Tag Archives: Immanuel Kant

Lenin: Empirio-criticism and historical materialism – part twelve

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Ordination of priests, Rome, 2008

Ordination of priests, Rome, 2008

Ernst Haeckel and Ernst Mach (continued)

…Haeckel does not attempt an analysis of philosophical problems and is not able to contrast the materialist theory of knowledge with the idealist theory of knowledge. He ridicules all idealist – more broadly, all peculiarly philosophical – artifices from the standpoint of natural science, without even admitting the idea that any other theory of knowledge than natural-scientific materialism is possible. He ridicules the philosophers from the standpoint of a materialist, without realising that his standpoint is that of a materialist!

The impotent wrath aroused in the philosophers by this almighty materialism is comprehensible. We quoted above the opinion of the “true-Russian” Lopatin. And here is the opinion of Mr. Rudolf Willy, the most progressive of the “empirio-criticists”, who is irreconcilably hostile to idealism (don’t laugh!). “Haeckel’s monism is a very heterogeneous mixture: it combines certain natural-scientific laws, such as the law of the conservation of energy… with certain scholastic traditions about substance and the thing-in-itself into a chaotic jumble” (Gegen die Schulweisheit, S. 128).

What has annoyed this most worthy “recent positivist”? Well, how could he help being annoyed when he immediately realised that from Haeckel’s standpoint all the great doctrines of his teacher Avenarius – for instance, that the brain is not the organ of thought, that sensations are not images of the external world, that matter (“substance”) or “the thing-in-itself” is not an objective reality, and so forth – are nothing but sheer idealist gibberish!? Haeckel did not say it in so many words because he did not concern himself with philosophy and was not acquainted with “empirio-criticism” as such. But Rudolf Willy could not help realising that a hundred thousand readers of Haeckel meant as many people spitting in the face of the philosophy of Mach and Avenarius. Willy wipes his face in advance, in the Lopatin manner. For the essence of the arguments which Mr. Lopatin and Mr. Willy marshal against materialism in general and natural-scientific materialism in particular, is exactly the same in both. To us Marxists the difference between Mr. Lopatin and Messrs. Willy, Petzoldt, Mach and Co. is no greater than the difference between the Protestant theologians and the Catholic theologians.

John Caird, theologian, 1871. From the page: ‘A sermon on Religion in Common Life, preached before Queen Victoria, made him known throughout the Protestant world.’

John Caird, theologian, 1871. From the page: ‘A sermon on Religion in Common Life, preached before Queen Victoria, made him known throughout the Protestant world.’

The “war” on Haeckel has proved that this view of ours corresponds to objective reality, i.e., to the class nature of modern society and its class ideological tendencies.

US dollar bill - In God We Trust. The motto of the United States ‘In God we trust’ was adopted by Congress in 1956 in response to fears of Godless ‘communism’.

US dollar bill – In God We Trust. The motto of the United States ‘In God we trust’ was adopted by Congress in 1956 in response to fears of Godless ‘communism’.

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 331-332

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Part twelve/to be continued…

Full text at Marxists Internet Archive

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Lenin: Empirio-criticism and historical materialism

