KANT, IMMANUEL

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was born in Köningsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), on April 22 and died there on February 12, having lived such an uneventful life that one early commentator questioned whether he had one. Yet his critical philosophy constituted a watershed in Western intellectual history. For science, technology, and ethics the significance of the Kantian watershed lies in the analysis of human experience as constructive and the argument that reason has insight only into that which it produces according to its own plan. With this argument Kant developed a new critical interpretation of scientific knowledge and of ethical reason that presents both as exhibiting constructive, not to say technological, dimensions.

Prior to Kant, modern philosophy was characterized by a contest between rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists such as René Descartes (1596–1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) considered reason to be the origin of all true knowledge, sensation merely a degraded form of thought or source of illusion. By contrast, empiricists such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and John Locke (1632–1704) argued that all knowledge derived from the senses, with thought being no more than an extension of sense perception. Kant's precritical writings included works in natural philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics reflective of the rationalist tradition. But reading the British empiricist David Hume (1711–1776) awakened Kant from what he described as his "dogmatic slumbers." This awakening led, in turn, to a synthesis of these two approaches in his major work, The Critique of Pure Reason, which argued that the form of human experience is constructed a priori by reason while its material content arises a posteriori from sensation. This is the core of Kant's transcendental or critical idealism, which he subsequently extended into ethics and aesthetics in order to respond to what he considered the three main questions of philosophy: What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope for? He later added a fourth question that synthesized the first three: What is the human being?

The Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

Kant's major work undertakes what he terms a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. Whereas traditionally philosophy had begun with particular objects of experience, Kant's transcendental method begins with experience in general and tries to uncover the "transcendental preconditions" that make such experience possible. For Kant, objects are seen as fitting into human representational structures rather than representational structures simply arising from objects. As Hume had shown, the necessity that these representational structures possess, the fact that all objects must appear in space and time, simply cannot be derived from sensory experience. According to Kant, then, space and time are the a priori forms of sensibility, the ideal or transcendental forms that make it possible for human beings to experience any object.

Only as a manifold of content within space and time is sense intuition or experience possible. But objects that first appear to the senses within the necessary structures of space and time are further known using concepts such as substance and causality. For Kant, the expectation that events necessarily have causes is not so much derived from experience as brought to experience, although of course the particular causes are determined by experience. Experience would not be what it is, would not be intelligible or knowable, without these a prior pure concepts of the understanding. The justification of these categories rests with their constitutive role in human experience and the fact that they work to make experience possible.

What is it that is known when sensation and understanding cooperate in this way to make experience scientifically intelligible? The answer is phenomena. Perhaps the single most important distinction in Kant's thought is that between phenomena and noumena, things as they appear to people and things in themselves, respectively. The former are open to positive knowledge, whereas the latter can be thought but never known in a positive or scientific sense.

The human mind nevertheless has a tendency to try to extend itself beyond phenomena to things-in-themselves. This includes claiming to have positive knowledge of supersensible realities such as God, the soul, and freedom, the topics of traditional metaphysics. These ideals of pure reason can never be scientifically verified. Thus Kant argued that traditional metaphysics, which focuses on objects that transcend experience rather than the transcendental preconditions of experience, is not an authentic form of knowledge. Yet, although the ideals of pure reason cannot be experienced they can be thought, and in their thinking serve what Kant calls a regulative function.

Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

The second critique turns from science to ethics and deals with practical or moral reasoning. This book was preceded by an introductory Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), which developed a deontological theory of ethics, that is, one based on the primacy of duty. For Kant, the only unconditional good is a good will, one that wills to do what is a duty merely because it is a duty, or to choose duty for its own sake. The philosophical challenge for ethics is to explicate what this means, and to identify the transcendental preconditions of its possibility.

Kant thus approaches ethics not in terms of the consequences of actions or whether decisions make a person happy, but in terms of moral obligation. The idea of duty leads Kant to the idea of freedom as its basis. Although with regard to many actions the will may be influenced by factors outside itself, that is, be heteronomous, at least in some instances the will is able to decide for itself, that is, act autonomously. In exercising its own decision-making capacity, the will may also reason according to hypothetical imperatives (If one wants X then do Y) or categorical imperatives (Do Y, no matter what). Practical reason at the highest level displays a spontaneity that makes its own law for itself, simply because this is the right way to act, independent of any particular consequences.

Hypothetical reasoning may be described as the basis of technological thinking. Indeed, Kant calls one form of a hypothetical imperative a technical imperative, which focuses on discovering the means to achieve some end. Categorical reasoning, by contrast, focuses on the identification of worthy ends. According to Kant the most worthy end, and thus categorical imperative, is to act according to a maxim that is universal, that is, applies to all, or to treat all persons as ends in themselves. Human beings have an inherent worth or dignity, unlike objects that have exchange value. To recognize this and act accordingly is to begin to construct something more than a traditional society or state, which presumes people acting out of self-interest and treats others as means to their own ends, and to begin to construct instead a new kind of social order that Kant calls a "kingdom of ends." This moral ideal has been applied widely to a range of ethical issues related to science and technology, from the treatment of human subjects in medical research, to privacy in the use of computers and debates about the permissibility of human reproductive cloning.

