Kantianism
Kantianism
The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804); also called variously, the critical philosophy, criticism, transcendentalism, or transcendental idealism. Its roots lay in the Enlightenment; but it sought to establish a comprehensive method and doctrine of experience which would undercut the rationalistic metaphysics of the 17th and 18th centuries. In an early “pre-critical” period, Kant’s interest centered in evolutionary, scientific cosmology. He sought to describe the phenomena of Nature, organic as well as inorganic, as a whole of interconnected natural laws. In effect he elaborated and extended the natural philosophy of Newton in a metaphysical context drawn from Christian Wolff and indirectly from Leibniz.
But Kant’s versatile, analytical mind could not rest here; and gradually his ideas underwent a radical transformation. He questioned the assumption, common to dogmatic metaphysics, that reality can be apprehended in and through concepts. He was helped to this view by the study of Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais (first published in 1765), and the skepticism and empiricism of Hume, through which, Kant stated, he was awakened from his “dogmatic slumbers”. He cast about for a method by which the proper limits and use of reason could be firmly established. The problem took the formBy what right and within what limits may reason make synthetic, a priori judgments about the data of sense?
By 1770, the beginning of his “critical” period, Kant had an answer which he confidently expected would revolutionize philosophy. First dimly outlined in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770), and elaborated in great detail in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), the answer consisted in the critical or transcendental method. The typical function of reason, on Kant’s view, is relating or synthesizing the data of sense. In effecting any synthesis the mind relies on the validity of certain principles, such as causality, which, as Hume had shown, cannot be inductive generalizations from sense data, yet are indispensable in any account of “experience” viewed as a connected, significant whole. If the necessary, synthetic principles cannot be derived from sense data proper, then, Kant argued, they must be “a priori” — logically prior to the materials which they relate. He also called these formal elements “transcendental”, by which he meant that, while they are indubitably in experience viewed as a connected whole, they transcend or are distinct from the sensuous materials in source and status. In the Critique of Pure Reason — his “theoretical philosophy” — Kant undertakes a complete inventory and “deduction” of all synthetic, a priori, transcendental forms employed in the knowledge of Nature. The first part, the “Transcendental Aesthetic”, exhibits the two forms or “intuitions” (Anschauungen) of the sensibilityspace and time. Knowledge of Nature, however varied its sense content, is necessarily always of something in space and time; and just because these are necessary conditions of any experience of Nature, space and time cannot be objective properties of things-in-themselves, but must be formal demands of reason. Space and time are “empirically real”, because they are present in actual experience; but they are “transcendentally ideal”, since they are forms which the mind “imposes” on the data of sense.
In the second part, the “Transcendental Logic”, Kant treats of the synthetic forms of the understanding. (Verstand), which he calls “categories” or “pure principles of the understanding”. Of these he recognizes twelve in all, arranged in groups of threes under the headsquantity, quality, relation and modality. The sensuous materials embedded in the forms of sensibility constitute percepts, while reason, through the understanding, supplies the concepts and principles by means of which percepts are synthesized into meaningful judgments of Nature. In the celebrated “deduction of the categories”, Kant shows that without these forms there could be no knowledge or experience of Nature. Just therein and only therein lies their va1idity.
But by the same token, as Kant now shows in the third part on “Transcendental Dialectic”, the forms of sensibility and understanding cannot be employed beyond experience in order to define the nature of such metaphysical entities as God, the immortal soul, and the World conceived as a totality. If the forms are valid in experience only because they are necessary conditions of experience, there is no way of judging their applicability to objects transcending experience. Thus Kant is driven to the denial of the possibility of a science of metaphysics. But though judgments of metaphysics are indemonstrable, they are not wholly useless. The “Ideas of Pure Reason” (Vernunft) have a “regulative use”, in that they point to general objects which they cannot, however, constitute. Theoretical knowledge is limited to the realm of experience; and within this realm we cannot know “things-in-themselves”, but only the way in which things appear under a priori forms of reason; we know things, in other words, as “phenomena.”
But reason is not limited to its theoretical use. Besides objects of cognition and thought, there are also those of will and feeling. Kant’s “practical philosophy”, the real foundation of his system of transcendental idealism, centers in a striking doctrine of freedom. Even in its theoretical use. reason is a law-giver to Nature, in that the data of sense must conform to the forms of the sensibility and understanding if Nature is to be known at all. But in moral experience, as Kant shows in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the will of a rational being is directly autonomous — a law unto itself. But the unconditional moral law, “duty” or “categorical imperative”, the validity of which Kant does not question, is possible only on the supposition that the will is really free. As phenomenal beings we are subject to the laws of nature and reason, but as pure rational wills we move in the free, noumenal or intelligible realm, bound only by the self-imposed rational law “to treat humanity in every case as an end, never as a means only.”
The influence of Pietism and of Rousseau’s gospel of Nature are apparent in the essentially Christian and democratic direction in which Kant develops this rigorous ethics. The reality of God and the immortality of souls — concerning which no theoretical demonstration was possible — emerge now as postulates of practical reason; God, to assure the moral governance of a world in which virtue is crowned with happiness, the “summum bonum”; immortality, so that the pursuit of moral perfection may continue beyond the empirical life of man. These postulates, together with moral freedom and popular rights, provide the basis for Kant’s assertion of the primacy of practical reason.
Finally, intellect and will are brought into meaningful relation (Critique of Judgment, 1789-1793) in the feelings of aesthetic (i.e., “artistic”) enjoyment and natural purposiveness. The appreciation of beauty, “aesthetic judgment”, arises from the harmony of an object of cognition with the forms of knowledge; the perfect compatibility, in other words, of Nature and freedom, best exemplified in genius. Natural purposiveness, on the other hand, is not necessarily a real attribute of Nature, but an a priori, heuristic principle, an irresistible hypothesis, by which we regard Nature as a supreme end or divine form in order to give the particular contents of Nature meaning and significance.
The influence of Kant has penetrated more deeply than that of any other modern philosopher. His doctrine of freedom became the foundation of idealistic metaphysics in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but not without sacrifice of the strict critical method. Schopenhauer based his voluntarism on Kant’s distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves. Lotze’s teleological idealism was also greatly indebted to Kant. Certain psychological and pragmatic implications of Kant’s thought were developed by J. F. Fries, Liebmann, Lange, Simmel and Vaihinger. More recently another group in Germany, reviving the critical method, sought a safe course between metaphysics and psychology; it includes Cohen, Natorp, Riehl, Windelband, Rickert, Husserl, Heidegger, and E. Cassirer. Until recent decades English and American idealists such as Caird, Green, Bradley, Howison, and Royce, saw Kant for the most part through Hegel’s eyes. More recently the study of Kant’s philosophy has come into its own in English-speaking countries through such commentaries as those of N. K. Smith and Paton. In France the influence of Kant was most apparent in Renouvier’s “Phenomenism”. — O.F.K.