Sorry - today’s essay is abstract even by my standards. Can’t be avoided :(

The Globe is both subject and object, transcendent and immanent. There’s no making sense of ‘humanity’ without the Globe; and what lies beyond is something else - call it non-humanity, call it post-humanity. There’s a famous saying of Kant that goes:

The Globe isn’t as big as the starry heavens and it doesn’t exhaust the moral law, but it has quite a bit of both, and therefore, it fill our minds with admiration and reverence. But there’s something unique about it:

We know there’s something beyond the Globe; but there’s no way for us to grasp that which lies beyond without running into contradiction. That’s either a cause for caution or a signal that we need to leap into the great beyond. I am inclined to practice my long jump.

The Globe is a limit: a limit of thought, a limit of politics, a limit of society….We will need to probe its limits, but before we do so, a word from our sponsor. At the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says:

That’s Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy. One way to think about objects conforming to our cognitions: the world isn’t intelligible without an organizer. Kant argues that two kinds of naive views are untenable:

1. The "objective" view that there's a world out there independent of who's in it. This is the standard scientific view grounded in the physicist's perspective that there's a vast universe out there well beyond any human presence. Of course, paradoxically, the physicist also believes that the objective universe can be grasped through mathematics and in particular, is the material outcome of rational laws. Which, in turn, grounds the next naive view:

2. That reason can grasp the bare structure of the universe, that there's a special kind of knowing that sidesteps our finite, bodily condition and gets to the truth.

Kant denies both of these possibilities. If we agree with him, we also believe there's no such thing as bare existence, or even if there is, it won't make sense so there's no point in talking about it.

These are important insights, but I want to suggest a line of development that abstracts away from Kant's particular identification of the organizer role. Kant identifies the organizer with the rational (human) subject, and in doing so, gives the subject an active role in the constitution of the world. I am thinking: organizer, yes, but organizer as subject: maybe not. We can acknowledge the need for organization while abstracting it away from the subject.

What if we replace the subject with the Globe as the primary organizing principle?

What exactly does that mean? How does the Globe organize the world? The transition from the Subject to the Globe is a three step process:

1. Replace the subject with some other organizing principle - can be anything: society, biological evolution etc. We can just as easily say: it’s the state that helps us make sense of the world, or more abstractly, it’s the mode of production that helps us make sense of the world. Lesson 1: there are many organizers.

2. Turn the organizer slot into a variable. So far, we have only dealt with constants, i.e., each organizer - subject, society etc - is a fixed entity. Instead, assuming that the organizer slot is dynamic and can be filled by several entities and we don’t need to determine that entity beforehand. Lesson 2: the organizer is a slot, not an individual.

3. The Globe denotes the variable itself, i.e., it’s identified with the organizer slot per se, and not a specific occupant of that slot whether that be the subject, Dasein, the genome or society. Lesson 3: the Globe is the name for the slot itself.

The Globe is a whole, but a relational one: THAT which stands in the organizer relation to the world, whatever that might be. Having sketched that outline, we can glimpse the future of globalization:

Abstract a "science" of organizers from the various instances we have seen in the wild: from Kant’s Subject to Husserl’s subjectivity to Uexkull’s organism to Heidegger’s Dasein to Luhmann’s Society.

We have to start with a descriptive science of the essential features of organizing. The idea is to keep it simple (don’t laugh!): suggest an intuitive shift from a specific organizer to the class of organizers as a whole.

Once again, sorry for writing an essay that may come across as word salad.

We want our inquiry to yield reliable and robust truths, especially in the case of abstract disciplines such as Metaphysics. While we might think that truth seeking is a matter of gathering the facts, serious inquiry almost always requires careful preparation, where I am using the term 'preparation' in a technical sense. To learn the truths about motion, we don't study leaves blowing in the wind; instead, we prepare an experiment in which balls fall in a vacuum. How might one prepare conditions in which metaphysical truths are revealed? Tsong-khapa as well as Kant have some thoughts on this matter.

Tsong-khapa

Tsong-khapa starts his text with the claim that it's important to know reality as it actually is; yet another articulation of the metaphysical impulse. Or as Aristotle said at the very beginning of his metaphysics: "All human beings by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing."

And yet, there are crucial differences in the way Kant represents the task of metaphysics and how Tsong-khapa frames his project. Kantian metaphysics is object directed, i.e., uncovering the a priori principles that reason brings to any experience; it's the metaphysics of a subject standing against the world. In contrast, Tsong-khapa's metaphysics is embedded within a lineage that includes gurus who are the embodiments of wisdom. Therefore, his inquiry has to include both the abstract principles that reveal 'the way things really are' and the practices that ripen that understanding in us as living practitioners of wisdom.

Kant

The Critique of Pure Reason was first published in 1781 and a second edition was prepared in 1787. He wrote a preface for both editions. We finished the original preface yesterday and are now ready to cover the preface to the second edition.

Both prefaces set out the nature and scope of Kant's project, which is to (re)establish Metaphysics as a science with secure foundations of the kind that had been established for logic and mathematics in antiquity and had been established for mechanics in the century before Kant.

For that to happen, Kant argued in his first preface that metaphysics would have to set aside speculations about entities such as the soul and God that have no basis in experience and then inquire into those aspects of reason that aren't derived from experience while being necessary to make sense of experience.

This double move is both subtle and profound: you restrict yourself to potential experiences but you don't let those experiences come to you; instead, you stamp the rules of reason upon the world. Metaphysics is the science of all those stamps, the structure of all a priori reason*.*

Kant starts his second preface (which is three times as long - 18 pages to the 6 in the first )by making the case for the stamp factory in a slightly different way. He says:

i.e, we have to do what it takes to turn a domain of inquiry into a science. That has already been achieved three times, twice by the Greeks and once by his peers. Logic was the first science:

According to Kant, logic has the great advantage that it's a purely formal science with no objects of its own; its rules apply to reasoning about any object whatsoever. We might disagree about this assessment today, saying that there's a minimal ontology of sets and functions that even logic depends on, for how else can we express the propositions of logic. But it's still a formal science. Then came mathematics, which does have genuine objects of inquiry:

Mathematics in his conception became a science only when we learned to replace empirical generalizations with proofs that started from first principles, which is to say when the stamp factory learned to produce mathematical stamps through which we could produce geometrical constructions. Mathematics is the first science which gives us confidence that a science of pure reason (i.e., metaphysics) is possible - it has genuine objects about whom we can acquire certain knowledge through the mechanism of proof.

Here too, inquiry becomes science only when reason is able to stamp its principles upon nature, not accept nature's impressions passively.

Kant is presenting a metascientific method on how to turn a domain of inquiry into science. It's not through the collection of facts, but through the careful preparation of a domain so that we only register those features that help us stamp the principles of reason on that domain.

For logic, that means abstracting out everything except for the formal principles of reasoning. For mathematics that means starting with axioms rather than figures and for mechanics, it means controlling the experimental situation so that you roll balls of a known weight down a frictionless plane rather than observing motion in the wild.

What about philosophy? Shouldn't it be a science? Of course it should, and we should start with its queen, metaphysics. Using the same method of careful preparation as one uses for mechanics and mathematics yields the proper domain of metaphysics: reason untainted by experience. Those are the objects whose principles will constitute metaphysics as a science.

Summary

We have seen how Tsong-khapa and Kant prepare the ground for their inquiry. The Tibetan master prepares the person as well as the domain, while Kant restricts himself to the domain alone. The first seems superior as a method, but it's quite possible that as social complexity increases and our scientific process becomes ever more refined, the preparation of the inquirer and the preparation of the inquiry have to take ever more divergent paths.

None today or the rest of this week - I am still figuring out how to narrate Nagarjuna and Kant in parallel; should have a better idea after a week’s immersion in the project.

Preamble

Today is the first day of reading Nagarjuna/Tsong-khapa and Kant in parallel. You'll note that the title of this essay has changed to the EOM (Essence of the Middle Way) from the earlier Kant-only label.

