Immanuel Kant – one of the most influential, consequential, and ground-breaking philosophers in history – changed the way we think about we’re all capable of. Each of us swim in the water of his philosophy – politically, morally, culturally. He changed everything. The course of history, us, our ways of thinking and acting.
He saw that people had been pushed around – by religious zealots, powerful leaders, and arrogant metaphysicians– and he wanted to prove and show how we could think for ourselves.
That in here, we had a powerful tool that no-one had yet properly understood. That if we used it properly, we could begin to strip away misconceptions, false opinion, all this fuzz, all of this confusion, all of this complexity, and find within us pure reason. A big claim.
He said that the Enlightenment – that 18th century period of radical change in Europe – was ‘man’s emergence from immaturity’ – and reading him, when you really understand what he’s saying, really does have an effect on the inner workings of your mind; you can feel the way you think changing.
So we’ll look at both his ideas about rationality, knowledge, and his philosophy of morality, and in doing so, we’ll try and find a peak, a viewpoint, from which we can reliably view the world, a solid foundation to stand on, from which we can find some tools, some guidelines for thinking and acting, a place we might be able to find pure reason.
This is also the story of a man, who, like Kant, is attempting to find their way up a mountain, searching for something pure at the top.
Kant’s Project of Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant – born in 1724 – wanted to make us a truly scientific species – he wanted to bring together reason – how we think – and experience – what we see, hear, touch through our senses – on a sure foundation – one that scientific knowledge could be built on.
He hoped to lay out what we described as a ‘cosmic’ idea of philosophy – one that followed in Newton’s footsteps when we discovered the laws of motion and gravity – Kant wanted to layout the laws that governed human thought, human experience, human action.
In that, he said that how we think is central in the three most important questions we can ask ourselves: What can I know? What should I do? And for what may I hope?
His most important book is the monumental Critique of Pure Reason – an 1000 page book published in 1781, written in technical philosophical language, in winding impenetrable passages, with no accepted interpretation.
The goal of the book though is quite simple: He’s asking What can we know objectively? Surely? With certainty. About the world? About ourselves? And about the relationship between the two.
He starts from a simple premise: if we look around us, at the landscape, the universe, the weather, our health & bodies, our pursuits, relationships, choices- how, if you really think about it, it seems incomprehensibly complex, there’s just so much going on , it’s almost chaotic, has so many distinct parts, can be approached in so many ways – how is it possible that we make sense of it at all?
Out of all of this, somehow, we do get meaning – we get lives, routines, schedules, books, places to go and people to see. He’s asking how , in the philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel’s words, we constitute a cosmos from chaos.
Kant said that:
‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me….’
The starry world he calls an ‘unbounded magnitude’ – worlds upon worlds, system upon systems – that unimaginable complexity everywhere we look in the world– and the second, is the way that from that, I manage to carve a path through it – I manage to think and act.
In all of that boundless complexity, we seem to have some sort of compass, something that guides our thought, and guides our sense of right and wrong.
So, lets get going. I’m to avoid being technical as much as I reasonably can. I’ll avoid going down the route normally taken – a route you’ll recognise if you’ve looked at any introductory book or podcast about kant – it’s the route of analytic a priori bachelors being unmarried men – and I think it’s a confusing place to start.
Because actually, I think the key to Kant is actually quite simple – he’s asking how we create concepts – how we make our ideas of the world – what’s happening when we do this? In thinking about this we approach the peak of pure reason because, conceptualising is what we do – in every moment, it’s the foundation of all thought. In finding what’s pure, you can know what’s reliable, what to most focus on, you can sharpen how to think.
The Chaos of the World: Empiricism
Think about all the experiences you’ve had in your life. The things you’ve seen, felt, smelt, heard, tasted. Now multiply that by all the people who have ever lived. By the numerical extent of the world, of the universe – what we know of it, what we don’t – add in all the things you’ve forgotten, the experience of animals, plants, the processes of physics or chemistry, too. Look around right now: look at all the parts of the room that you could focus on, but haven’t –
I could select this single quadrant out of all the others, and think about not just its shape, but its color, not just its color but its shade, not just its shade but its precise texture – how it feels, what happens to it, how it smells – now zoom back out – how do we choose what to select out of all of this? How do we get a comprehensible picture of the world? And that’ a single piece of dirt. That same problem applies to everything; what we have for lunch, which word we choose next, our life plans.
