The moment was all, the moment was enough. – Virginia Woolf
Good things make choices difficult, bad things leave no choice. – Michelle Cohen Corasanti, The Almond Tree
some sw tools
LOTR text internet archive
Evil fucks up because evil people fundamentally cannot imagine that others are not motivated by the same things as them.
Evil is its own undoing. Tolkein makes it clear that while Evil betrays its own purpose it is not self defeating. Good must still struggle and sacrifice in order to pvercome Evil at great cost.
LOTR The White Rider, page 497: ‘What then shall I say?’ said Gandalf, and paused for a while in thought. ‘This in brief is how I see things at the moment, if you wish to have a piece of my mind as plain as possible. The Enemy, of course, has long known that the Ring is abroad, and that it is borne by a hobbit. He knows now the number of our Company that set out from Rivendell, and the kind of each of us. But he does not yet perceive our purpose clearly. He supposes that we were all going to Minas Tirith; for that is what he would himself have done in our place. And according to his wisdom it would have been a heavy stroke against his power. Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream. In which no doubt you will see our good fortune and our hope. For imagining war he has let loose war, believing that he has no time to waste; for he that strikes the first blow, if he strikes it hard enough, may need to strike no more. So the forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended. Wise fool. For if he had used all his power to guard Mordor, so that none could enter, and bent all his guile to the hunting of the Ring, then indeed hope would have faded: neither Ring nor bearer could long have eluded him. But now his eye gazes abroad rather than near at home; and mostly he looks towards Minas Tirith. Very soon now his strength will fall upon it like a storm.
- traitors ultimately betray their own side too and end up destroying themselve
‘For already he knows that the messengers that he sent to waylay the Company have failed again. They have not found the Ring. Neither have they brought away any hobbits as hostages. Had they done even so much as that, it would have been a heavy blow to us, and it might have been fatal. But let us not darken our hearts by imagining the trial of their gentle loyalty in the Dark Tower. For the Enemy has failed — so far. Thanks to Saruman.’
“Then is not Saruman a traitor?’ said Gimli.
‘Indeed yes,’ said Gandalf. ‘Doubly. And is not that strange? Nothing that we have endured of late has seemed so grievous as the treason of Isengard. Even reckoned as a lord and captain Saruman has grown very strong. He threatens the Men of Rohan and draws off their help from Minas Tirith, even as the main blow is approaching from the East. Yet a treacherous weapon is ever a danger to the hand. Saruman also had a mind to capture the Ring, for himself, or at least to snare some hobbits for his evil purposes. So between them our enemies have contrived only to bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all!
- Gandalf and Frodo: what to do with the time that is given to us?
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Bilbo Baggins: You step on too the road, and you don’t know where you might swept of too.
Sam: “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”
Kamome Shirahama
This is something that readers of Witch Hat Atelier will already know or have started to notice, but the idea of the manga is that magic is not something you’re born with. It’s not in your blood or genes, nor if you were born into a family of magicians that makes you a magician. That’s not how it works.
Magic is something that anyone can learn to do with pen and ink, and it’s an ability that anyone can learn to harness and to hone. I want readers to think, “Well, if this is something that I also have an ability to do, what will I do with this power that I have in my hands?”
I know the story is set in a fantasy world, but the characters’ world is real to them. When the characters have a real pen and ink in front of them, how will they use this power? I want audiences to think [about] that as they read my story.
Book: Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, by Marcus Willaschek. translated by Peter Lewis from German, New Yorker on internet archive
Kant concluded that the task of philosophy was to distinguish those two realms—to show what kinds of truths we can hope to know from experience, and what kinds we can only ever imagine or make up stories about. “Metaphysics,” he wrote, “is the science of the boundaries of human reason.”
Critique of Pure Reason 1781, Critique of Practical Reason 1788, and Critique of Judgment 1790.
“Kant placed the human at the center of his thought like no other philosopher before him.” As Willaschek demonstrates, Kant believed that his ideas would change humanity’s understanding of its place in the world as profoundly as the Copernican revolution had changed our sense of Earth’s place in the cosmos.
