The Philosophy
Kant’s philosophical system is outlined in the three Critiques he published over the decade from 1781 to 1790. They are famous for being dry, academic, and dense reads. Nevertheless, they form a masterful whole that defined Western philosophy for generations afterwards.
Critique of Pure Reason was concerned with epistemology, that is, how we can have knowledge of the external world, and the limits thereof. It was largely a response to two people, or at least the philosophical camps they each represented; David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. Hume was an empiricist, so he believed that all of our knowledge was grounded in experience, and in carrying his empiricism to its bitter, sceptical end found that we could know nothing for certain. Leibniz, on the other hand, was a rationalist, holding that knowledge was grounded in reason alone. Experience can give us raw data, but only by synthesising these data into principles and laws under the guidance of reason can we acquire true knowledge. In the Critique, Kant seeks to place limits on rationalism, which he felt had overstepped its bounds in making metaphysical pronouncements; particularly concerning God, freedom, and immortality, while at the same time avoiding Hume’s scepticism. In other words, he wants to demarcate what we have the right to claim to know for certain and what we have to be more circumspect about.
Critique of Practical Reason principally outlines Kant’s moral theory. In this book, Kant is again grappling with David Hume, this time concerning the latter’s famous pronouncement that reason is the slave of the passions. Kant sets out to prove Hume wrong by showing that pure reason alone is sufficient to determine the will; in other words, that pure reason can be practical. On the basis of this practical law of pure reason, he also musters reasons for believing that we are free and immortal, and that God exists. His argument for freedom has merit, but his arguments for the remaining two are dubious at best.
Critique of Judgement contains Kant’s aesthetic theory and his argument for teleology in nature. The first Critique dealt with the natural world as it appears for us (i.e. as intuitive* objects). The second Critique considered the human being as a moral agent capable of acting in accordance with reason; i.e. not as mere appearance, but as a free being, a thing-in-itself. The problem is that these two ‘realms’ of being (appearance and thing-in-itself) are mutually exclusive. Enter the third Critique which addresses judgement; the faculty which mediates between the understanding (which conditions the appearance) and pure reason (which is our link to the thing-in-itself), essentially allowing us to subsume the particular (the object) under the universal (the concept) when the latter is not given (by the understanding). Kant’s concern here is to identify the a priori principles that belong to this faculty.
In the following, I will divide my summary of Kant’s philosophy into three sections corresponding to Kant’s three Critiques.
* Kant uses the word intuition in a completely different way than we do these days. For him, it refers to the way we know objects through our senses.
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Critique of Pure Reason
Synthetic vs. Analytic / A priori vs. A posteriori
Analytic propositions are those whose truth is evident solely through the meanings of the terms involved. By contrast, a synthetic proposition is only true when considered in relation to the real world. In other words, analytic propositions don’t provide any genuinely new information about the world. Kant’s example of an analytic proposition is ‘all bodies are extended.’ This is clearly true, but it tells us nothing we didn’t already know, because the quality of being extended is just part of what it means to be a body. His example of a synthetic proposition is ‘all bodies are heavy’ (i.e. are subject to gravity). Now, if this is true, it is not so by definition; rather, it tells us something about bodies that extends our knowledge of them.
The distinction between a priori and a posteriori turns on experience. A statement is a posteriori if it can only be known through experience, whereas an a priori truth can be known without experience; i.e. through reason alone. The example given above for a synthetic proposition (all bodies are heavy) is also an a posteriori one, and the analytic proposition (all bodies are extended) is a priori.
Combining these gives us three possible kinds of statements: synthetic a posteriori, analytic a priori, and synthetic a priori (an analytic a posteriori statement would be a contradiction). All empirical observations are synthetic a posteriori, and all analytic statements are a priori, which leaves just synthetic a priori propositions. These include truths of mathematics and physics, and also the claims of metaphysics. The problem is that while it is obvious how the first and second categories of proposition arise, it isn’t clear how, or even if, synthetic a priori judgements are possible. Indeed, this is precisely the category about which Hume argued we can have no certain knowledge, and precisely, therefore, the category that Kant is seeking to demonstrate in his first Critique.
Transcendental Philosophy
Kant’s philosophical system is transcendental. This means that he is concerned, not with the objects of our understanding, but with our manner of knowing those objects. In other words, he is interested in the a priori, universal conditions under which alone things can become objects of our cognition generally. In this way, his philosophy transcends objects themselves.
Space and Time
Kant describes space and time in the first part of Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Aesthetic. Prior to Kant, space and time had been thought of as things external to humans, something like containers or fixed backgrounds upon which events occurred (thus Newton’s absolute time and space). Kant’s revolutionary idea was to postulate that, instead of real things external to us, space and time were forms that we imposed on raw reality. Everything appears at a position in space and a moment in time because this is how our minds organise reality. It’s like when you are wearing glasses with red-tinted lenses. Everything appears red, not because the things you see are red in themselves, but because your glasses constrain how you see. In a similar fashion, everywhere we look, we see things in space and time, not because space and time exist as features of the universe external to us, but because this is how our minds constrain our knowledge.
