Ep. 393: Kant vs. Hegel (Part One)

0:00 Mark: The Partially Examined Life is celebrating the 250th birthday of our nation with another live show. We're back in Madison, Wisconsin, on Saturday, July 11th in the afternoon. Rapper Vanilla Ice may or may not be in attendance. We would love all those in the area willing to fly in to attend. Please look to partiallyexaminedlife.com live for details.

Listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 393 is something like can we legitimately reason about theology? And we're continuing our discussion from last episode on the chapter about Kantian philosophy, Hegel's 1802 essay Faith and Knowledge, to which we've added a short selection from Kant himself from his Critique of judgment, published in 1790. For more information about the texts and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, whose thinking can present things as merely possible.

1:09 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

1:13 Mark: Seth, didn't think it was.

1:14 Wes: Are you just refusing to do. Yes, this is Wes Alwan trying to live in part whole reciprocity. There's that whole part reciprocity in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:25 Dylan: Similarly in Madison, Wisconsin, this is Dylan Casey, conceiving of harmony between the particular and the universal.

1:32 Mark: All right, so what is with your boycott, Seth? Are you objecting to the.

1:35 Dylan: He's particularly objecting to the universal claim that we all have to have an opening?

1:41 Seth: No, I just. I got caught off guard. So.

1:49 Wes: It's just caught off guard. I love it.

1:55 Mark: So, I mean, this is sort of like, in fact, I believe, Seth, you had said I could just do another hour on. So it's sort of like a part three, but we wanted to make it beefier. I mean, in addition to the fact that most of the Kant chapter in the Hegel essay we did not get through, which I was grateful for because I had had my own stuff going on and I had not taken notes on that portion. So I sort of started the Kant chapter over and went through my existing notes and did the other 15 pages that I hadn't really gotten to. And then. Wes, you had done some. Yeah. Tell us about how you picked these Kant selections.

2:31 Wes: Well, if you look at the footnotes in the Hegel essay, it's full of references to these two sections in the Critique of Judgment 76 and 77, which, by the way, I think we should just discuss them first. I had said that maybe we would just have them as background and focus on Hegel from the very beginning. But it turns out to be very complicated. But these. I think the Hegel and the other German idealists actually saw these sections of the Critique of Judgment as crucial. We've mentioned this many times how influential the Critique of Judgment was on these guys.

But this is sort of the kernel of that, it turns out. And I also had Claude. I put the reading into Claude and I had it distill every. The references and every footnote and looked at that. But this is really. There's other things that we could have done. There's a broader reading we could have done. We could have looked at the Critique of Pure Reason, which I did a bit. But I think this is really the essence of it to get Hegelian, because it is the place where Kant talks about the possibility of this intuitive understanding which has no given right.

It's not receiving a sensible manifold and therefore it is spontaneous in every aspect what it thinks. You know, it's really the intellect of God when it comes down to it. But what it. Everything that it thinks it produces in a sense, right. It's. It's almost like it's producing its own manifold, its own given. Except that's a little bit misleading because it. It says, you know, you don't want to think of it as producing its manifold and then it being given back to it. So this is. They take this seriously and that, you know, this is why you have Fichte.

Why we were so confused about Fichte. Talking about sort of reason or the eye, right. The self positing its own data, sort of producing the data along, you know, along with being a faculty of concepts. And this is where Kant sketches out this possibility for. For God. And the. The German idealists want to. Want to generalize it.

4:32 Mark: All right, so Wes has jumped into the most difficult idea in the whole thing. But you're right, it is absolutely key. I read a few more sections, the Critique of Judgment, just based on the. More of the footnotes to give me a little more idea of the context of this. And I think it might be worth. I also, I should say I have an audio version. I don't think I bought it. I think it's just included in your Audible subscription with. Of the Critique of Pure Reason. And I listened to about the first half of it just to really get myself in Kant and I understood a lot of it. Like, even though we have not done any of that book officially, we've done what. This is our.

5:09 Dylan: We've not done anything. The Critique of Pure reason.

5:11 Mark: No, no, I'm. Because we had the prolegomena or the. Yeah. To any future metaphysics, which is sort of the. His Cliff Note version. So we, you know, we did that very early on, and then we've just been interested in like, well, what does he have to say about politics? What does he have to say about war? What. You know, so we've never gone back to. We did do some of the Critique of Judgment when we were doing taste. So the Critique of Judgment is famously, it is divided into considerations of taste, considerations of beauty, but then also considerations of teleology, of purposiveness, which are very much related.

Right. That part of the reason that we think a landscape is beautiful is because it seems designed. So this whole part of the Critique of Judgment is really. It's some kind of a defense in that Kant would be okay with of the design argument. Right. Because you can't for Kant, just say, like Aquinas or somebody, yeah, things look designed, therefore there must be a God who designed them. Because you're not allowed to do that.

6:07 Wes: Right.

