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Immanuel Kant: some essential ideas
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the great philosophers of the European Enlightenment of the late 18th century.He has exercised enormous influence on epistemology, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of history ever since.Here are a few of his basic ideas:
1) on human nature.Kant emphasizes:
our reason.Kant gives a modern turn to the medieval distinction between body and soul.We have an animal nature, but also rational faculties that take us to a higher plane.Reason is our most important capacity.It is constant in our nature, though we becomes aware of its power only over time.In his conception of reason, Kant include not only our analytic powers, but also our imagination.Imagination is an active faculty of mind that enables us to interpret our experience by giving it conceptual form and meaning.Kant's point is that we do not learn passively from the sense experience in which we are immersed by our animal nature, but rather actively as we use our powers of mind to impose imaginative forms upon it.Knowledge, therefore, is the understanding of experience as it is mediated by our imagination.
our will.Alongside our cognitive capacities, Kant notes our willpower.It is stimulated by our emerging awareness of the efficacy of our reasoning.Willpower underpins our moral striving to further our own interests, those of our society (even though these often conflict with our individual wishes), and in its highest expression, those of all humankind.
2) on human destiny.Kant stresses our quest to attain the full expression of our rational humanity.It is a human quest, but one undertaken through divine governance. In terms of God's role in human destiny, Kant gives a modern turn to the medieval Christian conception of it.
Medieval and Reformation theologians spoke of God's immanence in and transcendence over human affairs.
Immanence relates to ethics.By immanence, they meant God's participation in human decision-making. God intervenes to influence human behavior through miracles exceptionally and through the dispensing of his grace regularly.
Transcendence relates to faith. By transcendence, they meant God's preordained plan for his creation.
For Kant, God does not intervene from outside (miracles and grace), but from inside through the conceptual powers that he has instilled in man, his creation.In that sense, man is a reasoning organism, with conceptual powers that dispose him to act on his own in the way God had planned.In that sense, God is immanent in man's higher cognitive capacities. Correspondingly, God is transcendent in man's striving to fulfill his destiny, one of harmony, love, and peace.
3) on the good society.The creation of the good society is the project of human history.Man acquires his powers of reason, his capacity for moral judgment, and his social destiny over time.
History is of interest to Kant, therefore, not for its particular events, but for the overall direction of human striving. Accordingly, history has a beginning, a middle, and an end.On the basis of his reflections on human nature, Kant conjectures about each:
conjectural beginnings.In the beginning of human history, according to Kant, humans were motivated by instinct, "the voice of God obeyed by all animals." They were wholly immersed in their senses.But humankind's capacity for reason enabled it to emerge from that animal world to fashion a human one.
In its earliest expressions, reason presented itself in the human capacity for choice.Rather than listening to instinct (the voice of God), humans began to act as if they had Godlike powers to make judgments about the right course to take.The earliest judgments were about:
food, as in the Garden of Eden (thinly veiled in Kant's account);
sex, as in choosing when to have sexual relations, as opposed to animals for whom mating is regulated by instinct.Kant's interest is not in sexual permissiveness, but in humankind's willpower to exercise discipline over its own sexuality.
This was Kant's version of humankind overcoming the "concupiscence" that medieval and Reformation theologians taught was inherent in the human condition and that could not be overcome.
That is why officials in medieval society put so much stress upon external prohibitions.Humans are depraved and need political rulers who will impose social discipline and church elders who will watch over public morals.
What is modern in Kant's depiction is humankind's emerging ability to transcend his animal (concupiscent) nature in choosing to fashion his own human world.His reason enables him to create a better world; his will motivates him to do so.
conjectural middle.The middle, for Kant, is humankind's fashioning of its civilization through trial and error, which sharpens its reasoning and judgment.The events that he signals are close to those we identified with the emergence of bronze age culture: settled agricultural communities supersede nomadic hunting hordes; animals are domesticated; cities rise; political leaders devise strategies for defense and war.
Kant also notes a paradox.Humankind succeeds in creating civilization, a human world.But civilization brings its own discontents.As human ingenuity liberates humankind from some of its burdens, civilization imposes others of a different order --- those of social obligation and responsibility.
conjectural end.Kant envisions the ends of human striving in terms of trends that he discerns in the civilizing process: accomplishment as an incentive for more (rising expectations); the taming of aggression (war); the rising recognition of the need for more complex civic obligations; the humanizing of society through the spiritualization of love (for Kant, the enduring legacy of Christianity).
But Kant considers ends not only in terms of the objects of human striving, but also the prospect of their realization. The paradox is that to realize our human aspirations completely would render useless the very qualities of mind and character that distinguish our humanity.The quietude of perpetual bliss in this lifetime is a terrifying prospect. The ends of our moral striving in fact imply not accomplishment but transcendence.
The transcendental nature of moral striving raises the problem of the relationship between the end of human history and God's eternity.
Kant is skeptical of discussion that would consider the end of history as a Doomsday. For him, Doomsday has evoked much useless speculation, for an end of history conceived as a day of final judgment imposes our imagination upon God. The nature of eternity is beyond our ken.In terms of our own reasoning:
to assign some people to hell would render God's project for human destiny absurd;
to assign people to heaven provides its own terrors, for perpetual bliss connotes an inactivity antithetical to humankind's "restless reason."
Kant therefore settles on this proposition: as timeful, restless beings who live in history, we can have no knowledge (i.e., form no image) of what the human condition might be in a timeless eternity.Our reasoning about the prospect of eternity must therefore be "practical": we must act as if God's eternal order corresponds in some way to our own.Kant offers that conjecture because the moral ideals we strive to fulfill in this world are in fact transcendent: they connote a love, harmony, and peace for which we strive but whose realization in this world would bring to an end that very quality of moral striving that gives our lives meaning.