Kenny Anthony. An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy

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the critical philosophy of kant

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the individual things in the world which contribute to make it up; it must

therefore have been imposed by one or more sublime wise causes, operating not

blindly as nature does, but freely as humans do. Kant raises various difﬁculties

about the analogies which this argument draws between the operation of nature

and the artiﬁce of human skill. But even if we waive these, the most the argument

can prove is the existence of ‘an architect of the world who is always very much

hampered by the adaptability of the material in which he works, not a creator of

the world to whose idea everything is subject’.

Kant called the system of the Critique of Pure Reason, with its constructive

analytic part and its destructive dialectic part, ‘transcendental idealism’. This was

Figure 35 The architect of the universe in Blake’s Ancient of Days.

(Private collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

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meant to bring out both the negative and positive aspects of the system. At the

empirical level, Kant was a realist, not an idealist, like Berkeley: he did not believe

that nothing existed save ideas in the mind. On the other hand, at the ultimate or

transcendental level, he was an idealist, because he denied that things in them-

selves were knowable. Thus, he called himself a transcendental idealist.

Kant’s Moral Philosophy

Just as the ﬁrst Critique set out critically the synthetic a priori principles of

theoretical reason, the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) set out

critically the synthetic a priori principles of practical reason. This is a brief and

eloquent presentation of Kant’s moral system.

In morals, Kant’s starting point is that the only thing which is good without

qualiﬁcation is a good will. Talents, character, self-control, and fortune can be

used to bad ends; even happiness can be corrupting. It is not what it achieves that

constitutes the goodness of a good will; good will is good in itself alone.

Even if, by some special disfavour of destiny, or by the niggardly endowment of

stepmotherly nature, this will is entirely lacking in power to carry out its intentions;

if by its utmost effort it still accomplishes nothing, and only good will is left . . . ;

even then it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake as something which has its

full value in itself.

It is not in order to pursue happiness that human beings have been endowed with

a will; instinct would have been far more effective for this purpose. Reason was

given to us in order to produce a will which was good not as a means to some

further end, but good in itself. Good will is the highest good and the condition

of all other goods, including happiness.

What, then, makes a will good in itself? To answer this question we must

investigate the concept of duty. To act from duty is to exhibit good will in the

face of difﬁculty. But we must distinguish between acting in accordance with

duty, and acting from the motive of duty. A grocer who is honest from self-

interest, or a philanthropist who delights in the contentment of others, may do

actions which are in accord with duty. But actions of this kind, however right and

amiable, have, according to Kant, no moral worth. Worth of character is shown

only when someone does good not from inclination, but from duty: when, for

instance, a man who has lost all taste for life and longs for death still does his best

to preserve his own life in accordance with the moral law.

Kant’s teaching here is directly opposed to that of Aristotle. Aristotle taught

that people were not really virtuous as long as their exercise of virtue went against

the grain; the really virtuous person thoroughly enjoyed performing acts of virtue.

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For Kant, on the other hand, it is the painfulness of well-doing that is the real

mark of virtue. He realizes that he has set daunting standards for moral conduct:

he is quite prepared to contemplate the possibility that there has never been, in

fact, an action performed solely on moral grounds and out of a sense of duty.

What is it, then, to act from duty? To act from duty is to act out of reverence

for the moral law; and the way to test whether one is so acting is to seek the

maxim, or principle, on which one acts, that is to say, the imperative to which

one’s act conforms. There are two sorts of imperative, hypothetical and categor-

ical. The hypothetical imperative says: If you wish to achieve a certain end, act

in such-and-such a way. The categorical imperative says: No matter what end

you wish to achieve, act in such-and-such a way. There are many hypothetical

imperatives, because there are many different ends which humans may set them-

selves. There is only one categorical imperative, which is this ‘Act only according

to a maxim by which you can at the same time will that it shall become a

universal law.’

