Kenny Anthony. An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy
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heyday of the Gothic novel, full of mystery, ghosts, and wonders. Jane Austen’s
novels, and her mockery of the romantics, can be seen as a last reaffirmation of
the clear vision and tranquil values of the age of reason.
In his old age, Coleridge became a prolific philosopher in his own right. He
attacked the utilitarianism by that time flourishing in Britain, and he introduced
to English readers the philosophy which he had learned from the philosophers of
Germany. For the definitive evaluation of eighteenth-century empiricism and
rationalism was given not by its romantic critics, but by the author of The Critique
of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.
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XVI
THE CRITICAL
PHILOSOPHY OF KANT
Kant’s Copernican Revolution
One of the most significant events in the eighteenth century was the rise of the
Kingdom of Prussia. Once a backward province of eastern Germany, Prussia became
a kingdom in 1701 and under Leibniz’s patron Frederick I, and his grandson
Frederick the Great, who ruled from 1740 to 1786, it came to have great weight
in the balance of power between the European monarchies. Frederick the Great
built up and commanded a superb army, and after three wars he had added to his
kingdom substantial portions of neighbouring Austria and Poland. By the time of
his death, Prussia could challenge Austria as the leading power in Germany.
Though military efficiency was the overarching aim of his government, Frederick
was a cultivated man, a gifted musician, and a fluent writer in French. He cor-
responded with Voltaire and brought him for a period to Berlin. During his
reign were laid the first foundations not only of the nineteenth-century German
Empire, but also of the nineteenth-century domination of philosophy by German
thinkers.
The first and greatest of these, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), lived all his life
in the town of his birth, Königsberg, in what was then the eastern part of Prussia.
He was brought up as a devout Lutheran; he later became liberal in his theological
views but was always a man of strict life and regular habit, notorious for exact
punctuality in every action. At university he was instructed in the Leibnizian
metaphysics, as codified into a system by Wolff; he became disenchanted with it
after reading Hume and Rousseau. After holding some temporary teaching posts
and declining a chair of poetry, he became professor of logic and metaphysics in
his home university in 1770. He never married or held public office, and the
history of his life is the history of his ideas.
As a young man he was more interested in science than philosophy, and when
he first began writing philosophy it was of a cautious and conventional kind. It
was not until the age of fifty-seven that he produced the work which made him
immortal, The Critique of Pure Reason. This appeared in 1781, at the beginning
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of one of the most spectacular decades in the history of human culture, in which
The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni were composed, in which Gibbon was
publishing his Decline and Fall, and in which Boswell was writing his Life of
Johnson, and the youthful Turner first exhibited in the Royal Academy. Early in
the decade the constitution of the United States was drafted, and by its end the
French Revolution had taken place.
The Critique of Pure Reason reappeared in a revised edition in 1787. It was
followed by two other significant works, The Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
and The Critique of Judgment in 1790. Kant’s writing is not easy to read, and not
all the difficulty is due to the profundity of the subject or the originality of the
thought. He was overfond of inventing technical terms, and forcing ideas into
rigid schematisms. But the reader who perseveres through his difficult texts will
find the investment philosophically well rewarded.
Kant’s aim in his first Critique was to make philosophy, for the first time, truly
scientific. Mathematics had been scientific for many centuries, and physics had
become scientific when, in the age of Bacon and Descartes, it was first realized
that theory had to be confirmed by experiment and experiment had to be guided
by theory. But metaphysics, the oldest discipline, and the one which ‘would
survive even if all the rest were swallowed up in the abyss of an all-destroying
barabarism’, was still immature.
To become scientific, Kant believed, philosophy needed a revolution similar to
that by which Copernicus placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the centre of
the system of the heavens. Copernicus showed that when we think we are observ-
ing the motion of the sun round the earth, what we see is in fact the consequence
of the rotation of our own earth. Kant’s Copernican revolution will do for the
mind what Copernicus did for the sense of vision. Instead of asking how our
knowledge can conform to its objects, we must start from the supposition that
objects must conform to our knowledge. Only thus can we justify the claim of
metaphysics to a priori knowledge, which unlike a posteriori knowledge comes
before experience. All our knowledge begins with experience, but Kant insists
that it does not follow that all of it arises from experience.
