Critique of Pure Reason: Transcendental Aesthetic

[Music] Hello and thank you for joining us on another episode of Y Theory. As always I am your host, Ryan Angley joined as always. Black co-host Tom McGowan taught how you doing buddy. Ryan great to talk to you today. It is a wonderful day we are returning to a series that has been not, I wouldn't say abandoned that's mean to it. It's just having Kevin gone back to it. Like when the Seven Deadly Sons which I'm sure will come back to any day now, any week. We are talking about Kant we are returning to our work through of the first critique, critique of pure reason. I think I had this imagination that we would always start the year with it. I think we started a couple years ago in January, February and just didn't get around to it last year but we are back and it is great. And today we are talking about as you can tell from the title the Transcendental Aesthetic which is just the marvelous thing to read. Incredible. Yeah, it's really really great. I'm coming at this, so this is my just to be, I know that sometimes people contact me and they like to hear this sort of thing. So this is my third time I think, or my third earnest attempt to read this the first time I didn't make it very far the second time. I also didn't make it far. So those are two bad readings where I was relying on other people's summaries. And this is the first time that I'm going through and I feel like I am getting things for me and for the things that I like to think about and work through. And I'm reading I think better secondary literature. It was and I have some not. I don't want to like sub-tweet or I'm like not taking shots at anyone but I feel like I now know enough about Kant to have a take on the kinds of takes on Kant that I do and do not like. So that's sort of like good. That's sort of fun. We've we're big supporters of Henry Allison's work. He's been pretty great and he's I what what's really nice to read him if you're looking for somebody to read on Kant is I think he is very generous with people he disagrees with and even some of his detractors. Yeah, you know, specifically is it how do you say her name is it Beatrice Luzonet? Longness. Longness. Okay, right. Yes. So and it's like just it's really nice to like it's it's like a good scholarly disagreement. It's it's qualified disagreement. It's a disagreement. It is not when you read his the selection of essays from what is the titles that book talking you remind me you know the one I'm going to do. You mean Henry Allison's book. Yeah, what's the name of his book? Oh my god. It's constrance and an ideal. There we go. Sorry. Yeah. I'm yeah. No, that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's okay. Longness though is interesting case because she's one of the very I don't know actually anyone else who fits in this category. She started out as a hegelian and has has has gone to the dark side so she became a Kantian. So it's a usually people go the other way. So it's a really interesting. She's a she's a transitional philosopher like she transitioned in the wrong direction. Nonetheless, but but yeah, she said so I mean she wouldn't say that obviously and her reading of Kant is sophisticated one I think. Yeah, very good. But her book on hegel is great too. So it's a good sad that we lost her for our our side. Well, it's I mean it isn't I mean certainly I don't you know our friend our friend Joan Cobb check and I think would say that she went in the wrong direction. No, she would not you know that is true. The great I mean we were you and I were just talking about this like the great I think you can piece us together from things that Joan wrote but like there there is a great unwritten book that is like like that it can't and it's can't and Freud and it is from from Joan and from the way that she reads things and and just you know she's so influential on on both of us and on me directly because of and have some classes with her and she helped me on my day. I'm reading this for the first time since then. I have a greater appreciation for not just the Kantian aspects of her writing and her thought but really how it can't formulate how she sees Freud and how and it started to click for me for the like the for the first time ever so I want to sprinkle that in a little bit because to yeah you should these connections to different to the things that we we talk about more regularly. But this is yeah so this is this is great is a learning experience I also find it. I said this to you a couple days ago I guess that like one of the things that like I could totally get as a chief attraction to Kant is that like he he has his own language for talking about things and he he was to it so precisely he is he is the killer queen that Freddie Mercury sings about in the fact in that he's fistidious and precise I think with all with all the with all these terms and I think that that's something if you're someone who really likes that about Kant I think reading. Hegel doesn't I think this actually goes back to the conversation you and Slavway had all those years ago on the on this on our airwaves where you talked about sometimes he just he just takes the the word choices of others and doesn't like like in view them with his own right meaning at these moments when he's also being idiosyncratic so that makes it more difficult to like understand what he's getting at first blush whereas Kant is always like he Kant is always Kant it feels like and he is like re like re asserting this language like this idea of of intuitions and and what not and and I think that that's like there's some kind of to come to grips and to follow along with him it is like this is like the same the very thing that makes it daunting is I also think that makes it a very rewarding reading experience because you are submitting yourself to his vocabulary and once you do that you see why he's thinking the way that he is thinking and why he's saying any of this at all so that's kind of how I want to kick this off why is the why is this so early in the book what is transcendental aesthetic why why are we here why is this what is this need to be done this this this intervention is easy just explaining himself or is there like is there something some web of relation he might say he might say that is where this idea is is emerging from and what is this is emerging from and why it needs to be said at this particular time in his project and at this particular time in the history of philosophy what's going on here time ago yeah so I just want to say two things first. Betr's longness is the origin of the joke she said this to a friend of hers I tried to read Hegel but found out I can't so that is she is the actual origin of that joke so we do owe that to her pretty good her you know philosophical regression at least the benefit of it was that I'm kidding she didn't ever send that so so that's what the literally I think I just want to underline the point you made about the jargon that I think can't I wouldn't call my jargonist but he certainly has as I've said many times Hegel I don't think has a jargon he's not a jargon he doesn't he's hard to read yes very hard but he doesn't have it's not because of his jargon whereas can't has his own jargon that as you say he's going to employ again and again and again and again and in fact even even though the the transit all the static is less than 30 pages long it's even it has a lot of repetition of the terms right so yeah that's but yeah to now to your question why does it why does he begin with this because we had the preface introduction and then this is the this is how the book kicks off basically yeah and I think what he's trying to the mean this is in a way this marks the great achievement of con and and certainly someone like Martin Heidegger I think Heidegger is interesting because he never really writes anything good on Hegel I don't think that's even a contentious thing to say but he writes very good things on cons a great book called Con in the problem benefits called it's even in Heidegger circles known as the Kant book and then he gave a lecture series a phenomenal logical