Kant is difficult to understand, but pleasingly irreligious

I haven't read much of Immanuel Kant directly. Basically, all I've known about this great philosopher is his distinction between noumenon, which can't be known, and phenomenon, which can be known.

But since the book I'm reading now, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, contains a heavy dose of Kant, I'm gradually learning more about his worldview.

Which is pleasingly irreligious. I had no idea that Kant was so down on religion and the supernatural. Here's some passages about his philosophy from what I read today. Like Kant's writing itself, they aren't the easiest reading. But there's some valuable wisdom here.

On the other side, philosophers from Plato all the way to Leibniz, who did believe humans could successfully come to know the world as it is and derive laws for the Good or the Beautiful, implicitly attributed the cause for this knowledge to God: if we can know the deepest nature of reality, that's because some deity has planted a knowledge of unchanging things in our souls from the beginning or has guided the flow of our existence by way of a "preestablished harmony."

But such a deus ex machina was intolerable to Kant, for whom it not only represented "the greatest absurdity one could hit upon in the determination of the origin and validity of our knowledge," but also had the additional disadvantage of encouraging "all sorts of wild notions and every pious and speculative brainstorm."

Indeed, Kant now knew that one of the pressing needs of his philosophy would be to cleanse humans of their destructive tendency to theorize about God and the spirit world, or use religion to say something meaningful about the world of the senses.

...Like Copernicus removing the earth from the center of creation, Kant had decided to do away with a fundamental presupposition common to all attempts to describe how humans come to know the world: namely, that what we are trying to understand is the world itself.  

What we are really trying to understand, he now saw, is our picture of the world. And our natural tendency to think we are speaking about the world is what must be subjected to critique. Thus would be born a new "age of critique" that would initiate the downfall of humanity's submission to the age-old idols of its own creation. This would be called Enlightenment.

The essence of his revolution was Kant's realization that the very coherence of the picture we make of the world depended on conditions that must hold true for a being who exists in time and space -- that is, for a being for whom things are located in relation to one another and events succeed one another -- to come to know anything at all.

For sensory input to become knowledge of the world requires that objects be located in respect to other things, and that events be sequenced as coming before, after, or simultaneous to other events. But locating objects in respect to one another in space, or sequencing events in time, is something that pure sense perception on its own cannot accomplish. Beings who experience the world through sensory exposure need to unify and organize that exposure.

Given that Kant came up with these ideas in the late 1700s, it's damn impressive that Kant could realize that pure sense perception can't know anything. After all, there's no such thing as reality "as it is." For us humans, modern science knows that reality is constructed by the brain, using sensory inputs that are unique to our Homo sapiens species. 

Perceptions are constructed. Emotions are constructed. Thoughts are constructed. But these workings are almost entirely hidden behind the curtain of the brain's workings. So it is easy for us to wrongly believe that our knowledge stems from ethereal, non-physical sources: soul, free will, immaterial consciousness.

Reason's amazing ability to unify the disparate exposures of inherently limited beings into a coherent narrative tends to run roughshod over those same limitations. In the case of the self that can blur the differences in moments of space-time enough to allow objects to appear to us at all, reason turns a necessary condition of the possibility of experience into an independent substance, even endowing it with superpowers like the immortality of the soul. 

In the case of the presumption of a shared space that unifies the manifold of our perceptions into objects, reason turns it into a "collective unity of a whole of experience."

Such a collective unity, "an individual thing containing in itself all empirical reality," this all-encompassing whole -- "Deus sive natura," [God and nature are interchangeable] Spinoza would call it God or nature -- only such a being could be truly unconditional, self-contained, and not contingent on anything else.

...But in practical terms, what would such a knowledge look like? The ideal of "seeing" the universe sub specie aeternitatis [viewed in relation to the eternal] has existed for millennia, but those who have grappled deeply with this ideal have all tended to founder on the same shoal.

As beings who must know the world in time and space, the notion of a knowledge unconstrained by time and space is quite simply inconceivable. 

...Seeing everything simultaneously or knowing all time in the blink of an eye would obliterate the very connection between objects and instances that constitutes knowing. Thus although godlike knowledge in its ostensible freedom from bias may seem like a desirable goal, its realization even in theory leads to an absolute contradiction in terms. 

Comments

[Sant64]

Immanuel Kant, an influential philosopher of the Enlightenment era, had a complex relationship with religion. He was raised in a Pietist household and had a deep respect for the moral teachings of Christianity. However, Kant's philosophy also introduced ideas that challenged certain traditional religious beliefs.

Kant believed that religious beliefs could not be proven through empirical evidence or rational arguments alone. He argued that religion primarily belonged to the realm of faith, which he considered beyond the reach of reason. In his work, particularly in "Critique of Pure Reason" and "Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason," Kant distinguished between moral religion (based on the moral teachings of Christianity) and historical or dogmatic aspects of religion.

He suggested that while certain religious doctrines and rituals might not be rationally justifiable, the moral principles derived from religion, such as the idea of moral duty and the existence of God as a postulate of practical reason, were crucial for the moral development of individuals and society. Kant believed that religion, in its moral aspect, could serve as a support for ethical behavior and the cultivation of a moral community.

