THE PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM

Volume XXX, No. 2, June 1999

KANT AND THE QUESTION OF MEANING

GARRATH WILLIAMS

In this essay I would like to raise an important question for the overall direc-
tion of Kant’s philosophy. The question is large but, at least as it seems to me,
rarely discussed with any degree of explicitness; it concerns the issue of what
we are to make of our freedom—the freedom Kant’s critical philosophy has
surely helped to place at the centre of modern Western thought. In short, it is a
question about meaning.
It is part of Kant’s greatness that he is always determined to embrace human
freedom, and does not evade that ultimate question for the free agent: what may
be the meaning of my own and others’ lives? But although this problem haunts
Kant, to the point of preoccupation in his last years, I wish to suggest that his
attempts to answer the free person’s question are not compelling. While I think
Kant is correct to relate the question of meaning to concerns of dignity, personal
fulfilment, and hope for our common future, he has recurring difficulties in
understanding the reality of situated moral action and its possible effects—
something that will not be surprising to anyone familiar with his division of real-
ity into ‘sensible’ and ‘intelligible’ aspects. However, this division is itself moti-
vated by the problem of meaning, inasmuch as it is intended to secure the dignity
of the rational agent by allowing us to posit his or her freedom. For the purposes
of this article, I shall say relatively little about whether Kant is correct to seek the
very strong conception of freedom that he does, and I shall ask whether other
assumptions may not be responsible for the difficulties he encounters in under-
standing and granting significance to our worldly attempts at moral action.
This essay, then, proceeds as follows. The first section briefly investigates the
problem as Kant discovers it, following his attempt to make sense of human
agency under the idea of a ‘Categorical Imperative.’ The second section looks di-
rectly at his thoughts on the question of meaning in human affairs. Third, we turn
to some reasons for thinking Kant may have curtailed full examination of the
problem, by examining the adequacy of his answers. The fourth part suggests that

115
 WILLIAMS

Kant, whose faith in practical reason seems at first sight quite complete, actually
comes upon these difficulties through a lack of faith in the practical fruits of
reason. In conclusion I raise a further question about the space left open by the
spirit of his critical thought, as to whether Kant’s ambition to produce a single
moral-theoretical principle may not itself cause difficulties in discovering
meaningful individual and collective activity.

I AN OVERVIEW OF KANT’S MORALITY

Famously and notoriously, Kant’s moral philosophy places the individual’s

‘struggle with temptation’ at the very centre of morality. On the one hand, there
is the plural, disorderly ‘rabble’ of inclinations;1 on the other, a picture of
reason’s dictatorial authority embodied in a grand ‘Categorical Imperative,’
which commands our will with an inflexible dignity. But despite his insistence
that reason can and should depend on no authority beyond itself, it is also widely
known that Kant turns to a personal God, holding that such a belief or faith is
directly commanded by ‘practical reason.’ Small wonder, an on-looker might
observe, that critics of Kant have seen in his thought no more than a vindication
of a basically Christian belief system.
Closer attention to the Kantian Imperative itself may not strengthen our hope
of finding a successful vindication of freedom, in terms of freedom itself. Kant
is notorious for the strictness with which he interprets this apparently abstract
formula: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the
same time will that it become a universal law [i.e., a law for the willing of all
other rational beings].’2 Few indeed have been satisfied with the historically
limited and socially conditioned implications Kant believes will apply to all
rational beings, at all times and in all places—even to those as yet unknown
rational creatures on other planets, whose existence he never doubts.3 ‘Thou
shalt not lie,’ he tells us, not even to the would-be murderer who demands to
know the whereabouts of his intended victim. It is surely fair to see, in such a
view, the results not of ‘pure practical reason’ but of a secularised yet
unmistakably pietist fervour.
But the worry is not, at root, that Kant’s own faith in laws and law-likeness,
as much Newtonian as religious, distorts his interpretation of the Categorical
Imperative. There is much excellent work4 showing that Kant’s view of what his
Imperative demands, though unjustified, leaves space for markedly more
flexible and plausible interpretations—something I shall take for granted here.5
Rather, the much wider worry that occupies many readers of Kant concerns his
very understanding of an imperative: must not any law limit freedom? Law and
freedom are surely opposites, and it seems plausible indeed to suppose that an

116
 KANT AND MEANING

alarming contradiction sits at the centre of Kant’s entire moral project, that of
devising the law which freedom will give to itself.
I share some of this concern. Yet I think the worries that lie behind it are both
less simple and much more important than some of the more obvious accounts
of Kant’s difficulty: for example, the claim that law and freedom are simply
doomed to stand in contradiction; or the concern that any law will have to be
vindicated by reference to an alien authority (perhaps the God which Kant thinks
‘practical reason’ must postulate). However sympathetically we reinterpret
Kant’s ‘moral law,’ we are (I shall suggest) still left with that very far-reaching
question of the worldly meaning of this freedom for the Kantian enterprise—and
for ourselves. And this question, I wish to argue, requires us once more to pay
attention to the nature of Kant’s moral-theoretical quest, so often set aside in
friendly discussions of Kant’s Imperative, and to question the ultimate ambition
behind it.

