III
HISTORICAL NOTES
Merit of the Kantian Ethic.
I. It is the singular merit of Kant to have put an end, once for all, to every material Ethic, by proving its utilitarian character: a merit that is not cancelled by the lacunæ that exist in other parts of his thought, entangling him unawares in the materialism and in the utilitarianism that he had surpassed. It would be anti-historical to desire to judge a thinker by the contradictions into which he falls and so to declare his work to be a failure and of no importance, when it is only imperfect. There are errors in all the works of man, and error is always contradiction; but he who has the eye of the historian discovers where lies the true strength of a thought and does not deny the light, because of necessity accompanied with shadow. Before Kant, ethic was either openly utilitarian or such that although presenting itself in the deceitful form of Ethic of sympathy, or religious Ethic, was yet reducible to utilitarianism. Kant conducted an implacable and destructive war, not only against admitted utilitarian forms, but also against those that were masked and spurious, called by him material Ethic.
The predecessors of Kant.
In this too, his predecessors are to be found in traditional philosophy of Christian origin, or, if it be preferred, Platonic (opposition of material to formal Ethic can already be observed in the attitude of Aristotle to Plato). If the fathers and the scholastics had been divided as to the question of the relation between moral laws and the divine will, and many of them, especially the mystics, had made that law to depend upon the divine will and upon nothing else, yet views had not been wanting, according to which the power of changing at will the moral laws, that is to say, of changing his own essence, was denied to God, since he could not be supra se. Religious Ethic was cleansed of every admixture of arbitrarism and utilitarianism by this solution, accepted by nearly all religious thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (by Cudworth, by Malebranche, and finally by Leibnitz). On the other hand, we cannot but recognize that many other material formulæ used to be understood in an ideal, or, as we have said, in a symbolical manner; and certainly that very eudæmonism of Aristotle, toward which Kant showed himself too severe, was not the pleasure and happiness of the hedonists and utilitarians, and the mediety (μεσότης) proposed as the distinctive character of virtue, although without doubt empty and often incoherent, was already almost a formal principle. The same is to be said of the Stoic principle of following nature; and coming to the immediate predecessors of Kant, of that perfectio already mentioned, which Kant, after wavering a little, reduced to happiness, not, however, without stating that it is a more indeterminate concept than any other. With Kant, however, the point was admitted, that the moral law is not to be expressed in any formula, which contains representative and contingent elements.
Defect of that Ethic: agnosticism.
The defect of the Kantian Ethic is the defect of his whole philosophy: agnosticism, which prevents his truly surpassing either the phenomenon or the thing in itself, leading him, on the one hand, toward empiricism, on the other toward that transcendental metaphysic, which no one had done more to discredit than himself. He combated the concept of the good or supreme good as the principle of Ethic, and he was right in so far as he understood it as object of any sort, of "a good," as of a "thing." But this did not exempt him from the duty of defining the supreme good as that which is not exhausted in any particular object, or of determining the universal. Now his philosophy was incapable of attaining to the universal.
Critique of Hegel and of others.
Hence the involuntary return to utilitarianism, clearly stated by Hegel in his youthful essay upon natural Right. The practical principle of Kant (remarked Hegel) is not a true but a negative absolute; hence with him the principle of morality becomes converted into immorality: since every fact can be thought in the form of universality, it is never known what fact should be received into the law. In the famous example of the deposit, Kant had said that it is necessary to keep faith as regards the deposit, otherwise there would no longer be deposits.[1] But if there were no more deposits, how would this constitute a contradiction to the form of the law? There would perhaps be contradiction and absurdity for material reasons, but it is already agreed that this is not to be brought up in the argument. Kant wishes to justify property, but he does not attain to more than the tautology, that property, if it be property, must be property, opening the way to the free choice of conceiving at will as duties these or those contingent definitions of property. The moral maxims of Kant, owing to the empirical determinations that they assume, are contradictory, not only of one another, but of themselves. This inevitable degeneration of the Kantian Ethic was called by Hegel tautology and formalism.[2] Other thinkers were also affected by the utilitarianism of the Kantian Ethic: Schopenhauer even declared that his doctrine has no other foundation than egoism, since it can be reduced to the concept of reciprocity, and he protested against the Kantian theory that we should be compassionate to animals, in order to exercize ourselves in the virtue of compassion, judging it to be the effect of the Judæo-Christian views of Kant.[3] Schopenhauer was in some respect right in these observations, although as regards animals we must note that the same attitude is found in Spinoza and in other thinkers and that it derives from material and utilitarian Ethic; and for the rest that it would be very unjust to see nothing but egoism in the categoric imperative of Kant, for this, we repeat, though it constitute its danger, does not constitute its essential character.