Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Difference and Repetition makes heavy use of the system Kant lays out in his Critique of Pure Reason.  Since, to quote another philosophically minded friend, my understanding of Kant is shallow, I wanted to go back and see if I could better grasp what Deleuze saw in a man who was so systematic he even had suspenders for his sock.  However, reading the entire Critique of Pure Reason as a footnote to Deleuze seemed too daunting a task right now.  Luckily, Kant himself wrote a shorter and clearer version that is meant to frame the project of his Critique and introduce us to its basic ideas --  the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Science.

Since the Prolegomena presents an abbreviated version of Kant's system, I don't think I can claim a deep understanding of it yet.  But I found the basic outline of the system easier to grasp and more interesting than I was expecting, and I certainly understood something more about how it relates to Deleuze's project in Difference and Repetition.  

Kant claims that the Prolegomena addresses four questions:

1. How is pure mathematics possible?
2. How is pure natural science possible?
3. How is metaphysics in general possible?
4. How is metaphysics as a science possible?

But he really only addresses the first 3 of these in this book, and refers us to the Critique as the answer to the fourth.  The importance of the words "pure" and "science", which appear in 3 of these 4 questions cannot be overstated.  For Kant, they mean roughly the same thing, namely, our ability to establish completely certain a priori knowledge that does not need to make reference to any particular empirical experience (which Kant terms intuition or sensibility).  This distinction between what can be known a priori and what we have to discover empirically is intimately related to the central distinction in Kant's philosophy -- that between the mere appearance of things, and the things in themselves.  

Now, even my shallow understanding of Kant already had an adequate grasp of the difference between the in-itself and the for-us, perhaps because he beats this point like a dead horse.  Kant reasons that we cannot know anything about how things are in themselves because all our concepts only pertain to how we represent those things for ourselves in our experience.  Since we only know how things appear to us, it may at first seem like all of our knowledge must therefore be empirical and derived from the habits of our experience.  Indeed, this was Hume's skeptical argument about our ability to ever infer something like causality from correlation.  Kant begins with Hume's skepticism, but thinks we can overcome the problem by observing that all of our experience fits into a limited set of general forms, regardless of what its particular content might be.  For example, our sensible experience occurs in time and its objects in space, and our thoughts about those sensible experiences are always related by the form of cause and effect.  Kant calls these forms are the "categories of the understanding".  They operate as a general background or structure of our experience and enable connections between its particular contents.  In fact, since Kant thinks that these categorical forms are necessary for all possible experience, they actually provide the solution to his problem of what we can know a priori and prior to all possible experience.  In other words, we can know these forms of experience without having had any experience.

To me, this sounds a bit like Athena being born fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.  The idea almost perfectly captures the essence of what the Enlightenment took for granted as the new center of the universe.  An adult white upper class European male who just appears on the scene with no development and no history.  This type of parthenogenesis is crucial for Kant's universalizing project.  If you want to systematize all possible experience, you are ultimately forced to believe that it is all just like the particular experience you know best -- your own.  The quest to close the door on experience, to render some parts of it impossible and literally unthinkable, will always have both a normative and a mystifying dimension.  After all, if you believe an  experience is so different as to be unthinkable, you will certainly never be able to explain how it happened.

But I digress.  The universal forms of experience become Kant's categories, and form the basis of his answer to those first two questions.  Mathematics is possible because all our sensory experience must occur in space and time, and mathematics, according to Kant, is nothing but an elaboration of these a priori forms of intuition (sensibility).  And Natural Science is possible because all conceptual experience takes the form of causally linked representations appearing to a unified subject in our understanding.  This second part sounds weird at first, because it seems to define "natural science" in a way that removes all reference to empirical measurement and experiment in disciplines like physics and chemistry.  However, since Kant is not concerned with founding actual physics but only the possibility of physics, he's really only interested in proving (a priori of course) that there is a natural world to begin with, and that it follows certain laws.  In other words, for Kant, nature simply is the law-like connection of the appearances; asking to know nature in itself is meaningless.

We must, however, distinguish empirical laws of nature, which always presuppose particular perceptions, from the pure or universal laws of nature, which, without having particular perceptions underlying them, contain merely the conditions for the necessary unification of such perceptions in one experience; with respect to the latter laws, nature and possible experience are one and the same ...

