There was more implied in Kant’s theory of knowledge than the fact that what we see is not an objective world in itself, but rather a picture that is created by us based on sense experience. (As if that wasn’t enough.) Besides stating that we are in an essential way the creators of the world as we see it, he was also saying that creating that world as it did had a responsibility inherent in it.
Kant recognized that as we go through life we are bombarded by sensual impressions and from those we compose an ongoing moving picture of reality. The picture of reality that we create must conform to certain rules of necessity in order to create a picture that is intelligible. As we put together our moving picture of reality all sorts of laws of necessity will demand our picture of reality must look a certain way so as to remain consistent and therefore intelligible. Some of these laws are enforced apriori, or prior to thought. Kant identified certain categories such as, time, space and being that all sensations were necessarily ordered into.
Other aspects of ordering are done more consciously using thought and reason. Every way in which we order reality has implied within it certain other necessary orderings. For instance, let’s say that we perceive a certain sequence of sensations – a shape, that is furry, has four legs and two eyes and barks and we put these sensations together into a dog. To remain consistent seeing this mental object as a dog means that by necessity the same object cannot also be a cat. In order to be consistent something being a dog makes it impossible for it to also be a cat. Within all of our conceptual categories there are uncountable numbers of implied laws that order and structure the rest of reality.
To put it another way, Kant understood human reason to be a constantly integrative process. As human beings are bombarded with a barrage of varied and incoherent sensations. These sensations are instantaneously filtered, ordered and congealed into a coherent picture of reality. This picture of reality, what Kant called a necessary transcendental unity, is the contextual background of all of our experience. The demand that this contextual background remain coherent from moment to moment places a constant demand on the way we order our perceptions.
Kant went beyond this more mechanical understanding of how reality is constructed by the mind by recognizing that by seeing objects in certain ways we were also committing to them being that way. In other words, if we see the object as a dog, we are committing ourselves to acting as if it is a dog. If it is a dog then we don’t go up and start talking to it and expecting it to answer back in human language. The laws of necessity are not only rules for how we must perceive things. They are also laws governing how we must act in relationship to things. When we see things a certain way we are committing ourselves to acting as if that is the way they are and we are responsible for acting in accordance with the way we see things.
It is a small leap from Kant here to William James’ conception of “The Will to Believe” in which he sees that what we choose to believe in fundamentally orients our perception of reality and as a result the way we act in the world. Truth in James’ brand of Pragmatism was created by our actions and our actions were determined by what we chose to believe.
Of all the American Pragmatists, however, it was Charles Sanders Peirce who was following on most directly from Kant. He held an integrated view of reality in which he simultaneously acknowledged the existence of different modes of being while insisting that all were equally real. His three modes of being were a rethinking of Kant’s fundamental categories.
Peirce claimed that reality was comprised of three modes of being that he called “Firstness,” “Secondness” and “Thirdness.” These were his three catagories. Firstness is the quality or character of things. It is “redness” or “hardness” or “coldness.” Secondness is the brute actuality of things. It is the event of experiencing the quality of something. Thirdness is the laws and habits that allow us to create a mental understanding of reality by relating things and qualities. In this we hear echos of Kant’s unknowable thing in itself, firstness, his concept of sensations, Secondness, and his transendental unity, Thirdness.
To Peirce, Thirdness was not a view of some external reality; it was an actual part of reality itself. Peirce did not see ideas as simply mirrors of the “real world;” they were as real as anything else. To appreciate the metaphysics of the Pragmatists, this point is critical and it has also become central to all forms of Evolutionary Spirituality that we find in the popular literature today.
It was in this third domain of reality that Peirce’s evolutionary philosophy was rooted because he saw our growth in knowledge about the universe as part of the growth of the universe itself. In Peirce’s understanding, the fate of the universe was in human hands because it would ultimately be determined by what Peirce imagined as an “unlimited community” of investigators. These investigators, through their shared inquiry into the nature of reality, would slowly converge toward a final agreement about what was ultimately true, and that truth would define the concluding state of the universe.
10 responses so far ↓
Carl // November 11, 2009 at 7:33 am
Something that seems to be missing from the thinking of Kant and many of those who followed him is an understanding of the development of “mind.” Reading them, one gets the impression that there is some kind of unformed entity, the mind, that does all of this creative construction of the universe. I think that our contemporary understanding of development, based on experimental and observational science rather than on conjecture, of the emergence of verbal and conceptual behavior, and of the co-emergent impact of culture on the creation of “mind,” adds quite a bit to these relatively archaic pre-scientific ideas. In particular, there is a sort of holistic systems view that is implicit in Kant’s ideas, but which emerged more fully in detail with the development of scientific method applied to our own behavior.
Jeff Carreira // November 12, 2009 at 7:03 am
I agree Carl. Of course you are right that Kant’s ideas are in many ways old and crusty, at the same time I believe it is a mistake to dismiss the ideas of great thinkers like Kant without considering deeply that they might be telling us something that we don’t already know. Cognitive science certainly has something to tell us and – as you will see in my next post – Hegel was already talking about the cultural implications of mind hundreds of years ago. I think it is important and powerful to consider how the human understanding of itself has developed. I don’t think we have all the answers now and I am building up a history that I hope will allow me to convincingly challenge the scientific worldview. I once heard it said that in terms of technology most of us live about 10 years in the past. It now occurs to me that the sate of affairs in terms of philosophy is much worse.
