The Fault of Transcendental Truths
In essence, this whole process of existence is to attain or grass with some type of concrete objective knowledge, yes? That pure transcendental truth. Plato called it the forms. Aristotle translates this to essence. Essentialism. And as Aristotle comes to illustrate there is no real justification for saying the forms are closest to the Good (that ultimate form of the forms) if knowledge or conceptions of the forms are constantly referring to an unknowable source. This leads to either circularity or an infinite regress. Similar to Bertrand Russell and early set theory, you cannot have a set of all sets.
Against Plato, knowledge cannot remain transcendent, and against Aristotle knowledge cannot remain abstract. Aristotle, although he also participates in the problem of individuation cannot solve for individual identity, instead continuously operating in the middle regions of genus and species. Knowledge must grasp the individual as the individual and this is partially what Hegel dialectics aims to do. Transfer knowledge from the abstract to the concrete. (This is reductive just for the sake of brevity).
Knowledge for Kant will rest on his insistence that we will never know things-in-themselves only things as they appear, it is making that distinction between essence and appearance. This is Kant’s version of grasping or saving knowledge, in the same way, he goes on to claim it saves space for faith because there is a limit to our knowledge.
“All conceptions, like those of the senses, which come to us without our choice enable us to know the objects only as they affect us, while what they are in themselves remains unknown to us . . . . This must furnish a distinction, though a crude one, between a world of sense and a world of understanding . . . . A man may not presume to know even himself as he really is by knowing himself through inner sensation. For since he does not, as it were, produce himself or derive his concept of himself a priori but only empirically, it is natural that he obtains knowledge of himself only through inner sense and consequently only through the appearance of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected” (Critique of Pure Reason).
From this, he also defends autonomy, free will, not subject to causality and causality is a necessary category of our understanding. Everything we witness, everything we experience, we categorize in terms of causality, one thing following the other we make causal connections. If everything was subject to causality you would have no free will. Kant will say that this is how we may appear to ourselves, always as effects of causes, but that will not necessarily be the way we are. (But then he can’t ever prove we have free will).
That is how we organized things; these concepts and categories are only appearances. And there is a larger to this, if I was going to be describing a table I would say it’s brown, made of wood, smooth, and I would be describing its properties not actually “what it is”. Hobbs will make a similar point about the nature of knowledge an appearance. When I say something is red, I am not describing the essence of something (according to Kant) but the effect it is having on my senses, it is a perception. The property of red affects my eyes and brain in such a way to perceive the color. So what the color red designates doesn’t designate what a thing is, it designates a reaction or an effect. Kant says it’s necessary for us to organize appearances and categories, but it is faulty for us to think by grasping something’s properties, or appearances we are grasping things as they are. Of course this idea is ravaged by Hegel, by Nietzsche, and pretty much everyone else afterwards. What happens when you separate a thing in itself and its properties? Hegel will say this, Neitchze will say this, Adorno will say this, the thing and itself is a nothingness, a nullity. The separation loses all utility, it is literally a senseless distinction to make.
Like Neitchze says in The Will to Power, “The properties of a thing are effects on other ‘things’: if one removes other ‘things’, then a thing has no properties, i.e., there is no thing without other things, i.e., there is no ‘thing-in-itself.” The property of red is its effect on my eyes and my brain. The property of a thing is always its effect on other things, if we removed other things the thing would have no properties because its properties are effects. Therefore a thing can only have properties with other things, there is nothing in itself. A thing in itself which has no properties would be nothingness. Again the case that Hyppolite’s in his reading of Hegel will make which Deleuze incorporates approvingly, essence always seems to be situated behind the appearance, that is not appearing but is behind. And this is Hegel’s claim that behind the appearances there is only an illusion of something behind the appearances, or the thing in itself is nothing. A different way of putting it is even if you accept that it appears you one way and it appears someone else another way that is a type of perspectivism. That doesn’t mean there’s something behind the appearances It just means there’s a multiplicity of appearances. Then we see the return to the idea of Nietzsche’s “How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth” dismissal of the entire dichotomy of apparent/real, representation/thing-in-itself. Both the suprasensible “real world” and the apparent world of representation are overcome. The dichotomy of essence and appearance is rejected in the very passage in which the notion of perspectivism is introduced. Having claimed that “the world of which we become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world,” Nietzsche writes:.
You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: this distinction I leave to the epistemologists who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of “thing in itself” and appearance; for we do not “know” nearly enough even to be allowed to distinguish in this way. (GS 354).
This may sound like a skeptical argument. Yet it actually amounts to a rejection of skepticism. Nietzsche’s point is that, without access to a God’s-eye view capable of confirming the existence of a thing in itself and distinguishing it from its appearances, we have no basis for making such a distinction at all and thus no basis for skepticism. Earlier in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes a similar point:
“What is ‘appearance’ for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place over an unknown x or remove from it!” (Gay Science 54).
