The Critique of Practical Reason [with Biographical Introduction]

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While some of his early works tend to emphasize rationalist ideas, others have a more empiricist emphasis. During this time Kant was striving to work out an independent position, but before the s his views remained fluid. In Kant published his first work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, which later became a central topic of his mature philosophy. In , at the age of forty-six, Kant was appointed to the chair in logic and metaphysics at the Albertina, after teaching for fifteen years as an unsalaried lecturer and working since as a sublibrarian to supplement his income.

Kant was turned down for the same position in In order to inaugurate his new position, Kant also wrote one more Latin dissertation: Inspired by Crusius and the Swiss natural philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert — , Kant distinguishes between two fundamental powers of cognition, sensibility and understanding intelligence , where the Leibniz-Wolffians regarded understanding intellect as the only fundamental power.

Moreover, as the title of the Inaugural Dissertation indicates, Kant argues that sensibility and understanding are directed at two different worlds: The Inaugural Dissertation thus develops a form of Platonism; and it rejects the view of British sentimentalists that moral judgments are based on feelings of pleasure or pain, since Kant now holds that moral judgments are based on pure understanding alone. After Kant never surrendered the views that sensibility and understanding are distinct powers of cognition, that space and time are subjective forms of human sensibility, and that moral judgments are based on pure understanding or reason alone.

But his embrace of Platonism in the Inaugural Dissertation was short-lived. He soon denied that our understanding is capable of insight into an intelligible world, which cleared the path toward his mature position in the Critique of Pure Reason , according to which the understanding like sensibility supplies forms that structure our experience of the sensible world, to which human knowledge is limited, while the intelligible or noumenal world is strictly unknowable to us.

Kant spent a decade working on the Critique of Pure Reason and published nothing else of significance between and Kant also published a number of important essays in this period, including Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim and Conjectural Beginning of Human History , his main contributions to the philosophy of history; An Answer to the Question: Jacobi — accused the recently deceased G. Lessing — of Spinozism. With these works Kant secured international fame and came to dominate German philosophy in the late s. But in he announced that the Critique of the Power of Judgment brought his critical enterprise to an end 5: In his chair at Jena passed to J.

Kant retired from teaching in For nearly two decades he had lived a highly disciplined life focused primarily on completing his philosophical system, which began to take definite shape in his mind only in middle age. After retiring he came to believe that there was a gap in this system separating the metaphysical foundations of natural science from physics itself, and he set out to close this gap in a series of notes that postulate the existence of an ether or caloric matter.

Kant died February 12, , just short of his eightieth birthday. The main topic of the Critique of Pure Reason is the possibility of metaphysics, understood in a specific way. See also Bxiv; and 4: Thus metaphysics for Kant concerns a priori knowledge, or knowledge whose justification does not depend on experience; and he associates a priori knowledge with reason. The project of the Critique is to examine whether, how, and to what extent human reason is capable of a priori knowledge.

To understand the project of the Critique better, let us consider the historical and intellectual context in which it was written. The Enlightenment was a reaction to the rise and successes of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The spectacular achievement of Newton in particular engendered widespread confidence and optimism about the power of human reason to control nature and to improve human life. One effect of this new confidence in reason was that traditional authorities were increasingly questioned. For why should we need political or religious authorities to tell us how to live or what to believe, if each of us has the capacity to figure these things out for ourselves?

Kant expresses this Enlightenment commitment to the sovereignty of reason in the Critique:. Enlightenment is about thinking for oneself rather than letting others think for you, according to What is Enlightenment? In this essay, Kant also expresses the Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress. A few independent thinkers will gradually inspire a broader cultural movement, which ultimately will lead to greater freedom of action and governmental reform. The problem is that to some it seemed unclear whether progress would in fact ensue if reason enjoyed full sovereignty over traditional authorities; or whether unaided reasoning would instead lead straight to materialism, fatalism, atheism, skepticism Bxxxiv , or even libertinism and authoritarianism 8: The Enlightenment commitment to the sovereignty of reason was tied to the expectation that it would not lead to any of these consequences but instead would support certain key beliefs that tradition had always sanctioned.

Crucially, these included belief in God, the soul, freedom, and the compatibility of science with morality and religion. Although a few intellectuals rejected some or all of these beliefs, the general spirit of the Enlightenment was not so radical. The Enlightenment was about replacing traditional authorities with the authority of individual human reason, but it was not about overturning traditional moral and religious beliefs.

Yet the original inspiration for the Enlightenment was the new physics, which was mechanistic. If nature is entirely governed by mechanistic, causal laws, then it may seem that there is no room for freedom, a soul, or anything but matter in motion. This threatened the traditional view that morality requires freedom. We must be free in order to choose what is right over what is wrong, because otherwise we cannot be held responsible.

It also threatened the traditional religious belief in a soul that can survive death or be resurrected in an afterlife. So modern science, the pride of the Enlightenment, the source of its optimism about the powers of human reason, threatened to undermine traditional moral and religious beliefs that free rational thought was expected to support. This was the main intellectual crisis of the Enlightenment. In other words, free rational inquiry adequately supports all of these essential human interests and shows them to be mutually consistent.

