Kant And His Influence

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KANT AND HIS INFLUENCE Edited by George MacDonald Ross and Tony McWalter

This page intentionally left blank

KANT AND HIS INFLUENCE Edited by George MacDonald Ross and Tony Me Walter

continuum

This edition published by Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005 Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 15 East 26th Street 11 York Road New York, NY 10010 London SE1 7NX © Continuum International Publishing Group 2005 Introduction and editorial selection © George MacDonald Ross and Tony McWalter and contributors, 1990

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 0-8264-8853-6 (paperback) Previously published in hardback by Thoemmes Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Limited, Cornwall

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

vii

'OUGHT' IMPLIES 'CAN': KANT AND LU fHER, A CONTRAST Roger M. White CONFUSED PERCEPTIONS, DARKENED CONCEPTS: SOME FEATURES OF KANT'S LEIBNIZ-CRITIQUE Catherine Wilson

1

73

THOUGHT AND SENSIBILITY IN LEIBNIZ, KANT AND BRADLEY Guy Stock

104

'ORIGINAL NONSENSE': ART AND GENIUS IN KANT'S AESTHETIC Peter Lewis

126

FICHTE, BECK AND SCHELLING IN KANT'S OPUS POSTUMUM Eckart Fdrster

146

v

vi

Contents

IMAGINATION AS A CONNECTING MIDDLE IN SCHELLING'S RECONSTRUCTION OF KANT John Llewelyn

170

THE EARLY RECEPTION OF KANT'S THOUGHT IN ENGLAND 1785-1805 Giuseppe Micheli

202

HAMILTON'S READING OF KANT: A CHAPTER IN THE EARLY SCOTTISH RECEPTION OF KANT'S THOUGHT Manfred Kuehn

315

ASPECTS OF KANT'S INFLUENCE ON BRITISH THEOLOGY Donald MacKinnon

348

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

367

INDEX OF NAMES

371

INTRODUCTION George MacDonald Ross and Tony McWalter

The papers in this volume were originally delivered at a conference held at the University of Leeds in April 1990. The conference was organized by the British Society for the History of Philosophy, one of the aims of which is to promote a broader and more scholarly approach to the study of the history of philosophy than has generally been'characteristic of philosophers in the analytic tradition. In particular, it was felt that, at least in England, too little attention was being paid to Kant and the postKantian philosophy of the nineteenth century; and it is no accident that nearly all the contributors are from Scotland or abroad. The first four papers are primarily concerned with the interpretation of various aspects of Kant's philosophy, but setting him firmly in a historical context. The order in which they appear represents a gradual shift in emphasis from his connections with earlier thinkers to comparisons with subsequent developments. Roger M. White's paper, '"Ought" implies "Can": Kant and Luther, a Contrast', is untypical of the collection as a whole, in as much as his stance on this particular issue is unrepentantly anti-Kantian. White argues that although Kant does not explicitly mention Luther, he must have been aware of the opposition between his own position and Luther's a debere ad posse vn

viii

Introduction

non valet consequentia ('ought' does not imply 'can') but to have made this explicit would have brought him into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities. White provides a detailed and critical analysis of what Kant may have meant by 'Ought' implies 'Can\ and of how he might have argued for his position. He lays particular stress on the paradoxical consequences of Kant's complete divorce between the absolutely free rational will, and the causally determined empirical self. He then compares Kant's approach with that of Luther, and concludes that Kant, like Erasmus before him, made the mistake of putting the question of praise or blame before that of the nature of the good life and how, if at all, it can be attained. Two authors concerned with Kant's metaphysics have focused on his relations with Leibniz. If it was Hume who awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, it was Leibniz who provided the main starting-point for his critical philosophy. Catherine Wilson's paper, 'Confused Perceptions, Darkened Concepts: Some Features of Kant's Leibniz-critique', will prove a useful corrective for those in the Anglo-American tradition who think of the Leibnizian strains in Kant's work as an embarrassment or an unnecessary encumbrance. It helps us to ascertain how ambivalent Kant's position was, and how crucial it is for us to recognize this ambivalence if we are to understand the critical philosophy properly. Wilson focuses on Kant's criticisms of Leibniz's notion of confused perception. She maintains that it is by no means clear that Leibniz saw concepts and perceptions as differing only in degree (the former being 'distinct', the latter 'confused'), and that it is paradoxical to accuse him of failing to distinguish phenomena and noumena - although some of his followers were indeed guilty of such confusions. In his later writings, Kant acknowledged the possibility of a

Introduction

ix

Platonic interpretation of Leibniz, in which phenomena and noumena are sharply distinguished; and Wilson suggests that Kant himself was troubled by the claims of noumena to be over or behind the appearances in some way. In 'Thought and Sensibility in Leibniz, Kant and Bradley', Guy Stock starts out from Whitehead's dictum that 'Kant, in his final metaphysics, must either retreat to Leibniz, or advance to Bradley'. He concentrates on the connected problems of the relation between thought and individual reality, and of the distinction between the actual and the merely possible. Leibniz resolved the former through his privative account of sensibility and his doctrine of the individual as an infima species, but he failed to distinguish adequately between the actual and merely possible worlds. Kant, on the other hand, made a sharp separation between thought and sensibility, and maintained that the actual world is the one which is given in empirical intuition. Bradley rejected both Leibniz's account of sensibility, and Kant's epistemological dualism, together with the consequential doctrine of the thing-in-itself. However, the resultant metaphysical system was closer to Leibniz's than to Kant's. Peter Lewis's paper, '"Original Nonsense": Art and Genius in Kant's Aesthetic', aims to identify what Kant means by 'original nonsense' in the context of his discussion of art and genius in The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Lewis argues that Kant's great insight is that works of artistic genius, in virtue of being original and exemplary, are essentially embedded in traditions constituted by works of art. Works of genius provide rules to be followed in the work of non-genius, and set standards of excellence for the work of future genius. In the course of the paper, Lewis draws attention to significant similarities between the views of Kant and Wittgenstein on genius and taste in art.

x

Introduction

The remainder of the papers in the volume are concerned more historically with Kant's direct influence on subsequent thinkers in various disciplines and countries first, with his early influence in Germany. Eckart Forster is currently preparing an English edition of Kant's Opus postumum, a much-neglected work in which Kant deals with the transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics. In 'Fichte, Beck and Schelling in Kant's Opus postumum\ Forster describes the aim and content of the work, and argues that it constitutes a significant revision of Kant's critical position. In the Opus postumum there are references to Fichte, Beck and Schelling, who were all followers of Kant. Some scholars have claimed that the changes in Kant's position were due to their influence. After examining the evidence, Forster concludes that Kant may have been influenced by Schelling and Beck (though not by Fichte), but that his thoughts were in any case going in much the same direction as theirs. In his paper, 'Imagination as a Connecting Middle in Schelling's Reconstruction of Kant', John Llewelyn concentrates on Schelling's development of the Kantian concept of imagination as the 'connecting middle' between theory and practice. After describing Kant's account of imagination, Llewelyn analyses the difference made to Kant's critical idealism by Schelling's claim that we have non-discursive intellectual constructive intuition as well as empirical intuition. The focus shifts from the relationship between philosophy and mathematics to that between philosophy and art; and Schelling is seen as the connecting middle between Kant and Heidegger. To turn to Britain, it is remarkable how small a role Kant's thought has played in the intellectual life of the English-speaking philosophical world. The last three papers tell part of the story of this neglect.

Introduction

xi

However, any discussion of the history of philosophical thought in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain needs to preserve a sharp distinction between England and Scotland. In England, philosophy was virtually extinct as an academic discipline, returning only gradually during the second half of the nineteenth century. Such philosophical debate as there was existed largely outside the university world, in literary clubs and journals. In Scotland, by contrast, philosophical discussion among the educated laity was underpinned by a university curriculum which had philosophy at its very core (see Davie, The Democratic Intellect). In his exhaustive study, 'The Early Reception of Kant's Thought in England 1785-1805', Giuseppe Micheli has had to rely mainly on reviews and articles in literary journals, and the few translations and commentaries that appeared between those years. The picture he paints is a bleak one indeed: there was little interest in Kant's philosophy, and even less understanding of his central ideas. He was perceived mainly as a political writer, and a subversive one at that - encouraging his followers to reject the established political order, religious belief, and moral values. By the turn of the century increasing repression, and censorship of ideas emanating from the Continent, put a virtual stop to the study of Kant's work. With the exception of Coleridge, Kant remained a closed book to English thinkers until the 1830s. As for the early reception of Kant in Scotland, Manfred Kuehn, in his 'Hamilton's Reading of Kant: A Chapter in the Early Scottish Reception of Kant's Thought', shows that, despite the widespread interest in metaphysics, Kant's ideas were at first understood hardly any better than they were in England. The conventional wisdom is that Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856) was the earliest Scottish philosopher to be substantially

xii

Introduction

influenced by Kant. Kuehn argues that, although Hamilton had an intimate knowledge of Kant's texts, he was in fact quite hostile to his ideas, and much less influenced by him than has generally been supposed. Finally, in his paper 'Aspects of Kant's Influence on British Theology', Donald MacKinnon stresses that the pivot of Kant's influence lies in his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason. He criticizes the view of Kant as the 'philosopher of Protestantism', and he displays his influence on a wide range of British theologians from different denominations. MacKinnon concludes that Kant's influence did not take the form of slavish imitation, but of conversion of his insights to uses he could not have foreseen, and of which he might not have approved. The papers in this volume give only a taste of Kant's range of interests and of his influence. There is ample scope for a series of conferences and accompanying volumes covering his influence at different periods, in different countries, and in different disciplines. In particular, there is the issue of the revival of interest in his philosophy in Britain in the 1830s, and the subsequent decline in any fundamental influence of his thought during the twentieth century. This raises the question of whether Kant's philosophy deserves to be more influential. The Europe of 1989 shared with the Europe of 1789 the distinction of heralding a new political order. The year 1989 was one of progressive and democratically orientated revolution, and the influence of German culture is an issue for us in the latter part of the twentieth century as it was an issue in the latter part of the eighteenth. What Kant offers is the prospect of a worldview which portrays the ethical as fundamental to politics; and he provides an account of human nature

Introduction

xiii

which at least makes possible an ethical commonwealth. These concerns are relevant not merely to the politics of the late twentieth century, but to political theory in general. Kant's thesis that human nature is so constituted that an ethical commonwealth is possible is itself grounded on metaphysics. He sought to produce a Weltanschauung in which 'epistemology is logically prior to ethics in that it must prepare the ground for a philosophically defensible ethics, but [in which] ethics itself is practically prior to epistemology, because the development of an adequate epistemology is a task set by the highest good' (Van der Linden, p. 10). For Kant, epistemology and ethics, or more generally philosophical theory and praxis, are inextricably intertwined. It has long been fashionable for intellectuals in the British tradition to hold what one can call a modest view of philosophy. Integral to this view is the idea that, while once all knowledge was the province of philosophy, the history of its subsequent development is a history of subjects emancipating themselves from their parent disciplines. Ever greater specialization and ever greater expertise is required for work at the frontiers of knowledge. The modest view has it that, as subjects split from philosophy, as they develop their own methods, and as the knowledge-base becomes ever greater, so the field for philosophy contracts and becomes more focused. Some have felt that the philosophical residuum for the twentieth century has been the analysis of linguistic expressions, while others have gone so far as to maintain that linguistic analysis can itself be hived off, so that nothing remains for the philosophers to study other than the thesis that philosophers have nothing to study. If such conceptions of philosophy were to remain ascendant, then there would be no serious future for the subject.

xiv

Introduction

There is, however, a brighter prospect. While it is true that the knowledge industry grows ever more voluminous, it is also true that we have become ever more conscious of the limitations which the fragmentation of knowledge has engendered. Often the most exciting work, the search for solutions to pressing theoretical and practical problems, involves thinking at the frontier between two or more disciplines. What is needed is just the sort of overview of a whole problem area which philosophers have traditionally sought to attain. Reflection on the limitations of the methods used to acquire knowledge in particular disciplines can make us humble about the attainability of absolute truth; but it can also make us realize the importance of approaching problems from a different direction, or of setting up new forms of enquiry. Prominent English-speaking philosophers have maintained that philosophy provides no answers: but to adopt this as a motto for general philosophical practice is a recipe for the long-term decay of philosophy. It is entirely reasonable for the public to ask what sorts of problems a philosophical training enables one to tackle. We should not be seduced by the frequent demand for yes-or-no answers where these are inappropriate; but we must be willing at least to say what kinds of judgement are cultivated by a philosophical training. If we believe that the philosopher's judgement is more widely informed, more objective, based on sounder reasoning, and less bound by the presuppositions of particular disciplines than that of the non-philosopher, then we must emphasize that philosophy is not just a pleasant, abstract pastime, but a practical and useful activity, the diminution or absence of which would impoverish society in multifarious ways. The claim that philosophy must be practical as well as

Introduction

xv

theoretical is a thoroughly Kantian ideal; and it is testimony to the limited influence Kant has had in Britain that it should still be necessary to plead the case. If the case is accepted, it follows that philosophy should play a far more central role in the educational curriculum - a role it used to play in Scotland, and which it still plays in most of the continent of Europe. Kant himself regarded the whole of human knowledge as the province of the philosopher, and in presenting this book we hope to do something to rehabilitate the view that philosophers should be concerned with the full range of intellectual and practical problems facing mankind. His life's work is not simply an episode in the history of philosophy, but a rich resource from which we can derive inspiration for the future development of philosophy as an academic discipline.

Bibliography Davie, George E., The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 1961). Van der Linden, Harry, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1988).

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'OUGHT' IMPLIES 'CAN': KANT AND LUTHER, A CONTRAST Roger M. White

The aim of this essay is to examine a central idea of Kant's moral philosophy by setting it in the context of a radically opposed set of ideas - the ideas which inform the thinking of Martin Luther; in particular, the early Luther of The Disputation against Scholastic Theology and The Heidelberg Disputation, together with the positions that he develops in the famous controversy with Erasmus. For, if the idea that 'Ought' implies 'Can' (that we may infer from the fact that we ought to do something that we are able to do it) has central structural significance in Kant's whole moral thought, the directly opposed idea a Debere ad Posse non valet consequentia is equally fundamental in Luther's thought. How far, in doing this, I am setting Kant in a historical context is impossible to determine. For in those places where one would most naturally look for a discussion of Luther - Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and The Dispute of the Faculties - Luther is not explicitly referred to, and even if that which Kant calls 'ecclesiastical faith' has distinctly Lutheran features at many points, its named representatives - above all, Spener and others from the Lutheran pietist tradition 1

2

Kant and His Influence

are closer to Kant than to Luther on many of the key issues that confront us here. Given the sheer extent of Kant's writings, I cannot say for certain that he never explicitly discusses Luther, or even that he was conscious of Luther's theological positions other than through the frequently distorting glass of pietism. But, in view of Kant's religious background and upbringing, he must clearly have been familiar, if not with Luther's own writings, at least with texts such as the Heidelberg Catechism with its formative influence on the pietist movement, and therefore, it seems, would have to be conscious of the extent to which he was putting forward positions that were in direct conflict with the theologians of the classical Reformation. For instance, in the Heidelberg Catechism we find: Question 8: Are we then so depraved that we are utterly incapable of performing any good work and are inclined to all that is evil? Yes: unless it be that we are born again by the spirit of God. Question 9: Does not God then act unfairly by man, in that in His law He requires of him what he cannot perform? No: for God has so created man that he is capable of performing the good; but, by the instigation of the devil and through wilful disobedience, man has deprived himself and all his posterity of these gifts. This gives a clear statement of the complex of ideas to which Kant is reacting in works such as The Dispute of the Faculties and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. But when Kant arraigns ecclesiastical faith before the bar of reason, he does not cite the figures of the classical Reformation, not even Ursinus and Olevianus

'Ought' implies 'Can': Kant and Luther

3

let alone Luther himself. The representatives of ecclesiastical faith come from a generation later (Spener, Franck and Count Zinzendorf). But despite their close historical proximity to the Reformation and, indeed, their working within a framework directly given to them by the Reformers, these authors seem to me already to share many assumptions with Kant which are not to be found in the Heidelberg Catechism and which would be explicitly rejected by Luther himself. As a result, in the confrontation between 'ecclesiastical faith' and 'moral religion', Kant has a surprisingly easy victory. If we wish to test Kant's conception, we must leave Kant's chosen battlefield and confront him with a wholly different range of issues from those we find within the confines of pietism. We shall then find many of the questions are far more subtle than they appear when we allow the terms of the debate to be dictated by the confrontation between Kant and Spener. The historical story leading from Luther to Kant is an enormously complicated one, and, as I have said, it is in any case impossible to determine how much of that story was known to Kant. A reading of his writings in the Philosophy of Religion suggests that it might in crucial respects have been quite sketchy. In any case, Kant was well aware of the extent to which his religious writings were sailing close to the wind with the ecclesiastical authorities, and trouble with the censors was a real difficulty he had to contend with: to criticize Luther directly, or to comment on the divergence between what Kant was himself saying and what Luther had said, might well have seemed needlessly provocative. What I propose in this paper is a direct confrontation between Kant's key positions and the antithetical positions argued for by Luther. This is not in a direct sense a historical confrontation, but an attempt at a

4


confrontation between two radically opposed conceptions of the good life. In an indirect sense this is a historical confrontation, since one of the results of such a confrontation is to highlight a series of assumptions which Kant makes, assumptions which appear selfevident to Kant only because of the particular moment in the history of thought within which he is writing, but the particular nature of which only emerges fully if you confront him with a thinker who is not working within the confines that Kant takes for granted. It is, perhaps, worth emphasizing finally that whatever the precise historical relation of Kant to Luther, comparing him with Luther is the right kind of context in which to discuss his ethical thought. That is to say, despite Kant's theoretical agnosticism, it is clear not only that Kant's starting point is within the Christian tradition but also that the question of ethics remained for him a religious question. Kant would have understood what was meant if the question of ethics had been put in the form 'What shall I do to inherit eternal life?', in a way in which that question would be unintelligible to many of his twentieth-century followers.