The delusion is that there is a real world in comparison to a world of appearances, then in scrapping the contrast and you end up with some thing like a perspectival world. Perspectivism often gets confused with relativism. The relativistic approach implies a certain subjectivity; “I may see this as positive, while you may see this as negative” there’s no mediating over arching set of standards. The truth is relative to the subject, to the independent individual. So scratching the essence/appearance dialectic doesn’t eliminate truth but simply modifies it, truth becomes plural.
“The poisoned gift of Platonism,” Deleuze comments, “is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning. … Modern philosophy will continue to follow Plato in this regard, encountering a transcendence at the heart of immanence as such.”
What I meant by affects was not observer dependent I was just using an observer, the redness, and the function of the eye as an example, “Empirically real objects exist through time and unperceived and are in causal relations” (Allais) again causal relations aren’t observer dependent. Besides that Kant does claim mind-dependence explicitly asserting that appearances are mind-dependent. For instance: “if I were to take away the thinking subject, the whole corporeal world have to disappear” (A383).11 But frankly his contradicts are not my issue. And of course you have a discussion of Jacobi’s famous critique:
“without the presupposition of the [thing in itself] I cannot enter the [critical] system, and with that presupposition I cannot remain in it” (Jacobi, Werke, vol. II, p. 304)
(In order to secure your own point you would have to disprove this position at this stage)
Second, there exists some textual and critical support for the neo-Kantian interpretation of Nietzsche’s ontology. Yet it is inexcusably inconsistent with positions at the core of Nietzsche’s work, particularly his resolute antidualism. The claim that Nietzsche endorses a skeptical epistemology and a metaphysical ontology does not fit well with his explicit rejection of Kant’s notion of the “thing in itself” and the very distinction between a “real” and an “apparent” world. The Dichotomy of essence and appearance is rejected in the very passage in which the notion of perspectivism is introduced. Having claimed that “the world of which we become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world,” Nietzsche writes:.
You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: this distinction I leave to the epistemologists who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of “thing in itself” and appearance; for we do not “know” nearly enough even to be allowed to distinguish in this way (Gay Science 354).
This may sound like a skeptical argument. Yet it actually amounts to a rejection of skepticism. Nietzsche’s point is that, without access to a God’s-eye view capable of confirming the existence of a thing in itself and distinguishing it from its appearances, we have no basis for making such a distinction at all and thus no basis for skepticism. Earlier in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes a similar point:
“What is ‘appearance’ for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place over an unknown x or remove from it!” (Gay Science 54).
Kant’s is a Qualified phenomenalism: the existence of objects in space is grounded partially, and their core physical properties are grounded wholly, in the contents of our representations of them. They become “realism about the unobservable entities of theoretical science”. (Allais again) Kant is claiming that the contents of representations ground the existence and empirical properties of appearances.
“All conceptions, like those of the senses, which come to us without our choice enable us to know the objects only as they affect us, while what they are in themselves remains unknown to us . . . . This must furnish a distinction, though a crude one, between a world of sense and a world of understanding . . . . A man may not presume to know even himself as he really is by knowing himself through inner sensation. For since he does not, as it were, produce himself or derive his concept of himself a priori but only empirically, it is natural that he obtains knowledge of himself only through inner sense and consequently only through the appearance of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected”.
Yet Kant repeatedly claims that our representations alone do not ground the existence of their objects. We can think of any objects whatsoever using the categories. In fact, this is unavoidable; the categories are the most basic concepts of objects in general, so we cannot think about anything whatsoever without using some categories to do so. But in thinking about the things in themselves using categories we do not thereby (a) know that there are things in themselves falling under the categories or (b) even that it is possible for there to be things in themselves falling under the categories. The strongest form of Jacobi’s objection — that Kant’s view entails that the categories cannot be applied, even in thought, to things in themselves — may rest on a misunderstanding
Now in terms of effects:
“Or one understands by affecting objects the objects in space; but since these are only appearances according to Kant, and thus our representations, one falls into the contradiction that the same appearances, which we first have on the basis of affection, should be the source of that very affection”. (Vaihinger)
First, here does not refer to temporal priority, but to metaphysical priority: if p is true in virtue of q, then q is “prior” to p. Jacobi and Vaihinger assume that appearances exist in virtue of the contents of our experience of them:
(Trans. Idealism) If x is an appearance, then x exists in virtue of the fact that subjects experience x.
If we are empirically affected, though, it follows that:
(Empirical affection) For some x, x is one of the causes of subjects’ experience of x.
For instance, this computer is one of the causes of my current experience of it. But these assumptions are inconsistent if we assume the following plausible principle:
(Exclusion) If x exists in virtue of the fact that p, then x cannot be even a partial cause of the fact that p.
Intuitively, this principle says that no object can be even a partial cause of the very fact in virtue of which it exists; if it were, it would be a partial cause of its own existence. In the context of Kant’s theory of experience, it means that appearances cannot “reach back” and cause the very experiences in virtue of which they exist. Nothing about the notion of qua-object forces or precludes this identification of properties.