It's an interesting challenge to read texts from traditions separated from each other by time, space and style among other things. The standard scholarly approach is to continue to write in the modern academic style even when commenting on a Sanskrit text, so that the form of the text is modern even if the content is classical. I find that restrictive - even as it expands the scope of our inquiry, it misses a chance to expand our cognitive faculties. The modern academic style is just one cognitive style among many, and when presented with two cognitive styles, we should take our comparative task to be one of creating a literary middle way as much as a philosophical middle way.

We will see the rewards of that right away if we take the manner in which Nagarjuna and Tsong-khapa start their treatises seriously. But before I get there, here's the template for future updates in this parallel reading:

1. Preamble - what you’re reading right now - sets the stage for that day’s comments.

2. Nagarjuna reading

3. Kant reading

4. Synthesis (optional)

5. Parting remarks.

Nagarjuna/Tsong-khapa

How do we start a text? The usual thing these days is to start with acknowledgments, thanking one's peers, assistants and teachers. The translators of the Ocean of Reasoning start their journey so:

Samten is a monk so he starts with his teachers. Garfield starts with acknowledgment of his colleague and co-translator. Meanwhile, here's how Tsong-khapa himself starts his treatise:

He doesn't thank; he prostrates himself and then he takes refuge in the Buddha, the victor, the lord of the treasure of wisdom. He's no 'commentator': he's one being in a long lineage of beings, blood of their blood, flesh of their flesh. We can no longer conceive of such devotion, but we can learn from their veneration, for there's something deep and profound about listening to the words of the wise. It's romantic and moving at once. We should all start our days with such gratitude.

'Listening with veneration' of being thankful that we are in a position to hear the stream of wisdom wise course through one's mind. 'Hear' is important - it can't be a silent reading; the multi-sensorial experience of the text is an important aspect of our study.

Kant

I am cheating - I said I would read one page a day, but today's update is based on three pages and with that I am done with Preface A of Kant's CPR. Kant declares his main goal once again:

What can we cognize in the absence of any experience, i.e., in the absence of any inputs from the world?

He is confident that he's given a precise and comprehensive answer to this question. The world is intelligible and our experience evidences its intelligibility every waking moment, but what must reason supply on its own side for any experience to be intelligible? Which is to say that our experiences presuppose structure that's supplied by pure reason. But then there's a follow up question: what's presupposed by reason itself? Clearly, it presupposes the capacity to think. Why is thinking possible at all? Kant says he has an answer to that question too, but it's not as comprehensive as the answer to the first one, so he wants to persuade us of the necessity of the first even if we disagree about his answer to the second.

The amazing thing about mapping the geography of pure reason is that it's possible to carry out a complete and thorough investigation, leaving out nothing of value, for according to Kant, reason is transparent to itself. And therefore, not only can we chart the kingdom of reason, our map has the force of necessity - it's map could only be this way and no other. It's absolute rather than contingent, as one might desire from metaphysical foundations.

Here's a question though: is the widespread belief that foundations should be more solid than the structure that stands on it an unshakable belief? Why can't foundations be less solid, less certain? A steel ship can sail on the ocean can't it?

Kant says that faced with the forest of the world, he has cleared a little patch in its center from which he will survey the rest of the woods. Unlike the map of metaphysics of reason which he believes he has settled once and for all, the metaphysics of nature is an ongoing project where he expects collaborators to help him expand the principles into detailed descriptions of the domain at hand.

Parting Remarks

We have a promissory note from Kant: he's going to illuminate the a priori structures of pure reason in one long leap. We are also entering the stream of Nagarjuna's wisdom as further illuminated by Tsong-khapa.

It’s going to be quite the challenge rowing our boat between these two banks. One way to do so is by maximal fidelity to both texts and traditions. I might have gone that way in another life. But I am not a classicist, and instead, I prefer the method of Zen, which it’s founder Bodhidharma called ‘a special transmission outside the scriptures.’

Which I will interpret as a simultaneous transmission of these two traditions that feels compelling as living truth rather than archival material. It’s a reading of the texts in the bazaar, not the bungalow. Not that we shouldn’t be serious about the bazaari reading. As the great master says:

Like him, we can also say our investigation isn't for those who want a superficial understanding of the Middle Way, that grasping its principles across cultures will take enormous patience and conceptual creativity. Our special transmission beyond the scriptures will also need the blessings of gurus past, East and West.

May they offer us refuge!

The Kantian Middle Way

Ambition is often best achieved by accepting constraints. In fact, I am more impressive if I say I will climb Mt. Everest without an oxygen tank than if I hire a helicopter to fly me to the summit. It also helps deflate my critics who might otherwise complain about my boundless greed. Kant's ambition is circumscribed by experience, i.e., he doesn't consider thoughts unsupported by experience in some form or the other.

Kant's skepticism about unfounded speculation reminds me of the famous story about the Buddha and the arrow (from the Culamalunkya Sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya):

I read both the Buddha and Kant as saying: pay attention to the condition that's right in front of you - could be an arrow piercing your flesh or a mechanical philosophy that predicts the motion of the planets - and restrict your account to the resources you need to explain that condition and no more.

At the same time, both the Buddha and Kant have positive explanations for the phenomena within their ken. The Buddha says the causes and conditions of suffering are available in meditative experience. Kant says the structures are reason are available directly, 'it's in myself I encounter them.' Why not map and catalog the universe of pure reason before venturing into an explanation of unknown causes?

Some of Kant's assumptions appear contingent to me. A Ramakrishna would say: I experience God directly, just as I experience the apple in my hand. Ramakrishna might be remarkable in that his mystical experience was documented in late nineteenth century, right in the middle of colonial modernity, but I would think that the presence of God would have been unexceptionable to people in the middle ages, whether in Europe or in India.

So how do we discount their experience of God? Should we discount their experience?

At the same time, the idea that our reason is transparent to ourselves is no longer a plausible assumption. Ever since Freud, it's commonplace to think we are opaque to ourselves, not transparent and so the task of mapping the mental universe feels quixotic. But let's give the man a chance to vindicate himself before jumping on his neck. His ambition is to describe the kingdom of reason as thoroughly as possible:

But he has to careful, for the path to the peak he wants to climb is treacherous and so he has to pick the right tools to aid his ascent:

He claims that he only considers concepts and faculties that are unimpeachably a priori, i.e., that it must be necessarily true. The central example of necessarily true knowledge is the law of non-contradiction: that there's no proposition P so that both P and not-P are simultaneously true. Kant claims that his investigation will reveal all and only a priori cognitions with no hypothesis to marr their perfection.

Newton said something similar: 'I don't make hypotheses.' Both Newton and Kant seem to adhere to the Euclidean model of scientific demonstration - deductive, based on necessary and self-evident truths. Unfortunately for them, Euclid's truths turned out to be neither necessary nor self-evident and as of today with the immense expansion of statistical reasoning and machine learning, we might be ready to set aside necessity and certainty as important criteria.

Middle Way Metaphysics

Kant's 'middle way,' i.e., giving a characterization of pure reason while:

• Not overstepping its bounds by positing hypotheses that can't be supported by experience

• Aiming for complete and comprehensive coverage of all the concepts and faculties that make experience possible

strikes me as a particular example of a general 'middle-way' method of which the Buddhist Madhyamaka tradition is a powerful instance in a different philosophical tradition, of which Nagarjuna is the most well known proponent. Both try to characterize the limits of reason though they arrive at very different conclusion. The middle way method seems especially powerful when facing metaphysical challenges of the kind pose by 'hard problems.' Today's favorite hard problem is that of consciousness, i.e., how come there's conscious experience in a universe of insentient matter? Kant's hard problem was to reconcile and circumscribe human autonomy while preventing rational overreach.

Wouldn't it be nice to grasp the essence of the middle way? One way to do so would be to answer the question:

What's a meta middle way, i.e., a middle way between Kant and Nagarjuna?

