MY SPACEBALL SESSION : KANT

The empiricist Hume theorized that knowledge was a result of one’s perception of sensory data; that is, all thoughts and ideas stem from the life experiences one sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels. That seems natural, right? Where else could knowledge come but from the senses? Upon further analysis of Hume’s reasoning, however, two problems arise: that of substance, and that of causation. First, if all knowledge of substance comes from the senses, what exactly is this substance itself? To fathom the nature of substance apart from our sensory perception of it is impossible. And secondly, how is that one can recognize cause and effect between two events? Causation certainly cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or felt; and yet, one can hypothesize as to the cause of event A in reference to event B. To be sure, the senses grant us knowledge of both events, but the relationship between the two remains something our minds must forge without the aide of the senses.

The quandary is resolved by Immanuel Kant in his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ when he asserts, ‘That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. . .but though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn’t follow that is rises out of experience.’ The aspects of reality not applied immediately by the senses Kant refers to as a priori- a sort of intuition which our minds use to put sensory data into patterns we can understand. Referring back to the earlier example, our a priori knowledge made it possible to formulate a hypothesis regarding the cause and effect relationship between event A and event B. Although we applied the a priori knowledge as we received the events’ sensory information, the source of a priori is not from the senses, but from our intuition. That’s not to say a priori knowledge doesn’t grow as our experience grows; indeed, it grows as sensory experiences accumulate in the memory. From this memory our a priori knowledge can extract more and more patterns to apply to sensory data we receive. In this manner, our circumstance (life experience) plays a key role in our perception of the world.

Now, finally we can return to our discussion of fate. How in the world does all of this talk of Kant and Hume and a priori relate to fate? In Latin, a priori literally means from the former, which makes sense because a priori knowledge is based in large part on past experience As previously noted, the concept of knowledge from non-empirical sources is essential to an analysis of circumstance. This non-empirical knowledge is quite significant- it determines the manner in which each person interprets his or her sensory experience. In other words, it determines, along with the knowledge of the senses, what will compose each person’s version of reality. It’s as though each mind is a separate little world, with its own set of rules written by the minds intuitive sense, though each world is united by a complex web of occurrences resulting from one another. And it seems we have arrived at a point similar to where we left off. That is, the circumstance with which each soul comes into being determines the make-up of each person’s a priori knowledge, which in turn determines each person’s empirical knowledge of the world. Thus, each person has a different perspective of reality.