A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 1. The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy

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Chapter IV
The line of demarcation between the ideals of science and of personality in Kant. The (critical) dualist idealistic type of transcendental ground-idea under the primacy of the humanist ideal of personality

§ 1 - Introduction. The misconception of Kant's transcendental idealism as the philosophic expression of the spirit of the reformation

In the preceding chapters we have only given a sketch of the main lines of development of the basic antinomy in the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanistic thought during the period in which primacy was ascribed to the science-ideal. Our investigation ended in an examination of Rousseau's philosophy in which the first violent reaction on the part of the religious freedom-motive manifested itself. In the light of this previous development the philosophic system of Immanuel Kant must be viewed as inaugurating a new phase in Humanistic thought: namely, the phase of ‘transcendental freedom-idealism’.

This phase is typified by several characteristic features: The ideal of personality finally wrested itself free from the tyranny of the science-ideal. Primacy is now definitely acknowledged as belonging to the former and the ideal of science is limited to the world of sense-phenomena. The root of human personality is sought in the normative ethical function of its free will. In addition this new phase is marked by the growing self-reflection of Humanism upon the religious foundations of its philosophic attitude.

Kroner's view of the relation of Kant's transcendental idealism to the Christian religion.

It is typical of the lack of a critical view of historical-philoso-

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phical connections that in the XXth century Kant has often been characterized as the first to have expressed the intrinsic spirit of the Christian faith within a so-called philosophical life- and world-view. In this respect Kant's ‘critical’ idealism is sharply contrasted with medieval Christian thought. For example, the Hegelian philosopher Richard Kroner states: ‘The impact of Greek concepts on Medieval Christian thought in its totality was overwhelming, so that the true essence and the real depth of the Christian faith could not find here its full expression within a philosophical view of the world. It is especially Kant and German Idealism that deserve credit for having performed this enormous task, which is of unique importance in the history of the world. It was here for the first time that the idealism of the I-ness, surpassing that of the ἰδέαι and εἴδη, was opposed to the latter. Here at last the attempt was successful to conceive of God no longer as an objective Idea, as Pure Form, as First Cause and Substance, but rather out of the depth of the ethical-religious life’¹.

1 Richard Kroner: Von Kant bis Hegel I (1921) s. 45: ‘Während das gesamte christliche Denken des Mittelalters dem übermächtigen Anprall der Griechischen Begriffe gegenüber es nicht vermochte, das wahre Wesen, die eigene Tiefe des christlichen Glaubens innerhalb der philosophischen Weltanschauung zur vollen Geltung zu bringen, ist durch Kant und den deutschen Idealismus diese weltgeschichtliche Aufgabe gelöst worden. Hier zuerst wird dem Idealismus der ἰδέαι und εἴδη der ihn überragende Idealismus des Ich entgegengesetzt. Hier zuerst gelingt es, Gott, statt als objective Idee, als reine Form, als erste Ursache und Substanz, vielmehr aus der Tiefe des sittlich-religiösen Lebens heraus zu begreifen.’

Is Kant the philosopher of the Reformation? Przywara.

Such a statement strongly attests to a complete lack of insight into the antithesis between the really Christian and Humanistic ground-motives of philosophical thought.

It is very much to be regretted that some Roman-Catholic thinkers foster this basic misconception by seeking in German idealism since Kant the philosophical expression of the view developed by the Reformation with respect to the relation of God and His creation. It is further contended that the Roman Catholic conception, as embodied in Thomism, forms the real

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philosophical antipode to this idealism¹. We shall return to this point, but in passing, it is well to note, that this view of the philosophical antithesis between the Reformation and Roman Catholicism simply stems from the immanence-standpoint. Consequently, it can not do justice to the real situation.

Kant is not the philosopher of the evangelical idea of freedom; his philosophy is separated from the Biblical spirit of the Reformation by the irreconcilable cleft between the Christian and Humanistic ground-motives. Naturally this does not exclude the fact that Kant has been historically influenced by Puritanism and Pietism in his ethical and theological conceptions. But the very spirit and transcendental ground-Idea of his critical idealism is ruled by the Humanistic motive of nature and freedom. And the latter cannot be reconciled to the genuine Biblical ground-motive of the Reformation. All attempts at synthesis are born out of a lack of insight into the religious foundation of Kant's philosophy, and into the integral and radical character of the Biblical ground-motive.

It cannot be denied that criticistic idealism has deeply influenced the philosophical thought of Protestantism. But this is not to be explained in terms of the religious spirit of the Reformation. On the contrary, it betrays the invasion of the scholastic spirit of accommodation, originating from the religious ground-motive of nature and grace in its dualist nominalistic conception. And we have shown that this very ground-motive has impeded the inner reformation of philosophical thought.

In Kant's philosophy, it is actually the Humanistic ideal of personality which awakens from its lethargy and causes Humanism to become conscious of the ὑπόϑεσις of its philosophic attitude. Rousseau's religion of feeling could only signify a transitional stage in this course of development.

The deepest tendencies of the Humanistic ideal of personality could not reveal themselves in the psychical sphere of feeling which in Kant belongs to the realm of ‘nature’ and ‘heteronomy’. They could only find an adequate expression in a fundamental freedom-idealism which transcends ‘nature’ as the particular domain of the science-ideal.

In Kant's critical ethics the ‘Idea’ is the expression of the subjective autonomy of the rational and moral personality. And

1 See for example, the work of Erich Przywara, Thomas oder Hegel, in Logos Bnd. XV, Heft I, 1926, p. 12.

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as the ideal subject this personality is itself the final source of the categorical ethical imperative. Henceforth, the Idea is identified in an increasingly greater degree with the religious totality of meaning and with the very origin of the temporal cosmos¹.

1 Strictly speaking this identification of Origin and totality of meaning cannot be correct. For, as we saw in the Introduction, the Origin necessarily transcends meaning. In the Prolegomena I pointed out, that the absolutization of the transcendental idea in idealism, actually issues from the religious ground-motive that makes this philosophy possible. In the transcendent religious sphere the idea can never maintain itself as the actual origin.

The Idea of freedom as both the religious totality and origin of meaning: Höningswald.

In a pregnant statement, Richard Hönigswald summarized this development in the conception of the ‘Idea’, as the embodiment of the Humanistic ideal of personality which was becoming self-conscious: ‘so the course of the argument always urges us again to go back to the classical concept of the Idea: the latter signifies as ἀνυπόϑετον totality and process, end and beginning, content and norm, datum and task. As the point of indifference of every question and every answer the Idea embodies the highest form of necessity. But this means neither that the Idea compels something else, nor that the former is subjected to a constraint strange to itself: the Idea itself is this necessity. For this very reason, however, it signifies also in the deepest and most complex sense of the word freedom. The Idea is, as Bauch in a striking fashion has called it, the Λόγος of each phenomenon; the meaning of the concept, the problem of the being of the phenomenon. As an unbreakable bond it embraces world and experience, community and truth, language and object.

‘Orienting itself to the world, the Idea furnishes itself with the organon of its working and only through this working it is. It is the Spirit which never has been and never will be; for the Idea simply “is”: that is to say, it is, as Hegel has said, “present”, consequently, “essentially now”. It is not in time, and neither outside it. For the Idea itself is time; not, to be sure, the mere concept of its order, not only Newton's “tempus, quod aequabiliter fluit”, but time in the fulness of its development, “standing time”, time as totality, i.e. as eternity(!). In this - (and only in this conception) - the Idea means Being itself; Being, free from

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the notion of a mysterious “entity”, Being as Meaning, grounded in itself, which eternally renews and forms itself, thereby, however, imposes and at the same time realizes - the highest conditions of the concept of the “Gegenstand”. Meaning was “in the beginning”; and it stands at the end. In Meaning beginning and end are one. For meaning is the totality’¹.

The course of development in the conception of the Idea in this sense commences in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. It continues in dialectical tension in Fichte, Schelling, and in Romanticism and it reaches its completion in Hegel's absolute idealism.

It is my intention to sketch this course of development in the light of the inner dialectic within the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanistic thought. Our discussion will center around the extremely complicated evolution of the thought of Kant and Fichte. And from this evolution we shall seek to explain the intrinsic necessity of subsequent developments.

1 R. Höningswald: Vom Problem der Idea (The problem of the Idea), Logos Bnd. XV, Heft 3 (1926) p. 301: ‘So drängt der Beweisgang immer aufs neue zurück zu dem klassischen Begriff der Idee: Sie bedeutet als ἀνυπόϑετον Inbegriff und Prozesz, Letztheit und Anfang, Gehalt und Norm, Gegebenheit und Aufgabe auf einmal. Der Indifferenzpunkt jeder Frage und jeder Antwort, verkörpert die Idee die höchste Form der Notwendigkeit. Aber weder bedeutet das, dasz die Idee ein anderes bezwingt, noch auch dasz etwa sie fremdem Zwang unterliege: sie, die Idee, selbst ist diese Notwendigkeit. Ebendarum aber bedeutet sie auch im tiefsten und komplexesten Sinn des Wortes Freiheit. Sie ist, wie Bauch es einmal treffend nennt, der Λόγος jeglicher Erscheinung; der Sinn des Begriffs, das Problem des Seins der Erscheinung. Ein unzerreiszbares Band, umfängt sie Welt und Erleben, Gemeinschaft und Wahrheit, Sprache und Object.
‘Die Idee schafft sich an der Welt das Organ ihres Wirkens, weil sie selbst in ihrem Werk und durch dieses Werk allein ist. Sie ist der Geist, der nie gewesen ist und nie sein wird; denn sie “ist” schlechthin: d.h. sie ist, mit den Worten Hegels, “präsent” also “wesentlich itzt”. Sie steht nicht in der Zeit; aber auch nicht auszerhalb dieser. Denn sie selbst ist ja die Zeit; nicht freilich der blosze Gedanke ihrer Ordnung, nicht nur Newton's “tempus, quod aequabiliter fluit”, sondern die Zeit in der Fülle ihrer Gestaltung, die “stehende” Zeit, die Zeit als Ganzheit, d.h. als Ewigkeit(!). In diesem, und nur im diesem Verstande bedeutet die Idee das Sein selbst; das Sein, frei von dem Gedanken an eine dunkele “Entität”, als der sich ewig erneuernde und gestaltende, gerade damit aber die höchsten Bedingungen des Gegenstandsgedankens fordernde und zugleich erfüllende, in sich selbst gegründete Sinn. Der Sinn war “im Anfang”; und er steht am Ende. Im Sinn sind Anfang und Ende eins. Denn der Sinn ist das Ganze.’

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§ 2 - The development of the conflict between the ideal of personality and that of science in the first phase of Kant's thought up until his inaugural oration of 1770

All the philosophical motives of Humanistic thought during the rationalistic and transitional periods were focused in Kant's mind. In his struggle for release it was the mutual tension of these motives that gave rise to a new conception of the Humanist transcendental ground-Idea, which aimed at saving both the ideal of science and that of personality by bringing against them the actio finium regundorum.

The motives of the preceding Humanistic philosophy. The manner in which Kant wrestles with their mutual tension. The influence of Pietism.

Even in his pre-critical period Kant struggled with various mutually antagonistic motives. In the main they included: the proud structure of Newton's system of natural science, in whose philosophic attitude the Enlightenment found the incarnation of its own spirit; the Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics of the mathematical ideal of science, in which the free human personality was proclaimed to be a function of creative mathematical thought and a relatively perfect stage of development in the system of monads; the epistemological psychologism of Hume, which was detrimental to both the ideal of personality and that of science; and, last but not least, Rousseau's passionate plea for the liberation of the Humanistic ideal of personality from the tyrannical domination of the science-ideal.

In addition, the religious influence of Puritanism and Pietism, that had impressed itself on his entire education, continued to rule Kant's rigorous attitude with respect to sensory human nature, without having any affinity with the Biblical conception of sin. In his transition to the critical standpoint this influence was to acquire a conclusive significance.

No Humanistic thinker previous to Kant had struggled so intensely with the inner polarity in the basic structure of the Humanistic cosmonomic Idea. No one had understood the religious significance of the ideals of science and of personality as he did.

His ‘fondness of metaphysics’ had its deepest root in the hope that he would be able to find a scientific foundation for his moral and religious convictions. Yet, even in his pre-critical

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period, under the influence of Hume and especially of Rousseau, he acquired the insight that the speculative metaphysics of the mathematical science-ideal was necessarily incompetent to aid him in the fulfilment of his desire. Even in this phase he became confident that the sovereign freedom of human personality is not to be grasped in the categories of mathematical natural scientific thought.

In his natural scientific conception, Kant remained a faithful adherent of the ideal of science; his reverence for the spirit of the ‘Enlightenment’.

After all, Kant was from the very beginning an enthusiastic follower of this very science-ideal. He had been so captivated by the spirit of the ‘Enlightenment’ that even in his critical period he still spoke of it with an extreme reverence. His short answer to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’, given in 1784, begins with his confession of faith in the Humanistic Idea of science: ‘Enlightenment is the departure of man from his self-incurred blame of minority. Minority is the inability to use one's understanding without the direction of another... Sapere aude! Pluck up courage to use your own understanding! this is consequently the device of the Enlightenment.’ No church can contractually bind sovereign human thought to a dogma: ‘I say: this is quite impossible. Such a contract drawn up in order to keep mankind for ever from all further enlightenment, is simply null and void’¹.

Even the inception of Kant's philosophical development was characterized by a strong faith in the science-ideal in its mecha-

1 Kant's Werke (Groszherzog Wilhelm Ernst Ausg.), Bnd. I, pp. 163 and 167. Henceforth I shall cite from this edition. I shall only use the edition of Cassirer in order to supplement.
In the German text the quoted passages read as follows: ‘Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines Anderen zu bedienen... Sapere aude! Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also des Wahlspruch der Aufklärung...’ Keine Kirche kann ‘berechtigt sein, sich eidlich auf ein gewisses unveränderliches Symbol zu verpflichten, um so eine unaufhörliche Obervormundschaft über jedes seiner Glieder, und vermittelst ihrer über das Volk zu führen, und diese sogar zu verewigen. Ich sage: das ist ganz unmöglich. Ein solcher Kontrakt, der auf immer alle weitere Aufklärung vom Menschengeschlechte abzuhalten geschlossen würde, ist schlechterdings null und nichtig.’

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nistic conception. In his hypothesis concerning the origin of the planetary system, developed in the natural scientific treatise of his first period Allgemeine Naturgeschichte des Himmels (1755), he extended this mechanistic conception to the most extreme consequences. Here he repeated the proud motto of Descartes' work ‘Le Monde’, in which the passion to dominate nature found its classic expression: ‘Give me matter, I will build a world from it’¹.

Throughout the rest of his life Kant remained faithful to this science-ideal. He never repudiated the spirit of Newton whom he admired so strongly.

Even when Hume's epistemological psychologism temporarily gained the ascendency in Kant's thought, the resulting sceptical attitude could only momentarily shake his firmly established faith in the sovereignty of mathematical and natural scientific thought over the entire ‘empirical’ reality ‘in space and time’.

Kant's radical doubt was limited to the sovereignty of mathematical thought insofar as it involved itself with the most profound questions of life and of the world. It arose only with respect to the metaphysics of the mathematical science-ideal. Kant abandoned the latter insofar as he sought a definite answer to the questions in which the ideal of personality was directly involved.

1 Preface, Allgem. Naturgesch. des Himmels (General natural history of the Heaven), W.W. Bnd. II, pp. 267: ‘Gebet mir Materie, ich will eine Welt daraus bauen.’ To which Kant added: ‘das ist, gebet mir Materie, ich will euch zeigen, wie eine Welt daraus entstehen soll’ [‘that is, give me matter, I will show you how from it a world is to proceed.’]

The influence of Rousseau and Hume.

At this point he was deeply moved by Rousseau's proclamation of the freedom of human personality from its subjection to science.

Windelband correctly sought in the influence of Rousseau a decisive turning-point in Kant's philosophical thought. Through Rousseau's influence, indeed, the division between the theoretical and the practical element in his philosophy was accomplished in an ever increasingly radical fashion².

2 Tr.'s note: By employing our terminology, this division can be more accurately expressed as the division between the ideal of science and that of personality.
D.H.F.

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The decisive influence of Rousseau upon Kant's conception of the value of personality clearly appears from the famous treatise entitled ‘Träume eines Geistersehers erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik’ (Dreams of a visionary explained by dreams of metaphysics) (1766). Kant himself bore witness to the revolution in his thinking in his statement: ‘I myself am an investigator by nature. I feel all the force of the thirst after knowledge and the restless urge to make progress therein, but also the satisfaction at every advance. There was a time when I believed that all this could be to the honour of mankind and I disdained the mob that do not know anything. Rousseau has set me right. This blind preference is disappearing; I learn how to honour men, and I would esteem myself much more useless than the common labourers, if I did not believe, that this view can give to all the rest a value on which to found the rights of the human race’¹.

It is the voice of the ethical and religious spirit of Rousseau's Discours sur les sciences et les arts’ that we hear in this remarkable writing².

In the ‘Pratical conclusion from the whole treatise’ Kant writes: ‘But true wisdom is the companion of simplicity, and because with it the heart’ (here taken in the sense of moral feeling) ‘lays down the law to the understanding, it generally renders the elaborate equipment of learning superfluous, and its goals do not need such means that can never be in the power of all men.’ ‘When science has run its course, it naturally arrives at the point of a modest distrust and, angry with itself, it says: How many things there are which I do not understand. But reason ripened to wisdom by experience speaks in the mouth of Socrates in the midst of the wares of an annual fair with a

1 ‘Ich bin selbst aus Neigung ein Forscher. Ich fühle den ganzen Durst nach Erkenntnis und die begierige Unruhe, darin weiter zu kommen, oder auch die Zufriedenheit bei jedem Fortschritte. Er war eine Zeit, da ich glaubte, dieses alles könnte die Ehre der Menschheit machen und ich verachtete den Pöbel, der von nichts weisz. Rousseau hat mich zurecht gebracht. Dieser verblendete Vorzug verschwindet; ich lerne die Menschen ehren, und würde mich viel unnützer finden, als die gemeinen Arbeiter, wenn ich nicht glaubte, dasz diese Betrachtung allen übrigen einen Wert geben könnte, die Rechte der Menschheit herzustellen.’

2 See Traüme, first part, chapt. 2, p. 115. (W.W. Vol. I) in which the moral motives ‘which move the human heart’ are empirically reduced to ‘moral feeling’.

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cheerful mind: How many things there are that I do not need at all!’¹.

Rouseau's Discours also ended in this strain. With this statement the domination of the mathematical science-ideal over the ideal of personality in Kant's thought was definitely broken.

For in his humorous criticism of the ‘visionary’ Swedenborg, Kant turned against the entire rationalistic metaphysics. He actually dealt a blow to the metaphysics of the Humanist science-ideal, as conceived of by Leibniz and Wolff and to which he himself had formerly adhered. Henceforth, to Kant, this metaphysics lost the right to speak on questions of morals and religion.

Just as in Rousseau and in Hume, the ideal of personality in Kant, though only for a time, withdrew into the function of feeling. Henceforth, under the influence of Hume, theoretical metaphysics acquired in an ever increasing degree the positive significance of a critical theory concerning the foundations and limits of mathematical knowledge of nature.

Even in the so-called ‘empirist’ phase of Kant's philosophical development, the influence of Hume was only restricted in scope. Kant was no more capable of embracing definitively Hume's sceptical attitude with regard to the foundations of the mathematical science-ideal, than he was of following Rousseau's complete degradation of the latter.

He never took seriously Hume's attempt to establish the ground of the natural scientific judgment of causality in the laws of association which pertain to the connection of our successive psychical Ideas.

