Humanism & Its Discontents (Session 3)

Okay, hello and welcome everyone to the session of Humanism in this content in the new center with Professor Resenegar-Stani. I think we're going to start now with our presentations. Yes, no more hello, no more how are you, we're just straight going into presentation. uh oh uh don't forget the attendees i see still six seats over there so where are presenters where are presenters diego and uh and emu

yes if you want i can start with this it won't take too long hopefully and uh can i share my screen so please let me know if you have any trouble watching the presentation so i i'm going to talk about Marx's theoretical humanism. What does that mean? And well, basically, according to Althusser, we can divide Marx's work in two basic stages. The first goes from 1842 to 1845. and he calls it the years of Marx enthusiasm and hope and enthusiasm and hope related to

humanism naturally and then after 1845 we've got the years of desolation and break with theoretical humanism so to begin with uh before 1844 we've got the manuscripts and And Marx, according to Althusser, was basically a Feuerbach, a Feuerbackian. And well, what does it mean to be a Feuerbackian? For Feuerbach, communism is basically humanism. And that means that communism is the rank of love among men, reconciled among themselves, because reconciled with their essence.

And what is their essence? Basically, the essence of man is the condition of alienation. Okay, so if man are reconciled with the essence, that means that it has abolished, preserved, and at the same time transcend that condition of alienation. What is alienation? Is this kind of separation between the object and the subject, something that is very peculiar and very characteristic of the German idealism and Romanticism, at least since Fichte. So, theoretically Marx was Feuerbachian and it was Feuerbachian because

was Marx applied for backing principles to the objects of his interest, especially to, naturally religion, but especially in 1844 to the object of politics. And a political, and this kind of application of for your backing principles to the object of politics follows a political, what Althusser think was a political development that has no effect on the theoretical positions that are basically idealism and humanism of Marx. So remember that in the critical

Hegel's philosophy of law from 1843, Marx said that man is no abstract being and kept outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. That is, according to Althusser, a pure Feuerbach and sentence. And what it is a Feuerbach and sentence, because Marx is departing from this kind of relationship that I have already described between object and subject. In this, or doing this, Marx is doing anything very different from what Feuerbach and before him, I don't know,

Schiller Friedrich Schleger, Hölderlin, Schelling and Natural Fish were doing or what they did. Basically for Feuerbach, men is the subject of the relation and the world. So, to say, the state and society is the object. And remember that Fichte said that in this relation, there were some, one of these terms are the determining element, and the other one is the determined element. So naturally, as you can imagine, the subject is the determining element in this relation of the object. The object is what is determined by the subject.

So the first one is the subject has an active role, if you want, if you prefer, and the object has a passive role. The subject informs or gives the form to the subject. okay and uh so for four years back the world it means the law and the states are the result of this uh process or this relation of alienation or to say what alienation means the objectification of the essence of man the essence of men is this a pure or original activity of informing something but something that is different from the man that's the thing about alienation that you are

dealing you have this speculative relationship with something outside or different from you so that that is the what characterizes the relationship between demand and the world in this speculative terms. And even Marx is a Feuerbachian even in his conception of religion because he, back in those days, was thinking on revolution, sorry, not religion, revolution, in terms of disalienation or recognition. Okay. Then, in the second stage,

We've got the manuscripts from 1844, and it's a kind of year of transformation, said Althusser, where we've got the three-way encounter between Feuerbach, Hegel, and political economy. That, however, doesn't modify too much or doesn't change too much the scope of Marx's approach to the object of political economy. It's going to be speculative just as it was before. before. So here, the encounter with political economy is the economy of the economists,

Smith and Ricardo, naturally. It brings the use of new categories, okay? For example, the categories or categories such as capital, labor, profits, rents, division of labor, market and so on. Nonetheless, these categories are just objects under a kind of extension or that are covered by some kind of extension of Feuerbach's theory of alienation to economy. So what Althusser is pointing out here is that Marx is in, before 1844, Marx was using

power backing categories to talk about politics, but now Marx is going to take the same philosophical scope and the same philosophical categories to talk about economy, okay? So the relationship of the relation is still speculative. And it's going to, I mean, the change or what is changing here with Hegel is that Marx is taking Hegel's conception of labor to talk about political economy. So basically, the labor is an activity, an immense activity that is objectified in goods, products that are exchanged in the market.

And those goods and products are the objectification of this condition of elimination of men, particularly workers' activity. OK, so human activity is basically or the essence of human or men's. Sorry, the essence of men is this activity that produces objects and that concrete the state of alienation of men, specifically workers. um but um the problem here is that this conception of labor is not the same conception of labor that has in mind the economist such as ricardo or smith because it is hegelian conception of labor

is a speculative conception of labor that extends this relation between object and subject, the determining point of the relation or the determining term of the relation with the determined term of the relationship, right? So basically, what is labor for Hegel? is that kind of the moment in the dialectical process where the subject finds its limit and it's limited by an object

and it has to overcome to abolish, preserve, and transcend in this movement of Augebun, or the negativity of that external or contrary object, right? So the thing is that as we can see, the concept of labor is an idealist conception of labor that is not the same concept that, that or the same concept as we can find it in the work of Smith and Ricardo and that's the problem

that Althusser finds in these in these years or in these specifically text or in this specific text text of Marx right so basically what is doing Marx here according to Althusser is that he's kind of making a little modification in his definition of man's essence. Now, man's essence is an activity, and that activity is labor, and history is going to be the result or the outcome of the labor of men. um the problem is that the concept the concept of here the problem here is that um we are starting

to to see how marx is giving us or is telling us that history is the result of a man's of activity of man history is the result of man's activity that is what what are you i'm trying to say and The problem is that the concept, this anthropological conception of history has several presuppositions. When we talk about alienation, subject, and men, we are going to see that they start to present themselves. well, not present themselves, but for the scientists, they are like epistemological

obstacles, something that blocks our understanding or our proper understanding about history. And that's on the one hand. And on the other hand, these concepts of alienation, subject, and men embedded in this anthropological conception of history are part or are not very or came from a pure pure bourgeois moral ideology basically and what is this ideology? dissolution of free or original activity. Okay? That man is a free being that through its activity informs or gives shapes to the world.

Let's continue with the third. Sorry about that. Just one moment. um are you already counting with um a news and endless presentation because i think we if they're still going to present we should probably give them some space now he's doing very well i'm gonna let him continue okay to hurry up How about three more minutes? Yes. Yes, sure. So what happened years before with the public, when Marx makes public his thesis on Feuerbach

and the text of German ideology, that he's going to abandon this kind of idealism. and he is going to bring what he thinks, he and Engels think, are concrete new problems. But these concrete new problems are not going to leave this common land of humanism. What they are modifying their kind of theoretical empiricism in league with idealism to, and they are moving to a kind of humanist empirism. And the problem is that Marx is going to say that it is not man, the subject of history,

but the subject of history are actually real men or concrete men. So individuals, basically. And this means that Marx is taking a turn or is changing from idealism to a kind of empiric position, okay, theoretical position. And finally, just to finish with this, we can see how in Capital this theoretical humanism of Marx disappears. And disappears because he's going to develop a science of history, which is a historical materialism that was already present in the text on German ideology.

But at the same time, Marx is going to start out from the abstract, not from the concrete material individuals, but from the structures of society. So structures of society are going to be the first moment in this dialectical development of the history. So it's a kind of departure from humanism to something very, very different, which Althusser called Marx anti-humanism. And I think that that was everything. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Superb. Excellent. Magnificent. Thank you. So if I remember correctly though, everyone should collaborate on one single presentation. What happened? We did communicate, but then I think my internet has been very intermittent, so I think structurally it became very difficult. And we divided... So you screwed up again? I also thought I had another hour because of the baylight savings time. So I've been hardly. Don't worry. No, no explanation needed. Go on.

