By Badri Raina
The German philosopher, Kant, gave to the world two highly consequential orders of epistemology.
In a throwback to Plato, he stipulated that it is within the intuitive powers of the human mind that it can have a priori knowledge of the totality of relations among entities. Further, inorder to give a meaningful ground for experience or to make ethical conduct possible, it can postulate things unknowable to itself (god, soul, immortality), and, on that basis, lay down universal principles that can be construed “categorical imperatives.”
Remarkably, however, Kant wedded these idealist propositions to a caution that 18c Empiricism and Newtonian science made compelling.
This caution was to the effect that the mind, because of its own nature, cannot know the-thing-in-itself, but rather interprets the data presented to it as spatio-temporal phenomena.
Within some forty years of Kant’s death (1804), Marx—like Hegel before him—would locate within the Kantian duality the seeds and promise of a dialectical epistemology.
Briefly, Marx would point out to both Kant and Hegel that the realm of the intuitive was as much material as the rest of the phenomenal world. Indeed that ontological/ethical constructs could, in their changing courses, be understood as projections of specific class interests.
Only thus could the universe of contradictions in human praxis be made sense of, since everywhere in history the supposedly universalist postulates were vitiated/remade by productive human agents.
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