What It Means to Be Human: Marc Benioff and Klaus Schwab Get It Wrong

Generations of students have been assigned to write essays on the topic, “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” The result has been a collection of some of the worst prose known, and raging headaches for the teachers and professors who had to read it. Yet, as bad as most attempted answers to this question are, the question perpetually poses itself. Texts of today and tomorrow address it, as do texts from 3,000 years ago, and from every era in between.

Although getting the right answer, or answers, to this question is somewhere between difficult and impossible, and therefore a task undertaken only by the wise and brave, or by the ignorant and foolish, it is perhaps somewhat easier to identify what the answer, or answers, are not — to discern which answers are wrong.

Yet this approach has the defect of leaving one in the position of being labeled as purely negative: the armchair critic.

So perhaps a moderate approach to this question would be to do a little of both: to rightly discover the weaknesses in proposed answers, and to point to possible components of correct answers, without claiming to have precisely, exhaustively, and finally identified the correct answer or answers.

As a point of departure, Marc Benioff asserts that human nature is malleable, mutable, and changeable. He writes that not only is human nature capable of being changed, but rather also that it is in fact being altered:

The convergence of digital technologies with breakthroughs in materials science and biology means that we are seeing the emergence of entirely new ways in which to live. In both subtle and explicit ways, technology is changing what it means to be human.

There are reasons to question Benioff’s proposition that human nature can be altered. First, he asserts that “technology” is changing human nature; yet technology is a product of human nature. Any technology which acts upon humans is merely an extension of humanity itself.

In some science-fiction scenario where robot overlords, or AI run amok, or genetic engineering influences human beings, that is merely humans shaping themselves. To have an effect on one’s self — as in, the entirety of humanity having an effect on itself — is substantially different than being changed or altered by some external force.

If humanity acts upon itself, it will not change human nature, but rather merely be a working out, an extension, of what humanity is.

Technology can and does change a great deal about the world, and this is easily seen. But to say that it changes human nature is a different matter.

Benioff’s concept is essentially structured in the passive voice: “what it means to be human” is being changed by technology. If human nature can be changed by technology, then technology is in some sense superior to, or higher than, or dominant over, human nature. Yet technology is a product of, an extension of, human nature, and is therefore less than, or at most equal to, human nature.

Thus understood, Marc Benioff is partly correct and partly wrong when he writes:

In the coming decades, the technologies driving the fourth industrial revolution will fundamentally transform the entire structure of the world economy, our communities and our human identities.

To say that technology will change the economy, communities, and human identity is, respectively, correct, debatable, and wrong.

“The world economy” consists of what people value, how that value is produced, how it changes over time, how trades and exchanges are made, how local variables influence global patterns of valuation and exchange, etc. — All of which points to the malleability of economies. Indeed, a reasonable argument could be made for the hypothesis that economies are by nature changing and not static.

“Communities” are collections of humans who interact with each other on a frequent enough and significant enough level to create a communal identity in addition to the identity of each individual who is part of that community. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the word ‘community’ has been abused and misused to the extent that it needs some clarification. For example, there is talk of the “African-American community” or the “Latino / Hispanic community” or other alleged communities. But to assert that every African-American is part of some community, or that every Latino / Hispanic is part of some community, is to assert that a university-educated African-American millionaire on Wall Street is in community with an impoverished African-American farmer in rural Arkansas and with a blue-collar African-American in inner-city Chicago. It is to assert that a Latino professor of physics at the University of Michigan is in community with a Hispanic shop owner who operates a small business in Los Angeles. This is a thorough misunderstanding of what community is: community is more than a statistical sharing of only one of hundreds of demographic variables.

Before deciding whether, how, or to which extent human communities are mutable, it must first be determined what community is: a usable definition for the word ‘community’ must be found.

Human identity, on the other hand, is clearly non-malleable. One either is, or is not, human; and if one is human, then a change in “our human identities” would entail that some individuals would cease to be human if they met the criteria for the old version of humanity but not for the new version, and that, likewise, other individuals who were previously not human would become human through this “transforming” of human identity. Benioff’s assertion leads inexorably to some conclusions which even he himself might not desire.

Klaus Schwab echoes Benioff’s proposition:

Of the many diverse and fascinating challenges we face today, the most intense and important is how to understand and shape the new technology revolution, which entails nothing less than a transformation of humankind.

After an examination of Benioff’s and Schwab’s assertions about human nature — those assertions amount largely to the assertion of pliability — the task remains to make positive postulations about human nature: hypothesizing without going “a bridge too far” and claiming to have made a final and ultimate definition of human nature.

Therefore, the following are to be understood as suggestions — as indications about a possible path to a definition of humanity — and not as an exhaustive declaration of “what it means to be human.”

