Transcendental idealism

Not since Plato, it can be argued, has one man influenced so much of subsequent philosophy.

We need to talk about transcendental idealism.

Kant's great contribution to philosophy was the idea that space and time are forms of human intuition and that they do not have an existence independent of our cognition.

In other words, time and space, among other such forms, are not features of the world as such or, in Kant's terms, of the world in itself.

But we can reasonably say that the underlying worldview expounded by Schopenhauer, the idea that our world is but a representation of something fundamentally alien and ungraspable, something that forever lies beyond what we can reasonably assert about reality, but yet that we feel is out there somewhere, teasing us with possibility.

This idea spoke to these men as they were doing science away from the absolutism of Newton into new and relative territory.

Without this long line of ideas, from Aristotle's view on matter and form, to Descartes and the introduction of the concept of space, to Newton and Leibniz arguing about the nature of space and whether it's absolute or relative, all the way to Kant and his transcendental idealism that asks new questions about how our consciousness relates to reality.

and ultimately arriving at Schopenhauer, who went a step further than Kant and posited a world of will, where everything happens everywhere all at once and how our experience in the world is simply a kaleidoscopic snapshot of this fundamental unity at the heart of reality.

Kant was very concerned with whether or not it was possible to obtain objective knowledge of the world and was not satisfied with either the rationalism of Leibniz or the empiricism of Hume.

This led Kant to formulate his own position known as Transcendental Idealism, which was extremely influential in the development of Schopenhauer's philosophy.

Because of the impact Kant had on Schopenhauer, we will need to briefly discuss Kant's ideas before proceeding to Schopenhauer.

But as a warning, Kant is notoriously difficult to understand, and there is still no general consensus as to the meaning of many important aspects of his philosophy.

An integral distinction Kant made, which is essential to understanding transcendental idealism, is between the world as we experience it, which is called the world of appearances or phenomenal world, and the world as it exists independent of our experience, which is composed of what Kant called things in themselves.

According to Kant, we cannot obtain knowledge of things in themselves.

It is only the world of appearances which we can know, and according to Kant, this world is organized or structured by fundamental principles, most notably space and time, which Kant described as forms of intuition, and causality, which Kant called a category of the understanding.

If such a postulation is not made Kant reasoned, then one would have to arrive at the absurd conclusion that our representations of the world arise out of nothing.