Immanuel KANT
1724--1804,
Critical Works:
Inaugural
Dissertation, 1770;
Critique of
Pure Reason, 1781, second edition 1787; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 1783;
Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785;
Critique of
Practical Reason, 1788;
Critique of
Judgment, 1790;
Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone, 1793;
Perpetual
Peace, 1795;
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 1798.
It
is the last which gives the clue to the unity of Kant's philosophical project
and also relates him to Hume. According to Kant, lectures on logic, "The
field of philosophy may be reduced to four questions:
1. What can I know?
2. What ought I to do?
3. For what may I hope?
4. What is a human being?
"The first question is answered by Metaphysics, the second by Morals, the third by Religion and the fourth by Anthropology. In reality, however, all these might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last."
These
questions take on a particular flavour however, as
determined by the historical juncture in which Kant found himself:
: how to have both ethics
and religion which assume that human beings are free and that life is
purposeful,
and at the same time modern science and the mechanistic,
deterministic philosophy which seems to goes with it, which seems to put both
freedom and meaning in danger, and which in turn is put in danger by Hume's scepticism.
Kant's solution: let the metaphysics go, including
the mechanistic, deterministic philosophy and any other similar philosophy all
of which are 'uncritical',
while keeping the physics as valid for the world as we can not
but conceive and understand it, a
position which still allows in practice for free ethical behaviour,
and pure religion, the religion within the limits of reason alone which goes
with the ethics. Compare from the
Preface to the 2nd Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: "my intention
then was, to limit knowledge, in order to make room for faith", or as
sometimes translated, "I must therefore abolish knowledge, to make room
for belief."
Some Notes on the first two Critiques:
CRITIQUE OF
PURE REASON 1781, 2nd
edition 1787
:Concerned with the possibilities of knowledge,
what can I know?, and particularly and as part of this, with the contribution
which we the knowers make to knowledge, what we
contribute to the input of sensations in order to get objects of knowledge.
This latter = "transcendental analysis": the analysis of the a priori
conditions of possibility of objective knowledge, that is, of the conditions of
possibility on the side of the subject, the knower, the doer. Until philosophy
asks these questions, turns its attention to itself in this way, it remains uncritical.
According to the Critique of Pure Reason:
(A): knowing
is an activity:
All
knowledge begins with experience, but does not all arise out of experience:
experience gives only a booming buzz.
No knowledge without experience, it is experience
which gives real content to thought, thought without experience, as in high
metaphysics, is empty;
but it is the mind which makes the data intelligible, which gives
it whatever organization it has:
"Concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are
blind."
Knowledge, e.g. Newtonian physics is thus to be
regarded as a synthesis of form, supplied by the mind, and matter, received
from without.
Another
way of putting this: many of the statements we count as knowledge are 'synthetic a
priori':
·
all knowledge which is
universal and necessary, i.e. valid for all minds and valid throughout space
and time,
·
including the whole of mathematics and also the fundamental assumptions of physics
like the principle of causality or the conservation laws.
'Synthetic a priori': synthetic = they say something, the predicate
adds something to the subject, they don't just analyse
what is already implicit in the subject (=analytic, like all bachelors are
unmarried); and yet a priori = we take it to experience, assume it already in
our dealings with experience, we don't get it from experience (=a
posteriori)--experience being what it is, we couldn't.
(B)What, in
detail, do we contribute?
1) In order to perceive impressions we have to
arrange them in accordance with certain
forms of sensibility,
i.e. space and time, e.g. shining sun up there, road down here;
the sun shines and then the road gets hot.
These are 'a priori forms' --we take them to experience, we don't get
them from it. They are a priori forms or structures of 'sensibility' --defining the capacity to be
sensitively affected by objects. That is to say: we cannot but perceive things
as arranged in space and time.
Their
existence explains among other things why mathematics, though entirely a
priori, elaborated independently of experience, yet applies to the world of our
experience: not that it is the creation of a mathematician God but because of
the way we cannot but perceive it --we see the world through Euclidean glasses
so to speak, and we cannot help but perceive it this way.
2) Secondly, we think these impressions arranged
spatially and temporally according to certain concepts or categories of
the understanding, e.g. substance and accidents, cause and effect.
According
to Kant, there are twelve such categories, which he arranges in groups of
three: Unity, Plurality and Totality; Reality, Negation and Limitation;
Substance and Accidents, Cause and Effect, Community; Possibility, Existence
and Necessity.
