Kenny Anthony. The Rise of Modern Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 3

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Rousseau, like the author of this cartoon, held the view that women were made for

emotion, not for philosophizing

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WolV and Lessing

In Germany, the Enlightenment took a form that was less threatening to

the existing establishment—partly, no doubt, because it enjoyed for a while

the patronage of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia from 1740–86. In the

Wrst half of the eighteenth century the leading German philosopher was

Christian WolV (1679–1754), who began his career as a professor of math-

ematics at Halle, a post he was oVered on the recommendation of Leibniz.

When he Wrst ventured into philosophy he aroused the hostility of devout

Lutherans, who inXuenced the then monarch to deprive him of his chair

and banish him from Prussia. Such an experience of persecution was almost

the only thing WolV had in common with the philosophes; unlike them, he was

solemn, academic, systematic, and accurately erudite. His rationalism was at

the opposite pole from Rousseau’s romanticism.

WolV taught for seventeen years in a Calvinist university in Marburg,

but when Frederick the Great came to the throne he was restored to his

chair in Halle, which he held until his death. Later, he became vice-

chancellor of the university and was made a baron of the Holy Roman

Empire. His philosophical system was eclectic and capacious, embracing

elements from classical Aristotelianism, Latin scholasticism, Cartesian ra-

tionalism, and Leibnizian metaphysics. He took over from Leibniz the

principle of suYcient reason, which he regarded as the fundamental basis

of metaphysics in conjunction with the principle of identity. The suYcient

reason for the existence of the world is to be found in a transcendent God,

whose existence can be established by the traditional ontological and

cosmological arguments. The world we live in is the best of all possible

worlds, freely chosen by God’s wisdom.

There was little that was original in WolV, except for the system which

he imposed upon his borrowings from earlier authors. He perceived it as

his task, for instance, to impose order on what he saw as the chaos of

Aristotle’s metaphysics. He regimented the diVerent branches of philoso-

phy, popularizing such distinctions as those between natural theology and

general metaphysics (‘ontology’), which had been absent from medieval

discussion. His deWnition of ontology as ‘the science of all possible things

insofar as they are possible’, with its emphasis on possible essences rather

than actual existents, was a continuation of a line begun by Avicenna

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and Duns Scotus. He introduced a novel distinction between physics (the

experimental study of the contingent natural laws of this world) and

cosmology (an a priori investigation of every possible material world).

Like Descartes, Wol V accepted the existence of a human soul that was a

simple substance available to self-consciousn ess; but the relation between

this soul and the body he explained by appeal to a Leibnizian pre-established

harmony. In WolV ’s ethical system the key notion is that of perfection.

Good is what increases perfection, and evil what diminishes it. The funda-

mental human motivation is self-perfection, which includes the promo-

tion of the common good and the service of God’s honour. Although

living bodies, including human bodies, are machines, nonetheless we

enjoy free will: rational choice can, and should, overcome all the pressures

of sensibility.

WolV is nowadays hardly ever read by English readers. His importance in

the history of philosophy is that his system became accepted in Germany as

the paradigm of a rationalist metaphysics, and that later writers deWned their

own positions in relation to his. This is particularly true of Immanuel Kant,

who in his magisterial critique of m etaphysics often has WolV ’s doctrines

immediately in his sights.

A thinker who was much closer to the Enlightenment as understood in

France and Britain was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81). The son of a

Lutheran pastor, he was initially destined for the Church, but he aban-

doned theology for a literary career, in which he supported himself by

acting as librarian to the Duke of Brunswick. Like the philosophes he ex-

pressed his thoughts in essays and dramas in preference to academic

textbooks. His Wrst publication was an essay written jointly with the Jewish

philosopher Moses Mendelssohn entitled ‘Pope a Metaphysician!’, which was

partly an attack on the Leibnizian views expressed in Pope’s Essay on Man, but

also a plea for a sharp separation between philosophy and poetry as two

quite diVerent spiritual activities. In Laocoon of 1776 he pleaded for a similar

separation between poetry and the visual arts: the artistic eVect of Virgil’s

description of the death of Laocoon is quite diVerent, he argued, from

that of the famous classical statue in the Vatican. In each case Lessing,

taking as his starting point Aristotle’s Poetics (‘as much an infallible work as

the Elements of Euclid’), delineated a special, semi-prophetic role for the poet.

In doing so he foreshadow ed one of the principal themes of Romanticism.

