The result of this investigation, which was the first valuable contribution to a scientific theory of understanding and forms, from our standpoint, the most important part of Kant's philosophy, served him mainly as a means of answering the following questions: What is the value of knowledge which exceeds experience? Can we, by mere deduction through concepts which go beyond experience, arrive at truths? His answer was: No, and it was a crushing blow to rationalism. We cannot exceed the boundaries of experience. By experience alone can we arrive at science. All supposed knowledge about the unlimited and infinite, about concepts of pure reason, called Ideas by Kant, (as the soul, the world, and God) is nothing but illusions. The contradictions in which the human mind becomes involved whenever it applies the categories outside of experience to such subjects, are manifested in the fruitless strife between the philosophical systems. Metaphysics as a science is impossible.
This did not give the deathblow to rationalism alone, but also to bourgeois materialism which reigned among the French radical thinkers. Kant's researches refuted the negative as well as the positive assertions anent the supernatural and infinite. This cleared the field for faith, for intuitive conviction. God, freedom and immortality are concepts the truth of which cannot be proved by reason, like the natural truths derived from experience. But nevertheless their reality is no less certain, only it is of a different nature, being subjective and, therefore, necessarily a matter of personal conviction. The freedom of the will, for instance, is not a knowledge gained by experience, because experience never teaches us anything but lack of freedom and dependence on the laws of nature. But nevertheless freedom of will is a necessary conviction of every one who feels it in the categorical imperative: Thou shalt! of every one possessed by a sense of duty and of the knowledge that he can act accordingly: therefore freedom of will is unconditionally certain and requires no proof by experience. And from this premise there follows in same way the assurance of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of God. It gives the same kind of certainty to all ideas which were left in a state of uncertainty by the critique of pure reason. At the same time freedom of will determines the form of the theory of understanding. In the entire world of phenomena there was no room for freedom, for these phenomena follow strict rules of causality, as demanded by the organization of our mind. Therefore it was necessary to make room for freedom of will somewhere else, and so "things in themselves," hitherto a phrase without value and meaning, assumed a higher importance. They were not bound to space, time or categories, they were free: they formed so to say a second world, the world of noumena, which stood behind the world of phenomena and which solved the contradiction between the lawful dependence of things in nature and between the personal conviction of freedom of will.
These opinions and reasonings were fully in accord with the conditions of science and the economic development of Kant's time. The field of nature was left entirely to the inductive method of science which based itself on strictly materialist experience and observation, classifying things systematically in their causal order and excluding all supernatural interference. But while faith was banished from the natural sciences forever, it could not be dispensed with. The ignorance as to the origin of the human will left room for a supernatural ethic. The attempts of the materialists to exclude the supernatural also from this field failed. The time had not come as yet for a materialist and natural ethics, for science was not yet able to demonstrate as an indisputable truth, founded on experience, in what manner ethical codes and moral ideas in general had a material origin.
This state of things shows that the Kantian philosophy is the purest expression of bourgeois thought, and this is still more emphasized by the fact that freedom is the center of his system and controls it. Rising capitalism required freedom for the producers of commodities in order to expand its productive forces, it required freedom of competition and freedom of unlimited exploitation. The producers of commodities should be free from all fetters and restrictions, and unhampered by any coercion, in order that they could go, under the sole direction of their own intelligence, into free competition with their fellow citizens. For this reason, freedom became the slogan of the young bourgeoisie aspiring to political power, and Kant's doctrine of the free will, the basis of his ethics, was the echo of the approaching French Revolution. But freedom was not absolute; it was to be dependent on the moral law. It was not to be used in the quest for happiness, but in accord with the moral law, in the service of duty. If the bourgeois society was to exist, the private interest of the individual must not be paramount, the welfare of the entire class had to be superior to that of the individual, and the commandments of this class had to be recognized as moral laws taking precedence over the quest for happiness. But for this very reason, these moral laws could never be fully obeyed, and every one found himself compelled to violate them in his own interest. Hence the moral law existed only as a code which could never be fulfilled. And so it stood outside of experience.
In Kant's ethics the internal antagonism of bourgeois society is reflected, that antagonism which is the compelling force of the ever increasing economic development. The foundation of this antagonism is the antagonism, already mentioned, between the individual and social character of production that gives rise to omnipotent, but unconceived social forces ruling the destiny of man. In capitalistic production it is still intensified by the antithesis of the wealthy ruling class and the poor producing class that is continuously augmented by those who are expropriated by competition. This antagonism gives rise to the contradiction between the aims of men and the results achieved, between the desire of happiness and the misery of the great mass. It is the basis of the contradiction between virtue and vice, between freedom and dependence, between faith and science, between phenomenon and "thing itself." It is at the bottom of all contradictions and of the entire pronounced dualism of the Kantian philosophy. These contradictions are to blame for the downfall of the system, and the work of disintegration was unavoidable from the moment that the contradictions of the bourgeois production became apparent, that is to say immediately after the political victory of the bourgeoisie. The system of Kant could, however, not be overcome, unless the material origin of morality could be uncovered. Then these contradictions could be understood and solved by showing that they were relative and not absolute as they appeared. And not until then could a materialist ethics, a science of morality, drive faith from its last retreat. This was at last accomplished by the discovery of social class struggles and of the nature of capitalist production, by the pioneer work of Karl Marx.
