READING THE CRITIQUE PART SEVENTEEN

At the superficial or architectonic level, Kant has already introduced the Categories and derived them from the Table of Functions of Unity in Judgment, but that, as we have seen, is an inadequate justification of the Categories. Their appearance in the text is thoroughly ad hoc, and even if we accept Kant's claim that they are the rules for synthesis lying ready in the mind, we have no idea how they are supposed to function. What Kant needs is an argument that derives the Categories from the account of synthesis. Logically speaking, they are posterior to, not anterior to, that account.

What might such a derivation look like? Well, synthesis, Kant tells us, is essentially reproduction of a manifold of perceptions in imagination according to a rule. In the act of performing this reproduction, Kant says, the mind affects itself, and by so doing sets the spatially organized manifold in a temporal sequence. What are the most elementary ways in which such a temporally organized reproduction can take place?

There are three possibilities. First of all, two perceptions can be separated out from the entire diversity of perceptions and reproduced in a temporal order, with the precise temporal order not otherwise determined. In other words, which perception is to be reproduced first and which second is specified as undetermined. [Note: There is going to turn out to be a difference between saying that the perceptions are reproduced in an unspecified order and saying that the rule for their reproduction specifies that they may be reproduced in any order. This sounds like gobbledygook, but trust me, it isn't.]

Second, two perceptions can be separated out from the entire diversity of perceptions and reproduced in a specified temporal order -- this one first, then that one. Now, a very subtle but crucial point. The rule specifies which perception is to be identified as the first and which as the second, even if they are not called up in imagination in that order! Think for example of the rule which specifies the relative rank ordering of privates and corporals in the army. The order determined by the rule [from top down, as is appropriate in the army] is "corporals first, privates second." I could just as well have said "privates second, corporals first." Merely mentioning privates first does not alter the order specified by the rule.

Finally, two perceptions can be separated out from the entire diversity of perceptions and reproduced according to a rule that specifies that first the one perception is to be reproduced, then the other, then the other, followed by the first, so that the order [a la poetic rhyme schemes] is ABBA.

These are the three most fundamental rule-types by which a set of perceptions may be reproduced in imagination. [I say "rule types" for a reason that will become apparent shortly.] if you now take a look at the three Categories of Relation in the Table of Categories, you will find that they are "Of Inherence and Subsistence, Of Causality and Dependence, and Of Community." [The last is also glossed by Kant as "reciprocity between agent and patient."] To put it informally in the language of Kant's day, the first is the Category of Substance, the second is the Category of Cause and Effect, and the third is the Category of Action and Reaction [as in the case of two bodies that mutually exert a gravitational pull on one another.].

The Categories of Relation, Kant tells us in the Analogies, exactly correspond to the three different basic ways of reproducing perceptions in imagination according to a rule, as described above. How so? At this point, Kant helps us along with another of his all-too-rare examples -- the house and the boat.

Consider our perceptual experience of a house as compared with our experience of a boat sailing down a river. In both cases, our experience consists of a sequence of perceptions. In the case of the house, we may, for example, be walking around it, seeing first the front, then one side, then the back, and then the other side. In the case of the boat, we see it first upstream, then opposite us as we stand on the shore, then downstream. But there is this fundamental difference: the house is an object; the movement of the boat is an event. The four sides of the house [along with the foundation, the roof, and the inside] co-exist in time. The concept in accordance with which we are reproducing our perceptions in imagination so as to constitute them a unity specifies that the order in which they are to be reproduced is undetermined. Thus I can equally well walk around the house in the other direction, or start with the back, look then at the front, and only then look at the two sides, and so forth. In the case of the movement of the boat downstream, however, the order in which the perceptions are reproduced is determined by the concept -- first upstream, then midstream, then downstream.

I will leave it to you to work through the unpacking of the concept, from Newtonian physics, of equal and opposite gravitational attraction in the interaction of two masses in space.

