I love Dylan Shaul's videos! His video on Hegel is some of the best philosophical content I've seen on YT. And this pantheism series is equally excellent so far. Dylan presents the material in such a clear manner, without "dumbing it down", but also doesn't get bogged down in scholarly minutia. He's a really fantastic teacher, imo. Much gratitude to Zevi for showcasing Dylan's work on the channel. 🙏
i really enjoy this guest speakers lectures. i'm also glad that the channel is putting up these kind of lecture videos again as opposed to just strictly podcast style discussions/interviews. to quickly paraphrase the way i think about kant's argument is, one cannot prove or disprove any metaphysical or ontological argument, but there is a very strong existential case to be made for spirit/god/consciousness/the one, etc. (whatever you want to call it). ie kant's argument is based on morality, for me morality is just one aspect of the benefits of a transcendent spiritual, philosophical structure.
First of all many thanks for this interesting series of lectures, especially the third one! This second video is not bad as an introduction to a key part of Kant’s project for someone who’s not yet familiar with it. But as a Kant expert I can’t help but note that your expertise seems to lie more with Hegel than Kant, and while the overall lecture got the point, there are some details I’d like to correct: The way Kant is presented here makes it seem like his philosophy was (at least in a large part) a reaction to Spinoza. I have my doubts about Kant even reading Spinoza. But surely Spinoza was not an important influence to him. He went through a Renaissance only in the wake of the pantheism controversy, so the younger generation that grew up in this time, people like Fichte, Schelling or Hegel, took interest in Spinoza. But Kant was of an older generation. His Critique of Pure Reason first came out in 1781, before the pantheism controversy, and he had spent over a decade working on it. He already felt in the 60s that Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics was insufficient. It was his reading of Hume as well as Crusius, also his critique of Swedenborg and disappointment in him which influenced him, hardly Spinoza whom he doesn’t mention in this time, not even in his notes, and also later never credits as an influence. He makes some passing remarks about Spinoza here and there, considering him a virtuous man unjustly slandered for his atheism, which he considers only a theoretical error (and to Kant it is always the practical which matters). - Now there’s an interesting tendency in Kant towards his own sort of transcendental Spinozism and maybe even a sort of empirical Spinozism if we take his Opus postumum into account, but I don’t think that he was strongly influenced by Spinoza in those thoughts. I’d be interested in the source for Kant calling Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem irrefutable. Because I’ve read all 29 volumes of Kant’s writings and Kant remember such a remark nor find it in my notes. He does praise the book as showing prudence, delicacy and acumen, but I don’t recall him calling it irrefutable. And I’d be surprised if he did, since all of his critical project is essentially a refutation of leibniz-wolffian dogmatism and therefore also of Mendelssohn. Kant does not conclude in the Critique of Pure Reason that since God, the immortality of the soul or freedom cannot be refuted, they are, while not proven, at least possible. On the contrary, he stresses that even calling them possible would be saying too much. Possibility, like the other eleven categories, is meaningless, if it isn’t connected to any sort of sensual intuition. We can say that it is possible to THINK these ideas, i. e. they don’t contradict themselves, but not whether their objects are possible, as we don’t know about the actual conditions that would have to be met for a God or an immortal soul or a freedom to be possible, any more than we know about the conditions that would have to be met for them to actually exist. - The overall point of this lecture is still correct though: Since we don’t know about these ideas (not even their possibility), their objects can’t be ruled out, which allows for a belief if practical reason provides grounds for such a belief. As for that belief: This lecture makes it sound like Kant believes In freedom the same way as he does in God and the immortality of the soul. The idea of freedom however has objective reality to him. objective PRACTICAL reality, but objective reality nonetheless. The moral law makes freedom necessary. God and the immortality of the soul are not strictly necessary in the same way, they are not constitutive ideas and you can be moral without believing in them - but you’d have to feel like a fool, Kant would say. The moral law demands only that you STRIVE towards realising the highest good. It only demands good will from you, not success. So it doesn’t demand that you actually ACCOMPLISH the highest good. But if we truly believed a goal to not be accomplishable at all, we’d feel foolish for still striving towards it. And that’s why Kant says belief in God and immortality is also needed. Because without it we only have the option to either be a fool or evil (most likely a reference to Paul), i. e. either follow a moral law while believing it to be unfulfillable or discarding it and seeking our own self-interest instead of our duty. Finally you mention one criticism of Kant being that the highest good only comes about through God, the humans aren’t needed for that. I don’t know who formulated that particular criticism, but he seems to not have read Kant. As you yourself explain, the highest good has two parts: Happiness and the deserving of happiness (virtue), both in proportion to one another. God is only responsible for the first part, i. e. giving happiness to those who deserve it. But he himself Kant make us deserving of it. Kant is quite adamant about this. To him all value comes through