I Although the slogan, in the form in which it is usually cited, 'Ought' implies 'Can\ does not seem to occur in Kant's writings, the idea is omnipresent in the ethical writings: most fundamentally and famously in Kant's proof of the existence of freedom. Here there is a clear progression, at least in Kant's presentation of his conception. In the first Critique, the concern is the negative one of showing that theoretical reason, with its insistence on complete causal determination within the world as phenomenon, was still incompetent to rule out the


5

possibility of a transcendental freedom. Then, in the Foundations, freedom is presented as one of the three Ideas which practical reason must postulate in making sense of Man's moral endeavour. But in the second Critique, Kant marks off freedom from the other two Ideas God and immortality - as the only one which is known to have application, morality having become not merely a reason for adopting an 'as if hypothesis of freedom, but the ratio cognoscendi of freedom (second Critique, p. 119). (All citations, where appropriate, refer to Lewis White Beck's translation of the second Critique and other ethical writings of Kant.) It is, however, in the first Critique that Kant's argument is first adumbrated where, for example, we find that, in commenting on the third Antinomy, he writes: practical freedom presupposes that although something has not happened, it ought to have happened, and that its cause, as found in the field of appearance, is not, therefore, so determining that it excludes a causality of our will . . . (first Critique, A 534). and, most explicitly, in the Canon of Pure Reason: since reason commands that such actions should take place, it must be possible for them to take place. Consequently, a special kind of systematic unity, namely the moral, must likewise be possible, (first Critique, A 807) In the second Critique, the argument is illustrated as follows: Suppose that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passion if, in front of the house where he has this opportunity, a

6


gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust. We do not have to guess very long what his answer would be. But ask him whether he thinks it would be possible for him to overcome his love of life, however great it may be, if his sovereign threatened him with the same sudden death unless he made a false deposition against an honourable man whom the ruler wished to destroy under a plausible pretext. Whether he would or not he perhaps will not venture to say; but that it would be possible for him he would certainly admit without hesitation. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he knows he ought, and he recognizes that he is free - a fact which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him (p. 141f). Taken in isolation, this last passage could be misleading, suggesting some kind of argument from moral experience, an argument that depended upon the empirical phenomena of choice, decision-making and conscience. But that would be to mistake Kant's intentions completely, in a number of respects. (1) For Kant, all empirical phenomena are, as such, susceptible to full deterministic explanations, and that will include all the phenomena of willing and deciding. (2) Any argument which took as its starting point the empirical phenomena of willing could only have as its conclusion empirical freedom, whereas Kant wishes to establish the existence of transcendental freedom - a freedom in which I am the ultimate origin of my action. Kant's fundamental position here is, 'it is useless to endeavour to prove transcendental propositions by examples' (first Critique, A 554).


7

(3) Kant, at a number of points, explicitly reckons with the case where I indeed find within myself no capacity to obey the categorical imperative, and yet, in that I still say that I ought to do so, I ipso facto acknowledge that I am able to. (See, for instance, the way Kant treats the example of a malicious lie in the first Critique, A 554ff and, in particular, 'When we say that in spite of his whole previous course of life the agent could have refrained from lying, this only means that the act is under the immediate power of reason, and that reason in its causality is not subject to any conditions of appearance or of time', or, most clearly, where Kant discusses Man as fallen Man in Religion 'Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Bk. I, General Observation. How it is possible for a naturally evil man to make himself a good man wholly surpasses our comprehension . . . despite the fall the injunction that we ought to become better men resounds unabatedly in our souls; hence this must be within our power. . . . But does not this restoration through one's own exertions directly contradict the postulate of the innate corruption of man which unfits him for all good? Yes, to be sure, as far as the conceivability, i.e., our insight into the possibility, of such a restoration is concerned. . . . For when the moral law commands that we ought to be better men, it follows inevitably that we must be able to be better men. In this discussion, it becomes clear that Kant holds that 'Ought' implies 'Can' establishes human freedom to obey the moral law, even where empirically we detect no capacity to do so.) (4) Kant intends his proof of freedom to be valid for

8


all rational agents, qua rational agents, not merely for Man. So that, even if Man is the only rational agent we encounter, we are still to regard this proof as one that would be valid for any other rational agent, if there were such. As such, the proof is intended as one which derives its validity purely from an examination of the notion of a rational agent, without reference to particular facts of human nature or experience. The proof must be understood in the following way: We know that we ought to act in certain ways, act on some maxims rather than others. What is more, we know that this is so even when we do not behave in those ways. This premise is to be regarded as established not on the basis of a supposed moral sense or conscience, at least as popularly understood. We know this on the basis of reason alone: our reason itself inexorably proposes to us a course of action as the right one for us to follow. If something ought to happen, then it must be possible for it to happen. Therefore, we must be free to follow the dictates of reason. The general picture Kant is trying to present here is clear, even if the notion of transcendental freedom is fraught with paradox and difficulty: considered as an empirical being, I must be regarded as subject to the conditions of space and time, and, as such, my actions, as phenomenal actions, susceptible to full causal explanation within the phenomenal world. There will be nothing I do, think or feel, no decision I make, that cannot, in principle, be causally explained in terms of my earlier history. From this point of view, I must be regarded purely as the slave of my environment, nature and passions. However, in addition to considering myself as


9

an empirical being - that is to say an object of empirical observation, of scientific study - I have to regard myself as an agent, confronted by decisions to be made. I have to decide what to do. As an agent, deciding what to do, I am aware not only of what I am inclined to do, but also of what my reason tells me I ought to do. Since that is so, it is possible for me to follow not the inclinations of my nature, but the dictates of my reason. I am capable of an act of self-transcendence, in which I translate myself into a supersensible realm and become the ultimate author of what I do. A. Although Kant was of course aware of the difficulties that beset this picture, it is not clear whether he fully realized how close to complete incoherence it is. The central difficulty is that the action that morality dictates will be an action within the phenomenal world. If I do something, whether or not I do it because I ought to do it, that will be an empirical event: so that even when I do my duty, on Kant's own terms, what I do will still be susceptible to a full causal explanation. Kant writes: Inasmuch as it (the acting subject) is noumenon, nothing happens in it; there can be no change requiring dynamical determination in time, and therefore no causal dependence upon appearances. And consequently, since natural necessity is to be met with only in the sensible world, this active being must be independent of, and free from all such necessity. No action begins in this active being itself; but yet we may quite correctly say that the active being of itself begins its effects in the sensible world (first Critique, A 541). This serves to bring out the difficulty, rather than to alleviate it. It may well be that this 'positive' use of the concept of the noumenon is the unhappiest aspect of

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Kant's development of transcendental idealism: it always seems to place an intolerable strain upon the tenability of his contrast between the phenomenal and noumenal, rather than rendering intelligible his concept of man as a free agent. Kant's own attitude to these difficulties was twofold: (1) We are here within the sphere of practical reason, concerned with the question, 'What ought I to do?' To that extent, for Kant, the theoretical question, 'Do I know that I am free?' was less important than the practical question, 'Ought I to regard myself as free?' Here, the crucial idea would be the idea that if I regard myself as unfree, as not ultimately responsible for my actions, this would threaten to expose morality itself as an illusion. Since, therefore, the moral precept is at the same time my maxim (reason prescribing that it should be so) I inevitably believe in the existence of God and in a future life, and I am certain that nothing can shake this belief, since my moral principles would thereby be themselves overthrown, and I cannot disclaim them without becoming abhorrent in my own eyes (first Critique, A 828). What Kant says here about God and immortality will clearly, a fortiori, apply to the third, and most fundamental, postulate of Practical Reason. From this point of view, the important point was not so much proving that we are free, as establishing the possibility of believing ourselves to be so. Knowledge is to be removed so as to create a space for faith. From this standpoint, even if we could not form to ourselves a clear picture of human freedom, that would not matter if we could establish the bare possibility of our being so, without any precise knowledge of how we are so.


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(2) However, as Kant's thought progresses, he does not content himself with thinking of freedom as no more than a postulate of Practical Reason. Morality becomes the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. Whereas we do not know there to be a God, or that we are immortal, Kant claims that we know we are free: the basis for this knowledge being the proof with which we are concerned. Here, even if we find it impossible to form for ourselves an adequate conception of what it is like for us to be free, if the argument for freedom is valid, then we can know that we are free, even without a coherent account of how we are free. Is our knowledge really widened in such a way by pure practical reason, and is that which was transcendent for speculative reason immanent in practical reason? Certainly, but only from a practical point of view. . . . But how freedom is possible, and how we should think theoretically and positively of this type of causality, is not thereby discovered. All that is comprehended is that such a causality is postulated through the moral law and for its sake. It is the same with the remaining ideas, whose possibility cannot be fathomed by human understanding, though no sophistry will ever wrest from the conviction of even the most ordinary man an admission that they are not true (second Critique, p. 216). B. A few comments about the concept of freedom at stake are in order here. First, there is a minor inconsistency in Kant's way of speaking: am I only free when I obey the categorical imperative, or am I always free to obey the categorical imperative? And, if I do not but succumb to my inclinations, do I freely do wrong - so that I can be justly censured for so doing? This seems

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largely a terminological matter, but Kant's preferred terminology here is undoubtedly to think of the free man as the man who is acting morally. On this use of the concept, freedom is not to be thought of primarily as the ability to do otherwise but as freedom stemming from the fact that I myself am the author of the principles of my action. Moral freedom is a freedom under law, but the moral law is one 'in whose service is perfect liberty'. The main point here is that, for Kant, completely arbitrary, random action is a nonsense notion: all action is explicable, is action for a reason. Where it is correct to describe someone as acting, it is always appropriate to ask why they did what they did. The difference between free action and unfree action is not that the former is lawless and the latter bounded by causal law, but that the laws to which my free action conforms have been proposed by me myself. I am capable of escaping the tyranny of my inclinations, and animal instincts, because my reason itself proposes to me laws to which I may subject myself: I am the author of the laws of my own action. As free, I am still subject to law, but / subject myself to the law which my own reason commends to me. It is, finally, worth mentioning explicitly that it is part of Kant's conception that although I can know, can indeed know a priori, that I am free, I can never know whether I have, on a particular occasion, acted freely, acted not merely in conformity with the moral law but acted in that way because doing so was acting in conformity with the moral law. This is not merely because of the treachery of the human heart, the endless possibilities of self-deception, but precisely because the freedom at stake is transcendental freedom, concerning the 'intelligible character' of our action, which, as such, is not an object of empirical observation:


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The real morality of our actions, their merit or guilt, even that of our own conduct, thus remains entirely hidden from us. Our imputations can refer only to the empirical character. How much of this character is ascribable to the pure effect of freedom, how much to mere nature, that is, to faults of temperament for which there is no responsibility, or to its happy constitution (merito fortunae), can never be determined; and upon it therefore no perfectly just judgments can be passed (first Critique, A 551). Thus I can know that I am a free agent, I can know what constitutes acting freely, but never know whether I am, in fact, acting freely (or, indeed have ever done so). C. In the light of all I have said so far, it is clear that the crucial step in Kant's argument for freedom is the principle ''Ought' implies 'Can\ Despite an initial, intuitive plausibility which this principle undoubtedly has for us, it turns out to be remarkably difficult to see what in the end it amounts to, or why Kant holds it true: (1) It does not seem to be self-evident, and does indeed fly in the face of a great deal that we also wish to say in concrete moral debate: it, in part, gains its initial plausibility from leading us to think of certain aspects of our moral thinking at the expense of others. (2) Despite this, Kant never gives a detailed defence of the principle. He does, indeed, make several scattered remarks that lend support to it, but these invariably turn out to be suggestive rather than a properly worked out defence. Kant at most can be said to sketch out lines along which a defence of the principle is to be sought. (3) The different things that are said in support of the

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principle by no means amount to the same thing. I will spend the next section of this paper assembling the different defences which may be found at different points in Kant's ethical writings. The main point to stress here is the extreme variety of these defences. What is more, these different defences seem frequently to lead to very different ways of regarding Kant's claim, to very different interpretations of it. The main difficulty here stems from the bewildering variety of ways we may use the key words 'ought' and 'can'. In particular the language of human ability is extremely ill-explored and ill-understood territory. What I will have in mind when I say that someone can or cannot do something, will vary enormously from context to context. At one extreme, we have cases in which we say 'A can \ meaning thereby that the description 'A is -ing^ is logically possible, or that A is the kind of being which it makes sense to describe as -ing, and, at the other, cases in which I say I cannot do something, meaning thereby that I am inhibited in such a way that I find it emotionally impossible to bring myself to do it (shyness, fear of authority, etc.), with a huge range of very different cases between these extremes. It should also be remarked that what may be described as the logic of ability is opaque and not well understood: ordinarily self-evident principles of modal logic turn out to be treacherous here. Thus, it is true to say of me that I cannot throw a dart at a dartboard and hit the bull's eye: I lack the relevant skill. Nevertheless, I may throw the dart and by chance, or luck, it lands in the bull's eye. So that in many uses of 'I can <j>\ it does not follow from the fact that I have -ed, that I could have 4>-ed. Luther is characteristically more careful than Kant in attempting to bring out how his denial of 'Ought' implies


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'Can' is to be understood. It is worth stressing before going any further, something which Luther stresses against Erasmus: even if he wishes to insist on a human inability to obey the Law of God, this must not be taken as though God were commanding things which it would be absurd to imagine a man actually doing: God's Law is addressed to men, and not to stones or geese, and what is commanded is to that extent a genuine human possibility: the idea of someone actually obeying God's Law is a perfectly intelligible idea. It is not as though Man is being commanded to fly or carry a ten-ton weight. Perhaps the best way to bring out the dominant use of 'can' in this controversy is to use a gloss that Kant sometimes adopts - 'is a possible subject of a command': so that I may, or may not, like someone else, but if there is someone I dislike, a command for me to like them would for Kant be pointless and void of significance, Prima facie at least, if I don't like them there may well be nothing I can do about it: certainly, even if there are steps I may take of an indirect nature - trying to view them in a favourable light, for instance - 1 cannot directly obey the command 'Like X\ Liking X is not the kind of thing that I can do, simply at will; and, to that extent it is something which 'cannot be commanded'. This explanation by no means fits everything that Kant says in this connection, but it may serve as an introduction to an understanding of what he is trying to say. There is, however, one interpretative principle that we may clearly adopt in making sense of the apparent uncontrolled variety of Kant's detailed remarks here: any interpretation of what Kant means by 'Ought' implies 'Can' must bear in mind the conclusion that is drawn from this principle: that is to say, it must clearly yield a sense of 'can' that is strong enough to support the conclusion that man is transcendentally free.

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II How, then, did Kant understand the principle, and how did he seek to justify it? The trouble in interpretation here is twofold: the great variety in the remarks Kant makes in this connection, and the brevity of those remarks. Rather than force them into a single uniform account, which is, I suspect, in any case impossible, I shall examine in turn the different defences which are to be found scattered throughout Kant's writings. But first I shall look at a defence of the principle which cannot in any direct way be Kant's own, but that was crucial in the debate between Luther and Erasmus. Although there are clear reasons why Erasmus' objection to Luther cannot be Kant's thought, it is, I believe, in the end a secularized version of what Erasmus is urging against Luther that may well form the real basis for Kant's insistence that 'Ought' implies 'Can'. If the particular remarks Kant offers in support of the principle turn out to be inconclusive, it may be that the real reason for his passionate insistence on it is that his belief is sustained by ideas derived from Erasmus' argument, even if the context of Kant's thought is one in which this argument strictly has no place. A. The debate between Luther and Erasmus was of course not a debate in moral philosophy, but a theological debate. When the question, whether it was possible for man to obey the law, was raised, the law at stake was the law of God. Because of this, the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can' has a particular purchase that it cannot have within Kant. Luther's opponents, both the scholastic authors like Gabriel Biel, whom he was reacting against, and writers like Erasmus, who were reacting against him, were concerned with the picture of God that


17

seemed to emerge if you denied that 'Ought' implies 'Can'. It is in their writings that the Kantian principle may well emerge explicitly for the first time. The issue here is simple: if you deny 'Ought' implies 'Can', can God be just? A Being who enacted laws for his subjects which it was impossible for them to obey, and then punished them for disobedience, would be a monster. The world would then be like a dictatorship in the hands of a capricious tyrant who deliberately frames the laws of the land in such a way that everyone is guilty of breaking the law, so that it is impossible to be a law-abiding citizen. He could then punish whom he chose, and reward whom he chose, purely according to his whim. Such a land would have the form of law, but not the reality: if a master were to free a slave who had merited nothing, he might have reason perhaps to say to the other servants who murmured against him 'You are no worse off if I am kinder to this one; you have your due'. But anyone would deem a master cruel and unjust who flogged his slave to death because his body was too short or his nose too long or because of some other inelegance in his form. Would not the slave rightly call out 'Why am I punished for what I cannot help?' and he would say this with more justice if it were in the master's power to alter the bodily blemish of his slave, as it is in the power of God to change our will, or if the lord had himself given the slave this deformity which had offended, as for example by cutting off his nose or making his face hideous with scars. In this same way God, in the view of some, works even evil in us. Again, as concerns the precepts, if a lord were constantly to order a slave who was bound by the feet in a treadmill, 'Go there, do that, run, come back', with frightful threats if he disobeyed

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and did not meanwhile release him, and even made ready the lash if he disobeyed, would not the slave rightly call the master either mad or cruel who beat a man to death for not doing what he was unable to do? and: Furthermore, when God burdens man with so many commandments that serve for no other purpose than to make him hate God more and be more terribly damned, do not they make him worse than the tyrant Dionysius of Sicily, who deliberately made many laws that he suspected the majority would not keep in the absence of restraint, and at first took no notice, and then when he saw that everybody was breaking them, he began to summons them to punishment, in this way bringing everyone into his power (Erasmus, Diatribe, Epilogue). The basis for the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can' is easy to understand here: it is a matter of theodicy. If God is conceived as both the lawgiver, and the one who punishes if the law is disobeyed, then he becomes an insane and capricious monster, if it is thought that the laws he enacts are ones which it is impossible for Man to obey. But, at least in any straightforward way, this simple train of thought cannot be Kant's: for Kant, God is not the author of the moral law, nor are we to obey it out of fear of punishment by God. We ourselves are the authors of the moral law; it is our own reason that commands us to obey it. The framework within which Erasmus' arguments have immediate purchase would be, for Kant, a purely heteronomic framework, and as such the antithesis of true morality. Without a divine Lawmaker and Judge, no issue of the