Kant was soon to assign to theoretical metaphysics the task of founding the objective universal validity of mathematical natural scientific thought in opposition to Hume's sceptical criticism.

1 Ibid., p. 159 and p. 155: ‘Allein die wahre Weisheit ist die Begleiterin der Einfalt, und da bei ihr das Herz (read “das sittliche Gefühl”!) dem Verstande die Vorschrift gibt, so macht sie gemeiniglich die grosze Zurüstungen der Gelehrsamkeit entbehrlich, und ihre Zwecke bedürfen nicht solcher Mittel, die nimmermehr in aller Menschen Gewalt sein können.’ ‘Wenn die Wissenschaft ihren Kreis durchlaufen hat, so gelangt sie natürlicherweise zu dem Punkte eines bescheidenen Mistrauens und sagt, unwillig über sich selbst: Wie viel Dinge gibt es doch, die ich nicht einsehe! Aber die durch Erfahrung gereifte Vernunft, welche zur Weisheit wird, spricht in dem Munde des Sokrates mitten unter den Waren eines Jahrmarkts mit heiteren Seele: Wie viel Dinge gibt es doch, die ich alle nicht brauche!’

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At the same time, however, in opposition to rationalistic metaphysics, he sought definitely to limit mathematical and causal thinking to the sensory-aspect of experience.

I shall now endeavour to present a more detailed examination of these different phases in Kant's development up to his famous inaugural oration.

Kant's first period: Kant as an independent supporter of the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff. The primacy of the mathematical science-ideal in the first conception of his transcendental ground-Idea.

From the very beginning Kant was conscious of a certain discrepancy between mathematics and metaphysics in the sense in which the latter was defended by the Leibnizian-Wolffian school. Even in his Physische Monadologie (1756), he expounded the difference between the Leibnizian metaphysics and the mathematical conception of the problem of space.

In the discourse with which he began his career as special university lecturer in philosophy, Kant opposed Wolff's attempt to derive the principle of causality from the logical principium contradictionis. This discourse, Kant's first metaphysical treatise, was entitled de Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (1755). It attacked the Wolffian conception with Crusius' distinction between ‘logical ground’ and ‘ground of being’ (Realgrund) and rejected the ontological proof for the existence of God, which concluded from logical grounds to the actual existence of a perfect divine Being.

Both these treatises were written during Kant's first period in which he still held to the possibility of a theoretical metaphysics in the Wolffian sense; a metaphysics which in a purely analytical way, would furnish apriori knowledge of reality from mere concepts and also fancied itself competent to answer questions pertaining to the ideal of personality.

Even in this period Kant had gained the insight that the ‘metaphysical’ root and origin of reality cannot be derived from the logical unthinkableness of the opposite. Even at this time he rejected the conception of Leibniz and Wolff that a metaphysical-logical possibility lies at the foundation of metaphysical reality.

According to Kant, metaphysical being can be ascertained by logical thought only in the judgment of identity, but it cannot be proved to be necessary from the principium contradictionis.

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That is why Kant laid great emphasis upon the logical superiority of the principle of identity to the principle of logical contradiction.

Kant's second period: the methodological line of demarcation between mathematics and metaphysics. The influence of Newton and English psychologism.

In his second period, which extended from 1760 to 1765, these insights were intensified, so that they led to the drawing of a provisional line of demarcation between the method of mathematics and that of metaphysics.

Kant's views in this period are characterized especially by the following writings: Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (1763), Versuch, den Begriff der negativen Gröszen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen (1763), and Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und Moral (1763, published 1764), the last of which was written in answer to the prize question posed by the Academy of Science of Berlin. Kant noted a distinction between the mathematical and metaphysical method of acquiring knowledge on two points, namely, with respect to the significance of definitions and the form of demonstration. Mathematical definitions are synthetical in contradistinction to metaphysical definitions which are analytical. Mathematics creates its own ‘Gegenstand’ in arbitrary concepts. The being taken into consideration by it does not arise from anything other than the mathematical concept.

Therefore, in mathematics definitions come first, whereas in metaphysics the concepts of things are given. By means of thought the latter cannot create any new reality. Metaphysics can only logically analyze the concepts of concrete facts and things given in experience into their simplest elements, in order to make them clear and distinct. In metaphysics, therefore, unlike mathematics, definitions nearly always must be placed at the end rather than at the beginning. Kant pointed metaphysics to the method of mathematical physics as it was formulated by Newton: ‘At bottom the true method of metaphysics is identical with that introduced by Newton in physics and which had such useful results there’¹. By so doing he unequivocally sided

1 ‘Die ächte Methode der Metaphysik ist mit derjenigen im Grunde einerlei, die Newton in der Naturwissenschaft einführte und die daselbst von so nutzbaren Folgen war.’

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with Newton against the mathematical idealism of Leibniz and Wolff. According to Newton, knowledge commences with sense phenomena, from which by means of induction and analysis, scientific thought must ascend to the causes of these phenomena, which are expressed in natural laws.

Newton's famous pronouncement: ‘Hypotheses non fingo’ demanded, that the natural laws formulated with the aid of mathematical thought must in the last analysis be subjected to the test of experience. The causes of phenomena cannot be devised by thinking. Only sense experience can offer us the necessary material for knowledge. Even mathematical thought must therefore remain bound to the confines of sense experience, if it is to furnish us with veritable knowledge of reality. By the acceptance of this method of mathematical natural science for metaphysics, Kant implicitly acknowledged, that the line of demarcation, which he made between the method of mathematics and that of philosophy in his writings during the year 1763, could not be definitive and fundamental.

His opinion was only that for metaphysics the time to follow the synthetical method of geometry had not yet come. As soon as ‘the analysis will have furnished clear and thorougly understood concepts, the synthesis of the simplest cognitions will be able to subsume under itself the complex, just as in mathematics’¹.

In other words, the standpoint of Kant during this period is still that of the English and French Enlightenment. As also appears from the other writings of this phase, the science-ideal, at least partially, still possesses the primacy. This ideal, however, is no longer conceived of in the abstract mathematical deductive sense of Descartes, but rather in the sense in which it was formulated by Newton. In his first metaphysical treatise, it was this conception of the science-ideal which caused Kant to reject the freedom of the will, thereby manifesting its supremacy over the ideal of personality.

1 Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und Moral [Enquiry concerning the clearness of the basic principles of natural theology and ethics], W.W. Bnd. IV, pp. 299 (Conclusion of the ‘second consideration’).

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The rupture between the metaphysics of the science-ideal and moral philosophy in this period of Kant's thought.

Nevertheless, during this time, under the influence of English psychologism a break began to show between the theoretical metaphysics of the science-ideal and moral philosophy. This break reveals itself in the treatise concerning the clarity of the basic principles of natural theology and ethics which I have just cited.

Here Kant made a sharp distinction between the knowing faculty, through which we are able to represent that which is true, and the power to distinguish that which is good. And together with Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume, Kant sought the latter faculty in the moral sentiment: ‘It is a matter of the understanding to analyze the complex and confused concept of the good and to render it distinct,’ Kant observes, ‘by demonstrating how it originates from more simple impressions of the good. If once this latter, however, is simple, the judgment: this is good, is wholly incapable of demonstration, and an immediate effect of the consciousness of the feeling of the pleasure we take in the Idea of the object’¹.

The first principles of ‘natural theology’ are indeed capable of the greatest philosophical evidence, insofar as they are metaphysical principles of knowledge, as for example, the principle that an absolutely existing perfect Supreme Being must lie at the foundation of all possible existing things, or the principle of the omnipresence of this Supreme Being.

In contrast to these, however, (like all basic principles of ethics in general) the first principles of this theology are only capable of moral certainty, insofar as they are concerned with God's freedom in action, His justice and goodness.

From this we see that in moral philosophy Kant had taken the path of psychologism. This fact is also confirmed by his Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Considerations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime),

1 W.W. Bnd. IV, S. 311 (Fourth Consideration § 2): ‘Es ist ein Geschäft des Verstandes, den zusammengesetzen und verworrenen Begriff des Guten auf zu lösen und deutlich zu machen, indem er zeigt, wie er aus einfachern Empfindungen des Guten entspringe. Allein ist dieses einmal einfach, so ist das Urteil: dieses ist gut, völlig unerweislich und eine unmittelbare Wirkung von dem Bewusztsein des Gefühls der Lust mit der Vorstellung des Gegenstandes.’

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published in 1764, where in the footsteps of Shaftesbury, ethics is psychologically and aesthetically grounded in the ‘feeling of beauty.’ During this period in Kant's thought, the first division began to arise between the ideal of science and the still psychologically comprehended ideal of personality, although this line of demarcation was not yet radically drawn.

In this phase, in which Kant orientated theoretical metaphysics to mathematical natural science, he also proceeded critically to examine the contradiction between the latter and the logicistic-mathematical method of Christian Wolff, who thought that by mere conceptual analysis he could obtain apriori knowledge of reality and its causal relations.

Influence of Crusius.

The constant confusions between logical and real states of affairs in the ruling logicistic metaphysics were now analyzed with a real critical furor. Kant made Crusius' fundamental distinction between the logical ground of knowledge and the ground of being into the very foundation for this critical investigation.

Following in the footsteps of his teacher Rudiger, but with much more solid means, Chr. Aug. Crusius (1715-75) had been the foremost German opponent of the geometrical method in metaphysics. Crusius had related the material principles of knowledge to the sensory side of experience. Upon the same grounds he also combated Leibniz' monadology with a famous argument that since has very frequently been employed: if, as Leibniz taught, the essence of each monad were to consist in the fact that the latter represents to itself all the other monads, an absolute concept of the essence of any single monad is not given. If, however, nothing is absolute it is also contradictory to assume something which is relative¹.

In other words, the necessary relations may not be absolutized.

Crusius' fundamental distinction between the grounds of knowledge and the grounds of being and his further division of the latter into causal ones and mere grounds of existence (whereby he simultaneously distinguished the physical from

1 Entwurf der notwendigen Vernunftwahrheiten, wiefern sie den zufälligen entgegengesetzt werden [Project of the necessary truths of Reason, in how far they are opposed to the contingent ones] (3th ed. 1745) § 432.

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merely mathematical ones) undoubtedly exerted considerable influence upon the further development of German philosophy.

Such men as Lambert and Mendelsohn developed these distinctions further, while Schopenhauer's treatise ‘Uber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (Concerning the four-fold root of the principle of sufficient ground) is practically a faithful reproduction of Crusius' schema.

In his just-mentioned treatise, Kant recognized the great importance of this schema and made ample use of it. In his Versuch den Begriff der negativen Gröszen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen (Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes in philosophy), he affirmed that in physics the terms negative and positive have an entirely different significance from that ascribed to them in logic and mathematics. In physics the mutual neutralizing of physical determinations (forces) leads to rest, whereas the mutual neutralizing of logical determinations leads to a logical contradiction and with that to a logical nothingness¹.

1 Versuch den Begriff etc. first chapt. (W.W. Vol. IV), p. 239.

Third period; the dominating influence of Hume and Rousseau. Complete emancipation of the ideal of personality from the metaphysics of the science-ideal.

As Alois Riehl has convincingly demonstrated², during the following period of his development Kant was for a short time very close to Hume's scepticism with respect to the foundations of the mathematical ideal of science. At the same time the influence of Rousseau led him to the radical emancipation of the science-ideal from the grasp of theoretical metaphysics.

This phase in the evolution of his thought is best expressed in the writing which I have mentioned above, Träume eines Geistersehers.

In this period (between 1764 and 1766) Kant introduced the distinction between analytical judgments which in the predicate do nott add anything to the concept of the grammatical subject, and synthetical judgments which do so. This distinction which later on was to form the foundation of the entire Critique of Pure Reason, had not yet been introduced in his treatise concerning the ‘negativen Gröszen’ (1763)³. To be sure, the syn-

2 Rielh, Der phil. Kritizismus I (3e Aufl.), S. 306ff.

3 See Cassirer, Erkenntnisproblem II, p. 612ff.

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thetical method of the mathematical formation of concepts had, at this earlier stage, been placed in opposition to the analytical method of metaphysics. But this only meant to signify that mathematics creates its own ‘Gegenstand’ in its concepts. Mathematical judgments, which develop only the content given in the definitions, were still conceived of as merely logical. In the period with which we are now dealing, however, the distinction has assumed a new sense.

Following Hume, Kant could for the present find no other solution than to reduce all synthetical propositions to the sensory aspect of experience, thus qualifying them all as ‘empirical judgments’¹. Thereby, in fact, scepticism momentarily predominated with respect to the universally valid foundations of mathematical physics.

The physical principle of causality, as a ‘synthetic judgment’, does not possess universal validity or necessity. The universality which we ascribe to it, rests upon a generalizing of the sensory perception of the sequence of causes and effects.

Nevertheless, this psychologistic standpoint was abandoned almost immediately after Kant realized, that mathematical judgments, as ‘synthetical’, must possess an apriori universal validity which cannot be grounded in the senses. It was abandoned when he considered that scepticism with respect to the foundations of mathematical natural science would first of all touch the very foundations of mathematics².

Henceforth, the question arises as to whether or not apriori principles of form are included in all synthetic judgments, principles which, themselves possessing a synthetic character, lie at the foundation of all mathematical and natural scientific knowledge, and as such are the necessary prerequisites for all experience.

1 Cf. Reflexionen (Erdm.), p. 92 and 500 in Cassirer II, p. 614.

2 Reflexionen 496. See also H.J. de Vleeschauwer, L'évolution de la pensée Kantienne (1939) p. 48.

The transitional phase in Kant's thought until 1770.

Henceforth, the development of Kant's thought is very complicated. Its course can only be reconstructed in some degree by making use of Kant's philosophical journal, published by Erdmann, Reflexionen Kants zur kritischen Philosophie supplemented by the ‘stray notes’ of Kant of the Duisburg inheritance, first

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edited by Reicke and later on by Th. Haering¹. But it must be granted, that every reconstruction, in view of the scarcity of available material, must retain a hypothetical moment.

From the source material in question, it appears, that by this time the problem concerning the relation of space and time to real things had been placed in the centre of Kant's interest. In a treatise entitled, Vom ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume (About the first ground of the difference of situations in space)², which he wrote in 1768, Kant defended Newton's and Euler's mathematical doctrine of ‘absolute pure space’ against Leibniz' conception, which held that space is nothing but an apriori ‘ordre des coexistences possibles’, an apriori concept of relation. Kant showed, with respect to incongruent symmetrical figures, that two things in the ordering of their parts can be completely alike without the one being capable of covering the other spatially. Consequently, space cannot be the product of the relations of material parts with respect to each other, but it is rather the prerequisite for the relations of spatial things to each other.

In this writing Kant was concerned exclusively with the significance of Newton's and Euler's doctrine for geometry and mathematical natural science; he never wished to be held accountable for the metaphysical speculation which Newton joined to his theory of absolute space as sensorium Dei.

At the end of his treatise, he only mentioned the difficulties which are inherent in the concept of absolute space, ‘if one wishes to conceive its reality by means of rational concepts, whereas the inner sense is satisfied with grasping it in intuition. But this difficulty manifests itself everywhere, when we want

1 I could not consult the Reflexionen myself and cite them from Cassirer, Erkenntnisproblem II.

2 It is not easy to translate the German term ‘Gegend’ in the sense here intended by Kant. In his introductory considerations Kant refers to Leibniz' analysis situs; but he remarks that he is not able to say in how far the subject of his treatise has affinity with the branch of mathematics which Leibniz meant. Kant defines the ‘Gegend’ as the ‘relation of the system of spatial positions (Lagen) of a thing to the absolute world-space’. As the simplest examples of ‘Gegende’ he refers to the distinctions of above and beneath, right and left, ahead and astern of us, in which our body is the point of reference in relation to three planes of the three-dimensional space which intersect each other rectangularly. I think the English term ‘situation’ is the best I can find to translate Kant's ‘Gegend’ in the sense here explained.

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to philosophize at all about the first data of our knowledge, but it is never so decisive as that which presents itself when the consequences of an assumed concept contradict the most apparent experience’¹.

Thus Kant expressly removed the metaphysical side of Newton's doctrine in order to limit himself to the data of experience.

1 Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume (W.W. Bnd. IV) p. 325: ‘wenn man seine Realität, welche dem inneren Sinne anschauend genug ist, durch Vernunftideen fassen will. Aber diese Beschwerlichkeit zeigt sich allerwärts, wenn man über die ersten data unserer Erkenntnis noch philosophieren will, aber sie ist niemals so entscheidend als diejenige, welche sich hervortut, wenn die Folgen eines angenommenen Begriffs der augenscheinlichsten Erfahrung widersprechen.’

The problem of the mathematical antinomies. Leibniz' and Newton's conception of space and time.

Meanwhile, the very difficulties of this conception of space were to be of an enormous importance for Kant's further development. The thorough consideration of the problem concerning the relationship of absolute space and time to the universum of corporeal things led him to the discovery of the mathematical antinomies of actual infinity which were to play such an important rôle in the central part of the Critique of Pure Reason. Quite naturally, we shall deal with them later on.

By reason of these reflections, Kant finally became convinced, that space and time cannot be absolute realities in Newton's and Euler's sense. Therefore, for the time being he accepted Leibniz' doctrine, which had proclaimed them to be apriori forms of pure thought, ‘notions’ or ‘conceptus intellectus puri’; notions, however, of which we first become clearly aware on the occasion of our sensory perceptions of corporeal things².

For while Kant was in the middle of his reflections upon the exact relation between sensibility and the logical function of thought with respect to knowledge, the major epistemological work of Leibniz, the famous Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement Humain appeared.

In it Leibniz treated the same problem, and, as we have seen

2 In contradistinction to the earlier view, more recent investigation has made it very likely, that we are not here dealing with a merely external influence of Leibniz, but rather with an influence explainable only by the internal development of Kant's own thought.

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earlier, he sought its solution in the fact that the contents of experience virtually contain the very apriori concepts of mathematical metaphysical thought. Consequently, the latter do not originate from the sensory elements of the Idea, rather they are an originally obscure and unconscious possession of the mind. Even though sense experience acts as an intermediary, the mind becomes conscious of them only in clear conceptual apperception.

Nevertheless, Leibniz had given a metaphysical turn to his epistemology. The apriori concepts of the mind enable us to know the ‘eternal truths’, the metaphysical order of the cosmos; they reveal to us the laws of the ‘noumenon’, of the ‘Dinge an sich’, whereas sense experience, as a lower function of knowledge, supplies us with knowledge only of the sensory world of phenomena, in which world only contingent truths hold good.

Although originally Kant had accepted Leibniz' doctrine of the creative apriori concepts of mind, he could at this time no longer ascribe any value to their metaphysical application. Even in this phase of his development he had planned a schema of apriori basic concepts, although this project did not yet correspond to any specific methodical point of view. In this schema, space and time originally functioned next to the concepts of actuality, possibility and necessity, sufficient reason, unity and multiplicity, part, totality and nothing, complex and simple, change and motion, substance and accident, force and activity. In the Reflexion 513, written between 1768 and 1769, Kant reckoned all these concepts to ontology, in its true sense related to the rest of philosophy as mathesis pura to mathesis applicata¹. Nevertheless, he could not remain satisfied with this view. For, as we shall see, he was driven further in his thought by the activity of the ideal of personality.

1 Cassirer II, 623/4.

§ 3 - The further development of this conflict and the origination of the real critical philosophy

The separation of understanding and sensibility in Kant's inaugural address of 1770.

