The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant — Kant — John Shaqi
The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant
Kant · en
Now, although we perceive an objective reality, sense perception
obviously gives a very imperfect knowledge of objects. We see only some
sides and aspects of things, and not others. What we see depends on
changes in our position. Further, we know that what we see is only a
small part of the nature of anything. We think of reality as an
interconnected system, but we only perceive a very small part of it, and
what we perceive depends upon the particular time and the particular
part of space in which we live. In our experience we are never really
content simply with what we perceive; we perceive much too little for
that. We are always inferring from what we see to something beyond it.
What is that something beyond, which, as we have seen, is implied in all
judgment? We might hold that it was the things as they really are as
distinguished from things as they appear, or phenomena, and that, when
we turned from perception to thought, we turned from illusion to
reality. Kant denied this. He held that, if you examine a scientific
judgment about anything you perceive, such as that yellow thing is gold,
you will find that, if you know what the judgment means, you will be
able to say: Then, under such-and-such conditions--if you weigh it, for
example--you will have such-and-such a perception. The appeal is not
from what you perceive to what you think, but from what you perceive now
to what you will perceive under such-and-such conditions. Such a
reference indeed, implies thought and what is ordinarily called a
concept; but our knowledge of concepts used in science always means
that, if we know what is meant _e.g._ by calling anything gold, we know
how it will behave under such-and-such conditions. The concept, in
Kant’s words, is a function of unity in our representations. The task
of thought, then, is not to turn the mind away from what we perceive,
but to help us to transcend some of the limitations of our perceptions,
or, to speak more accurately, to set somewhat further back the limits of
our perception; for thought never entirely transcends these limits. Our
knowledge is always conditioned by the fact that we are finite minds
living in a particular place and at a particular time; but thought can
extend the range of our perception in space and in time.