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

[Ogg_Vorbis]

Quote

The major line of philosophers rejected Kant’s “noumenal” world quite speedily, but they accepted his “phenomenal” world and carried it to its logical consequences: the view of reality as mere appearance; the view of man’s conceptual faculty as a mechanism for producing arbitrary “constructs” not derived from experience or facts; the view of rational certainty as impossible, of science as unprovable, of man’s mind as impotent–and above all, the equation of morality with selflessness. They rejected the root or cause of Kant’s system, but accepted all of its deadly effects.

 

-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. It doesn’t matter if the senses modify, what matters is that Kant posited the noumenal’s existence. 

 

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). 

 

Logically, Rand committed the Fallacy of the Consequent in that quote. Because she focused on the alleged consequences of Kant’s philosophy rather than specifically on the (incorrect) rejection of the noumenal realm by post-Kantian philosophers, which is my point. 

 

Despite the inherent unknowability of the noumenal, its positing serves as the foundation for understanding the empirical origins of phenomena, a notion often overlooked in contemporary philosophical discourse.

 

The empiricist often confuses Kant’s form of Idealism with those that infer the existence of an external world from the matter of appearances (mental states). But Kant did not infer it, he wholeheartedly accepted its existence. He only inferred the existence of the thing-in-itself (or noumenon), not the existence of external things, which he accepted.

 

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.

[necrovore]

In the above quote, Ayn Rand lists a series of facts, but she does not do any deduction, she does not apply any abstract principle, so there cannot be any “fallacy.”

Also, you won’t get anywhere by starting with Kant. A valid argument starts with reality – not in the middle of anyone’s philosophy (Kant’s or Rand’s).

My understanding is that Kant’s noumenal realm was just a space that he intended to be filled with faith and Christianity. He himself claims there is no way to reach it from reality, which is why he thinks faith is necessary, but that need for faith is probably why more secular-minded philosophers rejected it.

However, it doesn’t matter, because Rand’s philosophy doesn’t depend on Kant at all. Her arguments against Kant are a sideshow made necessary only by the popularity of Kant; her philosophy stands on its own even without those arguments (and without Kant).

[tadmjones]

27 minutes ago, necrovore said:

In the above quote, Ayn Rand lists a series of facts, but she does not do any deduction, she does not apply any abstract principle, so there cannot be any “fallacy.”

Also, you won’t get anywhere by starting with Kant. A valid argument starts with reality – not in the middle of anyone’s philosophy (Kant’s or Rand’s).

My understanding is that Kant’s noumenal realm was just a space that he intended to be filled with faith and Christianity. He himself claims there is no way to reach it from reality, which is why he thinks faith is necessary, but that need for faith is probably why more secular-minded philosophers rejected it.

However, it doesn’t matter, because Rand’s philosophy doesn’t depend on Kant at all. Her arguments against Kant are a sideshow made necessary only by the popularity of Kant; her philosophy stands on its own even without those arguments (and without Kant).

I know nothing about academic philosophy , what with all the citing and whatnot. But I think I understand that Rand was not an academic and , I further assume that given the volumes of critical and comparative works on philosophy that few are pointed toward Rand. 
 
Is it true that none of Rand’s conclusions or arguments are in anway similar to Kant’s arguments or conclusions? No original ideas of Kant would or could have been incorporated into any of Rand’s formulations, ideas that Rand may not have considered attributable to Kant? 

[Boydstun]

Ogg,

On 6/3/2022 at 9:15 AM, Boydstun said:

It was correct, from the standpoint of her philosophy, for Rand to counter Kant’s notion that our minds cannot grasp things as they are apart from contributions from our minds. But there is a deeper criticism of Kant, based in Rand’s philosophy, that we should observe, one she never expressly stated: there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself in Kant’s most fundamental sense. From Rand’s metaphysics, fully grown, it is not only that Existence is identity and consciousness is identification. It is, additionally, that every existent has measures—they bear magnitude relations—and cognitions engage measurements, discernments of magnitude relations. “If anything were actually ‘immeasureable’, it would bear no relationships of any kind to the rest of the universe, it would not affect nor be affected by anything else in any manner whatever, it would enact no causes and bear no consequences—in short, it would not exist” (ITOE 39; Baumgarten §53– “whatever is entirely undetermined is nothing.” ). Then there is no such thing as Kant’s thing-in-itself. It is not only “as nothing to us,” it is nothing (and not because it would be as nothing to any kind of intelligence whatever, even an omniscient one, contra Rand’s thought in ITOE App. 194). With respect to relations, Rand’s dicta “Existence is identity” should be cashed as “No existents are without relations to other existents.” Among relations to things not itself would be possible real relations of any real thing to human consciousness. Kant’s distinction between things as perceivable or knowable and things in themselves is in reality a distinction between things as perceivable or knowable and things that do not exist. Inability to know things that do not exist is no shortcoming; said thing-in-itself is not something at which our perceptions and conceptions aim. Then too, it is not a thing-in-itself that brings us sensations; from nothing, nothing is supported or arises. Never “is the thing in itself . . . at issue in experience” (A30 B45) is so for the Kant-missed reason that there are no such things as things in themselves. However, although Kant was wrong to characterize things as they are independently of our discernment of them as things as they are “in themselves,” and we have exposed that misidentification of the two notions, it remains to complain against Kant that he should have the human mind, led by the senses, incapable of any discernment of things as they are apart from the human mind. 