In essence, Kant supported the moral and ethical teachings found within religion, emphasizing their importance in guiding human conduct. However, he also challenged the traditional dogmas and held that faith in religious doctrines couldn't be rationally demonstrated but was essential for moral development.

[Ron E.]

I believe we do experience reality ‘as it is’, a reality that we interpret according to our particular requirements for survival. So yes, it is constructed and predicted via the brain, though I would maintain that any perceived physical, natural reality is ‘our’ reality. I tend to think, that although our powers of perception do not reveal the true picture, what we do experience is our particular human reality – the only reality we need to live sanely.

If we were locked up in a 10 x10 cell that would be our reality, walking through a park with sun-shine, trees and flowers that would be our reality. For the squirrels, birds, insects etc, theirs would be their reality purely because their brains differ to ours.

What of the reality of our cognitive repertoire, our thoughts, feelings, emotions, imagination, memory etc? Although not physical, they emanate from matter so are as much a reality as anything else we experience in the natural world. Philosophising, although fun and sometimes valuable, can have the habit of over-complicating our relatively simple lives.

So, is there an ultimate reality? Maybe such a reality exists somewhere in the field of quantum physics and maybe as far as we are concerned it will ultimately remain outside the powers of comprehension for any brain, a brain that has evolved for the purpose of survival.

[Ron E.]

I believe we do experience reality ‘as it is’, a reality that we interpret according to our particular requirements for survival. So yes, it is constructed and predicted via the brain, though I would maintain that any perceived physical, natural reality is ‘our’ reality. I tend to think, that although our powers of perception do not reveal the true picture, what we do experience is our particular human reality – the only reality we need to live sanely.

If we were locked up in a 10 x10 cell that would be our reality, walking through a park with sun-shine, trees and flowers that would be our reality. For the squirrels, birds, insects etc, theirs would be their reality purely because their brains differ to ours.

What of the reality of our cognitive repertoire, our thoughts, feelings, emotions, imagination, memory etc? Although not physical, they emanate from matter so are as much a reality as anything else we experience in the natural world. Philosophising, although fun and sometimes valuable, can have the habit of over-complicating our relatively simple lives.

So, is there an ultimate reality? Maybe such a reality exists somewhere in the field of quantum physics and maybe as far as we are concerned it will ultimately remain outside the powers of comprehension for any brain, a brain that has evolved for the purpose of survival.

[Spence Tepper]

Kant wrote:
"...But in practical terms, what would such a knowledge look like? The ideal of "seeing" the universe sub specie aeternitatis [viewed in relation to the eternal] has existed for millennia, but those who have grappled deeply with this ideal have all tended to founder on the same shoal.

"As beings who must know the world in time and space, the notion of a knowledge unconstrained by time and space is quite simply inconceivable.

"...Seeing everything simultaneously or knowing all time in the blink of an eye would obliterate the very connection between objects and instances that constitutes knowing. Thus although godlike knowledge in its ostensible freedom from bias may seem like a desirable goal, its realization even in theory leads to an absolute contradiction in terms. "

Such a viewpoint would transcend our existence as single points altogether. We would understand, along the way, that we function here as mono-dimensional points upon a mono-dimensional string of time within an infinite reality. There is no hope of objectivity at all within that constraint.

And when a mystic has such a transcendent experience, they fumble with the practical matters of functioning as an individual in this place, limited by time and space. But at least they see how little all this really matters, and how vastly important one's own attention becomes, as the very vehicle for our own transformation and transportation. When a universal love is our point of constant attention, we are so transported.

Love is the greater good. Where love connects us, we are on to something.

If we love Love, we find Love Loves us back.
Where hate or disagreement separates us, we are seeing with blinkers from that mono-dimensional and inevitably biased single point.

But we have this amazing gift to focus on something better. And better reason unfolds around us like the budding of a flower.

[Spence Tepper]

Had Kant understood that his own understanding from a greater objective position is the very foundation of his own philosophy, then he would not so easily denigrate the infinite version of the same. Intelligence does not begin and end just where Kant happens to be.

All reality at once is holographic, not solid. Entirely empty is the whole, yet containing every point that ever was, will be, or just might be. But those points are each empty.

And the infinity of reality is not a static solid where there is no relationship of one to another, but a complexity from which emerges novelty and genius. To view the total is not from a single finished point. To view all time is not a single point of time. It is an infinity outside of time. An infinity that takes as much time as you like, because there is no lack of time.

To elevate consciousness is to integrate it at the same time. And to allow the interactions in their infinite and stunning variety. We are moving from part to whole. And whole, rather than vacant the parts, is the vastly greater infinite series summation of the parts. It is alive. But that summation is the experience, not a physical change at all.

The whole is indeed greater than the parts. Just as complex systems produce novel outcomes entirely unpredictable. Those outcomes can't logically come from the parts, yet they do.

Kant presupposes that an infinite understanding eliminates the relationship of instances of time and space. But instead it only integrates these and presents them with a clarity of even the smallest thing we never fully understood.

This is why God does not exist and yet is the whole, grander, wiser, incomprehensible from the tiny single point, but connected and accessible to every point. Just as the variety of novel outcomes from a complex array cannot be predicted from the parts alone. Just as a catalyst changes everything but disappears and cannot be found upon each change. Yet without that catalyst, nothing would move, nothing would be born, and nothing would find completion