Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise

From Christopher Want’s Introducing Kant:

“In the case of the pyramids:

the eye needs some time to complete the apprehension from the base to the peak, but during that time some of the earlier parts are invariably extinguished in the Imagination before it has apprehended the later ones, and hence the comprehension is never complete..’  “

What about this video of a surfer on Maui’s north shore?

Perhaps you get a sense of awe and wonder at observing this wave, but this may have more to do with your imagination and your onboard apparatus for observing the wave than perhaps any necessary characteristic of the wave itself (for Kant, the imagination is a very specific category of perception, which can ((amended)) function without the rules of the understanding, especially in aesthetic representation but which ultimately is applied to the rules of the understanding to give us the best knowledge we have, which are in turn guided by the Ideas Of Reason…).

Here’s another quote:

“…a light broke upon all natural philosophers. They learned that reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design; that it must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading-strings of nature, but must proceed in advance with principles of judgement according to unvarying laws, and compel nature to reply its questions.”

Immanuel KantPreface to the Critique of Pure Reason.

Newton’s 3rd Law might be a good example of those ‘unvarying’ laws.

Related On This Site:  When aesthetics goes too far?: Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…some problems with Kant and potential idealism when applied to American politics:  From The Internet Encyclopedia Of Knowledge: Immanuel Kant And Utilitarianism

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