Kant and the Possibility of Progress

From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties

Paul T. Wilford, Samuel A. Stoner, Samuel Stoner, Paul T. Wilford, Samuel A. Stoner

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812297799
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) transformed the philosophical, cultural, and religious landscape of modern Europe. Emphasizing the priority of practical reason and moral autonomy, Kant's radically original account of human subjectivity announced new ethical imperatives and engendered new political hopes. This collection of essays investigates the centrality of progress to Kant's philosophical project and the contested legacy of Kant's faith in reason's capacity to advance not only our scientific comprehension and technological prowess, but also our moral, political, and religious lives. Accordingly, the first half of the volume explores the many facets of Kant's thinking about progress, while the remaining essays each focus on one or two thinkers who play a crucial role in post-Kantian German philosophy: J. G. Herder (1744-1803), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). This two-part structure reflects the central thesis of the volume that Kant inaugurates a distinctive theoretical tradition in which human historicity is central to political philosophy.By exploring the origins and metamorphoses of this tremendously influential tradition, the volume offers a timely perspective on fundamental questions in an age increasingly suspicious of the Enlightenment's promise of universal rational progress. It aims to help us face three sets of questions: (1) Do we still believe in the possibility of progress? If we do, on what grounds? If we do not, why have we lost the hope for a better future that animated previous generations? (2) Is the belief in progress necessary for the maintenance of today's liberal democratic order? Does a cosmopolitan vision of politics ultimately depend on a faith in humanity's gradual, asymptotic realization of that lofty aim? (3) And, if we no longer believe in progress, can we dispense with hope without succumbing to despair?

PART I

Kant on Progress

Chapter 1

Kant on Individual Moral Progress

Oliver Sensen

Is it possible for a human being to become a morally better person by his or her own effort? We ordinarily believe that we can do this, and we frequently demand it of others. But once we think about it, it is difficult to see how this is possible. On the one hand, there is the problem of free will: how exactly can one act otherwise if one believes that nature, including one’s body, is causally predetermined and therefore predictable? On the other hand, there is the problem that we do not seem to be morally good already. Progress seems to be needed, but is it really possible?

Immanuel Kant addresses these problems on a very fundamental level. In this essay, I shall analyze his discussion of the problem and his solution to it. In order to do so, I shall first sketch the problem more fully, as Kant sees it. I shall then argue that Kant’s standard solution to the problem of free will—his discussion in the Third Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR)—does not really address our problem. Finally, I shall argue that Kant speaks to the problem of individual moral progress in the first section of the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Religion) before analyzing the answer he gives there. I conclude that Kant’s discussion of individual moral progress is mainly interested in a practical task—that we strive to become morally better—and that the answer to the theoretical question of how this is possible remains a mystery to human beings.

The Problem of Individual Moral Progress

In Kant’s moral philosophy the problem of individual moral progress arises because he seems to hold two claims. On the one hand, he believes that human beings are not already morally good. Indeed, he suggests that we have reason to believe that all human beings are evil by nature: “‘The human being is evil,’ cannot mean anything else than that he is conscious of the moral law and yet has incorporated into his maxim the (occasional) deviation from it. ‘He is evil by nature’ simply means … that, according to the cognition we have of the human being through experience, he cannot be judged otherwise.”¹ If we have a tendency to deviate from the moral law but are also commanded to act according to it, then there is a need for individual moral progress.

On the other hand, Kant repeatedly says that—in principle—we can predict human behavior: “If we could investigate all the appearances of his power of choice down to their basis, then there would be no human action that we could not predict with certainty.”² In fact, Kant claims that we can predict an action “with as much certainty as a lunar or solar eclipse.”³ If all human beings are evil by nature and if their actions are causally predetermined in a way that one can in principle predict their behavior, then how can a human being ever make moral progress in such a way that she is responsible for the progress that she makes? It could be that all human beings by nature will become morally better persons, for example, that in maturing, they will gradually become better able to follow the moral law for its own sake. However, this does not seem to be something that an agent would be responsible for or anything that would be in her power. Is it possible for an individual to better herself?

