The Fall and Rise (And Fall) of Pure Reason

“My idealism concerns not the existence of things (the doubting of which, however, constitutes idealism in the ordinary sense), since it never came into my head to doubt it, but it concerns the sensuous representation of things, to which space and time especially belong.”

~Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (Remark III)

This passage from the Prolegomena explains Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, which is a counter-position to commonsense realism (but not a skepticism in the Cartesian sense) about the objects of perception. All appearances for Kant are neither “things in themselves” nor determinations from “things in themselves”. By “transcendental” Kant is creating a reference for our cognitive faculties from which we cannot justify any conversion of the appearances into actual things. The critical position that Kant takes refutes the positions of the “rational psychologists” and the “visionary idealists” who reify the objects of perception or convert actual things into mere representations, respectively. So far, Kant says, all of metaphysics has suffered from an enormous, yawning error, and Transcendental Idealism is the solution to all error theory.

This view of Kant’s must be evaluated on the whole, and contradistinguished from the various forms of idealism that are possible at least logically. Kant challenges reason and says we must be able to understand the limits of the transcendental, or critical, idealism, and judge the possibilities of transcendental idealism itself. We must consider the implications of this seriously.

Since Kant uses reason itself to judge the limits of reason, and since transcendental idealism limits what can be said about all appearances in the mind, in order to survive any fundamental critique of transcendental idealism, the theory must be able to justify itself without using any Archimedean levers grounded in appearances. Any Archimedean levers, references points used to move the rest of the world, cannot be left unjustified.

One theme of the Critique is a legal reasoning analogy that is employed in places where Kant discusses the importance of his work. Throughout the Critique we see that reason has been placed on trial. Yet throughout this trial reason is its own judge, its own jury, its own defense and the witness. To judge the limits of reason, therefore, we must call upon reason itself to bring us the verdict. The philosophical Justice System may also be fundamentally in error, an enormous, yawning error that Kant left unchallenged.

Such a thorny, unresolved paradox in Kant’s work should suggest that his work is purely an unjustified exercise in reason, or that one of its more basic points is that all knowledge is purely tautological. The second point is more interesting. It makes Kant’s work compatible with logic (the rules of the mind that reason follows), but since only compatible with reason, it judges the compatibility of this work by its own standards. Yet if reason is a mere representation in the mind, or the result of some natural drive or natural propensity to go on justifying itself, then we should rightly doubt the possibility of using reason as the Archimedean lever from which we can move the rest of the world.

Further reading:

Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Cambridge University Press, 2004: New York, NY.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translation by Norman Kemp Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: New York, NY.

Loeb, Paul. Lectures on Kantian Philosophy. University of Puget Sound, 2008: Tacoma, WA.

Van Cleve, James. Problems From Kant. Oxford University Press, 1999: New York, NY.

Nietzsche's Kant-Smearing Campaign

As much as Immanuel Kant would probably be too shy to run for president, he apparently has a campaign going. This video ad has been making its rounds in the philosophy blog circuit. But Kant in fact is "Wrong for America", the ad concludes. Near the end, we find out it was paid for and approved by Friedrich Nietzsche. The last time an intellectual figure became president, if I recall correctly, was the former political science professor Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Realistically neither Kant nor Nietzsche stand a chance against this upcoming election's band of theologians, war veterans, and lobbyists.

The Moral Argument For Immortality

Kant thinks that religion must be understood thoroughly and rationally. We must work from within reason and the moral life. Kant develops an argument which would show that we're immortal. It goes as follows.

We have the duty, which would become clear from a close examination of our lives, to perfect ourselves. Kant claims that one can only have the strong sense of duty, which any one of us would have if we concentrated on our inner moral life, if we were in fact able to discharge that duty. If we have this sense of duty, Kant claimed he did at least, to reach perfection, then we must be able to become perfect. And by perfection he means completely moral: doing everything from duty.