6:07 Mark: The reason should be restricted in philosophy to the world of experience, to what the understanding can get a handle on. So you can say things like, everything has a cause, but you can't, in fact, even saying all the different natural laws are going to harmoniously fit together. Even that, according to the Critique of Judgment, is going a little bit outside. But you can, just like in ethics, we don't know that the moral law. The moral law is not something inexperienced, but it is something that, for practical purposes, not theoretical reason, but practical reason, we have to live as if we are free beings subject to a moral law.

So this is Kant's cheat, Right. That. The second critique is all about ethics. The third critique is getting into these issues of teleology. So specifically, can we. When we look at things and they seem designed, and we're trying to do science and we're trying to figure out how a blade of grass, why it has the properties it does, how it has become the way it has. There's a lot we can do within science mechanically. We can talk about different kinds of grass. We can talk about, you know, the patterns of how the grass grows, but ultimately we're just talking about patterns.

We really can't. There's something deeply unsatisfying. So our reason needs to posit that there is a designer of these things. We can't know anything about the designer. We can't even really definitively know that there is a designer. But we human beings, it Is our psychology such that we have to live as if there were a designer? And so this is again, this is

7:42 Wes: the cheat, more than that. So he's very right in these sections. He's very interested in biological organisms, although he's not often calling them that outright. And this is also something that the German idealist picked up. But what they notice is some, is whole part reciprocity, which is that. Right? So mechanistically we can just say that every entity in the world is a sum of causal influences, including its parts. Right? We can drill down and do physics and chemistry and get into molecules and things like that and the way that they determine the macro level phenomena.

And Kant says that's all we can really do in the empirical realm. But when we look at a biological organism, and yet we even have to say to ourselves, yeah, all this can be explained mechanistically, as he puts it, and he doesn't have evolution, but he's just supposing, yeah, one day we're going to find out how we can explain all of this mechanistically. But when we look at an organism and we see whole part reciprocity, which is to say that there's this special relationship between the heart and the organism, for instance, and the heart in a way serves the existence of the whole.

There's that the part whole relationship runs that way from part to whole, but then the whole turns around and makes the existence of the heart possible and in a way determines the heart. Because there would be no heart if you didn't have to sustain the whole body. It's as if there is a designer. We know that even though we know everything comes from evolution, we would have really trouble understanding what a heart is unless we could describe it in these functional terms. So his thesis, and I think this is, you know, I really don't disagree with this.

We couldn't just cut out all of the functional language from our descriptions in biology. We would have real trouble if we tried to do that. So we always put a little bit, you know, footnotes saying, yes, we're, you know, we're talking as if it's designed, but it's not really designed. It was just, you know, randomly, it was just selected during evolution, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's pretty consistent with what Kant is saying here. And Hegel and these guys are going to say, no, hold on a minute, right? Kant's imagining for this intuitive God's intellect.

It's not just that teleology and mechanism converge. There is no such thing as either in the intelligible substrate. So underneath these two different ways of looking at the world, teleology and mechanism, there's just. There's some other system in the intelligible substrate, in the thing in itself, which we just can't even imagine where all of this stuff converges. And that's what Hegel wants to say. No, we can't imagine it. Let me do it. Let me spell it out for you. Yeah, yeah.

10:27 Dylan: So for me, this was very straightforwardly. I'm Hegel and I say that Kant saw it, but he just didn't have the courage to grasp it. Chapter 76 and 77 are. This is what I'm talking about. This is what Kant saw. And he just. He was a coward and didn't realize that you had to. That was actually just true, that human beings have access to the unification of the particular and the universal. And I'm going to spend my entire life, starting with the phenomenology, maybe the Faith and reason book that we read. I'm going to at least try to show you that that's true.

And the dialectic gets you to that from Hegel's point of view. I found myself reading it, and this is probably because I'm reading it from standpoint of 2026. It might also, because I'm a scientist by education, is I don't see any God needing in here. He doesn't want to mention God. The whole theological thing, I don't read it as God. I read it when I'm reading it, I'm reading it that this is the way the world universe is. This is the way in which we have to think about things. We have to think about things in terms of wholes and parts that have relationships between one another.

Otherwise we can't even think about them. And the teleological part has to do with the simple observation that when. And this is the middle part of it where he says, well, how the heck do we even talk about purpose at all? How do. Why do we even have that? And that has to do with. We have to think about the world, about even the concepts of our ideas. So I get to the end of it and I get it that I see how Kant is saying that this way of thinking, this unity, this seamless unity, and maybe this is the part where I would just disagree with Kant is not accessible to human beings.

But I hear him just describing the way in which human thought works. That's how we have purpose. The concept of purpose relies on what he's talking about.

12:28 Mark: Seth, do you have an opening thought before I quote some of Kant to devastatingly refute these guys.

12:35 Seth: Yeah, yeah. So reading the Kant helped me understand better the whole why Hegel thinks it's an ontological argument and why he thinks it's a defective or a faulty ontological argument from Kant's perspective. So the key thing for me is that Kant says necessity comes from the understanding, the universal's contingency. But the content for those universals comes from intuition in the form of the contingent world, things in the world, whatever, or the experiences of things in the world, appearances. So what Kant is saying here in 76 and 77 is the world appears to us as having purpose.

This just is the way it is. And he says, but that purpose appears to us as necessary. He's like, so it can't come from intuition. It can't come from the content that is fed to us by the world, because that's contingent. That has to come in some way from the understanding. Necessity comes from the understanding. We feel this is necessary. And so the joke here is, right, the world appears to have been designed, right? And instead of the clock maker thing where you say, therefore there must be a Creator, you say, the world appears to us to be designed, therefore our consciousness must be structured in the kind of way where we see the world as having been designed.

Right? That's how Kant thinks about it. But then Kant says, yeah, but for us to kind of reflect on our own consciousness in this way, we have to be able to think of a consciousness that could conceivably not see the world as purposeful in this way, because there's no contingency. It just the world appears as necessary to it.

14:24 Dylan: That's the God part. You're right.

14:25 Mark: You know, it is, it's Leibniz is God.

14:27 Seth: Yeah, it's Leibniz's God. Because I can imagine something greater than myself, blah, blah, blah. It must exist. And what Hegel says is, I have no problem with the idea or the concept of this intellect for which everything is necessary. The problem is you're trying to get there through your own individual subjectivity, and you can't. That idea has to have substance. It has to be graspable. And what Kant says is, I have to just posit that it exists. I can't actually grasp it. I can't know anything about it. And Hegel's just saying, yeah, you can. You just can't do it through this, this reflective subjective structure that you've created. And that, that was kind of the net of it for me.

15:07 Wes: I think Kant avoids talking about God directly when he talks about this archetypal intuitive intellect. But it is God's intellect and we can't know it exists. Just like we can't know God exists. We can't imagine what it's like to have that intellect. And this is where Hegel and the others are going to disagree. Hegel's going to say this just as reason. We can participate in a way in God's intuitive understanding. And this is not actually cut off to us. So what Kant is sketching out here as impossible for us and in a way impossible to understand. Hegel and others are going to pick up as the very essence of a kind of reason that is available to us. This is the real stuff. This is the real reason. Not all this limited, empirical. Let's put the particulars under concepts, understanding

16:01 Dylan: and the is right. There's a kind of the thing that Hegel's saying that we can do and Kant saying that we can only imagine it being done is the end of a notion of purposefulness because it ends up being the world is understood as complete necessity. This is like Leibniz's God, right. So in this ultimate end of the thesis and antithesis dialectic, you keep going back and forth and you ultimately get to the end. This kind of nirvana point, not to conflate different traditions but of Hegel is you get to a point of view of God of being able to see the everything is absolutely necessary in the way in which it's related.

Of all the parts and wholes, there's no more possibility. It's the end of possibility and the end of purposefulness in the sense of it reaching for something. The only way you would have. You would have sort of this rather than having purposiveness that's born out of contingency. All you have is direct, absolute, derived, deterministic. This is the way the particulars are related to the whole and vice versa.

17:10 Wes: Well, and the. The particulars importantly fall out of the whole. Yeah, they are produced by the whole, posited, as Fichte would put it. So when Hegel's talking about the Begriff and the phenomenology, the concept. It's the concept that dialectically develops like an organism. But metaphor is very important to them and produces the particulars, becomes the concrete universal, produces its own particulars that nothing is given from some alienating external outside. Everything is coming from inside the house.

17:43 Mark: All right, so I have a quote from just when you assigned 76 and 77, I read 75 just to see what the context was. And on 75, this is page 281. But what does the most complete teleology of all prove in the end? Does it prove, say, that such an intelligent being exists?

18:01 Seth: No.

18:02 Mark: All it proves is that given the character of our cognitive powers, that is in connecting experience with the supreme principles of reason, we are absolutely unable to form a concept of how such a world is possible except by thinking of it as brought about by supreme cause that acts intentionally. Hence, we cannot objectively establish the proposition there is an intelligent original being. We can do so only subjectively for the use of our judgment as it reflects on the purposes in nature which are unthinkable on any principle other than that of an intentional causality of a supreme cause. So I'm not reading God into it like it's explicitly.

18:39 Dylan: No, you guys are right. It's also the same thing with Aristotle all over again.

18:44 Mark: Right? Yeah, well, but I see why. So even. Wes, you're talking about teleology as in the way that modern scientists even use purposive analysis. So as you said, like, how do you know when the heart is functioning? Well, you have to think of it as a thing that has a function. It's very much related, but it's a logically different point than something that somebody created to have a purpose. Right. So you could say, of course, you need this purposive analysis, but there's absolutely no metaphysical implications of that. It's just a matter of convenience. Even Daniel Dennett is completely fine with you talking about things like this, being an atheist. But, you know, here, teleology is definitely tied. Yes.

