Here is my attempt to summarize the theses of the most essential works of Hume and Kant:
Hume: All determinations of causality depend on the immanence of experience and all “formulations of causality” are merely the embodiments of the living history of these determinations. All metaphysical speculation is a function of ungrounded, that is non-emperical, religious custom.
Kant: The category of causality is an element of the transcendental logic that grounds the possibility of all subjective experience of an objective world. If this category were itself empirically determined, then experience itself is impossible. The necessity of the categories of transcendental logic impose upon all rational beings the ideas of God and immortality. These ideas are safeguarded from scepticism by the systematic and principled criticism of pure speculative reason.
Are these fair summaries of the thoughts of these two giants? Do you think Kant truly “delegitimized” Hume’s scepticism? Or does Hume’s “easy, pleasant style” betray a deeper truth that his words were ill-equipped to touch?
No; not even close. Kant managed to destroy the foundations of metaphysics entirely in the first Critique, and even his own contradictory efforts at resurrecting them in a new form ultimately broke down and managed only to inspire that titanic mess called German Idealism. Kant’s real accomplishment lies precisely in his demonstration that we can never discuss the thing in itself, being even in our empirical observations mere prisoners of representation.
In a way. Hume’s attemts at scepticism are inadequate precisely because they are too precise. Had he kept closer to Sextus Empiricus, Kantian logic would not even be speaking to the objections. That is, Kant demolishes the argument for scepticism that Hume puts forward, by demonstrating that we cannot deal with things as they are in the world at all; and, being stuck only with representation, we cannot speak of cause and effect in the world. As for scepticism itself, Kant solves the problem by changing the question, and presuming universality of categories without even addressing the arguments for suspensive judgement.
Possibly the simple scepticism of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, which nearly all modern sceptics have failed to match. Whether or not this is a sensible (or even sane) ground upon which to create philosophy is another matter entirely! Taken seriously, scepticism is only able to bring tranquillity and freedom from unanswerable questions; it does not easily lend itself to speculative or critical philosophy.
Just curious, morthaur, in what way could a polemic wholly meant to demonstrate the rational necessity of the “twin ethical pillars” of God and man’s spiritual immortality be an attempt to “destroy” metaphysics? Or are you just trying to seem erudite concerning a book of which you’ve only skimmed the Cliff notes?
Scepticism is a path to tranquillity, but only if you approach it the way Pyrrho and his early followers intended. Take a look at The Skeptic Way by Mateson.
Actually, that’s my impression of you, sir. I wonder if you could have read the first Critique and not recognised that its purpose was fundamentally epistemological; certainly you cannot have understood it. But thanks for calling me a posturing buffoon; it’s a fun way to start the day.
Kant set up in the Critique of Pure Reason some very well defended limitations on the sphere of human knowledge, and then proceeded to defend them when those following him (Fichte, Schelling, etc) sought to weaken them (see, e.g., the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics). The logic of his Critique was, and is, both powerful and radical. In it he made rational arguments for G-d impossible, leaving only the innate moral sense of mankind to point towards the Infinite. Reason alone could never again be used to defend metaphysical claims about nature, etc.
In later works Kant certainly tried to establish firmly the necessity of G-d, etc., as a part of his moral philosophy. In this he was not entirely successful, as many followers have shown: he is stopped by his own system. In the end, he waffles in re-introducing metaphysics, a task made highly tenuous by his own logic. It was always his goal, from the first Critique forward, to place metaphysics on a firm foundation. Kant wanted to do for metaphysics what Bacon had done for the physical sciences. In this, he failed utterly, in my not-so-humble opinion. Setting up a rationale for the assertion that nature is absolutely determined by causality, yet at the same time holding that human freedom is absolute and untouchable, was always going to be impossible: humans are part of nature.
And certainly he failed to demonstrate the “rational necessity” of G-d, as witnessed by his continuing writings on religion (a subject on which he was eventually barred from publishing). Quite the contrary is true: Kant showed that, in the impossibility of logically demonstrating the existence of G-d, all we had left were the categories of reason which implied G-d. And if your views on moral philosophy have advanced beyond the 19th c., this kind of argument doesn’t hold a lot of water. By placing such emphasis on what he saw as intelligible grounds for freedom, G-d, etc., Kant created a house of cards that later critics (like Nietzsche) could easily topple.
This may seem a little off topic, but maybe someone can shed some light on a question I have. It concerns Kant’s phenomenon/noumenon distinction. Are we to understand Kant as saying these two things are wholly distinct entities or concepts - like the phenomenon is the veneer behind which the noumenon stands but through which we cannot see - or can they be the same?
I mean, if I look at my cup of coffee, I take it for granted that the cup I see really is the cup that’s actually there - that is, I assume my perception of the cup is one and the same as the cup itself. In that sense, there is no difference between the phenomenon and the noumenon. But there will always be a difference between what I can know about the cup I see and what’s actually true about it. That difference is that I can never tell when I’m being deceived by my perceptions and when I’m not. What if I’m dreaming, or hallucinating, or the cup is not really a cup but something else that only looks like a cup? In other words, I’m wondering if Kant’s distinction is meant to be taken only in the epistemic sense rather than the ontological sense. If it’s in the epistemic sense, then it’s quite possible that, at times, the phenomenon and the noumenon are one. We just can’t know when that is.
