A.

INDIVIDUALISM: ITS POLAR EXTREMES AND ITS UNIFYING PRINCIPLE

1.

FRANCIS BACON AND THE SURFACING OF MATERIALISTIC INDIVIDUALISM IN ENGLAND

Bacon was born in 1561 and died in 1626, and his death ws hardly less than twenty years prior to the rise of Oliver Cromwell, the first of tow civil wars, and the beheading of Charles Stuart. In his tireless critiques of Aristotelian philosophy and protest of scholastic logical structures for the rationalization of Feudalism as God's creation, Francis Bacon was formally the first critical thinkers, who, at least in their own minds, detached the knowing subject from his socio/cultural context in his search for valid knowledge. Henceforth, this was to be the hallmark of individualism in any form. What would thereafter determine the special form of individualism would be the means conceived of as the instrument for this detachment. For Bacon it lay not simply in experience (for our senses do deceive us) but in carefully controlled experience by which all prior suppositions, all prior beliefs, superstitions, and vested interests could be kept out of observation, measurement, and analysis of sensory experience. For him, all knowledge issued from sensory experience, and the mind or intellect was but a representation or a misrepresentation of that experience. Aside from sensory illusions the sources of bias in the acquisition of knowledge, the sources of error or prejudice, (a) wishful ways of thinking based on racial or kinship loyalty or sentiments - the idols of the tribe, (b) personal likes or dislikes, prejudgement of others or events, personal or vested interests - the idols of the cave, (c) blind acceptance of tradition or of the world of secular or religious authority - the idols of the theater, and (d) the failure to define one's terms, meaning vagueness and ambiguity in our processes of communication or thought which could becloud the object of our perception - the idols of the market place.

Bacon, like the Ionian, Epicurean and Atomist individualists of antiquity, dedicated himself to an attempt to prove epistemologically that no valid metaphysical principle was possible. That the very sources of the validation of knowledge lay in the major institutional categories of the day, that they lay in the minds of others who shared a common culture - and not in experience narrowly conceived - was either a principle unknown to Bacon or else it was the very principle which he wished to disprove. In view of his critiques of Medieval philosophy, the latter was probably true. In one after another country, from England, then France, to Germany (and thence to the rest of the European world) the Baconian world-view and the detachment of the knowing subject from its socio-cultural context surfaced in abstracted form from the assumptions and predispositions for people as to the primacy of the individual. Man, as man, had become the measure of all things, and the individual, as an individual, could determine for himself through methodical experience or through reason the forms, that is, the law as of nature which were felt to apply as much to society as to the rest of the universe. That these transformations for major systems of thought were at least parallel to major transformations of whole institutional complexes through revolutions is not accidental. What had emerged as attitudes in the aftermath of the Feudal institutional system, as new modes of social relations, free of feudal bonds, were forming, were first with Bacon systematized, formalized and abstracted as a world-view. This as a method of knowing which then, as method and utilized everywhere, could further refine what had begun in social and cultural experiences in a transforming social world. The intellectual aftermath of what had begun as grass roots movements for earlier, when it did not deny the principal institutions of society was painstakingly trying to demonstrate that the 'irrational' elements could be removed from them. Society could thus be rendered more rational - more attuned to the laws of nature as the new ego-centered methods of knowing discovered them.

THE BACONIAN METHOD OF KNOWING

The first problem to be solved in the Baconian world-view was how to detach the individual from the influence of illusions and from the influence of the four idols. Perception or 'experience' in its narrowest sense held the key, but because perception is frequently deceptive, experience had to be made systematic in controlled observation. While experience was the source of all knowledge, it was not reliable unless controlled, and it was not valid as knowledge unless others could by the same method arrive independently at the same conclusions, the same laws or forms which experience was seen to take. Bacon and those after him in England and France distrusted reason, distrusted deductive methods of drawing new inferences from old beliefs or propositions. While reason had a role in the inductive process, and reasoning after that was suspect, --held to be a source of error. Through inductive method alone, and with logical processes held strictly to the task of systematic control of experience, could there ever be any valid knowledge of any kind whatever. For Bacon as for John Locke after him, the intellect of the individual could contain no knowledge without experience and certainly no valid knowledge without its rigorous control by the individual himself. Self-discipline by others in the community surrounding the individual.

