Immanuel Kant's Philosophy - Bryan Magee & Geoffrey Warnock (1987)

for several Generations now it's been a widely held view among serious students of philosophy that the greatest philosopher to have appeared in the west since the ancient Greeks is Emmanuel Kant was born in the town of koenigsberg in East Prussia in 1724 and died there at an age of almost 80 in the year 1804. many jokes have been made about the fact that he rarely left konigsberg and never went outside his native province in the whole of his life also about the fact that he stuck so strictly to a daily routine that the inhabitants of koenigsberg could literally set their watches by him as he walked past their Windows he never married and outwardly his life was entirely uneventful however he was not at all the dry stick that my description so far would suggest on the contrary he was sociable and amusing elegant in dress and witty in conversation and his lectures at the University of koenigsberg where he was a professor for more than 30 years were famous for their brilliance rather surprisingly Kant was the first great philosopher of the modern era to be a university teacher Descartes minoza leibniz Locke Barclay Hume Russo none of these were academics nor were most of the major philosophers in the century after calm the 19th century the obvious exception is Hegel but schopenhauer kirago Karl Marx John Stuart Mill Nietzsche none of these were academic philosophers it's only in the 20th century that nearly all important philosophers have been academics whether this professionalization of the subject is a good thing is very much a moot point I suspect it's inevitable however to get back to the first of the great professors the writings of Khan's Youth and early middle age made him widely known but all but a few of them are now virtually unread his lasting Fame rests on a series of Publications which didn't begin till he was 57 and continued into his 70s so we have the rare spectacle of a creative genius of the first order producing all his greatest work in late middle age and old age his acknowledged Masterpiece is the critique of pure reason which was published in 1781. it wasn't very well understood at first so two years later he published a short exposition of its Central argument as a separate book usually referred to as the prologometer and then brought out an extensively revised edition of the critique of pure reason in 1787. they are followed in quick succession his second great critique the critique of practical reason in 1788 and then his third critique the critique of judgment in 1790 meanwhile he'd also published in 1785 a little book called the fundamental principles of the metaphysics of Ethics in in spite of its unseductive title this book has had a simply immense influence on moral philosophy ever since with me to discuss kant's work is a well-known contemporary philosopher Sir Jeffrey Warnock principal of Hartford College Oxford and a former Vice Chancellor of Oxford University so Jeffrey Kant was perhaps the most famous system builder in the Contemporary era in philosophy and one notorious difficulty about expounding any system where everything fits in with something else is where to break into it how to make a start where do you think is the the best point to break into Kant for an exposition of his philosophy there's certainly is their problem I mean one of Khan's merits in a way it was he was very good at making an immense range of views fit together in a comprehensive and systematic way but um if we are embarking on the discussion I think it is important not to start off in too technical a way I mean to he's sometimes represented as conducting a sort of refereeing and job between the merits and demerits of rationalism and empiricism for example or discussing how there can be synthetic necessary truths but I think one ought to go rather further back to what the much wider and simpler concern was that really generated these other problems and that I would submit was his concern with an apparent conflict between the findings of the physical sciences in his day and our fundamental ethical and religious convictions he thought there was a prima facie conflict inconsistency there can you spell out what he thought the conflict consisted in I think the Central and simplest form of the conflict was that it seemed to be a presupposition and indeed can't go to a well-founded and proper presupposition of the physical sciences that everything that happens is determined by antecedent happenings and that there is always a law on the basis of which one can say that what happened was the only thing that could have happened in the physical way in the physical world yes but of course when we're thinking about our own conduct when we're thinking say um about moral predicaments we may find ourselves in we believe that we and everybody else have Alternatives before us and that there are various things we could do and it's for that reason that we have to accept the responsibility for what we actually do that was one thing that he thought that that was Prima face it contradicted by a presupposition of physical science in other words how in a universe in which the Motions of all matter are governed by newtonians can they be free scientific laws can there be free will yes that was yes yes he was also concerned with the question uh how a God would fit in to an essentially mechanical and physically determined universe he wasn't the first philosopher even the first major philosopher to see these problems was he no