History of Modern Philosophy / From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time

by Richard Falckenberg

The interests of the reason are not exhausted, however, by the question, What can we know? but include two further questions, What ought we to do? and, What may we hope? Thus to the metaphysics of nature there is added a metaphysics of morals, and to the critique of theoretical reason, a critique of practical reason or of the will, together with a critique of religious belief. For even if a "knowledge" of the suprasensible is denied to us, yet "practical" grounds are not wanting for a sufficiently certain "conviction" concerning God, freedom, and immortality.

After carrying the question of the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori from the knowledge of nature over to the knowledge of our duty, Kant raises it, in the third place, in regard to our judgment concerning the subjective and objective purposiveness of things, or concerning their beauty and their perfection, and adds to his critique of the intellect and the will a critique of the faculty of aesthetic and teleological judgment.

The Kantian philosophy accordingly falls into three parts, one theoretical, one practical (and religious), one aesthetic and teleological.

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Before advancing to our account of the first of these parts, a few preliminary remarks are indispensable concerning the presuppositions involved in Kant's critical work and on the method which he pursues. The presuppositions are partly psychological, partly (as the classification of the forms of judgment and inference, and the twofold division of judgments) logical, either in the formal or the transcendental sense, and partly metaphysical (as the thing in itself). Kant takes the first of these from the psychology of his time, by combining the Wolffian classification of the faculties with that of Tetens, and thus obtains six different faculties: lower (sensuous) and higher (intellectual) faculties of cognition, of feeling, and of appetition; or sensibility (the capacity for receiving representations through the way in which we are affected by objects), understanding (the faculty of producing representations spontaneously and of connecting them); the sensuous feelings of pleasure and pain, taste; desire, and will. The understanding in the wide sense is equivalent to the higher faculty of cognition, and divides further into understanding in the stricter sense (faculty of concepts), judgment (faculty of judging), and reason (faculty of inference). Of these the first gives laws to the faculty of cognition or to nature, the second laws to taste, and the third laws to the will.

The most important of the fundamental assumptions concerns the relation, the nature, and the mission of the two faculties of cognition. These do not differ in degree, through the possession of greater or less distinctness—for there are sensuous representations which are distinct and intellectual ones which are not so—but specifically: Sensibility is the faculty of intuitions, understanding the faculty of concepts. Intuitions are particular, concepts general representations. The former relate to objects directly, the latter only indirectly (through the mediation of other representations). In intuition the mind is receptive, in conception it acts spontaneously. "Through intuitions objects are given to us; through concepts they are thought." It results from this that neither of the two faculties is of itself sufficient for the attainment of knowledge, for cognition is objective thinking, the determination of objects, the unifying combination or elaboration of a given manifold, the forming of a material content. Rationalists and empiricists alike have been deceived in regard to the necessity for co-operation between the senses and the understanding. Sensibility furnishes the material manifold, which of itself it is not able to form, while the understanding gives the unifying form, to which of itself it cannot furnish a content. "Intuitions without concepts are blind" (formless, unintelligible), "concepts without intuitions are empty" (without content). In the one case, form and order are wanting; in the other, the material to be formed. The two faculties are thrown back on each other, and knowledge can arise only from their union.

A certain degree of form is attained in sense, it is true, since the chaos of sensations is ordered under the "forms of intuition," space and time, which are an original possession of the intuiting subject, but this is not sufficient, without the aid of the understanding, for the genesis of knowledge. In view of the a priori nature of space and time, though without detraction from their intuitive character (they are immediate particular representations), we may assign pure sensibility to the higher faculty of cognition and speak of an intuiting reason.

The forms of intuition and of thought come from within, they lie ready in the mind a priori, though not as completed representations. They are functions, necessary actions of the soul, for the execution of which a stimulus from without, through sensations, is necessary, but which, when once this is given, the soul brings forth spontaneously. The external impulse merely gives the soul the occasion for such productive acts, while their grounds and laws are found in its own nature. In this sense Kant terms them "originally acquired," and in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason declares that although it is indubitable that "all our knowledge begins with experience (impressions of sense), yet it does not all arise from experience." That a representation or cognition is a priori[1] does not mean that it precedes experience in time, but that (apart from the merely exciting, non-productive stimulation through impressions already mentioned) it is independent of all experience, that it is not derived or borrowed from experience.

[Footnote 1: The terms a priori representation and pure representation (concept, intuition) are equivalent; but in judgments, on the other hand, there is a distinction. A judgment is a priori when the connection takes place independently of experience, no matter whether the concepts connected are a priori or not. If the former is the case the a priori judgment is pure (mixed with nothing empirical); if the latter, it is mixed.]

The material of intuition and thought is given to the soul, received by it; it arises through the action of objects upon the senses, and is always empirical. Intuition is the only organ of reality; in sensation the presence of a real object as the cause of the sensation is directly revealed. When Kant's transcendental idealism was placed by a reviewer on a level with the empirical idealism of Berkeley, which denies the existence of the external world, he distinctly asserted that it had never entered his mind to question the reality of external things. Further, after the existence of real things affecting the senses had been transformed in his mind from a basis of the investigation into an object of inquiry, he endeavored to defend this assumption (which at first he had naïvely borrowed from the realism of pre-scientific thought) by arguments, but without any satisfactory result.[1]