(October 6, 2016 at 1:50 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: I think causality is another one of those thought structuring properties that Kant discussed at length. I don't know that one can get a rational handle on the nature of causality because it is a pre-rational notion. In short, we infer causality when we can build a story of physical interaction out of local events. It is an evolutionary short cut to picking out important relationships in the environment. We don't see causal relationships so much as construct them…
How would someone like a modern Kant be able to determine if some or all of his categories were based on innate mental instincts and not acculturation? If they are instinctual how would he or she know if those instincts reflect a necessarily intelligible reality? If they are mental habits conforming to someone’s social context, how could he learn to see beyond them? These are questions I have been pondering quite a bit lately.
With those questions in mind, I tend to ask myself if certain notions are self-sustaining or self-defeating. The assumption that on a fundamental level human reason cannot accurately reflect on itself and also that sense cannot, in principle, extract knowledge of reality – that stance – leads to some very dark places. Interior life deconstructs. Science devolves into magic. In the workaday world most people, me included, may not feel the corrupting influence of these ideas. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect those ideas operating under the surface of Western culture.
This suspicion of mine, which ultimately might prove unfounded, comes from my recent interest in the larger medieval folk culture of miracles and demons surrounding the Scholastic universities that cultivated and reinterpreted the most advanced ancient pagan thinkers. I’m trying to understand Scholastic philosophy on its own terms, through its pre-modern context rather than looking back at it through the lenses of either a modern mechanistic worldview or a post-modern world of deconstruction. As it applies to what I was saying earlier, I’m curious to know to what extent cultural narratives inform our perceptions of how the world works on the most fundamental levels. Maybe quantum curiosities only challenge modern narratives of causality, whereas they might have seemed perfectly normal from the perspective of a possibly earlier understanding of causality, one based not on mechanistic interactions but rather participatory engagement. If so, is it reasonable to recover pre-modern worldviews and adapt them to reflect current knowledge?
