Has anyone read Kant? I think I need a bit of a hand grasping his philosophy.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is definitely one of the most infamous philosophy books of all time — but I’m not sure I fully understand it. <br><br>I think Kant was trying to solve the centuries-long debate between Rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) and Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume). Both ways of thinking had flaws, and Kant was trying to create a new school of philosophy that took the best of both worlds. <br><br>Kant was very taken with Newton’s laws of motion. And what he liked about Newton was the idea that there are laws that govern the world that exist apart from our personal opinions. And so Kant was looking for similar laws of reasoning. That is, he wanted to find rules that everyone’s thinking must follow, whether we want them to or not. And so he set out to find these laws of reasoning. And this is what he called the Critique of Pure Reason. <br><br>For Kant, these laws of thinking are predictable and inevitable, everyone must follow them, and they exist regardless of our feelings. And he called these laws of thinking the structure of mind itself. Now, Kant claims that there are two ways our mind interacts with the world. The first way is zoning in on specific objects. And he called this process of zoning in the understanding. But there’s a second mental process, which is more about relating these different objects together, and he called that reason. <br><br>So on his view, there are two levels of cognition. There’s understanding and then there’s reason. And so he calls the laws of the understanding categories, and the laws of reason he calls ideas. Now, Kant claims that everyone must use these laws, regardless of whether they want to or not. We can’t avoid using the categories or the ideas any more than we can avoid following the laws of physics. <br><br>And so Kant sets out to make a complete list of these laws. And he starts with understanding, and he lists several categories. We must think in terms of cause and effect, we must think in terms of one and many, we must think in terms of big or small. And everyone must think this way, regardless of whether we like it or not. <br><br>But then he lists the laws of reason. And this is where it gets a bit tricky. It turns out that all of these laws of thinking conflict with each other if we try to take them too far. For example, Kant claims that reason wants to think in terms of causes and effects. But if we keep on asking what caused this, what cause that cause, and so on, we reach an impasse. We can either conclude that there’s an infinite chain of causes, or we can say there’s a first cause. And Kant claims that both options are impossible. <br><br>A first cause contradicts science, so Kant rules that out. But an infinite chain contradicts reason, because reason wants to reach a complete answer. So Kant concludes that these laws of reason are a bit of trick. They’re designed to push us to keep on thinking and striving, even though we can’t reach a complete answer. And so Kant calls reason a mere idea, whereas understanding is grounded in reality. <br><br>So far so good. But then Kant asks, what does the world look like when we take away all of our laws of thinking? What are things like in themselves? What is reality independent of our thinking about it? And Kant concludes that we’ll never know, because we can’t get outside of our own minds. <br><br>So Kant claims that we can never know things as they are in themselves. We can only know things as we’re able to perceive them. And this Cut off between how things are for us and how things are in themselves is called the noumenon/phenomenon distinction. So anything we can experience at all are called phenomena, whereas anything that exists independently of our minds are called noumena. <br><br>Now, for Kant, this distinction isn’t just theoretical. He claims that our minds play an active role in how we experience reality. So for example, we can never experience the world without using space and time. We can’t avoid thinking in terms of cause and effect. But he claims that space and time aren’t properties of the world itself, they’re properties of our minds. <br><br>And this is where Kant’s philosophy becomes really radical. Kant claims that the world isn’t made up of independent objects. Objects only exist in relation to a thinking subject. And he calls this framework that we use to organize the world the schema. So in order to engage with reality at all, we need to organize objects into a coherent framework, and that framework is how we relate ourselves to the world. <br><br>In effect, what Kant is saying is that the world isn’t “out there,” it’s not made up of independent objects. The world is more like a set of relations between subjects and objects. And this subject/object relation is the only way we can understand reality. In fact, Kant goes even further. He basically claims that there is no subjects or objects in isolation. There’s only the interaction between them. <br><br>So the framework that we use to relate objects to ourselves, he calls that framework the world itself. So the world is more like a set of relations than it is a set of objects. Now, Kant claims that we only experience reality through this set of relations, whereas the world itself is just an empty set of things without any relationships whatsoever. But we can never know the world itself. <br><br>So we can never know subjects or objects in isolation. We can never know how things are in themselves. We can only know how things are for us. And this limitation is not just a human limitation, it’s an absolute limitation. No one can ever know the world as it is in itself, apart from our framework for organizing it. <br><br>In summary: Kant claims that we can never know the world apart from our minds. And so the world is nothing but what we can experience, whereas the “things as they are in themselves” can never be known. Kant seems to be saying that nothing exists at all, apart from these mental laws of thinking, and the subject/object relations that shape our understanding of the world. So the world only exists as our framework for understanding it. <br><br>So what do you think? Is Kant right? Are we forever trapped in our own minds, doomed to only know reality through a framework of thinking that we can’t get beyond? It’s certainly a very radical philosophy.