▶︎ 0:00 Now we can begin the big argument. We finished the preparation. It was technical, but it's necessary to get up to understand what's at stake here. And now we're going to see his answer to the question how a priori synthetic judgments are possible by going through a riddle.
▶︎ 0:19 So, I'm going to, in real time, in front of you, tell the future. I'm going to predict something that has not occurred yet. I'm going to predict that tonight, when I go home, watch six o'clock news on Bay News 9, and watch weather, Weather on the Nines with Chief Meteorologist Mike Clay, that his shirt will be, hold on… gray. He will be wearing a shirt with some — I'm not sure what shade. It'll be some shade of gray. Now, I am predicting this with absolute certitude. I'm not saying it's likely. I'm not saying it's probable. I'm saying I know it for a fact, even though it has not transpired yet.
▶︎ 1:27 The riddle is, how can I know this? Is it analytic? No, it's not the definition of a shirt to be gray. It's contingent. There are lots and lots of different colors that shirts can be. Because it's not analytic, it must be synthetic. Right? It is informative. This is bringing a property, grayness, that is not inherent to the subject. It's synthetic in Kant's term. Therefore, Hume would say I need experience to know it. But it's in the future, so I do not have direct experience of it, direct empirical data of it. So, how could I know this?
▶︎ 2:11 Could it be that Chief Meteorologist Mike Clay has worn gray shirts every day for this week or this month or a year or his career? Well, no. Hume has taught us that just because something has a past pattern does not give us certitude for future predictions. We have to assume the future resembles the past, and there's no way to prove that. So, that doesn't give us any certitude. Could I have bribed him? Give him 50 bucks, tell him to wear a gray shirt? Well, no. Besides him being way too honest for that, at any point, he could spill coffee on it and have to change that. And yet, I know it.
▶︎ 3:02 The solution is that I have a black and white TV. So, everything on the TV is some shade of gray, somewhere between white and black. Now, notice how this works. If I only have access to information through one medium — the only way I can see Chief Meteorologist Mike Clay is through my TV — and if that medium has a specific effect on what comes through it, turns everything some shade of gray, then I can know for sure that everything that comes through that medium will have that particular property. If the medium that I get it through gives everything that comes through it one particular property, and I learn what that property is, then I know everything that comes through it will have that property. And I know it prior to turning on the TV and seeing what's on there.
▶︎ 4:18 In other words, I know it a priori, relative to the TV. I don't need to see what is actually on the TV. That would be empirical. I know it a priori from the TV. I know the TV itself will do this before I see what's actually on it. And yet, it's synthetic, because it's not the definition of a shirt to be some shade of gray. There still is content. There still is synthesizing something into it. It is a limitation — I cannot see colors on my TV — and yet, this limitation gives me a power. The limitation is precisely what gives me necessary universal knowledge. Everything on the TV has to be gray. I know this as a law of nature for everything that I watch.
▶︎ 5:33 Now, we have to be careful here. The whole riddle turns on the ambiguity of when I say, when I see his shirt. Right? Because what shirt am I actually seeing? I'm seeing the shirt on my TV. The shirt that I know about, the shirt that I have necessary universal knowledge of, the shirt that I predicted, is the shirt on the TV, not the shirt actually on Chief Meteorologist Mike Clay's back. I have no idea what the shirt on his back looks like, but I know for sure, ahead of time, independently of checking, what color the shirt on my TV will look like.
▶︎ 6:19 And this is the distinction that Kant makes. He says we have to distinguish between what he says are things for us and things in themselves. There is the way the world itself is, the way the world really is, on its own, independently of the way that we look at it, independently of the way that we see it, independently of any effect we have on it. And that, in this analogy — it's not perfect, but it's an analogy — that would be the shirt on his back, what color it really, really is. But there's also the color that it is that I see through the only way that I can see it. I can only see it on my TV. That's the only way that I can get to it. And so there is Chief Meteorologist Mike Clay's shirt for me, on my TV. And that is what I have knowledge of. That is what I predicted. That is what I have necessary universal information about. That is what I have a priori synthetic judgments about.