 

On 6/12/2022 at 10:03 AM, Boydstun said:

One way to rescue the thing-in-itself within the spirit of Kant’ critical philosophy is the way of Salmon Maimon (1753–1800). Maimon urged conception of the thing-in-itself as only an ideal of reason, an  asymptotic concept which human thought requires and under which it can profitably proceed, rather than conceiving thing-in-itself (as had Kant in A250–53, A38; 1783 §§12, 13, 32, 57; B_xxvi–xxvi;_ A45–46 B62–63, B69, B306–9, A696 B724) as an object in a noumenal domain (Beiser 1993, 306–309). Rand can maintain that no such ideal of reason is necessary for cognition, and of course, for Rand the parts of an existent unknown in present perception or thought concerning it can be things not only as things possibly knowable, but things as they are.

. . .

Beiser, F. 1993. The Fate of Reason. Harvard. 

 

[necrovore]

9 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Is it true that none of Rand’s conclusions or arguments are in anway similar to Kant’s arguments or conclusions? No original ideas of Kant would or could have been incorporated into any of Rand’s formulations, ideas that Rand may not have considered attributable to Kant?

I am not going to say that it is, because it would require a very large scale full-text search of both Rand and Kant.

Peikoff did say that Kant had “occasional fig leaves,” which means we can’t say that Kant was wrong about everything. (I suppose a complete lie would be more easily rejected than one that verifiably tells the truth some of the time.) We can say that Kant was wrong about fundamental ideas – like the whole division into noumenal and phenomenal worlds. On fundamental ideas, Rand and Kant are completely different.

If Kant were right about something, his fundamentals would tend to undermine it (sort of like if someone were saying that 2+2=4 because of extraterrestrials).

Rhetorically, at least, I’m sure there were places where Rand would take the other side of one of Kant’s formulations. But if she were to say that 2+2=4 she would probably (rightly) leave Kant out of it, even if he said the same thing at some point or other.

[KyaryPamyu]

According to David Hume, we cannot know with certainty whether the sun will rise tomorrow. But if the sun might not rise tomorrow, my plan to go to the beach will be ruined! That’s what would hurt people (including Objectivists) the most: an unpredictable, fickle, undependable, untrustworthy world. If there was any way out of that uncertainty, we’d cling to it with all of our soul, just like Koalas grab onto trees. Certainty is one means to attaining peace of heart.

One of the biggest obstacles to a predictable Reality is none other than God. If God exists, the behaviour of Nature is no longer predictable. In fact, Nature is as predictable as a capricious person. Oh no! It’s hardly surprising that Objectivists are so keen on philosophizing about identity-this and identity-that. Thanks to our blessed and holy Identity, a potato’s lack of vocal chords is sufficient for me to predict that no potato will ever sing in the next few millions of years. Nature is reliable again. Thank God Identity!

(But that’s not the only cool thing about Identity: we could say that, even if a God did exist, we’d be able to form some idea about what he can and can’t do, simply by studying his nature.)

With this background in mind, it’s quite natural that (some) Objectivists vilify Kant. An Objectivist wants to assert the non-existence of God with the same certainty with which he asserts that potatoes will never sing. And Kant, that no-good scoundrel, wants to take that away from us. To be sure, Kant didn’t claim that God exists, only that no one can establish this fact with immutable certainty.

A few Objectivists also demonize Kant on the basis of a straw-man they got from reading Rand, namely that

[W]e are in danger of getting killed because our sense organs systematically “distort reality.” This is suggested by the story of the astronaut landing on an unknown planet in Rand’s Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982, 1–4). Because his confidence in his reason, his senses and his instruments has been weakened, he dies. Now some students draw from this story the suggestion that Kant would say: “That is no surprise, because you can’t be certain of what your consciousness tells you about space and time.” Or the suggestion that the astronaut was himself a Kantian.

