GERMAN IDEALISM

§ 36. Kant

Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg in 1724, and spent his life without leaving his native province. The story of his life is thus the story of the development of his thought. He became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Königsberg in 1770. His Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, raised him to the foremost position among living philosophers, but his growing fame did not serve to alter his manner of life. His simple habits grew more and more regular and methodical as he grew older, and his interests limited themselves more exclusively to his abstract speculations. Heine's description of him is frequently quoted :

"The life of Immanuel Kant is hard to describe; he has indeed neither life nor history in the proper sense of the words. He lived an abstract, mechanical, old-bachelor existence, in a quiet, remote street in Königsberg, an old city at the northeastern boundary of Germany. I do not believe that the great cathedral clock of that city accomplished its day's work in a less passionate and more regular way than its countryman, Immanuel Kant. Rising from bed, coffee-drinking, writing, lecturing, eating, walking, everything had its fixed time; and the neighbors knew that it must be exactly half-past four when they saw Professor Kant, in his gray coat, with his cane in his hand, step out of his house door, and move toward the little lime-tree avenue, which is named, after him, the Philosopher's Walk. Eight times he walked up and down that walk at every season of the year: and when the weather was bad, his servant, old Lampe, was seen anxiously following him with

a large umbrella under his arm, like an image of Providence. Strange contrast between the outward life of the man, and his world-destroying thought. Of a truth, if the citizens of Königsberg had had any inkling of the meaning of that thought, they would have shuddered before him as before an executioner. But the good people saw nothing in him but a professor of philosophy; and when he passed at the appointed hour, they gave him friendly greetings and set their watches." 1

1. The Nature of Kant's Problem. It is difficult to make any brief statement which will give an approximate notion, even, of the importance of the revolution which Kant was the means of bringing about in philosophy. One needs to have studied both Kant and his successors, and to have some appreciation of the main currents of thought in recent times, before he can easily see into the significance of Kant's new attitude toward philosophical problems. Roughly, however, it may be said that this centres about two points in particular; and of these, the one it will be convenient to consider first, is the new conception of experience and of thought which is involved.

We have seen that, according to Hume, the reality of the world is dissolved into a host of unrelated feelings, or sensations, which, summed together, compose the human mind. But is this a tenable conception? Is it not rather suicidal? Must there not be certain relating activities of the mind, which are not themselves feelings, to work upon the material of sense, before even feelings can be known, and form a true experience? If mere sensations were the sole reality, would they not be shut up, each in its own skin, and be wholly impervious to other sensations? As a matter of fact, however, sensations are not thus isolated. Somehow or other they get related, they enter into a unified consciousness, which thus is more than the mere sum of them taken together, since they are experienced not as a collection of isolated units, but as an interconnected and 1 Quoted from Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy.

orderly whole. There is a term of which Kant makes a great deal of use in the Critique — the term synthetic. A synthetic judgment is one which goes beyond the meaning of the subject term, and binds to this some new idea not already contained there; as when, for example, I see my dog running across the field, and, adding to the idea of dog a new qualification, I say, "My dog is chasing a rabbit." On the other hand, if I say, "A dog is an animal,” I am only making explicit an idea already contained in the concept 'dog,' and my judgment is analytic. We may say, then, using this terminology, that there is to experience a synthetic side for which Hume does not account. The relatedness of sensations, the unity which binds them together, is a new element, which cannot be extracted from the isolated sensations themselves. To know two sensations together implies a state of consciousness which is not simply another sensation; for if it were, how could it bind together the first two? It would only add another term to the problem. Before sensations can be known, even in the simple relations of resemblance, or of contiguity in time or space, they must be brought into a unified consciousness, which thus is no mere additional sense fact, but an intellectual synthesis, presupposed by every possibility of experience.

Kant, then, has pointed out that for the possibility of real knowledge, it is necessary to presuppose a certain framework of thought relationships over and above the sense content to which Hume had reduced knowledge. But now, furthermore, the part which thought plays with reference to the objects of knowledge is conceived by Kant in a special and relatively novel way. Commonly in the past the rela tion of thought to its object had been understood in terms of the relation of a copy or reproduction to its prototype. For Kant, on the contrary, the relation is constitutive. The world, in so far as it is a known world, is a construct of thought. Any object, to be known, must enter into the world of knowledge, the thought world; and therefore be

tween thought and its object there is no separateness, but an identity. To be real, to be objective, is to have a fixed place in this system of thought, not to exist beyond it. An object is, only as it is for knowledge; and so it is actually built up out of these intellectual relationships which Kant had pointed out. It is this which makes experience no mere string of subjective feelings, but an ordered and orderly world of things.

For Kant, accordingly, the great principle of modern thought, which gives to consciousness, or the self, the fundamental place in the interpretation of the world, is reasserted in a new form. The world for us is not a

datum given by some external power. It is not an objective fact independent of us, to be defended or criticised as such. It is the product of the laws of our own understanding, acting, of course, in no arbitrary way, but in accordance with fixed and definite principles, which are not peculiar to our separate individuality. Human experience gives the point of view for the interpretation of everything that we can know; between the world, and ourselves, there is an inner identity.

Such, briefly, is the first of the two main aspects of Kant's thought. We may turn now to a somewhat more specific statement. And Kant's chief problem centres about a fact to which already reference has several times been made. Kant's metaphysical point of view is most easily understood by reference to Hume. Kant had been originally an adherent of the school of Wolff, who had attempted to systematize the philosophy of Leibniz. But he very soon had become dissatisfied with this. Wolff was a Rationalist of the most extreme type. He had the completest confidence that, by the use of certain abstract principles of reason, we can attain a demonstrative knowledge of ultimate verities. Kant found himself constantly less able to share this confidence. The more he thought, the more difficulty he found in the way of applying the a priori method of geometry to the facts with which philosophy is

concerned. Is truth not attainable at all then? this Kant was not willing to admit. For a time he tried to take refuge in Empiricism. But Hume had revealed to him clearly the outcome of Empiricism — the overthrow of all knowledge whatsoever.

Now the main problem which had engaged Hume— the problem of causation-will suggest the nature of Kant's central difficulty. Here is a supposed truth without which it had abundantly appeared that philosophers, to say nothing of scientists, could make no headway at all in knowledge. But whence does it come? It cannot be derived from experience. Hume had shown this clearly. With the difficulties in the rationalistic explanation Kant had been long familiar. Here, then, is a point which neither of the rival schools had found themselves able satisfactorily to clear up.

"There can be no doubt whatever that all our knowledge begins with experience. By what means should the faculty of knowledge be aroused to activity, but by objects which, acting upon our senses, partly of themselves produce ideas in us, and partly set our understanding at work to compare these ideas with one another, and, by combining or separating them, to convert the raw material of our sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is called experience? In the order of time, therefore, we have no knowledge prior to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins.

"But, although all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that it all originates from experience. For it may well be that experience is itself made up of two elements, one received through impressions of sense, and the other supplied from itself by our faculty of knowledge on occasion of those impressions. It is, therefore, a question which cannot be lightly put aside, but can be answered only after careful investigation, whether there is any knowledge that is independent of experience, and even of all impressions of sense. Such knowledge is said