I have been reading bits of Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life. It's a book about ancient philosophy as spiritual practice which inspired some of Foucault's late work. It tries to relate every aspect of ancient philosophy directly to an ethical ideal, saving it from the doctrine-oriented interpretations to which it has been subject.
It seems that the Stoics spent a lot of time reminding themselves of the objective facts about the Universe, as for example that a given human life is gone in the blink of an eye or that fornication is a brief and meaningless spasm, that all that is beautiful will soon putrify and that human desire can find no satisfaction. They didn't just write books about this-- that was beside the point for them. Every morning when they woke up and every evening while falling asleep they would, say, close their eyes and imagine flying up and up, farther and farther away from the Earth, until it looked like a tiny marble in a vast and uncaring black sky, until they could no longer locate the Empire on it and they couldn't even see the consul against whom they had sworn bitter revenge or tell whether there would be famine next year.
This isn't quite as grimly "Stoic" as it sounds, according to Hadot. In willing against nature, as humans always do, we're fighting the inevitable by acting as though the world were made to conform to our desires. We're going to be full of hate and disappointment and misery if we do this, because it's insane; why hope for rain in a desert? So the Stoics sought two kinds of truth to escape this: the study of natural law and the profound understanding of scale. When we understand natural law we won't expect things never to die or arbitrarily decide that rotting is better than growth, since we'll know that they're both arbitrary determinations. When we understand scale we won't be so caught up in our own desires that we're constantly pulled from nature. (Marcus Aurelius used to read history in order to remind himself that two hundred years ago there were thousands of individuals with passions just as desperate and intense as his own, and that every single one of them is dead.)
To understand these things doesn't just make life bearable, it opens our eyes to beauty. In Greek, when something is always happening it is said that this or that "loves to happen"; the Stoics thought that if we understood the truth we could feel and love the cycle of nature loving itself. We could love to happen, too. It's only our silly worries distracting us from participation in the great All; we're like someone watching a storm come in over the ocean and wondering whether he closed the windows at home.
Hadot thinks this is the essence of philosophy, tout court. He quotes Plato saying that the philosopher is characterized by the capacity to grasp all Time and Being and the correlative contempt for human affairs. Is it true that part of the pleasure of seeking knowledge is removal from the worldly into something calmer-- into a perspective, precisely, where you can love the world? When I started writing I was dismissive of this kind of practice-- a typical ancient philosophy / Buddhist attempt to stop being human because it's hard, I thought. And it's true that I wouldn't want to live there. But I think there's something maybe necessary in this kind of distance and the love it opens up-- something one also finds in laughter.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Kant and Nietzsche on the Active in Knowledge
So how can we possibly know the laws of nature a priori? It's not a problem, says Kant: we make them, after all. We "legislate" the laws of nature.
How is that so? Well, of course we don't make the sense-impressions bouncing of our sense-intuition, nor the laws according to which they bounce around. But in order to be properly thought of as experience, these sense-impressions must be subjected to an active synthesis under the concepts of our understanding-- and these concepts constitute the a priori laws of nature, where "nature" can only mean "the totality of our experience." (Thus, the statement "every event has a sufficient cause" is an a priori law of nature because it is an aspect of the synthesis which creates the possibility of any experience at all.)
The binary active / passive is very important here. Sensibility is passive: it receives impressions from objects external to itself. Understanding is active: it organizes these impressions according to its own laws. Sensibility relates us in some way to the things-in-themselves, but always only passively and so only to a secondary effect, not to the thing in itself. The understanding bears no relation to the thing-in-itself; its structure is entirely produced by the human intellect. For this very reason, the understanding is the only possible locus of a priori truth about nature. Because the sensibility is passive its testimony is always uncertain: sensation could always be different tomorrow, it is subject to the arbitrary will of the world. Nothing it tells us can be necessarily and universally true. Only that which we produce ourselves and actively impose on the world via the understanding possesses this kind of validity.