Should I go next or Emil, did you want to go next, which makes more whoever. Maybe we should get a little backstory to the three time zones. You know, but I also we've only just sort of compartmentalized who was going to do what in the readings. One person's pulled out because they're feeling sick. Don't worry. I understand. All the stuff I had prepared. So I don't know. All my notes were for everything that Diego covered because I was not sure what I was going to do. So he's going to do the first half. He's covered it excellently. So I'm going to leave it to end up.

Okay. I mean, I can just say some things very quickly and informally, I guess. Okay, so, yeah, so I guess one thing that I tried to focus on was the kind of the last section where, you know, I feel like what Althusser is critiquing, particularly in this essay, is the fact that humanist notions in, I guess, in Feuerbach, but then also in contemporary humanist Marxism, which for his time, at least, which he treats as being even worse than Feuerbach or like a second rate Feuerbach, is that they set their questions up with the pretension of scientific inquiry, and then they fail to live up to this kind of billing. And so this is where

he argues that the kind of humanist Marxism ends up being a very reactionary position. It's almost a redoubling of Feuerbach's story of man needs a bridge to be built across the river, and then the bridge is built, and he attributes this to God, where Feuerbach says, no, it would be man the whole time. And I think the redoubling of this, the problem, it becomes the kind of abstraction in a sense, or it becomes, it kind of, it poses an intermediary of man as this kind of like signifying object rather than the kind of real material activity that kind of produces this

like this kind of construction or whatever. And so I guess what he is arguing in that sense is this appeal to man, this appeal to humanism is always a kind of, like, I don't know how you would put it best, but, you know, like, like a kind of ideological, yeah, well, like, he said, pretty much, it's an ideological kind of, like, like, theological way of bypassing the problems of German idealism. And so, yeah, I guess, I don't know. So the questions that I was kind of really, I wanted to like, maybe raise was, first of all, you know,

whether this, like, yeah, I think there's like, there's like some nuance here in the sense that he's saying that like the problem is to do with the kind of theoretical humanism as a kind of philosophically bankrupt and ideological wishful thinking position. But like, I wonder whether, you know, there's, you know, still a kind of like a problem of human exceptionalism that we have to contend with in a sense, right? So, you know, we can't simply like explain away things like language or intelligence. And so might we have to bite the bullet of human exceptionalism insofar as like the language using human subject is still normatively, we have to consider it normatively

different terms to the animal subject. And I think, you know, I think Althusser even says this at certain points in the essay, or he alludes to like a possibility of still asking this question when he says that what is man shouldn't be a kind of a solution to these problems, but rather, it's like a further question. And I guess, you know, this is maybe a useful constraint for asking our question what is man or what is the human, not so much as a solution to certain kind of philosophical problems that lead to an impasse, but rather as a kind of constraint in the question that needs to be asked from the outset. But then my question is whether you can maintain an anti-humanist position in respect of this, because at a certain level, to my mind, it seems like whenever we posit a kind of degree of human exceptionalism, that also in a sense implies

that we're maybe, well, maybe it doesn't imply that we're taking kind of a humanist position, but we're nevertheless, yeah, we need to, it's kind of allied to humanism in a certain way, even by just kind of focusing on this question, it's within the ambit of that problem. And then, so what I also wanted to ask was whether the kind of position that Althusser is putting forward here can be applied to the kind of contemporary articulations of post-humanism. And I was thinking about this as I was reading, and I thought it would be a really effective way to ask whether, you know, you know, and we'd have to take each on their own merits, but I think that the question of post-humanism or the way that it's articulated often could be seen as a kind of sublimated version of the humanism that Althusser is critiquing here, which is,

you know, as a kind of way of paying kind of heed to the questions and the antinomies of German idealism or the sort of problem of like freedom and kind of natural necessity in a way that ultimately bypasses them through a kind of theological notion. I think often it seems to me that some of these kind of articulations of the post-human are in a sense theological, right? They try to bypass those problems. And so would, you know, I guess it's an open question that we can come back to when we discuss some of these ideas of the post-human, but just whether it's the same kind of theological impulse as humanism that simply kind of denies that that's what it's doing.

The last question that I wanted to ask, though, was, you know, it's, I guess, Althusser's ultimate kind of endorsement of Marx as a kind of process philosopher or Marx as the kind of anti-humanist philosopher is, it seems to me that he's pushing a position where there's no subject. And I wonder whether, you know, how we can have, like, you know, an agent of revolutionary change, which isn't a subject. Now, maybe in between the lines here, and I'm maybe misunderstanding what Althusser is saying, maybe he is saying, well, it's not the human, but the revolutionary subject is kind of the proletarian, the working class, and that is the kind of matter of subject construction here. I guess like for a contemporary situation where those, you know, where the way in

which we can sort of identify clearly sort of different classes is more diffuse and difficult, you know, is there some alternative way to construct subject which neither relies upon the human in all of the kind of insidious ways that Althusser seems to like, I think, in a quite compelling way criticizes, whilst at the same time also not relying on the kind of old categories of a kind of class subject as the agent of revolutionary, like, yeah, of like political revolution. And I'm kind of wondering, yeah, just to like the last thing to say would be like. That would be essentially what Poisson tries to do, what exactly Althusser tries to do German idealism.

And Poisson does the same thing to Althusser and Marx, really, by fundamentally criticizing, you know, the whole idea of classist struggle. I mean, Poisson's work on labor and time is absolutely an astonishing critique. It is a very damning critique of classical Marxism in any shape. And by that, I don't mean Marxist humanists. I mean, really Marxism in 20th century. Super, excellent as always. Yeah, I just was reading. Sorry, I got a little bit distracted. I was just reading Aaron's suggestion.

We used to actually have that sort of thing, but I don't know. Out of pure slot, we dropped it. it would be magnificent yes if people you know just upload their presentations I would say that by two days before the actual class so we can read it and then we only do the discussions right the problem that I have encountered with that in so far as we are feeble human beings. We are a sloth fool. And we are not going to upload it. But if any of you

actually write a presentation, please do upload it. And then we just go through the discussions. That would be magnificent. Do we have another presentation or not? Is that that was it? Yeah, I think someone was missing. Yeah, Ivan sent us an email saying he wouldn't be able to come. So I think it's the three of you. if Emil is that's all good that's all good so a few questions for your entertainment

number one if we go to the root of anthropology in a cantonian sense we see human as an activity right most probably derived by something called practical reason. Essentially, Kant ensures that the idea of theoria and the canonical sense of classical thought is being shattered by practical reasoning, by practical reasoning, practical knowledge. So in that sense, the question of human exceptionalism, Is it really human exceptionalism back into the essence of man?

Or simply, we are defining human, as it has always been since Kant, by a sui generis family of activities. Sui generisness of activities. Then you have to say that, okay, what can they be? and that sui generisity of activities qua man does it amount to human exceptionalism in the sense that we have been warned by these people number one question number two question So we get this idea that, you know, essentially man is simply a labor.

I mean, but that's not really actually a fundamentally Marxian idea, right? I mean, this is Kant's Hegel 101, right? Human is a labor. what actually Marx adds to it, initially, two new ingredients. One, historical materialist, nature of the slaver, and two, the essence of the labor itself, which is that of alienation.

Right. So in that sense, possibly as philosophers, we should think that can we actually does. Okay, how about this formulating like this does the soil historical material is nature of labor. of labor always coincides with alienation? Are they like weird sisters that come hand in hand in Shakespearean way or that they can be coupled? First part of this question. Second part of this question would be that if they can be separated to a certain extent, or at least distinguished from one another coherently,

then what is the nature of alienation? Can we say that there are negative and positive alienations? those that contribute to the labor, as Gramsci would say, the labor that the human makes of itself, right, of its own, you know, as an activity that determines concretely, historically its own self. That would be a positive alienation, right? A negative alienation would be simply the constraints upon the limitation, upon the nature of such an activity. And it wouldn't be overinflated

into something purely negative, quote, classical idea of alienation, right? so that would be the second question the third question which is like a I would say that an auxiliary question with regard to the second question is that what are we alienated of, essentially? So Marx has an answer for that. So us can't. And the whole history of German idealism, you know, Hegel's greatest idea that Geist is its own deeds,

and Geist is the greatest limitation on its own deeds. so there is a component of alienation here that you are being alienated from your own deeds which also make up the very idea of human but then we have to determine with regard to Kant and perhaps Hegel, what sort of alienation is going on in their idea of human as a practical activity, as a pragmatic activity? What sort of alienation happens precisely

in Marx and Althusser? So the level, there is a certain sort of, we are dealing with tiers of, uh, ontological tiers of, at which this alienation is happening. And then you have to answer, um, whether Marx actually adds something or whether Kant and Hegel had already foreseen this by very nature of how they define the nature of alienation. at their own specific ontological tier. Cassia?

