Part 5

Kant thought of knowledge as a process of extending the bounds of perception, of piecing together the fragmentary glimpses we get of the world, stretching them out in spatial and temporal determinations that go beyond what we have actually experienced, connecting and linking up the events which we perceive discontinuously. As science extends, the range of our knowledge widens, but the process of extension never reaches its completion. There are always more facts to be discovered and explained. Science, therefore, can never rest content with its achievements, but must always demand that the investigation of conditions should be pushed further back and on. From this sense of the incompleteness of all actual knowledge, and of all there is that might be but is not known, arises what Kant calls an ideal of reason, a demand that, in all investigation into the conditioned, we should go on till we come to the totality of conditions. This ideal he holds to be serviceable and necessary. It has, however, a natural tendency to pass from an ideal to an idea, and in so doing it gives rise to the contradictions with which the _Dialectic_ is concerned. If all our investigation is governed by the thought that it must go on until it reaches completion, we naturally speculate on the fulfilment of that ideal, and try to form an idea of that totality of conditions, of how we should think the world if we knew it in its completeness. Herein we hypostatize the ideal or make it an idea, and we fall into contradiction; for we cannot really know the whole without knowing all its parts. If we give up the slow and never-completed process of knowing one part after another, and try to jump to the idea of the whole, we reach quite contrary results, as we apply to the conception of the whole one or other of two assumptions implied in our investigation of the parts.

Kant sharply distinguishes between the principles of the pure understanding and the ideas of reason. The former are implied in all our knowledge, and the fact that experience is not chaotic confirms them at every moment. The second are ideals which guide knowledge, but are never realised. He calls them ideas of reason, because it is the special task of reason to lay down rules for the proper and complete working of the understanding. This task, he thinks, is exemplified in the logical nature of the syllogism which brings into unity the judgments of the understanding. As he used the forms of judgment as a guiding thread to discover a complete list of categories of the understanding, so he uses the forms of syllogism to discover a complete list of the ideas of reason. In both cases Kant's reference to logical forms is far-fetched. Actually the list in the _Dialectic_ seems to be influenced by a number of considerations not always consistent.

There are three main divisions of the _Dialectic_. (The first Kant calls the paralogisms of rational psychology.) All knowing and experience imply the unity of the self which knows. In actual experience that unity is qualified by the nature of what it unites, but we may try to think of it apart from and independent of this. This leads to an attempt to know the self by asking what must be its nature if it has the unity implied in knowing, and to argue that the soul is a substance and simple, not affected by the changes in the matter which it knows and therefore immortal.

The second division arises from the fact that in knowledge we are concerned with series--a series of addings together and a series of divisions, as of parts of space and time; a series of things arising one from the other, as in causation; and a series of things in dependence one upon the other. The _ideas_ of reason come from the thought of these series completed, and produce what Kant calls antinomies. For if we start with the thought that what we are trying to apprehend must be a whole, we get one series of results; if with the thought that we can only apprehend the whole by going from condition to condition indefinitely, we get another. Kant distinguishes four antinomies, each with thesis and antithesis. The thesis of the first is, "The world has a beginning in time, and is limited also in regard to space"; the antithesis, "The world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is infinite, in respect both to time and space." The thesis of the second is, "Every compound substance in the world consists of simple parts, and nothing exists anywhere but the simple or what is composed of it"; the antithesis is the contrary of this. The thesis of the third is, "Causality, according to the laws of nature, is not the only causality from which all the phenomena of the world can be deduced. In order to account for these phenomena it is necessary also to admit another causality, that of freedom"; the antithesis, "There is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to the laws of nature." The thesis of the fourth is, "There exists an absolutely necessary Being belonging to the world, either as a part or as a cause of it"; the antithesis is a denial of this.

The problems of the third division of the _Dialectic_ arises from an attempt to think of a whole which shall include both the known world and the mind that knows. This attempt, which Kant calls the ideal of pure reason, leads to proofs of the existence of God.

As the _Dialectic_ proceeds, it becomes clear that Kant has another list to hand. He enumerates, as the three great objects of metaphysical inquiry, God, Freedom, and immortality, and in his discussion of the ideas of reason he treats them principally as attempts to give definite and dogmatic answers to the problems suggested by these three topics.

