失意莫灰心，得意不忘形。
不怨天，不尤人，下学而上达。– 《论语·宪问》
Sancho tells Don Quijote: “Don’t die, Señor; your grace should take my advice and live for many years, because the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that.”
“I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose,” Cervantes famously wrote.
rational animal
Kant, 1724-1804 uses reaon as his base of argument. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality and that the categorical imperative binds all rational agents. Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)
Adam Smith, 1723-1790 talks about the invisible hand that is based on each rational individual participating the market. The Wealth of Nations, 1776.
Knowledge depends on the full cooperation of sensibility and understanding, not on either alone. So what is beyond sensibility is beyond knowledge. That is what he calls “concepts without intuition are empty. Seeking knowledge of things that are independent of experience is seeking noumena, and it’s doomed to fail.”
So understood in these terms, the burning question is whether we can know the world through pure reason. And the antinomies are intended to illustrate what Kant refers to as a necessary skeptical method when it comes to addressing the question of that kind. And he makes a very sharp distinction between skepticism and the skeptical method.
Our powers of knowing have real limits, even as they make nature itself possible. And this, after all, was the very point of the first critique.
Agami Heron of Costa Rica
hummingbird heron, beautiful bird in south America.
A life decoded, by Craig Venter (1946-2026)
What an incredible contrast. The man who should have lived did not, while the man who was supposed to die immediately lived beyond all conceivable odds because he wanted to. People don’t usually give up on life; it is torn from them.
Although the latter patient died a few days after being flown to the Philippines, he showed me the effects of the human spirit and of sheer willpower, which can be stronger than any drug. The effort we had all put into giving him a few more days of life was far from wasted, because he had bestowed on all of us, but most particularly me, a wonderful gift: He had won our respect and had given us a thirst for life, which I have craved almost every day since I first met him. I have spoken of and thought of both these men often and feel that they partly helped drive much of my future career. They helped turn me from a young man without purpose into one compelled to understand the very essence of life. And life was so cheap in Vietnam that my mission had real urgency.
Life was my gift. I had seen thousands of men my age killed or maimed in unthinkable ways. I did not feel survivor’s guilt, but I did want to do something with my life to honor all those who were now beyond my help. I was back in charge of my destiny again. I recognized that if I had said good-bye to death and destruction, I had also said good-bye to being taken seriously by doctors and practicing a level of medicine that I knew I could return to only after a decade or so of intense study and training in civilian life. I might never even get to that level, given my poor educational record, one that left me unable to spell the most basic words and that had resulted in my being sent to Vietnam in the first place. I was about to greet a life of uncertainty.
As it happened, my own days at the NIH were also numbered as new opportunities beckoned. A senior government official who visited my lab during this period told me: “Son, you are obviously doing extremely well.” He did not strike me as being au fait with the science, so I asked him why my success was so obvious: “This is Washington, and we judge people by the quality of their enemies, and son, you have some of the best."
roger Freeman (1904-1991), economist
At a press conference for Reagan on October 29, 1970, Freeman spoke on the issue of cutting funding for education: We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through (higher education). If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people. That’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.
- book: Vietnam and Other American Fantasies by H. Bruce Franklin
Yoin van Spijk
slow reading: read together and three pages at a time
杜甫诗选
LOTR
Don Quixote
AI is used as an excuse to undermine the value of labor such as a programmer, a musician, and so on.
- book: The Secret Life of Circuits: An Illustrated Guide to Electronic Circuit Design, by Michal Zalewski
Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) 荷尔德林
Die leidenden Menschen
Blindlings von einer
Stunde zur andern,
Wie Wasser von Klippe
Zu Klippe geworfen,
Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab.
受苦的人们
盲目地从一刻
挨到另一刻，
如同水流从岩壁
被抛向岩壁，
终年跌入未知的深渊。
Hyperions Schicksalslied
《海伯利安的命运之歌》
Hyperion's Song of Fate
音乐剧《悲惨世界》Les Misérables
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes
There’s a grief that can’t be spoken
There’s a pain goes on and on
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone
Here they talked of revolution
Here it was they lit the flame
Here they sang about “tomorrow”
And tomorrow never came
From the table in the corner
They could see a world reborn
And they rose with voices ringing
And I can hear them now
The very words that they had sung
Became their last communion
On the lonely barricade at dawn
links
Aamer Rahman, 1982-
“All colonised people see themselves in Palestine. They see some aspect of what was done to them, in Palestine. And all colonisers see themselves in Israel.”
book list
Kyle Harper (1979-) historian: Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (2011),[7] From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013),[8] The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017),[9] and Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (2021).
