THE PRINCIPLE OF MORALITY (by Immanuel Kant) (Part 1)
WARNING.
I have set out, in preparing this brief anthology of Kant’s moral writings, to achieve the greatest clarity, if not desirable, at least possible. Hence I have drawn far more extensively from Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals than from the Critique of Practical Reason, because the former of these two offers the great advantage of a flatter and more elementary exposition and at the same time of a tighter connection of problems, while in the latter the systematic and architectural concern to model practical reason on the schemes of pure reason predominates: what makes the treatment very often contrived and convoluted.
I have wished to limit myself to the examination of a few issues, among the most essential; but to compensate for this limitation (necessary, moreover, given the scholastic purpose of the anthology) I have procured to abound in the illustrations, notes, and even in the simple paraphrases of the text, where it seemed appropriate to bring greater clarity.
G. D. R.
INTRODUCTION
Kant laid out the guiding lines of his doctrine of morality in two main works: the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (published in 1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (of 1788), which were followed by other writings of lesser interest, albeit of greater bulk, where the new principles set forth in the two earlier works are systematically developed and applied according to the traditions of the school.
The peculiar formulation of the problem in Kant’s work cannot be explained if one does not bear in mind that the philosopher’s speculative interest in questions of ethics begins after he has already constructed, in the Critique of Pure Reason (of 1781), his doctrine of knowledge, and that the results of this great work provide him with the data, the intellectual presuppositions, from which the new construction is begun.
In fact, this chronological succession of works implies a logical connection of problems, of which we can easily come to the light by reflecting that the practical activity of the human spirit, on which morality is based, has a close relation to theoretical activity, which provides us with that knowledge of ourselves and of external things, on which practical action is grafted. What could we ever do, if we did not know what to do? By this is not to say that action is captive to knowledge (for the most elementary experience tells us that one does not need much doctrine to be a good man, and that man’s morality does not necessarily grow with his science); but it is only to say that knowledge offers at least a bare minimum, without which action would rest on emptiness.
Consequently, it turns out that, in general, the way in which one solves the philosophical problem of knowledge has a determining effect on the way in which one poses the problem of practical activity, that is, of the will. A philosopher, for example, who believes that he has shown that human knowledge is all made up of sensations variously combined together, and that even the ideas of reason, such as causality, law, conscience, the human soul, etc., are but a mosaic of sensations, will be driven to give practical activity a sensible foundation as well, and to resolve the universal ideas of morality, moral law, duty, etc., into the particular and sensible elements of pleasure and usefulness. A philosopher, on the other hand, who is convinced of the autonomous and irreducible value of reason over the senses, will be driven to seek an autonomous foundation of morality as well. So we have a first presumption that Kant, a rationalist in his doctrine of knowledge, gives a rationalistic direction to his ethics as well.
But the relationship between the doctrine of knowledge and the doctrine of morality is not-at least in Kantian philosophy-as simple and general as it may appear from what has been said. The rationalism of the Kantian doctrine of knowledge has an altogether peculiar character, so that while on the one hand it favors the rationalism of the practical doctrine, on the other hand it stands in its way and hinders it. It will therefore help to form a somewhat more detailed idea of it.
For Kant, the primary source of knowledge is sensibility. With the external senses (sight, hearing, etc.) we come into relationship with the world around us; with the internal sense we come into relationship with ourselves and perceive our states of soul. Without a content (sensible) that is offered to us by the activity of the senses, no knowledge is possible; but on the other hand with this content alone not even knowledge is still possible.
It needs to be organized, that is, connections need to be established between the individual sensible data, which the senses themselves do not offer us and which represent the contribution of an activity that takes place above the individual senses (e.g., the before and the after, the near and the far, the essential and the accidental, cause and effect, etc.). All these relations form the work of an activity of the spirit that goes by the name of the intellect, whose function is therefore to organize the sensible material and, to give form to that content.
Can it be said then that the intellect forms in the same way as the senses (albeit with a different function) an autonomous source of knowledge? According to some philosophers, who take the name of empiricists, the work of the intellect is not so essential and autonomous, and therefore it cannot be said to represent a true source of knowledge. The so-called relations (or nexuses) of the intellect would, according to those philosophers, be traceable to the primary activity of the senses, that is, they would arise from combinations and associations of sensible elements; the intellect would be but a kind of more illiterate and abstract sense.
