Philosophers in General Germany, or contemporary philosophers, regard the discussion of rational capacity established by Kant as a general philosophical problem. That is to say, the discussion of all philosophical questions involves a discussion of the capacity of reason.
——Jiang Yi
The fact that German classical philosophy can be accepted in a culture like China's, or in a historical tradition like China's, is not completely or absolutely attributable to the spread of Marxist philosophy. We used to think that the spread of Marxist philosophy led to the development of German classical philosophy in China, because Marxist philosophy originated from German classical philosophy. But we must know that at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century before Marxist philosophy entered China, that is, when Chinese did not know much about Marxist philosophy, in fact, many scholars at that time introduced many philosophical ideas in Germany, including the philosophical ideas of Kant, Hegel and others. And at that time, it can be said that there was a big market, and everyone thought that German philosophy was very powerful, thinking that it could help us solve the problem of Chinese place to live. From this we see a similarity or similarity between Chinese philosophy and German philosophy.
Of course, when we discuss German classical philosophy today, or re-evaluate German classical philosophy, there is another level of consideration, that is, what kind of special position German classical philosophy is in the West. Philosophers in General Germany, or contemporary philosophers, regard the discussion of rational capacity established by Kant as a general philosophical problem. What is a general question? That is to say, the discussion of all philosophical questions involves a discussion of the capacity of reason. So when Kant bases people's reason on the formal premise of general intellectuality, he tells us why we can know the world, why can we grasp the world with propositions or concepts. This is because we have a certain form of knowledge in the innate place, and this form of knowledge is called the a priori intellectual form or the innate knowledge form. He sees this transcendental or innate form of knowledge as a way in which we grasp any external world object, and all our experience is but the material that constitutes our understanding of the world.
Kant
Thus experience in Kant's philosophy is only used as a source of philosophical material, not as a way of composing all knowledge. When we want to acquire knowledge, we often grasp the object through the form of innate knowledge, and the object is obtained through experience. So Kant has a saying that "knowledge is obtained by the combination of innate intellectual forms (concepts), plus materials (intuitions) obtained from experience." So we need to have intuition, because intuition comes from experience, and everything we see comes from experience. Then these experiences provide us with only intuitive material, called perceptual intuition. But when we have perceptual and intuitive material, we cannot form knowledge. So Kant said that in order to acquire knowledge, then you have to have another thing, and this thing can determine whether the perceptual intuitive material you have obtained can become knowledge, and this thing is called "concept", so the concept exists before experience.
When Kant raised this question, he immediately changed the overall direction of traditional philosophy. Because the method of traditional philosophy is not to grasp the object of that experience through concepts, or innate concepts, it is often through first knowing the world to obtain the material of experience, and then to explain the world of this experience, that is, the world is for man, the object of interpretation, not the object of construction.
I don't know if you can understand these two different concepts, one is the object of interpretation, and the other is the object of construction. The object to be interpreted is how we are to understand it, to explain it, to exist as an object of interpretation when we are faced with the empirical world. And the object is constructed to say that the world is created by me, because it is established because of me, and if I am not there, if the subject of this knowledge is absent, then the world does not exist, or the object does not exist.
If this philosophical concept is interpreted according to the usual conventions, many people may immediately think of a concept called "idealism" and immediately say that this is not an idealistic idea? Not really. The so-called idealism, today we understand it as conceptualism, what does conceptualism mean? Conceptualism is the recognition that before we acquire knowledge of the external world, we have a certain idea as a leading condition. Whether you are going to say whether this idea comes from the world of man's inner consciousness, or from some innate objectivity that transcends man, or from a form of knowledge that has a universality, that is another matter. But it will emphasize that the idea itself must have existed before that object.
Just as when we say that this is a pen, we do not think that it is a pen because of the existence of this pen, but we must reduce this thing to a real object, an object, to a certain concept, and this concept is called a pen. So this is a pen, and this "this" word is the name of the object, and the "pen" is a concept. When we reduce this concrete object to an object, we have in fact admitted that we must have a concept of a pen before we can reduce the object to a pen. This is one of the simplest phenomena we often encounter in our experience. But we think less about this question, that is, why do we use such a concept to define this object? How did the way the objects were defined come about?
In fact, in the whole tradition of Western philosophy, when we are able to treat the object as an object of interpretation, we do not need to use a certain innate concept to describe the object, but only to explain how the material from which we have acquired such experience can help us form the concept. In fact, at this point, I have used a lot of philosophical concepts to explain, such as objects, concepts, meanings, self, world, these words are some of the words commonly used in philosophy. That is to say, these seemingly abstract concepts are actually everywhere in our daily lives. But we do not interpret it, to understand it, in the way of the philosopher, but to understand it in the way of everyday language, in terms of life, in experience.
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Famous philosopher, Doctor of Philosophy, Jiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of Education. He was the Dean of the School of Philosophy and Sociology at Beijing Normal University. Distinguished Professor of Shanxi University, Vice Chairman of the Steering Committee for the Teaching of Philosophy in Colleges and Universities of the Ministry of Education, Honorary Chairman of the Chinese Modern Foreign Philosophy Society, Honorary President of the Beijing Philosophical Society. His major works include: Wittgenstein: A Post-Philosophical Culture, Western Philosophy Toward the New Century, Modern Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy, and Mirror Images of Thought: From the Perspective of Philosophical Topology.
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Editor: Niu Yajie
Review: Gao Qiaoyan
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