I. As Descartes had observed, the knowledge I have about myself has a characteristic of certainty. This knowledge is not a set of particular thoughts I assert, but the underlying objective knowledge that I exist; a worldly fact, rather than my perception of it. Kant agreed with this sense of intrinsic knowledge to some extent, but claimed that we can be immediately certain only of the contents of our consciousness, our mental states, not of the 'I' Descartes suggested precedes them. In the subjective sphere, being and seeming collapse into each other, something which Kant felt the extremes of rationalism and empiricism failed to account for. This dual mode of experiencing the world, as we shall see, is a thread that runs throughout Kant’s thought, as well as, later, that of Merleau-Ponty who emphasised the importance of direct experience in understanding the nature of consciousness. II. The pertinent question for Kant became not whether I can have (a priori) knowledge of an objective world (Leibniz's substances and properties, arrived at through reasoned argument, science and common sense, whereby each individual view constitutes a mirror to rational principles of reality), but whether I can have objective knowledge of what this world based on how it seems to me. Hume's empiricism argued that all ideas are acquired through the senses, through our own individual experience, and therefore denied that reason could exist independently of our own ideas. He argued that when we refer to objective reality we are merely saying that "those perceptions exhibit a kind of constancy and coherence that generates the (illusory) idea of independence... the regular succession among experiences...". In other words, that does not exist beyond our experience of it. Kant sought to incorporate the truths of both objective rationalism and Hume’s empiricism to show that neither experience nor reason is alone able to provide knowledge. The former provides content without form, the latter form without content: “In describing my experience I am referring to an ordered perspective of an independent world." This leads to the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge and of the impossibility of divorcing the object known from the perspective of the knower. There are admittedly certain prepositions that cannot be established through experience, since their truth is presupposed in the interpretation of experience, such as mathematics or the idea, for example, that 'every event has a cause.' These things are true universally and necessarily. But our own perspective of the world is in some measure a constituent of our knowledge. And so it is vain to attempt to rise above that perspective and know the world ‘as it is in itself’. We can know the principles in which its nature is anchored, but this knowledge taken on its own is limited. It is only through the synthesis of concept and intuition that judgement is formed. III. In debating Kant’s position on truth and knowledge there is often disagreement among commentators as to whether this “thing-in-itself” exists independently of our concept of it or whether, as Kant seemed to suggest, it and its appearance are in fact two ways to conceptualise what was essentially the same thing. So we have seen that the world of the senses and that of the understanding are separable only in theoretical terms. That’s not to say that such a division is not useful in our analysis of the nature of truth but, as phenomenological philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty pointed out subsequently, such a division does not correspond to the nature of our experience in the world. Kant was eager to assert that, despite this inseparability of object and appearance, appearances must be grounded in a reality that is not itself merely appearance. And yet he acknowledges that we can never know this “world as it is”, unconditioned by experience. To aim to do so would be to aspire beyond the conditions that make knowledge possible. Kant’s idea of pure reason, the highest of our cognitive faculties, does not contradict this supposition, it is grounded therein. It is no more possible for me to make the “I” into the object of consciousness than it is to observe the limits of my own visual field. This “I” is the expression of my perspective, but denotes no item within it. Suggested follow-on reading: Merleau-Ponty “The Visible and the Invisible”
0 Comments
|
AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
Categories
All
|