Kant makes me sick: Russell, Moore and Carnap and the liberation from Kant

In a number of philosophical memoirs Bertrand Russell describes his break from the Kantian (and Hegelian) tradition in which he trained.  Russell’s first book, an extension of a fellowship dissertation, took up the Kantian question, “how is geometry possible?” An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry elaborated a “mainly Kantian” theory of geometry in which he claimed that geometry is possible “only if space is one of three varieties, one of them Euclidean, the other two non-Euclidean but have the property of preserving a ‘constant measure of curvature’.”  As Russell noted, this was a claim subsequently undermined by Einsteinian General Relativity.  On later reflection, he claims that his book does not contain “anything valid”.  A heavy price to pay, perhaps, for its Kantian commitments.

 

The retreat from Kant was not merely a matter of scholarly progression.  For Russell, there was an emotional appeal to setting Kant aside.  He records it as “a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot-house on a wind-swept headland”.  Furthermore, he claimed that he “hated the stuffiness involved in supposing that space and time were only in my mind”.  Elsewhere, he further underscores the emotional flavor accompanying his disagreements with Kant, regardless of any claims about their veracity, indicating that he finds “displeasing” any attempts to “humanize the cosmos”. “Kant made me sick”, Russell reported to Alan Wood.

In Luster Diminished: Writing Kant out of the Philosophy of Science

In the introductory chapter of his helpful Introduction to Phenomenology Robert Sokolowski reports on the genesis of his book project in a lunchtime conversation with a professor of mathematics and philosophy who reported on the following significant difference between mathematicians and philosophers: the former absorb the findings of their predecessors into their own work with little comment on or explicit acknowledgement of this foundational labor, compared with the manner in which “classical works often become enshrined as objects of exegesis rather than as resources to be exploited” in philosophy[1].

The observation regarding the absorption of earlier work is true of many natural science disciplines: for instance, rarely does one find explicit references to Darwin in the primary literature in ecology, even though Darwin provided the intellectual substrate upon which modern ecology is based[2].  Though one might be cautioned against overrelying on a taxonomic tool such as this one for distinguishing philosophical works from those in the natural sciences and mathematics, nevertheless the philosophy of science behaves quite philosophically when the tool is applied.   To illustrate, Rom Harré’s The Philosophies of Science: An Introductory Survey (1985) indexes Aristotle and Aristotelian (27 times), Hereclitus (and “Hereclitean individuals”) (5 times), Hume (3 times), Locke (5 times), J S Mill and his canons (22 times), and so forth.  Even Darwin gets mentioned (1 time).  Kant it seems gets two mentions in the book, although the second indexed reference cannot be found on the page referred to, and the first reference discusses Kant in relation to accusations regarding fundamental inconsistencies levied against Corpuscularian philosophy (something that Kant apparently levied validly, but “in a less clear form” than Boscovich, according to Harré[3]).  There are no references to any of the key terms of the Kantian lexicon, none that relate to the theory or practice of science (that is, no entry on a priori, transcendental idealism, analysis in the Kantian sense and so on.).

Kant’s body and other natural disasters

This post is part of a series of occasional posts I am working on concerning the body and ecology.  I start somewhat circuitously by examining the re-introduction of the body into philosophy in the work of Kant.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in tones braggadocio, prefaced his intellectual autobiography, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, with the following sentence (suggestion: read it slowly and dramatically), “Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am.”

Nietzsche proceeded to review the challenges he confronted us with in several chapters with titles progressively more grandiose (or jocular, depending upon your sensibility): "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", "Why I Write Such Good Books" and "Why I Am a Destiny".  My objectives are more humble than Nietzsche’s.  I am interested in re-examining the relationship between the comportment of our bodies and the founding of knowledge about the natural world.  Does having a body matter at all for deepening our relationship with the rest of nature? Though my objectives are modest, nevertheless it may be mannerly to take Nietzsche’s lead and say a little more about who I am.

Once a week or so for the last three years I metamorphose into a graduate student of philosophy at the same school where I am a professor of environmental science.  Though I am a clamoring scientific cuckoo dumped into the philosophical nest, my professors have been affable, hospitably taking my fledgling efforts seriously.  They have taken me under their capacious wings, (to keep the metaphor straight I can say they have placed this outlandish egg alongside the rest of their brood beneath their downy underbellies) and they treat me as one of the clutch.  And though I have perhaps been a little more impatient than my fellow students to sweep philosophy up into rapid use, I have nonetheless taken to heart their teacherly advice to be a slower and more attentive reader.  (Could it be that scientists, in general, are less patient readers of their foundational texts than are philosophers? Surely not all biologists have read their Origin of Species line by line, though it might be harder to imagine a philosopher that has left unread The Critique of Pure Reason).  These days I am as entertained as the next man by, let us say, lengthy disquisitions on the use by Kant of the two German words translated as “object” in the English rendering (Objekt and Gegenstand).  Despite my newfound persnicketiness when it comes to texts, I remain relatively impatient to launch myself from the nest’s edge and try out my new feathers.

