The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant

Part 1

Produced by Al Haines.

*THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT*

BY A. D. LINDSAY, M.A.

FELLOW AND TUTOR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK, LTD. 35 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C., & EDINBURGH NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.

*FOREWORD*

There is a story that Schopenhauer used to begin his lectures on Kant by saying: "Let no one tell you what is contained in the Critique of Pure Reason." The writer of this little book hopes that no one will imagine that he has disregarded this warning. There are no short-cuts to the understanding of a great philosopher, and the only way to appreciate the greatness of a philosophic system is to study the philosopher's own writings. All that the writer of a book like this can hope to do is to persuade others to undertake that study by interesting them in the problems with which it deals, and by offering a few suggestions which may help to an understanding of it. I have said nothing about the numerous other works which Kant wrote. For the three Critiques contain his system, and the understanding of that is all-important.

*CONTENTS*

CHAP.

I. THE IDEA OF CRITICISM

II. KANT'S STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM. SYNTHETIC A PRIORI JUDGMENTS

III. KANT'S IDEALISM. TIME AND SPACE

IV. THE CATEGORIES AND THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE UNDERSTANDING

V. THE ANTINOMIES AND CRITICISM OF THE PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

VI. KANT'S MORAL THEORY

VII. THE "CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT"

BIBLIOGRAPHY

*THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT*

*CHAPTER I*

*THE IDEA OF CRITICISM*

"It is a difficult matter," says Heine, "to write the life history of Immanuel Kant, for he had neither life nor history. He lived a mechanically ordered, abstract, old bachelor kind of existence in a quiet, retired alley in Koenigsberg, an old town in the north-east corner of Germany." The times he lived in were stirring enough. He was born in 1724, and died in 1804. He lived through the Seven Years' War that first made Germany a nation, he followed with sympathy the United States War of Independence, he saw the French Revolution and the beginning of the career of Napoleon. Yet in all his long life he never moved out of the province in which he was born, and nothing was allowed to interrupt the steady course of his lecturing, studying, and writing. "Getting up," continues Heine, "drinking coffee, lecturing, eating, going for a walk, everything had its fixed time; and the neighbours knew that it must be exactly half-past four when Immanuel Kant, in his gray frock-coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, stepped from his door and walked towards the little lime-tree avenue, which is called after him the Philosopher's Walk." "Strange contrast," reflects Heine, "between the man's outward life and his destructive, world-smashing thoughts." As the political history of the eighteenth century came to an end when the French Revolution spilled over the borders of France and drove Napoleon up and down Europe, breaking up the old political systems and inaugurating modern Europe, so its opposing currents of thought were gathered together in the mind of a weak-chested, half-invalid little man in Koenigsberg, and from their meeting a new era in philosophy began.

There are some philosophers to whom truth seems to come almost unsought, as an immediate authoritative vision. Kant was not one of these. His greatest work, the Critique of Pure Reason, was conceived when he was forty-eight, and published in 1781, when he was fifty-seven. It was the outcome of half a lifetime's patient study and thought. Heine says of him: "He was the perfect type of the small shopkeeper. Nature had meant him to weigh coffee and sugar, but fate willed that he should weigh other things and put a God on his scales, and his weighing was exact." The sneer is unjust, but there is something in the simile; for Kant's philosophy was a kind of taking stock, a survey of the great movement of thought from the time when the Renaissance and the Reformation made thought free, an attempt to estimate the achievements of the new sciences, to deal with their conflicting claims and ideals and say what it all came to. In Kant modern science, which began with Descartes and Galileo, first became conscious of itself.

This taking stock Kant called Criticism. His great books are all called Critiques--the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Critique of Judgment. He called his philosophy the Critical Philosophy or Critical Idealism. Essential to an understanding of Kant is an understanding of what he meant by criticism, and why he opposes it to dogmatism and scepticism; for the necessity and possibility of such a criticism was his great philosophical discovery. We have called Kant's work a survey of the achievements of the thought of his times, but it was very much more than that, and has a much more universal significance than could belong to any history of the thought of one epoch. For these achievements of thought, though great, were conflicting and partial. They contrasted with failure and barrenness in other directions, and they seemed to be due to different methods. This success of thought in one direction and its failure in another, and this uncertainty about the true method of science, were problems which at once presented themselves to an impartial observer, and Kant held that they could be answered only by taking stock of actual attainments, and by criticism of the powers and range of human thought in general.