There is no doubt that if Rand had meant to suggest anything like this she would have been mistaken. For Kant said very clearly that “[t]his ideality of space and time leaves, however, the centrality of empirical knowledge unaffected, for we are equally sure of it whether these forms necessarily inhere in themselves or only in our intuition of them” (Kant 1933, B56). The Kantian astronaut, then, would be just as likely to survive as if the Objectivist theory of knowledge were true […] (Source)

This kind of thing is on a par with a Creationist’s misinterpretation of Darwin. It’s not a good look, but thankfully many Objectivists think on their own feet and don’t base their judgements on “Rand wrote” or “Peikoff said”.

As for the thing-in-itself debate, here’s my two cents. Objectivism, to my knowledge, doesn’t entertain the possibility that finitude and infinity are epistemological, not metaphysical. I’ll briefly explain this.

Existential objects are finite in magnitude. By contrast, mathematical space can be infinitely divided. Together, this means the following: I can pick an existential object, e.g. a tomato, and (purely in my mind) zoom into this tomato forever and ever. I can zoom into its subatomic particles until said particles are as big as the current Universe, and I can keep going indefinitely. This doesn’t contradict the finiteness of the tomato.

Now, let’s say that the mind-independent world was utterly devoid of magnitudes, and that cognition nevertheless divides experience into units which mutually delimit themselves. Where one unit ends, the next one begins.

“Nonsense!” shouts the Objectivist. “The law of Identity means that existential things are of limited magnitude!”

Nope. The law of Identity simply states that something is a certain way, as against another way. In accord with this holy law, we can say that, if the mind-independent world is free of magnitudes, then it is free of magnitudes (A = A). As a corollary, if the world is devoid of magnitudes, then the opposite cannot be true (A ≠ non-A). And we can say that either the external world lacks magnitudes, or it doesn’t (A or non-A).

My point is that establishing the relationship between consciousness and existence is not as easy as looking at some axioms. But that rabbit hole goes deep.

[necrovore]

15 minutes ago, KyaryPamyu said:

This kind of thing is on a par with a Creationist’s misinterpretation of Darwin. It’s not a good look, but thankfully many Objectivists think on their own feet and don’t base their judgements on “Rand wrote” or “Peikoff said”.

PWNI doesn’t mention Kant by name. It does illustrate the practical consequences of certain philosophical ideas – if and to the extent that you take them seriously and try to apply them in a given situation.

Even Kantians can somehow manage to make it to the store and buy groceries, even though their minds allegedly are incapable of understanding the store and the groceries as they really are, and can only understand them as they appear to be.

In a sense the astronaut is an exaggeration just to make the point.

In another sense, though, the whole problem with certain philosophical ideas is that you can’t take them to their logical conclusions without causing disaster to ensue… and if that’s the case, there must be something wrong with those ideas.

I don’t think that’s “vilification.” That’s just calling attention to a problem.

(Of course I don’t think the real intention of those bad philosophical ideas is for people to go all-in with them – rather, it’s to use them as an excuse or an escape hatch whenever they want to do something irrational.)

[Ogg_Vorbis]

20 hours ago, necrovore said:

In the above quote, Ayn Rand lists a series of facts, but she does not do any deduction, she does not apply any abstract principle, so there cannot be any “fallacy.”

Also, you won’t get anywhere by starting with Kant. A valid argument starts with reality – not in the middle of anyone’s philosophy (Kant’s or Rand’s).

My understanding is that Kant’s noumenal realm was just a space that he intended to be filled with faith and Christianity. He himself claims there is no way to reach it from reality, which is why he thinks faith is necessary, but that need for faith is probably why more secular-minded philosophers rejected it.

However, it doesn’t matter, because Rand’s philosophy doesn’t depend on Kant at all. Her arguments against Kant are a sideshow made necessary only by the popularity of Kant; her philosophy stands on its own even without those arguments (and without Kant).

I judged an argument that doesn’t exist there, but I inferred it to exist this way, based on her other writings:

Quote

If post-Kantian philosophers accepted the phenomenal and rejected the noumenal, then they accepted all the errors that go with Kant’s idea of a phenomenal realm.

But it really does look like she’s just asserting “facts” that wouldn’t pass an official peer review process conducted by her contemporaries in the field of philosophy. Unofficially, though, they rejected her assertions en masse, from what I’ve read.

Rousseau seems more of a predecessor to modern philosophy than Kant, in my estimation. But that’s a different topic. And I wouldn’t expect people to accept it based on my authority. 

