Notes of Holderlin's fragment 'Being Judgment Possibility'

This fragment deals with the distinction between being and identity and why an ontology cannot follow from the fact the self-consciousness.

Being -, expresses the combination of subject and object.

The concept "being" must encompass all manners of existences.  Conscious states are subjective, first-person, non-extended entities.  Physical objects are objective, third-person, extended entities.  And yet both sorts of things exist.  So while we have no theory which explains how matter gives rise to consciousness, and while we have no theory which explains how consciousnesses are able to know reality, the fact remains: both sorts of things exist in the same world.  They both are, and so there's some underlying commonality.

Where subject and object simply are, and not just partially, united, such that no separation can take place without injuring the nature of that which is to be divided, only there and nowhere else can there be talk of being as such

The sense of unity implied by being is total, since it must apply equally to everything that exists, regardless of how it exists.  We might say that being implies unrelenting unity, since there is absolutely nothing it will exclude.  If something were excluded from being, and if there were separation between being and something else, then being would no longer be univocal, and so it could not be being.  It would be some particular, finite being.

the same is the case in intellectual intuition.

I take him to mean that intellectual intuition - the absolute I of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre - must also be characterized in such an infinite fashion.  Just as being must dissolve the opposition between subject and object, so too must the absolute I annihilate the distinction between itself and anything else.  There is no "outside" for absolute subjectivity any more than there is an "outside" for being.  Both are infinite.

But this being must not be confused with identity.  When I say: I am I, then the subject (I) and the object (I) are not combined in such a way that no separation can take place without injuring the nature of what is to be separated; on the contrary, the I is only possible through the separation of the I from the I.

When I reflect upon my experience, I recognize that it's my experience.  I perceive things, and in perceiving them, I'm also able to be aware that these perceptions are taking place in my mind.  So the mind not only perceives, desires, etc.  It also exists in relation to itself, and this self-relation is one of its essential features. It has subjectivity.  It not only relates to what is outside of it - objects, states of affairs, etc. - but also to itself, and it takes itself to be itself.  It identifies itself as itself.  That which appears in it appears for it.

There's a superficial similarity here with being.  Being contained the opposites of subject and object within itself.  It united them insofar as they both exist.  The subject does something similar insofar as it holds together perception of the object and reflective awareness of that perception.  Or to put the same thing another way: I perceive something, that something is other than me, but in perceiving that thing (and only in perceiving that thing) I am able to perceive myself.  The subject opposes the object to itself, but that act of opposition is  recooperated  back into the subject, just as being recooperated subjectivity back into itself.  

But the similarity with the concept of being is only superficial, according to Holderlin.  Being unites subject and object.  That's just what "to be" means.  But with the subject it's different.  The principle of subjectivity is not unity but identity.  And that identity only takes place by means of segregation.

How can I say: I! without self-consciousness?  

There's no understanding subjectivity without examining what's peculiar about its inner relation.  This wasn't necessary in the case of being, since we only had to worry about unification, not how the two things - subject and object - relate once they're brought together.  Subject and object only needed to be unified, not identified with one another.  To put it another way: subject and object were only identical qua existing things.  In every other respect they were opposites.

But how is self-consciousness possible?  By setting myself in opposition to myself, by separating myself from myself but, the separation notwithstanding, by being able to recognize myself in what opposes me.

Whatever is happening in self-consciousness, we can't understand it through the concept of unity alone.  There must be distance between myself and the object, otherwise I cannot perceive it.  And if I can't have perception, then I can't have self-consciousness.  It is only by sundering the unity of subject and object that the subject can be a subject.

But in what sense as the same?  I can, must ask this; for in another respect it is opposed to itself.  Therefore identity is not a unification of object and subject, which can take place absolutely, therefore identity is not = to absolute being.

I recognize myself as myself - I can identify myself - only because there is opposition between me and something else.  More than that: the opposition occurs within myself, not just between me and the physical world.  Therefore, the logic governing the I's knowledge of itself as I is not identical with the logic governing the unification that takes place in absolute being, and there is no way to construct an ontology on the basis of self-consciousness.

This has the further implication that, if I know I exist, original unity (being) has been sundered/lost:

Judgment - is in the highest and most strict sense the original [ursprunglich] separation of the most tight unity of object and subject in intellectual intuition, that separation which makes object and subject first possible, the judgment [Ur - theilung, original - separation].  The concept of judgment already contains the concept of the reciprocal relation of subject and object to each other, as well as the necessary precondition of a whole of which object and subject are the parts.

Judgment in the ordinary sense of the word contains separation within it.  In "S is P", "If A, then B", etc., concepts are opposed to and then related to one another.  This separation in judgment is a mere reflection of the original separation entailed by the possibility of experience itself.  If ordinary language is founded in original separation, then this explains why the Seinsfrage cannot be approached discursively.  Any statement to the effect of "Being is ______" or "The absolute is ________" presupposes the sundering of original unity, of absolute being.  And yet because the opposing terms show up for us at all, they point to the unity suggested by the concept of "being" itself.

'I am I' is the most fitting example of this concept of judgment [Ur - theilen], as a theoretical judgment [Urtheilung], for in the practical judgment it sets itself in opposition to the not-I, not in opposition to itself.

Self-consciousness is the most conspicuous case of the sundering and concealment of being itself.  It's the fount of absolute division and absolute disunity.  The idea of founding an ontology on the back of the "I" is absurd. "Being" cannot represent the goal of such a philosophy but can only be its enabling limit.

Actuality and possibility are differentiated, as mediate and unmediated consciousness.  When I think of a thing [Gegenstand] as possible, I merely repeat the preceding consciousness through which it is actual.  For us, there is no conceivable possibility which has not been actuality.  For this reason the concept of possibility cannot be applied to objects of reason, for they never occur to consciousness as what they appear to be, but only [occur as] the concept of necessity. The concept of possibility belongs to the objects of the understanding, that of actuality [belongs to] objects of perception and intuition.

Human experience is circumscribed and limited everywhere by the original sundering of being, and therefore it finds only the limited and the finite.  As Novalis exclaimed in his 1797 Miscellaneous Remarks: "We look everywhere for the Unconditional Absolute, and all we find are the conditions."  Unmediated, unified being is given only as a possibility.  Intellectual intuition is, at best, a regulative idea.  (There's ample evidence Fichte conceived of it this way.)