Immortality is the subject of what Kant calls the paralogisms of rational psychology. He argues that all attempts to prove the immortality of the soul by a priori arguments involve an argument of this kind: they begin by noting that death is always dissolution of some kind, that, therefore, what is not made up of parts and cannot be dissolved, cannot die. Then they urge that the soul is not made up of parts, and therefore cannot die. The fallacy in this argument is that it treats the unity of the self as though it were an object of knowledge. We can show that knowledge is only possible if the self has a unity other than that of a spatial whole, but we cannot therefore argue that it must be exactly like a spatial whole, in the sense that death in it can only be brought about by dissolution, but unlike a spatial whole in that in it there is nothing to be dissolved. The real nature of the unity of the self, Kant argues, cannot be known. All we can do is to reject a priori arguments either for or against its immortality.

Freedom is treated in the third antinomy of pure reason, and to that Kant devotes most attention, but others of the antinomies are concerned with the difficulties arising from the application of spatial and temporal determinations to reality as a whole, and to the category of necessity. Kant makes a distinction between the first two and the second two antinomies. It is the first two that express the inadequacy of temporal or spatial determination to reality as a whole. All such determination implies measurement, and measurement is always a relation of part to part. The antitheses of both antinomies express the inadequacy of any number to the expression of the nature of the whole, the thesis the inadequacy of regarding reality as an aggregate or addition of any kind. Each is strong in what it denies, and Kant's solution is that both thesis and antithesis are false, because you cannot apply spatial or temporal determination to the world as a whole.

In contrast the solution of the other antinomies is that both thesis and antithesis are true, and that is possible because they are concerned with different things. The third antinomy arises from the difficulty of applying the category of causation to the world as a whole. The assumption underlying the thesis is not, as is sometimes asserted, merely that the notion of infinity in itself implies a contradiction, but that a determinate result must have a determinate cause. If we think of what actually exists now as having been caused by what has preceded it, we must think of that which has had a determinate result being itself determinate. It is the familiar argument for a first cause. In causation we seem to be relating one event to another event, and are really only putting the question of origination further back. Yet, if we say that therefore we must suppose an absolute origination of change, a beginning of the series, we have to answer the question, How is it possible to think of the originating number of the series? For to think that something can arise from nothing is to contradict the principle of causation.

Kant's solution to this difficulty is important, for it had great influence upon his ethical theory. The category of causation applies only to phenomena. If we think of things as phenomena we must recognise that they are subject to the principle of causation; if we think of them as things in themselves, the category of causation does not apply to them, and their action may be free. The same action may therefore on its phenomenal side be determined, and on its nominal side, as the action of a thing in itself, be free. This may seem to be solving one contradiction by propounding another, till we remember that in causation we do not explain the relation of cause to effect. The relation we discover is between one instance of cause and effect and another. Like causes have like effects. The principle applies, then, in so far as things are like one another. It applies to changes which are aggregates or complexes of simpler changes which are like other changes. If and in so far as there are things which are more than aggregates of their elements, and are therefore unique, there are things to whose changes no laws of cause and effect are adequate. The point may be illustrated by the way we think about character. If we think of a man's character as his characteristics, his being this or that _kind_ of person, we must think of his action as so far determined, but that does not prevent us from thinking of his individuality as something more than any sum or combination of characteristics, as something essentially alive, which escapes all attempts to bind it by rules. It is the difference in Kant's words between man regarded "from the point of view of anthropology," and man regarded as a responsible moral being. We shall see in the next chapter that this distinction is the basis of Kant's moral theory. Here it must be noted that he does not claim that his solution of the third antinomy proves the fact of freedom. That, he held, no merely intellectual argument could prove. It only defends the possibility of freedom.

