The Writings of David Hume and Kant - Essay Example

1. Europe in the 17th-18th centuries was in the midst of the scientific revolution where methodology was paramount and the method of inquiry into Truth was changed from one based on pure reason, thinking, and the application of thought to problems, as represented by rationalism, to one based on quantifiable data, material results, and statistics as shown in empiricism. The writings of David Hume represent in many ways a radical diversion from rationalist thought in emphasizing the material phenomena and their measurement to a position of primacy vs. the thought processes and biases of mind. Hume is representative of skepticism in the search for Truth, skepticism of the mind itself in its ability to make valid judgments devoid of connection with material reality. Only when mental deductions were tied directly to “objective fact” through material measurements and statistical replicability would they be validated by the scientific method. Thus, the foundations of epistemology are revised with Hume in European thought, and Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” is an example of this in German philosophy of the same period. Kant’s polemics against metaphysics served to promote their devaluation in Western thought from the early 18th century, and metaphysics with its subjective methods that could not be proved or measured empirically were no longer considered objective knowledge. Hume’s writings on the biases, and the manner that logic reasons from the biases awoke Kant to writing his “Critique of Pure Reason” and other treatises. What Hume wrote of in the biases Kant would formulate more clearly in a conceptualization of a priori knowledge. In Kant’s philosophy, the logic of the biases was transformed into a type of integral essentialism, where the logic governing a process was held by the observer to be simultaneously its own nature, cause, and identity. This is based in an analysis of materialism that, like Hume, was based on substance and empiricism as indicative of the factuality of truth. In Kant, the application of moral awareness is limited to experience in the world as such, and therefore cannot be extended beyond being through speculation to places where the individual had no experience, thus limiting metaphysics to physics in the academic context of knowledge construction and validation. Kant’s model of consciousness was based on the preservation of the moral consciousness within logical thought or as its greater context of understanding. Thus, through this application, the biases in the sense of Hume with their own internal logic could be used as a pattern for individuality and diversity of views in the minds of men through being related tautologically to identity. For Kant, this eliminated the contradictions between modes of consciousness or thought in his framework of the mental processes through which truth was ascertained and validated. This is important as the biases dismissed by Hume are becoming the definition of subjectivity with Kant, contrasted vividly with the objective and “pure” world of numbers and mathematics. The developments which Hume represented as fundamental to scientific inquiry – materialism, empiricism, and skepticism – found their “pure” logic and expression in mathematics, a logic of existence that transcended the biases of the morals or subjectivity. Kant uses Copernicus and the “Second Copernican Revolution” to highlight the position of subjectivity in the scientific method, believing truth revolves not around the individual but that the individual revolves around truth, thus the method of science and philosophy shared the same goal in determining the nature of Truth. In basing apprehension of the Truth in its synthesis through moral understanding, Kant maintained the position of faith as constitutional in the foundation of subjectivity, and unlike Hume who rejected faith as superstition through biases, they become an integral identity for Kant and a means through which the ideas can still appear as transcendent for the individual in the manner of traditional metaphysics. In this we find the primacy of interpretation that is fundamental in post-modernism vs. the scientific method as a method of inquiry into Truth. In positing “noumena” as mental objects and “phenomena” as physical objects, the two dualities of subjectivity-objectivity and mental-physical are created and maintained. One possible problem of this is the extension of objectivity in the mental world as objective constituents, autonomous thought forms and ideas in the way posited by Popper. The objectivity of the mental world is the basic of metaphysics, archetypes, and traditional rationalism in the sense of “pure reason” critiqued by Kant. Skepticism, as expounded by Hume through science and its community of thought, would lead to a view of noumena as epiphenomena of material processes and lacking an objective base or even an existence as such (behaviorism). In Kant’s view of a genuine metaphysics, the noumena and phenomena are both apprehended by reason and synthesized by moral consciousness as they appear and are experienced, and the formation of identity based on the apprehension of valid knowledge is wisdom and understanding in the metaphysical sense. 2. The basic question of epistemology is the validation of knowledge and the processes through which Truth is constructed both subjectively, and in the societal or communal sense of understanding and definition. Thus, it can involve inquiry into a broad range of methodology such as material science, measurement, and calculation as well as reasoning, apprehension, grammar, semantics, and perception. In metaphysics, what is significant and meaningful in the cosmological sense of being universal and true, foundational for the existence and evolution of reality, man and nature, is sought to be articulated through the understanding of what is and what is known. Metaphysics is by nature a synthesis of knowledge and a search for first principles that govern creation. Metaphysics as it involves faith, or the bias in the philosophy of Hume, has its own logic, but as bias, it cannot be trusted vs. empirical methods, this is the foundation of the scientific method and the critique of traditional metaphysics articulated in Kant. Metaphysics relates to the moral synthesis of knowledge by the moral nature and thus becomes aligned with subjectivity fundamentally despite the fact that it must also, by definition, seek and express the objective. For moderns, this division rips traditional metaphysics apart as equally prejudice and bias, and lacking a foundation on which its conclusions can be critically judged. Thus, the application of epistemology or valid methods in the construction of knowledge leads to the critique of metaphysics and its fall from acceptability in the ideal of the objective, for there can be nothing beyond the physical from the point of view of extreme empiricism, or fantasy and imagination conjoined from the perspective of skepticism. As metaphysics lacks