The Spirit of Modern Philosophy/Lecture 4
LECTURE IV
KANT
We saw in the last lecture how the self-analysis of the eighteenth century inevitably tended towards the rediscovery of passion, and finally, towards the great revolutionary movement, in life and in literature, with which the century closed. But we also found that the same Lockean tendency was bound to produce a philosophical skepticism whereof Hume was our chief example. Hume stated the essence of Locke’s theory with an almost brutal simplicity of formulation. We know, he said, impressions, which come to us through sense, and ideas, which are the copies of impressions. About some ideas we can reason. These form the subject-matter of our only demonstrative science, mathematics. All our other science concerns matters of fact, that is, recorded impressions of our experience, with such rational observations as we can make upon them. Does the inner life pretend to more than this, to more than a knowledge of impressions and ideas, — then what is this pretense but sophistry and illusion? The inner life, under this merciless analysis, shrivels up, as it were, into a mere series of chance experiences. The sacred faiths of humanity, do they record seen and felt matters of fact? The moral law, is it more than a feeling in the mind of the sympathetic subject? Hume is indeed merciless; but his mercilessness is, after all, the clear insight of a reflective man. Bare experience of the Lockean sort does indeed contain no such supreme rationality as earlier thinkers had found there. What Hume showed was that unless there is more in experience than Locke’s view permitted it to contain, the hope of any transcendent knowledge or faith for humanity is indeed gone. That Hume showed this is his great merit, for hereby he led the way to Kant.
I.
When I mention the name of Kant, who forms our special topic to-day, I introduce to you one whose thought arouses more suggestions in the mind of a philosophical student than cluster about any other modern thinker. One despairs of telling you all or any great part of what Kant has meant to one in the course of a number of years of metaphysical study; but let me still try to suggest a little of Kant's place in such a line of work. One hears of Kant early in one's life as a student of philosophy. He is said to be hard, perhaps a little dangerous (a thing which of course attracts one hugely!). He is said to be also certainly typical of German speculation, and always worthy of one's efforts if one means to philosophize at all. Perhaps one, therefore, first tries him in translation, with a sense that, even if one's German is not yet free, something must already be done to win him. The “Critique of Pure Reason,” how attractive the name! How wise one will be after criticising the pure reason through the reading of five or six hundred pages of close print! There is an old translation of Kant, in Bohn’s Library, by a certain Meiklejohn. One begins with that. The English is heavy, not to say shocking; but the first effect of the reading is soon a splendid sense of power, a feeling of the exhaustiveness of the treatment, of the skill and subtlety and fearlessness of this Kant. What seems to be a good deal of the book — not the chief part, indeed — one can even fairly grasp at the first reading. In fact, so persuasive, to certain minds, is the general external appearance of Kant's method of work, that there are students who, on their first superficial acquaintance with him, really fancy that they have actually comprehended the whole thing at one stroke. I myself have heard this feeling expressed by diligent young readers, who have assured me, after their first trial of the “Critique,” that, as they supposed, it must be that they had somehow failed to understand Kant, for whereas people said he was hard, they themselves hadn’t found anything very difficult in the book at all. To their great alarm, as it were, they hadn’t even been puzzled. Yet when such persons come to read Kant a second time, I fear that they usually find themselves considerably puzzled; or rather, I should say that I hope so. Puzzle is a sensation that soon comes, when one begins to examine Kant more cautiously and worthily. The first superficial joy in his power, in his skill, in his subtlety, in his fearlessness, fades away. One sees his actual doctrine looming afar off, a mountain yet to be climbed. On nearer approach, one finds the mountain well wooded; and the woods have thick underbrush. The paths lose themselves in the dark valleys, leading this way and that, with most contradictory windings. Kant is a pedantic creature after all, one says. He loves hard words. He takes a mass of them, — as one of his critics fiercely says, he takes a mass of Latin terms ending in tion, and translates them into so many equivalent vernacular terms, ending in the German in heit and keit and he calls this sort of thing philosophy! Getting such things through the medium of an English translation doesn’t improve them. One begins to anathematize the poor translator, Meiklejohn, in fear lest one should blaspheme instead the sacred name of the immortal Kant. One finally concludes that this is a book full of great insights and of noble passages, but that the real connections aren’t to be made out until one shall have fought the good fight in German. And so one drops the subject until one’s German shall be free.
