The Critique of Pure Reason, the main philosophical work of Immanuel Kant, was published in 1781, the result of reckless writing after many years of deliberation. Before its creation, Kant reported that it was no longer possible to keep such complex material in mind, and it was urgently required to write it down. Immanuel Kant is engaged in criticism of the pure reason that caused the revolution. The book laid the foundation for transcendental philosophy and shocked contemporaries. The Königsberg philosopher examines the foundations of human’s cognitive abilities and concludes that they are limited. Unlike many philosophers before him, his treatise shows that the human mind cannot decide such issues as the existence of God, the soul, or the beginning of the world.
Kant’s first work in his Critical Writings, including Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment, was published within a few months. The fast-paced writer Kant, who wrote his doctoral and doctoral dissertations in the same year, previously took nearly a decade to perfect his ideas and get his thoughts through to the end. In 1770 he received the chair of metaphysics and logic at the University of Königsberg, to which he aspired.
In May 1781, the author finally published Critique of Pure Reason. However, the public reaction was sobering: the book was considered too bright and incomprehensible. Two years later, Kant tried again to create a simplified and abridged version, but the so-called abstracts of his work caused no less amazement. Moreover, the result turned out to be even more incomprehensible than the original because of the abbreviations.
Kant anticipates modern constructivism when he argues that people have only limited perceptual capabilities to view reality. Kant wanted to reconcile empiricism and rationalism through his philosophy. Still, he dismissed his astonished readers and numerous students at the university with the depressing conclusion that they could never know the real world in themselves. The Critique of Pure Reason is by far one of the most challenging things world literature has to show. In addition, the understanding of Criticism is burdened by the fact that its text is written in a unique language and is inaccessible to the reader without philosophical training.
There are two Critics, and this should be taken into account by those wishing to master its content. The presence of two editions is since after reading the first edition, readers ranked Kant as a follower of subjective idealism, not seeing in him the creator of an entirely new philosophical movement, transcendental idealism. To resolve this misunderstanding, Kant had to prepare a second edition, where he expressly stipulated the difference between subjective and metaphysical idealism.
Transcendental idealism is a cognition that deals not with objects, but with the types of human’s cognition of objects, since this cognition must be possible a priori. This fundamental formulation implies that all knowledge must begin with the conditions of the possibility of the experience that person has. Opportunity conditions are those cognitive abilities with which people shape their own experience. The word criticism in the title does not mean to criticize in the sense of complain but instead means investigate, analyze, reflect. In this sense, Kant is the pioneer of philosophical criticism. His work emerged at a time when several epistemological theories were battling each other on the battlefield of metaphysics. The main themes in the philosopher’s book were rationalism and empiricism.
Rationalism receives all the knowledge from outside the human’s mind. Experience is irrelevant and can be misleading; therefore, only the thinking subject is responsible for the conclusions and the search for solutions. Kant criticizes this unconditional view and believes that there are conditions of knowledge that do not depend on experience. Empiricism considered experience as the only source of knowledge. Nothing can enter the mind that was not previously in the senses. On the one hand, Kant also agrees with this epistemology, there is a world that can be perceived by the senses. On the other hand, he argues that a priori knowledge is also possible, that is, without the help of experience.
Kant’s outstanding achievement lies, first of all, in understanding that there is an area, a thing in itself, that people can never understand because of their insufficient cognitive abilities. It is an almost cruel realization that no one has ever spoken about with such clarity. What can be seen is not actual reality but a mixture of sensory impressions and their processing by human’s mind. All the knowledge are always constructed by human’s review. Kant is one of the great critics of metaphysics, that area of philosophy that deals with the origin, foundation, and purpose of all that exists. One of the main tasks of the Critique of Pure Reason is to clarify how metaphysics is possible at all.
The main question of the Critique is how a priori-synthetic knowledge is possible. All knowledge available to a person can be divided into two types: a posteriori, obtained from experience, and a priori, not associated with understanding. Knowledge is transmitted by judgments, respectively, and all decisions can be divided into two types: analytical and synthetic. It is easy to guess that all a posteriori judgments usually should be synthetic and all a priori – analytical. However, Kant discovered a third, not entirely standard, type of judgment, namely, a priori-synthetic. According to the logic, such conclusions should not be; it is impossible to learn something new about what is not taken from the experience.
In order to resolve the irreconcilable conflict of empiricism and rationalism, Kant initially criticized two opposing basic positions. He opposed rationalism, stating that feelings are an independent source of knowledge. They provided material without which command would not be possible. On the other hand, the philosopher reproached the empiricists for the fact that empiricism was already a theory that could not be found in feelings. Therefore, it seemed to Kant that knowledge arises when sensory data is processed in the human mind. Kant boldly formulated this basic idea: thoughts without content are empty, views without concepts are blind. Only the unity of feelings and understanding leads to learning.
According to Kant, this is primarily an understanding that forms and constructs phenomena for itself. To do this, he chooses stimuli that are appropriate or necessary for his patterns of actions or thoughts. Without mental activity, all sensory perceptions would be simply unstructured data. Thus, the organization and context of how nature appears to man is not determined by it but depends on how the cognitive apparatus processes it.
The author is talking about the pure reason because Kant is primarily interested in the possibility of knowledge independent of experience. Unlike Locke, and because of the triumphant successes of Newtonian mechanics, he considers the opportunity of empirical knowledge to be problem-free. The system of transcendental ideas includes the absolute, unconditional, unity of:
- The thinking subject (as a subject of psychology).
- A number of conditions of phenomena (cosmological ideas are the subject of cosmology).
- The requirements of all objects of thought in general (theological ideas are the subject of theology).
The application of the ideas of pure reason is, according to Kant, a regulatory application in relation to reason and not to objects. Thanks to regulatory ideas, the mind does not create any concepts about objects but only orders them.
The answer to the central question of Kant’s philosophy will be that it is possible due to the division of the world into phenomena and noumena and the transcendental structure of human cognitive abilities. Suppose people organize the world in which they live and think. In that case, two components can continuously be distilled from experience: that which belongs to human a priori abilities and that which came from the outside, from the noumenal world. The first will be responsible for the a priori part of cognition, and the second – for the synthetic one.
The Critique of Pure Reason is so fundamental and far-reaching, not least because it places the problems of epistemology, logic, and metaphysics within the overarching concept of human reason. The results of the Critique of Pure Reason extend to all areas of philosophy, as Kant himself shows in his works many perspectives of his learning. For example, ethics and philosophy of law, in natural philosophy and aesthetics, in political philosophy, religious philosophy, and historical philosophy that appear after it.