nelson’s (recommended) The Slightest Philosophy.

“It still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us … must be accepted merely on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.” Critique of Pure Reason, B519.

“All objects of an experience possible for us are nothing but appearances, i.e., mere representations, which … have outside our thoughts no existence grounded in itself. … The realist … makes these modifications of our sensibility into things subsisting in themselves, and hence makes mere representations into things in themselves.” Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 13, Note II.

“The senses … never and in no single instance enable us to know things in themselves.” Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Part I, Book I, Chap. I, sec. II, 55.

“Things in themselves … cannot be objects of experience.” Critique of Pure Reason, A385.

“Matter … is nothing other than a mere form or a certain mode of representation of an unknown object.” Critique of Pure Reason, B45.

“Nothing intuited in space is a thing in itself … what we call outer objects are nothing but representations of our sensibility the form of which is space. The true correlate of sensibility, the thing in itself, is not known, and cannot be known, through these representations; and in experience no question is ever asked regarding it.” Critique of Pure Reason, A370.

“External objects (bodies) are merely appearances, hence also nothing other than a species of my representations.” Critique of Practical Reason, Part I, Book I, Chap. I, sec. II, 54.

“The objects with which we have to do in experience are by no means things in themselves but only appearances.” Critique of Pure Reason, B520.

“Appearances are not things, but rather nothing but representations, and they cannot exist at all outside our minds.” Critique of Pure Reason, B235.

“Phenomena are not things in themselves, and are yet the only thing that can be given to us to know.” Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Part One, Remark II, 288-289.

“The non-sensible cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us.” Critique of Pure Reason, A494/B522.

“As we have just shown that the senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances…we conclude that all bodies together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.” Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Part One, Remark II, 288-289.

“Your object is merely in your brain.” Critique of Pure Reason, A484/B512.

“It is also false that the world (the sum total of all appearances) is a whole existing in itself … appearances in general are nothing outside our representations.” Critique of Pure Reason, A507/B535.

“Since space is a form of that intuition we call outer … we can and must regard the beings in it as real; and the same is true of time. But this space and this time, and with them all appearances, are not in themselves things; they are nothing but representations and cannot exist at all outside our minds.” Critique of Pure Reason, A492/B520.

“The understanding itself is the lawgiver of Nature; save through it, Nature would not exist at all.” Critique of Pure Reason, A126.

“If I remove the thinking subject, the whole corporeal world must at once vanish.” Critique of Pure Reason, A383. [See: Primacy of Consciousness]

“If then, as this critical argument obviously compels us to do, we hold fast to the rule above established, and do not push our questions beyond the limits within which possible experience can present us with its object, we shall never dream of seeking to inform ourselves about the objects of our senses as they are in themselves.” Critique of Pure Reason, A380.

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxx.

Source: Quee Nelson’s The Slightest Philosophy at Google books. Also available at Amazon.

Related on Kant:
My interpretation of Kant’s epistemology in Chapter Two of Explaining Postmodernism.
Kant on collectivism and war.
Is commerce rendering war obsolete?
Education: Locke versus Kant.
Philosophy’s longest sentences, Part 2.
Kleist: How Kant ruined my life.
On “giving back”.
Kant and modern art.
Is modern art too complicated for us? [with quotations from Kant's Critique of Judgment].
Heine on Kant: The Department of Great Putdowns.

Classic readings for Philosophy of Education

For my Philosophy of Education course lectures on video, readings are now posted from key philosophers to accompany several of the lectures. [All links are to PDFs.]

Idealism: Plato (the Allegory of the Cave from Republic) and Immanuel Kant (from On Education).

Realism: Aristotle (from Politics) and John Locke (from Some Thoughts concerning Education).

Pragmatism: John Dewey (from Democracy and Education).

Behaviorism: B. F. Skinner (from Beyond Freedom and Dignity).

Existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre (from Existentialism Is a Humanism).

Marxism: Karl Marx (from Theses on Feuerbach and The Holy Family).

Postmodernism: Henry Giroux (from Border Pedagogy as Postmodern Resistance).

In each case, I discuss the readings in my video lectures, but nothing beats also reading the primary sources for oneself.

Philosophical Foundations of Education course

Here is the syllabus and schedule [pdf] for my graduate course this semester.

I’ll be doing a few experiments with the course this time. One is using my online lectures in Philosophy of Education as assignments for class preparation, along with reading from Howard Ozmon’s textbook. I’ll also be asking the students to read and write a critical review of Jerry Kirkpatrick’s Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, a fine historically-informed survey of educational theory.

And in the second half of the semester I will be working with Marsha Familaro Enright, who will lead several Socratic discussions on key philosophers of education — including Plato, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, B. F. Skinner, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, and Henry Giroux.

