Background Importance And Essence Of Kant — страница 3

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answers to the questions: what is the nature of space and time? Is there some way to avoid Hume’s “psychological predisposition to believe” which leads to, at best contingency and at worst, skepticism? What is the proper role and scope of metaphysics? Is metaphysics really the queen of sciences, as the philosophical tradition since Aristotle had held? Kant provided his genuine answers to these questions when, in 1781, he published his Kritik der reinen Vernuft, referred to in English usually as The Critique of Pure Reason. What Kant means by “pure reason” is, simplistically put, reason independent of all experience. His fundamental question was: what and how much, apart from experience, can we know? He was, therefore, not concerned with the objects of knowledge, rather

with the conditions under which we can know anything. Kant preserved the Cartesian emphasis on subjectivity, but he was not particularly interested in it, as Descartes was, for providing a basis of knowing about objects. Kant’s subjective concerns were for the formal conditions under which we can know. Philosophy has always rotated around this issue and has sought to solve it through different ontological means. Kant approaches this issue by claiming in the Introduction of The Critique of Pure Reason that, Hitherto it has been assumed that our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial to

whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics if we suppose that objects must conform to knowledge. Thus Kant does something comparable to the endeavor that Copernicus had undertaken by radically shifting human understanding of the polar system. After the unsuccessful trials to examine the stars and their motion through the view-point of the observer, he tried to handle this problematic issue by leaving the stars in peace and making the observer “turn around them.” Kant does a similar thing in the realm of metaphysics. If we grant that the mind conforms to what it perceives, i.e. the physical objects, it would be impossible to show that there can exist a priori knowledge. But if we make the object of sensitivity conform to the nature of our capability to

have sense experience, then the existence of a priori knowledge becomes plausible. In order to deal with the above mentioned questions, Kant divided his Kritik into different sections. Besides the Prefaces and Introductions, there are the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” and the much smaller section named “Transcendental Doctrine of Method.” The Elements section is in turn subdivided into the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and the “Transcendental Logic.” These two subdivisions correspond to the twin stems of knowledge — sensibility and understanding. Kant devotes the “Aesthetic” to sensibility and the “Logic” to understanding. As he makes it abundantly clear, both are necessary for knowledge. Kant acknowledges in his work that human reason strives to

answer certain fundamentally important questions, yet by its inherent limitations it is unable to do so. The battlefield for this struggle is “metaphysics” and, until now there are two competing sides — the dogmatists (or rationalists) contended against the skeptics (or empiricists), as I have mentioned earlier in my paper. Kant believes that he can finally put an end to this controversy by providing an exact analysis of human mental powers. He attempts to show that knowledge is safe-guarded against skepticism by showing first that there exists a priori knowledge and that it is possible that we have it. Against the dogmatists Kant demonstrates that while we can and do have knowledge, the conditions that make it possible are at the same time that which limit knowledge to

experience. As I have already mentioned, Kant believes that his task is to set out the formal conditions that make knowledge possible. By marking out the limits of knowledge and by restricting it to experience, Kant is ruling out the possibility of knowledge concerning the three important issues of the existence of God, freedom and the immortality of the soul. The fact that there cannot exist knowledge concerning these three questions does no render them worthless, however. Kant instead maintains that the idea of God as opposed to knowledge of him, has, what Kant calls, a regulative use. We must, he insists, believe as if there is a God. For questions of morality this is equally crucial. While we cannot prove that we are able to act independently of any and all empirical