reason, through freedom, through autonomy. God could create a world of puppets who always do the right thing, but it would be meaningless. And the happiness of those puppets or robots would be undeserved, it would mean no more than the happiness of cows on a meadow. We must become worthy of happiness through our own virtue. Kant also calls God the original highest good (as he has ultimate happiness or felicity and is also deserving of it as he has ultimate goodness or holiness), while the world to him is the highest derived good, as here happiness and worthiness aren’t there yet, but can be brought about. And that to him is the very reason for the world’s existence and an answer to the theodicy problem: It was good that God existed, a being that already is holy and happy, but God recognised that it would be good for that highest good to be copied in a way but also to be different in a way, i. e. it was good for a highest good to exist which is not the highest good from the start but rather BECOMES good through striving and struggling. - Which maybe is where Kant actually comes a little closer to Hegel. The actual criticism of Kant’s philosophy of religion (considered the weakest part of his philosophy by his only true heir, that is Fichte) should be directed at something else: From Fichte till Schopenhauer, what has rightly been criticized is that the God Kant tries to proof is just the dispenser of happiness. Humans do their duty - and then God pays them their reward. That is unbefitting of God’s dignity. And it also contradicts Kant’s otherwise stoic moral philosophy which is precisely about NOT caring for a reward or for happiness, just for virtue. I am always reminded here of what Hegel said to the young Heinrich Heine when he talked of heaven: “What, do you want to receive a tip because you cared for your old frail mother and didn’t poison your brother?” But as Fichte also points out to Kant’s credit: His heart was better than his mind in regards to morality and religion. The letter of Kant’s philosophy is quite insufficient here and he himself seems to have felt that and not been content with the level of clarity he reached on this topic, but the spirit behind the letter is better. Fichte quite effortlessly gave us a better moral argument for God: He is needed not to reward the good we did here in this brief life on earth, but rather so that we can eternally continue doing good and striving to become ever closer to him and turn ever more into his living image. Edit: Oh and I forgot - that story about the people of Königsberg setting their clocks after Kant is wrong. It goes back to a satirical play by Kant's friend Hippel, but he based it not on Kant but on the tradesman Green, arguably Kant's closest friend.
An excellent and precise expert delivery by Dylan Shaul that I was able to follow note for note even as it challenges my perceptions, assumptions and preconceptions simply for the precision of deliberation! And what an opening to a world of philosophical discovery!
This is a great series. I hope you won’t leave Friedrich Schleiermacher out because Schleiermacher’s response to the Spinozism controversy was one of the more fascinating ones.
Amazing how Schopenhauer’s philosophy aims to bridge the gap between Kant and Spinoza by admitting to the kantian distinction of phainomena-nooumena while at the same time, acknowledging that everything in the phenomenal world is interconnected and, ultimately, one unified will, separated into countless objectifications through space, time and causality
One correction I have to insist on: the things considered in themselves are not to be taken as "true" reality whereas the appearance are to be taken as "mere seemings" or "appearances of the things as they are in themselves". This would invoke a sort of deficiency. The noumena, for Kant, is a baggage that he seeks to get rid of. Space and time do really exist, just not in abstraction to the subject.
Anyone ever wonder how psychedelics like Ayahuasca, DMT and LSD would have or could have changed what we're learning from their beliefs and philosophies today😂 I wonder how the absence of those experiences plays a part in the whole matter. Imagine if they all had gotten a hold of some shrooms and tripped for hours. Or does anyone know if they were aware of these substances and experiences from other sources in their day?
They knew full well that there were substances that alter your consciousness. They had alcohol, if nothing else. But Kant would not have been a philosopher or even an aufkläred person if he had just blindly accepted such subjective perceptions without questioning them. He would have told you: Such a perception proves nothing, as you have no way of knowing whether it's a real higher insight or simply drug-induced fever dreams, and believing otherwise would have made you a Schwärmer (fanatic) in his eyes. Aufklärung starts with questioning yourself. "I saw it, therefore it is real" is no better an argument in the theoretical than "This offends me, therefore it is evil" is in the practical. You need to ask WHAT you saw and WHY, WHAT offended you and WHY etc. Ultimately Kant relied on what he called the maxim of healthy reason. His whole philosophical project is about trying to save and preserve reason and its use, both from materialism but also fanaticism. So he would say: We ought to do and believe whatever allows us use of our reason. When some paper randomly blows from your table, you can believe it was the wind coming through the window - then you can make use of the laws of nature and close the window. Or you can believe it was a ghost - then you can do nothing, this belief, even if it was right, would be useless as it doesn't give but take freedom, doesn't broaden your applications of reason to life but narrows them. So he would say: Such a drug-induced vision of God may be true or not - it doesn't help our reason one bit. We should rather focus on what we ought to do: Our moral duty. Anything distracting us from that is evil and foolish.
