A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'
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Title: A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'
Author: Norman Kemp Smith
Release date: August 27, 2013 [eBook #43572]
Language: English
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Index Contents (etext transcriber's note)
A COMMENTARY
TO
KANT’S ‘CRITIQUE OF
PURE REASON’
BY
NORMAN KEMP SMITH, D.PHIL.
McCOSH PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
AUTHOR OF
‘STUDIES IN THE CARTESIAN PHILOSOPHY’
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1918
COPYRIGHT
TO THE MEMORY
OF
ROBERT ADAMSON
WISE IN COUNSEL, IN FRIENDSHIP UNFAILING
GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
PREFACE
The _Critique of Pure Reason_ is more obscure and difficult than even a
metaphysical treatise has any right to be. The difficulties are not
merely due to defects of exposition; they multiply rather than diminish
upon detailed study; and, as I shall endeavour to show in this
_Commentary_, are traceable to two main causes, the composite nature of
the text, written at various dates throughout the period 1772-1780, and
the conflicting tendencies of Kant’s own thinking.
The _Commentary_ is both expository and critical; and in exposition no
less than in criticism I have sought to subordinate the treatment of
textual questions and of minor issues to the systematic discussion of
the central problems. Full use is made of the various selections from
Kant’s private papers that have appeared, at intervals, since the
publication of his _Lectures on Metaphysics_ in 1821. Their significance
has not hitherto been generally recognised in English books upon Kant.
They seem to me to be of capital importance for the right understanding
of the _Critique_.
Some apology is perhaps required for publishing a work of this character
at the present moment. It was completed, and arrangements made for its
publication, shortly before the outbreak of war. The printers have, I
understand, found in it a useful stop-gap to occupy them in the
intervals of more pressing work; and now that the type must be released,
I trust that in spite of, or even because of, the overwhelming
preoccupations of the war, there may be some few readers to whom the
volume may be not unwelcome. That even amidst the distractions of actual
campaigning metaphysical speculation can serve as a refuge and a solace
is shown by the memorable example of General Smuts. He has himself told
us that on his raid into Cape Colony in the South African War he carried
with him for evening reading the _Critique of Pure Reason_. Is it
surprising that our British generals, pitted against so unconventional
an opponent, should have been worsted in the battle of wits?
The _Critique of Pure Reason_ is a philosophical classic that marks a
turning-point in the history of philosophy, and no interpretation, even
though now attempted after the lapse of a hundred years, can hope to be
adequate or final. Some things are clearer to us than they were to
Kant’s contemporaries; in other essential ways our point of view has
receded from his, and the historical record, that should determine our
judgments, is far from complete. But there is a further difficulty of an
even more serious character. The _Critique_ deals with issues that are
still controversial, and their interpretation is possible only from a
definite standpoint. The limitations of this standpoint and of the
philosophical _milieu_ in which it has been acquired unavoidably
intervene to distort or obscure our apprehension of the text. Arbitrary
and merely personal judgments I have, however, endeavoured to avoid. My
sole aim has been to reach, as far as may prove feasible, an unbiassed
understanding of Kant’s great work.
Among German commentators I owe most to Vaihinger, Adickes, B. Erdmann,
Cohen, and Riehl, especially to the first named. The chief English
writers upon Kant are Green, Caird, and Adamson. In so far as Green and
Caird treat the Critical philosophy as a half-way stage to the Hegelian
standpoint I find myself frequently in disagreement with them; but my
indebtedness to their writings is much greater than my occasional
criticisms of their views may seem to imply. With Robert Adamson I
enjoyed the privilege of personal discussions at a time when his earlier
view of Kant’s teaching was undergoing revision in a more radical manner
than is apparent even in his posthumously published University lectures.
To the stimulus of his suggestions the writing of this _Commentary_ is
largely due.
My first study of the _Critique_ was under the genial and inspiring
guidance of Sir Henry Jones. With characteristic kindliness he has read
through my manuscript and has disclosed to me many defects of
exposition and argument. The same service has been rendered me by
Professor G. Dawes Hicks, whose criticisms have been very valuable,
particularly since they come from a student of Kant who on many
fundamental points takes an opposite view from my own.
I have also to thank my colleague, Professor Oswald Veblen, for much
helpful discussion of Kant’s doctrines of space and time, and of
mathematical reasoning.
Mr. H. H. Joachim has read the entire proofs, and I have made frequent
modifications to meet his very searching criticisms. I have also
gratefully adopted his revisions of my translations from the _Critique_.
Similar acknowledgments are due to my colleague, Professor A. A. Bowman,
and to my friend Dr. C. W. Hendel.
I have in preparation a translation of the _Critique of Pure Reason_,
and am responsible for the translations of all passages given in the
present work. In quoting from Kant’s other writings, I have made use of
the renderings of Abbott, Bernard, and Mahaffy; but have occasionally
allowed myself the liberty of introducing alterations.
Should readers who are already well acquainted with the _Critique_
desire to use my _Commentary_ for its systematic discussions of Kant’s
teaching, rather than as an accompaniment to their study of the text, I
may refer them to those sections which receive italicised headings in
the table of contents.
NORMAN KEMP SMITH.
LONDON, _January 1918_.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PAGE
I. TEXTUAL--
Kant's Method of composing the _Critique of Pure Reason_ xix
II. HISTORICAL--
Kant's Relation to Hume and to Leibniz xxv
III. GENERAL--
1. The Nature of the _a priori_ xxxiii
2. Kant's Contribution to the Science of Logic xxxvi
3. The Nature of Consciousness xxxix
4. Phenomenalism, Kant's Substitute for Subjectivism xlv
5. The Distinction between Human and Animal Intelligence xlvii
6. The Nature and Conditions of Self-Consciousness l
7. Kant's threefold Distinction between Sensibility,
Understanding, and Reason lii
8. The place of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in
Kant's Philosophical System lv
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON[1]
_Title_ 1
_Motto_ 4
_Dedication to Freiherr von Zedlitz_ 6
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 8
_Comment on Preface_ 10
_Dogmatism_, _Scepticism_, _Criticism_ 13
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 17
_The Copernican Hypothesis_ 22
INTRODUCTION 26
_Comment upon the Argument of Kant's Introduction_ 33
_How are Synthetic_ a priori _Judgments possible?_ 43
_The Analytic and Synthetic Methods_ 44
_Purpose and Scope of the Critique_ 56
_Kant's relation to Hume_ 61
_Meaning of the term Transcendental_ 73
THE TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF ELEMENTS
Part I. THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC 79-166
_Definition of Terms_ 79
_Kant's conflicting Views of Space_ 88
Section I. SPACE 99
_Kant's Attitude to the Problems of Modern Geometry_ 117
Section II. TIME 123
_Kant's Views regarding the Nature of Arithmetical Science_ 128
_Kant's conflicting Views of Time_ 134
General Observations on the Transcendental Aesthetic 143
_The Distinction between Appearance and Illusion_ 148
_Kant's Relation to Berkeley_ 155
_The Paradox of Incongruous Counterparts_ 161
Part II. THE TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC 167
Introduction 167
I. Logic in General 167
II. Transcendental Logic 170
III. The Division of General Logic into Analytic
and Dialectic 172
Division I. THE TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYTIC 174
Book I. THE ANALYTIC OF CONCEPTS 175
Chapter I. THE CLUE TO THE DISCOVERY OF ALL PURE CONCEPTS
OF THE UNDERSTANDING 175
Section I. The Logical Use of the Understanding 176
_Comment on Kant's Argument_ 176
_Stages in the Development of Kant's
Metaphysical Deduction_ 186
Section II. The Logical Function of the Understanding
in Judgment 192
Section III. The Categories on Pure Concepts of the
Understanding 194
_Distinction between Logical Forms and Categories_ 195
Part II. THE TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC--_Continued._
Chapter II. DEDUCTION OF THE PURE CONCEPTS OF THE UNDERSTANDING 202
_Analysis of the Text: the Four Stages in the
Development of Kant's Views_ 202-234
I. _Enumeration of the Four Stages_ 203
II. _Detailed Analysis of the Four Stages_ 204
_Kant's Doctrine of the Transcendental Object_ 204
III. _Evidence yielded by the "Reflexionen" and "Lose
Blätter" in Support of the Analysis of the
Text_ 231
IV. _Connected Statement and Discussion of Kant's
Subjective and Objective Deductions in the
First Edition_ 234
_Distinction between the Subjective and the Objective
Deductions_ 235
_The Subjective Deduction in its initial empirical
Stages_ 245
_Objective Deduction as given in the First Edition_ 248
_The later Stages of the Subjective Deduction_ 263
_The Distinction between Phenomenalism and Subjectivism_ 270
_Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the
Second Edition_ 284
_The Doctrine of Inner Sense_ 291
_Kant's Refutations of Idealism_ 298
_Inner Sense and Apperception_ 321
Book II. THE ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES 332
Chapter I. THE SCHEMATISM OF PURE CONCEPTS OF
THE UNDERSTANDING 334
Chapter II. SYSTEM OF ALL PRINCIPLES OF PURE UNDERSTANDING 342
1. The Axioms of Intuition 347
2. The Anticipations of Perception 349
3. The Analogies of Experience 355
_A._ First Analogy 358
_B._ Second Analogy 363
_Schopenhauer's Criticism of Kant's Argument_ 365
_Kant's Subjectivist and Phenomenalist Views
of the Causal Relation_ 373
_Reply to Further Criticisms of Kant's Argument_ 377
Part II. THE TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC--_Continued._
_C._ Third Analogy 381
_Schopenhauer's Criticism of Kant's Argument_ 387
4. The Postulates of Empirical Thought in General 391
Chapter III. ON THE GROUND OF THE DISTINCTION
OF ALL OBJECTS WHATEVER INTO
PHENOMENA AND NOUMENA 404
_Relevant Passages in the Section on Amphiboly_ 410
_Alterations in the Second Edition_ 412
_Comment on Kant's Argument_ 414
Appendix. The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection 418
Division II. THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC 424
_Introductory Comment upon the composite Origin and
conflicting Tendencies of the Dialectic_ 425
_The History and Development of Kant's Views in
regard to the Problems of the Dialectic_ 431
Introduction 441
I. Transcendental Illusion 441
II. Pure Reason as the Seat of Transcendental Illusion 442
Book I. THE CONCEPTS OF PURE REASON 446
Section I. Ideas in General 447
Section II. The Transcendental Ideas 450
Section III. System of the Transcendental Ideas 453
Book II. THE DIALECTICAL INFERENCES OF PURE REASON 455
Chapter I. THE PARALOGISMS OF PURE REASON 455
First Paralogism: of Substantiality 457
Second Paralogism: of Simplicity 458
Third Paralogism: of Personality 461
Fourth Paralogism: of Ideality 462
_Second Edition Statement of the Paralogisms_ 466
_Is the Notion of the Self a necessary Idea of Reason?_ 473
Chapter II. THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON 478
Section I. System of the Cosmological Ideas 478
Section II. Antithetic of Pure Reason 480
_Comment on Kant's Method of Argument_ 481
First Antinomy 483
Second Antinomy 488
Third Antinomy 492
Fourth Antinomy 495
Part II. THE TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC--_Continued._
Section III. The Interest of Reason in this Self-Conflict 498
Section IV. Of the Transcendental Problems of Pure
Reason in so far as they absolutely must
be capable of Solution 499
Section V. Sceptical Representation of the Cosmological
Questions 501
Section VI. Transcendental Idealism as the Key to the
Solution of the Cosmological Dialectic 503
Section VII. Critical Decision of the Cosmological
Conflict of Reason with itself 504
Section VIII. The Regulative Principle of Pure Reason
in regard to the Cosmological Ideas 506
Section IX. The Empirical Employment of the Regulative
Principles of Reason in regard
to all Cosmological Ideas 508
Solution of the First and Second Antinomies 508
Remarks on the Distinction between the
Mathematical-Transcendental and the
Dynamical-Transcendental Ideas 510
_Comment on Kant's Method of Argument_ 510
Solution of the Third Antinomy 512
Possibility of harmonising Causality through
Freedom with the Universal Law of
Natural Necessity 513
Explanation of the Relation of Freedom to
Necessity of Nature 514
_Comment on Kant's Method of Argument_ 517
Solution of the Fourth Antinomy 518
Concluding Note on the whole Antinomy
of Pure Reason 519
_Concluding Comment on Kant's Doctrine
of the Antinomies_ 519
Chapter III. THE IDEAL OF PURE REASON 522
Sections I. and II. The Transcendental Ideal 522
_Comment on Kant's Method of
Argument_ 524
Section III. The Speculative Arguments in Proof of the
Existence of a Supreme Being 525
Section IV. The Impossibility of an Ontological Proof 527
_Comment on Kant's Method of Argument_ 528
Part II. THE TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC--_Continued._
Section V. The Impossibility of a Cosmological Proof
of the Existence of God 531
_Comment on Kant's Method of Argument_ 533
Discovery and Explanation of the Transcendental
Illusion in all Transcendental
Proof of the Existence of a necessary
Being 534
_Comment on Kant's Method of Argument_ 535
Section VI. The Impossibility of the Physico-Theological
Proof 538
Section VII. Criticism of all Theology based on speculative
Principles of Reason 541
_Concluding Comment_ 541
APPENDIX TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC 543
The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason 543
_Hypotheses not permissible in Philosophy_ 543
On the Final Purpose of the Natural Dialectic of Human
Reason 552
_Concluding Comment on the Dialectic_ 558
_APPENDIX A._
THE TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF METHODS 563
Chapter I. THE DISCIPLINE OF PURE REASON 563
Section I. The Discipline of Pure Reason in its Dogmatic
Employment 563
Section II. The Discipline of Pure Reason in its
Polemical Employment 567
Section III. The Discipline of Pure Reason in regard
to Hypotheses 568
Section IV. The Discipline of Pure Reason in regard
to its Proofs 568
Chapter II. THE CANON OF PURE REASON 569
Section I. The Ultimate End of the Pure Use of our
Reason 569
Section II. The Ideal of the Highest Good, as a Determining
Ground of the Ultimate End of
Pure Reason 570
Section III. Opining, Knowing, and Believing 576
Chapter III. THE ARCHITECTONIC OF PURE REASON 579
Chapter IV. THE HISTORY OF PURE REASON 582
_APPENDIX B._
_A more detailed Statement of Kant's Relations to his Philosophical
Predecessors_ 583
INDEX 607
NOTE
In all references to the _Kritik der Reinen Vernunft_ I have given the
original pagings of both the first and second editions. References to
Kant’s other works are, whenever possible, to the volumes thus far
issued in the new Berlin edition. As the _Reflexionen Kants zur Kritik
der reinen Vernunft_ had not been published in this edition at the time
when the _Commentary_ was completed, the numbering given is that of B.
Erdmann’s edition of 1884.
ABBREVIATIONS
Berlin edition of Kant’s works _W_
Pagings in the first edition of the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_ A
Pagings in the second edition B
Adickes’ edition of the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_ (1889) _K_
INTRODUCTION
I. TEXTUAL
KANT’S METHOD OF COMPOSING THE ‘CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON’
Seldom, in the history of literature, has a work been more
conscientiously and deliberately thought out, or more hastily thrown
together, than the _Critique of Pure Reason_. The following is the
account which Kant in a letter to Moses Mendelssohn (August 16, 1783)
has given of its composition:
”[Though the _Critique_ is] the outcome of reflection which had
occupied me for a period of at least twelve years, I brought it to
completion in the greatest haste within some four to five months,
giving the closest attention to the content, but with little
thought of the exposition or of rendering it easy of comprehension
by the reader--a decision which I have never regretted, since
otherwise, had I any longer delayed, and sought to give it a more
popular form, the work would probably never have been completed at
all. This defect can, however, be gradually removed, now that the
work exists in a rough form.”[2]
These statements must be allowed the greater weight as Kant, in another
letter (to Garve, August 7, 1783), has given them in almost the same
words:
“I freely admit that I have not expected that my book should meet
with an immediate favourable reception. The exposition of the
materials which for more than twelve successive years I had been
carefully maturing, was not composed in a sufficiently suitable
manner for general comprehension. For the perfecting of its
exposition several years would have been required, whereas I
brought it to completion in some four to five months, in the fear
that, on longer delay, so prolonged a labour might finally become
burdensome, and that my increasing years (I am already in my
sixtieth year) would perhaps incapacitate me, while I am still the
sole possessor of my complete system.”[3]
The twelve years here referred to are 1769-1780; the phrase “at least
twelve years” indicates Kant’s appreciation of the continuity of his
mental development. Hume’s first influence upon Kant is probably to be
dated prior to 1760. The choice, however, of the year 1769 is not
arbitrary; it is the year of Kant’s adoption of the semi-Critical
position recorded in the _Inaugural Dissertation_ (1770).[4] The “four
to five months” may be dated in the latter half of 1780. The printing of
the _Critique_ was probably commenced in December or January 1780-1781.
But the _Critique_ is not merely defective in clearness or popularity of
exposition. That is a common failing of metaphysical treatises,
especially when they are in the German language, and might pass without
special remark. What is much more serious, is that Kant flatly
contradicts himself in almost every chapter; and that there is hardly a
technical term which is not employed by him in a variety of different
and conflicting senses. As a writer, he is the least exact of all the
great thinkers.
So obvious are these inconsistencies that every commentator has felt
constrained to offer some explanation of their occurrence. Thus Caird
has asserted that Kant opens his exposition from the non-Critical
standpoint of ordinary consciousness, and that he discloses the final
position, towards which he has all along been working, only through
repeated modifications of his preliminary statements. Such a view,
however, cannot account either for the specific manner of occurrence or
for the actual character of the contradictions of which the _Critique_
affords so many examples. These are by no means limited to the opening
sections of its main divisions; and careful examination of the text
shows that they have no such merely expository origin. The publication
of Kant’s _Reflexionen_ and _Lose Blätter_, and the devoted labours of
Benno Erdmann, Vaihinger, Adickes, Reicke and others, have, indeed,
placed the issue upon an entirely new plane. It can now be proved that
the _Critique_ is not a unitary work, and that in the five months in
which, as Kant tells us, it was “brought to completion” (_zu Stande
gebracht_), it was not actually written, but was pieced together by the
combining of manuscripts written at various dates throughout the period
1772-1780.
