Kant's Judgment of Perception - Essay Example

1. In the second part of the Prolegomena, how does Kant describe the workings  of the understanding? What is the role of the understanding, in other words?  In the Second Part of the Prolegomena, Kant discussed how experience is not the only factor that produces human knowledge. One of his arguments is that human knowledge requires intuition that are both empirical and a priori and understanding by which humans judge the objective validity or reality of what are being experienced. It is important to underscore that, for Kant, understanding are not derived from experience. It even precedes the latter because understanding supposedly makes experience possible. In Prolegomena, Kant pointed out that the starting point of understanding lies not in conceptions but in perceptions. These perceptions, in turn, are not just consequences of an examination or analysis of judgments of experience into their inseparable parts. According to Kant, before “a judgment of perception can become a judgment of experience; it is requisite that the perception should be subsumed under some concept of the understanding.” (41) From this perspective, perceptions would supposedly lead us to make our judgments and that synthesis appears only in so far as the priori conceptions of the understanding enable us to go beyond the particular judgment of perception and to turn them into universal judgment of experience. To prove, according to Kant, the possibility of experience in the context of the a priori concept of understanding, one needs to represent what belongs to judgments in general and the various moments of the understanding in them. (42) Kant explained that understanding provided us with the categories that we could use in order to judge experience. He argued that this is particularly useful in judging ideas, such as the soul, God or freedom – things that are beyond experience. Understanding in his philosophy is not unlike judging, specifically when the act is done to unite representations in a consciousness. Again, the fundamental elements here are the intuition as well as Kant’s concept of the noumena or things in themselves, existing outside our intuitions such as Kant’s metaphysical knowledge which abstracts from all experience. “Experience,” wrote Kant, “consists of intuition, which belong to sensibility, and of judgments, which are solely the understanding’s business.” (43) This explanation is one of Kant’s depictions of interrelating and interdependent elements required in order to achieve knowledge. To clarify possible confusion, Kant summed his analogies in this way: “the business of the senses is to inuit; that of the understanding, to think.” (Kant 44) 2) Explain Kants psychological and cosmological ideas.  Kant’s psychological and cosmological ideas are two of his three speculative ideas of reason: the psychological idea, which is the idea of the soul as a thinking substance; and, the cosmological idea, which is the idea of the world as including all phenomena. The psychological idea, in Kant’s philosophy, is the realm in the transcendental discourse, pertaining to the unity of the thinking subject, its soul and its mind. With it, the reason perpetrates a simple paralogism. Here, Kant rejected the rational psychology, which dismisses the soul as a mere name, with an attribute of immateriality, a simple substance, an unextended and thinking entity tied with the idea of immortality. Kant lamented that in this view, intuition and conception has no place. Instead, it is preoccupied with only one premise, “I think” Kant’s psychological idea considers the entirety of the thinking human, including his soul and his life as a human being. He posits, for instance, that the soul will no longer persist after the death of a human being. This is demonstrated in how ones thought cannot exist outside one’s body. The Kantian argument posits that the traditional rational psychology is but a mere discipline, speculating and moralizing, in order, avoid the idea of people finally succumbing to a soulless materialism. Fundamentally, the cosmological ideas are based on Kant’s philosophy that the world is characterized by relations of dependency, wherein a part is conditioned by another. The principle at work here is that the world is internally complete due to the interrelationships therein, which holds all of its parts together. An important aspect of the cosmological idea is when it finds itself, in Kantian philosophy, driven to contradictory affirmations or antimonies. Kant posited here what he called as necessary conflicts. In this regard, he outlined two ways of relating the idea of an absolutely complete repressive synthesis of conditions to the idea of something that is absolutely unconditioned: [One] can think of this unconditioned either as subsisting merely in the whole series, in which thus every member without exception is conditioned, and only their whole is absolutely unconditioned, or else the absolutely unconditioned is only a part of the series, to which the remaining members of the series are subordinated but that itself stands under no other condition. (A417/B445) The first way of thinking, which is analogous to thinking from the outside is incompatible with thinking from the inside, Kant’s second way. 3) Give Socrates response to either the harmony or weaver objections.  