Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing awe and admiration, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
—philosopher Immanuel Kant, who walked out of life on this day in 1804
On the 220th anniversary of Kant’s departure from this life, I wanted to commemorate der Alte von Königsberg with a short survey of his work. Few philosophers in history can compare with Kant in respect to the influence that their thought exerted on the course of Western philosophy and science. Kant stood at the pinnacle of Enlightenment thought and thus also heralded the Romantic backlash, just as the sun, as it crests the heavens at High Noon, has already begun to set. Kant's attitude is summed up here, in his famous 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” (Aufklarung):
Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of humankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay—others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.
I have often wondered whether the difficulties we face today are due to our realization of these ideals, or our failure to realize them. In any case, I’ll briefly touch on the significance of what are perhaps Kant's three defining works: The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and The Critique of Judgement (1790). The last of these bears an interesting relation to the work of another thinker, who was born five years to the day that Kant took his leave of this life: namely, Charles Darwin.1 Most of the text below is adapted from Chapter 2 of my 2020 dissertation, The Redemption of Thinking.
First Critique
The fundamental question that Kant set out to answer in The Critique of Pure Reason was “how are synthetic a priori judgements possible?” Kant’s jargon (which has however become the lingua franca amongst many schools of philosophy since his time) will demand some explication before the significance of the question can reveal itself. Suffice it to say that it is a leading question, and also a loaded one. Let us first consider the meaning of a synthetic judgement. This we can accomplish by providing a conceptual and an ostensive definition, and by comparing it to its opposite. Conceptually, a synthetic judgement is a proposition that unites two terms that are not already joined purely in virtue of their meanings. Put another way, a proposition is a synthetic judgement if the concept of its predicate is not already implicit in the concept of its subject. For example, Newton’s Laws of Motion are synthetic a priori judgements because, as Kant conceives of the situation, it is not implicit in the meaning of “a body” that it “will maintain a constant velocity . . . unless acted upon by a net unbalanced force.” Instead, the concept of “a body” must be joined with to concepts of “inertial reference frame,” “net unbalanced force,” “constant motion,” and so on in order to synthesise the proposition that is known as “Newton’s First Law of Motion.” The quintessential example of a synthetic a priori judgement is that “all events have a cause” because this is something we must discover by experience. “All effects have a cause” is an analytic a priori judgement because it is implicit in the meaning of “effect” that it has a cause.2
Next we must distinguish between a priori and a posteriori judgements. Straightforwardly, the latter depend on experience through the senses and are therefore empirically contingent. The former do not depend on verification through the senses and are therefore logically necessary. “If there is a physical body in the yard, then it is extended in space” is an example of an a priori judgement since the concept of “spatial extension” is contained in the concept of “physical body.” That the body has a weight, that it weighs 200 kilograms, or that it is shaped and coloured like a tree, or whether there is a body at all are examples of a posteriori judgements since each depends on verification through the senses because neither “weight” nor “shape” nor “colour” is contained in the concept of “body,” nor is the concrete existence of any particular body derivative of that concept alone. It is interesting and may perhaps serve to shed light on an important difference in Kant’s and Goethe’s conception of organisms to consider the following judgement: “if there is a tree in the yard, then it was once a sapling.” For Kant, this is an a posteriori judgement, since it is necessary to learn through empirical observation that trees grow from saplings. For Goethe, however, the judgement that a tree in the yard was once a sapling is an a priori one (though Goethe never attempted to articulate his view in Kant’s terms) because metamorphosis from earlier stages is implicit on the concept of “organism” as such. For Goethe, to conceive of the tree is to understand it as the development from earlier forms. By the same token, not to conceive of the tree as a metamorphosis of a young tree is not really to conceive of the tree at all, but only of a body in the shape of a tree. Whether or not there is a tree in the yard in question, for Goethe as for Kant, depends on verification through sensory experience and therefore an eventual affirmative or negative judgement over it would be an a posteriori one.