Kant’s correspondence in these years contains the repeated assertion
that he expected to be able to complete the work within some three or
six months. This implies that it was already, at least as early as 1777,
in great part committed to writing. In 1780 Kant must therefore have
had a large body of manuscript at his disposal. The recently published
_Lose Blätter_ are, indeed, part of it. And as we shall have constant
occasion to observe, the _Critique_ affords ample evidence of having
been more or less mechanically constructed through the piecing together
of older manuscript, supplemented, no doubt, by the insertion of
connecting links, and modified by occasional alterations to suit the new
context. Kant, it would almost seem, objected to nothing so much as the
sacrifice of an argument once consecrated by committal to paper. If it
could be inserted, no matter at what cost of repetition, or even
confusion, he insisted upon its insertion. Thus the _Subjective_ and
_Objective Deductions_ of the first edition can, as we shall find, be
broken up into at least four distinct layers, which, like geological
strata, remain to the bewilderment of the reader who naturally expects a
unified system, but to the enlightenment of the student, once the clues
that serve to identify and to date them have been detected. To cite
another example: in the _Second Analogy_, as given in the first edition,
the main thesis is demonstrated in no less than five distinct proofs,
some of which are repetitions; and when Kant restated the argument in
the second edition, he allowed the five proofs to remain, but
superimposed still another upon them. Kant does, indeed, in the second
edition omit some few passages from various parts of the _Critique_; but
this is in the main owing to his desire to protect himself against
serious misunderstanding to which, as he found, he had very unguardedly
laid himself open. The alterations of the second edition are chiefly of
the nature of additions.
Adickes’ theory[5] that Kant in the “four to five months” composed a
brief outline of his entire argument, and that it was upon the framework
of this outline that the _Critique_ was elaborated out of the older
manuscript, may possibly be correct. It has certainly enabled Adickes to
cast much light upon many textual problems. But his own supplementary
hypothesis in regard to the section on the _Antinomies_, namely, that it
formed an older and separate treatise, may very profitably be further
extended. Surely it is unlikely that with the expectation, continued
over many years, of completion within a few months, Kant did not
possess, at least for the _Aesthetic_, _Dialectic_, and _Methodology_, a
general outline, that dated further back than 1780. And doubtless this
outline was itself altered, patched, and recast, in proportion as
insight into the problems of the _Analytic_, the problems, that is to
say, which caused publication to be so long deferred, deepened and took
final form.
The composite character of the _Critique_ is largely concealed by the
highly elaborate, and extremely artificial, arrangement of its parts. To
the general plan, based upon professedly logical principles, Kant has
himself given the title, architectonic; and he carries it out with a
thoroughness to which all other considerations, and even at times those
of sound reasoning, are made to give way. Indeed, he clings to it with
the unreasoning affection which not infrequently attaches to a favourite
hobby. He lovingly elaborates even its minor detail, and is rewarded by
a framework so extremely complicated that the most heterogeneous
contents can be tidily arranged, side by side, in its many compartments.
By its uniformity and rigour it gives the appearance of systematic order
even when such order is wholly absent.
But we have still to consider the chief reason for the contradictory
character of the contents of the _Critique_. It is inseparably bound up
with what may perhaps be regarded as Kant’s supreme merit as a
philosophical thinker, especially as shown in the first
_Critique_,--namely, his open-minded recognition of the complexity of
his problems, and of the many difficulties which lie in the way of any
solution which he is himself able to propound. Kant’s method of working
seems to have consisted in alternating between the various possible
solutions, developing each in turn, in the hope that some midway
position, which would share in the merits of all, might finally disclose
itself. When, as frequently happened, such a midway solution could not
be found, he developed his thought along the parallel lines of the
alternative views.
“You know that I do not approach reasonable objections with the
intention merely of refuting them, but that in thinking them over I
always weave them into my judgments, and afford them the
opportunity of overturning all my most cherished beliefs. I
entertain the hope that by thus viewing my judgments impartially
from the standpoint of others some third view that will improve
upon my previous insight may be obtainable.... Long experience has
taught me that insight into a subject which I am seeking to master
is not to be forced, or even hastened, by sheer effort, but demands
a fairly prolonged period during which I return again and again to
the same concepts, viewing them in all their aspects and in their
widest possible connections, while in the intervals the sceptical
spirit awakens, and makes trial whether my conclusions can
withstand a searching criticism.”[6] “In mental labour of so
delicate a character nothing is more harmful than preoccupation
with extraneous matters. The mind, though not constantly on the
stretch, must still, alike in its idle and in its favourable
moments, lie uninterruptedly open to any chance suggestion which
may present itself. Relaxations and diversions must maintain its
powers in freedom and mobility, so that it may be enabled to view
the object afresh from every side, and so to enlarge its point of
view from a microscopic to a universal outlook that it adopts in
turn every conceivable standpoint, verifying the observations of
each by means of all the others.”[7] “I am not of the opinion of
the well-meaning writer who has recommended us never to allow
doubts in regard to a matter upon which we have once made up our
minds. In pure philosophy that is not feasible. Indeed the
understanding has in itself a natural objection to any such
procedure. We must consider propositions in all their various
applications; even when they may not seem to require a special
proof, we must make trial of their opposites, and in this way fight
for delay, until the truth becomes in all respects evident.”[8]
That these are no mere pious expressions of good intention, but
represent Kant’s actual method of working, is amply proved by the
contents of the _Critique_. We find Kant constantly alternating between
opposed standpoints, to no one of which he quite definitely commits
himself, and constantly restating his principles in the effort to remove
the objections to which, as he recognises, they continue to lie open.
The _Critique_, as already stated, is not the exposition of a single
unified system, but is the record of Kant’s manifold attempts to
formulate and to solve his many-sided problems. Even those portions of
the _Critique_ which embody his latest views show that Kant is still
unwilling to sacrifice insight to consistency. When he is guilty of
special pleading--for he cannot be altogether absolved even from that
charge--it is in the interests of his logical architectonic, for which,
as I have said, he cherishes a quite unreasoning affection, and not of
his central principles. So far from concealing difficulties, or unduly
dwelling upon the favouring considerations, Kant himself emphasises the
outstanding objections to which his conclusions remain subject. If his
teaching is on certain points very definite, it is in other hardly less
important respects largely tentative.
The value of Kant’s _Critique_ as an introduction to modern philosophy
is greatly enhanced by this method of procedure. The student who has
steeped himself in the atmosphere of the _Critique_, however
dissatisfied he may perhaps be with many of its doctrines, has become
familiar with the main requirements which a really adequate metaphysics
must fulfil, or at least will have acquired a due sense of the
complexity of the problems with which it deals.
Recognition of the composite nature of the text will safeguard us in two
ways. In the first place, citation of single passages is quite
inconclusive. Not only must all the relevant passages be collated; they
must be interpreted in the light of an historical understanding of the
various stages in Kant’s development. We must also be prepared to find
that on certain main questions Kant hesitates between opposed positions,
and that he nowhere definitively commits himself to any quite final
expression of view.
Secondly, we cannot proceed on the assumption that Kant’s maturest
teaching comes where, had the _Critique_ been a unitary work, composed
upon a definite and previously thought out plan, we should naturally
expect to find it, namely, in its concluding portions. The teaching of
much of the _Dialectic_, especially in its account of the nature of the
phenomenal world and of its relation to the knowing mind, is only
semi-Critical. This is also true of Kant’s _Introduction_ to the
_Critique_. Introductions are usually written last; and probably Kant’s
_Introduction_ was written after the completion of the _Aesthetic_, of
the _Dialectic_, and of the _Analytic_ in its earlier forms. But it
bears all the signs of having been composed prior to the working out of
several of his most characteristic doctrines in the central parts of the
_Analytic_.
Thus both Kant’s introductory statements of the aims and purposes of the
_Critique_, and his application of his results in the solution of
metaphysical problems, fail to represent in any adequate fashion the new
and revolutionary principles to which he very gradually but successfully
worked his way. The key to the _Critique_ is given in the central
portions of the _Analytic_, especially in the _Deduction of the
Categories_. The other parts of the _Critique_ reveal the Critical
doctrines only as gradually emerging from the entangling influence of
pre-Critical assumptions. Their teaching has to be radically remodelled
before they can be made to harmonise with what, in view both of their
intrinsic character and of the corresponding alterations in the second
edition, must be regarded as Kant’s maturest utterances.
This was a task which Kant never himself attempted. For no sooner had he
attained to comparative clearness in regard to his new Critical
principles and briefly expounded them in the _Analytic_ of the first
edition, than he hastened to apply them in the spheres of morality,
aesthetics, and teleology. When the _Critique_ appeared in 1781 he was
fifty-seven years of age; and he seems to have feared that if he
allowed these purely theoretical problems, which had already occupied
his main attention for “at least twelve years,” to detain him longer, he
would be debarred from developing and placing on permanent record the
new metaphysics of ethics which, as the references in the first
_Critique_ show, had already begun to shape itself in his mind. To have
expended further energy upon the perfecting of his theoretical
philosophy would have endangered its own best fruits. Even the
opportunity in 1787 of a second edition of the _Critique_ he used very
sparingly, altering or adding only where occasional current
criticism--his puzzled contemporaries having still for the most part
maintained a discreet silence--had clearly shown that his modes of
exposition were incomplete or misleading.
II. HISTORICAL
KANT’S RELATION TO HUME AND TO LEIBNIZ
Kant’s manner of formulating his fundamental problem--How are synthetic
_a priori_ judgments possible?--may well seem to the modern reader to
imply an unduly scholastic and extremely rationalistic method of
approach. Kant’s reasons for adopting it have, unfortunately, been
largely obscured, owing to the mistaken interpretation which has usually
been given to certain of his personal utterances. They have been
supposed to prove that the immediate occasion of the above formula was
Hume’s discussion of the problem of causality in the _Enquiry into the
Human Understanding_. Kant, it is argued, could not have been acquainted
with Hume’s earlier and more elaborate _Treatise on Human Nature_, of
which there was then no translation; and his references to Hume must
therefore concern only the later work.
Vaihinger has done valuable service in disputing this reading of Kant’s
autobiographical statements. Kant does not himself make direct mention
of the _Enquiry_, and the passages in the _Critique_ and in the
_Prolegomena_[9] in which Hume’s teaching is under consideration seem
rather to point to the wider argument of the _Treatise_. This is a
matter of no small importance; for if Vaihinger’s view can be
established, it will enable us to appreciate, in a manner otherwise
impossible, how Kant should have come to regard the problem of _a priori
synthesis_ as being the most pressing question in the entire field of
speculative philosophy.
The essential difference between the _Treatise_ and the _Enquiry_, from
the standpoint of their bearing upon Critical issues, lies in the wider
scope and more radical character of the earlier work. The _Enquiry_
discusses the problem of causality only in the form in which it emerges
in _particular_ causal judgments, _i.e._ as to our grounds for asserting
that this or that effect is due to this or that cause. In the
_Treatise_, Hume raises the broader question as to our right to
postulate that events must always be causally determined. In other
words, he there questions the validity of the _universal_ causal
principle, that whatever begins to exist must have a cause of existence;
and he does so on the explicit ground that it demands as necessary the
connecting of two concepts, that of an event and that of an antecedent
cause, between which _no connection of any kind_ can be detected by the
mind. The principle, that is to say, is not self-evident; it is
synthetic. The concept of an event and the concept of a cause are quite
separate and distinct ideas. Events can be conceived without our
requiring to think antecedent events upon which they are dependent. Nor
is the principle capable of demonstration. For if it be objected that in
questioning its validity we are committing ourselves to the impossible
assertion that events arise out of nothing, such argument is only
applicable if the principle be previously granted. If events do not
require a cause, it is as little necessary to seek their source in a
generation out of nothing as in anything positive. Similarly, when it is
argued that as all the parts of time and space are uniform, there must
be a cause determining an event to happen at one moment and in one place
rather than at some other time or place, the principle is again assumed.
There is no greater difficulty in supposing the time and place to be
fixed without a cause than in supposing the existence to be so
determined. The principle, Hume concludes, is non-rational in character.
It is an instrument useful for the organisation of experience; and for
that reason nature has determined us to its formation and acceptance.
Properly viewed, it expresses a merely instinctive belief, and is
explicable only in the naturalistic manner of our other propensities, as
necessary to the fulfilling of some practical need. “Nature has
determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel.”
From this naturalistic position Hume makes a no less vigorous attack
upon the empirical philosophies which profess to establish general
principles by inductive inference from the facts of experience. If the
principles which lie at the basis of our experience are non-rational in
character, the same must be true of our empirical judgments. They may
correctly describe the uniformities that have hitherto occurred in the
sequences of our sensations, and may express the natural expectations to
which they spontaneously give rise; but they must never be regarded as
capable of serving as a basis for inference. In eliminating _a priori_
principles, and appealing exclusively to sense-experience, the
empiricist removes all grounds of distinction between inductive
inference and custom-bred expectation. And since from this standpoint
the possibility of universal or abstract concepts--so Hume argues--must
also be denied, deductive inference must likewise be eliminated from
among the possible instruments at the disposal of the mind. So-called
inference is never the source of our beliefs; it is our fundamental
natural beliefs, as determined by the constitution of our nature in its
reaction upon external influences, that generate those expectations
which, however they may masquerade in logical costume, have as purely
natural a source as our sensations and feelings. Such, briefly and
dogmatically stated, is the sum and substance of Hume’s teaching.[10]
Now it was these considerations that, as it would seem, awakened Kant to
the problem of _a priori synthesis_. He was, and to the very last
remained, in entire agreement with Hume’s contention that the principle
of causality is neither self-evident nor capable of logical
demonstration, and he at once realised that what is true of this
principle must also hold of all the other principles fundamental to
science and philosophy. Kant further agreed that inductive inference
from the data of experience is only possible upon the prior acceptance
of rational principles independently established; and that we may not,
therefore, look to experience for proof of their validity. Thus with the
rejection of self-evidence as a feature of the _a priori_, and with the
consequent admission of its synthetic character, Kant is compelled to
acquiesce in the inevitableness of the dilemma which Hume propounds.
Either Hume’s sceptical conclusions must be accepted, or we must be able
to point to some criterion which is not subject to the defects of the
rationalist and empirical methods of proof, and which is adequate to
determine the validity or invalidity of general principles. Is there any
such alternative? Such is Kant’s problem as expressed in the formula:
How are synthetic _a priori_ judgments possible?
It is a very remarkable historical fact that notwithstanding the
clearness and cogency of Hume’s argument, and the appearance of such
competent thinkers as Thomas Reid in Scotland, Lambert and Crusius in
Germany, no less than thirty years should have elapsed before Hume found
a single reader capable of appreciating the teaching of the _Treatise_
at its true value.[11] Even Kant himself was not able from his reading
of the _Enquiry_ in 1756-1762 to realise the importance and bearing of
the main problem.[12] Though in the _Enquiry_ the wider issue regarding
the general principle of causality is not raised, the bearing of Hume’s
discussion, when interpreted in the light of Kant’s own teaching, is
sufficiently clear; and accordingly we cannot be absolutely certain that
it was not a re-reading of the _Enquiry_ or a recalling of its
argument[13] that suggested to Kant the central problem of his Critical
philosophy. The probability, however, is rather that this awakening took
place only indirectly through his becoming acquainted with the wider
argument of the _Treatise_ as revealed in James Beattie’s extremely
crude and unsympathetic criticism of Hume’s philosophy.[14] Beattie had
great natural ability, and considerable literary power. His prose
writings have a lucidity, a crispness, and a felicity of illustration
which go far to explain their widespread popularity in the latter half
of the eighteenth century. Their literary quality is, however, more than
counterbalanced by the absence of any genuine appreciation of the
deeper, speculative implications and consequences of the problems
discussed. And this being so, he is naturally at his worst in
criticising Hume. In insisting, as he does, upon the absurd practical
results[15] that would follow from the adoption of Hume’s sceptical
conclusions, he is merely exploiting popular prejudice in the
philosophical arena. That, however, may be forgiven him, if, as would
seem to be the case, the quotations which he gives verbatim from Hume’s
_Treatise_ really first revealed to Kant the scope and innermost meaning
of Hume’s analysis of the causal problem.
The evidence in support of this contention is entirely circumstantial.
The German translation of Beattie’s _Essay on the Nature and
Immutability of Truth_ was published at Easter 1772, _i.e._ in the year
in which Kant, in the process of his own independent development, came,
as is shown by his famous letter to Herz,[16] to realise the mysterious,
problematic character of _a priori_ knowledge _of the independently
real_. He was then, however, still entirely unconscious of the deeper
problem which at once emerges upon recognition that _a priori_
principles, quite apart from all question of their objective validity,
are synthetic in form. We know that Kant was acquainted with Beattie’s
work; for he twice refers to Beattie’s criticism of Hume.[17] What more
probable than that he read the translation in the year of its
publication, or at least at some time not very long subsequent to the
date of the letter to Herz? The passages which Beattie quotes from the
_Treatise_ are exactly those that were necessary to reveal the full
scope of Hume’s revolutionary teaching in respect to the general
principle of causality. There seems, indeed, little doubt that this must
have been the channel through which Hume’s influence chiefly acted. Thus
at last, by a circuitous path, through the quotations of an adversary,
Hume awakened philosophy from its dogmatic slumber,[18] and won for his
argument that appreciation which despite its cogency it had for thirty
years so vainly demanded.
Let us now turn our attention to the rationalist philosophy in which
Kant was educated. Hume’s contention that experience cannot by itself
justify any inductive inference, forms the natural bridge over which we
can best pass to the contrasting standpoint of Leibniz. Hume and Leibniz
find common ground in denouncing empiricism. Both agree in regarding it
as the mongrel offspring of conflicting principles. If rationalism
cannot hold its own, the alternative is not the finding of firm foothold
in concrete experience, but only such consolation as a sceptical
philosophy may afford.[19] The overthrow of rationalism means the
destruction of metaphysics in every form. Even mathematics and the
natural sciences will have to be viewed as fulfilling a practical end,
not as satisfying a theoretical need. But though Leibniz’s criticism of
empiricism is, in its main contention, identical with that of Hume, it
is profoundly different both in its orientation and in the conclusions
to which it leads. While Hume maintains that induction must be regarded
as a non-rational process of merely instinctive anticipation, Leibniz
argues to the self-legislative character of pure thought.
Sense-experience reveals reality only in proportion as it embodies
principles derived from the inherent character of thought itself.
Experience conforms to _a priori_ principles, and so can afford an
adequate basis for scientific induction.
There is a passage in Hume’s _Enquiry_ which may be employed to
illustrate the boldly speculative character of Leibniz’s interpretation
of the nature and function of human thought. “Nothing ... [seems] more
unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human
power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of
nature and reality.... While the body is confined to one planet, along
which it creeps with pain and difficulty, the thought can in an instant
transport us into the most distant regions of the universe.... What
never was seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is anything
beyond the power of thought, except what implies an absolute
contradiction.” This passage in which Hume means to depict a false
belief, already sufficiently condemned by the absurdity of its claims,
expresses for Leibniz the wonderful but literal truth. Thought is the
revealer of an eternal unchanging reality, and its validity is in no
way dependent upon its verification through sense. When Voltaire in his
_Ignorant Philosopher_ remarks that “it would be very singular that all
nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should
be a little animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws,
could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice,”[20] he is
forgetting that this same animal of five feet can contain the stellar
universe in thought within himself, and has therefore a dignity which is
not expressible in any such terms as his size may seem, for vulgar
estimation, to imply. Man, though dependent upon the body and confined
to one planet, has the sun and stars as the playthings of his mind.
Though finite in his mortal conditions, he is divinely infinite in his
powers.
