ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS

Today, Susie and I celebrate our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. As readers of my Autobiography may recall, I fell in love with Susie sixty-three years ago, at the age if fourteen, but it took me a while to persuade her to marry me. It has been an extraordinarily eventful and happy twenty-four years, clouded only by the onset of Susie's MS, the progress of which seems to be very slow indeed. Bracketed as we are by an earthquake [which I did not actually feel] and a hurricane [which is due to hit the coast of North Carolina Saturday night], we shall stay close to home and celebrate in a decorous fashion befitting our age.



I had thought to launch a tutorial on the philosophy of David Hume, but after taking another look at my essay, "Hume's Theory of Mental Activity," which I published in 1960 and which now sits on box.net, I have had second thoughts. That essay says pretty much what I want to say about the Treatise, which in any tutorial would have to take pride of place. Perhaps in the dog days of August, I would be better advised simply to snark a bit at Republicans and count my blessings.

THE DSK AFFAIR ONE MORE TIME

As most of you undoubtedly know, the New York prosecutor has dropped the charges of attempted rape [and other charges] against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund and the French politician once expected to lead the Socialist Party back to power in the next presidential election. "California Prof" suggests that I make a comment on this turn of events. [He/she also rather snarkily suggests that we on the East Coast say something about our super-big earthquake, which struck at 1:51 p.m. yesterday, but since I did not even feel it, I do not think I should write about it.]





Since I blogged about the DSK case a good deal from Paris when it broke, I think I owe it to my faithful readers to say something by way of conclusion. So, here goes. I will try to make this as compact as I can.





Nafissatou Diallo, a West African immigrant hotel maid, says that DSK assaulted her and forced her to have oral sex with him when she went to his room, as he was preparing to check out, to clean the room. Since he never went to trial, his version of the events is not on the record. Diallo turned out, on investigation, to have a questionable past, and questionable associations, and to have lied about some elements of her story. There is no suggestion of money having been offered or accepted. Because a case like this almost always rests on the reliability of the accusing party, the authorities decided they could not be confident of getting a conviction, and have dropped the charges.



Forensic evidence has established the presence of DSK's semen on the rug where Diallo said it would be. [It may also have confirmed the presence of semen on her clothing, but I am not sure about that.] On the basis of this and other facts, we can be sure that one of two things happened in that room that day: (1) DSK assaulted Diallo and forced her to have oral sex with him; (2) DSK and Diallo had consensual oral sex. If (1) is the case, DSK is guilty as originally charged. If (2) is the case, he is not guilty.



Let us be clear. There is no third way. We cannot shave a bit off Diallo's charges because of her unreliability as a witness, and shave a bit off DSK's defense because of his history as a serial sexual abuser, and decide that the truth lies somewhere in between. There is no in between. Contrary to popular views widely held although rarely expressed openly, a woman does not lose her right not to be sexually assaulted because she is promiscuous, because she entered the United States illegally, or has several cellphones, or called a friend in prison after the event to discuss it with him. She does not even lose the right not to be sexually assaulted if she works as a prostitute. "She had it coming to her" is the oldest and most widely invoked excuse for male sexual assaults, and it just doesn't cut it.



So what happened? Obviously, I do not know, but I have an opinion, and I will give it to you for what it is worth. I believe that Diallo's version of the events is more believable than the version that DSK presumably would have given at trial, namely that the sex, while real, was consensual. To believe Diallo, we must suppose that DSK is a predatory man who goes through the world convinced of his irresistibilty, needing endless reconfirmations of his sexual attractiveness, impressed with his own importance, and thinking that he can get away with a sexual assault as -- apparently -- he has in the past. To believe DSK, we must suppose that when the maid came to the room, he said to her, "Hi, there. How about a blow job before I check out?" Whereupon she said, "Sure, I'm not too busy, where would you like it?" -- or words to that effect.



Take your choice. Let me offer one tiny bit of confirmatory evidence, which I must confess I consider really significant. In her original testimony, she describes DSK as saying to her, while he was forcing himself on her, "Don't you know who I am? Don't you know who I am?" It is a small thing, but it is pitch perfect. That -- as we know from so many examples of American politicians who are stopped by TSA officials or the like -- is just exactly what a self-important man like DSK would say if someone he considered his inferior in every way resisted his advances.