Socrates was compelled to respond to the objections of Simmias who raised the idea that the soul, though certainly more beautiful and divine than the body will perish as with the death of the body because it exists in the form of a harmony. Socrates’ response contained several objections to harmony. One of these is that souls can both be harmonious and disharmonious. The theory is that a disharmonious soul would no longer function harmoniously and, therefore, cease to be a soul. Further on, Socrates pointed out that Simmias insisted on opining that 1) harmony is a compound thing, then, 2) the soul is a harmony consisting of elements throughout the body. For Socrates, the composite thing existed before the elements that compose it. He argued that because Simmias would not admit to this, he, in effect, by believing in both (1) and (2) render the preexistence of soul impossible. Socrates also pointed out the fact that he and Simmias agree that the soul rules the body and, therefore, could command it to do things that the latter would not. Based, from this Socrates concluded that the soul must be different from the body. Then, he further reasoned that if human beings were structured systems of ordinary physical compositions, they would all act the same. Socrates then uses the necessary connections guaranteed by the Form of Soul to argue that the soul is immortal. His point here is that the soul brings life to whatever has it. (510) In the issue of death, Socrates proclaimed that when it approaches, only the body suffers while the soul continues to exist. Socrates replies to the objections in regard to harmony were not very satisfactory. I would like to pose an analogy here, that of playing a guitar. For instance, I am playing a major chord, three string will vibrate harmoniously together. However, each of these string vibrates in differing frequencies and so a string could resonate stronger or weaker at certain points in comparison with the others. Here, one sees that the strings could, in fact, resonate harmoniously together while at the same time resonate in a disharmonious manner as well. This analogy, in the context of Socrates’ argument, if the chord is played and it is harmonious, it would produce a song; otherwise, it will not. 4) Whose philosophy, Platos or Kants, is more valid?  Plato and Kant both believed that human existence calls for a philosophical solution. They both agree that the a priory variable takes precedence over others to certain Ideas that are characterized by an extraordinary universality. Their difference in this area is fundamentally illustrated in this analogy: For Plato, Ideas are metaphysical self-existences while Kant considered them as epistemological predetermninants. Here, Plato is at a disadvantage since he fails to clearly differentiate the judgments of knowledge and being. Kant, however, goes on further by explaining that metaphysical reality, as it is in itself, is something that exists independent of our knowledge or at least in the context of our common nonmystical forms of cognition. Kant’s philosophy raised the field to the modern level than did Plato. Kant perused Plato and the Greek philosophical thought examining what their relevance to the modern formulations of philosophical and scientific problems. With regards to ethics, Plato’s philosophy is more valid for me. It closely resembled the Christian ethics. Kant, on the other hand, digressed into petty commonplace as he inserted his carefully developed material formulas taken from the Kantian formal principle of universal validity. This made his philosophy in the context of ethics unnecessary, further muddling his arguments. Plato fared better in this area by simply starting very early in his philosophy with the realization of the state in the natural purposes of man. The point, I am making here is that there are so many dimensions to the philosophies of Plato and Kant. In some areas, Plato’s arguments would appear more valid than those of Kant’s and vice versa. Then, there is the fact that both have several commonalities. Or to put it another way, the Kantian philosophy owes a lot from Plato’s thoughts. However, an important Kantian contribution that must be recognized is its attempt to update philosophy. Science and scientific thought has grown so rapidly after Plato’s time, new philosophical questions emerged. Kant addressed them more specifically than Plato. For instance, Kant discusses the singularity of human being or how he tries to conceive a way from finitude to Transcendence. It is in this aspect that Kant’s philosophy becomes more relevant. In the heart of Kant’s arguments, one sees an individual, a thinking human lost in questioning with all the scientific rationalizing going on around him. References Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that will be able to come forward as science: with selections from the Critique of pure reason (2nd ed.). James Wesley Ellington (trans.). Hackett Publishing, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of pure reason (abridged). Werner Pluhar (trans.). Hackett Publishing, 1999. Plato. Great Dialogues of Plato. W.H. Rouse (trans.). Signet Classic, 1999. Read More