The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. In particular, Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind.
the trick of perspective
The parallel with Copernicus turns out to be apt. Before Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo, people assumed that the sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, and justifiably so—that’s how it appears to us when we look up at the sky. It took a lot of close observation and ingenious reasoning for astronomers to understand that this was a trick of perspective, and that in fact it is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Similarly, it is natural for human beings to assume that the way the world appears to us—extended in three dimensions, constantly moving from the past into the future, changing as its different elements interact—is the way it really is. But, Kant maintained, this is also a trick of perspective. Space and time do not exist objectively, only subjectively, as forms of our experience. He wrote that it is “from the human point of view only that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc.”
- noumena vs phenomena
This thinking led Kant to a more pessimistic conclusion than Copernicus’s. Whereas humanity did eventually arrive at a correct understanding of the solar system, it is impossible for us to ever know “things in themselves”—what Kant called “noumena.” We have access only to “phenomena”—the way things look to us, given the kind of mind we have. “What things may be in themselves, I know not and need not know, because a thing is never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon,” Kant insisted.
In fact, Kant didn’t intend to make us doubt the evidence of our senses. Instead, he reasoned, it is because all human beings experience the world through the same categories of time and space that scientific knowledge is possible. Science claims to deal with the world only as we perceive it, not as it is “in itself,” and to that extent it is completely reliable.
- enlightenment, liberty vs. autonomy
Called “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” it begins with a simple but thrilling definition: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.”
Tutelage is the condition of being a minor in need of a guardian. Throughout history, Kant says, that is how most human beings have thought of themselves. Afraid to trust their own judgment, they have looked to authorities to tell them what to do. “If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself,” Kant writes. But, at last, ordinary people were starting to realize that they have the right and the ability to think for themselves. “Have courage to use your own reason!—that is the motto of enlightenment,” he proclaims.
The goal of the French revolutionaries was liberty, but Kant’s ideal was significantly different. He called it “autonomy,” from the Greek words for “self” and “law.” Liberty implies a lack of constraint; we are free when no one can stop us from doing what we want. Autonomy means living by rules that we choose to accept because we decide that they are reasonable. As Kant puts it, a free will is “subject to the law, of which it can regard itself as the author.”
