Great Professors on the Internet

Appendix B 

B1

Husserlian Phenomenology: The Possibility of the Science of Essences

For an in-depth and technical explanation of Edumond’s Husserl’s phenomenological methodology, see Dr. Mark Thorsby’s lectures. Thorsby goes through Husserl's introduction to phenomenology in "Ideas" (pdf) section by section. In "Ideas " (section, 19, or pdf., p. 29) Husserl gives a powerful critique of naturalistic empirical positivistic methodology and its assumptions (Naturalistic Misinterpretations video @ 11 min. 43). He presents a good summary to the different types of phenomenologies. 

I have attended course lectures by Phenomenologist, Dr. Jitendra Mohanty, on Husserl’s critique of psychologism and the epistemological problems of naturalistic scientific empiricism. Dr. Thorsby gives an excellent lecture on this fundamental issue underlying all cognitive science, logic, and mathematics (Part II). Also, he teaches a complete symbolic logic course in another series of free videos on his channel. 

Phenomenology is the most radical form of empiricism for it describes the living stream of experience in meaning-reality; however, no pure phenomenological description is possible.

Mark Thorsby: Part I on Phenomenology: Types of phenomenology.
The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) features separate articles on the following seven types of phenomenology.

1. Transcendental Constitutive Phenomenology: studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness.

2. Naturalistic Constitutive Phenomenology: how consciousness takes in the world of nature.

3. Existential Phenomenology: studies concrete human existence.

4. Generative Historicist Phenomenology: studies how meaning is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time.

5. Genetic Phenomenology: studies the genesis of meanings of things.

6. Hermeneutic Phenomenology: studies interpretive structures of experience.

7. Realistic Phenomenology: studies the structure of consciousness, assuming a real world.

Appendix B2

Don’t forget about the Good Professor, Dr. John Vervaeke! I watch all of his videos. His monthly Question and Answer session for April, 17, 2020 is particularly good because it succinctly contains much of the content of his lectures and discussions during the last few months.

Each video lecture gets clearer and more concise on the themes of idolatrous objectification, self -deception, consciousness, paradigm entropy, the Logos, phenomenological existentialism, Kairos, Wisdom, dialectical meaning epistemology, Being Modes, and Mythic-Poetic thinking. 

I go crazy with excitement whenever he mentions Paul Tillich because his systematic theology unifies all those philosophical methodologies that we have been studying. Dr. Vervaeke incorporates the methodologies of Dialectics (Heteronomy vs. Autonomy), Critical Science (Kantian Criticism), and phenomenology (Heidegger, Tillich) in his scientific studies that require clear expression and terms. The professor's working vocabulary reminds me of the careful use of language by Husserl in his 1913 book introducing phenomenology, Ideas (pdf).

Appendix B3

Dr. Cornel West On Being A Revolutionary Christian 
April 23, 2020

Appendix B4

The Philosopher’s Stone

Dr. John Vervaeke discusses Carl Jung with cognitive scientists and practicing psychotherapist Anderson Todd who also teaches courses at the University of Toronto.

Speaking of synchronicity….

Todd demonstrates the use of all three methodologies of dialectical reasoning, critical philosophy, and phenomenology while discussing Jung and other philosophers. In addition, he integrates historical empirical research of past proto-cognitive science and classic philosophy. In other words, Anderson Todd is way ahead working on rich philosophical grounds.

I first encountered this concept of synchronicity in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment as ‘coincidence,’ and never seriously researched the concept further. Todd has an insightful and plausible interpretation of synchronicity. Synchronicity could also be understood as an experience of paradigmatic induction: the formation, or re-enforcing, or a weakening re-interpretation (thus inducted) of an ontological paradigm. Reason always demands coherence and completeness. A ‘coincidence’ is remembered and highly selective, but not meaningless. Coincidence can be a metaphor for transcendence. Is this a paradigmatic circularity any rational person can escape?

Also, I wondered why Isaac Newton spent many years experimenting with alchemy: he was not a gold speculator, but searching for something more valuable—the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. Rarely, is this side of Newton discussed. The alchemist is experimentally applying the categories of reason (Spirit) to matter, and attempting the reverse.

I am still holding on to the concept of telos, as “ethical telos,” or the “telos for the divine double,” seeking relevance realization, and transformative experience, which is compatible with historical telos, but not the Cold War trope of deterministic historical teleology.  

