ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the revolutionary nature of Kant’s doctrine of Anschauung (intuition). Armed with this new doctrine and the critique of pure understanding corresponding to it, Kant identifies the limits of our sensible cognition. Moreover, he shows how supersensible things are possible, and how they are to be thought of: we should seek the cognition of supersensible things not from objects, but from the constitution of the morally practical subject—namely, free will. The domain of supersensible things belongs to the domain of the concept of freedom. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, according to Kant, cognition no longer conforms to the object; instead, the object conforms to our cognition. Second, we must divert our self-cognition from fruitless and extravagant speculation to a fruitful practical employment (see B421), based on the concept of freedom, which in the second Critique Kant calls “the keystone of the whole system of pure reason, even the speculative” (5:3). And third, I argue that these aspects of Kant’s moral philosophy are prefigured by the classical Chinese philosopher, Mencius (372–289 B.C.), especially in his theory of the “original mind”—though in Mencius the mystical overtones are more overt than they are in Kant.
