Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant's Critical Philosophy / Edition 2

by Richard L. Velkley

Overview

In Freedom and the End of Reason, Richard L. Velkley offers an influential interpretation of the central issue of Kant’s philosophy and an evaluation of its position within modern philosophy’s larger history. He persuasively argues that the whole of Kantianism—not merely the Second Critique—focuses on a “critique of practical reason” and is a response to a problem that Kant saw as intrinsic to reason itself: the teleological problem of its goodness. Reconstructing the influence of Rousseau on Kant’s thought, Velkley demonstrates that the relationship between speculative philosophy and practical philosophy in Kant is far more intimate than generally has been perceived. By stressing a Rousseau-inspired notion of reason as a provider of practical ends, he is able to offer an unusually complete account of Kant’s idea of moral culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226852607
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/10/1989
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard L. Velkley is the Celia Scott Weatherhead Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. He is the author of many books, including Being after Rousseau and Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. 

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Freedom and the End of Reason

On the Moral Foundation of Kant's Critical Philosophy

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By Richard L. Velkley

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1989 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-85260-7

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CHAPTER 1

The Revolution in the End of Reason: Some Principal Themes

The Revision of Modern Foundations

The transformation of philosophy in the eighteenth century that is closely associated with Kant's proclamation of his intellectual "revolution" is a decisive reformulation of philosophical "foundations," both in metaphysics and the account of knowledge and in moral or practical philosophy. Historians of philosophy usually agree that the notions of theoretical and moral-political foundations in the major philosophers from Bacon and Descartes to Leibniz and Hume share certain basic features, and that as a group these notions of foundations are strikingly different from the foundational notions that first appear in Kant. Thus nearly all philosophy after Kant gives evidence of being influenced by his revision of modern methods and procedures. Yet this revolution is not often understood as one that brings about a basic revision of the end of reason. It is sometimes noted that the fundamental theoretical changes that emerge in Kant are connected somehow to a different approach in the aim or the end of the philosopher and, therewith, of "reason" in its philosophic and paradigmatic sense. But a careful and truly philosophic account of this connection has been lacking.

One should expect that Kant's thought would give evidence of a revolution in end as well as in theoretical method, or that the revolution in foundations would crucially include one in end. For Kant has expressly stated that a doctrine of the end of reason governs the employment of reason in the various realms of philosophy, guiding and orienting the nature and direction of inquiry in these realms. Thus Kant has written that "philosophy is the science of relating all cognition and every use of reason to the ultimate end of human reason, to which, as the supreme end, all others are subordinated and in which they must be joined into unity." Also, "Philosophy is the idea of a perfect wisdom that shows us the ultimate ends of human reason."

If Kant expressly states that his foundational inquiries are subordinated to the ultimate end of reason, one would suppose that the critical doctrine of the end would be especially helpful, if not indispensable, to uncovering the revolutionary character of those inquiries. Indeed, the doctrine of the end should be the locus of the revolution itself. According to Kant, the philosopher is to be defined as a legislator, not as a mere theoretician. His legislation establishes the architectonic order of reason wherein the various investigations of philosophy and science are to take their places and in which they are to be viewed as collectively furthering the ultimate end that the philosopher defines. In other words, the philosopher legislates the systematic unity of reason as governed by a single organizing principle, or telos. The revolution taking place in the foundational inquiries of theoretical and moral philosophy has a principal architect—the philosopher as legislator. That is to say that the "local" revolutions in theoretical and moral foundations are reflecting a larger, more comprehensive revolution planned and initiated by the legislative activity of the critical philosopher.

The most familiar of all Kantian revolutions is the revision of the foundations of theoretical philosophy that occurs in the transcendental grounding of all metaphysical inquiry by means of a "critique" of reason's powers. One of the main theses of this study is that the transcendental revolution is not wholly prior in the order of philosophical argument to the defense of moral reason and the erection of a new doctrine of moral autonomy. The argument is often made that the Kantian critique of speculative metaphysics is undertaken wholly without regard to the moral and the human dimension. The critique, it is said, resolutely completes a characteristically modern destruction of the cosmic supports for theoretical contemplation, moral nobility, and beauty; after such a "disillusionment of the world," Kant finds himself morally shipwrecked. The world having become deprived of "value," Kant looks about and finds that only a new doctrine of moral autonomy, wholly divorced from theoretical cognition, provides a certain way of recovering the lost ideals.