Kant vigorously disputes the validity of this thesis, showing that if intellectual connections had a merely sensible and empirical origin, they could have no universal and necessary value, but only that particular and contingent value, which sensibility can confer on them. But then no science of nature would be possible, because every science moves from the assumption of an immutable order of nature, that is, of inescapable connections of phenomena and their subordination to universally valid laws. Admittedly, the history of science offers us examples of continuous changes in the way of understanding the connections of phenomena in particular and in the formulation of laws; but this does not detract from the universal value of the principle of causality and legality of phenomena: it may be false to attribute the quality of effect to B with respect to the supposed cause A; but this error does not invalidate the causal ordering of phenomena, indeed indirectly confirms it, demanding a more adequate application. That in nature nothing is created or destroyed, that nothing happens without cause, that nothing is arbitrary and exlegitimate, are so little of the results of experience, that indeed they form the presupposition on which all our scientific experience is based.
The intellectual connections that science establishes between sensible elements therefore have a non-sensible origin: that is to say, the intellect stands on its own, as an autonomous source of knowledge, in the sense that it provides the latter with an element that cannot be attributed to the contribution of sensibility. If we call the content of knowledge that which is given by the senses, we can call form (i.e., a fabric of mental relations by which that content is organized) that which is the work of the intellect; and knowledge can be represented as a synthesis of content and form, so that one cannot stand without the other: the sensible content without the mental form would be blind, the form without the content would be empty.
Of the two elements of synthesis, the content is not the work of the activity of the conscious subject, but, in a sense, a passivity of his own, for he receives through the senses the impressions of objects. On the other hand, the ordering form, which the subject does not receive but gives to things, is the work of his activities. Thus, knowledge ultimately results from an intimate cooperation between the world of objects (nature) and the world of subjectivity (spirit). And the peculiarity of the synthesis lies in this, that we can know nothing of what the individual terms are outside the relationship, that is, nothing of what nature is in itself and spirit in itself, independently of the mutual connection. For how could we know, if to know means precisely to establish a relation between us and things? It is in vain to pretend to want to intuit, by means of a relation between two terms, what the individual terms are in isolation; it would be an attempt to surpass knowledge by an act of knowing.
The inseparability of this relationship carries with it very remarkable consequences in judging the value and limits of knowledge. First, we cannot know of nature except what comes into contact with us, and in the way in which it is modified by this contact: that is, what impresses our senses and is organized according to the forms of the intellect. In other words, we can only know natural phenomena, never things in themselves. And the science which we construct by the work of our intellect, making use of the sensible material, is summed up in an organic fabric of laws, which lace together all phenomena, so as to form that one field of experience, which we call nature.
But on the other hand, we cannot even know ourselves except by what we appear to our sensibility, that is, by what we are nature. What we may be in ourselves we cannot know, because to know-we repeat again-means to put ourselves in relation to things. Of us, therefore, we have knowledge only insofar as we live in the world of nature and are subordinate to its laws.
However, there is in us an activity superior to the senses and the intellect, which we call reason, which gives us ideas, surpassing phenomena and seeking to grasp reality for what it is in itself. Thus, reason tells us that we have an individual soul, whose nature is far more excellent than ordinary sensible nature and therefore has its own particular destiny; it tells us that this soul is free in its acts, that is, it is not subject to the laws of mechanical causality that governs the physical world; it tells us that nature does not stand for itself, but has a supersensible Creator. What is the value of these ideas of reason? It is clear that if knowledge is an inseparable relation between subject and object, the ideas of reason, in their claim to grasp individual terms out of mutual connection, cannot have any value of knowledge. So much so that, as soon as we leave the safe field of experience where only we can conquer solid and certain notions, and launch ourselves, with a purported science that goes by the name of metaphysics, into the sphere of ideas, we end up losing ourselves in a contradictory and vain task.
This does not mean that the use of reason should be precluded from us and that we should limit ourselves to the use of the intellect alone, connected to that of the senses. Kant prescribes for us the dogmatic use of reason, that is, the task of investigating with it the mystery of reality itself; but he accords us-and he himself begins to make use of it-a critical use of it. Indeed, who ever could authorize him to distinguish two parts of knowledge, namely the senses and the intellect, to study their connections, from which the whole scientific system of nature results? Certainly, the criterion of his analysis can be offered neither by the senses nor by the intellect, which form the matter to be analyzed; but precisely by reason, whose legitimate task therefore consists in criticism, that is, in assessing the scope and limits of our cognitive faculties and reconstructing the intellectual procedure from which science results.
Consequently, Kantian rationalism has this particular thing about it, that it makes use of reason to strip of validity the mere abstract constructions of reason and to circumscribe the field of the knowable within the sphere of nature, understood as a system of sensible phenomena, firmly connected together by intellectual laws.