The practice of developed capitalism about the middle of the 19th century directly challenged proletarian thinkers to criticise Kant's doctrine of practical reason. Bourgeois ethics and freedom manifested themselves in the form of freedom of exploitation in the interest of the bourgeoisie, as slavery for the working class. The maintenance of human dignity appeared in reality as the brutalization and degradation of the proletarians, and the state founded on justice proved to be nothing but the class state of the bourgeoisie. And so it was seen that Kant's sublime ethics, instead of being the basis in all eternity of human activity in general, was merely the expression of the narrow class interests of the bourgeoisie. This proletarian criticism was the first material for a general theory, and once it had been stated, its correctness was demonstrated more and more by the study of previous historical events, and these events were thereby shown in their proper light. It was then understood by this theory that the social classes, distinguished by their position in the process of production, had different and antagonistic economic interests, and that each class did necessarily regard its own interest as good and sacred. These general class interests were not recognized in their true character but appeared to men in the guise of superior moral motives; in this form they crowded the special individual interests into the background, and since the class interests were generally felt, all the members of the same class recognized them. Moreover, a ruling class could temporarily compel a defeated or suppressed class to recognize the class interests of the rulers as a moral law, so long as the inevitability of the mode of production in which that class ruled was acknowledged. Owing to the fact that the nature and significance of the productive process was not understood, the origin of human motives could not be discovered. They were not traced back to experience, but simply felt directly and intuitively. And consequently they were thought to be of a supernatural origin and eternal duration.
Not only the moral codes, but also other products of the human mind, such as religion, science, arts, philosophy, were then understood to be intimately connected with the actual material conditions of society. The human mind is influenced in all its products by the entire world outside of it. And thus the mind is seen to be a part of nature, and the science of the mind becomes a natural science. The impressions of the outer world determine the experience of man, his wants determine his will, and his general wants his moral will. The world around him determines man's wants and impressions, but these, on the other hand, determine his will and activity by which he changes the world; this will-directed activity appears in the process of social production. In this manner man by his work is a part, a link in the great chain of natural and social development.
This conception overturns the foundations of philosophy. Since the human mind is seen now to be a part of nature and interacts with the rest of the world according to laws which are more or less known, it is classed among Kant's phenomena. There is no longer any need of talking about noumena. Thus they do not longer exist for us. Philosophy then reduces itself to the theory of experience, to the science of the human mind. It is at this point that the beginning made by Kant had to be farther developed. Kant had always separated mind and nature very sharply. But the understanding that this separation should only be made temporarily for the purpose of better investigation, and that there is no absolute difference between matter and mind made it possible to advance the science of thought processes. However, this could be accomplished only by a thinker who had fully digested the teachings of socialism. This problem was solved by Joseph Dietzgen in his work on "THE NATURE OF HUMAN BRAIN WORK," the first edition of which appeared in 1869, and by this work he won for himself the name of philosopher of the proletariat. This problem could be solved only by the help of the dialectic method. Therefore, the idealist philosophical systems from Kant to Hegel which consist chiefly in the development of the dialectic method, must be regarded as the indispensable pioneers and precursors of Dietzgen's proletarian philosophy.
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The philosophy of Kant necessarily broke down on account of its dualism. It had shown that there is safety only in finite and material experience, and that the mind becomes involved in contradictions whenever it ventures beyond that line. The mind's reason calls for absolute truth which cannot be gotten. Hence the mind is groping in the dark and critique may perhaps explain why it is in the dark, but it cannot show the way out. What is called with Kant dialectics is in reality resignation. True, the mind finds knowledge about things outside of experience by some other way, viz., by means of its moral consciousness, but this intuitive knowledge in the form of faith remains sharply separated from scientific understanding. It was the task of the philosophical development immediately after Kant, to do away with this sharp separation, this unreconciled contradiction. This development ended with Hegel; its result was the understanding that contradiction is the true nature of everything. But this contradiction cannot be left to stand undisturbed, it must be solved and still retained in a higher form, and thus be reconciled. Therefore the world of phenomena cannot be understood as being at rest. It can be understood only as a thing in motion, as activity, as a continuous change. Action is always the reconciliation of contradiction in some higher form, and contradiction appears in this way as the lever of progressive development. That which accomplishes this dialectic self-development does not appear in the idealistic systems as the material world itself, but as the spiritual, the idea. In Hegel's philosophy, this conception assumes the form of a comprehensive system outlining the self-development of the Absolute which is spiritual and is identical with God. The development of this Absolute takes place in three stages; in its primitive pure spiritual form it develops out of its undifferentiated being the conceptions of logic; then it expresses itself in another, an external form, opposite to itself, as Nature. In nature all forms develop by way of contradictions which are eliminated by the development of some higher form. Finally the Absolute awakens to consciousness in nature in the form of the human mind and reaches thus its third stage, at which the opposite elements, matter and spirit, are reconciled into a unity. The human mind evolves in the same way to ever higher stages, until it arrives, at the end of its development by understanding itself, that is to say, by knowing intuitively the Absolute. This is what happens unconsciously in religion. Religion, which in the form of faith must be satisfied with a modest corner in the system of Kant, appears in the system of Hegel very proudly as a higher sort of understanding superior to all other knowledge, as an intuitive knowledge of absolute truth (God). In philosophy this is done consciously. And the historical development which finds its conclusion and climax in the Hegelian philosophy corresponds to the logical development of the human mind.