Immanuel Kant’s legacy is enormous. He has influenced epistemology, moral theory, existentialism, and poststructuralism. His ideas have been criticized, reworked, expanded upon, and vilified. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the Kantian system, it is a model of our reality that cannot be ignored.
What is striking in the philosophic literature is the wide variety of labels assigned to Kant. He is called an idealist, a rationalist, and a transcendentalist, along with a variety of variations on those themes. What he is never called is a materialist. It is not my intention to make such a claim in this chapter. However, it is my intention to claim that Kant was a pivotal figure in the rise of materialism within the continental approach to the social inquiry.
Kant’s significance to the emergence of a materialist model of social inquiry is in the doors his philosophy opens. The role of cognition in the construction of human knowledge, the extent and limits of our knowledge, and the subjective character of judgment are but some of the few avenues that Kant explores. These ideas have been reworked and developed by others over the last two hundred years. It is possible to criticize Kant, to reject his system and its ideas. What it is not possible is to ignore him.
This chapter will begin by exploring some of Kant’s predecessors. This will accomplish two tasks. First it will establish the epistemological context that Kant will draw on, react to, and argue with, in the development of his own model. Kant has an agenda, but that agenda can, in part, be found in the dynamics of the intellectual debate engaged by Kant’s immediate predecessors.
The second matter that can be addressed by this strategy is to introduce one of the dynamics for this work as a whole. The continental tradition in philosophy shares some common elements with the empirical and positivists schools. However, there are also some significant differences that are highlighted by the way in which Immanuel Kant responds to the empiricist David Hume. Some of those differences highlight the more far-reaching distinctions between the two traditions in philosophy and are worth noting here. Sir Francis Bacon and David Hume will be presented as representatives of the empirical tradition. Rene Descartes will be discussed as a predecessor to Kant from the continental tradition.
Following that discussion, I will briefly summarize the three projects that occupied Kant’s writings; knowledge of nature, the conditions for moral prescriptions, and the issue of human judgment. Kant calls the works on these topics “critiques,” but they are really explorations of the conditions that are necessary to the formulation of knowledge within each sphere. This is what is so radical about Kant’s approach. He explores the conditions of knowledge rather than making positive assertions about the world itself. This is the cornerstone of his “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy. The Kantian system seeks to outline a meta-theory about the rules and conditions of knowledge more generally. In that sense, Kant’s general intent will be echoed in the works by Hegel, Marx, and the poststructuralists.
The chapter will conclude with an analysis of Kant’s work in the light of the materialist model outlined in chapter 1. There are quite a few areas in which Kant could never be considered a materialist. However, by opening a discourse on the limits of human understanding, the mediate condition of knowing, and the subjective character of judgment, Kant is beginning to open the door for a materialist understanding of the world. Kant does not walk through that door. However, others do.
It took hundreds of years for the development of materialist forms of social inquiry. It was dangerous to espouse some of the concepts necessary for the development of materialism at the end of the Middle Ages. It could lead to banishment, imprisonment, or worse. However, materialist philosophy had a fellow traveler, empirical science.
Empirical science is not exactly the same as materialist social inquiry, but the success of empirical science in explaining recurring patterns in nature and providing a means to harness nature forces for production allowed for the acceptance of scientific explanations of the world and its processes. There was an affinity between the rise of science and a materialist form of social inquiry. This led to the development of an epistemological model in which there was less emphasis on religious and teleological explanations of the world. Tension existed between metaphysics and the emerging scientific method, and the intellectual space for an alternative understanding of how to conduct social inquiry began to emerge.
The anti-transcendental character of the scientific outlook provided room for a new avenue of questions regarding the nature and character of social and cultural life. In ancient Greece there was little distinction between the metaphysical question of the “right form” of social life and the study of the exiting conditions of the social order. The transcendental was fused with the analysis of the contemporary social order. The case was similar during the Middle Ages. The moral was synonymous with the true, and the telos of implementing God’s plan became the work of the philosopher/theologian.
The opening for a new understanding of social inquiry requires a new epistemological outlook. Bacon, Descartes, Hume, and Kant all move in the direction of defining new assumptions and new methods about what human beings can know. And, while each separates his ideas from the epistemology of the Middle Ages, each shares a concern about the limitations of human understanding. Each raises some doubt about the expanse of the mind’s ability to know, while outlining a means by which we can extend ourselves to those limits. In carrying out this formulation we are reminded of both the material substance of the world as the central issue of knowledge and the materiality of our own presence in the world.
These figures outline many of the problems with which nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers must grapple. What is the nature of knowledge? Can we define being? How can we arrive at ethical conduct and codes of human behavior? All of this must be carried out within an intellectual environment that is increasingly suspicious of metaphysical explanations of social and physical reality.
