THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT

Immanuel Kant

FOREWORD

There is a story that Schopenhauer used to begin his lectures on Kant by saying: "Let no one tell you what is contained in the Critique of Pure Reason." The writer of this little book hopes that no one will imagine that he has disregarded this warning. There are no short-cuts to the understanding of a great philosopher, and the only way to appreciate the greatness of a philosophic system is to study the philosopher's own writings. All that the writer of a book like this can hope to do is to persuade others to undertake that study by interesting them in the problems with which it deals, and by offering a few suggestions which may help to an understanding of it. I have said nothing about the numerous other works which Kant wrote. For the three Critiques contain his system, and the understanding of that is all-important.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I. THE IDEA OF CRITICISM

II. KANT'S STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM. SYNTHETIC A PRIORI JUDGMENTS

III. KANT'S IDEALISM. TIME AND SPACE

IV. THE CATEGORIES AND THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE UNDERSTANDING

V. THE ANTINOMIES AND CRITICISM OF THE PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

VI. KANT'S MORAL THEORY

VII. THE "CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT"

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT

CHAPTER I

THE IDEA OF CRITICISM

"It is a difficult matter," says Heine, "to write the life history of Immanuel Kant, for he had neither life nor history. He lived a mechanically ordered, abstract, old bachelor kind of existence in a quiet, retired alley in Königsberg, an old town in the north-east corner of Germany." The times he lived in were stirring enough. He was born in 1724, and died in 1804. He lived through the Seven Years' War that first made Germany a nation, he followed with sympathy the United States War of Independence, he saw the French Revolution and the beginning of the career of Napoleon. Yet in all his long life he never moved out of the province in which he was born, and nothing was allowed to interrupt the steady course of his lecturing, studying, and writing. "Getting up," continues Heine, "drinking coffee, lecturing, eating, going for a walk, everything had its fixed time; and the neighbours knew that it must be exactly half-past four when Immanuel Kant, in his gray frock-coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, stepped from his door and walked towards the little lime-tree avenue, which is called after him the Philosopher's Walk." "Strange contrast," reflects Heine, "between the man's outward life and his destructive, world-smashing thoughts." As the political history of the eighteenth century came to an end when the French Revolution spilled over the borders of France and drove Napoleon up and down Europe, breaking up the old political systems and inaugurating modern Europe, so its opposing currents of thought were gathered together in the mind of a weak-chested, half-invalid little man in Königsberg, and from their meeting a new era in philosophy began.

There are some philosophers to whom truth seems to come almost unsought, as an immediate authoritative vision. Kant was not one of these. His greatest work, the Critique of Pure Reason, was conceived when he was forty-eight, and published in 1781, when he was fifty-seven. It was the outcome of half a lifetime's patient study and thought. Heine says of him: "He was the perfect type of the small shopkeeper. Nature had meant him to weigh coffee and sugar, but fate willed that he should weigh other things and put a God on his scales, and his weighing was exact." The sneer is unjust, but there is something in the simile; for Kant's philosophy was a kind of taking stock, a survey of the great movement of thought from the time when the Renaissance and the Reformation made thought free, an attempt to estimate the achievements of the new sciences, to deal with their conflicting claims and ideals and say what it all came to. In Kant modern science, which began with Descartes and Galileo, first became conscious of itself.

This taking stock Kant called Criticism. His great books are all called Critiques--the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Critique of Judgment. He called his philosophy the Critical