Immanuel Kant 

The Giant of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
by Leo Kee Chye

The Man Himself

It’s no surprise that Immanuel Kant had dominated much of the European thought in the nineteen century. His original contributions to almost all areas of philosophy have had profound impact on almost every philosophy movements that followed him. Even his opponents couldn’t but concede his influence.

“Immanuel Kant is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate, but it would be foolish not to recognise his great importance.”

Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

Kant, despite his influence, lived a rather uneventful life. Born in Konigsberg (now called Kaliningrad) and he was never once many miles from Konigsberg for the whole of his life. Geographically restricted he was, intellectually, he seemed boundless in his philosophical quest.

If the statement “It takes the kind of person to produce the kind of work” is correct, you couldn’t find an better example than Kant. Outwardly, his life was marked by order and regularity as he literally lived it out in a clocklike manner, setting aside a time for everything and never once strayed from the routine. So punctilious to his daily schedule that his neighbours were said to have set their clocks and watches to his movement.

Inwardly, he was methodical and thoughtful; he never rushed into things except after exhausting all possible reasoning. It was said he contemplated marriage twice, but reflected long enough that the two ladies thought better of it; hence, Kant’s thoughtful nature destined him to the life of a bachelor.

Never was a philosopher matured slowly but steadily as Kant. It took him 12 years to develop his critical philosophy and he was already in his fifties when his first major work “Critique of Pure Reason” was published, compared that with David Hume who completed “A Treaty of Human Nature” before the age of 27; Adam Smith, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, 36.

Aims of Kant’s Enterprise
So what had Kant sought to accomplish that so started the rest of the world. The best summary is from the man himself.

“All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? and 3. What may I hope?”

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

And like all philosophers, Kant has ready-made answers for them. In the “Critique of Pure Reason”, he explains how can we have objective knowledge and what are its limitations. Using reason, he justifies the grounds for morals or ethics and freedom in “Critique of Practical Reason”. And, lastly, what to hope for is found in “The Critique of Judgement”.

What can I know? (Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge)
What can I know? And how can I be sure that what I know is objective and absolute.
Epistemology—the field of philosophy that devotes to the study of human knowledge—is the battleground where two camps of philosophers—the rationalists and empiricists—battled out in their quest for the truth. A background history of this battle is indispensable to understanding Kant’s masterpiece Critique of Pure Reason.

Rationalism
It was no coincidence that most rationalists were also themselves brilliant mathematicians. Rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz were so impressed by the prowess of mathematics that they held that human should rely only on his innate reasoning to comprehend true nature of the world or to obtain absolute knowledge.
In other word, rationalists merely need to exercise the power of reasoning to gain the absolute knowledge of the world, without the contamination of experience through our senses.

Using a analogy, Descartes describes solid wax when cooled and liquid wax when heated looks different through our senses, but our mind tells us the wax although both may look and feel differently, is still the same wax. It is our pure reason that sees through the deception of the world presented to us through our senses, and it is only through pure reason that we can build an indubitable foundation of knowledge.

In his “Meditations”, Descartes demonstrates that the statement “I think, I exist” is an irreducible self-evident truth and from this statement only, he set out to show the existence of God and the knowledge of the world.

A brief treatment of his method will show how rationalist postulates their argument. Many would wonder that how is it possible that an innocuous statement “I think, I exist” could provide a pillar to which all knowledge is supported upon. Descartes started his thought experiment by doubting everything that everyone takes for granted. When we are dreaming, our dreams are as real as the real world until we are awoken. In the same vein, the world we are living in could be just a dream that only death is the awaking call. Two plus two equal four seem indubitable but it could have being surreptitiously implanted in us by a devil; hence giving us the delusion of its veracity. If he was to doubt all knowledge, he has fallen into solipsism. However even solipsism is gone when Descartes pressed on to doubting the existence of he himself. It is here that Descartes hit the notion that he couldn’t doubt the existence of himself since it is he himself that’s required in order for the process of doubting to be possible; it follows that he has to exist.

An analogy might pave a way through the maze of his reasoning. Let’s imagine that you are imprisoned in an empty room, surrounded by walls and walls only. You are totally cut off from the world outside. The only communication you have is occasioned by photographs of the outside world slipped into the room. These photographs are the only things you have at your disposal to deduce the world outside. Looking at these photos, you see unicorns and dragons. Like Descartes, you doubted the existence of such creatures as presented to you by the photographs or to Descartes, through his senses. You may doubt all the things in the photographs as real representations of the world outside, but you cannot doubt the existence of the camera. It is the camera that took the pictures—“Photo exist, camera exist”. By the same logic, it is our faculty of mental thought that gives us the ability to doubt. However if we doubt the existence of our faculty of mental thought, there’s no way that we can have the ability to doubt. Without the camera, we couldn’t possibly have the photographs.

The problems of a rationalist approach to knowledge are:
1. Without references to experience, many of the theories propounded are purely speculative, difficult to ascertain their veracity.
2. The so-called innate ideas of human, the rationalists claimed we have, are often tautological statements which say nothing of the real world in which we live in.
3. Rationalists also have a hard time in explaining that much of our knowledge we hold is gained through experience.

Empiricism
Approaching epistemology differently were the Empiricists led by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Locke argued that all humans are born tabula rasa, a blank tablet where the experiences of the external world are written on. It is only through our experiences with the external world that truth knowledge can arise, not merely through engaging empty speculation like the rationalists. Using Newton as an example, empiricist formulate his hypothesis according to what nature has presented to him through his senses and with his hypothesis, the empiricist proudly challenge Nature to prove him wrong. If indeed he is proven wrong, the humble empiricist is back to his drawing board again.

Empiricism ran into problem when Berkeley pushed Locke’s empiricistical logic a step further. He questioned that we can ever gain absolute knowledge merely through our senses. Let’s take an apple in our hand. How can we be sure that there is really an apple there. The apple we experience is a just a bundle of sensations in synchronism; there is no way that we can affirm there is really an apple. An analogy can be enlightening at this time. Assuming you get to wear state-of-the-art virtual reality goggle and a high tech gloves that can emit sensations to your hands. In this virtual reality world, you see a living unicorn. Putting your hands over it, you can feel warm and texture of its body, similar to that of a goat or sheep. Because both touch and vision are in synchronism, you have a delusion of a unicorn, alive and running. Through the logic of empiricism, Berkeley has devastated the notion of the external world or matter.

Finally Empiricism ran into a wall when Hume went ahead and drove it to its logical extreme and led into conclusions that defied all commonsense. Whereas Berkeley destroyed the notion of matter, Hume destroyed both notion of matter and mind. It was no surprise that Hume was not well received by philosophers then. Hume argues that science is impossible since causality is a concept that could not be derived from experience. Let’s take the example of the imprisoned man again. From the photographs, assuming they are arranged chronologically, he discovers that photographs with lightning will always come before photographs with the sound of thunder (assuming thunder is represented in photograph by people clasping their ears with their hands). He, through his concept of causation, hypothesises it is the lightning that causes the thunder. Just because the two phenomena occur in sequence, we cannot justify the missing link as causation and thereby hypothesis this causation as universal principle for the two phenomena, Hume argue. Ludicrous it may seem, this argument devastated Newton Mechanics and all other physical science. In the twentieth century, we felt the reverberation of Hume’s argument when Newton Mechanics failed to operate under special circumstances and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity took stage. However both theories are wholly different kind of animals. Newton Mechanics is based on gravity whereas Relativity, space-time.

Equally unkind to Rationalist, Hume argues that all mathematical statements are analytic, that is tautology. Take this sentence “Woman is a female human being”. The predicate female human being is being defined in the subject woman. No new information is added. This statement is true without referencing to experience. Pure reason cannot help us to gain knowledge.

Kant to the rescue
Kant is one of the earliest to recognise the validity of Hume’s devastating argument or as Kant himself remarked, “It has awoken me from my dogmatic slumber.” So Kant took upon himself the task of reconciling the differences between rationalism and empiricism, without trappings of Hume’s scepticism. It was only after the publication of Critique of Pure Reason did Kant continue his slumber again.

Some terminology
Critique of Pure Reason is infamous for its unintelligibility. Kant wrote his works entirely in German which was rare among intellectuals then. And given the young language, there weren’t enough technical vocabulary to assist in Kant’s endeavour. Kant improvised, unfortunately. Translation of his works to English has the unintelligibility compounded when no equivalent English words could proxy its German counterpart. Hence, we need to grasp its terminology in order to make his works slightly more accessible.

A priori and a posterior
Both are Latin words, a prior means without reference to experience and a posterior, with reference to experience. Ability to reason is an a prior idea that is innate in us all, whereas a posterior idea is derived from experience like the feeling of cold or hot.