So reason deserves the sovereignty attributed to it by the Enlightenment. To see how Kant attempts to achieve this goal in the Critique, it helps to reflect on his grounds for rejecting the Platonism of the Inaugural Dissertation. In a way the Inaugural Dissertation also tries to reconcile Newtonian science with traditional morality and religion, but its strategy is different from that of the Critique.

According to the Inaugural Dissertation, Newtonian science is true of the sensible world, to which sensibility gives us access; and the understanding grasps principles of divine and moral perfection in a distinct intelligible world, which are paradigms for measuring everything in the sensible world. So on this view our knowledge of the intelligible world is a priori because it does not depend on sensibility, and this a priori knowledge furnishes principles for judging the sensible world because in some way the sensible world itself conforms to or imitates the intelligible world.

Soon after writing the Inaugural Dissertation, however, Kant expressed doubts about this view.

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As he explained in a February 21, letter to his friend and former student, Marcus Herz:. Here Kant entertains doubts about how a priori knowledge of an intelligible world would be possible. The position of the Inaugural Dissertation is that the intelligible world is independent of the human understanding and of the sensible world, both of which in different ways conform to the intelligible world.

But, leaving aside questions about what it means for the sensible world to conform to an intelligible world, how is it possible for the human understanding to conform to or grasp an intelligible world? If the intelligible world is independent of our understanding, then it seems that we could grasp it only if we are passively affected by it in some way. But for Kant sensibility is our passive or receptive capacity to be affected by objects that are independent of us 2: So the only way we could grasp an intelligible world that is independent of us is through sensibility, which means that our knowledge of it could not be a priori.

The pure understanding alone could at best enable us to form representations of an intelligible world. Such a priori intellectual representations could well be figments of the brain that do not correspond to anything independent of the human mind. In any case, it is completely mysterious how there might come to be a correspondence between purely intellectual representations and an independent intelligible world.

But the Critique gives a far more modest and yet revolutionary account of a priori knowledge. This turned out to be a dead end, and Kant never again maintained that we can have a priori knowledge about an intelligible world precisely because such a world would be entirely independent of us. The sensible world, or the world of appearances, is constructed by the human mind from a combination of sensory matter that we receive passively and a priori forms that are supplied by our cognitive faculties.

We can have a priori knowledge only about aspects of the sensible world that reflect the a priori forms supplied by our cognitive faculties. So according to the Critique, a priori knowledge is possible only if and to the extent that the sensible world itself depends on the way the human mind structures its experience. Kant characterizes this new constructivist view of experience in the Critique through an analogy with the revolution wrought by Copernicus in astronomy:. As this passage suggests, what Kant has changed in the Critique is primarily his view about the role and powers of the understanding, since he already held in the Inaugural Dissertation that sensibility contributes the forms of space and time — which he calls pure or a priori intuitions 2: But the Critique claims that pure understanding too, rather than giving us insight into an intelligible world, is limited to providing forms — which he calls pure or a priori concepts — that structure our cognition of the sensible world.

So now both sensibility and understanding work together to construct cognition of the sensible world, which therefore conforms to the a priori forms that are supplied by our cognitive faculties: This account is analogous to the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus in astronomy because both require contributions from the observer to be factored into explanations of phenomena, although neither reduces phenomena to the contributions of observers alone.

For Kant, analogously, the phenomena of human experience depend on both the sensory data that we receive passively through sensibility and the way our mind actively processes this data according to its own a priori rules. These rules supply the general framework in which the sensible world and all the objects or phenomena in it appear to us. So the sensible world and its phenomena are not entirely independent of the human mind, which contributes its basic structure.

First, it gives Kant a new and ingenious way of placing modern science on an a priori foundation. In other words, the sensible world necessarily conforms to certain fundamental laws — such as that every event has a cause — because the human mind constructs it according to those laws. Moreover, we can identify those laws by reflecting on the conditions of possible experience, which reveals that it would be impossible for us to experience a world in which, for example, any given event fails to have a cause.

From this Kant concludes that metaphysics is indeed possible in the sense that we can have a priori knowledge that the entire sensible world — not just our actual experience, but any possible human experience — necessarily conforms to certain laws.

Kant calls this immanent metaphysics or the metaphysics of experience, because it deals with the essential principles that are immanent to human experience. In the Critique Kant thus rejects the insight into an intelligible world that he defended in the Inaugural Dissertation, and he now claims that rejecting knowledge about things in themselves is necessary for reconciling science with traditional morality and religion.

This is because he claims that belief in God, freedom, and immortality have a strictly moral basis, and yet adopting these beliefs on moral grounds would be unjustified if we could know that they were false. Restricting knowledge to appearances and relegating God and the soul to an unknowable realm of things in themselves guarantees that it is impossible to disprove claims about God and the freedom or immortality of the soul, which moral arguments may therefore justify us in believing.

Moreover, the determinism of modern science no longer threatens the freedom required by traditional morality, because science and therefore determinism apply only to appearances, and there is room for freedom in the realm of things in themselves, where the self or soul is located. We cannot know theoretically that we are free, because we cannot know anything about things in themselves. In this way, Kant replaces transcendent metaphysics with a new practical science that he calls the metaphysics of morals.

