MY FAVORITE ONION HEADLINE OF THE DAY

"Scientists trace heat wave to massive star at center of solar system"

THE WISCONSIN RECALL ELECTIONS

The results are in, and we managed to recall two of the six Republican senators we targeted. This is widely being reported as a failure, since the Republicans retained control of the State Senate, but nothing could be further from the truth. These are six Republicans who won their local elections in a year [2008] in which the Democrats swamped the Republicans state-wide in the presidential contest. They were thus in solidly Red districts. Overturning two of them is a triumph. I say "we" simply because I gave money [more than I could really afford], not because I actually did any work. But there is a place for people who give money, just as there is a place for people who make phone calls or knock on doors or enter data in computers.



One blog commentator asked whether the enormous outpouring of money and energy on the left was "worth it." I am afraid too many people imagine that changing the world is easy -- that it requires nothing more than bestirring oneself just once, before lapsing back into customary sloth. The fact is that all real change takes enormous effort, over and over again. We on the left must fight one battle after another, defeating every troglodyte we can and electing the most progressive candidates available. Remember, this is not rocket science or brain surgery, it is a long, hard slog. A blue dog Democrat is better than a Republican. If that is the best we can do in a district, it is worth doing. A moderate Democrat is better than a blue dog, a progressive Democrat is better than a moderate, and a Socialist is better still.



The most important single fact about the Wisconsin recall elections, to my mind, is that they were about union rights. It has been a long, long time since progressives got really energized about union rights, and I am afraid there is precious little emotion among Democrats in Washington on the subject. But with all Democracy's faults [and I am the expert on that subject], it is still the only weapon we have. Bloody riots, like those now going on in England, are, as the English would say, bloody useless.



So, celebrate what we won, mourn what we lost, and continue fighting.



La Lucha continua no terminara facilmente

READING THE CRITIQUE PART ELEVEN

The first question, to repeat, is this: If our knowledge claims are true only under the condition that they are restricted to the realm of mere appearances, in what recognizable sense can they be described as objective, universal, and necessary?

Kant answers by drawing a very important set of distinctions and introducing some more terminology. In ordinary experience of the world, we frequently distinguish between what is real and what is not. An oasis is real. A mirage is not. The feel of a mattress beneath my leg is real; the sensations of so-called "phantom limbs" experienced by amputees are not in this sense real. They are real sensations, of course, but they do not reveal the presence of a real physical object. Rainbows are not real, in the same way that raindrops are. And so forth. So we may draw a distinction between the empirically real and the empirically ideal. Even if the entire experienced world is merely a realm of things as they appear to me in space and time and under the categories, nevertheless within that world the familiar distinction between the real and the merely ideal remains. And that, Kant insists, is all that is required for the validity of Newtonian Physics. Those laws tell us, with certainty and universality within the realm of experience, That all events have causes, and they tell us this prior to the experience of the events, which is to say a priori.

Now, if Kant is right, then the entire sphere of experience is, from a metaphysical point of view, merely ideal, for it is a sphere of things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves. In short, the realm of experience is transcendently ideal, not transcendently real as Leibniz and other metaphysicians have claimed. Note, by the way, that this is one of those places where Kant writes "transcendentally" when he really means "transcendently." You can see why he would make that mistake. It is, in some sense, true that epistemologically speaking [which, you will recall, is what "transcendentally speaking" means, for Kant] things as they appear to us are merely ideal, for their empirical reality is conditioned upon their conforming to the subjective, mind-dependent forms of intuition and conception. So, to sum up, Leibnizean monads are transcendently real. Tables and chairs are transcendently ideal but empirically real. And hallucinations are empirically ideal.

Is this really all we are claiming when we say that Newton physics gives us in knowledge of the experienced world? Kant responds by turning the question back on the questioner. What else could you possibly want? he asks. You want to be able to distinguish a real oasis from a mirage. Very well, my theory allows you to do so. You want to distinguish a mere assemblage of "resembling instances," as Hume calls them, from a scientific law that predicts with certainty and universality what will happen in space and time. Very well, again, my theory allows you to do so. But you pound your fist on the table and demand something that is really real? What can that be, other than a genuinely solid table that is not an hallucination?

