Kant's Philosophy

A Study for Educators

James Scott Johnston

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623568344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

James Scott Johnston's incisive study draws on a holistic reading of Kant: one that views him as developing and testing a complete system (theoretical, practical, historical and anthropological) with education as a vital component. As such, the book begins with an extensive overview of Kant's chief theoretical work (the Critique of Pure Reason ), and from that overview distils crucial discussions (the role of practical reason; the claims of the third antinomy) for his moral theory. An extended discussion of Kant's moral and political theories and the place of pedagogy in it follow, with attention to all of Kant's important moral works as well as his chief religious work, Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason. A discussion of culture and character follows, chiefly through a discussion of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint, together with certain lectures and published essays on history and politics. Finally, an extensive discussion of Kant's published works on education, together with only recently published letters and announcements (in English), is provided. This culminates in Johnston's estimation of what a Kantian education, systematically conceived, might look like: an education that is attentive to theoretical, moral, cultural-historical, and pedagogic domains of Kant's thinking.

1

Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy: The Critique of Pure Reason

Introduction

The Critique of Pure Reason is the decisive philosophical work of the past 250 years. More than any other text, it has defined the course of philosophical investigation in the modern era. As well, the foundations of Kant’s theory of freedom are here. Scholars generally look to Kant’s third antinomy—the absolute dichotomy between the idea we exist in a universe of absolute freedom and the idea we exist in a universe of absolute necessity—as the basis for understanding Section III of Kant’s Groundwork, where Kant attempts a deduction of the ground of autonomy—the supreme principle of the will.¹

However, to properly understand the arguments Kant makes in the third antinomy, it is important to step back and examine what the first Critique as a whole is intended to accomplish. This requires us to look at Kant’s project in the first Critique from the beginning; only then we will be in good position to examine Kant’s discussion of the antinomies generally and the third antinomy in particular. I will discuss the two prefaces and introduction (of both A and B editions), as well as (very briefly) the Transcendental Aesthetic in Part one. I will discuss the Transcendental Analytic of Principles and, particularly, the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, in Part two. I will also discuss Kant’s controversial thinking on transcendental objects, things-in-themselves, and noumena, here. In Part three, I will discuss the Transcendental Dialectic, the Antinomies of Reason, and the third antinomy in particular. In Part four, I will discuss Kant’s final section of the first Critique, the Doctrine of Method. Finally, in Part five, I bring the contents of the discussion thus far to one issue in philosophy of education where Kant is roundly invoked: constructivism and constructivist science education. Here, I will set what I see as Kant’s project in the first Critique in contradistinction to certain claims made on behalf of Kant for various understandings of constructivism in education. In all cases, my discussion is selective. Rather than providing a detailed exegesis of the first Critique, I will highlight and discuss those areas of most relevance to the chapters that follow. This will put us in a good position vis-à-vis the context for Kant’s Groundwork and other moral writings.

Part one: Kant’s preface, introduction, and the Transcendental Aesthetic

I will begin by describing what Kant’s project for the Critique of Pure Reason is not; it is not primarily an epistemological treatise. It is not a treatise on empirical, rational, or transcendental psychology.² It is not an essay on human understanding. Although it certainly contains aspects or elements of each of these, none of these is the proper aim of Kant’s in writing the first Critique. As Graham Bird says, “Kant makes plain that he embarks on his project not in order to justify knowledge in the sciences but in order to rehabilitate philosophy itself by modeling it on science.”³ The Critique of Pure Reason is not simply a treatise on knowledge because Kant’s aim is to set out the limits of what we can say we know from what we can think, believe, and hope, and the discussion of limits is a metaphysical task. Much of the associationist psychology that Locke and Hume spelled out in their respective treatises is simply downplayed (e.g., Kant 1998, A IX). In fact, Kant is very critical of the claims put to knowledge by empirical psychologists (especially Locke and Hume) and rejects the very possibility of both empirical and rational (Cartesian) psychology as a basis for metaphysics (Kant 1998, A XI–XX). Receptive knowledge, or receptivity, cannot be the (sole) basis for knowledge without the subject’s power (spontaneity), which makes possible acts of inference (judgement). Nor can the Critique be called an essay on human understanding, though the Faculty of Understanding is central, particularly to the first part of the Critique (the Transcendental Analytic). Kant makes few empirical claims, which would be necessary to develop such an understanding (Kant 1998, A XX). Instead, there is talk of pure concepts, categories, the synthesis of intuitions (the pure forms of space and time), and the transcendental unity of apperception. All of these are quite properly metaphysical topics and concerns.

Kant puts the question of metaphysics this way,

For it [metaphysics] is nothing but the inventory of all we possess through pure reason, ordered systematically. Nothing here can escape us, because what reason brings forth entirely out of itself cannot be hidden, but is brought to light by reason itself as soon as reason’s common principle has been discovered. The perfect unity of this kind of cognition, and the fact that it arises solely out of pure concepts without any influence that would extend or increase it from experience or even particular intuition, which would lead to a determinate experience, makes this unconditioned completeness not only feasible but also necessary. (Kant 1998, A XX)

The way to have metaphysics become a science is through a forceful critique of its assumptions. Much in metaphysics has been taken for granted. It has overextended itself in making claims to entities it cannot know. These are claims to entities that are familiar to us as God, Freedom, and the Immortality of the Soul. The problem is metaphysics has been so long to prove the existence of these it has tangled itself in interminable disputes and logical dead ends that have left it discredited. To turn metaphysics to the path of science, then, is to subject it to a thorough and unrelenting critique of its assumptions, its methods, and its conclusions.

