57. Kant's Sausage Grinder

[Music] we are considering the six points of times what I like to call pumpkin six easy lessons we are at lesson number three grinder [Music] all right I am now drawn upon the board an astonishing replica of a sausage grinder I've never seen a sausage grinder in my life Nicole so this is sort of what I envision this is kind of a big unit not to be confused of course with the big units who is who baseball big unit come on pitch for the Mariners the big units but some angry well yeah you're a pitcher you must have this kind of hang like that all right pen I always did think though if I were standing at the batter's box and Randy Johnson were on the mound his sheer ugliness guy is so scary looking really that Spencer is the biggest problem you've got you're a great pitcher fast hard but you're just too good-looking people stand out there they go all it's just Spencer you need to get a Randy Johnson bass all right so so there are several sub points in our analysis of the sausage grinder you want to understand each of these well so the first sub point is what we'll call the cosmos now by nozzles I mean the nozzles in place you put stop so I admitted unsophisticated what sure that I am I don't know exactly I assume that you just stuff things in you know bones cartilage stuff knees sweep off the floor sawdust and maybe a little meat I mean who knows what those are the that sausage that you buy in the store but anyway all kinds of stuff goes in and for cod there are precisely two nozzles now remember this entire device is the human mind this is con straight innovation this is his Copernican revolution he's putting the mind at the center of his philosophical discussion and so this entire conversation about a sausage grinder is his analysis of the machinery of the mind and the first piece of that machinery is the nozzles and these are called pure intuition pure intuitions the intuitions are part of your mind they are not to our knowledge part of this external world the stuff going in is is coming from somewhere we don't know where but it comes in through these pure intuitions and the pure intuitions are one of them is space and one of them is time yes sometime outside of your mind not according to Conte see this is this is one of the great revolutionary ideas now I'm not telling you Avery my opinion on this I'm just advocating constant four times he says we don't know if there is space or if there is time outside of the mind we do know that considered objectively both space and time are fundamentally absurd as was shown by Zeno Parmenides and that whole tradition you can apply a reductio ad absurdum to the objective ideas but he also notes that the very operation of the mind depends on space and time in other words just do this little experiment try to imagine no space let's try that just try to imagine no space how you doing the poor you doesn't know what to do with that no time what caught notices is that irrespective of how the external universe if there is one is organized one thing is clear the human mind intuitively applies spatial temporal categories to its experience we cannot think apart from space and apart from time we don't know how to think that way it is fundamental to thought and so he calls these intuitions of the mind we intuitively interpret all experiences in terms of space and in terms of mind so please get angel' science back to your cut or was it Stephen Stephen you made me come in to comment about no you made me come with you you made it Avery you're the genius about thinking that space and time are object if I was you okay yeah I it was such a bright comment I thought it mr. Mitchell Sonya you see how that happens it just do very good notice the difference lock Avery would say that space and time are part of the external world lock would say we perceive space and time I'm perceiving Laura and I am perceiving her in space and I'm perceiving her in an ongoing flow of time and lock would say that's because out there somehow in the structure of the universe there is space and there is time and I'm proceeding and I'm experiencing it Khan puts it all inside the mind and says I don't know if there's space or not my mind is implies applying that you know interpretive scheme alright second component this is not really a component of the meat-grinder but it is necessary to understand its operation is what calls percepts PRC EPS percepts percepts are precisely whatever it is and this pull again and through these nozzles raw unfiltered uninterpreted experience that is sensory the fundamental senses that are activated are as you well know what you see what you hear what you taste all of those senses of yours are being energized right now by ten thousand think two hundred thousand things a million things right now if you could get narrow enough you know just subtle enough if you can imagine how many of you recall the movie Fantasia from some years back it was a Disney like wasn't it it was just sort of what was it Chris do you remember it what was it but I mean a lot of the movies I recall it was just sort of just kind of flowing wonderful colors kind of if I got the right movie in mind and a lot of it was not really sensible in the in the sense that you were following a particular story with dramatic interaction between characters we're just sort of these lights and sounds and colors and just as flowing kind of and it was very pleasing I what I thought it was kind of enjoyable but here's what I want you to think about there is a sense in which what a newborn infant comes into this world that is the experience it's just sounds and lights and whatever there's no sense to it there's no meaning there's no rhyme there's no reason it's just this kind of collage that's almost blizzard of sensory experience imagine yourself being plunged into such a world in other words where Fantasia is not a movie where it is the reality of your entire experience you're just surrounded by you know kind of sounds shapes you know just imagine you're in that world in that world you are desperate to make some sense of what's going on you're trying to figure out a handle you