Original subtitles

For thousands of years, renowned as a land of poets, among them,

Immanuel Kant.

Ask yourself only, what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts

bear out?

The most important value that you can bring to the table is your integrity, is

your trustworthiness.

Immanuel Kant.

one of the most influential, consequential and ground-breaking

philosophers in history, changed the way we think about what we're all capable

of.

Each of us swim in the water of his philosophy.

Politically, morally, culturally, he changed everything.

The course of history, us, our ways of thinking and acting.

He saw that people had been pushed around by religious zealots, by powerful

leaders, and by arrogant metaphysicians, and he wanted to prove and show how

we could think for ourselves.

That in here we had a powerful tool, one that no one had quite yet

properly. understood, and that if we used it properly we could begin to strip

away misconceptions,

false opinion, all this fuzz, all this confusion, all this complexity, and

find within us pure reason.

A big claim.

He said that the Enlightenment, that 18th century period of radical change in

Europe, was, quote, man's emergence from immaturity. And reading him, when you

really understand what he's saying, really does have an effect on the inner

workings of your mind. You can feel the way you think change.

So we'll look at both his ideas about rationality and knowledge, and his

philosophy of morality, and in doing so, we'll try and find a peak,

a viewpoint, from which we can reliably view the world, a solid foundation to

stand on, from which we might be able to find some tools, some guidelines for

thinking and acting, a place we might be able to find.

or at least glimpse pure reason this is also the story of a man

who like kant is attempting to find their way up a mountain searching for

something pure at the top

Immanuel Kant, born in 1724, wanted to make us a truly scientific

species. He wanted to bring together reason, how we think, and experience,

what we see, hear, touch, what we get through our senses.

He wanted to bring them together on a sure foundation, one that scientific

knowledge could be built on.

He hoped to lay out what he described as a cosmic idea of philosophy, one that

followed in Newton's footsteps when he discovered the universal laws of motion

and gravity.

Kant wanted to lay out and discover the laws that governed human thought, human

experience, human action.

In that, he said how we think is central in the three most important questions we

can ask ourselves.

What can I know? What should I do?

And for what may I hope?

His most important work was the monumental critique of pure reason.

a 1,000-page book published in 1781, written in technical philosophical

language in winding, impenetrable passages with no accepted

interpretation.

The goal of the book, though, is quite simple. He's asking what can we know

objectively, surely, with certainty about the world and about ourselves and

about the relationship between the two.

It starts from a simple premise.

If we look around us, at the landscape, the universe, the weather, our health

and our bodies, our pursuits, our relationships and choices, how if you

really think about it, it all seems so incomprehensibly complex.

There's just so much going on, it's almost chaotic as so many distinct

moving parts can be approached in so many ways.

How is it possible that we make sense of the world and our lives at all?

Out of all of this, Somehow, we do get meaning.

We get lives and routines.

We get schedules and books and places to go and walks to go on and people to see.

He's asking how, in the philosopher Imayahu Uvel's words, we constitute

a cosmos out of chaos.

Kant said that two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration

and reverence the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me

the starry world he calls an unbounded magnitude worlds upon worlds

systems upon systems that unimaginable complexity everywhere we look

and the second is that the way from that i managed to carve a path through it

through that unbounded magnitude i managed to somehow think and act

in all of this boundless complexity we do seem to have a

compass something that guides our thought somehow something that guides

our sense of right and wrong

So let's get going. I'm going to avoid technical language as much as I

reasonably can.

I'll avoid going down the route normally taken, a route you'll recognise if

you've looked at any introductory book or podcast about Kant. It's the route of

analytic a priori bachelors being unmarried men. And I think that's a

confusing place to start.

Because actually...

I think the key to Kant is quite simple.

He's asking how we create concepts, how we make our ideas of the world.

What's happening when we do this? In thinking about this, we approach the

peak of pure reason. Because conceptualizing is what we do in every

moment. It's the foundation of thought itself.

In finding what's pure, You can know what's reliable, what to most focus on.

You can sharpen how to think.

Think about all the experiences you've had in your life. The things you've

seen, felt, smelt, heard and tasted.

Now multiply that by all the people that have ever lived, by the numerical

extent of the world, of the universe, what we know of it, what we don't.

Add in all the things you've forgotten, that they've forgotten, the experience

of animals, the lives of plants, the processes of physics or chemistry too.

Look around right now.

Look at all the parts of the room that you could focus on, but haven't, have

sidelined.