no certainly not um they've been really quite a preoccupation of philosophers all through the 18th century I mean ever since the um sort of Great Leap Forward so to speak in the physical sciences at the end of the 17th century among the empiricists for example Barclay had been preoccupied with this sort of problem and among those in Cancun tradition conspicuously leibniz no he certainly wasn't the first why was he so deeply dissatisfied as he obviously was with what his predecessors had done about this problem well he thought and I think correctly that his predecessors had tried to somehow resolve this conflict or bring it to an end by downgrading the pretensions of the physical sciences and that's certainly true of Barclay and I think it's true of leideness as well and to somehow present them as inferior and not having a claim to be an equal contestant with metaphysical Doctrine and argument and for one thing I think Khan thought that the the record showed that that was not the right way to proceed because on the one hand the physical sciences seemed to proceed smoothly and progressively from Triumph to Triumph with everybody agreeing what had been established and what hadn't um and on the other hand philosophy look to him like a sort of chaotic Battlefield I know philosopher agreed with any other philosopher no Doctrine was accepted for more than a few years before somebody refuted it and so on um that's one thing but then he also thought and I think this is more important that Hume in particular had raised serious doubts about the credentials of philosophy as a sort of possible intellectual Enterprise at all and he thought that a hume's hume's challenge if one can call it that had raised a serious doubt as to whether what the philosophers were professing to do was even in principle possible he made a famous remark once about reading Hume having woken him from his dogmatic Slumber yeah saying refers to this yes what was the Awakening in fact what did what did Hume awaken him to the problem I think in a crude nutshell was this that um Hume and indeed liken it and such other philosophers had thought about it had accepted the general view that propositions can be exhaustively divided into two classes on the one hand there are what used to be called truths of Reason which can't call the analytic propositions where um in a sense they're really true by definition like a triangle has three sides or a bicycle has two wheels that sort of thing those they said could be known a priori I mean independently of experience on the other hand there were substantial propositions which tell us something not simply implicit in the terms we're using these they said were substantial and informative but couldn't be necessary they were always contingent propositions and could be established only on the basis of experience or experiment and Hume said and Khan thought he was quite right to say that if that was right then philosophy itself was in a serious predicament because it didn't put itself forward on the one hand as an empirical science based on observation and experiment and on the other hand it didn't want to say that all it was doing was elaborating a set of tautologies analyzing the terms in which we speak and think and hume's question was well is there anything else that a philosopher could possibly be doing if he isn't doing either of that but didn't Hume realize and can't after him that it also created a serious problem for the Natural Sciences because scientific unrestrictedly General scientific laws yes are also propositions that are neither analytic they can't be deductively arrived at by Logic nor can they be proved from experience and they both realized that too didn't they I'm I'm not sure it shouldn't be I think a diversion at the moment to go into it really what Hume thought about that I think Hume thought that the Sciences could sort of carry on as a body of empirical knowledge um though of course in that case without the claim to establish that anything was necessarily so yeah um Count's view though was certainly that um this belief in an exhaustive dichotomy uh was mistaken he had no doubt that it was mistaken because while one might question the credentials of philosophers in claiming to put forward synthetic propositions that were both synthetic and necessary that might be questionable uh Kant had no doubt that this was perfectly in common form so to speak in the Natural Sciences and in mathematics so that there certainly were he thought undoubtedly there were propositions which were not analytic but were not empirical and contingent either in other words propositions which applied to the world but yet we which we didn't as it were derived from the yes but which we could establish simply by argument yes and we call them synthetic a priorities yeah technical terms yes now uh if such propositions apply to the world but are not so to speak read off from the World by experience by all yes how do we arrive at them well um yes one has to introduce here I think one of Khan's most important distinctions between what he called things in themselves or the world as it is in itself and appearances now on the question of things in themselves and can't would have said we can't make any demands I mean things in themselves simply are as they are and there's nothing we can do about that but if you move to the topic of the world as we experience it as it presents itself to us as an object of experience to the world of what he called appearances then he said it's a different matter