Kant: A Complete Guide to Reason

[Music] ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear the most important value that you can bring to the table is your integrity is your trustworthiness emmanuel kant one of the most influential consequential and groundbreaking philosophers in history change the way we think about what we're all capable of each of us swim in the water of his philosophy politically morally culturally he changed everything the course of history us our ways of thinking and acting he saw that people had been pushed around by religious sellers by powerful leaders and by arrogant metaphysicians and he wanted to prove and show how we could think for ourselves that in here we had a powerful tool one that no one had quite yet properly understood and that if we used it properly we could begin to strip away misconceptions false opinion all this fuzz all this confusion all this complexity and find within us pure reason a big claim he said that the enlightenment that 18th century period of radical change in europe was quote man's emergence from immaturity and reading him when you really understand what he's saying really does have an effect on the inner workings of your mind you can feel the way you think change so we'll look at both his ideas about rationality and knowledge and his philosophy of morality and in doing so we'll try and find a peak a viewpoint from which we can reliably view the world a solid foundation to stand on from which we might be able to find some tools some guidelines for thinking and acting a place we might be able to find or at least glimpse pure reason this is also the story of a man who like kant is attempting to find their way up a mountain searching for something pure at the top [Music] emmanuel kant born in 1724 wanted to make us a truly scientific species he wanted to bring together reason how we think and experience what we see here touch what we get through our senses we wanted to bring them together on a sure foundation one that scientific knowledge could be built on he hoped to lay out what he described as a cosmic idea of philosophy one that followed in newton's footsteps when he discovered the universal laws of motion and gravity kant wanted to lay out and discover the laws that governed human thought human experience human action in that he said how we think is central in the three most important questions we can ask ourselves what can i know what should i do and for what may i hope his most important work was the monumental critique of pure reason a 1 000 page book published in 1781 written in technical philosophical language in winding impenetrable passages with no accepted interpretation the goal of the book though is quite simple he's asking what can we know objectively surely with certainty about the world and about ourselves and about the relationship between the two it starts from a simple premise if we look around us at the landscape the universe the weather our health and our bodies our pursuits our relationships and choices how if you really think about it it all seems so incomprehensibly complex there's just so much going on it's almost chaotic as so many distinct moving parts can be approached in so many ways how is it possible that we make sense of the world and our lives at all out of all of this somehow we do get meaning we get lives and routines we get schedules and books and places to go and walks to go on and people to see he's asking how in the philosopher emiyahu uvel's words we constitute a cosmos out of chaos kant said that two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me the starry world he calls an unbounded magnitude worlds upon worlds systems upon systems that unimaginable complexity everywhere we look and the second is that the way from that i managed to carve a path through it through that unbounded magnitude i managed to somehow think and act [Music] in all of this boundless complexity we do seem to have a compass something that guides our thoughts somehow something that guides our sense of right and wrong so let's get going i'm going to avoid technical language as much as i reasonably can i'll avoid going down the route normally taken a route you'll recognize if you've looked at any introductory book or podcast about can't it's the root of analytic a priori bachelors being unmarried men and i think that's a confusing place to start because actually i think the key to kant is quite simple he's asking how we create concepts how we make our ideas of the world what's happening when we do this in thinking about this we approach the peak of pure reason because conceptualizing is what we do in every moment it's the foundation of thought itself in finding what's pure you can know what's reliable what to most focus on you can sharpen how to think think about all the experiences you've had in your life the things you've seen felt smelled turd and tasted now multiply that by all the people that have ever lived by the numerical extent of the world of the universe what we know of it what we don't add in all the things you've forgotten that they've forgotten the experience of animals the lives of plants the processes of physics or chemistry too look around right now look at all the parts of the room that you could focus on but haven't have sidelined now i could select this single quadrant here out of all of the others and i could think about not just its colour but its shade not just its shape but its particular lines its particular corners i could think about its texture how it feels how it smells how it tastes if i wanted to now zoom back out how do we choose what to select out of all of this how do we know how do we get a comprehensible picture from something so chaotic and that's one rock what about one piece of grass a tiny piece of dirt this same problem applies to everything in the world what we have for lunch who we're going to see what we're going to say next what we're going to choose to do next our life plans about half a billion photons hit the retina every single second yet somehow we translate that into something intelligible something human a picture a focus this is kant's fundamental question how do you get a structured comprehensible idea of the world from all of this stuff the collection of perceptions impressions on the eye on the skin in the nose on the eardrum are like billions of artists paintbrush strokes