What caused Kant to develop this two-tiered view of reality, phenomena and noumena? Why did he even feel a need to assert that some reality exists that we might experience, but we never know we're experiencing it and can never understand it?
That’s a great question! He’s trying to rescue knowledge from Hume’s skepticism (on Hume’s terms, which he accepts). Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature” was pushing for a radical skepticism that Kant was trying to answer. That’s why Kant’s three critiques are centered around Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. He believed he could rescue the transcendental from skepticism with some redefinitions and recentering in “subjective universality.”
Would you say that Kant’s philosophy has led to the widespread Gnosticism in modern evangelical Christianity?
What caused Kant to develop this two-tiered view of reality, phenomena and noumena? Why did he even feel a need to assert that some reality exists that we might experience, but we never know we're experiencing it and can never understand it?
That’s a great question! He’s trying to rescue knowledge from Hume’s skepticism (on Hume’s terms, which he accepts). Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature” was pushing for a radical skepticism that Kant was trying to answer. That’s why Kant’s three critiques are centered around Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. He believed he could rescue the transcendental from skepticism with some redefinitions and recentering in “subjective universality.”