Hermann Hesse
Hesse became alarmed because he saw that the post-WWI era was an acceleration of modernity’s dehumanizing forces—urbanization, mechanization, and technological progress. This, he believed, alienated people from nature and their authentic selves. It turns people into mindless functionaries.
peter ustinov 1921-2004, British actor
潘石屹(1963-)1995年与夫人张欣(1965-)共同创立SOHO中国
从福利分房到商品房: 1998 为了刺激购房，银行开始给购房人提供贷款，也就是“按揭”。刚开始是五成首付，也就是一倍杠杆。但市场表现离政府和银行的预期差距很大，于是首付比例就一降再降，四成、三成、两成，杠杆越来越高。
开发商大量储备土地的做法，也正好符合地方政府搞土地财政的需要——土地出让收入迅速成了很多地方财政的重要来源。没几年时间，行业竞争不再只是比谁能把房子盖好、卖好，而是比谁拿地更多、融资更快、扩张更猛。
庞氏骗局: 房价高低当然是个问题，但它不是最核心的问题。真正的问题，出在房地产背后的运转模式上。运转模式回归正常了，房价自然会回到合理的水平。这个模式是什么呢？开发商靠预售回款活着，用今天卖房的钱填昨天的窟窿；企业靠不断借新钱还旧债周转；地方政府靠卖地过日子，主观上就倾向于推高地价；购房者相信房价会一直涨，买房不是为了住，是为了转手赚钱。这四样东西绑在一起，哪一样断了，其他的都会跟着垮掉。行业表面看起来繁荣，实际上越来越脆弱，越来越依赖后来的人掏钱、后续的融资跟上、价格预期不断往上走，才能覆盖前面的承诺和窟窿。用大白话说，这叫击鼓传花。用专业术语说，就是庞氏骗局。
能离场的永远只是少数: 从行业的角度看，这些企业最终走到的那条路，用四个字概括，就是庞氏骗局。当然，走到这一步，也不只是企业的问题，它是制度、金融、地方财政、企业扩张和社会预期共同作用的结果。
- 庞氏骗局的实质就是用未来资金支撑当下运作。
John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902)
Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
自由不是做我们喜欢的事，而是不做我们不喜欢的事。
历史不是赞美，而是审判。
最危险的偏见，就是认为自己没有偏见。
每个时代，自由都面临四种威胁——强人对权力集中的渴望，穷人对不平等的怨恨，无知者对乌托邦的向往，以及人们把自由和放纵混为一谈。
这个社会一直就是多数人可以压迫少数人。
美德差异
德国，因受基督教“星期天为休息日”传统的影响（当然这也得益于百年来工人运动争取的成果），除了咖啡馆和餐厅外，大多数商铺通常在星期天歇业。
美国商店所标商品价格通常不含增值税（VAT），顾客需在结账时另行支付税款；而在德国，商品标价已含增值税，顾客结账时支付的正是标示的价格。
马田经常在众人面前重复一句话：“人们不去争取自由，就不会得到自由”，并说这是歌德的名言。他的话虽然有一定道理，但却并不是歌德的原话。歌德在《浮士德》中的原话是这样的：“只有每天像争取生命一样争取自由的人，才配享受自由”（“Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, der sie taeglich erobern muss”）。在以后谈论文学名著的时候，多次发现马田在引用原著时加入了自己的语言，这样以来就修改了作者的原意，他因此被同事们戏称为德国文学的“修正主义者”，他引用的名著也被称为“马田版本”。
German 德国姓名
德语名词有性别和单复数的区分，还有格的区分.动词有时态的区分（现在时，过去时，将来时，还有虚拟时，虚拟式中还分现在，过去和将来，等等）。
德语动词的前缀和中文里的偏旁有几分相似，从偏旁可以看出这个词的大概意思。前缀re- 的意思是”重新来过“，”重复“ 的意思。比如re-organisieren(基本词是“ 组织”的意思)，有了前缀，就是“重组” 的意思， re-novieren (基本词是变新的，有了前缀，就是“翻修”，“整修”的意思，比如翻修房屋。re-kultivieren (基本词是耕作，栽培的意思，有了前缀，就是“回归生态自然”，“重新栽培”的意思。比如将废弃的矿山改变成湖泊，种上树木等，就是“re-kultivieren“ 的措施。
又如前缀ent-, 它是“解除”，“释放出”的意思：ent-wickeln 词根是包裹，捆绑，缠绕的意思，加上前缀 ent, 就是放开这种束缚，如果用在小孩子身上，就是 孩子的“发育成长”，用在事业，事态方面，就是事业，事态的“发展”了。又比如形容词 fremd, 它是“生疏”，“陌生”的意思，加上前缀 ent-fremden, 就是释放生疏，陌生，用在人际关系上，就是两者关系疏远，甚至发生猜忌了。
又如前缀un，它主要置于形容词之前，也可置于名词和动词之前，主要作用是否定词根的内容，和中文里的“不”意思几乎完全一样，比如：“可能的” möglich, 加上前缀 un, 变成 un-möglich, 就是“不可能”。“可以想象” , denkbar, 加上前缀 un, 变成 un-denkbar, 就是“不可想象”。又如：genau, 准确，加上前缀 un, 变成 ungenau, 就是“不准确”。
数目 Summe, 花费 Kosten, 数量 Menge, 加上个前缀 un, 成了Un-summe, Un-kosten, Un-menge，就是“极大的数目”，“巨额花费”和“不计其数”的意思，和中文里的“无数”，强调了数量的巨大。
在名词“人“， Mensch, 前面加上个前缀 un, 成了Un-mensch, 就是 “不是人”。在德语和中文里，“不是人”都是骂人的话，都是情绪的发泄。还有名词“东西”, Ding, 加上前缀 un, 成了Un –ding, 就是 “不是东西”，在中文里这是骂人的话，德语里也一样。如果说他（或她）“不是个东西”，“不是个玩意儿“So ein Unding!“, 那也和在中文里一样，是很重的骂人话。
德语后缀置于动词，名词或形容词的后面。比如置于动词后面的有- ung: laden (装载) 动词变成 Ladung，就是名词了; 置于形容词后面的有：- heit, 比如形容词 frei （自由）加上后缀-heit就变成 名词自由 Freiheit; 置于名词后面的有后缀 –schaft, 如果放在一个名词如“邻居“ Nachbar 后面，就成了 Nachbarschaft, 就成了邻居群体的集合名词。一个名词教师 Lehrer,加上后缀-schaft,就成了教师群体Lehrerschaft.