each and every second like the collecting of infinitesimal peas in a colossal bag what we have is what kant called content without form there's no organizing factor it's just a mass a mess a chaos so the first problem is the organizational problem how do we organize all of this the second problem is how is objective knowledge possible in the face of all of this out of those trillions of artists impressions so many have been wiped away turned out to be mistaken mistreats how do we know that the sun will continue to rise that the laws of gravity will hold ten years from now kant was responding to the influential scottish philosopher david hume hume was an empiricist he believed that all knowledge came from the senses that we learn about the world from what we absorb from outside of us from this hugh made a radical claim that if we only know the sun rises and sets from experience or from the experience of others from what we've been told no matter how many times we watch it rise no matter how many times it's been recorded rising throughout history there is no certain proof that it will rise again tomorrow we can only say that with each time we experience something happening the chances of it happening again increase this deeply disturbed kant he said that it awoke him from his dogmatic slumber it disturbed him so much because it shook the new scientific method that was emerging in kant's time from having any secure scientific foundation we might observe gravity working consistently but this could change after all people believed many things throughout history that turned out to be false the second and related thing that disturbed kant was that if hume was right that all of our knowledge came from outside of us from experience through our senses then we have no innate knowledge making capacity for ourselves if all comes from outside we're just receptors passively driven by outside stimuli as juvel puts it can't felt intuitively that this was wrong that we have knowledge of our own and that some scientific truths for example that everything that happens has a cause or some mathematical truths like two plus two is four are true for us for everyone and doesn't come from outside experience we just know it from within somehow do we really have to go about like explorers with magnifying glasses searching for mathematics in nature for followers of hume's philosophy surely it follows that numbers had to be discovered one at a time counted out pythagoras could only find his theorem out in the world in the wild this surely wasn't true do we not have an innate capacity for working through some mathematical and scientific claims ourselves independent of experience don't we know that numbers exist even if we haven't counted them or thought of them ourselves as roger scruton puts it in his introduction kant wants to know how can i come to know the world through pure reflection without recourse to experience this pure reflection is pure reason the root of all thinking in short again how do we in here constitute a cosmos out of chaos counts wrote several influential books but what's referred to as the first critique the critique of pure reason is the central one it's where he answers the most fundamental of questions how do we constitute meaning out of chaos how do we create knowledge for ourselves okay so first what does reason mean for can't broadly it means the process of thinking the conditions the rules the operating system for thinking itself if hume was right that everything comes from outside of us then the very act of thinking makes little sense if we get everything from outside do we get the rules for thinking from outside of us too like picking up someone else's cookbook if hume was right it would be like all the thinking was done for us before it even gets to us through the senses so in short asking what reason is is asking what thinking is if it was emptied of all of its content that's why he says pure reason working out what this is could be unimaginably powerful to know how to build and program on a great computer of course you need to know how the source code works working this out is like finding the source of knowledge stripped of everything else the kind of meaning of life jovel writes that reasons interests are inherent to it and not directed at any external goal in other words human rationality is a goal orientated activity whose goal lies in itself rather than in anything other than itself pure reason is like this beaker a cup or a measuring jug it takes the data of the outside world and shapes it defines it in its own way and reason does that by formulating concepts concepts and how we see the world as kantian philosopher paul gaia puts it the critique of pure reason argues that all knowledge requires both input from the senses and organization by concepts and that both sensory inputs and organizing concepts of pure forms that we can know a priori thus know to be universally and necessarily valid okay kant uses that phrase a priori a lot it just means independent of experience before all thinking is done the conditions for thought itself universal it's the elixir the holy grail of pure thought he says means what is left when one removes from our experience everything that belongs to the senses he continues that every cognition is called pure that is not mixed with anything foreign to it pure thoughts receives organizes judges and applies concepts to the raw data of experience can't also cause pure thought the understanding because well it attempts to understand the world youvel writes that the senses supply the understanding with a crude element that is not yet a real object but only the material for it and the understanding a spontaneous factor must order and shape this material according to its the understandings own a priori modes of operation counts responding to two traditions in philosophy that were new at the time the empiricists as we've seen like q who argued that all knowledge comes from experience and the rationalists people like descartes and spinoza who argued that reason is the way to secure knowledge like mathematics can't carves a path that requires both it's a mixing of them and it's how that happens that's important for him famously he says without sensibility that's senses no object would be given to us and without understanding that's thinking none would be thought thoughts