History of Philosophy and Christian Thought - Lesson 40

Dr. Ronald Nash
History of Philosophy and Christian Thought
th620-40
Understanding
Lesson Transcript

I must now begin my discussion of Emmanuel Conte, whose dates are 1724 to 1804. Let me give you a little warning here. Crucial stuff. What I'm going to do in the next in the rest of today is I'm going to use the epistemology of this very famous German thinker as a way of bringing together a whole lot of stuff that we have covered up until this point. The fact that I am using Conte to bring this material together does not mean that I am recommending Conte system his theory of knowledge, because to be frank, it doesn't work. It fails. And it is Conte's failures. It is. It is Conte's failings that will help you conclude this course with a greater appreciation of the Lagos doctrine. Remember how close Plato got to understanding the existence of a personal god? Well, when we study Conte, you're going to you're going to see another guy getting so close to the truth about epistemology, and yet he fails because he didn't know about the Lagos doctor. So if we if we were to develop a musical theme for Conte, it would be the the theme to the log doctrine played off key. Okay. With everybody harmonizing badly, it'd be like the music you listen to on the radio every day. You've got to mind. We had one person snicker over that. That's proof you've got them. Did you snicker or A little bit. All right. So I have over the years, I almost said over the centuries. But if that were literally true, that would make me a vampire, wouldn't it? And I don't want anybody to play around with that.

[00:02:40] Over the years. I have developed an approach to cart that really works. You know what it does? It makes this highly difficult German thinker intelligible. Here's my first step in explaining what it is. And we're going to number these. All right. The first step. Number one is called Conte's Copernican Revolution. Kahn's Copernican Revolution in Epistemology. Any PC homology? Okay. Now, as you know, the first Copernican revolution was developed by Copernicus. See what a good teacher I am. This is really simple. That was Copernicus revolution in astronomy. When did Copernicus produce that? Well, I've lost the dates, but I'm going to guess somewhere around 1560, you know, somewhere in the late latter half of the 16th century. Copernicus was a Polish astronomer prior to Copernicus doing his work. The dominant view of the solar system for centuries was the Ptolemaic view. It was finally formulated. I'm going to guess again around 300 A.D. by an Alexandrian astronomer named Ptolemy around 300 A.D. with a question mark. As you know, Ptolemy said, the earth is the center of of the solar system. And then all of the other bodies in our solar system orbit around the Earth, including the sun. Oddly enough, this system began what was fine tuned, if any, was fine tuned to the point where it actually worked. Now, what we mean by working is this. An astronomer using Copernicus, Ptolemy's model could predict that tomorrow night at 8:00, the planet Saturn will be located right there in the heavens. And doggone it was, you know, give or take a little bit. What Copernicus did was and you know this he put the sun at the center of the solar system and then all of the other planets and moons in our solar system revolved around the sun.

[00:05:25] Thus, the term Copernican revolution means a gigantic upheaval in some system of thought. Since Conte. A lot of a lot of amateurs and phonies have used the term Copernican revolution to describe their own work, and only one of them is legitimate. There is only one other legitimate Copernican revolution, and that would be. Mine. Okay. I produced a Copernican revolution in economics. Not many people know about it, but it's there in my great book, Poverty and Wealth. Okay, Now, ironically, Copernicus Copernican revolution was not as useful as Ptolemy's system. And here's why. The Ptolemaic people had developed a theory of Epicycles. That is, they had orbits on orbits and they even had epicycles on epicycles. And B, because it was so complicated, it actually worked pretty good. The reason why Copernicus system didn't work is because he made the mistake of viewing the orbits of the planets as circles. And then a guy named Kepler came along and he said, no, The orbits of the planets around the sun are not are not circles. They're ellipses. They're more like this. And once that change was made, then Ptolemy's theory was basically dead. Now, here's what Kant did. This is Commerce Revolution prior to Comte, or so he said. And that's important because Can't was puffing up himself in his own theory, and he was misrepresenting his predecessors. But this is what Khan said. He said prior to me and my books and the major book here would be a book called The Critique of Pure Reason. The Critique of Pure Reason. Prior to me, philosophers made the world the center of the epistemological universe. The world that is all human knowledge rotates around the world. All human knowledge is dependent upon the prior structure of the world and our understanding of that structure.

