Was reading about Schopenhauer and how he was critical about Kant’s view of Transcendental Idealism. Every explanation I find online is rather confusing and explained in this way: “Man can only perceive appearances, which are dependent on the mind, and cannot access the mind-independent world of things in themselves.” What does this mean?
In: Other
Transcendental idealism is a very simple concept. All it suggests is that the way I experience is different than the way you experience. That’s because experience is shaped by the mind, and because you are I are individuals, the two of us have have similar but different perceptions of the world. For instance, the way I taste an apple is not exactly the same way you taste an apple. The flavor is modified by our individual senses.
It goes a little deeper to explain how we process emotion and other intangible experiences, but it’s the concept is the same. The difference between individuals guarantees a spectrum of experience and that there is no such thing as an objective perception of the world.
It’s a concept I fully agree with. It’s why we must rely on science to guarantee an objective understanding, otherwise we’re mired in subjective reality. I should note some of this is what Kant says about his theory, and some of it is what I draw from Kant’s reasoning which he may or may not agree with. I think that only goes further to prove the point.
You can know the reality as it appears to you. How does it appear to you? As it is given through experience. Experience gives us only finite objects and the relations among them. So we can know (have legitimate knowledge claims) concerning finite things. Hence, positive sciences.
However, we can not have legitimate knowledge claims concerning the condition of the possibility of finite things. In other words, that which brings the universe as the totality of finitude into existence (aka the unconditional, absolute, the infinite) is beyond our cognitive capabilities since this condition is not given to us in experience.
In a nutshell, we can have knowledge about the universe, but we can’t know why there is a universe. You can have faith, though (yet you can’t act as if yours is the true faith in contrast to all other infidels’).
It means that, if there is an objective reality, humans cannot perceive it directly, because we have to rely on the senses’ ability to observe and the brain’s ability to think, both of which vary from person to person and can be easily fooled.
Take color:
What you see as “red” has no inherent redness to it outside of a human eye. It’s just a narrow wavelength of light that happens to interact with a chemical that happens to exist in a cell inside a ball in your face. There are many animals that can’t see it at all. There are many *people* who can’t.
But it’s hard for people who are familiar with red to imagine a world without it. Or to imagine replacing it with something else.
There is the way we experience things, and the way things are in themselves, separate from how we experience them. You cannot know what things are like separate from how you experience them.
But, we can know that whatever you experience will be in space and time, and casually connected to other things. This is because space time, and causation are necessary features of our experience.
Latest Answers