I now realize that's a question I have been wanting to answer all along. So I am going to add Nagarjuna to my daily bookshelf and read Nagarjuna and Kant in parallel. To make the Nagarjuna and Kant readings of roughly equal length, I will read the Ocean of Reasoning, which consists of Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakarika (the root verses of the Middle Way) and a commentary by Tsong-khapa, the great Tibetan philosopher.

Starting next week, one page of Nagarjuna alongside a page of Kant every week day.

Border Patrol

In reading a two hundred and fifty year old author, however relevant, we have to learn to discern themes that were raging controversies in his time but mere curiosities for us from features that we can adopt for our purposes. This first footnote of his illustrates both:

The political geography of science has been transformed beyond existence since Kant's time. The traditional queen, Metaphysics, was still the nominal ruler and the natural sciences were the upstarts. Today the situation has been reversed: in academia, physics and mathematics are far more likely to be seen as unimpeachable, reality describing disciplines.

Who are our upstarts?

At the same time, we are also in the midst of a crumbling order; the inadequacy of the existing means of ordering the world are most obvious in the political and planetary realm, but the critique can and should be extended to every domain, including the inheritors of religion's holiness and majesty: physics and mathematics.

It's only fair that when every other domain is subjected to the gaze of reason, it also turn its gaze inward and subject itself to the same treatment. Not only is that the right thing to do, reason's claim to rule the kingdom of knowledge arises from its capacity to subject itself to a stricter test than it subjects every other domain.

As it so turns out, the quest to secure the foundations of reason is a quixotic quest, with every attempt to declare a permanent basis being undermined by the next generation of investigators.

Kant's foundation was laid on the cement of Euclidean Geometry, which turned out to be only one among many. With Geometry no longer secure, attention shifted towards logic, which too was shown to be inadequate to the task. Perhaps we should embrace the quicksand of reason, and declare once and for all that there's no such as thing as an autonomous, self-existing domain of reason which legislates over other provinces of knowledge. Or to put it in two other ways:

1. Reason is empty - empty not in the colloquial sense of being hollow and superficial, but in the Buddhist sense of not having self-existence.

2. Knowledge should be democratized - again, not in the standard sense that we should all have access to knowledge (which we should) but that the traditional hierarchy of knowledge which runs from the exact sciences at the top to the inexact sciences and finally the arts and speculative disciplines at the bottom should be flattened.

Neither emptiness, nor epistemic democracy is Kant's task. He wants to secure the first nation of knowledge, i.e., use reason to map its own extent and limits. As Kant says, he’s not critiquing ‘books and systems,’ i.e., his predecessor’s views on this or that, but the faculty of reason itself, though that critique of reason will also yield a critique of his predecessors. It’s pure reason he’s after; reason untainted by experience.

Physics makes the empirical world intelligible, so that the questions that can be answered by applying reason to data mark the boundaries of physics. For metaphysics to play an essential role, it should supply insights that can’t come from physics. For example, empirical research must obey the laws of logic; we can’t glean those laws from studying the physical world. By restricting itself to the structures and boundaries of pure reason, metaphysics becomes the storehouse of those universal concepts and intuitions that physics needs in order to render data intelligible.

In sticking to those concepts and intuitions needed by physics and those alone, Kant reveals himself as a conservative - he's not extending the realm of reason beyond its natural limits. Instead, he's a unifier of its existing provinces, ruthless in his rejection of all secessionist tendencies within its borders while being humble enough to recognize that his kingdom shouldn't be so greedy as to swallow the whole world. In his restrained ambition, the sage of Konigsberg is the precursor of another German: the Iron Chancellor, Count Otto von Bismarck.

I might argue that the middle path between rejecting all internal dissension and ruling the whole world is the basis for autonomy and success in all domains: in the kingdom of knowledge, in the sovereignty of nation states and in the creation of the liberal individual. Kant is the prophet of modernity for that very reason.

Two summarizing points:

1. The middle path, of course, is also the Buddha's way. This Buddhist reading of Kant has much to recommend itself in my view.

2. The triple analogy between the autonomy of the individual, the autonomy of reason and the autonomy of the state also has much to recommend itself.

I am playing with voice overs alongside brief presentations. Every feature needs major improvement - the slides, the design elements, the commentary — my plan is to start awful and get better bit by bit.

Day 2

Where we continue our reading of the Kantian fairy tale1, and like every good one, this too starts with a kingdom and a queen.

The realm of knowledge is as rife with claims of legitimacy as the realm of power. That awareness has many strands, of which I will mention three. There's the postmodern claim that knowledge and power are deeply intertwined, a claim that's deeply contested and arguably demonstrates the workings of power in the realm of knowledge through that very act of contestation.

There's the obsession with certainty, proof and exactness from Descartes onward, which positions itself as a purely internal matter to knowledge but betrays anxiety about the legitimacy of knowledge itself.

And there's the question of the legitimate scope of science - are there any limits to its understanding or is everything open to its purview? In practice, science is an imperial enterprise that doesn't accept any limits to its activity.

I was aware of these strands but it's only when I paid careful attention to the opening myth of the CPR that I realized how important it is to settle those disputes. Knowledge hasn't ever been a democracy, so it's no surprise that Kant opens his campaign with a royalist claim: is metaphysics the legitimate ruler of knowledge?

Even by the time of Kant, metaphysics was a queen with a shrinking empire2, with and ascendant physics sniping at the throne. That was two hundred years ago; today physics reigns supreme, and a physicist like Roger Penrose can write a book called 'The Road to Reality.'

The power struggle in the kingdom of knowledge oscillates between total control in which reason claims direct access to reality and skeptical chaos in which it has no purchase of the truth whatsoever. Kant is setting us up for the Middle Way between the two extremes.

Kant thought that he had steered the ship between the two rocks and was back in the open ocean. He should have known better: neither the dogmatist, nor the skeptic ever sleeps. Back in Kant's time, the new empirical sciences were agents of chaos, destabilizing the certainties of reason handed down from Plato and Aristotle. Now they are agents of dogmatism, routinely saying they have captured the universe with direct access to reality, though this time it's the mind of nature not the mind of God.

In their hubris, scientists almost universally reject metaphysics as a sovereign science that commands their obedience - the queen has been replaced by an accountant, the bookkeeper who makes sure that loot brought home by scientists is accounted for and stored in the right shelf. At the same time, the very success of our grasp over nature has brought us to the brink of total collapse. We too have to steer our ship between dogma and chaos and we too need a wise captain at the helm.

Can a renewed metaphysics come to the rescue once again? If so, what form will it take? The good news is that the metaphysical impulse never disappears, we can't be indifferent to its attractions for too long, for it's in our nature to pose metaphysical questions.

1

I mean 'fairy tale' as a term of endearment and approval

2

Reminds me of the quip about the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam - 'Sultanat-e-Shah Alam, Az Dilli ta Palam' - noting that the realm of the Emperor has been reduced to a few miles around the Red Fort in Delhi.

There’s a myth that with the European enlightenment, some humans matured into adults, abandoning both the fears and the dreams of childhood for the certainties of science and reason. Once freed, Rational Man had no need for God’s grace; nothing stopped him from going where no one has gone before.

The myth of reason is a myth like any other even as it resists being classified so. It’s a powerful myth, for rational man is fit for rule, firm and strong but also just, bringing the fruits of civilization to those who are stuck in barbarism. It’s a great myth, for it opens up the heavens to our infinite gaze, helping it grasp the universe from the moment it started. It’s a terrible myth for it justifies the greatest atrocities in the name of progress, and finally, it’s a deadly myth for it will end human and much non-human life on earth if it continues unchecked.

I will be honest with you: this myth courses through my veins; I fell for it when very young and never let go of its romance. I find it easy to roam from star to star and oppressive to kneel before an unseen God. And yet, I know this modern order can’t hold. We have reached its limits and it will pass soon. To be replaced by what?

