Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Immanuel Kant and Dennis Sweet

Immanuel Kant’sProlegomena is an indispensable guide through the obscure and convoluted tangle of his “critical philosophy.” It has inestimable value as an introduction to the revolutionary doctrine that he called “transcendental idealism” and clarifies the points made in his greatest and most influential book, the Critique of Pure Reason. The Prolegomena is a pivot of Kant’s revolutions in metaphysics and epistemology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430266

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and is known as one of the foremost thinkers of Enlightenment. He is widely recognized for his contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

IMMANUEL KANT’S PROLEGOMENA IS AN INDISPENSABLE GUIDE THROUGH the obscure and convoluted tangle of his critical philosophy, and it has inestimable value as an introduction to the revolutionary doctrine that he called transcendental idealism. In his greatest and most influential book, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant provides a fresh alternative to what he regarded as the bankrupt approach of traditional, or dogmatic, metaphysics, and the dead-end procedures of skepticism, as exemplified in the works of David Hume. However, the complexity of this enterprise, combined with Kant’s own professed shortcomings as a writer, made the book almost inaccessible to all but the most diligent reader. The Prolegomena , published two years after the Critique, is Kant’s attempt to clarify and sharpen the main points of the earlier work. It also provides some important elucidations that would appear, sometimes verbatim, in the second, expanded edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1787.

Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kalin ingrad, Russia), on April 22, 1724, the fourth of nine children. He entered the University of Königsberg as a theology student in 1740, but through his encounters with the writings of Isaac Newton, his interests soon turned to mathematics and physics. From 1746 to 1755, he worked as a private tutor. For the next fifteen years, he held the position of Privatdocent (lecturer) at the University of Königsberg, during which time he published over a dozen essays on a broad range of topics, including astronomy, physics, metaphysics, natural history, geology, meteorology, medicine, and theology. In 1770, Kant was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics.

The 1770s are sometimes referred to as Kant’s silent decade. His energies were focused on his new enterprise—a systematic criticism of all dogmatic metaphysics and the development of a new approach, what he called critical philosophy and transcendental idealism. The fruits of this endeavor appeared in the summer of 1781, under the title Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft). This book is the cornerstone of much of Kant’s subsequent thought, and is generally acknowledged to be one of the most important contributions made to modern philosophy. It was followed two years later by the present volume, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Can Qualify as a Science (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können). In 1785 the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten) appeared, perhaps Kant’s most accessible book and a seminal contribution to moral philosophy. In 1788 he published his second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der practischen Vernunft), a transcendental exposition of our moral judgments and the regulative ideas of morality. This was followed in 1790 by the third and final Critique, the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft), which is his account of teleological and aesthetic judgments. In 1800, Kant’s Introduction to Logic was published. This is a compendium of his lecture notes on various subjects, spanning forty years. Kant died on February 12, 1804, an event described by his first biographer as a simple cessation of life and not a violent act of nature.

An understanding of Kant’s Prolegomena requires some familiarity with the issues addressed in the first (1781) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (referred to as the A edition). It is also extremely useful for discerning the motives behind the numerous alterations and additions that were incorporated into the second (1787) edition of Kant’s magnum opus (referred to as the B edition). The fundamental concern throughout is to rescue metaphysics, the abused and forsaken Queen of all the sciences, and to establish its foundations on firm ground. Kant’s originality and his philosophical genius are most apparent in his ability to bring together disparate and seemingly irreconcilable positions into a new standpoint that acknowledges the basic assumptions of the other positions while avoiding the problems inherent in each. Critical philosophy is Kant’s attempt to reconcile the two seemingly incompatible views he referred to as dogmatism and skepticism.

Dogmatism is Kant’s term for the philosophical approach developed by G. W. von Leibniz (1646 -1716) and his student and expositor Christian Wolff (1679-1754). The basic claim here is that necessary metaphysical knowledge is achievable. In other words, we can know, with certainty, various basic truths about the world (e.g., that every thing or event was necessarily caused by some prior thing or event), God (e.g., that God exists, is rational, and good), and human beings (e.g., that we possess immortal souls). Such knowledge depends upon the existence of innate ideas or principles that are part and parcel of the rational mind. They are neither derived from, nor directly connected with, sense experience. Once revealed, these ideas or principles can be known with a priori certainty; i.e., they can be known to be necessarily true.