A bit more specifically, Kant calls space the form of all external appearances. Its purview is limited to those things that are outside us. Time, on the other hand, as the form of all inner sense, is more general than space because, in addition to regulating external matter, it also governs our internal sense of our selves. Together, space and time make up what Kant calls the manifold of pure intuition.
Categories of the Understanding
In addition to space and time being forms we apply to the world, in the section of Critique headed Transcendental Analytic, Kant goes on to identify twelve other features of the understanding he calls categories, which, rather than being out there in the things themselves, are forms or moulds in which we cast reality. He arranged them into four groups, each containing three specific categories, including things like causality, unity, plurality, possibility, necessity, and so on. Basically what this means is that everything we experience is organised according to these forms, so we understand events in the world as following the law of causality purely because this is how our mind arranges events. When we think about things in the world, we can understand them as a unity (perhaps the number 3) or as a plurality (three single units), not because reality itself is organised this way, but because this is how we structure reality. Essentially, the categories dictate how the understanding works, how it synthesises the raw data it receives from the external world.
Epistemology
We’re now in a position to see how Kant answers the question he posed at the beginning of the book: How are the synthetic a priori judgements of mathematics and physics possible? They are possible because there are universal, a priori principles of human understanding that ground such judgements. Since they unfailingly condition all of our observations of reality prior to experience, we can also be absolutely certain about them. In other words, we need not follow Hume into scepticism, because we have discovered fundamental features of reality, that are fundamental precisely because they concern how we know, not what we know. Any knowledge grounded in these principles is both certain and true.
The process by which knowledge is acquired occurs over three steps. First, we receive the manifold of pure intuition (objects appearing in space and time). Next, a synthesis of this manifold takes place by means of the imagination. Finally, the categories (the rules of the understanding) are applied bringing unity to the synthesis (this happens through the power of judgement which essentially involves organising different representations under a single representation, ultimately providing unity under a single concept). Thus, we derive knowledge, not of this or that particular thing, but of the essential forms governing all things; i.e. mathematics or physics.
The Ding-An-Sich
Kant’s famous Ding-an-sich, or thing-in-itself, is a reference to the world as it really is; i.e. independent of the manifold of pure intuition and categories of the understanding which a priori structure our experience of the world. A consequence of Kant’s philosophical system is that there are basically two ‘levels’ of reality. The world (as in the only world that is possible for human beings) is appearance, or phenomenon. The raw level of reality which our faculties organise into objects; ultimate metaphysical reality we might call it, is something absolutely mysterious. We have no way of knowing anything at all about it according to Kant. This is the thing-in-itself, which Kant also calls noumena.
Truth
A proposition is true if what it refers to in the external world is actually the case. That’s fine as far as it goes, but is too superficial for Kant, who is interested in uncovering the universal, formal structures underlying human reality. Propositions (or beliefs, thoughts, etc.) about the world participate in truth, but aren’t truth itself. Truth itself is the formal condition for true propositions; that which grounds true things, or that which makes them true. In other words, the question of what truth is, is asking about the general and safe criterion of the truth of any and every true statement.
Remember those a priori rules of the understanding (the categories) Kant outlined in the Transcendental Analytic? Well, these are the very things that will provide this general criteria of truth. Knowledge is true if it conforms to these rules; which, again, has nothing to do with specific content (whether this accords with that). Rather, truth is purely formal; that is, concerned only with the form, or structure, of our knowledge. If our empirical knowledge conforms to the categories, it is, not so much true, as grounded in the truth.
Transcendental Idealism
We’ve already discussed why Kant’s philosophy is transcendental, but he more specifically calls it transcendental idealism, in opposition to transcendental realism. The former holds that all knowable objects are mere representation (phenomena), not things in themselves, and that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations existing independently by themselves. This, we have seen, is precisely Kant’s position. The latter considers space and time as something given independently and imagines that all outer appearances are things in themselves. The transcendental idealist then, is an empirical realist in the sense that they can be certain that matter (which is the world conditioned and organised by the understanding) exists, while the transcendental realist will be an empirical idealist because the objects of the senses, being independent of us, can never be certain.
Self-consciousness
Self-consciousness goes by a few different terms in Critique; “I think,” pure apperception, the unity of apperception, and the transcendental unity of self-consciousness. What they all refer to though is a unity that accompanies all of my representations. If such a unity were absent, the representations would be representations that weren’t thought at all, making them literally nothing to me. The understanding then, is ultimately grounded in this unity of apperception, and so is the manifold of sensory intuition (time and space). In short, the unity of apperception grounds all experience. Importantly though, the “I think” is not an object, nor even a concept; rather, it is an empty representation, the mere consciousness that accompanies all concepts.
Kant goes on to distinguish between inner sense and the faculty of apperception. The former is how we appear to ourselves (being conscious of ourselves), whereas the latter is who we are (conscious that we are). We have already seen that time is the form of inner sense, which means we are never able to represent time directly to ourselves (because we are always in it, so to speak). In order to form a representation of time, we must draw a straight line which functions as the external figurative representation of time (i.e. in space). The consequence of this is that in exactly the same way as we saw earlier with things in themselves, I have no knowledge of myself as I actually am (i.e. as pure apperception), but only as I appear to myself through this external (spatial) figurative representation. Indeed, I (as pure apperception) am actually a thing-in-itself; that is to say, a part of the noumenal world.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
We now come to the critical part of Critique; the section Kant calls the Transcendental Dialectic. Metaphysics had fallen into disrepute in Kant’s time principally because he noted that philosophers had been attempting to use reason to prove metaphysical assertions (which Kant considered to relate to three things; God, freedom, and immortality). So, what is reason?
