Concluding critique of a postmodern trope….

“Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind.”— Kant, Critique, trans. Meiklejohn, p.64 (pdf.).

“But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.”— Ibid., p. 27.

Appearance and Reality in the Copernican Revolution

Kant’s Copernican Revolution is his version of Plato’s cave allegory. Remember that the prisoners with “…the most sunlike of all the instruments of sense”(508b) named the shadows created by a maintained firelight behind a wall. We discussed the two senses of real and reality that Hicks overlooks which the following two quotations reflect:

“Thus Kant, that great champion of reason, asserted that the most important fact about reason is that it is clueless about reality”-(Hicks, Loc: 917).

“In the arguments based on the relativity and causality of perception, the identity of our sense organs is taken to be the enemy of awareness of reality”-(Hicks, Loc: 1088).

Hicks referenced Galileo (1564-1642) five times in his writing as a free speech hero, but never discussed the reason why the state church censored Galileo. Galileo asserted against the accepted interpretation of the appearances that the sun is the center of the known universe (Heliocentric model) and not the earth (Ptolemy’s Geocentric model). From an ordinary observer’s point of view the sun’s movement appeared the same in both models of the universe. Kant wrote, 

“We here propose to do just what Copernicus did in attempting to explain the celestial movements. When he found that he could make no progress by assuming that all the heavenly bodies revolved round the spectator, he reversed the process, and tried the experiment of assuming that the spectator revolved, while the stars remained at rest. We may make the same experiment with regard to the intuition of objects. If the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects, I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori. If, on the other hand, the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition, I can then easily conceive the possibility of such an a priori knowledge. [B:xiii-xvii]”(Critique, trans. Meiklejohn, p.13).

The categories a priori are necessary for experience, and are the standard of objectivity. “And he [Kant] held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa”(Loc: 1130). Hicks’ grammar is misleading of Kant’s meaning of conform. Notice the ambiguity (The Fallacy of Amphiboly) of “conform” when he writes of Kant “the object must conform to the subject”(Loc: 1047), which suggests Berkeleian Idealism: “To be (exist) is to be perceived.” Kant’s meaning is that “the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition,” so that when Galileo imagined, and later concluded, that the earth obits the sun, Galileo didn’t change the earth’s movements one iota, but scientific understanding advanced.

When I perceive the color blue (sense perception, or sense impression is the empiricist relation to the object, or thing--John Locke, David Hume) that state of consciousness (seeing blue) is subjective. Even empiricism cannot be entirely objective. Locke used the term “ideas” with three meanings: sensible qualities, sense-data, and concepts/universal ideas. In this epistemological model empiricism is idealism. And when scientific empiricism demands the universal categorical imperative that all judgments be founded on verified sense experience to be considered objective, then empiricism has become pure speculative idealism. Positivism is really a disguised metaphysical doctrine of language, and not about the world. Worse, it presupposes the very world and language that it is supposed to explain. The world is constructed sense datum, and makes assumptions about its construction.

The Copernican Revolution is another example of how objects conform to consciousness in knowledge. Copleston explained Kant’s reasoning as “If objects, to be known, must conform to the mind, and if this means that they must be subjected to the categories of the understanding in order to be objects in the full sense, no further justification of the use of the categories is required”(Copleston S.J., The History of Philosophy, Vol. 6, Part II, Kant, Doubleday/Image, p. 47). The categories have objective validity.

Hicks is not defending the values of Western Civilization with an incoherent attack on Kant that is simultaneously an assault on the foundational principles of Western Christian theology and ethics. He fails to mention that Kant was critical of metaphysical speculative free-thinking. Kant wrote, “Criticism alone can strike a blow at the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which are universally injurious— as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous to the schools, but can scarcely pass over to the public”(Critique, p. 21). Kant was concerned about the very epistemological, religious, and moral “isms” that Hicks claimed Kant is responsible for bringing about in postmodernism. Kant wrote,

“…all the objections urged against them [speculative dogmatists] may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector. For, as the world has never been, and, no doubt, never will be without a system of metaphysics of one kind or another, it is the highest and weightiest concern of philosophy to render it powerless for harm, by closing up the sources of error”(Critique, p. 20).