The marks of a priori knowledge are necessity and universality. Unlike Hume,
Kant maintains that the proposition ‘every change has a cause’ expresses a judge-
ment which is strictly necessary and strictly universal. ‘All bodies are heavy’, on
the other hand, is simply a generalization to which no exceptions have been
observed; it is an a posteriori judgement.
In addition to the distinction between a priori and a posteriori judgement,
Kant employs a distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements. In any
judgement of the form ‘A is B’, he says, either the predicate B is contained in the
concept A, or it lies outside it. If the former, then the judgement is analytic; if the
latter, then it is synthetic. Kant’s examples are ‘all bodies are extended’ and ‘all
bodies are heavy’.
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What Kant means here is not altogether clear. The distinction is clearly intended
to be universally applicable to propositions, yet not all propositions are structured
in the simple subject–predicate form he uses in his definition. The notion of ‘con-
taining’ is metaphorical; and Kant’s discussion of the distinction does not make it
unambiguous whether he saw it as a logical or a psychological one.
One thing, however, is quite clear: for Kant a judgement cannot be both
analytic and a posteriori. But the possibility is left open that a proposition may be
both synthetic and a priori. In Kant’s system, indeed, the realm of the synthetic
a priori is extensive and important. It includes the whole of mathematics: arith-
metic and geometry are synthetic, since they go far beyond pure logic, and yet
they are a priori, because they are known in advance of experience.
Figure 33 The best known portrait of Immanuel Kant.
(Photo: akg-images)
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How such synthetic a priori judgements are possible is the principal problem
for philosophy, and only if it can be solved is a science of metaphysics possible.
If it cannot, then metaphysics is nothing more than a natural disposition to ask
certain types of questions, questions for instance about the universe as a whole.
Nothing guarantees that these questions are not completely idle.
Reason’s first task is to understand the nature and limits of its own power.
Reason must be used critically, not dogmatically, and scientific metaphysics must
begin with a ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. The critique of pure reason, that is, of
reason divorced from experience, prepares us for the general study of a priori
knowledge, which Kant calls ‘transcendental metaphysics’. ‘Transcendental’ is one
of Kant’s favourite words: he used it with several meanings, but common to all of
them is the notion of something which goes beyond and behind the deliverances
of actual experience.
Human knowledge arises from the combined operation of the senses and the
understanding. Through the senses, objects are given to us; through understand-
ing, they are made thinkable. The structure of our senses determines the content
of our experience; the constitution of our understanding determines its structure.
The philosopher has to study both sense and understanding: Kant calls the former
study ‘the transcendental aesthetic’ and the latter ‘the transcendental logic’.
The Transcendental Aesthetic
Like his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, Kant thinks of a sense-
faculty as being in itself a passive power of receiving representations. However,
he makes a distinction between the matter and the form of our experience: the
matter is what derives directly from sensation, the form given by our understand-
ing is what permits the chaos of appearance to take on order. The matter of
sensations would include what makes the difference between a glimpse of blue
and a glimpse of green, or the smell of a rose and the smell of a cheese. But what
Kant is interested in is only the form.
In human experience any object of sense is also an object of thought: whatever
is experienced is classified and codified, that is to say, it is brought by the under-
standing under one or more concepts. Kant wants to isolate sense-experience by
taking away from it everything which really belongs to the understanding, so that
nothing may be left save immediate empirical experience and its a priori form. ‘In
the course of this investigation,’ Kant says, ‘it will be found that there are two
pure forms of sensory awareness, serving as principles of a priori knowledge,
namely, space and time.’
Like his predecessors Kant accepts a distinction between inner and outer
senses. Space is the form of outer sense, by which we ‘represent to ourselves
objects as outside us, and all without exception in space’. Time is the form of
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inner sense by means of which the mind experiences its own inner states, all
ordered in time.