It thus turns out that two kinds of metaphysics are possible: Perhaps the central and most controversial thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason is that human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves; and that space and time are only subjective forms of human intuition that would not subsist in themselves if one were to abstract from all subjective conditions of human intuition. Kant calls this thesis transcendental idealism.

Kant introduces transcendental idealism in the part of the Critique called the Transcendental Aesthetic, and scholars generally agree that for Kant transcendental idealism encompasses at least the following claims:. Two general types of interpretation have been especially influential, however. This section provides an overview of these two interpretations, although it should be emphasized that much important scholarship on transcendental idealism does not fall neatly into either of these two camps.

It has been a live interpretive option since then and remains so today, although it no longer enjoys the dominance that it once did. According to the two-objects interpretation, transcendental idealism is essentially a metaphysical thesis that distinguishes between two classes of objects: Another name for this view is the two-worlds interpretation, since it can also be expressed by saying that transcendental idealism essentially distinguishes between a world of appearances and another world of things in themselves.

Things in themselves, on this interpretation, are absolutely real in the sense that they would exist and have whatever properties they have even if no human beings were around to perceive them. Appearances, on the other hand, are not absolutely real in that sense, because their existence and properties depend on human perceivers.

Moreover, whenever appearances do exist, in some sense they exist in the mind of human perceivers. So appearances are mental entities or mental representations. This, coupled with the claim that we experience only appearances, makes transcendental idealism a form of phenomenalism on this interpretation, because it reduces the objects of experience to mental representations. All of our experiences — all of our perceptions of objects and events in space, even those objects and events themselves, and all non-spatial but still temporal thoughts and feelings — fall into the class of appearances that exist in the mind of human perceivers.

These appearances cut us off entirely from the reality of things in themselves, which are non-spatial and non-temporal.

In principle we cannot know how things in themselves affect our senses, because our experience and knowledge is limited to the world of appearances constructed by and in the mind. Things in themselves are therefore a sort of theoretical posit, whose existence and role are required by the theory but are not directly verifiable. The main problems with the two-objects interpretation are philosophical.

Most readers of Kant who have interpreted his transcendental idealism in this way have been — often very — critical of it, for reasons such as the following:. First, at best Kant is walking a fine line in claiming on the one hand that we can have no knowledge about things in themselves, but on the other hand that we know that things in themselves exist, that they affect our senses, and that they are non-spatial and non-temporal.

At worst his theory depends on contradictory claims about what we can and cannot know about things in themselves. Some versions of this objection proceed from premises that Kant rejects. But Kant denies that appearances are unreal: But just as Kant denies that things in themselves are the only or privileged reality, he also denies that correspondence with things in themselves is the only kind of truth.

Empirical judgments are true just in case they correspond with their empirical objects in accordance with the a priori principles that structure all possible human experience. But the fact that Kant can appeal in this way to an objective criterion of empirical truth that is internal to our experience has not been enough to convince some critics that Kant is innocent of an unacceptable form of skepticism, mainly because of his insistence on our irreparable ignorance about things in themselves.

The role of things in themselves, on the two-object interpretation, is to affect our senses and thereby to provide the sensory data from which our cognitive faculties construct appearances within the framework of our a priori intuitions of space and time and a priori concepts such as causality. But if there is no space, time, change, or causation in the realm of things in themselves, then how can things in themselves affect us? Transcendental affection seems to involve a causal relation between things in themselves and our sensibility.

If this is simply the way we unavoidably think about transcendental affection, because we can give positive content to this thought only by employing the concept of a cause, while it is nevertheless strictly false that things in themselves affect us causally, then it seems not only that we are ignorant of how things in themselves really affect us.

It seems, rather, to be incoherent that things in themselves could affect us at all if they are not in space or time. On this view, transcendental idealism does not distinguish between two classes of objects but rather between two different aspects of one and the same class of objects.

That is, appearances are aspects of the same objects that also exist in themselves. So, on this reading, appearances are not mental representations, and transcendental idealism is not a form of phenomenalism. There are at least two main versions of the two-aspects theory. One version treats transcendental idealism as a metaphysical theory according to which objects have two aspects in the sense that they have two sets of properties: This property-dualist interpretation faces epistemological objections similar to those faced by the two-objects interpretation, because we are in no better position to acquire knowledge about properties that do not appear to us than we are to acquire knowledge about objects that do not appear to us.

Moreover, this interpretation also seems to imply that things in themselves are spatial and temporal, since appearances have spatial and temporal properties, and on this view appearances are the same objects as things in themselves. But Kant explicitly denies that space and time are properties of things in themselves. A second version of the two-aspects theory departs more radically from the traditional two-objects interpretation by denying that transcendental idealism is at bottom a metaphysical theory.

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Instead, it interprets transcendental idealism as a fundamentally epistemological theory that distinguishes between two standpoints on the objects of experience: Human beings cannot really take up the latter standpoint but can form only an empty concept of things as they exist in themselves by abstracting from all the content of our experience and leaving only the purely formal thought of an object in general.

So transcendental idealism, on this interpretation, is essentially the thesis that we are limited to the human standpoint, and the concept of a thing in itself plays the role of enabling us to chart the boundaries of the human standpoint by stepping beyond them in abstract but empty thought. One criticism of this epistemological version of the two-aspects theory is that it avoids the objections to other interpretations by attributing to Kant a more limited project than the text of the Critique warrants.