I was thinking a few things about that question. And it seems to me that the critique Autocert makes is quite thorough in some aspects because it denounces the conservative aspect of Feuerbachian humanism. But if we take serious Hegel's claims about the subject of history being the process of alienation itself, it seems weird to me that the concept of revolution, which until, at least until what I read from the text, is being thought of as doing away with alienation.

Because in some sense, we can see that what you call negative alienation and what I think Samo Tomchik calls constituted alienation can be seen as estrangement. And on the other hand, there is this constitutive alienation that which is structural and composes the very idea of the human as a formal condition which then is more aching to what uh hegel is is thinking as the spirit or the process without a subject yes so so i guess we can disambiguate this question by by by looking more uh deep into the

difference differences between structural alienations which is constitutive of the qualitative leap from sentience to sapience and then constituted alienation which is a contingent upon the capitalist mode of production and the alien will and so on yes yes i think that Althusser has a little bit of ambiguity in this whole idea of alienation. He doesn't do a great job at really distinguishing different forms of alienation and the consequences of such alienations. I mean Marx himself is quite clear that communism is actually a form of positive alienation,

taking capitalism to its ultimate concrete historical conclusions. And there is nothing else to communism. I mean communism is not a la-la land after capitalism. It is the self-concrete consciousness of capitalism. In that sense, he's already reserving a certain kind of wiggling room or what we might call what we can do with alienation. In the second sense that you mentioned. Aaron. Okay.

I will try to be brief. The dog. Two questions. The first, be really helpful if we could define what Althusser means by science. so he he he he's more is mostly talking about the spontaneous spontaneous ideology of science that's what he means really and what that's that science that science is essentially a philosophy in a heideggerian thing you know that science does not think right so for althusser is essentially a philosophy. Science is a philosophy, a philosophy that does not think. Simply, it is a practice. It's a matter of practice. And hence, it always has a spontaneous

ideology at its own background. Like think about the history of Mack and Boltzmann and all the great early philosopher scientists that essentially the way that they make their own practices in sciences are informed by fundamental philosophical doctrines that they have of ourselves and the world. So for Althusser, science is essentially a philosophy and is blind of its own doings. because he seems so i know at a later date he kind of expands ideology and says oh no everything

has ideology there's no getting rid of ideology but at least at this early stage he does seem to want to distinguish between ideology and science and say that marx is ideological until until he creates the science of historical materialism. Yeah, the science of history. Yes. That is actually quite, actually, yeah. In this earlier stage, I think that he cannot, that sort of move is rather not tenable. Yeah, probably. But so I once encountered this and I haven't been able to find it in my notes. I think it was probably Raymond Goiz, but someone did a very helpful sort of distinguishing what the term science means and how it's used in French, English, and German.

Right. And said that to understand Althusser, you need to understand this particular French sense of what science is. where sort of in English we think of predictive science as sort of empirical, predicting what's going to happen. In German, literature is a science because a science is any kind of systematic knowledge, rather than it being particularly predicting the future, it's more retrospective. And that French has this other way of considering things to be a science that comes out of these guys who he's citing, kanguiem um bachelard people like that and that althusser is using science in this specific way um i can't find it in my notes but does anyone know what that is or do you there is a certain sort of as i said there is a certain way that uh heideggerian sense that science does not think

science ultimately comes to know-hows but know-hows which are ultimately beholden to certain sort of implicit know-whats okay that's helpful it seems like he's flipping the valorization though yes yes yes i mean uh really i think uh that's a that's a more mature officer on the spontaneous sciences. That's actually a very good piece. But yeah, I think that I'm not convinced by the sort of moves to what you might call to be dredge up science from pure ideology. Right?

At least in the way that Althusser is trying to do that. well, if he really tries to do that, then he has to abide by at least a morsel of empirical justification for sciences, right? And that would be damning for him. Because that empirical justification itself in the sort of framework, Marxian framework that he works within can actually be the very apparatus of alienation itself. Given the material constitution

of science in the way that he talks about science as opposed to ideology. this is why I think that a majority of I mean the Althusser gives us great arsenal but I am not convinced by his discussion precisely because if you really take Althusserian discussion to its ultimate conclusion it's going to just like any sort of French Marxist is going to actually come back and bite them in the butt. As I said, the whole idea of labor for me

is very interesting. And this is, you see, yeah, sure. I completely understand that the human is a laborer. This is something that we know as homocriticus of Kant. that the human is a production of its own activity. And Gramsci talks about it quite at length as essentially the product of a certain critical philosophy post-enlightenment. But then labor here, you don't have different senses of labor in Althusser. essentially labor is being rather diluted to the very certain form of labor which is

you know uh basically riddled with material conditions of labor and so on so forth But the thing is that this is why I think this is why the battle happens at some point. That's been, for example, someone like Brandome and classical Marxists, right? Or French Marxists that, you know, insofar as you have not distinguished between different forms of laborers that constitutes the very essence of man as an activity, as a pragma, you cannot actually say that

historical, material historical conditions fully determine the essence. Essentially, it would be a fundamentally, again, Kantian move, you know, the critique of Althusser and French Marxist by saying that just as we put limits on the rational activities as a labor, we also put limits on the sort of knowledge of these material conditions that we have. And hence, your version of human as a laborer in terms of this sort of flattened alienation is exactly,

basically punctured by the same sort of problems that haunted Kant and German idealism, and probably even Fichte. It's just that the nature of those problems have changed because you have moved from one tier of one concept of labor to another. You see now them in terms of historical, material historical conditions. Is it okay if I ask one more sort of clarifying bit about alienation or that we focus on that? Because yeah, it's not clear to me exactly. It seems like Althusser is kind of just, you can give and not explicitly define a sort of inflated metaphysical conception and then say it's good that Marx discards it.

But it's not clear to me sort of what he means. I guess similarly with alienation, there are two specific ways in which I can see it. And it's primarily a concept about practical agency, about practical reason. right um and alienation can either be considered sort of a moment um in a process of of figuring out the labor that you need to do to to get the end and to get the end and the means in place right the the example um that i really like is learning a second language right where you think that you should be able to express yourself and then you realize you don't have the means to do so and you need to alienate yourself from how you think you express yourself and relearn a whole

new way of of moving your mouth and putting words together um or the other one is as a as a sort of concrete state of affairs in society where hegel gives the example of um courts of law and police right where in primitive society you believe you have the right to revenge yourself if someone comes and punches you in the face, you can go punch them back. In civil society, in a state of law, you have to go to the courts. So you have this alienated, but similarly, it's either a moment, you can think of it temporally, this is the work I need to do, or you can think of it as a kind of social process that you need to learn a different way of navigating through other people. I mean, I think that with Marx, it's a rather clear, vaguish about this, that alienation

is the very byproduct of historical concretization and the self-consciousness of that concretization within history. It's neither predetermined by the temporality of our practical reasonings, you know, I ought to do this, and by virtue of this, I might actually think. No, in a sense that for Marx, alienation actually arises from the freedom within the realm of practical agency. either and this is this is the downing thing for later marxists that probably they would say that

