Pragmatic elements in Kant's philosophy

Preface

Pragmatism is "a new name for old ways of thinking" — some of the old ways. Its mission and its merit consist, then, not in introducing an entirely novel standpoint, but in helping to disentangle the functional, dynamic viewpoint from the remnants of rationalism or intellectualism contained in most philosophical systems, whether they be of the idealistic or the materialistic order.

Pragmatism was practically influential long before it was recognized as a mode of philosophy. It was operative in ethical and educational theory. A decade ago Dewey rendered a service in the critical study of logic by showing that there were functional elements in Lotze. Addison W. Moore made a similarly valuable contribution in his comparison of the representational and functional aspects of Locke's Essay — a contribution that was immediately reviewed by Schiller. Doubtless this contrast between a practical conception of the real work of thought as one of the factors in human development and the copy view of ideas might be found in any one of the historic philosophers, indeed might be traced far back into the roots of historic development in the Greek thinkers.

The undertaking to study Kant's system from the pragmatic standpoint was made from several considerations. Kant himself was the clearing-house for a vast amount of antecedent and contemporary thought. His very effort to mediate between a raw empiricism and the old scholastic dogmatism indicated that he appreciated the difficulties in either standpoint and wished to find a way out. Technically he remained a rationalist but he was the initiator of an epoch that issues legitimately in the modern dynamic attitude toward truth and reality. Kant points two ways — toward idealism and toward pragmatism. It was the " transcendental" in his system that long obscured the functional and led his followers off on the wrong path. The influence and the interpretation of that "transcendental" are today not far from the firing-line of philosophical debate and advance.

The pragmatic movement, moreover, is constantly brought into comparison and relation to Kant whether we will or no. The very terms "practical reason," "theoretical reason," and the contrast between them are his invention. The "postulates of the practical reason" is a phrase so strikingly similar, even in sound, to the principles of pragmatic

IV PREFACE

inquiry that it is on the lips of pragmatic thinkers constantly. It arouses the feeling, even without accurate analysis, that Kant realized, after all, the true nature of thinking as an active process growing out of life itself. Yet it has been assumed by many that Kant's system stands for the fixed and the unmodifiable in thought and reality. A clear exposition of his functional leading, if it be contained in his work, should be of aid not only to pragmatism in giving it historic dignity, but also to a true estimate of Kant's place in the development of human thought and life.

Table Of Contents

PAGE

i. Introduction i

3. Tee Mind's Construction of Nature 16

Introduction

Kant's criticism was the center from which may be traced, roughly speaking, three lines of development. One main line took its rise from Kant's teaching regarding the a priori functions of the theoretical reason. This line culminates in Hegel and the neo-Hegelians. Its essence consists in abstracting Kant's thought-forms and making them absolute; in explaining content as determined by form; in affirming a logical reality higher than that appearing in the world of experience. A second main line may be traced to Kant's doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason. This movement is represented by Fichte and Schopenhauer who developed two aspects of Kant's conception of will. For Kant, will seems to be a complex of two factors: first, inclination or desire, and secondly, reason as setting up ideals and putting them into action. A double line of voluntarism appears in Fichte's connection with the second of these factors, an aspect of his thought not covered by his idealism, and in Schopenhauer's attachment to the first factor. Schopenhauer, taking his point of departure in the Kantian distinction between "thing-in-itself" and "appearance" — a distinction which absolute idealism in its own way sought to obliterate — endeavored to find in his own soul life a piece of reality given, existing in the form in which we know it. From this piece of reality Schopenhauer thought we could infer the whole reality by analogy. He would use the insight won in a psychological way as a "regulative principle," to adopt Kant's phraseology. For this principle the practical reason, not the theoretical, is the source. The conflict between intellectualism and voluntarism is solved in Schopenhauer by subsuming under will all psychical occurrences, but the rationalistic element in his thinking asserts itself in his adherence to a unity as the ultimate ground — a unity still conceived in an abstract-logical sense. The third main line of development boasting its lineage from Kant is empiricism. Passing by those problems upon which Kant placed such great worth, and fortifying itself upon that feature of the Kantian thought which affirmed that knowledge is limited to the empirical world, empiricism has ignored the treatment of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" and the "Transcendental Analytic" and has turned back gladly to Hume.

