The Knowledge Newsletter

I have held for some time now that Kant was the father of what has become known as epistemological postmodernism. The term has enough meanings to satisfy anyone attempting to wear it. On my definition, epistemological postmodernism categorizes anyone who holds the following:

• That direct knowledge of a reality beyond one’s own perceptions is not possible (i.e. logically possible)
• That if humans do have any grasp of a reality beyond their own perceptions, that reality is always interpreted.
• That knowledge consists of community agreement among tightly or loosely defined ideological groups.

While Kant did not say much about the last of these, depending on one’s interpretation, he did say something about the first two and it is his philosophy about perceptions (the phenomena) and reality (the noumena) that set the foundation for epistemological postmodernism.

I was reading through the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man in response to a question from one of my students tonight and it made me think of Kant and a discussion I had recently with a colleague who is an existentialist and a fan of Kant’s epistemology. Lewis, criticizing the epistemology of Gaius and Titius (pseudonyms for the authors of an unnamed elementary text on literature), includes a quote from their book that is very much Kantian in nature. Talking about a man that looks at a waterfall and calls it ’sublime’, the authors write,

Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really ‘I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime…"’

This is Kant with a little Wittgenstein mixed in topped off with a dash of Logical Positivism. But the essentially subjectivity of such a belief is clearly present. A colleague of mine was attempting to make a similar claim about knowledge.

His essential position (can one call it a position?) is that it is not possible to get beyond our own perceptions to the world "out there" and thus to have knowledge as defined by classical epistemology is not possible. The best we can hope for is belief that "works." Thus, existentialism is the only possible option for humans living on this planet. He does seem to allow for one exception and that appears to be knowledge of the divine. It’s not clear how all that works but the exception is notable and very Kierkegaardian.

In a recent dialog, my friend was attempting to make two arguments. The first was that the possibility of phenomena like inverted qualia and interpretive differences between similar perceptual experiences entails the relativity of all knowledge. That is, the world never presents itself to us directly because, ostensibly, not everyone’s experience of it is exactly the same. Second he claimed that language was the only epistemic connection human beings have between one another. If Clive and John both see a red object, the only epistemic commonality they have is that they both may use the English word "red" when pointing at the object. This is similar to Lewis’ author’s reducing a feeling to a word.

Rejoinders to arguments like these seem painfully obvious yet seem to elude so many. John and Clive do not epistemically share merely a word but an experience of the world. The experience of redness is their epistemic connection and we could say they both know the same proposition ("there is a red object before me") without every exchanging a word. It is this experience that makes a linguistic exchange even possible and so must be prior to any language game. Perhaps a stronger example would be to exchange the red object for a speeding vehicle coming directly at them. Both Clive and John, hopefully, would move out of the way of the vehicle without ever having to verbalize the fact that a car is speeding towards them and THEN could they live to tell about it. Language is secondary to the experience.

Kant’s argument that humans never get beyond the phenomena to the noumena seems to presuppose the existence of the noumena and thus some knowledge of it. The argument also seems to presuppose that statements can be made about the truth value of our epistemic position vis-a-vis both the noumena and the phenomena which either is a noumenal statement or either false or neither true nor false. If the former then it’s self contradictory and if the latter, epistemically impotent (Wittgenstein’s advice seems to be relevant here).

Lewis’ piece struck me because it illustrated again how deep epistemology have been impacted by the implications of Kant’s thought. My colleague doesn’t believe anything can be known about the world beyond our perceptions. Lewis was attempting to argue not only is there a real world that humans can know directly but that some objects have inherent value, inherent beauty, inherent evil and we can know these properties and respond appropriately or inappropriately to them! I find it hard to imagine any modern thinking calling an emotional reaction to anything "wrong or right." Not because he or she doesn’t have an opinion about, say, the sublimity of a waterfall but because he or she thinks that is all one could have.