The Philosophy of German Idealism 1/26 - Robbert A.

Veen

The Philosophy of German Idealism - Kant and Hegel

Introduction (1) Kant

WIZIQ, Monday January 18th 2010, 7 PM GMT

I have to begin somewhere so I thought I would begin with something

that can at least be interpreted as the actual beginning. There is no doubt
historically that what we call "German Idealism", basically the philosophy
of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, is the crowning achievement of what
we call the Enlightenment. Kant himself may be labeled as being both the
end product of the Enlightenment and the beginning of German Idealism.
So today I will make a few remarks about the nature of the Enlightenment
project as present in Kantianism. My aim is to present a couple of issues
that will guide us through the upcoming lectures when we study the
various aspects of the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. Most important
however is the summary of Kantianism that I will give here.
Now the word Enlightenment has received a whole lot of definitions that
we won't be troubled by in this course. The most general statement we
can make about it, I suppose, is, that Enlightenment designates a period
in history in which the Western world of science, technology and rational
politics came to existence. We are dealing with the rise of some kind of
rational thought, a new way of discovering truth and a transformation of
the societies in the western world around ideas of liberty, rational
knowledge and human autonomy. Part of the common consensus is the
idea that we have an early period in the Enlightenment, in which we find a
new mood of rational discourse as in the Essays by Montaigne and the
works of French philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot. And then there is
the general acceptance of a second and decisive period in the
Enlightenment, in which the philosophy of Descartes and Spinoza, Locke
and Hume was published.
In the session on Friday we will be discussing texts in more detail. Before
we dive into a text by Immanuel Kant that seems to be the first attempt
at defining the idea of Enlightenment, I am going to present to you
another text from an earlier period in western philosophy that
encapsulates the mood or spirit of the era in a concise way and presents
us precisely with the dilemma's and questions that we will encounter in

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Kant and Hegel later on. So on Friday we will be talking about the "Dialog
about Freedom" by Voltaire and "What is Enlightenment" by Immanuel
Kant. That's for Friday.
Today I wanted to just sketch out some of the issues that we will be
dealing with later on. This week I will be talking about Kant and next week
I will discuss Hegel.
So, what can we say about German Idealism by way of a general
introduction? First of all, it is a somewhat established idea that German
Idealism developed between 1781 when Kant published the first of his
three Critiques (The Critique of Pure Reason) and 1821 when Hegel
published his Lectures on the Philosophy of Right. We are talking about a
period of just forty years which makes it one of the shortest periods in the
history of Philosophy that has a coherent character if not a common idea
or goal. Just the pace of the work that has been produced in this period is
breathtaking. German philosopher Richard Kroner in his "From Kant to
Hegel", published in 1921 - a full century after the end of German Idealism
- speaks about the "eschatological mood" of the period, a sense of a truth
coming into existence, transforming the world. In a sense it is the
intellectual counterpart of the mood in which the French Revolution took
place and in many ways it is that historical event that triggered it.
Both Kant and Hegel speak directly about the "great event" in history
that is taking place in their life time. Kant wrote that humanity was now in
the process of answering the questions that had occupied it for centuries.
"There is only the critical path…human reason will come to full
satisfaction (it. mine) in all matters that its desire for knowledge has
occupied with in vain over the centuries." (KdrV, B 884) In his "What is
Enlightenment?" (WiE; 1784) Kant defines the Enlightenment as a new
attitude or mood of thought, that is in direct opposition to what had gone
before. The definition he gives is decidedly negative, deriving its contents
primarily from what it is opposing. "Enlightenment", Kant writes, "is man's
emergence from his self-imposed immaturity (or nonage as some have it,
or tutelage)." We have here, a negative definition. So it's an "emergence"
from something, a move beyond a dominant system of thought and a
movement out of a social order, that is now seen as completely obsolete
and detrimental. What is this immaturity then? He goes on: "Immaturity is
the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another."
"Guidance" from another can have of course various forms. It refers here
to the dictates of religious authority for example, or the identification of
truth with the Biblical text, or to any kind of political or social force that
imposes a worldview or prescribes what can be thought and said.
Opposed to all of that, Kant stresses that in this new period, there is a
new motto, defining a new attitude: "Have courage to use your own
understanding!"