The problem that presented itself to him will be understood if we look for a moment at the history of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One thing that Kant noted in it was the steady and sure progress of physics. "With the experiments of Galileo and Torricelli," he says in the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, "a new light flashed on all students of nature." The continued success of physics meant the successful application of mathematics to the concrete world, and along with it a remarkable development of mathematics itself. This sudden success inspired men to feel that they had discovered a way of explaining the universe; they contrasted the fertility of their new methods with the barrenness of scholastic speculation in morals and theology; they felt confident that all that was wanted to the attainment of certain knowledge in all spheres of human interest was the extension of these methods. If men would only set to work the right way, they were sure that all difficulties would be overcome; and, by reflection upon their own success, they hoped to explain what the right way was.

Unfortunately this was not easy, for the advance from pure mathematics to physics, from a study of the nature of pure mathematical conceptions to an inquiry into the laws of falling bodies, implied a change whose nature was not clear to the men who had themselves made the advance. A conflict arose between those who thought more of the fact that knowledge, to be certain, must be capable of mathematical expression, and those who thought more of the basis of experiment and observation on which the new sciences depended, who remembered that these sciences began when Galileo, instead of thinking in the abstract how bodies ought to fall, dropped bodies of different weights from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa and observed what actually happened. Descartes was the great representative of the first school. He began by insisting on the difference between mathematical truth which could be, as he said, clearly and distinctly conceived, and ordinary opinion about things which was full of guesswork and imagination. Scientific knowledge was possible, he thought, only by apprehending the real or primary qualities of things which were mathematical, in contradistinction to their secondary qualities--their colour, smell, &c.--which were less real. Thence he came to think that the real world was mathematical in nature, like a huge, intricate geometrical figure. The elements of mere fact, in our present knowledge, its dependence on observation and experiment, he thought of as temporary defects which the progress of science would remove. What we ordinarily call perception, indeed, in the sense of awareness of things in time and space, was described by Descartes' successors as confused thinking. Our knowledge of the world would, it was hoped, become a vast mathematical system, all the detail and complexity of which would be rigorously deducible from a few central truths.

This general way of thinking was called Rationalism. Kant ordinarily calls it Dogmatism. It was attacked by other scientists for its view of the nature of space and time. No one who reflects at all can fail to distinguish a difference between the way in which we see the truth of a geometrical proposition--that, e.g., the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles--and the way in which we judge that such and such a figure drawn on a board is a triangle, or make judgments about the way in which things are actually arranged in space or succeed in time. Judgments of the latter kind involve words like "here" and "there," "now" and "then," words which are all a kind of pointing. It seems impossible from considering the nature of a triangle to deduce why any existing thing should be called triangular, and all statements about the position of things in space and time seem to be derived not from a consideration of the general nature of space and time, but from observation. Now the science which had made perhaps the most striking progress in the time we are speaking of, physical astronomy, involved any number of statements about the position of bodies in space. The Rationalist school admitted this, but held that that was due to the fact that science was not sufficiently thought out. In time, they hoped, all statements about position in space would disappear. To think of things in spatial order was to think confusedly. Newton, on the other hand, held that space could not be explained away, that astronomy implied an absolute space in which things existed, that the spatial relations of things could not be explained by the nature of the things themselves, but only by a reference to absolute space in which they all were. This meant that observation or perception was something of which you could not hope and should not wish to get rid, and that an ideal of knowledge in which all applied mathematics should have been transmuted into pure mathematics was a vain one. Astronomy implied both mere observation and apprehension of necessary relations. Here was a science which seemed to employ both methods together. Galileo, in fact could not have made his discovery without observation but men had observed bodies falling for ages without discovering the laws of motion. Further, the laws of motion, once discovered, made men in some degree independent of observation, made them able to say of actual concrete things not only what had happened, but what must happen.

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