The Philosophy Book

170 IMMANUEL KANT

The Flammarion woodcut depicts a

man looking outside of space and time.

For Kant, what is external to us is

external to space and time also, and

can never be known as a thing-in-itself.

and according to what laws?” In
other words, Kant’s transcendental
idealism is what makes it possible
for our experience to be considered
useful to science.
On the negative side, certain
types of thinking call themselves
science and even resemble science,
but fail utterly. This is because
they apply to things-in-themselves
intuitions about space and time,
or concepts such as substance—
which according to Kant must be
valid for experience, but have no
validity with respect to things-in-
themselves. Because they resemble
science, these types of thinking are
a constant temptation to us, and
are a trap that many fall into
without realizing it. For example,
we might wish to claim that God is
the cause of the world, but cause
and effect is another of the a priori
concepts, like substance, that Kant
believes is entirely valid for our
experienced world, but not for

things-in-themselves. So the

existence of God (considered, as it

usually is, as a being independent

of the experienced world) is not

something that could be known.

The negative consequence of

Kant's philosophy, then, is to place

quite severe restrictions on the

limits of knowledge.

Transcendental idealism gives

us a much more radical way of

understanding the distinction

between ourselves and the external

world. What is external to me is

interpreted as not just external to

me in space, but external to space

itself (and to time, and to all the

a priori concepts that make my

experience of the world possible).

And there are two worlds: the

“world” of experience, which

includes both my thoughts and

feelings, and also includes

experience of material things such

as my body, or books; and the

“world” of things-in-themselves,

which is precisely not experienced

and so not in any sense known, and

which we must constantly strive to

avoid fooling ourselves about.

Our bodies have a curious role

to play in all this. On the one hand,

my body as a material thing is a

part of the external world. On the

other hand, the body is a part of us,

and indeed is the medium through

which we encounter other things

Reason only has insight

into that which it

produces after a plan

of its own.

Immanuel Kant

Human reason is

troubled by questions that

it cannot dismiss, but

also cannot answer.

Immanuel Kant