Kant claims that it is beyond any of us (including himself) “. . . to extend human knowledge beyond all bounds of possible experience . . .” (Kant 1998, A XIV). Yet, this should not be cause for despair; with a proper critique in place, Kant (rather arrogantly) foresees the completion of metaphysics: “. . . I make bold to say that there cannot be a single metaphysical problem that has not been solved here, or at least to the solution of which the key has not been provided” (Kant 1998, A XIII). Kant wants the critique of metaphysics to be hope-inducing, rather than an “all crushing” skeptical project.⁴ As Kant sees it, the task of a Critique of Pure Reason is to free metaphysics from its (transcendental) illusions and doing so will thereby put it on the secure path of a science.

In the preface to the B edition (1787), Kant strengthens his rhetoric regarding the need for a scientific accounting of metaphysics. This accounting issues in what Kant has famously termed the “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy (Kant 1998, B XVI–XVII).

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori though concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. (Kant 1998, B XVI)

The revolutionary moment arrives when we realize that “. . . we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (Kant 1998, B XVIII). The Copernican Revolution in philosophy, then, is the realization that we human, rational creatures are responsible for our cognitions. Cognition is an active, not passive affair, to which we contribute understanding.⁵

Kant’s other signal task in the B edition preface is to distinguish between appearances and things-in-themselves. A central undertaking of a critique of pure reason is to make (and enforce) the distinction. The failure of metaphysics from Plato to the present has been to mistake what we can know (cognition, the natural world) from what we can think, believe, and hope (God, Freedom, and the Immortality of the Soul). Conflating these, or using methods of reason to prove the existence of these, is responsible for the skepticism and incredulity toward metaphysics that famously manifest in the writings of David Hume (Kant 1998, A 764–7).⁶ The uses of reason in an attempt at cognizing God, Freedom, and the Immortality of the Soul have led reason into transcendental illusions—the focus of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic.

The need for things-in-themselves remains, however. Absent the notion of things-in-themselves, we fall into absurdity when we try to explain how there can be something behind the appearance we construct. This has led to great and lengthy disputes among Kant scholars and critics alike: does Kant or does Kant not advocate for a real thing-in-itself, lying behind appearances, yet uncognizable to us? G. W. F. Hegel and Hegelian and neo-Hegelian sympathizers (including John Dewey) certainly thought he did.⁷ Passages such as the following seem to suggest the critics are correct: “Yet the reservation must also be well noted, that even if we cannot cognize these same objects as thing in themselves, we at least must be able to think them as things in themselves. For otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears” (Kant 1998, B XXVI–XXVII). However, the issue is much more complicated than this, as I shall discuss further on.

In the Introduction to the B edition of the first Critique, Kant claims that all of our knowledge arises out of sense experience (Kant 1998, B 1). In this regard, Kant is at one with the empiricists John Locke and David Hume. Experience is the first indication we have of knowledge. However, Kant is quick to insist that simply because knowledge arises out of sense experience, sense experience does not exhaust all there is to knowledge. A fallacy of the empiricists was to assume that sense experiences exhausted knowledge, when in fact, there is an a priori element to knowledge that is absent from their accounts. Kant demonstrates this with recourse to his (famous) categorization of statements into analytic and synthetic (Kant 1998, B VIII–XIV). Analytic statements are of the sort,

The green ball is green.

or

Single women are unmarried

Here, no further cognition is required, and no further inference (judgement) is necessary to make the claim. We have all of the elements in place. However, most statements qualify as synthetic.

The ball is green.

or

The maid of honor is married

Here, an inference (judgement) is required to validate the statement. We need to demonstrate this claim. Kant thinks cognition is composed predominantly of synthetic statements—statements that require demonstration. Certainly, this is the case for statements involving empirical judgements. We cannot simply rest content with the association of ball-to-green to license the inference. There has to be something to connect these in the first place. Otherwise, we would be bombarded with associations with no way to discriminate amongst them. (This “something more” is a synthetic unity, as I shall discuss shortly.) Kant’s point with all of this is to demonstrate that analytic statements are the exception, rather than the rule. This applies, as we shall see, to moral claims in practical judgements. In fact, almost all meaningful statements are synthetic—that is, they are composed of empirical content and conceptual form. Concepts provide the form that then renders statements such as the above meaningful.

Kant calls the faculty of rules of representing objects, understanding. When Kant talks of intuitions, he is almost always indicating their manifoldness, which is to say, both sensation and the pure forms of space and time, conjoined. Kant discusses the pure forms of space and time separately from the rest of the Critique in a section titled the Transcendental Aesthetic, which we will briefly discuss. The immediate context for this section is his statements in the Inaugural Dissertation on the need to distinguish between the world of sensation and the world of intelligibility. There, Kant hypothesized the conditions for space and time as subjective, and a priori (pure and necessary).

Kant makes several important points in the Transcendental Aesthetic (Kant 1998, A 19–74, B 32–73), which I shall only summarize. (I will return to this topic in Part five of this chapter, which discusses Kant’s role as a leading theorist in constructivist models of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Kants Theoretical Philosophy: The Critique of Pure Reason
• 2 Laying the Groundwork of Moral Theory: The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
• 3 Practical Reason, Virtue, and Moral Education
• 4 Kants Political Thought
• 5 Culture, Character, and the Conduct of Thought: From the Lectures on Ethics to Kants Anthropology
• 6 Kants Educational Writings
• Conclusion: Toward a Kantian Moral Education
• Bibliography
• Index