Episode #056 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, I want to begin the show today by talking about something that Massimo Pigliucci, in my opinion brilliantly, said in the interview that we did with him last episode, more specifically I guess when I asked him the question, what did David Hume think that he was answering with his work? What questions faced him and his generation? What did he think he was setting out to comment on with all of his subsequent work? And Massimo said that David Hume would have thought that he was rebuilding philosophy from the ground up. But why would David Hume feel this way? I mean, it’s kind of weird, don’t you think? Like, where did philosophy go? I mean, you don’t fix something that ain’t broke. I mean, I got news for you guys. If you own a building, you don’t rebuild the building for no reason. You embellish the building. Maybe you put down a floor rug. Maybe you put a likeness of yourself above the fireplace. You don’t rebuild so—you don’t bring in Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball and just destroy the thing. Why was David Hume doing this?

Well, the answer is because he destroyed it. At least that’s what he thought he did. I mean, think about the conclusions that Hume arrived at by the end of his lifetime. Yeah, custom is the great guide of human life. But what is that really? Really, that’s only a consolation prize, a mere parting gift after you’ve been eliminated from The Price Is Right. You know, after we’ve applied this rigorous skepticism to the world and we’ve arrived at the idea that we can’t know anything for certain except for the fact that we exist, I guess that’s what we’re left with. And by the way, even that’s subject to debate. The point is, if in fact we can’t know anything for certain, then that doesn’t leave much room for philosophy, does it?

Well, I think it’s important in the interest of understanding Immanuel Kant, to just take a second to appreciate the situation he was born into. Immanuel Kant was born on April 22nd, 1724, in Königsberg. That would make him a Prussian at the time. It would make him a beneficiary to the rule and prosperity of Frederick the Great. It would make him kind of a weird guy. Like, he never left his house. Really, I’m serious. His entire life he never really ventured past about 20 miles in any direction of the home that he lived in. He was incredibly disciplined, incredibly ritualistic. He famously had all these little routines that he did every day to get him into the proper mindset. Like, he had to always go on a morning walk, and he had to do it at the exact same time every day. But on the other hand, you can’t really criticize the guy too much. He’s widely considered to be one of the greatest philosophers of all time. In fact, many people would say that to even question whether he is the greatest philosopher is tantamount to insulting the man.

What I want to talk about is how he rose to the occasion and what sort of historical occasion he was born into in the first place. See, this is one of those really fascinating things about history to me. Like, do you ever think about how little control you have over whether you’re one of these people that they write entire chapters about in the history books. Regardless of what discipline you’re talking about specifically, whenever somebody talks about someone who’s the greatest of all time at something, the GOAT, you can’t help but notice that in most cases so much of what makes someone the greatest ever as opposed to just merely good at their job was completely out of there control. Like, there’s a strange serendipity to being the greatest, is what I’m saying. If you asked the average person, “Who’s the greatest American president of all time? Who is it?” what are they going to say with their Pawn Stars’ education of history—that wheezing, laughing, bald dude that owns a pawn shop in the middle of the desert, what would that guy say? Three names, right? FDR, Abe Lincoln, George Washington. And he’s completely right, by the way.

But it’s interesting. Why are these the guys that we look at? Why are these three so much better than all the other ones that ever existed? What about Grover Cleveland? Whatever happened to Grover Cleveland? Where’s the love for old Grover? Well, I’ll tell you the mistake that Grover made. He wasn’t the president during one of the most trying times in American history. All three of these guys that we just talked about had their foils that made them great. Washington had the Revolutionary War. Lincoln had the Civil War. FDR had the Great Depression. These were massive crossroads in the history of the United States, moments that, more than arguably any other time in our country’s history when we needed a leader to deliver us unto evil. If George Washington was Muhammad Ali, then the Revolutionary War was his Frazier.

Now, these guys were all incredible. I’m not saying they weren’t. But it’s interesting to think about how so much of what makes you get that promotion—the promotion from someone who’s just really good at their job to the greatest ever—most of the time it has to do with events that are entirely out of your control. And Kant is no exception to this. I mean, just consider for a second the historical Goldilocks zone that Kant is born into here: 1724 in Prussia. Firstly, he’s fortunate enough to be at the tail end of this long debate that’s been going on between the continental rationalists and the British empiricists. This gives him a very unique ability to see all of the effects of all of their work as they’re applied to secular institutions. Not all of them got that luxury. For example, he’s not born too early. He’s not born so early in history to have to be a pioneer, like a Descartes or a Francis Bacon. In that same way, geographically speaking, he’s in Königsberg. He’s not forced to be immersed in a revolution—someone like a Voltaire or a Rousseau.