Analytic and synthetic
Both refer to statements. Analytic statement like “woman is a female human being” or “two plus two equal four” where the predicate can be derived from the subject. Its truth can be verified without recourse to experience; its denial will lead to self-contradiction. Synthetic statement, on the other hand, need reference to experience for its veracity. Take this statement “The Prime Minister of Singapore is Goh Chok Tong”. It’s clearly a synthetic statement which you need to check to confirm its truth and its denial will not lead to self-contradiction since Gok Chok Tong might not the Prime Minister of Singapore.

In Hume’s argument, no necessary and universal truth can be established a posterior knowledge and only analytic truths are capable of being established a priori knowledge. If Kant can show that there’re synthetic a priori, half of the battle is won.

Three faculties of mind: Imagination, Reason and Understanding
Kant shows there’re 3 faculties in us all. (Please remember the words used by Kant is not used in its normal denotation; I represent them by capitalising the first letter). Imagination is a passive receptor that represents and reproduces images from Intuition. I’ll explain Reason and Understanding later.

Intuition is from which we obtain sensory data from the external world. However this data receptor is not wholly a posterior as Empiricist insisted. Before Intuition is possible, it has to have Forms of Intuition which are Space and Time. These Forms are not found a posterior but a prior. Let’s assume a thought experiment where we can subtract our senses one by one. If we take out our sight, what will we see? Not darkness but “nothingness”. Try to imagine to see behind your back; what did you see. It’s “nothingness”—an empty gap. Proceed then to take away your hearing, touch, taste and smell. When you have subtracted all possible senses, you still left with the notion time. You cannot that out; it is a prior Form. Likewise, in order for any of your senses possible, space is needed; it forms a bridge to the external world but it is not external but a prior.

With this space-time as Forms of Intuition, we’re condemned to see, hear, feel, taste and smell the world as what the world appears to us. Again, if everything fails, analogy is the rescue. Imagine you have a pair of spectacle that reduces you to seeing everything in black and white. In other word, putting on that spectacle makes you clinically colour-blind. Being colour-blind, colours will mean absolutely nothing to you and you are condemned to interpret the world as black and white, as what the world appears to you. You’ll never comprehend the notion of colour. By the same logic, the Forms of Intuition force you to see, hear, feel, smell and touch through this spectacle of space and time; there is no way that you can comprehend the world-in-itself or nomenon, compare that with world-as-appeared or phenomenon.

As mentioned earlier, Imagination is passive and could only represents and reproduces images to be used by Faculty of Understanding. Understanding, on the other hand, can process these data from Imagination into Concepts using Categories. The table of Categories is shown as follows:

Imagine Understanding as a librarian and the books are donated by Imagination. Without the librarian the books will be thrown haphazardly. The library need to organise these books in a certain manner and he might arrange them using ISBN (International Standard Book Number). Similarly, The Table of Categories works like ISBN in organising date so as to rendering them intelligible. Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason has made detail argument for each of the Category. Notice that one of the Categories is Causality and Dependence. Kant argues it is an innate principle rather than a posterior concept; hence, he rescue Newton Mechanics from Hume’s scepticism. In Kant’s Category of Cause, he merely show that we do attribute the concept of causality to phenomenon but not suggesting that A actually cause B. Gravity in Newton Mechanics might not be the actual cause to the falling apple but there’s something that must have cause the apple to fall, so says Kant.

Lastly, we have this Faculty of Reason. Its role is rather peculiar but indispensable. Kant argues that the employment of Categories will legitimate the scientific knowledge but not things like grasping these notions—infinity, ethics, beauty, God and afterlife, to name a few. These ideas are not derived from Categories or from Intuition. Take Kant’s nomenon or thing-in-themselves where he can conceive the boundary separating nomenon and phenomenon yet he cannot know anything about nomenon. It’s that these ideas arise. Reason with its regulatory roles to Understanding helps reduce the world to the simplest of ideas. “Occam’s Razor: Entities should not multiply beyond necessity” is derived from Reason. In our world, we can observe many different kind of forces—electrical force, magnetic force, nuclear force. Since Occam’s Razor is within our Reason, we’re inclined to reduce the forces to as few as possible. For example, we have successfully combined electrical and magnetic into electrical and magnetic theory. However it is also the misused of Reason that we are led into metaphysical speculation about God, immortality of soul and infinite. Take Occam’s Razor to the extreme, it is easily to explain away everything through the acts of God.

To sum up Kant’s contributions:
1. He has shown that it is possible to have absolute knowledge of things—causality.
2. But the knowledge can only operate within the confines of world through what we are made to perceive with our senses.
3. We cannot possibly know the nomenon or the world-in-itself.
4. Questions about God, immortality of soul and infinite are not answerable. These questions arise out of Reason whose regulatory roles have abused by Understanding.