Leibniz thus boldly challenges the sceptical view of the function of
reason. Instead of limiting thought to the translating of sense-data
into conceptual forms, he claims for it a creative power which enables
it out of its own resources to discover for itself, not only the actual
constitution of the material world, but also the immensely wider realm
of possible entities. The real, he maintains, is only one of the many
kingdoms which thought discovers for itself in the universe of truth. It
is the most comprehensive and the most perfect, but still only one out
of innumerable others which unfold themselves to the mind in pure
thought. Truth is not the abstracting of the universal aspects in
things, not a copy of reality, dependent upon it for meaning and
significance. Truth is wider than reality, is logically prior to it, and
instead of being dependent upon the actual, legislates for it. Leibniz
thus starts from the possible, as discovered by pure thought, to
determine in an _a priori_ manner the nature of the real.
This Leibnizian view of thought may seem, at first sight, to be merely
the re-emergence of the romantic, rationalistic ideal of Descartes and
Malebranche. So to regard it would, however, be a serious injustice. It
was held with full consciousness of its grounds and implications, and
reality was metaphysically reinterpreted so as to afford it a genuine
basis. There was nothing merely mystical and nothing undefined in its
main tenets. Leibniz differs from Malebranche in being himself a
profound mathematician, the co-discoverer with Newton of the
differential calculus. He also differs from Descartes in possessing an
absorbing interest in the purely logical aspects of the problem of
method; and was therefore equipped in a supreme degree for determining
in genuinely scientific fashion the philosophical significance and value
of the mathematical disciplines.
Hume and Leibniz are thus the two protagonists that dwarf all others.
They realised as neither Malebranche, Locke, nor Berkeley, neither Reid,
Lambert, Crusius, nor Mendelssohn ever did, the really crucial issues
which must ultimately decide between the competing possibilities. Each
maintained, in the manner prescribed by his general philosophy, one of
what then appeared to be the only two possible views of the function of
thought. The alternatives were these: (_a_) Thought is merely a
practical instrument for the convenient interpretation of our human
experience; it has no objective or metaphysical validity of any kind;
(_b_) Thought legislates universally; it reveals the wider universe of
the eternally possible; and prior to all experience can determine the
fundamental conditions to which that experience must conform. Or to
interpret this opposition in logical terms: (_a_) The fundamental
principles of experience are synthetic judgments in which no relation is
discoverable between subject and predicate, and which for that reason
can be justified neither _a priori_ nor by experience; (_b_) all
principles are analytic, and can therefore be justified by pure thought.
The problem of Kant’s _Critique_, broadly stated, consists in the
examination and critical estimate of these two opposed views. There is
no problem, scientific, moral, or religious, which is not vitally
affected by the decision which of these alternatives we are to adopt, or
what reconciliation of their conflicting claims we hope to achieve.
Since Kant’s day, largely owing to the establishment of the evolution
theory, this problem has become only the more pressing. The
naturalistic, instrumental view of thought seems to be immensely
reinforced by biological authority. Thought would seem to be reduced to
the level of sense-affection, and to be an instrument developed through
natural processes for the practical purposes of adaptation. Yet the
counter-view has been no less powerfully strengthened by the victorious
march of the mathematical sciences. They have advanced beyond the limits
of Euclidean space, defining possibilities such as no experience reveals
to us. The Leibnizian view has also been reinforced by the successes of
physical science in determining what would seem to be the actual,
objective character of the independently real. Kant was a rationalist by
education, temperament, and conviction. Consequently his problem was to
reconcile Leibniz’s view of the function of thought with Hume’s proof of
the synthetic character of the causal principle. He strives to
determine how much of Leibniz’s belief in the legislative power of pure
reason can be retained after full justice has been done to Hume’s
damaging criticisms. The fundamental principles upon which all
experience and all knowledge ultimately rest are _synthetic_ in nature:
how is it possible that they should also be _a priori_? Such is the
problem that was Kant’s troublous inheritance from his philosophical
progenitors, Hume and Leibniz.[21]
III. GENERAL
In indicating some of the main features of Kant’s general teaching, I
shall limit myself to those points which seem most helpful in
preliminary orientation, or which are necessary for guarding against the
misunderstandings likely to result from the very radical changes in
terminology and in outlook that have occurred in the hundred and thirty
years since the publication of the _Critique_. Statements which thus
attempt to present in outline, and in modern terms, the more general
features of Kant’s philosophical teaching will doubtless seem to many of
my readers dogmatic in form and highly questionable in content. They
must stand or fall by the results obtained through detailed examination
of Kant’s _ipsissima verba_. Such justification as I can give for them
will be found in the body of the _Commentary_.
I. THE NATURE OF THE _A PRIORI_
The fundamental presupposition upon which Kant’s argument rests--a
presupposition never itself investigated but always assumed--is that
universality and necessity cannot be reached by any process that is
empirical in character. By way of this initial assumption Kant arrives
at the conclusion that the _a priori_, the distinguishing
characteristics of which are universality and necessity, is not given in
sense but is imposed by the mind; or in other less ambiguous terms, is
not part of the matter of experience but constitutes its form. The
matter of experience is here taken as equivalent to sensation; while
sensation, in turn, is regarded as being the non-relational.
The explanation of Kant’s failure either to investigate or to prove this
assumption has already been indicated. Leibniz proceeds upon the
assumption of its truth no less confidently than Hume, and as Kant’s
main task consisted in reconciling what he regarded as being the
elements of truth in their opposed philosophies, he very naturally felt
secure in rearing his system upon the one fundamental presupposition on
which they were able to agree. It lay outside the field of controversy,
and possessed for Kant, as it had possessed for Hume and for Leibniz,
that authoritative and axiomatic character which an unchallenged
preconception tends always to acquire.
The general thesis, that the universal and necessary elements in
experience constitute its form, Kant specifies in the following
determinate manner. The form is fixed for all experience, that is to
say, it is one and the same in each and every experience, however simple
or however complex. It is to be detected in consciousness of duration no
less than in consciousness of objects or in consciousness of self. For,
as Kant argues, consciousness of duration involves the capacity to
distinguish between subjective and objective succession, and likewise
involves recognition[22] with its necessary component
self-consciousness. Or to state the same point of view in another way,
human experience is a temporal process and yet is always a consciousness
of meaning. As temporal, its states are ordered successively, that is,
externally to one another; but the consciousness which they constitute
is at each and every moment the awareness of some single unitary meaning
by reference to which the contents of the successive experiences are
organised. The problem of knowledge may therefore be described as being
the analysis of the consciousness of duration, of objectivity, and of
self-consciousness, or alternatively as the analysis of our awareness of
meaning. Kant arrives at the conclusion that the conditions of all four
are one and the same.[23]
Kant thus teaches that experience in all its embodiments and in each of
its momentary states can be analysed into an endlessly variable material
and a fixed set of relational elements. And as no one of the relational
factors can be absent without at once nullifying all the others, they
together constitute what must be regarded as the determining form and
structure of every mental process that is cognitive in character.
Awareness, that is to say, is identical with the act of judgment, and
therefore involves everything that a judgment, in its distinction from
any mere association of ideas, demands for its possibility.
Kant’s position, when thus stated, differs from that of Leibniz only in
its clearer grasp of the issues and difficulties involved, and
consequently in the more subtle, pertinacious, and thoroughgoing
character of the argument by which it is established. Its revolutionary
character first appears when Kant further argues, in extension of the
teaching of Hume, that the formal, relational elements are of a
_synthetic_ nature. The significance and scope of this conclusion can
hardly be exaggerated. No other Kantian tenet is of more fundamental
importance.[24] With it the main consequences of Kant’s Critical
teaching are indissolubly bound up. _As the principles which lie at the
basis of our knowledge are synthetic, they have no intrinsic necessity,
and cannot possess the absolute authority ascribed to them by the
rationalists._ They are prescribed to human reason, but cannot be shown
to be inherently rational in any usual sense of that highly ambiguous
term. They can be established only as brute conditions, verifiable in
fact though not demonstrable in pure theory (if there be any such
thing), of our actual experience. They are conditions of
_sense_-experience, and that means of our knowledge of appearances,
never legitimately applicable in the deciphering of ultimate reality.
They are valid within the realm of experience, useless for the
construction of a metaphysical theory of things in themselves. This
conclusion is reinforced when we recognise that human experience, even
in its fundamental features (_e.g._ the temporal and the spatial), might
conceivably be altogether different from what it actually is, and that
its presuppositions are always, therefore, of the same contingent
character. Even the universality and necessity which Kant claims to have
established for his _a priori_ principles are of this nature. Their
necessity is always for us extrinsic; they can be postulated only if,
and so long as, we are assuming the occurrence of human
sense-experience.
Thus Kant is a rationalist of a new and unique type. He believes in, and
emphasises the importance of, the _a priori_. With it alone, he
contends, is the _Critique_ competent to deal. But it is an _a priori_
which cannot be shown to be more than relative. It does, indeed, enable
us to conceive the known as relative, and to entertain in thought the
possibility of an Absolute; but this it can do without itself possessing
independent validity. For though the proof of the _a priori_ is not
empirical in the sense of being inductive, neither is it logical in the
sense of being deduced from necessities of thought. Its “transcendental”
proof can be executed only so long as experience is granted as actual;
and so long as the fundamental characteristics of this experience are
kept in view.
Lastly, the _a priori_ factors are purely relational. They have no
inherent content from which clues bearing on the supersensible can be
obtained. Their sole function is to serve in the interpretation of
contents otherwise supplied.
The _a priori_, then, is merely relational, without inherent content; it
is synthetic, and therefore incapable of independent or metaphysical
proof; it is relative to an experience which is only capable of yielding
appearances. The _a priori_ is as merely factual as the experience which
it conditions.
Even in the field of morality Kant held fast to this conviction.
Morality, no less than knowledge, presupposes _a priori_ principles.
These, however, are never self-evident, and cannot be established by any
mere appeal to intuition. They have authority only to the extent to
which they can be shown to be the indispensable presuppositions of a
moral consciousness that is undeniably actual.[25]
That the _a priori_ is of this character must be clearly understood.
Otherwise the reader will be pursued by a feeling of the unreality, of
the merely historical or antiquarian significance, of the entire
discussion. He may, if he pleases, substitute the term formal or
relational for _a priori_. And if he bears in mind that by the
relational Kant is here intending those elements in knowledge which
render possible the relations constitutive of _meaning_, he will
recognise that the Critical discussion is by no means antiquated, but
still remains one of the most important issues in the entire field of
philosophical enquiry.
2. KANT’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC
The above conclusions have an important bearing upon logical doctrine.
Just as modern geometry originates in a sceptical treatment of the axiom
of parallels, so modern, idealist logic rests upon Kant’s demonstration
of the revolutionary consequences of Hume’s sceptical teaching. If
principles are never self-evident, and yet are not arrived at by
induction from experience, by what alternative method can they be
established? In answer to this question, Kant outlines the position
which is now usually entitled the _Coherence_ theory of truth.[26] That
theory, though frequently ascribed to Hegel, has its real sources in the
_Critique of Pure Reason_. It expresses that modification in the
Leibnizian rationalism which is demanded by Hume’s discovery of the
synthetic character of the causal axiom. Neither the deductive methods
of the Cartesian systems nor the inductive methods of the English
philosophies can any longer be regarded as correctly describing the
actual processes of scientific proof.
General principles are either presuppositions or postulates. If _a
priori_, they are presupposed in all conscious awareness; as above
indicated, they have a _de facto_ validity within the experience which
they thus make possible. If more special in nature, they are the
postulates to which we find ourselves committed in the process of
solving specific problems; and they are therefore discovered by the
method of trial and failure.[27] They are valid in proportion as they
enable us to harmonise appearances, and to adjudicate to each a kind of
reality consistent with that assigned to every other.
Proof of fact is similar in general character. The term fact is
eulogistic, not merely descriptive; it marks the possession of cognitive
significance in regard to some body of knowledge, actual or possible. It
can be applied to particular appearances only in so far as we can
determine their conditions, and can show that as thus conditioned the
mode of their existence is relevant to the enquiry that is being
pursued. The convergence of parallel lines is fact from the standpoint
of psychological investigation; from the point of view of their physical
existence it is merely appearance. Ultimately, of course, everything is
real, including what we entitle appearance;[28] but in the articulation
of human experience such distinctions are indispensable, and the
criteria that define them are prescribed by the context in which they
are being employed.
Thus facts cannot be established apart from principles, nor principles
apart from facts. The proof of a principle is its adequacy to the
interpretation of all those appearances that can be shown to be in any
respect relevant to it, while the test of an asserted fact, _i.e._ of
our description of a given appearance, is its conformity to the
principles that make insight possible.
Though the method employed in the _Critique_ is entitled by Kant the
“transcendental method,” it is really identical in general character
with the hypothetical method of the natural sciences. It proceeds by
enquiring what conditions must be postulated in order that the
admittedly given may be explained and accounted for.[29] Starting from
the given, it also submits its conclusions to confirmation by the given.
Considered as a method, there is nothing metaphysical or high-flying
about it save the name. None the less, Kant is in some degree justified
in adopting the special title. In view of the unique character of the
problem to be dealt with, the method calls for very careful statement,
and has to be defended against the charge of inapplicability in the
philosophical field.
The fundamental thesis of the Coherence theory finds explicit
formulation in Kant’s doctrine of the judgment: the doctrine, that
awareness is identical with the act of judging, and that judgment is
always complex, involving both factual and interpretative elements.
Synthetic, relational factors are present in _all_ knowledge, even in
knowledge that may seem, on superficial study, to be purely analytic or
to consist merely of sense-impressions. Not contents alone, but contents
interpreted in terms of some specific setting, are the sole possible
objects of human thought. Even when, by forced abstraction, particulars
and universals are held mentally apart, they are still being apprehended
through judgments, and therefore through mental processes that involve
both. They stand in relations of mutual implication within a _de facto_
system; and together they constitute it.
This is the reason why in modern logic, as in Kant’s _Critique_, the
theory of the judgment receives so much more attention than the theory
of reasoning. For once the above view of the judgment has been
established, all the main points in the doctrine of reasoning follow of
themselves as so many corollaries. Knowledge starts neither from
sense-data nor from general principles, but from the complex situation
in which the human race finds itself at the dawn of self-consciousness.
That situation is organised in terms of our mental equipment; and this
already existing, rudimentary system is what has made practicable
further advance; to create a system _ab initio_ is altogether
impossible. The starting-point does not, however, by itself alone
determine our conclusions. Owing to the creative activities of the mind,
regulative principles are active in all consciousness; and under their
guidance the experienced order, largely practical in satisfaction of the
instinctive desires, is transformed into a comprehended order,
controlled in view of Ideal ends. Logic is the science of the processes
whereby this transformation is brought about. An essentially
metaphysical discipline, it cannot be isolated from the general body of
philosophical teaching; it is not formal, but transcendental; in
defining the factors and processes that constitute knowledge, its chief
preoccupation is with ultimate issues.
In calling his new logic “transcendental” Kant, it is true, also intends
to signify that it is supplementary to, not a substitute for, the older
logic, which he professes to accept.[30] Moreover his intuitional theory
of mathematical science, his doctrine of the “pure concept,” his
attributive view of the judgment--all of them survivals from his
pre-Critical period[31]--frequently set him at cross-purposes with
himself. His preoccupation, too, with the problem of the _a priori_
leads him to underestimate the part played in knowledge by the merely
empirical. But despite all inconsistencies, and notwithstanding his
perverse preference for outlandish modes of expression, he succeeds in
enforcing with sufficient clearness the really fundamental tenets of the
Coherence view.
3. THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I shall now approach Kant’s central position from another direction,
namely, as an answer to the problem of the nature of consciousness. We
are justified, I think, in saying that Kant was the first in modern
times to raise the problem of the nature of awareness, and of the
conditions of its possibility. Though Descartes is constantly speaking
of consciousness, he defines it in merely negative terms, through its
opposition to matter; and when he propounds the question how material
bodies can be known by the immaterial mind, his mode of dealing with it
shows that his real interest lies not in the nature of consciousness but
in the character of the existences which it reveals. His answer,
formulated in terms of the doctrine of representative perception, and
based on the supposed teaching of physics and physiology, is that
material bodies through their action on the sense-organs and brain
generate images or duplicates of themselves. These images, existing not
in outer space but only in consciousness, are, he asserts, mental in
nature; and being mental they are, he would seem to conclude,
immediately and necessarily apprehended by the mind. Thus Descartes
gives us, not an analysis of the knowing process, but only a
subjectivist interpretation of the nature of the _objects_ upon which it
is directed.
Quite apart, then, from the question as to whether Descartes’ doctrine
of representative perception rests on a correct interpretation of the
teaching of the natural sciences--Kant was ultimately led to reject the
doctrine--it is obvious that the main epistemological problem, _i.e._
the problem how awareness is possible, and in what it consists, has so
far not so much as even been raised. Descartes and his successors
virtually assume that consciousness is an ultimate, unanalysable form of
awareness, and that all that can reasonably be demanded of the
philosopher is that he explain what objects are actually presented to
it, and under what conditions their presentation can occur. On
Descartes’ view they are conditioned by antecedent physical and
physiological processes; according to Berkeley they are due to the
creative activity of a Divine Being; according to Hume nothing
whatsoever can be determined as to their originating causes. But all
three fail to recognise that even granting the objects to be of the
character asserted, namely, mental, the further problem still remains
for consideration, how they come to be consciously apprehended, and in
what such awareness consists.
Certain interpretations of the nature of the knowing process are, of
course, to be found in the writings of Descartes and his successors. But
they are so much a matter of unexamined presupposition that they never
receive exact formulation, and alternate with one another in quite a
haphazard fashion. We may consider three typical views.
1. There is, Descartes frequently seems to imply--the same assumption is
evident throughout Locke’s _Essay_--a self that stands behind all mental
states, observing and apprehending them. Consciousness is the power
which this self has of contemplating both itself and its ideas.
Obviously this is a mere ignoring of the issue. If we assume an
observer, we _ipso facto_ postulate a process of observation, but we
have not explained or even defined it.
2. There is also in Descartes a second, very different, view of
consciousness, namely, as a diaphanous medium analogous to light. Just
as light is popularly conceived as revealing the objects upon which it
falls, so consciousness is regarded as revealing to us our inner states.
This view of consciousness, for reasons which I shall indicate shortly,
is entirely inadequate to the facts for which we have to account. It is
no more tenable than the corresponding view of light.
3. In Hume we find this latter theory propounded in what may at first
sight seem a more satisfactory form, but is even less satisfactory.
Sensations, images, feelings, he argues, are _states_ of consciousness,
one might almost say _pieces_ of consciousness, _i.e._ they are
conceived as carrying their own consciousness with them. Red, for
instance, is spoken of as a sensation, and is consequently viewed both
as being a sense-content, _i.e._ something sensed or apprehended, and
also at the same time as the sensing or awareness of it. This view is
unable to withstand criticism. There is really no more ground for
asserting that red colour carries with it consciousness of itself than
for saying that a table does. The illegitimacy of the assertion is
concealed from us by the fact that tables appear to exist when there is
no consciousness present, whereas redness cannot be proved to exist
independently of consciousness--it may or may not do so. Many
present-day thinkers, continuing the tradition of the English
associationists, hold to this pre-Kantian view. Sensations, feelings,
etc., are, it is implied, pieces of consciousness, forms of awareness;
through their varying combinations they constitute the complex
experiences of the animal and human mind.
