History of contemporary psychology

History of contemporary psychology Prelude From Kant to Taylor Taylor has argued that practical reason has fallen into disrepute as the result of modernity s moral skepticism the fact that moral claims lack validity and cannot be arbitrated by reason and been displaced by the epistemological not what is known but how it is known Taylor s attempt to recover a role for practical reason is then a way of undercutting the priority of the epistemological while it is charged with demonstrating and clarifying the implicit assumptions held inviolable by all interlocutors of a position What is remarkable about Taylor s uncovering of practical reason is that he begins with Mill s claim that question of ends are never amenable to proof but merely of assent or dissent and hence practical reason is a matter that follows an ad hominem rather than apodictic model of reason As a critique of Kant might note what is at stake in practical reason is the self Sensitive to the naturalistic fallacy deriving ought from is Taylor argues that moral claims claims of practical reason are other than what we desire or believe to desire but rather what we are committed to in his notion of strong evaluation Thus Mill s claim that assertions of assent or dissent about questions of ends are not weakly ad hominem in the sense it is these and not those ends we desire and hence cannot reason about for showing this does nothing to settle the question of whether or not we ought to desire these but not those ends As Taylor notes Mill understood the naturalistic fallacy well-enough and hence appealed to the intuition of competent judges to settle the question of the ends of desire What Mill understood well-enough was that reason cannot resolve the conflict or skepticism or moral ends in apodictic terms and hence he turned to the ad hominem argument But Taylor asks why Mill did so and he argues that Mill as the inheritor of the Enlightenment relied on naturalism to provide an apodictic model of moral discourse including paradoxically perhaps subjectivism our natural desires In other words naturalism was extended to include the subject s desires and attitudes towards things which while this seemed a natural progression to include desires among the things in this world that are given does not mean as Taylor notes that the fact of desire is more right than any other desire The argument against naturalism derives in large part from examination of our actual practices of moral deliberation involving discourses which are never neutral regarding our desires or attitudes which was of course Mill s justification for invoking the ad hominem argument Or to move straight to Taylor s question Can a naturalist epistemology invoking metaphysics of neutrality override our self-understanding in strong evaluative terms The claim that it can and does is according to Taylor one reason for our contemporary derision of subjectivism and its accompanying moral skepticism Naturalism dismisses the ad hominem argument and advocates an apodictic model of reason that would totally mischaracterize the human situation as understood in terms of traditionally meaningful practices and discourses inescapably strongly evaluative and purposive Of course this is in contrast with the th c which already demarcated between the natural and human sciences a distinction which has in many ways been subject to the overriding power of epistemology as the only model of reason which can withstand the parochialism of traditionalism and the prejudicial attitudes of a peculiar subjectivist perspective on the world Mill s ad hominem argument for utilitarianism was intended to by-pass any such traditionalism and subjectivism with an appeal to the given nature of human desire and presumably this has been utilitarianism s strength namely in carrying foundationalism into the explanation of human nature and along with it also procedural reason into the moral domain Yet during this same century the evident ubiquity of ethical disagreement also led to the embrace of ethical relativism According to Taylor the demand that the apodictic model of procedural reason arbitrate moral claims is deeply mistaken precisely because the assumption is that arguments have criteria with the result that there can be no incommensurable positions Taylor MacIntyre and others have argued that there are no such criteria but rather any effort to evaluate different moral stances or perspective always relies on some gain in historical understanding Something very similar is at stake in various post-modern writers such as Derrida Lyotard and Foucault Taylor sets out three arguments in support to the claim that the foundationalist thesis is deeply mistaken in its appeal to criteria and the effort to eliminate ad hominem models i e empiricist of practical reason Comparative judgments do not so much rely on criteria or invariant standards but on comparison or on relations among rival positions in evaluating anomalies Comparative judgments are transitional in that they are essentially historical judgments in evaluating rival positions Here we find the th c a distinction between understanding and explanation The turn towards mechanism Nature was deemed to require a very different sense of explanation than say the place of things in the meaningful order of Nature which relied on understanding Pre-Enlightenment Aristotelian thinking requires no such distinction However this distinction between explanation and understanding yields even greater skepticism with respect to moral life even as it also demands that we think relationally about incommensurability such that we gain clarity in our pre-understanding and so extent our knowledge of the connections between incommensurables Moreover in thinking relationally we not only extend our grasp of knowledge among incommensurables we also extend our understanding of our purposes and effective practices without invoking criteria Thus while Taylor is sympathetic to for example Kuhn s claim that there is no rational justification of transitions between incommensurables Taylor also rejects radical incommensurability as the foundationalist account would have it The risk here is that skepticism which accompanies explanation at the level of life as lived also risks irrationalism in understanding historical transitions But the connection between understanding and practice means that whenever we increase our social practices we also gain in knowledge Taylor like Kant begins phenomenologically within human life wherein understanding and practice dovetail each other Understanding is enabling not in the sense that we are trying to convince others to change their minds but to show others that whatever assumptions they others adhere to cannot account for what we are urging in some moral domain Incommensurability is then to be understood relationally in the sense that these are to be understood historically as transition between incommensurables and as making explicit what was implicit in pre-understanding within traditions immanent critique Indeed one such preconception that has confused our understanding and fostered skepticism is the foundationalist view of life as a closed system But history and life knows no such a closed system Not merely for the history of scientific theory but especially in the moral domain of life As Taylor points out however none of this implies that there may well be disputes to that cannot be so resolved i e ad hominem and hence may well not allow for arbitration Obviously all efforts to uncover and make explicit assumptions in one s interlocutor position assume that interlocutors in a dispute do share some understanding Yet there is also a more radical move wherein there is no such sharing and where a transition between rival in a dispute involves some error-reducing move Here the direction of the argument is reversed Whereas from a foundationalist perspective transition is always a gain whereas the reverse is not so if the transition is one of reducing error then it is a gain In practical reason we identify a tension then try to understand that tension by dissipating a confusion which is due to some neglect in self-understanding Understanding the tension re-situates the tension in making explicit some assumption worn feelings overlooked significances etc I come to see the situation differently than I did before this self-understanding and hence the situation changes in some ways see Taylor Ch in Phil Papers Volume Agency and Language In a way practical arguments reason are always ad hominem arguments These arguments appeal to what the opponent is already committed to perhaps implicitly or at least what they cannot repudiate The fact that we cannot convince people of the value of a premise may of course be grounds for despair and indeed practical reason may be powerless to resolve such disputes We can however expand the notion of practical argument by identifying a common premise which would allow for debate especially in the light of history and even where there is no such common premise we might claim that a transition from one premise to another is a gain and both these are ad hominem Of course just as we are never fully rational we never fully that an argument is true simpliciter What we can claim is that an argument is a better account and hence practical arguments are always comparative in that it brings to light what the interlocutor cannot repudiate A new account can make better sense of difficulties confronting alternative accounts can explain what other accounts cannot and is more error reducing than other accounts Hence what practical reason attempts is to make implicit premises explicit discern contradictions and bring our facts that are seemingly anomalous All of which extends the range of rational argument assuming we appreciate that not all disputes are about fully explicit positions which they never are Even so not all disputes can be arbitrated in reason Relativism has something going for it insofar as diversity and mutually incomprehensibility do mark moralities For example we may understand little of human sacrifices and it is only our sophisticated pluralism that prevents us from making devastating judgments Hence understanding may not be universal and may be markedly different in different cultures Especially science and technology seem enormously influential compared to traditional sufficiency of reflection contemplation or understanding Making and doing as a result of knowledge so changes our world as to alter whole ways of living Yet we should not give up on reason in being intimidated by distance of incomprehensibility as grounds for adopting relativism Perhaps most relevant today is the difference in culture based on distance of cosmology But even here even if we could demonstrate say the universality of individual rights we may also lose something in defending universalism equality but this does not mean we should take an easy position on agnostic relativism Moral arguments in our day lead to skepticism precisely because we adhere to relativism in grounding the way things are ad hominem a la Mill Our naturalist temper is hostile to strong evaluation and hence to making any ad hominem arguments instead we simply assume relativism in maintaining that there are cultural social and historical differences an instance of the naturalistic fallacy Along with the adherence to naturalism comes the rejection of ad hominem arguments as illegitimate this is part of universalism-relativism continuum We loath to reason about fundamental commitments for then we would have to acknowledge that truth is something asserted maintained We limit reason for the sake of the empirical natural world as being the way it is encapsulated universal rights even as we hold to the superiority of knowledge As if universal rights were itself a product of empirical knowledge This knowledge invokes foundationalism which deems reason to be reason about standards criteria based on fully explicit positions and yielding absolute judgments of adequacy But all this makes reason incomprehensible limits of reason insofar as reason is collapsed unto explanation Problem of other minds Lecture You are talking to a friend the talk is animated and involves all sorts of twists and turns in the conversation Suddenly the conversation begins to stray into idle chatter and your attention wanders But not entirely and with half your mind can still follow the talk but the other half of your mind is in a mood of detachment staring at the face and body of your friend as he talks There is nothing odd about this his is the same face familiar and beloved as always It is only that in looking at him your own mind has been invaded by an unusual question His lips move his eyes gleam and his limbs move gesture all of which is quite usual But your mind suddenly places these ordinary facts in a strange light is he really conscious behind all this physical appearing We all have these moments of passing schizophrenia - and we do not attach much importance to them But now consider that this passing mood is supported by a solid body of theory in psychology Thus there are numerous psychologists and philosophers who maintain that consciousness is something to be dispensed with in our explanations of human conduct These theories may vary a good deal but they have in common one feature we can proceed as if my consciousness of my friend does not exist and we find his bodily movements sufficient for the purpose of understanding him Why do we have this strange fear of consciousness Why are we so uneasy about admitting consciousness as a clear fact in our human world Of course there is the problem of other minds after all I do not see the consciousness of my friend or indeed my own consciousness theory claims that consciousness is merely something I infer from his bodily movements As an empiricist I cannot treat consciousness his or my own as a basic datum in my hard-headed explanations of his conduct I need not outright deny it of course but whenever my theoretical ingenuity can manage it I must proceed as if this consciousness is not there Now the problem of other minds is a strictly modern one thus we do not find it among the ancients or medievalists whatever their other aberrations these older thinkers did not doubt that we live in a world shared by our own and other minds a spiritual world But in our modern age we feel compelled to raise doubts about our consciousness out of a spirit of what we imagine is theoretical exactness