Posted on by under dialectical materialism, Philosophy

darkenergy

Parties in Philosophy and Philosophical Blockheads

Karl Grün quotes a letter from Marx to Feuerbach dated October 20, 1843, in which Marx invites Feuerbach to write an article for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher against Schelling. This Schelling, writes Marx, is a shallow braggart with his claims to having embraced and transcended all previous philosophical trends. “To the French romanticists and mystics he [Schelling] says: I am the union of philosophy and theology; to the French materialists: I am the union of the flesh and the idea; to the French skeptics: I am the destroyer of dogmatism.” That the “skeptics”, be they called Humeans or Kantians (or, in the twentieth century, Machists), cry out against the “dogmatism” of both materialism and idealism, Marx at that time already saw; and, without letting himself be diverted by any one of a thousand wretched little philosophical systems, he was able through Feuerbach to take directly the materialist road against idealism. Thirty years later, in the afterword to the second edition of the first volume of Capital, Marx just as clearly and definitely contrasted his materialism to Hegel’s idealism, i.e., the most consistent and most developed idealism; he contemptuously brushed Comtean “positivism” aside and dubbed as wretched epigoni the contemporary philosophers who imagined that they had destroyed Hegel when in reality they had reverted to a repetition of the pre-Hegelian errors of Kant and Hume. In the letter to Kugelmann of June 27, 1870, Marx refers just as contemptuously to “Büchner, Lange, Dühring, Fechner, etc.”, because they were incapable of understanding of Hegel’s dialectics and treated him with scorn. And finally, take the various philosophical utterances by Marx in Capital and other works, and you will find an invariable basic motif: insistence upon materialism and contemptuous derision of all obscurity, of all confusion and all deviations towards idealism. All Marx’s philosophical utterances revolve within these two fundamental opposites, and from the standpoint of professorial philosophy, their defect lies in this “narrowness” and “one-sidedness”. In reality, this refusal to recognise the hybrid projects for reconciling materialism and idealism constitutes the great merit of Marx, who moved forward along a sharply-defined philosophical road.

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 316-317

Dark matter ring modelled around galaxy cluster CL0024+17

Dark matter ring modelled around galaxy cluster CL0024+17

Distant supernova, dark energy

Distant supernova, dark energy. For details, click on third link at bottom.

If you add up all the matter and energy in the universe, you'd find little that is familiar. The stars and gas that astronomers see in their telescopes make up just 0.5 percent of the cosmos. Just 0.01 percent of the universe is made of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium. Because of uncertainties, the numbers in this chart do not add up to 100 percent.

What the universe is made of: if you add up all the matter and energy in the universe, you’d find little that is familiar. The stars and gas that astronomers see in their telescopes make up just 0.5 percent of the cosmos. Just 0.01 percent of the universe is made of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium. Because of uncertainties, the numbers in this chart do not add up to 100 percent.

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Part one/to be continued…

Full text at Marxists Internet Archive

Image sources: 1st/2nd/3rd/4th

Lenin: the philosophical idealists – part five

Posted on by under Marxism, Materialism, Matter, Objective reality, Objective truth, Philosophy, V.I.Lenin

The Criticism of Kantianism from the Left and from the Right (conclusion)

And lastly, Karl Kautsky in his Ethics also criticises Kant from a standpoint diametrically opposed to that of Humism and Berkeleianism. “That I see green, red and white,” he writes, arguing against Kant’s epistemology, “is grounded in my faculty of sight. But that green is something different from red testifies to something that lies outside of me, to real differences between things…. The relations and differences between the things themselves revealed to me by the individual space and time concepts… are real relations and differences of the external world, not conditioned by the nature of my perceptive faculty…. If this were really so [if Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of time and space were true], we could know nothing about the world outside us, not even that it exists.” (Russian translation, pp. 33-34.)

Thus the entire school of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels turned from Kant to the left, to a complete rejection of all idealism and of all agnosticism. But our Machists followed the reactionary trend in philosophy, Mach and Avenarius, who criticised Kant from the standpoint of Hume and Berkeley. Of course, it is the sacred right of every citizen, and particularly of every intellectual, to follow any ideological reactionary he likes. But when people who have radically severed relations with the very foundations of Marxism in philosophy begin to dodge, confuse matters, hedge and assure us that they “too” are Marxists in philosophy, that they are “almost” in agreement with Marx, and have only slightly “supplemented” him – the spectacle is a far from pleasant one.

