[anul Kant – eveniment publicistic]

by Ana Bazac

To the memory of my parents

Contents

1. Introduction

 

2. The precritical period (1745-1770): Kant’s journey, science and philosophy

2.1. In science, endeavour to detach from metaphysics, but…

          2.2. From Kant’s traditional philosophical effort to its negation

                        2.2.1. Questioning the traditional metaphysical approach: the world

2.2.2. The concept of God as an effort of thought

 

3. The critical period (1770-1791): what does it mean to know
   • Knowing and levels
     • Knowledge
     • “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”

3.1.3. What does pure mean in philosophy?      

3.2. To know, reason and the transcendental

      3.2.1. The feelings

4. The critical period (1770-1791): what is the telos of the humans and their knowledge
   • The particular and the transcendental
   • The categorical imperative(s)
   • The unique place of telos
   • The universalizable

 

5. Kant and Enlightenment
   • To be the child of one own’s time

 

6. Instead of conclusions. The legacy of Kant’s Enlightenment: reason and the categorical imperative

 

1. Introduction

A polyptych was a medieval Western type of painting, unfolding on a system of some panels formidable scenes – that is, symbols – related to a religious personage or process. Sometimes there was a central panel bigger than the other ones flanking it, signifying an apotheotic condensation of the events described in them. The painting was destined to communicate to a large public these events and thus, the value – and, obviously, the appreciation of this value – of the deeds.

The present paper is a “polyptych” not because the word suggests a holiness but simply because it refers to a series of different moments of the concerned topic. Actually, it is a polyptych only as chapters, in fact it is a diptych: because it selectively sketches and highlights the main uniqueness and novelty in the Kantian creation, neither what was said by other anterior and contemporary thinkers and nor his many ideas which, all, are extraordinarily interesting for us because they disclose fundamental meanings of what tormented the human thinking in its cultivated evolution. Thus, as a selection, the present paper has two central panels dedicated to the philosophical paradigms brought by Kant. And certainly, it is a “polyptych” because it wants to signal that Kant’s work is so rich and fruitful that it can be expressed only as an endless multifaceted analysis.

Therefore, even though all the panels of the polyptych would be filled, it would be an unfinished one. But, once more, in spite of the mentioned aspects, here it is about a diptych.

*

For philosophers, this year is Kant Year (1724-1804). But not only for philosophers. Especially today people must know that they must control their thoughts, because otherwise the results of these thoughts could annihilate them. Kant is a huge aid for this knowing. But would not be zany to posit Kant in summary reports popularising him as the images given by painted panels in polyptychs? Can Kant be reduced to some facets, he who is a giant of philosophy and whose accurate investigation lighting new aspects of his construction continues and is more and more scientifically valuable? Indeed, the more the interpretation of Kant’s philosophy develops, the more one discovers its inner aspects and meanings: given by Kant and by the interpreters.

Kant cannot be reduced and is not reduced by popularisation. On the contrary:  as he himself considered the practical philosophy – that which refers to the human action taking place under the condition of freedom – as the scope of philosophical endeavour[1], the theoretical branch being only a means for it, even if of fundamental importance, and as his urge towards ordinary people was to dare to know[2], so both how to know and how to dare[3] were (and are) essential tasks of education of all the humans. Sharing knowledge always means to learn to know – and to dare – because it is a bi-directional process, however asymmetrical may it be. And not only did he himself write papers destined to the large public, but he also gave, in his professional books, examples related to the everyday practice.

I am not a Kant scholar, I just love Kant. Kant scholars bring to light the aspects and meaningful features and details of Kant’s thinking, showing both its coherence and openness, its unique precedence and direction creation in the intellectual position of the human being towards the world. Obviously, my paper is based on the exegetic works about Kant, and, surpassing the understanding of Kant according to his dominant interpretations over time[4],  its aim is to point in a popular manner only the usefulness of Kant’s philosophical achievements for the present understanding of the world. This is the reason of the “panels” I fill here: to show how familiar for us is Kant even though we are not Kant scholars and professional philosophers, and how his sparks ignited forward.

*

Perhaps one of the most important fact for us and obviously for the human (and philosophical) thinking, fact that we must be aware of, was the perplexity and swinging of humans between the understanding of their logos as a key of the perception of the logos of the world and, on the other hand, their most pressing necessity to fathom and conceive of the logos of the world – of the setting up of things and of the order of the world – as an objective given that only needs to be deciphered.

The first situation, mentioned as a starting point of the human awareness of their unique and difficult existence in an environment that is different from them but that is their implacable condition of existence, was rather bracketed in and by the first urgency: to (re)act efficiently and thus, to know this environment. Or, if we use a concept coined by the Romanian philosopher Mircea Florian (1888-1960), the first situation was “recessive” – that is, remaining behind the second situation but actually supporting, pushing it –.

This is the reason why the first Greek philosophers were ontologists, searching for the structure and essence of the world.  But soon enough the “Socratic turn” happened: the cognisance used currently by humans as simple expressions of the state of things became – because they were – uncertain, unreliable, and thus, they had to be questioned first of all.

The tradition of this turn lasted in the European philosophy until Kant as interest for the human psychology, and – this was the real legacy of Sokrates and Plato – for the decomposition of concepts and for conceiving them as origin from which the things follow. Then, to the business of metaphysics to deduce the world from concepts supposed to transmit the imprescriptible essence of reality, the early modern thinkers, continuing some Scholastics[5], responded that without the empirical confrontation of senses, reason can construct nothing. So, even if they were not the first to say this, they were those who explicitly emphasised that the human experience – the subject-world encounter – gives the contents of the entire knowledge.

However, Kant’s great undertaking was more than pointing up the pre-eminence of epistemology over ontology and the scientific understanding of the concrete world. He decomposed the moments and aspects of the knowing process and conceived them as forms always intertwined with contents but which were/are patterns without which knowledge, truth, ideas, reasoning do not exist. Methodologically, this level of forms within the human reason/consciousness must be known by us because it explains that our ideas are neither copies of the real world, thus irrevocably true, and nor the objective impersonal authority according to which our judgements and conclusions are the only true guide and criteria of the order of the world. To know how we do judge is the key to understand what we do judge.   The knowledge of the forms of knowing, including the principles of the unity between forms and contents, was the goal of Kant. But knowledge is always concrete, concrete unity of forms and contents – namely, concrete ideas – and Kant enlarged his goal by demonstrating the principles (as forms) of moral (and esthetical) judgements and behaviour. However, there is also a very important aspect, that was not ignored[6] but only bracketed by Kant, the construction of the contents of knowledge from experience. This aspect was to be deciphered by the post-Kantian thinkers.

The humans have the capacity to discern, unite and put order in the world that is presenting to them. How does this capacity manifest was both the topic of the modern and contemporary epistemologists, while the order of the world is the business of all the thinkers: more, of all the human thinking beings.

*

The importance of Kant’s epistemology and, concretely, of the “constitution” of the transcendental level of the human reason, must be posited in  relation with the two strong modern traditions of the Western philosophy: 1) the direct object of the philosophical inquiry – the world as theme of ontology, and also the human subject as theme of descriptions which would converge into an ontology of the human – /differently put, the whole world as directly unveiled; 2) and the “phenomenological” standpoint focussing on the feelings of the human persons as lenses through which the world is perceived. Descartes’ cogito that was the grounding of Rousseau’s disclosure of what the immersion into feelings can bring about, initiated such an avant la lettre “phenomenological” tradition.

Kant offered the answer to both methodological patterns of the traditional philosophy.

On the one hand, he explained that our reasonings about the world and its essences take place according to concepts and ideas processed by the faculties of reason, indeed on the basis of notions and ideas directly related to the information given by the senses, but that the entire processing implies the existence of some “methodological” content principles which direct it and belong to the human reason as its “level”. Accordingly, and here a historically explainable contradiction in Kant’s thinking must be noticed: ontology itself is the result of the knowing process and thus a dynamical set of cognisance, while at the same time it contains and is based on firm and fix cognisance considered principles (the existence of God as ultimate/primordial cause, and purpose, and frame of both determinism and freedom); in this sense, ontology was metaphysics, as ultimate /fundamental and unquestionable cognisance about the world. And Kant felt this contradiction: this is why, in his first years of doing philosophy, that is to say, ontology, he wanted to (“mutually”) accommodate the above-mentioned metaphysical principles and the scientifical analyse of nature.

On the other hand, by explaining how does the human knowledge eventuate, Kant highlighted that all the feelings and their expressions in words, which we consider as mediations in our encounter with the world, have for all that their basis in the manifestation of reason: of not only our physiological display of our faculties to judge and arrive to efficient props for our reactions (namely, of our reasonability), but also – somehow especially – of our specifically human expression of reason, our “moral law” inside us.  And this stressing is all the more important today. Although the images can suggest a lot of things, the suggestions as such have force only as reasonings, in mente, and even though our expression in front of images can be an emoji or a verbal exclamation. Also, the words are vehicles of reason, and if they do not fulfill this function, and if they are transformed into simple labels – which would have an autonomous reality from both the facts and the rational ideas which in different variants inquiry them and give them different rational descriptions – instead of transmission of rational ideas, then, when all is said and done, they become meaningless and similar to instincts, to  “physiological stimuli” for automatic and unconscious answers. But we hope that ultimately we search for meaningful ideas, and Kant demonstrated: the human reason means meaningful ideas to which the humans arrive in any case.

*

Historically, the root of the idea of principle is a god or, better, the summum of gods. The complexity of the world and the human life was so obscure in its appearance and so incomprehensible and incredibly inconceivable that only out-worldly spirits could create it. But, if the spirits were the creators, the humans had to take care of themselves, and thus they developed their ability to think and use its results. First, their cleverness has imagined friendly and frightful gods governing them, but which were treated by them as they treated themselves: winning each other’s goodwill.

Gods represented the surrounding material environment and phenomena, and also attitudes and reasons of their own behaviour. They personified all of these, such that on the one hand, people learned to abridge this correspondence, even forgetting the richness of meanings behind the divine characters, and to consider their worship as enough. But then, struggling for their own lasting, the humans began to focus – on the basis of the already entered separation between gods and the meanings they were thought to represent – on the meanings themselves, putting the divine characters in arrière-plan.

Philosophy started with this re-positioning: when people began to question – not gods, of course, but – and to examine the problems they covered. And obviously, even the existence of gods themselves was questioned in this process (let’s remember only Xenophanes and Democritus), but not this aspect is important here.

Anyway, the questioning covered the unconscious belief of humans that they and their knowledge were responsible for the world as it is “known”/transmitted to them. And the principles (άρχᾑ/ ἀρχαί – archē/archai) were those which substituted the gods: the “lovers of wisdom” arrived to give an absolutely natural picture of the world and its absolutely unique fruits, the human beings.

2. The precritical period (1745-1770): Kant’s journey, science and philosophy

The humans evolve: according to their experiences, of course. So, what is of interest here is not the biological evolution as ontogenesis, but the individual’s ideas starting from which he/she conceives of and answers to life and the world. Today we know and study the two-way relations between ideas and the behaviour of people in specific historical moments and spaces, and between the social organisation and institutions in historical periods and spaces and, on the other hand, the ideas moving their culture.

Kant is the most brilliant example of the evolution of the individual’s world of ideas. Not only because we can observe this evolution only when the ideas are expressed, and the philosophers’ business was just to explicitly and coherently express their ideas and to demonstrate them as overwhelmingly covering the human behaviours, thus as necessary and general – opposed to the aim of “poets” to describe the unique individual feelings and only implicitly cueing general worldviews –. But because his deep thoughts pursued the solving of the problem “the human being as rational being”, signalled by the ancients and assumed by the cohorts of the following philosophers: thus, what does reason mean in fact and which are the ultimate moral criteria given by reason.

The humans have always reacted to the environment with human means: language, fabrication, arts, cunning, postponement, repetition, enclosure and openness, love and war, good and evil. But how did their reason arrive to these reactions? Is there any connection between the human differentia specifica, reason, and these reactions? Or are they the simple animal conatus[7], desire to live instinctively, the reason as such being only its supplementary means and actually the gift of cunning given to the human being? If the humans are paralysed when they do not know the elements of the environment they have to react to, and if to know means to have reliable information[8], is reason not the most reliable source of reliability? Since the words denote both concrete empirical things, as if these ones would be only individual and presented in a randomly way, and abstract generalisations without which the concrete cannot be expressed, namely, conceived, do these forms act similarly? But how are the concrete empirical and the abstract notions related? If thinking is spontaneous, is it tantamount only to empirical intuitions simply related or it does include the unending effervescence of judgements which never ignore their first and ultimate trigger as aim: the understanding of the objects of experience? In what sense is reason the key of the human consciousness[9]?

And can the thoroughgoing analysis of the reasons of the human behaviour not arrive to their reason-to-be?

Because the explicit answers and their coherent development in a systematic future-oriented philosophy were given from 1770 onwards, when Kant wrote the three critiques, his philosophy was divided into the precritical (1745-1770) and the critical periods (1770-1791), with the intermediary “silent decade” (1770–1781), and the final, old age, post-critical period (1798–1802). The critical period is, indeed, incommensurably rich in the foundation of his revolutionary philosophical theories, and because people want to understand them, they consider only this interval. The critical period corresponds to the constitution of Kantian “doctrine”, whose uniqueness was Kant’s contribution to the development of the human thinking.

However, already in the precritical period, from the 1740s to the 1760s papers, Kant was original in two senses.

2.1. In science, endeavour to detach from metaphysics, but…

First and simply leaning on his scientific research of scientific aspects, his goal was to unify science and metaphysics (without theology – intellectual discipline about God as a being legitimating the religious beliefs –; the integration of the two with theology being the aim of Middle Ages Scholastics). What did this mean? This chapter aims only to select from Kant’s scientific endeavour[10], intended by him to be subordinated to the traditional metaphysics.

Thus, and do not forget, by doing science, Kant was a natural philosopher[11], as, from the Greeks onwards, the entire scientific endeavour about nature was considered natural philosophy. Concretely, to the “why” and “how” of the natural phenomena the answers were, first, philosophical hypotheses, through logical deduction based on analogies. Then, the thinkers discovered that, for these philosophical hypotheses to be science, they had to be demonstrated through reproducible paths, and these were systematic observation (experiment) and mathematisation (measurement, calculus). And thus, the hypotheses became scientific, not obvious theories because they would be plausible, but premises being to be put on trial. Only in this way are the hypotheses – as ideas which evaluate the relations between what appear to us and its conditions, thus as ideas generating possible corresponding scientific theories[12] – predictions, valuable explanations of the discussed facts and of all facts subsumable to the regularities substantiated by the theories, thus showing why the connections described are necessary and universal cognitions.

Kant lived in an epoch when the importance of both the systematic observation of phenomena and the measurement and calculus had become obvious. And by focusing on circumscribed scientific problems, he followed the scientific method that involved both the above-mentioned direct means of research[13] and the scientific references. He was not yet able to separate the methodological level of the flowing and role of the parts of reason in the process of cognition – demarch of the critical period – but, in any case he knew from the surrounding scientific endeavour what the scientific discipline does mean.

*

But, as generally the natural philosophers did, by focusing on scientific questions, he/they also attained sensible philosophical problems. For instance, already Descartes (Principia Philosophiae, 1644, 2^nd and 3^rd parts[14]) analysed the relations and movements through which the material world has coherence, and the formation of the solar system – around the sun – and the movements of planets and comets, light etc. God remained a first cause, but the models of these relations were explained exclusively naturally, and rather as hypotheses (44^th proposition, second part). Actually, Descartes’ outlook was marked by an inherently colliding mixture of the motion started by the first cause and the motion continued exclusively because of the mutual impacts of material bodies (like a machine). An apple falls from the tree – let’s use the well-known folklore about Newton’s discovery – because the tree itself moves with the Earth and thus, the apple continues the movement.

The answer was corrected some decades later. By demonstrating the principle of gravity and the three laws of motion, Newton (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687) scientifically established that nature is regulated by its own functionality whose mechanics already involves disclosed forces. It is not important here that he thought that the natural rules and gravity were made by God, because in his theory the nature’s functioning itself was free of any external intervention.  Or, it is important for the history of thinking. But methodologically, the action-at-a-distance and the vacuum supposed in a universe moved by gravity were just opposite to Descartes’s representation of exclusive direct mechanical interactions and movements of bodies in a universe made by established mechanical movements, thus filled.

Fifty years later, Swedenborg[15] published Principia rerum naturalium sive novorum tentaminum phaenomena mundi elementaris philosophice explicanda, first volume of Opera Philosophica et Mineralia, 1834, where he outlined a Cartesian – not a Newtonian – cosmology marked by 1) a metaphysical proposition of constitutive material elements of the world, generated, through the medium of the “finite”, the first material element, by the First Natural Point (the mathematical starting point) via first pure motion and the subsequent motions, and 2) a model of the origin of planets from the matter emanated by the sun, the first moving power in the universe. The two aspects of his cosmology mixed, and thus his proposal is not the basis of the following scientific research.

Anyway, on the basis of Newton, Kant was able to formulate in 1755 his nebular hypothesis of formation and evolution of planetary systems, in Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens: or an Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the Universe upon Newtonian Principles[16]). Gravity was the scientific, demonstrated force that shaped the movements of gas nebulae, generating the planets: whose orbits were no longer circular – perfect, in the traditional metaphysical view – but elliptical. (And later on, but independently, Pierre-Simon de Laplace showed in 1796 (Exposition du monde) that the perturbations of the orbits of the planets, caused by the interactions of their gravities, does not lead to the destruction of the solar system in the absence of God’s intervention – as Newton thought – because the perturbations are periodic, the system restores itself naturally).

But this example does not illustrate the entire philosophical weigh of not only the precritical period but especially of the scientific papers of this interval. This example – and other ones[17] – shows rather the autonomy of scientific thinking towards the metaphysical suppositions, and at the same time the importance of the knowledge of the different philosophical assumptions for the awareness of the weight of the “technical” truth a scientist search for. Actually, natural philosophy was science, and Kant aimed to be a scientist and professor of natural philosophy: for instance, lecturing physical geography[18], as one of his quasi-permanent courses in his entire teaching activity. What was peculiar to his scientific exploits was just the independent scientific demonstration based on facts and testable, irrespective here of wrong scientific hypotheses.

*

Physics as a focus on kinematics had a rich tradition in both the ancient theoretical interest to understand motion as essential manifestation of action, and then in the early modern philosophy, and in the practical exploits of medieval artisans who succeeded to create empirical models[19] of controlling the movements. As a “superstructure”, mathematics led to the knowledge related to calculating machines, and this entire theoretical and practical endeavour brought: propositional knowledge resulting from a long experience with materials, “discernment, or the acuity of senses in making judgments about perceptions” of different properties of materials, “dexterity in doing work with hands”, “knowledge of the social world where other artisanal knowledge and skills can be found”[20]. As we saw, the mechanics of movements has developed from Descartes, he himself indebted to the former philosophy and mathematics.

The deciphering of the movement itself involves the impulse giving birth to the starting point of the movement and, obviously, its result, visible from the situation of phenomena – as the cosmological descriptions – and from the measurements of its speed and duration.  But until the constitution of the laws framing the movements (Newton), the measurements as such did require only a quantitative evaluation of impulses and results as stops and changes. For this reason, the scientific qualitative research of the force – as impulse and as inertia analysed under the angles of many physical characteristics and aspects, that is to say, as energy, as later on, from 1807, it was called – only was to follow.

 

*

But there is a difference between the physical and the philosophical analysis. In the 18^th century, the strong philosophical tradition was metaphysical – that is, based on absolute belief in the existence of God as a being, the immortality of the soul and the coexistence of the two types of determinism (natural and theist) with freedom –. And a consistent part of philosophy, and especially here the young Kant intending to apply his philosophical training in scientific questions, aimed at fitting metaphysics and science. This was Kant’s precritical project – which did not succeed and even was annulled by his insistence on the active force[21], measurable and being the explaining factor of the development of nature[22] and, as we saw, on the focus on both scientific problems whose solving did not require the existence of God and, more philosophically, on the manifestations of forces in the creation of space/continuum, both in principle[23] and at cosmic level.

We must introduce here two more aspects: Leibniz’s development of the mechanics of matter and his insistence on the active force. The first has in view his critique of the (Cartesian) corpuscular theory of matter, in the name of the principle of continuity and plenitude of nature as God’s creation, and the emphasis of matter’s passive powers or qualities (resistance to motion/ resistance as a force, impenetrability, firmness, extension as a result) which are the only ones – so, not motion, as Descartes claimed – generating its variety. The second concerns the emphasis of active powers – which are conserved in the universe (force as quantity of vis viva, able to impulse the movement of the body and to transmit the movement to other bodies in collision with the first), not motion, i.e. the quantity of motion, as Descartes purported. (Both types of conservation are imposed by God, Leibniz concluding that they show God’s purpose, creation of the best possible world). But force has a double face: one is the “mortua vis”, existing in the body and being only its preparation in view to respond to possible movements, and the other is the actual (we remind Aristotle’s terms, do we?) vis viva. Anyway, the forces are primary, they generate the movements, and we see this in the Leibniz’s returned theory of corpuscular matter, moved both at the level of bodies and at the level of their tiny parts.

*

Let’s summarize the development of the topic from a methodological standpoint and taking into account that thinking was then still in its speculative phase, meaning it started from “intellectual intuitions” (which Kant never accepted) and developed strictly within them:

• the first conceptual offer was, obviously, vague (Aristotle’s entelechy[24]);
• then – Descartes and the mechanists being the promoters – the concept was used in a perceptible form (force) in order to grasp natural phenomena, but, since the natural phenomena were/are results or embodiments, the concept was considered only under its quantitative aspect, as quantity of motion;
• then, this quantitative aspect was confronted with observable phenomena, as motion, rest, impulse/momentum, inertia; and the simplified understanding, only as a quantity of motion, required its own surpassing, generating qualitative aspects: a finer understanding of force – dead and “active” as Kant retains it, but it is called by Leibniz living force (being the part of the force in general, that is active, and not only moving) – and its (dynamic) results, and thus, a clearer proof of the pre-eminence of force over matter (Leibniz, Kant), but even this force having a material, natural essence. But since the emphasis of these types of forces takes place through measurement and calculus, both Leibniz and Kant thought that in order to understand them, both the quantitative approach of physics and the qualitative approach of metaphysics are needed. (Obviously, the quarrel between these two positions was not such a simple line and continued also after Kant, in both the mechanistic exaggeration and in the metaphysical one, transposed into chemistry and biology. But we know that all of these exaggerations are only historical, corresponding to the process of knowing).

