Day #22

Today’s favourite poses: Down Doggie!

Minutes with a relatively quiet mind: 5-10, give or take 5 (or 10)

Today’s interesting/thought provoking reading: (Taken from Think by Simon Blackburn)

Further to yesterday’s post on Kant (who seems to be somewhat conflictive when it comes to reasoning vs. the existence of God), in his passage from the Critique of Pure Reason:

'Hithero it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects but all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regard the intuition of objects. If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility.’

This is the element that Kant calls ‘transcendental idealism’.
It sounds as though in having experience we thereby ‘create’ a world that must conform to it.

What he wants is an understanding of the way in which concepts like those of things, forces, space, time, causation determine the way we think about the world. The intention is not to deny some element of scientific understanding, or indeed common sense, but to explain how those elements hang together in our thought. It is those thoughts that structure what he calls the ‘phenomenal world’; the world that is both described by science, and manifested to us in sense experience.
‘In our system on the other hand, these external things, namely matter, are in all their configurations and alterations nothing but mere appearances, that is , representations in us, of the reality of which we are immediately conscious.’