Why twelve: because there are twelve kinds of
judgements we make: e.g. categorical propositions: the sun is shining, the road
is hot: Substance and accidents; e.g. hypothetical propositions: if the sun
shines, then the road gets hot --corresponding to the category of cause and
effect: the sun causes the road to get hot. Where does the necessary connection
come from? We supply it, it is one of our ways of
thinking the world.
Once again these are a priori: our ways of thinking what we get in
experience, we take them to experience in order to make sense of it, we don't
get them from it. A priori concepts or
categories of the 'Understanding': of
the activity of thinking objects, synthetizing the
contents of experience in order to produce objective knowledge. Of course we can't just link things up any
old how: we do it according to certain schemata, e.g. cause and effect -- we
require contiguity, temporal priority and constant conjunction of similar
objects in the past.
3) Finally there are the Ideas of
the Reason. Reason: the activity of
reasoning and concluding, not of making judgements but of arranging the
judgements we make into some kind of order. This activity is guided by three
Ideas:
·
the Idea of the World: all
causally connected events grouped and considered as belonging to one world, one
great causal matrix;
·
the Idea of the Soul: that to
which all mental events are considered as belonging;
·
the Idea of God: which enables us to connect all events, the absolute and unconditioned unity of
all objects of thought (all events = ‘God’s Creation).
These are O.K. as long as they are used to regulate our thinking, put some order into it; but we are mistaken if we take them in our
speculative or scientific moments as actually referring to something, if we put
them to 'constitutive' use as if they were categories or concepts.
Why mistaken? Because
(i)there
is no percept corresponding to them: unfortunately they are never intuitively
presented; and
(ii)because when we do so
we get involved in all kinds of antimonies
and paralogisms. Antimonies: contradictory propositions,
each of which can be 'proved', once we take them as applying to reality, e.g.
"the world has a beginning in time", "the world does not have a
beginning in time". Paralogisms: pieces of fallacious
reasoning.
4) Beyond all this, there is the transcendental ego or as Kant terms it, the Transcendental
Unity of Apperception, the "I think which accompanies all
representation", which is presupposed in all knowing (cf. Descartes, but
you can't go from cogito, ergo sum, to sum res cogitans = one of the paralogisms;
the empirical ego, which is the object of empirical psychology, is a construct,
belongs to the phenomenal world).
(C) Implications:
I: theoretical knowledge, e.g. Newtonian physics,
is valid, but only for the phenomenal world, the world as it cannot but appear to us, not necessarily for the noumenal world, the
things in themselves (das Ding an sich). There is only one world of course, but we
only know it as it presents itself to us, and this depends partly on the a
priori structures of our minds.
II: speculative metaphysics in the traditional
sense, speaking of God and the World and the Soul, is impossible. Our theoretical knowledge does not attain to
reality as it is in itself, neither metaphysics nor physics, except to affirm
that it exists. Why even affirm this latter: because human subjects experience
themselves as finite subjects, not creating reality but affected by it: we find
ourselves already situated in the world, we are not as God but are subjected to
reality, e.g. via sensibility, we don't create it.
(D) Consequences
for the rest of our life as human beings:
(i) W.r.t. faith: faith is
concerned with reality in itself. There need be no opposition therefore between
knowledge and faith.
(ii) Resolution of the problem of freedom and
determinism, at least charting out the lines of a solution: all reality is determined, i.e. considered as belonging to the phenomenal world, we have to see it that way in order to 'know'
it, being the kinds of beings we are;
but in itself it could well be free.
The Critique of Practical Reason will give us
reasons for working in practice on the assumption of faith and freedom, though
without extending our knowledge: what the first Critique does is to make room
for such, "to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith".
CRITIQUE OF
PRACTICAL REASON 1788
See also, Groundwork
of the Metaphysic of Morals, 1785, for a more accessable
presentation.
Question for the Critique of Practical Reason:
What are the conditions of possibility for moral endeavour,
on the side of the person or people involved in it?
Our moral practice: we are committed to it as much
as to our knowing practice. There is no reason why we shouldn't be: the first
critique has shown that it is not inconsistent with our knowing practices
properly understood. Indeed, it is implicated in our knowing practice: implying
a commitment to truth as a value rather than to profit or personal ambition.
But before we ask about conditions of possibility
on the side of the doer for our moral endeavour,
first we need to clarify in what our specifically moral practice consists. It is this part of Kant’s ethics that has in
fact been most influential.
