Kant and Our Way
of Thinking
Man Alone. A Reason Reduced but Absolute
To safeguard God’s “otherness,” he declared the impossibility
of having an experience of Him, thus consigning the Mystery to an abyssal distance,
leaving man alone with his reason as the measure of all things
by Costantino Esposito
Kant’s thought turned out to be truly the winner in the conflict
of ideas that had accompanied the events of history for at least two centuries
and directed the cultural tendencies of the modern and contemporary age. This
judgment could perhaps seem a hazardous one, if we think of the developments
in sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries, which no longer refer to the structures
typical of Kant’s theory of cognition (I am thinking, for example, of non-Euclidean
mathematics or of quantum physics). The verdict seems even more incomprehensible
if we consider the distance that separates the rigorism of a formal ethic of
duty for the sake of duty, as that of Kant, from the moral sense most widespread
in our society, tied as it is to motives of instinct, of interest, and of power.
So what can we say? We can only go on giving this philosopher of Köningsberg
the honor that is due to one of the founding fathers of classic modern thought,
to the principal author of the great European illuministic plan which yet–we
have to admit–was not realized according to his previsions. But we would,
at the same time, be forced, on the insistence of those who consider themselves
heirs and custodians of that plan (as frequently happens in recent times, for
example in the debate over the cultural roots of the European constitution) to
project the heritage of Kantian critical philosophy as a real “regulative
ideal” on which to build our future. According to this ideal (and never
as in this case does the “ideal” tend to distance itself, as an a
priori law, from the empirical facts of experience), mankind would be called
to self-determination on the basis of criteria of a reason that is abstract (one
that does not take tradition as its starting point) and universal (that is to
say, above the individual, and in which the individual is a casual function of
the human race, which would then be the great subject of historical progress).
Rationalistic “ordering”
But reality continues clamorously to give the lie to this project of rationalistic “ordering” of
the world. If, for example, one follows the tone of the majority of commentators
on the present day cultural and political situation, what stands out clearly
is the discrepancy between an effectual reality presented as a violent and immoral
struggle for power and a model of critical rationality that is failing to direct
experience towards higher ends, precisely because it is in its very epistemological
structure not to start off from experience, but to have to “construct” it
a priori. The bitter consequence of this is that often there are the same interests
at play to be used, as arguments in one’s own favor, that are the reminder
of an ideal of “pure” rationality, thereby justifying well-determined
positions–to the point that someone is always ready to point to the scarcity
of Kantian critical rigor as one of the profound motives for personal incoherence
and public immorality in our culture.
But, if we look closer, it is precisely in this stall of critical philosophy
that the sign of its victory must also be recognized. It can be noted, not only
and not so much, obviously, in those who refer explicitly to the powerful program
of rationalism of Kantian matrix, but also, and most of all, in those who seem
to take other roads, towards territories that would be found beyond Kantian reason,
if not against it: think of the many appeals that abound in our culture that
space be given (for example, in pedagogy and psychology) to what goes beyond
the cold and measurative–that is to say, objective rationality–and
is more akin to feeling, emotion and faith, understood as a merely subjective
faculty. So, we could say that Kant’s incredible geniality consisted in
having molded not only his own followers, but even his adversaries, in the sense
that he predetermined the horizon, the categories of judgment, and even the lexicon
which laid the base for tackling or not tackling certain problems of philosophy
and culture of our time.
The Kantian option
The most eloquent example we can give in this regard is that attitude of thought
(very much present today, not only in a good deal of philosophy of religion,
but in broad sectors of theology, even of Catholic theology) for which human
reason, precisely in order to safeguard God’s otherness, cannot ever admit
that the divine can make itself knowable and, furthermore, that the mystery can
enter into the sphere of experience, without falling into idolatry and anthropocentric
reduction. Well, all this would not be possible without the great Kantian option,
in which one needs to “put aside thought to make room for faith.” And
it is a significant fact that, separated from knowledge, the faith Kant speaks
of–which is the pure moral faith of reason–ends up, paradoxically,
converging with the defense of the inaccessibility of the divine spoken of by
a theology disincarnated from experience. What is wanted “other” than
reason has already been decided by reason itself.
But the question deserves to be reopened in its fundamental terms. In his Critique
of Pure Reason (1781), Kant has no doubts in pointing out the “stuff” of
human reason in his question of the unconditioned: “Human reason has this
peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions
which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore,
but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”
Finite and infinite
Yet, Kant continues (and here begins the great aporia of his questioning), these
questions have such a range that they force reason to abandon experience because,
on its part, experience is the domain of what one can measure sensibly only in
space and time and what must be subjected to our a priori categories. If the
unconditioned cannot be formalized in this way, it means that we can never know
it. If, on one hand, therefore, reason is forced by its own nature to ask about
real and infinite being, on the other hand, it is forced not to be able ever
to meet it in experience. But in this way the finite would diverge more and more
from the infinite, the measurements of science from the incommensurability of
metaphysics and the empirical world of phenomena from the ideal world of freedom.
This therefore is the new “transcendental” metaphysics of Kant: “science
of the limits of reason,” whose task is that of “staying on the boundaries,” determining–always
a priori–not only what is found within these boundaries (objective experience,
which is the work of the intellect), but also what lies beyond them, whose actual
existence or non-existence is of less interest than its mental reality, its ideal
immanence in reason itself. Here, the limits of reason are revealed as limits
in reason: for, if it is true that the latter could not exist without tending
to an infinite object, not being able to build this object as a “given,” it
curves towards the same path as its question so as to reabsorb in itself–in
the pure ideas of the soul, of the world and of God–that being which it
was unable to know outside itself. Here, perhaps, where we would least expect
it, we can find the first root of that disquieting phenomenon that we call nihilism.
(To be continued in the next issue. This is the first of two
articles)
The Life
1724 Immanuel Kant is born on April 22th in Königsberg, capital of Eastern
Prussia, the fourth of eleven children, six of whom died in childhood, of a family
of modest extraction (his father was a saddler). His mother was a follower of “pietism,” a
Lutheran sect which insisted on absolute rigor in religious practice. He attends
the Collegium Fridericianum, of pietist inspiration, a school of very severe
moral and religious formation.
1740 He enrolls at the Albertina University of Königsberg, where he studies
philosophy, mathematics and theology.
1755 He earns his doctorate and lectureship at the same university. For fifteen
years, he holds a large number of lessons in various disciplines, from logic
to physical geography, and leads a very active social life.
1770 He is finally named Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University
of Königsberg, where he remains teaching until 1796, refusing offers from
other universities.
1794 After publishing two books (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and
The End of All Things), he is prohibited by the Prussian government from continuing
what was defined as a denigration of Christianity. Subsequently, however, when
Frederic William III becomes king, in 1797, freedom of the press is restored
and Kant is able to continue his activity, vindicating freedom of speech and
thought.
1804 Kant dies on February 2nd in his poor house at Königsberg, after a
period in which, struck down by old age, he loses the use of his mental faculties.