Making Sense of Kant
What does Kant say? Something like, "We do not experience the world in itself (noumenal world) as it really is. We only experience it through our perceptions, which is to say through our minds (the phenomenal world). That is, our minds impose sense on our sense experiences, and only then are they really experienced by us."
An analogy:
Look at a sentence an English. Any one. Now look at the same sentence in Chinese, or Arabic, or any language you do not understand. Now learn that language. At first a sentence such as, "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker" makes no sense. It is a string of letters. More importantly, when you look at it you can't really see anything. You make nothing out of the shapes present. But then you start to learn German. you learn that was is what, nicht is not, mich is me, and so on. You look at the sentence again and you immediately spot those words you learned. They are no longer strings of letters. "What doesn't do something, does something to me." Much of the statement is still senseless to your understanding, but it has started to take shape. Then, after a few years, you become an excellent German speaker. Now you see a statement, a description of events and the results. The string is gone; the image is no longer blurry and no longer escapes the reflective mind (this is an additional point of interest - try to memorize a sentence in another language, and compare that to memorizing the same sentence in a language you know. How does that work out?). Now a string of letters has perfect sense; now you see, "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger." This sentence is an object in your mind, you can reflect on it, agree or disagree, and so on. But before there was nothing.
This is what Kant means when he refers to the mind's making sense of experience. Raw experience is completely beyond us: it would be an incoherent mass of something or other that would hold no place outside immediate perception and would cause no judgments. But over time the mind differentiates. Patterns are discerned, distinctions in 'space' made (space itself is a tool to help separate), and soon we have an organized system that puts this mass into a perspective. Thus the 'real' world is something that we do not even know how to experience. The only way we 'experience' the world in any intelligible way is after our mind has put it through the sorter. Of course, then comes the possibility that our method of sorting is different from someone else's, or that it is simply wrong altogether, but that's a story for another time.
An analogy:
Look at a sentence an English. Any one. Now look at the same sentence in Chinese, or Arabic, or any language you do not understand. Now learn that language. At first a sentence such as, "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker" makes no sense. It is a string of letters. More importantly, when you look at it you can't really see anything. You make nothing out of the shapes present. But then you start to learn German. you learn that was is what, nicht is not, mich is me, and so on. You look at the sentence again and you immediately spot those words you learned. They are no longer strings of letters. "What doesn't do something, does something to me." Much of the statement is still senseless to your understanding, but it has started to take shape. Then, after a few years, you become an excellent German speaker. Now you see a statement, a description of events and the results. The string is gone; the image is no longer blurry and no longer escapes the reflective mind (this is an additional point of interest - try to memorize a sentence in another language, and compare that to memorizing the same sentence in a language you know. How does that work out?). Now a string of letters has perfect sense; now you see, "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger." This sentence is an object in your mind, you can reflect on it, agree or disagree, and so on. But before there was nothing.
This is what Kant means when he refers to the mind's making sense of experience. Raw experience is completely beyond us: it would be an incoherent mass of something or other that would hold no place outside immediate perception and would cause no judgments. But over time the mind differentiates. Patterns are discerned, distinctions in 'space' made (space itself is a tool to help separate), and soon we have an organized system that puts this mass into a perspective. Thus the 'real' world is something that we do not even know how to experience. The only way we 'experience' the world in any intelligible way is after our mind has put it through the sorter. Of course, then comes the possibility that our method of sorting is different from someone else's, or that it is simply wrong altogether, but that's a story for another time.
posted by Derek at 2:05 PM
4 Comments:
I like the analogy. I find information an extraordinarily interesting topic. What fascinates me is that the sentence in another language does confer some information. Mostly, it's 'I contain information'. I've heard this referred to as the 'outer message'.
Using the analogy to the noumenal world, the outer message of the world is raw experience, (qualia, if I remember my philosophy terminology correctly).
What amazes me is that once our brains understand a language, we are incapable of simply looking at the outer message. Try looking at any English word you know and not read it; just look at all the letters. It's impossible. The outer and inner message are processed simultaneously, or at least so quickly that we don't experience the time delay.
The same applies to the qualia from the noumenal world. When we hold and look at an object, we do not experience the color, texture, etc. of the object separately, but simultaneously, as a unified whole (unless on certain psychotropic substances). Does this suggest that we are grasping the 'inner message' and experiencing the world (at least in part) as it actually is?
I think the epistemic difficulty comes in when we try to make anything of it sans interpretation. We have experience, and it is certainly of something as you say, but how can we say anything of it, or even think of it, without adding meaning? The way I've just described points out the problem: we need terms like 'meaning' to explain the significance of something, which means the interpretation is already there, simultaneously with the experience as you pointed out. But it seems to follow that there's no such thing as a pure outer experience that can be understood 'in itself' since our own understanding is already acting on the experience.
At the same time, though, we are still in a sense experiencing the noumenal world...it's just that we are doing so with a certain view of it in mind (like when you look at something, look away, and look again, but this time something different sticks out in your vision - the view is technically the same, but the perspective is different). Nietzsche says that this use of perspective is necessary to survive - that without a way of controlling experience we would probably not get far, a position that seems like it may very well be true. The mind's categorization of experience allows us to see the raw noumenon and survive in it by categorizing it and making sense of it, perhaps at the intellectual cost of leaving us set on a particular perspective of it.
All that being said, I have to admit I am depressingly deficient in the fields of ontology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. I'll have to do some reading before I can really be sure of what I'm saying (this is painfully obvious since I wasn't even familiar with the terms 'outer message' or qualia :) )
I have to admit I am depressingly deficient in the fields of ontology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.
Most all of us have our deficiencies in some areas of philosophy. The three you mention are the only ones that I know some about with, maybe religion and ethics added in. For instance, I know almost nothing about Nietzsche.
I think you are correct, though, we cannot perceive without adding interpretation and meaning. I think Nietzsche is correct as well, that's a good thing from a survival perspective. It is, of course, a hindrance when it comes to trying to objectively explain the universe.
Luckily we have tools to overcome this shortcoming that are unavailable to most animals: language and mathematics. With language, we can generalize qualia and remove, or at least reduce subjectivity. Mathematics is even better at this. We can discuss 'two-billion' without ever having to experience two billion objects.
This reminds me of the concerns of 20th century language philosophy, one area in the field I do know a bit about. Language is just language, it reflects nothing more than the description it gives. I wonder how far ahead abilities like abstraction really take us. Perhaps saying 'two billion' is simply a much more complex game of memory on the same level as a certain monkey call that signals snake, and the mathematical patterns that we develop are simply chains based on those. But if it's only a matter of communication and agreement, it really doesn't seem more effective than what monkeys do, just more comprehensive and systematic.
Yet, as a logician into fuzzy logic once described to me, "I think we try to create an image, or a model, that reflects the world we all experience. The closer the model fits to (mostly) everyone's experience, the closer we get to having a constructed world we can describe with something approaching truth and objectivity." Add to that the ability to predict outcomes based on the model, and we have science. It might be that looking for a world 'in itself' is a ridiculous goal in the first place.
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