It is easy to see the trouble one has reading Kant for the first time when the following passage is regarded as constituting an introduction,
"Kant holds that we do not know our noumenal selves by any act of rational intuition (light of nature). For Kant, pure apperception is an act of spontaneity and as such is different from sensibility, which is a passive receptivity for sensible intuitions. The self for Kant becomes aware of itself and gains knowledge of itself only by bringing to self-consciousness (through a transcendental act of synthesis) the manifold intuitions provided by sensibility. Accordingly, the self knows itself only as an appearance (phenomenon)."
This is an introduction to the Prolegomena, which makes it an introduction to an introduction, and yet the writer still seems unaware that he is using at least nine words in one paragraph in a specialized manner.
"Kant holds that we do not know our noumenal selves by any act of rational intuition (light of nature). For Kant, pure apperception is an act of spontaneity and as such is different from sensibility, which is a passive receptivity for sensible intuitions. The self for Kant becomes aware of itself and gains knowledge of itself only by bringing to self-consciousness (through a transcendental act of synthesis) the manifold intuitions provided by sensibility. Accordingly, the self knows itself only as an appearance (phenomenon)."
This is an introduction to the Prolegomena, which makes it an introduction to an introduction, and yet the writer still seems unaware that he is using at least nine words in one paragraph in a specialized manner.
2 comments:
I counted 13 Philosophical Terms. :-)
The basic point isn't too bad. Descartes thought we knew the self using something called "the light of nature" which (conveniently) is never wrong and lets us see into our own souls. Later empiricists like Hume said we have no such faculty, and we can only get a sense of self from introspection. Hume concluded that there is no self, just fleeting perceptions. Kant thinks that the true Subject is a creative act of apperception—that is, it's an active doer—but our senses are all passive receivers, so there's no way to get a real picture of the self. All we get are Object copies based on the Subject, so the copies remove the most critical part of the original—the active doing.
As Heidegger might say: We can't see the insides of things, including things that are selves.
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