« La vérité consiste soit dans la découverte des rapports des idées considérées comme telles, soit dans la conformité de nos idées des objets aux objets tels qu’ils existent réellement.»

David Hume, Traité de la nature humaine

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GRILLE DE LECTURE

Qu’est-ce que la vérité ? Question philosophique inépuisable. Toute l’histoire de la pensée s’est attachée à décliner la vérité sous des modes variés. Avant la philosophie médiévale et moderne, Aristote avait peut-être fourni des bases de la définition de Hume en enseignant que le vrai et le faux ne sont pas dans les choses mais dans la pensée. Ainsi, la vérité comme adéquation de l’esprit avec la réalité,  la conformité de l’intellect avec le réel. Connaître cette conformité, c’est donc connaître la vérité, selon Hume.

Nous trouvons-nous en présence d’une conception matérielle de la vérité ? Kant affirme à la suite de Hume que « c’est dans l’accord avec les lois de l’entendement que consiste le formel de la vérité.»Si la vérité matérielle est l’accord de la pensée avec la chose considérée, la vérité formelle, elle, relève du principe de non contradiction qui met en jeu les lois universelles de l’entendement humain. Quant à Hume, il semble clairement faire signe vers l’accord de nos idées avec la réalité. Tout compte fait, Hume ne doit pas être si facilement rangé parmi les matérialistes.

Au-delà de ces définitions, l’on peut bien se demander si le vrai existe. La vérité est-elle une essence ou une production de l’esprit humain ? Le relativisme des Lumières invite à questionner davantage la vérité. C’est d’ailleurs ce qui a conduit Mucchellli Villani à dire que « la réalité est toujours réalité des choses, et la vérité est vérité des hommes ». En ce sens, la vérité est fonction de l’homme qui tente de l’appréhender. Elle dépend de nos idées, des idées que nous avons des objets qui existent réellement. S’il n’y a du vrai que selon l’esprit humain, il va sans dire que cette grille de lecture ne vaut que pour celui qui l’a écrite.

Emmanuel AVONYO, op

Pensée du 01 Décembre

L’academos

Sommaire

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[1] Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la raison pure, trad. Tremesaygues & Pacaud, PUF, 1997, p. 60.

Kant’s Formula of Humanity states: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” A derivation of the FH is to treat a person in a way that the person consents to be treated. Kant’s argument against lying is encapsulated on page 37 of The Grounding; he ends the second paragraph concerning duties to other with: “[persons should] be esteemed only as beings who must themselves be able to hold the very same action as an end”. Kant’s argument works very well in world in which everyone willingly follows the same universal laws, but falls short when applying the principal to any prophylactic rules designed to deter transgressions at the expense of other people. If there existed a world in which every person followed Kant’s FH, then the consent of another person on another’s actions concerning that person would be implied and not an issue. Kant proposes a world that paradoxically implodes on itself. When examined upon a large scale, the conjecture seems to fit, but once detailed situations are applied to the FH and its progeny, cracks materialize in its practical application.
Due to the existence of persons that will transgress Kant’s FH, we as a society governed by laws are forced to break Kant’s derived hypothesis that “a person should be treated in a way that the person consents”. Many violent criminal offenders do not consent to incarceration and being used as means to reach an “end”, that being a safer society. According to Kant, criminals exploit universal maxims in order for personal gain. The criminal wills the universal law that men should not steal from one another so that he can steal. If the criminal did will that stealing be a universal law, the law’s existence would nullify his role as a thief because larceny would not exist if theft is status quo. Although the criminal does will universal honesty in order that he might exploit it, he does not however, consent to being used as a “means” to establish a safer community. It is a rare occurrence when a convicted criminal is satisfied with a sentence of incarceration.
Governments, in particular, are responsible for many transgressions of the FH. Ostensibly governments are in power in order to rule a group of people insofar as to maximize the country’s benefits and to maintain a quality of life for the citizens of the country. The United States government has policies in place that ultimately value certain people over others. Secret Service agents use themselves as means in order to protect the President. A Secret Service agent neglects the duty to oneself to guarantee the preservation of another person’s life. The President and his cabinet are constantly aware of the men surrounding them who are essentially “means” to ensure the officials well being.
Parenting a child also exists an area in which the FH’s application falls short. An eleven- year old child will surely disagree with many decisions made by his/her parents regarding the child’s life. If I deny my child the permission to drive my car when she is 11 but she desperately believes that she has a right to drive my car, she is not holding the same action as an end that I am. The Formula of Humanity presupposes a ubiquitous rationale in all humans and does not grant exceptions to varying degrees of cognitive ability. My daughter might verily believe that her desire to drive at age 11 is perfectly reasonable, but under the FH there is no logical refutation to her egregious belief. If I respond to her request with “I am more experienced in life therefore your reasoning is faulty and mine presides” (The spoken rebuttal would not regurgitate verbatim the aforementioned quotation, but I have condensed the “essence” of my hypothetical response to my daughter’s hypothetical request for brevity’s sake), which seems perfectly legitimate in a parental context, however, the child thinks the response is just as irrational as I think her request. Kant’s assumption of the ability for all humans to access a state of pure reasoning ability ultimately weakens the FH.
The FH also fails to adequately resolve situations in which people are consenting to treatment and are willing to treat others in the same way, but the people acting are dastardly and conniving and contemplating insidious ends. For example, my second cousin is a drive-thru engineer at Taco Bell. Last week, I helped her steal her ex-husband’s glass eye and prosthetic legs, so she owed me a favor. She told me to visit her drive up window and she would “hook me up” with anything on the menu. I decide to eat and stop by Taco Bell and receive a free Nacho Bell Grande with extra fire sauce from my cousin for my services in her revenge plot against her ex-husband. Both my cousin and I are co-conspirators in the other’s indiscretion. I willingly assumed the role as a means in my cousin’s malicious ploy and she was a means to my free lunch. Neither action has any redeemable moral trait.
Instances in which the FH falls short are infinite; simple qualifications of most situations can render the Formula of Humanity inapplicable to those specific situations. Kant subliminally contradicts himself with the proposal of the FH. Kant’s law for generating a universal law from a personal maxim predisposes the FH vulnerability to criticism. A liar bases his mendacity on the general acceptance of honesty within a society. If all people in a hypothetical world lie, then lying would be universal and the hypothetical world could not possibly exist if the maxim of lying was made a universal law. The Formula of Humanity, although a positive conception, is also paradoxically constructed. Our world cannot be entirely subsistent on the Formula of Humanity. The FH is founded on a rigid dichotomy between moral correctness and moral corruption. Actions and decisions are inevitably fraught with ambiguities and “gray areas”. If Kant’s liar is basing his falsehoods on the expected probity of his fellow men, then Kant is basing the FH on the prevalence of moral corruptness within humanity and the ability to reason away from immorality. The FH is a product of abject human actions and cannot exist without them. Kant founded his Formula of Humanity on the human intellect’s ability to reason purely, however “pure reason” is also a law that is susceptible to an exposition of serious flaws.
In Kantian Ethics, Pure Reason will lead all humans to the same answer after proper deliberation on a correct action. Pure reason is a faculty which all human beings are endowed and Kant relies heavily on the belief that every human has some innate ability to reason. However, as the situations noted above elucidated, the FH loses a large part of its efficacy in meticulously detailed situations. The Formula of Humanity is a wonderful abstract notion, but it was developed under the auspices of a supposed inherent reasoning ability in all humans. It is impossible to infer from a select number of people’s ability to reason that all humans have the same capacities for reasoning. At what age does a child ascertain the ability to reason purely? My eleven years old daughter is capable of very logical reasoning in many areas, but in certain areas her maturity level prevents her from reasoning as an adult. In twenty years, I will have many of the same mental capacities, although some will have improved and others deteriorated. Pure Reason is as recondite a notion as Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, neither able to be fully realized. Pure Reason is untenable and manifests itself in varying degrees in different people. If we as humans could rely on Pure Reason alone to guide our ethical decisions, then the FH would be presupposed.
Kant’s ambition in formulating universal laws under which all humans should act blinded him to the intricacies of situations that contradict his proposed applications of the “universals”. His propositions are brilliant, however their existence is only possible in a thought experiment or one of Kant’s hypothetical universes. The substructure of the FH is Pure Reason, and Kant leaves himself open to detractors by his assumption that pure reason is also a “universal”. Kant disregarded the fact that declaring any law or concept as “universal” typically opens a Pandora’s Box of dissension and the ambition that prompts such declarations also obscures the declarer’s perception of details. The existence of the FH also implies its incompleteness. By the Formula of Humanity being in existence it is necessarily unrealizable.

Works Cited

Kant, Immanuel. Ethical Philosophy. Ellington Translation, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company), Second Edition, 1994.

“Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Königsberg, Prussia (Now Kaliningrad, Russia).  He was of Scottish descent and had a Pietist upbringing and education.  (Pietism is a form of Protestantism similar to Methodism, i.e. very conservative.)  He went to the University of Königsberg, where he received his PhD.  He taught as a privatdozent, which is a private teacher or tutor, paid by his students.  This meant a poor life, boardinghouses, and bachelorhood.

He began with an interest in science — physics, astronomy, geology, biology.  In fact, he introduced the nebular hypothesis, suggesting that originally, swirling gases condensed into the sun and the planets — basically, what we understand to be the reality today.  He also reintroduces Lucretius’s idea of evolution of plant and animal life.

In 1781, he published the Critique of Pure Reason.  Critique means a critical or careful analysis, and pure reason means reason which leads to knowledge that doesn’t require experiential proof, what is also called a priori (before-hand) knowledge.

He said he had been “awakened from his dogmatic slumbers” by reading Hume.  This is frequently misunderstood to mean that he was outraged.  Actually, he said that he had been dogmatically accepting of the traditional ideas about reason.  Hume enlightened him!  However, it is also true that Hume challenged him, in a sense, to rescue such concepts as cause and effect, which Kant felt were essential to the existence of science.  He took as his life’s  task to saving of the universe from Hume’s pervasive skepticism.

First, he makes a distinction between a posteriori and a priori knowledge:

It is a question worth investigating, whether there exists any knowledge independent of experience and all sense impressions.  Such knowledge is called a priori and is distinguished from a posteriori knowledge which has its sources in experience.  That there is genuine a priori knowledge, that we can advance independent of all experience, is shown by the brilliant example of mathematics….

