Tagged: kant
Breaking intuition’s chains (part 1)
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852
Wont to think of intuition as Avicenna did, a divine illumination, a serendipitous co-harmony between our limited intellect and the celestial emanations, an experience rather like surfacing for air, we should remind ourselves that we drown in it. Intuition is all well and good when it delivers us to some desired result of inquiry, when it accords with the world and the rest of our considered beliefs and provides impetus for further investigation. But we should recognize that intuition is an affliction, an inescapable inability to grasp a belief as anything but true, an optical illusion of the intellect. One does not choose intuition. It simply emerges, fully-formed as though Athena from the head of Zeus, and commits us brutely to a particular train of thought. More than any amount of education or training it is intuition which births the philosopher, the one who follows it with such singleminded passion that they scarce see the scorched countryside they leave in their wake. It is very possible to give up everything for an intuition; to condemn a whole project of thought, entire fields of study, a career, a life. But intuition on its own presents no signs of such external imperative. For by the time intuition strikes us it is already far too late. We only seize upon a truth as a fly seizes upon the web of the spider or the nectar of Dionaea muscipula. To its credit intuition coerces us to its side with the common decency to make us feel such a move agreeable (and do not say coercion functions inappropriately here; how else to describe the interaction between a student and their wizened professor who asks, prefiguring the answer, “but what do you think of this case?. . .”). And we are always chained to intuition by ghastly figures: philosophical zombies, botched products of teletransportation, daemons, swamp-men, a whole cryptid menagerie pushing levers and turning cranks in the recesses of imagination, grinning, hoisting lights like anglerfish.
In his 2013 “The Taming of Philosophy” Michael Della Rocca makes roughly the same point albeit in more sobering language, though one still gets the creeping impression from his paper that philosophers one by one have succumbed to a sinister entity parasitic on thought, method, and argumentation; in other words to intuition. Della Rocca argues that reliance on intuition leads to “the ungrounded [read: illegitimate] limitation of philosophy’s engagement with reality,” condemning us at once to a conservativism (of endorsing status quo belief), psychologism (of reading facts about human psychology as facts about the nature of reality), and arbitrariness (of choosing between competing intuitions) (190).
Della Rocca’s criticism elucidates a crucial question for any philosopher relying on intuitions: what are the conditions for the possibility of intuition yielding substantive philosophical conclusions (rather than, say, data about contingent psychological features of the human mind)? For the natural charge against intuition specifically and introspective philosophy generally is that it is a mere psychologism. It purports to offer fundamental facts about the nature of reality while peddling nothing but contingent facts about one’s mental state at a given moment. A contender for a response to this transcendental question is Kant’s — against charges that the First Critique was mere psychologism, he replied that the object of his study was both necessary and universal among all cognizing beings. With necessity and universality come philosophical significance. To make the distinction perfectly clear we need only consider the difference between one’s intuition that vanilla ice cream is delicious, which is neither necessary (imagine you grew up hating sweets) nor universal (there are those who hate vanilla and eat strictly chocolate), and one’s intuition that bodies in space must be extended. To be sure these may both present themselves as immediately plausible conclusions about the world, and we might even preface either judgment with an of course. But only one merits the designation of “intuition” in any philosophically meaningful sense, and it is not the intuitive nature of the conclusion per se which merits such a designation but rather the judgment’s necessity and universality. Surely an unsatisfying response to the intuitionist, for here the whole significance of intuition drops out as totally peripheral to the truth of what is intuited.
Indeed, Della Rocca rightly points out this tension in the method of the intuitionist: insofar as they are an intuitionist, they seek to develop a philosophical system which accommodates intuitions. But given that truth about reality stands as the object of our inquiry, philosophical or otherwise, shouldn’t it rather be that we develop philosophical systems which accommodate reality? But, in what really becomes the only disappointment in an otherwise outstanding piece, he never treats the intuition itself as something real. Rather he can only conceive of it as an epiphenomenal pointing-at some belief which, regrettably and all-too-often, ends up being false. Where the intuitionist claims the irrelevancy of the contingent conditions under which one’s mind produces an intuition as to the truth of its contents, Della Rocca (rightly, again) adopts the negation of this naivete: if the conditions are suspect, so too should be our faith in the content. But, as happens often the negation of a falsity, rather than bringing us straight at the truth, only makes apparent the juncture at which thought has taken the wrong turn. To put it rather crudely the debate focuses on the relation between the form of the intuition (the manner in which and by which the intuition presents itself) and its content (the belief the intuition renders obvious or obviously false). Intuitions are either damned to irrelevance by merit of its inadequate relation to the content of the belief (“…it seems obvious only because you were raised a certain way!”) or otherwise defended (“…well yes, but mathematicians and geometers too must be raised a certain way, and we do not doubt Pythagoras’ theorem nonetheless.”). Della Rocca wages battle admirably on this terrain, but not even the greatest tactical skill can prevail in a campaign in which the enemy sets the terms of engagement. For the intuitionist in times of trouble may always play their trump: “you have argued very well that our conviction in the truth or falsity of a belief is an illegitimate hold-over of biology, upbringing, and environment, a contingent psychological fact that cannot serve as the basis of philosophical knowledge. But know this — in damning us you damn yourself, for all things you believe and say succumb to the same mighty critique; if we are not left with intuitionism, we are left with barbarism.” One can hardly negotiate when such antinomy, the philosophical equivalent of a mutually assured destruction, lurks at the end of the discussion.
Adorno on Kantian autonomy, or: how can one freely be bound to law?
Alas, kites can be neither free nor autonomous.
What Kant grapples with in his moral philosophy, Adorno argues, is the tension between freedom and necessity as it pertains to human action. At the most obvious level the tension presents itself as the impossibility of moral human action in a world governed by causal laws. Insofar as we are empirical beings constrained by the doctrine of cause and effect, we cannot be held accountable for our actions, for we have no more agency in conducting ourselves than the billiard ball bouncing off the pool cue. The iron necessity of causality in this case subjugates us to the dictates of nature. We do not choose natural law, and yet we must abide by it. Hence we are heteronomous – literally, governed by the laws of another – and so unfree.
At this juncture one may very well conclude that genuine freedom involves action according to no rule, which springs from some unnatural font of spontaneity (e.g. an immaterial soul). Indeterminism fails to provide a substantive grounding for free action, however, for the same reasons that nature’s determinism does. Just imagine somebody who acted according to no principles whatsoever – whose action sprung mysteriously from some unknown source. Their choice in deciding to do X over Y would be unintelligible, more like the accidental outcome of a die roll than of the sort of deliberation characteristic of decisionmaking. So the way out from determinism to freedom can’t just involve the negation of determinism.
Instead, Kant’s answer is that moral choice must involve the right sort of determination: determination by reason. To act morally is to act in accordance with reason, and to act in accordance with reason means obeying strictly its laws. What differentiates these laws from those of nature is that the laws of reason are self-imposed – they are autonomous, auto-nomos, self-law. Adorno points out the tension in this approach: to secure freedom, Kant must establish a necessity in the moral sphere akin to the causal necessity present in the empirical sphere. Adorno puts it like this:
“…reason generally makes its appearance with the claim of deductive necessity, with the claim that everything it implies follows in accordance with the propositions of logic. And this element of necessity already presupposes an affinity… with the causality that is supposed to hold sway in the realm of empirical phenomena… the whole of Kant’s moral philosophy is tied to the concept of autonomy which is regarded as the realm where freedom and necessity meet. What this means is that the moral laws are indeed the laws of freedom – because as a rational being I give them to myself without making myself dependent on any external factor. At the same time, however, they have the character of laws because rational action and rational deduction cannot be understood except as acting and thinking in conformity with laws and rules.” (Problems of Moral Philosophy, Lecture 8, pg.80)
A problem immediately arises: in what sense can we act autonomously in accord with reason, if we are empirical beings who inhabit the determined world of nature? Adorno claims that “here Kant falls into a trap of his own making” in articulating a solution to this problem (81). Kant argues variously in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason that “as empirical beings we experience the obligation to perform certain actions, or to leave them undone” (Adorno 81). Proceeding from the fact of this experience, Kant asks as to the conditions for its possibility: what makes possible the experience of conscience, of the sense that one should and should not engage in certain actions? Such transcendental critique comes unsurprisingly as part and parcel with the rest of the Kantian system, but in this case Adorno points out its potentially damning implications:
“…if [Kant] desires to exclude every empirical element from his foundation of moral philosophy – and that is his aim – he cannot then appeal to the empirical existence of the so-called moral compulsion in man himself because this compulsion is itself an empirical fact… in short, the unity of moral obligation and reason that Kant insists on is not altogether unproblematic if we reflect a little more deeply on this obligation; indeed it becomes highly dubious.” (Lecture 8, pg 82)
The quite obvious Kantian response in this case involves an injunction against mistaking the empirical conditions by which we come to know a phenomenon for some essential feature of that phenomenon. In other words, such a criticism mistakes the process by which we contingently come to experience our moral duty for the characteristic qualities of that moral duty itself. It is a similar mistake to one who takes the truths of mathematics to be contingent upon empirical observations about the world, just because one has learned them through such observations.
But in this case such a response does not save Kant, because it introduces a rupture within the human being which is the subject of morality, splitting asunder the experience of morality from its essential nature. There are three possible ways we can conceive the relationship between the empirical experience of moral duty (conscience) and the “formal, abstract shape of the moral law” for which that experience serves as evidence.
First option: Conscience is coextensive with the moral law. This is a highly repugnant conclusion. To accept this is, in essence, to deny that there is any thing as a moral law in the first place. For it identifies the empirical constraints on moral thought (the psychological experience of moral duty) with the moral duty itself. One might imagine this position as involving an acceptance that “whatever one feels is moral, is moral; whatever one feels is immoral, is immoral.” An unacceptable conclusion, in short.
Second option: Conscience is totally separate from the moral law (though it grounds the moral law). This is a more palatable conclusion – presumably the one Kant took himself to be endorsing, in the last instance – but one which Adorno argues cannot be the case. For suppose it were true: that there was no substantive relationship between conscience and the moral law. Or, to put it more precisely, that there was no relationship between the motivational import provided by conscience and the demands lain upon it by the moral law. In this case, any case of moral behavior would be a merely accidental one of the sort Kant routinely decries in the Groundwork, e.g. of the shopkeeper who treats customers fairly not because it is moral, but because it brings them the greatest profit. Except in this the explanation for all moral behavior would be that, e.g. the shopkeeper treats customers fairly only because of some empirical-psychological motivation stemming from their conscience, and not because the moral law commands them to do so. In this case the pure abstract formality of the moral law might be preserved, but at the expense of its possible enactment.
Third option: Conscience is related somehow to the moral law. This is the only option which remains, but that “somehow” is a problem which – Adorno argues – we cannot solve using only the tools given to us by Kant’s system.
Adorno concludes his exceedingly fascinating eighth lecture with a concise statement of Kant’s, distinguishing the determinism of nature from that of the moral law:
“‘Reason therefore’, he continues, ‘provides laws which are imperatives, that is, objective laws of freedom which tell us what ought to happen – although perhaps it never does happen,’ – you see here [Kant’s] indifference towards effects – ‘therein differing from laws of nature, which relate only to that which happens. These laws [of reason] are therefore to be entitled practical laws.'” (Lecture 8, pg. 88)
lacun(a)head 