Reading Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” was helped immensely by the introduction. I was very relieved that I read it because when I was reading, I admit, I was a little flummoxed, but with the guidance of the introduction and its breakdown of the argument’s main points, I absorbed the information a lot better and cleaner.
Anyway, while I was reading the information, Kant talks a lot about intuition and how it requires a synthesis and collection of information and perception to experience reality. He uses it as a reference to make a point called the “Transcendental Unity of Apperception” and he is saying that this unity of self is what makes us “self-conscious” as existing human beings. He also later makes a split between phenomena and noumena, because phenomena are objects and events that we have cognition of.
Presentation is another thing that Kant makes a point of. He’s saying it’s our concept of the object itself that gives us the “standard.” The way we see the world is different, and there are certain things that we can see that can’t be denied its existence. However, there are questions of the mind; if one person sees one thing differently, which version is right? What is a person sees something and another doesn’t see anything at all? Does it make is less real? Perhaps. But it’s spooky to think how unstable existence can be. Everything is truly subjective, but it causes our senses to perceive them the way they are to be. Those are phenomena.
So are noumena things that have no definite proof? What about religion? Some people say that God isn’t real and religion such as Christianity have flaws in logic? While I do admit that the Bible isn’t the most logical piece out there, it comes from a matter of subjective faith. Yes, we can decide on a higher being controlling the basic plan of the universe in time, but if we look at a scientific point of view, is it any different. For examples, we know that there are objects, and they are created by atoms. Atoms have charges, and charges come from subatomic particles like electrons. But how we even know they exist? There is evidence for that yes, but that all comes from the assumption that the object exists in the first place, making all the other proofs and theories and hypotheses a little void of certainty. There is a lot of evidence, but in the end, it comes faith that they exist and make up the world we, logical and scientific or not.
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