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Файл:Kant. Aphorisms
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Personality and philosophy
Nothing can be more desirable to a philosopher than
to be able to derive, a priori from one principle, the multiplicity of concepts or basic principles that previously
had exhibited themselves to him piecemeal in the use he
had made of them in concreto, and in this way to be able
to unite them all in one cognition.
To a philosopher two things chiefly pertain: 1) Cultivation of talent and of skill, in order to use them for all
sorts of ends. 2) Accomplishment in the use of all means
toward any end desired.
Consistency is the highest obligation of a philosopher, and yet the most rarely found.
VII
VIII
IX
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Kant. Aphorisms
On Königsberg
A large city such as Königsberg on the river Pregel,
which is the centre of a kingdom, in which the provincial
councils of the government are located, which has a university (for cultivation of the sciences) and which has
also the right location for maritime commerce — a city
which, by way of rivers, has the advantage of commerce
both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs,
can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening
one's knowledge of human beings as well as of the
world, where this knowledge can be acquired without
even travelling.
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WHAT CAN I KNOW?
Kant. Aphorisms
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What can I know?
On Reason and Understanding
There are two stems of human cognition, which may
perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root,
namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of
which objects are given to us, but through the second of
which they are thought.
If we will call the receptivity of our mind to receive
representations insofar as it is affected in some way sensibility, then on the contrary the faculty for bringing both
representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognition, is
the understanding.
All our cognition starts from the senses, goes from
there to the understanding, and ends with reason, beyond
which there is nothing higher to be found in us to work
on the matter of intuition and bring it under the highest
unity of thinking.
Reason in a creature is a capacity to extend, far beyond
natural instinct, the rules and intentions of the use of all that
creature’s powers; and its projects have no limits.
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IV
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Kant. Aphorisms
V
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
VI
The understanding does not draw its (a priori) laws
from nature, but prescribes them to it.
VII
They [Galileo, Torricelli, Stahl et co.] comprehended
that reason has insight only into what it itself produces
according to its own design; that it must take the lead
with principles for its judgements according to constant
laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather
than letting nature guide its movements...
VIII
A correct understanding is that which is lustrous not
only owing to its great number of concepts but also owing to the appropriateness of its concepts for cognition of
the object; thus it contains the ability and skill to comprehend truth.
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What can I know?
On Truth and Delusion
I
The old and famous question with which the logicians were to be driven into a corner and brought to such
a pass that they must either fall into a miserable circle or
else confess their ignorance, hence the vanity of their
entire art, is this: What is truth?
Truth and illusion are not in the object, insofar as it
is intuited, but in the judgement about it insofar as it is
thought. Thus it is correctly said that senses do not err;
yet not because they always judge correctly, but because
they do not judge at all.
Error is effected only through the unnoticed influence of sensibility on understanding, through which it
happens that the subjective grounds of the judgement
join with the objective ones, and make the latter deviate
from their destination, just as a moved body would of
itself always stay in a straight line in the same direction,
but starts off on a curved line if at the same time another
force influences it in another direction.
II
III
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Kant. Aphorisms
IV
It does not seem enough to us merely to have expounded what is true, but also that which one has desired
to know.
V
The truth is not the highest perfection of social life;
the beautiful appearance drives it here just like it does
more so in painting.
On Nature
I
Everything in nature, both in the lifeless and in the
living world, takes place according to rules, although we
are not always acquainted with these rules. — Water
falls according to laws of gravity, and with animals locomotion also takes place according to rules. The fish in
water, the bird in the air, move according to rules. The
whole nature in general is really nothing but a connection of appearances according to rules; and there is no
absence of rules anywhere.
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What can I know?
II
By “nature”... is understood the sum total of appearances insofar as these are in thoroughgoing connection
through an inner principle of causality.
III
We are not concerned with the nature of the things in
themselves, which is independent of the conditions of
both our senses and understanding, but with nature as an
object of possible experience...
IV
…hence nature should be conceived in such a way
that the regularity of its form harmonizes with the possibility of the ends that are to be achieved in it according
to the laws of freedom.
We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition
is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the
things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit
them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own
On Things in Themselves
I
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Kant. Aphorisms
subject or even only the subjective constitution of the
senses in general, then all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves
would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in
themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity
of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us.
...Our sensory representation is by no means a representation of things in themselves, but only of the way in
which they appear to us.
In fact, if we view the objects of the senses as mere
appearances, as is fitting, then we thereby admit at the
very same time that a thing in itself underlies them, although we are not acquainted with this thing as it may be
constituted in itself, but only with its appearance, i.e.,
with the way in which our senses are affected by this
unknown something. Therefore the understanding, just
by the fact that it accepts appearances, also admits to the
existence of things in themselves, and to that extent we
can say that the representation of such beings as underlie
the appearances, hence of mere intelligible beings, is not
merely permitted but also unavoidable.
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