Kant illustrates this with several examples, of which we may mention two. The

ﬁrst is this. Having run out of funds, I may be tempted to borrow money, though

I know that I will be unable to repay it. I am acting on the maxim ‘Whenever I

believe myself short of money, I will borrow money and promise to pay it back,

though I know that this will never be done’. I cannot will that everyone should

act on this maxim, because if everyone did so the whole institution of promising

would collapse. Hence, borrowing money in these circumstances would violate

the categorical imperative.

A second example is this. A person who is well provided for, and is asked for

help by others suffering hardship, may be tempted to respond ‘What does this

matter to me? Let every one be as happy as Heaven wills or as he can make

himself; I won’t harm him, but I won’t help him either.’ He cannot will this

maxim to be universalized, because a situation might arise in which he himself

needed love and sympathy from others.

These cases illustrate two different ways in which the categorical imperative

applies. In the ﬁrst case, the maxim cannot be universalized because its universal-

ization involves contradiction (if no one keeps promises, there is no such thing as

promising). In the second case, the maxim can be universalized without contradic-

tion, but no one could rationally will the situation which would result from its

universalization. Kant says the two different cases correspond to two different

kinds of duty: strict duties, and meritorious duties.

Not all Kant’s examples are convincing. He argues, for instance, that the

categorical imperative excludes suicide. But however wrong suicide may be, there

is nothing self-contradictory in the prospect of universal suicide; and someone

sufﬁciently despairing might regard it as a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Kant offers a further formulation of the categorical imperative. ‘Act in such a

way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person

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of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.’ He

claims, though he has not convinced many of his readers, that this is equivalent to

the earlier imperative, and enables the same practical conclusions to be drawn. It

is, in fact, more effective than the earlier formulation in ruling out suicide. To

take one’s own life, Kant urges, is to use one’s own person as a means of bringing

to an end one’s discomfort and distress.

As a human being, Kant says, I am not only an end in myself, I am a member

of a kingdom of ends, a union of rational beings under common laws. My will, as

has been said, is rational in so far as its maxims can be made universal laws. The

converse of this is that universal law is law which is made by rational wills like

mine. A rational being ‘is subject only to laws which are made by himself and yet

are universal’. In the kingdom of ends, we are all both legislators and subjects.

The reader is reminded of Rousseau’s general will.

Kant concludes the exposition of his moral system with a panegyric to the

dignity of virtue. In the kingdom of ends, everything has a price or a worth. If

something has a price, it can be exchanged for something else. What has worth is

unique and unexchangeable; it is beyond price. There are, Kant says, two kinds of

price: market price, which is related to the satisfaction of need; and fancy price,

which is related to the satisfaction of taste. Morality is above and beyond either

kind of price.

‘Morality, and humanity so far as it is capable of morality, is the only thing

which has worth. Skill and diligence in work have a market price; wit, lively

imagination and humour have a fancy price; but ﬁdelity to promises and kindness

based on principle (not on instinct) have an intrinsic worth.’ Kant’s words echoed

throughout the nineteenth century, and still strike a chord with many people

today.

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XVII

GERMAN IDEALISM AND

MATERIALISM

Fichte

Napoleon’s conquest of most of Europe can be compared with Alexander’s con-

quests of much of Asia and parts of Africa. The spectacular military achievements

were short-lived, but their cultural consequences were felt long after. After Napo-

leon’s ﬁnal defeat at Waterloo, tired monarchies were restored throughout the

continent; but their tenure was precarious, and many disappeared within the next

half century. French armies had carried with them the slogans of the French

Revolution; and even though, in Napoleon’s Empire, liberty had given way to mil-

itary despotism, equality had been overlain with a new aristocracy, and fraternity

had never got beyond the Cain and Abel stage, the ideal of free democracy lived

on as an aspiration throughout Europe. Moreover, sentiments of nationalism had

been kindled in countries which had been attacked or oppressed by Napoleon’s

troops. In Italy and Germany, especially, men craved to replace a patchwork of

superannuated local regimes with a single, strong, national power.