Appendix B5

The Book People

That ending scene from Fahrenheit 451 is so frightening, and so beautiful.

Eventually, I will link up each appendix to a specific topic in this strange collection of essays. And I wrote them: you can see all the spelling errors as evidence!

Contemporary books on phenomenology are expensive, and so most of my studies focus on primary sources, free online libraries, and my own small book collection. I have found YouTube’s online lecture series freely contributed by scholars, universities (St. John’s College Nottingham, NYC Union Theological Seminary, Goethe-Institute), and philosophers to be very good quality.

There are online lectures on Husserl, and Heidegger given by some of the scholar mentioned already in the other appendixes: Dr. John Veraeke, Dr. Gregory B. Sadler (I finally made it to Lordship and Bondage in Phenomenology of Spirit), Dr. Mark Thorsby (also goes to primary texts of Husserl and Heidegger with expert commentary), and Dr. Johannes A. Niederhauser.

Since contemporary books on Heidegger are so expensive, and I don’t read the German language, my knowledge of the later Heidegger is relatively weak. Dr. Johannes A. Niederhauser insightfully speaks in the language of the later Heidegger and is particularly helpful explaining his further philosophical development. Heidegger’s complete writings are massive in volume.

Lecturer Eric Sean Nelson, formerly at University of Massachusetts Lowell before locating to China, gives a lecture on the later Heidegger and his studies of non-Western religions. Paul Tillich also was doing the same type of exploration of other religions during the 1950s meeting with Daisetz Suzuki and Shin’ichi Hisamatsu to discuss Japanese Buddhism in New York and Kyoto, Japan at various times (Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich, p. 254)(pdf).

The later Heidegger thought philosophy should be replaced by discourse. The Ancient Greeks had no word for language, but instead used the term "διάλογ-ος “ meaning “dialogue,” “conversation,” “debate,” or “argument.”

Philosopher Hannah Arendt was alive when phenomenology became a philosophical school of thought, and commented that it was “a time when talking became alive.” I think I know what she meant. 

This lecture by Eric S. Nelson ends at 54 minutes, but the question answer period is excellent also.

Husserl and Heidegger: Phenomenology, Eurocentrism, and Buddhism

Appendix B6

The Swimmer (1968)

 (Full movie)

"The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four, Chap. 5

The moral of the film is complete self-deception destroys the concept of Truth itself.

This very literary story was first written by John Cheever as a short story appearing in the The New Yorker magazine in 1964.

“The Swimmer” is about self-deception in American society during the heyday of capitalist growth and the extreme optimism that characterized the American mind. This frame of mind, or the shape of consciousness, in this era of suburban expansion and post-War II domination of the world economy was the Neo-liberal free market ideology beginning to emerge as unquestioned conventional knowledge.

We can see today’s corporate culture, which I have experienced, as motivational positive thinking pop psychology to manipulate people into conformity and to enforce ideological harmony masked by a cheerful fake veneer. This unrealistic optimism is strongly pointed out in the film. However, this consciousness is complete self-deception and delusion. Corporate positive psychology instills a false enthusiasm and happy conformity that denies truth itself not unlike Chinese Maoist revolutionary joyful extremists. Notice the excessive smiling of the characters which we see in North Korea. Excessive smiling has even become a syndrome for some Japanese businessmen. Face crimes are serious in authoritarian environments. Ned Merrill, the movie’s protagonist, is a wealthy, middle-aged advertising man trying to “swim” to his home in suburban Connecticut by skipping to his wealthy neighbors’ swimming pools along the way while ignoring the truth exposing his delusions and unconscious lies with his socialite friends, and ultimately with the film viewers. Ned lives a life of complete contradiction. Listen carefully to the dialogue as the truth will sometimes slip out. 

The dead in the Underworld would drink from the mythological river Lethe in order to forget they were dead.

In ancient Greek, λήθη (Lethe) means “forgetfulness,” or “oblivion.” Those that drank from the river Lethe would become oblivious to their true state of Being. The letter ἀ is a negative prefix, or alpha privative. The Greek word for "Truth" is ἀληθείᾳ (alethea) meaning the negation of forgetting, or knowledge is remembrance (early Plato). 

