“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”
Kant asserts the harmony that should exist between reason and experience for truths about reality to be discerned. In that, for reason to indeed make any sense, it has to be accompanied by experience. He further stresses that the truths are metaphysical in nature and to have any glimpse of it both intuition and concepts must apply. The statement expresses the barrenness of reason without experience because reality is too complex to be abridged.
“Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.”
He stresses that our concepts of reality attempt to oversimplify the truths about our universe and human experience. He argues that human knowledge is too narrow to actually decipher the basic truths since they exceed our mental acuities. Instead of letting the universe be transcendental, we overgeneralize the truths by trying to answer unanswerable questions. Thus, the assertion Kant extends the knowledge on the metaphysical nature of our universe and we should be open-minded in our ideas.
