Engels' characterization of 'shamefaced' belongs generically to a tendency,
most pronounced among English empiricists, to shrink from the ultimate
conclusions to be drawn from the direction set in motion, as Engels
delineates in recently discussed writings. "Materialism' in this context
can only logically refer to a tendency within a philosophy, not the
philosophy itself.
While Kant is hardly identical to Berkeley, his thought his driven by
fundamental contradictions, and not only regarding materialism/idealism.
Adorno's two volumes of lectures on Kant are brilliant:
KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
PROBLEMS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
I have a couple of quotes on my web site, though they will only help
marginally with this discussion:
T.W. Adorno on Theory, Practice, & Moral Philosophy
http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/adornprx.html
T.W. Adorno on Kant, the Division of Labor & Restriction of Reason
http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/adorno11dv.html
At 02:52 PM 1/10/2006 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
Engels terms Kant a angnostic
Clearly wrong, Kant is no agnostic about either the
empirical world we know or about the TII we can't
know. _Hume_ might be an agnostic, but Kant considers
himself to have answered Hume and Berkeley -- see his
secion in the CPR on the Refutation of Idealsim.
or a shamefaced
> materialist.
^^^^^^
CB; Kant is a dualist, and shamedfaced materialist . By this Engels means,
the materialism he gives us with the thing-in-itself, objective reality, he
takes back when he says it's unknowable to humans. He starts out at Hume, as
Kant famously says himself, but he ends up in the same place as Hume, even
when he thinks he has left idealism. Hume claims we only know sense datums
and we don't know whether the sense data are "of" an objective
thing-in-itself. Kant gives us things-in-themselves, but then says we can't
know them ! This is how Kant's dualism is ultimately identical with
Berkeley's idealism.
Again, to say there are things-in-themselves is materialism. To say we can't
know any of them is to fall back into idealism. The whole process is
dualist. Afterall , if we don't know the things-in-themselves, what exactly
is it that we _know_ ? The only thing left to know is ideas, thoughts, sense
data or the like.
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