There are passages that support this reading. The transcendental deduction is the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason and one of the most complex and difficult texts in the history of philosophy. Given its complexity, there are naturally many different ways of interpreting the deduction.

The goal of the transcendental deduction is to show that we have a priori concepts or categories that are objectively valid, or that apply necessarily to all objects in the world that we experience. To show this, Kant argues that the categories are necessary conditions of experience, or that we could not have experience without the categories. The transcendental deduction of all a priori concepts therefore has a principle toward which the entire investigation must be directed, namely this: Concepts that supply the objective ground of the possibility of experience are necessary just for that reason.

The strategy Kant employs to argue that the categories are conditions of experience is the main source of both the obscurity and the ingenuity of the transcendental deduction. Here Kant claims, against the Lockean view, that self-consciousness arises from combining or synthesizing representations with one another regardless of their content. In short, Kant has a formal conception of self-consciousness rather than a material one.

Since no particular content of my experience is invariable, self-consciousness must derive from my experience having an invariable form or structure, and consciousness of the identity of myself through all of my changing experiences must consist in awareness of the formal unity and law-governed regularity of my experience. The continuous form of my experience is the necessary correlate for my sense of a continuous self. There are at least two possible versions of the formal conception of self-consciousness: On the realist version, nature itself is law-governed and we become self-conscious by attending to its law-governed regularities, which also makes this an empiricist view of self-consciousness.

The idea of an identical self that persists throughout all of our experience, on this view, arises from the law-governed regularity of nature, and our representations exhibit order and regularity because reality itself is ordered and regular. But Kant rejects this view and embraces a conception of self-consciousness that is both formal and idealist. According to Kant, the formal structure of our experience, its unity and law-governed regularity, is an achievement of our cognitive faculties rather than a property of reality in itself. Our experience has a constant form because our mind constructs experience in a law-governed way.

In other words, even if reality in itself were law-governed, its laws could not simply migrate over to our mind or imprint themselves on us while our mind is entirely passive. We must exercise an active capacity to represent the world as combined or ordered in a law-governed way, because otherwise we could not represent the world as law-governed even if it were law-governed in itself.

Moreover, this capacity to represent the world as law-governed must be a priori because it is a condition of self-consciousness, and we would already have to be self-conscious in order to learn from our experience that there are law-governed regularities in the world. So it is necessary for self-consciousness that we exercise an a priori capacity to represent the world as law-governed. But this would also be sufficient for self-consciousness if we could exercise our a priori capacity to represent the world as law-governed even if reality in itself were not law-governed.

In that case, the realist and empiricist conception of self-consciousness would be false, and the formal idealist view would be true. Kant is saying that for a representation to count as mine, it must necessarily be accessible to conscious awareness in some perhaps indirect way: Self-consciousness for Kant therefore involves a priori knowledge about the necessary and universal truth expressed in this principle of apperception, and a priori knowledge cannot be based on experience.

The next condition is that self-consciousness requires me to represent an objective world distinct from my subjective representations — that is, distinct from my thoughts about and sensations of that objective world. Kant uses this connection between self-consciousness and objectivity to insert the categories into his argument.

In order to be self-conscious, I cannot be wholly absorbed in the contents of my perceptions but must distinguish myself from the rest of the world. But if self-consciousness is an achievement of the mind, then how does the mind achieve this sense that there is a distinction between the I that perceives and the contents of its perceptions? According to Kant, the mind achieves this by distinguishing representations that necessarily belong together from representations that are not necessarily connected but are merely associated in a contingent way.

Imagine a house that is too large to fit into your visual field from your vantage point near its front door. Now imagine that you walk around the house, successively perceiving each of its sides. Eventually you perceive the entire house, but not all at once, and you judge that each of your representations of the sides of the house necessarily belong together as sides of one house and that anyone who denied this would be mistaken. He then published this second installment, 'Critique of Practical Reason', seven years later.

Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this , which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical and self-destructive conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.

The foundations of this text a much briefer one than the first Critique can be found in the short volume 'Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals'. Whereas 'Groundwork' sets out some short, basic principles, the Critique is a more synthetic text - it takes these principles and combines them with experiences, then presenting them 'as the structure of a peculiar cognitive faculty, in their natural combination.

Kant does make his argument for the existence of the immortal soul and for God in this volume, but these are considered lesser areas of Kant's competence. His discussion of freedom and autonomy, carried forward from his discussion in 'Groundwork', is much more studied and used in today's philosophical circles. See all 12 reviews. Most recent customer reviews. Published on November 6, Published on October 8, Published on October 6, Published on July 31, Published on May 6, Published on May 17, Published on April 20, Customers who viewed this item also viewed. The Critique of Pure Reason.

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Critique of Practical Reason (Texts in the History of Philosophy)

Not Enabled Word Wise: Not Enabled Screen Reader: Enabled Amazon Best Sellers Rank: In was published the Critical Examination of the Faculty of Judgment. The essay on the corruption of human nature, which forms the third part of this volume, appeared in in a Berlin magazine. Four years before this an edict had been issued, limiting the freedom of the Press, and appointing special censors, whose Edition: The second part of the work on the Theory of Religion was referred to the theological censor, who refused his imprimatur. The Berlin censors were naturally annoyed at this way of escaping their decision, and the severe remarks in the preface did not tend to conciliate them.

