Comment by barberousse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barberousse | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was fascinating as I read the thesis statement that over two hundred years later we still haven't left Immanuel Kant's orbit. The author ended the article citing Kant's proposition that space and time belong to the mind rather than as properties of external reality however Kant directly answers her question, paraphrasing, "What is it that lends perception the power of perceiving", to which Kant answers with a technical term, original apperception, which more concretely means that the structure of consciousness, no matter its belonging to subjectivity (so-called empirical apperception, your spontaneous sense of selfhood), is itself objective (those terms are actually one in Kant, universal === necessary). There are readings of Kant to go further and suggest that math, by extension, must be the descriptor of anything that can exist therefore.

Interesting enough, the grandfather of the modern Left, Michel Foucault, spent a considerable amount of his career trying to dislodge Kant's claim before coming upon the realization that power informs our perceptions.

What a thoughtful response. I'd love to know which readings you'd suggest reading and in what order.

Not the user you replied to, but there's no harm (and in my judgement great benefit) from diving right into Kant, or more generally, German idealism - so Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Marx is also worth visiting for his "Hegelian" materialism (in this case opposed to idealism). That'll provide the basics to know what Foucault was talking about.

The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (I forget which year) is also highly recommended though I haven't looked into that myself.

Also, to plug my own favorite dead German guy, Schopenhauer spends a lot of time in his writings explaining (his interpretation of) Kant's ideas, and his prose is much easier to understand than Kant's, even in translation. You won't get any love for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel from him though.

>You won't get any love for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel from him though.

You most certainly won't :)

It should be noted that even Kant said that Hume "awoke me [kant] from my dogmatic slumber." Hume is pivotal to Kant's work, so at least reading the Enquiry is a good thing to read before Kant.

While true, and I realize the irony of saying this since I mentioned building up to Foucault, I don't think one is harmed so much by simply starting. There's a lot of people who try to pile on more and more prerequisites and I think it's less productive; for every person who tells you to read Hume before Kant there are ten who will tell you to read Berkely before Hume. Personally I simply entered what interested me; first Marx (which is an ongoing love) then Hegel and now Kant. Heraclitus can come later.

In order to understand Kant, first read David Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Kant's major ideas are entirely a response to this essay (we English-speakers are lucky to have this crucial piece of the Enlightenment in our native tongue). Hume argues that cause and effect are entirely empirical concepts, which has the implication that we can't actually talk about "eternal laws of nature" with any sense. Kant wrote The Critique of Pure Reason and his subsequent critiques in the trilogy to argue that the laws of nature are laws because they are the laws of our ability to experience subjectivity at all. The Critique is very dense and technically written and the English translations do little to abate this. I would recommend reading it with a companion commentary text though unfortunately that wasn't the path I'd taken so I can't pick out a specific one.

Did you mean to say in his native tongue? There are way more English-speakers than native English-speakers.

I think the person you're replying to meant to say "we native English speakers".

What about people that have a distaste for authority? Would this distrust dissolve how power informs our perceptions? Is there something in the transition period in the teenage years that also sets the foundation of perceptions? I ask because that is a time it seems where we take the most risks and question everything.

Distrust of authority does not change the fact that power informs our perceptions.

Imagine trying to have a conversation in a loud room. You struggle to hear the person you're conversing with. The loudness of the room informs your perception of the conversation. You might not enjoy the loud room, but it's nonetheless there. And your frustration with the loud room is probably affecting your responses to the conversation.

Disagreement is shaped as much by power as agreement, because in both cases you accept the framing of what gets discussed posed by the people in power. Truly claiming that power for yourself requires breaking out of the frame entirely and directing your attention where you want it.

For example, public educators have near-absolute power over K-12 students in the U.S. Many students rebel against this (I certainly did), and do things like argue about homework or refuse to go to class. But that accepts the educators' power as legitimate; if it weren't, you wouldn't bother to rebel against it! Someone truly intent on seizing power for themselves would devote the minimum amount of effort and attention to pleasing his teachers, and then go off and write a machine-learning based MP3 player that he can go sell to Microsoft for a million dollars.

> But that accepts the educators' power as legitimate; if it weren't, you wouldn't bother to rebel against it!

On the contrary, it only accepts that their power exists. That is not the same as accepting its legitimacy. If you accepted their power as legitimate then you wouldn't be rebelling! The rebellion occurs because of the this discrepancy between what is and what ought to be, as the student perceives it.

You're still accepting the frame: you're putting your energy and time into fighting against existing structures, which robs you of that energy for creating new structures.

People who actually hold power just go about their lives as if the world they wished to exist actually exists. That's what it means to have power - that you get to live in your version of the world.

Very interesting take. Wish I understood this decades ago.

I am not disputing any of that, but what you said before was that rebellion "accepts the educators' power as legitimate", which is incorrect. The act of rebellion indicates acceptance that the educators have power, but it rejects the idea that this power is legitimate. This is a far more constructive basis for realizing change than pretending that the very real power which the educators have over the students does not exist. If you want to move beyond fantasy and make your preferred version of the world a reality you first need to be willing to face the truth of the world as it actually exists. Accepting where you are is just as important as visualizing where you want to go.

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