Categories of thought- Kant

I found Immanuel Kant’s ideas on categories of thought very interesting. He felt that the things that we expreience are modified by purely mental concepts. This increases the meaning of these experiences in our minds. These categories are merely mental constructs, but they influence how we see everything. He included categories such as time and space, totality, cause and effect, reality, possibility-impossibility,  and existance-nonexistence. He used these to try to disprove Hume, who felt that all conclusions we ever reach are based on experience. How then, Kant would argue, can we make statements such as certain things being impossible? Does our experience tell us that? Is it truly impossible? What about statements that begin with the word all? Do we ever really know all of something? Of course not! We can’t know all of anything! These categories are so ingrained into our mental processes that once we become aware of them, we realize that we are incapable of viewing the world without them. Kant said that “a mind without concepts would have no capacity to think…” and I think he is right.

I tried really hard to think of things outside of these concepts, and found myself incapable of doing so. Every experience I called to mind, I had applied these concepts to. This is especially true of my spiritual experiences. I view all things along a certain possibility-impossibility bias, and yet my view of spiritual things directly contradicts this view. Indeed, I use a whole different scale for spiritual things. I apply the concepts of time and space to everything; in fact, I do not know how not to view things within these two concepts. As such, I have a really hard time thinking of a God who exists outside of these two concepts. These categories or concepts are so ingrained into my way of thinking that I am unable to think without them.