by Robert Wicks
In Kant’s philosophy, the obstacles to our apprehension of reality as it is in itself are space, time, and the categories of the understanding, all regarded as innate ways in which we humans process sensory information. In later philosophies with a Kantian flavour, the obstacles are in the same way conceived as residing within us, but other forms and/or categories are identified as salient, taking the place of space, time and the categories of the understanding.
A fascinating example is Martin Heidegger’s philosophy as expressed in his book, Being and Time (1927). Like Kant, Heidegger was interested in comprehending the universal aspects of the human being, although he disagreed with Kant that they reside in the structures of traditional Aristotelian logic. More practical and down-to-earth in his philosophical orientation, Heidegger sought to reveal the elements of what it is like to be a human being, not in the abstract or formalistically, but as we are situated actually and concretely in the world, walking, talking, eating, sleeping, making things and wondering about our surroundings and ourselves.
Heidegger discerned that when engaged in real-life activity with other humans, no matter where or when the human being historically happens to be, a person will, for example, have a sense of caring. The person will also have the awareness of being within and surrounded by an environment, of being in a community with other people, of being surrounded by a set of items that can be used for practical ends, of moving along a life-path where death awaits, and of wondering why we exist at all. Like Kant’s categories, space and time, Heidegger’s more existentially defined fundamental features of being human are universal to everyone, and define the limits of our daily awareness and possible knowledge.
Other theorists conceived of language itself as operating along the same definitive lines as Kant’s categories of the understanding, space and time. Every socialized human being is nurtured to speak some language, whether it happens to be Xhosa, Greek, Thai, Uzbek, English, German, or any other of several thousand possibilities. It is amazing how children have the potentiality to learn so many languages, and in a Kantian spirit, the linguist, political thinker and philosopher, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) hypothesized that there are innate principles for language acquisition, which in conjunction with environmental inputs, yield the different languages we speak.
More directly reflective of Kant’s view that we cannot know things in themselves, however, it was further observed that each language has its own particular conceptual contours which establish for each of its speakers, the basic categories through which the world is for them divided and experienced. Insofar as languages vary, two people who speak different languages can be regarded as apprehending the world through different sets of categories.
The resulting differences in world-view between people who speak different languages can become quite pronounced. When two natural languages have respectively diverse concepts of time, or incongruent sets of colour words, or radically different grammatical structures, the speakers could be said to be living in virtually different ‘worlds’. Edmund Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), an anthropologist and linguist respectively, advanced this idea of linguistic relativism in their writings. With this rendition of the basic Kantian insight, we retain the idea that our conceptual categories shape our experience, but lose the universality and commonality that Kant, Heidegger and Chomsky ascribed to their conceptions of what is fundamental to all human beings.
In accord with the idea of linguistic relativism, it follows that someone whose natural language is permeated with sexist or racist values, could also be said to live in a noticeably different world than someone whose language lacks such discriminatory aspects. Revolutionizing society can thereby be regarded significantly as a matter of changing the way people speak, where the political and moral project is to revise the vocabulary into a less prejudicial and oppressive form. An obvious example is how, in referring to everyone as a collective, we can replace the words ‘man’ and ‘men’, with words such as ‘people’, ‘persons’, ‘humans’ or ‘humanity’. Feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) have made considerable headway in illuminating the sexist dimensions of some of the more commonly used natural languages and in proposing alternative vocabularies.
Closely related to the theorists who regard language itself as a filter through which we apprehend the world, is yet another way to express the Kantian insight about how our conceptual categories filter our apprehension of the world. This is to maintain that not language, exactly, but the more complexly layered historical time period in which a person lives – one can call it the prevailing ‘spirit of the times’ – conveys its own way of apprehending the world. Inspired by this idea, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) described at some length the various styles of knowledge, along with their incongruities, that predominated respectively during medieval times, post-Renaissance times and contemporary times.
The above influences issue from Kant’s fundamental idea that we must always take into account the effects of our very presence, when addressing the question, ‘What can we know?’ In addition, there is another way to trace Kant’s historical influence – one that rests more specifically upon his idealistic position that as far as we know, the spatio-temporal world as such, has no existence independently of our minds. We have seen how Kant resolved the problem of freedom and determinism through this proposition, stating that although all of our actions in the spatio-temporal world are thoroughly predictable, freedom is still possible, because the mechanically driven, spatio-temporal world does not represent how ultimate reality is in itself.
Once we define the scientific, mathematical, predictable world of daily life as not self-subsistently real, there is a philosophical opening to assert that ultimate reality is not rational. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) expressed this view in 1818, asserting that the universe’s inner reality is a blind energy that is best called ‘Will’, which appears in us as unconscious, instinctual energy. Extending thereby from Kant to Schopenhauer is a non-rationalist path of Kant’s influence that moves from Schopenhauer to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, thereafter into the early twentieth century’s Surrealist artistic movement, and eventually into the literary theory of the 1960s. With respect to the pursuit of truth, these theorists tend to highlight artistic and literary methods over rationalistic philosophy, mathematics and natural science.
Among the many areas where his philosophy has had an impact, these are some of the larger historical waves of Kant’s influence. As ‘influences’ tend to operate, they involve transformations of Kant’s view, often to the point where some of his basic tenets are abandoned. The phenomenon compares to how languages slowly change as one drives across a multinational terrain, where perhaps for every 15-mile stretch, the people at each end will understand one another. After having driven 300 miles, however, the people residing at each end of the drive will be speaking entirely different languages.
