Immanuel Kant
In the complex web of influences on the development
of Vilém Flusser’s thinking, the role played
by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is most difficult to understand. Kant is not one of the philosophers
cited most often by Flusser – in fact, his name
is rarely mentioned by the Czech-Brazilian philosopher,
although he was influenced by German
and Austrian philosophy. Yet in a letter written to
the poet Paulo Leminski Flusser refers to Kant
as someone he “wished he could agree with”
(correspondence with Paulo Leminski, September
20, 1964; translated from the Portuguese).
This statement shows Flusser’s awareness that
Kant’s systematic and elegant reasoning engenders
a desire in the reader to believe that Kant
actually is right: that the incredible complexity of
his philosophy could actually be commensurate
with the reality of the facts – a desire that would
be frustrated over and over again, as it seems to
be suggested by Flusser. One can refer to two
sections for practical examples of Flusser’s fundamental
attitude towards Kant: one paragraph
from Língua e Realidade [Language and Reality]
(1963) and another quotation taken from a later
lecture named “Hearing Aids” (German manuscript:
“Hoerapparate”; abridged and revised in:
Angenommen, 1989).
In the above-mentioned paragraph in Língua e
Realidade, after introducing his hypothesis that
language corresponds to reality, Flusser claims
that the plurality of languages necessarily corresponds
to a plurality of realities. Considering
this, Kant’s transcendental philosophy is
mentioned not only to apply it to the class of
synthetic languages in general, but, more specifically, to the particularities of German grammar:
“As a matter of fact, if there were only one
language, we would all, naturally, be Kantian
(that is, if this one language were German or any
German-related language).” (Língua e Realidade,
2004, p. 51; translated from the Portuguese)
In the other example, when discussing the mechanism of our auditory perception, Flusser refers to the Kantian discussion of “schematism,” which mediates our sensory perceptions via concepts, filtering the predominantly acoustic material so that it becomes intelligible: “The world is conceived as programmed noise. Therefore, sounds between the world and us must be organized. Hearing aid. The problem is that it is an invisible apparatus, whose purpose or origin we are unaware of. Sometimes it seems the apparatus is part of the world itself; at others, it seems it is part of ourselves, as if it were a consequence of our ear’s structure. Dear old Kant racked his brains to try to solve the problem, but he failed.” (Ficções Filosóficas, 1999, p. 64; translated from the Portuguese).
Original article by Rodrigo Duarte