If every object we encounter already conforms to the mind’s organizing rules, how could we ever detect something that does not?

We can’t. And what about math?

We cannot detect something that lies completely outside the mind’s organizing framework. That is exactly the limit that Immanuel Kant establishes in the Critique of Pure Reason.

If something truly did not conform at all to the space, time, causality, quantity, relation and other structures through which the mind organizes experience it would never appear as an object to us. It would not be perceived as a thing, event, or phenomenon. In that strict Kantian sense, it would simply never enter experience. So detection is impossible if “outside the framework” means completely outside the conditions of possible experience.

Mathematics and figures like Albert Einstein introduces an important nuance. Mathematics and theoretical physics can reveal that our intuitive expectations about the world are wrong. For example, Newtonian intuition assumed absolute space and time.
Einstein’s general relativity replaced that with curved spacetime.

This looks revolutionary, but notice something subtle. Einstein did not step outside the framework of cognition. He still worked entirely within mathematics, measurement, space-time descriptions, and causal laws. What changed was the model inside the framework, not the framework itself. In other words, physics can revise how the world behaves within the structure of experience, but it cannot escape the conditions that make experience and description possible. Think of it like updating software inside an operating system. The applications may change dramatically, but the system still provides the environment in which those applications run. So mathematics does not give us access to reality beyond cognition. It gives us a more precise language for describing phenomena within cognition.

Kant and his stick #mystick

Königsberg was the birthplace of Kant … it is part of Russia now.

Kant’s Morality Project

Many philosophers agreed that the model proposed by Immanuel Kant describes what rational action should look like, but not how human beings normally reason in practice. The difference between a normative rule and actual psychological behavior is crucial here.

Kant was not describing ordinary human reasoning as it usually happens in daily life. Had he taken that action, the scenario would resemble a situation where individuals frequently label contradictory, tribal, or merely convenient ideas as “logical.” Human reasoning is easily distorted by emotion, loyalty to groups, fear, and habit. Modern psychology has shown this repeatedly. Kant’s framework does not describe the messy reality of human judgment.

But Kant’s project was different. He was trying to define the structure of rational justification itself, not the reliability of human thinkers. His question was essentially, if a rule is to count as rationally justified, what property must it have? His answer was that a rational rule must be universalizable, it must be something you could consistently apply to everyone without contradiction. This is a logical test, not a claim about how people actually think. It functions like a mathematical definition. Mathematics does not assume people are good at calculation; it defines what correct calculation would mean. Kant did something similar with moral reasoning.

The Moral Principle of Action-Motivation

Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative is to act according to that maxim which you can simultaneously will to be a universal law. However, I think that there are no maxims regarding actions alone that may be coherently willed universally, because one can easily contrive a situation where any action is permissible to prevent a greater evil. Instead, there are combinations of actions and sets of…

The Moral Principle of Action-Motivation

“I have already explained in the preface to the first edition that my philosophy starts from Kant’s, and therefore presupposes a thorough knowledge of it; I repeat this here. For Kant’s teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it. This change is so great that it may be regarded as an intellectual rebirth. It alone is capable of really removing the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

I have this moral dilemma where I love Kanye (the music) but I also hate Kanye (the man.) Because of these ethical issues I haven’t listened to his stuff in years. According to Immanuel Kant this actually makes me more ethical though, for avoiding something I want because it’s not morally upright.

The real question here is whether it’s more ethical to listen to Kanye or to not listen to Kanye and impatiently wait for him to die? Should I really be praying for the downfall of another, even if it’s Kanye?

Obviously, assassination by orbital strike fails the Categorical Imperative.

Kant explains why psychological therapy today is often one step forward and two steps back.

When individuals lack authentic goodwill defined as the capacity to act out of moral duty they may find it challenging to benefit from therapy, as it aims to instill precisely these qualities. According to Kant, if someone has never experienced genuine goodwill, they cannot achieve true happiness, raising the question of what therapy can impart in such cases.

