From: rwbrigg@srv.PacBell.COM (Rick Briggs)
Subject: Re: Obj/Exist
Reply-To: rwbrigg@srv.PacBell.COM
Organization: Pacific * Bell
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 21:51:59 GMT

In article D3J@umassd.edu, pmsc13sg@UMASSD.EDU (Stephen Grossman) writes:

>    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, 

I cannot parse the above sentence.

>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! 
>

I guess you are talking about prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics.  This
subjectivity and relativism that bothers you so much in the macroscopic world
has to do with how we as humans function intellectually.  This has nothing to do with
fundamentaly questions of idealism vs. realism at all that I can see.  Why
are we talking about this?

>    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!

Kant was not a nihilist.  He believed in a reality, a world of things in themselves,
connected in some obscure way to our feeling of duty.  In fact, Kant was later 
criticized by Schopenhauer for going too far in this regard, i.e. in attributing
a causal relation between things in themselves and their respective phenomena,
where causality belonged to the categories of Kant and therefore to phenomena.
This is not realism.  I missed the connection between Kant and Nazism.

>    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

Wrong, Kant spoke of things-in-themselves, an unknowable reality.

>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."

See the famous two-slit experiment demonstating wave-particle duality.

>    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." 

Which exists, the world of Schroedinger's equation, or the world of the collapsed
version of that same equation?

>    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. 
>

The vast majority of people know absolutely nothing of Kant, or QM, so how could
they have such a powerful effect on 'contemporary culture'? 

>    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." 
>


Your cornerstone, "everything exists equally" makes no sense to me.  I do nto even
know how to evaluate it as a predicate one way or the other?

-- rick