First, humans are rational, knowing, deliberate agents. A debt to the general trend of Lockean thought is evident here. Humans are rational: the powers of reasoning and logic are universal among human beings, even if the development and degree of that characteristic varies from one individual to another — 7 + 5 = 12 is a universal human truth. Humans know: they possess knowledge and information. Humans deliberate: the application of rationality to knowledge is part of deliberation, but there is more to deliberation than that: a teleology — deliberation calculates about a goal, or a set of goals, and how to reach those goals, and how to understand the possible tradeoffs between multiple dearly-held goals. Humans are agents: after reasoning, knowing, and deliberating, humans act. Thus described, human nature is immutable, and has not changed in all of recorded history — whether that be reckoned as 6,000 years or 10,000 years or some other number. It is not possible, nor even conceivable, that it should change.

Second, human nature is essentially imperfect and broken. Rationally, humans are liable to error in their deliberations. Cognitively, humans are liable to misunderstanding and misremembering. Morally, humans are liable to wrongdoing, to evil, to sin. Collectively, this is understood as “fallenness” or weakness — or, in the broader sense, mortality.

Third, humans have passion. Love and hate, sadness and joy — emotions are essentially human, despite the occasional attribution and misattribution of such to animals, and humans are essentially emotional.

Fourth, humans are communal. Aristotle’s comment on this is frequently quoted and as frequently misunderstood. Humans are innately social. Wittgenstein went so far as to write that language’s ability to have meaning is based on humanity’s social nature. Admittedly, humans can live in isolation: Defoe’s novel shows this, as does Mary Shelley’s less-known novel, The Last Man. The ability of humans to survive alone does not contradict the thesis that humans are intrinsically social.

No claim is here made that the above four assertions together constitute a complete or comprehensive definition of humanity. Rather, they are at best hints toward a rough working draft of such a definition. It is, however, plausible that the four qualities listed above are inherent, immutable, and immalleable, and that therefore, despite a changing context, human nature does not change.

What’s the Speed Limit? And What Would Edmund Burke Say About It?

A resident in the United States will be familiar with the roads and streets in her or his neighborhood and beyond. An obvious feature of almost any thoroughfare is a speed limit, which is often, but not always, posted. Laws regulating the speed of cars is a common type of legislation; it is also an example of the principles which Edmund Burke sought to explain.

In many of the fifty states, there is a general principle which states that city streets have a speed limit of 25 miles per hour, and country roads have a limit of 55 miles per hour. These two clear and simple axioms would seem to generate a decision procedure for most, if not all, thoroughfares.

Yet, in practice, one will encounter posted speed limits of all kinds of arbitrary numbers — limits other than 25 or 55 MPH. One commonly sees posted limits in multiples of five — 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 MPH — and occasionally numbers like 8 or 12 MPH.

Sometimes speed limits in cities will exceed the usual 25 MPH, and countryside limits will sometimes be below the standard 55 MPH. Freeways will have limits of 70 or 75 MPH, and sometimes even higher numbers.

The thought of Edmund Burke is often best understood in the context of the French Revolution and his commentary on it.

The style of political ideology which energized the French Revolution would embrace the axiomatic system of 25 MPH for city streets and 55 MPH for country roads absolutely and simplistically. There would be no other speed limits considered. Every street in the nation would be either 25 or 55 MPH, and the choice between the two would be based upon whether the thoroughfare was urban or rural. No other variation would be allowed or even contemplated.

By contrast, Burke would survey the situation as it is, with not only posted limits of 25 MPH and 55 MPH, but also with posted limits of all kinds of other numbers, and he would consider whether there was some reason for all these different numbers. Burke would proceed on the assumption that there is a reason why things are the way they are. If a local town council chose to post a limit other than 25 or 55 MPH, then it would be prudent to inquire as to why and how the council arrived at the decision to post the number it did.

Here the reader may imagine all kinds of scenarios: some streets in the town have few residents and few intersecting streets, and so a limit of 30 MPH seemed safe; other streets have thick traffic, many residential structures and many intersecting roads along their paths, and so a limit of 20 MPH seemed wise. In the countryside, perhaps a particular road was winding and tended to accumulate ice in cold weather, and so a lower limit of 50 MPH seemed appropriate.

Burke might suggest that decades of experience informed legislations prescribing all manner of speed limits other than 25 and 55 MPH. He would not argue that such laws are sacrosanct and can never be questioned. On the contrary, he would encourage such questioning, and encourage the questioner to consider the answers carefully.

There is a reason why things are the way they are.

There are reasons why societies and cultures have arrived at the patterns which they have. It is possible to contemplate adjustments to convention, but it is wise to do so only after carefully weighing the generations of experience which have brought society to those conventions.