a logic that can transcend the subjective it is excluded epistemologically from the construction of objective knowledge in empiricism, even though empiricism requires its own faith and set of limitations that are rejected by metaphysics as exclusive. Following the revolutions in scientific thought as represented by Copernicus and Newton, the most radical changes in understanding in the 20th-21st centuries are the developments in quantum physics and Einstein-ian relativity as it manifest in altering our fundamental cosmological view. Furthermore, advances in medicine, neuro-chemistry, and psychology have challenged traditional views of consciousness and the body-mind duality in fundamental ways. Furthermore, greater knowledge of Eastern religions and indigenous traditions in the West through translations have led to philosophy in the West drawing upon ideas from Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, for example, in changing the way concepts of reality are represented and conceived. The representational model of knowledge was best critiqued through semantics and Korzybski’s classic statement “the map is not the territory”. For example, the traditional nuclear model of the atom when contrasted with the quantum reality is something the human mind cannot comprehend, as it is cannot perceive this reality directly without instrumentation. As Rorty’s writings suggest, modern knowledge attempts to be the complete mirror of reality containing everything that is in its expression, but by nature fails as such would require a universal omniscience that precludes all future discovery and development in knowledge. Therefore, as Baudrillard wrote, there is always a remainder. The problem with the correspondence view of truth is that it ignores the subjective bias inherent in filtering what is considered to be taken as fact, and refuses to discuss the critical and fundamental assumptions of empiricism to limiting discourse on facts to one faith in reality, namely the material. In mind/body dualism, approached through physiology and the brain, tracing lines of brain cells, neural nets, and bio-chemistry, the place where mind resides cannot be found, nor any duality between brain and body. Projection of “organs” from concepts of divisions belie the fundamental unity of the operating system as a whole, as in the human body, homeostasis, or new understandings that would shift paradigms and perception of the real collectively. For the post-modern, the correspondence view of truth is authoritarian. Absolutism fails in understanding the subjectivity inherent in vision, voice, perception, and language when articulating the view of what is, and fails in neglecting to include the remainder. Thus, absolutism is also authoritarian from the perspective of the post-modern. Relativism is more reflective of post-Einstein views of reality and the paradigm of quantum physics. However, if relativism is taken as an absolute, then it can no longer be relativism, it is just another form of absolutism. Thus, the remainder of relativism is that an absolute may exist, either as expression or as the sum of reality taken as is, but it can never be definitively known. Thus, objectivity, truth, and understanding are now taken to be constructed objects of knowledge. Human finitude must be rejected fundamentally by the nature of consciousness, but cannot be, unless we allow the concept of Enlightenment. Our human vulnerability is in relating consciousness solely to ego and ignoring its deeper dimensions, through a discriminative and limiting application of empiricism. We must embrace our subjectivity and the communal nature through which knowledge is constructed as a fundamental of interpretation, both for the self, for the text, for the idea, milieu, and paradigm. Understanding as synthesis of knowledge, and its synergy into wisdom, can be viewed as thermodynamic, wave based, chemically derived, and autonomously existent simultaneously as identity, and relation can determine the growth of moral consciousness integrally with this overall synthesis and synergy. 3. Religion and philosophy share a belief in fundamentals and first principles, yet not all philosophy is seen as applied or as a way of life as Heidegger taught. Religion in a way denies human creation the power to destroy first principles and create them anew as science has done, “what is” has already been taught. Where the romantic engages in the search for self-discovery and identity through adventure, the way romantics seek to create new forms and structures of expression mirrors science – innovation, creativity, the search for the unknown all form a shared identity. If romanticism critiqued reason from a different fundamental than Kant and embraced irrationality through love and the passions, Kant directed this force into the development of morality. Nietzsche rejects most traditional morality as represented by Kant, representing a prescience of synthesis in knowledge through his philosophy that establishes him as a prophet for the modern age. He teaches as a prophet of modernity with the authoritarian hold on truth that fascism would later claim, but that is also inherent in the empiricism of science. Foucault would draw upon Nietzsche in his deconstruction of the totalitarian aspects inherent in the construction of knowledge politically. Yet, where Nietzsche rejected the fascism with which he is later aligned through the practice of being a hermit, he also rejects empiricism completely and can be seen as the apotheosis of both the rationalist and romantic movements in art. Indeed, Nietzsche rethought first principles directly from Greek and Roman philosophy, loathing the Christianity of his day. In this, his insanity, as well as the primacy to ego given in his philosophy, all combine to keep him misinterpreted and controversial in modernity. Where Nietzsche is most understood is in his concept of Übermensch or “superman” who would represent the coming next generation of giants inspired by his philosophy. In many ways this is the very essence of modernism as expressed in the 20th century through the logic of superpowers and MAD science. Yet this aspect of the geopolitical is just one aspect of what he is describing. What Nietzsche described as the “overview” was the key to the perhaps mistranslated “superman” because the overview of knowledge as represented by first principles in Einstein or in Nietzsche’s own philosophy of liberation of the individual depended on the overview. However, this overview was projected as a map onto the territory by ego, as represented by the center-periphery model of imperialism, and deconstructed in the foundations of law, politics, academics, and so on in the work of Foucault. The modern is centralizing and authoritarian politically as the ego is personally in the political construction of knowledge, which is the very definition of the overview as wielded as a weapon by the superman of Nietzsche. Source: Melchert, Norman (2010). The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA; 6th edition. Read More