>Hello JLN
>Yes, in fact the discussion is very dead. Why don't we start one? Would
>you please tell us a little about "the architectonic structure of the
>Kantian system"?
>Atefeh
>
Atefah, et. al.,
I am not a Kantian, so I am not sure how much detail I can give about
Kant's architechtonic structure. However, if you are more interested in
the Frankfurt School's critique thereof, I may be more helpful.
The architectonic structure of the Kantian system simply refers to the
elaborate theoretical apparatus which Kant builds up to explain (away)
metaphysics. Kant's system which attempts to find a middle ground or
perhaps resolve the debate between rationalism and idealism creates a three
level tier to several different metaphysical questions (this is the part I
am skimpy on). So there is this elaborate and carefully laid out plan by
Kant which, from the viewpoint of critical theory, answers nor resolves any
of the important social or moral issues with which philosophy should be
concerned. For example, Kant divides the world into the neoumenal and the
phenomenol, but by so doing he relegates all freedom and all desire for
liberation to the noumenal, that is to the world of mental images but not
physical reality. Thus, the practical world, practical life, has no
substantive goal - there is no good life in Kant. Rather, we are all
suppose to live by a rationalized lifestyle which serves the dominant (and
dominating) interests of society.
It is interesting to note that Kant's philosophy is not without its
own emphasis on freedom (though, again, a freedom Kant relegated to the
mind and made uselss or impotent in the physical world (confer Marcuse's
Eros and Civilization), and Foucault himself refers back to this in his
last written piece, What is Enlightenment. Basicall Foucault says get rid
of totalizing theory,and Enlightenment is an attitude in which "the
critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis
of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility
of going beyond them" (50). This relates to Kant's architectonic structure
in that it is Kant's structure which structures and sets limits on what we
are. We are rational beings who cannot prove freedom in the phenomenal
world (where it counts) but must assume it in the moral realm which puts
limits on who we are. All of our actions in the Kantian system must be
universalizable (the Categoricla Imperative). Foucault, of course, would
reject any such totalizing struture.
JLN "The architectonic structure of the Kantian
jlnich1@xxxxxxxxxxx system, like the gymnastic pyramids of
Sade's orgies and the schematized
principles of the early bourgeois
freemasonry reveals an organization of
life as a whole which is deprived of
any substantial goal."
from _The Dialectic of Enlightenment_
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