[00:08:12] Human knowledge depends first and foremost upon the structure of the world. What Kant did, and this was this Copernican revolution. He made the mind, the human mind, the center of the epistemological universe and the world. Reality is simply a human construct. What we call the world is dependent upon a prior structure of the human mind which forces us to think about the world in certain ways. Now, listen very carefully to this next point. Postmodernists have a big ego problem. They really do. And I know that I'm skipping chapter ten, but you're going to read chapter ten. But postmodernists are big on what they call constructs. Nothing is absolute. Everything is a construct of the human mind. You know, social conventions and all of the rest. And postmodernists are enemies of the Enlightenment and can't was perhaps the leading philosopher of what we call the German Enlightenment. In fact, John Locke was called the founder of the English Enlightenment. David HUME is often described as the founder of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Court was the founder of the German Enlightenment. Voltaire would have been the founder of the French Enlightenment and so on. But here's the interesting thing. In the case at least, of David HUME, the Scottish Enlightenment, and convert the German Enlightenment. They were really postmodernists in the in them in the modern world. So here today, we have all of these postmodernists running around the world saying who were the enemies of the Enlightenment and the two leading figures of the Enlightenment, or at least two of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, anticipated important elements of the postmodernist position. Something is fishy in Denmark here. Something smells very badly here. Which is why I argue that when you really understand what is called postmodernism, the postmodernists are really simply extreme extremists, Enlightenment extremists.

[00:11:18] They're not postmodernists at all, which is why I label. And if I've said this before, you just forgive me. This is why I label my own position, post post modernism saying. The only original guy in the world right now is me. Unlike the slavish postmodernist groupies who think they're on the cutting edge. The rest of us are way ahead of these guys. They're stuck back in the 1800s. You see, I stand here before you as the first post postmodernist. And those of you who have been wise enough to listen to what I've been saying, you know, you too, are ahead of the curve. You also are ahead of the curve. Did. I misspelled postmodernism. That's okay, because when you're a post-modernist, you can't spell anyway. I mean, you know why? What difference does it make? Okay, so this is Conte's Copernican revolution, and now I've lost my eraser. Let's move on to the second point. The second point, right from your text page to 60, the difference between form and content form versus content. If if you know, if in my rush here, I say something that you don't completely understand. It's in the book, It's in chapter 11. So just study it carefully. Let me use an example of form versus content. Let's place ourselves in an old country farmhouse. That's where farmhouses are in the country. Okay. And we go back into this old farmhouse and we walk into the kitchen and off the kitchen there's a pantry, a little room with shelves of full of food and a door and all pantry. And I want to draw your attention to one part of the pantry. There are shelves of jars full of preserves, jelly jars. And the lady of the of the farmhouse has peach jam.

[00:13:51] Grape preserves. Strawberry preserves. Uh hmm. And so she has put them up in different shaped glasses. Okay. And so we have here tall, narrow containers of strawberry preserves. Or then we have short, fat things somewhat like this. And, um. Yeah. Oh, and there's even a postmodernist jar in there. Okay. The only problem is they haven't yet. No, they don't know how to market this, but it looks like this. See, it's an upside down triangle. The reason why this is a post-modernist jar is because, of course, it has no respect for the laws of gravity or anything else like that. I mean, that's old fashioned, isn't it? So what? I mean, to show you how open minded I am, there's even a post-modernist jar and so on. Now, what's the difference between form and content? The form would be I'm sure the content would be whatever jam or jelly has been preserved and the grape stuff can be in different shapes and different sizes. The strawberry stuff can be in different shapes and sizes, so the content would be whatever is in the jars and the form would be whatever it happens to be, the shape and the size of the container. Can you agree with me that it's important to have both of these? Who wants a lot of empty? I mean, you open the pantry, here's a bunch of beautiful jars, but there's nothing in them. I mean, who wants to say that? On the other hand, if you open up the pantry and there's a whole lot of preserves, but there's nothing holding them. All right. You know, we could give a name to that situation. We could call that the downward path of oozing. Okay. Now, for CART, human knowledge also has form plus content.