So then what about question three: how is metaphysics  in general possible?  Since the universal forms of experience Kant has discovered are concepts only apply to actual experiences, Kant is adamant that we will only fall into error if we try to apply these concepts to anything that cannot be an object of possible experience.  This seems to make metaphysics, insofar as its objects are sure to be meta-physical, impossible.  Basically by definition, we can't have any possible experience of metaphysical entities like, say, God.  So at first it seems like the book should end here; metaphysics is bunk.  But the great Kant is too wily for that, and this is actually where the book starts to get more interesting.  

Kant explicitly limits the categories of the understanding to their application in sensible experience.  However, he claims that our reason is more difficult to tame, and is not satisfied by these limits.  The goal of reason is the unbounded application of the categories to everything, even those things that we cannot possibly have an experience of, namely, the things in themselves.  Basically, reason aims for extrapolation to completeness and totality, and the harmonization of all of our experience (including the stuff earlier discarded as illegitimate because it couldn't refer to a possible experience).  The Prolegomena doesn't make super clear why we have this (seemingly counterproductive, and practically speaking useless) mania for completeness, or exactly why Kant decided the mind was carved into exactly the three domains of sense (intuition), understanding, and reason.  Surely the a priori inevitability of this division is all cleared up in the Critique?  At any rate, the concepts that reason comes up with as it extrapolates the categories of the understanding beyond sensible experience are called Ideas.   There are basically three Ideas which structure the complete possibility of experience, but whose objects we can really say nothing about -- God, Self, and World. 

I say that the book gets more interesting when Kant introduces the concept of Ideas for two reasons.  First, this is where you can start to see how important Kant's scheme is for Deleuze's definition of Ideas in Difference & Repetition.  Unfortunately, fully fleshing this out goes way beyond what fits in a book review, and anyhow I'd probably need to read the whole Critique to accomplish it to my satisfaction, so I won't go into these connections.  Second, it's at this point that Kant's system gets weird and complicated.  He has introduced some fundamental tension or split within us where we inevitably strive for something we cannot reach and need to discipline ourselves with respect to it.  He calls the production of the Ideas a natural or transcendental illusion which we can only overcome ... by reading his Critique I guess.  Without this, reason remains trapped in a war against itself which he sees taking the form of the "antinomies of pure reason", which are his way of describing the classic philosophical paradoxes like whether the unstoppable force can push the immovable object.  

As you might expect from this structure, things get complicated quickly, and I'm not sure I quite understand all the ins and outs and whathaveyous.  Kant's goal is clearly to restore to us all our common sensical ideas of the unity of our ego and our belief in God and a world of unified objects in interaction with one another.  But since he's already pronounced these illusions (albeit transcendental and inevitable), he can only give these Ideas back to us by analogy.  We can't know our ego in itself, but we can know that our experience is structured as if we possessed a substantial unity of soul.  Likewise, we can't know anything about a Supreme Being in itself, but we do know that the world of experience is structured as if it had a plan and hence a creator.  In the end, Kant is as conservative as he can be.  However, I understand better now what Deleuze saw in him.  While the damage may be repaired and the conclusions may look much like what came before, on his way to them, Kant has completely cracked open the unity of our most cherished concepts.  

A Brief History of the Paradox

Roy Sorensen's history of paradoxes wasn't really quite what I was expecting.  Nevertheless, I still found it entertaining.  It's actually more a history of philosophy as told through the lens of the concept of the paradox that it is a deep exploration of the concept itself.  Sorenson spends quite a lot of time on the ancients, including discussions of Pythagoras, Sextus Empiricus, and perhaps most interestingly, Parmenides.  But the story stretches all the way up to the modern era, ending with Wittgenstein's philosophical suicide and Quine's reign of logical terror.  

Sorensen is an analytic philosopher.  Sometimes this unfortunate fact shows up in his terse writing style that leaves everything interesting unsaid.  But most of the time he avoids delving too deeply into argumentation and keeps the tone light; there are humorous examples and little biographical thumbnails of the various thinkers he discusses.  Despite this lightness, you can still get a flavor for the overall philosophy of each of these thinkers.  I'm not sure there's anything particular from his book that will stay with me, but if you want to read a quirky history of philosophy, this might be just the thing.