Now, I could select this single quadrant here out of all of the others, and

I could think about not just its colour, but its shade, not just its shape, but

its particular lines, its particular corners.

I could think about... Its texture, how it feels, how it smells, how it tastes,

if I wanted to.

Now, zoom back out.

How do we choose what to select out of all of this?

How do we know? How do we get a comprehensible picture from something so

chaotic? And that's one rock. What about one piece of grass, a tiny piece of

dirt? This same problem applies to... everything in the world. What we have

for lunch, who we're going to see, what we're going to say next, what we're

going to choose to do next, our life plans.

About half a billion photons hit the retina every single second, yet somehow

we translate that into something intelligible, something human, a

picture, a focus.

This is Kant's fundamental question.

How do you get a structured, comprehensible idea of the world from

all of this stuff?

The collection of perceptions, impressions on the eye, on the skin, in

the nose, on the eardrum, are like billions of artists' paintbrush strokes,

each and every second, like the collecting of infinitesimal peas in a

colossal bag.

What we have is what Kant called content.

without form.

There's no organising factor.

It's just a mass, a mess, a chaos.

So the first problem is the organisational problem.

How do we organise all of this?

The second problem is how is objective knowledge possible in the face of all of

this? Out of those trillions of artists' impressions, so many have been wiped

away. turned out to be mistaken, misstrokes.

How do we know that the sun will continue to rise, that the laws of

gravity will hold ten years from now?

Kant was responding to the influential Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Hume was an empiricist. He believed that all knowledge came from the senses, that

we learn about the world from what we absorb from outside of us.

From this, Hume made a radical claim that if we only know the sun rises and

sets from experience, or from the experience of others, from what we've

been told,

No matter how many times we watch it rise, no matter how many times it's been

recorded rising throughout history, there is no certain proof that it will

rise again tomorrow.

We can only say that with each time we experience something happening, the

chances of it happening again increase.

This deeply disturbed Kant.

He said that it awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.

It disturbed him so much because it shook the new scientific method that was

emerging in Kant's time from having any secure scientific foundation.

We might observe gravity working consistently, but this could change.

After all, people believed many things throughout history that turned out to be

false. The second and related thing that disturbed Kant was that if Hume was

right that all of our knowledge came from outside of us, from experience

through our senses, then we have no innate knowledge-making capacity for

ourselves. If all comes from outside, we're just receptors.

passively driven by outside stimuli, as Zouvel puts it.

Kant felt intuitively that this was wrong, that we have knowledge of our

own, and that some scientific truths, for example that everything that happens

has a cause, or some mathematical truths, like 2 plus 2 is 4, are true

for us.

for everyone and doesn't come from outside experience, we just know it from

within somehow.

Do we really have to go about like explorers with magnifying glasses

searching for mathematics in nature?

For followers of Hume's philosophy, surely it follows that numbers had to be

discovered one at a time, counted out.

Pythagoras could only find his theorem out in the world, in the wild. This

surely wasn't true.

Do we not have an innate capacity for working through some mathematical and

scientific claims ourselves, independent of experience?

Don't we know that numbers exist, even if we haven't counted them or thought of

them ourselves?

As Roger Scruton puts it in his introduction, Kant wants to know, how

can I come to know the world through pure reflection, without recourse to

experience? This pure reflection is pure reason, the root of all

thinking. In short, again, how do we, in here, constitute

a cosmos out of chaos?

Kant wrote several influential books, but what's referred to as the first

critique, the critique of pure reason, is the central one.

It's where he answers the most fundamental of questions.

How do we constitute meaning out of chaos?

How do we create knowledge for ourselves?

Ok, so first, what does reason mean for Kant?

Broadly, it means the process of thinking, the conditions, the rules, the

operating system for thinking itself.

If Hume was right that everything comes from outside of us, then the very act

of thinking makes little sense.

If we get everything from outside, do we get the rules for thinking from outside

of us too?

like picking up someone else's cookbook. If Hume was right, it would be like all

the thinking was done for us before it even gets to us through the senses.

So in short, asking what reason is, is asking what thinking is if it was

emptied of all of its content.

That's why he says pure reason.

Working out what this is could be unimaginably powerful.

To know how to build and program on a great computer, of course, you need to

know how the source code works.

Working this out is like finding the source of knowledge, stripped of

everything else, a kind of meaning of life.

Yovel writes that reasons interests are inherent to it and not directed at any

external goal.

In other words, human rationality is a goal-orientated activity whose goal lies

in itself rather than in anything other than itself.