OK. Now for a number of complications that must be introduced to capture what Kant is actually saying. I have already noted, in the example of the army rankings, that what matters is not the sequence in which the perceptions occur in the process of reproduction, but the rule-governed order that is specified for them. When I am recalling my experience of seeing a boat sail down a river, I can perfectly well think first about how it looked downstream, then how it looked upstream, and finally how it looked midstream. But as I recall it, I recall it as ordered upstream, midstream, downstream. Furthermore, although Kant does not say so, and even seems to suggest the contrary, it is perfectly physically possible that my first perception of the boat should be downstream, and my last perception be upstream. How so? Well, my upstream perception might be an auditory perception of the boat's whistle and my downstream perception might be a visual perception of the side of the boat facing me. Given the difference in the speed with which light and sound travel, it does not take much effort to work out how such a sequence might occur. Think of watching the halftime show at a football game from the last row in the upper stands. Even though you have every reason to believe that the band is marching in time to the music it is playing, you are far enough away so that their steps seem to lag behind their beat. Once again, the difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light.

Second complication, and this one really is complicated. My perceptions of the house and the boat, in addition to being perceptions of a physical object or an event, are also my mental contents. That is to say, they are perceptions in the empirical consciousness of Robert Paul Wolff. In fact, all perceptions have what I call in my book a double nature. They are all both contents of consciousness [bound up in the unity of consciousness with which we started this argument] and also representations of something other than themselves. My consciousness has a subjective temporal order -- first I am conscious of this perception, then of that one, then of the other one. And this subjective temporal order, which is the order of the empirical object that I call my mind, may very well be quite different from the order in which I reproduce them when forming the experience of an object external to my mind.

Scientific investigation tells me that my visual perceptions, as contents of subjective consciousness, are empirically caused in space and time by interactions between physical objects and my retina and optic nerve by the intermediation of photons reflected from the surface of the objects and striking my retina. So the elaborate rule for the reproduction of my manifold of perceptions in a rule governed temporal order must incorporate into itself this complicated situation. The Appearance, that Phenomenal Object that is Robert Paul Wolff, is just one of many objects in space and time obeying the universal causal laws discovered by Newton and other researchers. Once the original diversity of sense contents has had imposed on it a spatial order, and then in the process of reproduction in [my] imagination has had a rule-governed temporal order as well imposed on it, the result must be the concept of a world order of causally determined objects of which my own empirical consciousness is a part.

Right about now, someone out there is going to be asking, "What is all this about Robert Paul Wolff's empirical consciousness? I'm not Robert Paul Wolff. Don't I count for anything in this story?" That is the right question to ask, and as we shall see in not too long, it is a question that poses the most profound problems for Kant's ethical theory. It may occur to those of you with a secret guilty attraction to nineteenth century German Idealism that maybe the problems implicit in this question are what gave rise to the splitting off of Geist or the World Soul from the individual consciousness. To put the same point another way, what we have here, in all its messy difficulty, is what early twentieth century analytic philosophers called "the problem of other minds."

Next complication. What exactly is a physical object in space and time? The account just given makes it sound as though it is some sort of Tinker Toy or Lego construction out of sense contents, my mind then being another construction out of the same bag of parts. Not a bit of it. Kant's view in this, the most unabashedly Phenomenalist strain of his thinking, is that objects are structures of judgments, not structures of perceptions. And my mind also is a structure of judgments. Hence, as Kant signaled way back at the beginning of this exposition, empirical minds and empirical objects are on a par with one another. They are all mere phenomena, appearances in space and time.

THE SHADOW

A meme has been replicating itself in cyberspace concerning President Obama. It is said that he has a mysterious ability to get his enemies to self-destruct. I have been thinking about this for a bit, and I believe I can throw some light on this strange power. But first, a trip down memory lane.



