Critique of Immanuel Kant’s Idea of Abolishing the Delusions for the Sake of Intellectual Progress

Immanuel Kant had a keen awareness of the schism separating the capacity of human beings to perceive the world around them and truly know about things in the world. Despite how unsettling the truth may have appeared at the time, Kant viewed the removal of delusion within human thought as a necessary component of man’s intellectual progress. Through his writings addressing the natural sciences in the preface to the Critique on Pure Reason, Kant expresses that even among our most noble attempts to learn about the cosmos, our best application of reason leaves us only with illusions. Our senses shed a candle on the world that we inhabit that prompts us to know things with a penetrating depth and certainty, but our perception does not give us the tools to grasp all it illuminates. The faculties of our mind open up the world to rational examination, but by the same token, they present the most foreboding barrier to all that human beings desire to know. From this frame, human beings lack the resources to know the objects of the material world as well as nature itself, yet they are unaware of their inability to do so. To see that the tree of knowledge is in front of us, but to lack the awareness that its fruit cannot be plucked is a hazardous deficiency in our thinking. Kant’s role in removing this deception is grounded in his efforts to clearly delineate the boundaries of our reason and reveal the shallowness of our knowledge.

Whatever information one may be able to extract from an object must be given by our intuition. Being conscious and having sense perception allows us to acquire subjective mental representations of the objects that we perceive. In contrast to subjective representation, intuition is an objective manner of representation. Intuition constitutes the structure of our thinking that allows us to construe the nature of the objects that surround us. Space and time are forms of intuition because they shape our interactions with our surroundings. With space being a part of intuition that is externally imposed and time being internally imposed, they are purely features of our mind, things that are germane to human cognition and do not exist exterior to our perception. At the beginning of Remark II, Kant conjoins our concept of space with all the bodies in which they are located in order to conclude that we can only know appearances of things. This is a reflection the reality that subjective representations of objects cannot be extracted from our modes of thinking that order them. The crux of all this is that despite Kant’s admission that experience is at the core of informing our reason as well as all of the natural sciences, experience does not span the gap between what is simply a concept of an object and what constitutes an experience of the object itself. To have a concept of an object arises from a singular interaction within a particular context, but to truly know that object demands a universal understanding of it. There is no singular interaction with any material thing that yields knowing the thing-in-itself in the same way that such considerations as virtue such as courage and honor remain just as elusive. As a human being in the material world, we are given glimpses of the truth underneath our daily interactions, but can approach them only by piecing together a deeper understanding from isolated appearances.

Kant recognizes that this stance regarding man’s relationship to his surroundings bears a resemblance to previous currents of philosophical thought, particularly idealism, and seeks to explain how his analysis is not a continuation of a preexisting idea, but is his own distinct contribution. From his view that human beings can only possess appearances and not knowledge of things-in-themselves, Kant acknowledges a deceptive resemblance between his formulation of perception and idealism, but makes a greater effort in highlighting the differences among these theories rather than their similarities. Along with conferring the reality of appearances, Kant’s view regards the world we inhabit as being real as well, but the only knowledge that is available is that of our concepts, and not insight into our surroundings as they objectively stand. In the manner that he defines the term, idealism does not have an equally truthful view regarding the way in which our senses convey our surroundings and their objective nature. Idealism retains the notion that sense perception delivers an entirely unfaithful portrait of the actual domain of reality. Idealism that imagines a world of only thinking beings effectively fortifies the wall between the mind and external reality. This vision only gives human beings actuality, but through examination, it is not humans as a whole that are most real, but rather the insulated and isolated province of the human mind. It is a reality mapped by a collective consciousness, but can only be encountered one individual at a time.

Kant’s work revolves around his efforts to discover the basic elements of our rationality, and in the process of analyzing the various representations that occur through man’s interaction with his environment, attempts to show what is real about the physical world. George Berkeley was far less focused on the organization of our thinking and how it filtered our experience so much as he sought to show that thinking beings existed. He sought to support his faith in the significance of thinking beings by actively attacking any system that supported the presence of material objects. By noting that our awareness of physical objects was merely an indirect approximation of our ideas, which we are intimately dependent on, Berkeley attempted to justify that such objects can only be represented, never entirely known. As far as Berkeley was concerned, ideas and what they could represent were the only things of value. He stripped the significance of material things so far as to say that objects do not even carry value in their ability to convey abstract ideas.

In order to distinguish his views within the corpus of modern philosophical thought, Kant must address the credited theories on the relation of the mind and the exterior world. While has clearly attempted to divorce his thoughts from those of George Berkeley, he has to acknowledge the same thread of consideration present within such luminaries as René Descartes and John Locke. In particular, Kant states that idealism has been popular since the life of Locke, but has been taken up with even greater zeal in the intervening period a la Berkeley. Though Berkeley departed from the dualism of Descartes and Locke as a strict idealist, due to the fact that Descartes and Locke ascribed a similar degree of reality to the human possession of ideas, they all maintained some extent of agreement. In this vein, Kant was met with a significant challenge in attempting to emphasize the benefit of his view over that of the prevailing tradition. At the outset of his argument, Kant restates a central claim of Berkeley’s idealism, which is that there are no things-in-themselves. Within this theory, heat, color, and taste are among the qualities of an object that manifest themselves as appearances, but do not exist outside of the mind. Kant pushes this theory a step further, by suggesting that the primary qualities of a body, namely, extension, location, and space are also inventions of our cognition. To these idealists, Kant says that they cannot put forth a single reason against this proposition. In this part of the argument, Kant appears to tacitly suggest the troubling nature of such a strict version of idealism. The Berkelean idealist is inclined to say that the properties of the object do not exist within the object itself, but are located within the mind. Within a worldview where reality is only given to thinking beings, the interaction of our sense perception with exterior objects does not give us appearances, so much it as our own way of perceiving imposes the features that exist as mental representations. There is a kind of arrogance in attempting to give the highest reality to our own features and it is disorienting in how it implicitly states how the things external to us possess none of the features that we are able to see in them. Due to the fact that each quality of an object presents itself as a certain kind of appearance, they are not viewed as being bound in any way, and thus lack all structure. Since space and location are also viewed as principles of the mind, the structure of perception falls away because it exists solely in us. This is aptly contained within Kant’s view that this idealism effectively “destroys” the existence of all objects that can be perceived.