Decanting Kant's cant.

 The Point has a good article on Kant's 300th birth anniversary in which different philosophers highlight different quotations from the great philosopher which they personally found enlightening. 

It begins by looking at Kant's notion of an aesthetic idea- 

By an aesthetic idea … I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.

Suppose I hear that the auditors are going to make a surprise inspection tomorrow. I start imagining various scenarios. Suppose, they are going to check the Sales ledger. In that case, I am safe because I'm in charge of purchasing. But what if they focus on office expenses? They might find out I am buying toner from my brother-in-law. So what? I'm actually getting a discount and can prove it. Still... they might get suspicious. They might uncover some thing else. What if they frame me? Could that happen? No. I'm getting worked up over nothing. Nevertheless, I have a vague sense of unease. I can't put my forebodings into words. You could say, I have a visceral intuition rather than anything reasoned or effable.

Is this an 'aesthetic idea'? No. It is an intension whose extension is unknown. Indeed, the elderly janitor, who doesn't know what the word 'auditor' means, might share this feeling with the Purchasing Manager. If we have little knowledge of future states of the world, our thinking is bound to be 'uncorseted by concepts'. However, in an aesthetic field, we might have a lot of knowledge about what will happen next. We may gain pleasure from some novelty or 'surprisal' in how that inevitable sequence is played out. We may not have a good structural causal model of how the trick is worked, in which case we might say 'this moves me for a reason I can't put into words' but we might nod our heads politely if a Scientist says 'I measured your brain waves. At time t, the singer introduced a surprising micro-note , this stimulated such and such receptor in your amygdala. That's why you liked this song so much.'       

Michel Chaouli takes a different view. He asks us to         

savor the fact that this man, so maniacally devoted to conceptual rigor, opens the view to a field—an “immeasurable field,” he adds a page later—of a form of thinking uncorseted by concepts. This thinking that happens in aesthetic experience is of a kind that “no language … can make intelligible”—unintelligible thinking. Yet it is not nonsense; it is not madness or divine possession or Bacchic transport or any of the other things philosophers have called the experience of art. No, it is thinking. And take Kant at his word: thinking is active, continuous, present. Often it stiffens into thought, which is just thinking in the past. But not here.

A lot of our brain activity isn't linguistic. Equally, we may be talking without thinking or while thinking of something else. Kant wasn't a fool. He understood this.  

Here the imagination is in the driver’s seat.

Just as it is if you are alone at night in a spooky place. 

It is productive. It is poetic, in the word’s ancient sense, which is why Kant says that poetry is the true home of aesthetic ideas.

Surely that is rather a banal observation? Poetry is supposed to be beautiful or profound or some such thing. Sadly, that is seldom the case.  

Poetry produces poetic thinking, thinking that eludes the grasp of concepts. It puts into words what cannot be made intelligible by words alone.

Because though we can name feelings or describe them well enough, there is no verbal formula which is interchangeable with a feeling or an experience. 

Now you pause and relish the reward of slogging through 49 sections: a vista of an immeasurable field of thinking out of the reach of the very philosophy that discovered it.

Sadly, there is no such reward.

Sergio Tenenbaum draws our attention to the following passage from 'Religion within the bounds of Reason'- 

'We may presuppose evil as subjectively necessary in every human being,

this may be a dogma of our religion. We may pay it lip service but we need not ponder the matter too deeply. Dogmas are merely shibboleths or 'uncorrelated asymmetries' enabling us to distinguish those of our sect from others.  

even the best. Now, since this propensity must itself be considered morally evil,

Why?  We train out soldiers to kill. We endow them with a propensity which, ordinarily speaking, would be evil. But we do so for a good purpose. The fact that our soldiers are known to be very good at killing might itself prevent any large scale violence. A propensity or natural tendency is not good or evil if some check upon it supervenes. Our soldiers are trained to only use violence when the rules of war permit. 

hence not a natural predisposition but something that a human being can be held accountable for,