▶︎ 7:39 And what Kant is saying — and this is the solution to the riddle of the book, how are a priori synthetic judgments possible — is that our minds are like the black and white TV. Our minds are not purely passive, perfect replications of the world. When we take in sensory data, we don't just register it passively like photographic film or like a mirror or like a tabula rasa blank slate. The mind, the human mind, takes this in and organizes it. The human mind structures the information. We get all of this data — there's light waves and sound waves and smells and all of this information — and it's chaotic, and we can't deal with it in this raw form. In order to be able to navigate through the world, in order not to be rained on, in order to have an orderly structured reality that we can walk through and meet other people in, we have to impose a certain order on it. We have to impose a structure that is amenable to human comprehension. And if we can know what that structure is, then we know what everything we ever experience will be structured like, and that's all that math and science are: the study of the structures that we impose on experience.
▶︎ 9:26 Just like a TV, the only way we get to the world is through our mind, is through our senses, is through this structuring function, and if we can figure out what it is doing to everything that comes in it, then we will know something about everything that comes out of it. We will know facts — synthetic, substantive facts — but about everything, universal, necessarily, about the world for us. The world we live in.
▶︎ 10:16 Now, you have to realize what he's doing here. What he's doing here is stunning. On the one hand, he's taking Hume's empiricism and he's saying, "Yes, the only way we get any knowledge of the world is by getting sensory data. Yes, you are right, Hume. Empiricism has a deep, profound insight. The way that I know the world exists and I know anything about the world is by turning on the TV. Otherwise it's a blank. I've got to have input. You're right. But you're wrong to think that's all that knowledge is, that everything I get is simply through the senses. Descartes, you and the rationalists, you are right. There are things that I don't get from experience as part of my knowledge. It's just that you're wrong, Descartes, to think that it can go beyond our knowledge." The things that I can know a priori, necessarily, universally, are not from experience, but they're only true of experience.
▶︎ 11:44 On the one hand, I now have knowledge, true knowledge, not the weak substitute that he thinks Hume gave us. True knowledge. Universal. It will continue. It'll be this way. I can rely on it. I can know it. Of the world that I see, the world that I live in, the world that I know. But at the same time, for the same exact reason, I know nothing of the world as it is in itself. I can't. For the same reason, the same exact idea, both gives us the kind of knowledge we want of the world for us, and denies us the kind of knowledge we want of the world in itself. Kant guarantees physics and forbids metaphysics at one and the same time with one and the same idea. Kant giveth and Kant taketh away. He's the man.
▶︎ 12:52 And he does this by taking these two radically divergent thoughts, these radically divergent schools of thought that have gone farther and farther away from each other, and he brings them together as if they were made for each other. He synthesized them in this harmonious unity that's just beautiful, as if they belonged together instead of being incompatible, to this overarching system. The man is a horrendous writer, but his thinking dances. His thinking is so graceful, so beautiful. It's really lovely.
▶︎ 13:34 This is the big argument: the human mind is active in its structuring and organizing of experience. It is not a passive reception. It has reception, but it is not purely passive. It is not a pure reproduction. It is a production. It has an effect on what comes in. And as long as we can understand what that effect is, then we can understand something about everything we will ever experience. Everything I ever see on my TV will be some shade of gray. So if we understand what the faculties of our mind are doing, we will know something about every single thing you will ever encounter throughout your entire life. No exceptions.
▶︎ 14:25 And that's all you really care about, he thinks. It feels like we're giving up something really, really big — "Oh my God, I'll never know what the world really is." He says, "You don't actually care about that. You've never encountered the world in itself. Everything you've ever encountered is something for you, something you've already organized and structured, something you already have turned into a world for you. That's the only place you've ever been. That's where you keep all your stuff. That's where you meet all your friends. That's all you actually care about." So he would say you're giving up nothing real, nothing that you care about, and getting everything important by this one change. This is the answer to the question, how are a priori synthetic judgments possible?
▶︎ 15:19 And now what he does for the rest of the book is he takes this idea and he applies it — this is the big argument — he takes this idea and he applies it to the three faculties of the mind. He says the mind has three separate faculties, and each one of them organizes in a different way. Right? And it's Kant, so it's beautifully structured. There are three faculties, each one of which contributes something different, and each one of which has its own body of knowledge. And so he's going to go through them, he's going to apply it three times in these different ones.
▶︎ 15:59 The first faculty of the mind is what's called intuition, and this is a very unfortunate translation. Someone translated it that way early on, and it's just stuck, but it has nothing to do with the way that we use the word intuition. It's not a hunch. It's not what you think. It's just the senses. It's just how we directly take sensory data into our minds. Okay. And this is what gives us mathematics. This is the faculty of the mind, this is the body of knowledge that it gives us. Right? And each one of the faculties gives us a different body of knowledge, and each one of the faculties has a different structure that it imparts to experience.