Kant's deductive reasoning that there has to be a God and the soul immortal in order for man to do what he ought to, relies first on an intutive moral instinct which he assumes as an axiom. If one questions that man 'ought' to be moral, if for example one isn't feeling an inner compunction to be so, then the entire chain of proof for the transcendent world falls down. So this great solution Kant seems to make really just panders to popular sentiments which he assumes everyone shares because they are religious to begin with, and is no solution at all but a work around shoring up his credibility.
@optimisticdeterminist2291 Thank you. His arguments for why morality has value are perhaps very good ones, yet his chain of deductions about the existence of things in the noumenal world are apparently based on their subjective necessity for morality. I think this is a weak argument even if its ends are good ones. Nihilism doesn't need morality to establish its claims, and if morality can be trivialized as subjective and not objective, then there is no need for the noumenal world to have a good God or an immortal soul. I don't wish morality to be subjective myself, but Kant's apparent reliance on this deduction of God's existence by rational necessity, but never by any natural proof and only beyond reach, is a sand castle to be kicked over by irrational bullies. Let me clarify that it's no great thing to allow that God exists only because your reason allows you to believe it based on your projections of your own subjective moral feelings. No wonder people preferred Spinoza. Kant is setting up a house of cards about the inferred goodness of some noumenal world beyond proof, while denying both God and free will exist in nature and human experience. It's really very unsatisfactory.
@optimisticdeterminist2291 Again, thank you. I haven't studied Kant in the depth necessary to be a philosophy student. I have studied theology quite a bit more, and perhaps my bias makes me dislike Kant as a sort of fence-sitter on the subject of God. It is appreciable to establish God's existence through philosophical means, however, because the truth should be obvious to objective reason and science. So he does well to reach such an obvious conclusion, but the way he does so seems to place too much emphasis on man as the measure of all things, which is still off the mark, imo.
Kant's moral argument for God relies on morality, yes. He himself would openly admit so. (Though NOT on some moral instinct. Kant was in fact a great enemy of the moral sense theories of his days and it is one of his greatest achivements to have shown that morality does not rely on some vague and completely subjective feelings.) But not only are other proofs for God impossible (he refuted them all). Even if they were possible - what God would they proof? Only an immoral God. An all powerful creator with SOME will, but without us knowing WHAT his will is. That would require either blind faith in some revelation telling us his will - but how to know which revelation is true? Or it would lead to us trembling in fear of him possibly wishing us ill, and therefore it would lead to us seeking to appease him by all kinds of non-moral means like prayer, sacrifice, pilgrimage etc., i. e. it would lead to superstition. The real core of Kant's philosophy of religion, not touched upon in this lecture, is that he shows that God can only be good and religion can only mean to follow your conscience and do the will of the holy, i. e. be good. That aside: When you feel instinctive bias and dislike, you should not act upon it and critcize the other, rather you should look inside and criticize yourself, asking where this may come from. I don't know what theology you studied, but if christian, then you will know what Jesus says about the mote in the other's eye and the beam in one's own. It seems to me that what you want from a proof for God is an argument which "forces" people to accept him, no matter whether they want to or not, whether they are good or not. But that is not possible. Again, if you studied theology, you will know that Jesus says: Even if the dead rose and preached, some people would not believe. (Just as the Qu'ran says: God could lift the unbelievers up into heaven and still they'd say "we're only dreaming".) Jesus himself ultimately uses a moral argument, saying: If you want to do the will of him who sent me (i. e. if you want to be good), THEN you will know that it is indeed he who sent me. It is Kant's greatest achievement to move philosophy from the theoretical towards the practical. Fichte built upon that and went even deeper. He clearly showed: What you choose to believe in depends on what kind of person you are. Finding the truth deserves credit, being wrong is a sin. Because it is a choice. That doesn't just go for belief in God but for anything. Even where you do have scientific proof, you find people refusing to accept it. Why do people deny the climate crisis? Because the proof is not "forcing" them strongly enough to accept it? No, because they are evil at heart - they are people not wanting to take responsibility for their actions, not wanting to change their lifestyle etc. Once they turn into better human beings, they also start to accept this truth. The truth of God is only the peak of this, but not different in quality. Fichte clearly shows that even the belief in nature cannot be "proven", you could very well be a total sceptic and nihilist, and that even here it is merely morality that makes us believe in this world's and our own existence. Knowledge in a world doesn't come first and then morality as an afterthought, it's the other way around: Morality comes first, believing in a world, in yourself, in God is derived from there and only from there and you have ZERO reason to believe in ANYTHING if you don't accept morality. And quite frankly, I wouldn't trust anyone trying to get around this and to get through (let alone prove God) without relying on morality.
