Kant’s work may be read as an immediate response to Hume’s radical empiricism. Upon seeing the tradition Kant inherited, one can perceive two flavors of dogmatic poison. On the one hand, one considers Hume, in which perceptions are mere ideas, and causality itself is not a demonstrable aspect of the world. Taken together, Leibnitz’s dissertations represent a rebuttal of the philosophical utility of sense-perception and vindicate reason as the sole means of knowing. Leibnitz’ formulation of knowledge is both geometric and syllogistic and may be considered a psychological phenomenology in which reason possesses access to the true operative principles of nature and history.
In contrast, Hume’s skeptic admits that reason is solely applicable to the ordering of relations of ideas, which all arise, ultimately, from experience. For Hume, reason is incapable of determining the existence of time, space, or causation. These shortcomings present a foundational challenge to natural philosophy. Even experience cannot be trusted to furnish a foundation for the order of events in constant conjunction. One response to this challenge is radical Leibnitz’ monism, and another is the Kantian perspective, inasmuch as scholars are capable of attributing a single doctrine to either.
Broadly speaking, Kant argues against Locke and with Hume that the realm of intelligibility is not the province of reason alone. There is a vital place for experience, but also a vital place for psychology. If not all knowledge is reducible to that obtained through sensation, one must account for the origin of systematic knowledge. What is at issue is the validity of the scientific method, before this method had a name or definite scope. Kant’s Critiques aim to define this scope negatively – namely, by positing what it cannot accomplish, or what has already been accomplished by other means. Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” is nothing less than the determination that the relations of matter, either in lived experience or theory, are impossible to frame without inherent order-imposing aspects of the mind.
The Cartesian question of whether mind can exist without matter is misguided because it supposes that “thinking things”, while intellective and perceptive, do not exert an influence on the order of perceptions a-priori. The Lockean perspective is misguided because it demands the “superogation” of Divinity to obtain adequate knowledge of the world; for Kant, a much weaker statement – that the supposition of God’s existence is reasonable – is all that we may say without transcending the bounds of reason.
Similarly, Leibnitz’ Monadology seeks to locate all of time within matter rather than within mind – or, in its most radical form, to assert that all matter is mind. This collapses precisely into the Berkelean critique of empiricism, and is very similar to the Neoplatonic repudiation of Aristotle and Diogenes. Kant’s distinction between noumenon and phenomenon sacrifices the latter in favor of the former, only to gain it back by positing causality and temporality as features located in the structure of the mind itself. The cost in this gambit is that reason’s waywardness disposes it to peer beyond the realm of its rightful operation, which is the realm of the noumenon. For Kant, any phenomenology must be a psychology; pure sciences like mathematics can exist, but only in the realm of idealized forms. The existence of synthetic and a-priori knowledge is a great advance from the skepticism of the empiricists.
One critique of this paradigm is that it accounts as a-priori the best extant theories of form, number, and physical sciences. Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics are a-priori. Lobachevsky and Einstein refuted this. If Plato’s formalism is incapable of accounting for understandable change in the physical world, Kant’s paradigm is incapable of accounting for understandable scientific theories of that change. Additionally, it would be wayward to consider Kant’s philosophy of history and freedom apart from his thoughts upon science. The latter question the efficacy of theoretical reason as an arbiter for science and at the same time dispense of the determinism of Monadology while preserving time as a causal factor in experience.
One must reconcile the domain of freedom present in the Enlightenment and the attendant liberation from idealism with the a-priori necessity of Newtonian physics. The latter implies that for every state of matter, an indefinite future state may be adduced through the application of mathematical principles which are held to hold everywhere and for all time. Moral decisions, in impacting history, are also decisions about the disposition and relation of matter to matter. But to possess genuine moral agency, decisions must be “un-coerced” by fate, so that the person is able to freely choose which desired moral state he is to bring about.
For Kant, every agent possesses a faculty of moral conscience that informs of the universal moral law and is accessible through the exercise of practical reason. Kantian ethics dispels any notion that theoretical reason may prove (or dispel) – in the sense of Anselm or Aquinas (or the Stoics) – the existence of God or spirit apart from matter or form. The purpose of practical reason is to inform duty, which is incumbent upon all
agents. Freedom is the freedom to act according to this duty. As a consequence, every moral act must admit to generalization without engendering contradiction. The practical imperative is similarly universalist, and provides a basis for the existence of human rights as we know them. Moral acts may not be merely reactive, but should be, at least retroactively, reflective as worthy of universalist postulation without engendering contradiction. Implicit within this framework is the idea that the moral state is not a state of moral citizens.
The morality of states and nations is bound by a duty toward perpetual peace, even when citizens will never attain even approximate harmony in their mutual dealings. Kant recognizes that history is the province of men who have acted from the worst geniuses of nature. Perpetual peace arises when Republican states demand that citizens obey civil laws, and the inexpediency of war is exposed as a greater cost to states than an epoch of perpetual peace. For Kant, history is a dialectic in which good springs from evil in accordance with the noumenal freedom of men and the phenomenal bondage of causality.
Primary Sources.
Critique of Judgment, 540-543; 550-554; 570-573.
Critique of Pure Reason, 5-8; 15-18; 23-24; 34-36; 45-49; 63-72; 81-95; 110; 114-119; 173-188; 211-218.
Critique of Practical Reason, 294-313; 326-350.
Metaphysics of Morals, 256-271; 273-283.
Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, 366-380.
Science of Right, 399; 408-409; 435-439.