In his Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (Prolegomena to every future Metaphysics), Kant declared, that it was only after long reflection that he came to the conclusion

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that a complete separation must be made between space and time as synthetic apriori forms of sensory intuition and the apriori pure concepts of understanding. He executed this division in his inaugural address with which he accepted a chair at the University of Königsberg: De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis. Nevertheless, his terminology is still vacillating insofar as sometimes he called space and time ‘conceptus singulares’, and other times ‘intuitus singulares puri’¹.

By means of the term ‘conceptus singularis’, Kant intended to place space and time in opposition to the ‘conceptus universales’ or concepts of species which are acquired by abstraction: there exist only one space and only one time, which respectively include all limited spaces and all finite periods of time as their parts. This conception passed over unchanged into the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason.

The deeper ground of this new conception of time and space is to be sought only in a reaction against theoretical metaphysics on the part of Kant's gradually maturing new conception of the ideal of personality.

As long as space and time were subsumed under the creative apriori concepts of logical thought, there lurked the constant danger that the relations discovered between spatial things would be tranferred to the ‘mundus intelligibilis’. This would result again in a domination of the mathematical science-ideal within the realm of the free and autonomous human personality.

Ethics and religion, the kingdom of sovereign personality, may no longer be conceived of in the forms of nature-experience. For this very reason the metaphysics of the intelligible world must be strongly prohibited from the domain of natural science.

1 De mundi sensibilis etc. (W.W. Bnd. IV), Sectio II § 12, S. 343: ‘Intuitus autem purus (humanus) non est conceptus universalis s. logicus, sub quo, sed singlaris, in quo sensibilia quaelibet cogitantur, ideoque continet conceptus spatii et temporis.’ Cassirer I, 626/7, thinks Kant conceived of time and space as ‘conceptus singulares’ before he conceived of them as forms of intuition. In this connection he refers exclusively to ‘Reflexions’ written during 1768 and 1769; but Cassirer has apparently overlooked the fact that Kant even in his inaugural oration, in which he distinguished to the utmost possible degree the ‘forms of pure sensibility’ from the ‘pure synthetical concepts of reason’, still sometimes qualified space and time as ‘conceptus singulares’.

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Consequently, the significance of the inaugural oration of 1770 lies primarily in the sharp distinction made between the sphere of the knowledge of sensory phenomena and the intelligible world, accompanied by the recognition of the apriori synthetic forms of sensibility and logical understanding. Kant called this distinction the chief methodological basic principle of metaphysics¹.

Even in his Träume eines Geistersehers, he had made a division between the sphere of the experience of nature and that of ethics and religion, and thus withdrew the ideal of personality from the supremacy of natural scientific thought. Even here Kant taught that outside the sphere of sensory experience no scientific judgment is possible. Theoretical metaphysics which endeavours to acquire knowledge from pure concepts lapses into speculative mysticism. It tries to comprehend the spiritual world in the conceptual forms of sense-experience. The value of personality is, however, not dependent upon scientific thought. But during this period Kant still adhered to the sentimental religion and ethics defended by Rousseau and English psychologism.

1 De mundi sensibilis etc. Sectio V, § 24 (S. 359): ‘Omnis metaphysicae circa sensitiva atque intellectualis methodus ad hoc potissimum praeceptum redit: sollicite cavendum esse, ne principia sensitivae cognitionis domestica terminos suos migrent ac intellectualia afficiant.’ [‘Every method of metaphysics concerning the sensory and the intelligible is to be chiefly reduced to this precept: take great care lest principles belonging to sensory knowledge should surpass their boundaries and affect the intelligible’].

The development of Kant's new conception of the ideal of personality. Earlier optimism is replaced by a radical pessimism with respect to the sensory nature of man.

A new conception of the Humanist ideal of personality matured in Kant in proportion to the degree in which he became involved in the antithesis between sensibility and reason. As Windelband has explained, this antithesis acquired an axiological character. The pietistic motives of Kant's youth, traversing the influence of Rousseau, were active in an increasingly rigourous suspicion of sensory human nature. And because of this distrust it was no longer possible to seek the value of personality in the function of feeling, which function Kant considered to be only sensual.

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With the elimination of this possibility, Kant definitely said farewell to the optimistic life- and world-view which, after the fashion of Leibniz' Theodicy, he had previously defended in his Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den Optimismus [An attempt at some considerations on Optimism] (1759)¹. Kant's gradually maturing dualistic transcendental ground-Idea made it impossible for him to harmonize with the sensory nature of man the Idea of normative autonomous freedom contained in his new conception of the ideal of personality. That caused him to adopt the pessimistic view of human nature expressed in his critical philosophy of religion, by his doctrine of the ‘radical evil’ in man.

If sensory human nature with its sensual inclinations forms the real antithesis to the rational morality of man, then, in consequence, knowledge bound to sense-experience cannot furnish us with a knowledge of the real essence of things.

‘Nature’ as the sole experienceable reality is degraded by Kant to mundus sensibilis. In the same sense as in English psychologism², this mundus sensibilis includes both external and internal experience. Space was conceived of as a synthetical form of the ‘äuszeren Sinn’ (outer sense), time as a synthetical form of the ‘inneren Sinn’ (inner sense). Both space and time are already recognized as necessary transcendental conditions for all sensory experience, as universally valid subjective conditions of our sensibility, in which the material of our sensory impressions is ordered apriori³.

1 W.W. Bnd. IV, pp. 73ff. It is the metaphysics of the Leibnizian ideal of science that motivated Kant to write here (p. 81/2): ‘...ich bin... erfreut, mich als einen Bürger in einer Welt zu sehen, die nicht besser möglich war.’ Man functions as a member of a cosmos which in its totality is the best possible!

2 De mundi sensibilis etc. Sectio II, § 12 (S. 343): ‘Phaenomena recensentur et exponuntur primo sensus externi in Physica, deinde sensus interni in Psychologia empirica.’ [‘Phenomena are investigated and explained in the first place in physics insofar as they belong to the outer sense, afterwards in empirical psychology, insofar as they belong to the inner sense.’]

3 De mundi sensibilis etc. Sectio III, § 14, 5: ‘Tempus non est objectivum aliquid et reale... sed subjectiva condicio per naturam mentis humanae necessaria, quaelibet sensibilia certa lege sibi coordinandi, et intuitus purus.’ [‘Time is not something objective and real... but a subjective condition necessitated by the nature of the human mind in order to coordinate any sensible impressions whatever according to a fixed law, and it is a pure intuition.’] Space is qualified in a simular way. Ibid., p. 15. D.

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But this entire ‘mundus sensibilis’ only reveals the phenomenon to us, the mode in which the ‘Dinge an sich’ appear. The latter are, as such, fundamentally excluded from the sphere of experience. In this way even mathematics and mathematical natural science, the primeval domain of the ideal of science in the Cartesian conception, are in principle limited to the phenomenon. Thus Newton's metaphysics of space, which elevated space as ‘sensorium Dei’, is cut off at its very root.

Mathematics furnishes us with universally valid apriori knowledge of space and time which are the apriori forms of sensibility. Consequently, mathematics only provides us with knowledge of the apriori forms of the world of appearance.

With the aid of mathematics, whose universal validity was thus secured, Kant tried in his inaugural address to uphold the foundations of mathematical natural science against Hume's psychological criticism.

Following Newton, he accepted the conception of corporeal things as filling of mathematical space (a basically false conception as we shall see in the second volume). Corporeal things are only possible in space, as an apriori form of intuition. This apriori form of sensibility is at the same time an apriori structural law of the entire experienceable world of things.

In the creation of the mathematical theory of the world of phenomena, logical understanding is still limited by Kant to the usus logicus, that is to the formal analysis of the phenomena given in time and space¹.

In addition an usus realis is postulated for logical understanding. The synthetical apriori concepts are related to the ‘mun-

1 De mundi sensibilis etc. Sectio V § 23: ‘Usus autem intellectus in talibus scientiis, quarum tam conceptus primitivi quam axiomata sensitivo intuitu dantur non est nisi logicus h.e. per quem tantum cognitiones sibi invicem subordinamus quoad universalitatem conformiter principio contradictionis, phaenomena phaenomenis generalioribus, consectaria intuitus puri axiomatibus intuitivis. [‘But the use of the intellect in such sciences, whose primal concepts as well as whose axioms are given in sensory intuition, is only a logical one, that is to say that by means of the latter we only subordinate our cognitions to one another with respect to their generality in conformity to the principium contradictionis: the phenomena to more general phenomena, the conclusions of pure intuition to intuitive axioms.’]

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dus intelligibilis’. This intelligible world is to be sure still conceived of as that of the ‘Dinge an sich’. But even in the inaugural address of 1770 it appears that, contrary to the opinion of Windelband¹, this does not indicate a relapse into the speculative Leibnizian metaphysics. It is rather the new conception of the Humanistic ideal of personality which now embodies itself in the Idea of the ‘thing in itself’, at least insofar as the latter is an object of metaphysics! Our pure autonomous will, being only determined by the form of moral legislation, is itself ‘an example of an Idea of freedom, of an intelligible substance, namely insofar as it binds effects, which can be given in experience, to super-empirical grounds of determination’².

In section 11, paragraph 9 of his inaugural address, Kant assigned two different tasks to metaphysics, namely, an elenctic and a dogmatic one. In the first respect metaphysics must eliminate all sensory concepts out of the sphere of noumena; in the second respect it must direct all the principles of pure reason - which exceed sense experience - toward one thing only, namely the perfectio noumenon, that is the super-sensory perfection. And the latter, as the perfection of God, becomes a principle of theoretical knowledge; and as a moral perfection, as perfectio moralis, it becomes a principle for human action. Knowledge derived from pure concepts of the mind is only a ‘cognitio symbolica’.

The expression ‘symbolical knowledge’ is derived from Leibniz' treatise, Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis of 1684, in which this thinker developed further the Cartesian criteria for the clarity and distinctness of knowledge. By ‘cognitio symbolica’ in contradistinction to cognitio intuitiva, Leibniz understood a ‘cognitio caeca’, in which, when we lack insight into the total character of the sensory object, we call in the help of abbreviated symbols in stead of the objects themselves. Nevertheless, it is by means of these very symbols that, according to him, we can acquire adequate knowledge, as in mathematics.

When Kant now applied this conception of the ‘cognitio symbolica’ to the concepts of pure reason, and as a result denied to theoretical metaphysics every mode of intuitive adequate know-

1 Gesch. der neueren Phil. II (4th ed.) S. 39.

2 Cf. Cassirer II, 635. In Reflexion 1156 and 1157, ‘die Regel der Freiheit apriori in einer Welt überhaupt’ [‘the rule of apriori freedom in a world in general’] is expressly called the ‘forma mundi intelligibilis.’

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ledge, he chose a position diametrically opposite to that of Leibniz: according to the latter, we do acquire intuitive metaphysical knowledge derived from pure and simple concepts of reason.

Kant combated strongly the Idea of Leibniz and Wolff that sensory knowledge is only a ‘cognitio confusa’, whereas, in contrast, knowledge derived from simple concepts is clear and distinct. In Reflexion 414 Kant observes: ‘It is perfectly out of the question that the sensory intuitions of space and time are confused Ideas; rather they furnish the most distinct cognitions of all, namely the mathematical ones’¹. As confirmed by the ‘Reflexions’ of this period, the notion of metaphysical knowledge as merely symbolical is to be considered as the prelude to the doctrine of transcendental Ideas of Kant's critical period. ‘The mundus intelligibilis’, he remarks in one of these Reflexions, ‘as an object of intuition, is a mere undetermined Idea; but as an object of the practical relation of our intellect to intelligences of a world in general and to God as the practical original Being of it, it is a true concept and a determined Idea: civitas Dei (the city of God)’².

In the Reflexions written during this time, the mundus intelligibilis was plainly identified with the mundus moralis and the idea of God was qualified as the ‘practical original Being’. The identification in the cited ‘Reflexion’ (1162) of the mundus intelligibilis with the Idea of the ‘civitas Dei’ is undoubtedly formally derived from Leibniz³. But Leibniz' God was in the last analysis the deification of mathematical thought, the final hypostasis of the mathematical science-ideal. Whereas, in Kant's Idea of God, even in this phase, is expressed the moralistic ideal of personality, in the sense of supra-theoretical practical freedom and sovereign self-determination.

1 ‘Es ist so weit gefehlt, dasz die sinnlichen Anschauungen von Raum und Zeit sollten verworrenen Vorstellungen sein, dasz sie vielmehr die deutlichsten Erkenntnisse unter alle, nämlich die mathematischen verschaffen.’

2 Cassirer, Ibid.: ‘Der mundus intelligibilis als ein Gegenstand der Anschauung ist eine blosze unbestimmte Idee; aber als ein Gegenstand des praktischen Verhältnisses unseres Intelligenz zu Intelligenzen der Welt überhaupt und Gott als das praktische Urwesen derselben, ist er ein wahrer Begriff und bestimmte Idee: civitas Dei.’

3 Cassirer II, 635.

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The new conception of the ideal of personality as ὑπόϑεσις in the transition to the critical standpoint.

The last phase in Kant's development, the rise of his actual critical philosophy, can be understood only in terms of this new conception of the ideal of personality. The Idea of the autonomous self-determination of personality became the hidden ὑπόϑεσις of theoretical knowledge.

It may be true that according to Kant's own testimony he was awakened from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’ by the discovery of the antinomies of theoretical metaphysics¹. Yet this theoretical discovery cannot be considered to have been the deeper cause, but only the occasion of his transition to critical idealism. The real motive of this transition was religious in nature.

Once the ideal of personality is recognized as the foundation of the ideal of science, the autonomy of the theoretical function of thought can be proclaimed over against the empirical determinations of the merely receptive, passive sensibility. The spontaneity of the logical function of thought acquires a new meaning in contrast to the receptivity of sensibility! The sovereign value of personality can express itself in the spontaneity of the intellect only if the latter, in its apriori synthetic functions, is elevated to the position of law-giver with respect to ‘nature’. Kant's famous letter of February 21, 1772 to Markus Herz is the first clear attestation to this new turn in his thought.

Up til now Kant had approached the problem concerning the relation of theoretical thought to reality only from the metaphysical side. In his inaugural address of 1770, he went no further than drawing a sharp line of demarcation between mundus visibilis and mundus intelligibilis. The usus realis of logical understanding with its synthetical categories was related here to the metaphysical root of reality, to the ‘Ding an sich’.

Henceforth, Kant posed the problem concerning the relation of logical understanding and reality with reference to the world of sense-experience ordered in the apriori forms of intuition, space and time.

Does not the intellect possess an ‘usus realis’ in the apriori foundation of the ‘mundus visibilis’?

Henceforth, Kant concentrated his attention upon the problem of the apriori synthesis, through which in his opinion the world

1 Kant's letter to Garve of Sept. 21, 1798, Cf. Riehl op. cit. I, p. 351.

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of experience is first constituted as a universally valid ordered cosmos. To Kant, universally valid experience becomes identical with the ‘Gegenstand’ of theoretical knowledge, and ‘Gegenstand’ becomes identical with ‘objectivity’.

In his letter to Herz, Kant wrote, that the key to the entire mystery of metaphysics is to be found in the question: ‘what is the basis for the relation between that which is called our representation, and the object’ (Gegenstand).

The ‘Gegenstand’ may be given to us by our senses, however, this sensory datum appears only as a chaotic mass of as yet unordered material of experience, a mass of intermingled sensory impressions, within the apriori forms of intuition, space and time in which they are received.

All of our representations of things in the external world are actually syntheses of our consciousness through which we bring under the unity of a concept a given sensory multiplicity received in the forms of space and time. The universal validity and necessity of these syntheses can never be found in the psychical laws of association of our representational activity. It can only originate from the apriori function of pure logical understanding with its synthetical categories, which understanding is not determined by sensibility, but, on the contrary, does itself define the sensory datum in a universally valid manner. It is the logical function of thought in its pure unconditioned apriori structure that synthetically constitutes the ‘Gegenstand’ by realizing its categories in sensory experience.

The reason why we rightly assume that the things in experienceable reality conform themselves to these concepts and their combinations, is that our mind itself constitutes the apriori form of the ‘Gegenstand’, while only the sensory material is given to us in the apriori forms of intuition.

Beyond any doubt, even in this letter to Markus Herz, Kant has clearly formulated the problem of his ‘critical’ philosophy. For the first time he developed the program of the Transcendental Analytic, in sharp contrast to the traditional formal logic, and he introduced the name ‘transcendental philosophy’ for the critical inquiry concerning the apriori elements of human knowledge.

In the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ Kant wished to discover the system of all synthetical functions of the ‘pure understanding’ which are related apriori to the ‘Gegenstand der Erfahrung’.

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Once this task had been accomplished the key would be found for the solution of a question that he later was to formulate as the central problem of his first critical work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781): ‘How are synthetical judgments apriori possible?’ But it took nine years before Kant was prepared to present the elaborate system of the Critique of Pure Reason to the scientific world.

The discovery of the system of the transcendental categories cannot in itself explain this long delay. Kant had quickly found the principle of the ‘metaphysical deduction’ of these categories, as it is called in the Critique of Pure Reason. Namely, the principle that all of these categories are founded in the logical function of judgment, so that they automatically arise from the four classes of these judgments (quantity, quality, relation and modality).

Rather it appears, as Riehl supposes¹, that the so-called ‘transcendental deduction’ presented Kant with his greatest difficulty. This deduction entailed the task of explaining why the categories are necessarily related to the ‘Gegenstand’ of experience, and as such have universal validity for all possible experience. As B. Erdmann has shown, we find the first utterance concerning the principle of this transcendental deduction in a letter which Kant wrote on Nov. 24, 1776.

It is also certain that it was again Hume's critique of the principle of causality which stimulated Kant to demonstrate the transcendental-logical character of the synthetical categories. In the transcendental deduction, the foundations of the mathematical and natural scientific pattern of knowledge were at stake.

1 Riehl I, (3e Aufl.) p. 371 ff.

The ‘Dialectic of Pure Reason’ as the heart of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

But these foundations had an inner connection with the intrinsic dialectic of Kant's hidden transcendental ground-Idea.

According to his own testimony, the core of the Critique of Pure Reason is not to be found in the Transcendental Analytic or in the Transcendental Aesthetic; rather it is to be found in the Dialectic of Pure Reason, in which he develops his doctrine of the transcendental Ideas of pure reason.

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For here the tyranny of the science-ideal over the ideal of personality must be broken. Therefore, in the transcendental deduction of the categories the foundations of the ideal of science were to be brought in accordance with the aim of Kant's dialectic of pure reason. The claims of theoretical metaphysics inspired by the mathematical science-ideal to acquire knowledge of the supra-temporal root and origin of experienceable reality were to be rejected and the way was to be opened for the apriori rational faith in the reality of the idea of autonomous freedom of human personality.

For that very reason we shall have to place the doctrine of the transcendental ideas in the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Over and above this, in the explanation of Kant's ‘critical’ philosophy it will become evident to us how his three main critical works: The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgment (1790) must be viewed as a whole, inseparably connected to his dialectical transcendental ground-Idea. In other words, we shall see, that if any one, from a Christian point of view, believes he can accept Kant's epistemology, while rejecting his ethical and religious philosophy, he is only giving evidence of a lack of appreciation of the true transcendental foundations of Kant's philosophy.

In the second volume, in our treatment of the problem of epistemology, we shall give special attention to Kant's theory of knowledge; therefore, in the present connection we shall only consider its main Idea, insofar as it is necessary in order to gain an insight into the structure of Kant's transcendental ground-Idea.

