Hume and Kant

Hume declared that he saw objects moving about, but never saw “causality”.

It was the voice of Attila that men were hearing.

It was Attila’s soul that spoke when Hume declared that he experienced a flow of fleeting states inside his skull, such as sensations, feelings or memories, but had never caught the experience of such a thing as consciousness or self.

Hume declared that:

• the apparent existence of an object did not guarantee that it would not vanish spontaneously next moment
• the sunrise of today did not prove that the sun would rise tomorrow
• philosophical speculation was a game, like chess or hunting, of no significance whatever to the practical course of human existence
  • This was because reason proved that existence was unintelligible and only the ignorant maintained the illusion of knowledge

He had:

• a vehement opposition to the mysticism of the Witch Doctor
• loyalty to reason and science

What men were hearing was the manifesto of a philosophical movement that I call Attila-ism.

If it were possible for an animal to describe the content of his consciousness, the result would be a transcript of Hume’s philosophy. Hume’s conclusions would be the conclusions of a consciousness limited to the perceptual level of awareness, passively reacting to the experience of immediate concretes, with no capacity to form abstractions, to integrate perceptions into concepts, waiting in vain for the appearance of an object labeled “causality” (except that such a consciousness would not be able to draw conclusions).

To negate man’s mind, it is the conceptual level of his consciousness that has to be invalidated. Under all the tortuous complexities, contradictions, equivocations, rationalizations of the post-Renaissance philosophy—the one consistent line, the fundamental that explains the rest, is: a concerted attack on man’s conceptual faculty. Most philosophers did not intend to invalidate conceptual knowledge, but its defenders did more to destroy it than did its enemies. They were unable to offer a solution to the “problem of universals,” that is: to define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the relationship of concepts to perceptual data—and to prove the validity of scientific induction. Ignoring the lead of Aristotle, who had not left them a full answer to the problem, but had shown the direction and the method by which the answer could be found, the philosophers were unable to refute the Witch Doctor’s claim that their concepts were as arbitrary as his whims and that their scientific knowledge had no greater metaphysical validity than his revelations.

The philosophers chose to solve the problem by conceding the Witch Doctor’s claim and by surrendering to him the conceptual level of man’s consciousness— a victory no Witch Doctor could have hoped to achieve on his own. The form of that absurd concession was the philosophers’ ultimate division into two camps: those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the Witch Doctor, by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind. Thus reason was pushed off the philosophical scene, by default, by implication, by evasion. What had started as a serious problem between two camps of serious thinkers soon degenerated to the level where nothing was left on the field of philosophy but a battle between Witch Doctors and Attila-ists. The man who formalized this state, and closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant.

Kant gave metaphysical expression to the psycho-epistemology of Attila and the Witch Doctor and to their primordial existential relationship, shutting out of his universe the existence and the psycho-epistemology of the Producer. He surrendered philosophy to Attila—and insured its future delivery back into the power of the Witch Doctor. He turned the world over to Attila, but reserved to the Witch Doctor the realm of morality. Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason. Attila’s share of Kant’s universe includes this earth, physical reality, man’s senses, perceptions, reason and science, all of it labeled the “phenomenal” world. The Witch Doctor’s share is another, “higher,” reality, labeled the “noumenal” world, and a special manifestation, labeled the “categorical imperative,” which dictates to man the rules of morality and which makes itself known by means of a feeling, as a special sense of duty.

The “phenomenal” world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man’s mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty: man’s basic concepts (such as time, space, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled “categories” and “forms of perception”) which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it. This proves, said Kant, that man’s concepts are only a delusion, but a collective delusion which no one has the power to escape. Thus reason and science are “limited,” said Kant; they are valid only so long as they deal with this world, with a permanent, pre-determined collective delusion (and thus the criterion of reason’s validity was switched from the objective to the collective), but they are impotent to deal with the fundamental, metaphysical issues of existence, which belong to the “noumenal” world. The “noumenal” world is unknowable; it is the world of “real” reality, “superior” truth and “things in themselves” or “things as they are”—which means: things as they are not perceived by man. Even apart from the fact that Kant’s theory of the “categories” as the source of man’s concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.

As to Kant’s version of morality, it was appropriate to the kind of zombies that would inhabit that kind of universe: it consisted of total, abject selflessness. An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.) Those who accept any part of Kant’s philosophy—metaphysical, epistemological or moral—deserve it.

If one finds the present state of the world unintelligible and inexplicable, one can begin to understand it by realizing that the dominant intellectual influence today is still Kant’s—and that all the leading modern schools of philosophy are derived from a Kantian base.

The popular slang expression “head-shrinker,” applied to psychologists, is much more literally applicable to Kant: observe the sharp drop in the intellectual stature of the post-Kantian philosophers, and the progressively thickening veil of grayness, superficiality, casuistry that descends on the history of philosophy thereafter—like a fog enveloping a sluggish river that runs thinner and thinner and finally vanishes in the swamps of the twentieth century. The major line of philosophers rejected Kant’s “noumenal” world quite speedily, but they accepted his “phenomenal” world and carried it to its logical consequences: the view of reality as mere appearance; the view of man’s conceptual faculty as a mechanism for producing arbitrary “constructs” not derived from experience or facts; the view of rational certainty as impossible, of science as unprovable, of man’s mind as impotent—and, above all, the equation of morality with selflessness. They rejected the root or cause of Kant’s system, but accepted all of its deadly effects. They accepted it as some monstrous spider hanging in midair, in a web of unintelligible, almost unreadable verbiage—and, today, few people know that that spider is not supported by a single thread of proof.

Such was the intellectual equipment with which philosophers approached the task of observing the unprecedented historical events of the nineteenth century, and the responsibility of providing guidance for the new, free society of capitalism.