19

justice of God can arise, so that the train of thought we find here can at most be considered as a remote ancestor of the ideas that we find in Kant. Yet, this train of thought seems to me to be far from irrelevant to an understanding of Kant. At some level, ways of thinking about morality that only made immediate sense within the context within which Erasmus and Luther were disputing, continue to inform Kant's whole conception of morality. And, at the end of this paper, I shall return to this first defence of 'Ought' implies 'Can', which at least has the merit of being a clear defence. B. In the first Critique, when Kant first adumbrates the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can', he writes: 'Ought' expresses a kind of necessity and of connection with grounds which is found nowhere else in the whole of nature. The understanding can know in nature only what is, what has been, or what will be. We cannot say that anything in nature ought to be other than what in all these time relations it actually is. When we have the course of nature alone in view 'ought' has no meaning whatsoever. It is as absurd to ask what ought to happen in the natural world as to ask what properties a circle ought to have. All that we are justified in asking is: what happens in nature? What are the properties of a circle? (first Critique, A 547). If we regard this preliminary introduction of the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can' as also an attempted justification of it, what it amounts to is obscure. Kant is claiming that where we regard things as necessarily the way they are, it is meaningless to say that they ought to be otherwise. But this is infected with all the ambiguity that I have already noted surrounding the words 'ought' and

20


'necessarily'. On several understandings of the words, this is simply untrue. A doctor may certainly point to a diseased or deformed organ and describe how it ought to be - and so, indeed, with a deformed animal or plant without claiming that there is any real possibility of ever curing or rectifying the deformity. A dog handler may have clear views as to how his dogs ought to behave and train them so to do, without his activity only making sense if he supposes his dogs to be free. Equally, I may have in mind goals that I want to achieve in this paper and, as a result, clear views as to how it ought to be. If I am then guided by these goals in constructing the paper, success is certainly not guaranteed a priori. The fact that I hold that the paper ought to be a certain way - even justly hold it ought to be that way - in no way implies it is necessarily within my power to produce a paper of the required sort, that I can produce such a paper. The most that can be said on the basis of the alleged meaninglessness of asking what the properties of a circle ought to be, is that if we say things ought to be thus and so, we are implying the logical possibility of their being so. But it is a huge step from there to what Kant requires - that there must be a real possibility of bringing the desired goal about. Hence, Kant must be taken to be making a claim that attaches peculiarly to the moral sense of 'ought': but, to that extent, I do not think this preliminary observation can, in its generality, offer any justification for the claim, and, at most, it only serves to introduce it. C. The other support for the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can', to be found in the first Critique rests on a contrast between a categorical imperative and a hypothetical one. This, unlike the first passage, is unequivocally intended


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as a justification of the principle, and one which, moreover, explicitly ties the principle to the moral 'ought': I assume that there really are pure moral laws which determine completely a priori (without regard to empirical motives, that is, to happiness) what is and what is not to be done, that is, which determine the employment of freedom of a rational being in general; and that these laws command in an absolute manner (not merely hypothetically, on the supposition of other empirical ends), and are therefore in every respect necessary (first Critique, A 807). Clearly, the contrast between a categorical imperative and a hypothetical imperative (together with the related notion of a rule of prudence or happiness) is fundamental to Kant's whole presentation of his moral philosophy, and, at a number of points, he will claim that as a consequence of the contrast, whereas it will not always be possible to implement a rule of prudence or to follow the path which leads to happiness, we can always obey the categorical imperative. This claim seems to have two different sources, one of which I will examine later but now I will concentrate on what is perhaps the more natural reading: does the fact that a law is to be regarded as unconditionally binding, of itself imply that it must necessarily be possible to obey it? As it stands, it looks as if Kant is guilty of confusion here, of running together different ways in which a command could be 'absolutely binding'. Suppose I make a promise to you, which I subsequently fail to keep; there are a number of possibilities here, e.g. (1)1 make the promise, because I want your good will,

22


or friendship. Later, under altered circumstances, these, no longer matter to me, so I disregard the promise. (2) I make the promise, but fail to foresee the disastrous consequences of keeping it. When these become clear, I break the promise. (3) I make the promise. Circumstances that I could not have foreseen, and wholly beyond my control, make it impossible to do what I said. We may assume here that, in each case, at the time at which I make the promise, I fully intend to do what I say: it is because of subsequent, unforeseeable changes in circumstances that I do not do what I said. The main point to stress here is that these are three very different cases, and that Kant, by his uses of the notions of absolutely or unconditionally binding, tends to assimilate them, ignoring morally relevant considerations: (1) Here Kant would say I am treating a categorical imperative as if it were hypothetical: this is not quite right, but it is near enough. (I do not do the thing, in order to keep your friendship: I still do it, because I have promised you. It is rather, that in the case envisaged, when your friendship ceased to matter to me, the fact that I have promised ceased to serve as a reason for me. But this is a very fine distinction.) This is the case where Kant is clearly right to maintain that, if I regard the promise as morally binding, I ought to regard breaking the promise as ruled out. (2) I do not wish to dispute this second case with Kant at this stage, beyond commenting on the fact that it is the kind of case where Kant's 'rigorism' continually leads him to maintain quite preposterous positions.


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Suppose I promise to meet you at a certain time 'without fail'. As I am setting out someone has a heart attack, necessitating urgent medical attention. The meeting, although of some importance to you, is scarcely a matter of life or death. I consequently skip the meeting, ensuring instead that the appropriate assistance is given to the victim of the heart attack, 'knowing you will understand'. To do otherwise here strikes me as a form of insanity, part of what led Freud to dismiss Kant's conception of the categorical imperative as not genuine, but taboo, morality. But, for Kant, 'knowing you will understand' is neither here nor there - my obligation is not to you, but to the promise. What is of immediate concern to me is that this is already a very different case from (1). In no sense whatsoever am I treating a categorical imperative as if it were hypothetical - in Kant's sense of a hypothetical imperative. The fact that I behave in the way envisaged in no way shows that if the unforeseen accident had not occurred and I had kept the promise, I would only have kept the promise to secure some desirable end. But, even so, in (2) as in (1), rightly or wrongly, I may be said to have bargained the rigour out of the promise. So that, even if in very different ways, I have treated a promise as not unconditionally binding. (3) I promise to intervene on your behalf; before I have a chance to do so, and in a way that I could not have envisaged, I lose the status that would enable me to intervene. This case is completely different from (1) and from (2) above. Here, in no sense whatsoever, need I cease to regard the promise as unconditionally binding: if the promise is overridden by events, I have no part in the overriding. The only blame that could

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Kant and His Influence conceivably be attached to me would be one of rashness in making the promise, and, clearly, if I knew my position to be precarious, you might justly censure me for promising, thereby entitling you to rely on my promise. But, it need not be like that. I might have every reason to suppose that keeping the promise will be unproblematic, and yet. . . . If it were then said, you ought only to make promises in circumstances in which you can absolutely guarantee delivery, then given our limited control on the future, that is tantamount to abandoning the practice of promising. Every promise to <j> is to be taken, and will naturally be taken, as a commitment, if at all possible, to . Now, does this make the practice of promising conditional, so that there is no absolute obligation to keep a promise? Not at all: it certainly does not, as Kant sometimes seems to think, convert the imperative to keep the promise into a hypothetical one. The difference between the hypothetical and the categorical imperative is that, in the former case, a condition has to be satisfied before the imperative comes into force. Here, the imperative to keep your promise, if at all possible is and remains unconditionally binding. Kant may simply be guilty here of confusing two different logical forms, represented by the same surface grammatical structure:

If P, 0! might mean, either, as in the hypothetical imperative, that a certain condition had to be satisfied, before any imperative came into force, or, that what was (unconditionally) commanded was, 'If p, 4>V.


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But, and this is the point, it is only if one runs together these three very different cases, (l)-(3), that considerations of the unconditional validity of the moral law lend any support to the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can'. Only if the thought, that we should regard the demands our reason makes of us as unconditionally binding, leads to the idea that our reason may not demand of us something that turns out to be impossible to do, may we infer from the fact that there is a categorical imperative, that it must be possible to carry it out. There is perhaps here the further thought that if I am really unable to execute a demand my reason makes of me, then I cannot be blamed for failure: but that thought is powerless to prove the existence of freedom. It is at this point that the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can' threatens to become utterly empty, as follows: Suppose I were to say: when you are (morally) commanded to 0, the most that can be expected of you is that you do all that is in your power to <j>, and if you do

that you will be morally blameless. Hence, from a moral point of view, the commands, '0!', and, 'Do all that is in your power to !', come to the same thing: so that not only do you necessarily do precisely the same thing in obeying the command, but you will be appraised as having obeyed or disobeyed the command, not according as you did, or did not, 0, but as you did, or did not, do all in your power to <j>. On this interpretation, moral commands can always be obeyed, it being the merest tautology that it is always in your power to do all in your power to do something. But on this, minimalist, interpretation of 'Ought' implies 'Can\ the principle is powerless to prove anything, let alone the idea that Man is transcendentally free. Kant's position is only to be rescued from complete vacuity at this point by his insistence that there is one

26


thing which is and remains necessarily under my control, namely good and bad willing, and that this must be simultaneously regarded as the true locus of human freedom and of moral appraisal. But that development lies ahead of us (see section E, below), and leads on to different aspects of Kant's thought from any which can be derived from a simple reflection on the difference between the categorical and hypothetical imperative: in itself, that difference is powerless to give Kant what he wants. D. There is a strand in Kant that suggests that the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can' follows from the fact that the moral law consists in commands: that what can be commanded, must be possible. This strand has been followed up by Professor Hare in Freedom and Reason, Chapter 4. Hare's discussion turns out to be elusive, and often he seems to be saying: 'Ought' implies 'Can', except when it doesn't. It is 'ought' 'with its full force' which implies 'can'; but it is difficult to see what exactly this 'full force' is, other than that it is the force which attaches to it when it implies 'can'. (1) The crucial point here is that Hare is wishing to maintain that imperatives, as such, in some way imply the possibility of carrying them out: so that his considerations will apply as much to advice, or other non-moral imperatives, as to morality. For this reason alone, the considerations to be adduced here cannot be central to Kant's position, where he clearly wishes us to see his principle as saying something that has purchase for the categorical imperative, as opposed to other imperatives. (2) Hare's key point is the relation between ought and what he calls 'Practical questions' ('What am I to do?'):


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unless the practical question arises, the 'ought' question cannot arise, if 'ought' has its full force. . . . And the reason for this is that, when the word is being used in this way, its function is to offer help and guidance in answering this practical question . . . and so, naturally, there is no point in asking the 'ought' question when the practical question does not arise {Freedom and Reason, p. 36). (3) Of course, if the considerations Hare wishes us to take into account derive from reflections on practical questions as such, they are bound to be impotent to establish Kant's principle 'Ought' implies 'Can': for such questions arise with respect to the phenomena of acting and deciding, and reflections upon such phenomena will from the very outset be incapable of settling the question whether Man is transcendentally free. On Kant's conception, the phenomena of acting, including choosing and deciding, will all be compatible with a thorough determinism: indeed, Kant himself accepts such a determinism with respect to them. The most that Hare's arguments could establish would be the empirical phenomena of choosing and deciding, whose existence Kant would not dispute, but which Kant would not see, as such, to be incompatible with a metaphysical determinism: if we could investigate exhaustively all the appearances of men's wills, there would not be a single human action which we could not predict with certainty, and recognise as proceeding necessarily from its antecedent conditions (first Critique, A 550). (4) It should be noticed, quite independently of the particularities of transcendental psychology, that the sense of 'can' that is at stake in the main thrust of Hare's remarks is very weak: I can only order someone to 0, if

28 Kant and His Influence 'the question of their -ing arises'. If we consider practical questions, we typically have two concerns in mind: we consider what needs doing, and what we are able to do. In considering what needs doing, although we will characteristically not consider what it is obviously absurd to suppose that human beings could do, we may well consider much that we subsequently have to work out how to do, and whether it can be done at all. The only things that could be ruled out from such considerations would be things that we already know to be impossible, but many things will be included for which we will have then to seek to find out whether they are possible. Positing ideals, where we then have to see whether or not it is possible to realize them, is an important part of the business of reflecting on practical questions. Maybe 'the question of our realizing those ideals must arise', but that does not imply that they may not, in the event, prove impossible to realize. The language of 'ought' moves between setting ideals of conduct and presenting the practical steps to realize those ideals; frequently, it will, as a result, present ideals prior to knowing whether or not they may be possible to realize. Indeed, sometimes the use of 'ought' to posit an ideal of behaviour may be put uppermost, so that we explicitly posit an impossible ideal; as, for example, when a patient is told by their doctor 'What you really ought to do is avoid all situations that create stress: I realize that will not be possible; so, what you should do instead is . . . .' I may summarize the result of this examination of Hare's position - and those elements in Kant that suggest it by saying that this train of thought, considered as supporting Kant's principle 'Ought' implies 'Can', would be truly feeble. And it would be truly feeble for one


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simple reason: the most they could possibly establish is that it is inappropriate to say 'You ought to ' if it is known to be impossible that you should 0. So that if it is not known whether or not it is possible to , we certainly cannot infer from the fact that it is correct to say that we ought to 0, that we can <j>. Although the positions I have considered in the last three sections all appear to be operative at various points in the Kantian texts, it is the remaining sections which give interpretations of the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can' that relate most particularly to Kant's own ethical theory: E. If we consider the following passage from the second Critique, we arrive at another interpretation of 'Ought' implies 'Can', different in kind from any I have looked at so far: It is always in everyone's power to satisfy the commands of the categorical command of morality; this is but seldom possible with respect to the empirically conditioned precept of happiness, and it is far from being possible, even in respect to a single purpose, for everyone. The reason is that in the former it is only a question of the maxim, which must be genuine and pure, but in the latter it is also a question of capacity and physical ability to realize a desired object (second Critique, p. 148). Here, the categorical and the hypothetical imperative are sharply contrasted, in the respect which interests us: for the hypothetical imperative as explained here, 'ought' does not imply 'can'. This is Kant's clearest passage concerning the relation of 'ought' and 'can', but the thought moves in a different direction: now, the reason that 'Ought' implies 'Can'

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is that the moral 'ought' is seen as restricted in its scope to that which I am seen as necessarily having within my power: issues concerning the maxim that I choose to adopt, and the 'purity' of that maxim 'Do I choose the right maxim?' and 'Do I choose the maxim that I do, because it is the morally acceptable maxim?' But the thought here should not be regarded as a justification of the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can', so much as a consequence of it. The thought is not so much ''because morality only concerns the purity of the will, it is necessarily within the power of everyone to be moral', as 'because being moral is necessarily within the power of everyone, it must be conceived as being restricted in its scope to what must be within their power'. We may perhaps see best what has happened here if we anticipate the next section of the paper by looking at a case I shall reconsider there: one of the first kinds of counter-example to Kant's claims that will occur to anyone is the case in which someone does the wrong thing under extreme duress. Suppose someone is tortured to betray a solemn confidence and reveal the whereabouts of their colleagues, thereby putting their lives in jeopardy. Here is a case in which we may clearly wish to say that, regardless of the severity of the torture and distress of the agent, they ought not to betray their friends. But it seems a monstrous claim to suppose that, quite regardless of the severity of the torture, everyone will necessarily be able to resist it indefinitely. It could well be that, at a certain point, their will is overridden and as an almost physiological reflex they blurt out the required information: that possibility does not seem to be one that could be ruled out a priori. The rejoinder to this example suggested by the passage we are now considering is as follows. Let us suppose someone does indeed blurt out the words. There will still


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be a morally significant difference between two cases: between, on the one hand, the person who at some stage in the proceedings adopts the maxim 'If the pain threatens to become intolerable, do whatever is in your power to stop it', and as a result betrays the whereabouts of the colleagues, whether they adopt this maxim prior to the torture or under the stress it induces; and, on the other hand, the person who never adopts any such maxim, even though, in the end, they too ejaculate the words. Even if the latter case cannot be ruled out a priori^ it is only the former case in which the agent is to be regarded as morally culpable. From a moral point of view, the traitor is not ipso facto the person who betrays the confidence, but the person whose will at the same time consents to the betrayal. Because Kant unfortunately never considers this kind of case, we cannot say for certain that he would have adopted the defence of his position just envisaged, although the passage we are considering means that it is clearly consistent with his thought, and does, indeed, seem the only defence to rescue his position from obvious absurdity. What must be stressed is that here we see the full importance of a transcendental psychology for Kant's ethics: here it emerges clearly that it will depend upon a conception of the will which is exempt from all empirical conditioning; the transcendental will is and remains in Olympian isolation above and unconditioned by the empirical rough and tumble of the situation in which I find myself. So that regardless of the vicissitudes of my life - both my passions and the external constraints to which I find myself subjected - there is a capacity for choice that remains wholly under my control. F. The third chapter of the second Critique can yield another, totally different, reading of 'Ought' implies

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'Can'. Here it could be read as saying 'Ought' enables. One of the questions that dominates the early parts of the second Critique is the question, 'What makes moral reasons, reasons for me? Kant's empirical determinism, as far as human beings are concerned, is not simply the general argument for strict universal causation of the second Analogy, but a reflection on the notion of human action as such; if an action is to count as an action of mine, I will have made a decision, and have a reason for my decision - in Kant's terminology, I will be acting upon a maxim. This does not imply that I necessarily do the reasonable thing, but it does imply I can give some form of answer to the question, 'Why did you do that?' A purely gratuitous action would not be an action at all. If that is so, there will be some things that serve for me as reasons for action, and other things that do not. It will be a matter of quite contingent empirical fact that I have certain desires, drives and wants which lead certain proposed courses of action to be open to me and not others. We may call the sum total of such drives, 'my nature'. Kant rather naively develops his account of such a nature in terms of a narrow psychological egoism: All inclinations taken together (which can be brought into a fairly tolerable system, whereupon their satisfaction is called happiness) constitute self-regard {solipsismus). This consists either of self-love, which is a predominant benevolence toward oneself (philautia) or of self-satisfaction (arrogantia). The former is called, more particularly, selfishness; the latter, selfconceit (second Critique, p. 181). Given the existence of such a system, it will be intelligible that certain reasons for action are reasons for me: quite simply, to show why I do something will be to show why it appears to me to be in my interest that it


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should be done. One should not be deceived by the naivety of the psychology here. Kant may well have been confused at this point - together with a large number of his contemporaries and predecessors - into thinking that psychological egoism was some kind of necessary theory of human motivation; but this does not affect the picture which ultimately concerns him here. We could substitute for the psychological egoism of this quotation, some other theory of human motivation which was not necessarily self-regarding - such as, for instance, a Freudian theory of the Instincts where the instincts are ultimately to be explained in biological terms, in terms of the value of precisely these instincts to the survival of the human species. Either way, I will have an empirical system that makes it intelligible that certain reasons are reasons for me: I will have a theory of the springs of my action. There need not be anything particularly 'rational' about the way I behave, and certainly nothing morally to be commended in my behaving in this way - it is just the way I am. But, alongside this system - the sum total of my empirical drives - my reason will commend to me a way of life as the way things ought to be, how I ought to behave, where there will be a discontinuity between the ways I am naturally inclined to act and the way my reason advocates. What my reason tells me I ought to do may, or may not, coincide with what I am, in any case, inclined to do. How then do I have any incentive to do what my reason tells me ought to be done? Kant is fully aware of the difficulty he confronts here. He has to show the existence of a moral motive and yet make out that it is not simply one motive alongside other motives; and, above all, not simply find a place for the moral motive within the empirical system of my motives. The moment I make the moral motive simply one among

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the diverse motives I, as a matter of fact, have, then it ceases to have for him any moral value. There is nothing particularly commendable about having moral reasons for action if it is just as much a brute fact about me that these reasons serve as reasons for me as it is that I have other natural dispositions. Kant's attempted answer may be put in the form: it is the 'ought' which makes it possible. How successful this answer is I leave to the reader to judge, but it is at this point we may find the Achilles' Heel of Kant's ethical theory. He wants the moral motive both to be an inclination and not an inclination. It must be an inclination, since it must be that it should motivate, but not an inclination in such a way that someone might protest 'There's nothing commendable in your acting that way, you are merely acting in accordance with your inclinations: my inclinations lead me in- the direction of my self-interest, yours in the direction of duty. It's just a difference of temperament.' So we seem close to having to talk of an 'inclining noninclination'. The difficulty here is not with the idea that human beings are filled with respect for the moral law, or that there are objective features of the law which engender that respect, but that the respect thus engendered is different in kind from the other feelings that may motivate me. Kant will reply here: 'Although there obviously has to be a psychological story to tell here, and we must be concerned with genuine human incentives, there is a big difference here in that it is my reason that commends this course of action to me, tells me that it is the right path to follow, that I ought to do it, quite independently of whether I otherwise want to do or it is in my interest to do it.' My reason does not commend my duty to me by making the way of life that it presents to me as my duty attractive to me, but by telling me: That is how things ought to be.