without content are empty intuitions without concepts are blind can't takes complex bewildering twists and turns towards his proof of this he takes different pathways towards the same goal i'm going to focus on the three central ones from them pure reason can be glimpsed and understood the technical names are the transcendental aesthetic the metaphysical deduction and the transcendental deduction but don't worry about them sounding technical just focus on that peak and together we'll meander our way towards it okay so what is that first path what's pure and necessary and fundamental and universal and a priori to receiving any of that data from the environment from the senses what's the first part of our pre-empirical toolkit time and space cant is always asking this question what must be the case for this to be true what are the conditions that make this possible and the first thing that kant claims is that space and time are the universal forms of all intuitions space and time are the preconditions for experience those inputs to happen at all and it doesn't come from the senses from outside because to even have sensations in the first place we must have some kind of intuitive framework to receive them this idea is the first stone laid in kant's transcendental method speaking of stones for me to even experience an object whether i see it hear it touch it i must be able to place it in space separate from other objects and importantly as distinct in space from myself as something separate from my consciousness we have to have what can't cause pure intuition a framework of space and time that the experience can happen in kant says space is not an empirical concept that has been drawn from outer experiences because in order for certain sensations to be related to something outside me the representation of space must already be their ground in other words our experience of space is not something we learn empirically it's presupposed to even have empirical experiences a tool because in order for us to even say something is over there the over thereness is assumed in the judgment when i say this is over there the very quality of this nurse must be recognized as something i've carved out in space what am i doing when i say this i'm delimiting this as a thing in space separate from me relative to other things time functions in the same way for me to even understand that one thing follows another for me to say something happened after something else before and after are assumed in the recognizing of a moment we have to have carved out a period of thisness in time a moment separate from other moments and so space and time are pure intuitions they're the sea that everything else swims in but we can learn something else from this too something radical that this pure intuition is about being able to perceive particulars within a totality by being able to recognize carve out select pick out designate a particular unit of space in this case the stone or a particular unit of time now then when again a particular in a totality jovel writes that pure intuition works by perceiving a priori a basic singular unit in geometry it's a unit of space in arithmetic the number and transcends it towards other units of the same kind existing outside it for us to perceive the world a tool we must have an innate grasp of what is inside of us and outside of us what is here and what's there without which everything would be everywhere at once and an innate sense of succession of something following another thing in time without which everything would happen at once what this assumes to be able to distinguish points on these spectrums is that we can splice them up that i can locate isolate analyze focus on single particular points and this leads to another radical implication a consequence of this that carving out units is the basis of mathematics once i can say one rock or one moment in time i can conceive of that being another unit then another then i could add them together i could multiply them subtract them divide them so kant says that the very idea of mathematics is presumed in having any experience at all writes simply that the number five is the product of a construction that adds the basic numerical unit to itself and stops at the fifth place mathematics is transcendental a priori universal pure thought that does not come from out there from experience again it means that pythagoras did not have to go around the world with the magnifying glass searching for his theorem in the wild the question though is whether he could have imagined it with no sensory input at all [Music] okay so space and time are pure forms of intuition through which we are connected to the objects of empirical experience but this is still something passive it's the common landscape of the universe something we swim in swim through but can't also needs to prove that we bring something to the table to do the thinking that on this landscape of pure intuition we are doing something and in short that something is the forming of concepts we do this by categorizing our experience kant calls the metaphysical deduction a mere clue to the discovery of all pure concepts of the understanding and it's the second pathway up towards the peak of pure reason before we get to that third and main path first what is a concept well in general a concept is an abstract idea the way we think the way we hold something an object or an idea a thought or an image in our heads are everything in fact they're the only access to the world outside of us that we truly have okay so i have a concept of water for example what it's like what it does where to find it and so on i can't see the other side of this bottle but i have an idea of it and where it fits in nonetheless in concepts of the way we focus on the parade of experience around it they're the very way we experience the way we select and organize without some way of focusing the parade of experience is just that a parade passing us by float by float act by act we need something that focuses that selects one of the floats one of the ants one of the dancers one of the lights exactly what we do when we watch a parade we change our focus move our necks and suddenly a whole different perspective is within view so what's going on when we do this once again kant asks what must be the case for this to be possible concepts are something like how