You wrote: 

Quote

My understanding is that Kant’s noumenal realm was just a space that he intended to be filled with faith and Christianity.

Not Christianity. Christians of his time rejected his reducing of God to a mere Idea, and rightly so. It’s unChristian.

The noumenal can be used as a conceptual “space,” and in fact I identified that usage myself over 20 years ago in a Yahoo Groups Kant forum. But that’s only because we can’t know what’s “out there” without going outside of our senses. This creates a conceptual “space” for further possibilities than just empirical ones. The noumenal, or thing-in-itself, consists of furniture, planets, pets, humans - and potentially, supernatural entities. Free-will is also posited to exist in the noumenal conceptual realm. 

If, however, we limit our concepts to what can be known through the five senses, as Rand did, then this leaves no room for free-will. And that’s a real problem for Objectivism. 

[Ogg_Vorbis]

19 hours ago, tadmjones said:

I know nothing about academic philosophy , what with all the citing and whatnot. But I think I understand that Rand was not an academic and , I further assume that given the volumes of critical and comparative works on philosophy that few are pointed toward Rand. 
 
Is it true that none of Rand’s conclusions or arguments are in anway similar to Kant’s arguments or conclusions? No original ideas of Kant would or could have been incorporated into any of Rand’s formulations, ideas that Rand may not have considered attributable to Kant? 

What Kantian and Randian ethics have in common:

Focus on reason.

Universality: ethics applies to everybody.

Duty/obligation: Kant called it duty. Rand would call it obligation.

Respect for individual autonomy.

Respect for rights.

Independence: The CI is a formula for individuals to use to make up their own minds about rational ethical principles. Specific ethical principles that Kant mentioned were examples.

Strength of Will.

Moral integrity.

 

[Ogg_Vorbis]

19 hours ago, Boydstun said:

It was correct, from the standpoint of her philosophy, for Rand to counter Kant’s notion that our minds cannot grasp things as they are apart from contributions from our minds.

 

 

From the standpoint of Rand’s introduction to epistemology, a percept is a mental integration and retention of sensory input. The mind for Rand contributes an integrating process. She didn’t explore this process at length. But it should be possible to throw Space, Time and the Categories into the integrating process, as well as the transcendental synthetic unity of apperception. 

Lacking any exploration of this integrating process leaves the door wide open for whatever someone wants to fill the empty space with. 

[Ogg_Vorbis]

20 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Quote

One way to rescue the thing-in-itself within the spirit of Kant’ critical philosophy is the way of Salmon Maimon (1753–1800). Maimon urged conception of the thing-in-itself as only an ideal of reason, an  asymptotic concept which human thought requires and under which it can profitably proceed, rather than conceiving thing-in-itself (as had Kant in A250–53, A38; 1783 §§12, 13, 32, 57; B_xxvi–xxvi;_ A45–46 B62–63, B69, B306–9, A696 B724) as an object in a noumenal domain (Beiser 1993, 306–309). Rand can maintain that no such ideal of reason is necessary for cognition, and of course, for Rand the parts of an existent unknown in present perception or thought concerning it can be things not only as things possibly knowable, but things as they are.

Then she would be wrong. No thing-in-itself, no profit. No noumenon, no free-will. No free-will, no morality.

 

[Ogg_Vorbis]

13 hours ago, necrovore said:

PWNI doesn’t mention Kant by name. It does illustrate the practical consequences of certain philosophical ideas – if and to the extent that you take them seriously and try to apply them in a given situation.

Even Kantians can somehow manage to make it to the store and buy groceries, even though their minds allegedly are incapable of understanding the store and the groceries as they really are, and can only understand them as they appear to be.

In a sense the astronaut is an exaggeration just to make the point.

In another sense, though, the whole problem with certain philosophical ideas is that you can’t take them to their logical conclusions without causing disaster to ensue… and if that’s the case, there must be something wrong with those ideas.

I don’t think that’s “vilification.” That’s just calling attention to a problem.

(Of course I don’t think the real intention of those bad philosophical ideas is for people to go all-in with them – rather, it’s to use them as an excuse or an escape hatch whenever they want to do something irrational.)

It’s a “problem” that very few philosophers agree exist. Perhaps none of them believe it, except for Peikoff the chemist-philosopher. Rand’s interpretation of Kant’s ideas was pretty far out in left field.

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. 

[Boydstun]

5 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

What Kantian and Randian ethics have in common:

Focus on reason.

Universality: ethics applies to everybody.

Duty/obligation: Kant called it duty. Rand would call it obligation.

