A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

2. The Leibnitz-Wolffian Philosophy. This influence came during his academic training in the University of Königsberg, which he entered upon at the age of sixteen years. This was in 1740, the same year in which Frederick was crowned and Wolff was recalled to Halle,—the time when the Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophywas at the fullness of control of Germany. It must not be forgotten that this philosophy remained dominant in German academic circles until Kant’s own theory supplanted it in the nineties. Kant was an avowed disciple of the Wolffian school for the next twenty years (until 1760), and he never shook off the Wolffian metaphysical dualism.

3. The Physics of Newton. To his university training Kant was indebted also for his acquaintance with Newton. The antagonism between the metaphysics of Wolff and the physics of Newton was, at least at the beginning of Kant’s career, of decisive importance in his development. One of Kant’s teachers at the university was Martin Knutzen, whose lectures included philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Through personal intercourse with Knutzen, the young Kant was introduced to the Wolffian philosophy, and also to the Newtonian mathematics and physics. During his activity as a teacher Kant showed, even into his later period, a predilection for natural science, especially for physical geography and anthropology. The same year in which he entered upon his career as teacher in the University of Königsberg (1755), he published his celebrated Theory of the Heavens, in which he anticipated Laplace by forty years in the formulation of the nebular hypothesis.

4. The Humanitarianism of Rousseau. Kant got from Rousseau a new evaluation of man. Kant had the advantage of a prolonged youthful development. He was well into his thirties when the movement, begun by Lessing, became a social force in Germany. A new political consciousness appeared among the German people, due to the influence of Frederick the Great and to thatof the Frenchmen, Voltaire and Rousseau. Kant was thirty-eight (in 1762) when he read Rousseau’s Emile. Kant had been brought up in the common teaching of the early part of the Enlightenment to despise the ignorant masses of people. Through Rousseau he received in words of authority the conception of the inherent dignity of the individual man. Through this conception science and speculation came to have a new value to Kant. They were no longer ends in themselves, but the means for moral development. The moral in its primacy over the intellectual came to be a permanent feature in Kant’s doctrine. His early Pietism was confirmed, and Rousseau replaced Newton in his regard.

5. The Skepticism of Hume. The influence of Hume’s skepticism was felt by Kant just before his eleven years of silence, when he became engaged in his construction of his critical problem. But Hume influenced Kant in a negative way. The classic and oft-quoted expression of Kant, that Hume awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber,” refers to the dogmatism of the empirical school to which Hume belonged, and not to that of the rationalistic school of Wolff. To Kant both empiricism and rationalism were dogmatic; the one because it assumed the validity of sensations, the other because it assumed the existence of innate ideas. Thus Hume effected a reaction in Kant against Hume’s own doctrine. But in thus reacting from Hume, Kant saw that the answer was to be found not in the rationalism of Wolff, but in an ideal conception of space and time. Hume’s influence was the last before Kant firmly established his theory of knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason.

The Life and Writings of Kant (1724–1804). Theexternal changes in the life of Immanuel Kant were the fewest possible. He was born at Königsberg in 1724; he went to the school of that city and then to its university, and then acted in the capacity of tutor in families in the province of Königsberg. He became privat-docent in the university at the age of thirty-one, and professor of logic and metaphysics at the age of forty-four. He was called to the University of Halle in 1778, but he refused to leave Königsberg. In fact, Kant never went outside the province, and but little outside the city. Nevertheless, in the eighties he saw himself become the most important figure in Königsberg, and in the nineties the most important power in German academic circles. In 1794 he came under the censure of the reactionary government of Frederick William II and “was obliged to refrain in the future from all public addresses on religion.” This was the only outer conflict in his life. In 1804, at the age of eighty, he died. The externals of his life were from the beginning to the end an undeviating routine,—his lectures, his daily walk, his dinner with friends, his hours of reflection upon his great problem. These have been made the subject of many descriptions.[54]

The life of Kant is notable because it is the history of an unusual singleness of devotion to the solution of a speculative problem. His youthful point of departure was the rationalism of Wolff; his point of attainmentwas the Critique of Pure Reason. Between these two points his history was a series of mental reversals. Kant spoke of his life as divided into two parts at the year 1770; his pre-critical and his critical periods. At that time there was a change in the form as well as the content of his writings. His pre-critical writings possess a graceful, flowing style; his critical works are heavy and artificial in their structure, and reveal the labor with which his thought tried to reconcile contending motifs. So far as the content of Kant’s thought is concerned the pre-critical period will be seen to fall into two subdivisions at the year 1760. Kant’s life may therefore be divided into three epochs: (1) 1724–1760, the period when he was a Wolffian rationalist; (2) 1760–1770, the period when he was an empirical skeptic; (3) 1770–1804, the period when he was a critical epistemologist.

