Kant and the Paralogisms
December 17, 2009
I am beginning to plough my way through Kant’s Paralogisms. Everything is as yet very murky, but I have developed a frame of reference to take with me on my second go-round.
I am seeing something like this. We reason our way to a necessary object, the soul, and think we then recognize the object, in the same certitude as we do the external object. This is an idea of reason which is a natural extension of the applications of the understanding. We just think we have recognized an object, the soul, but are engaging in a fallacy of conclusions. We conceive the idea of totality of all conditions and conceive of thinking beings which would have to exist naturally and necessarily by virtue of their consciousness of thinking. This is not easy for me yet to follow.
Somehow we confuse the idea of a necessary being due to it being a thinking being, and then reach down empirically to note that we are thinking beings, and think that we can then conclude that we are necessary beings as souls.
It is impossible for us to come to the recognition of any such object via our understanding. With regard to external specters/appearances/Erscheinungen we have something abiding which we can latch on to sustain the application of the category of substance. We think of the material of the tree as substance and thus judge that it abides in all time. But there is no material to the soul (as conceived) and so there is nothing to sustain a judgment of abiding. What is it that abides? It is simply the “I†of the sentences which is thought to abide, but that is not an envisagement/intuition/Anschauung of any object, but merely the consciousness of self, i.e., a capacity for expressing a sentence. It is what accompanies all uses of the categories. Nothing is given except the consciousness of self, but not what that self is.
We cannot look upon ourselves as objects, but only as subjects, and so we are never present and given except as subjects, which makes it difficult then also to look at ourselves as objects, and indeed impossible.
So it is impossible that the soul can be recognized as a substance, and in fact nothing whatsoever affecting the soul, e.g., can be asserted or denied, e.g., that the soul be material or that the soul be spiritual.
And we have seen that our reason can come to the conclusion of our immortality by virtue of a reach in to logic while using words of different though overlapping meaning. Again it was the idea of the unconditioned of a thinking being, namely that he be a simple and identical and enduring substance, and thus necessary (although I need to understand better this rational necessity). Then I take myself as an empirically determined being, namely that I do in fact think, and conclude then that I must exist, i.e., always. And then we bolster our conclusion by noting that there is an indentical consciousness in all thinking and so this would mean (although it actually does not) that we continue to exist in time (for it could be like one pool ball hitting another in a straightline and coming to a complete halt while the other balls continues the line, i.e., one electron handing it over to another (although Kant did not use that example).
Filed under: Kant