What Was Kant's Critical Philosophy Critical

chapter 15 What was Kant’s Critical Philosophy Critical of?

Catherine Wilson

Summary

While P.F. Strawson saw in Kant’s enterprise a form of ‘descriptive’ as opposed to ‘revisionary’ metaphysics, and while most historians of philosophy regard Kant as aiming to settle the foundations of physics and to explain the mind’s contribution to experience, Kant’s own account of his project is very different. His aim—the defeat of materialism, atheism, and fatalism—as stated in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, is frankly revisionary, and joins metaphysics to morals. Here I present evidence that Kant’s overarching aim was not epistemological description, but the rejection of the physical, moral, and historical outlook of his Enlightenment contemporaries.

An ideology, in the classic formulation of Karl Mannheim, is an account con- structed by the dominant intelligentsia of a society that obscures certain facts about reality in order to maintain their privileged condition. Utopian thinking, by contrast, is fantasy that reflects the aspirations of a rising, aspiring class.1 Taken more generally the term ideology has come to refer to descriptions and explanations—theories of how the world works—that underwrite normative ideals of a controversial type. The history of metaphysics, as well as the history of science, is fertile ground for the study of ideologies and utopias. Both metaphysical and empirical gen- eralizations, such as Aristotle’s form-matter distinction, or Hobbes’s theory of boundless human desires, suggest inexorable constraints or irresistible affor- dances and offer grounds for certain political arrangements or adherence to particular moral norms. At the same time, because ideologies by defini- tion obscure the motives that give rise to them, the link between seemingly objective descriptive content and practical and justificatory aims may not be as evident as it is in the case of Aristotle’s metaphysical defense of slavery or Hobbes’s psychological grounding of autocracy.

1 See Mannheim K., Ideology and Utopia, trans. L. Worth – E. Shils (New York: 1936 [1929]) 36.

The ideological content of Kant’s critical philosophy furnishes a case in point. Kant’s overarching philosophical ambition is stated clearly in the Prolegomena. It is the recovery and application, in purified form, of the ‘transcendental Ideas’ which, he says, ‘if they do not positively instruct us, nevertheless remove the crude and reason-limiting doctrines of materialism, naturalism, and fatalism, and thereby [. . .] bring the ideas of morality out of the realm of speculation’.2 Yet most general accounts of Kant’s project, including the most authoritative, seem to veer to the side of this statement. Perhaps because of the propensity to regard Kant, to a degree that is exceptional for historical figures, as having something to say ‘to us’, particularly in moral philosophy, Kant’s own statement of what he is up to is discounted or replaced by a more constructive, less nega- tive account. For example: Michael Rohlf says,

Kant’s main goal is to show that a critique of reason by reason itself, unaided and unrestrained by traditional authorities, establishes a secure and consistent basis for both Newtonian science and traditional morality and religion. In other words, free rational inquiry adequately supports all of these essential human interests and shows them to be mutually consistent. So reason deserves the sovereignty attributed to it by the Enlightenment.3

And Paul Guyer states in his Introduction to the Cambridge edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, referencing Wolff and Baumgarten as dogmatists and Locke and Hume as empiricists, that ‘Kant attempted to lay the foundations both for the certainty of modern science and for the possibility of human freedom’.4 In a frequent form of exposition, Kant is described as seeking a com- promise between the rationalist position that truths about God, the soul, and the world can be derived by analysis and reflection and the empiricist position that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience and reflection on it. He

2 Kant Immanuel, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, AA IV, 363. AA references are to Kant Immanuel, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften, (Berlin: 1902–). References to the Critique of Pure Reason (volumes III [2nd B ed. 1787] and IV [1st A ed. 1781] of AA) are given in the usual A/B format; longer quotations are taken from the English translation: Kant Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. N.K. Smith (New York: 1929). 3 Rohlf M., “Kant”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = . 4 Guyer P., “Introduction”, in Kant Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: 1998) 2.