About half a billion photons hit the retina every single second. And somehow we translate that into something intelligible, something human, a picture, a focus. This is Kant’s fundamental question: How do you get a structured, comprehendible idea of the world from all this stuff?
The collection of perceptions, impressions on the eye, on the skin, in the nose, on the ear drum – are like billions of artists strokes each and every second – like the collecting of infinitesimal peas in a colossal bag. What we have is what Kant called ‘content without form’ – there is no organising factor, its just a mass, a mess, a chaos.
So the first problem is the organisational problem – how do we organise all of this?
The second, is how is objective knowledge possible in the face of all this? Out of all of those trillions of artists impressions – so many have been wiped away, turned out to be mistaken, mis-strokes – how do we know that the sun will continue to rise, that the laws of gravity will hold ten years from now?
Kant was responding to the influential Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Hume was an empiricist. He believed that all knowledge came from the senses; that we learn about the world from what we absorb.
From this, Hume made a radical claim: that if we only know the sun rises and sets from experience, or from the experience of others, from what we’ve been told – no matter how many times we watch it rise, no matter how many times we’ve recorded it rising through history – there is no certain proof that it will rise again tomorrow. We can only say that with each time we experience something happening, the likelihood of it happening again increases.
This deeply disturbed Kant. He said that awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.
It disturbed him so much because it shook the new scientific method that was emerging in Kant’s time from having any secure foundation. We might observe gravity working consistently. But it could change. Afterall, people believed many things throughout history that turned out to be untrue.
The second and related thing that disturbed Kant was that, if Hume was right, that all of our knowledge came from outside of us, from experience, through our senses, then we have no innate knowledge making capacity for ourselves. If all comes from outside, we are just receptors, ‘passively driven by outside stimuli’ as Yovel puts it.
Kant felt intuitively that this wrong. That we have knowledge of our own, and that some scientific truths – for example, that everything that happens has a cause – or some mathematical truths – like 2+2=4 – are true for us, for everyone, and doesn’t come from outside – we just know it.
Do we really have to go about searching for mathematics in nature?
From followers of Hume’s philosophy, surely it follows that numbers had to be discovered one at a time. Counted out. Pythagoras could only find his theorem out in the world, in the wild. This surely isn’t true – do we not have an innate capacity for working through some mathematical and scientific claims ourselves, independent of experience?
As Roger Scruton puts it in his introduction, Kant wants to know ‘How can I come to know the world through pure reflection, without recourse to experience?’’ This pure reflection is pure reason – the root of all thinking. In short, again, how do we – in here – constitute a cosmos out of chaos.
The Critique of Pure Reason
Kant wrote several influential books, but whats referred to as the first critique – the critique of pure reason – is the central one. Its where he answers that most fundamental of questions – how do constitute meaning out of chaos – how do we create knowledge ourselves, for ourselves.
Ok, so first, what does reason mean for Kant?
Broadly, it means the process of thinking – the conditions, the rules, the operating system, for thinking itself. If Hume was right that everything comes from outside of us, then the very act of thinking makes little sense. If we get everything from outside, do we get the rules for thinking from outside too, like picking up someone elses cookbook? It Hume was right, it would like all the thinking was done for us before it even gets to us.
So in short, asking what reason is, is asking what thinking is if it was emptied of all content. That’s why he says pure reason.
Working out what this is could be unimaginably powerful. To know how to build and program on a great computer, of course you need to know how the source code works. Working this out is like finding the source of knowledge stripped of everything else, a kind of meaning of life.
Yovel writes that ‘reason’s interests are inherent to it and not directed to any external goal. In other words, human rationality is a goal-oriented activity, whose goal lies in itself rather than in anything other than itself.’
Pure reason is a bit like this beaker, a cup, or a measuring jug – it takes the data of the outside world as its content – but it shapes it, defines it in its own way – and reason does that by formulating concepts – concepts are how we see the world.
As Kantian philosopher Paul Guyer puts it
‘The Critique of Pure Reason argues that all knowledge requires both input from the senses and organization by concepts, and that both sensory inputs and organizing concepts have pure forms that we can know a priori, thus know to be universally and necessarily valid’.