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Perhaps Kant wishes us to see an analogy here with having reasons for believing: if I believe something, then a psychological investigation can seek to find out why I do so. Such an investigation will include an investigation of my temperament and include a description of emotional factors that incline me to believe it. But if my reason tells me it is so - if I have, for instance, followed a mathematical proof that it is so - then a correct explanation of why I believe it need go no further than explaining why it is objectively right for me to do so. So here, if my reason tells me that I am to do something, I escape the subjective realm of my empirical nature into a realm where it is objectively the right thing to do. Just as in the one case, I believe something because my reason shows me that I ought to believe it, so in the other I do something because my reason shows me that I ought to do it. But this appears no more than a somewhat remote, and not wholly convincing, analogy. My reason is seen by Kant here as functioning in a twofold way: it humiliates me, and it fills me with respect for the ideal which it presents to me. Sensuous feeling, which is the basis of all our inclinations, is the condition of the particular feeling we call respect, but the cause that determines this feeling lies in the pure practical reason; because of its origin, therefore, this reason cannot be said to be pathologically effected; rather, it is practically effected. Since the idea of the moral law deprives self-love of its influence and self-conceit of its delusion, it lessens the obstacle to pure practical reason and produces the idea of the superiority of its objective law to the impulses of sensibility; it increases the weight of the moral law by removing, in the judgment of reason, the counterweight to the moral law which bears on a will

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affected by the sensibility. Thus respect for the law is not the incentive to morality; it is morality itself, regarded subjectively as an incentive, inasmuch as pure practical reason, by rejecting all the rival claims of self-love, gives authority and absolute sovereignty to the law (second Critique, p. 183f). It is this aspect of Kant's thought that may be summarized by the slogan 'Ought' enables: to the question, 'How is it possible for me to be moral?', that is to say, 'What makes a moral reason for action, a reason for me?', Kant wishes to say that it is because my reason not only presents me with an ideal way of life, it confronts me with that ideal as the one I ought to adopt: humiliating me for not doing so, and filling me with respect for the ideal it presents. Hence, it is because my reason itself shows a course of action as the one I ought to adopt, that that course of action becomes a live option for me - even if that course of action contradicts my natural impulses: it is because I can see that I ought to do it, that I can do it. G. I have left to last what I suspect may have been for Kant the most basic reason for his principle, and the one that also explains the emotional pathos surrounding it: and perhaps, also, his frequent claim that to deny 'Ought' implies 'Can' is to threaten to expose morality as an illusion. This is the quite fundamental significance which the notions of merit and the meritorious have in Kant's whole ethical outlook. As everyone knows, Kant begins the Foundations by claiming that the only thing that is good without qualification is the good will, but his initial explanations of this claim are unconvincing, even self-refuting. Kant begins by saying that if you take other humanly desirable


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traits, such as intelligence or resoluteness, if they are dissociated from a good will, they can become harmful in their consequences. But (a) this is irrelevant if the claim is that the good will is good in itself and not to be commended for something else, such as its good consequences; and (b) if it is true that intelligence only serves to make the villain more dangerous, it can be equally true that a good will detached from other qualities can be destructive in its effects. A nincompoop with a good will may behave like a bull in a china shop. If we are concerned with truly creative human action, 'being wellmeaning' may be a necessary condition, but it is certainly far from a sufficient condition. Without other qualities such as empathy, an awareness of your own limitations and a capacity for an imaginative understanding of the situation that confronts you, the person who has 'a good will', but no more, may well be a menace. But Kant's real thought is not captured by his opening remarks; he is not really thinking of the consequence of having certain traits at all. What he is thinking is more closely captured by what he goes on to say: Moderation in emotions and passions, self-control, and calm deliberation not only are good in many respects, but even seem to constitute a part of the inner worth of the person. But however unconditionally they were esteemed by the ancients, they are far from being good without qualification. For, without the principles of a good will, they can become extremely bad, and the coolness of a villain makes him not only far more dangerous but also more directly abominable in our eyes than he would have seemed without it (Foundations, p. 56). Now Kant is saying: 'Forget about the consequences: imagine someone censuring someone else's wickedness. If

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they receive the reply "But, don't you admire their ingenuity, their resourcefulness, daring . . . " then the appropriate thing to say is, "That only makes it worse!" - even if, in some curious quasi-aesthetic way, we may continue to "admire the ingenuity"'. Given any human trait, with the sole exception of the good will, it can be seen that in the wrong context the presence of that trait will detract from, rather than enhance, our estimate of the person. Is this true, and why does Kant insist it must be true? Pritna facie, Kant makes things easy for himself by his choice of examples. Suppose that instead of choosing a skill or an ability such as ingenuity, we had considered a disposition such as being naturally compassionate would his remarks hold? Consider a Falstaff - much that he does is monstrous, and it is undoubtedly right to censure much of what he does. But if we, nevertheless, are made by Shakespeare not simply to condemn him but even to feel affectionately disposed towards him, it is by virtue of his other personality traits - his spontaneous warmth, his generosity towards friends, his capacity for self-mockery. Here, we do not simply say 'That only makes it worse!', we regard these as mitigating, even 'redeeming', traits; despite the fact that these qualities have no obvious connection with the Kantian good will, with reverence for the moral law. Can we actually imagine circumstances in which someone, having censured someone else's villainy, could justly say - when we had retorted 'But still, they are capable of great spontaneous and natural compassion' - 'That only makes it worse!' The most that would be appropriate to say would be 'That still doesn't excuse it!' Kant seems to be wanting to convict us of a kind of incoherence if we insist on regarding a trait such as being


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naturally and spontaneously compassionate as of any ultimate value, as 'good without qualification'. What he has said so far has not brought out why. To see why he held this attitude we have to consider the distinction he draws between admiration {Bewunderung) and respect {Achtung). We may clearly be moved to admire (or have affection, love or even fear of) a wide variety of different human beings, for a wide variety of different reasons, including some quite trivial ones. We may admire someone's intelligence, fortitude, strength and even their good looks or special talents - and they may feel proud of these traits. We may even, as Kant remarks, admire someone for their social status, including factors such as their aristocratic blood over which they have no control whatsoever. The existence of such admiration is not disputed by Kant, but he sees it as not different in kind from the feelings we may have for certain purely natural phenomena such as the strength, agility or beauty of an animal, or even an inanimate phenomenon such as a lofty mountain. 'All of this however is not respect' (second Critique, p. 185). Despite the ludicrousness of some of these phenomena (admiration for rank), Kant is not wishing to say that these feelings are simply inappropriate but that they are different in kind from the respect that is evoked in us by morally good action. Kant says that in the latter case the respect is really respect for the moral law itself, as exemplified in the action: I am not sure that I fully understand his thought here, but this does not seem quite right. The point is that a crucial element in respect is that I myself feel humbled by the action, and that is not simply being humbled by the difference between me and another human being but by the consciousness this prompts of the disparity between my own behaviour and that demanded by the

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moral law: so that I am not really humbled by them, but really by the moral law itself. However, it still seems important to say here that I do respect the person as well. But, even if I did feel humbled by the prospect of a person with talents far greater than my own, that would be an inappropriate and irrational response. I ought, rather, to say simply that it takes all sorts to make a world. To the extent that the admiration is directed towards what must be regarded as no more than a brute fact about its object, it would be absurd, even if the admiration is in place, to look on what is admired as though it were meritorious. To take an extreme case, we talk of 'venerable age', and it may well be appropriate to show deference to those whose age has given them a wider and deeper experience of life than our own. But it would be a kind of insanity to reproach myself for not being as old as they are. It is only to the extent that I can represent to myself the difference between myself and someone else as other than a brute fact, that 'reproaching myself for the difference would make sense; but that means representing the difference as an achievement, something for which they are responsible, something under their control. Certainly great talents and activity proportionate to them can occasion respect or an analogous feeling, and it is proper to accord it to them; then it seems that admiration is the same as this feeling. But if one looks more closely it is noticed that it is always uncertain how great a part of the ability must be ascribed to innate talent and how much to cultivation through one's own diligence. Presumably reason represents it to us as a fruit of cultivation, and therefore as merit which perceptibly diminishes our self-conceit and


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therefore either reproaches us or else imposes it upon us as an example to be followed in a suitable manner. This respect which we have for a person (really for the law, which his example holds before us) is, therefore, not mere admiration (second Critique, p. 185). Kant draws from this train of thought the startling conclusion that the sum total of what may be called natural philanthropic feelings are without moral value. It is a very beautiful thing to do good to men because of love and a sympathetic good will, or to do justice because of a love of order. But this is not the genuine moral maxim of our conduct . . . (second Critique, p. 189). At this point, Kant develops the second element in his thought which he presents by the striking metaphor that we do not confront morality as 'volunteers'. If I am confronted by, let us say, a great piece of philosophical writing that fills me with admiration, it is inappropriate for me to reproach myself if I lack the natural abilities necessary to emulate the achievement. I may also refuse to reproach myself simply on the grounds that I have chosen not to dedicate myself to philosophy - and I am none the worse for that. If I do reproach myself, it is for failure to achieve a goal that I have chosen to set myself, whereas moral self-reproach is for failure to achieve a goal that my reason presents to me as one that I ought necessarily to aim for. The picture to emerge from this is of morality as a task that is necessarily set to every rational agent, and one where it is appropriate to reproach oneself for failure. To the extent that I am bound to represent a feature of myself, or my behaviour, as a brute fact about myself that is not under my ultimate control, the notions of

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ultimate praise and blame, and of merit lose coherence. Even if a dog-handler does train dogs using in part not only rewards and punishments but also praise and blame, there is a kind of absurdity in taking this praise and blame with acny ultimacy: its force is exhausted by the extent to which it can profitably change the dog's behaviour. But to represent a feature of myself as not simply a brute fact about myself, as under my ultimate control, is to represent myself as free. This seems to me the real core of Kant's insistence that 'Ought' implies 'Can'. If the denial of this principle is said to threaten to expose morality as an illusion, it is not so much because it undermines the possibility of serious reflection on what is the good life, which is the life worth living; what it threatens to undermine is the ultimate significance of the practices of praise and blame. It is these notions which had fundamental importance for Kant's whole ethical outlook and which were put in jeopardy if 'ought' did not imply 'can'. The whole pathos of Kant's position is captured by the following passage: if nature has put little sympathy in the heart of a man and if he, though an honest man, is by temperament cold and indifferent to the sufferings of others perhaps because he is provided with special gifts of patience and fortitude, and expects or even requires that others should have the same - and such a man would certainly not be the meanest product of nature would not he find in himself a source from which to give himself a far higher worth than he could have got by having a good-natured temperament? This is unquestionably true even though nature did not make him philanthropic, for it is just here that the worth of


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the character is brought out, which is morally and incomparably the highest of all: he is beneficent not from inclination but from duty [Foundations, p. 60). Here we have a picture of a man of high moral integrity, even if not a particularly likeable man, and Kant is wishing to commend precisely such a man as this as worthy of the highest possible respect, quite on a par with the respect we, perhaps more automatically and ungrudgingly, give to someone of great personal warmth and compassionate self-giving to others (and, moreover, by whom most of us would prefer to be helped). The thought here is the same as Christ's on 'the widow's mite': Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast more in than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had (Luke 22.3-4). The moral 'ought' demands 'all we have', and no more. But that it does demand, and if it is not vacuous, there must be something that we do have: we must be free.

Ill Periculosa est haec oratio: lex praecepit, quod actus praecepti fiat in gratia dei. Contra card, et Gab. (DST, 57, Weimar Ausgabe, I, p. 227) If 'Ought' implies 'Can' could be taken as at the centre of Kant's whole moral vision, this antithetical thesis could equally be taken as close to the centre of the moral vision

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of Martin Luther. The terseness of the Latin creates difficulties for translation, and, indeed, the two standard translations make Luther say something very different. In The American Edition, Vol. 31, H.J. Grimm translates this: It is dangerous to say that the law teaches that its performance takes place in the grace of God. This in opposition to the Cardinal and Gabriel; whereas in The Library of Christian Classics XVI, James Atkinson renders it: It is dangerous to believe that the existence of a law implies that it can be obeyed, for the law is fulfilled by the grace of God (against Peter d'Ailly and Gabriel Biel). Of these two, undoubtedly the somewhat free rendering by Atkinson is the one that comes close to Luther's meaning. Grimm's, indeed, is close to gobbledegook, and whatever it is meant to mean does not fit the sequence of Luther's thoughts in this Disputation. I would render it, again somewhat freely: It is misleading to say that the Law is prescriptive (action-guiding) [and hence, with Hare, that 'Ought' implies 'Can'], since the action it prescribes only occurs by the grace of God . . . . Despite the fact that the opposition between the two visions is immediate, it is difficult to organize an appropriate confrontation. For, not only is Luther writing exclusively as a theologian and Kant as a philosopher, but that difference is to be taken strictly. Whereas Luther presents his thought to be judged only by its fidelity to the scriptural witness to divine revelation, Kant equally wishes his thought to be judged exclusively at the bar of


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pure reason. What I propose then, in this - which is intended in the first instance as a philosophical essay - is to set Kant's position in relief by asking whether his concentration on the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can' does not by implication carry with it a severe truncation or distortion of much that we also wish to say in ethics; illustrating this, as appropriate, by the elements in Luther's thought that, by doing justice to those elements within a Christian framework, constantly led him to the apparently paradoxical denial of the principle that Kant treats as axiomatic. Although my sympathies here undoubtedly lie in the end with Luther, and I shall make no attempt to disguise them, my purpose is not the absurdly ambitious one of adjudicating the confrontation. It is to see more clearly the precise nature of the two fundamentally opposed visions of the good life, and what is involved in choosing one side or other of the confrontation. A. Kant's picture of Man is like a Pre-Raphaelite morality painting - we always stand like an Arthurian knight at a crossroads, with our inclinations as a houri beckoning seductively down one road while our reason is a grim matriarch sternly pointing along the other. This picture, as we have seen, is not based on any empirical study of Man, but is a product of 'transcendental psychology', a piece of a priori reasoning. Essential to this picture is that (a) even if I were always to be seduced down the wrong path, the other one is always open to me, and that (b) the crossroads is permanently manned: my reason always tells me what I ought to do. Luther's objection to this whole picture is that it failed to take sin radically enough. The complexities of Luther's conception of the Fall, and Man as sinful, are such that I can at most sketch what is at stake in what is already

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a long paper. Kant, indeed, is far from an absurd optimist about human nature and talks of a Radical Evil in Man. However, he writes: It must indeed be presupposed throughout that a seed of goodness still remains in its entire purity, incapable of being extirpated or corrupted; and this seed certainly cannot be self-love which, when taken as the principle of all our maxims, is the very source of evil {Religion Within, p. 41). The crossroads is permanently doubly manned. There is 'Radical Evil' in me, in that there is a perpetual seduction down the wrong path to which I perpetually succumb, but still I remain in a state of permanent internal conflict between reason and inclination. If Luther contests this account, it is not because he has a more 'pessimistic' or 'cynical' assessment of Man than Kant: anyone reading Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone will be struck by the extent to which, in contrast with the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries, there is a pervasively pessimistic view of the phenomena of the human. Despite the obvious differences, part of the substance of Luther's opposition to 'Scholastic Theology' translates well into the Kantian debate, and the picture that emerges from transcendental psychology. Luther was opposed to any picture of the Fall and Sin in which Man, as fallen Man, was seen in terms of Man having a 'higher' nature (his rationality) and a 'lower' nature (his sensuality), and the Fall was seen to consist in some form of displacement of the higher nature by the lower - with the higher nature remaining intact as 'an image of God in Man'. Sin involved the whole man, his reason and capacity for decision making every bit as much as his animal passions. Man was in rebellion against God, and this involved a disorientation of the whole person so


