Abstract

KANT'S argument in the early sections of the Critique of Pure Reason reveals the crucial inadequacy of empiricism as it had previously been elaborated by such founding fathers of the empiricist movement as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. This inadequacy lies above all in a dogmatic and barely questioned commitment to the idea that human experience must be understood as a passive process, and that the experiencing human mind can therefore only be seen as a rather puzzling kind of object or else as a location in which our externally-originating "impressions" or "ideas" come in some way to be interrelated. Kant shows that the possibility of our being aware of ourselves as selves, and therefore of our being able to "have" any experience of something "external" to ourselves, depends on our possession of certain concepts of "objects of experience" which exist quite separately from ourselves and quite independently of any particular experience which we may happen to have of them. If we did not think in some such way as this it would be impossible for us to have any experience at all. That Kant may have been over-zealous or overscholastic in his elaboration of the actual kinds of concept--the a priori "categories" or "pure concepts of understanding"--which contribute to our possession of self-awareness or subjectivity can perhaps be allowed to be secondary to these more important considerations.