Brace yourselves, PhilosoFans.
You all knew this was coming:
it's time to have a look at some Kant.
[electronic intro music]
[music fades to background]
This week we're trying something a little bit different.
Instead of examining a question, we're going to go through a famous philosophical idea
and try to understand it together.
Okay, so for those who haven't heard of him, Immanuel Kant was an 18th century Prussian philosopher
and, as well as being one of the cleverest people who ever lived,
he was also probably the most famous philosopher of modern times.
This guy was the Tom Hanks,
the Usain Bolt,
the Bob Dylan
of philosophy.
He wrote so much stuff and we're only going to look at one tiny, tiny little bit of it,
but his writing is famous for being really, really hard.
So before we jump into one of his most influential ideas, we're going to need to have a little bit of context.
During Kant's time, philosophy was puzzling over the question of how human beings acquire knowledge,
and the debate was broadly split into two different camps.
On one side, you have the empiricists: clever men and women who thought that if you wanted to get knowledge,
you had to experience the world.
So, if you want to know whether or not there's a pink elephant hiding in your refrigerator,
you'd better go and have a look.
On the other side, you have the rationalists, like Rene Descartes:
clever men and women who thought that the only way to get knowledge
was to use this thing right here, buddy!
After all, your senses can deceive you sometimes.
That pink elephant in the refrigerator might be a hallucination.
The only things that you can be totally certain about is the stuff that you can figure out,
like two plus two is four and all triangles have three sides.
Empiricists: Yeah, but that's not going to get you very far, is it?
Rationalists: Well, maybe not, but at least it's certain!
And, so it went on.
And into the middle of this debate swaggered Immanuel Kant,
who wrote an extremely long and insanely difficult book,
called "The Critique of Pure Reason."
Kant was pretty sure that experience was important for knowledge,
but he also realized that it couldn't account for all the concepts you have in your head.
Take the concept of space, for example --
as in 3D space,
[Space Core: Spaaaaaaaaaaace!] as opposed to the big black thing up there.
How could you ever acquire that through experience?
You couldn't ever go, "Huh, that thing is over there and I'm over here, so there must be space in the middle."
Because, in order to say, "That thing is over there," you must already have had the concept of space
in the beginning!
What Kant realized was that certain concepts, like space (he also included number and time),
must be in our heads from the beginning.
Our minds must be hard-wired to experience the world in that way.
It's a little bit like Pokemon.
You go out and you capture new knowledge,
but you always get a starter and a few Pokeballs to get you on your way.
So you're born with these concepts -- the technical name Kant gave them was "synthetic a priori concepts"
but you probably don't need to worry about that.
They're a condition of having a mind. You /need/ them in order to have experience.
You can't leave Professor Oak's lab until you've picked a starter.
But, brace yourselves, because here comes the twist:
if we're born with certain concepts, like space and time, and we have to experience the world that way
and there's no way we can experience anything except through those filters,
then how do we know that space and time and all that stuff
are really features of the real world?
[Inception Bwoooonng]
And this
is one of Kant's most famous and influential bits of philosophy:
He divided the world into two halves:
on one hand, you've got the world of experience -- of space and numbers and time that we inhabit --
that's called the Phenomenal World.
And on the other hand, we have the world as it /really is,/ in itself, independent of our observations.
That's called the Noumenal World, and we can never experience it,
because as soon as you experience something, it's part of the Phenomenal World.
And there it is: one of the most famous and difficult pieces of philosophy in modern times.
[raspberries]
There are some ways to critique it, but you guys probably want a break after all that information
and maybe you can come up with your own ideas to critique in the comments.
I'll give you a clue to get you started on one of them:
The world is not necessarily the way we think it is;
the world is /not/ the way we think it is.
Hmmmm.
What do you guys think? Is Kant onto something here or is it all just crazy Prussian nonsense?
And what do you think about this format, going through a famous text? Is this useful to you?
Do you want to see more of this?
Leave a comment with your questions and suggestions and we'll answer them at the end of the next video.
Favorite, share, tell you're friends about PhilosophyTube. You can also follow us on Twitter.
And leave a "Like" if you've never heard anyone compare Kantian metaphysics to Pokemon before.
Also, one other quick announcement: I'm afraid that there won't be an episode in two weeks time,
because I'm actually going to be at the Edinburgh Fringe performing live stand-up comedy.
Details in the description if you're in Edinburgh during that week and you fancy some giggles.
So, there will be an episode in three week's time and it will hopefully be a really good one
that we can have a lot of good discussion about.
["Death, Death" by Aurelio Voltaire in background]
YouTube Comments: "the undiscovered Country, from whose bourn / No Traveller returns."
Let's see what you guys had to say about death and fear.
Pearl said that fear originates from the unknown, and that's why we're afraid of death
because we don't know what's going to happen to us.
I'm not really sure I agree with that. Does fear /only/ orginate from the unknown?
Like, I don't know what the square root of 919 is, or how many grains of sand there are at the beach,
but I'm not really afraid of that.
And some things that I do know quite well I am really afraid of -- like, pain, for example.
Also, I wasn't afraid of my driving test because of the unknown, I was afraid of my driving test because
I am really bad at driving.
Shinysquid pointed out quite rightly that, whilst it may not be rational to fear death,
we're animals, so we're probably going to go ahead and be afraid of it anyway because
we have an in-built aversion to dying.
Bobsobol said that they fear about being dead is that they wouldn't be around to support
the loved ones that count on them.
But, of course, Lucretius would say that you won't know that you're ever going to be in that state.
You won't know they're not receiving your support.
So you're being afraid of a state that you will, as far as you're concerned, never enter.
BBrucker2 came back with a really nice answer that said that if being afraid of death is all about
the consequences for those left behind,
then logically, we shouldn't fear events that wipe everybody out and don't leave anybody behind.
That's a really good point. Of course, if that sort of thing happened, then we wouldn't be there to worry about it.
We also had a little competition to see if we could name the official PhilosophyTube mascot.
Thank you for all your suggestions and sending those in.
I quite liked Friedrich Neightzche [NAY-Cheh].
So thank you to DSfan81 for that. I think that probably came in second, just.
Eh, thank you also to Andy Gill. Jeff would have been a pretty good name as well.
But I think, in the end, the best one was probably "Thomas Equineus."
So, congratulations to Michael Ruigrok for sending that one in.
You have now named the official PhilosophyTube mascot.
Eh, that's all from us. Please wish me lots of luck for the Edinburgh Fringe.
And me and Equineus and Albert Camus will see you all in the next episode.
Byyyyeee!
Song ends: I'm just kidding kid, welcome to Hell. Enjoy the buffet.