Before we delve into Kant’s work, let’s discuss:
Conscience and Consciousness
In our language, Portuguese, there are not, as in English, Conscience and Consciousness, two words to designate two totally different things, but totally interconnected and interdependent.
Conscience is of a moral order, the intimate sense of being or not attending to an intimate order of what is morally good or not. Whoever acts under Conscience, has Conscientiousness also, to which it should not be confused with.
Consciousness is the quality of being alive and perceiving both inner and outer things within oneself, and my English dictionary tells me also (a) perceiving with a degree of controlled thought or observation, (b) ability to demarcate by thought, will, project or perception; (c) feel personally; (d) having the mental faculties unimpeded by sleep, weakness or stupor, being awake (e) acting or acting with critical perception, and finally (f) acting in such a way as to be perceiving, considering, evaluating, taking interest and being concerned , under strong influence of feelings or notions.
As I speak Portuguese, I consulted Lello Universal, one of the most respected encyclopedic dictionaries of our language. In the excellent entry, I transcribe the second part, as the first part is about “moral” conscience in English, although it ends up mixing it up a bit:
Encycl. Consciousness, as understood in psychology, has three characters (sic, it dates from right after the first world war…) 1 – it is the type of immediate or intuitive knowledge, in which the thinking agent and the thought object are identified 2 – is the common origin of all psychological phenomena 3 – is essentially personal and impenetrable.
A distinction is made between spontaneous consciousness, simple more or less vague information that accompanies all the acts of our psychological life, and reflected consciousness, that is, the act by which the spirit bends (flexes, curves) on itself, becoming like an object. The problem of individual consciousness is one of the most serious that philosophers have been agitating. For spiritualists, only it is reality; for the Scottish school, consciousness is distinguished from the objects it knows, to which it pre-exists; for the sensualist school it is an accumulated and ordered total of sensations.
Moral conscience is the faculty of appreciating, given to all human beings, of good and evil. Certain philosophers see in it the result of experience, individual or accumulated. Others, especially Kant, identify with reason as a practice. It is in every case the foundation of practical morality and the immediate guide of everyday life.
My Lello is from the First World War (I’m glad I didn’t throw it away…) and, from another cultural environment, “both there and here”…(expression which in Portuguese means the same for cultured and uncultered). The Age of Uncertainty was already installed but had not yet produced its fruits totally and Lello, with the impeccable competence of the Portuguese, is an excellent portrait of this.(The Age of Uncertainty is a Galbraith’s book under this title. He argues that before the first war, the social fabric was always the same, that is, a king is a king, a shoemaker is a shoemaker, a nobleman is a nobleman, etc. The end of monarchies and stable social spaces is admirably examined in this work. The Wikipedia entry is a little flawed in not mentioning this, because the uncertainty Galbraith is referring to is this).
Good’old times when in Newtonian physics the Earth was not the center of the Universe since Copernicus and everything moved with a clockwork mechanism, through eternal and immutable laws. It was only necessary that the minds applied themselves and discovered the order that God created the Universe, as had already been amply demonstrated by the thousands of holy wars and the burning of a countless number of ignorant and evil witches…
Kant had already realized, in the 18th century, albeit in an obscure and practically unintelligible way, in that boringness that are his books, that the mind only perceives what it is and with that he had already anticipated the death of Science even before it reigned in splendor in the 20th century.
Science had been born a long time before him, with Descartes, but its real midwife was his fellow, Johannes Gutemberg, who would practically delimit the map of our standard consciousness of educated Western civilization.
The appearance of books and the modern University with its vast libraries and the enthronement of science, would put to sleep all other possibilities pointed out not only by witches and infidels who became Christians by force, but also pointed out by all cultures, which remained hidden and protected by the inaccessibility of this skimmed pasteurization that is our western civilization… (the Christian is jumping on the tip of my tongue…)
Before going back to this event that left behind the pre-Gutenberg state, brought back by the Internet, communications and computers, I will comment briefly, trying to separate from philosophy the only discussion that seems really valid and that even rescues the polarization, superficiality, wishful thinking which it is philosophy, with this marvel of human thought that is the “Critique of Pure Reason”, by Immanuel Kant.
For different reasons, Kant is in the same category as James Joyce, with his Ulysses and the indigestible Finnegans Wake, Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, War and peace by Tolstoy, Brothers Karamazov by Leon Tolstoy, The Capital by Marx, who are not read, some because they are long, others for being boring, and some for being incomprehensible what makes them even more boring.
Although Kant condemned synthesis, it is what attracts me and I always try to form pictures with the essence of the idea I am examining and with his Critique of Pure Reason it will be no different.