Ok, Kant uses that phrase a priori a lot – it just means independent of experience, before all use, universal – it’s the elixir, the holy grail, of pure thought. He says a priori means what is left when ‘one removes from our experience everything that belongs to the senses.’ He continues that ‘Every cognition is called pure, that is not mixed with anything foreign to it.’
Pure thought receives, organises, judges and applies concepts to the raw data of experience. Kant also calls pure thought the understanding because, well, it attempts to understand the world.
Yovel writes that ‘the senses supply the understanding with a crude element that is not yet a real object but only the material for it; and the understanding, a spontaneous factor, must order and shape this material according to its (the understanding’s) own a priori modes of operation.’
Kant’s responding to two traditions in philosophy that were new at the time. The empiricists, as we’ve seen, like Hume – who arguing all knowledge comes from experience, and the rationalists -people like Descartes and Spinoza – who argued that reason is the way to secure knowledge like mathematics.
Kant carves a path that requires both. It’s the mixing of them – and how that happens that’s important.
Famously he says: ‘Without sensibility – that’s senses – no object would be given to us, and without understanding – that’s thinking – none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’
Kant takes bewildering, complex, and difficult to understand twists and turns towards his proof of this. He takes different pathways towards the same goal. I’m going to focus on the three central ones. From them, pure reason can be glimpsed and understood. The technical names are: Transcendental aesthetic, metaphysical deducation, and the transcendental deduction
But don’t worry about them sounding technical – just focus on that peak – and we’ll meander our way towards it.
Transcendental Aesthetic (translation: time and space is everything)
Ok, so what’s the first path? What is pure and necessary and fundamental and universal and a priori to receiving any of that data from the environment from the senses? Whats the first part of our pre-empirical toolkit? Time and space.
Kant is always asking this question: what must be the case for this to be true? What are the conditions that make this possible?
And the first thing Kant claims is that space and time are the universal forms of all intuitions; time and space are the conditions for experience – those inputs – to happen at all. It doesn’t come from the senses; to even have sensations in the first place we must have some intuitive framework.
This idea is the first stone laid in Kants transcendental method.
Speaking of stones, For me to even experience an object – whether I see, hear, touch it – I must be able to place it in space -separate from other objects, and importantly, as distinct, in space from myself -as something separate from my consciousness. We have to have what Kant calls pure intuition – a framework of space and time – that the experience can happen in.
Kant says “Space is not an empirical concept that has been drawn from outer experiences,” because “in order for certain sensations to be related to something outside me… the representation of space must already be their ground”
In other words, our experience of space is not something we learn empirically. It’s presupposed to even have empirical experiences at all. Because in order for us to even say something is over there, the ‘overthereness’ is is assumed in the judgement. When I say this is over there, the very quality of thisness must be recognised as something I’ve carved out in space. What am I doing when I say this? I’m delimiting this as a thing in space, separate from me, relative to other things.
Time functions in the same way. For me to even understand that one thing follows another, for me to say ‘something happened after something else’, before and after are assumed in the thingness – we have to have carved out a period of thisness in time -a moment, separate from other moments.
And so space and time are ‘pure’ intuitions – they’re the sea that everything else swims in.
But we can learn something else from this, something radical.
That this pure intuition is about being able to perceive particulars within a totality, about being able to recognise, carve out, select, pick-out , designate a particular unit of space – the stone – or a particular unit of time – now, then, when. Again, a particular in a totality.
Yovel writes that
For us to perceive the world at all, we must have an innate grasp of what us inside of us and outside of us, what is here and there, without which everything would be everywhere at once, and an innate grasp of succession, of something following another thing in time, without which everything would happen at once.
What this assumes, to be able to distinguish points on these spectrums, is that we can splice them up, that I can locate, isolate, analyse, focus on single particular points.
And this leads to another radical implication, a consequence of this.
That carving out units is the basis of mathematics. Once I can say one rock or one moment of time, I can conceive of there being another unit, then another, then I can add them, times then, subtract and divide them. So Kant says the very idea of mathematics is presumed in having any experience at all.