‘What, then, are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only
determinations or relations of things, yet such as would belong to things even if
they were not intuited? Or are space and time such that they belong only to the
form of awareness, and therefore to the subjective constitution of our mind, apart
from which they could not be ascribed to anything whatsoever?’
A dogmatic, uncritical, metaphysician will tell us that space and time are pre-
supposed by, not derived from, experience; that we can imagine space and time
without objects, but not objects without space and time; and that there is only a
single space and a single time, infinite in each case. But a critical philosopher will
ask how it is that we can know truths about space and time which are based on
awareness (because they are not analytic), and yet are a priori (because they are
prior to any experience). Kant’s answer it that the knowledge of synthetic a priori
truths about space and time is only explicable if they are a priori forms of sense-
experience, rather than properties of things in themselves.
Does this mean that space and time are unreal? Kant’s answer is that empirically
they are real, but transcendentally they are ideal. ‘If we take away the subject,
space and time disappear: these as phenomena cannot exist in themselves but only
in us.’ What things are in themselves, beyond the phenomena, is something
which is unknown to us.
Does this then mean that everything is mere appearance? Not in the ordinary
sense. We commonly distinguish in experience between that which holds for all
human beings and that which is incidental to a single standpoint. The rainbow in
a sunny shower may be called a mere appearance, while the rain is regarded as a
thing in itself. In this sense, we may grant that not everything is mere appearance.
But this distinction between appearance and reality, Kant says, is something
merely empirical. When we look deeper, we realize that ‘not only are the drops
of rain mere appearances, but that even their round shape, nay even the space
in which they fall, are nothing in themselves, but merely modifications or funda-
mental forms of our sensible awareness, and that the transcendental object remains
unknown to us’.
This conclusion may seem unpalatable, but it is forced on us, Kant believes, if
we consider the nature of geometry. Geometry is a splendid achievement of the
human intellect: but on what does it rest? It cannot rest on experience, because it
is universal and necessary. It cannot rest on mere concepts because concepts alone
will not tell you there can be no such thing as a two-sided figure. Therefore it
must be a synthetic discipline resting on a priori awareness.
Kant’s transcendental aesthetic is one of the least successful parts of his enter-
prise. At the time he wrote, Euclidean geometry was regarded as the only possible
theory of space; shortly afterwards it was shown that there were other consistent
non-Euclidean geometries. Moreover, the question whether the fundamental
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structure of the world we live in is Euclidean or non-Euclidean was a matter
for scientific investigation to settle. But this would be impossible if spatiality was
something constructed by the mind in a single, inescapably Euclidean, form.
The Transcendental Analytic:
The Deduction of the Categories
The transcendental aesthetic is followed in Kant’s system by the transcendental
logic, which is the study of the understanding, the creative part of the mind. It is
the understanding that makes the objects of sensible awareness into objects of
thought. Understanding and sense are equal and interdependent. ‘Without the
senses no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would
be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, awareness without concepts is
blind. . . . The understanding is aware of nothing, the senses can think nothing.
Only through their union can knowledge arise.’
By ‘logic’ Kant means the rules by which the understanding operates. He is
interested not in the methodology of particular sciences, but in the ‘absolutely
necessary rules of thought without which there can be no employment whatso-
ever of the understanding’. The pure logic which is his concern treats only of the
form and not of the content of thought. It is distinct from, and independent of,
psychology; it has no interest in the origin or history of our thoughts.
Kant was not himself concerned to expound or develop formal logic itself; in
fact he accepted uncritically the logic of his day. His transcendental logic is meant
to be something different: it is an inquiry into what can be known a priori about
the applicability of logic. The task of transcendental logic is comprised in two
major enterprises: the analytic and the dialectic. The transcendental analytic sets
out the criteria for the valid empirical employment of the understanding; the
transcendental dialectic offers a critique of the illusory dogmatic employment of
the reason.
