Immanuel Kant’s Epistemology and its Impact
Historical Context of Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy
Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Königsberg. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a protest against religious orthodoxy spread through German Pietism. This religious trend, followed by Kant’s parents, exerted a profound influence on him. Kant was influenced by the rationalism of Wolff but also became aware of the trends from English empiricists. On the other hand, Newton’s physics deeply impressed Kant, and he was also influenced by the French Enlightenment.
From 1770, he began his critical period, during which Kant developed his own philosophy. His main works are Critique of Pure Reason and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. He had a conflict with Frederick William II for publicly exposing Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. The latter was threatened by the spread of the ideals of the Enlightenment in Germany and the triumph of the French Revolution, of which Kant was a great admirer. Kant was forced to sign a letter in which he promised not to talk or write publicly about religion. He died in 1804 in his hometown at the age of 80.
The Enlightenment was not only a philosophical movement but also a cultural one in the broadest sense. It constituted a state of mind with sufficient influence in the literary, artistic, historical, and religious spheres. It developed throughout the 18th century, and in all aspects of life and human activity, the requirements of clarity, justification, and substantiation of claims and statements became apparent. These demands had already appeared in other stages of philosophy (e.g., the Sophists), but in the 18th century, a peculiar way of understanding this instructive activity spread. The movement lasted for a century and had broad implications in different cultural, geographic, and socio-political contexts.
The Enlightenment developed alongside the great liberal-bourgeois revolutions, the English and French. It was one more factor in the process of struggle against the old regime. It started in England, rooted more strongly in France, and from there spread to Germany. The enlightened attitude and rationalist mentality had little impact in Spain. In Germany, the main objective was the analysis of reason and the idea of obtaining a system of principles that guarantee certain knowledge about nature, moral action, and political activity, with Kant being its maximum representative.
Kant’s Epistemological Theory
Kant’s Theory of Knowledge
Kant’s thought attempts to synthesize the two main currents of modernity, rationalism and empiricism, trying to extract the positive aspects of both. From rationalism, he takes the idea that knowledge must be universal and necessary, and from empiricism, he values the importance of experience. Previous theories revolved around objects outside the subject and spoke of reality as something independent of us; they were realistic in nature. The novelty in Kant is the consideration that we know reality according to our mental structures, so what we know depends on us. The subject thus becomes the center of knowledge, which is called the Copernican revolution.
Kantian theory is called critical, not in a pejorative sense, but because it means critical analysis. Kant tries to analyze the possibilities and limits of reason. According to Kant, reason is questioned by four key questions:
- What can I know? (Philosophy)
- What should I do? (Politics)
- What may I hope? (Religion)
- What is man? (Anthropology)
Kant attempts to answer the first question in his work Critique of Pure Reason, where he tries to solve the problem of whether or not metaphysics is a science. To resolve this question, Kant starts by discussing the requirements of science. Science must be universal knowledge, valid in all cases; necessary, meaning it cannot change; and progressive, meaning it increases knowledge.
For him, all knowledge consists of judgments (statements), and these must be universal (a priori judgments, i.e., prior to experience), necessary, and progressive (synthetic judgments).
Classification of Judgments According to Kant
Judgments can be analytical or synthetic. They are analytical when the predicate is contained in the subject (e.g., “A triangle has three angles”). They are synthetic when the predicate is not contained in the subject (e.g., “Llerena, March 16, 2010, has a 10% unemployment rate”). Analytic judgments are universal and necessary but do not progress in our knowledge. However, synthetic judgments are progressive; they increase knowledge as we read them, but they are neither universal nor necessary.
Judgments can also be a priori because they do not depend on experience and are universal and necessary. A posteriori judgments are those that are derived from experience; they are a kind of induction, needing to look at experience to draw conclusions. According to Kant, for science to truly be a science, it must be universal, and hence a priori, and it must advance knowledge, and therefore be synthetic. According to Kant, mathematics and physics use these synthetic, a priori judgments, but what about metaphysics? Does it also work with these kinds of judgments?
In his work, Critique of Pure Reason, he establishes a division into three parts:
- The Transcendental Aesthetic, which deals with mathematics
- The Transcendental Analytic, which deals with physics
- The Transcendental Dialectic, which asks questions about metaphysics
In aesthetics, the power is above all the senses; in the analytic, it is understanding; and in the metaphysical, it is reason.
Transcendental Aesthetic
In this first part, Kant questions our sensory capacity. Our knowledge begins by receiving something coming from outside that we perceive through the senses, giving rise to sensations. That sensation is not yet knowledge because, for him, it must be prepared and organized by the subject. These elements serve to organize our sense experience, not from experience, but that the subject has a priori.
According to Kant, for real objects to be grasped by us, they should be given in a given space and time, so these are themselves of the subject and allow us to capture and organize reality (a priori conditions of sensibility). We always know objects arranged in a space and time, and ultimately we give up knowing things as they would be without that space and without that time. What we know, Kant calls this phenomenon, while the reality stripped of space/time would be the thing itself.
Transcendental Analytic
Sensitivity gives us intuitions of objects, but to get knowledge of them, we need the unifying work of understanding. This option directs the multiplicity of views on concepts, and according to Kant, there are two types of concepts: a posteriori and a priori. The first are the concepts we have formed with our experience with reality, for example, that fire burns. The latter are categories. According to Kant, there are 12 categories, grouped into four distinct groups:
- Quantity: unity, plurality, totality
- Quality: reality, negation, limitation
- Relation: causal, substantial/accidental, reciprocal action
- Modality: existence, possibility, necessity
Example: The sun heats the stone (unity, reality, causal, and existential). According to Kant, judgments of physics are based on these 12 categories, and that’s what makes science a science.
The Transcendental Dialectic
According to Kant, thought does not end until it reaches the level of reason. Sensitivity unifies impressions due to space and time, and so are the phenomena. Understanding, in turn, unifies phenomena through concepts. Finally, reason unifies all our experiences through the three transcendental ideas: the idea of the soul, the idea of the world, and the idea of God.
For our author, we cannot get any experience from these ideas, and therefore we fall short of reaching reliable knowledge. In short, metaphysics would never achieve the status of science, but we cannot renounce it; asking questions about the soul, God, or the world is inevitable.