Comments:
Though he doesn't stick to the letter of Kant's philosophy, Holderlin is a very good Kantian philosopher.  He's picked up on the idea of finitude and has expressed it with a sublimity of prose unapproached by Kant.  The idea in this passage is that an absolute, subjective idealism - where the I posits both itself and the not-I - is stopped, not by anything external, but rather by the very conditions that allow self-consciousness to the thrive in the first place.  This is not done on the basis of the conditions of sensibility, as Kant does it.  Rather, it's done by means of an examination of the conditions of the I itself.  The elegance and brutality of this attack is unsurpassed.  I would not want to be Fichte reading this.

But is his description of subjectivity correct?  Fichte's account of the I's self-positing is strong.  This is really his great contribution to the history of philosophy.  Because what he realizes is that the subject has to be understood as subject, not as object.  Fichte was fond of asking his students on the first day to think about the wall in the lecture hall, and then to think about the I who perceives the wall.  Yes, there is the moment where the subject knows itself by reflecting upon itself.  In that moment it sunders its unity: there is the first-order mental state (e.g., riding a bicycle), and there is the second-order mental state which has the first-order mental state as its object ("I know that I am riding a bike.")

Yet Fichte was also aware that in order to have that second-order knowledge, the first-order mental state must already "be there" for me somehow.  It's the same way that you would not be able to specifically think, "I am reading a blog post," unless you already had some kind of non-specific, background awareness that you were reading a blog post.  The explicit act of knowing arrives late to the party.  It's only underlining what you already know.

And this non-explicit awareness of your own existence and what you're doing really must be a knowing.  It has to be knowledge as opposed to blind intuition.  There's no mistaking that it's me who's reading/writing the blog post.  Saying "I'm aware of reading the blog post," is a repetition of what's already there.  So by the time the I explicitly finds and calls itself out, it has long since not only been aware of itself but has known itself to be itself.

This is a peculiar state of affairs, one which Holderlin never seems to take into account in his otherwise brilliant critique of Fichte.  For Holderlin, the self is an inherently dual phenomenon.  It always turns up only as the I breaking itself apart in self-consciousness.  But for Fichte, self-consciousness is an originally non-dual existence.  And unlike for Holderlin, where non-duality is something always already destroyed by the act of awareness, for Fichte, non-duality is the apparent reality of the I as I.  This isn't a matter of speculation for Fichte.  It's a matter of experience.

Holderlin's critique of Fichte, with its notions of finitude and the concealment of being, looks back to Kant and forward to Heidegger. Yet Fichte's account of subjectivity seems more enduring than Holderlin's.  His idea of the I's self-positing anticipates Sartre's concept of non-thetic self-awareness.  It also seems to jibe with other 20th century accounts of subjectivity that are similarly non-dual.

Being/Having vs. Being/Doing

I'm reading Stephen Batchelor's first book, Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism. I was curious to see if the book he wrote on the subject was as good as the book I have not written on the subject. I would say the approach is different, and his book is a lot less boring than the book I would write.

Being vs. Having
The first distinction Batchelor draws for understanding Buddhism from a contemporary perspective is that between having and being. All phenomena can be looked at from either perspective. For example, I am drinking a cup of tea right now. The cup and the tea belong to me, i.e., I have them. The cup is blue (it has blueness as a property). It has tea in it. I have a mental representation of the cup, and that representation belongs to my mind (my mind has it).

More broadly I might say that I have a life, I have a job, I have an apartment, I have a car and other possessions, I have goals, and I have a purpose.

But all these things can also be looked at from the perspective of being. There is a cup. There is tea. There is thirst. There is drinking. And all these things can be examined in terms of the way they are (their types of beingness). The tea and the cup are physical objects, but they also exist relative to human activities. So a cup exists (not just as a collection of atoms but) in order to be drunk out of, and tea exists (not just as a plant but) as something to be drunk. The beingness of things turns up as a set of possible actions one can perform with those things. Indeed, our word "pragmatic" comes from the ancient Greek word for things, "pragmata".

But then the bigger things, such as life or human being, can also be understood this way. And according to Batchelor, the Buddha's renunciation of palace life in favor of the life of a religious mendicant typifies this shift from having to being. Suddenly one is no longer concerned with particular things but rather with the characteristics belonging to anything, regardless of what it is. One is no longer concerned with prosaic aims like getting a bigger house or getting a promotion but rather with the aim and purpose of life itself. And from the ethical point of view, there's a shift from having relationships with people to a stance of unconditional love with no particular object.

I have not had a chance to fully evaluate this distinction, and I don't think I know enough about Buddhism to say whether or not Batchelor is entitled to understand it in terms of this distinction.

Being vs. Doing
Nonetheless, I'm struck by how different this distinction is from the distinctions used when I was taught meditation. I was taught that the main distinction is between being and doing, not being and having. Don't try to do anything, just be there, just let what will happen happen. Relinquish all goals and aims. Don't look at it as self-improvement. Don't worry about doing anything right or wrong. Just be there.

This is not a terrible way to teach someone meditation. I remember one person in my class saying what a relief it was for him to do something and not have to worry that he was doing it wrong. (Indeed, if you're not doing anything, you can't be doing something right or wrong.) As a culture, we're uncomfortable with doing nothing and just being. There's always a sense that something has to be done, it has to be done right away, and it has to be done the right way—OR ELSE! That OR ELSE is where our ultimate values lie, and they go unexamined in this perpetual striving. And this striving is usually a striving to have one thing or another, so it's easy to see how the being/doing dichotomy is a close neighbor to the being/having dichotomy.

Still, it concerns me how easily the being/doing distinction maps on to the capitalist distinction between leisure and work. There's no doubt that with their relatively few, infrequently taken vacation days that Americans need a break from their lifestyles. But the fact that leisure or just-being is seen as the alternative to capitalism is a symptom of the fact that we've lost sense of any real alternative to capitalism itself. The alternative to economic exploitation of labor, destruction of the environment, abrogation of our civil liberties, and numerous other injustices is not to change them but to "just let them be". It's never suggested that we might radically alter or replace the system we have, thereby giving ourselves a permanent "vacation" from it all.

So I suspect that the emphasis on this particular dichotomy, at least in North American Buddhism, is a symptom of the fact that our society is so goal-oriented and focused on action and results. There's a solid tradition of progress-oriented Buddhism in southeast Asia. It's not appealing to most North American Buddhists, probably because of the shadow issues we've developed here with regard to the mode of production.