Although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises entirely from experience.  For it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions and that which our own faculty of knowing (incited by impressions) supplies from itself–a supplement to impressions which we do not distinguish from that raw material (i.e. impressions) until long practice has roused our attention and rendered us capable of separating one from the other.

What then are these a priori faculties of our minds?  The first stage of mind’s operation on experience is the transcendental aesthetic,  which states that all sense experience is synthesized “through” the concepts of time and space.

Space does not represent any property of things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relation to one another….  Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense.  It is the subjective condition of sensibility under which alone outer perception is possible for us.

Since the capacity to be affected by objects must precede all perception of these objects, it can readily be understood how the form of all appearances (i.e., space) can be given prior to all perceptions, and so exist in the mind a priori;  and how, as a pure intuition, in which all objects must be determined, it can contain, prior to all experience, principles which determine the relations of these objects.  It is, therefore, solely from the human standpoint that we can speak of space, of extended things.  If we depart from the subjective, the representation of space stands for nothing whatsoever.

Time is a purely subjective condition of our human perception, and, in itself, apart from the subject, is nothing….  What we are maintaining is the empirical reality of time, its objective validity of all objects which allow of ever being given to our senses.    Since our perception is always sensible (i.e., by the senses), no object can ever be given to us in experience which does not conform to the condition of time.  On the other hand, we deny to time any claim to absolute reality; that is to say, we deny that it belongs to things absolutely, as their condition or property independently of any reference to the form of our perception.  Properties that belong to things in themselves can never be given to us through the senses.  This, then, is what constitutes the ideality of time.

So time and space are necessary to perception, even though they themselves cannot be perceived apart from the events “in” them.  The next step is the  transcendental analytic,  which says that the mind applies certain categories of thought to ideas.  Without these categories, Kant says, we would not be able to think at all, and Hume couldn’t have come up with his arguments.  Hume, for example, felt that cause and effect were not objectively real; Kant says right! — they are a priori, in the mind:

1.  Quantity:  unity, plurality, totality.

2.  Quality:  reality, negation, limitation.

3.  Relation:  substance and accidents, cause and effect, reciprocity between active and passive.

4.  Modality:  possible-impossible, existence-nonexistence, necessity-contingency.

Finally comes the transcendental dialectic.  Kant believed that the mind seeks complete knowledge.  But it is limited to dealing with phenomena, appearances, only.  It can’t reach to noumena, the thing-in-itself.  Phenomena are all you have, but they are not real; noumena are real, but you can’t have them.  So, to discover that real world, we try to construct it.  Unfortunately, we err by trying to use the categories (logic), “designed” for phenomena, on the ultimate reality!  So we end up with contradictions that are irreconcilable.  Regarding cause and effect and free will:

If, however, we may legitimately take an object in two senses, namely, as phenomena and as thing-in-itself; and if the principle of causality applies to things only as phenomena and not as noumena, then we can, without any contradiction, think one and the same thing when phenomenal as necessarily conforming to the principle of causality and so far not free, and yet, in itself not subject to that principle and therefore free.

Suppose morality necessarily presupposed freedom of the will while speculative reason had proved that such freedom cannot even be thought.  In such case freedom, and with it morality, would have to make room for the mechanical interpretation of nature.  But our critique has revealed our inevitable ignorance of things-in-themselves, has limited our knowledge to mere phenomena.  So, as morality requires only that freedom should not entail a contradiction, there is no reason why freedom whould be denied to will, considered as a thing-in-itself, merely because it must be denied to it as a phenomenon.

Ultimately, Kant found that the existence of God, the soul, and ultimate reality is not something you can prove, because proof is based on phenomena and the categories.  Instead, they are heuristic, that is, we believe in these things because they are useful to us!  In saving science and religion from Hume, he proved that they had to be taken on faith!  Scholars and churchmen on all sides of the issues criticized the Critique, which ironically guaranteed its success.  Kant had no censorship problems to worry about at the time, because Frederick the Great — a brilliant man himself — ruled Prussia at that time.  Unfortunately for Kant and many others, he died in 1786.

(A note on Frederick the Great:  The King of Prussia, including much of Germany as well, he was, besides a consummate leader and politician, an accomplished philosopher and a passionate amateur musician.  He corresponded with Voltaire and Rousseau, and Bach wrote “A Musical Offering” for him, based on a melody the King had challenged him with.  He wrote a number of books, including A History of My Times and The Anti-Machiavelli)

In 1788, Kant wrote the Critique of Practical Reason.  Practical reason refers to the making of moral decisions.  In this book, he argues that everyone has a conscience, a moral law within their souls, not unlike the categories of the Critique of Pure Reason.  This moral law he calls the Categorical Imperative, which is phrased two ways.  The first is a variation on the Golden Rule:  Whatever you do, consider what kind of world this would be if everybody did the same.  The other is a little deeper:  Treat people (including oneself) only as ends, never as means to an end.  Never use them, we would say today.

In order to have morality, Kant believed we needed free will.  If you can’t make choices, how could you be responsible?  If you aren’t responsible for anything you do, like an animal or a robot, then what you do is neither bad nor good!  Also, he felt we needed the idea of immortality:  Since justice rarely happens within a lifetime, we need life after death to take care of that.  And, in order for eternal life to exist, or free will, or good and bad at all, we need to believe in God.

Notice that he doesn’t say that, first God exists, therefore….  He is actually saying that, although we can never prove the existence of God (or immortality, or free will, or good and bad), we must act as if he (and they) existed.  Religious thinkers of the time did not care for this way of thinking at all!

Kant wrote a good deal more.  In 1790, he wrote the Critique of Judgement, regarding judgements of beauty.  He notes that our sense of beauty is based on feeling, not reason.  We seem to “see” the harmony, the power, the miraculous in some things.  It is as if God so arranged things!

In 1793, when he was 69 years old, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone came out.  Here he argues (unlike Hobbes and unlike Rousseau) that we are born with the potential for both good and bad.  He does acknowledge, though, that a great deal of evil comes out of civilization, rather than our primitive nature.  In fact, a lot of what we now consider bad was probably originally necessary for survival in primitive conditions!

He also said that, although there is an inborn moral sense, it must be developed by moral instruction.  For this reason, he believes that religion is necessary — although he also points out that religion shouldn’t be dogmatic, and that beliefs such as original sin, the divinity of Christ, and the efficacy of prayer are mere superstitions.

In 1795, he wrote On Perpetual Peace, outlining the basis for international law.  In 1798, he came out with The Conflict of Faculties, arguing for the importance of academic freedom.  He died February 12, 1804, after long illness, and was buried ceremoniously in Königsberg Castle.  Over his grave is written

The starry heavens above me;

The moral law within me.”

The History Of Psychology, Part 2: The Rebirth

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥

Eating meat.
Five months ago, today.
And I feel great.

At first it was entirely a personal decision. But now the ethical judgements are starting. And I truly don’t want to judge people based on their own choices.

But I’m finding that Kant is haunting me and as much as I think a lot more about what I’m eating, I’m also thinking a lot more about what other people are eating.

My body feels great. Now I need my mind to feel the same.

So, today, while I was eating a rueben at Applebee’s, I was thumbing through the latest edition of the American Poetry Review. When it comes to that journal, it’s kind of hit or miss with me. Anyhow, I happened across something that touches on my aesthetic beliefs about horror in literature. APR republished an old essay by William Carlos Williams, entitled “The Practice.” Basically, Williams is reflected back on his other profession (the one that paid his bills), medicine. Basically, he suggests that without his practice of medicine, he wouldn’t have been able to write. Basically, making daily house calls kept him in touch with other people’s humanity, and that, in the end, fueled his writing.

That is why as a writer I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man?

It’s something I always circle back to. People make literature interesting, as language can only go so far. In the end, it’s always Achilles or Hamlet that keeps us reading, not the meter Homer or Shakespeare wrote in. The drum I often beat about horror is: in order to understand or comprehend inhumanity, you also have to understand and comprehend humanity. Squirting blood can only get you so far, and it’s the people written about that keeps readers reading. Have an uninteresting character, and you have an uninteresting story. If we adapt this to poetry, it’s a matter of voice and persona, in most cases. You have a listless voice, and you have a listless poem.

But that’s not the all of it. APR also published some other material on Williams, some of it from Robert Lowell, and then there’s Christian C. Thompson’s essay “The Science of Subjectivity.” Thompson basically seeks to examine Williams through the Lens of Immanuel Kant. But, those greater points aside, I found the third paragraph of the essay and instructive reminder of what it is to be a writer:

The serious poet — whether he or she realizes it or not — is a social scientist. On a daily basis the poet is inundated by a vast amount of cultural data which excites the sensibility, is synthesized and stored by the brain, until on occasion, something happens–sometimes immediately, somtimes weeks, months, or years later, which results in a poem.

As writers, to an extent, we are the sum of our experiences. Even if fiction is largely contrived, there’s still some form of observation going on, some sort of stimulus that has warranted a response. For Williams, it seems, this came by way of his patients and his house calls. And, it makes one wonder, at least, what might happen to horror writers if they took these observations, this sort of writing ethic to heart.

Critique relates to values, not to objects. The objective world is given in phenomena, but what gives the given? This is the domain of values. Values condition the appearance of the objective world. It follows that the method of critique must be transcendental, since the transcendental is concerned not with the objects of experience but with the conditions which render these objects knowable.

In this sense, critique is anti-dogmatic. Dogmatism is the name Kant gives to the uncritical use of existing values, or what Nietzsche called the “higher values”, to make a philosophical claim. A dogmatic philosophy makes a claim about the world on the basis of concepts the principles informing which remain presupposed. Critique entails not simply an interrogation of these presuppositions but the genesis of a new object form distinct from both knowledge and experience.

Critique thus has two components: it functions to limit the claims of philosophical reason, interrogating the pre-existing values informing it, while also constructing a new field of investigation according to new values, a field in which the object is not “always already” conditioned by values. This is the theoretical “objectivity” which critique itself makes possible. Critique, then, is paradoxical by nature: it states that we can only create something genuinely new in terms of self-imposed constraint. An intellectual impulse, dependent on the values which condition the objects of consciousness, is constrained so that a new unconditioned form of objectivity is revealed.

Deleuze writes that the Husserlian “noematic content” relating to the objects of thought or perception “is not given in perception” but “involves an ideational objective unity as the intentional correlate of the act of perception”. This objective unity hovers over objects like an impassable cloud, allowing them to be thought or perceived, but unthinkable and imperceptible in itself.

Critical thinking does not begin freely, it is not a product of free will but of constraint. It follows that there thus must be something in thought which resists the will to think (which is the “free” will par excellence). This unthinking “thing” has a long cultural heritage. It has been identified with evil, the body, death, sin. Psychoanalysis understands it as the “object cause” of desire, as the horrific or terrifying longed for object of the unconscious drive. We will understand it, however, in purely formal, i.e. theoretical, terms as the constitution of critical objectivity.

Deleuze characterises the transcendental field as being composed of a “pure stream of a-subjective consciousness” prior to the world of experience, prior to the world of subjective selves and empirical objects. Following Bergson, he says the a-subjective stream can be thought of as a beam of light. Once the beam hits a surface, it is reflected back and becomes visible. The visible conditions the appearance of visual objects. But what constitutes the visible is the interruption of the beam, and is invisible, strictly speaking. “As long as consciousness traverses the transcendental field at an infinite speed everywhere diffused, nothing is able to reveal it. It is expressed, in fact, only when it is reflected on a subject that refers it to objects.” Visibility and reflectivity are derived and secondary with respect to the obscurity which renders visible. This is why Deleuze was so concerned with cinema. Cinematic forms for Deleuze were critical objects.

Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Königsberg, Prussia (Now Kaliningrad, Russia).  He was of Scottish descent and had a Pietist upbringing and education.  (Pietism is a form of Protestantism similar to Methodism, i.e. very conservative.)  He went to the University of Königsberg, where he received his PhD.  He taught as a privatdozent, which is a private teacher or tutor, paid by his students.  This meant a poor life, boardinghouses, and bachelorhood.

He began with an interest in science — physics, astronomy, geology, biology.  In fact, he introduced the nebular hypothesis, suggesting that originally, swirling gases condensed into the sun and the planets — basically, what we understand to be the reality today.  He also reintroduces Lucretius’s idea of evolution of plant and animal life.

In 1781, he published the Critique of Pure Reason.  Critique means a critical or careful analysis, and pure reason means reason which leads to knowledge that doesn’t require experiential proof, what is also called a priori (before-hand) knowledge.

He said he had been “awakened from his dogmatic slumbers” by reading Hume.  This is frequently misunderstood to mean that he was outraged.  Actually, he said that he had been dogmatically accepting of the traditional ideas about reason.  Hume enlightened him!  However, it is also true that Hume challenged him, in a sense, to rescue such concepts as cause and effect, which Kant felt were essential to the existence of science.  He took as his life’s  task to saving of the universe from Hume’s pervasive skepticism.

First, he makes a distinction between a posteriori and a priori knowledge:

It is a question worth investigating, whether there exists any knowledge independent of experience and all sense impressions.  Such knowledge is called a priori and is distinguished from a posteriori knowledge which has its sources in experience.  That there is genuine a priori knowledge, that we can advance independent of all experience, is shown by the brilliant example of mathematics….

Although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises entirely from experience.  For it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions and that which our own faculty of knowing (incited by impressions) supplies from itself–a supplement to impressions which we do not distinguish from that raw material (i.e. impressions) until long practice has roused our attention and rendered us capable of separating one from the other.

What then are these a priori faculties of our minds?  The first stage of mind’s operation on experience is the transcendental aesthetic,  which states that all sense experience is synthesized “through” the concepts of time and space.

Space does not represent any property of things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relation to one another….  Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense.  It is the subjective condition of sensibility under which alone outer perception is possible for us.

Since the capacity to be affected by objects must precede all perception of these objects, it can readily be understood how the form of all appearances (i.e., space) can be given prior to all perceptions, and so exist in the mind a priori;  and how, as a pure intuition, in which all objects must be determined, it can contain, prior to all experience, principles which determine the relations of these objects.  It is, therefore, solely from the human standpoint that we can speak of space, of extended things.  If we depart from the subjective, the representation of space stands for nothing whatsoever.

Time is a purely subjective condition of our human perception, and, in itself, apart from the subject, is nothing….  What we are maintaining is the empirical reality of time, its objective validity of all objects which allow of ever being given to our senses.    Since our perception is always sensible (i.e., by the senses), no object can ever be given to us in experience which does not conform to the condition of time.  On the other hand, we deny to time any claim to absolute reality; that is to say, we deny that it belongs to things absolutely, as their condition or property independently of any reference to the form of our perception.  Properties that belong to things in themselves can never be given to us through the senses.  This, then, is what constitutes the ideality of time.

So time and space are necessary to perception, even though they themselves cannot be perceived apart from the events “in” them.  The next step is the  transcendental analytic,  which says that the mind applies certain categories of thought to ideas.  Without these categories, Kant says, we would not be able to think at all, and Hume couldn’t have come up with his arguments.  Hume, for example, felt that cause and effect were not objectively real; Kant says right! — they are a priori, in the mind:

1.  Quantity:  unity, plurality, totality.

2.  Quality:  reality, negation, limitation.

3.  Relation:  substance and accidents, cause and effect, reciprocity between active and passive.

4.  Modality:  possible-impossible, existence-nonexistence, necessity-contingency.

Finally comes the transcendental dialectic.  Kant believed that the mind seeks complete knowledge.  But it is limited to dealing with phenomena, appearances, only.  It can’t reach to noumena, the thing-in-itself.  Phenomena are all you have, but they are not real; noumena are real, but you can’t have them.  So, to discover that real world, we try to construct it.  Unfortunately, we err by trying to use the categories (logic), “designed” for phenomena, on the ultimate reality!  So we end up with contradictions that are irreconcilable.  Regarding cause and effect and free will:

If, however, we may legitimately take an object in two senses, namely, as phenomena and as thing-in-itself; and if the principle of causality applies to things only as phenomena and not as noumena, then we can, without any contradiction, think one and the same thing when phenomenal as necessarily conforming to the principle of causality and so far not free, and yet, in itself not subject to that principle and therefore free.

Suppose morality necessarily presupposed freedom of the will while speculative reason had proved that such freedom cannot even be thought.  In such case freedom, and with it morality, would have to make room for the mechanical interpretation of nature.  But our critique has revealed our inevitable ignorance of things-in-themselves, has limited our knowledge to mere phenomena.  So, as morality requires only that freedom should not entail a contradiction, there is no reason why freedom whould be denied to will, considered as a thing-in-itself, merely because it must be denied to it as a phenomenon.

Ultimately, Kant found that the existence of God, the soul, and ultimate reality is not something you can prove, because proof is based on phenomena and the categories.  Instead, they are heuristic, that is, we believe in these things because they are useful to us!  In saving science and religion from Hume, he proved that they had to be taken on faith!  Scholars and churchmen on all sides of the issues criticized the Critique, which ironically guaranteed its success.  Kant had no censorship problems to worry about at the time, because Frederick the Great — a brilliant man himself — ruled Prussia at that time.  Unfortunately for Kant and many others, he died in 1786.

(A note on Frederick the Great:  The King of Prussia, including much of Germany as well, he was, besides a consummate leader and politician, an accomplished philosopher and a passionate amateur musician.  He corresponded with Voltaire and Rousseau, and Bach wrote “A Musical Offering” for him, based on a melody the King had challenged him with.  He wrote a number of books, including A History of My Times and The Anti-Machiavelli)

In 1788, Kant wrote the Critique of Practical Reason.  Practical reason refers to the making of moral decisions.  In this book, he argues that everyone has a conscience, a moral law within their souls, not unlike the categories of the Critique of Pure Reason.  This moral law he calls the Categorical Imperative, which is phrased two ways.  The first is a variation on the Golden Rule:  Whatever you do, consider what kind of world this would be if everybody did the same.  The other is a little deeper:  Treat people (including oneself) only as ends, never as means to an end.  Never use them, we would say today.

In order to have morality, Kant believed we needed free will.  If you can’t make choices, how could you be responsible?  If you aren’t responsible for anything you do, like an animal or a robot, then what you do is neither bad nor good!  Also, he felt we needed the idea of immortality:  Since justice rarely happens within a lifetime, we need life after death to take care of that.  And, in order for eternal life to exist, or free will, or good and bad at all, we need to believe in God.

Notice that he doesn’t say that, first God exists, therefore….  He is actually saying that, although we can never prove the existence of God (or immortality, or free will, or good and bad), we must act as if he (and they) existed.  Religious thinkers of the time did not care for this way of thinking at all!

Kant wrote a good deal more.  In 1790, he wrote the Critique of Judgement, regarding judgements of beauty.  He notes that our sense of beauty is based on feeling, not reason.  We seem to “see” the harmony, the power, the miraculous in some things.  It is as if God so arranged things!

In 1793, when he was 69 years old, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone came out.  Here he argues (unlike Hobbes and unlike Rousseau) that we are born with the potential for both good and bad.  He does acknowledge, though, that a great deal of evil comes out of civilization, rather than our primitive nature.  In fact, a lot of what we now consider bad was probably originally necessary for survival in primitive conditions!

He also said that, although there is an inborn moral sense, it must be developed by moral instruction.  For this reason, he believes that religion is necessary — although he also points out that religion shouldn’t be dogmatic, and that beliefs such as original sin, the divinity of Christ, and the efficacy of prayer are mere superstitions.

In 1795, he wrote On Perpetual Peace, outlining the basis for international law.  In 1798, he came out with The Conflict of Faculties, arguing for the importance of academic freedom.  He died February 12, 1804, after long illness, and was buried ceremoniously in Königsberg Castle.  Over his grave is written

The starry heavens above me;

The moral law within me.”