Kant’s teaching is developed in direct opposition to all such views. If
we discard his antiquated terminology, and state his position in current
terms, we find that it amounts to the assertion that _consciousness is
in all cases awareness of meaning_. There is no awareness, however
rudimentary or primitive, that does not involve the apprehension of
meaning. Meaning and awareness are correlative terms; each must be
studied in its relation to the other. And inasmuch as meaning is a
highly complex object of apprehension, awareness cannot be regarded as
ultimate or as unanalysable. It can be shown to rest upon a complexity
of generative conditions and to involve a variety of distinct factors.
There are thus, from the Kantian standpoint, two all-sufficient reasons
why the diaphanous view of consciousness, _i.e._ any view which treats
consciousness merely as a medium whereby the existent gets itself
reported, must be regarded as untenable. In the first place, as already
remarked, it is based on the false assumption that consciousness is an
ultimate, and that we are therefore dispensed from all further
investigation of its nature. Kant claims to have distinguished
successfully the many components which go to constitute it; and he also
professes to have shown that until such analysis has been made, there
can be no sufficient basis for a philosophical treatment either of the
problems of sense-perception or of the logical problems of judgment and
inference. The diaphanous view, with its mirror-like mode of
representation, might allow of the side-by-sideness of associated
contents; it can never account for the processes whereby the associated
contents come to be apprehended.
Secondly, the diaphanous view ignores the fundamental distinction
between meaning and existence. Existences rest, so to speak, on their
own bottom; they are self-centred even at the very moment of their
reaction to external influences. Meaning, on the other hand, always
involves the interpretation of what is given in the light of wider
considerations that lend it significance. In the awareness of meaning
the given, the actually presented, is in some way transcended, and this
transcendence is what has chiefly to be reckoned with in any attempt to
explain the conscious process. Kant is giving expression to this thesis
when he contends that all awareness, no matter how rudimentary or
apparently simple, is an act of judgment, and therefore involves the
relational categories. _Not passive contemplation but active judgment,
not mere conception but inferential interpretation, is the fundamental
form, and the only form, in which our consciousness exists._ This, of
course, commits Kant to the assertion that there is no mode of cognition
that can be described as immediate or unreflective. There is an
immediate _element_ in all knowledge, but our consciousness of it is
always conditioned and accompanied by interpretative processes, and in
their absence there can be no awareness of any kind.
By way of this primary distinction between existence and meaning Kant
advances to all those other distinctions which characterise our human
experience, between appearance and reality, between the real and the
Ideal, between that which is judged and the criteria which control and
direct the judging process. Just because all awareness is awareness of
meaning, our human experience becomes intelligible as a purposive
activity that directs itself according to Ideal standards.
The contrast between the Kantian and the Cartesian views of
consciousness can be defined in reference to another important issue.
The diaphanous view commits its adherents to a very definite
interpretation of the nature of relations. Since they regard
consciousness as passive and receptive, they have to maintain that
relations can be known only in so far as they are apprehended in a
manner analogous to the contents themselves. I do not, of course, wish
to imply that this view of relational knowledge is in all cases and in
all respects illegitimate. Kant, as we shall find, has carried the
opposite view to an impossible extreme, assuming without further
argument that what has been shown to be true of certain types of
relation (for instance, of the causal and substance-attribute
relations) must be true of all relations, even of those that constitute
space and time. It cannot be denied that, as William James and others
have very rightly insisted, such relations as the space-relations are
_in some degree or manner_ presentational. This does not, however,
justify James in concluding, as he at times seems inclined to do, that
all relations are directly experienced. Such procedure lays him open to
the same charge of illegitimate reasoning. But even if we could grant
James’s thesis in its widest form, the all-important Critical question
would still remain: in what does awareness, whether of presented
contents or of presented relations, consist, and how is it possible? In
answering this question Kant is led to the conclusion that consciousness
must be regarded as an activity, and as supplying certain of the
conditions of its own possibility. Its contribution is of a uniform and
constant nature; it consists, as already noted, of certain relational
factors whose presence can be detected in each and every act of
awareness.
There is one other respect in which Kant’s view of consciousness differs
from that of his Cartesian predecessors.[32] Consciousness, he
maintains, does not reveal itself, but only its objects. In other words,
there is no awareness of awareness. So far as our mental states and
processes can be known at all, they are known in the same objective
manner in which we apprehend existences in space.[33] Now if that be so,
a very important consequence follows. If there is no awareness of
awareness, but only of meanings all of which are objective, there can be
no consciousness of the generative, synthetic processes that constitute
consciousness _on its subjective side_. For consciousness, being an
_act_ of awareness in which _meaning_ is apprehended, has a twofold
nature, and must be very differently described according to the aspect
which at any one time we may have in view. When we regard it on its
_objective_ side as awareness of _meaning_, we are chiefly concerned
with the various factors that are necessary to meaning and that enter
into its constitution. That is to say, our analysis is essentially
logical. When, on the other hand, we consider consciousness as an _act_
of awareness, our problem is ontological or as it may be entitled
(though the term is in this reference somewhat misleading, since the
enquiry as defined by Kant is essentially metaphysical) psychological in
character. Between these two aspects there is this very important
difference. The logical factors constitutive of meaning can be
exhaustively known; they are elements in the meanings which
consciousness reveals; whereas the synthetic processes are postulated
solely in view of these constituent factors, and in order to account for
them. The processes, that is to say, are known only through that which
they condition, and on Kant’s teaching we are entirely ruled out from
attempting to comprehend even their possibility.[34] They must be
thought as occurring, but they cannot be known, _i.e._ their nature
cannot be definitely specified. The postulating of them marks a gap in
our knowledge, and extends our insight only in the degree that it
discloses our ignorance. As consciousness rests upon, and is made
possible by, these processes, it can never be explained in terms of the
objective world to which our sense-experience, and therefore, as Kant
argues, our specific knowledge, is exclusively limited. The mind can
unfold its contents in the sunshine of consciousness, only because its
roots strike deep into a soil that the light does not penetrate. These
processes, thus postulated, Kant regards as the source of the _a priori_
elements, and as the agency through which the synthetic connections
necessary to all consciousness are brought about.
According to Kant’s Critical teaching, therefore, consciousness, though
analysable, is not such as can ever be rendered completely
comprehensible. When all is said, it remains for us a merely _de facto_
form of existence, and has to be taken just for what it presents itself
as being. It is actually such as to make possible the logical processes
of judgment and inference. It is actually such as to render possible a
satisfactory proof of the scientific validity, within the field of
sense-experience, of the principle of causality, and of such other
principles as are required in the development of the positive sciences.
It is also such as to render comprehensible the controlling influence of
Ideal standards. But when we come to the question, how is consciousness
of this type and form possible, that is, to the question of its
metaphysical significance and of the generative conditions upon which it
rests, we find, Kant maintains, that we have no data sufficient to
justify any decisive answer.
The ontological, creative, or dynamical aspect of consciousness, I may
further insist, must be constantly borne in mind if the Critical
standpoint is to be properly viewed. The logical analysis is, indeed,
for the purposes of the central portions of the _Critique_ much the more
important, and alone allows of detailed, exhaustive development; but the
other is no less essential for an appreciation of Kant’s attitude
towards the more strictly metaphysical problems of the _Dialectic_.
Hegel and his disciples have been the chief culprits in subordinating,
or rather in entirely eliminating, this aspect of Kant’s teaching. Many
of the inconsistencies of which they accuse Kant exist only if Kant’s
teaching be first reduced to a part of itself. To eliminate the
ontological implications of his theory of consciousness is, by
anticipation, to render many of his main conclusions entirely untenable,
and in particular to destroy the force of his fundamental distinction
between appearance and reality. If consciousness knows itself in its
ultimate nature--and such is Hegel’s contention--one half of reality is
taken out of the obscurity in which, on Kant’s reading of the situation,
it is condemned to lie hidden. Man is more knowable than nature, and is
the key to nature; such is Hegel’s position, crudely stated. Contrast
therewith the teaching of Kant. We can know nature more completely
(though still very incompletely) than we can ever hope to comprehend the
conditions that make possible and actual man’s spiritual life. The moral
consciousness is an autonomously acting source of independent values,
and though a standing miracle, must be taken for all that on independent
and separate enquiry it is found to be. Hegel, in his endeavour to
establish an intellectual monism, does violence to some of the highest
interests which he professes to be safeguarding. Kant, while outlining
in Idea a Kingdom of Ends, remains satisfied with a pluralistic
distinction between the intellectual and the moral categories. The
antithesis of the two philosophies is in some degree the ancient
opposition between Aristotle and Plato, restated in modern terms.
4. PHENOMENALISM, KANT’S SUBSTITUTE FOR SUBJECTIVISM
The revolutionary character of the above conclusions is shown by the
difficulty which Kant himself found in breaking away from many of the
presuppositions that underlie the views which he was renouncing; and
this is nowhere more evident than in his constant alternation throughout
the _Critique_ between a _subjectivism_[35] that is thoroughly
Cartesian--we might almost, allowing for his rationalism, say
Berkeleian--in character, and a radically different position which may
be entitled _phenomenalism_. The latter is alone genuinely Critical, and
presents Kant’s teaching in its maturest form. For though first
formulated only in those portions of the _Analytic_ that are late in
date of writing, and in those passages of the second edition which
supplement them, it would seem to be the only logical outcome of Kant’s
other main doctrines.
I have especially in mind Kant’s fundamental distinction between
appearance and reality; it has an all-important bearing upon the
Cartesian opposition between the mental and the material, and especially
upon the question as to what view ought to be taken of our so-called
_subjective_ experiences. The objective is for the Cartesians the
independently real; the subjective is asserted to have an altogether
different kind of existence in what is named the field of consciousness.
Kant’s phenomenalist restatement of this distinction is too complex and
subtle to be made intelligible in the brief space available in this
_Introduction_--it is expounded in the body of the _Commentary_[36]--but
its general character I may indicate in a few sentences. All
subjectivist modes of stating the problem of knowledge, such as we find
in Hume and in Leibniz no less than in Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley,
are, Kant finally concluded, illegitimate and question-begging. Our
so-called subjective states, whether they be sensations, feelings, or
desires, are _objective_ in the sense that they are _objects_ for
consciousness.[37] Our mental states do not run parallel with the system
of natural existences; nor are they additional to it. They do not
constitute our consciousness of nature; they are themselves part of the
natural order which consciousness reveals. They compose the empirical
self which is an objective existence, integrally connected with the
material environment in terms of which alone it can be understood. The
subjective is not opposite in nature to the objective, but a sub-species
within it. While, however, the psychical is thus to be regarded as a
class of known appearances, and as forming together with the physical a
single system of nature, this entire order is, in Kant’s view,
conditioned by an underlying realm of noumenal existence; and when the
question of the possibility of the _knowing_, that is, of the
_experiencing_ of such a comprehensive natural system, is raised, it is
to this noumenal sphere that we are referred. Everything experienced,
even a sensation or feeling, is an event, but the experiencing of it is
an act of awareness, and calls for an explanation of an altogether
different kind.
Thus the problem of knowledge, stated in adequate Critical terms, is not
how we can advance from the merely subjective to knowledge of the
independently real,[38] but how, if everything known forms part of a
comprehensive natural system, consciousness and the complex factors
which contribute to its possibility are to be interpreted. On this
latter question, as already indicated, Kant, though debarring both
subjectivism and materialism, otherwise adopts a non-committal attitude.
So long as we continue within the purely theoretical domain, there are a
number of alternatives between which there are no sufficient data for
deciding. To debar subjectivism is not to maintain the illusory or
phenomenal character of the individual self; and to rule out materialism
is not to assert that the unconscious may not generate and account for
the conscious. In other words, they are ruled out not for any ulterior
reasons derived from their supposed metaphysical consequences, but
solely because they are based on palpable misinterpretations of the
cognitive situation that generates those very problems to which they
profess to be an answer.
5. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN HUMAN AND ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
The inwardness of Kant’s Critical standpoint may perhaps be made clearer
by a brief consideration of his view of animal intelligence. We are
accustomed nowadays to test a psychology of human consciousness by its
capacity to render conceivable an evolution from lower forms. How does
Kant’s teaching emerge from such a test?
It may at once be admitted that Kant has made no special study of animal
behaviour, and was by no means competent to speak with authority in
regard to its conditions. Indeed it is evident that anything which he
may have to say upon this question is entirely of the nature of a
deduction from results obtained in the human sphere. But when this has
been admitted, and we are therefore prepared to find the problems
approached from the point of view of the difference rather than of the
kinship between man and the animals, we can recognise that, so far as
the independent study of human consciousness is concerned, there is a
certain compensating advantage in Kant’s pre-Darwinian standpoint. For
it leaves him free from that desire which exercises so constant, and
frequently so deleterious an influence, upon many workers in the field
of psychology, namely, to maintain at all costs, in anticipation of
conclusions not yet by any means established, the fundamental identity
of animal and human intelligence. This besetting desire all too easily
tends to the minimising of differences that may perhaps with fuller
insight be found to involve no breach of continuity, but which in the
present state of our knowledge cannot profitably be interpreted save in
terms of their differentiating peculiarities.
The current controversy between mechanism and vitalism enforces the
point which I desire to make. Biological problems, as many biologists
are now urging, can be most profitably discussed in comparative
independence of ultimate issues, entirely in view of their own domestic
circumstances. For only when the actual constitution of organic
compounds has been more completely determined than has hitherto been
possible can the broader questions be adequately dealt with. In other
words, the differences must be known before the exact nature and degree
of the continuity can be defined. They cannot be anticipated by any mere
deduction from general principles.
The value of Kant’s analysis of human consciousness is thus closely
bound up with his frank recognition of its inherent complexity. Not
simplification, but specification, down to the bedrock of an irreducible
minimum of correlated factors, is the governing motive of his Critical
enquiries. His results have therefore the great advantage of being
inspired by no considerations save such as are prescribed by the actual
subject-matter under investigation. As already noted, Kant maintains
that human consciousness is always an awareness of meaning, and that
consequently it can find expression only in judgments which involve
together with their other factors the element of recognition or
self-consciousness.
This decides for Kant the character of the distinction to be drawn
between animal and human intelligence. As animals, in his view, cannot
be regarded as possessing a capacity of self-consciousness, they must
also be denied all awareness of meaning. However complicated the
associative organisation of their ideas may be, it never rises to the
higher level of logical judgment. For the same reason, though their
ideas may be schematic in outline, and in their bearing on behaviour may
therefore have the same efficiency as general concepts, they cannot
become universal in the logical sense. “Animals have apprehensions, but
not apperceptions, and cannot, therefore, make their representations
universal.”[39] In support of this position Kant might have pointed to
the significant fact that animals are so teachable up to a certain
point, and so unteachable beyond it. They can be carried as far as
associative suggestion will allow, but not a step further. To this day
it remains true--at least I venture the assertion--that no animal has
ever been conclusively shown to be capable of apprehending a sign as a
sign. Animals may seem to do so owing to the influence of associated
ideas, but are, as it would appear, debarred from crossing the boundary
line which so sharply distinguishes associative suggestion from
reflective knowledge.
But Kant is committed to a further assertion. If animals are devoid of
all awareness of meaning, they must also be denied anything analogous to
what we must signify by the term consciousness. Their experience must
fall apart into events, that may, perhaps, be described as mental, but
cannot be taken as equivalent to an act of awareness. “_Apprehensio
bruta_ without consciousness,”[40] such is Kant’s view of the animal
mind. Its mental states, like all other natural existences, are events
in time, explicable in the same naturalistic fashion as the bodily
processes by which they are conditioned; they can not be equated with
that human consciousness which enables us to reflect upon them, and to
determine the conditions of their temporal happening.
The distinction which Kant desires to draw is ultimately that between
events and consciousness of events. Even if events are psychical in
character, consisting of sensations and feelings, there will still
remain as fundamental the distinction between what is simply a member of
the causal series of natural events and the consciousness through which
the series is apprehended. Kant’s most explicit statements occur in a
letter to Herz.[41] He is referring to data of the senses which cannot
be self-consciously apprehended:
“I should not be able to know that I have them, and they would
therefore be for me, as a cognitive being, absolutely nothing.
They might still (if I conceive myself as an animal) exist in me (a
being unconscious of my own existence) as representations ...,
connected according to an empirical law of association, exercising
influence upon feeling and desire, and so always disporting
themselves with regularity, without my thereby acquiring the least
cognition of anything, not even of these my own states.”[42]
As to whether Kant is justified in maintaining that the distinction
between animal and human consciousness coincides with the distinction
between associative and logical or reflective thinking, I am not
concerned to maintain. This digression has been introduced solely for
the purpose of defining more precisely the central tenets of Kant’s
Critical teaching.
6. THE NATURE AND CONDITIONS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
We have still to consider what is perhaps the most serious of all the
misunderstandings to which Kant has laid himself open, and which is in
large part responsible for the widespread belief that his Critical
principles, when consistently developed, must finally eventuate in some
such metaphysics as that of Fichte and Hegel. I refer to the view that
Kant in postulating synthetic processes as conditioning consciousness is
postulating a noumenal self as exercising these activities, and is
therefore propounding a _metaphysical explanation_ of the synthetic, _a
priori_ factors in human experience.[43]
Kant’s language is frequently ambiguous. The Leibnizian spiritualism, to
which in his pre-Critical period he had unquestioningly held, continued
to influence his terminology, and so to prevent his Critical principles
from obtaining consistent expression. This much can be said in support
of the above interpretation of Kant’s position. But in all other
respects such a reading of his philosophy is little better than a parody
of his actual teaching. For Kant is very well aware that the problem of
knowledge is not to be solved in any such easy and high-handed fashion.
In the _Critique_ he teaches quite explicitly that to profess to explain
the presence of _a priori_ factors in human experience by means of a
self assumed for that very purpose would be a flagrant violation, not
only of Critical principles, but even of the elementary maxims of
scientific reasoning. In the first place, explanation by reference to
the activities of such a self would be explanation by faculties, by the
unknown; it is a cause that will explain anything and everything equally
well or badly.[44] Self-consciousness has, indeed, to be admitted as a
fact;[45] and from its occurrence Kant draws important conclusions in
regard to the conditions which make experience possible. But, in so
doing, Kant never intends to maintain that we are justified in
postulating as part of those conditions, or as condition of those
conditions, a noumenal self. The conditions which make experience
possible, whatever they may be, are also the conditions which make
self-consciousness possible. Since the self is known only as appearance,
it cannot be asserted to be the conditioning ground of appearance.
