A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Kant Part one Early work and Influences.

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If Spinoza was the God-intoxicated Philosopher then Leibniz was by comparison also divinely inspired by a divine understanding that provided us with a picture of the divine library of God containing our world book which according to Leibniz was the best book in the library. Kant may not have shared this sentiment because as he claimed we might be living in an age of Enlightenment but are not as yet living in Enlightened times. By this, he meant that whilst there were signs of progress it was uncertain as to whether we would reach the telos of Civilization and Culture which he described as a “Kingdom of Ends” lying one hundred thousand years in the future.

Before being awoken from his dogmatic rationalist slumbers by Hume and Rousseau, Kant was much influenced by Leibniz and Newton. He was also affected by the tension created by the demands of religious faith and the more skeptical natural scientists in an Enlightenment Prussia who were not impressed by the anti-clerical revolution of the French “philosophes”. Indeed, Rousseau, it could be argued belonged essentially to the Counter-Enlightenment movement. A movement which in the eyes of a Prussian society drew inspiration from the Pietist protest against Protestantism. Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi all aligned themselves with the Counter-Enlightenment and thus against the spirit of the rationalist component of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: a Philosophy that attempted to integrate Natural Science with Religious Faith, Ethics, Politics, Philosophical Psychology, and Aesthetics.

Even in his earlier work, Kant was convinced that the Leibnizian-Newtonian conflict could be averted by distinguishing between different principles and different spheres of application. As his work progressed and matured, however, there was to be a decisive shift away from the more theoretical metaphysical commitments of Leibniz and a shift towards a critical approach. This Critical Philosophy took as its data categories of judgments and experience in the context of a tripartite structure of a mind constituted by Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. It also was committed to a logical method that used the principles of identity and sufficient reason The ideas of spheres of application and principles also evolved eventually into a belief that metaphysics and transcendental philosophy had application in both theoretical and practical arenas of activity. This application, however, distanced itself from theoretical proofs of the existence of God but embraced a practical argument that used the practical reasoning of ethics as a basis or reason for believing in God’s existence. In Kant’s mature work we encounter a philosophical theory worthy of the Aristotelian and Enlightenment idea of integrating as many intellectual realms of activity as possible. Kant is known for a number of theoretical innovations and an admiration for the apriori elements of Newtonian Physics and Euclidean Geometry, but we should not forget the inscription on his grave which refers to both the starry heavens above and the moral law within. We should not forget, that is, his contribution to metaphysically grounded ethics. Both of these aspects of human existence produced in him experiences of awe and admiration but his accomplishment was to theoretically show how it was possible to believe in the physical laws of nature and the moral laws of ethics that embraced both the ideas of Freedom and God. If anyoone deserved the title “The Newton of the Moral Universe” it was him. He refused to reduce the importance of the status of Natural Science as the theories of Berkeley and Leibniz appeared to demand. He also refused to embrace the skepticism of Hume who questioned not just the relevance of metaphysics but even that of Philosophy in general. Many commentators claim that it was the battle with the Humean giant of skepticism that produced a philosophical theory which divided our discourse up into empirical, transcendental, and metaphysical propositions–thus restoring the status of much of science and most of Philosophy. This division enabled Kant to insist that Laws need not necessarily be derived from observation of the world yet were nevertheless necessarily applicable to that world. In this context, Kant invokes a vital distinction between the world as it presents itself to beings possessed of the powers of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason and a world in itself which may have a form beyond our comprehension and about which we can know and say nothing. According to Kant, the closest we come to understanding this so-called “noumenal world” is via a holistic understanding of ourselves as beings that freely install and follow the moral law within. Understanding this aspect of ourselves requires some kind of understanding of transcendental philosophy and its metaphysical assumptions. Part of this understanding will involve an awareness that the world of appearances is riddled with a contingency that is connected to the kind of sensory apparatus we possess: a sensory apparatus that for example synthesises light rays into objects of visual perception but is unable to synthesise x-ray waves or any other kind of wave about which we have no knowledge. This transcendental philosophy will also involve an awareness that the powers of perception we do possess is a condition of what can be done with our powers of understanding and reason.

