Classically Kant’s Critical philosophy goes beyond the duality of empiricism and rationalism of the philosophies to which he was referring that was the context of his work. He believed that Reason produced phantasms on its own without the input of experience. So he believed there was limits to the usefulness of Reason, but still thought that if Reason was used properly, eg. for science, then there was great benefit in it. He was looking for an alternative to either induction (empiricism) and deduction (rationality). It was not till much later that Peirce produced abduction as the third alternative that allowed one to formulate hypothesis in science that would allow the connection between theory and experimentation through the projection of hypotheses. Without that idea, Kant basically held that we were presented with singular a priori syntheses that bridged the gap between a priori deduction and a posteriori induction. These a prior syntheses were the projection of spacetime and the categories. It was these projections that allowed us to locate things in spacetime in our experience and to identify objects causally related in experience and to make out of that an objective story. Basically it was recognizing the limits of the possibility of experience that allowed one to assume a stance toward transcendental realism. His position was that only though transcendental idealism could view of transcendental realism be achieved. Basically we have been operating in science within the boundaries that Kant set ever since.

Kant was a rationalist that recognized the limits of what reason could accomplish on its own. And specified that only reason operating on the basis of experience could be trusted to tell us something important about the world in which we live, i.e. something scientific.

Strictly speaking most of the texts cited so far say how something in the world works, or how the world works within some domain, but if we want to see how the world itself operates, i.e. what makes a world and how we dwell in a world then the works of Heidegger are the best source. And in fact that is why he has had such far-reaching influence in modern philosophy, because he is focused on this one question: How does the world work? and that includes how do we enter into that world as it is operating, and what role to we play in the operation of the world. So I suggest Heidegger if you want some inkling of how the world operates including our operation within it. Being and Time is a good place to start for that.

From the point of view of Jung self-knowledge is the process of individuation whereby the ego comes to know the whole self, as a whole, including the Shadow, and the manifest unconscious via the archetypes which when known appears as a mandala. This is Apollonian. Its opposite is the Dionysian loss of the self advocated by Nietzsche. Apollo was a wolf god of initiation. Dionysus was instead the only god to know death, to transition through death, like Osiris/Horus or like the avatar Christ. We might say that Dionysus brings knowledge of the Other by throwing off all constraints and going beyond all bounds while Apollo brings knowledge of the Self via initiation by taking on constraints and respecting the liminal, the thresholds. Apollo is like Brahma and Dionysus is like Shiva, and so there is another way which is nondual between them which is the way of Vishnu brought by his Avatars, such as Krishna. Krishna advises each of the Pandavas to do something against the Dharma, something evil because each of the Pandvas are too good, too perfect. Each must encounter their shadows, the evil side of their goodness. Self-knowledge concerns all the things about yourself that you do not want to confront, that you hide from yourself and others and that you deny. No one actually wants self-knowledge in the Jungian sense. And when it is pursued too far it leads to tragedy as in Oedipus. As the bird said in Four Quartets of Eliot human beings cannot stand too much reality.
In my opinion Self-Knowledge has to do with the confrontation with the nonduals of the Western Worldview within yourself and these are Order, Right, Good, Fate, Sources and Root. And normally that comes out in rare situations in a meaningful word. So there is the orderly words which we say everyday which stay within the bounds of decorum but which have little meaning, except when now and again some word seeks to put things right. Rta in Sanskrit means cosmic harmony, so the right word is the one which expresses harmony at the right time in the right context. In that context we know our selves as wrong, or on the sinister side and we put that right in ourselves. But at a deeper level there is the good word which we say to the other in need, and when we give of the abundance which is ours to give. And in that we find ourselves to be bad, or even evil and we set ourselves on a good track turning away from our harmful ways either to self or other. And yet at a deeper level there is the fateful word, spoken at some rare moment when someone’s fate hangs in the balance, even perhaps our own, which is neither free nor determined but in which we dree our wyrd. Or on yet a deeper level there is the source word, the origin of the word, where the always already lost origin bubbles up from the sources of things to light our way, and where we return to those sources, and we know our own source. And finally there is the root word, that gives rise to all the other words, more likely than not some name for God we utter in despair and then we receive grace, enlightenment, or guidance in that moment when we feel the most loss and we taste redemption. Self knowledge means to take the homeward way and to know the nondual kernel of the worldview directly within ones own self. Because ultimately the self is a face of the worldview. There is nothing in it of itself, merely an emptiness in a void that none the less manifests a fullness of life, of awareness, of social belonging together where we face our fate as a community together. No sharing of Fate no community. No giving and receiving gifts of what is good for each no community. No justice and the establishment of rights then no community. No order that is mutually recognized then no community. No community of mutual recognition then no self.

