Topics Philosophers

Question Hi, I read in a book, which according to Kant, "our concepts seem to agree with the facts because both have a common origin, the human condition. We can explain only those aspects of the world assigned to it by ourselves, so the nature of deep reality remains forever unattainable." In a discussion of physical reality, said that this concept of Kant is outdated. It is true that information? Where can I find this argument against the thought of Kant. Thanks!

Accepted:
November 29, 2009

Comments

Please have a look at responses to similar questions: click on'philosophers' on the list of categories, and then search for 'Kant'.

I'd like to comment here on the quotation that you cite, becauseit seems to me (at least when taken out of context) to be amisleading representation of what Kant actually argues. First of all,let of think about the notion of a 'common origin' in 'the humancondition': this makes it sound as though Kant is concerned with thepsychological origin of concepts and of facts, as if his work couldbe without remainder reduced to, say, evolutionary biology,linguistic relativism or cognitive science. All three of these areperfectly interesting fields of enquiry, but they miss the notion ofthe transcendental in Kant.

Second of all, the notion of a 'aspects of the world assigned toit by ourselves' seems to entail that there are other aspects of theworld that are not assigned by us. The problem comes from thinkingthat there is a set of 'superficial' aspects S that we can know, anda set of 'deep' aspects D that we cannot – in other words, that Sand D are the same kind of thing, namely aspects of the'world' or of 'reality'. If that were the case, Kant's epistemologywould be little more than a fairly naive scepticism, one thatstresses the limits of the senses. For Kant, however, there is noobject that cannot in principle be known, because the definition of'thing' or 'object' is that which could in principle come to beknown, precisely through its aspects. For Kant, viewedtranscendentally, a 'fact' (he prefers to talk about 'things' or'objects') are particular synthetic mental acts, and a concept is ourconsciousness (also synthetic) of the unity of that act. Accordingly,the infamous 'thing-in-itself' is not a thing– that is, not an object in an ordinary sense, which exists outthere somewhere and which has aspects, but which just happens to beout of the reach of knowledge. Viewed from the other 'side',so to speak, the issue is not that the human mind has this or thatlimit, but that it is a mind at all. Kant's epistemologybegins from an ontology of thought (see for example B71-2 in theCritique of Pure Reason.)