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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by Immanuel Kant
This may well be called the age of criticism, a criticism from which nothing need hope to escape. When religion seeks to shelter itself behind its sanctity, and law behind its majesty, they justly awaken suspicion against themselves, and lose all claim to the sincere respect which reason yields only to that which has been able to bear the test of its free and open scrutiny. Metaphysics has been the battlefield of endless conflicts. Dogmatism at first held despotic sway; but ... from time to time scepticism destroyed all settled order of society; . . . and now a widespread indifferentism prevails. Never has metaphysics been so fortunate as to strike into the sure path of science, but has kept groping about, and groping, too, among mere ideas. What can be the reason of this failure? Is a science of metaphysics impossible? Then, why should nature disquiet us with a restless longing after it, as if it were one of our most important concerns? Nay more, how can we put any faith in human reason, if in one of the very things that we most desire to know, it not merely forsakes us, but lures us on by false hopes only to cheat us in the end? Or are there any indications that the true path has hitherto been missed, and that by starting afresh we may yet succeed where others have failed? It seems to me that the intellectual revolution, by which at a bound mathematics and physics became what they now are, is so remarkable, that we are called upon to ask what was the essential feature of the change that proved so advantageous to them, and to try at least to apply to metaphysics as far as possible a method that has been successful in other sciences of reason. In mathematics I believe that, after a long period of groping, the true path was disclosed in the happy inspiration of a single man. If that man was Thales, things must suddenly have appeared to him in a new light, the moment he saw how the properties of the isosceles triangle could be demonstrated. The true method, as he found, was not to inspect the visible figure of the triangle, or to analyze the bare conception of it, and from this, as it were, to read off its properties, but to bring out what was necessarily implied in the conception that he had himself formed a priori, and put into the figure, in the construction by which he presented it to himself. Physics took much longer time than mathematics to enter on the highway of science, but here, too, a sudden revolution in the way of looking at things took place. When Galileo caused balls which he had carefully weighed to roll down an inclined plane, or Torricelli made the air bear up a weight which he knew beforehand to be equal to a standard column of water, a new light broke on the mind of the scientific discoverer. It was seen that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must itself lead the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, and force nature to answer its questions. Even experimental physics, therefore, owes the beneficial revolution in its point of view entirely to the idea, that, while reason can know nothing purely of itself, yet that which it has itself put into nature must be its guide to the discovery of all that it can learn from nature. In metaphysical speculations it has always been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects; but every attempt from this point of view to extend our knowledge of objects a priori by means of conceptions has ended in failure. The time has now come to ask, whether better progress may not be made by supposing that objects must conform to our knowledge. Plainly this would better agree with the avowed aim of metaphysics, to determine the nature of objects a priori, or before they are actually presented. Our suggestion is similar to that of Copernicus in astronomy, who, finding it impossible to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they turned round the spectator, tried whether he might succeed better by supposing the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. Let us make a similar experiment in metaphysics with perception. If it were really necessary for our perception to conform to the nature of objects, I do not see how we could know anything of it a priori; but if the sensible object must conform to the constitution of our faculty of perception, I see no difficulty in the matter. Perception, however, can become knowledge only if it is related in some way to the object which it determines. Now here again I may suppose, either that the conceptions through which I effect that determination conform to the objects, or that the objects, in other words the experience in which alone the objects are known, conform to conceptions. In the former case, I fall into the same perplexity as before, and fail to explain how such conceptions can be known a priori. In the latter case, the outlook is more hopeful. For, experience is itself a mode of knowledge which implies intelligence, and intelligence has a rule of its own, which must be an a priori condition of all knowledge of objects presented to it. To this rule, as expressed in a priori conceptions, all objects of experience must necessarily conform, and with it they must agree. Our experiment succeeds as well as we could wish, and gives promise that metaphysics may enter upon the sure course of a science, at least in its first part, where it is occupied with those a priori conceptions to which the corresponding objects can be given. The new point of view enables us to explain how there can be a priori knowledge, and what is more, to furnish satisfactory proofs of the laws that lie at the basis of nature as a totality of objects of experience. But the consequences that flow from this deduction of our faculty of a priori knowledge, which constitutes the first part of our inquiry, are unexpected, and at first sight seem to be fatal to the aims of metaphysics, with which we have to deal in the second part of it. For we are brought to the conclusion that we never can transcend the limits of possible experience, and therefore never can realize the object with which metaphysics is primarily concerned. In truth, however, no better indirect proof could be given that we were correct in holding, as the result of our first estimate of the a priori knowledge of reason, that such knowledge relates not at all to the thing as it exists in itself, but only to phenomena. For that which necessarily forces us to go beyond the limits of experience and of all phenomena is the unconditioned, which reason demands of things in themselves, and by right and necessity seeks in the complete series of conditions for everything conditioned. If, then, we find that we cannot think the unconditioned without contradiction, on the supposition of our experience conforming to objects as things in themselves; while, on the contrary, the contradiction disappears, on the supposition that our knowledge does not conform to things in themselves, but that objects as they are given to us as phenomena conform to our knowledge; we are entitled to conclude that what we at first assumed as an hypothesis is now established as a truth. |
The
Critique of
Judgment,
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