I have a natural tendency to fart. However, at some point in childhood, I was taught to repress this natural tendency when in the company of others.  I might be forgiven for inadvertently letting one rip on one social occasion but I may find myself ostracized if I make a habit of it. 

and consequently must consist in maxims of the power of choice contrary to the law and yet, because of freedom, such maxims must be viewed as accidental, a circumstance that would not square with the universality of the evil at issue unless their supreme subjective ground were not in all cases somehow entwined with humanity itself and, as it were, rooted in it;

Nonsense! Kant's problem was that he hadn't studied the law. He didn't understand that judgments are defeasible. To be fair, it wasn't till relatively recently that mathematical category theory showed why 'naturality' or 'non-arbitrariness' is far to seek. The Eighteenth Century had a naive faith in 'natural law' and even 'natural religion'.  

so we can call this ground a natural propensity to evil, and, since it must nevertheless always come about through one’s own fault, we can further even call it a radical innate evil in human nature.

One call anything by any name. That does not alter reality.  

Sergio writes-

Kant’s views here are taken by many philosophers to be an impossible attempt to have it both ways. Kant seems to be arguing that evil is necessarily attributed to each of us, apparently rooted in human nature. And yet at the same time he claims that evil is freely chosen: each of us is fully responsible for this unavoidable human predicament. But how is this possible? How could a condition “entwined with humanity itself” be something that “come[s] about through one’s own fault”?

Negligence or malice. I should have taken a shit before attending your dinner party. My negligence caused me to fart and stink up the place. However, my shitting myself was a definite act of malice.  

Nonetheless I always found this passage to contain a powerful insight into the human condition. It is not only Kant who needs to have it both ways; we all do.

No. We have a propensity and receive training to suppress it. However, we may suffer an accident though there may be a degree of personal negligence. The law clarifies such matters. If I didn't shit myself on purpose, you may still have a have an action in tort against me. I was negligent in not emptying my bowels before attending your dinner party. My defense is that I was drunk off my head. Sadly, since I had no business rendering myself so hopelessly intoxicated, my defense fails.  

The high ideals that we set for ourselves are indeed unattainable,

which is why we keep shitting ourselves at dinner parties- right?  

and yet we betray our freedom if we do not own up to every particular failure of our agency.

No. We misuse our freedom. A dinner party isn't the right place to take a shit.  

Not seeing that these ideals are unattainable, let alone thinking that one has attained them, is a form of moral arrogance or fanaticism that blinds us to the real obstacles for moral progress.

That's a stretch. Still, it is true that by focusing on not shitting ourselves at dinner parties, we neglect our duty to show solidarity with trans people by undergoing gender reassignment surgery.  

Yet not seeing that our failures are imputable to us is a form of self-satisfaction that lets us rationalize our shortcomings as vicissitudes of human nature.

My failure to chop my own balls off is a vicissitude of human nature.  

It is certainly difficult to find a path here between arrogance and rationalization. Whether or not Kant succeeded in doing so, it is undeniably to his credit that he saw that such a path must be there.

There is no such path. There is merely virtue signaling. The fact is I have vowed not to undergo gender reassignment surgery till every last starving disabled Guatemalan lesbian goat has been provided with this vital service. 

Keren Gorodeisky highlights Kant's notion of '“sensus communis,” which Kant identifies with taste. What is this sensus communis? It is “the idea of a communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought.”'

We say a person has 'good taste' if they correctly identify the Schelling focal solution to coordination and discoordination games. Thus if you are dining with snobs, you show good taste by praising the vintage wine that has been carefully selected by your host. You show bad taste by demanding Coca Cola. 

If Kant is right,

He isn't. He lived long ago and thus didn't know about game theory.  

our widespread aesthetic sociality and the risk of aesthetic alienation are not a happenstance—a result of the way we happened to organize our lives, the fact of the vast world of beauty or the shortness of our lives.

The fact is we have prudential or mercenary reasons for wishing to be in part of this clique or else to clearly advertise that we will have nothing to do with it. Economics explains this.  

They are already there every time each of us appreciates beauty, whether we are alone or together.