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that you could not isolate within Man a faculty or part that was and remained exempt from corruption. This is, of course, precisely what Kant does, and indeed insists on a priori grounds must be possible. It is not my concern here to become involved in the theological debate but to ask how credible is the conception of Man on which Kant is insisting here. The point is that to maintain the connection between 'ought' and 'can', Kant is led to assume a power of reason, of decision making, that must remain exempt from all empirical conditioning, intact throughout the emotional vicissitudes of life. In section II of this paper I looked at a possible Kantian defence against the counter-example of someone breaking under torture: the core of the defence was the idea that even if under duress the person snapped, their reason might nonetheless refuse at every point to cooperate with the betrayal. It was always possible, no matter how severe the torture, to refuse to adopt a morally corrupt maxim. It is clear that the defence sketched here would have to apply, mutatis mutandis, to a wide variety of situations in which someone, under emotional or physical stress, does the wrong thing; if we say they ought not to have done what they did, it remained within their control whether they did or did not do it, at least to the extent that they need never decide to adopt the wrong maxim. This at least seems grotesquely implausible; only to be held as a dogma of transcendental psychology in splendid isolation from Man as we actually encounter him. Let us consider Othello here. If anything is clear, it is that a series of moral judgements is in order. He ought not to have killed Desdemona; he ought not to have judged and sentenced her without confronting her with his suspicion and allowing her to speak in her own defence. What is

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more, these judgements stand with full moral rigour. One will only hesitate over saying this if one insists on hearing it as saying the same as 'he was fully to be blamed for what he did'. But 'being wrought, perplexed in the extreme', however adequate or inadequate to the situation the remainder of what Othello says at the end of the play may be, this can clearly be allowed to stand. He has been subjected to a complex emotional manipulation directed at his most basic insecurities and vulnerabilities, and thereby plunged into a horrible confusion of thought and feeling. To suppose here that Othello retained throughout the process an ability for clear thought about what was right and wrong, and that the decisions he made were deliberate flouting of what his reason was telling him he should do, is clearly absurd. Confronted by an extreme case like this, Kant is surely forced into giving a perverse description of what occurs. In fact, when we look at the actual complexity of the situations within which people make moral decisions, Kant's account seems only preserved from instant falsification by being transposed to a noumenal realm. In the first Critique, he writes: The action to which the 'ought' applies must indeed be possible under natural conditions. These conditions, however, do not play any part in determining the will itself, but only in determining the effect and its consequences in the field of appearance. No matter how many natural grounds or how many sensuous impulses impel me to will, they can never give rise to an 'ought', but only to a willing which, while being very far from necessary, is always conditioned; and the 'ought' pronounced by reason confronts such willing with a limit and an end - nay more, forbids it or authorizes


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it. Whether what is willed be an object of mere sensibility (the pleasant) or of pure reason (the good), reason will not give way to any ground which is empirically given (first Critique, A 548). Kant is saying here that, in human action, there may indeed be a number of constraints, both physical and psychological, which influence my capacity for doing what I set out to do, and also a number of emotional factors that influence the choice I make, but that there is one thing which must remain immune to all external influence, namely my reason, that will continue to confront my action with an account of what it ought to be. It is difficult to make sense of this, save on the assumption that Kant is guilty of a confusion here: a confusion which perhaps stands out more clearly if we transpose his remarks to the sphere of theoretical reason. If I follow a valid piece of reasoning, then this will provide an objective check on by belief, so that whatever I may feel, for whatever reason, 'inclined to believe' must give way to what here confronts me as what must be the case. But to infer from this that my reasoning processes are not subject to empirical conditioning, that I may not simply fail to follow the proof because I am tired, or that I may not become confused, or that my judgement of the strength of the argument I am considering may not be warped by prejudice, self-deception or other emotional factors, would be absurd. There is a sort of equivocation here involved in the phrase 'the "ought" pronounced by reason'. If Othello is persuaded that he ought to kill Desdemona, we might well say that it is not his reason which thus persuades him. We would then mean no more than that this is an irrational conviction. But we are certainly not

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entitled to say that no process of reasoning has led him to this conviction: it is just a bad one, which has been distorted and corrupted by his emotional confusion. Is the 'ought' of 'I ought to kill Desdemona' 'pronounced by reason' or not? Not by 'pure reason', but by Othello's process of reasoning. When Luther inveighs against reason as 'the Devil's whore', he is not indulging in irrationalism, or the kind of enthusiastic celebration of feeling at the expense of reason before which Kant had such evident horror and of which he was justly suspicious. If by 'reason' you mean embodied reason, the actual thinking processes of people in concrete situations, these are every bit as subject to distortion and corruption as any other aspect of the mental life, and someone can be every bit as much persuaded by 'their reason' in this sense to embark on a wicked project as they can be seduced by their animal passions into doing what they know to be wrong. What both Luther and Kant saw clearly was that to talk in this way had profound repercussions for the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can'. If our reason can persuade us to do great evil, so that it is with 'righteous indignation' that we do it, we are far more radically enmeshed in evil than Kant could ever permit. When Othello kills Desdemona, with pathetic sincerity he is portraying himself to himself as wielding 'the sword of justice'. If he had simply been tempted to do something which he could see all along was wrong, then the Kantian picture, that he could nevertheless have turned aside from his evil project, has purchase. But if what it is right for him to do has here become inaccessible to his mind, then it becomes almost meaningless to insist that, since he ought not to have killed Desdemona, it must have been possible for him not to have done so. For Luther, the Crucifixion would clearly have central


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significance: '. . . the wisdom of God . . . which none of the princes of this world knew; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory' (1 Corinthians 2.8). If, on any understanding, the Crucifixion was an act of great human wickedness, the men who conspired to bring it about would nonetheless have included those who were not just firmly persuaded that they were doing what was morally permissible, but, indeed, were acting out of moral indignation, conceiving themselves to be doing their religious duty. Now, if that is how it can be with Man, then Man is clearly not in a situation from which he can extricate himself by his own efforts, by 'doing what in him lies', but only by the intervention of divine grace. B. Closely connected with the train of thought we have just developed is the question of our knowledge of what we ought and ought not to do. Kant makes the astonishing claim that we always know what we ought to do. This is not just a naive assumption about the powers of human reason, but is presented as a consequence of the claim that 'Ought' implies 'Can'-. But the moral law commands the most unhesitating obedience from everyone; consequently the decision as to what is to be done in accordance with it must not be so difficult that even the commonest and most unpractised understanding without any worldly prudence should go wrong in making it (second Critique, p. 148). This must be wrong. It is perfectly clear that if there are objective answers to questions of right and wrong, these answers are not automatically available to all people, at all times and at all places. This follows quite simply from the fact that there are considerable divergences in the moral practices and beliefs of people.

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To take an extremely simple case: in many societies, the practice of buying, selling and owning slaves was regarded as morally unproblematic. We would now say, and Kant would unhesitatingly agree, that they had simply missed something of fundamental moral significance. But what are we to say of the slave-owners in such societies? There is no reason to suppose that these would not include some who regarded themselves as decent morally upright people. We certainly do not wish to say anything other than that they ought not to have owned slaves, but, is there any force here to saying that they could have done the morally right thing? It is only if we are in the grip of a dogma that we insist here 'They must have known they were doing wrong. They must have been insincere if they claimed to see nothing wrong with what they were doing.' There are clearly extensive areas of moral disagreement in which, however much the protagonists may insist on seeing their opponents as insincere, there is no reason whatever to dispute the sincerity of the two opposed parties. Thus, Kant is perfectly clear in the Metaphysic of Morals that I cannot have duties to irrational animals, even if I can have duties in respect of them (that is to say, an apparent duty to an animal must always be regarded as an indirect duty to myself). Any duty I have to another always stems from their rationality. Many today would vehemently dispute this, seeing the fact that the animals are sentient as generating a duty towards them that is the same in kind as the duty I have towards human beings. This is not a merely verbal disagreement; there are many situations in which the two views would lead to very different accounts of what was morally permissible or obligatory. Consider, for instance, the following:


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Vivisectionists, who use living animals for their experiments, certainly act cruelly, although their aim is praiseworthy, and they can justify their cruelty, since animals must be regarded as man's instruments {Lectures on Ethics, p. 240). There is no reason whatever to doubt the sincerity of either party in such a disagreement. But if, say, Kant were wrong here, does it have any purchase whatever to say he could do the right thing, when he is firmly persuaded it is no such thing? It is also clear that a disagreement such as this is a radical disagreement: that is it will not be resolved by one side pointing out to the other some minor oversight, or clear inconsistency in their position. In the case of slavery, we might think that it would be possible to convict the slave-owners of an ethical inconsistency - that what they would say on other ethical issues would conflict with what they had to say about the practice of keeping slaves. But, in the case before us, if either side were to adopt the ethical perspective of the other, it would seem to involve a conversion, a change of fundamental moral beliefs, since both sides in the debate have prima facie internally consistent and yet incompatible positions. This may serve to introduce the second major disagreement between Kant and Luther. In The Dispute of the Faculties, Kant takes issue with Spener and Zinzendorf over conversion (op. cit., p. 95ff) and seems to have a surprisingly easy victory. What obviously fills him with horror in their accounts is what he sees as a kind of irrationalism, of 'a mysticism which kills reason' (ibid., p. 107). There is for him only one tolerable answer to the question: 'How is it possible for someone to be awakened again to a new life? The moral predisposition in

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us'. The aim of his discussion is to reject the 'supernatural' accounts given by Spener, Franck and Zinzendorf. We do not wonder at the fact that we are beings subject to moral laws and destined by our reason to obey them, even if this means sacrificing whatever pleasures may conflict with them. , . . But we do wonder at our ability so to sacrifice our sensuous nature to morality that we can do what we quite readily and clearly conceive we ought to do. This ascendancy of the supersensible man in us over the sensible, such that (when it comes to a conflict between them) the sensible is nothing, though in its eyes it is everything, is an object of the greatest wonder; and our wonder at this moral predisposition in us, inseparable from our humanity, only increases the longer we contemplate this true (not fabricated) ideal. Since the supersensible in us is inconceivable and yet practical, we can well excuse those who are led to call it supernatural - that is, to regard it as the influence of another and higher spirit, something not within our power and not belonging to us as our own {The Dispute, p. 106f). That is to say, the only legitimate answer for Kant to the religious question of conversion is the idea that I have put in the form 'It is the 'Ought' that enables1: Even the Bible seems to have nothing else in view: it seems to refer, not to supernatural experiences and fantastic feelings which should take reason's place in bringing about this revolution, but to the spirit of Christ, which he manifested in teaching and examples so that we might make it our own - or rather, since it is already present in us by our moral predisposition,


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so that we might simply make room for it (ibid., p. 107). What are we to say to this? The main point to stress, which is indeed stressed by Kant, is that both sides in the dispute - both Kant's opponents with their supernatural agency in conversion, and Kant with his insistence that our own reason is the only legitimate agent in any morally tolerable process of renewal - agree on one central point: we know what the good life is: This radical change [according to the pietists], therefore begins with a miracle and ends with what we would ordinarily consider natural, since reason prescribes it: namely morally good conduct (ibid., p. 99). and According to the Moravian view, as man becomes aware of his sinful state he takes the first step toward his improvement quite naturally, by his reason; for as his reason holds before him, in the moral law, the mirror in which he sees his guilt, it leads him, using his moral disposition to the good, to decide that from now on he will make the law his maxim. But his carrying out of this resolution is a miracle (ibid., p. 100). Once the matter is conceived in either of these ways the whole process of conversion is necessarily seen in non-cognitive terms: we learn nothing new. Instead, the only problem that could remain would be one of weakness of will, a will which already knows what it ought to do. In this context, Kant recoils from the prospect of a purely emotional manipulation of the will, leaving room, at most, for the example of Christ to encourage our reason to do what it already knows it

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ought. Although not strictly relevant to my purposes, there clearly also runs through these pages in The Dispute, 2L considerable scepticism about the actual moral efficacy of such emotional experiences (cf. the delightful footnote on p. 103, where he scarcely disguises his hostility towards 'the sects' whose teaching he is here attacking). What we find here is part of Kant's general attack on the possibility of a revealed theology, which if correct would be far more subversive of traditional Christianity than his more famous refutation of natural theology in the first Critique. The core of the critique of the possibility of revealed theology is to be found in the famous sentence from The Foundations of the Metaphysic of Morals: Even the Holy One of the Gospel must be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before He is recognized as such; even He says of Himself, 'Why do you call Me (Whom you see) good? None is good (the archetype of the good) except God only (Whom you do not see)'. But whence do we have the concept of God as the highest good? Solely from the idea of moral perfection which reason formulates a priori and which it inseparably connects with the concept of a free will. Imitation has no place in moral matters, and examples serve only for encouragement (p. 68). That is to say, let us suppose that we are confronted by an alleged revelation of God. If we are not to sacrifice our moral integrity and rationality, we must test the claim by seeing how far it accords with what our reason tells us is good. If it does not accord, we must reject the alleged revelation as spurious, but if it does accord, then we learn nothing that we could not have already known on the basis of our reason alone. The argument here is,


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of course, not peculiar to divine revelation but to anyone confronting us with a 'new' moral view. What is said here is just as applicable to protagonists of 'animal rights' as to 'the Holy One of the Gospels'. Within the sphere of morals, we are and ought to be locked within the confines of our own reason. The suppositions that arise here are: Suppose we do not know what is right. Suppose we have warped or corrupted views of the good life. These suppositions are ones which, as we have seen, Kant simply rules out of court, but they are the questions with which Luther begins. Through sin comes ignorance of the law {Against Latomus, p. 195); and

35. It is not true that an invincible ignorance excuses one completely (all scholastics notwithstanding). 36. For ignorance of God and oneself and good works is by nature always invincible {DST, p. 11); and

Notice how simple the words are: 'Through the law comes knowledge of sin': yet they alone are powerful enough to confound and overthrow free choice. For if it is true that when left to its own devices it does not know what sin and evil are - as Paul says both here and in Romans 7: 'I should not have known that covetousness is sin if the law had not said "You shall not covet"' - how can it ever know what righteousness and goodness are? And if it does not know what righteousness is, how can it strive toward it? If we are unaware of the sin in which we were born, in which we live, move and have our being, or rather, which

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lives, moves and reigns in us, how should we be aware of the righteousness that reigns outside of us in heaven? These statements make complete and utter nonsense of that wretched thing, free choice {Bondage, p. 306f). Now the questions raised above have to be posed in more radical terms than they were in the Kant-Spener debate: conversion cannot be construed purely noncognitively: 'Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God' (John 3.3). One obvious fact about the Bible which Kant signally omitted in his account of what it has to say in the debate with Spener, is the extent to which it confronts us with natural man as 'blinded'. Such an idea will necessarily be ruled out of court by him, if nothing else because it instantly puts in jeopardy the idea that 'Ought' implies 'Can'. If the idea is once allowed that fallen men might not know what the good life was, that their reason might have become incompetent, that their '. . . foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools . . .' (Romans 1.21f), the possibility of a radical incapacity to do good emerges. Now we have to reckon with the possibility that we cannot do the right thing, simply because whether through our own fault or not, we no longer know what it is. Now our reason can no longer pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Luther is as aware as Kant of the paradoxical situation that emerges at this point. Confronted by a putative divine revelation all we can and ought to do is, of course, to judge it by our own moral standards: to allow our judgement to be submerged here would be to open the floodgates to the most vicious fanaticism. But if our own moral standards are themselves far from infallible, are indeed corrupt - so that there is the possibility of a gulf


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between the dictates of our reason and the truth - then, prima facie, such subjection of the alleged revelation to our own reason would seem to imply that we were for ever irredeemably locked in error. What we have now to reckon with is the possibility that in the process of judging Christ (necessarily by our own standards), we find that we ourselves, and those standards themselves, are judged: that we find 'our wisdom' convicted of folly by a higher wisdom. However difficult it may be to work this out, it is clear that we are not reckoning with a possibility that we can ourselves engineer. If it occurs at all, it can only be by divine initiative, subject to the rule 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou nearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell where it comes from or whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit' (John 3.8). Here we find a radical limit to the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can'. If we have to reckon with the possibility of an ignorance of the good life on the part of natural man, then for Luther the possibility of leading the good life only comes about, if at all, as a result of a revelation that Man could not himself bring about but which occurred only by the grace of God. Obviously, this paper is not the context to argue through the question of the conceivability of revelation seen in these terms. But what clearly emerges from the confrontation between Kant and Luther is that even leaving the issue of the possibility of divine revelation on one side, Kant's picture cannot be sustained without the, to me, incredible assumption that we are infallible in moral matters, that we always know what is the right thing to be done. Without such an assumption, we must always reckon with the possibility that I am simply unable to do what is right because I have radical misconceptions of what my duty is. But if anything is a moral of a study

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of the history of mankind, it must surely be that men have done some of their most evil deeds under the firm conviction that they were doing their duty. C. But I have not yet touched on what I believe to be the real core of the disagreement between Luther and Kant, which issues in their equally passionate, but violently opposed, attitude to the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can'. This concerns the central question, 'What is a possible subject of a moral command?' Luther's theology undoubtedly takes its roots in his own experience as a young monk, filled with a zealous concern to dedicate his life to the service of God and who, by all accounts, was punctilious in the observation of the monastic rule. But what confronted him in his most scrupulous endeavours to observe the law as the Law of God, was that the Law seemed to command the impossible. That is to say, that if it were a matter of the observation of the rules of a monastic order, he could observe them to the letter, but the Christian commandments talked in quite other terms. Above all, at their centre there was a twofold command to love. Here, prima facie, was a straightforward impossibility. How can there be a command to love} The terms in which the Bible talked about the good life involves at every turn notions which are by no stretch of the imagination under our control. When he expressed his worries, he was given the popular Aristotelian psychology of the day: that a virtue was a sort of skill, and you acquired a virtue by practising it. Just as you become a good chess player by playing chess, so you become a compassionate man by performing acts of compassion. All his experience convinced him that this was simply bad psychology, that, indeed, all the religious acts of service to God, far from leading towards


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loving God, led him to hate God - precisely for setting him such a fantastical task. His wrestling with the problem that emerged here, and his ultimate resolution of it, was to form the basis of all Reformation theology. I must try here to pick out the salient points which lead into direct conflict with Kant, and, above all for our purposes, two points are crucial: (1) Luther never compromised with the idea that the Law included at its very centre much that simply could not be construed as lying within the power of man to do at will: it included much that, in Kantian terms, 'could not be commanded'. (2) As a result, if there were such a thing as a man being acceptable to God, it could not be as a result of his having merited such acceptance by obedience to the Law. And, equally, if there were actual acts of obedience to God, this could only be by the grace of God, and not the product of Man's efforts. I shall return to this in the final section of this paper. As is well known, Luther and Kant take diametrically opposed positions on (1): Luther: There is also 1 Corinthians 13.2: 'If I have not love, I am nothing.' . . . For it is strictly true that a man is nothing in the sight of God if he is without love. And that is precisely what we teach about free choice {Bondage, p. 286). Kant:

