Unveiling Ayn Rand's Misinterpretation: Kant's Noumenal Realm and the Fallacy of the Consequent

[KyaryPamyu]

1 hour ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

It is THIS that is the problem with modern philosophy - not the acceptance of Kant's philosophy, but its rejection of the ground of appearances (or phenomena). 

@Ogg_Vorbis, you might find the following of interest.

"Results from the 2020 PhilPapers survey, with responses from nearly 1,800 philosophers (mainly from North America, Europe, and Australasia), to questions on a variety of philosophical subjects and problems, have now been published." (Source)

As you can see from the results, on the question of an external world (i.e. the ground of appearances or phenomena), 79.5% of the surveyed philosophers align with non-skeptical realism.

Personally, I couldn't care less whether the external world exists or not. What I want is a comprehensive view of reality that isn't argued for on the basis of some lame Subject-Object distinction. In my opinion, neither Kant nor Rand have succeeded in this endeavor.

[Ogg_Vorbis]

12 minutes ago, KyaryPamyu said:

@Ogg_Vorbis, you might find the following of interest.

"Results from the 2020 PhilPapers survey, with responses from nearly 1,800 philosophers (mainly from North America, Europe, and Australasia), to questions on a variety of philosophical subjects and problems, have now been published." (Source)

As you can see from the results, on the question of an external world (i.e. the ground of appearances or phenomena), 79.5% of the surveyed philosophers align with non-skeptical realism.

Personally, I couldn't care less whether the external world exists or not. What I want is a comprehensive view of reality that isn't argued for on the basis of some lame Subject-Object distinction. In my opinion, neither Kant nor Rand have succeeded in this endeavor.

Sorry for the confusion, but the external world is not the ground of appearances or phenomena. The external world IS the appearance or phenomena, at least the external part of it.

[Boydstun]

On 4/21/2024 at 6:29 PM, Ogg_Vorbis said:

 

-Ayn Rand (For the New Intellectual, 32; Kndl ed.)

 

 

If the majority of philosophers rejected Kant's "noumenal" realm, they have left out an important aspect of his philosophy - the source of all phenomena. Because even if the noumenal is unknowable, it is, for Kant, the grounds for phenomena beyond the senses. . . . 

 

The noumenal is the ground of experience. Without it, there is no perception, nothing to perceive. Kant never denied the ground of perception, only that it is knowable in itself, that is, by somehow going outside of your consciousness to know it directly without your senses.

The noumenal is posited to exist as the ground of perception, of something for the senses to sense. The only way to know it directly would be to somehow go outside of your senses.

Simple as that.

Rand did not say that a majority of philosophers rejected Kant's noumenal realm. She said that a major line of philosophers rejected it. She knew what line that was from elementary history of philosophy. Do you know what line that was?

"These appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object—which cannot be intuited by us . . . and may be named the non-empirical, object = X" (A109).

Kant indicates that the transcendental object, which he takes to be the ground (or cause, or correlate) of (the matter of) appearances, should not be identified with noumena. Scholars are divided on whether the two are always kept distinct in Kant, but in representing Kant, it is safest to call the source of (the matter of) appearances "transcendental object" if one's aim is to speak truly in representing Kant's view.

[necrovore]

10 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

Rather than taking one person's word for it, and Peikoff's if you include his mimicry, it's always best to consult several sources - If the issue is important to you.

As I said, I think the refutation of Kant is just a sideshow.

10 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

I don't think this is as important an issue as Objectivists make it out to be. They may consult several expert sources with a financial question. But for philosophy, they are all "I BELIEVE RAND!" people, and refuse to look any further.

Speaking for myself, I feel like I did my further-looking before discovering Objectivism. Kant, I suppose, had his chance.

Objectivism isn't rooted in Rand, it's rooted in reality, or at least it's supposed to be. I suppose it is possible to claim that Objectivism is wrong about reality. Some Objectivists are wrong about reality from time to time. This occasional wrongness is actually normal, coming as it does out of human fallibility. I think the correct answers will come out in time.

But that is not the same thing as claiming that reality is inaccessible (or that certain parts of it are inaccessible).

[Ogg_Vorbis]

I don’t want this to turn into a Kant study group. But the transcendental object is the other side of the transcendental subject, that unifying of the manifold which is the given or the x that is, at this point, only a potential empirical object. An unknown in itself but not unknowable possibility of experience for us. 
 

I have never equated these concepts, and although Kant said that the thing-in-itself is the same as a noumenon, there has to be a reason to create two or more terms, or it is simply an unnecessary redundancy.

[Ogg_Vorbis]

21 minutes ago, necrovore said:

As I said, I think the refutation of Kant is just a sideshow.

