akshobhyavajra's Full Review: Immanuel Kant - The Critique of Pure Reason (1890)
Introduction
First I am going to state the obvious: it is very difficult to grasp where modern day philosophy stands without a somewhat basic understanding of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
I would suggest familiarizing oneself first with his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, since it presents much of the underlying structures of the Critique in a clearer form.
Once that basic understanding is gained, Pure Reason becomes more transparent.
Historically, 18th century philosophy was in a schism between rationalism and empiricism. This complicated the dispute over the status of religion and the threat of science.
Kant's aim was to place these concerns on a secure basis while limiting their claim to unqualified truth -
he was equally committed to reason and experience,
science as well as morality.
Synopsis
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant affirms that our capacity to perceive objects in the external world is dependent upon the subject's imposition of certain conditions of the possibility of experience. Time, space and the categories are among these. Hence human beings are capable of viewing only the appearance and not things as they are in themselves.
Now a thing in itself cannot be known through mere relations; and we may therefore conclude that since outer sense gives us nothing but mere relations, this sense can contain in its representation only the relation of an object to the subject, and not the inner properties of the object in itself. This also holds true of inner sense, not only because the representations of the outer senses constitute the proper material with which we occupy our mind, but because the time in which we set these representations, which is itself antecedent to the consciousness of them in experience, and which underlies them as the formal condition of the mode in which we posit them in the mind, itself contains relations of succession, coexistence, and of that which is coexistent with succession, the enduring.
Being consistent with the modern tradition Kant states that the acquisition of knowledge is dependent upon the perspective of the subject. He does, however, break with the tradition when he describes the subject, the human being, as not having direct access to his own mind. Kant states that both external objects and inner sense are presented as appearances to the subject.
If the faculty of coming to consciousness of oneself is to seek out that which lies in the mind, it must affect the mind, and only in this way can it give rise to an intuition of itself. However the form of this intuition, which exists antecedently in the mind, determines, in the representation of time, the mode in which the manifold is together in the mind, since it then intuits itself not as it would represent itself if immediately self-active, but as it is affected by itself, and there as it appears to itself, not as it is.
Kant is arguing that one’s own mind is observed only as an appearance based upon the temporal conditions of inner sense. Thus, the mind, as a thing in itself, is not directly available to the understanding. If any real knowledge of one’s own mind is unavailable, it hardly seems possible to know whether other minds exist at all. Kant denies that knowledge relating directly to external objects or the mind is available to the knowing subject.
He states further that it is required that we affirm the actual existence of the external world. It is the only means one has to mark the passage of time required for inner sense (Kant does not address the challenge of proving the existence of other minds).
Kant believes in the actual existence of the external world, but also concludes that knowledge related to the mind is unavailable.
Within the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant asserts that one can establish freedom as a causal source of reason as there is no possible source for the ethical impulse of “oughtness” from the sensible world. This does not reveal anything about the “reality of freedom”, but it does show that “causality through freedom is at least not incompatible with nature”.
Kant concluded that the knowledge of human beings is limited to a realm of appearances. He contends that rational beings must also assume that they act according to the notion of freedom even though they can know nothing about it.
Conclusion
Kant's work is rather difficult to read and understanding it is even more laborious and difficult. I first started reading this work in 1975 and to this day don't feel that I have completely grasped the scope of what he was attempting to convey. I do suggest some preliminary historical study as a primer to the actual work.
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