POST-COITAL TRISTESSE [HEM HEM]

Every time I complete a piece of writing, I have three reactions: First, a sense of liberation and elation; then a feeling of sadness that I have nothing to do; and finally a fear that I will never write anything again. I felt all three of these emotions for the first time in 1957, when I completed my doctoral dissertation, and have experienced them again every time I have finished writing a book or a serious essay. You would think I would stop worrying, after fifty-four years, but sure enough, the completion of the "Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason" produced the same reaction.



One reader wrote an email suggesting that I tackle Kant's ethical theory. Independently, I was thinking about a short introduction to the thought of David Hume. But perhaps I ought to take a few days to think about it before launching into another thirty thousand word undertaking. Once the Dodgers left Brooklyn, baseball lost its attractions, and I never really got the Red Sox, for all that I once rode in the same parlor car as Ted Williams.



Maybe retirement was not such a good idea. Sigh.

OMNIUM GATHERUM

While I was beetling away, writing my 30,000 word "Introduction" to the Critique of Pure Reason, the world seems to have just gone on turning, quite oblivious of my labors. A good deal has been happening that in quieter times I would have commented on, so perhaps I should take a few moments to acknowledge reality.



By the way, my thanks to all of you for the variety of comments on the last several sections of the tutorial on Kant. Marinus, I find it easier to swallow references to Hegel when they are in the same sentence with references to Russell -- sort of like sugar-coating a pill. Harsanyi is an interesting character -- his deployment of formal tools is skillful, but sometimes in the service of rather odd ends. See his early criticism of Rawls [pushing the same line, by the way, that the Maximin rule of choice in the Original Position is formally indistinguishable from Utilitarianism.]



The major news, as I write this, is that the Libyan rebels have all but taken Tripoli, and it appears that in very little time -- perhaps hours -- Ghaddaffi will have been deposed. I do not read, write, or speak Arabic, and my only trip to the Middle East or North Africa was an unpleasant three-day tourist visit to Israel, so I will not presume to prognosticate. But this past six to eight months has been simply extraordinary, and it would not surprise me at all if there are more major changes to come. I was in favor of the U.S. and NATO support of the rebels, and I am very happy that it appears to have turned out well. What will happen now? I have no idea. Nor do I think it is the responsibility of the United States to play a role in the future internal affairs of Libya.



I have alreadty expressed my great pleasure at the recall of the two Wisconsin State Senators. I donated a fair amount of money to the effort, and will donate to the effort to recall Walker. Grassroots progressive political movements are our best hope for some sort of decent future, and we must support every one of them, wherever they crop up. I note, by the way, that the despicable little pipsqueak John Kasich, whio used to be all over TV as a "commentator," is now trying to sweet-talk the unions he screwed into reasoning together with him. It is a small victory, but these days one must savor every one of them.



And then there is the unleashing of Jon Huntsman. [I confess I am reminded of the killer rabbit in one of the of the wonderful old Monty Python movies]. For those who missed it, Huntsman published a Tweet defending the reality of global warming and the truth of evolution, and since then he has been attacking all of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination as fringe characters with zero connection with reality. The common wisdom is that he has lost his mind and doesn't want the nomination. My guess is that that is all wrong. There is a fragment of the Republican Party [maybe 30%, I don't know] that is still in touch with reality, and he is playing for that group. I desperately don't want the Republicans to win the presidency [whatever Chris says], but I am genuinely frightened by what has happened in the Republican Party. I know what happened in Germany in the mid-thirties. The rise of a large, noisy, angry, bigoted, crazy rightwing political movement may be good electoral politics for the Democrats in the short run, but it is genuinely dangerous. If Hunstman's statements can start to change the public discourse, that is all to the good. We really do not need a rise of fascism in this country. We have gone far enough down that road already, and the weakness of the underlying economy will create the material conditions for a fascist party for some time to come.

INSIDE DOPE FROM THE HOT STOVE LEAGUE

I have been surfing the web trying to get a more precise idea of how the Republican primary race is likely to play out, but the following article on The Slate is obviously a great deal more knowledgeable than anything I can write. Take a look, if this sort of thing interests you.



http://www.slate.com/id/2302013/

READING THE CRITIQUE CONCLUSION

But this poses an enormous problem, of which Kant appears not have been aware. What is the relationship between the empirical self and the self in itself, between the phenomenal self and the noumenal self? Since the noumenal self is the moral self, the self that abides by the Moral Law, it is clear that the noumenal self is aware of itself. It is, Kant sometimes says, Practical Reason [thus identifying the bearer of a faculty with the faculty.] The empirical self, which experiences temptation, desire, pleasure and pain, is the appearance in the realm of phenomena of the noumenal self. I cannot recall that Kant ever says this straight out, but there is really no other possible answer to the question.

Let me try to clarify this by means of an analogy. Suppose that I decide to write a story about my family when I was a boy. In the story are a number of characters -- my father, my mother, my sister, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, and my grandparents. One of the characters in the story is called "Rob." [Since my big sister, Barbara, had already appropriated "Bobs" as her nickname I couldn't really be called "Bob," so I became "Rob."] All the characters in the story bear a relationship to me as the author of the story, but the character called "Rob" bears a special, a privileged, relationship to me as author. That character is the appearance of me in the story. No other character in the story can have that relationship to me as author. Now, my sister might decide to write a story about the family as well, and she might [though it is unlikely] write word for word the same story that I have written. In her story, there will be a character named "Bobs" who will have the same privileged relationship to her as author of her story that the character named "Rob" has to me as author in my story. There will of course also be a character named "Bobs" in my story and a character named "Rob" on her story, but neither of those characters will bear a privileged relationship to the author of its story.

This is, roughly speaking, the situation Kant is describing. I synthesize my manifold of sensuous intuition according to the rules for such synthesis, and produce thereby a story, if you will, that I call "nature." In that story are many objects -- the sun and the moon, the earth and all that is on it, and a number of human beings, among whom there is one bearing the name "Robert Paul Wolff" born in 1933 in New York City, New York. That human being is conscious -- indeed, he is self-conscious -- and he bears a privileged relationship to the noumenal self that has synthesized the manifold and has by so doing acted as "the law-giver to nature." That noumenal self is a moral agent, and it has certain obligations, says Kant, to other moral agents.

But how on earth can this moral agent ever encounter other moral agents in the realm of appearance that it has synthesized from a diversity of sense contents?

I want you just to think about this for a moment. According to Kant, I have moral obligations -- duties -- to other moral agents. Not to rocks or to trees or to horses or to human beings understood merely as natural things in the realm of appearance, but to other moral agents, which is to say other noumenal selves. But it is as a phenomenon, as an appearance, that I speak, make promises, tell lies, borrow money, kill other human beings, and do all the things that the Moral Law tells me I must do or must not do. And leaving aside the duties to myself, which Kant is sure to make a place for in his ethical theory but which do not really count for all that much, all my duties are to other noumenal selves. For the life of me, I cannot see how, on Kant's theory of a priori synthesis, I could ever even hypothetically encounter another noumenal agent in the realm of appearances.

I mean, we cannot each of us be telling numerically the same story, any more than -- to use an old philosophical example -- we can all be sneezing the numerically same sneeze. We might be telling qualitatively identical stories, by a sort of Leibnizean pre-established harmony, rather like two year olds engaged in what child psychologists call "parallel play," but Kant's very first foray into what became the Critical Philosophy, the Dissertation, decisively rejected the theory of pre-established harmony, and besides, even though it might somehow save physics, it cannot save morality. If I can never encounter another moral agent, then Kant's ethical theory is vacuous.

Well, no doubt you will along about now be waiting for me to tell you how this tangle can be unraveled, concluding with a triumphant reconciliation of Kant's ethical theory with his epistemology. But I cannot. No more can I reconstruct out of the text of the Groundwork a satisfactory demonstration of the validity a priori of a substantive fundamental principle of morality. Lord knows, it is not for not trying. I spent seven years puzzling over these questions. In the end, I wrote a book about Kant's ethical theory and a number of scholarly articles. But none of those writings contains a satisfactory resolution of this problem. Indeed, I do not think that it has a resolution. This has profound consequences for ethical theory, whether you are sympathetic to Kant's approach to the subject or not. But that is a story for another day. This "Introduction" has no gone on for more than thirty thousand words, and it is time to bring it to a close. I hope it has proved useful. I shall edit it slightly and post it on box.net, so that anyone who is interested can read it at his or her leisure.

READING THE CRITIQUE PART EIGHTEEN

Before wrapping up the exposition of this central line of argument in the Critique by stating the full-scale argument in quasi-formal form, let me touch on one matter that was passed over. It actually relates in a way to the section of the Critique called "The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding," though Kant actually thinks he is doing something else in that section. Strictly speaking, the rule which Kant calls the Category of Causality and Dependence is not a rule for reproducing the manifold of perceptions in Imagination. If it were [as may have occurred to some of you], then we would know the laws of nature a priori, and not require experiment or observation to arrive at them. Kant does not really believe that. Rather, they are what we might call second-order rules, or rules for forming rules.

Think of it this way. The rules of chess, of monopoly, of bridge, and of mahjongg are rules that define a game and determine how many players there are, what the legal rules are, when someone has won or lost, and so forth. Now imagine someone who gets a job at a company that makes and sells board games. She is told to create games with the following characteristics: They must be games for two players, suitable for children seven to ten, playable in under one hour, and [very important] absolutely requiring the patented game package made by the company to be played. There are [the president of the company hopes] many games that can be invented obeying these rules, but he can know a priori that they will all re two-person games and will all require his company's game set.

In something like the same way, all the possible causal laws that can be formulated on the basis of observation and experiment conform a priori to the requirement that one event follow upon another necessarily in conformity with a general rule. Incidentally, for you Hume fans out there, exactly the same distinction between rules and rules for formulating rules crops up in the Treatise in the form of the distinction between dispositions and propensities to form dispositions. [See my paper, "Hume's Theory of mental Activity," on box.net.]

But, you may ask if you are really paying attention, how can we know, in advance of experience, that we will actually encounter, in our sense experience, patterns of what Hume calls constant conjunction of resembling instances on the basis of which causal laws can be formulated? Kant calls this question "the affinity of the manifold," and he devotes a good deal of attention to trying to show that his doctrine of pure intuition offers an answer to it. This is one of the many things in the Critique that I am going to pass over, in order to keep this Introduction within manageable limits. The time has come to pull all of this together and state

And now to the final form of the argument of the Deduction, folding in the materials from the Second Analogy. Here it is:

To Prove: There is an objective order of events, and everything in it which happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule. [Notice that this is as proof only of the Law of Cause and Effect, not of the other things Kant claims, somewhat unsuccessfully, to have proved as well.]

Proof:

1. All the contents of my consciousness are bound up in a unity. [Premise]

2. The only way to introduce synthetic unity into a manifold of contents of consciousness is by reproducing them in imagination according to a rule.

3. The defining mark of objectivity is necessity of connection. [I have not talked about this, but it should be clear from what I have said.]

4. Synthesis, i.e., reproduction in imagination according to a rule, confers necessity of connection on a manifold. [This was the point of the house/boat example.]

5. If all the contents of my consciousness are bound up in a unity, then they have, qua representations, an objective order. [2, 3, 4, substitution and conversion.]

6. The contents of my consciousness have, qua representations, an objective order,

which is to say

there is an objective order of events. [1, 5, modus ponens]

7. The form of inner sense is time, and therefore all the representations of my consciousness, considered simply qua mental contents, must be arranged in a temporal order. [additional premise]

8. But since these representations must be reproduced in imagination according to a rule before they can be admitted to the unity of consciousness [step 3], they must have a rule-determined time-order which is the order of their reproduction. [from 7]

9. Thus, any mental content, in order to be treated as a representation with objective reference, must be reproduced in a temporal sequence of representations according to a rule. [3, 4, 8]

which is to say

Everything which happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows (temporally) according to a rule, and, there is an objective order of happenings (events).

Q. E. D.

We now reached the end of the connected line of exposition by means of which I hoped to explain in simple language the central argument of the Critique. There is a vast amount of fascinating and important philosophy remaining in the work on which I have not touched: the Refutation of Idealism; the analysis and refutation of the proofs for the existence of God, including the best known of all, the refutation of the Ontological Argument; the Antinomies, with their Kantian version of Zeno's Paradoxes, and much, much more. As I hope I have made clear, my goal has been to encourage all of you to read -- or to re-read -- the Critique, perhaps finding it easier to master as a consequence of this Introduction.