The Limitation of Knowledge is not a Denial of Knowledge

“Epistemologically, having rejected the notion of an independently existing reality, postmodernism denies that reason or any other method is a means of acquiring objective knowledge of that reality”-(Hicks, Loc: 529).

“One purpose of the Critique accordingly, was to limit severely the scope of reason”-(Hicks, Loc: 949).

These quotes represent another equivocation by the author between the distinction of the limits of knowledge and absolute skepticism. Recognizing the limits of reason is not necessarily a rejection of the possibility of knowledge. An epistemology of limitation is possible. For Kant such an epistemology avoids the airless space of pure ideas that metaphysics seek such as for example, the Platonic Forms, and speculative dogmatic theology. Plato abandoned the world of sense perception; however, Kant wanted to turn back to the appearances, but newly understood as sense experience necessarily organized by the a priori categories of knowledge.

“It is true that the mathematician occupies himself with objects and cognitions only in so far as they can be represented by means of intuition…Deceived by such a proof of the power of reason, we can perceive no limits to the extension of our knowledge. The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space. Just in the same way did Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding, venture upon the wings of ideas beyond it, into the void space of pure intellect….”(Critique, p.27).

The Scandal of Philosophy

“For all of their differences, the empiricists and rationalist had agree with the broadly Enlightenment conception of reason-that human reason is a faculty of the individual, that it is competent to know reality objectively, that it is capable of functioning autonomously and in accordance to universal principles”-(Hicks, Loc: 951).

Kant recovered rationalism and empiricism by making a synthesis of the two opposing epistemologies. The Empiricists were having difficulty with the problem of induction and causation such as the ancient skeptic Prryho. The Rationalist Cartesians were unable to prove the mere existence of anything except their own selves with any certainty. The situation was a philosophical scandal. Kant most likely had Berkeley (1685-1753) in mind when he wrote:

“However harmless idealism may be considered—although in reality it is not so—in regard to the essential ends of metaphysics, it must still remain a scandal to philosophy and to the general human reason to be obliged to assume, as an article of mere belief, the existence of things external to ourselves (from which, yet, we derive the whole material of cognition for the internal sense), and not to be able to oppose a satisfactory proof to any one who may call it in question”(Critique, p. 23).

Science in Disrepute

 “…philosophers, ignorant of the path they ought to pursue and always disputing with each other regarding the discoveries which each asserted he had made, brought their science into disrepute with the rest of the world, and finally, even among themselves” (Critique, p. 470).

Hicks falsely believes that modern science was some kind of pre-lapsarian epistemological utopia. Cartesian and Humean realism turn out to be completely solipsistic. This problem was an epistemological trap that Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism could not escape, and not a matter of negotiating “pay offs and trade-offs”(Loc: 1066) with science losing and religion winning credibility: the business metaphor is greatly misleading. Transcendental logic in not psychology as with empiricist psychological oriented epistemologies, but rather concerns the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience—not what is accidental to experience. One cannot negotiate that the categories and forms of intuition are optional for experience anymore than one can negotiate that a triangle should have two sides instead of three. Kant wrote, “It is therefore not merely possible or probable, but indubitably certain, that space and time, as the necessary conditions of all our external and internal experience….”(Critique, p.59). This is why the Critique is organized by transcendental deductions. Hicks completely misunderstands the meaning of transcendental logic as a critical science of a priori logical necessity and not of the accidental attributes of psychology. For Kant, the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience universally apply to all sentient self-conscious beings—even to the angels. 

“It is, in fact, a call to reason, again to undertake the most laborious of all tasks—that of self-examination, and to establish a tribunal, which may secure it in its well-grounded claims, while it pronounces against all baseless assumptions and pretensions, not in an arbitrary manner, but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws. This tribunal is nothing less than the critical investigation of pure reason”(Critique, p. 5).

Hicks does not understand the Critique of Pure Reason as a solution to anything because he is unaware of exactly what were the epistemological problems. He provides no architectonic non-Kantian epistemological answers to the problem of solipsism in rationalism or empiricism. He laments, “Reason is clueless about reality,” but is seeking edification instead of seeking truth as Hegel warned.