II THE PROBLEM OF MEANING IN KANT

Kant’s struggles with the problem of meaning are evident both in and beyond
his moral thought, with its twin poles of our freedom and our finitude. Kant’s
intent in asserting both is to go beyond, respectively, empiricism and rational-
ism. In terms of the question of meaning, however, the former seems both more
salient and of greater concern to Kant. (I return below to the danger to our
dignity that Kant discerns in broadly rationalist projects, suggesting that Kant
himself may be thought, in certain respects, to have neglected this threat.) I shall
not, here, try to discuss Kant’s reasons for thinking that empiricism could never
allow for morality, and must leave aside vexed questions of ‘compatibilism’ and
the like. Suffice to say that Kant believes that empiricism creates what we might
call an external view of the agent as a mechanism, determined at both psycho-
logical and physical levels.6 Whether this is correct or not, the important point
here is that human beings can indeed be thought of as determined in both ways,
to the extent that (1) we sometimes treat their self-interpretations as illusory and
delusory; and that (2) we can understand the dark doubt, that all our self-
interpretations might be like this.7
Beyond all theoretical difficulties, then, Kant’s major problem with an empiri-
cist worldview centres on the question of human dignity. Kant watches the ‘mel-
ancholy haphazardness’8 of human affairs with profound doubts and uncertainty
about the extent to which we truly do exercise our reason and agency; but what
saves the whole is the postulate of our freedom, that we are reasoning beings
notwithstanding all ‘appearances.’ At what we might, for shorthand, call the em-
piricist limit where freedom is quite lost, the spectacle is simply that of mere
subjects, thrown back and forth by their desires, their wants of each other, their

117
 WILLIAMS

inevitable antagonisms. The picture is one quite devoid of meaning: not that it is
one of evil, merely of utter amoralism. Without meaningful choice among its
members, the world promises nothing but haphazardness and chance and folly,
and only boredom and indifferentism among those who look on.
It is a sad irony, then, that Kant himself finds the world, both past and present,
close to presenting such a prospect. For this there are, I think, two main reasons.
In biographical terms, one cannot but note Kant’s religious faith which, although
it was at some sure remove from institutional Christianity, largely endorses
Christian other-worldliness. And this is linked, complexly, to a more systematic
factor: Kant finds no theoretical bridge across that ‘great gulf fixed’9 between
free and sensible realms, a gulf so famously drawn in his ‘Third Antinomy.’10
Kantian judgment fails to cross this barrier, to discern freedom and reason in the
world of appearances.
With Kant’s increasing years—and of course, the critical philosophy is the
work of an old man—we see melancholia become a more marked and persistent
theme in his writings. This melancholy is related to the question of meaning
both in terms of individual dignity or fulfilment and in terms of hope for our
common future.11 For the individual, the sum total of one’s pleasures and pains
is easy to decide: for it will always fall below zero.12 By implication, he who
looks for joy as vindication of this life is doomed to disappointment. One
soldiers on, kept back from suicide only by the Imperative’s command to pre-
serve one’s humanity and faith in God’s future world where morality will find
concord with happiness. For the collectivity, Kant’s writings on history postulate
human progress in much the same way as the moral writings postulate God and
another life—that is, against any tangible evidence. History is to be thought of
as progressing despite the fact, as Kant often admits it, that there is little sign of
this. We hope to trace the results of a hidden hand behind the wars, famines,
disease, chance, and sheer human folly that constitute the course of historical
events; yet we hope against hope, for ‘the end of all things which go through the
hands of human beings . . . is folly.’13
Both these melancholy stories come together in an especially revealing
passage:

If it is a sight worthy of a divinity to see a virtuous man struggling with adversity and tempta-
tions to evil and yet holding out against them, it is a sight most unworthy, I shall not say of a
divinity but even of the most ordinary but well-disposed human being to see the human race
from period to period taking steps upward toward virtue and soon after falling back just as
deeply into vice and misery. To watch this tragedy for a while might be moving and instructive,
but the curtain must eventually fall. For in the long run it turns into a farce; and even if the actors
do not tire of it, because they are fools, the spectator does, when one or another act gives him
sufficient grounds for gathering that the never-ending piece is forever the same.14

118
 KANT AND MEANING

The personal struggle, with adversity and joylessness, is juxtaposed with that
seemingly hopeless struggle of the race, for progress in our common life. The
solution, however, is similar in structure in the two cases—Kant’s ‘postulates’
of practical reason, the ‘idea’ of progress.
In the case of the individual, Kant becomes increasingly less hopeful that virtue
leads to happiness (such optimism is still visible in the lectures on ethics he was
delivering roughly at the time of the first Critique’s publication). Parts of the
Groundwork plainly show Kant’s growing impatience with the ways of the world
around him, while in the Critique of Practical Reason the central ‘dialectic,’ or
conflict, faced by practical reason is the worldly disunion of virtue and happiness.
For Kant (against more superficial readings, but quite in accord with common
sense) does not doubt that happiness is part of the good; yet he finds no empirical
grounds to suggest that the good will is fated to earthly happiness.15 The ultimate
source of the postulates with which that Critique closes (immortality, God, and
the highest good) is Kant’s demand for some connection between these two
aspects of the good, which if it will not be found in experience must be ‘a
priori’—and this, in practical terms, is to say that it must be quite other-worldly.
Schopenhauer will offer us the natural misreading of Kant here, the idea that
virtuous struggle needs, at least practically, the promise of reward.16 But I hope
it may be clear that Kant is dealing with a much less vulgar difficulty, one in
which science had earlier failed him as much as the moral endeavour does now:
how we are to find dignity, or meaning, in our struggle with an unfathomable
world, whose goods—and evils—are scattered with appalling caprice? Yet the
challenges of Kant’s solution are not difficult to discern, both for the individual
and the collective.
For the virtuous man, there is the assurance of a divinity’s witness, and
other-worldly reward. Of course, this idea may offer existential solace to some,
yet can just as reasonably generate the protests of Job at the needless, unde-
served, and unasked tribulations of life in this world. Kant indeed discusses
Job’s plight, with marked sympathy.17 As all the goods of the world fall away
from him, Job protests to the God who appears to have forsaken him. Kant gives
short shrift to those friends or rather, as he rightly implies, false friends who
claim that justice is surely being served upon Job, though they cannot say what
he is supposed to have done wrong. Yet Kant’s account of God’s intervention, in
which Job is shown the wisdom of His inscrutable ways, is rather less easy to
accept. Here, the theodicy which Kant denies us in the rest of the essay leaps out
from the page—a leap of faith indeed!

