Kant and the Revolution in Philosophy
- Human Spontaneity and the Natural Order (Critique of Pure Reason)
- Autonomy and the Moral Order (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Ethics, Critique of Practical Reason, Metaphysics of Ethics)
- Aesthetic Taste, Teleology and the World Order
Human Spontaneity and the Natural Order (Critique of Pure Reason)
Kant transformed the landscape of philosophy by introducing his theory of transcendental idealism. His theory addresses the problems raised by both rationalists and empiricists about the relationship between knowledge and the object of knowledge, or, how do we have necessary and universal knowledge about the external world if all we can think of is our ideas. Rationalists starts with innate ideas (concept) and tries to derive knowledge with the ideas and make judgments about things even outside of empirical realm, like the immortality of the soul and existence of God. Empiricists starts with sense perceptions (intuition), and claims that the knowledge is abstracted from the sense perceptions, however, it cannot address Hume’s doubt that causality is just our mental habit and bears no real significance in the real world.
To summarize Kant’s theory of knowledge, we can use the famous quote from CPR: “Concept without intuition is empty, intuition without concept is blind.” Kant defines what it means to have knowledge about the external world: both concept and intuition are required to constitute knowledge. The way we have knowledge is that first we have intuitions about the objects through our five senses, that is passively received, then in order to have knowledge, to be conscious about the object that we are experiencing, our mind plays an active (spontaneous) role in organizing the multiplicity of intuitions, the materials from sense perception, into concepts of one subject of knowing, and our mind has a priori categories that can be applied to these empirical content. Also Kant claims that “To know is to judge”. Knowledge is an activity of making judgments about the objects in the world.
Given the above theory, it is clear how we can answer the question: “What is the relationship between representation to the object that’s been represented”. In other words, are these representations in our mind about the external world real in the sense that it corresponds to something in the world or are they mere illusions? With terminology from Kant’s transcendental idealism, the objects in the external world are transcendentally ideal and empirically real. According to the process described above about how we get to know external things, all knowledge are mediated by our faculty of knowing, which includes the intuitions of space, time and the twelve categories of understanding (subject, object, causality etc.). So the external object that we know is known through these a priori epistemic conditions of knowing, and we cannot know the things-in-themselves which is independent of our faculty of knowledge. However, they are empirically real because even in the realm of the world constructed by our faculty of knowing, the common sense external world, we still have the distinction between appearance and reality, for example objects in dreams does not have empirical reality.
The external world that depends on our epistemic conditions of knowing is appearance, or phenomena, and the world that’s in itself, that is independent of our epistemic conditions is noumena. What we can know is limited to the realm of phenomenon because our categories of understanding only applies to intuitions from sense perceptions, therefore we cannot claim any knowledge about the things-in-themselves, this includes the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, which classical metaphysics claims to have prove of. Kant also demonstrates through his four antinomies about the limitation of reason. For example, the third antinomy talks about whether we have freedom of will. The thesis is that we have freedom of will where causality does not apply. The antithesis is that we do not have freedom of will, everything follows the rule of causality and is thus fully determined. Kant shows that both the thesis and antithesis can be proven true. And he said this contradiction only exists when people adopt the common sense transcendental realism view on things. The problem does not exist in the framework of transcendental idealism, and both of them are true. From the practical (moral) perspective, we must conceive ourselves as noumenally free and from theoretical (reason) point of view, we must conceive of ourselves as agnostic about the problem of freedom or deny its possibility. In the first Critique, Kant seems to be saying that the issue of freedom had no solution from theoretical perspectives, we simply have to live with the beliefs that we were both free (practically) and not free (theoretically).
With the distinction between phenomena and noumena, Kant finishes the work of “to deny knowledge, in order to leave room for faith”. By denying knowledge, Kant means we can’t “know” the things in the noumenal realm, about the immortality of the soul or existence of God, in his definition of what knowledge means.
Autonomy and the Moral Order (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Ethics, Critique of Practical Reason, Metaphysics of Ethics)
From Spontaneity to Freedom
The question after the Critique of Pure Reason is that if with the aid of pure reason we could not establish that there were certain value and goods in the created order that had been intended for us, were we then to become “nihilists” or do we have to admit that reason is just slave to passions and what we counted as good or evil only depends on what we happen to desire.
