Kant's Phenomenalism in Its Rela- Tion to Subsequent Metaphysics
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II.—KANT'S PHENOMENALISM IN ITS RELA- TION TO SUBSEQUENT METAPHYSICS. BY ABCHIBALD A. BOWMAN. Downloaded from IN a previous article we examined Kant's denial of meta- physics, with a view to determining whether this must be taken as definitive, or may be regarded as admitting, under certain qualifications, a body of positive doctrine on ultimate questions. Considered in itself Kant's statement is suffici- ently categorical. Metaphysics is impossible. But as soon http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ as we try to relate the views of subsequent thinkers to the position thus formulated, a curious anomaly makes its ap- pearance. Generally speaking post-Kantian thought, largely unsympathetic in its attitude to metaphysics, could hardly be said to dismiss the matter with such a direct and unqualified negation as that of Kant From this point of view there- fore it might seem as if the tendency since Kant's day had been on the whole in the direction of a tolerant reconsidera- tion of the question. This however represents only one aspect of the case. It is no less true that from the average at OCLC on March 13, 2015 modern standpoint the Critical Philosophy, so far from seem- ing to negate metaphysics, is apt to appear as itself extrava- gantly metaphysical. The reason for this is that while Kant excluded the un- conditional from the content of the knowable, as denned in the Critique of Pure Reason, he did so by a method which implied, not the negation, but the emphatic assertion, of the unconditionally valid. The extent to which Kant's use of a priori principles has given his thinking the air of fateful dogmatism is evident enough if we view his ethical absolut- ism in the light of subsequent naturalism. To Nietzsche, for example, it seemed that Kant, like all European philosophers since Plato, was overruled in his search for truth by a fana- tical regard for " majestic moral structures ". The unavail- ability of the moral order is a dogma which he maintains in defiance of the evidence. " For," says Nietzsche,," as regards nature and history, and the utter immorality of nature and history, Kant was a pessimist, as every true German of old; 462 ABCHIBALD A. BOWMAN : he believed in morals, not because they are verified by nature and history, but in spite of their being constantly contradicted by nature and history." l The substance of Nietzsche's complaint is that Kant subor- dinates the rational interpretation of experience and history to ethical prejudice. In attempting to render morality " un- assailable, by rendering it " unintelligible " to reason, he has contributed in his own way to the " general animosity of the Germans against enlightenment ".* But it is by no means only in this direction that Kant has seemed to go wrong. On the contrary, to writers of another temper the defect of Downloaded from his thinking is just the opposite—viz. its extravagant intel- leotualism, infecting his ethics, through his epistemology, with a pseudo-scientific exactitude ana simplification. His failure to do justice to the original and infinitely complex de facto character of the moral life is due not to a moral but to a logical fanaticism. This view, which is maintained by the http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ French sociological school of moralists,3 particularly by M. Belot, has been stated with remarkable persuasiveness by Prof. Georg Simmel in his Vorlesungen uber Kant; and nothing could better serve our present purpose of determining the ultimate purport of Kant's total thought in relation to metaphysics, than an analysis of Simmel's argument. In his Berlin lectures, published in 1904, Prof. Simmel offers a presentation opposed to that which accords what he considers a spurious primacy to the ethical interest at OCLC on March 13, 2015 This latter view is based on the assumption that Kant handles morality from within, i.e. from the standpoint of the- moral agent, beset on the one hand by the natural desires and on the other by the dictates of the Categorical Imperative, and concerned only with the practical solution to what is- essentially a practical problem. The centre of Kant's ethical teaching is found in the actuality of the moral conflict, in relation to which his formal rigorism appears under the aspect of asceticism. The seriousness of this assumption may be measured by the consequences which it entails, and particularly by the readiness sometimes shown to take for granted that Kant is answered by the ordinary refutation of ascetic theory. To this tendency Prof. Simmel furnishes a valuable counterpoise in the skilful reorientation by which he places the centre of 1 MorgenrOte, Einleitung, tr. Johanna Volx. ' Ibid., pp. 191-192. 