Yovel writes simply that ‘The number 5 is the product of a construction that adds the basic numerical unit to itself and stops at the fifth place.’
Mathematics is transcendental, a priori, universal, pure thought, that does not come from out there, from experience.
Again, it means that Pythagoras did not have to go around the world with a magnifying glass searching for his theorem in the wild. The question is whether he could have imagined it with no sensory input at all.
The metaphysical deduction (translated: we are all judges)
Ok, so Space and time are ‘pure forms of intuition,’ through which we are connected to the objects of empirical experience. But this is still something passive – it’s the common landscape of the universe – something we swim in, swim through. Kant also needs to prove that we bring something to the table – that on this landscape, we do something. And In short, that something, is the forming of concepts. We do this by categorising.
Kant calls the “metaphysical deduction” a mere “clue to the discovery of all pure concepts of the understanding,” It’s the second pathway up towards pure reason, before we get to the third and main path.
First, what is a concept? A concept is an abstract idea – the way we hold something in thought. Concepts are everything – in fact, they’re the only access to the world outside of us we have.
I have a concept of water, for example – what it like, what it does, where it is, and so on. I can’t see the other side of this bottle – but I have an idea of it nonetheless. Concepts are the way we focus on the parade of experience around us, they’re the way we experience, select, and organise it.
Without some way of focusing, the parade of experience is just that – a parade, passing us by. We need something that focuses on what of the parade floats. Exactly how we do when we do watch a parade – we change our focus, move our necks, and suddenly a whole different perspective is within view. So what’s going on when we do this? Once again, Kant asks, what must be the case for this to be possible?
Concepts are something like empty containers for our experiences to fit into – containers that are ours – that are part of pure thought. They are innate – but they have no content of their own, because they need something to fill them before they are anything at all – some way of understanding experience.
Concepts are the way we understand the world, and we judge what we see so as to categorise it with concepts. In fact, all thinking is judging, all thinking is understanding, and all thinking uses categories.
its the job of our pure ‘understanding’ to organise that data we receive, too judge where it fits, to recognise patterns. If it doesn’t do this, what job would it have? We’d be placid receptors just soaking everything in.
He calls the understanding discursive which he gets from the Latin, ‘running through’ -we run through experience. And when we run through we make judgements.
Let’s imagine I was born yesterday – which some people say is true – and this leaf is the first thing I see – I recognise certain qualities – its green, it has a shape, its found on the ground or on a tree, its light. But its singular – I’ve carved it out in space & time. Now, I come across another object, it looks similar, I recognise it too has this quality of greenness to it – that’s two instances – its shape is different but similar too. Now, I see the grass as green, but its different to a leaf, it has a difference shape, its found elsewhere. I find another leaf, this time on a tree – in a different place but it looks, feels, smells very similar.
What’s happened here? I’ve identified an object as separate from its surroundings, I’ve judged it to appear to have a certain quality that differs from other parts of the environment – greenness, softness, lightness, this shape. I’ve focused on each of these properties – drawing them out from the leaf, then I’ve unified them back into the concept of a leaf, for me to recognise again.
Philosopher Jill Vance Buroker writes that
‘Judgments are acts in which the understanding unifies diverse representations into a single, more complex, representation of an object.’
The judgement splits the world up into different parts, analyses it, then unifies it again into a representation of an object. I see this tree – I split into colours, shapes, bark, leaves, – I might later include its roots – or scientific knowledge about photosynthesis, or ideas about where the tree came from, or its different species – but ultimately, I unify it into a concept of a tree.
Conceptual thinking unifies distinct representations of the world by making judgements about them. This is one of the roots of all thinking.
Everything – whether its objects like leaves and trees or ideas like democracy or love, looks for the distinct parts that make up the concept.
Philosopher Paul Guyer writes that ‘The premise of Kant’s argument is that all cognition involves the combination of concepts into judgments, which in the first instance subsume more particular concepts under more general ones.’
Now the question becomes, what are the rules that govern this process? How do we unify representations? How do we combine? What rulebook are we judging by?
Kant’s answer is the categories. Bear with me here.
The core of the metaphysical deduction is that we think in categories. That all thinking is judging by applying the categories. Like time and space, the categories are the conditions for having any understandable experiences at all.
