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"I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."
Oh Kant, Kant, Kant, Kant, Kant. Kant. You're such a problem.

I blame the cold, rainy weather, for rendering the atmosphere so contemplative that it inspires introspection and reading.
To state the fundamental question in mind so plainly, is reason capable of knowing reality?
I have such a deep appreciation for and admire these Enlightenment thinkers, who challenged their own beliefs.
Too often are they touted as absolute champions of reason and empiricism, when they were actually their harshest critics.

At any rate, I'm providing a short write-up of Kant's essential argument from his work, Critique of Pure Reason.
To further my own understanding, and perhaps inspire introspection into your own beliefs regarding the matter, dear reader.


------- Background -------

During Kant's time the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge (see: epistemology) experienced a hard schism between the rationalists and the empiricists. In the rationalist camp, it is believed that knowledge and concepts can be arrived at either through deduction and/or intuition alone. An example of this is intuiting that the number three is a prime number greater than two. From this you can deduce the knowledge that there is a prime number greater than two. Notice that the process of intuiting and deduction are both examples of coming to knowledge a priori, or in a manner independent of experience. You don't have to experience through the senses that the number three is a prime number greater than two, or that there exists a prime number greater than two; you can simply think it. There's a bit more to this rationalist camp, particularly when it comes to the subject of innate knowledge, but being familiar with this first, central thesis is good enough.

Contrast to the rationalists are the empiricists, who believe that knowledge and concepts can only be arrived at a posteriori, or through experience. It is their belief that observation through the senses are the only mechanism by which humans can come to know true knowledge. A very intuitive position to have, I must admit, but that may just be the scientist in me speaking. But to any of you that are agonizing over which camp is superior, rest assured that it has been decided that both have their merits and their practical, assigned domains of competency. Rational-minded people will find their home in the field of mathematics, whereas those of a more empirical persuasion will find the physical sciences as their refuge.

Fundamentally, the rationalists and empiricists disagreed on how knowledge and concepts can be arrived at. However, for all of their differences, both broadly agreed that reason--the human faculty each individual possesses--is capable of knowing reality objectively, autonomously, and in a manner concordant with universal principles. Of all these traits though, Kant took issue with the objective nature of reason; he maintained that noumenal (a little bit of Kantian terminology here. A phenomenon is something in reality you experience through your senses. A noumenon is something in reality that exists independently of human observation and perception), objective reality is closed off to human reason. Reason, by its very nature cannot be objective.


------- Sense-Perception Analysis -------

To arrive at this conclusion, Kant borrowed from the examination of sense-perception and how reason related to it. From these investigations were two main points. One, reason does not directly interface with the objective world. Reason operates on internal representations that are generated through sense perception; it does not operate on objects out there in the external world. If we see this as a causal process, it appears as if reason is aware of some end, internal state, and not of the external object that generated this causal process. Two, there is far too much variability both between people (The dress phenomenon that swept the Internet of 2015 is a good example) and within people (the human hearing range is typically between 20 Hz - 20 kHz. Past age 25, the perceptibility of sounds above 15 kHz is greatly reduced) when it comes to sense perception that reason only has a subjective effect to work with, not anything close to resembling objective reality.

Okay, so this analysis of sense-perception has been understood by empiricists as highlighting the need to take our observations with a grain of salt and tentatively accept conclusions derived from sense data, ceding that no absolute conclusions can be drawn. Meanwhile, rationalists concluded that sense-perception is useless when it comes to finding significant truths and thus we should turn elsewhere.


------- Concept Analysis -------

That elsewhere lies within concepts (abstract ideas). To the empiricist, concepts are just as bad as empirical observations because the material required to form concepts are derived from the very same empirical observations. Worse still, because they're a grouping of empirical observations, they're reflective of individual choices and not necessarily that of universal truths; thus no propositions generated from them have no necessity or universality ascribed to them. However, to the rationalist, the material required to form concepts isn't to be found through empirical observations, but since we do have necessary and universal knowledge, the source must be found somewhere else. Unfortunately the implication here is that, if the material required to form concepts is not found though the senses and experience, what possible application could they have in the sense-experience realm? There'd be little utility in that manner.