The third division of the _Dialectic_ is an examination of the proofs of the existence of God. When we study Kant's account of them, we find we are concerned not, as elsewhere in the _Dialectic_, with a conflict springing from the nature of reason itself, but with the relation of thought and conduct. Kant distinguishes three proofs of the existence of God--the ontological, the cosmological, and the physico-theological--but he maintains that the last two really rest upon and imply the first. The first, the ontological proof, is the argument that the very conception of a perfect being implies existence. It is the only proof of moral importance, inasmuch as it attempts to argue a priori that a being of perfect morality must exist. Kant's answer to it is that, to argue that we could not conceive a perfect being unless we conceived that being's existence, is to suppose that to conceive of a thing, and to conceive of the same thing existing, is to conceive of different things. Existence, he says, adds nothing to the concept of an object. Kant's objection to the ontological proof has been criticised. But the proof either assumes that God is a being independent of and separate from the rest of reality, and then, as Kant says, we may conceive God as existing, but our conception not being necessitated, carries no necessity with it. (If I conceive a hundred dollars to be in my pocket, he says, I conceive them to be there; but that does not mean the dollars are there.) Or if we say that reality must be thought of as existing, the answer is, Yes, but must reality necessarily be thought of as morally perfect? It is this last assumption which alone makes the ontological proof worth proving; for arguments about the existence or non-existence of God are mere quarrels about words, except in so far as they are concerned with moral issues. But moral issues cannot be solved by a consideration of purely intellectual assumptions. The nature of the other two proofs of God's existence makes this clear. The second, the cosmological, is the argument that if anything exists, something must necessarily exist. Kant's answer is that this is sound so far as it goes, but it does not prove that what necessarily exists is a morally perfect being. The third, the physico-theological argument, is the familiar argument from design. Kant treats this argument with much greater respect than the other two, but insists that we must see how far it will carry us. If we are going to infer the nature of God from the nature of the world as we see it, we must do so honestly. But though we see design in the world, we do not see perfection, and on the basis of this argument we cannot ignore the imperfection and want of harmony which is as patent as the harmony and design.

Kant's analysis of these proofs seems negative. Its real purport is to insist that religion cannot be dissociated from moral experience, that the knowledge of God, which is the concern of religion, is not got by intellectual speculation, but in the moral life. When he said that he had limited reason to make room for faith, he did not mean that men could not prove the existence of God, but might believe in it if they pleased. He meant that God is implied and known above all in moral action. His criticism of these classical proofs is thus the beginning of that revivified philosophy of religion whose chief representatives have been Schleiermacher and Ritschl.

*CHAPTER VI*

*KANT'S MORAL THEORY*

Kant's moral theory is an integral part of his philosophical system. If the _Critique of Pure Reason_ argues the impotence of reason in the sphere of speculation, the _Critique of Practical Reason_ affirms its sovereignty in the sphere of practice. The second _Critique_ is thus the complement of the first. Kant's treatment of moral problems being largely the consequence of the conclusions of the first _Critique_, his moral theory is thus mainly metaphysical. The title of one of his works on moral theory, _Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals_, bears this out. There were, no doubt, other influences which had their effect on his conception of morality. He tells us himself that he was inspired by the teaching of Rousseau on the dignity and worth of man. He was undoubtedly repelled into a reaction against the sentimental school of Shaftesbury, which in its German adherents insisted on the agreeable and gentlemanly nature of virtue with an almost sickly sentiment. This reaction accounts for the extreme emphasis laid by Kant on the divorce between duty and any kind of inclination. But his doctrine as a whole can only be understood in the light of the conclusions of the first _Critique_.

Kant's conception of freedom or autonomy of the will is the key to his moral theory. "On the hypothesis of freedom of the will," he says, "morality together with its principle follows from it by mere analysis of the conception." We saw in the last chapter that Kant regarded human action, when looked at from an anthropological point of view, as phenomenal, and therefore subject to the law of cause and effect. If we think of man as a creature of inclination, with likes and dislikes, we seem, in considering men's differences from one another in this respect, to be dealing with matters of fact over which men have no control. We are born and grow up with different natures, with the result that one man likes one thing, another another; one man's temptations do not tempt another, what one man finds easy another finds difficult. We seem here to be in a world where causation rules. If men act differently, it is because their external environment, acting upon their different natures, calls out different responses. So far, then, says Kant, as men act according to inclination, do things because they like doing them, or avoid them because they dislike them, their actions are what he calls heteronomous, governed by laws over which they have no control. We assume, whenever we are trying to explain human actions, that they are the result of the interaction of character and environment, and are not to be praised or blamed but understood. _Tout comprendre est tout pardonner_.

But when we consider our moral judgments we seem to be in a different world, for there are some actions which we think we or others ought to have done or ought not to have done, and this obligation has nothing to do with our likes and dislikes. If we look back upon a past action of our own, we may see why we did it, understand how the temptation to it appealed with peculiar strength to something in our nature, yet nevertheless we may say that we ought not to have done it, and with that judgment goes the conviction that we need not have done it. The conception of "what ought to be" is on a different plane from the conception of "what is," and assumes a different kind of causality. It assumes that, when we are done with our analysis of character, of a man's likes and dislikes and the effect of circumstances upon them, we can still assume that it is in his power to do what he ought and to abstain from doing what he ought not. We praise the first and blame the second, whether in ourselves or others, just because we assume, over and above inclination and disinclination, a possibility of acting or not acting as duty demands.

Thus Kant analyses the assumption of moral judgment. But it is still no more than an assumption, and he has to ask how it can be reconciled with the seemingly contradictory principle of causation. The analysis of the third antinomy in the first _Critique_, as we saw, prepared the way by maintaining that the same action might be phenomenally determined, and free as the action of a thing in itself, were there another form of causality--free causality or self-determination. For the existence of such another form of causality the first _Critique_ offered no evidence. Kant's concern is to show that morality assumes it; for the claim of duty is that a man should not act as a creature of inclination, of likes and dislikes. Duty claims to cut across all such empirical considerations. The motive to do what duty demands must come from elsewhere. It may then be found to be a claim that man should act not as a part of the physical world, but as a moral being. For man, as well as an observer and understander of other men, is also a moral agent. As such he stands in quite different relations to other men. He treats them and himself as moral agents, responsible for their actions. As a member of the world of moral relations he acknowledges a system of rights and duties, he holds himself responsible to other men as they are responsible to him, and all this has nothing to do with what a man wants or does not want to do, with how easy or how difficult he may find it to perform what duty demands. In this he is assuming in himself and other men a power of determining the will in accordance with the moral law. That, just because it takes no account of likes and dislikes, cannot be derived from these or from considerations of circumstances or environment. It must be deducible from the nature of man as a moral being. In obeying the moral law, then, man will be obeying a law that comes from himself. His will will be self-legislative. This power of acting in accordance with a law that comes from the nature of man as a rational, responsible being, and not as a member of the world of causes and effects, is moral freedom; it is the assumption of all moral judgment and action. It cannot, Kant holds, be _explained_. For all explanation is the work of the understanding, and that can explain only phenomena. It is enough that the first _Critique_ has shown that phenomenal causality is not inconsistent with the possibility of another causality. In the moral sphere we act and judge as if we were free. The moral law and duty make claims upon us on the same assumption. Moral freedom, then, is the ground of the possibility of moral experience.

Kant's account of duty is determined by the sharp separation which he makes of man as moral agent and man regarded "from the point of view of anthropology." The commands of duty must be derived solely from the nature of man as a moral agent. If they were the consequence of man's empirical nature or his surroundings, they would have no claim to override his promptings of inclination or pleasure. He describes these commands as categorical, and the principle of morality as a categorical imperative. The meaning of this phrase lies in its opposition to hypothetical. Many commands and principles are, Kant says, hypothetical. They assume that men desire certain ends, happiness or health or success, and the actions they advise are advised as means to such ends. The law of morality is quite different from such prudential maxims. It does not say, "If you want to be happy or to save your soul, then act thus and thus." Its commands are absolute, for they appeal to man simply as a rational being. They must therefore be derived solely from a consideration of man's rationality. It is difficult at first sight to see how any commands can be deduced from a consideration so abstract. How, we might say, can man's rationality be known and recognised except in the content of what he does and thinks?

Kant seeks to derive his imperative from the contrast between acting as a moral agent and following inclination. Man regards himself as a moral agent, morally responsible for his conduct, and he regards others as morally responsible, whatever his or their particular nature or character may be. That means that he must act as he thinks any one else would be bound to act, and from this Kant deduces his formulation of the categorical imperative: "_Act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law_." Another formula indicates more clearly the relation of duty to a society of moral agents responsible to one another: "_Act so that you treat humanity, in your person and in the person of every one else, always as an end as well as a means, never merely as a means_." It is only by following such imperatives that we can rise above the promptings of circumstance, for only thus is the will self-legislative. In obeying such an imperative our will is self-determined, for it is following a principle that is derived from man's nature as independent and transcendent of the world of phenomena. Hence in moral action we are in contact with the reality of things more truly than in any understanding of phenomena. The moral law has a dignity which no natural inclinations or likings can have, and the good-will, the will which follows such a law, has a similar worth and dignity. "There is nothing in the world--nay, even beyond the world--nothing conceivable, which can be regarded as good without qualification, saving alone a good will."