Pure reason is like this beaker, a cup or a

measuring jug.

It takes the data of the outside world and shapes it.

defines it in its own way. And reason does that by formulating concepts.

Concepts are how we see the world.

As Kantian philosopher Paul Geyer puts it, The Critique of Pure Reason argues

that all knowledge requires both input from the senses and organisation by

concepts, and that both sensory inputs and organising concepts of pure forms

that we can know a priori, thus know to be universally and necessarily

valid.

Okay, Kant uses that phrase a priori a lot. It just means independent of

experience before all thinking is done. The conditions for thought itself,

universal. It's the elixir, the holy grail of pure thought.

He says, a priori means what is left when one removes from our experience

everything that belongs to the senses.

He continues that every cognition is called pure. That is not mixed with

anything foreign to it.

Pure thought receives, organizes, judges, and applies concepts to the raw

data of experience.

Kant also calls pure thought the understanding, because, well, it

attempts to understand the world.

Yuval writes that The senses supply the understanding with a crude element that

is not yet a real object but only the material for it, and the understanding,

a spontaneous factor, must order and shape this material according to its

own a priori modes of operation.

Kant's responding to two traditions in philosophy that were new at the time,

The empiricists, as we've seen, like Hume, who argued that all knowledge

comes from experience, and the rationalists, people like Descartes and

Spinoza, who argued that reason is the way to secure knowledge, like

mathematics.

Kant carves a path that requires both.

It's a mixing of them, and it's how that happens that's important for him.

Famously, he says, without sensibility, that's senses, no object would be

given to us, and without understanding, that's thinking, none would be thought.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are

blind.

Kant takes complex, bewildering twists and turns towards his proof of this. He

takes different pathways towards the same goal. I'm going to focus on the

three central ones.

From them, pure reason can be glimpsed and understood.

The technical names are the transcendental aesthetic, the

metaphysical deduction, and the transcendental deduction.

But don't worry about them sounding technical, just focus on that peak and

together we'll meander our way towards it.

Okay, so what is that first path?

What's pure and necessary and fundamental and universal and...

a priori to receiving any of that data from the environment, from the senses?

What's the first part of our pre-empirical toolkit?

Time and space.

Kant is always asking this question.

What must be the case for this to be true?

What are the conditions that make this possible?

And the first thing that Kant claims is that space and time are the universal

forms of all intuitions. Space and time are the preconditions for

experience, those inputs, to happen at all.

And it doesn't come from the senses, from outside, because to even have

sensations in the first place, we must have some kind of intuitive framework.

to receive them.

This idea is the first stone laid in Kant's transcendental method.

Speaking of stones, for me to even experience an object, whether I see it,

hear it, touch it, I must be able to place it in space, separate from

other objects, and importantly as distinct in space from myself.

as something separate from my consciousness.

We have to have what Kant calls pure intuition, a framework

of space and time that the experience can happen in.

Kant says, space is not an empirical concept that has been drawn from outer

experiences because in order for certain sensations to be related to something

outside me, the representation of space must already be their ground." In other

words, our experience of space is not something we learn empirically.

It's presupposed to even have empirical experiences at all. Because

in order for us to even say something is over there, the over-there-ness

is assumed in the judgement.

When I say this is over there, the very quality of this-ness must be

recognized as something I've carved out in space.

What am I doing when I say this?

I'm delimiting this as a thing in space, separate from me,

relative to other things.

Time functions in the same way. For me to even understand that one thing

follows another, for me to say something happened after something

else, before and after are assumed in the recognising of

a moment.

We have to have carved out a period of this-ness in time.

A moment separate from other moments.

And so, space and time are pure intuitions. They're the sea that

everything else swims in. But we can learn something else from this, too.

Something radical.

That this pure intuition is about being able to perceive particulars within a

totality.

carve out, select, pick out, designate a particular unit of space,

in this case the stone, or a particular unit of time. Now, then,

when. Again, a particular in a totality.

Yovel writes that pure intuition works by perceiving a priori a basic singular

unit. In geometry, it's a unit of space, in arithmetic, the number,

and transcends it towards other units of the same kind existing outside it.

For us to perceive the world at all, we must have an innate grasp of what is

inside of us and outside of us, what is here and what's there, without which

everything would be everywhere at once.

and an innate sense of succession, of something following another thing in

time, without which everything would happen at once.

What this assumes, to be able to distinguish points on these spectrums,

is that we can splice them up, that I can locate, isolate, analyse, focus

on single particular points.