Taking these two analysis into consideration, the following realization becomes apparent: either we accept that concepts can tell us something that is universal and necessarily true but none of it is relevant to the realm of sense experience (i.e. natural human life), or we accept that we have concepts that say something about the realm of sense experience, but it isn't universally and necessarily true.

Seeing as how reason utilizes concepts to make theories and propositions, it calls into question the validity of the assertion that science can generate universal and necessary truth. If we accept the premise that reasoning utilizes concepts that are irrelevant to the sense-experience realm, how could that assertion stand? If we accept the premise that reasoning utilizing concepts that are created from contingent groupings of sense-experience, again, how could that assertion stand?


------- Kant's Argument -------

In making his argument, Kant first identified a premise that was shared between the empiricists and rationalists alike and forms the basis for realism: the assumption that knowledge must be objective. Whether or not there are consciousnesses to experience reality, reality exists independently of it. The purpose of consciousness is to become aware of reality. In Kantian terms, both camps assumed that the subject is to conform to object, not the other way around. This is exactly where the point of contention lies with Kant, and argues that both groups have it wrong.

First, Kant offers a dilemma, stating that there are only two ways in which what we experience (Kantian term: synthetic representations) and objects can interface with each other. Either the object alone makes the representation possible, or the representation alone makes the object possible.

If we are to accept the first alternative, that the object alone makes the representation possible, then that implies that the subject has no identity (for it is interchangeable with any other subject; they should experience the same thing). This is heavily suggestive of the proposed metaphysics (theory of the nature of reality) of naive realism (so-called 'common sense' realism), which posits that our senses detect objects as they really, truly are. Needless to say, this isn't necessarily true, as anyone who has been drunk enough can attest that maybe that boy or girl from last night wasn't as cute as they appeared. The point here being, the subject HAS an identity, and that identity shapes the way we perceive objects. Consciousness is not a blank tablet on which reality writes itself on; it's loaded with presuppositions and has a hand in creating it's own synthetic representations. Since the subject is heavily implicated in creating these representations on which reason works off of to come to knowledge, it cannot be said that objects alone are sufficient to arrive at knowledge.

Thus Kant proposes the second alternative, namely that representations alone make the object possible, to be true. With objectivity abandoned for subjectivity, only then can we make sense of empirical knowledge.

Kant also sought to square away the problem of necessary and universal concepts. As we established before, concepts from a empirical standpoint suffer the same pitfalls as sense-perception and therefore are far removed from anything resembling necessary and universal truth. Similarly, if approached from a rationalist point of view, if the knowledge is necessary and universal, it's irrelevant to the sense-perception realm. In order to resolve this problem, Kant once again discarded the assumption that knowledge is objective and worked off of the premise that representations alone make the object possible. By doing so, we implicate that that our role as subjects is involved in creating our experiences, and that our identity will generate necessary and universal features from our experiences.


------- Conclusion -------

Right, so what is the conclusion of all of this? By acknowledging that sense-perception is subjective, and therefore empirical knowledge is subjective, we can identify necessary and universal knowledge in the phenomenal world. Simultaneously, we can also generate necessary and universal concepts about the phenomenal world. The key phrase here is phenomenal world, with nothing to be said about noumenal reality. The implications of this are that science, based off of reason, which in turn relies on sense-perception and concepts to generate theories and propositions, is limited only to the phenomenal world and cannot comment on anything regarding objective, noumenal reality. As it would turn out, the primary motivation of Kant's arguments were to impose limits and boundaries on reason, to defend morality and religion from the onslaught taking prevalence at the time. And it really is a valid argument, however not necessarily sound as it's unclear if the premises are true. Well...something to contemplate over the next few days.

In all honesty the entire affair leaves me anxious. Leave it to thinkers such as Kant and Hume to tear a girl's heart into two.

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