Having laid out Kant’s taxonomy of judgement, it will be evident that analytic and a priori are natural parents of a judgment, as are synthetic and a posteriori. Kant noticed, however, that not all of our judgments are the issue of such natural pairings. Specifically, Kant noted the propositions of natural science as apparent exceptions, since they appeared to join two separate concepts in synthesis but they also seemed to be logically necessary and therefore apparently a priori. The operation of Newton’s laws, for instance, did not appear to depend on a posteriori verification to be known. This is to say that they must be a priori. Nevertheless, they appear to offer knowledge beyond what is accessible to mere rational analysis, which is to say that they provide for synthetic judgements. Kant’s question of “how are synthetic a priori judgements possible?” can now be approached with some notion of what is at stake. How is it that the world operates according to laws, and that scientists can discover those laws, and yet that those laws are neither self-evident nor accessible to sensory experience? We cannot see “Newton’s First Law of Motion,” for instance, nor, for that matter, “Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity” (since the latter has, to a large extent, replaced Newtonian mechanics as the dominant paradigm of macrophysics). As to whether this is a proper characterisation of knowledge, and as to whether Kant’s careful distinctions are also real ones, I will suspend judgement at the present time.3 Suffice it at this point to have established the impetus for Kant’s Copernican Revolution.
Naturally, Kant’s philosophy would not have been called “a revolution” if his answer to this question did not imply a radical restructuring of our world conception. Indeed, Kant’s solution to the riddle of synthetic a priori judgements amounted to an inversion of the traditional hierarchy of knowledge, which is to say, the understanding of the relation between mind and world. Kant proposed that synthetic a priori judgements are possible because they are not judgements about the world itself. Instead, they are judgments about the world as it must appear if it is to become a matter of experience: “Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects,” Kant writes in the preface to The Critique of Pure Reason, but argues that the only way to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements is to assume instead that “objects conform to our cognition.” Kant recognised that philosophers thitherto had largely concerned themselves only with the objects of knowledge and not with the conditions for, and possibility of, that knowledge in the first place. Kant’s solution was “Copernican” in that, just as one must needs remove (at least conceptually) oneself in space to retrospect on the Earth if one is to understand one’s original conditions, so with the transcendental method, Kant strove to evaluate human cognition itself by reflexively examining his own ideation. In this manner, Kant had shifted philosophy’s center of gravity from the Earth to the Sun, from an objective standpoint to a transcendental one, from conditions of fact to conditions for knowledge. Transcendental idealism is, therefore, Kant’s solution to the question of “how are synthetic a priori judgements possible?” This is to say that from a transcendental perspective—a perspective which takes account of the conditions for knowledge as such—the world of space and time is of the nature of an idea. In Kant’s words:
everything intuited in space or in time, hence all objects of an experience possible for us, are nothing but appearances, i.e., mere representations, which, as they are represented, as extended beings or series of alterations, have outside our thoughts no existence grounded in itself. This doctrine I call transcendental idealism.
In other words, space and time are the necessary conditions of experience without themselves originating in that experience. Instead, they are intuited inwardly with the same firmness as a sensation outwardly. Just as a person cannot see a blue flower as anything other than blue, ceteris paribus, so objects of experience including an eventual blue flower cannot but appear extended in space and with duration in time. Thus, for Kant, objects are real as phenomena or appearances (Erscheinungen) situated in space and time, which is to say, in the empirical sense. From the transcendental perspective, however, objects are always phenomenal or contingent on a subject to perceive them. This confers the title of idealism to Kant’s philosophy. Phenomenal objects stand in contrast to noumena (Dinge an sich selbst, or Wesen), which is to say, “things-in-themselves” outside of any relation to a subject. Phenomenon, for Kant, means “what shows itself through the senses,” while noumenon means “what is of the nature of thought,” from the Greek nous. The latter Kant regards as, in principle, thinkable but not knowable. This is less unreasonable than its sounds, since a subject is the patient of knowledge and therefore, all knowledge must be subjective, “for knowledge is regulated according as the thing known is in the knower.” Otherwise, what would we mean by knowledge?