And this leads to another radical implication, a consequence of this.

That carving out units is the basis of mathematics.

Once I can say one rock, or one moment in time, I can conceive of there being

another unit, then another, then I could add them together, I could multiply

them, subtract them, divide them.

So Kant says that the very idea of mathematics is presumed in having any

experience at all.

Yovel writes simply that the number five is the product of a construction that

adds the basic numerical unit to itself and stops at the fifth place.

Mathematics is transcendental, a priori, universal, pure thought that does

not come from...

out there, from experience.

Again, it means that Pythagoras did not have to go around the world with the

magnifying glass, searching for his theorem in the wild. The question,

though, is whether he could have imagined it with no sensory input at

all.

Okay, so space and time are pure forms of intuition, through which we are

connected to the objects of empirical experience.

But this is still something passive.

It's the common landscape of the universe, something we swim in, swim

through. But Kant also needs to prove that we bring something to the table

to do the thinking.

On this landscape of pure intuition, we are doing something.

And in short, that something is the forming of concepts.

We do this by categorizing our experience.

Kant calls the metaphysical deduction a mere clue to the discovery of all pure

concepts of the understanding, and it's the second pathway up towards the peak

of pure reason, before we get to that third and main path.

First, what is a concept?

Well, in general, a concept is an abstract idea.

the way we think, the way we hold something, an object or an idea, a

thought or an image, in our heads.

Concepts are everything.

In fact, they're the only access to the world outside of us that we truly have.

Okay, so I have a concept of water, for example, what it's like, what it does,

where to find it, and so on.

I can't see the other side of this bottle, but I have an idea of it and

where it fits in nonetheless.

Concepts are the way we focus on the parade of experience around it. They're

the very way we experience, the way we select and organise.

Without some way of focusing, the parade of experience is just that, a parade,

passing us by, float by float.

act by act we need something that focuses that selects one of the floats

one of the acts one of the dancers one of the lights exactly what we do when we

watch a parade we change our focus move our nets and suddenly a whole different

perspective is within view

So what's going on when we do this?

Once again, Kant asks, what must be the case for this to be possible?

Concepts are something like how we create those containers for our

experiences of the world to fit into.

Containers that are ours, that are pure thought.

They are...

innate to us, but they have no content of their own, because they need

something to fill them before they're anything at all – something to organise,

something to give shape to.

Concepts are the way we understand the world, and we judge what we experience

so as to categorise it through concepts.

In fact, All thinking is understanding, and all thinking uses categories.

It's the job of our pure understanding to organise that data we receive,

to judge where it fits, to recognise patterns.

If it doesn't do this, what job would it have?

We'd be placid, docile receptors, just soaking everything in like sponges.

He calls the understanding

discursive, which he gets from the Latin, running through.

We run through our experiences, and when we run through something, we make

judgements.

Let's imagine I was born yesterday, which some people say is true.

And the first thing I see is this leaf.

I recognise certain qualities.

It's green.

It has a particular shape. It's found on a tree or on the ground.

It's light, but it's singular.

I've carved it out in space and time.

Now, I come across another object.

It looks similar. I recognise that it too has this quality of greenness

to it. That's two instances.

Its shape is different, but similar too.

Now I see the grass as green, but it's different to a leaf. It has a different

shape. It's found elsewhere.

I find another leaf, this time on a tree in a different place, but it

looks, it feels, it smells very similar.

What's happened here?

I've identified an object as separate from its surroundings.

I've judged that a part of it seems to have a certain quality that differs from

other parts of the environment in my view.

Greenness, softness, lightness, this particular shape.

I've focused on each of these properties, drawing them out from the

leaf as a whole.

then I've unified them back into the concept of a leaf as a whole, for me to

recognise it again.

Philosopher Gilles von Barocca writes that judgments are acts in which the

understanding unifies diverse representations into a single, more

complex representation of an object.

The judgment splits the world up into different parts, analyses it, then

unifies it back together again into a representation of an object or an idea.

I see this tree.

I split it into its colours, its shapes, the bark, the leaves, the wind rustling

through it. I might later include its roots, or scientific knowledge about

photosynthesis say, or ideas about where the tree came from, or its different

species, but ultimately I unify it into a concept of a tree.

conceptual thinking unifies distinct representations of the world by making

judgments about them this is one of the roots of all thinking everything

whether it's objects like leaves and trees or ideas like democracy or love

looks for the distinct parts that make up the unified concept Goya writes that

the premise of Kant's argument is that All the cognition involves the

combination of concepts into judgements, which in the first instance subsumes

more particular concepts under more general ones, like the particular

concept of bark and the general concept of tree, or the particular

concept of a specific shade of brown under the general concept of brownness.

or the particular concept of all of these things under the general concept

of nature.

Now the question becomes, what are the rules that govern this process?

How do we unify our representations?

How do we combine them together?

What rulebook are we judging by?

Kant's answer is the categories.

Now, bear with me here.

All thinking is judging by applying the categories.

Like space and time the categories are the conditions for having any

understandable experiences.

at all. Now this next bit gets a little bit technical so don't worry too much it

doesn't matter too much but there are four main categories each with three

subcategories. Philosophers have criticized Kant here for various reasons

but it's the idea of these rough set of categories that's important for

us and important for understanding Kant.

The four main ones are quantity, quality, relation, and modality, and

don't get too bogged down in this, but it's the way we judge particular

representations and unify them into concepts.

It works like this.

A quantity of judgments is either universal, particular, or singular.

It's just the way we carve up units and say all of them.

some of them, or one of them. For example, all leaves come from plants, or

some leaves are green, or a leaf is in my pocket.

Universal, particular, single.

Quality is the affirmation of some predicate that an object has.

Quality is the R in some leaves are green.

It's our ability to recognise that some unit, a unit we carve out, is different

in quality from, for example, the air, or the ground, or the rest of the plant,

or myself, or the birds that surround it.

There's also relation.

If something happens, something else happens. If-then statements.

We might always find a leaf by a tree, for example. So it would be if tree,

then leaf.

Or it might be exclusive, either or. We never find a leaf growing out of

concrete, say.

And then there's modality. That's statements about existence, say, or

whether something is being asserted or not, or held in the mind or not.

In this, we also have the idea of possibility.

This might be right, or might not, or this is here now, or that

is not.

Okay, but back to the path.

The particulars of the categories aren't too important for an introduction, but

what is is that we have a universal, a priori, pre-experienced,

transcendental set of categories that we use to run through experience, judge

it, understand it, and organize it into sets of ideas.

What we have, if Kant is right,

is quite incredible.

It's the foundation of knowledge itself.

This is the heart of Kant's philosophy, the third path up to the peak.

It's here that Kant argues that the concepts like quantity and quality apply

to experience, synthesize experience spontaneously, and that through

them experience becomes our experience.

That the whole process requires an identity that's persistent through time.

Like the previous two paths he's asking what must be true for thought to happen

at all? What is transcendental?

He starts from a simple premise.

What are the conditions of the possibility of the I think itself?

It's really a common sense question.

If we were just receiving experiences like Hume thought, what would the I

think even mean?

After all, we'd just be passive.

We'd have no way of distinguishing our representations of the world from the

world itself.

We'd receive the world, but we wouldn't have concepts like cup, walking, cloud,

life. We wouldn't even be the containers that the experience was poured into.

because we wouldn't have any containers at all. We'd just be this amorphous mass

that was just drawn from and shaped by everything around us.

In having a representation of an object, in thinking about this

apple, its redness, its sweetness, its location, of turning it and

remembering what the side I can't see looks like, in remembering what the

inside smells like from a previous experience. I'm obviously aware that

what I'm thinking about is an apple that is my idea of the apple, that I'm

constructing a concept.

Let's go back to that empirical chaos.

Kant starts with that simple premise, that all of my representations of the

world are inherently complex, a whole of compared and connected representations,

as he puts it. The world, any snapshot of it, is seemingly

irreducible, full of objects and impressions and sense data that could be

cut up in a dizzying and infinite number of ways.

This doesn't just apply to space, to a snapshot of the world around us, but to

time too.

Pause for a moment.

Listen to and look at your surroundings.

The speed of things vary.

The birdsong comes and goes.

The water flows.

The rain moves at different speed, maybe quickens.

The clouds move.

Hunger appears.

Some things are long, large, and steady, others small and fleeting.

Kant says they must all be ordered, connected, and brought into relations.

For example, if I'm trying to understand the apple or the leaf or the tree,

I'd watch them and experience them over the course of a year, say, through the

seasons. as the leaves shed and the fruit falls and find something new to

add to my understanding of the concepts of apple, leaf or tree.

Now, the key to this is synthesis.

It's only in spontaneously recognising the world in its parts, breaking them

down, Then unifying them, synthesising them back together into unities

that I do any thinking at all.

