It can be said that the 18th century most certainly belonged to the likes of Hume
and Voltaire, but the 19th would be awarded to the immensely influential philosophy of
Immanuel Kant. As said best by philosopher and historian Will Durant “It was Kant who labored
best to rescue mind from matter; who argued so irrefutably (because so unintelligibly)
against the uses of ‘pure reason,’ and who, by the prestidigitation of his thought,
brought back to life, magician-wise, the dear beliefs of the ancient faith.” I believe it
would be foolish and near impossible to capture the immensely complex philosophy of Immanuel Kant
in just one video, so instead we will focus on aspects of his Transcendental Idealism,
namely on his claim that the external world is unknowable and that the reality we know
is only mere interpretation from our minds. The fantastic and exhilarating thing about
Kant is that his writings, profound as they are, stir debate among philosophers. The identity of
his Transcendental Idealism remains to this day an enigma. Keep in mind as we continue; that your
interpretation may differ slightly from my own. Before getting started I would be incredibly
grateful if you would subscribe to the channel, I post videos relating
to eastern and western philosophy every week. I would like to begin with a quote from Kant
himself, he said “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding,
and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.” Beneath the surface of this
statement from Kant, there is much to unpack. First that there are two distinctions of knowledge
that must be understood, knowledge that is a priori and knowledge that is a posteriori.
A priori meaning in Lain “from the former;” refers to knowledge that can be known without
experience or data from the senses. A prime example of this is mathematical equations,
for we cannot conceive that 2 + 2 can or will ever in this world or any other equal anything but 4,
because 2+2 and 4 are one in the same expressed differently. Likewise we cannot begin to think
that the shortest distance between two points will ever be anything but a straight line.
A posteriori meaning in Latin “from the latter;” refers to knowledge gained through sensory
experience and cannot be understood independently of reference to sensory knowledge. For example
the statement “My dog is black” would not be knowable without first gaining sight
conformation of his black color. This knowledge unlike a priori knowledge is subject to change
upon one gaining broader evidence. Second we move to the senses,
for Kant said “all knowledge begins with the senses.” In order to understand Kant we must
understand the terms phenomena and noumena as he understood them, he believed that all
objects can be categorized as one or the other. In regards to phenomena Kant explains this
term as “the realities or appearances that are interpreted from our minds.”
And in regards to noumena he explains this to be the things that exist regardless of
our minds interpretations. Kant claimed that this knowledge will always be unknown
because we only have the ability to know the world that is presented to us from our mind.
Kant does not mean to convey that an external world outside of our mind’s
personal perception does not exist, but only that our mind limits reality, that phenomena
and phenomena only can be known since we only know the world around us through our senses.
I think an example is in order to better explain. Let us take an orange as this
example. We feel the shape and texture of the its rind, the cool temperature of its core,
we smell the citrus entering through our nostrils, we see the bright orange color
reflecting through our retinas, and we taste the combination of sweetness and bitterness saturating
our taste buds. When combined these sensations have created this “thing” we name an orange,
all of this is phenomena, what we can know. Outside of these sensations we can conceive
that this “thing” presumably still exists, this is noumena and will always be unknowable
as our sensation Kant believed is all that we can truly know, anything else is only
speculation. This is the limitation of the mind. He believed that speculation about noumena should
be avoided and said that “metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse,
strewn with many a philosophic wreck.” Instead of this speculation we should spend our hours
examining our own mental abilities and how they relate to what we perceive in our own personal
reality. By this self-examination he thought that we would learn more about important philosophic
questions. With this view of metaphysics I suppose Kant as said by Durant “did not
foresee that the greatest of all metaphysical tempests was to be of his own blowing.”
The effort to answer these problems that transcend sense-experience Kant
calls his transcendental philosophy, and it is not so much concerned with the objects,
as with our a priori concepts of objects. “Even so matter-of-fact a man as Schopenhauer,
and rabid a heretic as Nietzsche, accepted him, and looked upon his reduction of the world to
mere appearance as the indispensable preliminary of every possibly philosophy” – Will Durant. In
future videos I plan to expatiate on this as well as other aspects of Kant’s philosophy.
I attempted to explain this small part of Kant’s philosophy to the best of my current ability and
as said earlier in the video the identity and credibility of his philosophy remains debated. I
hope this video has helped you understand this one aspect of his incredibly complex philosophy. If
you would like to learn more about Immanuel Kant Will Durant recommended starting with Wallace’s
Kant, and for a great criticism of his work to read Schopenhauer’s World, Will, and idea. I could
also recommend reading Durant’s section on Kant in his book The Story of Philosophy; I will put the
links to these as well as the audiobook version of this work of Durant’s in the description below. I
hope this video has helped you in some way, if so don’t forget to subscribe to see more on eastern
and western philosophy, as always, thank you for talking philosophy with me, until next time.