The Seinsfrage
It may also be inadequate from an ontological perspective. Is doing really the opposite of being? The temptation is to reify being, to treat it as an object. Thus we think of the Highest Being, the Ground of Being, a sense of Being Itself, or any number of things that often have a religious connotation.

But in ordinary language, the word "being" is a gerund. It's a verb which has been turned into a noun by tacking "-ing" to the end. In this way it's similar to words like "swimming" or "singing", as in "I hate swimming", and "Singing is fun!" The words refer to activities, not objects. This is the case even if we replace the gerunds with their infinitives and say "I don't like to swim" and "I like to sing."

So the ontological question is not, "What is being?" It can't be. Because even if we answered the question with "Being is _______________," we wouldn't really have succeeded in answering the question. We don't need to clarify the subject of that sentence ("Being"); we need to clarify its verb, "is".

Heidegger's breakthrough was to phrase the question differently. Instead of asking "What is being?" he asks, "What does it mean to be?" We're no longer thinking about a thing now. We're thinking about a process. That process is the arising and passing of phenomena themselves, their shining forth into unconcealedness and their return back into obscurity after a time. This is not some far-off entity whose existence we can infer or infer things about, nor is it anything abstract. This is a process everyone is already aware of just by being alive. We experience it every waking moment of every day. We just need to clarify its meaning by means of the proper investigation.

But if this is true—that being is a process and not a thing or even a state of mind—then the opposition between being and doing can't be right. Being itself is already some kind of activity. And passivity or "just sitting" is some kind of activity, too. We can't escape it.

Then the question becomes: What's the right sort of activity that lets this luminous, moving process of birth and dying shine forth as it really is? For Heidegger, it's a kind of thinking: existential phenomenology. For the Buddha, it is insight meditation.

Questions I have:

• What is the relationship between "thinking" (as Heidegger understands it) and meditation?
• The experience of Nirvana is ineffable. So, too, is the experience of being, at least to some degree, since throughout all his writing Heidegger never states, "Okay, this is what it means 'to be'." Do Buddha and Heidegger perceive the same phenomenon?
• It seems we can't understand being without opposition, and yet every opposition to being is absurd, since everything real or unreal participates in the process of being. We do gain some clarification of being by using these oppositions, but once we've ascended that ladder, we pull it up behind us, so to speak. So what's the status of the having/being opposition? Is it really more helpful than the having/doing opposition?

Things, properties, and personal identity

Personal identity is one of my favorite philosophical subjects to think about. It's been a mystery to me literally as long as I can remember. I remember being a kid and creeping myself out by wondering things like, "How do I exist?" and "Why am I me rather than someone else?" "If you replaced all my memories with other memories, would anything of me remain?"

Philosopher Julian Baggini recently gave a talk on this subject at Tedx.



I mostly agree with what he says, but I have my quibbles and additions.

Things and their properties
Baggini claims that objects are mere aggregates of properties, and so it makes little sense to look for the essence of water beyond its formula H₂O or the essence of a watch beyond its parts. Likewise we should not look for a self beyond the parts of which it is composed: memories, beliefs, patterns of behavior, etc.

It doesn't seem that objects uncontroversially are their properties, though. If that were the case, then—keeping the example of the watch—I might not be able to tell the difference between the watch which is on Mr. Baggini's wrist and Mr. Baggini himself. The watch face, watch hands, gears, wrist band, skin, forearm hair, veins, and bones are all in very close proximity with one another, yet we know some of those properties form an arm and others form a watch. Yes, we could remove the watch and find out it's separate, but we could do the same thing with the skin and veins and make the same claim.

If we're dissatisfied with that account of things—which we should be, since it doesn't seem specific enough—we might switch to a more scientific, less subjective account. Then we go beyond the issue of objects and their properties and get into the realm of experimental science. There it turns out that things like watches and forearms are not in fact real "things" at all. The particles and forces composing them are. Then we might say that where the Indian Ocean ends and the Atlantic Ocean begins is a matter of convention, but the properties of H₂O are not.

But in fact the same problem we had with objects and their properties pops up here, too. There's a debate in the philosophy of science about whether laws of nature really exist, or whether they're just observed regularities. Our senses or our instruments tell us hydrogen and oxygen behave this way under these circumstances, but it's not as though we perceive the necessity or universality in that. And yet, we do believe mathematical formulations like E=mc² are more than mere conventions. They seem to constitute real insight into nature itself. And our basic curiosity as human beings leads us to believe there are other such laws "out there", waiting for us to find them.

Selves and their Mental States
The same line of reasoning I've used here for physical things can also be applied to the mind and the notion of the self. If I reflect upon my experience, I'll observe sensations, memories, beliefs, cognitions, judgments, emotions, and the like, but I will never observe anything in addition to those things that I might, with right, apply the term "self". The philosopher David Hume famously pointed this out in the 18th century, but it's really an old idea, and Baggini rightly attributes it to the Buddha.

But the story doesn't end there, just as it didn't in the case of physical objects. While it's true that I have no sensation of a self apart from the aggregates mentioned above, there is a sense in which I am given to myself that has nothing to do with these other things. Namely, I am aware of myself as this awareness.

If I recollect something embarrassing or shameful from my past, I might think, as Baggini suggests, "That's not me!" or "I'm not like that any more!" But of course that is you, and that's why you feel ashamed! Just because something happened in the past, and just because I was acting upon beliefs I no longer hold, there is still something that appears constant, and that's the mental "stage" that the events took place on. Regardless of whatever else changed, those things happened to me, not to anyone else.

But when we say "to me", we don't always mean they happened to my body. We often mean something like that they existed for me, and that's the dimension of experience Baggini does not adequately flesh out. When I perceive a ripe, red apple, there are three things: the act of perceiving, the apple itself, and the knowledge, however implicit, that I'm undergoing that experience. This is what the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre called "non-thetic awareness". It doesn't require a special act of reflection (which Sartre called "thetic awareness"). If it did, then self-awareness would require an infinite regress of awareness of awareness of awareness... Instead, it's an immediate intuition we have, before we apply concepts to our own experience, that, indeed, this isn't just happening, it's happening for me.

So there's a parallel problem here to the one we had with physical things. It's not enough to describe self-experience just in terms of its properties (the sorts of things that pop up as objects of experience), because there's still a subjective component that has to be taken into account. This is important because, no matter how I decide to describe myself—whether by my beliefs, my memories, my actions, or whatever—I'm going to include in that account that I am also a subject, i.e., the experiences happen for me.

