If all what you have said was true, then it was Kant who gave structure to Hume, and you to Kant and Hume, and me to what you have said. In itself, what you, or Kant, or Hume, have said, would have no structure.Kant was awaken from his “dogmatic” slumber by Hume. What does this mean? Hume opened up a conversation about how “we” construct the world. But this “we” is a special “we”, it is the transcendental “we” … this “we” is somehow outside the “world” being constructed.
For example, this transcendental “we” imposes the notion of causality on the flux of sensory experience. Likewise the notion of substance. And so on with the other metaphysical categories.
This turns traditional (Greek and medieval) philosophy upside down. The transcendental “we” does not “receive” the form, the structure from a pre-existing world; no, the “we” puts the form into the original “chaos” (somewhat like God does in Genesis). “We” are the maker, the engineer, the source of all meaning…
Yet “we” do all this without knowing at first that “we” are the ones doing it. We start off thinking that we receive the meaning from “outside” us. But really, without “us”, there is no “world” (understood as the structure of meaning).
Hence Kant refers to all this as a Copernican revolution - a reversal of the traditional way of thinking about reality. Instead of the “sun”, we are the “center” of the “solar system”.
This is why Hume is so important - Kant simply makes more explicit the transcendental machinery that is already at work in Hume. They are two peas in the same pod.
Now where is Hume/Kant “wrong”; and where are they “right”? That’s the question we face today after the “collapse” of modern philosophy.
Good point.If all what you have said was true, then it was Kant who gave structure to Hume, and you to Kant and Hume, and me to what you have said. In itself, what you, or Kant, or Hume, have said, would have no structure.
Some answers in philosophy are better than others - but even those answers spawn more questions - Plato’s dialogues are a perfect example of this.Too many questions, but not many agreed upon answers. There may be lots of “answers” or responses but there is generally widespread disagreement on what is the right answer. And the disagreements are among professionals in the field. So, for someone looking for the correct answer to a question, no, philosophy is not fun. It is close to chaotic. Lots of discussions which go nowhere to getting the correct answer.
The shorter one puts too much distance between Kant and Hume. Both Kant and Hume argued that the connections (substance, causality, transcendental unity of apperception, etc) between sensory impressions come “from us” and not from “outside”. Kant is just more elaborate in his “internal machinery”.
Know? He didn’t. It was an assumption.Good point.
Kant assumes that the transcendental structures of sensibility and reason are the “same” in all of us.
Although the transcendental unity of apperception refers to the “I think”, “we” all have it; likewise, with the transcendental aesthetic (we share the same space and time) and with transcendental analytic (we share the same categories of understanding and the ability to put them together, to synthesize them, with our empirical intuitions).
How does Kant know about all of this?
Another good point.Know? He didn’t. It was an assumption.
Let’s consider space. And let’s suppose that you and I are seated at the same table; and between you and me there is a small statue representing a human being. You see the front part of it. I see its back. According to Kant, you and I are being affected by a noumenon, which is not spatial in itself. Also, according to him, nor you nor me are spatial, nor are in space. But being affected by the noumenon, each one of us experience an spatial phenomenon. If we are being affected by the same noumenon and space is not real, why is it that you see the front and I see the back of the statue? Shouldn’t we see the same thing?
Let’s suppose now that we are being affected by different noumena, why is it that we can talk about the statue as if it were the affection produced by the same noumenon?
I guess it would be! But I cannot say, for the moment, that I know the works of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty so as to be able to compare them with Kant; and I still need to continue studying Kant for some time.Another good point.
You are getting close to Husserlian profiles. And the role of the body (Merleau-Ponty).
It would be intereresting to compare Kant to these two phenomenologists.
But if “space” is not a singular object of a synthetic a priori intuition, then how do we have access to it?
Or to put it another way: our sensory perceptions are “always already” in space; what is the condition of possibility for this; how do we “perceive” space since it is not a special object of a particular sense?
These questions can also be asked about time.
No, not at all.If some of our sensory perceptions are “always already” in space, and happen in time, it is because we ourselves are temporal and spatial.
Have I misunderstood your question?
To “us”? If Being reveals to us, then its revelation to some individuals is richer than it is to some others; or there is more than one Being; or once it reveals itself to everybody, each one expresses the revelation in a different fashion, but why? Is it because Being and language are heterogeneous?No, not at all.
The phrase “always already” is taken from Heidegger. His notion of Dasein, being-in-the-world, was intended to break us free from the private cabinet of internal ideas, impressions, sensations in Descartes, Locke, Hume and even Kant. According to the “cabinet” paradigm, we are only directly aware of the sensation/impression/idea, not the external object. In Heidegger, we are “always already” out there in the world at large - we do not begin “locked up” in the private cabinet.
The old medieval distinction between “that by which” (medium quo - the phantasm) we are aware of things, and “that of which” (medium quod) we aware is helpful here. The empiricists confused the “medium quo” with the “medium quod”.
Another way of putting it: Being discloses itself to us.
This “disclosure” is how we “exist” - other non-human entities do not have this mode of existence.
So, corresponding with your comment above, we exist “spatially and temporally” because this is how Being “reveals” itself to us.
All this is early Heidegger. Later Heidegger assigns a history to Being’s disclosures - and this complicates the picture because such an “ontological” history (which has a connection to Hegel) is incompatible with metaphysics which seeks the eternally “same” structure of Being.
Later Heidegger does “identify” more than one of those structures (so to speak). He claims that Being’s primordial revelation (to the early Pre-Socratics) is different from Being’s revelation to Plato, Aristotle and subsequent philosophers (down through the modern period including Nietzsche).To “us”? If Being reveals to us, then its revelation to some individuals is richer than it is to some others; or there is more than one Being; or once it reveals itself to everybody, each one expresses the revelation in a different fashion, but why? Is it because Being and language are heterogeneous?
Does Heidegger mean that the structure of Being itself changes? To be able to say such a thing, he must have identified at least more than one of those structures. Or, does he simply mean that there have been several doctrines concerning Being?
No doubt!Later Heidegger does “identify” more than one of those structures (so to speak). He claims that Being’s primordial revelation (to the early Pre-Socratics) is different from Being’s revelation to Plato, Aristotle and subsequent philosophers (down through the modern period including Nietzsche).
All of this is quite controversial…
It certainly is! But if Being has really revealed its fault to Heidegger, and Heidegger has written the revelation in his books, it has to be true, no matter how scandalous if may sound. There must be a right way for Being to be, and it must have willingly violated the rules. So, it is at fault, and it must “pay” and suffer the consequences. But again, if Being reveals to “us”, why did Heidegger had to write and say something about it at all? Or is it that Heidegger pretended that Being reveals itself to us through his writings?I have been using the early Heidegger in these discussions.
Language, for Heidegger, is the house of Being. Language and Being are thus not heterogeneous (it is not simply a question of human beings arguing with each other - Being itself “behaves” differently). But, since Plato, the “language house” has been in a state of “disrepair”. And it is Being’s fault. This is quite a declaration.