Most people have heard of Hegel’s famous “Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis” dialectical tirade of thought and historical change, but what is often not mentioned is that the suffering of self-delusion, or illusion of consciousness struggling with itself. This agony and spiritual internal violence is a central concept of Hegel’s historical account of the evolution of consciousness in time. Because of these internal contradictions Ned is unconsciously forced to seek unity in his fragmented life by swimming in each of his neighbor’s pools until reaching home. His journey isn’t a river as he images for rivers are a unified whole. The swimming pool is the human conception of nature’s Walden pond except that 99.99 percent of impurities are filtered away. Self-deception is easy to embrace because of our desires, but a difficult state of mind to escape. Both Ned, and the film viewers will reach what is known in Hegel’s thought as emerging self-consciousness at the end of Ned’s journey of untruth to truth.

Ned first appears in the film walking alone in a forest nearly naked, only wearing a bathing suit. Is he Adam exiting the Garden alone as post-lapsarian man?  Or is Ned the free Rousseauan “state of nature” good human being that transforms into an impostor by life’s shaping internal and external forces? This analysis could be developed further.

This is not a true story, but as myth it is the truest story.

I chose “The Swimmer” for review because of the current pandemic, but also this film as been interpreted by some as a critique of “postmodernism” which it clearly is not, but rather about the individualist social paradigm in American capitalist society.  Some of the postmodern interpretations make many of the same conceptual errors and fallacies identified in my last polemical essay titled, “The Ayn Randian Propagandistic Trope Concerning Postmodernism.”

APPENDIX A1 to A8 Miscellaneous Comments

APPENDIX
A

Miscellaneous Comments

Appendix A1

I discovered a wonderful new philosopher, Johannes Achill Niederhauser PhD, appearing from the North through the lectures of Dr. John Vervaeke. Both philosophers deliver very high quality talks in their fields of study and interest.

Also, Dr. Vervaeke will soon have a video series on Socrates.

Notice that Dr. Niederhauser reads Heraclitus out loud in the original Greek! My goodness! Johannes has many more videos on his channel "Classical Philosophy" that are incredibly insightful.  

λύω 

I loosen, break, release, undo, resolve, atone for.

λυθήσεται

"She shall be released!"

Paradigm for the Greek verb λύω 

Cronos: Χρόνος

Appendix A2

Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer. In 2001, Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Toronto and Princeton University, where he is a visiting lecturer in African American studies. And Hedges has taught college credit courses for several years in New Jersey prisons. (Wikipedia: Chris Hedges)

In the spirit of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rev. Chris Hedges gave the following sermon in Victoria BC on January 20, 2019.

Appendix A3

Paul Tillich could be viewed as representing the religious wing of the Frankfurt School of Critical Research. Tillich was never an official member of the Frankfurt School, however, he knew Max Horkheimer as both a fellow professor at the University of Frankfurt, and the director of the Frankfurt School of Critical Research. Tillich once dedicated the essay "Participation and Knowledge: Problems of an Ontology of Cognition” to Max Horkheimer's sixtieth birthday in 1955.

Also, Professor Tillich knew the young Theodor Adorno as his student while acting as adviser for his habilitation (a written thesis), which the University of Frankfurt accepted. The approved habilitation gave Adorno permission to lecture. Eventually, all three scholars had to immigrate to the US as German exiles during the 1930’s as the Nazis took power.

Paul Tillich, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer wrote about the same concerns of the modern age using the same methodologies of dialectical reasoning, critical theory, and phenomenology. All foresaw the dangers of instrumental rationality, systems of domination, existential alienation, repressive reified social concepts, objectification of human beings, and nihilism. Tillich formulated and applied metalogic (a reconfiguration of dialectical analysis, critique, and phenomenology) as his methodology to examine these modern afflictions in both the religious realm (heteronomy), and secular culture (autonomy). Adorno demanded everyone keep their feet on the ground of existence, and not fly off into pure metaphysical speculation. Horkheimer was more of a mediator between the two other philosophers.

As a religious socialist, Tillich worked to keep Christianity relevant to persons in modern industrial society by reinterpreting its symbols of meaning, and categories. For Tillich culture is directed to “conditioned forms,” while religion is directedness to “Unconditional meaning,”(Schelling).