When I was a boy, I listened faithfully to a radio show called "The Shadow." The central character was a gentleman crime fighter named Lamont Cranston who, it was said, had acquired, during his travels in the Orient, the "strange power to cloud men's minds" and thereby render himself invisible. [Obi Wan Kenobe, in the original Star Wars movie, has a similar power, as he reveals when he and Luke go to town to hire a freighter to take them to Alderan. Am I recalling this correctly?] Each episode of The Shadow would begin with a sepulchral-voiced announcer intoning, "Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men? The Shadow knows." The always indispensable Wikipedia tells me that in the earliest years of the radio show, before I began to listen, Lamont Cranston was actually played by a young Orson Wells.



Now, to Obama. I begin with a crucial observation about the character of the political climate in the United States in the last twenty years or so. For a variety of reasons, some of which I have discussed here in the past, a sizable fragment of the American electorate has become viscerally convinced that no Democrat, regardless of the election results, is or could be a legitimate President of the United States. These are people who feel very deeply that the America they think they grew up in has been lost, and that they are being ruled, dominated, betrayed by foreigners, aliens, people who are "not American." They thought this about Bill Clinton, about John Kerry, about Hilary Clinton, about Joe Biden, and about anyone else who might put himself or herself forward as a candidate of the Democratic Party. The election to the Presidency of a Black man with a strange name who had spent part of his youth growing up in the Far East simply confirmed their worst fears, and has driven them clinically insane.



One of the consequences of this development, coupled with the new world of multi-media and cable television, has been a transformation of what passes for a public conversation in this country. The standard image of that public conversation now, replicated daily, is of angry talking heads in matching screens, shouting at one another, talking over one another, wrestling verbally for control of a few seconds of airtime. I respond to this in the way that many people do, I imagine, by feeling as though I am being assaulted. The talking heads all seem to be pushing air at me, as though by the sheer force of their voices they could reach out of the screen, grab me by the throat, and force me to accede to their point of view.



Now, good old Marshal McLuhan, the Canadian literary and cultural critic, had it basically right when he said "the medium is the message." [Or, as Aristotle would have put it, had he seen television, form dominates content.] It does not matter that in these shouting matches one person is saying reasonable, albeit debatable, things and the other is saying things that are just batshit crazy. The format defines the situation as one of rhetorical equality. As one of the speakers raises his or her voice, the other responds in an effort not to be drowned out, and no matter how hard we try when we are watching, it is impossible not to feel, at some level, that they are equivalent.



What happens when one side won't play? Call the two parties the shouter and the debater. What is the effect when the debater will not become a shouter, will not raise his or her voice, push air, make more and more un-nuanced assertions to balance the un-nuanced assertions from the shouter? Refuses to get angry? There is an interesting and complex effect. First of all, the partisans of the shouter see the shouter as winning the encounter, and so they cheer to the echo. The shouter, frustrated by the seemingly wimpy, flaccid, unresponsiveness of the debater, and emboldened by the cheers of the fans, makes more and more outrageous statements, almost taunting the debater, seeing what he or she can get away with. The debater remains calm, quiet, reasonable, refusing to interrupt, to respond angrily, to become accusatory. The debater's supporters become frustrated at their champion's failure to give as good as he is getting, and they demand that he take the fight to the enemy, even, in their frustration, threatening to find another champion. The debater remains poised, unflappable, unmoved by these demands from his supporters. Meanwhile, as the shouter grows louder, more extreme, more uncompromising, the rather large group of lookers-on who are partisans of neither side become uncomfortable with the sheer assaultive noise of the shouter, and feel increasingly comfortable with the debater. It would be a mistake to suppose that the debater has won them over by the logic of his arguments. They aren't listening that carefully. They simply feel more comfortable with him.



This, I suggest is most -- but not yet all -- of what is going on right now in the public arena of American politics. But everything is complicated by the fact that Barack Obama is Black. Deeply rooted in the very being of White America is the image of the angry Black man, the menacing Black man, the mugger, the rebellious slave, the rapist, The Other. However much White America may congratulate itself on the extraordinary generosity and liberality of its open-mindedness in electing a Black man to the Presidency, that dark, frightening image remains. If the Republicans ever succeed in making Obama angry, they win. It won't matter what he is angry about, or how justified his anger. He will become The Angry Black Man, and they will win.