For God deigned to lay before Job’s eyes the wisdom of his creation, especially its inscrutability.
He allowed him glimpses into the beautiful side of creation . . . but also, by contrast, into its
horrible side. . . . And yet God thereby demonstrates an order and maintenance of the whole

119
 WILLIAMS

which proclaim a wise creator, even though his ways, inscrutable to us, must at the same time
remain hidden. . . .18

This turn to a theodicy, albeit an oxymoronic one of ‘demonstrated

inscrutability,’ indicates that such reflection upon the individual’s struggle with
adversity is unlikely to be far removed from Kant’s thoughts on history.
In these reflections upon the course of our collective life, Kant seeks to vindi-
cate the obvious worldly aim of moral striving, the hope of a better future for
humankind. But the difficulty, as Kant sees it, is that in the collective story indi-
vidual moral action is doomed to be effaced, because wisdom is not a human but
a divine quantity. It is only true wisdom, in fact omniscience, that would allow a
person to see what would be required for things to turn out for the best—in just
the same way that finding personal happiness is beyond the powers of human
reason.19 Instead, history exhibits that costly consequence of our freedom to
which Hannah Arendt once referred as ‘the haphazardness and moral irresponsi-
bility inherent in a plurality of agents.’20 Without a system of coercive law to
unify the whole, human affairs are doomed to chaos.21 And as Kant well knows,
a peaceful world unified by laws of republican concord is altogether a more
distant and unlikely prospect than the ‘perpetual peace’ of the graveyard.22
Accordingly, the idea of progress is, for Kant, only the irrefutable hope that
the sum of human actions and natural events will make for a better future. More-
over, this process can only take place behind the backs of acting men and
women: our different ideas of what is right and good, our tendency to leave the
right aside for mere inclination, and our finitude (here equivalent to a lack of
wisdom) render all our willed interventions down into folly. Only the idea of an
invisible stage manager whose design of the whole leads to a better future en-
ables us to observe the course of history without despair. And is Kant not right
at least in this much, that a procession of endless folly is in need of redemption,
if one is not to despair of the whole?
True as this is, however, Kant leaves each person’s place highly uncertain. It
is unclear indeed whether the idea that our human condition may, by some other
hand, steadily improve on this earth can grant any worldly significance to the in-
dividual’s ‘struggle with temptation.’ For historical events and their march of
folly will certainly trample upon this, and even efface it entirely.

III DIFFICULTIES IN KANT’S ATTEMPTS TO ADDRESS

THE PROBLEM OF MEANING

We can sum up the trouble as follows. History presents us with a sorry

display, unwatchable except with the idea of—faith in—progress to a better
state. Even as Kant asks us maintain this hope, he holds that our willed

120
 KANT AND MEANING

interventions, our attempts to build a world better in accord with reason, are
doomed to oblivion. Our moral action will join the endless procession of folly,
and so we turn to faith in a divine witness, whose eye saves the individual’s
struggle with temptation from being swallowed up by the forgetfulness and fool-
ishness of worldly events.
One of the obvious perplexities is actually noted by Kant himself:

What remains disconcerting about all this is firstly, that the earlier generations seem to perform
their laborious tasks only for the sake of the later ones . . . and secondly, that only the later
generations will in fact have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a whole series of
their forefathers (admittedly, without any conscious intention) had worked without themselves
being able to share in the happiness they were preparing.23

Still more perplexing, however, is the notion that, so far as this ‘task’ succeeds,
it will have been performed unconsciously and unintentionally. Even if we
should choose Kant’s leap of faith, viewing the tribulations and follies of the
world under the idea of indefinite progress to a better state, it is hardly clear that
such a move could lend meaning to our striving in the here-and-now—the place
of free but finite beings.24 Not so much despite as in virtue of such a faith, we
consign ourselves to a present of external chance and inner struggle, a desolate
and depressing context for our actual agency.
Equally clear problems open up when we ask about Kant’s answer to the
laments of Job. Here, the story turns to an old-fashioned theodicy, as Job is con-
vinced by God that his suffering and despair are all to the good. Yet that revela-
tion is something which will occur to no Kantian agent. This difficulty is notably
paralleled in another historical judgment of Kant’s, his famous interpretation of
reactions to the French Revolution. Notwithstanding his conviction that the
overthrow of a government must be immoral, Kant observes the Revolution with
‘a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm.’ In this widely
shared feeling, Kant discovers “a moral predisposition in the human race.” Here
is ‘a phenomenon in human history . . . not to be forgotten,’25 which accordingly
shows the course of history to be irreversible.
Yet this is hardly the symbol of hope Kant suggests. Now, of course, we
cannot recall the initial sympathy for the Revolution without remembering the
waves of reaction that would later follow; in fact, Kant seems simply naïve in
his understanding of his contemporaries’ response. As with Job’s theodicy,
when Kant discerns widespread ‘moral sympathy’ for the phenomenon, this is
hardly something he can be sure of by his own premises. It seems more fitting,
in fact, to wonder at the true morality of this wave of ‘moral enthusiasm’ for an
(ex hypothesi) immoral event.
I suggest that these difficulties—the isolation of the individual’s moral life
from lasting impact on human affairs; the untenable turn to theodicy; the

