Kant
I've been reading Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Not enough time to give a full reaction or analysis here, but here's a summary:
- The whole sensible world/intelligible world dualism seems really unmotivated to me, and yet it's right at the heart of the theory. I guess his main defense of it lies elsewhere, but it's totally a turnoff.
- That said, Kant is more interesting than I thought he would be. When I think about it, I think this is largely because he's more concise than I thought he would be. This also may be a particularly nice translation (H.J. Patton. What's his reputation?)
- The critique which I think I recall from Lukacs just seems obviously right as soon as you read the argument here. I mean, even if you buy the whole will-as-funky-alternative-causality thing, if you buy the causal determinism of the sensuous world bit as well, as you are meant to, then you have to deal with either an completely impotent will or some sort of whack double causation thing. Lame.
- I'm happily surprised by Kant's use of causality in his moral philosophy though. It's actually a little redemptive in my eyes. Basically, if you do nothing to the whole theory except say that the intelligible world is in fact sensuous after all, but unintuited directly by ourselves, you get a position whereby where we have an active unconscious part of our mentality that is the "spontaneous" source of our conscious Ideas, and rationality is a property of that unconscious. That's pretty much compatible with a contemporary cognitive science view of mentality, although it causes trouble for the whole freedom bit, of course.
- The whole sensible world/intelligible world dualism seems really unmotivated to me, and yet it's right at the heart of the theory. I guess his main defense of it lies elsewhere, but it's totally a turnoff.
- That said, Kant is more interesting than I thought he would be. When I think about it, I think this is largely because he's more concise than I thought he would be. This also may be a particularly nice translation (H.J. Patton. What's his reputation?)
- The critique which I think I recall from Lukacs just seems obviously right as soon as you read the argument here. I mean, even if you buy the whole will-as-funky-alternative-causality thing, if you buy the causal determinism of the sensuous world bit as well, as you are meant to, then you have to deal with either an completely impotent will or some sort of whack double causation thing. Lame.
- I'm happily surprised by Kant's use of causality in his moral philosophy though. It's actually a little redemptive in my eyes. Basically, if you do nothing to the whole theory except say that the intelligible world is in fact sensuous after all, but unintuited directly by ourselves, you get a position whereby where we have an active unconscious part of our mentality that is the "spontaneous" source of our conscious Ideas, and rationality is a property of that unconscious. That's pretty much compatible with a contemporary cognitive science view of mentality, although it causes trouble for the whole freedom bit, of course.