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First of all you must notice the double strategy as it were. On the one
hand the Enlightenment phraseology is meant to be descriptive. We are
living in an age of reason, and Frederick the Great has done so much
already etc. On the other hand the language is prescriptive: we need to
adopt another attitude, we need to have the courage to start moving
away from our immaturity etc. So which is it? Is it happening? Or are we
under obligation to make it happen? Hegel of course would argue that
philosophy cannot be about moral imperatives like that, because they are
abstract and detached from reality. The normative should be found in the
real. Kant is not doing that according to Hegel, in fact he is setting up a
norm as separate from reality.
It also seems to imply secondly that reason is exercised by individuals,
that have a single point of view from which to understand the world as a
whole. That is not without problems. It seems to imply at first sight a
complete relativism, because it is not at all clear that individuals would -
by using their own reason - would come to any common truth. Universality
is however restored when it can be established that reason is a universal
and universalizing faculty in all of mankind. Individuals using their faculty
of reason exercise a faculty that is shared among humans. (Actually one
might say: a particular usage of reason is defining what humanity is, but
let's not be too skeptical at the start.)
All humans? All of mankind? But does Kant really mean that this
Enlightenment is there for all peoples? Is the Enlightenment a process
without specific historic conditions or context, so to say and are people in
Australia challenged by it at the same time and in the same manner as
the Europeans of his day? We may see here the birth of what almost two
centuries later was called Europacentrism, the identification of universal
human reason with the particular shape it received in Western European
history.
And third, it says that "courage" is needed. There is a sense in which the
new humanity of the Enlightenment has to give up its comforting
traditions and prejudices in which it can live with a sense of security and
belonging. It has to use reason against the ol order of things. At the same
time, it should leave that old order intact in so far as social order and
political hegemony is concerned. Isn't there a real tension or even
contradiction? I think it comes close to what we find in another defining
moment in philosophical history, when we hear Socrates argue that the
life of reflection, of questions and arguments about the good and the true,
is a dictate from the gods and in that sense higher in value than the
demands of the State. In the Apology of Socrates Plato argues for this "life
of reflection" as surpassing the State and all the comforts of social life. So
far so good.
Plato however also has Socrates argue in the Kritoon against any scheme

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for his escape by constructing - like a good sophist - the State's argument:
you are escaping Socrates and thereby you say to everyone that the Laws
of the State should not be upheld and so by your escape from judgment
you do exactly what we accused you of, i.e. destroying the very
foundations of the allegiance to the State. What would happen if everyone
flees from the administration of the Laws like that? Laws would have no
authority. And how can you even think of this, because the State has
nurtured you, educated you, provided you with the conditions to live etc.
Is this not contradictory in the same way as Kant's refusal to break with
political tradition and authority while demanding the courage to use one's
own reason? On the one hand we find Plato arguing for the divine right to
question everything in a free state, even against the state, and on the
other we find him arguing for some type of political patriotism that would
not allow you to go against the decisions of the State. The answer of
course lies precisely in the distinction between the application of political
power (let's call it government) and the State as such, but that is not here
yet, not even very clearly in Hegel, but that's a distinction we would need
to make in order to clarify this tension between these seemingly separate
and conflicting loyalties.
Now, to Kant this "Enlightenment" as a transformation of thought was
only a prelude to what he calls "the Enlightened Age". When everybody
would be able to use his own reason, we would see an age in which
rational, autonomous thought pervades the whole of society. "If it is now
asked, 'Do we presently live in an enlightened age?' the answer is, 'No,
but we do live in an age of enlightenment.'" So what is the main obstacle
for this complete liberation? Is it the State, including the benign rule of
Frederick the Great? "As matters now stand," he continues, "a great deal
is still lacking in order for men as a whole to be, or even to put themselves
into a position to be able without external guidance to apply
understanding confidently to religious issues." (See p. 19 of the text I've
uploaded on WIZIQ) So we can deduce from that passage that essentially
the opposition to be dealt with in the process of coming to this
Enlightened Age is organized religion.
However, Kant is far from telling us that we need to break the shackles of
organized religion, or of political bondage for that matter. It's for that
reason that a commentator like Susan Neiman has argued that we should
read the entire text as an address to King Frederick.
Which seems obvious when you think about Kant's rather flattering
statement that the age of Enlightenment is the Age of Frederick, or when
he states that an enlightened ruler would say: argue as much as you will,
but obey. Political dominance stays in place. It is interesting to compare
this to the position of Karl Marx, who also positioned his thinking by
tracing its origin in the Enlightenment. Here we find a connection between

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the Enlightenment and the end to political domination that is completely
missing in the Kantian version of the Enlightenment, but might have been
a part of what Kant called the Enlightened Age. Alex Callinicos stated the
relationship like this:

