Kant's Nihilism
As Scott Lemieux points out, rightwing cartoonist Chris Muir has gotten mighty pretentious these past couple of days -- accusing The New York Times of having fallen prey to "Kantian nihilism."
He caches this out with the claim that "this country was based on Judeo-Christian moral values as well as Kant, Shopenhauer, later." Meaning that liberal Kantian nihilists are "missing half the picture."
The view that Kant was a nihilist is really very odd. So, too, is the view that this country was based on a blend of Judeo-Christian moral values and Kantian ethics. Kant's important work all came after his so-called "critical turn" and the first result of this turn -- The Critique of Pure Reason -- wasn't published until 1781. His major works of moral philosophy were written in the 1785-1798 era and his book on international relations, Perpetual Peace, was published in 1795. Kant is a -- if not the -- major intellectual figure of the Enlightenment, and the Founders were certainly suffused with Enlightenment thought, so there's a certain congruence between Kantian ideas and the founding ideals of the United States. But the dates just don't work out to make it plausible that Kant's work, as such, was an important influence.
But that's taking this all too seriously anyway. Kantian nihilism? Kant as moral relativist? Kant as someone who thinks there are "no objective truths?" That's all very, very, very wrong.
Ironically, "nihilism" largedly entered the philosophical vocabulary because of Nietzsche's criticism of it, and he associated this becoming "weary of man" with Christianity. Of course, he couldn't have influenced the framers either.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
July 19, 2006 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
According to my commenters, it's apparently a Randian thing...
July 19, 2006 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
John,
A little googling has made me think that some confusion about Nietzsche might be what's going on here. There's an abstract here that makes Kantian "Nihilism" sound like Nietzsche's characterization of Judeo-Christian--and Kantian--morality as merely negative, or always just saying "No!" and "Don't!".
Of course, that conflates the two different views that Nietzsche wanted to reject, doesn't it?
July 19, 2006 2:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here comes the quackery:
Kant's key moral innovation was to strip self-interest of all honor. No matter whose interest, no matter by what standard it is judged, no matter what consequences follow from it, the fact that it is someone's self-interest damns it! So what? So Kant's ethics is a morality of evil, as is easily shown. To act from self-interest is to pursue some value, some good. To reject all self-interest is to reject all good, absolutely and in principle. When good is ruled out, what's left is evil. This is nihilism.
July 19, 2006 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Shopenhauer"
SHOPENHAUER?
If you're gonna be a "prominent op-ed columnist", Matt, check your spelling!
Or was that his spelling?
By the way, what does "cache this out" mean?
July 19, 2006 5:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Leave Matt alone. He spent all his cache schopping for a new spell-czeck program.
July 19, 2006 6:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
to 'cache out' is something like to give a fuller description of a claim or idea. Another term that philosophers use for this is 'unpacking'. If you are pretty serious about philosophy you normally start talking this way sometime in the middle of your junior year.
As for the content of Matt's post, let me say 'right on'. It is sad how little people think they need to work at this learning thing before they feel like they can talk intelligently about it.
July 19, 2006 8:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the explanations.
It all sounds like computer terminology - both "cache" and "pack" and "unpack" are computer terms.
I'm glad I never got into "serious" philosophy.
July 19, 2006 9:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
A postulate is not a belief. In fact, a postulate may be the opposite of a belief.
July 19, 2006 10:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Stanford. Leo Strauss did his Phd on Jacobi.
"Because of Jacobi's insistence on the primacy of immediate existence over reflective conceptualization, and of the rights of the ‘exception’, the possibility is there to interpret his position as case of proto-existentialism, and to treat him, just as Kierkegaard, as an essentially religious thinker."
The Scott Edgar link to the Agamben...it made a kind of sense to me.
July 19, 2006 10:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, Scott. Obviously that's a pretty obscure article on a pretty obscure book, so I couldn't swear it is what a right-wing cartoonist is thinking about. Of course, I'm not a philosopher, but I had to read the abstract three times to come close to making sense of it, and then I mostly relied on your paraphrase.
Seems odd, though, to characterize Kant's morality as about banning and negation. After all, he's trying to make this universal: "treat others not as a means only, but as an end also." I think he means that as enabling and positive. Much of religious and other traditional concepts of law are much more inclined to "shalt not" formulas. Indeed, so is the Christian right today, with all the things it wishes to ban.
Nietzsche didn't like Kant's degree of abstraction and so might find the connections from Kant to nihilism real, although he doesn't develop them. One might also lump Kant with the Christianity that Nietzsche despised simply because the categorical imperative is so close to the golden rule. Come to think of it, the golden rule might discomfort the right, too. How would we have enough tax cuts?
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
July 20, 2006 6:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Construing Kantian ethics to be one of negation is silly. The essence of Kant's ethics and the categorical imperative is one of 'duty' (which was a big problem for Nietzsche). It is nearly impossible to read Kantian ethics as negative. What this right winger displays is not a creative interpretation of Kant's ethics, but his abject ignorance of the subject he is discussing.
July 20, 2006 7:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's not "cache out"; it's "cash out." Like in a casino, when you trade in the abstract tokens you've been playing with for "real" money (itself an abstract token, but never mind that). It means getting down to an idea's concrete implications, the upshot. It differs from "unpacking" in that it has a connotation of getting down to the ultimate or practical implications rather than just drawing out further entailments generally.
July 20, 2006 8:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yup, that's the way to spell "cash out". The earliest use of this idiom I've come across is in, not suprisingly, James, who (somewhere or other) said that pragmatism demanded an account of the "cash value" of an empirical hypothesis, by which meant the hypothesis' observable upshots.
July 20, 2006 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
yeah i suppose the spelling was off. odd to be that strict about something which is close to philosophical slang. typically you say you will cash something out only when taking a conversational tone (I don't think McDowell would ever say he would cash something out for you for instance)
i think you are sort of right. I don't think you are right in saying that cashing out gets you concrete or practical implications. I think it is true to say that there is the connotation that you are going to provide something more practical and concrete if you cash something out, but in some cases you are not going to get something that is actually that concrete. you can cash out unrestricted mereology, but you aren't going to get much of concrete consequence in your cashing out. Similarly with lots of notions in contemporary metaphysics. I think you are right that unpacking doesn't have the same connection to practicality and concreteness though.
July 20, 2006 12:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure, sure; I guess I meant "concrete" in a relative sense, like,"what does this ultimately amount to?" And I didn't intend that as a rigid or formal definition so much as a description of how the terms seem to get used, by and large, in a way that I think makes some sense in terms of the gambling analogy.
July 20, 2006 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that Muir is probably confusing Kant with Nietzche. They're both Geramn "furinners" after all.
What Kant actually did was to reconcile the Enlightenment to the Christian philosophical tradition, for those willing to sign on to his compromise that is.
July 20, 2006 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I suspect the cartoonist's knowledge of Kant comes straight from Ayn Rand, the only person wacky enough to consider the propounder of the categorical imperative to be a nihilist- it's been so long since I read any Rand that I can't remember her arguments.
July 20, 2006 6:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I suspect the cartoonist's knowledge of Kant comes straight from Ayn Rand, the only person wacky enough to consider the propounder of the categorical imperative to be a nihilist- it's been so long since I read any Rand that I can't remember her arguments.
July 20, 2006 6:40 PM | Reply | Permalink