THE OPTIMISTIC-ETHICAL WORLD-VIEW IN KANT
Kant’s ethics, deepened, but lacking content
SO far as the general tendency of his thought goes Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) lives entirely in the optimistic-ethical world-view of
rationalism._(_39_)_ He has, however, a feeling that its foundations
are not deep and firm enough, and he regards it as his task to put
them on ground which is in every respect more secure. For this purpose
a deeper ethic, and a less naïve positiveness in assertions about
world-view which touch upon the supra-sensible, seem to him desirable.
Like the English intellectualists and intuitionists, Kant is offended
by the idea that the ethic in which the modern age finds satisfaction
and its impulse to activity is rooted merely in considerations of the
universal advantage of morally good actions. Like them, he feels that
it is something more than this, and that in the ultimate analysis it
has its origin in the compulsion which men experience to strive for
self-perfecting. But while his predecessors stick fast in the matter
provided by semi-scholastic philosophy and theology, he attacks the
problem along the lines of pure ethical thought. It follows for him
that the fundamental origin and the exalted character of the moral can
be preserved only if we always consciously make it an end in itself,
and never merely a means to an end. Even if moral conduct prove itself
to be always advantageous and practical, our motive to it must
nevertheless always be a [pg 107] purely inward compulsion. The
utilitarian ethic must abdicate before that of immediate and sovereign
duty. That is the meaning of the doctrine of the categorical
imperative.
The English anti-utilitarians had in common with the utilitarians the
thought that the moral law was related in its essence to empirical
natural law. Kant, however, asserts that it has nothing to do with the
order of nature, and has its origin in supra-natural impulses. He is
the first since Plato to feel, like him, that the ethical is the
mysterious fact within us. In powerful language he proves in the
_Critique of the Practical Reason_ that ethics are a volition which
raises us above ourselves, makes us free from the natural order of the
world, and attaches us to a higher world-order. That is his great
discovery.
In the development of it, however, he is not happy. Whoever asserts
the absoluteness of moral duty, must also give the moral an absolute
and completely universal content. He must specify a principle of
conduct which shows itself as absolutely binding, and as lying at the
foundations of the most varied ethical duties. If he does not succeed
in doing this, his work is only a fragment.
When Plato announces that ethics are something supra-natural and
puzzling, his world-view provides him with a basic principle of the
ethical which corresponds to these qualities, and also has a definite
content. He is in a position to define ethics as a process of becoming
pure and free from the world of sense. This, his own special ethic, he
develops in the passages where he is consistent with himself. Then,
when he cannot complete his argument without an active ethic, he has
recourse to the popular theory of virtue.
Kant, however, as a child of the modern spirit, cannot let world- and
life-denial rank as an ethic. Therefore, since he can go only a part
of the way with Plato, he sees himself faced with the confusing task
of letting a purposive, activist ethic which is directed on the
empirical world originate in impulses which are not determined by any
adaptation to the empirical.
[pg 108]
He can find no solution of the problem thus set. In the form which he
gives it it is in fact insoluble. But he never even realises that he
has arrived at the problem of finding a basic principle of the moral
which is a necessity of thought. He is content with formally
characterizing ethical duty as absolutely binding. That duty, unless a
real content is at once given to it, remains an empty concept, he is
unwilling to admit. For the exalted character of his basic principle
of the moral he pays the price of having it devoid of all content.
Beginnings of an attempt to establish a basic moral principle which
has a content are to be found in his treatise, _Prolegomena to a
Metaphysic of Morals_ (1785), and again later in _A Metaphysic of
Morals_ (1797). In the 1785 volume he arrives at the dictum: “Act in
such a way that you use every human being both in your own person and
in everyone else’s always as an end, never merely as a means.” But
instead of seeing how far the totality of ethical duties can be
developed out of this principle, he prefers in the 1797 treatise to
set before ethics two ends to be aimed at, viz. the perfecting of
oneself and the happiness of others, and to enlarge upon the virtues
which promote them.