(A) what kind of
imperative is the specifically moral imperative?
It's
what Kant calls a 'categorical'
imperative -- we impose moral values on ourselves without condition,
categorically. There are three kinds of imperatives: 1/problematic hypothetical: if you want to
be rich, do this (but maybe you
don't want to be rich --it's problematic whether you want to be rich).
2/assertoric
hypothetical: if you want to be happy, do this (and everyone wants to be
happy);
3/categorical: simply, do
this.
Moral imperatives are of this third kind. How do
we know this? Everyday moral experience.
Note
that we impose it or them on ourselves,
they don't come from outside: autonomy, not heteronomy. We impose it on ourselves as rational beings and on other rational beings (or on other
rational beings and on ourselves as well).
As a law of reason it is also a
law of freedom: to do the reasonable
thing, because you recognize it as reasonable (and not because someone tells
you to do it or because you are pushed by passions is
a free act. Indeed it may be (and is
according to Kant) the only kind of freedom we can have. Otherwise, as Kant has it, we are just being pushed about by the
response of our passional nature to outside forces or
fear of the authority etc. Only in
rational behaviour are we truly directed from within,
self-determined.
(B) What
criteria does a personal maxim, a subjective rule of action, have to satisfy in
order that we impose it on ourselves this way?
It
has to be in line with
the principle of universalizability --roughly, if it is good for us it is good
for them also, if it is bad for them, then it is bad for us. Kant himself has a
number of ways of formulating it:
1/ Act
solely according to a maxim that you can elevate into a universal law;
2/ Act
always as though the maxim of your action were by your
adopting it to become a universal law of nature;
3/ So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or
in that of any other, in every case as an end, and never solely as a
means;
4/ Act
always as if you were both lawmaker and subject in a republic of free and
reasonable wills.
Note that this is a purely formal requirement, does not give content to the maxims, does not tell us what they are about. And once again it is an a priori form, we take it to our practice and it is what makes our practice moral, we don't get it from it.
In
spite of its purely formal and a priori character however, Kant thinks this is
sufficient to give unambiguous direction to moral life.
(C) A consequence of the categorical and purely
formal quality of the moral imperative as moral is that morals
as morals is entirely separated from happiness and pleasure. Why --how
can he justify this? Because (i)what the objects of happiness
and pleasure are is contingent, and so cannot ground unconditional laws; and
because (ii)otherwise we would be determined by outside realities, in so far as
our happiness or pleasure would depend on such.
(D) This moral practice to which we are committed,
thus clarified, brings certain other commitments in its train, the so called Postulates of Practical Reason: Freedom,
Immortality of the Soul, and the Existence of God. These don't add anything to
our speculative knowledge but are accepted by faith,
a practical faith, implicit already in the imposition on
ourselves of acting morally and once made explicit freely accepted. Unlike in the speculative realm, in the
practical realm by definition we are moving in the thing in itself, the noumenal world, the real world; but still this doesn't
increase our speculative knowledge, which remains confined to the phenomenal
world: the world still cannot but appear as it cannot but appear, we being what
we are -- but we don't and needn't act that way, in line with the
appearance.
Why 1)freedom of the will?
Because its a condition of moral obligation: I
ought, therefore I can. In imposing on myself to live morally, which I do, I
commit myself to the position that I am free.
Why 2)immortality of the soul? Because virtue is a struggle, with victory
never fully achieved, presupposing an endless activity. This life is not long
enough for the achievement of
holiness: the perfect
conformity of our intentions with duty -- and yet we don't just impose duty on
ourselves, we impose the achievement of holiness on ourselves. In Kant's view,
this is something which for us can only be found in a progressus
in infinitum, presupposing not only life after death but endless
existence.
Why 3)the existence of God? Because of the claim of
moral consciousness that there be a harmony between virtue and happiness.
Moral being cannot bear with the suffering of the innocent, the disproportion
between human being as a sensuous being and human being as a moral being. Virtue is worthiness to be happy, good people
ought to be happy people, the innocent child ought not
to suffer. This refusal to condone a
state of things in which children are put to torture according to Kant however
is tantamount to admitting the ultimate harmony, which is an implicit faith in
the Lord of All, governing both Nature and the realm of Ethics. In practice whatever about the theory we act
in the faith that everything will turn out right in the end. Not knowledge though: a kind of faith, which
we take for granted in practice.