@@Jonathan.Ivo.Loewer That's a really thoughtful answer, and I am touched that you care enough to give the question the amount of time you have. I don't quite see how morality precedes God in order of appearance, however. Morality to me presupposes some objective right and wrong, and that means that a first principle must be established from which one deduces what it means to be moral. Can you please explain how this works in your view?
@@MichaelK.-xl2qk I never quite understood why so many people believe God would be necessary for there to be a moral law. Funnily enough, many believers and atheists seem to agree on that, the believers will try to use it as an argument for why believing in God is necessary, while the average atheist will believe there is no moral law because there is no good, there is only sympathy, utilitarian calculations and so on. If you think about it, it’s really the other way around: If your morality would be based solely on God having commanded it (leaving aside the issue of how we know if there is a God and what his commands are), then it would NOT be a moral law and our duty at all. Just like when the government demands or forbids certain actions, that has nothing to do with morality. God would simply be some heavenly dictator, giving commands as he sees fit. Why would it be our DUTY to do what God wants? Why would doing it be good, not doing it evil? I see why you’d want to do it out of self-interest, so as not to go to hell. But when you keep the state’s laws so as not to go to prison, that has nothing to do with moral duty either. And you couldn’t accuse someone not following God of being evil, you could just accuse him of being stupid, because he gets himself into hell. Also, God could change what’s good or evil on a whim in that case. Today he could forbid murder, tomorrow he could allow it. And saying God is good would lose all meaning, if there is no such thing as “good”, except for what God decides to call good. “Good” would then mean “whatever God wants”, so of course he’d always be good, even if he commanded mass murder. This is the whole point of Kant’s moral philosophy: Whenever you have a principle of heteronomy, i. e. a moral law outside of you, whether you try to ground it in God or in moral sense or in culture or whatever, there is no reason why following it would be good or not following it would be evil, at best you could argue that following it would be beneficial for you. Kant revolutionized practical philosophy by pointing out morality is based on autonomy: We as rational beings are free, we don’t have to just follow a law of nature dictated by our instincts, we can, through reason, give ourselves our own law. That is the only way you get an actual “ought”, an actual moral duty instead of just a “something outside of you wants you to do this and makes promises or threats to convince you”. No, you OUGHT to do this, you, through your own reason, command yourself to do it. That’s also why morality is not about not causing suffering or being nice or any such thing, not directly. It’s about regard for freedom, for autonomy. Murder is not evil because it hurts someone, because that would imply there first being a law saying “you mustn’t hurt anyone”, murder is evil because it takes away completely someone’s autonomy. We ought to act morally simply out of regard for the moral law itself, for the fact that we have the ability to give ourselves a law. That’s the whole point: People usually try to prove some sort of material law, so a law that has some sort of content. That doesn’t work, unless you have a selfish interest in that specific content (i. e. helping someone out of compassion, so ultimately helping yourself because you feel bad for that person). Kant shows the moral law is purely formal, it has no content, it simply says: Act lawful, i. e. act in a manner that makes your actions not contradict and that preserves the ability to act according to your own law, instead of according to nature’s dictates. That is of course a very brief and over-simplified overview. I suggest getting deeper into Kant’s or Fichte’s moral writings if this truly interests you. Like the Groundworks of the Metaphysics of Morals. I plan giving more extensive lectures on this within this year, but unfortunately I can’t link there yet, as I’m just starting talking about Kant’s theoretical philosophy for now.
I love Dylan Shaul's videos! His video on Hegel is some of the best philosophical content I've seen on YT. And this pantheism series is equally excellent so far. Dylan presents the material in such a clear manner, without "dumbing it down", but also doesn't get bogged down in scholarly minutia. He's a really fantastic teacher, imo.
Much gratitude to Zevi for showcasing Dylan's work on the channel. 🙏
i really enjoy this guest speakers lectures. i'm also glad that the channel is putting up these kind of lecture videos again as opposed to just strictly podcast style discussions/interviews. to quickly paraphrase the way i think about kant's argument is, one cannot prove or disprove any metaphysical or ontological argument, but there is a very strong existential case to be made for spirit/god/consciousness/the one, etc. (whatever you want to call it). ie kant's argument is based on morality, for me morality is just one aspect of the benefits of a transcendent spiritual, philosophical structure.