But surely there is something a little strange and foolish about this flight from consciousness After all is consciousness is something we do expect to see in others ourselves even if it cannot be a datum of science We are fully aware of the minds of others in that we share in them Other minds are fully a vital part of the flow of life that surrounds and sustains us We are surrounded by a life larger than ourselves and of which we are an intimate part Suppose for a moment a moment of theoretical austerity that we commit ourselves only to a minimal theory as if we had no mind and were not conscious but were only behaving bodies Surely this would be deranged grotesque schizoid especially in a moment of passion care concern this borders on madness In short there is a gap between theory and life between reason and life We entertain theories that we could not possibly live Such gaps are not uncommon in our modern age but the one concerning consciousness is particularly ominous For example when we examine the first years of this new millennium we are confronted by the nagging question of whether this civilization will survive an old question There is an apocalyptic note to every news event we read or hear which we cannot seem to escape In fact we seem in our culture to relish and indulge in this apocalypse e g death metal music and we use it to camouflage all sorts of political pleading Whether this fear of the apocalypse is bogus or genuine it is revelatory somehow it situates the past century and the present one After all it is a very different apocalypse that people feared say in the year What we now fear at the turn of this millennium are technology and science as central cultural events that characterize modernity When did this modernity begin Historical epochs merge into one another and it may be arbitrary to look for a beginning Thus when did the middle ages begin When did they end There is no absolute point of division between the past and the epochs that succeeded it But there are times when we see clearly that something new has arrived and this something is bound to change humanity radically I take the beginning of modernity to be the th c the age that initiated modern science and its accompanying technology and it is these two science and technology that characterize our modern age or what is sometimes called modernity What is modern science What is that event that has transformed human life in the th c Whatever else science may be and we will examine psychological science in some depth it is above all the power of the human mind of human freedom and originality to construct concepts that are not merely passively found in nature but rather serve to organize our experience of nature The existence of a body of knowledge we call science and the activity of scientific inquiry methods is powerful evidence of the human beings in their freedom to create construct and act in short of their consciousness Yet there is a curious paradox here The new science of the th c began with mechanics meaning many things but above all decomposition analysis exact measurement etc which was central to modern physics classical mechanics But mechanics soon became an ideology mechanism the human being is a machine just as Nature universe is a machine As our molecules go so do we go the person is the gene s way of making another gene The human mind is on this ideology a passive and helpless pawn pushed around by forces of nature freedom is an illusion and the entire ideology crescendos in the th c in a pessimism that pervades the th c psychological science at least to those who understand it No sooner had the new science of the th c entered the world and it becomes dogged by an ideology of scientism its shadow What is scientism mechanism As a shadow of science it is not identical to the real thing Scientism is pseudo-science or misinterpreted science drawing unwarranted conclusions generalizations in pretending to be philosophical But scientism is not philosophy if by philosophy we mean the effort to think soberly within the restrictions that human thought reason reflection must impose on itself Scientism is neither science nor philosophy it is a modern malady it is ideology It is an ideology like many ideologies is part of modernity What is ideology The science which the th c sought was primarily physics astronomy namely the understanding of Nature physical nature But as the science of nature blossoms the theories of the mind now deemed to be a part of Nature come to occupy philosophy in a way that generates paradoxes It is as if the thinkers who had formulated the dazzling new science of nature physics were increasingly puzzled about the nature of the mind that produced this new science In the four centuries or so since the new science and technology entered the Western world we have added immeasurably to our explanations of the Nature even as our understanding of the human mind consciousness which produced this knowledge has become increasingly fragmentary and bizarre reaching a point today where we are in danger of losing any intelligent grasp on the human mind consciousness altogether I want to take a step backward and see how this situation came about I am not going to treat you with heavy historical detail although I warn you that historical amnesia is partly responsible for the current crisis of modernity - an age without consciousness is also an age without history I want to treat only sufficient history to serve my effort at a thematic clarity in relation to the science of psychology I am not going to propose a new theory of the mind you can find that in various psychological specializations what I want to do is to simply lay hold of the fact that human consciousness has been lost in the modern world psychology Lecture the new science The th c was a strange century It bristles with energy and genius but also with contradictions However it contained those contradictions and lived them in a way that we conclude that they are contradictions only on hindsight The century created what we now know as modern science which in some way has been as a great a revolution as has befallen humankind and yet the minds of the individuals who created this science were all firmly planted in the mind of God It is necessary to begin with this salient fact The word revolution connotes violence but the revolution that was the beginning of modern science was silent As Nietzsche observes great revolutions in thinking come silently on dove s feet In any case the minds that originated modern science were immersed in theology and indeed the age was itself saturated in theology Consider the three greatest of these scientific geniuses Kepler Galileo and Newton They hardly viewed the world as our contemporary naturalists say in the evolutionist traditions view the world universe Kepler s mind was fascinated by spiritual or angelic presences in the universe while Galileo in his famous run-in with the church s inquisition suggests as Bertolt Brecht s play Galileo would depict it that he was a free-thinker a dissident spirit in the style of the Enlightenment yet Galileo would not have recognized himself in that light His writings move within the mind of God and the laws of nature he sought were for him the working of the divine mind in nature Newton perhaps the greatest of the three in bringing expression to the outlines of a mechanical world-view that dominated Western science and technology to the present was a man mind reposed with in the prophesies of Daniel on which he spend more time than he did on mathematical physics He left us a million and a half words on theology and in his personal life he was a man of steady an untroubled faith Despite this theological centeredness the entire th c was intensely pious these founders of the new science were radically engaged in a way that would eventually tear Western civilization away from its religious moorings They called the science they were creating the new science however what they understood by this word new came to be understood only years later by the philosopher Immanuel Kant For they were deeply aware of their debt to the ancients Euclid Aristotle Archimedes and Pappus The science they created could not have been radical or revolutionary had it not drawn on the ancients and medieval scholars What T S Eliot said in the context of literature namely that original creation draws always upon tradition even when it shakes up and transforms tradition applies also to science The whole body of science is a continuous stream from the beginnings of human consciousness and genuine scientific creation is one that reaches most deeply into the body of this traditional thought in order to give it new direction If they were traditionalists these founders of the new sciences were also radicals and rightly insisted on calling their science the new science But wherein did this newness consists It turns out that this is not an easy question to answer In fact we see that the answer is not forthcoming until Kant but meanwhile I want to say a few words by way of anticipation At first sight the newness of this new science was the fact that it was experimental Whereas the ancients contemplated speculated the moderns experimented Of course no one experiments unless they also think about experimenting If experimentation for these early founders of the new science involved the construction of machines which allowed for precise quantitative measurement from the start science and technology go together thinking and doing they were also re-constructing Creation as Nature that is creation as a machine That is Nature itself must reflect the workings of the machines they constructed mechanics became part of physics and physics became the whole of the new science Nature became one interlocking machine the machine of all machines What was so distinctive about mechanics that would give it such a special place Mechanics is a science that deals with matter at rest or in motion But this was not the matter that is sensuously and immediate before us rather it is matter that has been abstracted and schematized mathematically physicalism The new science was first of all mathematical the Renaissance recovered of Plato and his Pythagorean tradition as much as it was experimental This notion of matter as mathematical is not insignificant especially because on it hangs a philosophical lesson which is that the mind is central in the creation of the new science the evidence for a mechanistic view of Nature is the mathematics that characterized the new science and here is the first paradox that still haunts us today namely the mathematics of the new science is the human mind human consciousness even as it gave rise to a mechanistic view of Nature which would eventually deem the human mind as feeble and unfree totally determined by the mechanism that is nature Yet the founders of the new science felt no such uneasiness about the implications of their mechanistic worldview that mechanism would eventually also embrace the mind for their religious convictions Indeed they deemed this mechanistic view of Nature as the way that God managed his universe What more intelligent way to arrange matter and the material universe than as a vast clockwork machine The uneasiness about this machine-as-Nature when it did come was primarily among philosophers The scientific effort to found mechanics as the basis for physics quickly passed into a more general frame of mind an attitude or disposition that the modern philosopher Alfred Whitehead aptly labeled scientific materialism This was the conviction that the ultimate facts of Nature are bits of matter in space that all the phenomena of our experience are to be explained in terms of bits of matter These bits of matter had only the properties that are in accord with mechanics mass extension solidity and movement in space All other qualities of experience suddenly acquired as curious status indeed it seems rather curious that the nature of what we see experience is not really there real Here we have the foundationalism which would come to characterize what philosophy later would call epistemology and which I take to be the characteristic of modernity Scientific materialism despite of its inherent paradoxes e g nature is not what it appears to be primary and secondary qualities epistemology and the mind is really not free creative - anthropology - but is merely a conglomerate of bits of matter was to become the dominant mentality for the next years to the present However it was not and still is not so much an explicit philosophy as it was an unspoken attitude habit prejudice of mind Even today materialism is the unspoken basis of research and the funding it receives For the Christian believer of the th c who was tempted by this reductionist view of Nature as bits of matter moving in space there was always the exception namely the soul The soul was not a natural phenomenon it stood outside nature universe But of course the effect of the scientific materialism was to leave this insubstantial soul precariously perched on the edge of matter in strange conjunction with the body which was clearly matter This precarious perch of the nature of the soul was to become very pronounced in the philosophy of the th c Finally there is also the tension that suddenly emerged in the consciousness of this th c namely that while the century was theologically grounded in God these founders of the new science were discovering uncovering the strangeness of human presence in the universe now conceived as the machine-of-Nature that is the new science was discovering a vastness to the universe that was unimaginable to the medieval and ancient scholars Copernicus had dislodged for once and for all the earth humanity from its privileged position in the cosmos Not just that we lost our position but also that in an infinitely extending universe we seemed but random and accidental incidental beings We were not at the center and we were not at the edge we were nowhere just brute fact part of the throw-ness as Heidegger calls it of existence This unbelievable fact led to profound feelings of alienation perhaps best expressed by the greatest mind of the century Blaise Pascal - When I consider the short duration of my life swallowed up in the eternity before and after the little space which I fill and can even see engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not I am frightened and I am astonished at being here rather than there for there is no reason why here rather