Immanuel Kant Presentation

 With help from: http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/kant/section1.rhtml

 

OVERVIEW:

Kant’s  primary aim is to determine the limits and scope of pure reason. That is, he wants to know what reason alone can determine without the help of the senses or any other faculties. Metaphysicians make grand claims about the nature of reality based on pure reason alone, but these claims often conflict with one another. Furthermore, Kant is prompted by Hume’s skepticism to doubt the very possibility of metaphysics.

 

1)      Kant thanks David Hume for awakening him from his “dogmatic slumber” that had kept him from questioning rationalist metaphysics. Although he was trained in the rationalist tradition, Kant was heavily influenced by the empiricist philosophy of David Hume.

 

2)      Kant is generally credited with effecting a synthesis between the empiricist philosophy that had dominated Great Britain and the rationalist philosophy that had dominated the European continent for the previous 150 years.

 

3)      By questioning our ability to rationally justify causation, Hume throws a great deal of rationalist metaphysics into doubt. Kant was impressed with Hume’s work but not entirely ready to abandon rationalism.

 

4)      The mature philosophy we find in Kant’s Critiques is his attempt to answer Hume’s skepticism. This answer generates what Kant calls a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy: both in morals and in metaphysics, Kant turns his philosophical eye inward, investigating or critiquing the powers of the human intellect itself. Instead of asking what we can know, Kant asks how we can know what we can know.

 

5)      According to Kant, we can never know with certainty what is “out there.” Since all our knowledge of the external world is filtered through our mental faculties, we can know only the world that our mind presents to us. That is, all our knowledge is only knowledge of phenomena, and we must accept that noumena are fundamentally unknowable.

 

a)       Noumenal Realm and Phenomenal Realm

i)        Noumena are “things-in-themselves,” the reality that exists independent of our mind

ii)       Phenomena are appearances, reality as our mind makes sense of it.

 

6)      The Category of the Synthetic A Priori

 

a)       Kant inherits from Hume the problem of how we can infer necessary and universal truths from experience when all experience is by its nature contingent and particular. We actually experience individual sights and sounds and so on. We cannot “experience” a physical law or a relation of cause and effect. So if we cannot see, smell, or hear causation, how can we infer that some events cause others? Kant phrases this question more generally as the question of how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible; that is, how can we know things that are necessary and universal but not self-evident or definitional?

 

b)      Kant’s ingenious solution is that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible because our mental faculties organize experience according to certain categories so that these categories become necessary and universal features of our experience. For instance, we do not find causation in nature so much as we cannot not find causation in nature. It is a feature of the way our minds make sense of reality that we perceive causes and effects everywhere at work. For Kant, then, the category of the synthetic a priori is the key to explaining how we gain substantive knowledge about the world.

 

c)       a posteriori knowledge is the particular knowledge we gain from experience

d)      a priori knowledge is the necessary and universal knowledge we have independent of experience, such as our knowledge of mathematics

e)      In an analytic judgment, the concept in the predicate is contained in the concept in the subject, as, for instance, in the judgment, “a bachelor is an unmarried man.” It is true by definition.

f)        In a synthetic judgment, the predicate concept contains information not contained in the subject concept, and so a synthetic judgment is informative rather than just definitional.

g)       Kant argues that mathematics and the principles of science contain synthetic a priori knowledge. For example, “7 + 5 = 12” is a priori because it is a necessary and universal truth we know independent of experience, and it is synthetic because the concept of “12” is not contained in the concept of “7 + 5.” Kant argues that the same is true for scientific principles such as, “for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction”: because it is universally applicable, it must be a priori knowledge, since a posteriori knowledge only tells us about particular experiences.

7)      The fact that we are capable of synthetic a priori knowledge suggests that pure reason is capable of knowing important truths.

8)      However, Kant does not follow rationalist metaphysics in asserting that pure reason has the power to grasp the mysteries of the universe. Instead, he suggests that much of what we consider to be reality is shaped by the perceiving mind.

