Q&A: Soft words about arranging the beard. The Rabbi looks handsome…
Soft words about arranging the beard. The Rabbi looks handsome …
Question
And now, I have a question please:
What do you think about Kant’s Copernican revolution?
Do you think it’s true that we experience only ourselves, and that the world as it is in itself has no effect on consciousness?
Thank you very much.
Answer
Every question that is written is being asked “now.” Only when we’re in the middle of a discussion does it make sense to say, “And now I have a question.”
As for your actual question, Kant did not say that the world in itself has no effect. On the contrary, it is what generates the phenomena. Why does one table appear red to me and another green? Because in reality itself there is something different between them. That difference in the noumena is expressed in the phenomena as a difference in color.
Discussion on Answer
Exactly the opposite. That’s one of the criticisms against him: how does he know that there is a thing in itself detached from the phenomenon? But he himself claimed that he knows. At the base of it is the principle of causality: if consciousness arises in me, then there is something that caused it. And that something is the noumenon. The above criticism rests on the fact that causality too belongs to the phenomenon. But in my view that’s irrelevant, because the phenomenon expresses something in the noumenon.
According to your view, that the phenomenon is derived from the noumenon, I need to say that my experience too is derived from the object being experienced.
In other words: there is a connection between the beautiful object in itself and my subjective experience of beauty.
Which means that one can learn about the world from feelings.
That’s not my view. It’s Kant’s view (and I agree with him). You’re confusing experience with cognition here. Experience is an emotional matter that doesn’t say much about reality. Cognition is a phenomenal presentation of the noumenon, and it really does express reality within me. You should really read C. S. Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. It deals precisely with this point, and the discussion is simple and truly illuminating (summarized in my book Truth and Unstable).
And maybe one can say about the idea of the essence, say the idea of the flower, that the very essence of the idea causes me pleasure.
And then I can infer: if the idea of the flower gives me pleasure because it has “quality of life” y, then all the more so x will give me pleasure, since x has a greater “quality of life.”
By the way, where in Truth and Unstable does a discussion of this actually appear?
I don’t know how one measures such qualities except through pleasure, and in any case there’s no room for that a fortiori argument.
End of chapter 24. But it’s worth looking at the original. It’s a short book and very nicely written.
Oy vey, do you always have to smash my theories …
But I have to fight tooth and nail for the theory of emotion:
It may be that sexual pleasure is so great in order to ensure the continuation of existence, and the pleasure from eating an apple is smaller because it isn’t all that important.
So maybe there is logic in emotion.
When I said “and now,” I meant: now, after I praised the radiance of your face because of the beard trim.
And regarding the schizophrenia in Kant’s words: does he have any argument that justifies this reasoning?
How does he know that the object in itself affects consciousness?
I had innocently thought that in his view there is no connection between the world of phenomena and the world as it is in itself, and that consciousness also produces the concept of “the thing as it is in itself.”