Hegel

And was not Kant contradicting himself when he said that we could know nothing of it, and yet claimed to know that it exists and is a ‘thing’?

in the Critique of Judgement Kant pictured aesthetic appreciation as involving a harmonious union of our understanding and our imagination.

Kant pictured man as a being capable of following a rational moral law, but also liable to be swayed from it by the non-rational desires which have their origin in our physical nature. To act morally is thus always a struggle.

Victory is to be won by the suppression of all desires except the feeling of reverence for the moral law, which leads us to do our duty for its own sake.

There were also two other critiques, the Critique of Practical Reason, on ethics, and the Critique of Judgement, a large part of which is on aesthetics.

What, then, one might naturally ask, is the world really like, independently of the framework within which we grasp it? This question, Kant says, can never be answered. Independent reality – Kant called it the world of the ‘thing-in-itself’ – is for ever beyond our knowledge.

Knowledge is only possible because our mind plays an active role, organizing and systematizing what we experience. We know the world within a framework of space, time, and substance; but space, time, and substance are not objective realities that exist ‘out there’, independently of us.

Kant set out to establish what our reason or intellect can or cannot achieve in the way of knowledge.