Immanuel Kant: Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment
**Kant: Historical Context**
Modernity and the Enlightenment
- Pre-Revolutionary France: Enlightened Despotism
- Absolute power of the monarch, who receives it from God.
- The king is the sovereign, possessing all authority: “Everything for the people, but without the people.”
- Influence of enlightened ideas on the continent’s monarchies through a portion of the nobility and gentry.
- England: Parliamentary Monarchy
- The king reigns but does not govern.
- Primacy of the democratically elected parliament.
Enlightenment Revolutions
- Glorious Revolution in England.
- Independence of the colonies, a result of the Glorious Revolution:
- In the North American colonies, enlightened ideas were advocated not only by some nobles and bourgeois but also by the people.
- U.S. Constitution.
- The French Revolution.
In Germany, enlightened despotism under Frederick William I, Frederick II the Great (The Splendor of German culture), and Frederick William II, who was anti-Enlightenment. (Kant faced censorship problems during this time).
Sociocultural Context
- The Enlightenment, a new cultural, political, social, and educational movement, gradually spread across Europe and America.
- Rise of the bourgeoisie and the first steps towards addressing societal problems.
- Trust in reason:
- Criticism: capable of coping with problems.
- Secularized: independent of religious systems.
- Autonomous: consistent with itself and self-governing.
- Belief in education and knowledge:
- “Sapere aude” – Dare to know.
- Exit from the “guilty minority.”
- Idea of free will.
- Publication in France, in 1751, of the *Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts*.
- Confidence in progress:
- More and better knowledge will lead to continuous progress for mankind.
Philosophical Context
- Rationalism, based on the continent
- Innate ideas.
- Mathematics as a model of deductive reasoning and metaphysical speculation.
- English Empiricism
- Denial of the existence of innate ideas: all ideas and knowledge come from experience.
- Metaphysics as a model of inductive reasoning and the experimental method.
- Denial of metaphysics.
- Criticism: Synthesis of rationalism and empiricism (Kant).
Kant’s Thought
Kant assumes that man has a moral conscience, a moral law, which raises the question of how to act: What should I do? It is at the level of practical reason that the question arises not of what things are, which belongs to pure theoretical reason, but of how they should be. This is the practical function of reason: to ask for the principles of acting, just as pure reason makes judgments. As we shall see, practical reason makes imperatives, commands that must be universal, necessary, and a priori synthetic. These are categorical imperatives. This imperative is also formal and autonomous, which are the features of Kantian ethics.
Kant proposed an ethics valid for all people and for all times, that is, a universal ethics. This ethic must be formal, not material, with neither happiness nor pleasure as goals. It does not tell us what we must do, but how we should act. It is autonomous; no one outside of us can tell us how we should behave, in which case it would be heteronomous. It emphatically does not start from any hypothetical scenario: “If you want to do this, you have to do that,” because it would not be universal, but valid only for those who wanted to achieve that goal. What determines whether an action is good is the subjugation of the will to reason. To act ethically is to act out of duty. Duty is the criterion of the goodness or badness of our actions.
Kant distinguishes three ways of acting: against duty, according to duty, and out of duty. Each person has written within them, in their conscience, what their duty is. Kant gives us some formulations of his categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
The moral experience of acting out of respect for duty implies freedom, as one of the postulates of ethics. If there were no freedom, there would be no moral conduct. The world and God are the other two postulates of practical reason, as demonstrated in his theory of knowledge. Human beings want, need to know.
Kant asks three fundamental questions: What can I know? (answered in his *Critique of Pure Reason*), What should I do? (answered in his *Critique of Practical Reason*), and What may I hope? (answered in his *Critique of Judgment*). All three can be reduced to a single question: What is man? If practical reason shows the foundation of all morality, pure reason shows the foundation of scientific knowledge.
The *Critique of Pure Reason* has three parts:
1. Transcendental Aesthetic: Deals with synthetic a priori judgments in mathematics. Space and time are a priori conditions of our sensibility that allow for mathematics and science.
2. Transcendental Analytic: Deals with a priori judgments in physics and knowledge categories. Knowledge consists of what we receive from experience through our senses and what our reason contributes. The sciences consist of judgments, which are synthetic a priori. Synthetic judgments are those whose predicate is not included in the subject and teach something new, unlike analytic judgments in which the predicate is included in the subject. A priori judgments are not derived from experience but precede and make it possible. Therefore, the necessary judgments valid for science are those that teach something new (synthetic) and are a priori, that is, universal, necessary, and not dependent on experience.
What we perceive through experience is the phenomenon, and what is beyond experience is the noumenon. We can only know the phenomena, which come from experience. The whole of experience gives us a kind and a vacuum in which to place what is perceived by the senses.
3. Transcendental Dialectic: Attempts to demonstrate synthetic a priori judgments in metaphysics and whether metaphysics, therefore, is a science, that is, the subject of scientific knowledge. Metaphysics, by definition, consists of synthetic a priori judgments; it is the noumenon, what is beyond experience, beyond space and time, which are the conditions that allow for knowledge. It deals with the unconditioned, which is why metaphysics is impossible as a science. The objects of metaphysics are the three substances of the rationalists: I, world, and God. These three substances are real but are not the subject of knowledge because they do not come from experience: one does not perceive the self, the world, or God, but particular things. They are ideal ratios, which are the third source of knowledge and postulates of practical reason.