"Thoughts without content are empty"

It's one of the most quoted zingers in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Thoughts without content are empty.  Intuitions without concepts are blind.

OK.  So what is the chap talking about?  Kant's whole game is to deal with the David Hume challenge, his so-called "associationism."  On this view we humans are more or less passive consumers of a bundle of sense impressions of the real world.  Kant's strategy is to turn this on its head.  No we don't associate sense impressions with the real world.  We take formless sense impressions, view them with the forms of intuition about space and time, synthesize them with intuitions, and then own them as ours by applying the pure concepts of the understanding to our intuitions and finally applying judgments.

The experts call this the "togetherness principle."  You need both concepts and intuitions to achieve useful judgments about the world as it appears to you.   Kant repeats his famous apothegm several times:

• "[N]either concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition."
• "Thus pure intuition contains merely the form under which something is intuited, and pure concept only the form of thinking of an object in general."
• "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought."
• "The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything."

All along, Kant is arguing for the importance of both intuition and concepts in full human cognition.  Thus, Kant might have made things clearer had he written:

Thoughts without sensible content cannot apply to the real world; intuitions without rational concepts cannot be used for judgment.

For all its famous difficulty.  Kant's Critique does have its moments.

Voters and Free Stuff

I thought that President Obama won on points in the townhall debate last night, especially given the help of the replacement ref.  Imagine my surprise to learn that the "undecided voter" focus groups at FoxNews and MSNBC both leaned to Romney!



I guess that undecided voters are looking at a completely different debate.



But what troubles me is the questions, because they show the difficulty of moving forward.



There was the "women only earn 72 percent" question, and neither the president or the governor told the questioner that, look, it's time to end the women-are-victims game.  Women do better in school, earn 60 percent of the college degrees, meanwhile men, particularly low-income men, are dropping out of the workforce.  But how do you change a cultural meme that has served its term?  How do you talk to two generations of women taught to believe that they have been oppressed by the patriarchy since the dawn of time?



Or the question about the prospects for college graduates.  Both candidates swung into their standard pitches about the wonders of Pell grants and student loans.  Yeah.  Well, the ruinous cost of college today is mostly due to the money sluicing into colleges through government subsidies like Pell grants and government guaranteed student loans.  What have the colleges done?  They have built luxurious workout facilities and raised the fees and the salaries.  But when will the day dawn that a politician dares to suggest that the free stuff has got to go?



Mitt Romney is proposing to lower tax rates and simplify the tax code by cutting deductions.  So of course there was a woman asking about the mortgage interest deduction.  Now, I'd say that after the mess created by Fannie and Freddie with their $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and debt, and the mandates of the Community Reinvestment Act to force banks to loan to people that couldn't afford the payments, you'd have to say that the subsidy for mortgage interest in the income tax code sits right up there as something that has got to go.  But try telling the voters that.



That's why I doubt if the current debt problems can be solved with "austerity" and "cuts."  Just like in Europe, the program beneficiaries won't allow it.  The only way out of the jam is by default, by inflation and by financial repression, so that the government cunningly reduces the value of entitlements etc. by stealth and deception.



They say that Russia increased its public spending in the last decade from 15 percent of GDP  to 25 percent of GDP.  Now that revenue from oil and gas is declining the Putin government is facing a looming crisis.  But what in the world did the Russian government increase spending like that?  Well, obviously to buy support.  Even an authoritarian government needs support.  Especially an authoritarian government.



So governments are all the same.   They all get in power and maintain themselves by taxing the people and rewarding their supporters with free stuff.  Until they can't.

Are Space and Time Real?

We humans are born, live, and die, and experience ourselves moving through time.  We open our eyes and see objects before us.  It seems sensible to see space as a container, as Plato did, and time as the flow of a river.  But are they real?  Can we speak as Newton did of absolute space and time?

The early modern era brought these questions into sharp relief, and by the time that Kant came along there were several contesting notions abroad, from Newton's absolute space and time--though he insisted that humans could only experience relative space and time--to Bishop Berkeley's idealist notion that we cannot experience absolute space and time and so should content ourselves with experiencing sensible things.  For Hume, impressions come before ideas, so space is our interpretation of a bundle of impressions that seems to suggest extension.