This first objection is not explicitly stated by Kant, but it is implied
in a second argument which finds expression both in the _Deduction of
the Categories_ and in the chapter on the _Paralogisms_. The only self
that we know to exist is the _conscious_ self. Now, as Kant claims to
have proved, the self can be thus conscious, even of itself, only in so
far as it is conscious of objects. Consequently we have no right to
assume that the self can precede such consciousness as its generating
cause. That would be to regard the self as existing prior to its own
conditions, working in darkness to create itself as a source of light.
But there is also a third reason why Kant’s Critical solution of the
problem of knowledge must not be stated in spiritualist terms.
Self-consciousness, as he shows, is itself _relational_ in character. It
is a fundamental factor in human experience, not because the self can
be shown to be the agency to which relations are due, but solely
because, itself a case of recognition, it is at the same time a
necessary condition of recognition, and recognition is indispensably
presupposed in all consciousness of meaning.[46] Awareness of meaning is
the fundamental mystery, and retains its profoundly mysterious character
even when self-consciousness has been thus detected as an essential
constituent. For self-consciousness does not explain the possibility of
meaning; it is itself, as I have just remarked, only one case of
recognition, and so is itself only an instance, though indeed the
supreme and most important instance, of what we must intend by the term
meaning. All awareness, not excepting that of the knowing self, rests
upon noumenal conditions whose specific nature it does not itself
reveal. Only on moral grounds, never through any purely theoretical
analysis of cognitive experience, can it be proved that the self is an
abiding personality, and that in conscious, personal form it belongs to
the order of noumenal reality.
7. KANT’S THREEFOLD DISTINCTION BETWEEN SENSIBILITY, UNDERSTANDING, AND
REASON
Even so summary a statement of Critical teaching as I am attempting in
this _Introduction_ would be very incomplete without some reference to
Kant’s threefold distinction between the forms of sensibility, the
categories of the understanding, and the Ideas of Reason.
On investigating space and time Kant discovers that they cannot be
classed either with the data of the bodily senses or with the concepts
of the understanding. They are sensuous (_i.e._ are not abstract but
concrete, not ways of thinking but modes of existence), yet at the same
time are _a priori_. They thus stand apart by themselves. Each is unique
in its kind, is single, and is an infinite existence. To describe them
is to combine predicates seemingly contradictory. In Kant’s own phrase,
they are monstrosities (_Undinge_), none the less incomprehensible that
they are undeniably actual. To them, primarily, are due those problems
which have been a standing challenge to philosophy since the time of
Zeno the Eleatic, and which Kant has entitled “antinomies of Reason.”
In contrast of sensibility Kant sets the intellectual faculties,
understanding and Reason. In the understanding originate certain pure
concepts, or as he more usually names them, categories. The chief of
these are the categories of “relation”--substance, causality and
reciprocity. They combine with the forms of sensibility and the manifold
of sense to yield the consciousness of an empirical order, interpretable
in accordance with universal laws.
To the faculty of Reason Kant ascribes what he entitles Ideas. The Ideas
differ from space, time, and the categories in being not “constitutive”
but “regulative.” They demand an _unconditionedness_ of existence and a
_completeness_ of explanation which can never be found in actual
experience. Their function is threefold. In the first place, they render
the mind dissatisfied with the haphazard collocations of ordinary
experience, and define the goal for its scientific endeavours. Secondly,
they determine for us the criteria that distinguish between truth and
falsity.[47] And thirdly, in so doing, they likewise make possible the
distinction between appearance and reality, revealing to us an
irreconcilable conflict between the ultimate aims of science and the
human conditions, especially the spatial and temporal conditions under
which these aims are realised. The Ideas of Reason are the second main
factor in the “antinomies.”
The problem of the _Critique_, the analysis of our awareness of meaning,
is a single problem, and each of the above elements involves all the
others. Kant, however, for reasons into which I need not here enter, has
assigned part of the problem to what he entitles the _Transcendental
Aesthetic_, and another part to the _Transcendental Dialectic_. Only
what remains is dealt with in what is really the most important of the
three divisions, the _Transcendental Analytic_. But as the problem is
one and indivisible, the discussions in all three sections are condemned
to incompleteness save in so far as Kant, by happy inconsistency,
transgresses the limits imposed by his method of treatment. The
_Aesthetic_ really does no more than prepare the ground for the more
adequate analysis of space and time given in the _Analytic_ and
_Dialectic_, while the problem of the _Analytic_ is itself incompletely
stated until the more comprehensive argument of the _Dialectic_ is taken
into account.[48] Thus the statement in the _Aesthetic_ that space and
time are _given_ to the mind by the sensuous faculty of receptivity is
modified in the _Analytic_ through recognition of the part which the
syntheses and concepts of the understanding must play in the
construction of these forms; and in the _Dialectic_ their apprehension
is further found to involve an Idea of Reason. Similarly, in the
concluding chapter of the _Analytic_, in discussing the grounds for
distinguishing between appearance and reality, Kant omits all reference
to certain important considerations which first emerge into view in the
course of the _Dialectic_. Yet, though no question is more vital to
Critical teaching, the reader is left under the impression that the
treatment given in the _Analytic_ is complete and final.
Partly as a consequence of this, partly owing to Kant’s inconsistent
retention of earlier modes of thinking, there are traceable throughout
the _Critique_ two opposed views of the nature of the distinction
between appearance and reality. On the one view, this distinction is
mediated by the relational categories of the understanding, especially
by that of causality; on the other view, it is grounded in the Ideas of
Reason. The former sets appearance in opposition to reality; the latter
regards the distinction in a more tenable fashion, as being between
realities less and more comprehensively conceived.[49]
A similar defect is caused by Kant’s isolation of immanent from
transcendent metaphysics.[50] The former is dealt with only in the
_Analytic_, the latter only in the _Dialectic_. The former, Kant
asserts, is made possible by the forms of sensibility and the categories
of the understanding; the latter he traces to an illegitimate employment
of the Ideas of Reason. Such a mode of statement itself reveals the
impossibility of any sharp distinction between the immanent and the
transcendent. If science is conditioned by Ideals which arouse the mind
to further acquisitions, and at the same time reveal the limitations to
which our knowledge is for ever condemned to remain subject; if, in
other words, everything known, in being correctly known, must be
apprehended as appearance (_i.e._ as a subordinate existence within a
more comprehensive reality), the distinction between the immanent and
the transcendent falls within and not beyond the domain of our total
experience. The meaning which our consciousness discloses in each of its
judgments is an essentially metaphysical one. It involves the thought,
though not the knowledge, of something more than what the experienced
can ever itself be found to be. The metaphysical is immanent in our
knowledge; the transcendent is merely a name for this immanent factor
when it is falsely viewed as capable of isolation and of independent
treatment. By Kant’s own showing, the task of the _Dialectic_ is not
merely to refute the pretensions of transcendent metaphysics, but to
develop the above general thesis, in confirmation of the positive
conclusions established in the _Analytic_. The _Critique_ will then
supply the remedy for certain evils to which the human mind has hitherto
been subject.
“_The Critique of Pure Reason_ is a preservative against a malady
which has its source in our rational nature. This malady is the
opposite of the love of home (the home-sickness) which binds us to
our fatherland. It is a longing to pass out beyond our immediate
confines and to relate ourselves to other worlds.”[51]
8. THE PLACE OF THE _CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON_ IN KANT’S PHILOSOPHICAL
SYSTEM
The positive character of Kant’s conclusions cannot be properly
appreciated save in the wider perspectives that open to view in the
_Critique of Practical Reason_ and in the _Critique of Judgment_. Though
in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ a distinction is drawn between
theoretical and moral belief, it is introduced in a somewhat casual
manner, and there is no clear indication of the far-reaching
consequences that follow in its train. Unfortunately also, even in his
later writings, Kant is very unfair to himself in his methods of
formulating the distinction. His real intention is to show that
scientific knowledge is not coextensive with human insight; but he
employs a misleading terminology, contrasting knowledge with faith,
scientific demonstration with practical belief.
As already indicated, the term knowledge has, in the Critical
philosophy, a much narrower connotation than in current speech. It is
limited to _sense_-experience, and to such inferences therefrom as can
be obtained by the only methods that Kant is willing to recognise,
namely, the mathematico-physical. Aesthetic, moral and religious
experience, and even organic phenomena, are excluded from the field of
possible knowledge.
In holding to this position, Kant is, of course, the child of his time.
The absolute sufficiency of the Newtonian physics is a presupposition of
all his utterances on this theme. Newton, he believes, has determined in
a quite final manner the principles, methods and limits of scientific
investigation. For though Kant himself imposes upon science a further
limitation, namely, to appearances, he conceives himself, in so doing,
not as weakening Newton’s natural philosophy, but as securing it against
all possible objections. And to balance the narrow connotation thus
assigned to the term knowledge, he has to give a correspondingly wide
meaning to the terms faith, moral belief, subjective principles of
interpretation. If this be not kept constantly in mind, the reader is
certain to misconstrue the character and tendencies of Kant’s actual
teaching.
But though the advances made by the sciences since Kant’s time have
rendered this mode of delimiting the field of knowledge altogether
untenable, his method of defining the sources of _philosophical insight_
has proved very fruitful, and has many adherents at the present day.
What Kant does--stated in broad outline--is to distinguish between the
problems of _existence_ and the problems of _value_, assigning the
former to science and the latter to philosophy.[52] Theoretical
philosophy, represented in his system by the _Critique of Pure Reason_,
takes as its province the logical values, that is, the distinction of
truth and falsity, and defining their criteria determines the nature and
limits of our theoretical insight. Kant finds that these criteria enable
us to distinguish between truth and falsity only on the empirical plane.
Beyond making possible a distinction between appearance and reality,
they have no applicability in the metaphysical sphere.
The _Critique of Practical Reason_ deals with values of a very different
character. The faculty of Reason, which, as already noted,[53] renders
our consciousness a purposive agency controlled by Ideal standards, is
also, Kant maintains, the source of the moral sanctions. But whereas in
the theoretical field it subdues our minds to the discipline of
experience, and restrains our intellectual ambitions within the limits
of the empirical order, it here summons us to sacrifice every natural
impulse and every secular advantage to the furtherance of an end that
has absolute value. In imposing duties, it raises our life from the
“pragmatic”[54] level of a calculating expediency to the higher plane of
a categorical imperative.
The categorical imperative at once humbles and exalts; it discloses our
limitations, but does so through the greatness of the vocation to which
it calls us.
“This principle of morality, just on account of the universality of
the legislation which makes it the formal supreme determining
principle of our will, without regard to any subjective
differences, is declared by the Reason to be a law for all
rational beings.... It is, therefore, not limited to men only, but
applies to all finite beings that possess Reason and Will; nay, it
even includes the Infinite Being as the Supreme Intelligence.”[55]
Consequently, in employing moral ends in the interpretation of the
Universe, we are not picturing the Divine under human limitations, but
are discounting these limitations in the light of the one form of value
that is known to us as absolute.
“_Duty!_ ... What origin is worthy of thee and where is to be found
the root of thy noble descent ... a root to be derived from which
is the indispensable condition of the only worth that men can give
themselves.”[56]
In his earlier years Kant had accepted the current, Leibnizian view that
human excellence consists in intellectual enlightenment, and that it is
therefore reserved for an _élite_, privileged with the leisure and
endowed with the special abilities required for its enjoyment. From this
arid intellectualism he was delivered through the influence of Rousseau.
“I am by disposition an enquirer. I feel the consuming thirst for
knowledge, the eager unrest to advance ever further, and the
delights of discovery. There was a time when I believed that this
is what confers real dignity upon human life, and I despised the
common people who know nothing. Rousseau has set me right. This
imagined advantage vanishes. I learn to honour men, and should
regard myself as of much less use than the common labourer, if I
did not believe that my philosophy will restore to all men the
common rights of humanity.”[57]
These common rights Kant formulates in a purely individualist manner.
For here also, in his lack of historic sense and in his distrust alike
of priests and of statesmen, he is the child of his time. In the
education and discipline of the soul he looks to nothing so artificial
and humanly limited--Kant so regards them--as religious tradition and
social institutions. Human rights, he believes, do not vary with time
and place; and for their enjoyment man requires no initiation and no
equipment beyond what is supplied by Nature herself. It is from this
standpoint that Kant adduces, as the twofold and sufficient inspiration
to the rigours and sublimities of the spiritual life, the starry heavens
above us and the moral law within. They are ever-present influences on
the life of man. The naked eye reveals the former; of the latter all men
are immediately aware. In their universal appeal they are of the very
substance of human existence. Philosophy may avail to counteract certain
of the hindrances which prevent them from exercising their native
influence; it cannot be a substitute for the inspiration which they
alone can yield.
Thus the categorical imperative, in endowing the human soul with an
intrinsic value, singles it out from all other natural existences, and
strengthens it to face, with equanimity, the cold immensities of the
cosmic system. For though the heavens arouse in us a painful feeling of
our insignificance as animal existences, they intensify our
consciousness of a sublime destiny, as bearers of a rival, and indeed a
superior, dignity.
In one fundamental respect Kant broke with the teaching of Rousseau,
namely, in questioning his doctrine of the natural goodness and
indefinite perfectibility of human nature.[58] Nothing, Kant maintains,
is good without qualification except the good will; and even that,
perhaps, is never completely attained in any single instance. The
exercise of duty demands a perpetual vigilance, under the ever-present
consciousness of continuing demerit.
“I am willing to admit out of love of humanity that most of our
actions are indeed correct, but if we examine them more closely we
everywhere come upon the dear self which is always
prominent....”[59] “Nothing but moral fanaticism and exaggerated
self-conceit is infused into the mind by exhortation to actions as
noble, sublime and magnanimous. Thereby men are led into the
delusion that it is not duty, that is, respect for the law, whose
yoke ... they must bear, whether they like it or not, that
constitutes the determining principle of their actions, and which
always humbles them while they _obey_ it. They then fancy that
those actions are expected from them, not from duty, but as pure
merit.... In this way they engender a vain high-flying fantastic
way of thinking, flattering themselves with a spontaneous goodness
of heart that needs neither spur nor bridle, nor any
command....”[60]
In asserting the goodness and self-sufficiency of our natural impulses
Rousseau is the spokesman of a philosophy which has dominated social and
political theory since his day, and which is still prevalent. This
philosophy, in Kant’s view, is disastrous in its consequences. As a
reading of human nature and of our moral vocation, it is hardly less
false than the Epicurean teaching, which finds in the pursuit of
pleasure the motive of all our actions. A naturalistic ethics, in either
form, is incapacitated, by the very nature of its controlling
assumptions, from appreciating the distinguishing features of the moral
consciousness. Neither the successes nor the failures of man’s spiritual
endeavour can be rightly understood from any such standpoint. The human
race, in its endurance and tenacity, in its dauntless courage and in its
soaring spirit, reveals the presence of a _prevenient_ influence,
_non-natural_ in character; and only if human nature be taken as
including this higher, directive power, can it assume to itself the
eulogy which Rousseau so mistakenly passes upon the natural and
undisciplined tendencies of the human heart. For as history
demonstrates, while _men_ are weak, _humanity_ is marvellous.
“There is one thing in our soul which, when we take a right view of
it, we cannot cease to regard with the highest astonishment, and in
regard to which admiration is right and indeed elevating, and that
is our original moral capacity in general.... Even the
incomprehensibility of this capacity,[61] a capacity which
proclaims a Divine origin, must rouse man’s spirit to enthusiasm
and strengthen it for any sacrifices which respect for his duty may
impose on him.”[62]
We are not here concerned with the detail of Kant’s ethical teaching, or
with the manner in which he establishes the freedom of the will, and
justifies belief in the existence of God and the immortality of the
soul. In many respects his argument lies open to criticism. There is an
unhappy contrast between the largeness of his fundamental thesis and
the formal, doctrinaire manner in which it is developed. Indeed, in the
_Critique of Practical Reason_ the individualist, deistic, rationalistic
modes of thinking of his time are much more in evidence than in any
other of his chief writings; and incidentally he also displays a curious
insensibility--again characteristic of his period--to all that is
specific in the religious attitude. But when due allowances have been
made, we can still maintain that in resting his constructive views upon
the supreme value of the moral personality Kant has influenced
subsequent philosophy in hardly less degree than by his teaching in the
_Critique of Pure Reason_.[63]
The two _Critiques_, in method of exposition and argument, in general
outcome, and indeed in the total impression they leave upon the mind,
are extraordinarily different. In the _Critique of Pure Reason_ Kant is
meticulously scrupulous in testing the validity of each link in his
argument. Constantly he retraces his steps; and in many of his chief
problems he halts between competing solutions. Kant’s sceptical spirit
is awake, and it refuses to cease from its questionings. In the
_Critique of Practical Reason_, on the other hand, there is an austere
simplicity of argument, which advances, without looking to right or
left, from a few simple principles direct to their ultimate
consequences. The impressiveness of the first _Critique_ consists in its
appreciation of the _complexity_ of the problems, and in the care with
which their various, conflicting aspects are separately dealt with. The
second _Critique_ derives its force from the fundamental conviction upon
which it is based.
Such, then, stated in the most general terms, is the manner in which
Kant conceives the _Critique of Pure Reason_ as contributing to the
establishment of a humanistic philosophy. It clears the ground for the
practical Reason, and secures it in the autonomous control of its own
domain. While preserving to the intellect and to science certain
definitely prescribed rights, Kant places in the forefront of his system
the moral values; and he does so under the conviction that in living up
to the opportunities, in whatever rank of life, of our common heritage,
we obtain a truer and deeper insight into ultimate issues than can be
acquired through the abstruse subtleties of metaphysical speculation.
I may again draw attention to the consequences which follow from Kant’s
habitual method of isolating his problems. Truth is a value of universal
jurisdiction, and from its criteria the judgments of moral and other
values can claim no exemption. Existences and values do not constitute
independent orders. They interpenetrate, and neither can be adequately
dealt with apart from the considerations appropriate to the other. In
failing to co-ordinate his problems, Kant has over-emphasised the
negative aspects of his logical enquiries and has formulated his ethical
doctrines in a needlessly dogmatic form.
These defects are, however, in some degree remedied in the last of his
chief works, the _Critique of Judgment_. In certain respects it is the
most interesting of all Kant’s writings. The qualities of both the
earlier _Critiques_ here appear in happy combination, while in addition
his concrete interests are more in evidence, to the great enrichment of
his abstract argument. Many of the doctrines of the _Critique of Pure
Reason_, especially those that bear on the problems of teleology, are
restated in a less negative manner, and in their connection with the
kindred problems of natural beauty and the fine arts. For though the
final decision in all metaphysical questions is still reserved to moral
considerations, Kant now takes a more catholic view of the field of
philosophy. He allows, though with characteristic reservations, that the
_empirical_ evidence obtainable through examination of the broader
features of our total experience is of genuinely philosophical value,
and that it can safely be employed to amplify and confirm the
independent convictions of the moral consciousness. The embargo which in
the _Critique of Pure Reason_, in matters metaphysical, is placed upon
all tentative and probable reasoning is thus tacitly removed; and the
term knowledge again acquires the wider meaning very properly ascribed
to it in ordinary speech.