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 186

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Part five/to be continued…

Full text at Marxists Internet Archive

Lenin: the philosophical idealists – part four

Posted on by under Marxism, Materialism, Matter, Objective reality, Objective truth, Philosophy, V.I.Lenin

There are the most subtle and powerful proofs for the existence of God – astonishing intellectual achievements, the work of towering philosophical geniuses. Then there is materialism – which explores the relationship between philosophy, ideology and the workingman’s sausage.

sausage_2001253c

The Criticism of Kantianism from the Left and from the Right (continued)

…Engels, as we have seen, rebuked Kant for being an agnostic, but not for deviating from consistent agnosticism. Lafargue, Engels’ disciple, argued in 1900 against the Kantians (amongst whom at that time was Charles Rappoport) as follows:

“…At the beginning of the nineteenth century our bourgeoisie, having completed its task of revolutionary destruction, began to repudiate its Voltairean and free-thinking philosophy. Catholicism, which the master decorator Chateaubriand painted in romantic colours (peinturlurait), was restored to fashion, and Sebastian Mercier imported the idealism of Kant in order to give the coup de grâce to the materialism of the Encyclopaedists, the propagandists of which had been guillotined by Robespierre.

“At the end of the nineteenth century, which will go down in history as the bourgeois century, the intellectuals attempted to crush the materialism of Marx and Engels beneath the philosophy of Kant. The reactionary movement started in Germany – without offence to the socialist integralistes who would like to ascribe the honour to their chief, Malon. But Malon himself had been to the school of Höchberg, Bernstein and the other disciples of Dühring, who were reforming Marxism in Zurich. [Lafargue is referring to the ideological movement in German socialism in the later seventies.] It is to be expected that Jaurès, Fournière and our other intellectuals will also treat us to Kant as soon as they have mastered his terminology…. Rappoport is mistaken when he assures us that for Marx the ‘ideal and the real are identical’. In the first place we never employ such metaphysical phraseology. An idea is as real as the object of which it is the reflection in the brain…. To provide a little recreation for the comrades who have to acquaint themselves with bourgeois philosophy, I shall explain the substance of this famous problem which has so much exercised spiritualist minds.

“The workingman who eats sausage and receives a hundred sous a day knows very well that he is robbed by the employer and is nourished by pork meat, that the employer is a robber and that the sausage is pleasant to the taste and nourishing to the body. Not at all, say the bourgeois sophists, whether they are called Pyrrho, Hume or Kant. His opinion is personal, an entirely subjective opinion; he might with equal reason maintain that the employer is his benefactor and that the sausage consists of chopped leather, for he cannot know things-in-themselves.

“The question is not properly put, that is the whole trouble…. In order to know an object, man must first verify whether his senses deceive him or not…. The chemists have gone deeper – they have penetrated into bodies, they have analysed them, decomposed them into their elements, and then performed the reverse procedure, they have recomposed them from their elements. And from the moment that man is able to produce things for his own use from these elements, he may, as Engels says, assert that he knows the things-in-themselves. The God of the Christians, if he existed and if he had created the world, could do no more.”1

We have taken the liberty of making this long quotation in order to show how Lafargue understood Engels and how he criticised Kant from the left, not for those aspects of Kantianism which distinguish it from Humism, but for those which are common to both Kant and Hume; not for his assumption of the thing-in-itself, but for his inadequately materialist view of it.

Note

1. Paul Lafargue, ‘Le matérialisme de Marx et l’idéalisme de Kant’, Le Socialiste, February 25, 1900

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 184-186

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Part four/to be continued…

Full text at Marxists Internet Archive

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Lenin: the philosophical idealists – part three

Posted on by under Marxism, Materialism, Matter, Objective reality, Objective truth, Philosophy, V.I.Lenin

The Criticism of Kantianism from the Left and from the Right (continued)

