Right Reason

Of Kant and Lovecraft

 

Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

-H.P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West: The Re-Animator”

 

An important theme in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is that the world is made intelligible to the mind through the senses, that the understanding can make inferences only of things as they appear to us, phenomena, not things in and of themselves, noumena. The intuitive possibilities of human experience of phenomena therefore provide limitations upon what reason can work upon, and this theme is most obvious in “The Antinomy of Pure Reason”. There, Kant takes four controversial topics in metaphysics, including the questions of whether the universe is infinite and whether there is a necessary being within the world, and argues that they cannot be answered by human ratiocination. In “The Antinomy” — perhaps the weakest part of Kant’s project because they rely so strongly on his dubious theory of space and time — Kant argues that sophistical inferences are made when philosophers move beyond the world of sense to make statements about the world which cannot possibly be objects of human experience. 

The reason being that the mind can only reason about that which it can have experience of. The human mind is only able to understand those objects which come to us through the senses. Kant had argued this point earlier in The Critique of Pure Reason when he writes:  

The division of objects into phaenomena and noumena, and of the world into a world of sense and a world of understanding, can therefore not be permitted at all in a positive sense, although concepts certainly permit of division into sensible and intellectual ones; for one cannot determine any object for the latter, and therefore also cannot pass them off as objectively valid. If one abandons the senses, how will one make comprehensible that our categories (which would be the only remaining concepts for noumena) still signify anything at all, since their relation to any object something more than merely the unity of thinking must be given, namely a possible intuition, to which they can be applied? (B311)

 He drives home the point not soon after when he writes: “With us understanding and sensibility can determine an object only in combination”(B314, Bold original). The mind does not function independently of our senses. Instead, the mind is able to make sense of the world thanks to the objects the senses have allowed the mind to comprehend through the categories. The world of experience that humans live their lives in is therefore a matter of the entities which are amenable to human experience of phenomena, rather than of objects in and of themselves as noumena. 

The main thrust of Kant’s “Antimony” was that so many metaphysical conundrums are created by philosophers going beyond subjects of potential experience, and moving into thinking about noumena. For instance, the world as the world of experience has no beginning besides the beginning of the person’s experience, and thus talk about whether the world has a necessary being which began it is talk about the world beyond the purview of experience. Although we can apply reason to our thought about phenomena, the world of noumena is beyond our human senses and therefore beyond our human understanding.  Here Lovecraftian themes start to make themselves felt, or at least, as I think, can be inserted for good fun. 

 

H.P. Lovecraft is the master of cosmic horror, so much so that his last name has been made an adjective to describe such things. The most potent origin of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is that his writing calls forth monstrosities from Meinong’s menagerie that defy our attempts to intuitively grasp them. Lovecraft’s stringing together of adjectives in describing the things from beyond often has the effect of contradicting themselves, and the reader being left with no sensible description of the thing. 

This origin of cosmic horror contradicts with what Kant said about noumena since Lovecraft’s creatures were phenomena with sensible attributes. That contradiction, though, can be mollified by the consideration of the role of insanity within the Cthulhu Mythos. Characters consistently have their sanity broken entirely by experience of the Great Old Ones within their own realm. Those unfortunate characters beheld what their minds should not ever have beheld — of noumena-like objects — and are driven mad by the experience. Within Lovecraft’s mythos, the human mind is a fragile thing not meant to comprehend the true nature of the universe. As the modest products of natural selection, we have been left without the ability to register the greater reality of the Great Old Ones. As Lovecraft writes in “The Call of Cthulhu”:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

 

Kant and Lovecraft both explicitly deal with the theme of the unfathomable. For Kant, the unfathomable was the world in and of itself which is not amendable to human reason, and important metaphysical questions, like that of Aristotle’s first mover, remain forever there beyond the grasp of rational thought. For Lovecraft, the unfathomable was the great unfeeling universe which posed the constant threats of both madness and annihilation to those unfortunate enough to stumble upon its greater reality. H.P. Lovecraft’s writings demonstrate that the possibility of noumena, of objects beyond comprehension by the intuitive possibilities of the human mind, is not only humbling, but also frightening. 

Immanuel Kant on Complex Orders

 

The contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office than are the most perfect production of human ingenuity.

-William Paley

 

What is a complex system? Perhaps that question is best answered from perspective of a via negativa. Latin for “the negative route,” via negativa going about the analysis of an object or a phenomenon by thinking about what it is not, not what it is. Rather than thinking about the sine qua non of a complex system, the via negative way is to think about what a negative system is not, coming to an understanding of its essence by eventually recognizing the dividing line demarcating that which is a complex system from that which is.

 

The most striking example of something that is not a complex system is a machine like a watch. Immanuel Kant uses this example as a simple system, though he does not use that language, when he is analyzing the traits of what he calls “self-organized beings” or “natural ends” in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (a lengthy discourse, but one well deserving to be quoted in full):

In a watch one part is the instrument for the motion of another, but one wheel is not the efficient cause for the production of the other: one part is certainly present for the sake of the other but not because of it. Hence the producing cause of the watch and its form is not contained in the nature (of this matter), but outside of it, in a being that can act in accordance with an idea of a whole that is possible through its causality. Thus one wheel in the watch does not produce the other, and even less does one watch produce another, using for that purposes other matter (organizing it); hence it also cannot by itself replace parts that have been taken from it, or make good defects in its original construction by the addition of other parts, or somehow repair itself when it has fallen into disorder: all of which, by contract, we can expect from organized nature. – An organized being is thus not a mere machine, for that has only a motive power, while the organized being possesses in itself a formative power… (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:374)

In this surprisingly insightful piece for a philosopher unaware of the modern investigations into the nature of order in the world (though Immanuel Kant is rarely ever not insightful), Kant identifies the dividing line between natural ends, or in our contemporary lingo complex orders, as the capability of an object to form itself.

One of the most key attributes to a complex order that Kant recognizes within the quote is that a complex order has its own sources of causation within it which it can use in order to maintain and further advance the order, to “make good defects in its original construction” and to “somehow repair itself.” The watch could not be a natural end since the watch has no means of creating itself and it thus, as Kant's contemporary William Paley so famously harped on, requires an external artisan to provide it with its organization. On the contrary, a natural end is able to bring about its own possibility from within, a Kant noted earlier in his third Critique:

For a body, therefore, which is to be judged as a natural end in itself and in accordance with its internal possibility, it is required that its parts reciprocally produce each other, as far as both their form and their combination is concerned, and thus produce a whole out of their own causality, the concept of which, conversely, is in turn the cause (in a being that would possess the causality according to concepts appropriate for such a product) of it in accordance with a principle; consequently the connection of efficient causes could at the same time be judged as an effect through final causes. (Critique of Practical Reason, 5:373)

In more concise language, a natural end could bring about causal power from within itself in order to ensure its own being. For the sake of a definite example, an animal, as a natural end, is able to use its jaws in order to secure the nutrition it needs in order to maintain its existence within the world.

 

 

The concepts that matter most here are that of entropy and order. Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system based on the number of ways that a system can be arranged. More technically, it can be understood as the number of microstates within a macrostate, but intuitively it is how smashed a porcelain teacup. That teacup's organization requires that the matter constituting it have a certain form, and that form is the order that restrains the number of microstates that can be counted within a macrostate inhabited by that teacup; that is, until someone in passionate anger throws the poor cup against the wall, greatly increasing the number of microstates that it can contain.

Returning to Kant's example, a watch, once smashed upon the ground, has absolutely not capability of reforming itself. There is simply not causal power from within the watch, as a physical system, in order to ensure its own orderliness, and this is one of the sine qua non defining a simple system. A simple system is organization with no means of restoring its own order. Once entropy has its way with it, the watch simply goes derelict. Contrast this with a biological organism, surely an example of a complex system. If an organism is hurt and its order disrupted (which is really what all injuries are: disruptions to the body’s somatic order), it has the capability of causing the restoration of that order through bodily processes that being hurt triggers.

Unlike the simple machines, a complex order is not helpless among the storms of the Heraclitean flux of time; rather, complex orders can adapt to change and fight against it, however futile that fight may eventually be in the long run. Memento mori, death is the ultimate conquest of the body’s complex system by disorder, and it is coming for every such order in the world.    

Roundtable: What is Democracy?

From On the Laws by Cicero, I.41:

Now every people (which is the kind of large assemblage I have described), every state (which is the organization of the people), every commonwealth (which, is, as I said, the concern of the people) needs to be ruled by some sort of deliberation in order to be long lived. That deliberative function, moreover must always be connected to the original cause which engendered the state; and it must also be either assigned to one person or to selected individuals or be taken up by the entire population. And so, when the control of everything is in the hands of one person, we call that one person a kind and that type of commonwealth a monarchy. When it is in the control of chosen men, then a state is said to be ruled by the will of the aristocracy. And that which everything is in the hands of the people is a “popular” state – that is what we call it. And of these three types any one, even though it may not be perfect or in my opinion the best possible, still is tolerable as long as it holds to the bond which first bound men together in the association of the commonwealth; and any one may be better than another.