- Spitzname 是绰号。前德国足球明星Bastian Schweinsteiger的绰号Schwein。德语里猪既可以是好意思，也可以是坏意思：说“你是猪”，就是很严重的骂人话, 但说“我有猪”，那就是“我很幸运“的意思了。
后缀还能变动名词的大小，甚至对名词注入作者和说话人的感情。比如：后缀-chen:名词 Haus(房子)，加上后缀-chen, 就是Häuschen, 成了“小房子”，“可爱的房子”。又如名词Kind (孩子)，加上后缀 –chen, 就成了Kindchen, 就是“可爱的孩子”了。名词父亲 Vater, 加上-chen, 变成Väterchen, 当然不能译成“小爸爸”，而是女儿发嗲，撒娇时对父亲的称呼了，比如：“好爸爸”，“爸爸耶”之类。
后缀还能变动词为动词的主体，人。如：动词prüfen （考试，考验）加上后缀 –ling 就成了名词 Prüfling (应试者，考生)。
德语常有两个词或两个以上的词组成一个词的现象，它们的内容也是需要认真对待，不能马虎的： 这里举一些例子：母亲（Mutter）和 爱（Liebe）组成一个词 Mutterliebe, 就是“母爱”，顺序是：“母亲”置于前面，是她爱孩子，她主动。动物（Tier）和爱（Liebe）也能组成一词，Tierliebe, 就是人类“爱动物”，“动物”虽然在前面，但是却是被动的。再有一词Affenliebe, 前面是“猴子”，后面是“爱”，这里既不是猴子爱别的什么动物，也不是什么别的动物爱猴子，而是形容父母对孩子的溺爱。
德语的组合词太多，有的很长，有几十个字母组成一个词的，甚至有上百个字母的：这里仅举两个例子： Donau-dampf-schifffahrts-gesellschafts-kapitäns-mütze：多瑙河汽船航运公司船长的帽子（这不算太长，只有四十几个字母），还有更长的： Schauspieler-betreuungs-flugbuchungs-statisterie-leitungs-gastspiel-organisations-spezialist ：演员服务，订机票及票友管理和客串组织专家。（这里有85个字母）
昵称，德语里叫Kosename。昵称只在相爱的人或夫妻间用，或者非常亲近的亲戚和朋友间用。比如，原名叫乌苏拉 (Ursula) 的昵称就变成了乌西 （Ursi）。通常的昵称有的根本没有名字，只有叫“我的公主“，”我的宝贝“ 之类。
姓氏的法律地位重于名字，德语里姓的数量多得难以计数，而名相对来说还是比较少的。 德国的人名数量不多，而且欧洲国家的人名大多差不多，男女名字发音不同，字母不同，但实际上是一样的。但是姓氏数量庞大，千变万化，大体上有以下几类：
按身高定姓氏，如克莱恩（klein, 小个子），格罗斯（groß, 大个子），朗格（lang, 高个子），库尔兹（kurz, 矮个子）。
按头发颜色定姓氏，如 施瓦茨 （schwarz, 黑色），维斯 （weiss, 白色）。
按其他身体特征定姓氏，如 林克 （link, 左撇子）。
按性格特征定姓氏，如 居恩 （Kühn, 勇敢），福罗姆 （fromm, 虔诚），古特 （gut, 好），比泽 （böse, 凶狠）。
也有按生活特点定姓氏的： 如 诺伊曼 （Neumann, 新来的人）
比较普通的姓氏大多和出生地，住地和职业有关，下面举几个例子：
和出生地有关的：如姓法兰克的，来自法兰肯地区(Franken), 姓海斯的， 来自黑森州 （Hessen），姓珀尔的(Pohl)，来自波兰或和波兰有关的地区。
和住地有关的姓氏：如姓艾波纳的，住在平原地区（Ebne）。姓博格的，住在山区（Berge）。姓库尔曼的，住在低洼地区（Kuhlmann）。和职业有关的姓氏，如贝克尔（就是面包师，Bäcker, Becker）。
也有用动植物来作姓氏的，如：哈泽 （Hase, 兔子，还是野兔子）， 福克斯（Fuchs, 狐狸），沃尔夫（Wolf，狼）。如：波洛姆 （Blume, 花， 真有点像是中国姓），基希鲍姆 （Kirschbaum, 樱桃树）。
也有用整个句子作为一个姓氏的，如：克洛芬施泰因 Klopfenstein（Klopf den Stein, 砸石子），舒尔腾勃兰特 Schultenbrand (Schür das Feuer, 煽火)。
不得不提起: 德国姓名中也有不少外来名字，有意大利化的，法国化的，还有斯堪的纳维亚的，波罗的海地区的，
张荫麟
- 张荫麟《中国史纲》
Leo Buscaglia (1924-1998)
- to love is to risk, not being loved in return. to hope is to risk pain. to try is to risk failure. but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in my life is to risk nothing.