What is essential to the existence of any thing, any event, any change, any motion; and how could what was inessential to the existence of anything to be known, isolated or controlled? Reason could not be trusted. Consensus in the community was worthless. Authority had already demonstrated many times over its fallibility. And social institutions were steeped as they were in magical and religious beliefs and practices. So how would these questions of essentiality be answered? (As an aside, it is of some importance to note that Bacon did not come to know of the system he formalized by processes of pure induction or by any controlled experience on his own part. His world-view and the method of knowing derivable deductively from it was at first a product of deduction from among the contents of his own mind - a mind whose contents were shared by a great many other intellectuals of his time.) Bacon outlined three techniques for learning what is or is not essential to the existence or appearance of things. The rigorous application of these techniques would free us from illusion and rid us of the 'contaminating' influences of the four idols.

First in order to discover what is essential and thereby learn the form of the thing observed, individual instances, once observed, must be compared systematically. No conclusions could be valid or known to be valid merely from observation of single things or events. Second, in observations of events or processes of change, one must carefully look for and in some sense measure concomitant variations. That is when one thing happens are their other things that happen also? Are these other things simultaneous; do they increase or decrease together; when on thing inclines does another thing decline or vice versa to what extent is this apparently so? Is there any lag effect between the occurrences of one thing and that of another; what conditions may be observed which would demonstrably explain this lag such that it could be predicted in every instance? Third, an examination of negative instances - that place as they had taken place in all prior experience with the same objects or events. Bacon's methodology proved weakest a this point for about all he could say of them was that they should be noted, isolated or set apart from all cases in which concomitant variations did occur as anticipated. Negative instances then became the basis for further, and more careful inquiry under the same rules of controlled experience.

But what of the possibility of undiscovered negative instances? Because of this possibility, Bacon's search for laws governing things and motions (and by his own insistence) could not yield more than provisional results. One could not state a pure or universally applicable law simply because a given individual at one point in time and space could not know all that could possibly happen which might alter the results of that individual's experimentation. The best science could do was to leave known negative cases ['unadulterated' by speculation until there were sufficient numbers and variations of them to enable us by the same careful, plodding way to find the principle that would account for them. Speculation immediately inherited all of the temptations of the idols, invited into the explanatory process all of the contaminants that reason and the idols were quick to muster. For Bacon, speculation insured 'understanding' and understanding was ever fallible:

"The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would'. For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes." 2

Thus Bacon did not deny the idea that social existence is involved in the validation of thought. To the contrary, he recognized it as a chief contaminant of the validation process. The problem of objectivity then was solved by laying bare and isolating all such contaminants. This meant removing from rational thought all predispositions arising from culture, from social life of people saturated with culture. What motivated such plodding, monklike pursuit, such a single-mindedness of purpose was Bacon's faith that mankind could come to ever greater control over the forces of nature that would otherwise control mankind. His statement, that the only way to control nature is to obey her, implies that control is predicated upon learning what nature is all about and only after that is obedience possible. Yet, is there any way to disobey a law of nature? What is the difference between human laws and natural laws in this regard? How would obedience to the former be different from obedience to the latter?

It is indeed ironic that in the probable birthplace of individualism as a way of life - i. e., in the arena of the market where the relations between buyer and seller are governed, in strictly 'rational' terms, only by the value of the commodity between them - Bacon found the most troublesome Idol. For if max Weber is correct that the epitome of Western rationality lies in action stripped of all prior affections, all unquestioned loyalties, magical and religious beliefs as exemplified in the marketplace, then market behavior was already achieving, before Bacon's time - what science was later to do by the Baconian method.

In a very real sense, the objectivity of the marketplace--where the sole object is to cut away all possible risk and show profit in part by stripping away all family, feudal and other traditions of cooperation, or other 'irrational' idols--is the same as that posed by Francis Bacon as the method of validation of knowledge.

What Bacon saw in market behavior, however, was the tendency to substitute words for ideas in the bargaining process. This substitution was one of the tendencies among Medieval scholastics which Bacon and others in England never tired of flailing. Yet, in just this tendency we can see the interplay between rational and 'irrational' behavior in the marketplace. That is , in situations of bargaining any personal submission on the part of one party based upon appeals to family loyalty, sentiment, or religious morality served only to impoverish one of the bargainers while elevating the profits of the other. In the long run, in the history of capitalism, any lowering of price based upon such 'irrational' appeals was bound to be unsuccessful. Henceforth, by the 18th century, and even in the 15th and 16th, market behavior was characterized by impersonal, if not alienative, interaction in which Bacons'
idols played no part.

