Immanuel Kant - if reason were enough ...
I’ve always thought that Kant has needed a gifted philosophical vulgarizer. He has so much to offer. In the Metaphysics of Morals he writes: 'to have [a metaphysics of morals] is itself a duty. Moreover, every man has such a metaphysics within himself, although commonly only in an obscure way'.
Here’s a (very) simple presentation of his ethics. If reason were enough…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsgAsw4XGvU
More on what Kant was about:
Immanuel Kant by Christopher Insole (I’m afraid this gets cut off when it gets really interesting on the noumenal world and an objection to Kant’s denial that we can know things-in-themselves. Does that leave Kant walled up in his conceptual world? No truths/values but created truths/values? A projectionist fallacy? I’ll declare myself unhappy with a world that is no more than a symbolic anthropocentrism. The video ends just before any of this is discussed).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfkfBoTQN4I
Kant gets from Rousseau a horror of enslavement and a respect for the dignity of the common man and the common understanding. Insole says here: ‘There’s this fascinating strand in Kant’s work which isn’t perhaps much explored, which is a desire at least to be anti-elitist, to make insights into morality possible universally’.
If I may … something I’m quite proud of in my own philosophical work is to have emphasised this anti-elitist strain in Kant. Here’s what I wrote in ‘Kant: the Ethics of Rational Nature’:
‘Kant’s ethico-rational freedom encompasses Plato’s sublime morality, the Gospel’s stress love of thy neighbour as thyself, the righteous, the poor in spirit, the Protestant emphasis on good works, and it does all this without requiring any recourse to such elitist or selective notions as Platonic guardians, the ‘chosen people’, the elect, or, in the century that came after Kant, ‘the party’. Kant achieves this by emphasising the creative power of reason which each and all individuals possess as part of their essential humanity, conceiving human beings as co-authors of their moral existence and as co-legislators in a universal kingdom of ends. The sphere of human freedom is thus expanded by reason impressing its sign upon empirical reality. In establishing the limits of reason within the confines of nature, Kant established the intellectual and moral foundations of an expansive rational freedom. This is the 'kingdom of ends' as realised in the three dimensions of nature, society and the mind. Kant’s normative philosophy thus expounds an ideal of human association as a realm of ends composed of autonomous individuals who, as rational natural beings, are co-legislators of their freedom.’
https://www.academia.edu/1241590/KANT_THE_ETHICS_OF_RATIONAL_NATURE
Kant’s Natural Teleology and Moral Praxis
https://www.academia.edu/2327860/Kants_Natural_Teleology_and_Moral_Praxis
More stuff from when I was working with my fine German friends.
For Initiative für Praxisphilosophie und konkrete Wissenschaft
The Socratism of Immanuel Kant
https://www.academia.edu/11097480/The_Socratism_of_Immanuel_Kant
Kant and Virtue
http://www.praxisphilosophie.de/critchley_kant_and_virtue.pdf
http://www.praxisphilosophie.de
I’ve criticised Kant for a ‘legalism’ that is capable of a regulation of a competitive, selfish society but cannot transform that society. That may be the fate of Kantianism, despite Kant’s best efforts. I’ll say this, though, there are few philosophers who had a clearer understanding of how to differentiate and relate legality and morality.
"A perfectly good will . . . [cannot] ... be conceived as necessitated to act in conformity with law, since of itself, in accordance with its subjective constitution, it can be determined only by the concept of the good. Hence for the divine will, and in general for a holy will, there are no imperatives : 'ought' is here out of place, because 'will' is already of itself necessarily in harmony with the law. Imperatives are in consequence only formulae for expressing the relation of objective laws of willing to the subjective imperfection of the will of this or that rational being—for example, of the human will."
Kant, The Moral Law, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, transl. by H. J. Paton, p. 81.
You can find this idea a much more prominent theme in Rousseau, the idea that the stern morality of duty and virtue is a second best solution to the problem of living in a fallen social state, and that should we ever come to live without corruption, no such moral regulation would be necessary.
‘This point where values and norms coincide, which is the ultimate origin of law and at, the same time the beginning of moral life proper, is, I believe, what men for over two thousand years have indicated by the name of natural law.’ (A.P. d Entreves, Natural Law 1951: 122). That’s true. That's what I'm investigating in my own work (should it ever end, somewhere between and beyond the old natural law and the rational freedom/self-legislating reason of the moderns).
Augustine understood Stoic conceptions of the original freedom and equality of human beings in some such way. Human beings were not intended to be subject to the coercive domination of government or of slavery (Augustine, The City of God, Bk. XIX, 15), and the institution of private property would not have been necessary had all come to cooperate and give support to one another freely. Thus, Isidore of Seville argued "possession in common of all things and one liberty for all men" as an integral part of the natural law (Etymologies, Bk. V, 2).