I am hoping Kant will offer us clues, he being the first cartographer of our promised land. But not in his self appointed role as a legislator, for that’s a promise of adulthood we can’t keep anymore, but a mythical Kant, the dreamer of reason. I once heard if you steep a dream in the world for too long, it turns into a nightmare. So here we are; the Kantian dream needs an infusion.

Page 1

Let’s keep this simple: I will read, reflect and riff on one page of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason every day, starting with the preface to his book. I am using the Guyer-Wood translation published by Cambridge University Press. I will also be recording short videos (the one below is 27 seconds!) of the key sentences in that day’s page.

Kant opens his book by saying that reason has a tendency to tie itself in knots, not because of external pressure, but for its own internal reasons. That’s a microcosm of the larger human condition: which child hasn’t asked where she was before she was born? Kant says: there are questions which we can’t help asking because of being finite creatures thrown into the world and which our finitude prevents us from answering even in principle. Reason cannot prevent itself from trying to surpass the bounds of experience but it’s enmeshed in contradictions as soon as it achieves liftoff.

Philosophy walks the tightrope between spiraling speculation and pedestrian fact collection - the first ends in madness and the second in stamp collecting. We need a discipline that helps us walk, perhaps even run across this narrowest of paths. That discipline is metaphysics.

Here’s where we left the story: once upon a time, philosophers thought they could divine the structure of the world using reason alone. They called their quest for the Fundamental Structure of Being ‘Ontology.’

Try saying ‘ontology’ three times in a row and tell me whether philosophy needs a better marketing consultant.

Reason married to Christian (and Islamic) faith was the foundation of Western culture for fifteen hundred years. Not a bad run, but eternal marriage has its challenges. In the modern era, reason switched partners and eloped with experiment. Newton’s remarkable achievements sealed the deal: here was a form of reason that captured all known experimental phenomena, a new science of mechanics of unparalleled accuracy and explanatory power.

So where does reason get its power? Why is it so good at capturing the structure of the empirical world? Why is the world intelligible? Looking back to the reason’s first marriage: what do we do about faith and morals? And when reason wants some alone time: what are its limits? What can it do on its own?

Kant was the philosopher who recognized intelligibility is the key to the future of philosophy. In his view, the proper task of philosophy is to map the structures of intelligibility while keeping one eye on the second marriage (i.e., experimental science) and one eye on the first marriage (faith and morals). In doing so, Kant carved a middle way between the two marriages:

1. He charted a metaphysical version of ‘you need an eye in order to see,’ i.e., that the intelligibility of the empirical world presupposed concepts that couldn’t be derived from experience. These a priori concepts provide the scaffolding on which we can hang the body of the universe. The intelligibility of the sensorial world is dependent on the mind’s innate structure, which it imposes on the sensations it receives from the world.

2. At the same time, the mind’s eye can’t see beyond the realm of the senses - it’s not the third eye of Siva. And therefore, it has no knowledge of God. For that matter, it has no knowledge of objects as such; only objects as filtered through its own concepts.

With that second Copernican revolution, Kant transformed the task of philosophy from discerning the structure of the world (which he thought beyond the capacity of reason) to discerning the structure of intelligibility (which he thought was the proper scope of reason).

These structures of intelligibility, i.e, the means through which we grasp the world aren’t derived from experience or experiment - instead, they are imposed by the mind on the world and are the preconditions for making sense of anything at all. That’s what Kant means by ‘a priori’ concepts.

The Kant’s scheme, the mind is a talisman, the lamp that sheds light on the abyss of existence. Future thinkers have other talismans: some look at logic, others language, consciousness or the unconscious. It’s also possible to historicize the a priori order and attribute it to social classes and the associated means of production.

Nevertheless, whether it’s the revolutionary proletariat or the brain’s wiring diagrams, the secret lies in discerning the talisman that reveals the structures of intelligibility. However, science wasn’t sleeping at the wheel for two hundred years while letting philosophers appropriate intelligibility to themselves.

With cognitive science, neuroscience and AI, we now have empirical disciplines loath to leave the a priori to pure reason; whether it’s space, time or concepts, there are plenty of researchers who study the psychological and neural basis for intelligibility.

How do we bring these two streams together?

That’s the question I want to address in the next five weeks. I will do so by reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason line by line and bringing in modern sources and ideas as I see fit. My reading will be ‘digestive’ rather than analytical. I am not interested in what Kant said per se, as much as using him as a tool for my own thought.

One argument of particular interests: Kant says that the unity of experience follows from the unity of the subject, i.e., that every external cognition (say, me perceiving the tree outside my window) is accompanied by the cognition that indexes the ‘I,’ and that it’s the latter that lends unity to the former.

That’s quite different from the approach of cognitive science & neuroscience, which assumes that I can perceive the tree in the manner of a camera without implicating myself or any other subject and to the extent we perceive unified objects and scenes, it’s because we combine and bind multiple streams of information into a single entity, so that color and shape and texture are all bound into a mango I am holding in my hands.

But the basic structure of a priori arguments suggests why the ‘I’ needs to get involved:

1. Space and time and other forms of intuition (Kant’s term for the a priori structures that structure incoming sensory data) are necessary for the chaos of sensation to be organized into meaningful unit of experience.

2. Similarly, there has to be an a priori unity for those meaningful units to be cognized as unities, or else they will be perceived as indivisible layouts rather than a landscape of discrete and individuated objects.

3. The I is the ‘ur’ unity which serves as the template for all other unities.

In short, just as there’s no seeing without an eye, there’s no understanding without an I.

This is the last update in this cycle of the Kyborg Series (Five weeks of Five updates, if you remember). I will be back in 3 weeks with another cycle. Today’s essay summarizes what I have learned over these five weeks.

Series Summary

I started this series with two linked assumptions:

1. While all of us take the intelligibility of the world for granted (it’s rare that someone wakes up into a dream, and even then the dream is as intelligible as waking reality) it continues to be a puzzle at the heart of science and philosophy, and in the heart of hearts is a “hard problem” at its core: why is the world intelligible at all?

2. The German philosopher Kant was the person who revolutionized our understanding of intelligibility and in doing so, put humans at the heart of world making. Given my own training, I would add a footnote to this second point: cognitive science and neuroscience haven’t absorbed Kant’s insights yet.

If computation is the technical advance that made a science of the mind and the science of intelligibility possible, then the Kyborg is the computer passed through a Kantian filter.

Back on Earth

There’s an ancient myth that the Rishi (sage) Bhagiratha prayed to Siva to bring the river Ganga down to the earth. If you consider the Great Chain of Being as the heavenly order of reality, Kant helped bring the GCB down to the earth. But once the river lands on earth, you never know where it’s going to go before it meets the ocean. Who would have predicted that our species would colonize this planet so thoroughly that we are in an era that bears our name: the Anthropocene.

Why were we able to go places where no one has gone before?

Asking that question opens up an exploration of the modern identity, the self who roams the world. Where did that self come from? I ended this series by engaging with Charles Taylor’s book on this topic, on the peculiar qualities of the modern self. I am taken with his view (or a view that I arrived at by reading Taylor) that a certain kind of moral cognition reveals the ontological essence of being human. That would have been a human in the light of God but in the modern era, the lamp of morality reveals humans as humans. It’s the singular earthly achievement of our age.

But now we have reached an impasse. The roaming self has nowhere left to go. We know the earth all too well and every extra serving of knowledge leads to more destruction. The earth can’t take that weight for much longer.

Some of us might leave this planet and make our fortune on Mars, but that will be a minuscule percentage for the foreseeable future, and we are only now beginning to understand how humans are not just connected with other earthly beings, we are constituted by them. In our ignorance, we have so endangered other beings on this planet that revealing humans as humans increasingly feels like a terrorist ideology than a form of liberation.

Where are going to go next? Will it be worth going?

These are the questions that arise as our species prepares for its next journey.