Kant's Big Idea is to drive his ship between the Scylla of absolute space and time and the Charybdis of external impressions.  He doesn't want to prejudge the world as real, for Berkeley shows that our ideas of the world are all in the mind.  But he doesn't want to concede to Hume that the world imprints itself upon us.  Thus for him space and time are forms of intuition independent of experience.  They form a mental framework, forms of intuition, that the mind uses to make sense of sensible impressions.  Says he:

By means of outer sense [i.e. physical sensations of external objects]... we represent objects as outside us, and all as in space.

But he argues that the "representation of space" can't be obtained from experience but rather that "outer experience is itself possible only through this representation."  We do not get our experience from outside; we manufacture it inside us, and only then apply it to the outside world.

This is a theme that repeats itself again and again in Kant, and you can see that it comes down to us in current notions of the way that science works.  You have a problem, so you gather some data.  Then you come up with a theory in your mind, a mental idea of how the world works.  You test it against the data.  If it works, your mental idea is your new view of the world.  Until your wonderful theory crashes and burns and another theory comes up and supersedes it.

Now Kant does not consider space as an illusion, existing only in the mind.  He argues the reality of space for "everything that comes before us externally as an object."  But he insists on the "transcendental ideality" of space when we are talking about things in themselves.

When it comes to time, Kant asserts that "time is nothing other than the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner state."  And it is a necessary condition of our experience of space as well, because we could not experience external objects unless they were experienced in time.

Again, Kant asserts the "empirical reality of time" an an objective reality of all "objects that may ever be given to our senses."  But not "absolute time". That "transcendental ideality" could "never be given to us through the senses."

My Responses to the Bain Question

The experts tell us that, besides the 47 percent issue, the president will be raising the Bain Question.  They mean, I presume, that President Obama will attempt to embarrass Mitt Romney with his record at Bain Capital, at which he... well, after Romney left, Bain bailed on an attempt to turn around a Kansas City steel company.  One of the guys laid off was a man whose wife later died of cancer.



You can see why they do this.  The average man in the street just sees Romney or Bain as a "boss" that can create or more significantly destroy jobs as the mood takes him, while keeping their own jobs and perquisites safe.  If you think of the average uncommitted voter as a woman with a job in a social service or health care or education bureaucracy, you can see how the attitude makes sense.  In a bureaucracy people normally take care of themselves before the organization.



But how should Mitt reply to the "Bain Question" on Tuesday night?  Here are a few responses that I've cooked up.  Probably they aren't as good as the ones the debate preppers are coming up with.

• It's interesting that both the president and I have had experience with failing steel mills.  The president served a term as a community organizer in South Chicago where they had lost thousands of jobs when steel plants closed.  I wonder how many jobs the president saved.  The truth is, when a company is in trouble it is really hard to save it.  At Bain we tried, but we didn't always succeed.  But here is the point.  There is no getting around the fact that, for investors, such a failure means little more than a financial loss; for the workers it means a devastating end to their dreams, and I always tried to remember that when I worked at Bain.
  


• It's always been interesting to me how success and failure are rated differently in business and politics.  In business, it is considered a plus to hire someone that has been through a couple of failed startups or turnarounds.  In politics, a failure is considered poison.  That is why politicians go to such enormous lengths to cover up their failures.  Like the killing of the US Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi.
  


• Look, in business you win some and you lose some, and you are deeply conscious that, win or lose, there are peoples' lives depending on you.  The president's campaign has spent $100 million or so on negative ads to make sure that there isn't a single person left in America that doesn't know that Bain, two years after I left, closed a steel mill it had tried to turn around.  Bully for you, Mr. President.  Now can we get back to how we get this economy out of the ditch so Americans can get jobs again?
  


• Good point, Mr. President.  Bain Capital did screw up sometimes when it tried to turn around failing companies, and thousands of people suffered.  Now can we get back to the US economy, and how millions of people are suffering because of your mistakes: how in 2009 you decided that the way to heal the economy was by distributing about a trillion dollars among special interests that supported your campaign?  Or that you decided to burden the economy with the enormous costs of Obamacare before you knew that the economy was getting back on track?
  