No self-knowledge except via the knowledge of the other.

No other knowledge except though ourselves.

No self/other knowledge then certainly no wisdom.

No wisdom then only desolation.

I have been interested for a long time in the work of Yuri Gurevich who is at Microsoft Research and who was the inventor of the Gurevich Abstract State Machine specification method and the ASL language.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gurevich/
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_State_Machine_Language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_state_machines
http://books.google.com/books?id=Am43BAC06L8C

http://books.google.com/books?id=HqIRT51n74YC

Gurevich is a Mathematician who proved that a higher order and abstract language could be Turing equivalent so that we did not have to reduce to a Turing machine representation to know that something was Turing computable, and that made it possible to have a very specification language at any given level of abstraction that was assured to be computable. The method is very simple and basically can be described in one sentence which is “Define it with rules.” So a given set of rules that are well-formed at a given level of abstraction can be equivalent to a Turing machine representation of the same algorithm or transformational system. Others such as E. Borger have gone on to turn this into a robust specification method which can describe more types of systems than many other more formal methods while at the same time being easy to use for engineers who seek more formalism in the specification of systems.

To my mind Systems Thinking is becoming more and more prevalent and its importance is in fact waning as it becomes ubiquitous. Let us get some perspective on this question to see why this might be the case.

A System is a schema, i.e. a way of understanding things that can be projected on many phenomena. In the Western Worldview there was from the beginning until the last century one schema that ruled all phenomena which was the Form. But at the beginning of the last century two other schemas started to become important which was the System Schema on the one hand and the Pattern Schema on the other. The pattern schema led to a movement called Structuralism. In the last century Structuralism and Systematism both struggled to replace Formalism as the fundamental way of looking at things. Structuralism showed itself invaluable over and over again as the best way to understand phenomena, for instance in the periodic table. In Science structuralism prevailed in disciplines and Systems remained an interdisciplinary topic. However, as an interdisciplinary topic structuralism more or less faded away with the advent of post-structuralism. There are however thinkers who combine the different schemas together into a single framework. Anthony Wilden was one of those thinkers who wrote a book called System and Structure. George Klir developed a systems theory that had structural underpinnings called the Architecture of Systems Problem Solving. This was the precursor to what is now called Complex Adaptive Systems Theory such as that which John Holland laid out in The Hidden Order and the companion book called Emergence. And it is interesting that Complex Systems theory has left behind the General Systems Theory frameworks that were its precursors. Now the problem is not so much seeing things in terms of systems, but instead realizing that each schema has its own usefulness and to give each one its proper due and place within the scientific enterprise. So for instance Forms are associated with proofs as in Geometry, but Systems are related to descriptions, and structures are related to explanations. And what we really need are all of these approaches to understanding in their proper balance.

One of the things I talk about a lot is the relation of the System to its inverse dual, i.e. the OpenScape or what I also call the Meta-system where “meta” means what is beyond the system, i.e. the context, environment, ecosystem, media, etc. Our culture has a hard time recognizing and giving its due to the schema of the meta-system. The meta-system is the realm of indirect indication which also has its place in the ways of understanding phenomena. But we do not realize that the system and meta-system are inverse duals of each other and we tend to be blind to the role of meta-systems and their peculiar organization. So to my mind the next frontier after the system becomes an ubiquitous approach to things, is to be reminded of the role of structure and form, but also to recognize the necessity of considering the meta-systems and their importance. So it is not so much that Systems are important in and of themselves, but more that each schema is important in its own right and to its own degree with respect to explaining different phenomena in specific sciences. All schemas can be applied to any given ontic emergent level of organization found in nature, but different schemas are more appropriate to certain phenomena and others to other phenomena enhancing the various phenomena’s understandability differentially. So my response is that Schemas are important, and different schemas are more important for particular phenomena but all are useful in their own places for different purposes.