The Intentionality Thesis
The real spooky stuff starts when we try to get to the bottom of what it means for something to be for me. The overwhelming temptation is to attempt to understand subjectivity as just another thing in the world, i.e., as an object. And indeed, we do something like this when we reflect upon (using thetic self-awareness) upon our own experience. But if something is an object for us, it can't be us, and so when we deliberately reflect upon such states, we find that we're "too late", so to speak, and what we were trying to grasp has been converted into its opposite. In order to understand subjectivity, we have to understand it as subject and not as object. And that's very hard.

One solution to this problem is to argue, as both Heidegger and Sartre did, that awareness—they called it "intentionality"—always only has as its content some external thing that is not intentionality. So when I perceive that juicy red apple, I am perceiving the apple itself, not some property of perception. This flies in the face of some of our intuitions about experience, according to which our minds only represent the world, and we're always only deal with our mental states about the world, not the world itself. The argument in favor of the intentionality thesis is that there's no experiential evidence for the representationalist view. I see evidence of the apple and nothing else. I don't even know what a representation would look like, so why should I believe I "have" it?

Well what about illusory objects, beliefs, and mental pictures? Aren't they just contents of the mind? According to the intentionality thesis, our perceptions can be wrong, and not everything we perceive or experience belongs to the physical world. But you have to be careful what theoretical components you bring in to explain this. First, if I have some hallucination, this is proved by comparing my experience with the experience of others, sometimes but not always by means of experiment. At no point do I ever get to immediately compare my experience of something to reality in and of itself. Second, even in those cases where I'm aware of something that has only subjective reality, like a belief, I am only aware, again, of three things: the belief, the act of believing, and the implicit awareness that I am the one believing this. Nothing whatsoever about that experience entails that there is another entity, "the mind", and that the belief and the believing are taking place "inside" that entity. There's just the object, the act that "reaches out" for the object and which can be distinguished from it, and the bare, minimal sense that this is an experience for me.

Now, if you have a good argument against the intentionality thesis—which you might, since it's controversial—then you'll wiggle by the next move. But if you can't, fasten your seatbelts.

No-Self
If there's always only these three components—intentional act, intentional object, and non-thetic self-awareness—then there is no "mind space". The mind is just a theoretical construct. All there is is just intentionality. But this means that, whoever "we" are, we're not our minds, at least not in the sense of being a container of experiences, because there is no such thing.

You might think, "Yes, but there is the intentionality itself, and the intentionality is aware of itself. I am the intentionality."

Good. But what is intentionality? Nothing. I mean that in a technical sense: it is not a thing. It can't be. To be a thing means to be an object for intentionality. If I can see it (or perceive it or think it or desire it or...), then it cannot be me. And when intentionality is aware of itself, as in non-thetic self-awareness, it has itself as bare intentionality, not as anything else. Intentionality—really awareness in general—is therefore "empty". There can be no separate self to find "inside" of it, because there is no "inside" to intentionality. Awareness exhausts itself completely in the act of being aware of the object. The only "beingness" to be found is on the other side of intentionality, on the side of the object.

Sartre wrote a book about this. It should be plainly obvious from what I just said why he called it Being and Nothingness. It's a long book, because he felt a lot of interesting things followed from this.

But you don't need to embrace existential phenomenology. The almost identical realization was made 2,500 years ago by the figure we call the Buddha. Some of the details are different, but the main difference is that the Buddha advocating using meditation and not just reason to discover the truth of anatta or "no-self". If you follow the meditation instructions given by the Buddha, you should be able to perceive no-self as well as the characteristics of impermanence and suffering. And then you will be free of the cycle of samsara or suffering and achieve happiness.

Transcendental vs. Empirical
Now, you might think that was a very verbose way to say what Baggini managed to get across in a lot fewer words. Not quite. There's a subtle but important difference in what I'm saying. The sense of no-self that Buddha, Heidegger, and Sartre discovered and talked about is different from the sense of no-self that Hume and Baggini point to. The latter is an empirical sense of no-self. It's saying that there's no way to cobble together a separate, permanent sense of self out of things like memories, beliefs, thought patterns, actions, personality, and the like, because (a) these things themselves are always changing, and (b) upon reflection there is nothing else I could possibly base a sense of self on.

True! But this line of thinking leaves untouched a transcendental sense of a self. According to this view, you can keep my memories, thoughts, personality, and everything else, because it's my consciousness that's truly me. And while there may be no good external, empirical evidence for the existence of this consciousness, I still know it inwardly. And this inward grasp I have of myself as a separate, transcendental being is inviolate, since it depends upon no particular conscious awareness. I might "lose my mind", but only in a manner of speaking! If I have crazy thoughts, there's no doubt those thoughts are mine, because they take place inside my mind.

That's the notion of self that Buddha demolishes. Rather, that's the notion of self Buddha claims is illusory, and its illusory nature can be clearly perceived if one carries out a careful, systematic investigation of experience itself. And unlike a philosophical argument, which may leave an illusion intact in practice even while destroying it in theory, following the Buddha's procedure is supposed to permanently remove the illusion and grant one an unobstructed, permanent view of reality.

Conclusion
So I really wanted to make that distinction, because I think too quickly people want to say, "Oh right, of course, there's no permanent self. We all know that." But the claim is actually a bit more disturbing than that. Whatever happens in the "outside" world, we tend to think we're somehow inviolate "inside", that this is the true home of the self. But if Buddha and the transcendental phenomenologists are right, then we're wrong about ourselves—profoundly wrong.

Moral philosophy, part 2

I wanted to spend time on the presuppositions of Kant's philosophy in the last post because like much in Kant's philosophy they seem like they're open to easy attack. They're not. I wanted to draw a close connection between the presuppositions of Kant's moral philosophy and modernity generally, specifically modern technology and modern science. Kant and the rest of us assume a radical fact/value distinction because we have come to have a particular kind of understanding of what it means for something to belong to nature. The reason we have this particular understanding of nature—call it rational or naturalistic or non-superstitious—is not because some people were really smart and decided to think of it that way. We have this understanding of nature because of modern experimental methods which were invented and developed in the Islamic world in the Middle Ages and which were taken over by people in Europe. So it's really a kind of technique or practice which gives rise to science. Science then allows us to create even more powerful instruments, which then allows us to refine our science, and so on. Which came first in this chain of events, the technology or the science, I'll leave for another time. The point is that Kant's assumptions don't come out of thin air. They're in fact real world accomplishments.

If we accept these assumptions, then we can see why Kant believes the good, whatever it is, cannot be any object. If the good is an object, it can only relate to my will either contingently or necessarily. Assume it relates to it contingently. I am therefore under no obligation to desire it, so morality collapses. Assume it relates to it necessarily. Then it destroys my freedom. As long as the good is any object, I'm either not obligated to pursue it, or I'm forced to pursue it. Both outcomes make morality impossible.

To get out of this paradox, Kant attempts something very clever. He says the will does not will an object, it just wills itself. This seems like a strange idea, but it's really the only way out. Whatever the will wills, it cannot will its own lack of freedom. That's just a logical and performative contradiction. Even if I decide I don't want to be free anymore and I'm just going to do what the Pope says, it's still my choice to do that. There's just no way to escape from freedom. No matter what, the will must at least will itself.

This seems like a rather thin idea. At least when I'm willing an object or some state of affairs, I can think about that object and its properties. I can think about whether one of those properties is "goodness", and if it is, I can go after it. Kant is saying that is precisely what I cannot do. I have to will freedom itself. But pure freedom doesn't have any content. It doesn't look like anything or smell like anything. It's just a pure capacity.

But that's exactly why Kant's solution is so successful. If we're not thinking about anything in particular when we think about an absolutely free will, then we're not trapped in the paradox that arises when we start with a concept of a good object or a good end. But more importantly, since we are willing nothing but willing itself (or the capacity to act freely), then we are willing something that is absolutely universal. Since we're not tied down to any particular content here, what we will in willing freedom applies not just to us but to anyone, and it applies irrespective of whatever particular desire they have. The only maxims of action that accord with pure freedom are those which can be carried out by any rational agent irrespective of their particular desires. In other words, they are universal laws.

Here's how it works. Let's say that I borrow money which I promise to pay back, but when it comes time to pay back the money, I choose not to. Is my action right or is it wrong? A non-Kantian would answer this by appealing to human happiness, virtue, the 10 Commandments, or whether it maximizes utility. Kant tries something different. He says, imagine you do not pay back the money. Furthermore, imagine that every single person who ever enters into your same position also does not pay back the money, and that this happens as surely as releasing a stone causes it to fall to the ground. In addition, imagine that every person on earth already knows that every single person who ever enters into your same position does not pay back the money. Assuming this is the case, is the action you propose even possible?

Well, if we assume all these things, then no, the action does not seem possible. If no one ever paid back money when they said they would, no one would ever lend money in the first place. The institution of lending simply wouldn't exist, and so you would never have the chance to go back on your promise to repay. If you choose not to pay back the money, you are also covertly choosing to live in a world wherein your action is impossible. Your action is not just your own. It also implicitly legislates for everyone else at the same time. And by doing that, you're in this case willing a contradiction, since it could never be the case that everyone could perform that action.

So what? Why is a contradiction immoral?

Because it amounts to making an exception for yourself. You're excluding yourself from the community of human beings. You're saying there's something particular about you that makes the action okay for you but not for anyone else. It's elitist, of course, but the real problem is that it's particularistic and so it invokes all the problems that come with willing any "good" object. Whatever free action is, it has to have logical consistency. If it doesn't, it's not free. But being a free-rider in the moral community turns out to be the most basic form of logical inconsistency in action.

I wouldn't call it a beautiful idea, but it accords with a lot of our intuitions about morality. There's no such thing as particular morality. We might argue about whether or not it's ever okay to kill another human being, but we're going to argue a lot less about whether you being a woman or black or short or incredibly smart or whether you like the color red has any bearing on the question. The idea that our acts are legislative captures nicely basic facts of human sociality, but it also gets at the idea that morality has a generalizable structure. I'm not just wondering whether this action is good for me. (That might be an important question, but it's not a morally relevant one.) The question is whether it's good for anyone. The idea that action x is morally good but is not binding on you is a contradiction. Kant's move to think about the conditions of willing itself gets at that idea.

Of course there are criticisms one can make of this idea, and they've been made many times. That's fine, but I think we need to keep some things in mind as we do that. The formalistic approach Kant uses here sounds stuffy and professorial, but we do get neat things like human dignity out of it. (One implication of the moral law is that you are to treat people always as ends and never merely as means.) We also get a compelling albeit somewhat abstract argument against elitism and exceptionalism. If you're going to move away from these ideas, you had better do so because it's necessary, not because you don't like how the word "duty" sounds or some other theory appears sexier.

These ideas are still pretty foundational for modern life, despite how it appears when you're studying them in school or something. There's arguably something very Kantian every time a person or group of people stand up and demand dignity and fair and equal treatment or when people protest corruption. Sure, you can complain about the details of the arguments. But the idea that these thoughts are somehow passé and that we could do so much better listening to Nietzsche or Heidegger would be dangerous if it didn't sound so absurd.

Moral philosophy

Kant noticed a paradox in all other theories of morality: so long as morality is based upon the idea that there was some object or material concept worth striving for by virtue of its intrinsic goodness—be it happiness, perfection, a moral feeling, the will of God, the 10 commandments, or the good life for man—then morality is impossible. Kant's claim was radical. These weren't just the wrong objects to strive for; he realized that the very notion of striving for an object was wrong in principle, because it was insufficient for the very possibility of morality. In other words, if in order to be good, we must strive after a good object or realize any material concept of the good, no distinction between good and evil or right and wrong is possible.

Kant's indictment is based on two premises. The first premise is that, in order to be good, there must be a constraint upon the will to act in a specific fashion, whether or not it happens to be what one desires at that moment. The fact of our desire cannot determine what we are supposed to do. The second premise is that this constraint—call it "duty"—must not only determine the will; we must be able to freely choose it. Otherwise we're talking about coercion, not morality.

Neither of these premises seems self-evident, but the second one at least accords with our intuitions about morality. If you're forced to pursue good ends—a la the character Alex in A Clockwork Orange—then you are not freely choosing the good action and so you cannot be considered good. This is not to say that the goodness of an action reduces to the intention that brings it about (though Kant seems to think so), just that intention and freedom cannot be left out of the balance when we are considering morality. Of course not all accounts of the good are premised upon Kant's notion of radical freedom, but they all seem to include some minimal account of agency. That is, a good action is premised upon some sort of activity of the person who is considered good or acting in accordance with the good. This is true of Aristotle as much as it's true of Kant.

The first premise—that the goodness of an action must be considered in abstraction from the fact of desire—seems to have less intuitive evidence in favor of it. In my opinion this premise is more obviously historically conditioned, though it is not for that reason any more objectionable than the second. The first premise rests on a radical distinction between fact and value. Minimally it is grounded in the idea that just because something is the case, it does not follow that it ought to be the case. Maximally it means that the ground of moral judgment is absolutely independent of sense experience.

The minimal version of this premise seems to be an aspect of human experience itself which we might call transcendence. Humans are not merely aware of what presents itself immediately to the senses. They are also aware of the fact that they are being appeared to this way. There is what we immediately perceive or desire, but there is also what we imagine or conceive to be beyond that which is sensuously given. Humans populate this supersensible realm with spirits, powers, forces, and mathematical laws of nature, and what we immediately perceive becomes the expression of that underlying, truer reality. Yet transcendence does not occur for the first time with the rise of art, religion, and science. It's a feature of perception itself. I don't just perceive redness, sweetness, hardness, etc. I perceive that these are properties that belong to a piece of fruit and that could belong, jointly or separately, to other objects in the world. Already in basic perception, I am beyond the immediate sense appearances and am aware of general things like properties and objects. This, too, is a feature of transcendence. So is the fact that I can contemplate the past and the future and think about what my life means. Part of living that life means I have to drink water, because I'm an animal. But it also might mean ignoring that desire because the recognition I'll acquire by crossing the desert is more important to me. Neither nature within me nor without me is merely given to me. I am aware of and participate in a world of norms and universals that I use to judge and make decisions about how I will act in the material world. What I desire at the moment might be absolutely irrelevant to what I ought to do right now. This minimal notion of the ought is present in virtually all philosophy and seems to be a basic feature of human experience.

Yet Kant seems to believe the stronger, maximal version of this: moral judgment occupies a sphere absolutely independent of sense experience. More than that: the will operates in a realm absolutely free of any kind of natural causation. This is the ground of the will's absolute freedom, but it also the source of the prohibition on basing any maxim of action on anything sensuously given. I can base my actions on any principle I want, but the good action is the one which is based on a principle given by pure reason itself. So whatever the moral law is, it's not good because it comes from a good object, be it nature, God, whatever. It's the other way around. Whatever the good object is, it attains its goodness by its action according with a law given by reason itself. It's a radical, profound statement. Nothing in this world or any world is intrinsically good or just. Every human political institution must answer to reason itself. We decide what is right and what is wrong, regardless of what has come before or what exists. It's a powerful, compelling modernist idea, the force of which was experienced in France in the 18th century and which is being experienced in Libya right now. In thinking about this assumption, we're doing more than thinking about Kant's moral philosophy. We're thinking about why human action has come to have a power to reorganize the whole of society and the planet. Because the fact/value distinction at work here really is a total opposition. It represents a break with all previous intellectual thought, but more importantly, it represents a real break in the material world with a previous way of living. This idea is really given its full articulation in Kant's philosophy. Why does Kant seem to think this?

The usual way to do this would be to present the argument in the Third Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason and from there to move on to the elaboration in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. I'm not going to do that because (a) it would take too long and (b) Kant presents his arguments in those works as though they are true a priori and I don't believe they are. As I'll explain later, I think the fact/value distinction has the force of an a prior (there's necessity in it), but it's in fact a historical accomplishment.

The short answer to why Kant believes in a radical fact/value distinction is one word: Newton. Kant believed the natural world was a causally-closed realm governed by the sorts of mathematical laws Newton had articulated in the Principia. Modern science abolishes superstition, but it would also appear to abolish freedom and hence morality and values. The Critique of Pure Reason is an attempt at a rapproachment between knowledge and morality: Newton's laws govern the reality we perceive with the senses, but only the moral law can govern the purely intellectual reality in which the will operates. This is what Kant means when he says he had to limit knowledge to make room for faith. He did not mean faith in God. He meant faith in the possibility of absolutely free action, an idea he proceeds to flesh out in subsequent works. This limitation on knowledge is possible by virtue of Kant's "Copernican" turn. This is the idea that objects must in some sense accord with the way we know things and not the other way around. Kant not only compares himself with Copernicus. He sees the very same pattern of thought all over the modern scientific method:

When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane; when Torricelli made the air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to that of a definite column of water; or in more recent times, when Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime back into metal, by withdrawing something and then restoring it, a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. Accidental observations, made in obedience to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which alone concordant appearances can be admitted as equivalent to laws, and in the other hand the experiment which it has devised in conformity with these principles, must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated.

The idea here—and this applies equally to metaphysics and science—is that understanding is relative to a specific kind of human activity. This contrasts with the pre-Kantian idea which is that understanding is relative to an optimal, "God's eye" perspective in which a representation accords with (or fails to accord with) an object outside of consciousness. Kant noticed that Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl didn't just look at nature and write down what they saw. Neither did they simply count out what they saw, as though the application of mathematics was somehow peculiar to the modern age. He saw that they designed experiments, and that everything they discovered was due to this original action.

Modern science agrees with Kant. The idea behind general relativity is that spatiotemporal relationships between distinct events are relative to the experimental setup used to determine those relations. (See Geroch, General Relativity from A to B) Most people who look at the Kant/Einstein connection look to Kant's writings on space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic section of the first Critique. This is an error, since Kant's concepts of space and time are largely Newtonian and conservative. He argues there that transcendental idealism is the view that there are subjective, a priori forms of experience. In other words Kant intellectualizes and subjectivizes what is in fact something that occurs in the real world. He's much closer to the mark in his resolution to the First Antinomy where he argues that whether or not the universe is bounded or limited can only be answered relative to the actual way we go about studying the cosmos. There Kant seems to be saying that knowledge is a special kind of human activity carried out in the real world. And natural science, of course, is human knowing par excellance.

We set up experiments in which we control for certain variables, and by doing so we get nature to tell us the mathematical relationships between those variables. This is why Kant says that reason is "an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated." What the natural philosophers of the 17th century did for our knowledge of nature, Kant suggests we do for our knowledge of metaphysics. So in comparing himself with Copernicus, Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl, Kant is not reading his own philosophy back into the natural philosophy of the 17th century. What Kant embodies in his philosophical thought is a real movement that had been taking place in physical reality for at least two centuries if not more. It's because of this historical transformation that took place in the way people relate to one another and the natural world that Kant begins philosophizing from a radical fact/value distinction.