“The Kantian philosophy is a contradiction,” Feuerbach wrote to Bolin on March 26, 1858, “it inevitably leads either to Fichtean idealism or to sensationalism”. The former conclusion “belongs to the past”, the latter “to the present and the future” (Grün, op. cit., II, 49). We have already seen that Feuerbach advocates objective sensationalism, i.e., materialism. The new turn from Kant to agnosticism and idealism, to Hume and Berkeley, is undoubtedly reactionary, even from Feuerbach’s standpoint. And his ardent follower, Albrecht Rau, who together with the merits of Feuerbach also adopted his faults, which were overcome by Marx and Engels, criticised Kant wholly in the spirit of his teacher: “The Kantian philosophy is an amphibole [ambiguity]; it is both materialism and idealism, and the key to its essence lies in its dual nature. As a materialist or an empiricist, Kant cannot help conceding things an existence (Wesenheit) outside us. But as an idealist he could not rid himself of the prejudice that the soul is an entity totally different from sensible things. Hence there are real things and a human mind which apprehends those things. But how can the mind approach things totally different from itself? The way out adopted by Kant is as follows: the mind possesses certain a priori knowledge, in virtue of which things must appear to it as they do. Hence, the fact that we understand things as we do is a fact of our creation. For the mind which lives within us is nothing but the divine mind, and just as God created the world out of nothing, so the human mind creates out of things something which they are not in themselves. Thus Kant guarantees real things their existence as ‘things-in-themselves’. Kant, however, needed the soul, because immortality was for him a moral postulate. The ‘thing-in-itself’, gentlemen [says Rau, addressing the neo-Kantians in general and the muddleheaded A. Lange in particular, who falsified the History of Materialism], is what separates the idealism of Kant from the idealism of Berkeley; it forms a bridge between materialism and idealism. Such is my criticism of the Kantian philosophy, and let those who can refute it….” “For the materialist a distinction between a priori knowledge and the ‘thing-in-itself’ is absolutely superfluous, for since he nowhere breaks the continuity of nature, since he does not regard matter and mind as two fundamentally different things, but as two aspects of one and the same thing, he has no need of any special artifices in order to bring the mind and the thing into conjunction.”1

Note

1. Albrecht Rau, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie, die Naturforschung und die philosophische Kritik der Gegenwart, Leipzig, 1882, S. 87-89

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 182-183

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Part three/to be continued…

Full text at Marxists Internet Archive

Lenin: the philosophical idealists – part two

Posted on by under Marxism, Materialism, Matter, Objective reality, Objective truth, Philosophy, V.I.Lenin

The Criticism of Kantianism from the Left and from the Right (continued)

Another immanentist, Johannes Rehmke, reproached Kant because he realistically walled himself off from Berkeley with the thing-in-itself (Johannes Rehmke, Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, Berlin, 1880, S. 9). “The philosophical activity of Kant bore an essentially polemical character: with the thing-in-itself he turned against German rationalism [i.e., the old fideism of the eighteenth century], and with pure contemplation against English empiricism” (25). “I would compare the Kantian thing-in-itself with a movable lid placed over a pit: the thing looks so innocent and safe; one steps on it and suddenly falls into… the ‘world-in-itself’” (27). That is why Kant is not liked by the comrades-in-arms of Mach and Avenarius, the immanentists; they do not like him because in some respects he approaches the “pit” of materialism!

And here are some examples of the criticism of Kant from the left. Feuerbach reproaches Kant not for his “realism”, but for his idealism, and describes his system as “idealism based on empiricism” (Werke, II, 296).

Here is a particularly important remark on Kant by Feuerbach. “Kant says: If we regard – as we should – the objects of our perceptions as mere appearances, we thereby admit that at the bottom of appearances is a thing-in-itself, although we do not know how it is actually constructed, but only know its appearance, i.e., the manner in which our senses are affected (affiziert) by this unknown something. Hence, our reason, by the very fact that it accepts appearances, also admits the existence of things-in-themselves; and to that extent we can say that to entertain an idea of such entities which lie at the base of appearances, and consequently are but thought entities, is not only permissible, but unavoidable….” Having selected a passage from Kant where the thing-in-itself is regarded merely as a mental thing, a thought entity, and not a real thing, Feuerbach directs his whole criticism against it. “…Therefore,” he says, “the objects of the senses [the objects of experience] are for the mind only appearances, and not truth…. Yet the thought entities are not actual objects for the mind! The Kantian philosophy is a contradiction between subject and object, between entity and existence, thinking and being. Entity is left to the mind, existence to the senses. Existence without entity [i.e., the existence of appearances without objective reality] is mere appearance – the sensible things – while entity without existence is mere thought – the thought entities, the noumena; they are thought of, but they lack existence – at least for us – and objectivity; they are the things-in-themselves, the true things, but they are not real things…. But what a contradiction, to sever truth from reality, reality from truth!” (Werke, II, S. 302-03). Feuerbach reproaches Kant not because he assumes things-in-themselves, but because he does not grant them reality, i.e., objective reality, because he regards them as mere thought, “thought entities”, and not as “entities possessing existence”, i.e., real and actually existing. Feuerbach rebukes Kant for deviating from materialism.

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 182-183

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Part two/to be continued…

Full text at Marxists Internet Archive

Lenin: the philosophical idealists

Posted on by under Marxism, Materialism, Matter, Objective reality, Objective truth, Philosophy, V.I.Lenin

The Criticism of Kantianism from the Left and from the Right

The principal feature of Kant’s philosophy is the reconciliation of materialism with idealism, a compromise between the two, the combination within one system of heterogeneous and contrary philosophical trends. When Kant assumes that something outside us, a thing-in-itself, corresponds to our ideas, he is a materialist. When he declares this thing-in-itself to be unknowable, transcendental, other-sided, he is an idealist. Recognising experience, sensations, as the only source of our knowledge, Kant is directing his philosophy towards sensationalism, and via sensationalism, under certain conditions, towards materialism. Recognising the apriority of space, time, causality, etc., Kant is directing his philosophy towards idealism. Both consistent materialists and consistent idealists (as well as the “pure” agnostics, the Humeans) have mercilessly criticised Kant for this inconsistency. The materialists blamed Kant for his idealism, rejected the idealist features of his system, demonstrated the knowability, the this-sidedness of the thing-in-itself, the absence of a fundamental difference between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon, the need of deducing causality, etc., not from a priori laws of thought, but from objective reality. The agnostics and idealists blamed Kant for his assumption of the thing-in-itself as a concession to materialism, “realism” or “naïve realism”. The agnostics, moreover, rejected not only the thing-in-itself, but apriorism as well; while the idealists demanded the consistent deduction from pure thought not only of the a priori forms of perception, but of the world as a whole (by magnifying human thought to an abstract Self, or to an “Absolute Idea”, or to a “Universal Will” etc., etc.). And here our Machists, “without noticing” that they have taken as their teachers people who had criticised Kant from the standpoint of skepticism and idealism, began to rend their clothes and to cover their heads with ashes at the sight of monstrous people who criticised Kant from a diametrically opposite point of view, who rejected the slightest element of agnosticism (skepticism) and idealism in his system, who demonstrated that the thing-in-itself is objectively real, fully knowable and this-sided, that it does not differ fundamentally from appearance, that it becomes transformed into appearance at every step in the development of the individual consciousness of man and the collective consciousness of mankind. Help! – they cried – this is an illegitimate mixture of materialism and Kantianism!

V.I.Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 179-180

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Part one/to be continued…

Full text at Marxists Internet Archive

Schelling and Nietzsche Respond to Kant: Part Four

Posted on by under Capitalist ideology, Concealed priesthood, Mysticism, Neoplatonism, Philosophy, the aesthetics of self

Kant’s setting out of his dilemma – we can only know appearance – contained, for the Romantics, the solution – we are free to overcome it – by focusing on our inner experience.1

And not only to overcome that dilemma but, because of our freedom to focus on our inner experience, to bridge the schism between appearance and what stands beyond it (all the dichotomies symbolised by that schism, ‘the world’) – on the basis of mysticism (the dominant Western form being Neoplatonism).

The very dryness and one-sided rationalism of Kant’s philosophy was an incentive to take that step. The other incentives – our freedom (which Kant intended to be moral) and the justification to focus on the self by exploring the at first implicit then overt Neoplatonism2 in his writing (in fact, the very framework of the dilemma) were the answer.

Kant’s philosophy was both the concentration of a problem and a dare – to fully take up what had not been fully explored, fully indulged in, in German philosophy in the modern period. The Romantics, Schelling and Nietzsche responded eagerly to Kant and met his unintended challenge.