because there are certain conditions he claimed which any world must satisfy if it is to be a possible object of experience at all for us for well Us and other people I think too he thought it um a crucial fact that the world is a common object of experience to an indefinite array of subjects of experience and if there is to be such a world that can be experienced and known about in common to a community of subjects of experience then he argued there are conditions which it must satisfy and we can say a priori that um appearances must satisfy these conditions would it be correct to put what you've just said in the following sort of way that what there is for us to experience or perceive or know must of course depend on what there is to experience or perceive or no but it must also depend on what apparatus we have for experiencing or seeing or no yes and that the apparatus that we have is a contingent matter I mean to use a modern example we we happen to be equipped to interpret uh electromagnetic waves of some frequencies but not others that's to say we can receive and interpret heat waves and light rays but we don't receive an interpret uh radio waves and x-rays yes and it's imaginable that we might apprehend reality in entirely different terms from those that do yes now uh Kant is saying this being so for us to be able to experience anything at all it must be such as is apprehensible by our apparatus by the apparatus weave yes yes now that's not to say that nothing else can exist but only that it can't so to speak exist for us that that we can't know it or at least is that right well I would qualify that in one way I can't didn't I think want to get into considerations about what our sensory equipment specifically is I mean what kind of eyes and ears we have um I think he was trying to say something more General than that that the notion of a subject of experience presented with a world as an object of experience requires that it should have sensory capacities of some kind and intellectual and conceptual capacities of some kind but he didn't want to say they must be of this specific kind or that and he didn't he wouldn't have been interested in whether our eyes were different from those of kestrels say I mean just that we must have some way of perceiving yeah but the point then is that we bring certain as it were predispositions yeah and only what fits into this yeah positions can be experienced that's absolutely right yes and this was something the nature of which I think had not occurred to any philosopher no genuinely novel I think yes now what sort of entirely novel view of the nature of human knowledge did this begin to lead him to always well he he put forward the claim that if one um sort of thought carefully and haven't argued long enough one could specify what he called the form of any possible experience this he he gave the name of this the metaphysic of nature although sometimes the metaphysical of experience to this Enterprise what he called the matter that was a contingent matter and there might be this or that actually happening but he thought one could spell out and think out what the form as he called it of any possible experience must be and this would be a body of doctrine that would tell you something about the world of course because it's telling you what its Central form is but telling you something necessary that couldn't be otherwise and for this and because there are such uh propositions uh that was why Hume and others of his predecessors were wrong in analyzing all possible propositions into either analytic which would be true of course by nature of the terms used and synthetic or a posteriori which were true or false according to observations yes we've now got a Third Kind yes yes now can you give us an example or two of of Concepts or propositions which are of this sort well um uh putting it in the most general terms they divide into two broad classes um first of all can't try to deal with what he called the form of sensibility or perception and he thought that here one could um spell out and work out the fundamental character of space and time he thought these were imposed Upon Our experience by the nature of our Sensibility and I want to stop you there because I think this is a very hard idea for people to grasp that's new yes he was saying that space and time don't characterize things as they are in themselves yes indeed but our inescapable modes of experience for us that's right that we can only experience things in these Dimensions but independently of our experience these Dimensions can't be said to exist that's certainly right and he would say if somebody said well what about the creation as it is in itself what kind of spatial and temporal order does it display can't would say not a discussable topic and all we can talk about is that world which is an object of experience to us and the world as it appears and he thought that here it's a very arguable whether he was right to have this thought but he thought that in thus bringing in space and time as forms of sensibility he was in effect bringing in geometry and arithmetic amazingly rather odd claim but he thought that geometry and arithmetic dealt with forms of sensibility and were bodies of synthetic a priori Truth for that reason given that he says that there are propositions of this special kind which apply to the world but are not derived from experience yes could I decide could I just intermediate yes um I was going to say that his synthetic a priori proposition divide into two