One of the founders of German nationalism was the philosopher Johann Gottlieb

Fichte. He was a professor at Jena and in the new University of Berlin, whose

active life spanned the period between the execution of Louis XVI and the

banishment of Napoleon to Elba. His Addresses to the German Nation in 1808

rebuked the Germans for the disunity which led to their defeat by Napoleon at

the battle of Jena, and he served as a volunteer in the army of resistance in 1812.

But his reputation as a philosopher rests on his book of 1804, Wissenschaftslehre.

Fichte was an admirer of Kant: his ﬁrst book had been a Critique of All

Revelation, written in the style of Kant, so successfully that it passed for the

Master’s work. He thought, however, that Kant’s philosophy contained a radical

inconsistency. Kant never gave up the notion that our experience was ultimately

caused by ‘things in themselves’ even though we could know nothing about such

things. But on his own account, the concept of cause was something which could

only be applied within the sphere of phenomena. How then could there be an

unknown, mind-independent cause outside this sphere?

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Accordingly, in his Wissenschaftslehre Fichte tried to redesign Kant’s system to

remove the inconsistency. Two ways were possible. One way would be to allow

the notion of cause to extend beyond the realm of phenomena, and allow experi-

ence to be caused by things in themselves. That is the path of dogmatism. The

other would be to abandon the thing-in-itself, and to say that experience is

created by the thinking subject. That is the path of idealism. That path Fichte

followed, and made himself the father of German Idealism.

Fichte, starting with the Ego or pure self, set himself the task of showing how

the whole of consciousness could be derived from it. His various explanations of

this derivation failed to make clear, either to his admirers or to his critics, that he

was not claiming that the individual self could create the whole material world.

But he insisted that he was talking not of an individual self, but of a single,

absolute ego, which created all phenomena and all individual selves.

This sounds rather like God, and indeed in his later, popular works, Fichte was

prepared to talk in this way. ‘It is not the ﬁnite self that exists, it is the divine Idea

that is the foundation of all philosophy; everything that man does of himself is

null and void. All existence is living and active in itself, and there is no other life

than Being, and no other Being than God.’ But elsewhere he said that it was

superstitious to believe in a divine being which was anything more than a moral

order. Fichte’s populist pantheism seems to have been only a shell for a less

pictorial philosophy which few could understand, and which those who claimed

to understand found wanting.

Hegel

One of those most indebted to, but also most critical of, Fichte was G. W. F.

Hegel, by far the most inﬂuential of the German Idealists. Born in 1770, Hegel

studied theology at the University of Tübingen, and taught at Jena until the

University was closed down by the French invasion. In 1807 he published The

Phenomenology of Spirit. It was not until 1816 that he became a Professor, at

the University of Heidelberg; by that time he had published his major work, The

Science of Logic. After publishing an encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences

(logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit), he was called in 1818 to a

Chair in Berlin, which he held until his death from cholera in 1831.

Hegel’s writings are extremely difﬁcult to read. They also make a great im-

mediate impression of profundity. On closer attention, some readers ﬁnd that

impression is enhanced, others ﬁnd that it evaporates. The least difﬁcult, and

perhaps the most inﬂuential, part of Hegel’s writing is his philosophy of history,

so let us start with that.

Hegel believed that the philosopher had a special insight into history which

ordinary historians lacked. The philosopher knows that reason is the sovereign of

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Figure 36 Portrait of Hegel.

(Private collection, Ken Welsh/Bridgeman Art Library)

the world, and that the history of the world presents us with a rational process.

This knowledge can be reached either by the study of a metaphysical system, or

by inference from the study of history itself. It corresponds to the religious belief

in providence; but it goes beyond it, because the general notion of providence is

inadequate to explain history.

To explain history is to depict the passions of mankind, the genius, the active

powers, that play their part on the great stage; and the providentially determined

process which these exhibit, constitutes what is generally called the ‘plan’ of pro-

vidence. Yet it is this very plan which is supposed to be concealed from our view;

which it is deemed presumption even to wish to recognize.

