Prior to Kant human beings had assumed that material objects possessed an independent existence in space and time. Kant said, "Not so." He pointed out that if we look at the situation from the opposite perspective, rather than object to subject look at it from subject to object, reality would make much more sense. While counter intuitive, it is non the less true according to Kant. He proposed that in understanding reality we start from where we are. He concluded that our brains, nervous systems and senses represent reality in terms determined by their own natures.
Perhaps the best analogy to illustrate Kant's conclusions is that of a camera and photograph. In the same way as a photograph is produced in a camaer and a sound recorind in a piece of sound-recording equipment produce results which are conducive to their natures, so also our brains, nervous systems, and senses present reality to us in a way conducive to their natures.
For a long time I communicated this reality inaccurately in my classes. I explained Kant's conclusions by saying that Kant was arguing that we ourselves synthesize reality, that we put it all together in our heads, that we make it up. But this is not what Kant was proposing at all. He was insistent that reality exists independently of us and that reality has to be mediated by apparatus that is not itself the object of experience and also that it must inescapably take the forms determined by the nature of the apparatus with the consequence that the representations it yields are categorically different from their objects.
In the same way that a photograph is not the actual entity which is being photographed, and in the same way that a sound recording is not the actual entity which is being recorded, so also our understanding of reality is not the same as the reality. There is the ever lingering distinction in Kantian thought between "things are they are in themselves" and "things as they appear to be."
