The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

basis, an all-inclusive problematic situation involving the whole of mankind, that will serve as common denominator for verbal intercourse with mutual understanding. For if different universes of discourse divide us, our common problems can unite us. How, then, could cultural anthropology even begin its investigations without the help of those tools for research that Kant brought to such precision in his Critique?

He taught us above all, not to make our selves our starting point, as if we were absolutes, not to treat our empirical ego as the standard for all truth, because that makes us dogmatic and intolerant; and not even to accept the so-called objective world as unchangeable and rational in itself, and therefore essentially incapable of improvement. He taught us, instead, to watch our mental processes, and to discover how, guided by the pattern we have learned, we can organise the confusion which meets us into a coherent situation, a situation which we can identify and master. Think of a new-born baby. All its sensations are quite vague; it can see no object around it, and therefore it is unable to master the situation which it is living in; it sees nothing but light that hurts its eyes; cannot think because ithasn’t the symbols which are the necessary instruments for doing so; suffers, exults, gets excited, but doesn’t ‘take in’ anything, not even what has to do with its joys and sufferings. Slowly, gradually, it learns, first from its mother and later from others around it, those first experiences through which it builds for itself a system, a more and more complex and complete system of patterns for ‘taking in’ the ‘world’ around it, making sense of it, and consequently being able to manipulate it and gain more and more control of it. This controlling system of experience, which is not transmitted hereditarily through the genes but acquired through education, is organised in the ganglia of our central and our peripheral nervous system, incarnated in the synapses of our brain cells (where it is recorded as if on magnetic tape) and eventually develops into a particular cultural apparatus, biologically built-in to enable us to live humanly among human beings. This structure which controls our stream of consciousness and the actions resulting from it, can be compared with Kant’s notion ‘transcendental’ because it is not just our own private system but is shared with all the other members of our particular society. This structure is not in things

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