interpretation that could be a reason in which he says this is the great section of the book and what Kant does is show that knowing has its fundamental basis not in the categories of thought but in the intuitions in our in the aesthetic and so that's that I think that's that's a so what he's doing this is the first part of the way he breaks up subjectivity into sensibility which is being discussed in the aesthetic understanding which will be discussed in the rest of the transcendental transcendental logic in the analytic part of that logic and then reason, which gets us into all kinds of problems, according to Kant. So that's what he's doing here. This is the first part of that division of subjectivity, I think. So that's why he's doing it. One little thing that I think really can be helpful to an English speaker is that the term, I don't know, did the first translator choose right-layer and do subsequent translators, which is right-lay, but the term "and-showing," which the people will know if you speak English from "velt and-showing," the world view. So that's what gets translated as intuition. So it's a little misleading in English because intuition has this whole other connotation, which is, "Oh, my intuition told me that I should have that person instead of hugging them," or whatever. That would be a nice way to say it, but I said, "We're just good." So that is maybe an issue, but it comes from the verb "and-showing," which means to look at, or to regard, to view, also to intuition. So you can get intuition from it, but it ends up making Kant, I think, sound a little more jargon-y and specialized than he actually is because it's not an uncommon German word, like intuition used in the way Kant uses it. It's utterly singular to Kant in English, like no one would ever say, "Oh, my sensible intuition has told me now." You would never say that. The space and time are the pure forms of intuition. I've never said that in a conversation. So here's an example of my most direct and immediate kind of representation of an object, like no one would say. Right. No, no. Anyway, so I think that's something to keep in mind if you're reading it in English. I actually have German friends that prefer to read Kant in English because one thing that translators all do is break up the sentences because their sentences in German are quite long. Although I get in trouble every time I say someone's not a good writer in German, they say, "You don't really understand." So I'm not saying that, but it is true that his sentences are long, and they do get broken up in almost every translation. So I think that makes it a little bit easier to digest, but I think there is this kind of slight difficulty of the translation. But just quickly, I say, what's great about this is that he makes that distinction between sensibility, which is receptivity of sensation. And the understanding, which is the way we order it. And I think that's the, that's maybe the great breakthrough of the entire critique of pure reason, that he, that on one side there was livenants who thought our perceptions were just confused ideas. Everything is on the level of an idea, right? And then on the other side, there's Locke and Hume who think our ideas are just complex perceptions. So there's this kind of, like, on both sides, they have to do these gymnastics to explain the other thing that they're not rooting their thought in. But Kant says, well, wait a minute, what if it's both things are operative and interact with each other to create our knowledge? And I think that's the, I think this is pretty, everybody would say, I think that that's the great breakthrough of this, of this book that starts in this, in the aesthetic section. Yeah. And not to, not to, you know, to move to this territory, like, so, so quickly, but if you have it in your head that Freud absolutely read Kant, references him a couple times, a couple few times throughout the standard edition. But clearly there was an influence on his thinking as opposed to Hagle, whom it's, he'd never read, is that never read? So if you have that in your head, you know Freud pretty, pretty well, there, you just, you'll come upon some passages and, and just in some ideas, to not speak in Kantian language on that, but where you're just like, like, you can see where the unconscious comes out of this. And you can even, you can even see like the one of it just because this is your main to our section, like, at the time that Kant writes this, there, there had been this move to use aesthetic as the name of a philosophical investigation of taste and art. And he does, and Kant does not like that. And because he doesn't think that there can be like a, like a full scientific investigation about that, how art contributes to the senses of knowledge in general, right? Like the, no, it's exactly right. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. So, but he nonetheless, he is going to, you know, he's going to use that term to talk about, like, you know, his idea of the transcendental, transcendental aesthetic, which is concerning the, the, the, I just have this written down. So this is not from the top of my head, but concerning the, the, the, the, the, the elements of sensible perceptions. That's the, yeah, you know, but again, if you know a little bit about Freud, he has a problem, this is like the second line of the Uncanny essay in 1919 that whenever anyone talks about aesthetics, they're always talking about beauty. And so, he wants to write about, okay, well, what about something that's not an abhorception of the beautiful, but rather something that is disquieting and uncomfortable? How can that fit into aesthetic inquiry? And what happens if we incorporate that? We've long had the idea that aesthetic inquiry is an aesthetic inquiry into the beautiful. What if it's not? And so, he's accepting, I think, what Kant doesn't accept, which is that you can have a, what Freud would call, scientific as an an organized body of knowledge about interactions with objects and experiences in this way that you could call a aesthetic. So, he accepts maybe what Kant doesn't, but he carries with him this push against what everybody else calls aesthetic, this focus on taste and being related to the beautiful and a sublimity that is non-negative, let's say, like Freud wants to offer a correction of that. You can see it in here, how it just might have settled in his mind and then come out in different works and ideas. Anyway, so that's just as I'm reading and understanding Kant on his own terms, it's helping me to think through Freud as well. So, like, in this, maybe should have said this earlier, especially when we go through, I think we said this about, even when we talk about LeCon's seminars, but certainly this was true when we went through Hagle, is that, like, I love when I hear from people that our podcasts on Hagle's phenomenology encourage them to read it for themselves. And, like, that's awesome. Because I don't, you know, you and I don't imagine that when we do this, we're the first and final word on these texts. So, far from it. Yeah, yeah. So, this, I would hope, because I think, because the, like, Gisex influence it looms rightly so large, but I think that there is just a version of Kant that doesn't get brought into the kinds of conversations that, you know, we tend to have, like, even on this podcast, but tend to get published, you know, in our field. It's far more leaning toward Hagle at the exclusion of maybe a complexity of Kant that it doesn't need to be so binary, I guess I would say. Right, right. For sure. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right that, like, one of the major things he's doing is saying we have to understand aesthetics differently. Because that's, and that, and that we can make some, we can make transcendental comments about aesthetics. So, for him, there's a really important distinction. The words are the same. This is, in this case, the words are the same in English and in German. Transcendental means what is a priori and outside of or prior to sense experience. Right. So, yet it is determinative about sense experience. So, transcendent means, and Kant's this book toward the end and the transcendental dialectic will author a critique of transcendence and thinking, trying to think, trying to, when you believe you can know something about the transcendent world, like about God, it's, or something like that, right. So, you very famously rejects all proofs for the existence of God because they're talking about what's, those proofs are concerned, what's transcendent. But if philosophy couldn't make any claims about the transcendental, then it wouldn't, it would be worthless as philosophy. So, what could those aesthetic claims be? What does that mean to say, transcendental aesthetic? And what he, what he concludes, and I do want to spend a little time talking about the way that he makes his argument, because I think it's, it's stunning really, and I think it's so revolutionary, I think it'll be very influential on Hegel, even though Hegel's going to take argument in our whole other direction, but I think he kind of builds on what Kant is articulating. But first I think what by using the term aesthetic, what he's trying to say is that we have that there are certain ways of looking or ways of perceiving are necessarily shaped in some kind of way that we can deduce through argument. And that's what he's going to do in this section of the book. And again, like you said, he's completely redefining what aesthetic means, because there's nothing about taste here, there's nothing about work of art, there's nothing about beauty, or about the sublime, which there will be in the creative judgment. So none of that. And I think that, but it's going to be about what is it that in our, what faculty makes our aesthetic grasp of the world possible? That's what he wants to explore. And the faculty for him is the sensibility. So there's a tie between aesthetics and sensibility. It's very, I mean, of course, it's the opposite way, but it's very lachanian, right? Because sure. Like the it's this we're talking about the lachanian imaginary that this is and then when he when Kant gets to the understanding, he's going to be talking about LeCons symbolic order in the categories that govern it, just like LeCons thinks there are certain laws that govern the way signifiers that are actually it's exactly the same. So the like you mentioned influence on Freud, I think in a certain way, the influence on LeCons and LeCons basic three categories is even more profound and just self evident. But again, I think the idea to transform aesthetics in the way you say allows him to make this incredible. For one thing, it allows it's the vehicle through which he makes this divorce in the in the subject between understanding and sensibility, which is again, such importance because you don't that there's a difference between receiving sensations and the way that we structure them. So that's what he's called. I think this is worth, I mean, a lot of time, is is that split alone? Is that the like we talk, I think we talked about this in the other episodes that like Kant is the the he is if not the first, like the most prominent earliest person to use subject in the way that we do on this podcast. And certain and then attach a very important rider onto that when he talks about subjectivity because of this split, as you just said, between sensibility and understanding that maps very neatly onto the split subject as it appears named as split subject in Lecon. But that Freud is talking about as this like the split in the psyche, the you know, the in the 80s go super ego like the the unconscious that like, you know, you're not self identical as the subject. You have, you know, you with Lecon, you have a symbolic identity. People used, you know, you are you are seeing a certain way. And I'm, you know, I am, I had, I've kind of gotten over this a little bit because students increasingly have like not wanted to, I used to make a big, I could get to my point. I used to make a really big deal about people should call me by my first name. And I know that you kind of do a similar thing. But yeah, more, more recently, I've just kind of stopped doing that because it makes like I started to notice that like some students were uncomfortable at the idea of just, of calling me Ryan and they really just wanted to say, Professor Angley. So now, you know, I sign my emails, Ryan, other students call me Ryan. It's, it's fine. I, I say you can do that. But it's also most people say now that really they say Professor Angley. Yeah. And I don't, I don't know. There's something I don't like so much about, about that. It is like, I think it's, I mean, what would be the Lecadian thing is like, like, that's like mean, coming into contact with my symbolic identity for, for sure, for these people and, and for sure, it's a little bit, it's in a way, it's like, you know, that great, uh, Carrie Grant line where he was told by a reporter, I believe that are you aware that every man in America wishes they could be Carrie Grant? And he said me too. So it's, and of course, his name was also Archibald Leech. So there's like, there's like a double thing in there. But it is like, you, you know, you are the basic psychology, I like idea, you are not who you are like, you know, period, but you're certainly not who you are for other people all the time. And being that is very, very difficult. And the roots of that are here in the, the split between sensibility and understanding. Right. Right. It's not the same. Right. But it is, I think you're right. Like there is a kind of a pre mature, I'd understanding of the split in the subject that Khan develops. And this is the first. I mean, it's obviously there's nothing unknowable about the intuition or about, sorry, about the sensibility or about the understanding. So there's not the sense of part of you is unconscious, right. But nonetheless, this split does make it impossible to have the subject be totally unified. Right. Like it's always your sensibility is never going to be perfectly aligned with your understanding. Because I mean, this is Khan's idea that there will be sensible intuitions that will challenge or that need to be aligned with the categories of the understanding. Right. And so if you, that alignment happens de facto, but it still has to happen. And so I think that that's for Kant the way in which there is this still this division here, I think articulated for the first time within the subject. I think it's a really, it's a really good point that this is this is how he, how he's doing that. And I think it's funny that this is, I think in certain ways, this is the easiest part of the book that transcendental aesthetic because his basic point is just there are two pure. So he's taking our different sensations that we have, all different kinds, right, of different objects, whatever, of whatever kind of content they have. And then he's saying, okay, what, and this is a way that he makes the argument. He's saying, what can we, what can, what is the sine qua non of that perception? Right. What can we not remove from it? And it still work as a perception. And his idea is that for external perceptions, its space, and then for our internal sensations, it's time. And time applies, and this is why Heidegger will say, time, there's absolute priority of time in Kant, even though Kant doesn't really say that. But he says it and he even Kant discuss his space first, of course. Yeah. So there's a little bit of maybe a problem with that. But the reason he says it, and this I think is right, that time applies to both, right, like there can't be like both internal, our internal sensations are, they're necessarily temporal, one follows after another, and our external sensations are also one following after another. For instance, when we perceive movement, movement is space and time operating together, right, because you're one place and then you're another place, but you're at a different place over time. And so Kant allows us to understand movement in a way that thinkers before him couldn't understand, because he's saying, no, it's because of this absolute role that time plays within our sensibility. You could see the line from there to the delus that Brian Misumi extracts for the foundation of his version of affect, which is movement, which is movement based. There's a lot of things that get yoked into the affect studies, but his thing has to do with movement and motion. The motion and emotion might be a very simplistic way of making that connection for someone if they hadn't heard of that. I think that's a song by Rico Kasek of the cars. You're right, that wasn't Brian Misumi. He plays your eyes that from Rico Kasek. I can't believe it. No, but I think I'm singing the cars, but I'm really singing parables of the virtual. I happens to me all the time. Yeah, it's a problem. It's a problem. Yeah, everybody. But it's, you know, I just won little detail. Rico Kasek, he didn't graduate, but he went to Ohio's state University. No, Todd Zee, Ohio State. The, sorry. I hate that so much. It's so dumb. Did you know that this was really funny? The University of Rhode Island is also supposed to be the University of Rhode Island. I am in my acknowledgments because, you know, your first book, your acknowledging a lot of different people. So when I was acknowledging people from my PhD program, I put it as the capital T and then that was corrected by the copy editor. I was like, I know it's [BLANK_AUDIO] supposed to be that, but let's just be the lower case that, please. You let it be let it go. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway. Yeah, that's funny. So anyway, yeah, I think that this apprehension of the necessity of our spaceciality and temporality, it's just so crucial. And again, I love the way that Kant argues it because he doesn't start with an axiom or a principle or a proposition and then try to prove it. What he does is he starts with our experience and he says, "Okay, what can I remove from this?" Like I can change the object, I can take all the objects out, but I'm still, what's it going to be if it's external? It's going to be spatial. There's no way to think. And if it's internal, it's going to be temporal because I can't think a thought that doesn't follow from another thought. Even if I'm not paying attention to the temporality of my thoughts, which most of the time we're not doing, right? We just exist in the temporality of that. Yeah. This is what you said to me about how Kant is also changing how philosophical arguments are made. Right. Because there's not an early. So he is giving you his principles certainly. Like in these early pages, you get the idea. I said it as part of a joking exchange earlier, intuition, most direct or immediate kind of representation of an object, a concept represents an object, and then this is a phrase, through a detour, or some kind of. I hesitate to use the word distinction, but it will make sense to a listener. A distinction of that property or distinctive property that that object has. Okay. Concept represents an object through some detour by a distinctive mark. Yeah. And so you're getting this thing early, but he's not asserting the argument through the principles and then going on. I don't know, point by point, what he's doing is like he's asking what is inextractable from inexperience, right? And that will be. I'm certain that me having said that will be translated by the. No, not trans. Transcribed in the Spotify transcription as inexperience rather than in space experience. But. Which is. There's some interesting there we could talk about, but sort of in the weeds. But yeah, what is inextractable in space experience? And that's how he would lead some to space and time, or just these two. Again, I'm saying ideas, he doesn't use that word like that because we're talking in specialized vocabulary for a very good reason. But these two things that cannot be edited out, that have to be there for anything else to occur. And also you have. You have. You have the. Seeming knowledge of them already. It's not like. There's not a point in growing up where it's like, okay, this is when. We're going to introduce our child to space and time. We got to go to the space and time room so they can be fully integrated into space and time. Like, it's not like that. It's like this. And again, to bring it back to that sort of. You can almost get to like. Likhan's an estimate through this. Like, what's this external that we always have an internal idea about? That's just always there. And this intimate knowledge that is also part of the forming of the outside. So anyway, that. No, it's right. And I think like the. I love that idea that you don't have to teach it. And I also think it's true even. Right, and this is the best argument for a composition. Right? That even a total psychotic still knows in terms of space and time. Right? You can't be outside the symbolic enough or skewed to the relative relation to the symbolic enough to be outside of space and time. Right? You have to. You cannot. We can't imagine someone without that. Without space and time as their fundamental aesthetic relationship to the world, to what they intuit about the world. And so that's for con. That's the crucial thing. That you can't. It doesn't matter how far outside the usual tracks of thinking the person is. Because this isn't about thinking. This is about a kind of knowing that for him is distinct from. I don't think prior to. I think this is someone like Heidegger would want to say it's prior to. But I think it's distinct from the categories of the understanding. And that is. That's for him. That's everything. And make that distinction, if one thing, it allows us to, as we were saying earlier, to separate how we're. What we're. Our receptivity of these. Of these intuitions from the way that we are ordering them. And that distinction then gets out of a lot of philosophical minds that otherwise would exist. Such as. I think that might be helpful. Well, such as. Yeah, such as the problem of how do you. If you're an empiricist like Locker Hume, how do you explain the complexity of ideas? Well, you just don't. And if you're rationalists like Liebnerz, how do you explain the fact of experience and perception? You just don't. You just treat it as a. As a some kind of confused version of the idea. So that. And so I think that's the great thing. The other thing that he does in this section that's really important, I think, and this goes throughout the entire, at least the transatlantic analytic, is that he makes this. Or he talks about appearances and makes the really important for him distinction between appearances and things in themselves, which will get him. That will be the source of a lot of critiques. Having with thick, but then shelling in Hegel for sure and then extending into the 20th century, that this becomes. And for many people, an indefensible part of the Kantian legacy, because. And this, I think, Hegel's critique of this is the one that people know the best. I think it's the one that's had the most staying power. Hegel says, "Well, if we can't know the thing in itself, how do we know this thing that we can't know?" Yeah. Right. And Henry Allison, whom you mentioned, has a pretty interesting rebuttal to that. He just says, "Well, Kant doesn't mean a thing in itself beyond appearance. What he means is it's just two different approaches to objects. You can either approach them as appearances or you can approach them as things in themselves." The problem with that is Kant himself seems to argue against that in what we're going to read later, the reputation of idealism, because he would say, I think, that makes. And I think this is a temptation when you read Kant. That makes him too close to Barkley, George Barkley, the Irish bishop. Right? That makes it seem like it's all just in your head and Kant really doesn't want to. He really doesn't want that to be the way that you think of it. So he wants to cling to the thing in itself to avoid this idealist in the bad sense trap that he thinks otherwise is waiting for him. Interesting. So I don't know. Yeah, I think he talks about appearances all the time and they're constituted by sensations and the categories of the understanding. But here it's just the discussion of the sensation as. Again, but not triggered by the thing in