Phenomena like black holes and quantum entanglement may appear paradoxical only because we're perceiving them within inadequate categories.īut Einstein’s new category doesn’t get us any closer to Kant’s thing-in-itself. Einstein’s conflation of space and time into an entirely new category of spacetime is an example of how altering a perceptual presumption has a profound on perceptions by scientists. And the implication is that if we had different built-in categories of perception, the world would be a rather different thing than we perceive it to be.
Thus things in themselves are, according to Kant, permanently beyond our comprehension. Whatever we perceive is always in some way ‘corrupted’ by our sensual construction. We are therefore unable to distinguish what is in the world from what we bring to the world. Because our physical make-up operates using certain ‘categories’ - space, time, cause/effect among others - we inevitably apply these to not just interpret what we see, hear and feel, but to see, hear and feel anything at all. One of the things Kant had to say was that human intellect has a severe limitation. He undermined most of the philosophical systems which preceded him and more or less set the agenda for those which followed - either to confirm, deny or modify what he had to say. Immanuel Kant is known among philosophers as the All Destroyer.
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