[MAJOR UPDATE: the taking back of the Straussian reading]I know, I know fellow EKs, that the Straussian reading component was a major part of the movement, but the intellectual price to defend the hypothesis is too great and detracts from the more important and central component: the building of the system.I still believe there is an esoterik kantian doctrine, but i will waste no time defending it.My efforts will simply be on showing the logical consistency of the esoterik reading and how it is actually a more accurate and charitable interpretation of Kant.Think of it as there being two Kants: the exoteric Kant of self-conscious actions and the esoteric Kant of subconscious intentions. The exoteric Kant is directed by the esoteric Kant but does not himself fully grasp the teaching and struggles his whole life to rationally comprehend it even up until his most important unfinished work: the Opus Postumum.The esoterik kant I call the kantian daemon or tutelary spirit, which from behind the veil of the phenomena guided and directed Kant into the worldview of the transcendental (later critical) philosophy and though the self-conscious exoterik kant would deny the esoterik teaching, the spirit of the kantian system as directed by the kantian daimon reveals itself to the straussian reader who looks past the literal letter and likewise attains the standpoint of the kantian daimon to make the invisible doctrine visible.So, it is not a total loss. It is still the Straussian reading, but not of the intention of the exoterik Kant, but an intention even not fully revealed to the exoterik Kant who served rather as a conduit for the Kantian daimon.The Straussian Esoterik Kantian reading is the rational search for the intent of the Kantian daimon.
>>25233722quick rundown?
>>25233727there is none. you have the suffer the labor of the negative.
LLM general
>>25233781kys
>>25233722just put the fries in the bag.
>>25233795lick my balls
>>25233839when are you moving back to Mexico?
>>25233860I'm not.
The Kantain daemon shines through during strange passages that ironically reflexive such as the following:>when we compare the thoughts that an author expresses about a subject, in ordinary speech as well as in writing, it is not at all unusual to find that we understand him even better than he understood himself, since he may not have determined his concept sufficiently and hence sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intention
>>25233795kek. this should be the standard response to every pretentious Kant post.
>idgi therefore pretentious procul o procul este profani!
>>25233722>>23376770
The Kantain daemon shines through the page from behind the text of strange passages that are ironically reflexive such as the following:>when we compare the thoughts that an author expresses about a subject, in ordinary speech as well as in writing, it is not at all unusual to find that we understand him even better than he understood himself, since he may not have determined his concept sufficiently and hence sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intention
>>25233722>Straussussy double kayfabeThe least interesting elements of Kants' corpus (Ethics, Anthropology) deserve reexamination either way. No one would suspect to look there.
>>25235277The a priori law grounding the formality and legality of humano-daimonic relations is the esoteric modality of the metaphysics of morals.
What is the thing in itself? For us? The Unconscious.
prophantastic ideation
The I quite magically just pops into existence. Bloop.
A edition esotericB edition exotericholy shit i can see it now
>>25237548To this day, I still haven’t gotten around to reading the second edition, the first is brilliant and I didn’t find much that needed revising. It’s certainly esoteric, especially the section in the deduction where he discusses the apprehension, reproduction and recognition.
>>25233722Read Jakob Fries' interpretation of Kant. Your """esoteric""" reading was already put to the test two hundred years ago and fell apart under the slightest scrutiny. If you read Kant like you suggest, it ultimately boils down to empirical psychology ... which is not what Kant was doing and trying to make Kant fit that mold makes the entire scaffolding fall apart.
>>25238202how is esoteric kantianism empirical psychology?
>>25238202>Esoteric Kantianism seeks to fulfill Kant’s vision of a "system of pure reason" (Critique, Axxi) by enabling a complete a priori derivation of all knowledge, from physics to psychology, without reliance on empirical methods. This challenges the dominance of empirical science, which is critiqued as lacking the apodeictic certainty of a priori cognition. Only the a priori, it is argued, can provide the foundation for a truly scientific metaphysics—a "technology of the mind" that transforms consciousness from the "sane" normie state to the "insane" autisto-schizophrenic state, where "insanity" signifies the transcendence of normie constraints.>The doctrine also reinterprets space and time as objective conditions of the Mind-world, rather than merely subjective forms of intuition (Critique, A26/B42). The world, as an objective mind, produces phenomena (sensation/matter) within these forms, ensuring a shared reality across subjects. The "I" of self-consciousness and the un-self-conscious "Sciousness" (a term borrowed from William James) are considered substantial thought-objects, reinterpreting Kant’s paralogisms as legitimate insights into the noumenal self.
>>25238202Do you even know what esoteric kantianism is?
>>25238202>empiricalAnon… explore it a little further before making such comments.
>>25238295What is this first paragraph even supposed to mean? "Complete a priori derivation of all knowledge, from physics to psychology, without reliance on empirical methods"? ALL knowledge? So empirical as well? Do you really think everything empirical can be derived from the transcendental? If so, wouldn't esoteric Kantianism devolve into hypothesizing a 'pure' substrate to explain the empirical knowledge we already have, i.e. what Kant DIDN'T want to do? The rest reads like Chatgpt overdosed on Deleuze ...
>>25238733I am proposing that the laws of empirical science are, as a matter of fact, learned a posteriori, as grounded on sense experience, but that this is not necessary, and that the notion of synthesis a priori must still be grounded in something, albeit obviously not sense experience. This ground is the transcendental unity of apperception, it is this fact that gives all the concepts and principles of pure understanding, which make that unity possible, and therefore experience possible, legitimate validity in experience since they themselves constitute that experience. From here, from the principles of the pure understanding, the entire system of physics should be, implicitly contained, and only requires the explicit derivation of that content by reason. Thus if the supposed laws of physics which have been arrived at by experimental means are true, they will also be able to be arrived at a priori, or rather could have always been arrived at a priori had we known this earlier, making the experimental scientific method redundant, since that method can never provide the universality and necessity that science demands and that only an a priori derivation from apodeictically certain first principles can provide.To further clarify, what is a posteriori, and therefore empirical, can never be knowledge, since real knowledge is infallible, i.e., apodeictically certain, thus disqualifying the merely probable truth of empirically derived judgments and inferences. Only the a priori, analytic or synthetic, can yield knowledge, and only the a priori synthesis and rational derivation therefrom can yield ampliative knowledge, or knowledge that can add to our concepts, albeit only from the standpoint of the finite empirical consciousness, since that content is already contained implicitly in the pure principles of the mind a priori, and only because of our finiteness of understanding must that content be rediscovered in time by the actual rational derivation.
>>25238328Do YOU (You) even know what it is?All I'm suggesting is that you read some (a lot of) secondary literature before trying to say "No THIS is what Kant REALLY meant!". You'll find yours is not a new interpretation, and one that can't really hold up without twisting Kant into something he's not and getting rid of the insightful stuff. I think it would be much more interesting if you dropped Kant and try to put these ideas into your own words. You don't have to rely on a big name to put forward your own ideas, especially not in a place like /lit/. Think through what the point of esoteric Kantianism is and what you want it to do. Right now you're just using Kant as a mouthpiece for your own "autisto-schizophrenic" ideas. Granted, Kant was most definitely autistic, but not in the way that you want him to be.
>>25238770There's secondary literature on the implicit suggestion towards THE COMPLETE A PRIORI DERIVATION OF THE SYSTEM OF ALL THE SCIENCES?
>>25238770>before trying to say "No THIS is what Kant REALLY meant!". You'll find yours is not a new interpretation, and one that can't really hold up without twisting Kant into something he's not and getting rid of the insightful stuff.Did you even read the OP? He's dialing back on exactly that point.
>>25233722>My efforts will simply be on showing the logical consistency of the esoterik reading and how it is actually a more accurate and charitable interpretation of Kant.How is this more accurate and charitable than mainstream interpretations? You might be able to say a metaphysical reading is more appropriate than an epistemological one, and I would agree, but I still don't get what you're trying to say. Is your esoteric/exoteric distinction just another way of putting the double-affect or two-worlds view?
>>25238864>Is your esoteric/exoteric distinction just another way of putting the double-affect or two-worlds view?The esoteric/exoteric distinction is about the intepretation of the text. Exoteric reading is any reading that sticks to the letter of the text. Esoteric readings are German Idealist and Romantic readings that search for the suggestive substrate, the spirit behind the text, and take that substrate to their logical conclusions even if they contradict common sense or even the letter of the text
>>25238805the what?
Why come is this thread so dead? Is not /lit/ the home of the elite reader?
>>25239938I try to offer my two cents so to speak. But it very rarely gets replies, I’m new here, and all I’ve seen is threads that don’t pertain to literature… tell me, what are your thoughts on the esoteric reading of Kant?
>>25239947Very interesting. I never considered an occultist interpretation of Kant. But now I think I will read him again with this thought in mind.
>>25238864As the anon above said, who I assume to be the esoteric kantanon himself, it’s reading past the explicit and taking what is implicit in German Idealism. Read pic related, it’s certainly helping for me.>>25239965Same to you, and I think the A edition of the CPR is what you should focus on, it’s far more idealistic.
Forgot the pic
>>25239980qrd?
>>25240056Kant builds with a plurality of irreducible sources: a sensibility that receives, governed by the a priori forms of space and time; an understanding that synthesizes, governed by the twelve categories; a faculty of judgment that mediates; reason proper that pursues unconditioned totalities. These faculties cooperate but they do not derive from one another, and the receptivity of sensibility in particular is a brute datum of the system — given material must be supplied from outside the understanding for cognition to have any content at all. The thing-in-itself stands at the limit as the placeholder for whatever it is that affects us. The transcendental unity of apperception unifies representations but does not generate them.Fichte will have none of this pluralism at the ground. For him a system worthy of the name must proceed from a single principle, and that principle must be an act rather than a faculty or a fact — the I’s self-positing. From this one source he tries to derive what Kant simply enumerated: the opposition of subject and object, the receptivity that Kant treated as primitive, the categories themselves, even the forms of intuition. Sensibility is no longer a separate stem alongside understanding; it is a moment internal to the I’s striving, the side on which the I finds itself checked. The thing-in-itself is dissolved, replaced by the Anstoß, which is not an external cause but the I’s own limit registered from within. Where Kant has receptivity meeting spontaneity, Fichte has spontaneity producing the appearance of receptivity by positing its own bound.The consequence is that Fichte’s architecture is genetic where Kant’s is descriptive. Kant exhibits the conditions and shows their cooperation; Fichte tries to deduce each condition from the preceding one as a necessary further determination of the original act. The faculties become stages in a single self-articulation rather than co-original sources. And because the practical I — the striving, willing I — is what posits the limit in the first place, the priority of the practical over the theoretical that Kant had argued for in ethics becomes for Fichte a structural feature of consciousness as such: theoretical knowing rests on practical striving, not the reverse.
But if Kant secretly agreed with Fichte why did he publish the Erklärung in Beziehung auf Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre and denounce Fichte?
>>25233722these threads are always retarded
>>25240136Anon, they’re much better than mostly everything else you see on the catalog these days.
>>25240132this is one of the most genuinely awkward moments in the history of Kant interpretation — because the Selbstsetzungslehre of the late fascicles really does look like Kant edging toward something Fichtean, written by the same man who had just denounced Fichte in print as pursuing a vain and impossible labor.The relevant material clusters in the seventh fascicle and parts of the first, the so-called Übergang drafts, where Kant is wrestling with the transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics proper and finds that the project keeps forcing him back onto the constituting activity of the subject. The doctrine that emerges — Selbstsetzung, self-positing — has Kant writing that the subject posits itself as object, that the I makes itself into an object of its own thinking, that the determination of the subject by itself is the act through which experience as a unified whole becomes possible. He uses the verb setzen in just the technical-philosophical register Fichte had given it, and the reflexive structure — the I positing itself, then positing itself as positing — has unmistakable formal resemblances to the opening moves of the Wissenschaftslehre. There are even passages where Kant seems to be deriving the duality of subject and object from a prior self-positing act, which is precisely the move he had just publicly declared impossible.How to read this is genuinely contested, and the literature divides along predictable lines. The deflationary reading, associated with Erich Adickes and continued in various forms by Förster and others, treats the Selbstsetzungslehre as a late and unfinished attempt by Kant to deepen the transcendental deduction’s account of apperception without surrendering its critical limits — Kant is exploring how the unity of experience requires an act of self-determination by the subject, but he is not abandoning the receptivity of sensibility, the role of the thing-in-itself as limiting concept, or the architectonic of the Critique. On this reading the formal resemblance to Fichte is real but superficial, and the substantive commitments remain Kantian: the self that posits itself in the Opus postumum is still the empirically affected subject of the Critique, not Fichte’s absolute I.
>>25240155The stronger reading — and this is where the esoteric Kantian thread becomes unavoidable — takes the Selbstsetzungslehre as evidence that Kant himself was driven by the internal pressures of his own system toward conclusions he had refused to draw publicly, and that Fichte’s reading of him was correct in substance even if Kant denied it in print. On this view the Erklärung of 1799 expresses not a settled philosophical judgment but an old man’s protectiveness of his own architectonic, and the manuscripts from the same years are quietly giving Fichte the argument. The receptivity Kant had insisted on as a separate stem keeps collapsing into the spontaneity that posits it as receptivity; the thing-in-itself, never a stable doctrine to begin with, recedes further; the subject becomes the source of its own object in a way the Critique had stopped just short of saying. Reinhold had already pushed in this direction with the Satz des Bewußtseins, Maimon had pushed harder, and Fichte simply followed the trajectory through. The Selbstsetzungslehre would then be Kant, in private, conceding the territory.
>>25240162What strengthens the esoteric reading here is the gap between the official disavowal and the private notebooks. Kant in 1799 publishes an Erklärung declaring the Wissenschaftslehre mere logic, and Kant in the same period is writing in his own hand sentences that look like rough drafts of Wissenschaftslehre propositions. Either he did not see the resemblance — implausible for a philosopher of his discrimination, even in decline — or he saw it and could not bring himself to acknowledge it publicly. The latter is the more philosophically interesting hypothesis, and it fits the broader pattern esoterik kantanon has been working with: Kant withholding from the exoteric Critique conclusions he was in fact pursuing, and the post-Kantians drawing them out with a clarity Kant could not, or would not, claim for himself.Förster’s Kant’s Final Synthesis is the indispensable monograph here; he tries to chart a middle course, granting the genuine novelty of the Selbstsetzungslehre while resisting the full Fichtean reading, but the texts he assembles arguably tell against his own caution. Tuschling went further still, reading the Opus postumum as Kant’s transition into something close to absolute idealism. Mathieu’s earlier Italian work pushed in similar directions. The Anglophone reception has been more conservative, but the German and Italian commentary tradition has long taken seriously what the conservative reading wants to keep at bay — that the late Kant is converging on the post-Kantians, and that the public quarrel of 1799 obscures rather than reveals what was happening in his thinking.