Some of the first systematic works of the modern age on the matters of science, understanding, and materialism can be found in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). In the “Great Instauration” and “Novum Organum” Bacon discusses both the problems of the old form of knowledge and outlines a methodology for the scientific method. Both essays convey the necessity of moving into a greater materialist understanding of the world.
Coming out of the Middle Ages it was clear that the epistemological methods employed were not providing human beings with a means to generate a greater and more accurate understanding of the physical environment. As Bacon puts it, “ . . . what is now done in the matter of science there is only a whirling round about; and perpetual agitation, ending where it began.”[1] Logic applied to the world seems only to perpetuate falsehoods.[2] There is a tendency to defer to traditions in the study of things rather than employing methods that will generate new knowledge.[3] New ideas are often ridiculed and rejected by a population that prefers simple answers.[4]
Bacon’s point is that there is need not just for greater knowledge of the physical world, but that this can be accomplished only by using a different methodology for the construction of knowledge. This is to be carried out with the employment of two strategies: the use of an alternative form of logic, and a more rigorous program of observation and experimentation. This requires engaging the material of the world directly as an object and not treating nature as if it were only the reflection of some divine plan.
Bacon repeatedly refers to the use of syllogistic reasoning as part of the old thinking about science and the world. Syllogistic reasoning, or deductive logic, relies on the authority of some accepted truth in order to generate new claims to truth. Such thinking, claims Bacon, is useful for clarifying arguments and terminology. However, this logic has several flaws. First of all, it contains the implicit danger of perpetuating falsehoods.[5] If one of the premises in the syllogistic argument is false, then the conclusion will also be false. For that reason, Bacon makes it very clear that he does not accept “tradition” as the proper validating mechanism to a claim to knowledge. Real progress comes from tearing down traditions when they can be proven false.[6]
But to Bacon the biggest flaw in deductive reasoning is that it cannot formulate new knowledge about the world. Beginning with accepted truths means that deductive logic can only extend the description or character of an already accepted knowledge claim. Therefore, Bacon asserts that the new method of knowledge construction must employ inductive logic. Induction can generate new knowledge. It does not rely on tradition or the repetition of accepted truth. Instead, it begins with the observations of material reality.
Inductive logic in the sciences begins with the observation of phenomena. Information from the senses may be sifted and examined in many ways.[7] The sense impressions are then analyzed by the intellect for indications of regularity, causality, or other conditions that provide some new information about the object and its relation to other objects in the world. Empirical and rational faculties are employed in this analysis.[8]
Relying on sense impressions for the generation and verification of knowledge claims provides the scientific enterprise with a means to validate claims to knowledge that are not subjective in character. Further, because sense impressions have their origin in the observation of what can be observed in the material environment it is possible for others to observe the same phenomena. Through this process claims to knowledge can be accepted or rejected within a wide community of observers. Bacon refers to this process as “demonstration.”
Therefore, providing a new method opens up a new path for the creation of knowledge. We must begin again.[9] All the past claims must be reexamined. We must begin with sense impressions of the material world and employ a systematic examination of nature in a careful and deliberate way.[10] Induction is a form of knowledge construction that “upholds the senses.”[11] Where the senses seem inadequate to the task, instruments and experiments can be employed to further our understanding.[12]
By asserting the significance of sense impression in the demonstration for claims to knowledge Bacon helped push our philosophic understanding of the nature of knowledge in a new direction. Sense impressions, cognitions, and testable hypotheses are now the means by which we can make claims to knowledge. Material reality takes center stage. Religion is given a nudge toward the realm of the irrational, even as Bacon “prays” that the knowledge of things human will not “interfere with things divine.”[13]
The contrast between the world of human knowledge and the realm of things divine is also found in the work of René Descartes (1596–1650). But Descartes is closer to what will be called the rationalist school of philosophy than Bacon. Descartes relies on a dualism between that which is part of the realm of the divine, accessible through the use of reason, and that which is the realm of physical reality. According to Descartes, we know that there is a God because “nothing cannot be the cause of something.”[14]
But Descartes is also looking for a new path to knowledge of our physical world. Like Bacon, he rejects deductive logic as a path forward. It simply will not provide us with any new knowledge about the world.[15] The truths it has produced are mingled with errors. What is needed is a new method that allows the sorting of truth from error. All things must be doubted so that we can put our understanding of the world on a new foundation. Begin with simple facts and move to more complex ones in a systematic way.[16]
However, Descartes's solution interjects the idea of consciousness into the process of understanding. Descartes asserts a dualistic philosophy that distinguishes the activities of consciousness, the mind, from the senses in the exploration of the physical world. The methods employed are, therefore, also different. For the exploration of the mind, there is only consciousness exploring itself. For an inquiry into the nature of physical reality the senses serve as the initiator of understanding.[17]
It is possible to have knowledge of cause and effect in the world.[18] However, this is only the case for the realm of the senses and only in a limited way. The senses cannot tell us the essence of an object, but can tell us only what may be useful or harmful in an object.[19]
The senses may also deceive us. Sensation assigns more substance to rocks than to air. The senses tell us the earth is flat rather than spherical.[20] For this reason Descartes says that we need to both train ourselves with an understanding of the physical world and to recognize the difference between sense impressions and cognition.
Sensations initiate our understanding of the world, but the sensations are turned to understanding only once they have undergone the process of reflection. At this stage in our understanding, sensations move from body to mind. Descartes's point is that the mind has certain capacities to process sensation that turn it from pure sense impression to understanding. The mind implicitly knows the character of extension in space and time.[21] The mind has the capacity to process ideas of quantity, division, substance, and voids.[22]
Descartes remains a central figure in the development of modern philosophy. However, his ontological dualism may raise a question about his centrality in the rise of materialism in the Western world. A realm of pure thought and consciousness leaves open the possibility for speculation about non-material causality in the world. This critique is softened, somewhat, if we accept that Descartes is struggling with the role and status of consciousness even as he is trying to overcome the biases of deductive inquiry coming out of the Middle Ages.
Therefore, even as Descartes would not be considered a “materialist” in any formal sense, he is helping to set in motion a path of inquiry that stresses a methodical inquiry into the physical conditions that surround us. In Descartes's statement that we cannot know the essence of physical objects he is effectively denying the possibility of transcendent knowledge in the realm of experience. This claim effectively challenges both the ethical teleologies of ancient philosophy and the transcendentalism of Christianity as it applies to the physical conditions of the world.
He tells us to doubt what we know. Then it is through our conscious, meticulous, and systematic inquiry into those conditions that we can formulate a body of knowledge that serves human needs. An inquiry into the nature of matter and our material environment is an important component of Descartes's focus.
David Hume (1711–1776) is a major figure in the development of empiricist philosophy and an important philosopher of modernity. He is also a critical figure in moving a form of materialist philosophy to the center of philosophic debates.
Hume claims that all knowledge is from sensation. Human beings have no innate ideas.[23] The ideas we have are a compilation of sense impressions, as they are stored in the human memory.[24] Ideas are formulated out of these sense impressions, but as Hume states, while sense impressions are strong and immediate, ideas are more distant and subject to the influence of sentiments and creative fantasy.[25]
Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality. . . . But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find upon a nearer examination that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.[26]
At this point Hume has already demonstrated a certain level of materialist credentials. However, he is going to examine the implications of these simple concepts and explore the consequences for knowledge more generally. Metaphysics and religion cannot be demonstrated with reference to sense impression and are therefore relegated to irrational superstition.[27] Morality is argued to be a sentiment that is largely the product of cultural conditioning. Therefore, any notion of morality that is asserted to be the eternal and immutable principles of transcendent reason is rejected.[28] Morality must be treated as relative to custom and culture. Morality is a feeling rather than something that can be considered as hard immutable fact.
But Hume is going to go further, raising doubt about our ability to have knowledge at all. He carries out his epistemological critique by strictly adhering to the empirical principles he presents. He claims that cause and effect among physical objects is something the mind “infers” from the association of two conditions with one another. We do not directly experience causality. To do so would violate the material premises of empiricism.[29]
Hume also challenges the epistemological validity of the inductive enterprise outlined by Bacon. Statements of fact always have the possibility of error.[30] Since inductive reason relies on the direct observation on the part of the subject, there may be a domain of objects not considered in the formulation of truth claims. Further, since inductive statements are predictive of future conditions, conditions that have yet to be experienced, the results of inductive logic are not factual but probable. Therefore, the products of inductive reason are probabilistic hypotheses based on past experiences but, in a strict empirical sense, cannot be asserted as factual. The same results will only appear if all the conditions surrounding the event are similar.[31]
There is little doubt that Hume furthers the scope and significance of materialism as a philosophic position in modern epistemology. His demands for empirical referents in claims to knowledge and his claims that science is hypothetical and probabilistic set the parameters for the modern understanding of science.
However, Hume is less adept at expressing the materiality of subjective experience. Hume states that the science of man is the foundation for all other sciences and sets himself the task of defining its character. Nevertheless, while denying the notion of “innate ideas” he comes close to such a claim in defining the “capacities of the mind” in the essay, “A Treatise on Human Nature.” In the work Hume discusses our limited ability to conceive of infinity,[32] our ability to contemplate being and non-being,[33] our understanding of proportionality, among other capacities of the human mind.[34] Here Hume may be closer to Kant and the “categories” than is often discussed. To put it another way, Hume’s analysis shifts from a subject-object relationship to a subject-subject introspective inquiry. Is Hume breaking his own rules for the construction of knowledge? A case could be made to support that conclusion.
