Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future MetaphysicsKant, Immanuel
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Kant, Immanuel
Knowledge, Theory of -- Early works to 1800; Metaphysics -- Early works to 1800
Our critical deduction by no means excludes things of that sort
(noumena), but rather limits the principles of the Aesthetic (the
science of the sensibility) to this, that they shall not extend to all
things, as everything would then be turned into mere appearance, but
that they shall only hold good of objects of possible experience.
Hereby then objects of the understanding are granted, but with the
inculcation of this rule which admits of no exception: "that we
neither know nor can know anything at all definite of these pure
objects of the understanding, because our pure concepts of the
understanding as well as our pure intuitions extend to nothing but
objects of possible experience, consequently to mere things of sense,
and as soon as we leave this sphere these concepts retain no meaning
whatever."
§ 33. There is indeed something seductive in our pure concepts of the
understanding, which tempts us to a transcendent use, —a use which
transcends all possible experience. Not only are our concepts of
substance, of power, of action, of reality, and others, quite
independent of experience, containing nothing of sense appearance, and
so apparently applicable to things in themselves (noumena), but, what
strengthens this conjecture, they contain a necessity of determination
in themselves, which experience never attains. The concept of cause
implies a rule, according to which one state follows another
necessarily; but experience can only show us, that one state of things
often, or at most, commonly, follows another, and therefore affords
neither strict universality, nor necessity.
Hence the Categories seem to have a deeper meaning and import than can
be exhausted by their empirical use, and so the understanding
inadvertently adds for itself to the house of experience a much more
extensive wing, which it fills with nothing but creatures of thought,
without ever observing that it has transgressed with its otherwise
lawful concepts the bounds of their use.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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