Metaphysical Meandering from Jordan Peterson to an Odd Refutation of Anti-Realism
Actually written APRIL 27, 2023
Since Jordan Peterson is currently famous, I begin with him to make this writing more interesting to a wider audience. From Peterson, I will tell the story of my meandering chain of thoughts leading to an odd refutation of anti-realist metaphysics.
Peterson claims that Marxists abandoned their pretense at being scientific when the empirical evidence refuted their position, and thereafter embraced postmodernism as its new supporting framework, a framework of irrational-ism used to undercut the validity of empirical science. Like children loosing the game, the Marxists changed the game’s rules to reinterpret themselves as the real winners.
Many people believe Peterson got this shpeal from Objectivist philosopher, Stephen Hicks, who wrote a book called Explaining Postmodernism. Hicks, like most Objectivists and their sympathizers, traces the origins of postmodernism to 18th century philosopher, Emmanuel Kant.
In turn, video blogger Jonas Ceika / CCK Philosophy claims Hicks is wrong about postmodernism in general, and wrong about Kant.
This got me wondering whether any Objectivist has ever proved that Kant started postmodernism, or rather, paved the way for postmodernism. And basically this means proving that Kant was that alleged “father of idealism” – father of a sophisticated anti-realist metaphysics and epistemology.
On this issue, my mind went to an audio recording of a lecture by Objectivist philosopher, David Kelley, in which he quotes Kant: “Hitherto it has been supposed that all our knowledge must conform to the objects: but, under that supposition, all attempts to establish anything about them a priori, by means of concepts, and thus to enlarge our knowledge, have come to nothing. The experiment, therefore, ought to be made, whether we should not succeed better with the problems of metaphysics, by assuming that objects must conform to our mode of cognition…” (Audio lecture by David Kelley, “Foundations of Knowledge, Primacy of Existence”, Laissez Faire Books)
Well, that’s an interesting quote. But of course Kelly also wrote a peer reviewed book in which he does take Kant as the “father of” idealism/anti-realism, where he wrote: “He [Kant] regards the nouminal world as unknowable, not merely unprovable but unknowable in principle, by the very nature of consciousness; and he regards the nouminal world – reality – as irrelevant to our epistemological standards of truth and justification. In this respect, Kant is the father of idealism.” (The Evidence of the Senses, P21)
Ceika contradicts Kelley by stating of Kant: “And to say that for Kant our reason is limited to structuring our subjective creations is flat out false. Because Kant very clearly stated that what our categories of understanding structure is not subjective creations, but sensory data given to us by the thing in itself, which is Kant’s term for external things outside of relations to human subjects.” (Video by Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy “A Critique of Stephen Hicks’ ‘Explaining Postmodernism’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHtvTGaPzF4 )
For those interested in how Kelley might reply to Ceika, I refer to Kelley’s book wherever he addresses the issue in terms of sensationalist theories.
But enough of this. It is time to meander to the next thought.
I speculated that Ceika was right, and Objectivists are simply wrong about Kant.
And I gave Kant credit for calling his hypotheses an “experiment” that “out to be made”, rather than the last word on metaphysics.
It reminded me of my own version of the experiment. I once tried to make sense of anti-realism, tried to construct a version of it that could avoid self-refutation. I could not actually do this, as the self-refutation is inescapable. But I did have some interesting ideas along the way.
Early in the attempt, it was the self-refutation that led me to try for an anti-realism that subordinated itself to an overarching realism. I call it “nested idealism”, a limited anti-realism nested within realism. Here the self-refutation served as a kind of transcendental insight into the truth of realism.
But other than this transcendental acknowledgment of realism, idealism was the rule. And this meant one basic thing: consciousness created its own content, as in what Kant wrote: “… objects must conform to our mode of cognition …” I tried to make this work. Here the whole thing hinged on the idea of “creation”.
At this level, idealism would equate consciousness with creation. To become aware of something is to create it. My gut reaction to this was “That’s stupid. To be aware of something, the something must exist first.” But I challenged myself. Sure, it is intuitively stupid. But is it logically impossible?
At first, I could not find any logical refutation of “consciousness equals creation”. I had to admit that it was logically possible. Nested idealism was logically possible.
