Hegel, Part 3c
‘Critique of Pure Reason’
With Immanuel Kant, we will
need some word-definitions. “Empirical” means sensed or found; a priori means first, or before; a posteriori means after.
The Introduction to
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (attached; download linked below) is a
“propaedeutic”, which is another word for introduction, or preliminary course.
An “organon” is the whole course, or the whole work. “Hume” is David Hume, a Scottish
philosopher (also featured in the above cartoon).
Right at the beginning, Kant
is trying to persuade his reader that although things are learned by experience,
yet it is possible to have known something before. This is a clear
self-contradiction of Kant’s, but he insists on it. He continues:
“In what
follows… we shall understand by a priori knowledge, not knowledge independent of this or
that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience.
Opposed to it is empirical knowledge, which is knowledge possible only a posteriori, that is,
through experience.”
Kant then claims that the a priori knowledge is by nature
collective, or in other words social, knowledge.
The source of collective
consciousness is a matter of great interest to revolutionaries. Kant says it is
already there. Few revolutionaries will agree with Kant.
Kant then prays for a science
which will classify the details and describe the extent of a priori human knowledge, of which he says, in conclusion, that the
first part will be “the transcendental
doctrine of sensibility.”
Are we any the wiser? At
least we have this much: That Kant tried to have his cake and eat it. He wanted
to have unreasonable reason. He wanted reason without a source or origin.
Later, he even wanted religion that would be “within the limits of reason”.
Also, he wanted to create a taxonomy of “antinomies”. That is a list or
catalogue of things that contradicted each other, as if to list them would
excuse them.
Kant seems to be rehearsing
and trying to legitimate the bourgeoisie’s necessary (for them) habit of
believing two contradictory things at the same time, or, which amounts to the
same thing, taking possession of all arguments and pretending that they all
support the bourgeois position.
Part of this mental trickery
is to endlessly categorise things. See the above cartoon, which can also be
found in “Philosophy for Beginners”, by Richard Osborne, a very helpful
illustrated manual. According to Osborne’s book, one of Kant’s slogans was: “Purposiveness without purpose.” How
pathetic!
Altogether, Kant appears like
the fore-runner of the typical modern bourgeois journalist or “analyst”. He can
march the reader up the hill, and march the reader down again, purposively, but
without purpose.
In this regard, please note
that from the very first line, Kant is referring to “our” and “we”. But who is
this “we”? It is an a priori “we”. It
is a “we” that always pretends to be class-neutral, but is not in fact
class-neutral. It is a “we” that does not willingly reveal its nature. It
hides.
So long as the world is
Kantian, so long does in remain in the tiresome hands of “analysts”.
Back to Hegel
If Hegel is at all heroic, it
must be partly for this: that Hegel refuses Kant, and thereby rescues
philosophy from Kant’s dreadful pedantry. Hegel seeks to build a knowledge of
the common, collective consciousness from history, by a process that can be
understood, and observed, as a unity and struggle of opposites, or in other
words dialectic.
Andy Blunden calls this
man-made collective world of understanding “second nature”. This is the social
environment, where the physical environment external to human beings is “first
nature”.
Hegel opens the door that
Kant keeps shut. It is the door to honest class-consciousness, which when open,
reveals the road to revolutionary thought. It was Marx and Engels who realised
this potential in Hegel’s philosophy. Conversely, understanding Hegel (as Lenin
pointed out*) is going to help us to understand Marx. And that is our goal: Not
Hegel for Hegel’s sake, but Hegel for the sake of understanding Marx, Engels,
and everything that followed.
* “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and
especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood
the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the
Marxists understood Marx!!” - Lenin
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Kant,
Introduction to ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, 1787.
