Another distinction is between the object being represented and the object's representation, which is determined by experience itself. What is the relationship between representation and their represented objects?
The problem posed by Kant is truly complex, requiring us to answer the question, but rather to think about it in a normative way based on experience itself.
Normative thinking questions and causal answers are of course very simple. There is something there, I see it, and I come up with such an appearance. This is a causal answer question. The philosophical education we have received since childhood has always been based on this causal approach to answering questions. Why do I feel this way? Why do I make judgments?
Because I was faced with a fact that led me to make a judgment, it is a causal thing. The thing itself is the cause, and one of my judgments is me.
Kant said that if we could establish an epistemological relationship with things themselves, we could use this method. However, this path is no longer feasible. We are facing our experience, which is something constructed through our appearances, and our judgment is also a construction of our appearances. Whether they are right or wrong, and whether their judgment is correct or not, cannot be judged by traditional causal conformity, but by normative conformity.
The question I repeatedly stressed when I was teaching graduate students later. In fact, German philosophy or modern western philosophy later, you don't think about normative thinking, or we Chinese people think about causality basically now. Why is it like this? Because there was such a thing, he had such an idea.
In Kant's view, we should change our thinking and have a normative thing to think about. Why do we have normative things, how do we have knowledge, and how do we have experience? It is because they are combined together. They are combined together in a certain way and according to certain rules, not something that can be combined casually.
Therefore, this is a rule. What are the rules?
Rules are norms, following them is right, not following them is wrong. We can understand the rules when playing ball and chess. In Chinese chess, horses cannot fold their horns, and even if they fold their horns, they cannot move. Why, there's no reason, because of this regulation.
This is a rule that has nothing to do with cause and effect, but it's not right if you have to leave with a clumsy horse. This is not right, we cannot go this way, and in any game or sports, we have many of them. His right or wrong is based on whether the rules comply or not, and rules are certain norms.
Kant is truly one. He now believes that since we can only discuss issues within the subjective realm of experience and the world of phenomena, whether there is truth or falsehood, of course there is truth or falsehood. Human judgment can be right or wrong, but right and wrong cannot be as simple as before. Just what kind of right and wrong things are is right. As I said, the problem of right and wrong has become more complex now, and we need to judge according to his rules. Right and wrong.
Just a beginning, this is a very complex phenomenon. Like Kant would say, can we combine or not understand things themselves? What we know is what we subjectively provide, is there still right or wrong? Is there a universal truth?
Of course there is, but the standard of right or wrong is no longer the conformity established based on causal correspondence in the original mechanical way, but a normative conformity.
Since Kant has already told me that objective facts depend on our subjective independent existence. To be able to obtain the phenomena that we can face and speak of is to a considerable extent a subjective construction, which requires our subjective conditions to form its phenomena or experiences.
Therefore, I will compare the causal relationship with the original one and say whether I caused the reaction. This kind of establishment requires Kant to deal with the problem. He believed that our normative problems are not causal, and then, by matching cause and effect, they are truth. Now we need standardization, what does standardization mean?
We Chinese still have quite a few people who do not understand that there are two kinds of human descriptions, one is factual description, and the other is normative description.
For example, today is Thursday and has no normative significance. We say it's daytime now, which is a factual statement without any standardization. However, if we say today is a good day, it is normative. Because good or bad is not a fact, it is a norm set by humans. In places like China, where is the current level of theoretical knowledge often discussed? He was first discussing or arguing about what he advocated against, but he didn't figure out whether it was normative language or descriptive language.
He hasn't figured out his own opinion either. What I'm talking about now is whether it's normative or descriptive, including many people in our philosophy department. For example, Kant said that humans have the subjective ability to connect one representation with another, which is a fact about their cognitive ability. We can combine the two representations together.
However, for example, if we can judge whether an appearance or a phenomenon is true or false, and if it is experienced as false and judged as true, when we involve the issue of truth and falsehood, it is not about a fact, but about a normative aspect. Why?
Because truth and falsehood are normative terms, they are not descriptions of facts. When we say something is true or false, you are not a descriptive statement, but a normative one. When we engage in theoretical writing, we must understand that there is an important distinction involved.
Normative language is about how we should treat things, not how we actually treat things. Whether it is true or false, whether the day is good or bad, it is about how we should treat facts; It's not about how we treat facts, it's not about how we actually treat things.
For example, it's daytime now, and it's a factual thing. We do our things during the day, and how do we respond to this fact. Therefore, if we consider an experience to be correct, it is true for its object.
For example, if a table has four legs, and we have a flat surface of a wooden board with four legs underneath, then our experience is about a table, and that experience is true.
So, it's simple, we can see experience as whether something is true or false about an object. To do this, we must distinguish three things.
The usual reality is like this, for example, if it's raining now and it's clearly the sun, it's a wrong imagination. But if it's really going to rain, and you say it's raining now, then you're right. Why is that right? It's because things appear in such an environment and in such a habitual order. For example, these things are now placed in the classroom. When he faces a row of classes and several desks, the teacher stands at the back. There is no doubt that this is the habitual order of our desks. Therefore, people below us say, 'I have experience with a desk now, or I have experienced a desk and there is no problem. He was right at that time.'.
But the desk, if it hadn't appeared here, like during the Cultural Revolution, you can't imagine that China still had a crazy era, just over thirty years ago. During the Cultural Revolution, in order to prevent people from rushing to the third floor, many people blocked their desks and podiums on the stairs, blocking the stairs and preventing people from rushing up.
At this point, he no longer appeared in the habitual order. When you said I had experience with a desk, they said you were wrong. You had experience with a barrier or a military obstacle, but you didn't have experience with a desk. He and other miscellaneous things were stuck there, used as fortifications.
This is something I have experienced before. And it's not ordinary, almost becoming a habitual order? This is entirely for the purpose of fighting, the purpose of fighting. It's the habitual order. Don't underestimate it, because in China, there is a saying that goes, 'The people are unaware of their daily lives, and the habitual order has become second nature to us.' We wouldn't think that we can actually pull out the layers of things, because the order can be changed. Just like this desk, there are crazy people who will go and fix it. As a martial arts fortification, I hide behind it.
Another rule is what we should believe in. Why do we say that before this, we should call it a desk? This is what we should do. No one has ever taught us that even if we live in such a culture, they will say that believing is right and believing the opposite is wrong.
There are actually three factors combined here that truly constitute our experience. It's not like the experience we had teaching in ordinary subjects before, let alone the important issues we are discussing now. Why should we say that when we say I have experience teaching on a podium, it doesn't necessarily mean that my experience is on a podium. Although the podium itself is a phenomenon, we can still distinguish it in my experience of having a podium.
When everything we can experience is a phenomenon, Kant did not deny the concept of objects. When I have experience with the podium, it does not mean that I cannot be inside. In my experience, I can distinguish between my subjective experience and what I have experienced, that is, the object is the podium.
Although what I experience is not the thing itself, but a subjective construct of human beings, it is indeed the object of our experience.
Otherwise, we would be living in a dream and still have a problem. So that we are facing a world of phenomena, we cannot say that all our experiences are right, and all our statements about experience are perfectly aligned with the object. If so, humanity would not have any mistakes.