Nietzsche’s vitalist philosophy, from The Birth of Tragedy to the final ‘aphorism’ of The Will to Power (which ‘aphorism’ contains a synopsis of The Enneads) was built on Neoplatonism mixed with Platonism and Christianity – the parallels between his god Dionysus and Christ are numerous.3  In The Gay Science Nietzsche wrote: ‘Even less am I concerned with the opposition between ‘thing in itself’ and appearance: for we ‘know’ far too little to even be entitled to make that distinction.

For Nietzsche, we simply have no organ for knowing, for ‘truth’.4 The ‘truth’ to which he (as one drenched in ‘god’) referred was Absolute and ineffable, not (as for the materialist) deepening and relative (it was once true that the earth is flat). It was constrained by the same ‘limits of reason’,5 the same Neoplatonic perspectivism to which Leibniz, Kant and Schelling subscribed.6

In hindsight, the ‘diagnoses’ that Schelling and Nietzsche made of Kant convey that he was far too restrained, too controlled. But in their writing, all of the dualisms were retained – only the emphasis was different. The ‘reason’ of Kant shifted to the ‘emotion’ of Schelling and Nietzsche, but the writing of all three was equally within the embrace of Lloyd’s Man of Reason, equally divorced from true life and nature, and from the criterion of practice.

Kant wrote:

‘the fundamental laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies gave established certainty to what Copernicus had at first assumed only as an hypothesis, and at the same time yielded proof of the invisible force (the Newtonian attraction) which holds the universe together. The latter would have remained for ever un-discovered if Copernicus had not dared, in a manner contradictory of the senses, but yet true, to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator.’7

He believed that in his Critique of Pure Reason he had made a similar revolutionary achievement in metaphysics – he too had developed an hypothesis that contradicted previous metaphysicians and made the spectator necessary.

What Kant and Copernicus did could not have been more different, each from the other. The observation of matter, and thought about and testing of those observations, resulting in certain laws, confirmed Copernicus’ hypothesis – one which did not seek the observed movements in the spectator, but of bodies in relation to the sun.

For Copernicus, the spectator (or particularly – their consciousness) was not required. His discovery went beyond appearances, which according to Kant’s Critique, was impossible. Kant engaged in sleights of hand to justify his division between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge,8 between ‘conceptual knowledge’ and the distorting influence of the senses, between what goes on in the spectator’s head and in the world, of which that spectator’s head and body are a part.

Like Schelling and Nietzsche, Kant was not guilty of ‘spiritual sickness’ nor ‘decline of life’, he contemplated the world on the basis of a long philosophical tradition – one divorced from the criterion of practice.

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Notes

1. In his metaphysics Kant argued that a person’s perception of the world is dependent on what they bring to the act, in his moral theorising he argued that the individual is free to determine their actions and in his aesthetics he argued the beautiful is to be found in the subject’s experience. ↩

2. Behind which stood Leibniz ↩

3. The final words of Ecce Homo (the words spoken by Pilate before the crucifixion of Christ) are ‘Have I been understood? – Dionysos against the Crucified…’ My reply – in the din of ideology, nowhere near well enough. Ecce Homo, Trans., R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 2004, p. 104, section 8 ↩

4. The Gay Science, Trans., Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 214 section 354 ↩

5. The Anti-Christ, p. 185, section 55, in Twilight of the Idols (or How to Philosophise with a Hammer) and The Anti-Christ, Trans., R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 2003 ↩

6. Schelling wrote: ‘Within the absolute all particular things are genuinely separated and genuinely one only to the extent that each is the universe unto itself, and each is the absolute whole.’ The Philosophy of Art op. cit., p. 34, #26 ↩

7. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason op. cit., Preface to Second Edition, Note p. 25 ↩

8. The Critique of Judgement op. cit., p. 15. For any reader willing to consider Kant’s carefully worded and much repeated lie (in his and subsequent philosophy academics’ attempts to retain the relevance of metaphysics) that his great ‘achievement’ (in The Critique of Pure Reason) replicated in philosophy what Copernicus had contributed to science, I recommend my previous post. ↩

A Materialist Critique of Cosmopolitanism: Part Six

Posted on by under Capitalist ideology, International relations, Materialism, Matter, Objective reality, Objective truth

Pogge correctly states that ‘democracy may take many forms’49 and Caney argues a most important point, that ‘it is of vital importance to explore traditions of thought other than those prevalent in the west.’