I think that Kant is as committed to the highest good as any natural law thinker. He develops a theory of legality and morality which is derived in his conception of human nature and has a claim to be the last of the great system-builders in the tradition of natural law. Can he ground that highest good as well as the old natural law thinkers? I am sceptical of the notion of a self-legislating reason, grounded in nothing but itself. That leads either to a pragmatism, in which objectivity is some kind of phenomenology of intersubjective experience, or a subjectivism that fractures into a relativism.
So is it possible, after all, to revisit the natural law tradition and ground the highest good in transcendent norms, and set reason in a greater frame? In other words, a rationalised will that recognises a greater standard, not a self-rationalised will that sets its own standard? If reason were enough, then Kant's the man. I don't think it is, I no longer think praxis-based philosophies producing the truth will do it - we need to find our way of combining disclosure and imposure. I'm loathe to lose Kant and the value-centred, praxis-orientated approach, though.
But just to qualify any anti-elitist democratisation – be wary of having your cake and eating it too – once the cake is gone, it is gone – don’t eat up transcendent or objective standards by grabbing impatiently at the ideal, leaving you just with its vulgarisation in the form of concretized particulars, with no other standards to draw on but an endless self-creation grounded in nothing. Kant himself didn’t make the error of impatient revolutionary grabs that would realise/abolish philosophy and thereby put an end to transcendent truths that are the condition of normative and critical action and judgment. I'm just not sure his intersubjective ethic is strong enough to resist dissolution into a subjectivism in morals held together only by a legalism in politics.
The truth is .... Aquinas' moderate realism brings us back to our senses - there is nothing in the mind that wasn't first in the senses. Knowing and being go together. And reason and faith. Reason can't do it alone. Kant's a genius. The greatest modern philosopher. He nearly pulled it off. But he didn't. He couldn't. It can't be done. I'm taking what he has to offer, which is plenty.
But it's not enough. Which is why I followed the line back to Aristotle - reason educates desire from within, not without as in Kant - and traced it to Aquinas, who gives us both Plato and Aristotle and more besides, immanence and transcendence.
Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good.
'This book thus argues the case for the philosophical/theological synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas as providing the only secure basis for the objective and universal foundations of the moral law and the common good. I show how Aquinas’ rational metaphysics and natural law theory join reason and nature together on the basis of a necessary ontological connection. I argue that to make good Kant’s moral claims, we need to recover St Thomas Aquinas’ natural moral law, rationalist metaphysics and realist epistemology. I argue that the universal claims of the greatest of the modern moral and political philosophers – Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx - can only be realized by being grounded in the natural law.'
https://www.academia.edu/4472142/Aquinas_Morality_and_Modernity._The_Search_for_the_Natural_Moral_Law_and_the_Common_Good
That work needs tidying up and tightening up sharply. The way it emphasizes grounding the good in ontological nature is far too simplistic, and gives the impression that Aquinas' moderate realism is a naturalism. That's not so. And there's no need to labour the answer the is/ought dualism, the issue does not arise for Aquinas. I need most of all to emphasize practical reasonableness in relation to substantive and reflexive human goods and the constitution of forms of the common life, practices and character-construction. I think that's what's needed. More than an ethical naturalism, more than a quasi-scientific account of Aristotelian flourishing, I think MacIntyre's Thomism falls short of Aquinas (it is very Aristotelian, and doesn't do justice to Aristotle's own emphasis on nous) - we need to take spirituality seriously. I've been thinking on this for years, I can draw no other conclusion. If reason were enough, then Kant's the man. He is a brilliant philosopher, studied him hard for years. Spinoza too. Spinoza is, in Russell's words, ethically supreme. I just see it as enclosing the world in Reason, mistaking part - the physical world - for the whole.
There is a distinction between classical or traditional natural law, and its belief in a rational order or objective standard in the universe and modern natural law. Traditional natural law proposes an objective 'rule and measure', a binding order that is prior to and independent of human will and artifice. Modern natural law rejects such a notion of order in favour of a series of 'rights', subjective claims, which originate in the human will. The corporate or communal stress upon duties and responsibilities in the former – human affairs organised towards a common end – comes to be replaced by rights – assertions of self-will on the part of self-interested individuals.