The History Of Psychology, Part 2: The Rebirth

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥

Aşteptarea e o anomalie a raportării noastre la timp. Fiecare secundă din numărul limitat de secunde ce delimitează existenţa noastră în timp, e unică şi irepetabilă, cum se zice, şi de aici rezultă că ar trebui să fie sfîntă. Dar timpul, chiar daca nu e doar formă a apriori a sensibilităţii noastre, cum zicea Kant, e doar o formă, al cărei conţinut e experienţa. Secundele sînt doar cupe goale ce se învîrt pe banda timpului, aşteptînd să fie umplute de contingentul (întîmplătorul) poveştilor noastre individuale. Şi dat fiind  că viaţa noastră e, în general şi pentru cei mai mulţi oameni de pe planeta asta ciudată, formată mai mult din lucruri indezirabile, peste care vrem să trecem mai repede ca să ajungem la scurtele oaze de fericire, plăcere, linişte, împlinire etc, apare aşteptarea. Aşteptarea e pur şi simplu dorinţa de a diseca timpul şi de a extrage de acolo doar ce ne place şi din acest motiv are ca rezultat direct o incredibilă desconsiderare a timpului, această materie primă care ne dă tuturor posiblitatea să devenim alchimişti, deoarece stă în puterea fiecăruia dintre noi să transforme secundele în aur.

While watching CNN this morning, I heard an excerpt from the speech given by President Obama at his first state dinner.  What immediately caught my attention was the fact that Obama seemed to have quoted Immanuel Kant:

“For it’s been said that ‘the most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us.’ Mr. Prime Minister, today we worked to fulfill our duty –bring our countries closer together than ever before. Tonight, under the stars, we celebrate the spirit that will sustain our partnership — the bonds of friendship between our people.”

While it would be rather too much to claim that Obama is a Kantian based on this one phrase, it is certainly interesting.

Kant’s Essay on Enlightenment

Kant might have been only responding to a newspaper query in answering the question, however, the views expressed therein might as well
encapsulize the aspirations and ideals of the intellectual movements that have been acting proactively and reactively to combat the stifling forces of the socio-political systems of the eighteenth century.

He described the means to attain an aspect of humanization of the individual, to achieve one’s full potential as a thinking being, wherein one takes active part in the pursuit of knowledge, and to have sole responsibility in teaching oneself of the truths encountered in that pursuit, so as to arrive at a perspective independent of the prevailing institutions of the time. In short, to be one’s own man.

His statements appear deceptively innocuous and very carefully worded s far as political and military authorities were concerned, but totally uncharitable to religious views and their adherents. It might as well be so, writing in Prussia, one of the most powerful military states of the time, and the Unifier of the then highly fragmented German states.

Other philosophers and scientists might have been exercising more or less restraint in attacking the superstitions and the obduracy of the authorities when it comes to being pilloried, however, the implications of serving the creed of individual/self-determination, on how far freedom and reaction to the realizations of critical thinking could be obtained with lasting results were not lost on those who were under the yoke of colonial domination or any form of intellectual or political repression.

It it debatable whether Kant was arguing for a more radical form of exercising that freedom, of totally overthrowing the Guardians upon proven guilty of being hindrances to that “freedom from immaturity”, but cursory study of the events that suddenly were precipitated after or during Enlightenment, we could theorize with conviction that the peoples in nation-states touched by these concepts of which Kant is one of the spokespersons, had acted on these views to the fullest, if not, to the extreme.

Let us be clear that Kant’s Essay explicitated the necessity of disregarding religious authorities insofar as their guidance was flawed, while rulers/superiors that demand obedience were, by inference, tolerate no dissent leading to open rebellion. Thus, Kant had indicted oppressive governments/rulers and intolerant religious hierarchies as the adversaries of human individual and social progress and/or expansion of knowledge.

Thus, without stating it, it would follow, a reader could reason, that a confrontation or open conflict with these “adversaries” would be inevitable, in the pursuit of one’s reasoning and search for Truth.

It goes without saying that the sudden explosion of scientific discovery, social criticism, critical and satirical literature, and the great political upheavals in the French, British, and American Revolutions, especially the American Revolutionary War, had had their seeds planted during the Enlightenment, and that was followed by the Modern Era. On a local note, Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo novels recounting the abuses of the Spanish overlords and friars in the Philippines further inflamed the Filipinos to revolt from the Spanish Crown.

The importance of Kant’s assertions do not lie in whether he was directly responsible for influencing revolutionaries, anymore we can credit Nietschze of the superstition of Aryan racial superiority or Marx with the Communist Revolution, rather Kant had been a famous element in “internationalizing” liberalism, as was his French, British, and American counterparts, thus helping corroborate the universality of the individual reasoning and its social expression and actualization. Here, philosophers, scientists, and thinkers buttressed each others’ conclusions and modes of thinking. We could perceive here an “underground international democratic movement” as far as the number of unforgiving military, political, and religious authorities were concerned.

The question now remains, “Is Kant’s call to ‘dare to know’, with its revolutionary undertones necessarily relevant in today’s society?” The answer to that would be taken up vigorously by Michel Foucault.

Michel Foucault: What is Enlightenment?

According to Foucault, the reasoning “component”, and thus, its published or publicly expressed intentions, of the Enlightenment, is but a part of the complex power relations and historical circumstances and factors that birthed the Modern Age, subsuming any philosopher, or their theories and convictions, into a greater whole, that Foucault seems to require laymen to comprehend from its totality to its minute machinery. So, any defintion of Enlightenment, in a few facts and explanations, would not suffice without contrasting it to other eras, and making anyone a scholar if one dares to match Foucault’s challenge.

As for his take on achieving enlightenment, one should be aware of one’s own capabilities, or even one’s attitude, and taking into account present reality, the lessons of history, before philosophizing and then undertaking the insinuated quixotic admonition of Kant, “aude sapere”, lest our collective or individual action following this misguided direction lead to the “return of the most dangerous traditions”.

This he adeptly illustrated by mentioning National Socialism and Stalism as humanisms, and that the Enlightenment nourished a plethora of humanisms enthusiatically making good “thinking without guidance from another”, thus pointing out the possibility of people/societies overstepping their “aude sapere”.

Thus, Foucault appears to advocate a more moderate approach to the concepts of enlightenment, one that is in accordance with modern sensibility and stability.

However, it seems ironic that Foucault, a Frenchman, faults the Enlightenment and propaganda/discursive formation, whereas his countrymen

aided the American cause in repudiating the Divine Right of Kings, an Enlightenment political contention, and radically enforcing “Give me liberty or give me death” against British Rule, the political “guardian” of the Colonies.

The victory of the American Revolutionaries could by no means be attributed to blind luck. American and French leaders were visionaries, as far of the reality aspects of the war and the confidence of securing victory, was concerned. They had Foucault’s view of Enlightenment in mind when they

utilized tactics, logistics, and knowledge of terrain to break British Hegemony of the Atlantic, and establishing the world’s largest democracy since the first democratic assembly was held in Athens, Greece.

Question to be asked of Foucault’s polemics on Kant’s assertions is: Is it absolutely necessary for Foucault to discredit Kant, whose views were absolutely IMMEDIATELY PERTINENT to the Enlightenment Era in general, and to the American Revolution and Nation-building in particular, or does his philosophizing beg the question? Furthermore, is he guilty of theorizing for theorization sake?

A follow up question would be: What realizations could a student attain in the analysis of the two essays?

For the former, Foucault should have had recognized Kant’s words value for its reflection on the dependency of the Guardians’ (rulers, governments, church, or any other authority) mandate on the sufferance of their constituents, on the majority’s perception of their maintenance of civil liberties and rights, and the truth about each person being responsible for their learning and decision-making. His perambulation on Enlightenment, his own application of discursive formation, historicity of power relations, is nonetheless brilliant, yet, is far from what a layman would have time for, unlike Kant’s easily comprehensible text, the facility of which easily urges one to action. One could surmise that Foucault strove to be only understood by a few, while Kant was trying to reach a great number of people with his simple-worded text. For the latter, a student should realize: (a) Responsible to learn as much as possible not only to be good at one’s profession but to also uphold dignity and to be in the best position to protect one’s own rights; (b) institutions are established to serve the interests of the constituents. Failure to do so would invite censure, and the people should readily speak out against such abuses of power and advocate reforms; (c) radical liberal views, though attractive and seductive in their passionateness, should be critiqued in the light of today’s due process of law, primacy of social order, the best forums for the redress of grievances, proper expression of dissent, etc., just to name a few possible student responses.

The best definition of enlightenment remains in the hands of the individual, by how far and how purposeful one’s own desire to conscientiously advance oneself in knowledge, skill, and self-actualization and humanization, and in doing so, one would best serve the family and society.

El año 2001 se publicaba el libro de Gustavo Bueno titulado ¿Qué es la Bioética?Ahora tenemos la ocasión de escuchar y ver una conferencia del autor del libro impartida en Oviedo en el otoño del 2009 . Se puede ver en el sitio de youtube canal fgbuenoyv 

Y el exito de Europa Oriental: Obrero y Parasito!

Kant unterscheidet zwischen Erfahrung und den Formen der Erfahrung, die ihrerseits nicht empirisch zugänglich sind, sondern in der Reflexion auf ihre Vorbedingungen erschlossen werden. Die Erfahrung als solche ist der Erfahrung nicht zugänglich. Dem entgegen ist Luhmann zufolge Beobachtung immer eine empirisch beobachtbare Operation.
Entsprechend unterscheidet Luhmann nicht zwischen einer empirischen und einer transzendentalen Ebene. Beobachtung im Sinn von “Unterscheiden und Bezeichnen” umfasst nicht nur Kants Erfahrung, sondern auch die Überlegungen über ihre Vorbedingungen. Diese Begriffsfassung führt aber dazu, dass die Transzendentaltheorie nicht mehr als alternativer theoretischer Ansatz, sondern eher als Missverständnis erscheint: Kant meinte zwar, er betrachte nicht-empirische Vorbedingungen der Erfahrung, aber diese Betrachtung war selbst eine Beobachtung, und das heißt Empirie.

« Le prudent d’Aristote est plutôt dans la situation de l’artiste, qui a d’abord à faire, pour vivre dans un monde où il puisse être véritablement homme. La morale d’Aristote est, sinon par vocation, du moins par condition, une morale du faire, avant d’être et pour être une morale de l’être. »

Pierre Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote

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GRILLE DE LECTURE

Difficile de réfréner son plaisir devant l’hommage que le disciple rend à son maître. La prudence chez Aristote est un des traités de morale les plus consultés sur Aristote. Pierre Aubenque place la prudence au centre de la morale aristotélicienne. Et cette prudence n’est pas à confondre avec la passivité ou la morale couarde du moindre risque. Si elle se rapporte à l’être, c’est d’abord à un être conscient de la part active qu’il doit prendre dans le cosmos. Aristote ne confond pas la vie morale avec la contemplation sans action, ni avec la volonté droite, s’il en est une.  Pour lui, la vie morale commande d’adapter constamment les fins aux moyens et les moyens aux fins. Et c’est à cela que sert la prudence.