There are exceptional instances where individuals from traumatic backgrounds have developed a sense of goodwill, which contributes to their personal happiness. However, how can therapy effectively cultivate this? Skills like self-reliance, confidence in one’s character, courage, and perseverance are crucial. If these are not taught within the family or educational systems, the responsibility falls elsewhere. This is one reason for high dropout rates and the frequent statement, “I tried therapy, and it didn’t help.” Therapy asks individuals to engage in actions that their current character may not be ready for.

Who, then, is responsible for teaching self-reliance and courage? Kant would argue that it is primarily the role of families and schools to model these traits and help children develop them long before they reach adulthood. Children learn about goodwill by observing adults who honor their commitments, tell the truth despite the consequences, and confront their fears for moral reasons. Historically, schools reinforced these behaviors through discipline, classic literature, and moral education. When these formative environments fail, the onus then largely shifts to the individual in adulthood. No institution can instill character.

Traditional therapy generally assumes a baseline of internal motivation and character strength that many trauma survivors may lack. In such scenarios, it often fails. The only viable path for these individuals is to emulate the rare cases who manage to begin acting based on duty toward their rational self not for approval or pleasure, but because it is inherently right. This is the essential beginning. While everything else, including therapy, can support this growth, it cannot initiate it. If family and school did not provide this foundation, the adult must take it upon themselves to cultivate it or risk remaining dependent on external circumstances for their sense of stability and happiness.

This leads to the uncomfortable point that both classical philosophy and modern research converge on that character is less often taught through moral lectures and more often formed through repeated exposure to stable rules with real consequences. Family and school can do that well, or very poorly. But they are not the only environments capable of doing it. Military training, demanding professions, disciplined crafts, caregiving roles, or even structured therapy models can sometimes perform a similar function. Not perfectly, but not impossibly either. People often say therapy “didn’t work,” but in many cases the deeper issue is that the behavioral load exceeded what their current structure could sustain. They were asked to reorganize too much at once.

From Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant (Beginning)

However, Kant also notices a problem. Humans constantly feel pressure from desires, needs, and personal interests, all grouped under the idea of happiness. These pressures often conflict with moral principles. Because of that tension, people begin to rationalize exceptions and weaken the rules. This creates what Kant calls a natural dialectic a tendency to argue against moral requirements in order to justify what we want anyway.

That is why moral philosophy becomes necessary. Not to replace ordinary moral understanding, but to clarify and stabilize it so it is not slowly distorted by self-interest. In short, Kant’s argument in this section is very direct, intelligence, success, or emotional warmth do not define morality. Only the structure of the will, the rule it follows determines moral worth. Results are unstable. Inclinations fluctuate. But a principle that can hold universally reveals the architecture of a morally good will.

Truth becomes clearer when you remove the decorations. Morality is not about feeling good, succeeding, or appearing virtuous. It is about whether the rule guiding your action can exist without contradiction when everyone follows it. And that exposes the uncomfortable truth that most people do not fail morality because they do not understand it. They fail because they negotiate with it. Clarity removes excuses.

When the result stops mattering, the structure of your decision is exposed.

From Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant (Beginning)

Kant applies the logic duty to kindness. Some people help others because they naturally feel sympathy and pleasure in doing so. Kant says that although this is admirable, it does not yet show moral worth in the strict sense. The deeper moral case appears when a person helps others despite lacking emotional motivation simply because they recognize it as something that should be done.

Here Kant is separating two different systems inside human behavior. Inclination (what we feel like doing) and principle (what reason determines should be done). Moral value appears only when the second system determines the action.

You and the whole human race have been a little lost since he wrote the damned texts. So, there’s not really a consensus or standard explanation for what he means by this. Everyone who does research in the area of Kantian metaphysics has their own ideas about what in hell is even going on. If there’s anything that’s certain, it’s this: Kant is definitely not—or at least, believes he is not—saying either of those things. Efforts to say exactly what he is saying, though, tend to collapse into the one or the other. As always, I encourage my dear followers to enter courageously into an engagement with the texts themselves and make up your own minds about what they say, but I know that’s especially challenging in this specific area.

