From: pmsc13sg@UMASSD.EDU (Stephen Grossman)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Obj/Exist
Date: 8 Oct 92 21:38:07 GMT
Reply-To: pmsc13sg@UMASSD.EDU
Organization: UMASS DARTMOUTH, NO. DARTMOUTH, MA.

In article <1992Oct7.215507.28498@PacBell.COM>, rwbrigg@srv.PacBell.COM (Rick Briggs) writes:
>In article 7GH@umassd.edu, pmsc13sg@UMASSD.EDU (Stephen Grossman) writes:

    I quote Peikoff's _Objectivism_.
>
>>   Kant is a different case. He denies Existence not in the name of a
>>fantasy but of nothing; he denies it in the name of a dimension that is, by 
his
>>own insistent statement, unknowable to man and inconceivable. The mind, he 
says,
>>is cut off not merely from some aspects of "things in themselves," but from
>>everything real; any cognitive faculty is cut off because it has a nature, any
>>nature....
>>    Occasional fig leaves aside, Kant offewrs humanity no alternative to the
>>realm of that which is, and no reward for renouncing it. He is the first
>>philosopher in history to reject reality, thought, and values, not for the 
sake
>>of some "higher" version of them, but for the sake of the rejection. The power
>>in behalf of which his genius speaks is not "pure reason," but pure 
destruction.
>
>Kant declared the ideality of time & space, and discussed the boundaries of
>what we can know intellectually.  He did this (apart from his ludicrous views
>on morality) in a dispassionate way, seeking the truth.  This approach 
contrasts
>strongly with the whine above, in which the writer is merely trying to prove
>what he already believes.  In the period in which Kant wrote,  there was no 
shortage
>of dogma and declarations of truth; why criticize Kant for that which is his
 greatest
>merit -- curtailment of wild speculation (referred to above as 'pure destruct
ion.
>

    Briggs limits Kant to idealism, a radically different limit than the Ob-
jectivist claim that Kant's limit is nihilism. That is, within the limit of 
idealism, Kant is an idealist; within the limit of objectivity, Kant is a nihil-
ist. This is not a claim that Briggs' idealist understanding of Kant is false.
This is the claim that there is more, there is always, and that, therefore,
there is also objectivity. And, within the limit of Objectivist, not Kantian, 
objectivity, Kant is a nihilist. It is possible to limit Kant to nihilism since
everything exists and exists equally. Within the limit of nihilism, the follow-
ing comment from Kant is essential: "I have limited knowledge therefore, to 
make room for faith." (This quote is probably not essential within the limit of
idealism) 
    Kant was not essentially interested in knowledge, rationalist, empirical, 
or ideal. It is, I believe, uncontroversial that Kant wanted to protect the
religious morality of selflessness (or sacrifice or duty) from science. To 
achieve this salvation of religion under attack from the Enlightenment, Kant 
needed to enter a historical, philosophical debate between empiricists and rat-
ionalists. (rationalism is NOT reason; Cartesian rationalism began in cons-
ciousness and Aristotle's reason began in existence [or being]) Furthermore,
both rationalism and empiricism are types of subjectivism, a situation in 
which the religious Kant was not required to judge realism. (Realism gave way
to nominalism [a type of subjectivism] after Aquinas) Kant did not want truth:
he declared reality unknowable. (Within idealism, truth and reality are split)
    Kant's "curtailment of wild speculation" included the denial that reality
was knowable. Killing the patient to cure the disease is not good. This is the
bland, boring view of Kant that I got in a university. Kant had no positive al-
ternative to "wild speculation." His philosophy is a description of the experi-
ence and morality of a person whose mind cannot contact reality: subjective
mental structures and selflessness. The history of philosophy since Kant is an
absurd debate among the willfully ignorant and the willfully self-destructive
to proclaim that some particular version of ignorance and self-destruction is
the best(?!). Now, British-American philosophy is a study of the elucidation
of the arbitrary and conventional usages of language and continental philosophy
is a focus on the text (the philosophy of bookworms). The APA affirms a philo-
sophy-life split and one recent APA speaker claimed contemporary philosophers
were, literally, insane. He claims that the cause is the alleged rationality of
contemporary philosophy! Good grief! 