121
 WILLIAMS

implausible empirical ‘proof’ of irreversible progress—are symptomatic of one

overall issue. In any case where we might have hoped that the (individual) will
had some contact with the (collective, historical) world, Kant’s critical bite
excises that idea. To retain a belief in the meaning and dignity of our struggle
with inclination, only one recourse remains: to a faith in the overall meaning of
the whole, albeit a whole inaccessible to us finite beings. The grand Kantian gulf,
between the sensible world we know and an intelligible world which can only be
the object of our faith has (as some might have anticipated) cut away worldly
meaning from our attempts at moral action. In the sensible world each human
being is commanded to perform the trials of Sisyphus,26 condemned endlessly to
repeat the same moral labour as he beats back the forces of ‘inclination.’ If things
improve here, it will be by grace of another, merely intelligible hand, which
moves behind—for example—the immorality of those who undermine an estab-
lished government. So we turn to such a faith, trusting that some deeper purpose
will discover meaning in the foolish human struggle among ‘mere appearances.’
Otherwise, as Kant eloquently shows, the prospect is unendurable:

Let us then, as we may, take the case of a righteous man, such as Spinoza, who considers himself
firmly persuaded that there is no God and . . . no future life either. . . . Deceit, violence and envy
will always be rife around him, although he himself is honest, peaceable and benevolent; and the
other righteous men he meets in the world, no matter how deserving they may be of happiness,
will be subjected by nature, which takes no heed of such deserts, to all the evils of want, disease,
and untimely death, just as are the other animals on the earth. And so it will continue to be until
one wide grave engulfs them all—just and unjust, there is no distinction in the grave—and hurls
them back into the abyss of the aimless chaos of matter from which they were taken—they that
were able to believe themselves the final end of creation.27

But is it only Kant’s own abyss, between sensible and intelligible worlds, that
leads him to see our choice so starkly: between God, the invisible guarantor of
invisible progress, and this ‘abyss of the aimless chaos of matter’? Or is this too
easy as a diagnosis? After all, the overall sense of Kant’s sensible-intelligible dis-
tinction is for many of us simply of compelling force, insofar as we would main-
tain faith in our own capacity truly to be agents in the world. Yet few would
accept that this, in turn, demands Kant’s articles of faith, indefinite future prog-
ress and another world altogether—solutions that seem intrinsically unstable.
Another possible explanation for Kant’s problematic solution might be noted.
Is his melancholy no more than a natural result of an attempt to take an over-
general, indeed over-theoretical, view of the matter? We can recall one recurring
strand of anti-Kantian thinking, that his abstract universalism contradicts the
particularity at the core of any meaningful human life. There is, I think, a kernel
of truth in this critique, so long as it is not phrased as a moral point, that is, as
an objection to universalism in our duties.28 So far as the issue concerns the

122
 KANT AND MEANING

worldly meaning of action under a universalist ideal, Kant’s critics score their
point. As Kant himself can show us, in global terms a deed is doomed to be of
barely tangible impact; and even where an action evidently reverberates through
history, there will still be an endlessly ambiguous story to tell of its unintended
and even counter-productive outcomes.
One can link these two lines of criticism. Kant’s metaphysical divide may be
read as one between a partial world we can know and a (universal) idea of the
whole that we shall never know. No wonder, then, that we fail if we try to use
the universal as a source of meaning! To address the problem, schematically,
will require us to seek some sign of the intelligible in the particular, an approach
that, for systematic, ‘metaphysical’ reasons, Kant would never contemplate.
Slightly differently put, our search for meaning cannot be restricted to some
global entity necessarily beyond our experience, except at the cost of rendering
the moral endeavour meaningless in worldly terms. It is difficult to see how this
could not lead to a turning away from the world to the sphere of personal con-
science or salvation—a move, as history may testify, that requires great spiritual
depth if it is not to result in a dangerously self-centred and worldless morality.

IV FAITH, MEANING AND PRACTICAL REASON

For Kant the connection between intelligible and sensible worlds is, of course,
found in the task of ‘practical reason.’ This suggests, however, a further and more
radical diagnosis of Kant’s difficulty. To see this, first recall the threat of mean-
inglessness, even nihilism, that Kant thinks implicit in an ‘empiricism of princi-
ples.’ Without freedom, ‘the stumbling block for all empiricists,’29 reason ceases
to be practical, and we lose the moral struggle, and with that our dignity.30 Ac-
cordingly, the problem of meaning might be said to motivate Kant’s fundamental
determination to vindicate human reason and the freedom of the individual.31
Granted this, however, a paradoxical conclusion seems to follow: it is actually
a lack of faith in practical reason that we see reflected in Kant’s difficulties with
this question of meaning. This lack of faith may be thought manifest in several
ways. There is Kant’s unworldly determination that the intelligible not be per-
ceived amid appearances, however plain it may be that any application of the
moral theory requires us to discern others as free, intelligible entities (the ‘prob-
lem of other minds’ recast as that of other moral agents). As we have seen, there
is his turn to global postulates safely beyond any challenge or refutation by
worldly events. And not least, Kant radically foreshortens the moral reasoning
required of everyone, frequently indicating that the major implications of the
moral law are given innately and do not require the dialogue and exploration
seen in all sympathetic reconstructions of his ethics.32 Accordingly, Kant’s
moves are by turns individualistic to the point of solipsism and unworldly to the