Kant distinguishes between two powers of the mind: the understanding and
the judgement. The understanding is the power to form concepts, the judgement
is the power to apply them. The operations of the understanding find expression
in individual words, the operations of the judging faculty find expression in whole
sentences. Concepts which are a priori are categories; judgements which are a
priori are called principles. Kant’s transcendental analytic consists of two corres-
ponding parts: the analytic of concepts and the analytic of principles. Kant devotes
much the larger part of his transcendental analytic to the analytic of concepts,
which is also called the deduction of the categories.
What is meant by all this terminology? We may start from the notion of
‘category’, which Kant took over from Aristotle, while rejecting Aristotle’s list as
hopelessly unsystematic. In its place he offers a list based on the relationship
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between concepts and judgement. A concept is in fact nothing other than a
power to make judgements of certain kinds. (To possess the concept metal, for
instance, is to have the power to make judgements expressible by sentences
containing the word ‘metal’ or its equivalent.) The different possible types of
concept are therefore to be determined by setting out the different possible types
of judgement.
Kant took over from contemporary logicians distinctions between different
kinds of judgement. He classes judgements as universal (‘Every man is mortal’),
particular (‘Some men are mortal’), or singular (‘Socrates is mortal’). Again, he
classifies them as affirmative (‘The soul is mortal’), negative (‘The soul is not
mortal’), and infinite (‘The soul is non-mortal’). Finally, he divides judgements
into the three classes of categorical (‘There is a perfect justice’), or hypothetical
(‘If there is a perfect justice, the obstinately wicked are punished’), or disjunctive
(‘The world exists either through blind chance, or through inner necessity, or
through an external cause’).
Kant claims to derive from these familiar classifications of judgements a new
and fundamental classification of concepts. For instance, he relates categorical
judgements to the category of substance, hypothetical judgements to the cat-
egory of cause, and disjunctive judgements to the category of interaction. It
would be difficult, and unrewarding, to try to follow the detailed steps of this
derivation; it is more important to interpret the thesis that a concept is essentially
a power of judgement.
Commentators have suggested various analogies for the role which Kant attrib-
uted to the categories. Some have suggested that if we compare language to a
board game in which pieces are moved, then the categories are a listing of the
ultimate possible moves available (forward, backward, sideways, diagonally, etc.).
Alternatively, if we think of language as a tool for coping with the world, we
might think of the list of categories as similar to the specification of an all-purpose
tool (it must be able to cut, drill, polish and so on).
Leaving metaphor aside, we may ask whether Kant is right that there are some
concepts which are indispensable if anything is to count as the operation of
understanding. We might put the question in a linguistic form: are there any
concepts indispensable for a fully-fledged language? The answer seems to be that
any language-users – however alien to us – need to have a concept of negation,
and the ability to use quantifiers such as ‘all’ and ‘some’. If they are to be rational
language-users they will also need the ability to draw conclusions from premises,
which is expressed in the mastery of words like ‘if’, ‘then’, and ‘therefore’. Kant
was correct to link concepts with judgements, and to see that certain concepts
must be fundamental to all understanding, whether or not he was well inspired
when he drew up his own particular list.
If we accept that there must be a nucleus of indispensable categories, there
remains the crucial question where this comes from, and how we acquire our
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grasp of it. Kant calls his answer to this question ‘The transcendental deduction
of the categories’.
‘Deduction’ in Kant’s terminology is a quasi-legal term, a metaphor from
genealogy and inheritance. A deduction of a concept is a proof that we have
a title to use it, that in using it we are acting within our epistemological rights.
A deduction of the categories is a proof that we have the right to apply these a
priori concepts to objects. A deduction of an a priori concept cannot be a mere
empirical explanation of how we come by it: it must be a proof which is, in Kant’s
term ‘transcendental’, that is to say, one which shows that the concept is necessary
if there is to be any such thing as experience at all.