This is a treasure. I understand Kant far better than I thought possible and appreciate his contributions to philosophy. Thanks!
This channel as excellent summaries of these great philosophers. The best I’ve heard.
First of all many thanks for this interesting series of lectures, especially the third one!
This second video is not bad as an introduction to a key part of Kant’s project for someone who’s not yet familiar with it. But as a Kant expert I can’t help but note that your expertise seems to lie more with Hegel than Kant, and while the overall lecture got the point, there are some details I’d like to correct:
The way Kant is presented here makes it seem like his philosophy was (at least in a large part) a reaction to Spinoza. I have my doubts about Kant even reading Spinoza. But surely Spinoza was not an important influence to him. He went through a Renaissance only in the wake of the pantheism controversy, so the younger generation that grew up in this time, people like Fichte, Schelling or Hegel, took interest in Spinoza. But Kant was of an older generation. His Critique of Pure Reason first came out in 1781, before the pantheism controversy, and he had spent over a decade working on it. He already felt in the 60s that Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics was insufficient. It was his reading of Hume as well as Crusius, also his critique of Swedenborg and disappointment in him which influenced him, hardly Spinoza whom he doesn’t mention in this time, not even in his notes, and also later never credits as an influence. He makes some passing remarks about Spinoza here and there, considering him a virtuous man unjustly slandered for his atheism, which he considers only a theoretical error (and to Kant it is always the practical which matters). - Now there’s an interesting tendency in Kant towards his own sort of transcendental Spinozism and maybe even a sort of empirical Spinozism if we take his Opus postumum into account, but I don’t think that he was strongly influenced by Spinoza in those thoughts.
I’d be interested in the source for Kant calling Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem irrefutable. Because I’ve read all 29 volumes of Kant’s writings and Kant remember such a remark nor find it in my notes. He does praise the book as showing prudence, delicacy and acumen, but I don’t recall him calling it irrefutable. And I’d be surprised if he did, since all of his critical project is essentially a refutation of leibniz-wolffian dogmatism and therefore also of Mendelssohn.
Kant does not conclude in the Critique of Pure Reason that since God, the immortality of the soul or freedom cannot be refuted, they are, while not proven, at least possible. On the contrary, he stresses that even calling them possible would be saying too much. Possibility, like the other eleven categories, is meaningless, if it isn’t connected to any sort of sensual intuition. We can say that it is possible to THINK these ideas, i. e. they don’t contradict themselves, but not whether their objects are possible, as we don’t know about the actual conditions that would have to be met for a God or an immortal soul or a freedom to be possible, any more than we know about the conditions that would have to be met for them to actually exist. - The overall point of this lecture is still correct though: Since we don’t know about these ideas (not even their possibility), their objects can’t be ruled out, which allows for a belief if practical reason provides grounds for such a belief.
As for that belief: This lecture makes it sound like Kant believes In freedom the same way as he does in God and the immortality of the soul. The idea of freedom however has objective reality to him. objective PRACTICAL reality, but objective reality nonetheless. The moral law makes freedom necessary. God and the immortality of the soul are not strictly necessary in the same way, they are not constitutive ideas and you can be moral without believing in them - but you’d have to feel like a fool, Kant would say. The moral law demands only that you STRIVE towards realising the highest good. It only demands good will from you, not success. So it doesn’t demand that you actually ACCOMPLISH the highest good. But if we truly believed a goal to not be accomplishable at all, we’d feel foolish for still striving towards it. And that’s why Kant says belief in God and immortality is also needed. Because without it we only have the option to either be a fool or evil (most likely a reference to Paul), i. e. either follow a moral law while believing it to be unfulfillable or discarding it and seeking our own self-interest instead of our duty.
