GETTING TO KNOW IMMANUEL KANT

[Audio] Who is Immanuel Kant? Watch this video to learn who is this philosopher and more importantly his views about what the self is..

[Audio] Immanuel Kant is a German philosopher considered by many to be the greatest thinker of the eighteenth century. Kant attempted to synthesize the two competing schools of the modern period, rationalism and empiricism, by showing the important role both experience and reason play in constructing our knowledge of the world. His works include the Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

[Audio] Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, then East Prussia, now part of Russia, to a harness-maker of modest means. As a boy, Kant was sent to a Pietist school for his early education. At sixteen, he enrolled in the , also known as the Albertina, where he became interested in philosophy..

[Audio] When Kant graduated six years later, he was not financially able immediately to pursue his academic career, and, therefore, worked as a private tutor for several years. At the age of 31, he obtained an unsalaried position as a private docent at the university, lecturing an average of twenty hours per week on an array of subjects including logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and physical geography. In addition to teaching the dominant Wolffian-Leibnizian philosophy, Kant also incorporated ideas from abroad..

[Audio] David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau , in particular, became influential in Kant's thought, and he shared his reflections on these thinkers with his students. Kant published several significant essays during the first decades of his career at the Albertina. Although these essays were not nearly as influential as his later works, they already contained the seeds of his "critical philosophy.".

[Audio] As an academic at the Albertina, Kant led a life of strict self-discipline. It is said that his routine was so rigid that his neighbors would set their clocks by the time of his afternoon walks, which he missed only once, the day he discovered the Emile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This self-discipline served him well, allowing him to focus all of his energies on developing his thought. Despite the singular regularity of his routine, Kant led a lively social life. Those who knew him described him as a sparkling conversationalist as well as a captivating lecturer. He entertained frequently at home and was a prominent figure on the Königsberg social scene..

[Audio] Kant did not publish his first major work, the Critique of Pure Reason, until 1781, at the age of 57. This book was the result of over a decade of reflection in which he published nothing else of significance. However, its appearance quickly established his reputation across Europe, and inaugurated a period in which Kant brought his most enduring works to print. His influential Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of the Power of Judgment all followed within the next decade. These works, together composing Kant's "critical philosophy," secured him international renown and came to dominate German philosophy. Kant continued producing significant works well into the 1790s. Kant's last official lecture took place in 1796. He died on February 12, 1804..

[Audio] Where does the order and organization of our world come from? According to Kant, it comes in large measure from us. Our minds actively sort, organize, relate, and synthesize the fragmented, fluctuating collection of sense data that our sense organs take in. For example, imagine that someone dumped a pile of puzzle pieces on the table in front of you. They would initially appear to be a random collection of items, unrelated to one another and containing no meaning for you, much like the basic sensations of immediate unreflective experience. However, as you began to assemble the pieces, these fragmentary items would gradually begin to form a coherent image that would have significance for you. According to Kant, this meaning-constructing activity is precisely what our minds are doing all of the time: taking the raw data of experience and actively synthesizing it into the familiar, orderly, meaningful world in which we live. As you might imagine, this mental process is astonishing in its power and complexity, and it is going on all of the time. This lesson will focus on Kant's views of the self. It will highlight empiricism and rationalism and Kant's critiques of both. In addition, it will define apperception and representation..

[Audio] For starters, metaphysics can be summed up as the branch of philosophy that deals with being, substance, and identity. Relating this to our lesson, let's take a look at what Kant thought of self and being. Stated simply, how do we get our knowledge of self? During his era, much of philosophy centered on self-knowledge. In other words, how do we know what we know and where does this knowledge come from. Is it internal or external?.

[Audio] Many philosophers of Kant's day considered empiricism as the only path to true knowledge. Keeping things simple, empiricism asserts that knowledge is only attained through the senses. In other words, seeing is believing! If something can't be seen, tasted, touched, heard, or physically experienced, it might as well be a fantasy! Standing in opposition to empiricism, many of Kant's cronies espoused rationalism. Rationalism is the theory that reason, rather than experience, is the foundation of all knowledge. For instance, my eyes might tell me that a 3-D monster is jumping out of a screen, but my rational mind lets me know it's not! Seeing isn't believing! Reasoning is!.