Does Obama understand this? Can Geico save you fifteen percent or more on your car insurance? [Local reference, for my overseas readers.] Of course he understands it. Every Black man in American understands this, whether he chooses to talk about it or not, and regardless of how he deals with it.



These ruminations are prompted by Rick Perry's veiled threat to lynch Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. It was an unconscionable statement, made by Perry deliberately for effect, and it triggered an eruption of outrage. Obama happened to be giving a one-on-one television interview, and was asked about it. His reply was pitch perfect. "He has only been running for president for a few days. I think we ought to cut him some slack." It reminded me of a televised moment, during the 2008 campaign. Obama was speaking to a large outdoor audience somewhere, and he brought up some of the attacks that had been directed at him. With a grace that would have done credit to Cary Grant, he lightly brushed an invisible speck of lint from the shoulder of his suit jacket. The crowd roared. It was the coolest thing I have ever seen a candidate do.



Now, none of this has anything to do with actual policies. But purely at the level of style, I think it is a profound mistake to criticize Obama for not throwing his base some rhetorical red meat. I repeat: if he gets angry, they win.

READING THE CRITIQUE PART SIXTEEN

As we move on to the Second Analogy, we enter a different section of the Critique, so this is perhaps a good place to say a few things about the overlapping and somewhat incompatible principles on which the book is organized. Kant wasn't kidding when he said that he thought he had handled every major question in philosophy. There is so much going on in the Critique that some system of organization is needed, and Kant being Kant, he gave us about four.

First of all, Kant distinguishes between the elements of knowledge and the method of employing those elements. So the book is divided into the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements ["transcendental," remember, meaning roughly "epistemological"] and the Transcendental Doctrine of Method. But the Doctrine of Method is just an afterthought, and though there are some interesting things in it, such as Kant's remarks about mathematics, we can safely ignore it. Since Kant has deliberately charted a middle course between the Rationalists, who say that all knowledge rests on reason alone, and the Empiricists, who trace all knowledge back to perception, he says that there are two "elements" of knowledge: Sensibility and Understanding. So the Doctrine of Elements has two parts: The Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Logic. The Aesthetic deals with sensibility, the Logic with the intellect. Strictly speaking, of course, one needs the cooperation of the two elements to have knowledge. Hence, one ought not to be able to arrive at any definitive conclusions about any body of knowledge solely on the basis of the arguments in the Aesthetic,. But Kant, ever busy with pigeon-holing, decides that the Aesthetic grounds mathematics and the Logic grounds science. He knows better, of course, and half-heartedly tries to make amends in the part of the Logic known as the Anticipations of Perception, but by the time he came to write the Critique, his attention was focused on Hume's challenge to physics, and since he was pretty happy with what he had said about mathematics in the Dissertation, he just it carried over into the Aesthetic almost unaltered and let it go at that. Not surprisingly, the Aesthetic is tiny compared to the Logic -- in the Kemp-Smith translation, 27 pages versus 471. All the good stuff is in the Transcendental Logic.

How to organize that? Well, Kant had two separate incompatible ideas, and he used both of them. First of all, he wanted to distinguish between what we can genuinely know to be true, and what previous philosophers have mistakenly and confusedly thought they could know. So he divides the Transcendental Logic into a Logic of Truth, which he calls the Transcendental Analytic, and a Logic of Illusion, which he calls the Transcendental Dialectic. Note that the Dialectic is a logic of illusion, not simply of error, like the fallacies of traditional logical theory. The beliefs Kant is attacking -- that we can have knowledge of the existence and nature of God, that we can have knowledge of the existence and nature of the self in itself, that we can have knowledge of the Infinite -- are illusions, he thinks, which is to say beliefs that we find it terribly difficult to give up even after we see that they are groundless. It is in the Dialectic that he is going to trot out the notion of antinomies he had already broached in the Dissertation.

Entirely separate from all this is the standard, old-fashioned organization of logic textbooks, which Kant decides he can use for his classificatory purposes. The customary understanding of the subject in Kant's day [and remember that during his many years as a privatdozent, he lectured regularly on Logic at Kőnigsberg] was that the fundamental elements of logic are concepts, judgments, and inferences. Concepts are class notions, formed by uniting several "notes" or characteristics in a single thought. So we unite the characteristics of "being a man" and "being unmarried" to form the concept "bachelor." Judgments, or propositions, are formed out of concepts by uniting them by means of the copula, "is." So we form the judgment, "A bachelor is unmarried," or "A bachelor is unhappy." [Never mind truth at this point.] Finally, we form inferences by putting together propositions into syllogisms.

Kant liked that way of arranging things, even though, as should now be clear [I will explain why in a moment], his arguments in the Deduction completely undermine this principle of organization. So he divided the Transcendental Logic into: The Analytic of Concepts, The Analytic of Principles [or judgments], and The Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason. Except that he needed someplace to talk about the notion of the Unconditioned, which is the root of all the trouble in traditional metaphysics, so he sticks in an extra chapter in the Dialectic called "The Concepts of Pure Reason."

Organizationally speaking, this whole thing is a godawful mess. But you can see what Kant was getting at. My old professor, Clarence Irving Lewis, in his great course on the Critique, actually used as a question on the final exam [which was most definitely not open book!] "Reproduce as much as you can of the Table of Contents of the Critique of Pure Reason." It turns out that the better you understand the book, the finer the detail in which you can conjure up the Table of Contents. There are not many books of philosophy that you could examine in that way!

The central, underlying problem, once we get past the three or four overlapping principles of organization, is this: Both the principle of organization of the Transcendental Logic and Kant's resolution of the conflict between Free Will and Determinism depend on the claim that we can form concepts prior to attempting to unite them into judgments. The idea is that we can then legitimately use the concepts to form judgments about things that lie beyond the limits of experience -- judgments that are, as Kant would say, problematic, or as we might say hypothetical. So, on this view, we can form the empty concept of an unconditioned being, or of a free will, or of a thing in itself. With such concepts, or Ideas as Kant calls them, we can form judgments that conform to the canons of logic -- judgments that are not self-contradictory. But since the component Ideas are empty, inasmuch as no sense experience is adequate to them, we can never ascertain whether the judgments we form with them are true or false. Any claim otherwise is an illusion.

However, in the depths of the Deduction [in A], as Kant is wrestling with the explication of the notion of synthesis, he concludes that concepts are actually rules. As he tells us, "a concept is always, as regards its form, something universal which serves as a rule." Thus, a concept has a propositional form. So concepts are not the basic building blocks of thought; propositions are. What is even worse, for his future architectonic plans, concepts are rules for doing something with a manifold of sensibility, which means that we cannot even hypothetically form judgments about things that could never appear in intuition [which is to say, about things as they are in themselves.] It is at least possible that there might be creatures whose forms of sensible intuition are different from mine, and hence who would, using the same rules, organize a different realm of appearances. But those rules, the Categories, could never, even hypothetically, apply to things in themselves, which are not manifolds of sensibility.

I am going to return to all of these problems, and some others besides, when I come to talk briefly about Kant's ethical theory [if I ever get out of the First Critique!]. Now it is time to see how Kant completes the argument of the Analytic, using the deeper understanding of synthesis as a rule-governed reproduction in imagination that he has arrived at in the Subjective Deduction.

A QUICK REPLY TO ENGLISH JERK

Before I continue with today's Part of Reading The Critique, let me respond to a question asked yesterday by English Jerk [I will never get used to these web handles.] Here is what he/she/they/it say/s: "Another question we might raise is the one Meillasoux opens his interesting book After Finitude with: If we accept that Kant has grounded the natural sciences, what happens when the natural sciences are capable of determining (through carbon-dating and the like) that specific spatio-temporal objects existed before the human species? If the world was timeless before there were people to impose temporal structure on it, how did we ever arrive at the moment in which such people could come into being?"