Again, it is clear, if Weber is correct about the rationality of market relations, that the alienation of personal ties in market behavior was precisely the same thing that Bacon advocated as a first principle of gaining valid knowledge. Both called for a detachment of the knowing subject from the wider socio/culture context. The point to appreciate is that the market principle of alienation or detachment from prior traditions and sentiments appeared in history quite before its surfacing in Baconian thought. The principle of individualism at the level of attitudes towards one another in the marketplace provided science later with its leading philosophical premises. Thus the link between the first principle of the market place and the first principle of Baconian science was forged in the institutional transformations which followed the collapse of the feudal world view.

Baconians, whether classical or modern, cut up their universe of being into things that move in some relation to each other vs. conceptions of things that move, and into conceptions of their relations with one another. And between these two postulated worlds there existed only a kind of skin of senses by which the objects and events of the first world were carried through into the second--the world of the knowing subject, the world of intellect. In England, though not in Germany, individualism in Bacon's time located reality (as Medieval nominalists had before them) in the world of hard things and soft things in motion or at rest. The world of intellect was but a crude reflection of the 'real' world of things. Concepts, ideas, values, beliefs and attitudes (conveyed by words) were merely flatus vocis and had no causal bearing upon the outer world of things in motion or at rest. The world, out there, was said to be unaffected by mind. So important to them was this world view, this relation of the knowing subject to the outer world of sensory objects, that it could not be uttered in the vulgate but had to be written in the mandarin style of Latin:

Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu fuerit.

Nothing is in the intellect that was not already in sense. This axiom was not invented by any one person as something merely out of the head of a single individual. The same ideas has arisen everywhere that pronounced individualism has arisen. It is no accident then that it was found in the individualism of antiquity as subscribed to by Aristotle (though opposed by Plato). It is no accident that it is found in the works of St. Augustine (both subscribed to and oppose by the latter in different parts of his writings.). It cannot thus be surprising to us that the same idea is found in Bacon or John Locke after him. Despite English 16th and 17th century diatribes against scholasticism of the Middle Ages, a good deal of Medieval nominalism was brought forward in history without fundamental modification. This is largely because the nominalists, in believing that only concrete particulars could have universality or reality, and thus in denying the reality of concepts, had eventually to deny the reality of such institutions as the Church, of God, of the holy trinity, and of all miracles and revelations. It was for this reason that the most extreme of the nominalists in the 11th century, such as Rosecelinus, were excommunicated for their views. Conflict was everywhere throughout the Middle Ages, and its most abstracted forms were found within the Church itself in the unending controversy between nominalists and Medieval realists - the latter believing that concepts, not things, were immutable and therefore universal. The main point here is that in every social context where persons stand in conflict with the normative structure and the social structure of pivotal institutions the tendency favorable to individualism is present. Individualism is not then an invention without social origins. Its origins lie in the fact of socio/cultural conflict within which the structures of a traditional conceptual system are in process of transformation.

'Modern' individualism as it first surfaced in England of the 16th century expressed in abstract form the institutional upheavals of the pre-Cromwell period. It surfaced again later in France among the ideologues and the philosophs. Still later, in Germany, perhaps owing to the latter's then heavy residue of feudalism, it took on a remarkable different form. We shall return to this observation later, for in Germany, from Leibniz to Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and on into one present form of neo-Kantian thought more globally distributed now, the above axiom was either qualified (Leibniz, Kant) or else rejected altogether (Hegel). For Leibniz and Kant agreed that nothing existed in the intellect that was not first in sense, but they added, except that which was already in the intellect to begin with. This exception to the rule proved to be the conceptual pivot between English individualism as formalized by Bacon, Locke and others and the other pole of individualism (individualistic rationalism) as the latter surfaced in abstracted form in the writings of Immanuel Kant. Even so, it was David Hume, who strongly influence on Kant, who posed a new problem for the Baconian method of validation of knowledge.

It is clear that in the English version of individualism, concepts of objects on the part of the knowing subject, were never taken as in any way important to our knowledge of the objects of sense. Concepts only beclouded our direct or 'pure' apprehension of the world of objects or things. They, as well as reason and emotions, had to be set aside in the business of direct experience with the world of things and motions. That such direct apprehension was impossible was never seriously entertained - as indeed it is not entertained today by a wide range of professionals as for example, behavioral psychologists, sociological positivists (positivists of any kind), anthropological and sociological ecologists who operate from a positivist methodology, engineers involved in social development planning, most of the professionals in the physical and natural sciences, and even those who are committed to existentialism. It was Sartre who told himself that "thought is the story I tell myself later." It was Camus who tried to write novels and essays without the use of metaphors - as if the avoidance of metaphor was the sure means of having an experience uncontaminated by thoughts or rationalizations. Yet, every thought is a rationalization of some kind, with or without metaphor. Contrary to what some phenomenologists may tell themselves today, the Baconian world-view and the application of its method is far from dead. To the contrary, it is the former which still dominates both the physical and the social sciences today. If individualism is dead, it is only so in the political economies of the contemporary world. And the 'scientific' structures and methods born of individualism are increasingly in the service of those political economies.