Along with Hume, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the giants of modern philosophy. In contrast to Hume’s skepticism, however, Kant tries to create the epistemological conditions for the generation of knowledge without the baggage of Hume’s skepticism. Kant’s project is to define not what we know but the conditions that must be present if we are to make knowledge claims in the areas of natural science and universal morality.
Following Descartes, Kant employs a dualistic strategy, dividing our explorations into the realm of physical sensation (phenomenal) and the realm of thought and the mind (noumenal). However, the simple dualistic approach is not sufficient to overcome Hume’s critique. Kant must rely on claims of transcendental reason in order to create the space for his two domains of knowledge. As Kant explained, experience alone is not enough to generate a claim to knowledge. Experience is a species of knowledge but understanding requires a set of rules that must be presupposed prior to the generation of knowledge.[35] Kant’s three critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and The Critique of Judgment, are the attempts to lay out those rules for their particular domains of inquiry.
In his analysis of knowledge in the phenomenal realm Kant set out by reorienting the relationship between subject and object. In Hume’s empiricism, knowledge is asserted to be a direct result of stimuli received through the five senses. Human beings are claimed to be blank slates upon which the record of sense impressions are imprinted. The experiences can be recalled from memory, and human creativity may draw from the recurring patterns to generate statements about the phenomenal realm. For Kant, such a position leads to an unrelenting skepticism regarding the possibility of generating any knowledge about the world.
In response Kant makes two critical moves. In qualifying sensation as the initiator of knowledge rather than assigning it the quality of knowledge itself, Kant is then able to argue that the process of knowledge construction is more complex than that described by Hume. Taking his lead from Aristotle and Descartes, Kant argues that human beings possess a set of faculties for processing simple sensations and transforming raw experience into cognitions. Kant called these faculties the categories: quantity, quality, relation, and modality.[36] The important point in this discussion is not whether this list of faculties is exhaustive. The central point is that in Kant’s view the human mind mediates between the objects of experience and the generation of knowledge claims about the physical environment. To state it simply, the human being can sense only what the senses are capable of sensing, and the cognitions of the human mind are limited to those that are the products of the faculties for cognition. Therefore, the relationship between subject and object is transformed.
Kant touched on the implications of this in the preface to the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason.
Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. . . . If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility. . . . For experience is itself a species of knowledge which involves understanding; and understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me, and therefore as being a priori.[37]
Here Kant is laying the foundation for his second critical claim regarding knowledge of the physical world. However, he must begin by preparing the foundation with regard to the possibility of a priori statements. Kant asserts that the conditions for cognition must be present prior to the formation of knowledge claims about the objects of the world. We know this a priori. We know that the possibility of a priori knowledge exists, claimed Kant, because there are things that we can say about the condition of an object prior to its perception.
In the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant made his case for the possibility of a priori claims. Pure reason is the exploration of what we can know a priori.[38] He asserted that this is not knowledge of objects but the mode of knowing objects. In an exercise to prove his point, Kant imagines taking away all sense data from an object. He then asks, is there anything that we can know about the object without direct experience? His answer is that we can know a priori that it must be extended in space and time.[39] Thus, a priori knowledge is possible.
Having laid out the foundation for the existence of a priori knowledge, Kant is ready to make his next significant statement about our knowledge of the physical world. There is a distinction between the world that exists in itself and the world as it appears to human beings. The logic is simple. Human beings have five senses with which to sense the world of objects. There are four categories of faculties that are used in the formation of cognitions about the world. We know, a priori, that objects must have other characteristics that are not the result of our direct experience, for example, their extension in space and time. Kant concludes that it is similarly rational to assume that there are other properties of objects that do not conform to the limited sensing apparatus of human beings.
His conclusion is that there may be many other characteristics that make up the totality of an object's existence which are hidden from our perception. The full array of an object's potentiality must be regarded as an issue of metaphysics. An object's “essence” must be considered as a subject of speculation, not empirical fact. The “thing-in-itself” is beyond the scope of human inquiry.
Therefore, human knowledge is confined to the appearance of objects, not things-in-themselves.[40] Nevertheless, when we consider objects we must understand them as things-in-themselves, even though their essential character is beyond our perception. Otherwise, “we should have landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.”[41] Rationally, we know the totality of the object is behind its appearance to us, even though we only know the surface of the object’s totality.