Knowledge begins with the senses (the manifold of pure intuition), passes through the understanding where the categories are applied to it, and finally culminates in reason, which Kant says, provides us with the “highest unity of thought.” The difference between the two is that whereas the understanding is “a faculty for producing unity of appearances according to rules… reason is the faculty for producing unity of the rules of the understanding under principles.” So, the understanding deals with empirical reality, the particulars of which it organises under universal concepts in accordance with the categories, but reason, in dealing with concepts only (which have already been formed through the understanding), is divorced from empirical reality; i.e. possible experience. It is thus completely unconstrained by, and indeed blind to, empirical reality. So when we attempt to use reason, which can only tell us about concepts, to prove empirical facts, we inevitably find ourselves mired in contradictions and paradoxes.
There are only three concepts of pure reason (which Kant calls transcendental ideas); the absolute unity of the thinking subject (the object of psychology; the soul), the absolute unity of the series of conditions of appearance (the object of cosmology), and the absolute unity of the condition of all objects of thought in general (the object of theology). Pure reason operates through syllogisms, and Kant will show that the syllogisms used in all of these concepts are sophistical. The first he calls the transcendental paralogism, the second the antinomy of pure reason, and the third the ideal of pure reason.
The Paralogisms of Pure Reason
There are actually four paralogisms, but the fourth is a little different in nature from the others (and I actually already slipped it in earlier while you weren’t looking!), so I will confine myself to the first three here:
The First Paralogism of Substantiality: The absolute subject is substance. I am the absolute subject of all my possible judgements. Therefore, I am substance.
Consequence: If the soul is a substance, then it will also be permanent.
The Second Paralogism of Simplicity: A thing, which is not the sum of several acting parts is simple. I am such a thing. Therefore, I am simple.
Consequence: If the soul is simple, then it will be distinguished from matter (which is a composite), and therefore exempt from the decay to which all matter is subject.
The Third Paralogism of Personality: Whatever is conscious of the numerical identity of itself at different times is a person. I am so conscious. Therefore, I am a person.
The reason the paralogisms seem so convincing is that the category in the major premise (substance, simplicity, numerical identity over time) is used transcendentally (as a general, universal concept), while in the minor premise and conclusion, it suddenly becomes empirical. In other words, the terms are being used equivocally, and while legitimate (and true!) in the first sense when we are dealing only with concepts, become meaningless in the second, telling us absolutely nothing about empirical reality.
The Antinomies of Pure Reason
The antinomies are the most well-known part of the Dialectic, and consist of four pairs of assertions about the universe in which the first of each pair contradicts the second, while both assertions (thesis and antithesis) can be justified with a proof that derives an absurdity from the consideration of its opposite.
First Conflict
Thesis: The world has a beginning in time, and is limited with regard to space.
Proof: If we assume no beginning in time or space, we get an infinite regression.
Antithesis: The world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is infinite in regard to both.
Proof: If we assume the world had a temporal beginning, there must have been a time when the world was not; i.e. an empty time. In an empty time there can be no reason for anything to have a beginning. If we assume the world to be finite and limited in relation to space, it would exist in an empty space that could not be limited. This means things would be related, not just in space, but also to space. This is impossible because the world is an absolute whole.
Second Conflict
Thesis: Every composite substance consists of simple parts which underlie all reality.
Proof: Assume composites are not composed of simples. If we were to completely decompose a composite, there would be nothing left, and therefore no substance would have been given in the first place. Since this is absurd, there are only two options. Either it is impossible to decompose a composite, or composites are composed of simples. Since the first contradicts what is a reasonable presupposition, the latter must be true.
Antithesis: No composite substance consists of simple parts; there are no simple parts.
Proof: Assume composites consist of simple parts. Every part of a composite substance (i.e. simples) occupies space, but everything which occupies space has parts. Therefore, every simple has parts; a contradiction in terms.
Third Conflict
Thesis: Any causal chain based on the laws of nature must have a beginning in a freedom.
Proof: If we assume there is no freedom, every state must depend on a preceding state extending backwards to infinity, which is impossible.
Antithesis: There is no freedom. Everything happens according to laws of nature.
Proof: Assume there is an uncaused freedom at the beginning of every causal chain. This freedom must act from an absolute beginning. Every act, however, presupposes a prior state in which the act hasn’t yet happened. Since the absolute beginning of freedom isn’t causally connected with this state, it must then be completely random. This conflicts with coherent experience.
Fourth Conflict
Thesis: An absolutely necessary being exists, either as a part of it, or its cause.
Proof: The world of sense contains a series of alterations. Every conditioned, then, presupposes a complete series of conditions leading up to it. There is necessarily a first condition, itself unconditioned. This absolutely necessary being must belong to the world of sense or else the first cause of the world would lie outside that world, which is impossible.
Antithesis: No absolutely necessary being exists.