Obviously, knowledge entails a subject whom it can be knowledge for. Less obvious however, are Kant’s other criteria for knowledge. Kant conceives of two capacities of the mind that provide for knowledge: the poetic or self-initiating functions of “spontaneity” (Spontaneität) and receptive functions of direct beholding or “intuition” (Anschauung). According to Kant, the organisation of human beings dictates that thinking is a spontaneous faculty while sensation is an intuitive one. In fact, sensations are the only intuitions that are provided to the human being, with the exception of space and time, and mathematical operations. The reality of intuition is concomitant with its very appearance. This is not the case for a spontaneous activity, since its activity bears no necessary connection to the phenomenal world. Thinking can go astray while sensations, together with space and time, appear as fact; they are not about anything. Since space and time are the conditions for outer experience but are not themselves objects of that experience, judgment plays a crucial role in mediating between the mind and the world. Thinking can spontaneously conceive a near-infinite abundance of possible judgments, but the conditions of knowledge inherent to the human mind directly prune this proliferation so that only those objects that conform to sensory intuitions together with space and time remain. Sensations, however, do not contain their own understanding. The understanding of sensations depends on thinking. Thus thinking provides intelligibility while sensations provides objectivity; each must supply what the other lacks, and neither can itself compensate its own deficiency. The consequence of this arrangement is that only phenomena are objectively knowable because they receive their verification through sensory intuition. Noumena, by contrast, can be thought but cannot be known because they cannot receive intuitive ratification, which could only come through the senses, for thinking is a spontaneous faculty, not an intuitive one. Thus, the human being can know how things appear but not what they are.
Kant sums up his position in a famous statement from the First Critique: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind). Kant has a somewhat annoying habit of employing precise technical language, but also changing his terminology from one sentence to the next, and in this case, from one clause to the next. This stylistic trait likely accounts for Goethe’s aversion to entering “the labyrinth.” Nevertheless, it may be possible to understand what Kant means based on what we have this far established. To say that thoughts should be empty implies that they are not, by themselves, able to fill themselves with material content. We know that thinking operates in the mode of spontaneity and not intuition. We know also that the only sources of intuition are the material intuitions of the senses with the exception of the formal intuitions of space and time. Since we cannot intuit concepts, then the only content available for thoughts is that which arrives through the senses (with the exception of mathematical intuitions, which are not received through sensation but are rather contingent on our formal intuitions of space and time). Thus we could understand the first part of Kant’s statement to mean that thought depends on sensation for content. The second part becomes clear if we reflect on the relation of concepts and thought. Kant is adamant that the intuition of concepts is not granted to human cognition. Concepts, therefore, must be arrived at by the faculty of spontaneity, which unlike intuition, does not guarantee their phenomenal reality. Nevertheless, intuitions by themselves do not offer sufficient conditions for understanding, since, according to Kant, they can only provide sensory percepts and not the concepts that could illuminate them. Therefore, intuitions by themselves are blind because sensory percepts do not provide their own intelligibility. We could therefore, rephrase Kant’s maxim in a chiastic form (without jumping ship from our terminology in mid-phrase) to reveal the essence of the doctrine that Kant is setting forth: “concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are blind.” Kant continues in the same paragraph from which the quote above is taken:
It is, therefore, just as necessary to make the mind’s concepts sensible—that is, to add an object to them in intuition—as to make our intuited percepts understandable—that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers, or capacities, cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only from their unification can cognition arise.
Concepts depend on precepts for content and empirical reality, which percepts depend on concepts if they are to be understood. Yet the knowledge arrived at in this manner is always questionable because of the spontaneous nature of thinking, which is charged with ordering sensory intuitions according to the categories of understanding. Only of what we ourselves initiate and carry out in full awareness can we be completely certain that it is not illusory, and yet this very fact of our own agency casts doubt on the reality of it; we therefore have knowledge without reality. We know what we do, but we cannot do what is necessary to know beyond sensory appearance. Put another way, we can only know how things appear to our sense, but not what those things are because we played no part in their generation.
In this manner, Kant appeared to have quarantined reality from knowability. Our self-initiating understanding can only set to work on the stuff of intuition, and the latter is limited to the material intuitions of the senses and the formal intuitions of space and time, which are conditions for experience but which bear no necessary reality beyond this. For this reason, our knowledge pertains to phenomena, which is to say, “things as they appear to us,” and never to noumena, which is to say, “things in themselves” (Dinge an sich selbst). If the intuition of concepts is not granted the human being, then neither is knowledge beyond semblance.
Second Critique
We are grateful not only for what we have received but also for the good intention which prompted it, and the greater the effort it has cost our benefactor, the greater our gratitude.
