THE CRITICAL SOLUTION, CONTINUED: KANT.
Kant's answer to his question was briefly this. Intelligence is
essentially synthetic, always supplementing the given by something
beyond, instituting relationships, unifying the many, and thus
building up concrete totalities. In pure mathematics this is obvious:
the process of numeration shows it creating number out of units, and
geometry shows elementary propositions leading on to complicated
theorems. In abstract physics it is hardly less obvious: there, e.g.,
the principle of reason and consequent or the persistence of substance
are rational and legitimate steps beyond the mere datum. The more
important question follows. How are these 'pure' syntheses applicable
to real fact? To that Kant replies: They apply, because in all that
we call real or objective fact there is a subjective element or
constituent. What appears to be purely given, and independent of our
perceptions, is a product of perceptual and conceptual conditions,--is
constituted by a synthesis in perception, imagination, conception. Our
world is a mental growth--not our individual product, but the work of
that common mind in which we live and think, and which lives and thinks
in us. Anyhow it is not an isolated self-existing un-intelligent world
for ever materially outside us--an other world, eternally separate
from us; but bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, the work realised
by our great 'elder brother,'--the Idea of human collectivity--the
Reason or Spirit in which we are all one soul. It is therefore no
unwarranted step on to a foreign property when we apply the categories
of thought and forms of sense to determine objective reality: for
objective reality has been for ever made, and is now making, objective
and reality by the conscious or unconscious syntheses of perception and
imagination.
There remains the answer to the same question as regards the objects
of Metaphysics. These objects are according to Kant inferences, and
illegitimate inferences. They are not necessary elements or factors
in the constitution of experience. In order that there should be
experience, knowledge, science, there must be an endless hold of
space and time in which to stow it clearly and distinctly away: and
there must also be ties and relations binding it part to part, links
of reference and correlation, a sort of logical elastic band that
will stretch to include infinitely copious materials. But each real
knowledge attaches to a definite assignable perception, in a single
place and time. From this point we can travel--by means of like
points--practically without limit in any direction. But though the old
margin fades forever and forever as we move, a new margin takes its
place: the limitation and finitude remain: and new acquisitions are
always balanced in part by the loss of the old. Yet the heart and the
imagination are clamorous, and the intellect is ready to serve them.
Such an intellect Kant has called Reason, and its products (Platonic)
'Ideas.' The (Platonic) Idea expresses not so much an object of
knowledge as a postulate, a problem, an act of faith. The 'Vaulting
ambition' Intelligence 'o'erleaps itself and falls on t'other,'
Unsatisfied with a bundle of sensations and ideas, it demands their
abiding unity in a substantial Soul. To simplify the endlessness of
physical phenomena, it sums them up in a Universe. To gather all mental
and physical diversities and divisions into one life, it creates the
ideal of God.
Each single experience, and the collected aggregate of these
experiences, is felt to fall short of a complete total: and yet this
complete total, the ultimate unity, is itself not an experience at
all. But, if it be no object of experience, it is still an idea on
which reason is inevitably driven: and the attempt to apprehend it, in
the absence of experience, gives rise to the theories of Metaphysics.
Everything, however, which can be in the strict sense of the word
known, must be perceived in space and time, or, in other words, must
lie open to experience. Where experience ends, human reason meets a
barrier which checks any efficient progress, but refuses to recognise
the check as due to a natural limit which it is really impossible to
pass. The idea of completeness, of a rounded system, or unconditional
unity, is still left, after the categories of the understanding have
done their best: and is not destroyed although its realisation or
explication is declared to be impossible.
There is thus left unexplained a totality which encompasses all the
single members of experience--a unity compared to which the several
categories are only a collection of fragments--an infinite which
commands and regulates the finite concepts of the experiential
intellect. But in the region of rational thought there is no objective
and independent standard by which we can verify the conclusions of
Reason. There are no definite objects, lying beyond the borders of
experience, towards which it might unerringly turn; and its sole
authentic use, accordingly, is to see that the understanding is
thorough and exact, when it deals in the co-ordination of experiences.
In this want of definite objects, Reason, whenever it acts for itself,
can only fall into perpetual contradictions and sophistries. Pure
Reason, therefore, the faculty of ideas, the organ of Metaphysics, does
not of itself 'constitute' knowledge, but merely 'regulates' the action
of the understanding.
By this rigour of demonstration Kant dealt a deadly blow, as it seemed,
to the dogmatic Metaphysics, and the Deism of his time. Hume had
shaken the certainty of Metaphysics and thrown doubt upon Theology:
but Kant apparently made an end of Metaphysics, and annihilated
Deistic theology. The German philosopher, as Hegel has said and Heine
has repeated, did thoroughly and with systematic demonstration what
Voltaire did with literary graces and not without the witticisms with
which the French executioner gives the _coup de grâce._ When a great
idea had been degraded into a vulgar doctrine and travestied in common
reality, the Frenchman met its inadequacies with graceful satire, and
showed that these half-truths were not eternal verities. The German
made a theory and a system of what was only a sally of criticism; and
rendered the criticism wrong, by making it too consistent and too
logical[1].
Science--such is Kant's conclusion--is of the definite and detailed,
of the conditioned. It goes from point to point, within the
enveloping unity of what we call experience, and which rests upon the
transcendental and original unity of consciousness. But a knowledge
of the whole--of the enveloping unity--is a contradiction in terms.
To know is to synthetise: you cannot synthetise synthesis. Knowledge
is of the relative: but an absolute and unconditional totality has no
relations. We may therefore, possibly, feel, believe in, presuppose
the absolute: but know it in the stricter sense, we cannot. It may be
the object of a rational faith. But as for knowledge, we can get on
in psychology without the invisible and immortal soul: we can carry
out sciences of the physical universe, without troubling ourselves
about the 'cosmological' questions of ultimate atoms or ultimate
void, of first beginning and final end: and no proofs will ever prove
the _existence_ of that 'ideal' of reason--briefly termed God--which
transcends and completes and creates all existence. Not that such Ideas
are useless even in science. They represent--if not without risks--the
faith and the presupposition which underlie the spirit of scientific
progress, and set before it an ideal perfection which it will do well
to strive after, though it can never get beyond approximations. What
is perhaps more important: this faith of reason science is as little
competent to disprove, as it is incompetent to prove it. Science is not
all in all: we are more than mere theoretical and cognitive beings.
The logic of science is not the sole code of our spiritual or higher
intellectual life;
'We live by admiration, hope, and love.'
The sequel and development of the first Criticism are found in Kant's
works on ethics, aesthetics, teleology and religion. Only in one
supplementary chapter, and in casual indications as need arises, has
Kant made any pronouncement on his view of Philosophy as a whole and as
a system. That it is and can only be a system, when it really engages
on reconstruction in theory, was of course his fundamental insight.
But in his stage of _Zetesis_[2], of testing and sifting the sound
from the professed, he has confined himself to breaking up the mass
piecemeal, and leaving each result in its turn to corroborate and
correct the other. Sense and intellect may spring from a common stem;
but let us, he says, deal with them in their apparent separateness.
Reason practical must no doubt be identical at bottom with reason
theoretical: all the more convincing will be the undesigned coincidence
between the results of an inquiry into the principles of science, and
one into the principles of morals. We have seen that science ultimately
rests--though it does not discuss it and would indeed be incompetent
to do so--on a faith, a hope, a postulate of the ultimate supremacy of
intelligence,--the faith of reason in its own power (not verifiable
indeed by an exhaustive list of actual results)--or in the rationality
of the world. For science--though a kind of action and a part of
conduct--is a sort of inactive action: an _enclave_ in the busy world,
a period of preparation for the battle of life. In the field of conduct
the ultimate presupposition, which was for the luxury of science called
a reasonable faith or faith of reason, makes itself felt in the more
forcible form of a categorical imperative.
Or, at least, so it seems on first acquaintance. The command of duty,
addressed to the sensuously-conditioned nature, brooks no opposition
and condescends to no reasons in explanation or promises by way of
attraction. The moral law claims unconditional authority: towards its
sublime aspect reverence and sheer obeisance is due, utter loyalty to
duty for duty's sake. Nothing short of this absolute identification
with the Ought and a willingly willed self-surrender of the whole self
to it can entitle an agent to the full rank of moral goodness. Such is
the form--the synthetic link which joins the sensuous will indissolubly
with the will reasonable of moral law. Now for its explanation.
Humanity, though in the world of appearance and experience always
subject to sensuous conditions, is also a power of transcending these
conditions. Man is more than he can ever show in visibly single act.
He has in him the hope, the faith, the vision of absolute perfection
and completeness: but has it not as positive attained vision, but as
the perpetual unrest of unsatisfied endeavour, as the feeling and
the anticipation of an unachieved idea. And that perfection, that
completeness he believes himself to be; he even in some sense is.
Lapses and ill-success cannot quench the faith: for so long as there is
life, there is hope.
As he pictures out this invisible self, it may assume various forms
more or less imaginative. At times it may seem a far away, and yet
intimately near, being of beings,--the common father of all souls, the
eternal self-existent centre of life and love, the omnipresent bond
of nature, the omniscient heart of hearts,--on whom he can lean in
closest communion; though he is only too well aware how often he lives
as if God were not, and human beings were roaming specks in chaos. At
other times, he looks up to it as to an inner and better self, his
conscience, the true and permanent being, which controls his choices
and avoidances, which approves and disapproves, commands and condemns:
his soul of soul, genius, and guardian spirit. In such a mood to be
true to his own self--to follow the very voice of his nature--is to
realise his law of life. His Ego is the absolute ego--the reason which
is all things. And lastly, there are times when he conceives this
better self and true essence as the community of the faithful, as the
congregation of reasonable beings, of all perfected humanity.
In Kantian phraseology, man under one visible form is the union of
an intelligence and a sensibility, of a noümenal with a phenomenal
being. He is, indeed, says Kant, the former only in idea: it is only
a standpoint which he assumes. But it is a standpoint he always does
assume, if he is to be practical, i. e. if he is to move and modify
the world he finds around him. And what standpoint is that? What is
the law that has to govern his action, the law of the spiritual world?
Its supreme law is the law of liberty; and that law is autonomy.
Action--always under law--but that law a self-imposed one. So act
that thy will may be thy law, and with thy will the law of all others
whatsoever; so act that no other human being may by thy act be deprived
of full freedom and treated merely as a thing: so act as to respect the
dignity of every human being as implicitly a sovereign legislative.
In other words, Morality is a stage of struggle and of progress
which bears witness to something beyond. The 'I ought' represents a
transition stage towards the 'I will,' or rather it is the translation
of it into the language of the phenomenal world.[3] Morality, in a
sense-being, always presents itself as a contest between the good
and the evil principle: but in the transcendent and noümenal being
which such a being essentially is,--in the reasonable or good will,
the victory is already won by the good. Good is the law which governs
the world, and which is the strength of the individual life. To the
sensuous imagination, indeed, which here is apt to usurp the place of
reason, things appear under a somewhat different aspect. There the
certainty of self-conquest is forced by the difficulties of apparent
failure to veil itself under the picture of a perpetual approximation
through endless ages towards the standard of perfect goodness:
the confidence that the world is reasonable is presented under the
conception of a God who makes all things work together for good to the
righteous: and the autonomy of reason presents itself as the postulate
of freedom to begin afresh, absolutely untrammeled by all that has
gone before. Thus the kingdom of reason is represented as having its
times and seasons; as making determinate starts, and working up to a
consummation in the end of ages. But implicitly Kant's idea of reason's
autonomy,--of the 'I ought' as in its supreme truth an 'I will,'--is
an eternal truth. The 'standpoint,' so to call it after Kant, is the
standpoint which explains life and conduct and which makes conduct
possible. It is the assertion that the completeness _is,_ and is my
inmost being, the source of my action, my chief good, and that chief
good not a gratification or satisfaction to be looked forward to as
reward, but essential life and self-realisation. And this joy is what
is hidden under the austere gravity of the categorical imperative.
The Criticism of the Judgment-faculty is Kant's next step towards
providing a completer philosophy. Ostensibly it owes its origin to
the need of supplementing the treatment of Understanding and Reason
by a discussion of Judgment, and of considering our emotional as well
as our cognitive and volitional appreciations. What it really does
is to minimise still further the gulf left between the intellect
and nature--between the natural and the spiritual world. The
intellect, said the first criticism, makes nature: it makes possible
the general outlines of our conception of the world around us as
a causally-connected system, in which a permanent being undergoes
perpetual alteration, and manifests phenomena subject to mathematical
conditions. Intellect, in short, has staked out the world which is
the object of the practical man, and of his adviser the scientist.
But there is another world--the world of beauty and sublimity--the
world which art imitates and realises. The interpretation Kant gives
to the aesthetic world is as follows. The fact of beauty is a witness
to the presence in the mere copiousness of sensible existence of a
sub-conscious symmetry or spirit of harmony which realises without
compulsion and as if by free grace all the proportion and coherence
which intellect requires. Nature itself has something which does the
work that intellect was charged with, and does it with a subtle secret
hand which does not suggest the artificer. The fact of sublimity, on
the other hand, indicates the presence of an even greater spirit.
For beauty may seem--from what has been said--to be only an unbought
accrement to the commodities of life--facilitating the task of the
practical intellect. But the sublime in nature speaks of something
which is greater than human utilities and practical conveniences. It
reveals a something which is in sympathy with our essential and higher
self, and therefore stirs within us the keen rapture of the traveller
who sees from afar his home in 'rocky Ithaca,' but a something which
is cold to daily wants and vulgar satisfactions, and therefore strikes
upon us a gelid awe.
Another world yet remains, which appeals neither to our utilitarian
science, nor to our higher sentiments of artistic perfection. This is
the world as the home of organic life, and perhaps itself an organism.
The organism is apt to be a poser for the ordinary categories of
mechanical science. Here the part contains the whole, not less than the
whole contains the part: the cause is an effect, as well as cause, of
its effect. One thing is in another, and the other in it: 'the present
is charged with the past, and pregnant of the future,'--as the great
founder of modern teleology often said. In the plant and the animal
the natural world has to a certain degree reached an ideal unity which
is also real. Reason--the syllogism--is here not merely introduced
from without, as when man manipulates, but is the immanent law of a
natural life,--the end working out itself by its own means and act.
The fact admitted in these creatures suggests extending the conception
of organism (or teleology) to nature as a whole. From this point of
view Nature may almost be said to have a history--because it is almost
conceived as having one abiding self which in apparent unconsciousness
wonderfully simulates the purposive adaptation of conscious life.
The older vulgar teleology was somewhat mechanical: it regarded the
natural world outside of--or as it said, below--man as having no end
of its own, but in its series subserving man's commodities. In the
teleology of Kant the supreme end is still in a way man, and still
there is a little of the mechanical about it: but it is not to promote
man's happiness, understood as that probably _must_ be in a selfish
sense, but to produce in him the worthiest agent to carry on to its
highest the rational process of development. The struggles and pains
of natural existence, the laws of life, the competition of rivals, are
all means in the hands of nature to produce an autonomous being. Kant
says, a moral agent. But a moral agent has been already explained as
an intelligence certified unto truth and a self-centred will whose law
is the law of the cosmos,--whose plan of life, if we so put of it, is
essentially a concentration in miniature and in individuality of the
system ordained by the all-present God.
It is true that Kant, after all these soarings, checks enthusiasm by
the words 'not that we can know this, or that it is so: but our nature
with unmistakable tendency bids us act _as if_ it were so. Logic will
hardly justify it--but life seems to demand it.' And some have replied:
'let us trust the larger hope.'
[Footnote 1: Hegel's _Werke_, vol. i. p. 140.]
[Footnote 2: Kant from 1762 onwards continues to insist on the
necessity for philosophy taking up an analytic and critical attitude to
current conceptions: see especially _Werke,_ i. 95 and 292.]
[Footnote 3: Foundation of Metaph. of Eth. (_Werke_, viii. 82, 89):
'Dieses Sollen ist eigentlich ein Wollen.']