This is the carving out of units in space and time that I talked about

earlier. Take a look at this pillow. It has so many colours, shapes,

intersecting parts, threads.

How do you decide?

where to focus.

In the very act of focusing, of looking through, of touching, of

smelling, hearing even, we synthesize either a part of it

or all of it into a unity.

It's also true that space and time can be cut up.

infinitely even more so today with microscopes and hearing equipment i can

look at a part of an apple it's hard in some places and soft in others

it's found on a tree but can be picked up it can be cut up into many parts

the number of shades it has is immeasurable the feel of the stalk the

inside and the outside are all different to experience The storks say, I've

synthesized its parts, its brownness, roughness, its shape, into one unity,

and excluded the rest of the apple.

The key is, we separate into parts, into units, and then

synthesize back into wholes.

But again, Kant goes further.

He makes the point that for us to even begin to construct a concept out of

experience we also need memory and imagination.

He writes

We have to recall parts of the apple, even if it was just milliseconds before,

to synthesize those parts into a single concept.

Apple. We can't see the back.

We have to remember what it tasted like. In fact, me and you are looking at

different sides right now. We have to remember where we found it. And this

applies to everything we experience.

previous representations have to be recognised as being related in some way

to present themselves as unified representations.

And this is true for exclusion too.

It's only in recognising that the redness of the object that I just looked

at is different from the brown branch and the green leaves that I'm now

looking at where it grows that I recognise that the red quality of the

apple, along with its other qualities, makes it something to focus on and

conceptualise a tool.

This doesn't just apply to simple objects like apples, but every thought

we have, every concept we have.

Democracy, mountaineering, love, friendship, they all require breaking

phenomena into parts, then reunifying them into a concept, recalling separate

parts of it to do that.

This is the basis of thought, fundamental for pure reasoning.

The count now brings the categories back into the picture. To do any of this, to

synthesize, to use our memory or imagination to recognize how our

different experiences are related, we must use the categories.

We have to count, we have to recognize quality, we have to exclude parts,

and so on. Even if we're not doing it consciously.

We have to do these things in the abstract.

This has been called the embryo of Kant's philosophy.

The core, the middle, the centre, the foundation, the top, the summit,

the terrifyingly titled, the transcendental unity of apperception.

It's the bringing of all of this together.

Kant synthesises it all into a, quote, unity of consciousness that

precedes all data of the intuitions, or a, quote, pure, original,

unchanging consciousness.

Applying the categories, counting through the world, recognising

qualities, affirming and denying, requires a thorough going thread.

A consistent self-same unity that's required for any experiencing

to happen at all.

He writes, We are conscious a priori of the thoroughgoing identity of ourselves

with regard to all representations that can ever belong to our consciousness.

Remember that phrase discursive, that running through? Well, it's central

it's at the center it's the me taking the roots up to the mountain top it's

the i synthesizing it all together the world space and time

experience me he says the i think must be able to accompany

all my representations for otherwise something would be represented in me

that could not be thought at all Which is as much as to say that the

representation would either be impossible or else at least would be

nothing for me.

This unifying can only be done by some singular activity of a unified

independent consciousness, which one becomes aware of through the process of

understanding, through judging, through time, through fabricating our ideas of

the world, through constructing, through counting, through looking at the

qualities. We build up the world for ourselves.

self-aware and self-conscious of the world as my experience of the world.

He writes that we can represent nothing as combined in the object without having

previously combined it ourselves and that among all representations

combination is the only one that is not given through objects but

can be executed only by the subject itself.

since it is an act of its self-activity. Again, this requires the categories

because to judge and organize any experience at all, I must be able to

carve out a unit to judge, to compare it to other units, to

recognize its qualities, to count it, and so on.

Barocas says that I then judge that each of these judgments belongs to me, and I

find that I can make judgments about one representation, some representations,

and all of my representations.

What he's saying is that in the very act of recognizing a representation of the

world, in sight, say, in carving out a particular unit, in

time-say, in excluding a different part, or in synthesizing it

back together again. We're doing something that's not given in

experience.

We're doing something that's truly mine.

Unifying can only be done by a single unity, a thread, a

core, a central meanness.

And that cannot be given by experience.

That is the summit of pure reason.

The unity centres everything.

Space and time are the vessel.

Judgment, synthesizing, and understanding are the process, and the

categories of splitting up, counting, recognizing qualities, and so on, the

tools, the rules, along with our imaginations and our memory, to do all

of this, to survey everything.