That happy time comes. One has first read Schopenhauer whose German, to use a comparison of Jean Paul Richter’s, is as limpid as a mountain lake that lies beneath gloomy cliffs, under a clear and frosty sky. One has even plunged down the tumultuous streams of Fichte’s eloquence, where the frail bark of a student’s understanding is indeed occasionally rather near to destruction, but whence a man still usually escapes with his wits. Now it is time to return to Kant. One hereupon falls upon the “Critique” with new zest, and finds that, as reading goes in a studious but rather busy and distracted life, one can at length read the book through in about three years, and can feel that thereafter he might do well to begin and read it again. After doing so, one lays it aside for a spell, and so returns afresh, from year to year, for a longer or shorter season, to the fascinating but baffling task. In Germany, where there has been a revival of interest in Kant, during the past twenty years, reading the “Critique” has come to take rank, so to speak, as one of the liberal professions. There are learned men who, in all appearance, do nothing else. The habit is dangerously fascinating. The Kant devotee never knows when to stop. When I studied in Germany as a young college graduate, some fifteen years ago, it was my fortune to meet one of the most learned and many-sided of the new philosophical doctors of the day, who was just then preparing for a docentship. He was a man who promised, as one might say, almost everything; who wrote and published essays of remarkable breadth and skill, and who was especially noticeable for his wide range of work. Some years later, it unhappily occurred to him to begin printing a commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” He planned the commentary for completion in four volumes octavo. Of these four he published, not long afterwards, the first, a volume of several hundred large pages, wherein he deals — with Kant’s introductory chapter. Since then my former acquaintance is lost.
The final volumes of the commentary have never appeared, although he has now been at work upon them more than ten years. How many volumes will really be needed to complete the task, only the “destroyer of delights and terminator of felicities,” whom the Arabian Nights’ tales always love to mention as they close, to wit, Death himself, can ever determine. The thorough student of Kant is, so to speak, a Tannhäuser, close shut in his Venusberg. You hunt for him fruitlessly in all the outer world. Worse than Tannhäuser he is, for you can never get him out. Pilgrims' choruses chant, and waiting Elizabeths mourn for him, in vain. As for me, I, as you perceive, am no reader of Kant, in the strict sense, at all. I won a doctor's degree, years since, in part by writing a course of lectures upon the “Critique.” I have since come to see that those lectures were founded upon a serious, I might say an entire, misinterpretation of Kant’s meaning. Since then I have repented, as you also observe, of this misinterpretation, and, as I might add, of several others. I love still to lecture to my college classes on Kant. I think that possibly I know a little about him. But then, after all, Kant, you see, is Kant; and the Lord made him, and many other wondrous works besides; and it takes time to find such things out.
You will understand therefore, at once, that I can have no intention of making clear, within the limits of a single lecture, a doctrine so subtle and involved as this. But then the justification of my undertaking in these lectures is wholly that I attempt, not to describe the philosophers and their opinions as the monuments of technical skill and of exhaustive research which they are, but to set forth to you something of the temperament which they embody. Kant shall be for us a character in a story, an attitude towards the spiritual concerns of humanity. As such you want to know him; as such only can I attempt here to describe him.
II.
The man Kant is an old subject for literary portraiture. It is hard to say anything in the least new about him. He was born in 1724, in the city of Königsberg, in the province of East Prussia, and never once in his life traveled beyond that province. His family was poor; his father was of Scotch descent, and was a saddler, and in religion a pietist. Both Kant’s parents lived a narrow and glowing religious life, cheerful, harmonious, and, in a worldly sense, dispassionate. At school Kant attracted such attention that a university course of study followed, in Königsberg, of course, and this led him to an academic career. At the outset of his literary work Kant is a curious mixture of the pedant, the many-sided student, the young man of literary skill, and the independent investigator. His earliest essay was in philosophical physics, and was in more senses than one a failure. In 1755, he published, however, a remarkable paper on the “General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,” wherein he anticipated the essential features of the nebular hypothesis which Laplace afterwards developed. Up to this time he had been a private tutor. Thenceforth he lectured as privat-docent at the university until his appointment as professor in 1770. Promotion, as one sees, was thereabouts slow, and Kant was perhaps at first overlooked by higher officials, whom he never sought to please. During these earlier years he was a man of considerable literary skill, but in philosophy was still under the influence of the reigning dogmatic school. The poet Herder, who heard him as docent, speaks very highly of his power in those days as a lecturer. Of Kant in his young prime we have a portrait, showing him at the age of forty-four. More common is the portrait taken much later in life. Both show us the spare, small, insignificant-appearing man. He was of frail health, but Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/131 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/132 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/133 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/134 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/135 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/136 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/137 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/138 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/139 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/140 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/141 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/142 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/143 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/144 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/145 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/146 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/147 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/148 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/149 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/150 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/151 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/152 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/153 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/154 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/155 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/156 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/157 Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/158