Consider, for instance, the concept of ‘cause’, which appears in Kant’s list of
categories. If it is a priori then experience cannot be cited as its origin; indeed,
experience – as Hume had shown – could never establish the necessity and
universality of the link binding cause and effect together. No doubt our experi-
ence does suggest to us various generalizations. But might there not be a world
of experience in which such great chaos reigned that nothing could be identified
as cause and effect? The thrust of the transcendental deduction is that if we
did not have the concepts of the categories, including those of substance and
cause, we could not understand – could not conceptualize – even the most
fragmentary and disordered experience. Unless we can conceptualize objects whose
existence is more than mere appearance, we cannot conceptualize sensory aware-
ness at all.
Three elements are involved in the conceptualization of experience. First, there
is the ordering of intuitions in time; secondly, there is the union of intuitions
in a single consciousness; and finally, the conscious subject brings the intui-
tions under concepts. All this, Kant argues, involves the permanent possibility of
self-consciousness.
It is not possible for me to discover that something is an item of my conscious-
ness. I cannot be, as it were, faced with an item of consciousness, go on to
wonder to whom it belongs, and conclude, upon inquiry, that it belongs to none
other than myself. I can, through reflection, become aware of various features
of my conscious experience; but I cannot become aware that it is mine. The
self-conscious discoveries which one can make about one’s experience are called
by Kant ‘apperceptions’. Kant puts the point that one does not rely on experience
to recognize one’s consciousness as one’s own by saying that one’s ownership of
one’s own consciousness is not an empirical apperception, but a ‘transcendental
apperception’.
Awareness of experiences as mine is at the same time awareness of experiences
as belonging to a single consciousness. But what unites these experiences is not
experience itself; in themselves my experiences are, as Kant says, ‘many coloured
and diverse’. Once again it is the a priori activity of the understanding which is
at work, making what Kant calls a ‘synthesis’ of intuitions, combining them into
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the unity of a single consciousness. This Kant calls ‘the transcendental unity of
apperception’.
The possibility of self-consciousness, in turn, presupposes the possibility of the
consciousness of extra-mental objects. This is because self-ascription of experience
is only possible because of the unity and connectedness of a temporal sequence of
awareness, and this same unity and connectedness is what makes it possible for a
succession of experiences to constitute a single objective world.
Kant goes all the way to meet the empiricist, and then shows him on his own
ground that empiricism is not enough. He agrees that for any knowledge of
objects – even of oneself as an object – experience is necessary. The original unity
of apperception gives me only the concept of myself; for any knowledge of myself,
empirical awareness is necessary. But empirical knowledge, whether of myself or
of anything else, involves judgement; and there cannot be judgement without
concepts. Among concepts, there cannot be ones which are derived from experi-
ence without ones which are presupposed by experience; and therefore know-
ledge even of appearances, knowledge even of myself, must be subject to the
categories.
The source of the objective order of nature is the transcendental self: the
self which is shown, but not yet known, in the transcendental unity of appercep-
tion. It is thus from the transcendental unity of apperception that Kant seeks to
derive the objective nature of the world, and seeks to show that there is a
difference between reality and appearance. For the transcendental unity of
apperception is possible only if our experience is experience of a world which is
describable by the categories. That is, in essence, the transcendental deduction of
the categories.
The details of the argument remain obscure. Kant states and restates it, in
many different forms; in each statement there always seems to be one or other
link missing in the chain of reasoning. The reader is able to glimpse isolated
flashes of amazing insight without being given an overview of a compelling
argument. Kant’s transcendental deduction makes a damaging attack on empiri-
cism, but it does not succeed in dealing the death blow. That had to wait for the
twentieth century.
The Transcendental Analytic:
The System of Principles
None the less, Kant’s exploration of the principles underlying our judgements
is of the highest interest. A priori judgements, we recall, may be analytic or
synthetic. The highest principle of analytic judgements is the principle of non-
contradiction: a self-contradictory judgement is void, and the mark of an ana-
lytic judgement is that the contradiction of it is self-contradictory. But the
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