This, combined, is the center of Kant's project.

A priori, universal, required, necessary.

from which everything else can be experienced and understood.

But remember that Kant says that experience is required too. So we should

now be in a better position to understand this famous and influential

phrase, thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts.

Kant wrote a lot and we've covered as much as we can in a video the first

critique of pure reason but He went on in later texts to apply this to

practical reason, how pure reason informs how we choose what to do, what

political systems we might use, what we find beautiful, for example.

And he began this later project in his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of

Morals.

His starting point is this.

If what we've found at the summit is the only thing that is universally

guaranteed, a priori, from which all else is surveyed, then it must be

the highest good.

It must be the only thing we can absolutely depend on, rely on.

It's what he calls an end in itself.

Kant wants to unleash the reason that we have within us.

He said famously in his essay What is Enlightenment that enlightenment was

man's emergence from self-incurred immaturity.

That immaturity was not using the reason that we are endowed with.

And just as Kant wants to find pure reason stripped of any experiential

content,

something that's ours to rely on. He wants to find a moral code that's pure

too, one that doesn't rely on anything outside of us. He called Hume's

philosophy a wretched anthropology.

If we reduce morality to just what we experience, what we see other people do

say, well, people do some pretty horrible things to one another.

It seems that many people don't care about morality at all, and it doesn't

seem that nature gives us too many clues either.

So, morality must come from elsewhere.

As Kenneth Westphal writes, by definition, pure practical reason omits

all corporeal desires.

motives, urges, inclinations or preferences, and all a consideration of

the agent's capacities and resources for achieving ends.

Kant's in search of a moral compass that's cleansed and stripped of anything

outside of itself, that could sway it, because If, as Hume thought,

our morality comes from our feelings, our sympathies towards others, instead

of from reason, then how do we ever condemn those that have no feelings

towards others, those that just don't care, that are selfish, psychopathic

even? How can we ever say that anyone is wrong if Empathy and

sympathy are the basis of morality, and they simply don't feel those things.

For Kant, reason is so important that we have a duty to it,

because having the ability to reason implies we have something else, freedom.

He writes, If only rational beings can be an end in themselves, this is not

because they have reason.

but because they have freedom.

Reason is merely a means.

David Misselbrook writes that Kant started with the fact that mankind's

distinguishing feature is our possession of reason.

Therefore, it follows that all humans have universal rational duties to one

another, centering on their duty to respect the other's humanity.

In a later work, The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says, What characterizes

humanity, as distinguished from animality, is the capacity to set

oneself an end, any end whatsoever.

Humans can set goals and use reason to meet them. It's this that

makes us human.

What this means is that we shouldn't use people, treating them as means to our

goals without their consent. We should respect their capacity to reason for

themselves, to set their own ends, as Kant called it.

He famously writes that, So act that you use humanity, whether in your own

person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end.

never merely as a means.

Each of us only has access to the outcomes of our own reasonable thinking.

We set goals and reason how to achieve them.

I might freely set a goal to come down the mountain and you can tell me that

one way is better than another.

But if you force me down, against my wishes, you've gone against the reason

of another.

The only thing we can all trust, absolutely, each person sets their own

ends. Each person is an end in themselves.

This belief is the grounds of what Kant called the categorical imperative.

all other things love sympathy friendship charity can wax and

wane be felt one minute and gone the next instead we should rely on reason

and duty to do what reason commands he said nothing is left but the

conformity of actions as such with universal law which alone is to serve

the will as its principle that is I ought never to act except in such a

way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

He called the result a categorical imperative.

Categorical meaning unconditional, always true, and imperative meaning

something that we know we ought to follow.

So how would this work?

Well, first we should formulate a maxim, a test.

to see if something is moral or not.

A maxim is a principle for acting.

I will give this spare change to charity.

I will drop this litter or trash here. I will steal this sandwich. I will lie to

my friend. I will drive faster. I will cheat on my exam.

Kant says that the first way to see if a maxim conforms with reason, to see

whether it's moral or not, is to ask whether it could become a universal law

without any contradictions.

Kant asks, would it be logically possible for everyone to do this if it

was universalised? Is there a contradiction in conception?

Take breaking a promise.

Then ask, if everyone broke promises when they wished, what would it mean to

promise in the first place?

Nothing. The institution of promising itself would break down, wouldn't

function, would become untrustworthy.

There's a contradiction in conception.

