CHAPTER IX

THE OPTIMISTIC-ETHICAL WORLD-VIEW IN KANT

Kant’s ethics, deepened, but lacking content

SO far as the general tendency of his thought goes Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) lives entirely in the optimistic-ethical world-view of rationalism._(_39_)_ He has, however, a feeling that its foundations are not deep and firm enough, and he regards it as his task to put them on ground which is in every respect more secure. For this purpose a deeper ethic, and a less naïve positiveness in assertions about world-view which touch upon the supra-sensible, seem to him desirable.

Like the English intellectualists and intuitionists, Kant is offended by the idea that the ethic in which the modern age finds satisfaction and its impulse to activity is rooted merely in considerations of the universal advantage of morally good actions. Like them, he feels that it is something more than this, and that in the ultimate analysis it has its origin in the compulsion which men experience to strive for self-perfecting. But while his predecessors stick fast in the matter provided by semi-scholastic philosophy and theology, he attacks the problem along the lines of pure ethical thought. It follows for him that the fundamental origin and the exalted character of the moral can be preserved only if we always consciously make it an end in itself, and never merely a means to an end. Even if moral conduct prove itself to be always advantageous and practical, our motive to it must nevertheless always be a [pg 107] purely inward compulsion. The utilitarian ethic must abdicate before that of immediate and sovereign duty. That is the meaning of the doctrine of the categorical imperative.

The English anti-utilitarians had in common with the utilitarians the thought that the moral law was related in its essence to empirical natural law. Kant, however, asserts that it has nothing to do with the order of nature, and has its origin in supra-natural impulses. He is the first since Plato to feel, like him, that the ethical is the mysterious fact within us. In powerful language he proves in the _Critique of the Practical Reason_ that ethics are a volition which raises us above ourselves, makes us free from the natural order of the world, and attaches us to a higher world-order. That is his great discovery.

In the development of it, however, he is not happy. Whoever asserts the absoluteness of moral duty, must also give the moral an absolute and completely universal content. He must specify a principle of conduct which shows itself as absolutely binding, and as lying at the foundations of the most varied ethical duties. If he does not succeed in doing this, his work is only a fragment.

When Plato announces that ethics are something supra-natural and puzzling, his world-view provides him with a basic principle of the ethical which corresponds to these qualities, and also has a definite content. He is in a position to define ethics as a process of becoming pure and free from the world of sense. This, his own special ethic, he develops in the passages where he is consistent with himself. Then, when he cannot complete his argument without an active ethic, he has recourse to the popular theory of virtue.

Kant, however, as a child of the modern spirit, cannot let world- and life-denial rank as an ethic. Therefore, since he can go only a part of the way with Plato, he sees himself faced with the confusing task of letting a purposive, activist ethic which is directed on the empirical world originate in impulses which are not determined by any adaptation to the empirical.

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He can find no solution of the problem thus set. In the form which he gives it it is in fact insoluble. But he never even realises that he has arrived at the problem of finding a basic principle of the moral which is a necessity of thought. He is content with formally characterizing ethical duty as absolutely binding. That duty, unless a real content is at once given to it, remains an empty concept, he is unwilling to admit. For the exalted character of his basic principle of the moral he pays the price of having it devoid of all content.

Beginnings of an attempt to establish a basic moral principle which has a content are to be found in his treatise, _Prolegomena to a Metaphysic of Morals_ (1785), and again later in _A Metaphysic of Morals_ (1797). In the 1785 volume he arrives at the dictum: “Act in such a way that you use every human being both in your own person and in everyone else’s always as an end, never merely as a means.” But instead of seeing how far the totality of ethical duties can be developed out of this principle, he prefers in the 1797 treatise to set before ethics two ends to be aimed at, viz. the perfecting of oneself and the happiness of others, and to enlarge upon the virtues which promote them.

In his investigation of the ethic which aims at personal perfecting, he drives his gallery with sure instinct towards the recognition that all virtues which contribute thereto must be conceived of as manifestations of sincerity and of reverence for one’s own spiritual being. He does not, however, go the length of comprehending these two as a unity, just as little does he concern himself to make clear the inner connexion between self-perfecting and effort directed to the common good, and in that way to dig down to the roots of the ethical as such.

How far Kant is from understanding the problem of finding a basic moral principle which has a definite content can be seen from the fact that he never gets beyond an utterly narrow conception of the ethical. He persists obstinately in drawing the boundary of his ethic as close [pg 109] as possible, making it concerned with no duties beyond those of man to man. The relation of man to non-human existences he does not draw within it. It is only indirectly that he includes in it the prohibition of cruelty to animals, putting this among the duties of man to himself. By inhuman treatment of animals, he says, sympathy with their sufferings is blunted in us, and thereby “comes a weakening of a natural disposition which is very helpful to our morality in relation to other men, and it gradually dies out.”

Again as to the vandalism of the destruction of what is beautiful, in the form, that is, of natural objects which are viewed as entirely without feeling, this is said to be unethical only because it violates the duty of man to himself by undermining the desire—itself a support to morality—of having something to love without regard to utility.

If the sphere of the ethical is limited to the relations of man to man, then all attempts to reach a basic principle of the moral with an absolutely binding content are rendered hopeless beforehand. The absolute demands the universal. If there really is a basic principle for the moral, it must be concerned in some way or other with the relations between man and life as such in all its manifestations.

Kant, then, does not essay the task of developing an ethic which corresponds to his deepened conception of the ethical. On the whole he does nothing more than put the current utilitarian ethic under the Protectorate of the Categorical Imperative. Behind a magnificent façade he constructs a block of tenements.

His influence on the ethics of his time is twofold. He furthers it by challenging it to profounder reflection on the nature of the ethical and the ethical destiny of man. At the same time he is a danger to it in that he robs it of its simplicity. The strength of the ethic of the age of reason lies in its naïve utilitarian enthusiasm. It directly enlists men in its service by offering them good aims and objects. Kant makes it insecure by bringing this directness in question and calling for an ethic which is derived from much less elementary considerations. Depth is gained at [pg 110] the cost of vitality, because he fails to establish at the same time a basic moral principle with a content, a principle which compels acceptance from deep and yet elementary considerations.

Several times Kant actually makes it his object to block the natural sources of morality. He will not, for example, allow direct sympathy to be regarded as ethical. The inner feeling for the suffering of another as if it were one’s own is not to count as duty in the real sense of the word, but only as a weakness by which the evil in the world is doubled. All help to others must have its source in a reasoned consideration of the duty of contributing to the happiness of others.

By taking from ethics their simplicity and directness, Kant also loosens the connexion which they and the belief in progress had formed with one another, and through which the two together had proved so productive of good. The disastrous separation between them which later on, in the course of the nineteenth century, became complete, was partly due to him.

In consequence of his wishing to drive out the naïve rationalistic conception of the ethical in favour of a deepened one without at the same time being in a position to establish a basic principle of it which has been correspondingly deepened, has a definite content of its own, and is directly convincing, Kant brings the ethics of his time into danger. He labours at the provision of new foundations without remembering that the house will develop cracks, if it is not propped up sufficiently.

Kant’s attempt to reach an ethical world-view

Kant passes by the problem of finding a basic principle of the moral with a definite content, because, while attempting to deepen the concept of the ethical, he pursues an object which lies outside ethics. He wishes to bring ethical idealism into connexion with an idealistic representation of the world which has its source in a theory of knowledge. But [pg 111] from that source he hopes there will come an ethical world-view able to satisfy critical thought.

Why has Kant with a rigorism which intentionally depreciates ordinary moral experience ventured forward to the discovery that the moral law has nothing to do with the natural world-order, but is something super-sensible? Because he refuses, similarly, to let the sensible world which is experienced by us in space and time be accepted as anything more than a manifestation of something nonsensible which makes up true reality. The concept of a moral which contains none but inward and spiritual duties is for him the expanding ladder which he draws out so as to reach by means of it the region of Being in itself. He has no feeling of dizziness when in company with ethics, he mounts above all empirical experience and all empirical aims and objects. He is determined to go right up with her, and she can never be sufficiently _a priori_ for him, because he sets up another ladder of the same length, that of epistemological idealism, and tries to lean one against the other, so that they may give each other mutual support.

How does it come about that the theoretical assumption that the world of sensible phenomena has a non-sensible world of Being lying behind it, has any importance for world-view? Because within the notion of absolute duty which man experiences at work within himself there lies a fact of the world-order of that same non-sensible world. Hence arises the possibility, so Kant thinks, of raising to certainty by means of ethics those great elements in the non-sensible world which are of value for the optimistic-ethical world-view, viz. the ideas of God, of the ethical freedom of the will, and of immortality, which otherwise would always remain merely problematical.

So far as rationalism affirms unhesitatingly from the standpoint of theoretical knowledge the ideas of God, of the ethical freedom of the will (_i.e._, of virtue), and of immortality, which make up its optimistic-ethical world-view, it builds upon a foundation which cannot bear the weight of critical thought. Kant wishes, therefore, to erect the [pg 112] optimistic-ethical world-view as a lake-dwelling upon piles rammed into place by ethics. These three ideas are to be able to claim real existence for themselves as necessary postulates of the ethical consciousness.

This plan, however, of thus securing the position of the optimistic-ethical world-view cannot be carried out. It is only the idea of the ethical freedom of the will that can be made a postulate of the moral consciousness. To establish the ideas of God and immortality as equally “postulates,” Kant has to abandon all honourable logic and argue with bold and ever bolder sophisms.

