Lee Braver > Quotes

“The Kantian Paradigm embraces what I am calling the Empirical Directive by changing the conception of the self from a substance like Descartes’ thinking thing to a functional experience-organizing energeia which can only be studied by the way it organizes experience.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Although he initiates anti-realism, Kant retains two key elements of realism in his system. First, in order to secure the stability—that is, necessity and universality—of the knowledge organized by the subject, he has to make the experience-organizing faculties of the subject permanent and unchanging. Although it is no substantial object like Descartes’ thinking thing, this view still amounts to a vestigial realism of the subject. Second, in order to escape what he considers to be the incoherence of complete idealism, he posits mind-independent reality in noumena.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Starting from Descartes’ commitment to a few absolutely certain innate ideas and reason’s ability to determine some facts about reality a priori, Leibniz ended up making all ideas innate and deducing how God must have set up the universe. On the other side, Hume continued Locke’s emptying out of the mind until there was no longer a there there, that is, not even a substantial mind to be emptied. Far from being rationally justifiable, Hume demonstrated that most of our beliefs are determined by an arational reflex, a process that has roughly the epistemological status of digestion. Perhaps Kant’s greatest accomplishment was reconciling these deeply heterogeneous schools, weaving a seamless system out of ideas taken from both sides. The linchpin of this synthesis was what he called his Copernican Revolution: the epoch-making claim that the mind actively processes or organizes experience in constructing knowledge, rather than passively reflecting an independent reality. To speak metaphorically, the mind is more like a factory than a mirror or soft wax. It is this idea that enabled Kant to incorporate the empiricist dependence on experience into the rationalist ideal of universal and necessary knowledge.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“R5 Passive Knower: “If, whenever I have to make a judgement, I restrain my will so that it extends to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it is quite impossible for me to go wrong” (Descartes, PWD 2:43).”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“In a move that is at odds with what I am calling the Unmooring thesis, Heidegger wants to show that modern philosophy is the “logical” consequence of Plato’s humanistic legacy. For Kant, as for the Greeks, [A5] thinking (as Logos—forms of judgment—categories—reason) gets the upper hand in establishing the perspective for interpreting beings as such. Additionally, following Descartes’s procedure, thinking as “thinking” comes to dominate; and beings themselves become [A1] perceptum (represented) or object, in accordance with the same [legacy] historical reason. Therefore thinking cannot get to a [ICS] ground of Da-sein; i.e., the question of the [A2] truth of be-ing is unaskable here.45 The Greeks allowed thinking to get “the upper hand” in the correct ascertainment of the Forms until it came to dominate interpretation completely, eliminating A2 Unconcealment Truth (rendering it “unaskable”) and radically altering man and Being. The very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. . . . Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes. (Heidegger, QT 128; see also 151; Heidegger, PR 76–77)”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Starting from Descartes’ commitment to a few absolutely certain innate ideas and reason’s ability to determine some facts about reality a priori, Leibniz ended up making all ideas innate and deducing how God must have set up the universe. On the other side, Hume continued Locke’s emptying out of the mind until there was no longer a there there, that is, not even a substantial mind to be emptied.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Translating Sein-bei as “being alongside” is just dumb.”
― Lee Braver, Heidegger: Thinking of Being

