A rationalist in his thinking, concerned purely with reason—the intellectual processes of the mind—and dismissive of physical experience, Plato posited that the physical world is unreal, and that truth and reality lie beyond it in an immaterial world existing outside of space and time. Immanuel Kant proposed a different strategy for understanding reality. Kant's strategy shared Plato's framework of dual existences, but demystified the framework and validated earthly existence by claiming that, although there is a world of objective truth beyond human experience, it exists not in some ethereal plane beyond space and time, but rather alongside the subjective world of human experience, which, to Kant, is itself real, valid, and true. Kant then solved the problems of rationalism and empiricism by proposing a radical method of understanding the division between the objective world and the subjective one.
The subjective world within the range of human perception is real, Kant argued, and can be proven by the fact that “the world of objects exists, that objects are related in lawlike ways that science and common sense can discover.”* Were the subjective world to be ultimately unreliable, as the rationalists asserted, the natural laws which apply to material things would not bind them. The fact that interpretations of the subjective world are dependent on human perception does not invalidate them as reality. But the reality of the subjective world is subjective, and therefore separate from the objective reality, because it cannot provide complete truth merely through physical experience, contrary to the empiricists' claims. Human perception and interpretation of physical objects can be easily shown to be limited. Physical experience on its own, therefore, is an unreliable basis for understanding of ultimate reality.
Existing in a world of objective things inherently unknowable because of the limitations of our perceptions, Kant argued, human beings have actively constructed the subjective reality they can know. It is the middle ground between subjective perception and objective reality, Kant argues, which constitutes the reality in which we live, an “orderly and intelligible world” which we construct by using human reason on objective things. Those objective things, the experience of which is valued above all else by the empiricists, are not an end in themselves. What objective things provide is raw material, upon which we then use our rational, reasoning faculties to construct a world that makes sense.
We construct a world that makes sense by choosing to perceive only those things which we can arrange in orderly fashion. Kant theorized that there are twelve basic categories of understanding which every human being possesses and uses to make sense of things and events. Those categories include cause and effect, “induction, objects, space, and time,” and are universal to every human mind. Human beings construct their reality by selectively perceiving and interpreting those things that conform to the rules of the twelve categories. If an object or concept does not conform, we are unable to perceive or make sense of it, and it therefore does not exist in our reality. Our reality, according to Kant, is one which our minds actively created by the selection and processing of only those stimuli which we can understand.
It is clear that Kant's fusion of rationalism and empiricism allows one to come closer to a complete understanding of reality than either rationalism or empiricism can alone. Pure rationalism, in valuing the intellectual processes of the mind above all else and rejecting the physical stimuli of the earthly realm, is fatally limited by the absence of data or context: “Thoughts (concepts) without content (sense data) are empty,” as Kant said. And pure empiricism, in assuming that physical objects or stimuli are the sole source for universal understanding, is fatally limited by the subjectivity of human perceptions: “Intuitions (of sensations) without conceptions [are] blind.” To understand our reality, we must recognize that we use both our faculty for experience and our faculty for thought. Our world is “an integrated package in which sensory experience and the faculties of the mind” work together seamlessly to construct a reality that makes sense.
It can be argued that Kant's constructivism opens the way for a frightening conception of the world. If every person's world is different because every person's mind constructs it slightly differently, how can we ever know what is true? If one person perceives the other as standing too close to him, while the other perceives himself as standing at an acceptable distance from his companion, how then can they truly judge the distance between them? If every individual perceives and interprets things differently, how then can humanity come to a consensus about any truth?
Kant's argument of the twelve categories of understanding solves this problem. By stating that all human beings share these universal methods for deriving knowledge, he states that there are certain ways of understanding that are universal, and can be used to arrive at important consensuses, such as the existence or nonexistence of specific objects or phenomena. All human beings do share a basic reality. That there is room for individual interpretation within this basic reality does not disprove the existence of the basic, shared reality itself. We may each see our personal worlds differently from anyone else, but we do all live in the same larger, collective reality. Ultimately, Kant's constructivism provides a deeply reassuring and yet potentially exhilarating way of viewing existence: reassuring because we can be assured of the reality of our world, and exhilarating because within that framework, we do still construct our own individual worlds, and are free to do so as we will.
*Footnotes removed because Blogger doesn't support them. All quotations are taken from John Chaffee's The Philosopher's Way.
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