In the first period he accepted the rationalism of Wolff, but his main interest, as shown by his writings, was in natural science. He was inspired by the natural philosophy of Newton, which, in the latter part of this period, led him to mistrust the metaphysics of Wolff. That is to say, he began to suspect that the mere logical operation of concepts by the “pure reason” could not be a statement about things in the real world. In the next ten years—his second period—he became convinced that the metaphysics of the rationalists was impossible, and yet that the metaphysics of the empirical school of the English was equally absurd. His writings during this time are more strictly devoted to questions of metaphysics and epistemology. Then came his critical period. This was inaugurated by his celebrated Dissertation of 1770, followed by a period of eleven years of literary silence,a silence broken by the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Between 1781 and 1790 appeared the more mature works from Kant’s pen. Among them were the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of Judgment (1790), formed on the model of the Critique of Pure Reason. Besides these, his minor writings were very numerous, and one notes an essay by him in the last year of his life. But the writings of Kant after 1790 treat in the main of the philosophy of law and conduct, and show themselves to be the writings of his declining years.

The Problem of Kant. The problem which Kant placed before himself was that of epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, and Kant set to work to investigate the knowing process. The peculiar significance of Kant rests upon the fact that out of the various influences converging upon him and his time he matured a new conception of the problem and of the method of procedure of philosophy. He was convinced that the problem of his time was not one of metaphysical speculation, although he felt the value of such speculation in the regions of religion and morals. Yet he saw that the metaphysical rationalism of Wolff had proved itself inadequate because it was merely the logical operation of concepts, and had not dealt with real relations. He was equally sure that the empirical metaphysics of the Englishmen was inadequate because it was never certain of any truth. Rational metaphysics was logically true, but not real; empirical metaphysics was real enough, but never true. So Kant determined to find out the relation between the logical process of thought and the reality of things. He felt that the first problem in his time to be faced and settled was the problemof knowledge,—the epistemological problem. He planned to face later the metaphysical problem, but he delayed this until too late in his old age. The problem of Kant can be put in the simple question, What can we know? The metaphysical problem that he deferred was, What is real? Yet his problem was not nearly so simple as this statement would seem to make it; for the epistemological problem which he set himself was complicated by the Wolffian metaphysical dualism which he always presupposed. Since Kant agreed with the Wolffian dualism—the theory that a great gulf separates mind and matter—his query about knowledge was not the simple question, What can we know? but the longer question, What can we know about the external world?

The Method of Kant. There is bound up with the epistemological problem a new method of procedure in solving it. How shall we find out what we can know? Kant calls his method the critical method. It is not only a criticism in a general sense, in that it weighs carefully the conditions of knowledge. It is also criticism in the special sense of confining itself to a restricted field. Kant pointed out that two methods may be employed, the dogmatic and the transcendental. He asserted that the dogmatic method had been employed in the past and had proved itself fallacious. What is the dogmatic method? All philosophy was dogmatic to Kant which sought to find out what knowledge is true by showing how it originated and developed. Dogmatism is no solution; it is merely a psychological tracing of ideas to their sources. These sources will be either innate ideas, if we are rationalists, or sensations, if we are empiricists. The true method is the transcendental or criticalmethod. What is this method? It is a study of the nature of the reason itself. It is an examination of the “pure reason” to see if its judgments have in any instance a universality beyond human experience, and yet are necessary to human experience. The logic of such judgments must be absolutely reliable; and yet at the same time the judgments must be applicable to the world of things. The method being transcendental, such judgments are transcendental; not because they transcend our experience, but because they are necessary to experience. The transcendental is not what is chronologically but what is rationally prior. The transcendental is the indispensable to knowledge. The critical method is the finding of this indispensable condition. Kant would search the whole field of the reason for this. Since to Kant thinking, feeling, and willing are the fundamental forms of the reason, he sought the realm of thought for the transcendental principles of knowledge, that of the will for the transcendental principles of morality, that of feeling for the transcendental principles of beauty.

The Threefold World[55] of Kant—Subjective States, Things-in-Themselves, and Phenomena. In his search for those indispensable conditions of knowledge of the external world, Kant unfolds the threefold character of the realm of human life. To Wolff the world had been twofold. In other words, Wolff had conceived the world as dual, in which there was a correspondence, part by part, of independent reality to the states of consciousness. To Wolff reality is independent of consciousness, and yet we are conscious of that reality.Now Kant never gave up entirely the Wolffian dualism, but he came to see that in such a situation there could be no knowledge. For how can we be conscious of what is absolutely independent of us? Consequently Kant plundered the Wolffian worlds of independent realities to build up an intermediate world,—a world of phenomena. He dissolved the sharpness of Wolff’s dualism into a world with three divisions; and he gave to each division a new epistemological value. These were the realm of the subjective states or the inner consciousness of the individual, the world of phenomena or the realm of knowledge, and the world of absolute reality or that of things-in-themselves. The value of the world of phenomena consists in its being the realm of knowledge. The other two realms have values of their own, which we shall describe below.