What this means is that the fact/value distinction is a presupposition of modern science, but it is a result of it, too. How is that possible? The fact/value distinction is something that human beings bring about through technology and through the construction of experiments that yield cognitions of nature. The cognitions it brings forth are themselves mathematical, objective, and therefore value-neutral, thereby reinforcing the initial assumption. And it is only in this context, I would argue, that a Kant could come along and say that the fact of our desire cannot tell us what we ought to do. Surely something like this idea existed before modernity. That's the minimal version of transcendence I articulated earlier. But Kant's view is premised on a radical fact/value distinction which I think is particular to an age in which nature has come to be understood as a causally closed, mathematical whole.


One might ask at this point: If the fact/value distinction is not a factual distinction but instead a value distinction and one which is historically conditioned, why should we accept it? Doesn't that make it arbitrary?

No. Just because something is historically conditioned, that doesn't make it arbitrary; nor does it mean you could just wave your hand and change it. Perhaps it was necessary that, at some point, some humans would develop their technology to the point to have control of nature sufficient enough to do modern science. From that would follow the fact/value distinction and the Kantian way of understanding morality. That would be a lengthy and difficult argument to make, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. The only point is that, just because something did not always exist but came into being at some point, that does not make it arbitrary.

I mentioned earlier that the fact/value distinction seems to have the force of an priori, even though it seems to be historically conditioned. In order to understand it this way, we need some notion of historical necessity or of a material a priori. This is the idea that something sensuous and particular can have all the authority and all the power to orient us as one of Plato's ideas. Kant's own philosophy rules out such a material a priori. Despite the radicalism of his Copernican turn, Kant appears to believe the fact/value distinction he assumes is a basic feature of the universe. For him, the fact/value distinction is a factual distinction, one we must assume. I'm claiming it's a value distinction or at least one which was brought about through the real activities of real human beings. That strikes me as a more "Kantian" formulation than Kant's own. (Fichte and Hegel seem to have agreed, which is why they took Kant's philosophy in that direction.)

So those are the assumptions of Kant's moral philosophy. They're not without their problems. Though I would argue that the problems are not trivial problems. Like most of the really interesting problems in Kant's philosophy, they reflect contradictions that exist in material reality. Getting rid of them is not a matter to be taken lightly. This is even more evident in Kant's moral philosophy, which I'll talk about in the next post.

Transcendence

Excerpt from something I wrote a couple years ago that I want to reproduce here...

The reason I asked what your concept of God entails (other than to entertain myself while at work) is that my reaction to the use of this concept is often one of puzzlement and confusion. When it's used to refer to the omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely good, anthropomorphic entity that created the universe that Christians think will bbq their testicles if they have sex out of wedlock, I know exactly what people are talking about. When asked if I believe in such a thing, I reply that it has very little to do with belief as I'm as certain of the non-existence of Nobodaddy as I am of just about anything else. As Nobodaddy is what the overwhelming majority of followers of Abrahamic religions have in mind when they use the term "God", I am comfortable considering myself an atheist for all intents and purposes.

Of course there are enough people who do not have that in mind when they use the word "God" that it can get tricky. Then it seems to refer to a tangle of competing (or even contradictory) thoughts. I wouldn't even say I'm agnostic with regard to the existence of such a thing, since most of the time I have no idea what the person is talking about or why they call it "God". Or if I do figure out what they're talking about, I usually already have another name for it which has nothing to do with God, religion, spirituality, or theology, and I figure the other person is just confused or hasn't managed to convey to me what they're really talking about. Any way, I don't relate to religious or spiritual people in this respect.

Though I was reading a book yesterday (Hegel's god: a counterfeit double? in case you're curious) that helps to sort through some of these concepts through an analysis of the different kinds of transcendence. For those uninitiated into the nomenclature of philosophy, "transcendence" is the quality of anything that is beyond. It's the quality belonging to anything transcendent that makes it that way. Whatever people mean when they talk about God, they much more often than not are trying to talk about some kind of transcendence. Understanding the different kinds of transcendence might be a useful guide to talking to such a person if you're like me and otherwise have no idea what they're trying to say.

There is first transcendence, which is the transcendence of nature. Nature is transcendent, because it is there independent of our thinking and doing, even though it relates to our thinking and doing. There is a certain kind of wonder attached to this kind of transcendence. We feel it when we feel the weight of the question "Why are there beings rather than nothing at all?" This kind of transcendence has import for theology insofar as God is considered to be the reason for (the existence) of the whole of finite beings. (This is what people are supposed to mean when they say that God is the "ground of being".) The mystery attaching to the beingness of beings doesn't go away when we claim God as the reason for them being there. It extends to God as well, such that God exceeds all determinate thought.

That's what the author says. I'd add this bit of commentary. Should you identify God with the ground of being, then the mystery attaching to the existence of beings ("why are there beings rather than nothing at all?") will of necessity extend to God as well. It's like when I was a very small child and asked my father in astonishment, "Why is there any of this?" and he answered, "God." That was unsatisfying for the obvious reason: in asking the question, we seek something to steady us. Astonishment at the existence of things is "wonderful" (we wonder at something mysterious), but it is also something vertiginous and a bit sickening if we're really open to it. God enters as the ground of no ground at that point. By which I mean the question then arises: Wherefore God? We open on to the infinite at that point, which I am not sure is really the terrain of theology despite claims to the contrary.

This brings me to the second point—which is really the same issue from the other side. If you begin not from a theological position (faced with a problem of extrapolating the divine essence) but from an ontological position (simply wondering about existence), then you're not liable to need the concept of "God". It's not clear why one would have at some point to bring in the concept "God" rather than just remaining with the problem of being. Lots of philosophers have dealt in interesting ways with the beingness of being without bringing in God. Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger come to mind. So while there is certainly a connection between first transcendence and God, the connection does not seem to me at least to be a necessary one. And the stronger the connection is made—per what I said above—the less we seem to say that is relevant either to theology or ontology.