uh okay so uh alienation is the byproduct of freedom within practical domain either precisely because the nature of this freedom was illusory. Then you have to become very, very empirical, human at this point, right? Which they are not going to do that. But of course you have seen that there are some of them have done that, like Jack Comet and other, you know, communization theory par excellence. Or you would say that, yes, alienation is coming through freedom and freedom is really

that sort of activity that generates alienation, but then alienation, you would then, you cannot simply say that alienation is alienation as a flat sense. then you have to distinguish between different senses of alienation as pertaining to different senses of freedom. Negative, positive, practical, theoretical, the choice of knowledge. I mean, remember that Kant actually does not reserve freedom merely for practical agents. he just thinks that even the knowing agent has freedom right

freedom with regard to the sort of contents of questions that we are going to pursue that even a scientist has a freedom in a deep sense of a knowing agent no i yeah that's it's all great and helpful um yeah i would just like do you have a better sense of what altusser is going at of like what what he no really i'm not a lot of serian but but i mean yeah essentially yes that's you see essentially the only reason that i actually selected this

texts precisely because it kind of brings us back further into Kant rather than alienating us from Kant. We see that this sort of coup, the so-called coup, is actually not coup. It's just simply refining the edifice of critical philosophy a la Kant. Simply, sometimes by virtue of unraveling the criticisms levied against Kant. Okay, Maria. Yeah. I ended up

on a different really different part of Althusser where he was saying that alienation was in Fairbach alienation was the separation of human ideals in form of religion. So if your question is whether this is connected with labor in Marxian sense probably not. If in in Fijlian maybe yes because this but there is a sense a deeper sense that you can say that this is what I was going to talk about and we are going to talk about today finally thanks god that there is in fact that whole idea of activity what is man as an idea of a pragma as

an activity a practical sort of science or practical form of inquiry I wouldn't call it science, let's just put that word out of this whole thing at this point. I would say that unfortunately or fortunately that actually brings us to a very Feuerbachian question that or anti-Fuerbachian that precisely the idea of the human does not become religious, but it becomes an object of certain sort of faith. Or I wouldn't call it faith,

perhaps highest ends of a regulative idea. He calls it the limit. The limit, yes. I mean, look, I think that there is a certain kinds of opportunism, if I need to be really, and hopefully we don't have super classical Marxists amongst us. I would say that there is a certain kind of conservatism among the early Marxism. I'm not going to say French Marxist because that would be too much. But certain kinds of conservatism within the early classical Marxism in how they interpret

counts to German idioms. What they say actually about the human. And to be honest with you, I'm not convinced that any of that sort of, they add new elements, which are great. I mean, like whole idea of discovery of history as a plane of inquiry, right? But I don't know how much it radically changes what Kant and German idealists after him had actually already discovered. of, you know, yeah, sure. I mean, there is a change in the dynamic, concrete dynamic of history,

you know, that we no longer talk about these sorts of stuff as if they were abstract ideas. We are talking about them as if they were particular and universal, concrete ideas. concrete here is essentially what distinguishes the process of concretization and the specificity of those processes of concretization is what actually sets apart marks from people who have come before him. But yes, I'm unfazed at this point by this source of criticisms levied against Kant and Hegel.

And actually I'm coming back again reading Hegel. I'm also unfazed by some of the criticisms that Hegel levies against Kant. it seems to me but that's the whole nature of philosophy though I mean isn't it a circle of revenge that never closes a circle right that's a source of enrichment but yes no I mean literally I wish that there was a really really super Hegelian Marxist amongst us who could say that everything that you

say is just plain wrong well we don't have it unfortunately so arman this is the last question no more questions we're going to have you taking a break and then i'm going to lecture and no question afterwards i'm going to take a real quick shot at doing it hegelian marxist something Because what you said about practice, I think about the first question is the real, as I understood it, would be the real strategic question. Because if you can answer that, is the practice sujuris a lot?

Or is it some kind of unconscious process that we don't know where it's going? Which is what Althusser is trying to say in my head. Some kind of a process of classic struggle, but not really classic struggle. Some structuralist version of it. That the base structure is so much alien from the superstructure that can swing it off. So if you see practice as that, then you cannot have alienation in a positive sense because you cannot plan alienation. You cannot see, yes, I'm going to be alienated from this state to that state and this is the path. If you accept Otisar's way of putting practice.

In a sense, if I can formulate it, is that precisely by virtue of his own words, then alienation remains fundamentally indeterminate and abstract. No, just recollectively because you can't- Recollectively recollectively recollectively. But recollectively is essentially when we see to basically the idea of recollection, we see that it is not fully concrete. It is still remains to be determined. That would be signs of history or signs of society. That would be Marxian dream. It would be, but how can it be achieved?

I don't have a question for our fortune. There is something here. No, it's a really good question. I mean, there is a certain source that what Althusser tries to do here with the idea of alienation, and labor as the essence of the human, and human as activity in that sense, is exactly by shifting the domain of inquiry to a different plane. So Kant already has that too, with imagination and schemata, right, as a source of objective knowledge. And by that, I mean objective knowledge of man.

Not as simply an empirical, but simply as a practical agent, right? So Kant already falls under the weight of this problem. And Altucher seems to be simply thinking that he can actually change the plane of human activity from that was already at hand with Kant to a new one, the historical materialist one, and he can actually resolve this. This is not a really good strategy to solve philosophical questions. You cannot simply think that moving from one level to another gives you what you might call to be a more godlike resolution to the problem that you already have.

It actually more probably, as we know it in philosophical canon and in sciences, it more probably riddles you with more fucked up problems. okay five minutes see i know maria has a question maria you have to wait until the end now love you five minutes of refreshments smoking more and so on so forth and then i will come see you So we're back now.

Please. Sure. So continuing from what we have been talking about, as I said, can try to solve a very fundamental discussion in the sense that he realizes at some point after writing Critic reason that the questions of what is and there are three iterations of that ultimately relegated or delegated to a fourth question it is important to understand that Kant actually does not

counter anything new fundamentally sorry can you hear me can you all hear me yeah sorry forgot to put my mic no no don't worry don't worry So Kant essentially stays within the ambits, of course with new twists, of classical thought, pre-critical modern philosophy, right? So the first question, what do I know? Why not? it? That is actually not really an interesting question. It is the question that philosophy

has been struggling with since the time of Plato and Aristotle, right? It's essentially the question of metaphysics. It just wants to change the nature of this question, but But nevertheless, it is really the ambit of the classical thought, meaning that he just thinks that metaphysics is not possible anymore, aka science of being co-being. What is to know, ultimately, is at the bottom, what is there? right a very metaphysical robust question so Kant simply tries to

by a way of certain sort of philosophical cunning to divert that question from classical question of philosophy but of course to any person who has read Aristotle, we know that this is exactly what basically philosophy has been grappling with. Right? So he's essentially just like Althusser with Kant and Hegel, German idealism

try to substitute a question, question one, with question two, that still tries to inform the possible answers that question one would have plus something more. By limiting the nature of the question or problem itself. So, in this sense, you can say that the project of the critique ultimately tries to put a limit on a finite intellect,

dependent on our own receptivity in terms of sensory impressions. But that really does not actually challenge fundamentally the question of what is knowledge in a classical sense of philosophy. So in that sense, can simply attach a few more limits to the problem at hand. What can I know? Right?

But the limits that he's putting on this, absolutely, under no condition, change the very nature of the question, which has given to us a classical philosophy, right? But of course, this is what I think Kant is a genius. He wants exactly do this. He doesn't want really to challenge classical thought, classical philosophy. He wants to create a cumulative effect by introducing new limits on what sort of problems these problems are, right?

