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By Root 814 0

to categorize our experiences in certain ways under various concepts such as time, space, and causality within a singular consciousness, or “I.” All knowledge comes from our experiences, but all of our experiences come to us through our mind. So our world and everything we can know about it is filtered through our mind first. The basic structure of our mind, therefore, determines the nature of perceived reality or the phenomenal world as Kant denotes it. This process categorizes and connects our experiences according to innate concepts of the understanding, making sure our experiences are coherent, but also by determining that only certain kinds of thoughts will be thinkable. The long and the short of it is, we can only know things we can experience and our experiences are a result of how our brain works. So our brain determines what we can know through determined concepts and categories. Only certain things are knowable because only certain things are thinkable. Anything beyond the limits of the human mind, beyond its concepts and categories, beyond possible experiences, is unknowable.

Consider Conrad. His world is only comprised of twenty-six letters because that is as far as his alphabet goes. It can’t go further, and anything beyond Z is pure nonsense, and will remain so as long as he remains within his limited alphabet. This means that Conrad’s world is limited to only those twenty-six letters and what he can say with them. His experiences must fit within that framework in order to be coherent, and so knowable. Anything beyond them is unable to be said, unthinkable, and so unknowable. Kant claims to have done nothing short of having defined the alphabet of the human mind and thus the limits of all possible knowledge. Thus he has claimed to have found the limits of our world, our experiences, and basically our lives.

The consequence of Kant’s theory of knowledge is significant. If we can only know things of which we could have a possible experience, then the majority of our lives occur on the margins of knowledge. Consider that most of your life is not simply about facts and observations but evaluations built on things like God, souls, free will, dignity, or beauty; things we can’t experience and so can’t know. For Kant you can’t know any of this stuff, not like you can know the sky is blue. For some this isn’t problematic. They will just do as they always have done without any worries. But Kant, and philosophy, isn’t for these people. Philosophy is for thinkers and people who care about why they believe what they believe and wonder whether they should believe it. For them, this result is devastating. The issues that determine the meaning of our lives are according to Kant unknowable, and this poses a problem—can we speak about right and wrong or religion and beauty with any authority if it’s the kind of thing that can’t be known? Kant answers with his second and third critiques, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment. Beyond Z there may be certain letters that we are permitted to utter, but they are few and far between and still regulated by laws.

List of Ideas for People Who Don’t Stop at the First Critique

We’ve done plenty of Kant for a Dr. Seuss book, so I’ll only worry you with the second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. In the second critique, Kant seeks to ground ethics. This is problematic for Kant since ethics implies free will, and the freedom of our will is not provable. But without free will we can’t be held accountable for our actions, and ethics is all about praise and blame. So we need to be able to make claims about our freedom at some level. According to Kant’s framework we can’t know that we are free. In fact, the more we learn about ourselves the more it seems we’re determined by material processes and are in no way free. We’re constantly finding new laws of behavior, chemical processes that determine brain states, moods, and so forth. It seems the more we learn the more we appear to be nothing more than complex machines, and machines run on programs over which they