It is better if we can combine the schemas and make use of their different strengths in frameworks of Formal Structural Systems for instance that also recognizes the unique organization of the environment as different from that of the System or its structural patterning. In a way Complex Systems has forgotten these advances made by General Systems Theory and needs to relearn that perspective. What is important is to realize that there is not just emergence but also de-emergence is also an important phenomena, and that while systems as gestalts are emergent so to meta-systems are de-emergent, and it is the addition or subtraction of the Gödel Statements that makes something a system as emergent or a meta-system to be de-emergent. And there is an oscillation between emergence and de-emergence in phenomena, not everything is emergent. And what we need to understand is how things oscillate between emergence and de-emergence and how that occurs on the basis of the inverse duality of the system and the meta-system as two different organizational templates for intelligibility of phenomena.

It is fascinating that in our tradition General Schemas Theory, as a theory of all possible schemas was not developed sooner. We need to concentrate on building a good theory of the relations between all possible schemas that play a role in understanding phenomena in Science. The S-prime hypothesis that I developed to kick off General Schemas theory is a beginning. It posits that there are ten schemas and that schemes and dimensions are related to each other. Once we have a theory of Schemas then we can realize the importance of each schema and give each its due. This also allows the System Schema to retain its own value and meaning, because if everything is a system, then system ceases to mean anything and thus loses its intrinsic importance to us as a mode of understanding different from other modes of understanding.

Systems actually derive their importance from their difference from the other schemas that are possible ways of understanding phenomena each with its own contribution to our understanding of things within a scientific framework. The value and importance of the System Schema is not intrinsic to that schema in isolation from the others, but only in as much as we recognize the others and their various values supporting our varied ways of understanding phenomena. The deeper our explanations go the more schemas are involved with respect to any given phenomena, and it is the schemas working together that have the most value for human understanding of natural phenomena.

Bernstein in his taped lectures (bernsteintapes.com) said Nietzsche was just a good Hegelian. If that is the case then we would expect him to reverse Kant just like he did everyone else (A ruse practiced by Zizek today). One quote that stikes to my mind is an object is just a subject turned inside out. Zizek makes fun of Kantianism in Thus Spake Zaratustra when he talks about climbing the mountain until he climbed so high he had to climb on top of his own head to keep going to reach the headland above the world. Nietzsche did not believe in any transcendentals and worked hard to try to get rid of them and the result of this struggle was Will to Power and Eternal Return. By our will to power we create meaning in the world ourselves without the aid of transcendentals which are all illusions. Eternal Return is an ethical standard that does not appeal to any a prioris. So Nietzsche, affirms Kantianism by reversing it, just like he does everything else like when he substitutes joy for the pessimism of Schopenhauer, or when he tries to create a morality for the Masters when Hegel says that only slaves scan achieve self-consciousness. A philosophy of reversal only reinforces what is reversed. So although Zizek sounds radical he like Nietzsche is not really radical.

http://www.ohadmaiman.com/displayessay.asp?PageNumber=19
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24034-nietzsche-s-critiques-the-kantian-foundations-of-his-thought/
https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/group/modlang/general/weekly_roundup/TT%202011/20%20May%202011/Tom%20Bailey%20-%20Nietzsche%20the%20Kantian.pdf
http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/61/The_Kantianism_of_Hegel_and_Nietzsche_by_Robert_Zimmerman
http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/philosophy/downloads/a2/unit4/nietzsche/NietzscheCritique.pdf

See also http://thinknet.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/quora-answer-what-did-nietzsche-think-of-kants-metaphysics/

The Absurd in my opinion is an intensification of contradiction into paradox and paradox into the Absurd and is an image of the limit of Doxa in Plato’s divided line. We can just keep intensifying the limits of doxa so that opinion becomes senseless by violating logic, and then violating itself by redoubling the gesture of rendering doxa meaningless by producing paradoxes which then are redoubled again into Absurdity.

Kierkegaard was the first to give this term philosophical meaning when he said that Religion was essentially absurd and therefore against Hegel could not be reduced to Reason. This cause was taken up by Sartre and Camus who said that existence was essentially meaningless unless we manufactured the meaning of it ourselves. But the false attempts of society to project meaning on existence produced absurdities of the type that abound in the novel Catch 22. Absurdity exposure became a prime motif in the theater and the best of these plays are those of Becket who has two bums waiting for the Big Other as Lacan via Zizek would say, i.e. Godot. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot] Their situation is fundamentally absurd, endless waiting for nothing trapped in eternal return of Pozo and Lucky the master/slave dialectic being replayed over and over again. The only break is the appearance of the boy who promises that Godot will come tomorrow. Such is the innocence of youth. Lots of other lesser lights like Ionesco produced different sorts of absurdist drama. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Absurd