Second transcendence is the transcendence of self-being. We encounter it in the self-surpassing power of the human being. This is transcendence as freedom or free finite creativity. We are finite human beings, but we are always already surpassing that finitude by choosing to be something we aren't already. This is the kind of transcendence involved in what I called "autonomy" or "self-determination" the other day. It's what we have in mind when we talk about individual freedom and subjectivity. It may seem odd to call such a thing "transcendence". After all, what could be more immanent than my relationship to myself? But the point is that in determining myself, I am always beyond some determinate concept of who I am. I am not simply what I am, a given thing like a stone or a tree, but rather something continually developing itself. (Even remaining static is a kind of self-determination and hence a going-beyond-oneself.) The question here is: is this self-determination absolutely free, or is it to be understood in terms of a higher form of transcendence? Are we creations of another origin, or are we self-creating (our own origins)? Hegel saw this kind of transcendence as raising all the questions about dependence and independence that constitute modern human subjectivity.

Such transcendence is "excessive" in its own way. Just as the first transcendence (of nature) produces vertigo, there is disorientation attached to this form of transcendence, too, it seems. One useful way to understand the meaning of modernity is to understand it as the domination of nature within and without. Modernity is the freedom of the subject from all arbitrary notions of authority, be they in the form of nature, the passions, the local bishop, whatever. The point isn't so much that we reject all forms of authority, all points of reference for action, but rather that we reject those that are there arbitrarily and without good reason. The problem with this kind of transcendence is that there's a contradiction between reason's demand that everything accord with universal, abstract principles of justice and the particular, material, sensuous world as it actually exists. Reason untethered from nature and tradition wants to be its own ground.

Think here of something like the sexual revolution or the demand for marriage rights for gays and lesbians. The idea motivating these movements is that there's something arbitrary and particularistic in the demand that men and women not be treated equal or that homosexuals and heterosexuals not be treated equal. Just because you're born a certain way isn't good enough reason that you should be treated differently. You're making arbitrary exceptions when you say otherwise. You're not playing "fair", which means, in essence, that you're not thinking abstractly enough. You're seeing the color of the skin or the genitals the person has rather than the humanity. That's reason untethered from nature. We use reason to pass judgment on things in the world, to say they're just or unjust, and we can do that regardless of what the current state of affairs happens to be right at this moment. We are in other words transcending the given when we pass judgment. Here it goes beyond a particular human being and extends to society, but it's the same basic phenomenon.

But many philosophers (and not just the curmudgeonly conservative ones like Allan Bloom) have pointed out that there's something disorienting about this sense of freedom, that in untethering reason from nature, reason, ironically, loses its raison d'être. This is captured well in the question: Why be rational? This has given rise to a debate in contemporary ethics over whether the motivation to be good is internal or external to the reason to be good. Externalists, true to their name, believe the motivation to do good is separate from whether an action really is good; internalists believe the opposite, saying that something is only good if we have good reason to believe it's good. It's really a surface debate. The real problem is the rationality of reason itself. Why should reason matter? Why does it matter to live a life in accordance with reason? Is there any "glue" that will stick reason to action? Are there any affects of import that should make a life lived rationally worth it? We might call this "affective skepticism" to differentiate it from the prosaic type.

Lest you think this is an idle philosophical question, just think for a moment. Why has the ascendancy of modern rationality been accompanied so pervasively by a fascination with and even an embrace of the irrational? Why did faith come to dominate the center of the religious experience at the same time reason came to dominate the center of natural philosophy? Why is there a Jacobi for a Kant? Why is there a Schopenhauer for a Hegel? Why positivism and existentialism? Or—more on the dark side—why does religious fundamentalism become more powerful with the ascendancy of liberal democracy? Why is the information age accompanied by social anomie? Why is it that, the more we're supposedly together, the more lost, lonely, and isolated we feel? Why does an increase in choice and freedom make us feel disoriented and incapable of making decisions?

All these questions indicate that modernity is characterized by the ubiquity of second transcendence but that this kind of transcendence is inherently disorienting. It doesn't simply give rise to its shadow (a kind of unfreedom). It gives rise to a kind of extreme vertigo. Freedom doesn't give rise to slavery so much as it creates a kind of dizziness that brings about a self-imposed paralysis. It's not that one isn't capable of acting. It's that one isn't really sure why one should bother. And that's quite different.

No wonder there's such a strong reaction in the opposite direction. But all these anti-modern tendencies, be they religious, spiritual, political, or what have you, really must be understood as aspects of modernity itself and hence must be understood (ironically) as forms of second transcendence. The rebellion against second transcendence is in fact a form of second transcendence. One doesn't embrace religious fundamentalism for the same reasons people embraced religion in the 12th century. Not even close. Or take contemporary returns to nature as they appear in contemporary new age and new thought practices. That toward which these individuals "return" is not at all the same thing we departed from. Nature can never be a source of authority again. This is proved by the fact that people are able to choose to return to nature. The choice is as inescapable as the fact that it is made in a vacuum. Freedom is absolute, vertiginous, disoriented, and disorienting. This explains the ferociousness with which the shadow of reason rears its ugly head. It's not the otherness which explains the antagonism here but rather the sameness. Its desire for what lies outside of itself becomes a rage for what is new, what is novel, what is spiritual, what is powerful, what is invigorating, what is enlivening—in short, what is other. Freedom is everywhere the same to itself. Transcendence becomes infinite immanence.

I mention all this—which the author does not—because I think it's impossible to understand God in modernity (whatever the concept) without understanding it from within this context. This is one of the main reasons the concept "God" is unclear and seems to point to so many different, contradictory things. "God" is merely the name (for some people) for what is other, what escapes second transcendence. In this way, God (or what is called "God") is no different in form from any other candidate for a kind of transcendence that would break the monotony of modern life and the helpless situation of confusion freedom finds itself in.

Those are the first two kinds of transcendence. The author has a third. I'll deal with it later.

Alan Turing

The really interesting thing Alan Turing did was to turn the machine itself into a kind of input. What the machine deals with and the machine itself aren't different in kind. This is the idea that both program and input are held in the same memory space—an essential feature of the von Neumann architecture that describes nearly every computer in existence today.

But the engineering feat is less interesting than the logical one. A machine able to emulate any other machine, including itself, is a universal machine.¹ Turing isolated the "machineness" of the machine, if you will, and was able to make true statements about the limits of computability generally on the basis of that.

¹ This is called "Turing completeness". The first Turing complete computer was Konrad Zuse's Z3, completed in 1941.