Rousseau? Rousseau is frequently classed with the latter against the former. I don’t see things as so simple at all. If Rousseau were so easy to classify, why would he involve himself in such a difficult and seemingly contradictory notion of ‘the general will’. The will as such is subjectivist, individualist, it can pertain only to particular beings. So why the need for ‘the general?’ Because Rousseau affirmed transcendent norms every bit as much as the traditional natural law theorists. He still emphasised reason as the common property of human beings, and it was this aspect that Kant developed. I see Rousseau as attempting to reconcile the two key poles of western philosophy – reason/nature and objective grounding/transcendent truths (disclosure, the rational universe) on the one side, and will and artifice (imposure, praxis based philosophies) on the other – duties and rights coming together within the legitimate constraint of self-assumed obligation, an obligation that is right not simply because the contracting parties have agreed to it, but because they have recognised its truth – the truth cannot just be given, it must be willed, hence the notion of ‘the general will.’
The controversy? Even Leibniz, who affirms the idea of a preordained order and harmony, and who therefore would seem to argue for disclosure over imposure (coming to recognise the truth of the world’s order rather than project truth upon that world through praxis), holds that the propositions of the natural law possess only a conditional character. Such a view implies the conventional nature of truth, a view that goes back to the sophists. It is for this reason that Kant devoted so much attention to the categorical imperative as distinct from imperatives which are merely hypothetical. Which is an awful lot of hard work to take us back to something we already had – the rules of traditional natural law were themselves categorical imperatives, and were understood as such.
I just can't avoid the conclusion I am drawing. Which is not fideism. Roman Catholic theology puts an emphasis on reason in general, and on natural theology in particular. In the 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II warned against “a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God” (§55). In Caritas In Veritate (2009), Pope Benedict XVI writes, “Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space. In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word. (§3).
As for Immanuel Kant, he was concerned to steer a path between scepticism and rationalism by setting limits on metaphysical speculation. For Kant, the existence of God was a postulate not of pure reason but of practical reason. He thus rejected the traditional “proofs” of God’s existence—the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments. In their place, Kant presented a moral argument, the thoroughly “rational” version of Christianity adumbrated in the video above — a “religion within the limits of reason alone.” Is this position satisfactory? If all that there is is human beings and human reason, then any God or gods can only be a human invention, and any truths can only be (self)created truths, begging the question of why anyone should accept their authority as truthful if they are merely conventional. Pragmatism and the phenomenology of intersubjective experience – the way truthseeking on our part as co-legislators generates an objectivity and objective standard – seems inevitable. But if, in the context of a fact-value split, in which morality takes the form of irreducible value judgments – subjective opinion/preference – then the value of truthseeking must itself become non-rational. There is, therefore, no rational grounds for justifying reason and the pursuit of rational knowledge. In placing religious belief outside the domain of what can be known by means of speculative philosophy, Kant “found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”
We lose rational grounds. A self-legislating reason sounds liberatory. As Kant wrote in ‘What is Enlightenment?’:
‘Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. ... Sapere Aude! [dare to know] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.’ But if the value of truthseeking, of the pursuit of rational knowledge, can only be justified by non-rational values, then reason undercuts its own grounds. So I note the neglect of pre-Reformation Christianity in Kant, a failure to engage with Aquinas, the assumption of that modern mechanistic science is the truth about reality (as objectively valueless), and the curtailment of metaphysical speculation along these lines. That puts morality into our own hands, a world of created values and created gods (or none at all), the true as a human projection, a symbolic anthropomorphism. That denies the Thomist notion of a rational science of human and social order, natural law as nature seen through the critical eyes of reason, not as a mere naturalism, the organisation of the common life with a view to substantive human and reflexive goods as not simply a belief, a matter of faith, but as a work of reason. Such a political philosophy is really based on a knowledge of human beings and of substantive and reflexive human goods, deepened and corroborated by the self-knowledge and self-examination of the individual, and accessible by practical reasonableness, rather than being based on a general scientific or metaphysical theory.
Xenophanes is the first philosopher we know who employed the as if approach that since we can never attain absolute truth or knowledge, we can come to act as if we can have truth or knowledge. Xenophanes criticizes the Homeric view of religion as a projectional fallacy, what Kant called symbolischer anthropomorphismus, and which Kauffman openly states as God as a human invention, our most powerful symbol.
‘The vision we have discussed rests morality in our own hands, and rests the restraints on the evil we do with we who cause it.’
‘We can experience this God in many places, for this God is real. This God is how our universe unfolds. This God is our own humanity. No, we do not have to use the God word, but it may be wise to do so to help orient our lives. This sense of God enlarges Western humanism for those who do not believe in a Creator God. It invites those who hold to a supernatural Creator God to sustain that faith, but to allow the creativity in the universe to be a further source of meaning and membership. I hope this sense of God and the sacred can be a safe, spiritual space we can all share.’
Stuart Kauffman Reinventing the Sacred 2008 ch 19
Which sounds like wanting our God and eating it too. The problem is that once you have eaten your cake, it is gone for good. You can make another one, of course, but in accordance with what recipe? Once you have lost the transcendent norms and truths, that cake can be anything anyone wants it to be. This is morality as a congeries of value judgements, endless yes/no arguments with no way of deciding between them.
