Kant Lucien Goldmann

KANT LUCIEN GOLDMANN k Lucien Goldmann ! London j NLB • ! Atlantic Highlands i HUMANITIES PRESS Immanuel Kant First published as Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants by Europa-Verlag, Zürich, 1945 © Europa-Verlag, 1945 New, revised and enlarged edition first published as Introduction ä la Philosophie de Kant by Gallimard, 1967 © Editions Gallimard, 1967 This edition first published 1971 Translated from the French and German by Robert Black © NLB, 1971 NLB, 7 Carlisle Street, London wi Designed by Gerald Cinamon Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt and printed by Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol SBN 902308 85 2 TO MADELEINE DUCLOS AND THEOPHILE SPOERRI Acknowledgments 8 Translator's note 9 Preface to the 1967 French edition 13 From the Preface to the first French edition, 1948 17 From the Preface to the original (German) edition, 1945 19 Introduction 21 PART I 1. Classical Philosophy and the Western Bourgeoisie 31 2. The Category of Totality in the Thought of Kant and in Philosophy in General 50 3. The Precritical Period 58 PART II 1. The Critical Philosophy and its Problems 101 2. What Can I Know ? 131 3. What Ought I to Do ? 170 4. What May I Hope for ? 180 The Present - Beauty 182 Eternity - God, Immortality 193 The Future - History 205 Conclusion: What is Man? Kant and Contemporary Philosophy 223 Index 231 Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the following for permission to quote passages from works by Kant published by them: Macmillan & Co. Ltd for Critique of Pure Reason; Manchester University Press for Selected Pre-critical Writings; Cambridge University Press for Kant's Political Writings; The Clarendon Press for Critique of Aesthetic Judgement; Harper & Row for Religion within the limits of reason alone; Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc. for Critique of Practical Reason; and University of Chicago Press for Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759-99. Translator's Note: This was Luden Goldmann's first book. Originally his doctoral thesis for the University of Zürich, it was published there in 1945 under the title Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants. A French translation, incorporating some changes,1 was first published in 1948, under the title La communaute humaine et l'univers chez Kant. A second French edition with the new title Introduction ä la Philosophie de Kant appeared in 1967. The latter forms the basis of this translation, but I have not hesitated to refer to the original German where I have found it clearer than, and not materially different from, the French. References to the works of Kant are made first to the standard Prussian Academy edition, by volume and page number, and then to the standard English translation, if one exists. The latter are encoded as follows: Aesth. J Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith, The Clarendon Press, 1911. Ethics Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. L. W. Beck, Chicago, 1949. Groundwork The Moral Law: Kant's 'Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals', trans. H. J. Paton, Hutchinson, 3rd edn., 1956. Metaph. I The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. J. Ladd, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Metaph. II The Doctrine of Virtue, trans. M. J. Gregor, Harper Torchbooks, 1964. (The above two books constitute the two parts of the Metaphysic of Morals.) Phil. Corr Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759-99, trans. A. Zweig, University of Chicago Press, 1967. Polit Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, 1970. 1. The principal alterations are the addition to the first chapter of material on the social foundations of the tragic vision of the world in seventeenth- century France and the suppression of an appendix on the relations between Heidegger and Lukdcs. 10 Prac. R Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck, Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. Pre-crit Selected Pre-critical Writings, trans. G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford, Manchester Uni versity Press, 1968. Proleg Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be able to present itself as a Science, trans. P. G. Lucas, Manchester University Press, 1953- Pure R Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith, Macmillan, 2nd edn., 1933. Religion Religion within the limits of reason alone, trans. T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson, Harper Torchbooks, i960. Tel. J Critique of Teleological Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith, Oxford University Press, 1928. In addition, references to the Critique of Pure Reason are given with the page number of the original edition, in the usual manner. Thus, for example, 'ill, 385; Pure R, 488; B 600' denotes volume ill, page 385, of the Prussian Academy edition, or page 488 of Kemp Smith's translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, corresponding to page 600 of the 1787 edition. No estate is so useless as that of the man of learning in his natural innocence, and none so necessary in conditions of oppression by superstition or by force. (Kant, Posthumous works, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. xx, p. 10.) Moral luxury. In sentiments which have no effects. (Kant, Posthumous works, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. xx, p. 9.) Preface to the 1967 French edition This book was my first work. With it I began an inquiry which I later pursued in several studies and which led to the gradual development of a new method for the under standing and explanation of cultural creation. When, in this work, I laid the foundations for this type of sociological research, I was of course unaware of the future development of my work. My principal intention at the time was to write a history of dialectical thought which would itself form an essential part of the development ofthat thought. Hegel and Marx have taught us that the problem of his tory is the history of problems, and that it is impossible validly to describe any human fact without bringing into that description its genesis. This implies that one must take into account the evolution both of ideas and of the way in which men represent to themselves the facts studied, since that evolution constitutes an important element in the gene sis of the phenomenon. Of course, the converse is also valid. The history of problems is the problem of history, and the history of ideas can only be positive if it is closely bound to the history of the economic, social and political life of men. Finally Marx, in a famous passage referring to Darwin, whom he profoundly admired (and to whom, moreover, he had wished to dedicate Capital), formulated a further essen tial methodological principle of the human sciences in assert ing that the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape. These considerations explain why, in wishing to create a system of dialectical philosophy, I began with its history, and also why, in devoting the first study to the philosophy of Kant, the main emphasis was upon those aspects of his philosophy which pointed towards later developments, and in particular towards the Hegelian dialectic. '4 This said, I nevertheless believe that I succeeded in pick ing out a number of essential aspects of Kant's thought, in particular the importance of the precritical period, the unity of the development of that thought, and the fundamental place of the idea of totality in the critical philosophy itself. In doing so, I formed quite a new picture of Kant's philo sophy, which allowed me to bring to light the nature and origins of the neo-Kantian distortion. But whilst the idea of totality is central to this study, another particularly important dialectical idea is unfortu nately neglected: that of the identity of subject and object, in the elaboration of which Kant's philosophy constituted a not insignificant step. This is frequently termed, using Kant's own phrase, his Copernkan revolution. But here too, I believe that the meaning and importance of that 'revolu tion' can only be properly understood in terms of the Hegelian and Marxist positions. Kant's Copernican revolution involves three ideas whose later development in philosophical and scientific thought has been extremely fruitful, but which can only be judged and understood in the light ofthat development, viz.: i. The opposition between universal form and particular content. This has played an important part in the elabora tion of the Marxist analysis of man in liberal society and of the distinction (central to that analysis) between formal democracy and real stratification, between formal equality and real inequality, and so on, a development which cul minates in the theory of reification. This aspect of Kantian analysis is to some extent studied in the present work. 2. The distinction between two kinds of knowledge: that based upon experience and that based upon synthetic a priori judgements (which do not, as the positivists claim, have an analytic and tautologous nature). For Kant, the distinction is rigid and universal, valid for all human know ledge. Certain later thinkers have tried to give it a basis in empirical reality and in the situation of man in relation to the universe: the sociological epistemology of Durkheim and the genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget, to mention but the two most important attempts. However much the posi tions of Durkheim and especially of Piaget may differ from Preface to the ig6? French edition 75 the rigidity of transcendental analysis, it is nonetheless pos sible to say that the most general framework in which these reflections are situated is Kantian in character. 3. The idea that man creates (for Kant, creates only in part) the world which he perceives and knows in experience. This is the famous transcendental subjectivity of space and time and of the categories. But since this creation clearly could not be attributed to the empirical individual, Kant was obliged to limit it to formal structures and to confer upon it an abstract and transcendental character.

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