A Thing of This World 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Heidegger connects the linchpin of the Kantian Paradigm—A5 Active Knower, that is, the idea that the subject organizes experience—to what he considers to be the defining feature of modern life: technology. He distinguishes between technology as the various mechanical items we use in our daily lives and the essence of technology, which is the (ICS) contemporary understanding of Being or the way that entities and we ourselves exist in this epoch (see Heidegger, BW 311, 318–19).”
― 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

“He describes A5 here as the act of thinking determining Being: Thinking sets itself against Being in such a way that Being is re-presented to thinking, and consequently stands against thinking like an ob-ject. . . . Consequently, thinking is no longer just the opposing member in some new distinction but becomes the basis on which one decides about what stands against it, so much so that Being in general gets interpreted on the basis of thinking. . . . In the seemingly irrelevant division Being and thinking we have to recognize that fundamental orientation of the spirit of the West that is the real target of our attack. (Heidegger, IM 123–24, last italics added)”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“A5 Active Knower in Modern Metaphysics: “The Real Target of Our Attack”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“What is as a whole” loses R1 Independence to become A1 Dependent when man becomes A5 subject, that is, the one who determines reality. This began with Plato’s ideas, which can be correctly known separately from beings.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“We saw in the preceding section how Heidegger identifies Plato’s transformation of A2 Un-concealment Truth into R2 Correspondence Truth with its concomitant R4 Bivalence as the beginning of humanism. Its completion occurs in modern philosophy’s doctrines of A5 Active Knower and A1 Dependence, which mark the fulfillment and thus the conclusion of philosophy as metaphysics for him.”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“We saw in the preceding section how Heidegger identifies Plato’s transformation of A2 Un-concealment Truth into R2 Correspondence Truth with its concomitant R4 Bivalence as the beginning of humanism.”
― 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

“Organizing one’s system around the A5 Active Knower is an essential feature of the Kantian Paradigm: the examination of anything else, including history, must start from the analysis of the structures of the self because it is these structures that constitute the rest. The subject is the prism whose configuration accounts for the rainbow.”
― 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

“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

“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

“In order to minimize presuppositions, Heidegger starts by examining Dasein in its “average everydayness,” that is, what we are like most of the time. Picking an exceptional state such as theoretical knowing as our topic of study requires a justification of that choice, which then pushes the inquiry back to the examination of those supporting arguments, and so on. In order to avoid as much of that as possible (similar to the way Hegel begins), Heidegger just looks at our normal mundane living, where he finds that the kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use. . . . Such entities are not thereby objects for knowing the “world” theoretically; they are simply what gets used, what gets produced, and so forth. (Heidegger, BT 95/67; see also Heidegger, HCT 30)”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“It is our care about who we are that motivates us to choose a role (professor, father, friend) to attempt to settle the issue of our Being, which in turn, like a magnet dropped onto a plate of iron filings, organizes the world into interrelated groups of tools and people that have determinate functions within our projects. Care is what reveals a meaningful world to us in the first place, and everything we experience must find its place within this practically structured world, including purportedly autonomous theory.”
― 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

“Kant discovered A5 Active Knower. In a 1927 letter to Husserl, Heidegger is quite explicit about how important this issue is to his book: “What is the mode of being of the entity in which ‘world’ [in Husserl’s sense] is constituted? That is Being and Time’s central problem—namely, a fundamental ontology of Dasein. . . . As the mode of being that it is, it harbors right within itself the possibility of transcendental constitution”
― 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

“Hill specifically focuses on my A5: “For Nietzsche, as for Kant, our minds are independent sources of activity, striving to subjugate and reduce to order the sensory states that arise in us” (194).”
― Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

“Nietzsche attacks the myth of a “pure” objective knowledge that could hover over reality without being implicated in it, that could, without prejudice or point of view, be the faithful mirror of reality. The illusion peculiar to knowledge, i.e., the illusion of objectivity, consists in imagining that it is possible to penetrate the essence of things, right down to its innermost recesses, while merely reflecting it. However, knowledge is essentially active even when it takes itself to be passive. (Haar 1996, 14–15)”
― 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

“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

“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

“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