• Good point, Mr. President.  Now can we talk about your mistakes, which are rather more to the point, since you have been in charge of the economy for the last four years?  I remember thinking, back in early 2009: wow, these guys don't get it.  They don't realize that all their grand plans for big new liberal spending programs have got to be put on the shelf until they get the economy moving again.  I remember wondering back then what the damage would be from that huge strategic mistake.  Well, now we know.  An economy that is growing at 1.3 percent a year.  Less than last winter.  Less than last year.  Less than the year before.  It's time for a change, Mr. President.

You get the point.  Really, who cares any more about Bain Capital except a few crazed liberals?  The question for America is which candidate looks as though he has thought about the nation's problems and has actually come up with a plan to fix them.  Investing in more teachers and more job training doesn't cut it, Mr. President.  And as for green jobs, please, Mr. President.  That dog won't hunt.

The Debates: A Word to You Liberals

I guess that it was good for liberals to have Joe Biden throw out some red meat last night, on the 47 percent and all.



So Joan Walsh gets to write that "Biden Wiped the Floor with Biden" in Salon.  In reply, Rush Limbaugh this morning said that Ryan's performance was rather like a son trying to deal with the embarrassing behavior of his blustery father.



But think of this.  In two straight debates the Democrats have allowed Romney and Ryan to speak directly to the moderates while they have been speaking to their base.  A week ago the president just emitted his usual base-pleasing platitudes.  Last night Joe Biden played the angry old white man.



Wait a minute.  I thought that the Republican Party was supposed to be the party of angry old white men.



Now, either we have here a strategic error of monumental proportions or we have something worse.  We have the fact that the Democrats don't have their base nailed down.



The experts tell us that the independents and women hate the partisan bluster and name-calling.  Or at least they tell us that when Republicans refuse to do the decent thing and cave to a Democratic initiative.



My guess is that the conventional wisdom isn't quite true.  Voters don't want politicians to be angry until they are angry.  Then and only then do they want anger in politics.  Liberals were angry about the results of the first debate, so they wanted Joe Biden to be angry about Romney's 47 percent remark.  I'd say, on the other hand, that liberals are angry about the 47 percent remark because it came a bit close to home.  Liberal politics does encourage dependency.



In any case, suppose you were an independent voter, the classic kind that doesn't pay much attention to politics, but you are concerned this fall about the direction of the country.  You've seen two debates thus far in which the Republican candidates seem to have developed thoughtful ideas about governing the nation in the next four years.  What are they to think about the Democratic candidates?  President Obama appeared to be in a supercilious sulk, and Vice-President Biden seemed to be channeling Willy Loman.  You almost expected him to blurt out "Attention must be paid."



Yes.  Willy Loman.



Could it be that we are approaching Death of a Salesman for liberals?  Somehow the old charm, the old success has gone.  Liberals are sitting at the bar staring at their beers wondering what went wrong.  And they are angry.



Now, of course, the received opinion on Arthur Miller's famous play is that it is monstrous for society to treat an old guy like that, deceive him with the salesman culture of charm and manipulation.  After all, we know that the success culture is all an illusion.



Maybe liberalism is like that.  For decades liberals have lived a fantasy, and now, as their movement has aged, the fantasy is collapsing into failure and anger and ruin.



So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

Timid Camille on 2012 Choice

Art teacher Camille Paglia is conservatives' favorite liberal, for obvious reasons.  She whacks feminists and Naomi Wolf around, and she actually listens to talk radio.



(Does that really mean that this lesbian is really a crypto-conservative?)



Anyway she's got a book out, Glittering Images, and so she's doing interviews.  So what is she doing to assist in the 2012 meltdown of Obama?  She's voting for the Green Party candidate.



Oh please, Camille.  What a high-school cliquish, blonde-WASPy thing to do.  How in the world could a tough Italian girl from gritty upstate New York descend to that?



Why won't she just vote for the Republican and show that she's got a brain?  Because of a very high-school cliquish reason.  Because of Newt and Santorum -- eeeuugh!  But she thinks that Romney is a moderate, and that makes it safe to vote Green rather than vote for Obama to keep the nerds out.

There are three people on the political landscape whom I absolutely loathe — Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Dick Cheney — that delusional and mendacious war-monger.

