And by the way, all this works for your soul, too

Quotes from § 49, pp.84-86, ak.336-338:

...because objects which cannot be given us in any experience, do not exist for us...

However as the Ego in the proposition, "I am," means not only the object of internal intuition (in time), but the subject of consciousness, just as body means not only external intuition (in space), but the thing-in-itself, which is the basis of this phenomenon; [as this is the case] the question, whether bodies (as phenomena of the external sense) exist as bodies apart from my thoughts, may without any hesitation be denied in nature. But the question, whether I myself as a phenomenon of the internal sense (the soul according to empirical psychology) exist apart from my faculty of representation in time, is an exactly similar inquiry, and must likewise be answered in the negative.

And in a nearby footnote:

...the law of the permanence of substances has place for the purposes of existence only, and hence can hold good of things so far as they are to be consigned and conjoined with others in experience, but never independently of all possible experience, and consequently cannot hold good of the soul after death.

plus, in § 34:

...beyond [experience] no concepts have any significance, as there is no intuition that might offer them a foundation.

I have to take a break from reading to post about this, because this completely blew my mind.

So, okay, let's see here: objects exist, but we can't know anything about them-in-themselves. We can know about our experiences with them, and that is all we can know. Our sensibilities enable nature/the-totality-of-appearances. Our understandings / our a priori synthetic principles of possible experience enable experience itself in a way analogous to the way our minds 'create' space and time. So it ends up that every object that meaningfully exists can be experienced. Several parts of that are wrong, I'm sure, but is that it vaguely?

So Kant took all that, and then applied it to your mind.

This whole thing seems almost solipsistic, but without the self, somehow. This idea that we would not exist without being aware of oneself is fascinating and absolutely trippy. We are self-aware; we can observe ourselves, or in other words experience ourselves, and so we exist. But things which cannot be experienced make no impression on any sensibility; how could one suppose something like that to exist in any meaningful sense?

How does this connect to Rousseau, and what it means to be human? For Rousseau, humans are self-aware creatures, who think, who consider events in sequence, who place artificial systems of value over otherwise equivalent things (cf. the dancer segment). There was a sense in Rousseau that we were over ourselves, disconnected from ourselves. Here in Kant, the "ego" wouldn't even exist if we weren't sensing it! I just remember that passage in Rousseau, where the savage dies without even noticing that he had been alive. In Kant's philosophy, where existence itself seems so deeply and meaningfully engraved in the geography of the human mind, it would make sense that existence itself would depend on self-awareness. What are the implications of this?

I apologize in advance if any of this turns out to be invalidated in what I haven't read yet. I'll edit if necessary.

Experience and the Sensuous World

For we are not concerned with the nature of things in themselves, which is independent of the conditions both of our sensibility and our understanding, but with nature as an object of possible experience; and in this case the understanding, since it makes experience possible, thereby insists that the sensuous world is either not an object of experience at all or that it is nature [namely, the existence of things determined according to universal laws].  (322, pg. 69)

Similar to the sentiments of some of my other group members, Kant confuses the you-know-what out of me.  This passage is especially mind-boggling, and it's never a good sign when the conclusion of a part is inconclusive!  So I'm hoping someone will be able to shed some light on this issue... Kant says that the sensuous world is 1) not an object of experience or 2) nature, which a few lines above is described as "an object of possible experience" in terms of our intelligible experience.  So doesn't (2) contradict (1)?  What is the distinction between these two conceptions of the sensuous world?  Doesn't everything boil down to experience and our faculties of understanding our experiences?

The Supreme Being

But as we can never know these beings of understanding as they are in themselves, that is, as definite, yet must assume them as regards the sensible world and connect them with it by reason, we are at least able to think this connection by means of such concepts as express their relation to the world of sense. "355"

I'm going to start off by saying even if I think I know that Kant is arguing, I probably am in the wrong. Because of that lack of confidence I am not going to give a cool "Greil on Kant" interpretation. I would simply like to talk through Kant's argument as to why we should believe in the immaterial being if we can never know it as the thing-in-itself. I guess some questions could also be, How does Kant's "proof" of a God compare to Descartes? Are their motivations the same? Do the two arguments support each other, or combat each other?

Kant Part II

"For there would be no reason for the judgments of other men necessarily agreeing with mine, if it were not the unity of the object to which they all refer, and with which they accord; hence they must all agree with one another...

The object always remains unknown in itself; but when by the concept of the understanding the connection of the representations of the object, which are given to our sensibility, is determined as universally valid, the object is determined by this relation, and it is the judgment that is objective."

- Part II, "pages" 298 and 299 (not the common edition pages)

If I understand Kant correctly, he is arguing that to make universal judgments, we first have to make sure that we have a common understanding the object, and to do this, we check whether our perception of the object is the same as everyone else's perception. But what does he mean by "universally valid"? I think he means a concept that arises a priori and is common to all humanity. Does this also mean objectively true? I don't think so; we aren't talking about the object "in itself" but rather a commonly defined object (this reminds me of Hobbes' definitions). But how do we rise from these commonly defined obejcts - which may not be objectively real - to laws of nature, i.e. laws that are objectively true? Kant seems to connect the two by assuming that the way we experience things is a law of nature, and so by studying the origins of this law, we can see how all laws of nature are derived. But what if the former is not a law of nature? Confusion...

Clarifying Example

"What Copernicus did was take the existing a priori concept of the world, the notion that it was flat and fixed in space, and pose an alternative a p riori concept of the world, that it's spherical and moves around the sun; and showed that both of the a priori concepts fitted the existing sensory data."

The above excerpt comes from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which I found in Zen and the Art of Motorcylce Maintenance (I did not read Critique of Pure Reason along with our current, beefy assignment). I remembered coming across Hume and Kant in Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wanted to review what the author, Robert Pirsig, had said about them. I, like a few others (I believe) in class on Monday, was having trouble interpreting what exactly Kant was claiming about human understanding and how it differed, if at all, from Hume's Enquiry.

Copernicus' method of forming the Copernican Revolution was a clarifying example for me, and I wish to share it here in hopes that other confused Kantian readers find clarification as well. Copernicus, as Kant states above, changed our internal understanding of the world from an unmoving, flat object to an orbiting, spherical object. Space and time constituted both understandings, and the spacial and temporal representation of a flat world fixed in our minds properly assimilated the flux of sensory data we experienced just as well as the spacial and temporal representation of a round world.

But Copernicus used the mind's intuitive faculties of perceiving things in space and time to amend our understanding to the one accepted today. Upon viewing a moon revolving around Jupiter through his telescope, he used intuitive faculties to form the concept of a round earth revolving around the sun. How could he have come to this assured truth, one he believed to be as true as we know it today, based solely on experience? He never experienced a round earth in one complete vision, considering humans were far from the ability to view the earth in third person from outer space. Even if he could sit afar and perceive the earth's shape, it would be hard to patiently watch it revolve around the sun for a year. The reasoning behind the Copernican Revolution was not an a posteriori synthetic judgment, but an a prior synthetic judgment. He spatially built the true image of the world and temporally revolved it around the sun, all in his mind. Brilliant!