[00:16:23] Let's see what we say here. I'm going to read from the top of page 261. Conte sought to go beyond both rationalism and empiricism by making human knowledge a composite of two factors form versus content. Now, just so I can give you a foretaste of what's coming here form. Here's what will be supplied by the reason you associate form with rationalism. You associate content with information supplied by the senses. You got to have both sense, experience and reason. May I remind you, that way back in the beginning of this course, I told you that the proper understanding of rationalism is the old proposition. Some human knowledge does not arise from sense experience. I am not an enemy of sense experience. What marks me and many great thinkers in the history of the world is our recognition that as important as sense experience is, there are some things that human beings know that cannot possibly arrive from sense experience, the knowledge of the equal itself, for example, the knowledge of perfect goodness, for example. Okay, let's keep reading from the text. The content of human knowledge is given by sense experience. In fact, all human knowledge begins with sense experience. Now, that's not I won't agree with that sentence, but Kahn did. Do you know where that puts Kant? That puts cart in the camp of the old. A proposition. All human knowledge arises from sense experience. You might. You might want to write in the margin. There Cart was an empiricist. In fact, all human knowledge begins with sense of experience. This is an important point to which we will return. It is also a mistake making it necessary, as we will see, to place cart in the empiricist camp. Having made this point, however, cart goes on to say the following.

[00:18:56] And this is a direct quote from the critique of pure reason. Although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience. What can't means. Look at my footnote there. Footnote 21 You know, I've got a streak of nastiness in me. Nastiness and I cannot help it. I cannot control it. In fact, we just had kind of a family reunion over Thanksgiving. My brother came. Two of my brother's children came. We brought my mother over. Nice family reunion. But we all have the same genes, okay? We all have the same genes. So I'm an unfinished work. God's got a lot to do with me yet. But let's read that footnote for any deconstructionist who happened to be eavesdropping. I'm interpreting and explaining the meaning of a text. Even though deconstruction claim this task cannot be done. I'm doing it. All right. I'm telling you what comments. Anybody who tells you that the meaning of court is up to you. Anybody who approaches our final exam as a deconstructionist is in deep trouble. According to a deconstructionist can't means whatever it means to you. Don't pull that on me. You got to know what court really meant, and I know what he meant. All right, This is called textual analysis now. What it means is that while since experience is necessary for human knowledge, in that no one could have any knowledge without it. Since experience is not a sufficient condition for knowledge. I'd rather not take the time to explain the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition. So I won't. Something else. A form or structure must be added to the content supplied by the censors. Unless the content is given form or structure by the human mind.

[00:21:18] Knowledge would be unattainable. Now let us return to our marvelous country pantry. It is easy to see the role that both the fruit preserves and their containers play as attractive as the glass jars might be. And the glass jars are analog for cots form. The real value of the jars lies in their service as containers for those precious preserves. Our analog for carts content as you stand before the shelves of preserves, imagine that you have the power by snapping your fingers to make the glass jars disappear, leaving nothing but the preserves. If that were to happen, the preserves would suddenly become a massive inconvenience as they slowly oozed and drip their way from shelf to shelf to the pantry floor. I don't know many people who would rejoice at the sight of that mess. My point is whether the subject is epistemology or preserves both form and content are necessary. Let me add a comment. This is simple stuff. When you know what you're doing right, you'd have to be absolutely out of your mind not to understand the difference between form and content. Now, a rhetorical question. Tell me why. Nowhere in his writings on any of this stuff. A simple analogy like this occurs to cut. The only thing I can think of is he was a German, all right? And I just realized how much I sound like my brother when I do that. He's a German. I'm a German, so I can do that. I'm not going to criticize your answer, but I can kick Germans around pretty good. What's wrong with a simple analogy? I'm so tired for people listening by tape. I'm drawing a cut across my throat here. I'm so tired of people who write books that nobody can understand, including themselves.