My credentials: back when I was in a PhD programme, I was trying and failing to write about the version of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories as it appears in the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. I have probably read the B Deduction more times and more closely than any living human being. I have a few draft papers from those days, but nothing that was ever published, and I didn’t finish the dissertation before I had to withdraw for mental health reasons.

Kant was the first person to describe his own view as a kind of “idealism.” When he does so, he qualifies it. He draws a distinction between two levels at which we can apply the realism/idealism distinction, which he calls the “empirical” and “transcendental” level. The empirical level is about our perception and experience. It asks: Is our experience an experience of a real world outside of us, or is it some kind of illusion that’s playing in our mind? Kant identifies Leibniz and Berkeley as empirical idealists in this sense, as well as Descartes inasmuch as his view invites skepticism about the external world. Kant insists, expressly and vigorously, that he is an empirical realist. In fact, he seems to be something of a direct realist.

The transcendental level is harder to understand, and in my opinion, Kant probably means something different by it in different places. It’s not really one theory, but multiple, and we should probably treat these as distinct: transcendental idealism about space and time, transscendental idealism about the categories, and transcendental idealism about rational ideas. The point, ultimately, is that we can have a priori knowledge of the world—the actually existing world outside of us—and this cannot be explained if all there is to know about the world has its rational basis in the world itself. So, there has to be some creative or constitutive acts whereby we put the world before us as an object of knowledge, and these acts already determine some of the facts that are true of those objects.

Space and time provide a really interesting example, because I think what Kant is trying to do there is to explain something we now know very well, but only because we learned other ways to talk about it about 100 years after Kant was writing. In my opinion, Kant’s theory of space and time anticipates the theory of inertial reference frames. Think of it this way. The things we observe in space are real, and are really related to one another by their position and distance. Suppose we have two bodies A and B in relative motion. From an observer comoving with B, A appears to be moving. If we ask, “Okay, but is A really moving?”, we have to say the question is meaningless. There is no absolute, observer-independent space. Body A is real, but its state of motion is relative to an observer. In fact, every observer comes equipped with their own “space”—their own frame of reference—in which they can position all physical events at any given moment. That space is something the observer brings, without which they would not be able to make any observations at all, and every observation is an observer-relative “appearance” of the thing they observe. Even more trivially, let’s say we’re standing facing one another, and between us, a body is spinning on the axis running between us. From my point of view, it’s rotating one “way” (let’s say clockwise); from yours, the “other” (counterclockwise). Which way is it “really” rotating? That’s a meaningless question—its rotation appears differently for me than for you. That, I think, is the sense in which Kant says space is “ideal” and concerns only “appearance”—what we now call “observation.”

The categories have a different function, and “idealism” about them means something different, but related. When we talk about things in the world, we find ourselves having to describe them as substances with properties, having actual and possible states, standing as effects of other things as their causes and being causes of further effects of their own. But these concepts don’t come from observation; we couldn’t even begin to make sense of our observations if we didn’t have recourse to these concepts. They are the basic terms in which facts are propositionally articulated and logically interrelated in the first place. Consider the logical quandaries in which we’d find ourselves if we tried to ask, “Do facts exclude their negations?” We wouldn’t be able to do any experiment to learn the answer, because experiments rely on modus tollens—we already need to be able to assume that whatever’s going on in the world, it’s basically logical. So elementary logical functions are something we, as knowing beings, bring to our understanding of the world, without which we wouldn’t be able to have any understanding at all.

On my reading, Kant believes that we can put the whole world into logical interrelation a priori in virtue of being able to construct coordinate systems (my gloss for what he calls the “formal intuition” of space and time), as a kind of ideal structure within which the phenomena of the world become manifest for us. Constructive mathematics explores this framework in its own right, and physics populates it with phenomena with specific qualities and interactions. This allows us to generate knowledge that combines mathematical, conceptual, and empirical knowledge—you couldn’t have the third without the first two.