But, while Leibniz considered that God preserves the living force – and not the quantity of motion (as Descartes said), Kant was struck by the proof that – science proving to be irrefutable in its empirical and mathematised demonstrations showing an ordered universe functioning as a mechanism – it remains that even the metaphysical truths, posited irrevocably in the philosophy of his age, must be, if not revised, anyway treated in a different manner. How? This was the project of the critical period, and until it, Kant was to assume the paradigm of accommodation of science with the metaphysics of his time, actually, of the subordination of science to this metaphysics.

2.2. From Kant’s traditional philosophical effort to its negation

Though tending to detach himself from Leibniz (preestablished harmony theory) and Wolff (preestablished harmony linking only the non-empirical world of simple substances) – whose metaphysical branches he followed (ontology, logic, rational psychology, rational cosmology, rational theology, as well as empirical psychology[25] and natural theology[26]) – Kant still thought metaphysics in the traditional manner of unquestionable assumptions (teleology of nature, existence of God as a being, “the possibility of a morally relevant freedom”) which should subordinate the requirements of science; this was the cause of the failure of his project of unification of science and metaphysics[27], but just this contradiction between science and the traditional metaphysics led him to radically rethink philosophy.

However, because Kant was trained to be a philosopher, already in the precritical period he was interested in the understanding of metaphysical interpretations of the metaphysical concepts.

Doing this, he arrived – in the 1770 Dissertation that is with one foot in the precritical and with the other foot in the critical period – to the conclusion that the metaphysical assumptions apply only to forms of the intelligible world (to concepts), and also, even before, that the demonstration of the existence of God is mediated by the human moral position. This conclusion – actually, these two theories – is/are proofs of the originality of Kant even before his doctrinal period.

 

2.2.1. Questioning the traditional metaphysical approach: the world

(This traditional approach was: metaphysics is about the real world of bodies, but it searches for and arrives at its essences, beyond the description of what is seen, and the essences are spiritual, intangible – God and the soul – but nevertheless transfigured as beings: at least, God. Descartes made a breach in this corpus, revealing its contradictory state, by his res cogitans that is thinking that affects the whole body (Les passions de l’âme, 1649), but obviously he could not detach from the metaphysical assumptions and proved the existence of God just by thinking. However, God appears as a deus ex machina in the Cartesian system of two rei (Les principes de la philosophie/Principia philosophiae, 1644, I) as the proof of res extensa but, since the idea of God is innate, as also the proof of the truth of ideas because they are based on the proof of res extensa.

Since 1755 Kant wrote in the spirit of rational metaphysics: knowledge of the world from the analysis of concepts in a strict logic, taking into consideration the inconsistencies and searching for proofs in the real life. The concepts, the principles were given (like the mathematical axioms), as objective as the material reality, and their logical investigation would lead to the knowledge of the concrete surrounding us, of the organisation of the world as such/cosmology and of the psychological complexity of man. Knowledge meant here the real understanding of the deep skeleton of things through deduction from principles, much beyond their delusive and shallow appearances grasped by senses. Therefore, (rational) metaphysics was ontology – including its cosmological and psychological branches and, obviously, the rational theology – namely, the only real and truthful knowledge about the existence that is outside the scrutinising mind. The modern metaphysics was rational because it was based on the deployment of reason, and not on revelation, but starting from predetermined, so unavoidable axioms concerning the existence of God as being and the immortality of the soul).

Yes, the world is more than its appearances. But if it is as it appears to us, it is not our phantasy, because we experience it as both appearances and our quest for their meanings for us. Their meanings for us are the “more”. In this sense, “the world” is, in fact, the result of our faculty of representation: not only of direct parts of it since we are affected sensorially by the presence of an object, but also of “things which cannot by their own quality come before the senses of that subject”[28]. Therefore, through this faculty, the world appears to us as both sensible and intelligible. But clearer, the concept of the world has a “two—fold genesis of the concept out of the nature of the mind”[29], thus not only simplistically and roughly speaking ‘from senses and the mind’, but from the processing of reason in two levels: the one of the understanding from senses and generating sensible intuitions, and the one of “pure reason”[30] reasoning from concepts. (So, cognition of the object, of the “world”, is, on the one hand, subjected to the laws of sensitivity, thus is sensitive, and on the other hand, is subjected to the laws of intelligence, being intellectual or rational[31]).

 As a result, “the abstract ideas which the mind entertains when they have been received from the understanding very often cannot be followed up in the concrete and converted into intuitions”[32].

But this doesn’t mean that the concepts are arbitrary “and, as happens in mathematics, constructed only for the purposes of deducing the consequences which follow from it”[33]. On the contrary, there is both a dependence of the sensible intuitions and notions upon concepts – meaning that the first fall under concepts which we take into account a priori[34] when we want to understand something beyond appearances – and also a dependence of concepts on the formal “conditions of sensitive intuition”[35]. These conditions are space and time as concepts/intuitions “beyond the limits of reason” and they “cannot in any way be explained by the understanding”[36] – being, in the case of space, a singular representation/pure intuition as a form  and a formal  principle of the sensible world; and, in the case of time, a singular idea/a pure intuition as a formal condition of the sensible world – but as “underlying foundations upon which the understanding rests”[37], conditions determined by the subject. While the conceptual approach depends only on the object.

(Let’s give our example: when the problem/object we focus on is that of human relationships, we use the abstract concept relationship/s and we develop inferences and corelations starting from this concept and based only on the meaning and our semantic awareness of these concepts. When our problem/object is, say, the servants-master relationships, we cannot discuss it without taking into account the historical epochs and places – that is, space and time – which give the concrete colour, that is, understanding, of the object. And, obviously, the analysis involves both the empirical and the intellectual cognition[38]). Because: “1. The same sensitive condition, under which alone the intuition of an object is possible, is a condition of the possibility itself of the

object.

2. The same sensitive condition, under which alone it is possible to compare what is given so as to form a concept of the understanding of the object, is also a condition

of the possibility itself of the object.

3. The same sensitive condition, under which alone some object met with can be subsumed under a given concept of the understanding, is also the condition of the possibility itself of the object”[39].

Therefore, the sensitive cognition involves “empirical concepts”[40] which, “no matter how high they ascend by abstracting”, remain sensitive. They are “abstract concepts”[41]. And, once more (meaning from the standpoint of cognition as such), in order to know, these concepts are given – “and this is the real use”[42], and used according to logic: subordination of concepts to each other and “compared in accordance with the principle of contradiction”[43].

In its turn, the intellectual cognition involves concepts created exclusively by “the pure understanding”, “abstracting” “from everything sensitive”[44], they are “pure ideas”[45], “concepts

abstracted from the laws inherent in the mind”[46].

In any case, we have only a “symbolic cognition”[47], and not an intuition of what does understanding mean / what belongs to the understanding.

The correspondence between concepts and, on the other hand, the sensible intuitions and concepts – in the present parlance, correspondence between ideas and reality – takes place in a mediated stage process, but is realised because all sensitive “cognitions must be treated as sensitive cognitions… “on account of their genesis”[48]. And “thinking is only possible for

us by means of universal concepts in the abstract, not by means of a singular concept in the concrete”[49].

Well, the universal concepts explain and relate the multiplicity in the interaction and constitution of the world within a necessary cause-effect and inferences frame, and are subordinated to a principle of architecture / creation of the world. For this reason, if in sciences (natural science and mathematics, Kant specifies), “use gives the method”[50], “in pure philosophy, such as metaphysics… method precedes all science”[51]. Method, namely “the right use of reason”[52], the awareness of the difference between the natural/intuitive naming of things (or between the natural/intuitive allocation of empirical concepts) and the development of knowledge from universal and necessary concepts alone.

Who gives the right use of reason? It’s clear now that it is metaphysics: “the philosophy which contains the first principles of the use of the pure understanding”[53]. Accordingly, metaphysics is first of all, epistemology, and especially the epistemology of the universal and necessary concepts and reasoning from them: “the exposition of the laws of pure reason is the very genesis of science”[54].

The predicate – Kant taking over Christian Wolff (1679-1754) and Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762)’s perspective of explanation, they themselves taking over the medieval one, because if we do not decipher the functions of words, we cannot explain the entities we consider – is always the condition “in the absence of which, it is maintained, the subject cannot be thought; the predicate is, thus, a principle of cognising”[55]. But we must separate carefully the sensitive concepts/predicates from the intellectual ones, because if we do not do this, we fall under metaphysical fallacies: as that of subreption (when we confuse a sensitive concept as if it would be an intellectual one). Or vice versa, when we confuse a concept issued from pure understanding with a sensitive one: for instance, “the presence of God is imagined to be local, and God is enfolded in the world as if He were contained all at once in infinite space, the intention being to compensate for this limitation, it would seem, by means of this local presence conceived absolutely, so to speak, that is to say, conceived as infinite. But it is absolutely impossible to be in several places at the same time, for different places are outside

one another. It follows that what is in several places is outside itself and present to itself externally, and that is a contradiction”[56].

If so, metaphysical assumptions which relate to the concrete depending on space and time are only the conditions of sensitive judgements, but these conditions are sine qua non, “in the absence of which a given concept would not be sensitively cognisable”[57]. Because, ultimately, “whatever cannot be cognised by any intuition at all is simply not thinkable, and is, thus,

impossible”[58]. However, and once more, the judgements arising from reason (from intellectual synthesis) must not be confused with the ones from sensitive cognition[59], and, because of their universal and necessary, encompassing feature, are both necessary conditions of sensitive judgements and their meta/methodological/philosophical conclusions. This fine epistemological distinction of concepts and judgements according to their cognitive origin will be developed in the critical period, giving, inter alia, the famous transcendental.

The distinction according to the cognitive origin is essential for acknowledging the causes of things, and also the power and limits of the human cognition. If we think that we can to infer from metaphysical assumptions concepts about the sensitive world, we only “invent”, living in an imaginary world of “chimaeras”[60]. Because any concept of force is possible only if “it has been given by experience”[61]. We cannot give metaphysical assumptions as proofs of sensitive facts, as we cannot give sensitive proofs for metaphysical theories: because they are different cognitive domains, and in a cognitive domain the truth can be attained only respecting the principles of that domain: this is the big epistemological paradigm conceived of by Kant. And it is more than important today, when intentions to cover empirical facts with ideas reduced to labels are abundant, as the intentions to distortedly allocate distorted facts to ideas/to consider distorted facts as proofs of labels, are abundant.

Actually, in this paradigm we must insert, as Kant did, the reasonable cognitive semantic prejudices (this is my formula). What is there about? The problem is complex, and it includes, first, ideas which are usual/traditional, but which are not /were not demonstrated but were/are useful for our understanding of the world. They are starting principles (actually, postulates) of our ratiocination about the world / starting principles for an efficient ratiocination[62]. They are reasonable, because they are not irrational beliefs anterior to and excluding any experience and reference to experience, as the already common meaning of “prejudice” is. On the contrary. Kant’s examples were: 1) the idea of order (“we suppose that all things in the universe take place in accordance with the order of nature”[63]); 2) the idea of unity, manifesting as search for common denominators of things, thus as epistemological necessity  to explain the multiplicity and variety through encompassing principles; 3) the idea of stability as sine qua non for our understanding of a fluctuant and changing world: and, more specifically, the idea of permanence of matter, as basis of the changes of the world “which concern its form alone” (“Nothing material at all comes into being or passes away”, and all changes take place only at the level of forms[64]).

However, all these ideas as contents must be thought of in a method, or are according to a method. Consequently, the metaphysical assumptions need to be demonstrated and are demonstrated: but first of all, not semantically, but “methodologically”. Or, in other words, the semantic demonstration itself cannot be understood without understanding how do we form and arrive to concepts and judgements, how is our faculty of reason deploying itself so as to pass from empirical/sensitive concepts to intellectual concepts and to judgements with them. But the analysis of this “method” “will serve as a propaedeutic science, and it will be of immense service to all who intend to penetrate the very recesses of metaphysics”[65]. Through this distinction, the leap into the critical period is made.

2.2.2. The concept of God as an effort of thought

Kant was the son of his epoch. He tried to answer the problems considered by thinkers as the most important for man: because they are very important for the order of the human society, and the philosophers considered that this order – a concretisation and extension of the order of the world – is and gives the ultimate reason-to-be of the existence of humans. Thus, one of these problems was the substantiation of religion: starting, obviously, from the speculative[66] proof of the existence of God.

In a pre-critical book, from 1763[67], Kant – declaring the necessity of the existence of God and thus, of the self-conviction of humans that God exists – demonstrated that the proving as such is not necessary, and anyway it could be fulfilled only from the concepts of properties (singularity, simplicity, immutability and eternity, the highest reality and spiritual nature) which, existing, prove God. (Pay attention to this example of metaphysical speculation: because the concepts of properties exist, then God exists). However, the idea of God as “all sufficient” Being is more than the unity of these properties, “expanded to include all that is possible or real, is a far more appropriate expression for designating the supreme perfection of the Divine Being than the concept of the infinite, which is commonly employed. For no matter how this latter concept be interpreted, its fundamental meaning is manifestly mathematical”[68]. The big aspect is that Kant develops rational metaphysics by stressing that the above possible demonstration excludes any reference to the existence of the human subject experiencing feelings related to God and reflections about Him: just opposite[69] to the “dissident” phenomenological tentative asserting that the proof of everything is preceded by the existence of the human self who thinks and senses (Descartes (cogito)[70], Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Christian Wolff); but the (first) cause of the cogito and reason (Descartes, Christian Wolff) is nevertheless God.

But, Kant thought, to prove God is not necessary, because faith is necessary so that the humans may be open to the moral law, and the respect – and more, the assumption – of the moral law is the result of the reason with which all people are endowed. Consequently, and conversely, all people have propensity to the moral law, but faith strengthens[71] it, driving them toward the internalisation of the moral law.

In order to rigorously explain why and how is the propensity toward the moral law strengthened by faith – but also that this philosophical assumption is in fact common between ordinary people – Kant emphasised (almost in the same period and prefiguring what he will write in the Discipline of Pure Reason from the Doctrine of Method, last part of Critique of Pure Reason,1781/1787, about philosophy and mathematics, proofs and arguments) that in different systems of cognition there always are principles as postulates which do not require demonstration but which are indispensable “for all the other practical principles” as their foundation[72]. These postulates are, in the metaphysics of Kant’s epoch and, as he underlined, for our problem of morality through faith: the highest good[73]/perfection/wisdom, God, and immortality of the soul. Opposite to mathematics where the postulates have and bring “apodictic certainty”, these postulates result only from the practical reason, as he specified later on; the first – from the pure practical reason, namely, “previously theoretically cognized a priori with complete certitude as possible”, while the latter have no theoretical certainty – thus, neither apodicticity/“necessity cognized with respect to the object“– but are “an assumption necessary with respect to the subject’s observance of its objective but practical laws, hence merely a necessary hypothesis”[74]. Keep attention: the highest good is a postulate that is cognised a priori as possible, while the latter are postulates which are only hypotheses, necessary for the social life.

Therefore, the metaphysical substantiation of religion should differentiate between faith and the rational part that alone would require proofs. But could these proofs be possible, and what kind of proofs? Kant answered in his critical period. The proofs are possible only if we distinguish between concepts and judgements related to experience and concepts and judgements related to the pure a priori development of reason. This development is highlighted by metaphysics, but following the scientific method of analysis. By doing this, it appears that “even though metaphysics cannot be the foundation of religion, yet it must always remain its bulwark, and that human reason, which is already dialectical on account of the tendency of its nature, could never dispense with such a science, which reins it in and, by means of a scientific and fully illuminating self-knowledge/ prevents the devastations that a lawless speculative reason would otherwise inevitably perpetrate in both morality and religion”[75]. The speculative theology used and derived its demonstration from, however general, concepts related to experience. The moral theology proposed by Kant developed its demonstration on the basis of transcendental principles[76] and is called also transcendental theology[77]. It is intertwined with the transcendental ethics where, “in the world of sense”, “the absolute-good can and must be thought as a principle for that which can be done through freedom, but because it is itself unconditioned, it is yet not the whole which is required for the highest good. Second: the presentation of this good in the world of sense is not possible in itself, for there that absolute good consists in the lawfulness of our conduct insofar as we are in conflict with the subjective principle of absolute evil: for that is virtue (not holiness)”[78].

Briefly, what is a permanent, an everlasting proof of God, is his ideal[79] character as representing the stimulus and reward of cognition[80] and morality in humans: a morality that is not the conjunctural answer to conjunctural situations but a behaviour that listens to a priori principles and is determined by freedom[81]. “Thus, without a God and a world that is now not visible to us but is hoped for, the majestic ideas of morality are, to be sure, objects of approbation and admiration but not incentives for resolve and realization, because they would not fulfil the whole end that is natural for every rational being and determined a priori and necessarily through the very same pure reason”[82].

As it is known, Kant is generally remembered as an atheist because he showed that philosophically – namely, analysing the grounds of religion – one can discuss about it only “in the limits of reason alone”[83]. But this late work was only a finer demonstration of the moral ground of the belief in God[84] (and religion), thus a reversal of the traditional speculative naïve “ontologism”[85] that deduces the including moral empirical functions of God from His existence. And here Kant followed, as before, the consistent demonstration of relations between the empirical cognition and behaviour and the frame of transcendental principles.

He considered that in front of the “starry heaven”[86] only the human reason – and thus, the human moral – can stay, and so only the understanding of the human reason with its moral can contribute to its development without which no reason-to-be of the human existence as such exists.  (Gödel, too, would have assumed this impression, but he rather stopped at the technical power of reason, leaving aside that reason has power only if it is morally/fundamentally (transcendentally) grounded).

In the critical period, in Religion within…, Kant focused on the demonstration that God represents and promotes the human propensity toward the good, and the good will as a ground of faith, mentioning also the historical – and even distorted – manifestation of this representation. Besides the groundwork of reason, God is a problem of sentiment: and indeed, what is left for the throes of desperate humans when reason no more exists and its perversion generates abominable evil, annihilation?[87] But can a dystopian present-day while annul the metaphysical – through principles – thus the scientific immersive analysis of religion? Of course, not. And Kant, considering this approach in mere reason as necessary, could but provide it. Ultimately, the moral meanings behind   the profound presence of the “empirical” God are those which must be retained.

And these meanings cannot be understood without their substantiation: which concerns not only the individual propensity toward the good, toward the principle of goodness of the world, requiring duties of humans towards humans – and thus a political community that overtakes the natural bellum omnium contra omnes respecting the external laws, but in reality being marked by many hostilities – but also, and transcendentally as a priority, the “ideal of the whole of all people” and duties of virtue of the humans qua human race. For this reason, groups of people united in particular societies striving with other groups are not elements of a human ethical community, but rather each of them can “imagine” itself being in a state of nature with other similar groups[88]. We can deduce – beyond Kant’s following description of the people of God, that respects the moral requirements of all its members and/because these requirements of common wills are as if they are instituted by a unique legislator – that Kant’s ideas of God representing the whole mankind, and the ideal of the whole mankind as being tantamount to God’s legislation for every human being, were indeed untimely and, concretely, subversive. The official interdiction of his book and the official hope that, with all the good intentions of the “Prince”, most of people is outside (the understanding of) these “subtleties”, are not incomprehensible today, are they?

3. The critical period (1770-1791): what does it mean to know

Philosophy is research that involves technicalities, as every scientific inquiry. These technicalities are interesting for and understood only by professional philosophers. And we know that besides the necessary technical language they have developed during their analyses, there is also a jargon that tends to put a clear and unpassable distance between they and “laymen”. Actually, the jargon is and gives an intentional apparently non-translatable image of the problems posed by the philosophical investigation. As a result, there is not only the ordinary people’s contempt of “philosophers” – who ignore that “as the humans are ‘poets’ so they philosophise” – but also their situation, intended from outside of them, of being deprived of ability of logical critique (that is, including all the way), of coherent interpretation and self-control during the process of critical reflection on the world: something that is supposed the philosophers do.

Philosophy is not, or not only, a technical dialogue between philosophers whose main purpose is to correctly describe their forerunner and contemporary fellows’ theories. It is the open access supply of problems, whose awareness already took place in the mind of people or hit this one with novel fresh outlooks, and interpretations. The fact that the problems arise from the interpretive effort and/or coexist in a tight interdependence is not important here: the point is that without the offering of new perspectives issued from interpretations, philosophy does neither transmit and provide that which is its telos, its reason-to-be.

The history of philosophy is fully subordinated to this reason-to-be, or at least it should be. It is not only a story of the philosophical discoveries of technicalities but also, or especially, the emphasis of answers to the perennial and new problems and aspects of the human reality. What and why did a philosopher / some philosophers conceive of about these problems and aspects, were their theories new, were they better than the old ones, and according to which criteria, are the goals of the history of philosophy if it has in view, and if we have in view, the purpose of its efficiency.

One of the main, crucial problems of philosophy was that of knowledge, as process and result, of course. And because the humans always start from what is more evident – so, known – they and especially the philosophers focused on cognisance, their credibility, their correspondence with the facts, their variants, their degrees of deviation, their limits, and their relations with cultural frames. And when all was said and done it was clear-cut that what is known depends on the process of knowing. The ancients and then Kant considered it a wonderful faculty of man, something of the spirit. Science was that which was to examine this faculty. Philosophy has hypothesised only what ought to consist of the faculty according to the types of knowledge: or hypothesise the types of knowledge requiring adequate mental elements.

The apprehension of things by our mind is only partial, since it is the result of experience, of our clash with the world. However, this apprehension is real: our experience attests this. And this experience shows that humans made all the things they made, and they have developed: because they thought. From the ancient definition of man as rational animal, all the philosophers considered that the peculiarity of the human history is the history of thought (as Hegel stated explicitly) and that to understanding the thinking means to understand the human being.

This was Kant’s position, too. To think means to know, thus it is possible to scrutiny the world as it appears in experience and to arrive to valuable conclusions about phenomena, although they may be both apodictic and problematic.