[00:23:35] Okay, now the next step. Point three Another simple analogy. I call it Conte's sausage machine. Just as Plato never wrote anything called The Allegory of the Kitchen. So Conte never talked about the sausage machine, but he could have. This is. This makes this stuff so simple. Right. But he didn't do it now. Because I belong to a different age. Let me explain what a sausage machine was when I was growing up. My German grandmother, Julia, raised grandchildren like me. Throughout World War Two, I was born in 36. We'd go to Grandma's house. My father was in the Navy. My grandmother used to back in the days of 41, 42, 43. You couldn't go to a grocery store and buy margarine. You couldn't. You had to mix it. You couldn't go to the grocery store and buy ground beef. You had to you bought chunks of meat and you ground it up yourself. And my mother had a sausage machine. Okay. Something like this. And she would stick to the meat, either pork or beef. And in the nozzle, she'd push it down with something or other, and she turned. She'd crank the handle, and out of here would come. Ground beef or ground pork. Now, I want you to imagine a sausage machine like my grandmother used to have. Only they're going to be two nozzles. All right? And we're going to use this as an example of the human mind of what can't call the human mind a sausage machine with a place where the ground pork or beef comes out and two inlets. Now, there are three important parts to this sausage machine. The first important part is what it calls. And now we have to use his terminology, the forms of sensibility.

[00:25:50] Notice the word form. The forms of sensibility. The forms of sensibility. Are these two inlets on the top of the sausage machine. Conte calls one of them the form of inner sensibility. And the other one is. Mm hmm. Help me here out. Yeah. Thank you. Who said that? Outer inner and outer sensibility. Yeah, that makes sense. Inner and outer. Now, incidentally, these inlets here are an imaginary source through which information flows from our senses, the bodily senses to the mind. Okay. Out here would be the external world. But of course, we can't know anything about it. We presume that's the external world, and we're having perceptions enter our consciousness from the external world. But they enter through these two forms of sensibility. Notice how easier this could have been. Now the form of inner sensibility is really time. That's conch way of explaining the human understanding of time. The form of outer sensibility. Any guess what that might be? Space. What a teacher. What a teacher. See, all I do is lead you into the neighborhood. And you know your way around. This is not difficult unless you're reading. Can't. Now, let me tell you something about the ideas of space and time. Throughout the history of philosophy. Philosophers were never able to explain how we come to know space and time. With the exception of Saint Augustine. What is time when no one asks me? I know. But when someone does ask me, I don't know. Listen, what kind is going to do here and what I'm. Which I'm going what I'm going to explain in the next 2 minutes was anticipated by Saint Augustine in the early four hundreds. No one. Very few people still recognize that that that that Augustine was doing this before cop.

[00:28:41] Now, here's what it means. Our knowledge of both space and time does not come to us from outside the mind. Our knowledge of space and time is contributed to is added to all of our sense information as a part of the knowing structure of the mind. Space and time are not out there. Time is not out there. Spaces are not out there. Space and time are simply ways in which our mind forces us to think about things. I'm saying the same thing in different language here. It is impossible for you even to think about something without that thing appearing to you as though it were in space and time. I'll repeat that it is impossible for you to even think about something without that thing appearing to you as though it existed in space and time. Now, fortunately, we have a very good analogy of this in some of the modern technology technology that moviemakers use. But I got to think of the word here. Oh. Oh, oh, oh. Well, I'm going to talk about I'll give you my example. And then the word will appear to one of some of you. All right. The first time I saw the movie Superman, the movie with Christopher Reeve. And some of you weren't born then. I guess that was a pretty amazing film. And of course, the movie got pretty rank there at the end, you know, with Superman flying around the world backwards because he wasn't where Lois Lane was when he should have been there. That's that's a man for you. All right. Lois Lane needed him, and he was off saving the world or doing something else. But those first few scenes where Superman and Lois Lane are flying over Gotham City, that was magic, especially.

