Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724, in Königsberg, the fourth of nine children. The family was poor, so Kant needed the financial aid of supporters and friends in order to study at the pietistic Collegium Fridericianum. Working as a private tutor he studied at the University of Königsberg, where he was influenced primarily by Martin Knutzen (1713– 51), who held a professorship in Logic and Metaphysics. Two major influences can be singled out, the traditional school of metaphysics as derived from Leibnitz, and the example of Newton whom Kant revered as a paradigm of exact science. Following his father’s death, Kant had to leave the university to earn a living as a private tutor, employed by families of the local aristocracy. As early as 1755 Kant submitted his major thesis, and already criticized the central assumptions of traditional metaphysics. After years of holding the untenured position of a Privatdozent, working as a sub-librarian at the same time, he was finally appointed to a full professorship in Logic and Metaphysics

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at Königsberg, a position he held until his death in 1804. The most remarkable of his pre- critical texts is undoubtedly his polemic against Swedenborg, Dreams of a Ghostseer Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766), published anonymously, where we encounter a Kant full of irony and venom, anticipating much of what he would later discuss in his major works. In 1781, the Critique of Pure Reason was published, in 1788 there followed The Critique of Practical Reason and in 1790 The Critique of Pure Judgment . Afterwards the world of philosophy would never be the same; the ‘smasher of metaphysics’, as he was frequently referred to, had made his mark. Many important texts were published in between, and many form his opus postumum, but his three Critiques remain as lasting contribution to the realm of philosophy to this very day.

The legacy of Kant shaped the structural contours of nineteenth-century thought in totally different fashion, last not least because of its epistemological presumptions and simply because its maxim sapere aude, the epitome of traditional enlightenment, does not lend itself all that easily to politicization. Kant, as early as in his pre-critical writings, as in Träume eines Geistersehers, began to demolish the assumptions of traditional meta- physics, assumptions which in the light of the progress of the natural sciences, represented by Galileo and Newton, in the light also of what logic had achieved, Kant found preposterous and not acceptable. Thus he broke with the tradition of Leibnitz, personified by Christian Wolff, and emphasized the limitation of human knowledge rather than its speculative powers. Metaphysics, he claimed from the year 1766 on, was the science of the limits of human reason. To outline these limits was the task of his major work, beginning with the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which was also the first step towards establishing the foundations of his own transcendental philosophy. The term ‘transcendental’, ancient as it is, assumes a new meaning in the terminology of Kant inasmuch as he refers to criteria that constitute the necessary preconditions of knowledge rather than to everything that is generally presupposed. In his pain-staking style Kant reduces the empirical world to the elements of pure space and pure time (as opposed to this specific time and this space), and deduces all categories from this concept, showing in his further argument that reasoning, on the basis of categories a priori is possible in an empirically given world. Without a systematic, transcendental deduction of categories, subjective knowledge will never be scientific. Objective judgements are the result of the assumption that all categories are synthetically unified in the shape of pure reason, the original ‘I think’ being conceived of as the transcendental unity that is the precondition of all further judgements. Thus Kant breaks with the traditional metaphysical assumption that the essence of things is accessible, the ‘Thing as such’ (Das Ding an sich) is something that the human mind cannot know. Reason is a regulative instrument of knowledge, just as human knowledge is limited.

In his subsequent Critique of Practical Reason (1783) Kant followed his own principles in the attempt to establish a final, irrefutable foundation for the necessity of moral action, which would culminate in his famous categorical imperative, ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ In working out the various formulations of this paradigm of rational action Kant introduced another pair of terms, the juxtaposition of which would have far-reaching consequences, the terms of end and means. The extended version of the categorical imperative therefore implies never to use action as means for a purpose alone but always in a way that can be justified as an end in itself, because the nature of reason is an end in

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itself, as Kant had so elaborately argued in his first Critique. Kant’s theory of action, if we want to call his argument about means and ends by this name, would—as we shall see later on—profoundly affect the development of US Pragmatism and British empiricism. In addition we cannot ignore his influence on modern philosophy, even if only certain aspects of his philosophy are relevant, such as the categorical imperative, and not the method of transcendental reasoning of his first Critique. So, to name just one example, John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, in its passionate plea for certain necessary conditions that make the idea of justice plausible in the first place, relies heavily on the acceptance of Kantian premises, without invoking the whole content of Kant’s method. In fact, post- Kantian philosophy has either sought to bring his work to its legitimate fulfilment, or it has offered competing interpretations of Kant.

