Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. He earned this distinction by introducing a new style of philosophizing, the critique of reason. Unlike the dialogue or the genealogy, which try to answer the question of what is something or how it came about, criticism is occupied not so much with objects but with the conditions for the possibility of our experiencing them. Critical philosophy undertakes the examination of the powers reason employs to cognize the world of nature, to act according to duty, and to judge natural and human purposes. Its job is to determine the limits and legitimate mode of employment of the rational powers that make such activities possible. In the case of cognition, the experience is made possible by our understanding the legislating of its rules (the so-called categories) over nature. In the case of morality, pure practical reason legislates over human sensibility, making us autonomous. In the case of the aesthetic, teleological experience, the power of judgment provides a rule for us to make sense of beautiful objects, organisms, and the whole of creation.

Kant was a thoroughly systematic thinker. Thus, he devised an independent Critique to justify the legislation of each rational power. The Critique of Pure Reason (first published in 1781 and revised in 1787) vindicates the role of the understanding in the constitution of the natural world. The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) vindicates the reality of human freedom and provides a rule, the categorical imperative, to constitute a common world of moral experience. The Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), unlike the other two, is not meant to legislate on the world but bridge the “incalculable gulf” that exists “between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible” (Critique of the Power of Judgment, “Introduction”). In Kant's mind, this mediation is essential to account for the possibility of realizing the demands of moral goodness in a mechanical order of nature, which is in principle indifferent to them.

The activity of criticism is necessary because “through no fault of its own,” human reason otherwise enters into self-contradiction and destroys itself. Kant believes our reason has the “peculiar fate” of being burdened “with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it cannot possibly answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason” (Critique of Pure Reason, “Preface”). Lack of awareness about reason's inner structure has triggered interminable disputes among philosophers. It divided the discipline into warring camps, each expressing a partial truth about human rationality and hence capable of achieving a short-lived victory. This was particularly evident in the case of modern rationalists and empiricists, which forced philosophy to oscillate between dogmatism and skepticism. Kant's project was to bring peace among philosophical contenders. To this effect, he proposed a kind of therapy: knowing the limits of knowledge allows [Page 828]reason to overcome its obsession with grasping the absolute; Kant argued that the unsatisfied metaphysical drive could then be channeled to productive practical and spiritual purposes. This, for him, was the main lesson of criticism: “to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Critique of Pure Reason, “Preface”).

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