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General philosophy Kant vs Hegel

Cubey

Azazel
Points
205
So in metaphysics, you had the revolutionary enlightenment thinker Rene Descartes, who influenced a whole slew of philosophers after him, including but not limited to Leibniz and Spinoza. Kant was among these. He proposed speculative philosophy and Hegel was affected to the point of basing his entire philosophy around defeating the kantian stampede.

So what did Kant actually put forth?

-limits of knowledge
-thing-in-itself
-antinomies
-analytic-synthic distinction
-a priori/a posteriori distinction

I will be updating this thread expounding on these concepts and then introducing hegel’s response.
 
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Speculative Philosophy 1
Alright so starting things off with speculative philosophy:

Why did Kant say philosophy is speculative in his Critique of Pure Reason? He was stressing the limits of human knowledge. And this isn’t some lofty idea to grasp. It’s fairly simple in its assertion: the human mind is finite and cannot see or comprehend anything beyond its subjective boundaries. Which is to say, I cannot possess the perspective of say @Ral because that is outside of my mental state. To understand ral’s perspective, I would have to become Ral and that would allow me to view things through the lens of his mind, if that makes sense. Now this is not to say it can’t be done, but only if the other party is willing, which we’ll get to when I discuss Hegel.

So that’s Kant on the limits of knowledge and why metaphysics is thusly grounded in speculation.

I’ll continue with more updates.
 
Speculative Philosophy 2
And I should probably add that one of the elements or causes or what have you that leads to the limit of human knowledge is the subjective nature of the mind - that is to say, interpretation. You read a book. You can interpret the themes one way, another interprets them completely differently and this is because we cannot escape the subjective nature of the human mind which is caused by two things: our ideals (that in which we carry faith) and our experiences.
 
I'm not well versed in most ontological theories

He believed them to be separate facets of what shapes human knowledge itself?
Or did he believe experiences are shaped by ideals and they were separate facets entirely?
 
I'm not well versed in most ontological theories

He believed them to be separate facets of what shapes human knowledge itself?
Or did he believe experiences are shaped by ideals and they were separate facets entirely?

This is more epistemological than ontological. We’ll discuss his ontology when I get to the thing-in-itself or noumenon.

Basically Kant posits that ideals and experiences give rise to subjectivity and we cannot see outside of or transcend that interpretative lens.
 
Noumena
I could go more in-depth about speculative philosophy but I think that’d be beating a dead horse at this point so moving on:

Kant puts forth the notion of a “thing-in-itself”. What does this mean? It means: an object, whether physical or otherwise, that is unknowable in its nature because it is unobserved by the human senses and unaffected by phenomena. One could argue that the thing-in-itself implies a deeper purpose for every object than what is known in the mundane. Things-in-themselves are also known as noumena, opposing phenomena. Phenomena are observable, noumena are veiled behind a shadow cast by the light of insight.
 
Noumena 2
The big question: if noumena are unknowable, and if the assertion “unless you know everything, you don’t know anything” is valid, then that leads us back to speculation and the limits of knowledge. For example, when you dream you enter a new world. When you wake up, you re-enter the world of everyday life. Who is to say which of the two hold more truth than the other.

Noumena point beyond the mundane and carry a purpose beyond mere representation, where once they are understood they validate the insight of individual to whom it belongs. One could say that dismissing phenomena as “ordinary” rather than the extraordinary display of the magnitude of existence is a socially constructed distraction. Noumena lead to the Kantian sublime … not sure if I’ll talk about that itt :tchpepe
 
Intermission with article
I’ll be getting to this but here’s a great article on Kant to hold readers over until then:


(Please do not feel obligated to constantly like every post Trinity)
 
Antinomies 1
An antinomy according to Kant is a dialectical assertion and its negation simultaneously positing themselves as truth. In other words, a contradiction in which both sides make equally valid points. This results in exhaustion and a stalemate, where inertia becomes the major player, unless one-side becomes outweighed by the other. For example, the proposition “God exists” and “God does not exist” are antinomians because they cannot both be true at once.

Kant gives us four major antinomies:

The universe is finite or the universe is infinite
Things are reducible or they are irreducible
There is either freedom or determinism
God exists or God does not exist

The first two are called the mathematical antinomies and the latter two - dynamic.

So to defeat the inertia caused by contradiction, Kant says “neither… nor.” The meaning of “the universe is neither finite nor infinite” and that “things are neither reducible nor irreducible” means what? They are indefinite.

I will address the dynamic antinomies in a bit.
 
Antinomies 2
The first dynamical antinomy is the contradiction between free will and determinism. In a sentence, the antinomy is that we either have free will and have the ability to act however we want or determinism rules over time and circumstance through causality. So the implication then becomes: determinism -> causality is the law; free will is the law -> causality is an illusion.

To resolve this Kant puts forth the theory of the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is the reversal of the causal hypothetical imperative (do this to achieve that). The categorical imperative makes the will the law of causality so that, teleologically speaking, the end goal is sovereignty. To be free from the bondage of the world one must listen only to their own will while maintaining a high moral standard - dignity.
 
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Antinomies 3
Kant’s final antinomy is this: either God exists or he does not exist. Now this is a fairly simple antimony primarily, because, regardless of the complications of negations and logic-chopping, God himself is simple in nature. Meaning that, although there are arguments both ways that constantly undo the prior counterargument, God is an example of the ultimate noumenon, where the human mind cannot grasp solid evidence of him, or perceive him with the intelligent mind. This means that it is not logic, but a matter of morality, and subsequently faith, of whether not the individual accepts his existence.
 
Excuse the small intermission, will be picking back up later today. Next up we’re gonna discuss the analytic/synthetic distinction.
 
Analytic/synthetic
The analytic-synthetic distinction:

Kant defines as analytic that proposition which contains no more information in the predicate of any given subject than is readily available or apparent in the definition of said subject. For example we have the subject “God”: the predicates omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent and creative are what are typically assigned to that subject. Since they contain no more information about God than we already know, rather they are the terms that, together, give the term “God” its denotation, it follows then that the definition is recursive and analytical. Now if I was to say God is a dignified and subtle troll, well that would be, according to Kant, the synthetic proposition because it holds more information than is apparent in the meanings of the three omni’s.
 
A priori/a posteriori
Right alongside the synthetic and analytic propositions, Kant gives us two more propositions. These are a priori and a posteriori propositions.

A priori propositions: propositions whose basis is deduced through sheer logic instead of experience. For example, we say “you were born” when a child is old enough to understand what that means in conventional language. She will ask what happened before I was born? And thus we launch into a series of causes, each of which is both cause [of something] and effect [of another]. Eventually she will reach the point where she realizes that everything has a cause, but since every cause terminates by becoming an effect and every effect terminates by becoming a cause, she will deduce that for the temporal chain of causes itself to terminate, there has to be a cause that is its own effect.

That is one example of a priori reasoning because it deduces by logic and without pre-established notions.
 
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