I mean, I guess what I’m saying is that he’s very fortunate for the situation that he was born into. He’s very much a fly on the wall to all this amazing stuff that’s going around him in Europe all the time. Well, that is if a fly didn’t spend all day sitting on the wall, eating trash, vomiting on the wall. Kant’s like a really, really smart fly that realized he’s probably vomiting all day because he’s eating trash. And he took this perspective, and he applied it to his work. And boy did it serve him well.

Because as we’ve been talking about for the last dozen or so episodes of the podcast, the world has been changing. A lot of stuff’s going on. And in many ways, Kant thought that this all started with Copernicus, you know, that big moment when we all collectively realized that we weren’t the center of the universe. No, in fact, the earth revolves around the sun. And all those shiny spots out there in the night sky? Yeah, those aren’t celestial road flares or something; they’re stars with other planets revolving around them. And as we’ve talked about on this show before, the implications of this fact were massive. See, Kant saw Copernicus as nothing short of a complete revolution in the way that we humans perceive the world around us. He saw the progress of the Scientific Revolution. He saw the incredible feats that it was capable of firsthand.

I mean, just think about it for a second. Just a few conclusions that a small handful of people arrived at paved the way for a wealth of knowledge about the universe around us. Just think about the power of that. Just a few maxims, a few laws from people like Galileo, Newton, Kepler, and yes, Copernicus in this case, took us from a place where we knew nothing about the universe to feeling confident, as though we knew more than we ever had before. Living during the time when you could see the very real benefits of this knowledge firsthand, it’s not difficult to see why someone like David Hume would have such contempt for speculative thinking, for thinking like metaphysics. This stuff had led us down a dark path in the past. Why would we do it again? What’s the use in doing it again?

You know, this is something that’s actually a common subject that comes up in these science-versus-religion debates that we’ve been touching on lately. Someone will say something like, “My belief in God or my belief in the divinity of Jesus is not a scientific claim; it’s a metaphysical claim. To hold my own metaphysical speculation to the rigors of scientific scrutiny is just unfair because it’s not science; it’s metaphysics.” But people like Hume would no doubt say back to this person, “Well, that’s precisely why you’re calling it metaphysics, right? I mean, that’s precisely what’s wrong with using metaphysics as a means of arriving at reliable knowledge in the first place. They call their ideas metaphysics to escape scientific scrutiny.” Hume would say, you know, “That’s fine if you want to call the New Testament a work of metaphysics, but just realize that Plato’s Timaeus was a work of metaphysics. Leibniz, Plotinus—all metaphysical systems that are completely unverifiable, and you’re now aligning yourself with that.” By the way, you could do this with anything. I could say that the earth is flat. I could call it a metaphysical belief that I have and then say it’s unfair for you to hold me to scientific scrutiny because I’m making a metaphysical assertion here.

This is the sort of thinking that leads David Hume to have such a strong conviction about us proportioning our belief to the evidence. This is the sort of thinking that has Hume urging us to commit metaphysics to the flames. He thinks it’s that useless, that destructive. It’s all unverifiable speculation. And then, once we get there, we’re faced with a new problem, right? Like, what means do we use to arrive at something more legitimate? Ah, well, we proportion our belief to the evidence. Custom is the great guide of human life. And that becomes the task of philosophy and science at that point. This is something that we should all be very aware of. It was the success of empiricism, the success of the Scientific Revolution all around Hume that leads him to this conclusion about the futility of metaphysics in the first place.

Now, Kant, to say the least, didn’t agree with Hume. See, Kant wanted to revolutionize metaphysics. The same way that Copernicus revolutionized our views about our place in the universe in Kant’s eyes, Kant wanted to usher in a very similar kind of revolution in the area of metaphysics. He wanted to rescue metaphysics from the smoldering ash that David Hume thought he left it in at the end of his lifetime. And by the way, if David Hume did leave it in a pile of ashes, it was a pile of ashes caused by the skepticism of both he and Descartes. And it’s a pile of ashes that really only exist if we accept the premise of solipsism—the idea that the only thing we can know is that we exist.