Kant Recovered Rationalism, Empiricism, and Spiritual Faith

“I have not returned an evasive answer to the questions of reason, by alleging the inability and limitation of the faculties of the mind; I have, on the contrary, examined them completely in the light of principles, and, after having discovered the cause of the doubts and contradictions into which reason fell, have solved them to its perfect satisfaction”(Critique, p.6).

The Kantian concept of the thing-in-itself recovers both rationalism and empiricism from solipsism. This is contrary to Hicks’ interpretation of Kant. The synthesis with transcendental idealism not only rescued rationalism and empiricism together as coherent epistemologies for science, but also expunged the solipsistic character of both with the noumenon doctrine of which nothing determinate can be said of the thing-in-itself.* Kantian transcendental idealism is not solipsistic which means for Hicks it is not real_undefined or objective.

*I must add this note: Kant’s argument that the noumenon is indeterminate and nothing can be said determinate about the noumenal without contradiction is a rejection of solipsism. Tillich duplicates this same Kantian logical move in defining God as “being-itself” which has “no qualities, beyond everything, above and beyond all determination, above essences”(see, ”Tillich and the Postmodern,” by John Thatamanil in “Paul Tillich Cambridge Companion,” p. 288)(pdf). This is why Tillich cannot be called onto-theological, and Kant cannot be understood as a solipsist.

Conclusion

"So the reviewer understood nothing of what I wrote...."-Kant, Prolegomena, p. 81.

The term postmodernism as used by Hicks is a trope, and a style of rhetoric. “Trope” from Greek “tropos” means “style, a turn, or related to turning.” He consciously constructs a Kantian straw man to create a false stereotype, which is then used to smear all the other philosophers he identifies as postmodern, and later as the forefathers of terrorism (Loc: 3725) and cultural Marxism which is yet another trope. The same poor reasoning is duplicated with each philosopher he describes as postmodern so that there are endless errors based on his initial Kantian straw man constructed from circular argument and informal fallacies of content. Unfortunately, Hicks’ book will turn some readers away from the philosophers he smeared while those that are still interested will have special difficulty understanding Kantian epistemology having unknowingly embraced distorted and distorting assumptions.

"The Future"

by Leonard Cohen

(1992)

  

Give me back my broken night

my mirrored room, my secret life

it's lonely here,

there's no one left to torture

Give me absolute control

over every living soul

And lie beside me, baby,

that's an order!

Give me crack and careless sex

Take the only tree that's left

and stuff it up the hole

in your culture

Give me back the Berlin wall

give me Stalin and St Paul

I've seen the future, brother:

it is murder.

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions

Won't be nothing you can measure anymore....

You don't know me from the wind

you never will, you never did

I'm the little jew

who wrote the Bible

I've seen the nations rise and fall

I've heard their stories, heard them all

but love's the only engine of survival

Your servant here, he has been told

to say it clear, to say it cold:

It's over, it ain't going

any further

And now the wheels of heaven stop

you feel the devil's riding crop

Get ready for the future:

it is murder

There'll be the breaking of the ancient

western code

Your private life will suddenly explode

There'll be phantoms

There'll be fires on the road

and the white man dancing

You'll see a woman

hanging upside down

her features covered by her fallen gown

and all the lousy little poets

coming round

tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson

and the white man dancin'

Give me back the Berlin wall

Give me Stalin and St Paul

Give me Christ

or give me Hiroshima

Destroy another fetus now

We don't like children anyhow

I've seen the future, baby:it is murder...

…Continuing the critique of a Postmodernism Trope.

“… they may try to disguise themselves by the assumption of a popular style and by changes on the language of the schools, unavoidably fall into metaphysical declarations and propositions, which they profess to regard with so much contempt”—Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Meiklejohn, p.5.