Proof: Assume the world is a necessary being, or a necessary being exists in it. Then, in the series of alterations (the conditioned) there would be a being without a cause, which is impossible, or the series would have no beginning, so despite being contingent and conditioned in all its parts, it is somehow also necessary and unconditional as a whole, which is self-contradictory. If we assume an absolutely necessary cause outside the world, then this cause would have to begin to act, making its causality appear in time, and therefore not outside the world.
The resolution of the antinomies lies in the realisation that both of the conflicting theses can be false. If the rejection of one thesis necessitated the other, we would be affirming that the world is a thing-in-itself; i.e. existing independently of our understanding. But, as we have seen, the only world that can qualify as a world is the appearance, or phenomenon. If we remove this notion that the world exists in itself, we see that “…it exists neither as a whole that is in itself infinite, nor as a whole that is in itself finite.” It is simply, and only, encountered in the empirical regress of the series of appearances and nowhere by itself. We literally can’t say anything about whether it is infinite or finite. Kant calls this kind of opposition, where the rejection of one position doesn’t imply the other, dialectical. “The antinomy of pure reason with regard to its cosmological ideas is therefore removed by showing that it is merely dialectical, and that it is a conflict due to an illusion produced by our applying the idea of absolute totality, which holds only as a condition of things in themselves, to appearances, which exist only in our representation, and, if they form a series, in the successive [i.e. in the appearance] regress, but nowhere else [i.e. not in reality].”
The Ideal of Pure Reason
There are only three possible proofs of the existence of God; the ontological, the cosmological, and the physico-theological, each of which we will investigate in turn.
The Ontological Proof
This argument essentially claims that God is absolutely necessary; i.e. that existence is included in the very concept of God in the same way that ‘having three sides’ is an absolutely necessary property of a triangle. Kant points out that examples taken from judgements are very different from analysing a thing and its existence. To posit a triangle and reject its three angles is contradictory, but there is nothing wrong with rejecting the existence of triangles along with their three angles. The same applies to an absolutely necessary being; reject its existence, and you remove the thing, along with all of its predicates.
The counter-claim will be that you cannot reject the existence of an absolutely necessary being because one of its predicates is existence. Here Kant notes that being is not a real predicate because it adds nothing to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of the thing. The proposition ‘God is omnipotent’ contains two concepts; not three. The ‘is’ isn’t a predicate of God; rather, it merely serves to posit the predicate in relation to the subject. If it were true that saying a thing is added something to the concept, we would be in the bizarre situation of having to admit that what exists is not the same as what was thought in the concept, but is somehow more. The unappealing consequence of this would be that we would then be unable to say that the exact object of our concept exists.
The Cosmological Proof
This argument moves from contingent being to necessary being. In noting that something exists (me), it concludes that an absolutely necessary being must also exist somewhere way back along the chain of existence. So, although this proof begins with experience, it does so only in order to make the jump to a necessary being, which means it will ultimately have to rely on the ontological proof. Because of this, it fails for the same reason outlined in the previous section.
The Physico-Theological Proof
This argument starts by noting the order apparent in the world, and, supposing that this order could not have arisen spontaneously, postulates a sublime and wise cause (or causes). Finally, the unity of the cause is inferred from the unity of the different parts of the world. Kant finds fault with this proof in the way it also progresses from empirical grounds; i.e. assuming a proportionate, but non-determinate, cause to the order of the world, to a transcendental one; i.e. the existence of an absolutely necessary being. In effect, the physico-theological proof eventually treads the same path as the cosmological proof, meaning it ultimately finds itself back at the ontological proof.
At the end of the Transcendental Dialectic, despite having just effectively dismissed the postulates of the three transcendental ideas, Kant then proceeds to justify belief in them by appealing to their regulative function as maxims providing systematic unity, claiming that they are objects “in the idea,” even as he denies that they refer to any actual existing object. Instead of being constitutive principles extending our knowledge, they are regulative principles, meaning they provide a systematic unity of the manifold of empirical knowledge in general. In other words, although they are things we can never prove, we are nevertheless justified in acting as if they were true because they allow us to live good, meaningful lives.
Critique of Practical Reason
Morality
Kant’s second Critique aims to show that pure reason alone is sufficient to determine the will; i.e. that pure reason, independent of the passions, can provide a practical, universal moral law which is sufficient to govern our behaviour. We start with three theorems:
Theorem I: All practical principles that presuppose an object as the determining ground of the will are empirical and cannot be laws
Theorem II: All material practical principles concern self-love or one’s own happiness
Theorem III: A practical universal law must be the determining ground of the will by its form, not content
The first and second theorems tell us what a moral law cannot be; specifically, it cannot be a principle. Principles (as Kant defines the word) are propositions that concern specific objects, and therefore suffice to determine the behaviour of individuals who are interested in those objects; i.e. they are subjective in nature, and don’t reach beyond the individual and his or her selfish motives. Laws, on the other hand, are objective and universal, applying to all rational beings. Since morality must be objective, what we are looking for cannot be a principle; hence, it cannot refer to specific, empirical objects.
The consequence of these first two theorems, coming in the third theorem, is something that we saw all through the first critique; namely, what we are looking for must be formal in nature (i.e. not concerned with content), because only this will yield a law; i.e. a universal, objective maxim.
Now, it’s clear that we can act against our selfish desires (our material practical principles) in favour of some perceived higher good. Kant’s example is that of a young man ordered, on pain of execution, to give false testimony against an innocent man. It is quite clearly possible (although it may not be easy) for the young man to resist such an order, thereby acting against the strongest practical principle guiding his behaviour; i.e. the preservation of his own life. This means that there is a practical law over and above our material practical principles. Kant calls it the moral law, and formulates it thus:
“So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.”
Since this moral law derives from pure reason, not empirical considerations (which we have seen it can transcend), we can conclude that pure reason is also practical.
The Role of Feelings in Morality
Since the moral law is a postulate of pure practical reason, it is completely distinct from anything empirical. This means that our feelings, which concern pleasure and displeasure, are not only irrelevant when it comes to morality, they are an impediment to moral behaviour. Kant is so committed to this idea that he even holds that while an action done in accordance with the moral law, but by means of a feeling, may contain legality, it has no part in morality. Even compassion and sympathy are, while not bad, “burdensome to right-thinking persons… [and bring] their considered maxims into confusion…”
This means that, contrary to popular opinion, it is therefore “contrapurposive to set before children, as a model, actions as noble, magnanimous, meritorious, thinking that one can captivate them by inspiring enthusiasm for such actions.” Instead, we ought to cultivate and encourage in our children the development of rational principles built on concepts.
Moral Law as Command
Given that the moral law specifically goes against our inclinations, it humiliates us. This is its negative aspect. However, as the determining ground of our will, even as it humiliates us, it also awakens in us respect for it. This respect we have for the moral law is the sole allowed moral incentive (all other incentives pollute the rational enterprise). This incentive awakens an interest, and the interest grounds the maxim. In this way, everything comes to rest on the moral law. Given that we have to exclude our inclinations from our motives, acting in accordance with the moral law is called duty, and is, in fact, as submission to a law, a command.
Since finite beings will always have inclinations that urge them to act in their own interest (this is just part of what it is to be a finite being), they will always have to overcome these urges to act in accordance with the moral law. Far from this being something negative though, something we ought to try to remedy, it is exactly as it should be. If we didn’t have to overcome our natural inclinations, morality would be impossible. Without a duty or command that we have to exert our will to live up to, we would all just be acting in our own self-interest, and even if such acts were in accordance with the moral law, they would be morally worthless. In other word, compliance with a moral law that coincided with our natural inclinations would no longer be a virtue.
Good and Evil
We have already seen that the moral law is formal; i.e. unconcerned with particular objects. However, we may allow two objects proper to practical reason: good and evil. Again, we must be careful not to adulterate these concepts with pleasure or displeasure because a) the objects would then lack universal validity, and b) the good would no longer be good itself, merely good for something; i.e. instrumental, in service to some other, higher good. Instead good and evil must be judged with reason; that is, through concepts.
Applying reason here reveals that, in fact, good and evil are not specific objects, but rather refer to the way the will is determined by the law of reason to make something its object. Relying on reason to govern our behaviour is good, while not doing so is evil. Hence, good and evil aren’t objects as such; rather, they refer to whether or not the will is determined by the law of reason. Only the acting person, not an object their behaviour aims at, can rightly be called good or evil.
Kant also notes a paradox of sorts regarding good and evil. We usually attempt to discern the good and evil before we determine the moral law. If we have no ‘good’ goal, how can we determine whether our behaviours are right or wrong? However, if we attempt to determine the good first; i.e. without a moral law guiding our intuition, we won’t be able to avoid grounding it in pleasure and displeasure.
This is where the strength of Kant’s formal approach comes in. The moral law must come first, and it must be content-free. This will ensure that the moral law we erect will be free from any bias of the feelings, and will allow us to use it to determine the good and evil.
Freedom
Kant argues that we know the moral law first, and it is only from this that we come to know our freedom. Having established the moral law through pure reason, Kant asks what the will must be like if its only sufficient determining ground were a practical law of reason (i.e. a maxim referring to form, not matter). In order for the will to be sufficiently determined by such a practical law; i.e. not merely subject to the whims of the passions, it must be free. In short, if you can act against your natural inclinations, you must be free; i.e. not enslaved to them.
Kant then goes on to ask what type of practical law could determine a will if that will were free. By a parallel kind of reasoning process to what we just saw, Kant concludes that the answer here is only a law that was independent of the matter; i.e. that contained nothing more than form. So, it turns out that freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other.
Immortality of the Soul
Complete conformity with the moral law is holiness, and, as we’ve already seen, is unattainable for finite, rational beings. Nevertheless, since conformity with the moral law is required as a practical necessity, Kant reasons that such conformity must be possible. The way he squares this is to stipulate that the requirement therefore constitutes an endless progress toward that complete conformity. But the only way this could be possible would be “on the presupposition of the existence and personality of the same rational being continuing endlessly (which is called the immortality of the soul).” Hence, the soul is immortal.
The Existence of God
In the practical task of pure reason; that is, in the pursuit of the highest good, there must be, Kant feels, a connection between morality and one’s proportionate happiness (contentment). Yet, there is nothing in moral acts themselves which would appear to guarantee such a connection. Based on this, Kant argues that we are justified in postulating “the existence of a cause of all nature, distinct from nature, which contains the ground of this connection, namely of the exact correspondence of happiness with morality…” Such a cause must also be an intelligence, and the cause that it grounds must therefore be his will. Furthermore, in order to vouchsafe this connection, he must be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Such a being is God.
The Quote
No outline of Critique of Practical Reason would be complete without the inclusion of what must surely be one of the most famous things Kant ever said:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
The first, in recognising our finitude as animal creatures and our insignificance in the universe, annihilates our sense of self-importance, but the second raises our worth as intelligences through our personalities, lifting us up above our animal nature and even the whole sensible world, letting us, for just a moment, reach into the infinite.
Critique of Judgement
Aesthetic Judgement
The first type of judgement that Kant will discuss in this book is the aesthetic. The aesthetic is that in the representation of the object which is purely subjective in nature, and it involves judging the forms of representations of objects without concepts. If concepts were involved this would mean we were no longer discussing judgement; rather, we would be returning to the realm of the first Critique, the understanding. There are two parts to the aesthetic; the beautiful, and the sublime.
Pleasure
Pleasure obviously concerns the subject, but it cannot be that which merely pleases at a personal level or else we will find ourselves lacking anything that could yield any universal, a priori principles. Pleasure turns out to be based on the formal process which the first Critique uncovered, in which the understanding imposes its categories on the raw thing-in-itself, creating the object (as phenomenon). Pleasure is nothing other than our awareness of this process insofar as the resulting state in the subject (the perception of the object) is strengthened and preserved. Displeasure is the opposite; i.e. an object which fails to strengthen and preserve itself in the subject.
The Beautiful (and Taste)
Following the structure he established in the first Critique, Kant analyses the beautiful into four moments.
The first moment (quality) asserts that taste is the faculty of judging an object according to the delight or aversion it inspires apart from any personal interest the individual has towards the object. The object of such a delight is called beautiful. The individual must be completely indifferent towards the object in order to judge in matters of taste.
The second moment (quantity) holds that the beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally. So, an object is beautiful insofar as it concerns cognition in general (making the judgement universal), which is the harmony established between the form of the representation of the object and the understanding; in other words, that which makes experience in general possible. As we saw, the feeling of pleasure derives from this harmony.
The third moment (relation) says that beauty is the form of purposiveness in an object, so far as this is perceived in it apart from the representation of an end. This requires a little unravelling. Basically, Kant is saying that there can be purposiveness even in the absence of an explicit, willed end. (If this weren’t possible, all judgements of taste would be tainted by personal desire or interest). An example of such purposiveness occurs in the action of our minds as they create the objects we perceive in the world (the phenomenon). This whole process is just how the mind works, and is, in fact, necessary before desire can arise in the first place. So, to say that beauty is the “form of purposiveness in an object” is to connect beauty, not to specific features of objects, but to the form by which the object (as phenomenon) is brought into being by the mind. This is in keeping with the formal nature of Kant’s philosophy, which I have tried to emphasise all throughout this summary.
The fourth moment (modality) states that the beautiful is that which, although not falling under a concept, necessarily arouses pleasure in the subject; i.e. everyone ought to feel pleasure when contemplating this object.
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Since taste cannot be determined by concepts or precepts, it must be cultivated in the individual through exposure to examples of beautiful things. Kant notes that this is a peculiar consequence because although beauty is an a priori judgement, acquiring the faculty of judging beauty (taste) requires empirical examples.
A second peculiarity arises in the way that, for the same reason, the beautiful cannot be proven to be so by definite rules, nor can we be argued, or persuaded, into conceding that an object is beautiful. The peculiarity here arises from the fact that despite its immunity to argument, the subjective judgement extends to all subjects as if it were an objective judgement.
Another peculiarity is that although taste must be cultivated in the student, it cannot be directly taught, precisely because there are no rules or precepts to teach. Instead, Kant maintains that taste requires a solid preparatory education in the humanities; i.e. with a view to creating a well-rounded, mature person. In addition, Kant feels that taste is best cultivated through the instilling of a strong moral sense. This is because he sees taste as “a faculty that judges of the rendering of moral ideas in terms of the senses…” In a sense, then, beauty is morality for the senses. This is quite a stunning idea, and only works because for Kant both morality and beauty are grounded in the purely formal; i.e. not content. In the case of morality, it is concerned with an objective, universal law, and in the case of beauty, with the formal conditions that produce the object (as phenomenon) in general.
Finally, Kant reveals a definite bias for beauty in nature as opposed to beauty in art. The reason for this is that nature displays that purposiveness of form that is at the same time free of arbitrary rules and explicitly willed ends naturally, as it were. Works of art, on the other hand, can all too easily end up being products of artifice following prescribed formulae, contravening Kant’s notion of the beautiful as we have outlined it here. Art, then, can only be beautiful where we recognise it as art, even as it has the appearance of nature; i.e. that lively, spontaneous, free-flowing quality that tempts and tantalises the imagination.