Now, this next bit gets a bit technical so don’t worry too much, but there are four main categories, each with three subcategories. Philosophers have criticised Kant here for various reasons, but it’s the idea of these rough set of categories that is important for us:
The four main ones are quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Don’t get bogged down in this. But it’s the way we judge particular representations and unify them into concepts. It works like this:
Quantity of judgements is either universal, particular, or singular. It’s just the way we can carve up units and say all of them, some of them, or one of them.
For example all leaves come from trees, or some leaves are green, or a leaf is in my pocket – universal, particular, single.
Quality is the affirmation of some predicate than an object has. quality is the ‘are’ in ‘Some leaves are green.’
It’s our ability to recognise that some unit is different in quality from for example, the air or ground that surrounds it.
There’s also relation – if some thing happens, some thing else happens – if, then statements – We always find the leaf by the tree, for example. If tree, then leaf. Or we might find non-relation. There are no trees in the sky – so its either-or.
And then there’s modality – statements about existence – or whether something is asserted – held in the mind or not. In this, we also have the idea of possibility – this might be right, might not, this is here, now, this is not.
Ok, but back to the path, the particulars with the categories aren’t too important – but what is is that we have a universal, a priori, pre-experience, transcendental set of categories, that we use to run through experience, judge it, understand it, and organise it into sets of ideas – what we have, if Kant is right, is quite incredible: its the foundation of knowledge itself.
The transcendental deduction (translation: the transcendental unity of apperception) (translation: Thinking is all)
This is the heart of Kant’s philosophy, the third path up to the peak.— It’s here that Kant argues that the concepts – like quantity & quality – apply to experience, synthesise experience spontaneously, and that through them experience becomes our own experience, that the whole process requires an identity that’s persistent through time. —Like the previous two paths, he’s asking what must be true for thought to happen at all? What is transcendental?
He starts from a simple premise: ‘what are the conditions of the possibility of the “I think” itself ?’
It’s really a common-sense question. If we were just receiving experiences like Hume thought, what would the ‘I think’ even mean? After all, we’d just be passive – we’d have no way of distinguishing our representations of the world from the world itself. We’ve receive the world but we wouldn’t have concepts like cup, walking, cloud, life.
In having a representation of an object – in thinking about this apple – its redness, its sweetness, its location, of turning it and remembering what the side I cant see looks like, in remembering what the inside smells like from a previous experience – I’m obviously aware that what I’m thinking about is an apple that is my idea of the apple – that I’m constructing a concept of it in real time.
Let’s go back to that empirical chaos.
Kant starts with that simple premise: that all of my representations of the world are ‘inherently complex’ – a ‘whole of compared and connected representations’ – the world – any snapshot of is, is seemingly irreducible – full of objects and impressions and sense data that could be cut up in a dizzying and infinite number of ways.
This doesn’t just apply to space – to a snapshot of the world around us, but to time to. Pause a moment. Listen to and look at your surroundings. The speed of things vary. The bird song comes and goes, the water flows, maybe quickens, the clouds move, hunger appears, some things are large and steady, others small and fleeting.
Kant says “they must all be ordered, connected, and brought into relations”.
If I’m trying to understand the apple or the leaf or the tree, I’d watch them over the course of a year, through the seasons, as the leaves shed and the fruit falls, and find something new to add to my understanding of their concepts.
Now the key to this is synthesis. It’s only in spontaneously recognising the world in its parts, breaking them down, the unifying and synthesising them back together that I do any thinking at all.
Synthesis of apprehension in intuition (selecting from chaos)
This is the carving out units in space and time that I talked about earlier. Take a look at this pillow – it has so many colours, shapes, intersecting parts, threads – how to you decide where to focus? In the very act of focusing – through looking, touching, smelling, hearing even – we synthesise either a part or all of it, into a unity.
Its also true that space and time can be cut up infinitely – even more so today with microscopes and hearing equipment – I can look at a part of an apple – its hard in some place, soft in others, its found on a tree but can be picked up, it can be cut up into many parts. The number of shades it has is immeasurable, the feel of the stalk, the inside, the outside are different. To experience, the stalk say, I’ve synthesised its parts – brownness, roughness, shape – into one unity and excluded the rest of the apple. The key is, we separate into parts, into units, and then synthesise into wholes.