"As at once heir and critic of the Enlightenment, Marx sought to expose the social
limits of its aspiration to universal emancipation through the power of reason by
tracing the material roots of its ideals to what he called the “hidden abode” of
production. At the same time, he radicalized these ideals into the ethical and political
drive to rid the world of all forms of exploitation and oppression—what as a young
man he proclaimed to be “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in
which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being.” 1

So Callinicos is telling us here that according to Marx the Enlightenment

had inner limitations precisely in the area of social and political structures.
The material basis of society was forgotten in the notion of liberation
through the free use of reason. Precisely this forgetfulness however also
limited the aspirations of the Enlightenment to liberation. Social and
economic oppression was not seen as a problem. One of the fundamental
paradoxes however of the Enlightenment was this production of new
rational ways of producing goods, that actually strengthened this
oppression. The great danger to social freedom actually was the realized
Enlightenment in the area of economic production, underneath the
banner of total liberty.
He cleverly introduces a distinction between two ways of using reason in
order to avoid the conclusion that the Enlightenment can be identified
with political or religious revolution. So how does this Kantian distinction
work and how does it avoid revolution? In the preliminary stage of the
Enlightenment, Kant tells us, one must make a distinction between the
private and the public use of reason. Clergy e.g. have to obey their
Churches that hired them and teach in accordance with dogma and
established doctrine. The same goes especially for public officials. There
the motto really is: "Argue all you want, but obey!" The private use of
reason is restricted by the necessities of public life. A soldier cannot
question his orders any more than a cleric or an appointed official.
However, all of these restrictions come to bear in the area of the private
use of reason. As scholars, as participants in the learned community,
these same clergy should have the right to examine and criticize the
established doctrine without hindrance. That means that Kant does not
advocate the idea of the public debate that we have identified as the
hallmark of a free society. The public use of reason does not imply any
kind of public space where all arguments are heard, it's not the general
public that is debating the issues, but the learned, the scholars among
themselves. It is not about what we would call the "public debate." Yet
1
http://www.istendency.net/pdf/CallinicosHolocaust.pdf

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Kant calls this use of reason public, not just because its results are
published and accessible to everyone, but particularly in the sense that it
is for the good of the public, of the whole of society that such a free
debate takes place.
Still, there is a political function for this debate which Kant hints at. When
we must struggle against "the external obstacles of governments that
misunderstand their own function" (p. 22-23) there is even greater need
for freedom of expression. One might think here of a public debate among
scholars - professors of law, religion and philosophy - that would lead to
changes in government policy. All of that would define the public use of
reason, which is a scholarly debate among equals and not a confrontation
of opinions and ideas by the general public.
So, in conclusion, we find that to Kant the Enlightenment is a period of
liberation, of the acquisition of a new freedom of thought and expression,
that would be the preparation for a truly Enlightened Age. Especially it is
an age in which people learn to question the imposed traditions of
institutional religion, the dogma's and moral teachings of the Church.
What is needed is an atmosphere in which the public uses of reason is
encouraged and permitted by the State.
Kant's critical philosophy can now be seen as the execution of the
program of this self-liberation. The three main works of Kant both
presuppose and ground the notion of Enlightenment. Though
paradoxically at first sight, it is only through a process of critique, i.e. by
establishing the limits of reason, that reason can be free.
The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is an examination of the limitations of
human reason in order to establish the kind of science and metaphysics
that is still possible.
The Critique of Practical Reason (1784) is an examination of the formal
structure and presuppositions of everyday moral judgments, as they are
determined by the consistency of reason with itself.
And finally in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790) the harmony
between our sensuous faculties and reason is examined as it expresses
itself in judgments about beauty and finality.
In all three Critiques the unity and coherence of Reason with itself seems
to be the goal of the exploration of human knowledge - in short, the
autonomy of human reason is expressed in all three areas of human
knowledge.
So we turn first to the general ideas of the Critique of Pure Reason.
A fair and balanced account of what human reason is capable of, Kant
argues, must avoid the unfounded optimism of the kind of rationalism that
was in vogue in Germany (the system of Leibniz and Christian Wolff).
Rationalism did not accept that our conceptual understanding of the world
has no true referent, because it simply consists of so-called analytic