Well, I hate to spoil the ending here, but Kant does usher in this revolution in metaphysics. And the work that does in this area would change philosophy forever. And we’re going to revisit this, but there’s another subtle distinction that I want to make about Kant here that hopefully will help us all answer, in my opinion, the most important question of all: why is any of this even remotely interesting? Why do I care about Kant with his pasty white skin, jumping into the Atlantic Ocean, saving metaphysics? I mean, this is a very easy thing for people to overlook. I think if it was possible to do some sort of elaborate survey of everybody who’s ever been interested in Immanuel Kant before, I think you’d find that most people after reading him for the first time actually think that he is very boring and insignificant in the grand scheme of philosophy. They probably don’t understand him that well.

And actually, I can kind of empathize with these people, because I do a lot of research for these shows, especially when we’re covering somebody like Kant. One thing you got to understand about Kant is that he wrote his work in a purposefully dry, insular style. I mean, he basically wrote an entire dictionary that you’d have to memorize if you were going to understand the rest of his work. And there’s a lot of subtlety to it. There’s a lot of different interpretations, a lot of different readings that people have of Kant. And of course, I want to bring you guys the best show I possibly can. So, I’ve been doing a lot of research myself, trying to understand biases that I bring to the table having read Kant in the past. Really, I’m just trying to get a more full understanding of how all the different groups’ interpreters work.

But anyway, I swear this is important. I’ve been reading a lot of books. I’ve been reading a lot of papers. And really, I’ve been watching a lot of videos lately. I think they’re valuable to me. These people do the same sort of episodic content that I do. It helps me sometimes to see how these guys structure their work. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of the last few weeks that I’ve been researching Kant watching all these videos that people try to use to introduce the ideas of Kant, it’s that there are a lot of people out there in the world—hundreds all over the world right now at this very moment—that are miserable at teaching philosophy, absolutely terrible at it. Book after book, video after video of these people claiming that they are presenting to you an introduction to Kant’s philosophy for beginners. And being somebody that’s read Kant before, you instantly see these people wantonly throwing around philosophically loaded terms with absolutely zero explanation about what they mean.

Like, how can you expect a beginner to know what you’re trying to get across if you never define terms? The philosophers understand the importance of this. In many of these philosophical treaties, these guys spend entire books just explaining what they mean by one concept as a requisite for the next book. They understand that when you invent a word, you need to explain what you mean by it. They understand that even when you don’t invent a word, there’s usually a specific connotation attached to it—a connotation that might change from reader to reader or generation to generation. And if this is, in fact, an integral part of your system, you might want to explain what you mean by it. These people making these videos don’t see the same importance there.

Now, I’m not coming at this from a place where I feel like I’m better than these people. I’m frustrated because I think people must feel like their time is being wasted. I think it’s probably made a lot of people give up on their quest to pursue this knowledge. When you turn on a video and it’s marketed towards beginners and they start throwing around Kantian terms like “synthesis” and “concepts” and “categories”—terms that mean very different things to you in 2015 than they did to Kant—and you come out on the other side of the video feeling confused and feeling like you know less than when you started the video, that person that made that video has shortchanged you as a educator. That person has wasted your time. When you decide to put on the bifocals, when you decide to get up in front of the class and put on this sport coat with the patches on the elbows, you have a responsibility as an educator. This is much more sinister than it might initially seem.

Real quickly, the most valuable commodity on planet earth is not gold. It’s not platinum. It’s not oil, not oil. The most valuable commodity on planet earth is a young mind with a willingness to learn. Now, that may sound melodramatic, but I don’t think it is. Whenever there’s a Newton, whenever there’s an Einstein, whenever there’s forward progress made by the human species in some way, what is the fertile soil from which those ideas sprouted? Well, at the current state of education in our country, it’s at the university level, right? Now, when an excited young mind—very much like you guys listening to this show—when an excited young mind signs up for a Philosophy 101 class, and they go in there on the first day, and they want to know what it’s all about; and on the first day of class some teacher gets up there with tenure, and they just start throwing around philosophically loaded terms without ever defining them; and they start talking about super specific, complex aspects of philosophy and is basically just reveling in the fact that he speaks a different language than these people do—“Oh, let me translate this sophisticated philosophy down to you people.”—that man is worse than Hitler to me, because when that young, inquisitive mind says after that lecture, “Oh, well, this is what philosophy is? This is boring. This is unrelatable,” and they drop the class a week later, and they end up punching numbers into a computer for the rest of their life; that lazy professor, that ego-driven professor, in my opinion, has squandered the most valuable resource that we have as a species. That person has stolen something from them.