Synthesis of reproduction in the imagination (the selection mechanism)
But again Kant goes further. He makes the point that for us to even begin to construct a concept out of experience we also need memory and imagination.
He writes ‘apprehending identifiable objects requires reproducing in imagination the previously apprehended parts.’
We have to recall the parts of the apple, even if it was just milliseconds before, to syntheses those parts into a single concept: apple. We can’t see the back, we have to remember where we found it, what it tasted like. And this applies to everything we experience. Previous representations have to be recognised as related in some way to present representations. —This is true for exclusion too. It’s only in recognising that the redness of the object I just looked at is different from the brown branch and the green leaves that I’m now looking at that I recognise that the red quality of the apple, along with its other qualities, makes it something to focus on and conceptualise at all.
This doesn’t just apply to simple objects, like apples, but every thought we have, every concept we have. Democracy, mountaineering, love, friendship – they all require breaking phenomena into parts, unifying them into a concept, recalling separate parts to do it – this is the basis of thought, fundamental for pure reasoning.
Synthesis of recognition in the concept
Kant now brings the categories back into the picture. To do any of this – to synthesis, use our memory and imagination to recognise how our different experiences are related – we must use the categories – we have to count, recognise quality, exclude parts, and so on. We must make judgements.
The transcendental unity of apperception (translation or “I think.”) Translation: the core
This has been called the ‘embyro’ of Kant’s philosophy, the core, the centre, the proof, the nucleus, the summit. The terrifyingly titled ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ is the bringing of it all together.
Kant synthesises it all into a “unity of consciousness that precedes all data of the intuitions” or a “pure, original, unchanging consciousness”
Applying the categories – counting through the world, recognising qualities, affirming and denying – requires a thoroughgoing thread – a consistent self-same unity that is required for experience to happen at all.
He writes ‘We are conscious a priori of the thoroughgoing identity of ourselves with regard to all representations that can ever belong to our consciousness’
Remember that phrase – discursive – that running through – well its central – its at the centre – it’s the me taking those routes up the mountain – it’s the I synthesising the world
He says “The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me”
This unifying can only be done by some singular activity of a unified independent consciousness, which one becomes aware of through the process of understanding – through judging, through time, through fabricating our ideas of the world, through counting, we construct, build up the world ourselves, and in doing so we also become self-aware and self-conscious of the world as my experience of the world.
Kant writes that ‘we can represent nothing as combined in the object without having previously combined it ourselves, and that among all representations combination is the only one that is not given through objects but can be executed only by the subject itself, since it is an act of its self-activity.’
Again, this requires the categories because to judge and organise any experience at all I must be able to ‘carve out’ a unit to judge, compare it other units, recognise quality, and so on.
Buroker says that I then judge that each of these judgements belong to me. And I find I can ‘can make judgments about one representation, some representations, and all my representations.’
What he’s saying is that, in the very act of recognising a representation of the world – in sight say – in carving out, in needing the phenomenon of time to, say exclude a different part, or vsynthesise another part – we’re doing something not given in experience –
we’re doing something that’s mine – the power to unify that can only be processed by a single unity – a thread, a core, a single me – and that cannot be given to us by experience – that is the summit of pure reason.
This unity centres everything. Space and time are the vessel, judgement, synthesising and understanding are the process, and the categories of splitting up, counting, recognising qualities and so on and the tools, the rules, along using our imagination and our memory to do so – to survey everything – this is the center of Kant’ s project – a priori, universal, required, from which everything else can be experienced.
But remember, Kant says experiences are required too. So now we should be in a better position to understand that famous phrase: ‘Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind’
Ethics
Kan’t wrote a lot. We’ve covered, as much as we can, the first critique of pure reason. He went on in later texts, to apply this to practical reason – how pure reason informs how we go about the world, how we choose what to do, what political systems we use, what we find beautiful. He began this in his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.
His starting point is this: if what we’ve discovered at the summit is the only thing that is universally guaranteed, a priori, from which all else is surveyed, then it must bee highest good, the only thing we can absolutely rely on, what he calls an end in itself. Kant wants to unleash reason that we had within us.
He said famously in the essay What is Enlightenment? That Enlightenment was man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. That immaturity was not using the reason we are endowed with.
And just as Kant wants to find pure reason stripped of all experiential content, something that is ours, to rely on, he wants to find a moral code that is pure too, one that doesn’t rely on anything outside of us. He called Hume’s philosophy a ‘wretched anthropology’ – if we reduce morality to just what we experience, what we see people do, well, people do some pretty horrible things to each other. It seems that many people don’t care about morality, and it doesn’t seem that nature gives us too many clues, so morality must come from elsewhere.
As Kenneth Westphal writes ‘By definition pure practical reason omits all corporeal desires, motives, urges, inclinations or preferences and all consideration of the agent’s capacities and resources for achieving ends.’
Kant is in search of a moral compass that is cleansed and stripped of any help from anything outside of itself – that could sway it. Because if, as Hume thought, our morality comes from our feelings, our sympathies towards others – not from reason – then how do we ever condemn those that have no feelings towards others – those that don’t care, that are selfish, psychopathic even – how can we say anyone is ever in the wrong.
Reason and Freedom, Ends in itself
For Kant, reason is so important that we have a duty to it, because having the ability to reason implies something else, freedom.
He writes “If only rational beings can be an end in themselves, this is not because they have reason, but because they have freedom. Reason is merely a means”
David Misslebrook writes that Kant started with the fact that ‘mankind’s distinguishing feature is our possession of reason. Therefore, it follows that all humans have universal rational duties to one another, centring on their duty to respect the other’s humanity.’
In a later work – the metaphysics of morals – KAnt says ““what characterizes humanity (as distinguished from animality)” is the “capacity to set oneself an end – any end whatsoever” Humans can set goals and use reason to meet them. It is this that makes us human.
What this means is that we shouldn’t use people, treating them as means to our goals, without their consent. We should respect their capacity to reason for themselves, to set their own ends, as Kant called it.
He famously writes that ‘“So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means”’
Each of us only had access to the outcomes of our reasonable thinking. We set goals and reason how to achieve them. I might freely set a goal to come down the mountain, and you can tell me one way is better than an other – but if you force me down, against my wishes, you’ve gone against the reason of another, the only thing we can all trust absolutely – each person sets their own in ends – each person is an end in themselves. This belief is the grounds of what Kant called the Categorial Imperative.
The Categorical Imperative
Reason, for Kant, was the path to morality because all other things – love, sympathy, friendship, charity – can wax and wane, be felt one minute and gone the next – instead , we should rely on reason and duty to do what reason commands.
He said ‘nothing is left but the conformity of actions as such with universal law, which alone is to serve the will as its principle, that is, I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law’
He called the result a categorical imperative: categorical meaning unconditional – always true – and imperative – meaning something that we know we ought to follow.
So how would this work? First, we should formulate a maxim – a test to see if something is moral or not – a maxim is a principle for acting: I will give this change to charity, I will drop this litter here, I will steal this sandwich, I will lie to my friend, I will drive faster, I will cheat on my exam. Kant says that the first way to see if a maxim conforms with reason – to see whether its moral – is to ask whether it could become a universal law without contradiction.
Kant asks would it be logically possible if everyone did this, if it was universalised? Is there a ‘contradiction in conception’.
Take breaking a promise. Ask ‘if everyone broke promises when they wished, what would it mean to promise in the first place?’ Nothing. The ‘institution’ of promising would break down, wouldn’t function, would become untrustworthy.
James Fieser writes that ‘if such deceit were followed universally, then the whole institution of promising would be undermined and I could not make my promise to begin with.’
Or stealing – if everyone stole from each other whenever they wished the idea of personal property would become meaningless. And in cheating – the institution – whether in a card game or an exam – the rules that govern the activity would fall apart and becomes pointless once everyone starts doing it.
If, when universalizing our maxim, we get a contradiction in conception, then Kant says we have a ‘perfect duty’ not to do it. But we should also ask whether the maxim is something I could rationally will. Some things do not contradict themselves when univseralised, but are still clearly intolerable.
He writes ‘The rule of judgment under laws of pure practical reason is this: ask yourself whether, if the action you propose were to take place by a law of the nature of which you were yourself a part, you could indeed regard it as possible through your will.’