The Fallacy of Tunnel History

Hicks’ historical narrative presents a too narrow view by selecting Kantian epistemology as the landmark philosopher who destroyed realist epistemology. Over emphasis of a few historical events, or persons can lead to distortion and misinterpretation. There were other forces that brought about the decline of an intelligible religious world-order having a clear hierarchy of authority inherited from the Middle Ages. Kant, Descartes, and Leibnitz were part of the rationalistic current that was sweeping the world. Hobbes (1588-1679) Locke, Berkeley (1685-1753), and Hume all constructed psychological oriented epistemologies and were forces in themselves bring about the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Others interpret Kant as contributing to the empiricist-mechanistic-scientific realist epistemology that reduced modern science to the technology of subject-object manipulation. Of course those who blame Kant as responsible for this trend of Enlightenment science should also consider the explosion of new technology resulting from the destabilizing effects of capitalist factory production that encouraged scientific empiricist instrumental rationality. Marx was one of the first to note hyper-technical innovation in Capitalist production, “The inanimate machinery not only wears out and depreciates from day to day, but a great part of it becomes so quickly superannuated, by constant technical progress, that it can be replaced with advantage by new machinery after a few months” (Capital Vol. I, p. 400). Historical events and persons may act as both cause and effect in the movement of history.

Hicks commits the Fallacy of Tunnel History as formulated by historian J. H. Hexter in “Reappraisals of History,” (Evanston, Ill., 1961, p. 194-95).

Let us construct a hypothetical historical matrix with twenty historical events. *

Time________Past events

(Past)

1____ A B C D E

2 ____B C D A B

3 ____C D A B C

4 ____D A B C D

5 ____A B C D E

(Present)

There are other economic, political, culture, religious, and philosophical forces that Hicks overlooked by misinterpretation and over emphasis. If we place Kant as the central figure in the historical event matrix, it would have the following pattern:

Time________Past events

(Past)

1__________ B

2 ________B

3 ______B

4 ____B

5 __B

(Present)

A more likely historical narrative would look at the larger historical picture and not just reduce history to one person, issue, or event. A more inclusive historical event matrix would have a somewhat different pattern:

Time________Past events

(Past)

1_A_C_D_ B_E

2 ___________

3 _B_ D_A_C_

4 __________

5 _B_C_A__E_

(Present)

* Historian David H. Fischer created this clever historical matrix diagram in “Historians’ Fallacies” (1970), Harper Perennial, p.142.

The Fallacy of Difference

The fallacy of difference is an attempt at a special definition of a group by genus (common traits), and differences in which the genus is omitted or forgotten.

Hicks claimed skepticism is a unique trait of postmodernism, making it different from modern realism.

Pyrrho, Plato, Kant, Hume, Descartes, and Locke were all skeptics in some since, not just Kant. The single word “skepticism” has many meanings such as Humean scientific empirical skepticism, Descartes’ rationalist methodological doubt, attitudinal skepticism, atheistic doubt of any type, or simply mean non-dogmatic. All of these philosophers applied methodological doubt—even Pyrrho (360 B.C.)—in their respective fields of study so Kant is not unique as a skeptic in this sense.

To help clarify this fallacy American Puritanism is again a good example. Puritanism is often identified with witch burning as its special characteristic from other religious sects of its time and region. However, historian Dr. Fischer noted that much of Puritan theology was Anglican, a greater amount was Protestant, and the majority was Christian (source: David Hackett Fischer, The Historians’ Fallacies, 1970, Harper/Perennial, p. 222).

The attempt to define postmodernism by the special characteristic of skepticism does not make postmodernism distinct from modernism for want of an insight into a criteria of difference.

The Converse Fallacy of Difference:

This fallacy attempts to render a definition of a group by a quality, which is not special to it. Fischer’s Puritan historical example is helpful for understanding this fallacy also. Historical records show that the Puritans engaged in the fewest witch killing, and burned none. However, this difference among the other sects is ignored and the Puritans are especially distinguished as witch burning fanatics instead.