itself, triggered by the appearances that we encounter. Yeah. I think, again, just in the same way that we're offering. Because Kant, again, there's another kind of conversation you and I have before this. It's just a far more. It's just not even a controversial statement, just far more influential than Hagle. And the tendrils into other areas of knowledge, both in a continental and analytic tradition, just to boil all of them. Well, he's the last thinker that everyone can agree on. They have radically different takes on him. I should say that recently Hagle's been appropriated by the analytic tradition. It's not totally true anymore. But in order to do that, they have to basically turn him into a version of Kant. It really is true what you're saying that he's by far the most important modern thinker. So the most influential on both of the main philosophical traditions and even outside of them, I think, just incredibly influential. But I think what's really interesting is that the take, what's important for each tradition is different. For someone like Joan Coptic, I think what's most important is the track. transcendental dialectic, the way in which the antinemies were reasoned stumbles. Yes. Well, for analytical, I'd say, I don't care about that at all. Right. That's not there. They care. And what they care about is not this part, the middle part. They care about how, like, there's certain laws, logical laws that determine how we think. And that controls our experience. There's that. And then there's high degree, this phenomenal logical take on Kant that says, no, what's more important than the understanding is the aesthetics. So this is the, for Heidegger, this is the most important section of the book. So his discussion on this and his lecture series on Kant is longer than Kant, the transcendental aesthetic itself. Sure. Sure. So it's kind of crazy, but that's because for him as a phenomenologist, it's all about that moment of receptivity, right? And not about imposing our categories on what we're receiving, because he wants to say, Kant's this great thinker of the priority of receptivity to logical, categorical thinking. And yeah, I don't think that's true. No, but it's really fascinating. What I was, yeah, what I was just going to say is like, you'd also think that, again, to bring Jonah, because it's hard not to when you're talking about Kant and Kant. And on our side of things, because she's just the big Kantian, Lacanian, I would say. But then there's also the direction that like, Levy Bryant and people are into like object oriented ontology go, that is very much invested in thinking Kant and the object. Like that's, and I think people probably know this because I said this before, but the, I think this happened at the first lack. I know that there was a conversation between Bryant and, and, and Joan who, Bryant, I think he expected that she would have a little more agreement with what he's doing and what other people in the object oriented ontology are trying to do. But she called herself an object A ontologist. Yeah, that was funny. Just like, I mean, what a, just a withering philosophical line. So that was, that was, so, so there's that anyway, just given the different tendrils of people who are listeners are more familiar with, with one, like, again, that's why I brought up Bryant and assuming me, maybe someone out there more familiar with him, you work your way toward Kant through, through that line or if you maybe more familiar with what, you know, object oriented ontology is doing with the idea of the object, you work your way back through, I think that that's, that's a way in just trying to give people who may, yeah, except don't you think for them, Kant's the villain? No, I know that, but that's the real, yeah, I agree. But I think that, like, that's, I think that's the way in because I kind of think that's how, like, I mean, I came back to Kant's, like, the villain for Hegel and then I just, yeah. But I ultimately, I think if you're being fair to the text, you just can't, I don't know, not that you can't, but read him that way. And I'm not trying to make a pun on his name, but like, it's just, you do, the thing, the, the, that very valuable thing, Melvolio says, when he finds the letter that is not addressed to him, but is designed to manipulate him. And he says, if I crush it a little, make it bow to me, you know, like, and I just, like, I, you know, it's, I think it's very nice to come to a text or, or thinker who, because of other things that you, like, agree with, you have this, like, ah, no, this is a, this is my, this is my villain. This is my, this is my, this is my experience writing my book with, sorry, where I found, like, you know, he's on the, he's on the, the end, the, just, I could just complete disagreement on so many things, but I just, I love the way that he thinks and, and the method. So he's, like, like, a, um, a villain whom I have no animosity toward. I guess is what I would, would try to play. Right. That's really good. Yeah. I think it's really good, then, I think it's really good because I can, so I was just part of preparing for this in addition to rereading this section was I read through my summary of the entire critique of your reason at the end of every summer. I write, I read a little response. And so I don't know. I read it six times, whatever writing a response. And I noticed how my, like, first time, very critical, second time, no, no, there's actually some good things here. And every time I've, like, man, my prior response was so stupid. I didn't see all of that. So it's just really progressively, like, oh, there's something really valuable happening here. And of course, it's this Hagellian prejudice, but Hagell is impossible to imagine as a thinker without cons breakthrough. I think that's the really, I mean, that's why Hidegger, I'm sorry, I just mentioned Hidegger so many times. That's why Hidegger famously said to call the preso-cratic's preso-cratic's is about as dumb as to call Kant a pre-Hagellian. That's pretty good. Which I have quite a call Kant that, but that just captures, I think, the nature of the breakthrough. Anyway, so yeah, I think that's such a great point. And I do think that he really rewards, okay, yeah, maybe you come to him as a villain at first, but then I think he really rewards the, like, this re-evaluation and maybe even reading him for the first time occasions that are re-evaluation, right? Because he's not really saying, I mean, just for the breakthrough alone of this separation into the, into the sensibility and the understanding, which this is the first index of, and the way, like you said, the way he redefines what aesthetic means to make it, what LeCon will mean by imaginary. Yeah. Yeah. And then, which is amazing. And then the way he, I want to stress this again, the way he changes the form of argument, to take someone like Spinoza who lays out definitions, axioms, et cetera. So Spinoza's the great, okay, there's Descartes before Spinoza, but then there's Spinoza. And he's just, that's how he philosophizes before Kant. And Leibniz II, right, Leibniz makes definitions A equals A. That's in Leibniz's philosophy. So a principle of non-contradiction, that's in Leibniz, like those are just absolute print, Kant doesn't have anything like that. He just says, okay, we, and just I think what he says, right, we know, we do know, what do we know? We know we're experiencing, right? We know we're doing that because even to think about the fact that we're experiencing, you have to be experiencing to do it. Just kind of, it's a little like Descartes, how do I, what can I be sure of, I can know that I'm thinking, right? I'm not kind of like that. And Kant says, okay, I'm experiencing, I know I'm experiencing. So what is there that has to be essential to that? And I just think what an amazing way to turn philosophical argument around, and I think in a way, doesn't that pave the way for this whole, the way the whole continental tradition developed? And that's why in the late 19th century, as a reaction against hegelianism, I'm convinced, the neocontanism developed with this real emphasis on