Finally you mention one criticism of Kant being that the highest good only comes about through God, the humans aren’t needed for that. I don’t know who formulated that particular criticism, but he seems to not have read Kant. As you yourself explain, the highest good has two parts: Happiness and the deserving of happiness (virtue), both in proportion to one another. God is only responsible for the first part, i. e. giving happiness to those who deserve it. But he himself Kant make us deserving of it. Kant is quite adamant about this. To him all value comes through reason, through freedom, through autonomy. God could create a world of puppets who always do the right thing, but it would be meaningless. And the happiness of those puppets or robots would be undeserved, it would mean no more than the happiness of cows on a meadow. We must become worthy of happiness through our own virtue. Kant also calls God the original highest good (as he has ultimate happiness or felicity and is also deserving of it as he has ultimate goodness or holiness), while the world to him is the highest derived good, as here happiness and worthiness aren’t there yet, but can be brought about. And that to him is the very reason for the world’s existence and an answer to the theodicy problem: It was good that God existed, a being that already is holy and happy, but God recognised that it would be good for that highest good to be copied in a way but also to be different in a way, i. e. it was good for a highest good to exist which is not the highest good from the start but rather BECOMES good through striving and struggling. - Which maybe is where Kant actually comes a little closer to Hegel. The actual criticism of Kant’s philosophy of religion (considered the weakest part of his philosophy by his only true heir, that is Fichte) should be directed at something else: From Fichte till Schopenhauer, what has rightly been criticized is that the God Kant tries to proof is just the dispenser of happiness. Humans do their duty - and then God pays them their reward. That is unbefitting of God’s dignity. And it also contradicts Kant’s otherwise stoic moral philosophy which is precisely about NOT caring for a reward or for happiness, just for virtue. I am always reminded here of what Hegel said to the young Heinrich Heine when he talked of heaven: “What, do you want to receive a tip because you cared for your old frail mother and didn’t poison your brother?” But as Fichte also points out to Kant’s credit: His heart was better than his mind in regards to morality and religion. The letter of Kant’s philosophy is quite insufficient here and he himself seems to have felt that and not been content with the level of clarity he reached on this topic, but the spirit behind the letter is better. Fichte quite effortlessly gave us a better moral argument for God: He is needed not to reward the good we did here in this brief life on earth, but rather so that we can eternally continue doing good and striving to become ever closer to him and turn ever more into his living image.
Edit: Oh and I forgot - that story about the people of Königsberg setting their clocks after Kant is wrong. It goes back to a satirical play by Kant's friend Hippel, but he based it not on Kant but on the tradesman Green, arguably Kant's closest friend.
As a devout follower of Kant, thanks for this video.
A synagogue on my walk to work was celebrating sukkot outside on Saturday, a tent is up still & it’s nice to see.
Dylan here casually interrupting our dogmatic slumber.
Wonderful video😊
An excellent and precise expert delivery by Dylan Shaul that I was able to follow note for note even as it challenges my perceptions, assumptions and preconceptions simply for the precision of deliberation! And what an opening to a world of philosophical discovery!
Man this series is really good
Thank you for this series!
You’re most welcome 🙏🏼
I LOVE Kant's philosophy. Thanks for THIS, bro.
Ikr. It's lterally fucking brilliant
Thanks for this. This renewed an appreciation of the contributions of Kant.
Wish more would be awakened from dogmatic slumber listening to Dylan’s 3 part series. If you don’t know better ask seekers of unity ❤
This is a great series. I hope you won’t leave Friedrich Schleiermacher out because Schleiermacher’s response to the Spinozism controversy was one of the more fascinating ones.
This video better clarified things about Kant that I thought were really contradictory, thanks.
The explanation of the book's title by itself is gold.
Thank you!
A question: Isn't Kant going back to Plato's cave allegory?
loving the series thank you
great series!! thank you
Amazing how Schopenhauer’s philosophy aims to bridge the gap between Kant and Spinoza by admitting to the kantian distinction of phainomena-nooumena while at the same time, acknowledging that everything in the phenomenal world is interconnected and, ultimately, one unified will, separated into countless objectifications through space, time and causality
Loving the series
One correction I have to insist on: the things considered in themselves are not to be taken as "true" reality whereas the appearance are to be taken as "mere seemings" or "appearances of the things as they are in themselves". This would invoke a sort of deficiency. The noumena, for Kant, is a baggage that he seeks to get rid of.
Space and time do really exist, just not in abstraction to the subject.
Watch the next episode: ruclips.net/video/P8TE6-jlAU0/видео.htmlsi=mgIFoFtPk4Xe8vTT
EXCELLENT!
Thank you. :)
Great video, thank you Watched all of it 19:31
as a pantheist, i *know* (heh heh) there is god and that god is everything including the cause of everything and is not separate.
Algormancy!
Who is he?
Anyone ever wonder how psychedelics like Ayahuasca, DMT and LSD would have or could have changed what we're learning from their beliefs and philosophies today😂 I wonder how the absence of those experiences plays a part in the whole matter. Imagine if they all had gotten a hold of some shrooms and tripped for hours. Or does anyone know if they were aware of these substances and experiences from other sources in their day?
They knew full well that there were substances that alter your consciousness. They had alcohol, if nothing else. But Kant would not have been a philosopher or even an aufkläred person if he had just blindly accepted such subjective perceptions without questioning them. He would have told you: Such a perception proves nothing, as you have no way of knowing whether it's a real higher insight or simply drug-induced fever dreams, and believing otherwise would have made you a Schwärmer (fanatic) in his eyes.