Tillich writes,"...culture is a form of expression of religion, and religion is the substance of culture" (Tillich, What is Religion?, p. 73)(pdf). On the other hand, “....culture in substance is religious, even though it is not so by intention, (ibid.,p. 97).

In both cases the religious and cultural unintentionally display common essential elements that seek fulfillment in a complete unity of meaning within the “living stream of meaning reality.”

"...every religious act is... a cultural act; it is directed toward the totality of meaning. But it is not by intention cultural; for it does not have in mind the totality of meaning…. In the cultural act, therefore, the religious is substantial; in the religious act the cultural is formal”(ibid.,p. 59).

For more about the philosophical relationship between Horkheimer, Tillich, and Adorno see the very short summary review of the book, Prophetic Interruptions: Critical Theory, Emancipation, and Religion in Paul Tillich, Theodor Adono, and Max Horkheimer (1929-1944), Atlanta, GA: Mercer University Press, November 2017.

I studied some of the Youtube video lectures about Paul Tillich, and selected this one by Russell Re Manning as one of the best overviews. Part I of II.

Appendix A4

I want to provide some background for the two videos on the Frankfurt School. 

By the way, the Frankfurt School is often referred to as "Culture Marxism," a popular old Cold War trope. And, it is true that the Frankfurt School is about Marxism for sure, but what they do not tell you is the Frankfurt School is also about Christian theology--they lied to us again, but we're used to it. Marxism has had more impact on Western Christian theology, than on Western economic theory--and it has only been 170 years. After reading something written by Paul Tillich, I feel...free.

Some Frankfurt School members fled fascist Germany, and while in exile attempted to understand how fascism emerged out of a Capitalist society by researching German society.

1.) The Frankfurt School scholars extended ideological critique to social psychology. The psychology of the individual is an important agent in the rise of fascism. They did the first studies on the authoritarian personality and family structures (which turns out to be a key source of fascism).

2.) The Frankfurt School explained the self-reinforcing qualities of Capitalist social infra-structure and the process of power legitimation.  Our practical reason (ethical reasoning) is used to achieve freedom, but instead evolves into “Instrumental Reason,” (technology) to the point that there is an “Eclipse of Reason.” The Enlightenment has been replaced by positivism to reinforce Capitalism. The tendency of instrumental reason is to dominate both human beings and nature by a systemic internal process sustained by social organizations. Instrumental reason has redefined the meaning of human existence. Now “surplus repression” is necessary to exploit and maintain the flow of surplus value.

3.) The Frankfurt philosophers rethought the concept of the “Negative,” (the possible) as opposed to the “Positive”(the actual). Marcuse reformulated a method for critical negative dialectics, or the dialectics of imagination for possibilities by borrowing concepts from a.) Freud, the b.) Existentialists, c.) Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, d.) Hegel’s concept of "negation" and “determinate negation.” 

Adorno contributed his “Negative Dialectics”(1966) to re-define and refine a critical dialectical methodology (imminent critique) to derive contradictions from systems of concepts, and paradigms. The genetic influence of Hegelian Absolute Idealism in Marxism allows the critical theorists to shift the analysis from its historical emphasis of Marxist’s so called materialism --a Positivistic dialectic of actual existence--to a Negative dialectic of essences and possibility.

4.) Habermas attempted to bring a new hermeneutic, or principles of interpreting political theory. Capitalism has changed modern "politics" from the Greek “polis” of participation and attempts to reclaim communication from a distorted reality, and Orwellian contradictions.

I touched on many of these themes in this strange book of mine, but the two part video series on “Adorno and Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment, Part I” more clearly brings them all together. Part II is particularly well done.

Appendix A5

Critical Negative Thinking as the Logic of Protest and the Impoverishment of Experience

“… the "inner" dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking--the critical power of Reason--is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition” (One-Dimenisonal Man, Herbert Marcuse, Beacon,1964, p.13)(pdf).

Negative critical thinking is possibility thinking, of what could exist as opposed to what actually exists (positive). Critical thinking is often viewed as “utopian” thinking (οὐ, no; τόπος, place) especially when scientific empirical positivism is the dominant paradigm that de-realizes, discourage, and de-legitimizes this dimension of the cogitative inner self (Geist). The logic of domination (instrumental logic) results in the constriction of human experience—in the poverty of experience. This sublimated inner-dimension is where spiritual experience abides.