Pragmatism enters the arena with a clear title of its own. Reacting strongly against the absolutism of the first main line of development, it assumes the role of a better empiricism. Empiricism itself had shown a strongly marked intellectualistic disposition, failing utterly to do justice to the organism's reaction upon its environment. Pragmatism transplants empiricism to the region of voluntarism and is thus in better position to overcome the opposition between Kant's rationalism and his empiricism than was any movement of thought that has yet appeared since the epoch of criticism itself. It may safely be affirmed that in pragmatism philosophic thought moves in the direction from Hegel back to Kant. For while the faithful follower of Hegel may assert that his genesis of the categories is more pragmatic than Kant's given, fixed categories, it is all too evident that in the end this supposed genesis lacks any genuine quality. As Sturt says, "A changeless development is not merely a difficult conception; it is downright nonsense." 1 All of the apparent development in Hegel and the neo-Hegelians is merely the phenomenal unfolding of the timeless absolute idea, which is the sole reality. For pragmatic purposes thought must move back to the vantage-ground of criticism, to gain a fresh start in the study of the properly constructive character of mental activity, to see the function of knowledge as one of the factors in reality. It cannot be committed to a plan given and finished in advance. Pragmatism is deflected at times from this straight backward path, in tracing its historic origins, not only by its antipathy to the rationalistic elements latent in criticism itself, but also by its affinity for the results of modern psychology which were either unknown to Kant or were at no time in the focus of his attention.

If it can be shown that the salient features of the pragmatic attitude are contained either explicitly or implicitly in Kant's thinking, several distinct points will be gained for the pragmatic movement and, possibly, for the interests of real intellectual progress. First, it may appear that the critical movement of thought was not a mere waste, to say the least; that we do not, as James has suggested, have to short-circuit the great German thinker, though it may result that we have short-circuited some of the idealistic systems that succeeded him. Secondly, it may be seen that pragmatism is not a mere by-path from the main road of philosophic development, but preserves the line of historic continuity and sequence. Thirdly, by finding and accrediting itself in the great thinker who stands historically as the gateway to modern thought, pragmatism may at least challenge the right of absolute idealism to usurp the leadership over the philosophical world, to claim for speculative philosophy the sole key to

1 Idola Theatri, p. 186.

INTRODUCTION 3

reality and the meaning of things. Fourthly, in revealing the arrogance of pure intellectualism generally, it may serve to show the weakness of that form of scientific investigation — so called — that was provoked in opposition to speculative systems — the craving for mere blind facts — and may lead thought back to the vantage-ground of modesty with which the effort of criticism set forth originally. The oft-repeated cry, "Back to Kant," may be found to have vital significance.

That there are close resemblances between pragmatism and Kantianism is apparent even to the casual reader. As George A. Coe remarks, "From the historical side pragmatism appears as a new presentation of empiricism, or a new development of the Kantian doctrine/ of the primacy of the practical reason as against the theoretical." 1 The most naive student, when he reads of the Will-to-Believe and of Kant's postulates of the practical reason is moved to exclaim, "How very modern this Kant is after all." The relation of pragmatism to criticism is forcefully suggested in Schiller's declaration that if Kant had been twenty years younger when the full significance of postulating dawned . upon him he would have rewritten his great work from the avowedly pragmatic standpoint. How close or how loose some of these intimated comparisons and relationships are we hope to discover as we proceed.

Historically, two systems of thought met in Kant — rationalism and empiricism. It is our conviction that throughout his thinking two systems or aspects are apparent — the transcendental and what we moderns designate as the functional or the pragmatic. In his "transcendental" we see the influence of inherited rationalistic assumptions from which he was unable wholly to escape; but when we come to examine his use of the transcendental — the practical application of it when it has any meaning — we come upon distinctly pragmatic tendencies. Kantianism, relieved of transcendentalism, yields virtually pragmatism. Kant stands with his face toward the modern, functional view of life and reality, even when he is unable to express himself to that effect in the letter of his terminology.