The Third Antinomy: An Insufficient Solution

One might think that Kant solves this problem in the resolution to CPR’s Third Antinomy. There, Kant wants to argue that it is at least not contradictory to think that freedom and determinism are compatible and that they can hold for the one and “very same effect.”⁴ If the Third Antinomy shows that freedom does not contradict the causal determinism of nature, then it seems that this would also explain how individual moral progress is conceivable. However, I shall argue that the Third Antinomy does not attempt to show that moral progress is consistent with the idea of causal predeterminism and that Kant addresses a different problem in this section of CPR.

Whatever the solution to the problem of freedom and determinism in the Third Antinomy is, it is important to emphasize that Kant never denies that the world as we experience it in space and time, including our bodies and brains, is causally predetermined: “The correctness of the principle of the thoroughgoing connection of all occurrences in the world of sense according to invariable natural laws is already confirmed as a principle of the transcendental analytic and will suffer no violation.”⁵ Furthermore, as I have noted above, Kant also holds that our actions can in principle be predicted. But if our actions can be predicted, how can agents morally better themselves of their own accord?

The standard view is that Kant resolves the conflict between freedom and determinism by arguing that the phenomenal realm of sense-experience is causally determined, while maintaining that rational agents are part of a different, noumenal realm in which they are free and can decide otherwise.⁶ However, this solution does not seem to work even as an interpretation of the Third Antinomy. There are problems internal to the text itself that prevent this solution, as well as external problems concerning the solution’s plausibility.

The main internal problem is that—according to Kant—only the phenomenal and not the noumenal realm is in space and time. However, if the agent is supposed not to be part of the phenomenal world, but rather a noumenal entity, how could the agent decide otherwise? To decide otherwise seems to be a form of change, and change seems to presuppose time. But as we have seen, the noumenal realm cannot be temporal. Thus, a noumenal rational agent could not decide otherwise.

But even if there is a way to explain how a nontemporal agent could change, there are at least two external problems that significantly raise the cost of adopting the standard interpretation, according to which the Third Antinomy explains the possibility of individual moral progress. The first external problem is that any free action seems to change the past. If, for instance, my noumenal self freely decides to get up from the chair, the past would have to have been different. This is because—according to the initial stipulation—one could predict a behavior if one could know the agent deep down. Looking at all the sensible conditions, including the state of the body and one’s desires and beliefs, one should in principle be able to predict an agent’s action. If the prediction is that an hour from now, I will remain seated, but then the noumenal self decides to stand up, this action too would have to be predictable looking at the sensible conditions. A free decision of the noumenal self would seem to entail a change to the sensible conditions that led up to it. In this way, a free action seems to alter the past. This is a highly implausible claim, and it raises the cost of the interpretation of the Third Antinomy as an account of the possibility of individual moral progress significantly.

A second external problem is that the noumenal self is not something that is available in introspection. Our inner sense, to which reflection and conscious deliberation belongs, is in time and is, therefore, causally determined. If a noumenal self is not in time, then it is not something that is available to our conscious reflection. A free action would therefore feel as if it were being handed down from outside our awareness and conscious control. It is not clear that this is the kind of freedom we are after ordinarily, and this too would raise the cost of adopting an interpretation of the Third Antinomy as an account of the possibility of individual moral progress.

Given the internal and external problems that confront an interpretation of the Third Antinomy as an attempt to explain how individual moral progress is possible, I believe that we should have a second look at whether Kant really seeks to offer such an explanation. The interpretation in question makes two assumptions, both of which are in tension with what Kant actually says. The first assumption is that Kant conceives of freedom as the ability to do otherwise, that is, as an independence from the causal determinants of nature that allows one to act differently from those determinants. The second assumption is that Kant sees the “noumenal self” as the thing that makes freedom possible. I believe that we should change both assumptions.