9)      The mind, according to Kant, does not passively receive information provided by the senses. Rather, it actively shapes and makes sense of that information.

a)       If all the events in our experience take place in time, that is because our mind arranges sensory experience in a temporal progression, and if we perceive that some events cause other events, that is because our mind makes sense of events in terms of cause and effect.

b)      According to Kant, the mind wears unremovable time-tinted and causation-tinted sunglasses, so that all our experience necessarily takes place in time and obeys the laws of causation.

c)       Kant is suggesting that time, space, and causation are not found in experience but are instead the form the mind gives to experience. We can grasp the nature of time, space, and causation not because pure reason has some insight into the nature of reality but because pure reason has some insight into the nature of our own mental faculties.

 

NOTE: This does not mean that Kant believes time and cause and effect actually exist. Rather, this is a construct of our minds that everyone constructs with their minds. Time and space, Kant argues, are pure intuitions of our faculty of sensibility, and concepts of physics such as causation and inertia are pure intuitions of our faculty of understanding. Sensory experience only makes sense because our faculty of sensibility processes it, organizing it according to our intuitions of time and space.

These intuitions are the source of mathematics: our number sense comes from our intuition of successive moments in time, and geometry comes from our intuition of space.

If time and space, among other things, are constructs of the mind, we might wonder what is actually “out there,” independent of our minds. Kant answers that we cannot know for certain. Our senses react to stimuli that come from outside the mind, but we only have knowledge of how they appear to us once they have been processed by our faculties of sensibility and understanding.

1)      Metaphysics relies on the faculty of reason, which does not shape our experience in the way that our faculties of sensibility and understanding do, but rather reason helps us reason independent of experience.

2)      The mistake metaphysicians typically make is to apply reason to things in themselves (Which is things in the unreachable noumenal realm, things as they are APART FROM the mind molding them) and try to understand matters beyond reason’s grasp.

3)      Kant redefines the role of metaphysics as a critique of pure reason. That is, the role of reason is to understand itself, to explore the powers and the limits of reason.

4)      We are incapable of knowing anything certain about things-in-themselves, but we can develop a clearer sense of what and how we can know by examining intensively the various faculties and activities of the mind.

 

 

SUMMARY: In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant achieves a synthesis between the competing traditions of rationalism and empiricism. From rationalism, he draws the idea that pure reason is capable of significant knowledge but rejects the idea that pure reason can tell us anything about things-in-themselves. From empiricism, he draws the idea that knowledge is essentially knowledge from experience but rejects the idea that we can infer no necessary and universal truths from experience, which is Hume’s conclusion. As a result, he avoids the metaphysical speculations of the rationalists, for which any definite proof seems unattainable but maintains the rationalists’ ambitious agenda, which attempts to give some answer to the sorts of questions that inevitably occur when we think philosophically. By locating the answers to metaphysical questions not in the external world but in a critique of human reason, Kant provides clear boundaries for metaphysical speculation and maintains a sensible, empirical approach to our knowledge of the external world.

 

Kant thus achieves what he calls a Copernican revolution in philosophy by turning the focus of philosophy from metaphysical speculation about the nature of reality to a critical examination of the nature of the thinking and perceiving mind. In effect, Kant tells us that reality is a joint creation of external reality and the human mind and that it is only regarding the latter that we can acquire any certain knowledge. In order to understand what we can, we must therefore seek to understand how our minds shape and change the sensations that we receive.

 

 

 

Critiques of Kant:

Kant has earned the great compliment of having detractors who criticize him with great insight and ingenuity. German idealism, which dominated nineteenth-century philosophy, finds its footing by attacking Kant’s conception of things-in-themselves. Idealists such as Hegel argue that there is something deeply suspicious about these mysterious entities, which Kant claims are the source of our sensations while claiming we can have no direct knowledge of them. Idealism jettisons things-in-themselves and the whole noumenal realm, arguing instead that reality consists primarily of mental phenomena.

Analytic philosophy, which is one of the leading schools of twentieth-century philosophy, also gets its start through an attack on Kant. The logician Gottlob Frege criticizes Kant for basing the analytic–synthetic distinction on the subject-predicate form of grammar, which is not a necessary feature of the logical structure of language or reality. Frege argues that we should base the analytic–synthetic distinction on whether we justify a given judgment by appealing to its logical form or to empirical investigation and that, according to this distinction, the category of the synthetic a priori becomes unnecessary. Kant is only able to argue that geometry, for instance, relies on synthetic a priori knowledge because he fails to distinguish between pure geometry—the stuff of mathematical axioms and proofs—and empirical geometry—the application of geometrical principles to science. Pure geometry is a priori, but it is also analytic, since it is justified according to logical principles alone. Empirical geometry is synthetic, but it is also a posteriori, since we only learn from experience what sort of geometry applies to the real world.