▶︎ 17:03 Now, the structure that intuition gives us — he gives a different name to each one of them, because he has to, because it's Kant, it's got to be complicated. Intuition has forms, two forms: space and time. What that means is we get all this sensory data coming at us, and it's chaotic and it's overwhelming. And our minds put all this information into relationships. So that I can find my way around the world, it puts the incoming information into relations like to the left of, to the right of, above, below. That's all that space is, according to Kant — relationships. He got this from his forebear, Leibniz, in the rational school. Space is just a way to bring things together, a certain type of relationship, okay? Same goes for time. Time is just before, after, at the same time — ways that events relate to each other. There was a huge debate, in fact, between Leibniz and Newton during this time, because Newton thought that time and space was a big box, that it was something in itself, and if nothing existed, it'd just be an empty box. Leibniz said, "It's just relationships, and if nothing existed, there would be no space and time." And Einstein came down on Leibniz's side, so hooray for the philosophers.
▶︎ 19:00 In any case, what the mind does — and of course you're not aware of this. This is not something that you do consciously. This is autonomic, like the way that your brain regulates your heartbeat or digestion. You're doing it, but not consciously, not with any control, not aware of it. You are putting things into spatial relationships, putting things into temporal relationships, such that the only things that you will ever become aware of are already spatialized, already temporalized. You can't get before that. You can't access the data before it has been put into temporal and spatial relationships. The only way you can ever become aware of anything is after it has gone through this process.
▶︎ 19:50 Now, that means the world in itself is not spatial and it's not temporal. Do not try to imagine what that is. That will break a lobe. It is impossible to imagine, because our imagination is structured by space and time too. You cannot imagine what a non-spatial or non-temporal world is like. You can think abstractly it is not spatial, it is not temporal. You cannot think what it would be like, because we can only think what the world like the one we live in is like. So we can understand the idea that it lacks time and space. We cannot have any sense of what that might be like. We are barred from it forever by the very thing that opens up the world to us at all. It opens up to us our world while barring us from the world.
▶︎ 20:56 And these are what give us math. Time, a little complicated, gives us arithmetic. That's not so obvious. But space gives us geometry. All that geometry is, is Descartes' favorite subject: the rules of the way that our intuition organizes incoming data. That's it. That's all it is. And everything you ever experience will be geometric. It will obey the laws of geometry. Why? Because you make it. You make it obey them. You cannot ever encounter something that will not be geometric, because to encounter it is to put it through the form of space, which means that it will obey the laws of geometry.
▶︎ 21:57 Now, the second faculty, he calls this the understanding. And instead of forms — the intuition has forms — the understanding has concepts. And instead of two, it's got 12 of them, and we're not going to get into them. We're only going to talk about the one that's most interesting, which is causality. And you know why that's important. Causality is what gives us science. Just like Hume said, "Science is the study of what causes what." Kant says, "That's right, exactly. That's brilliant." Hume said, "If science was entirely empirical, it would be contingent. We could not make predictions with any confidence." And therefore, Kant says, "It cannot be purely empirical." That's where he disagrees with Hume.
▶︎ 23:12 We know that the laws of nature will remain the same — exactly what Hume said we cannot know. We know the future will resemble the past, because we will make it resemble the past, because our understanding will always impose this structure, these concepts, onto incoming data. Just like my TV will always show things to me black and white, you will always find the laws of nature. You will always find the same causal relationships. Not because they're there — because Hume would be right. If they're just out there in the world and we're empirically deriving them, it'd be contingent and we couldn't know; they could stop at any time. But Hume didn't think about this other possibility. The other possibility is that we are not deriving these patterns from experience, we are imposing them on experience. And that's why all experience, everything we ever experience, will happen, 100%, necessarily, universally. And there we have laws of physics, what Hume said was impossible. We have laws of physics as a priori synthetic judgments because of the nature of the mind.
▶︎ 24:46 See, remember, we said that a priori synthetic judgments would be our clue: whatever our mind is like, it must be able to produce this weird kind of judgments. This is the answer. Because we are structuring and organizing experience, we have the capacity to have the kind of knowledge that Hume thought was impossible. This thing that was so hard to explain is also the clue that helps us understand the world, understand the mind. So the first two chapters are why we can and do have a priori synthetic judgments — necessary, universal, substantively informative information about the world that we can guarantee will continue. Hume said it was impossible. This is why. This is how.