From our study overall, we can now readily appreciate how it is impossible to understand our present-day historical situation well, without having an appreciation for Kant’s contribution to the influential theorists who have been working for the past two centuries, numbering literally in the thousands, and extending across every major field. As one of the most important thinkers within relatively recent human history, Kant’s thought has indelibly touched philosophy, psychology, politics, linguistics, physics, anthropology and theology in its emphasis upon the humility of the human condition and the supreme importance of morality.
Dig Deeper
Karl Ameriks, Nicholas Boyle and others (eds.), The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought [four vols] (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard University Press, 1993)
Mark Cheetham, Kant, Art and Art History: Moments of Discipline (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann, The Kant
ian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science (MIT Press, 2006)
Tom Rockmore, Kant and Phenomenology (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
Further reading
Al-Azm, Sadik J., The Origins of Kant’s Arguments in the Antinomies (Clarendon Press, 1972)
Allison, Henry, Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Allison, Henry, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Allison, Henry, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Allison, Henry, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (Yale University Press, 1983)
Ameriks, Karl and Otfried Hoeffe (eds.), Kant’s Moral and Legal Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Ameriks, Karl, Nicholas Boyle and others (eds.), The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought [four vols] (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Ameriks, Karl, Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (Clarendon Press, 1982)
Baron, Marcia, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (Cornell University Press, 1995)
Beauchamp, Tom, and Alexander Rosenberg, Hume and the Problem of Causation (Oxford University Press, 1981)
Beiser, Frederick, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard University Press, 1993)
Beck, Lewis White, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1960)
Brook, Andrew, Kant and the Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Buchdahl, Gerd, Kant and the Dynamics of Reason: Essays on the Structure of Kant’s Philosophy (Blackwell, 1992)
Cassirer, Ernst, Kant’s Life and Thought, (trans. James Haden, Yale University Press, 1981)
Cheetham, Mark, Kant, Art and Art History: Moments of Discipline (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Cohen, Ted and Paul Guyer, (eds.), Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 1982)
Crowther, Paul, The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Crowther, Paul, The Kantian Sublime, From Morality to Art (Clarendon Press, 1989)
DiCenso, James J., Kant, Religion and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Falkenstein, Lorne, Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic (University of Toronto Press, 1995)
Føllesdal Andreas and Reidar Maliks (eds.), Kantian Theory and Human Rights (Routledge, 2014)
Förster, Eckart (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: The Three ‘Critiques’ and the ‘Opus postumum’ (Stanford University Press, 1989)
Friedman, Michael and Alfred Nordmann, The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science (MIT Press, 2006)
Frierson, Patrick R., Freedom and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Grier, Michelle, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Gulya, Arsenij, Immanuel Kant and His Life and Thought (trans. M. Despalatovic, Boston: Birkhauser, 1987)
Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1979)
Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Guyer, Paul, Kant on Freedom, Law and Happiness (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Guyer, Paul (ed.), Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement: Critical Essays (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)
Guyer, Paul, Knowledge, Reason and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume (Princeton University Press, 2008)
Hudson, Hud, Kant’s Compatibilism (Cornell University Press, 1994)
Insole, Christopher J., Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Kemal, Salim, Kant and Fine Art: An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Art and Culture (Clarendon Press, 1986)
Kleingeld, Pauline, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Korsgaard, Christine, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Kuehn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Kukla, Rebecca (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Lahat, Golan Moshe, The Political Implications of Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: Rethinking Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Longuenesse, Béatrice, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason (Princeton University Press, 1998)
Louden, Robert, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Martin, Wayne M., Theories of Judgement: Psychology, Logic, Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
McCarty, Richard, Kant’s Theory of Action (Oxford University Press, 2009)
McFarland, John D., Kant’s Concept of Teleology (University of Edinburgh Press, 1970)
Melnick, Arthur, Kant’s Analogies of Experience (University of Chicago Press, 1973)
Melnick, Arthur Space, Time and Thought in Kant (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989)
O’Neill, Onora, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Pippin, Robert, Kant’s Theory of Form (Yale University Press, 1982)
Powell, C. Thomas, Kant’s Theory of Self-Consciousness (Clarendon Press, 1990)
Riley, Patrick, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 1982)
Ripstein, Arthur, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2009)
Rockmore, Tom, Kant and Phenomenology (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
Rogerson, Kenneth, The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant’s Aesthetics (SUNY Press, 2009)
Rosen, Allen D., Kant’s Theory of Justice (Cornell University Press, 1996)
Shaper, Eva and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (eds.), Reading Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy (Blackwell, 1989)
Shaper, Eva, Studies in Kant’s Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 1979)
Shaw, Christopher David, On Exceeding Determination and the Ideal of Reason (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012)
Sklar, Lawrence, Space, Time and Spacetime (University of California Press, 1977)
Stern, Robert, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Stuckenberg, J. H. W., The Life of Immanuel Kant (London: MacMillan, 1882)
Timmerman, Jens, Kant’s ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Velkley, Richard, Freedom and the Ends of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Watkins, Eric, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Waxman, Wayne, Kant’s Model of the Mind: A New Interpretation of Transcendental Idealism (Oxford University Press, 1991)
Westphal, Kenneth R., Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Wicks, Robert, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Judgement (Routledge, 2007)
Wike, Victoria S., Kant’s Antinomies of Reason (University Press of America, 1982)
Wood, Allen, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Wood, Allen, Kant’s Moral Religion (Cornell University Press, 1970)
Wood, Allen, Kant’s Rational Theology Cornell University Press, 1978
Zammito, John, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Zuckert, Rachel Kant on Beauty and Bio
logy: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgement (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton. An Hachette UK company.
First published in US in 2014 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Copyright © Robert Wicks 2014
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