§ 4 - The antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality in the critique of pure reason

Actually Kant's ‘Copernican deed’, i.e. his critical reversal of the relation between the knowing subject and empirical reality, his fundamental break with dogmatical metaphysics, in short the whole content of his Critique of Pure Reason, acquires its essential significance only in the light of the new relationship between the ideal of science and that of personality, in the basic structure of his transcendental ground-Idea.

If one isolates Kant's epistemology from the latter, Kant's

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Copernican deed, which is usually considered to be a radical revolution in modern philosophy, is, in itself, in no wise radical.

It is quickly forgotten that since the time of Descartes, Humanist philosophical thought had been characterized by the tendency to seek the foundations of reality in the knowing subject only. Hume had with extreme acuteness tried to show that our experience is limited to sense phenomena. In distinction to the ‘objective’ metaphysics of Greek and medieval philosophy, the Cartesian adage ‘cogito, ergo sum,’ signified the very proclamation of the sovereignty of subjective thought. Insofar as the Humanist ideal of science, with its logicistic principle of continuity, developed without a real synthesis with medieval or ancient metaphysics, its deepest tendency was the elevation of mathematical-logical thought to the throne of cosmic ordainer. If any one doubts this, he may return to the sources of the Humanistic science-ideal and behold once again the cleft which separates modern Humanist thought, with its essentially nominalistic concept of substance, from the old objective metaphysics of substantial forms. He may examine once again the experiment of Hobbes, as presented in the preface to his ‘De Corpore’, according to which the entire given world of experience is theoretically demolished, in order that it may be reconstructed by the creative activity of mathematical thought¹.

If indeed Kant had done no more than to proclaim the sovereign transcendental-logical subject as lawgiver of empirical reality, his Copernican deed would have been nothing more than the realization of the basic tendency of the Humanistic science-ideal restricted to sense phenomena and his Criticism would have never become a true ‘transcendental idealism’.

1 Cf. p. 197 of this volume.

The deepest tendencies of Kant's Copernican revolution in epistemology are brought to light by the ascription of primacy to the ideal of personality resulting in a new form of the Humanistic ground-Idea.

Kant's withdrawal of the ‘Ding an sich’ from the domination of the mathematical ideal of science, and his limitation of all theoretical knowledge to sense-phenomena is only to be understood from the dialectical turn of Humanist thought to its religious freedom-motive, embodied in the ideal of personality.

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Henceforth, the transcendent root of human existence is no longer sought in limited mathematical and natural scientific categories but rather in the rational moral function of sovereign personality, as it is expressed in the transcendental Idea of human freedom. This is the real cause of Kant's aversion to Leibniz' logicistic cosmonomic Idea of harmonia praestabilita, by which free personality was included in a continuous mathematically construed cosmic order, and in which, in the last analysis, the distinction between sensibility and rational freedom was relativized by the ideal of science.

In Kant's epistemology the postulate of the sovereignty of mathematical thought remains in full force with respect to knowledge of nature, but the ideal of science (essentially pertaining only to the domination of nature) cedes its primacy to the ideal of personality. Kant had become fully aware of the polar tension between both of these ideals.

The (sit venia verbo!) naturalistic idealism of the mathematical concept is replaced by a normative freedom-idealism of the transcendental Idea which - in pointing to the root of human personality - transcends the limits of logical understanding.

The neo-Kantian idealism of the Marburg school, in its first critical enthusiasm, thought it could correct Kant by abolishing his limitation of the sovereignty of theoretical thought to sensory phenomena. Thus it wished to extend the logicized ideal of knowledge to the normative world. Meanwhile, we have observed in an earlier context that, in so doing, this school was simply not conscious of the fact that it violated the typical structure of Kant's transcendental ground-Idea. It supposed it could elaborate Kant's critical method more consistently by eliminating the epistemological function of sensibility. It was unaware that in so doing it substituted a new type of Humanist ground-Idea for the Kantian one!

The very transcendental critical meaning of Kant's epistemology is indissolubly linked up with the binding of the mathematical and the natural scientific categories to the sensory function of experience. For this restriction of the Humanist science-ideal was strictly commanded by Kant's critical insight into the definitive antithesis between the nature- and the freedom-motives in the religious root of Humanistic thought.

The transcendental Ideas of reason point theoretical thought regulatively to the totality of the determinations of empirical reality without logical understanding ever being able to encom-

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pass this totality. At the same time these Ideas point beyond the logical function of theoretical thought to the supra-sensory root of reality, which the Humanistic ideal of personality henceforth, in an increasing degree, would identify with the practical Idea of autonomous moral freedom.

Here the deepest tendency in Kant's proclamation of the ‘primacy of practical reason’ manifests itself. This proclamation signified the first step in the process of concentrating philosophical thought in the Idea of autonomous moral personality.

As we observed in an earlier context, it was still only the first step which Kant's critical philosophy took in this direction. For the sharp line of demarcation between both of the basic factors in his transcendental ground-Idea, for the present, prevented the drawing of the full consequences of freedom-idealism.

The dualistic type of the Kantian transcendental ground-Idea.

The Critique of Pure Reason and its counterpart the Critique of Practical Reason break the cosmos asunder into two spheres, that of sensory appearance and that of super-sensory freedom. In the former, the ideal of science is the lord and master, the mind is the law-giver of nature, since it constitutes empirical reality as ‘Gegenstand’. But the ideal of science with its mechanical principle of causality is in no way deemed competent in the super-sensory sphere of moral freedom. It is not permitted to apply its categories outside of the domain of sensory experience. In the realm of moral freedom the ‘homo noumenon’ (the humanistic ideal of personality in the hypostatized rational-moral function) maintains its own sovereignty.

Kant severed all cosmic connections of meaning which bind the normative moral function to the sensory. This hypostatization of the moral function of personality, as a self-sufficient metaphysical reality, avenges itself by a logical formalism in the treatment of ethical questions.

Here it clearly appears how the meaning of the normative functions of reality is disturbed by the attempt to loosen them from their coherence with all other modal aspects in cosmic time.

The dualism between the ideal of science and that of personality in Kant's conception of the Humanist cosmonomic Idea comes sharply to the fore in the relationship between the ‘transcenden-

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tal unity of apperception’ and the hypostatized Idea of the absolutely autonomous moral freedom. This relationship was in Kant essentially unclarified and antinomical. On the one hand the freedom-motive expresses itself in the ‘transcendental thinking ego’, conceived of as the necessary pre-requisite for all objective experience of nature and as the apriori form of logical unity of the autonomous knowing subject. Whereas, on the other hand, opposite to it was posited the Idea of autonomous freedom of ‘pure will’.

In Kant's transcendental dualistic ground-Idea the basic antinomy between the ideals of science and of personality assumes a form which was to become the point of departure for all the subsequent attempts made by post-Kantian idealism to conquer this dualism.

Are we confronted here with two distinct roots in human reason? If this question were to be answered affirmatively, the unity of human selfhood (which from the outset had been sought in human reason) would be destroyed. This, however, cannot be Kant's true meaning, for he denied emphatically that the logical form of the ‘transcendental cogito’ has any ‘metaphysical’ meaning.

Must we then conclude that the ‘transcendental logical ego’ itself belongs to the phenomenon? This supposition, too, appears to be untenable, because, in this case, this transcendental subject could never be conceived of as the formal origin of the world of natural phenomena.

So the basic antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality discloses itself in the transcendental Idea of the autonomous human ego itself. This was to become the point of departure in the development of post-Kantian idealism. In Fichte the Idea of autonomous freedom was in a radical fashion elevated as the all inclusive root and origin of the entire cosmos.

For we have seen in an earlier context, that, just as the classical ideal of science implies a postulate of continuity which requires a methodical levelling of the modal aspects, in similar fashion the ideal of personality possesses its proper tendency to continuity which soon was to contest the self-sufficiency of the science-ideal.

Kant conceived of the ‘transcendental cogito’ neither as a substance nor as a phenomenon, but as a merely logical function,

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as pure spontaneity of the uniting act synthesizing the multiplicity of a possible sensory intuition¹.

He tried to represent this ‘cogito’ as a spontaneous activity, and as a final logical unity in consciousness which is ever elevated above all logical multiplicity in concepts².

When we deal with the problem of knowledge in the second volume of this work, we shall more closely analyze the intrinsic antinomy which lies hidden in this concept of the ‘unity of pure consciousness’. Nevertheless, we can note in passing, that Kant cannot recognize the real unity of self-consciousness, because his hidden transcendental ground-Idea requires an unbridgeable gulf between the so-called theoretical and practical reason.

1 Kr. d.r. V. Allgemeine Anmerkung den Übergang von der rationalen Psychologie zur Kosmologie betreffend [General remark concerning the transition from rational psychology to cosmology], p. 322/3: ‘Das Denken, für sich genommen, ist blosz die logische Funktion, mithin lauter Spontaneität der Verbindung des Mannigfaltigen einer blosz möglichen Anschauung... Dadurch stelle ich mich mir selbst weder wie ich bin, noch wie ich mir erscheine, vor, sondern ich denke mich nur wie ein jedes Objekt überhaupt’ (sic), ‘von dessen Art der Anschauung ich abstrahiere.’ [‘Thought, taken in itself, is merely the logical function, consequently pure spontaneity of the uniting activity synthesizing the multiplicity of a merely possible sensory intuition... Through it I represent myself neither as I am, nor as I appear to myself, rather I think myself only as an object in general, abstracted from the mode in which it is perceived.’]

2 Kr. d.v. V. Transsz. Logik, 2e Abschn. §§ 15 and 16.

The expression of this dualism in the antithesis of natural laws and norms.

The transcendental logical subject is lawgiver of ‘nature’; the transcendent subject of autonomous moral freedom is lawgiver of human action (or rather is the logical form of the moral law itself)!

Natural necessity and freedom, causal law and norm, in their relationship to each other become antinomic species of laws which cannot find any deeper reconciliation in Kant's dualistic cosmonomic Idea.

If natural necessity cannot itself find its root in the Idea of free sovereign personality, it remains a counter force against the declaration of the absoluteness of the moral Idea of freedom, and this fundamental antithesis cannot be resolved by a mere axiological subordination of theoretical to practical reason.

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If philosophical thought is to avoid becoming constantly involved in intrinsic antinomies, the Archimedean point of philosophy cannot be as a house divided against itself.

The form-matter schema in Kant's epistemology as an expression of the inner antinomy of his dualistic transcendental ground-Idea.

In Kant's epistemology, too, an inner antinomy is concealed by the fact that sensibility and logical understanding are dualistically set in opposition to each other. And this antinomy is dangerous to both the ideal of science and that of personality.

In spite of the proclamation of logical understanding as the lawgiver for nature, the sovereignty of theoretical thought is seriously threatened, because sensibility as a purely receptive instance, imposes insurmountable limits upon it. The understanding (‘Verstand’) is the sovereign lawgiver only in a formal sense. Only the universally valid form of natural reality originates in the ‘transcendental cogito’.

The material of knowledge, remains deeply a-logical, so that at this point the problem of the ‘Ding an sich’ behind the phenomena of nature arises again in a dangerous fashion. In the traditional metaphysical way, Kant permits the purely receptive sensibility to be affected by the ‘Ding an sich’.

This ‘Ding an sich’ is obviously again thought of as a natural substance and cannot be compatible with the Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’ as a free and autonomous supra-temporal being. In consequence, post-Kantian transcendental idealism necessarily must consider this to be an insult to sovereign reason. The a-logical ‘natural substance’ threatened both the ideal of science and that of personality.

Pre-Kantian rationalism had actually conceived of the substance of nature as the creation of absolute mathematical thought, and thereby it had made the latter to be the deepest root and the origin of the cosmos. In so doing, however, it had disregarded the proper claims of the Humanistic ideal of personality.

In his dualistic delimitation of the ideal of science and that of personality, Kant permitted an a-logical ‘Ding an sich’ to remain behind the phenomena of nature, a ‘Ding an sich’ which destroys the sovereignty of thought¹ and gives rise to the pro-

1 Kroner rightly observes op. cit. I, p. 103: ‘In den so gedachten Dingen an sich tritt dem Subject ein gleichwertiges, gleichmächtiges, ja übermächtiges Prinzip entgegen, zwischen beiden aber wird keine gedankliche Vermittlung festgestellt (denn die “Affection” ist ein völlig dunkeles Wort, das nur die Stelle eines fehlenden Begriffs vertritt.’ [‘In the things in themselves thought of in this manner, the subject is confronted with an equivalent, equipotent, nay predominant principle; but there is not established in thought a mediation between both (because “affection” is an entirely mysterious word, which only takes the place of a concept that is lacking’).]

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blem of a deeper root behind both logical thought and the metaphysical natural substance, and which on the other hand is not compatible with the postulate of continuity of the Humanistic ideal of personality; the acceptance of a metaphysical ‘substance of nature’ did not permit the Idea of free and autonomous personality to be recognized as the deepest root of empirical (natural) reality.

Kant himself felt the antinomy in his delimitation of the science-ideal by a natural ‘Ding an sich’. He tried, therefore, to avoid this antinomy by his construction of an intellectus archetypus, an intuitive divine mind, that creatively produces its ‘Gegenstand’ in direct non-sensory intellectual intuition. This Idea is essentially derived from Leibniz' notion of infinite analysis which is to be completed only in divine thought. Kroner rightly observes from the Humanist point of view: ‘The consequence of epistemological thought compels us to transcend the separation and to arrive at the unity of the intuitive understanding; with regard to the latter, however, the opposition between the “Gegenstand” and the ego can no longer be maintained. In the Idea both are identical, and such not as “Gegenstand”, because the understanding is not produced by that which is viewed, but as understanding, since the latter produces that which is viewed... The Idea of the understanding producing its “Gegenstand” leads beyond logic as epistemology: it is a limiting concept, - a concept which limits epistemology’¹.

1 Kroner, Op. cit. I, p. 109: ‘Die Konsequenz des erkenntnistheoretischen Denkens zwingt dazu, über die Trennung hinauszugehen bis zur Einheit des intuitiven Verstandes; für ihn kann dann aber auch der Gegensatz von Gegenstand und Ich nicht länger fortbestehen. In der Idee sind beide identisch, und zwar nicht als “Gegenstand”, denn der Verstand wird nicht vom Angeschauten erzeugt, sondern als Verstand, denn er erzeugt das Angeschaute... Die Idee des seinen “Gegenstand” erzeugenden Verstandes führt über die Logik als Erkenntnistheorie hinaus: sie ist ein Grenzbegriff, - ein Begriff, der die Erkenntnistheorie begrenzt.’

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The function of the transcendental Ideas of theoretical reason.

In spite of all this, it cannot be denied that in the transcendental dialectic, by introducing the transcendental Ideas of theoretical reason, Kant took an important step in the direction later taken by Fichte. The latter completely eliminated the natural ‘Ding an sich’ and proclaimed practical reason, as the seat of the ethical ideal of personality, to be the deepest root of the entire cosmos.

With the synthetic determination of the ‘Gegenstand’ by the mathematical categories of quantity and quality, and by the physical (categories) of relation, substance, causality and interaction, the logical understanding is set on an endless path; in this way alone the totality of the conditions can never be thought of as the ‘unconditioned’ itself.

The very limitation and the restriction of the categories to the sensory phenomenon makes it impossible for the intellect to conceive of the ‘Ding an sich’ in a positive sense as the absolute.

The ‘absolute’ can never be given in experience, since the latter is itself determined by the mathematical and dynamical (natural scientific) categories.

For this very reason the mind can conceive of the ‘noumena’ as ‘Dinge an sich’ only in a negative sense. In his remarkable explanation ‘Von dem Grunde der Unterscheidung aller Gegenstände überhaupt in Phaenomena und Noumena,’ Kant wrote: ‘The concept of a noumenon is also merely a limiting concept, in order to fence in the presumption of sensibility, and it is also only to be used in a negative sense. Nevertheless, it has not been arbitrarily invented, but is connected with the limitation of sensibility, without, however, being able to set anything positive in addition to its extent’¹.

It was from this point of view that Kant began his destructive criticism of the rationalist metaphysics of the Leibnizian-Wolffian school. This criticism was pregnantly expressed by Kant

1 Kr. der reinen Vernunft (W.W. Bnd. III) p. 243: ‘Der Begriff eines Noumenon ist also blosz ein Grenzbegriff, um die Anmaszung der Sinnlichkeit einzuschränken, und also nur von negativem Gebrauche. Er ist aber gleichwohl nicht willkührlich erdichtet, sondern hängt mit der Einschränkung der Sinnlichkeit zusammen, ohne doch etwas Positives auszer dem Umfange derselben setzen zu können.’ In the present connection I am quoting exclusively from the second edition. In Vol. II when we take up the problem of Epistemology I will consider the differences between the first and second edition.

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in the statement that concepts without sensory intuitions are empty, as vice versa intuitions without concepts are blind. It began with the famous Appendix: ‘Concerning the amphiboly of the concepts of reflection by means of mistaking the empirical use of the understanding for the transcendental one’ and reached its culminating point in the ‘Antinomies of Pure Reason’.

Yet, Kant simultaneously tried to show that no contradiction is implied in the acceptance of the concept of a ‘noumenon’ as the ‘Gegenstand’ of an infinite intuitive intellect, even though the reality of the ‘things in themselves’ is only secured by ‘practical reason’ in apriori faith.

By recognizing the infinity of its task in the determination of the ‘Gegenstand’, the intellect subordinates itself to ‘theoretical reason’, which with its transcendental Ideas - as mere regulative principles for the use of the understanding - indicates to the latter the direction to follow in order to bring unity to its rules¹. The transcendental idea presents to the understanding the unattainable goal: the ‘unconditioned’, as totality of categorical determinations; so theoretical reason subjects logical thought to an infinite task. Consequently, in Kant the theoretical transcendental Idea is viewed as nothing but the logical category extended to the ‘absolute’. This extension is made possible in pure reason by freeing the category from the inevitable limitations of possible experience and by so extending the concept beyond the limits of the sensory empirical, although still in contact with it².

1 Kr. d.r. Vern., p. 276: ‘Der Verstand mag ein Vermögen der Einheit der Erscheinungen vermittelst der Regeln sein, so ist die Vernunft das Vermögen der Einheit der Verstandesregeln unter Prinzipien. Sie geht also niemals zunächst auf Erfahrung oder auf irgend einen Gegenstand, sondern auf den Verstand, um den mannigfaltigen Erkenntnissen desselben Einheit a priori durch Begriffe zu geben, welche Vernunfteinheit heiszen mag und von ganz anderer Art ist, als sie von dem Verstande geleistet werden kann.’ [‘The understanding may be a faculty of bringing unity to the phenomena by means of rules: Reason, on the other hand, is the faculty of creating the unity of the rules of understanding under principles. Consequently, the latter is never directly related to experience or to a “Gegenstand”, but rather to the understanding, in order to furnish the manifold cognitions of the latter with unity a priori by means of concepts; a unity which may be called unity in the sense of Reason and is of a quite different nature from that which can be produced by the understanding.’]

2 Kritik der r. Vern., p. 327.

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The transcendental Idea is a necessary concept of reason to which no corresponding objects can be given in the sensory aspect of experience. ‘Pure reason’ is never related to ‘Gegenstände’, but only to the apriori concepts of ‘Gegenstände’, to the logical categories.

As Kant tried to derive his table of pure concepts or categories of the understanding from the forms of logical propositions according to the viewpoints of quantity, quality, relation and modality¹, so he also tried to construct a table of transcendental Ideas of pure reason patterned after the form of the judgments of relation: the categorical, the hypothetical, and the disjunctive.

