/lit/ - Literature

Kant literally shit himself in his bed /lit/, a female came to tuck him into bed and he froze where he lay. Sweat rolled down his humongous forehead, and then dripped onto his crooked, bent and jew'd nose. He quickly imagined scenarios where the woman would just walk past him or walk to the next room, only for her to just dissappear through the doorway. He wrote about the matter in a letter to his friend, David Hume: "I was trembling with the utmost fear, my mind picturing images of my stiffened shaft being noticed, that came like a visceral tidal wave, in a fraction of a second I was flipped from one mood to the next. I slowly lay my head back down with uncontrolled excrement seeping down my garments"

CATEGORICAL FEAR
A POSTERIORI TREMBLING
ABSOLUTE SHAMBLES
nice one /lit/

Be Kant
>absolute (1.57 m) manlet
>believed in a 'Categorical Imperative', no exceptions.
>liked to be swaddled like a babby, and preferred a man to do it, so no lass would clock his stiffened shaft.
>would've lost to Spinoza in a Spider death battle. (Spinoza pbuh, had a prized collection of fighting spiders. Kant had a shitty house spider that he hated)
>Died a "weak and feeble" old bastard
Kant BTFO'd

>>6916222
>>6916255

There's ambiguity here that stems from a failure to distinguish the empirical object from the thing-in-itself. >>6916352 points this out.

According to Kant, we see an empirical object by means of sight, we hear an empirical object by means of hearing, we taste an empirical object by means of taste.

But we do not see, hear, or taste the thing-in-itself. For Kant, the thing-in-itself is what we must think of as a ground of the empirical object's sensible characteristics; that is, when the particular constitution of the human mental faculties meets with the unknowable constitution of the thing-in-itself, the consequence is our experience of the world of empirical objects, each empirical object having a determinate size and shape and color and temperature, having a determinate composition of parts comprising its physical wholeness, and having a determinate place in the order of causes and effects. For Kant, the noumenal is required as a correlate of the phenomenal, since he takes it to be absurd that there could be appearances without that which appears (or, more precisely, appearances are consequences, given undeniably in experience, that require some ground-in-general as correlate).

While >>6916352 was correct to point out the distinction between thing as appearance and thing-in-itself, s/he is incorrect on the following:

>Kant honestly doesn't even care about the noumenon. He just needs it as a concept to resist the icky conclusion of "We as humans know absolutely everything."

Kant does care about the noumenal. As is evident from his second critique in particular, Kant's moral philosophy requires noumena like immortal souls, free wills, and God (the conceptual distinctions between these things is important, even if in the noumenal domain there can't be spatiotemporal differentiation of the sort that individuates empirical objects). It's not "just" a matter of denying human omniscience - it's also a matter of preserving human (transcendental) freedom and moral responsibility.

>he thinks metaphysics is useless

This is a common claim, but Kant himself endorses metaphysics, but of a critical rather than a dogmatic kind. His problem wasn't with metaphysics per se, but with all metaphysics that, devoid of what he saw as the proper method, flew into extravagance. After all, his "Groundwork" purports to supply the basis of a metaphysics of morals (and he eventually published a "Metaphysics of Morals,") just as in the theoretical domain he used the Critique of Pure Reason to deduce "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science."

At least s/he can admirably recognize the probability of inaccuracies like these (and I'll probably get forgetful once I'm equally distant from my reading of Kant).

>>6176448

>How do we know the noumenal world exists? If we can't determine its existence how do we know it exists at all?

Because when we find ourselves in morally significant situations (whether to tell a lie against an innocent person or to tell the truth, for example) we *feel* that we ought to act in accordance with the moral law; that is, we are confronted with the fact of our moral obligation, and - here is the especially crucial part - "ought" implies "can." We are capable of an immediate awareness that the deterministic chain of causes and effects in the physical world describes only what is the case, not necessarily what ought to be the case, and we feel a requirement to strive to our utmost to bring about the world that ought to be. Kant's separation of the faculty of sensibility from the faculties of understanding and reason means that free will is thinkable, while our feeling of moral obligation means that free will exists*. The moral law reveals to us our vocation as intelligible beings that are not limited to the world of sense, of phenomena, of the world described by natural science.