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propositions. An analytic proposition however only clarifies our knowledge,
but does not enhance it. Human knowledge always has to start with
experience. Nevertheless, the emphasis on experience alone is overly
pessimistic about human knowledge, as Kant found particularly in the
philosophy of David Hume. Although it is true that all our knowledge must
start with experience of some sort, it does not follow that knowledge only
comes from experience. Experience is a necessary condition of
knowledge, but not the sufficient condition. It needs the concept as well.
So the question must be posed how human reason combines concepts
and experience to arrive at knowledge. Kant deduces this necessity
primarily from the phenomenon of the so-called synthetic judgments a
priori. What does he mean by that?
Synthetic means that we have real knowledge expressed in these
statements, e.g. the statement "lead balls are heavy." There is nothing in
the predicate "heavy" that is already contained in the concept of a lead
ball. That means that the statement is not analytical. We need experience
to know that lead balls are heavy. The judgment then follows the
experience and is therefore "after the fact" or in Latin: a posteriori. All
analytical judgments on the contrary are a priori in this approach, e.g. the
statement that a circle is round. But that does not contain knowledge: it is
merely an inference from the concept of a circle. If the predicate is
contained in the subject we call the judgment a priori and analytical, if it is
not, we call it a posteriori (according to its genesis) and synthetic
(according to its structure).
However, there seems to be a class of (universal and necessary)
judgments that is both a priori in the sense that they do not presuppose
experience and synthetic in the sense they do seem to presuppose (or at
least are valid for) experience. Such synthetic judgments a priori are e.g.
"everything that happens has a cause." Kant argues that the concept of a
cause is not part of the concept of an event. Experience alone would not
be able to legitimize this statement. No matter how many events we
observe, it would never ground the general statement that "everything
must have a cause". Experience cannot ground universality or necessity.
For that reason David Hume concluded that the judgment of causality was
merely probabilistic, based on a generalization of previous experiences
and represented a psychological habit. Nevertheless, a statement like this
seems to be important for any kind of scientific explanation. The Critique
of Pure reason must then be the examination of judgments like this in
order to find the mysterious X that provides the solid foundation for
reason to make this kind of judgment. On what basis can cause and effect
be combined in this universal and necessary connection?
We will discuss in some detail the various steps in which Kant searches
for this X in later lectures. (Lectures 4 - 7) For now we have to make just

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one remark. By finding the limit of the use of reason - which can be
condensed into this statement: reason is limited by the general conditions
of all possible experience - the road is open for a new field of
understanding. The Critique of Pure Reason is in a way the necessary
preparation for the real metaphysics, which is the speculative knowledge
of that what is possible by real freedom. The real motivation of reason is
not to arrive at a theoretical understanding of the major metaphysical
ideas of God, immortality and freedom, but to approach them as objects
of faith. I.e. to understand them as necessary conditions of moral living.
The Critique of Pure Reason merely clarifies what had been confused
before. In traditional metaphysics, reason went beyond its inner limits by
moving into a realm beyond any experience. By accepting the limits of
theoretical understanding of the world, we can now see more clearly how
it is practical reason that shapes human morality and politics. As long as
we tried to establish the precepts of morality on the basis of theoretical
reason, they could never be secure. Theoretical reason is bound by the
limits and conditions of possible experience. Freedom however is the
potential to establish something in reality that was never there before.
Freedom belongs to the realm of the purely intelligible, not the world of
experience. Only because we limit theoretical reason therefore are we
able to establish practical reason. We will talk about Practical Reason in
detail in lectures 8 -12.
What concerns me now for the moment is the connection there is
between the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Pure Reason.
One of the major concepts of the Enlightenment is the idea of the
autonomy of human reason. The immaturity that mankind has to escape
from is defined as the lack of courage or the laziness that prompts us not
to use our own mind, but to rely on the authority or tradition of others.
Now, we have seen that reason as theoretical reason is autonomous in the
sense that the major rule of its proper application is given by the self-
imposed limitation to accept the conditions of possible experience.
Theoretical reason is autonomous in so far as it accepts this limit but
within it, it can achieve an adequate theoretical understanding of the
world. Only when it reaches beyond these conditions of possible
experience, will it run into inconsistencies and unfounded claims.
Whenever we consider what should be done, i.e. when we engage in
moral reasoning, we exercise the faculty of what Kant calls
"transcendental freedom". Now this seems to lead to a paradox: if we
exercise freedom, how is it possible that we have to deal with moral rules
and restraints? Kant's argument here is analogous to the argument that
he gave in the Critique of Pure Reason. If the exercise of theoretical
reason is itself bound by certain structures, summarized as the
"conditions of possible experience" then this might also be the case when