Gannibal, “dark star of the Enlightenment”

Imagine that this is your life story:

You are born in Africa, possibly in Ethiopia or perhaps Chad, but as a child you are taken by Arab slavers and sold in Constantinople to the Sultan of Turkey, before long catching the eye of a Russian diplomat and spy, who acquires you and smuggles you out in order to send you to the Kremlim in Moscow as a gift to Peter the Great, who becomes your godfather and, impressed with your wit and obvious intelligence, has you given the best education, whereupon you grow up to be a first rate military engineer, being posted on campaigns from the Basque country to the Baltic (where you meet in Königsberg the then-mathematics tutor Immanuel Kant), along the way learning French (naturellement!) and studying mathematics, such that when you engage in further study in Paris, you charm not only the wives of noble women with your sexual charisma but meet and impress Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Leibniz as one of the few people in the world who is proficient at Newtonian mechanics and the new calculus, leading you to be nicknamed “dark star of the Enlightenment,” although when you return to Russia you run afoul of a power struggle after Peter the Great’s death and are exiled to a place in Siberia 4,000 miles east of St. Petersburg and near the then-Chinese border, though some years later you are pardoned and return to further exploits of military engineering for which you are rewarded with large estates of your own, meaning, in 18th-century Russia that you become a slave owner yourself because of the serfs who come with the land, and all is well except that your first wife hates you because it was an arranged marriage against her will and she has cheated on you, leading to a divorce and your marriage to a woman of noble Scandinavian and German origin, with whom you have ten children, one of which would become General-in-Chief, the second highest rank in imperial Russia’s military, and one of which would become the grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, thought by many to be the greatest of Russian poets.

Except that your story is real, your name is Abram Petrovich Gannibal, and your biography is well told by Hugh Barnes’s Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg.

According to Barnes, Peter the Great’s interest in the young Gannibal was both personal and social-reformer: “by educating the young Negro in a style befitting a prince, the tsar hoped to teach the nobility a lesson, ‘and to put Russians to shame by convincing them that out of every people and even from among wild men—such as Negroes, whom our civilized nations assign exclusively to the class of the slave—there can be formed men who, by dint of application, can obtain knowledge and learning, and thus become helpful to the monarch’” (p. 97).

Further, “[Peter] admired the African’s didactic spirit, and believed his formidable mathematical talents would unlock Russian potential: ‘Abram Gannibal furnished the most striking proof of the injustice of that odious prejudice which assigns to the Negro race a reputation of intellectual and moral inferiority. He had immense spirit, a prodigious facility for study, and a rare capacity for mathematics and diverse branches of the human sciences, although mathematics always served as the science-mére. He was also blessed with a noble and elevated character and an incorruptible probity’” (p. 129).

Barnes’s Gannibal is well worth reading for a colorful, quintessentially Enlightenment-era life.

[The image is of a memorial bust of Gannibal in the province of Pskov, Russia.]

The Department of Great Putdowns

The satirist, poet, and radical Heinrich Heine described poet Alfred de Musset as “a young man with a great future behind him.”

Ouch. Musset never forgave him.

Heine is known to have fought in at least ten duels in his life. One wonders why.

Heine also said this of Kant, describing his clockwork walks along his street in Koenigsberg — then comparing him to the brutal dictator Robespierre:

“Truly, if the citizens of Koenigsberg had had any premonition of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt a far more terrifying dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, an executioner who merely executes people. But the good folk saw in him nothing but a professor of philosophy, and as he passed by at his customary hour, they gave him a friendly greeting and perhaps set their watches by him.
“If, however, Immanuel Kant, the arch-destroyer in realm of ideas, far surpassed Maximilian Robespierre in terrorism, yet he possessed many similarities with the latter which invite comparison of the two men. …”

Indeed.

Also to his credit, Heine’s works were among those torched in the Nazi book burnings of 1933.

Sources:
For the Musset putdown: Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years. The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847, Volume 1, p. 163.
For the Kant/Robespierre comparison: from “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” in Heinrich Heine, Selected Works, translated by Helen M. Mustard (New York: Random House, 1973).

More of my thoughts on Kant at this page.

Is modern art too complicated for us?

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, art critic Terry Teachout asks: “Are our brains big enough to untangle modern art?”

As examples, Teachout quotes one of thousands of sentences from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake like this one: “It is the circumconversioning of antelithual paganelles by a huggerknut cramwell energuman, or the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne to the herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?” And he mentions “the splattery tangles and swirls” of Jackson Pollock pieces and quote music theorist Fred Lerdahl, who argues that much modernist music “overwhelms the listener’s processing capacities.”

To which I juxtapose three quotations from Section 23 of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790. Professor Kant divides art into the merely beautiful and that which is magisterially sublime:

“But there are remarkable differences between the two. The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by the occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought.”