Kant did not mention the order even to his intimate friends. A slip of paper, found after his death, contained this reflection: In Kant ceased to lecture publicly. In the same year he published his Metaphysical Elements of Morals, which treats of the several virtues and vices in detail, 1 and Metaphysical Elements of Law.

After the publication of these, he seems to have been regarded as a counsellor to be consulted in all difficulties, and an authority in all questions of conscience. The pains he took to give real assistance in such cases, both by his own reflection, and by inquiring from his colleagues, are attested by his written and often corrected memoranda. As an example may be mentioned the question whether inoculation was morally allowable or not. This question was addressed to him at the same time by a Professor of Medicine in Halle, and by a young nobleman who was going to be married, and whose bride wished to be inoculated.

After this time he began to feel the burden of age, and his powers, mental and bodily, gradually failed. He was quite aware of his condition, and resigned. Two days after his seventy-ninth birthday he wrote in his memoranda: But soon after he had written this memorandum his sight also failed, and he died in February, , in his eightieth year. His body was so dried up that the physicians said they had hardly ever seen so wasted a body.

Indeed he had himself said jestingly some years before, that he thought he had reached the minimum of muscular substance. Kant was of weak frame, and still weaker muscular power; he was barely five feet in height. Even after he had lost the sight of one eye, the defect was not visible to a stranger.

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In consequence of his contracted chest he suffered from a feeling of oppression, which early in life caused a tendency to hypochondria, to such an Edition: This, however, he overcame by force of thought. His practice illustrated this. The two indulgences of which he was found were tobacco and coffee. But of the former he limited himself to a single pipe in the morning, whilst he altogether abstained from the latter until far advanced in life, thinking it injurious to health. He attached great importance to the habit of breathing through the nostrils instead of through the mouth, and asserted that he had by this means overcome a tendency to cough and cold in the head.

There is more truth in this than is perhaps generally thought. The true reason of this preference in later life only for solitary walks was, beyond doubt, that which is mentioned in this essay, that it is undesirable to exercise the limbs and the brain or the brain and the stomach at the same time. His punctilious attention to health is amusingly illustrated by the artifice he used for suspending his stockings.

Immanuel Kant (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Thinking that garters injuriously impeded the circulation, he had a couple of bands attached to each stocking, and passing through a hole in the pocket of his breeches. Inside the pocket they were connected with a spring enclosed in a box, and this spring regulated the tension. That he might not be without some exercise in his study, he habitually left his handkerchief at the other side of the room, so that now and then he should have to get up and walk to it. He went to bed punctually at ten, and rose punctually at five.

His servant had orders not to let him sleep longer on any account; and on being asked once by Kant, in presence of guests, testified that for thirty years his master had never once indulged beyond the appointed hour. On rising he took a cup indefinite cups of tea, but no solid food. The early hours were devoted to preparation for his lectures, which in his earlier years occupied four or five hours, but subsequently only two. Lectures ended, at nine or ten, he returned to his study, and applied himself to preparing his books for the press.

Kant had no Boswell, and nothing is preserved of these conversations, in which he is said to have often thrown out profound and suggestive remarks with extraordinary richness. He considered that meal-time ought to be a time of perfect mental relaxation, and was not disposed to turn the dinner table into a lecture pulpit. His afternoons were, however, often spent at the houses of his friends, where he enjoyed meeting foreign merchants, sea captains, and travelled scholars, from whom he might learn much about foreign nations and countries.

His instructive and entertaining conversation, flavoured with mild satiric humour, made him a welcome guest, and even with the children he was a favourite. After he became famous he declined invitations if he thought he was to be made a lion of. When he had a house of his own, he had every day a few friends to dine with him. He liked to have a mixed company—merchants, professional men, and especially a few younger men. He had on one occasion a narrow escape from assassination.

A lunatic, who had made up his mind to kill some one, waylaid Kant for the purpose, and followed him for three miles, but on reflection, thinking it a pity to kill an old professor who must have so many sins on his head, the unfortunate madman killed a child instead. The evening was devoted to lighter reading and meditation. In his later years he was especially fond of reading books on physical science, and books of travel. How unwilling Kant was to depart from his regular routine appears from a characteristic anecdote.

One day as he was returning from his walk, a nobleman Edition: Kant yielded to the first impulse of politeness, and consented. The Count, after driving over some of his property near the city, proposed to visit a friend some miles from the town, and Kant of course could not refuse. He thereupon made it a fixed rule never to get into a carriage that he had not hired himself, so that he could manage it as he pleased.

When once he had made such a resolution, he was satisfied that he could not be taken by surprise, and nothing would make him depart from it. So his life passed, says one of his biographers, like the most regular of regular verbs. Punctual, however, as he was, his punctuality did not come up to the standard of his friend Green. One evening Kant had promised that he would accompany Green in a drive the next morning at eight.

