Introducing Kant E-Book

Christopher Kul-Want

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 111

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Immanuel Kant laid the foundations of modern Western thought. Every subsequent major philosopher owes a profound debt to Kant's attempts to delimit human reason as an appropriate object of philosophical enquiry. And yet, Kant's relentless systematic formalism made him a controversial figure in the history of the philosophy that he helped to shape. Introducing Kant focuses on the three critiques of Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgement. It describes Kant's main formal concepts: the relation of mind to sensory experience, the question of freedom and the law and, above all, the revaluation of metaphysics. Kant emerges as a diehard rationalist yet also a Romantic, deeply committed to the power of the sublime to transform experience. The illustrated guide explores the paradoxical nature of the pre-eminent philosopher of the Enlightenment, his ideas and explains the reasons for his undiminished importance in contemporary philosophical debates.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP Email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-209-8

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Early Life

The Enlightenment

Theories of Mind and Nature

What is Metaphysics?

Kant’s Early Career

Early Pre-Critical Work from 1746 to 1770

Period of Silence, 1770–80

Critical Philosophy

The Potential of Judgement

Three Cognitive Faculties

Imagination and Reflexivity

Understanding, Representation and Reason

The Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

The Uncertainties of Representation

The Central Question

The Transcendental Aesthetic

The Role of Form

Space and Time

The Absences of Space and Time

Two Operations of Imagination: Apprehension and Reproduction

Understanding and Intuition

The Categories

Kant’s Four Categories

How Does Understanding Occur?

Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”

How Images (Data) Become Possible

Understanding and Apperception

The Help of Reason

The Illusions of Understanding

The Paralogisms of Pure Reason

The Antinomy of Pure Reason

The Ideal of Pure Reason

Kant’s Middle Years

Dining with Professor Kant

The Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

Predestination or Free Will?

Free Will and Desire

Moral Examples

The Antinomy of Practical Reason

Unconditional Freedom

Effort and Sacrifice

Rethinking the Faculties

Absolute Absence of Moral Reason

The Limits of Consciousness

Pure Freedom and Desire for Knowledge

The Sacrifice of Freedom

The Noumenon or “Thing in Itself”

Mourning and Sacrifice

Suffering the Absence of Reason

Freedom of the Rational Being

The Suprasensible System

Subject to the Law

Free to Think Freedom

The Categorical Imperative

Avoid Illusion

Seek Self-Contentment

Moral Law Cannot be Represented

Kant’s Physical Obsessions

The Critique of Judgement (1790)

Analytic of the Beautiful

Judgement and Feeling

Judgement and Form

The Unknown in its Relation to Judgement

The Place of Feeling in Judgement

The Sensuality of Thought

The Priority of Design

Nature Versus Artifice

Nature, Design and Ornament

Genius Transforms Nature

The Order of the Arts

Romantic Ideas of Genius

Genius and Deformation

Analytic of the Sublime

Burke’s View of the Sublime

The Mathematical Sublime

The Dynamic Sublime

Experiencing the Sublime

Excess of Freedom

Freedom From Nature

Freedom, Pain and Desire

Critique of Teleological Judgement

Kant and Religion

Job, An Elightenment Figure

What is Enlightenment?

Private and Public Reason

A Royal Warning

Kant’s Last Days

After Kant

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Michel Foucault (1926–84)

Jean-François Lyotard (b. 1924)

Jacques Derrida (b. 1930)

Conclusion

Further Reading

Author’s acknowledgements

Artist’s acknowledgements

Index

Situated at the threshold of modern thought, Kant’s philosophy is marked by scepticism and a loss of faith in both religion and metaphysics. His writings are remarkable for the way in which they systematically refute any claim to know what the truth is, or where it lies.

If we say, ‘There is no God’, there is not the least contradiction in such a judgement

Yet, in the face of this overwhelming demolition of traditional beliefs, Kant’s philosophy develops a new and profound sense of affirmation. It affirms the limits of human knowledge and the creative possibilities resulting from an acknowledgement of these limits. In place of superstition and dogma, Kant embraces change and human fallibility, recognizing these qualities to be the sources of pleasure. Such an outlook exceeds modernism’s desire for order and progress and places Kant’s thought within the turmoil of the postmodern.

Early Life

Immanuel Kant was born in the East Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) at 5 a.m., 22 April 1724. He was the fourth of nine children, three of whom died in infancy. His mother, Anna Regina, died when he was thirteen. Kant acknowledged a lasting debt to her love and instruction. She seems to have been the first to recognize his intellectual gifts.

It was she who decided to direct me toward an academic education.

His father, Johann Georg, was a harness-maker, and died when Kant was twenty-two. Kant spent his childhood in an artisanal suburb of Königsberg, growing up in an intensely Pietist milieu.

Königsberg was founded in the year of Kant’s birth out of an amalgam of three large towns grouped around the River Pregel. Unlike other German cities of the period, Königsberg did not possess a closed urban élite consisting of patricians or local rural aristocracy.

It was the second largest city in Prussia and the most economically and culturally dynamic in Germany. This allowed for a certain upward social mobility in the academic profession, owing to its particular economic and class structure.

Kant went to school at the Collegium Fridericianum, a private Pietist foundation, between 1732 and 1740, aided by the family pastor, Franz Albert Schütz, who was also a principal of the school.

I followed a rigorous and austere schooling in grammar and philology, accompanied by a régime of inflexible piety. We stress above all the felt power of God’s grace to transform the believer’s life through a conversion of “born again” experience. In religious controversy, we urge that the aim should be to win over the heart of one’s opponent rather than to gain intellectual victory.

Pietism was founded in Germany by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705). The Pietists regarded Christian faith not as a set of doctrinal propositions but as a living relationship with God.

For Pietism, the institution of the Lutheran church was considered less important than “the church invisible”, whose membership in principle included the whole of humanity.

Despite Pietism’s emphasis upon intuitive experience, its adherents laid great stress upon devotional exercises. A contemporary of Kant’s at the Collegium Fridericianum, David Ruhnken, who later became teacher of philology at the University of Leiden, spoke of the “pedantic and gloomy discipline of fanatics” which dominated the organization of the school.

The curriculum of the institution was filled with uninterrupted prayers and periods of devotional exercises, with periods of edification, sermons and catechizing. Theoretical classes were designed to insist upon the topics’ relation to religious and theological questions.

Whilst Kant cherished the memory of the domestic Pietism of his parents and maintained respect for their traditional Pietist calm and serenity, he had nothing but scorn for the official version of Pietism encountered at school.

Partly under the influence of rational philosophy, he later became opposed in principle to religious ceremonies. In a letter of 1775 to J.C. Lavater he stated, “No confession of faith, no appeal to holy names nor any observance of religious ceremonies can help to gain salvation”.

I regard petitionary prayer as the “wheedling of God”.

As rector of the University of Königsberg, he was always “indisposed” when his official participation in religious observances was required.

Kant’s one inspiring teacher at the Fridericianum was the Latin master Heydenreich who introduced him to a life-long love of Latin literature. Of Heydenreich’s other colleagues, Kant was later to comment . . .

They were incapable of inflaming the sparks within us for the study of philosophy or mathematics but could certainly blow them out!

Nevertheless, by the age of sixteen, Kant had fulfilled the state-imposed matriculation requirement of the local university.

Accounts of Kant during his early years as a student show him to be poor, although there are indications that he was supported financially by some of his fellow students in return for his help with their work!

The University of Königsberg was organized in the four traditional faculties, the three “higher faculties” of theology, law and medicine, and the fourth or “lower faculty” of philosophy. It is not known in which faculty Kant enrolled, but in spite of great poverty he did not pursue the qualification for a bureaucratic post in the Prussian administration.

I dedicated myself to the “lower faculty” of philosophy.

For much of the 18th century, the lower faculty was the most dynamic and innovative in the university. Because its curriculum was not adapted to the demands of the university, the range of subjects covered by philosophy included physics and geography, ignored by the higher faculties, and even religion, jurisprudence and medicine, which were their protected domains.

The Enlightenment

Importantly, for Kant, the faculty of philosophy was in the best position to respond to the contemporary debates of the Enlightenment, in which developments in science were having their effect upon questions of metaphysics and religion.

