Kant's Revolution

Kant is widely acknowledged as a pivotal figure in intellectual history, but the axis of that turn is often misplaced. The Enlightenment tradition into which he entered regarded Knowledge as the recording of the world as accurately as possible. But unease with that project was dawning, due to the gradual realization that there can be no independent way to verify not merely how accurate an interpretation can be, but whether interpretation in principle could corresponded in any way whatsoever to purported objects. So, Kant effected what he called a 'Copernican Revolution': just as Copernicus showed that instead of the sun rotating around the earth, the latter rotates around the former, Kant reconstrued Knowledge as instead of an adaptation of human cognitive faculties to objects in the world, an adaptation of the latter to the former. Hence, instead of aiming at accuracy of recording the world, Knowledge, according to Kant, should be embraced in its status as mere interpretation, with the criterion of success now being internal coherence of interpretation. So, what Kant is usually taken as revolutionizing is the enterprise of Knowledge. But that understanding of his project still takes Knowledge to be a recording of something or other, whereas a more detailed reading reveals that for him Knowledge is more: a construction of a world and its objects. In other words, for him, Knowledge is a process of anthropomorphization of the world--a shaping of it, in human image. As Marx later put it, Knowledge is not to understand the world, but to change it. Likewise, for the Pragmatists, Science is essentially Technology, a process of controlled experimentation that seeks not Knowledge for its own sake, but Knowledge that can help enhance the quality of life. In other words, the more profound revolution that Kant effected was in the relation between Theory and Practice--no longer is the latter an incidental application of the findings of the former, but, rather, the former is an abstraction from the latter that helps improve it. Or, as Kant himself put it, in an underappreciated comment on the ambitions of his system, Reason is in its element not in theorizing about the world, but in shaping how we conduct ourselves.