Kant, in his late hylomorphic phase, believed in both the matter and the form of experience. Form was investigated by the metaphysics of scientific and moral laws. Two a priori forms of sensibility were, for example, Space and Time. Kant argued that these forms were not a consequence of experience but rather forms of sensibility that are used to help organize what we experience, or, in other words, what he referred to as a priori conditions of our experience. Space and time were for him modes of experience and in this claim, Kant disagreed with the Newtonian ideas of absolute Space and Time in themselves which, according to Newton, existed independently of any experience of them. Kant’s reasoning in relation to this point was that we could neither imagine nor think of the “form” of the in-itself because our thought and imagination are formed partly by a human configuration of sensory powers which created the “forms of Space and Time. This in turn created the “form” of our experience. Kant is here in this discussion drawing the limits of our understanding and reasoning and any metaphysics which fails to register these limits are merely the dreams of spirit seers. In response to the question of what we can know about the nature of the above forms of Space and Time, Kant responds by claiming that geometry reveals to us the a priori form of Space and Arithmetic reveals to us the a priori form of Time. Mathematics, then, helps us to investigate these modes of our experience.

There is also in Kant reference to those forms of thought, understanding, and reason which have both transcendental and metaphysical aspects. The Newtonian law of conservation of matter and energy which states that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed is an example of a metaphysical assumption, whilst “every event must have a cause” is an example of a transcendental assumption about the form our understanding must take if we are to make justified true claims about the physical world, The law claiming that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, of course, immediately places a question mark over the religious idea of a God that has created the universe. Such an idea for Kant is an idea of a spirit seer as is the idea of a soul that can disengage from a physical body in accordance with nonphysical laws. In spite of this Kant believed both in God and souls insofar as both are embedded in our ethical relations to each other and the world as a whole. For him, it is a matter of transcendental fact that we human beings possess moral convictions that emanate from a moral power which is expressed in a system of concepts we use for forming our moral intentions and our moral judgments, (concepts such as good, bad, right, wrong, ought, etc). These concepts form the conditions for our moral discourse and the moral assumptions we make when we “judge” that someone could have acted differently to the way in which they did in fact act. Without such conditions, Kant argues, all moral and legal evaluation of our actions are impossible. Such evaluation also assumes a free will or freedom to choose. This discourse, Kant points out is not similar to our scientific discourse about the phenomenal world we all observe and move in. Moral discourse runs deeper, Kant argues: it is about the noumenal world and because of this state of affairs we distinguish fundamentally between the status of the philosophical questions “What can we know?” and “What ought we to do?”. With respect to this latter question, we are thrown immediately into the realm of metaphysics and when we further seek to justify our moral evaluations in terms of a just and good God we move into the realm of faith and the third philosophical question, “What can we hope for?” All three questions require the regulation of Reason and its Principles of identity, noncontradiction, and sufficient reason. The principle of non-contradiction, Kant argues is, in fact, two principles one of which relates to things that are, and the other relates to things that are not, and these principles probably follow from the principles of identity and sufficient reason.

The moral law within us is regulated by an imperative form because we are dealing with the fundamental moral question of “What ought we to do?”It is formulated in terms of the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason. The moral law claims that we should only act on that maxim of action that we can will to become a universal law of nature which basically means a law that is universally agreed, adopted, and acted upon by everyone. The logical implication here is that if one possesses and understands the concepts and has used them in the formulation of an intention to do the right thing, the good thing, or the thing one ought to do, a fitting moral action must follow as a matter of rationality. This, of course, is a process and as such much can go wrong but even if it does it will remain forever true that the action conceived of is the one that ought to have been done. This, of course, assumes that for example after having made a promise, one’s commitment to treating oneself and others as ends in themselves demands that I do everything in my power to keep my promise. Doing anything else will fail to honour what Kant calls the “dignity of man”