The second critique postulates freedom, the existence of God, and immortality of the soul as necessary presuppositions of moral experience. Freedom is necessary to make sense of the human experience of moral responsibility, God to guarantee the ultimate triumph of moral order, and immortality to allow for the final realization of the good will. In this regard, practical reason provides access to a supersensible reality closed to science, though in a manner that can only be an issue of rational faith.

The Third Critique and Kant's Influence

Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) attempted to show how theoretical and practical reason—science and ethics—are unified in the sense of beauty. For Kant, the judgments of beauty and purpose provide a sensible symbol of the supersensible realm. They suggest that the natural and ethical realms make up a unified whole. The purposeful structures humans observe especially in organic bodies and their beauty provide clues to the further understanding of nature. The idea that nature is purposeful lies behind the human belief that a system of laws of nature is possible. It can also lead to the extension of humanity's empirical investigations of nature. Judgments of beauty are based on a subjective feeling of delight in an object, but this feeling has a universal validity deriving from the harmony of the faculties of imagination and understanding. The feeling of the sublime depends upon the moral feeling Kant supposed common to all of humanity.

Taken together, Kant's three critiques thus answer what he takes to be the basic questions of philosophy. The fourth question was to find its answer in a study of anthropology. What can be known are intelligent constructions of science that constitute the basic form of knowledge. What ought to be done is to treat human beings as ends in themselves in order to establish a kingdom of ends. For the individual human being there is hope for personal immortality in order to be able to make infinite moral progress. For the human race there is the hope that human progress will be instantiated in the moralization of the human race, so that the advance of human capacities, including humankind's scientific understanding of the world, may contribute to the construction of a harmonious moral social order.

Kant's influence is inestimable. Although in the next generation Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) challenged Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena, Hegel's alternative system never became as influential as Kant's. Future efforts to explicate the unique power and limitations of science and the independent validity of ethics have repeatedly returned to formulations of what have become known as various forms of neo-Kantianism. Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), for instance, widened Kant's appreciation of human construction in science to include the entire range of cultural symbolic production, including the realms of language, myth, and religion. Bernard Gert's Morality: Its Nature and Justification (2004) develops a Kantian-like set of moral rules, often explicitly considering issues related especially to biomedical technologies.

More generally, Friedrich Dessauer (1881–1963) developed a broadly Kantian interpretation of technology, going so far as to propose a fourth Kantian critique of the transcendental preconditions of technological invention (Mitcham 1994). More recently, Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla (1989) has provided an analysis of the transformations of technical rationality brought about by new instrumentations that reflects a Kantian and phenomenological heritage. Finally, detached from its transcendental moorings, Kant's approach may also be seen as supporting contemporary social constructivist interpretations of science and technology (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987).

In his first critique, Kant sought to limit positive scientific knowledge to phenomenal reality so that noumena may be posited without interference by rational faith and that ethics may be able to rest on its own foundations. In this way, ethics could be freed from the dogmatic assumptions and skepticism associated with traditional metaphysics.

[E]ven the assumption—as made on behalf of the necessary practical employment of my reason—of God, freedom, and immortality is not permissible unless at the same time speculative reason be deprived of its pretensions to transcendent insight … thus rendering all practical extension of pure reason impossible. I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars against morality. (Kant 1965 [1781], pp. Bxxix–Bxxx)

Kant's philosophy sought the harmonious development of human faculties but ended in separating scientific intellection and ethical reflection. Both exhibit the free and spontaneous constructive activity of the human mind. Yet Kant did not foresee how scientific (and technical) development could outpace the application of ethical reflection. As a result, ethical thought often appears to lag behind technoscientific achievements. To what extent should ethical concerns establish limits on scientific inquiry? This question manifests itself repeatedly in contemporary discussions of advancing science, new technologies, and ethics.

DARYL J. WENNEMANN

SEE ALSO Axiology;Deontology;Discourse Ethics;Freedom;Leibniz, G. W.;Risk and Emotion;Scientific Ethics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bijker, Wiebe E.; Thomas P. Hughes; and Trevor J. Pinch, eds. (1987). The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A collection of essays exploring the social construction of technology.

Cassirer, Ernst. (1953, 1955, 1957, and 1996). Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim and John Michael Krois. 4 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gert, Bernard. (2004). Morality: Its Nature and Justification, rev. edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. The second extensive revision of Gert's The Moral Rules: A New Rational Foundation for Morality (1970).

Kant, Immanuel. (1902–1997). Gesammelte Schriften [Collected works], ed. the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (and its successors). 29 vols. Berlin: Georg Reimer (subsequently Walter de Gruyter). The standard German edition of Kant's works.

Kant, Immanuel. (1965 [1781/1787]). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, unabridged edition. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Kant, Immanuel. (1990 [1785]). Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck, 2nd edition. New York: Macmillan.

Kant, Immanuel. (1993 [1788]). Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, 3rd edition. New York: Macmillan.

Kant, Immanuel. (2000 [1790]). Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Körner, Stephan. (1955). Kant. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. A basic introduction to Kant's philosophy.

Mayz Vallenilla, Ernesto. (1989). Fundamentos de la meta-técnica Caracas, Venezuela: Monte Avila Editores. English translation: The Foundations of Meta-Technics, tr. Carl Mitcham. Laham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. A phenomenological analysis of the transition from the technical to the meta-technical forms of space and time.

Mitcham, Carl. (1994). Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A critical introduction to the philosophy of technology.