Cette définition de la prudence fait penser aux sages stoïciens qui se considéraient comme “une œuvre d’art” reflet d’un monde achevé. L’homme aristotélicien n’est pas a priori un sage. Aucun savoir humain ne peut combler l’abîme qui sépare l’homme de la sagesse. A défaut, il peut être au moins prudent. Cela requiert que l’homme agisse, faute de mieux. Pour Pierre Aubenque, vu la contingence du monde, et en attendant le pouvoir de réaliser en nous-mêmes l’ordre que nous contemplons dans le Ciel, il nous appartient d’ordonner le monde nous s’engageant prudemment en lui selon le vœu d’Aristote.

Aristote distingue l’habileté technique, indifférente à ses fins, de la prudence qui est morale dans ses fins comme dans ses moyens. Après Aristote, Kant définissait la prudence comme l’habileté dans le choix des moyens qui nous conduisent à notre propre bonheur. La morale est de l’ordre de action, et la prudence, du travail. La morale de la prudence vise l’être, le bonheur. La prudence est pour ce faire une vertu de l’action et de l’être. L’homme ne se rationalise que dans un faire qui vise l’être. C’est cette idée de prudence qui a sans doute inspiré André Comte-Sponville lorsqu’il écrivait que le principe de précaution n’est pas un principe d’inhibition mais de l’action. C’est pourquoi « le risque zéro, c’est de n’être pas né, ou d’être déjà mort. Vivons donc prudemment, mais sans nous laisser paralyser par la peur. »

Emmanuel AVONYO, op

Pensée du 23 novembre

L’academos

Sommaire

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Ever since Shakespeare the ultimate symbol of beauty...

It is tempting to sing the praises of nature. Sweet-smelling flowers, colourful kingfishers, a pastoral pond to dangle your feet in – gorgeous. The standard is (at least in Europe) set by breathtaking BBC-documentaries and dodgy TV-commercials. Presenting washing your hair in rivers as the ultimate state of happiness, and cheerful families in delightful green surroundings, buttering sandwiches all day long.

But jellyfish, spiders and round-worms, that’s a horse of a different colour. And what about the bacterial ooze in your drain or the snails that dine on the doings of a dog? Sheer nature, but hardly considered beautiful. Richard Attenborough once said that some footage is never broadcasted, for instance the cute little antelope that ran for its mother after a lion attack, with its bowels hanging out. Not all in nature is beautiful.

A long time ago Plato thought that beauty is evoked by the extent to which something resembles a pre-imprinted ideal in our ‘realm of thoughts’. In a way it seems logical. For instance, I have some holiday pictures in which I sit under a palm tree on a white tropical beach, a clear blue sea in the background. The more this picture resembles our idea of holiday, the more beautiful it seems. Apparently we have some idealized picture in our mind. But then: where does this idealized picture come from? Do we have a free supply when we are born?

Some of us think so. For instance, scientists have examined our preference for pastoral, Arcadian landscapes (in the Netherlands for instance Freek Couterier). Our preference is explained by deeper biological motives. The landscapes fulfilled a primeval sense, a memory from the times that we were primitive hunters-gatherers. Such a landscape offered enough food and shelter for a worriless existence, and the inhabitants had more chance of survival. In the same way, our feelings of affection for small creatures with large, innocent baby-eyes contributed to the continued existence of future generations. Our love and lust preferences for large, symmetrical people aided to keep that offspring as healthy and strong as possible. Resentment and fear do fit into this idea: bitter tastes, fungus, dead or malformed creatures, poop and garbage promise most of all disease, death and misery. Beauty is oriented towards what supports human survival.

My colleague Edo Knegtering will obtain his PhD next week with a dissertation, The Featheries and the Furries, on the preferences for colourful, big and cute animals in Dutch nature conservation. Many organisations admit that they focus mainly on these animals. And the government joins in as their interest is with pleasing the voters. Protecting fluffy and colourful creatures is acceptable. But a government that protects unsightly snails smaller than 2 millimetres, even delaying road construction because of them, has a lot of explaining to do in our automobile Netherlands. International research on communication has discovered a lot of these preferences: size, colour, texture of skin, the possession of a spine, children-like faces, resemblance to people, predatorily behaviour, competition with humans, economic value, social way of life… and so forth.

Suppose now that you and your family are happily buttering your bread in the countryside and suddenly you see a cute little rabbit. What do you actually see? According to the philosopher Kant we only see our own thoughts. He states that we can only see the world around us because we have pre-imprinted ideas of what we expect to see. The continuous flow of signals from our senses only takes on meaning as we have learned to add meaning to it. In the way that a baby learns that these vague visual blurs and the tickling of the belly are parents with food. That is to say, of course they are not parents, but it is very convenient for the baby to think that they are. And is if appears to be convenient for a lifetime to think so, than in due time we will accept this as reality. We think that our parents exist.

Kant’s theory also explains why people perceive different things as beautiful. If you look at my picture of the beach, you’ll see a place where you would like to go to, preferably today. You think that this place will offer you some time off, relaxation and an escape from your hectic existence. If I look at the same picture, in my mind I see the poverty of the people in the village, the demolition of the coral reef under water by dynamite fishing, and the tourist hotels just around the corner of the bay. Our interpretation is different, and so is our appraisal.

And how exactly does this appraisal work? I think: through emotions or feelings. I don’t know whether research has been conducted in this area. It simply seems logical that evolution has invented a mechanism that triggers during perception, at the exact same time of the rational assignment of meaning, a parallel system that induces sense. A kind of reflex. In the way that you pull back your hand from a flame even before you discover that it hurts, and long before you have explained rationally the meaning of your melting skin. Likewise, your body is already in a state of euphoria even before you have considered that the landscape with flowers might be a suitable place to rest and look for food.

Sidetrack. Fear, fury and pure hate are emotions as well, gloomy emotions (I know, this is a normative adjective, but ethics and aesthetics are in line). Is it possible that gloomy emotions also form the basis of such a ‘beautiful’ feeling? Yes it is. In the beginnings of the last century, the art world lost itself in a panting sequence of innovative movements. Of course these renewals could not continue for ever, and when all new ideas had been thought of, the artists focused on shocking the public. At first, they started rather decent, with empty walls, empty stages and concerts without a sound. But in the end the search across the borderline generated into pictures of torture, the crushing of goldfish in a blender and a show of dissected bodies of executed Chinese prisoners. Horror and pulp have a cult status. It is allowed to indulge in gloomy emotions, in the beauty of evil.

But wait… Are our preferences really ours? Do we determine ourselves what is beautiful and what not? No, of course not. An overload of commercials tries to stress our individual freedom of choice, but the truth is that beauty is mainly the norm of a group. Bony cover girls, cubic paintings and the last performance of the National Ballet – the feelings that they rouse are mainly determined by the way we share our thoughts about them with others. Call it fashion, yes. Or a little more sophisticated: culture. This also offers an evolutionary advantage: a person who conforms to the norm of the group has a higher chance of survival than an outcast. In overblown language Nietsche has described how he sees the world as a collection of meanings that we have attributed, with behind it a kind of hidden force that wants to express itself (‘will’). And that is in a state of continuous conflict with other forces from other people. What we see, or what we think we see, is a result of power. Unconsciously, like children in a schoolyard who say that pink is so much prettier for girls. Consciously, when an inhabitant of the Dutch city of Leiden refers to those beautiful seagulls as ’shrieking crap machines’. So maybe our preference for Arcadian landscapes has nothing to do with memories of our times as hunter-gatherers. Maybe it just comes from a time that landscape paintings were a response of the dominant culture to certain social developments.

So this is how it works with nature. The beauty is in the ideas that we have already and that are imposed upon us. We regard nature as beautiful, because it is repeatedly confirmed from specific points of view with specific purposes. Holiday nature. Nature to wash your hair in. Nature to drive through, smoothly and fast.

I thought of a picture of a rose as an illustration. Ever since Shakespeare the ultimate symbol of beauty. And what surprise when I read Hans Achterhuis this week. In ‘Natuur tussen mythe en ethiek’ he describes the rose as a technological product, scentless but with exact the right colour, produced with great precision, in endless monotonous rows, connected to a drip with artificial food, on rock wool, in closed systems, free of bacteria and other nasty natural influences. Pseudo-nature that has nothing to do with what traditionally was referred to as nature. “The rose as the end of nature.”

It is beauty, but not as we know it.

In the chapter entitled “The Critique of the Subject” in the volume Who Comes After the Subject (edited by Cadava, Connor, and Nancy), Michel Henry embarks on a critical history of the philosophy of the subject. While he claims that the history of the critique of the subject has “numerous convergent formulations” from which a detailed tome could be assembled, for the sake of space he limits his chapter to brief analyses of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Freud. Acknowledging the diversity of these thinkers, he nevertheless draws on a convergent point in the four; namely, what they have in common is the “critique of man conceived as a specific and autonomous reality” (157).

It is this specificity and autonomy that Henry claims must be understood. Accordingly, in the philosophy of the subject, man is identified as the subject “granted an exorbitant privilege in that there is in the end no Being nor being except in relation to him, for him and through him, and this insofar as he constitutes the a priori condition of possibility for all experience and thus for all that is and can be, at least for us” (157). Henry refers to this subject as a “super being,” one who has all beings at his disposal – as they are subjugated to him. As he goes on to remark, “These descriptions are those of our world – of the ravaging of Earth by Technology [... which] consists in the unconditional subjugation of the Whole of being, which becomes the Ob-ject, to man, who becomes the Subject” (158). Henry is not here concerned with how such a view of subjective-subjugation of the world can have power, although he does imply that this view of mastery over the world based on subjectivity is an illusion that needs to be addressed. Rather, his immediate concern lies elsewhere; namely that the philosophy of subjectivity does not know anything about the being of this subject. He poses two questions to begin his essay:

1. What is the Being of this subject that has to be eliminated, “evacuated,” from the problematic?
2. Who, contesting at once the right and the existence of such a subject – the right of man to identify with it – goes about its elimination?