I must think of myself as free to follow self-imposed laws, not laws ordained for us from outside us. However, even though I must think of myself as free, why must I conclude that I really am free? Why should I not conclude that I am destined to entertain some kind of deep illusion about myself? Kant’s answer lies in his distinction of phenomena and noumena. Our own freedom is a presupposition that we must make about ourselves but which we cannot theoretically defend; it is a necessary condition for conceiving ourselves as spontaneous beings, as not merely conceive ourselves as physical beings in the world but also as having a subjective point of view on the world. We must see ourselves as each causing himself to adopt and act on the maxim and not as beings caused by things outside of himself in doing so.
From Freedom to Autonomy
Kant’s picture of agency is that of a subject acting in accordance with self-imposed laws. And he proceeded to argue about what particular actions we ought to perform. Kant found many laws or imperatives are conditioned on people’s ends, and that might be different. Therefore, Kant tries to find some unconditioned imperatives that is valid for all rational agents deliberating whatever course of action they happen to be deliberating upon. Kant concludes that only the form of the imperative itself is valid in that sense. Kant formulated the categorical imperative as following: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. This means it should make sense for the maxim to become a universal law.
Since it is unconditionally binding on us, we cannot be motivated to do it simply because we wanted to do it, instead, it is linked to the feature of our agency that it is free. For it to be unconditionally binding on us, for us to be said to choose it unconditionally, we must freely be able to choose it while at the same time regarding it as something imposes itself on us. Kant saw categorical imperative as a “calling”. We encountered this in the ordinary experience of duty itself. Kant claims that “The will is therefore not merely subject to the law, but is so subject that it must be considered as also giving the law to itself”.
From Autonomy to Moral Principle
But is there any particular laws that everyone should follow? Kant said that we should “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as means, but always at the same time as an end.”
Therefore Kant revolutionized the moral order in claiming that the moral order was not a created order that each of us were obligated to conform, nor was it a natural order that determined what counted as happiness or perfect for each of us, instead it is a “kingdom of ends”, each conceives of himself as legislating entirely for himself, and respects all others as ends-in-themselves. The moral order is an ideal, communally instituted order.
Freedom and the Political Commonwealth: Autonomy and Virtue
Kant divided moral world into two spheres, one is what was unconditionally required of us politically and socially, and the other duties of virtue that each of us owed ourselves. If a public order is a conception of freedom of choice under the rule of law, the private moral order, is a conception of virtue, or each autonomously willing the right maxim for the right reason. One might obey the public law non-virtuously, but one cannot be virtuous and obey the moral law out of any other motive than that of duty and respect for the moral law itself.
Autonomy, Religion and the Ethical Commonwealth
Kant’s categorical imperative removes the direct dependence of morality on religion, which posed the question what role, if any, was religion to play in people’s lives at all?
There is a contradiction in Kant’s framing of self-imposed moral laws on ourselves. The paradox rises from the demand that if we are to impose a principle (maxim) on ourselves, then presumably we must have a reason to do so; but if there was an antecedent reason to adopt that principle, then that principle would not itself be self-imposed; yet for it to be binding on us, it had to be. The “fact of reason”, as an expression of “Kantian paradox” is thus practically undeniable, not theoretically proven.
There is no interest, strictly conceived, in being moral agents. We simply are moral agents by virtue of being the kinds of rational creatures we are, and we simply do experience the call of moral duty on ourselves by virtue of being such agents. Whatever “interest” we can have in morality must itself be generated by the call of moral duty.
But it is practically necessary both for us to do our duty for duty’s sake, forsaking all claims of happiness that conflict with our duty, and to carve out some area in our lives where we pursue our own happiness. Kant attempted to deal with the problem by introducing “postulates” of morality, which is called “highest good”. A “highest good” is a union of virtue and happiness, in which the virtuous person would have exactly that amount of happiness that would deserve if happiness were distributed as a reward for virtue. But it is only an ideal and can’t be achieved in this world. Therefore we must postulate two things: that there is an immortality of the soul and that a God exists who will distribute happiness to the virtuous in the right proportions.
Kant’s point is that religion does not give rise to morality so much as morality gives rise to religion. This becomes more clear in Kant’s book “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone”.