There is no way of uniting epistemological and ethical idealism, however enticing the undertaking looks at first sight. When they are set side by side, the happenings which take place according to a law of causation subordinate to freedom, and become conscious in man through the moral law, become identified with the happenings which are universal in the world of things in themselves. There ensues a disastrous confusion of the ethical with the intellectual. If the sensible world is only a manifestation of an immaterial world, then all the happenings which come about in the space and time sphere of causation produced by necessity are only parallel appearances of the events which are brought about in the intellectual sphere of causation produced by freedom. All happenings, therefore, human activity just as much as natural happening, are, according to the point of view, at once intellectual and free, and at once natural and necessary. If ethical activity produced by freedom is represented as analogous with the results of epistemological idealism, then either everything that happens in the world, conceived as intellectual happening, is ethical, or there is no such thing as an ethical happening. Because it has chosen to put side by side these two things, human activity and natural happening, Kant’s way of looking at the question has to renounce all ability to maintain the difference between them. But the very life of ethics depends on this difference being there and effective.

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Epistemological idealism is a dangerous companion for the ethical. The world-order of immaterial happening has a supra-ethical character. From the setting side by side of ethical and epistemological idealism there can never result an ethical world-view: it will always be a supra-ethical one.

From epistemological idealism, therefore, ethics have nothing to expect, but everything to fear. By its depreciation of the reality of the empirical world the ethical world-view is not helped: it is injured.

Ethics have materialist instincts. They want to concern themselves with empirical happenings and transform the circumstances of the empirical world. But if that world is only “appearance,” derived from an intellectual world which functions within it or behind it, ethics have nothing on which to act. To wish to influence a self-determined play of appearances has no sense. Ethics can therefore allow validity to the view that the empirical world is mere appearance only with the limitation that activity exerted upon the appearance does at the same time influence the reality lying behind it. But thereby they come into conflict with all epistemological idealism.

Kant is defeated by the same fate which rules in Stoic, Indian, and Chinese monism alike. As soon as thought tries in any way to comprehend ethics in connexion with the world-process, it falls at once, whether it is conscious of it or not, into the supra-ethical manner of regarding it. Fully to shape ethics to an ethical world-view means letting them come to terms with nature-philosophy. Ethics are thereupon, as a matter of fact, devoured in one way or another by that philosophy, even if they are in word saved from that fate. The coupling of ethical idealism with epistemological is only bringing ethics and nature-philosophy into relation with one another in a roundabout way by which it is hoped to outwit the logic of facts. But this logic cannot be outwitted. The tragical result lies in the identification which has been made of the ethical with the intellectual.

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The ethical is not something irrational which becomes explicable when we betake ourselves from the world of appearance to the region of immaterial Being that lies behind it. Its intellectual character is of a peculiar kind, and rests upon the fact that the world-process, as such, comes in man into contradiction with itself. It follows that the ethical will and ethical freedom of the will are not explicable by any theory of knowledge, and cannot, moreover, serve as a support to any such theory.

As a result of conceiving the moral law and empirical obedience to natural law as in absolute opposition to each other, Kant finds himself on the road which leads to a dualistic world-view. Afterwards, however, in order to satisfy the claims of the unitary and optimistic world-view which the spirit of the age prescribes to him, he manages with the stratagems which are provided for him by the combination of ethical and epistemological idealism, to work himself back on to the road which leads to the monistic point of view.

Kant is great as an ethical thinker, great too with his theory of knowledge, but as shaper of a world-view he is not in the first rank. By his deepened conception of the nature of the ethical, a conception which lands him in dualistic thought, the problem of the optimistic-ethical world-view is unfolded in an entirely new way. Difficulties reveal themselves which till then no one could have imagined to exist. But he does not deal with them. He is blinded by his ambition to be the Copernicus of the optimistic-ethical world-view, believing that he can show the difficulties inherent in that view to be misunderstandings which explain themselves away as soon as, by means of his epistemological idealism, actual circumstances and relations take the place of these which are apparent but inexplicable. In reality he does nothing but replace the naïve optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world which was the basis of action for the rationalists by an artfully contrived one.

He does not take the trouble to ask in what the optimistic [pg 115] ethical world-view consists, to what final items of knowledge and demands it leads, and how far these are confirmed by experience of the moral law. He takes it over without examination in the formula: “God, Freedom (or Virtue), and Immortality,” which was supplied to it by rationalism, and wishes to raise it in this naïve form to a certainty.

There is thus in Kant’s philosophy the most terrible want of thought interwoven with the deepest thinking. New truths, weighty in their novelty, make their appearance in it. But they get only half-way on their journey. The absoluteness of ethical duty is grasped, but its content is not investigated. Experience of the ethical is recognized as the great secret by means of which we comprehend ourselves as “other than the world”; but the dualistic thinking which goes with it is not worked out any further. That the final items of our knowledge of our world-view are assertions of the ethical will is admitted, but the consequences of this supremacy of the will over knowledge are not thought out to a conclusion.

Kant stimulates powerfully the men of his time, but is unable to make secure for them the optimistic-ethical world-view in which they have lived. His mission is, although both he and they are content to deceive themselves in the matter, to deepen it, and ... to let it become less secure than before.

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