Whenever I pored over the “Critique of Pure Reason”, I fell asleep after a few pages and was happy to see the note in his biography that the Encyclopaedia Britannica has, made by Otto Allen Bird, Emeritus Professor of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame University from Indiana, who speaks in commenting on this book that, I transcribe: “But with regard to difficulty and ease of reading and understanding, it is generally agreed that there is little to choose between these two options. Anyone opening any of the books for the first time (he refers to the two versions of the “Critique of Pure Reason”) will feel an overwhelming difficulty and oppressive impenetrable obscurity.”
Thanks Heaven I’m fully accompanied…
I did a search on the Internet and found pearls of obscurity and impenetrability, but on Wikipedia I found a perfection of synthesis and ability to get to the point, which, with some changes that I made, at my discretion, I transcribe with quotation marks, but not in italics, because I changed it enough so it’s not the same thing anymore:
“Kant’s most read and most influential book is the ‘Critique of Pure Reason‘ of 1781, which results from a remarkably simple thought experiment. He said: try to imagine something that exists outside of time and that has no extension in space. The human mind cannot produce such an idea. Time and space are fundamental forms of perception that exist as innate structures of the mind. Nothing can be perceived except through these forms, and the limits of physics are the limits of the fundamental structure of the mind. In Kant’s perspective, there is, therefore, something like innate ideas, – ‘a priori’ knowledge of some things (space and time), since the mind has to possess these “categories” in order to understand the mass whispering of raw, uninterpreted experience that presents itself to our consciousnesses, through our senses, embedded that we are physically in reality, both external and internal. Second, it removes the real world (what Kant called the world noumenal or noumenon, and I add that number does not depend on space and time, except to make sense to reason) of the arena of human perception – since everything we perceive (through perception) is filtered through the forms of space and time, we cannot truly ‘know’ the real world. Kant called his critical philosophy ‘transcendental idealism‘. Although the exact interpretation of this phrase is contentious, one way to understand it is through Kant’s comparison in the second preface to the ‘Critique of Pure Reason‘ of his critical philosophy with Copernicus’ revolution in astronomy when he revealed that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Kant writes: ‘Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all our attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing anything ‘a priori’ about them, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, failed. We have, therefore, tentatively, to see whether or not we are more successful in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that the objects must correspond to our knowledge. Just as Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by changing the point of view, Kant’s critical philosophy asks what are the ‘a priori’ conditions for our knowledge of the world to come to fruition. Transcendental idealism describes this method of looking for the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of the world. Kant’s ‘transcendent idealism’ must be distinguished from idealist systems. While Kant thinks that phenomena depend on the conditions of sensibility, space and time, his thesis is not equivalent to mind-dependence in the sense of idealism. For example, for certain schools of philosophy, a thing is an object only if it can be perceived. For Kant, perception is not the criterion of the existence of objects. Before, the conditions of sensibility – space and time – offer the ‘epistemological conditions’ (critical study of its knowledge), Kant had wanted to discuss metaphysical systems but discovered “the scandal of philosophy” – one cannot define the correct terms for a metaphysical system until you define the field, and you cannot define the field until you have defined the boundary of the field of physics first. In the case of Physics, in this sense it means, generically, the discussion of the perceptible world”.
Einstein in his critic of Quantum Mechanics does exactly the same reasoning Kant did and established as a precondition, which is not fulfilled in Quantum Mechanics which stays floating as a concept which cannot be established empirically.
Kant claims, in summary, that we are not able to fully know real objects and that our knowledge about real objects is the result of what we are able to think about them.
To which it should be added that these thoughts when empirically verified may or may not cease to be just concepts of our mind and perhaps it is the best possible definition of consciousness…
A paradoxical way of verifying what Kant ingeniously detected is the reaction of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, which especially affects the notion of space and time, eventually leading to involuntary suicide by its users, for example, throwing themselves off the top of buildings for altering or lose the notion of space and time, essential to perceive reality.
I have not yet mentioned the word that I consider key for us to proceed: reality, but before submitting to this post, I developed notions about it, which I summarize here:
Despite all the explanation I made in the post above, I don’t find definitions that satisfy what I feel, or perceive what reality is, neither in what I posted, nor in English dictionaries, nor in Lello, nor in Caldas Aulette, nor in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In fact, in Caldas Aulette, the entry says: “Reality is what really exists, which has a real and not an imaginary existence”
And I add the keyword: It is not illusion.
Is there anything that is not imaginary? Or is it not an illusion? If a tree falls on Mars and there’s no one to hear it, did it make a noise? What is sound?
In the time of the dinosaurs, if a time traveler hit his foot with a hammer, or the “proto foot” of the dinosaur, would he or the dinosaur have felt pain? Or would it be “dor”? Or would it be “douleur”? Or would it be “Schmerzen”? Or would it be what since dinosaur would speak dinosaurez? Does dinosaur speak? Does it feel pain? Does he feel anything? Without the man there on Mars to hear the tree fall and the sound exist or be present with the time traveler and sympathize with the dinosaur, what is there?
Do I think, therefore I exist or “I exist because I think”?
Man & Time J B Priestley 