This is an interesting question, which reveals a fundamental but natural misunderstanding of what Kant is saying. Now, to pose the question, it is not necessary to invoke carbon-dating and other fancy stuff. Let me instead talk about the birth of my big sister, Barbara, which occurred on August 24th [I think], 1930, three and a half years before my own birth. How on earth can that event be dated if it took place before I was even alive? Well, you might reply, your mother was alive [and present at the event, after all.] But Kant does not begin his argument with the premise, "Mrs. Wolff can attach the 'I think" to any of her representations." He begins with the premise, "The 'I think" can attach to any of my representations." it is not someone's consciousness that exhibits a unity -- it is my consciousness that exhibits a unity. Kant's argument is essentially, ungetoverably first-personal [a fact that will cause monster problems for his ethical theory, although he seems not ever to have realized that.]



But then, how can I talk about my sister as having been born in 1930, and about my parents as having been married nine years before that, and of my father as having been born twenty-nine years before my sister, and so forth, never mind about the French Revolution and the Roman Empire and Plato and dinosaurs and all?



Well, think about it, Kant tells us [this he really did understand, and thought about, as did Hume, by the way.] Every judgment I make about things distant from me in time or in space [such as my Paris apartment or the Crab Nebula] is grounded in a present perception, from which I reason on the basis of scientific laws. Indeed, connection by laws to a present perception, Kant will tell us later on in the Critique, is the definition of what it is to be empirically real. So, my statements about Rome or Old Regime France or my sister's birth all start from some present perception -- a bit of old wall or a coin dug up in Italy, or a yellowed document in the Bibliotheque National, or a hand-written notebook apparently recording my mother's experiences of Barbara's first year. My statements about the formation and the evolution of the earth start with laboratory observations which I interpret as evidence of something that theories tell me is radioactive decay of unstable elements. All of it, all of it, starts with some present perception.



On the one hand, this is extraordinary. The entire spatio-temporal spread of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present, stands on a diversity of perceptions now present to my mind? But what else could it stand on, if it is ineluctably I who am asserting the propositions in question?



In this respect, Kant comes down entirely on the side of the Empiricists in the great Empiricist Rationalist debate. This is what it means to give up, once and for all, the claim that we can have knowledge of the independently real. "Scientific realism," ass a contrary position in the 20th century came to be called, is, according to Kant, wrong, indeed, wrong-headed. The doctrine known as Phenomenalism when I was a youth is, he tells us, the correct way of understanding our knowledge of the physical universe.



OK. Back to the Critique.

READING THE CRITIQUE PART FIFTEEN

And so, after a break of one day, we return to the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Attentive readers of what I have written thus far may have noticed a curious consequence that seems to flow from the position Kant has staked out. Strange as it may seem, Kant appears to have committed himself to the view that the laws of physics derive from the human mind, Surely that cannot be what he intended! Quite to the contrary, that is precisely what Kant intended, and in two striking passages near the end of the First Edition Deduction, he says so flat out. Here are the two crucial passages, the first at A125, the second at A 126:

"Thus the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had we not ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there."

"Thus the understanding is something more than a power of formulating rules through comparison of appearances [as Hume, in a sense, had suggested - ed.]; it is itself the lawgiver of nature."

The understanding is the lawgiver of nature. This is a simply extraordinary statement, and Kant means it to be. In the process of reproducing a diversity of sense contents in Imagination, thereby imposing on them a temporal order that is unified and necessary as a consequence of their being reproduced in accordance with a rule, I create nature. I can know a priori, with universality and necessity, that appearances, which is to say tables and chairs and planets and atoms, will obey the Law of Cause and Effect, precisely because I have myself imposed that Law upon them. It is the condition of the possibility of my being conscious, and of my consciousness having the unity that it in fact does.

