The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

which means that the patterns of our thinking also change correspondingly.

And, I may say, we find very clear corroboration of this in history. We have only to recall the Cold War atmosphere of some fifteen years ago, when two different worlds were facing each other uncomprehendingly without hope of fruitful discussion. This was a sure sign of insufficient critical sense on both sides: Stalin’s Russia, and the America of McCarthy and Foster Dulles. Another ten years, and people on both sides had begun to realise that they were ‘all in the same boat’, threatened with sudden mutual extermination in a nuclear war. But in that realisation, there was at least a hope, fanned by peace moves and demonstrations for nuclear disarmament—and, lo and behold, thanks to the personal qualities of Kennedy and Khruschev, in whom that consciousness found concrete expression, there did arise the possiblity of face-to-face talks and understanding which had till then been thought impossible. May I repeat: even if our different universes of discourse divide us, our common problems can unite us. And the patterns of our thinking, as they become adjusted to the real issues which constitute our life problems, enable us to discover a new and common language.

From Kant’s philosophy anthropologists have been able to draw yet another fundamental lesson which has a direct bearing on human personality. Granted that we get our knowledge of the world through special patterns, if these patterns of knowledge are simply those that our culture has imprinted upon our minds, so that they form an integral and a stable part of our empirical ego, we don’t really get our knowledge of this surrounding world at first hand, we recognise it by carrying out a mental operation that, adapting Kant’s terminology, we may call a synthetic a posteriori judgement. That is to say, by learning these patterns of knowledge and what they mean in practice, we become familiar with the problems of behaviour that are typical in our society, and consequently we behave in accordance with knowledge that has been given to us and that we have accepted more or less passively. But what happens if we find ourselves up against a new problem, for the solution of which no ready-made pattern of knowledge and action, or none quite suitable and adequate for dealing with it, has yet appeared in our culture? In that case there isn’t any