There is nothing in the belief in a supernatural Creator God (or transcendent norms and truths) that implies denying the meaning, value and creativity in the universe, quite the reverse. It was the modern revolution in mechanistic science that denied all of those things. But I can agree with what Kauffman writes here. It is a statement made by those with a belief in a supernatural God, God as both immanent and transcendent. The weaknesses in Kauffman’s position become more clear when he emphasises that we need to take control of ‘our own’ morality:
‘The reinvention of the sacred is our own choice of what we will hold sacred in an emergent universe exhibiting ceaseless creativity… I hope we are hovering on the verge of taking responsibility for our own sharable meaning, our own collective actions, our own evolving cultures, and our own use of the God we invent for ourselves. Ultimately, it is our collective choice whether we continue to break bones.'
Kauffman 2008 ch 16
That view is consistent with Kant and Kant's ethical system as a projection of reason. Ultimately, it is the choice of human beings whether they do good or evil. It always was, mind. That is something that Dante emphasised too. But Dante drew on the bedrock moral grounding of our being which is God. Kauffman can propose no such grounding. He offers merely human beings alone, ‘ourselves’ and what we choose to invent. This is the ethic of the self-made man in the self-made world. This is not a radical new morality to cure all our ills at all, this is precisely the morality that has prevailed in the world since the ‘death of God.’ It could be objected that we haven’t yet come to live in a secular age stripped of the theological assumptions once attendant upon God, but an age that has invested ‘things’ with divine significance – the new idols of the state, money, capital, commodities etc. I would simply reply ‘of course’. Human beings are social beings who live in a social world. And they are spiritual beings with a deep cosmic longing for meaning. Religiosity as something that has ossified the religious impulse is certainly something we need to extirpate, but in the name of the genuine and healthy expression of that impulse.
‘Choice’ is never ultimately subjective, but coalesces around something supraindividual, something greater than individual egos. Without a greater force anchoring and orienting ‘choice’, we will continue to lurch between the perplexities of irreducible subjective opinion and collective sacrifice to false idols.
My response to Kauffman is that ‘we’ have been taking responsibility of our own morality and have been doing so for a long time now. It’s been a long time since Nietzsche announced ‘the death of God.’ The problem is that without an objective or transcendent standard, we struggle to constitute a ‘we’ out of our moral theories that is capable of commanding universal assent. If it is objected that many people still adhere to the objective morality of a religion, I would simply respond ‘so what?’ If morality is no more than a series of human constructions, then the criticism that the deities we worship and serve are no more than ‘created gods’ is invalid. That is all morality could ever be on these terms, and the objections are therefore self-defeating. You don’t believe in my gods, and I don’t believe in yours. When everything becomes a human construction, there is no possibility of offering compelling reasons to favour one morality over another. There are claims to be able to offer a better reading of reality. But those are claims which imply a world outside of human social construction. Without notions of an objective reality and an objective morality, morality as something more than irreducible subjective opinion/non-rational value judgments, human beings are entitled to ‘make up’ their morality any way they choose. If they choose God and religion in these terms, who is anyone to say that they are wrong? That's the invitation to fideism. You can find that in the likes of Erasmus and Montaigne, whose simple contention was that since skepticism means there can be no good reason to become Protestant, one is perfectly entitled to remain a Catholic on grounds of faith alone. Theologians who followed Montaigne “showed no particular fervor in their religious views” (a good thing, given the religious wars, which took Christians a million miles away from Jesus) and practiced a “tepid, if sincere” form of Catholicism (Popkin 1992, 124). The same couldn't be said for Pascal, mathematician and scientist who underwent a 'night of fire' and got religion big time. The heart has its reasons ... That may be enough for some.
But what of reason? Is there a division between reason and faith? Must philosophy and religion be at odds, with the one necessarily becoming the handmaiden of the other? What standards do we have to determine right from wrong? The criticisms that may be made of God and religion as ‘created’ and ‘constructed’ can be made against every other human endeavour, from science to politics. We need an anchoring in something real beyond self-creation. And, at some point, beyond our conceptual and reach, we will be called upon to take a leap of faith. Dante’s heart leap. And, thinking further, the notion of 'anchoring' is a highly misleading way of phrasing things. We cannot have that kind of 'anchoring', we have never had it. And it is the illusion that we have that lies behind the idea that the alternative to some illusory grounding is some 'free-floating' nihilism. These are false alternatives. The key is practical reasonableness in the context of moderate realism orienting action towards human goods. Reason (morality) is very much in our hands in that sense, as our responsibility to see and do good. It always was.