Peter Brown (1935-) historian: Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967; 2000), The World of Late Antiquity (1971)
Kant on wiki
this fundamental distinction between appearance and reality and we’ve talked about Kant’s constant concern with the exercise of reason and what we can and can’t do through a proper exercise of reason. And this idea that we’re fundamentally rational beings yet also limited in various ways, which itself shows up in this distinction between appearance and reality: that’s an idea that dominates the whole of Kant’s work.
the concept of object
the categories:
| quantity | quality | relation | modality |
|---|---|---|---|
| universal (all), particular (some), singular (one) | is or are reality, negation, limited | inherence, causality, reciprocity | possibility, existence, necessity |
Kant to Fichte - Schelling - Hegel, and Schopenhauer
Kant and Hegel
Kant wants to establish the limits of human reason by going beyond it and showing that a super-sensible realm beyond the limits of human knowing is thinkable. After establishing the realm of the knowable, Kant aims to ground metaphysics (that is, a system of a priori cognitions) within the limits of human knowing, grounding it on the a priori principles available to our reason. So the Three Critiques provide a critique of the a priori principles available within each of the faculties of human cognition (understanding, judgment reason) and their application to the three parts of the human mind (cognition, like and dislike, desire). He will then establish a two-fold system of metaphysics on the basis of the available a priori principles, one part that corresponds to the faculty of understanding/cognition (metaphysics of nature) and another part that corresponds to the faculty of reason/desire (metaphysics of morals). Judgment gets no metaphysics.
Kant’s typical solution to an antinomy (a contradiction resulting from reason’s attempts to go beyond its limits and think the unconditioned) is to place one side of the antinomy in the sensible realm and the other side in the super-sensible realm. This creates a dualism between the phenomenal and noumenal that most German Idealists find unacceptable.
Another way of dealing with antinomies, for Kant, is through the notion of “infinite progress” or “infinite perfectability,” precisely by placing an idea as a goal to be achieved. Fichte also keeps notions of infinite progress.
Generally speaking, Hegel thinks that Kant (and Fichte’s) attempt to avoid contradiction through the distinction between the sensible and supersensible or the infinite progress creates its own contradictions.
For example, Kant says that we cannot know that God exists, but we must act as if God existed. Likewise, we cannot actually attain the infinite perfectability of our will, yet we must act as if this could be obtained to satisfy the needs of our reason. Hegel takes these “as ifs” and the “oughts” of infinite progress to be hiding a contradiction in the form of “we must believe we can perfect our will, yet also must believe this to be unobtainable,” etc.
Hegel’s general move to combat this is to emphasize the fact that we think we are dealing with a supersensible realm, but really we’re just trying to shuffle our thoughts to keep them from interacting with each other. So generally speaking, Hegel wants to show that there’s actually not a thinkable “beyond,” that the idea of a supersensible realm is just a result of thinking in a one-sided way.
In fact, Hegel says in the Introduction to the Phenomenology that his goal is to take us to the point where consciousness no longer needs to go beyond itself, where its concept is adequate to its object and its object to its concept. In Kantian terms, this means to take us to a place where we realize that there’s not a supersensible realm that’s thinkable beyond the sphere of the knowable, that the noumenal is immanently contained within the phenomenal and is just its one-sided reflection. So rather than placing the limits in human reason, Hegel puts it within the things themselves. Finite things, by virtue of their own dialectic, become self-opposed. Yet what Hegel calls “the Concept” can unify these oppositions by showing that it’s the concept of the thing becoming self-opposed, yet remaining the same concept throughout this self-externality and self-opposition.
Once there’s no beyond, Hegel will also establish a system of metaphysics, one that corresponds to the movement of the Concept. The first considers the Concept in its immediate content (Logic), the second considers the Concept as external to itself (Nature) and the third shows the Concept reuniting with itself (Spirit).
Kant to Freud and Lacan
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” from Kant’s 1784 essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”
That Enlightenment was man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. That immaturity was not using the reason we are endowed with.