At a quarter before eight Green was walking up and down his room, watch in hand; at fifty minutes past seven he put on his coat, at fifty-five he took his stick, and at the first stroke of eight entered his carriage and drove off; and although he met Kant, who was a couple of minutes late, he would not stop for him, because this was against the agreement and against his rule. This gentleman, for whom Kant had a great esteem, served as the model for the description of the English character in the Anthropologie.

Green, and allowed to accumulate at 6 per cent. Kant is said to have been on two occasions on the Edition: When he was seventy years of age, an officious friend actually printed a dialogue on marriage, with a view to persuade the philosopher to marry. Kant reimbursed him for the expense of printing, but at that age, not unnaturally, thought the advice rather too late. How sensible he was to the charms of female society appears from the Essay On the Sublime and Beautiful, p.

He was always ready with counsel and assistance for the young. His modesty towards scholars of great fame almost degenerated into shyness. As may be supposed from the regularity of his habits, he never allowed himself to run into debt. When a student at the University, with very narrow means, his only coat had once become so shabby, that some friends subscribed a sum of money, which was offered to him in the most delicate manner possible for the purchase of a new one.

Kant, however, preferred to retain his shabby coat rather than incur debt Edition: On the death of his brother, he assigned to the widow a pension of thalers. His kindness was shown in his last will, in which he left an annual sum to a servant who had treated him shamefully, but who had served him not indeed faithfully for thirty years. Kant had dismissed him two years before, with a pension, on condition of his never setting foot inside the house again. After some other small legacies, the residue was left to the children of his brother and sisters.

The whole amount was under four thousand pounds. The principal questions on the Theory of Morals may, with sufficient accuracy for the present purpose, be said to be these: First, the purely speculative question, What is the essential nature of moral rightness? Secondly, the practical questions, What is to man the criterion of his duty? The additional question, By what faculty do we discern right and wrong? If we had only to do with a being in whom Reason was irresistibly dominant, we should not need to raise any further questions; but having to treat of a being with affections and appetites distinct from Reason, and not of themselves dependent on it, we must answer the further question: How is Reason to maintain its authority in spite of these resisting forces?

What is the Motive? Lastly, since we have to deal with a corrupt creature, a new question arises: How is such a creature to be reformed? Now how does Kant deal with these questions? His categorical imperative—Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of Nature—gives perhaps not the essence of virtue, but a property of it, which may indeed serve as a subjective criterion. That this criterion is formal only, and therefore empty, is hardly of itself a valid objection. The test of valid reasoning, the syllogism, is equally empty.

The categorical imperative is, however, rather negative than positive, and it is far from being sufficiently clear as a test of the morality of actions. This appears even in the examples which Kant himself gives. For example, treating of Compassion, he supposes that if a man refuses aid to the distressed, it is out of selfishness, and then shows that if selfishness was the ruling principle, it would contradict itself. But why assume a motive for refusing help? What we want is a motive for giving help. There is nothing contradictory in willing that none should help others.

So in the case of gratitude, there is no contradiction in willing that those who receive benefits should entertain no peculiar feeling toward their benefactor. It is true we should look Edition: Kant has in fact treated human nature too abstractly. Indeed, in some of the instances he himself chooses, he elicits a contradiction only by bringing in a teleological consideration; e. These remarks, however, only show that the formula is not a mechanical rule of conduct; they do not disprove its scientific value.

In fact precisely similar objections have been alleged against the logical analysis of speculative reasoning, that it leaves untouched what in practice is the most difficult part of the problem. If all poisonous substances could be brought under a single chemical formula, the generalization would be of value both theoretically and practically, although its application to particular cases might be difficult and uncertain.

Nor is it to be supposed that Kant was not fully aware of the difficulty of applying his formula to the complex circumstances of actual life. In his Metaphysic of Morals he states a great number of questions of casuistry, which he leaves undecided, as puzzles or exercises to the reader. The reason of it, says the former, is the same as that which forces us in speculation to affirm that if one line or number be equal to another, that other is equal to it.

Whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that, by the same judgment, I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him. As such it has a real scientific value. Practically, its value Edition: As to testing maxims by consequences, he does so in the same sense in which Euclid in indirect demonstrations tests a hypothesis by its consequences, and in no other, i. Take the case of a promise.

Of inconvenience to society not a word is said or implied. As to the example of celibacy, Kant has himself indicated how he would dispose of it by the way in which he treats suicide. He does not show its unlawfulness by alleging that if everyone committed suicide the human race would come to an end, but by exposing the inconsistency in the principle of action which would lead to suicide.

In every case it is the mental principle which is to be tested, not the mere external action. Bearing this in mind, we shall find no difficulty in the case of celibacy. It may proceed from motives which there would be no absurdity in supposing universal, because the circumstances which give them this particular direction could only be exceptional. But, suppose celibacy recommended on grounds which are in their own nature universal, e.

On the other hand, apply Mr. Why, that we might innocently kill, provided the action were not likely to be generally imitated! If occasional celibacy is justified only because there exists a natural passion which is sure to be usually powerful enough to prevent the example being followed, then we may equally justify occasional violence or murder on the ground that fear or benevolence will naturally prevent the action from being extensively imitated. A law must be above the nature to which it is a law, and which is subject to it.

A being which gave itself the moral law, and whose freedom, therefore, is Autonomy, would not be conscious of obligation or duty, since the moral law would coincide with its will. Kant draws the apparently self-contradictory conclusion that we, though willing the law, yet resist it. Even if this be granted, it would follow, not that we should feel obliged, but that either no action at all would follow, or the more powerful side would prevail. That we condemn ourselves when we have violated the law is an important fact, on which Kant very strongly insists, but which his theory fails to explain.

Is it not a far simpler and truer explanation to say that this self-condemnation, this humiliation in the presence of an unbending judge, is a proof that we have not given ourselves the law; Edition: The moral law is not a mere precept imposed upon us from without, nor is it forced upon us by our sensitive nature; it is a law prescribed to us, or, more correctly speaking, revealed to us, by our own Reason.

But Reason is not our own in the sense in which our appetites or sensations are our own; it is not under our own control; it bears the stamp of universality and authority. Thus it declares itself impersonal: Hence, many ethical writers, both ancient and modern, have insisted as strongly as Kant that the moral law is common to man with all rational creatures. Accordingly, he sometimes speaks of rational creatures as the subjects of Reason, which is the supreme legislator.

As regards the sanctions of the moral law, which practically to imperfect creatures furnish the motive, these consist, according to Kant, in the happiness and misery which are the natural consequences of virtue Edition: But since, as he maintains, we have ourselves to blame for not having attained this ideal, what right have we to expect such an opportunity? Having missed the true moment in his argument, which led to the existence of a Supreme Lawgiver, he arrived at this fundamental truth by a roundabout way, through the conception of the summum bonum.

But this introduces a quite heterogeneous notion, viz. Happiness belongs to a man as a sensible creature, and all that he has a right to say is, that if Practical Reason had happiness to confer, it would confer it on virtue. A direction of the Author of Nature, given to creatures capable of looking upon it as such, is plainly a command from Edition: Kant sees no mode of reconciling morality with the law of Causality, except by his distinction of noumena and phenomena.

When the law of Causality is rightly understood there is no inconsistency. For the cause which it demands is an efficient cause, and the idea of an efficient cause involves the idea of mind. True, we may then ask for the motive; but the nature of motive and that of efficient cause are heterogeneous. Freedom, according to him, is not independence on law which we can consciously follow, but independence on the physical relation of causality, the not being determined by physical or sensible causes.

On this view the contradiction, which to Hobbes and others seemed to exist between the conception of freedom and that of the divine foreknowledge, would have little weight. Suppose a being perfectly wise and good, and at the same time free, then we should only require perfect knowledge of the circumstances of a particular case in order to predict his conduct, and that infallibly.

If he were not free we could not do so. And the more nearly a being approaches such perfection, the more certainly could we predict his actions. If his goodness were perfect, but his knowledge imperfect, and if we knew how far his knowledge extended, we could still predict. It would be absurd to say that this would be a contradiction.

Paul, who represents sin as slavery, righteousness as freedom. Kant is by no means happy in his treatment of the corruption of human nature. In order to escape the difficulty of reconciling responsibility with the innate corruption on which he so strongly dwells, he has recourse as in the case of freedom to the distinction between man noumenon and man phenomenon. The innate evil of human nature rests on an inversion of the natural order, the legislative will being subordinated to the sensibility. But how can this be reconciled with the self-given, and therefore self-willed law which makes good a duty?

It is inconceivable that the pure supersensible essence could invest the sensational nature the objects of which have for it no reality with a preponderance over itself. A further contradiction appears to be involved in the relation of evil to freedom; for he states that freedom is as inseparably connected with the law of Practical Reason as the physical cause with the law of nature, so that freedom without the law of Practical Reason is a causality without law, which would be absurd; and yet, on the other hand, he regards freedom as an ability from which proceeds contradiction to the moral law.

A still more insuperable difficulty meets him when he attempts to answer the question, Is reformation possible? Yes; for it is a duty. You ought, therefore you can. How the return from evil Edition: Now, freedom which belongs to the supersensible sphere the sphere of noumena cannot be determined by anything in the phenomenal world; consequently, if freedom has, apart from time, given the man a determination, then no event in time can produce a change.

MEMOIR OF KANT.

Nay, it would be a contradiction to suppose the removal of an act in the noumenal supersensible world by a succeeding act. Contrary or contradictory attributes cannot be attributed to the same subject except under the condition of time. If, therefore, the intelligent being is timeless, we cannot possibly attribute to it two decisions, of which one annuls the other.

He is not even consistent, for he argues that it is not possible to destroy this radical corruption by human power, but only to overcome it. Why does he not conclude here, I ought to destroy it, therefore I can? If the man endowed with the faculties in their true subordination, with reason supreme, has yet not had strength or purity of will to remain so, what practical possibility is there that having this subordination perverted he can restore it? There is obviously an external aid necessary here. Such aid, such leverage are provided by the Christian religion.

It has introduced a new motive, perfectly original and Edition: He accepts the whole moral and spiritual teaching of the New Testament, because he finds it in accordance with reason, and this being so, he judges that it is a matter of no practical consequence whether its introduction was supernatural or not. He did not deny that Divine aid was required to make reformation possible, but he thought that no intellectual belief or knowledge of ours could be a condition of this aid, and, therefore, that all historical questions were adiaphora.

But this is to take for granted, that if God gives such aid at all, it must be in a particular way. And, indeed, it is certain that the moral and the positive in Christianity cannot be thus kept apart. It is to the facts that the doctrines owe their life and motive power. It is these that supply the leverage, without which the most perfect moral teaching will fall dead on the ears at least of the masses of mankind.

ADDITIONAL MEDIA

Besides, as Butler shows, revealed facts may be the foundation of moral duties to those to whom the revelation has come. It is remarkable that, although Kant was fond of reading English authors, and was influenced in his moral discussions by English moralists, Butler who had written half a century before the publication of Edition: What is more remarkable is, that Butler has remained equally unknown to German writers up to the present day.

The reason of this silence, doubtless, is to be found in the title of his work. But although foreign philosophers could not be expected to look for a treatise on moral philosophy in a book called Fifteen Sermons, how is it that attention was not called to him by the notices in Mackintosh who is largely cited, e. Fichte , which showed the high estimation in which the work was held in England? It is certainly a curious and suggestive fact that writers, professedly and learnedly treating of English moral philosophers, should be wholly ignorant of the writer who holds by far the highest rank among them, whose work is the classical work, the text-book of the Universities, and with a wider circulation, probably, than the works of all the other moralists put together.

It is in the moral law that he finds the means of establishing the existence, and to some extent the nature, of the supersensible reality. He has been charged with inconsistency in this. What he pulls down in the Critique of the Speculative Reason, he restores illogically, it is said, in that of the Practical Reason.

The fact appears to be, that readers of the former work are apt to fall into two mistakes. First, they suppose that they have before them a complete system instead of a portion only; and secondly, they mistake Edition: That he limits his affirmation of the supersensible to its practical aspect is quite in accordance with the spirit of his philosophy. Physics, Ethics, and Logic. This division is perfectly suitable to the nature of the thing, and the only improvement that can be made in it is to add the principle on which it is based, so that we may both satisfy ourselves of its completeness, and also be able to determine correctly the necessary subdivisions.

All rational knowledge is either material or formal: Formal philosophy is called Logic. Material philosophy, however, which has to do with determinate objects and the laws to which they are subject, is again two-fold; for these laws are either laws of nature or of freedom. The science of the former is Physics, that of the latter, Ethics; they are also called natural philosophy and moral philosophy respectively. Logic cannot have any empirical part; that is, a part in which the universal and necessary laws of thought should rest on grounds taken from experience; otherwise it would not be logic, i.

We may call all philosophy empirical, so far as it is based on grounds of experience: When the latter is merely formal it is logic; if it is restricted to definite objects of the understanding it is metaphysic. In this way there arises the idea of a two-fold metaphysic—a metaphysic of nature and a metaphysic of morals.

Physics will thus have an empirical and also a rational part. It is the same with Ethics; but here the empirical part might have the special name of practical anthropology, the name morality being appropriated to the rational part. All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labour, namely, when, instead of one man doing everything, each confines himself to a certain kind of work distinct from others in the treatment it requires, so as to be able to perform it with greater facility and in the greatest perfection.

Where the different kinds of work are not so distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism. It might deserve to be considered Edition: As my concern here is with moral philosophy, I limit the question suggested to this: Whether it is not of the utmost necessity to construct a pure moral philosophy, perfectly cleared of everything which is only empirical, and which belongs to anthropology?

Everyone must admit that if a law is to have moral force, i. Thus not only are moral laws with their principles essentially distinguished from every other kind of practical knowledge in which there is anything empirical, but all moral philosophy rests wholly on its pure part. No doubt these laws require a judgment sharpened by experience, in order on the one hand to distinguish in what cases they are applicable, and on the other to procure for them access to the will of the man, and effectual influence on conduct; since man is acted on by so many inclinations that, though capable of the idea of a practical pure reason, he is not so easily able to make it effective in concreto in his life.

For in order that an action should be morally good, it is not enough Edition: Now it is only in a pure philosophy that we can look for the moral law in its purity and genuineness and, in a practical matter, this is of the utmost consequence: That which mingles these pure principles with the empirical does not deserve the name of philosophy for what distinguishes philosophy from common rational knowledge is, that it treats in separate sciences what the latter only comprehends confusedly ; much less does it deserve that of moral philosophy, since by this confusion it even spoils the purity of morals themselves, and counteracts its own end.

By this it is distinguished from a metaphysic of morals, just as general logic, which treats of the acts and canons of thought in general, is distinguished from transcendental philosophy, which treats of the particular acts and canons of pure thought, i. For the metaphysic of morals has to examine the idea and the principles of a possible pure will, and not the acts and conditions of human volition generally, which for the most part are drawn from psychology Edition: It is true that moral laws and duty are spoken of in the general practical philosophy contrary indeed to all fitness.

Intending to publish hereafter a metaphysic of morals, I issue in the first instance these fundamental principles. Indeed there is properly no other foundation for it than the critical examination of a pure practical reason; just as that of metaphysics is the critical examination of the pure speculative reason, already published.

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