Kant asserts that the phenomenal world is driven by causality and necessity. Our senses are the window into that reality. However, they cannot provide us with the essence of that reality. Not only do the senses give us incomplete data, they also provide us with only the surface impressions of a reality that is beyond our human grasp. Reality is an infinitely complex array of causality that is beyond our abilities to fully discern. Further, what we do understand is the result of a process of cognition in which sensations are mediated by the faculties present in the human mind.
So while Kant gives us something, knowledge of the physical world, he also takes something away. We are separated from the world, knowing only its appearance. We have no ability to approach either its infinite richness nor its metaphysical essence. What we claim to know must always be within the confines of what is humanly possible.
With all of his transcendental assertion regarding the scope and limits of knowledge about the world of objects it would seem that Kant is far removed from anything that can be called a materialist philosophy. However, in The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant has set in motion an understanding of knowledge of the physical world that does meet some of the criteria for materialism set out in chapter 1. By limiting the scope of human claims to knowledge Kant has addressed the human-centric nature of knowledge claims. More will be said about this later.
The Kantian epistemological system for the study of nature explores the conditions that must be present in order to make claims to knowledge of the physical world. In that phenomenal realm there are recurring patterns of relationships that are governed by the laws of causality and necessity. However, that is only one part of the Kantian formulation.
Kant was also concerned with elaborating the conditions that must be present for the formulation of universal codes of morality and ethics. In seeking to avoid the relativism that emerges from Hume’s empiricism, Kant must confront an epistemological problem. How is it possible to construct a foundation for the elaboration of moral codes in light of the parameters that Kant erects for his understanding of knowledge more generally?
Kant realized that in order to avoid a relativistic morality, any elaboration of moral codes must be unaffected by experience. Therefore, the path to morality must operate according to different epistemological parameters than are found in the construction of knowledge of the physical world. As a dualist, Kant builds on the Cartesian idea of a separation between the realm of objects (the phenomenal world) and the realm of ideas (the noumenal). Such a distinction would seem to provide a basic structure for the construction of such claims. However, Kant recognizes a problem.
The problem for morality is highlighted in a discussion found in the introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason. In the introduction, Kant makes a distinction between two types of statements: analytic and synthetic. In an analytic statement the predicate is contained in the subject.[42] We make such statements in order to clarify concepts or give definitional content to the words in our expressions. “A bachelor is unmarried” is such an analytic statement.
In synthetic statements the predicate is not contained in the subject. It adds something new to the understanding of the object. In the statement, “the pencil is yellow,” new information is added to the discussion of the pencil. While Kant exempts mathematics from such restrictions, he stated that all other synthetic statements are posteriori.[43] They can only be made after experience.
The problem, of course, is that the noumenal realm does not lend itself to direct observation. It suffers from the same limitations of metaphysics more generally. To advance, it needs synthetic statements that add knowledge to the discourse. However, metaphysics operate outside the realm of experience. To advance knowledge in metaphysics would require the elaboration of synthetic a priori statements. In The Critique of Pure Reason this leads Kant to conclude that there are questions that are beyond our ability to provide definitive answers. A few of these are addressed at the end of the work, in a section called “The Antinomies.”
Human beings have senses through which they have contact with the empirical world, but also “[they] must reckon [themselves] as belonging to the world of the mind, of which, however, [they have] no further knowledge.”[44] Lacking a synthetic a priori in the noumenal realm upon which he can construct a universal moral system presents Kant with a problem. This forces Kant to ask the questions of morality differently. Therefore, the first question is not, “what is moral behavior?” The first question is, “what conditions must be present if we are to be able to consider the possibility of universal morality?”
Kant’s answer is simple. Autonomy of the will is the supreme principle of morality.[45] To Kant, morality is about the assessment of intentional behavior on the part of individuals. However, to be held accountable for one’s behavior a person must be free to choose an alternative. If the will were simply the product of cause and effect, operating according to necessity, the consideration of morality would be no different than the assessment of cause and effect in the physical realm. But such a position would deny the possibility of morality as Kant defined it, all together.
Kant knows that he does not have the ability to demonstrate the autonomy of the will. Such demonstrations would require the illusive synthetic a priori. Autonomy of the will must be assumed in order to make morality possible.
Kant also states that the assessment of the outcome of our behavior is not a perfect measure of moral action. The world is an infinitely complex web of actions and reactions. Every act sends a ripple through that web of causality, influencing the occurrence of other events and behaviors. There is no certainty that an action with moral intent will produce only positive consequences. Further, it may not be possible to say what constitutes the good without the consideration of the specific circumstances in which moral questions arise. For that reason Kant states that there is nothing that can be said to be “good” without qualification except “good will.”[46]
Is there a principle that can ensure the universality of actions of good will? Such a principle is contained in the Categorical Imperative. “Act only on a maxim by which you can will that it, at the same time, should become a general law.”[47] So the first condition that must be met in the consideration of moral acts is whether or not they can be universalized for all people in all times and all places.