The same thing you can say about Kant's idea of science. My apologies for my illiterate German pronunciation, Weissenschacht. It's still the same sort of science that people have been peddling in philosophy before. rigorously self-determined knowledge and that knowledge is uh can can actually be tailored a little bit tapered and tailored so

what ultimately Kant can tell you about science is um by simply saying that the science is a species of reason. A reason that actually admits the revolutions made by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. the second question if you remember that what ought i to do what should i do

uh of course this question is also very very classical it's about practical reason morality obligations and accountability right the third question is about values and perhaps even religion but of course in all of these three questions Kant as I said launch a fundamentally genius attack on these questions by grilling them,

by problematizing them with new limits, with new constraints. He's a child of enlightenment, right? So he knows the bipolarity of the empirical transcendental doublet, right? He does not want to abide by one side, unilateral side of this doublet. He wants to actually create something that we would call really transcendental philosophy. And I don't think that Foucault's idea of transcendental philosophy,

transcendental, empirical transcendental Doppler actually gives anything new and perhaps even less to the very idea of what transcendental actually means, transcendental philosophy. And I'm going to talk about this. So, with regard to the question and two and three, he tries to accommodate classical thought plus revolutions made at the hands of people like Galileo, Copernicus, and so on and so forth. that they had won on the battle of the old metaphysics.

What do I know, right? Comte de Holbach, Baron, Baron, actually, sorry. Baron de Holbach has this really interesting passage in system of nature that tries to make sense of these questions post the invention of mechanics, enlightenment, and the emergence of natural sciences. And lo and behold,

even when Holbeck tries to grapple with these three questions, which are classical, even after the honest lot of science on everything that we know, these questions remain intact. These questions become very humble questions and over-ambitious questions in a sense that we have always been asking ourselves from day one in philosophy. It says, man always deceives himself when he abandons experience to follow imaginary systems. Man is a work of nature. He exists in nature. He is submitted to her laws.

He cannot deliver himself from them. He cannot accept beyond them, even in thought. Let man cease. Let man cease. I can see that some promonition about the nature of the human. Let man cease. Then the search out of the world he inhabits for beings who can produce happiness. You know, this happiness is essentially the question number two. Felicity. Felicity. The question of ethics should end up with the question of felicity, happiness.

The nature denies. Let him study this nature. Let him learn her laws. Let him contemplate her energies and the immutable rules by which she acts. Let him apply these discoveries to his own felicity and let him submit in silence to a loss which nothing can alter. So this is like someone who sees, becomes in a head-to-head collision with natural sciences and yet even with that sort of fatal collision with natural sciences

all those first three questions remain intact. It's just that we are we cannot actually answer those questions without the introductions of new constraints upon them. new constraints at this point are those which are levied against us by the invention of modern sciences. And furthermore, there is an absolute integrity between these first three questions, precisely

because the integrity, the union of these three questions is the very history of philosophy. Literally, all of philosophy has been grappled with these questions for so many times. So Holbach, as an ardent, staunch warrior for the new enlightenment and system of sciences, national sciences, It still holds the view that those questions, the first three questions, are not actually being annihilated by the emergence or advent of natural sciences, but rather they finally shine forth.

they come to the foreground in their extreme troubling nature I'm not supposed to ask questions but is there any sort of stuff that you want to say at this point heckling and so on and so forth yeah Aaron So just to challenge you on the question of an end to metaphysics, because I feel like this brings up sort of how you treat post Kantian skepticism and Hegel in particular. But as I understand it, the answer to the first question, what can I know, for the most part is what you're saying.

The answer is nature, right? It's the realm of entities that Newtonian physics or something like it gives us. We can know that and we can know certain synthetic a priori sort of concepts and the categories that allow us to know that, allow us to do natural science. Right? There's nature and then there's the transcendental ideas. Yes. but we are not talking about transcendental ideas or activities as categories as activities right now we're simply trying to say that

Kant's idea what do I know is essentially remains within the ambit of the classical thought what is being it is just that we have changed just as I said to Arman that we have changed the level of the inquiry from level one to level two. And we are now no longer asking sort of questions within the chain, the great chain of beings. But we are actually asking these questions within the domain of new national sciences. Yet those problems persevere and resist. but they they persevere because we're limiting ourselves to the first question i guess it can

wait till we go on but the question of whether you think sort of post-Kantian skepticism is warranted and so further questions about metaphysics are warranted or whether Kant really does in some way put an end to metaphysics and and Jacobi and Hegel and everyone sort of Kant is a progenitor of positivism in its essence. I think that is absolutely true. I mean, Kana without Kant is a matarsak, what do we call it in Parsi, matarsak? A scarecrow, right? But essentially, Kana without Kant,

as a progenitor of positivism, is meaningless. Kant essentially trying to make the foundations of what later becomes positivism, even to his own basically downfall in the sort of questions, in the first three questions, particularly the first one. But throwing out the holism of transcendental ideas makes the other questions incomprehensible. Right? Yes, yes, of course, of course. Which is the limits of positivism and why positivism can't answer any of the other questions. Yes, yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. That essentially, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is, of course, you know, positivism is essentially a thesis about reduction as enrichment of claims. but Kant actually does not believe in that sort of schema, absolutely not but nevertheless he actually puts something forward that really lubricates the emergence of positive I'm going to talk about this I don't know anyone wants to say something here just one more question before I move forward

can i ask didn't you say previously that what is the answer to the question this man is uh essentially his labor and in kentian terms his practical reason pragma pragma pragmatism Isn't that pragmatism a task which can be understood as a task that is consisting of different parts, which we can know.

And in history, what is changing is not the task as a whole, but its parts. Yes, but you are ruining my great twist in this narrative. I'm just trying to connect to it. Not another question. Yes, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. You see, this is kind of actually very interesting that so nature on the first three questions, in a way or another, are still fundamentally classical questions of philosophy, in the sense of theoria.

Theoria doesn't mean that it's a theoretical reason, but a theoretical reason that is also mingled with certain sort of practical reasons. Because we cannot have theory without know-hows, without practices of some sort. But the thing is that Kant wants to radicalize this question, to relegate every sort of theoretical reasoning within these first three questions to that of a practice, and not any sort of mundane sort of practice, what the pragma, the system of practices of man or the human can make of its own self.

Precisely because the human is not an object of theoretical reason. Simple as that. The human is the object of pragma's. Right? practices. And of course, then it becomes very clear that Kant is no far from Hegel, and Kant is no far from Marx in that manner. It's just that the nature of these pragmats needs to be understood in their entirety. What is the sort of labor that makes a human

a human? Right? I think that that's the real question. And that the nature of this labor cannot be flattened into one specific family of pragmoms or practices, or rather should be distributed across horizontally and vertically at the same time. But the nature of the human unfortunately comes to hierarchies of various sort of practices. And if we do not pay attention to one practice, we most probably end up mixing up one practice

with another practice. As a history of, I hope that you are not going to snitch on me on this, as a history of Kitsch Marxism assurance, identity politics and all of that sort of jazz, that we can simply solve these questions by this and that. We need everything. Every level needs to be accountable and accounted for. This is essentially the very idea of anthropology, as I'm going to say it in a Kantian sense.

that the fact that we have not understood the idea of anthropology has landed us on a very, very bleak historical moment. anything any more tickling you can swear at me too just one quick one um do you think knowledge as a practice can can be thought as a whole

is is there is there is knowledge one because that seems to be the difference between someone like Kant and positivists or anti-representationalists. I mean, no, absolutely. No, knowledge can never be understood as a whole. No, absolutely. We cannot have holistic methodologies of knowledge production, but we can never actually have knowledge as a whole. Interesting. To be honest with you, even this is, I wish that you were in my Karna classes. That was essentially my goal to show that even Karna, as a champion of positivism, right?

Logical positivism. Yes, probably he did that idea at the beginning, precisely because he was influenced fundamentally by Husserl and Noah Kantinists. But soon he understands that this is completely an untenable project. The whole idea of conceptual engineering or explication is essentially an answer to the idea that we cannot have knowledge as a whole. but we cannot holistic humble i would say modest holistic methodologies mhm

so well i disagree on that let's yeah i don't want to stop us no no no please please go on If you have a disagreement, you have to stop. Yeah, I think Carnap, well, I wish I had taken the Carnap class as well. I haven't really dealt with Carnap, but I don't think Carnap can because positivism, by only talking about being or by what is, can't treat knowledge as a whole because knowledge has to also talk about what is. actually does not bother itself, logical positivism does not. Maybe early positivism, but definitely

Carnap and positivism absolutely does not bother itself with the question of being. That is out of the window right away. Yeah, so yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get at is more the, when you can only talk about the modality of what is, you can't talk about becoming or things that aren't, you can't, you can't really talk about meaning or historical processes in the same way. I don't, I think a good Kantian like Sellers thinks that philosophy is trying, what philosophy is, is trying to take knowledge as a whole, right, the how things hang together is holistic, at least in a propulsive ideal regulatory sense.