Even before we move on to the completion of the argument in the Analogies of Experience, there is a great deal that needs to be said about Kant's dramatic claim. First of all, it is a radically subjective claim, in a certain sense. It is not we who are conscious -- it is I who am conscious. Cogito. Immediately, a question thrusts itself upon us, a question that in the eighteenth century was very far from the minds of even the most sophisticated philosophers: How do we know that everyone's mind has in it the same structure of Categories? Can we even ask such a question? Could the Categories of the Understanding be culturally variable, could they evolve historically, or could they be ideologically encoded, or racially encoded, or differ according to gender? Every one of these questions has been asked in the nineteenth century and subsequently, and every one of them has given rise to a literature. But these questions seem never to have so much as occurred to Kant, nor indeed did the corresponding questions occur to Hume, or to Locke, or to Descartes or Leibniz or Spinoza.

Second, a rather more interior question, if I may put it that way. Even if we accept without cavil the radically subjective, even solipsistic implication of Kant's argument, there is another question that ought to puzzle us. The Law of Cause and Effect asserts that all objects in space and all events in time are in thoroughgoing interaction with one another according to the laws of gravitation articulated by Newton. This can be so, on Kant's view, only if the mind, through the activity of synthesis, imposes the rules that are the Categories on a total manifold of sensibility, thereby producing the entire temporal run of events, past, present, and future. Now, I, as an empirical object, a being having a certain birth, life, and eventual death, occupy only one vanishingly small interval of the world-historical temporal sequence, and yet it is, according to Kant, my mind, my Understanding [it helps to put it in caps], that synthesizes the entire causally determined sequence of which my life is the merest proper part. Can Kant really mean that?

He pretty clearly did not put it to himself in quite that fashion. How could he have done so seriously? And yet, not only is this an immediately implication of the theory he has put forward, he actually, in a strange fashion, needs this extraordinary claim in order to carry out, later on, his planned resolution of the conflict between free will and determinism. We shall get to that in time [assuming that I do not totally lose all of you before then.]

Kant does address in one way this puzzle about my relation as a particular human being to the world order of causes and effects in space and time. His answer gave rise to what Erich Adickes called "the theory of double affection." It might be useful to say a few words about what that is all about. "Affection" is Kant's term for the impact of independent things on my sensibility. Now, in our ordinary thinking about the origins of our sense perceptions, we understand that physical objects interact with our sense organs, producing sensations. Air vibrating at certain pitches generates the sensation of tones, photons entering the eye strike the retinal cells and trigger electrochemical reactions that we experience as light. That sort of thing. All of these interactions take place in space and time, in what Kant calls the realm of appearance. But Kant also maintains that things in themselves affect our sensibility, producing the diversity or manifold of sensations that we reproduce in Imagination according to the rules of synthesis, thereby forming or constructing eyes and ears and brain cells and optic nerves and air and photons and everything else that is involved in ordinary empirical perception. What is the relation between these two processes?

Kant struggled with this question, which arises immediately out of the theory of the Deduction. One of his answers was to posit a full-scale doubling of "affektionen." To put it is simply and nakedly as I can, things in themselves affect our Sensibility, generation a manifold of pure intuition in space and time [not a manifold the pure form of which is space and time, but a separate pure manifold.] This pure manifold, which can, he says, be thought of as a manifold of relations, without sensory content, is actually the object of pure mathematical reasoning, giving rise to Geometry. It is also the subject of a priori synthesis, thereby producing a world of physical objects in space and tome which, sure enough as Newton claimed, have only such spatio-temporal properties as size, shape, density, and velocity. Among the many objects thus created by synthesis is the human body itself, with its sense organs. There is now a second affection of those sense organs by physical objects, which produces the sensory perceptions that we know ahs sights, sounds, etc. These perceptions do indeed obey the laws of association studied by Hume. But the tendency of this manifold of sense perceptions to exhibit such patterns of association, which Kant calls "the affinity of the manifold," is grounded in the (logically and epistemologically) prior pure synthesis of the pure manifold.

This, as clearly as I can state it, is Kant's attempt to sort out what he has committed himself to, and it is pretty clearly rather iffy. That is one reason for his oddly ambivalent statement in the Preface of the First Edition, quoted above.

Ok, enough for one day. Tomorrow we shall tackle the Second Analogy and see how Kant brings his argument to completion.

