From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Mon Oct 13 2003 - 13:36:20 MDT
A couple of points on the WSJ article. Its central thesis is that reality as demarcated by the evidence of our five senses demarcates a boundary to knowledge and is in fact limited. Similarly, our understanding of such matters if mediated through our own consciousness and experience and is therefore unreliable. To that extent, it follows the argument in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm), where Hume argued that reason was not a meaningful foundation for religious belief. However, Kant argued that the intuition of that which is noumenal rather than phenomenal is not dependent on reason, especially since there is nothing to say that there is nothing beyond what is inacessible to reason.
"In his "Critique of Pure Reason," Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. The only way that we apprehend reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that our five-mode instrument for apprehending reality is sufficient for capturing all of reality? What makes us think that there is no reality that goes beyond, one that simply cannot be apprehended by our five senses?
Kant persuasively noted that there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe that we can know everything that exists. Indeed what we do know, Kant said, we know only through the refracted filter of our experience. Kant argued that we cannot even be sure that our experience of a thing is the same as the thing-in-itself. After all, we see in pretty much the same way that a camera does, and yet who would argue that a picture of a boat is the same thing as a boat?
Kant isn't arguing against the validity of perception or science or reason. He is simply showing their significant limits."
The problem with this is that it assumes the absence of philosopher after Kant; even saying "If Mr. Dennett and the rest of the so-called brights have produced refutations of Kant that have eluded the philosophical community, they should share them with the rest of us." As it happens, Nietzsche did indeed produce a refutation of Kant; given that our perceptions are constrained limited, in the event of there being some form of noumenal order beyond the merely phenomenal, then it hardly follows that such an order would be remotely intelligible; since the constrained perceptions that mediate our perception of reality would find it completely alien.
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