Continuing yesterday’s thoughts on autonomy and power and its deep transformation. In my part of the world, power is hierarchical, ritually encoded but sporadic. When I am in front of a superior, I bow my head, talk softly and do what I am told. However personal authority has a very short half-distance - the further removed I am from my superior, the less likely is it that I am under his command.

Personal authority is an inefficient (if not immoral) and unstable way to run a modern society, for outcomes are too dependent on individuals - we want the processes of governance to be automatic.

Note the close etymological relationship between autonomy and automatic - one suggesting freedom and the other suggesting mechanical uniformity.

In contrast, the liberal citizen doesn’t submit to authority - they’re equals after all. Instead, they voluntarily accede to the order of power, digesting it and making it their own. That voluntary accession is far more robust, manufacturing consent at a scale that can’t be done through submission.

I was noticing the power of voluntary consent earlier today when I was in a Zoom call with some people in the USDA (US Department of Agriculture - don’t ask me why). The mid-level bureaucrats in the call were uniformly bright, articulate, well informed and their command over the facts and arguments would have been perfectly at home in an academic seminar. I am guessing many of them had advanced degrees, if not PhDs.

It’s precisely because autonomy and ownership are so prized that being stuck in a ‘bullshit job’ is considered an emptying out of one’s existence.

Comparing the technical and professional competence of the USDA bureaucrats with its lack that I would expect in their Indian counterparts, it struck me how each one of them represented themselves as autonomous individuals and were treated by others as such - even the one undersecretary in the call deferred to the opinion of the far more junior person in their domain of expertise.

And yet, every single one of them was a spokesperson for a neoliberal, market driven approach to food systems. Conformity with person ownership of what one conforms to is that much more powerful than conformity driven by my being the inferior of the person who’s demanding I conform.

The modern technologies of the self - education, socialization, promotions and paychecks are a vast and subtle machinery of control and autonomy. Here’s another way of saying the same thing: the control apparatus of advertising & propaganda aren’t a perversion of freedom; instead our idea of freedom makes sense only when it’s being actively shaped by the forces of control.

Just as representative democracy makes sense only when there’s a party apparatus (which is controlled by elites, corporations etc) which decides who gets to stand for election. The architecture of this system showcases autonomy in the foreground while there’s control in the background. No conspiracy needed.

I will end with two core questions:

1. What are the various points of tension between freedom and control in the absence of divine authority or a hierarchical society?

2. How can the state or other social institutions help us see people as people? Can our ontological essence as ‘human beings’ be revealed by the state?

In yesterday’s essay, I introduced the idea that the self is in a dialectical relationship with society/state, that the two shape each other as they unfold. One theme that cuts across the dialectical divide is that of identity, i.e., answers to questions such as “Who am I/we?” and “What keeps us the same over time?”

All of us assume we are the same person from the time we are born to the day we die, but what constitutes our sameness? What guarantees invariance from one day to the next? And how can I change (grow older, hair turning white) while still remaining the same? How can both change and statis be simultaneously true?

Here I take the view that change is unavoidable. As beings embedded in Deshkaal, we can never step into the same river twice - and yet, that river is the same.

National Identity

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking terms like “India” refer to an eternal, unchanging entity. Of course there’s continuity, but there’s also dramatic change. With the possible exception of China, no premodern political unit can be called a ‘nation state’ in the modern sense of that term.

This book by Mark Elvin gives an answer to why China might be an exception to that rule.

However, the range of transformations that led to the modern nation: literacy and news technologies, data on populations, shift to rule based bureaucratic rule etc only came together in the modern era.

Not that the premodern was entirely different: Akbar’s institution of the Mansabdari system (in which the Mansabdars were rotated throughout the Mughal empire and not allowed to inherit their roles) is certainly a form of bureaucratic organization. However, the impulse to institute the Mansabdar system wasn’t because Descartes’ soul transmigrated into Akbar’s body, but because the young emperor wanted to prevent his nobles from settling down and creating an independent power base that could revolt against his regime. Which suggests two equal and (somewhat) opposite truths:

1. Social institutions that appear ‘natural,’ ‘obvious’ and ‘rational’ after the fact might yet emerge from specific needs of power, i.e., by happenstance rather than the working out of universal reason.

2. The logic of power operates in every Deshkaal. Smart rulers and upstarts will take advantages of whatever technologies and forms of organization available at a given time and place to increase their chances of getting into power and retaining it once they’re on top.

The Self as Identity

The self, like the state, has a history. It’s only in the modern era that ‘autonomy’ became one of the defining features of the self and once that happens, there’s an explosion of identities, for it becomes possible to print identities on demand. I may identify myself as a comic fan, spending enormous amounts of money on books, cosplay and comicons. That ability to invent new identities and to create attentional communities around them (here’s a quick refresher on attentional communities from the first week of this series) is central to our era.

That freedom to develop one’s self leads to tensions - the debate between free speech and its limits and the banning of hate speech is a common one. However, the claim is that we would rather preserve and expand autonomy than to curb it.

You might think autonomy is incompatible with power, and libertarian and anarchist movements make a powerful case for the dismantling of all power relations, but the actual history of our times shows that power is liquid and adaptable enough to transform itself (and become more powerful) in the age of autonomy.

First, autonomous people who voluntarily choose to enlist in an army or work for a government have much greater commitment - and a subset of them can be trained as an elite corps without worry that they might revolt against the emperor- than the older style of feudal military relations. Napoleon’s successes after the French revolution being a great example.

No wonder that the two most important mechanisms for ordering our lives - the market and the state - have spread throughout the world, so that practically every human being resides in a nation state (actually, who doesn’t?) and almost every human being lives in a market society. The standard model of human existence is that of autonomous beings trading with each other or binding each other in a social contract.

Second, the proliferation of identities in the era of autonomy actually gives that many more targets for power to infiltrate. If there were no comicons, there would be no recruitment drives that emphasize the superpower nature of the modern military technologies.

Both the autonomous person and the collective people are joint products of the forces of the modern era. The first is the identity appropriate to the self and the second is the identity appropriate to society.

Power flows through the entire spectrum and leads to a strange contradiction: that societies experiencing freedoms and autonomy no one had experienced before also saw their lives being regulated at a depth and scale no one had seen before. Free labor supporting the strictest factory line is a deep contradiction but also lived reality.

How else could it be? What might it be to inhabit a different self?

That brings me to the nature-society divide, for the self that Taylor has recounted lives firmly on one side of it, namely: society. The Taylorian self is a personal and a social phenomenon, i.e., either how it’s experienced by me as an individual or how it manifests in the social world, i.e., social ideas about autonomy, freedom etc and how they are protected or violated by institutions such as the state. In this, the self is primarily represented as a person, and the person is surrounded by society and its institutions such as the state.

That’s the Person-Society dialectic.

At the outer limits of this autonomous self-society is Niklas Luhmann’s treatment of an autonomous social being that he simply terms SOCIETY - to denote the single world spanning social being encompassing all human beings and fully autonomous of all other beings on this planet.

But there’s another approach to the self which is more biological, of treating the self as an organism and the organism’s surround as its environment. That biological self intrudes itself into society primarily as pathology, of the outcome of mental illness or brain injury. Consider the phenomenon known as Capgras Syndrome, in which:

Capgras delusion is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor. It is named after Joseph Capgras (1873–1950), a French psychiatrist.

Or other syndromes in which people have a violent reaction to one of their limbs, believing that it’s an alien object attached to their bodies. The bodily self and its pathologies opens a window into an animal world.

That biological self also starts with an autonomous being who shapes and is shaped by the world that the being inhabits. But the similarities stop soon, for the division between nature and society is the basic division of modernity and the way a person inhabits society is quintessentially human, while the way animals inhabit their environment is of another, ‘natural’ order.

Perhaps even more importantly, the way social scientists and humanists are trained and how they communicate their work is quite different from the way natural scientists are trained and how they communicate their work.