[00:30:56] I don't know where the music came from. You know, there they were flying. Can you read my mind? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But, you know, Superman wasn't really flying over Gotham City. Oh, we got a wise guy here who reminds me that Gotham City is the Batman garbage, and Metropolis is the Superman garbage right there over Metropolis. Thank you. Well, I can't. You know, I said before you were born, and now Superman wasn't flying over Metropolis. He was hanging from wires in front of a blue screen. And that and thus they take his image of flying, you know, and they they put. And what do we call that process? Superimpose. Yeah. Thank you. See what I need? Just like a football coach. I need all of the key plays right here. Superimpose, superimpose, superimposition. You watch the weather and the weatherman is pointing to what's going on and a map behind him. But the map isn't there. He's standing in front of a light blue screen or a light green screen. There's nothing there. And he's just looking and he's cheating. He's looking at a monitor off the screen and he knows where. 2.0. I got to move my hand over here. There's nothing behind him. Well, that's what the mind does. The mind superimposes the ideas of space and time upon everything that we become conscious of. But the space and time aren't out there. The space and time is in here, in the mind there. Okay, Now read the book. Second point, the categories of the understanding. Categories of the understanding. According to CART, there are 12 count them, 12 categories organizing principles or rules in the human mind, which take this totally unorganized mess of sense data and begin to put it into classes or classifications.

[00:33:24] Now, these 12 categories were divided into four groups of three, but and there's no need to remember all 12 because we now understand this is one of the, you know, modern logic has advanced to the point where we know that we can we can explain everything that can't sort to explain in terms of 12 categories. We can do it in terms of maybe seven or eight categories. We don't need to go into that. What the categories do is take this mass of unsorted information and put it in to put it into categories or groups. Here's another example. All right. When I lived in Kentucky, my bank was a little branch bank out near where we lived, and I had a safety deposit box in that bank. I didn't have anything in the box, but I just felt good. And in that place they'd let me go in the back and I'd have my own key. I got here. I felt so powerful, you know, I'm back there all by myself today. I go in there and I still don't have anything in my bank box, but there's, you know, people guarding me at every minute. So I open the bank box and I take out my box and I just, you know, I caress it. But in the case of the Kentucky Bank, they had a coin counting machine in the back. That's that's what I'm getting to here. And I like to be back. What they did was they had a nozzle and this was all yet they had electric plug and they would just dump boxes of coins of all denominations in that coin counting machine. They would turn the switch and that thing would start whirling. And before you knew it, all the pennies would come out of one place and the nickels out of another.

[00:35:17] And they all go into a bag and the dimes and the quarters and they'd all be counted so that in 30 seconds all of these coins would be counted and in bags. And you're now that's that's probably even a better analogy than the sausage machine. What had to be in that machine, that coin counting machine I don't know gears something that would sort the stuff out. Well, likewise, there's something in the brain, the mind I'm sorry, the mind that sorts out colors and shapes and smells and enables us to categorize things in classes. That's a dog. That's a triangle. That's a tree. That's a mountain. Okay. Incidentally, many of those categories were elements of knowledge that nobody before Cart was really able to explain. You want to know one of the categories? Equality. Equality. How do we know the two things are equal? Can't says because you've got a category of your mind. And that gives you the idea, the notion of equality itself, and you apply that to particular things. See? The this knowledge is a priori. Every human being is born equipped with certain innate. Categories of thinking. Oneness that would be unity. Oneness. 12 of them. Causation. How do we know that X causes Why? Because our mind forces us to think These categories force us to think in certain ways. Do you want to know why we interpret certain things as loss of science? Because our mind forces us to. The world is dependent upon the prior cognitive structure of the human mind. Wow. Now, finally, we come to part three, and we're not going to spend a lot of a lot of time here concerning for this is the transcendental unity of perception. Now, normally I take the time and I explain each word in this, but time is short and we got to cut some things out.

[00:37:55] I'm going to give you the four letter word that sums up what the transition to a fabulous epiphany. And it is a four letter word. Okay. I can't help that. What letter does it start with? Oh, okay. The transcendental unity of perception is the soul. It's the mind. There's so much else here that's interesting. But time keeps us from going into that. I mean, tomorrow morning at breakfast, ask your spouse how his or her transcendental unity of perception is doing. Okay. And if she says, well, my arthritis is kicking up again, but she doesn't get it, All right. This has nothing to do with arthritis. This is the mind, the soul. I'll give you one little one other analogy. Think of a picture puzzle. Here we have a thousand pieces of a picture puzzle. So how do you put them together or how do I put them together? I put all the colors the same. I put all the green in one place, the red on another, the blue sky in another. What I think is a building in another place, what I think is a white cow and another place. So then I have these things all over the table. That's the categories of the understanding. We group similar things together. But look, we don't perceive the world as a bunch of disconnected concepts. That's not how we perceive the world. When we become what you're aware of as you look around, this room is not this unrelated concept. You're aware of the whole picture. See, I see you right now in the context of the whole appearance. And that's the function of the self. There's another four letter word, the soul, another four letter word mind, another four letter word. We can't get along without four letter words.