we create those containers for our experiences of the world to fit into containers that are ours that are pure thought they are innate to us but they have no content of their own because they need something to fill them before they're anything at all something to organize something to give shape to concept to the way we understand the world and we judge what we experience so as to categorize it through concepts in fact all thinking is understanding and all thinking uses categories it's the job of our pure understanding to organize that data we receive to judge where it fits to recognize patterns if it doesn't do this what job would it have we'd be placid docile receptors just soaking everything in like sponges he calls the understanding discursive which he gets from the latin running through we run through our experiences and when we run through something we make judgments let's imagine i was born yesterday which some people say is true and the first thing i see is this leaf i recognize certain qualities it's green it has a particular shape it's found on a tree or on the ground it's light but it's singular i've carved it out in space and time now i come across another object it looks similar i recognize that it too has this quality of greenness to it that's two instances its shape is different but similar to now i see the grass as green but it's different to a leaf it has a different shape it's found elsewhere i find another leaf this time on a tree in a different place but it looks it feels it smells very similar what's happened here i've identified an object as separate from its surroundings i've judged that a part of it seems to have a certain quality that differs from other parts of the environment in my view greenness softness lightness this particular shape i focused on each of these properties drawing them out from the leaf as a whole then i've unified them back into the concept of a leaf as a whole for me to recognize it again philosopher jill vons baraka writes that judgments are acts in which the understanding unifies diverse representations into a single more complex representation of an object the judgment splits the world up into different parts analyzes it then unifies it back together again into a representation of an object or an idea i see this tree i split it into its colours it shapes the bark the leaves the wind rustling through it i might later include its roots or scientific knowledge about photosynthesis say or ideas about where the tree came from or its different species but ultimately i unify it into a concept of a tree conceptual thinking unifies distinct representations of the world by making judgments about them this is one of the roots of all thinking [Music] everything whether it's objects like leaves and trees or ideas like democracy or love looks for the distinct parts that make up the unified concept goya writes that the premise of kant's argument is that all cognition involves the combination of concept into judgments which in the first instance subsumes more particular concepts under more general ones like the particular concept of bark and the general concept of tree or the particular concept of a specific shade of brown under the general concept of brownness or the particular concept of all of these things under the general concept of nature now the question becomes what are the rules that govern this process how do we unify our representations how do we combine them together what rulebook are we judging by kant's answer is the categories now bear with me here all thinking is judging by applying the categories like space and time the categories are the conditions for having any understandable experiences at all now this next bit gets a little bit technical so don't worry too much it doesn't matter too much but there are four main categories each with three subcategories philosophers have criticized counts here for various reasons but it's the idea of these rough set of categories that's important for us and important for understanding can't the four main ones are quantity quality relation and modality and don't get too bogged down in this but it's the way we judge particular representations and unify them into concepts it works like this a quantity of judgments is either universal particular or singular it's just the way we carve up units and say all of them some of them or one of them for example all leaves come from plants or some leaves a green or a leaf is in my pocket universal particular single quality is the affirmation of some predicate that an object has quality is the r in some leaves are green it's our ability to recognize that some unit a unit we carve out is different in quality from for example the air or the ground or the rest of the plants or myself or the birds that surround it there's also relation if something happens something else happens if then statements we might always find a leaf by a tree for example so it would be if tree then leaf or it might be exclusive either or we never find a leaf growing out of concrete say and then there's modality that's statements about existence say or whether something is being asserted or not or held in the mind or not in this we also have the idea of possibility this might be right or might not or this is here now or that is not [Music] okay but back to the path the particulars of the categories aren't too important for an introduction but what is is that we have a universal a priori pre-experienced transcendental set of categories that we use to run through experience judge it understand it and organize it into sets of ideas what we have if count is right is quite incredible it's the foundation of knowledge itself this is the heart of kant's philosophy the third path up to the peak it's here that kant argues that the concepts like quantity and quality apply to experience synthesize experience spontaneously and that through them experience becomes our experience that the whole process requires an identity that's persistent through time like the previous two paths he's asking what must be true for thought to happen at all what is transcendental he starts from a simple premise what are the conditions of the possibility of the i think itself it's really a common sense question if we were just receiving experiences like hume thought what would the i think even mean after all we'd just be passive we'd have no way of