Immanuel Kant: ‘Organic Contact Lenses’

Immanuel Kant defined the borders of Academic Philosophy for two centuries. And his work had much to do with the ideas of Knowledge and ‘Knowing’.

Kant tried to identify the ‘First Principles of Knowing’ itself, reaching back to Aristotle’s Principle of [Non] Contradiction and Categories [Cause, Necessity, Contingency, etc]. Along with ‘Space’ and ‘Time’, the ground conditions of Sensibility, they made up the Kantian Grid.

You cannot but view the World through these fundamental constructions, said Kant. They are organic contact lenses, hard-wired processors, the immutable framework within which must arise all Knowing and Understanding.

But what about these conditions themselves? How did you locate them? How does one see one’s own organic contact lenses? How does one ‘Know the Knowing’?

From Kant’s: ‘Critique of Pure Reason’:

‘If deduction of these conceptions is necessary, it must always be Transcendent. All attempts at an empirical deduction in regard to pure and a priori conceptions are in vain, and can only be done by one who does not understand the altogether peculiar nature of these conceptions.’

If you don’t see the significance of that qualification you will elaborate learnedly on the nature of Kant’s organic lenses while wearing them securely atop your nose.

And find yourself willy-nilly in the center of the vortex. Which is exactly where Universities are today.

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Unlike most philosophers, Kant was alert to the Loop although he never took his own understanding to its necessary, implosive limit. He was perhaps the first modern philosopher to use the word ‘Transcendent’ widely in his work. So what is Transcendent to ‘Transcendent and Not-Transcendent’?