It is useful to cultivate a propensity for correctly identifying 'focal solutions' or more simply to have good 'Tardean mimetics'- i.e. an instinct to copy superiors. If everybody is drinking vintage wine and talking about Proust, drink wine and say 'honestly, I feel I walking through the world like a blind man till I read 'Remembrance'.'  

To appreciate, for Kant, is already to speak to you as a “you” and as different from “me”;

No. Kant wasn't stupid. He knew that people with good taste like to appreciate good things with other decent people. He feels there is a 'we' which gains greater enjoyment than could be possible on a solitary or adversarial basis.  

it requires that I acknowledge others as those who can either agree or disagree with me, as other members of the same potential community.

There is no such notion in Kant. He was cool with the Enlightened despot or the refined 'Beamten' of Civil Servant who sets the pattern for society. He didn't think anybody had any obligation to acknowledge the alterity of the Lesbian Guatemalan goat.  

And it is by experiencing beauty and art that we experience this fundamental connection between us and our necessary “separateness” (in Stanley Cavell’s coinage).

Bullshit! We like watching our favorite films while cuddling with our wife or kiddies on the couch. Equally, our enjoyment of a soccer match is greater if we are part of the crowd.  

Simone de Beauvoir calls it “the miracle of literature”:

that miracle is that her books can't actually bore you to death though they can put you to sleep quickly enough.  

“that an other truth becomes mine without ceasing to be other. I renounce my own ‘I’ in favor of the speaker; and yet I remain myself.”

Sartre started off as a stand-up comic. Sadly, Simone would keep interrupting him to say 'I'm renouncing myself!'  Thus the fellow was obliged to take up philosophy. 

No wonder, then, that Kant’s aesthetics influenced thinkers like de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt,

who lacked a penis and thus had to pretend to understand Heidegger- whom Arendt had actually fucked.  

who explore the political and social aspects of human existence.

because exploring Outer Space requires actual intelligence 

No wonder it is still relevant for us today.

Coordination and discoordination games are important. As David Lewis points out, Conventions are Schelling focal solutions to the former. The 'moral inversion' we see on woke campuses is a 'discoordination game' which will end when non-STEM subjects are defunded. 

Perhaps, had Frank Ramsey had lived, we Anglo-Saxons would have a Pragmatic, game theoretic, 'Law & Econ' which would 'de-Kant' (as Binmore puts it) Social Choice and Political Philosophy. But anyone can figure out what that would be for themselves. It is easy enough to decant Kant's wine and get rid of two centuries of holier-than-thou cant. 

Personally I found this passage from a paper by Prof. Gier illuminating- 

Though this representation [of heaven and hell] is figurative, and, as such disturbing, it is nonetheless philosophically correct in meaning. That is, it serves to prevent us from regarding good and evil, the realm of light and realm of darkness, as bordering on each other and as losing themselves in one another by gradual steps. . . but rather to represent those realms as being separated from one another by an immeasurable gulf

'...there is the belief in the coincidence of eschaton and noumenon, that means that the "end" already exists in an atemporal state of moral perfection. We find this view in works as far apart as Lectures on Philosophical Theology, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (hereafter Foundations), and parts of Religion. In these passages the operative phrase is "kingdom of ends," an ideal moral realm in which each rational being is automatically a member. During the winter of 1783-84 Kant introduced this idea: "If all men speak the truth, then a system of ends is possible among them" (LPT 140; cf. 41). This view continues in Foundations, where the noumenal kingdom of ends, consisting of self-legislating rational beings, contrasts with a phenomenal realm of heteronomous beings obedient to an external law. Again, membership is not granted by God, but is acquired by reason: "He is fitted to be a member in a possible realm of ends to which his own nature already destined him" (F, 54). Even though Religion introduces a significantly different eschatology, Kant's initial view is still present: "The constant seeking for the kingdom of God would be equivalent to knowing oneself to be already in possession of this kingdom"; and we must "consider ourselves always as chosen citizens of a divine ethical state" (R 61, 93).'