Kant and the World of Reality and Experience

Immanuel Kant is a revolutionary and polemic figure in the history of Western philosophy. His idealism has commonly been seen as a reaction to Enlightenment assumptions that knowledge can only be grounded in human reason and science. Kant, without dismissing either discipline, attempted to place philosophy in dialogue with science, as he was very much moved by people like Rousseau and Hume: praising the former for his emphasis on the senses and the latter for his unprecedented skepticism. By attempting to synthesize our experiences of the world to the demands of reason, Kant believed he was doing for philosophy what Copernicus had done for astronomy.

It may be helpful to give a brief layout of Kant’s philosophy which he lays out in The Critique of Pure Reason in order to better understand his ideas about the sublime in Critique of Judgment. Kant’s beginning premise is that all human knowledge can be based on experience. Whatever data our five senses reports to us about reality is what we can know. But Kant was a skeptic, after the fashion of Hume who had argued that it is simply irrational to presume that our experience of reality corresponds to reality itself. In other words, if my senses report to me that I am seeing a waterfall, that doesn’t mean that in reality, I can know what a waterfall is. All I can know is my experience of the waterfall, as I perceive it through my senses. My experience of such objects is what Kant refers to as the phenomenon. However, besides my experiences of things there are the noumenon—the things as they exist in themselves, which we can know nothing about. In short, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or “take” on reality (Western Philosophy Russell).

Now, in Critique of Judgement, we can see similar methods of these two categories of knowledge operating at the level of understanding sublimity and beauty. What Kant says about the sublime, in terms of the mathematically sublime, is that its location does not reside in the external world (noumenon), but rather “only in our own ideas” (LABL 45). Speaking of sublimity in nature, Kant is consistent by saying it “does not reside in any of the things in nature, but only in our own mind” (LABL 46). These feelings provoked in us by the sublime, and registered by our senses, are our experiences (phenomenon) of such things, and not of reality. Since Kant was attempting cohesiveness between our reason and our imagination (the former demanding a limit to what we can know, while the latter entertains limitlessness), our mind can apprehend a “reflective judgment” about the object, but not the object itself (noumenon), regarding the sublime. As Kant says, this feeling (experience) of the sublime, arises from our “inadequacy of [our] imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason” (LABL 45). Our imagination and reason collide and produces a state of mind in which we place a value judgment on the object that is to be called sublime; but our state of mind is what warrants to be called sublime, not the object, since the object is part of the reality, which our reason can never fully grasp. Our minds can receive the data collected from reality through our senses, but we can only formulate concepts (such as sublimity) according to that data, and this helps us understand our experiences. But, according to Kant, things in themselves are unknowable.

Some critics have argued that Kant therefore denies the existence of reality, since that is the world containing the noumenon which are unknowable. But other critics believe that is not the case: the noumenon exists because it gives rise to the phenomenon which we experience. Perhaps it’s best to think that Kant contends there are two realities: the reality we experience and the reality itself. Because of Kant’s education in Leibnez philosophy and because of his attempt towards a conciliate epistemology between science and philosophy, I like to think the latter is true. Either way, Kant is a figure that continues to be controversial and influential for his profound genius.