On the employment of “§76 Remark” from the Critique of Judgment in Heidegger’s “Kant’s Thesis about Being (1961)

On one occasion when Robert Schumann was asked the meaning in a composition, he played it again. An exegetical exercise that commented on the meaning of a philosophical text by merely repeating it in an analogous fashion might be regarded as unhelpful . Yet commentary relies, somewhat at least, on the repetition of parts of the original texts. Through the bricolage of aptly chosen quotes, an essay can amplify a theme, drawing out elements of an argument that might have posed difficulty or been hard to discern in the original, and moreover such essays can make the philosophical texts of an earlier age present testimony to a later time, or finally they can set the original work a new task by setting the historical text side-by-side with the work of the commentator. Heidegger’s late essay Kant’s Thesis on Being (KTB) is by no means merely exegetical; nonetheless, it attempts to clarify Kant’s scattered comments on Being across several texts. To do this, of course, necessitates the repetition of Kant’s statements concerning Being. Of particular significance is the following statement from the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR):

'Being' is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations in and of themselves.” (A 598,B 626)

Heidegger both amplifies upon and discerns the difficulties posed by this compressed statement; he presents testimony regarding its relevance both within Kant’s critical project, and for the larger discussion about Being through which “the tradition speaks”, and finally he sets Kant’s thesis on Being to work alongside his own perennial question concerning Being, this question that, he had claimed as early as 1927, “has today been forgotten”.

In Kant’s Thesis about Being, Heidegger marshals Kant’s episodic statements about Being in a manner that demonstrates both their consistent elements and their progression. Finally, he says “we can make clear to ourselves what is unavoidable in Kant’s ultimate step” and do so by means of certain reflections. What Heidegger hopes to achieve, it seems to me, is not simply a presentation of Kant’s results; rather, he suggests, our approach should be that of “following Kant’s path”. Since “episodic statements about being as positing, belong to the style of his [Kant’s] work” and since these statements are pressed by Heidegger beyond the limits “[i.e., the most] Kant can say about being,” it therefore is valuable to remind ourselves of the context in which any given episodic statement was made. That is, one goal of a meta-commentary such as mine can be to provide a sort of philosophical “hyperlink” back to the textual context in which any one of the episodic statement was made.

So here I attempt a disarticulation of one small piece of the brickwork of Heidegger’s commentary on Being in Kant’s work – that is, his use of §76 of the Critique of Judgement. §76 is an important section and has attracted considerable critical attention – from Schelling as Heidegger reminds us, but also from Hegel and from contemporary writers like Derrida. I say little more about the use to which these writers put the section – but it serves to remind us that there is some pedigree to resorting to this short and at first glance only barely remarkable section. The way I proceed here is to remind us first of how, in the most proximate way, the section is put to use in Heidegger’s essay – what parts does he quote and what themes does he take up from that section?; that is, to what purpose is it put in commenting on Kant’s thesis? After these initial comments, I will unmoor §76 from Heidegger’s immediate use of it, and place the section back into the play of the Third Critique. When replaced into its original dock in the Critique of Judgement, the work of the section can only be adequately assessed by reference to its preceding section upon which §76 follows as a “remark”. The substance of the “remark” brings forward some commentary on the peculiarities of the human cognitive faculties which Kant comments on in §77. Minimally, therefore, even an economical comment on §76, requires a nod towards the proceeding section and the one that follows on from it. Taken together the three sections can be seen as important cogs in the machinery of the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment though more perplexingly still, they serve an important functional role in a reflection of the entire critical project. Clearly, the task of commentary on the role of §76 in Heidegger’s essay could quickly ripple beyond the useful limits of the present task. Therefore, I more simply reinsert §76 into the Third Critique and comment on the local significance of the passage for the work of the Dialectic. After this, I provide commentary on the details of the remark before returning finally to Heidegger’s use of this section, but this time freighted with a secure grasp on the textual environment in which our section originally did its work.