The possibility of such a command as, 'Love God above all and thy neighbour as thyself agrees very well with this. For as a command, it requires respect for a law which orders love and does not leave it to arbitrary choice to make love the principle. But love to God as an inclination

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(pathological love) is indeed impossible, for He is not an object of the senses. The latter is indeed possible toward men, but it cannot be commanded, for it is not possible for man to love someone merely on command. It is therefore practical love which can be understood in that kernel of all laws. To love God means in this sense to like to do His commandments, and to love one's neighbour means to like to practise all duties toward him. The command which makes this a rule cannot require that we have this disposition, but only that we endeavour after it (second Critique, p. 190). Now, leaving aside the oddity of Kant's actual formulation of what practical love is here (I simply do not know what is meant to be involved in 'endeavouring to like to practise all duties toward' someone), the spirit of his proposal here is clear - in so far as there is a command to love, it must be interpreted in such a way that what is thereby commanded is something I can simply decide to do. The question is, is this reupholstered love, love at all? Part of the trouble is that Kant not only gives an odd account of practical love, but his remarks seem to betray a faulty conception of the 'pathological' love with which it is contrasted. He seems to confound it with the different notion of 'liking someone'. Let us consider here an indisputable case of an act of love: And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. And they departed into a desert place by ship privately. And the people saw them departing, and many knew him, and ran afoot thither out of all cities, and outwent them, and came together unto


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him. And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and he began to teach them many things (Mark 6.31ff). It is clear that we have here a description of a simple act of goodness, a manifestation of love. It is equally clear that this description contains much that would necessarily lie outside the scope of Kantian 'practical love'. The situation here is clear. Jesus has through his ministry to the people reached the point where he needs rest and to be alone; but they are insatiable and refuse to allow him to have that time alone, (i) On any understanding, he would clearly have been justified simply to try to avoid them: whatever he does here is 'beyond the call of duty'. Christ is a 'volunteer', (ii) What is shown here clearly involves the emotions: it is essential to the account that 'he is moved with compassion', (iii) What we have is an act of pure spontaneity, clearly not part of a pre-planned policy of action: indeed, he has gone into the desert precisely to be away from the people, (iv) The act of love is an act directed towards this specific group of people, not the carrying out of some universal maxim of action: he acts 'because they are as sheep not having a shepherd'. It is clear that it is precisely features such as those four which lead us to think of this as a simple act of goodness. The question is: How far can Kant accommodate this into his account of the good life? To answer that we must clearly take into account not merely the earlier formulations of the Foundations and the second Critique, but also the far more nuanced, if somewhat convoluted, discussion of love which we find in the Metaphysic of Morals. Here, at least, we have a more

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sensible version of what he means by 'practical love' than the frankly silly account in the second Critique: 'The duty of love for one's neighbour can also be expressed as the duty of making others' ends my own (in so far as these ends are only not immoral)' (M., p. 117). In that later discussion, Kant is far from wishing to deny the value of what he calls there 'sympathetic feelings', culminating in saying: Hence we have an indirect duty to cultivate the sympathetic natural (aesthetic) feelings in us and to use them as so many means to participating from moral principles and from the feeling appropriate to those principles. . . . For this is one of the impulses which nature has implanted in us so that we may do what the thought of duty alone would not accomplish (M., p. 126). There are two questions here: Is what Kant says consistent with his basic ethical position? And, secondly: Is what Kant says adequate in itself? He is clearly wanting to acknowledge a value to love, to gratitude, to generosity, to compassion, even in so far as these notions go beyond the notions of 'performing acts of generosity' and the like: 'there is a value in the generous disposition as such. The basic ethical position confronting us at every point in the earlier writings was that the morally good act was not only the act in which I did the right thing, but the act in which I did the right thing 'because it was my duty'. The thought of duty was seen there as the only morally acceptable motive, the only motive that conferred moral value on the act: To be kind where one can is a duty, and there are, jnoreover, many persons so sympathetically constituted


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that without any motive of vanity or selfishness they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy and rejoice in the contentment of others which they have made possible. But, I say that, however dutiful and amiable it may be that kind of action has no true moral worth {Foundations, p. 59). Here he is vehemently maintaining a position which is at least on the surface in considerable tension with the later discussion. However, a detailed reading of the later passages may, for the most part, be reconciled with the earlier one: most of the time he may be read as saying in the later passages that the feelings are themselves of no true moral worth. It is the cultivation of those feelings as an aid to doing our duty that is morally commendable. However, he culminates the discussion in The Metaphysic of Morals: Would it not be better for the welfare of the world in general if human morality were limited to juridical duties and these were fulfilled with the ultimate conscientiousness, while benevolence were considered morally indifferent? It is not so easy to see what effect this would have on man's happiness. But at least a great moral ornament, love of man, would then be missing from the world. Accordingly benevolence is required for its own sake, in order to present the world in its full perfection as a beautiful moral whole, even if we do not take into account what advantage it brings (in the way of happiness) (M., p. 126f). 'Moral ornament'? 'A beautiful moral whole'? Here he finally uses the word 'moral' in a way that is not only wholly unprepared by the earlier discussion but, if taken seriously, would threaten to explode its most fundamental presuppositions and introduce a use of the word

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'moral' that was no longer governed by the principle 'Ought implies 'Can'. Perhaps the best way to confront Luther and Kant at this point is to compare the famous passage about Love in 1 Corinthians 13, with the opening paragraphs of the Foundations. Here Paul and Kant are in different ways concerned to single out one element in human life and subordinate in importance every other aspect of human life to it. But Paul, throughout the passage, is clearly describing love in such terms that it does not lie in Man's power whether he loves or not, and yet seeing the performing of those acts which are within one's power as worthless without love ('And though I give all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing'). Kant, by contrast, is explicitly limiting his celebration to 'the good will' in a way in which that notion is deliberately restricted to what is within Man's power: and it is thus restricted precisely because 'Ought' implies 'Can'. Luther, confronted by such passages as 1 Corinthians 13, refused to compromise in his interpretation of them. Here we are confronted by a picture of the good life, the life acceptable to God, and demanded of Man by God. If that is so, then any adequate basis for Christian ethics would have to begin precisely by repudiating 'Ought' implies 'Can', refusing to restrict his account of what the good life was if it was restricted to the idea of 'doing what in one lies'. But then a fundamental contrast emerges between 'doing the works of the Law' and 'fulfilling the Law' (see, for example, Bondage, p. 302f). One could, and should, 'do all the works of the Law': become a model citizen, obey the categorical imperative . . . and yet even when one had done all that one would not have 'fulfilled


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the Law'. To fulfil the Law one would have not merely to perform acts of generosity but be generous. A text to which Luther recurs is Matthew 7.16ff: Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. The problem was not just to do good but to be good: So a man must first be good or wicked before he does a good or wicked work, and his works do not make him good or wicked, but he himself makes his works either good or wicked [Freedom of a Christian, p. 361). and: Why therefore do we yield to an invincible evil lust? Do what is in you and do not lust. But you cannot do that. Therefore you also do not by nature fulfil the law. But if you do not fulfil it, much less will you fulfil the law of love. Likewise, do what is within you and do not become angry with him who offends you. Do what is in you and do not fear danger [Heidelberg Disputation, p. 69). It is clear by now that the difference between Luther and Kant runs deep, but its roots seem to lie in a basic difference of approach. Luther starts by considering two things - the nature of the good life, the life for which God created Man, which made Man acceptable to God, and the nature of sin. Only then, working out from that point, he argues in a number of ways that the nature of sin was such that man had rendered himself incapable of fulfilling the Law, and

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hence that it could only be by divine grace liberating Man that such a thing as obeying the Law of God could ever occur. Kant, by contrast, always proceeds the other way round: starting by considering what Man can do, he allows that to define the scope of what could count as a legitimate account of the good life. It is because 'Ought' implies 'Can' that 'nothing is good without qualification, save only a good will'. The question is: if we adhere rigidly to Kant's programme, will we not be led, from the very outset, to give a truncated account of the good life? Is there not a great deal that we consider to be of fundamental value in human life, which, if duty is construed in Kant's terms as governed by 'Ought' implies 'Can', simply has to be regarded as lying beyond the scope of duty? We have a simple intuitive contrast between a good man and a moral man, and to my ear at least there is no contradiction in saying 'He's a highly moral man, but scarcely a good man'. Of course, being a moral man matters, but someone may do all that in him lies, and yet not be a good man. But to say this is to attach a great deal of fundamental significance to the good life that simply cannot be regarded as a human achievement.

IV Let us try to draw together the somewhat disparate threads of this paper. When I examined the principle 'Ought' implies 'Can\ I began with an argument from Erasmus and ended with an argument from Kant which I believe to be Kant's real argument for the principle - in any case it seems the only one of the arguments to be found in Kant which does not seem badly flawed when you try to think it through. The others seem at best


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suggestive, and at worst muddled. I described the argument in Erasmus as a distant ancestor of Kant's, and now we have looked at Luther's antithetical position. I wish briefly to comment on what I had in mind. Erasmus' argument rested on the notion of a God who commanded, and who rewarded or punished Man for obedience or disobedience. He then wanted us to contemplate the morally outrageous picture that emerged if the commands were impossible for Man to fulfil: as though life became an insane obstacle race in which the obstacles were deliberately set to trap every competitor. When Luther replies to Erasmus, one feels that despite the fact that both men are arguing well and making good points, the debate really gets nowhere; that in the end they are simply talking past one another. The reason for this is that Luther and Erasmus brought such different presuppositions to the debate, that they simply were unable to hear what each other was saying, and that Luther had in particular questioned a whole range of assumptions which were for Erasmus simply axiomatic to his whole way of thinking. What Luther was breaking completely with was thinking in terms of merit. It is not by chance that the first really public act of the Reformation was his attack on the system of indulgences, which is the sick outworking of a theology conceived in terms of merit. What makes the Erasmus argument seem at first so attractive is that it is presented as though the purpose of God, in issuing his commands, is to set Man a task and reward or punish Man for his success and failure in that task; so that the whole history of the Universe was a history of crime and punishment. If crime then was inevitable, the history became a black comedy. The task had at least to be a possible one, and, however difficult it may be, Man could merit the reward. But this picture is certainly not the only possible one

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of God and his relation to Man. There is, indeed, something already perverse in viewing life as no more than this kind of obstacle race - whether or not the race is a possible one. One may, for instance, think instead of God's commandments as simply the Law of life: that living according to the Law of love will be the life for which God has created Man, and according to which man will find life and fulfilment. If Man through his own perversity rejects that life, turns his heart in upon itself, he may radically cut himself off from the possibility of the good life so that, thereafter, if freedom, love and even happiness are to be available to him it will only be by an act of divine grace, which is based entirely on a divine, initiative. This is a crude sketch of Luther's picture. But seen in this way, Erasmus' argument has no purchase at all. It is only when we think of the whole purpose of the Law of God to be a complex system of tasks set to us purely for us to be rewarded or punished that it can appear so strong. Now of course, as I stressed, this is not the context of Kant's thought: he is not thinking of God as the author of the moral law, but of the law as dictated by reason alone. But the notions which are implicit in Erasmus' argument are the notions of reward and punishment, and consequently merit. Kant is taking the notions of that which is praiseworthy and that which is blameworthy as the crucial notions in approaching the fundamental questions of ethics. These are, as it were, the secular analogues of the notions with which Erasmus is working, Now, of course, notions of moral praise and blame, of guilt and worthiness, are important moral notions, but they are not the only fundamental moral concepts. It is, I believe, only because Kant insists in giving to these notions absolutely decisive weight from the very outset of his enquiry that he is led to claim that the only thing that


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is good without qualification is a good will; a simple act of true compassion is worth every bit as much, even if not everyone can at will be compassionate. It is only because we at some level all agree with Kant in assigning the fundamental role that he does to the notions of the praiseworthy and the blameworthy, that we find his insistence that 'Ought' implies 'Can' so plausible. An alternative approach to ethics would be to begin by enquiring into the question: 'What is the life which is truly valuable, which is truly worth living?' Only then to raise the question: 'How, if at all, can we attain that life?' We shall then, I suspect, be led to see a large number of the questions of ethics in very different terms from Kant. Questions of praise, blame and guilt will still have their place, but only to be raised after other questions have been raised: and there are whole areas of ethical enquiry in which these questions can become almost irrelevant. Shakespeare, in a play like Othello is engaged in a profound ethical exploration of Othello and his relationships, but it is an enquiry in which the question whether we blame Othello or not is of hardly any interest whatever, even if it remains an exploration of the question: 'How has Othello got human life and human relationships wrong?' The fact that he may not have been able to help doing so, does not in any way mean that he has not gone radically astray. But to begin to explore that question as an ethical question, we have to do what Luther did and dethrone the concept of merit from the centre of our moral thinking.

Bibliography The following translations of Kant and Luther have been used in this paper. Page references are to the editions cited, and abbreviations are as given.

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Kant Critique of Pure Reason, trans N. Kemp Smith (London, 1929) [first Critique]. Critique of Practical Reason, and other ethical writings, trans L.W. Beck (Chicago, 1949) [second Critique and Foundations]. Metaphysic of Morals, part II, trans M.J. Gregor (New York, 1964) [M.]. Lectures on Ethics, trans L. Infield (New York, 1963). The Dispute of the Faculties, trans M.J. Gregor (New York, 1979) [The Dispute]. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans T.M. Greene and H.H. Hudson (New York, 1960) {Religion Within].

Luther and Erasmus For Luther, I have generally cited from The American Edition of Luther's Works, Vols 31-3 (Philadelphia, 1957), referring as appropriate to The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. XVI (London, 1962): Disputation against Scholastic Theology [DST]. For the Luther-Erasmus debate, I have used The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. XVII (London, 1969): Erasmus [Diatribe], Luther [Bondage].

CONFUSED PERCEPTIONS, DARKENED CONCEPTS: SOME FEATURES OF KANT'S LEIBNIZ-CRITIQUE Catherine Wilson

This paper describes a route to Kant's rejection of the metaphysics of the monadology, one which proceeds not by way of the antinomies and the associated claims about the limits of knowledge, but by way of Kant's often repeated claim that Leibniz treated perception and cognition as higher and lower degrees of a single faculty, perception being a mode of confused cognition. Although this criticism, which appears in the Amphiboly section of the first Critique and in many other locations, has certainly received its share of attention, there is a well-founded uneasiness about it. While a few scholars just state their all around endorsement, as though there were obviously a mistake here and it was good of Kant to have seen it, Leibniz scholars have long recognized that it is very difficult to pin this single faculty theory on to the historical Leibniz. This seems to reduce the value of Kant's criticism, for if there is no evidence that it ever related to any real position, its historical significance cannot be very great. Here I would like to try to show that Kant's accusation really is at the centre of his Leibniz-critique. It does, in 73

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fact, touch its intended object with one arm, as it were, while reaching with the other into the interior of Kant's own scheme of things. On this interpretation, Kant's reassessment begins with a point of what he calls 'logic' - what we would call a point of epistemology - and becomes a point of metaphysics; the attack on Leibniz's epistemological notion of a confused intellectual apprehension becomes an attack on the system of monads. We have here a definite shift of levels: for what begins as an internal, theoretical criticism ends as a metatheoretical criticism of the ability of any philosophical subject to apprehend sensibly the noumenal world. If a subject cannot apprehend the noumenal world cognitively either - there being no such thing as a 'cognitive apprehension' - the end result is that the philosophical subject Leibniz is effectively cut off from his doctrines; he has no right to them. By way of discussing the relation between Kant's internal and external criticisms, I will try to provide a more accurate account of Leibniz's own view; and to show to what extent the Leibnizian doctrine was mediated for Kant by the Leibnizians. I begin, however, with the problem of extracting the confusion doctrine from Leibniz himself.

I 'Leibniz intellectualised appearances', Kant says, just as Locke . . . sensualised all concepts of the understanding. . . . Instead of seeking in understanding and sensibility two sources of representations, which, while quite different, can supply objectively valid judgements of things only in conjunction with each other, each of these two great men holds to one

Confused Perceptions, Darkened Concepts

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only, viewing it as in an immediate relation to things in themselves. The other faculty is then regarded as serving only to confuse or order the representations which this selected faculty yields.1 This criticism is often taken as bearing wholly on the problem of space, and as reaching out only through the problem of the identity of indiscernibles to more general features of Leibniz's metaphysics. This interpretation is supported by the close proximity of the famous passage talking about comparing and distinguishing objects: Leibniz, Kant says, 'compared all things with each other by means of concepts alone, and naturally found no differences save those only through which the understanding distinguishes its pure concepts from one another'.2 So he is supposed to have arrived as a result at the view that spatial relations and orientations are intellectually known properties of things-in-themselves, confusedly perceived, for 'appearance was, on his view, the representation of the thing in itself. Now, although it is right to see in these passages echoes of the NewtonLeibniz controversy and to read Kant as endorsing a nonrelational theory of space, this does not settle the question of the justice or appropriateness of Kant's accusation; in fact, it is a somewhat strange accusation, for Leibniz assuredly did not hold, could not have held, that righthandedness and left-handedness were properties of 1 Critique of Pure Reason, A 271/B 327, trans N. Kemp Smith (St Martin's: New York, 1965). 2 Ibid., A 270/B 326. This criticism was already in finished form in the 'pre-critical' essay 'On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World' (1770), 'The sensitive should not be described as what is more confusedly cognized and the intellectual as that of which there is a distinct cognition. For these things are only logical distinctions, which do not touch at all the things given', trans and edited by G.B. Kerferd and D.E. Walford, in Selected pre-Critical Writings (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1968), p. 58.

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simple substances. (Moreover, Kant seems to have known that Leibniz did not hold this view while he was composing the B version if not the A version of the Critique.)3 What kind of general view of perception as confused cognition is it right, then, to pin on to him? From what basis was Kant actually working? These are the first questions we have to investigate, and by appeal only to works of Leibniz which formed the basis of commentary in the eighteenth century.