*

Philosophy has always searched for and provided principles. They were origins of things, both of the wholeness of universal order and of its aspects – the kosmos, in the Pythagorean image of universe marked by balance of parts and features and arisen from the (principle of) unity then evolving as “undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause; from the monad and the undefined dyad spring numbers; from numbers, points; from points, lines; from lines, plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures; from solid figures, sensible bodies, the elements of which are four, fire, water, earth and air ; these elements interchange and turn into one another completely, and combine to produce a universe animate, intelligent, spherical, with the earth at its centre, the earth itself too being spherical and inhabited round about”[89]. This was the ontological perspective of giving a ground to the explanation of reality in the manner of a scientist studying the external world absolutely disconnected of the conditions of the study as such.

The attitude of men in front of the world matters, however, and to a great extent. This has been shown by many, and Socrates and Plato drew attention on the cognitive cause of the positions of humans towards the world.

But how cognition is deployed, actually what does it mean, thus what does it bring to the consciousness of humans were answered by the epistemological set of principles given by Kant.

Indeed, the entire proffer of Kant’s epistemological theory was marked by principles concatenating each other, as all the other ideas do, and being the final formal cognitive justification of the ideas related to experience. In contradistinction to the concepts and principles resulted from the analysis of experience, the epistemological principles are a priori, thus resulted from the analysis and constatation – that reason/consciousness, in fact cognition have different, and obviously, interrelated strata/levels (as the logical one, that is embedded as a “means” in cognition) which, epistemologically, form a hierarchy: the stratum of cognitive principles regulates that of development of empirical concepts and principles. Obviously, the “empirical” and the a priori stratum of principles constitute a bidirectional (top-down and bottom-up) cognitive structure, but what was important to Kant was just to emphasise the a priori cognitive principles.

These principles are frames and cognitive driving forces of all the judgements.

*

What does to be the son of the epoch mean?

This question can be put concerning of many aspects. Here, it signals Kant’s position towards the “pre-Kantian” philosophy where metaphysics was ontology, namely towards its objectivist standpoint. In that philosophy, the meanings of the abstract concepts discerned by philosophy – abstract concepts which, they themselves, were models for or copies of the world – corresponded thus to the essence of the world and, as in the Greek philosophy that deployed a “scientific” perspective of decomposition and re-composition of the objective being, could be directly attained because these meanings revealed themselves to thinkers.

Kant considered that metaphysics as ontology is possible and necessary and that he made metaphysics, emphasising meanings of the world, not essences of sensorially transmitted things: but these meanings and this metaphysics were now the explicit result of the thorough decomposition of the cognitive process and the cognitive effort of humans, of thinkers. In this situation, metaphysics – limiting itself to the sensorially transmitted experience – generated and concerned its synthetic a priori propositions which alone shed light on the meanings and understanding of the world. Accordingly, the humans, the thinkers/philosophers were and are responsible for the meanings of the world.

Kant lived in an epoch when this turn to the responsibility of thoughts was not only possible, but felt as an urgency. The Enlightenment theory as such was aware of its explicit role in the development of society.

After his traditional journey in philosophy, Kant arrived to create both the methodological propaedeutics of the semantic-focused metaphysics/ ontology (which in fact he never arrived to develop), and the metaphysics of morals[90], which he wonderfully completed.

*

Kant was one of the philosophers who can rightly be characterised as an epitome of systemic thinking. Namely, he not only gave a system of philosophy, i.e. by developing all its main branches, including because he was a university professor of philosophy, a professional philosopher as we say today, but more, this system is harmonious, the principles governing the practical realm being the “methodological” result of the transcendental principles.

Kant was the son of his epoch. Doing philosophy, he based on his bookish experience, dialoguing with the great figures of ancient and modern thinking and assuming their ideas, at the same time judging them. And, because we always see farther than those on whose shoulders we climb, Kant could arrive to his extraordinary theory of transcendental principles of reflection governing in fact the mental architecture of knowing. Just this is epistemology: theory of formation of knowledge qua knowledge, not at the level of neuro-physiology and psychology, but at the level of epistemic components.

*

The principles exist and are the result of an “act of thought” as transcendental conditions of experience[91], so, they are not the ontic origin of the world; and they are transcendental as meta parts of the meta/epistemological paradigm of the cognitive process: that, necessarily, corresponds – at least in principle – to the real cognition since this one aims at grounded knowledge. Transcendentality is Kant’s characteristic and name resulting from the “methodological” principles of the consciousness governing the internal organisation of the mind and the internal formation of knowledge.

Indeed, “Without consciousness that that which we think is the very same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be in vain”[92]. This is the first “methodological” principle, followed by other ones, applied to the type of objects we focus on (for example, when counting, I do not simply name 1, 2, 3, but I know that “the units that now hover before my senses were successively added to each other by me”, only on this basis I “would cognize the generation of the multitude through this successive addition of one to the other”, and only on this basis I know the meaning of numbers[93]). We become aware of all of these principles only after a thoroughgoing analysis obviously made at the level of intellectual understanding, and this level of judgements is itself transcendental, made with concepts generated only from concepts, but anyway the principles are made in our reason at its transcendental level, not at the one of empirical reproduction.

The transcendental level takes place only through concepts, and from concepts. A concept is “the consciousness of this unity of the synthesis”[94] of the different perceptions – of parts, moments, aspects – of the object. It unites “the manifold that has been successively intuited, and then also reproduced, into one representation”[95].    It is the “formal unity of the consciousness”[96] having the function of synthesis according to a rule suitable to the object (par example, a triangle is an object composed of three straight lines according to some rules relating to its constitution and limits). We retain this formal unity as the concept that retains the rules and relations specific to the object. Accordingly, the concept is always general (it regards the form and the rules) and serves as a criterion for differentiating the objects. It is the vehicle of the process of understanding, judging and thinking, because it is the unity of the rules[97] of the object, as these rules constitute in the mind in its transcendental level of “pure” concepts and rules.

Consequently, the transcendental realm governs the internal organisation of the mind and the internal formation of knowledge, whose “levels”/constitutive moments are:

• sensible intuitions
• sensible concepts (“synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuitions”[98], but subordinated to the a priori rule of synthesis as such[99])
• intellectual concepts
• a posteriori judgements

(– all of these being realised by mind’s scrutiny of the sensible data of experience, with the help of synthetic judgements / ampliative propositions: where the predicate is not implied in the subject/concept, as in the analytic propositions, but on the contrary, adds a new property to the subject; therefore, the synthetic judgements arise from experience, but sometimes also only “from pure understanding and reason”[100] –) and

• a priori judgements without connection with experience, thus pure, in analytic /explicative propositions[101] deploying within the limits of the concept/having all the conditions in the concept, and helping themselves with synthetic propositions and ultimately giving as their results, the pure intuitions and concepts, as conditions of the spring of knowledge outside the sensible experience, this outside being, obviously, limited.

In any case, cognition surpasses intuitions: because cognition/thinking is “discursive” understanding”[102].

Cognition – as “consciousness” of correspondence between synthetic representations/concepts and objects[103] – occurs in two ways: “either if the object alone makes the representation possible, or if the representation alone makes the object possible”[104]. The first is empirical cognition, the second is a priori, from concepts. The first is fulfilled with empirical concepts – abstract, but not a priori – the latter, with intellectual ones: the first, “how the appearances must be represented as objects of experience”[105], the latter – how the intelligible objects are represented through categories (concepts of understanding), “without any conditions of sensibility”[106], but also without being conditions of the understanding but, at the same time, having the dignity of universal and necessary rules of  deduction of one from another[107].

*

Metaphysics takes place through synthetic propositions. It is helped by analytic propositions which, however, are only “means”[108] for the aim and reason-to-be of metaphysics, the synthetic judgements.

How are the pure/a priori synthetic judgements possible is, accordingly, the problem and topic of a new metaphysics, Kant thought, that has to be similarly rigorous to mathematics and physics, demonstrating the necessity of principles according to which knowledge in general and a priori judgements and concepts are possible.

From this standpoint, Kant is the direct origin of

• the new epistemology – that is more and different from logic and psychology – as research of what knowledge, truth, belief, imagination, justification, consist of and arise from, and
• philosophy of mind or more exactly mind studies focusing on the functioning, relations, structuring of the neural network, constitution of biological causation (“adaptation, phylogeny, ontogeny, and mechanism”[109]) and cognitive levels (formal, material/contents).

Kant did not know, obviously, what the mind is; he spoke about its faculties (power, ability) to do all that is necessary for the fulfilling of the moments of knowing.

Differentiating (and no matter how intertwined they are in our experience) between particular and random cognition resulted from experience – thus a posteriori to it – and  cognition that gives us what is necessary and universal, thus what is valid in itself and exterior to any experience, thus a priori to it,  consequently resulted only from concepts / judgements related to concepts, Kant developed epistemology as a science, namely, analysis of cognition as a multi-level cognitive (and not physiological or psychological) process: where there are cognitive frames as space and time, which are innate and Kant explained them as transcendental – beyond experience, and where are “principles” according to which all the aspects of cognition take place and where, as a result of this thoroughgoing research, fine details and moments are revealed and defined, and new concepts appear, as well as problems as contradictions in the dynamic of cognition, and as inconsistent explanations of cognition in the philosophy till him.

Obviously, I used here contemporary terms – as “level”, “frame”, “realm” – and Kant used well accredited philosophical terms as “form”: space and time were for him a priori forms of our sensibility, and cognition was the activity of reason in the broad sense of this last word and conducted according to innate a priori regulative principles which form reason in the narrow sense of the term, called also faculty of principles. For example, the human has empirical perceptions of things, but for man, this being endowed with reason, the condition of empirical receptivity is an a priori principle of pure apperception: this a priori principle existing also for the empirical perceptions to being conscious/to arriving at the consciousness of the always “I”[110]. Or, the human has intuitions – direct and immediate grasping of the peculiarity of a thing – but in order to have them, there are also the pure intuitions, space and time. Actually, all these concepts which describe the cognitive conditions of the deployment of reason denote faculties, capabilities of the human reason.

We can surmise that Kant considered the faculty which regulates, with the help of principles, the deployment of empirical cognition as a “methodological level” of reason, called transcendental; and this level could be “personified” as a “transcendental subject”, circumscribed to the transcendental conditions of experience. But in fact, the transcendental principles and all those “concepts of reason” (of comprehension[111]) are only means of a science of cognition, of a scientific metaphysics (actually, an introduction to this science that is to develop rigorous cognisance of ontology, but also of cognition etc). For the time being, we cannot conceive this science, this is the reason we/Kant describe the transcendental as knowledge of the conditions of cognition, conditions of the constitutive manifestation of reason.

Therefore, it is about meta/epistemic/necessary conditions of knowledge[112], they are a priori to any experience and are cognised only from concepts, in this way these conditions as principles which substantiate and explain knowledge and the process of cognition being “pure”. But obviously, not every a priori intuition and cognisance are transcendental, but only those which can never arise from experience and at the same time are a priori relating to objects of experience. (For example, space and time for sensible cognition, cause as necessary and universal rule of thinking about phenomena, but also, for the moral cognition, duty for the moral law) In a large sense, the principles governing the practical realm reflect the relative autonomy of ideas (as concepts and judgements, but also and especially as principles) towards the perceived experience known only a posteriori to it.

So, the transcendental principles mediate and direct our knowledge of the empirical world, thus including our moral relations. More generally, the relative autonomy of ideal mental constructions allows and leads to the meta[113] moral principle of the categorical imperative.

Consequently, the novel and huge creations of Kant were

• the epistemological theory as such[114] – of cognition as the unreducible means of the reality of the world and as a complex structured in levels/strata that can be explained as an epistemological ontogenesis that is more than the logical level and contains it –
• and the moral theory of the categorical imperative.

 

3.1. Knowing and levels

Let’s familiarise with the topic.

Man – even in its phase of infant – perceives the world as outside him. Reality – if he could express – is always him and the world, in this order, because of (the already mentioned) conatus. And as he is an objective reality – he is, not because he thinks, but because he feels himself and the world – the world is objective, too, it is felt as the outside of him. Later on, when man becomes learned, he understands that the world is also anterior to him. He is transient, but the world is permanent.

 Anyway, man – even in its phase of infant – is in an experiential contact with the world. And he experiments the world, representing it as the challenge to which it must respond. But always in his experience thinking accompanies his representations, as if they were accompanied, from the off, with “I think that…”[115].

And thinking is to know. How can we understand what to know means?

To know is to think logically, may sound our spontaneous answer. Well, how to infer is logic, as a specific procedure – as a specific “level”/function of mind – that fulfils the task of an efficient matrix for inferences.

But, as Kant demonstrated, logic is subordinated to knowing, and thus there is a specific – obviously, complex, multi-level/multi- strata – “level” of mind occupied with/having as aim knowledge. This “level” is the cognitive methodological one. The notion of level is our representation – actually, knowledge – of this topic and, generally, of the world. But, being knowledge, it corresponds to the structural constitution of mind and, generally, of things. Actually, the structure of our consciousness is a complex of functions – fulfilled by biological (chemical, physical) reactions between biological components – which intermingle, double themselves and mutually help, in both specialisation (division of tasks) and “holistically” taking in the purposes. This “holism” does not regard here the entire organism but only synergy of parts of the mind (both as brain and consciousness) and, possibly, a holistic approach/manifestation of mind, not yet understood.

The notion of levels of mind corresponds, thus, to the functions. Here we do not speak about levels of material, energetic, informational components, neither of different biological functions, but only about the cognitive function, itself manifesting as a set of functions having the same finality: knowing as sine qua non condition of efficient reactions.

Why is the inference true or false a “methodological” level of mind, how is this level the realisation of cognition, of knowledge; what is knowing and how to cognise and arrive to grounded knowledge; what to manipulate data – as empirical concrete and as abstract notions, and as concepts – does mean; knowing as permanent self-verification; the fact of the historical and social determinants of knowledge – namely, of the contents of cognition –: all of these forbids us to consider the ideas as axioms. On the contrary, they are only “theories” which involve our permanent awareness of their historical and social character. This position does not imply relativism – and lesser, moral relativism – but only the understanding that knowledge depends on information and (practical and in mente) collective verification. Since even though all cognition requires a concept, this one may be “imperfect and obscure”[116] and thus, we do not err accepting them and “explaining” them as intuitions “more profound than the cold positive concepts”, but we must argue which meaning we choose, and we must show the possibility of plural derivations/deductions but also, we must explain why the chosen deduction is the most suitable.

We also should not forget that, regarding the contents, in every cognisance – in concepts and theories – there are two types of knowledge: one is necessity and universality of the problem posed by that concept or theory, and the other is the concrete expression of the problem. Both types are rectifiable – even radically – but the first is more related to certainty than the second. The movement of the sun around the Earth, as a problem, is absolutely certain/it is a historical fact, while the geocentric theory was certain just for a while. Concepts and ideas may be considered to reflect objective facts for a while, but then the collective experience of knowing changes the concepts and ideas according to the collective information and verification. The new concepts and ideas reflect now reality, the objective world (that, obviously, includes also the world of the mind).

*

Epistemologically, knowing is neutral: examination and verification are constitutive procedures of knowing. In this sense, the epistemological is “technical”. It concerns the problems of how is cognition realised qua cognition. Now, if we consider cognition as knowledge, any knowing relates data and information to other information, including those about the methodology of this relation. The methodology as such implies both (knowledge of) the universality of this action of relating information, and the specific methodology of relating a specific information in order to understand a specific problem.

Therefore, the relation of information, including in the form of concepts, is a necessary and universal feature of cognition. But the contents of information are not necessarily necessary and universal, thus in principle. (Obviously, excepting the universal of methodology).

Cognition means arrival to a theory (“an idea”) following the “technical” procedure of relations between information. This procedure consists of relating to considered sure information our questions and suppositions (which are information and involve other information, more or less sure), and of developing new information as a relatively coherent unit of knowledge.

The sure information as premise of cognition is/must be necessary and universal. There is about information, not data. Obviously, data themselves must be reliable, but: 1) only methodologically, have they a necessary and universal level of content – that they are real and they give a content, and 2) as given, they have a necessary and universal structural aspect (“it’s raining” is the data, possible to correspond to the real events, but this means that rain and raining are banal – universal and necessary – phenomena), and 3) as concrete content, they are not (necessarily) universal and necessary.

Only when data are interpreted, thus united with information in the frame of a theory/idea, have they sense, contributing to the creation of meaningful information.

So, the sure information is absolutely necessary for cognition. But just here two intertwined phenomena occur: one is the methodological inadvertence where people consider automatically that the sure information is necessary and universal. For instance, concepts and theories (ideas) are premises of cognition, the basis of the cognitive answer to a question. In order to proceed, the premises must be sure. But sometimes people do not apply the methodological sure (universal and necessary) cognisance about the existence of two types of problems solved in cognition:

• one which requires that the obviously necessary certainty of premises not be rigorously universal and necessary, and one which requires it must be. A cognition whose content is about the measurement of facts, or about corelation and conditions related to a given topic with a given sure starting point, does not necessarily suppose that we have to discuss at the same time the correctness of premises. Max Weber did not pretend that the Western capitalism is the result of Protestantism, he only emphasised the intense concrete role of this religious ideology in the formation of the Western modern attitudes. But obviously, a cognition intended to solve the truth of premises must take into account the primary concepts and theories from the standpoint of the universal and necessary requirement for sure premises.
• The other problem is the oblivion that even the premises must be examined. This oblivion causes the universality of opinions versus grounded knowledge. On this basis, the tendency to equate opinion with grounded knowledge is so strong: not only at the ordinary level, but also – and here is the guilt – of the modern institutions whose end is just the general strengthening of direct and indirect baneful opinions.

The study of the “technical” procedure of cognition is very interesting, it is the “bred” of epistemologists. They tried and try to answer the questions concerning the constitution of coherent unit of knowledge, its features and results.

3.1.1. Knowledge

Knowledge: data and information, including the representations of experience linked to them. How is this knowledge formed from an epistemological standpoint, and not from a neuro-physiological one. This question was cardinal – for Kant – because its answers were and constitute criteria of certainty in statements, discourses, narratives, prescriptions: and thus, its answers opened the path to the description of the world as such. Epistemology as precedent to ontology, and in a scientific perspective, namely, only through demonstrations as transitions from the real(ist) known, and not from the speculative one, to the unknown.

Two little observations to the above: first, during Kant’s life there were not yet neuro-physiological research and theory, this is the reason of his use of the soul as implicating, for us, the neuro-physiological level, the brain; but Kant started from sensations etc., so from the visible of the physiology to the invisible – but graspable – level of formation and organisation of knowing, as and within mind. Second, the scientific understanding starts from proven and demonstrable reality – thus, this scientific understanding is always realist; it is different from and opposed to speculation arisen from un-verifiable principles.

In contemporary terms, knowledge is software and its epistemological knowing is analysis and programming. But, as we know, there are many types of software for a computer, including those for the devices themselves. This meaning the entire experience of humans’ encounter with the world and their creating of the world. The comparison of the human knowledge with the computers’ software is thus only an analogy between two fundamentally different entities: software is a complex of algorithms and algorithmic construction irrespective of its development as self-learning power, while the human knowledge is more. At least, this is what we have today.

The second observation is rather a reminder: most of philosophers, including Plato and Berkeley, were realists, i.e., considered the external world as objective. The difference or reason of splitting between them was how did they conceive the knowledge of the world: and from this, how the world as such does present in front of the humans. Kant inherited both a strong modern empiricist picture highlighting that through sensations the real world gives ideas and is mirrored by the ideas which combine and develop from the simplest ones to the highly abstract ones, and the rationalist picture where the mind is not a passive collector of external phenomena and where the world is the set of mind’s representations. The problem was thus not only to understand how does the mind constitute as an active entity of procedures mediating the world but also what is perceived from the world in itself / how does the known world overlap thoroughly to the real one.

Kant’s answers were the transcendental constitution of the mind and the difference between phenomena – perceived both through our sensations and both empirical/concrete and abstract concepts and ideas – and the things in themselves, external to our transcendental constitution of the mind. The world is objective as both phenomena and things in themselves which are relatively/partially perceived as phenomena, but the “thing in itself”, the nature of existence, cannot be known: what we do know is not a copy of the world in itself but only a demonstrable (proven) mental interpretation of phenomena.

*

Knowledge is always approximate[117], Kant showed. But this doesn’t mean than we cannot know the object. Let’s insist. Our object we intend to know, is always an aspect of reality. The knowledge of the object is not a reduction to different perspectives, nor its conscious simplification, but the possibility to know that aspect. Obviously, in the individual process of knowing there are ideas reflecting different perspectives about the aspect, but 1) the process as such is unique, and 2) the knowledge of the aspect is fulfilled after the review of these ideas and the selection of the perspective we cherish.

Also, to know an aspect – an intentional object of our consciousness – does not mean to know a part of the object. We know only the phenomenon, shining before our senses, and what we know is the result of our mind’s processing of the data given by senses. The object can be an absolutely abstract idea, and even not at the simple level of mathematics – which is that of a posteriori and synthetic judgements, from the experience of its construction, only the pure mathematics being a priori “because they carry necessity with them, which cannot be taken from experience”[118] – but at the level of judgements from concepts, and we know this abstract idea by still processing it/its composition and reasons. Thus, if the object is not less than the aspect we are interested in, it is not more than the aspect, and its knowledge is never a “catching” of an “essence” beyond the ideas we process and arrive at when focusing on the object. It is never the “thing-in-itself”, the wholeness of the concrete – as Hegel expressed it – whose deployment develops the essence that, in this way, pervades the whole: it is only a unified view about the aspect/phenomenon we want to know. Thus, it is not a simplification of the “original”/supposed object: the aspect/the phenomenon is ab initio what we do want to know.

If so, the objects we consider in order to know them are the result of a well-tempered constructivism: in science we construct our objects[119] according to our mental patterns/paradigms, according to the level of scientific process and theories, according to our technical and theoretical instruments, thus according to our openness and horizon of scientific view. But letting science apart – as a model of knowledge as such – the objects of our attention are parts of reality. Our ideas take part from reality, too, but their direct origin is internal to us, it is our reason, and we proceed with them as with the external reality: but they are part of the virtual/second order reality. While when the direct origin of objects is external to us, they are parts of the first-order reality.

However, are these first-order reality objects immutable? Of course, not. And this not in the objectivist key of matter in permanent movement, but in the “idoneist” (Ferdinand Gonseth) one: these first-order reality objects, too, are – since they are for us only how we see them in our mind – intellectual representations (but, once more, not fantasy) which, obviously, depend on the historically and socially determined contents/ideas we have; accordingly, they are adequate, in an infinite historical process of knowing, not only to real properties, which thus are not  absolute, nor to the formal coherence of judgements but, more important, to the whole “horizon” of object-subject interdependence in every moment of the historical process of constitution of knowledge. And obviously, this “horizon” itself is constituted of some of its types (Gonseth’s horizons are synthetised by me): that of the mezzo-world, natural to us, those expected by us in the quantum world (and in the mega cosmic world); and from an epistemological point of view, that of the classic mechanistic world and that of the relativistic one.

The solution is the openness of thinking (of philosophy, Gonseth specified[120]) to all the types of experience: something that is not strange for Kant.

3.1.2. “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”[121]

What does this mean for the understanding of the human being as such and/thus the knowledge of things?

It means that the essence of man was constituted in the historical process of human experience, and that the ultimate, structural/methodological, justification of knowledge cannot be separated from the historicity of knowledge: the principles explaining a domain, as well as the methodological principles explaining the cognitive structures, are only a level of knowledge, though fundamental one, “determining” the levels of ontology and scientific information, thus of the entire human behaviour. Kant focused on the structural/methodological level, in fact on the structure of cognition, because this was the means of the cognisance about the world. The deciphering of the means helps us to remove the illusions of the full and definitive truth given by concepts and judgements which are historical. And making sense of principles we understand, beyond the feedbacks from experience, both the hierarchy of legitimising the cognisance and the reason-to-be of the human (moral) reactions.

Later on, and focusing on the understanding of society and social ideas of people, Marx expressed the interdependence between experience, given by the senses, and knowledge, that is cognisance of “essences”, as a complex social determinism – that includes, obviously, all types of feedback – which no longer considers “experience” neither as a vague all-encompassing abstraction and nor as a restrictively individual one: “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations” (Theses on Feuerbach, VI)[122] . The concepts resulting from individual experience are in fact social/cultural creations, and walking through the epistemological process of articulation of cognition – that, obviously, is a theoretical construct that covers or corresponds to every individual human – is not enough to understand the cognisance, the concepts and judgements used by humans.

But Kant was not opaque to this aspect. It’s just that his intention was to find the principles which structuraly explain the deployment of human reason and, what was somehow more important, to induce what the human beings can and ought to think beyond hypothetical situations: actually, this “ought to” has never missed from the human relations, but just in order to be present in the behaviour of all, one can arrive to categorical imperatives principles. And these principles are not some fanciful ideas created in an abstract deontology, but they are transcendental: thus, existing within the cognition of the human moral.

*

On the one hand, Kant tried to apply the scientific methods based on analysis of experience – the deduction of laws (order, continuity, permanence) of the existence and functioning of systems in a rigorous way – to the philosophical understanding of natural phenomena: and here, he was empiricist. On the other hand, he took over from science the analytical method and presumed that metaphysics in this new form would better fulfil philosophy’s rationalist peculiarity. Anyway, if “philosophy examines the universal by means of signs in abstracto”, “metaphysics is nothing other than the philosophy of the fundamental principles of our cognition”[123], namely, “the analysis of confused cognitions”[124].

The constitution of cognition is cardinal to the understanding of the world, because the world is as it is cognised, thought of by reason, as the concepts or ideas are born “from the nature of the mind”[125]. This problem of constitution of cognition was one of the two tasks Kant gave to himself decomposing the faculties of the mind, the other being the capacity of reason to guide the moral behaviour.

Kant was not the first philosopher who was troubled by the mediation of cognition between the humans’ consciousness and the world (he said that Hume woke him up from his “dogmatic slumber”), but he was the first who constructed this mediation as a specific philosophical discipline emphasising the causes, types, functions and determinations of cognition qua cognition, epistemologically and not psychologically. He considered that before philosophy discloses the meanings of objects /reality, it must show why and how do these objects and meanings appear and are cognised. If ontology is the fundamental discipline and reason-to-be of philosophy, epistemology is/was for him the principal one, the principal urgency. Not the object was for him in the foreground, but how judgements about it take place and, accordingly, the functions of judgements as explanation and justification.

But beyond the hierarchy of concatenated ways/moments/elements of cognition, Kant has also sketched a methodology “of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences”[126].

He could not ignore this methodology: not only from the standpoint of its articulation in the development of reason, as he showed in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also from the one of pedagogy, namely, of transmission to the students of the manner they must avoid (the mechanical thinking, in a non-autonomous way) and the real possibility to do this.

The words are ambiguous – as the philosophical experience showed – but this ambiguity can be disclosed: and must be done, as in the epistemological propaedeutics of philosophy (of metaphysics as ontology). As a result, in the metaphysics of morals (in the contemporary terms, the ontology of the human, as for instance in Lukács and Sartre) the words are no longer slogans, cold prescriptions exterior to humans, labels, all taken for granted, and thus taken over by people mechanically[127], but describe and correspond to the inner power of humans, the moral power (the pure moral reason, said Kant): but the possibility to manifest this power by following the moral law – that is a transcendental cognisance arising from the transcendental level of reason – although objective, depends on the external, historical and social, conditions of men. This is the reason why Kant insisted that people must dare to think autonomously.

Do we not see how relevant Kant’s exhortation is?

3.1.3. What does pure mean in philosophy?

Concepts in each field are interesting because they account for the goals, perspectives, and theories in that field, and they do so by evolving. The birth of a concept illuminates (unique) moments of understanding and relating the human mind to reality.

Among the many concepts used by Kant, that of the pure is particularly revealing. On the one hand, in the European philosophy before Kant the term was not very widely used, because everything in experience and in the world being so mixed up, it was important to highlight the principles and, on the other hand, the extreme concepts: which explained and set limits in the order of the world. In the traditional metaphysics, the concept of the pure was linked only to God, to His power and activity. Accordingly, man with his telluric origin and feature was impure. Pure is a classificatory concept. But, Kant showed, not in and about the world, but in knowledge and of knowledge.

Kant distinguished between empirical knowledge, of facts from experience, and knowledge from reason alone, a deduction of a priori from a priori. Such knowledge means rationalism and is accomplished by pure reason as the faculty of a priori knowledge, that is, of principles, of ideas on the basis of knowledge and concepts given by the intellect which it orders.

Knowledge that concerns the a priori conditions of knowledge of any possible experience – the current meaning of this knowledge is epistemology – was called transcendental by Kant. Transcendental is knowledge of the a priori conditions of any possible experience. Such knowledge is pure and is realised by philosophy as pure philosophy: which is speculative in the sense that its objects are outside of any possible experience, they are ideas obtained only from ideas, concepts which are abstractions from abstractions.

But it is precisely this clarification that allows us to distinguish between pure philosophy, which deals with the conditions of knowledge for the knowledge of experience to take place, and the traditional meaning of metaphysics until Kant. Metaphysics was the discipline that dealt with the transcendent, determining from it principles such as freedom and immortality. Now, Kant considered, without the prerequisite of pure philosophy – which he called propaedeutic in the sense of critique[128] of the process of knowledge (epistemology, in contemporary terms) – that this metaphysics was dogmatic, or speculative in the common meaning of the term, where there is deduction of truths given by experience from unproven and unprovable transcendent principles and deduction of unproven and unprovable transcendent principles from experience.

Kant, however, recovered the concept of metaphysics: as the philosophy of the principles of the development of pure reason. And since the principle must be universal and necessary – otherwise it is not a principle – metaphysics in the Kantian sense, divided into the metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of morals, deals with the deduction and explanation of the universal and necessary character of the principles in these domains, principles that were prepared by the critique of the conditions of knowledge in these domains. The foundations of the metaphysics of morals thus deal with the pure level of morality, outside of moral experience, but determining it.

This whole meaning of the concept of pure was taken up in philosophy after Kant. Husserl also considered pure logic and pure ontology and pure phenomenology[129].

3.2. To know, reason and the transcendental

Let’s stop a little. Yes, the proof of everything involves the precedence of the human who thinks and senses but, once the human reason exists, it can be understood not only as a physiologically demonstrated particularity of the human beings but also, from the standpoint of its results – ideas, knowledge – as a capacity (Kant said, faculty), itself formed from many capacities which, intertwined, explain knowledge, thus necessarily including the proven knowledge. Everything that exists and has meanings for us is because we have ideas about them, first of all corresponding concepts “however imperfect or obscure”[130].That which we have no idea about, thus we can articulate nothing about, has no reality for us, does not exist for us. And first of all, we arrive to ideas in our experience (that is, fundamentally, the experience of knowing: thus, “it consists in the apprehension, the association (the reproduction), and finally the recognition of the appearances and contains in the last and highest (of the merely empirical elements of experience) concepts that make possible the formal unity of experience and with it all objective validity (truth) of empirical cognition”[131]).

Therefore, the proof of everything can be approached not in the relativist key giving to proofs no value and legitimising any opinion irrespective of its absurdity – namely, of its ignorance of causes, logic and consequences – because of the origin in the human subjectivity, but just on the level of ideas as such, this level being objective, as “intangible reality” resulted from reason and given to humans as a result of their intersubjective communication.

 Reason in its broad sense means for Kant just the epistemic level (or faculty) of the human general capacity of sentience, of reactivity, thus of knowing[132]: both at the level of processing the data given by senses, and at the level of processing the abstractions from abstractions. It is a level of ideas and judgements constituting knowledge. And in its Kantian special, i.e. “pure” sense, reason is the level (or faculty) – within the broad level of reason – that offers principles resulted from judgements from concepts alone and which regulate all the judgements related to experience, thus the entire formation of knowledge: but this level of principles is not only that of our explanation of knowledge, it is also and foremost a constitutive epistemic one, that “must be” in humans.  Because this “pure” sense is the transcendental, thus all the necessary conditions of cognition from experience, and which can be understood. These principles are and rule all the moments and aspects of cognition:

• from the unity of representations, which are parts of the first unity of apprehension constituting a single empirical intuition, with the reproductive synthesis of imagination[133],
• to the axioms of time and space (“a priori formal conditions of sensibility, that contain the general condition under which alone the category can be applied to any object”, namely the schema that is produced by imagination[134] and which are the persistence of substance in time, the representation of the real as a substratum of empirical time-determination in general, the determination of the representation of a thing to some moment of time [135]),
• to the principles governing the categories (which are “grounds of the recognition of the manifold, so far as they concern merely the form of an experience in general”[136]),
• to those governing the idea of cause as a synthetic unity and a priori condition of combination of the manifold into an intuition in general[137] and that of relation of effects and causes[138],
• to those of the a priori form of the understanding, i.e. the form of “combining the manifold in general”[139].

So, we know the things which exist – both in the real world and imaginary – because, through the impression of sensations on  representations, we have ideas about them which we prove on the cognitive level/with reasonable analysis, not only formally, that is to say logically, but also and always “materially”, that is, confronting different representations with the perception made by senses, but with the help of (dynamical) categories[140], a priori forms of the intellect which have no function if they are not related to the sensible; or, finer, the first intuitions of objects we focus on are already made within /in the frame of the a priori /pure forms of sensibility (space and time) because they are not discursive[141], and they are further processed as representations, concepts, ideas with the help of a priori principles governing the epistemic faculty of cognition and, of course, with the help of other representations, concepts and ideas. Knowledge is the result of judgements, and their entire development as mentioned above means that we know only phenomena, not things-in-themselves.

*

Hmm: concepts and judgements related to the pure a priori development of reason. Today we know that ultimately every cognition arises from experience: but only ultimately. In fact, cognition is – letting aside the first grasping of a thing that interests the human – processing of articulated information and the evolving of new articulated information from (the judgements of) other articulated information. The highest generality of this articulated information is called by philosophers, principles. Obviously, we can inversely walk the way from principles to the information related to concrete things, and here it’s not only about a “mathematical possibility” of going from the result to the data but indeed, the concepts related to concrete phenomena and actions seem to be derivable from principles, anyway justified by them. Because these principles apply to the empirical cognition in a universal and necessary way: they are sine qua non for whatever cognition.

This power of principles was considered by Kant to constitute a special fundamental layer of ideas, anyway justifying and explaining the march of ideas. In the formation and explanation of cognition, this special, fundamental layer was called by Kant, transcendental. It was not transcendent in the sense of the transcendency of Almighty, but it was so important that it – however constituted within reason – was above the ordinary a posteriori dynamic of concepts and judgements, as if it would be exterior, “transcendent-al”.

Kant called his philosophy transcendental idealism: the external world was objective, of course[142], but the means by which we know it is the world of ideas, these are the direct object of our knowledge of phenomena, and his new philosophical specialty focused on and ordering the tempestuous movement of ideas – epistemology, in our contemporary parlance – was all the more “idealism”. But it was not a traditional speculative idealism: it neither did deduce the external world from ideas and nor did it consider them uniformly[143], but as a complex structure whose specific determinant cognitive layer is that of the transcendental, and of the methodological principles; both in the constitution of knowledge as such and in the constitution of different practical domains. And thus, the first caveat of this pre-eminence of cognition was that we know only phenomena given to us through the transcendental conditions of our receptivity fulfilled initially through senses and then through the deployment of reason; and thus, even the space and time within which we perceive the objects have a conceptual reality only for us as transcendental suppositions. But, once more, space and time are, objectively, phenomena which are intuited firstly by infants.

Especially today we must be very sensitive to the power of principles or, negatively put, to the ignorance of principles. We cannot “leave them aside” and consider only some restrictive ideas related to restrictive interests. Because the principles legitimate our judgements about transitory situations. Why? Because the principles have in view what is universalizable in the human behaviour, what surpasses the limited focus on the individual/particular “will to survive”.  The universalizable is what is specific to the human being as such – not to particular groups “superior” to other ones – and what is a form that takes account of contents which are never a slice that, itself, cannot be universalizable. This is the reason why, on the one hand, the principle of causality is not reducible to a slice of inferences in a closed system[144] and on the other hand, that Kant used much space to  discuss the illusions, the fake appearances, fallacious arguments, the fake reasoning (paralogisms), abuses made by using improper names (as that in which we call transcendental whatever a priori cognisance, while the transcendental means that some intuitions and concepts are and are applicable only a priori[145]).

The epistemological principles are the fundamental, “methodological” basis of the problem of the universalizable because they are part of the human reason. The categorical imperatives are the other most illustrative universalizable principles.

Why is the universalizable – as a transcendental principle, and as cognitive methodological and ethical principles – so important? Because, it emphasises the difference between the general and the universal. The first is the result of the processing of empirical situations which are always examples. But we never have all the examples, and thus our general is not fully trustworthy. Or, it is only if and at the extent it is underpinned by ideas (principles) which are “transcendental”, namely, universal motivations.

3.2.1 The feelings

Sensation is not a confused form of thought, as Leibniz considered, but is outside it. However, it is united with other ones in perceptions, this unity itself through the form of representation being allowed by the transcendental faculty of apperception, the pure apperception. It’s the constitution of reason, said Kant, or of consciousness, as he formulated the synonym of reason in broad sense.

But beyond these, we have feelings. Sentiments arisen from the soul, and having, as all of the great philosophers showed, a huge importance in the actions of humans.

*

We feel. But ultimately, we ratiocinate what, why and how do we feel the way we do. Kant’s goal was to found how and on what basis we display our reasoning that accompanies, like the interior face of a Möbius strip, the feelings.

This aspect of reason’s accompaniment is related with the phenomenological description of the world. Phenomenology highlights the world as it appears to us/ how the world does appear to us. Phenomenology’s emphasis is a description of how does reason reverberate on the basis for feelings.

I perceive, I feel, I express my feelings as well as my perceptual reality.  Reality is as the subject sees it. Is this a subjective idealist declaration of the extreme relativity of reality? Not at all, because: 1) we always see with our reason that is not an automatic expression of feelings, and 2) reality – even that seen by the subject – is always intersubjectively posited (already seen) and verified. Even if I see “this reality”, it is never an absurd imagination (irrespective of the function of imagination as an “a priori ground” of the necessary synthesis of reproduction[146]) because neither my reason – that already operates with intersubjectively verified notions, concepts and empirical principles – and nor the transmission of my feelings, that aims to confront them with other realities, including those intersubjectively considered, allow an unintelligible reality.

More: I communicate “this reality” / “my reality” –; if I do not intend to communicate them, they do not exist: neither for others, interested in the description of the world, and not even for me, my reasoning in mente, expressed with mutually recognizable (identifiable) and intelligible words, being only a prelude of their publicity – and thus I intend to be intelligible: and “felt” by the receivers.

But if this technical formal frame of phenomenology is given, the empirical contents of feelings and forms are which must be questioned.

The world felt through the medium of the memory awaken by the smell and taste of a madeleine (Proust): “my world”, “my reality”. But what if the world I feel is in a process of destruction, of annihilation? The topics of many present phenomenological expressions of the world seem to be marked by the inertia of a “transcendental” explanation and legitimation of phenomenology, discussing exclusively neutral and non-problematic examples (somehow copying the model of analytical philosophy). But what about the problematic examples? How can we feel and “contemplate” destruction?

Well, Kant contrasted to the individual feelings which remain inherently in the narrow circle of individual contingency and limits, the moral reason that underpins and subtends the human feelings. The moral reason is felt as respect for the moral law, said Kant in Groundwork, because only this moral feeling is really valuable for moral: for the human vocation to be a moral being. Obviously, this vocation belongs to the human species, as he insisted in Anthropology[147],  but already in the precritical period, Kant showed that the humans have virtues (moral power[148]) because they are moral beings, and that, although they are influenced by inclinations which may remove them from a true moral behaviour, nevertheless they have moral feelings. Even the true virtue is a feeling, but of the moral principles and “the more general they are, the more sublime and noble it becomes”[149]. “These principles are not speculative rules, but the consciousness of a feeling which lives in every human breast, and extends much further than the particular reasons of compassion and complaisance”[150]. The sum of the general moral principles “is the feeling of the beauty and dignity of human nature”[151]. This feeling can and must subordinate our “particular inclinations”: thus, it is about a fight between different types of feelings. But the true moral feeling generates non-contradictory behaviours: for the sake of moral principles. While feelings from inclination – even toward the good, as the inclination toward complaisance – may generate contradictory behaviours even according to the “inclination that is beautiful in itself”: for instance, a complaisance/sociability felt only in “the small circle” of the group a man associates to and wants to please it, may involve “very often an injustice towards others who are outside this small circle”[152].

The moral principles are general moral motivations, transcending the particular motivations and ultimately underpinning them. These general motivations are general goodwill and general respect[153]. Giving an example relevant for today: we may respect someone for his/her professional excellence (so, from a particular reason), but beyond that, we respect his/her humanity; or, negatively put, we may not respect at all someone because of his/her behaviour, but we must never give up to the respect towards his/her humanity: and thus, we must consider his/her dignity as an autonomous rational being. And, because the humans are moral beings inclined toward the good[154], this doubling of motivations is not something impossible and extraordinary requirements: all the good particular motivations generated not by the awareness of the conformity with the moral principles  are “auxiliary impulses as supplements to virtue, which, while they move some to beautiful actions even without principles, can at the same time give others who are governed by these principles a greater impetus and a stronger incentive to do so”[155].

Therefore, no matter how strong the feelings are, they are not devoid of a rational substratum, and we must not give up to this rational substratum – and to its articulated rational analysis and evaluation – in the name of “sentiments and feelings which are outside the realm of reason”. Yes, people act and can act more or less impulsively from feelings alone. And the entire behaviour can be seen in a neutral phenomenological way, like a part in a picture: “this is reality”. But in the humans, these feelings have motivations which, ultimately, are articulated in their conscience when they experience feelings. And anyway, these feelings must be understood when we discuss about the consciousness of humans. In the last resort, they cannot be separated from the human faculty of reason. Kant did not neglect or reduce the feelings and their importance: but he tried to disclose – always at the level of reason – why do they deploy in the way they do, and what can the humans do in order to manifest their inner moral power. And obviously, first of all they must understand that they have this inner moral power, all of them, as they all have “common sense” (Descartes), reason.

Consequently, we cannot contemplate passively the evil and destruction, the decree of the Only Truth, the labels put without any explanation, the unimaginable calumnies and lies – although very primitive –, the absolute separation/dephasing between the rulers and the ruled, the distortion of language and ways of existence.

4. The critical period (1770-1791): what is the telos of the humans and their knowledge

Man can be taught everything, the human child can be taught everything, including to be and to be reduced to a state of animal. But what for this reduction? Kant did not put forth / not explicitly the Aristotelian telic cause, but he implicitly answered it: the cognitive architecture of man is not a reduction, a unilateral outlook on man, but the means (and explanation) of the ultimate/basic reason-to-be of the human as reasonable being.

Man is a reasonable animal, and because of the capacity of reason he is an absolutely unique animal: he is moral. The ability to discern between the good and the evil, to choose and to control the eventual inclinations toward selfishness, to anticipate and to imagine more than his immediate feelings, give to the human being the transcendental moral power that governs his contingent reactions: that see these reactions from the standpoint of the moral criterion, the moral law. The transcendental level of reason is “the legislator” of man’s behaviour, similar to the function of (the idea of) God as a cosmic moral legislator. To be legislator means to give the principles for the human behaviour. According to these principles can the human being walk on the road of his moral progress: can the human being understand his reason-to-be in universe.

In orienting his research according to the moral reason-to-be of man, Kant was not rigid, promoting an impossible moral maximalism (an impossible total disinterest): on the contrary, the categorical imperative as the moral law as such lies in the deep transcendental level of reason – thus, of the conscience of all humans – and gives the inner, structural possibility of moral behaviour.

 The categorical imperative is the stake (Staket) that the humans can and have to consider when they behave according to everyday challenges. Therefore, the categorical imperative appears as an ought to.

The significance of the deontological ethics – of the ought to be within the human relationships – of the duty towards mankind as such as it is personified in every human being is deeper than it was considered by the critiques of Kant.