the force of the understanding and not this collision and the psyche between sensibility and understanding. But instead, it's all, we can reduce everything to the categories of understanding. And they'll even say things like, you know, space and time really are categories. They're really concepts. But that, isn't it? It's so absolutely essential that for Kant, space and time are not concepts, right? They're for the pure forms of the intuition. That's what they are. They're not concepts. They're not ways. They're the stuff that concepts use, but they're not themselves concepts. And I think it's interesting. I think when people just start talking, they'll talk about the concept of time or the concept of space. But that is a non- Kantian. Those are forms of intuition that can't be separated from every intuition has them. And so I think, again, maybe it's the problem that we got this word intuition that makes it not be able to be widespread because I think people still talk about the concept of time and people still talk about the concept of space. So maybe that's the problem. But I think here, he really is going in a different direction. Yeah. No, it's just, it's, it's, I also, I mean, I also see the, because I also see the impulse to push in the analytic direction where it's, I guess I put it this way where it's more sober and less touchy-feely. Like in that, because in the, in English, we're talking about intuition and sensations and sensibility. And these things are, like, again, in, and I'm not saying that these are bad translations at all. And they're the, the, there's something that is like very subjective, infused in a very common sense of meaning that word that it seems like, that's not, that's not like hard enough. Like, let's go, let's go harder. Let's, let's actually, let's get intuition out of intuition. Let's get, right. Right. Right. Let's get sense out of sensibility, Jane Austen. Like, of course, the great Kantian thinker. No, I'm kidding, of course. But, but really, no, like getting, getting, like, just like, stripping it, like we're trying to get to something. And you can see why, because of the way that he writes, and again, that killer queen facetias in precise way, you can see that like the text would seem to call. for it. Like I can completely see that argument. But I again, we're coming at it from this direction. So it's hard for me not to see the like, no, there's there's a kind of betrayed something. Yeah, that's actually yeah. Yeah. And again, the split between sensibility and understanding. I think really important for us, especially and I think very important for Freud and certainly important for for Lecon with the history of philosophy. Yeah. It's really important. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's really important for them. I think that yeah, I think it's really good what you're saying. And I think so the main guys, the main Neocontian guys in the late 19th century Herman Cohen and Paul Natorp. And and then in the 20th Ernst Kessier and Kessier and Heidegger had this very famous Davos. They they weren't it wasn't the world economic forum that Davos it was instead Heidegger versus Kessier, but it was a Nazi. It was anticipating the Nazi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. The Nazi versus the Jew. Sadly, if I had to choose a side, I'm afraid I would be on the not I'd be on the Nazi side. But I don't like either of those positions. What's that? No, no, I just yes, just argumentatively just about their reading of Kant. Because precisely because Kessier served a very good book called Kant's life and thought. I should say also that the best book that just came out it just was out in German. And I think it was just been translated to English called Kant a revolution in thinking. It's very good. It's by this guy Marcus Villecek. And we were talking about the difficulty of being a cons like being a Hingles scholar. There's just so much you have to master as a Kant scholar because his whole there's a nice portion of the 19th century that you don't have to do anything about it. That's color because everyone thought he was dumb. And so there's nothing. But that's not true for Kant. You have this incredible feek and period in the late 19th century. So we're just saying we have a lot of I said esteem for this is I this I don't know for whom this does a favor for but like I think that to like to to try to say something about Kant you it's like it's like oh how do you know you're saying something original about Shakespeare there's just so much that you have to know. And it's like that and then with Hagle I think comparatively I think that this is probably not the right analogue. It's probably Dickens. It's Dickens. I wanted to at least I at least wanted to keep it at least an Elizabethan or John's writer. So I said Middleton but I think that the discovery it's the rediscovered Middleton I think is too recent that doesn't work. Maybe Marlow. What do I've been Johnson Johnson good for yeah yeah yeah yeah I like Johnson. Johnson's good yeah yeah yeah one of those metaphysical dudes like John Donne or more vellors somebody like that. Do you know that great joke from the pilot episode of or the first episode of cheers is that no I'm ready for it. Oh god it's so freaking I don't so it's when Diane and her professor come in because they're gonna get they're they're gonna get married they're gonna get engaged in the professor he he starts she's a grad student his grad TA the and he's expressing his love for her and he's he's quoting a poem and then he turns to Sam the bartender played by why am I forgetting his name right now Ted Danson Ted Danson and he just looks at him because he's low he's lower class and seemingly uneducated and he just says that's done and then Ted Danson says I yeah I really hope so. That's a really good that's a good one that's really funny yeah it's a good you should take incredible for it you should I should take I know I guess you couldn't though because you need to the setup of the show so you yes the setup of the show is too good really yeah no I mean and that it's just too that's just too good that's one of the great first episodes yeah it's amazing it's incredible yeah really amazing every character comes in you can do this thing I'm sorry to do this like cheers no it's good minute but like TV's kind of lost this a little bit because TV's just done differently now but like every character they all work at the same place of course it's in a bar but every character is introduced and you can almost immediately say something about them and like like who they are and what they're about without without resorting to what their job is or what they look like or like some some sort of very superficial look look at them like Carla comes in and she's just like she knows she's late her like it's her kids her kids were up and you're like don't yell at me like you know you know everything about her coach comes in and he's screaming about the Patriots draft but he but then Ted says one to dance it's sorry Sam says one thing to him that just contradicts what he was thinking and he immediately is like oh he questions himself and then Carla contradicts the thing that Sam said and that he doesn't know what to think he has to put ice on his head you know norm comes in like like and you know he's there all the time you know it's like you know all these things about these characters and no one said anything about themselves it's not reduced so well again to where they worked like superficial appearances or whatever it's like you just you you know them almost you know them first and then you meet them and it's it's really really nice because the like again I just a lot of times you can see like a show or like a network node or an executive or maybe people in the writers room were like well we need we we have to make sure the viewer knows these people before they do something before they care about them and then that show is like no you're gonna know everyone first then you're gonna meet them yeah and and I and it's like it's it's brilliant so can we tie that back to Kant because I think it's because I think