Certainly it is true that Kant brings to a consequent conclusion the primary thrust of modern philosophy as critique of speculative metaphysics. But that critique, as initiated by Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, does not aim solely at a scientific "disillusionment" of the world. Rather, it is in the service of a new practical goal of the emancipation of humanity—the assertion of human freedom from superhuman constraints. The destruction of traditional metaphysically supported theology is absolutely central to that aim, and thus also is the creation of a new science of nature that is "neutral" to final causes in the cognizable order of nature. All the same, the modern critique of speculation is not neutral to all human purposes or human finality. The rejection of metaphysical first causes is to make room for the supremacy of human final causes. The order of cosmic final causes is replaced by the legislated order or by the ideal construct supported only by human volition—the establishment of a new universal nomos that promotes the maximum of human freedom from the evils and unwelcome constraints of the natural order. Kant's own critique is quite clearly a continuation of this emancipatory project. His proclamation of allegiance to "Enlightenment" as the liberation of man from self-imposed tutelage to authorities other than his own reason has its counterpart in a theoretical dictum. Reason must assert itself as the source of the conditions of knowledge, and abandon the "leading-strings" of nature, in determining the cognizable order. The necessary corollary of such maxims is the turning away from all metaphysics of first causes or absolute wholes (speculative "dogmatism") that would assign ultimate responsibility for the human order to something beyond the legislative jurisdiction of human reason. Thus it can hardly be maintained that the critique of speculative reason is undertaken with no regard for the practical good. Kant informs us of the philosophical lineage of his conception of the practical aim of theoretical inquiry by placing a Baconian motto at the head of the Critique of Pure Reason: the object of philosophy is to lay the foundations of human utility and welfare.

Kant thus does not reject the emancipatory end of modern philosophy or Enlightenment but reformulates it. At least initially, it is better to say that Kant seeks to enhance the modern project's chances of success rather than to say that he seeks to restore some lost premodern "values." His criticism of previous versions of the emancipatory end concerns the internal weaknesses of those versions, which put success of the project in jeopardy. It is not that unwittingly Kant has, through his critique of metaphysics, brought about the total success of a project whose human and moral consequences he now deplores and must seek to rectify. On the contrary, his critique starts from the insight that the modern efforts to achieve the emancipatory goal are collapsing upon themselves and must collapse upon themselves. The causes for this collapse are basic flaws in the conception of both the final end of these efforts and of the theoretical methods and procedures employed to realize the end. The two areas of basic flaws are furthermore very deeply related.

Again, Kant's revision of the end and methods of modern philosophy occurs within a broad agreement he has with his modern predecessors in both areas. Several of the features of Kant's critical "epistemology" are quite clearly of a modern, post-Cartesian sort: (1) the procedure of doubting the "realist" starting point in ordinary experience, as above all revealed by the senses, and of turning to the "immanent" sphere of consciousness for the uncovering of universal, necessary, indubitable and unrevisable truths; (2) the substitution of an "artificial" or "methodical" order of cognition to arrive at a total construction of the knowable world, for the unreliable natural procedures of our reason; (3) the securing of foundations for all genuine knowledge on such certitudes and methods, without appeal to first causes or the hidden natures of things in themselves; (4) the distrust of the natural telos of the human mind towards ultimate or unconditioned wholes or toward the contemplative goal of absolute rest in a final and perfect cognition. Kant's writings on metaphysics of the early 1760s, before the decisive Rousseauian and transcendental "turns," clearly evince these aspects of the modern account of cognition. And it is evident that Kant agrees with his modern predecessors that ancient and medieval trust in the natural anticipations of "wholes" by the human mind is incompatible with both genuine theoretical science and the practical goal of emancipation.

Yet certain costs had to be paid for the achievement of the very efficient instrument of modern "method," and the problems that give rise to critical philosophy lie in the region of these costs. First, the rejection of the quest for knowledge of ultimate wholes or first causes may advance the aims of an emancipatory science, but leave unexplained, not to mention unsatisfied, the metaphysical urges or longings of the human mind that are irrepressible. Second, the modern construction of knowledge introduces a divorce between new scientific accounts of nature and of human experience and "ordinary experience" of the world as good and bad, noble and base, beautiful and ugly; it is uncertain that this divorce can actually help to secure the emancipatory aim it is meant to serve. For that aim, after all, is presented as desirable, and even as prescriptive. And if that is so, the aim must be described in terms of the good, or the noble, or the beautiful. But according to the epistemology serving the aim, such terms have dubious cognitive status. Thus in pursuing the project of scientific emancipation we must after all trust certain natural promptings that compel us to pursue that aim, but which have no rational status—passions or sentiments that promote self-preservation or the love of mastery or the love of freedom. According to modern philosophy, reason is and must be only a servant of the passions.

