Notes on Kant: Part 1
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Kant began his philosophical career by subscribing whole-heartedly to Cartesian rationalism as it had come down to him in the works of Leibnitz and Wolff. Kant was broken from his dogmatic slumber by reading David Hume in a German translation in 1756. This statement requires some explanation. Kant defines dogmatism as “the positive or dogmatic procedure of reason without previous criticism of its own faculty.” (What do we know, instead of how do we know.) Or as “the groundless assumption that we can make our way in metaphysics without criticism.” In other words, a system which is produced in the direct effort to understand and interpret the world—the effort of a mind which is as yet troubled by no scruple as to its own competence, or as to the efficiency of the methods and principles it uses. Kant had learned from Hume that the principle of causality was both necessary to experience and not obtained by analysis. Hume had said that he could find nothing essential in the idea of cause and effect but a relation of contiguity, or succession, between what we call cause and effect, plus the notion of a necessary cause between them. A certain body approaches another, touches it, and, without any sensible interval, the motion that was in the first body is now in the second. We see that it is so; we feel that it cannot be otherwise, and that, in similar circumstances, it will always be so. But why and how it is so, we have sot the slightest idea, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine what an impulse, or a production, could possibly be. Considering this problem of causation Kant says that he could understand the necessity of knowledge if it were either archetypal or ectypal: if what we know were produced entirely by the mind or entirely by objects. Kant’s early difficulties had taught him that neither of these alternatives was possible. The new sciences, he had convinced himself, relied on observation, and could not do without it. Knowledge could not be regarded as either the mind’s coming to apprehend and reason from its own innate principles, or as the mind’s unaided self-development. The attempts of Descartes and Leibnitz to explain the sciences on those lines had, he considered, hopelessly broken down. The British empiricists had chosen the ectypal alternative. For them the guarantee of the validity of knowledge was the mind’s passive reception of the impressions stamped upon it by external things. But Hume had shown by his account of causation that as at once an essential and (on such a theory of knowledge) an inexplicable that that “way of ideas” would not explain the facts. Both those alternatives had led to idealism by different ways, to what Kant calls the problematic idealism of Descartes and the dogmatic idealism of Berkeley.
For the archetypal alternative assumes that knowledge is really the mind’s knowledge of the principles within itself, and it can get beyond itself to an external world only by miraculous interventions. The existence of the external world is but an unsupported conjecture. The empiricists had begun by supposing the independent reality of external things producing impressions on the mind. But as they supposed that physical effects of external things got somehow changed into mental “impressions” or “images” which had in some curious way to get out of physical space into the mind, they thought of knowing as the mind’s regarding its own ideas or images. It was easy then for Berkeley to kick away the ladder by which this position had been reached and deny the existence of external things all together.
What is the cause of the sad state of metaphysics? It must, Kant thought, in some way lie in a failure to attain the sure scientific method, and really consists in the neglect of an inquiry which should be a preliminary to all others in metaphysics. Men ought to have begun with a critical investigation of pure reason itself. Reason should have examined its own nature, to ascertain in general the extent to which it is capable of attaining knowledge without the aid of experience. This examination will decide whether reason is able to deal with the problems of God, freedom, and immortality at all; and without it no discussion of these problems will have a solid foundation. It is this preliminary investigation which the Critique of Pure Reason proposes to undertake. Its aim is to answer the question, ‘How far can reason go, without the material presented and the aid furnished by experience?’ and the result furnishes the solution, or at least the key to the solution, of all metaphysical problems. Kant’s problem, then, is similar to Locke’s. Locke’s purpose was to enquire into the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge. The task which both Locke and Kant set themselves resembled that of investigating a telescope, before turning it upon the stars, to determine its competence for the work.
Now it is to be noted, as Gilson says, that hope came to Kant from the same source whence it had come to Descartes—from science itself. Mathematics maintained its old reputation of solidity, and physics, with Newton, had far surpassed its own fame. All was well with science, but something was wrong with philosophy. What was it? Kant had come to believe that metaphysics had in the past made the mistake of thinking that it ought to be like mathematics. But the objects of metaphysics and of mathematics are different—therefore you cannot apply the same method to both. The object of mathematics is simple—quantitative, that of metaphysics is manifold, it is qualitative. The certainty of mathematics (according to Kant) comes from the mind’s construction, from its independence of the impressions of experience. The figures with which geometry deals arise in and with the act of construction. That is why geometry rightly begins with definitions. But the physics which began with definitions and attempted to grasp the real essences of force and matter and movement and deduce consequences from such conceptions, had made no progress. The physics of the last century, whose success all were admiring, had begun with definite quantitative measurements of phenomena. Now, the physicist, from a number of observations, constructs an hypothesis and then confronts reality with it. If it agrees with the facts well and good; if not, he must modify it. Kant adopts Newton’s method (p. 227). But Kant leaves out this last step. Experiment, he holds, is only fruitful when reason does not follow nature in a passive spirit, but compels nature to answer its own questions. Reason, Kant says, must approach nature not as a pupil but as a judge, and this attitude forms the condition of progress in physics.
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