Nishad // November 12, 2009 at 8:41 am
Peirce’s ideas are so “integral” by today’s definitions – reality is not just “third-person” but also “first-person” and “second person” – as these evolve, reality itself is evolving – just brilliant – and, of course, it makes the evolution of our own cognition so vital – the very universe is evolving in and through us
Brian // November 14, 2009 at 9:06 am
Jeff, I’m looking forward to reading your dismantling of the scientific worldview. Good luck with that!
Jeff Carreira // November 14, 2009 at 10:12 am
Brian you give me too much credit, I can’t dismantle the scientific worldview. I hope to put a dent in it and perhaps give rise to some doubt as to its ability to function as a theory of everything. I also look forward to explosing my flank to your diserning intellect and being challeneged on fundemental positions.
Carl // November 14, 2009 at 8:50 pm
My take on this is that in any comparison between a “scientific worldview” and pre-modern philosophy based on conjecture and logic, it’s all relative. I certainly don’t think that scientific method, given the methods and measurement tools we have now, can give us answers to “everything.” But I believe that a way to connect ideas to what actually happens, to empirical facts, represents an evolutionary advance over reliance on ideas disconnected from empirical investigation. I am a modern follower of Thomas Aquinas, I guess — thinking that the findings of science and faith should be consistent with one another. It was an investigation of epistemology — how we obtain knowledge — that caused me to decide to move from Philosophy to natural science in the late 1960’s — that we could make stuff up forever, but having a reality check would help us more quickly reject things that did not turn out to be true and refine our intuitive understandings that did turn out to be true — faster than layer upon layer of conjecture absent systematic empirical investigation that had occurred prior to the emergence of scientific method.
Brian // November 14, 2009 at 11:38 pm
OK Jeff, my guess is you will attempt to transcend and include the scientific worldview rather than dismantle it. See I’m learning…lets see it!
Jeff Carreira // November 15, 2009 at 9:25 am
Transcend and Include it will be – that is one of the key elements of Integral/Evolutionary thinking and I believe it might represent a method of inquiry that could prove to be as monstrously important as the scientific method or Hegel’s dialectic (which is perhaps an early version of transcend and include anyway). I think that there is some powerful work happening in philosophy today with the re-emergence of pragmatism and from what I am currently reading an merging of aspects of analytic philosophy that has perhaps in the past been overly wedded to a scientific worldview and the new pragmatism that is emerging from the magnificent though incomplete and sometimes naive early formations of pragmatism. I do believe that philosophy is best understood in its historical context so looking at early works of philosophy helps us understand the leading edge of thought today. Unfortunately it takes a lot of time, but together we will work it out right here.
Catherine // November 17, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I come late again and it was a pleasure to read. I am happy that Carl is a modern re-incarnation of Thomas Aquinas and I find myself completely agreeing that the findings of science and faith should agree with each other.
my take at the scientific worldview. The problem is certainly not the scientific Method (testing ideas on experimental results and in parallel getting ideas from careful observation of phenomena), which is so far quite an unparalleled way of making up our way in the Universe.
The problem is the interpretation of what we do when investigate the world this way. How close to the original is the reconstruction of reality we do this way ?
Can the scientific method be extended to deeper levels of reality ? how do we define those deeper level ( what is the ordering criterion there, the hierarchy principle which enables us to say “deeper” ?)
Moreover I would like to challenge the whole notion of “worldview” as being too shallow to account for the principle that make us act. I want to say that our worldview is not the motor of our cats, it is more a consequence.
The difference between a cat and human being doesn’t reside mainly in the fact that they have different world views. The point is that the cat has a different capacities to intellectualize and as such different level of consciousness. When the cat will know how to speak, his level of consciousness will increase. is the worldview of the cat important in learning how to speak ? I don’t think so.
My point is that we human should learn how to speak, should increase our capacities and transmit the new abilities, before our worldview can consequently change.
I discover, as a surprise to myself, that my view is strangely mechanical. Maybe that’s why after all I am a scientist. To be coherent, as s scientist following Andrew Cohen’s teaching, my view is that th eAuthentic self is as well mechanical. Let’s say that itmight have deeper levels of reality than the mechanical one, but it must also have this one (which is the good news, since the mechanics is what our human brain knows how to do). So can we be a scientist and not believe that “ consciousness comes from the brain” but rather to believe that the mechanical view is still of actuality, that everything reals obeys to some laws which our human scientific capacity can and will be able to unveil ?
If everything obeys mechanical laws, that’s really a good news, because we have a good grip on it and more than this, human know already how to transmit mechanical knowledge to each other. So transmission will be possible.
Jeff I will see in the next blog how my scientific worldview is probably destroyed!
Jeff Carreira // November 17, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Catherine, I doubt that your scientific worldview will be destroyed….that was Brian trying to make me look like a psychospiritual flake
…I totally agree that the scientific method is among the best things to happen to the human race. What I want to talk about is the danger of over generalizing that success. Stay tuned.