19:31 Wes: Yeah. I mean, we could have a meta argument about whether using function language implies an intelligent designer. I think it does. And I think we.

19:41 Mark: Kant does. Yes.

19:42 Wes: Have to say, like Kant here, we just, I think, you know, we have to say, okay, we're going to talk as if that's true, but for the purposes of empirical science, we know that that's not true. Now, it could be true, you know, in the things in themselves, but probably in the realm of the things in themselves, there's neither teleology nor mechanism, or they converge in some manner that's completely incomprehensible to us. Us. And then for us rational finite beings, they bifurcate. They bifurcate into mechanism and teleology in our particular realm. But there's something else entirely outside of us. So I'm not even sure that Kant would say there is such a thing as teleology, even though we have kind of have to act like there is.

20:29 Dylan: I'm losing my grip on what teleology means.

20:33 Wes: Things are designed with intelligent design. Just that there are purposes, that there are real purposes and goals in nature.

20:40 Dylan: Well, those are two dramatically different things. Saying that something was designed with an intelligent, with an outside entity, with a derived proactive intention is completely different than saying that nature has a direction or that there is, you know, there are gradients in the world.

21:02 Wes: It's not just that there's a direction, there are goals. How can there be goals in the world without an intelligence that has goals?

21:09 Dylan: So where, when we speak of something like healthy for an organism, we're saying that that notion of it's operating in a way that is fitting for itself is a teleological necessarily, you're giving a

21:24 Wes: deflationary version of teleology that's consistent with contemporary science. And I think these guys, look, they're coming off of medievals who are very Aristotle influence, and they're talking about final causes in the world. And under the influence of the advent of modern science, they think that that is very unscientific. And they don't think that we should be talking about final causes. We should be talking about mechanism. We should only be talking about efficient causes, cause and effect. So I think that from their point of view, there aren't any final causes in empirical nature because that does imply intelligent design of some sort.

Now Aristotle's, it's a very abstract form where it's the good or the unmoved mover drawing things towards him. I don't think that these. Right, so they're objecting to final cause language in light of modern science. And I think that they think that if we're talking about goals in nature, then we can't get away from designing intelligence or some godlike entity, whether it's Aristotle's unmoved mover or something like that.

22:30 Seth: Yeah, Dylan, I'm kind of with you on this one. The purposiveness or the teleological thing seems to be very closely tied to the concept of the part whole as opposed to the intelligent design. And there is something in the explanation that I got about this Kantian section when I was using Claude and all this, that kind of triggered this for me. Where structurally, when we use the understanding to apply universals to the particular, that's subsuming the particular under the universal. And essentially it's a top down way of doing things. And the part whole relationship in nature that gives us this idea of purposiveness is essentially the Opposite of that meaning we see roots and we see branches in the tree and it's not just like they're two totally unrelated things, right. We think, oh, the roots take nutrients out of the soil and that gets transferred up the trunk and it allows

23:31 Dylan: for the sake of the tree, for

23:32 Seth: the sake of the tree and what have you. And in that case where it's this part whole, but we're going from the particular to the universal. And because Kant says essentially like, because he doesn't have a structure with intuition and understanding where you can go from contingent particular to universal, that comes through judgment, that's not part of the understanding, then we make a judgment. Seems like there's a reason for this, right? There's a way, it's a purpose, Right. And then that in turn would lead to the question of how does nature get its purposiveness.

And I think then you make the step to the concept of the intelligent designer which he maybe then ties into this intellectus archetypus or whatever. But that's how I was thinking about it and I do think you're right, they are two different things. But it still makes some sense within this logic of top down, bottom up inference versus, you know, sub, I guess, predication or whatever the case, you know, that may be.

24:29 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually quite simple, which is that if the heart is for the sake of the body, then it's hard to see how mechanism gets you there. Although Kant says we'll probably figure it out one day. But even then it's really still hard to conceive of that working. So we tend to go towards a designer point of view where we, he puts it in very confusing language, but basically where you have a thought in someone's head, a plan, a blueprint and then that unfolds that allows this weird relationship between wholes and parts, this what he calls reciprocity, where it's not just bottom up mechanism.

I'm talking a little bit differently now than you, than you, Seth. But it's not just the atoms determining cells and cells determining the body and all that stuff. Everything that we can describe mechanistically, but it's that the whole determines what the parts are going to be. So if you're going to be a zebra, you're going to need a heart. And that we have trouble thinking about unless we can say, oh, there's this blueprint zebra and then we're going to put a heart in there as good designers to make sure that the zebra works. Now we Know that there is a blueprint in a way and that somehow it can be encoded in nature and that blueprint can be produced through trial and error.

