Kant’s Philosophy: Influences, Critical Dialogue, and Legacy
Influences on Kant’s Philosophy
Influences received: Wolff’s rationalism, Hume’s empiricism, Newtonian physics, and Enlightenment thinkers (e.g., Rousseau). Kant’s philosophy is intended to be a definitive and scientific systematization of all valid contributions received throughout history, and a necessary starting point for any future philosophy. Although this claim may seem excessive, it is largely justified: nowadays, it is difficult to engage in philosophy or, in general, to think about any subject with a minimum basis without considering Kant’s ideas.
Kant’s Critical Dialogue with Tradition
Kant’s work is a critical dialogue with all previous tradition. For example:
- From Plato: Kant adopts the concept of “idea” as an ideal or model to which objects known through experience aspire without ever fully reaching it. He also takes the notion of a “supreme good” or “good idea,” wholly determined by reason a priori, which should be the aim of the will, renouncing all sensible impulses. However, Kant rejects Plato’s claim of a rational knowledge of reality itself: all our knowledge is limited to phenomena, as known to the subject who has intervened in its construction.
- With Aristotle and the Empiricists: Kant agrees with the assessment of sensitive knowledge: “all our knowledge begins with experience.” But he rejects the thesis that this is equivalent to: “all our knowledge comes from experience.” Experience itself is possible because of a priori conditions that allow feeling and thinking the objects given to us in it.
- Rationalists: Kant believed rationalists were correct in claiming that knowledge should be a priori and necessary. However, they were wrong to relate this necessary knowledge to “reality in itself” and to use a priori principles to deductively construct metaphysics or a theory of reality as such.
- Against Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, and all forms of hedonism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism: Kant states that moral laws must be deduced a priori or must be found in the very form of the moral mandate, without reference to an alleged constitution of human nature that can only be known by experience.
Lasting Impact of Kant’s Philosophy
Neither philosophy nor science have been the same after Kant.
Impact on Philosophy
In Germany, the immediate impact of Kant’s insistence on the subject was Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). Idealists removed restrictions on the knowledge of the thing-in-itself (noumenon) and aimed to demonstrate how the subject or Spirit not only constructs knowledge of the world but the world as such, with all its natural and cultural manifestations. The reaction against Idealism led to the great philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: positivism, Marxism, vitalism, existentialism, and others. All these currents coincide in accepting the metaphysical agnosticism of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Impact on Science
The emergence of non-Euclidean geometries and quantum and relativistic physics, which renounce the intuitive notions of space and time, has called into question Kant’s foundation of science. The very idea of “scientific knowledge,” the basis of the Critique of Pure Reason, is more of an ideal than a fact, and more a set of hypotheses and theories than a system of absolute certainties. Popper, for example, defines science as tentative hypotheses which we accept as true until experience demonstrates their falsity.
Impact on Ethics
Something similar can be said of the concepts of duty, moral obligation, imperative, etc. Nietzsche explored the forgotten origin of moral ideas, and psychoanalysis has emphasized the hidden, unconscious motivations of behavior. Both inquiries offer results that cast doubt on whether such concepts are more than costumes for processes, both historical and psychic, that are dark and shameful. In any case, we must remember that one of the basic insights of psychoanalysis is already present in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant acknowledges that experience cannot provide a single example of acting out of respect for duty: even though the subject believes he is acting on this occasion, there may be other unknown reasons that are the true causes of their behavior.