: The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant by Lindsay A D Alexander Dunlop - Kant Immanuel 1724-1804

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"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 K?nigsberg, 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 K?nigsberg, and from their meeting a new era in philosophy began.

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.

We have here the same general starting point of inquiry as we shall afterwards find in Kant. There are certain, obstinate puzzles which we meet with in discussion which can only be solved by going back and inquiring into the nature of knowledge and the powers of our minds. Unfortunately, as Kant points out, Locke went the wrong way about his task. He describes it as "a plain historical inquiry." He thought that he had only to look into his mind and see what was in it, as he might open a door and look into a room. The result is that he thinks of all knowledge as consisting simply in looking at what is present to the mind. We can know, therefore, whatever can be present to the mind, and the limitations of knowledge are discovered by asking what can be so present to the mind. The conclusions to which he comes as to different spheres of human inquiry are roughly these: We can have knowledge of mathematics because there we are concerned only with ideas present to the mind, and with noting their agreement and disagreement. We can have no knowledge of such questions as the immortality of the soul, or the nature of spirits, for they are beyond our observation. As regards existing things, we can have knowledge of them, in so far as they are present to our minds, and no further. The meaning of "present to the mind" was never clearly analysed by Locke; but he meant, for example, that we can observe that an object which is yellow, and which we call gold, is also heavy, and can be dissolved by Aqua Regia, but we cannot say why that is so, and we ought not, on Locke's principles, to have any ground for supposing that these qualities will go on co-existing.

These difficulties were seen more clearly by Hume, at once the greatest and the most thorough-going of empiricists. He cut the knot in regard to mathematics by asserting that geometry, just because it has clearly an application to the existing world, had no more certainty than any other empirical inquiry, while arithmetic and algebra, he agreed, were certain, but confined their application to the sphere of our own ideas. Both positions are almost obviously inconsistent with the facts. In considering the nature of our judgments about concrete existences he raised a more profound problem. All such judgments, as he said, imply the principle of causation, or of what is called, in modern times, the principle of the uniformity of nature. That principle we take with us in our investigation of the existing world. Yet, as Hume saw, we do not observe causes; we only observe succession and change. We seem, therefore, to put into the world we see a necessity and uniformity which the observed facts do not warrant. How is this to be explained?

Hume's answer is ingenious. The principle of causation cannot be rationally justified, and the necessary connection we predicate of changes in the outside world is not in the things; it is only a feeling in ourselves, and is the result of custom. After seeing the same succession several times, we come somehow to feel differently about it, and that feeling of difference we express by saying that we have before us an instance not of simple succession, but of cause and effect.

This is not the place to discuss the difficulties of Hume's position; it is enough to notice how entirely passive it makes the mind, and how alien such an explanation is from the spirit of inquiry and discovery. If cause is simply the effect of custom on the mind, then the facts either produce that effect or they do not. In neither case is there anything to find out. But the scientist, in investigating causes, however strongly he may hold that he has to observe the facts, knows also that he has a problem to solve, that he has to discover the right way to go about it, must adopt some principle in dealing with the facts. Pure passivity will help him little.

Both the rationalistic and the empirical explanations of science had failed, the one because it could find no room for observation of facts, the other because it could find no room for principles governing that observation; and we shall see that Kant started with a consciousness of this double failure. He saw that Hume's criticism of causation raised problems for which the rationalist had no answer, and yet that the position reached by Hume was incompatible with the existence of science.

The same failure of both rationalism and empiricism had become evident in another sphere--that of morals and religion. The relation of philosophy to science is always twofold. Philosophy is partly concerned with analysing and reflecting on the methods of the different sciences, partly with seeking to adjust the rival and conflicting claims of the two great departments of man's life--science and religion.

It might seem, at first sight, as though in morals and religion rationalism were the only possible method to be approved by philosophy, for, inasmuch as morals are concerned with what ought to be, not with what is, they cannot depend on observation, but must be deduced from some principle above experience; nor are objects of religion, God and the soul, objects of observation. No man can "by searching find out God."

The earlier of the modern thinkers--Descartes among the rationalists, and Bacon among the empiricists--are full of hope. They have confidence in the human spirit. But increased reflection seemed only to bring distrust with it. The history of rationalism in theology showed that, in such matters, reason could prove absolutely opposing positions. Most men were ready to accept Hume's dictum that any one who follows his reason must be a fool and take refuge in an indifferentism which accepts whatever happens to be there.

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