CRITICAL IDEALISM OF IMMANUAL KANT,VIKAS KUNNATHUMPARAYIL (B09017)

CRITICAL IDEALISM OF IMMANUAL KANT

Idealism is the philosophical theory which maintains that experience
is ultimately based on mental activity. In the philosophy of
perception, idealism is contrasted with realism, in which the external
world is said to have an apparent absolute existence. Epistemological
idealists (such as Kant) claim that the only things which can be
directly known for certain are just ideas (abstraction). In
literature, idealism means the thoughts or the ideas of the writer. In
the philosophy of mind, idealism is the opposite of materialism, in
which the ultimate nature of reality is based on physical substances.
Idealism and materialism are both theories of monism as opposed to
dualism and pluralism. Idealism sometimes refers to a tradition in
thought that represents things of a perfect form, as in the fields of
ethics, morality, aesthetics, and value. In this way, it represents a
human perfect being or circumstance.
Held that the mind shapes the world as we perceive it to take the form
of space-and-time. It is said that Kant focused on the idea drawn from
British empiricism that all we can know is the mental impressions, or
phenomena, that an outside world, which may or may not exist
independently, creates in our minds; our minds can never perceive that
outside world directly. Kant made the distinction between things as
they appear to an observer and things in themselves, that is, things
considered without regard to whether and how they may be given to us.
If I remove the thinking subject, the whole material world must at
once vanish because it is nothing but a phenomenal appearance in the
sensibility of ourselves as a subject, and a manner or species of
representation. (Critique of Pure Reason)
Kant's postscript to this added that the mind is not a blank slate,
tabula rasa but rather comes equipped with categories for organizing
our sense impressions. Perhaps this Kantian sort of idealism opens up
a world of abstractions to be explored by reason, but perhaps, in
sharp contrast to Plato's, confirms uncertainties about an unknowable
world outside our own minds. We cannot approach the Neumann, the
"Thing in Itself" outside our own mental world. (Kant's idealism is
called transcendental idealism.)Apparently Kant distinguished his
transcendental or critical idealism from previous varieties:
In the 1st edition (1781) of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
described idealism thus: We are perfectly justified in maintaining
that only what is within ourselves can be immediately and directly
perceived, and that only my own existence can be the object of a mere
perception. Thus the existence of a real object outside me can never
be given immediately and directly in perception, but can only be added
in thought to the perception, which is a modification of the internal
sense, and thus inferred as its external cause. In the true sense of
the word, therefore, I can never perceive external things, but I can
only infer their existence from my own internal perception, regarding
the perception as an effect of something external that must be the
proximate cause. It must not be supposed, therefore, that an idealist
is someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses;
all he does is to deny that they are known by immediate and direct
perception. (Critique of Pure Reason)
In the 2nd edition (1787) of his Critique of Pure Reason, he wrote a
section called Refutation of Idealism to distinguish his
transcendental idealism from Descartes' Sceptical Idealism and
Berkeley's Dogmatic Idealism. In addition to this refutation in both
the 1781 & 1787 editions the section "Paralogisms of Pure Reason" is
an implicit critique of Descartes' Problematic Idealism, namely the
Cogito. He says that just from "the spontaneity of thought" (cf.
Descartes' Cogito) it is not possible to infer the 'I' as an object.
Kant also defined idealism in the following manner: "The assertion
that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer
experience is not mere imagining is idealism."

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