“Interestingly, the topic that I believe can best initiate this twenty-first-century rapprochement comes from the same figure who solved the parallel problem in the eighteenth century: Immanuel Kant. In fact, the seed for the reconciliation can be found in the very idea that forms the core of the Critique of Pure Reason and the linchpin of its rationalist-empiricist synthesis; namely, the idea that the mind actively organizes experience. This idea, along with its various interpretations and ramifications, forms an important thread of what has become known as anti-realism in analytic philosophy.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“These thinkers establish the presence of human activity (A5) in experience in other ways than Kant’s strategy of positing a difference between the way the world appears to us and the way it really is (R1); namely, by noting (A3 Ontological Pluralist) differences among historical periods (Hegel), among the experiences of various kinds of people (Nietzsche), or between tools and objects depending on whether we use or stare at them (early Heidegger). These differences are linked to some form of human agency in order to show A5.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“A5 Active Knower: “The order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had we not ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there” (Kant, C1 A125).”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“One of Nietzsche’s most frequently repeated assertions is that we are at least partially responsible for the organization of the world, a view he explicitly attributes to Kant: “When Kant says: ‘the understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature,’ this is wholly true with regard to the concept of nature” (Nietzsche, HATH 1.19).”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“This is the way in which everyday Dasein always is: when I open the door, for instance, I use the latch. The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter, consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretive tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us, and which conceal not only the phenomenon of such “concern,” but even more those entities themselves as encountered of their own accord in our concern with them. . . . In addressing these entities as “Things” (res), we have tacitly anticipated their ontological character. When analysis starts with such entities and goes on to inquire about Being, what it meets is Thinghood and Reality. (Heidegger, BT 96/67–68)”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Derrida embraces the Heideggerian Paradigm’s new version of R5 Passive Knower. According to this view, we are not the autonomous source of the organizing structures of experience but recipients of them, rendering us deeply dependent on what we have been “thrown” into.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Since this organization takes place at the preconscious level, our conscious experience shows us stable, apparently independent objects, which accounts for the plausibility of realism; it certainly seems as if all we do is open our eyes and encounter a premade world. The similar “optical illusion” of the sun appearing to rise is one of the reasons Kant chose the title “Copernican Revolution” (see Nietzsche, TI 3.5, for a reference to this phenomenon).”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“I sprinkle many references to other works throughout the text in order to show that these themes appear throughout the thinkers’ oeuvre, thereby demonstrating that these topics are present throughout the thinkers’ works rather than cherry-picked from gerrymandered quotes.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Whereas Kant maintains a single, static set of experience-organizing processes necessarily linked to experience and so not transcendent but transcendental, Hegel posits an evolving chain of conceptual schemes within history that transform according to an internal logic. Nietzsche liberates this multiplicity from the organizing rule of reason that limits its possible forms, allowing the schemes to proliferate according to needs, albeit needs founded on a somewhat determinate will to power.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no why. I simply don’t. This is how I act.”32”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“The mind must be passive and in some sense featureless so as not to distort what comes into it. If it interferes with its input, then, in a metaphor that permeates discussions of realism, the consequence is that (in Francis Bacon’s words) “the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Kant conceives of the mind as actively organizing experience, which entails a new aspect of reality—phenomena—and a new conception of truth—intersubjective “agreement,” that is, what is necessary to experience for creatures like us.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“This is the textual form of R5 Passivity: in order to dis-cover preexisting reality without distorting it, which would falsify it, language must have no effect on meaning, ideally to the point of virtual disappearance.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“The overarching issue is the idea that “the mind is in some sense creative. . . . Some such theory is essential to every form of Kantianism.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“One of the ways that Heidegger radicalizes Kant is by showing the “subject” to be active in multiple ways rather than limiting it to theoretical knowing (see Heidegger, PIK 136). We are doers before we are knowers, and our theoretical activity is parasitic upon our practical activity. Initially and for the most part, Dasein exists in the mode of concerned interaction. In thus being preoccupied with the world, Dasein always already finds its world, and this finding is not theoretical apprehension. The “already-being-involved-with” is care in being concerned. As concerned preoccupation with the world Dasein lets itself encounter its world. Concern as the basic mode of Dasein permits encounter. . . . All knowing, which as a mode of being of concern is built upon concern, merely lays out, interprets the disclosed world and happens on the basis of concern. (Heidegger, HCT 168; see also 185)”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“If mathematical knowledge is to have legitimacy, the mind must passively discover it (R5) without affecting it in any way; “mere delusion” results from any other view.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Awareness is the ultimate “always already,” the transcendental condition for the possibility of everything.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Being and Time begins by quoting a great philosophical authority not for his knowledge but for his perplexity, then tells us that we don’t understand the question, and demonstrates this by giving us the answer which means nothing to us at this point.”
― Lee Braver, Heidegger: Thinking of Being

“Russell simply could not swallow the notion that the mind is not R5 Passive but affects what is known—the very centerpiece of Kant’s Copernican Revolution,”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“It is this discovery of A5 Active Knower that separates Kant from all previous thinkers. Since reality is at least partially determined by Consciousness, and since Consciousness’ goal is to understand reality, it can only fulfill its goal by studying itself. Instead of directly or immediately studying independent objects, we must study consciousness to see how it constitutes the objects; worldly inquiries actually turn out to be studying the mind’s organization of the world.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Here is how A5 and A6 come together: A5 Active Knower states that consciousness contributes features of the mind to experience and A6 Plural Subject specifies that since it changes, the way it organizes experience must do so as well. In an idea that Nietzsche will incorporate into the self-overcoming Übermensch and Heidegger into ecstatic Dasein, Hegel paradoxically makes this constant flux part of the very definition of consciousness: “Consciousness . . . is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Philosophy today faces a dilemma similar to the situation at the end of the eighteenth century. As we are now divided between analytic and continental branches, so philosophy was then split into rationalism and empiricism.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Nietzsche wants us to become aware of the fact that we are A5 Active Knowers, that we are always already organizing experience, so that we can take control of that ability. Rather than meekly trying to copy the world which we have in fact created, we ought to take the reins of this power in our hands to use it for our benefit.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism