Kant turns 300! What may I hope?

300 years ago —April 22, 1724— Emmanuel Kant was born in Germany.

54 years ago —April 22, 1970— Earth Day was born in the United States.

We are always already, a part of the whole.

Or as Edouard Glissant —born 1928 in Martinique— has written “We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry” (Poetics of Relation, 1990 French, 1997 translation).

Recently, a good friend —R, born 1965 in Haiti— summarized something of Kant (for me, for my use in my brain from his perspective of our shared conversations):

What can I know;

What must I do;

What may I hope.

I live in a time/place (Bronx, NY 2024 ADE) of culturally-normalized and dominant laissez-faire global economics oozing over and suffocating both once-robust-tho-still-partial-and-problematic-democracies and non-democracies. All of us born-today of a fascinating and rich cultural legacy that none-the-less continue-to-colonize this-then-landscape, repeatedly, with our then-as-now techniques, drowning out some variants and lauding others. For good and bad, we have accumulated this-now. We —the part and the crowd, each and together— activating and changing the biosphere of this ~4,543,000,000 (+/- 2024) year-old stone moving through seemingly infinite space.

Ok! Homo sapiens sapiens - man-the-knower-knower!

We have proven we can master each other.

Gah! It’s ugly.

We have proven we can master materials!

Gah! It’s all wrong.

(tho do read this fascinating article where we could blame oxygen on earth as the source of all our clever evils (e.g. no fire without oxygen)! "We might end up being oxygen-rich but companion-poor" https://bigthink.com/13-8/oxygen-bottleneck/

We have proven we can change the world.

Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.

Archimedes of Syracuse, 287 BCE, Sicily

BUT!

What do YOU —compatriot in this bog— really Want?

Help me sleuth what we really want to do with our unique creatureliness?

Here is my extremely simple summation of where I think we are, on this Earth Day in 2024.

• We are animals.

  • We wish to think we are higher animals - which I take as a wish to be ethical.

• We participate in some cultivated variant of a ‘free-market-economy’.

  • Some claim this means no self-regulation (and are succeeding).

• We want ‘freedom’.

  • Is it freedom to do whatever we want?

  • Is it freedom to be ethical?

What is Freedom?

The lability of words is why they can be so potent as poetry - but also why they can unite very different people under the same political banner when left as vague proclamations.

Written by Susan Neiman, NYT, April 22, 2024

(I SWEAR THIS IS CONNECTED TO MY MUD… I’M TRYNG DESPERATELY TO GET THERE. I think what I’m trying to ask, is how do we each self-regulate on behalf of the whole?)

More here: Kant’s Account of Reason by Garrett Williams.

In the Doctrine of Method (the last, least-read part of the first Critique) Kant refers to the biblical story of Babel (Genesis, Ch. 11). The literal meaning of “Babel” is “confusion”—God punished human beings’ attempt to build “a tower that would reach the heavens” (A707/B735) by giving them many different languages. Since they were unable to understand one another, they could no longer cooperate in such hubristic ventures.[10] Again and again, reason returns to some simple ideas with towering implications—the immortal soul, God, freedom. Worse, it cooks up[11] more or less convincing proofs of these.

Since these ideas reach beyond experience of a shared world, people lack a shared way to test them. Perhaps they emptily repeat other people’s words without real understanding; quite possibly, they come up with conflicting versions of these ideas. They talk past one another; they might as well speak different languages. Most likely, they will fall into conflict, or find peace only by submitting to an unreasoned authority. In metaphysics, Kant refers to “the ridiculous despotism of the schools” (Bxxxv).[12] In practical life, however, despotism is far from ridiculous: it is the brutal last resort for securing order when people adopt conflicting ideas and pursue conflicting goals. Kant often alludes to Hobbes, who holds that peace is only possible if an unaccountable sovereign “overawes” every member of society.[13] On many interpretations, Kantian reason aims to build intersubjective order and avoid the dangers of Babel-like hubris, conflict and despotism (Saner 1967, O’Neill 1989, Neiman 1994).

In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant makes a famous claim: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Bxxx). Human beings cannot have knowledge of the world as a whole. They cannot know entities that transcend this world, such as the immortal soul or God. We cannot experience these things through our senses; reason cannot supply such knowledge. However, Kant argues that knowledge is not the primary end of reason. Only our role within the world “necessarily interests everyone” (A839n/B867n). Kant rejects a “scholastic” or knowledge-oriented notion of philosophy. Instead, he offers a “cosmic” or world-oriented one (A838/B866; cf. Ypi 2021: Ch. 1 and Ferrarin 2015).

Kant proposes three questions that answer “all the interest of my reason”: “What can I know?” “What must I do?” and “What may I hope?” (A805/B833). We have seen his answer to the first question: we can only know the world as revealed through the senses. Kant does not answer the second question until the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, four years later. (Arguably, he sees no need to answer the question in this form, since he is confident that people have long known how they ought to act.[14]) But the first Critique does include some observations on hope—that is, faith in God and a future world. Kant argues that knowledge of these things is not only impossible—it would also corrupt practical reasoning. Rather than doing good for its own sake, we would be motivated by external incentives—eternal punishment and heavenly reward. Kant later calls this “heteronomy,” as opposed to “autonomy”—our own personal commitment to morality. Despite this, Kant argues that we have legitimate reasons to hope for God and immortality. We must also have confidence in our freedom to act morally. He connects and develops these claims in the second Critique, as discussed below (§2.3).

Since “reason” is a mental capacity, it may seem strange to speak of it having “needs” or “interests.” The basic idea is that there are preconditions for successfully exercising this capacity. For finite human beings, reason is not transparent or infallible, as some rationalist philosophers seemed to think. We may think we are reasoning, when actually we are cooking up false rationalizations and self-deceptions. We may think we are reasoning well, when we argue toward transcendent truths, such as the existence of God or a future world. So reason has an “interest” in appreciating its own limits, if it is to be valid. As Kleingeld puts it, reason “needs to present itself to itself in the process of gaining clarity about its own workings” (1998a: 97)—above all, the principles that it must give to itself. As the next section discusses, this means that Kant views reason as essentially self-reflexive.