Magical Realist > Oct 29, 2018 09:57 PM
C C > Nov 2, 2018 02:11 AM
Stuart Greenstreet: . . . They are discoverable, Kant claims, because human actions, just like physical events, must be systematically connected. Our actions take a law-like path because they are ruled by the causality of reason:
“Reason does not here follow the order of things, as they present themselves in appearance (ie. as compelled by the causal principle), but frames for itself with perfect spontaneity an order of its own according to ideas.... And at the same time reason also presupposes that it can have causality in regard to all these actions (ie the causality of reason) since otherwise no empirical effects could be expected from its ideas.” (B576)
If human actions were nothing but physical events – merely the by-products of physical processes – they would be subject to natural laws which determine physical events. But actions are not determined indirectly as physical events. They themselves fall under a set of rules in their very character as actions:
“Reason though it be, it must nonetheless exhibit an empirical character. For every cause presupposes a rule according to which certain appearances follow as effects; and every rule requires uniformity in its effects.” (B576-71)
All of Kant's explanations, so far, still leave a crucial question unanswered. The causality of reason presupposes a rule whereby one willed action systematically follows another. So actions can be explained by tracing them to their sources. How, then, is the will able to escape an endless causal chain and initiate a new series of actions, one which begins purely of itself? We must look more deeply into Kant's startling claim that if we could exhaustively investigate all the appearances, [ie empirical evidence] of men's wills we would see that every human action had followed from its prior conditions and could have been predicted.
He does not mean that it is possible to predict a person's action at any given moment in advance of it being performed. After it has been performed, and has entered a causal series, the action will be explicable within that framework. Given what we then know we could have predicted the action. The causal series does not precede that action, but includes it. Kant's meaning is easier to grasp in the light of his claim that human actions are necessitated by facts about character. Until a person has finally decided how to act (say, whether or not to lie) her choice remains open. She could have a change of heart. Therefore until she has acted, any estimate of her character is underdetermined by the data. Every moral choice she makes as she conducts her life yields more data about her essential character. It is the action she actually performs which enables us to see, retrospectively, how it fitted into a pattern and could have been predicted. We will be in exactly the same position at her next point of decision, and so on.
Earlier, I stressed the distinction between transcendental principles of causality (which must exist for experience to be possible) and the natural causality of material things (particular empirical causal laws discovered by science). Transcendental causality is not an event in the worldly chain of events. It is, in Kant's words, “the ground which determines the causality of natural things to an effect in accordance with their proper laws.” Transcendental causality stands behind all events and outside of time. It is non-temporal. Now recall the argument: physical events have empirical causes; human actions are not determined indirectly as physical events; they conform as actions to the rules of the transcendental causality of reason. Now maybe we can make sense of the claim that the will is spontaneously able to originate actions. This is possible, Kant says, because
“[the] first beginning of what we are here speaking is not a beginning in time but in causality. If, for instance, I at this moment arise from my chair, in complete freedom, without being necessarily determined thereto by the influence of natural causes, a new series, with all its natural consequences ad infinitum, has its absolute beginning in this event, although as regards time [it] is only the continuation of a preceding series.” (B748-9)
An act of the will, says Kant, ‘follows upon' natural causes “but without arising out of them”. Although human actions follow the train of natural events they arise from the transcendental causality of reason. They are not, therefore, time-bound. ‘First beginnings' – spontaneous human actions – are possible at any point in our lives because they respond to rules which exist outside of the temporal order. They can occur without interrupting nature's causal chain. --Kant versus Hume on the Necessary Connection ... Philosophy Now, Issue 49, 2005
Magical Realist > Nov 2, 2018 09:03 PM
Quote:An act of the will, says Kant, ‘follows upon' natural causes “but without arising out of them”. Although human actions follow the train of natural events they arise from the transcendental causality of reason. They are not, therefore, time-bound. ‘First beginnings' – spontaneous human actions – are possible at any point in our lives because they respond to rules which exist outside of the temporal order. They can occur without interrupting nature's causal chain. --Kant versus Hume on the Necessary Connection ... Philosophy Now, Issue 49, 2005
C C > Nov 2, 2018 11:03 PM
(Nov 2, 2018 09:03 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:Quote:An act of the will, says Kant, ‘follows upon' natural causes “but without arising out of them”. Although human actions follow the train of natural events they arise from the transcendental causality of reason. They are not, therefore, time-bound. ‘First beginnings' – spontaneous human actions – are possible at any point in our lives because they respond to rules which exist outside of the temporal order. They can occur without interrupting nature's causal chain. --Kant versus Hume on the Necessary Connection ... Philosophy Now, Issue 49, 2005
Fascinating. I assume these rules which exist outside the temporal order include those of logic and language and ethics and even form and aesthetics, if we include among "human actions" such creative acts as dancing, singing, poetry, painting, writing, or playing a musical instrument.
Laws of Nature, Source Unknown (PDF): [...] Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas, Austin, described himself in an e-mail message as “pretty Platonist,” saying he thinks the laws of nature are as real as “the rocks in the field.” The laws seem to persist, he wrote, “whatever the circumstance of how I look at them, and they are things about which it is possible to be wrong, as when I stub my toe on a rock I had not noticed.”
[...] If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.
[...] Dr. Davies complains that the traditional view of transcendent laws is just 17th-century monotheism without God. “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,” he said in his e-mail message.
But the idea of rationality in the cosmos has long existed without monotheism. As far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras and his followers proclaimed that nature was numbers. Plato envisioned a higher realm of ideal forms, of perfect chairs, circles or galaxies, of which the phenomena of the sensible world were just flawed reflections. Plato set a transcendent tone that has been popular, especially with mathematicians and theoretical physicists, ever since.