Aufklärung starts with questioning yourself. "I saw it, therefore it is real" is no better an argument in the theoretical than "This offends me, therefore it is evil" is in the practical. You need to ask WHAT you saw and WHY, WHAT offended you and WHY etc.
Ultimately Kant relied on what he called the maxim of healthy reason. His whole philosophical project is about trying to save and preserve reason and its use, both from materialism but also fanaticism. So he would say: We ought to do and believe whatever allows us use of our reason. When some paper randomly blows from your table, you can believe it was the wind coming through the window - then you can make use of the laws of nature and close the window. Or you can believe it was a ghost - then you can do nothing, this belief, even if it was right, would be useless as it doesn't give but take freedom, doesn't broaden your applications of reason to life but narrows them. So he would say: Such a drug-induced vision of God may be true or not - it doesn't help our reason one bit. We should rather focus on what we ought to do: Our moral duty. Anything distracting us from that is evil and foolish.
Kant's deductive reasoning that there has to be a God and the soul immortal in order for man to do what he ought to, relies first on an intutive moral instinct which he assumes as an axiom. If one questions that man 'ought' to be moral, if for example one isn't feeling an inner compunction to be so, then the entire chain of proof for the transcendent world falls down. So this great solution Kant seems to make really just panders to popular sentiments which he assumes everyone shares because they are religious to begin with, and is no solution at all but a work around shoring up his credibility.
@optimisticdeterminist2291 Thank you. His arguments for why morality has value are perhaps very good ones, yet his chain of deductions about the existence of things in the noumenal world are apparently based on their subjective necessity for morality. I think this is a weak argument even if its ends are good ones. Nihilism doesn't need morality to establish its claims, and if morality can be trivialized as subjective and not objective, then there is no need for the noumenal world to have a good God or an immortal soul. I don't wish morality to be subjective myself, but Kant's apparent reliance on this deduction of God's existence by rational necessity, but never by any natural proof and only beyond reach, is a sand castle to be kicked over by irrational bullies.
Let me clarify that it's no great thing to allow that God exists only because your reason allows you to believe it based on your projections of your own subjective moral feelings. No wonder people preferred Spinoza. Kant is setting up a house of cards about the inferred goodness of some noumenal world beyond proof, while denying both God and free will exist in nature and human experience. It's really very unsatisfactory.
@optimisticdeterminist2291 Again, thank you. I haven't studied Kant in the depth necessary to be a philosophy student. I have studied theology quite a bit more, and perhaps my bias makes me dislike Kant as a sort of fence-sitter on the subject of God. It is appreciable to establish God's existence through philosophical means, however, because the truth should be obvious to objective reason and science. So he does well to reach such an obvious conclusion, but the way he does so seems to place too much emphasis on man as the measure of all things, which is still off the mark, imo.
Kant's moral argument for God relies on morality, yes. He himself would openly admit so. (Though NOT on some moral instinct. Kant was in fact a great enemy of the moral sense theories of his days and it is one of his greatest achivements to have shown that morality does not rely on some vague and completely subjective feelings.) But not only are other proofs for God impossible (he refuted them all). Even if they were possible - what God would they proof? Only an immoral God. An all powerful creator with SOME will, but without us knowing WHAT his will is. That would require either blind faith in some revelation telling us his will - but how to know which revelation is true? Or it would lead to us trembling in fear of him possibly wishing us ill, and therefore it would lead to us seeking to appease him by all kinds of non-moral means like prayer, sacrifice, pilgrimage etc., i. e. it would lead to superstition. The real core of Kant's philosophy of religion, not touched upon in this lecture, is that he shows that God can only be good and religion can only mean to follow your conscience and do the will of the holy, i. e. be good. That aside: When you feel instinctive bias and dislike, you should not act upon it and critcize the other, rather you should look inside and criticize yourself, asking where this may come from. I don't know what theology you studied, but if christian, then you will know what Jesus says about the mote in the other's eye and the beam in one's own. It seems to me that what you want from a proof for God is an argument which "forces" people to accept him, no matter whether they want to or not, whether they are good or not. But that is not possible. Again, if you studied theology, you will know that Jesus says: Even if the dead rose and preached, some people would not believe. (Just as the Qu'ran says: God could lift the unbelievers up into heaven and still they'd say "we're only dreaming".) Jesus himself ultimately uses a moral argument, saying: If you want to do the will of him who sent me (i. e. if you want to be good), THEN you will know that it is indeed he who sent me. It is Kant's greatest achievement to move philosophy from the theoretical towards the practical. Fichte built upon that and went even deeper. He clearly showed: What you choose to believe in depends on what kind of person you are. Finding the truth deserves credit, being wrong is a sin. Because it is a choice. That doesn't just go for belief in God but for anything. Even where you do have scientific proof, you find people refusing to accept it. Why do people deny the climate crisis? Because the proof is not "forcing" them strongly enough to accept it? No, because they are evil at heart - they are people not wanting to take responsibility for their actions, not wanting to change their lifestyle etc. Once they turn into better human beings, they also start to accept this truth. The truth of God is only the peak of this, but not different in quality. Fichte clearly shows that even the belief in nature cannot be "proven", you could very well be a total sceptic and nihilist, and that even here it is merely morality that makes us believe in this world's and our own existence. Knowledge in a world doesn't come first and then morality as an afterthought, it's the other way around: Morality comes first, believing in a world, in yourself, in God is derived from there and only from there and you have ZERO reason to believe in ANYTHING if you don't accept morality. And quite frankly, I wouldn't trust anyone trying to get around this and to get through (let alone prove God) without relying on morality.
