...it resolves the paradoxes of Kant's theory, opening up with two basic realizations: (1) Kant always believed that reason connected us directly to things-in-themselves, and (2) Kant's system is not a Cartesian theory of hidden, transcendent objects, but a version of empirical realism, that we are directly acquainted with real objects, a notion that reason connects us directly to things-in-themselves and does not allow for speculative metaphysics as practiced by the Rationalists because reason alone does not determine any positive content of knowledge ("Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind," A 51), but does allow that we possess two sources of input (physical sensation and the sense of moral duty), with physical sensation precipitating an application of reason to experience, producing the perception of phenomenal objects, thus making the supreme rational expression of this science, while the sense of moral duty on the other hand precipitates an application of reason that generates ethics and religion, its supreme rational expression being "Postulates of Practical Reason," the "Ideas" of God, freedom, and immortality which, to Kant, are required as conditions of the the Moral Law, though differences between reality as seen in science and reality as seen in morality and religion reveal that there are aspects to existence that are not revealed by either datum alone, thus making the two sources unequal in the magnitude and ultimate significance of their content, leading to questions of what science can investigate and know (but still leaves us wondering, "What is it all for?"), and, conversely, morality and religion have a far more limited rational content, returning to many of the same issues over and over again, but such issues happen to include, not just the questions about how to live, but the ultimate questions about the meaning of life and existence ("Life, the Universe and Everything," in the memorable formula of Douglas Adams) and that our moral datum does not lead to direct, positive knowledge of things that we are able to conceive, like God, leads Kant to characterize his system as transcendental idealism, that we have a subjective representation of such things, without the real intuition that we have of physical objects and a reality revealed by morality is thus for Kant a matter of faith (Glaube), an inference from the Moral Law which is itself present to us with an inexplicable authority, thus "transcendental idealism" is profoundly different from other forms of "idealism," like the "subjective idealism" of Berkeley (what Kant called "empirical idealism") or the "objective idealism" of Hegel, both of which offer speculative certainties about the ultimate nature of things, which Kant does not do and instead the nature of things that we can know about concretely, for Kant, is revealed by science, and Hence, Kantian transcendental idealism is equally attended by empirical, and yet soft and chewy, pieces of nougat dipped in...
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Ham-fisted ham fisting.