The second condition of morality deals with practical matters of moral intent. “Act so as to treat man, in your own person as well as in that of anyone else, always as an end, never merely as a means.”[48] Kant called this the Practical Imperative, as it is to serve as a principle for individuals as they interact with one another. It is to serve as a guide to the creation of a social order directed by reason in the conduct of people’s daily lives.
Several issues are clear from the Kantian model of morality. It is clear that Kant views each individual as an independent moral agent. He is, in that sense, an ontological individualist. Freedom of the will means that each individual possesses the ability to make moral choices that transcend conditions and circumstance. For that reason, the individual’s intentions form the centerpiece of moral considerations.
Kant’s Categorical and Practical Imperatives are the transcendental framework for the generation of universal content regarding moral behavior. Thus, it is clear that Kant outlines a framework in which human reason is sufficiently robust that universal moral principles can be formulated as natural law. Reason informs the techniques for moral understanding.
For Kant, the legal system is a direct result of his system of moral reasoning.[49] As reason informs the creation of universal moral codes, so it also creates the guidelines for positive law. Laws, to the extent that they are legitimate, must be constructed in a way that is consistent with the universal laws of freedom and morality.
The Kantian moral system has been extremely influential in the two centuries since its formulation. However, any assertion that it is “materialistic” would stretch the limits of credulity. Kant’s entire moral system has a transcendental character, and even the twentieth-century attempts to soften those claims by people like John Rawls do not solve the problem. Not only is the system built on the stated assumption of free will, but there are several other assumptions in the mix. Kant is also assuming the universality of reason and its moral pronouncements, but also the equality of reason, in the sense that the same processes and conclusion can be arrived at by all people in all places and times. Such a claim ignores the relative nature of history and context.
The Critique of Judgment is a work which is often discounted or underemphasized in the corpus of Kant’s writings. However, The Critique of Judgement opens up a significantly different line of thought in the Kantian project. The work's pronouncements are, in many ways, less rigid and definitive than the structures that govern his two previous critiques. Kant opens up the possibility of individual subjectivity regarding acts of judgment, even as he is trying to outline a priori conditions for the activity of judgment. This is particularly pronounced in the discussion of aesthetic judgment.
Like the other Critiques, The Critique of Judgment is interested in the question of human knowledge. However, this is again not a question of what we know, but the conditions that must be present if we are to make a claim to knowledge. “Properly speaking the Critique, which deals with what our cognitive faculties are a priori capable of yielding, has no field in regard to objects; for it is not a doctrine, but merely investigates whether and how a doctrine may be possible, considering our [mental] faculties.”[50]
At play throughout The Critique of Judgment is the juxtaposition of nature and freedom. Kant viewed the faculty of judgment as link between the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of morals.[51] The intellect prescribes a priori laws for the analysis of nature as an object of sense experience. Reason prescribes a priori laws that follow from the condition of freedom.[52] Judgment is the activity that links the intellect and reason.[53]
Kant goes on to say that judging is not only linked to our cognitive faculties but also the power of our imagination. It is related to what Kant calls “spiritual faculties” that include feeling of desire, pleasure, or displeasure.[54] This feeling is particularly manifest in relation to aesthetic judgments.
If we wish to discern whether anything is beautiful or not, we do not refer its image to the object by means of the intellect with a view to knowledge, but by means of the imagination acting perhaps in conjunction with the intellect we refer the image to the subject and its feeling of pleasure of displeasure. Therefore the judgment of taste is not an intellectual judgment and so not logical, but is aesthetic – which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective. Every reference of images is capable of being objective. . . . The one exception to this is the feeling of pleasure of displeasure. This denotes nothing in the object, but is a feeling which the subject has . . .[55]
So while an image or object may be empirical, the feeling it provokes is entirely subjective. In an aesthetic judgment the image is referred wholly to the subject and to its “feeling of life – under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure . . . ” Kant continues, “this forms the basis of a quite separate faculty for discriminating and estimating, that contributes nothing to knowledge.”[56]
So for Kant, aesthetic judgments are not connected to the ways of human knowing. Aesthetic judgments do not provide us with knowledge of the world or our moral actions. The beautiful and the sublime are matters of subjective taste and refer to the feelings that are produced by our contact with objects rather than our analysis of an object's empirical properties. A feeling of pleasure or displeasure regarding an object, therefore, must always be posteriori.[57]
Nor do aesthetic judgments employ reason, as is the case with the philosophy of morals. They are manifestation of will as desire, and as such, relate to life as a subjective, internal feeling rather than life as the pursuit of knowledge or moral action. It is, therefore, a subjective phenomenon a priori.