This is also true of the enormous impact of his third Critique, that of Judgment, which more than any given text has influenced consequent aesthetic theories. Formally the Critique of Judgment seems to mediate between the faculties of reason and of understanding. But the basic question raised in the Critique of Judgment addresses the problem of how nature can be seen as the intelligible part of our world that allows as well as necessitates a priori judgments concurring with our cognitive faculties. Kant, therefore, has to qualify both the teleological element in Nature, appealing to our sense of seeing, or judging nature as full of purpose, hence objective, and its appeal to our sentiments, which are purely subjective. But we are nevertheless still within the categories of reasonable judgement when we comment on the beauty of an object, because, as Kant points out, our judgement must be disinterested. Taste is our ability to make disinterested judgements concerning the purposeless beautiful. Kant elaborates on this in great detail, covering the beautiful and the sublime, and their respective relation to reason and freedom, until we end up reading his third Critique mainly as his contribution to aesthetic theory, more so in any case than as an integral part of his philosophical system as a whole. But whenever we go into the details of Kant’s aesthetics, we are eventually carried back to his original arguments about reason, necessity, ends and means.

As we have already mentioned, nineteenth-century Continental philosophy at first tried to avoid the restrictions Kant had put in the way of speculative philosophy by claiming to absorb him into the grand prpject of Idealism, which meant to say that Kant had in fact strengthened the status of the subject in the fields of philosophical knowledge, but not radically enough . Fichte was the first to claim that his criticism of Kant was in fact a completion of his work. But so did Schelling and likewise Hegel. These claims might, at first sight, strike one as somewhat strange in the light of Kant’s anti- metaphysical position and his well-known aversion to the larger aspirations of the individual’s transgressions against the limitations of its own capacities to understand the world. They are, however, at a closer look not totally without foundation, even if after the demise of absolute Idealism, in the post-Hegelian era, the Kantian project would slip away from future Idealists. Kant, in the eyes of Fichte, had compromised his very own intentions by holding on to the idea of the Ding an sich, the thing in itself, which provoked the immediate question of its possible existence without the subject. And this idea inevitably led to the question about the subject’s creative capacity in general. Vague as this may sound, and not wanting to make a homogenous mess of the highly refined philosophical systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, each of them differing from one another, and confounding them with German literary Romanticism to boot, a common

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ground in many respects can and should not be denied. It would be hard, otherwise, to explain the influence of post-Kantian Idealism in France, England and the USA. It would

be equally hard to come to terms with the profound dislike that the same kind of Idealism met in the same countries, more or less at the same time. While the influence of Fichte would largely remain within the boundaries of philosophy, Schelling and Hegel both influenced the intellectual community of their time. Schelling’s visionary qualities, his demand for a new mythology, a new religion in fact, based on a radicalized version of Spinoza’s pantheism, was well understood in literary circles, especially because F.H.Jacobi had drawn Lessing into the debate about pantheism by publishing a series of letters to Moses Mendelssohn that revealed Lessing’s turn towards pantheism. Schelling not only took the later writings of Fichte seriously—which abandoned the field of philosophy proper and became increasingly political, arguing as they did against the despotism of Napoleon and trying to lay the foundation of German patriotism based on a renewed interest in language, philosophy and art as constitutional element of a national character—but he also emphasized the political nature of Fichte’s ego that had replaced Kant’s transcendental subject as a kind of first principle, and which in the hands of Fichte had become an ontological principle. It would only be a question of time until this ontological ego, already being characterized as the origin of all knowledge—combining spontaneity, with unity and self-presence—should want to be qualified in more concrete terms. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss Fichte lightly as somebody who simply turned Kant upside down. He called his philosophy ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ a ‘science of knowledge’, and he bitterly fought against misunderstanding his ego, his self-positing ‘I’, as an empirical self. He clearly wanted to be seen as a follower of Kant, albeit a critical one. Very early in his life Fichte outlined and clarified his own intentions by way of reviewing a work critical of Kant, and had argued that neither a transcendental self that related to something outside of itself could exist, nor could a purely empirical self, in Kant’s sense. In each case the self would be fatally divided by fundamental logical contradictions. So Fichte endowed his ego, his intelligent self, with one decisive quality, energeia, a form of energy striving towards fulfilment, towards unity with its own potential, a moral energy that would lead the way towards self-fulfilment and the unity with the divine. As if simply trying to integrate Kant into his own system of philosophy, Fichte saw three principles at work in the defining of the self: a desire for knowledge, for praxis and for aesthetics. In fact Fichte talks about Trieb, so we might call these defining qualities instinctive to the self. If we take all that has been briefly pointed out about Fichte seriously, who stands here pars pro toto, we immediately see why he became so popular in his own time, and almost notoriously unpopular in a different political and cultural climate. For his time he addressed the topics everybody wanted to hear about: the scientific character of moral and political philosophy, the virtually limitless potential of the subject, the freedom of the individual, freedom being discussed within the context of the French Revolution and its repercussions throughout Europe. Fichte, who became known in Jena as a kind of German Jacobin, left that town after a turbulent and slanderous debate about his alleged atheism for Berlin. There he was welcomed in the literary salons of Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin, and during the Napoleonic Wars his Speeches to the German Nation articulated a moral and cultural sense of mission for Germany, which sense was easily abused at the time of extreme German Nationalism and National Socialism. More or less the same can be said for the general fate of German

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speculative Idealism in its garb of aesthetic Romanticism. However, its influence would, for better or for worse, lie exactly in this domain.