First of all, Kant does not define freedom as the ability to do otherwise, but in the following way: “By freedom in the cosmological sense … I understand the faculty of beginning a state from itself, the causality of which does not in turn stand under another cause determining it in time according with the law of nature.”⁷ This is a “first cause” or unmoved mover conception of freedom that is grounded in the idea of “a first mover … i.e., a freely acting cause, which began this series of states first and from itself.”⁸ Significantly, this definition does not include the claim that one could act otherwise. It merely says that something, for example, the Big Bang, is the first cause (of nature) without being caused itself (by anything in nature). But it does not include the claim that the Big Bang had a choice or could have acted otherwise. This is important because in CPR, Kant’s concern is whether human beings can be a first cause.

Second, Kant argues that it is an intelligible character and not a noumenal self that makes cosmological freedom possible. What does he mean by an intelligible character? Kant defines a character as a law of causality: “But every effective cause must have a character, i.e., a law of its causality, without which it would not be a cause at all.”⁹ He defines “intelligible” in the following way: “I call intelligible that in an object of sense which is not itself appearance.”¹⁰ If one puts both definitions together, then Kant’s conception of cosmological freedom seems to involve the claim that a human being can be an uncaused cause in virtue of having a law of causality that can be discerned in experience, but does not itself arise out of appearances. What kind of experience is that, and what more concretely is the intelligible character? The intelligible character Kant has in mind here is the moral law: “Now that this reason has causality, or that we can at least represent something of the sort in it, is clear from the imperatives that we propose as rules to our powers of execution in everything practical.”¹¹ The moral law is precisely a law of causality that has effects in the sensible world without itself arising out of the sensible world. It is this law and its ground, pure reason, that are said to be outside time and unchanging: “Reason is not affected at all by that sensibility … it does not alter … in it no state precedes that determines the following one … is present to all the actions of human beings in all conditions of time, and is one and the same, but it is not itself in time, and never enters into any new state in which it previously was not.”¹² Pure reason is the source of the moral law: “Reason does not give in to those grounds which are empirically given … but with complete spontaneity it makes its own order according to ideas.”¹³

Ultimately, then, the moral law explains how a human being can be a first cause. If one does not give in to temptations, but follows what is morally required simply because it is required, then one can cause an action in the sensible world (e.g., not lying), without the cause of this action (the moral law) being itself caused by nature. This solution also explains how Kant can hold that one and the same action can be free, causally predetermined, and predictable at the same time. The solution to the question of how one and the same action can be free and predictable is that an action that is based on an a priori law can be predicted, but is at the same time caused by something that does not arise out of the sensible realm (the a priori law). For, if I know you deep down and know that you will refuse a bribe for moral reasons, your action is caused by something outside of sensible desires, but still predictable.

However, this solution to the problem of the relationship between freedom and determinism does not help us address the question of how individual moral progress is possible. Since Kant does not—in the first instance—talk about the ability to act otherwise, the possibility of the freedom he argues for in CPR does not explain how individuals can better themselves. In CPR, Kant talks as if every action is causally predetermined and can be predicted. If, as the Religion argues, human beings are by nature evil, and if all of their actions can in principle be predicted, then it is still not clear how individual moral progress is possible. In order to address this issue, we must turn to Kant’s Religion.

Kant’s Argument in the Religion

In the Religion, Kant seems to introduce a new conception of freedom. He is no longer concerned with (cosmological) freedom of the will (Wille). Instead, he focuses on the freedom of choice (Willkür). In his mature works, Kant identifies the will with practical reason and characterizes practical reason as the faculty that prescribes the moral law to human beings.¹⁴ Further, Kant argues that the will is free if it is not itself causally determined by sensible nature, for ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. Modernity and Postmodernity: Our Temporal Orientation
• Part I. Kant on Progress
• Part II. Progress after Kant
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments