Continental philosophy

Kant

Hume’s skepticism was the explicit point of departure for the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who acknowledged that it was Hume who had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” Although Kant’s subsequent “critical” philosophy emphasized the limitations of human reason, it did so in a manner that ultimately vindicated the claims to knowledge that more-traditional philosophers had made on its behalf.

Following the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), Kant insisted that any investigation of the scope of human knowledge must begin with an examination of the cognitive faculties through which it is acquired. This general approach became characteristic of later German idealism and has exerted an enormous influence on continental philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787), Kant presciently observed that “the critical path alone is open,” meaning that any approach to the problem of knowledge that failed to respect the limitations that he had laid down risked falling into the metaphysical dogmatism of old.

The problem of knowledge, according to Kant, is to explain how some judgments about the world can be necessarily true and therefore knowable “a priori,” or independently of experience (see a posteriori knowledge). Until Kant’s time, all empirical judgments were regarded as vulnerable to skeptical doubt, because human experience is inherently fallible. On the other hand, all a priori judgments, such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” were regarded as empty of content, because they did not present any information that was not already contained in the concepts with which they were composed (being unmarried is part of what it is to be a bachelor). If human knowledge of the world was to be possible, therefore, there would have to be judgments that were both empirical and a priori.

The genius and originality of Kant’s philosophy lay in the means by which he made room for such judgments. In what he described, in the preface to the second edition (1787) of the Critique of Pure Reason, as his “Copernican” revolution, he proposed that knowledge should not depend on the conformity of a judgment to an object in experience; rather, the existence of an object in experience should depend on its conformity to human knowledge.

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Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.

That is to say, a thing can be an “object of possible experience” for human beings only if it conforms to human knowledge in certain respects. This is because the faculty of intuition—which receives the appearances (“phenomena”) of experience—is structured by the concepts of space and time, and because the faculty of understanding—which orders the phenomena received through intuition—is structured by concepts grouped under the general headings of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. The fact that space and time are forms of possible experience, rather than generalizations derived from experience, explains how the judgments of geometry, for example, can be both empirical (about experience) and knowable a priori. Similarly, a judgment such as “Every event has a cause,” is both empirical and a priori, because causality (under the heading “relation”) is one of the concepts imposed on experience by the understanding, not a generalization derived by the understanding from experience.

Behind the phenomena of experience, according to Kant, there is a realm of “noumena,” e.g., “things in themselves,” that is in principle unknowable. The mistake of traditional philosophers had been to assume that reason could use a priori principles to derive metaphysical knowledge of things outside or beyond any possible experience. In this respect the skeptical philosophers had been right to criticize the traditional proofs of the existence of God or of the immortality of the soul as so much empty dogmatism.

Not surprisingly, neither of Kant’s chief philosophical antagonists was satisfied with the new critical philosophy. For the skeptics, Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena was redolent of earlier metaphysics. If knowledge of the noumenal realm is impossible, on what basis could Kant claim that it exists? Why refer to it at all? For the dogmatists, conversely, Kant’s supposed defense of the powers of reason ceded far too much ground to the antimetaphysical camp.

Kant’s moral philosophy, as elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), also proved extremely influential. In these works his central concern was human freedom, or the autonomy of the will, just as the autonomy of reason had been the focus of the first critique (see free will). The immediate problem for Kant was to reconcile the idea of freedom with the evident causal determinism operative in the phenomenal world, a determinism that the first critique itself had endorsed.

Against the champions of determinism, Kant insisted on the autonomous capacities of the human will: by universalizing one’s maxims (or reasons) for action in accordance with the categorical imperative—“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”—one acts freely, or autonomously. By following universal imperatives, the will escapes the contingencies and determinism of the phenomenal or empirical realm. Thereby, its actions obtain an ethical dignity or moral purity that approximates the sublimity of what Kant called the “kingdom of ends”: a noumenal realm of pure morality, unaffected by the vagaries of experience. In Kant’s ethical theory, the kingdom of ends possesses the sublimity of an idea of pure reason, inasmuch as it is free of empirical taint. Kant’s formula for autonomy is thus opposed to utilitarianism, the view that actions are right or wrong by virtue of their consequences. Whereas utilitarian moral theories suggest that morally right actions are properly motivated by desires or interests—e.g., to maximize consequences that are good, such as pleasure or happiness—Kant’s brand of moral rigorism is predicated on reason alone.

Yet, Kant openly admitted that, according to the letter of his approach, human freedom possesses a merely “formal” or “noumenal” character. Once one tries to act freely in a phenomenal world dominated by the principle of causality, or to act morally in a world in which human action is always motivated by interests, “rational” or “free” outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Thus, Kant’s practical philosophy is beset by the antinomy (contradiction) between freedom and necessity: human beings are inwardly free but outwardly subject to the laws of causality. This Pyrrhic vindication of freedom left many of Kant’s heirs dissatisfied and striving vigorously to transcend the oppositions and limitations his philosophy had bequeathed.