distinguishing our representations of the world from the world itself we'd receive the world but we wouldn't have concepts like cup walking cloud life we wouldn't even be the containers that the experience was poured into because we wouldn't have any containers at all we'd just be this amorphous mass that was just drawn from and shaped by everything around us in having a representation of an object in thinking about this apple its redness its sweetness its location of turning it and remembering what the side i can't see looks like in remembering what the inside smells like from a previous experience i'm obviously aware that what i'm thinking about is an apple that is my idea of the apple that i'm constructing a concept let's go back to that empirical chaos can't start with that simple premise that all of my representations of the world are inherently complex a whole of compared and connected representations as he puts it the world any snapshot of it is seemingly irreducible full of objects and impressions and sense data that could be cut up in a dizzying and infinite number of ways this doesn't just apply to space to a snapshot of the world around us but to time too pause for a moment listen to and look at your surroundings the speed of things vary the bird song comes and goes the water flows the rain moves at different speed maybe quickens the clouds move hunger appears some things are long large and steady others small and fleeting kant says they must all be ordered connected and brought into relations for example if i'm trying to understand the apple or the leaf or the tree i'd watch them and experience them over the course of a year say through the seasons as the leaves shed and the fruit fools and find something new to add to my understanding of the concepts of apple leaf or tree now the key to this is synthesis it's only in spontaneously recognizing the world in its parts breaking them down then unifying them synthesizing them back together into unities that i do any thinking at all this is the carving out of units in space and time that i talked about earlier take a look at this pillow it has so many colors shapes intersecting parts threads how do you decide where to focus in the very act of focusing of looking through of touching of smelling hearing even we synthesize either a part of it or all of it into a unity it's also true that space and time can be cut up infinitely even more so today with microscopes and hearing equipment i can look at a part of an apple it's hard in some places and soft in others it's found on a tree but can be picked up it can be cut up into many parts the number of shades it has is immeasurable the feel of the stalk the inside and the outside are all different to experience the stalk say i've synthesized its parts its brownness roughness its shape into one unity and excluded the rest of the apple the key is we separate into parts into units and then synthesize back into holes but again kant goes further he makes the point that for us to even begin to construct a concept out of experience we also need memory and imagination he writes apprehending identifiable objects requires reproducing and imagination the previously apprehended parts we have to recall parts of the apple even if it was just milliseconds before to synthesize those parts into a single concept apple we can't see the back we have to remember what it tasted like in fact me and you are looking at different sides right now we have to remember where we found it and this applies to everything we experience previous representations have to be recognized as being related in some way to present themselves as unified representations and this is true for exclusion too it's only in recognizing that the redness of the object that i just looked at is different from the brown branch and the green leaves that i'm now looking at where it grows that i recognize that the red quality of the apple along with its other qualities makes it something to focus on and conceptualize a tool this doesn't just apply to simple objects like apples but every thought we have every concept we have democracy mountaineering love friendship they all require breaking phenomena into parts then reunifying them into a concept recalling separate parts of it to do that this is the basis of thought fundamental for pure reasoning it can't now brings the categories back into the picture to do any of this to synthesize to use our memory or imagination to recognize how our different experiences are related we must use the categories we have to count we have to recognize quality we have to exclude parts and so on even if we're not doing it consciously we have to do these things in the abstract [Music] this has been called the embryo of kant's philosophy the core the middle the center the foundation the top the summit the terrifyingly titled the transcendental unity of a perception it's the bringing of all of this together kant synthesizes it all into a quote unity of consciousness that precedes all data of the intuitions or a quote pure original unchanging consciousness applying the categories counting through the world recognizing qualities affirming and denying requires a thorough going thread a consistent self-same unity that's required for any experience to happen at all you're right we are conscious a priori of the thoroughgoing identity of ourselves with regard to all representations that can ever belong to our consciousness remember that phrase discursive that running through well it's central it's at the center it's the me taking the roots up to the mountain top it's the eye synthesizing it all together the world space and time experience me he says the i think must be able to accompany all my representations for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me this unifying can only be done by some singular activity of a unified independent consciousness which one becomes aware of through the process of understanding through judging through time through fabricating our ideas of the world through constructing through counting through looking at qualities we build up the world for ourselves self-aware and self-conscious of the world as my experience of the world he writes that we can represent nothing as combined in the object without having previously combined it ourselves and that among all representations combination is the only one that