You don't need a designer in the strict sense. We know that. But I think it's very. It's still, even for us, it's really hard to conceive of it because we're not going to strip our language of the heart is for the body. We can't get beyond that language. As biologists, we would cease to understand the heart if we stopped using that language, which is weird.

26:05 Dylan: Maybe we ought to revisit some good discussions of emergence and what the relative interdependence of parts and wholes of higher order entities are. That would help us reformulate the words. For thinking about this, that doesn't end you with, oh, if I'm going to have zebras, I'm going to have to design a zebra. I agree with you that there's something that we find challenging about how in fact people do this, talking about evolution all the time, and they use language like it's very, very directional rather than that, that's intention rather than saying it was selected.

And there's a dramatic difference between something having been selected versus something intentionally growing its neck out. That's related. But the fact that it makes sense to talk about a whole and part relationship is that there's something about the heart being for the body and there's something about the body needing a heart. That's also true. And that there would be contingent, dependent part, whole relationships as things get more complicated, frankly, that they can't exist without each other. The heart can't exist without the body and the body can't exist without the heart.

27:21 Wes: That doesn't mean one is for the other.

27:24 Dylan: No, it doesn't mean one's for the other. It means that they are interdependent in a way with respect to the entire entity. And I think the language we would end up with is, you don't. You don't get a zebra without both.

27:35 Mark: So I had been looking forward to reading this teleology section of the Critique of Judgment. It's been on my list for a long time. And having read now part of it, I don't want to do it as a whole episode because it is right. We're pre Darwin, we're pre DNA. The idea. It seems like there's even more sophisticated language in Aristotle than in here. So I'm looking at Section 65, another one of those that was not assigned, but that was in order for Us to judge a body as being in itself and in its inner possibility, a natural purpose. What is needed is that all the parts, through their own causality, produce one another as regards both their form and combination.

Skipping down a little, we must think of each part as an organ that produces the other parts, so that each reciprocally produces the other. So that's not even just saying all the parts are related in a common plan, but that literally, like the heart is producing the liver and the liver is producing the heart. That is bananas.

28:33 Wes: No, he's not. He's saying that they can't exist without each other. It's just the weird language that he's putting it in. There's this mutual dependence. Dependence is the. He's not saying. I mean, he obviously, he knows that the liver doesn't come out of the

28:45 Mark: heart through their own causality, produce one another as regards both their form and combination.

28:51 Wes: They keep each other alive. Yeah, they're in it together. They're buddies. But, I mean, I think all of that is in these sections, right? The whole part reciprocities directly in this section. But the other thing I just want to. Before we move on from this to back to Hegel, I just wanted to say the other thing that I took me a long time to understand, but is very helpful, I think, to understanding the German idealists, is this idea, this weird idea of what happens when you get rid of sensible intuition, where we have a sensible manifold given to us from the outside, which is what accounts for contingency, because the sensible particulars don't just flow out of the concepts, as Seth was pointing out.

Well, intellectual intuition, if the understanding could be intuitive without a separate faculty giving us this manifold, it would create everything it thinks. And it took me a long time to understand that. I think I understand that right now. Because if, you know the data isn't going to come from the outside, if we're not begging for the alms of empirical data, we just produce it all. That with this cognitive power, God's mind produces it all for itself. And, you know, I think if you think of this in terms of God, it becomes clear, right? Because it's not like there's a world.

For there's something, the world, external to God that he perceives, he produces it all in the act of cognition. So cognition and creation, the boundary between those two things breaks down. And so therefore does the distinction between possibility, an actuality. Because possibility, in his epistemological way, associates with concepts, right? Concepts are not actualized until particulars, until the Given comes under them. So the actual is the realm of the given. But that collapses in this archetypal intellect.

30:48 Mark: I think we should actually read some quotes from 76 to 77 before we move on. But I do want to nitpick one more thing, which is, Wes, you said that for the scientists everything is mechanism, it's not teleology, but this. I'll just point to the title of section 80. So right after what we read on the necessary subordination of the principle of mechanism to the teleological principle in explaining a thing considered as a natural purpose. So scientists, he says, work your hardest, find out your mechanistic things. But you know that it's not going to be completely satisfying. You know, it's not going to go all the way that to even explain even just a blade of grass, you're going to absolutely need to read the teleological, the idea that it was created even for a scientist, you're going to have to use that regulative idea working

31:38 Wes: off two equivocal definitions of quote unquote. Explain. Yes, for our understanding, to understand it in terms of explanations, we need teleology, but in nature, explain as in cause as an actual mechanistic causation doesn't eat teleology. And he says that directly in here. We can read the. Read the quote. Here he says mechanism, you know, within the domain, the empirical domain, mechanism is sufficient, but for our understanding it is not.

