Things That Made Me Go “Hmmm..” Today……literally….outloud even.
“The differences between reality as seen in science and reality as seen in morality and religion reveal that there are aspects to existence that are not revealed by either datum alone. The two sources are also unequal in the magnitude and ultimate significance of their content. What science can investigate and know is apparently all but endless, but it still leaves us wondering, “What is it all for?”“…
…Morality and religion have a far more limited rational content, returning to many of the same issues over and over again, but such issues happen to include, not just the questions about how to live, but the ultimate questions about the meaning of life and existence (”Life, the Universe and Everything,” in the memorable formula of Douglas Adams). That our moral datum does not lead to direct, positive knowledge of things that we are able to conceive, like God, leads Kant to characterize his system as transcendental idealism, that we have a subjective representation of such things, without the real intuition that we have of physical objects. The reality revealed by morality is thus for Kant a matter of faith (Glaube), an inference from the Moral Law which is itself present to us with an inexplicable authority. “Transcendental idealism” is thus profoundly different from other forms of “idealism,” like the “subjective idealism” of Berkeley (what Kant called “empirical idealism”) or the “objective idealism” of Hegel, both of which offer speculative certainties about the ultimate nature of things, which Kant does not do. The nature of things that we can know about concretely, for Kant, is revealed by science. Hence, Kantian transcendental idealism is equally attended by empirical realism…
…The situation, however, is not unique to Kant. Something very similar can be found in Chinese T’ien-t’ai Buddhism (Japanese Tendai), as formulated by the great Chih-i (or Zhiyi, 538-597). There we find the doctrine of the “three truths” of “Emptiness” (neither existence nor non-existence nor both nor neither), “conventional existence,” and “the Middle.” “Emptiness” is rather like Kantian things-in-themselves where “dialectical illusion” is revealed by the Antinomies (a device similar to that employed by Nagârjuna, c.200 AD); “conventional existence” is empirical realism; and “the Middle” the Buddhist reconciliation of the two — not a Hegelian “synthesis” because no absolute knowledge is produced to overcome the inconceivablility of Emptiness.
Such a religious doctrinal tradition, however, may not be considered by many to be very helpful with modern philosophical problems; and the T’ien-t’ai “Middle,” however consistent with the paradoxes of Buddhist philosophy, is not a marked improvement over the balancing act in which Kant himself leaves us. The solution to the dilemma was grasped by Schopenhauer but not otherwise well understood by Kantians:
“Consciousness does not just condition knowledge and perception, it conditions external reality.“
“The modern context the most like this is in quantum mechanics, where, at least according to Niels Bohr, objects exist in a certain way, as discrete actualities, because they are observed. Otherwise, reality exists independently only as a sum of possiblities.”
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“While the knock-offs occupy fashionable opinion, basic misconceptions about Kantian theory are casually perpetuated. For instance, a defining characteristic of Kantian philosophy is that synthetic a priori propositions are not self-evident and can be denied without contradiction. What makes them true a priori is that they have a cognitive ground which is not in empirical intuition (i.e. perception). Although it is often claimed, as by the great French mathematician Poincaré, that the existence of non-Euclidean geometry refutes Kant’s philosophy of geometry, in fact Kant’s view of the nature of the axioms of geometry as synthetic a priori propositions means that Kant could have predicted the existence of non-Euclidean geometry. This should be obvious given any clear understanding of the meaning of “synthetic.”"
http://www.friesian.com/kant.htm