Kant carried the momentum form his meteoric First Critique to a second, The Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) published in 1788, in which he outlines a moral philosophy, arguing that the morality of a given deed is measured by the goodness—which is to say, its conformity to the structure of universal Reason—of the will that was its motive. Given that good will is both theoretically and practically certain, Kant argues that it is our moral duty to transmute this will into deed. While the lack of intellectual intuition forever divorces us from intimate scientific knowledge of Nature, the conditions are entirely otherwise in respect to our own actions. From Kant’s standpoint, proscriptions to knowledge not proscriptions in respect to morality. Morality, for Kant, is categorically a question of motive and not of consequence. If it were a question of the latter, then our morality would open itself to the same sceptical fugue as our scientific knowledge. The single thing of which one can be certain is the will behind his own deed precisely because he is the one whose will it was which enthused it. Because we are living in the will that kindles the deed, by definition, we partake in its coming into being. For this reason, we also know it in the most immediate certainty. “Here is what Archimedes sought, but could not find: a firm fulcrum on which reason could place its lever,” Kant wrote. A further exploration of Kant’s moral philosophy must be reserved for a separate occasion. To follow the thread of the present inquiry demands to continue on to Kant’s final critique, bearing in mind the Polarität between the two scenarios which the First and Second Critiques present—of doubt through thinking and certainty through will—and the latent possibility of its Steigerung or intensification, which we will attempt in subsequent chapters.
The Third Critique
Kant’s First and Second Critiques form something of a pair of antitheses: the first taking thought as its concern and the second taking the will. Kant synthesised these two works in a third, called the Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft), published in 1790, the same year as Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants. In a manner, Kant’s Third Critique could be called the Critique of Feeling, following the Critiques of Thinking and of Willing, respectively.
In the Critique of Judgement—specifically in the second part—Kant sets out to address the question of limits of human knowledge in relation to living things. Given the precepts that he established in the First Critique, we know that intuition is limited to the material intuition of the senses and the formal intuitions of space and time. We know that thinking orders these material intuitions within the formal intuitions of space and time and according to the categories of understanding and the result of this activity is perception of the phenomenal world, which for Kant is the only world there is for us as knowers. By “judgement,” Kant refers to the faculty of the mind to form propositions by linking a subject and a predicate. Recall the discussion of the various forms of judgment which we undertook at the very portal of entry into the Kantian labyrinth, as well as the riddle of the First Critique, “how are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” We know now that they are possible because they are not exactly synthetic in the sense of yoking two entirely independent concepts, but rather that they are forced to follow the contours of our own cognitive architecture. For this reason, they are judgements about how the world must appear to us if we are to experience it, but beyond this they are silent. Judgments operate within this ideal framework. They are a function of thinking and therefore associated with the “spontaneous,” “subjective,” or “self-initiating” aspect of the mind and not the “intuitive,” “objective,” or “receptive” one. This is mostly recapitulation from the first part of the present chapter.
Suppose then that one beholds the blue flower. We know that inasmuch as it is a flower and not a replica or a specimen, that it is a living thing. This is to say that a formative force of growth is immanent to it. It expresses this immanent power by changing its phenomenal appearance in an apparently purposeful manner. One says “apparently purposeful” because, as Kant never tires of reminding his readers, the human mental organisation obviates scientific knowledge of what is not sensible. Kant, therefore, describes life as apparently purposeful, or “purposive” (zweckmässig). Despite that virtually everyone4 can feel that organisms live and act in a goal-driven manner, Kant denies that we can know this. Let us call this inner purposefulness—which, according to Kant, we can feel but not know—“entelechy,” after Aristotle’s coinage, ἐντελέχεια. It is worth understanding the soul of this word to measure it against Kant’s conception. Joe Sachs provides an extraordinary summary:
Aristotle invents the word by combining entelēs (ἐντελής, “complete, full-grown”) with echein (derived from hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition, or “habit”), while at the same time punning on endelecheia (ἐνδελέχεια, “persistence”) by inserting telos (τέλος, “completion”). This is a three-ring circus of a word, at the heart of everything in Aristotle’s thinking.5
Thus, when we perceive a living thing as living, we are recognising that its form, growth, and behaviour are not arbitrary, but rather strive towards some end, and that this striving is not imposed as a law by an external agent. The formative force of an organism is autonomous, not heteronomous. The latter would be the case if an architect were to fashion a model of that being. Life, however, means precisely that this formal and efficient causality6 is constitutive of that being, and works recursively. Modern Neo-Darwinian biologists refer to a simplistic notion of entelechy when they invoke, usually with derision, the term “teleology.” The former must reject any notion of teleology in the natural world. The reason for this rejection is that Neo-Darwinian biology is beholden by its Vorstellungsart of choice to uphold the axiomatic precept that an ultimate explanation of Nature is possible through random and accidental processes without any appeal to intelligence or purpose. One is tempted to relate this situation to the Behaviourist psychology as two symptoms of the same clandestine nihilism of the post-truth Zeitgeist. The Behaviourist school, in the tradition of Lange, Mach, and Skinner rallies around the ideal of studying “psychology without a soul”7 while Neo-Darwinism champions the study of biology without life. This is an apt comparison because the denial that life is purposeful beyond mere propagation of genetic material is a “biology without bios”—an abiology—just as psychology is “the study of the soul,” and therefore cannot be undertaken by denying the existence of the object of one’s study. Kant’s criteria for scientific knowledge were that it must fall within the purview of the sensory manifold so far as it is determinable by categories of the understanding and conditioned by pure forms of intuition (i.e., space and time).8
Thus, the prevalent attitude in contemporary biology and behaviourist psychology is largely an inheritance from certain precepts of Kant’s philosophy, as will become readily apparent as we continue in this survey. Kant had a nuanced argument for the exclusion of teleology from science, however, while many contemporary scientists tend to adopt it as a foregone conclusion following from the axiomatic postulate that the world is explicable without appeal to meaning. Kant summed up his conception of scientific knowledge when he wrote that, “a doctrine of nature will contain only as much proper science as there is mathematics capable of application there.”9 Kant is upholding the ideal of precision and calculability in the scientific conception of Nature that originated as recently as the sixteenth century with Galileo, continued with Newton, came to full flower during the Enlightenment, and which continues to this day. As Goethe expressed it:
What was lauded as mystery in Nature,
By experiment we compel it to conform,
What she wrought in living forces,
We crystallise in frozen form.10
Life, according to Kant, consists in “an immanent principle of action,” and is characterised as “that in which every part is at once means and end.”11 This principle, or entelechy, does not lend itself to quantification, and thus it does not meet Kant’s criterion for science. Neither does it lend itself to intuition (Anschauung) via sensation or the a priori strictures of space and time, and therefore it fails to meet the criterion for experience or cognition altogether. Cognition, for Kant, represents the principle species of which judgement (Urteilskraft) is the genus. Thus The Critique of Judgement is largely concerned with the boundaries of human cognition. And Kant intends to establish a boundary when he asserts that, despite being able to feel that life is teleological, we cannot know this. In other words, the entelechy of an organism cannot be an object of cognition.
Kant attempts to resolve this difficulty by distinguishing between constitutive and regulative principles. By a constitutive principle, Kant means a principle (or in the case of living things, a purposefulness) that is real and actually operative in Nature. Thus, a constitutive principle is a “thing-in-itself.” But the judgment that a constitutive principle is operative in Nature depends on the ability to cognise that principle via intuition. The latter being limited to sensation, this possibility is denied the human being. The senses perceive objects of sense, not principles. While we cannot, therefore, know what things are, we can know how they appear. Kant calls such principles as we may employ to structure our experience and categorise objects in it, “regulative.” The categories of our understanding are adequate to make regulative judgments that living things seem to be purposeful, but not that they in fact are, constitutively. Were it possible for a being to apprehend the constitutive entelechy of an organism, such a one would have to be possessed of the capacity for synthetic a priori judgements beyond the material intuitions of sensation and outside of the formal intuitions of space and time. Kant is adamant that this is impossible because all objects of cognition must conform to these a priori strictures of space and time as conditions for their perception in the first place.