It might at this point occur to someone to wonder why, if Kant is correct, there is any point at all in continuing to talk about the unknowable transcendently real realm of Leibnizean monads. Isn't Kant simply like one of those Unitarian/Universalist pseudo-religionists who has given up a belief in God but still likes to go to a Sunday service now and again? There is a good deal of truth in this jibe, as we shall see later on. But Kant has one reason for keeping alive the possibility of thinking about a realm of which we can have no knowledge, namely that he believes the realm of unconditioned reality is the realm of moral agents bound by the Moral Law. Much, much later, I shall talk at some length about that side of Kant's philosophy. But first there is a good deal more to be said about his attempted defense of science against Humean scepticism.

The second question was: Where did those Categories come from? Once again, Kant operates at two quite different levels of philosophical explanation. The official story, from which he never deviates, is that the Table of Categories derives from the Table of Functions of Unity in Judgment, which is given to us by Logic. But as an answer this is twice-inadequate. First of all, the Logic Textbooks of Kant's day do not know this Table. It was invented by Kant both for reasons of architectonic neatness and because he needed some convenient hooks on which to hang an enormous amount of philosophical argument with which the Critique is filled. And Second, as we have seen, the transition from the first Table to the Second [which of course has a name too -- the so-called Metaphysical Deduction] rests on the hopelessly flawed argument that the two Tables must be parallel to one another because they memorialize two different activities of the same mental faculty, viz. the Understanding.

The real story is quite different from the official story, and very interesting philosophically. In a somewhat later section of the Critique, Kant will actually derive several of the Categories from an analysis of time-consciousness and the activity of synthesis that creates it. He will, in the ordinary sense of the term, deduce the Category of Cause and Effect. This derivation is the highpoint of the argument in the Critique, in my opinion, and it deserves a good deal of attention. We shall encounter it when we come to the section of the Analytic of Principles called the Analogies of Experience.

But first we must attend to the third, and most important, of the three questions we have imagined Hume posing to Kant, for it is in his response to this question that Kant reaches his greatest philosophical depths. What is synthesis? And in what way does synthesis transform a diversity or manifold of perceptions into a realm of phenomena governed by the laws of physics?

At this point, I encounter as an interpreter or commentator a problem from which there is no shrinking. In the First Edition of the Critique, Kant develops a detailed answer to the question, What is synthesis? It is to be found in Section 2 of "The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding," a passage that has been dubbed by commentators "The Subjective Deduction." As I shall argue at some length, the content of this section is the essential key to Kant's entire philosophy. But Kant was deeply ambivalent about it, because it is pretty obviously a psychological account of the way the mind works, and thus seems to be [indeed, as we shall see, is] open to the objection that it is grounded in observation, not philosophical analysis. Indeed, he was so ambivalent about the "Subjective Deduction" that he simultaneously repudiated it and embraced it in the Preface to the First Edition. At Axvii, Kant writes:

"This enquiry, which is somewhat deeply grounded, has two sides. The one refers to the objects of pure understanding, and is intended to expound and render intelligible the objective validity of its a priori concepts. It is therefore essential to my purposes. The other seeks to investigate the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests; and so deals with it in its subjective aspect. Although this latter exposition is of great importance for my chief purpose, it does not form an essential part of it. For the chief question is always this: -- what and how much can the understanding and reason know apart from all experience? not: -- how is the faculty of thought itself possible? The latter is, as it were, the search for the cause of a given effect, and to that extent is somewhat hypothetical in character (though, as I shall show elsewhere, it is not really so."

That is, I think we can agree, a textbook case of ambivalence. So uncomfortable was Kant with the Subjective Deduction that when he came to rewrite the Deduction from scratch for the Second Edition, he omitted it completely from the text. And yet, and yet. I am absolutely convinced that we can only make sense of Kant's argument by taking the Subjective Deduction very seriously, and basing our entire interpretation of the Critique on its arguments.

We have now come to the very heart of Kant's undertaking, and of the interpretation I discovered fifty years ago. I shall therefore pause until tomorrow, for we need to be fresh and alert for what comes next.

READING THE CRITIQUE PART TEN

Back from the Coast and ready to tackle the most difficult part of the Critique. [One of the perennial problems in teaching the Critique is that the hardest part comes so near the beginning of the book. A week on the Prefaces and Introduction, a second week on the Transcendental Aesthetic, and whammo, you are right there in the Deduction. It never seems fair.]

Recall that Kant introduces the Categories in an effort to counter Hume's devastating critique of causal inference. Newton's Laws and all the rest of natural science are intended to apply to objects in space. Even after Kant has given up for all time any claims on knowledge of things as they are in themselves, he is still left with the problem of showing that we can have causal knowledge of things as they appear to us in space [and time.] In a very deep and very difficult move, Kant tackles this challenge by going all the way back to Descartes' foundational premise, Cogito, "I think," and extracting from it what he thinks is the correct conclusion, not the mistaken inferences that Descartes draws in the remainder of the Meditations.