The Sublime
Whereas the beautiful appeared through a consideration of the form of the object, the sublime is provoked by an object devoid of form insofar as it yields a representation of limitlessness; that is, in the way it transcends the comprehension of our senses/intuition as an empirical object. Nevertheless, we are able to grasp such limitless objects, but only through our rational faculty. So the mind, instead of feeling pleasure, is actually repelled by the object, and at the same time there arises a feeling of admiration or respect for the faculty of reason within us. Another way of saying this is that while the beautiful yields a purposiveness of form that makes the object appear already adapted (through the way our understanding organises and synthetises the raw impressions it receives) to our power of judgement, the sublime is the exact opposite of this, appearing ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and doing violence to the imagination.
Since sublimity actually refers to a feeling of respect or admiration for our rational capacities, the object merely being the occasion which highlights this for us, we should not say that objects are sublime; rather, “the object lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable in the mind…”
There are two kinds of the sublime Kant recognises; the mathematical, and the dynamic. The former concerns those objects so great in magnitude that we are unable to comprehend them through the sensory intuition. We find ourselves overwhelmed, for example, when we try to comprehend the vastness of the starry sky. However, when we attempt an estimation of this magnitude, not through reference to empirical reality, but through reason, we find we are more than equal to the task. The sublime is precisely the feeling that arises when we behold this power of reason; i.e. “…the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of the senses…”
The dynamically sublime arises when we are confronted with a terrifying, violent force of nature, before which we shrink into impotence. We recognise that, as finite, physical creatures, were we to attempt to resist this violent force (say, a tornado or violent storm), we would be swept aside in a heartbeat. In this case, the sublime lies in the discovery of a power of resistance within ourselves of quite a different kind, a resistance centred in our nature as infinite, rational beings, against which this violent force has no dominion.
Teleological Judgement
We have just looked at aesthetic judgement, which concerned the subjective purposiveness of the object. Teleological judgement, on the other hand, concerns the objective purposiveness of nature. The problem with this is that objective purposiveness implies some kind of natural end when, to the contrary, everything we see in nature appears completely contingent (we can’t get away with the lack of an explicit, willed end here as we did regarding aesthetic judgement). Kant’s goal, then, will be to investigate how teleological judgements are possible.
Constitutive vs. Regulative Principles
We have already encountered this distinction at the end of our run-down of Critique of Pure Reason, but it is of central importance here, so it’s worth a quick review. Constitutive principles, or determining judgements, are those which explain causal relations in nature. In other words, they refer directly to empirical reality (which, recall, is not the thing-in-itself, but the way our knowledge of that reality is constituted through the organisation and synthesis of our sensory intuitions through the categories of the understanding such that we are able to experience actual objects in the first place). Regulative principles, or reflective judgements operate at a level ‘above’ constitutive principles. While constitutive principles constitute, or make up, our knowledge, reflective principles allow us to organise and make sense of that knowledge in a broader systematic unity.
Teleology – Causes and Ends
As we noted earlier, teleology requires ends which are not mechanistic; i.e. ends which are the result of a will. The problem for us is that we see no such ends in nature. Let’s see if we can tackle this problem from the other end; causes. There are two kinds of causes; efficient causes, which involve a progressive dependency; i.e. forwards, so the end depends on the cause, and final causes, which involve a regressive dependency; i.e. backwards, so the cause depends on the end. In the case of a painting, the efficient cause is the artist (cause) who actually puts the paint on the canvas (end), while the final cause is the artist’s idea of what the completed painting will look like (cause) which guides the artist in his or her painting (end). Teleology, we can see, requires final causes. Can we find any in nature?
Most causal events in nature cannot be described in terms of final causes. For example, the sea can’t be held to be the natural end (final cause) of the river. There is nothing going on there but efficient causes. However, Kant argues that we can consider something an end, or a final cause, if it is both cause and effect of itself. Kant uses the example of a tree. First, our tree produces another tree, which, while not being the same tree is of the same genus. So, in its genus, a tree is both cause and effect of itself. Second, a tree produces itself as an individual when it causes itself to grow by the taking in of nutrients which it assimilates and converts to energy, bark, etc.; things that the mechanism of nature external to the tree cannot provide. Finally, the tree generates itself through a variety of parts which can be considered as separate appendages, but at the same time, the preservation of which are reciprocally dependent on the preservation of other parts.
This gives us a definition of final cause that is broad enough to include certain ends we encounter in nature. In short, a natural end has two requirements: (1) “its parts, both as to their existence and form, are only possible by their relation to the whole…”, and (2) “the parts of the thing combine of themselves into the unity of a whole by being reciprocally cause and effect of their form.” Applying this definition to things we find in nature reveals that only those things which are organised (satisfying condition (1) above) and self-organising (satisfying condition (2) above); i.e. organisms, or living beings, can be considered natural ends, or final causes. But it’s not just that they can be considered final causes, it’s that we can only think of them in terms of final causes. We can certainly account for the simple accretions and interactions of parts in nature according to mechanical laws, but “…the cause that accumulates the appropriate material, modifies and fashions it, and deposits it in its proper place, must always be judged teleologically.” In other words, we can’t properly account for the existence of living organisms (which are both cause and effect of themselves) through pure mechanism.