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Like the Romantics, Lessing admired Spinoza. He regarded the world as

a single uniWed system whose components were identical with ideas in

the mind of God. He was willing to accept that determinism was true and

that freedom was an illusion; on the other hand, he was willing to admit

contingency in the world, with the consequence that some among God’s

ideas were contingent also. He praised Spinoza for realizing that liberation

from anxiety is only to be achieved by accepting the inevitability of destiny.

‘I thank my God’, he said, ‘that I am under necessity, that the best must be.’

Lessing’s most important philosophical work was The Education of the Human

Race (1780). The human race, like the human individual, passes through

diVerent stages, to which diVerent kinds of instruction are appropriate. The

upbringing of a child is a matter of physical rewards and punishment:

the childhood of the human race was the era of the Old Testament. In

our youth, educators oVer us more spiritual rewards for good conduct;

eternal rewards and punishments for an immortal soul. This corresponds to

the period of history dominated by the Christian religion. However, as

Lessing endeavoured to show in a number of critical studies of the New

Testament, the evidence for the divine origin of Christianity is uncompel-

ling. Even the strongest historical evidence about contingent facts, Lessing

went on to argue, cannot justify any conclusion to necessary truths about

matters of divinity.

The Christian religion, therefore, can be no more than a stage in the

education of the human race, and its dogmas can have no more than

symbolic value. Human nature, come of age, must extract from Christian-

ity a belief in the universal brotherhood of man, and must pursue moral

values for their own sake, not for the sake of any reward here or hereafter

(although Lessing toys with the idea of a transmigration of souls into a new

incarnation after death). Like the leaders of the French Enlightenment,

Lessing was a passionate advocate of religious toleration; he gave fullest

expression to this advocacy in his drama Nathan the Wise (1779). One reason

for toleration that Lessing oVers is that the worth of a person does not

depend on whether his beliefs are true, but on how much trouble he has

taken to attain the truth. This novel argument was presented in a vivid

paragraph often quoted since:

If God held all truth in his right hand and in his left the everlasting striving after

truth, so that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me, Choose,

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with humility I would pick on the left hand and say, Father, grant me that; absolute

truth is for thee alone. (Gesammelte Werke, ed. Lachmann and Muncker, XIII. 23)

Kant

One man who devoted his whole life to the pursuit of absolute truth was

Immanuel Kant: indeed, apart from this pursuit, there is little to tell about

his biography. Born in 1724 in Ko

nigsberg, which was then in the eastern

part of Prussia, he lived all his life in the town of his birth. From 1755 until

1770 he was a Privatdozent or lecturer in Ko

nigsberg University, and from 1770

until his death in 1804 he held the professorship of logic and metaphysics

there. He never travelled or married or held public oYc e, and the story of

his life is the story of his ideas.

Kant was brought up in a devout Lutheran family, but he later became

liberal in his theological views, though perforce regular in religious obser-

vance. He was always a man of strict life and constant habit, notorious for

exact punctuality, rising at Wve and retiring at ten, lecturing in the morning

from seven to eight, and then writing until a late and ample luncheon. The

citizens of Ko

nigsberg used to joke that they could set their watc hes by

his appearance for his afternoon constitutional. As a university student he

was taught by a disciple of WolV, but his own ea rly interests were more

scientiWc than philosophical, and as a Privatdozent he lectured not only

on logic and metaphysics but on subjects as diverse as anthropology,

geography, and mineralogy. His Wrst books, too, were written on scientiWc

subjects, most notably the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens

of 1755.

From 1860 onwards he began to devote himself seriously to philosophy,

but for the next twenty years the works he published were of a cautious

and conventional kind. In 1762 he wrote a short and rather superWcial essay

on the traditional syllogistic, criticizing the unnecessary subtlety (‘Die

falsche SptizWndigkeit’, as the essay’s title has it) of its customary presen-

tation. In the same year he wrote The Only Possible Ground for a Demonstration of

God’s Existence, in which, while rejecting three of the standard proofs of

God’s existence, he argued, in the spirit of WolV and Duns Scotus, that if

there are any possible beings at all there must be a perfect being to provide

the ground of this possibility.

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In 1763 the Berlin Academy set as a prize question ‘whether metaphysical

truths can be demonstrated with the same certainty as truths of geometry’.

Kant’s (unsuccessful) entry for the prize underlined a number of crucial

distinctions between mathematical and philosophical method. Mathemat-

icians start from clear deWnitions which create concepts which they then go

on to develop; philosophers start from confused concepts and analyse them

in order to reach a deWnition. Metaphysicians rather than aping ma themat-

icians should follow Newtonian methods, by applying them not to the

physical world but to the phenomena of inner experience.