Thus he divided these Ideas into three classes:

1	- the first is that of the absolute unity of the thinking subject as the absolute substratum of all subjective psychical phenomena;
2	- the second is that of the absolute unity of the series of synthetical determinations of the objective sensory phenomena;
3	- the third is that of the absolute unity of determinations of all the objects of thought in general or the Idea of a supreme Being, a ‘Wesen aller Wesen’^2. The first point of view furnishes the Idea of the soul as absolute unity of the thinking subject, the second the Idea of the world or that of the universe as totality of all objective phenomena in the external world. The third furnishes the Idea of Deity as the being which includes all reality within itself (ens realissimum).

None of these transcendental Ideas are related to experience. Since in Kant's system all science is limited to the sensory aspect of experience, it is impossible to acquire scientific knowledge

1 Kant's list of the logical forms of proposition is as follows:

I

- Quantity of propositions: universal, particular, singular propositions.

II

- Quality of propositions: affirmative, negative, infinite propositions.

III

- Relation-propositions: categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive propositions.

IV

- Modality of propositions: problematical, assertoric, apodictic propositions.

To this table corresponds that of the categories:

I

- Categories of quantity: unity, plurality, totality.

II

- Categories of quality: reality, negation, limitation.

III

- Categories of relation: substance and accident, cause and effect, interaction.

IV

- Categories of modality: possibility, actuality, necessity.

2 Kritik der r. V., p. 297 ff.

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from such Ideas. In their speculative use, in which we conclude from the mere ‘Idea’ to the absolute reality of its content, there arises the ‘dialectical illusion’: theoretical thought transcends the boundaries of experience and supposes that in this way it can attain to knowledge of the ‘supra-empirical’.

The task of the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ is to dispel this dialectical illusion and to keep theoretical thought within its boundaries, while, at the same time, it must furnish us with an insight into the fact that the speculative ‘dialectical conclusions’ are not arbitrary, but rather spring necessarily from the very nature of pure reason itself¹.

Thereby the three metaphysical sciences are discarded in which idealistic pre-critical rationalism had attempted to carry through the primacy of the ideal of science over the ideal of personality, namely rational (metaphysical) psychology, cosmology (more exactly called: metaphysics of nature) and natural theology.

1 Kritik der r. V., p. 302.

Kant's shifting of the Archimedean point of Humanist philosophy is clearly evident from his critique of metaphysical psychology, in which self-consciousness had identified itself with mathematical thought.

In his doctrine of the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ in which the rationalist psychology, as theoretical metaphysics, is reduced to absurdity, Kant struck at the very core of the Cartesian conclusion drawn from the intuitive self-consciousness in the cogito, to the esse². From this appears most clearly the shift in the

2 Ibid., p. 321: ‘Der dialektische Schein in der rationalen Psychologie beruht auf die Verwechselung einer Idee der Vernunft (einer Intellegenz) mit den in allen Stücken unbestimmten Begriffe eines denkenden Wesens überhaupt... Folglich verwechsele ich die mögliche Abstraktion von meiner empirisch bestimmten Existenz mit dem vermeinten Bewustztsein einer abgesondert möglichen Existenz meines denkenden Selbst und glaube das substantiale in mir als das transzendentale Subject zu erkennen, indem ich blosz die Einheit des Bewusztseins, welche allem Bestimmen als der bloszen Form der Erkenntnis zum Grunde liegt, im Gedanken habe.’ [‘The dialectical illusion in rational psychology arises from mistaking an Idea of Reason (of an intelligence) for the concept of a thinking being in general, which is undetermined in all respects... Consequently, I mistake the possible abstraction from my empirically determined existence for the supposed consciousness of a separate possible existence of my thinking self, and I believe I know the substantial in myself as the transcendental subject, while I have nothing in mind but the unity of consciousness which as mere form of knowledge lies at the foundation of all determining acts of thought’.]

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Archimedean point which the Humanistic transcendental ground-Idea underwent in Kant's criticism.

The basic theses of metaphysical psychology: the substantiality, immateriality, simplicity, immortality and personality of the ‘thinking’ ego and the different metaphysical conceptions concerning its relation to the things of the ‘external world’, were pulled to bits by Kant's critique. According to him, they only rest on an unjustifiable relating of the empty logical form of transcendental self-consiciousness to a supra-empirical ‘Gegenstand’. And this is done by means of the logical categories. ‘All modi of self-consciousness in thought as such, are therefore not yet logical concepts of objects (categories), but mere logical functions which neither give to thought any “Gegenstand”, nor any knowledge of myself as a “Gegenstand”. The object is not the consciousness of the determining but only of the determinable self, that is of my intuition (in so far as its multiplicity can be synthetized according to the general condition of the unity of apperception in thought)’¹.

As soon as the ideal of personality had freed itself from the stifling grasp of the science-ideal, Humanism could no longer seek the metaphysical root, the ‘substance’ of personality, in sovereign mathematical thought.

Thus, even the basic problem of Humanistic theoretical metaphysics, namely, the relation of the material substance to the soul substance (in its three pre-Kantian solutions, viz. the naturalistic acceptance of an influxus physicus, occasionalism, and the Leibnizian doctrine of the pre-established harmony between material and spiritual monads), became null and void to Kant.

For him the entire problem is reduced to the relation between the subjective-psychical phenomena of the ‘inner sense’ and

1 Kritik der r. Vernunft, Transsz. Dialektik 2es Buch: ‘Beschlusz der Auflösung des Psych. Paralogism’, p. 322: ‘Alle modi des Selbstbewusztseins im Denken an sich sind daher noch keine Verstandesbegriffe von Objecten (Kategorien), sondern blosze logische Functionen, die dem Denken gar keinen Gegenstand, mithin mich selbst auch nicht als Gegenstand zu erkennen geben. Nicht das Bewusztsein des bestimmenden, sondern nur des bestimmbaren Selbst, d.i. meiner Anschauung (so fern ihr Mannigfaltiges der allgemeinen Bedingung der Einheit der Apperzeption im Denken gemäsz verbunden werden kann), ist das Object.’

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the objective-psychical phenomena of the ‘outer sense’, in other words, to the question how these phenomena can be joined in the same consciousness¹. In fact, this is the problem which concerns the relation between logical thought and psychical sensibility in the same consciousness, which problem Kant deemed to be insoluble in a psychological sense. For him the transcendental Idea of the soul has no other theoretical function than that of a regulative principle of pure reason for all psychological knowledge whose final goal, though never attainable, lies in the insight into the absolute unity of the functions of sensibility and logical understanding.

Nevertheless, as limiting concept, the Idea of the soul possesses an actually transcendental significance. In his ‘General remark concerning the transition from rational psychology to cosmology’ Kant indicated the practical use of the transcendental Idea, in which it directs theoretical thought toward the homo noumenon, as the autonomous law-giver in the supra-sensory realm of freedom.

A principle of the supra-sensory determination of human existence is really found ‘through the admirable faculty that first reveals to us the consciousness of the moral law’. Metaphysical psychology had vainly sought this principle in theoretical thought².

Thus in its practical trend, within the limits set for the Humanist science-ideal by the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, the Kantian idea of the soul displayed itself as a transcendental foundation, even of this science-ideal itself. But Kant's dualistic transcendental ground-Idea prevented him from drawing the consequences through which the cleft between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ reason could be bridged.

1 See note 1 p. 366.

2 Kritik der r. Vern., pp. 324/5.

Kant's criticism of ‘rational cosmology’ (natural metaphysics) in the light of the transcendental trend of the cosmological Ideas.

In the analysis of the antinomies of pure reason Kant reduced to absurdity rational cosmology, in the sense of the natural metaphysics of the mathematical science-ideal.

According to him the paralogisms of metaphysical psychology cause a completely one sided dialectical illusion with respect

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to the Idea of the subject of our thought, since there is not to be acquired the least evidence for the affirmation of the contrary through a speculative ratiocination from the pure transcendental Idea of the soul. It is entirely different, however, in the case of the ‘cosmological ideas of the universe’. If reason desires to draw theoretical conclusions from these Ideas with respect to the ‘Dinge an sich’, it necessarily involves itself in antinomies.

If with respect to a supposed metaphysical object, one can prove with the same logical right the thesis as well as the antithesis of a speculative proposition, and consequently the logical principle of contradiction is violated, then it is evident that the supposed object cannot be a real ‘object of experience’.

Now in the first place, Kant developed the system of all possible cosmological Ideas in accordance with the table of categories. These Ideas are nothing but the pure concepts of understanding elevated to the rank of the absolute, viz. the totality of the determinations performed by the logical function of thought, insofar as the synthesis contained in the categories forms a series of determinations¹. Thus Kant arrived at four transcendental Ideas, which, when speculatively misused, lead to a corresponding number of theoretical antinomies.

In these four cosmological Ideas the Idea of the universe is related to the categorical points of view of quantity, quality, relation and modality.

The antinomies, which arise in the speculative application of these transcendental Ideas, were accordingly divided by Kant into two mathematical and two dynamical (natural metaphysical) ones.

According to him, it can be proved with equal logical stringency that the world with respect to quantity is both limited and infinite in time and space. And, with respect to quality, the world can be shown to consist of absolutely single parts, while at the same time the opposite can be proved with equal logical force. With respect to relation (causality) it can be demonstrated, that causality through freedom in the sense of a first cause is possible. And, with seemingly the same force of argument it can be demonstrated, that such a metaphysical cause cannot exist and everything occurs in the world according to a fixed mechanical necessity. Finally, with respect to modality, the existence of an

1 Kritik der r. Vernunft, p. 328.

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absolutely necessary supreme Being can be both proved and disproved.

The actual transcendental trend which the theoretical Idea acquired in Kant is, nevertheless, also evident at this point. Here, too, the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ discloses itself only as a preparation for the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’.

The intervention of the ideal of personality in Kant's solution of the so-called dynamical antinomies and the insoluble antinomy in Kant's dualistic transcendental ground-Idea.

Kant's Humanist ideal of personality has as its foundations causality through freedom, that is, the autonomous self-determination of personality as ‘homo noumenon’, and the existence of God as the final hypostasis of the moral Idea of freedom. In the treatment of the so-called dynamic antinomies which are related to the categorical points of view of relation (causality) and modality (the absolute necessity), both of these foundations are called into play.

Here, in a positive sense, Kant chooses the side of the theses, in so far as they are related to the ‘Dinge an sich’, and he grants validity to the antitheses only with respect to the sensory world of appearance.

There is at this point, indeed, no longer any question of a natural ‘Ding an sich’, but rather of the intelligible root and origin of the cosmos, in the sense of Kant's conception of the ideal of personality. Thus Kant's ideal of personality is actually involved in the case that ‘theoretical reason’ conducts with itself in the dialectic.

As soon as Kant gives to his theoretical thought this really critical transcendental turn towards the religious root of his entire critical philosophy, the insoluble antinomy in its dualistic transcendental ground-Idea is again immediately in evidence.

At every point this ground-Idea implies ‘purity’ in the sense of the unconditionedness of ‘theoretical reason’. Consequently, the cleft between the ideal of science and that of personality may not be eradicated in an actual transcendental self-reflection. But it must be eradicated, since actually the Idea of the autonomy of pure theoretical thought, in the deepest sense, is entirely dependent upon the Idea of the autonomous freedom of personality!

In the treatment of both mathematical antinomies Kant had

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resigned in an equal rejection of thesis and antithesis insofar as both in an untenable manner treat a mere transcendental Idea as a thing of experience.

But in the treatment of the interest that reason has in the antinomies, he gives evidence of having clearly seen the stimulus of the Humanistic ideal of personality behind the rationalist-idealistic metaphysics: ‘That the world has a beginning¹, that my thinking self has a simple and therefore undestructable nature, that this self at the same time is free in its volitional acts and elevated above the coercion of nature, and that finally the whole order of things in the world originates from a first Being, from which everything derives its unity and appropriate connection: these are so many fundamentals of morals and religion. The antithesis deprives us of all these supports, or at least it appears to deprive us of them’² (I am italicizing).

The question arises why in the solution of the dynamic antinomies the appeal may be made to the supra-sensory sphere of human personality in favour of the thesis, whereas in the solution of the mathematical antinomies such an appeal to a ‘noumenon’ behind the phenomena, in support of the thesis, must be excluded. Kant answers this question in the following way: ‘The series of conditions to be sure are all similar insofar as one considers only their extent with respect to the question whether they correspond to the Idea, or that they are too great

1 This thesis is also orientated to the attempt of Christian scholasticism to prove rationally the creation of the world with the aid of the metaphysically applied principle of causality, although the Thomistic demonstration did not imply a temporal beginning of the universe. Naturally in itself this proof has nothing to do with the Humanistic ideal of personality. Kant directs one and the same blow against all rationalistic metaphysics, and in the case of ‘Christian’ rationalistic metaphysics his task was lightened all the more, since in origin it is in nowise more Christian than Humanistic metaphysics. In fact, in the long run, Christian metaphysics joined hands with the Humanistic!

2 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 373: ‘Dasz die Welt einen Anfang habe, das mein denkendes Selbst einfacher und daher unverweslicher Natur, dasz dieses zugleich in seinen willkürlichen Handlungen frei und über den Naturzwang erhoben sei, und dasz endlich die ganze Ordnung der Dinge, welche die Welt ausmachen, von einem Urwesen abstamme, von welchem alles seine Einheit und zweckmäszige Verknüpfung entlehnt: das sind so viele Grundsteine der Moral und Religion. Die Antithesis raubt uns alle diese Stützen, oder scheint wenigstens sie uns zu rauben.’ (I am italicizing).

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or too small for it. But the concept of understanding which lies at the foundation of these Ideas, contains either merely a synthesis of the similar (which is pre-supposed with every quantity both in its composition and in its division) or also of the dissimilar, which at least can be allowed in the dynamical synthesis of the causal connection as well as in that of the necessary with the contingent. This is the reason why into the mathematical connection of the series of phenomena there cannot enter any other condition than a sensory one, that is such a one which itself is a part of the series; the dynamical series of sensory conditions, on the contrary, still allows a dissimilar condition, which is not a part of the series, but as merely intelligible lies outside the latter; thereby Reason is satisfied and the unconditioned is placed at the head of the phenomena, without thereby disturbing the series of the latter, which is always conditioned, and without interrupting it contrary to the principles of understanding’¹.

One cannot say, that this argument is very convincing. Consider for example the second mathematical antinomy²: the Leibnizian monadology affirmed, that the monad is spaceless, and insofar as it made this affirmation, it taught that the infinite

1 Kr. d.r. V., pp. 416/7: ‘Die Reihen der Bedingungen sind freilich in so fern alle gleichartig, als man lediglich auf die Erstreckung derselben sieht; ob sie der Idee angemessen sind, oder ob diese für jene zu grosz oder zu klein sind. Allein der Verstandesbegriff, der diesen Ideen zum Grunde liegt, enthält entweder lediglich eine Synthesis des Gleichartigen (welche bei jeder Grösze in der Zusammensetzung sowohl als Teilung derselben vorausgesetzt wird) oder auch des Ungleichartigen, welches in der dynamischen Synthesis der Kausalverbindung sowohl, als der des Notwendigen mit dem Zufälligen wenigstens zugelassen werden kann.
Daher kommt es, dasz in der mathematischen Verknüpfung der Reihen der Erscheinungen keine andere als sinnliche Bedingung hinein kommen kann, d.i. eine solche, die selbst ein Teil der Reihe ist; da hingegen die dynamische Reihe sinnlicher Bedingungen doch noch eine ungleichartige Bedingung zuläszt, die nicht ein Teil der Reihe ist, sondern als blosz intelligibel auszer der Reihe liegt, wodurch denn der Vernunft ein Genüge getan und das Unbedingte den Erscheinungen vorgesetzt wird, ohne die Reihe der letzteren, als jederzeit bedingt, dadurch zu verwirren und den Verstandes Grundsätzen zuwider abzubrechen.’

2 The thesis reads here as follows: ‘Eine jede zusammengesetzte Substanz in der Welt besteht aus einfachen Teilen und es existiert überall nichts als das Einfache oder das, was aus diesem zusammengesetzt ist.’ [‘Every composite substance in the world consists of simple parts and there exists nowhere anything but the simple or what is composed of it.’]

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series of spatial analysis has its metaphysical origin in a noumenon which is dissimilar to the parts of space. So it can be said with respect to the thesis of the first mathematical antinomy (the world has a beginning in time and is spatially limited) that cosmic time originates in eternity as timelessness, and with that is likewise accepted a heterogeneous ‘noumenon’ outside the ‘synthetical series of temporal moments’.

Within the cadre of Kant's transcendental ground-Idea the natural ‘Ding an sich’ can no longer be maintained. The depreciation of the theoretical Idea of God.

The truth of the matter is, that in the deepest ground of his transcendental ground-Idea, Kant had to reject the natural ‘Ding an sich’ and could only accept the normative ethical function of personality as the very root of natural reality. This is also true in respect to Kant's theoretical Idea of God, which as ‘Transzendentales Ideal’ (Prototypon transcendentale), only had to pave the way for the practical Idea of the deity as a ‘postulate of practical reason’, an idea, which in this practical function is nothing but the idol of the Humanistic ideal of personality.

The entire theologia naturalis with its speculative rational proofs for the existence of God must be destroyed by the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, because the ideal of personality can no longer find its veritable Idea of God in absolutized mathematical thought, but only in the hypostatized moral function of free and autonomous personality. To this end even the theoretical Idea of God must be depreciated. As long as it concerns the ‘merely speculative reason’, one had better speak of the ‘nature of the things of the world’ than of a ‘divine creator of nature’ and better of the ‘wisdom and providence of nature’ than of the divine wisdom, since the first mode of expression ‘abstains from the presumption of an assertion which exceeds our competency and at the same time points our reason back to its proper field viz. nature’¹.

1 Ibid., p. 533: ‘die Anmaszung einer gröszeren Behauptung, als die ist, wozu wir befugt sind, zurück hält und zugleich die Vernunft auf ihr eigentümliches Feld, die Natur, zurückweiset.’

§ 5 - The development of the basic antinomy in the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’

The kernel of the Humanistic ideal of personality in the

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typical form which it assumes in Kant's transcendental ground-Idea is the freedom and autonomy of the ethical function of personality in its hypostatization as ‘homo noumenon’.

As we have formerly seen in another context, it is essentially the hypostatization of the merely formally conceived moral law itself which is identified with the ‘homo noumenon’, as ‘pure will.’

Autos and nomos in Kant's Idea of autonomy.

Kroner strikingly observes that ‘a double sense is included in the Idea of moral autonomy’. The ego does not only subject itself to the moral law, instead of receiving as a slave the command of his master from outside, but it also acquires its own selfhood only through the very law. It does not become autos but on account of its subjecting itself to the nomos, it only becomes an ego when it obeys itself: ‘The (moral) law is consequently the true ego in the I-ness, it is the transcendental consciousness, the pure practical Reason, to whose rank the empirical will has to elevate itself, if it is to become an ethical one. Reason becomes only as law-giver the reason which separates itself from arbitrariness and inclination. The law which derives its legitimation from itself, and commands by its own authority, elevates Reason above all finite connections, and makes it infinite, absolute’¹.

In Kant's theoretical philosophy self-consciousness had only a hovering existence in the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ which is related to the phenomenon. In the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, however, it discloses its ‘metaphysical root’².

1 Von Kant bis Hegel, Bnd. I, p. 167: ‘Das Gesetz ist also das wahre Ich im Ich, es ist das transzendentale Bewusztzsein, die reine praktische Vernunft, zu der sich der empirische Wille zu erheben hat, wenn er ein sittlicher werden will. Die Vernunft wird als Gesetzgeberin erst zur Vernunft, die sich von Willkur und Neigung unterscheidet. Das Gesetz, das seinen Rechtsgrund aus sich schöpft, das eigener Vollmacht gebietet, erhebt die Vernunft über alle endlichen Zusammenhänge, macht sie unendlich, absolut.’

