Robert Bass
rhbass@gmail.com
2 August 2001
[A version of this was originally posted on the newsgroup, humanities.philosophy.objectivism -- which explains some of the passing references to Rand. In it, I rely on Adler's treatment of Kant in Ten Philosophical Mistakes, which I have handy. If he does better on the same issues elsewhere -- with respect to which I make no claims -- it would have to be by rejecting or correcting the mistakes he makes in this book. (I haven't counted, but Adler is guilty of a goodly number of philosophical mistakes in his exposition of Kant. He wouldn't need many more to fill up a quota of ten!)]
Mortimer Adler made a long and successful career out of popularizing philosophy. But whatever his merits in other respects, he is not a good guide to the thought of Kant. For the most part, he shows only that he hasn't understood, and in consequence fails to correctly represent, Kant's views. (I am not here trying to give anything like a comprehensive exposition, only to correct mistakes. I'll be happy, however, to recommend some secondary literature for more comprehensive treatment if anyone wishes to explore it.)
Here are some of the mistakes Adler makes in discussing Kant's epistemology (pp. 94-100).
1. Adler claims that Kant restricts self-evident truths to verbal tautologies (p. 96). This is doubly misleading. First, Kant does not normally talk about anything being self-evident at all. Second, the closest analogue within his system is judgments that are a priori, i.e., that can be known prior to or independently of experience. But Adler should know that Kant explicitly denied that all a priori truths were merely verbal tautologies: that is one of the points of his investigation of the synthetic a priori -- there are, according to Kant, truths that are known a priori but that are not analytic, that is, are not merely verbal tautologies.
2. And indeed, Adler does know this, as he reveals in his very next paragraph. He says that the mistake mentioned above (which Kant did not make) "is not the worst of Kant's mistakes. Much worse is his view about synthetic judgments a priori." (p. 96) So, according to Adler, first Kant is mistaken for restricting self-evidence to verbal tautology and then for not doing it! Any stick, it seems, is good enough to beat Kant with.
3. In speaking about Kant's conception of the forms of intuition and of the categories of the understanding, Adler writes, "Locke rightly subscribed to the mediaeval maxim that there is nothing in the mind that does not somehow derive from sense-experience. It was this maxim that Kant rejected." (p. 97) Since he thinks Locke rightly subscribed to the maxim, we must suppose that Adler agrees with it. Now, I think it's a mistake and one which Kant rightly rejected. Be that as it may, it causes problems for Adler, for, in discussing how Kant was misguided in his rejection of certain kinds of metaphysical knowledge, he writes, "However, all the ideas used in metaphysics are not empirical concepts. The idea of God, for example, and the idea of the cosmos as a whole are not concepts derived from sense-experience. They are instead theoretical constructs." (p. 98) So, does Adler think that everything in the mind must be derived from sense-experience or not? Apparently, he'll say whatever serves his dialectical purpose of the moment.
4. Adler says that Kant's "driving purpose" was "to establish Euclidean geometry and traditional arithmetic [and Newtonian physics] as sciences that not only have certitude, but also contain truths that are applicable to the world of our experience." (p. 96) This is a misunderstanding of Kant's concerns. He is not a skeptic and does not feel called upon to provide foundations for mathematics or science: "Since [pure mathematics and pure natural science] are actually given, it is surely proper for us to ask how they are possible; for that they must be possible is proved by their being actual." (B 20-21) His concern is to understand, not underwrite, these fields and to see how (or whether) traditional metaphysical arguments and doctrines (especially the conception of a human being as a responsible moral agent) can (a) have the same kind of status as mathematics and natural science and (b) can be fit consistently into the Newtonian world-view.
5. According to Adler, "the most serious mistake that modern philosophy inherited from Kant" is "the mistake of substituting idealism for realism.... [Locke and Hume] regarded us as having knowledge of a reality that is independent of our minds. Not so with Kant." (p. 99) Adler recognizes that Kant speaks of "things in themselves" as being realities independent of our minds. (He does not mention that Kant's usual locution is not "things in themselves" but "things considered as they are in themselves.") He does not think this meets the problem, for things in themselves "are intrinsically unknowable. This is tantamount to saying that the real is the unknowable." (p. 100)
Here, the mistake is more subtle, but it is still a mistake. One indication that it is a mistake deserves a brief excursion into a comparison with Rand. She used "primacy of consciousness" in two related ways to describe positions (which she rejected) that were held or presupposed by certain other philosophers. One was the metaphysical thesis that consciousness creates reality. The other was the epistemological thesis that we only know of reality outside of consciousness by inferring it from events or experiences in the subjective realm.
Curiously, this view, primacy of consciousness, is almost exactly identical to what Kant calls "idealism." He distinguishes two forms idealism can take, dogmatic idealism and problematic idealism. Dogmatic idealism is the doctrine that it is impossible for anything to exist apart from or outside a mind. (His best example was Berkeley, who said, "to be is to be perceived.") Problematic idealists do not claim that nothing can exist apart from the mind, but hold that any knowledge of external things has to be inferred from inner experience. (Here, his best example was Descartes, trying to start with the cogito and reason to the external world.)
So, with different terminology, he has the same notion of primacy of consciousness and makes the same distinction in ways that it can be held. What did he make of it? Answer: He rejected it. He called it a "scandal for philosophy and human reason in general: that we have to accept merely on faith the existence of things outside us ... and that, if it occurs to someone to doubt their existence, we have no satisfactory proof with which to oppose him." (B xl) He didn't, of course, mean to leave the scandal in place; he meant that no one had come up with a satisfactory proof before him. His discussion appears in a section headed "Refutation of Idealism" at B 274-279. There he argued that the inner awareness, the awareness of subjective or experienced content (which all the idealists agreed in admitting) itself depended on our direct -- that is, not mediated or inferential -- awareness of external things. Instead, it is our awareness of the inner that is mediated, that depends on the awareness of external things.
Here are some relevant quotes:
B 274-275: "Problematic idealism,
which asserts nothing about this [the supposed impossibility of
external, mind-independent realities] but only alleges that we are
unable to prove by direct experience an existence apart from our own,
is reasonable and is in accordance with a thorough philosophical way of
thinking -- viz., in permitting no decisive judgment before a
sufficient proof has been found. The proof it demands must, therefore,
establish that regarding external things we have not merely imagination
but also experience."
B 276: "... the consciousness of my own existence in time is
simultaneously a direct consciousness of the existence of things
outside me."
B 276-277: "Idealism assumed that the only direct experience is inner
experience and that from it we only infer external things ....
Yet here we have proved that outer experience is in fact direct, and
that only by means of it can there be inner experience..."
In other words, with regard to the primacy of consciousness, Kant and Rand were on the same side! (Kant was more polite to opponents, more careful in argument and, in general, a much better philosopher.)
More generally, the mistake Adler makes in saying that, for Kant, things in themselves, and therefore reality, are unknowable is in failing to recognize that in knowing things as they appear, we are knowing things in themselves because these are the same things. It is things in themselves that appear. Talking about things in themselves and about appearances is talking about two different perspectives upon or ways of conceiving the same things.
As a first approximation, and as an explanation of what Kant meant in talking of the unknowability of things considered as they are in themselves, appearances are things as we are cognitively engaged with them, whether through the senses ("intuition" in Kant's terms) or theoretically. Things considered as they are in themselves are things thought of or conceived as beyond or apart from our cognitive engagement with them. We might be tempted to stop there, and note that, of course, we cannot know things apart from our cognitive engagement with them, but that, though part of the truth, seems trivial. We can push further and ask whether there might be something beyond not only our actual cognitve engagement and theorizing -- which there surely is: there is much of which we are ignorant -- but also beyond any possible cognitive engagement on our part -- facts that we could not understand because, given the structure of the human mind, we are just not equipped to understand them or to determine where the truth lies with respect to them. If there are any facts of the latter sort, then there would be a strong sense in which they are unknowable to us. Arguably, we could not even know whether there are any such facts. (Would that unknowability be of the strong kind that extends not merely beyond our actual investigations but also beyond any that are possible for us?)
But to return to points more pertinent to Adler's misunderstanding of Kant, it should be emphasized that saying that something is or may be unknowable in no way implies that everything (or reality) is unknowable. In Kant's view, we do know reality, and the reality we know is not purely subjective, not merely in our minds.
6. Adler has concerns that should be taken more seriously when he points out that some of Kant's theses, such as the a priori validity of Euclidean geometry, of deterministic understandings of causality and of Newtonian physics, have not worn well. If the apparatus of the first Critique is warranted solely by its role in supporting these theses, then it should be rejected. Adler says as much: "How anyone in the twentieth century can take Kant's transcendental philosophy seriously is baffling ..." (p. 98)
These reasons certainly weigh heavily -- I would say decisively -- against taking Kant's theory to be exactly right. But, as is often the case with Kant, there is more of philosophical interest than appears on the surface -- which is only obscured by Adler's hasty and unsympathetic dismissal. One point has already been mentioned: it is just not true that "giv[ing] mathematics and natural science ... certitude and incorrigibility" (p. 98) was a central aim of Kant's. Hence, failure to do it is not ipso facto a central failure of Kant's philosophy.
Second, a more sympathetic reader might raise the question whether there is a respectable case for the idea that our experience is somehow structured by something that might be called "categories" -- such as an innate readiness to interpret certain experiences in certain ways -- whether or not Kant was right about the details.
I think the answer to that is clearly Yes. The basic reason is that there's no such thing as experience that is not theory-laden. Experience does not interpret itself, and even the least committal observation-claim entails commitments to further claims or facts that are not given in the moment of observation itself.
That may be too abstract, so here are a couple of examples. One is the learning of language. Learning a language requires coming to be able to use large amounts of information about grammatical and structural features of the language that is not normally available explicitly to typical speakers. But a key lesson of post-Chomsky linguistics is that this is by no means a trivial task. In fact, one way of representing those results is to say that what Chomsky and his successors have shown is that language-learning is impossible. More precisely, it is impossible to learn language from experience alone, given the amount of experience that children typically have. If, as they do, children manage to reach reliable conclusions about the features and structure of their languages, and are therefore able rapidly to acquire competence in language-use, they must be guided by something other than their own experience. The solution seems to involve some kind of evolutionary assist: There is, so to speak, a language module in the brain that predisposes children to interpret their experiences of language in a certain way. Language, or better, the cognitive capacities drawn upon in language acquisition and use, is largely (for each individual) innate rather than acquired through experience. (In this connection, I highly recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct.)
Another has to do with vision. In principle, we could take information about the shape, color, size, distance, reflective properties and incident illumination of an object and calculate the kind of image it would cast on a human retina. That is a tractable problem in optics. However, it is not the problem the brain has to solve. The brain has to solve an impossible problem in reverse optics -- namely, it has to go from retinal image to conclusions about what sort of object in the world cast the image. That's an impossible problem because there are infinitely many different combinations of such properties as shape, size, distance and so on that would result in identical retinal images. Nevertheless, we manage very rapidly and with great reliability to reach conclusions about the objects in our visual environments. How can that be? Again, the answer appears to involve an evolutionary assist. Our visual systems are designed to make assumptions about standard conditions of illumination and such -- assumptions whose warrant is ultimately that they worked well in the ancestral environment in which the visual systems evolved. Of course, in complicated critters such as ourselves, there is plenty of room for the built-in assumptions to be tentative, over-ridable and subject to revision, but without the assumptions, we wouldn't be able to make sense of the visual world at all.
Examples of this type -- and there are many more -- carve out a conceptual space for something that might be called a naturalized Kantianism. For Kant, the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding are essentially brute facts about human nature, necessary for us to have intelligible experience, but not further explained. We, on the other hand can view the categories as equally necessary for our experience to be what it is, but subject to further explanation in terms of evolutionary theory. I've discussed some of this at greater length in Cognitive Adaptations: Some Conceptual Issues. The general point, however the details fall out, is that there is more to be said for the idea that the mind has features that shape its experience and learning capacity that are prior to the individual's experience than Adler allows for.