can grab on to and concepts that fundamentally is all that the experience all of us have we are plunged into a world of this collage of sensory experience of every description and our mind goes to work trying to make sense of it to put things into classes categories interpretive schemes and the first thing we do is we start interpreting these experiences in terms of these most fundamental intuitions we put things first into space and then we start interpreting them in a progress of events that's how at least we begin the process now we do much more than that but we cannot do less than that we have to do at least that much right off the bat what we are dealing with in a word is phenomena that's the word caught uses with phenomena is not in this sense spectacular like fireworks always phenomenal you know but it just means experience and it's this this great wonderful strange experience of all of these sounds sights whirring noises and other things now if you're dealing with an infant I've talked about this before I was reminding you of it if you're dealing with an infant you try to help the infant along the way so if you're trying to communicate with the infant you get up about one inch from its nose and go with you know you do all kinds of things to try to get the infant to notice you because one of the most frustrating things about an infant is they will tend not to notice you you're right there and they're kind of looking off you're like they don't know you're the important thing they think maybe that little lightbulb over there it's about really matters they don't know and so you have to try to help them so no I'm the important one here you know and maybe the infant will start paying attention to you maybe not it's sort of the way I feel when I'm lecturing in philosophy I'm the important thing here blue you got me I'm on the wood because I see students looking off out the window there's a sparrow hi please I am the one that's supposed to be the center of your concern right at the moment you know well we do that and gradually we get it gradually we start picking up a clue that in our in these 10,000 experiences of sensory stimulation some things are more important than others and we fix on those and suppress or at least ignore the others there's all kinds of sounds that are reaching you right now I think I'm probably the most noisy of them but there's the Hori sound in the back of the room there's lockers doors voices all kinds of things going on you know and for the most part you're ignoring it I say for the most part at least my hope my wish is the urine organ you're paying fundamentally attention to me so that's this process of sort of sifting out and interpreting our experience well what Conte means my percepts are these raw sensory experiences Donen don't think of them in space don't think of them entire just think of them is the most basic stimuli lights colors sounds feelings smells all of that just coming all at once impinging on your senses crowding into your consciousness with no particular interpretive meaning to them at all and it's up to you to make sense out there persons now for Kant the percepts are coming I'm giving you this in advance and this make a little marginal note because we're gonna come back to it the percepts are coming from somewhere he grants that but we don't know much about where they're coming from and so he calls them by a word that means mystery the word he uses is Numa not a thing question mark it's coming from somewhere that our first experience of these things is when they come pouring in like so much stuff in a butcher shop into the nozzles that's when we start having to deal with it and we really don't know what's out here big question mark what's out here don't know cannot get there from here mystery but we know something is tickling our nozzles and making us a layer of sensation that's where we begin to play the game alright next term concepts concepts refer to something happening in your mind and this goes back to my discussion yesterday of the country kitchen so you want to incorporate the country kitchen and metaphor into our current discussion concepts refer to what he calls the innate categorical sorting machine the innate it's in categorical sorting machine each of those words is important then it's innate Ness would would highlight what aspect of this what does it mean to say it's innate ok literally innate means once again what's the basic meaning of the word innate Steven it means e'en 8 means most basic meaning yeah inside and that's not quite it ok get this place when I mentioned the other day get it into your notes I want you to know this I want you to have this innate means it was in you at birth in Nativity is the idea acts your birth innate you bring it with you this is why cot is not an empiricist as he thinks we bring something to the table but he's not a pure rationalist because he thinks there'd be nothing for us to do were not for the percepts which are empirical and character you follow that he's trying to synthesize he's trying to give a fair hearing to both sides so it's an 8 it's categorical I mentioned to you the other day that the 12 jars in the country kitchen all have different shapes and sizes and we can put the same thing in two different jars or different things in two but we don't have the same jars but you get the idea there's a there's these categories and mind the percepts in and of themselves the percepts now are not knowable what can be known is the consequence of putting a percept into a concept so the purse that flows in and just like a coin in one of those coin machines that sips them out it begins putting all of these percepts into various little jars which are the categories of the mind and it's from that sorting process percepts being sorted into categories that we get knowledge knowledge is the result of sorting percepts as I mentioned to you there are 12 co-op categories this is more detail than you need for this class but any of you who expect to study philosophy in college which I hope many of you hopefully will and then you will be so grateful for the little heads up I gave you today so