Were we talking about Kant or pedants?


I never liked Kant very much. Mostly because I don't understand him.

I've read Prolegomena three times and it's still a complete mystery to me. (The only other books, excepting comics, that I've read three times is Khun's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Asimov's I, Robot.) I really felt stupid. Okay, I often feel stupid when I read philosophy - like when I read Martin Heidegger talking about the "nearness of the farness" - I'm never sure if this guy's serious or if he full of it.

Supposedly Kant was an able geometer and had somehow proven (not geometrically, of course, but through, I suppose his metaphysics) that Euclidean geometry was the only possible geometry. Gauss (a personal hero of mine) had meanwhile discovered, OTOH, that Euclid's fifth postulate (AKA Playfair's axiom) was a little different in that one could make other assumptions and develop other perfectly consistent geometries (none of which I know anything about, BTW). But Gauss didn't publish right away which might have been due to his few-but-ripe philosophy, but might also have been due to the fact that he had no interest in wasting time in a public brawl with the old man (they were contemporaries, but Kant was a deal older). This might be the origin of a comment I had heard about Gauss stating that everything Kant said was either trivial or false.

Heisenberg, in his autobiographical Physics and Beyond, talks about how after he and his buddies had published some of their results on QM, that they received a visit from some neo-Kantian professors who tried to convince them that they didn't really mean to publish what they said. I don't recall the details of the exchange, but it was pretty funny. I highy recommend the book for anyone who likes that sort of thing.

I guess my problem with Kant is my understanding of his idea of categorical imperatives. I'm guessing this is a formalized statement of what most people innately understand to be true about morality, even if they've never given it a moment's thought. My comic-book understanding of categorical imperative is that whenever multiple values collide there is always a higher value (that may or may not be known) to which one might refer for resolution. This is okay for Kant, because I'm guessing he also just assumed the existence of a god. Even before I was an atheist this was a little hard for me to swallow. Nowadays I look at it as a kind of brain pollution driving us to pretend (or at least to believe) we know more than we really do. Example: we have two conflicting values, espoused by two diametrically opposed parties. The temptation to just manufacture a higher value is tremendous.

I think it's easier for a believer like Kant to believe that somehow right and wrong are built into the universe than for a non-believer to believe such a thing. There are several takes (at least) and innumerable variations --

Absolute Right and WRONG (ARAW) exist. There *IS* *exactly* *ONE* set of principles corresponding to right and wrong. They exist externally to man and are imposed on man (by God, the universe, whatever).

RAW exists, but it is intrinsic to groups of people. It's not built into the fabric of the universe, but into the fabric of society. Some things just don't work and cause society to implode. Note that this is *not* absolute, because a change in environment can cause a change in what makes a society viable. This is sort of a minimalist view, almost utilitarian. A conflict can be resolved in either of several ways and any way that results in sustainable society can be viewed as right. (A trivial variation with major ramifications is that only the resolution that results in the most sustainable society is right.) I'm tempted to think a genetic view of right and wrong might be a variation on this -- or maybe it's a fourth category, I'm not sure.

ARAW do not exist. Only relative right and wrong exist. There are numerous, conflicting values. There may or may not be a resolution to a given conflict. There may or may not be a higher value that trumps the values in conflict. In some sense, right and wrong are completely fabricated. Very scary possibility for me because a clear implication is that we really have to be careful what what we work towards. No god will save us if we screw up. Even our own sense of survival (as a species) is circumvented.


ah, well, enough rambling...i gotta go.

k