than there why now rather than then Who has put me here By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me Alienation has become a dominant fact of modern life and of the th c perhaps explaining why the concept of anxiety has become so pronounced psychology Of course we have come to trivialize the meaning of alienation by customarily using for social alienation as the early Marx But the most profound form of alienation is cosmic alienation inherent in our human consciousness of itself in relation to cosmic vastness As we became conscious of this vastness of the universe so we became troubled by our being in it or part of it Myth magic religion and philosophy all seek to deal with this condition in different ways In point of fact philosophy only began to take note of this alienation in the th c when the structures of religion were pretty well eroded with the death of God and the resulting perspectivalism Whether philosophy by itself as a purely rational effort of mind can heal our alienation remains to be seen Surely no one cares much for philosophy today remarkably because surely scientific materialism that is characteristic of modern science is the ideology that made us astutely aware of but offered no solution to our alienation All this is not the usually picture we get about the th c Usually the th c is seen as the century of rationalism Enlightenment the shedding of a dogmatic past the emergence of the new science perhaps retaining some remnant of religion supra-natural which would however in the steady progressive march of science eliminate all such superstition and assure the advancement of knowledge in order to bring about Francis Bacon s glorious vision of the betterment of humankind we didn t need Marx to tell us about that utopia But this view of a fixed line of progress is no longer valid Every era has its own aspirations and complexities every era is whole and even with all the apparent contradictions remains fertile The line of progress that our historical consciousness has projected is an abstraction and a construction that fits a certain telos an ideology of endless progress The th c was what it was and not some way-station between the medieval period and our scientific age History is itself fundamentally an adventure in human consciousness and cannot be fixed in some abstract time-line If I begin with the th c it is because that age is not yet over and has not yet vanished it is still present with all its paradoxes and tensions its uncertainties and malaise malady of our modern consciousness Indeed perhaps at some future time we may regret that our minds are not as Newton s was preoccupied with the Prophesies of Daniel or some other religious matter Lecture Descartes The alienation between us our selves and the machine-of-Nature - between subject and object is something the th c bequeathed our age We sometimes think of this rift as a Cartesian subjective whim but in fact the rift was one already put in place by the new science scientific materialism which then forced Descartes to make this split between mind and body that is to rescue the mind For consider what is to become of me my consciousness and freedom in a universe Nature wholly determined by law Only anguish as Pascal lamented No other species feels this anguish or the implications of this scientific materialism as do human beings who cannot find sufficiency in their instincts genes or brains the th c notwithstanding But more than this insufficiency of instincts the I that thinks also drags with it a history tradition memories hopes feeling emotions that I cannot separate from my thinking I am aware of all this in my body as lived which is the habitus wherein I live For eons the universe existed without me and will continue to do so without me and measured against the vastness of space and time I am aware of my finitude I will vanish and this reality of my finitude is incomparable to any other For what meaning does my mortality wealth fame fortune etc or lack thereof have in the vastness of time and space What meaning does my particularity have in relation to others The answer of the new science alienates me even more from others There is no I without this habitus and it was Descartes who thought about this density of I and habitus embodiment tradition history others and the vastness of the universe in space and time It was Descartes - who discerned in this density this consciousness my consciousness solitary of the thinker sitting besides the fireplace alone in his room paradoxically this solitary consciousness is anything but solitary for Descartes was man of his time passionate about mathematical reason and the new science a man who fought in the wars a man of action When he goes off at age to a bar in Amsterdam to find seclusion he comes to reflect on himself the ego which thinks which lights up his solitude as he takes refuge from life For in life the th c not only brings the new science certitude but at the same time the new science brings uncertainty and doubt Why Because the new science doubted the world of the senses Copernicus and others trusted reason mathematics and it was Descartes who confronted certainty with uncertainty of the new science in this sense Descartes is not an Enlightenment thinker but the culmination of the medieval era For even if Descartes reflections on life in a bar in Amsterdam shows that life is not what it appears to be in accord with the new science there is no doubt that his consciousness experience perceives it all as real That is if we are going to be deceived by the senses then we must possess consciousness and so consciousness has priority of over matter science and as such consciousness must be the starting point of all reflection thinking philosophy also about science This was a bold step to return to the certainty of consciousness of the thinking I at a time when all that was perceptually evident was in doubt Descartes move in recovering the thinking I also recovered the certainty of subjectivity If Hegel applauded Descartes habor thinking I in our own time we find hardly anyone willing to applaud Descartes idealism dualism rationalism In fact both of the th c major philosophical movements analytic philosophy and positivism and phenomenology however different one from the other lament Descartes error e g Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger In this sense the th c has rejected any concern with subjectivity and consciousness in an abiding concern with the impersonal objectivity of matter or being whether of matter or of Being The question is whether Descartes prioritizing of consciousness of the I think did in fact prioritize the concrete subject person as the point of certainty Was the I of Descartes I think the habitus of embodiment memories hopes emotions etc Was Descartes a psychologist who tried at the time of the new science to recover something of the subject person so as to forego the alienation that the rejection of all authority God cosmos creation church gave rise to Descartes concern was for certitude in a world made uncertain by the new science e g distinction between primary and secondary qualities first proposed by Galileo and later by John Locke However this I was for Descartes a merely an instrument means way methodos for finding an indispensable starting point arche for his method of systematic doubt which would isolate a certain absolute point of departure for thinking I can doubt all that given to the senses and understanding but I cannot doubt the consciousness I that doubts Descartes turns the I back unto itself doubting all except itself as doubting But this Cartesian I is itself an abstraction from the world it is merely a metaphysical arche and a methodological tool required for his method of systematizing doubt which the new science had already begun and in finding a place to stand a point of certitude quoting Martin Luther But once he abstracted the I as the beginning point of his method of systematizing doubt Descartes was faced with the problem of getting the I back into the world which had been suspended in his method of systematic doubt If his laborious doubt left Descartes with a painful sense of his own finitude and imperfections the certain I of consciousness that he postulated also has an idea of a supreme and perfect Being who embraces all reality and this idea could not come from me but must come from this perfect Being and hence who then must exist This is the ontological argument for God s existence first proposed by St Anselm in the th c - Of course it is not an argument but rather an intuition compelling as soon as we reflect on the mystery of our own existence it is a certainty as certain as my own existence this is religious feeling Descartes was Freud s first victim his ontological argument may be understood as a rationalization a reaction formation in dealing with his own finitude and doubt In a way God becomes an epistemological tool for grounding the knowledge we posses of the world through the senses since God would not create beings I think that are deceived about their world and if we use our faculties properly we can come to true knowledge The problem is that what is so restored is not the concrete person but the I ego cogito and this is Descartes dualism his answer to the scientific materialism of the new science between the arche of the I think and the world of bits of matter moving in space But we must also remember that Plato already knew that the soul is much more than thinking and Freud in our century only confirmed that Descartes I is anemic The rational self or mind which Descartes made the essence of the soul psyche has no body no habitus no history is solitary and knows no other minds or people Yet paradoxically enough it is not this notion of soul as mind as reason that is the problem rather Descartes problem is the body pieces of matter that cannot accommodate the soul mind but remains external to it Descartes body is not the lived body habitus but the body as matter the mathematical abstraction of the physicist But the body is never so removed from the soul as Plato and Freud knew so well Flesh and blood feeling and emotion and reason exist together in a corruptible unity As long as we have an inadequate sense of the body as lived we cannot deal with the integrity wholeness of mind and body adequately We are reminded that Descartes wrote a treatise on the passions all the senses are seen through the privileged position of the I Hence all that is given to the senses becomes objective to be known by way of thought and hence not is not lived but is object Here Descartes dualism is carried into the person where we have the I think distinguished from the I lived and the body world and it is this dualism that we have inherited between mind I think soul and the self as lived in the body habitus This dualism would constitute the supremacy of reason certitude in a world distinguished from the un-certainty the senses but losing the person with others in the world Now the fact is that for Descartes the I think is still the Christian unity of soul and body although seemingly a very faint image of it Scientific materialism had crucified this soul which Descartes tries to rescue by splitting the person between mind reason and every other psychic experience of consciousness especially as this relates to the lived body and by grounding the mechanism-of-Nature of the new science in the freedom of this mind reason Note the tensions here In identifying mind reason freedom with the soul and giving the soul priority to everything else that is known experienced which was threatened to be subsumed by the science machine he split the subject from the object and split the person within him herself Discuss psych-somatic illness e g psychoanalysis Descartes picture of the mind soul as reason was in the th c placed into doubt by psychoanalysis claim that reason was itself but a thin veneer of civilization that reason was invaded by desire forces unknown as indeed psychoanalysis was preceded by Kierkegaard Schopenhauer Nietzsche and others in the th c If today we no longer split reason soul off from Nature and indeed assimilated the whole psyche self person subject to Nature naturalism we also have lost the sense of soul consciousness in favor of a narrow conception of mind as reason made reason instrumental in coming to know the world lost the integrity of the body self person in favor of dualism lost the transcendental in favor of ontological intuition and finally lost consciousness in favor of instrumental reason Lecture Leibnitz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz - comes two generations after Descartes - and in this period the framework for the new science had already taken shape and Leibnitz calls attention to the philosophical shadows that lurk about the Newtonian picture of Nature as machine Leibnitz would have been an extraordinary figure even in his own time in a century of genius he stands out as its most many-sided mind He addressed science mathematics philosophy theology jurisprudence and history He was well acquainted with the works besides the ancients of Galileo Bacon Hobbes and Descartes he was also in touch with the best minds of his time notably Malebranche the great Cartesian Pascal Leibnitz improved on his calculating machine Locke and Huygens who stimulated his interest in optics and with them maintained a massive correspondence he visited the Royal Society in England all under the reign of Louis XIV Leibnitz was thoroughly conversant with the new science he was the co-creator with Newton of calculus enormously important for the new science and he was also thoroughly acquainted with Christian theology He was a speculative metaphysician against which Kant warned us but he was also one of the last great Christian philosophers and believed that thought reason required the fullness of the Christian life He accepted the life of faith in a way that say Kant years later could no longer do More importantly Leibnitz was the best educated philosopher of his time Descartes was educated in philosophy by the Jesuits at La Fleche Leibnitz educated himself by reading seemingly everything he could especially from the medieval period and the Greeks strongly convinced that the past could bring understanding to the new science s scientific materialism Remarkably Leibnitz disagreed with almost all of the founders and systematizers of the new science especially Locke s empiricism and Descartes dualism Leibnitz radically revises Descartes