Fragment of a letter sent by email to Constantin Aslam, moderator of ”Springs of philosophy” on Radio Romania Cultural, 21 January 2009
Second revised and added edition: Kantinomus Verlag, Tübingen, July 2022
ISBN 978-3-9820930-1-7
© Marcello-Silvestri Chelba, 2022
PDF, 8 Pages A4, 2,99 Euro
”Nota Bene: These 30 philosophical conjectures are actually the main ideas of my book: Critical Introduction. About the possibility of Metaphysics as Science in the critical philosophy of Kant (Introducere critică. Despre posibilitatea metafizicii ca știință în perspectiva filosofiei critice kantiene, Crates, 2004). The central thesis is that modern sciences brought Kant the ultimate confirmation, not refutation. I submitted this text as a paper proposal to the 12th International Kant Congress ”Nature and Freedom” (Vienna 2015), but I received no response.
1. No matter how it will be (monadic, pentadic or dodecahedric) our systems of categoryes are nothing more than just some systems of coordinates – some transformation matrices – some codes of interpretation that translate data of our sensitive experience into the terms of our faculty of representation.
2. Modern physics works with a hidden reality (as »thing in itself«, in Kant’s philosophy), not explicit (as in Newtonian mechanics). The epistemological paradigm of modern sciences is that of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics.
3. Kant’s transcendental aesthetics is actually a hermeneutics of empirical experience. »Sensibility« is our faculty to recognize the »a priori forms« of our productive imagination into the data received from our sense organs.
4. Modern physics does not make the inventory of nature (does not draw maps that tend to substitute reality, as Fritjof Capra noticed in ”The Tao of Physics”), but it knows from the beginning that it can approach its objects of study only in a probabilistic and relativistic manner. Modern physics is no more an exact science in the classical sense of the term, because it is mathematicaly certain only on its uncertainties. Modern physics is rather a hermeneutics of empirical experience than an objective description of reality. That said their way, Heisenberg, with his famous uncertainty principle, and Einstein, with his famous epistemological paradox: ”As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”1 . Indeed, as also said Niels Bohr, ”It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out about nature. Physics concerns what we can say about nature”2. Regarding that insurmountable precipice between our mathematical models and physical reality, Bohr and Einstein were in agreement.
5. For Kant, modern science began with Galileo – with his way of forcing nature to answer certain questions in the course of experiments. Hence, from Galileo onwards, the new ontological and epistemological problem of philosophy is no longer our sensitivity, but the consistency of our criteria of truth in the interpretation of responses given by nature. (In the eyes of Galileo, Saturn seemed to have two satellites. Observation was correct, something gravitate around Saturn, but the interpretation was still wrong.) ”The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”, said Galileo, in Il Saggiatore (1683) – but any act of reading is an act of interpretation, and any act of interpretation is an act of treason, will try to say Kant, in his own way. Nothing is as it seems at first glance. »Tradutore, traditore!« – it was the great scholastic adage of the Middle Ages.
6. Transcendental illusion is the veil of Maya. The awareness on this confusion (amphiboly, or subreption, as Kant says), that we do always between object and concept, between sign and meaning or between phenomenon and thing in itself, it is the donkeys bridge (pons asinorum) of philosophy – as it was considered the Pythagorean theorem by scholars. Indeed, scientific experiment is not an innocent and heavenly act of contemplation, but a genuine interrogation – our brutal way to force nature to come into our synthetic a priori concepts as in the slipper of Cinderella. In modern physics the act of measurement is not a simple act of observation of nature, but a rude interference into her personal life. In modern physics the so-called laws of nature no longer regard nature, but our relationship with it. Scientific theories are no longer some simple police reports but some indictments. Science is our way of contaminating nature with our own heuristic fictions. Technology is our way to plagiarize Nature (or God, if you wish).
7. Advancement of knowledge depends not so much on increasing the resolution of our telescopes and microscopes as of the finesse our conceptual grid of interpretation. Indeed, without sensuous intuitions our concepts are void, but without concepts our sensuous intuitions are blind, says Kant (KrV, A 51, B 75). Without a priori principles, our empirical knowledge would be a simple groping (ein blosses Herumtappen) – a bunch of experimental data for which any generalization would not be feasible. Therefore, after a courageous investigation of our criteria of truth, Kant also had to proceed to a severe examination of our moral criteria. For without moral in Kant’s view, man is nothing but a »crooked wood« (krummen Holz). Morality is our only original contribution in the economy of nature – is the attitude that brings us irreversibly out of animal kingdom. Morality in Kant, is another instinct – a kind of survival instinct turned inside out, which does not concern our selfish interests (personal or of group), but our universal interests. We are truly free only in our moral acts – he means Kant. The moral is the historical determined expression of causality through freedom. Only in his moral acts man proves his divine ancestry. Man is not truly free when does what he thinks he’s free to do, but only when he chooses to do only what reason tells him that anyone can do without damage the freedom of others. Do not confuse, however, »free will« with »causality through freedom«. To be free is not to choose a path between some predefined paths, but to be a pioneer (an opener of new paths). Only by moral man become really a determinant factor in history – the original (demiurgical) beginning of a new causal chain in nature. This is the great ontological stake of the famous classical urge: sapere aude!”
(Marcel Chelba: Kant – the modern! 30 philosophical conjectures, Kantinomus, 2022)
1 A. Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity, London, 1922, p. 28 – apud M. Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, p. 56.
2 Apud Nick Herbert, in Quantum Reality, Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York, 1985, p. 259.
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