A COMMENTARY TO KANT’S “CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON”
TITLE: KRITIK DER REINEN VERNUNFT
The term critique or criticism, as employed by Kant, is of English
origin. It appears in seventeenth and eighteenth century English,
chiefly in adjectival form, as a literary and artistic term--for
instance, in the works of Pope, who was Kant’s favourite English poet.
Kant was the first to employ it in German, extending it from the field
of aesthetics to that of general philosophy. A reference in Kant’s
_Logic_[64] to Home’s _Elements of Criticism_[65] would seem to indicate
that it was Home’s use of the term which suggested to him its wider
employment. “Critique of pure reason,” in its primary meaning, signifies
the passing of critical judgments upon pure reason. In this sense Kant
speaks of his time as “the age of criticism (_Zeitalter der Kritik_).”
Frequently, however, he takes the term more specifically as meaning a
critical investigation leading to positive as well as to negative
results. Occasionally, especially in the _Dialectic_, it also signifies
a discipline applied to pure reason, limiting it within due bounds. The
first appearance of the word in Kant’s writings is in 1765 in the
_Nachricht_[66] of his lectures for the winter term 1765-1766. Kant
seldom employs the corresponding adjective, critical (_kritisch_). His
usual substitute for it is the term transcendental.
_Pure_ (_rein_) has here a very definite meaning. It is the absolutely
_a priori_. Negatively it signifies that which is independent of
experience. Positively it signifies that which originates from reason
itself, and which is characterised by universality and necessity.[67] By
“pure reason” Kant therefore means reason in so far as it supplies out
of itself, independently of experience, _a priori_ elements that as such
are characterised by universality and necessity.
_Reason_ (_Vernunft_) is used in the _Critique_ in three different
meanings. In the above title it is employed in its widest sense, as the
source of all _a priori_ elements. It includes what is _a priori_ in
sensibility as well as in understanding (_Verstand_). In its narrowest
sense it is distinct even from understanding, and signifies that faculty
which renders the mind dissatisfied with its ordinary and scientific
knowledge, and which leads it to demand a completeness and
unconditionedness which can never be found in the empirical sphere.
Understanding conditions science; reason generates metaphysic.
Understanding has categories; reason has its Ideas. Thirdly, Kant
frequently employs understanding and reason as synonymous terms,
dividing the mind only into the two faculties, sensibility and
spontaneity. Thus in A 1-2, understanding and reason are used
promiscuously, and in place of _reine Vernunft_ we find _reiner
Verstand_. As already stated, the term reason, as employed in Kant’s
title, ought properly to be taken in its widest sense. Sensibility falls
within reason in virtue of the _a priori_ forms which it contains. Kant
does not himself, however, always interpret the title in this strict
sense. The triple use of the term is an excellent example of the
looseness and carelessness with which he employs even the most important
and fundamental of his technical terms. Only the context can reveal the
particular meaning to be assigned in each case.
The phrase “_of_ pure reason” (_der reinen Vernunft_) has, as Vaihinger
points out,[68] a threefold ambiguity. (1) Sometimes it is a genitive
objective. The critical enquiry is directed upon pure reason as its
object. This corresponds to the view of the _Critique_ as merely a
treatise on method. (2) Sometimes it is a genitive subjective. The
critical enquiry is undertaken by and executed through pure reason. This
expresses the view of the _Critique_ as itself a system of pure rational
knowledge. (3) At other times it has a reflexive meaning. Pure reason is
subject and object at once. It is both subject-matter and method or
instrument. Through the _Critique_ it attains to self-knowledge. The
_Critique_ is the critical examination of pure reason by itself. The
first view would seem to be the original and primary meaning of the
title. The second view very early took its place alongside it, and
appears in many passages. The third view must be taken as representing
Kant’s final interpretation of the title; it is on the whole the most
adequate to the actual content and scope of the _Critique_. For the
_Critique_ is not merely a treatise on method; it is also a system of
pure rational knowledge. It professes to establish, in an exhaustive and
final manner, the _a priori_ principles which determine the possibility,
conditions, and limits of pure rational knowledge.[69]
MOTTO
De nobis ipsis silemus: De re autem, quae agitur, petimus: ut
homines eam non opinionem, sed opus esse cogitent; ac pro certo
habeant, non sectae nos alicuius, aut placiti, sed utilitatis et
amplitudinis humanae fundamenta moliri. Deinde ut suis commodis
aequi ... in commune consulant ... et ipsi in partem veniant.
Praeterea ut bene sperent, neque instaurationem nostram ut quiddam
infinitum et ultra mortale fingant, et animo concipiant; quum
revera sit infiniti erroris finis et terminus legitimus.
This motto, which was added in the second edition, is taken from the
preface to Bacon’s _Instauratio Magna_, of which the _Novum Organum_ is
the second part. As the first part of the _Instauratio_ is represented
only by the later, separately published, _De Augmentis Scientiarum_,
this preface originally appeared, and is still usually given, as
introductory to the _Novum Organum_.
The complete passage (in which I have indicated Kant’s omissions) is
rendered as follows in the translation of Ellis and Spedding:[70]
“Of myself I say nothing; but in behalf of the business which is in
hand I entreat men to believe that it is not an opinion to be held,
but a work to be done; and to be well assured that I am labouring
to lay the foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human
utility and power. Next, I ask them to deal fairly by their own
interests [and laying aside all emulations and prejudices in favour
of this or that opinion], to join in consultation for the common
good; and [being now freed and guarded by the securities and helps
which I offer from the errors and impediments of the way] to come
forward themselves and take part [in that which remains to be
done]. Moreover, to be of good hope, nor to imagine that this
Instauration of mine is a thing infinite and beyond the power of
man, when it is in fact the true end and termination of infinite
error.”
The opening sentence of Bacon’s preface might also have served as a
fitting motto to the _Critique_:
“It seems to me that men do not rightly understand either their
store or their strength, but overrate the one and underrate the
other.”
Or again the following:
“I have not sought nor do I seek either to enforce or to ensnare
men’s judgments, but I lead them to things themselves and the
concordances of things, that they may see for themselves what they
have, what they can dispute, what they can add and contribute to
the common stock.... And by these means I suppose that I have
established for ever a true and lawful marriage between the
empirical and the rational faculty, the unkind and ill-starred
divorce and separation of which has thrown into confusion all the
affairs of the human family.”
DEDICATION
TO
FREIHERR VON ZEDLITZ
Karl Abraham, Freiherr von Zedlitz had been entrusted, as Minister
(1771-1788) to Frederick the Great, with the oversight and direction of
the Prussian system of education. He held Kant in the highest
esteem.[71] In February 1778 we find him writing to thank Kant for the
pleasure he had found in perusing notes of his lectures on physical
geography, and requesting the favour of a complete copy.[72] A week
later he invited Kant to accept a professorship of philosophy in
Halle,[73] which was then much the most important university centre in
Germany. Upon Kant’s refusal he repeated the offer, with added
inducements, including the title of Hofrat.[74] Again, in August of the
same year, he writes that he is attending, upon Mendelssohn’s
recommendation (and doubtless also in the hope of receiving from this
indirect source further light upon Kant’s own teaching in a favourite
field), the lectures on anthropology of Kant’s disciple and friend,
Marcus Herz. The letter concludes with a passage which may perhaps have
suggested to Kant the appropriateness of dedicating his _Critique_ to so
wise and discerning a patron of true philosophy.
“Should your inventive power extend so far, suggest to me the means
of holding back the students in the universities from the bread and
butter studies, and of making them understand that their modicum of
law, even their theology and medicine, will be immensely more
easily acquired and safely applied, if they are in possession of
more philosophical knowledge. They can be judges, advocates,
preachers and physicians only for a few hours each day; but in
these and all the remainder of the day they are men, and have need
of other sciences. In short, you must instruct me how this is to be
brought home to students. Printed injunctions, laws,
regulations--these are even worse than bread and butter study
itself.”[75]
A Minister of Education who thus ranks philosophy above professional
studies, and both as more important than all academic machinery, holds
his office by divine right.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Detailed discussion of the _Prefaces_ is not advisable. The problems
which they raise can best be treated in the order in which they come up
in the _Critique_ itself. I shall dwell only on the minor incidental
difficulties of the text, and on those features in Kant’s exposition
which are peculiar to the _Prefaces_, or which seem helpful in the way
of preliminary orientation. I shall first briefly restate the argument
of the _Preface_ to the first edition, and then add the necessary
comment.
Human reason is ineradicably metaphysical. It is haunted by questions
which, though springing from its very nature, none the less transcend
its powers. Such a principle, for instance, as that of causality, in
carrying us to more and more remote conditions, forces us to realise
that by such regress our questions can never be answered. However far we
recede in time, and however far we proceed in space, we are still no
nearer to a final answer to our initial problems, and are therefore
compelled to take refuge in postulates of a different kind, such, for
instance, as that there must be a first unconditioned cause from which
the empirical series of causes and effects starts, or that space is
capable of existing as a completed whole. But these assumptions plunge
reason in darkness and involve it in contradictions. They are the
sources of all the troubles of the warring schools. Error lies somewhere
concealed in them--the more thoroughly concealed that they surpass the
limits of possible experience. Until such error has been detected and
laid bare, metaphysical speculation must remain the idlest of all tasks.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century metaphysics had fallen, as
Kant here states, into disrepute. The wonderful success with which the
mathematical and natural sciences were being developed served only to
emphasise by contrast the ineffectiveness of the metaphysical
disciplines. Indifference to philosophy was the inevitable outcome, and
was due, not to levity, but to the matured judgment of the age, which
refused to be any longer put off with such pretended knowledge. But
since the philosophical sciences aim at that knowledge which, if
attainable, we should be least willing to dispense with, the failure of
philosophy is really a summons to reason to take up anew the most
difficult of all its tasks. It must once and for all determine either
the possibility or the impossibility of metaphysics. It must establish
“...a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and
which will also be able to dismiss all groundless pretensions, not
by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and
unalterable laws. This tribunal is no other than the _Critique of
Pure Reason_.”[76] “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of
criticism (_Kritik_), and to such criticism everything must submit.
Religion, through its sanctity, and law-giving, through its
majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then
awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which
reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test
of free and open examination.”[77]
As has already been emphasised in the preceding historical sketch, Kant
had learnt to trust the use of reason, and was a rationalist by
education, temperament, and conviction. He here classifies philosophies
as dogmatic and sceptical; and under the latter rubric he includes all
empirical systems. ‘Empiricism’ and ‘scepticism’ he interprets as
practically synonymous terms. The defect of the dogmatists is that they
have not critically examined their methods of procedure, and in the
absence of an adequate distinction between appearance and reality have
interpreted the latter in terms of the former. The defect of the
empiricists and sceptics is that they have misrepresented the nature of
the faculty of reason, ignoring its claims and misreading its functions,
and accordingly have gone even further astray than their dogmatic
opponents. All knowledge worthy of the name is _a priori_ knowledge. It
possesses universality and necessity, and as such must rest on pure
reason. Wherever there is science, there is an element of pure reason.
Whether or not pure reason can also extend to the unconditioned is the
question which decides the possibility of constructive metaphysics. This
is what Kant means when he declares that the _Critique_ is a criticism
of the power of reason, in respect of all knowledge after which it may
strive independently of experience. Pure reason is the subject-matter of
the enquiry; it is also the instrument through which the enquiry is
made.[78] Nothing empirical or merely hypothetical has any place in it,
either as subject-matter or as method of argument.
From this position Kant draws several important consequences. First,
since pure reason means that faculty whereby we gain knowledge
independently of all experience, it can be isolated and its whole nature
exhaustively determined. Indeed pure reason (Kant seeks to prove) is so
perfect a unity that if “its principle” should be found insufficient to
the solution of a single one of all the questions which are presented to
it by its own nature, we should be justified in forthwith rejecting it
as also incompetent to answer with complete certainty any one of the
other questions. In metaphysics it must be either all or nothing,[79]
either final and complete certainty or else absolute failure.
“While I am saying this I can fancy that I detect in the face of
the reader an expression of indignation mingled with contempt at
pretensions seemingly so arrogant and vainglorious; and yet they
are incomparably more moderate than the claims of all those writers
who on the lines of the usual programme profess to prove the simple
nature of the soul or the necessity of a first beginning of the
world.”[80]
In so doing they pretend to define realities which lie beyond the limits
of possible experience; the _Critique_ seeks only to deal with that
faculty of reason which manifests itself to us within our own minds.
Formal logic shows how completely and systematically the simple acts of
reason can be enumerated. Aristotle created this science of logic
complete at a stroke. Kant professes to have established an equally
final metaphysics; and as logic is not a science proper, but rather a
propaedeutic to all science, metaphysics, thus interpreted, is the only
one of all the sciences which can immediately attain to such
completeness.
“For it is nothing but the inventory of all our possessions through
pure reason, systematically arranged. In this field nothing can
escape us. What reason produces entirely out of itself cannot lie
concealed, but is brought to light by reason itself immediately the
common principle has been discovered.”[81]
Secondly, the _Critique_ also claims certainty. With the removal of
everything empirical, and the reduction of its subject-matter to pure
reason, all mere opinion or hypothesis is likewise eliminated.
Probabilities or hypotheses can have no place in a _Critique of Pure
Reason_.[82] Everything must be derived according to _a priori_
principles from pure conceptions in which there is no intermixture of
experience or any special intuition.
* * * * *
This _Preface_ to the first edition, considered as introductory to the
_Critique_, is misleading for two reasons. First, because in it Kant is
preoccupied almost exclusively with the problems of metaphysics in the
strict ontological sense, that is to say, with the problems of the
_Dialectic_. The problems of the _Analytic_, which is the very heart of
the _Critique_, are almost entirely ignored. They are, it is true,
referred to in A x-xi, but the citation is quite externally
intercalated; it receives no support or extension from the other parts
of the _Preface_. This results in a second defect, namely, that Kant
fails to indicate the more empirical features of his new Critical
standpoint. Since ultimate reality is supersensuous, metaphysics, as
above conceived, can have no instrument save pure reason. The subjects
of its enquiry, God, freedom, and immortality, if they are to be known
at all, can be determined only through _a priori_ speculation. This
fact, fundamental and all-important for Kant, was completely ignored in
the popular eclectic philosophies of the time. They professed to derive
metaphysical conclusions from empirical evidence. They substituted, as
Kant has pointed out,[83] “a physiology of the human understanding” for
the Critical investigation of the claims of reason, and anthropology for
ethics. They were blind to the dogmatism of which they are thereby
guilty. They assumed those very points which most call for proof,
namely, that reason is adequate to the solution of metaphysical
problems, and that all existence is so fundamentally of one type that we
can argue from the sensuous to the supersensuous, from appearance to
reality. When they fell into difficulties, they pleaded the
insufficiency of human reason, and yet were all the while
unquestioningly relying upon it in the drawing of the most tremendous
inferences. Such, for instance, are the assumptions which underlie Moses
Mendelssohn’s contention that since animals as well as men agree in the
apprehension of space, it must be believed to be absolutely real.[84]
These assumptions also determine Priestley’s assertion that though every
event has its cause, there is one causeless happening, namely, the
creative act to which the existence of the world is due.[85] On such
terms, metaphysics is too patently easy to be even plausible.
“Indifference, doubt, and, in final issue, severe criticism, are truer
signs of a profound habit of thought.”[86] The matter of experience
affords no data for metaphysical inference. In the _a priori_ forms of
experience, and there alone, can metaphysics hope to find a basis, if
any basis is really discoverable.
This is Kant’s reason for so emphatically insisting that the problem of
the _Critique_ is to determine “how much we can hope to achieve by
reason, when all the material and assistance of experience is taken
away.”[87] But in keeping only this one point in view Kant greatly
misrepresents the problems and scope of the _Critique_. Throughout the
_Preface_ he speaks the language of the _Aufklärung_. Even in the very
act of limiting the scope of reason, he overstresses its powers, and
omits reference to its empirical conditions. It is well to contrast this
teaching with such a passage as the following:
“The position of all genuine idealists from the Eleatics to
Berkeley is contained in this formula: ‘All cognition through the
senses and experience is nothing but mere illusion, and only in the
ideas of pure understanding and Reason is there truth.’ The
fundamental principle ruling all my idealism, on the contrary, is
this: ‘All cognition of things solely from pure understanding or
pure Reason is nothing but mere illusion, and only in experience is
there truth.’”[88]
But that passage is equally inadequate as a complete expression of
Kant’s Critical philosophy. The truth lies midway between it and the
teaching of the _Preface_ to the first edition. Pure reason is as
defective an instrument of knowledge as is factual experience. Though
the primary aim of metaphysics is to determine our relation to the
absolutely real, and though that can only be done by first determining
the nature and possible scope of _a priori_ principles, such principles
are found on investigation to possess only empirical validity. The
central question of the _Critique_ thus becomes the problem of the
validity of their empirical employment. The interrelation of these two
problems, that of the _a priori_ and that of experience, and Kant’s
attitude towards them, cannot be considered till later. The defects of
the _Preface_ to the first edition are in part corrected by the
extremely valuable _Preface_ substituted in the second edition. But some
further points in this first _Preface_ must be considered.
=Prescribed by the very nature of reason itself.=[89]--Metaphysics exists
as a “natural disposition,” and its questions are not therefore merely
artificial.
“As natural disposition (_Naturanlage_) ... metaphysics is real.
For human reason, without being moved merely by the idle desire for
extent and variety of knowledge, proceeds impetuously, driven on
by an inward need, to questions such as cannot be answered by any
empirical employment of reason, or by principles thence derived.
Thus in all men, as soon as their reason has become ripe for
speculation, there has always existed and will always continue to
exist some kind of metaphysics.”[90]
Hence results what Kant entitles _transcendental illusion_.