It would, of course, be idle to ignore, at the outset, the too static character of his system. He antedates evolution and the biological approach to the problems of psychology and life. To be sure Paul Carus thinks that Kant — particularly the young Kant, the Kant of the first edition, the author of the Presumable Origin of Humanity, of the treatise, Upon the Different Races of Mankind, and of The General History and Theory of the Heavens — leaned strongly toward the evolution

1 Methodist Review, 1908, p. 212.

hypothesis; that he recognized "neither the stability of species nor any fixed limits between them," and that "he discusses the origin of the species of man in a way which would do honor to a follower of Darwin." 1 But while the younger Kant, in his most scientific moods, may have had fitful foregleams of the evolution of species and of the survival of the fittest, there is, unfortunately, "no evolution in his categories" when he sets himself to his great work in the examination of knowledge. In common with the ancients who rightly held that ultimately the problems of science and metaphysics are identical, he wrongly considers his / concepts fixed and unalterable — "these and this exact number only." v Yet with all his dogmatic background and environment it may still be indicated that the epoch opened by him in the evolution of thought extends legitimately through all the one-sided systems that have attempted to complete his work and reaches our most modern dynamic conception of thought and life; that he was essentially pragmatic in his view of the nature of truth, the criterion of truth, and, possibly, the nature of reality.

His rationalistic inheritance from the past appears in his separation of sense and understanding and in his retention of things-in- themselves. He practically accepts with Hume the isolated, relationless sense elements which require to be combined for knowledge. To be sure, after he has laboriously shown how these are combined by the forms and categories of the mind, he virtually repudiates them and proves that they could never have existed in the abstracted, relationless form in which he sets out with them. He seems, however, never to discover the full meaning of this truth. A deeper study of this important fact would have helped to square him completely with the modern functional viewpoint. The transcendental deduction assumes in its premises what it emphatically denies in its conclusion. To get unification he thinks we must introduce a transcendental element — spaceless and timeless; yet, having assumed in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" these atomistic entities, he turns around and rejects them in the "Transcendental Analytic." This would seem to imply that the desired unity may be attained without the transcendental element. Had this separation been less sharp in his mind to begin with, the thought implicit in his entire system might have reached explicit recognition, namely, that sense material has connections of its own, or otherwise speaking, that sense material standing by itself is a mere abstraction, an unwarrantable assumption. Kant and the objective idealists who followed him assumed that whatever is distin-

1 Kant and Spencer, p. 42.

INTRODUCTION 5

guishable is separable. All idealistic systems need this assumption to make out a case, and when the assumption is exposed, their case tumbles. Their problem is how, out of a congeries of atoms, to get an experience, but as Dewey well says, "That red, or far and near, or hard and soft, or big and little involve a relation between organism and environment is no more an argument for idealism than is the fact that water involves a relation between oxygen and hydrogen. It is, however, an argument for the ultimately practical value of these distinctions — that they are differences made in what things would have been without organic behavior — differences made not by consciousness or mind, but by the organism as the active center of a system of activities." 1 Kant makes an artificial separation between his sense-impressions and his concepts which he says are pure. The real distinction between the two is functional and may vary with the situation. Kant seems to use it as an ontological distinction hard and fast. Instead of taking the experience just as it presents itself — datum and meaning included — he first puts his sensequalities and his concepts into tight compartments. This is not always the case, as we are endeavoring to point out, but in the "Aesthetic" especially he treats his a priori elements and his empirical elements as actual entities, existing in independence of each other, prior to their union by the transcendental forms. f All transcendentalists make the same mistake. Bradley, for instance, says that in our sensation of black certain relations of comparison and discrimination are constituents. He forgets that this is true only when we begin to ask questions about it. He says these relations are present transcendent ally, as did Kant. He substitutes the black of the discriminated experience as the situation from which we get our notion of what quality is and then equates the two experiences. That is, he takes a situation where datum and meaning have been developed, where the discriminated and related qualities are experienced in reflective analysis and throws this back into situations of the non-reflective sort. Sense content does not mean anything apart from relations of meaning, but, says Bradley, the sense content is not created by these relations of meaning, hence intellect can do nothing with it and we have contradiction. He does not realize that in making the distinction between the sense-elements and thought we have changed the character of the experience; that when experience is thus transformed we have experienced datum and experienced meaning. He overlooks the fact that in our actual experience there is no datum other than that of meaning. Just so /Kant takes a sense-impression, abstracts it from

1 Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, p. 66.

its concrete situation, and makes a formal unity of it. He does the same with thought or with his concepts.