1

The 'Authentic' Version of the Confusion Doctrine

Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of whether perception and cognition are two faculties or one, let us note that the claim that normal perceptions are, or may be, thoroughly or somewhat confused enters into Leibniz's philosophy in three different ways. First, it is an internal feature of Leibniz's logic, where it is one of a cluster of terms that qualitatively differentiate 'ideas' or items of 'knowledge'. Second, it occurs as an internal term in Leibniz's descriptive psychology: lower monads or bare monads, resembling people in a swoon or a deep sleep, are said to have more confused perceptions than higher monads. Finally, and here we really do shift levels, confusion is said in some texts to characterize our human perception of sensible things in general; they are really, as intellectual analysis reveals, aggregates of monads, which we perceive confusedly as matter. I will take up each of these broader notions and consider Kant's reaction to it in turn.

1

See p. 100, n. 47.


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(a) 'Confused cognition' and the mind-body link Leibniz seemed to be motivated by three main sets of problems in his elaboration of the logical-epistemological theory of confused perceptions. The first was the problem posed by the Cartesian account of sensory experience. It is supposed a desideratum in theories of perception that the object of my perception and its cause should coincide. If I am seeing a piece of wax, for instance, my visual experience should be caused by a piece of wax. But the Cartesian theory dispensed with this desideratum in a bold and deliberate way: the cause of my perception of wax - whether we understand here 'real, interactive cause' or 'occasional cause' - is the motion of tiny particles with only the primary qualities of shape and size. My perceived object with its colours, smell, warmth, etc. fails to coincide with it.4 Now, Leibniz has not one but two ways of dealing with this problem. The exoteric solution (of which Leibniz was nevertheless inordinately proud) is the theory of pre-established harmony. On this theory, coincidence is still sacrificed but, by designating the relation between object and cause as 'pre-established', it achieves a kind of legitimacy; and by describing it as 'harmonious', the failure to achieve coincidence is somewhat mitigated. The esoteric solution is the theory of confused perception: object and cause do actually coincide, on this view; the relation is not arbitrary because one is a true mapping of

4

See, for example, the discussion in the 'Principles of Philosophy', Part IV, section 198 in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols, J. Cottingham et al. (eds) (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1985), 1: 284-5.

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the other, a 'confused' version of it.5 The perception of colour is just the confused perception of colourless moving particles. So Leibniz anticipates the answer to an argument of Berkeley against the corpuscularians which goes something like this: cherries are coloured, so if we can't perceive colours, we can't perceive cherries either. Our text is the 'Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas'. Here Leibniz says that when we perceive colours or odours 'we are having nothing but a perception of figures and motions, but of figures and motions so complex and minute that our mind in its present state is incapable of observing each distinctly and therefore fails to notice that its perception is compounded'.6 The emergence of a new, apparently 'simple', quality yellow, the scent of violets, the taste of pineapple - is secured to its cause by a striking analogy: unresolved, indistinct, confused figures and motions produce colour, just as unresolved, indistinct, confused blue and yellow particles seem to produce a new simple quality of green. Note that a perfect theory of colour which showed why blue and yellow make green would reduce the arbitrariness to the point where lack of coincidence was no longer a difficulty. This is, by the way, the solution Leibniz indicates to the mind-body problem in general; a perfect theory of mind reduces the arbitrariness of its connection 5 So Leibniz attacks Locke for his resigned acceptance of Cartesian arbitrariness; see the New Essays, trans P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1981), p. 381f. (In an interesting passage discovered by Parkinson, however, he adopts a more resigned attitude; see G.H.R. Parkinson, 'The Intellectualization of Thought and Appearances' fn. 26 in M. Hooker (ed.), Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1982), pp. 3-20.) * 'Meditations', L: 294 ('L' references are to L.E. Loemker, trans and ed. of G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd edn (Reidel: Dordrecht, 1969); G IV: 426 ('G' references are to C.I. Gerhardt (ed.), Die Philosophische Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, 7 vols; reprinted by Olms: Hildesheim, 1962).


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to the body by considering smaller and smaller units (perhaps individual cells), or more and more refined theoretical constructions (perhaps information networks), to the point where coincidence is achieved. (Sometimes his despair of doing so, or his fear of the materialistic consequences, seem to push him back towards pre-established harmony with its acceptance of 'arbitrariness'.)7 (b)

Degrees of confusion

The second problem concerned the distribution and grades of consciousness. If the soul is essentially res cogitans, as Descartes maintained, what is it when the person is asleep, mad, raving, knocked out, drugged, or, equally important, unborn or dead? Descartes said that the body was the instrument of the soul; when it was diminished, affected, or not all there yet, the soul could not express itself properly even though the soul itself thought as perfectly as ever.8 Add to this somewhat doubtful solution the general dubiousness of the beastmachine hypothesis, and the need for a notion of grades of consciousness is clear. In the 'Monadology' Leibniz divides souls into three main groups: simple monads (regular), souls and spirits. The simple monads have no distinguishable or memorable perceptions; they experience something like our swoons and dreamless sleeps; souls have distinct perceptions because they belong to 7

See, for example, the famous 'mill' pas«?ge at 'Monadology' 17, L: 644; G VI: 609. Solomon Maimon, who saw confused perceptions as 'merely bridges with which to cross from soul to body and back again' registered this tension (though Leibniz had good reason to prohibit this passage). See his letter to Kant of 20 September 1791 in Kant's Philosophical Correspondence 1759-1799, trans and edited by A. Zweig (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1967), p. 177. 8 See the 'Reply to Gassendi' in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 vols, trans E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press: London, 1931), II: 208-9.

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animals with better developed sensory organs, for example, eyes and ears, which make perceptions more distinct. Spirits are, in addition, self-aware and can grasp necessary truths.9 Observe that our human perceptions are characterized as 'distinct' in this context even though, according to the theory of perception we considered a moment ago, they are also thoroughly confused. The context we are considering is phenomenological and has nothing to do with an analysis of perception. Nor does this notion of distinctness seem to have much to do with consciousness or apperception.10 I can apperceive myself in a swoony state where everything is a blur, or apperceive my hearing when my ears are stuffed with wax and I cannot hear the articulation of words. And animals, which do not apperceive, have distinct sensations in so far as they have well developed sensory organs. Sensory organs concentrate and collect, Leibniz thinks, and that is how they make perceptions distinct. The connection between the physical and the phenomenological is, I believe, afforded by the optical notion of 'resolution': a lens does not just magnify, it resolves a blurry region into two distinct points. The experience of lower beings presumably is indistinct in something of the way that the world is to creatures who do not see different colours, who cannot distinguish speech sounds, or who see only patterns of light and dark, rather than definite contours and edges. (c)

Confused cognition and aesthetic perception

The third subject requiring its own notion of confusion was aesthetics and the problem of the grounding for judgements of beauty. It is commonplace in the history of "Monadology', 19-30; L: 644-6; G VI: 610-12. 10

But cf. R. McRae, Perception, Apperception and Thought (University of

Toronto Press: Toronto 1976), p. 36.

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aesthetics that the subject shifts in Leibniz's period from a concern with the rules for producing aesthetically correct objects, correctly proportioned and appropriately decorated, to a concern with accounting for the experience of the observer, his idiosyncratic response to what may be a unique work. Alfred Baeumler, in his study of the theory of irrationality in the eighteenth century, has pointed to the significance of Father Bouhours, a writer mentioned by Leibniz, who wrote, in opposition to Port Royal, an aesthetics - what he described as a 'logic without thorns'.11 Bouhours thinks that beauty depends on something unique, resistant, and intellectually impenetrable in the work of art: it is not a matter of clarity and distinctness, but of indistinctness. Its appreciation calls for a particular fineness - a delicatesse - in the observer: a sense for half-tones and nuances, a receptiveness for sudden unexpected revelations following long confusing searches, and so on.12 'Confusion' enters into this general conception in several ways. In the 'Meditations' Leibniz draws a parallel between aesthetic perception and ordinary perception; just as seemingly simple perceptual qualities like 'red' are composite and can be resolved into their underlying causes by moving to the physical level of analysis, so aesthetic qualities such as beauty are composite, and judged to be unanalysable. 'We sometimes see painters and other artists correctly judge what has been done well or done badly; yet they are often unable to give a reason for their judgement, but tell the inquirer that the work 11 A. Baeumler, Das Irrationalitaetsproblem in der Aesthetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts (1923) (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt, 1967), p. 29. 12 Ibid., p. 32. On Leibniz's interest in D. Bouhours' La maniere de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit (1687), see the editors' note in the New Essays, p. xxix.

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which displeases them lacks "something, I know not what".'13 A second example is from the 'Principles of Nature and of Grace', and here Leibniz makes the connection between perception and confused cognition stunningly explicit. 'Even the pleasures of the senses are reducible,' he says, to intellectual pleasures, known confusedly. Music charms us, although its beauty consists only in the agreement of numbers and of counting, which we do not perceive but which our soul nevertheless continues to carry out, of the beats and vibrations of sounding bodies which coincide at certain intervals.14 Certain pictures look like confused blurs until they are seen in a spherical mirror, when it is suddenly apparent what they represent, e.g. Julius Caesar.15 So much then, for the sources and main points of the theory of confused perceptions. The reader will note that, just on the basis of what has been said so far, it would be difficult to assign to Leibniz the view that we possess only a single basic faculty of apprehension, or that perception is the lowest grade of cognition. To see whether he has any such systematic view, we need to look at some other theoretical statements; I will not cite the evidence on both sides here, but rather point out the very different constructions that can be placed on the same alleged pieces of evidence. The single most suggestive text comes from the 'Principles of Nature and of Grace': it reads Each soul knows the infinite, knows everything, but "'Meditations', L: 291; G IV: 423. L: 641; G V I : 605-6. 15 New Essays, p. 257. 14


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confusedly. Thus when I walk along the seashore and hear the great noise of the sea, I hear the separate sounds of each wave but do not distinguish them: our confused perceptions are the result of the impressions made on us by the whole universe. It is the same with each monad. Only God has a distinct knowledge of everything for he is the source of everything.16 This passage, which expounds a doctrine of confused omniscience, seems at first to support the single faculty view. For God's knowledge, our knowledge, and the knowledge of every other creature seem to lie on a continuum. We are all granted a certain omniscience, only our human and animal omniscience is confused while God's is distinct. Assuming that God's knowledge is intellectual knowledge, then, we would have to say that our knowledge is intellectual knowledge too; otherwise it would not be the same kind of omniscience in our case and God's case and the passage would be pointless. So, on this reading, when we hear the waves, we have some confused intellectual knowledge of the waves. However, a thought is cutting across this one: the thought that we know passively, where God knows actively. He knows everything because he is the source of everything - that is what the passage says. If so, there is no continuum. God does not soak up or receive impressions from every part of the universe as I soak up the sound of the ocean; nothing impresses itself on him. He is not there being reached by everything as the creatures are. So the passage could just as well be said to point to a categorical difference between perception and intellection, between the kind of knowledge that "L: 640; G VI: 604.

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depends upon having sensory organs that are impressed upon, and the kind of knowledge that does not. Here is a second ambiguous piece of evidence for the unity of the apprehending faculty, which depends upon an analogy between the fineness of the natural world and our confused apprehension of it, and the beauty of the moral world and our confused intellectual understanding of it: We also find order and wonders in the smallest whole things when we are capable of distinguishing their parts and at the same time seeing the whole, as we do in looking at insects and other small things in the microscope. . . . This is also true when one looks at the brain, which must undoubtedly be one of the greatest wonders of nature . . . yet one finds there only a confused mass in which nothing unusual appears, but which nevertheless conceals some kind of filaments of a fineness much greater than that of a spider's web. . . . We may say that it is the same in the government of intelligent substances under the kingship of God, in which everything seems confused to our eyes. To try to perceive immediately the beauty of the world is 'like wishing to take a novel by the tail and to claim to have deciphered the plot from the first book; the beauty of a novel, instead, is great in the degree that order emerges from the very great apparent confusion'.17 Note the progression of ideas: the undifferentiated speck or blob of the insect body is resolved by the lens into limbs and organs which give us an intellectual understanding of the insect body; so the undifferentiated mass of the human brain could be resolved into a system of fibres and filaments which would help us understand its 17

'Reflections on the Common Concept of Justice', L: 565.


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functioning; so the moral confusion of the world could be resolved, enabling us to see that it is a system after all. We have moved from peering intently at something with a microscope to 'looking' at the world from a religious perspective, that is to say, from a particular intellectual perspective. Does this mean that clearing up perceptual indistinctness is a Way of acquiring knowledge? Is an inadequate intellectual grasp much the same thing as an inadequate perceptual grasp? That is what the passage and its internal dynamics might suggest. But one might also say that the three cases are simply related to each other by analogy - that there is a rhetorical, rather than a logical, relation between the three cases. If so, then no assimilation of perception and cognition is necessarily implied. My third piece of ambiguous evidence is Leibniz's seemingly direct statement that there are only two fundamental faculties possessed by 'simple substances': perception and appetition. 'The passing state which enfolds and represents a multitude in unity or in the simple substance is merely what is called perception.'18 No separate description of the state of 'cognition' or 'intellectual apprehension' of an object is given. This suggests that a single faculty of representation must embrace both. There is, however, some discrepant information, which suggests that Leibniz recognizes a difference between perception and intellection; that they are, at any rate, clearly defined subcategories. For in the 'Monadology' we also find the claim advanced that the intellectual apprehension of necessary and eternal truths is a reflexive action in which the soul does not merely mirror or reflect the universe, but turns back to look at 18

'Monadology', 14, L: 644; G V I : 608f.

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itself. In spirits 'the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths . . . gives us reason and the sciences, lifting us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God . . . we rise to reflective acts'.19 In the New Essays, Leibniz comes close to Locke's formulation, arguing that, besides ideas which are acquired through the senses, there are ideas like those of substance, being, unity, etc., which the mind achieves by reflection on itself. We might as well be talking about a higher faculty here: Kant, if he had taken a mind to it, might as well have accused Leibniz in these contexts of having sensualized cognitions, by supposing that these ideas and truths can be, as it were, seen on the soul, or inscribed on our inner tablets. What of our original text, the 'Meditations'? Here, despite the usual loose seventeenth-century handling of words like 'idea' and 'knowledge', Leibniz implicitly distinguishes between an idea in the sense either of an image or of an immediate impression, later called an Anschauung or a Vorstellung, and an idea in the sense of a concept, a Begriff. Each can be indistinct in its own way, and his whole exposition seems indeed directed precisely toward a separation of experiential and analytical elements. The vividness and simplicity of an impression - an immediate sensory experience - are something other than a discursive or analytical understanding of an object. That is why colours, flavours, odours, and, surprisingly perhaps, beauty are all clear ideas (and, usually, clear impressions), while they are neither distinctly sensed nor distinctly conceptualized. We do not perceive their causes distinctly, nor do we know, discursively, what their causes are. That intellectualized concepts are different from perceived or imagined objects is plain from the fact that, although I "Ibid., 29-30, L: 645-6; G VI: 611.


cannot imagine or see a thousand-sided figure except confusedly, and I cannot understand the individual terms of the definition of the word 'chiliagon' distinctly, my concept is nevertheless distinct.20 Still, we should have to say that Leibniz does not always hold ideas in the sense of Vorstellungen or presentations, and ideas in the sense of Begriffe or concepts, apart, and that this opens the door to the perception-asconfused-cognition theory. In his discussion of 'obscure concepts', Leibniz explains that: A concept is obscure, which does not suffice for recognizing the thing represented, as when I merely remember some flower or animal which I have once seen but not well enough to recognize it when it is placed before me and to distinguish it from similar ones, or when I consider some term which the Scholastics had defined poorly, such as Aristotle's entelechy.21 In this case my idea, in the sense of my Vorstellung, is poorly defined and so is my idea in the sense of my Begriff. My mental image is not sufficiently distinct to enable me to give defining criteria. The implication is that if my Vorstellung were sharper, clearer, a better picture, my Begriff would be in better shape too. While happily allowing that to get a better Begriff of a chiliagon I do not need a better Vorstellung, Leibniz fails, perhaps, to be sufficiently interested in the fact that to get a better Begriff of, say, an ash-tree, I do seem to need a better Vorstellung. And sometimes Leibniz does suggest that what we see confusedly is identical with the discursive analysis of the thing we see. What we see confusedly 20 21

'Meditations', L: 292; C IV: 423. Ibid., L: 291; G IV: 422.

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when we see red is whirling corpuscles of a certain description; 'whirling corpuscles of a certain description' is also part of the discursive analysis of red. There seems to be, in other words, a use-mention confusion.22

2

Kant's Reception of 'Confused Cognition'

While a reading of the Critique might make anyone wonder how much Kant actually knew of Leibniz, and while we have surprisingly little evidence of much firsthand study of Leibniz's works, there can be no doubt that Kant was seriously concerned with Leibnizian themes - from monadology, pre-established harmony and theodicy, to forces, space and time in his early essays, and indeed throughout the course of his life. He did not, at least at first, need to return to the original, as Leibniz was well-furnished with interpreters and systematizes in C.F. Wolff (1679-1754); A.G. Baumgarten (1714-1767); and C.F. Meier (1718-1777). Kant's lectures in metaphysics, for example, were a critical exposition of the Metaphysica of Baumgarten, a monadologist and aesthetician, which he studied and annotated thoroughly. His lectures on logic were a critical exposition of Meier, author of the Vernunftlehre, Baumgarten's pupil, and both Baumgarten and Meier looked back to Wolff, who rightly and wrongly was seen as the explicator and systematizer of Leibniz. In the course of this transformation of Leibniz's writings into a system, the confusion doctrine is clearly articulated. For Wolff and Baumgarten, there is, dogmatically stated, one faculty of representatio with perception 22 Kant seems to have taken Leibniz as saying that there are properties which would be mentioned if we were conceptually distinguishing between a right-handed object and a left-handed object; and that the properties themselves are actually dimly apprehended when we see those objects.