'For an excellent critical account of their views on thin point among others vidt 3. Lottin : Lt Problbme de* Fini en Morale in the Annales de l'lnstitnt inpe'rieur de Philosophic of the University of Lourain, 1914. Especially pp. 316-317. PHENOMENALISM IN RELATION TO METAPHYSICS. 468 Kant's ethical teaching, as of his teaching in general, not in the moral interest as such but in the intellectual. " The un- compromising rigour of Kant's ethics," he writes, " has its origin in his logical fanaticism, which would force upon life as a whole the form of mathematical exactitude " ; and he goes on to attribute " this intolerance of the ethical impera- tive " to "a spiritual propensity directed not towards the practical but towards the logically comprehensible ".1 In its most general character this representation is of course one which has been widely accepted in Germany and else- where. What is peculiar to Simmel's account is the fatal nature of the effects which, following certain well-known tendencies in contemporary thinking, he attributes to the Downloaded from intellectualistic attitude of Kant. These effects, as they appear to Simmel, may be summed up in one or two broad features. In the first place " the boasted primacy of the practical reason " must go.1 The centre of Kant's system being shifted from morality as such, the latter retains only that amount of interest which its con- http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ nexion with scientific method allows it. This according to Simmel results in an unexampled ethical rigorism. " The greatest moralists," he says, " who found the springs of their teaching in the exclusive estimation of the ethical, were not for an instant to be compared to Kant in point of rigour—neither Buddha nor Jesus, neither Marcus Aurelius nor St. Francis." The comparison is not a happy one; and it suggests that the writer is himself confusing the scientific rigorism of at OCLC on March 13, 2015 Kant with something intrinsically different—no less, in fact, than the view attributed to him by those who are charged with placing the centre of his system in the immediacy of the moral interest. An excess of rigour in the application of scientific or logical principles to the ethical aspect of life is not obviously or necessarily the same thing as a rigonstic content in the system of ethics involved. And the converse is strictly true. It would be difficult to find an extremer rigorism than in the moral and religious teaching of Tolstoy; yet this coincides with a view which negates the very idea of science. At a later point Sinnnel states his position unambiguously. He shows that for Kant there is no necessary intrinsic op- position between pleasure and the morally good. The prominence given to the conflict with pleasure is of purely theoretical significance. Its value lies in the fact that this 1 Vorletungtn iibtT Kant, p. 6. s Ibid., p. 28. Cf. p. 130. 464 ARCHIBALD A. BOWMAN. situation more than any other furnishes the conditions which render the specifically moral attitude clearly definable to the intellect. Ascetic morality on account of its passivity is alien to Kant's point of view.1 A further matter which calls for attention is the alleged undue simplification of the ethical problem. " It is in com- plete agreement with this," Simmel continues, "that Kant . takes his problem only from the most everyday and, so to speak, grossest eventualities of the moral life. That which in the facts of morality is accessible to the most general concepts he treats with unprecedented greatness and acute- Downloaded from ness. But all the deeper and finer questions of ethics, the points where conflicts culminate, the complications of feeling, the dark powers in us, with which we so often stand face to face in moral perplexity—of all that he appears ignorant— he who in the observation of man's intellectual activity penetrated to the deepest, finest and nicest functions. The http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ want of imagination and the naivete (Primitivitat) in his mode of stating the ethical problem, and the refinement and comprehensiveness in his mode of stating the theoretical, prove that for him the amenability to logical thinking was the sole factor which determined what should enter into his philosophical thought."3 There follows a consequence which, unless it is stated with certain very exact modifications, will certainly prove fatal to Kant's account of the moral life—viz. that our con- duct derives its ethical value from its conformity to the law at OCLC on March 13, 2015 of non-contradiction.3 This may of course be in some sense allowed (certain presuppositions being first of all secured). But the point of Simmers.statement is that the intellectual implications of Kant's ethics are of such a nature as to substitute logical for moral values and thus to annul the independence and specific character which distinguish morality.