Now, I get that there are great professors out there. We’ve all had them before—Massimo Pigliucci being one of them. And look, there are thousands of professors out there that are better than I could ever be if I dedicated every second of my life to trying to get better. I guess what I’m saying is that over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve realized something. I’ve realized just how many of these people waste your time out there. And if there’s one request I can make, it’s that when you see one of these lazy educators or people that are doing it for the wrong reasons, don’t patronize people that are patronizing you, whether it’s philosophy or history or science, whatever you’re studying. These people have an obligation to you as educators. And don’t let them squander the most valuable resource in the world. I mean, it is disgusting what these people are putting out there.

Anyway, the whole point of that diatribe was to point out that to understand why Kant’s system is interesting at all lies in understanding, I think, a subtle difference between the way humanity used to look at the universe versus how they were starting to look at the universe during the time of Kant—completely different times. Think back to antiquity. Think back to ancient Greece. We aren’t wearing togas anymore in Kant’s time. The world’s a very different place back then. When Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle look out at the night sky, in one sense, it was the exact same night sky that Galileo looked out into, right? It was the same stars, the same blackness. But in another sense, they were looking at a completely different universe. What’s the vocabulary that pervades all of their work? They looked out into the sky, and they looked out into a harmonious, ordered cosmos.

The point is, there were first principles in play here, things about the universe that underlied any future inference that you could make about the universe. We’ve talked about many of them. Probably the most important one here is the fact that there was order to the universe. We could look at how perfectly all the different aspects of nature worked together. We could look at things like the movement of the celestial bodies, and we could conclude back then that we lived in an ordered cosmos. So, in that world, science becomes a really easy task for humans. We go around, agents of reason, existing in this ordered universe, looking at nature, and garnering information about it. We are passengers in this world. Science was a passive process during antiquity. We sit back—as humans engaging in science—we sit back, and we observe like we’re watching a movie. We observe and try to uncover the order and beauty of nature. That was science.

Now, fast-forward to Kant’s time, post-Scientific Revolution. And science looks very different now. We look out into that same night sky, and we see chaos. We’ve talked about it multiple times on this show. But this is a big deal because when you remove these first principles, a lot changes. If we don’t have the first principles of order and harmony to the universe, how can we do science in good conscience? How can we be sure that we can consistently measure anything? The entire process of science needs to change. We’re no longer observing harmony in the universe. Now science becomes an active, constructive process.

And this is a subtle change, but it’s a very important one to people like Kant. We aren’t these passengers receiving the order of the universe. So, in that way, any scientific method that we make, any law, any rule that we ascribe, any connection or associations that we make between anything in the universe is us as humans projecting ourself onto it in some way. These associations that we make between phenomena in the world—any phenomena—are human constructs imposed by us as a third party. And the point is, we should look at them that way.

For example, think of what Hume’s getting at when he calls into question the idea of causation. He says, we look around us; we see this chaotic flurry of phenomena happening all around us. And in an attempt to try to make sense of it all, we look through the lens of cause and effect. We flip on the light switch, and that turns the light on. That pool ball over there moved that other pool ball. But these connections are imposed by us onto the universe, not given to us by the universe. This is a construction by humans to try to make sense of it all.

So, this is the revolution that Kant’s aiming for. How do we as human beings in good conscience make these connections about the universe? Is it even possible? How do we even arrive at laws that can serve as a foundation for knowing anything about the universe? Well, these are big questions. And whatever it is, one thing seems for certain, it seems like a big, big part of whatever this is going to be is going to be contingent on how we as humans—how our minds specifically—perceive the world, if the real world is even what we’re seeing when we look out at the world. This active construction of his system is what we’ll spend quite a bit of time on. But just understand right now the magnitude of this task that he’s set out to do. He’s not just trying to revolutionize what and how we know what we do. He’s trying to revolutionize, in the vein of Copernicus, our understanding of how we think at all.

Now, there may not be a perfect place to begin talking about Kant’s system. I think, no matter what I do, it’s going to be imperfect. But given the amount of time that I have left on this show, I think I might begin with something that we’re all kind of familiar with because we’ve talked loosely about it before. Now, I want you to imagine a giant dinner party, an elaborate, formal dinner party like The Symposium where every philosopher that lived before Immanuel Kant has a spot at the table. There’s a podium up at the front of the room. They all get up there in chronological order, and they start giving speeches about their philosophy. The night would probably end with David Hume getting up there, breaking down everyone’s arguments, saying they’re pretending to know things that we cannot know, making unfounded assumptions, unfounded inferences. He would even be so bold as to claim that we can’t even know something as seemingly obvious as whether the physical world exists at all.

And I can imagine him up there to say, “And then I told him! And then I told him, we can’t even know if the physical world exists! Ahahaha!” Thunderous laughter. It’s a jovial seen. I imagine Immanuel Kant sitting in the corner just kind of awkwardly laughing, fading off. “Ha, ha… [sigh]. No, seriously though. We can’t even prove that the physical world exists? What? We can’t even prove that the…!” Then he’d get up in front of the room, take the podium, and start yelling at these people, lambasting them. “Look at you! What’s the point of philosophy? Is philosophy a joke? Look, we all fancy ourselves to be really, really smart people. But just think about how pathetic our situation is. Look at how little we’ve done in how much time we’ve had to do it. I mean, there’s more genius in this room than a Mensa meeting, but we can’t even prove that anything outside of us exists? Nobody’s ever proven that the physical world exists? It’s right in front of us.”

Immanuel Kant would probably say, “Alright, enough of this nonsense. I’m going to take a crack at this.” And for us to understand where Immanuel Kant’s coming from with this argument, we need to think of what Descartes argued before him. So, just real briefly, remember cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. I look out into the world, and I have to doubt its existence if I’m going to be honest. For all I know, Descartes said, there’s an evil demon perpetually deceiving me, tricking me into believing that a physical world exists when, in reality, it doesn’t. I’m being deceived. But there’s one thing I can know in that reality, and that is that I am thinking, because even a thought that was deceptively planted into my head by an evil demon is still a thought. And I at least know that I am a thinking thing of some kind. Therefore, I exist. I think, therefore I am.

Now, from right here Kant does something absolutely brilliant, I think. He uses Descartes’ argument to prove the existence of more stuff. Kant asks, if we can know that we are a thinking thing, if we can know that we exist, is this really all that we can know? Is this really the end of the rope? Well, a good place to start this line of inquiry for Kant is the very basic question, well, what does it mean to exist at all? What does it mean to be? What are the requisites for existence? Kant argues that for something to exist at all it needs to exist in a particular moment in time in relation to things changing in space. Here’s what he means by that. We don’t experience time directly, right?

Think about time for a second. Think about the concept of time. It’s kind of mind-numbing. What is this thing that we call time that we’re talking about? Sure, we as humans think about it in terms of easily understandable things. We think about it in terms of a watch on our wrist, a timer on our phone. But time doesn’t exist inside of your iPhone. That iPhone is a measuring device. It’s measuring some aspect of what it means to exist at all. Now, whenever you exist, Kant says, you exist at some precise moment in time. And in that way, to be something that exists requires that you are existing at at least a fleeting present moment.

But that said, whatever this time thing is that we’re talking about, we don’t communicate with it directly. We don’t touch or see time directly. No, our minds have these benchmarks and reference points in the world around us that we use to estimate it. The way that we interact with the concept of time is by seeing changes in the world around us. The dog runs across the yard. The car backs out of the driveway. The earth rotates around the sun. That’s a big one.

So, if what Descartes said is true, that we exist, then we must also exist, to Kant, right now at this moment. And for us to say that we exist at some point in time implies the existence of some external world where time exists. Now, this may seem obvious, but think of what Kant’s done here. Think of what Kant has realized here that even someone as skeptical and brilliant as a David Hume, as a John Locke, think of what they have overlooked. The significance of this is that we can have the exact same level of certainty that there’s an external world out there where time and space exist—we can have the exact same certainty that we have when thinking about ourselves as thinking things as Descartes argued. And if that is a certainty, then the existence of space and time must also be a certainty.

Again, this is a very broad-strokes explanation. We’re going to have a lot more time next week to dive into this stuff. There’s a lot of subtlety here. But next week we’ll be able to dive deeper, flesh him out a bit. I look forward to seeing you then.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.