Kant

Kant

Our knowledge of the world of our experience is inevitably a knowledge that is constructed through our own frameworks and categories - this gives rise to questions about whether our "knowledge" is anything to do with the "world as it is." Kant's epistemology stands as a critique of both empiricism and rationalism. The empiricist view is wrong, since the mind is not a mere tabula rasa, which passively receives knowledge of the world through the senses. The rationalist model of knowledge is just as mistaken, as reason alone can never give rise to knowledge, since knowledge demands both concepts and the raw data supplied by the senses. Thus speculative metaphysics - the attempt to achieve theoretical knowledge of non-empirical subjects such as the existence of God, freedom and immortality - inevitably falls into illusion. It aims to gain knowledge of the world as it is in itself, but theoretical knowledge can only be of the world as it appears.

Kant held that we have no theoretical knowledge of such things, he maintained that we can have a practical knowledge of them. Consider free will. When I consider my actions as constituents of the phenomenal world, I am obliged to regard them as produced by rigid deterministic laws, but when I consider those same actions as they are in the nominal world I am not so obliged. I can have practical knowledge of that freedom, which I am required to postulate in order to account for my inescapable sense of myself as a responsible moral agent.

It seems to many that a choice has to be made between two apparently incompatible ways of looking at the world: the spiritual and ethical on the one hand, and the scientific on the other. If Kant is right, the dichotomy between these two ways of looking at the world is purely illusory. There is room in the world for both determinism and freedom, spirituality and science.