“The cause of this transcendental illusion is that there are
fundamental rules and maxims for the employment of Reason,
subjectively regarded as a faculty of human knowledge, and that
these rules and maxims have all the appearance of being objective
principles. We take the subjective necessity of a connection of our
concepts, _i.e._ a connection necessitated for the advantage of the
understanding, for an objective necessity in the determination of
things in themselves. This is an illusion which can no more be
prevented than we can prevent the sea from appearing higher at the
horizon than at the shore, since we see it through higher light
rays; or to cite a still better example, than the astronomer can
prevent the moon from appearing larger at its rising, although he
is not deceived by this illusion.... There exists, then, a natural
and unavoidable dialectic of pure Reason, not one in which a
bungler might entangle himself through lack of knowledge, or one
which some sophist has artificially invented to confuse thinking
people, but one which is inseparable from human Reason, and which,
even after its deceiving power has been exposed, will not cease to
play tricks with it and continually to entrap it into momentary
aberrations that will ever and again call for correction.”[91]
=Dogmatism.=[92]--According to Kant there are three possible standpoints
in philosophy--the dogmatic, the sceptical, and the critical. All
preceding thinkers come under the first two heads. A dogmatist is one
who assumes that human reason can comprehend ultimate reality, and who
proceeds upon this assumption. He does not, before proceeding to
construct a metaphysics, enquire whether it is possible. Dogmatism
expresses itself (to borrow Vaihinger’s convenient mode of
definition[93]) through three factors--_rationalism_, _realism_, and
_transcendence_. Descartes and Leibniz are typical dogmatists. As
rationalists they hold that it is possible to determine from pure _a
priori_ principles the ultimate nature of God, of the soul, and of the
material universe. They are realists in that they assert that by human
thought the complete nature of objective reality can be determined. They
also adopt the attitude of transcendence. Through pure thought they go
out beyond the sensible and determine the supersensuous. Scepticism
(Kant, as above stated,[94] regards it as being in effect equivalent to
empiricism) may similarly be defined through the three terms,
_empiricism_, _subjectivism_, _immanence_. A sceptic can never be a
rationalist. He must reduce knowledge to sense-experience. For this
reason also his knowledge is infected by subjective conditions; through
sensation we cannot hope to determine the nature of the objectively
real. This attitude is also that of immanence; knowledge is limited to
the sphere of sense-experience. Criticism has similarly its three
constitutive factors, _rationalism_, _subjectivism_, _immanence_. It
agrees with dogmatism in maintaining that only through _a priori_
principles can true knowledge be obtained. Such knowledge is, however,
subjective[95] in its origin, and for that reason it is also only of
immanent application; knowledge is possible only in the sphere of
sense-experience. Dogmatism claims that knowledge arises independently
of experience and extends beyond it. Empiricism holds that knowledge
arises out of sense-experience and is valid only within it. Criticism
teaches that knowledge arises independently of particular experience but
is valid only for experience.
The following passages in the _Methodology_ give Kant’s view of the
historical and relative values of the two false methods:
“The sceptic is the taskmaster who constrains the dogmatic reasoner
to develop a sound critique of the understanding and reason. When
the latter has been made to advance thus far, he need fear no
further challenge, since he has learned to distinguish his real
possessions from that which lies entirely beyond them, and to which
he can therefore lay no claim.... Thus the sceptical procedure
cannot of itself yield any satisfying answer to the questions of
reason, but none the less it prepares the way by awakening its
circumspection, and by indicating the radical measures which are
adequate to secure it in its legitimate possessions.”[96] “The
first step in matters of pure reason, marking its infancy, is
_dogmatic_. The second step is _sceptical_, and indicates that
experience has rendered our judgment wiser and more circumspect.
But a third step, such as can be taken only by fully matured
judgment, is now necessary.... This is not the censorship but the
critique of reason, whereby not its present bounds but its
determinate [and necessary] limits, not its ignorance on this or
that point, but in regard to all possible questions of a certain
kind, are demonstrated from principles, and not merely arrived at
by way of conjecture. Scepticism is thus a resting-place for human
reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make
survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the
future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But
it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. That can be
obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of
the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our
knowledge of objects is enclosed.”[97]
=Locke.=[98]--Cf. A 86 = B 119; A 270 = B 327; B 127.
=On the unfavourable contrast between mathematics and
metaphysics.=[99]--Cf. _Ueber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze_ (1764),
_erste Betrachtung_, and below, pp. 40, 563 ff.
=The age of criticism.=[100]--Kant considered himself as contributing to
the further advance of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.[101] In
view, however, of the contrast between eighteenth and nineteenth century
thought, and of the real affiliations and ultimate consequences of
Kant’s teaching, it seems truer to regard the Critical philosophy as at
once completing and transcending the _Aufklärung_. Kant breaks with many
of its most fundamental assumptions.
=The Critique of Pure Reason.=[102]--Kant here defines the _Critique_ as
directed upon pure reason.[103] Further, it is a criticism of knowledge
which is “independent of all experience,” or, as Kant adds “free from
all experience.” Such phrases, in this context, really mean
_transcendent_. The _Critique_ is here taken as being a Critical
investigation of transcendent metaphysics, of its sources, scope, and
limits.[104]
=Opinion or hypothesis not permissible.=[105]--Cf. below, p. 543 ff.
=I know no enquiries, etc.=[106]--The important questions raised by this
paragraph are discussed below, p. 235 ff.
=Jean Terrasson= (1670-1750).[107]--The quotation is from his work
posthumously published (1754), and translated from the French by Frau
Gottsched under the title _Philosophie nach ihrem allgemeinen Einflusse
auf alle Gegenstände des Geistes und der Sitten_ (1762). Terrasson is
also referred to by Kant in his _Anthropologie_, §§ 44 and 77. Terrasson
would seem to be the author of the _Traité de l’infini créé_ which has
been falsely ascribed to Malebranche. I have translated this latter
treatise in the _Philosophical Review_ (July 1905).
=Such a system of pure speculative reason.=[108]--The relation in which
this system would stand to the _Critique_ is discussed below, pp. 71-2.
Speculative does not with Kant mean transcendent, but merely theoretical
as opposed to practical. Cf. B 25, A 15 = B 29, A 845 = B 873.
=Under the title: Metaphysics of Nature.=[109]--No such work, at least
under this title, was ever completed by Kant. In the Kantian terminology
“nature” signifies “all that is.” Cf. below, p. 580.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
I shall again give a brief explanatory paraphrase, before proceeding to
detailed comment. The main points of the preface of the first edition
are repeated. “Metaphysics soars above all teaching of experience, and
rests on concepts only. In it reason has to be her own pupil.”[110] But
Kant immediately proceeds to a further point. That logic should have
attained the secure method of science is due to its limitation to the
mere _a priori_ form of knowledge. For metaphysics this is far more
difficult, since it “_has to deal not with itself alone, but also with
objects_.”[111]
The words which I have italicised form a very necessary correction of
the first edition preface, according to which the _Critique_ would seem
to “treat only of reason and its pure thinking.” A further difference
follows. The second edition preface, in thus emphasising the objective
aspect of the problem, is led to characterise in a more complete manner
the method to be followed in the Critical enquiry. How can the
_Critique_, if it is concerned, as both editions agree in insisting,
only with the _a priori_ which originates in human reason, solve the
specifically metaphysical problem, viz. that of determining the
independently real? How can an idea in us refer to, and constitute
knowledge of, an object? The larger part of the preface to the second
edition is devoted to the Critical solution of this problem. The
argument of the _Dialectic_ is no longer emphasised at the expense of
the _Analytic_.
Kant points out that as a matter of historical fact each of the two
rational sciences, mathematics and physics, first entered upon the
assured path of knowledge by a sudden revolution, and by the adoption of
a method which in its general characteristics is common to both. This
method consists, not in being led by nature as in leading-strings, but
in interrogating nature in accordance with what reason produces on its
own plan. The method of the geometrician does not consist in the study
of figures presented to the senses. That would be an empirical (in
Kant’s view, sceptical) method. Geometrical propositions could not then
be regarded as possessing universality and necessity. Nor does the
geometrician employ a dogmatic method, that of studying the mere
conception of a figure. By that means no new knowledge could ever be
attained. The actual method consists in interpreting the sensible
figures through conceptions that have been rigorously defined, and in
accordance with which the figures have been constructively generated.
The first discovery of this method, by Thales or some other Greek, was
“far more important than the discovery of the passage round the
celebrated Cape of Good Hope.”[112]
Some two thousand years elapsed before Galileo formulated a
corresponding method for physical science. He relied neither on mere
observation nor on his own conceptions. He determined the principles
according to which alone concordant phenomena can be admitted as laws of
nature, and then by experiment compelled nature to answer the questions
which these principles suggest. Here again the method is neither merely
empirical nor purely dogmatic. It possesses the advantages of both.
Metaphysics is ripe for a similar advance. It must be promoted to the
rank of positive science by the transforming power of an analogous
method. The fundamental and distinguishing characteristic of
mathematical and physical procedure is the legislative power to which
reason lays claim. Such procedure, if generalised and extended, will
supply the required method of the new philosophy. Reason must be
regarded as self-legislative in all the domains of our possible
knowledge. _Objects must be viewed as conforming to human thought, not
human thought to the independently real._ This is the “hypothesis” to
which Kant has given the somewhat misleading title, “Copernican.”[113]
The _method of procedure_ which it prescribes is, he declares, analogous
to that which was followed by Copernicus, and will be found to be as
revolutionary in its consequences. In terms of this hypothesis a
complete and absolutely certain metaphysics, valid now and for all time,
can be created at a stroke. The earliest and oldest enterprise of the
human mind will achieve a new beginning. Metaphysics, the mother of all
the sciences, will renew her youth, and will equal in assurance, as she
surpasses in dignity, the offspring of her womb.
From this new standpoint Kant develops phenomenalism on rationalist
lines. He professes to prove that though our knowledge is only of
appearances, it is conditioned by _a priori_ principles. His “Copernican
hypothesis,” so far from destroying positive science, is, he claims,
merely a philosophical extension of the method which it has long been
practising. Since all science worthy of the name involves _a priori_
elements, it can be accounted for only in terms of the new hypothesis.
Only if objects are regarded as conforming to our forms of intuition,
and to our modes of conception, can they be anticipated by _a priori_
reasoning. Science can be _a priori_ just because, properly understood,
it is not a rival of metaphysics, and does not attempt to define the
absolutely real.
But such a statement at once suggests what may at first seem a most
fatal objection. Though the new standpoint may account for the _a
priori_ in experience and science, it can be of no avail in metaphysics.
If the _a priori_ concepts have a mental origin, they can have no
validity for the independently real. If we can know only what we
ourselves originate, things in themselves must be unknown, and
metaphysics must be impossible. But in this very consequence the new
hypothesis first reveals its full advantages. It leads to an
interpretation of metaphysics which is as new and as revolutionary[114]
as that which it gives to natural science. Transcendent metaphysics is
indeed impossible, but in harmony with man’s practical and moral
vocation, its place is more efficiently taken by an immanent metaphysics
on the one hand, and by a metaphysics of ethics on the other. Together
these constitute the new and final philosophy which Kant claims to have
established by his Critical method. Its chief task is to continue “that
noblest enterprise of antiquity,”[115] the distinguishing of appearances
from things in themselves. The unconditioned is that which alone will
satisfy speculative reason; its determination is the ultimate
presupposition of metaphysical enquiry. But so long as the empirical
world is regarded as true reality, totality or unconditionedness cannot
possibly be conceived--is, indeed, inherently self-contradictory. On the
new hypothesis there is no such difficulty. By the proof that things in
themselves are unknowable, a sphere is left open within which the
unconditioned can be sought. For though this sphere is closed to
speculative reason, the unconditioned can be determined from data
yielded by reason in its practical activity. The hypothesis which at
first seems to destroy metaphysics proves on examination to be its
necessary presupposition. The “Copernican hypothesis” which conditions
science will also account for metaphysics properly conceived.
Upon this important point Kant dwells at some length. Even the negative
results of the _Critique_ are, he emphasises, truly positive in their
ultimate consequences. The dogmatic extension of speculative reason
really leads to the narrowing of its employment, for the principles of
which it then makes use involve the subjecting of things in themselves
to the limiting conditions of sensibility. All attempts to construe the
unconditioned in terms that will satisfy reason are by such procedure
ruled out from the very start. To demonstrate this is the fundamental
purpose and chief aim of the _Critique_. Space and time are merely forms
of sensuous intuition; the concepts of understanding can yield knowledge
only in their connection with them. Though the concepts in their purity
possess a quite general meaning, this is not sufficient to constitute
knowledge. The conception of causality, for instance, necessarily
involves the notion of time-sequence; apart from time it is the bare,
empty, and entirely unspecified conception of a sufficient ground.
Similarly, the category of substance signifies the permanent in time and
space; as a form of pure reason it has a quite indefinite meaning
signifying merely that which is always a subject and never a predicate.
In the absence of further specification, it remains entirely problematic
in its reference. The fact, however, that the categories of the
understanding possess, in independence of sensibility, even this quite
general significance is all-important. Originating in pure reason they
have a wider scope than the forms of sense, and enable us to conceive,
though not to gain knowledge of, things in themselves.[116] Our dual
nature, as being at once sensuous and supersensuous, opens out to us the
apprehension of both.
Kant illustrates his position by reference to the problem of the freedom
of the will. As thought is wider than sense, and reveals to us the
existence of a noumenal realm, we are enabled to reconcile belief in the
freedom of the will with the mechanism of nature. We can recognise that
within the phenomenal sphere everything without exception is causally
determined, and yet at the same time maintain that the whole order of
nature is grounded in noumenal conditions. We can assert of one and the
same being that its will is subject to the necessity of nature and that
it is free--mechanically determined in its visible actions, free in its
real supersensible existence. We have, indeed, no knowledge of the soul,
and therefore cannot assert on theoretical grounds that it possesses any
such freedom. The very possibility of freedom transcends our powers of
comprehension. The proof that it can at least be conceived without
contradiction is, however, all-important. For otherwise no arguments
from the nature of the moral consciousness could be of the least avail;
before a palpable contradiction every argument is bound to give way.
Now, for the first time, the doctrine of morals and the doctrine of
nature can be independently developed, without conflict, each in
accordance with its own laws. The same is true in regard to the
existence of God and the immortality of the soul. By means of the
Critical distinction between the empirical and the supersensible worlds,
_these conceptions are now for the first time rendered possible of
belief_. “I had to remove _knowledge_, in order to make room for
_belief_.”[117] “This loss affects only the _monopoly of the schools_,
in no respect the _interests of humanity_.”[118]
Lastly, Kant emphasises the fact that the method of the _Critique_ must
be akin to that of dogmatism. It must be rational _a priori_. To adopt
any other method of procedure is “to shake off the fetters of _science_
altogether, and thus to change work into play, certainty into opinion,
philosophy into philodoxy.”[119] And Kant repeats the claims of the
preface of the first edition as to the completeness and finality of his
system. “This system will, as I hope, maintain through the future this
same unchangeableness.”[120]
=Logic.=[121]--For Kant’s view of the logic of Aristotle as complete and
perfect, cf. below, pp. 184-5. Kant compares metaphysics to mathematics
and physics on the one hand, and to formal logic on the other. The
former show the possibility of attaining to the secure path of science
by a sudden and single revolution; the latter demonstrates the
possibility of creating a science complete and entire at a stroke.
Thanks to the new Critical method, metaphysics may be enabled, Kant
claims, to parallel both achievements at once.
=Theoretical and practical reason.=[122]--Such comment as is necessary
upon this distinction is given below. Cf. p. 569 ff.
=Hitherto it has been supposed that all knowledge must conform to the
objects.=[123]--This statement is historically correct. That assumption
did actually underlie one and all of the pre-Kantian philosophies. At
the same time, it is true that Kant’s phenomenalist standpoint is
partially anticipated by Hume, by Malebranche and by Leibniz, especially
by the first named. Hume argues that to condemn knowledge on the ground
that it can never copy or truly reveal any external reality is to
misunderstand its true function. Our sense perceptions and our general
principles are so determined by nature as to render feasible only a
practical organisation of life. When we attempt to derive from them a
consistent body of knowledge, failure is the inevitable result.[124]
Malebranche, while retaining the absolutist view of conceptual
knowledge, propounds a similar theory of sense-perception.[125] Our
perceptions are, as he shows, permeated through and through, from end to
end, with illusion. Such illusions justify themselves by their practical
usefulness, but they likewise prove that theoretical insight is not the
purpose of our sense-experience. Kant’s Copernican hypothesis consists
in great part of an extension of this view to our conceptual, scientific
knowledge. But he differs both from Malebranche and from Hume in that he
develops his phenomenalism on rationalist lines. He professes to show
that though our knowledge is only of the phenomenal, it is conditioned
by _a priori_ principles. The resulting view of the distinction between
appearance and reality has kinship with that of Leibniz.[126] The
phenomena of science, though only appearances, are none the less _bene
fundata_. Our scientific knowledge, though not equivalent to
metaphysical apprehension of the ultimately real, can be progressively
developed by scientific methods.
=The two “parts” of metaphysics.=[127]--Kant is here drawing the important
distinction, which is one result of his new standpoint, between
_immanent_ and _transcendent_ metaphysics. It is unfortunate that he
does not do so in a more explicit manner, with full recognition of its
novelty and of its far-reaching significance. Many ambiguities in his
exposition here and elsewhere would then have been obviated.[128]
=The unconditioned which Reason postulates in all things by themselves,
by necessity and by right.=[129]--Points are here raised the discussion
of which must be deferred. Cf. below, pp. 429-31, 433-4, 558-61.
=The Critique is a treatise on method, not a system of the science
itself.=[130]--Cf. A xv.; B xxxvi.; and especially A 11 = B 24, below pp.
71-2.
=The Copernican hypothesis.=[131]--Kant’s comparison of his new hypothesis
to that of Copernicus has generally been misunderstood. The reader very
naturally conceives the Copernican revolution in terms of its main
ultimate consequence, the reduction of the earth from its proud position
of central pre-eminence. But that does not bear the least analogy to
the intended consequences of the Critical philosophy. The direct
opposite is indeed true. Kant’s hypothesis is inspired by the avowed
purpose of neutralising the naturalistic implications of the Copernican
astronomy. His aim is nothing less than the firm establishment of what
may perhaps be described as a Ptolemaic, anthropocentric metaphysics.
Such naturalistic philosophy as that of Hume may perhaps be described as
Copernican, but the Critical philosophy, as humanistic, has genuine
kinship with the Greek standpoint.
Even some of Kant’s best commentators have interpreted the analogy in
the above manner.[132] It is so interpreted by T. H. Green[133] and by
J. Hutchison Stirling.[134] Caird in his _Critical Philosophy of Kant_
makes not the least mention of the analogy, probably for the reason that
while reading it in the same fashion as Green, he recognised the
inappropriateness of the comparison as thus taken. The analogy is stated
in typically ambiguous fashion by Lange[135] and by Höffding.[136] S.
Alexander, while very forcibly insisting upon the Ptolemaic character of
the Kantian philosophy, also endorses this interpretation in the
following terms:
“It is very ironical that Kant himself signalised the revolution
which he believed himself to be effecting as a Copernican
revolution. But there is nothing Copernican in it except that he
believed it to be a revolution. If every change is Copernican which
reverses the order of the terms with which it deals, which declares
A to depend on B when B had before been declared to depend on A,
then Kant--who believed that he had reversed the order of
dependence of mind and things--was right in saying that he effected
a Copernican revolution. But he was not right in any other sense.
For his revolution, so far as it was one, was accurately
anti-Copernican.”[137]
As the second edition preface is not covered by the published volumes of
Vaihinger’s _Commentary_, the point has not been taken up by him.