Now, this is why I'm at this point quite Carnapian and Hegelian and not Szilardzian because I think that this whole idea of things holding together in the broadest possible sense can never be achieved as Carnap has shown us through his own failure, which he recognized it, It is a failure, it can never be attained. Yet, yet, we can actually create a certain sort of systems of methods. There's a job of philosophy and new sciences in unison to create a vision of the world

I would say exactly what I said about Victor Frankl last session, that the divergences, the surplus of variations in projections are actually the result of certain methods certain sort of system of methodology that actually have something in common this is ultimately what carnapp is that it does not believe in the holistic idea of knowledge it doesn't actually resolve any problems to be honest with you

But what actually does resolve some of those problems is reinventing the question of methodology. That perhaps we have to pluralize our methods, not in a dilly-dallying sense of Disneyland, but in the sense that we, the system of methods needs to have rankings, priorities, and so on and so forth. And then within the methods, we see that there is a commonality. The commonality cannot be found in an illusory idea of the whole of the

knowledge. I don't think that, I mean, science has already proved that to be concretely and historically correct there is no holistic view of knowledge i mean the idea of knowledge of the world and model of the world as a unified sort of thing as a holistic sort of gestaltic sense has been shattered already why do we need to approach this any further well i think it's a different question than the unity of science right i'm not talking about unity of sciences unity of science can be achieved by showing that the commonality of objective

will probably give us some sort of mirage and by that mirage i don't mean it's in a in a as an illusion but something of an objective apparition of the unity of all sizes that's fine with me that's i don't have any problem with that could we put it in in solarzian terms i think i'd i'd get it or at least i understand it in solarzian terms where the the holism comes from practice and the manifest image right you can the manifest image and and and your attempt you see as salaris becomes mature he learns that really the whole idea of scientific image relies on an engine that is always active within the

manifest image and yeah ultimately we have to we have to make this engine ever smaller by new parts to make it like a little microscopic lean manifest image but we can never dispense with it yeah i i fully agree with that but i do think that's what like the holism is is the navigational element right we're navigational creatures our reason is is how we navigate in the world and the holism comes from trying to put everything onto a plane of our of our practical engagement with it so that so if you're navigational creatures and i think homo navigus uh hey guys i just invented the award homo navigus so homo navigus the navigational agents

sure absolutely has that sort of uh power but then it wouldn't be exactly the sort of holistic image of knowledge that we have been given throughout the history of classical philosophy. It wouldn't be. It really wouldn't. Because navigation requires, it's essentially like navigating in the desert where you don't have addresses. You have to find the addresses. You have to abduce them in a person's sense, right? That holistic image of knowledge is essentially

the byproduct of us taking the pragmatic vision of the human very seriously. yeah and those are the transcendental like those are the transcendental conditions we can't yes without or i guess i'd be curious to hear how you how you frame this sort of discontinuity in hegelian terms then if you said you're a car napian and hegelian you know the carnal hey table right but i think that there is something of a continuity between them precisely because

not early Karna of Afbahu, but Karna of more maturity. He sees something fundamental that, I mean, the whole idea of principle of tolerance is simply an injunction about diversification of objective methodologies that perhaps what we have done wrong within the ambit of philosophy doesn't originate from the sort of bad problems that we have asked or the bad solutions that we have given to these misconceived problems.

It rather originates from something even more significant. And what is that? That our ideas could not actually be lifted up precisely because we did not have sufficient methodologies to lift these ideas and hence they failed failed so miserable and that idea is a pragma pragma is really i think that can't's fundamental discovery

and pragma of course we can talk about it versus pairs random cans hegel and so on support but this is i think uh the very nature of the problem itself can i ask a really quick question about Pragma. Wouldn't we run a danger that this Pragma becomes something that we label every that can solve the problem of this bump of humanism. Every word that you have a good title for an essay. The bump of humanism. It is really a bump because it's difficult to understand why it's there in the topology,

if you want. But everything that can display that bump or explain that bump away, like the very good Szilardzian paper about some language game, some revolve, I don't remember the exact name. Anyway, his paper about the language game. he uses this idea very masterfully. He used the practice of conforming to rules because you need to product. Very good to explain that how we became people who conform to rules in the second place. So I don't know, I understand this whole point of of detoxing the practice or the utopian idea of designing good practices or manifesting

the good in the society or something like that. That becomes difficult exactly here. Practice is not really a science. We don't have, for example, science of practice. We don't really know what great labor is. Or at least I cannot understand what really labor is. We don't. I mean, the middle of pragma, as Kant, Hegel, and Marx understood it, is that pragma is something that unfolds. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a goddamn fine pragma. It would be a theory. It's only through what unfolds that we actually do.

and literally I am not talking about trial and error practice. I am talking about the very nature of pragma. That practices are context sensitive. You see, the greatest Kant's questions ultimately comes down And with that, the question of man or human. Sorry I'm using the word man. My apologies. I mean, these philosophers have put some sort of really bad word in my mind. I cannot get rid of it.

The question on mortal, the finite, right? The finite species and who is conscious of its own finity. So. You might ask yourself, a lot of Kant's, Plato, Kant, and even Kruko, and that's a lot of goddamn historical junk, right? What makes pragma so important? Obviously there is a reason. Because pragmas are concrete determinations, acts of concrete determination.

Anything that cannot fall under the act of concrete determination is most probably, as Pucco would say, and Hegelian would say, is an illusive truth. Now, of course, then you come back to this idea of Kant versus Marx or Hegel versus Marx and so on and so forth. Now, what would be the proper claim to distinguish pragmat from illusions?

I don't have a good answer to that. Could I also quickly ask, when we talk about pragma as being something that is not merely heuristic, does it not raise the further question then of what it is which determines the trajectory and direction of pragma? Is it history? Is it kind of human social history? Is it like the history of social practices or is it something else, right? I mean, maybe that's... Yeah, that's exactly what I said, that there are different planes of inquiry. theory, what becomes the question of pragma, social collectivity with all its historical materialist baggage, or is it really the pragma of seven sorts of objectivity we call a man

or a human? Yeah, because maybe I'm asking the question that Althusser wants to eliminate here in in terms of like maybe an essence or something, but I guess what I'm asking is more, is there something behind these different modalities that in a sense drives that decision to put it? Probably there is. I think there is. In that question. Yes. I think Kant sees the shattering of theoria not as a failure of theoretical reasoning but as something that has always been there as the very engine

of our own doings that essentially practices make practices. Of course, this discussion sounds extremely circular, but unfortunately, if you take it to a historical level, you see that this becomes critical. And essentially what Kant tries to do at the end is to create practice as the very foundation of homocritics. Of course Kant does not have enough vervito the way that Marx has, but we can see how

the story going on uh like 2 900 humans finally become gods i'm talking with nick landon a little bit here i'm just just uh uh basically uh put some fun in this sort of questions one second one second my apologies one one one single second i uh in a minute i will come back sorry speaking of land has anyone read um cryptocurrency

i haven't but i'm very curious about it have you read it luke i've read some of it um but it's as of right now it's like a series of kind of unorganized of like a hundred thousand words unorganized in various blog posts and then also I haven't I don't think I've read the necessary cont to really get into it you know but has anyone else here read has anyone here read Intelligence and Spirit I've ordered it I'm really excited to read it

Yeah, I think probably many people here have read at least some parts of it. I have read it as well. Well, let's stay on topic. And if land is coming into this, we can kind of bring up a bigger concept that I think

sort of unites all of the kind of anti-humanist, the Althusser, Land, Foucault, the whole sort of, and it's all very, for the rest of them, couched in psychoanalysis, but it's this idea of the cunning, Hegel's idea of the cunning of reason, right? And it seems like the rest of them all want to talk about the cunning of either reason or something other than reason without the human, without that the motor of this kind of historical cunning is something other than the human. What do you say reason? Dialectic, I think they try to say dialectic because they precisely don't want to say reason.