2 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (W.W., Bnd. V), Vorrede, p. 108: ‘Hierbei erhält nun zugleich die befremdliche, obzwar unstreitige, Behauptung der spekulativen Kritik dasz sogar das denkende Subject ihm selbst in der inneren Anschauung blosz Erscheinung sei, in der Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft auch ihre volle Bestätigung, so gut, dasz man auf sie kommen musz, wenn die erstere diesen Satz auch gar nicht bewiesen hätte.’ [With this the critique of Practical Reason at the same time completely confirms the surprising, although undisputable, assertion of the speculative critique, that even the thinking subject in the inner intuition can conceive itself only as phenomenon; and this confirmation is so striking, that one must even arrive at this thesis if the latter (viz. the speculative critique) had not at all demonstrated it.’]

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We have seen that in this very dualistic conception of the selfhood once more is disclosed the unsoluble antinomy in Kant's trascendental ground-Idea: In the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ the ‘thinking ego’, conceived of as a pure transcendental-logical subject, is made the autonomous unity of self-consciousness, whereas in the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ the ethical and faith functions of human personality are hypostatized as metaphysical root of human existence. In this way the human ego is itself broken up into two diametrically opposed roots. This remains true even though Kant rejects the conception that the transcendental selfconsciousness is a ‘Ding an sich’.

The dualistic division between the ideal of science and the ideal of personality delivers the latter into the hands of a logical formalism.

The hypostatization of the moral and faith functions of human personality necessarily results in a logical formalization of ethics and theology, which, as we saw, leads to a disturbance of meaning of the modal law-spheres concerned. Contrary to Kant's own intention, theoretical logic dominates the ideal of personality as formulated in the categorical imperative. The sharp dualistic ‘either-or’ between sensibility and reason, induced him to apply - though not in a theoretical epistemological sense - even to the moral, principles, the same form-matter schema which had played a dominating rôle in his epistemology: ‘If a rational being is to think of his maxims as practical universal laws, it can think the same only as such principles which contain the ground of determination of the will, not in respect to the matter, but merely in respect to the form’¹.

Kant's categorical imperative: ‘Behave so that the maxim of your will can at the same time hold as a principle of a universal legislation,’ is in essence a logicistic judgment, for the very reason that it is thought of as an ‘absolute’ principle, separated from the cosmic-temporal coherence of meaning. By its elimination

1 Kritik der pr. V., S. 136: ‘Wenn ein vernünftiges Wesen sich seine Maximen ais praktische allgemeine Gesetze denken soll, so kann es sich dieselbe nur als solche Prinzipien denken, die nicht der Materie, sondern blosz der Form nach den Bestimmungsgrund des Willens enthalten.’

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from the cosmic coherence among the modal law-spheres, it lacks any true inter-modal synthesis. In our treatment of the epistemological problem, we shall have ample opportunity to demonstrate this thesis more elaborately. In Kant the religious meaning of the Humanist ideal of personality concentrates itself essentially in the absolutizing of a function of human personality.

The transcendental concept of freedom considered in itself is merely negative (freedom from natural causality) and is to acquire a positive sense only through the principle of autonomy, in the sense of the absolute sovereignty of Human personality as the highest legislator. But this ‘autonomy’, too, lacks as such a meaningful content. It is in itself only a formal principle. The religious ground-motive which finds its expression in Kant's transcendental freedom-Idea implies the self-sufficiency of the homo noumenon and it is this very divine predicate which makes any moral autonomy of man meaningless.

In Kant's conception, the ideal of personality actually requires the logistic hypostatization of the ‘categorical imperative’; however, it destroys itself by the very fact that it can only offer ‘stones for bread’ when challenged to disclose its full religious content. Perhaps never in the history of philosophy has the Humanist ideal of personality received a more impressive formulation than in Kant's famous eulogy of duty, but, on the other hand, this ideal of personality has never before exhausted itself in an emptier formalism. To the impressive question, ‘Duty! sublime and great name... what is the origin worthy of yourself, and where is the noble root to be found that proudly excludes all kinship with the inclinations, and which is the indispensable origin from which man can derive any value that he can give himself?’ - the Königsberg philosopher replies: ‘It must be nothing less than that which elevates man (as a part of the sensory world) above himself, and connects him with an order of things only to be conceived by the understanding, an order embracing the whole world of the senses - including the empirically determinable existence of man in time - as well as the totality of all purposes... It is nothing but personality, i.e. the freedom and independence of the mechanism of the whole of nature. But at the same time it is to be considered as a faculty of a being to whose own peculiar - i.e. by its own reason imposed - and purely practical laws it is subjected insofar as it belongs to the sensory world. In other words the person, as belonging to the world of the senses, is subjected to his own per-

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sonality insofar as he belongs to the intelligible world. It is not surprising, therefore, if man, who belongs to both worlds, looks upon his own being in relation to his second and highest destination with veneration and considers its laws with the greatest respect’¹.

1 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, p. 211/2: ‘Pflicht! du erhabener, groszer Name... welcher ist der deiner würdige Ursprung, und wo findet man die Wurzel deiner edlen Abkunft, welche alle Verwandtschaft mit Neigungen stolz ausschlägst, und von welcher Wurzel abzustammen, die unnachläszliche Bedingung desjenigen Werts ist, den sich Menschen allein selbst geben können? Es kann nichts minderes sein, als was den Menschen über sich selbst (als einen Teil der Sinnenwelt) erhebt, was ihn an eine Ordnung der Dinge knüpft, die nur der Verstand denken kann, und die zugleich die ganze Sinnenwelt, mit ihr das empirische bestimmbare Dasein des Menschen in der Zeit und das Ganze aller Zwecke... unter sich hat. Es ist nichts anders als die Persönlichkeit, d.i. die Freiheit und Unabhängigkeit von dem Mechanism der ganzen Natur, doch zugleich als ein Vermögen eines Wesens betrachtet, welches eigentümlichen, nämlich von seiner eigenen Vernunft gegebenen, reinen praktischen Gesetzen, die Person also, als zur Sinnenwelt gehörig, ihrer eigenen Persönlichkeit unterworfen ist, so fern sie zugleich zur intelligibelen Welt gehört: da es denn nicht zu verwundern ist, wenn der Mensch als zu beiden Welten gehörig, sein eignes Wesen in Beziehung auf seine zweite und höchste Bestimmung nicht anders als mit Verehrung und die Gesetze derselben mit der höchsten Achtung betrachten musz.’

The precise definition of the principle of autonomy through the Idea of personality as ‘end in itself’.

Free personality is viewed as an end in itself, as ‘absoluter Selbstzweck’. To be sure, it is true enough that man is unholy, but ‘humanity’ in his person ought to be sacred to him.

In the entire cosmos all that man desires and all that over which he has power may be merely used as a means, only man and with him every rational creature is ‘Zweck an sich selbst.’

This ‘human value’, however, which must be sacred to everyone as homo noumenon, is itself in the last analysis the empty formula of the categorical imperative. The real motive of ‘pure practical reason’ is also none other than the ‘pure’, that is the absolutized and therefore formalized and empty moral law². Thereein consists in Kant the fundamental difference between mede morality and legality.

2 Ibid., p. 213: ‘So ist die ächte Triebfeder der reinen praktischen Vernunft beschaffen; sie ist keine andere als das reine moralische Gesetz selber, so fern es uns die Erhabenheit unserer eigenen übersinnlichen Existenz spüren läszt...’ [‘Such is the nature of the true motive of the pure practical reason; it is but the pure moral law itself insofar as it makes us aware of the sublimity of our own super-sensual existence.’]

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The thesis that human personality is an end in itself, can have a good meaning only in respect to the things which can become an object of human goals. That is to say it is meaningful only in the temporal subject-object relation in which things have modal object-functions in respect to the different modal functions of the volitive act of man.

As soon, however, as this thesis is extended to the central religious sphere, it becomes void, because it contradicts the ex-sistent character of the religious centre of human personality.

The true religious root of our existence is nothing in itself, because it is only an imago Dei.

As soon as it is absolutized, it fades away in nothingness and cannot give any positive content to Kant's freedom-Idea. This very absolutization is implied in Kant's conception of the ethical idea of human personality as an absolute end in itself.

We have learned, in an earlier context, that the antinomy in the Humanist concept of substance consists in the fact that a result of theoretical abstraction is absolutized as a ‘thing in itself’.

In Kant's practical philosophy, the absolute freedom of the ‘homo noumenon’ exists by the grace of the same logical understanding that he had bound in his epistemology to the chain of sensory phenomena!

Now this understanding with its analytical laws even subjects the very ideal of personality to a logical formalization, whereas one would expect that, in keeping with the primacy of ‘practical reason’, it should, on the contrary, be subject to the latter.

This is clearly evident from the noteworthy section of the ‘Analytic of Practical Reason’, in which Kant treats the subject of the pure practical judgment¹.

At this point a problem rises with respect to the categorical imperative, which runs parallel to the problem Kant had raised in the so-called ‘Schematism-chapter’², with respect to the pure concepts of the understanding. Just as these pure concepts must be capable of being applied to sensory intuition, in the same manner that which in the ethical rule is said generally (in ab-

1 Ibid., p. 188.

2 I must postpone a detailed analysis of this important part of the Critique of Pure Reason until the second volume in which I will discuss the problems of epistemology.

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stracto) must be applied, by the practical faculty of judgment, to an action in concreto.

This gives rise to the difficulty that in Kant's system a concrete action is always ‘empirically determined’, that is, belongs to the sensory experience of nature. And as Kant expressed it: It seems absurd, that one could encounter an instance in the sensory world, that, although itself subject to the laws of nature, yet is capable of being brought under a law of freedom. Naturally there can be no question of a schematization of the practical Idea of reason in the same manner as the schematization of the categories of the understanding, because the moral good (‘the pure will’) is something supra-sensory that never permits itself to be related to experience.

In the application of Kant's categorical imperative to concrete actions, the dualism between ‘nature’ (ideal of science) and ‘freedom’ (ideal of personality) becomes an antinomy.

The antinomy which necessarily must arise from the dualistic division of nature and freedom emerges at this point. The function of moral activity is impossible outside its cosmic temporal coherence of meaning with the ‘natural’ functions. But the recognition of that connection of meaning would have immediately destroyed the hypostatization of the moral function in Kant's conception of the ideal of personality.

The way in which Kant sought to escape this contradiction is quite typical. The transcendental idea is only to be related to concepts of the understanding and not to sensory experience. Consequently, the moral law can only be schematized by relating it, in its abstract logical formulation, to the mere form of a natural law which is then qualified as a type of the moral law.

The natural law itself can be related to the ‘sense-objects’ in concreto. It is evident that thereby the possibility of applying the categorical imperative to concrete actions is not demonstrated. Even though in Kant's system the category of causality can be related to sensory actions in concreto, this is only possible by means of its schematization in time.

But the mere form of natural law cannot be applied to sensory experience without its schematization in time as a form of intuition of the ‘inner sense’¹.

1 Ibid., p. 191: ‘Es ist also auch erlaubt, die Natur der Sinnenwelt als Typus einer intelligibelen Natur zu brauchen, so lange ich nur nicht die Anschauungen, und was davon abhängig ist, auf diese übertrage, sondern blosz die Form der Gesetzmäszigkeit überhaupt (deren Begriff auch im gemeinsten Vernunftgebrauche stattfindet, aber in keiner anderen Absicht, als blosz zum reinen praktischen Gebrauche der Vernunft a priori bestimmt erkannt werden kann) darauf beziehe. Denn Gesetze als solche sind so fern einerlei, sie mögen ihre Bestimmungsgründe hernehmen, woher sie wollen.’ [‘It is consequently also permitted to use the nature of the sense-world as a type of an intelligible nature, so long as I do not transfer to the latter the sensory intuitions and what is dependent on them, but relate to it only the form of conformity to law in general (the concept of which is also present in the most common use of reason, but to no other end than what can be understood as destined merely to the pure practical use of reason a priori). For laws as such are of the same kind, no matter from where they derive their determinative grounds.’]

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According to Kant, the rule of the judicative faculty under laws of pure practical reason is this: ask yourself whether the action which you intend to perform could be viewed as possible through your will, if it would occur according to a law of nature, of which nature you yourself would be a part. Consequently, if the subjective maxim of action does not permit itself to be thought of according to the form of natural law, as a universal law of human action, it is morally impossible.

In the final analysis, this ‘Typik der reinen praktischen Urteilskraft’ is simply reduced to the judgment of the concrete actions according to the logical principium contradictionis. The mere form of the natural law is, according to Kant's own statement, nothing but the form of the ‘conformity to law in general’; for laws as such are of the same kind, no matter from where they derive their ‘determinative grounds’.

To apply the categorical imperative, Kant has no other choice than to relate it to the logicistic generic concept of ‘law’, which in fact is identified with the analytical principle of contradiction.

As the result of this logical formalism, the antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality acquires its greatest sharpness in Kant's transcendental ground-Idea. The ‘pure will’ must be comprehended as ‘causa noumenon’, i.e. as absolute metaphysical cause of human actions in their sensory mode of appearance. Under the ‘mechanism of nature’ - the sovereign domain of the ideal of science - Kant subsumed psychical as well as physical causality, and mockingly he called psycholo-

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gical freedom ‘the freedom of a turnspit, which also, once it is wound up, executes its movements of its own accord’¹.

1 Kritik der pr. Vern., p. 224.

Kant's characterization of Leibniz' conception of free personality as ‘automaton spirituale.’

The Leibnizian automaton spirituale, which through its representations is determined to its activity, is, according to him, just as devoid of real transcendental freedom as the automaton materiale that is nothing but a material machine. Kant remarks: ‘if indeed human actions, as they actually belong to the determinations of man in time, were not only determinations of man as phenomenon, but as “thing in itself”, then freedom could not be saved. Man would be a marionette or an Vauconson automaton, constructed by the highest Master of all art works, and even though self consciousness would make him a thinking automaton, he would be of such a nature that the consciousness of his spontaneity, when considered as freedom, would be a mere deception...’².

God has created man, however, only as a homo noumenon, not as ‘phenomenon’. So it is a contradiction to say that God, as Creator, is the cause of actions in the sense-world, while he is at the same time the cause of the existence of the acting being as noumenon³.

But the ‘causa noumenon’ of sensory actions itself appears to be nothing but the absolutized form of the law ‘überhaupt’. This is the embodied antinomy itself.

The categorial imperative, as moral law, is itself thought of as subjective ‘causa noumenon’. Why? Since the subjective moral volitional function (over against which the categorical imperative sets itself as a ‘norm’, because the volitional function can exceed the law) cannot be comprehended as ‘free cause’. For Kant views this subject-function as ‘empirically conditioned’ and dependent upon sensory nature.

Kroner thinks he can solve this antinomy by stating, that not the ‘pure’ (that is hypostatized) will, but only the ‘empirically conditioned pure will’ is to be understood as ‘causa noumenon’ of actions. However, unintentionally he gives in this way the

2 Kritik der pr. Vern., p. 229.

3 Ib., p. 231. At this point one can clearly see how Kant's Idea of God is determined by the ideal of personality.

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most pregnant formulation to this Kantian antinomy¹. For how can a ‘pure will’ be ‘empirically conditioned’ without losing its ‘purity’, i.e. its absolute character? Speculative idealism with its dialectical method sanctions the antinomy as a transitional stage to a higher synthesis. Kant, however, did not accept antinomies and so this solution can never constitute an answer within his system.

1 Kroner, Op. cit. I, S. 199.

Kroner's conception of the origin of the antinomy in Kant's doctrine of ‘pure will’ as ‘causa noumenon’.

Kroner has, however, penetratingly seen wherein lies the origin of the antinomy in Kant's doctrine of ‘pure will’ as ‘causa noumenon’. This origin is hidden in the impossibility of thinking the moral-logical form of reason together with its sensorily determined material.

As we saw before, the ‘Typik der reinen praktischen Vernunft’ does not afford any escape from this difficulty. In Kant's system the ‘Dialectic of pure reason’ could only demonstrate that the natural scientific category of causality is exclusively related to sensory experience but never to ‘Dinge an sich’. The ‘Critique of pure Reason’, however, could not furnish us with the insight into the possibility of a real connection between nature and supra-sensory freedom, since it was itself based upon the hypostatization of the logical and psychical functions of consciousness. Kant thought he could lift these functions out of the cosmic temporal coherence of meaning without this hypostatization. But this is impossible.

The antinomy between nature and freedom in Kant's concept of the highest good.

In a final attempt Kant tried to re-establish in practical reason the coherence of meaning between nature and freedom, which he had crudely severed. To this end he used the concept of the highest good. Nevertheless, it has generally been acknowledged that it is just this very point in Kant's system which exhibits its weakest spot and actually resolves itself into intrinsic antinomies.

It is our intention to examine briefly this final attempt to achieve a synthesis. Kant considers the older heteronomous (non-realistic) ethics to be characterized by the fact that it sought after an ‘object of the will’ in order to make this at the same

[p. 382]

time both the material and the ground of the moral law. This was done instead of first seeking after a law, which apriori and directly determines the will and the object of the latter only through the will itself.

Thus in this heteronomous ethics the concept of the highest good became the final determinative ground of the moral will¹. To Kant the concept of the ‘highest good’ becomes the ‘unconditional totality of the object of pure practical reason’, but it is never to be comprehended as the determinative ground of the ‘pure will’². The moral law as the final determinative ground is rather pre-supposed in this concept.

In the concept of the highest good, however, virtue (as the determination of the will exclusively by the categorical imperative) and blessedness (as the motive of our sensibility) must, according to Kant, be conceived of as necessarily united. For it cannot be supposed that personality needs blessedness and is worthy of it, but nevertheless cannot possess it; this would be incompatible with the perfect will of the rational Being that at the same time is almighty (i.e. the deity). This uniting of virtue and beatitude cannot be conceived of analytically, since freedom and nature do not logically follow from each other, but rather exclude each other³. It can only be thought of synthetically, and then only in such a manner, that either happiness is the necessary result of virtue as ‘causa noumenon’, or vice versa the desire for happiness is the moving cause of moral action. The latter alternative is excluded by the principle of autonomy. But the first way seems equally impossible, since all

1 Ibid., p. 183/4.

2 Ibid., p. 283/9.

3 Kr. d. pr. V., S. 243: ‘Also bleibt die Frage: “wie ist das höchste Gut praktisch möglich? noch immer unerachtet aller bisherigen Koalitionsversuche eine unaufgelösete Aufgabe. Das aber, was sie zu einer schwer zu lösenden Aufgabe macht, ist in der Analytik gegeben, nämlich dasz Glückseligkeit und Sittlichkeit, zwei spezifisch ganz verschiedene Elemente des höchsten Guts sind, und ihre Verbindung also nicht analytisch erkannt werden könne... sondern eine Synthesis der Begriffe sei.” [Thus, notwithstanding all attempts at a solution, the question: “How is the highest good practically possible?” still remains an unsolved problem. That, however, which makes the latter a problem hardly to be solved, is given in the Analytic, namely that blessedness and morality are two specifically completely different elements of the highest good, so that their uniting cannot be understood analytically... but rather is a synthesis of concepts’].

[p. 383]

practical uniting of causes and effects in the world as a result of the determination of the will is not directed by the moral inclination of the will, but rather by the knowledge of natural laws and the physical power to employ these to its purposes.

Kant formulates the antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality as it is implied in the concept of the highest good as the ‘antinomy of practical reason’.