Kant objects that in several crucial respects modern philosophy has suffered from lack of self-knowledge. Its own principles cannot account for themselves on both teleological and methodological levels. While it summarily dismisses the urge for metaphysical wholeness, it cannot account for what it dismisses. In fact all metaphysical thought must employ certain concepts of wholeness. Thus even while he is opposing metaphysical ultimates, the modern philosopher is presupposing notions of ultimates in his own discourse. He fails, however, to justify their use and thereby proceeds "dogmatically." Furthermore, while modern philosophy would make the telos of emancipation the sole end that justifies science, its science is unable to justify that end. Kant thus comes to the insight that modern rationalism must eventually undermine itself. Because it is unable to pursue its emancipatory aim consistently and with security, the foundations need reform. The modern account of reason, being unable to demonstrate its own goodness, may be unable to answer those who speak for the forces of reaction or for the legitimacy of the human mind's subordination to an authoritative whole.

Yet there is a school within the modern metaphysical tradition that presents a somewhat different picture of reason. The historical background to Kant includes the attempts of Leibniz and Wolff to incorporate the mind's quest for totality within the framework of modern philosophy, and their attempts entail an acknowledgment of a spontaneity or dynamical aspect of human reason (and in Leibniz's case, of nature as a whole). On the basis of modern principles, Leibniz reintroduced concepts of substance and the whole, not as fully actualized forms, but as the products or ideal limits of spontaneous and dynamical processes. Kant sees in the work of this great synthetic mind a role for the metaphysical demands of reason, but also the danger of a lapse into "dogmatism." The achievement of a cognitive totality (of the totally determined individual substance all of whose attributes are known adequately) is the Leibnizian ideal of theoretical understanding which is, in Kant's view, valid only for a divine understanding.

Again Kant suspects an internal difficulty within Leibniz's formulation of a modern metaphysical position—a contradiction between the goal of emancipation or self-rule, appropriate to a "finite" being, and the postulation of an object of total cognition. But the Leibnizian endeavor is in many ways the model for Kant's—to account for the metaphysical striving of reason within the framework of the modern emancipatory project. In Kant's view, to grant a certain irreducibility to such striving is also to give a certain place to rational autonomy: reason is not merely an inert instrument that responds to the dictates of passion or sentiment. In some way, reason prescribes its own object; it spontaneously originates the goal of wholeness. If one can grant that reason is the origin of its own goal, then one can begin to justify rationally the final goal of philosophy or science.

The Critique of Instrumental Reason

The critique of theoretical cognition must be understood within the context of such concerns. As I argue in more detail below, the function of Kant's metaphysical and epistemological inquiries is not well described by the most frequent characterizations in the scholarship. The "critique" is not primarily an effort to place Newtonian science on a more secure foundation, nor is it primarily an effort to secure the "objectivity" of science or ordinary cognition against the skeptical threat of Humean arguments. One must go back to the issue of the teleology of reason to determine sufficiently the aim of Kant's "transcendental" arguments.

In the critique of theoretical cognition as it relates to the epistemological thought of his modern predecessors, Kant's starting points are (1) reason is driven by its own nature to seek a total determination of the whole of the knowable, including the first causes of the whole; (2) philosophy in the past, while attempting to base a secure science of philosophy on the most immediate and evident sources of certainty, is driven at the same time to arrive at a determination of the whole by these means; and (3) the result is a "dialectic" in which reason comes into conflict with itself. The cognitive determinations of the whole are inconsistent with the movement toward self-grounding autonomy that is evident in modern philosophy's turn to consciousness and freedom.