[00:40:00] Okay. So what the mind does is it brings together all of these otherwise disconnected concepts, which in the beginning were utterly disconnected pieces of color, shape and so on. See, we never can perceive what's out here. We can never become aware of anything until after the categories of the understanding have acted upon them. But what we actually become aware of is the whole picture, which is that the self unifies the components of consciousness. Point four In my little outline, there are the two words perception, concepts, perception and concepts. Now I'm going to write two sentences on the board. Let me write them first and then I'll tell you they're important. Okay. Percept without concepts are blind. Concepts without percept are empty. Now, every time I write these two sentences on the board, I then utter the following sentence. In many respects, anybody who can interpret correctly these two sentences understands Kant's theory of knowledge. These two sentences are really the key that unlocks the meaning of Kant's theory of knowledge. Now, let's explain them. First of all, what is a percept? A percept is a unit of sense information, which we presume which we assume comes to us from the world outside of us. Keep in mind, however, that if there is an external world, we never perceive it. All we ever become conscious of our perceptions that have reached this place in the sausage machine, the body, the middle of the sausage machine, where the categories of the understanding are working. So when concept precepts without current concepts are blind, what he meant was if all you had was raw. Unfiltered unorganized. Uncategorized. Since information. It wouldn't be knowledge. It would be, you know, you'd be like a blind person. You'd be getting all of this buzzing, booming world of colors and shapes and sounds and smells.

[00:43:01] But there would be no knowledge. It would be blind. But concepts without perception are empty. If all you had were these 12 categories of the understanding can't here uses concepts and categories interchangeably, they would be empty. Now let's use our earlier examples perception without concepts that would be like the jelly, the preserves without any jars. Can you see them oozing down, dripping on the floor? No one's going to touch that stuff except the dog. And the dog will probably get to it before you do. All right. The jelly preserves without the jars are blind, but the jelly jars without the preserves are empty. They sure are. Human knowledge requires both raw sense information and the organizing principles of of the human understanding. Now, let me just read from the summary on page oh 264. I also see my example of the coin counting machine, but let me read under the summary knowledge four card is a compound, a combination of the impressions received through the senses and that which are inborn faculty of knowledge supplies humans possess and are priori rational structure of the mind. I think I've explained the word a priori earlier. Something is a priori. If it is independent of sense experience, it exists prior to it exists independently of sense perception. Okay, so humans possess and are priori rational structure of the mind, the categories that organizes sense data or percept. That's a typo right there. We didn't catch that that word. There should not be precept, it should be percept. So you might want to correct that. Can't sort to avoid the traditional difficulties of empiricism, especially as they came to light in the thought of HUME. For example, HUME showed that empiricism cannot justify any judgment of the form X causes.

[00:45:39] Why can't argued that our knowledge of X causes Y is a result of our mind necessarily disposing us to think in terms of causation? We think in terms of causation because we are where our mind forces us to and listen. All of the laws of science that you and I have been taught, or that the human race has been taught for the last 200 years post Newtonian science is not a reflection of the way the world is. The laws of science reflect the way our minds force us to think about the world. If you want to know the true home of the laws of science, it is not the world. It is the cognitive faculties of the human understanding. Our mind forces us to think of the world in terms of cause and effect and so on and so forth. Our mind forces us to think in terms of, Ooh, I'm going to open up. Bah bah bah bah bah Pandora's box here. But I'm and I'm not going to walk through it. But our minds force us to think of the world in terms of Euclidean geometry. Right. And don't don't raise the issue a pose of of non-Euclidean geometry. Okay. Because that is largely a construct anyway. All right. But I'm just telling you what how can't explain. Understands geometry and science and so on. Okay. Now we have one more step to take with Conte before I give you my comments and criticisms and then my alternative move when I got to hurry because I really want to finish this.