First of all, it is not an impossible, utopian dream that has nothing to do with the prosaic life. In the different conditions of the different connections between humans, they have different hypothetical imperatives responding to the hypothetical situations. And Kant was not naïve: there are plenty of life moments – actually, all of them – when there are interests which not only compete to each other but also make hard to decide which one leads to morally acceptable results or, generally are moral at all. People behave according to hypothetical subjective maxims, whose efficiency or correctness depend on the result or goal of the considered actions. However, the fundamental condition of these actions –  emphasised by the pure ethical philosophy of demonstrations inside the a priori realm (the (groundwork of) metaphysics of morals) but at the same time suggested by the most common conscience that feels that there is the reason that says more than the interests[156] –  is the moral law that gives the ultimate reason and the limits of hypothetical maxims: the moral law that underlies and underpins the subjective maxims so as “that they can also hold as objective, that is, hold universally as principles, and so serve for our own giving of universal laws”[157].

Kant’s moral was retained by thinkers as a dry deontological writing. They insisted on the subjective means – the duty – of the realisation of the categorical imperative maxim of reason, maxim that arises from the power of human reason as a transcendental condition of the possibility of human moral as such. Many thought that it would be impossible to reduce man with its body, imagination and desire to the pursuit of fulfilment of the duty[158]. Hegel was the most famous critique of Kant’s formalism. But in fact, he was wrong.

• The particular and the transcendental

 

The humans, like the other living beings, are under the sign of the particular. They experience particular, concrete, unique experiences and react to them according to the same pattern of stimuli-reaction as the other living beings are within, thus according to the access consciousness, which I prefer call access sentience. However, since they are rational/discursive beings, they interpret the signs of the stimuli and reaction, generating meanings beyond the simple consideration of relationships between stimuli and reaction, imaging them in the past, in the future and in different spaces, inferring from these meanings, new ones. Moreover, they know that they know, or that they do all of these, as if they would be constituted from two entities, one watching the other one, or from levels of reality. And they do all of these according to the interpretive consciousness about the phenomena of reality. And again moreover, in the humans these two forms of reflective consciousness intertwin and translate each other, generating new mental creations: which enrich the world/reality.

Thus, even though the humans interpret the particular experiences with abstract concepts, in this way better understanding their value, they nevertheless are framed within the particular of experiences. They make not only inductive judgements but also deductive ones (and, obviously, also abductive ones): but if these judgements move only within the area of the particular, it’s not enough, the impulse to transcend this area comes from the depth of the human reason.

Perhaps this is the very meaning of the transcendental, of this concept coined by Kant and its concrete significances. First, the transcendental is a cognisance generated directly from concepts, and not from the mediated way of senses-concepts, letting here aside that in the last instance there always is this mediated way.  And the transcendental, only the transcendental generates the universal, the basis that gives knowledge beyond the probing of the ephemeral.

For this reason, those who study Kant first endeavour to understand the transcendental as a pillar of the theory of knowledge. And Kant highlighted the function of the transcendental as the vault key of the theory of knowledge as: 1) the universal legitimating the formation of knowledge and knowledge as such, 2) the ideal universal and / or, in fact 3) the moral universal.

Only as/through universal can the humans know, and only as/trough moral universal can the humans overtake the particular situations based on particular interests. The categorical imperative is a transcendental, results from transcendental judgements. Its model is God, the ideal of moral thinking. The absolute moral passion to apply the categorical imperative is the cornerstone of the human behaviour consistent with the claim of every human being: thus, of all.

 

• The categorical imperative(s)

They are only forms, patterns and ultimate explicative criteria, deduced at the transcendental level, since from the everyday experience people cannot do this. The categorical imperatives advance concepts explaining why are they the only universalisable criteria of the human and all rational beings’ behaviour. And thus, these moral imperatives are very concrete, because they specify the limits of staying human: to not be considered only a means of the ends of others, but always an end in itself (for itself), because of both that everyone has a unique life and everyone is a representative of the human species.

There is a single one categorical imperative: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”^[159]. (It reminds us the Golden Rule, isn’t it? “You can’t do to others what you don’t want done to you”, isn’t it? But the categorical imperative(s) have a deployed explanatory power that the Golden Rule does not have).

Or “Act in accordance with maxims that can at the same time have themselves as universal laws of nature for their object”^[160].

However, it has some forms which, all together, constitute the “categorical imperative”, namely, the corpus of formulas (the moral law) relating each individual to humanity and deriving the moral feature of individuals from the reason common to all rational beings:

• because its universality is as if it would be the universal law of nature (“So act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature”^[161]); or “Act as though your maxim should serve at the same time as a universal law (for all rational beings)”^[162]; or “Act in reference to every rational being (to yourself and others) so that in your maxim it is always valid at the same time as an end in itself”/ “Act in accordance with a maxim that at the same time contains its own universal validity for every rational being”^[163];

• The formula of humanity as end in itself, because “Rational nature exists as end in itself”^[164]: ‘‘Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means’’^[165]; and humanity is end in itself if everyone aspires to further the ends of others^[166]; the “principle of humanity and of every rational nature in general as end in itself (which is the supreme limiting condition of the freedom of the actions of every human being)”^[167];

• the third practical principle of the will, as the supreme condition of its harmony with universal practical reason^[168]: ‘‘the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law’’^[169]/ “the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislative will”^[170] or ‘‘the principle of every human will as a will legislating universally through all its maxims’’/ “if there is a categorical imperative (i.e., a law for every will of a rational being), then it can command only that everything be done from the maxim of its will as a will that could at the same time have as its object itself as universally legislative”^[171] ; “Not to choose otherwise than so that the maxims of one’s choice are at the same time comprehended with it in the same volition as universal law”^[172] : this is the principle of the autonomy of the will;

• The formula of the realm of ends, that is “a systematic combination of various rational beings through communal laws”^[173]: ‘‘Do no action in accordance with any other maxim, except one that could subsist with its being a universal law, and hence only so that the will could through its maxim at the same time consider itself as universally legislative”^[174]; or “Act in accordance with maxims of a universally legislative member for a merely possible realm of ends”^[175].

(All maxims have:

(1)       a form, which consists in universality, and then the formula of the moral imperative is expressed as: ‘That the maxims must be chosen as if they are supposed to be valid as universal laws of nature’;

(2)       a matter, namely an end, and then the formula says: ‘That the rational being, as an end in accordance with its nature, hence as an end in itself, must serve for every maxim as a limiting condition of all merely relative and arbitrary ends’;

(3)       a complete determination of all maxims through that formula, namely ‘That all maxims ought to harmonize from one’s own legislation into a possible realm of ends as a realm of nature’^[176]).

The moral law/the categorical imperative is a real level of the moral thinking. It is felt by people^[177], and felt as being contradictory to the empirical principles, felt as a moral dissonance between the imperative human duty they feel in their deep down and the divergent empirical pragmatic “requirements” and maxims; the proof is just their tendency to avoid it, to resist to it and to transform its universality into a simple general (and abstract) requirement^[178].

All the imperatives of duty can be deduced from the categorical imperative^[179].

 

• The unique place of telos

The human thinking is always all of its complicated and intertwined moments, components and aspects together. All the humans have both an empirical and a transcendental use of them.

But, not only on the basis of the two “versants” of consciousness (from a psychological point of view) – the reactive and the interpretive – but also and rather because of the simplification and reduction of the human manifestations, made by the social division of functions in the hierarchical society, it seems that the humans are used to using in different manners and proportions their curiosity towards existence, their questioning and ideas of causes.

The efficient reactions involve the focus on causes deciphering the given and its constitution. Why B and C? Because there is A; or vice versa, there is A, thus B and C; or B means that there is A and C. And Aristotle’s famous material, formal and efficient explanations are used to more or less satisfactorily react in this given.

But telos – the what for that is not a synonym of what is? (A and B and C) but the question of the reason-to-be of the given as such – is thus a quite different outlook. Eventually, people can skip the telos if they want to survive in the given. But when they want to survive humanly, they can’t.

Telos is the odd – strange enough from the viewpoint of the reactively efficient questions – and unexpected “deviation” from the reactive explanations fit for the emergency of survival. It interrogates even the “axiomatic” truths of this emergency, the whole set of words which already have for us a blurred meaning, or no meaning at all, but we listen to and repeat mechanically.

Telos does not hasten to react, it interprets, construes. And because the reactive humans live on the basis of a Weltanschauung quite enough for survival, telos exposes its reason-to-be.

In this, telos is an absolutely transcendental concept. It may precede the reactive questions and explanations. But in any case, it must follow them: because the questions are posed by rational beings.

Perhaps people have in the deep down of their commonsense the Golden Rule. But this Rule is so infringed that it arrives even to vanish from the moral conscience of reactions for survival. However, if people think they can arrive to the categorical imperative transcendental principle. The use of teleological method is paramount for the humans: not in order to imagine a inmotus primus movens, even hiding in the innards of things, but for understand their own reason-to-be.

 

4.4. The universalizable

Why is the categorical imperative so important for us, human beings? Because it is the single human universalizable, the most generalisable moral criterion. There are many moral criteria for many types of interhuman relations, but they depend on the type of these relations: and thus, their power to be taken for other relations is limited.

What does the (human/ moral) universalizable mean? It is not tantamount to the generalisable. First, not all the general – and thus, generalisable – features of humans are moral. We all know that everybody goes to bathroom, but this aspect is a biological one. Then, humans live in different groups/communities, but this is a social/organisational aspect. We know that, because living in groups/communities, people develop deep sentiments of interconnectedness, including the one of belonging to a group/community, thus of their individual identity as pertaining to that group/community and at the same time as representing that group/community: namely, sharing its values and destiny. But is the feeling of representing a group and sharing its values and destiny a universalizable one? No, it is not – however general it be –: because it is only a “quantitative” social ideology aspect.

The moral criterion is only qualitative, giving a content – that is, a certain value or model of human attitudes and relations – to the process of self-evaluation and social evaluation of these attitudes and relations. And the above “quantitative” characterisation of the aspect of social ideology is only between quote marks, in fact there is only about a superficial, obvious general feature of the determination of ideology by the concrete social organisation of the human society. It is in no way a criterion.

But did Kant not show that the categorical imperative is a form? Yes, but a transcendental principle that, as the transcendental principles do, only gives the form for other empirical and rational moral principles and judgements. In other words, the human reason is organised in such a way that – now concerning the moral judgements – it has the level of transcendental principles which give the frame and criterion of moral judgements, and the level of everyday moral judgements, that also has the level of moral principles and the one of applied judgements. But the moral judgements always concern concrete attitudes and relations and thus, the transcendental form of categorical imperative also must provide a content, a concrete landmark for the moral principles and judgements.

 Thus, the categorical imperative is not at all an abstract form, eventually – only eventually, as demonstrated by the shy of the present researchers to focus on it, because it is, and thus they would be too, allusive – a theme of professional discussions, but a form that gives the ultimate content of moral principles and judgements, the ultimate criterion to deploy them.

Accordingly, the categorical imperative is frighteningly concrete. It does not refer to modes of deduction from abstract situations, but from concrete ones. As a transcendental, it cannot be avoided, the moral reason, n times has Kant insisted, being constituted just of the different levels of moral approach: thus, in the last instance, people ask themselves and the others if a certain situation, some moral (empirical and rational) principles and judgements are ultimately according with the moral imperative.

But do they really ask? No, despite the original constitution of the moral reason, people do not always ask. The categorical imperative is a transcendental principle that, however constitutive of the human reason, is understood by humans only after their careful reasoning: they confront the real situation, the existent principles and judgements with the consistent rational judgements from concepts, with the categorical imperative.

As it is known, all (moral) concepts are a priori,[180] serving as premises/basis for the deduction/judgements about moral situations and facts. People are taught – not as a neutral epistemological teaching but, since we speak about moral that is deeply referring to relations and attitudes in given political and ideological environment – that they should believe and infer their conclusions from empirical principles which “are not at all fit to be the ground of moral law”[181]. More, people are taught to believe and infer from rational principles developing from the principle of perfection built “upon the concept of an independently existing perfection (the will of God) as the determining cause of our will”[182]. But neither that theological and nor the abstract ontological concept of perfection do offer the premise for a transcendental judgement that highlights the universal criterion to moral judgements. (Although the ontological concept “withdraws the decision of the question from sensibility” and, promoting a rational analysis of concepts, lets the concept of perfection as such unquestioned[183]).

Since people are not taught a thoroughgoing analysis and deduction from concepts, and that only this demarch is rationally valid to supply moral criteria and, concretely, the categorical imperative, they do not use it; are they are not aware of its cardinal importance. For this reason, the Kantian Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals is, as Kant himself thought, the only teaching that prepares people to think morally.

*

But if people are not taught to morally reason according to what is universalizable, the result is dire. We saw this from the entire human history. But if this entire history was historically determined by the rarity of resources, including of the human science to acquire the well-being, the present imperiously demands to put the universalizable as the only grounding principle of moral behaviour. And thus, to ask “philosophical questions” related to all political and social decisions avoided and covered by the mystification generated by the power relations which are more than ever far away from the moral human universalizable.

Universalizability is the feature of the human morality.

Universalizability is a maximalist principle. It is not a middle – as Aristotle’s virtues – and does not comport quantitative phases. The human history was a long process of moral tendencies toward and deviations from the inner human feeling, or even idea – corresponding in Kant to the transcendental categorical imperative – that the human beings must be treated according to the equal appurtenance to the human species. But a whatever moral reaction – attitude, relation, with their legitimating ideas – is either universalizable, or not.

From a moral standpoint, we cannot measure /deduce the universalizability of moral criteria from restrictive groups and their criteria. Because these criteria are not universalizable, but generate a wasted life of those outside these restrictive groups.

For this reason, the questions we ask about policies and political and social decisions and behaviours have clear-cut answers from the standpoint of the moral universalizability.

5. Kant and Enlightenment

The 18^th century was not only that of Enlightenment. There were even ideas which opposed^[184] to the message of progress through cultural development of the many – although “the many” were, at least for the German intellectuals, only townsmen, and rather propertied. But just because of the coexistence of adverse ideologies, we cannot hold the principle of Enlightenment to be guilty of the theses of the Counter-Enlightenment, as Adorno and Horkheimer believed.

And thus, we (not I/me, but we all as rational beings) cannot hold “Kant” – meaning the entire Kantian critical philosophy, that which is the novelty brought about by Kant, and especially the Groundwork (1785) constructing the categorical imperative, as well as the ulterior writings – guilty for theses which not only do not derive from, but are wholly opposed to the categorical imperative.

Obviously, we do not idealise Enlightenment’s power to impose reason in the functioning of the human society, and neither that this reason was in that time the higher level of the reasonable organisation of society. The Western Enlightenment was the historical epoch of legitimisation of capitalism: as a society of citizens, utopian political liberalism based on the correctness of the principle of contract, both economic and social. “Capitalism in a country”, struggling for resources, markets and profits, competing for them with other “capitalisms in a country” and subjugating the “rest” of the world. This is why the Enlightenment views were contradictory: and, for instance, why Kant emitted racist ideas: but only before 1785. Because from his ethical theory with its basis, the categorical imperative, no racism results.

*

Actually, what did Enlightenment mean? It was felt by prominent intellectuals and theorised in the entire Western Europe: as both amount of scientific/rationalist knowledge and its diffusion, that is the development of a rationalist spirit in the European peoples or, at least in the conscience and behaviour of the townsmen citizens. As a result, Enlightenment was a practical programme of rationalist mass instruction, in order to counter the malignant role of

• “priests” and opportunist philosophers using a double speak and the behaviour of “priests”,
• “publicists” (publicistes, generating “long-term errors” “and incomplete or vague theories” fuelling “the passions”; they are described as the present “opinion former” and “influencer” – all of them “manufacturing consent” as Noam Chomsky said (1988), borrowing the formula from American professionals in political science and economic advertisement),
• and “ignorant declaimers” who reduce knowledge to “pragmatism” and reject theoretical foundations)^[185].

Therefore, Enlightenment is not only a doctrine – a speculative exploit, ultimately – but at the same time a commitment to implementation.

*

We can take Enlightenment in the strict sense, as a doctrine of the method of raising the culture and social conscience of masses, or in the broad sense, as a doctrine of general progress, and especially of the political one, as a result of the implementation and assumption of rationalism.

In both senses, Enlightenment was the ideology of the nascent and developing bourgeoisie in the Western Europe and, because its social origin itself was hierarchical (big, middle and petty strata of bourgeoisie), the Enlightenment ideology was also stratified: and even though all these ideological strata were created by intellectuals, they were

• either utopian (as the utopian liberalism that actually represented the illusions of the petty bourgeoisie and lower classes)
• or nationalist (as nationalism or the political liberalism of national groups and related to the interests of the middle and big bourgeoisies which reduced the slogans of freedom and future social equality dreamed of by the petty bourgeois, to a strict political liberalism (freedom of speech, right to vote, middle bourgeoisie)
• or a vague one (the big bourgeoisie).

And even though in its fight against the presence and voice of the lower classes and petty bourgeoisie, the big one took over the slogans of utopian liberalism in order to mobilise them to fight for its own power, the final victory of the big bourgeoisie in the bourgeois revolutions – victory showed by the phenomenon of Restoration, alliance of the big bourgeoisie with monarchy, Church and an already “toothless” aristocracy – brought about the attack against the Enlightenment rationalism and the deletion of the hoped political rights. The fight of the middle bourgeoisie, again allied with the petty one and the poor, culminated in the 1848 revolutions which were defeated by the big bourgeoisie, after the new treason of the middle bourgeoisie against the petty one, fearing the poor. The reactionary era lasted until the last decades of the 19^th century, when, as a result of the pressure from below of workers and their organisations, an era of prevention began.

However, for Kant and others, Enlightenment was both doctrines: the amount of rationalist knowledge as such leads to progress only through the education and assumption of this knowledge by citizens, who must and arrive to manifest freely in the public space; the progress is first of all that of freedom. And the vector of this process is the leading stratum, and first, the enlightened monarch.

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To show the importance of Enlightenment is not a Eurocentric view. The more so we understand this importance for the global history. The point is not that its ideas were conceived of only by Europeans: on the contrary, the role and criterion of reason was and is common to cultures worldwide, and to point the different meanders of human reflection on man and the world is not only fascinating but necessary^[186], because otherwise there is neither real knowledge of it and nor dialogue between the different facets of the same human culture. The focus on Enlightenment is a part of this dialogue.

It’s difficult to refrain from discussing the Enlightenment as such: a cultural system of ideas about society and the man-society relationships^[187], preceding both the Western bourgeois revolutions of the 18^th century and the German way of reformism leading to the German way of modernisation; and reflecting, through the starry-eyed lens of petty bourgeoisie aiming at the abolition of privileges and at its own freedom and equality that would be tantamount to the freedom and equality of “all”,  the big bourgeoisie’s scopes of political equality with the dominant layers of the feudal society, actually its primacy in a modern society based on “merits”.

The set of Enlightenment ideas corresponded to the development of capitalist relations and logic in the Western society. This is why Spinoza, who gave a deep understanding of the “multitude” – the common people in towns and countryside, as constituted from unique individuals having their human aspirations, and not from serial and dependent beings who definitely renounced to their autonomy subordinating themselves to the leading entity forever^[188] – can be considered a precursor sketching the political and ethical lines of reasoning of the next, enlightened century^[189]; and why the discontinuity of ages, that is not a fiction, is so embedded in the continuity of the human creation, representing it^[190].

The Enlightenment ideas arose from the antinomies of the monarchic and feudal hierarchical society, highlighted by the loud and deaf opposition of the many. Aiming to control this opposition, they were responses trying to preserve the fundamental pattern of continuity of the hierarchical relations – through the slogans of political liberalism – within the “freedom” of capitalist economy. But the ideas of the Enlightenment were also trans-capitalist attempts to appropriate the point of view of the many, as if they would have transposed in them the deep feelings of the many and made them audible. The belief in improving the lives of the greatest number of people through the development of their knowledge and their abilities to know was the main distinguishing characteristic of intellectuals in the years of the construction of modernity. Obviously, these intellectuals belonged to the affluent or at least prosperous strata^[191].

The Enlightenment was constituted in the shadow of capitalist slogans and promises of the Western bourgeoisie to itself, and which considered those outside it and in lower status than it as insignificant means. Once more, this is the reason that in the era of Enlightenment there were also discriminatory and exclusivist ideologies flourishing: as the racist and nationalist ones, promoting, through the veil of oddities that needed to be civilised or the veil of cultural freedom to manifest one group’s culture, the bourgeois goals to impose its economic and political domination over the majority of the same linguistic culture and over the majorities of different cultures thought as being “inferior”. But we must not confound the era of Enlightenment with the typical Enlightenment ideas.

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The picture of the future – of the future society, that was to defeat, to surpass the “Ancient Order” – is the main characteristic of Enlightenment. This characteristic is due to the rationalism (with its secular feature) of the era. In all the anterior historical epochs of Europe, the future was given, because it was created by an extra-mundane force; it was prefigured, thus closed. Now, the future was to be created by humans, and it was open. However, what was depicted? As any picture, the Enlightenment proposition was a blend, and thus it was difficult to discern the different strokes. The liberal future – and different liberal futures, mixed with old guarantees of stability and power, as in the Restoration type liberalism, long-drawn till nowadays – was considered by its promoters as the Ideal future, and the only one. But this was only the description/definition of the future – as other “given” – as the transposition into law of the already existing wage labour and capital relationships, so, as the attesting within law of the capitalist competition for power, this entire description being justified with beautiful words (toleration, freedom, progress, constitutional government^[192]). The means of achieving this definition, this future, were in fact not really new: the separation of powers in the preconised bourgeois era of constitutional government was not the annihilation of domination, but only a sharing of power and co-option in the power circle of capitalist groups and layers. And thus, submission was to continue to be the basic status of the many: they could choose individual paths in their life, of course, but only in the frame of their obedience to the rules of domination, and more, of their consent to this status of submission.

But is the context-dependency of human facts and thoughts not a universal meta principle of behaviours and ideas? Obviously, it is: but the definite transition to capitalism, sung out triumphantly by Enlightenment, did not radically change the shape of the social relations, although just Enlightenment seemed to promise this. Accordingly, neither liberalism nor the liberal meanings of knowledge sharing and public education were truly new ideas^[193], distinguishing in nature from the old ones – but only in degrees – though their implementation generated a new civilisation: but only through the medium of the new power relations, political and economic institutions and laws. But what would have been – and what was – something truly new in the realm of ideological ideas?

*

Obviously again, the ideas which offer a novel pattern of social reality are those which structurally change the social relationships, which, by the shifting of the point of view, do no longer consider the domination–submission matrix eternal, but historical and having complex causes which, however, can be deciphered.

But could this type of ideas flourish during Enlightenment? No, or only marginally, as the utopian sketches till Gracchus Babeuf’s Manifesto of the Equals already speaking about a post-bourgeois revolution. However, what is important in the development of ideas is not so much their descriptive strength, as their substantiation.

*

Kant provided this substantiation with the ethical demonstration of the categorical imperative. The humans behave in historical and individual contexts according to different interests and views assumed and transmitted to them by millenary moral principles. This behaviour corresponds to these hypothetical contexts, interests and views. However, this behaviour itself can be judged from an ethical standpoint. In all the hypothetical public contexts until now, people entered in relations positing them as means of others. And each human being is a means for the others, because each and all of them have social roles and functions. But at the same time, all are human beings and the respect for the humanity of each person requires that the behaviour of all take this humanity into account: people must be treated not only as means but always at the same time as ends. This moral treatment is imperative if the humans want to preserve their humanity, that is, their human species.  In different contexts, people behave according to different maxims. But what is essential is that moral involves what is human in all these maxims, what is universal. Technically, this is a universal law, and the formulations of the categorical imperative specify: that the maxims followed in random occurrences must be of such content that they could serve also as a universal moral law. Only in this way the human person keeps consciously his humanity and considers the humanity of others, so his and their both uniqueness and universality as ends, and their representativity for the rational beings able to understand and create universal ends.

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In the effort to theoretically create a better organisation of society, to demand from all citizens behaviours based on good will, Kant was not alone. There were many intellectuals, high rank nobles and clergymen, physicians, scientists and university professors, philosophers and writers, constituted in cultural and scientific societies. In Prussia, these societies merged with the state in order to make reforms for a better management of society, that would prevent a revolution. The reforms allowed a “passive revolution” – as Gramsci called the modernisation from above – in a country where the feudal power still overwhelmed the bourgeois production and trade, but in its shadow, with its help.

The Berlin Wednesday Society in 1783-1798 (Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft (or Gesellschaft der Freunde der Aufklärung)) was an example of these societies.  Johann Karl Wilhelm Möhsen, delivered “What Is to Be Done Towards the Enlightenment of Citizens?”^[194], in this society in 1783. This paper and other ones promoted the critical spirit – result of education and ability of “bien raisonner”, as Frederick the Great insisted – therefore the formation of modern members of society, of citizens. Hence, the entire Enlightenment age was a pedagogical age^[195], because education was both a popular goal and a purpose – because a necessary condition of modern development – of the bourgeois layers. Enlightenment generated a process of development of the “public sphere”^[196] of transformational ideas and debates.

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But Kant went beyond the praise of education of rationality. The categorical imperative moral theory suggested that no progress in the human rationality is achievable if people still are treated only as means and never as ends at the same time; the telos of the human beings fade^[197] and a cosmopolitan spirit for the perpetual peace is not possible only on the basis of hypothetical maxims which do not acquire a universal feature. No public spirit defeating the former “representational culture” is possible without, not a moral education but, a moral transformation of society, based on the consideration of people always as ends and not only as means. The normative ethics is demonstrated, and this demonstration indicates the interdependence of moral and concrete economic and political changes. Kant’s theory is not speculation, but a path-orienting theory for the structural transformation of society. This is his original position that made him the axial representative of Enlightenment, its emblem. In the political conception he could be but a utopian liberal^[198] benefitting from the enlightened Prussian monarchy, but the categorical imperative moral surpassed liberalism: and also, the utopian optimism that was the general spiritual state of the 18^th century, before the new capitalist relations won and became an explicit dominant system, defeating (and integrating within it) the former social order. The categorical imperative theory has so high stakes, on the basis of an implacable logic, that it warned ab initio about the huge difficulty and revolutionary trials its transposition in life implies. From the standpoint of his moral theory, Kant was a moderate optimist, or rather a moderate pressed by the burden of realist scopes: and directing toward a “maximalist” perspective of the human society.

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The Kantian paradigm, the flag of trust in reason, considered by most of the 18^th, 19^th and even 20^th century people as essential for Enlightenment or even for the new era of modernity and dignity of all, was only one, although the main one, of the ideologies which shaped the modern world.

The bourgeois revolutions in the 18^th century and the bourgeois-democratic in the 19^th century had in the core of their thinking, the Enlightenment ideas. The lack of freedom is a limit, but just the limit is a heuristic instrument of freedom: if people are enlightened. And

*

As it is known, AI deduces the future from data of the past. And the future is, generally – let’s be optimistic – superior to the past. Now let’s make an exercise of imagination. If we were AI and we would know the categorical imperative, what other principle would we deduce as a superior one for the future?

*

The core of the Enlightenment doctrine is the categorical imperative.

In the polemic of Robert E. Allinson^[199] and Michael H. Mitias^[200] around the question of the need of a new Enlightenment in the 21^st century, Małgorzata Czarnocka^[201] pointed at the fundamental similarity of the two, and the complementary elements brought about by each of them.

Both suggested “the need for the world’s transformation in an Enlightenment spirit”^[202].

Michael H. Mitias showed that: the ideals of reason, science/truth, humanism, all being concrete transpositions of goodness, truth and beauty, are universal, and conceived of in concrete historical conditions; therefore, we do not need a new Enlightenment, but “a reinterpretation of the ideals of the European Enlightenment” in the present conditions. Actually, Allinson’s view was the same: because the 18^th century European Enlightenment – but as a historical period, as well as through the persons of big philosophers, not as a doctrine promoting specific values/ideals – brought about mixed ideas (with those racist and Eurocentric), we need a new Enlightenment cleansed of such malignant products of historical human minds. Another consideration was the different focus on either the continuity of Enlightenment (Professor Mitias) or discontinuity of the historical epochs, as the present one that seems to having degrade the Enlightenment values (Professor Allinson).

However, if we understand Enlightenment not only as a theoretical supply of values but also as a call for their implementation – actually, just because these values are not passive descriptions but warm urges – then yes, we need a “new Enlightenment”, as Robert Allinson insisted. That is, I say, the developments of contents of values in the contemporary challenging times. If we do not develop these contents, the values/ideals remain vague and consequently, able to be used in a “double speak” (Orwell) that, on the contrary, destroys even their original meaning that is implied under any of their historical forms.

In this sense, once more, the categorical imperative cannot be surpassed by other ethical criterion and stake: but it requires and determines principles of implementation. And these are the principle of abolition of the private property (that is not tantamount to the personal one) and the abolition of the political fragmentation of humanity, because only with this abolition the cultural uniqueness of groups can flourish, are the sine qua non principles of implementing the categorical imperative.

Only in this perspective, the Enlightenment values have relevance. Actually, only in this perspective have they, beyond their content given by that historical epoch, a necessary and universal peculiarity of being values, criteria and stakes of universal appreciation by humans.

The philosophers, dealing with the articulation of ideas, are preoccupied only with the topic they pursue. And their professional dialogue is the only thing they can do in order to really substantiate the concepts and values of their ideas. But this doesn’t mean that they show only these immaterial tools of the historical process of humankind. They show also the actors of this process: the values have a dynamic force only through the activity of humans. This is the reason of the double function and relevance of values: both descriptive and practical. And this is the reason of the necessary feature of values: the presence of telos in their internal logic. And the Enlightenment pointed out that the values whose telos is not universal/universalizable, are not really positive for humankind, that is, for all members of this species and for each of them, and on long term.

Once more, the Enlightenment revealed that the well-being of groups cannot transcend the well-being of all the human groups and of every member of them, and that the ethical principle of the categorical imperative must be continued within the structural social relations, as principle of common/social property and thus, as principle of abolition of domination-subsumption.

The Enlightenment signalled that progress is not an inexorable and objective march, but depends on the contents of moral values and thus, on the public debate of the reasons of contents and the extra-theoretical domain of practical interests and relations. However, the public analysis  discovered that, just because of the universal quest of humans for “the goodness, the truth and the beauty” – namely, for their conditions / the conditions to really  live under their aegis – : on the one hand, there is a sense of history that seems to be an inexorable and impersonal given, while on the other hand, the dominant groups do not recognise this sense of history because if they would do, they should recognise the entire logic of the human universal striving for the above values. As a result, the dominant groups privilege the process with its momentary, temporary and restrictive teloi of the domination. And the dominated groups emphasise both the telos of the human being and the logic to go to it.

Accordingly, the political repercussion in the class-divided society is not the “equilibrium between the dominant classes and the dominated classes” (or, said more bashfully, “between the rulers and the ruled”), but the struggle against this division itself, led by the moral values whose core is the categorical imperative. Actually, this struggle shows the interdependence between the biological determinism and the cultural/moral determinism of the human species: and thus, the “superiority” of the latter from the standpoint of dynamics and change. Our biological determinism is the same as that of our ancestors 3000 years ago, but our cultural – meaning, obviously, cognitive (artistic, scientific and technical achievements) – and, here emphasised, moral determinism is that which changes and fuels the behaviour of agents and the sense of history.  And even though the everyday problems lead to moral choices between moral models facing social constraints, and thus to moral uncertainty, this phenomenon is not solved only by the ad hoc moral theories which we compare^[203], but ultimately by the categorical imperative that subtends all these theories and is the real construct and emblem of Enlightenment.

Indeed, the categorical imperative is the only moral principle opposing to the banalisation of evil, and not to an abstract evil, but to incredible cruelty and murders.

5.1. To be the child of one own’s time

Kant was the son of his epoch. He lived when the European first industrial revolution was only in its first moments, the well-ordered guilds guaranteeing the steadfastness of urban habitats in a hierarchical society where the censorship on behalf of princes representing the unity of dominant layers of aristocracy and wealthy traders still was (considered) natural. The French thinkers of the early modernity have insisted on the hypocrisy of a social order based on privileges, and Kant contributed to this position by his philosophy demonstrating the coherence, necessity and universality of the principles of reason – somehow in contradistinction with the dedication of his books to socially high personages, as well as with his letter to the king on the occasion of the publication of Religion, where  he exonerated himself of the guilt of professing and teaching harmful ideas and promised to not ever repeat this type of deviation from the absolute submission he will show[204] –.

Anyhow and after he tried to rationally develop arguments within the assumed frame of the existing object-oriented pattern, to be modern meant for him to critically examine everything – namely, the ways of thinking, science and philosophy, and institutions[205] – and this feature, explicitly promoted by Enlightenment but in fact present in the whole history of philosophy and sciences, was continued by Hegel[206]. And while Kant considered that the model of international relations is that of peaceful commerce[207]– in his idealistic/utopian liberalism, inherent since the capitalist relations and forces were just about to show their strength towards the ugly relations of the past – latter on Marx demonstrated that the international relations cannot evolve toward a perpetual peace without the transformation of the domination-submission structural relations in every country and in the global net.

But at the same time, Kant has exceeded the idealistic utopian liberalism in his magnum ethics of categorical imperative. Just this ethics was the ultimate telos of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist structural relations, and allowed him to develop the theory of proletarian revolution.

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To be the son of his time means, thus, to understand at the level of ratiocination not only determinations and results from close to close but also – and foremost – determinations and results all the way. And, so as not to sound abstract, the criterion of ratiocination all the way is the impact of events on humans: on every human being and thus, on all of them.

The “peaceful commerce” that the utopian liberalism dreamed of proved impossible. But in the 70s of the 20^th century, the “pragmatic” liberalism waving utopian veils coined the “peaceful coexistence” theory that – continuing the liberal reduction of social systems (the social system means structural relations) to political regimes (of forms of government) – asserted the “convergence of systems”: the same technology spreading globally would annul the socialist principles of the socialist system and would impose the unique neoliberal one, and also the so desired world peace. But the socialist system – with all its problems because of the historical conditions and the world domination of capitalism – was based on principles which considered the dignity and development of every and all of citizens, going toward a society without social hierarchy but where the professional “elitisation” were to be generalised : how could a socialist system renounce to these specific values, in the name of the most advanced technology that, however, would not have changed the international competition for markets and thus, would not have brought the so desired world peace?

Well, there were socialist leaders who thought that this renouncement is good. And they led this process of relinquishment that transformed the former socialist economic independence into dependent economies – and the equal opportunity to education, culture and activity, generating real social equality, into unequal opportunities, decline in cultural level and an incredible social hierarchy. While the keystone value of the socialist system was the dignity of every one and all humans so as no one be treated only as a means, but always at the same time as an end in itself, the cornerstone of the modern/capitalist society with its liberal ideology was the private profit imposing the treatment of humans as means, the human end considered by every one of them being without importance. The Kantian categorial imperative proves to be unavoidable in the political ratiocinations.

One of the most important liberal reasoning is the necessity to be patient and accept the liberal pattern of society, the irrational and savage wars, because it will generate “wellbeing and democracy”. This argument is wrong, deceptive and cynical: 1) since every human life is finite, what is the result of my patience for those who suffer and die now; 2) how will be “wellbeing and democracy” when their price is the indigence, destruction of solidarity and humanity, the savage wars induced “far away”?

The rather implicit concepts of liberal ideology are patience ad postponement. Toward an always more distant horizon. And this is because liberalism has no social ideal – unlike socialism/communism –. The social ideal is not perfection (in Kant, perfection and ideal are synonyms), but prefiguration of the desirable society for each and everyone.

So, could a convergence of systems be possible? Of course, not. Either the practical realisation of the categorical imperative, or its exclusion, even only on theoretical level: these are the alternatives. But, since the categorical imperative proved to be the universalizable – while the private profit principle is restrictive and generates unsolvable contradictions – can the liberal alternative be consonant to the general progress/the progress of the human species in its environments?

The communist idea – the real heir of the categorical imperative – is not a group ideology against other ones. It is a practical – at the level of economy, and not only of morals – solution that is universalizable, while the liberal one is not, and generates indescribable and endless suffering. Neither Kant not any other thinker following him in spirit promoted the idea to renounce to freedom and rights in the name of survival. Because this type of survival would be and is only animal. On the contrary, the human survival is the survival of the human species and the dignified and creative life of each of its members, and not the survival of groups on the expense of other groups:  so, it is always based on reason and universalizable principles.

To promote these universalizable principles, to be loyal all the way to every human being and all of them is the real grandeur humaine.

 

6. Instead of conclusions. The legacy of Kant’s Enlightenment: reason and the categorical imperative

Kant’s ethical theory is the emblem of Enlightenment: actually, it is an emblem both as rationalism (this word signalling not the philosophical paradigm opposed to empiricism, but that of rational legitimating of beliefs, opposed to irrational one) and as commitment to coherent social intervention. Or, an emblem not only of rationalism but also of committed social activism.

In this, the Enlightenment rationalism was the heir of the previous rationalist trends: of Renaissance, especially. And it was the cradle of the American and French revolutions.

Indeed, the 18^th century is the century of pedagogical innovations and administrative coherent initiatives, including by developing and subordinating the sciences to the requirement of efficient deployment in the social life (see the German cameralist sciences). Through these directions, the century saw the elites’ express discourse of social transformation toward a system of radically new structure and principles: and first of all, that of the people as legitimating factor of the system/ system of powers as such. Kant was, in the German Enlightenment, the clearest and most substantiated promoter of this discourse and perspective.

Kant’s ethical theory gave the ethical basis of the radical social transformation – irrespective of conjunctural triggers of some benevolent monarchs – and more, of the understanding of structural contradictions even within the novel system substituting the ancient. The categorical imperative is the moral criterion behind the processes which took these contradictions into account and overcame/tried to overcome them. Its legacy is the communist/ “real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx, Engels, The German Ideology, 1845). The criterion of categorical imperative cannot be surpassed: even though, as in present, the dominant ideology seems to have paralysed the conscience of the many, in fact it did not, because the reason of the categorical imperative, of the what for of actions, lights in the deep down of the human consciousness. Kant called this deep down “transcendental”, a level of reason/ the human consciousness, where the judgements from concepts take place, in fact the constitution of the necessary and universal knowledge (concepts and judgements) that surpasses that from direct experience. Nowadays, it’s clear that knowledge is constituted through the passage of the process of cognition from simple processing of sensory data to complex processing of intellectual information. Is just what Kant showed. And especially nowadays, we see how important is to be able to process intellectual information. The humans ratiocinate from concepts naturally, but if they have no concepts – namely, if they are not educated to deploy articulate logical thinking and ascension from sensorial to the intellectual, but they are given games in front of which they just wonder and react, or, when they look at the real games of domination-submission they doubting and refusing it but without expressing to themselves all the way why do they refuse – then they are only a prey to those who dominate even the concepts. It’s cardinal to ratiocinate “transcendentally”.

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Here it is how important is to think “at a transcendental level”: we can, obviously, open our eyes and startle when we face examples of injustice and harmful behaviour, but the example as such has behind it/more correctly, in our reason (our) judgements explaining ourselves why is the exemplified behaviour bad, which meanings of the behaviour are harmful. This is why do we startle: as a background, the judgements precede our startle and our now conscious attention to things previously unnoticed or noticed as habitual noise, even though now we change our attitude – we “open our eyes” – in front of the example, and not of an ethical lecture.

An example is like music, a musical phrase. We have feelings listening it, but if we want to communicate – even to ourselves – what meanings does it suggest and what feelings does it generate, we articulate ideas. Our feelings do not depend on explicative ideas, these ones do not precede our feelings, but when we want to express the integration of music in the world, we articulate ideas. Music, as painting (visual arts), is/are integrated within the world, and the human awareness of this integration takes place through ideas. These ideas show that we have not only feelings, but also cognition, knowledge: meaning that we act not only according to feelings, but also according to reason.

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The brief excursion undertaken in this paper was intended only to suggest the development of Kant’s thinking, and how did his main breakthrough achievements stem from previous steps. And also, that the categorical imperative, as the real victory of the philosophical theory, denies and refutes the liberal ideological belief. Kant believed that his utopian liberalism would be consonant with the categorical imperative. But, because that utopian liberalism was speculative, because it did not take into account the real social and economic relations of domination-submission, it could but evolve in its “pragmatic” form that exclude “idealistic principles”. From the point of view of these principles, Kant had already seen real ugly phenomena[208] opposed to the moral principles, but thought that just the utopian liberalism – namely, its practical implementation – will erase them. We know that not this was the case, and that not the “pragmatic” ideological (namely, restrictive/dominant class/dominant group), so the “pragmatic” dominant ideological view brings a universal moral: but just the theoretical moral universalism has the power to show the insolvable contradictions of liberalism, the incongruence between the restrictive, group moral and the universalist one.

I do not suggest that his conclusions would have been predetermined, he only following the path. We always can stop at a moment and turn onto another road, as Kant himself could have behaved. But I wanted to show that the universalist openness of the categorical imperative is the inherent result of the consistent development of philosophy as such, that is, of the endeavour to go farther than the given ideas which seem to be obvious. Indeed, “a problem is not a philosophical problem unless it is possible to imagine that its solution will consist in showing how appearance has been taken for reality”[209]. And the criterion of universalizability of moral criteria in the everyday life is the main contribution of philosophy to this everyday life: the proof that it is necessary for every human being and that it subtends all the human relationships.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 695: the “essential ends of human reason”, (A839/B867) “the preeminence which moral philosophy had over all other applications of reason” (A840/B868).

[2] Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question:  What Is Enlightenment?” (1784). In: Kant, Towards Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, Edited and with an Introduction by Pauline Kleingeld, Translated by David L. Colclasure, with essays by Jeremy Waldron, Michael W. Doyle, Allen W. Wood, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.

[3] See in S. N. Gradirovsky, “Dare to Know, or the Gospel According to Kant”, Kantian Journal, 2023, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 141-170, a challenging interpretation of the meanings of Enlightenment in Kant’s previously quoted essay, the chapter Archeology of the Enlightenment Motto.

[4] See Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet, L’Avènement de la métaphysique kantienne. Prémisses et enjeux d’une réception au XXe siècle, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2024 ; also Vlad Mureșan, „Turnanta metafizică a interpretării lui Kant”, Revista de Filosofie, LXXI, 3, 2024, pp. p. 447–455.

[5] Solomon Diamond, “Leibniz’s aphorism in different contexts”, Revista de Historia de la Psicología, Vol. 5. Núm. 1-2. – 1984, páginas 109-115. See the Scholastics mentioned by him. (The aphorism is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu / There is nothing in the intellect that has not been in the senses). See also, Solomon Diamond, “Seventeenth-Century French Connectionism: La Forge, Dilly, and Regis”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 5, 1969, pp. 3-9.

[6] See his extremely important What is Enlightenment (Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question:  What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), ibidem), where he shows how do “the guardians” (the dominant “influencers”) distil their own ideas and intentions within the consciousness of citizens.

[7] The animal reactions involve the conatus (conor, -ari, -atus sum – to try, to dare, to run in front of another, get ready), the impulse “to persist in its own being”, see only Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (1677). Edited and translated by Edwin Curley, with an Introduction by Stuart Hampshire. Penguin Books, 1996: III, Prop. VI, p. 72.

[8] This definition of knowledge as “information confirmed by a reliable source” (Marta Bílková, Ondrej Majer, Michal Peliš, “Epistemic logics for sceptical agents”, Journal of Logic and Computation, Volume 26, Issue 6, December 2016, pp. 1815–1841) is another angle of understanding knowledge as “justified belief” and keeps attention on certainty/“hard knowledge” in the process of its creation. When we gather/review the data necessary for our knowledge of the object we focus on, we must select those which are “reliable”, thus justified, true. So, we pass from different states of information to another one that is the justified knowledge, our end. Doing this, we exercise our reason. But more precisely, when examining the different states of information, we search for the internal truthfulness of the different bundles of data. Reason is our faculty to evaluate the truth/the state of information, thus the internal coherence of the states themselves: therefore, the states of information present themselves as if they are those which have reason. This moving that brackets the subject with its reason and emphasizes the mirroring of reason in the object, in the world – the states of information are/form the world, as Kant described the world already in its 1770 Dissertation – was not only that of the empirical attitude of humans, and of the learned position of science, of course, sine qua non for knowing the surrounding things, but also that of philosophy: that arrived even to the theory of reason as an objective given of the world.