So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. This is from Kant’s The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. This line was said by Terry Pratchett in another way: “And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” Here I think “things” are just another name of “means” instead of “ends”. Each person is an end in themselves. That is Kant’s categorical imperative because comparing to emotion, love, empathy and others, reason is an unconditional constant. “The rule of judgement under laws of pure practical reason is this: ask yourself whether, if the action you propose were to take place by a law of the nature of which you were yourself a part, you could indeed regard it as possible through your will.”
P. Guyer: Kant’s idea that humanity must be treated as an end in itself and never merely as a means has gained wide acceptance in modern moral thought and philosophy.
The Enlightenment had brought with it a sort of scientific rationality that thoroughly destabilized older presumptions about values and truth. There wasn’t a clear way out of this destabilization. Philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Hobbes had cast doubt on our ability to have any kind of ultimate meaning and values. So Kant’s philosophy attempted to solve a rather large problem: how can we know anything or value anything when science and reason have eliminated appeals to the Church and monarchy as our ideological foundations? Are we left with pure skepticism?
Kant created a system of philosophy based on Enlightenment-style capital-R Reason which spanned ethics, politics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Kant gave us radically new ways to understand the foundations of knowledge, the foundations of values, and the foundations of history, and all of it was eloquently tied together. Kant gave us a way to have Enlightenment reason without giving up objective truth and ethics.
Hegel built on and altered Kant’s philosophy of history and rationality to devise his own system of philosophy and advance the notion of “dialectics,” or how historical ideas clash and result in new ideas. Hegel in turn inspired many others, most famously Marx.
Kant’s ethics and political philosophy is the largest influence of John Rawls’ political philosophy, for example, which has itself revolutionized how the Anglo-American world thinks about politics and ethics. Martha Nussbaum’s pathbreaking work in ethics and Christine Korsgaard’s work on the foundations of normativity are thoroughly Kantian.
In Kant’s view, reason can convey to us knowledge about reality that is not based on experience: in this, the rationalists were right. But this knowledge only relates to objects within the ambit of our experience. Thus, reason cannot provide us with knowledge about a world beyond all sensory perception — a correct insight on the part of the empiricists. And while we can understand the fundamental laws of the world in time and space a priori, as the rationalists maintained, according to Kant this does not hold good precisely for objects beyond all possible experience, such as God and immortal souls.
What characterizes humans, therefore, is that although they are rational beings they are not purely rational, but are at the same time sensual beings. It is our sensuality that makes our judgment fallible and our will susceptible to evil. But as a constituent part of a human being it also has its beneficial sides. Thus, for example, it not only allows us to experience physical pleasure, but also to enjoy art and natural beauty.
Ethics: Kant does not deny that it is generally useful and beneficial in the long term to obey the dictates of reason. But it is also right to do the reasonable thing, even if it does not happen to be to one’s benefit.
Stella Sandford: Kant’s legacy
For Kant the objectivity of knowledge is secured by the a priori contribution to it of the faculties of sensibility (with space and time) and the understanding (with the pure concepts or the categories).
‘Subjectivity’ no longer means the variable or even fickle contribution of the particular individual that messes up the possibility of objective knowledge. It refers to the universal, hence shared, structures of subjectivity. So it is not just objectivity that Kant forces us to rethink.
Kant curtailed philosophy’s metaphysical scope and ambitions, retrenched human knowledge to the confined sphere of mere appearances, thus forfeited the realist ambition of directly referring to, or even grasping, reality in itself.
What was said about objectivity could equally be said of ‘reality’. Kant’s position (as you know) is that appearances just are ‘reality’ for us. He distinguishes between metaphysical and empirical realism. A metaphysical realist is effectively committed to the aim of knowing reality as it is in itself, independently of any subjective contribution to knowledge. For Kant it is metaphysical realism – not transcendental idealism – that inevitably leads to scepticism and relativism because we will never know reality as it is independently of our way of knowing reality.
Appearances are real, they are not illusory – the distinction between appearance and illusion is very important for Kant and it is only the metaphysical realist who is forced to conflate them. Transcendental idealism (the doctrine of the transcendental ideality, i.e. mind-dependence, of space and time and of the origin of the pure concepts in the understanding itself) is equated with empirical realism because, together with the empirical contribution to knowledge via sensibility, the a priori contribution of the subject gives us real and objective knowledge of the world.