What conceptual method might help us look beyond these disciplinary boundaries?

One candidate: phenomenology

The tradition of philosophical inquiry that starts with Husserl has been embraced by many scientists as the best method to incorporate the first, second and third person approaches to mind, cognition and self. In particular, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a major inspiration for scholars who see the body as the key to a future science of the self that’s both natural science and social science.

I am skeptical of the phenomenological approach’s power for reasons I will explain later this week.

If phenomenology doesn’t work, where do we go for inspiration? One place to start is with cultures that have a very different perspective on how to carve reality. The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro for example:

EVDC says:

The most brilliant insight here is not that animals and humans view the world from their own perspective - which would be a multispecies take on the ancient tale of the seven blind men and the elephant - but that that different species have the same perspective on multiple worlds. Or as EVDC says:

If we continue to wear the modernist hat, we’ll say the Amerindian naturalizes the social or socializes the natural, but neither does justice to this ontological insight. Whether true or false, it offers the possibility that ontology is way more flexible than we normally take it to be and in fact, the project of phenomenology as fundamental ontology (Heidegger’s take on Husserl) is inadequate for what we need to do.

Let’s keep all these proliferating worlds and views in mind as we read Taylor for three more days

The second Copernican revolution is the one that Kan't achieved which is to look at the maker of the world and instead of having the world be made by two beings - God being the primary and Man being secondary, there’s only one world maker from now on, and that’s man.

The self plays a much bigger role in the Kantian Copernican revolution but it's not without impact on the first. Can you imagine Star Trek or Star Wars or any other science fiction movie or novel which involves people ‘boldly going where no one has gone before’ without there being a certain kind of self that's capable of doing so? Or the tragic version of the same belief, which is expressed as ‘are we along in the universe?’ Of course we aren’t alone, for we inhabit a planet with millions of other species, but are we alone as sapient beings?

The Sketch and the Painting

It is this self, i.e., the world-making galaxy-farming self that deserves a cult of its own, and once one joins the cult, it proposes all kinds of new directions to explore: from new forms of marriage that are the product of romance rather than property exchange to the subject being the source of metaphysical truth. It's a self which can be understood in one of two ways; metaphorically speaking, the first is a sketch while the second is a painting:

1. A metaphysical subject which is the grammar of existence, defining the categories through which the world is grasped. It is this subject as the grammar of existence that Kant will teach us about.

2. But there is also the self as the story, the self that goes where no one has gone before, that experiences new places, new cuisines, new toys, that consumes the latest fashions and is targeted by any number of commercial establishments for the purposes of doing so.

Taylor is tracking both of these selves. I will end today’s essay with an introduction to the subject as the bearer of rights.

Whose Rights and Granted by Whom?

Taylor starts with the observation that both the previous picture and the current picture agree on the importance of human life. Who cares if the value of human life comes from natural law that with origins beyond the human (say, of divine origin) or if the value comes from our self-making capacity?

The law is negative, it closes options (as the ten commandments say: thou shalt not…) In contrast, the self-authenticating right is an opening rather than a closing. In our sketch versus picture analogy, the sketches are rather similar, but as we fill out the picture we start noticing major differences. Because rights are ours to disclose and expand upon, we don’t have to stop with the right to life; we can have far more fine grained rights such as the right to cohabit with whomever we chose or the right to live in the city of one’s choice. We can’t predict beforehand where the self will take us, but the intuition (i.e., the ontological opening) that it’s central keeps disclosing new vistas to us.

The story of the self continues to be told anew every day.

However, we would be amiss in thinking the self’s autonomy is the only (or even main) driving force of this new revelation. In fact, everything from rights to freedoms are guaranteed or violated by new institutions that also emerged in the modern era: the nation state in particular and the idea of society in general. The Yang to Taylor’s Yin is the story of how these institutions emerged in parallel with the self and how they shape the development of the self. I’ll end with a puzzle:

One of the classic problems of Christian (and in related ways, other religious traditions) ethics is:

if God is perfectly good, why is there evil?

Now replace divinity with the state and let’s ask the same question in the new language of the self and the state:

If our rights are inalienable, why is there so much (state sanctioned) oppression?

If you ask someone what meditation is, you will likely learn that it’s an ancient practice, maybe even an ancient Eastern practice. But what do you make of the fact that 7% of all American children practice meditation in school and that it’s a quintessentially modern phenomenon to see such a large % of children meditating (whatever that might mean).

Whatever else mass meditation might be, it’s not the same as what tiny forest communities in ancient India would have experienced. No more than large scale biomedical science is the same ‘science’ as an isolated investigator peering at the heavens a couple of thousand years ago.

Buddhism (and to a much lesser extent various Hindu traditions) is flourishing in the West and many practitioners are undoubtedly serious about their faith, but what if I said that Buddhism is primarily feeding into the cult of the self?

‘Cult’ is a pejorative term, but I am using it in a technical sense, to mean:

The modern self has more admirers than any that came before, and that admiration spawns many a self-making technology. Meditation is just one of them: drugs are another, so are MBA programs and therapy sessions. Even big data has gotten into the game with the quantified self. Whatever meditation was in the past, it’s ubiquity is because of the self and its future (which could be a non-self or a fragmented self) are central concerns of our time.

Somewhat tongue in cheek, we can say Kant is the prophet of this new religion.

Universal ‘Self’-Respect

Such is the veneration of the self that even when we abuse it, we do so in its name.

Because respect for the self is axiomatic and taken for granted, people rarely have the desire to question where it comes from (another reason to call it a cult) and when they do, they can’t identify the reason why they venerate it so much.

The easiest fallback is to say the self’s divinity is a reflection of ‘real’ divinity, i.e., the divinity of God. Which is often discussed in the negative, by saying that it’s only because of God that we stay away from committing evil, and that the direct worship of the self leads to all kinds of perversions.

But we might turn that around and say that it’s precisely because the self is the object of worship that so much is permitted: from drugs to MBAs to swapping religions to the quantified self.

There are many paths to the worship of the self. Metaphysics is one of them, as our study of Kant will tell us soon. However, the self isn’t an unmoved mover in the way the divine was; it’s changed by the act of worship, as advertising tells us everyday. The various technologies of the self are all technologies of self-transformation. Capitalism provides a broad umbrella for housing a range of these technologies, but the worship of the self is very much alive in other economic and political configurations as well.

This worship isn’t bad: for example, who can complain about human rights? Or when Amartya Sen talks about “Development as Freedom” he’s talking about the ways in which the self can flourish in the world and that development is nothing but providing the opportunities for that flourishing to happen.

Next Week

I will continue with Taylor.

That takes into different types of investigation and their respective methodologies. By now all of us are aware that there’s a special kind of investigation which we call ‘scientific.’ It’s an overused term and most of us have no clue as to how science is actually done in the lab or on the screen, but we have a sense that it’s a game with specialized rules.

One of the first steps is to ‘prepare’ an object for scientific investigation, which is to decontextualize it to the extent possible and place it in a new environment whose variables are under explicit control. Or if such control isn’t possible, to randomize the context so that its influence can be averaged over.

Through such efforts, we make it possible to take a neutral stance towards the object even before its properties are made available to us. But moral investigation can’t take a neutral stance, for we are always in a position of concern towards our object of moral inquiry.

What that means is that naturalistic inquiry cannot reveal moral objects even if it tried - the methodology prevents us from doing so. Taylor suggests an alternative:

Taylor’s framing of moral inquiry has two important claims built into it:

1. It’s through moral inquiry that our deepest instincts about value are respected - I read ‘respect’ here as a technical term, analogous to how scientific inquiry is used to validate or refute hypotheses. Which is to say that the particular mode of respect is an outcome of moral inquiry under the general umbrella of respect for human life.

2. That moral inquiry can be used to evaluate ontological claims - while scientific inquiry can never do so. Which can be inverted to answer the question: what kind of inquiry reveals metaphysical truths?