@@Jonathan.Ivo.Loewer That's a really thoughtful answer, and I am touched that you care enough to give the question the amount of time you have. I don't quite see how morality precedes God in order of appearance, however. Morality to me presupposes some objective right and wrong, and that means that a first principle must be established from which one deduces what it means to be moral. Can you please explain how this works in your view?
@@MichaelK.-xl2qk I never quite understood why so many people believe God would be necessary for there to be a moral law. Funnily enough, many believers and atheists seem to agree on that, the believers will try to use it as an argument for why believing in God is necessary, while the average atheist will believe there is no moral law because there is no good, there is only sympathy, utilitarian calculations and so on.
If you think about it, it’s really the other way around: If your morality would be based solely on God having commanded it (leaving aside the issue of how we know if there is a God and what his commands are), then it would NOT be a moral law and our duty at all. Just like when the government demands or forbids certain actions, that has nothing to do with morality. God would simply be some heavenly dictator, giving commands as he sees fit. Why would it be our DUTY to do what God wants? Why would doing it be good, not doing it evil? I see why you’d want to do it out of self-interest, so as not to go to hell. But when you keep the state’s laws so as not to go to prison, that has nothing to do with moral duty either. And you couldn’t accuse someone not following God of being evil, you could just accuse him of being stupid, because he gets himself into hell. Also, God could change what’s good or evil on a whim in that case. Today he could forbid murder, tomorrow he could allow it. And saying God is good would lose all meaning, if there is no such thing as “good”, except for what God decides to call good. “Good” would then mean “whatever God wants”, so of course he’d always be good, even if he commanded mass murder.
This is the whole point of Kant’s moral philosophy: Whenever you have a principle of heteronomy, i. e. a moral law outside of you, whether you try to ground it in God or in moral sense or in culture or whatever, there is no reason why following it would be good or not following it would be evil, at best you could argue that following it would be beneficial for you. Kant revolutionized practical philosophy by pointing out morality is based on autonomy: We as rational beings are free, we don’t have to just follow a law of nature dictated by our instincts, we can, through reason, give ourselves our own law. That is the only way you get an actual “ought”, an actual moral duty instead of just a “something outside of you wants you to do this and makes promises or threats to convince you”. No, you OUGHT to do this, you, through your own reason, command yourself to do it. That’s also why morality is not about not causing suffering or being nice or any such thing, not directly. It’s about regard for freedom, for autonomy. Murder is not evil because it hurts someone, because that would imply there first being a law saying “you mustn’t hurt anyone”, murder is evil because it takes away completely someone’s autonomy. We ought to act morally simply out of regard for the moral law itself, for the fact that we have the ability to give ourselves a law. That’s the whole point: People usually try to prove some sort of material law, so a law that has some sort of content. That doesn’t work, unless you have a selfish interest in that specific content (i. e. helping someone out of compassion, so ultimately helping yourself because you feel bad for that person). Kant shows the moral law is purely formal, it has no content, it simply says: Act lawful, i. e. act in a manner that makes your actions not contradict and that preserves the ability to act according to your own law, instead of according to nature’s dictates.
That is of course a very brief and over-simplified overview. I suggest getting deeper into Kant’s or Fichte’s moral writings if this truly interests you. Like the Groundworks of the Metaphysics of Morals. I plan giving more extensive lectures on this within this year, but unfortunately I can’t link there yet, as I’m just starting talking about Kant’s theoretical philosophy for now.
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