The Fatal Flaw of Kantian Philosophy: We Cannot Judge Whether It Is Correct
I am reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
I stumbled early on at the “Transcendental Aesthetic: Space and Time.”
It is not because the text is too difficult; I am reading the Cambridge University Press edition, and the English is plain enough to understand without issue.
The problem lies in Kant’s logical progression itself.
Kant argues that we can only perceive phenomena through our a priori forms of sensibility, and therefore, we can never know the “thing-in-itself.” To me, this seems completely obvious.
Download the Medium app
Subscribe to Pro Writer Tools to remove upgrade prompts from your unlocked stories.
If we discover laws that apply to our observable universe, there could still be — and probably is — an unobservable universe out there. We cannot know if our laws hold true in that unobservable realm, and since it is unobservable, there is no real need for us to know anyway.
The fatal flaw in Kant’s argument is that his own thinking is also a worldview filtered through these a priori faculties. Consequently, whether his theory is correct can only be judged through those very same a priori faculties. I feel that while Kant’s logic serves as excellent training for analytical thinking, it is by no means a method for reaching the ultimate truth of the world.
I started reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit simply because I felt I should read the classics. I intend to keep going a little longer to see how it unfolds. At a pace of ten pages a day, I will be fortunate if it takes me only two months to finish one volume.
No comments:
Post a Comment