This is also an interesting question because the answer on the face of it is that with nonduality there is no “out there” as opposed to “in here” because that is a duality, and nonduality attempts to get at what is there prior to the dualistic split, i.e. suchness. But the part of the question that asks about it “existing separate from the world” brings into play what Heidegger calls Dasein, i.e. the kind of existing thing whose ecstasy projects the world within which it finds itself (Discoveredness, Befindlichkeit, i.e. we discover ourselves already within the world that it turns out we project a priori, the projection of that illusion we call Being, which is really a doubled illusion that acts as a reflective mirror, rather than merely what is found, i.e. this and that. Being in our tradition supports the essence of the things “whatness” with a substrate or substance through which things can be the same, though difference, i.e. Tropes operate through it like Metaphor, Metonymy, etc. For Heidegger the world exists though our ecstasy by which we project it temporally as a space in which we can dwell, and BE. And in that space we can experience the process of Becoming. But if we did not have the Parmedian idea of Being as Stasis, (Pure Being) then we could not experience the flow of Heraclitian fire, i.e. change changing everything always. In this it is really only Knowledge that is perdurant but in the Indo-European tradition we project perdurence on things which may also be done by others but not in the unique, strange and onefold way that Indo-Europeans do. Now if we ask what is the distinction between Static Pure Being and Dynamic Process Becoming, since Being is the highest concept, these either have to be mutually exclusive, i.e. something we are dogmatic about, or as Heidegger suggests they may be equi-primordial, in which case Being has kinds, and as such because it is the highest concept, then there must be a third kind of Being (as Plato called it in the Timaeus) which gives this distinction itself a kind of Being. Merleau-Ponty calls that Hyper Being (Derrida calls it Differance [differing, deferring]; Heidegger calls it Being crossed out). And Merleau-Ponty points out that it has an opposite which he calls Wild (Savage) Being using a term from structuralism already overloaded by Levi-Strauss. If we realize that the kinds of Being are meta-levels in the Theory of Higher Logical Types then that is half the battle because then we realize that the difference between the kinds of Being is the greatest that can exist in the world. In essence when we see the four kinds of Being together (not taking into account the singularity of Ultra Being) then we have a vision of a face of the World which we normally only see clearly in an emergent event, where the baseline of Nihilism is reset. Now all that is entailed, in my view, by the projection of the World in which it finds itself by Dasein.

As we explored earlier All this is implicit in the relation between Parmenides Ways and Heraclitian Fire, which Plato calls the Greater and Lesser initiations. The third kind of Being (Hyper Being) is the difference that makes a difference (Bateson) between these two kinds of Being. As such it is a slippery and mercurial kind of Being always introducing differing and deferring of DifferAnce into the play of the world (John S. Hans). But none of these standings through Being are Existence proper in the sense of nondual emptiness (Buddhist) or void (Taoist). At the fifth Meta-level of Being there is both Ultra Being as singularity and emptiness/Void (Striated/Unstriated). It took me a long time to figure out how Ultra Being could exist, but basically if ou have two different types of interpretations of existence then Ultra Being is the difference that makes a difference between them. This is so interesting because it points the way toward the role that Being plays. We see it externally as a singularity in existence but inside it is differentiated into meta-levels fo maximal emergent difference. It is the singular distinction between two different interpretations of nonduality. Duality unfolds from this singular distinction between interpretations of nondual existence. If we remember that illusion exists in existence as well, and that Being is really just a doubling which makes illusion reflexive, then we realize that existence itself is the difference between these two layers of illusion. So from the point of view of Being, it is a distinction between interpretations of Existence, while Existence is really a distinction between two layers of illusion, i.e. illusion folded back on itself, i.e. illusory Illusion. In this way we can see that Existence and Being are completely intertwined each distinguishing the other.

When you realize that there is this deep intertwining of Being and Existence, i.e. neither can really be completely what they are without the other, then you actually see that the doubling of illusion into Maya is actually progress in our understanding because Existence becomes the difference between the veils of illusion. And likewise without Ultra Being as a singularity you cannot distinguish between different sorts of nondual interpretations of Existence. And it is this kind of deeper realization that I think Tantra of the Tibetans comes out of, which on the face of it looks like a falling back into the illusion of Being, but instead leads to the formulation of DzogChen by Manjushrimitra where he applies the logic of Nagarjuna to Buddhism itself and sees the two truths as nihilistic extremes. Buddhism itself was a heresy within the Hindu strain of the Indo-European worldview that revolted against the idea of Being, and instead saw existence as the flux of aggregates. But once you get into existence, then you realize that in order to get to deeper levels of understanding of existence you have to bring back Being, because otherwise you cannot put Buddhist Emptiness in the same poem as Taoist void as Stonehouse does, i.e. you cannot actually get the best our of both Buddhism and Taoism (Bon) which are actually different but you cannot tell that difference without bringing another kind of existence which is Maya, Dukah, Dunya as seen from the outside as a singularity.

So we see that there are two views of Being, i.e. from the point of view of existence (from the outside) and from the point of view of Being itself, i.e. from the inside. In the one case we see a singularity, in the other case we see the fragmentation of the kinds of Being. So there is an inside and outside with respect to Being, but not Existence. Existence is Unary. And Existence can be interpreted as Nondual, eiher as emptiness or void. To make that distinction we need the singularity of Ultra Being as the difference that makes a difference between different interpretations of the nondual state of existence. So if we take the world to be a schema projected by Being then there is some sense in which existence is out there beyond the world. But that leaves us to quibble over the word separate. The non-dual lacks the following characteristics: Separate, Fused, Separate And Fused, Neither Separate nor Fused. It is something else beyond these four logical states. It is Not One! Not Two! So the fact that there are two interpretations for Existence without illusion as nondual is itself a problem, because that calls for a third the singularity of external Being, i.e. Ultra Being. What this indicates is that there is actually multiple levels of non-duality and that Emptiness/Void as Striated and Unstriated terms in the Pleroma, are not the ultimate type of Nonduality but there are deeper froms of nonduality. I call these deeper forms of Nonduality: Manifestation, using a term from Henry’s Essence of Manifestation which he attributes to Meister Eckhart.

We know now from Heidegger that there are striated and unstriated Being/Beyng in the Pleroma as well as their opposites Forgetfuness/Oblivion. To the extent that nonduality is reflected in the Pleroma then it appears also as Striated and Unstriated as Emptiness/Void. So that means that there is a standing beyond the Pleroma where nonduality is not made dual, i.e. which we are calling manifestation. Now the Pleroma is the field out of which the Worldview arises, and clearly the Pleroma arises from this deeper nonduality of Manifestation. So there is a sense in which Non-duality is “out there” beyond the world, if we take it as being always already prior to the arising of the pleroma and world. But as for being either fused or separate we must apply the tetralemma to that even at the level of Emptiness and Void the two canonical interpretations of Existence.

So from one perspective the answer to your question is true, instead of false, with some caveats, like separate/fused has no meaning either at the fifth standing (Existence) or beyond that at the sixth standing (Manifestation). In some sense these distinctions are only apparent, they are standings we take toward what we find (existence), or if we enter into reflexive illusion (being), or if we see nonduality without differentiating interpretations of illusionless existence (manifestation). “Standings toward . . .” are our own embodied standing.

I hope this is sufficiently bewildering . . .

http://www.quora.com/Armchair-Philosophy/Should-we-question-everything

It is in my view impossible to question everything. However, this is precisely what Descartes tried to do, or at least said he did in order to find something that could not be doubted, and that was his famous “I think therefor I exist”, he could not find a way to doubt this because it was the doubter who still existed even if he doubted everything, including himself, still the doubter existed in the doubting. This is a proof by existence. I am doubting so I must be here to do that. But the problem is that the ego who is there is finite and much less complex than the world of things to be doubted, and so essentially the finitude of the doubter is the limitation that makes it so we cannot doubt everything. We can doubt everything that occurs to us, or comes our way, but that is not everything. So doubt is a process, it is not absolute. Just like getting to infinity is a process, in which we never really reach infinity. There is the limit of this process which we can estimate, and there is the actual infinity that we cannot bear due to our finitude.