Still, it is probably true that Charles Peirce was right when he said that our concept of the object is the only knowledge we can have of it. And he applied this idea both to the examination of the physical and the social world.

There are two observations to be made here. First, under Baconian individualism ( which I call materialistic individualism), the universe beyond the sensory equipment of the knowing subject was seen as being unaffected by intellect or its contents, i. e., unaffected by culture when the latter is defined as all shared cognitive phenomena. Second, at the earliest stage of individualism, the knowing subject was not taken an object of explanation. For when the knowing subject is taken as the 'thing' to be explained, Baconian methodology is quite useless. Whenever the individual is held to be both logically and chronologically prior to the socio/cultural system, there is no wy to account for the individual as a knowing subject. Intellectually, individualism has already detached him from the very universe in which such an explanation is possible. This charge holds as valid an objection to the Baconian methodology as it holds today to a great deal of psychosocial 'science'. This objection holds too for sociological and anthropological positivists, a most interesting, and ironic, contradiction. THey hold that the individual is not prior to the social system, and at the same time the very way in which they go about to research the human condition is an exercise in Baconian methodology. Random samples, for example, sample individuals as individuals, and it is unusual for samplers to place a sampled individual into his social context at any stage of the analytical process.

While is would be instructive now to move into Locke, a great deal of repetition would be necessary for generally in essential ways the framework of their thoughts was the same as Bacon's. It would be of some value also to devote space to the institutional roots of individualism in France, for we are not dealing there with a simple case of 'culture borrowing' even though the French philosophs (Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, Lielvetius, Holbach, and La Mettrie) had all read the works of Bacon and Locke. The point is simply that the same or similar world-view of conflict and societal transformation and from the same grass roots attitudes of individualism in everyday life. For the philosophs, as for the ideologues (Condillac, Cabanis, Maine de Biran, and de Tracy et. a. ) 3 harbored the same severely critical view of the institutions of feudalism as was so for the literati in England. Everywhere the residual remnants bones of feudalism in the monarchy were being assaulted, and already, as in England, vassal homage counted for little. In Marc bloch's words which applied earlier to the second feudal age, fealty was for sale 4. The chief instruments of production (land and labor) had already passed into the hands of the rising merchant class. Already monarchs were beholden to that class for revenue as the sources of vassal revenue were drying up. The same detachment of the individual from prior debts of loyalty to kindred, to traditional noms and taboos, to 'irrational' elements of feudal life had come to dominate economic life in France as in England. It was but a short logical step from the alienative relations of the market places in France to its more abstract for in philosophy: the detachment of the knowing subject from his socio/cultural context or heritage. About the latter, Taylor observes:

The full significance of the idols makes itself apparent only when attention is directed to the study of human relations. The idols mean that historical social structures are edifices of prejudice, bias, and error. The latter having their foundation in expediency, interests and passion, they become the instruments of exploitation, and at the same time, the living repository of the past stupidities of mankind. It is these implications of the nominalism of bacon... which on being transplanted to France become the revolutionary thought of the philosophs - Voltaire, Diderot /et al./. Finally, the view that society and its institutions are the chief source of human error is taken up by the ideologues, or ideologists, whose task becomes that of first identifying, and then separating the rational idea from its institutional husk. 5

The importance of this statement lies not in the fact that Taylor accounted for French individualism by reference merely to culture borrowing from England- an error to because the individualism in France which had already been present before Bacon and Locke were consulted by Frenchmen. Rather, the importance lies in Taylor's observation that the same doctrine and method of Baconian individualism - on French soil - came to be applied, however fruitlessly, to an understanding of society and to its further transformation! It was Bacon in England, not Diderot in France, who made his peace with the king and the state in general. It was Diderot in France, not Bacon in England who vented his spleen - not in dry light of reason but with the white heat of an angry man:

"Men will never be free, " Diderot exclaimed, "until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last Priest." 6