I could just promise you that so anyway I'm going to give you more detail than I will expect from you on any exam I'm not going to ask for this back but for you who are wanting to kind of get yourself geared up for you no further philosophical studies at least give you something to think about there are 12 categories and I want to give them to you with brief explanations so this is like a footnote kind of an extended footnote to our discussion of the weak Reiner there are 12 categories in four classes four classes of categories the four classes are give these to your first quantity quality relation modality for four classes quantity quality relation modality the quantity ones are the easiest to get there are three of them three categories in the class of quantity they are unity plurality totality unity is a category you can put percepts into a category by which you interpret an experience as being unified one thing there is one Spencer that I put that at least in some sense the percept of my experience of that thing over there that I call Spencer into a class of one there's one of you and each of you would be similarly put into a class of one that's an interpretation of an experience there is plurality I look in this room and I see a number of critters I call them human beings more particularly I call them students I noticed there's more than one it's sort of at this point and it determined a number I haven't gone through and counted but I have a notion of plurality there are several of these that's a way of categorizing these percepts there is totality I have a notion of a whole number all of the things within a given set of whatever the item is kind of gets to set theory by the way do you ever do set theory in mathematics does that ever come up there's very popular a few years ago and it has words and cockt really in this kind of theory of numbers that you get from him all right so that's quantity it's easy enough really question no yes yes what's so it morality is many totality would be all the students in a sense that I said say it like this I could say are all the philosophy students here today they're not so I can make a distinction between this partial group and the whole group I have a notion of completion totality everything everybody in a given class it's like asking you know can we get all the dogs in the world together well I have an idea in my head of all the dogs in the world I can think about totality in that sense all right secondly quality again three of these reality negation limitation reality negation limitation this is a little hard and again I don't I'm just trying to give you a kind of a sense of this without spending with you know there are whole courses literally on these topics in a philosophy major so this is more than you need to worry about but just the basic idea reality I can evaluate something as to whether it is real or not you know whether it is in fact reality I can also contemplate the opposite of reality which is non reality or negation I can look at Spencer and say he is real I can imagine him not being there I can think of the alternative I can think of his non-being or I can imagine who's not here today who's missing this in Sydney yeah so I've got a notion of a reality that I can negate you know I can imagine this one who was not here for me right now she's not real and we hope she's real for somebody somewhere but for us right now she's not limitation that's the idea of I can distinguish between that which is real and other things I can limit Spencer from other items in this room I can say Spencer is not Megan I can limit this one thing that I'm calling feels that's just like the boundaries principle relation third class substance and accidents causality and dependence community and interaction once again these are these are three stats you got it three sets that stand in a relation to each other so relation can come in three flavors one substance and accidents second causality and dependence third community and interaction my mind does this to the percepts just as Hugh would say I don't know if that's the way the external world really works all I know is this is the way my mind understands the experiences it's having substance and accidents basically the same distinction that we found in what earlier philosopher who made that distinction long before can't it was Spencer well and before Aquinas he makes the same distinction but before him it was who Megan Aristotle Aristotle's the first one to really work that out substance accidents yes it can yes it can in fact I would say it virtually always does because you have to think about I know this is difficult if I if I think about what I'm seeing kind of in your end of the room here alright what I'm if you take away space I'm just seeing kind of a panorama of some shapes colors sizes and they all are sort of you know coming like this and and now I immediately look and I say Oh Steven but before I can say Steven there's kind of this color of your hair there's sort of a shape of a face there's years there's nose in all this a tile it's kind of coming at me and so I'm putting you in a variety of categories here I'm putting you in a variety of categories including your unity you are not the person sitting next to you and your relation to them and you know so I would imagine that Khan would say in some sense we put a little bit of this percept in all of the categories all the time and that's how they make sense out of our experience all right so substance accidents and Megan you're the one who reminded us of the original architect of such a distinction what did aristotle have in mind when he made that distinction to you remember [Music] body for the bread and wine you're eating the actual Body blood and not movie accidents just the opposite urine you're eating the substance of the body of blood the accident stay the same II know what you're trying to say or worse Hey well okay yeah let's see I guess y'all remember that don't you so Aristotle's distinction is that the substance is what's actually there the accident is what appears to be in the bread eNOS of the friend if you will the wine eNOS of