Despite this separation on the part of Kant, however, there is a near approach to the pragmatic method in his three-fold synthesis of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. He moves away from crude realism and in the direction of functionalism in arguing that, instead of our cognition conforming to objects, objects must conform to our mode of cognition. At the very outset of the " Aesthetic" he lifts space and time out of the hands of every form of crude realism although he makes it rather easy for them to lapse into the arms of absolutism. Pragmatism takes one of its chief inspirations in breaking away from the representational view of knowledge — the view that our scientific ideas are exact copies of external or trans-empirical realities. Kant would seem to be in harmony with this attitude in holding that the mind furnishes constituent factors — helps to build its own ideas of natural science. He differs from the pragmatist in abstracting sharply this work of the understanding in thus furnishing the relating factors. He sees that the mind contributes something to the determination of the object — so far pragmatic. He cannot grasp the full truth that the perception of the object is just one whole piece of experience. It was the false separation left between datum and meaning that offered the opening wedge for idealistic systems. Kant says or implies that all experience is not self-conscious but potentially self-conscious. This implies a set of relations not in experience, and just here we have the root of Bradley's puzzles, as has been indicated. From this spring T. H. Green's efforts to bring relations and sense-impressions together. Green identifies knowledge with all relationships and finds, therefore, that it is not derived from nature. Elsewhere Green uses knowledge as a mere temporal function. This confusion and error in his thought is plainly attributable to the influence of German idealism. As Sturt says, "Kant's influence led him to make an absolute separation between the synthetic consciousness and the empirical stream, and to say that the synthetic consciousness is changeless or out of time entirely." 1 He and all the absolutists use knowledge in the two senses. Knowledge as a temporal function is forgotten, its dynamic and purposeful implications are ignored, and hence the metaphysical riddles.

1 Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, p. 240.

In Kant's treatment, first of all, of space and time — the fundamental forms of or rather for perception — he has both a transcendental and a functional use. To experience things in space and time we must have a space and time into which to put them. Therefore they are not derived from experience but are preconditions. In the "Aesthetic" he says: " Time is not an empirical conception. Time is given a priori." 1 Yet he elsewhere remarks: "Time is nothing in abstraction from the conditions of sensible perception." 2 If he had stopped to ask himself the meaning of this functionalism, to analyze and elaborate the significance of this contradiction, he might have been led farther on the path of the instrumental character of knowledge. Holding the mathematical viewpoint, he stresses the continuity aspect of these forms, failing to notice sufficiently that from the practical viewpoint they receive their content from discrete objects and events. Other expressions, however, are not wanting to contradict his notion of an intuition of an objective time as an infinite necessary continuum: "Time is nothing but the form of our own internal intuition. Take away the peculiar condition of our sensibility, and the idea of time vanishes, because it is not inherent in the objects, but in the subject only that perceives them." 3 If the latter statement is true, accepting for the moment its subjectivistic characterization, we scarcely need the subsequent debate in the "Antinomies" as to our ability to imagine time either as ending or as going on forever. For our purposes we want neither to go to the end of time nor to divide it up into infinite atoms. Our conception of time is adequate for all the purposes to which we need to put it and this is implied in the outcome of Kant's discussion of this antinomy, namely, that only the one use of it, the functional, phenomenal, will ever benefit us. " What it does determine is the relation of ideas in our own inner state." 4 Bawden well says: "Antinomies result from the attempt to conceive empty space and time apart from the concrete experience where they have meaning. We cannot perceive empty space and time, but only objects and events. Pure space and time are artifacts like ' the average child ' or ' the economic man.'" 5 Kant, in his summation of this matter, swings back to his

