The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

nowhere. Kant’s creative genius enabled him to discover this new point of view and he coined a new word to name it—‘transcendental’—which was to mean something quite different from ‘transcendent’. Transcendent means “beyond experience’, transcendental means something in experience without which experience would not be possible.

What did Kant mean to convey by this word ‘transcendental’ : Well, it was the adjective he used to characterise any concept which is, firstly, not bound up with our private, subjective experience as persons but universally valid for all human beings, and secondly, not an idea in Plato’s sense, as having objective existence outside of us and independently of us, whether in the mind of God or in a transcendent world of pure ideas. “Transcendental’ was his word for those a priori forms that make knowledge possible, that is to say, those particular procedures which the human mind has to go through if cognition is to take place. These forms, according to Kant, are absolutely valid for everyone, so that cognition takes place only through these forms and never apart from them; nevertheless, they have no independent existence, as abstract metaphysical entities and apart from anyone’s thinking, but are only valid and only exist in this strictly limited sense, as forms of the concrete activity of thinking; in fact they are identical with the activity of thinking and are filled with those sensory contents without which thought becomes empty and dissolves into an illusory abstraction.

In other words, so Kant said, if we really want to understand what cognition is, we must start out from the act of cognition itself, from our actual experience, and observe how it comes about and what factors we must assume if we are to explain it.

This way of viewing things was, for those times, revolutionary —so much so that Kant himself referred to it as a Copernican revolution in philosophy. For whereas, according to traditional philosophy, the object in cognition took its origin either from the activity of a subject’s mind, or from the impact of an objective reality on a passive subject, Kant proposed to show that the object in cognition has its source in an operation that is carried out in accordance with certain conceptual forms which have no independent existence of their own, outside our consciousness. They are not private characteristics of this or that individual, neither

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