@TheGemsbok

1 year ago

This is a very high-quality video, and it does a great job in particular with introducing some of the finer points of Kant's theory of mind. But its emphasis on 'pure reason' as the summit of Kant's thought is fairly misleading. Kant's work was a rejection of the dogma of the rationalists no less than it was a rejection of the skepticism of the empiricists. His Critique of Pure Reason has that title because it's intended as a study of the structures, abilities, and limitations of pure reason. Don't forget: the portion of the Critique entitled "The Transcendental Dialectic" is almost exclusively dedicated to the tendency of pure reason to come up with completely groundless and unfalsifiable ideas. And similarly, with regards to the field of metaphysics, Kant lays out his project as follows toward the end of his Prolegomena: "what is wanted is the possibility of this science, the sources from which certainty therein can be derived, and certain criteria by which it may distinguish the dialectical illusion of pure reason from truth." Kant's point there is that 'pure reason,' without constant pertinence to experience, can easily lead a thinker into confidence about unknowable matters. So pure reason can easily become a dialectical illusion, distinct from truth. When Waller reaches the mountaintop in this video and follows up his explosive praise of 'the summit of pure reason' with, "But remember: Kant says that experience is required too," it's a genuinely incredible understatement. One of Kant's main points is that all we can know about is either actual experience in life, possible experience in life, or the conditions for the possibility of experience. Now, Kant does think that's enough to refute Hume's most pervasive skepticism, but it obviously still places experience at the center of his system. Not reason. As Kant writes in the Prolegomena: "The dictum of all genuine idealists, from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in this formula: 'All cognition through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason is there truth.' The principle that throughout dominates and determines my idealism is, on the contrary: 'All cognition of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth.'" So, one might prefer to say Kant was trying to bring us to the summit of our experience of the world, rather than the summit of pure reason. The firm basis on which Kant wants to rebuild metaphysics is not reason alone, but all of cognition (including sensibility, understanding, and reason). What is needed, in Kant's view, is an awareness of transcendental idealism---his doctrine that (1) all objects we encounter in the world must necessarily conform to our cognition; (2) the cognition in question is composed of our sensibility, our understanding, and our reason; and (3) we have no access whatsoever to the world as it is in itself, apart from our cognition of it. I believe this mistaken emphasis surfaces in the video simply because Waller seems to conflate Kant's notion of 'synthetic a priori judgment' with Kant's notion of 'pure reason.' So when he rightly identifies that Kant's highest aim in the Critique is to establish the legitimacy of the former (and hence a way for metaphysics to become possible), he mistakenly assumes that means Kant's highest aim can be expressed as basing philosophy, or at least metaphysics, on the latter. But this misses a primary thread in the text, as Kant puts it at the start of the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic: "The outcome of all dialectical attempts of pure reason not only confirm [. . .] that all the inferences that would carry us out beyond the field of possible experience are deceptive and groundless, but it also simultaneously teaches us [. . .] that human reason has a natural propensity to overstep all these boundaries."

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