In this manner, Kant establishes basic boundaries to human apprehension. They are more membranes than borders, however, because in the same Critique, Kant devotes an extensive exploration to the notions of beauty and artistic creation. Given the ability of people to successfully apply the regulative principle of beauty to affirmatively judge the aesthetic appeal of a work of art, there must have been a constitutive principle behind the creation of that work. Kant recognised, like Goethe, that the artist was generally unaware of the very principles by which he or she operates. And yet he or she is evidently making use of them, as the eventual fact of a beautiful creation testifies. If the artist were not making use of these constitutive principles, then the former would be incapable of producing beautiful art. Kant concludes, therefore, that the artist is able to feelingly express precisely those constitutive principles that are unattainable by thinking cognition. Kant calls the faculty by which an artist is able to unconsciously apprehend these constitutive principles “genius.” In this manner, Kant leaves something of a silver thread which, with proper sensitivity, one may ultimately succeed to extricate oneself from his magnificent epistemological labyrinth.
Darwin was born on 12 February, 1809, and his work has been critiqued here before:
To my mind, the most illustrative examples of analytic a priori judgments can be found in Euclidean geometry, though I am departing from the great philosopher of Königsberg’s opinion on the matter. Geometrically speaking, that all points on the circumference of a circle are equal from its radius is an analytic a priori judgement because that is what “circle” means. Similarly, it is not that a line has length. Rather a line is length. Euclid defined “line” in this way from the beginning (Cf. Euclid, Elements 1.2). So in the same way, a circle does not have the quality of a circumference of equidistant radii, but is that.
Though I addressed the objection I have to these foregone theories of “knowledge” recently in this little essay:
Everyone except Neo-Darwinist biologists, whose theory of organism sees living things as materialised algorithms coded by no one to the non-purposeful end of propagating genetic material. Cf. footnote №1
Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study, 245.
Aristotle’s notions of causality were given more thorough treatment in Part 1 and will be considered again in Part 4.
Carl Lange (1834–1900), Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Burrhus Skinner (1904–1990). Regrettably, the situation has hardly changed, unless one thinks the “brain chemistry” is the same thing as a soul, since anti-depressants seem to be standard approach amongst modern medical professionals to treat afflictions of the psyche. The issue of the relation of mind and brain was presented in a certain light in Part 1.
The reason is that the senses offer intuitions and therefore lend themselves to synthetic a priori judgments. Kant says that mathematics are also synthetic a priori judgments but this strikes the present writer as a confusion of concepts, since mathematics as a systemic unity is built up purely through conceptual definitions. Judgements of magnitude or quantity, therefore, only appear synthetic when their context is disregarded. Because they are analytic judgements, they still fall within the scope of knowledge so the point is somewhat moot, since Kant comes to the same conclusion about their ability to supply knowledge.
Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 6.
Wagner expresses this sentiment as he exhorts his scientific method to Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust:
Was man an der Natur Geheimnisvolles pries,
Das wagen wir verständig zu probieren,
Und was sie sonst organisieren ließ,
Das lassen wir kristallisieren.
Goethe, Faust zeiter Teil II.2, 209.
Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 215.
Hi Max,
You will like this from Rudolf Steiner's autobiography, chapter two:
“Then one day I passed a bookshop. In the show window I saw an advertisement of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
I did everything that I could to acquire this book as quickly as possible.
As Kant then entered the circle of my thinking, I knew nothing whatever of his place in the spiritual history of mankind. What anyone whatever had thought about him, in approval or in disapproval, was to me entirely unknown. My boundless interest in the Critique of Pure Reason had arisen entirely out of my own spiritual life. In my boyish way I was striving to understand what human reason might be able to achieve toward a real insight into the being of things.
The reading of Kant met with every sort of obstacle in the circumstances of my external life. Because of the long distance I had to traverse between school and home, I lost every day at least three hours. In the evenings I did not get home until six o'clock. Then there was an endless quantity of school assignments to master. On Sundays I devoted myself almost entirely to geometrical designing. It was my ideal to attain the greatest precision in carrying out geometrical constructions, and the most immaculate neatness in hatching and the laying on of colours.