In his investigation of the ethic which aims at personal perfecting,
he drives his gallery with sure instinct towards the recognition that
all virtues which contribute thereto must be conceived of as
manifestations of sincerity and of reverence for one’s own spiritual
being. He does not, however, go the length of comprehending these two
as a unity, just as little does he concern himself to make clear the
inner connexion between self-perfecting and effort directed to the
common good, and in that way to dig down to the roots of the ethical
as such.
How far Kant is from understanding the problem of finding a basic
moral principle which has a definite content can be seen from the fact
that he never gets beyond an utterly narrow conception of the ethical.
He persists obstinately in drawing the boundary of his ethic as close
[pg 109] as possible, making it concerned with no duties beyond those
of man to man. The relation of man to non-human existences he does not
draw within it. It is only indirectly that he includes in it the
prohibition of cruelty to animals, putting this among the duties of
man to himself. By inhuman treatment of animals, he says, sympathy
with their sufferings is blunted in us, and thereby “comes a weakening
of a natural disposition which is very helpful to our morality in
relation to other men, and it gradually dies out.”
Again as to the vandalism of the destruction of what is beautiful, in
the form, that is, of natural objects which are viewed as entirely
without feeling, this is said to be unethical only because it violates
the duty of man to himself by undermining the desire—itself a support
to morality—of having something to love without regard to utility.
If the sphere of the ethical is limited to the relations of man to
man, then all attempts to reach a basic principle of the moral with an
absolutely binding content are rendered hopeless beforehand. The
absolute demands the universal. If there really is a basic principle
for the moral, it must be concerned in some way or other with the
relations between man and life as such in all its manifestations.
Kant, then, does not essay the task of developing an ethic which
corresponds to his deepened conception of the ethical. On the whole he
does nothing more than put the current utilitarian ethic under the
Protectorate of the Categorical Imperative. Behind a magnificent
façade he constructs a block of tenements.
His influence on the ethics of his time is twofold. He furthers it by
challenging it to profounder reflection on the nature of the ethical
and the ethical destiny of man. At the same time he is a danger to it
in that he robs it of its simplicity. The strength of the ethic of the
age of reason lies in its naïve utilitarian enthusiasm. It directly
enlists men in its service by offering them good aims and objects.
Kant makes it insecure by bringing this directness in question and
calling for an ethic which is derived from much less elementary
considerations. Depth is gained at [pg 110] the cost of vitality,
because he fails to establish at the same time a basic moral principle
with a content, a principle which compels acceptance from deep and yet
elementary considerations.
Several times Kant actually makes it his object to block the natural
sources of morality. He will not, for example, allow direct sympathy
to be regarded as ethical. The inner feeling for the suffering of
another as if it were one’s own is not to count as duty in the real
sense of the word, but only as a weakness by which the evil in the
world is doubled. All help to others must have its source in a
reasoned consideration of the duty of contributing to the happiness of
others.
By taking from ethics their simplicity and directness, Kant also
loosens the connexion which they and the belief in progress had formed
with one another, and through which the two together had proved so
productive of good. The disastrous separation between them which later
on, in the course of the nineteenth century, became complete, was
partly due to him.
In consequence of his wishing to drive out the naïve rationalistic
conception of the ethical in favour of a deepened one without at the
same time being in a position to establish a basic principle of it
which has been correspondingly deepened, has a definite content of its
own, and is directly convincing, Kant brings the ethics of his time
into danger. He labours at the provision of new foundations without
remembering that the house will develop cracks, if it is not propped
up sufficiently.
Kant’s attempt to reach an ethical world-view
Kant passes by the problem of finding a basic principle of the moral
with a definite content, because, while attempting to deepen the
concept of the ethical, he pursues an object which lies outside
ethics. He wishes to bring ethical idealism into connexion with an
idealistic representation of the world which has its source in a
theory of knowledge. But [pg 111] from that source he hopes there will
come an ethical world-view able to satisfy critical thought.
Why has Kant with a rigorism which intentionally depreciates ordinary
moral experience ventured forward to the discovery that the moral law
has nothing to do with the natural world-order, but is something
super-sensible? Because he refuses, similarly, to let the sensible
world which is experienced by us in space and time be accepted as
anything more than a manifestation of something nonsensible which
makes up true reality. The concept of a moral which contains none but
inward and spiritual duties is for him the expanding ladder which he
draws out so as to reach by means of it the region of Being in itself.
He has no feeling of dizziness when in company with ethics, he mounts
above all empirical experience and all empirical aims and objects. He
is determined to go right up with her, and she can never be
sufficiently _a priori_ for him, because he sets up another ladder of
the same length, that of epistemological idealism, and tries to lean
one against the other, so that they may give each other mutual
support.
How does it come about that the theoretical assumption that the world
of sensible phenomena has a non-sensible world of Being lying behind
it, has any importance for world-view? Because within the notion of
absolute duty which man experiences at work within himself there lies
a fact of the world-order of that same non-sensible world. Hence
arises the possibility, so Kant thinks, of raising to certainty by
means of ethics those great elements in the non-sensible world which
are of value for the optimistic-ethical world-view, viz. the ideas of
God, of the ethical freedom of the will, and of immortality, which
otherwise would always remain merely problematical.
So far as rationalism affirms unhesitatingly from the standpoint of
theoretical knowledge the ideas of God, of the ethical freedom of the
will (_i.e._, of virtue), and of immortality, which make up its
optimistic-ethical world-view, it builds upon a foundation which
cannot bear the weight of critical thought. Kant wishes, therefore, to
erect the [pg 112] optimistic-ethical world-view as a lake-dwelling
upon piles rammed into place by ethics. These three ideas are to be
able to claim real existence for themselves as necessary postulates of
the ethical consciousness.
This plan, however, of thus securing the position of the
optimistic-ethical world-view cannot be carried out. It is only the
idea of the ethical freedom of the will that can be made a postulate
of the moral consciousness. To establish the ideas of God and
immortality as equally “postulates,” Kant has to abandon all
honourable logic and argue with bold and ever bolder sophisms.
There is no way of uniting epistemological and ethical idealism,
however enticing the undertaking looks at first sight. When they are
set side by side, the happenings which take place according to a law
of causation subordinate to freedom, and become conscious in man
through the moral law, become identified with the happenings which are
universal in the world of things in themselves. There ensues a
disastrous confusion of the ethical with the intellectual. If the
sensible world is only a manifestation of an immaterial world, then
all the happenings which come about in the space and time sphere of
causation produced by necessity are only parallel appearances of the
events which are brought about in the intellectual sphere of causation
produced by freedom. All happenings, therefore, human activity just as
much as natural happening, are, according to the point of view, at
once intellectual and free, and at once natural and necessary. If
ethical activity produced by freedom is represented as analogous with
the results of epistemological idealism, then either everything that
happens in the world, conceived as intellectual happening, is ethical,
or there is no such thing as an ethical happening. Because it has
chosen to put side by side these two things, human activity and
natural happening, Kant’s way of looking at the question has to
renounce all ability to maintain the difference between them. But the
very life of ethics depends on this difference being there and
effective.
[pg 113]
Epistemological idealism is a dangerous companion for the ethical. The
world-order of immaterial happening has a supra-ethical character.
From the setting side by side of ethical and epistemological idealism
there can never result an ethical world-view: it will always be a
supra-ethical one.
From epistemological idealism, therefore, ethics have nothing to
expect, but everything to fear. By its depreciation of the reality of
the empirical world the ethical world-view is not helped: it is
injured.
Ethics have materialist instincts. They want to concern themselves
with empirical happenings and transform the circumstances of the
empirical world. But if that world is only “appearance,” derived from
an intellectual world which functions within it or behind it, ethics
have nothing on which to act. To wish to influence a self-determined
play of appearances has no sense. Ethics can therefore allow validity
to the view that the empirical world is mere appearance only with the
limitation that activity exerted upon the appearance does at the same
time influence the reality lying behind it. But thereby they come into
conflict with all epistemological idealism.
Kant is defeated by the same fate which rules in Stoic, Indian, and
Chinese monism alike. As soon as thought tries in any way to
comprehend ethics in connexion with the world-process, it falls at
once, whether it is conscious of it or not, into the supra-ethical
manner of regarding it. Fully to shape ethics to an ethical world-view
means letting them come to terms with nature-philosophy. Ethics are
thereupon, as a matter of fact, devoured in one way or another by that
philosophy, even if they are in word saved from that fate. The
coupling of ethical idealism with epistemological is only bringing
ethics and nature-philosophy into relation with one another in a
roundabout way by which it is hoped to outwit the logic of facts. But
this logic cannot be outwitted. The tragical result lies in the
identification which has been made of the ethical with the
intellectual.
[pg 114]
The ethical is not something irrational which becomes explicable when
we betake ourselves from the world of appearance to the region of
immaterial Being that lies behind it. Its intellectual character is of
a peculiar kind, and rests upon the fact that the world-process, as
such, comes in man into contradiction with itself. It follows that the
ethical will and ethical freedom of the will are not explicable by any
theory of knowledge, and cannot, moreover, serve as a support to any
such theory.
As a result of conceiving the moral law and empirical obedience to
natural law as in absolute opposition to each other, Kant finds
himself on the road which leads to a dualistic world-view. Afterwards,
however, in order to satisfy the claims of the unitary and optimistic
world-view which the spirit of the age prescribes to him, he manages
with the stratagems which are provided for him by the combination of
ethical and epistemological idealism, to work himself back on to the
road which leads to the monistic point of view.
Kant is great as an ethical thinker, great too with his theory of
knowledge, but as shaper of a world-view he is not in the first rank.
By his deepened conception of the nature of the ethical, a conception
which lands him in dualistic thought, the problem of the
optimistic-ethical world-view is unfolded in an entirely new way.
Difficulties reveal themselves which till then no one could have
imagined to exist. But he does not deal with them. He is blinded by
his ambition to be the Copernicus of the optimistic-ethical
world-view, believing that he can show the difficulties inherent in
that view to be misunderstandings which explain themselves away as
soon as, by means of his epistemological idealism, actual
circumstances and relations take the place of these which are apparent
but inexplicable. In reality he does nothing but replace the naïve
optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world which was the basis of
action for the rationalists by an artfully contrived one.
He does not take the trouble to ask in what the optimistic [pg 115]
ethical world-view consists, to what final items of knowledge and
demands it leads, and how far these are confirmed by experience of the
moral law. He takes it over without examination in the formula: “God,
Freedom (or Virtue), and Immortality,” which was supplied to it by
rationalism, and wishes to raise it in this naïve form to a certainty.
There is thus in Kant’s philosophy the most terrible want of thought
interwoven with the deepest thinking. New truths, weighty in their
novelty, make their appearance in it. But they get only half-way on
their journey. The absoluteness of ethical duty is grasped, but its
content is not investigated. Experience of the ethical is recognized
as the great secret by means of which we comprehend ourselves as
“other than the world”; but the dualistic thinking which goes with it
is not worked out any further. That the final items of our knowledge
of our world-view are assertions of the ethical will is admitted, but
the consequences of this supremacy of the will over knowledge are not
thought out to a conclusion.
Kant stimulates powerfully the men of his time, but is unable to make
secure for them the optimistic-ethical world-view in which they have
lived. His mission is, although both he and they are content to
deceive themselves in the matter, to deepen it, and ... to let it
become less secure than before.
[pg 116]