Quoted in April Wilson’s German Quickly:
According to April Wilson, according to Heinrich Heine: “Die Lebensgeschichte Immanuel Kants ist schwere zu beschreiben. Denn er hatte weder Leben noch Geschichte.”
According to me, according to April Wilson, according to Heinrich Heine: “The life story of Immaneul Kant is difficult to describe. This is because he had neither life nor story.”
After reading this article, I was fairly struck by how the researcher was facing some of the same problems with which philosophers have had to deal for the past 300 years or so, and how their solutions could be informed by philosophy.
Anyone who has poked around here probably knows that I hate Kant, but there are interesting parallels to the problems Kant faced and one of the problems faced by AI researchers concerned with embodied AI: How the AI perceives the world. Kant argued that we don’t actually see the world as it is, that such things as space, time, and causation are not in the world so much as they are imposed on the world by our minds. One lesson to take from that, if you buy this story, is that the representation of the world that we make to ourselves has no necessary relationship to the world as it actually is. The lesson for AI (which it seems AI researchers are already well aware of): An embodied AI does not need to perceive (where ‘perceive’ should be taken to indicate any structure that represents the world, whether mathematical, spatial, geometrical, or even in terms of semantics) the world as it actually is (or even as we perceive it), but in whatever way facilitates its accomplishing of its goals.
I thought I hated Kant before. But now I’ve picked up a copy of The Metaphysics of Morals (which, by the way, has all these weird numbers all over it – there are page numbers, section numbers, paragraphish numbers – it’s very weird). Now I hate Kant more. Here’s why:
1. OMG WTF with the Awake magazine-like titles? “In a State of Nature Something External Can Actually Be Mine or Yours but Only Provisionally”? Really?
2. Stupid questions: “What is money?”, “What is a book?” (the answer literally opens with “A book is a writing…” and is quickly followed with another JW-ish title: “Unauthorized Publishing of Books Is Forbidden as a Matter of Right”. Kant should so work for the RIAA)
3. “Section III: On Rights to Persons Akin to Rights to Things”, which details all the ways, despite Kant’s dictum that a person should never be treated as a thing, that we can treat persons like things. I knew I would love this section once he started talking about sex, which is at the very beginning: “Sexual union is the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another. This is either a natural use (by which procreation of a being of the same kind is possible) or an unnatural use, and unnatural use takes place either with a person of the same sex or with an animal of a nonhuman species.”
Note for the future:
So here’s the deal. I got in a lot of women’s studies classes on the one hand, and in a sort of skepticalish sense in a class on Foucault on the other, that he’s (maybe?) got this picture of reality he’s trying to get across in, say, The Order of Things that all of reality is somehow socially constructed, that we somehow collectively construct the stuff we see and study. I’m not sure I buy that, even if that’s the sort of thing that he was trying to do.
But I think it might not be. Maybe Foucault wasn’t so much into telling the truth about the world as he was into showing that a certain way of looking at the world just can’t possibly be true. Here’s my reconstruction:
Modern era: “Man constructs all of his experience WITH HIS MIND! Maybe there’s even Platonic forms!”
Foucault: “Do you even know where you came from? Because here’s the thing: Before you, people thought very differently about things. Isn’t that weird? And after you, they’ll probably think differently about things.”
Modern era: “WTF SRSLY?!”
Foucault: “No, really. And here’s the thing: This whole ‘man constructs all of his experience WITH HIS MIND’ whatnot isn’t only kind of embarrassing. Its also problematic.”
Modern era: “But it sounds so COOL! Also, PLATONIC FORMS!”
Foucault: “No it does sound cool, but if man constructs all of his experience with his mind, and part of man’s experience is man, then doesn’t man construct man WITH HIS MIND?“
Modern era: “OMGWTF BWAAAAAAA!”
Foucault: “Yeah, seriously.”
Did you catch the magic move there? The whole episteme talk that makes it so there can be a way of thinking before the modern era, and a way of thinking after the modern era, is kind of a version of “MAN CONSTRUCTS ALL OF HIS EXPERIENCE WITH HIS MIND!!!” Its using the rules of the Modern era that Foucault is able to pull together his claim that the Modern way of thinking self-destructs, and is therefore, I think he hopes, able to inaugurate a new way of thinking. What he doesn’t seem to be interested in doing there, though, is telling the truth, except insofar as “OMG contradiction!” is a truth. That is, you don’t play using a set of rules you think are flawed if what you want is to get at REAL REALITY. You only play with a set of rules that you think are flawed if you want to make sure the people who like those rules aren’t going to cry foul.
I hate Kant. Maybe that’s putting things too strongly. Maybe not. No, not. Kant was wrong. About everything. Kant makes me more cranky, the more I read of him. Kant did important (or important-sounding) things for unimportant reasons. Kant was shallow, and sounded deep. Everything Kant said was either obvious or obviously wrong. Kant used big words where he could have used small words. Kant was not stylin’. Kant was what is wrong with modernity. I can’t read Kant. Kant thought homosexuality violated Kant’s categorical imperative (but not for the reasons you might think he thought that). Kant used radical philosophy to maintian the status quo. Kant changed his name from ‘Emanuel’ to ‘Immanuel’. Kant worked hard. Kant agreed with Hitler (or Hitler agreed with Kant). Kant never married. Kant’s givens are not my givens. Kant hid things so that he could keep them. Kant supported racial (racist) heirarchies. Kant was not a clock. Kant probably ate alone.
So I was literally forced to read the first book of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation which was, for the most part, fairly uninteresting. Except, that is, for this one part that was really interesting. For someone like me, anyway.
Schopenhauer builds this whole pseudo-Kantian structure around the world, but where Kant divides the world in two for primarily epistemological reasons, Schopenhauer’s interest is mostly metaphysical. Kant says we can know all about one half, and nothing about the other (not even that it exists), while Schopenhauer insists that we can know all sorts of things about both halves. Kant’s main interest in all this halving business is to make room in that inaccessible place for all the philosophically problematic stuff like God or free will. So if its something that he likes, but its hard to deal with philosophically, he calls it noumenal and says we can’t really know anything about it. Since Schopenhauer lets us access the other side, its clear that he’s up to something different.
Wait for it, we’re still not to the interesting part. So for Schopenhauer, the split sort of follows outside/inside lines, which lets us know things in different sorts of ways. I can look at my body as an object and learn all about it, from the outside. But I can also access it from the inside, because its my body: I can know all sorts of things about what it is to be me that just can’t be learned by looking at me from the outside. And for Schopenhauer, everything is like this – there’s something that is what-it-is-to-be-a-rock-from-the-inside, etc.
Still not to the interesting part. So Kant made a big deal about things like space, time, and causation being things that our understanding of the world forces onto it – the world-in-itself (if there is such a thing) has none of those things going on in it. Schopenhauer agrees, but adds that plurality must be one of those things that gets added by our understanding, since plurality can’t exist without space and time. So (maybe you can see where we’re going with this), although on the outside there are desks and people and me, on the inside (where things are as they are without my understanding imposing itself on them), there can be only one thing.
What-it-is-to-be-Khrushchev-on-the-inside is the same as what-it-is-to-be-Khrushchev’s-desk-on-the-inside, and so on. I know, who cares.
So we’re almost to the interesting part. Schopenhauer’s ethical system, built on this picture of the world, revolves around realizing all this through our sense of compassion. That is, compassion lets us see the world as it truly is and leads to a whole other set of bonuses that aren’t really important here. Our compassion is supposed to lead us to reject what-it-is-to-be-everything-on-the-inside, which ends up being the only moral, maybe even the only possible, option once this realization occurs. The thing is, Schopenhauer was a dick. He pushed a woman, Caroline Marquet, living in his apartment building out of the house, injuring her, just because she was irritating him by making noise. He didn’t speak to his mother or sister for eleven years because they didn’t follow his advice on some investment.
So, and for me this is the interesting part, we have this philosopher who makes compassion the cornerstone of his ethics but himself seems particularly uncompassionate. In a sense, the whole World As Will and Representation then becomes an elaborately (and unnecessarily) argued case for Schopenhauer’s being a very, very bad person, on his own terms. More interesting, to me, is that the book was written, published, on Schopenhauer’s account, because he had a very important message to tell the world. It became a marginal classic of Western philosophy. And possibly because a cranky, callous man felt guilty for being such a cranky, callous man.