These results of the doctrine of knowledge are gravely detrimental to morality, which, as long as it is possible, insofar as those of ideas have value, which the Critique of Pure Reason precludes us from doing. For if man is not free, what moral value can his action have? It cannot be imputed to him as his own work, so it is not susceptible to satisfaction or remorse, praise or blame, reward or punishment. But on the other hand, according to the results of the doctrine of knowledge, the idea of freedom, insofar as it claims to grasp the essence of man himself and to derogate from the principle of natural causality, which dominates the world of phenomena, is not valid knowledge.
Again: according to the results of the doctrine of knowledge, all phenomena, and man himself insofar as he is a phenomenon, that is, part of the system of nature, are subject to necessary laws. But, if within the scope of these laws undoubtedly falls the human body, as a physical organism, can it be said that it equally falls man as a moral being? Certainly, he too is subject to laws, which are called moral laws; but these have a necessity of their own which is different from physical laws: they presuppose not the passivity of natural objects, but the free activity of the spiritual subject, and they do not impose themselves upon them fatally, but as a duty to be performed, the fulfillment of which, however, is left to the faculty of the agent. Therefore, while the force of physical laws is manifested by their absolute non-derogation, that of moral laws is manifested by what the subject, though he may derogate from them, freely fulfills them.
Now, how is it that these deviations of moral values from the line drawn by the doctrine of knowledge are justified? How is it that man, as a moral being, surpasses the limits that reason itself has assigned to his cognitive faculties? If man as a knowing subject and man as a moral subject were two distinct beings, we could eliminate the conflict between the two opposing demands by giving the one and the other two distinct protagonists. Instead, it is a question of the same man taking on two antithetical tasks; and what is more, of the same reason proscribing in its theoretical use those ideas which it nevertheless makes use of in its practical use.
Thus the problem arises: how is morality possible? That is, how can that practical use of reason be justified? And to justify it means, not only to see how the world of morality is organized by means of reason, but also how it accords with the world of knowledge, with which it seems to be conceived in irreconcilable conflict.
That there is in fact this problem, is indubitable for the very fact that we cannot renounce either of the terms of the conflict: on the one hand, we cannot disavow the work of the theoretical region; on the other hand, we cannot deny the very certain fact, that there is in us the consciousness of a moral law, to which we are subject by means of duty, and whose fulfillment implies our freedom.
Now, since we cannot escape the problem by denying one or the other of the two claims of reason from which the conflict arises, it is a matter of bringing it into sharp focus, in the hope that we may be able to set it in motion for a resolution. To this end that same doctrine of knowledge that posed, with its antithesis, the need for our problem suggests an appropriate analogy. We have seen that there is a critical use of theoretical reason, by virtue of which the value of ideas is reinstated, which, on the other hand, is nullified in dogmatic use. Now, is there not also a similar critical use of practical reason? That is, the human will, which is reasonable, does not have its own peculiar mode of action, whereby one practically justifies those moral ideas of which one cannot give a logical demonstration. For example, even if one cannot prove, by scientific argument, that man is free, is there no way to practically prove this freedom, prescinding from any speculative formulation of its essence?
The critical procedure of Kantian ethics, which is based on these premises, is therefore distinct from the dogmatic procedure of earlier ethical systems. The latter claimed to speculatively define the object of morality, that is, to extend the dogmatic use of theoretical reason to practice as well. With them they formulated metaphysical concepts of good and evil, freedom and necessity, etc., to which they deductively linked moral action.
Kant, on the other hand, understands the critical function of reason as a reflection, a return of the spirit to its own activity in order to acquire an intimate awareness of it. He starts from a statement of fact: that is, there is a moral law, to which we feel bound, and the consciousness of this obligation is what we call duty. How is this moral law justified? How are we obligated to it? And, since law implies freedom, what is the mutual relationship? How do we explain the practical use of a freedom, of which we cannot form a rational concept?
As we can see, Kant does not claim to extend the sphere of morality with his research, as dogmatic moralists do, but to judge and evaluate it. He does not increase the sum of moral goods that man must achieve by his action, but gives us an appreciation of the common moral heritage of humanity. In a sense, he, too, increases those goods,but intensively and not extensively, in that he, by his criticism, intrinsicates them with the human spirit and reveals in them a deeper and more intimate meaning.
The inquiry we undertake under Kant’s guidance moves from the factual observation of the existence of the moral law to proceed to the question of law: how is obligation possible under this law, that is, duty. In the course of developing this procedure, a point will be reached where the practical realization of duty postulates the freedom of the human spirit. Hence, the further task of justifying this freedom, in relation to the negative conclusions of the doctrine of knowledge.
Our work is thus naturally divided into two sections: Moral Law and Freedom.