The key is an idea that Kant calls "the unity of consciousness." The mind is affected by things in themselves, and produces a diversity or manyness or manifold of sense contents on which it imposes the form of space. But in some way that requires explanation, it is able to hold this diversity of sense contents together in a single thought. I think these many contents as my thoughts. As Kant says, significantly revising Descartes' cogito, "The 'I think" attaches to all my representations." This is the radically subjectivist implication of the Epistemological Turn. It is always I who think the thoughts in my mind. But this is puzzling. How can a multiplicity of representations be thought as a unity? Kant's answer is that the mind runs through them and holds them together. It synthesizes them, by bringing them under the Categories lying ready in the mind. The Categories are thus, Kant says, conditions of the possibility of experience in general, where the term "experience" [erfahrung] means "empirical knowledge."

But "running through a manifold and holding it together in one concept" is not exactly transparently clear as an explanation for the unity of consciousness. Kant thought of this as his signal contribution to the Theory of Knowledge, and so it was, suitably fleshed out and explicated, but unbeknownst to Kant, Hume had already identified the problem [this is in a part of the Treatise that Kant never read, and that Beattie did not quote], and as usual, Hume's account of the problem is much simpler and clearer than Kant's. Here is what Hume says, in Book One, Part iv, Section ii of the Treatise, with the intriguing title, "Of Scepticism With Regard to the Senses." He is trying to explain how we form the idea of the continuing identity of an object through time:

"First, As to the principle of individuation; we may observe, that the view of any one object is not sufficient to convey the idea of identity. For in that proposition, an object is the same with itself, if the idea express’d by the word, object, were no ways distinguish’d from that meant by itself; we really shou’d mean nothing, nor wou’d the proposition contain a predicate and a subject, which however are imply’d in this affirmation. One single object conveys the idea of unity, not that of identity.

On the other hand, a multiplicity of objects can never convey this idea, however resembling they may be suppos’d. The mind always pronounces the one not to be the other, and considers them as forming two, three, or any determinate number of objects, whose existences are entirely distinct and independent.

Since then both number and unity are incompatible with the relation of identity, it must lie in something that is neither of them. But to tell the truth, at first sight this seems utterly impossible. Betwixt unity and number there can be no medium; no more than betwixt existence and non-existence. After one object is suppos’d to exist, we must either suppose another also to exist; in which case we have the idea of number: Or we must suppose it not to exist; in which case the first object remains at unity."

Further to clarify this central notion of the unity of consciousness, let me repeat here a little thought experiment that I used in Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, borrowing it from Norman Kemp Smith, who got it from William James, who got it from Franz Brentano. Here is how James puts it: "Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men, and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence." [Principles of Psychology, Volume I, p. 160.]

Hokey though it may sound in the telling, I would actually write a sentence on two pieces of paper, tear one of them into one-word segments, hand the first piece to one person and each of the torn segments to separate people, and have them stand in front of the room and read what was on their piece of paper. I used James Thurber's great six-word sentence, "The unicorn is a mythical beast." The point is that although "The," "unicorn," "is," "a," "mythical" and "beast" were each in someone's consciousness, they were united only in the consciousness of the person who held the first piece of paper. I know, I know, Show and Tell is not exactly appropriate for a graduate course at Harvard University, but it worked very nicely when I first tried it in the Spring of 1960.

Because this is important, and not at all easy to grasp, I am going to go over it carefully several times, at the risk of seeming tedious. Kant starts, in the Inaugural Dissertation, with the traditional view that it is possible, by the use of the power of Reason, to gain knowledge a priori of independent reality ["of things as they are in themselves," or, in the famous phrase, dinge an sich. Jokey side note: in 1954, when I bought a tiny motorcycle in Oxford for my trip to the Continent, I called it the "ding nicht an sich" because it was a phenomenal motorcycle. I was twenty at the time.]

In a major concession to the subjectivist, or sceptical, or empiricist side of the great debate, Kant gives up the belief that we can have knowledge a priori of independent reality, and introduces the notion of mind-dependent forms of intuition to explain how the mind can have genuine knowledge of things as they appear to us in space and time ["phenomena," as he calls them.] Almost immediately, he encounters Hume's criticisms of causal inference, which, because they apply to things in space and time, call into question even the limited claims Kant has made for Newtonian science. In response, he makes two moves: First, he introduces the notion of Pure Concepts of Understanding, or Categories, which, like Space and Time, are mind-dependent forms -- this time of conception, not of intuition -- that the mind imposes on the spatio-temporal manifold of sense contents. And Second, he argues that we can know, a priori, that the Categories find application in experience [the so-called Deduction of the Categories] because only by applying them to the manifold of sense-contents in the process of synthesis can we bring them to consciousness at all.

Let us be clear about the dialectical situation we now confront, if I may use that term. Imagine Kant engaging Hume in a public debate, before an audience of philosophers. Kant begins by claiming [The Inaugural Dissertation] that the Wolffian version of Leibnizean metaphysics is true. [That is Christian Wolff, of course.] Hume replies with sceptical doubts about the possibility of having genuine knowledge [universal and necessary] of independent reality. Kant concedes the point, but introduces the notion that space and time are mind-dependent forms of sensuous intuition, and hence ground the knowledge claims of Geometry. Hume returns to the attack, arguing that Newton's physical theories [and all other physical theories, of course] apply to objects in space and time, and since representations in space and time that are distinguishable from one another are separable at least in the imagination, so that we can at least imagine that one should occur without the other, there are no necessary connexions between objects in space and time Hence, the knowledge claims of Newtonian physics must be given up. Now Kant comes back at Hume with his boffo rejoinder.

"You deny that we can have knowledge of independent reality, and you deny that we can have knowledge of causal connections between objects even if we recognize that those objects are merely appearances in space and time. But surely you must grant that you are conscious, and that your conscious has a unity. You cannot coherently deny that minimal claim, because you implicitly acknowledge it in the very act of asserting the proposition. But I can show you that the condition of the possibility of that unity of consciousness is the applicability of the categories to the manifold of perceptions, and the categories whose applicability is a condition of consciousness itself include none other than the category of cause and effect.

Whereupon Hume retires from the field of elenchic battle and Kant claims the day.

That is what is really going on in the dense pages of the Transcendental Analytic. But several crucial questions remain as yet unanswered. And we may be sure that Hume would ask them, once he had recovered his customary aplomb.

First, if our knowledge claims are true only under the condition that they are restricted to the realm of mere appearances, in what recognizable sense can they be described as objective, universal, and necessary? Second, where did you get these so-called Categories from? The derivation from the Table of Functions of Unity in Judgment is totally ad hoc and unsatisfactory in several different ways. Third, and most fundamental, you describe the Categories as forms of synthesis, and you describe synthesis as the act of running through and holding together" a manifold of sensuous intuition. But "running through and holding together" is a metaphor, at best. What is this activity called "synthesis," and how does it impart unity to a multiplicity? Until you can answer these questions, you have proven nothing.

ONE MORE WORD ABOUT A. A. MILNE

Before I return to the Critique, one final word, prompted by M's heartfelt cry from Utah. I fear we are all living in Utah now, for all that the scenery may vary. No, it is useless to burn police cars or trash neighborhood convenience stores. The most reliable incubators of progressive change in America, for all their faults, have been the labor unions. The dying embers of the Tigger in me await the results today of the Wisconsin recall elections, which more than anything else were prompted by attacks on hard-won union rights. Perhaps if those recalls are successful the scores of millions of progressive Americans will begin to stir. They are out there, and in the American electoral system, every vote counts for one [more or less, of course], regardless of the intensity with which it is cast. Preference intensity is expressed by turnout, and if enough progressives can be troubled to vote, we might begin to make a change in at least some of what is wrong with this country. Not with the foreign policy -- that would require the reintroduction of the universal draft and -- for real effect -- the elimination of the college deferment. Fat chance. The military learned its lesson in Viet Nam and will not return to a citizen army.



But the larger structural problems remain. Even a fairer, less unequal America would still be a capitalist America with an increasingly large unemployed and unemployable population. I tried to analyze the reasons for the failure of the socialist dream in my paper, "The Future of Socialism," available on box.net. Nothing I have seen lately leads me to change what I wrote there.



Still and all, I am reminded that when Herbert Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man, he was convinced that there simply was not a movement on the ground that could undergird a progressive politics. Almost the next year, young people in Europe and America awoke and took to the streets, and for a few delicious moments one could again believe in the possibility of radical change.