32:07 Mark: Yes. So it's actually a big problem of how these two types of causality can interact. Final causality and efficient causality, because they're fundamentally different and there can't be just like, you know, you reach a certain point and the other one takes up like in the. In itself, they actually have to both be the same thing, but we can't possibly understand how that could be. So this is. You were saying? It's right. It's the realm, the divine realm that is surpasses the realm of the. In itself that is beyond both of those. So even though purposiveness, it is using a regulative idea that reason is getting from the supersensible, from something beyond even that if we actually got to the realm of the supersensible, as we've said a few times here, we wouldn't think in terms of purposiveness.

Right. Because everything would just be. And for purposiveness at least. Yeah. So I think we should read a little bit about this possibility versus actuality.

33:03 Wes: Can we just pause on the point you made just for one second? Before you do that, it's worth underlining. Again, Kant is suggesting that it's not like it's intelligent design. If we. If we could only see God and the things in themselves, we'd realize it's intelligent design. He's not saying that. He's saying even intelligent design wouldn't make sense at that level. It's something that we can't even imagine. It's not mechanism, it's not intelligent design. It's some unified thing out of which those two emerge for our understanding. But it's neither in the beyond.

33:34 Mark: But yet I just have to point out what one of these more sections. 73. None of the above systems accomplish it. It's what it alleges to accomplish. So he talks about Spinoza a little because you would think that this God. Oh, it's the underlying. It's the unity of everything. But Kant thinks that merely saying, well, there's some just being that the acorn and the blade of grass and the heart and the zebra, that these are all just pieces of its body, essentially, that still doesn't explain why they are the way they are. So just saying, like it says, okay, there's a grand plan, everything fits together because they're all part of one organism. But that's not sufficient to actually account for natural purposiveness. So, interestingly, even though this sounds a lot like Spinoza, it's not Spinoza.

34:22 Wes: No, this is very. I mean, Kant is very anti Spinoza, and the German idealists subsequently are going to use Spinoza against him.

34:30 Seth: Right.

34:30 Wes: The whole. For Spinoza, identifying substance, like Spinoza collapses cognitive substance in terms of. Right. Cartesian souls with divine substance, those two just collapse together. And that is part of the way out of this Kantian problem. But, yeah, Kant is very anti Spinoza. All right. Did you want to read some stuff from these sections?

34:53 Mark: Yes, yes. I'm completely from the sections here. Straying beyond the bounds of reason alone.

35:02 Wes: Do we want to step through or just highlight a few things? What did you guys want to do?

35:06 Mark: Just what's the point about possibility and actuality? Right. That just this, as we've said, if you were God, there would be no difference between them. Possibility seems to be something that is only. And I don't want to say illusion, but a constitutive part of the way that we understand the world, that when we encounter a particular, we think, well, this didn't have to be right there the way it is now. It could. Things could be different. And so the. Is where.

35:35 Dylan: Where is that coming from so page 285. But our entire distinction between the merely possible and the actual rests on this. In saying that a thing is possible, we are positing only the presentation of it with respect to our concept and to our thinking ability in general. But in saying that a thing is actual, we are positing the thing itself apart from that concept. Hence, the distinction between possible and actual things holds merely subjectively for human understanding. So when we talk about something, this is possible, this is actual, this is a subjective point of view from just because we're human beings that we even have that distinction.

36:19 Wes: And this is actually an issue we visited during the podcast over with many philosophers, ancient and contemporary, early modern. Right. So this is about modal realism. Hume is not a modal realist. Possibility isn't really out there in the world. It's just a matter of our lack of knowledge. What's going on with our cognitive faculty. Carnap was not a modal realist. Quine was not a modal realist. He was suspicious of any modal claims like possible and necessary. You know, and then there's people kind of in between, like, well, hopefully we'll do McDowell one day.

But the modal realist, you know, we. We've read some, like Aristotle's a modal realist and Kit Fine, who's another essentialist. And there's David Lewis, like, dramatically, right? When you say there's like, the possible worlds actually exist, like David, that's an attempt to rescue modal realism. And so is Kripke's naming and necessity. There's day Re. Necessity, right? Water is necessarily H2O. So that I just wanted to say that because this is not. It looks kind of weird when you first read it in Kant, and then you realize, oh, yeah, philosophers have been arguing about this forever.

Is possibility out there in the world or is it just in the mind? For Kant, it's not. It's not out there.

37:30 Mark: So it's an actual category.

37:32 Dylan: Kant is not out there. It's a consequence of our subjectivity, I think, even if you don't sort out that part of it, like, is possibility really out there in the world or not? I think it does clarify a lot about the way in which we're thinking. And what purpose of thinking or the difference between possible and actual thinking is doing. It's saying that there is a direction for one thing to become another thing, or it's a reflection of our uncertainty. And so, you know, until we get further confirmation, we only know that it's. That it might Be something so that it's a reflection of our contingent understanding.

38:11 Wes: So to Mark's question, yeah, possibility is a category and so is necessity and reciprocity. And right. There's always these umbrella, under the umbrella category of modality. Right. And it's just the categories are just really forms of judgment. Any can do in with forms of judgment and logic, you'll get a category for that. So the modality attaches to our judgments and therefore you'll see these modality categories.