Speaking for myself, I feel like I did my further-looking before discovering Objectivism. Kant, I suppose, had his chance.

Objectivism isn't rooted in Rand, it's rooted in reality, or at least it's supposed to be. I suppose it is possible to claim that Objectivism is wrong about reality. Some Objectivists are wrong about reality from time to time. This occasional wrongness is actually normal, coming as it does out of human fallibility. I think the correct answers will come out in time.

But that is not the same thing as claiming that reality is inaccessible (or that certain parts of it are inaccessible).

The thing-in-itself is theoretically accessible, if there were a way to experience it directly without the intervention of your five senses.

[Boydstun]

1 hour ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

The thing-in-itself is theoretically accessible, if there were a way to experience it directly without the intervention of your five senses.

If I may add:

Kant's predecessors such as Leibniz thought we have a faculty of intellectual intuition by which we DO access things as they are in themselves. Kant denied we have a faculty of intellectual intuition, only a faculty of sensory intuition. He was not in any sort of lamentation over that; it is not like we should be having a rational ambition to get hold of such a thing, like we pursue science, and are forever to be disappointed.

Kant was NOT saying: "Oh, if only our senses were not getting in the way, we could grasp things as they are in themselves. Kant did not regard the senses, including the forms time and space that he thought of as contributions from the human powers of apprehension as DISTORTING anything. Indeed, he expressly denied that and denied that by appearance he meant illusion.

Rand, and I also, are fully satisfied to know things as they are without trying to cast them as things as they are in themselves. Nothing is as it is in any way not standing in relations to things not itself.

Edited April 23 by Boydstun

[Ogg_Vorbis]

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

If I may add:

Kant's predecessors such as Leibniz thought we have a faculty of intellectual intuition by which we DO access things as they are in themselves. Kant denied we have a faculty of intellectual intuition, only a faculty of sensory intuition. He was not in any sort of lamentation over that; it is not like we should be having a rational ambition to get hold of such a thing, like we pursue science, and are forever to be disappointed.

Kant was NOT saying: "Oh, if only our senses were not getting in the way, we could grasp things as they are in themselves. Kant did not regard the senses, including the forms time and space that he thought of as contributions from the human powers of apprehension as DISTORTING anything. Indeed, he expressly denied that and denied that by appearance he meant illusion.

Rand, and I also, are fully satisfied to know things as they are without trying to cast them as things as they are in themselves. Nothing is as it is in any way not standing in relations to things not itself.

It's okay if people want to stop reading at the end of the Aesthetic and say something like, "Okay, cool, but what was the point of all that?"

In the Aesthetic, Kant made a point of dealing with the ideas of space argued for by Leibniz (relative space) and Newton (absolute space). And the domain of the thing-in-itself is not just an interesting concept. It makes conceptual room for possibilities that are developed much later in the Critique: the non-phenomenal Ideas of God, Freedom (free-will), and Immortality. 

_____________

Perhaps we, or some people, do have intellectual intuition as well as sensible intuition. Who knows? Christians and other spiritual types say that we all walk around with a veil over us that limits our sight to the empirical and blocks us from seeing another, spiritual, realm. I'm open-minded, I enjoy speculating, and so I wrote two heroic fiction books, under a pen name, that involved some far-out spiritual things. 

[tadmjones]

3 hours ago, Boydstun said:

  fully satisfied to know things as they are without trying to cast them as things as they are in themselves. Nothing is as it is in any way not standing in relations to things not itself.

Yours would be a strict materialism then , no ? It presupposes an ontologic discrete-ness, yes ?

 

[Boydstun]

55 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

Yours would be a strict materialism then , no ? It presupposes an ontologic discrete-ness, yes ?

 

When you say "it" are you referring to materialism? If so, yes, materialism today about living things would be the discreteness of cells. But that is not a conjecture or implication of any modern philosophical position; it is just the result of nineteeth century biology that all living matter is made of cells. It is a further speculation, such as I would make, that all consciousness and experience and memories are results in living matter engaged with the world and the organism's own internal regulations. That would be a modern materialism of consciousness and pals. That the matter is cellular is only from science.

In the portion of what I said that you quoted, I was thinking only of general ontology and Rand's point about it in that first paragraph at the top of page 39 in ITOE, with which I mainly agree. I don't see that as implying an ontologic discreteness, rather, an absence of any absolute disconnection of any existent from any other existents at all (except the existent that is the entirety of existence, of course). And I don't see that position in general ontology as implying any sort of materialism.

 

Edited April 23 by Boydstun

[tadmjones]

Thought I knew where I was going with that line, but I've lost the thread , lol. I went 'off' like half a full rooster.