溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
What Can I Know?
How far do the bounds of what reason can reach extend — what can I know?
What can I know?
Kant's question merged two rivers into one. The rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz believed reason alone could deduce the truth of the world; the empiricism of Locke and Hume, holding all knowledge to come from the senses, pared that ambition down. When Hume reduced even causation to habit, Kant confessed he was roused from his "dogmatic slumber." His answer was not compromise but reversal: the mind does not copy the world; the world appears to us shaped by the mind's forms (time, space, the categories). Thus we can know appearances, but never the thing-in-itself.
Even in an age where data seems infinite, asking what we cannot know in principle does not disappear — because knowing the limit is itself a form of knowledge.
Kant bound the interests of reason into three questions: what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Kant bound the interests of reason into three questions: what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope. The first was not an ambition of knowledge but the drawing of its limits. He held that we see the world not as it is in itself but through our own lenses of space and time. I sense that this question demands humility and courage at once: to know what is knowable to its end, yet to halt before what cannot be known. I stand on that boundary line too.
✍️Your Answer
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