From Kant to Rawls, and After

The core concept in Kant's philosophical system is autonomy: living by universal laws one has oneself adopted, so that one is not dominated by other persons or by one's own inclinations. All Kant's followers have set a high value on autonomy, though not all make it the core of their own systems.

Some Key Concepts of Kant and Rawls

Kant's philosophical system on the one hand aims to justify and explain the doctrine of the freedom and moral equality of persons that he takes from Rousseau. On the other hand, it aims to discover how knowledge, science, morality, and moral responsibility are possible once we accept the major results of Hume's empiricism. Yet Kant does not want to join empiricism in constructing knowledge, morality, etc., purely out of the evidence of the senses via inductive or experimental

reasoning--what he calls "a posteriori reasoning." For he fears that doing so will encourage subjectivism and relativism

about these systems: they will lose their rational authority. But neither does Kant wish to use the rationalist methods of

Leibniz and Christian Wolff, since those consist in asserting some ultimate principles as self-evident axioms, and then deducing the existence of knowledge, morality, etc. from them. This, Kant thinks, risks dogmatism. For he holds that no metaphysical first principles can be self-evident and uncontroversial.

To solve this problem, Kant advocates a "Copernican revolution in philosophy," which consists in three basic changes. We must, first, shift our view of what should be the central concept of philosophy; second, accept a new doctrine of the relation between subject and object, and, third, use a new method of philosophical reasoning.

Above all else, Kant advocates a fundamental shift in our view of what should be the central concept of philosophy. Prior to him, philosophies had sought to ultimately ground and explain everything in something they thought truly objective and bound up with the way things really are. Among these central concepts of earlier philosophical systems were Reason, the eternal Forms, a Necessary and Perfect Being, Substance, Nature, or human beings driven by emotions. In each case, the concept in question is something largely external to the philosopher while he or she philosophizes. For each of the great past philosophies, the goal of philosophizing is to find the path to communion with that concept, so that the philosopher can exhibit everything as deriving from it. Kant's Copernican Revolution urges us to break entirely with this picture of the objects and goal of philosophizing. Rather than seek the path to communion with something that is initially external to the philosopher, Kant suggests, the philosopher should discover her already existing communion with something internal to her. This is herself as an autonomous agent, a capacity and status internal to her as philosopher and as person. The true philosophy, Kant thinks, will find that everything derives from the concept of an autonomous agent in a community of autonomous agents. From this concept can be derived all the laws of nature and the laws of morality: for autonomy grounds and justifies both the principle of causation and the supreme principle of morality. Indeed, it does so in a very powerful way, because Kant thinks that the true system of philosophy divides into two separate sub-systems: a system of the philosophy of nature and a system of the philosophy of morality or freedom. The only way to unite these sub-systems, Kant maintains, is by taking the practical point of view: seeing them as grounded in the viewpoint of an autonomous agent acting upon the world. Kant maintains that theoretical notions like Reason, the eternal Forms, a Necessary Being, or Nature, cannot unite the truths of morality with the truths of nature. Only notions taken from the practical point of view can do this. Hence it is the autonomy of persons--the fundamental notion of practical philosophy--that unifies and harmonizes science and values. Thus the fundamental doctrine of Kant's philosophical system is that we are autonomous agents--we have the capacity to be self-governing actors in the world.

To explain and demonstrate how autonomy can be the center of philosophy, Kant turns to the second major shift required by his Copernican Revolution. Rationalist and empiricist philosophers had both assumed that to know anything about an object, a subject's beliefs had to conform to it. The rationalists had sought to achieve and ground such knowledge of objects on a priori principles that together conform to the objects. The empiricists had sought to achieve and ground such knowledge by a posteriori observation and experiment, which can be generalized into theories that we may then apply to any object. Both schools had assumed that the subject's thinking and concepts made no contribution to the object. Kant's new Copernican doctrine suggests instead that we see the subject's concepts as partially constituting objects: our concepts and categories partially--but only partially--shape the external world. Objects must in part conform to our concepts and categories. By this means, Kant has a substantive doctrine that avoids the pitfalls of the subject-object doctrines of the rationalists and empiricists. His Copernican doctrine avoids the dogmatism in the rationalists' candidates for a priori principles conforming to an autonomous object. On the other hand, his new doctrine avoids the a posteriori grounding that the empiricists give to objects, and so avoids the subjectivism and relativism which Kant thinks purely a posteriori methods must always invite. The doctrine takes a Copernican stance because like Copernicus's heliocentrism, it inverts the relation between the two entities in question: instead of having the Sun orbit the Earth, Copernicus had the Earth orbit the Sun. Kant, instead of having the subject's thoughts and concepts conform to the object, has the object partially conform to the subject's concepts. This is the doctrine of constructivism.