Now Kant’s own statements are entirely unambiguous and do not justify
any such interpretation as that of Green and Alexander. As it seems to
me, they have missed the real point of the analogy. The misunderstanding
would never have been possible save for our neglect of the scientific
classics. Kant must have had first-hand acquaintance with Copernicus’
_De Revolutionibus_, and the comparison which he draws assumes similar
knowledge on the part of his readers. Copernicus by his proof of the
“hypothesis” (his own term) of the earth’s motion sought only to achieve
a more harmonious ordering of the Ptolemaic universe. And as thus merely
a simplification of the traditional cosmology, his treatise could
fittingly be dedicated to the reigning Pope. The sun upon which our
terrestrial life depends was still regarded as uniquely distinct from
the fixed stars; and our earth was still located in the central region
of a universe that was conceived in the traditional manner as being
single and spherical. Giordano Bruno was the first, a generation later,
to realise the revolutionary consequences to which the new teaching,
consistently developed, must inevitably lead. It was he who first taught
what we have now come to regard as an integral part of Copernicus’
revolution, the doctrine of innumerable planetary systems side by side
with one another in infinite space.
Copernicus’ argument starts from the Aristotelian principle of relative
motion. To quote Copernicus’ exact words:
“All apprehended change of place is due to movement either of the
observed object or of the observer, or to differences in movements
that are occurring simultaneously in both. For if the observed
object and the observer are moving in the same direction with equal
velocity, no motion can be detected. Now it is from the earth that
we visually apprehend the revolution of the heavens. If, then, any
movement is ascribed to the earth, that motion will generate the
appearance of itself in all things which are external to it, though
as occurring in the opposite direction, as if everything were
passing across the earth. This will be especially true of the daily
revolution. For it seems to seize upon the whole world, and indeed
upon everything that is around the earth, though not upon the earth
itself.... As the heavens, which contain and cover everything, are
the common locus of things, it is not at all evident why it should
be to the containing rather than to the contained, to the located
rather than to the locating, that a motion is to be ascribed.”[138]
The apparently objective movements of the fixed stars and of the sun are
mere appearances, due to the projection of our own motion into the
heavens.
“The first and highest of all the spheres is that of the fixed
stars, self-containing and all-containing, and consequently
immobile, in short the locus of the universe, by relation to which
the motion and position of all the other heavenly bodies have to be
reckoned.”[139]
Now it is this doctrine, and this doctrine alone, to which Kant is
referring in the passages before us, namely, Copernicus’ hypothesis of a
subjective explanation of apparently objective motions. And further, in
thus comparing his Critical procedure to that of Copernicus, he is
concerned more with the positive than with the negative consequences of
their common hypothesis. For it is chiefly from the point of view of the
_constructive_ parts of the _Aesthetic_, _Analytic_, and _Dialectic_
that the comparison is formulated. By means of the Critical hypothesis
Kant professes on the one hand to account for our scientific knowledge,
and on the other to safeguard our legitimate metaphysical aspirations.
The spectator projects his own motion into the heavens; human reason
legislates for the domain of natural science. The sphere of the fixed
stars is proved to be motionless; things in themselves are freed from
the limitations of space and time. “Copernicus dared, in a manner
contradictory of the senses but yet true, to seek the observed
movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator.”[140]
In view of Kant’s explicit elimination of all _hypotheses_ from the
_Critique_[141] the employment of that term would seem to be
illegitimate. He accordingly here states that though in the _Preface_
his Critical theory is formulated as an hypothesis only, in the
_Critique_ itself its truth is demonstrated _a priori_.
* * * * *
=Distinction between knowing and thinking.=[142]--Since according to
Critical teaching the limits of sense-experience are the limits of
knowledge, the term knowledge has for Kant a very limited denotation,
and leaves open a proportionately wide field for what he entitles
thought. Though things in themselves are unknowable, their existence may
still be recognised in thought.
INTRODUCTION
I shall first[143] give a restatement, partly historical and partly
explanatory, of Kant’s main argument as contained in the enlarged
_Introduction_ of the second edition.
There were two stages in the process by which Kant came to full
realisation of the Critical problem. There is first the problem as
formulated in his letter of 1772 to Herz: how the _a priori_ can yield
knowledge of the independently real.[144] This, as he there states it,
is an essentially metaphysical problem. It is the problem of the
possibility of transcendent metaphysics. He became aware of it when
reflecting upon the function which he had ascribed to intellect in the
_Dissertation_. Then, secondly, this problem was immeasurably deepened,
and at the same time the proper line for its treatment was discovered,
through the renewed influence which Hume at some date subsequent to
February 1772 exercised upon Kant’s thought.[145] Hume awakened Kant to
what may be called the _immanent_ problem involved in the very
conception of _a priori_ knowledge as such. The primary problem to be
solved is not how we advance by means of _a priori_ ideas to the
independently real, but how we are able to advance beyond a subject term
to a predicate which it does not appear to contain. The problem is
indeed capable of solution, just because it takes this _logical_ form.
Here as elsewhere, ontological questions are viewed by Kant as soluble
only to the extent to which they can be restated in logical terms. Now
also the enquiry becomes twofold: how and in what degree are _a priori_
synthetic judgments possible, first in their employment within the
empirical sphere (the problem of immanent metaphysics) and secondly in
their application to things in themselves (the problem of transcendent
metaphysics). The outcome of the Critical enquiry is to establish the
legitimacy of immanent metaphysics and the impossibility of all
transcendent speculation.
The argument of Kant’s _Introduction_ follows the above sequence. It
starts by defining the problem of metaphysical knowledge _a priori_, and
through it leads up to the logical problem of the _a priori_ synthetic
judgment. In respect of time all knowledge begins _with_ experience. But
it does not therefore follow that it all arises _from_ experience. Our
experience may be a compound of that which we receive through
impressions, and of that which pure reason supplies from itself.[146]
The question as to whether or not any such _a priori_ actually exists,
is one that can be answered only after further enquiry. The two
inseparable criteria of the _a priori_ are necessity and universality.
That neither can be imparted to a proposition by experience was Kant’s
confirmed and unquestioned belief. He inherited this view both from
Leibniz and from Hume. It is one of the presuppositions of his argument.
Experience can reveal only co-existence or sequence. It enables us only
to assert that so far as we have hitherto observed, there is no
exception to this or that rule. A generalisation, based on observation,
can never possess a wider universality than the limited experience for
which it stands. If, therefore, necessary and universal judgments can
anywhere be found in our knowledge, the existence of an _a priori_ that
originates independently of experience is _ipso facto_
demonstrated.[147]
The contrast between empirical and _a priori_ judgments, as formulated
from the dogmatic standpoint, is the most significant and striking fact
in the whole range of human knowledge. _A priori_ judgments claim
absolute necessity. They allow of no possible exception. They are valid
not only for us, but also for all conceivable beings, however different
the specific conditions of their existence, whether they live on the
planet Mars or in some infinitely remote region of stellar space, and no
matter how diversely their bodily senses may be organised. Through these
judgments a creature five feet high, and correspondingly limited by
temporal conditions, legislates for all existence and for all time.
Empirical judgments, on the other hand, possess only a hypothetical
certainty. We recognise that they may be overturned through some
addition to our present experience, and that they may not hold for
beings on other planets or for beings with senses differently
constituted. Whereas the opposite of a rational judgment is not even
conceivable, the opposite of an empirical judgment is always possible.
The one depends upon the inherent and inalienable nature of our
thinking; the other is bound up with the contingent material of sense.
The one claims absolute or metaphysical truth: the other is a merely
tentative _résumé_ of a limited experience.
The possibility of such _a priori_ judgments had hitherto been
questioned only by those who sought to deny to them all possible
objective validity. Kant, as a rationalist, has no doubt as to their
actual existence. In the _Introduction_ to the second edition he bluntly
asserts their _de facto_ existence, citing as instances the propositions
of mathematics and the fundamental principles of physical science. Their
possibility can be accounted for through the assumption of _a priori_
forms and principles.[148] But with equal emphasis he questions the
validity of their _metaphysical_ employment. For that is an entirely
different matter. We then completely transcend the world of the senses
and pass into a sphere where experience can neither guide nor correct
us. In this sphere the _a priori_ is illegitimately taken as being at
once the source of our professed knowledge and also the sole criterion
of its own claims.
This is the problem, semi-Critical, semi-dogmatic, which is formulated
in the letter of 1772 to Herz.[149] What right have we to regard ideas,
which as _a priori_ originate from within, as being valid of things in
themselves? In so doing we are assuming a pre-established harmony
between our human faculties and the ultimately real; and that is an
assumption which by its very nature is incapable of demonstration. The
proofs offered by Malebranche and by Leibniz are themselves speculative,
and consequently presuppose the conclusion which they profess to
establish.[150] As above stated, Kant obtained his answer to this
problem by way of the logical enquiry into the nature and conditions of
_a priori_ judgment.
One of the chief causes, Kant declares, why hitherto metaphysical
speculation has passed unchallenged among those who practise it, is the
confusion of two very different kinds of judgment, the analytic and the
synthetic. Much the greater portion of what reason finds to do consists
in the analysis of our concepts of objects.
“As this procedure yields real knowledge _a priori_, which
progresses in secure and useful fashion, reason is so far misled as
surreptitiously to introduce, without itself being aware of so
doing, assertions of an entirely different order, in which reason
attaches to given concepts others completely foreign to them--and
moreover attaches them _a priori_. And yet one does not know how
reason comes to do this. This is a question which is never as much
as thought of.”[151]
The concepts which are analytically treated may be either empirical or
_a priori_. When they are empirical, the judgments which they involve
can have no wider application than the experience to which they give
expression; and in any case can only reveal what has all along been
thought, though confusedly, in the term which serves as subject of the
proposition. They can never reveal anything different in kind from the
contents actually experienced. This limitation, to which the analysis of
empirical concepts is subject, was admitted by both empiricists and
rationalists. The latter sought, however, to escape its consequences by
basing their metaphysics upon concepts which are purely _a priori_, and
which by their _a priori_ content may carry us beyond the experienced.
But here also Kant asserts a _non possibile_. _A priori_ concepts, he
seeks to show, are in all cases purely logical functions without
content, and accordingly are as little capable as are empirical concepts
of carrying us over to the supersensible. This is an objection which
holds quite independently of that already noted, namely, that their
objective validity would involve a pre-established harmony.
What, then, is the nature and what are the generating conditions of
synthetic judgments that are also _a priori_? In all judgments there is
a relation between subject and predicate, and that can be of two kinds.
Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A, or B lies outside the
sphere of the concept A though somehow connected with it. In the former
case the judgment is analytic; in the latter it is synthetic. The one
simply unfolds what has all along been conceived in the subject concept;
the other ascribes to the concept of the subject a predicate which
cannot be found in it by any process of analysis. Thus the judgment ‘all
bodies are extended’ is analytic. The concept of body already contains
that of extension, and is impossible save through it. On the other hand,
the judgment ‘all bodies are heavy’ is synthetic. For not body as such,
but only bodies which are in interaction with other bodies, are found to
develop this property. Bodies can very well be conceived as not
influencing one another in any such manner.
There is no difficulty in accounting for analytic judgments. They can
all be justified by the principle of contradiction. Being analytic, they
can be established _a priori_. Nor, Kant here claims, is there any
difficulty in regard to synthetic judgments that are empirical. Though
the predicate is not contained in the subject concept, they belong to
each other (though accidentally) as parts of a given empirical whole.
Experience is the _x_ which lies beyond the concept A, and on which
rests the possibility of the synthesis of B with A. In regard, however,
to synthetic judgments which are likewise _a priori_, the matter is very
different. Hitherto, both by the sensationalists and by the
rationalists, all synthetic judgments have been regarded as empirical,
and all _a priori_ judgments as analytic. The only difference between
the opposed schools lies in the relative value which they ascribe to the
two types of judgment. For Hume the only really fruitful judgments are
the synthetic judgments _a posteriori_; analytic judgments are of quite
secondary value; they can never extend our knowledge, but only clarify
its existing content. For Leibniz, on the other hand, true knowledge
consists only in the analysis of our _a priori_ concepts, which he
regards as possessing an intrinsic and fruitful content; synthetic
judgments are always empirical, and as such are purely contingent.[152]
Thus for pre-Kantian philosophy analytic is interchangeable with _a
priori_, and synthetic with _a posteriori_. Kant’s Critical problem
arose from the startling discovery that the _a priori_ and the synthetic
do not exclude one another. A judgment may be synthetic and yet also _a
priori_. He appears to have made this discovery under the influence of
Hume, through study of the general principle of causality--every event
must have a cause.[153] In that judgment there seems to be no connection
of any kind discoverable between the subject (the conception of an event
as something happening in time) and the predicate (the conception of
another event preceding it as an originating cause); and yet we not
merely ascribe the one to the other but assert that they are necessarily
connected. We can conceive an event as sequent upon a preceding empty
time; none the less, in physical enquiry, the causal principle is
accepted as an established truth. Here, then, is a new and altogether
unique type of judgment, of thoroughly paradoxical nature. So entirely
is it without apparent basis, that Hume, who first deciphered its
strange character, felt constrained to ascribe our belief in it to an
unreasoning and merely instinctive, ‘natural’ habit or custom.
Kant found, however, that the paradoxical characteristics of the causal
principle also belong to mathematical and physical judgments. This fact
makes it impossible to accept Hume’s sceptical conclusion. If even the
assertion 7 + 5 = 12 is both synthetic and _a priori_, it is obviously
impossible to question the validity of judgments that possess these
characteristics. But they do not for that reason any the less urgently
press for explanation. Such an enquiry might not, indeed, be necessary
were we concerned only with scientific knowledge. For the natural
sciences justify themselves by their practical successes and by their
steady unbroken development. But metaphysical judgments are also of this
type; and until the conditions which make _a priori_ synthetic judgment
possible have been discovered, the question as to the legitimacy of
metaphysical speculation cannot be decided. Such judgments are plainly
mysterious, and urgently call for further enquiry.
The problem to be solved concerns the ground of our ascription to the
subject concept, as necessarily belonging to it, a predicate which seems
to have no discoverable relation to it. What is the unknown _x_ on which
the understanding rests in asserting the connection? It cannot be
repeated experience; for the judgments in question claim necessity. Nor
can such judgments be proved by means of a logical test, such as the
inconceivability of the opposite. The absence of all apparent connection
between subject and predicate removes that possibility. These, however,
are the only two methods of proof hitherto recognised in science and
philosophy. The problem demands for its solution nothing less than the
discovery and formulation of an entirely novel method of proof.
The three main classes of _a priori_ synthetic judgments are, Kant
proceeds, the mathematical, the physical, and the metaphysical. The
synthetic character of mathematical judgments has hitherto escaped
observation owing to their being proved (as is required of all apodictic
certainty) according to the principle of contradiction. It is therefrom
inferred that they rest on the authority of that principle, and are
therefore analytic. That, however, is an illegitimate inference; for
though the truth of a synthetic proposition can be thus demonstrated,
that can only be if another synthetic principle is first presupposed. It
can never be proved that its truth, as a separate judgment, is demanded
by the principle of contradiction. That 7 + 5 must equal 12 does not
follow analytically from the conception of the sum of seven and five.
This conception contains nothing beyond the union of both numbers into
one; it does not tell us what is the single number that combines both.
That five should be added to seven is no doubt implied in the
conception, but not that the sum should be twelve. To discover that, we
must, Kant maintains, go beyond the concepts and appeal to intuition.
This is more easily recognised when we take large numbers. We then
clearly perceive that, turn and twist our concepts as we may, we can
never, by means of mere analysis of them, and without the help of
intuition, arrive at the sum that is wanted. The fundamental
propositions of geometry, the so-called axioms, are similarly synthetic,
_e.g._ that the straight line between two points is the shortest. The
concept ‘straight’ only defines direction; it says nothing as to
quantity.
As an instance of a synthetic _a priori_ judgment in physical science
Kant cites the principle: the quantity of matter remains constant
throughout all changes. In the conception of matter we do not conceive
its permanency, but only its presence in the space which it fills. The
opposite of the principle is thoroughly conceivable.
Metaphysics is _meant_ to contain _a priori_ knowledge. For it seeks to
determine that of which we can have no experience, as _e.g._ that the
world must have a first beginning. And if, as will be proved, our _a
priori_ concepts have no content, which through analysis might yield
such judgments, these judgments also must be synthetic.
Here, then, we find the essential problem of pure reason. Expressed in a
single formula, it runs: How are synthetic _a priori_ judgments
possible? To ask this question is to enquire, first, how pure
mathematics is possible; secondly, how pure natural science is possible;
and thirdly, how metaphysics is possible. That philosophy has hitherto
remained in so vacillating a state of ignorance and contradiction is
entirely due to the neglect of this problem of _a priori_ synthesis.
“Its solution is the question of life and death to metaphysics.” Hume
came nearest to realising the problem, but he discovered it in too
narrow a form to appreciate its full significance and its revolutionary
consequences.
“Greater firmness will be required if we are not to be deterred by
inward difficulties and outward opposition from endeavouring,
through application of a method entirely different from any
hitherto employed, to further the growth and fruitfulness of a
science indispensable to human reason--a science whose every branch
may be cut away but whose root cannot be destroyed.”[154]
These statements are decidedly ambiguous, owing to Kant’s failure to
distinguish in any uniform and definite manner between immanent and
transcendent metaphysics.[155] The term metaphysics is used to cover
both. Sometimes it signifies the one, sometimes the other; while in
still other passages its meaning is neutral. But if we draw the
distinction, Kant’s answer is that a genuine and valid immanent
metaphysics is for the first time rendered possible by his _Critique_;
its positive content is expounded in the _Analytic_. Transcendent
metaphysics, on the other hand, is criticised in the _Dialectic_; it is
never possible. The existing speculative sciences transgress the limits
of experience and yield only a pretence of knowledge. This determination
of the limits of our possible _a priori_ knowledge is the second great
achievement of the _Critique_. Thus the _Critique_ serves a twofold
purpose. It establishes a new _a priori_ system of metaphysics, and also
determines on principles equally _a priori_ the ultimate limits beyond
which metaphysics can never advance. The two results, positive and
negative, are inseparable and complementary. Neither should be
emphasised to the neglect of the other.
COMMENT ON THE ARGUMENT OF KANT’S _INTRODUCTION_
This _Introduction_, though a document of great historical importance as
being the first definite formulation of the generating problem of Kant’s
new philosophy, is extremely unsatisfactory as a statement of Critical
teaching. The argument is developed in terms of distinctions which are
borrowed from the traditional logic, and which are not in accordance
with the transcendental principles that Kant is professing to establish.
This is, indeed, a criticism which may be passed upon the _Critique_ as
a whole. Though Kant was conscious of opening a new era in the history
of philosophy, and compares his task with that of Thales, Copernicus,
Bacon and Galileo, it may still be said that he never fully appreciated
the greatness of his own achievement. He invariably assumes that the
revolutionary consequences of his teaching will not extend to the sphere
of pure logic. They concern, as he believed, only our metaphysical
theories regarding the nature of reality and the determining conditions
of our human experience. As formal logic prescribes the axiomatic
principles according to which all thinking must proceed, its validity is
not affected by the other philosophical disciplines, and is superior to
the considerations that determine their truth or falsity. Its
distinctions may be securely relied upon in the pioneer labours of
Critical investigation. This was, of course, a very natural assumption
for Kant to make; and many present-day thinkers will maintain that it is
entirely justified. Should that be our attitude, we may approve of
Kant’s general method of procedure, but shall be compelled to dissent
from m
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