▶︎ 25:48 And now the question is, what about metaphysics? Does that also become legitimate? Because metaphysics claims to be a priori synthetic as well. Metaphysics is synthetic. It claims to have substantive facts about the world, and it's not based on experience, so it's a priori. Well, this is the third faculty of the mind, which he calls reason. It is what attempts to give us metaphysics, and it has three ideas. See, here, again, we have the word idea. Again, Kant means something totally different from the other two. It's reason's version of concepts or forms. And these are the things that reason has internal to it that it uses to structure experience.
▶︎ 26:59 Kant thinks that reason is different from the other two. Reason has the demand for completeness. When reason looks at knowledge produced by intuition in math, by understanding in science, it says, "That's not good enough. You're only giving me part of the picture. I want it all. I want a total view." When the intuition gives us space, reason says, "The only kind of knowledge of space that would be satisfactory is if I can have a map of the entirety of space." And this is what astronomers want. They want to map the entire universe. When intuition gives us time, reason says, "I want to know time all the way to the very first instant." And this is what the cosmologists study, going back to the Big Bang. When the understanding gives us causality, understanding says, "I want to know all of causality, what causes everything, all the way. Only if I get that totality," reason says, "can I finally be content. Until then, I'm going to keep whipping the intuition and the understanding to keep getting more and more and more." Right?
▶︎ 28:41 But there's a problem here. The reason why reason is unsatisfied is not because of the weakness of our minds. It's not because we haven't worked hard enough, we haven't done enough. It's because of the intrinsic nature of the forms of intuition, of the concepts of understanding, all of these. And notice, these are very, very obvious things to do — the space, time, causality, this is what structures science and math. Kant isn't just shoving things artificially in there. But Kant says, "Look at these. It is internal to the very nature of time, space, and causality to be incomplete." Completeness is impossible for these, and here's why.
▶︎ 29:43 Let's imagine that we're trying to get all of space. And so we send probes out. And let's imagine that we can send them faster than light. And we get all the way to the very edge of space. We've got it. This is it. Once we get to the edge, hey, we've got the entirety of space. Right? So we come up to the edge of space, and here we are. Here's the edge. We've got it. Now, what do you immediately ask? What's on the other side? Because that's the way space works. The nature of space is that for any point, there's a point on the left of it and on the right of it, on top of it and below it, which means there cannot be a final point in space. It is the nature of space, of every single point in space, to point beyond itself, to point next to it. There's always a next to, just because that's the way space works. So space, by its nature, is always driving beyond itself, and it cannot be complete.
▶︎ 31:03 What about time? I want to get to the very first moment. What do you ask when you get to the very first moment of time? What happened before then? What was going on before that? Because every moment in time has an after and a before. That's the way time works. So the very notion of a first moment in time is a contradiction in terms. You need a first moment if you're to have a totality. You cannot have a first moment if it's to be time. So the whole idea of getting the entirety of time is, on the one hand, something that time itself seems to drive us towards, because it's before and before and before and before. It's what philosophers call an infinite regress, because it just keeps going back and back and back forever, and it just keeps leading. But it also, at the same time, can never be satisfied. It can never be finished. You can never get to the end, because there cannot be an end. If you get to a moment that there is no before, then you've got a four-sided triangle. You've got a moment that is not a moment of time. That's not the way time works. But that's what reason demands.
▶︎ 32:32 Now, the understanding says I want to understand the causal relationships. I want to understand the causal nature of the world. So to understand something, I have to understand what caused it. To understand event A, I have to understand what caused it. B, okay, now I understand A because B caused it. That's great. Except, what about B? The only way I can really understand A is understand how B caused it, which means I have to understand B. But B is an event, which means that B also had a cause. To have the form of causality means that everything I see, I put into this concept. So everything I see must have a cause, because I cannot experience anything without a cause. So for B that caused A, it's an event. It must have a cause. All right, well, I trace it back to C. Whew. Well, that's good. Now I'm done. Except that C is an event. So the only way to understand A is by understanding B, to understand B has from C, and it goes on forever.
▶︎ 33:44 What do we want? We want a first cause. A first cause, to be first, would have to be an uncaused cause. There'd have to be a cause that causes everything for it, but nothing caused it. And you know what we call that? God. God is the uncaused cause. God is the creator of the universe that was never created. And that's metaphysics.