broad classes we've only dealt with one of them yes of course if I could just very briefly bring in the second right um he thought that there are also what he called forms of the understanding um it sends forms of thought and I suppose the fundamental principles which he tried to show were conditions of the possibility of understanding would be first of all the principle of universal causal determinism which he thought was one of them and then rather unplaused he also tries to show that Newton's law of the conservation of matter States a condition of the possibility of experience too now in order to arrive at the sort of total picture that we are beginning to build up uh let me just recapitulate up to this point that Kant is saying that because all of our knowledge and experience comes to us through our sensory and mental apparatus it all comes to us in forms which are sense-dependent and mind-dependent yes and that we have no direct access to things as they are in themselves independently of all possible experience now given that the modes of apprehension that we have are whatever they are possible experience must as it were fit in with them to be able to be experienced for us at all absolutely and part of his project as a philosopher therefore was to carry out a large-scale investigation into what the nature of these forms walls yes and if that investigation is successful and complete it will tell us what the limits of all possible knowledge is is that right yes yes and that anything that's outside that is just simply unknowable to us yes yes now the implications of this are absolutely radical not only for what is included but for what is left out there that's certainly true and fundamentally true and um I find it hard to believe that it wasn't so to speak something of a disappointment to Carte that um this is the position he got himself into because one gets the impression from the way he embarks on his inquiries that he would like to build a sort of firm foundation for theological speculation about God and the soul and metaphysical speculation about the cosmos um whereas what he actually finishes up doing is saying that there can be no such foundations because all we can establish foundations for is the notion of possible experience and what can be an object of possible experience and if you try to go beyond that if you try to raise questions about how the cosmos should be characterized quite independently of any possible experience or if you're trying to talk about God and the soul then your Enterprise must collapse and be in principle vacuous count is saying certainly now I can't thought that it was impossible for us to know whether God exists or not or whether we have cells or not but he did himself believe that God did exist and that we do have souls didn't he yes he was very clear that this was a matter of faith and not something that was knowable yes but how on his own premises is talk about God or the soul even intelligible yes well that's a very good question and one on which he is I can say slightly Shifty I think what he wants to say and this is rather interesting it involves some sort of turning the whole issue upside down in a rather interesting way because some of his predecessors at any rate had made the supposition that moral convictions and attitudes and our religious convictions stand in need of some kind of metaphysical foundation and they try to provide one in the form of Theology and philosophical ethics well Khan finishes up putting the thing exactly the other way up he says that we are not only entitled to moral convictions and religious convictions he thought it inescapable that we should have them but and these would lead us to essentially emit physical doctrines about God and the soul but that those doctrines themselves if they had any foundation at all and it consisted directly in our primitive moral convictions themselves so that it's those that are fundamental is he saying this that it just is an inescapable empirical fact that we're all directly familiar with yes but whether we like it or not most of us at least simply do have moral convictions which we find ourselves unable to ignore even when we want to yes and that's a fact now for these convictions to have any real validity or significance at all or the essential moral terms like good bad right wrong yes blame etc for these to have any significance at all there must be some Freedom of Choice it must be possible for some of us some of the time to have done other than we did otherwise the terms are meaningless yes but how is that possible on the one hand in a world in which actual emotions of matter are governed by Newtonian laws that was one problem that you started us off with right at the very beginning of the discussion yes but also fought for us to have free will which he thinks is an inescapable consequence of the uh direct experiences do have of moral categories then there must be some sort of moral realm is that correct yes yes now how does he get even further as it were from that to God or and what he says about himself thinking about Theology and religion I think specifically he says that he had denied knowledge in order to make room for faith he had simply shown why it was that the sort of subject matter of theology if I put it like that is not a possible topic of knowledge but then he says what's alarming about that because we've all all known all along it's essentially a matter of faith but as you rightly say and one could claim that his arguments have really been rather