So the whole reason to go into this is that it is precisely this discrepancy between all the things we can doubt given our temporal finitude, and the near infinite amount of things in the pluriverse that are doubtable, that produces schematization. In other words to protect ourselves from this gap between actual infinity and its estimated process limit we schematize, and that schematization process is precisely our projection of finite realms that we can handle which have a pre-ordained order that is imposed by us. This is where Idealism comes from, and the idea that there are a priori projected categories, or transcendentals. A good book to read about schemas is Kant and the Platypus by U. Eco, and in there he distinguishes “mathematical and geometrical schemas” which is what I mean when I use the term. Not all schemas but those related to spacetime only which are the most basic schemas, our first projection so to speak. The novelty of the idea of General Schemas theory is that it posits that we project different levels of schematization of various scopes and that the projection itself is striated and not a homogeneous plenum as Kant and it appears all idealists after him thought. Knowing that there are different schemas or templates of pre-understanding with different inherent organizations that nest with each other is important if we are going to understand art, engineering, and science in any fundamental way, and it is odd that no one seems to have realized that we need General Schemas Theory as a level of emergent abstraction previously in our intellectual history. I have been searching for a precursor in Architectural Theory, in Art Criticism, in Science or Engineering and I have not found anyone yet, who posits anything like the S-prime Schemas Theory that there are ten schemas that nest at different scopes each with a different self-organizing pattern and that they are related to dimensionality by the rule Two Schemas per Dimension and Two Dimensions per Schema. If we posit this S-prime theory, then it can tell us a lot about our own projection process. And one thing that is interesting is that this set of schemas goes up to the ninth dimension, and then stops just before string theory begins, not to mention M and F theory. This tells us that there is a fundamental limit to doubt, because we cannot form an image of things in spacetime to which we can relate in our finitude beyond the ninth dimension. We just don’t have schemas for that. And just like we cannot understand Quantum Theory, there is a fundamental limit on our understanding String Theory due to these limitations. We can posit these theories mathematically but we cannot relate to them in our finitude, and this has to do with the organization of spacetime itself. It turns out that in the ninth dimension our ability to understand things breaks down. This is because if we fill the universe with spheres close packed, and then we place a smaller sphere in the interstices of that close packing in the ninth dimension the smaller spheres defined relative to the close packed larger spheres is actually bigger than the larger spheres. Here our intuitions of relative size completely breaks down and so we cannot schematize beyond this limit.

And so I posit that we can only doubt things which have been schematized, and so that means anything which is beyond the ninth dimension cannot be doubted because doubting brings them into relation with our finitude via the schemas and if we cannot schematize something then it is impossible to doubt it. So in a sense we are saying that we cannot doubt string theory because we cannot really bring it into relation with our finitude as such. So if this is true it means that Doubt has a limit, and thus by definition we cannot doubt everything because we cannot schematize everything. This limit of schematization is equivalent to the limit of the possibility of doubt. Therefore we cannot doubt everything, because some things cannot become things through our schematization in order for us to doubt them.

http://www.quora.com/Immanuel-Kant/What-are-the-most-interesting-ideas-in-Kants-book-The-Critique-of-Pure-Reason

I have been listening to the Bernstein Tapes (bernsteintapes.com) which are lectures on Critique of Pure Reason after previously listening to his Hegelian lectures. His Hegelian lectures allowed me my first real access to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind/Ghost/Spirit for the first time. I have spent a lifetime stating and failing to finish that book. Bernstein says it is the most complex book in Western philosophy, and I just could not get through it myself on my own, even though I managed to do so with many other long complicated and abstruse philosophical classics previously. I figured if Bernstein could finally give me access to Hegel in a way that made sense to me, then he might also have some things to say about Kant that would help me understand Critique of Pure Reason. To me one of the most interesting parts of Western Philosophy is Heidegger’s attempt to appropriate Kant, to his philosophy. It is interesting that the key word for Heidegger is Ereignis which has one meaning that is Appropriation, because Heidegger is famous for appropriating other philosophers to his own thought, like Aristotle, the Pre-socratics, Husserl’s later work (where appropriation here is tantamount to stealing). So listening to these lectures on Kant gave me a new appreciation for his thought. I kept worrying that my understanding of Kant would be wrong, but in the end it was merely greatly enhanced. I had a good idea of the Architectonic of Kant’s philosophy, but I did not really understand how important the arguments were in the book until I listened to these lectures. And without command of the arguments then one’s understanding remains very superficial, whereas from reading other commentaries I had the idea that the arguments were not really very important. That is because most authors attribute to Kant what Bernstein calls a progressive reading, i.e. assuming that Kant is claiming more than he has a right to claim, and then blaming him for not succeeding, and then subsituting their own thought for that of Kant. So Kant just is a jumping off point for their own ideas, which normally are pretty strange, and there are few attempts to try a minimal reading that tries to stay close to what Kant himself really meant, assuming that he was not claiming more than he could deliver. Bernstein calls this the regressive reading.