The rational ideas are a whole other thing yet besides. There are certain things we believe in because we recognize that an iterative inductive procedure never terminates. Traditional arguments for the existence of God assumed an induction from the world as an effect, back through a chain of causes that doesn’t seem to terminate, up to God as the prime mover. Kant thinks this is a fallacy (what we would now call special pleading). But, at the same time, our inductive procedure doesn’t really give us any direct knowledge of any event arbitrarily backward in time (or forward, for that matter). So it is not something we can rely upon for scientific knowledge. To use traditional terms, we get to work with potential infinity, but not actual infinity; to use Kant’s new terminology, we can talk about a given iterative inductive procedure as a “regulative” idea but not a “constitutive” one.

As you can see, none of this has anything to do with a suggestion that natural events don’t really exist. But it’s also saying something much stronger and much richer than just that we need to observe something in order to know anything about it. The specifics of observation introduce something into our experience of the world, and those specifics are not trivial.

I haven’t gotten into the whole question of “things in themselves” and the phenomenon/noumenon distinction. I think all readings of Kant on this topic are wrong that don’t connect to his moral philosophy, and they introduce what might be a fourth concept of “idealism.” But that would take a longer post. The important point is that we’re allowed to think of the world as as something we interpret according to our own intellectual and practical purposes, and we are in some ways constrained in how we do that, but not in all ways, not even in all fundamental ways.

«Es ist also ein nicht bloß gutgemeinter und in praktischer Absicht empfehlungswürdiger, sondern allen Ungläubigen zum Trotz auch für die strengste Theorie haltbarer Satz: dass das menschliche Geschlecht im Fortschreiten zum Besseren immer gewesen sei und so fernerhin fortgehen werde». Streit der Fakultäten (7:88)

About Brahman

In the Vedanta traditions of Indian philosophy, the word Brahman refers to what is claimed to be the fundamental reality that exists regardless of how humans perceive or divide the world. It is described as the underlying basis of everything that exists. According to these traditions, all particular things, objects, people, events are not ultimately separate entities. They are expressions or appearances of that underlying reality. In other words, multiplicity is treated as a secondary level, while Brahman is supposed to be the primary level.

Notice the structure of the claim. Vedanta philosophers argue that ordinary perception divides the world into many separate objects because of how the mind operates. This division is called Maya. Maya does not necessarily mean that the world is nonexistent, like a hallucination. Instead, it means that the way we interpret what we perceive is considered mistaken or incomplete. The error is the belief that separate things exist independently and permanently. From the Vedanta viewpoint, that belief is wrong because everything is ultimately one reality called Brahman appearing in many forms.

In that framework, suffering is explained as a consequence of identifying with a limited individual self that believes it is separate from the rest of reality. If someone believes they are a distinct entity struggling inside a world of other distinct entities, they experience fear, attachment, and loss. Liberation, often called moksha, is defined as the realization that the individual self and Brahman are not actually separate. The supposed goal is to remove the mistaken identification with the individual perspective.

But here is the critical point that is often skipped in popular explanations, the claim that Brahman is the deeper truth is not something that can be verified the way scientific claims can be verified. It is a metaphysical assertion supported by philosophical reasoning and tradition, not by independent observation that could confirm it from outside the system. In that sense, it is very different from what Immanuel Kant was doing. Kant argued that we cannot access reality outside the conditions of our cognition at all. Vedanta claims the opposite, that it is possible to realize the underlying reality directly. Those two positions are structurally incompatible.

Also, when Vedanta says the world is “illusion,” people often misunderstand it. The claim is not that physical events do not occur. The claim is that the interpretation of those events as separate, independent entities is mistaken relative to the supposed unity of Brahman. So the “illusion” is about how things are categorized and understood, not necessarily about whether experiences occur.