The apparent patchwork of varying speed limits may appear to be illogical and haphazard. A system which assigned every road and street to either 25 MPH or 55 MPH might seem more rational and axiomatic. But the patchwork system is the accreted wisdom of decades. Successive city councils will have encountered varying events and circumstances, and will have adjusted legislations accordingly.

It is impudent to arrive lately to the question and presume to impose a rationalized system upon a complex state of affairs.

Simplistic and absolute patterns, imposed arbitrarily in the name of being imposed rationally, lead more often to problems than to resolutions.

This is one of the major tenets of Burke’s thought.

Edmund Burke’s plea is for the would-be revolutionary to consider that the system which he desires to destroy is, while not perfect, still the accumulation and coalescence of decades and generations of experience — of people encountering a wide range of conditions and events, of people having already seen the results of a variety of responses to those conditions and events, and having learned the results and having chosen carefully from among them.

Complex systems are the result of a history of varying experiences — and of people having made varying decisions in response to those experiences — and a massive catalog of such experiences and the sundry responses to them constitutes a nuanced reality which in turn informs legislations. Burke does not argue for the permanence of societal standards, but rather he argues for a nuanced examination of the existing norms before any alteration is suggested — and such proposed alterations are better when they are slight and not radical.

Being and Existence: Passive or Active?

Those who analyze language as a way to investigate metaphysics have long wrestled with the verb ‘to be’ in various languages and various grammatical forms. Verbs like ‘see’ and ‘eat’ and ‘sing’ seem intuitively easy to define. The verb ‘be’ is intuitively understood in daily practice, and yet the definition of this verb and the referent of the word ‘being’ are debatable.

The reader will be aware that Martin Heidegger explored ‘being’ by contrasting two German words, Sein and Dasein. The former corresponds roughly to the English infinitive construction ‘to be’ and the latter is used in everyday speech to indicate ‘being there.’ Heidegger uses Dasein to refer to human existence: a human’s experience of being. He uses Sein to refer to being in general.

The detailed interpretation of Heidegger’s use of Sein, Dasein, ‘being,’ and ‘existence’ is a complicated and controversial discipline unto itself.

For the present discussion, it is worth noting that Sein and Dasein are active verbs, for which no passive form is possible. The same is true of the English verbs ‘be’ and ‘exist’ — these verbs all have active nominative subjects and no accusative direct objects. These verbs denote some type of agency.

There is another linguistic artifact which expresses being in a transitive way: the German construction es gibt. This structure is usually rendered into English as “there is” or “there are.” But the grammar of es gibt makes the being thing — the thing which is — into a direct object. The existing thing is being put into, and kept in, existence. There seems to be no clearly analogous construction in the English language. It is left as an exercise for the reader to survey English idioms, past and present, to see if there is some such analogous formulation.

Heidegger hints at this type of being — or this aspect of being — which lacks agency when he uses the word Geworfenheit. This word is often translated into English as ‘thrownness’ — human existence is beyond its own control: a human being finds himself thrown into a time and a place not of his own choosing. Not only is the spatial-temporal physical location not chosen, but also cultural and social contexts are not chosen.

The question at hand is this: to investigate the nature of Being by contrasting and comparing the grammatical nominative subject with the accusative direct object. There remains, of course, the question of whether it is a valid or sound method to use the grammar of natural language to explore metaphysical questions.

The reader will remember that Heidegger wrote that Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins, but while that sentence is thought-provoking, it hardly serves to solve or explain these questions.

One might postulate a spectrum, at one end of which is Being as absolute agency: God said, “I am that I am,” a sentence which has kept philosophers, theologians, and Semitic philologists busy for 3,500 years. Being is in this sense an assertion and an action. Being as a choice and as an act of the will.

At the other end of the spectrum is Being as ultimate passivity: That which is — things which are — have been thrown into existence. A conscious, knowing, deliberate thing — a person, a human — finds himself thrown into existence. One simply is, and is at a time and place not of one’s choosing. Searching one’s memory, one finds that at some point in time, one started to be. One simply was. It was certainly not a volitional act. One did not choose to be, nor was one at first even conscious of being. Somehow, it gradually dawned upon one, that one was.

Perhaps one clue is to be found in this usage: that es gibt is often used of inanimate things, and more often used of unaware and non-sentient things. To be sure, this is not a universal rule, and exceptions will be found. But might one generalize that es gibt mainly describes unconscious objects?

On the other hand, Heidegger’s Geworfenheit describes the experience of beings which are aware, conscious, and sentient.

Questions about Being are so foundational and basic that they link automatically to other branches of philosophy and to the written works of many different philosophers. When one notices one’s awareness — whether it be the earliest childhood memories or simply awakening each day — one is suddenly confronted with a world which “is there” — eine Welt, die es gibt — Who put it there? Why is it there? Why is there something rather than nothing?