I see the beginnings of a profoundly anti-Kantian move here, for Kant famously argued that reason can’t reveal objects as they are in themselves. Taylor is a practicing Catholic, so he’s committed to the possibility of access to at least one metaphysical object (i.e., God) but his arguments open answers to the following question:

What modes of inquiry give us access to things in of themselves?

If Taylor is right, there is at least one such inquiry:

Moral inquiry

But of late, the new kid on the Continental block called “Speculative Realism” suggests that Aesthetic Inquiry also grants us access to things in of themselves1.

There’s a third candidate for a type of inquiry that gives us access to metaphysical truth: that’s formal inquiry, of which mathematics is the most historically prominent version but we now have computing as an increasingly important fork in the formal road. Strangely, it’s physicists, not mathematicians, who evoke the metaphysical power of formal inquiry the most, in phrases such as ‘knowing the mind of God’ etc.

We have (or seem to have) access to forms such as numbers and programs without being able to behold them with our eyes. How do we do so? What capacity of ours enables such knowledge? Number knowledge has an ancient pedigree, matched only by religious and mystical exploration, though the relative prestige of mathematics and religion has changed over the centuries. But we must acknowledge that contemplative inquiry has traditionally been associated with metaphysical knowledge.

I am best acquainted with the Indic versions which combine philosophy with meditative practice, which is a phrase that masks a plethora of systems. Divinity and religion aren’t the only ways of contemplating - we can reject God as the focus of contemplative inquiry (hat tip Linji: if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him) and still conduct that inquiry with great faith.

1

The screenshot is from the table of contents to Harman’s book on Object Oriented Ontology. It’s also the first time I am using Substack’s footnote feature - if you read this footnote, send me a response saying you did!

There are two poles to intellectual inquiry - I will call them ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’

Hard approaches make precise claims, draw strict boundaries and generally try to capture their object of investigation in their conceptual net. They have a tendency towards reduction and (over)simplification. When the hard approach works, it makes every other approach redundant, like what’s happened with planetary motion. Before Newton, it might have still been possible to imagine the Moon and Venus influencing your mood or cursing your business rivals, but which serious thinker today would go that route?

The ‘soft’ approach, in contrast, draws fuzzy boundaries when it draws them at all. It’s comfortable with multiple perspectives and reduction is frowned upon. There’s always something more to learn and a new variable to incorporate.

A hard approach to morality might say axiomatically:

1. The space of all morally relevant beings includes all humans (and soon, great apes and then, all mammals and a little later all living creatures).

2. Within that space, all the morally relevant beings are treated equally. When formulating a policy, it should not matter whether you’re a being of type A or a being of type B as long both of you are morally relevant beings.

It’s setting up the rules of the moral game as fixed from the beginning and immune to considerations from the rest of society. In contrast, Taylor is a softie who thinks selfhood and morality are joined at the hip.

He wants that connection between selfhood and morality to be compelling, i.e., they aren’t motivated by a random concern he’s invented but in deep and widespread intuitions about the dignity and value of human life.

Then the question arises: how to explain this ‘respect for the life, integrity, and well-being, even flourishing, of others’? In our naturalistic age, we are likely to offer a biological or psychological explanation. One that says humans have a moral instinct that makes us averse to killing or harming other humans just as we might have an instinctual aversion to certain smells and textures.

Turning morality into a biological instinct makes possible the kind of research program that gets massive funding from the NIH with legions of researchers trying to locate the neural and evolutionary pathways from which that moral instinct arises.

We are even more likely to offer such an explanation today than when Taylor wrote this book because of the explosion of research in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience in the three decades that have passed. How else will we explain the scale of our concern?

But Taylor has a very interesting line of attack against naturalism when it comes to morals. His criticism has two legs. First: humans have moral worth because of our ontological status as humans (though we may disagree about the source of that ontological status - it could be because we are the special creatures of god, we are uniquely rational etc).

Second: other instincts such as our aversion to smells have no such ontological intuition backing them:

As good an evocation of the ‘human question’ (I covered the human question in the second week of the Kyborg series, starting here) as any.

The core of Taylor’s argument: The human qua human necessarily invokes a metaphysical being and not just biological instincts.

And once we grant that metaphysical intuition its due, we are led to a further question:

What is our interface to that metaphysical being? I am using the term ‘interface’ in the way I articulated yesterday.

the answer to which is:

The Self.

In saying that the urgency of our moral concern is due to a metaphysical reason, Taylor is alerting us to a deep issue that we are barely scratching here: that there’s a long history of multiple orders of existence:

1. The order of nature

2. The order of reasons

3. Supernatural orders - totally out of fashion

Saying that the natural order is the only order and the others are superstitions is itself a modern superstition. Further, Taylor helps us see how two of these orders (the natural and the rational) meet in the ontology of the human. The force of that argument has to be met by anyone who wants to subsume all orders under the natural order.

The human being as the nexus of various orders of existence is at the very heart of the ‘human question’ and why modern thinkers return to it again and again.

The Logic of Metaphysics

One final technical point before I quit today:

Taylor argues that in some cases a feature (disgust, for example) can be explained on purely natural grounds while in other cases, a feature (moral worth for him) necessarily invokes an ontological account.

This argument can be generalized into a bigger question about logic and metaphysics:

Under what condition can a feature X be explained solely on the basis of other features of the same type X’, X’’ etc and when does an explanation necessarily involve features of a different type - Y, Y’ etc.

Staying within the realm of natural causes is of the first kind, since naturalistic explanations only involve features of the same type (i.e., all are causes, for example). But the minute you argue that a natural feature has a supernatural explanation, a miracle or a transcendental explanation (Kant will take us there) then we are crossing type boundaries in the act of explanation.

Independent of the way types could be different (natural/supernatural or formal/causal etc), it’s worth investigating logical systems that mix types.

Let’s start with a cognitive framing on how to read Charles Taylor.

The heterodox psychologist J.J. Gibson has been an inspiration for many; Donald Norman, the author of “The Design of Everyday Things” and one of the minds behind Apple’s design revolution, is one of them. Norman says about Gibson:

Objects tell us how to interact with them. A chair tells us to sit (seems obvious), a car tells us to drive (less obvious) and a laptop tells us to type (doesn’t seem obvious at all). Gibson thought that affordances are there for the taking, but we might want to contextualize them, embedding affordances in Deshkaal. A laptop’s typability might be obvious to an inhabitant of a knowledge society but would offer no clues to one of Hammurabi’s minions.

Affordances have a history.

Selves as Interfaces

What works for objects might also work for selves. Our identities tell the world how to interact with us. A man in suit and tie invites one kind of interaction and a man in tie die invites another.

The self arises as a cluster of affordances that tells the world how to interact with us. But we can add an extra self-affordance: historical and other contingencies also tells the self how to interact with itself. Which is to say, the inner space, that realm of private consciousness that’s central to how the modern person experience themselves is an affordance.

You can see what I am trying to do here: as Taylor traces the outlines of the self, I will keep weaving a third cognitive thread into Taylor’s duo of analysis and history so that we surface the affordances that Kant uses to build his metaphysical system.

Here’s how Taylor frames his project:

Unlike an object which can be entirely characterized by what it is, a self demands an understanding of what it could be and what others like it are. The question “Who am I” can’t be answered without probing who I want to be and what’s preventing me from doing so.

Or perhaps that way of articulating the self is itself a modern framing - it’s possible that one of Hammurabi’s minions would have been satisfied with a self description in which what he ought to be is the same as what he is.

The self’s flourishing is inside the penumbra of the self, if not part of its definition. In any case, I think definitions are the wrong way to grasp the self. A better analogy is with polysemy. When I say:

1. The cow jumped over the gate

2. The plane flew over the city

The meanings of the preposition ‘over’ are related but distinct: in the case of the cow, the sentence marks the passage of the cow from one side of the gate to the other, while in the case of the plane, it marks the presence of the plane above the boundaries of the city. Natural language terms have shifting connotations based on context.

