Can there be a middle way between the systems loathed by the Dadaists and the “isness” exhausting Funes? If so, might this golden mean establish moral ground?
Immanuel Kant, the late-eighteenth-century philosopher from Königsberg, was famous for the regularity of his walks. The villagers set their clocks to his passing by. Perhaps Kant was strict in his strolling to balance his somnolence. According to an early-nineteenth-century English biographer, Thomas De Quincey (a notorious opium addict who wrote a memoir about his habit), Kant suffered from “unseasonable dozing” that caused him to fall “repeatedly, whilst reading, with his head into the candles; a cotton nightcap which he wore was instantly in a blaze, and flaming about his head.” Kant, though, might have found the danger stimulating, for it was precisely a rude awakening from his “dogmatic slumbers” that inspired him to grapple brilliantly with the problem of whether we can access meaningful matter beyond our minds.
For the first half of his philosophical career, Kant was a rationalist in the tradition of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Christian von Wolff: he believed that rational inquiry revealed a rational universe. But then Kant read Hume, the Scottish empiricist who argued that if we gain knowledge only through sense experience, then we are able to perceive only sequence, not causality. The falling pocket watch is at this height one instant and another the next, and so on. We have no basis to conclude that gravity pushes the mechanism earthward. Kant reasoned: If Hume is correct, then a primary rationalist assumption—the universe functions according to strict cause and effect—is untenable. Not just that, science itself is worthless.
Burned awake, Kant devoted himself to saving causality and so, science. This redemption required a Copernican revolution—not for cosmos but mind. Kant agreed with Hume: we cannot perceive causality. But causality must exist somewhere; otherwise, all is chaos. If not in matter—at least in a way we can comprehend it—then why not in mind? Yes, causality—as well as quality, quantity, relation, and such—is mental. The mind regulates the raw data streaming into it, translating fluxes into pattern. But the true nature of a thing—the ding an sich, the “thing in itself”—remains mysterious. We can only understand the phenomenal realm—what presents itself to the mind’s categories—never the noumenal: unmediated thisness.
This system—Kant developed it in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason—works nicely for science, which focuses only on phenomena. What, though, of morality? According to Kant in his 1788 Critique of Practical Reason, morality requires noumena—freedom, God, and immortality: freedom as a basis for choosing between good and evil; God as a guarantee that we will be rewarded for choosing good; immortality as the realm where the reward is truly enjoyed. Obviously, we can’t prove that such entities exist, as we can validate, say, gravity. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, nor does it—this lack of proof—preclude belief. If freedom, God, and immortality are necessary for moral behavior, then we must indeed behave as if they existed. Treating such concepts as real produces moral reality. The abstractions of the mind and matter’s immediacy, the fake and fact, blend into a vision of each person’s intrinsic worth.