 

KANT’S INFLUENCE TODAY:

Kant’s influence has been revolutionary. No philosopher since Kant has remained entirely untouched by his ideas. Even when the reaction to Kant is negative, he is the source of great inspiration.

1)      Kant has cut off God or the metaphysical from discussion today by saying we cannot get to Him (we only have access to the phenomenal).

 

2)       Goodness is defined as behaving rationally, and behaving rationally is defined as acting in accord with what we discover through thinking at the phenomenal level, not the meta-physical/noumenal level. This leads to man determining truth as he perceives it, not as God perceives it.

 

3)      It also pushes God out of thought or conversation altogether, since he is by definition unknowable and inaccessible.

 

Political Influence:

1)      He shaped our understanding of liberalism in his emphasis on individual autonomy.

 

2)      He shaped our understanding of representative democracy with his distinction between republics (he implies representative democracy) and democracy (he means direct democracy)

 

3)      He gave the idea for the UN with his emphasis on a perpetual peace between republics by creating a body similar to a World Government. 

4)      He developed the idea of 'categorical imperative' and founded the strongest secular moral doctrine. (Critique of practical reason). 

 

Judgment on Beauty and Argument For Designer (God)

Kant’s account of beauty as based in subjective feeling as well as his struggles with teleology stem from his desire to refute all metaphysical proofs of God. Kant is by no means an atheist, and he makes forceful arguments for why we ought to believe in God. However, God is the ultimate thing-in-itself, and so, according to Kant’s epistemology, the nature and even the existence of God are fundamentally unknowable. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant provides refutations for all the main “proofs” of God’s existence, one of which is the Argument from Design. According to this argument, the patterns and formal perfection in nature suggest the presence of an intelligent designer. Kant argues that our judgment of beauty is a subjective feeling, even though it possesses universal validity, in part because arguing that beauty is objective would play into the hands of those who make the Argument from Design. If beauty were an objective property of certain objects in nature, the question would naturally arise of how these objects were bestowed with beauty. This question would provide a toehold for the Argument from Design, an outcome that Kant is determined to avoid.

 

 

The Ethics of Autonomy (and discussion on morality)

 

Kant argues that since reason is the source of morality, goodness and badness should be dictated by reason. To act badly, according to Kant, is to violate the maxims laid out by one’s reason, or to formulate maxims that one could not consistently will as universal laws. In other words, immorality is a form of irrationality: badness results from violating the laws of reason.

According to Kant, our rationality is what makes us human, so by acting irrationally, and hence immorally, we also compromise our humanity. Kant’s answer to the question “Or else what?” is that we diminish ourselves as rational human beings by acting immorally. Only by behaving rationally do we show ourselves to be autonomous beings, in control of the passions and appetites that might lead us to act against our better judgment.

We can determine the worth of the motive behind any given moral action by asking whether we could turn that motive into a universally applicable maxim. Reason is the same at all times and for all people, so morality too should be universal. Therefore, an action is moral only if it embodies a maxim that we could will to be a universal law.

 

Kant calls it a “categorical imperative” that we must act in such a way that we could will the maxim according to which we act to be a universal law. He contrasts this with the “hypothetical imperative,” which would demand that we act to achieve certain ends (Thus he is not utilitarian). The maxim of a hypothetical imperative would assert, “do such-and-such if you want to achieve such-and-such result.” There are no ifs in moral action, according to Kant. Morality works according to a categorical imperative because we must act in a given way simply because the motive is admirable, not because we have calculated that we can achieve certain ends as a result.

 

Once we recognize the universality of moral law, we must also recognize that it applies equally to all people. Acting morally, then, requires that we recognize other people as moral agents and always treat them as ends in themselves, not as means by which we can achieve our own ends. We must also ensure that our actions do not prevent other people from acting in accordance with moral law. Kant envisions an ideal society as a “kingdom of ends,” in which people are at once both the authors and the subjects of the laws they obey.