Thus arises the ‘antinomy of practical reason’ which Kant treats in the chapter entitled ‘About the dialectic of pure Reason in the defining of the concept of the highest good’. He thought, however, the following solution would afford a satisfactory answer to the difficulty. He conceded that the judgment according to which the desire for happiness is the moving cause of moral action, must be unconditionally qualified as false. The second proposition, that happiness is the necessary result of virtue, however, is only false insofar as virtue is considered to be the cause of happiness in the sense world, so that only a phenomenal existence would be ascribed to rational beings. It is, however, not only quite reasonable to think of the existence of man as noumenon in an intelligible world, but there is even given in the moral law a pure intelligible determinative ground of the causality of free personality in the sense-world. Therefore, according to Kant, it is not impossible that by an intelligible Creator of nature, the moral inclination is set in a necessary causal coherence with beatitude as its effect in the sense-world.

Thus Kant finally felt compelled to accept a coherence between ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ in order to escape the antinomical consequences of his hypostatization (and consequently logicistic formalization) of moral personality. The acceptance of such an intelligible Creator of nature (the Deity) cannot be rationally proved, but it is a postulate of pure practical reason that makes possible the realization of the highest good. This postulate consequently, does not rest upon a theoretical knowledge, but just as the two other postulates of pure practical reason (freedom in a positive sense and immortality), it rests upon a universally valid and necessary reasonable faith in the reality of a supra-sensory, noumenal world and in the possibility of the realization of the highest good.

It is easily seen that this entire attempt to bring ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ again in a deeper coherence, can only be accomplished

[p. 384]

by abandoning the Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’ as ‘Ding an sich’. If the free and autonomous moral function of personality is actually to be the ‘substance’ of human being (existence), a substance, which according to Descartes' pregnant description ‘nulla rē indiget ad existendum’, then there is no possible bridge between ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’. Every attempt to effect a synthesis must necessarily dissolve the basic absolutization in Kant's Humanistic ideal of personality. Kroner correctly observes, that the very characteristic of pure practical reason, i.e. its autonomy, is undermined by the inclusion of happiness as material determination (‘Inhaltsbestimmung’) in the pure moral law. By so doing the very absolute sovereignty of the moral will is restricted to sensibility instead of maintaining its absolute independence in the face of the latter¹.

It is the concept of the highest good itself into which all of the antinomies between the ideal of personality and that of science are crowded together!

1 Kroner, Op. cit. I, p. 209.

In Kant's Idea of God the ideal of personality dominates the ideal of science.

Kant's Idea of deity as postulate of ‘pure practical reason’ is the final hypostatization of the ideal of personality. In this hypostatization, the Idea of the noumenal world as ‘a nature under the autonomy of pure practical reason’², reaches its climax. This reasonable God is the categorical imperative itself, conceived of as the noumenal determinative ground of sensible nature. His will does not exceed ‘practical reason’ with its hypostatized moral law. For the ‘principle of morality is not merely restricted to men, but extends to all finite beings which have reason and will, nay it even includes the infinite Being as Supreme Intelligence’³.

The autonomous will can only recognize a command as divine insofar as it originates from ‘practical reason’.

The philosophy of ‘religion’ which Kant built upon his metaphysics of ‘reasonable faith’ is the ‘Religion within the boundaries of mere Reason’. In the writing published under the same title Kant attempts to accommodate Christian faith to his metaphysics rooted in his Humanist ideal of personality. In so

2 Kr. d. pr. V., t.a.p., p. 158.

3 T.a.p., p. 143.

[p. 385]

doing he gave a striking example of the fundamental lack of insight into the essence and starting-point of the Christian doctrine, a lack of insight, which has from the outset characterized Humanistic philosophy. The faith of pure reason is, according to him, the kernel of all religious dogmas. Mankind is not capable of conceiving this kernel in its ‘purity’; it must be rendered perceptible, so that it can become a living force, a ‘religious reality’.

If this ‘pure ethical kernel’ is selected from the Christian revelation it is wonderfully in accord with the ‘apriori reasonable faith’. The fall into sin is then nothing but the antagonism between sensory and moral nature, between ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ in man.

The ‘radical evil’ in human nature is its tendency to subject the will to sensory inclinations, instead of directing it by the ‘categorical imperative’. Regeneration is a free deed of our moral nature through which the good conquers the evil.

The ‘God-man’ is the Idea of the ‘moral ideal man’ in whom reasonable faith accepts the absolute realization of the Idea of the good; in this sense the God-man is the pre-requisite for regeneration, for the latter can only take effect insofar as we believe in the possible realization of the moral Idea.

Consequently, insofar as the God-man is the redemptive force through whom regeneration is effectuated in this moral ideal of humanity and in the striving toward its realization, individual sins are atoned!

This is the religion of the Humanistic ideal of personality clad in the stiff garb of moralistic rationalism. And this is the ‘pure ethical kernel’ which Kant thought he could select from the Christian revelation!

§ 6 - The development of the basic antinomy in the Critique of Judgment

The attempt to resolve the dualism between the ideal of science and that of personality in the Critique of Judgment. The problem of individuality.

In both the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, Kant failed to resolve the antinomy between the ideals of science and of personality. In his third main work the ‘Critique of Judgment’, Kant attempted to bridge the cleft between nature and freedom in another way. Here he surveyed

[p. 386]

the entire course which his philosophical thought had previously taken. In his famous introduction he wrote: ‘Now, to be sure, an immense cleft has been established between the realm of the nature-concept as the sensory, and the realm of the freedom-idea as the super-sensory, so that no transition is possible from the former to the latter (that is to say by means of the theoretical use of reason), as if there were two different worlds, the one of which cannot have any influence on the other. Nevertheless, the super-sensory ought to influence the sensory, that is to say the freedom-Idea ought to realize in the sense-world the goal set by its laws; consequently nature must also be conceivable in such a way, that the laws of its forms at least agree with the possibility of the goals which are to be realized in it in conformity to laws of freedom. - Consequently, there must after all be a ground of unity of the super-sensory which lies at the foundation of nature, with the practical content of the freedom-Idea; and although the concept of this unity neither theoretically nor practically arrives at a knowledge of the same, and consequently does not have a proper realm’ (I italicize), ‘nevertheless it must make possible the transition from the mode of thought according to the principles of the one to that according to the principles of the other’¹.

The problem raised by the ‘Critique of Judgment’ is, consequently, not new to Kant's system. For it is once again the possibility of subsuming nature under the freedom of reason which

1 Kritik der Urteilskraft (W.W. Bnd. VI) pp. 19/20: ‘Ob nun zwar eine unübersehbare Kluft zwischen dem Gebiete des Naturbegriffs, als dem Sinnlichen, und dem Gebiete des Freiheitsbegriffs, als dem übersinnlichen, befestigt ist, so dasz von dem ersteren zum anderen (also vermittelst des theoretischen Gebrauchs der Vernunft) kein Übergang möglich ist, gleich als ob es so viel verscheidene Welten wären, deren erste auf die zweite keinen Einflusz haben kann: so soll doch diese auf jene einen Einflusz haben, nämlich der Freiheitsbegriff soll den durch seine Gesetze aufgegebenen Zweck in der Sinnenwelt wirklich machen; und die Natur musz folglich auch so gedacht werden können, dasz die Gesetzmäszigkeit ihrer Form wenigstens zur Möglichkeit der in ihr zu bewirkenden Zwecke nach Freiheitsgesetzen zusammenstimme. - Also musz es doch einen Grund der Einheit des Übersinnlichen, welches der Natur zum Grunde liegt, mit dem, was der Freiheitsbegriff praktisch enthält, geben, wovon der Begriff, wenn er gleich weder theoretisch noch praktisch zu einem Erkenntnisse desselben gelangt, mithin kein eigentümliches Gebiet hat, dennoch den Übergang von der Denkungsart nach den Prinzipien der einen zu der nach Prinzipien der anderen möglich macht.’

[p. 387]

is made a problem. But the manner in which this third Critique seeks to arrive at a solution is certainly original. The course of thought here followed constitutes a counterpart to the way that had been taken by Leibniz.

Kant's rationalistic conception of individuality.

The path taken by Kant led him to consider the problem of individuality, or rather that of the ‘specificity in nature’; for Kant was always concerned with conformity to a law and, as we know, within the cadre of his rationalistic cosmonomic Idea he again and again identified law and subject¹. Only Kant's aesthetic philosophy, in its doctrine of the creative genius, attributed an independent place to subjective individuality. In the final analysis, it appeared that both the laws of understanding and those of reason can only determine their ‘object’ apriori in an abstract-universal way. There are, however, many forms of nature, ‘as it were so many modifications of the universal transcendental nature-concept’ which are left undetermined by the laws given apriori by the pure logical function of understanding. For these forms of nature there must also be laws, which, to be sure, are empirical and consequently, according to our rational insight, must be called contingent, but which nevertheless, if they actually can be called laws, must be viewed as necessarily originating from a principle of unity in multiplicity. And this is the case even though this latter principle may be unknown to us².

Now in the ‘class of the higher cognitive faculties’ there is a peculiar connective link between understanding and reason, namely, the ‘power of judgment’ (‘Urteilskraft’). This faculty subsumes the particular under the universal laws, and as such, i.e. as ‘determining transcendental faculty of judgment’, it is constitutive for experience; while, as the mere ‘reflecting power of judgment’, it judges of the appropriate accommodation of the particularity in the laws of nature to our cognitive faculty

1 In our later treatment of the problem of individuality we shall see, that the species as a type-concept includes only the typical law-conformedness, but does not include subjective individuality. Furthermore, we shall find that in the irreducibleness of subjective individuality to the typical law of individuality, the subject-side of our cosmos discloses very clearly its proper unexchangeable rôle with respect to the law-side.

2 Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 24.

[p. 388]

(that can only give universal laws apriori). And in this latter function it is not constitutive for experience, but regulative only.

When compared with the determining faculty, the reflecting faculty of judgment, consequently, operates in just the opposite way. The latter judges the particular in its accommodation to the universal laws given to ‘nature’ by the understanding in the apriori synthesis. The determining judicative faculty, on the contrary, proceeds from the very apriori universal laws and subsumes under the latter the particular empirical laws of nature. The ‘reflecting judgment’, in contrast to the determining, does not possess objective principles apriori, but only subjective ones. It judges the particular multiplicity of nature as if a higher understanding than our own had given the empirical laws of nature for the benefit of our cognitive faculty, in order to make possible a system of experience according to particular laws of nature.

Kant related the reflecting power of judgment to his famous schema of the faculties of the soul. According to him, all of the latter can be reduced to three, which do not allow of any further deduction from a common basis. These faculties are the cognitive, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and the desiring power. Insofar as the former, as the faculty for the acquisition of theoretical knowledge, is related to ‘nature’, it receives laws apriori only from the understanding. The desiring power, as a ‘higher faculty according to the Idea of freedom’, receives its laws a priori only from reason. Therefore, in accordance with his schema, it is quite natural for Kant to relate the reflecting power of judgment to the feeling that we have when confronted with the theoretically known nature.

According to Kant's extremely rationalistic conception, every feeling is a ‘synthetical activity’ through which we relate the representation of an object to our subjective intentional activity in which we set ourselves a purpose. In every feeling we order an imagined object under an end.

The Idea of teleology in nature.

In its empirical form the reflecting faculty of judgment, according to Kant, coincides completely with the ‘inner life of feeling’. It is this power that permits us to recognize the higher unity between understanding and reason, because it orders a ‘Gegenstand’ of knowledge under a goal. But these empirical reflections of the power of judgment being entirely arbitrary

[p. 389]

and subjective, are never able to possess a universally valid and necessary character. The reflecting judgment possesses, however, a universally valid principle apriori, a transcendental principle joined with a feeling which is likewise necessary and universal. This principle is that of the ‘formal teleology of nature.’

For the concept of the objects so far as they are judged according to this principle, is only ‘the pure concept of objects of possible empirical knowledge in general’ and includes no single empirical content¹.

According to this transcendental principle, the reflective power of judgment must consider nature as if it were generated after a teleological plan. As Kant himself says, ‘as if that which, for our human insight, is contingent in the empirical specificity of the laws of nature, is, nevertheless, generated by a higher intellect after a law-conformed unity, which unity, although not knowable to us, is, however, conceivable.’

1 Kritik der Urteilskraft, t.a.p., pp. 26/7.

The law of specification as the regulative principle of the transcendental faculty of judgment for the contemplation of nature.

This transcendental concept of a teleology in nature is neither a concept of nature, nor a concept of freedom. For the power of judgment, through its transcendental principle, does not dictate a law to nature, but rather to itself in order to judge nature². This law can be called the ‘law of specification’, and it is a mere regulative principle for our view of nature. ‘For it is not a principle of the determining, but only of the reflecting power of judgment; one wants only that the empirical laws of nature - as to its universal laws the latter may be ordered as it pleases - must absolutely be investigated according to this principle and the maxims founded therein; because only in this case can we proceed with the use of our understanding in experience and can acquire knowledge’³.

2 Kant here speaks of the ‘heautonomy’ of the reflecting judgment.

3 Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 32: ‘Denn es ist nicht ein Prinzip der bestimmenden, sondern blosz der reflektierenden Urteilskraft; man will nur, dasz man, die Natur mag ihren allgemeinen Gesetzen nach eingerichtet sein, wie sie wolle, durchaus nach jenem Prinzip und den sich darauf gründenden Maximen ihren empirischen Gesetzen nachspüren müsse, weil wir, nur so weit als jenes statt findet, mit dem Gebrauche unseres Verstandes in der Erfahrung fortkommen und Erkenntnis erwerben können.’

[p. 390]

If we momentarily overlook the task which Kant here ascribes in a general sense to the reflecting power of judgment, it is easily ascertained, that the basic problem submitted for solution to the ‘Critique of Judgment’ has its root in the question which the other two Critiques had failed to solve; namely, the problem concerning the relation between the ideal of science and that of personality. The Critique of Pure Reason did not ascribe to the understanding the possibility of possessing knowledge of the ‘totality of determinations’, which knowledge was supposed to have included that of the theoretical necessity of empirical laws. If such a possibility were open to the understanding, then, once again, the ideal of science would have dominated the realm of the ‘absolute’, which Kant had once and for all intended to set apart in the supra-sensory teleological kingdom of personality as ‘Selbst-zweck’ (end in itself).

The logical and psychical functions of consciousness may, consequently, only be brought to a unity in a formal synthesis, and the sensory material must continue to be a limit for logical thought.

The teleological mode of contemplation of practical reason, on the other hand, may not penetrate into the domain of the ideal of science, since Kant will not abandon the sovereignty of mathematical and natural scientific thought over nature. This prevented him from following the course taken by Fichte who at the expense of the ideal of science accepted the domination of the ideal of personality over nature!

The reason why the ‘Critique of Judgment’ cannot resolve the basic discord in Kant's Archimedean point.

Consequently, there remained for Kant no other way than to seek a connecting link between understanding and reason. However, this connecting link, in its subjective functional character, is actually not the absolute ‘supra-sensory subject beyond theoretical and practical reason’, but only a third immanent function of consciousness next to and between the latter. For that very reason, it cannot effect a veritable unity between the two antagonistic factors of the Humanist transcendental ground-Idea.

According to both ‘sources of knowledge’ which the faculty of judgment compares with one another reflecting on their mutual appropriate accord, i.e. sensory intuition and logical

[p. 391]

understanding, this faculty can display an alternative function: it can either judge a given sensory representation - before we have acquired any logical concept of it - and establish, that in its immediate visibleness it has an appropriate accommodation to our understanding; or it can, inversely, judge that the concept of an object is the ground of being of the latter and, consequently, establish that the concept has an appropriate accomodation to the visible reality of the object.

In the first case, the object is only called appropriate upon a subjective ground, since its representation is directly joined with a subjective feeling of pleasure (complacence) that never can become an objective ‘piece of knowledge’, and this representation is itself a teleological representation of an aesthetic character. In the second case the teleological judgment is related to a specific objective knowledge of the object under a given concept; it has nothing to do with a subjective feeling of pleasure concerning things, but with the understanding in the judgment of things only. In this case we judge that the teleology is laid objectively (actually) in the thing of nature as an organism.

In the first case, the original point lies in the emotional effect of (natural) things upon us, and we become explicitly conscious of the teleological relations only by analytical investigation. In the second case, the centre of gravity of our attitude toward the things lies in the rational conception of the relations in the ‘object’, which we judge to be appropriate. Moreover, in this case the feeling of pleasure is only secondarily united with this judgment.

It is upon these alternative functions that Kant based the division of the ‘Critique of Judgment’ into the critique of the aesthetic and that of the teleological judgment: ‘By the former we understand the faculty to judge the formal appropriateness (ordinarily also called the subjective) through the feeling of pleasure or pain: by the latter the faculty to judge the real (objective) appropriateness of nature through the understanding and the reason’¹.

The former has to demonstrate how the universal validity of a cognitive judgment can rightly be attributed to the aesthetic judgment, even though such a judgment lacks a concept. The critique of the teleological judgment has to show, that all teleo-

1 Kr. der Urt. kr., p. 41.

[p. 392]

logical contemplation of nature only possesses a regulative value for biological investigation and it must reject its possible claims to constitutive value for knowledge.

In the final paragraph of the ‘Introduction’, Kant treated ‘the uniting of the laws given by the understanding and by reason through the faculty of judgment.’ Here, once again, the dualism between the ideal of science and that of personality is formulated with great acumen: ‘The realm of the nature-concept subjected to the laws of the one legislator, and that of the freedom-Idea subjected to those of the other, are completely isolated from each other, precluding all reciprocal influence which they (each according to their basic laws) might have on one another; this separation is guaranteed by the great cleft which severs the super-sensory from the phenomena. The freedom-Idea does not determine anything with respect to the theoretical knowledge of nature; just as the nature-concept does not determine anything with respect to the practical laws of freedom; and insofar it is impossible to bridge over the gulf between the two different realms’¹.

Be that as it may, the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ furnished the Idea of a causality through freedom. This causality through free will is the final goal, which itself (or the appearance of which in the sensory world) ought to exist, to which end the condition in nature was pre-supposed which would permit the possibility of such an effect. Now, according to Kant, the faculty of judgment is supposed to furnish us with the mediating concept between the concept of nature and that of freedom, and this in the concept of a teleology in nature: ‘because through the latter is understood the possibility of the final end which can only be realized in nature and in accord with its laws’².

Kant thought that in his system the concept of an absolute causality through freedom could be conceived of without an

1 Kr. der Urt. kr., p. 43: ‘Das Gebiet des Naturbegriffs unter der einen und das des Freiheitsbegriffs unter der anderen Gesetzgebung sind gegen allen wechselseitigen Einflusz, den sie für sich (ein jedes nach seinen Grundgesetzen) auf einander haben könnten, durch die grosze Kluft, welche das Übersinnliche van den Erscheinungen trennt, gänzlich abgesondert. Der Freiheitsbegriff bestimmt nichts in Ansehung der theoretischen Erkenntnis der Natur; der Naturbegriff eben sowohl nichts in Ansehung der praktischen Gesetze der Freiheit; und es ist in sofern nicht möglich, eine Brücke von einem Gebiete zu dem andern hinüberzuschlagen.’

2 Ibid., p. 44.

[p. 393]

intrinsic contradiction. It has, however, become apparent to us, that the concept of an unconditional ‘causa noumenon’ is encumbered with all the antinomies of the Humanistic concept of substance.