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discuss practical or moral reason. The human will or volition is determined
by certain principles that function like imperatives. There are demands
imposed upon our will. Again Kant tries to establish that these principles
cannot be given by authority but only by the exercise of our human
reason. If moral reasoning itself is only possible because of these
principles, then it is established that their application must lead to the
determination of what is good.
Now in order to show that Kant introduces a distinction between two
kinds of imperatives. On the one hand we have hypothetical imperatives
that express a condition that needs to be met whenever we try to effect a
change in the world. If we want to achieve certain goals, we need to act in
a definite manner. For example, when we want to construct a bridge, we
would need beams of a certain length and we would need to know how to
put them together in a certain way. From the way our moral reasoning
normally operates, Kant deduces that the imperatives of morality do not
function in the same manner. We normally would not say that we need to
fulfill our promises in order to achieve a certain goal. We would be more
likely to say that we fulfill our promises because a promise always needs
to be fulfilled. We would maybe speak of our duty to stick to our given
word.
That leads us then to a second class of imperatives, that Kant calls
"categorical". There are no "ifs" in a categorical imperative, since we are
supposed to obey them under whatever circumstances. The idea that
keeping a promise e.g. would be conditioned by some goal we set
ourselves, would lead us into a contradiction. The meaning if a promise
certainly is inherently unconditional. The act that I promised can however
be in contradiction with a given goal that I set myself. Would that change
anything? Kant argues that it does not. Reason would be self-
contradictory if we on the one hand accept a promise as an unconditional,
categorical statement, and on the other would think that we should only
act accordingly if that is a condition of our achieving certain goals. If we
accept this contradiction, all promises would become meaningless.
The reasonable principle that grounds all my moral decisions would
therefore have to be something like the respect for the law. Only a being
endowed with reason would be able to feel such a respect. Duty is actually
defined as the necessity of an act based on respect for the (moral) law.
The major principle and criterion of all moral reasoning that leads to moral
action should therefore be, that the subjective principle of my individual
actions (which Kant calls a maxime) should be able to function as a law.
That is the first of three ways of formulating the principle. (1) The personal
guideline for my actions should be such that a reasonable person can
think of it as a general law.
One might think of this general rule - the categorical imperative - as the

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practical counterpart of the rule that all exercise of theoretical reason
stands under the condition of the possibility of experience. When I
consider breaking a promise, I might reflect on this possibility of making
the personal guideline or maxim of that action a universal law. What if all
people would break their promises? Well, then of course, promising would
be a meaningless act. My reason would be in contradiction with itself. It
would lead to an assessment of the need to break a promise and it would
lead to the evaluation that promises should be kept under all
circumstances.
It does not follow from this necessarily that I would not be able to break
my promise, but I would never be able to do that without a bad
conscience. Here and there Kant suggests that if we know how to behave,
we will be able to do so as well - a modern version of what is called
Socratic determinism. Understanding a moral rule implies obeying it. But
he gives no further argument for that statement.
There are other versions of this categorical imperative to be found, such
as (2) the principle that one should act in such a way that other
reasonable persons are treated as goals and not as means to an end. Or
(3) the idea that the reasonable will of every person is legislative, i.e. that
the free will of humans is expressed in the universality of moral law, and
never in the contingent space of desires and the aspiration for happiness.
Whenever we act on the basis of our egotistical interests, our will is not
free and autonomous, because it is determined by our bodily cravings.
The reasonable will then serve just the purpose of achieving satisfaction
of various kinds. In all three versions of the basic moral law - categorical
imperative, respect for persons, free will as autonomy - the identity of
practical reason, its coherence with itself, seems to provide the basic
structure of the argument.
We come now to the third Critique, after this all too brief exposition of
Kant's basic argument in the Critique of Practical Reason. We will discuss
Kant's aesthetics in more detail in lectures 13 and 14 in this series. We
have moved on now from the domain of theoretical propositions through
the domain of moral reasoning to a third dimension of human life. We can
refer to that domain in short hand by saying that we will now be dealing
with feelings or judgments of taste. We are talking about, of course, the
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Urteils-kraft).
In the first part of this work Kant deals with aesthetic judgments in a
proper sense, judgments about beauty in nature and art. Purely sensuous
enjoyment of objects of nature and works of art are a matter of taste and
predilection alone. In that sense we cannot argue about matters of taste.
But our judgments about beauty are not simply like that. In principle they
are objective or at least in some sense they claim to be. When I say that I
find something beautiful I do not simply mean that I happen to like it, as if