123
 WILLIAMS

point of renunciation. They still leave us wondering at the worldly question, of

what meaning we might discover in the practical exercise of our supposed
freedom.
Kant, of course, has compelling motivations for denying knowledge of free-
dom, above all in his refusal of complacency and ‘enthusiasm,’ or fanaticism.
No worldly evidence can prove the ‘purity’ of the will; a humility, a ‘there but
for the grace of God,’ must therefore accompany the judgments we pass on
others. Not least, for the self there is always more to be done. The choice is this
denial of knowledge, or a retreat into dogmatism: into either the pathologies of
religious fanaticism and arrogant self-certainty, or the disavowal of responsibil-
ity involved in Kant’s construction of thorough-going empiricism. Yet some-
times we can read Kant as going further than this denial of knowledge, into a
denial even of faith. He places a profound question mark over the will’s ‘power
in execution’ [Vermögen in der Ausführung]:

provided that the will conforms to the law of pure reason, then its power in execution may be as
it may, and a nature may or may not actually arise in accordance with these maxims for giving
law for a possible nature; the Critique which investigates whether and how reason can be
practical, that is, whether and how it can determine the will immediately, does not trouble itself
with this.33

As the sentence preceding this passage makes clear, Kant is not simply talking
about whether the good will might bring about a good world order, a question to
which we have seen his deeply pessimistic response. The matter at stake is much
more basic, whether this will might even result in a good deed: ‘It is here a ques-
tion only of the determination of the will and of the determining ground of its
maxims as a free will, not of its result.’
In addition to denying knowledge, then, one strand of Kant’s thought even de-
nies faith in the efficacy of the will. Of course, this is no thorough-going denial:
like most of us, Kant generally does not suppose the good will to be wholly in-
visible. And it is also a partly justifiable denial: we can never be sure what inner
obstacles the will must face, and must not assume its effectiveness. Yet it still
represents a highly consequential removal of faith in the worldly possibilities of
reason, one that goes beyond the limits set down by critique, and even endangers
the project of critique itself.
Against this rather ascetic aspect of Kant’s thinking, which isolates the will
from the world, there remains ‘reason’s need’ to keep faith with itself. This
need runs, of course, through all the critical writings. It is perhaps most clearly
stated in the final chapter of the Groundwork: ‘Reason must regard itself as the
author of its principles independently of alien influences . . . the will of [a
rational] being cannot be a will of his own except under the idea of freedom.’
Thus ‘will is a kind of causality of living beings insofar as they are rational.’34

124
 KANT AND MEANING

Kant’s ‘insofar as’ seems to me absolutely crucial, indeed ‘critical.’ It suggests

that we may do better not to think of the will as something ‘inner,’ subject only
to the scrutiny of God, but rather as existing ‘insofar as’ someone strives to
raise herself above mere subjectivity—or merely submits, to become the sub-
ject of drives and desires.35 Accordingly, this suggests a role for ‘faith’ in our
‘knowledge’—in fact, judgment—of our own and others’ agency: a faith that
good willing may be manifest in the deed, and that we can develop a sensitivity
to the nuances of agency that will resist dogmatic claims to knowledge without
disavowing judgments of responsibility and achievement.
However, there is still no reason to disagree with Kant that folly will be the
‘end of all things’—so long, at least, as we look to the ‘end,’ and choose to con-
sider ‘all things.’ Yet if we place faith in the efficacy of the will—in some times,
some places—there is doubtful need to look to these ultimate quantities: no need
to be kept from despair (at our own sinfulness, our personal destiny, the world
we live in) by faith in a silent, inscrutable witness who orders the whole—the
personal God of the Christian tradition, the invisible hand behind the historical
process. Of course, there will always be those times and places where chaos, un-
reason and sheer inhumanity take over. But, for the fortunate, those are not the
times in which one is doomed to live: Kant cannot remove the hope that human
reason can create times and places whereby our striving, our joys, and our
achievements might enter into at least partial relation.
But his philosophy of history, eyes relentlessly turned to the future, abandons
faith in the work of human hands. An observation of Nietzsche’s seems apt:
‘there are even cases in which morality has been able to turn the critical will
against itself, so that, like the scorpion, it drives its sting into its own body.’36
Kant’s sensible-intelligible distinction is motivated above all by the need to keep
faith in our own capacity truly to be agents in the world. Yet the fragility and
intangibility of our agency created by hypostatising that distinction shipwreck
reason’s need to keep faith in itself. If the sole dimension of our freedom is cap-
tured in the decision whether or not we shall will in accord with a law whose
implications are already known, freedom remains without worldly vindication,
for two reasons. The most worldly of motives might lead us to the dictates of
that law, while we are left with nothing more to contribute, neither in discover-
ing what it is to be reasonable nor in exploring those human possibilities beyond
‘mere reason.’