you can I which is that you know you know you know you know something first and then you meet it I think that that's like pretty much a nice way through cheers of bringing us back to like his concerns about space and time is that like again these these things that are as I've said about different things on this show like space and time are there in the same way that air is and it's like well like what is what why would you think about air unless there was like a problem unless space was closing in on you or time was short like you tend not to like actively consciously think about these things but they are nonetheless the precondition for any other thing to occur right and how can we extract an understanding of space and time that's not reducible to their formulation within an object or thing or an experience is that that's exactly exactly that's exactly right because he because then you're stuck with empiricism and then you're you're stuck with the form is just arbitrary yeah right like he would I mean that's the thing that that's the again that's the great contribution is that he sees how this form of space is not just something it's arbitrary and that we should pay attention to it and I think it's so I think it's so hard to pay attention to to time for sure but to to space reality as well like I think it's I think it's so and this is the point you're getting at is that we so take space for granted that we never take the time to think about how space is structured and I think yeah and and that's like to me the great filmmakers are the ones they I think so Delos basically the two I don't I'm not a great fan of Delos as everyone knows but one of the things the two cinema books do is they're basically divided between the divide between movement and time but but you could say between space and time sure right and and that that yeah and that that he sees Italian neorealism as this as the first time that time gets injected into cinema but I was thinking who's the great I think it's hard to even think about this but who's the great filmmaker of space like just that sure makes us aware of space and then I was thinking of course it's Curacao because in high and low you get this like the spatial arrangement in within the Mison Sen is the you can no one really moves that much and so you can't really think about anything else except how they're spatially arranged and then I was thinking this great it's it's it's not the greatest Macbeth adaptation because it's the it's the Michael I forgot his name and and Mary on Cotear I always forget his name he's an X-Men first class what's his name uh fast bender fast bender sorry that that's the great to me that's the great Macbeth but this close second is thrown of blood by a cure Curacao and one thing that Curacao does when Macbeth back at the I don't know what castle it is the Macbeth castle at the end of the play or at the end of the film there it there's like three people in the castle so yeah you really feel and the and the trees you see they're amazing the way they come alive the which is true to the play uh and and and that you really get this sense of the vastness of the empty space that surrounds Macbeth which then course I mean there's obviously a psychic point that Curacao is making about that his his psychic isolation too but but I think just to be aware of space theality to watch a Curacao a film I think is to be made aware of even a bad one is to be aware of space. I'd like the He's early ones like drunk in angel, which I don't think is great or, I don't know, that's the only one I could think is not great. Well, you know, Akira too is also a film. - Akira, which is a masterpiece. - Yes, that's also great. And that's also, I think that that's a nice combingling of space and time. - Yeah, yeah, it really is. - But it really is, 'cause yeah, he's confronted obviously with temporality in a really profound way. - And what he builds is, he manages to build a public park, you know, through layers of, like it's really beautiful. I think that that's amazing. I think that had to be our recommendation. We did that public, didn't it? - I believe it was, yeah, yeah. And I don't think I'd seen it yet. And I saw, I taught it recently in my disability in media class, just, he does things, you know, I just, I noticed this, just a slight tangent. Sorry, everybody over here. - That's okay. - Oh, it's interesting. - Well, I know it's fine for you, but there's other people to consider to. Are there really, yeah. - That's not how I play. (laughs) - One of the things I noticed, and I had all these different films that, I was trying to see how disability is represented through form and through formal aspects and not just representation in, like, - Yeah, right, characterization. - Right, yeah, and to help anyone, probably the great, just this film is an example of a film of a disabled form would be Bill Morrison's Ticosia, which is literally silver nitrate clips like stitched together. And like, every time, like, so like the form of the, like the object form of the film is itself meaningfully disabled every time, like, like these, 'cause-- - Yeah, it sounds very boring to me. - Well, okay, it's not a fictional film, but whatever, okay. So, but I think it's, I think it's really interesting. If you like-- - Yeah, good. - I'm just kidding. - If you like Koyanna Scotty, this would be, and I think you'd be very interested, someone would be very interested in this kind of thing. But anyway, one of the things with Akiru and a lot of another number of other films that I saw that had sort of strong attempts to represent disability in form was there's always some kind of mirror scene. And-- - Oh! - Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can even, I mean, even something like Memento, there's like-- - Right, there's always-- - There's great mirror scenes. - Yeah. - And that, what was I mean-- - It's funny 'cause that's a film about, everyone would say that's a film about time. - Right. - But it does also emphasize, there's so many scenes that emphasize the spacey hours. - Yeah, no, and the way that Kurosawa uses, there's a couple different scenes when the main character's name I'm forgetting from Akiru, I mean, that's his name, actually, isn't it? - That is his name, okay. - It's that makes it Kurosawa did that for people like-- - It probably is for people like me. - For people like me. - What? - My goodness, what a dead a gratitude I owe them in. The, that there's, he kind of dissolves into the mirror, I think, in one scene, and then he uses the mirror to do kind of, as you and I love so much, kind of a violation of the 180 degree rule. William Wiler will also do this in the best years of our lives. This is a really great post-war film that's about how disabling, like the war was both to the body and then like to the psyche into the public. And anyway, that was something that I noticed and that I didn't expect to find was this repeated use of the mirror. And what is the mirror show? How is the mirror used by the filmmaker in the film? Because as I think actually a humanin might have said in our episode we did with him all the way back, is that when you see a mirror, there's a trick being played by the camera, because it has to be like it can't be-- - Right, you can't shoot directly, obviously, into a mirror. - Yeah, right. And like Lady from Shanghai also has, I mean, the, the, what's his name, the guy who's her husband, who has to walk with the, he has this, there's crutches, so there's a disability kind of thing there and then that's like giant mirror scene. So there's this thing I was trying to stitch, like aesthetically, you know, falling to open the mirror. - He's the actor, who's the, what's his character name? - I'm forgetting his name. - Anyway, I was like, what's the disability aesthetic? I was like, you could look for mirrors in films that all of us could go together, but it's kind of, it comes into this thing as well, which is like that. When you see a mirror in a film, like you're suddenly very aware of space in a way that is, like you take for granted because you have the like, the privilege of you of the camera into