Kant Touch This

In Konigsberg's silent, winding streets, A scholar kept a clockwork beat— Immanuel Kant, whose daily round Set city watches to their sound. A mind both shaped by science’ light And mystic mother’s faith at night, He stood where reason, faith, and sense Met at Enlightenment’s immense And trembling, storied, ancient cross, Where gain for one meant some were loss. Hume, thirteen years ahead in age, Had shaken reason, dimmed the stage— His doubts on causality’s bond Cast shadows reason could not abscond. Kant, startled from his dogmatic sleep, Sought for a synthesis, robust and deep: To “save science,” yet “make room for faith,” To answer doubt, restore what’s safe, And in this work, transcendental named, He set a revolution famed. Transcendental—preconditions sought, Not what’s beyond, but what is wrought Within the mind, the grid, the tray, That freezes chaos into shape, So loose sensation, wild and blind, Is molded, cubed, and then defined. Three critiques, three pillars bold: Of Pure Reason first, its questions old; Of Practical Reason—ethics’ ground; Of Judgment, where aesthetics sound. He asked: How can there be Synthetic a priori certainty? Where analytic is clear and taut— (All bachelors are unmarried, thought), The synthetic, broad, must draw On something sensed, and something raw. The mind is not a vacant slate, Nor merely passive at its fate; It acts—like screens that re-arrange And process data, sort, exchange. It organizes what we perceive, And draws from chaos, forms to weave. Time and space—within us dwell, Not ‘out there’ as stories tell; The world is shaped by mind’s own art, Experience and thought both play their part. Percepts, concepts—each in turn: One is blind, the other sterile, learn— Unless together, hand in hand, They craft for us a knowing land. Quantity, quality, relation, mode— Twelve categories Kant bestowed, To every sense, a framework fit, To every thought, a place to sit. But what of things themselves, the real, To the “noumena” bell our minds [ap]peal We know them not, but only see The “phenomena” shaped for you and me. For what the mind cannot perceive, Or tie to sense, it cannot weave. So God, the self, the world beyond— Remain outside our knowing bond. Regulative principles, not truths we own, But concepts needed to get along. In vain we reason, spin, debate; Yet must proceed as though innate Is world, and self, and God above— Though knowledge here is out of love— For thought requires, though never finds, A ground beyond our bounded minds. Such is the crossroads, such the task, To live, to reason, yet to ask What mind constructs, and what may be— Forever seeking, never free. To this thing the ding an sich Kant said that our minds can't stick So his worldview leads to doom All Kant did was psychologize Hume As a metaphysical skeptic he must surmise Hume's skepticism Kant psychologized This transcendental method is like a Copernican Revolution To all philosophical reason this method is the solution To the impossibility of the contrary God must exist always, not nary Argumentum ad Ignorantiam Where all other proofs fail, I AM All other worldview are attempting but never surmounting The worldview that can "account for counting"