[Audio] Working to find a middle ground in this debate on self-knowledge and perception was Immanuel Kant. According to him, we humans have both an inner and an outer self which unify to give us consciousness. The inner self is comprised of our psychological state and our rational intellect. The outer self includes our sense and the physical world. To explain his views a bit more, we need to get into pretty heady and nebulous terms. They are apperception and representation..

[Audio] Kant argued that apperception occurs in the inner self. In a nutshell, apperception is how we mentally assimilate new ideas into old ones. Occurring through rational reasoning, it's how we make sense of new things. For an example of apperception, suppose Kant owns a dog weighing in at about 200lbs, his dog is huge. For this reason, when he meet an 80lb dog, He doesn't consider it to be big. However, to a person who spends all day with a tiny little Chihuahua, the same 80lb dog would seem immense. In other words, his rational thoughts on big are based on his already formed apperceptions of his big beast, while others are based on teacup-sized canines. Neither is right or wrong, they are just based on internal reasoning that can't be experienced through the senses..

[Audio] Moving on to representation, Kant argued it occurs through our senses. As part of the outer self, representation can be simplified as mental imagery based on past sensations and experiences. For instance, I have never been to the desert of Saudi Arabia. However, based on pictures I have seen and my past physical brushes with hot sand during the summer time at Ilocos sand dunes, I can easily imagine what the desert of Saudi Arabia would feel like. Using the previous sensation of hot sand getting stuck in my slippers, I know the desert of Saudi Arabia is not for me. No, I've never been there, but my representation of hot is enough to keep me away!.

[Audio] According to Kant, empiricists who only rely on the sensory world and representation miss the mark on self by negating the effects of apperception. On the other hand, rationalists who cancel out representation miss by just as much. Rather than self being one or the other, Kant believed the inner and outer self combine to give us our consciousness. From Kant's standpoint, it's our self that makes experiencing an intelligible world possible because it's the self that is responsible for synthesizing the discreet data of sense experience into a meaningful whole. Metaphorically, our self is the weaver who, using the loom of the mind, weaves together the fabric of experience into a unified whole so that it becomes my experience, my world, my universe. Without our self to perform this synthesizing function, our experience would be unknowable, a chaotic collection of sensations without coherence or significance..

[Audio] The unity of consciousness is a phrase invented by Kant to describe the fact that the thoughts and perceptions of any given mind are bound together in a unity by being all contained in one consciousness, my consciousness. That's precisely what makes your world intelligible to you: It's your self that is actively organizing all of your sensations and thoughts into a picture that makes sense to you. This picture is uniquely your picture. You are at the center of your world, and you view everything in the world from your perspective..

[Audio] For example, think about a time in which you shared an experience with someone but each of you had radically different experiences: attending a party, watching a movie, having a communication misunderstanding. Reflect on the way each person instinctively describes the entire situation from his or her perspective. That's the unity of consciousness that Kant is describing. Your self is able to perform this synthesizing, unifying function because it transcends sense experience. Your self isn't an object located in your consciousness with mother objects, your self is a subject, an organizing principle that makes a unified and intelligible experience possible..

[Audio] Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that deals with being, substance, and identity. Immanuel Kant was an uber-famous 18th-century Prussian philosopher. Two of the most famous metaphysical views of his day were empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge is only attained through the senses. Rationalism argues that reason, rather than experience, is the foundation of all knowledge. According to Kant, both of these theories are incomplete when it comes to the self. According to him, we all have an inner and an outer self which together form our consciousness. The inner self is comprised of our psychological state and our rational intellect. The outer self includes our sense and the physical world. When speaking of the inner self, there is apperception. Apperception is how we mentally assimilate a new idea into old ones. According to Kant, representation occurs through our senses. It is mental imagery based on past sensations and experiences. Lastly, Unity of consciousness is described as the thoughts and perceptions of any given mind are bound together in a unity by being all contained in one consciousness..