CONCLUSION

Of course, it is unfair to treat this as the whole of Kant’s story. His with-
drawal of faith in willed activity, and a turn to the ‘end of all things,’ stand
alongside richer considerations:

125
 WILLIAMS

Thinking people are subject to a malaise which may even turn into moral corruption, a malaise of
which the unthinking are ignorant—namely, discontent with that providence by which the course
of the world as a whole is governed. They feel this sentiment when they contemplate the evils
which so greatly oppress the human race, with no hope (as it seems) of any improvement. Yet it
is of the utmost importance that we should be content with providence, even if the path it has laid
for us on earth is an arduous one. We should be content with it partly in order that we may take
courage even in the midst of hardships, and partly in order that we should not blame all such
evils on fate and fail to notice that we may ourselves be entirely responsible for them, thereby
losing the chance to remedy them by improving ourselves.37

This is not a simple faith: here, to be ‘content with providence’ is no

Panglossian optimism and no evasion of harsh realities. It hints, rather, that in
the name of courage and a will to self-responsibility we ought indeed to keep
faith in the good will’s possible contact with the world.38
Following recent reinterpretations of Kant’s Imperative, we can see one way
we might hope to perceive the fruits of our good willing: in seeing the determi-
nation of an agent to respond reasonably to the always mutable circumstances of
human life, to apply the abstract demand of the moral law in a sensitive, respon-
sive manner.39 We might hope to find something of reason where a person has
striven to present a unity of word and deed, of thought and feeling, and has held
to no dogma that proves inimical to others’ freedom and well-being. Courage
and a will to self-responsibility demand our faith, both that this is possible and
that our shared judgments may discover such exercises of reason in the world.
Still, I am unsure we should stop here in seeking to answer Kant’s problem of
meaning. All well and good, that we strive to maintain our humanity in suppos-
ing no fixed precept of action will answer to our duties—to ourselves or to
others. This answers to part of Kant’s problem, by its implicit faith in our ability
to bring both thought and deed closer to reason, and granting meaning to the
contextual, situated, and particular aspects intrinsic to such activity. The relent-
lessly ascetic idea that good willing might remained trapped within the self,
leaving each to face a worldless and interminable struggle of the self-divided
will, is then displaced, in favour of a common world of judgment. The moral
law presents a worldly project, not an isolated labour of Sisyphus.
But we have not yet doubted the Kantian claim to knowledge of this most cru-
cial and over-riding demand, the Categorical Imperative. Those who already
have their doubts about Kantian ethics may think of the difficulties that have
been proposed with regard to role of personal (‘non-impartial’) relations, or vari-
ous other sorts of commitment (to projects or vocations). One can try to argue,
of course, that such commitments are part of a contribution to wider human ra-
tionality and its necessary context of mutual care. To critics this will sound
stretched, although not, perhaps, more stretched than any other systematic
account of human duties.

126
 KANT AND MEANING

But it may be that the question of meaning should give us pause concerning
this overall systematic project of Kant’s. He has been concerned to ward off
threats to meaning discovered in (a particular conception of) empiricism; it
seems to me, however, that in so doing he has forgotten certain dangers that lurk
in a broadly rationalist approach. As we know, Kant is strongly—and I have
supposed rightly—concerned with the question of dignity. And he is concerned
not only that we might be puppets of sensible inclination, so that our claims to
any reason beyond the instrumental would be simply illusory: he is also sure that
our dignity is undone when we make dogmatic claims to knowledge of the tran-
scendent (the image of the tower of Babel is never far from Kant’s mind). Yet
perhaps the claim to knowledge of a key to the right and good is problematic in
a similar way.40
What Kant forgets in his search for moral certainty is the centrality of faith in
these matters. Freedom is, as he is clear in the second Critique if not the
Groundwork, postulated through our ‘knowledge’ of the moral law;41 it is a mat-
ter of faith proven by a ‘fact of reason’ that is no fact at all. However we supple-
ment his account, regarding our ‘knowledge’42 of reasoning beings (criteria for
discerning such beings are notably missing in his philosophy, for they would
open the question whether all human beings do have reason, and indeed to what
degree they may have it), Kantian premises can provide only for judgment
underlain by a faith in freedom. Such a cognitive ‘limitation’ is a problem only
if one thinks certainty is possible or desirable. But if we do not know free others,
in the sense of freedom Kant has staked as essential to our dignity, perhaps we
should doubt whether the ‘moral law’ in all its fixity is the key to dignity that
Kant had sought.43
Thus one may note something which is perhaps obvious so long as one has
not invested in Kant’s system, that many imponderables surround Kantian eth-
ics: is not rational agency a rather weighted term with which to capture human
flourishing? does not sentience—surely less dubitable and wider-ranging than
rationality—intrinsically demand respect? is our moral agency not less ‘autono-
mous,’ more reliant on care and criticism from others, than Kant demands? The
particular questions are not crucial here; the important point is only that answers
to these and other such basic questions are unavailable on Kantian premises, and
are given only so long as ‘un-critical’ convictions are entered into the matter.
Such questions, then, are glossed over both by Kant’s framing assumptions and
in recent sympathetic commentary on his Imperative. In essence, they are ques-
tions about where we will place our faith in the moment of decision and action:
even or especially in matters moral, we deal with Kant’s ‘need of reason’ to
think where we cannot know.
I emphasise this point in recognition of an important theme of post-Kantian
philosophy, that part of the dignity and meaningfulness of human life stems from

127
 WILLIAMS

the fact that we can, indeed must, legislate for ourselves, despite or because of
the absence of absolutes to decide for us. To be sure, some have seen here an
abyss of the absurd, and sought to cling to the certainties the critical philosophy
had surely undone—just as Kant himself sought certainty in his Categorical
Imperative. Here I have been concerned to emphasise that if we will find the
courage to face worldly events without dogma or despair, we must seek to dis-
cover meaning in our action and lived experience. Yet if one accepts that Kant’s
morality is beset by unanswerable perplexities (and is not persuaded that any
other would-be systematic account could evade such questions), then it is clear
that this project of making sense of our lives is bound never to be completed, and
permits rather less fixity of judgment than Kant had hoped to secure. Neverthe-
less, so far as we seek to understand the significance of our individual and collec-
tive lives, this uncertainty permits a very weighty return: for what is opened is a
space of judgment, exploration and discovery, that can allow us to find meaning
in a plurality of lives well-lived, however fragile their ‘results.’ And this in turn
may open hope for the future, without denying the dignity of the past.

Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire, U.K.

NOTES

For comments on work related to this paper, I am grateful to Margaret Canovan, Katrin Flikschuh,
Ian Holliday, Morris Kaplan, Onora O’Neill, Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, Hillel Steiner, and
Ralph Walker.

1 Kant’s image in his Lectures on Ethics (Collins version, ‘Of self-mastery’), Ak 27:360, an image
still echoed in his later, more subtle analysis of ‘radical evil’ (Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason, Part I). References to Kant’s works are generally made by title of text, and volume
and pagination of the standard Akademie edition. Unless otherwise noted, I cite the Cambridge
University Press translations, by Mary Gregor (Practical Philosophy, 1996); Allen Wood and
George di Giovanni (Religion and Rational Theology, 1996); Peter Heath (Lectures on Ethics,
1997); Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Critique of Pure Reason, 1998); and David Walford
with Ralf Meerbote (Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, 1992).
2 As Kant phrases the Groundwork’s first formulation of the Imperative, at Ak 4:421. I leave
aside, here, the many different formulations he offers of the principle.
3 See, for example, the remarkable passage at Critique of Pure Reason, A825 = B853 (using the
customary citation to first ‘A’ and second ‘B’ edition pagination).
4 See especially Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), part 1; and Susan Neiman, The
Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
5 In doing so, however, we beg the question of why Kant should so resolutely have resisted any
substantial flexibility of interpretation with regard to our moral duties under his ‘Imperative.’ I
shall also leave this question aside here, although some of the considerations in the conclusion
bear on this matter.

128
 KANT AND MEANING

6 See especially Critique of Practical Reason, ‘Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical
Reason,’ Ak 5:89ff. Note that the issue does not really turn on that of determinism—although Kant
does not consider it, randomness would be just as worrying to him: the issue is whether one can
‘determine’ one’s own activity.
7 Some might object that this doubt is not coherently formulable (i.e., without self-contradiction);
however since its import, that ‘all is vanity,’ is readily enough grasped, I shall not be worried
about such an objection here. For more on the theoretical and moral difficulties Kant has with
empiricism, see O’Neill, Constructions of Reason, ch. 4; on his overall thinking about freedom,
see Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
For interesting reflections on an ‘external’ perspective in relation to the question of meaning, see
David Wiggins, ‘Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life,’ in his Needs, Values, Truth: Essays
in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), ch. 3, esp. §§ 2–5.
8 Arendt highlights this phrase, her translation of (I think) ‘das trostlose Ungefähr’ (‘Idea for a
universal history . . .’ Ak 8:18), in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald
Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 24; I should add that it is taken somewhat
out of context.
9 Critique of Judgment, Introduction to ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’ Ak 5:176.
10 Critique of Pure Reason, A444ff = B472ff. The Antinomy is of course long debated: for our
purposes its most interesting oddity is that in it we can find no clues as to how the spontaneity of
transcendental freedom, intended to allow for a ‘decision and deed [that] do not lie within the
succession of merely natural effects’ (A450 = B478), might be thought—and judged—a matter
of degree.
11 I will not be the first to observe that it is always the future that occupies Kant. Apart from all the
critical essays on history, see also the striking passage in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, on ‘the scales
of the understanding’ and ‘their defect [an imbalance toward hope for the future] which I cannot
even wish to eliminate,’ Ak 2:349f.
12 Critique of Judgment, § 83, Ak 5:434n; ‘On the miscarriage of all philosophical trials in
theodicy,’ Ak 8:259—where no person ‘of sound mind who has lived and pondered over the
value of life’ would choose ‘to play the game of life once more.’
13 ‘The end of all things,’ Ak 8:336.
14 ‘On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice,’ Part III,
Ak 8:308
15 Nor, in any case, could such grounds be conclusive; cf. ‘On the miscarriage . . .’ Ak 8:256.
16 That this line of thought had earlier been entertained by Kant, thought not unambiguously, is
shown by Henry Allison in Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 66ff. Thus in the first Critique a
‘semi-critical’ Kant says: ‘without a God and a world that is now not visible to us but is hoped
for, the majestic ideas of morality are, to be sure, objects of approbation and admiration, but not
incentives for resolve and realisation,’ A813 = B841. For Schopenhauer’s critique, see especially
his On the Basis of Morality (1841), ch. 2.
17 ‘On the miscarriage . . .’ Ak 8:265ff.
18 ‘On the miscarriage . . .’ Ak 8:266.
19 Thus the Groundwork’s argument, Ak 4:395f, that reason must be given to us for a moral end,
since it is (following Rousseau) such an unfit, in fact counter-productive, tool for the attainment
of happiness.
20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958), 220.
21 Such disunity and conflict is an a priori fact for Kant, engraved as it were in the fundamentals of
our finitude and plurality: ‘it is not some fact that makes coercion by public law necessary . . .
[it] lies a priori in the rational idea of such a condition (one that is not rightful) that before a
public lawful condition is established individual human beings, peoples and states can never be

