International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
But will Kant's analysis stand? Have we not here another of his few but
fatal slips,--like his doctrine of the dependence of Number upon Time
and Space, and its consequent subjection to them? It surely seems so. If
the veritable postulate of categorical syllogizing be, as Kant thinks it
is, merely the Subject, the self as experiencer of presented phenomena,
in contrast to the Object, the causally united sum of possible
phenomena; and if the true postulate of conditional syllogizing is this
cosmic Object, as contrasted with the correlate Subject, then it would
seem we cannot avoid certain pertinent questions. Is such a postulate
Subject any fit and adequate account of the whole Self, of the Soul?--is
there not a vital difference between this subject-self and the Self as
Person?--does not Kant himself imply so, in his doctrine of the primacy
of the Practical Reason? Again: Is not the World, as explained in Kant's
analysis, and as afterwards made by him the solution of the Cosmological
Antinomies, simply the supplemental factor necessarily correlate to the
subjective aspect of the conscious life, and reduced from its uncritical
rôle of thing-in-itself to the intelligible subordination required by
Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism?--and can this be any adequate
account of the Idea that is to stand in sufficing contrast to the whole
Self, the Person?--what less than the Society of Persons can meet the
World-Idea for that? Further: If with Kant we take the World to mean no
more than this object-factor in self-consciousness, must not the Soul,
the total Self, from which, according to Kant's Transcendental Idealism,
both Space and Time issue, supplying the basis for the immutable
contrast between the experiencing subject and the really experienced
objects,--must not this _whole_ Self be the real meaning of the
"Totality of Conditions, itself unconditioned," which comes into view as
simply the postulate of disjunctive syllogizing? How in the world can
disjunctive syllogizing, the confessed act of the _I_-thinking
intelligence, really postulate anything as Totality of Conditions, in
any other sense than the total of conditions for such syllogizing?--namely,
the conditioning _I_ that organizes and does the reasoning? There is
surely no warrant for calling this total, which simply transcends and
conditions the subject and the object of sensible experiences, by any
loftier name than that which Kant had already given it in the Deduction
of the Categories, when he designated it the "originally synthetic unity
of apperception (self-consciousness)," or "the _I_-thinking (_das
ich-denke_) that must accompany all my mental presentations,"--that is
to say, the whole Self, or thinking Person, idealistically interpreted.
The use of the name God in this connection, where Kant is in fact only
seeking the roots of the three orders of the syllogism _when reasoning
has by supposition been restricted to the subject-matter of experience_,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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