What would it mean, according to Kant, to know the thing-in-itself, to directly understand the noumenon? This would be to have "intellectual intuition"-- to "perceive" the essence of things the way we now "perceive" their effects. For Kant, a being who had this faculty would be a god: someone whose thinking was directly creative, who produced the object he intuited. Only such a being could fully grasp an object, since no passive perception of an object could every understand it in itself. For Kant, to know something as it is in itself one must create it.
In his reading of Kant's "What is Enlightenment?", Foucault links the Kantian critical project to the project of autonomy in the following way: the critique marks the limits of both truth and freedom, since in transgressing the bounds of what we know we are bound to fall into heteronomy. If we want to seek metaphysical truths out beyond the boundaries of what reason can teach us we'll be forced to take as our guides the metaphysical dogmas of our society, since no autonomous guide can lead us beyond the bounds of critique. I want to suggest a somewhat mroe internal relationship between critique and freedom here: the first Critique marks the things-in-themselves as off-limits because the autonomy and spontaneity of reason (freedom) is the condition of necessary and universal truth. As long as we remain in the world that we create through the synthesis of reason, we remain in the truth; to the extent that we venture beyond the bounds of our creation we venture outside the possibility of truth.
Okay, sorry, I'll get to Nietzsche next post. Roughly: Nietzsche's philosopher has intellectual intuition.
How is that so? Well, of course we don't make the sense-impressions bouncing of our sense-intuition, nor the laws according to which they bounce around. But in order to be properly thought of as experience, these sense-impressions must be subjected to an active synthesis under the concepts of our understanding-- and these concepts constitute the a priori laws of nature, where "nature" can only mean "the totality of our experience." (Thus, the statement "every event has a sufficient cause" is an a priori law of nature because it is an aspect of the synthesis which creates the possibility of any experience at all.)
The binary active / passive is very important here. Sensibility is passive: it receives impressions from objects external to itself. Understanding is active: it organizes these impressions according to its own laws. Sensibility relates us in some way to the things-in-themselves, but always only passively and so only to a secondary effect, not to the thing in itself. The understanding bears no relation to the thing-in-itself; its structure is entirely produced by the human intellect. For this very reason, the understanding is the only possible locus of a priori truth about nature. Because the sensibility is passive its testimony is always uncertain: sensation could always be different tomorrow, it is subject to the arbitrary will of the world. Nothing it tells us can be necessarily and universally true. Only that which we produce ourselves and actively impose on the world via the understanding possesses this kind of validity.
What would it mean, according to Kant, to know the thing-in-itself, to directly understand the noumenon? This would be to have "intellectual intuition"-- to "perceive" the essence of things the way we now "perceive" their effects. For Kant, a being who had this faculty would be a god: someone whose thinking was directly creative, who produced the object he intuited. Only such a being could fully grasp an object, since no passive perception of an object could every understand it in itself. For Kant, to know something as it is in itself one must create it.
In his reading of Kant's "What is Enlightenment?", Foucault links the Kantian critical project to the project of autonomy in the following way: the critique marks the limits of both truth and freedom, since in transgressing the bounds of what we know we are bound to fall into heteronomy. If we want to seek metaphysical truths out beyond the boundaries of what reason can teach us we'll be forced to take as our guides the metaphysical dogmas of our society, since no autonomous guide can lead us beyond the bounds of critique. I want to suggest a somewhat mroe internal relationship between critique and freedom here: the first Critique marks the things-in-themselves as off-limits because the autonomy and spontaneity of reason (freedom) is the condition of necessary and universal truth. As long as we remain in the world that we create through the synthesis of reason, we remain in the truth; to the extent that we venture beyond the bounds of our creation we venture outside the possibility of truth.
Okay, sorry, I'll get to Nietzsche next post. Roughly: Nietzsche's philosopher has intellectual intuition.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Kant's Phenomena
At one point in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant observes that he is not the first philosopher to think the problem of knowledge in terms of a distinction between phenomena and noumena: "Since the oldest days of philosophy, inquirers into pure reason have thought that, besides the things of sense, or appearances (phenomena), which make up the sensible world, there were certain beings of the understanding (noumena), which should constitute the intelligible world" (Prolegomena Section 32). The difference, however, between Kant's use and what we might see as analogous in Plato, amounts to a neat reversal: if for Plato the realm of phenomena is that of illusion and change which escapes conceptual determination, in Kant the phenomena are the locus of all possible knowledge, and any attempt to know beyond them must end in delusion or skepticism.
This metaphor of "beyond" is not the right one, though. It suggests an outside which, although necessarily inaccessible, is qualitatively similar to the inside-- as though our faculty of sensible intuition goes out toward the thing-in-itself but doesn't quite reach it for one reason or another. It suggests that our understanding of the phenomena might somehow distort the truth of the noumena, that the phenomena may not "resemble" the noumena. But the whole question of resemblance, similarity, getting the noumenon right or wrong in the phenomenon is misplaced. The phenomena are not illusions, mere appearances blocking us from the object; rather, they are things insofar as things appear.
What would it mean to know things, not as they appear, but as they are? It would mean to know them through thought rather than sensibility-- to have concepts, Kant says, whose designation could not be shown in any possible experience. But this is impossible on Kant's understanding of thought and sensibility: these faculties are handcuffed together, and neither can transcend the other. Sensibility is receptive and passive, allowing it some form of access to the objective world, but needs thought to transfigure its subjective sensations into an experience which might be called objective. Thought is active, but possesses no capacity to grasp objects of its own accord-- there is no "intellectual intuition," where "intuition" is that which allows our mind to grasp objects-- and so needs objects and cannot transcend them. Sensibility cannot grasp the noumena because it cannot think; thought cannot grasp the noumena because it can grasp only what the sensibility offers.
Contrast this with Plato: for Plato, contemplation is possible. One can see Ideas with the eye of the mind. For Kant, the mind always only thinks about and around what the eyes see. So: I'm dissatisfied with what Kant says, to be sure, but he helps me articulate why I find what Plato says to be genuinely unthinkable.
This is background reading for my post of tomorrow which will be more interesting because it will relate to Nietzsche.
This metaphor of "beyond" is not the right one, though. It suggests an outside which, although necessarily inaccessible, is qualitatively similar to the inside-- as though our faculty of sensible intuition goes out toward the thing-in-itself but doesn't quite reach it for one reason or another. It suggests that our understanding of the phenomena might somehow distort the truth of the noumena, that the phenomena may not "resemble" the noumena. But the whole question of resemblance, similarity, getting the noumenon right or wrong in the phenomenon is misplaced. The phenomena are not illusions, mere appearances blocking us from the object; rather, they are things insofar as things appear.
What would it mean to know things, not as they appear, but as they are? It would mean to know them through thought rather than sensibility-- to have concepts, Kant says, whose designation could not be shown in any possible experience. But this is impossible on Kant's understanding of thought and sensibility: these faculties are handcuffed together, and neither can transcend the other. Sensibility is receptive and passive, allowing it some form of access to the objective world, but needs thought to transfigure its subjective sensations into an experience which might be called objective. Thought is active, but possesses no capacity to grasp objects of its own accord-- there is no "intellectual intuition," where "intuition" is that which allows our mind to grasp objects-- and so needs objects and cannot transcend them. Sensibility cannot grasp the noumena because it cannot think; thought cannot grasp the noumena because it can grasp only what the sensibility offers.
Contrast this with Plato: for Plato, contemplation is possible. One can see Ideas with the eye of the mind. For Kant, the mind always only thinks about and around what the eyes see. So: I'm dissatisfied with what Kant says, to be sure, but he helps me articulate why I find what Plato says to be genuinely unthinkable.
This is background reading for my post of tomorrow which will be more interesting because it will relate to Nietzsche.
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