- how are synthetic judgements a priori possible?
judgements to clarify or analysize vs. judgements to amplify
- analytic judgements are universally and necessarily true and thus, could not be the product of experience. Their truth is established independently - a priori - not empirically.
Paul Guyer: “So how can Kant show that the first principles of mathematics, science and philosophy itself are synthetic propositions known a priori , not merely a posteriori ; that is, how can he refute Humean skepticism: that what may seem to us to be universal and necessary principles are in fact nothing but contingent and incomplete generalizations. . . ?”
- knowledge is different from perception and that those representations at the level of perception must finally stand in proper relation to the objects represented. There must be, as Kant says, “the determinate relation of given representations to an object.”
From a purely physical perspective, the physics of the thing changes from moment to moment as does the percipient. There must be some a priori basis on which various elements of the overall physical array are joined. With this understanding, Kant is then able to define an object as that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united. Thus, the manifold of color, shape, texture, and so on—through the spatiotemporal mode of representation—is united to constitute an object.
- However, the unification of the manifold as given in intuition cannot be supplied by sensibility itself. That is, sensibility, as the potentiality for experience, does not include any means by which a manifold is forged into a unified whole. As unification is both necessary and a priori, Kant refers to the power or process by which it takes place as pure apperception and says,
The unity of this apperception I likewise entitle the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate the possibility of a priori knowledge arising from it. For the manifold of representations, which are given in an intuition, would not be one and all my representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness. (B132)
The synthetic unity of consciousness is, therefore, an objective condition of all knowledge. It is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing an object, but is a condition under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me . (B138)
If the imagination is not simply to be visionary , but is to be inventive under the strict surveillance of reason, there must always previously be something that is completely certain, and not invented . . . namely, the possibility of the object itself. (A770/ B798)
Empiricists offer a mental life that is stimulus bound and rationalists a mental life of abstractions. It is by way of the imagination that actual mental life moves freely and beyond the simplicities that systematic philosophies tend to impose.
determinate , reflective , and teleological forms of judgment
Space and time, as conditions under which alone objects can possibly be given to us, are valid no further than for objects of the senses, and therefore only for experience. . . . The pure concepts of understanding are free from this limitation. . . . But the extension of concepts beyond our sensible intuition is of no advantage to us. For as concepts of objects they are then empty, and do not even enable us to judge of the objects whether or not they are possible. They are mere forms of thought, without objective reality. (B147–9)
references
book: Onora O’Neil, Constructions of Reason: explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, 1989
book: Kant’s Philosophical Revolution: A Short Guide to the Critique of Pure Reason (June 2020) by Yirmiyahu Yovel
book: The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, by Lea Ypi (2021 Oxford Univ. Press)
book: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction (Oct. 12 2006) by Jill Vance Buroker (in Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts, 16 books)
book: The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Sept 2018) by Peter Strawson, 1966.
book: Kant, by Paul Guyer, 2006
book: Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (March 2004) by Henry E. Allison
book: Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (March 1999), by Sebastian Gardner
book: Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-49644-6.
book: Kant: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton, 1981
Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 2. By Jean-Paul Sartre
book: Cambridge Companion to Kant,
book: Cambridge Companion to Kand and Modern Philosophy
book: Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
book: Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Understanding, Sebastian Rödl, 2012
Group A: Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.
Group B: Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.
post-Kant: Pinkard’s German Philosophy 1760-1860
post-Kant: Reading Hegel: The Introductions
book: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel (1991), by Walter Kaufmann
book: Kant and the mind, by Andrew Brook, 2012
book: Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (2025), by Andrés Saenz de Sicilia
book: Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (2015), by Joan Copjec
The Plague of Fantasies, by Slavoj Žižek, 1997
book: The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’, 2017, by Dany Nobus
book: Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, by Alenka Zupancic
book: The Organization of the Mind: Lessons from Kant and Freud, Béatrice Longuenesse
Whereas Kant investigates the forms of rational thinking that are necessary conditions for theoretical cognition and moral motivation, in contrast, Freud reveals the irrational core of our mental life. Whereas conscious states and their unity play an essential role in Kant’s view of the mind, in contrast, Freud takes the core of our mental life to be unconscious and inhabited by insuperable conflicts.
- book: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, Author: Ingrid Robeyns