The rapid rise of hundreds of millions into a middle class in China, pressing increasingly on both the constraints and the potential of their one-party state of 1.3 billion, in my belief, will present a new model for the world in distributive justice and economic and human rights, but whatever develops there will certainly be very different from the outdated Western model.

One can, however, construct wish-lists to one’s heart’s content50 but, and going beyond Nagel’s position – that ‘we should keep in mind that political power is rarely created as a result of demands for legitimacy’51 – political power is a reflection of economic relations, and whatever determinations are made at the political level (including the recognition of rights and justice) will ultimately be constrained and shaped by those unwilled contradictions between the forces of production and the relations of production.

Nussbaum expresses a very negative perception regarding the future of cosmopolitanism52 and in this, she is by no means alone. Held and Benhabib write similarly.53 Yet Benhabib also makes an excellent point on the basis of ‘Europe’s lumpen proletariat’

‘As European social democracy has shrunk in the last decades under the impact of global economic competition, the costs of German unification and the dislocations caused by the common Euro-market, these groups have become subject not only to continuous discrimination but also to socioeconomic cutbacks and increasing unemployment. In the current context, it is desirable to find a language of universalistic solidarity which also would be a language of integration (my italics) through socioeconomic equality rather than that of assimilation through denial of difference. Redistribution and recognition struggles need to go hand in hand. This process may move the liberal nation toward the more democratic kind of cosmopolitanism that I have proposed in these lectures.’54

Benhabib recognises the need not merely for institutional reform but a thorough-going redistribution towards socio-economic equality, and the potential for rights, democracy and justice thereby. But this could never happen to any significant degree under capitalism because, at its core, as I have processed earlier, is the necessity of exploitation – nationally and globally.

Brown warns of the problems facing Europe and notes ‘just how important it is to understand the deeper forces and issues (my italics) brought to the surface by the processes of political restructuring currently under way in Europe.’55 It is my understanding of these underlying forces and that their primacy must be recognised in any considerations regarding rights, democracy and justice that I have been arguing for in this essay.56

Part six/to be continued…

Notes

49. ‘The human right to political participation also leaves room for a wide variety, hence regional diversity, of decision-making procedures – direct or representative, with or without political parties, and so on. Democracy may take many forms.’, Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty’ op. cit., 69 ↩

50. ‘Once we think about present human misery in global terms, other reforms come readily to mind’ Pogge, ‘The Bounds of Nationalism’, op. cit., 148 ↩

51. Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’ op. cit., 145 ↩

52. ‘One must acknowledge that we do not see a triumph for cosmopolitanism right now in the United States, which seems increasingly indifferent to cosmopolitan goals and increasingly given over to a style of politics that does not focus on recognising the equal humanity of the alien and the other; which seems increasingly hostile, too, to the intellectuals whom Kant saw as crucial to the production of such an enlightenment. …Nor is it only in America that cosmopolitanism seems to be in grave jeopardy. The state of things in very many parts of the world gives reason for pessimism’, Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’, The Cosmopolitan Reader, op. cit., pp. 27-44, 41 ↩

53. ‘For many, it is already “apocalypse now”; for the rest of us it may well be “apocalypse soon” unless our governance arrangements can meet the tests of solidarity, justice, democracy and effectiveness.’ David Held, ‘Reframing Global Governance: Apocalypse Soon or Reform!’, ibid., pp. 293-311, 311; ‘This is the truth behind contemporary theories of empire: the flight of power from the control of popular jurisdiction. …The interlocking of democratic iteration struggles within a global civil society and the creation of solidarities beyond borders, including a universal right of hospitality that recognises the other as a potential co-citizen, anticipate another cosmopolitanism – a cosmopolitanism to come.’ Benhabib, ‘Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations – Reply to Commentators’, op. cit., 177 ↩

