Kant’s Philosophy: Enlightenment, Reason, and Ethics
Frame: The Eighteenth Century Context
Immanuel Kant lived in the eighteenth century, coinciding with U.S. independence, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. These changes were linked to capitalism and the consolidation of political and social advancement of the bourgeoisie, which set a new cultural model: the Enlightenment. Kant described the Enlightenment as the mental attitude in which man decides to leave his minority, using his unaided reason.
In this era, political despotism dominated, and monarchs implemented social reforms advocated by the Enlightenment, without popular participation. The Encyclopaedia defended the principles of tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and respect for human dignity, representing the ideals of secularization. The Enlightenment culminated in the release of reason from any religious guardianship. Enlightened politics shared the ideal of achievement: the educational gains that thought, science, and technology would make possible a more just humanity. Kant proposed to establish an egalitarian society that ended the rivalry between states.
Physics culminated with Newton’s work, building upon Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, with a conception of science based on the combination of experimentation and calculation. In philosophical terms, dogmatic rationalism held out the possibility of metaphysics as a priori knowledge, independent of experience, about the soul, the world, and God. Empiricism, represented by Hume, based human knowledge on experience and considered metaphysics an impossible science. Prominent religious movements included deism, which Voltaire maintained as a natural religion, valid for all beings and without dogmas, and pietism, a Protestant sect that founded religion in personal reflection and the practice of virtue.
Influences and Implications
From Rationalism, Kant took the idea that scientific knowledge is universal and necessarily true, so there is some a priori factor from the knowing subject. The influence of Hume’s empiricism made him aware of the importance of experience and limited the use of reason. He also rejected the possibility of metaphysics as a science: God, the soul, and the world can be thought of but never known.
From Rousseau, Kant understood that scientific knowledge ensures its finitude of human happiness and therefore requires an ethical complement. From pietism in his youth, and the ancient Stoics with their ethics, Kant took the idea of virtue. Kant reformulated the ideas of reason and the subject, and his ethics became intellectualist. The repercussions resulted in the first end of the nineteenth century German idealism, whose principal representatives built great philosophical systems with which they pretended to explain all reality, above critique of Kant’s proposal. This line culminated in Marx and Schopenhauer’s dialectical conception of history. Schopenhauer collected the Kantian concept of the thing itself, identifying it with the will as an irrational principle of reality, and Nietzsche criticized Kant’s formal duty ethics as being oppressive to life.
Kant’s influence was detected in the neo-Kantians, who tried to synthesize Kant’s thought, the ratio-vitalism of Ortega y Gasset, who criticized Kant’s pure reason for its abstraction, trying to link it to life, and critical realism of authors such as Scheler and Hartmann. Others criticized Kantian formal ethics, opposing a material ethics of values, Heidegger and Sartre proposed a formal ethics of freedom, inspired by Kant, but atheistic. Wittgenstein swapped the limits of reason for an analysis of the limits of language through which to express our knowledge.