Kant As Nihilist
Kant As Nihilist
Kant As Nihilist
Jacobis Objection
A contemporary of Kant, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, coined the term nihilism in response to Kant's transcendental idealism
According to Jacobi, Kant faces a dilemma: on the one hand, he has to claim that we cannot know anything about the thing in itself, on the other hand he has to acknowledge that we know at least something about the thing itself as it is the source of affection." - Horstmann, Companion to the Critique of Pure Reason, p.332
Conclusion
"Having adduced the clearest arguments, it would be absurd for us to hope that we can know more of any object, than belongs to the possible experience of it for how could we determine anything in this way, since time, space, and the categories, and still more all the concepts formed by empirical experience or perception in the sensible world [Anschauung], have and can have no other use, than to make experience possible. And if this condition is omitted from the pure concepts of the understanding, they do not determine any object, and have no meaning whatever. " Prolegomena, Conclusion
But it would be on the other hand a still greater absurdity if we conceded no things in themselves, or set up our experience for the only possible mode of knowing things, our way of beholding [Anschauung] them in space and in time for the only possible way" Prolegomena, Conclusion
Reason by all its a priori principles never teaches us anything more than objects of possible experience, and even of these nothing more than can be known in experience. But this limitation does not prevent reason leading us to the objective boundary of experience, viz., to the reference to something which is not itself an object of experience, but is the ground of all experience." Prolegomena, Conclusion
Kant simply wants to say that reason can and in fact should bring us to the edge of experience and allow us to posit the existence of things beyond that edge, these things he calls "the things in themselves".
Questions Answered
Is Jacobi's interpretation of Kant's philosophy as setting up both a thing in itself that we can have no knowledge of and the thing in itself as basis for sense perception correct?
No, pure intuition is the basis for perception. Pure intuition is innate.
Do Kant's conclusions refute Jacobi's famous conjecture that "there is no I without a thou"?
"Thou" is derived from experience. Just because we can create and distinguish between an I and a thou, doesn't mean that there can't be aspects of that "thou" or object which are unbenounced to us. These unknowns are called things in themselves by Kant and we can acknowledge their existence because of pure intuition.
Why is his philosophy referred to as transcendental idealism?
Transcendental in the sense that in grounding sense perception in innate pure intuition, Kant allows for the existence of a priori synthetic knowledge, or things that transcend reason
Is it transcendental or nihilist?
Be denition it is nihilist but, in modern terms, Kant certainly doesn't not strip meaning from life but rather intends to contextualize a certain type of judgment by justifying the possibility of the existence of of the unknown. Certainly transcendent in intention and debatably objectively transcendent.