more radical than that it isn't just that when I talk about God I am saying things that I don't know to be true his argument really seems to lead to the conclusion that I don't know what I'm saying what I'm saying doesn't really mean anything but he was very reluctant to draw that conclusion yeah what he tries to say is all I've done is to show that it's not a matter of knowledge or proof yes and his point on that as you I suppose is this that whereas it's superstitious to rest on faith over a question which can actually be decisions if the question can't be decided one when way or the other it's not irrational to have belief on one absolutely yes yes at the very beginning of this discussion Mr Jeffrey you said that that what the problem that could usefully be regarded as having as it were launched can't on his philosophical Enterprise was a perception of an apparent a conflict between uh Newtonian physics yes and the requirements of Ethics how in the light of everything we've said up to this point did he solve that problem thank you um yes um to really quite minimal extent I think and I think this was something of which she was himself perfectly aware what he would clay is that um by making clear the distinction between the world as a appearance as an object of experience and the world of things in themselves he is in a position to say there is the world of appearances and the physical sciences in principle give us the whole truth about that and he believed that they did he had no doubt that Newton had got it absolutely right and that physicists description of the world as an object of possible experience was correct and could be exhaustive but she says bear in mind that we are there talking about the world of appearances there is also the topic of things in themselves and there is room so to speak there for other sorts of Concepts altogether of Free Will of rational agency right and wrong good and bad the soul there is a room for these Concepts not in the world of appearance but outside the world of appearance of course he saw that on his own principles he would have to say that these other matters couldn't be topics of knowledge and I've had you said do you know that there is such a thing as free will he would consistently have said no I do not know any such thing all I know is that there is room for that possibility and that I can't help believing that there's no certain yes you would have gone on to say that too given that on this view ethics comes to us somehow from outside the world of all possible knowledge yeah does he have a view about where it comes from or how we get it um well he thought it came out of reason I think it'll help us to understand that problem further if you if if you tell us what the main conclusions of his moral philosophy were it's quite impossible I think in the context of this discussion to go into the arguments with which he supported those yes but if you are able out to outline the conclusions for us briefly I think that will contribute to an understanding I think one could say something quite briefly about that what he really tries to do in his moral philosophy is somehow extract the essentials of morality from the pure concept of rationality he says the the essential thing about any agent of whom one can think or speak in moral terms is that he must be a rational being capable of thinking of reasons for and against doing this and that and he tries to argue that the essential requirements of morality are really built into the concept of rationality itself um essentially trying to show that well he seems to try to show that um only a body of principles of action corresponding to our principles of morality could consistently I.E rationally be universally adopted by a community of rational beings that's what he tries to show and there is the famous categorical imperative which is directly derives from that yes perhaps I should ask you to formulated really he says Act only on that Maxim which by which you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law and I think that is the idea he he wants to say that what morality really imposes on us is conditions on conduct um which require and I think he also thinks uniquely determine the ascent of any possible community of rational creatures that's what he's trying to do now Khan's philosophy is notoriously difficult to understand but the first encounter and I'm sure that many of the people listening to this discussion between you and me are experiencing this difficulty now I think fundamental to the difficulty is his contention that of things as they are in themselves we simply have no knowledge and no way of acquiring knowledge that we are as it were permanently screened off from this by our own limitation years and these are partly limitations as it were in time and space is it helpful do you think to say it appear to point out to people look in a quite different context something very much of this sort is what Many religious people have always believed that as it were real reality is outside this world of art experience outside space and time and that this world of our experience is ephemeral and perhaps uh illusory in some yes metaphysical sense is it helpful to say that or do you think that just obscures the issue no I don't think it does and if for example and one raises the rather um in a sense hypothetical and perhaps idle question what sort of being one would have to be to be acquainted with things as they are in themselves at the only possible answer you can get out of card is you'd have to be God in fact that's to say you would be acquainted with things in some Timeless way and without any kind of spatial limitations and with no particular sensory limitations on the mode of your acquaintance and I'm not thinking in English or French or any other particular language your acquaintance with the universe would be not subject to any of these limitations and if you say well and what would I have to be to be like that then the answer is I'd have to be God it's a very striking feature I think of Khan's philosophy that although he conducted his philosophy impeccably in accordance with the criteria of philosophy he didn't call on faith or Revelation or anything of that kind but relied purely on argument and was working as it were entirely from within the central tradition of Western philosophy and yes through predecessors like Locke and Hume and leibniz and so on nevertheless he does arrive at conclusions which are strikingly capable of cohabiting with religious belief well yes except for the uncomfortable fact which we mentioned earlier that um he has to say that strictly speaking all discourse on those topics is unintelligible to us we don't really know what we mean yeah and that's a proposition that theologians have been a bit Chariot of acceptance they might even say that nowadays more and more are except well that may be true yes another uh difficulty about reading can't is is simply the Pro's style I mean there are philosophers Hume is one Plato is another schopenhaus another who are beautiful writers and the pleasure to read but Khan's best friend couldn't say that about him it's opaque it's difficult it's obscure yes why did he write so badly I think there are perhaps three things one might say I think partly um it's due to the effect which you mentioned right at the beginning that he was by profession and very single-mindedly by professional and academic and he does write in a very heavily academic start with a great taste for technical terminology and jargon and what he called architect tonic it is all very academic um but another important point I think to remember about the critiques and this again connects with something you said at the beginning was that by the time he was seriously launched on writing what he knew to be his sort of Master Works he hoped would be his Masterworks he was nearly 60. and he was actually dogged by the thought that he might die before he'd got it all done and there's no doubt that those hundreds of pages between the ages of 16 and 60 and 70 were written extremely fast he was just writing in a hurry and I think that has of course 200 years ago the expectation of Life simply was very much shorter than no and it was perfectly reasonable for him to think that he might die quite yes so that he was writing in a hurry another point that slightly less obvious one is that um he was and still by that date somewhat unusually writing in German which had at that date barely become accepted as a sort of decent language for academic and learned use um I liked it but I don't believe leibniz ever read German it was all either French or less either French yes and um there just wasn't a sort of established style of academic learned German prayers for Kant to adopt and as for example for Barkley and Hume there was I mean English had become a well-established uh language for that kind of learned use and I think that may have been a problem to him he had no sort of models it's a great sadness I think because it it's it's a huge unnecessary obstacle yes understanding the work of somebody who after all yes it is almost incomparable thinker yeah I said at the very beginning of this discussion that he's been regarded for Generations by large numbers of professional philosophers as the greatest philosopher since the ancient Greeks why is his reputation at quite that pinnacle like secret there were I think I would mention two qualities as entitling him to his Pinnacle of Fame I think he was quite exceptionally penetrating in in the sense that he was able to see an intellectual problem in something which had previously been taken for granted and has not worth much attention he was able to see where the problems were um and I think and that's one of the greatest philosophical gifts to be able to see that there is a problem where everybody else is going on quite happily without thinking about it much then I think the other thing and this connects perhaps with his academic professionalism he was extremely good at seeing how how it all fitted together and how what he'd said on this topic might repercuss so to speak on what he'd said somewhere else and he was very self-conscious about and of professionally methodical in this sort of way he does I must say to me make writers like say lock and Barclay and indeed Hume excellent there they are look rather like amateurs thank you very much sir Jeffrey [Music]

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Keywords: Philosophy Overdose, Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Metaphysics, History of Philosophy, Bryan Magee, Kant, Immanuel Kant, Subject-Object, Interview, Idealism, Transcendental Idealism, Consciousness, Thing-in-itself, Kantian, Absurd, Subjectivity, Critique of Pure Reason, Free Will, Determinism, Modern Philosophy, Empiricism, Rationalism, Theism, Skepticism, Synthetic A Priori, Agnosticism, Hume, Philosophy, Subjectivism, Geoffrey Warnock, Moral Philosophy

Id: wlEMkAkGS1I

Length: 42min 50sec (2570 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2023