This is a rather classical view deriving from Aristotle's taxonomy of different types of poleis within the Hellenistic world. The emphasis on who within the population deliberates on the functions on the government, though, is an attribute of democracy that any sound notion of it must capture. T

he notion that democracy is the deliberation about laws among the entire population has been emphasized by contemporary theorists like Amartya Sen. In his own work, Sen has argued that the reasons that there has never been no major famine in a modern democracy is this deliberative aspect of democracy. Since everyone can have a say in the deliberation of policies within a democracy, few within government cannot hide the facts behind famines for long and the outcry for famine-relief cannot be long kept quiet.

 

Another aspect of democracy is highlighted by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol I., pg. 124: 

(W)e may distinguish two main types of government. The first consists of governments which we can get rid (sic) without bloodshed – for example, by way of general elections; that is to say, the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled, and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not be easily destroyed by those who are in power. The second type consists of governments which the ruled cannot get rid of (sic) except by way of a successful revolution – that is to say, in most cases, not at all. I suggest the term “democracy” as a short-hand label for a government of the first type, and the term “tyranny” or “dictatorship” for the second. This, I believe, corresponds closely to traditional usage.

Popper's assertion that a democracy is a changable government brings to mind something that Edmund Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”No doubt, the authoritarian style of the Bourbon kings and the centralization of political power in the halls of Versailles created a political climate in which change could only be achieved via bloodshed and the great tragedy that was the French Revolution.

Ludwig von Mises also emphasizes that a democracy is a government that can change as to best suit the will of the governed. From Liberalism, pg. 21:

Democracy is the form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles. If in a democratic state the government is no longer being conducted as the majority of the population would have it, no civil war is necessary to put into office those who are willing to work to suit the majority. By means of elections and parliamentary arrangements, the change of government is executed smoothly and without friction, violence, or bloodshed.

 

When speaking about what democracy is, it is also important to keep in mind what democracy is not and Friedrich Hayek writes about this in The Constitution of Liberty, pg. 103:

Equality before the law leads to the demand that all men should also have the same share in making the law. This is the point where where the traditional liberalism and the democratic movement meet. Liberalism (in the European nineteenth-century meaning of the word, to which we shall adhere throughout this chapter) is concerned mainly with limiting the coercive powers of all government, whether democratic or not, whereas the dogmatic democrat knows only one limit – current majority opinion. The difference between the two ideals stands out most clearly if we name their opposites: for democracy it is authoritarian government; for liberalism it is totalitarianism. Neither of the two systems necessarily excludes the opposite of the other: a democracy may well wield totalitarian powers, and it is conceivable that an authoritarian government may act of liberal principles.

There can be both illiberal and liberal democracy. Of course, as both Popper and Mises have noted, the benefit to an illiberal democracy as opposed to, say, an illiberal monarchy is that an illiberal democracy can be changed if there are enough votes against it.

 

Finally, we have our last perspective in this roundtable from “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” by Immanuel Kant:

A republican constitution is founded upon three principles: firstly, the principle of freedom for all members of a society (as men); secondly, the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and thirdly, the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens). It is the only constitution that can be derived from the idea of original contract, upon which all rightful constitution of a people must be founded. Thus as far as right is concerned, republicanism is in itself the original basis of every kind of civil constitution, and it only remains to ask whether it is the only constitution which can lead to a perpetual peace.

While Kant does not describe here his notion of what “Democracy” is, but our modern notion of democracy is so close to his notion of republicanism, just as it is close to what the American founders like Madison thought of as republican government, that he mind as well be talking about modern democracy. That modern theorists like John Rawls have tried to create normative standards for democracy around notions like Kant's original contract is even more evidence that Kant speaks here of what we call “Democracy” today. Then again, we need to keep in mind Hayek's lesson that we cannot equivocate Liberalism and democracy.

This is a typical Kantian attempt at trying to understand something as well. Like Aristotle, I often think of Kant's philosophical style of taxonomic: he tries to augment our understanding of philosophical objects by immediately creating categories and systems of classification. Indeed, one of the reasons the Critique of Pure Reason can be so intimidating is just how many new words Kant creates in order to classify reason in its many functions.

However, I am greatly skeptical of the entire philosophical project of trying to deduce the nature of government via a priori constructions like the original contract. I think that Burke succinctly summarized all the errors of this rational constructivist approach when he wrote in his Reflections: “The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.

 

 

Bibliography:

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2004.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Commonwealth in One the Commonwealth and On the Laws ed. James E.G. Zetzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Hayek, Friedrich. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Political Writings ed. H.S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Mises, Ludwig von. Liberalism: The Classical Tradition. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc., 2005.

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.