The ‘homo noumenon’ is supposed to be a ‘Ding an sich’ in an absolute sense, and its moral freedom was to have an unconditional validity. This hypostatization is, nevertheless, actually determined by analytical thought in its cosmic relativity¹. It is nothing but an absolutizing of the moral aspect of human existence, which is lifted out of the cosmic temporal coherence of the modal law-spheres by means of a false analysis, and is thus logically formalized. And in this logical formalization it destroys itself. Even the Humanistic freedom-motive is in this way almost completely reduced to the logical principle of contradiction. It is only the Idea of human personality as ‘Selbstzweck’ in which the religious meaning of this motive could withdraw in order to escape its complete dissolution into a formal tautology. But we have seen, that this Idea itself, because of its absolutization, dissolves itself in nothingness.

1 In the famous para. 76 of the ‘Critique of Judgment’, Kant writes: ‘Die Vernunft ist ein Vermögen der Prinzipien und geht in ihrer äuszersten Forderung auf das Unbedingte; da hingegen der Verstand ihn immer nur unter einer gewissen Bedingung die gegeben werden musz zu Diensten steht. Ohne Begriffe des Verstandes aber, welchen objective Realität gegeben werden muss, kann die Vernunft gar nichts objectiv (synthetisch) urteilen und enthält als theoretische Vernunft für sich schlechterdings keine konstitutive, sondern blosz regulative Prinzipien.’ [‘Reason is a faculty of principles, and in its extreme demands it points to the unconditional; the understanding, on the contrary, is always only at the service of the former on a specific condition which must be previously fulfilled. Reason, however, is not able to judge anything objectively (synthetically) without concepts of the understanding to which objective reality must be given, and as theoretical reason it does not contain in itself any constitutive principles, but merely regulative ones.’]
But Kant has not seen that the Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’ as the hypostasis of the moral function of personality is itself the product of a religiously founded analytical mental activity which ignores the cosmic coherence and is thus false! For the transcendental ‘Idea’ points toward the totality of meaning and not towards an analytical abstraction, which in its hypostatization destroys the meaning-coherence.

The same antinomy which intrinsically destroys the Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’ recurs in the principle of teleological judgment.

The same antinomy reappears in the principle of teleological

[p. 394]

judgment. The point here in question is the possibility to conceive of the stringent mechanical causality of the classical Humanistic science-ideal together with a teleology in nature, a teleology which can only find termination in a moral ‘Selbstzweck’.

The critique of teleological judgment derived the justification of a teleological view of nature from the fact that in nature itself phenomena are given, namely, the living organisms, which set a limit to causal explanation and present themselves to our contemplation, as if they were constructed after a teleological plan.

A thing, which as a product of nature can nevertheless be conceived only as a natural organism, must be related to itself as cause and effect. It is a product of nature itself, and not like the beautiful, only the representation of a thing which is produced by nature or by art. For it gives ‘objective reality’ to the concept of a goal. Since this is the case, the question must necessarily be raised: How is this possible according to the ‘transcendental conditions of objective reality’ in conformity with the category of causality? Now the connection of cause and effect, so far as it is only thought by means of the understanding, is a synthetical determination of phenomena that forms a series of causes and effects and in which the effect is always subsequent to the cause. Therefore, the causal coherence, in a natural organism, can never be a nexus effectivus, a coherence of mechanical, efficient causes.

The organism cannot result from an external cause, but must be thought of as its own cause and at the same time as the effect of this cause; therefore, this relation of causality can be considered by the reflecting judgment in such a manner only, that it is viewed as a nexus finalis, in which the effect is at the same time thought of as a causa finalis¹. This includes a twofold condition:

1	- the parts of the organism can only exist through their relation to the whole, and
2	- the parts are only connected to the unity of the whole through the fact that they are the mutual cause and effect of each other's form.

1 Kr. der Urt. kr., pp. 261/2.

[p. 395]

The fictitious character of the teleological view of nature follows directly from Kant's transcendental ground-Idea.

Since such a teleological union of cause and effect is known to us only from our own human action, we can, to be sure, lay this teleological principle at the foundation of our judgment concerning the natural organisms, but we must always bear in mind, that by so doing we do not categorically determine the ‘objective reality’ of the organic, but only reflect on it, in order to acquire a regulative principle for the mechanical determination of nature. We may judge the living organism, only as if a teleological activity lay at its foundation. Kant's dualistic transcendental ground-Idea does not permit any other view.

The principle of the inner teleology in nature leads the reflecting judgment necessarily beyond the living organism to the ‘Idee der gesamten Natur als eines Systems nach der Regel der Zwecke’, in other words, to the Idea of nature as a ‘universal organism’ (an expression first employed by Schelling) to which Idea all mechanism of nature must be subordinated according to principles of reason: ‘The principle of reason has for it (viz. the teleological judgment) only subjective competency, that is to say as maxim. Everything in the world is good for something whatsoever; nothing in it is aimless; and by the example which nature gives in its organical products, one is entitled, nay called upon, to expect from it and its laws nothing but what is appropriate in its totality’¹.

The teleological view may never again be introduced as an immanent principle of the causal explanation of nature. It remains a transcendental Idea, a limiting concept for the latter and has as such the heuristic value that it constantly raises the question as to which mechanism is responsible for effectuating the particular end of nature.

On the other hand, insofar as it can discover no single ‘Selbstzweck’, no single final goal in nature, the teleological view of nature automatically results in the supra-sensory Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’ and with that in an ethical teleology. Thus it appears, that in the ‘reflecting faculty of judgment’ a reconcilia-

1 Kr. der Urt. kr., p. 268/9: ‘Das Prinzip der Vernunft ist ihr als nur subjectiv, d.i. als Maxime zuständig. Alles in der Welt ist irgend wozu gut; nichts ist in ihr umsonst; und man ist durch das Beispiel, das die Natur an ihren organischen Produkten gibt, berechtigt, ja berufen, von ihr und ihren Gesetzen nichts, als was im Ganzen zweckmäszig ist, zu erwarten.’

[p. 396]

tion is to be really found between the ideal of science and that of personality. This reconciliation, however, is not a real one. In the ‘Dialectic of teleological judgment’ Kant himself begins with the formulation of the antinomy between the mechanical view of nature of the ideal of science and the teleological view of nature which is essentially derived from the ideal of personality. The thesis in this antinomy is: ‘All production of material things is possible according to merely mechanical laws.’

The antithesis: ‘Some production of the same is not possible according to merely mechanical laws’¹.

It is clear that the antinomy here formulated fits entirely in the cadre of the Humanist cosmonomic Idea, in which the antagonistic postulates of continuity of the ideal of science and of personality are involved in an irreconcilable conflict with each other.

1 Ib., p. 278.

The origin of the antinomy of the faculty of teleological judgment in the light of Kant's cosmonomic Idea.

We are not concerned here with the maintenance of the modal boundaries of meaning among the law-spheres which are anchored in the cosmic order of time, but only with the maintenance of the ideal of personality against the ideal of science that desires to erase all the boundaries of meaning through creative sovereign thought. For this very reason, the solution given by Kant to the antinomy which he formulated, rests entirely upon an analytical hypostatic division of the functions of consciousness of reflective and determinative judgment: ‘All appearance of an antinomy between the maxims of the properly physical (mechanical) and the teleological (technical) mode of explanation consequently rests upon this: that a principle of the reflecting faculty of judgment is taken for that of the determinative faculty and the autonomy of the former (which only subjectively holds good for the use of our reason in respect to the particular laws of experience) for the heteronomy of the latter which must conform itself to the (universal and particular) laws gives by the understanding’².

2 Kr. der Urt. kr., p. 281: ‘Aller Anschein einer Antinomie zwischen den Maximen der eigentlich physischen (mechanischen) und der teleologischen (technischen) Erklärungsart, beruht also darauf: dasz man einen Grundsatz der reflectierenden Urteilskraft mit dem der bestimmenden und die Autonomie der ersteren (die blosz subjectiv für unsern Vernunftgebrauch in Ansehung der besonderen Erfahrungsgesetze gilt) mit der Heteronomie der anderen, welche sich nach den von dem Verstande gegebenen (allgemeinen und besonderen) Gesetze richten musz, verwechselt.’

[p. 397]

From where, however, does the antinomy of teleological judgment arise? It arises from thinking together two principles which, according to Kant, really have their origin in two entirely different and separated functions of reason.

This antinomy cannot be solved by referring either of these functions to its own apriori principles. We are here concerned with the very basic question which every transcendental ground-idea must answer in principle: Where is to be found the deeper unity and the mutual coherence of meaning of the different functions of our consciousness and of temporal reality?

This problem is not taken up again by Kant before the famous Par. 78 of his ‘Critique of Judgment’ where he treats, ‘Von der Vereinigung des Prinzips des allgemeinen Mechanismus der Materie mit dem teleologischen in der Technik der Natur.’

After having first established that the mechanical and teleological ways of explaining nature mutually exclude each other, Kant observes: ‘The principle which is to make possible the compatibility of the two in judging nature according to them, must be placed in that which lies outside both (consequently also outside the possible empirical representation of nature) but which nevertheless contains the ground of them. This is the super-sensory and each of the two modes of explanation is to be related to it’¹.

The reason why the causal and teleological views of nature are capable of coexisting harmoniously in thought is consequently sought by Kant in the supra-sensory substratum of nature, of which, however, we cannot acquire any theoretical knowledge².

1 Kr. der Urt. kr., p. 309: ‘Das Princip, welches die Vereinbarkeit beider in Beurteilung der Natur nach denselben möglich machen soll, musz in dem, was auszerhalb beiden (mithin auch auszer der möglichen empirischen Naturvorstellung) liegt, von dieser aber doch den Grund enthält, d.i. im Übersinnlichen gesetzt und eine jede beider Erklärungsarten darauf bezogen werden.’

2 Ibid., p. 312, Kant wrote as proof for the necessity of thinking together natural mechanism and natural teleology: ‘Denn wo Zwecke als Grunde der Möglichkeit gewisser Dinge gedacht werden, da musz man auch Mittel annehmen, deren Wirkungsgesetz für sich nichts einen Zweck Voraussetzendes bedarf, mithin mechanisch und doch eine untergeordnete Ursache absichtlicher Wirkungen sein kann.’ [‘Where ends are thought of as grounds of the possibility of certain things, there must also be assumed means, whose law of operation in itself does not need anything which pre-supposes a goal, and consequently can be mechanical and nevertheless a subordinate cause of teleological effects.’] If consistently applied, this Idea leads to the dissolution of the hypostatization of the moral function in the ‘homo noumenon’.

[p. 398]

The influence of Newton's view of the compatibility of mechanism and divine teleology in nature is here very evident¹.

Once again we are confronted with the concept of the ‘Naturding an sich’ which is so extremely problematical in the system of Kant. Moreover, in this connection it is doubly problematical, since Kant himself began to explain, that the apriori teleological principle of the reflecting judgment may itself never be related to the objective reality of things in nature, but is only a subjective principle for judging nature, which we essentially derive from the teleology in our own human actions!

How then can the basis for the compatibility in thought of the mechanical and teleological explanation of nature suddenly be sought in a supra-sensory substratum of nature, while a little earlier, Kant himself wrote: ‘in conformity with the particular constitution of our understanding we are obliged to consider some products of nature with respect to their possibility as being produced after a plan and as goals; we may not pretend, however, that there actually exists a particular cause which has its determinative ground in the idea of a goal; consequently it is not permitted to deny, that another (higher) understanding than the human one can find the ground of possibility of such products also in the mechanism of nature, i.e. of a causal connection for which not exclusively an understanding as cause is assumed’².

1 The rather primitive conception of divine Providence in nature after the pattern of human technics (compare the machine!) was accepted by the whole of enlightened deism.

2 Kr. der Urt. kr., p. 301: ‘gewisse Naturprodukte müssen nach der besondern Beschaffenheit unseres Verstandes von uns ihrer Möglichkeit nach als absichtlich und als Zwecke erzeugt betrachtet werden, ohne doch darum zu verlangen, dasz es wirklich eine besondere Ursache, welche die Vorstellung eines Zwecks zu ihrem Bestimmungsgrunde hat, gebe, mithin ohne in Abrede zu ziehen, dasz nicht ein anderer (höherer) Verstand, als der menschliche auch im Mechanism der Natur, d.i. einer Kausalverbindung, zu der nicht ausschlieszungsweise ein Verstand als Ursache angenommen wird den Grund der Möglichkeit solcher Produkte der Natur antreffen könne.’

[p. 399]

In this connection Kant himself expressly speaks of a ‘gewisse Zufälligkeit der Beschaffenheit unseres Verstandes’ (a certain casuality in the constitution of our understanding), which would necessitate a teleological judgment of nature.

Furthermore, in the preceding § 76 and § 77 he had worked out this Idea more precisely in the famous contrast between the intuitive divine understanding which is creative in a material sense and the human understanding which is only creative in a formal sense.

Our understanding has this peculiarity, that it must be given sensory material which does not lie in the understanding itself, and so is not created by the latter. This material is the ground of all contingency of the particular in nature, in contradistinction to the formal and universal laws given by the understanding. For the same reasons our understanding must distinguish the possibility and reality of things. If our cognitive faculty were not assigned to the cooperation of two distinct functions, i.e. logical understanding and sensory intuition, then the distinction between possibility and reality would disappear¹. An absolutely intuitive understanding could only know reality. ‘For an understanding in which this difference should not present itself, it would hold good: all objects which I know, are (exist)’² and the distinction between contingency and necessity would also disappear for such a mind (compare Leibniz). Now although human reason can ascend to the transcendental Idea of the absolute necessity (in which possibility and reality are inseparably united), yet this Idea itself is only something possible; as an Idea, it is distinct from reality.

The situation which holds good for our human understanding in respect to the relation between possibility and reality, has also validity with respect to its conception of the relation between mechanism and teleology in nature. The contingency in the particular in nature is the remainder which for our understanding is not definable by the universal laws which it imposes apriori upon the phenomena. In order to subject this remainder to the understanding, we must ascend above mere possibility, above the mere universal, above the mere concept, to the transcendental Idea of reason, which requires an absolute necessity.

1 Op. cit., p. 300.

2 ‘Für einen Verstand bei dem dieser Unterschied nicht einträte, würde es heiszen: alle Objekte, die ich erkenne, sind (existieren)’.

[p. 400]

It is true, that by so doing we subject the particular itself, by means of teleological judgment, to a law, namely a teleological principle, but this is only a subjective principle of reason valid for our judgment, ‘which as regulative (not constitutive) holds good for our human faculty of judgment with the same necessity as if it were an objective principle’¹.

In other words, the antinomy which in Kant's functionalistic mode of thought necessarily emerges between natural causality and natural teleology, remains in fact unsolved. For the principle of teleology in nature remains in the last analysis a fictitious one, belonging to the ‘as if’ - consideration of our human reason. Consequently, we may conclude, that also his third Critique could give no real solution to the basic antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality.

This basic antinomy is irreconcilable, since the absolutizing of reason must necessarily proceed from a rejection of the cosmic order of time, which alone can determine the mutual relation between the modal law-spheres, and which alone can maintain the cosmic coherence of meaning in the sovereignty of each sphere.

Even the appeal to an absolute intuitive mind is of no avail, because this ‘absolute mind’ is itself the final hypostatization of the Humanistic ideal of science, and as such is not identical with the final hypostatization of the ideal of personality in the moral God of reason.

1 Kr. der Urt. kr., p. 300: ‘welches als regulativ (nicht konstitutiv) für unsere menschliche Urteilskraft eben so notwendig gilt, als ob es ein objectives Prinzip wäre.’

The basic antinomy between the ideals of science and of personality in Kant is everywhere crystallized in the form-matter schema. A synopsis of the development of this antinomy in the three Critiques.

If we survey Kant's three Critiques, it appears, that the basic antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality has everywhere crystallized in the dialectical form-matter scheme. Thereby we have proved the thesis, developed in our Prolegomena, that this scheme, formally derived from the religious ground-motive of Greek thought, in Kant's philosophy has assumed an intrinsically Humanistic sense.

In the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ it violated the sovereignty

[p. 401]

of the Humanistic science-ideal and, where it appealed to a natural substance, it simultaneously evoked an antinomy with the ideal of personality, that can only find its ‘substance’ in moral law.

In the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, it dissolved the hypostasis of the ideal of personality, the Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’ as a ‘Ding an sich’, by again relating this Idea to the sensory.

Finally, in the ‘Critique of Judgment’, it produced the antinomy which necessarily arises by subjecting the same sensory aspect of reality to two principles which by definition mutually exclude each other, namely, that of mechanical causality and that of teleology in nature. In Kant's system a teleology can never be a teleology of nature, if, as he supposes, it must be thought of as supra-sensory². For how can the principle of teleology be related to sensory experience while the sensory and the supra-sensory are divided by an unbridgeable cleft?

Moreover, as soon as Kant again relates this principle of teleology to the sensory material of experience, even though only as a subjective principle for the use of the understanding, this material is subjected to two principles which mutually exclude one another. In this way the conflict between the ideal of science and that of personality is unchained in the original domain of the Humanistic science-ideal, namely, the experience of nature.
¹

2 In his ‘Critique of Judgment’ Kant thought he could continue to speak of nature-teleology by simultaneously conceiving the organized product of nature under the law of mechanical causality: ‘da ferner ohne allen zu der teleologisch gedachten Erzeugungsart hinzukommenden Begriff von einem dabei zugleich anzutreffenden Mechanism der Natur dergleichen Erzeugung gar nicht als Naturprodukt beurteilt werden köntte.’ [‘because furthermore without combining the teleological conception of the mode of production with a concept of a simultaneous mechanism of nature, such a production could not at all be judged as a nature-product.’] Thereby, however, only the mechanism of nature, and not the teleology of nature is saved!

1 In the second discourse of a later edition (1804) of his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ Fichte observed these antinomies very clearly, where he wrote concerning Kant's three Critiques with their three absoluta: ‘Überdies, was noch mehr bedeutete, war über der zuletzt aufgestellten moralischen Welt, als der einen Welt an sich, die empirische verloren gegangen, zur Vergeltung, dasz sie zu erst die moralische vernichtet hatte...’ [‘Besides, which signified still more, with the finally projected moral world as the one world in itself, the empirical had been lost, in return for the fact that it first had destroyed the moral one...’].

[p. 402]

Just as, on the other hand, the ideal of personality is dissolved by joining the principle of teleology (and with that in the last analysis the ‘homo noumenon’ as the final goal) with the substratum of a mechanism of nature.

Kant's dualistic transcendental ground-Idea lacks an unequivocal Archimedean point and an unequivocal Idea of the totality of meaning.

As we observed in an earlier context, Kant's transcendental ground-Idea lacks unity in its Archimedean point and, consequently, an unequivocal Idea of totality. It is true that in its transcendental usage the Idea points very clearly towards the moral aspect of human existence and seems to absolutize it as a totality of meaning. The dualism between the ideal of science and that of personality, however, which characterizes Kant's transcendental ground-Idea, prevented him from reducing all of the functions of human existence to the moral, as the supposed root of personality. The ‘Ding an sich’ of nature, which Kant did not definitely eliminate, continued to be a counter instance against his moralistic Idea of totality.

This is the source of all of the contradictions in his philosophy.

It must be granted that it was a really transcendental critical motive which prevented him from constructing a unity which, indeed, was excluded by his dualistic religious ground-motive¹. Nevertheless, the very fact that, in the cadre of his transcendental idealism, he emphatically proclaimed the primacy of the ideal of personality must result with an inner necessity in the development of the post-Kantian freedom-idealism which tried to overcome the critical dualism by means of a theoretical dialectic.

Kant's transcendental Idea of freedom became the starting-point of this dialectical evolution in Humanistic thought.

1 In this respect I must correct the opinion defended in the first (Dutch) edition of this work, that the maintaining of this dualism was due to a lack of critical consistency in Kant's thought.