thinking about the soul recall what was wrong with Descartes dualism was his thinking about the body Descartes conception of matter was simply that of extension it fills space but Leibnitz bridles at this view and maintains that extension is simply bits of matter external to very other bit of matter and he asks the important question what unifies these bits of matter In answering this question Leibnitz moves from an inert notion of matter to a notion of energy Real that for Descartes the problem was that reason mind confronted matter and this raised the question just how this was possible But for Leibnitz perception senses did not merely operate mechanically perception was itself permeated with reason and hence not just a physical events but a psychological one involving human consciousness and consciousness was never matter Similarly Leibnitz in reply to Locke s Essay concerning human understanding writes New essays on the understanding The publication was post-humus as it was first completed in but Locke had died that year and Leibnitz did not deem it proper to reply to or argue with the dead In opposition to Locke s claim that the mind was a tabula rasa Leibnitz gave the classical rationalist reply namely that the mind must be prepared to receive experiences Locke in Book II of the Essay began with the claim that has become central to all empiricists Suppose the mind to be as we say white paper void of all characters without any ideas how comes it to be furnished Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with almost endless variety Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge To this I answer in one word from experience In reply to Locke s claim that nothing exists in the intellect that was not first in the senses a statement that Dun Scotus attributes to Aristotle Leibnitz writes nothing except the intellect itself In the Essays Leibnitz constructs a conversation between Philalethes friend of sleep an empiricist and Theophilus friend of God rationalist Here Leibnitz gives Philalethes the role of Locke and himself takes the role of Theophilus and argues that experience is not necessary in order for the soul to have ideas and what experience provides is a context for our thoughts and direction for out ideas It is impossible for experience to produce an idea for the very simple reason that it involves a physical confrontation between sense organs and matter and ideas have nothing to do with these mechanical processes But agues Leibnitz perception is not merely a mechanical process but always involves reason and so lead to ideas Theophilus is made to say This tabula rasa of which so much is said is in my opinion a fiction Which nature does not admit Uniform things and those which contain no variety are never anything but abstractions like time space and other entities of pure mathematics There is no body whatever whose parts are at rest and there is no substance whatever that has nothing by which to distinguish it from every other those who speak so frequently of this tabula rasa after having taken away the ideas cannot say what remains Experience is necessary I admit in order that the soul be determined to such and such thoughts and in order that it take notice of the ideas which are in us but by what means can experience and the senses give ideas Has the soul windows does it resemble tablets is it like wax Leibnitz is clearest on his critique of Locke and Descartes in his Monadology written two years before his death where he spells out his own metaphysics Moreover it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds And supposing there were a machine so constructed as to think feel and have perceptions it might be conceived as increased in size while keeping the same proportions so that one might go into as into a mill That being so we should on examining its interior find only parts which work upon one another and never anything by which to explain perception Perception is a unique psychological event it is that of which we are conscious It is qualitative in a way that no purely quantitative material phenomenon can imitate As we walk through the great mill of the mind observing the spinning wheels and crashing hammers we find nothing by which the mill could have perception not that the mill does not have such perceptions or is not aware of itself but that nothing in its moving parts could convey such Thus the mind-body interaction advanced by Descartes is confused and Leibnitz claims meaningless Mind is simply a monad a simple substance not reducible to anything and not deriving its character from any source outside itself it is not extended As with all simple substances it is understood as quality not quantity It is intensive not extensive For example a point is not a very short line or a very small fraction of a line rather it is the idealized limit as extension line approaches zero and this limit is quality not quantity Similarly as quantity is stripped of its extensive features there is a limit beyond which further reduction is not possible this is the quality of being and not an extension of magnitude The limit of the body is also a simple substance it is a monad The body as it is perceived is a composite whose extension rises from an assembly of simple substances No two simple substances are alike Each monad not only has a distinguishing quality but it is the very unit of quality Being dimensionless it is not subject to change from the outside There is nothing to penetrate it Hence all speculation as to mind and body makes little sense as each is properly conceived of as unique independent and ultimately unextended The relation between mind and body is not causal but one of harmony Leibnitz writes if a note is sounded in the presence of two resonators we do not ask which of the two resonators establishes the sympathetic vibrations in the other The two resonate in parallel as do body and mind they are in pre-established harmony with each other The action of mind body is not caused by the other body mind as a mechanistic account requires nor is the action of each reconciled to that of some third external time-keeper occasionalists such as to make sure all the clock are on time The universe is then a collection of simple substances monads which are created in harmony prior to their coming into being Harmony is as Leibnitz writes God s modality If monads change it must be through some inner principle This inner principle through which monads change is called petite perception These petite perceptions are different from apperception which also implies consciousness To the extent that every monad has an internal organization it perceives petite perception and is open to change When a monad allows both perception and memory it is called a soul So that animals have souls but they do not have rational souls minds because while they are able to perceive and even retain traces of consecutive perceptions they are unaware of necessary truths Human beings too insofar as their perceptions are united by memory ac like lower animals resembling empiricists whose methods are those of mere practice without theory In fact in of our actions we are nothing but empirics It is only in knowledge of rule of necessary relationship that we display the uniquely human quality of human life This is consciousness Leibnitz was one of the first to write about the problem of the unconscious His notion had however little to do with motivation or psychopathology Rather Leibnitz employs the notion of the unconscious to support his position that monads are indestructible that perception petite perceptions are distinguished from consciousness and on the difference between just monads and monads of the rational conscious mind soul Even in sleep monads perceive but since it is not accompanied by memory it is not conscious subliminal A number of unconscious insensible perceptions when stored in the mind can add up such as to break through into consciousness Leibnitz suggested that there is a gradual scale separating sleep from other states of awareness and these are constituted by thresholds For example we might retain a great deal in memory and yet not be explicitly aware of it This threshold phenomenon means that the present is big with the future and laden with the past It is not easy to cave a niche for Leibnitz in the history of psychology He is an enemy of empiricism and materialism and as such he cannot be easily located in the history of psychology as an experimental science Leibnitz writings make clear that he believe that most of what psychologists have dealt with could be deduced from common experience Leibnitz contributed to the concept of sensory thresholds via his petite perceptions he noted the role of memory in consciousness he also distinguished consciousness from perception on the one hand and memory on the other but his major influence is his critique of Cartesian dualism and this by way of his critique of Descartes metaphysics replacing two kinds of substance with one and replacing causation with harmony Of course much of the early psychology physiological psychology while accepting Leibnitz critique of Descartes forgot about his monadology - it smacked too much of pantheism In fact Leibnitz did little to restore idealism to philosophical significance in fact there is little relation between Leibnitz and say later Hegel But Leibnitz emphasis on activity of monads as energy and unity both features of every simple substance or monad can be found in the psychologies of James Brentano and Gestalt psychology Leibnitz monism also influenced the biological oriented psychologist who might believe that in order to understand mind one would need to investigate brain Indeed his insistence on animal souls and the continuous evolution of levels of organization complexity of monads also influenced comparative animal research in the later Darwinian tradition Inertial universes are always in motion whereas energetic universes have beginnings energetic universes are self-generating This notion especially when applied to minds means that minds are active and not merely passive receptors processor But from whence comes this energy activity Here we have Leibnitz monadology Leibnitz begins not with matter bits of matter that float in space void bouncing off each other motion but with spirits souls or units that Leibnitz calls monads or centers of energy at different levels of spirit and energy A universe of communicating monads the self as a monad communities of peoples the environment the entire cosmos all as layers of self-originating activity or monads It is a fantastic vision But what are we to make of monads that now take the place of atoms Obviously this is not an easy substitution Monads generate their own energy and destiny Frankly they are not empirical even as atoms were not in Democritus or Newton s day but they are a rational concept that can direct empirical research According to Leibnitz monads have windows in the sense that they are not only the origin of energy but also direct their destiny movements purpose and not self-encased towards other monads Here Leibnitz has the unconscious and the conscious working together the latter embedded in the former and in this way the self is psychophysical unity wherein body and mind are both abstractions from this unity and the body is no longer alien to the soul as it was for Descartes Leibnitz spiritualizes the body and soul in this psychophysical unit of monadic energy we cannot tell where the body leaves off and the mind begins below the level of consciousness but then so is the atom below the level of consciousness On this view the body is no longer a chunk of matter on which the soul precariously perches rather the body is spiritualized and it is here that honoring the soul might begin On the one hand Leibnitz extraordinary metaphysical imagination gives us a universe of organisms within organisms and on the other hand he has the unique capacity for simplicity and logical incisiveness The latter is evident in the manner he deals with the argument for the existence of God Consider the question with which he begins why is there anything at all rather than nothing This question lurks behind all the traditional arguments for the existence of God in a tradition that begins with Aristotle who was not particularly religious whose prime mover was tied to the concentric spheres of a finite universe that was Greek cosmology The th c broke with that tidy universe and imagined a much larger possibly infinite universe Leibnitz speaks from the center of this new consciousness of an infinite universe and asks why is there anything at all rather than nothing This is the question of all questions Heidegger that permeates our lives even in our ordinary moods in which we are metaphysical why was I born The question demands an answer After all to ask why is to seek a reason or cause all being is contingent and Leibnitz then adds to this contingency his principle of sufficient reason a principle that reflects the mind s seeking a cause reason explanation restlessly driven to the unconditional absolute and non-contingent So long as we remain within the realm of the contingent we will never answer the question why We are then faced by two alternatives that there is no reason and things are just as they are because they happen this way Nietzsche the world is absurd including our existence This is no merely atheistic answer it bears the weight of enormity a universe without reason we can confirm a cause reason outside of contingent being by positing another order ground a necessary being which exists and assumes a mystery religious answer which of course Nietzsche rejected Here too the leap is audacious as Kierkegaard recognized a century later It was again Kant who was later to clarify this dilemma by making God a condition of possibility of moral action Lecture Empiricists The British distrusted this continental rationalist tradition of Descartes and Leibnitz The British mentality professes a certain distrust of intellectuals and the intellect The British are a practical people preferring commonsense to the intricacies of reason in the Germans or French divide between the continentalist and the empiricist pragmatist traditions Whether or not it was this gift for practicality that was responsible it was clearly at work in the greatest creation of British genius liberal democratic government The triumph of this British character was not merely that it conceived of the idea of free but that it also embodied