According to Kant, our mind or representational apparatus is constituted by three distinct faculties or capacities:
- The faculty of knowing (science), which is objective and universal;
- The faculty of desire (ethics), also objective and universal and;
- The faculty of judging (aesthetics), this subjective and universal.
In the first faculty, Reason is limited by representation. In the second, Reason determines the parameters of action, since it is unconditioned, that is, it does not depend on experience. And in the last one, our subjectivity perceives (and then links the other two and unites them) the beauty in the human work. It is a feeling (of pleasure and displeasure) that expresses judgments of tastes and reflection that expresses aesthetic judgments. We will detail each of these faculties, in the same order that Kant did. We will start, therefore, with the faculty of knowing.
In his work "Critique of Pure Reason”, Kant tries to solve the problems posed by the two positions studied above, trying to understand the role of reason, its uses and limits, tracing it. For this he accomplished what he called the
Copernican Revolution in philosophy. We know that the Copernican revolution was carried out in the field of astronomy, altering the geocentric system by the heliocentric one. In philosophy it means changing the focus on the object so that before the mind should adapt to it and now the object should adapt to the mind. Do we return to Cartesianism? Do not. And here's the reason.Kant distinguishes between noumenon (thing in itself) and phenomenon (apparition). This distinction shows that it is only possible for man to know things as they appear to the mind, never in themselves (whether through Cartesian innate ideas or through the idea as an exact copy of sensation). The phenomenon is a representation that the subject undergoes when something changes him. I don't know what affects me, I just know that I'm affected by something I can create an image of. This implies several developments.
First of all, the mood perceives something of the sensations because we have proper forms for it. Our intuition, as Kant calls the feeling, is determined a priori by the forms of sensibility that are space and time. Note: space and time are no longer qualities inherent to objects, but conditions prior to the experience that enable them to occur. The mind is not a passive wax, as Locke wanted, it organizes the material it receives from sensation according to the forms of space and time. Through intuition, objects are given to us and the doctrine that studies the data of sensitivity is the Transcendental Aesthetics.
Second, the mind orders and classifies things according to a series of categories that are not intuited but deduced from the intellect. The science of the intellect in general is logic. THE Transcendental Logic is the doctrine that studies the origin of concepts and it deals specifically with a priori concepts that refer to objects which, in this case, are no longer merely given but thought. Only the sensitivity is intuitive. The intellect is discursive and therefore its concepts are functions that unify, order, synthesize the multiple given in an intuition, in a common representation: this properly means to think, and to think is to judge, being, therefore, the intellect, the faculty of judging (and not the reason).
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Well, the success of Copernican Revolution operated by Kant is that the foundation of the object is in the subject, that is, the unity of the object in the experience is constituted, in reality, in the synthetic unity of the thinking subject, called Transcendental Apperception. The I think is the original and supreme unity of the self-consciousness commanded by the 12 categories, therefore, the principle of all human knowledge. Furthermore, intuition and concept are heterogeneous among themselves (one given, the other thought) requiring a third term that is homogeneous among them to enable knowledge. Judgments made only by intuition (no concept) are blind, vague judgments. Judgments made only with concept (therefore, without intuition) lead us to the errors of imagination (paralogism). Therefore, the judgment that can be made for us to know something has to combine intuition in concept, necessarily. The phenomenon given in the intuition, allied to the categories of the intellect, makes the thing an object for me. Kant calls this procedure the Transcendental Scheme, produced by Transcendental Imagination.
Thus, the possibility of science as universal and necessary judgments carried out by the schemes a priori of human reason. However, knowledge is limited to the phenomenal, showing that we cannot extend our judgments to things as they are in themselves, but only to the way they appear to us. The thing itself (noumenon) escapes us, it cannot be known, only thought about. It's just the first division of the Transcendental Logic, call of Transcendental Analytics. It is now necessary to move on to the second part.
This second division, called Transcendental Dialectics, constitutes a critique of the hyperphysical use of the intellect, aiming to unveil the appearances, illusions and deceptions caused by the pretense of going beyond phenomena. The reason is the intellect when it goes beyond the physical, the conditioned, seeking the unconditioned, fleeing the horizon of experience. Reason is the faculty of the unconditioned, that is, it is metaphysical and is destined to remain a pure requirement of the absolute and unable to attain it by knowledge. Reason does not know objects.
Therefore, intellect is the faculty of judging, Reason is the faculty of syllogizing, that is, of thinking about concepts and pure judgments, mediated by deducing particular conclusions from supreme principles and not conditioned.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Philosophy - Brazil School