38:37 Mark: So something I was looking for in re approaching Kant was do we know anything about whether these categories apply to the things themselves? We know that we can't state there is necessity and possibility in the things themselves, but also can we state there is no necessity or possibility in the things themselves that you think that if you were truly keeping to his skepticism about the things in themselves, then we should not be able to say either way. But yet, say Schopenhauer, a distinct Kantian follower, says, oh, we absolutely know that things in themselves do not have the categories.

And what I was reading in here and in Critique of Pure Reason was making me think that Schopenhauer is actually right, that that is actually the Kantian interpretation is that these are modes that comprise our experience. And so we would not expect. Like, if I approach everything with a hunger, I'm always hungry. And so everything I perceive in the world I think in terms of is this for me to eat or is this for me not to eat? And then I ask, well, I know that's a thing that's weird with me because I'm just a really hungry person, but what about the world in itself, apart from any human beings?

Could it be that those things are tinged with hunger or not with hunger? Of course they're not tinged with hunger. Not with hunger. That's something to do with me having a stomach and me having this weird constitution. So the same thing, causality, individuality, time, space, these could not actually be applied to the things themselves, which is saying a lot more specific stuff, even though negative, about the things themselves than I thought Kant was allowed to say.

40:18 Wes: Yeah, because it's like as if everything is a secondary quality. Right? So red is just a matter of a relation between us and the world. And it's not like we say, oh, we can't know whether red is out there. We say to ourselves, if we buy that picture, well, no, it's physics out there. And then it's red, you know, the qualia in. In here. So it's conceptually, it doesn't even make Sense to say that the categories are out there. And this is where the people subsequent to him, like Jacobi and then all German idealist hit him really hard because one of the categories is unity.

And also he constantly talks about the things in themselves causing the data, causing the given. Causality is a category. But Kant talks about noumena causing stuff in us, in our minds all the time, because how could he. None. And then he talks about things in themselves. Well, you can't have things unless you have unity. Unless you have all these categories, there's no such thing as things. The idea of a thing is a very categorical.

41:13 Dylan: It requires unity.

41:15 Wes: Yeah, unity and a lot of other. Even the manifold. Right. What does it mean to be a manifold? A many. Right. You need plurality. Whether you think about it the realm of the. In the domain of the thing in itself, or the little foyer in our mind with the given and the data, the sense data. It's the myth of the given. There just is no and. And they make this the myth of the given thing. Hegel's right there already before Wilfrid Sellars. Right? Is that his name?

41:40 Dylan: Sellars? Yep.

41:41 Wes: They're saying that it's absolutely impossible that the manifold isn't already conceptually articulated because it just wouldn't be anything. So yeah, this category thing is really problematic. And Hegel's just going to say obviously the categories apply to being itself and not just to the mind. But I think you're right, Mark. Kant just doesn't even think it makes sense to talk about them. That's how extreme his subjectivism advancement.

42:04 Mark: So in our last minutes here of part one. Yeah. Are there any other particular quotes or things from those two cont Sections anybody wants to read?

42:12 Dylan: I guess I found myself really appreciating and liking thinking about his clarification of purposiveness, where he says, this is the bottom of 287 in terms of the universal, the particular as such contains something contingent. Yet reason requires that even the particular laws of nature be combined in a unified and hence lawful way. Thus, this lawfulness of the contingent is called purposiveness.

42:38 Wes: Yeah, Good pick.

42:40 Dylan: Yeah. So this is the kind of language that is where I start thinking there's nothing particularly goddess about this to me saying that when we talk about lawfulness of the contingent things, that's what we mean by purposiveness. That's providing me insight about what I mean by what's purposive about something.

42:59 Wes: Well, one of the things that Kant is really interested in here is Mark made this point early on, it's about natural laws, right? Which themselves can't come from the categories. Now he derives like principles from the categories, which are pre scientific in a way. But we can't get the inverse square law out of the categories. We need data before we do that. And all those particular scientific laws, we can't possibly know that they're going to add up to a unity. In other words, what if we treated the scientific laws as another manifold and asked ourselves whether there are any overarching unifying laws that connect them all rising at the inverse square law in one part of space and not in another, or something like that.

And that's something that we, for the sake of inquiry, we have to make the assumption that everything does fit together in that way. There's another aspect to this, and he makes the point in these sections as well, which is that we can see it as a matter of chance that the manifold and all the particulars in the sense data are just somehow amenable to the categories. Right? It's not foreordained that we could get any data that would actually be amenable to these categorical impositions. Kant doesn't think we can just shape anything into with the categories.

So it's as if nature is somehow designed for our cognition, and we get that in beauty as well, right? The pleasure of beauty. It's as if nature is designed for our cognition, teleology. It's as if nature is designed both these things to go together.

44:34 Dylan: But this is where I want to take Kant seriously from earlier in the Critique of Pure Reason, where before you get to, well, it's as if the world was designed such that this were true is just saying, well, the conditions of my thinking, the conditions of human thinking require that the world appear in a certain way. Right. And if I say something like what you just said earlier, which is, well, I have to posit a unity of some sort in order to do thinking at all. That's absolutely true. And if you start saying, well, what if the inverse square law was true here, but then over an adjacent galaxy it was inverse cubed?

You can ask that question and you could say, well, what does that look like? And you could sort out the results and inconsistencies. If you have both those things going on at the same time, in fact, you can show, in fact, Newton shows that you won't get gravity out of other kinds of laws. Right?

45:29 Wes: Yeah, I remember that from St. John's yeah.

45:33 Dylan: So I guess I don't find it mysterious that we, as reasoning human beings that all of a sudden there's a unity that I'm going to have to think about, and the notion of consistency between one thing and another, and even this notion of purposiveness based upon where I have contingent information and I'm trying to figure out how the world works, contemplating that the world could be just any kind of random association and therefore, oh, I need to have God to turn that into something that is not random. It's just a weird thing to me. I don't understand. I mean, unless you just say, well, look, if I'm going to have reason in the world, I can't imagine that there's no reason to have reason. I guess you could do that unless you go down the road that we mentioned earlier, which is that reason is a consequence of the organization of entities that progressively gets more sophisticated.

46:30 Seth: So another way to kind of put a spin on this, if we want to pivot away from Hegel, is to just pivot towards Hume and talk about this in terms of causality. And it will just kind of shine another light on this. So on 292, Kant says, you know, the only way we can present the possibility of the parts as being dependent on the whole is if we had a presentation of the whole that was able to explain both the whole as well as the connection of the parts in such a way that those parts make this whole possible. In other words, we would be able to see the entirety of the universe or nature all at once and understand how the parts form the whole.

But we'd also be grasping the whole and we'd understand the whole in terms, you know, it says, in that case, the whole of nature essentially would be an effect, a product of this presentation. But when we say the product of a cause that determines its effect, right? It's just called a purpose. So if we think about this in terms of his thinking about Hume, Kant and Hume, on the causality question, you know, Hume says, yeah, we think we see causality, but all we see is, you know, successive events, right? Like correlation or what have you. And Kant says, well, you're right, at least on the first part.

We can't help but see the world as this series of causes and effects, cause and effect, cause and effect. It's like causality is just a structure of the way we see things. But because we can only see small parts and we can't see the entire larger whole, we can't even think about unity in that respect, or we can't think about the whole as being created by these Parts or as the whole as being constituted by the parts. And so there's a sense in which the notion of purpose is really talking about causality more generally and not specifically teleological.

And we can kind of tie this back into what Kant says about causality. It's, you know, kind of a piece, part of that same overall argument. So it's just like another nuance there.

48:44 Wes: My take on this section, he's talking about final causality. We're fine on mechanism, on efficient causality, until we get to organic beings, until we get to biological entities. And then we have this problem of it's not just parts determining the whole, it's the whole determining the part. The whole determines the part because the heart is for the whole, right? The whole says, I need a heart. The whole determines the part. And we can't conceive of that without this, that having the presentation of the whole contain the basis that makes possible the form of that whole as well.

The presentation is just like the idea in the mind of the artisan. The presentation here is the blueprint. We can't conceive of this particular type of relationship where a whole has to say, I need a heart, unless it's pre established in some way, it's encoded. And that we know can happen through DNA, through evolution. He's not wrong. It has to be done somewhere. We know it can be done in DNA, but from this particular teleological perspective, it just has to be done somewhere. And it seems like it might be the mind of God or something more abstract like Aristotle's unmoved mover.

49:51 Mark: Well, let's see where Hegel is going to. You know, he wants to be able to talk about theology. He thinks that Kant, far from, you know, we're approaching this from the modern perspective, is like, oh, it's too bad that Kant is explicitly bringing in God. Can he talk about final causes and teleology without talking about God? Hegel's coming from the opposite direction. Like, no, you were on something, but you were just too cowardly and, you know, you thought that we didn't have epistemic warrant to talk about these theological things. I want to talk about these theological things. So we'll get back into Hegel directly and the part that he takes inspiration,

50:25 Wes: I think he just summed it all up. I don't know that we need to do.

50:28 Mark: He takes inspiration from Kant as well as being very harsh on, you know, what Kant does to reason, as we were discussing in the last episode. Please come back for part two to hear the yes, the exciting conclusion of this battle of two epic minds, Hegel and Kant. If you're not a Partially Examined Life supporter Already, go to partialexaminelife.com support and your part two should be in your feed already or very, very soon. Otherwise, just wait until next week. Thanks.

50:57 Dylan: Thank.