>>    The result of Plato's approach was a form of adoration. The result of Kan
>t, in Ayn Rand's words, was 'hatred of the good for being the good.' The ha-
>tred took shape in the culture of nihilism.
>
>what?

    Brigg has a lot of "floating abstractions" but cannot connect Kant to re-
ality. He does not know or care to know that the proclaiming the unknowability
of reality (the "ideality of time and space") has real, concrete effects in
the concrete reality of the lives of real, flesh and blood people. Nazism was
the first major cultural expression of Kantian nihilism; the 1960s may be the
second. In this regard, it is worth considering that there were hippies in
1890s Germany!
>
>>    Modernist intellectuals are comparable to a psychopath who murders for
>>kicks. They seek the thrill of the new; and the new, to them, is the negative.
>>The new is obliteration. obliteration of the essential in every field; they have
>>no interest in anything to take its place. Thus the uniqueness of the century
>>behind us: philosophy gleefully rid of system-building, education based on the
>>theory that cognition is harmful, science boasted of its inability to
>>understand, art which expelled beauty, literature which flaunted antiheroes,
>>language 'liberated' from syntax, verse 'free' of meter, nonrepresentational
>>painting, atonal music, unconscious psychology, deconstruction in literary
>>criticism, indeterminacy as the new depth inphysics, incompleteness as the
>>revelation in mathematics-a void everywhere that wassa acclaimed by the
>>avant-garde with a metaphysical chuckle....
>>    In a Kantian reality, nothing else was possible....
>
>This has nothing to do with a Kantian reality.  You can cry all you want, but
>you won't get rid of quantum uncertainty, chaos, or non-computable functions.
>Too bad the universe isn't the way you want it.

    There is NO Kantian reality, a position accepted, as far as I know, by all
scholars of Kant. Having accepted the existence-identity split dominant in the
history of philosophy, Kant and his followers claim that existence has no iden-
tity or, as Briggs puts it above, Kantian reality has quantum uncertainty,
chaos, and non-computable functions. But existence is identity and therefore,
reality is well-ordered and causal. As Peikoff observes in _Objectivism_,
"Our knowledge of certain measurements, however, does not affect their 
reality or the consequent operation of nature."
    Quantum uncertainty, chaos, and non-computable functions, like everything
else, exist. However, they exist within the limit of a mind not in volitional,
conceptual contact with reality. "Ahh, that's a lot of crap." 
    Also, Brigg does not explain the uncontroversially negative character of
contemporary intellectual and artistic movements: "The center does not hold."
Perhaps those whose focus is limited to the "ideality of time and space" can
hold their center (and their breath), at least in the short run. Brigg's
claim that this negative character of contemporary culture "has nothing to do
with a Kantian reality" of "quantum uncertainty, chaos, or non-computable
functions" is, to say the very, very least, fantastic. 

>>    Kant is dead in academic philosophy: the subject has effectively expired
>>under his tutelage. He is dead among the intellectuals, whose world-view is
>>disillusionment (they call it the 'end of ideology'). He is dead in the realm
 of
>>art, where nihilism, with little left to defy, is turning into its inevitable
>>product: nihil (this is now being called 'minimalism' and 'postmodernism')....
>>    The collapse of a negative, however, is not a postive. The atrophy of a
>>vicious version of unreason is not the adoption of reason. If men fail to
>>discover living ideas, they will keep moving by the guidance of dead ones; 
they
>>will keep following, by inertia, the principles they have already
>>institutionalized.
>>    
>
>Kant is certainly not as well-known and respected as Ayn Rand is, I guess.

    Ad populum!
    Brigg does not argue with Peikoff's principled description of contemporary
culture. He turns up his nose and sniffs the "ideality of space and time." As
Barbara Stanwyck exclaims in "Sorry, Wrong Number," "It's unnerved me dread-
fully." 
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