Further: The beautiful “directly brings with it a feeling of the furtherance of life.” “But the other [i.e., the sublime] is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, viz. it is produced by the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them, so that it seems to be regarded as emotion—not play, but earnest in the exercise of the imagination. Hence it is incompatible with charm; and as the mind is not merely attracted by the object but is ever being alternately repelled, the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much involve a positive pleasure as admiration or respect, which rather deserves to be called negative pleasure.”

And finally: “But the inner and most important distinction between the sublime and beautiful is, certainly, as follows. … . Natural beauty (which is independent) brings with it a purposiveness in its form by which the object seems to be, as it were preadapted to our judgment, and thus constitutes in itself an object of satisfaction. On the other hand, that which excites in us, without any reasoning about it, but in the mere apprehension of it, the feeling of the sublime may appear, as regards its form, to violate purpose in respect of the judgment, to be unsuited to our presentative faculty, and as it were to do violence to the imagination; and yet it is judged to be only the more sublime.”

So, for Kant, the sublime in art is formless, charmless, checks our vital powers, is repellent and a negative pleasure, violates our attempt to judge its purpose, and does violence to the imagination.

Another datum toward connecting Kant and modern art.

Schopenhauer’s sense of humor

One of the major, major pessimists in history. I quoted him last week in the context of contemporary anti-humanism and those calling for human extinction. But lest we think of Arthur as always grim and cranky, here’s a delightful zinger.

Schopenhauer, assessing Kant’s moral philosophy:

“I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife” (On the Basis of Morality).

Although it is hard to imagine (even if one tries very hard, which I don’t recommend) Professor Immanuel Kant in pursuit of a love affair, Schopenhauer’s simile is on to something. Kant and his followers presents his project as new, modern, and revolutionary, but after doggedly reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose (sample here), one realizes it’s essentially the same old dowdy stuff (apologies to all wives).

Which is why Schiller could say, in a letter to Goethe, “There still remains something in Kant, as in Luther, that makes one think of a monk who has left his monastery, but been unable efface all traces of it.” Indeed.

Kant and modern art

The poet John Enright has a post entitled “Kant and Abstract Art,” in which he takes up the claim Rand made in The Romantic Manifesto that “the father of modern art is Immanuel Kant (see his Critique of Judgment).” Rand does not elaborate, and Enright notes that some people scoff at the claim.

Rand’s claim is a strong one, in part because it makes intellectual-causal connection across centuries. How does one establish a fatherly connection between an uptight eighteenth-century philosopher and a sprawling twentieth-century movement? And in part Rand’s claim is hard to wrap one’s mind around because Kant’s philosophy is known to be turgid, arid, and highly rationalistic while modern art is known to be wild, weird, and wacky. How on earth could the Prussian lead to Pollock?

Is Rand right, and if so what is the connection?

I’ve been working on and off toward an essay on the topic of Kant’s influence on modern and postmodern art. Huge topic, so let me here give only some preliminary scholarly props to Enright’s post in the form of a few quotations from recent thinkers.

What have scholars after Rand said about the connection between Kant and modern art?

In a scholarly collection of essays on Kant’s philosophy, Eva Shaper writes that Kant is “the father of modern aesthetics” (“Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: the Aesthetics of Nature and Art,” in Paul Guyer, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 368).

Harold Osborne, longtime editor of the scholarly British Journal of Aesthetics, writes of “Kant, who is rightly regarded as the founder of modern aesthetics” (Aesthetics and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction, E. P. Dutton, 1970, p. 153). And further Osborne claims of Kant’s analysis: “This theory is the most important anticipation of the modern aesthetic outlook in any philosopher before the twentieth century” (p.191).

Without the first part of Critique of Judgment, writes philosopher Roger Scruton, “aesthetics would not exist in its modern form” (Kant, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 79).

Philosopher Arthur Danto agrees with influential modernist art critic Clement Greenburg on the centrality of Kant’s work to the modernist project:
‘“The essence of Modernism,” [Clement Greenberg in “Modernist Painting” (1960)] wrote, “lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Interestingly, Greenberg took as his model of modernist thought the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist.” […] I suppose the corresponding view of painting would have been not to represent the appearances of things so much as answering the question of how painting was possible”’ (After the End of Art, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 7).

Kant scholars Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer note that in the Critique of Judgment Kant “is entrenching the assumption of the subjective character of aesthetic judgment so strongly that by our own time it has become virtually an (unargued) commonplace” (Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 11).

And more sweepingly, Professor Denis Dutton, philosopher and author of The Art Instinct, writes that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is “the greatest work of philosophical aesthetics ever written” (Dutton’s website).

Enright notes that scholar Roger Kimball makes a point of connecting Kant and modernist art in an essay on Schiller.

So from Kant’s Critique to Christo — an interesting fill-in-the-blanks intellectual-history project awaits.