My own approach to philosophy is to try to understand what the philosopher himself had in mind before placing my own projections on their philosophy. I think this is a minimal threshold of intellectual honesty. And then one should always differentiate ones own thought from those of the philosopher one is basing what one is saying upon. I like to try to use other philosophies as a whole without appropriating them to my own philosophy. Because my greatest interest is in the differences between philosophers rather than subsuming them to my philosophy, or one philosophers ideas to another. Of course, this is very hard because it is almost impossible not to misunderstand the precursors. We have this map of misreading as Bloom says. For instance how Marx misread Hegel for instance, perfect example of a dumbed down reading of Hegel which some people really want.

So from Bernstein’s presentation I learned that the arguments themselves have substance. When commentators over claim what Kant is trying to achieve, and then point out how he fails, then one tends to discount the arguments, and concentrate on the architecture of his thought, because that is not affected by the discounted arguments. But Bernstein concentrates on the arguments and brings out their substance and shows how they are still relevant in light of his regressive reading.

So from Bersteins view point the major idea in Kant is that the only way to be a Transcendental Realist is via Transcendental Idealism, and thus realism is dependent on idealism. And that is why our tradition turned toward idealism and away from either rationalism or empiricism. This essentially makes Kant primarily into a precursor to Husserl’s phenomenology. This for me was very good because what I have been saying for years is that Kantian transcendentalism is the basis for understanding Husserlian Phenomenology. However, this devalues the idea of transcendentals being headlands above the world as Nietzsche calls them. To the regressive reading Kant is critiquing these headlands and pulling the carpet out from under them rather than establishing them as the progressive reading would have us believe.

To me this is a very important issue. In Badiou for instance we see the use of Cohen’s approach to set theory that establishes the independence of the continuum hypothesis. Basically Badiou says that Set theory is metaphysics of Being, to which he adds the Event and Multiple to complete it and give a full fledged ontological meaning to set theory. But what I learned from Badiou’s use of Cohen is that if you have a transcendental, i.e. an invisible assumed ground over a domain of a certain size, and you expand the territory it covers, if it does not create a difference in the larger scoped territory, then it is essentially irrelevant and does not have to be taken into account in our metaphysics.

Now if we take this insight back to Kant, we see that Kant has three transcendentals The Subject, The Object, and God. God maintains the coherence between the transcendental subject and the noumena, i.e. the transcendental object. This is an invisible scaffolding around our worldview. The Copernican turn from dogmatism is to offer a critique of the necessary preconditions for possible experience. As I listened to this phrase over and over in Bernstein I thought about the Unnecessary Impossibility as its opposite. The transcendental subject as the source of Apriori Synthesis (space, time, categories, schemas) and the Noumena, what is there beyond the appearances are the Unnecessary Impossibilities. They are impossibilities because we cannot know them. And they are unnecessary because no matter how we expand the scope of our inquiry the scaffolding does not make any difference in experience that makes a difference (Bateson). Implicit in Kant’s argument is the opposite of necessary conditions of possibility, which is the unnecessary and insufficient reasons of impossibility of experience of the T. Subject or the T. Object, or God that which retains the coherence between these inaccessible invisibles which are beyond all experience. I have not heard of any commentator who points out this duality between necessary possibilities and unnecessary impossibilities. And this kind of reminds me of Zizek and his argument that Kant glossed the possibility of Ethical Evil, in other words he suppressed that possibility, thinking it impossible. This makes us think that this limit the unnecessary and insufficient impossible is really the core of Kant’s thinking that is unthought. We normally say that what is impossible is the same as the negation of necessity. However, like a priori synthesis there must open up a gap between necessity and its opposite impossibility. Necessity is aligned with Actuality, and Possibility aligned with the Arbitrary. But in order for something to cross over from possibility to actuality there needs to be another moment of potential. For something to be denied the ability to cross over from necessary to the arbitrary there must be the impossible as a barrier. And that means there must be a middle ground between actuality and possibility as well which we can call sufficiency.

Now if we take this conceptual structure as given as the background set of modalities that allow Kant to talk about the necessity that grounds the possibility of experience, then we can discuss the unnecessary lacks grounding for the impossible. In other words the impossible is unmotivated. It is truly spontaneous and the limit of spontaneity from which experience arises. We can read Kant as a meditation on modality, where he wishes to get from the necessary grounds of actual experience by means of positing the transcendentals as the impossible but sufficient lack of grounds for the unknowability of invisibles beyond experience. The spark that jumps this abyss is the intuition of a priori synthesis which gives us the potential for framing experience based on what is absolutely prior to it, in a logical sense.