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Only the philosopher knows the ultimate destiny of the world, and how it is to

be realized. Universal history, Hegel says, consists in the development of Spirit

(Geist) and its manifestation in concrete reality. What, then, is Spirit? It is the

opposite of matter; and while the essence of matter is gravity, the essence of spirit

is freedom. While matter is thus deﬁned by the attraction its parts exercise on each

other, Spirit is existence which is self-contained, independent, and self-conscious.

As conscious of itself, Spirit is conscious of its own potentialities, and it possesses

a drive to actualize these potentialities. Universal history, Hegel says, is ‘the

exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it

is potentially’.

The notion of Spirit thus introduced is likely to be found bafﬂing on ﬁrst

acquaintance. Is it God? Or is ‘Spirit’ a misleadingly grand way of talking about

individual human minds, in the way in which medical textbooks speak of ‘the

liver’ when they are generalizing about individual people’s livers? Neither of these

guesses is quite right. To get a feel for what Hegel means it is better to reﬂect on

the way in which we all talk about the human race. Without any particular meta-

physical commitment, we are happy to say such things as that the human race has

progressed, or is in decline, or has learnt many things in the age of science of

which it was ignorant in the age of barbarism. When Hegel uses the word ‘Spirit’

he means much more than we do when we talk of the human race; but he is

using the same kind of language.

Thus, when he says that in history Spirit progresses in consciousness of freedom,

Hegel traces the growth of awareness of freedom among human beings. Those who

lived under oriental despots did not know that they were free beings. The Greeks

and Romans knew that they themselves were free, but their keeping of slaves

showed that they did not know that man as such was free. ‘The German nations,

under the inﬂuence of Christianity, were the ﬁrst to attain the consciousness that

man, as man, is free: that it is the freedom of Spirit which constitutes its essence.’

The destiny of the world is Spirit’s expansion of its freedom and its conscious-

ness of its freedom. But this, though all-important, is an abstract statement: what

are the means in the concrete by which Spirit realizes its freedom? Nothing

seems to happen in the world except as the result of the self-interested actions

of individuals, and history presents a dismal spectacle: it is, as Hegel puts it, the

slaughterhouse in which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the

virtues of individuals are sacriﬁced. But gloom is not justiﬁed: for the self-

interested actions of individuals are the only means by which the ideal destiny of

the world can be realized. ‘Nothing great in the world has been accomplished

without passion.’ The Ideal provides the warp, and human passions the woof,

of the web of history. The union of the two is ‘Liberty, under the conditions of

morality, in a State’.

The self-interested activities of individuals are the instruments by which the

World-Spirit (Weltgeist) achieves its object; but they are unconscious that they are

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doing so. They do so to greatest effect when a State is so organized that the

private interests of the citizens coincide with the common interest of the State. In

respect of world history, states and peoples themselves count as individuals; but

there are also some unique ﬁgures who have a special role in Spirit’s expression of

itself: world-historical individuals such as Julius Caesar or Napoleon, whose own

particular aims express the will of the World-Spirit, and who see the aspects of

history which are ripe for development in their time.

These great men, however, are the exception, and the normal development of

the World-Spirit is through the spirit of particular peoples or nations, the Volksgeist.

This spirit manifests itself in a people’s social and political institutions, cul-

ture, religion, and philosophy. Nations are not necessarily identical with States –

indeed, it was the great task of nineteenth-century German nationalism to turn

the German Nation into a German Reich – but only in a State does a nation

become self-conscious of itself as a nation.

The creation of the State is indeed the high object for which the World-Spirit

has been using individuals and peoples as its instruments. The State ‘is the realiza-

tion of Freedom, i.e. of the absolute ﬁnal aim, and it exists for its own sake’. All

the worth, all the spiritual reality which the individual human being possesses, he

possesses only through the state. For only in participating in social and political

life is he fully conscious of his own rationality, and of himself as a manifestation,

through the Folk-Spirit, of the World-Spirit. The State, Hegel says, is the Divine

Idea as it exists on earth.