What Kant seems to close off in The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason finds a place in The Critique of Judgment. Judgment is not connected with knowing but with feeling. It is associated with life as a subjective existence in which individual matters of taste and feeling manifest themselves.
Here Kant has opened the possibility that part of consciousness is not a direct result of reason and intellect. It means that there are experiences that effect the human being that are not directly related to the explanation of empirical phenomena or the explication of the logical applications of freedom. However, the question that follows is a simple one. How large is the domain of judgment? Does it expand if the Kantian systems for empirical knowledge or moral prescription are denied?
The Kantian system is extraordinary in its scope and depth. However, the question remains about the extent to which there is anything within the Kantian formula that can be considered materialistic. Following the model for materialism outlined in chapter 1 it would appear that there is little evidence that Kant would meet the criteria for materialist philosophy. Kant’s entire project is based on the idea that it is possible to establish a priori principles that provide the foundation for the construction of knowledge claims regarding the inquiry into nature and morality.
So much of Kant’s scheme is based on the distinction between mind and body that treating the claims as a heuristic arrangement cannot be possible. It is at the very core of the entire system. It allows Kant to establish different models of epistemology for the generation of knowledge claims.
In the discussion of morality, this means that the experience of individuals in their daily lives will have no impact on the content of ethical and moral claims about the world. Kant fully understands that the introduction of experiential influences into the formation of morality leads to moral relativism. He wishes to avoid relativism in morality. Instead, Kant claims that ethical and moral claims are the product of reason, a logical extension of the freedom presupposed as a condition of the noumenal.
But here Kant is assuming a lot more than freedom of the will. The transcendental character of the entire discussion of morality has pushed Kant to assert the universality of reason, denying it any contextual content whatsoever. In application, the moral transcendentals suggested by Kant are so general and so vague that they would not be of much use, especially when two principles come into conflict. For example, in Kant’s discussion of the Categorical Imperative, he suggests that suicide would be a violation of nature’s principle of self-preservation.[58] But what of the freedom to die with dignity if stricken by a painful debilitating disease? The problem is exacerbated when such principles are to be the source of law and social policy.
In the end, Kant’s moral system is so rigid and universalist in its conclusions that it presents the danger of reifying a historical formulation of morals and setting itself on the course to correct any outliers. This kind of homogenization would fail to account for the experiential factors that have led to the formation of ethical systems that have worked for societies, both past and present. The point is that the practical imperative, in itself, may present a civilizing principle. However, the transcendental claims regarding the origins of moral prescriptions suggest a full denial of experiential foundations. The basis of a prescription may come from its pragmatic function. Its morality of the claim may be the afterthought.
As suggested, Kantian dualism and the subject of morality within that dualistic philosophy are problematic when it comes to a discussion of materialism. However, in the discussion of the phenomenal realm the results are more mixed. Kant still cannot be labeled as a materialist, but there are some assertions that have pushed the direction of social inquiry in that direction.
In the discussion of empirical knowledge Kant sets the limits on what is possible. Part of this relates to the issue of transcendental a prioris, but part of this discussion has more practical implications. In making a distinction between experience and cognition Kant is moving in the direction of establishing the human-centric character of empirical knowledge. The categories are faculties of cognition. Even if one were to treat the categories as unfinished and open, the general point remains. Human beings are capable of formulating knowledge claims only within the array of faculties at their disposal. As a result, all claims to empirical knowledge must be bracketed, understood as the claims to knowledge from the position of the human organism, rather than knowledge more generally.
Given the finite nature of human experience it is not contrary to materialism to suggest that all our positive statements about the qualities of an object must be treated as incomplete. In fact, it is a central claim of the materialist approach that the assigning of identities to objects, as well as people, must be assumed to be open to amendment and addition. Kant’s claim regarding our inability to know a thing-in-itself has an admittedly transcendental character; however, as a practical matter, the result is the same. It is simply not possible for a finite organism to assign an infinite array of possible identities to an object.
This position also takes philosophy away from a discourse on metaphysics and into a realm that is more materialist in its intent. The mind does not conform to the objects of experience, but the objects of experience are understood to conform to the capacities of the human organism. Therefore, our understanding of the world is mediated by faculties of cognition. Not only does this separate the Kantian model from the empiricist tradition in philosophy, it opens up a discourse that will provide a basis for the emergence of twentieth-century philosophies such as phenomenology, existentialism, and poststructuralism. Each of these has materialist components within their subtle variations.
Another area in which the Kantian system opens a path for a materialist understanding of the world is in his discussion of judgment, especially aesthetic judgments. Judgment is the bridge between the intellect and reason. It is a bridge that takes place within the living human being. Therefore, it must include some experiential component, as the individual is part of a lived historical experience. Kant limits the subjective components of judgment to matters of aesthetics but such a claim may have broader implications. For example, if, as Nietzsche claimed, our relation to the world is an aesthetic, interpretive relationship, then the domain for aesthetic judgments goes well beyond the limit placed upon them by Kant.[59] Such a view leads Nietzsche to a materialist and human-centric understanding of knowledge more generally.
It was not the aim of this chapter to give a materialist reformulation of the Kantian epistemology. My attempt has simply been to show the areas in which the Kantian system has provided ideas that will be relevant in the development of materialist methods as Western thought has moved deeper into modernity.
Kant is trying to identify the objective conditions for the subject’s understanding of the world. His assertion is that there are such conditions. To identify them requires a level of abstraction. There are rules that govern knowledge construction but are themselves outside the normal validating mechanisms for any specific claim to knowledge. In that sense, they operate on a meta-theoretical level, describing what would be necessary for the formation of the kind of knowledge Kant seeks rather than trying to tell us what that knowledge is directly.
In that meta-theoretical sense, Kant is engaged in an enterprise that is not unlike Marx’s German Ideology or Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge, albeit with a different objective. Kant wants both causality and necessity in the empirical world. He also wants universal morality. Those objectives directed his project. However, that is not sufficient grounds to assert the truth of his system. That is a different matter altogether.
Kant gives the continental response to the question of knowledge. He does not believe that the claims of empiricism can provide either of the objectives he seeks. The empiricist account of the subject—object relationship does not account for the mediated nature of cognition. In contrast to the mechanical process suggested by empiricism, Kant puts the human being at the center of knowledge construction. The mind does not conform to object, but objects conform to the possibilities presented by the mind and its ability to create cognitions.
Kant’s discussion of the human limits of cognition and the subjective character of aesthetic judgments will provide avenues for the development of materialist thought well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Francis Bacon, “The Great Instauration,” in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, edited by Edwin Burtt (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 6.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 10.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 9.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 8.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 10.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 9.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 17.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 12.
Francis Bacon, “Novum Organum” in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, edited by Edwin Burtt (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 25.
Bacon, “Novum Organum,” 27.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 16.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 17.
Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 12.
Rene Descartes, A Discourse on Method (New York: Dutton, 1941), 172.
Descartes, Discourse, 15.
Descartes, Discourse, 15.
Descartes, Discourse, 168.
Descartes, Discourse, 174.
Descartes, Discourse, 200.
Descartes, Discourse, 194.
Descartes, Discourse, 200.
Descartes, Discourse, 200-210.
David Hume, “An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature,” in On Human Nature and the Understanding, edited by Antony Flew (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), 291.
Hume, “An Abstract,” 298.
David Hume, “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” in On Human Nature and the Understanding, edited by Antony Flew (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), 36.
Hume, “An Inquiry,” 34.
Hume, “An Inquiry,” 28.
Hume, “An Inquiry,” 30.
Hume, “An Inquiry,” 48
Hume, “An Inquiry,” 47.
Hume, “An Inquiry,” 57.
Hume, “An Abstract,” 182.
Hume, “A Treatise,” 185
Hume, “A Treatise,” 191.
Immanuel Kant, “Preface to the Second Edition,” The Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Modern Library, 1958), 16.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 72.
Kant, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Critique of Pure Reason, 16.
Immanuel Kant, “Introduction,” The Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Modern Library, 1958), 36.
Immanuel Kant, “The Critique of Pure Reason.” In The Philosophy of Kant, edited by Carl Friedrich (New York: Modern Library, 1977), 27.
Kant, “Preface to the Second Edition.” Critique of Pure Reason, 20.
Kant, “Preface to the Second Edition.” Critique of Pure Reason, 20.
Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason.” In The Philosophy of Kant, 30.
Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason.” In The Philosophy of Kant, 33.
Immanuel Kant, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Morals,” in The Philosophy of Kant, edited by Carl Friedrich. (New York: Modern Library, 1977). 197.
Kant, “Metaphysical Foundations,” 187.
Kant, “Metaphysical Foundations,” 140.
Kant, “Metaphysical Foundations,” 170.
Kant, “Metaphysical Foundations,” 178
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 45.
Immanuel Kant, “The Critique of Judgment,” in The Philosophy of Kant, edited by Carl Friedrich (New York: Modern Library, 1977), 268.
Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” 265.
Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” 280.
Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” 269.
Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” 269.
Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” 284.
Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” 285.
Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” 297.
Kant, “Metaphysical Foundations of Moral,” 170.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Nietzsche Selections, edited by Richard Schacht (New York: Scribner/Macmillan, 1993), 51.