At this point he deems it necessary to focus on the philosophies of the two greatest philosophers of the subject: Descartes and Kant – although he chooses to address them historically backward. His attentions swings first to Kant because Henry wishes to show how the Kantian paradigm is the pre-eminent philosophy of the groundless subject. In other words, the moment philosophy “sees itself clearly as a philosophy of the subject… the foundation on which it explicitly and thematically bases itself… escapes it and, slipping from its grasp, tips over into the void of inanity” (158). “Inane” because essentially what occurs is that the Being of the subject becomes understood as representation. Thus, “I think” is equal to “I represent to myself that I think.” As Henry elaborates,

“[This] means that the Being of the subject is classed as the object of a representation, an object that, on the one hand, presupposes this subject and, on the other, never contains by itself, insofar as it is represented any reality – just as to represent to oneself a thaler does not imply that one has one in one’s pocket. Thus the foundation of any conceivable Being is stricken with a profound ontological indigence that prevents us from attributing to Being itself and kind of Being. Like it or not, it is the philosophy of the subject itself that has raised the most serious objection to the subject, to the point of rendering its very existence problematic” (159).

Returning to the two questions above, Henry then asks, “which subject finds itself thrown out of existence, and by whom?” His answer is the subject of representation, and by itself. This is so because the subject-as-representation draws its essence, its Being, from representation, which thus prevents Being from being conferred upon it. According to Kant, because the structure of representation is intuition and concept – and because we have no intuition or concept of the “I think” – we cannot know anything about it. Thus, the subject-as-representation is not a phenomenon for us, nor can it be. In other words, the essence of Being itself cannot consist in representation because representation does not rest upon itself and cannot ground itself in itself – as it is always referential. Thus, “to be” does not mean “to be represented” (160).

For Descartes, the problematic takes a different form. Henry notes that in the Meditations two decisive traits emerge: (1) The Being of the subject is contested, unsettled and denied. The Being of the subject and hence Being itself is the issue; and (2) The foundation of the Being of the subject presupposes that representation be ruled out – this means all that is or can be represented and the very structure of representation itself. By doubting all things – all representations and the structure of representation – Descartes’ remaining inquiry was regarding what might “sub-sist, that is to say, what can still be when representation in its entirety has been blocked”? What can still be when being is not through representation? Descartes’ answer is the “anti-essence of representation” as being “precisely the essence of the ‘subject’” (161).

Henry then briefly describes Descartes’ epoche as found in the Passions of the Soul. In this text, Descartes imagines himself dreaming. As such, all that is represented to himself in his dream is understood as illusory – is not. However, if the dreamer happens to experience emotions of sadness or grief or the like, even though still in a dream, even thought the representation(s) are false, the feelings themselves are absolute. Thus, he concludes: this feeling does not occur through representation but independent of it. How does it then occur? Henry notes, “In and through its affectivity” (161, emphasis his). Accordingly, this affectivity of the subject, this “auto-affectivity”, is the self’s immediate and undistanced experience of itself. And as such, it is to be understood as the essence of the subject and of all possible Being. As Henry thus remarks at the conclusion of his brief discussion of Descartes: “It is only when, as happens at one moment in Descartes, the philosophy of the subject returns to this original essence of subjectivity and Being that the ‘subject’ can become the theme of a philosophical discussion” (162).

Leaving behind Descartes and Kant, Henry turns his attention to his favorite philosophical punching bag. As he states, “The most striking misunderstanding is Heidegger’s, who explicitly and repeatedly identifies the ‘I think’ as an ‘I represent myself to myself’” (162). This non-ground of subjectivity is the resultant model of most critiques of the subject post-Heidegger. With this being the case, as far as Henry is concerned, the Being of the subject has “lost… all possible philosophical meaning” (162). Although Heidegger’s critique of the essence of Being was assumed to be something different, according to Henry, all that really occurred in Heidegger’s problematic was a new schematic of representation-as-essence.

The one bright spot that Henry notes in the history of the critique of the subject is located in the thought of Freud. Although not completely endorsed, Henry claims that the Freudian subject is “capable of opening up new paths” in the history of the critique. Freud’s critique was aimed directly at the subject of representation, which he identified as “consciousness.” As Henry mentions, Freud was not concerned with redefining consciousness, but rather took the stock meaning as employed by common philosophical jargon: “Let us call ‘conscious’ the representation which is present to our consciousness and of which we are aware, and let this be the only meaning of the term ‘conscious.’”

As noted above, for Freud, consciousness was equal to representation. It is this level – the level of consciousness – that would become the ground of his study of the unconscious; for there are memories that we “possess” which are not immediately accessible in the consciousness, as representation. Therefore, the subject cannot be understood in terms of “I represent myself to myself” because the unconscious, which is unrepresented, is integral in the constitution of the subject. However, whatever is not conscious is capable of becoming conscious. This is the task of the psychoanalytic therapist: to bring to the “actuality of representation something nonconscious that is secretly homogeneous with representation and that can, for this reason, change into it – an unconscious constituted by ‘unconscious representations.’ i.e., those that are not yet represented and that, ontologically if not existentially, are only asking to be” (164). Thus,  according to Henry, “Classical thought calls out for the coming of psychoanalysis” (164).

It is therefore “anther subject that comes to light with the idea that the unrepresented is also representable, that the original Being of this subject is no longer represented but its anti-essence” (164). Henry continues:

“Freud in his turn runs up against such a subject, half perceived by Descartes, when he finds himself in the presence of an unconscious that is no longer provisional, no longer one phase in the history of representation, capable of completing itself in itself, in the actualization of it full essence. The history of our representations refers back to a force that allows them precisely to actualize themselves or that forbids them to do so. It is only this force itself that is irreducible to any representation. This force collapses in on itself in an immediation that is so radical, and in this immediation is submerged into itself in such a way that there is no room in it for any Difference, no distantiation thanks to which it would be possible for it to perceive itself, to represent itself – to be conscious in the mode of representation” (164-65, emphasis his).

However, all is not well in Henry’s eyes. At this point, right when Freud is divulging the most original dimension of Being – the unrepresented and unrepresentable force that directs all representations – that Freud “succumbs” to the presuppositions of this metaphysics and that force and affect fall back to the unconscious. Thus, the subject is led to its true Being, only to find itself removed from such Being.

In the final lines of the chapter, Henry focuses once again on Descartes and asks whether Descartes had perceived (or half-perceived) the Being of the subject as an anti-essence of representation, and that if such is the case why did consequent critiques of the subject so badly misunderstand the cogito in terms of representation? Well, Descartes is partly to blame for this. In the Meditations, Descartes does not completely disavow the subject as representation. In fact, it could be concluded that even after bracketing off all representations, the cogito that remains does so only as a representation to itself. Thus, the cogito is the “first truth and at the same time the prototype for all truth” (165). In this case, the cogito has nothing to do with the actual process of thought or with thought itself. Rather, the cogito is the subjective condition (understood as affectivity, as noted above), without which no appearing of the world would appear.

With that said, it is hence claimed that Descartes draws back at precisely this moment and states that affectivity, as the original essence of subjectivity, is a “disturbance brought into subjectivity by some foreign agent. Why? Because thought is light, the light of representation, the light of the world, the light in which things and their geometric shapes shine – Greek light” (166). It is here, according to Henry, where the problem of the philosophy of the subject lies: “absolute objectivism, whether it be the naive objectivism of the sciences, notably the human sciences, or the ek stasis of Being that, unbeknownst to them, serves as their foundation” (166).

While not setting out to resolve the problematic of the history of the critique of the subject in this chapter, Henry concludes the article by remarking that there is no past in the critique, there is no model that ought to be resurrected or restored. Rather, there is only the possibility of a “first coming”…

Der Philosoph Walter Hoeres hat einen kleinen Onlineartikel für das Magazin Cicero geschrieben. Thema ist die gemeinsame kulturkritische Haltung der Vertreter der Frankfurter Schule (Adorno, etc.) und konservativer Denker wie Heidegger. Sie beschreibe heute mehr denn je unsere Zeit der Rationalisierung. Hier ein Ausschnitt – großartig:

“Nun besteht der langwierige Prozess der Aufklärung darin, dass sich diese Vernunft immer mehr aus ihren gewachsenen Bindungen emanzipiert. Aus ihnen herausgerissen, ist sie nicht mehr eingebettet in das konkrete Leben, die natürlichen Bedürfnisse und die geschichtliche Tradition. Vielmehr folgt sie jetzt nur noch dem Gesetz ihrer eigenen Rationalität. Sie dient nun nicht mehr dem Menschen, dessen Organ sie war, sondern er dient nun ihr. Dieser Prozess war notwendig, um den Kampf gegen die Natur und die Not schließlich zu gewinnen. Aber in ihm sind Heil und Unheil untrennbar verquickt. Dem Zauberlehrling gleich gibt diese losgelöste Vernunft keine Ruhe, bis sie alles vollends reglementiert, organisiert und rationalisiert hat.”
Link: http://www.cicero.de/97.php?ress_id=1&item=4348

Ever since Shakespeare the ultimate symbol of beauty...

It is tempting to sing the praises of nature. Sweet-smelling flowers, colourful kingfishers, a pastoral pond to dangle your feet in – gorgeous. The standard is (at least in Europe) set by breathtaking BBC-documentaries and dodgy TV-commercials. Presenting washing your hair in rivers as the ultimate state of happiness, and cheerful families in delightful green surroundings, buttering sandwiches all day long.

But jellyfish, spiders and round-worms, that’s a horse of a different colour. And what about the bacterial ooze in your drain or the snails that dine on the doings of a dog? Sheer nature, but hardly considered beautiful. Richard Attenborough once said that some footage is never broadcasted, for instance the cute little antelope that ran for its mother after a lion attack, with its bowels hanging out. Not all in nature is beautiful.

A long time ago Plato thought that beauty is evoked by the extent to which something resembles a pre-imprinted ideal in our ‘realm of thoughts’. In a way it seems logical. For instance, I have some holiday pictures in which I sit under a palm tree on a white tropical beach, a clear blue sea in the background. The more this picture resembles our idea of holiday, the more beautiful it seems. Apparently we have some idealized picture in our mind. But then: where does this idealized picture come from? Do we have a free supply when we are born?