129
 WILLIAMS

secure against violence from one another, since each has its own right to do what seems right and
good to it. . . .’ Metaphysics of Morals, Ak 6:312. The similarity to Hobbes is notable—as is
Kant’s deliberate forgetfulness of our conflicting notions of the right and the good in almost
every part of his moral philosophy.
22 Thus the satirical motif of his essay, ‘Toward perpetual peace.’
23 ‘Idea for a universal history,’ Ak 8:20, trans. H. B. Nisbet in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans
Reiss (Cambridge University Press, 1970, 1991), 44.
24 The point may parallel one of Nietzsche’s most basic insights: in the act of according authority to
God and a transcendent world-order, we ourselves sap this world of meaning. Whatever we may
think of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ or his attempted solutions, I think we should agree that faith
in this overall historical process is problematic indeed.
25 Conflict of the Faculties, Ak 7:85ff. The phenomenon in question is the wave of feeling, of
course, not the Revolution itself.
26 Kant himself notes the myth and its relevance a few pages before his discussion of the
Revolution, Conflict of the Faculties, Ak 7:82.
27 Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), § 87, Ak
5:452.
28 For an excellent recent argument against (im)moral parochialism, see Norman Geras, Solidarity
in the Conversation of Human Kind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London:
Verso, 1995).
29 Critique of Practical Reason, Ak 5:7.
30 If this is not always clear, it is only because Kant unwaveringly locates such a dignity in our
freedom to will in accord with the moral law. Thus his justly famous words: ‘Two things fill the
mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily
one reflects on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within me.’ And he continues,
‘The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an
animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force . . . must give
back to the planet . . . the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely
raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life
independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world.’ Critique of Practical Reason,
‘Conclusion,’ Ak 5:161f. My doubt will be that this dignity fails to answer to the full difficulty.
31 In other words, the first issue is not whether Kant can disprove empiricist theorising, a vexed
question that would take us into the shady waters of transcendental idealism; the point is simply
that he must find it unbearable to suppose that ‘empiricism’—shorthand here for the psychologi-
cal and physical mechanism of human beings—captures the whole of the matter. A reader who
does not accept Kant’s general case against empiricism may simply read the claim here as this:
that we must have some ‘free power of choice’ if we are to believe in our own agency. Whether
or not one wishes to think this compatible with our actions being determined at other, perhaps
causal, levels, the point is that we must suppose those levels do not express all that is to be said.
With regard to rationalism, we might take Kant’s reference to the heavens above, and the humil-
ity they invite, as a response to the hubris involved in certain broadly rationalist worldviews, a
hubris that may also undo our dignity, albeit not at the global level Kant discerns in the empiri-
cist nightmare.
32 I believe that one might go further and see a discreditable desire for moral certainty even in the
very formulation of a purportedly watertight Imperative to guide moral judgment—a suspicion to
which I return in conclusion.
33 Critique of Practical Reason, Ak 5:45f (emphasis added). Oddly, the connectedness of body and
soul is an evident concern in Kant’s earlier Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Ak 2:327ff, 370f, and is

130
 KANT AND MEANING

echoed in his letter to Moses Mendelssohn written shortly after this work was published (8.4.66).
But with the flowering of the critical philosophy, the issue passes from view.
34 Groundwork, Ak 4:448, 446 (emphasis added).
35 This mirrors a well-known argument in the endless ‘compatibilism’ debate: that specific
incapacities, and not the notion of determinism per se, lead us to treat others as determined (by
drugs, pathologies, conditioning) and so (e.g.) not to resent their actions. P. F. Strawson, ‘Free-
dom and Resentment,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962). However, this argument,
by itself, speaks for neither side of the debate: what it does do, in a Kantian context, is nicely
point up that complex questions of judgment are at stake in judging degrees of imputability,
which are unanswered by sheer assertion that we are all free in the alleged intelligible realm.
36 His 1886 Preface to Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, § 3.
37 ‘Conjectures on the beginning of human history,’ Ak 8:120f, in Kant: Political Writings, ed.
Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 231.
38 Courage and self-responsibility are absolutely central here; both, for example, are crucial
elements in Kant’s elevation of morality and action above all religious concerns and beliefs.
Thus he tells us that the concept of atonement should come after that of virtue; otherwise, the
doctrine could seem to be a ‘representation of our total incapacity for the good, and the anxiety
lest we slip back into evil, must take courage away from the human being, and must reduce him
to a state of groaning moral passivity where nothing great and good is undertaken but instead
everything is expected from [mere] wishing for it.’ Religion, Ak 6:184f.
39 We might also recall Kant’s famous maxims of wisdom—to think for oneself, to put oneself in
the place of others when thinking, to ensure consistency in one’s thought—that apply to all areas
of life, and are shorn of moral application only through the rigidity of his own interpretation of
the Categorical Imperative. Anthropology, Ak 7:200, 228; Critique of Judgment, § 40, Ak
5:294f. These represent, fairly clearly, the principle of universalisability put into the service of
one’s imagination and understanding (in the widest sense of those terms).
40 Even if that key is construed as the self-reflexive demand that we conduct ourselves in such a
manner as to avoid the confusion and conflict of Babel—thus O’Neill, Constructions of Reason,
ch. 1, ‘Reason and Politics in the Kantian Enterprise.’
41 Kant’s formulation at Ak 5:94.
42 As is well-known, Kant is unclear in formulating just what this ‘fact’ is (cf. Critique of Practical
Reason, Ak 5:31, 42); but it is certainly more than the bare idea that most people (claim to) think
there is such a thing as morality, for it involves the faith that this is also a genuine object.
43 Of course, some would rather doubt that Kant is right to place such an idea of freedom at the
centre of this thought; perhaps a notion so unworldly was bound to generate hopeless perplexities
that endanger meaningful human endeavour, at least for those who try to take it seriously. Here I
have simply assumed that Kant is right to insist on such an absolute concept of freedom—while,
I hope, demonstrating the need to think of such freedom as open to worldly judgment.

131