The former: they are completely distinct, and their separation is at the heart of Kant’s critique. Rather than try to summarise it I’ll quote §32 from the Prolegomena, with the relevant lines emboldened:
Kant’s point is precisely that you can’t take that for granted.
The point being that you only have a limited amount of information, and cannot therefore know whether or not a given distinction is “only” epistemological, which means that your distinction is largely meaningless.
So let me get this straight. Kant says that because we can’t make the sort of distinction I’m entertaining, we shouldn’t try? Simply don’t assume the noumenal can take on the form of appearances? (honest question)
In my opinion, Kant makes more assumptions than Hume. While an empirical outlook requires having some faith in the reliability of our perceptions, we are at least basing it on those perceptions. Kant just assumes metaphysical and universal laws.
Yes, more or less; the emphasis is on the “can’t” part. If something cannot be done, trying anyhow seems pretty irrational… And anyway, the point was to prevent the errors of metaphysics that he was addressing. If you cut such unanswerable speculations off from consideration, logical errors can be stopped at the source.
Agreed! The problem with scepticism, for folks like Kant, is an unwillingness to say that you can’t make moral distinctions with universal applicability. Not many thinkers are willing to stomach the implications of suspended judgement. That, and the empiricist approach really has to be taken, at base, as a sort of pragmatic acceptance of the probable, otherwise it risks falling into a simple positivism. As Kant ably demonstrates, and as many followers have affirmed, we can’t really get beyond representation and appearance; to make sense logically, empiricism must be content with that.
Okay, I want to make a more polite, and more directly on-point, response to this original question:
This formulation (“meant to demonstrate the rational necessity”) is, in fact, a very good description for Kant’s work as a whole; just not for the first Critique itself. And, to be fair, Kant does demonstrate the “rational necessity” of G-d, granted you accept his reasoning as still valid. I may thoroughly disagree with it, but if you accept the fundamental premises, according to the logic it is still a functional solution.
To re-state it simply, that solution comes up to something like this: G-d cannot be proven in any traditional way, but we must recognise–given our innate moral sense and need for meaning and purpose–that G-d must still exist. G-d becomes necessary, both to ground moral philosophy, and to avoid a catastrophic collapse into social nihilism. Which means that, it’s not so much that Kant proves G-d exists, but proves that without such a belief we are doomed as a species! It’s a very fine argument: if you accept the basic assumption that such a belief is indeed necessary.
My criticisms in this thread stemmed, I suppose, from not seeing a strong enough appreciation for Kant’s logical feats in the first Critique. If you take his proofs as they stand, whilst simultaneously rejecting as inadequate his subsequent attempts to re-introduce G-d, the end result is a thorough demolition of the grounds for metaphysics. Given that morality can be understood perfectly well as a natural adaptation grounded in our evolutionary heritage, the arguments of Kant’s practical philosophy (e.g., second Critique) are simply unnecessary. And if they are accepted as no longer necessary, the proofs that he offers go up in smoke, leaving only that powerful limitation on the sphere of human knowledge.
Anyroad… I just wanted to apologise for being too acerbic in my response above to dkane75. I seldom think before I write and my responses can be unnecessarily nasty at times. And, that said, I wanted to clear the water by acknowledging that–from a certain point of view–he is perfectly right to think of Kant as he does.
I thought that was an excellent summary, Kane. I fail to see how Morthaur can at once dismiss both metaphysics and still entertain the idea that a “noumenal” reality exists which is not transcendental. If I am not mistaken, Morthaur endorses Kant’s “accomplishment” of proving a representationalism rather than a true realism- is this not a metaphysical position? I do not, indeed, cannot, comprehend a “thing-in-itself”…much less an experience that is only a representation of such a thing-in-itself. I prefer a monistic approach…something Spinozean.
The “thing-in-itself”, according to Kant, is not a substance or attribute of what is experienced, as this is empirical. It is, rather, what you described as the “necessary categories”…which constitute reason. That these categories can exist in “thought” alone is a kind of “proving through the pudding”- to deny the truth of such categories is to employ the use of such categories. That is an illegal move in epistemology.
For me, Kant was finding phenomenology rather than reimbursing idealism- this was the bridge he built between rationalism and empiricism.
What I mean to say is: one cannot fix what is not broken.
How then did Kant “accomplish” something where nothing could be done to begin with? Perhaps I misunderstood the argument there, but I found it to be slightly oxymoronic.
I’ve been through this argument before with various materialists, and their response is usually that that which the representation represents can still justifiably be labeled “physicality”. I try to argue that “physicality” necessarily refers to the representation itself, for the very concept that the word conjures up in one’s mind takes a phenomenological (though cognitive) form, and that if we really could grasp the true essence of the represented, we would find no possible way to equate it with our concept of “physicality” except through a crude correspondence based only on labels.
Taken seriously, scepticism is only able to bring tranquillity and freedom from unanswerable questions; it does not easily lend itself to speculative or critical philosophy.