Intro to Philosophy

Lesson 8:German Idealism,Immanuel Kant, &

G. W. F. Hegel

Immanuel Kant

1724 – 1804

Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia)

Three Major Works: The Critique of Pure

Reason The Critique of Practical

Reason The Critique of Judgment

Three Shorter Works:

Quote

“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.” – Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason

Hume’s Skepticism

Kant believed that Hume established conclusively that there are no necessary connections between our observations.

If our knowledge is limited to experience then we only have knowledge of what we observe in time and space. E.g., I can only know that kicking a ball will result in its

movement (away) is true for the time(s) that I observed this phenomenon and not as a universal law.

With Hume we are left without any grounds to claim knowledge of anything universal.

Enlightenment

The “Enlightenment” is a reaction to the rise and success of modern science.

It displaced confidence in traditional authorities (governments and religious institutions) with the authority of the individual’s capacity for reason.

The worldview generated by Newtonian science, however, also threatened to undermine reason itself (as in Hume) as an authority as well as the traditional basis for morality and other common conventions.

Terminology

Analytic – The predicate is part of the meaning of the subject (a priori) Example: All bachelors are unmarried men. By definition a bachelor is an unmarried man—it adds no

new knowledge.

Synthetic – The predicate is not part of the meaning of the subject (a posteriori) Example: 7+5=12 (or 14,251 x 76,828 = 1094890079) //

or propositions of physics. The predicate is not known by definition of the subject—

it adds new knowledge.

Terminology

A priori – (literally: from the first) Not verified by sense experience Necessary Universal

A posteriori – (literally: from what comes after) Based on sense experience Contingent

The Problem

Can we have access to “synthetic a priori” knowledge? Propositions that are necessary and universal

and cannot be verified by sense experience.

All knowledge begins with experience, but it does not necessarily come from experience—that is, its truth is not established by experience.

Experience can teach us that a thing is so but not that it must be so (Allen, 156).

A Kantian Quadrant

Synthetic

Analytic a posteriori

a priori

* Kant thought that analytic, a posteriori knowledge was unnecessary and/or self-contradictory because one need not appeal to experience for any analytic statement, and if one does it would be self-contradictory, e.g., “the light is dark.”

The Answer

Mathematics: (1+1=2) Does not rely on experience for verification Synthetic – ‘2’ is not implied in (1+1)

Physics: Every body that moves in any curved line… is urged by a centripetal force directed to that point. Learned through experience but not verified by it Synthetic – centripetal force is not implied by the meaning of

‘curved line’

Kant’s Question: How are such propositions possible?

How do we know things to be true (in this way) if we have no necessary connection between our observations?

The Copernican Revolution

Copernicus “revolutionized” cosmology by reversing the way in which we perceived the relationship of the earth to the sun (instead of sun revolves around earth, the earth revolves around sun).

Kant “revolutionizes” metaphysics by reversing the way in which we perceive the relationship of the subject (mind) and object.

Things do not impose themselves on us, we impose ourselves on them.

We create categories that help us to process the data we receive such as space and time.

All we are ever aware of is the phenomenon – the thing as it appears to us – not the noumenon – the thing as it is actually is.

Transcendental Arguments

Kant aimed to find the necessary conditions for experience. What has to be true in order for our sense experience to be verifiable?

In geometry the idea of space must be true in order to know that a line is the shortest distance between two points. Without a concept of space we have no necessary reason to believe this.

“Space” is thus a category we invent in order to make sense of geometric principles.

In a sense, we create the terms upon which things are knowable. Thus we affect the things we know.

Therefore we only know things as they appear to us, not as they truly are—and we will never have access to that noumenal reality.

Conclusions

Our knowledge of the physical world is possible but limited (we only know things as we process them)

Our knowledge of metaphysics (our self, our world of experience, and God) is impossible because in each case we lack transcendental arguments—or access to the grounds of our experience of selves, world, or God.

“Pure Reason” can neither prove or disprove metaphysical judgments—Because pure reason deals with appearances (or the organization of sense data through ‘transcendent’ categories)

Metaphysical judgments become properties of “Practical Reason”—Because practical reason deals with the domain of action.

Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel

1770-1831 CE

Stuttgart, Germany

The Phenomenology of Spirit

The Science of Logic

The Philosophy of Right

Quote

“The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.” – The Phenomenology of Spirit

Background

Hegel is, in particular, responding to Kant, and, in general, the wider Western philosophical tradition in their search for a rational foundation of knowledge.

Kant’s “Transcendental Unity of Apperception” became a subject of interest to subsequent philosophers.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Posits an “Absolute Ego” that underlies all experience of subject and object.

Reduces everything to the subject and doesn’t resolve the implicit dualism between subject (ego) and object (not ego).

Friedrich Schelling

Proposed an “Absolute Identity” that sees everything in essential unity yet revealed or appearing as distinct.

This makes everything essentially the same and only posits an illusory difference, not a real difference.

Some Criticisms

Hegel criticizes the Kant and the rest of Western philosophy for thinking of ideas as discrete, independent units of thought Locke thought of ideas as “simple” units that can be combined to

form “complex” thoughts. Kant drew to heavy a distinction between the knowing self and the

knowable phenomena (object).

Plato looked for the ground of truth in the Forms; Aristotle looked for it in the forms of things; Kant looked for it in transcendental arguments (reason). Hegel, we will see, will look for it in History.

Hegel posits that nothing can be knowable except in relation to something different. We do not have an idea of something except in terms of both what it is and what it is not.

Even when we identify something in positive terms we are implicitly identifying it in terms of what it is not.

Therefore things are only known, indeed only exist, in relation to other things.

The Absolute

Hegel is influenced by both Ficthe and Schelling but posits an idea of an Absolute with a dialectical unity.

There must be something that underlies our selves: a self-consciousness.

We cannot know anything except as it relates to something other.

We cannot know our own selves except in relation to the self-consciousness of others.

Thus we determine the idea of an objective Spirit that is developing between the correspondence of self and others. What links subject and object is that the subject cannot know itself as subject without an object. This link is grounded by Spirit progressing toward the Absolute by means of dialectical synthesis.

Spirit becomes other than itself in time and then develops by developing a unity between a thing and its opposite.

History

Hegel sees reality as a “continuum” or a process of unfolding of reality through dialectical synthesis.

The ultimate reality, the Absolute, is realizing itself through the course of history.

As education progresses (through a dialectical process) oppositions are removed and the Absolute becomes more singularly aware of itself.

The historical process is necessary, therefore nothing is intelligible unless it makes itself manifest in history; or “concretized” as a relation to something else.

Hegelian “Dialectic”

Hegelian Ethics

Sittlichkeit

Hegel’s ethics in general followed his relational metaphysics. The broader the social group, the more it manifests the Absolute, culminating in the “State” (i.e., country).

Each higher stage is more valuable, and therefore trumps the lower stage in terms of obligation.

One’s duty extends upward and not downward.

The isolated individual holds the least value, and therefore holds the least ethical attention—a belief that both Marx and Kierkegaard will later critique.