At first glance, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason might seem to advocate a rejection of reason in favor of passion. However, Kant is not discarding reason, he is examining its limits, asking how far pure thought can take us. For Kant, "pure" reason is thought that operates independently of sensory experience, aiming to explore the limits of knowledge. Thus, his critique is not an attack on reason but a careful examination of its boundaries.
Kant’s most profound insight is that our minds aren’t passive mirrors of reality, they’re architects, shaping the world we perceive. So we don’t just receive reality as it is, we mold it, filter it through our mental framework. But this means the true essence of things, the “thing-in-itself”, remains just out of reach, forever hidden behind the structures we use to make sense of the world.
Literature:
Critique of Pure Reason, translated/edited by P. Guyer & A. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997
00:00 Introduction
01:42 About Immanuel Kant
02:18 The Dispute between Rationalists and Empiricists
04:50 Space and Time: Transcendental Aesthetic
07:29 The Categories: Transcendental Logic
09:58 The thing-in-itself