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Let me turn now to Adler on Kant's ethics. This can be much shorter, since Adler has considerably less to say about it.
7. Adler says that "Kant tries to make moral duty ... totally independent of our desires and totally devoid of any reference to matters of fact, especially the facts about human nature." (p. 122) This is false. Very briefly, Kant proposes a universalizability test for the acceptability of a maxim, where a maxim is something like an underlying plan or intention upon which an agent is considering acting. If the maxim passes the test, then it is permissible to act on it; otherwise not. But the maxim itself is shaped by the agent's desires and beliefs about matters of fact. What's morally permissible or not depends on the universalizability of the maxim, the formulation of which depends on desires and matters of fact. For a little further elaboration, see Kant's Ethics: A Sketch. Kant briefly discusses the way that facts about human nature and the human situation affect the application of moral principle in The Metaphysics of Morals, 205-206 and at somewhat greater length at Groundwork, 389, 410-412.
8. Adler complains that Kant thought the categorical imperative was self-evidently true, but that it is not. The short answer is that Kant didn't think so. How we do know it is a complicated issue, only made more complicated by the fact that Kant seems to have changed his mind on the question between the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. Exploring the question is not well-suited to Usenet exchanges. If you're interested, I'd recommend sitting down for a good long while with Kant and some sympathetic commentators. For the present, however, suffice it to say that there is no basis for saying that Kant thought the categorical imperative to be self-evident. (For something short on one strand of Kant's thought on the subject, see my Kant and Knowledge of the Categorical Imperative.)
9. Adler also says that the categorical imperative "boils down to the golden rule." (p. 122) Again, this is false. This would be clearer if Adler had actually bothered to state at least one of the formulations of the categorical imperative. Since he does not, let's do it for him. The formula of universal law says that one must not act upon a maxim unless one could will that it be universally acted upon. Without venturing far into Kant interpretation, it should be obvious that that allows for duties to oneself -- if one could not will that everyone neglect to cultivate all their talents, then one could not adopt a maxim of neglecting one’s own. Equally plainly, since the golden rule is stated in terms of doing to others as one would wish them to do to oneself, it has no place for duties to oneself. All duties generated by the golden rule are duties to others. Since one allows duties to oneself, while the other does not, they can't be equivalent.
10. Adler's further complaint that the categorical imperative, like the golden rule, lacks content (is "an empty recommendation," p. 122) is also misguided. In this case, what he has failed to understand is that the categorical imperative is supposed to be a test for maxims that already have content derived from elsewhere. It doesn't have to contribute content of its own, because that's not where content enters the picture for Kant. (Besides, Adler has no basis for making this complaint anyhow. His assertion that the categorical imperative lacks content is based entirely on its presumed -- but not actual -- equivalence to the golden rule. All he even attempts to offer is an argument that the golden rule lacks content.)
11. According to Adler, "Kant's assertion that the only thing that is really good is a good will ... flies in the face of the facts." (p. 122) Well, it would fly in the face of the facts -- if Kant ever asserted it. But he did not. What he said was that only a good will is unconditionally good. That is not the same as saying that only a good will is really good, and it leaves open the possibility that other things are really good but not unconditionally good. The idea is that, of other good things, such as pleasure, we can conceive of conditions under which they are not good or are bad -- e.g., the pleasure that lures someone into an addiction. But, Kant thinks, the good will is not like that: it is always good, regardless of the conditions under which it appears. Now, that may not be correct, but it is not the silly doctrine that Adler charges Kant with upholding.
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I'll stop there, though more could be said. The general point should be clear. At best, Adler has a tin ear when it comes to appreciating Kant's philosophy. He shows little sign of understanding it or even of being able to state it correctly. If you want to find out about Kant, don't trust Adler. (Don't trust Rand or Peikoff, either.)
Rob
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Rob Bass
rhbass@gmail.com
http://oocities.com/amosapient