Читать книгу Phenomenology - Anthony Chemero - Страница 13

Kant is fond of astronomy. He thinks of it as an example of a discipline that struggled for a long time to produce theories and predictions with certainty, until Copernicus’ revision of its foundation put it on what Kant calls “the secure path of a science.” Kant likes to compare the main insight of his Critique of Pure Reason to this Copernican revolution. In the preface to the B edition (published in 1787), he writes:

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition. (Bxvi)

Copernicus enabled progress in astronomy by presupposing that the earth revolves around the sun, despite the intuitive evidence to the contrary. Kant sees himself as enabling progress in metaphysics. By metaphysics Kant means an account of non-empirical truths, that is, propositions that are necessarily true and whose truth we can establish without recourse to particular experiences of the world. He claims that we can only give such an account by presupposing, counter-intuitively, that objects conform to our a priori cognition of them, rather than the other way around. This claim is more readily expressed by saying that the structures of cognition constitute general features of objects or, as Kant himself puts it, that “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (Bxviii). Besides constituting the objects of our experience, the same basic structures also constitute ourselves. So, although he is not consistently clear about this, Kant ends up with the view that subject and object are two interdependent poles in a single structure that constitutes the origin of meaningful experience. The task of philosophy is to analyze and spell out this underlying origin.