Hicks tries to group together epistemological skepticism which “cannot put us in contact with reality,” and postmodernism (the shadow of circularity still hangs over this term) with philosophers Kant and Hegel. However, Kant and Hegel had opposite views about this very question of the possibility knowledge. Again skepticism is being used as a special characteristic of postmodernism. Kant argued the thing-in-itself (noumenon) could not be known determinately. Hegel argued that absolute knowledge (as opposed to knowledge of appearances) is possible; therefore, Hicks should not point to Hegel as an example of a postmodern skeptic, yet he does by ignoring this and other differences. Hicks also links David Hume with postmodernism (Loc: 786). Kantian faithful non-theism is much different than Humean atheistic empiricist skepticism. Kantian skepticism is not cynical attitudinal skepticism. Kantian Transcendental Idealism is wholly different than Berkeleian Psychological Idealism.

Since the terms skepticism, idealism, and relativism have multiple meanings, the attempt to define postmodernism by these special characteristics does not make postmodernists distinct even from themselves for want of an insight into a criteria of sameness.

Consequently, Hicks committed both the Fallacy of Difference and the Fallacy of Converse of Difference as a result of committing the Fallacy of Equivocation at the very beginning. We can think of these fallacies as multiple compounding felonies.

The Static Fallacy Relating to Process, Truth, and Falsity.

The Static Fallacy is another formulation of the False Dilemma Fallacy.

This fallacy attempts to conceptualize a dynamic process in static terms. Hicks views various schools of philosophy as isolated ahistorical monads by treating them as inert elements having only the two possible values of true and false (bivalence). Historical process is absent in this tunnel vision narrative of postmodernism except for the continuous thread of ill-defined Kantian skepticism. Instead of thinking in terms of true and false, Hegel understood the history of philosophy in terms of parts and whole in which historical process is included so that a school of philosophy (bud) will past away to only reappear as a new fuller form (blossom), and then as truth:

“The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit emerges as the truth of it instead” (Preface; Section: 2. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807, trans. by A. V. Miller, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977. Preface, Paragraph: 2.). See lecture: The Complete Phenomenology of Spirit (Preface, section 2) by Professor Gregory B Sadler.

Hicks’ understandable longing for a lost world-order of essential meaning, identity, hierarchy, and faith—a lost substantial world of meaning (Lifeworld)-- is what Hegel spoke of in tracing the history of philosophical movements. The pre-scientific worldviews and past religious orthodoxy are now just dead empty husks. A distressed humanity is now demanding from philosophy the recovery of this lost world of certainty. Hegel wrote that Geist (Mind, or Spirit),

“…has not only gone beyond all this into the other extreme of an insubstantial reflection of itself, but beyond too. Spirit has not only lost its essential life; it is also conscious of this loss, and of the finitude that is its own content. Turning away from the empty husks, and confessing that it lies in wickedness, it reviles itself for so doing, and now demands from philosophy, not so much knowledge of what it is, as the recovery through its agency of that lost sense of solid and substantial being.” (Original italics) Hegel’s Spirit, Paragraph 7. 

Hegel warned that in desperation for meaning dogmatists would seek to restore that lost sense of substantial being by engaging in metaphysics, “He will find ample opportunity to dream up something for himself. But philosophy must beware of the wish to be edifying“(Hegel, para. 9). Kant uses the terms metaphysics in a variety of ways that are both negative and positive (Critique, p.471). Metaphysics in its negative sense means the attempt to apply the cognitive categories of a priori reason to the non-empirical--not within the sphere of possible experience. Kant wrote this kind of metaphysics, “…deals with mere conceptions—not, like mathematics, with conceptions applied to intuition—and in it, reason is the pupil of itself alone”(Critique, p.12). 

The real issue for scientific philosophy is knowledge and truth, but instead dogmatic philosophy has become (my italics)...”no more than a device for evading the real issue, a way of creating an impression of hard work and serious commitment to the problem, while actually sparing oneself both. For the real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out, nor is the whole, but rather the result together with the process through which it came about” (Hegel, para. 3). The static view of history fails to perceive the process of Mind (Spirit). Tillich tells us that at these historical moments of paradigm shifting reason must not deny itself, does not abdicate, but turns into itself to transcend itself, within itself.

…Next are collected quotations by Kant contradicting Hicks’ straw man interpretation of The Critique of Pure Reason.