Kant’s reckoning with the true elements of knowledge ushered in a “Copernican Revolution”.  Kant focuses on his study of knowledge by distinguishing between the material and the form of sensation. The content of our sense knowledge comes from experience. The form, however, is not derived through the senses, but is imposed on the material by the mind in order to provide the material universal and necessary. The form is, therefore, a priori; it is independent of experience.  Kant called this content or stimulation input, intuitions as it comes from the senses. He also contended that there are innate categories of the mind which condition, mold and give form to these incoming sensual stimuli.  The mind possesses logically, but not chronologically categories such as sequence, size, causality, substance and modality. Time and space are considered pure intuitions which condition all knowledge gained through the senses.  The mind shapes the received information through these a priori categories.  These true elements of knowledge paved the way for Kant’s understanding of certain realms of knowledge; the phenomenal and noumenal realm. According to Kant one cannot know the thing in itself (Ding an Sich) by pure reason; one is therefore limited to sensual and shaping mental categories of the mind.  Therefore, one can never know the noumenal realm by pure reason from the phenomenal realm.  The noumenal realm is the real of essence of being of eternal realities, including God and the things one cannot physically touch. In view of that, the phenomenal realm is the realm of sensual reality, the things which we experience through the senses. This realization was a powerful and influential synthesis of empiricism and rationalism which for Kant led to the disposing of metaphysical claims to any cognitive status – no longer regarded as knowledge.  This meant that knowledge through pure reason is always limited by sensations and the a priori forms and categories of the mind.  Therefore, that which comes through sensation (intuitions) is shaped by the minds a priori categories and forms.  Kant did support the reality of knowledge and indeed his quest was to establish the condition of the possibility of there being knowledge at all.  Yet in the process he greatly limited what is called knowledge and especially the knowledge of God.  In favor of the cognitive status of sense phenomena by pure reason absolute knowledge, that which is above experience is unattainable by purely intellectual processes (pure reason). This restriction of knowledge of the noumenal realm opened the way for many philosophers to claim that theology only deal with symbols that are not literal or historical.

Posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2012 at 18:00 in Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy   |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback URL