Risks
To laugh is to risk appearing a fool,
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out to another is to risk involvement,
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return,
To live is to risk dying,
To hope is to risk despair,
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow,
But he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or live.
Chained by his servitude he is a slave who has forfeited all freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.
Change is the end result of all true learning.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow or love. Chained by his certitude, he is a slave; he has forfeited his freedom. Only the person who risks is truly free.
Love is always bestowed as a gift - freely, willingly and without expectation. We don’t love to be loved; we love to love.
Kant
empiricists vs. rationalists
Locke-Hume school vs. Descartes-Leibniz school
avoid paralyzing forms of skepticism that would take reality to be utterly unknowable
the major disagreement between them pertains to the epistemic resources with which to establish the nature of that reality and the means by which to acquire valid knowledge of it.
To assume, as traditional empiricism does assume, that access to reality is unavoidably mediated by perceptual or sensory processes implies that what is directly known is only the contents of consciousness. There is then no means of testing the agreement between these contents and reality, for all the evidence that might be collected for the purpose becomes just further conscious content. Skepticism waits at the end of the process, for every knowledge claim is ultimately challenged by the recognition that what is known is only what is found in conscious experience. “Reality” as such falls beyond this.
Rationalism suffers its own limitations, not least of which is something of a distain for “mere facts.” Recognizing the limitations of perceptual modes of knowing, the rationalists often go beyond caution and simply rule out the senses as at all relevant to the search for “truth,” which is assumed to be in the form of ever more general and grand systems.
The passive relationship between physical impingements and sensory responses does not establish “experience,” for the latter is an ordered, unified, and coherent conscious event. For there to be experience as such there must be governing principles that ordain the manner in which external impingements will be registered. The resulting order and organization are not “given” by the stimuli themselves but are determined by the very mode of sensibility. Thus, empiricists are correct in regarding knowledge as arising from experience and rationalists in recognizing that such knowledge is nonetheless not grounded in experience.
transcendental: sensibility, understanding and reason
the Transcendental Aesthetic is intended to establish the necessary conditions for sensibility,
the Transcendental Analytic is to establish the necessary conditions for understanding, and
the Transcendental Dialectic serves this same function in relation to reason proper and its “discipline.”
With this framework the overall project can be considered more fully: First, the aim of the Critique is to establish the basis on which to distinguish what is knowable from what is merely conjectural and hypothetical; to establish the limits of sense and of reason, and thus, the limits of scientific understanding itself. It is always useful to employ “scientific” as the modifier when referring to the knowledge and understanding Kant would defend against skepticism.
Kant identifies two fundamental powers of the mind from which knowledge arises: The first is the capacity of receiving representations . . . the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations.
Kant goes on to say of the categories, they serve only for the possibility of empirical knowledge ; and such knowledge is what we entitle experience.
- Spontaneity is integral to the process of synthesis, pulling together into organized wholes what would otherwise leave each representation foreign to every other. The synthesis by which knowledge is achieved is threefold: It is found in the apprehension of representations as modifications of the mind caused by stimulation; it is found in the reproduction of representations in imagination; it is found in the recognition of representations in a concept.
Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me, that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself, and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside one another, and accordingly as not only different, but as in different places, the representation of space must be presupposed. Space is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions. . . . We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though, we can quite well think it as empty of objects. It must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a demonstration dependent upon them.
Kant: 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.
Hume was right in saying that all of our knowledge arises from experience. The mistake Hume made was that in assuming that all of our knowledge arises from experience, our knowledge is grounded in experience. To be known, an object must go beyond an element of experience, and it must be located within a conceptual framework. So what’s required now is an argument that establishes the necessity and universality of the pure concepts. Required is what Kant refers to as the transcendental deduction of the categories.
sensibility and understanding
The supreme principle in relation to sensibility is that the manifold of intuition quote, should be subject to the formal conditions of space and time. That’s the transcendental aesthetic. The necessary enabling conditions for there to be sensibility is a spatio-temporal framework, not in the stimulus.
The supreme principle in relation to understanding is that quote, all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of our perception.
What’s the manifold of intuition? It’s all that impinging stuff, you see, spatiotemporally received, you see, intuition, on-shower, this mode of reception, and what has to happen to it? It has to get synthesized, and it has to get unified. So we’ve got to have the synthetic unity of our perception, again imposed on these sensuous intuitions, the manifold of sensuous intuition, which by the way do not come carrying a code of unification. We provide the unification. The external world provides the manifold.
the transcendental as noted refers to the necessary conditions for there to be knowledge at all. the task is to to establish the warrant or the justification of any knowledge claim we might make, that would be validly tied to experience.
Now, integral to this entire process is the faculty of imagination. It’s through the imagination that concepts and intuitions become synthesized, and become synthesized according to a universal rule, which Kant refers to as a schema. This is the way the understanding will rise to the level of empirical knowledge, and objective empirical knowledge.
The imagination is what has the power of drawing together certain elements in an otherwise disconnected assortment of sensations. Drawing together just those elements that constitute a knowable something. But the imagination as such does not yield knowledge.
Rather, it makes knowledge possible. It’s only when the synthesis of the manifold is then brought into, brought under the pure categories of the understanding, that knowledge as such arises. Now, you might say, well, the imagination, the word itself is suggestive of a kind of subjectivity.
There must be a framework, there must be rules by which the elements of the manifold are pulled and held together. And this, of course, is what the pure concepts of the understanding are all about. So you begin to see how the famous transcendental deduction unfolds.
The difference between something that’s perceptually governed and something that’s conceptually governed. Percepts and concepts are quite different.
Kant: the self and the synthetic unity of perception
the supreme principle in relation to understanding is to quote Kant that all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of our perception. Kant goes as far as to say that the synthetic unity of our perception is , quote, the highest point to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding.
ch5: idealisms and their refutation
Kant identifies each as subscribing to a theory which declares the existence of objects in space outside us to be merely doubtful and indemonstrable or to be false and impossible. The former is the problematic idealism of Descartes. . . . The latter is the dogmatic idealism of Berkeley. (B274)
Berkeley reached the conclusion that the notion of a mind-independent material world was incoherent. To be is to be perceived was the resulting motto.
Problematic or skeptical idealism is based on the uncertainty that attaches to all empirical claims, except one, namely, Descartes’s Cogito. Certain only that he is a “thinking thing,” Descartes was left with the conclusion that all other merely empirical contents of consciousness are subject to manipulation by the evil demon.
What Descartes and Berkeley share metaphysically is the supposition that nothing in consciousness per se can establish the objective reality of an external world.
Kant: The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me. (B275)
One is conscious of one’s existence as determined in time.
All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception.
The permanent is not within the conscious percipient, for that very consciousness requires something permanent outside oneself.
Only through perception of an objective “thing” outside oneself can there be consciousness of an enduring “self.”
To be conscious of one’s enduring existence in time there must be among the objects of perception an objective and permanent “thing” outside oneself.
Kant: 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, through experience. . . . [But] experience never confers on its judgments 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, it is not derived from experience, but is valid absolutely a priori . (B2-4)
Kant summarizes his conclusion in the famous passage (B74–6): 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.
Kant is not an idealist: Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, thought quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, yet we know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary. (289)
Kant’s transcendental idealism: “By transcendental idealism , I mean the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only, not things in themselves, and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not . . . conditions of objects viewed as things in themselves. (A369)”
- First, the transcendental realist accepts outer appearances as real and as independent of the percipient, including the spatial location of what is perceived. Thus does he confuse appearances with things in themselves. But, as the percipient has direct access only to the contents of his own mind, his own representations, the percipient must deal with some sort of epistemic gap separating the outer world of spatial objects from the immediately known world of his mental representations. Enter Cartesian skepticism. However, once it is granted that “space” is the very form of sensibility and is provided by the percipient, there is no gap at all between the perception of objects “in space” and the representation of this in experience. Kant concludes,
If we treat outer objects as things in themselves, it is quite impossible to understand how we could arrive at a knowledge of their reality outside us, since we have to rely merely on the representation which is in us. For we cannot be sentient of what is outside ourselves, but only of what is in us, and the whole of our self-consciousness therefore yields nothing save . . . our own determinations. (A378)
- Kant says of himself that he is an empirical realist but not an empirical idealist.