The Weather of the Pacific Northwest

I discovered Cliff Mass's invaluable weather blog shortly after moving to Seattle.  The blog is great because it goes far beyond merely trying to predict the weather and includes a lot more data and explanation of what's happening, often including a discussion of how the prediction was made.  So when I saw that we wrote a whole book about our regional weather I was too intrigued to pass it up.

Unfortunately, the book is a bit of a disappointment.  I don't regret reading it and learned a bunch of interesting things from it.  There are good explanations of interesting geographic anomalies like the Oregon banana belt and the Sequim rain shadow effect.  There's also a lot of good stuff about general tendencies in the weather around here.  For example the correlation of El Niño with warmer, drier winters, the way fog develops and what it portends, the wind tunnel effect of the Frasier River Valley, and so on.  The explanations are scientific, but ably presented in a way that I think most anyone could understand.  

The disappointment is that the book contains so much useless weather trivia.  For example, after spending a few pages discussing the unusual conditions that produce heavy snow in lowland Seattle, there are even more pages devoted to discussing the details of the half dozen largest storms, complete with dollar damage estimates and number of downed electric lines on Columbus Day, 1962.  Who cares!?  Who is really into that kind of trivia about "largest" and "highest" and "record-breaking"?  I guess we expect this sort of doom loop from the TV weatherman.  But why bother to put so much of it into a book?  It could have been half as long, or better yet, twice as good, with more technical discussion of specific local weather features.  This is what the blog is like when it's at its best.  

And when it's at its worst?  Well, you just have to ignore his Statler and Waldorf impression when it comes to anything other than the weather.

Difference and Repetition

Well, it's finally done.  Despite spending the past 2 years reading Deleuze's magnum opus, I'm still not sure how to review it.  It hardly makes sense to get involved in some long technical discussion here.  I could try to write a pithy summary of the thesis, like, "difference in itself is repetition for itself", but that isn't going to convey much without a lot more backstory.  Deleuze creates some amazing concepts to flesh out that thesis, but these individually resist summary because they are so intimately tied together that it's nearly impossible to explain just one without slowly being forced to unravel the whole ball of twine.  

So perhaps the only thing to do is to take Deleuze's own advice on reading philosophy, "If you haven't found the problem to which a concept corresponds, everything stays abstract. If you've found the problem, everything becomes concrete."  The problem in Difference and Repetition is how we can think of a world that has no innate or essential forms.  We begin to understand the stuff around us insofar as we start to realize that it didn't just fall from the sky readymade.  Everything that is was constructed.  This problem leads immediately into others: how was it constructed? from what? what can it do?  And from those we move into the more directly practical question at the heart of his philosophy: how could it be constructed differently?  All the book's seemingly very abstract concepts like differential ideas, and simulacra, and the dark precursor, and the eternal return, respond directly to this problem.  

It's a deceptively simple question.  Often we approach it in ways that are not so much wrong as just terribly incomplete.  We try to control the question, to answer it finally, once and for all.  Objective atoms.  Subjective ideas.  Divine plan.  These are responses meant to close the problem by positing some necessary forms of being.  Deleuze tries to take us beyond these responses, to open the problem and think of a world where nothing is necessary, and everything is ultimately formed by chance.  This might sound like a world of pure chaos in which anything is possible, and in some sense that's exactly what it is.  But even this chaos-god conceived as a totality can become a kind of necessity that limits the world unless we are prepared to conceive the structure of its perpetual unfolding in detail.  And maybe that's all that Difference and Repetition wants us to do -- think all the way through the chaos so that we stay open to it.

 

#reread 

The Stone Sky

In the third and final volume of the Broken Earth Trilogy, the whale wins.  Just kidding.  Actually the trilogy gets a little pulpier and more action adventure oriented as it goes, and so it predictably culminates in a final uber-battle in which the good gals win (though of course not without great sacrifice).  I found the finale a little over the top, though not as goofy as, say, the third Matrix film.  Still, all in all, the books are quality sci-fi, and once you read the first, you're bound to eat all the stones.