Well, Hegel calls it the cunning of reason. Dialectic is a description of the way that reason works in specific areas. But for Hegel, there's no dialectic in general. There are dialectics of dialectic is a process that moves through the medium of reason or language or dispersive claims in spirit. Right? But Mark's problem is that you want to be in a material mode for the ideology of Hegel. That's the whole point of it. That's the part that's- Yeah, sure. Sure. I mean, but it is a transformation of that same concept. And I think maybe getting that concept down and understanding whether it's a misreading or not to try to think about, yeah, I guess for land, the cunning of intelligence is the real phenomena driving history.

You can call that capital, you can call that machinic self-organization. I don't know. It's turning Adam Smith's invisible hand into the cunning of reason, or in the sort of psychoanalytic Marxism, it's turning the unconscious into the cunning of reason. I think my understanding of Marx is that this trying to the way people have interpreted this concept into sort of the teleology of history mixes up the difference between causal necessity and rational necessity material. material and and so they just misunderstand all of it and basically turned it into this sort of

metaphysical nonsense um but i i don't think hegel had it wrong i and i think marx wouldn't um Marx's concept of the sort of material development of modes of production relies on people like the agents producing. It simply sets the condition of possibility of what those agents can do. And in some ways sort of determines or sets the limits of how they conceive of the world and their actions within it, because it's all mediated through social institutions. But for Hegel, it also is mediated for social institutions.

There's just an emphasis on different institutions. He wants to talk about the state, the law, the family, marriage. And Marx wants to talk about property relations. But I think, I'm sorry to cut you off, but I think there is one further in Marx. That it's not just Hegel in economy. It's of course Hegel, I'll also separate Hegel in for a buck. because the point here becomes the process of reason for Hegel this process has an end and it if you look at its steps the steps tell you something there is a science in this march of reason through history and you can learn these things but I think Marx

want to say no this science doesn't become determined by idea or by age of ideas what determines it is the base structure of production and blah blah blah blah. What I'm trying to say, all I'm trying to say is that this step, or Althusser also tries to say, that this step is one step further than the Higuarian ideology. I would say I agree. I would characterize the difference differently. So the step that Marx makes beyond Hegel is that Marx is writing in an industrial like watching the development of industrial society uh whereas hegel is writing in in 1805 or whatever and he um he he does have a critique of what comes to be called like economics

he simply believes that this like that in some sense the sort of rational proposiveness of the state will be able to overcome it um sorry um i think this is back um we just should we'll go back on track yeah keep on track just some i mean i'm i'm just look at would it be a great opportunity finally for a new role of teacher to sit back and relax while the students talking i mean look it's the greatest sort of dream job you could ever have, right? Well, unfortunately, we have to go forward. And yes, absolutely, some of this stuff that Aaron and Armin were talking about is,

I generally think that Aaron is right with regard to the old edifice of Hegel. But I'm not going to say why he's white yet. I think that we have to question it, interrogate the shit out of that sort of stuff. We are philosophers. We are not going to abide by mere opinions. Even though I think that his opinion is totally right. um absolutely um

so coming back to that idea that as i said that with regard to first uh three questions so can't doesn't essentially break apart from the nature of classical thought. And by virtue of that, not from the question of the human framed or enframed within classical thoughts. Not yet, not yet, not in critical reason. Probably you can get some clues as where is going to be headed. but these are for philosophical sleuths and not for a layman person who actually reads Kant's

critical reason. it is only with the discovery of the Copernican philosophical term that Kant really understands where all these questions headed, where they are going to be end up, and what sort of solutions possible philosophers might actually come up with with these first three questions.

but of course understanding the copernican revolution philosophy which i explained the nature of it briefly in the first session can now understand something even more that he needs to limit reason in order to actually make room for something that is not irrational, but has elements of irrationality in it.

I don't know if there is a word for this thing. Some people call it faith, but probably that's just overloaded sort of concept. But out of convention, we can go with that word for now. Faith in a philosophical sense. And we noticed that Kant absolutely saw the sort of rigor that has been behind the construction

of a new idea of nature, a world. And such a world or such nature is rife for fullest forms of determinism. That sort of world, unfortunately, cuts the ropes that has attached this ship of critical philosophy from classical thought. And hence, Kant ceases to be a classical thinker, even though still he's trying to formulate the first three questions within the classical ambit.

so science natural sciences are so vile are so awful and awe-inspiring to Kant that he's a captain of a ship and he sees all of this stuff that's going on on this land we call the world and he has to unmoor the ropes at this point to cut the ropes and let the ship to finally set sail on an open ocean even if the dangers of the open ocean

are far more insidious than the ones, the carnage that has happened at the hand of natural sciences on the land. This is classical Kantian story. He essentially sees something very novel. He sees, in a Marxian-Hegelian sense, or Althusser's word, a dispersal of the classical order of things. You see,

when Foucault says that there is a wager and that wager is the face of the man will be erased. Just like face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. This is not actually a retort against Kantian edifice or Kantian philosophy, because Kant has already unmoored knowing what sciences can do to the idea of the first three questions. He has unmoored his ropes, and he's actually sitting on an open sea,

an open ocean. And of course, it would be really hard for any philosopher to catch someone who is a raft, a raft that is wandering in the open ocean. That's what Kantianism to me looks like, truly, from a philosophical standpoint. literally cannot catch this person you cannot pirate the ship precisely because you don't know where he's going but that probably is the very strength of Kantian philosophy

he understood the dispersal in a Foucaultian, Althusserian sense of the classical knowledge. And it caught those moors that affixed its ship to land. And now he's on a different plane. And good luck if you are trying to find him in the open ocean. now there is a different story in conjunction with the one that I just said as an allegorical philosophical metaphor that in the second critique

Kant comes up with something about the primacy of practical reason. In our allegorical story that I just gave you, you can think about navigation on an open ocean or a desert for that matter. Right? And that, he says, that such practical reasoning will ultimately furnish us with virtues, felicities, and values.

even though the land has already been conquered the land that we thought of our basically home home of the human home of the man where man can sell even if that land has already been conquered in its entirety by Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton. So, upon setting sail in this open ocean, Kant stumble across a new philosophical idea,

which is again within the ambit of the classical thought, but as ever, as always, with a new twist, a new Kantian twist. It's a notion of freedom. That has been haunting us since Plato and Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, right? Kant tries to relate this notion of freedom, of navigation at the open sea, with the question of rationality, accountability, and responsibility.

All of them are of the same nature at this point. He no longer actually at this point thinks that eschemata of empirical understanding can be absolutized. that absolutization of empirical understanding which has given to him by early enlightenment philosophers and scientists

is out of the window that absolutization failed the moment that he unmoored his ship from the land which could be absolutized in that sort of way is actually going through a new realm, which is not purely empirical, even though it has empirical components, absolutely empirical navigations and components. But nevertheless, empirical components cannot be absolutized and totalized.