Before I close this series of posts, do a bit of editing, and place the entire text on box.net, where it will live forever in cyberspace, I would like to discuss one fundamental problem for Kant's ethical theory that grows directly out of one of the very last things I have been talking about, viz. the relation of the empirical self to the world of physical objects. It is worth noting that very few commentators on the philosophy of Kant write about both his epistemological theories and his ethical theories. When I was a student, the only scholar with whom I was familiar who and written full length books on both aspects of Kant's philosophy was the Englishman H. J. Paton. For a long time -- conceivably it is still true, I have not checked -- I was the only American commentator to do so.

The question of the relationship between the Critique of Pure Reason and Kant's ethical theory [most notably, the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals] is important because Kant wrote his ethical theory without taking into account the deeper position at which he had arrived in the portions of the First Critique that I have been explaining. In particular, he did not. when writing his ethical theory, take into account his new teaching that concepts are rules for the synthesis of a manifold of sensibility. Nor did he keep before his mind the radically subjectivist implications of the theory of synthesis put forward in the Subjective Deduction. Now, one might of course argue that since Kant omitted the doctrines of the Subjective Deduction from the Second Edition, we may conclude that they are not really a part of his considered mature teaching. But I think that would be a mistake, and perhaps I ought to take a moment to explain why.

To put it simply, Kant set out to answer Hume's scepticism about the knowledge claims of Newtonian physics. The core of his response is the theory of a priori synthesis according to the Categories. But that theory is hopelessly metaphorical and incomplete without an explanation of the nature of synthesis and its connection to the categories, and the Subjective Deduction is the only place in all of Kant's writings where he gets past the metaphors and actually tells us what this activity of synthesis is. As we have seen, if we take that account seriously, we can actually reconstruct a coherent argument that takes us from his premise, "The 'I think' can attach to all my representations" [i.e., the unity of consciousness] to his conclusion, that Everything which happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows (temporally) according to a rule, and, there is an objective order of happenings (events). So I have, in reading Kant, made the deliberate interpretative choice of taking seriously the teaching of the First Critique, regardless of the problems that poses. As I indicated on the very first day of this seemingly endless series of posts, engaging with a philosopher like Kant [if indeed there really is anyone else "like Kant"] requires such choices, and the only thing one can do is to make them, make it clear what they are, and hope to find readers or listeners willing to make the same choices, at least provisionally to see where they lead. I think this is what literary critics call a "strong reading" of a poet.

Kant is, as everyone knows, a deontologist in ethics. Indeed, one might say he is the deontologist in ethics. So no one would mistake him for a situationalist, let alone a utilitarian. Now Kant thinks that the Moral Law [which we fallible creatures experience as a Categorical Imperative] requires that I treat persons as ends in themselves, not merely as means to my ends. [Never mind that that is actually an incoherent, albeit admittedly a deeply moving, notion. Anyone who wants to see what I have to say about that and the rest of Kant's ethical theory can look up and read The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.] So whatever you may think of the details of Kant's ethical theory, and a lot of ink has been spilled on that topic, one thing is surely clear. Kant thinks that I encounter persons. If I cannot encounter persons, then the injunction to treat them as ends in themselves is vacuous. So are the obligations to be truthful, to injunction against lying, the obligation to keep my promises [to whom am I making a promise if not to another person?], and so on.

Just who are these persons I am assumed to be encountering, and to whom I owe this, that, and the other obligation? Things now get rather complicated. Let me start with what you might suppose is a somewhat easier question. Who am I, ethically speaking? Remember that for Kant, the I we are talking about when we talk ethics has to be capable of rational freedom, or what Kant calls the exercise of Practical Reason. Pretty clearly, that I is not the empirical self [a.k.a. Robert Paul Wolff, born 27 December 1933 and due to die on some as yet undisclosed date.] That I is governed by the laws of physics in just the way that every other phenomenal object in the realm of Appearances is. That I's behavior in the realm of appearance is as predictable, if only we had enough information, as the behavior of that old standby of 18th century epistemology, billiard balls.

To cut to the chase, and squeeze into one sentence about two chapters worth of textual explication, the empirical self, determined like all other phenomena by the laws of nature, is the appearance in the realm of phenomena of the I of Practical Reason, the I bound by the Moral Law, the Noumenal Self, the Self in Itself, the Self that is also the locus of the Forms of Intuition and Conception, the Self that engages in the activity of synthesis, the Self whose Transcendental Unity of Apperception appears in the phenomenal world as the unity of consciousness.

But this poses an enormous problem, of which Kant appears not have been aware. Tomorrow we shall explore that problem.