   The problem itself is that of the expression, through words, of the separation between the reason of the subject and the “reason” of the object. The “primacy” of the objective reason means that the statements about the truth “of”/related to the object – reason implies truthfulness – are true. But the subject who expresses these statements does not believe them, ignore them and act just in an opposite way. However, the truth of statements remains. And people feel, or not, the hypocrisy of the transmitter. But they must have the finesse to assume the truth of the statements. Here are what interesting applications does an epistemological theory have.

[9] See Ana Bazac, “The Discontinuity of the Virtual Toward the Non-Living and the Living”, Biocosmology – Neo-Aristotelism, 2, 2024, forthcoming, where the psychological theory of the consciousness is summarised as: the access consciousness of reactions (based on thoroughly emphasized quite complex neurobiological manifestations) – as a manifestation of conatus – and the interpretive consciousness.

   It is worth to note that Kant used the term consciousness in both senses, but “united” them (as “apperception”, “consciousness” or “self-consciousness”), revealing the active role of the interpretative consciousness on the relations between the self and the world, including the inner feelings of the self. This active role is manifesting as “transcendental consciousness” without which the representations given in the access consciousness do not transform into cognition. The transcendental consciousness is the active unity of consciousness and self-consciousness: the capacity of the consciousness to unify representations and to synthesise them and their contents in the process of judging, and to being aware of these mental operations; thus, the transcendental consciousness is the “transcendental unity of consciousness”. See Béatrice Longuenesse, “Kant on Consciousness and Its Limits”, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 2023/1 (N° 117), p. 7-26.

   Free will is not the result of conatus, but of the human interpretive consciousness of the self in relation to the surrounding selves. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an Introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge University Press, 2006, (AA 07:322), pp. 234-235: (the human being) “first preserves himself and his species; second, trains, instructs, and educates his species for domestic society; third, governs it as a systematic whole (arranged according to principles of reason) appropriate for society…. to bring about the perfection of the human being through progressive culture, although with some sacrifice of his pleasures of life”.

[10] For a larger analysis, Martin Schönfeld, and Michael Thompson, “Kant’s Philosophical Development”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).

[11] See also, Martin Schönfeld, “Kant’s Physics and Philosophy of Nature Anticipating the Standard Model”. In: Sorin Baiasu/Mark Timmons, ed., The Kantian Mind , London: Routledge, 2017.

[12] As in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B40, p. 176: “cognitions are only possible under the presupposition of a given way of explaining this concept”. This quote refers to “transcendental exposition (AB, that is) the explanation of a concept as a principle from which insight into the possibility of other synthetic a priori cognitions can be gained”, ibidem. However, the presupposition of a given way to explain involves the experience: that means both objects “that stimulate our senses and in part themselves produce representations, in part bring the activity of our understanding into motion to compare these, to connect or separate them, and thus to work up the raw material of sensible impressions into a cognition of objects that is called experience” and concepts and ideas which correspond to them (but provide out of our cognitive faculty), consequently we cannot distinguish these two aspects which indestructibly form experience.

[13] See Ana Bazac, The Meanings of Kant’s Attitude towards the Technical Instruments of Science in the Atmosphere of Enlightenment, Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philosophia, Vol. 69 (2024), 3, pp. 7-24.

[14] Descartes, Les Principes de la philosophie, in Œuvres de Descartes, publiés par Victor Cousin, Tome troisième, A Paris, chez F.G. Levrault, MDCCCXXIV.

[15] See Gregory L. Baker, “Emanuel Swedenborg – A 18^th century cosmologist”, The Physics Teacher, October 1983, pp. 441-446.

[16] (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels oder Versuch von der Verfassung und dem mechanischen Ursprunge des ganzen Weltgebäudes nach Newtonischen Grundsätzen abgehandelt, AA I:215-368). Translated by Olaf Reinhardt, in Kant – Natural Science, Edited by Eric Watkins, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 182-308.

   See its reading in Andrew Cooper, Kant and the Transformation of Natural History, Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 69-89, where Kant is interpreted as more than a Newtonian, a materialist Newtonian, using both Maupertuis’ point mass of matter and Leibniz’s active force of motion and rest of material bodies.

[17]  • („Untersuchung der Frage, ob die Erde in ihrer Umdrehung um die Achse, wodurch sie die Abwechselung des Tages und der Nacht hervorbringt, einige Veränderung seit den ersten Zeiten ihres Ursprungs erlitten habe und woraus man sich ihrer versichern könne, welche von der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin zum Preise für das jetztlaufende Jahr aufgegeben worden”, AA I: 183–191). “Examination of the question whether the rotation of the Earth on its axis by which it brings about the alternation of day and night has undergone any change since its origin and how one can be certain of this…”, 1754, – where Kant considers the influence of the sun’s and the moon’s gravitation on Earth, concretely, on its water and not only on its solid constitution, and uses the evidence of tides as a proof of  the decrease of the rotation of Earth around its axis; conclusion consonant to the contemporary scientific theories about the role of external causes on changes in rotational speed.

    Translated by Olaf Reinhardt, in Kant – Natural Science, pp. 156-164.

• „Die Frage ob die Erde veraltet, physikalisch erwogen” (AA I: 195–213). “The question, whether the Earth is ageing, considered from a physical point of view” (1754) – where Kant – on the basis of the philosophical reasoning that every created object evolves towards its perfection and then regresses, removing from its good constitution, and the example of the animal and plant kingdoms shows this law as both an impulse and an interior mechanism of the concrete being – sketches firstly a tableau of the great phases of the formation of the Earth (fluid, solidification and formation of the relief, actually never ending and showing different aspects of order/disorder in the different parts of the planet, some younger, other older). Then, the problem of the ageing of the whole Earth is confronted with four theories/causes, internal to the functioning of the Earth and chosen from all the possible causes. Rejecting the first which supposes that the Earth would lose “the salt” necessary to the fertility of land through the rivers flowing into the seas; rejecting the simplified and uniform perspective of the second conjecturing that, as a result of rains and rivers washing the soil and flowing into the seas, on the one hand, the level and size of the land would shrink and, on the other hand, the level and quantity of the seas would rise, damaging the necessary milieu of the terrestrial life; rejecting the third, reverse cause presuming the growth of the land in the detriment of the seas, Kant assumes the fourth cause, the inner force of nature in all its forms, that is a subtle matter – chemically, a “quintessence” – active in all the salts and in fire. But this inner force would generate the reproduction of life and its consumption of land’s production and water more than the recycling of these resources could take place. And to this contraction of the natural balance and force of the Earth, a similar reduction of the modern morals and “fire of the human nature” corresponds. In order to have a betterment of this spiritual manifestation of the humans, the manners of governing, of education and influence of good examples are essential: and thus, the human behaviours prove to be the criterion for the understanding of the physical destiny of the Earth. (And, if we think from the standpoint of the present ecological problems, not only for the understanding but also for the good management of the natural environment).

   Translated by Olaf Reinhardt, ibidem, pp. 165-181.

• “Meditationum quarundam de igne succincta delineatio”, AA I: 369-384 (“Succinct Exposition of Some Meditations on Fire”, 1755, Translated by Lewis White Beck, ibidem, pp. 309-326; Kant’s magisterarbeit), where Kant discusses the cardinal problem of matter in front of concrete phenomena. If the solid bodies could send to the theory of their motion through direct contact and their change of their constitutive smaller parts, winning and losing these parts (as Descartes’s res extensa), the fluid bodies (fire, vapors, air (light), heat) involve a new type of matter, the elastic one, that explains them and their change.
• “Von den Ursachen der Erderschutterungen bei Geleggenheit des Unglucks, welches die westliche Lander von Europa gegen das Ende des vorigen Jahres betroffen hat”, AA I: 417-428 (“On the causes of the earthquakes on the occasion of the disaster which affected the western countries of Europe towards the end of last year”), 1756; “Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigsten Vorfälle des  Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres einen großen Theil der Erde erschüttert hat”, AA I:429-462 (“History and natural description of the most noteworthy occurrences of the earthquake that struck a large part of the Earth at the end of the year 1755” (1756), Translated by Olaf Reinhardt, ibidem, pp. 337-364); “Fortgesetzte Betrachtung der seit einiger Zeit wahrgenommenen Erderschütterungen”, AA I:463-472 (“Continued observations on the earthquakes that have been experienced for some time” (1756), Translated by Olaf Reinhardt, ibidem, pp. 365-373. All three in AA 01: 417-472.

   In these essays, firstly Kant gave physical causes (subterraneous caverns and subterraneous galleries, along mountain ranges; the combustion of iron filings, sulphur, or vitriolic acid; the movements of water, due to pressures which would transform it into a “solid” whose passage and speed is amplified by this internal power and by the shores; but not influence of configurations of planets and the moon). These physical causes show that the earthquakes are not God’s punishment, because God does not consider man as the apogee of creation, and in front of the disclosure of physical facts occurred during the earthquakes, man has to learn to know and adapt.

• New notes to explain the theory of the winds, in which, at the same time, he invites attendance at his lectures (1756), ibidem, translated by Olaf Reinhardt, 374-385, where he related the direction of coastal winds to the inflation and reduction of air, determined by the heating and cooling of land and sea during day and night; the direction of circulation of winds from Poles to Equator and conversely because of the rotation of the Earth; and the trade winds and monsoon winds.
• Plan and announcement of a series of lectures on physical geography with an appendix containing a brief consideration of the question: Whether the West winds in our regions are moist because they travel over a great sea (1757), ibidem, translated by Olaf Reinhardt, 386-395.

In both these two papers, Kant was one of the precursors of meteorology, being the first explaining the seasonality of monsoons.

• New doctrine of motion and rest and the conclusions associated with it in the fundamental principles of natural science while at the same time his lectures for this half-year are announced (1758), ibidem, translated by Olaf Reinhardt, pp. 396-408, where he explains why there is no absolute motion, but relative – the inertia itself being dependent on the equal action and reaction of bodies.

[18] Stuart Elden, “Reassessing Kant’s Geography”, Journal of Historical Geography, 35(1), 2009, 3-25.

[19] As that given to Leibniz – when he thought to build a calculating machine that emphasizes the “the ‘geometrical’ understanding of things that itself is the key of material objects by its selection of forms allowing profound meditation”, Leibniz, “Dissertatio exoterica de usu geometriae, et statu praesenti, ac novissimis ejus incrementis” (1676). In: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Matematische Schriften, Sechster Band 1673-1676, Arithmetische Kreisquadratur. Akademie Verlag, 2012, pp. 483-513 (here, 488) – by the artisanal secret of Paris manufactures, Matthew L. Jones, “Calculating Machine”. In: Maria-Rosa Antognazza (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Leibniz. Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 509-525.

[20] Matthew L. Jones, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage. Chicago University Press, 2016, pp. 35-36.

[21] Kant took over the concept of vis activa – as an Aristotelian entelechy of the body – from Leibniz who took over Aristotle’s “obscure” (I:17, p. 22) concept, developed it and considered Kraft anterior to matter/to Descartes’ res extensa), and not tantamount to the quantity of motion, but provided that the force is divided into a vis mortua (Descartes’ vis inertia, the force opposed to movement and, in Leibniz, the force that is not transmitted by motion but remains absorbed in the body) and vis activa, the latter opposed to rest and explaining motion but not being tantamount to it, and whose quantity is mathematizable. But Kant considered that the force

[22] Martin Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: the Precritical Project, Oxford University Press, 2000; see also, for the personal causes of only his speculative approach of Newton’s and scientific problems of nature, Martin Schönfeld, Kant’s philosophical development, ibidem.

[23] Thoughts on the True Estimation of the Living Forces, § 9, pp. 26-27, I: 23.

[24] Leibniz has shown that “active force includes a sort of act or εντελέχειoν, which is midway between the faculty of acting and the action itself and involves an effort, and thus of itself passes into operation; not does it need aid other than the removal of impediments”, this force being “energy or virtue, called by the Germans Kraft, and by the French la force and for the explanation of which I have designed a special science of dynamics, adds much to the understanding of the notion of sub stance. For active force differs from the bare power familiar to the schools, in that the active power or faculty of the scholas tics is nothing else than the possibility ready to act, which/has nevertheless need, in order to pass into action, of an external excitation, and as it were of a stimulus. But active force includes a sort of act or l^re^s^eiau^ which is mid way between the faculty of acting and the action itself, and involves an effort, and thus of itself passes into operation ; nor does it need aid other than the removal of impediments. This may be illustrated by the example of a heavy hanging body straining the rope which sustains it, or a tense bow. For although gravity or elastic force may and must be explained mechanically from the motion of ether, nevertheless the final reason of motion in matter is the force impressed upon it at the creation, a force inherent in every body, but which is variously limited and confined in nature by the very meeting of bodies. I say, then, that this property of acting resides in every substance, that always some sort of action is born of it ; and that, consequently, corporeal substance, no less than spiritual, never ceases to act ; a truth which those who place its essence in mere extension or even in impenetrability, and who have imagined that they conceived of body absolutely at rest, seem not to have sufficiently understood”, “On the Reform of Metaphysics and of the Notion of Substance” (1694), in The Philosophical Works of Leibniz, Translated from the original Latin and French, with notes by George Martin Duncan, New Haven, Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Publishers, 1890, (http://archive.org/stream/philosophicalwor00leibuoft#page/n11/mode/1up), pp. 69-70.

   And in The Monadology, he insisted: “11. The natural changes of the monads proceed from an internal principle” and “15. The action of the internal principle which causes the change or the passage from… (“a transient state” to another, a transient state of reaction), G.W. Leibniz, “The Monadology” (1714), in The Philosophical Works of Leibniz, pp. 219-220.

At the level of living bodies, it is more understandable: as instinct of self-preservation.

[25] “M. Immanuel Kant’s Announcement of the program of his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765-1766”. In: Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, Edited and translated by Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer, Introduction by Patrick Frierson, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 255, (II:309): “empirical psychology, which is really the metaphysical science of the human being based on experience”.

[26] “The latter comprises physico-theology or teleology, and concerns the knowledge of God through nature’s purposes and design”; there are two levels of reality, one empirical, visible, the other non-empirical, consisting of simple substances in preestablished harmony. Soul is such a simple substance, Martin Schönfeld, “German Philosophy after Leibniz”, pp. 545-562. In: A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 553, 554.

[27] See Immanuel Kant, Theoretical philosophy, I755-1770, Translated and edited by David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge University Press, 1992; also, Martin Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: the Precritical Project, Oxford University Press, 2000 (p. 209); Martin Schönfeld, “Response to commentaries” symposium on Philosophy of the Young Kant, Florida Philosophical Review, 2(1), 2002, pp. 60-71; also, his following studies: “Kant’s Early Dynamics”. In: A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 33-46; “Kant’s Early Cosmology”, ibidem, pp. 47-62; “Kant’s Material Dynamics and the Field View of Physical Reality”, (with Jeffrey Edwards), Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 33 (1), 2006, pp. 109-123; Martin Schönfeld, Kant’s Physics and Philosophy of Nature: Anticipating the Standard Model. in Sorin Baiasu/Mark Timmons, ed., The Kantian Mind London: Routledge, 2017.

[28] Immanuel Kant, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (Inaugural Dissertation), 1770. In: Immanuel Kant, Theoretical philosophy, 1755—1770. Translated and edited by David Walford, Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 373-416 ((2:392); Section 2, §3, p. 384).

[29] Ibidem, (II:387), § 1, p. 377.

[30] Ibidem.

[31] Ibidem, §3, p. 384.

[32] Ibidem.

[33] Ibidem.

[34] Ibidem, p. 380. The concepts a priori, a posteriori, transcendental, appear for the first time in Dissertation.

[35] Ibidem (II:392), §2, p. 383.

[36] Ibidem (II:405), Corollary, p. 399.

[37] Ibidem.

[38] Ibidem (II:411), §23, p. 407: “the inflection of sensitive cognition by cognition deriving from the understanding”.

[39] Ibidem (II: 413), § 26, p. 409.

[40] Ibidem (II:394), §5, p. 386.

[41] Ibidem (II:394), §6, p. 387.

[42] Ibidem (II:393), §5, p. 385.

[43] Ibidem.

[44] Ibidem (II:394), §6, p. 386.

[45] Ibidem (II:394), §6, p. 387.

[46] Ibidem (II:395), §8, p. 387.

[47] Ibidem (II:396), §10, p. 389.

[48] Ibidem (II:393), §5, p. 385.

[49] Ibidem (II:396), §10, p. 389.

[50] “trial and error show what path and what procedure must be pursued”, ibidem, (II:410), §23, p. 406.

[51] Ibidem.

[52] Ibidem.

[53] Ibidem (II:395), § 8, p. 387.

[54] Ibidem (II:411), §23, p. 407.

[55] Ibidem (II:411), §24, p. 407.

[56] Ibidem, (II:414), §27, p. 410.

[57] Ibidem (II:412-3), §25, p. 408.

[58] Ibidem (II:413), §25, p. 409.

[59] Ibidem (II:416), §28, p. 412.

[60] Ibidem.

[61] Ibidem (II:417), §28, p. 413.

[62] Ibidem (II:418), §30, p. 414: “those rules of judging to which we gladly submit ourselves and to which we cling as to axioms, doing so for the simple reason that if we abandoned them, our understanding would scarcely be able to make any judgements about a given object at all”.

[63] Ibidem.

[64] Ibidem (II:418), §30, p. 415.

[65] Ibidem (II:419), §30, p. 415.

[66] This word as in the common understanding, from abstract suppositions, and not in the Kantian precise meaning as metaphysics of nature.

[67] Immanuel Kant, “Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrud zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes”, 1763, AA II:63-164, translated into English as “The Only Possible Argument In Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God”, in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, Translated and Edited by David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 107-201.

[68] Immanuel Kant, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763). In: Theoretical philosophy, I755-1770, Translated and edited by David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 194 (2:154). See also p. 191 (2:151) “Supreme Being embraces within itself everything which can be thought by man, when he, a creature made of dust, dares to cast a spying eye behind the curtain which veils from mortal eyes the mysteries of the inscrutable. God is all—sufficient. Whatever exists, whether it be possible or actual, is only something in so far as it is given through Him. If it be permitted to translate the communing of the Infinite with Himself into human language, we may imagine God addressing Himself in these terms: I am from eternity to eternity: apart from me there is nothing, except it be through me. This thought, of all thoughts the most sublime, is still widely neglected, and mostly not considered at all. That which is to be found in the possibilities of things and which is capable of realising perfection and beauty in excellent schemes has been regarded as a necessary object of Divine Wisdom but not itself as a consequence of this Incomprehensible Being”.

[69] Inquiry 2:300, p. 247 “practical philosophy” (dealing with morality) “is even more defective than speculative philosophy, for it has yet to be determined whether it is merely the faculty of cognition, or whether it is feeling (the first inner ground of the faculty of desire) which decides its first principles”

[70] How to not see the entire development of the focus on the cogito and its mediating function for the knowledge of the world – including of our consciousness – as a basis of phenomenology? See this focus in the concrete example: Descartes, Œuvres, publiées par Charles Adam et Paul Tannery, IX, Méditations et Principes, Paris, Léopold Cerf, 1904, Méditation seconde (1641), p. 25: “And yet what do I see from this window, if not hats and cloaks, which can cover ghosts or holy men who move only by springs? But I judge that they are real men, and thus I understand, by the sole power of judgment which resides in my mind, what I believed I saw with my eyes”.

   See also the entire interpretation of the cogito in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945.

[71] As it is known, theology intertwined with religion showed, besides Its ontic character and power, the symbolic/symbolising character of God as the most appreciated human relationships, and the power of this symbolic character: as being closer to humans’ conscience than the religious rituals worshiping God as a being. But this was the empirical realm when people could but having beliefs as faith, Kant specified. In this realm, the traditional value of love was transposed by Kierkegaard as God=Love, love itself being the sine qua non connection of all humans, pervading all human relations as a “middle term” that makes the field of possibility wide open and thus, gives hope. See, though in a book devoted to another concept, Niels Wilde, Isotopography: Kierkegaard’s Topological Realism, Berlin, Boston, De Gruyter, 2024.

[72] Immanuel Kant, Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral, AA II:273-301; “Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality” (1764). In: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, Edited by Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 247, 2:300.

[73] In the Middle Ages, God was “summum bonum”, bonum being not an infinite morality but the principle of cause and thus, causa causarum.

[74] Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, AA V:1-163, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Translated and edited by Mary Gregor, with a revised introduction by Andrew Reath, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 9 (note at V:11). The difference between mathematics and philosophy/metaphysics and their principles, also in Critique of Pure Reason, A 730/ B 758, A 731 / B 759, pp. 639-640.

[75] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 700 (A 849/B 877).  And A 829/B 857, p. 689 sqq. Metaphysics as “the culmination of all culture of human reason”,  A 850/B 878, p. 701.

[76] A814/B842- A815/B843, p. 682: “This moral theology has the peculiar advantage over the speculative one that it inexorably leads to the concept of a single, most perfect, and rational primordial being, of which speculative theology could not on objective grounds give us even a hint, let alone convince us. For neither in speculative nor in natural theology, as far as reason may lead us, do we find even a single significant ground for assuming a

single being to set before all natural causes, on which we would at the same time have sufficient cause to make the latter dependent in every way. On the contrary, if, from the standpoint of moral unity, we assess the cause that can alone provide this with the appropriate effect and thus obligating force for us, as a necessary law of the world, then there must be a single supreme will, which comprehends all these laws in itself”.

[77] A816/B844, p. 683: “since it arises from moral order as a unity which is grounded in the essence of freedom and not contingently founded through external commands, brings the purposiveness of nature down to grounds that must be inseparably connected a priori to the inner possibility of things, and thereby leads to a transcendental theology that takes the ideal of the highest ontological perfection as a principle a of systematic unity, which connects all things in accordance with universal and necessary laws of nature, since they all have their origin in the absolute necessity of a single original being”.

[78] Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments. Edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, Frederick Rauscher, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 477 (note 7313, 1790–94. LBl Scheffners Nachlaß. 19: 310).

