Transcendental knowledge requires guru, not agnosticism; purified senses reveal what material reasoning cannot.Listen — Srila Prabhupada Uvaca
Kant, Immanuel Audio [Nairobi] ymasundara: Today we are discussing Immanuel Kant. Basically, his philosophy seeks to trace the relationship between a priori ideas, or those ideas of the mind which are independent of sense experience, and the a posteriori ideas, or sense impressions. He wants to unify these two positions. So he wrote The Critique of Pure Reason, in which he asks the fundamental question, "How
are a priori synthetic judgments possible?" In other words, how can we decide anything, judge anything? Where does this facility come from? What is the source of knowledge?
Prabhupāda: Intelligence. The source of knowledge is intelligence. Intelligence acts through mind, and then some conclusion comes. Man is mortal, so here is a man, intelligence; he must be mortal. This a priori idea means "I know man is mortal; therefore here is a man, he must be mortal." What is that? A priori before. And then?
Śyāmasundara: A posteriori means after; sense impressions. So he developed this process for attaining knowledge in three steps. The first step he calls the transcendental aesthetic, and this is the basic stage which synthesizes sense experience through concepts of time and space. In other words, the mind acts upon sensory perceptions and applies time and space relations to them. So he says that this knowing of time and space is a priori; it's an internal creation of the mind. Before we sense anything, we have an idea of time and space. So as soon as we sense something, we can apply time and space ideas.
Prabhupāda: He said something transcendental?
Śyāmasundara: He calls it the transcendental aesthetic.
Prabhupāda: Transcendental means it is not in my experience, but I get the experience from higher authority, parampar.