The Roots of Modern Thought: An unhurried reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
All roads in modern life and thought lead back to Immanuel Kant. If you want to understand where we are even today, sooner or later, spending time with Kant rewards the effort. And if you want to fully access ancient thought, the road also leads through Kant. He can’t be avoided.
Today most generally educated people have never read Kant (not to mention many other original works by thinkers) and if they have heard the name of Kant, they will have likely spent little time with his work. This is because our educational world has fallen into a rigid mode of specialization that sees “philosophy” as one among a countless number of specializations. But this itself is perhaps a sign of the difficulty we are in today. It is the aim of this pathway to provide the open opportunity for serious general readers like us to be able to encounter the thought of Kant, in a setting that is leisurely, non-academic in character, yet serious.
The Great Rift
Immanuel Kant mounted a great effort to resolve the deep rift inherent in modern life, that is, the unbridgeable gulf between the self or the inner freedom of ‘subjective’ experience, and the world of extension and measurement, the realm of the ‘object’ of the objective. Rather than challenging this divide, and seek an alternative, Kant proceeds to work on the basis of the modern presupposition that the self or soul divided from the world.
Kant’s meticulous writing is not a mere academic or technical exercise, but he writes as if there is something of the greatest importance at stake. He writes above all with a conviction that the thought of his predecessors matter, and that one cannot just ‘decide’ that these problems don’t matter, dismissing them with the wave of a hand.
The problems we still face, with the rise of a virulent form relativism – or radical subjectivism – in all areas of life, indicates that Kant’s sense was right, that there is an important problem here to understand and even resolve.
The growing success of mathematic physics, in particular Newtonian science, and the rise of philosophies that seemed increasingly detached from reality raises an alarm for a thinker like Kant.
For if mathematical physics is the authoritative picture of reality, then what happens to human moral freedom? Freedom appears to be nothing but an illusion, if the world in its essence is nothing but necessity as captured by Newton and Galileo’s systems. On the other side, if John Locke is right about human knowledge, that the mind is a tabula rasa and everything in our knowledge stems from experience, what can we make of mathematical truths, which are indisputable, especially for the successes of mathematical physics? The two camps are deeply, and troublingly, at odds with each other.
Wasn’t Kant wrong?
A common, even vulgar, objection to a writer like Kant is this.
We can see that we still have these same problems today – a rift in both popular and intellectual culture, a rift between the“subjective” and the “objective” camps, relativism and the threat to human freedom. So clearly Kant’s thinking must therefore be wrong, if his thought didn’t change the world by resolving this problem.
The presupposition here is that any insight of a thinker on a set of problems can and should change the world. If doesn’t change the world, the thinker’s ideas are clearly wrong or worth little.
But this presupposition itself is in truth a philosophical argument. That is to say, it is not in fact self-evident or obvious what the standard by which we should judge the success or failure of human thought should be. Should it be its power to change the world? Or should we judge thought by some other standard, for example, its capacity to illuminate timeless problems, or even to educate an individual human mind?
A moment’s reflection will might suffice to begin to loosen the hold of such an idea. We do not think for example, that because we can imagine a better state of things, seeing all around us that things in a far worse condition than what we can imagine, that therefore our imagination – or our capacity to envision alternatives – is wrong or worth nothing.
Today we are quite certain that no philosopher can be right or hold definitive truths about the fundamental questions. This is “obvious” to us. But we haven’t always believed this. Why are we so sure about the philosophers and what they are capable of? And how can we be so sure, if most of us have spent little or no time actually encountering the writings of these philosophers?
Thus in our reading, we hold to the possibility that not only could Kant be right, but – even if Kant is wrong on the whole – he may nevertheless be right in certain essentials, and that his insights could help us develop the capacity of our own understanding regarding the fundamental problems of greatest importance.
The Plan of this Pathway
Kant wrote many books which are worth reading, but our plan is to spend time with arguably his greatest work, “Critique of Pure Reason.”
We shall spend two quarters on this book, and get as far as we can with it. We will likely not finish the entire work, but by the time this reading is over, you will have a much better sense of what Kant is up to, than any other way, whether by reading articles or encyclopedia entries, or listening to lectures.
We will begin with Chapter 1 of the CPR, saving the Introduction and Preface for later date in the series.
Reading slowly together, at the pace we can set ourselves is the key to this endeavor. Chances are very few individuals will have had this experience with a philosophical classic of this stature. That we should and need to have this experience is the conviction underlying this offering to the community of general readers.
What is the aim of a conversation (what learning experience should I expect)?
You don’t have to know anything “about” the subject of philosophy, let alone Kant’s philosophy to join this course and be rewarded by it. This is not a standard academic course, which emphasizes the “history of ideas” and historical background.
Our approach to the books will be conversational rather than lecture. Serious conversation allows discussants to meet the texts on the basis of discussants’ own questions – thus promoting a more active and intimate relationship to the material, not to mention a better understanding of it.
Conversation aims for reflective understanding based upon a sustained work with the text. The primary focus of this pathway is the building of reflective understanding based on direct engagement with the text, rather than amassing facts and historical data outside our reflections.
2024 Starting Date: Friday, January 5th
Day/Time: Fridays 1pm Central, 2 pm EST, 12 pm Mountain, 11 am Pacific.
Meeting Frequency: Weekly Meetings
Session length: 1.25 hour
Instructors: David Saussy
Pathway Duration: 2 quarters