Respect for individual autonomy.

Respect for rights.

Independence: The CI is a formula for individuals to use to make up their own minds about rational ethical principles. Specific ethical principles that Kant mentioned were examples.

Strength of Will.

Moral integrity.

 

Kant’s Wrestle with Happiness and Life

[Ogg_Vorbis]

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.

[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. It doesn’t matter if the senses modify, what matters is that Kant posited the noumenal’s existence. 

 

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). 

 

Logically, Rand committed the Fallacy of the Consequent in that quote. Because she focused on the alleged consequences of Kant’s philosophy rather than specifically on the (incorrect) rejection of the noumenal realm by post-Kantian philosophers, which is my point. 

 

Despite the inherent unknowability of the noumenal, its positing serves as the foundation for understanding the empirical origins of phenomena, a notion often overlooked in contemporary philosophical discourse.

 

The empiricist often confuses Kant’s form of Idealism with those that infer the existence of an external world from the matter of appearances (mental states). But Kant did not infer it, he wholeheartedly accepted its existence. He only inferred the existence of the thing-in-itself (or noumenon), not the existence of external things, which he accepted.

 

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.

Kant v. Rand

[Boydstun]

7 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

. . . But for philosophy, they are all “I BELIEVE RAND!” people, and refuse to look any further.

If you actually bothered to read what people write here, you would see how flatly false is that generalization “all”. But perhaps you presume nobody here has anything to say that you might learn from, you are going to bury your head in the sand about what they write, and you have only come here to enlighten these folks whom you presume to all be philosophical illiterates and have yet to discover thinking for themselves.

[Ogg_Vorbis]

9 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

Rand v. Kant

You wrote: 

Quote

While their metaphysical views are different from Rand’s, hers is a broadly empiricist method that Kant would reject because the necessity in such a metaphysics is not of the a priori sort.

A minor quibble. I don’t believe Kant would reject it. He would critique it by employing his transcendental method. He would show that A is A belongs to logic, not metaphysics. The only philosophy that Kant rejected, as far as I know, was ontology in general, the study of the nature of being per se. 

[Ogg_Vorbis]

4 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

If you actually bothered to read what people write here, you would see how flatly false is that generalization “all”. But perhaps you presume nobody here has anything to say that you might learn from, you are going to bury your head in the sand about what they write, and you have only come here to enlighten these folks whom you presume to all be philosophical illiterates and have yet to discover thinking for themselves.

I always learn something from these conversations. It just so happens that I am used to addressing first generation Objectivists who were, on the whole, completely obsessed with Rand’s philosophy. I’m aware that this attitude may have toned down with the new generation. But my primary experience with Objectivism is with the first generation, and they were quite shrill, I can assure you. And they still are, those that are still around anyway.

For example,

“But Kant said…” <BLOCKED>

If you are a first-generation Objectivist with a more open mind, then I salute you.

[Boydstun]

Read the entire composition very carefully. Everything is cited, and hopefully you go to Kant to know Kant.

Metaphysical knowledge would have to be synthetic a priori. You know that, right? It is elementary Kant.

There is no excuse, with the English translations available today, to make assertions about what Kant thought, without citations. Likewise, for Rand: quote exactly and give the citation. Show they say what you assert they say, and you will also be making a handy resource for you to return to for cites for your future re-readings of these thinkers

Keep reading.

[Boydstun]

21 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

I always learn something from these conversations. It just so happens that I am used to addressing first generation Objectivists who were, on the whole, completely obsessed with Rand’s philosophy. I’m aware that this attitude may have toned down with the new generation. But my primary experience with Objectivism is with the first generation, and they were quite shrill, I can assure you. And they still are, those that are still around anyway.

For example,

“But Kant said…” <BLOCKED>

If you are a first-generation Objectivist with a more open mind, then I salute you.

I am technically not an Objectivist, since some of my points of disagreement with Rand are ones essential to her philosophy. But I have much sympathy and overlap with her philosophy, and I have always represented Rand’s or anyone’s philosophy as accurately as possible in discussions of it. I am elderly, though not first-generation, or anyway not zero-generation. There are some Objectivists today, of every age, who judge what’s true by what Rand said on candidates for truth or at least what they think Rand would say on candidates. Sometimes that is innocent in that it is just a short way of finding out what implications of Rand’s fundamental views there are, given that they have come to accept those fundamentals as true of reality, Rand’s fundamental views. Other times it is intellectual laziness or modest intelligence. But many, old and young, think for themselves and well. There is a passage in Rand stating that that is what she hoped for in her readers, but right now, I have to go to sleep.