The programme that Kant lays out here for the philosopher closely

resembles that which Hume had set himself, and later Kant was to credit

Hume with having woken him from the ‘dogmatic slumber’ of the years

when he accepted the philosophy of Leibniz and WolV. It is not certain when

Kant began the serious study of Hume, but during the 1760s he became

increasingly sceptical of the possibility of a scientiWc metaphysics. The

anonymous, skittish Dreams of a Ghost Seer of 1766 compared metaphysical

speculations with the esoteric fantasies of the visionary Immanuel Sweden-

borg. Among other things, Kant emphasized, in the wake of Hume, that

causal relations could be known only through experience and were never

matters of logical necessity. However, his inaugural dissertation as professor

in 1770 (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World) still shows the

strong inXuence of Leibniz.

The W rst eleven years of his professorship were spent by Kant in devel-

oping his own original system, which was published in 1781 in The Critique of

Pure Reason, a work which at once put his pre-critical works in the shade and

established him as one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age.

He followed it up with a briefer and more popular exposition of its ideas,

the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783), and republished it in a second

edition in 1787.

Kant’s aim in his critical philosophy was to make philosophy, for the Wrst

time, fully scientiWc. Mathematics had been scientiWc for many centuries,

and scientiWc physics had come of age. But metaphysics, the oldest discipline,

the one which ‘would survive even if all the rest were swallowed up in the

abyss of an all-destroying barbarism’, was still far from maturity. Metaphys-

ical curiosity was inherent in human nature: human beings could not but be

interested in the three main objects of metaphysics, namely, God, freedom,

and immortality. But could metaphysics become a true science?

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101

Hume and others, as we have seen, had tried to do for the philosophy of

mind what Newton had done for the philosophy of bodies, making the

association of ideas the psychic counterpart of gravitational attraction

between bodies. Kant’s programme for rendering metaphysics scientiWc

was on a more ambitious scale. Philosophy, he believed, needed a revolution

like that of Copernicus who had moved the earth from the centre of the

universe to put the sun in its place. Copernicus had shown that when we

think we are observing the motion of the sun round the earth what we see is

the consequence of the rotation of our own earth. Kant’s Copernican

revolution will do for our reason what Copernicus did for our sight. Instead

of asking how our knowledge can conform to its objects, we must start from

the supposition that objects must conform to our knowledge. Only in this

way can we justify the claim of metaphysics to possess knowledge that is

necessary and universal.

Kant distinguishes between two modes of knowledge: knowledge a priori

and knowledge a posteriori. We know a truth a posteriori if we know it through

An engraving of Kant at the

age when he published his

first Critique

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experience; we know it a priori if we know it independently of all experience.

Kant agreed with Locke that all our knowledge begins with experience, but

he did not believe that it all arose from experience. There are some things

that we know a priori, fundamental truths that are not mere generalizations

from experience. Among the judgements that we make a priori some, Kant

says, are analytic, and some are synthetic. In an analytic judgement, such as

‘all bodies are extended’, we are merely making explicit in the predicate

something that is already contained in the concept of the subject. But in a

synthetic judgement the predicate adds something to the content of

the subject: Kant’s example is ‘all bodies are heavy’. All a posteriori proposi-

tions are synthetic, and all analytic propositions are a priori. Can there be

propositions that are synthetic, and yet a priori? Kant believes that there are.

For him, mathematics oVers examples of synthetic a priori truths. Most

importantly, there must be propo sitions that are both a priori and synthetic

if it is ever going to be possible to make a genuine science out of meta-

physics.

The philosopher’s W rst task is to make plain the nature and limits of the

powers of the mind. Like medieval and rationalist philosophers before him,

Kant distinguishes sharply between the senses and the intellect; but within

the intellect he makes a new distinction of his own between understanding

(Verstand) and reason (Vernunft). The understanding operates in combin-

ation with the senses in order to provide human knowledge: through the

senses, objects are given us; through the understanding, they are made

thinkable. Experience has a content, provided by the senses, and a struc-

ture, determined by the understanding. Reason, by contrast with under-

standing, is the intellect’s endeavour to go beyond what understanding can

achieve. When divorced from experience it is ‘pure reason’, and it is this

which is the target of Kant’s criticism.

Before addressing pure reason, Kant’s Critique makes a systematic study of

the senses and the understanding. The senses are studied in a section en-

titled ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’, and the understanding in a section entitled

‘Transcendental Logic’. ‘Transcendental’ is a favourite word of Kant’s; he used

it with several meanings, but common to all of them is the notion of

something which (for better or worse) goes beyond and behind the deliver-

ances of actual experience.

The transcendental aesthetic is largely devoted to the study of space and

time. Sensations, Kant says, have a matter (or content) and a form. Space is

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the form of the outer senses, and time is the form of the inner sense. Space

and time are not entities in the world discovered by the mind: they are the

pattern into which the senses mould experience. In expounding his tran-

scendental aesthetic, Kant oVers his own novel solution to the age-old

question ‘Are space and time real?’6

When we move from the transcendental aesthetic to the transcendental

logic we again encounter a twofold division. The logic consists of two

major enterprises, which Kant calls the transcendental analytic and the transcen-

dental dialectic. The analytic sets out the criteria for the valid empirical

employment of the understanding; the dialectic exposes the illusions that

arise when reason tries to operate outside the limits set by the analytic. In

his analytic Kant lays out a set of a priori concepts which he calls ‘categories’,

and a set of a priori judgements which he calls ‘principles’. Accordingly, the

analytic is again subdivided, into two main sections, containing ‘The

Deduction of the Categories’ and ‘The System of Principles’.

The Wrst section presents the deduction, or legitimation, of the categor -

ies. Categories are concepts of a particularly fundamental kind: Kant gives

as instances the concepts of ‘cause’ and ‘substance’. Without these cat-

egories, he argues, we could not conceptualize or understand even the

most fragmentary and disordered experience. His aim here is to meet the

empiricist’s challenge on the empiricist’s own ground. He agrees with

the empiricist that all our knowledge begins with experience, but he denies

that all of it arises from experience. He seeks to show that without the

metaphysical concepts that Hume sought to dismantle, Hume’s own basic

items of experience, impressions, and ideas would themselves disintegrate.

The second section of the analytic, the system of principles, contains a

number of synthetic a priori propositions about experience. Experi ences, Kant

maintains, must possess two kinds of magnitude—extensive magnitude (of

which an instance is the distance between two points) and intensive magni-

tude (of which an instance is a particular degree of heat) Moreover, Kant

maintains, experience is only possible if necessary connections are to be

found among our perceptions. Hume was wrong to think that we Wrst

perceive temporal succession between events, and then go on to regard one

as cause and another as eVect. On the contrary, we could not establish an

6 Kant’s account of space and time is considered at greater length in Ch. 5.

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objective time sequence unless we had already established relationships

between causes and eVects.7

While Kant is hostile to empiricism, he attacks rationalism no less

vigorously. At the end of his analytic he insists that the categories cannot

determine their own applicability, the principles cannot establish their own

truth. Understanding alone cannot establish that there is any such thing

as a substance, or that every change has a cause. All that one can establish

a priori is that if experience is to be possible, certain conditions must hold.

But whether experience is possible cannot be established in advance: the

possibility of experience is shown only by the actual occurrence of experi-

ence itself.

The analytic shows that there cannot be a world of mere appearances,

mere objects of sense that do not fall under any categories or instantiate

any rules. But we cannot conclude from this that there is a non-sensible

world that is established by the intellect alone. To accept the exist ence of

extra-sensible objects that can be studied by the use of pure reason is to

enter a realm of illusion, and in his ‘transcendental dialectic’ Kant explores

this world of enchantment.

‘Transcendental’, as has been said, means something that goes beyond

and behind the deliverances of actual experience, and in his dialectic Kant

has three principal targets: metaphysical psychology, metaphysical cosmol-

ogy, and metaphysical theology. ‘Pure reason’, he tells us, ‘furnished the

idea for a transcendental doctrine of the soul, for a transcendental science

of the world, and Wnally for a transcendental knowledge of God.’ In turn

he tests to destruction the three notions of an immaterial immortal soul, of

a surveyable cosmic whole, and of an absolutely necessary being.

Rationalist psychology, as practised by Descartes, started with the premiss

‘I think’ and concluded to the existence of a substance that was immaterial,

incorruptible, personal, a nd immortal. Kant argues that this line of argu-

ment is littered with fallacies—he lists four of them which he calls ‘the

paralogisms of pure reason’. These paralogisms are not accidental: in

principle, any attempt to go beyond empirical psychology must be guilty

of fallacy.

In order to dismantle a priori cosmology, Kant sets up four antinomies. An

antinomy is a pair of contrasting arguments which lead to contradictory

7 Kant’s account of the relation between time and causation is discussed in Chapter 6.

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