The Moral Postulates. Kant’s ethical theory points away from the phenomenal world rather than toward it. To be sure, the natural inclinations take the color of the moral law when they are inspired by it; but the moral law tells us of the world of reality rather than of the world of phenomena. The moral law shows to man that he is more a resident of the world of reality than of that of phenomena. Man’s nature is dual. Of its two sides—the theoretical and the moral—the moral is primary. Fundamentally man is a willing agent rather than a thinking being. He is a phenomenal being, bound to the laws of natural necessity; but he is also a real unconditioned being, because the unconditioned reason is his real self. What was implicated in the Critique of Pure Reason becomes explicit in the Critique of Practical Reason. The understanding hints at what the will makes plain. Human knowledge is a mixture of transcendental understanding and empirical sensations. God’s knowledge would be pure understanding; the knowledge of the brutes is pure sensations. Human morality, however, contains a dualism; for the practical morality of man consists of the formal moral law inspiring the sensibilities although not heeding them. The will as pure reason is the activity of God; the will as pure impulses is the activity of brutes. But the true realm of man is this world of reason in which he is one with God, although he is at the same time hampered by being part of the world of phenomena.
1. The Postulate of Freedom. The unconditioned moral law is the basis of freedom for which all scientific knowledge seeks in vain. An unconditioned will is a free will. The will based upon the reason is based upon itself and is therefore free. The consciousness of the moral law within us implies freedom in its exercise. The “I ought” implies “I can.” We can have no knowledge of freedom, for in the eye of the understanding only causal necessity rules. But the reason commands as well as knows. It states what ought to be as well as what is. Its mandate implies freedom, as its knowledge states existence. When we will, we act as if we were free, and our freedom is a postulate which cannot be proved to the understanding. Freedom is not an object of knowledge, but an act of faith. Freedom as a postulate is the condition of morality, and the primacy of the will over the pure reason is shown in the fact that it can guarantee what the understanding cannot prove.
2. The Postulate of the Immortality of the Soul. The goal of the inclinations is happiness. The goal of the will is virtue. There is no relation or correspondence between the two in this world. A man may be happy and still not virtuous; he may be virtuous and not happy. Since a man belongs to both the world of free spirits and the world of necessity, he is thwarted in reaching for his highest good in this life. His highest good is the union of virtue and happiness. If this is to be attained, another life must be guaranteed. Yet this is only a postulate and not a proof. When man wills, he wills as if he were an immortal being.
3. The Postulate of the Existence of God. Faith in reaching forward must postulate God, as alone able to vouchsafe future harmony between goodness andhappiness and alone able to distribute justly the rewards and punishments that are so disproportionate in this world. When I will, I will as if God existed. When I will, I create by my willing my freedom, my immortality, and God’s existence. But because my will is an unconditioned law of my real being, my faith in these things is well founded.[58]
CHAPTER XI
THE GERMAN IDEALISTS
Idealism after Kant.[59] Kant’s criticism had been a fine dissection of the processes of knowledge. He had laid scientific knowledge open and separated it into its parts. In doing this he had acted in the spirit of his time, which had been inaugurated by Lessing. His doctrine became the point of departure of many differing systems. A modern German professor in the University of Berlin has been wont to say, “There are ten interpretations of Kant’s Critique, which are the ten kinds of philosophy at the present time.” The incoherence of Kant’s philosophy made it famous. He represented the first stage of a social movement; and like all social movements the world over, the first stage was critical, self-inconsistent, and destructive of tradition. The second stage is the one upon which we now enter, and we shall find it to be reconstructive along several lines. Criticism is always an inducement to new systematization. In Germany, after Kant, there was naturally, therefore, a great systematic movement which its intellectually virile and many-sided life was ready to express. Culture and philosophy went hand in hand. Jena was the centre of Kantianism and was in close proximity to Weimar, the centre of German culture.
At the time that the philosophy of Kant became popular, the teaching of Spinoza was resurrected from its long sleep and introduced into Germany. Kant wasthe “all-crushing” critic; Spinoza was the dogmatic mystic. Their opposition did not amount to a contradiction, but was of the correlative sort. Kant and Spinoza became the two intellectual foci about which revolved the thought of the generation after Kant. All the succeeding philosophers show Kant’s influence upon them, for they all accept his epistemology. They show the influence of Spinoza in varying degrees.
The philosophers whom we shall now meet may be divided into groups. The first group consists of Rheinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. These took the lead in destroying the Kantian conception of the thing-in-itself and in constructing a pure idealism. The second group consists of Herbart and Schopenhauer. These tried in different ways to develop a metaphysics of the thing-in-itself. A third group consisted of the old Wolffian rationalistic school, which was, however, unsuccessful in its opposition to the spread of the doctrines of Kant and Spinoza. A summary of the leaders of the German thought of this time would not be complete without mention, lastly, of the miscellaneous group of literary Romanticists, whose writings partook of the philosophical spirit. The influence of Spinoza is especially prominent in this group. Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) was the forerunner of this movement, and it included the names of Tieck, Wackenroder, the two Schlegels, Novalis, the two Romantic women,—Dorothea and Caroline,—Schiller, and Goethe. The poet Schiller did much to popularize Kant’s æsthetic and moral doctrines.