So I had scarcely any time left for reading the Critique of Pure Reason. I found the following way out. Our history course was handled in such a manner that the teacher appeared to be lecturing but was in reality reading from a book. Then from time to time we had to learn from our books what he had given us in this fashion. I thought to myself that I must take care of this reading of what was in my book while at home. From the teacher's “lecture” I got nothing at all. From listening to what he read I could not retain the least thing. I now took apart the single sections of the little Kant volume, placed these inside the history book, which I there kept before me during the history lesson, and read Kant while the history was being “taught” down to us from the professor's seat. This was, of course, from the point of view of school discipline, a serious fault; yet it disturbed nobody and it subtracted so little from what I should otherwise have acquired that the grade I was given on my history lesson at that very time was “excellent.”
During vacations the reading of Kant went forward briskly Many a page I read more than twenty times in succession. I wanted to reach a decision as to the relation sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature.
The feeling I had in regard to these strivings of thought was influenced here from three sides. In the first place, I wished so to build up thought within myself that every thought should be completely subject to survey, that no vague feeling should incline the thought in any direction whatever. In the second place, I wished to establish within myself a harmony between such thinking and the teachings of religion. For this also at that time had the very strongest hold upon me.
In just this field we had truly excellent text-books. From these books I took with the utmost devotion the symbol and dogma, the description of the church service, the history of the church. These teachings were to me a vital matter. But my relation to them was determined by the fact that to me the spiritual world counted among the objects of human perception. The very reason why these teachings penetrated so deeply into my mind was that in them I realized how the human spirit can find its way consciously into the supersensible. I am perfectly sure that I did not lose my reverence for the spiritual in the slightest degree through this relationship of the spiritual to perception.
On the other side I was tremendously occupied over the question of the scope of human capacity for thought. It seemed to me that thinking could be developed to a faculty which would actually lay hold upon the things and events of the world. A “stuff” which remains outside of the thinking, which we can merely “think toward,” seemed to me an unendurable conception. Whatever is in things, this must be also inside of human thought, I said to myself again and again. Against this conviction, however, there always opposed itself what I read in Kant. But I scarcely observed this conflict. For I desired more than anything else to attain through the Critique of Pure Reason to a firm standing ground in order to get the mastery of my own thinking. Wherever and whenever I took my holiday walks, I had in any case to set before myself this question, and once more clear it up: How does one pass from simple, clear-cut perceptions to concepts in regard to natural phenomena? I held then quite uncritically to Kant; but no advance did I make by means of him.
Through all this I was not drawn away from whatever pertains to the actual doing of practical things and the development of human skill. It so happened that one of the employees who took turns with my father in his work understood book-binding. I learned bookbinding from him, and was able to bind my own school books in the holidays between the fourth and fifth classes of the Realschule. And I learned stenography also at this time during the vacation without a teacher.”
https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c02.html
As you likely know, Rudolf Steiner was highly critical of Kant's epistemology in his own doctoral dissertation in 1892, which was expanded to become the book, "Truth and Knowledge", the veritable introduction to Steiner's own magnum opus, "The Philosophy of Freedom", which was first published in November 1893, while Steiner was in Weimar working at the Goethe-Schiller.
Steiner would expand upon his criticism of Kant in the first lecture of GA 201, which was previously cited. And here is the reason, which you amplify in your dissertation presented, it seems, to the review panel of the California Institute of Integral Studies. Steiner presented his dissertation to Heinrich von Stein, of the University of Rostock, who was an authority on Plato, and had written a huge volume of several parts on Plato and Platonism. So, he felt he needed to "bone up" on Plato, for the benefit of Professor Stein, and yet Stein agreed on everything Steiner had written about Kant's epistemology as being the path away from Plato. So, Steiner got his PhD very readily. It interests me, Max, that CIIS, as you seem to admit, knows very little about the work of Rudolf Steiner, and even in 2019. How can this be?
Your work described in "The Redemption of Thinking" is well done, but it only describes what constitutes the a priori and a posteriori dimensions of the human being as a physical human being on earth. Steiner also describes the lines of demarcation which describe the etheric body (left-right), and astral body (above and below}. Kant only emphasized the (before-behind) dimension, which accords the physical body. Thus, Spiritual Science is needed for the full spectrum. Thinking, which is seated in the Etheric Body, Feeling, which is seated in the Astral Body, and Willing, which is seated in the Physical Body. Kant is an icon of this third, through his three books, written in 1781, 1788, and 1790. He was definitely knocking on the door.