Perceptions of the self - Essay Example

Perceptions of the self Perceptions of the self The main reason that led to Kant thinking on “We construct the self” was his alarmover David Hume’s skepticism from his serious empiricism; the human mind is just a vessel for fleeting sensations and various disconnected ideas, and that human’s reasoning capability is just a slave of passions (Kant, 2007). To Kant, Hume’s conclusions did serve as a Socratic insult to his inquiry spirit, waking him from his sleep and throwing him to action.

According to Kant (2007), it was Hume’s remarks that woke him from his intellectual slumber, and gave him new directions to philosophy’s speculative field.According to Kant (2007), the main experience of the world is not only in terms of a spoilt stream of sensations, but see and experience a world full of relationships, ideas, objects living within a stable framework of both time and design. At times, the discreet and also randomly similar sensations, rule peoples experience; for example when a strong fever generates funny hallucinations.

Nevertheless, we stay in a stable and precise, orderly world where the different sensations become built together in a framework that is familiar to us. In Kant’s (2007) view, the problem Hume had was not on his starting point, but solely on the reason that he refused to move from the starting point to the next level of experience.Though we know that knowledge starts with experience, it does not mean that everything comes from experience. It can even be from the empirical knowledge that consists of what we get from the knowledge faculty and also through impressions.

According to Kant (2007), human minds sort, organize, relate and then synthesize the pieces of information that the organs of sense absorb. As an example, imagine a person dumps an enormous pile of pieces of the puzzle on a desk. At first glance, they would look like a random collection of different items that are not related and have no meaning. This is just like the sensations of an immediate unreflective experience. Nevertheless, when the person starts to assemble the pieces, they start forming an image that would be significant.

In Kant’s (2007) view, this construction activity is what peoples brains are doing every time, taking that raw experience data, and actively assembling it to more familiar, meaningful environment that we live in.Human minds have organized rules or principles built in them. These principles order, arrange, organize and then synthesize the sense data in a more familiar way of peoples lives. The organizing rules precede the experience sensations existing independently of these sensations. We do not have to learn the basic ways of arranging and relating the world, but it naturally comes as software installed in human brains.

ReferenceKant, I. (2007). We Construct the Self. Retrieved August 27, 2012, from http://www.prenhall.com/chaffee/chapter3