(*Strictly speaking, it's better - although unusual in english - to say that "free will is," since in Kant's terminology the words "exists" and "actual" and "real" should be restricted to phenomena.)

Separately, and again, phenomenal appearances imply some noumenal domain of that-which-grounds-appearances.

>So it is unfalsifiable.

Yep - in a way that, I'd say, is very much like the unfalsifiability of the laws of logic (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle).

>>5921322

>it seems like Kant had some fun things to say about the objective reality of our existence isofar as we can experience it via the senses we have and have developed externally.

Yep. What I find most entertaining about Kant's philosophy is its insistence on the active role that the mind plays in generating the external world. Space and time themselves, and thus all the objects within them, are just aspects of how your mind organizes its own responses to unknowable things-in-themselves; space and time are not entities or forces existing independently of human minds. And the natural laws that describe the most basic characteristics of the natural universe are also contributed a priori by our mind, not derived from experience; for example, that events in nature all follow lawfully as effects from prior causes, that objects can be considered on their own or as members of a larger group, that external objects have spatial limits and sensory qualities that never allow us to become conscious of a gap or nothingness in nature, and that certain kinds of events can possibly occur in nature while other kinds can not. These rules that all appearances fit into give rise to our orderly, regular experience of the universe, and thus to our awareness of our selves as unified, persisting subjects.

Again, Kant believed that our consciousness of ourself is bound up with our consciousness of objects; it's only when our thinking is directed toward some object* that we can be aware of our self, of our role as subject (at both the empirical and transcendental levels). This is especially interesting because it's easy for us to believe - especially given the influence of Descartes - that our mind, our self, has a kind of independence from what it is directed at, such that we can discard all sensory influences and by introspection see what the mind is really like all on its own.

Kant focuses on this point especially in a section of the Critique of Pure Reason called the Refutation of Idealism - one of his more difficult and lesser developed passages. He argues that that our awareness of being temporally conscious - of having a mind whose thinking is represented as spread across time - requires the perception of a stable external world, since it's only in reference to these apparently persisting objects of outer sense that the constantly changing series of inner sense, which includes awareness of the self as subject, can be judged. For Kant, awareness of change requires awareness of something else unchanging against which the change can be contrasted - otherwise we'd have disconnected moments of a series without anything to relate them to one another, as if each moment were perceived by a different mind without them all being unified and ordered in a single, identical mind.

*(either an object represented as external to us in space, or an object represented as among the inner contents of our own mind like a memory or a desire or an imaginary entity.)

>>5866291

Coming down from a Kant binge as I am, let me jump at the opportunity to complicate this even more, especially for people who are less familiar with him than you are.

First, Kant wouldn't have claimed to have discredited metaphysics. Critique of Pure Reason established, in Kant's mind, the general principles of the metaphysics of nature, while the Critique of Practical Reason helped establish the metaphysics of morals. Kant would say that his philosophy discredited the improper methodologies of metaphysics before him, but that he was setting metaphysics on the path where it could become a legitimate branch of knowledge. This involved denying theoretical knowledge of some traditional objects of metaphysics (god, freedoms of the will, immortality of the soul, the totality of the world), but it didn't involve denying metaphysical endeavors in general.

Second, and most important, if we are going to use Kantian arguments against metaphysics, we need to remember that those arguments depended upon the transcendental psychology Kant establishes. Do you believe that the human mind is divided into the faculties of sensibility, understanding, and reason? This would imply, of course, that space and time don't exist independently of human minds (belonging to sensibility), and that causality and possibility and unity can't be known to exist independently of human minds (belonging to the understanding) - which are claims that your average person would find extremely bizarre. do you adopt this view of the human mind? If not, is there a way to keep Kant's conclusions while discarding his premises?

Finally, the antinomies you describe only apply to one branch of traditional metaphysics, in which we try to determine the nature of the whole physical universe as if it existed independently of our minds. But different kinds of problems arise when we try to determine the nature of our soul, as if we could know it as a thing in itself rather than merely how it appears to us, or when we try to prove on theoretical grounds that a god exists. These are also metaphysical speculations, but they don't yield antinomies.