To this, Kant adds another crucial part of the doctrine. While both rationalism and empiricism thought that we could in principle get at the whole truth about objects and the world, Kant maintains that there will always be properties of objects that we can never know--those properties of the objects that are unscrutinized by us and our concepts. These Kant calls "the things in themselves," and he says that they must exist, but that we cannot have full knowledge of them. What we can fully know are just the appearances of those things to us as objects. Hence his Copernican revolution puts a limit on what we can know: we cannot know the whole of reality--a part of it must always lie beyond our knowledge. There are two worlds, or at least two aspects of the world: the aspect of appearances, and the aspect of things in themselves. This doctrine restricts our knowledge to the human-centered outlook. All we can really know, Kant maintains, is our own concepts and categories, what has interacted with them, and what our concepts and practices presuppose. This is the doctrine of transcendental idealism.

Note that these Copernican doctrines together imply a human-centered stance. We are restricted to the viewpoint of autonomous human agents. We cannot have knowledge of things from the point of view of the universe. What we can know is how things look from our viewpoint. Hence the laws of nature and the laws of freedom are to be understood as the laws as understood by autonomous agents who cannot take up the universe's viewpoint: these laws are understandable and knowable only as centered upon us.

But Kant, to overcome and transcend the pitfalls of both rationalism and empiricism, needs more than these Copernican doctrines. For the philosophical methods prominent in his time are those used by rationalism and empiricism. But, as we saw above, these methods are both of them philosophically biased toward the substantive points of view of rationalism and empiricism. Hence Kant invents a new method of philosophical reasoning--the critical method--which tries to avoid these pitfalls of the rationalist's methods and the empiricist's methods. The critical method consists in two procedures, to be applied always in the same order. The first is to seek out the presuppositions of our having experience of objects, or of our feeling that morality makes claims on us. To proceed this way, we start with such obvious features of our thought and experience, and then ask what we must presuppose in order for them to be possible. The innovation here is that we do not ask what must be the case about reality for them to be possible, as had Descartes in his analogous procedure in the Meditations on First Philosophy. For to ask that is to make a metaphysical inquiry forbidden by transcendental idealism. Instead, we ask what thinking beings capable of autonomy must presuppose for them to be possible. These presuppositions we then treat as the possibility-conditions for those obvious features of our thought and experience. This regressive procedure is usually called "a transcendental argument." Kant employs just such a regressive argument in Section II of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: he starts from what he says is popular moral philosophy's belief that the only thing good in itself is a good will which is motivated solely by duty: he then asks what that belief must presuppose, and determines that it presupposes the existence of a moral law in the form of a categorical imperative, and that accepting the commands of that imperative is what moral autonomy consists in. (Regressive procedure is eschewed by two other great works of early modern philosophy, Hobbes's Leviathan and Spinoza's Ethics, both of which proceed in more geometrico: from definitions and axioms to lemmas and theorems.)

But the critical method does not stop with the presuppositions obtained by regressive inquiry. Transcendental arguments treat the presuppositions they identify as first principles which establish the grounds and limits of such systems of rules as knowledge, morality, and science. These first principles are what we must presuppose in order to be engaged in such practices as knowledge or morality or science as they currently exist. But the critical method seeks also to justify those practices, and in so doing, to establish their precise limits. To do this, we deploy a synthetic or deductive argument from the discovered presuppositions to the chief features of our practices. In so doing, we discover exactly what is justified and what isn't in those practices, and so we establish their proper limits. Kant attempts just such a deductive or synthetic argument in Groundwork Section III, and more fully in The Critique of Practical Reason, where he argues from the presupposition of morally autonomous agents to the existence of the categorical imperative, and from that to our moral practices. (Again, Descartes had used an analogous procedure in the Second Set of Replies to Objections in the Meditations. But this is only a brief sketch of a deductive presentation of the system, meant to help readers grasp the system's essentials. Descartes has no great interest in setting exact limits to our beliefs and practices; whereas Kant joins Hobbes and Spinoza in being greatly interested in this.*)

Kant applies this method in defending and applying his autonomy-centered philosophy, his Copernican constructivism, and his transcendental idealism. These applications form his "critical philosophy," chiefly embodied in the three Critiques.

