Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

4.6 Immanuel Kant: We Construct the Self Immanuel Kant helped create the conceptual scaffolding of modern consciousness in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. He was alarmed by Hume’s notion that the mind is simply a container for fleeting sensations and disconnected ideas and that humans would never be able to achieve genuine knowledge in any area of experience: scientific, ethical, religious, or metaphysical, including questions such as the nature of ourselves. Kant believed that our primary experience of the world is not in terms of a disconnected stream of sensations; instead, we perceive and experience and organized world of objects, relationships, and ideas--all existing within a fairly stable framework of space and time. In general, we live in a fairly stable and orderly world in which sensations are woven together into a fabric that is familiar to us; integrated through this fabric is our conscious self who is the knowing subject at the center of our universe. Our minds actively sort, organize, relate, and synthesize the fragmented fluctuating collection of sense data that our sense organs take in. Our minds are performing meaningful, constructive activities all of the time, taking the raw data of experience and actively synthesizing it into the familiar, orderly, meaningful world in which we live. We have fundamental organizing rules or principles built into the architecture of our minds. These dynamic principles naturally order, categorize, organize, and synthesize sense data into the familiar fabric of our lives bounded by space and time. These organizing rules are a sense of priori in the sense that they precede the sensation of experience and they exist independently of these sensations. Our minds actively synthesize and relate these sensations in the process of creating an intelligible world and, as a result, these sensations of immediate experience conform to our minds rather than the reverse. We construct our world through these conceptual operations and we gain insight and knowledge. Our self is the weaver who using the loom of the mind, weaving together the fabric of experience into a unified whole so that it becomes my experience, my world, and my universe. Without our self to perform this synthesizing function, our experience would be unknowable, a chaotic collection of sensations without coherence or significance. The unity of consciousness describes the thoughts and perceptions of any given mind are bound together in a unity by being all contained in one consciousness my consciousness which makes your world intelligible to you. You are the center of your world and you view everything in the world from your perspective. Your self is not an object located in your consciousness with other objects; your self is a subject, an organizing principle that makes a unified and intelligible experience possible. The self exists independently of the experience; it is the product of reason and regulates experience by making unified experiences possible. The self is a dynamic entity and is continually synthesizing sensations and ideas into an integrated meaningful whole. Kant’s work includes Fundamentals Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals . Kant proposed an actively engaged and synthesizing intelligence that constructs knowledge based on experiences and this synthesizing faculty transcends the senses and unifies the experience. Kant proposed a second self, the empirical self (or ego), which consists of those traits that make us each a unique personality.

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