2021-10-08

Kant

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Lately I’ve been reading a little bit about Kant, mainly Roger Scruton’s book: “Kant: A Very Short Introduction”. Here I intend to briefly explain things I find interesting about him.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense and extends the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and presents me in a world which has true infinity but which can be discovered only by the understanding, and I cognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, raises my worth as an intelligence infinitely through my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law.

This is the most famous quote from Kant which, as Paul Guyer puts it, contains within itself references to two of the Kant’s greatest accomplishments in philosophy: his ideas about metaphysics and his ideas about ethics.

What does Kant have to offer? He has already answered this question:

All interest of my reason (the speculative as well as the practical) is united in the following three questions:

1. What can I know?
2. What should I do?
3. What may I hope?

Kant was born in 1724. He went on to become one of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment era.

During this era, thanks to the confidence brought by the great achievements of Newton, much emphasis was put into human reasoning. If one were to substitute, or even support, traditional authorities through reason, two basic disciplines were needed. First, if we’re going to ever do scientific experiments, or use their results, we need to determine whether knowing anything about this world is possible at all (since my whole world may be an illusion made by an evil demon after all). It’s obvious then, that we need a philosophy of epistemology. Secondly, if we are not going to rely on religion, we’re going to need another moral compass. A philosophy of ethics is then needed. Kant has came up with solutions in both areas.

During the Enlightenment two main views were prevalent: Empiricism and Rationalism. Empiricists like Hume, threatened the foundations of science in a way. They had posited that we can’t have any knowledge of the world except through our own experience, and that our knowledge is always limited to our very own experience of the world. Leibniz and other rationalists however thought that the knowledge can be derived from reason independent of sensation and experience. Kant takes the middle way. He argues that knowledge is impossible without both our sensory input and our capacity to understand. Reason offers forms without content and sensation content without form. If I see something and call it a chair, it’s because I’ve used both the sensory input and my capacity to reason.

What I like most about Kant is his creativity. For example in case of epistemology, empiricists claim that no knowledge can be possible that is not from my perspective, so it’s impossible for me to come up with a universal fact. They ask how is synthetic a priori knowledge (knowledge that offers something new about the world that is both universal and necessary) possible? Kant says it’s true that nothing can be said about the intelligible world, but what if we investigate what’s possible to say about the sensible world? He then goes on to show how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible in this case. He calls this “Copernican revolution in philosophy”.

What Kant comes up with ultimately is nothing but what commonsense usually offers. For epistemology He tries his best to prove that things are as we see them and we see as they are. The same inclination towards commonsense is also true for his philosophy of ethics. Good will is central to his ethics.

It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.

It’s an enormous task to provide philosophical grounds for what we have in ourselves intuitively, but what’s more interesting about Kant is how derives most of the information he needs from very basic ideas. He answers most of the questions of epistemology by examining the presuppositions of the simple fact that we can ask the question “How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?”, and for ethics he utilizes a basic claim of “Ought implies can” to get what he wants.

I talked mostly about Kant’s ideas about metaphysics. Kant’s ethics is a lot more interesting indeed but you don’t need me to explain it to you, there are experts that explain it a lot better than I ever could.

While I can’t claim to have understood him, I’m glad I took the time to read about him and his ideas. I am less interested in metaphysics, so my next goal would is to read more about ethics in general.

Next book: Ethics for Dummies.