For the dogmatists, all cognition and knowledge involve judgments; and every true judgment expresses a necessary relation between a subject-concept and a predicate-concept. This is Leibniz’s prædicatum inest subjecto principle: the claim that whatever predicate can be truly asserted of a subject depends upon that predicate-concept being contained in the subject-concept. Every true assertion is simply the analysis, the exfoliation, of what is inherent in the subject. Therefore, all true judgments are, on this view, analytic judgments. We know that the assertion all bodies are extended in space is true, insofar as we recognize that the idea of spatial extension is implied in the idea of a body. In making this judgment, we are simply unpacking the subject-concept and showing some particular feature inherent in it. And for the Leibniz-Wolffian school, all judgments, even judgments about sense experience, are analytic judgments. The difference between metaphysical judgments and ordinary judgments about sense experience is not a difference of kind, but one of degree. In making a metaphysical judgment, we discern all of the elements of the judgment clearly and distinctly. In judgments about sense experience, however, the elements involved are neither clearly nor distinctly known. For example, the judgment that this chair is mauve appears to be utterly contingent. It seems entirely possible that the chair could have been ochre or indigo or any other color. Yet, the dogmatists insist that such a judgment is, despite appearances to the contrary, analytic, and therefore, necessary. The necessity is not apparent to finite intellects like ours. An infinite, divine intellect, however, would be capable of deducing the infinite number of steps necessary to analyze the predicate, mauve, from the subject, this chair. Our inability to do this betrays something about the limitation of human understanding.

Skepticism, on the other hand, is Kant’s term for the basic procedures and claims found in the writings of John Locke (1632-1704) and, more particularly, in the works of David Hume (1711-76). The guiding principles of this approach are the claims that all knowledge is grounded in sense experience, and that no such experience can ever provide us with necessary or certain knowledge. On the negative side, these writers insist that the arguments supplied by the dogmatists to ground their metaphysical claims are simply bad arguments (i.e., invalid and unsound). On the positive side, the skeptical empiricists provide new criteria for what counts as viable philosophical knowledge. Extravagant claims based on mere logical, deductive arguments are no longer allowed. Philosophical feasibility now depends upon sense experience and the procedures of science.

The skeptics contend that, while we do possess the capacity for a priori knowledge, such knowledge is formal and empty, and has nothing to do with the world of sense experience. Logical knowledge involves what Hume calls relations of ideas, and deals exclusively with the necessary connections between certain ideas. But the vastly greater extent of our knowledge has to do, not with logic, but with sense experience. Knowledge of the sensible world is what Hume calls matter of fact knowledge. It is neither necessary nor certain. It is grounded in sense impressions and their derivative ideas, combined and organized in terms of the mind’s contingent principles of association . The impressions are passively received in sensation. The ideas, which are mere copies of the impressions, are then organized by the imagination according to these principles. So to know, for example, that the cue-ball caused the eight-ball to move, requires us to acknowledge that causation is involved. In fact, causation is evident in a great deal of our matter-of-fact knowledge. Hume insists, however, that no analysis of any causal situations can ever reveal any sort of necessary connection between a cause and its effect. We don’t perceive such a connection; nor is it revealed in any logical consideration of the causal situation. For Hume, our recognition of the causal relation is based upon our customary and habitual experiences of some things being constantly conjoined with other things. And our so-called metaphysical knowledge of cause and effect is really just a belief. Belief is an instinctive, psychological feature of the mind that infuses some of our ideas with the force and vivacity of an inner impression, such that we are compelled to think or to act in some particular fashion. There is neither certainty nor necessity involved. This is, for Hume, simply a brute fact of the human condition.

Kant’s critical philosophy is an attempt to reconcile Hume’s skeptical conclusions with the claims of the dogmatic Leibniz-Wolffian school. For much of his life, Kant had been a card-carrying dogmatist. For decades he studied and taught metaphysics, using the academic primers written by Christian Wolff and his student Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62). But something profound happened to Kant’s views in or around 1772. He tells us that it was his recollection of Hume’s problem, at this time, that first interrupted [his] dogmatic slumber, and gave [his] investigation in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction (Prolegomena, Introduction). Hume’s problem refers to the skeptical conclusions regarding the causal principle: a notion that is fundamental for dogmatic metaphysics. René Descartes (1596 -1650) had employed it to prove both the existence of God and the existence of material substances. Leibniz and Wolff saw the causal principle, or its logical manifestation, the principle of sufficient reason, as crucial for our understanding of both God and the realm of phenomenal experience. According to Kant, Hume had shown that, rather than being an offspring of the understanding that provides a priori knowledge of the world, our knowledge of the causal principle is, in fact, nothing but a bastard of imagination, impregnated by experience, which . . . mistook the subjective necessity of habit for an objective necessity arising from insight (Prolegomena, Introduction). Thus, the skeptical Hume reduced the causal principle, regarded by the dogmatists as essential for metaphysics, to mere empirical, psychological functions grounded in belief and instinct and incapable of providing us with a priori knowledge.

Critical philosophy emerges, first, in Kant’s attempt to generalize Hume’s problem, i.e., to suggest that Hume’s skeptical observations apply, not just to causation, but to all the other principles of metaphysics as well; and second, in Kant’s desire to trace the origin of these principles to the human understanding, and not to the empirical imagination. Kant’s task, then, is to provide these principles the a priori status that will satisfy our fundamental desire for metaphysical knowledge; a program that he regards as the most difficult task ever undertaken in the service of metaphysics (Prolegomena, Introduction). In the first Critique, Kant proceeds in terms of two questions: the quid facti question, which is concerned with describing the facts involved in human knowledge; and the quid juris question, which deals with our right to possess such knowledge. He acknowledges the value of Hume’s description of the facts that are involved in our experiences of causal situations. Yet Hume (and every other philosopher) had failed to even consider the quid juris question. Given the facts surrounding our causal judgments, we must ask, by what right do we make such judgments? What gives us the right, or the justification, for making the judgment this made that happen? or for making the general (metaphysical) judgment whatever happens was necessarily brought about by some prior condition? Kant’s answers to these quid juris questions express the vital heart of the new philosophical perspective he calls transcendental idealism. In the Prolegomena, as well as in the second edition of the first Critique, the issue is expressed in terms of the question: How are a priori synthetic judgments possible? Metaphysics stands or falls with the solution of this problem: its very existence depends upon it (Prolegomena, § 5).

How are a priori synthetic judgments possible? The distinction between a priori (necessary and certain) knowledge and a posteriori (experiential, unnecessary, and uncertain) knowledge was a traditional distinction, in common use long before Kant. The distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, however, is generally regarded as a Kantian innovation. Like the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophers before him, Kant regards all cognitions, all instances of knowledge and conscious experience, as judgments. He contends that the dogmatists were correct in their account of logical, analytic judgments. Such judgments are indeed necessarily true and certain. In the judgment all bodies are spatially extended, we can recognize (in a finite number of analytical steps) that the predicate-concept is inherent in, and implied by, the subject-concept. Kant, however, adds to this limited kind of judgment another kind, which is far more common and ultimately, for metaphysics and mathematics, far more important. This he calls synthetic judgment. The constituents of a synthetic judgment are a concept, i.e., a general rule of the understanding that is actively applied to what Kant calls an intuition, i.e., a passively sensed object of experience. So, for example, the judgment, all bodies have weight, is a synthetic judgment. While it is true of every body that we encounter in ordinary experience, such truth cannot be found through conceptual analysis. Kant insists that no amount of analysis of the subject-concept body will ever unpack or reveal the predicate-concept weight. Yet, inasmuch as the statement is true, there must be some kind of connection between the subject and the predicate, one that cannot be found in the judgment itself. According to Kant, we have to go outside the judgment, go beyond the framework of judgments entirely, and call in some tertium quid, some third thing, which unites them so that we can know that the judgment is true. The third thing that Kant refers to is experience . In order to acknowledge the truth of the judgment all bodies have weight, we must generalize on the basis of our experiences of this particular body having weight, another particular body having weight, and so on. And it is to these experiences (or the memories of them) that we appeal in order to recognize the truth of this judgment. Since the truth is revealed not through analysis of concepts, but through an appeal to actual sense experience, judgments of this sort are synthetic judgments.

But what is the status of the objective realm of experience, which makes our synthetic judgments true? Kant contends that either there is such a realm, which we can know in terms of metaphysical, scientific, and common sense judgments, or there isn’t. To say that there isn’t commits one to dogmatic idealism