His numerous followers have seen the critical philosophy as an attractive way of reconciling the epistemic claims of science and its capacity to fundamentally change our image of ourselves and the universe with our image of ourselves as free and reasonable beings who live by values, rules, and norms that make authoritative claims on us. The key is the concept of the autonomous construction of the world: this allows us to have both science and values, both facts and norms.

For an illuminating overview of the main ambitions and chief doctrines of Kant's philosophy, see this video of a conversation with Geoffrey Warnock. (The discussion of Kant's moral philosophy begins in Section 4 of the conversation.)

Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804 (Wikimedia Commons)

Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Present itself as a Science (1783)

"Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (1784)

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences (1786)

Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790)

Religion within the Limits of Bare Reason (1793)

Theory and Practice (1793)

"Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" (1795)

The Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

Anthropology from a Practical Point of View (1798)

Initial Proponents of Philosophies in the Same Spirit as Kant: Kantians in Kant's Aftermath

Propagators of Kant's Ideas in Britain and France, 1820s-1840s

(During this time, Hegelianism was the leading philosophy in Germany)

Mid-19th-century Developers of Critical Philosophies in the Spirit of Kant

(At about 1850, Hegelianism was declining, and materialism and positivism were on the rise)

The German "Back to Kant!" Movement of the 1860s

(This movement set itself against the declining Hegelianism and surging materialism of the decade. By the end of it, Kantian philosophy is back; Hegelianism is nearly disappearing from German philosophy; and positivism is a major force in German, French, and English-language philosophy)

German Neo-Kantians of 1870-1925

(Positivist empiricism is the major alternative in German-language philosophy during this period; in English-language philosophy, evolutionary positivism and Hegelianism followed by pragmatism are the fashionable philosophies; in France, Neo-Kantianism, positivism, and a kind of evolutionary spiritualism are locked in struggle; in Latin America, positivism is predominant)

Karl Vorlaender, 1860-1928

A neo-Kantian philosopher, he attempted to set the social, political, and economic theories of Marx on the foundation of Kant's moral and theoretical philosophy.

-Kant and Socialism; with special reference to recent theoretical movements in Marxism (1900)

-Kant and Marx (1911)

-Marx, Engels, and Lassalle as Philosophers (1921)

Kant-indebted Philosophies of the Modernist Period, 1910-1940

These philosophers adopt the characteristic concerns of modernism. First, they obsess over purity of discipline, and so

frequently write about the nature and boundaries of philosophy and its distinctive techniques. Second, that obsession leads them to reject old philosophical techniques they regard as impure and debased: they reject attempts to reduce philosophical problems to problems of psychology, they reject evolutionary models, and they reject genetic or historical procedures for answering conceptual problems: hence the "genetic fallacy" becomes a bugbear. Third, they obsess over the distinctive mediums of philosophy, and so devote much effort to analyzing logic, language, concepts, and theories. Fourth, they accommodate modernism's stress on the power of irrational emotions. Logical analysis, logical positivism,

phenomenology, existentialism, Lebensphilosophie, and pragmatism are in this period the fashionable philosophies.

C. I. Lewis

The Resurrection of Kant-Indebted Philosophy in the 1960s

Kantian philosophy had declined in the 1940s and 1950s, when positivism, ordinary language philosophy, and existentialism flourished. But Kant scholarship was growing. This, combined with increasing dissatisfaction with the leading modernist philosophies, led to a 1960s revival of Kantian critical philosophy, which then exploded in the 1970s and has never abated.

Some Influenced by Rawls One Influenced by Habermas

Kantian Oppositional Theorists

* = Descartes makes some suggestive remarks in that Set of Replies about why he is reluctant to give a synthetic presentation of his system. For the two pages containing those remarks, download the file below.