Running Head: PHILOSOPHIES OF IMMANUEL KANT 1

Philosophies of Immanuel Kant

Jessica A. Moore

Texas State University

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Abstract

Immanuel Kant was considered one of the foremost thinkers of the Enlightenment.

Educated by the theories of David Hume and German philosopher and

mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Kant went on to postulate his own

theories on sensory experience and categories of thought. Kant would later reject

the tenets of his teachers and form his own philosophy stating that human

perception provides the only possible description of reality. Kant’s theory would

represent a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy.

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Immanuel Kant was born in Konigsberg, Prussia (the modern-day Russian exclave

known as Kaliningrad) in April 1724. He was considered one of the foremost thinkers of

the Enlightenment and one of the greatest philosophers of all time (Britannica, 1975). His

early studies of German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and

later fascination with British philosopher David Hume, contributed significantly to future

students of German rationalist psychology and philosophy – most significantly through his

discussions of categories of thought.

Kant’s Theory of categories of thought is the concept that the mind must add

something to sensory data before knowledge can be attained. This addition to sensory data

was provided by the a priori or “innate” categories of thought. According to this theory,

everything that we experience has been modified by the concepts of the mind and rendered

more meaningful than it would have originally been. Included in Kant’s list of a priori pure

concepts are “unity, totality, time, space, cause and effect, reality, quantity, quality,

negation, possibility, impossibility, and existence-nonexistence.” (Hergenhahn, 2009)

Kant, like many faculty psychologists, believed that man is gifted with a single,

unified mind that displays various attributes, which are constantly interacting. These

attributes, or capabilities of faculty, are assigned no particular home or location in the

mind (which is viewed as distinct from the brain). Though Kant’s initial argument was of a

somewhat mental nature, it later was echoed in physiological terms by Johannes Muller,

who pinpointed the central nervous system as the interface between physical objects and

consciousness (p. 236) – arguing that the body’s nerves are subject to “specific irritability”

or types of stimulation, which categorizes sensory signals to the brain. This line of
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thinking paved the way for later Gestaltian psychologists, for whom Kant’s “faculties of

the mind” concept could be neatly overlaid with notions “characteristics of the brain.”

Though Kant was an early disciple of Leibniz, he grew to reject Leibniz’s works.

One of Leibniz’s major tenets, The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, also known

as “Leibniz's law” received a great deal of criticism from Kant. Kant’s complaint of this

theory was that it treated “perception and thought as a single representational faculty that

was ‘logically’ (by which Kant meant ‘qualitatively’) distinguished in terms of the clarity

of the representation, rather than ‘transcendentally’” (Wilson, 2009) With this theory of a

single cognitive faculty, Kant criticized that Leibniz negated the distinction of phenomena

and noumena to the “detriment of philosophy.” Kant disagreed with Leibniz’s views of the

senses, suggesting that he treated the senses as a lesser mode of cognition which was only

able to distort and confuse representations of reason.

Like Hume, Kant agreed that mankind could never experience the world – or the

inputs of his own senses – with certainty, due to the subjective filter of the mind. In other

words, the world that man perceives is never precisely the same as the world that he is able

to experience through his five senses. Kant explained the difference between these two

worlds as the result of several “a priori” – or innate – categories of thought, which existed

independently of the senses and helped to organize and give meaning to sensory data.

Though Kant agreed with Hume in that we can never directly experience the

physical world, they held very different views on the causes of mental experience. Kant

held the belief that our phenomenological experience (experience based on the premise

that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human

consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness), was a result of

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an interaction between sensory input and categories of thought. For Hume, our cognizance

contained only impressions and ideas, the combination of which was arranged by

imagination or the laws of association.

According to Kant this interaction was unavoidable. He believed that when

scientists described the physical world, they were actually describing the human mind, and

that the human mind created the universe as we experience it. According to Kant, objects

which construct reality are called noumena, or "things-in-themselves." As humans, we will

always be ignorant of noumena, we can only know phenomena as they are arranged and

modified by the categories of thought.

Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, another great philosopher of Kant’s time, saw the

universe as an interrelated unity, which he termed “the absolute.” Hegel’s argument,

summarized: True knowledge can never be attained by examining isolated instances of

anything, unless those instances are related to the whole – because the nature of the part is

changed when it is separated from the whole, and therefore can’t be understood in its

entire truth. And for Hegel, Truth was paramount. Hegel accepted Kant’s philosophy in its

entirety, but added to categories of thought a single, essential question: why do the

categories of thought exist? Kant had never posed this question; Hegel answered it by

postulating that the purpose of innate categories of thought is to bring man closer to the

Absolute – thus phrasing the issue in somewhat spiritual terms, as Muller had phrased it in

physiological terms.

On the topic of morality, both Kant and Hume agreed that moral thoughts motivate

action. Kant and Hume also seem to agree that feelings, especially pleasure and pain,

motivate action. Hume believed that human action is all that is warranted, and that
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passion took the leading role when directing action, while reason took a secondary

position to passion. Kant’s view of human action however, differs in that his belief of

human action is that it is based in reason. To Kant, human feelings such as sympathy,

morals and respect for the law are an addition to his a priori theory. Human feelings that

Kant sees as being essential to moral motivation are grounded in reason, and as such give

humans an indirect sense of duty to develop genuine (yet conditional) moral value.

Hume would have rejected Kant’s “attribution of a special moral value, ‘moral

worth,’ to actions done ‘from duty.’” (Denis, 2011) According to Hume, no action could be

virtuous unless in human nature, there was some motive to produce the act. Hume

theorized that any act of virtue or goodness did not exist, unless a person was devoid of

natural feelings which prompt one to act morally. In this case that person may feel

humility and act in attempts to change their conduct or character.

The idea that reality cannot ever be perceived by the human mind is very similar to

Plato's Theory of Forms. The Theory of Forms argues that everything in the empirical

world exists as a non-material abstract "form," or idea. The material world known to

humans through sensation is merely a representation of reality and can never be perceived

in pure form as perception interferes with the Form's perfect reality. Like Plato, Kant

realizes that human perception interferes with noumena, or Forms. Kant however, goes

one step further to explain that reality is not skewed by human perception, but rather

human perception defines reality.

Though Plato's Theory of Forms and Kant's theory of how sensation interacts with

categories of thought are very similar, their theory of reality could not be more opposed.

Kant asserts that though human perception is influenced by categories of thought, and that
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though humans will always be ignorant of noumena, our perception is what creates reality.

Kant's belief that the human mind acted as the center of the universe became a

revolutionary idea in philosophy.

This new philosophy was likened to the revolution in astronomy created when

Nicolaus Copernicus discerned that the earth was not the center of the universe. It was

Kant himself who claimed that his assertions that the human mind was the center of the

universe created a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy.

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References

Denis, Lara, "Kant and Hume on Morality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring
2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/kant-hume-morality/>.

Hergenhahn, B.R., (2009). An introduction to the history of psychology. Wadsworth Pub Co.

Identity of Indiscernables. (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 22, 2011, from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_of_indiscernibles.

Theory of Forms. (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 22, 2011, from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Theory_of_Forms.

Wilson, Catherine, "Leibniz's Influence on Kant", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

(Winter 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), from
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/kant-leibniz.