Stated in other terms, Kant believes that the modern employment of the "immanent" certainties that are well suited for grounding a universal and necessary science (one that owes nothing to the contingencies of the "real" as "given") has been "uncritical." In various ways, modern rationality has confounded itself through insufficient regard for the role that reason, as spontaneous and self-legislative, must play in determining the end and the scope of valid employment for the instruments of modern methodology. Most characteristically, modern philosophy turns either to intuitive certainties immediately given to consciousness (mathematical or merely "empirical" and perceptual) or to logic for the determination of the knowable. In both cases, reason proceeds as though these obviously attractive sources of evidence could be employed as an organon to extend human knowledge even in the realm of ultimate ends or to attain its highest object, metaphysical totality. The modern philosophers developed a whole array of procedures whereby reason discovers "analytically" the ultimate elements of knowledge in simple and intuitive certainties and then advances with them "synthetically" towards the construction or reconstruction of the knowable whole. Kant's transcendental critique is centrally a criticism of the view that such procedures give reason a true organon in the knowledge of most concern to reason—the knowledge of ends.

All of Kant's critical philosophy, as an account of reason, is a critique of instrumental reason, either from a moral or a theoretical standpoint. From the latter standpoint, the critique is an investigation of the limits of past approaches to metaphysical inquiry and a determination of the possible context, defined by human reason itself, for all such inquiry. In Kant's view, the reliance of earlier philosophers on the ultimate elements of knowledge—intuitive or logical and conceptual—has not enabled them to determine the context of possible metaphysical inquiry. They have assumed that the final objects or goals of such inquiry—the ideas of the whole—are accessible to human determination and thus that they are in some sense real and "given." Kant regards that assumption as natural to our human reason and predisposing it to dialectical error. And in his view this assumption must infect modern philosophical thinking as much as ancient, until modern philosophy becomes truly self-critical. What all earlier approaches in metaphysics lacked was a prior critique or "propaedeutic" to metaphysical inquiry which would determine the total context of possible knowledge. Such a total context is not available through the analysis of our knowledge into its most secure and evident elements. Indeed, the use of such elements presupposes the context of possible knowledge. But the latter can be defined only by way of a novel "transcendental" inquiry.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Freedom and the End of Reason by Richard L. Velkley. Copyright © 1989 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
The Problem of the End of Reason in Kant's Philosophy
The Primacy of the Practical End of Reason
Rousseau's Insight
The Highest Good and the End of Reason
A Prospectus of the Argument
1. The Revolution in the End of Reason: Some Principal Themes
The Revision of Modern Foundations
The Critique of Instrumental Reason
The Crisis in the Relation of Metaphysics to Common Reason
Rousseau's Protest against Modern Enlightenment
Kantian Philosophy as Transcendental Practice
2. The Teleological Problem in Modern Individualism
Individualism and Moral Sense
Rousseau's Challenge to Moral Sense
The Teleological Problem in Rousseau
3. Kant's Discovery of a Solution, 1764-65
History, Nature, and Perfection
Will, Reason, and Spontaneity
The Analysis of Passion: Honor and Benevolence
Justice and Equality
Common Reason and the End of Science
4. The Origins of Modern Moral Idealism, 1765-80
The Unity of Freedom and Nature as Ideal Goal
The Failures of Ancient Moral Idealism
Morality as System
Socratic Metaphysics as Science of the End and the Limit of Reason
The Dialectic of the Pure Concepts of the Whole
5. Culture and the Practical Interpretation of the End of Reason, 1781-1800
The Ultimate End of Theoretical Inquiry
Philosophy's "Idea" and Its History
Culture's Contradictions and Their Ideal Resolution
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Velkley handles his subject with skill and style, moving easily from Rousseau to Kant, and from the latter’s earlier to his later works. This is a significant piece of scholarship not merely for its historical insights but also because of the new focus it provides for interpreting Kant’s philosophy as a whole.

Ethics

The picture of Kant that emerges from this fascinating study is at once richer and more complex than the straw man who often appears in the works of defenders and detractors alike.

American Political Science Review

Velkley has produced an outstanding philosophical work on the late modern problem of the relation between reason and freedom.”
 

Review of Politics

Velkley (philosophy, Stonehill College, Mass.) finds Kants' major theses to be influenced by Rousseau's assertion that reason can be free of both superhuman authority and human passion. He argues that the combination of Kant's and Rousseau's ideas set the stage for much of modern thought. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Velkley’s reconstruction of Kant’s encounter with Rousseau is sufficiently interesting to reward the reader of this thoughtful and impressively researched book. By leaving aside stale debates about ‘influence’ in favor of an account of how one philosopher creatively responded to the challenges posed by another, Velkley provides a useful model of how scholars should deal with encounters between great minds.

Political Theory