”The world of immediate experience-the world in which we find ourselves living-must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.

In the equation Reason = Truth = Reality, which joins the subjective and objective world into one antagonistic unity, Reason is the subversive power, the “power of the negative” that establishes, as theoretical and practical Reason, the truth for men and things — that is, the conditions in which men and things become what they really are”(ibid., p.85). 

When we critically examine the appearances (phenomena) in the living stream of meaning-reality, they fade away into a cloud of quantum haze.

In spite of our “struggle against…absorption into the predominant one-dimensionality,” the universe is open.

Paul Tillich: The Open Universe and the Sacred

Appendix A6

I want to find the best video lectures on some of the key philosophers discussed in “A Theory of Spiritual Experience.” I once took a graduate level course on Hegel taught by Dr. David Carr reading mainly the Introduction to “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807). There were only about 15 students in the class. Dr. Carr is best known for translating Edmond Husserl’s “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”—Yes, that David Carr.

I only mentioned that to say philosopher Dr. Gregory B. Sadler has a free online YouTube paragraph-by-paragraph reading course of Hegel’s entire “The Phenomenology of Spirit”! Dr. Sadler is at paragraph 644 now! I’m trying to catch up by watching one lecture a day.  It’s unbelievable! 

Be sure to not miss his future lectures starting at paragraph 672 on Art, Religion, and Philosophy. This section on religion is where Paul Tillich learned systematic Christian theology!

Dr. Sadler delivers very clear commentary and interpretation—clearer than Hegel, for sure. I learned an awful lot from these marathon expert lectures and have already link to one of his insightful videos in one of my essays quoting Hegel.

Dr. Sadler is cool! However, he hoards chalk. 

Appendix A7

Biblical Economics through the ages.

Dr. Hudson explains why Christians hate Jesus so much.

Sociologist Jim Vrettos interviews Professor Michael Hudson, Economist, Wall St. Analyst, Political Consultant, Commentator and Journalist; who offers his views in the way finance works and how debt is actually a tool for oppression.

Dr. Hudson has written many books including:

• Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972)
• Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (1999)
• Killing the Host (2015)
• J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception (2017)
• ...and Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (2018)

Appendix A8

"Despair is suffering without meaning"-Victor Frankl 

(∀x)[Dx ⊃ (Sx * ~Mx)]

“The secret of Kant’s philosophy is the unthinkability of despair.”--Theodor Adorno

It is as if Dr. Frankl gave this interview yesterday. Frankl knew his chances of surviving the Nazi Death Camps were statistically 1 in 29.

Victor Frankl: Finding meaning in difficult times.

The Martin Heidegger Blues

The Martin Heidegger Blues

The Martin Heidegger Blues

You got your Existentialism, Phenomenology,

you learn to say the words,

you get a PhD,

but what is all the learn'n gonna do fur you?

That's when you know,

you got the Martin Heidegger blues!

You made your reduction,

transcended your ego too,

that's what you discovered,

that you're just a fool,

but the ground of Being,

is closing in on you!

That's when you know,

you got the Martin Heidegger blues!

Well, Freud don't scare you,

And Skinner's a fool.

To hear about Husserl,

and you think he's so cool!

But your Cognito

is making a monkey out of you!

That's when you know,

you got the Martin Heidegger blues!

What is Truth and Reality?

You read a book by 

Merleau-Ponty,

and you read all 200 pages,

and it makes no sense to youuuuu.

That's when you know,

you got the Martin Heidegger blues!

When you're at a Duquesne orgy,

sit'in next to Andy Georgie,

he looks down at your paradigm and says

"Hey, boy that's out of line!"

He says "You better forget about all those traditional schools!"

That's when you know,

you got the Martin Heidegger blues!

And then there's Soren Kierkegaard,

who needed some money for bread,

He sat down one day,

and wrote the "Concept of Dread!"

He said, "Either, Or"

"I got the Sickness unto Death" 

Yeah!

That's when you know,

you got the Martin Heidegger blues!

Concluding critique of a postmodern trope….

Concluding critique of a postmodern trope….

“Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind.”— Kant, Critique, trans. Meiklejohn, p.91 (pdf.).

“But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.”— Ibid., p. 43.

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...