最近在看康德 Kant的第一批判，然后碰巧看到诗人奥登 Auden写于1954年关于《魔戒》LOTR第一部的评论。

To present the conflict between Good and Evil as a war in which the good side is ultimately victorious is a ticklish business. Our historical experience tells us that physical power and, to a large extent, mental power are morally neutral and effectively real: wars are won by the stronger side, just or unjust. At the same time most of us believe that the essence of the Good is love and freedom so that Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to be good.

Evil, that is, has every advantage but one-it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil-hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring-but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head,

康德在他的第一批判中展示纯粹理性的力量及其与生俱来，每个人都不是被动地接受而是主动地感知世界。奥登借其评论指出好与坏的本性差异：好可以想象坏，而坏却不能想象其他。想象拓展了人类的生存空间，无数不存在的、尚未发生的或永远不会存在发生的虚拟世界扩大了人类的梦想。而理性和想象都是与生俱来的，但两者都没有为人所发扬光大。启蒙运动开启了人类的科学时代，观察测量和理性的实践应用居功甚伟。佛教所说的觉醒在我看来，其实就是意识到每个人自身理性和想象的存在及其力量，正所谓人人皆佛。只是不是每个人都能如佛陀一样自觉，这就是《魔戒》中的甘道夫需要四处奔忙，无非就是唤醒每个人起来（抵抗邪恶）。

  • British empiricists, notably Locke, Berkeley, and Hume: the inability to establish the reality of an external world. But if empiricism leads to skepticism, traditional rationalism leads to empty and misleading conjectures. Kant must, therefore, test the limits of pure reason — what it can establish through its own resources without the benefit of experience. What Kant has come to recognize is the neglect displayed by the rationalists in their reliance on a faculty of reason whose nature and limits had never been subjected to critical appraisal. If, indeed, reason is the instrument of choice, it must be calibrated. The range over which it can be productively employed must be established. If, instead, the senses are the instruments of choice, it is essential to establish the form of knowledge thereby obtained and the manner in which such knowledge is incorporated into the systematic bodies of knowledge claimed by science.

休谟Hume 理性主义rationalism 经验主义empiricism

康德看到了十七世纪以牛顿经典物理(physics)的飞速发展，尝试着如何推动停滞不前的形而上学(metaphysics)。物理的发展主要基于观察测量和实验，而数学的发展则基于逻辑推理的理性，这其中的代表人物就是哥白尼、牛顿、笛卡尔和莱布尼兹。康德选择了运用理性来推动形而上学。

Leibniz: Against the traditional empiricist claim that nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses (Nihil in intellectus quod non prius fuerit in sensu), Leibniz counters, Nisi intellectus ipse – nothing but the intellect itself! Here again is the core rationalist assumption: Knowledge necessarily bears the mark and expresses the innate character of intellectual cognition.

Kant: He must show that the claims of science are not merely expressions of a peculiar cognitive process, that reality is comprised of what is more than and different from ideas about it, and that the world as a congeries of appearances is nonetheless an objective world capable of being known as such. If it is our fate to have knowledge cobbled out of appearances and a fixed scheme of categories, we are not thereby left to wishful thinking or the mere prejudices of the imagination.

Kant: My principal aim is to know the actual nature and limits of human capacities and inclinations. He recoginzed the limits of human sense and reason and the fundamental distinction between the intelligible world (mundus intelligibilis) of metaphysics and the sensible world (mundus sensibilis) of the natural sciences. He knew that the analysis of concepts is a metaphysical dead-end.

Dan Robinson, Oxford: idealisms and their refutations

  • Kant: transcendental idealism. not every kind of knowledge a priori should be called transcendental. how a priori synthetic judgement is possible? philosophy can’t establish the existence of an externla world?

  • The ideal theory, Thomas Reid 1710-1796 says, is a theory according to which we have no contact with the objects of the external world directly, but only by way of some mode of mental representation, such that the only thing we can talk about with any authority, are the contents of our own minds and not the external world. Reid says, if the ideal theory is true, I lay my hands across my lips and become a skeptic. So Reed is going to defend a direct realism against this account.

  • the ideal theory declares the existence of objects in space outside us to be merely doubtful and indemonstrable (Descartes), or to be false and impossible (Bartholomew).

  • So you think that there is a mind-independent, physical reality. Physical reality. A material reality.

  • everything with real existence subsists in the attending mind, in some attending mind. Esso est prokippi. To be is to be perceived.

  • Bishop Berkeley 1685-1753 is a very able philosopher, optic specialist, world-class mathematician. And the general question, what is the ontological status of that, which no human recipient has experienced or even could experience?

  • Kant is making the distinction between phenomena dn noumena, between an entity as in itself it really is and the representation of that entity.

  • What’s the transcendental argument according to which you can go to the moon and come back? And the transcendental argument is there must be a fundamental and objective agreement between the pure concepts of the understanding as we have subsumed the data of sense under these categories, and the validity of our representations of the external world. That matched, if it weren’t valid, the achievements would be unimaginable. That’s saying that we’ve done it, and that something must be there for us to have done it. But how do we establish the reality of things outside ourselves in the first instance? Suppose the whole space program is a kind of dream.

  • To establish the reality of things outside ourselves, Kant says he will turn idealism, all idealisms, against themselves. And he sets out to establish that the very possibility of self-awareness, Descartes or Berkeley’s own inner sense, requires an awareness of the external world. That is to say, it is only by way of what is outside of us, it is only by way of our access to what is outside ourselves, that we are able to establish that inner life of conscious experience.

  • you are conscious of your existence as determined in time. But all determination of time presuposes something permanent in perception. Now determined here is the translation of the German bestimmt. One is conscious of one’s existence as set or fixed in time.

  • So time variation presupposes a static background or a permanent background. That permanent background is provided by the pure intuition of space. So absent the spatial framework, you could not have that sequence of events in inner space, which just is the march of conscious events.

  • The permanent can’t be within the conscious recipient, for that very consciousness, for its own successive states to exist, requires something permanent that is external to itself. Only through perception of an objective thing outside myself, can I be conscious of an enduring self possessed of successive inner states.

  • Kant concludes that self-consciousness requires perceptual awareness of objects external to one’s self. This is the counter to an idealist claim that the mind has direct access only to its own internal states and processes. What the idealist is claiming is that all of my epistemic claims are tied to the parade of experiences in my own mind, not Kant as it pains to establish that that very parade, that very conscious life, that very possessed set of inner state experiences cannot exist except insofar as there is a permanent external world constituting the background for it.

  • We shall understand by a priori knowledge, not knowledge independent of this or that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience. Opposed to it is empirical knowledge, which is knowledge possible only a posteriori.

  • That is only by way of experience. But experience never confers on its judgements true or strict universality. If then a judgment is thought with strict universality, that is in such a manner that no exception is allowed as possible, then it is not derived from experience, but is valid absolutely a priori.

  • And he takes his argument against idealism to reach that degree of necessity and universality. Do you see that this time-determined internal life of the mind is not unique to Jack or Joe? These constitute the necessary conditions for there to be successive states of mind as such, necessary and universal, therefore not the gift of experience.

concepts, judgement and the transcendental deduction of the categories

  • Without sensibility, no object would be given to us. Without understanding, no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty. Intuitions without concepts are blind.

references

Tolkien makes it clear that while Evil betrays its own purposes it is not self defeating. Good must still struggle and sacrifice in order to overcome Evil at great cost.

others