it in institutions even though it took a hundred years of turmoil including civil war to achieve it England had firmly laid down the structures of a free society which continued to develop for the next two centuries John Locke - was the philosopher of the British political revolution and still remains the spokesperson for classical liberalism But my interest in Locke is his more devious route through the intricacies of the human soul He will express the same British trait here of plain speech common sense and the sense of fact He tells us that his method is the plain historical method and he traces the operations of the mind from sensations to ideas to the association of ideas All our ideas come from sensations and are tested against sensations This is the core of British empiricism But from the very start empiricism ran into snags For one thing sensations provide us with the material of thought but the mind seems to do something with these materials combining and recombining them Is the mind merely passive a receptor for sensations or is the mind active doing something of its own before the flood of sensations come in This is a cardinal question and the question turns not only on how we know and what we can know but also on human freedom If the mind is active forming its own judgments can it also initiate actions consequent on those judgments Locke s answer is ambiguous He tends towards the passivity of the mind and this is the empiricist tendency more generally especially when the doctrine of the association of ideas is proposed as the mechanical deterministic combination of sensations What is this mind such that the empiricists claim is bombarded by sensations and then mechanically processes these into ideas What are the sensations that correspond to the ideas in the mind How are sensations grasped by the mind Do sensations themselves exemplify the mind Since Locke is a Christian he believes in an immortal soul which he claims is outside his empiricist framework In a sense this notion of the soul is a barrier to the mind and hence there are limits on empiricism Yet the soul must also in some sense touch the mind In a way empiricism bifurcates the world into two the regions one where empiricism holds good the mind is a passive machine that processes sensations into ideas the other being the traditional doctrine of the soul Thus Locke s empiricism is somewhat half-hearted But there is also a graver split within Locke and this comes from the opposite direction than his religious faith it comes from the new science This is Locke s distinction between primary and secondary qualities inherited from one of the originators of the new science - Galileo cementing a distinction between the objective extension and subjective experience But this distinction is an odd one given that empiricism is after all supposed to take what is in experience seriously Rather what we see here is that Locke s empiricism is not merely an appeal to what is experienced but his empiricism follows the speculations of scientific materialism In other words Locke begins not with experience his plain historical method but with the purportedly metaphysically real as defined by the new science that is his empiricism is informed by what the new science says is real namely bits of matter Thus this distinction between primary and secondary qualities implies a bifurcation between the experiential world and the world of science which would dictate the nature of Locke s empiricism In other words Locke s empiricism is no less an abstraction from experience than is Descartes reason I think an abstraction from the personal I habitus British empiricism is not an open reliance on experience it is not genuinely empirical but rather is a disciplined reliance on what the new science maintains is real matter Thus for example sensations are never experienced they are an abstraction from perception in accord with what we know how the senses work as processors of matter photons hitting the retina how the physical biological body works It is this bifurcation of the latter two worlds that the Irishman George Berkeley - understood so well If matter of scientific materialism determines how the mind works as Locke would have it then the mind is not free it is merely a machine Berkeley defend Locke s everyday experiential empirical not empiricist world but the world as it appears in experience is not subjective as Locke held rather experience is the real and it is the real of physics senses that is an abstraction Berkeley maintains that not only secondary qualities but also primary qualities are relative to observers and Berkeley knocks down Newton s claim to absolute space in which bits of matter bounce up against each other The latter is he notes an instance of misplaced concreteness Locke had stripped the world of its color sound odors etc and his argument had been that these secondary qualities were relative of the observer perceiver and therefore were not objective But if secondary qualities were relative to the observer then so are primary qualities argues Berkeley Here Berkeley introduces the relativity of all observation in a through-going way such as was not to emerge again until Einstein in the th c Locke held that taken the new sciences claim that reality consisted only of bits of matter in motion or at rest as absolute objective because there was the absolute space of Newton in which these bits of matter moved or remained at rest But Berkeley audaciously rejects one of the sacred pillars of the Newtonian world namely absolute space Newton s absolute space is an abstraction far removed from our perception empirical world For Berkeley who stands in the empirical world of plain ordinary commonsense empiricism is enslaved to scientific materialism According to Berkeley experience both primary and secondary qualities is always dependent on mind even if we are not aware of this we cannot escape mind all reality is permeated by mind We cannot grasp any reality outside of the mind even the computer Immanuel Kant was later to take over this perspective and built upon it Nevertheless Berkeley s plain commonsense runs into trouble when he encapsulates his position in the phrase esse est percipi to be is to be perceived Does reality really depend on our perceiving it Surely reality cannot be so fickle Surely the tree that falls in the forest does make a sound even if there is no one to hear it How can Berkeley as an arch-commonsense-empiricist even as he is more critical than Locke ensure that the real is real without invoking a perceiver Berkeley introduces God It is God that maintains reality when there are no observers But this move proves disastrous for an empiricist after God is not there to be perceived even as Berkeley s also claims that it is the mind that perceives after all the mind cannot be perceived How can Berkeley appeal to the mind or to God since neither is given in sensuous experience Berkeley does so because he believes we have direct access to our own mind when we are conscious of something we are also conscious that we are conscious and on analogy of the finite and infinite we can speak of God s mind Thus while our human mind is imperfectly grasped God s mind grasps perfectly Leaving aside God for the moment are we aware of ourselves as minds Here we come to a crucial divide among empiricists The ordinary person says of course I am aware of my own mind I am aware of the table but I am also aware that I am aware of the table I am aware of having the experience of the table and I am aware that it is I who has this experience of the table But there are some empiricists who doubt this primary fact of consciousness If Locke s sensations are clear and distinct like Descartes ideas hard and fast and objective data of consciousness then surely in comparison the mind is a fleeting and unwarranted ghost in the machine William James divided empiricists between tender-minded and tough-minded where the first are empirical including the experience of intuition and consciousness whereas the second are tough-minded empiricists allowing only what the new science permits namely sensations It is the tough-minded position that is adopted by the Scotsman David Hume - who is an archetypal sensationist and the precursor of positivistic thought in the th and th centuries If Berkeley reduced Locke s bits of matter sensations to a bundle of perceptions Hume seeks to reduce Berkeley s mind to a heap of sense impressions and this is as far as empiricism can take us unless we can reduced impressions further to something else like nerve impulses Discuss decomposition analysis David Hume takes a giant step forward from Berkeley in defining the modern mind even as his conception of mind was curiously at odds with our ordinary experience If the th c was still implanted mind in God Descartes appealed to God soul as did Locke and Berkeley Hume began what the th c the age of Reason - adopted as a strictly modern secular conception of the new science by removing God in what later was to become th c positivism in the work of Wittgenstein it became logical positivism Hume s impressions plus mathematical logic For Hume experience was now a succession of sense impressions impressions including sensations of the body and the world was mechanically constructed out of these Life is a stream of impressions that are simply given to us by the world and hence all ideas for example cause and effect relations are themselves only impressions What happens here is that the new science knowledge of the world is grounded in habit or psychology the repeated co-occurrence of two impressions leads us say by habit that one is the cause of the other Little wonder that Hume is so important for empiricist psychology his empiricism looked exact - exactness that the new science admired so much and did so much to get it started We might note right off that Hume was not a good psychologist for he collapses under the label impression both sensations outer and feelings inner But surely my feeling of sadness is not so distinct it may well infuse all my other impressions something Hume failed to appreciate Furthermore it was Hume s atomism that led to his celebrated skepticism about such concepts as cause and effect and all other such ideas which could not be grounded in impressions If cause and effect is nothing but the co-occurrence of two events contiguity of sensory impressions then we are never logically justified in speaking of the necessity of cause and effect merely of psychological habit All knowledge now becomes psychology which is surely nonsense It would be altogether stunning if the new science were nothing but habits of mind and bundles of impressions What follows from Hume sensationalism is skepticism If the self is merely a set of impressions then the self also is merely a repository of the impressions consciousness becomes then nothing else than this set of impressions the self is a ghost in a machine There is strange alienation evident here a third person perspective where I stand outside myself in order to see myself Sense data and logic was Russell s adumbration of Hume It is easy to see why this would happen to Hume Consciousness is for him something that just happens when we have impressions The entire notion of experience is corrupted here in this empiricism Things in the world including my own body are merely sensations impressions and the mind soul self is nowhere evident in these impressions One is reminded here that Hume might be engaged in a category mistake he is like the man who goes outside of his house and looks through the window to see if he is home It is a spectator rd person view view of the mind forgetting that it is I whose impressions these are Hume stands outside himself and looks for himself in some kind of sensory datum Bertrand Russell in the th c tries to rescue Hume s empiricism by adding a bit of modern logic The self now becomes an aggregate of sense data which is then given a verbal appellation as if language is merely labelling - but Russell never says how such aggregates are formed Moreover how do I know that yesterday s aggregate of impressions is like that the impressions I experience now How does one compare memories In a way Hume the empiricist finds himself aligned with Descartes the rationalist For while Hume s consciousness as a set of impressions is very different from Descartes consciousness as innate reason both the empiricist and the rationalist would have the mind sit precariously external to the body For neither men is the mind embedded in the body or the body animated by the mind the one remains external to the other Finally this psychological philosophy of mind also presumes that reason association of idea is strictly instrumental and hence an individual phenomenon Reason and association of ideas occurs in my head alone and then trick is to get the knowledge in my head to others we then get endless speculation on the designative nature of language Lecture Immanuel Kant Kant - is the last great thinker in whom the intellectual unity of the Western mind rationalists Descartes Spinoza and Leibnitz and empiricists Locke Berkeley and Hume still held together After Kant this unity began to fall apart diverge into a number of irreconcilable directions e g Idealism of Hegel and Marx Positivism pragmatism existentialism Of course Kant preserved the unity of a still fundamentally theistic civilization his thought always ends with God yet this unity is a precarious one more precarious than Kant imagined It was Kant the pietist who in fact departed farther from God in undermining all the reasoned theological argument for God than he realized Kant called his philosophy critical philosophy and in this separated himself from the dogmatism of his predecessors the dogmatism of speculative metaphysics and theology in Leibnitz on the one hand and the dogmatic skepticism of Hume on the other hand Kant insists everywhere on the limits and conditions under which the mind must operate conditions that is to say under which the mind operates effective and productively Even in matters of religion and God in fact perhaps there most of all we have to be aware of the limits op reason with which our human nature endowed Kant s century the th c Age of Reason was also the age of the bourgeois and the voice of bourgeois was one of sobriety prudence and caution Kant comes on the scene in Western civilization just Galileo s new science had come into its own and Kant launches the next wave a wave in which we still