▶︎ 34:15 See, he took Hume's notion of causality, which just is what science is about, and then he showed how it intrinsically leads to an infinite regress, which drives us through reason to want to find its beginning point. And that beginning point is exactly how people have talked about God, which is what metaphysics is. Physics drives us to metaphysics. Metaphysics exists not because there have been a lot of weird people who have this strange appetite. It's built into the structure of the mind. The nature of time is to drive us back and back and back and forward and forward and forward. The nature of space is drive us outwards and outwards and outwards. The nature of causality is to drive us back and back and back. And what we get to are the totality of time and space — that's a metaphysical idea. God — that's a metaphysical idea. There's a third one we're not going to deal with, immortality of the soul, but that's different. So metaphysics is an organic, natural growth, culmination, conclusion of physics itself. Our minds are such that we automatically construct a mathematical, scientific universe, and we yearn for a metaphysical universe. We yearn for metaphysics. The brain, the mind itself is oriented towards this, and there's no way to stop it. There's no way to stop that yearning.
▶︎ 36:09 But, it's not knowledge. There is no first cause. There is no first moment. There is no outer space. It's impossible. Kant is not saying there is no God, okay? Very clear. Kant personally was a very religious man. What he is saying is that we can never know if God exists. What he's saying here — and this is a very important moment in the history of philosophy and the history of science — is that belief in God is just that: it's belief. It is a matter of faith, it's not a matter of knowledge. It is not a matter of proof, it's a matter of belief. We need to stop this foolishness of trying to prove it, trying to know it. It's not that kind of thing. This is something you believe or you don't believe. And in fact, if you prove it, then you can't believe it anymore. Belief means that you don't have proof.
▶︎ 37:20 So Descartes was wrong in saying that we could know it, Hume was wrong in saying that we couldn't know it, because it's not knowledge at all. Both are misunderstandings, because both attempt to treat it as a piece of knowledge. It's a completely different category. Science has nothing to do with it. Science can never prove God's existence, and it can never disprove God's existence. Because if science ever starts using God, that's the end of science. Not because Kant doesn't like God — he's quite fond of him — but because you stop asking good questions, you stop getting good explanations. Everything just becomes: why does the rain fall? Because God wants it. Why is there lightning? Because God wants it. And you stop having substantive informative explanations.
▶︎ 38:14 So, what Kant argues here, he says, look, we have these ideas of reason built into our minds. You can't get rid of them. The nature of space and time and causality is to push beyond, point beyond themselves, to drive us towards these. But there are two different ways we can treat it. Right? He talks about what he calls a transcendental illusion, you see. Imagine — this was a later philosopher, Bertrand Russell, would use this analogy — imagine that you have pink sunglasses on, and you look at a white wall. What would the wall look like? The wall would look pink. Not because the wall's pink, but because you, by looking at it through those glasses, you are empinkifying it. You are making it pink. But it looks like the wall is pink. That's the illusion. The illusion is we're looking through something that confers this attribute onto our experience. It looks like it's on the thing, not on our lens. The transcendental illusion is to take the qualities about our mind, about our faculties, and think they're about the world. And this is what every philosopher's done before Kant, he thinks.
▶︎ 39:54 Now, if we do that here, we think that there is this first cause out there, this uncaused cause, and then we want to find him. And so much of metaphysics has been about proving the existence of God, knowing the nature of God. Wasted effort, just like Hume thought. Again, not because he's anti-religion, but because he wants it in religion, not in science. The transcendental illusion uses — and he has to come up with technical difficult words, he's Kant — uses the ideas in what he calls a constitutive way. That means it treats these as if they're out there in the world, as if the wall was pink. Because my reason demands a causality come to a conclusion, I treat it as if it's really out there and I could find it, and I search for it as if I can get to it, as if it's a thing. That leads to wasted effort. That leads to that you'll never find it. Anything you come up with is going to be wrong, it's going to be a misunderstanding. That's just not the way the mind works.
▶︎ 41:20 But there's another way to look at it, because we can't just get rid of it. We can't just say, well, then stop thinking that way, because it's built in. It's hardwired into our brains. But we can look at it in a totally different way. Instead of constitutive, instead of thinking this is something that's out there that we ought to go look for, we can treat it as regulative. Regulative means we know it's not out there. We know the wall isn't pink. We know that we can never actually find the last, the outside, of space. We know we can never find the first moment of time. We can know we can never find the first cause. But we can keep looking for it. Sounds weird, because usually if we look for something, we want to find it. But he says we don't have to. You can keep looking for something while knowing you can never find it.