2 Ibid., p. 34. 3 Ibid., p. 35. 4 Ibid., p. 32. s The Principles of Pragmatism, p. 273.

transcendental use and yet, even in that very use, implies the functional application of it to make any sense: "Phenomena have, therefore, no existence apart from our consciousness of them: and that is what we mean by their transcendental ideality." 1 Again he declares: "Transcendental 'Aesthetic' cannot count the concept of change among its a priori data, because time itself does not change, but only something which is in time. For this, the perception of something existing and of the succession of its determinations, in other words, experience, is required." 2 Here he grasps the fact that it is change, succession that really afford the perception of time, yet he abstracts time itself as a concept. He does not pause to realize the necessarily concrete character of change.

Similarly, of space, he writes: " Space is not an empirical perception which has been derived from external perceptions. Space is a necessary a priori idea which is presupposed in all external perceptions." 3 He says we experience space as a unity. Here he evidently confuses mathematical and psychological space. We may conceive space as a unity, but we actually experience only individual spaces. So true is this that, as James says, "Most of us are obliged to turn round and drop the thought of the space in front of us when we think of that behind." 4 Later on Kant himself says: "Space and time are quanta continua, because no part of them can be presented that is not inclosed between limits (points or moments) and therefore each part of space is itself a space, each part of time is itself a time. Space consists only of spaces, time of times. There is no way of proving from experience that there is empty space and empty time"; 5 and very significantly for our present purposes in his Metaphysical Elements of Natural Science, where he must necessarily touch upon the real value of this form or category, he adds: "The absolute void and the absolute plenum are in the science of nature pretty much the same thing as blind chance and blind fate are in metaphysical cosmology, namely, a bar to inquiring reason. Everything that relieves us from the need of taking refuge in empty space is a real gain for natural science." 6

Thus he first dogmatically assumes space and time as ontological realities, or if not quite ontological realities as transcendental idealities — yet, when it comes to concrete experience, which it must be noticed

2 Mueller's Trans., p. 33. 4 Psych., II, 275.

3 Ibid., p. 18. 5 Watson, Selections, p. 98. 6 Metaphysische Anjangsgrilnde der Wissenschaft, IV, 427.

is his only sphere of knowledge, space and time reduce to merely empirical cash value. Or, if this is held to be not antecedently the only alternative, what are space and time if not pure forms ? He treats them sometimes as pure forms, sometimes as something else. He inevitably raises this question, which remains unanswered.

It seems highly significant, in Kant's whole treatment of space and time and particularly of space, that he resorts constantly to mathematics for an illustration of necessary a priori forms of knowledge and, as someone has remarked, it is always to pure mathematics, making no /^ distinction between it and applied mathematics. It may reasonably be y/ held that if Kant had placed less rationalistic confidence in the a priori certainty of mathematical knowledge, he would have succeeded in shifting the emphasis from constitutive to regulative in the treatment of all his forms and categories, instead of limiting the latter to certain "ideas of reason." It seems deplorable that his criticism could not, at the outset, have been turned to a more minute and genetic inquiry into the real character of geometry. He says :

On the necessity of an a priori representation of space rests the apodictic certainty of geometrical principles and the possibility of their construction a priori. For if the intuition of space were a concept gained a posteriori, borrowed from general external experience, the first principles of mathematical definition would be nothing but perceptions. They would be exposed to all the accidents of perception, and there being but one straight line between two points would not be a necessity, but only something taught in each case by experience. Whatever is derived from experience possesses a relative generality only, based on induction. We should therefore not be able to say more than that, so far as hitherto observed, no space has yet been found having more than three dimensions. 1

Along with Descartes he accepts mathematics as the ideal of scientific method. Particularly in his Prolegomena Kant practically contradicts his real critical position in this respect. In accepting and so readily explaining mathematics and physics as actual and valid bodies of knowledge that need no epistemological examination and vindication, he virtually abandons his critical ground and takes for granted what he started out to prove critically. His convenient straight line itself should have been subjected to a more severe genetic examination. Ladd says:

If one wants to know what a straight line is actually, one must draw it by an act of constructive imagination. But Kant does not emphasize the truth that such drawing of a straight line is quite impossible for a mind that has not

IO

previously traced some line, as seen or felt, actually limiting a thing perceived by the senses. That is to say, the grounds for the construction of a straight line, on which the foundations of all the mathematics of the geometrical order and all the mathematical sciences themselves are standing, are given only in the cognitive judgment which terminates a series of sense-perceptions. This process is an envisagement by thinking mind of the nature of the really existent as given to it in the object of sense-perception. What is true of those processes that constitute the actual experiences in which we come to the knowledge of the properties of a straight line, is true of all the experience which furnishes the other primary conceptions and axioms of geometry. As a science, a system of cognitions, it is not a mere product of imagination or of thought, much less of mere aggregated sensations or of associated ideas. It is rather a product of the entire mind in its actual living commerce with things. 1

In this " living commerce with things," however, the pragmatist would take care to remind us that the mind is not restricted to mere envisagement, as this statement of Ladd might seem to imply. The mind's true role is rather that of reconstruction than of envisagement. Both mind and things are efficient factors in the outcome. A crude realism would emphasize only the things, leaving to mind the empty task of copying. Kant swings to the other extreme and seems to attribute to mind the power of constructing things regardless of any give and take, in the transformation of meaning through conflict and reconstitution. The truth is, of course, that neither thing nor mind is alone the determining factor.

Kant was powerfully influenced by the recent development of mathematical physics in his day. He declares: " The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may enlarge its domain without the aid of experience." 2 Again he says: " Since in any doctrine of nature only so much of real science is contained as there is knowledge a priori, every doctrine of nature will constitute a real science only in so far as mathematics can be applied to it." 3 In his reaction from Hume's skepticism he swung so far from the empirical attitude that he wanted to put the whole process of knowledge, or as much of it as he possibly could, into the mind's constituent forms themselves. But for this reaction he might have glimpsed the fact that mathematical science is as empirical ultimately as are the other sciences. He might have anticipated John Stuart Mill in recognizing that mathematical judgments have in the last analysis an empirical genesis, that

1 Philosophy of Knowledge, pp. 259, 260.

3 Metaphysical Elements of Natural Sci., Preface.

SPACE AND TIME II

"axioms are experimental truths generalized from observation," or better, as the pragmatist would again amend, truths reached by the mind in its movement back and forth between observation and ideas, in the formation or re-formation of hypotheses. It was Mill's weakness at times to postulate a raw material of pure sensational data, forgetting the important fact indicated by himself in other places, that the positive aspects of scientific inquiry require the assistance of the mind's hypotheses, of ideas, to keep the "facts" from being meaningless or inadequate. Mill saw clearly, however, just in this connection, that the idea must develop within the same experience in which the facts play their part. Kant's confidence that the steps of the great mathematicians like Newton "became a highway on which the latest posterity may march with perfect confidence" 1 might have been rudely shaken could he have foreseen the efforts of a non-Euclidean geometry, coupled with its appropriate non-Newtonian mechanics, to describe our world as exactly as the Euclidean can do it. In the words of Lobachewsky, "We cognize directly in nature only motion, without which all the impressions our senses receive become impossible. All other ideas, for example geometric, though tied up implicitly in the properties of motion, are artificial products of our minds; and consequently space, by its own self, abstractly, for us does not exist." 2 If Kant had been less cavalier toward the psychological aspects of his problem, he might have realized, as have later thinkers, that geometry arose originally out of man's interest in the spatial relations of physical bodies about him, numerous facts testifying to its empirical origin; and that its development cannot be made intelligible apart from consideration of these. "The perception of space as a continuous whole goes back to such empirical elements as sensations of movement, sight, touch, the statical sense of the semicircular canals, the power of orienting the body with reference to presented stimuli." 3 The unitary conception of space resulting from all these factors is a complex phenomenon and is determined by the sensory factors that contribute to it. This is evidenced by the fact that psychological spaces which correspond to the different senses are not entirely identical. The unitary space-perception of a man blind from birth is of one sort and that of one of unimpaired vision is of another sort. Different forms of geometry have developed in accordance with these differences of sensory material and have been characterized as