The self, in my view, is a worldly counterpart of concepts, i.e., a thing in the world that has shifting affordances based on who is querying whom. Taylor gives us a hint of this multi-faceted nature of the self:

Taylor seems himself as going against the grain of his peers, who treat morality as an autonomous domain independent of what it is to live a good life. That wall between morality and the good is itself a symptom of the separation of disciplines and sub-disciplines in the classification of intellectual life and the organization of departments. 

Specialization, fragmentation and unification proceed apace in the modern world, both in the university and in our psyches. Taylor is a weaver. We can build upon his philosophical weaving by noticing that our social technologies (the law, academia etc) draw their resources from a cognitive realm in which morality, selfhood and flourishing are intertwined, though like in the outer world, the cognitive sources of selfhood etc might also be fragmented. 

We will see how Taylor connects the self with the good and the good with the right tomorrow.

In Pinker’s view, we are thinking machines that evolved to solve problems our environment threw at us. Or rather, the ones who solved those problems went forth and multiplied while those who didn’t are six feet under.

The machine is the ruling idea of out times. Are we machines and nothing but machines? This is one of the central questions of the modern era.

Machines have eaten the world. They take us to the bottom of the ocean and the depths of space. If we ever leave this planet in large numbers and settle on Mars, we will do so because we have machines that help us brave the heavens.

Our terrestrial life is fundamentally intertwined with other living beings, but our extra-terrestrial life - if and when that happens - will be symbiosis with machines.

The rule of machines is almost complete, with ‘thinking machines’ solving the puzzle about how machines and mechanisms can explain everything. And yet, there remains one exception, like that tiny village in Gaul holding out against Julius Caesar’s Roman empire.

That’s the problem of subjectivity and consciousness, of sentience more broadly. Why is there anything like consciousness at all in a world of whirling matter? Even Pinker has his misgivings:

Subjectivity and its seat, i.e., the Subject, remain a mystery to the world of matter. But that doesn’t mean that subjectivity remains underdeveloped even as our mechanical capacities increase by leaps and bounds. The truth is the exact opposite: the modern era is also one of great advances in the representation and exploration of subjectivity too. It’s not science that has explored the sense of inwardness. That’s been the province of the arts - especially the novel.

Artistic (i.e., subjective) and mechanical (objective) explorations have always worked hand in hand. The development of perspective and 3D geometry revolutionized painting and more recently, special effects and computer graphics are central to the movie business. However, there’s a clear hierarchy of prestige and power - science and technology are higher up than the arts. It’s a deep error to think that lack of a scientific theory of consciousness is evidence that we don’t understand consciousness at all.

The experience of an inner realm that’s unique to me and opaque to everyone else is itself a modern ‘discovery.’ Or as Charles Taylor says:

The modern era then has two powerful, if contradictory intuitions:

1. A world of machines and mechanisms that give us unprecedented control.

2. A world of increasingly more autonomous and free subjects who explore ever new territories - both real and imaginary.

Modern culture worships both intuitions at once, selling us new experiences every day. Indeed, there’s a paradoxical sense in which machines increase the value of experience - as hard labor, and now increasingly, white collar labor, is outsourced to machines, we are left with nothing else to do besides seek new experiences. Which can have a good side, if those experiences lean on the side of creativity or a bad side if they lead to an opioid addiction. 

One of Kant’s challenges is to reconcile these intuitions, of the possibility of an autonomous subject in a world of objects, but before we get to Kant, I will use Charles Taylor to give us a taste of the autonomous subject and the self that houses it. Like the machine, this self intrudes in many a domain outside its natural home, and by studying the archaeology of the self we are are likely to unearth ideas and intuitions that pass by the purely scientific investigator.

But what I found is that (cognitively, if not historically), is that the Great Chain of Being and its faith in the rational intelligibility of the world actually laid the foundations for what followed and if anything, the revolution in ideas depends on digesting and reformulating the GCB. It requires faith in reason to remap the origins of reason from the divine intellect to the human intellect, and then in a second step (that Kant took) to acknowledge the finitude of the human intellect to draw the boundaries of reason.

It’s said that revolutions eat their own children, but that can be inverted and said that the revolution is caused by eating one’s parents. Ontological openings - i.e., a reordering of our map of reality - are made possible by the existing map.

The ‘human question’ is a natural outgrowth of the ‘divine question,’ and in turn, the ‘planetary question’ will be a natural outgrowth of the human question.

Bhavacakra

All of this would be somewhat of a curiosity if it were not for the prospects of a similar ontological opening in another part of the world. I have in mind an insight that animates much of Indian (and India-influenced) culture, including our religious and intellectual traditions. It’s the Bhavacakra, the wheel of existence:

Like the GCB, the Bhavacakra renders the world intelligible, and just like the GCB, the Bhavacakra is also rendered around the centrality of human existence in the cosmological scheme of things.

What might it look like for the Bhavacakra to eat itself and a new tradition to emerge in its place?

I am convinced that underlying the feel good attempts at ‘bringing Buddhism and Science together’ or ‘Indian Philosophy in the Modern Age’ - a favorite pastime of retired scientists and modernizing monks - is an attempt to create a new ontological opening.

How should we go about it?

From the Chain to the Self

I will do a jugalbandi with Charles Taylor next week.

It’s impossible to cover such a rich book in such a short period of time, but the goal isn’t to absorb its arguments in five days, but to get a taste of why the self became the locus of intellectual and artistic energy in the modern era.

As the saying goes: any feedback is good feedback.

Before the Chain

There’s a view in the conservative end of the liberal sphere that the world has been getting better and better and deservedly so (which makes the writer a liberal) and the reason for progress is the enlightened ideas of (mostly) dead white people (which makes the writer a conservative). Exhibit A in that category is Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature.”

The case for progress is usually made in the context of modern Western dominance, of a world made safe by science and reason — you will hear the term ‘European Enlightenment’ a lot if you read these guys. Since they’re liberal, the progress propagandist will argue how early modern Europeans broke with the past and rejected superstition for science.

In that scheme, the Great Chain of Being is one of the villains, the inherited superstition that had to be overthrown.

But looking back, it seems to me that the GCB itself can be construed as progress over what came before. It was Plato who marked the shift away from the warrior ethic to one in which the life of reason was the most prestigious. Lovejoy doesn’t have much to say about the transformations that led to the GCB, but strangely, it’s the chronicler of the modern self, Charles Taylor, who gives us an indication.

Note how he says: “the higher life is that ruled by reason and reason itself is defined in terms of a vision of order, in the cosmos and in the soul.”

“a vision of order, in the cosmos and in the soul” is nothing but the Great Chain of Being.

That’s how Taylor indicates that Plato was as radical as Descartes in his rejection of the warrior past before him, of replacing the world of Homer with the world of Socrates. Why is this Platonic view superstition? Wouldn’t the conservative liberal agree that replacing the warrior ethic with the life ruled by reason is a strong indicator of progress?

The Great Chain of Being is a world made intelligible to reason

It’s not a society of unreason being replaced by a more enlightened society: the Platonic Republic is as much a society ruled by reason as Victorian England. In fact, the transition from the primacy of honor to the primacy of reason happens much earlier. Instead what occurred a few hundred years ago is a transformation in our understanding of reason and its origins.

In the GCB, reason is out there - it emanates from the divine intellect and envelopes the world. Aristotle famously said that ‘man is a rational animal’ and the only animal to be so - which is why we are close to the top of the Great Chain. But we don’t carry the burden of reason because it emanates from God. But after the fall, the world is no longer embodied reason; it’s purely mechanical motion.

So where do we look for reason: inside ourselves.

But when we look inside ourselves, do we find reason? Kant thought so, but after Freud and a couple of world wars, Europeans could no longer believe that reason dominates their lives. The brute exiled by Plato was back in town with nuclear weapons in his holster.