Overcoming Kantian Skepticism

This is partly for aiding my thought process in my massive PHIL304 paper, and partly so that I can think about this/apply it directly to my own life. If you’re reading this, let me know if it makes sense (especially if you’ve never learned about this material before), because my paper has to be able to be understood by a random person reading it, without prior knowledge, and if this doesn’t make sense, then my next 10 pages won’t make sense, either. I don't necessarily agree with all these ideas (especially Hegel's input), but it must be inevitably written.

The problem with Kantian dualism:
There are two problems with Kantian dualism, both intertwined. First, Kant’s dualism leaves us with the unknowability of the thing-in-itself. Second, by positing two stems of human cognition, sensibility and understanding, Kant left it unclear how these two faculties, so distinct from one another, could actually interact. Through understanding, objects are thought - this is the region of our spontaneity. Through sensibility, objects are given to us - this is the region of our receptivity, that is, how we are affected by objects different from us.

One problem that many found unacceptable with Kant’s system was the thing-in-itself, which was unknown and unknowable. How do we eliminate the thing-in-itself and its unknowability? Fichte’s move was eliminating the thing-in-itself, the object that was totally distinct from the mind. In order to avoid positing something unknowable that was totally distinct from the mind, Fichte posited that what happens in the act of knowledge is that the mind really knows only itself. There is, therefore, a subject-object identity: all knowledge requires nothing less than an identity of the knower and the known. But in order for the mind to know itself, it must know itself in an object distinct from itself, its object, so the “I that posits itself as an I” must also posit that which is different from itself, the impact (AnstoB), through which the I can determine itself. In other words, if genuine knowledge is to be possible, two conditions must be met. First, there must be an identity of the knower and the known (only like knows like). Second, if a mind is to have knowledge, there must be an object of knowledge that is over against a subject. It therefore follows that the object of knowledge stands over against the subject but is really in some sense identical with the subject. Moreover, if the mind only knows itself in knowledge, then there must be a point in immediate consciousness where subject and object are one (Schelling’s point of indifference) before the subject and object split.

These Fichtean ideas had a fundamental influence on Schelling and Hegel. What is most important about Hegel is that he takes the Fichtean dialectic of the I that posits itself as an I (and which much also posit its object in order to define itself as an I) and sets it up as the fundamental dialectical principle at work in the absolute Mind. What is a mind without objects of knowledge? There can be no mind, no subject that knows without objects that it knows. And so it is with the divine Mind, the absolute. The absolute mind only comes to know itself (and thereby becomes mind) by positing what is other than itself. This “other” is first realized in space as Nature. It is in nature that the absolute receives its first actualization; it in and through nature that the “universal” first particularizes itself, that is, receives concrete determinations and hence actuality. Most importantly, however, it is in nature that rational nature first arises. Nature is in the arena in which spirit is to develop itself and know itself as spirit. The human spirit is necessary for God to actualize God-self. The ultimate goal of human action and knowing is for human beings to recognize themselves as the actualization of the Idea, that is, as the actualization of the absolute. Hence the absolute must develop itself in the space of nature and in the time of history in order to be; this is what Hegel means when he tells us that “being lies in becoming.” Furthermore, God is only fully God when that which is other than God, but which God must posit in order to know himself, comes to know itself as God, and it thereby taken up into the divine life.