Knowing, ultimately, as, you know, and knowing in Kantian sense always pertains to experience and phenomena, right? It falls short. It really falls short. and Kant ultimately at the early stage thinks that that maybe God is actually going to reward us once we truly navigate at the open sea without crushing our raft. but then he become convinced that no god is not going to reward us it would be just the question

that was ultimately necessary and no one has ever explicitly made that question on the forefront of philosophical investigation since Kant even find Plato the question what is their match? What is mine? That question, he thinks, ultimately understood coherently as an activity, as a pragma, will deliver us. Not where it lands, but simply does not allow us to simply come into a head-to-head collision

with a rock as a stormy night at the ocean. I know that this is a little bit too allegorical, but look, I mean, unfortunately, philosophers have a really nasty habit of using allegories ever more so often. So, questions at this point? May I? Yes. Thank you. Well, I had this question since early on, but it would be a really long one. So, given what you just said, and I'm sorry, I'll have to pick up on the allegory.

um i take issue i i liked altusser's text but i take issue with how uh it sort of uh evokes some voluntarism uh even even more so because nowadays without any institutions which which can support um the emancipation of reason uh like pedagogical institutions uh uh reason the duty of reason becomes is abandoned by by the right to do it so a man is not an island and now is a raft but how can we communicate send smoke signals from raft to raft

we don't actually you see uh neurath's neurath's boat is actually a fundamentally neocantian allegory in its essence it's a raft of a medusa you know the painting of raft of the medusa right you know people are cannibalizing each other on this raft but nevertheless we think that we are going to be okay right and imagine that you actually add a twist to this raft of the Medusa

that this raft is on the open sea and it's leaking plank by plank so how are you actually going to maintain this raft while you're at the open sea Are you going to repair it from scratch? Obviously, you cannot do that while you're at the open seat. You can only take one plank, a rotten plank that assumably looks rotten or more rotten than the other planks. You change it. You put your foot on a more, less rotten, more solid plank, and so on and so forth.

you create a certain sort of what you might call to be a speculative pragmatic decisions to fix this raft even though on the raft people are fucking cannibalizing each other okay i didn't get the sense that the raft would be the ship of fools So it's not the sheep of cannibals. I mean, can someone please post the raft of Medusa, the painting by the French princesses. I know the painting, but I was getting the sense that the raft was an individual raft for each individual.

No, it's not. We are collectively imprisoned on this raft. We are bound to this. And the thing is that it was a good decision to finally unmoor ourselves from the land. because land was never actually the source of the idea of who we are according to Kant and Hegel it was always supposed to be a pragmatic navigational choice, freedom but now we actually see that once we unmoor this raft or ship

we are actually being dealt with with problems of fundamental philosophical importance sure we do not believe in land and its stability and we have put the carnage behind us but nevertheless we are an open ocean without any provision and we are going to eat each other. Hobbes, this is really interesting, magnificent thing to understand the idea of anthropology in Kant. At its core is Hobbes, but with a twist, with a canonical twist that

Kant introduces to Hobbes. So you still have the sort of Hobbesian jungle and Hobbesian machines. Then Kant says that I used to actually be very, very infuriated by this question that we are better than machines, right? but now i understand what he was trying to actually give us that we are not simply hobbesian entities and i know this is all in the dark in the allegorical realm of shit sort of philosophy i love plato

but nevertheless food fucking for thought. So who is going to be on this raft and what are your solutions to it? Maybe that we are going to say that this is a problem next presentation. A concrete scenario you are on the raft of medusa you're unmoored from that sort of land that has always been the bane of classical humanism where are you going to do this on this raft

once you actually get deprived of your own provisions and your ship or your raft starts to leak greatest philosophical question and what are you talking about and the other sort of thing uh arm one second and and uh saying something i cannot i apologize i cannot actually read these small fonts i mean end up would you please the support yeah okay well it was actually just in response to um i thought

aron put it put an interesting point forward about um maps uh like like the the holism uh being you you know, a task of navigating in the N'igola philosophy to kind of construct one map that can contain all of the right information for navigation. Hopefully I'm not butchering Aaron's point. I suggested that you need to have several different maps because one map containing all of the information would be not particularly useful as a map. And then the- But you cannot have map. That's the whole fine point. You see, I watched Dune without falling asleep in one sitting, right? It's just like, I never have actually read the book.

But it was actually quite interesting to me. Arman and I have been talking about the Shia eschatology in this story and desert mythology and so on and so forth. I mean, you cannot have a map once out of necessity. You unmoor your anchors from the land. You're essentially going to simply trying to survive an open sea. so the fact that you say that there is a map or there are multiple maps is based on the condition of possibility that how can we actually make a map on an open sea

which is the human of which we have no fine clue simply only all we have are practical reasoning practical knowledge pragmas so to speak so but then I guess the the metaphor of the map is in in the idea of choosing between the correct domain to to you know like we talked about earlier in terms of this navigational question you know that the choice that to act in a pragmatic sense is not something that is merely heuristic and so I guess the the kind of metaphor of the map enters into the equation when we think that the choice is still determinate in some sense. It is determinate, yes. But then we have to explain what is the source of that determination?

Where does it come from? Right? I think that is fundamentally determinate. I mean, people who are sea bound or sea wanderers or desert wanderers I've always had exactly working with the situations. And of course, there's fundamentally, we are squeezing the allegorical story here. But nevertheless, I think that there is a certain sort of truth to it and Kant understood it. But how do we, so then how do we articulate that? Do we articulate that as intuition? Do we articulate it as Glauber, like faith, the kind of faith? or do we no i think the cant has a very good uh with regard to the question of a schemata you see

a schemata is essentially the final resolution for the principle or doctrine of affinity that the knower and the no one common uh share something in common so in the old doctrine of affinity before Kant in Rational Metaphysics was that knower and the knower share something in common precisely because that common thing is different from the knower. Kant resurrects the idea of the principle of affinity by simply saying that no, there is no third thing that is outside the vein of the known and the knower.

But the known has a mark of the knower, always. That's the principle of eschemism. Within the ambit of productive imagination, we can't. And in that sense, yes everything is good until he says that eschematism emanates from the deepest secrets of the soul so he is still not really fully critical or maybe he's critical

but as a philosopher and as a finite man a limited being he understands that he has tasked himself against a job that probably cannot be answered by philosophy alone nor by sciences alone Would this then not resurrect the question of humanism that Althusser Absolutely it does unfortunately or fortunately yes yes so questions we have 20 minutes to go

a really quick question each that I can never attend to it myself and that's the question of Henry Gibson's public enemy basically you know the play or anybody knows the play what is that exactly there is a public enemy there is a town they have some touristic attraction in the form of pools of warm water mineral water so there is a doctor who who find out that this pool is toxic or something like that.

And he tries to warn people that we should stop tourists coming down and we should all do stuff that we did through pandemic. But the people who have the rights and the tribune to talk and the media and all that, they don't believe him because they want to do their business. And I thought that the allegory of Boat is, maybe it is a very good allegory, but this idea when it comes to Kant or normality of praxis, this play of Henry Gibson, which is not a very good play, always boggles me. So I want to ask what is your thought about that or what is your solution to that problem?

problem hard to say what my exact solution these sort of allegories are but i know what can't probably thought about it so we know that reason by itself simply does not know nothing it just does not have empirical knowledge but reason is constitutive so what Kant ultimately tries to do is not going to

put reason under the acts of empirical sciences or limits reason to empirical sciences. He always thinks that empirical sciences do play a role, albeit minimally, in the task of reason. Kant does something fundamentally revolutionary. regardless of the empirical facts and empirical sciences we must put limits upon reason the nature of these limits

do not originate from the clash between reason and empirical sciences they actually come from our own freedom as agentic entities rational agents the only we and that's a generous activity doesn't make us exceptional but yeah in a sense probably does, that we limit our own reason by our own hands. That to me is when philosophy finally becomes mature, that even if there is not a limit,

We are going to institute limits, provisional limits, and speculative ones, upon the very vehicle that delivers us from the raft of the Medusa. But of course we have to think about the nature of such how what sort of decision. We should make to institute such limits, where the source of this limits are the historical or the speculating or of the logical purely logical nature.

Well, my friends, that will be the story of Sinbad that is going to unfold next session. So. All right. So should we wrap up? yeah i think that we can at this point uh say that okay but i would be available for 10 minutes whoever wants to talk and we are going to turn off the recording just in case that someone wants to say something very nastily radical all right then we're finishing the recorded part

thank you