To be aware and to be conscious leads to experiencing this sense of “thrownness” and to ask, in the first person, Who threw me? Why did someone throw me? Who made me? What is this world into which I am suddenly and involuntarily thrown?

To fully explore Being, the reader will need, in addition to Sein and Dasein, a sense of es gibt.

Hermeneutics: What?

Students routinely encounter the word ‘hermeneutics’ with a sense of mystery. Articles in scholarly journals use the word on the assumption that the readers are already familiar with it, and introductory textbooks often fail to define it.

One edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica offers this explanation:

Exegesis is the actual interpretation of the sacred book, the bringing out of its meaning; hermeneutics is the study and establishment of the principles by which it is to be interpreted.

The mention of the ‘sacred book’ alludes to the origin of both hermeneutics and exegesis as spiritual disciplines. Examples of both are in the Talmud.

Both ‘exegesis’ and ‘hermeneutics’ are subject to varying usages, and can be in some circumstances nearly synonymous, having among their manifold referents sometimes overlapping semantic fields. Dorothee Kimmich writes:

Hermeneutik ist Reflexion, Systematisierung und Theorie einer bestimmten Konzeption von Textauslegung und Interpretation. Nicht gemeint ist damit eine spezielle Methode oder ein bestimmter Komplex von Formen und Regeln. Die Hermeneutik hat eine lange Tradition. Je radikaler man das Verstehen von Texten selbst als ein historisches Phänomen ansah, desto umfassender wurde das hermeneutische Problem. So entwickelte sich im Umgang mit den je verschiedenen Texten, die im Laufe der Zeit zum Gegenstand hermeneutischen Interpretierens wurden, eine Vielzahl von Fragestellungen, Praktiken und Zielen. Eine Erläuterung des Begriffs Hermeneutik fordert also nicht nur eine systematische, sondern immer zugleich auch eine historische Darstellung.

As noted, ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘exegesis’ have varying definitions. Among the common and preferable usages, ‘hermeneutics’ has broader and higher scope. Hermeneutics operates at a metalevel. If ‘exegesis’ routinely refers to the interpretation of a particular text and the methods used to extract meaning from this text, then ‘hermeneutics’ is the discussion and examination of the general process of interpreting texts and extracting meaning from them.

Hermeneutics might examine exegetical results, or compare exegetical methods.

If the exegete is analyzing the text and obtaining meaning from it, the hermeneutician is watching the exegete and analyzing his method of extracting meaning from the text. Dorothee Kimmich continues:

Hermeneutik beschäftigt sich mit den Fragen der „richtigen“, d.h. angemessenen, kohärenten, kompetenten, sinnvollen und nützlichen Auslegung schriftlicher Texte. In den meisten Fällen handelt es sich dabei entweder um normative, sakrale und kanonische Texte – so v.a. in der Spätantike und im Mittelalter – oder – und das gilt für antike und insbesondere für die moderne Hermeneutik – um poetische Texte. „Modern“ wird die Hermeneutik genannt, die versucht, Einzeldisziplinen, wie z.B. die juristische, die theologische und die altphilologische Hermeneutik unter abstrakten und umfassenderen Kategorien zu einer Grundlagendisziplin zusammenzufassen und sich zudem bemüht, den hermeneutischen Gestus als allgemeinen, existentiellen Zugang zur Welt zu qualifizieren. Schleiermacher gilt als Initiator solcher Bemühungen, Nietzsche formuliert das Programm am radikalsten, durch Heidegger erfährt es seine ontologische Wende und Gadamer ist einer der einflussreichsten Vertreter dieser Tradition im 20. Jahrhundert.

Hermeneutics can be, and often is, a valuative activity: it will judge the exegetical methods.

The big question is: by which criteria does one evaluate an exegetical methodology?

Jaroslav Pelikan writes:

The distinction between hermeneutics and exegesis is between theory and practice, hermeneutics being the definition of the principles according to which the Bible is to be interpreted and exegesis being the application of those principles; historically and practically, of course, hermeneutics and exegesis are inseparable.

As noted above, the origin of both exegesis and hermeneutics is in the study of sacred text. While their most focused and thorough application remains in biblical context, literary studies have borrowed these methods and techniques and used them to study the works of a wide range of authors, from Trakl to Hölderlin, from Ernst Stadler to Gerrit Engelke.

Descartes vs. Kant — What is Transcendental Philosophy?

The significant breakthroughs made by Immanuel Kant are often gathered together under the title of ‘transcendental philosophy.’ Indeed, Kant himself used that word, Transzendentalphilosophie, to describe his own thought.

But what is meant by the phrase ‘transcendental philosophy’? The reader will be aware that, in the history of philosophy, the simple paradigm is common in which Rene DesCartes is the representative of ‘rationalist’ philosophy, while John Locke is the icon for ‘empiricist’ philosophy. Each of those two was joined by teammates. Alongside DesCartes were, e.g., Jacques du Roure, Geraud de Cordemoy, Francois Bayle, and Jacques Rohault. Locke’s fellow empiricists included, among others, David Hume and Thomas Reid.

The rationalist team distrusted empirical knowledge, arguing that sense-data was unreliable. The rationalists found certain knowledge in a priori reasoning.

The empiricists discounted a priori knowledge as largely vacuous, consisting mostly of tautologies like “a = a” and “all triangles have three sides.” They argued that meaningful content came from sensations.

A sort of stalemate between these two teams had emerged by Kant’s time. Kant hoped to find a third option in philosophy: his Transzendentalphilosophie.

Webster’s dictionary defines ‘transcendental’ as “of or relating to experience as determined by the mind’s makeup” or “transcending experience but not human knowledge.” Webster offers an important contrast between ‘transcendental’ and ‘transcendent’ — the latter being “beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge.”

Random House offers a similar distinction: ‘transcendent’ is “transcending experience, not realizable in human experience,” while ‘transcendental’ is “of, pertaining to, based on, or concerned with the a priori elements in experience that condition human knowledge.” Random House adds that ‘transcendental philosophy’ is “based upon the doctrine that the principles of reality are to be discovered by the study of the processes of thought.”

Likewise, the dictionary of Funk and Wagnalls defines ‘transcendent’ as “lying beyond the bounds of all possible human knowledge,” and explains ‘transcendental’ as “having an a priori character; transcending experience.” According to Funk and Wagnalls,

Intuitive truths are those which are in the mind independently of all experience, not being derived from experience nor limited by it, as that the whole is greater than the part, or that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. All intuitive truths or beliefs are transcendental. But transcendental is a wider term than intuitive, including all within the limits of thought that is not derived from experience, as the ideas of space and time.

Significantly, Funk and Wagnalls directed the reader to a reference work by Charles Krauth and William Fleming. This book went through several editions, with slight variations in the book’s title. Henry Calderwood seems to have been involved in one of earliest editions. It is usually cited as Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences. Fleming and Krauth give extensive discussions of the word ‘transcendental.’

Eric Kandel offers a glimpse into Kant’s philosophy of mind, and into Kant’s epistemology:

The view of the brain as a creativity machine that constantly uses inference and guesses to reconstruct the external world — the view advocated by Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich — was a dramatic shift from the naive philosophical realism of the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke that dominated thinking about mind at that time. Locke conceived of mind as receiving all the information capable of being gathered by the senses, a view in which mind simply mirrors the reality of the external world. Kris and Gombrich’s view of the brain was a modern version of Kant’s theory that sensory information allows reality to be invented by the mind.

Kant perhaps would not have phrased it as Kandel does, but the point is made: Kantian epistemology sees the mind as active. The mind doesn’t passively receive sense-data and then process them into perceptions. Even at the earlier stage of sensation, before perception, the mind is shaping the sense-data by placing it into space and time — or rather, by creating space and time around the sense-data.

Without using the word ‘transcendental,’ Eric Kandel describes the Kantian epistemological process:

The biological study of learning raises some familiar philosophical questions: What aspects of the organization of the human mind are innate? How does our mind acquire knowledge of the world?

Serious thinkers in every generation have struggled with these questions. By the end of the seventeenth century, two opposing views had emerged. The British empiricists John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume argued that our mind does not possess innate ideas; rather, all knowledge derives from sensory experience and is therefore learned. By contrast, the continental philosophers Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and particularly Immanuel Kant argued that we are born with a priori knowledge; our mind receives and interprets sensory experience in an innately determined framework.

The definitions offered by Webster, Random House, and Funk and Wagnalls are compressed, intended for laymen, and somewhat simplified. They are not written by philosophers for philosophers. Eric Kandel is a brilliant and recognized neuroscientist, but his descriptions of Kant’s thought are not from the viewpoint of Kantian specialist and are not for an audience of Kant scholars.

A text coauthored by Julius Maria Roth and Paul Schulmeister points out that epistemology in general — and especially Kant’s epistemology in particular — is concerned not about what we know, but about how we know it, and the conditions which make knowledge possible:

Die Wende, die mit Immanuel Kants (1724-1804) Transzendentalphilosophie eingeläutet wurde, lässt sich am prägnantesten durch den Vergleich von Rene Descartes (1596-1650) und Kant nachvollziehen. Es handelt sich um den Unterschied zwischen Wissen und den Bedingungen von Wissen.

Roth and Schulmeister argue that DesCartes sought certain knowledge which can’t be doubted, while Kant sought the prerequisite which made knowledge attainable. Both Kant and DesCartes were concerned with the formal mechanisms of epistemology, but under the interpretation of Roth and Schulmeister, DesCartes was driving toward specific contents of knowledge as well as the form of knowledge:

Descartes ging es darum, sicheres Wissen zu erlangen, das nicht mehr bezweifelt werden kann. Kant hingegen fragte nach der Bedingung der Möglichkeit von Wissen.

DesCartes proceeded from the assumption that knowledge was possible, and so his questions were “What can we know? What do we know? Do we know what we think we know?”

Descartes setzte die Möglichkeit von Erfahrung als gegeben heraus. Ihn interessierte deshalb die Wirklichkeit von Erfahrung. Seine Frage lautete: Sind die Dinge wirklich so, wie sie uns erscheinen?

Kant, in contrast to DesCartes, focused on this question: “Can we know? How can we know? What are the mechanisms which would, or which do, make experience possible?” Understanding how experience is structured, or constructed, also points to the centrality of space and time in Kantian thought. Without space and time, there would be and could be no experience, and accordingly, early in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Kant explores space and time.

Kant rückte jedoch genau jenen Aspekt in den Vordergrund, den Descartes als gegeben hingenommen hatte, nämlich die Möglichkeit von Erfahrung. Seine Frage lautete: Wie ist die Erfahrung überhaupt möglich?

The questions “How do I perceive objects? How do my experiences arise?” is closely related to the question “Why is it that my experiences and perceptions happen necessarily in a certain way?” The observer will note that it is not possible to have an idea of a physical object without having an idea of it in space. The mind finds it impossible to conceive of a physical object which is not in space. Likewise with time.

Kant’s exploration begins, not by asking about the objects in the world, but rather by asking about the mind which perceives them.

Bevor man wie Descartes danach fragt, ob die Dinge, wirklich so sind, wie sie uns erscheinen, lautet Kants Vorschlag, dass wir zunächst klären sollten, wie es überhaupt dazu kommt, dass die Dinge auf eine bestimmte Weise erscheinen. Mit Kant lernen die Philosophen, nicht gleich nach der Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit zu fragen, sondern zunächst das eigene Denken zu untersuchen. Genau das ist der Clou der Transzendentalphilosophie, die sich nicht vorschnell in metaphysische Gefilde vorwagen will, bevor nicht die Frage nach den Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von etwas geklärt ist.

The above summary of one part of Kant’s thought relies on Julius Maria Roth and Paul Schulmeister. The reader will ask, to which extent have those two authors accurately understood and expressed this part of the Kantian system?

Perhaps one of the main interpreters and advocates of Kant’s work is Carl Christian Erhard Schmid. Schmid is perhaps most responsible for explaining, and drawing attention to, Kant’s writings. Kant would have been much less well-known if Schmid hadn’t lectured and written about him.

Not only did C.C.E. Schmid offer a clear and influential exposition of Kant’s thought, but he is one of the few Kantian scholars to have published and lectured extensively during Kant’s lifetime. Schmid’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft im Grundrisse nebst einem Wörterbuche zum leichteren Gebrauch der kantischen Schriften appeared in 1786, one year prior to the second edition of Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. Schmid’s book about Kant went through several editions, the exact title changing slightly.

Schmid was writing and teaching about Kant, not only while Kant was still alive, but during Kant’s most productive years. It is left as an exercise to the reader to find primary source documents to answer questions about the extent to which Kant was aware of, and familiar with, Schmid’s writings — and questions about whether or not there was any direct communication between Kant and Schmid.

What is clear is that there was no objection from Kant about Schmid’s explanations of the Kantian system. In a hierarchy of reliability, therefore, Schmid would be near the top. To cite Schmid is arguably to cite one of the most dependable secondary sources on Kant.

Schmid’s Wörterbuch articulates a similar distinction between ‘transcendent’ and ‘transcendental’ and offers a lengthy entry on the latter word. The entry includes:

Transzendental bedeutet überhaupt eine Vorstellung (Anschauung oder Begriff), Urteil, Wissenschaft a priori, so fern sie sich doch auf Gegenstände bezieht, und darauf anwenden läßt; die Erkenntnis von dem objektiven Gebrauche, der rein a priori entsprungenen Vorstellungen und ihrer Vermögen.

Schmid’s detailed entry defining ‘transcendental’ merits detailed study, and is perhaps a powerful instrument for gaining insight in what is meant by the word Transzendentalphilosophie.

John Locke’s Epistemology: What Is Supernatural Knowledge?

In the long history of epistemology, many philosophers have asserted some form of a distinction between the knowledge humans gain through the five physical senses and the knowledge they gain through the exercise of reason. This distinction is drawn slightly differently from one philosopher to the next, and described in slightly different vocabulary, but the dichotomy is perennial one.

As an empiricist, John Locke looked to experience as the source of much or most of knowledge, and in some way, perhaps, the foundation of all knowledge. Yet Locke was aware of the complexities which arise when one uses this distinction in the careful analysis of knowledge.

There are relatively clear cut cases: The sense of vision may tell us that before us is a blueness; rational reflection may tell us that a = a. But between those extremes are a variety of borderline cases which are more complicated and do not always fall neatly into or or the other of those two categories.

One example is a perception which is the result of raw a posteriori sense-data which have been processed by a priori rational concepts, as J.L. Mackie explains:

The empiricist may, and Locke does, recognize that even the reception of ideas in perception is not wholly passive, but includes a considerable element of (unconscious) interpretation.

Locke shows how raw sense-data, which is a sensation and not yet a perception, needs to be processed by concepts in order to become a perception and eventually to become knowledge. A drawing on a two-dimensional paper of a three-dimensional object furnishes an example:

We are further to consider concerning perception, that the ideas we receive by sensation are often, in grown people, altered by the judgment, without our taking notice of it. When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform color, v.g. gold, alabaster, or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted on our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us; what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of the sensible figures of bodies; — the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes. So that from that which is truly variety of shadow or color, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure and an uniform color; when the idea we receive from thence is only a plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting.

There is a long series of thinkers in the history of philosophy who have written about this matter. Routinely, it is framed by some type of dichotomies: experience vs. reason, a priori vs. a posteriori, analytic vs. synthetic, etc.

As with any dichotomy, one may ask whether there are other alternatives in addition to the two given.

As William Uzgalis writes, “Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience.” Uzgalis is expressing the more-or-less standard understanding of Locke. It is worth noting that Locke, in most of his texts, hesitates to write that all knowledge comes from experience, but rather writes that all ideas come from experience: this nuance is worth noting.

In any case, however, another question presents itself: when Locke writes ‘experience,’ does he mean ‘sensory experience,’ i.e., from our five physical senses? Or does he leave room for some other types of experience?

Locke wrote about Paul, the author of several New Testament epistles, that Paul obtained something — ideas or knowledge — directly. Would Paul’s reception of propositions from God count as ‘experience’ for Locke? Locke writes:

Paul was miraculously called to the ministry of the gospel, and declared to be a chosen vessel; that he had the whole doctrine of the gospel from God, by immediate revelation; and was appointed to be the apostle of the Gentiles.

Even more direct, Locke uses the word ‘knowledge’ to refer to the content of Paul’s experience:

For his information in Christian knowledge, and the mysteries and depths of the dispensation of grace by Jesus Christ, God himself had condescended to be his instructor and teacher.

One could, then, begin to construct a paradigm with two categories of experience: first, the experience which arrives by means of the five physical senses; second, experience which arrives otherwise.

If there is such a thing as some type of experience distinct from physical experience, then what could it be? There might be more than one answer. Such non-sensory experiences could be emotional: experiencing happiness or sadness. They could be rational: the experience of calculating, for example. Locke speaks of ‘dictation’ to describe Paul’s experience: Locke says that Paul was “under the Spirit of God, that dictated these sacred writings.” Was this an audible dictation, i.e., the ordinary physical sense of hearing? Or was it somehow an experience of ideas: ideas arising without the five physical senses?

Rene DesCartes is often seen as the opposite of Locke, especially in terms of their respective epistemological systems. Locke however uses one of DesCartes’ more notorious vocabulary items when speaking of Paul’s experience. Cartesian scholars have long wrestled with how DesCartes uses the word ‘light,’ especially in the phrase ‘natural light’ or ‘light of nature.’ It seems to indicate, for DesCartes, an a priori bit of knowledge which is so obvious in its truth that it cannot be doubted. Critics of DesCartes accuse him of a deus ex machina move which begs the question of epistemological certainty when he invokes this natural light. Locke uses a similar phrase to describe the source of Paul’s knowledge:

He was full stored with knowledge of the things he treated of, for he had light from heaven, it was God himself furnished him.

As Locke uses the phrase ‘immediate revelation,’ so he also here speaks of a ‘truth’ which has been ‘revealed’ — truth being one of the usual ingredients of knowledge, as in ‘justified true belief.’

Like Francis’s Bacon’s listing of the sources of experimental error, Locke also indicates that human perception is liable to error, and proposes reliance on revelation as one possible measure against such error:

We are all men, liable to errors, and infected with them; but have this sure way to preserve ourselves, every one, from danger by them, if, laying aside sloth, carelessness, prejudice, party, and a reverence of men, we betake ourselves, in earnest, to the study of the way to salvation, in those holy writings, wherein God has revealed it from heaven, and proposed it to the world, seeking our religion, where we are sure it is in truth to be found, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things.

John Locke’s epistemology, then, may have room for something more than the usual ‘experience vs. reason’ template to describe sources of ideas, of perceptions, and of knowledge. Or, at least, if he does limit the sources to those two, then he may be broadening the definitions of ‘reason’ and ‘experience’ to include more than one might at first suppose.

Schopenhauer: Metaphysician or Empiricist?

Authors who write about the history of philosophy often include Arthur Schopenhauer in a group titled ‘German Idealism’ or ‘Transcendental Idealism’ or something like that. Yet he bears affinities to thinkers like David Hume, who is often placed into a group titled ‘British Empiricism’ or ‘Radical Empiricism’ or similar words.

Schopenhauer’s empirical bent is revealed in his attention to observable data. He explores in detail the discoveries, findings, and methods of the natural sciences. His philosophy of language, likewise, is founded on linguistic data, much of it derived from historical philology and from explorers returning from obscure corners of the planet with new linguistic evidence.

Yet Schopenhauer’s terminology might mislead the reader. He relies on words like ‘Will’ — the capitalization hinting at the centrality of the concept in his thought. The reader can be forgiven for thinking that Schopenhauer is referring to a metaphysical entity instead of empirical evidence.

He has, however, so remade and redefined the word that it now serves as shorthand for a bundle of empirical data, as Lenart Skof writes:

The profound affinity between Schopenhauer and Radical Empiricism is documented by Schopenhauer’s method of observing reality and its phenomena and his reliance of on the achievements of the natural sciences of his time. In the second book of The World as Will and Representation, metaphysical ways of speaking like that of “objectifications of the Will” serve only as metaphors for a number of empirical phenomena, which already in the first book had been freed from the old epistemological modes of subjective knowledge.

Not only does the ‘Will’ seem like a suspiciously metaphysical concept for an alleged empiricist to embrace, but Schopenhauer even begins to discuss Platonic ideas — or ideals — which seem to place him in the middle of a metaphysical tradition.

One way, perhaps, to understand Schopenhauer’s seeming metaphysical discourse as compatible with the hypothesis that he is an empiricist is this: to see the ‘Will’ as being an abbreviation for ‘my experience of the Will.’ The empiricist will deny that there is a metaphysical object called the ‘Will,’ but the empiricist cannot deny that I have some experience of what I call the ‘Will.’

Likewise, I can have the experience of noticing similarities among different objects, and can label a list of those similarities as a Platonic idea. In this way, possibly, Schopenhauer does not follow the metaphysical path of trying to describe what metaphysical objects like the Will or a Platonic idea are, and does not attempt to create an epistemological system explaining how we can know about such objects.

Instead, he turns to concepts of art and morality, in a development which tempts the reader to think him a proto-existentialist. Lenart Skof continues:

The body, as the first representation, revealed to the thinker the world as Will — the immediate world as the effects of matter. However, by shifting into the world of Platonic ideas in the third book, Schopenhauer undertook a task that could only have one possible solution: Dismissing the principle of reason was now only possible through the brilliant artistic act, and through related forms of artistic contemplation of ideas, and, analogously through the world as suffering, and the related conception of his main ‘existentials’ (guilt, conscience, grace, the path of salvation) based on the negation of Will, or asceticism.

The Will, then, is not a metaphysical object, but rather an object of perception. The ‘World as Will’ and the ‘World as Representation’ together compose all experience — and all possible experience.

His own scheme of philosophy, in the development of which he proceeded around or, more precisely, over and above Kant, turns back on itself and can only boomerang. Thus, already in the second book, Schopenhauer is forced to start discussing Platonic ideas as the models of objectifications of the Will, although methodologically, these ideas do not yet belong there at all, as the theme discussed in this book is the world as Will.

Schopenhauer frequently compliments Kant, and it is clear that he has embraced parts of the Kantian system, while rejecting some other parts. In any case, space and time, as the prerequisites for any experience, and as formed by the mind to make experience possible, are central to Schopenhauer and are also the constituent ingredients for causality.

Considered in this way, Schopenhauer is an empiricist or a phenomenologist. He seems to have wrestled with slightly different understandings of Kant’s Ding an sich, at times under the influence of Gottlob Ernst Schulze.

On the one hand, as a student of G.E. Schulze, Schopenhauer was tempted to join Schulze and write that the Ding an sich is an illegitimately postulated construct, and that we have no valid reason to assert that there is such a thing.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer is tempted to retain the Ding an sich in his own system, but to redefine it substantially. Since the Will is behind our sensations and perceptions, as objectified Will, then perhaps the Will is the Ding an sich. If the world is will and representation, then every representation is the will: the will is the cause of, or lies behind, every representation.

If we understand Schopenhauer to assert that even the self is composed of will and representation, then it is only another small step to say, that for Schopenhauer, “I am the Ding an sich.”