Kant was introduced by his professor, Martin Knutzen (1714–51), to a wide range of material, including the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (or Principia) by Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727).

I defined a new science of dynamics and mechanics, concerned with the forces that hold the universe together. Newton’s principal contributions to science were to envisage interactions between particles other than solely through contact, and to give force a central role in the theory of matter, linking it directly with gravity.

Inevitably, Newton’s theories reopened questions of causality. However, Newton himself countered the idea of a self-generating universe, by holding that gravitation was due to the direct action of God Himself.

Elsewhere in Europe, religion was under pressure from science. The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78) provided a new classification of plants built upon their sexuality (Systema Naturae, 1735).

I see nature as having a history far older than that suggested by Biblical chronology. But I still saw nature as a harmonious and balanced system created by God.

Linnaeus’ views were challenged by the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88) in his vast Histoire Naturelle (1749–67). Buffon argued that classifications were merely heuristic devices incapable of revealing the “real” structure of nature.

Buffon came close to the idea that species could change over time – a theory which foreshadows Darwin’s evolutionism. These views, and his implicit support for the idea that man was intrinsically within the natural order, led to condemnations by the theology faculty of Paris in 1749.

Theories of Mind and Nature

Philosophers at this time regarded themselves as what we would now call “scientists”. Our current distinction between philosophy and “science” did not yet exist. Even the “empirical” David Hume (1711–76) defined his moral philosophy as the “science of human nature”. Hume saw his philosophy as analogous to the physical inquiries of Isaac Newton.

My branch of science is concerned with the secret springs and principles by which the human mind is actuated in its operations.

These philosophers, just prior to Kant, set the agenda for the classical “mind and body” (or “soul and body”) problem, i.e., the study of cognition, which today is investigated as a “brain and mind” problem in experimental psychology.

Other contemporary philosophers, such as Denis Diderot (1713–84), co-editor of the monumental Encyclopédie (1751–72), applied themselves to the “nature” of life itself.

We produced a picture of “life” as the constitutive force of nature, an impulsion within living beings themselves to survive, to reproduce, and to obey the laws of their own existence. Just as science unsettled transcendental views, so problems appeared in metaphysics itself!

“I have had the fate to be in love with metaphysics”, wrote Kant in 1776, “although I can hardly flatter myself to have received favours from her”. This unrequited love of metaphysics provided the leitmotif and underlying drama of Kant’s whole career.

What is Metaphysics?

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that takes its name from the Metaphysics of Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), a number of his treatises or lecture courses, written at different times and brought together later by an unknown classical editor. He gave the title Metaphysics to this collection because the topics discussed follow the philosophy of nature (physics), as well as being concerned with reality as a whole (meta in Greek means above or beyond).

Thus, metaphysics as a branch of philosophy refers to the study and theory of the question of Being.

“There is a branch of knowledge that studies Being qua Being, and the attributes that belong to it in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences, since none of these inquires universally about Being qua Being.” (Aristotle, Metaphysics)

Aristotle’s great predecessor Plato (c. 428–348 B.C.) had expressed a dualistic view of Being.

The concept of Being is equated with an eternal, transcendental world of unchanging Forms which exists in a hierarchical relation to the physical, corporeal world.

Plato’s famous story of the cave in Book VII of The Republic (366 B.C.) illustrates his dualistic system. The story, told by Socrates, describes a group of prisoners who live in an underground cave, bound and chained so that they can only see straight ahead.

What they see on one of the walls of the cave are shadows of men “carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials”. These men move about behind the prisoners, divided from them by a raised way upon which is built a low wall.

These men seem like marionette players who perform above a screen.

Above and behind both the prisoners and men burns a fire whose light casts the shadows seen by the prisoners upon the wall opposite.

Socrates states that this story is a metaphor of the human condition.

Man, like the prisoners, witnesses the fire of divine truth at several removes and thus inhabits and experiences a mere semblance of true reality.

Man has become separated from the “real” light of truth, the transcendent realm of the Gods. Platonic philosophy promises that after a series of reincarnations such a state of unity may be reattained.