Kant took great pains to convince his readers that this was all compatible with Christianity and even claims that Christianity is the only example of such a “moral religion”.
Aesthetic Taste, Teleology and the World Order
The Natural and Moral Orders
There had long been a tradition in philosophical thought that our individual perceptions of things and our deliberations about what to do required us to have some conception of our own standing in the overall scheme of things. Although in one way Kant rejected that we can have any knowledge about the thing-in-itself or the “unconditioned”, in another respect he holds that experiential knowledge and moral knowledge required us to understand our place in certain totalities. In experience, spontaneity (combined with intuition) produced an experience of natural order governed by necessary causal laws and fitting the a priori laws of mathematics and geometry. In case of action it produces a moral order, a “kingdom of ends”. Both of them requires us to appeal to regulative reason to make them intelligible to us.
Normativity and Aesthetic Judgment
The most obvious difficulty in Kant’s approach was that how do we explain the way in which we are both subject to the norms of reason and yet also the agents who institute those norms. He came to face with the issue in “The Critique of Judgment”. In this work he talks about how do we orient ourselves in the moral and empirical order and how is such orientation tied into what is necessary for us to make valid judgments? Kant talk about a different type of judgments from the determinative judgments, which is reflective judgments, the type of judgment that begins with particulars and searches for the kind of general concept they might fall under. Both aesthetic and teleological judgments are examples of reflective judgment.
The experience of the nature as beautiful is based on a reflective judgment about the purposiveness of the world around us and how that world harmoniously fit our nature as spontaneous beings. It also involves the element of “ought”. We think things are beautiful because it appears to us as if it were designed to match exactly what the result of a spontaneously produced harmony between our unfettered imagination and intellect would have produced.
Experience of the beautiful is an experience of “purposiveness without purpose”, a sense that things fit together according to a purpose that we cannot state. The solution to the “antinomy” of aesthetic judgment - that aesthetic judgments are normative and thus must be conceptual; and that aesthetic judgments cannot be conceptual since judgments of taste cannot be based on concepts - is that aesthetic judgments are based on the “indeterminate concept of the super-sensible substrate of appearances”.
We are adjusting our judgments about the purposiveness of nature in light of an orientation toward what other spontaneous agents would ideally be doing in responding reflectively to the same things. “Kingdom of ends” seems to at play in aesthetic judgments, except that “kingdom of ends” involves the use of concepts and aesthetic experience does not.
Normativity and Teleological Judgment
Kant claims that the force of aesthetic judgments rested on seeing nature as a purposive unity suited for the kinds of activities of the creatures we are, which required him to say something about teleological judgment.
Teleological judgments are also reflective judgments, and they are beyond judgments based on purely physical attribute. No law of nature is violated by a damaged or malfunctioning organ. To judge an eye is damaged is to judge it is not being the way that it should be.
The question is whether this is only an “as if” judgment, or must we judge them purposively because of some other reason. There is no good empirical or theoretical reason to see nature as purposive as a whole. Viewed naturalistically, man is merely one link among others in a natural chain, however, from the moral point of view, we necessarily must judge humanity to be an end in itself, and the world have the purpose within itself to bring about the existence of man as a moral being. To see man as a moral being is to evaluate him normatively, rather than naturalistically. It is to regard him, a member of “kingdom of ends”, as a creature capable of both giving and asking for reasons and determining himself to act on his conception of what those reasons demand of him.
Kant argued that the moral conception of humanity requires that we think of the whole world as purposively structured in terms of providing the possibility for man’s achieving the “highest good”, the union of virtue and happiness, and thus requires us to conceive of a moral initiator of the world who has designed the world in that way. Without such an assumption, we cannot rationally take ourselves to be aiming at the highest good, since it is not something we alone could accomplish.
To act according to the moral law and to seek the improvement of man’s lot, we must have some practical faith that doing so makes a difference. If we do not, then we must have to see all of history and humanity’s role in it, as a “farce”, “and even if the actors do not tire of it - for they are fools - the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will go on in the same way forever.” We must have a practical faith that somehow history works according to unknown laws that are nonetheless compatible with the normative moral law which inch us toward our ideal outcome.