Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy: Ethics and Knowledge
For Kant, the true philosophy is that which asks questions that concern everyone and whose answers we need everyone. These are: What can I know? What should I do? And what may I expect? These questions can be summarized as: What is man? Kant claims philosophy should begin from these questions and, depending on them, the different areas of philosophy can be divided. His work can be divided into two stages: the pre-critical and the critical period.
Ethics
Kant examines ethics in his Critique of Practical Reason. He analyzes the practical use of reason to determine what principles should guide our behavior. The existence of morality in humans is an obvious and undeniable fact. Kant’s intention is to offer a rational ethics, whose principles are universal and necessary and are a priori (its principles cannot come from experience but from reason), autonomous (to follow your own rules), categorical (the acts are performed for an end in itself), and formal (not fixed in the content of the action but the intention). A material ethics cannot guide universal and necessary human behavior, as these are empirical (and hence a posteriori), hypothetical (and thus, conditional), and heteronymous (consequently, the individual is not autonomous or free, overriding morality).
The starting point of formal Kantian ethics is the Good Will, which is the only good thing in itself and without restriction, making it the ultimate criterion for judging the morality of any action. But as human reason is struggling with natural inclinations, it becomes Duty. Our will is good if we act out of duty. This is to make something out of pure respect for moral law. There are three types of action: breach of duty (bad), conformity with duty (good but with interest), and duty (good and disinterested), the latter being the only one with moral value.
Kant says, to see if we act out of duty, we must resort to the categorical imperative (a test by which reason makes good will). It is an expression of duty and requires us unconditionally.
This receives various formulations:
- Universal law: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
- Law of nature: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.”
- Formula of the end in itself: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
Finally, we find a place here for the “ideas” of metaphysics, affirmed as postulates of practical reason (they cannot be proven, but are necessary because otherwise the fact of morals would be impossible). We must admit the postulate of freedom (= existence) so that morality can be possible.
The other two principles arise from the Supreme Good (synthesis between virtue and happiness: the good and virtuous man is to be happy), which is only possible if we accept the postulate of the immortality of the soul (the good man is not always happy in this world, so the good man will be happy in “another world”) and if we affirm the proposition that God exists, who would be the one who assures us that in the other world the good will always be happy.
Theory of Knowledge
As for the theory of knowledge, Kant raises the question: What do I know? He is trying to answer in his Critique of Pure Reason (“All knowledge starts from the senses, proceeds thence to the understanding, and ends with reason” = CPR). This book asks about the possibilities and limits of human knowledge [both on theoretical grounds (Pure Reason) and practical (Practical Reason)], carrying out an analysis or critique of reason. He sees Newton’s science as a starting point in the analysis and model of “knowledge” to study reason (and it is able to make universal and necessary laws based on experience). Now the original question becomes: How is Newton’s science possible? From here, Kant will ask another question: Is metaphysics possible as a science?
To attempt to answer these questions in CPR and the first response, may affirm or deny the second.
A science is nothing more than a set of judgments. The question that Kant asks is: “What types of judgments are used in Newton’s science?” From which to ask how human reason makes such judgments possible. He distinguishes two kinds of judgments: Analytic judgments, which are those in which the predicate is included in the subject, do not expand our knowledge, and are a priori (no need to resort to experience to know the truth, and therefore are universal and necessary), and synthetic judgments, which are those in which the predicate is not included in the subject, it expands our knowledge and are a posteriori (its truth depends on experience, so they are particular and contingent). So far, nothing new for philosophers, until Kant discovered synthetic judgments a priori, that both enlighten and are universal and necessary. And since these are the judgments themselves of science, Kant analyzes how human reason makes them possible, by analyzing what is going on. He distinguishes three faculties of knowledge, which he studies separately in the CPR.
Transcendental Aesthetic
On the one hand, sensitivity, discussed in the Transcendental Aesthetic. For there to be knowledge, there must be an object to be known and a subject that knows. Both impose a number of “conditions” in the process of knowledge: the subject matter provides the content or subject of knowledge and imposes a number of conditions we call transcendental form and are therefore universal and necessary, and consequently, conditions a priori. These are space and time, the “pure intuitions.” The synthesis between matter and form is the empirical intuition or phenomenon. It follows that we cannot know the “thing itself” (noumenon), only the phenomenon. Given here is what he calls a Copernican turn, being the object that fits the subject and not vice versa. This new philosophical approach is called transcendental idealism. Kant also deals in this section of the “Transcendental Aesthetic” with mathematical knowledge, that is, the possibility of “synthetic judgments a priori” in arithmetic and geometry, affirming that these sciences can make such judgments through pure intuitions.
Transcendental Analytic
Besides understanding, studied in the Transcendental Analytic. For Kant, understanding is the ability to think. Such understanding is active. Its activity consists in producing certain pure concepts or categories (twelve, not from experience) that unify and order the phenomena of sensation arrived. The synthesis between a phenomenon and a category is the object. We find here why synthetic judgments are possible a priori due to the ability of the subject (transcendental self) to know by ordering the categories. Two conclusions stem from this point: if there is no real knowledge of phenomena and synthesis of categories and that our knowledge has been limited by experience.
Transcendental Dialectic
Finally, reason, discussed in the Transcendental Dialectic. Kant tries to find if metaphysics is possible as a science. He will say no, that metaphysics is an illusion, because the objects (God, soul, and world) that it deals with are beyond experience. Kant says that reason, trying to reach absolute knowledge, “jumps” experience (the conditioned) and creates its own “objects” (the unconditioned or Ideas). These objects belong to the noumenal. Reason comes to them through an argument that falls into contradictions, paralogisms, and claims to prove the existence of God. But Kant also says it is a natural tendency of human beings and thus inevitable. He is now trying to get the contents of metaphysics through ethics.