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Before
Kant, philosophers had debated for centuries whether
knowledge is derived from experience or reason. Kant says that
both views are partly right and partly wrong, that they share
the same error; both believe that the mind and the world, reason
and nature are separated from one another. Building on an insight
from Hume,
Kant says that our reason organizes our sense perception to
produce knowledge. The mind is a creative force for understanding
the manifold of new, unconceptualized sense impressions with
which the world bombards us. And Kant says we cannot know the
"thing-in-itself" - the object apart from our conceptualization
of it.
Kant's
"transcendental" philosophy transcends the question
of "what" we know to ask "how" we know it.
He seeks to discover the rules or laws of the understanding;
he concludes that we can never transcend the limits of possible
experience, declaring "I have had to limit reason to make
room for faith." For Kant, space and time are not external
realities; they are tools of the mind in organizing experience.
And we are unable to determine the ultimate nature of some things,
such as whether humans have free will.
Kantian
ethics asserts that we endure a perpetual struggle between duty
and desire. The moral Law is universal and it speaks to us through
our conscience. Kant's "categorical imperative" is
to act only according to the maxim by which you can at the same
time will that it should become a universal law of nature.
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