However, there is an unresolved problem in this philosophy that critics often point out. If Brahman is the only true reality, and Maya is a distortion, then one must explain how that distortion arises within a reality that is supposed to be complete and unified. Different Vedanta schools give different answers, but none of them remove the logical tension entirely. This is why many philosophers treat Maya not as a proven insight about reality but as a metaphysical framework that organizes certain experiences and interpretations.

So if you strip away the mystical language, Vedanta claims there is one underlying reality, that humans misinterpret it as many separate things, and that correcting this interpretation removes psychological conflict. Whether that is an actual discovery about reality or a conceptual system built to reinterpret experience is still debated. Declaring the world an illusion often says more about the theory someone adopts than about the structure of the world itself.

“La unidad alcanzada por Kant es sintética, porque, procediendo de abajo hacia arriba y con enfoque más bien gnoseológico, quiere basar las funciones y estructuras del conocimiento en un punto único — y éstas tienen en realidad que ser unidas, porque se las acogió ya separadas en la constitución del mundo objetivo; sin embargo, esa unidad es también analítica si, tramontado aquel punto, Kant mismo, procediendo de arriba hacia abajo y con enfoque más bien ontológico, vislumbra cómo aquellas estructuras se contienen ahí y mediante análisis pueden ser deducidas — y avanzando en esta dirección, tienen que ser desplegadas, porque mediante ellas es necesario constituir desde el punto uno del Yo la realidad objetiva. Por otra parte, síntesis o unidad sintética presupone análisis o unidad analítica, en cuanto que los elementos —funciones o estructuras— por sintetizar han de tener una base interna para ello (y no pueden serlo al azar y por ciega necesidad o forzamiento externo), base que es punto pasivo y objetivo —analítico— de unidad: mientras que el punto activo y subjetivo —sintético— sería el principio de unificación, toda vez que la síntesis implica de modo necesario un elemento unificable y un principio unificante.”
Bernabé Navarro “El Desarrollo Fichteano del Idealismo Trascendental"

Kant avec Sade

Ce week-end avec Lilou, nous avons beaucoup parlé de déontologie, c’est-à-dire de devoir-être. Cela m’a rappelé ce qu’en disait Jacques Lacan dans son article « Kant avec Sade » (1963). En effet, pour le célèbre psychanalyste français, Kant et Sade présentent une caractéristique commune qui consiste à ériger une loi formelle comme impératif universel. Et la mise en application de cette loi constitue en soi un principe de jouissance. Mais qu’en est-il lorsque la loi non connue de celles et ceux auxquels elle s’applique est censée être connue d’eux alors que les clauses du contrat ne sont pas et ne peuvent pas être connues d’eux¹? La jouissance naît-elle de ce paradoxe, où l’objet du désir est constitutif d’un manque, à savoir un contrat implicite nécessitant un blanc-seing?

À suivre…

¹ Objet a

It’s kind of a caricature, but it’s also kind of not. This was the topic of a controversy between Kant and the French philosopher Benjamin Constant, who first characterized Kant’s view in this way. What Kant said in reply is that, as a matter of justice, you can’t be held liable for the consequences of telling the truth to the murderer, but you can be held liable for the consequences of lying. This 2010 article by philosopher Helga Varden explains the nuances of Kant’s view.

There really isn’t a place for “white lies” in Kant’s moral theory. A lie is a lie. But maybe the broader point is that there’s not really such a thing as a “greater good” for Kant. There is only how we treat one another. If we lie to someone so they will behave in a certain way, we are using them as a means to our own ends. As far as that goes, it doesn’t really matter whether those ends are for our own benefit or someone else’s. And following the point about the murderer at the door: if you tell me a lie, even with the best of intentions, you are an author of everything that follows, whether or not it’s what you intended. If things go badly, you can’t hide behind your good intentions to justify it. Treating others as ends in themselves involves letting them be co-authors in what happens next. It doesn’t require you to tell them everything you know, but it does require you to be basically truthful.