live Thus Kant has before him not only the edifice of the new science which was framed by the rationalist Descartes and Leibnitz and the empiricist Locke and Hume but which originated in the discoveries of Copernicus Kepler Galileo and Newton but his distance on this edifice was sufficient long over years that he could reflect on its implications Kant genius was the genius of reflection he is the first thinker to grasp the implications of the new science at a level of depth that was not again reached until Martin Heidegger in the th c See the map Rationalism plus empiricism yield Kant which in turn in the th c yields idealism positivism pragmatism and existentialism Note that what is at the center of this historical map is philosophy Why Why should philosophy and the contending schools of philosophy be at the center of this historical map of Western thought The answer is the traditional one philosophy is the effort by the human mind to know itself and to take stock of our knowledge of the universe and out place in it The doubt we might have today about the centrality of philosophy is in part because the small space philosophy seems to occupy in our culture Philosophers seem not to discover anything talk only to each other and are mostly concerned with esoteric questions that even if they were or could be answered yield no pay-off Philosophers seem only critical clever in making difficult what is easy Even if we allow that philosophy is not useless the question arises whether philosophy is only about reflection whether philosophy merely reflects its time or whether philosophy also does something permanent something that generates consequences for society culture or the individual Yet in anticipation of Kant has to say we must remember that the mind pervades society reality at its most mundane levels the level of experience Reflection is here not merely passive contemplation like Descartes in his armchair in his bedroom away from everyone else on something already formed like the new science on the contrary philosophy gives shape and form to what we experience it articulates and so makes real it lends vision to the assumptions and consequences to how we live and how we think science included Recall that my entire course is based on the intuition that reflection and understanding of the human historical world is an activity of the utmost importance We might speculate that there is something deeper than philosophy That is religion I have not placed religion into my historical map because philosophy in our modern epoch the epoch of the death of God or the dying of God has been in continuous dialogue with religion even today when leading cognitive and evolutionary thinkers are still very busy refuting God We can argue that religious questions are at the center of philosophy even if only by way of its rejection and even if today there are many philosophers who do not engage religious questions this says more about philosophy and the state of our Western civilization than it does about religion In any case it took a lot of philosophy to prepare the human mind for this matter-of-fact state of godlessness There is also art aesthetics which captures a kind of truth which philosophy must take note of and which it can not itself produce Art should also occupy a central place just as religion should in our historical map Aesthetics and art were an integral part of Romantic philosophy and even of the idealists Indeed I think of art as typifying an age or epoch in a way that philosophy religion or science cannot do Artistic expression is much overlooked as a source of truth also in psychology in favor of intellectual expression of the human mind about itself that I characterized as the task of philosophy There is also science of course Curiously it is not represented by any philosophical school but it is something that concerns them all often as something to be absorbed and transcended or fought against and rejected I referred to this science in quasi-philosophical terms i e metaphysics as scientific materialism a movement that floats around all thought especially the sciences It is not usually professed as an explicit commitment rather it is part and parcel of the triumph of the sciences technology The achievements in the physical sciences technology become the measure of scientific materialism and the ghostly insubstantial individual human soul and common human spirit seems almost childish by comparison Scientific materialism is the terrain in which the historical map above plays itself out Such materialism need not be explicitly professed as a creed rather it is the de facto philosophy of an era reaping the great triumph of the physical sciences and in technology and pushing more and more of its energies into those fields The achievements of the physical sciences and technology become the invisible standard and sometimes not so invisible by which to measure all thinking in whatever domain However much we may hide this scientific materialism in our philosophical study we are caught up in its flow as soon as we step outside into the actual world If we in our time want to come to terms with its most troubling questions it will only be when it comes to terms with scientific materialism In fact Kant s critical philosophy is hardly read today except by philosopher of the history of philosophy Hence we have to retrieve Kant and when we do we find his reflections rather contemporary in a way that all philosophy is eternally contemporary The terrain is scientific materialism it is implicit in the new science Thus the question is can mind be reduced to matter But in this form this question is unanswerable It is as Kant might say an effort at bad metaphysics and we cannot know one way of the other Instead we might ask the phenomenological experiential question what role does the mind play in human life This way of asking the question has the virtue of confronting both metaphysical materialism and indeed scientific realism and it was Immanuel Kant who brought out more clearly than any other philosopher the active organizing role of the mind in human experience The British empiricists from Locke to Hume had stressed the mind s passivity ideas are imprinted on the mind the mind is a blank slate on which experience writes etc But when one turns to experience first then one finds that the mind does something much more than the empiricists give it credit for For example if we turn to one of the most significant events in the history of our species the construction of numbers we find the mind exemplary in doing Mathematics is one of clearest examples of the power of the mind to bring order into our experience We all participate in mathematics and when we do we realize that we are involved in elementary operations adding subtracting etc It is interesting that today we think of reason as endlessly distorting and concealing but it is remarkable that in case of mathematics we see the legitimacy of the power of the mind reason We know from anthropology that ancient cultures had only a rudimentary conception of the number system Thus however astute the ancients were in their sensory capacities yet they were unable to even formulate an elementary conception of numbers This state of affairs when there were no numbers should give us especially philosophers of mathematics some food for thought Before we had a number system were there numbers Did numbers subsist perhaps in some Platonic heaven plucked down by some Promethean mind Even if there were such a Promethean figure s he would have to go through the operation of constructing numbers as Kant suggests Or look towards some future and consider that through some unimaginable disaster the human species lost all its knowledge forgetting or amnesia is according to Heidegger still very prevalent including our knowledge of mathematics But suppose that textbooks on mathematics survived this disaster so that people could point at math books in libraries and say this is mathematics without understanding what mathematics was about Mathematics as marks on paper is mathematics only if there are minds to give these marks meaning How did the ancients or how do people following this disaster rediscover mathematics We are reminded of Plato s cave when suddenly someone announces that today the sun rose and I am going to scratch a mark on the side of the cave wall and tomorrow when the sun rises again I will make another mark and so each day afterward Bit by bit as the marks gather we notice that the place of each mark in the sequence is given a name its number name Note that the mind is here directed to both the future and the past and synthesizes the past and future perspectives in the present a pattern that lies at the root of the number system This kind of synthesis is not a simply association conditioned response rather it is the construction of a structure that give rise to a very different meaning an active construction of a meaningful order What is involved here is a continuity of consciousness and I that accompanies or that enables the synthesis taking into account past and future in the present What kind of I is this that can synthesize past and future into the present Kant is cautious he claims that there is as much I ego as is required to give continuity and meaning to particular processes of thought this I is what he calls a transcendental ego an ego that synthesizes This was a decisive step beyond Hume even as we may not be satisfied with Kant s answer Remember Hume s conception of the I as a bundle of perceptions impressions such an I could not even count up to A bundle of perceptions does not have the continuity of consciousness necessary for synthesis The question is whether Kant s transcendental ego is in fact the concrete self I that we need in order for the imaginary person in Plato s cave to construct numbers Hardly any more than Descartes ego cogito In fact Kant turns his critical philosophy in the same direction as Hume - in fact he is more rigorous than Hume - in dismissing the theological conception of soul or mind as pure immaterial substance which we cannot know i e of which we cannot have scientific knowledge In other words Kant s transcendental ego is a very minimal self one necessary to allow for the synthesis required in constructing mathematics reason but no more than that Thus Kant rejected the possibility of a science of psychology since psychology on his view dealt with the mind which was non-substantial Kant s insight is essentially that mathematics is a construction Not only does mathematics deals with entities that are constructed by the mind there are no numbers straight line points etc in nature but its methods are constructive throughout Thus mathematics is not merely substituting one set of symbols for an equivalent set but in fact it constructs new cases or mathematical entities that bring forward the properties under investigation The geometrician draws lines the arithmetician builds up a new number complex and if s he has to prove that there is no last prime number s he does so not by contemplating the meaning of the essence of prime or of number but by actually constructing a last prime number and then showing that it leads to contradiction Here Kant s view of mathematics is connected with his distinction between analytic and synthetic employment of the human understanding An analytic statement is one in which the predicate adds nothing to the subject of the predicate a bachelor is an unmarried man here the predicate merely explicates what is already in the subject a tautology In contrast a synthetic proposition is one where the predicate add to our knowledge of the subject a man is an animal with a bivalvular heart where the predicate adds to our knowledge of what a man is Kant s distinction is open to criticism today because he relies on a subject-predicate logic which is not sufficiently rigorous compared to modern mathematical logic Be that as it may Kant s distinction was an effort of considerable significance Thus mathematicians regularly speak of trivial significant and really new results depending on whether the results of their work obviously merely what is already known or whether it adds something new to mathematics But if we consider modern mathematical logic we find that for example Russell reduced mathematics to logic where logic is tautological and hence where mathematics becomes tautological and hence new results in mathematics merely means that mathematicians do not see all the logical implications of their work at once The reason for this Russell claims is that the human mind is finite if our minds were infinite we would seem all the logical implications at once i e tautologies and there would be no new results in mathematics Of course this is a rather strange tack by Russell and other positivists in explaining mathematics as an analytical endeavor since appeal to an infinite mind even as a form of argument is obviously not an empirical entity In this regard Kant was a down-to-earth philosopher our mind is radically finite but we cannot see except from a framework of finitude We cannot have any adequate concept of the infinite mind as Russell suggests we do rather all we can have is a vague and numinous idea of mind nothing sufficient for use in a scientific understanding of mathematics It is this finite mind according to Kant that produces mathematics by constant constructions and inventions Is calculus a logical tautology or is it a new invention namely the construction of the idea of a limit Kant cites the evidence of history in support of his claim that mathematics is a construction of mind He claims not since Aristotle has there been any progress in logic while mathematics has progressed rapidly especially in the two centuries preceding Kant i e in the new science Russell comments that Kant is simply ignorant of modern mathematical logic and in this Russell is both right and wrong True enough Kant did not know the mathematical logic but he would have no difficulty assimilating modern mathematical logic modern logic has been productive Kant would claim precisely because it is mathematical logic Systematic symbolic notation characteristic of mathematical logic permitted forms of construction not available to the older logic and symbols may be numbered and so the resources of arithmetic may be ingeniously used giving rise to Godel s theorem which depends on numbering the expressions of language The latter s proof is that there will always be theorems or axioms in mathematics