1. SENSIBILITY ANTHROPOCENTRISM

In the initial part of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant insists that we must accept, if only by way of presumption, that there is such a thing as a characteristic modus operandi of the human mind - that the human mind, by its very nature as such, functions in a certain specific sort of way in its cognitive operations. And he goes on to hold that, in consequence, any question about how matters may stand “in themselves” - apart from the conditions of knowability set by the human mind - is something about which we can hope to achieve no information whatsoever. We therefore face the situation of an agnosticism regarding the nature and machinations of things as they are in themselves, apart from the conditions imposed by our human cognitive faculties. Moreover, Kant goes on to insist that we can secure no basis for understanding why the modus operandi of our human cognitive faculties has the features it does through appeal to some more fundamental level of known fact. While we can discern what the conditions of human cognition are, we cannot possibly secure any information about how and why they obtain, seeing that any explanation of these issues would require some deeper involvement in inaccessible information about how matters stand “in themselves.”

The implications of this agnostic position - and in particular those regarding its specifically anthropocentric nature - often go unappreciated. The present discussion explores somewhat more fully the nature of Kant's agnosticism regarding the roots of human knowledge and examines its implications for the coherence of Kant's overall argument.

There is no need to go to great lengths to establish Kant's acknowledgment that the forms of sensibility at issue in the Transcendental Aesthetic are forms of human sensibility specifically relating to the perceptual experience enjoyed by us. He could scarcely be more explicit on this point: