THE CYBER ENLIGHTENMENT

  

I regret to inform you that for the next year I will be reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

-------- Skip This Section if you don't want my background--------

    I won't be starting it quite yet though, I have to give some background on my approach and literacy, as any true Kantian would. I did not study philosophy academically, my undergraduate degree is in Biology and my actual career is related to molecular biology. I have been reading Hard Philosophical Texts (with accompany lectures/podcasts) (at work, on the clock) for about three years. The first one I read through was Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, the second was Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and the third was Peter Strawson's Bounds of Sense, I've also read the first third of Robert Brandom's Spirit of Trust (on semantics and epistemology). Those are largely what inform my views and takes on philosophy I read. I read (past tense, here) them loosely, narratively, took what I could, ignored what I couldn't make sense of, got to the last page and said "that's that." I will not be doing this with the Critique. 

    I used to tutor mathematics and chemistry, and I had many nursing students whose careers those disciplines don't necessarily completely apply to, but who nevertheless are required to prove that they, the nursing student, are capable of passing*, so I will be reading each section as if I am required to explain it to a layman, a student, who might be in over their head in a subject they need to get over with. I want to actually understand the Critique, and will know whether or not I do if I can parse it in a language that an intellectually curious person can at least grasp at, or know-where-they-are-at, at.

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    Kant's project is couched, historically, within a larger (some say fundamental) Philosophical quandary: how do I know that I know what I know, and what are the conditions for knowing that? Much of contemporary analytical Philosophy consists in figuring out where to apply the italics in that previous statement (I did it at random).  

    Anyway, "What is knowledge? What is truth?" was the subject analyzed in Plato's Theaetetus, where the ideas of something being Justified, True, and a Belief were formed as the criteria for truth. Aristotle expanded on this in his Organon, in which notions that evolved into both classical logic as well as the classificatory notions of biology (phylum, genus, species), originated - as well as Newtonian Physics.

    Unfortunately for readers, IE myself, Kant did not have Plato's aptitude for literary prose or storytelling (which is probably why Kant never fucked, but that is an aside). Aristotle is said to have been a better, clearer writer than Plato, but Aristotle's actual written texts are lost, and all we have are lecture notes - and so Kant studied the people who studied the people who studied the people who studied the people who studied Aristotle, and not Aristotle himself. Therefore, Kant's style is in the same vein as hastily taken lecture notes: Observation, Argument, and Remark, always assuming a prior engagement with the subject. I am looking at some of my old lecture notes from Organic Chemistry right now, and, three years removed from the lectures, there is no way I can infer the actual mechanistic pathways of the reactions we studied. If I had to, say, do a distillation and condensation reaction, my knowledge of the chemical compounds involved is such that, just using my notes, I would not know if I am generating ethanol or a toxic gas that will give me lung cancer in six months. Philosophy moves forward regardless.

    Wasn't that rude? I assumed a lot of previous knowledge of philosophy, I referenced Aristotle in the second sentence - where did that come from? I was talking about Plato and prose style. I also didn't deliver the punchline at the correct moment, but delayed it in a series of  anecdotes (involving Organic Chemistry? Why would a general audience member know anything about that?) and kind of killed the whole thing - and I ended with a general account of  how my unclear argument was successful, with no interlocutor? But it did all make sense to you - which is how you knew it was poorly written or argued. Welcome to Kant, lets figure out how you put those puzzle pieces together and made sense of that previous paragraph, and make sense of the world. Philosophy is not, after all, something meant to be immediately applicable to our everyday lives, Philosophy is more of a 2000 year long running game of mind-chess where most of your team mates and opponents are dead pedophiles.

Part 1: The Transcendental Aesthetic

    I will not be reading his preface or his introduction until the end. Kant's Critique is divided roughly between sections that deal with the semantics of his cognitive model, the first section has to do with knowledge before it counts as knowledge, sensings, and the framework sensing relies upon. This framework consists in 2 things: Space, and Time, these are pure intuitions a-priori, require no outside experiential source. They are the matrix in which all statements about experience happen. This might seem obvious, "of course all statements between people are assumed to take place in a consistent spatiotemporal framework" and you are right. Anyway, expect my post about it next monday.