Название: IMMANUEL KANT: Philosophical Books, Critiques & Essays
Автор: Immanuel Kant
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Философия
isbn: 9788075837691
isbn:
There is thus no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of Kant's reference to the particular occasion or cause of the critical inquiry. Up to the stage indicated by the Dissertation he had been attempting, in various ways, to unite two radically divergent modes of explaining cognition — that which would account for the content of experience by reference to affection from things without us, and that which viewed the intellect itself as somehow furnished with the means of pure, rational cognition. He now discovered that Hume's sceptical analysis of the notion of cause was really the treatment of one typical or crucial instance of the much more general problem. If experience, says Hume, consists solely of states of mind somehow given to us, each of which exists as an effect, and therefore as distinct from others, with what right do we make the common assumption that parts of experience are necessarily connected? The only possible answer, drawn from the premises laid down, must be that there is no warrant for such an assumption. Necessity for thought, as Kant had been willing to admit and as Hume also held, involves or implies something more than is given in experience — for that which is given is contingent — and rests upon an a priori or pure notion. But a priori notions, did they exist, could have no claim to regulate experience. Hume, therefore, for his part, rejected entirely the notion of cause as being fictitious and delusive, and professed to account for the habit of regarding experience as necessarily connected by reference to arbitrarily formed custom of thinking. Experience, as given, contingent material, had a certain uniformity, and recurring uniformities generated in us the habit of regarding things as necessarily connected. That such a resort to experience for explanation could lead to no valid conclusion has been already noted as evident to Hume himself.
The dogmatic or individualist conception of experience had thus proved itself inadequate to the solution of Hume's difficulty regarding the notion of cause, — a difficulty which Kant, erroneously, had thought to be the only case contemplated by his predecessor. The perception of its inadequacy in this respect, and the consequent generalization of Hume's problem, are the essential features of the new critical method. For Kant was now prepared to formulate his general inquiry in a definite fashion. His long-continued reflection on the Wolffian doctrine of knowledge had made clear to him that synthetic connexion, the essence of real cognition, was not contained in the products of thinking as a formal activity of mind operating on material otherwise supplied. On the other hand, Hume's analysis enabled him to see that synthetic connexion was not contained in experience regarded as given material. Thus neither the formal nor the material aspect of conscious experience, when regarded from the individualist point of view, supplied any foundation for real knowledge, whether a priori or empirical. An absolutely new conception of experience was necessary, if the fact of cognition was to be explained at all, and the various modes in which Kant expresses the business of his critical philosophy were merely different fashions of stating the one ultimate problem, differing according to the particular aspect of knowledge which he happened to have in view. To inquire how synthetic a priori judgments are possible, or how far cognition extends, or what worth attaches to metaphysical propositions, is simply to ask, in a specific form, what elements are necessarily involved in experience of which the subject is conscious. How is it possible for the individual thinking subject to connect together the parts of his experience in the mode we call cognition?
The problem of the critical philosophy is, therefore, the complete analysis of experience from the point of view of the conditions under which such experience is possible for the conscious subject. The central ideas are thus self-consciousness, as the supreme condition under which experience is subjectively possible, and the manifold details of experience as a varied and complex whole. The solution of the problem demanded the utmost care in keeping the due balance between these ideas; and it can hardly be said that Kant was perfectly successful. He is frequently untrue to the more comprehensive conception which dominates his work as a whole. The influence of his previous philosophical training, nay, even the unconscious influence of terminology, frequently induces in his statements a certain laxity and want of clearness. He selects definitely for his starting point neither the idea of self-consciousness nor the details of experience, but in his actual procedure passes from one to the other, rarely, if ever, taking into full consideration the weighty question of their relation to one another. Above all, he is continuously under the influence of the individualist notion which he had done so much to explode. The conception of conscious experience, which is the net result of the Kritik, is indefinitely profounder and richer than that which had ruled the 18th century philosophizing, but for Kant such experience still appears as somehow the arbitrary product of the relation between the individual conscious subject and the realm of real facts. When he is actually analysing the conditions of knowledge, the influence of the individualist conception is not prominent; the conditions are stated as quite general, as conditions of knowledge. But so soon as the deeper, metaphysical problems present themselves, the shadow of the old doctrine reappears. Knowledge is regarded as a mechanical product, part furnished by the subject, part given to the subject, and is thus viewed as mechanically divisible into a priori and a posteriori, into pure and empirical, necessary and contingent. The individual as an agent, conscious of universal moral law, is yet regarded as in a measure opposed to experience, and the Kantian ethical code remains purely formal. The ultimate relation between intelligence and natural fact, expressed in the notion of end, is thought as problematic or contingent. The difficulties or obscurities of the Kantian system, of which the above are merely the more prominent, may all be traced to the one source, the false or at least inadequate idea of the individual. The more thorough explanation of the relation between experience as critically conceived and the individual subject was the problem left by Kant for his successors.
In any detailed exposition of the critical system it would be requisite in the first place to state with some fullness the precise nature of the problems immediately before Kant, and in the second place to follow with some closeness the successive stages of the system as presented in the three main works, the Kritik of Pure Reason, the Kritik of Practical Reason and the Kritik of Judgment, with the more important of the minor works, the Metaphysic of Nature and the Metaphysic of Ethics. It would be necessary, also, in any such expanded treatment, to bring out clearly the Kantian classification of the philosophical sciences, and to indicate the relation between the critical or transcendental investigation of the several faculties and the more developed sciences to which that investigation serves as introduction. As any detailed statement of the critical system, СКАЧАТЬ