It is the interplay between Folk-Spirits which constitutes the history of the World-

Spirit and enables it to realize its destiny. In different epochs, different Folk-Spirits

are the primary manifestation of the progress of the World-Spirit. The people

to which it belongs will be, for one epoch, the dominant people in the world

history. For each nation, the hour strikes once and only once. In Hegel’s time the

hour had struck for the German nation. Whereas the English can say ‘we are the

men who navigate the ocean, and have the commerce of the world’, the German

can say ‘The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization

of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom’.

German history is divided into three periods: the period up to Charlemagne,

which Hegel calls the Kingdom of the Father; the period from Charlemagne to

the Reformation, the Kingdom of the Son; and ﬁnally the Kingdom of the Holy

Ghost, from the Reformation up to and including the Prussian monarchy. Though

Prussia is almost the realization of the ideal, it is not to be the last word of the

World-Spirit. One might expect, given the preference which Hegel commonly

shows for wholes over their parts, that nation-states would eventually give way to

a world state. But Hegel disliked the idea of a world state, because it would take

away the opportunity for war, which he thought had a positive value of its own

as a reminder of the transitory nature of ﬁnite existence. Instead, the future of

the world lies in America ‘where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of

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the world’s history shall reveal itself ’ – perhaps in a great continental struggle

between North and South.

Hegel’s philosophy of history, he claimed, could be deduced from his meta-

physics. Only there can we see the full meaning of his invocation of World-Spirit,

for the references to it are not meant to be mere metaphors for the operation of

impersonal historical forces. Spirit, in Hegel’s metaphysical system, resembles

Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception in being the subject of all experience,

which cannot itself be an object of experience. Kant seems content to assume that

there will be a separate such focus in the life of each individual mind. But what

ground is there for this assumption? Behind Kant’s transcendental self stands the

Cartesian ego; and one of the ﬁrst critics of Descartes’ cogito put the question to

him: how do you know that it is you who thinks, and not the world-soul that

thinks in you? Hegel’s spirit, then, is meant to be a centre of consciousness which

is prior to any individual consciousness. One Spirit thinks severally in the thoughts

of Descartes and in the thoughts of Kant, perhaps rather as I, as a single person,

can feel simultaneously toothache and gout in different parts of myself.

The existence of Spirit is said, by Hegel, to be a matter of logic. Just as he sees

history as a manifestation of logic, so he tends to see logic in historical, indeed

military, terms. If two propositions are contradictories, Hegel will describe this as

a conﬂict between them: one proposition will go out to do battle against another,

and achieve defeat or victory against it. This is called ‘dialectic’, the process by

which one proposition (the thesis) ﬁghts with another (the antithesis) and both

are ﬁnally conquered by a third (the synthesis). Let us illustrate how Hegel uses

this dialectical method in practice.

The subject matter of logic is the Absolute, the totality of reality, familiar to

us from earlier philosophers as Being. We start from the thesis that the Absolute

is pure Being. But pure Being without any qualities is nothing; so we are led

to the antithesis ‘The Absolute is nothing’. This thesis and antithesis are over-

come by synthesis: the union of Being and Unbeing is becoming, and so we say

‘The Absolute is Becoming’. The Absolute has a life of its own, which passes

through three stages, Concept, Nature, and Spirit. These three stages are studied

by three different branches of philosophy, logic, philosophy of nature, and phi-

losophy of spirit.

Hegel often refers to the Absolute by the word ‘God’, and a modern Christian

might think to identify the three stages in the life of the Absolute with (i) the

existence of God alone before the world began, (ii) the existence of the natural

creation before the evolution of man, and (iii) the history of the human race. But

this would be far too simple. Hegel does make use of Aristotle’s deﬁnition of

God when he describes the Absolute as being the Thought which thinks itself.

But it turns out that the self-awareness of the Absolute comes at the end, not at

the beginning, of this life-cycle, and it is brought into existence by the philo-

sophical reﬂection of human beings. It is the history of philosophy which brings

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