On the title page of the first volume of my Memoirs, I quoted a poignant passage from Erik Erikson's great book, Childhood and Society: "An individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history." Had I been born in 1883 rather than in 1933, I might have lived the last years of my one and only life during the upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies. I could have taken part in the dramatic events at Columbia University of 1968 not as a young professor in my thirties, but as an old professor emeritus in my eighties. I would have died believing that the dreams of my grandfather were finally coming true. I would have been wrong, of course, but since I am an atheist, I do not believe I would have ever known that I was wrong. Perhaps the most we can hope for is to have the good fortune to die deludedly happy.

METAMORPHOSIS

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug." Thus begins Kafka's famous novella. Far be it from me to aspire to such heights, but something happened to me during the time I was on vacation in California, something odd that I hope does not prove to be permanent.



As I have several times remarked, I am viewed with amusement by my friends as incurably, unrealistically, irremediably optimistic. Show me a glass half full, and I think it is an ocean. Spill a drop of water on me, and I think it is a flood. During my years in Western Massachusetts, I periodically had lunch with a circle of friends with whom I would discuss the events of the day. They could always count on me to see the silver lining in every storm cloud, the upside of every downturn. I acquired the reputation of being a Tigger, if I may allude to Winnie-the-Pooh.



Now, it would seem, I have metamorphosed into an Eeyore. The fiasco surrounding the raising of the debt ceiling was the proximate cause, as we say in the Philosophy game. I was deeply disappointed by Obama's decision not to stand up to the Tea Party and invoke the 14th Amendment. Although I think I understand all the reasons behind that decision, that does not lessen my dismay.



But the larger reason for my loss of ebullience is the overwhelming sense that the future for this country is bleak. Americans are permanently committed to endless imperial adventures. They have given up any collective commitment to the amelioration of poverty or the narrowing of the gap between rich and poor. The quality of the public discourse is now so vulgar, so flattened, so suffused with ignorance and religious fanaticism that nothing resembling a public conversation can take place. Perhaps this is how it felt to thoughtful, intelligent, reflective Romans in the 2nd century A.D. I do not know.



There are some people on the left who can relax into this bleak view almost gratefully, comfortable with a stance of endless condemnation and crying in the wilderness. But that is not my nature. I need desperately to believe that there is something I can do, something for which I can hope, something to which I can commit my energies.



Who knows? Perhaps the rccall elections will go well tomorrow in Wisconsin, and my good spirits will return. Perhaps the Republicans will choose a candidate so unmitigatedly awful that I will throw myself into one more fight against the barbarians. But for the moment, I cannot even bear to read the newspapers or surf the web.



What to do? Fortunately, I am embarked on an exposition of Kant's central ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason, and that effort retains its value even in the worst of times. So tomorrow I shall continue with my series, "Reading the Critique," while I wait for better times.

HOME AGAIN

Inasmuch as all happy families are happy in the same way, there is not much to tell about our week-long Californian get together. We spent the week in Stinson Beach, a small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge, with Susie's sons, daughters-in-law and four grandsons, in a very lavish rental house, complete with heated pool, spa, and bocce court. The high point for me was Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday when my son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren came up from the city and rented a nearby beachfront house. One moment stands out in my mind, because of its trans-generational filiations.

In 1939, my parents rented a converted farmhouse for the summer in the Catskills town of West Shokan, New York. I was five and a half, and my big sister, Barbara, turned nine while we were there. Barbara taught me how to play War, an endless, mindless card game played with anywhere from one to four decks of cards that was just about the right speed for a five and a half year old. I have a vivid visual memory of sitting on the floor of the main room in the little house, playing a game of War with Barbara while my parents listened to the radio, visibly upset. A little historical reconstruction tells me it was probably the very first day of September, when Hitler marched into Poland, launching the Second World War.

Last Thursday, I taught Samuel, age five and a half, to play War. Since I have seventy-two years on him, I was able to gimmick the play of the cards without his noticing it so that he won. As each pair of cards was played, he would say "seven is greater than five, so I win" or "ten is greater than six, so you win." He quickly grasped that the Jack was greater than any of the numbered cards, but less than a queen or king, and after a bit he got the idea that the Ace, although a one, is better than any of the other cards. As I played, I thought to myself, "Here I am, an old man, teaching my young grandson to play the same game that my sister taught me when I was Samuel's age."

Later that afternoon, as I was walking through the living room, I heard Samuel trying to teach little Athena, age three, how to play War. It gave me a very satisfying sense of closure.