that cannot be proven from within the system of mathematics itself incompleteness theorem This theorem has also been used to refute any pretension of computational language to stand alone or be complete The usually textbook after introducing elements of the logical calculus presents or simple which are reformulations of axioms If the Lowenheim-Skolem or Godel s theorems are mentioned it is usually overlooked that the latter are very different from the simple theorems that are reformulations of axioms The Lowenheim-Skolem and Godel theorems are however of a very different order than those theorems obtained by a mechanical substitution of the axioms the former produced new and disturbing knowledge Kant was also limited by being attached to Euclidean geometry Kant lived prior to the formulation of non-Euclidean geometries But even here Kant s views of mathematics as grounded in free constructions of an active mind would not be surprised by the inventions of non-Euclidean geometries that are after all not confined to Euclidean absolute space All this stuff about mathematics and logic may well seem trivial relative to Kant s major contributions to philosophy Yet this stuff while technical ties directly to other major concerns in science For example the foundations of mathematics remains disturbingly unsettled and contested and here Kant still remains very relevant in reminding us that thinking reason if it is not to be empty must be aware of the elementary intuitions from which it starts in experience Modern science Of course the most dazzling example of the constructive power of the mind was the whole edifice of the new science Here Immanuel Kant s insights proved to be decisive and remain so today Galileo was deeply conscious of the fact that when he introduced the phrase new science he was making a break with the wisdom of the ancients By Kant s time the new science was well-established and in his st Critique almost years after Newton Kant writes When Galileo caused balls the weights of which he had previously determined to roll down an inclined plane when Torricelli made air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to a definite column of water a light broke upon the students of nature They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own and that it must not allow itself to be kept as it were in nature s leading-strings but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws constraining nature to give answers to questions of reason s own determining Reason holding in one hand its principles according to which alone concordant appearances can be admitted as equivalent to laws and in the other hand the experiment which it has devised in conformity with these principles must approach nature in order to be taught by it It must not however do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated Even physics therefore owes the beneficent revolution in its point of view entirely to the happy thought that while reason must seek in nature not fictitiously ascribe to it whatever as not being knowable through reason s own resources has to be learnt if learnt at all only from nature it must adopt as its guide in so seeking that which it has itself put into nature It is thus that the study of nature entered on the secure path of a science after having for so many centuries nothing but a process of merely random groping Kant points here to the intrinsic relation between science and technology The mind is not passive not merely a sensory receptor that reflect like a mirror nature or the facts but active in constructing models which are not found in experience but in the human imagination even if the mathematical imagination and then to proceeds to impose those models on nature Moreover those models are first of all conceptually constructed before being materially translated in apparatus of the laboratory In fact Kant could have used Galileo s construction of the concept of inertia as a simpler example The concept of inertia was new and the entire science of mechanics the basis for the whole of the new science depended on it What does Galileo do He does not passively record facts instead he constructs a concept that is never precisely found in nature at all in fact it is in some sense contrary to what we do find in nature Imagine Galileo tells us a body on a perfectly frictionless plane now if motion is imparted to this body it will move infinitely in a straight line unless of course it is impeded and altered by some countervailing force But there are no frictionless planes in nature or any plane with infinite extension What Galileo constructs is a model that is counterfactual to nature as we experience nature He constructs an idealization a standard in approximation to which the actual factual situation may be calculated Here the basic concept of science is mind-made and never copies nature it is a profound human artifice and therefore a technical construct as fully as a piece of material apparatus might be Science is technological at its core and it is the basis of the formation of its concepts and hence technology is not something that happens after science as an application It is this intimate connection between science and technology which Bacon foresaw in his claim that knowledge is power to change and control the world But for Bacon this power was the result of science in contrast Kant sees clearly that technology is the very basis of science Once seen by Kant this connection spreads through the entire edifice of the science throughout the th c The more advanced the science the closer the connection between its own technology and the more every part of the science joins with every other part in a unity of the whole contrast psychology This does not mean that one can say beforehand just what particular discovery becomes a part of or serves to join other parts but the history of the natural sciences has been the surprising discoveries of such connections even where they were not first suspected So too with a particular technical device no matter how isolated its function or principle of operation at first appears to be it may become indispensable to the structure of science as a whole During the past years science-technology has played itself out as a single human project This project was both daring and deep for as Kant remarks it is a turn in human reason and hence a transformation of our attitude towards the world away from a passive receptive and contemplative towards an active projective and enactive struggle with nature We have to master nature not drift with it Kant employs some key words human beings impose their models upon nature human beings compel nature to answer their questions the inquirer is in a position to demand of nature All these are words of power and Kant knew it He had read Francis Bacon carefully knowledge is power even as Kant parts company with Bacon when the latter demands that nature be placed on the rack as if tortured to give answers and suggests that we have power over nature Kant was more insightful and more humble than Bacon Knowledge is power in that knowledge enables us to deal with nature but more than that knowledge is itself a step in power for knowledge is intimately tied to doing thinking reason and doing In the very concepts constructed and not literally founding the world we have already taken a step beyond nature in order to subsequently understand it and deal with it It is in the construction of concepts that the human mind comes to its fullness In this sense the project of science-technology which launched modernity is a genuine transformation of our human being If at times during the last years this knowledge-power coupling gave rise to an optimistic progress endless progress vision that was almost utopian as it is sometimes today it has also become far less optimistic creating despair passivity nihilism towards the future What Kant foresaw in his philosophical reflections was that this edifice of science-technology coupling exemplified the constructive power of the mind even as this very knowledge-power coupling threatened to denigrate the human mind Its success in the natural sciences led to an attitude of scientific materialism according to which the mind becomes merely a passive play-thing of material forces It is as if the offspring turns on its parents Oedipus we today have forgotten Kant namely that the mind is everywhere imprinted on this body of science technology and that without the founding imagination of mind there would be no science Thus there is no logic of discovery a la Reichenbach which a machine could compute This is not merely something to be assented to and perhaps enjoyed this the mind is nothing but empiricist position it is also a terrible existential reality for doubt about the mind as in scientific materialism has profound consequences and provides one of the ordeals that have beset modernity in our day when the mind has becomes a cognitive machine what happens to our freedom and individuality Let s turn to Kant solution in noting the limitations on and finitude of the mind that he brings out so sharply It would seem an easy matter to grasp our finitude in time birth-life-death and space vastness of the universe But such finitude is largely quantitative But Kant s notion of finitude is different his is a qualitative finitude one that maintains that the human mind is constituted in a way that the understanding cannot grasp conceptually those matters that are of ultimate significance to us This mode of our finitude is an uncanny fact about our human nature namely that we must bring ourselves to reflect again and again to see just how far we can carry our understanding Leibnitz why is there anything and not nothing But what can we understand when we say or hypothesize that space or time is infinite how can we bring this before our mind We can only do so as a process to which there is not last term no end Kant s point is that the legitimate or meaningful understanding of a concept can only come about through intuition particularly to make some kind of mental picture of a concept on risk that otherwise our words become empty verbalisms But from where do these intuitions come asks Kant Only from sense perception and these only come always within the framework of space and time Our thinking must work within that framework of space and time wherein perception occurs The mind can synthesize and organize sometimes brilliantly as in modern science but only within that framework of sensory-intuition-space-time Contrast this with our usually view inherited from the Greeks that thinking begins where sensory experience leaves off The mind if you will produces from this welter of perceptions inductively an idea and then this sensible mind aspires to an intelligible world the world of knowledge real of the world of forms leaving behind the sensory perceptual world of experience flux In contrast for Kant thinking does not leave the world of sensory experience rather thinking is always already involved by organizing and synthesizing sensory intuition in experience Just as the number system is a human construction a magnificent one but for that reason does not lead us out of this world of experience for in numbers we organize the world of sensory experience Thus we can say that Kant s view of the mind is pragmatic Kant is in some way the father of what later in the late th c an early th centuries became known as pragmatism meaning that the mind has the practical function of organizing and synthesizing sensory intuition so as to yield the world of experience Thus the mind is the mind-in-use essentially tying knowledge to doing technology Mental pictures are transformable into mechanical designs From an evolutionary point of view we might say that the mind its use in conceptualizing is an extension of our sensory intuition in giving us a world of experience and experience is always meaningful Of course for Kant this is not the whole function of mind as we will see below there are also other functions of mind where reason or understanding our conceptual capacities cannot help For readers of Kant in their time the most important impact of his work was that he destroyed any possibility of proof for the existence of God That is in limiting reason to sensory intuition Kant in one fell-blow demolished traditional rational theology and thereby placed God in a problematic light Kant s critique in the st Critique was to limit the role of reason to experience and all concepts that referred to that which is not part of experience is an illegitimate extension of reason where it should not in fact cannot go at least if reason is to full it legitimate role in constructing meaningful cognitive knowledge concepts That is for Kant unlike Leibnitz metaphysics and rational theology going back to St Aquinas was the result of the illegitimate extension of reason beyond the confines of sensory intuition Metaphysics cannot give us knowledge which does not mean that metaphysical questions are non-sense or meaningless as the later th c positivists held but just that these questions could not yield knowledge in their answers Remember Leibnitz reasoning about God Leibnitz begins with the contingent beings of the world around us contingent here means that beings come into existence and pass out of existence and are causally conditioned by other beings All we can know through experience senses and understanding is this flux of beings Even the ever-lasting hills were begotten by geological convulsion and worn away through weather and time Nature is a chain of contingent beings or many chains of interlocking and perhaps infinite chains upon chains of beings Why are there such chains In asking this question we come upon the awesome question that inevitably confronts the human mind when it pushes thought far enough why does anything at all exist rather than nothing Leibnitz question Leibnitz then he invokes his principle of sufficient reason which tells that nothing that exists can exist without a reason There is nothing obscure about this principle so long as it functions within experience pushing ever farther backwards in the chain s of nature That is when we experience nature as change contingent and we use the principle of sufficient reason to move backward to the origin of the contingent in the non-contingent or the necessary this is the whole rationalist tradition from Aristotle to the new science Of course Leibnitz intended this question to lead us outside the chain of being to some