Kant is always searching for the third moment that can link unreconcilable opposites. So for example he posits a priori synthesis in order to get beyond a priori analysis of reason, and the a posteriori synthesis and analysis within experience. Pure concept is connected to percepts by way of a third moment that connects them the projection of a priori synthesis that we intuit via the imagination. Heidegger seizes on his change in the status of the imagination between the first and second editions of the critique to interpret Kant as a pre-Heideggarian. Heidegger sees the more basic form of the imagination as equivalent to his idea of Dasein as the ability to project Being. Subsumed faculty of the imagination placed under another faculty is imagination tamed, and a step back from the abyss suggested by the free ranging imagination as an independent faculty.

So from all this I opine that the most basic and interesting concept in Kant is the one he does not articulate which is the unnecessary and arbitrary impossibility of the inexperience-able (i.e. the transcendentals) that gives rise to the potentiality to cross over into the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. This intermediate realm of potentiality allows the sufficient conditions for the actualization of experience.

As we know from Kubler’s Shape of Time actuality is a great mystery which is rooted in potentiality and sufficiency as a middle ground between impossibility and arbitrary on the one hand and necessity and possibility on the other.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Time:_Remarks_on_the_History_of_Things)

Kubler is the only one I know that has tried to delve into this area of how things become actual, i.e. cross over from possibility to actuality in any serious or deep way from the point of view of an Art Historian, i.e. one who is concerned with the shapes that well up from oblivion based on their first coming into Being as artifacts of a civilization, and then the subsequent loss of this civilization. He uses the metaphor of a light house, whose strobe lights up the darkness momentarily, so that we get a glimpse of what was lost in oblivion, through the relics that were preserved. We embed our experience of time within the things we shape, and we uncover the times of others so different from our own and glimpse other kinds of time when we dig up the artifacts from lost civilizations. Compressing our comprehension of time into shapes is a way to give others access to our own views of time from very different civilizations that have other embodied concepts of time that they embed into their artifacts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kubler
http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/kublerg.htm

But even as Bernstein in his critique of Kant, for not recognizing that there were many kinds of time, and Kubler who sees various civilizations experience of time embedded in their physical artifacts that we use to draw them back from the abyss of oblivion, there is little exploration of the exact mechanism by which things move over from possibility to actuality. I formulated an answer to this question as an addendum to my dissertation which is unpublished based on the work of Ian Thompson (http://www.ianthompson.org/philosophy_papers.htm) and the theory of dispositions. Design occurs in Hyper Being of possibilities, but for things to come into existence we need Wild Being of propensities. And the key concept that allows us to move between the extremes of Actuality and Possibility, or Arbitrary and Necessary is the ideas of Potential and Sufficiency. But this is based on understanding the Ultra Being of Unnecessary Impossibility as a limit. Kant skirts around this Impossible possibility and unnecessary adjunct (i.e. supplement) to his philosophy the same way he skirts around the idea of ethical evil as Zizek accuses him of doing. But it is from this hidden singularity in his thought that Hegel sees the French Revolution springing, the Irrational from the heart of critical reason. It is not a necessary condition for destructive chaos being unleashed by the French Revolution throwing off the oppression of sovereignty which ultimately only led back to Napoleonic sovereignty, i.e. from one nihilistic extreme to its opposite, and then back to the first, only with an intensification of nihilism. Hegel saw the advent of Napoleon as the dawning of a new age win which Absolute Spirit was embodied, but little did he imagine the death march of the troops into Russia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon)

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index

[Note: E. Tufte’s lecture on this map accessed through Intelligence^2 is brilliant.]

The terrible defeat by nature of the army of Napoleon, his first exile, his escape and defeat at Waterloo, and then second exile show how irrepressible Absolute Spirit can be when embodied in a single man who is the motive force behind historical changes. His reassertion of Sovereignty shaped his times. In him Hegel saw Absolute Reason working itself out in History re-establishing the state which represented Absolute Spirit as embodied by Absolute Monarchy. And this is the fundamental shift after Kant to the recognition that the intersubjective cohort was a horizon on which the individuals humanity was achieved. Absolute Spirit can be seen as an embodiment of that unnecessary Impossibility as Absolute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza