Kant-on-Wheels and the Problem of Nihilism

Kant on Wheels and the Problem of Nihilism

by

Jason DeWitt

(Editor’s Note: This is part one of a three part series on the problem of nihilism from Jason DeWitt. The next parts will be available soon!)

I. Introduction

The Rortyan post-Philosopher, in attempting to “see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term” (Sellars 1962, 37), must be “a name-dropper, who uses names such as these [Proust, Marx, Foucault, Mary Douglas, Gandhi…] to refer to sets of descriptions, symbol-systems, ways of seeing. His specialty is seeing similarities and differences between big pictures, between attempts to see how things hang together’’ (Rorty 1982, xl). To attempt to synthesize and draw on so many streams of thought at once, the Rortyan philosopher cannot focus on the intricacies of slow, cautious, and rigorous academic history. As this essay is, in many ways, a Rortyan exercise, I hope I can be forgiven for any carelessness and/or any accidental misinformation in my remarks on various historical thinkers. I’ve tried to keep my historical remarks accurate, but I am far from an expert on the figures I employ and mention here. A treatment of the same issues meeting the standards of trained historians would be book-length, if achievable at all.

I want to start to argue for a certain conception of philosophy as a whole, and a view of the relationship between language/mind and world. The contents of this paper are thoughts that have been swimming around in my head for over a year. I only write them now for a few reasons: (1) There hasn’t really been a venue for it, but now we’ve started working on The Trough. (2) I’m afraid the more analytically-minded philosophers around me would think I’m a bit silly or out of my mind. (3) I thought that even the less traditionally analytically-minded philosophers in my circle would think it’s overly ambitious. It is overly ambitious. But I have discussed some of this material with philosophers who I really take to know their stuff, and it has survived without too much ridicule.

I’m deeply attracted to the historically-informed, name-dropping, synoptic methodology of philosophy employed by Rorty. Hence this essay’s methodology. I’m also deeply attracted to many of the intermediary conclusions Rorty reaches in the course of his philosophizing. However, and here is the trouble: I do not want to accept many of his ultimate conclusions. This is the primary aim of this essay: to find a way to accept Rorty’s intermediate points, while rejecting some of his central conclusions. The Rortyan conclusions I want to avoid are his historicism, contingentism, and relativism.

This should seem striking to any readers of Rorty. Aren’t Rorty’s historicism, contingentism, relativism (and resulting ironism) the most central aspects of his picture? What does it mean to be a Rortyan, or even to be attracted to Rorty’s approach at all, if one rejects these commitments? It is definitely true that these commitments are central to Rorty’s thought. They are what separate his post-Philosophical philosophy from Philosophy (the search for timeless, ahistorical Truths about the perennial problems). I’m not sure how much of my ultimate picture is Philosophy rather than post-Philosophical philosophy. But I do think I can achieve a picture which follows the Rortyan train of thought up to a rather advanced point, but then diverges in a way that, at least, limits the amount of relativism we must accept.

Rorty is aware of the deep, nagging, and pervasive feeling of nihilism that may arise on adoption of his view. He raises this unsettling feeling as the biggest challenge to his conception of philosophy (or at least its adoption). The following passage was partial motivation for the present essay, so allow me to quote Rorty at length:

The most powerful reason for thinking that no such [post-Philosophical] culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark:

Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be much as man has decided they are. [From Sartre’s (1946) Existentialism is a Humanism]

This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together — the sense there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.

A post-Philosophical culture then would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond. On the pragmatist’s account, positivism was only a halfway stage in the development of such a culture — the progress toward, as Sartre puts it, doing without God. For positivism preserved a god in its notion of Science…, the notion of a portion of culture where we touched something not ourselves, where we found Truth naked, relative to no description. [Rorty 1982, xxx-xxxi]

These are powerful reflections and it’s admirable that Rorty foresaw the depth of the reaction against his historical relativism. I will return to this sort of deep relativism and the nihilistic thoughts it provokes in section three. Rorty’s own solution to these nihilistic anxieties is his theory of social hope and his ironism. I’ll mention that again later, but they are not my focus. My focus is on finding a way to accept Rorty’s starting points while rejecting the historical relativism that leads to this kind of nihilism. To this end, the paper is organized as follows.

In the next section, I introduce a sketch of the history of post-Kantian philosophy (drawing on Rorty’s, Critchley’s and Bowie’s). I identify two steps in the history of philosophy that jointly lead to this sort of historical relativism. The first move is Kant’s Copernican Revolution (at least on a naïve understanding of it). The second is what I’ll call the “Linguistic Move” (so as to avoid confusing it with the more specific historical phenomenon we know as the “Linguistic Turn”). I point out that these two moves were put together quite early in the history of continental thought by figures like Hamann and Herder. They were appreciated much later in the history of analytic thought. When both steps are put together, we have a schema for a family of positions I will call, using Peter Lipton’s phrase, “Kant-on-wheels” (Lipton 2001). From Kant-on-wheels a sort of historical relativism naturally follows which in turn implies a sort of nihilism: the sort of nihilism Rorty and Sartre are discussing above. Thus we have the problem of nihilism (at least of this sort). This nihilism will form the subject of section three. I’ll discuss the problem of nihilism and some historical solutions to it. I then lay out five major options with regards to the dialectic I’ve presented (each of which could have different particular ways of being developed). I rule out some options as implausible (or, at least, as inoperable for me). In section four, I discuss the remaining option. The conception of philosophy I develop within the last option is a Davidsonian one. I borrow from Davidson in an attempt to block the problematic nihilism and historical relativism we find in Rorty’s (and other’s) position. Briefly, my idea is that a Davidsonian version of Kant can accept the Copernican Revolution (in some sense, at least), and the Linguistic Move, without having to accept Kant-on-wheels. It’s post-analytic philosophy without Rorty’s historical relativism. In short, I’m using Davidsonian thought within Rortyan methods to answer what worries me in Rorty’s thought. 

I’ll conclude with some reflections on what this Davidsonian-Kantian version of post-analytic philosophy means and where it should go. The conclusion can be read as a messy, personal, and abbreviated manifesto concerning the type of philosophy I identify with most now (or at least move towards).

II. A Sketch of Post-Kantian Philosophy: How to Get Kant-on-Wheels

As I said, I’m attracted to the Rortyan picture of philosophy. What I can’t accept is the historicist, contingentist, relativism that follows from his post-Philosophical picture. But, throughout this piece, it is essential to remember this historicist, contingentist, relativism isn’t unique to Rorty. There are elements of it in Foucault, in the non-realisms of other neo-pragmatists (see Thomasson’s latest on morality), and in (at least some readings of) Kuhn. It, in some sense, just is the “postmodern condition.” It was accurately observed and remarked on by Nietzsche. It has been seen by continental figures as a primary source of the problem of nihilism. It is related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It is a result of putting Kant-on-wheels. Let me explain.

We all know, if we’re being very general, that Pre-Enlightenment Western philosophy had God, and a rather specific conception of God, as the foundation of it all: a moral foundation, a metaphysical foundation, an epistemological foundation, etc. But then, as the Scientific Revolution and humanism progressed, God was dropped as the essential foundation. Humanity and our reason replaced God and we find Enlightenment/Aufklärung thought at its apex embodied in the philosophy of Kant. (Kant had religious motivations of course. In general, this is probably not the best or most accurate way to tell the story of the Enlightenment, but it is a common picture, and it helps me to make my points.)

I will avoid serious Kant exegesis here. But the important bit can be put very naively and simply: Kant put us at the center. He put the trail of the human serpent over everything (James 1907). From the IEP: “Kant’s crucial insight… is… that experience of a world as we have it is only possible if the mind provides a systematic structuring of its representations.’’ The world, in the only sense that the term “world”  makes sense, is structured by our conceptualization of it. This is Kant’s Copernican Revolution: “Copernicus recognized that the movement of the stars cannot be explained by making them revolve around the observer; it is the observer that must be revolving. Analogously, Kant argued that we must reformulate the way we think about our relationship to objects. It is the mind itself which gives objects at least some of their characteristics because they must conform to its structure and conceptual capacities. Thus, the mind’s active role in helping to create a world that is experienceable must put it at the center of our philosophical investigations” (McCormick’s “Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics”).

If the world is, in some sense, determined by us and colored by our conceptual framework, then we have the first step on the way to Kant-on-wheels: the Copernican Revolution in epistemology and metaphysics. But this is only the first step in the process of getting us from the Pre-Enlightenment to the contemporary postmodern view. Kant held on to a strong form of intersubjectivity because he thought the conceptualizations which structure the world are universal: they are features of the mental faculties of every rational being (or at least of every human being). And so, there are no different worlds for different people, no different worlds for different cultures. He had not yet accepted the second step, and so remained just Kant, not Kant-on-wheels.

The second step is to realize that our conceptualizations are not the results of unchanging psychological structures. Rather our conceptual framework just is our language. Call this realization: the Linguistic Move. As will become clear starting in the next paragraph, the “Linguistic Turn” in analytic philosophy names something too specific, so we’ll stick with “the Linguistic Move.” When combined with the Copernican Revolution the two moves achieve Kant-on-wheels. It’s called Kant-on-wheels because It’s the Copernican Revolution + the admittance that our conceptualizations can and do change, and thus, that there are many different ways of worldmaking. There are as many worlds as there are conceptual frameworks. In other words, there are as many worlds as there are languages and thus, we do not all share one world. Different cultures, times, and places live in different worlds, in a very deep, and fundamental sense. 

Some figures, at the root of continental philosophy, made the Linguistic Move very quickly. Johann Georg Hamann, another Königsberger, was a colleague of Kant’s. And as he engaged with Kant’s work, he began to make the Linguistic Move: “indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible?—The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.” And even more directly, Hamann says: “Vernunft ist Sprache” and “the entire capacity to think rests upon language.” Here we see something like the Linguistic Turn, but in the 1780s!

As early as 1766 Herder, who later became Hamann’s student, was making similar moves: “If it is true that we cannot think without thoughts and that we learn to think through words: then language gives the whole of human knowledge its limits and outline” (Herder 1985: 373). Hamann and his contemporaries didn’t exactly put the pieces together in the way that I discuss here. But Hamann, Jacobi, and Herder all saw that, when taken to its logical conclusion, the completion of the Aufklärung leads to a pernicious nihilism: “A nightmare looms: that the self-criticism of reason ends in nihilism, doubt about the existence of everything. That fear was the sum and substance of the crisis of the Aufklärung” (this is Beiser (1998) on these figures). Jacobi, less interested in the philosophy of language, also thought Kant put Western philosophy on a path to nihilism. Here’s a striking quote about Jacobi’s philosophy:

[T]the deflationary effects of the Kantian critique of traditional metaphysics… not only denied human beings cognitive access to the speculative objects of classical metaphysics (God, the soul), also removes the possibility of knowing both things-in-themselves and what Kant described as the ‘noumenal’ ground of the self, having no phenomenal presence. Jacobi’s basic thesis is that Fichte’s reworking of Kantian transcendental idealism leads to an impoverished egoism which has no knowledge of objects or subjects in themselves. It is nihilistic because it allows the existence of nothing outside or apart from the ego, and the ego is itself nothing but a product of the ‘free power of imagination’. Jacobi protests, in an extraordinary passage, “If the highest upon which I can reflect, what I can contemplate, is my empty and pure, naked and mere ego, with its autonomy and freedom: then rational self-contemplation, then rationality is for me a curse – I deplore my existence.” [Critchley 2001, 26-27]

It’s the separation from the world that is a curse for Jacobi: separation from the world itself is what he takes as leading to a pernicious nihilism. As Critchley puts it: “The so-called “postmodern predicament” really began, then, in 1786” (ibid., 23). My present worry is similar: in admitting that there is no one world because we have Kant-on-wheels, we admit there are no transhistorical and transcultural standards. We have the Rortyan contigentist, historicist, relativism discussed at the beginning: with no transhistorical appeals to make, with no one, real world to appeal to, with only my world and the world of those who happen to share my language/framework. If that’s all we have, how can we really condemn the fascists tomorrow or the genocidal conqueror of years past? We couldn’t even make sense of the idea of progress. The future, though it may in some pre-theoretical sense seem to have progressed, cannot properly be said to have progressed. For it is just a world with a new and different framework, a description of “progress” in our framework would be meaningless in its. We are forced to talk, praise, and condemn past each other, like ships passing in the night.

These early figures reacted to the nihilism that they thought proceeded from Kant by turning to faith, romanticism, Sturm and Drang, etc. But I should return from this historical interlude to my main point: the linguistic move + Kant’s Copernican Revolution gets you Kant-on-wheels and Kant-on-wheels is this: the world is (partially at least) conditioned (and constructed?) by our conceptual frameworks, and our frameworks, being either linguistically mediated or languages themselves, are contingent, socio-cultural products of a specific historical time and place. There is no wider intersubjectivity captured as the original Kant had it. Our conceptual frameworks are not something shared by all of humanity, across time and place. No, when Kant is taken on wheels, even this last grasp at objectivity via intersubjectivity is lost. We have to accept a deep contingent historical and cultural relativism about worlds, because we must accept the obvious fact that languages change. With change of language, we have change of worldview, and we thus have change of world.

And it is exactly this that provokes the ideas I began with: the pernicious, nagging feeling that, with no transcendent world, thus with no transcendent moral and theoretical truths, there is nothing right in saying that the fascist betrays something within them. There is no transcendental world to appeal to say that the world that the fascist imperium sine fine makes is wrong. There is no objective world to appeal to say that Socrates was right and the Athenian court wrong. The winners do write (and right) history.

That a nihilism can follow from there being no timeless and transcendent world is something I think that those early German figures surmised so quickly. But this nihilism and this source is familiar throughout the rest of the history of philosophy too: long have people worried about isolated and contingent worlds and what that meant for questions of ultimate meaning. This is just the existential predicament: the loneliness that can follow from a Godless world. I think this is part of why Nietzsche criticized Kant as a self-limiting Christian (in addition to his ethical similarities). Kant was striving and yearning (in an embarrassingly futile and last-ditch way, according to Nietzsche) for his watered-down objectivity. Nietzsche had his own anti-egalitarian virtue-theoretic solution to this kind of nihilism. Marx had his own solution, so did the existentialists, so did Heidegger, so did…. In a fairly accurate sense, adapting Critchley, I think it’s safe to say that the history of continental philosophy is a history of offering responses to this sort of nihilism. Even in “postmodernism” we find a similar diagnosis to mine as to why this sort of nihilism has arisen in Western philosophy (it’s a story like mine in that it fundamentally draws on Kant). Though the answer in postmodernism, if there is one, is something akin to Rorty’s ironism: a half-sighing, half-laughing acceptance of the relativism and contingentism that comes from Kant-on-wheels.

Accepting the starting point of Kant-on-wheels and then turning to combat the nihilism that follows has been the path of much of continental philosophy. One can see analytic philosophy, on the other hand, as the story of trying to get the objectivity/intersubjectivity back. First it was done in a relatively empiricist way: think of Carnap’s Aufbau and logical positivism. This was an attempt, in an overly simplifying sense, to return to empiricist transcendental realism.

Then, in many major figures of mid-century theoretical analytic philosophy, we see a turn to almost accepting Kant-on-wheels. I think it starts with C.I. Lewis’s integration of pragmatist insights within an analytic Kantianism. Kant-on-wheels is most evidently present in Kuhn. It’s in Goodman, there are themes in late Wittgenstein (maybe even early, for example in, proposition 5.6 of the Tractatus). You can get hints of how Rorty synthesized it from Quine and Sellars. It’s in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

But then, following pioneering work by Kripke, Burge, Putnam, David Lewis, et. al, that almost-Kant-on-wheels-accepting take on philosophy is rejected. Metaphysics and a transcendental, mind-independent world of no one’s creation can be resuscitated. Instead of the empiricist version of transcendental realism in analytic philosophy’s early years, we instead have a rationalistic version. You can see this in the rationalistic metaphysics of post-Lewisian metaphysicians (despite their claim to a Quinean methodology), you can see it in the “hyperintensional” revolution around essence and grounding, and you can see a lot of it in contemporary epistemology too. We’re back to allowing, what Sider calls the “epistemically metaphysical” (2011, 187). This sort of position, which currently dominates the theoretical side of contemporary analytic philosophy, is certainly not Kant-on-wheels. It allows for a respectable sort of non-Kantian realism about the world: ethical properties are natural ones, scientific realism is true, we have epistemic access to modality via the positing of essences, nature is carved at its joints by perfectly natural properties, meanings ain’t just in the head and are partly determined by what is most magnetic. On this picture, we can build a robustly realist network of views between and on laws of nature, causation, naturalness, possible worlds, counterfactuals, reference, etc… Some variations of that picture of the world do seem consistent to me in a way the early empiricist versions of analytic philosophy do not.

But what if Kant-on-wheels is right? Its starting points seem more convincing to me anyway. On a Rortyan reconstruction, Quine should have killed the rationalist wing of analytic transcendental realism by undermining the analytic/synthetic distinction, and Sellars should have killed the empiricist wing by showing there is no completely unconceptualized given. The two epistemic pillars of any transcendental realism, be it following from Leibniz or following from Hume, must go.  

But enough rough conjectures on history. Let me return to the main thread again: Kant had secured objectivity and Enlightenment by securing intersubjectivity. Because Kant’s categories were innate and common to all humankind, we get a strong intersubjectivity that guarantees a shared world across all times and cultures (and a similar fabric too). If Kant is on linguistic wheels then we just are where we are in the contingent march of history, with no transcendent moral or epistemological standard beyond those enforced in your time and place.

But did those who lived their life in search of truth live for nothing? Did all those heroes, and activists, martyrs, and saints, all die for nothing? Aren’t those who fought for human dignity everywhere and all times the heroes of the world forever and always no matter what may come? It is hard for me to accept that there is no transcendent or intersubjective moral right such that the feminist, anti-slavery, anti-transphobic, anti-homophobic…. revolutionaries and heroes aren’t actually, in some meaningful sense, ahead of their time and forever correct. I also find it hard to accept that we are so incredibly lonely, here in our inch of time and space, divided, a world away, from the men and women of long ago, and far ahead.

(Part 2 coming soon)