A note on ignorance from Kant
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a hugely impressive (but fiendishly difficult) treatment of our knowledge and ignorance. One of its more clear and plainly-written segments comes in a Note to a section entitled: ‘ The Transcendental Ideal ’. In this, Kant writes: “ The investigations and calculations of astronomers have taught us much that is wonderful; but the most important lesson we have received from them is the discovery of the abyss of our ignorance in relation to the universe – an ignorance, the magnitude of which reason, without the information thus derived, could never have conceived. This discovery of our deficiencies must produce a great change in the determination of the aims of human reason.” There is a crucial point here for all of us, that the deficiencies in our claims to knowledge are as much if not more important than all our achievements. Too often we assume that our knowledge is all-pervading or at least at some point in the futu...