Manfred Keuhn in his work “Kant: A Biography” charted the history of the Categorical Imperative” from what he called Kant’s “Socratic Turn” when Rousseau convinced the great philosopher that “natural man” possessed a moral sensibility that was a part of everyone’s nature. This aspect of our nature, Rousseau argued, was clouded by the customary habits and norms we form when we gather together in groups. Kant gradually, however, began to feel that this hidden nature of man was not described entirely correctly by Rousseau and he turned instead to English thinkers such as Hutcheson and Reid to characterize what he would later call the “unsocial sociability” of man manifested in particular in his antagonism toward his fellows when his own self-love overrides his own innate benevolent sensibility. Hutcheson embraced a variation of the Pleasure-Pain Principle that was not instrumentally oriented or utilitarian. He also pointed out that benevolence can be associated with pain for the morally inclined individual. It is clear for Hutcheson that moral worth(a key concept in Kant’s ethics) is to be measured in terms of the benevolence directed at others. A variation of the Reality Principle is also involved in Hutcheson’s account in the form of an insistence on our ability to adopt the perspective of a spectator with respect to our own actions, evaluating them, as it is maintained, disinterestedly. Our moral affections, it is claimed, can be reflected upon. These moral affections are “determinations of our nature”, according to Hutcheson, but he also somewhat paradoxically conceptualises them as “obligations” and it becomes unclear here whether he means to use the term to name an affective-motivational force or rather something closer to Kant’s idea of a rational norm governing our action. Given the fact that Hutcheson was particularly critical of rationalism, the likelihood is that he was referring to a naturally motivating force and distinguished it from other motivational forces such as anger because this latter motive lacks an articulate intention. Like many sentimentalists of this time, Hutcheson rested his case on happiness which Kant critically regarded as the principle of self-love in disguise. Hutcheson believed that we are benevolent towards others because we realize that our own happiness rests on their happiness.

Kant, in this early phase of his development was beginning to manifest an eclectic tendency that would later develop into the theoretical cosmopolitanism of his later critical philosophy where Ancient Greek, German, English, Swiss, French and Dutch influences were firmly integrated into one philosophical outlook. In this later phase Kant abandons the idea of moral sensibility and the motivating force of action in favour of a more reflective position which focuses on the maxim of an action that is arrived at rationally and with understanding. In his work “Anthropology fro a Pragmatic point of view” Kant writes: “What is decisive in practical matters is not whether we have done a good action at one time(or another), but rather it is the maxim.” Our moral worth, that is, is directly connected to the rational worth of the maxim, i.e. its universality and necessity. So we see here that there is a sense in which Rousseau’s “natural man” was supplanted by a man that is obligated to create his own character by rational reflection upon his maxims: a rational, non-observational reflection that involved universality and necessity. It is worth noting that at this late stage Kant would not have subscribed to any view which claimed morality to be rooted in sympathy: an emotion which he regarded as “blind”, meaning without conceptual or cognitive import. Insofar as there is a general “emotion” required by moral judgment and moral action it must be generally applicable to all of humanity and whatever we call that feeling it must be related to both a work of the imagination that is in principle conceptualisable(as is the case with aesthetic judgment). In such judgments what is particular is subsumable under what is general and in the moral case these judgments are maxims or “reasons for acting” . Ethical reasons will not meet the criteria of self-love but rather a criterion relating to self-worth related to the more neutral attitude of respect and the logical requirements of universality and necessity.

In this later phase of development, Kant was returning to a thesis of the Ancients, in particular returning to Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory in which all understanding was the understanding of forms or principles that organised matter in successive actualisation phases. The initial phase insofar as moral judgment is concerned related to something that was the case or something that needed to be done rather than something that was or was to be felt. Moral Philosophy at this point for Kant was a philosophy of the noumenal world, of the mundus intelligibilis. No motiva sensualis was involved in the consideration of “reasons for action”– and as with the ancients, all morality is based on ideas and principles. The metaphysics of morals would then constitute the knowledge we have of ourselves and would provide the rational justification or groundwork for a virtuous character or will.

In conclusion, as we approach Kant’s more mature work written late in his life, beginning with the “Critique of Pure Reason” at age 57, we encounter the strategies of Plato and Aristotle being put to the use of integrating the cognitive faculties or powers of the mind into one systematic whole. Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason all possessed their “forms” or “principles” which together contributed to shaping the overall power of the mind Kant had been seeking to correctly describe and explain during his long philosophical career. The first Critique took 12 years to complete and was a testament to the difficulty of the task set by David Hume: the task, namely of steering an Aristotelian middle course between the rocks of dogmatism and the sandbanks of Skepticism This task involved the construction of a power of understanding and judgment to mediate between the powers of sensation and reason as well as between the methods of “observation” and “logic”.

The strategy was clearly Aristotelian but the result was something new and unique, something purely Kantian and worthy of that period of History we call “The Enlightenment” when men for the second time in philosophical history dared to use their reason.