Frederick Copleston on Kant
This book of excerpts from Kant's works contains in English translation three of the philosopher's letters, more than half of the first Critique, the whole of the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, and selections from the second and third Critiques and the Metaphysics of Morals. The eighteen- page introduction is straightforward and helpful. The publisher's blurb tells us that `this quiet professor in an obscure German university dramatically changed the course of human thinking'. The statement is apt to make the historian of philosophy recall claims made on behalf of Descartes, Marx and Husserl and to reflect that not so long ago we were hearing about a revolution in philosophy which started in Cambridge. but which seems to have become thoroughly respectable at Oxford. However, the state- ment may encourage students to do better than Herbert Spencer who made several attempts to read the Critique of Pure Reason but, not having much time for other people's ideas, on each occasion laid the book aside when he came to Kant's theory of space and time.
In William Golding's novel Free Fall Sammy Mountjoy sees the world of the sciences, the world of 'daylight explanation' and of predictable behaviour, as real. He also sees as real the moral-religious world, the world in which human actions are weighed in the balance and judged from another point of view than that of science. Though, how- ever, Sammy Mountjoy accepts both worlds as real, he believes that between them 'there is no bridge'. Kant too accepted both worlds. But he was not prepared to leave them juxtaposed and unreconciled.
When referring to Kant, we might perhaps speak of three worlds. In the first place there was the world of Newtonian physics, a world which could hardly be restricted to objects other than man. In 1748 La Mettrie had published Man a Machine in which he agreed that Descartes' view of the material world as
a 'machine' must be extended to man as a whole. Thinkers such as Hume had called for
the application of the scientific method which had proved so successful in physics and astronomy to the study of man and his activ-
ities. Kant took it as obvious that the concept of a law-governed World must cover man
himself, and that from the scientific point of view human actions must be regarded as causally determined. To be sure, Kant believed that science rested on presuppos- itions which, as Hume had shown, could not be proved empirically. (In Human Know- ledge: Its Scope and Limits Bertrand Russell expressed a similar idea.) But he tried to justify these presuppositions in a new way, in terms of a theory of necessary conditions of human experience. In any case he was convinced that science provided man with genuine knowledge, enabling him to predict, and that man could not be regarded as a kind of 'monster' in the world, exempt from the reign of causal laws.
At the same time Kant was convinced that man is a moral agent, subject to oblig- ation, and that the idea of moral obligation presupposes the idea of freedom. He was therefore faced with the task of reconciling the scientific point of view with the ethical vision of man. There was however a third area, that of religious faith. During the period of the Enlightenment the process of separating ethics from theological presuppos- itions had developed apace. And Kant had no intention of trying to base ethics on theology. Though, however, he had reacted strongly against his pietistic upbringing and tended to a narrowly moralistic concept of religion, he had no intention of jettisoning all religious faith in the name either of science or of autonomous ethics. So his task was that of harmonising the areas of natural science, the moral consciousness and religious faith.
The serious student of Kant obviously has to try to understand his technical phil- osophy. But if we content ourselves with a general idea, we can perhaps express Kant's line of thought in this way. Man is able of course to consider himself as a thing or object in the spatio-temporal world. Indeed he must do so, if he is to obtain scientific knowledge of himself. Looking at himself from outside, as it were, as a thing among other things, he seeks for causal explanations of his actions and regards human behaviour as in principle predictable. But it is man who turns himself into a scientific object, a thing among things. And the man who makes science possible is something more than a scientific object. He is a moral agent, a per- son. And as a moral agent, aware of obliga- tion, he sees his actions, which, regarded from another point of view, are links in causal chains, as the expression of his decisions, as proceeding from himself, his own will. No scientific proof of freedom can be given. For the scientific point of view involves a kind of methodological determinism. But the moral consciousness is a reality; and it is not pos- sible to take the moral consciousness serious- ly and at the same time to reject the view of man as a decision-making and responsible agent. In other words, the scientific view of man is not the only one. A scientific explan- ation of the phenomena of a sunset does not include an aesthetic appreciation of its beauty. But it does not follow that the aesthetic point of view is illegitimate. Similarly, the physical scientist is not concerned with moral obligation and freedom as seen from the point of view of the moral agent as such. But it by no means follows that the scientific point of view is the only one. Nobody with a genuine 'moral sense' would suppose that it is.
As for religion, anyone who has a nodding acquaintance with the philosophy of Kant is aware that he rejected any claims that the metaphysician could prove the existence of God. At the same time he believed that the moral agent who explores the implications (in a wide sense) of the moral consciousness is led to faith in God, or can at any rate see that such faith is warranted. It is not that religious belief is required in order to be aware of obligation or to have moral con- victions. Rather is it a case of the moral con- sciousness opening the way to religious faith. It is indeed arguable that, given Kant's pre- mises in the first Critique, talk about God is meaningless. He himself however tried to show, whether successfully or not, that re- flection on the moral consciousness can lead to faith in a God of whom we can speak in the language of symbols.
The philosophy of Kant is open to criti- cism on a variety of grounds. He seems to have thought that the classical physics was final and definitive. His ideas on mathema- tics are open to question. It is by no means everyone who in his account of the moral consciousness would place the emphasis where Kant placed it. His idea of religion was narrow and had no room for important elements, such as the mystical. He does not appear to have understood the divergent im- plications of various theories which he ex- pounded. And so on. But the general prob- lem of harmonising man's moral, religious and aesthetic experience with his scientific conceptions of the world (conceptions which
have changed in significant ways since the lime of Kant) is real enough and recurs in different forms. Some philosophers might prefer to speak of studying distinct `langu- ages' (the language of science, the language or morals, and so forth) and the interrela- 1 ions between them. This is doubtless one way of tackling the general problem. With the late Karl Jaspers however we can find some of Kant's basic ideas, such as the distinction between the external, objective or scientific view of man and the point of view of the free agent, expressed in an existentialist frame- Work of thought. Indeed it has been said of Jaspers that he was a Kantian who had undergone the shock of reading and medita- hog on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The actu- al philosophy of Kant, with its formal struc- ture and rigid positions, has passed into history and become a subject for specialised Study. It by no means follows however that there is nothing to be learned from him. And his influence can sometimes be seen Where one would not expect to find it. There Was a time, for example, when Kant was regarded by Thomists either as a dangerous and pernicious thinker or as the expounder of obviously absurd theories. With the mod- ern transcendental Thomists' however he is regarded as the man who pointed the way to the right method in philosophy.
Kant's doctrine of the 'postulates' of the
moral law has sometimes been treated as a recommendation to pretend that something is the case (that there is a God, for instance) when we have no good reason for supposing that it is in fact the case. But perhaps there is something more than this in Kant's line of thought. It is obviously true that profes- sed agnostics and atheists can have moral convictions and a sense of obligation. This is simply an empirical fact. It is arguable however that the moral consciousness can take a form in which it passes into the religi- ous consciousness, even though a man is not explicitly aware of it. On hearing mention of this idea some people, whether professed religious believers or unbelievers, are apt to protest that well-meaning but misguided clerics should not try to make out that athe- ists are 'really' theists, and with the charit- able purpose of getting them all safely into heaven. This seems to me a rather silly line of objection. The contention that in certain forms the moral consciousness passes into the religious consciousness has no necessary con- nection with traditional ideas of heaven and hell. What it presupposes are broader ideas of the moral consciousness and of religion than we can find in the writings of Immanuel Kant.
Frederick Copleston Si is Principal of Heythrop College.
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