I guess that Paglia just doesn't like competition in the personality stakes.  After all, Newt is a guy rather like Camille, fizzing with ideas, some of which are pretty interesting.  Rick Santorum is a Catholic with the courage of his convictions, just like Camille in the art world, and he was prepared to go down to defeat as a Catholic pro-life conservative in the moderate blue-collar state of Pennsylvania.  Surely Paglia could respect that?  And Dick Cheney the bogeyman that liberal mothers use to terrify their children?  Come on, Camille, you've been reading too much partisan swill.



Still, the wonderful thing about Camille Paglia is that she does get out of the liberal bubble and actually listen to what's going on in flyover country.  She rails against ObamaCare and the Big Brother surveillance state:

What in the world has happened to the Democratic Party? Its passivity towards this awful takeover of our lives by a know-it-all government, as shown by the way Obama has governed by constantly going around Congress — appointing czars and one new layer of bureaucracy after another.

And who is fighting against this? Not liberals.

Listen — a huge point I want to make is that the protest against the surveillance state has, with only a few exceptions, been mainly coming from the Right and not from the Left! Talk radio has been seething with this issue for years.

 Here's the thing, Camille.  The reason that liberals go meekly forward accepting the expansion of the administrative state is that they think they run it.  They get to tell people what to do from their positions in the bureaucracy, the university, and the media.



They don't get the obvious point that the monster will one day devour them.  And you too, Camille Paglia.

Two Stand-up White Guys

Right there in the center of the liberal narrative is the idea that you can't trust regular white guys--you know, the ones that obeyed the law, went to work, followed the rules, and all that stuff.  It is time for regular white guys to stand aside, finally, and give way to a diverse America that has made room for the traditionally marginalized, women and minorities, and all that.  That's the liberal narrative.



Behind the idea is the notion that regular white guys have benefited unfairly from America's white-bread, Protestant, patriarchal, western European culture, and it has a point.  But liberals never asked what kind of America is left when you toss the regular white guys and their ideas out onto the ash-heap of history.



Well, now we are finding out, because although liberals talk the talk of diversity, when it comes to walking the walk they always trot out liberal white guys instead of regular white guys.



And I include President Obama in that category.  There is nothing in President Obama except white-bread western liberalism.  There is no "authentic" African American in him.  He is just a hot-house flower from liberal finishing school.  His anti-colonial philosophy is not an idea that came out of West Africa but out of European intellectual salons.



But the thing about regular white guys is that they have this inchoate sense of doing the right thing.  Call it noblesse oblige or the code of the gentleman, if you like.  Liberals don't have that sense; they already know they are doing the right thing before even thinking about it.  The liberal white guys that go into politics are people that believe in political power, their political power.  Think Carter, Clinton, Obama.  And of course, Obama is the worst.  His administration has committed abuses of power that, in a Republican administration, would have prompted the mainstream media to cry out to the heavens for justice.  The ends justify the means, right bro'?



Now come Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.  Regular white guys.  They have always done the right thing, and always acted as if they must be seen to be doing the right thing as well as actually do it.



Of course, the irony about Romney and Ryan is that they are not quite regular white guys in the sense we all think of it: of coming from solid WASP Bushy northeastern stock.  They are oddballs; they are strivers, and they are "minority" candidates from traditionally marginalized groups.   Romney is a Mormon, and Mormons have had their travails in the wilderness, and even now your average liberal girl will wonder whether it is "ethical" for her to be in Utah.  Ryan is an Irish Catholic.  A century ago and more, in the days of "No Irish Need Apply," the Irish Catholics were definitely on the margins.



But the whole point of Romney and Ryan is that they are solid doers and achievers.  You expect them to tell you what they plan to do and then you expect them to execute on their commitments.  Who, really, ever expects President Obama to execute?  And what about Bill Clinton?  The point about Clinton was that you never knew what the guy would get up to.



The beauty of the 2012 First Debate was that it so clearly demonstrated the difference between a regular white guy and a liberal white guy.  Regular white guys really have to work to earn the trust of the American people.  Liberal white guys are different.  They have the mainstream media to do the heavy lifting for them.



It's great to have the liberal mainstream media do your heavy lifting for you.  Until the moment that you have to lift a heavy wooden beam on your own.