Kant says that it is obvious to us that, in the finite period of time allotted to us in this life, we could not perfect ourselves. Yet we have this duty, and everything we have the duty to do we could in fact do, Kant says that there must be an infinite amount of time to perfect ourselves. We cannot in this world. So we must live in another world after this.

This argument doesn't add up. Do we actually have the obligation on ourselves to perfect ourselves? And does that mean that we would live forever in order to fulfill our duties? Kant even adds to this that there must be a God. After all, if we were perfect, then we must be rewards with complete happiness. Only an extraordinarily powerful being could give the kind of happiness you deserved if you became perfect. Kant says there is something to the logic of moral life that indicates God exists as the basis for rewards.

But this is an extraordinary set of doctrines! Yet this is the kind of confidence Kant has. Kant tells us that we can look within ourselves and discover duty: the duty of reason to fight passion, duty to fight desire, duty to fight inclination, and we even have the duty to completely perfect ourselves. This is a very austere view. Yet I find its austerity attractive. The arguments for immortality are unsound, but the austerity, the mere stoic sensibility, I find enlightening. The notion that reason would be caught up with moral duty, and that religion would arise out of a rational conception of moral duty, virtually unhinged the Romantic philosophers. Yet Kant's self-defeating pronouncements make his philosophy unacceptable.

The Stasis of Utilitarianism in Kantian Ethics

Kant and Mill represent to us two opposites of ethical thought. The discovery of any common ground between them which might form the basis of a relationship may appear a hopeless task. Kant says that a good will is not good because of what it performs or effects, but simply by virtue of the volition, that is, it is “good in itself” and considered by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought about by any inclination. Mill says in Utilitarianism that the “creed which accepts as the foundations of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”

We have here a conflict between the subjective and the objective—between the individual and his environment. With Kant the moral ideal is regarded as the product of pure reason. With Mill and utilitarianism it is the result of an accumulated experience of pleasure and pain. Yet before accepting this opposition as absolute, and rejecting on or the other system, we must examine the problems which were before the minds of Kant and Mill, that we may be sure they are giving contradictory answers to the same question. It may be that they are not arguing over the same thing, and that the stasis of debate is unclear. If so, we may take comfort in the idea that human reason is not as divided against itself as it sometimes appears at first glance.

The common, and apparently essential, characteristic which it would seem possible to discover in all forms of Utilitarianism is that moral conduct is estimated by the effects of action, and that the effect which is the moral criterion is the “greatest happiness for the greatest number.” By “greatest happiness” is meant the greatest excess of pleasure over pain, considered in reference either to all sentient beings or to all mankind. Pleasure is to be considered abstractly and purely quantitatively, as if one could hypothetically measure the sum of all hedons and pleasurable experiences. Thus, no question of individuality is considered. One man’s hedons are not only quantitatively different from that of another.

Most importantly, motives have nothing to do in deciding the worth of an action, except if they are useful in the production of pleasure. As Mill puts it, “The morality of an action depends entirely upon the intention—that is, upon what the agents wills to do. But the motive, that is, the feeling which makes him will so to do, when it makes no difference in the act makes none in the morality; though it makes a great difference in our moral estimation of the agent, especially if it indicates a good or bad habitual disposition—a bent of character from which hurtful or form which useful actions are likely to arise.”

In this case the motive is also included in the moral judgment, but does not form the principle of that judgment. It does not determine the moral character of the effects, but is determined by them. Thus all departments of moral life are subordinated to feeling: that is morally good which produces pleasurable feeling; that is morally bad which does not. The great merit claimed for this system of morals is its great clearness and practicality. Every one is supposed to know what pleasure is, and most people know what will tend to produce it. If they do not, the common code of morals, which is claimed to be the result of the accumulated experiences of the race, furnishes a generally correct guide. This brief description of the utilitarian position attempted to show its wholly external character. The effects of conduct must be the only objects of moral judgment, unless we fall into confusion and mysticism, losing all standards of valuation except the individual moral sense, or an arbitrary code of revealed morality. Motives, so far as they are internal, a supposed free will or autonomous self, cannot be subjected to observation and experiment, and hence must be ignored in considering the principles of moral judgment.

Kant, on the other hand, has always been connected with a system the exact opposite of the one just described. The idea is that the only good thing in the world is a Good Will. Here we have the direct contrary of the Utilitarian position that the will has no value except in relation to the effects produced by it. Kant recognizes that face that his doctrine of the absolute value of the good will must seem wholly paradoxical to the adherents of the happiness theory, yet he emphasizes it as the only basis for a universally binding moral law. If the desire for happiness were to be admitted by Kant as the principle of determination of the will, no necessary law could be formulated; since pleasurable consciousness is the result of experience, no examination would give rise to any sort of necessary law. In other words, the principle would be heteronomy instead of autonomy, which alone gives a basis for distinctly moral judgment. To allow a material principle such as pleasure to determine the will would be to place the Ego under natural laws in which no freedom is possible—and if there is no freedom, then for Kant, no morality is possible.

The moral law, then, must be purely formal and given by the subject. The good will must consist in willing the good out of pure respect for law. This is where the contrast is most clearly drawn by Utilitarians between them and Kant. Their criticism is that from such an empty statement of morality no practical duties can be deduced. What practical help will it give to apply Kant’s formulation of the moral law to any given perplexity? “Act from that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law of nature”—this is the first statement of the rule.
In the case of lying, this could give us no help, since if we wished to lie it would be easy to suppose our maxim as a universal law. We might will that all men should steal, or all men should lie, and Kant’s rule would make such actions moral, since we could imagine them and will them to be a universal law. Only if we consider the consequences of the act, say his critics, can we tell whether it is moral or not. We know by experience that lying, stealing, murder, are not productive of more pain than pleasure, hence we call them morally bad, and not because they cannot be made universal laws.

Kant, however, is brilliantly guarded against such objections by his making the test of fitness logical. When we lie, we do so under the supposition that the law is for me to tell the truth; and that, consequently, men will believe that we are doing so. At the same time that we lie, we would not will that lying should be universal, because our own lie would not be believed. Plus the very distinction between truth and falsehood would vanish. Such a law would be self-destructive. So in stealing, we assume that the law of property will generally hold; for otherwise our own act would not be stealing—there would be no property-rights to violate.

It’s not the unpleasant consequences of such a society which leads to the impossibility of willing these laws, but the self-contradictory nature of the laws themselves. This point is not as important as the Utilitarians make it out to be, however. The point of real value in Kant’s thought, and the only point which it is the object of this paper to defend is not his exposition of how the moral law is to be applied to particular cases, but the determination of the principle involved in our judgment of worth. For Mill, if motives are to be judged good or bad, it is only on account of their effects. Kant, on the other hand, places all moral value on the motive itself—respect for law—obligation. Duty he defines in the Metaphysics of Morals as “the necessity of acting from respect for law.” Even actions in accordance with law are not moral, but merely legal, since they may be done from motives other than that of respect for law. Kant’s doctrine is not, “Thou shalt because it is good,” but “Thou shalt, therefore it is good.” The form of the law determines the end, and not the end the form of the law.

Moreover, nothing but the will must determine the will, and in order to find a universal and necessary determinant for all rational beings, only the bare form of will and not its material content must be taken. The law must not be externally imposed; else it loses it binding character and allows us the options of disobedience to its commands under condition of accepting the penalties attached. The governing principle must come from within—it must be the reason issuing its commands to itself. Thus not only must the idea of law be the principle, but it must be the law of autonomy—that of the self-legislating Ego. But, as we have seen, this law is deprived of all content in that it can be merely the universal form of law. To determine our moral judgment by means of an external end would be the dethroning of the legislative self. The natural criticism then is, of what use is this discovery of a law which commands the fulfillment of no end? What use is a will which wills nothing but itself? As before stated, this is the main criticism of Kantian ethics—its purely formal character and its opposition to at least a partial and popular doctrine of happiness as a good and an end of action.

Kant, however, by no means considers his system in such a debilitating way. Kant is as well aware as his critics are that one cannot will a maxim in general and at the same time will no actions in particular. He knows that there must be an object in every act of the will. The purpose of his insistence on the purely formal element in morality is to emphasize the fact that moral law must be universal and necessary—must command obedience categorically and of itself. In this, Utilitarians are right in considering his system as utterly opposed to their own, but the opposition does not consist in the fact that he denies the necessity of an end for every action. It is his aim to change the stasis of debate, i.e. the point of emphasis, and supplement their partial system by one which embraces all the phenomena of the moral consciousness.

Kant says, “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.” Here, however, we find an apparently out of place element introduced in this conception of an end. Yet this second statement of the law is what follows from the implicit contents of the first. To say that man is to act from a principle which he can will to be a universal law—to make him the supreme law-giver to himself, is to place him above the reach of all law other than his own, or that which he freely makes his own. If, then, as a rational being he cannot be subject to anything without him, he is an end unto himself—an absolute end so far as rational. All men, moreover must also be regarded as ends, and so treated, i.e., the ends of each individual must be made the ends of the particular subject.

Kant is opposed to utility, not as an end of conduct, but as a motive to conduct. Utility places all morality in the outward manifestation. Kant would seek a law which shall command the transition from the individual to the universal—which shall enable the subject to transcend the limits of his private interests, and find his true self in the proliferation of the common good. This can only be done by a universal element in the individual. A system, on the contrary, which makes the standard of morality an end external to the subject, or else and end limited to the subject, cannot bind the subject at all, or compel him to pass beyond his own interests. If the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the sole principle of morality, what power is there which can compel man to seek it? What hold has it over the individual when conflicting with his own interest? The end must have some attractive power in itself to draw men’s wills toward its realization. But, according to Mill, this end can only appeal to men through pleasure, which, as individual, can only be estimated by the individual. If, then, someone does not feel the desire to promote the greatest happiness of anyone beyond himself, he is at liberty to act as he pleases, since there exists no common principle to which appeal may be made. His desires will from his only rule of action. If his own happiness and that of others cannot be shown to be identical, which is possible only under presuppositions destructive of utilitarianism, there seems no way of advancing from the on to the many.

Kant’s moral theory takes us out of the relative and introduces us to the sphere of true being and the Good Will. Instead of making experience the guide of life, and constructing the ideal out of experience, he sets out a theory which is universal and absolute. The content of his moral theory gives rise to experience, but the necessity of the realization is found entirely in the rational self.

Kant's Relation to Consequentialism

The concept connected by Kant with the phrase “categorical imperative” seems easy to explain. It means a law valid for the will of every rational being and therefore valid unconditionally. This is in no need of interpretation: it can hardly be misinterpreted. Kant has stated in the clearest and most intelligible terms. Understanding becomes much more difficult if we are concerned, not merely with the verbal definition, but with the content of the categorical command and the interferences to be drawn from it.

Even specialists have fallen into confusion about these questions. But the doctrine of a categorical imperative inherent in the will of man himself appears at present to meet with most unexpected and most unwanted repercussions in the common opinion. To lovers of humanity it may seem a lofty and worthy aim that doctrines elaborated by science and claiming to determine the conduct of every man should gradually spread wider and wider until at last every cottage.

The law formulated by Kant in his categorical imperative is not one by which any principle whatever to which a many may find himself drawn under conditions of experience—such as obedience to superiors or abstention from pleasure of life—can be imposed on him categorically. Kant’s law is rather a way of expressing the conditions under which alone a principle can have the character of a categorical demand. The categorical imperative is thus conceived as the fundamental principle determining which possible principles can be objectively valid for the decisions of our will as such.

When we say it is our duty to do something or to refrain from doing it, we manifestly have in mind such a categorical demand or such an objectively valid principle. Hence we can also say that on Kant’s view the categorical imperative contains nothing but the concept of being under a possible moral obligation as such. If he was wrong in maintaining that such a command is binding upon our will, it is not to be inferred that duty must be determined by some other law; what it would mean is that there are no universally valid demands on human behavior, so far as this depends on our will, and consequently that nothing whatever can be our duty and that we are entirely free to do whatever we may happen to want.

We might indeed by acting in this way get entangled in all sorts of disagreeable consequences or we might be astute enough to find means of escaping these disagreeable consequences. But what Kant maintains is this: the sum total of these means could never have the character of a system of precepts for the will such that men would be under an objective obligation to obey them. Nor could a necessary harmony of these means be discovered (independently of a categorical imperative) such that it would be free from all possible conflict of the will with itself and with the will of others.

We can sum all this up in the proposition that the categorical imperative determines the concept of duty solely as regards its form. It states only what duty as such is and consequently what all duties have in common. But it contains nothing to show how the particular duties determined by it are materially different from each other. Yet we ought not to imagine that this purely formal character of the categorical imperative as the law of duty is identical with the property envisaged by those who describe as formal both the principle of Kant’s ethical theory and consequently this theory itself in distinction from other systems of morality.

Here we find the first misinterpretation of the categorical imperative—the view that this necessarily confines moral philosophy to stating what the concept of duty is simply as regards to its form and makes impossible the articulation of particular duties that are materially different. Every doctrine of duties, if it is based on any principle at all, must begin by stating in what duty consists—i.e. by stating what is the concept of duty simply as regards to its form. If we say, for example, that duty consists in performing the actions required to realize the happiness of the greatest number, we have determined the concept of duty simply as regards to its form. This special characteristic may be described—negatively—as the assertion that if we are to discover the concept of duty, we must abstract, not merely from all the matter of duty, as is obvious, but also—as it not so obvious—from all the matter of the will; that is from all purposes or ends.

Naturally, if anyone intends to realize something tat he has made the end of his action, it is necessary that he should adopt the means adequate to realize it. But such necessity is a conditioned one (hypothetical, not categorical); and it contains no immediate law for his will since he must already will something definite before he can become subject to this necessity. “Yes,” it may be replied, “we must naturally being with some final end. This is already stated by Aristotle. And just as naturally such an end must possess some kind of necessity for the human will.”

“We are not to infer,” John Stuart Mill says, “that it is acceptance or rejection must depend on blind impulse or arbitrary choice.” (U. 1) But if, with Aristotle and Mil, we take happiness as the final end on which we may hope to find all men agreed, can we then say that there is for man an unconditioned command to make his own happiness his end? Even if he may in fact always make it his end, no one can say that this inevitably to found in experience is the necessity of characterizing a demand in virtue of which man has the duty of adopting this end. And is it not at least conceivable that it may be both possible and necessary for the will of man to subordinate the end of his own happiness to a higher condition of his actions?

Suppose one answers, “Yes, admittedly there must be an end necessary in and for itself—that is, necessary for the will of every rational being independently of all subjective conditions—and end which alone supply the ground for an unconditioned demand that it be adopted.” The question then arises: in what way is it possible for us to have such an end? If we assume that man by nature can have no ends conflicting with the end that is necessary in itself, then clearly he can be subject to no command at all about the decision of his will: his will must always of itself have this highest good as its object. In that case there can be no question of duty.

If we admit, on the other hand, that he can decide to act contrary to this end which is necessary in and for itself, there must be, even beyond this highest end, a motive which can move him to do what he does not already do of himself—namely to make this end his own. He would then need to have above this highest end, a still prior end by which he would be required o take as his end what was good in and for itself. But such a prior end contains a contradiction; for all possible ends must be naturally subordinated to the end which is by definition the highest. Hence along this line we could produce neither a categorical nor a hypothetical imperative for adopting the end on which the whole necessity of human action is supposed to be dependent. We should be left merely with a choice between a will that was infallibly good and a will that could not even be asked to be good at all.

It is purely analytic considerations like these that ought to be adduced if we want to understand the real motive which led Kant to what constitutes the strictly formal character of his ethics. This character is to be found in the fact that in place of some previously given end—that is, in place of some matter of the will—Kant asserts that the mere form of maxims (that is, of the subjective principles of our arbitrary choice), so far as this fits them for the making of a universal law, is what determines duty as regards to its form.

After what has been said, there should be no need to explain further why in this statement the word “form” occurs twice. The form which fits maxims for the making of universal law—whatever may be their matter, that is their end—is here identified with that demand by which alone an imperative can have the character of being categorical, or in other words, by which duty is determined as regards to its form. If in the language of this abbreviation we call this imperative “formal,” this does not mean that it has no content. It has precisely the content we have just adduced; and we cannot infer conversely that because the categorical imperative has in fact a content, therefore Kant must be in error when he maintains that only the form which fits maxims for the making of laws can supply a universally valid ground for determining our will.

Apart from objections of this kind, which rest merely on a play of words, the fact that Kant has calmly built up a whole system of commands and prohibitions on the basis of his moral law has been looked on with the utmost suspicion and indeed with open scorn. “When he begins,” says John Stuart Mill, “to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct.

This charge has its history. It is already present in Hegel’s assertion that when Kant deduces particular duties, he goes continually round in circles since in order to show a contradiction between a maxim and the possibility of willing it as a universal law he has always to presuppose as necessary the very volition whose necessity it is his business to prove. By this method it would be open to us to put forward any kind of arbitrary conduct as a demand of duty. This seems to confirm one view of the history of moral evaluation.

Yet we cannot say in Kant’s sense that atrocities have been commanded “at some time and some place” by conscience and duty, or are still commanded, unless we have first shown that such conduct is contained in the demand of his moral law. Obviously in the opinion of the author the formalism of Kant’s ethics consists in this—that his concept of duty can be applied to any arbitrary behavior, so far as man believes himself constrained to it by any will beyond which, for some subjective reason, he recognizes no higher.

We have at least establishes this—that the obedience required by the categorical imperative is the direct opposite of an obedience by which a man could subject himself at random to any arbitrary power. If anybody is looking for definite precepts contained in the categorical imperative, he can put this down as the first—that such subjection is forbidden. The ban admittedly is only another way of saying that the categorical imperative is in fact nothing but the law of the will’s autonomy (it’s making of its own laws). But with this view of it are we not plunged into a difficulty of the opposite kind?

Instead of inferring that our will must be unconditionally fettered to the will of another are we not bound to infer that our own arbitrary will must be unconditionally unfettered? Must not a will subjected solely to its own legislation be able to pass any law it likes? Must it not be able in virtue of its autonomy “to will as a law” any arbitrary maxim it says to use in regulating its choice of ends?

At any rate Kant—as we have already heard—fails “almost grotesquely” in the eyes of his critics when he tries to persuade us that we must will any particular maxim as a law or that we cannot will it as a law. This failure is obviously called “grotesque” because, in the examples he gives of such necessities and impossibilities, it looks as if he casually introduces, in order to reach a decision, that very consideration of the agent’s personal advantage which the categorical imperative professes to set aside as a principle of moral evaluation.

Suppose, for example, he wants to show that nobody can will as a law the maxim of not bothering about the distress of others: “For,” he says, “a will which decided in this way would be in conflict with itself, since many a situation might arise in which the man needed love and sympathy from others, and in which by such a law of nature sprung from his own will, he would rob himself of all hope of the help he wants for himself. A clear case, it might seem.