wherever you are, and maybe the way that you're thinking about space is how you're limited. Like maybe you wish you could see more. And then suddenly the mirror is like a real limitation that then is like, oh no, this is too much. It's like, it's so being confronted by like the too muchness of not enough. I think is something really interesting that happens when the, - Yeah, that's great. It's great. I do think you're right that in a way, Kant is trying to understand what are the necessary limit, he never says this. But isn't he saying, like just like you're pointing out, he's saying, what are the limits on our experience well? It's gonna be temporal and it's gonna be spatial. And the other limit is it has to have, our intuitions are receptive, right? They're not, and this I think is really important that we don't create them. - Right. - Like we don't have, so he's not saying that we have, and this is why he's not a subjectivist, right? Like this is basically, the aesthetic is the beginning of Kant's defense of objectivity even though he's saying, it's the subject that's the basis for these experiences. But he's not saying, oh, everything is subjective. It's just quite the opposite. It's that, and I think it's through the limit that that's how he's shown, that's where he's getting to objectivity because you can't, no one can, like if we could freely violate the limit of space and time and create our own forms of intuition, then it would be subjective. Our whole world would be subjective, but we can't do it, and we can't even, not only that, but we can't even imagine it being done. And I think that's what for Kant is the really crucial thing, that we can't, we can try, but you can really do the thought experiment yourself. You can try to imagine something out of this. Why, don't you think this is why the idea of heaven is so, we never think of it, we just have, we put an image up and then we don't think about it anymore. When I was a little kid, my mom, who taught them, their weekly Bible school would put an image of streets of gold and I was heaven, and I'm like, that doesn't seem great. - Pretty sure that would be, you know, I'm quite certain. - That, right, right, right. But whatever, the point is, you cannot, you cannot have an unhorifying thought of eternity, because you think of it as just time going on and on and on and on and on, right? You can't do it, you can't think of, Augustine drives to, he says, no, we should think of time as existing within eternity. Okay, fine, but how do you really think that? He doesn't, he just says that, and then, you know, so I think that's the, that's where you can really get to what Kant is trying to say, if you try to think of a different, try to think outside of time, you just, you can't do it, you cannot do it. - Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's really interesting. I mean, like what, again, there's some kind of, this is part of why, like I was reading, you know, Paul Gyer, 'cause he's a lot smarter than I am about this and he knows Kant a lot better than I do, but I found, it, I just did not prefer the way that he was talking about Kant as a nominalist and that all the objects that Kant is concerned with are particulars. Like that's, that's, he made, he says that in the, the Kant book for Routledge. To, I think, not, I think, because I read it, I know why he does this, which is that, like, there's some inconsistencies that he knows other, that some people critique Kant for, that he thinks, thinking about him as anomalous, gets him out of the, and I don't wanna go through those things, but if you can read the book for yourself to see what he does with that. - Right, right, but I just think, if Kant is a nominalist, then what he's saying about space and time is that these are things that exist, but they exist differently for everyone. - Right. - Which he's not saying, right? - He's not saying that, right. I think that's such a crucial point, right? Like this is, in fact, he's going out of his way not to say that. - Yeah. - What he's saying is, no, these forms of intuition are pure. He says that word of many times, they're pure, which means they applied everybody. You don't get, it's not a relative, I mean, he's the opposite, the opposite of a relative. - Yes. - Right, like you couldn't, you couldn't say that Kant's the reason why we exist in our contemporary siphistic relativism, right? Which I think we both would say that we do, but it's certainly not Kant's fault. He's trying to, if anything, he's trying to do the, as best he can, in the face of that sophistry, in the face of that relativism, to preserve some kind of objectivity through an analysis of what makes it possible, what Kant's doing, constitutes it. Yeah. Which is, I think that really is the lasting value of Kant that he really is trying to say, look, this is what, this is the basis of our knowing and sorry, you don't, just because you have a certain wacky view of things, you don't, you don't, you don't escape this. Yeah. You still are, you know, you can have a conspiracy theory about the COVID vaccine or whatever, yeah. It doesn't matter. Still, you're, you're still thinking in terms of the pure forms of the intuition, space and time, right? You can't, yeah, you can't get out of that. This is, this is not as a serious or sophisticated as Kant's argument, but if this might help the, just to install the structure a little bit in people's heads, there's a version of this that I, I sometimes say for students like, if I'm, like, I'm asking for a 1500 word essay, like I'm asking for a 1500 word essay, if you'd like draw something on a piece of paper and you hand it to me, I'm not going to be like, oh my God, my idea of what a 1500 word essay is has just been exploded by your raw creativity. I'm so limited that I couldn't think that you could have drawn this doodle on a post it and that that actually like, like, like, I, like, oh, this is changing, that's changing my, like, like, I can do this like, this condescending thing where like everything is right, like, it's all subjective, like, well, you said 1500 and I thought, like, each line was 100 words on my drawing. So it's like, like, it doesn't, it's, no, it's, it, like, again, there is a, there's an inescapable, business that's. Necessity, limit. Yeah. I think that was the right thing to say by you that, like, it really is a book about, and that this will be the genesis of Hegel's critique that you can only know a limit once you're beyond it. But that, Khan is a philosopher over the limit as constitutive. Right. And Hegel does kind of take that on certain ways. So it's, it's really, I think that's just, there's certain something amazing about that. Yeah. All right. So what I think, I think, since we've already recommended a crew and I think we've already recommended high and low, I think we got to recommend Throne of Blood, which is a great Macbeth adeptate per Macbeth adeptate. You know that's highly recommend. That's like, you know this, have you seen this one? Scotland, Pennsylvania, have you seen this adeptate? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's good Macbeth. That's good. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's pretty good. Yeah, it's funny. That was, it's like, it's good. It's good. You know, so go ahead. No, I was going to say my friend Andrew Barnaby, that's his favorite Macbeth and he says Shakespeare scholars. I was like, right, that's really, that's great. Oh, God. I, you know what, I run into a lot of people who really hate that movie and I started to think like, am I, is this, is this my wrong? Is that, but that makes me feel, that makes me feel better. No, no, no, no, no, no. You've got the confirmation from a Shakespeare scholar and when we taught Shakespeare together, that was the, I was like, can we do the curse? I always like, no, no, we're doing this kind of thing. I'm like, okay, all right, you overruled me. That's funny. Well, I don't know if I, I don't know if I wrote it or if I wrote it. That's the, well, you know, it's Andrew. So, all right, over and out, Ryan. Over and out, Ted. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]