Take laziness, for example, or not helping someone in need. They don’t contradict themselves when universalised, but they don’t aid everyone’s reason in pursuing their ends if everyone did it. He sees we all need aid some times, and so a world where no-one helped one another would obviously be a bad one.
Fieser says two types of contradictions emerge: one an internal contradiction with the proposed universal rule; and the other, a contradiction between the proposed universal rule and another rational obligation that treats reason as an end in itself.
The next formulation of the categorical imperative is to ask whether we are treating people as people with goals themselves. He says:
‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.’
This means that not only should we avoid manipulating, using, or blocking that freedom in others, and even more, that we should actively pursue aiding it in others. We should not only avoid treating people as instruments for our own gain, but we should find ways to help them in achieving their ends – because that’s what we’d rationally will for ourselves.
To take one example, in asking whether I should help someone in need, not only should we pursue it if we see someone in need, but we should actively seek it out, if we can, within a balancing of our other responsibilities and rational life plans, because it will help them achieve their own goals, their own ends as humans.
Finally, we should ask whether ““every rational being must act as if he were by his maxims at all times a lawgiving member of the universal kingdom of ends”
In short, this means thinking about whether – if everyone was rational, everyone followed each others moral laws, if everyone respected each other – the maxims would all hang together.
Think about traffic lights. I have a maxim to stop or go at a certain time and this hangs together with traffic coming the other way, the maxim fits the maxim of the pedestrian to wait patiently, our moral ideas should be symmetrical so as to be universalisable – otherwise there would be chaos.
Allen Wood writes that “Rational beings constitute a realm to the extent that their ends form a system” in which “these ends are not only mutually consistent, but also harmonious and reciprocally supportive,”
Well, in writing these works, in a short period, just before the French Revolution at the onset of the truly modern world, towards the end of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant changed everything.
For example, Guyer writes that ‘Kant’s idea that humanity must be treated as an end in itself and never merely as a means has gained wide acceptance in modern moral thought and philosophy’ – and while its liberal consequences has had a huge effect on our politics, the question has to be asked, has its implications been fully realised?
He was immediately, immeasurably, and inimitably influential. This idea of focusing on that relationship between experience and conceptual thinking started a revolution in philosophy in Germany known as German Idealism that led to Hegel and Marx, and in many ways, he began to put an end to many intellectual arguments that defined the Enlightenment.
This was because, for many, Kant had proven that you couldn’t get beyond immediate experience and thought – any grand theories that tried to prove or disprove god – whether there was a beginning to time – were, in their very nature, pointless, ungraspable. In this sense, he was a very conservative figure – carefully attending to the matters at hand. But also, strangely, a very radical one – we can all think for and guide ourselves.
But once you’ve been to the top of the mountain – got a glimpse of pure reason – been convinced of your own – truly your own – powers of rational thought, of applying careful categorisation to the world, recognising qualities, counting carefully where and in what ways those qualities are found – you notice it everywhere – in ideas & objects, in facts & feelings, in relationships, philosophies, pursuits, passions, and projects – how we judge, in what ways we understand, how we reason through the world – well, its everything.
Sources
Understanding Kant is difficult. Accept that there will be bits you understand and bits you don’t. Be patient, keep going, and things will slowly click into place.
Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant’s Philosophical Revolution (the best introduction to the critique of pure reason but doesn’t comment on Kant’s ethics, in my view)
Dan Robinson Oxford podcast (https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/kants-critique-pure-reason) – A great podcast to listen through to supplement introductory reading. It’s clear and in-depth and uses lots of interesting metaphors.
Roger Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction
Jill Vance Buroker, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (especially the three chapters on transcendental aesthetic, metaphysical deduction, and the transcendental deduction (which are the three main parts of Kant to get to grips with to understand Kant))
Will Dudley, Kristina Engelhard, Kant: Key Concepts (a collection of introductory articles)
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Paul Guyer translation)
Paul Guyer, Kant (An in-depth intermediate introduction that also critiques Kant’s arguments and assumes some background knowledge. I’d read this after the other introductions)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-conceptualism
Ethics
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
James Fieser, The Categorical Imperative, https://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/300/categorical.htm
The introductory works above