“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

What does it mean?

The usual reading takes the sentence as the cooperation at the centre of the critique: concepts give form and intuitions give matter, and knowledge of objects needs both. Thoughts with no sensory content spin. Sensory intake with no concept does not yet amount to experience of an object. A rival reading treats the line as a slogan against theory, or against observation, depending on which half is dropped; Both halves are the claim; It appears in the Transcendental Logic, where he is introducing the need for concepts as well as for the sensibility described earlier.

Did Immanuel Kant really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Guyer and Wood's English of the Critique of Pure Reason, A 51 / B 75. Concepts without intuitions are empty. Intuitions without concepts are blind. The German is his. This wording is a translation.

Where it comes from

Critique of Pure Reason, A 51 / B 75

Approximate date: 1781; second edition 1787.

How to use it

A neighbourhood meeting in Hackney that has a pile of unlabelled photos of a junction, and another meeting that has a theory of traffic with no count of the cars, has split the two halves. Kant thinks neither pile is yet knowledge of the junction. The photos are blind without a concept of what is being measured; The theory is empty without an intuition it can take in; The planning decision still has to be made by people, not by the sentence.

A mindset reading

Each half is a weapon if used alone. Empiricists quote the emptiness of thoughts. Rationalists quote the blindness of intuitions; He is refusing the choice; A concept is not a guess, and an intuition is not a theory; The sentence does not say that every abstract inquiry is worthless, or that staring is a method; It says that knowledge of objects has a double source, and that forgetting either source produces a characteristic failure.

Understand the philosophy

The key terms are concept and intuition, a rule-like general representation and a singular sensory representation. Sensibility receives. Understanding thinks. Knowledge of objects requires their join, which is why the critique spends so long on how they join in experience; Guyer and Wood translate the pair as empty and blind at A 51 / B 75; The sentence is a summary of a doctrine, not a proverb about keeping an open mind.

Related

• “Have the courage to use your own understanding! — that is the motto of enlightenment.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related fallacy. Appeal to authority. Citing an expert is reasonable when the person is expert on this question, the field has real standards, and serious disagreement is not hidden. The appeal fails when the authority is in the wrong field, is unnamed, or is treated as settling a question experts still dispute.

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