There is even a natural next step here in which we go from viewing the organised product (living beings) as a natural end (because of that complex, interdependent relation of parts to the whole) to seeing the whole of nature as a natural end. From this perspective, other natural products which aren’t self-organising in themselves would be understood as forming parts of the ultimate system of ends that is nature as a whole.
Despite the arguments for why we have to judge the natural world teleologically, Kant is clear that we ought at all times, when we are thinking about natural things, to do so according to the principle of the simple mechanism of nature (a constitutive principle). First, this is just literally how our minds work, causality being one of the categories of the understanding. Second, science cannot progress in any other way. Nevertheless, there are times when it may be useful to eschew this practical (and again, necessary, because of the way our minds constitute reality) approach, and inquire a little more deeply into nature; times such as when we are doing philosophy perhaps, or seeking ultimate foundations for reality, carrying us beyond the appearance to the thing-in-itself.
The Mechanism behind Teleology
In this section Kant asks how teleology unfolds. He considers two alternatives; the theory of evolution and the theory of involution, or epigenesis. Evolution is essentially a mechanistic, deterministic process in which the individual plays no role; instead the “formative force” rolls on implacably, producing organised beings mechanically according to the ‘rule’ implanted in nature at the beginning. Individual organisms, represented like this, cannot be considered both the cause and effect of themselves (our earlier criterion for something to be a natural end). They are more like cogs in a machine; essential to the process, but impotent in themselves. Because of this, Kant rejects evolution.
Epigenesis, however, holds that every individual starts from material that is originally unformed, and form is only acquired over time through an interactive and cumulative process in which the individual itself plays a key role. Since individuals themselves are productive in respect of the continuation of this process, in addition to the principle of primordial organisation driving life, there is also a formative impulse in the individual itself which contributes to the regenerative process.
The Ultimate End of Nature
Although this doesn’t rise to the level of a determinative judgement, as a reflective judgement, there is “ample ground,” Kant thinks, for considering human beings to be the ultimate end of nature. Contrary to what you might think, there is no appeal to theology to justify this. Instead, the reason proffered is that we are “the one and only being upon [earth] that is able to form a concept of ends, and from an aggregate of things purposively fashioned to construct by the aid of his reason a system of ends.” So, as the only beings capable of producing ends for themselves, humans can be considered the ultimate end of nature.
So, human beings are the ultimate end of nature, but what is the nature of human beings? Broadly speaking, there are two options. It could be either that we are so constituted that we can be completely satisfied by nature itself, or our nature could lie in possessing an aptitude and skill for all manner of ends, for which we use nature both external and internal to obtain. The former is happiness (i.e. it is our nature to seek happiness in what nature provides); the latter, culture (i.e. it is our nature to use nature to achieve ends we set ourselves).
Kant affirms, as you might expect, that our nature lies in culture. What is more interesting than this though are the reasons Kant gives for rejecting happiness. Happiness, he notes, even if we had complete control over nature, would be impossible for us to obtain because it is the “mere idea of a state, and one to which he seeks to make his actual state of being adequate under purely empirical conditions – an impossible task. He projects this idea himself, and, thanks to his understanding and its complex relations with imagination and the senses, projects it in such different ways, and even alters his concept so often, that even if nature were a complete slave to his free power of choice, it would nevertheless be utterly unable to adopt any definite, universal and fixed law by which to accommodate itself to this fluctuating concept…” This is a deep insight, and even a cursory look at any human life seems to validate it (no sooner after we get what we thought would make us happy, we find it somehow never seems to live up to the promise). Happiness, it seems, is something that, like tomorrow, is always in the future. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Kant also notes that “…the discord of inner natural tendencies betrays him into further misfortunes of his own invention…” We have multiple desires, some of which are inevitably contradictory, meaning we cannot possibly satisfy all of them.
God
After studiously avoiding invoking any theological causes, Kant finally caves and turns to God at the end of the book. Basically, what we get here is another reason, in addition to the ones he provided in the first two Critiques.
First, Kant rejects what he calls physico-theology, which is an attempt to infer the Supreme Cause from the ends of nature. This will never succeed because being restricted to ends in nature, it cannot tell us anything about the end of nature itself, a cause which must, therefore, be outside nature.
Ethico-theology, on the other hand, is an attempt to infer the Supreme Cause from the moral end of rational beings in nature. We are not ends by virtue of our cognitive faculty which would imply that the world gets its worth through being made an object of contemplation. The existence of a world can acquire no worth merely through being known, for things without a final end can also be known. On the contrary, the only worth of which we can be speaking here is that which the person can give to him or herself, consisting therefore, in what they do; that is, the manner in which a person acts and the principles in which their free acts are grounded. It is only in our capacity as moral beings that humans can be a final end of creation.
It is in this ultimate, moral end that we now find a reason for seeing the whole of nature as a system of final causes. Our rational faculty necessarily refers ends to causes, and in this case (where the product is a moral system), we can’t help but suppose a single, intelligent world-cause. In addition, with this moral principle at our backs, we can now go ahead and speculate on the attributes this world-cause must have. He must be omniscient (so as to know the moral worth of our actions), omnipotent (so he can adapt nature to his highest ends), all-good and just (the two attributes which unite to form wisdom), and, in fact, possess all the other transcendental attributes we usually bestow on God, like eternity, omnipresence, etc.