But there was a paradox that needed to be explained away. There exist multiple minds that are conscious of one another, but sometimes not. So, either:
1.) These minds create each other. Each mind only exists so long as another mind is conscious of it.
Or,
2.) Not all of the mind’s objects are created by that mind. Other minds are not created in the act of being aware of them. Hence an exception to idealist creation.
Resolve this paradox with one singular master mind that creates all the other minds and the world they perceive, by being continuously aware of it all. A god.
Lots of details like this to resolve.
But later on in my thought experiment, another potential logical problem appeared to me. Literal creation is impossible. Here’s why: “creation” is a time-laden concept. “First it does not exist. Later in time, it exists.” But time is not metaphysically real, not intrinsic to existence, but rather it is a form of our awareness of metaphysical difference. Time is one of the ways (space being the other) we experience the finitude of something particular. The duration of something is not intrinsic to that something, but is the way our minds grasp its finitude, its distinctness from all else – the way we grasp difference. My argument for this is the same as my argument against the metaphysical reality of space: neither can be metaphysically real because they express Zeno’s infinity problem, and infinity again necessitates the existence of gaps in existence, gaps of “nothings” – non-existence that exists. (See my writing: “Against Metaphysical Continua”.)
And this refutes even a nested idealism. Consciousness cannot create its content because creation is logically impossible. Everything that exists, exists eternally, independently of time and space. Our experience of creation (and destruction) is just our way of experiencing the differences among things that exist.
If there’s really no such metaphysical thing as creation, then what is there? What’s really going on that we experience as creation, as change, as motion, as any and all of our time-space-laden experiences?
I go to my super-deep relationalism hypothesis described elsewhere. And therein I go to the merelogical simples. Some finite but super-vast quantity of simples exist without time or space in which to exist. Some of these simples are conscious of other simples. Consider yourself as one or more of these simples. Metaphysically, you are the one or more simples who are aware of other simples (or groups of simples), all of which are distinct from one another. Which of these other simples you are aware of depends on how the simples that are you relate to the simples that are the objects you are aware of. This relationship does not change. Your existence and their existence and the relationship you have with them are “eternal”, beyond time, unchanging. But your consciousness of the objects is such that you experience them as separated, distinct from one another, by means of a structure in that experience that corresponds to the differences between at least some of them. In our case, that structure of correspondence is in the form of time and space. It seems we cannot focus on everything all at once or all at one place, eternally. So our consciousness splits our finite focus along lines of differences among objects. This creates the experience of differences. And that experience must be in some form. For us, the form is time and space.
This business of our minds structuring the awareness of differences among groups of simples into some form, as an integral part of consciousness, gives me the impression of a kind of sensationalism, perhaps even a Kantian sensationalism. I don’t really know. I wish I were more versed in sensationalism. But if my impression is correct, then perhaps Kant was also just expressing this kind of sensationalism. And this is odd, ‘cause this kind of sensationalism, if it really is a kind of sensationalism, would be a realist sensationalism, making Kant a realist after all, as Ceika suggests. Did I say “realist sensationalism”? Ya. Near as I can tell, nothing logically wrong with that. Even Kelly admits “One could thus imagine a realist version of sensationalism.” (The Evidence of the Senses, P51)
But against that impression, I also have this other impression that overturns it. See, I also have the impression that for my super deep relationalism hypothesis to be a sensationalist one, it would need to regard our awareness of time and space as independent of our awareness of objects, or the simples that comprise them. Time and space would be a priori categories, theoretically available to our awareness abstractly, that we superimpose onto some other experience, to construct awareness of objects. My hypothesis does not make this claim. On my view, time and space might be “categories”, but it is not possible to experience them separately from the objects they construct from the differences among simples. We cannot experience time and space on the one hand, and the differences among simples on the other hand. We can only experience the differences among simples by means of time and space. These experiences are integrated in a way that awareness would be impossible without that integration. You can’t have awareness of any differences between simples without being so aware in some form, a form like time and space. Time and space are forms of grasping difference, not a mode of awareness distinct from grasping that difference. All this I get from Kelly’s statement about sensationalism: “It is a doctrine about the relationship between two modes of awareness …” (The Evidence of the Senses, P51)
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