James Fizer writes that if such deceit were followed universally then the whole

institution of promising would be undermined and I could not make my

promise to begin with or take stealing if everyone stole from each other

whenever they wished then the idea of any personal property at all would

become meaningless and in cheating the institution

Whether it's the institution of the rules of a card game or the procedure of

an exam at school, the expectations and the rules that govern the activity would

fall apart and become pointless once everyone starts cheating.

When universalising our maxim we get a contradiction in conception, then Kant

says we have a perfect duty not to do it.

But we should also ask whether the maxim is something I could rationally will,

for myself and for others.

Some things do not contradict themselves when universalised, but are still

clearly intolerable.

He writes,

Take laziness, for example, or not helping someone in need.

They don't contradict themselves when universalised, but they don't aid reason

in pursuing ends if everyone did it.

Kant sees that we all need aid sometimes, so a world where no one

helped each other would obviously be a bad one, one more inhospitable to reason

itself.

Pfizer says that two types of contradictions emerge, one an internal

contradiction with the proposed universal rule and the other a

contradiction between the proposed universal rule and another rational

obligation that treats reason as an end in itself.

goals themselves.

He says,

This

means that not

only should we avoid manipulating, using, and blocking that freedom in

others, but that even more than this, we should actively pursue aiding it in

others. We should not only avoid treating people as instruments for our

own gains, but we should find ways of helping them in achieving their ends,

because that's what we'd rationally will for ourselves, and that's what furthers

and expands rationality in total.

To take one example, in asking whether I should help someone in need.

Not only should we pursue it if we see someone is in need, but we should

actively seek it out, if we can, within a balancing of our other

responsibilities and our own rational life plans and goals, because it will

help them achieve their own goals, their own ends as humans, and if everyone

did it, it would help us achieve our own goals and our own ends.

ourselves. Finally, we should ask whether we are seeing that every

rational being must act as if he were by his maxims at all times a law-giving

member of the universal kingdom of ends.

In short, this means thinking about whether if everyone was rational,

everyone followed each other's moral laws, if everyone respected each other,

the maxims would all hang together.

Think about traffic lights.

I have a maxim to stop or go at a certain time. If everyone cheated the

traffic lights, then the traffic lights would be pointless.

And this all hangs together, and my stopping or going hangs together with

traffic coming the other way. The maxim fits the maxim of the pedestrian to wait

patiently for their turn to cross.

Our moral ideas, in other words, should be symmetrical, so as to be

universalisable, otherwise there would be chaos.

Alan Wood writes that rational beings constitute a realm to the extent that

their ends form a system in which these ends are not only mutually consistent

but also harmonious and reciprocally supportive.

Well, in writing these works, around the time of the French Revolution, at the

onset of the truly modern world, at the end of the Enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant changed everything.

For example, Goya writes that Kant's idea that humanity must be treated as an

end in itself and never merely as a means has gained wide acceptance in

modern moral thought and philosophy.

And while the liberal consequences of this have had a huge effect on our

politics, the question has to be asked, has its implications been fully

realised?

Do we treat each other as ends, not as means?

He was immediately, immeasurably and inimitably influential.

The idea of focusing on that relationship between Experience and

conceptual thinking started a revolution in philosophy known as German Idealism

that led to thinkers like Hegel and Marx, much of the modern intellectual

world and modern politics too.

And in many ways he began to put an end to many of the intellectual arguments

that defined the Enlightenment.

This was because for many Kant had proven that you couldn't get beyond

immediate experience and thought.

Any grand theories that tried to disprove or prove God, say, or whether

there was a beginning to time, were, in their very nature, pointless,

ungraspable. In this sense, he was a very conservative figure, carefully

attending to the matters at hand, but also, strangely,

a very radical one, we can all think for and guide ourselves.

But once you've been to the top of the mountain, once you've got a glimpse of

pure reason, been convinced of your own, truly your own, powers of rational

thought, of applying careful categorisation to the world, of

recognizing qualities counting carefully where and in what ways those qualities

are found you'll notice you doing this everywhere in ideas and objects in

facts and feelings in relationships philosophies pursuits passions and

projects how we judge in what ways we understand how we reason through the

world well it's everything

If you're interested in learning more about Kant, please make sure to check

the sources in the description.

I've added a few comments and listed them in the order I think they should be

read to understand him because, well, he is a difficult thinker.

So have a look at that and if you want to support me in making more videos like

this, like all these wonderful people do, then please head over to Patreon

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the discord server and all the rest of it. Thank you so much, I've really

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See you next time.