unconditioned non-contingent or necessary Being God I this way Leibnitz remained solidly within the tradition of rational theology But Kant s refutation is sharp The mistake Leibnitz makes is that he extends the principle of sufficient reason beyond the sphere of our possible experience Leibnitz extends reason beyond where it can go beyond the framework of space and time Kant argues that we are creatures within space and time and the power of the human mind as in the achievements of science is to synthesize perceptual intuition which is always found within space and time Experience only has meaning within that framework and all proof disproof of our concepts and theories occur within that framework If we seek to push reason beyond the framework of space and time the framework Kant calls the apriori conditions of possibility of experience in other words if we try in reason to transcend experience to move beyond the apriori conditions of possibility of experience we preclude the possibility of proof or disproof of our theories explanations and concepts Kant even raises the question of whether Leibnitz Necessary Being is meaningful we can of course provide a verbal definition since we know what contingent being is we can always say that a Necessary being is a non-contingent one But when we give this definition is there any content to our definition concept Or is it merely a verbal formula as Kant warns is the case of all metaphysics Kant s point is fundamental here When Kant says that Leibnitz Necessary Being is a concept that has no positive content he is not saying that it is meaningless as the positivists do and the positivists take Kant to be saying just that Kant maintains that Necessary Being has no positive content his claim is that it is not a clear-cut concept like the concepts in science about which admit of proof and disproof Here Kant introduces a distinction between idea and concept The ideas of God infinity and freedom are not meaningless just because these ideas cannot become concepts as in science rather these ideas belong to another order of mind and lays claim on other portions of our being human Indeed as human beings we exist within the question of God and freedom we can never escape these questions although we can clearly turn out backs upon them So in the matter of proofs of God then who is right Kant or Leibnitz On very practical grounds Kant seems to be right that there is no proof of the existence of God or infinity or freedom or the mind otherwise these words would not be the perennial problem they are The same is true for numbers theory in mathematics Godel s theorem and there are limits to scientific proof especially with respect to foundational questions Yet Leibnitz cannot so easily be dismissed After all we cannot evade his question why is there anything rather than nothing We may fall back on the need for faith here but even without faith this question is one our intellect must confront For consider that even if our civilization was to continue indefinitely and science would continue to make progress indefinitely the question would still confront us At least Kant s refutation serves the religious in assuring them that science can never answer all the questions we ask especially those which most deeply concern us about the meaning of existence In other words Kant assures them that science can never take the place of religion perform its functions or answer its questions The intellect simply cannot cope with this question and others like it conceptually and it is this limit of reason which is its radical finitude We usually think of finitude as an endpoint of a line but for Kant finitude is right up front it is gap hole in the middle of reason This reason is not of the kind to answer all questions it brings to us i e we ask ourselves We can spin a brilliant web the new science yet we cannot step beyond it scientific materialism We continue to ask question which cannot be conceptualized and subjected to proof or disproof We must take care to understand Kant carefully He is easily subject to misinterpretation as indeed the positivist of the th misinterpreted Kant The st Critique is divided into three parts sensibility or sensory intuition understanding or the conceptual scientific intellect and reason dealing with transcendent ideas but we must take care not to think of these three part as three stories It is not that understanding apriori conditions of the possibility of experience is added to sensibility and then reason is added to the understanding Rather all three categories function within the framework of sense experience I do not have sense impression perceptions Hume to which I then add the concept of substance or then concept of cause and effect Rather the notion that we are surrounded by substantial things and that things causally affect each other are analyzed out of the whole of experience Instead of stacked stories we need to see Kant s three parts as concentric circles and even this is not enough for the outer circles of reason and understanding penetrate the inner circle of sensibility In other words all three parts are analyzed out of experience Experience is never just sensibility rather experience is permeated by understanding concepts and reason ideas This is why experience is so rich and why in contemporary science including psychology experience is replaced by observation perception in an effort to restrict or reduce experience to what is observably present - empiricism but of course whatever we come to know by way of strict observation must return to experience external validation of scientific findings In experience we are always thrown back to the question of why and scientific questions and answers are restricted to the how For Kant we cannot escape from asking the question of God it is a metaphysical question that arises within experience even as we cannot conceptually understand it or evade it though we try Nor are we pushed to ask the transcendental question only in moments of speculative questioning sort of philosophizing with all the negative connotations when contrasted with scientific questioning In fact sometimes just a mood swing an event will lead us to ask about the meaning of my life or just about the meaning of life Such questions cannot be answered at a conceptual level of understanding as Kant calls it The concept of understanding after Kant changes its meaning in favor of explanation even as we might allow that both involve reason For this question of the meaning of my life and other such questions cannot be assuaged by fame fortune achievement health family and friends e g Tolstoy s My Confessions cf Confessions by St Augustine and Rousseau are all about the lack of certitude in life and just perhaps science or analytic philosophy which would relegate such question as meaningless because they are not answerable conceptually Psychology in the th c has a long history of trying to ban those questions because they are not answerable the reality is however that people do ask those questions and psychology as a discipline surely must be interested in thw questions people ask themselves and others Perhaps the human mind is larger than sensibility and understanding in Kant s sense perhaps such questions lay claim to a sense of cosmos inaccessible to reason even as Kant as a thoroughgoing rationalist a child of the Enlightenment would never assent to that Nevertheless Kant provided another way to God to answering such questions besides the speculative intellect reason that way lies through our experiences of being moral agents and of being sensitive to the beauty of nature and the sublime of reason Let s briefly examine both Duty and beauty Kant was not merely the first thinker to understand the full impact of the new science but he was also the first to split the human mind itself Descartes had split the mind off from the body but Kant split the mind within itself This split is evident in one of his more famous passages Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them the starry heavens above and the moral law within me Here he draws a distinction between the inner and outer and natural world and the moral world the phenomenal and noumenal world The starry heavens open the expanse of the universe system beyond system in confrontation with which my personal significance is but an infinitesimal and borrowed bit of matter that in the end must return to the universe On the other hand moral law grips my conscience and so my dignity as a person is exalted As a spiritual being I am no longer but a bit of matter nothing in an indifferent universe rather the moral law commands me inwardly in a way that seems to open upon a fuller destiny than being a mere bit of matter The difference between these two perspectives is irreconcilable as we lean towards the one or the other our human nature is radically split If Kant is far more explicit in articulating this split it is the same one as haunted Pascal when he writes the eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me It is this same alienation that runs through all of modernity It is resolved only when or if the universe is believed to have some meaning in harmony with our own inward spiritual and moral aims the re discovery of God transcendental Kant follows the tradition in this regard but in a non-traditional way Before examining this let me briefly comment on what happened here a separation of the natural and moral the separating of human being as moral agent and a non-moral universe a Machine of Nature For the ancients there was no such separation between the natural and moral For Aristotle morality is the fulfillment of human nature virtue means excellence Just as our physical virtue or excellence is the perfection of the body so our moral virtues are the perfection of our living together as social beings in community Just maybe Aristotle gazing at the Mediterranean sky is very different from Kant gazing at the Konigsberg sky the former is ablaze with light and life suggesting the habitat for spirit Similarly for the Christian medieval era the universe was the creation of a loving God and hence entirely congenial for our moral nature which was part of God s creation Christians added theological virtues to Aristotle s scheme which Aristotle had planted in our human nature loving our neighbor while not our inclination is surely a divine command But then suddenly with the emergence of the new science the Enlightenment the harmony between cosmic and human vanished Modern science the new science in a few short centuries put forward another image of the universe as a machine indifferent to human purposes If Kant grasped the implications of this new science in terms of its methods and concepts Kant also understands its consequences for moral and aesthetic life Of course even in our everyday life we find that the moral and natural are not always conjoined witness our efforts to move against our inclinations or against circumstances how difficult is obedience even if were so inclined But if learn morality through instruction or example Kant claims it would be a mistake to think that we can define the moral in terms of social-psychological conditioning In fact Kant s ethics is one of the most sharply drawn non-naturalistic psychological theories There is no set of natural predicates whether social cultural psychological etc However thorough our social conditioning we can always move against the social order In fact we may find that the call of our conscience is precisely that it moves against the social-political order of tradition however much we may respect that tradition Kant claims that the fundamental situation in ethics is that the individual asks himself what ought to do But ought can never be defined in term of is Thus the factual case of what is can never guide to us what moral case of what ought to be even if in some unusually and happy situations the two happen to coincide where desire and ideal coincide Human beings are the only animals in nature that submit to the call of the ought How do we explain this demand power of the call of the ought of duty Kant answer here is divided On the one hand we are creatures haunted by the feeling of spiritual destiny beyond the material order this is the call to duty of conscience or the voice of God within us On the other hand Kant in the rationalist tradition demands a purely formal explanation in terms of the moral imperative This dual answer once again exemplifies the division within the mind moral and religious consciousness is on its way to being secularized by the rationalism of the new age For example Kant claims that we have a moral obligation not to lie Ye life often carries us into dilemmas such that we do lie and we feel ashamed guilty perhaps especially when the lie is trivial From where comes this power of the command thou shalt not lie Kant tells us that the command is planted in our very reason like the apriori categories of understanding in case of our knowledge about the world and so for Kant lying becomes a formal contradiction of our reason The question is of course whether this is so Kant makes a strong argument that we should always act such that we can will others to act as well but can reason can bear the load of spiritual values Take for example lying in the context of a promise in the act of promising I also think that I have no intention of carrying out the promise - this does look like a formal contradiction of reason i e I will do it and I will not do it p and not p Yet if we just take these two propositions in themselves they do not actually give us the situation of the lie For consider I say aloud I will do it while I think to myself I will not do it But this is not a formal contradiction however morally reprehensible they may be Lying is not merely a formal contradiction in logic For one thing why should we feel ashamed or guilt on lying if it merely involved a formal contradiction I might feel embarrassed at my stupidity in reasoning cognitive dissonance but surely not guilty Indeed psychologically the aftermath of a lie is particularly potent and this would be very odd if it were a mere formal contradiction There is a contradiction involved in lying of course but it is not a formal one Language is an open realm and in using language to speak I enter this realm When I lie I shut myself off from this realm of the open and so from others In lying I shut myself off from others from the community of speakers from their communal reality It is this sense of