 

A postmodernist critique of Kant would suggest that Kant is insufficiently sensitive to the great variety of individual experience and that it is paternalistic, if not arrogant, to assume that one can apply one’s own moral standards to peoples and cultures of which one has no understanding. A Kantian would reply that Kantian ethics are based in a shared humanity that applies to all people. Certainly, we adopt different practical identities, such that we might hold different values depending on whether we identify, say, as a Canadian, a postal worker, or a jazz aficionado. However, Kantian ethics are based not on these particular practical identities but on our shared identity as rational beings, which we cannot revoke without revoking our humanity.

Morality is based in the concept of freedom, or autonomy. Someone with a free, or autonomous, will does not simply act but is able to reflect and decide whether to act in a given way. This act of deliberation distinguishes an autonomous will from a heteronomous will. In deliberating, we act according to a law we ourselves dictate, not according to the dictates of passion or impulse. We can claim to have an autonomous will even if we act always according to universal moral laws or maxims because we submit to these laws upon rational reflection.

 

KANT ON FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM

Kant answers the tricky question of free will and determinism—how can we at once assert that we have a free will and that we live in a world that functions according to necessary physical laws?—by drawing on his distinction from the Critique of Pure Reason between the phenomenal world of appearances and the noumenal world of things-in-themselves. Physical laws apply only to appearances, whereas the will is a thing-in-itself about which we have no direct knowledge. Whether the will is actually free we can never know, but we still act in accordance with the idea of freedom.

 

Kant recognizes that grounding morality in an externally imposed law compromises the autonomy of the will: in such a case, we act under a feeling of compulsion to a will that is not our own, and so we are not entirely accountable for our actions. We act autonomously only if we act in accordance with a law dictated by our own reason.

 

 

 

KANT’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: Classical Republicanism

Classical republicanism became extremely popular in the Classicism and Enlightenment, playing a central role in the thought of political philosophy since Hobbes, through John Locke, Giambattista Vico, Montesquieu, Rousseau, until Kant. Some historians have seen classical republican ideas influencing early American political thought.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction."

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

 

1.       Kant believed we have autonomous free will, which must be preserved. Government then should only be by the consent of the governed, built on a social contract of the consent of the governed whereby members of society give up some of their rights to have others protected for them by government.

 

2.       The biggest invention of Kant in the philosophy of law and the political philosophy is the doctrine of Rechtsstaat. According to this doctrine, the power of the state is limited in order to protect citizens from the arbitrary exercise of authority. In a Rechtsstaat the citizens share legally based civil liberties and they can use the courts.

 

3.       Kant’s approach is based on the supremacy of a country’s written constitution. This supremacy must create guarantees for implementation of his central idea: a permanent peaceful life as a basic condition for the happiness of its people and their prosperity. Kant was basing his doctrine on none other but constitutionalism and constitutional government. Kant had thus formulated the main problem of constitutionalism, “The constitution of a state is eventually based on the morals of its citizens, which, in its turns, is based on the goodness of this constitution.” Kant’s idea is the foundation for the constitutional theory of the twenty-first century.

 

4.       Government should be a form of mixed government, with checks and balances, in order to avoid tyranny, even the tyranny of the majority as in a direct democracy. The government itself is limited by a written constitution which it must abide by, in order to avoid the tyranny of government.

 

5.       Mixed government, also known as a mixed constitution, is a form of government that integrates elements of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. In a mixed government, some issues (often defined in a constitution) are decided by the majority of the people, some other issues by few, and some other issues by a single person (also often defined in a constitution). The idea is commonly treated as an antecedent of separation of powers.

 

6.       This is similar in some ways to our own government, which has checks and balances with three branches of government, legislative, executive, judiciary. We also have a constitution.   

 

Most controversial is the classical republican view of liberty and how, or if, this view differed from that later developed by liberalism. Previously, many scholars accepted the stance of Isaiah Berlin that republicanism was tilted more toward positive liberty rather than the negative liberty characterizing liberalism.[11] In recent years this thesis has been challenged, and Philip Pettit argues that republican liberty is based upon "non-domination" while liberal freedom is based upon "non-interference." Another view is that liberalism views liberty as pre-social while classical republicans saw true liberty as a product of society. Because liberty was an important part of republican thought, many republican thinkers were appropriated by the theory of classical liberalism.