▶︎ 42:29 That is in fact what spurs science on. You see, cosmologists have been trying to get as close as they can to the Big Bang. They get closer and closer and closer and closer to it, until they're these unbelievably tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, but they're not at the Big Bang yet. They can't quite get there. But they get closer and closer and closer, and by getting closer, they learn. This is not useless, not futile. By trying to get to the first instant, the first moment in time, which is impossible — by trying to get there, we keep getting closer and closer, and we keep learning. Because of the way time works, we will always be able to find more information. We'll always be able to find more time. We'll always be able to find finer and finer bits of time, and they'll always be informative.
▶︎ 43:36 If we just said, "Oh, well, screw it, we'll never get there," just give up, we wouldn't learn all this stuff. If we said, "We can get there," then we would either congratulate ourselves on doing it, when we hadn't, or give up, out of frustration. But instead, we say, "I know we'll never get there, but I'm not going to stop trying." And that's what we do, and we get closer and closer and closer. We get more and more and more of the universe, because we're trying to get all of it, even though we know we can't. We're trying to get more and more causes, even though we can never get all of them. We're trying, we know we can't. This is what spurs science on. This is what gives it a motor, so to speak. If we treat it as regulative, a way that regulates our search, instead of constitutive, something that we can actually find. And that's the way metaphysics is impossible and necessary at the same time, because he's Kant, and he can do anything. It's impossible, we can't get the answers, but asking the questions is incredibly helpful.
▶︎ 45:09 So, what we have with Kant — he brings this whole period to a close, the early modern period. He reconciles empiricism and rationalism, and he brings this period to an end while opening up the next period of German idealism in the 19th century. And on the one hand, he's agreeing with Descartes. Descartes said, "If you look at a candle and a star, they look the same brightness, and therefore your eyeball, if your eyeball could speak, it would say they're the same, the same brightness." But your brain overrules it. It says, "No, no, no, no, I know that the star is incredibly, incredibly bright, and it's just really, really far away. And the candle's much, much dimmer. It's just much closer." So that, for Descartes, even when I'm using my senses, I'm using my reason. That's the rationalist view. Kant says, "That's right. Even when I'm looking at the world, my mind is adding a priori components, the forms of the intuition, the concepts of the understanding. We are not simply taking experience in, like the empiricists say, and only relying on experience." He gets this nugget of insight from Descartes.
▶︎ 46:39 But then he turns to Hume. Hume says, "Even when we're reasoning, we're relying on experience, because the way that Adam was able to know that the second billiard ball would move was only because he had seen it over and over and over again. So, Adam was sort of reasoning, because if it's happened many times, it will happen again, but even reason depends on experience." For Descartes, even experience depends on reason. For Hume, even reason depends on experience. And Kant says, "That's right. We can only use our reason if we have experience." We have to have something coming through the TV to have the black and whiteness. We have to have some input in order to get to use these forms and these concepts. They're both right, but they both went too far. They both have this nugget of wisdom, and Kant reaches into their system, grabs it, pulls it out, brushes off all the extremes, the places that go too far, the misunderstandings, and he finds the two pieces fit together perfectly once he brings them out. We do need experience in order to know, but knowledge isn't only experience. We can have knowledge that exceeds experience, because we can know the future, but even that knowledge is limited to experience. We know the future of the world for us. We can have the science that Hume thought we couldn't, but we can't have the metaphysics that Descartes thought we could, with the same idea, in the same way, at the same time.
▶︎ 48:39 And what he teaches us in the end — Kant was the great thinker of the Enlightenment, and "The Enlightenment," he said, "was the time when humanity grows up." It's a time we mature. We take our seat at the adult table. And what that means is ultimately we think for ourselves. Descartes said, "I'm not going to rely on all this education I've gotten, because it's not good enough. I'm going to start from scratch and think for myself, think everything through myself," but then he had to rely on God. Right? Hume says, "I'm going to work through all this. I'm not going to rely on God," but then he ended up with very little, Kant thinks. Kant thinks we have to rely on ourselves. We cannot rely on God. We cannot, but we also do not have to rely on nature, as Hume thought. We don't have to rely just on what the world shows us. The order and regularity we find in the world, we impose. We are autonomous. We aren't finding these connections. We are forging them. We are in charge of our epistemological fate. We are in control of it. We are lighting the torch that lights up the darkness, and that gives us the knowledge that we wanted.