   Let’s remember that Aristotle posited the highest good as desirable for itself and not for the sake of other goods, while all other goods are desirable for the sake of this special good: happiness, conceived in a rational manner, with wisdom, sophrosyne, The Nicomachean Ethics, Translated and introduced by Sir David Ross (1925), Oxford University Press, 1966, I.7. 1097b, p. 12; 1098a, p. 13, sqq.

   Kant replied: “Yet morality alone, and with it, the mere worthiness to be happy, is also far from being the complete good… In order to complete the latter…it puts itself in the place of a being who would have to distribute all happiness to others”, Critique of Pure Reason, A 813 / B 841, p. 681. Or, ““happiness in exact proportion with the morality of rational beings, through which they are worthy of it, alone constitutes the highest good of a world”, ibidem, A814/B842, pp. 681-682.

[79] As in the speculative theology.

   For Kant, God is an ideal, “the highest ontological perfection as a principle of systematic unity”, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 816/B 844, p. 683.

   In Opus Postumum, Translated by Eckhart Förster and Michael Rosen, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Eckhart Förster, Cambridge University Press, 1995, Kant once more explained: 21:19, p. 225; 21: 25, p. 228-9, “All knowledge consists in the capacity to think, intuit, perceive, and know in experience, and, as efficient cause, is the system of technical-practical or moral-practical reason: not for metaphysics, but for transcendental philosophy. The latter contains synthetic a priori principles from concepts, not merely from intuitions; it contains, subjectively in human reason as an absolute whole, a genealogical tree of such principles, whose roots ramify into branches, and a tree of knowledge of quite different kinds: nature and freedom, the world and God. Not a system of nature but of thought… But it is not God in substance whose existence is proved”.  21: 19, 225, 224: God “not as a world-soul in nature, but as a personal principle of human reason (ens summum, summa intelligentia, summum bonum), which, as the idea of a holy being, combines complete freedom with the law of duty in the categorical imperative of duty; both technical-practical and moral-practical reason coincide in the idea of God and the world, as the synthetic unity of transcendental philosophy”. God is (p. 213), as “the subject of the categorical imperative”, a “transcendental ideal” “which emerges” “from a synthetic a priori proposition from a pure concept, not from sensible intuition” and about whom it “cannot be asserted that it exists outside rationally thinking man”.

[80] Immanuel Kant, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (Inaugural Dissertation), “in same time, in so far as He really exists, the principle of the coming into being of all perfection whatsoever”.

[81] Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments. p 478 (note 7321. 1800. LBl L 20.19: 316): “The concept of freedom and its reality cannot be proven in any way except through the categorical imperative. The concept of God also cannot be proven theoretically and unconditionally, but only conditionally, from a practical point of view, namely the moral-practical point of view. It would be contradictory to seek to acquire favor and happiness from God in the technical-practical point of view, because the will of God to impart these is not consistent with this end”.

[82] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 813 / B 841 p. 681.

   But this was also Christian Wolff’s position.

[83] Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mare Reason (1793) and Other Writings, Edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, Introduction by Robert Merrihew Adams, Cambridge University Press, 1999. The speculative critics of Kant, which have a persuading function on the ordinary conscience, are rather afraid of the Critique of Pure Reason: it is more difficult to read than Religion within…, and it contains the epistemological structure of cognition and its transcendental level without which the empirical knowledge cannot be explained, and that includes the moral transcendental principles without which morality as such and its religious vector cannot be understood.

[84] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 819/ B 847, p 684: “So far as practical reason has the right to lead us, we will not hold actions to be obligatory because they are God’s commands, but will rather regard them as divine commands because we are internally obligated to them”.

[85] It is interesting that Gödel, in his text proving the existence of God – a joke signalling that the abstract symbolic language and mathematical logic have not only an autonomous power but also limits (See “Gödel *70: Introductory note to Gödel *70, by Robert M. Adams; Ontological proof (pp. 403-404); Gödel *70a: Introductory note to Gödel *70a, *70b, *70c, by Robert M. Solovay; as well as the Annex with the whole proof, at pp. 429-437, in Kurt Gödel, Collected Works, Volume III, Unpublished essays and lectures, Solomon Feferman (Ed.), New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) – professed the same ontologism.

[86] Critique of Practical Reason, p. 129 (AA V: 161sq): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and more enduringly reflection is occupied with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”.

[87] God as personification of the totality of human beings, so witness of incredible human cruelty and, at the same time, the only possible guardian of those in state of helplessness, was understood later by the young Hegelians, see Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach.

[88] AA 6: 96.

[89] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, In two volumes, Translation by R.D. Hicks, London: William Heinemann, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925, Volume II, Book VIII, pp. 341, 343.

[90] Immanuel Kant, “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World” (Inaugural Dissertation), ibidem, II:396, §9, p. 388: “Moral philosophy, therefore, in so far as it furnishes the first principles of judgement, is only cognised by the pure understanding and itself belongs to pure philosophy”.

[91] “The concept of transcendental subject seems obvious today (the subject of cognition, bearer of transcendental conditions of experience”, Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, p. 476e, 7308. 1780, –89. Pr 119, at §177, in Imputatio legis (19: 308).

[92] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 230 (A103).

[93] Ibidem, pp. 230-231 (A103).

[94] Ibidem, p. 231 (A103).

[95] Ibidem, p. 231 (A103).

[96] Ibidem, p. 231 (A 105).

[97] Ibidem, p. 232 (A 105).

[98] Ibidem, p. 256 (B 151).

[99] Ibidem, p. 256 (B 151).

[100] Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) in Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics with Selection from Critique of Pure Reason, Edited and Translated by Gary Hatfield, Cambridge, 2004, § 2, (c), p. 17 (IV: 267).

[101] Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena, § 2, (b), p. 17 (IV: 267).

[102] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B93, p. 205.

[103] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 224 (A 92): “come together, necessarily relate to each other, and… meet each other”.

[104] Ibidem, p. 224 (B 125).

[105] Ibidem, p. 352 (A 258).

[106] Ibidem, p. 221 (A88).

[107] Ibidem, p. 223 (B124).

[108] Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena, § 2, (c), p. 21 (IV:273).

[109] Paul B. Badcock & Karl J. Friston & Maxwell J. D. Ramstead & Annemie Ploeger & Jakob Hohwy, “The hierarchically mechanistic mind: an evolutionary systems theory of the human brain, cognition, and behavior”, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience (2019) 19, 2019, pp. 1319–1351.

[110] We can link this element of Kant’s theory with the contemporary research of the access consciousness.

[111] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 394 (A 311): “they contain the unconditioned, then they deal with something under which all experience belongs, but that is never itself an object of experience; something to which reason leads through its inferences, and by which reason estimates and measures the degree of its empirical use”.

[112] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 106, p. 232.

[113] Meta – over. Kant inherited the word – and the discipline – of metaphysics as beyond any possible experience.

[114] The epistemological theory was considered by Kant the metaphysical propaedeutics for metaphysics as ontology. As he considered in Dissertation, Immanuel Kant, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (Inaugural Dissertation), II:395, § 8, p. 387: “its propaedeutic science is that science which teaches the distinction between sensitive cognition and the cognition which derives from the understanding”.

[115] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 246, §16 (B131–32): “The I think must be able to accompany all my representations: for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing to me”.

[116] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 232 (A106).

[117] See for the scientific knowledge, Gaston Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée (1928), Paris, Vrin, 1969, p. 19, meaning “the incessant rectification of thought in the face of reality”.

[118] Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena, § 2, (c), p. 18 (IV: 267).

[119] Ibidem, see especially chapter VII.

[120] See Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji, « Actualité de la philosophie de Ferdinand Gonseth », Revue de synthèse, 5 e série, année 2005/2, p. 417-429.

[121] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B75/A51, pp. 193-194.

[122] And he continues, showing us not only that a simplistic understanding of the human experience, obviously historically and socially determined, has continued despite Kant’s specification that we must not confuse the discussion of the different levels of cognition (see first reference  (A) below), but also that the “essence” must not be considered an intangible a priori that would naturally generate the cognisance not only about the world but also about the process of cognition, but on the contrary, a concept that must be analysed (see second reference (B) below): “Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled: To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), VI).

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 842/B 870, p. 696: “It is of the utmost importance to isolate cognitions that differ from one another in their species and origin, and carefully to avoid mixing them together with others with which they are usually connected in their use. What chemists do in analyzing materials, what mathematicians do in their pure theory of magnitude, the philosopher is even more obliged to do, so that he can securely determine the proper value and influence of the advantage that a special kind of cognition has over the aimless use of the understanding”. but also p. 700 (A 849/B 877).
2. Immanuel Kant, “Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality” (1764), ibidem, p. 235 (II:289); (even) “in metaphysics one must proceed analytically throughout”, and p. 230 (2:285): “one ought not to start with definitions” and “one ought particularly to distinguish those judgments which have been immediately made about the object and relate to what one initially encountered in that object with Certainty”.

[123] Immanuel Kant, “Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality” (1764), ibidem, p. 229 (II:283).

[124] Ibidem, p. 235 (2:289).

[125] Immanuel Kant, “On the form and principles of the sensible and the intelligible world” (1770). In: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, Translated and edited by David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 377 (II:387).

Also, “Zetetic proceeding by inquiry M. Immanuel Kant’s announcement of the programme of his lectures for the winter semester 1765—1766”. In: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, p. 293 (II:307): “One would be betraying the trust placed in one by the public if, instead of extending the capacity for understanding of the young people entrusted to one’s care and educating them to the point where they will be able in the future to acquire a more mature insight of their own? — one would be betraying the trust placed in one by the public, if, instead of that, one were to deceive them with a philosophy which was alleged to be already complete and to have been excogitated by others for their benefit. ‘Such a claim would create the illusion of science. That illusion is only accepted as legal tender in certain places and among certain people. Everywhere else, how-ever, it is rejected as counterfeit currency.“ The method of instruction, peculiar to philosophy, is zetetic, as some of the philosophers of antiquity expressed it (from ζητειν). In other words, the method of philosophy is the method of enquiry.‘ It is only when reason has already grown more practised and only in certain areas, that this method becomes dogmatic, that is to say, decisive”.

[126] Descartes, Discours de la Méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, 1637 (Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences).

[127] Immanuel Kant, “Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality,” ibidem, p. 239 (II:292): “Errors do not arise simply because we do not know certain things. We make mistakes because we venture to make judgments, even though we do not know everything which is necessary for doing so. A large number of errors, indeed almost all of them, are due to this latter kind of overhastiness”. And p. 238 (II:291): “The human understanding, like any other force of nature, is governed by certain rules. Mistakes are made, not because the understanding combines concepts without rule, but because the characteristic mark which is not perceived in a thing is actually denied of it”.

[128] For both Kant and Hegel, criticism meant analysis, the “criticised” development of a process and its knowledge.

[129] David Woodruff Smith, “’Pure’ logic, ontology, and phenomenology”, Revue international de philosophie, 2, 224, 2003, pp. 21-44.

[130] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A106, p. 232.

[131] Ibidem, A 124-A125, p. 241.

[132] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le phénomène humain (1955), Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1956, p. 109): “the animal knows, of course. But certainly, he does not know that he knows”.

[133] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 102, p. 230.

[134] Ibidem, B 179/A 140, p. 273.

[135] A 144-A145, p. 275.

[136] Ibidem, A125, p. 241, and he continue: “On them is grounded, therefore, all formal unity in the synthesis of imagination, and by means of the latter also all its empirical use (in recognition, reproduction, association and apprehension) down to the appearances”.

[137] B 163, p. 262.

[138] Ibidem, p. 263.

[139] B 164, p. 263.

[140] See the table of categories and the observations, Ibidem, A80, B106, p. 212 to B113, p. 216.

[141] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 32, p. 162.

[142] Ibidem, B238/A193, p. 307; A200, p. 310 – A204, p. 313.

[143] A854/ B 882

[144] Second analogy of experience, B234, p. 305

[145] See the demonstration (“proof”) of the principles of the understanding (axioms of intuition, anticipations of perception, analogies of experience, postulates of empirical thinking in general).

[146] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 230 (A101).

[147] Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, pp. 220 (AA 07: 324).

[148] Ibidem, §12, p. 40 (AA 07: 146): “virtue is moral strength in adherence to one’s duty, which never should become habit but should always emerge entirely new and original from one’s way of thinking”.

[149] Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). In: Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, Edited and translated by Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer, Introduction by Patrick Frierson, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 24 (II: 217).

[150] Ibidem.

[151] Ibidem.

[152] Ibidem.

[153] Ibidem.

[154] We see this at the newborns and infants: they search for the good, and not for the evil.

[155] Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, p. 24 (II: 217).

[156] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Translated and edited by Mary Gregor, with an Introduction by Christine M. Korsgaard, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 8, 19, 55 sqq.

[157] Ibidem, p. 52.

[158] See in the Hungarian Controversy on Kant: Ungvárnémeti Tóth, L., 1819. “Beszélgetés. Arisztipp, Kant, Merkúr” [A Dialog. Aristippus, Kant, Mercurius]. Hasznos Mulatságok, 3(36), pp.281–284. [For its modern edition see: Merényi, A., Tóth, S. A, eds. 2008. Ungvárnémeti Tóth László művei. Budapest: Universitas, pp.541–542]. Here Aristippus, the head of Hedonist school, casted doubts.

[159] Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood, with essays by: J. B. Schneewind, Marcia Baron, Shelly Kagan, Allen W. Wood, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 37 (Ak 4: 419).

[160] Ibidem, p. 55 (Ak 4: 437).

[161] Ibidem, p. 38 (Ak 4: 421).

[162] Ibidem, p. 56 (Ak 4: 438).

[163] Ibidem, p. 55 (Ak 4: 437-438).

[164] Ibidem, p. 46 (Ak 4: 429).

[165] Ibidem, pp. 46-47 (Ak 4: 429).

[166] Ibidem, p. 48 (Ak 4: 430).

[167] Ibidem, pp. 48-49 (Ak 4: 430-431).

[168] Ibidem, p. 49 (Ak 4: 431).

[169] Ibidem.

[170] Ibidem, p. 50 (Ak 4: 432).

[171] Ibidem.

[172] Ibidem, p.58 (Ak 4: 440).

[173] Ibidem, p. 51 (Ak 4: 432). And continues with the inference: “For rational beings all stand under the law that every one of them ought to treat itself and all others never merely as means, but always at the same time as end in itself. From this, however, arises a systematic combination of rational beings through communal objective laws, i.e., a realm that, because these laws have as their aim the reference of these beings to one another as ends and means, can be called a ‘realm of ends’ (obviously only an ideal).

[174] Ibidem, p. 52 (Ak 4: 434).

[175] Ibidem, p. 56 (Ak 4: 439).

[176] Ibidem, p. 54 (Ak 4: 436).

[177] Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, Edited and with an Introduction by Pauline Kleingeld, Translated by David L. Colclasure with essays by Jeremy Waldron, Michael W. Doyle, Allen W. Wood, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 100 , (AA 8: 375-376): “at least the following is clear: that human beings are no more able to fully abandon the concept of right”.

[178] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 42 (Ak 4: 424).

[179] Ibidem, p. 37 (Ak 4: 419).

[180] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork…, p. 23 (Ak 4: 411).

[181] Ibidem, p. 48 (Ak 4: 442).

[182] Ibidem.

[183] Ibidem, pp. 49-50 (Ak 4: 443).

[184] After an early history, the term counter-enlightenment appeared in Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors, Cambridge, Ma., 1969; and in Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment” (1973). In: Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, Edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, New York, Ferrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1997, pp. 243-268.

[185] Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1793-1794/1795, posthumous) Paris, Librairie philosophique Jean Vrin, 1970, pp. 79, 153, 180.

[186] See, for example, the beautiful David Graeber, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2019), New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

[187] The ideas about society and the man-society relationships form what was named ideology; or ideology was defined as the ideas about society and man-society relationships from the standpoint of concrete, conscious or not, position of people within the economic and political power relations (Marx). There are not “neutral” ideas about society and man-society relationships.

[188] This demonstration of opposition between the multitude in Spinoza and in Hobbes was provided by Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (2001), trans. I. Bertoletti, J. Cascaito, A. Casson [Los Angeles, New York: Semiotext(e)/ Foreign Agents, 2004].

[189] Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford University Press, 2001.

[190] For example, the volume Lumières et classicism/Enlightenment and Classicism/Aufklätung und Classizismus, of the International Review of Eighteenth-Century Studies (IRECS) /Revue internationale d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (RIEDS), edited by / sous la direction de Jean-Christophe Abramovici (Université Paris IV–Sorbonne), Daniel Fulda (Universität Halle–Wittenberg) Vol. 3 (Quebec University), 2017.

[191] See Betty A. Schellenberg, “Reading in an Epistolary Community in Eighteenth-Century England”, in DeNel Rehberg Sedo (Ed.), Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace, Palgrave Macmillan London, 2011, pp. 25-43.

[192] Karl Marx, “England’s 17th Century Revolution. A Review of Francois Guizot’s 1850 pamphlet Pourquoi la revolution d’Angleterre a-t-elle reussi?” (1850), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/02/english-revolution.htm: “For Guizot, English history ends with the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy. For him, everything that follows is limited to a pleasant alternating game between Tories and Whigs… In reality, however, the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy is only the beginning of the magnificent development and transformation of bourgeois society in England. Where M. Guizot sees only gentle calm and idyllic peace, in reality the most violent conflicts and the most penetrating revolutions are taking place. Under the constitutional monarchy, manufacturing at first expands to an extent hitherto unknown, only to make way for heavy industry, the steam engine, and the colossal factories. Whole classes of the population disappear, to be replaced by new ones, with new living conditions and new requirements. A new, more gigantic bourgeoisie comes into existence; while the old bourgeoisie fights with the French Revolution, the new one conquers the world market. It becomes so all-powerful that even before the Reform Bill gives it direct political power, it forces its opponents to enact legislation entirely in conformity with its interest and its needs. It wins direct representation in Parliament and uses it for the destruction of the last remnants of real power left to the landowners. It is, finally, at the present moment engaged in a thorough demolition of the beautiful codes of the English Constitution, which M. Guizot so admires”.

[193] See only the excellent Alain Michel, Rhétorique et philosophie chez Cicéron. Essai sur les fondements philosophiques de l’art de persuader, Paris, PUF, 1960.

[194] Johann Karl Wilhelm Möhsen, “What Is to Be Done Towards the Enlightenment of Citizens?”, Translated by James Schmidt, in James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 49-52.

[195] G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Pedagogy: Toward Education for Freedom, Evanston, Ill. Northwestern University Press, 2012; also, Klas Roth and Chris W. Surprenant (eds.), Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary, Routledge, 2012.

[196] Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), (Cambridge, Polity, 1989).

[197] Ana Bazac, “The philosophy of the raison d’être: Aristotle’s telos and Kant’s categorical imperative”, Biocosmology – Neo-Aristotelism, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2016, pp. 286-304.

[198] He conceived Enlightenment in a “minimalist” view, if we can take over Samuel Fleischacker’s, What is Enlightenment? (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) demarcations.

[199] Who was the guest editor of three monothematic issues around this question: “Do We Need a New Enlightenment for the Twenty–first Century. Part I.” Dialogue and Universalism, monothematic issue, 31 (2), 2021; “Do We Need a New Enlightenment for the Twenty–first Century. Part II.” Dialogue and Universalism, monothematic issue, 31 (3), 2021; “Do We Need a New Enlightenment for the Twenty–first Century. Part III.” Dialogue and Universalism, monothematic issue, 32 (1), 2022.

   And who answered in the special rubric On the Need of Enlightenment, in Dialogue and Universalism, 33 (1) 2023, as “On the Question of Whether We Need a New Enlightenment for the 21st Century”, pp. 217-228;

[200] “Do We Really Need a New Enlightenment for the 21st Century?”, Dialogue and Universalism, 33 (1) 2023, pp. 195-216.

[201] “How Do We Shape a Reform of the 21st-Century Human World in an Enlightenment Spirit? On Projects by Robert E. Allinson and Michael H. Mitias”, Dialogue and Universalism, 33 (1) 2023, pp. 229-242.

[202] Małgorzata Czarnocka, ibidem, p. 232.

[203] William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord, Moral Uncertainty, Oxford University Press, 2020.

[204] Immanuel Kants, Sämmtliche Werke, Herausgegeben von Karl Rosenkranz und Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert, Leipzig, Leopold Voss: 1842, Elften Theils, Immanuel Kant’s Briefe, Erklärungen, Fragmente aus seinem Nachlasse. Biographie, Herausgegeben von Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert, (Fragmente…:272-275 seite: “Erste  Entwurf seiner Vorstellung an König Friedrich II. zur Rechtfertigung seiner Stellung als Universitätslehrer 1794” (First draft of his presentation to King Frederick II to justify his position as a university teacher in 1794) (footnote: “This document, with which Kant justified himself before the sovereign against the suspicions raised against him, occupies such an important place in the cultural history of the Prussian state at this time that it can only be of the highest interest to combine this first draft with the one sent later to compare documents published in Conflict of Faculties (Vol. X. pp. 253-57)”). (Dieser Dokument, womit Kant sich Gegen den wider ihn erhobenen Verdacht vor dem Landesherrn rechtfertige, nimmt eine so beteutsame Stelle in der Culturgeschichte der Preussischen Staats in dierser Zeit ein, dass es nur das höchste Interesse gewähren kann, diesen ersten Entwurf mit dem später abgesandten und in Streite des Fakultäten (Bd. X. S. 253-57) bekanntgemachten Dokumente zu vergleichen, (note of) Sch.)

[205] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface A (A ixf), p. 158: “Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination”.

[206] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Translated and edited by Terry Pinkard, Cambridge University Press, 2018, Preface, p. 10: “Besides, it is not difficult to see that our own epoch is a time of birth and a transition to a new period. Spirit has broken with the previous world of its existence and its ways of thinking; it is now of a mind to let them recede into the past and to immerse itself in its own work at reshaping itself”.

[207] As Montesquieu considered (De l’esprit des lois (1748), édition électronique, Québec, Les classiques des sciences sociales, Quatrième partie, Livre XX, Chapitre 1, p. 24: “Commerce cures destructive prejudices and this is almost a general rule that wherever there are gentle morals, there is commerce; and that wherever there is of commerce, there are gentle morals”.

[208] As in Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Introduction, translation and notes by Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

[209]Arthur Danto, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), p.6.

 

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