Kant's Approach To Experiences

Immanuel Kant was the only philosopher who managed to combine rationalism with empiricism. He proved that there’s not only one way or another. Combining reason and senses to prove reality is not an easy doing, and explaining it is not easy either, so let’s take this step by step.

We have experiences and create memories. We remember, we feel, we act. That’s how we work. But where does experience come from? Do we feel it directly, or is it something that just exists? Until Kant, there were two ways to understand experiences.

Berkeley believed that there is no procedure of inner feeling. He believed that behind the impressions we get from our senses, there must be some kind of material substrate that we cant realize directly. That’s why, according to him, our ideas and what we acknowledge is all that reality is. “For something to exist it means that it is being acknowledged”. He supported that all that exists is souls and ideas and that reality is only one. The most important part of his theory is that everything in this world (which is not materialistic) exists inside God when it is not acknowledged by humans. He supported that God is “a priori”, and whatever He acknowledges exists.

Hume, on the contrary, didn’t think that the mention of God is essential. He believed that the imprinting of sensory impressions on the mind is enough. He thought that there is more to the outside world than what we can acknowledge, that we have a limited cognitive ability. As we can only collect data from 5 sensors, he thought that reality is wider than what our mind can understand. According to Hume, material objects have no objective substance, and we create their representations based on personal impressions. Eventually, he didn’t think that inductive generalizations have any real logical power.

Here is where Kant steps in as a pure empiricist. He took the rational mechanism of the mind and the input of knowledge through senses and made them cooperate. He made a new guess about the development of experience: experiences provide the “data” that the mind is going to process, and this data works as direct representations. The mind processes the representations that it receives, and the data gets modified with previous data of the mind. This shows that time and place are not dependent of experience but rather the condition for empirical perception to exist. Experiences are blind without understanding, and understanding is empty without experiences. According to Kant, “real stuff” are phenomena organized by the mind.

It was a big step to bring two opposite philosophical approaches into one. It may seem normal to some of us, but it’s not that easy to realize it on our own. Bringing rationalism and empiricism in piece is, in my opinion, one of the greatest achievements of man.