JESUITS AND JANSENISTS

I am a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish. It is lively, well-written, and gives me insight into thinking on the right. Sullivan is an English Catholic HIV-positive gay conservative man, and each of these aspects of his being plays an important role in his blog. [He also has a beard, and makes a big deal about beards, but that, I am afraid, leaves me cold.]

Sullivan is extremely critical of those whom he calls Christianists -- the fundamentalist young earth end times creationist rabidly anti-gay born-again Protestants who seem to have captured the Republican Party. I am fascinated by this animus toward people who might, from a suitable distance, be mistaken for his co-religionists, because it echoes a tension in Christianity that is literally two millennia old.

I have always associated the tension with the feud between the Jansenists and Jesuits in France -- the Jesuits, worldly, educated, flexible, intellectual, the Jansenists rigid, unyielding, narrow in their view of the world. More recently, I saw a version of this old struggle when Zeno Vendler, a Jesuit priest fleeing from Stalinist Hungary, arrived in Boston to study Philosophy at Harvard. The Boston Irish clergy [Jesuits, to be sure], were narrow and rigid in their rejection of anything more modern philosophically than late St. Thomas, and Zeno, in despair, left the church, married a nice Catholic girl named Helen Hennessey [who went on to become, as Helen Vendler, a famous literary critic], and had a fine career as an American philosopher. I have always thought that if Zeno had come to a city dominated by French Catholics, he might have remained a priest.

The split in the Republican Party between old fashioned flacks for capital and the new-fangled crazies is of course currently center stage in presidential politics, What makes Sullivan's version of it interesting is the connection in his world view to the split in Christianity.

Take a look at the blog. It is worth a read.

A BRIEF PAUSE

I have just read through what I have written thus far on Kant, and I cannot believe how much I have said so quickly. I very much fear I am writing it faster than my faithful coterie of readers can absorb it. So I think I will take a break for one day to let the dust settle, before pressing forward with the completion of the central argument of the Critique.



Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann has edged out perennial State Fair and Straw Poll favorite Ron Paul, thereby causing Tim Pawlenty to drop out of the race. I should imagine Gingrich, Santorum, Cain and other minor candidates will either officially or unofficially throw in the towel pretty quickly. The big news, if you follow that sort of thing, is the entry of Rick Perry of Texas into the race. Perry appears to be a dumb, charmless, inflexible, Christian fanatic version of George W. Bush, if you can imagine such an animal. The coming street fight between him and Bachmann should be great fun to watch. My money is on Bachmann, because she is, if anything, crazier than Perry, and this is the season for crazy in the Republican world.



Perry has just wrapped up his much touted but lightly attended prayer meeting in Texas. The cast of preachers invited to take part in the festivities includes some truly mesmerizing characters. It is hard to pick a favorite -- the chap who identified Oprah as the Harlot, The Whore of Babylon? or maybe the one who warned that the Statue of Liberty is a demon foisted on us by French Masons? My choice for winner is the earnest preacher who informed his congregation one day that the Japanese emperor had sexual intercourse with the Sun Goddess, whereupon the Japanese stock market went down and has never recovered. [No, I am not making any of this up.]



I think we must face the fact that we live in a country perhaps thirty percent or so of whose citizens are, by any reasonable criterion, certifiably insane. I have a secret dream, which I shall reveal here [thereby making it no longer secret, of course.] I would like Bachmann to beat back the challenge of Perry and emerge as the sole alternative to Romney in the Republican primaries. I would like to see the two of them approach the Convention with large blocs of delegates, Romney in the lead, but with neither able to put together a majority. At the Convention, I would like to see the powers behind the throne pull some strings to make sure Bachmann does not win, driving her and her rabid supporters to bolt the party and form a new American Christian Freedom Party, thereupon ensuring Democratic victories in November 2012.



Meanwhile, the rest of us can work our butts off trying to elect as many progressives to local, state, and national office as possible.



Well, so much for idle speculation. Tomorrow, on to the Analogies of Experience.