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it were a completely contingent and inexplicable statement of fact. Most
often I will say that something "is" beautiful as if beauty was some
objective reality that I can treat like facts.
Kant then raises the question how such objective statements about
beauty are possible. What Kant had to defend is the thesis that an act of
aesthetic appreciation does not have the kind of validity as a judgment in
theoretical reason, but nevertheless still is a judgment. We cannot say like
we do in theoretical reasoning that the concepts we use to determine
beauty stand under the general condition of experience. If that was the
cases, the concept of beauty would be analogous to, say, the concept of
causality or substance. There seems to be a gap however between the
feelings of the enjoyment of beauty on the one hand and the concepts
with which I express those feelings in a judgment. There is no congruity
between sensuous experience and concepts here, because the concepts
do not express the universal conditions of experience, like they do in
theoretical reason. On the other hand, when we drop the concepts
altogether, we are simply left with these feelings as they occur and we
have no aesthetic judgment - just an expression of personal taste.
Again, Kant answers the question by analysis of the autonomous way by
which human reason comes to form aesthetic judgments. What goes on
when we pass an aesthetic judgment? Here Kant introduces the concept
of disinterestedness. The object of such a judgment is taken as something
particular and seen as just by itself, under abstraction of all other
interests the observer might have. This in itself gives rise to certain
regularities in my judgment that other people can relate to. Without the
intrusion of some private interest, I can relate to the way a particular
object is seen. Some ,kind of universal faculty of appreciation comes into
play. Other people may never share the experience of the thing as such,
but they can understand how I see a particular thing. The faculty of
producing images - which was also apart of theoretical reason, but
severely limited in that context - is now supposed to be free. In theoretical
reason I want to state that something is this or that: it's about facts. But in
aesthetics, I take something to be (like) this or that. In an aesthetic
judgment I express a particular relationship between a particular object
and my feelings or sensuous experience. I express the object as
something that is coherent with my feelings of enjoyment.
Kant expresses very much the same idea with reference to the finality of
a thing. We can see that some things are called beautiful or pleasing
because of the relationship they have with their goal. So we can say that a
particular building is beautiful - we might rather call it efficient or well-
constructed - because it is suited to its goal or use. The same goes for
objects in nature, when we consider the construction of a bird's wing for
example.

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Apart from beauty in this sense, which is connected to purpose, there is
something called "free beauty." Kant mentions the beauty of flowers as
such a free beauty, because the colors of flowers according to Kant serve
no purpose - which of course may be true in a human context but
certainly not if seen from an evolutionary standpoint. Kant however
accepted that such "free" beauty is only possible - and meaningful - to
beings such as we are, that can ascribe such purpose without goal to
things in experience.
Ultimately, the ground for aesthetic judgments lies in the inner harmony
between human reason and its sensuous faculties. To call something a
thing of beauty presupposes finality without goals, and expresses this
harmony of reason with other faculties.
With this third Critique the principle of the Critique of Reason - the self-
critique of Reason - comes to an end so it seems. The project of the
Enlightenment is the attempt to transform human life by expressing the
autonomy of human reason in knowledge, moral praxis and aesthetic
appreciation. Science, morality and art must be freed from the restraints
of authoritarian metaphysics, revealed morality as well as the pure
subjectivism of taste. It is the end of the dogmatism in religion as well as
metaphysics. It changes radically our perspective of how we know
anything about the world around us. Only by limiting ourselves to what
humans can know within the context of experience, can we know with
certainty.
The ultimate and most discussed expression of this self-limitation is
undoubtedly Kant's distinction between reality as it appears to a human
being (appearance; Erscheinung) and the Thing-in-itself or noumenal
world, that is the aim of metaphysics. Kant limits theoretical reason to an
understanding of appearances, but understands a human being to be also
an inhabitant of the noumenal world. Despite the many problems that this
Kantian solution raises, and despite the major criticism directed at it by
later thinkers, it is still a wonderfully constructed philosophical edifice.
We must come to some sort of conclusion at this moment and I will try do
so by stressing just this one point. Only through a careful examination of
the limits of reason, can reason be free. Reason ought to be expressed as
autonomous, as freedom itself. This longing for autonomy is a defining
trait of German Idealism. It was taken up by Fichte and his doctrine of the
Infinite Ego, by Schelling in his work on the life of the Absolute and by
Hegel in his entire work, when he identified Spirit with Freedom.
Next time we will see how Hegel saw the new era and after that we will
plunge into the major works of Kant.

R.A. Veen © 2010

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