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and cognition corresponding to its 'lower' and 'higher' parts.23 And, to make matters worse, we see, in Wolff's work especially, the thorough confusion of Begriff and Anschauung, concept and intuition, that so provoked Kant. So, for example, Wolff defines a concept {Begriff) as 'a presentation in our thoughts'. 'I have a concept of the sun,' he says, when I represent it to myself in my thoughts, either through a picture, as though I were to see it before me, or through mere words, with which I would make it clear that I had seen the sun, e.g. that it is the blazing body in the sky by day which blinds the eyes and make it warm and light on the earth; or through another symbol, such as the astrological sign. The same goes for marriage. I have a concept, when I either see in my mind an image of two people getting married or again through mere words: linguistic signs.24 Our concepts, he goes on to say, may be more or less 'dark', darkness being opposed to clarity of perception. For example, he says, drawing on Leibniz, I see a plant in the garden and can't quite remember whether I have seen this plant before, or know its name. Most people, he thinks, have this kind of dark concept of philosophical terms and mathematical ones, and that is why they have 23 See Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 7th edn (1779; reprinted by Olms: Hildesheim, 1963): 'Anima mea quaedam cognoscit obscure quaedam confuse cognoscit. . . . Unde FACULTAS obscure confuseque seu indistincte aliquid cognoscendi COGNOSCITIVA INFERIOR est. . . .' (#520); 'Repraesentatio non distincta sensitiva vocatur' (#521); 'Anima mea cognoscit quaedam distincte . . . facultas distincte quid cognoscendi est FACULTAS COGNOSCITIVA SUPERIOR' (#624). 2A Vernunfftigen Gedancken von den Kraeften des Menschlichen Verstands (1713; reprinted by Olms: Hildesheim, 1965), Chapter 1, section 4. Otherwise known as the Deutsche Logik, this work was directly inspired by Leibniz's 'Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas' as well as by Locke and Tschirnhaus.

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difficulties with those subjects. Note that because of the indiscriminate treatment of Begriff in both its pictorial and its verbal sense, darkness of concepts describes any less-than-ideal perceptual situation as well as any lessthan-ideal epistemological situation. I also have a dark concept, Wolff thinks, when what I experience is too far away or too small - or even when it is just too dark outside - to distinguish its features clearly 'as when we see something white in the twilight lying far away in a field' or when a discursive gardener is explaining plants to me, but I am distracted by the person accompanying me through the garden.25 Perceptual indistinctness, indistinct cognition, and darkness of concepts are blended together here in an unfortunate way. And Wolff also associates clear-sightedness with theoretical improvements when he says that microscopes and telescopes help us to refine our concepts. What he means is quite innocent; a microscopical examination of Brennessel shows us that its irritating power really involves tiny points on the leaf; that sparks are really glowing bits of steel or stone; that the milky way is a collection of individual stars and that the moon is mountainous.26 There is nothing 'dark' or 'confused', Kant protests in his own logic lectures, about failing to distinguish the individual parts of an object. For example, if you look at a house, you must take in its parts: doors, windows, etc. 'For if we did not see the parts we should not see the house itself.'27 We are not individually conscious of the plurality of parts, but this does not darken or confuse the perception. And this is his stance in general. The 25

Ibid., section 23. Ibid., section 22. 27 Kant's Introduction to Logic, trans R.S. Hartman and W. Schwartz (Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis and New York, 1974), p. 38. 26


telescope, he says, changes the white band of the milky way into a host of individual stars: the stars were indistinct, but my perception was not confused.28 In making this substitution he is effectively redefining confusion as a lack of order. It has nothing to do with a failure to recognize, identify or define a perceptual object, or with a failure to note or distinguish its parts. Confusion is not the antonym of 'distinctness' but the antonym of 'order'. Throw some coins on the table in any old way and they are confused; put them in neat piles and you have order. It follows that our impression of red cannot be, as Leibniz stated, 'confused' for it has no parts to become disordered. In the case of the impression or even the idea of beauty, we cannot, Kant admits, state its 'parts' i.e. its analysis or the cause of the impression to ourselves in detail. But our inability to give a conceptual analysis of beauty does not imply that the experience of beauty is something involving confusion. Now, it is worth pointing out that Leibniz, at any rate, did not make the inference he is being accused of here. And it is probable that Kant's own theory of aesthetics does without the notion of confused perception because he is concerned with a different kind of aesthetic object. His focus is, as a result, no longer on the aesthetic experience of the observer, but on his exercise of a faculty of judgement or taste. The typical aesthetic objects of the baroque, the trompe I'oeil painting, the complicatedly plotted novel, the formalistic musical pieces - examples, one might say, of 'court art' - lend themselves to Leibniz's treatment in a way in which Kant's aesthetic objects, with their somewhat stifling air of bourgeois domesticity, do 28

Ibid., p. 3 9 .

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not.29 The activity of connoisseurship, with its picking, choosing, and comparing, with its judgements, is suited to those objects; there is correspondingly nothing mysterious or intriguing about how they are experienced: certainly no need for the Leibnizian multiplicity of levels. Note as well that Kant is able to redefine confusion as a problem of orderliness because he is not at all concerned with something which preoccupied Leibniz: the coincidence of cause and object in perception. The problem of primary and secondary qualities or visual impressions and their corpuscular causes that so perplexed his predecessors either does not register with him or he has seen beyond it: Transcendental Idealism is perhaps a way of putting the question about the relation between cause and object in perception out of bounds. For what Kant introduces in place of this truthguaranteeing coincidence is the notion that two faculties co-operate to produce our perceptions, each of which guarantees objectivity in a different way. There are two sources of representation, he maintains, 'which, while quite different, supply objectively valid conceptions of things by working in conjunction'.30 Sensibility delivers to us the matter of knowledge, the understanding brings sensibility under rules. This distinction, as he says, is not 'logical' but metaphysical: It has, in other words, nothing to do with concept formation, with introspectively identifiable differences in our thoughts and experiences; it is not part of 'empirical psychology' or epistemology: it has to do with metaphysics, and that is to say with origins. 29 'Porzellandosen und - Figuren, Stockknoepfe, Spitzen, Tapetenmuster und derartige Dinge waren die Gegenstaende, von denen Kant seine Geschmackslehre abstrahierte.' Quoted by Baeumler, Das Irrationalitaetsproblem, p. 254, from Schlapp, Kants Lehre vom Genie, p. 181, fn. 5. 10 Critique, A 271/B 327.


And it is evident that this point is specifically meant against Baumgarten.31 The co-operation of two faculties, passive and active, one which delivers, one which organizes, then, replaces the Leibnizian picture which veers to odd extremes. Sometimes Leibniz suggests that all experience in the sense of representatio is wholly passive. Every creature is a mirror of the world: it mirrors some things distinctly, some confusedly. And sometimes he suggests that experience is wholly active, that every mind produces or draws up from within itself all its thoughts, which are clear or confused depending on the type of mind it is. When Kant splits the faculty of representation to derive separate active and passive features in perception, he reminds the reader that it is part of the human character of knowledge that it is so divided. Were I to think an understanding which is itself intuitive (as, for example, a divine understanding which should not represent to itself given objects, but through whose representation the objects should themselves be given or produced) the categories would have no meaning whatsoever in respect of such a mode of knowledge. They are merely rules for an understanding whose whole power consists in thought. An archetypic intelligence would not contain a formal 31

See Kant's 'Reflexion' # 2 2 0 to Baumgarten's 'Metaphysica' # 5 2 0 : 'Der Unterschied der Sinnlichkeit vom Verstande ist 1. formal, da die erste Erkenntnis intuitive, die zweite discursive ist . . . In jeder diesen beyden Formen kann Deutlichkeit oder Undeutlichkeit statt finden, nemlich in der Anschauung oder im Begriff. Deutlichkeit der Anschauung findet statt wo gar kein Begriff ist . . . Man muss auch nicht zur Unvollkommenheit der einen Form als der Anschaung das rechnen, was eigentlich nur die Form des Verstandes angeht. Der Unterschied des Verstandes beruhet also nicht auf Verwirrung und Deutlichkeit, wohl aber der Form nach, auf Anschauung und Begriff. In Kants Werke, 19 vols (Walter de Gruyter: Berlin and Leipzig, 1917-28), 15: 84.

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component working on the matter as a given; it would produce both.32 There is, then, no continuum of representations from the divine to the dim; instead the archetypal, creating intelligence and the passive receptive intelligence seem to work together.33

3

The Confused Apprehension of the Noumenal World

I now come to the last section of the paper with its question, how did Kant's refusal to treat sensibility and cognition as higher and lower grades of the single faculty of representatio give him a point of departure for criticizing the 'Monadology' qua philosophical document? Kant sometimes presents his criticisms in a single breath, sweeping epistemology and metaphysics together. So he tells us early in the work that his whole teaching with regard to sensibility would be rendered empty and useless if we were to accept the view that our entire sensibility is nothing but a confused representation of things, containing only what belongs to them in themselves, but doing so under an aggregation of characters and partial representations which we do not consciously distinguish. The representation of a body in intuition, he continues,

32

Critique, A 271/B 327. In the logician Meier we get a possible route by which the split into the material and the workman might emerge from the Leibnizian theory of confused perception. In Meier, dark knowledge is the matter, which the craft of the soul shapes into clear knowledge: 'When God made the world, he made something dark and empty: a chaos and out of it he built this splendid worldedifice. Dark knowledge is the chaos in the soul, the raw lumps of matter which creative force works upon and out of which she gradually assembles all her knowledge. Without dark knowledge, we could not have any clear knowledge at all'. Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre (Halle, 1752), p. 131. 33


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'contains nothing that can belong to an object in itself, but merely the appearance of something'.34 But what we experience is not, in Leibnizian fashion, an appearance of a thing-in-itself: 'With their theory of a single cognitive faculty', Kant thinks, Leibniz and Wolff 'abolished the distinction between phenomena and noumena to the great detriment of philosophy'.35 Now, that Kant should have accused Leibniz of taking appearances for things-in-themselves and so confusing phenomena and noumena seems at first even more incredible than that he should have accused him of treating perception as a variety of cognition. Are not the monads noumenal objects par excellence} Are they not, as incorporeal, non-spatial, spontaneous minds, unaffected and unaffecting, utterly different from the persons, animals, and material things that appear to us, and that act upon us and are acted upon? Kant at some points takes Leibniz as asserting that an ideally clear cognition of a body would reveal it as an ensemble of monads - immaterial simples - while our ordinary, indistinct perceptions show a continuous extension. Phenomena and noumena are thus confused, for the monad is a noumenal object only in so far as it exists below the threshold of distinct perception. And this interpretation is less arbitrary than it might seem, for Leibniz, though distressingly vague on the question of how to derive the continua of experience from the discrete unextendeds of metaphysical reality, did at times suggest that matter is the result of a perceptual blurring and confusion of monads.36 Supernaturally clear perception, for example of a divine being, which would be no different * Critique A 44/B 61. 35 Ibid. 16 See, for example, Leibniz's 'Letter to Sophie', G V I 1 : 564.

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than that being's cognition, would then resolve the continuum into discrete parts revealing units - monads. Which view was adopted by Leibniz's eighteenthcentury interpreters? Wolff says that space is that thing which we imagine when we imagine some arrangement of things;37 but he also says that many simple substances can be gathered together, whereby they fill up space together 'though indeed each individual one actually fills up no space, but simply occupies its particular place within it'.38 He argues from a logical 'Verknupfung' or 'bond' of the cause-effect type (the earth and the sun, being, for example, verknupft), which implies their spatial distinctness, to the possibility of their spatial Verknupfung and so extension in length, breadth and thickness.39 But it is not simply the case that Wolff leaps from the possibility of logical relations to the possibility of spatial relations: what he seems to have in mind here, surprisingly enough, is something like the dynamical occupation of space by repulsive point-forces.40 After stressing that simple things cannot be stuck together as ordinary objects of experience are, he states that 'Just as they are grasped only through the understanding, so their Verknupfung with each other is also only intelligible'.41 Thus no direct claim is made to the effect that a confused perception of monads yields the appearance of continuous matter. In Baumgarten's work, however, we get a more suggestive statement. Though he, too, seems to have both logical and dynamical ideas of monadic bonding,42 he does state in the context of a 17 'Deutsche Metaphysik', #46. "Ibid., #602. "Ibid., #603. 40 'die Puncte der Natur . . . auch eine in ihnen bestaendig wuerckende Kraft haben, und daher ein jedes ausser dem andere seyn muss', ibid., #604. 41 Ibid., #604. 42 'Metaphysica', #402 ff.


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discussion on monads, atoms, and corpuscles, that observabilia or phenomena are the things which we can know through the senses, that is, confusedly.43 We explain those phenomena by means of corpuscles, which are not, however, to be identified with monads. Thus, confused perception is at least introduced into the discussion of aggregation, though both Wolff and Baumgarten seem determined to maintain a categorical distinction between simple substances and the seemingly simple objects of experience, one which cannot be effaced by confused perception. We get a much stronger link, however, in the later Leibnizian, J.A. Eberhard: Concrete time, or the time which we feel, is nothing other than the succession of our representations; . . . [it] is therefore something composite; its simple elements are representations. Since all finite things are in a continual flux, these simple elements can never be sensed; inner sense can never sense them separately. . . . Furthermore since the flux of alterations of all finite things is a continual unbroken flux, no sensible part of time is the smallest, or a fully sensible part. The simple elements of concrete time therefore lie completely outside the sphere of sensibility. . . . The understanding therefore raises itself beyond the sphere of sensibility as it discovers the unimageable simples without which the sensible images, even in respect to time, are not possible.44 Thus we have an example of at least one Leibnizian 43 Ibid., #425: and he seems to allow, like Leibniz, that 'material atoms' can be used to explain phenomena, though the notion is actually a 'contradictio in adjecto'. Cf. ibid., #429. 44 J.A. Eberhard, Pkilosophisches Magazin, quoted H.E. Allison (trans and ed.), The Kant-Eberhard Controversy (Johns Hopkins: Baltimore, 1973), p. 23.

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though the dating of this passage is too late to suppose that it was an initial stimulus to Kant - who believes that intelligibility is a matter of lying below sensory thresholds. And the account being offered here seems distinctly different from the relational theory of Wolff. The experience of time is said to be a blur of tiny insensible intervals between tiny, atomic imperceptible experiences, too brief for us to apprehend singly. Now, for Kant, as we know, time could not be the cumulative experience of successive atomistic subsensible experiences. Experiences are, as such, temporalized; they cannot be built out of temporal atoms. The error of Leibnizians like Eberhard is that they regard something of which we can form no image, something which we cannot recognize or identify in intuition, as a nonsensible object. The objects of understanding, they say, are 'unimageable'. But this unimageability concerns, Kant points out, only the limits of perception, not a metaphysical uniqueness. According to Kant, the result is that Eberhard has reproduced the error of Wolff; if the difference between the sensible and the intelligible is a matter of degree and has to do with human capacities and thresholds, then a nine-sided figure is 'more than half-way from the sensible to the supersensible' and a chiliagon is an entirely intelligible object.45 We have now reached the point where the full weight of Kant's epistemological distinction is thrown against the monad. Mr Eberhard wants the monads to be known as nonsensible objects, either insofar as they are too small for the degree of sharpness of our sense, or the number of them in intuition is too large . . . about which we 45

Ibid., p. 127.


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should be able to know a great deal through the understanding.46 Kant forces a parting of the ways: if microscopes could enable us to see monads by resolving the confusion of the aggregate into distinct beings, seeing those beings would not give us a distinct understanding of simple substances. If, by contrast, the concept of simple substance can be arrived at by a priori reflection, those substances cannot be apprehended, even confusedly, as objects. To sum up, for a Leibnizian like Eberhard, there are two ways of apprehending the monad-world; directly, though confusedly, through perception, and indirectly, though clearly, by reflection on the necessary properties of simple substances. On the interpretation I have been proposing, Kant's attack on the internal logic of 'confused perception' culminates in his cutting off of the direct route to the monad-world. Other portions of the Critique are of course dedicated to cutting off the other possible mode of access.

4

The 'Platonic' Approach to Noumena

In his later writings, particularly in his reply to Eberhard, Kant tried to reclaim Leibniz from the Leibnizians. In the Metaphysische Anfaengsgruende of 1786, he had already criticized his own understanding of Leibniz, as well as the interpretations of commentators, as insufficiently Platonistic: space was always thought of as adhering to things outside of our power of representation, but the mathematician thought of this quality only according to common concepts, i.e., confusedly (for appearance 46

Ibid., p. 128.

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is commonly explained in this way). By the same foregoing misinterpretation one attributed the mathematical proposition of the infinite divisibility of matter, . . . to a confused representation of space. . . . In this way it remained open to the metaphysician to compound space of points and matter of simple parts and thus (according to his opinion) to bring clarity into the concept of space. This ground of this aberration lies in a badly understood monadology, which does not at all belong to the explication of natural appearances but is a platonic concept of the world carried out by Leibniz.47 On Kant's view, then, Leibniz, a proto-Kantian, had really wanted to say that space belongs only to the appearance of external things. Reclaiming Leibniz from the textbook writers who had made him a systematist and a dogmatist, especially by overextending his confusion theory, meant 'Platonizing' Leibniz, and showing that he was also a proto-Kantian in regarding phenomena and noumena as belonging to separate realms. And this leaves us with an historical question. As we have seen, there does not appear to be a straightforward claim to the effect that monads are confusedly perceived as extended matter in either Wolff or Baumgarten. The discussion of monadic 'V'erknupfung or '' composition is separate from the discussion of the order of the cognitive faculties. Did persons who are unnamed but whose existence is indicated in the passage from the Metaphysical Foundations really promulgate the 'wrong' Leibnizinterpretation? Or was this doctrine simply extracted from time to time, by Kant among others, from the 47 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), trans J.W. Ellington (Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis and New York, 1970), p. 55.


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known Leibnizian writings? I have tried to show that pertinent passages from Leibniz's more popular writings such as the 'Principles of Nature and of Grace' do not seem to support the doctrine in question very consistently. In looking for a source of the 'wrong' interpretation, we might find it necessary to bypass Wolff and Baumgarten and look to the material published in 1768 in Dutens' edition. The 'Letter to Hansch' might be promising in this respect, as the source of Kant's own initial misreading and the grounds of his self-confessed correction. For it is in this letter that Leibniz, in the space of a few lines, claims that sensible or composite things are in flux and do not really exist, that the mind contains an intelligible world within itself and also represents a sensible world to itself, and that 'God sees all things adequately and at once, while very few things are known distinctly by us; the rest lie hidden confusedly as it were in the chaos of our perceptions'.48 It would be difficult to blame anyone for concluding from this passage that sensible things are composites confusedly perceived where divinely clear perception would be an intelligible representation of substances. In rejecting this conception, Kant assigned priority to the Newtonian world of objects located in space and time and forming together a system of dynamical interactions; the Newtonian world is riot a degraded appearance, a confused representation of a higher, purer world of metaphysically real but non-spatial, non-temporal, noninteracting entities. But validating the Newtonian picture was not Kant's only concern, and it is still worth wondering how Kant's own preoccupation with the supersensible was furthered by his encounter with Leibniz. How far did Kant really approve of the reconstructed Tlatonizing'

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