54. Benhabib, ‘Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations – Reply to Commentators’ op. cit., 175 ↩

55. Chris Brown, Ed., Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, Routledge, London, 2001, 3 ↩

56. Held writes ‘The deep drivers of this process (i.e. globalisation) will be operative for the foreseeable future’. For him they are the changing infrastructure of global communications, the development of global markets, the pressure of migration, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new type and form of global civil society. Held, ‘Reframing Global Governance: Apocalypse Soon or Reform!’, op. cit., pp. 296-297 ↩

Schelling and Nietzsche Respond to Kant: Part Three

Posted on by under Aesthetics, Capitalist ideology, Concealed priesthood, Mysticism, Philosophy, the aesthetics of self

Schelling and Nietzsche both made excellent criticisms of Kant. Schelling who wrote that to philosophise, one cannot neglect the issue of matter,1 that matter is the foundation of all experience2 also wrote

‘It is quite possible to drive even the most convinced adherent of things-in-themselves as the causes of our ideas into a corner by all sorts of questions. One can say to him, I understand how matter affects matter, but neither how one in-itself affects another, since there can be no cause and no effect in the realm of the intelligible, nor how this law of one world extends into another altogether different from it, in fact completely opposed to it. You would then have to admit, if I am dependent on external impressions, that I myself am nothing more than matter’3

He not only argued the priority of matter over thought but the impossibility of a law completely opposed to the material world and its causal determination, itself functioning in this world. Kant defined matter as ‘that in the appearance (of an empirical intuition) which corresponds to sensation’.4

Yet matter, as with space and time, is a concept for what exists independently of consciousness and thought – of us. Space is not a thing in which matter is distributed, it is the distribution of matter itself, time is not a measure which we rely upon, it is matter in motion. In the functioning of matter there is no requirement for us. We are manifestations of matter. This is the unity that Kant rejected.

It is most interesting that Schelling, the same person who wrote so well about matter (although his discussion of it, indicatively, slipped into the metaphysical), who, on this basis identified the flaw in Kant’s noumenon, then proposed as the solution that philosophy take over the role of religion, later that nature itself be deified and mythologised – that mythology supplant matter.5 He developed his ‘cure’ by drawing on a Platonic/Neoplatonic/Christian current present in German philosophy long before Kant, and in Kant’s philosophy itself.6

Nietzsche’s relation of Christianity and ‘god’ to metaphysics and Kant is justified – his thoughts are tersely, astutely and (as one would expect from him) acerbically expressed. His defence of becoming and praise for the senses themselves warrant praise.

But if one has any concern for what is preached and philosophically practised, when one examines Nietzsche’s arguments more closely, his own position becomes ‘the last smoke of evaporating reality’.7 I know of no more contemptuously hypocritical and self-contradictory philosopher than Nietzsche. In relation to his own writing, his condemnation of Kant warrants Homeric laughter. His indebtedness to Kant was profound.

Part three/to be continued…

Notes

1. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature op. cit., p. 181 ↩

2. Ibid., p. 179 ↩

3. Ibid. ↩

4. The Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., p. 65, A20 ↩

5. ‘(mythology) is the world and as it were the ground in which alone the exotic plants of art are able to bloom and grow.’ The Philosophy of Art op. cit., p. 45, #38 ↩

6. In his writing on morals, Kant advocated not only belief in God as ‘a postulate’ but Christian morals and ‘practical’ faith in the Son of God. Schelling wrote: ‘(the divine imagination) is the means by which the universe is populated; according to this law life flows out into the world from the absolute as from that which is without qualification one.’ The Philosophy of Art op. cit., p. 37, #30 ↩

7. Twilight of the Idols, op. cit., p. 481, section 4 ↩