In France the attitudes of individualism which were everywhere evident as the conceptual bases of new religious, political, and economic institutions and social movements had not in Diderot's time fully risen to bacon's dry light of understanding. What Diderot's exclamation betokens is an ironic, yet enduring paradox in the history of individualism. At the Baconian level of method, when applied to the physical universe, freedom from being determined means that every individual can find out for himself what is true and what is not by his choice to apply rigorously the Baconian method of validation in becoming detached from the alleged chief sources of error, the institutions of society. It has little to say after that about how to be free in society. Yet when the same individualism turns its attention to the problem of freedom from tyranny in France, and what it takes actions to overthrow what remains of feudalism - the chief sources of error - the result is not individual freedom but another tyranny, another mode of political and economic life in another economic order and set of social constraints. Freedom from other- determination in the discovery of 'truth' about the physical world, and freedom from other-determination in the world of institutional conflict have never meant the same things. In Diderot's time, the two were assumed to be one. The tyranny of the masses or the tyranny of the one is tyranny all the same. The postulated freedom of thought in the acquisition of valid knowledge, and the freedom of action in society have never meant the same things. Nor are there any grounds to believe that the first must lead to the second.

The philosophs and ideaoloists of France sought, in the main, to apply to human society what they believed then to be the laws of nature, and of course chief among the laws of nature was the 'natural right' of every man to determine himself and at the same time to assume full responsibility for himself and to accept the consequences of his action. In France, though not in Germany, the concept of liberte meant freedom from authority and full personal responsibility. In Germany it appeared to be just the other way around. To be free meant for the most part to be free from responsibility by accepting the authority of Kultur and of the state which allegedly represented it. That is, any consequences coming from conformity to Kultur, negative or positive for the individual, could not be charged against the person. Doing one's duty as set forth by Kultur was a moral imperative. If harm came to other for being dutiful the one who harmed was blameless. As Fichte once remarked, do not praise or blame me for anything I have done or will do, for it is not I Herr Fichte who was responsible for the act or thought, it was Kultur acting through Fichted as its vehicle that was responsible. Leslie White, the cultural anthropologist, believe essentially the same thing as a cultural determinist. The individual's control over culture he claimed is "an anthropocentric delusion". 7

Seeking better laws for society in the law of nature meant a turning away from the study of history in the 17th and 18th centuries, and it was not until the 19th century that attention was again paid to history. Then, the attempt was to make history scientific. And two main paths were sought: one was to find its universal and necessary laws by applying positivist laws to the study of past events and conditions. (historicism), while the other denied that such laws existed (historicism) and sought not for explanation in any natural laws sense but only for understanding by methods of verstehen, which will be discussed later. But in the time of the philosophs and the ideologists history as a source of knowledge about society, about the individual, about social change was deplored. It had to be about institutions, a study of idols instead of man's 'true' nature. History, Voltaire once said, is a pack of tricks which the living play upon the dead.

Napoleon's critical reaction to the philosophs' attempt to ignore institutions and study of their history, and to their claims about applying natural laws to society was quoted by Pareto:

"All the misfortunes that our beautiful France has been experiencing have to be ascribed to 'ideology', to that cloudy metaphysics which goes ingeniously seeking first cause and would ground legislation of the peoples upon them, instead of adapting laws to what we know of the human heart and the lessons of history. Such errors could only lead /sic.' / men to a regime of blood and have in fact done so. Who cajoled the people by thrusting upon it a sovereignty it was unable to exercise? Who destroyed the sacredness of laws and respect for the laws by basing them not on the sacred principles of justice...but simply on the will of an assembly made up of individuals who are strangers to any knowledge of law, whether civil, administrative, political, or military? When a man is called upon to reorganize a state, he must follow principles that are forever in conflict. the advantages and disadvantages of the different systems of legislation have to be sought in history. " 8

--Reply by the Emperor to the Council of State at its session of December 20, 1812

A sharp antithesis was drawn by individualists between natural laws and human laws, and to such a degree that it become unthinkable in their minds that anyone could give a natural law explanation to tribal and feudal institutions of the past. If such institutions, as Bacon claimed, were the chief sources of error in the method of science, then surely a study of such institutions historically or comparatively would merely compound the error; or else, if there were any laws about history, then surely they did not have to do with competition, and equality of competitors? Why study history in either case? Was not the problem only study, the inner workings of the individuals in wholly biological terms, egoistic terms, to know what to do about society.

2.

IMMANUEL KANT AND THE SURFACING OF RATIONALISTIC INDIVIDUALISM IN GERMANY

The career of Kant (1724-1804) was decisively influenced by G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716) and by Kant's contemporary, David Hume (1711-1776). Yet the whole tradition of German idealism or rationalistic individualism (Kant, Fichte, Hegel) was equally a product of the different institutional structure of Germany had not undergone nearly the institutional transformations that characterized England and France. There ws no nation as Germany was the still cut up into several hundred petty states and provinces with no overall political regime - not at least until Bonaparte's military designs upon those petty states and principalities was successful. Fichte, whose career overlapped those of Kant and Hegel, a close follower of Kant, was fired up by the spirit of nationalism all around him in other countries, and he may be described as a nationalist in search of a nation. Rousseau was as great an intellectual hero to both Kant and Fichte as was Spinoza, and the conflicts between the philosophies of Spinoza and Rousseau were felt deeply among the German literati of Kant's day. There was then no overall or unified economic system - in fact no Germany as we know it today. Its aufklärung was at best the dull afterglow of the enlightenment. The great internal conflicts which had been the two civil wars of England, that would eventually would be Germany. This appears to be a case in which individualism was borrowed, and more at the intellectual level at that, from other nations by Germanic intellectuals.

"Truth' either in the English conception or the French had a different meaning as treue, for in addition to its non-Germanic meanings, it meant in Germany two seemingly different but actually inter-related ideas. Germany's first was the idea of faithfulness unto death (and even beyond the grave); the second was the belief that pleasure finds its end at last in pain. Truth and fidelity were virtually the same. To pursue it (in idealism) was to gave rise to Idea - idea that lay in Kultur, the germinal concept which gave rise to all that was later to unfold as society and state. There was also the idea that God had created Kultur, the state, and that its essence would ultimately dissolve the independent polities of the German people into a single political economy. To abnegate self to the state was at once to fully immerse oneself (or be immersed in) kultur. One derived pleasure in treue by faithfully following he logic given in Kultur to its final end. Or else this pleasure lay in following faithfully a leader who was believed to be the repository of Kultur as head of state. Indeed, these values, expressed in the Niebelunganlied, in German intellectuals of the day. Yet pleasure derived in following the idea faithfully was ever to end in pain, as each new generation would, like Moses, die just outside the promised land - seeing in the mind what could not be touched by the hand. Idea, or concept was thus already more important to Germanic intellectuals than it was in England or France.
It was Kant, among the trinity of German idealists, who seemed less sensitive to the spirit of treue than Fichte and Hegel were. It was Kant who hung onto the belief that beyond the senses there excited perhaps a different world than that which the mind constructed of it. It was Kant who hung onto the belief that beyond the senses there existed perhaps a different world than that which the mind constructed of it. And it was Fichte and then Hegel who came to deny its importance to knowledge, but his students denied its existence. In what way, finally does individualism in Germany of that time become manifest? What is the method of liberation, of objectivity? The method of liberation was ever an historical process of the unfolding of the enfolded idea. It went by stages and in dialectical ways, either through deductive prediction (Kant, Hegel) or by prophecy (Fichte).

Already the centuries of individualism from Bacon to Kant's day had ended not as it had begun but in the skepticism of David Hume. It was Hume, Kant had said, who first awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, but it was Leibniz who had given Kant the starting point by which to resolve the dilemma which Hume's materialism had led to. It is easier to understand the Kantian theory of knowledge (i.e., culture) if we begin, as Kant did, with Hum's dilemma and with Hume's skepticism concerning the objectivity claims that had been made by Baconians or Lockeans from the 16th to the 18th century.

Hume like his forebears was convinced that all knowledge issued into the intellect by means of sensory experience alone. He remained convinced of this even though there was no way to demonstrate it after all his labors to do so. Neither could he accept the idea that there could be anything in the mind prior to experience. Like Protagoras of antiquity, the whole tradition from Hume back to Bacon had argued, in effect, that knowledge and perception were one and the same. However, from Bacon down to Hume the amendment was made that experience gives us the form our thinking or reasoning takes - that it gives us the categories by which we classify and analyze our experiences or perceptions. These categories of thought are the elements of the conceptual system of the intellect. Our intuitions, our ideas about causes or of causal relations between events, our notions about space and time, the distinctions we make between subject and object - these were believed to be given in our sensory experience alone. From perceptions come conceptions and the latter were alleged to come from no other source. All this Hume also believed. Yet he did not accept it on faith; he tried to demonstrate it and found he could not. What he did demonstrate was this: that there is nothing observable in any object of perception, in any event that will signify another object or that will signify a subsequent event. Neither is there anything observable in any postulated consequent event which can signify an antecedent event. From where, then do our ideas of causation come? They are not given in experience. Statements of causal relations (if A, then B; if B then A) were shown not to be given in our perceptions. The problem Hume raised then went deeper than the question of valid knowledge; it was the problem of knowledge itself or how we acquire any knowledge.

In the Appendix of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, the results of his investigations were summed up by the following statement:

There are two principles which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them - viz., that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connection between distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some real connection among them, there would be no difficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege of the skeptic, and i confess that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding. 9 (emphasis is Hume's)

Hume would not consider that the connections between events or distinct existences are products of conceptions, not perceptions, or that it is a characteristic of mind to impose upon perceptions a set of forms. He would not consider that the categories by which we demonstrate relations are innate existences in the intellect before any experience at all. He held doggedly to Locke's tabula rasa idea of mind as a blank slate until experience writes its messages. Yet, some of these 'messages' (knowledge) were not, he said, given in perception. Doggedly he clung to the fundamental axiom of materialistic individualism: nothing exists in intellect that was not first in sense. He refused despite his paradoxical conclusions to accept Leibniz qualification: except what was already in intellect to begin with.

Kant then stated that though experience was necessary to knowledge, the a priori contents of intellect, the logic categories by which we reason are essential to knowledge, and to validation of experience. These were in the subject prior to experience. They were believed to be innate, i.e., given at birth. Thus concepts came to have priority over perceptions; thus too all perceptions were merely first images in the mind.

The question arises, if Kant put concepts above experience as the means to knowledge and as the means to its validation, then why is he classed as an individualist? The answer is that Kant also detached the knowing subject from his socio-cultural context. That is, he did not see that our categories of reasoning or the concepts with which we think and act come from our everyday social, i.e., symbolic, interaction with those around us. He did not investigate and discover any possible cultural variability of the concepts or categories of thought themselves. Had he, he would have seen the fallacy of attributing to biological inheritance the basic templates of thought or the concept we use symbolically in discourse with each other.

As alluded to earlier, both Baconians and Kantians detached the knowing subject from the social processes by different means: the first by then emphasis upon sensate experience of the individual as an organism; the second by their emphasis upon the priority of allegedly universal conceptual categories of reasoning. It is for this reason that I have named the followers of Kant - from his day to now - rationalistic individualists.

Before Kant had derived these insights, he had not questioned the long traditions of rationalism before him - one stemmed largely from the view of the Scholastics, this was a form of Medieval realism which denying the existence o particular or concrete entities and affirmed only our concepts, or categories of understanding. Kant was severely critical of this doctrine, however, in his critical period when he took up the Humian dilemma. He was convinced that rational principles were a part of the process of acquiring and validation knowledge, but he was convinced also that by itself experience could not accomplish its own validation. He was able to show that the data of sense, by themselves, are useless to knowledge - cannot amount to knowledge - and that valid knowledge is thus a derivation of the lentil processes. Kant saw knowledge as a process of interaction between perception and conceptual operations.

Kant's system or method.

There is a distinction between 'data of sense' and objects of sense. Science can work only with the 'data of sense'. Data of sense are untrustworthy. What appears and what exists ae often not the same; sense data may also stand in opposition. Our data of sense as well as what the mind does to them are phenomena. Objects of sense on the other hand constitute things-in-themselve. The world of things-in-themselves - that is, the noumenal world existed apart from the only would we can know, the phenomenal world of mind. It is not directly knowable. (Thus, all of the 'sciences' based upon methodology which assumes that this external world beyond sense data can be known by direct contact alone cannot be a valid science. Thus, Kant wrote off any method of knowing in the Baconian tradition as being delusory for it was not based upon principles of reason. Induction alone was not possible for all inductions were transformed by the mind into concepts, that is, into shapes and forms that were already in the mind to begin with).

The noumenon was defined as the object of no-sensuous intuition; or , negatively, it was not an object of sensuous intuition. In his methodology for science, one need not be bothered by any quest to know the noumenal world. Method pertained only to how we operate rationally (or arationally) with phenomena. Thus postulating a noumenal world was not necessary to the problem of gaining valid knowledge. It was a concept, however, which was necessary to Kant's practical philosophy in dealing with freedom and moral imperatives. Again, we see this curious juxtaposition between freedom of the individual to derive valid knowledge for himself and the freedom of the individual in the practical sense when in context with other moral beings. What can personal freedom mean except detachment o the knowing subject from his social system? Detachment ins science, i.e., in individualist science, appears on the surface to be the same as freedom in society -- alienation of individuals from each other.

How then does the mind operate on sense data in order to have concepts of relationships among the sense data? The mind, i.e., reason related these data, for as Hume had seen, there was nothing given in experience that such relations existed. If relational principles are not given in experience (sense data), then they must be a priori, or logically antecedent to the materials they relate or synthesize.
Kant's method of knowing was critical or 'transcendental'. In creating the materials of sense the mind depends upon a number of principles as valid. One is causality. It is the mind, not experience, that imposes upon discrete sense data the idea of causality between 'events'. The first thing the mind does to sense data is to impose upon it the ideal of spatiality and temporality. It places 'events' or 'instances' in a space and time context. Knowledge of space and time are not properties of 'nature' but are the formal demands of reason. We see them as 'real' for they are part of experience in the two forms of intuitions of sensibility.

Data of sense exist within these two forms of intuition as precepts. How they are related after that into concepts is a function of the operation of twelve categories of reason. These are 'pure principles of the understanding'. They reduce logically to form groups of three categories under the headings: quantity, quality, relation and modality. To quote Kraushaar:

The sensuous materials embedded in the forms of sensibility constitute precepts, while reason, through the understanding, supplies the concepts and principles y which precepts are synthesized into meaningful judgements of Nature. 10

Now this summarizes Kant's answer to the question posed above. What does Kant's answer set aside? B anchoring the acquisition of knowledge in the knowing subject, and by making objectivity a matter of learning hw rigorously to apply principles of pure reason, Kant set aside validational methods used in every type of society which are based on cultural values - differential value systems and differential categories of making judgements.

But suppose that Kant's categories are themselves the abstracted products of operating social institutions, and for that reason are not universal at all? In setting aside the categories of thought and the values of sacred societies in terms of which people make daily judgements, Kant seems to be denying other people the capacity of objective knowledge. Yet, his own categories of judgement are in a different way perhaps as culture-bound as theirs are. Surely, if the work of Boas, Sapir, and Whorf has any validity at all, then the categories of thought as well as those of perception ar not a priori but are given in the rather arbitrary manner in which a particular language structure has been put together. That is, categories of judgement (in minds) are as many and varied as the syntactical structures of languages are many and varied. 11 To understand the actual source of Kant's categories then would be to investigate the syntactical structure of the language which Kant and others commonly used in the Germany of his time, and to investigate the nature of the social institutions within which that language was habitually used in conducting the affairs of daily life.

That Kant was unaware of the connections, or possible connections, between the German language and his own reasoning processes is evident. That he was unaware of the connection between his categories and the social institutions of his day also appears true. By his own method he strived to disallow moral judgements any role in the making of valid theoretical judgements. Moreover, he attempted to set forth the moral judgements that we ought to have or ought to follow as a result of his inquiries. Again, the whole issue of natural laws (whether of reason or of experience) is present. This is the case, and it must be so, whenever the knowing subject is detached from his socio/cultural context. In the cases examined above, this detachment is itself a function of the growing institutions of individualism, and of their diffusion to other lands as Taylor noted:

What Kant has substituted for the values embodied in institutional structure, and which are the basis of the individual's thinking in a sacred society, is a set of forms according to which one judges, but judges judges upon the relations between objects. The scheme may be said to be limited to objects and their interrelations. This only means that an observer judging upon the interrelations of objects according to Kant's categories will arrive at conclusions regarding these interrelations which will differ from those reached when the judgement is on the basis of Value. 12

Earlier, Taylor remarked, "There is, of course, some doubt whether the term objectivity is genuinely applicable to experience for which the validational basis is the category of Value." 13 Later, Taylor observed that kant went so far as to day that in order to eliminate all elements of contingency (bias, etc.) from knowledge - to make it truly scientific - the validating criterial must be a priori, and that they cannot be based on anything having to do with everyday moral judgements or common beliefs or upon modes of logic other than what Kant had used. Thus the only rationality must be Kantian rationality, a rationality which Kant shared with so many in varied institutions of his own time and place. Taylor goes on to say:

To this the sociology of knowledge must take objection. It would hold that the validation framework is built up in the social process, and hence, the view of an absolute rationality is untenable. If, as the sociology of knowledge would hold, the categories have a history, this would mean that the objectivity given by the Kantian categorical scheme, like that given by the sacred society, has its basis in agreement. To say this is to indicate that knowledge validated on the basis of the Kantian criteria is perspectival knowledge, is knowledge from one point of view, and that al knowledge is perspectival in this primary sense. 14

Moreover, if Kantian or Baconian objectivity does have a history, and if it is an abstracted by-product of the institutions of the period, then such an objectivity is but one of many possible forms if so, then what are the criteria by which we would choose among the forms? There appear to be none. Again, if Kantian objectivity is anchored to the going institutions of individualism in Europe at that time, then it could not have been successful in detaching the knowing subject from his institutional context. It proceeded on the supposition that it had done so. What was accomplished was an alienation, but an incomplete one, between knowing subject and posited, external object.

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CONCLUSION