Some of us think so. For instance, scientists have examined our preference for pastoral, Arcadian landscapes (in the Netherlands for instance Freek Couterier). Our preference is explained by deeper biological motives. The landscapes fulfilled a primeval sense, a memory from the times that we were primitive hunters-gatherers. Such a landscape offered enough food and shelter for a worriless existence, and the inhabitants had more chance of survival. In the same way, our feelings of affection for small creatures with large, innocent baby-eyes contributed to the continued existence of future generations. Our love and lust preferences for large, symmetrical people aided to keep that offspring as healthy and strong as possible. Resentment and fear do fit into this idea: bitter tastes, fungus, dead or malformed creatures, poop and garbage promise most of all disease, death and misery. Beauty is oriented towards what supports human survival.

My colleague Edo Knegtering will obtain his PhD next week with a dissertation, The Featheries and the Furries, on the preferences for colourful, big and cute animals in Dutch nature conservation. Many organisations admit that they focus mainly on these animals. And the government joins in as their interest is with pleasing the voters. Protecting fluffy and colourful creatures is acceptable. But a government that protects unsightly snails smaller than 2 millimetres, even delaying road construction because of them, has a lot of explaining to do in our automobile Netherlands. International research on communication has discovered a lot of these preferences: size, colour, texture of skin, the possession of a spine, children-like faces, resemblance to people, predatorily behaviour, competition with humans, economic value, social way of life… and so forth.

Suppose now that you and your family are happily buttering your bread in the countryside and suddenly you see a cute little rabbit. What do you actually see? According to the philosopher Kant we only see our own thoughts. He states that we can only see the world around us because we have pre-imprinted ideas of what we expect to see. The continuous flow of signals from our senses only takes on meaning as we have learned to add meaning to it. In the way that a baby learns that these vague visual blurs and the tickling of the belly are parents with food. That is to say, of course they are not parents, but it is very convenient for the baby to think that they are. And is if appears to be convenient for a lifetime to think so, than in due time we will accept this as reality. We think that our parents exist.

Kant’s theory also explains why people perceive different things as beautiful. If you look at my picture of the beach, you’ll see a place where you would like to go to, preferably today. You think that this place will offer you some time off, relaxation and an escape from your hectic existence. If I look at the same picture, in my mind I see the poverty of the people in the village, the demolition of the coral reef under water by dynamite fishing, and the tourist hotels just around the corner of the bay. Our interpretation is different, and so is our appraisal.

And how exactly does this appraisal work? I think: through emotions or feelings. I don’t know whether research has been conducted in this area. It simply seems logical that evolution has invented a mechanism that triggers during perception, at the exact same time of the rational assignment of meaning, a parallel system that induces sense. A kind of reflex. In the way that you pull back your hand from a flame even before you discover that it hurts, and long before you have explained rationally the meaning of your melting skin. Likewise, your body is already in a state of euphoria even before you have considered that the landscape with flowers might be a suitable place to rest and look for food.

Sidetrack. Fear, fury and pure hate are emotions as well, gloomy emotions (I know, this is a normative adjective, but ethics and aesthetics are in line). Is it possible that gloomy emotions also form the basis of such a ‘beautiful’ feeling? Yes it is. In the beginnings of the last century, the art world lost itself in a panting sequence of innovative movements. Of course these renewals could not continue for ever, and when all new ideas had been thought of, the artists focused on shocking the public. At first, they started rather decent, with empty walls, empty stages and concerts without a sound. But in the end the search across the borderline generated into pictures of torture, the crushing of goldfish in a blender and a show of dissected bodies of executed Chinese prisoners. Horror and pulp have a cult status. It is allowed to indulge in gloomy emotions, in the beauty of evil.

But wait… Are our preferences really ours? Do we determine ourselves what is beautiful and what not? No, of course not. An overload of commercials tries to stress our individual freedom of choice, but the truth is that beauty is mainly the norm of a group. Bony cover girls, cubic paintings and the last performance of the National Ballet – the feelings that they rouse are mainly determined by the way we share our thoughts about them with others. Call it fashion, yes. Or a little more sophisticated: culture. This also offers an evolutionary advantage: a person who conforms to the norm of the group has a higher chance of survival than an outcast. In overblown language Nietsche has described how he sees the world as a collection of meanings that we have attributed, with behind it a kind of hidden force that wants to express itself (‘will’). And that is in a state of continuous conflict with other forces from other people. What we see, or what we think we see, is a result of power. Unconsciously, like children in a schoolyard who say that pink is so much prettier for girls. Consciously, when an inhabitant of the Dutch city of Leiden refers to those beautiful seagulls as ’shrieking crap machines’. So maybe our preference for Arcadian landscapes has nothing to do with memories of our times as hunter-gatherers. Maybe it just comes from a time that landscape paintings were a response of the dominant culture to certain social developments.

So this is how it works with nature. The beauty is in the ideas that we have already and that are imposed upon us. We regard nature as beautiful, because it is repeatedly confirmed from specific points of view with specific purposes. Holiday nature. Nature to wash your hair in. Nature to drive through, smoothly and fast.

I thought of a picture of a rose as an illustration. Ever since Shakespeare the ultimate symbol of beauty. And what surprise when I read Hans Achterhuis this week. In ‘Natuur tussen mythe en ethiek’ he describes the rose as a technological product, scentless but with exact the right colour, produced with great precision, in endless monotonous rows, connected to a drip with artificial food, on rock wool, in closed systems, free of bacteria and other nasty natural influences. Pseudo-nature that has nothing to do with what traditionally was referred to as nature. “The rose as the end of nature.”

It is beauty, but not as we know it. 

If anybody interested in reading Kant online http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)nació y murió en la antigua ciudad prusiana de Königsberg. Procedía de una familia modesta y de arraigada profesión de fé cristiana. Echó fama de persona metódica y ordenada. A pesar de nunca haber salido de su ciudad natal y sus alrededores, el suyo fue un espíritu cosmopolita y siempre estuvo al tanto de lo que pasaba en el mundo a través de periódicos y libros. La extensión e intensidad de sus conocimientos fueron estimuladas por la penuria económica y el agobio del pluriempleo, que le obligaban a profesar casi la totalidad de las materias de las Facultades de Filosofía de la época. Comprendían las ciencias empíricas -tanto naturales (física, química o geografía) como humanas (historia, filología, antropología) y las “ciencias puras”, como la matemática pura y la filosofía pura, ésta a su vez dividida en dos grandes apartados (la metafísica de la naturaleza y la metafísica de las costumbres) que acabarían vertebrando la propia obra de Kant.

Kant adquirió una cierta familiaridad con la tradición de la metafísica racionalista, de inspiración remotamente leibniziana, sistematizada por Christian Wolff. Éste sostenía que todos los entes que componen la realidad han de ser posibles (es decir, no contradictorios) y existen en virtud de una razón suficiente, de suerte que estos dos principios se bastarían para explicar todo cuanto hay. Un armonismo éste del que ayudarían a salir a Kant el empirismo antimetafísico de Hume y el radicalismo político de Rousseau.

En lo que se refiere a Hume, y por más que Kant no vacile en atribuirle la hazaña de haberle despertado del “sueño dogmático”, la deuda precisa matizaciones. No está claro que el empirismo constituya la teoría del conocimiento más adecuada para satisfacer las necesidades del pensamiento científico, como la de dar cuenta, por ejemplo, del funcionamiento del principio de causalidad. Cuando la priedra lanzada por un muchacho rompe el cristal de una ventana, lo único que empíricamente percibimos es una sucesión de hechos -lanzamiento y rotura- pero no así el nexo causal entre uno y otro, que sería absurdo reducir a la simple secuencia temporal de nuestras percepciones (nadie diría, pongamos por caso, que la undécima campanada del reloj sea la causa de la duodécima cuando oímos dar la hora al mediodía). Frente a la pretensión empirista de que no hay nada en el entendimiento que no se halle con antelación en los sentidos (nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu) un Leibniz habría respondido que ciertamente no lo hay… salvo el entendimiento mismo (nisi intellectu ipse). Si Hume despertó a Kant del sueño dogmático, fue Leibniz quien le previno de incurrir en el sueño escéptico y abandonarse a la tentación de renunciar a cualquier esfuerzo por ir más allá de lo empíricamente dado, con la funesta consecuencia de impedir al sujeto cognoscente la posibilidad de contribuir activamente a la organización intelectual del conocimiento científico en lugar de someterse pasivamente a los rudos y crudos datos suministrados por los objetos conocidos de conformidad con los cánones empiristas.

La “revolución” filosófica de Kant divide en dos la historia entera de la filosofía. Descontando el difuso precedente del humanismo renacentista, la reivindicación del protagonismo del sujeto en la filosofía moderna se remonta a Descartes, pero la de Kant es más sobria y sofisticada que la cartesiana. El sujeto del que habla Kant no es el “yo substancial” de la metafísica racionalista inaugurada con Descartes y que vendría a ser para el criticismo incognoscible, pues no hay manera de confirmar su existencia (Kant reservará para esa supuesta substancia -la res cogitans del cogito, ergo sum- la denominación de sujeto metafísico o “yo nouménico”), pero dicho sujeto tampoco se reduce a inconexas percepciones de sí, como lo quería el empirismo antimetafísico de humeano, pues el yo de “yo pienso” o cogito habrá de acompañar a todo acto de conocimiento, un sujeto que oficiaría como “la condición de posibilidad” de cualesquiera objetos o hechos en cuanto conocidos (recibirá en la jerga kantiana el nombre de sujeto o “yo trascendental”, con lo que el criticismo kantiano pasará a ser llamado trascendentalismo).

De la deuda de Kant para con Rousseau, reconocería deberle poco menos que su “sentido de la humanidad”, obnubilado con frecuencia en los filósofos por un pedante intelectualismo, y consideraba a Rousseau “el Newton del mundo moral”, en el que él mismo había sido introducido de su mano. Cabría decir ahora, que el lugar central ocupado por el sujeto (el sujeto moral y no ya el tracendente) se traduce en la “autonomía” de su legislación moral o su moralidad, la cual el hombre se impone a sí mismo libremente en lugar de esperar a que le venga heterogéneamente impuesta desde fuera. La huella de Rousseau en Kant-más que la de ningún otro ilustrado, cosa que aquél sólo lo fue muy matizadamente- se dejará apreciar con fuerza en el texto Contestación a la pregunta: ¿Qué es la Ilustración? de 1784, donde Kant aventura una famosa caracterización de esta última:

Ilustración significa el abandono por parte del hombre de una minoría de edad de la que él mismo es culpable. Esta minoría de edad significa la incapacidad para servirse de su entendimiento sin verse guiado por algún otro. Y uno mismo es el culpable de dicha minoría de edad cuando su causa no reside en la falta de entendimiento, sino en la falta de valor y de resolución para servirse del suyo propio sin la guía de algún otro. Sapere aude! ¡Ten el valor de servirte de tu propio entendimiento! Tal es el lema de la Ilustración.

Sinds Shakespeare toch het ultieme symbool van schoonheid. ...

Het is verleidelijk om de schoonheid van de natuur te bezingen. Geurende bloemen, kleurige ijsvogels, een rustiek plasje om de voeten in te laten bungen – het is schitterend allemaal. De standaard wordt gezet door adembenemende BBC-documentaires en listige TV-spotjes. Met als ultiem geluk het harenwassen in rivieren en vrolijke gezinnen die tussen oogstrelend groen de hele dag boter smeren.

Maar kwallen, spinnen of spoelwormen, dat is andere koek. En wat te denken van het bacterieprutje in uw afvoer of slakken die op straat drollen opsmikkelen? Puur natuur, maar mooi is anders. Richard Attenborough vertelde dat sommige filmbeelden nooit worden uitgezonden, bijvoorbeeld van schattige kleine antilopes die na een aanval van leeuwen met hun darmen buiten hun lichaam naar moeder vluchten. Niet alle natuur is mooi.

Heel lang geleden dacht Plato dat schoonheid wordt opgeroepen door de mate waarin iets lijkt op een soort voorgeprent ideaalbeeld in onze ‘gedachtenwereld’. Dat klinkt wel logisch. Ik heb bijvoorbeeld vakantiefoto’s waarop ik onder een palmboom op een parelwit tropisch strand zit, met een helder blauwe zee daarachter. Hoe meer het plaatje lijkt op wat we kennen als vakantie-ideaal, des te mooier is het. Kennelijk hebben we dus een ideaalbeeld in ons hoofd. Maar waar komt dat ideaalbeeld dan weer vandaan? Krijgen we bij onze geboorte een gratis voorraadje mee?

Sommigen denken van wel. Zo is er onderzoek gedaan naar onze voorkeuren voor arcadische landschappen (in Nederland o.a. Freek Couterier). De verklaring voor die voorkeur werd gezocht in diepere biologische drijfveren. De landschappen beantwoordden aan een oergevoel, een herinnering uit de tijd dat we nog jagers-verzamelaars waren. Zo’n landschap bood genoeg voedsel en schuilplaatsen voor een onbekommerd bestaan, en de bewoners hadden een grotere overlevingskans. Op dezelfde wijze droegen gevoelens van affectie voor kleine wezens met grote onschuldige baby-ogen bij aan het voortbestaan van nieuwe generaties mensen. Onze liefdes- en lustvoorkeur voor mooie, symmetrische mensen hielp om dat nageslacht zo gezond en sterk mogelijk te maken. Afkeer en angst passen keurig bij dit idee: bittere smaken, schimmels, dode en mismaakte wezens, poep en afval beloven vooral ziekten, dood en ellende. Het mooie is gericht op datgene wat de mens doet overleven.

Deze voorkeuren werken ver door. Collega Edo Knegtering promoveert komende week op een onderzoek naar onze voorkeuren voor kleurige, grote en schattige dieren in onze natuurbescherming, The Featheries and the Furries. Veel organisaties geven aan zich vooral op ‘aaibare dieren’ te richten. En de overheid, die luistert naar het volk en doet vrolijk mee. Een overheid die pluizige en kleurige wezentjes beschermt is dus okee. Maar een overheid die onooglijke, twee millimeter grote zeggekorfslakjes beschermt, en daarvoor zelfs de aanleg van wegen uitstelt, die heeft heel wat uit te leggen aan automobiel Nederland. Internationaal communicatie-onderzoek heeft een flinke rij voorkeuren ontdekt: grootte, kleur, vacht, het bezit van ruggengraat en kinderlijke gezichtjes, de mate waarin een dier op een mens lijkt, predator-gedrag, competitie met de mens, economische waarde, sociale leefwijze… noem maar op.

Stel, je ben als vrolijk gezin druk bezig met boter smeren in het groen en ziet opeens een schattig konijntje. Wat zie je eigenlijk? Volgens de filosoof Kant zien we alleen maar onze eigen gedachten. Hij stelt dat we de wereld om ons heen alleen kunnen zien doordat we al voorgeprogrammeerde ideeën hebben van wat we verwachten te zien. De stroom signalen van onze zintuigen krijgt slechts betekenis omdat we hebben geleerd daar betekenis aan te geven. Zoals een baby leert dat die vage vlekken en dat gekroel aan het lijf ouders met voedsel worden. Of nou ja, het zijn natuurlijk geen ouders, maar het is handig voor de baby om te denken dat het ouders zijn. En als het een heel leven lang handig blijkt om zo te denken, dan nemen we het op gegeven moment vanzelf voor waar aan. We denken dat onze ouders bestaan.

De theorie van Kant verklaart waarom mensen verschillende dingen mooi kunnen vinden. Als u naar mijn vakantiefoto op het strand kijkt, dan ziet u een plek waar u naartoe wilt, en liefst vandaag nog. U denkt dat die plek ontspanning biedt, en ontsnapping aan uw hectische bestaan. Als ik naar dezelfde foto kijk, dan zie ik in gedachten de armoede van de mensen in het dorp, en de afbraak van het koraalrif onder water omdat de vissers met dynamiet hebben gevist, en de toeristenhotels die om de hoek van de baai staan. Onze interpretatie verschilt, en onze waardering ook.

En hoe ‘werkt’ dat toekennen van betekenis dan precies? Ik denk: via emotie of gevoel. Geen idee of daar ook onderzoek naar is verricht. Het lijkt domweg logisch dat de evolutie een mechanisme heeft verzonnen waarbij tijdens het waarnemen, gelijktijdig met de rationele toekenning van betekenis, een parallel systeem in werking wordt gezet dat gevoel oproept. Een soort reflex. Zoals je je hand terugtrekt uit een vlam nog vóórdat je hebt ontdekt dat het pijn doet, en lang voordat je de betekenis van je smeltende huid rationeel hebt geduid. Zo is je hele lichaam al in een staat van euforie, nog vóórdat je hebt bedacht dat dat het arcadische bloemenlandschapje misschien wel een geschikte plek is om voedsel te zoeken.

Zijpaadje. Angst, boosheid en pure haat zijn ook emoties, duistere emoties (normatief, ik weet het, maar ethiek en esthetiek liggen in elkaars verlengde). Kunnen duistere emoties ook aan de basis liggen van zo’n ‘mooi’ gevoel? Jazeker. Begin vorige eeuw verloor de kunstwereld zich in een hijgerige opeenvolging van vernieuwende stromingen. Die vernieuwing kon natuurlijk niet eeuwig doorgaan, en toen alle ideeën waren bedacht richtten de kunstenaars zich op het shockeren van het publiek. Het bleef eerst nog netjes, met lege muren, lege tonelen en concerten van stilte. Maar uiteindelijk ontaardde de zoektocht naar het grensoverschrijdende in foto’s van martelingen, het vermalen van vissen in een blender en een show van ontlede lichamen van geëxecuteerde Chinese gevangenen. Horror en pulp hebben cultstatus. Het is toegestaan te zwelgen in duistere emoties, in de schoonheid van het slechte.

Maar wacht eens… Zijn al die gevoelens wel van onszelf? Beslissen wij zelf wat mooi is? Natuurlijk niet. Reclames buitelen over elkaar heen om onze individuele keuzevrijheid te benadrukken, maar de waarheid is dat mooiheid grotendeels een groepsnorm is. Graatmagere fotomodellen, kubistische schilderijen en de laatste uitvoerig van het Nationale Ballet – het gevoel dat ze oproepen wordt grotendeels bepaald door de manier waarop wij daarover met anderen van gedachten wisselen. Noem het mode, ja. Of iets eerbiediger: cultuur. Ook dat biedt evolutionair voordeel: iemand die zich conformeert aan de groepsnorm heeft een grotere kans te overleven dan iemand die door de groep wordt uitgestoten. Nietsche heeft in ronkende volzinnen beschreven hoe hij de wereld ziet als een verzameling van betekenissen die we hebben toegekend met daarachter een soort drijvende kracht die tot uiting moet (‘wil’) komen. En die voortdurend met andere krachten in conflict is. Wat wij zien, of wat wij denken te zien, is een resultaat van macht. Onbewuste macht, zoals kinderen die op het schoolplein zeggen dat roze veel mooier staat bij een meisje. Bewuste macht, zoals een inwoner van Leiden die prachtige zilvermeeuwen betitelt als schreeuwerige schijtmachine’s. Misschien heeft onze voorkeur voor arcadische landschappen dus niets te maken met herinneringen aan onze jager-verzamelaartijd. Misschien heeft het gewoon te maken met herinneringen aan de dominante cultuur van landschapsschilderijen, die een reactie waren op maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen.

Zo gaat dat dus met die natuur. Het mooie zit hem in de ideeën die wij al hebben, en die ons van buiten worden opgelegd. We denken dat natuur mooi is, omdat dat voortdurend wordt bevestigd vanuit specifieke gezichtspunten, met specifieke doelen. Vakantienatuur. Natuur om je haren in te wassen. Natuur om bijzonder snel en soepel doorheen te rijden.

Voor de aardigheid had ik een foto gemaakt van een roos. Sinds Shakespeare toch het ultieme symbool van schoonheid. En – in het licht van bovenstaande – wat een verrassing toen ik deze week Hans Achterhuis las. In ‘Natuur tussen mythe en ethiek’ beschrijft hij de roos als iets geheel anders. Als een hoog-technologisch product, geurloos, maar met exact de juiste kleur, in eindeloze gelijkvormige rijen geproduceerd met grote precisie, aan het infuus met kunstmatige voeding, op steenwol, in gesloten systemen, vrij van bacteriën en andere nare natuurlijke invloeden. Pseudo-natuur die niets te maken heeft met wat traditioneel natuur heette. Ofwel: ”De roos als het einde van de natuur.”

Tjonge… Schoonheid is ook niet meer wat het was.