the wine you know that and soul so we make that distinction and he says that's a classification in the mind notice the implication of that both substance and accidents are are in our minds for Aristotle they are in the object where we're distinguishing the substance what's actually there from the accidents my experience of it Khan says my experience of it includes both if all of that so it's all going inside this is again the Copernican revolution it's all in here second one causality independence see that's this is con following you because I think that causality is part of the operation of the universe I think that things cause other things and some things depend on other things but what God is arguing is that that very idea of dependence of causality of one thing producing another is an interpretive mechanism in my mind and this is why can't though awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by Hume nevertheless follows Hume in Humes criticism of classical theistic proof so can't in some ways is as vicious in his attack on something like the cosmological argument as Hume was even though can't not only calls himself a theist he calls himself a Christian he believes he's a good Christian Scientist you know what that term means but he considers himself a Christian and a defender of Christianity okay but Aquinas has to go the argument from motion has to go the argument from design has to go the argument from gradation of reality has to go all of that stuff has to go because all of it depends on categories of the mind and if that's all it is that we have no idea if that's what the external universe is actually all about it's not part of the external universe then there's no way to reason to external you know sort of objective conclusions like God is tracking with me here yes or no do I need to run by you know you look at me like you oh that's very profound this is good stuff you know I want you to get this like you get caught you understand the world today is we are living in a Content world alright so you follow that basically Conte agrees with Hume that the theistic proofs do not work because he agrees that causation itself is not part of the external world at least we don't know that it is totally part of our internal interpretation of raw percepts it's the way we explain these process they're deployed and we mistakenly assume that because we interpreted this way in here it must be the way things are out there there's no way to know so does he say yeah he said that the table there wasn't actually we just we just first of all we don't know if there is a pen and we don't know if there's a table we don't know if the sound you hear has any connection to those what's the whether those are just raw percepts flowing in and kind of random collage experience but your brain goes to work on that experience and begins to interpret this coincidence of drop pen here sound as causation but the interpretation of it is purely intuitive it is purely internal he says we don't know he says it's Neumann ah it's miss mystery it's a mystery place he assumes there's something out there all right that's important he does not believe it kind of like solve system you know that term where you are the only reality that is he believes there's a movement order but he simply says we have no clue what it actually is all we have a clue about is these percents flowing in and what we do with them so the chief focus of our studies would be what's come in here you to despair by troll it's the listen to me it is the depth of metaphysics metaphysics has always been concerned with the Khans terms what's upstairs what is out there that's metaphysics by definition metaphysics in the modern world is dead do you understand that you go down to Barnes and Noble you I can you say and I think I'll take a look at the section on metaphysics they have one what do you find if you go and look at the section on metaphysics at Barnes and Noble what kind of books do you find you know honey you find books on superstition you find books on the occult you find books on new-age you find books on mysticism you find books on irrationality you see you don't find books on traditional metaphysics it's dead cop killed it put a tombstone over it and the modern age is an age the despairs of objective reality metaphysical truth and says the only thing you can know about it is what you might learn in a seance you know we're looking into a crystal ball or a Ouija board I mean that's where you're going to get in touch with metaphysics right please take reconcile that this Christian that's rest of it yes I'm gonna talk about that Jacob it's an extraordinarily astute question and if I can just I go to hazard to say something here which I will in fact explain a little bit more later Kant is probably the most robust presuppositional apologized in the history of the church until Bart okay and that's how we reconcile it I'm gonna save for the discussion so that's a very cryptic answer but I think you may catch the point but in any event I'll come back to it later it wasn't quite we not Spencer yeah well he does head over that thing he has his category well that's true but he says you still have to live with the world in here and in the world in here you do have conscience you do have self-interest and in fact you have some idea that is until less than you're interested in freedom to virtue even though in fact you have no clue that there is a Spencer and whether anything you do for him is wrestling with that you know benefiting him but he wants to find in his category imperative some justification for good conscience and they you know a solid ethic that will guide your behavior we will come back to that little bit later yeah all right well as you will see we have not quite made it through the meat grinder we saw three more easy lessons so a little bit more to cover here probably safe to say we're looking at Wednesday all right you are dismissed [Music]

Channel: Bruce Gore

Views: 3,955

Keywords: Immanuel Kant, Kant's Meat Grinder, Bruce Gore

Id: wfR_m6_Xmnc

Length: 39min 45sec (2385 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018