990115 0240 - KANT-L digest 1158

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Von: ed.s@sfnet.com <ed.s@sfnet.com>
An: Multiple recipients of list <kant-l@bucknell.edu>
Betreff: RE: KANT-L DIGEST 1158
Datum: Freitag, 15. Januar 1999 02:48

Michael Scarpitti <MScarpit@asnt.org> in re Binkley on conformity in knowing:

> Kant says that what objects may be in themselves and apart from our way
> of perceiving them is and must be unknown to us. Even if we could
> sharpen our perception to the highest degree possible, this would bring
> us no closer to the nature of objects.
>
> See this passage. A43

This tells me that for Kant, the objects of interest here must be perceived to
be known. That is, perception is some kind of transformation between the
object itself and the possibility of knowing. If that transformation is
neither the identity function nor some other mapping which while not identity
could be reconstructed exactly and known "both ways", then this seems quite
normal. The real orange I hold in my hand is neither the orange that I see
[of] nor the orange that I feel [of] nor the orange that I smell [of] nor the
feeling of resistance when I go to juggle [with] it. It is such a thing that
makes all those possible, but it is not any one nor some simple sum of those.

If we retreat from that impossible ground and consider, based upon empirical
science, that say vision involves an eye with selective attention to certain
limited parts of an E-M spectrum, and that a retina feeds pulse trains of
electrochemical discharges on many thousands of fibers to a brain in which the
orange-as-seen manifests (miraculously or otherwise) to a normal human with
eyes open and some attention to spare, then we understand why the
orange-as-see-able which is the orange-as-known-visually when it is recognized
as such, is not the orange-in-itself.

But one may still ask about knowing the orange-as-see-able. When that
orangeness floods some portion of the evoked visual field in the brain and
offers itself to me as a visual object and I recognize it as something, then in
my knowing it, does it not conform to my knowlege and my knowledge conform to
it, regardless of whether it is a plastic orange or a Magritte-like painting of
an orange? This it seems is the necessary ground of knowing for Kant.
Knowledge is post-perception, so to speak, it's all in your head.

Now if science ever unravels the mysteries of visual perception into necessary
well-defined transformations, would we say that we had extended the ground of
knowledge beyond mere perception, back out the optic nerve, through the retina
and vitreous humor, and onto the surface of the orange-in-itself where the
visual phenomena originate in the interplay between E-M disturbances and
molecules of orange-skin?

And then if we also discover the secrets of how multifaceted sense perception
is synthesized into knowledge of objects-as-perceived, would Kant's
things-in-themselves no longer be unknowable as such? Perhaps not until we
also know not only the factual world, but also the actual world of will, and
how those two form what passes for reality.

Ed Severinghaus