is not given through objects but can be executed only by the subject itself since it is an act of itself activity again this requires the categories because to judge and organize any experience at all i must be able to carve out a unit to judge to compare it to other units to recognize its qualities to count it and so on baraka says that i then judge that each of these judgments belongs to me and i find that quote i can make judgments about one representation some representations and all of my representations what he's saying is that in the very act of recognizing a representation of the world in sight say in carving out to particular units in time say in excluding a different part or in synthesizing it back together again we're doing something that's not given in experience [Music] we're doing something that's truly mine unifying can only be done by a single unity a thread a core central meanness and that cannot be given by experience that is the summit of pure reason the unity centers everything space and time for the vessel judgment synthesizing and understanding of the process and the categories of splitting up counting recognizing qualities and so on the tools the rules along with our imaginations and our memory to do all of this to survey everything this combined is the center of count's project a priori universal required necessary from which everything else can be experienced and understood but remember that kant says that experience is required too so we should now be in a better position to understand it's famous and influential phrase thoughts without content to empty but intuitions without concepts are blind can't wrote a lot and we've covered as much as we can in a video the first critique of pure reason but he went on in later texts to apply this to practical reason how pure reason informs how we choose what to do what political systems we might use what we find beautiful for example and he began this later project in his 1785 ground work of the metaphysic of morals his starting point is this if what we found at the summit is the only thing that is universally guaranteed a priori from which all else is surveyed then it must be the highest good it must be the only thing we can absolutely depend on rely on it's what he calls an end in itself can't wants to unleash the reason that we have within us he said famously in his essay what is enlightenment that enlightenment was man's emergence from self-incurred immaturity that immaturity was not using the reason that we are endowed with and just as kant wants to find pure reason stripped of any experiential content something that's ours to rely on he wants to find a moral code that's pure too one that doesn't rely on anything outside of us he called hume's philosophy a wretched anthropology if we reduce morality to just what we experience what we see other people do say well people do some pretty horrible things to one another it seems that many people don't care about morality at all and it doesn't seem that nature gives us too many clues either so morality must come from elsewhere as kenneth westphal writes by definition pure practical reason emits all corporeal desires motives urges inclinations or preferences and all a consideration of the agent's capacities and resources for achieving ends counts in search of a moral compass that's cleansed and stripped of anything outside of itself that could sway it because if as hume thought our morality comes from our feelings our sympathies towards others instead of from reason then how do we ever condemn those that have no feelings towards others those that just don't care that are selfish psychopathic even how can we ever say that anyone is wrong if empathy and sympathy are the basis of morality and they simply don't feel those things for count reason is so important that we have a duty to it because having the ability to reason implies we have something else freedom he writes if only rational beings can be an end in themselves this is not because they have reason but because they have freedom reason is merely a means david misselbrook writes that kant started with the fact that mankind's distinguishing feature is our possession of reason therefore it follows that all humans have universal rational duties to one another centering on their duty to respect the other's humanity in a later work the metaphysics of morals count says what characterizes humanity as distinguished from animality is the capacity to set oneself and end any end whatsoever humans can set goals and use reason to meet them it's this that makes us human what this means is that we shouldn't use people treating them as means to our goals without their consent we should respect their capacity to reason for themselves to set their own ends as can't called it he famously writes that so act that you use humanity whether in your own person or in the person of any other always at the same time as an end never merely as a means each of us only has access to the outcomes of our own reasonable thinking we set goals and reason how to achieve them i might freely set a goal to come down the mountain and you can tell me that one way is better than another but if you force me down against my wishes you've gone against the reason of another the only thing we can all trust absolutely each person sets their own ends each person is an end in themselves this belief is the grounds of what kant called the categorical imperative [Music] reason for count was the path to morality because all other things love sympathy friendship charity can wax and wane be felt one minute and gone the next instead we should rely on reason and duty to do what reason commands he said nothing is left but the conformity of actions as such with universal law which alone is to serve the will as its principle that is i ought never to act except in such a way that i could also will that my maxim should become a universal law he called the result a categorical imperative categorical meaning unconditional always true and imperative meaning something that we know we ought to follow so how would this work well first we should formulate a maxim a test to see if something is moral or not a maxim is a principle for acting i will give this spare change to charity i will drop this litter or trash here i will steal this sandwich i will lie to my friend i will drive faster i will cheat on my exam kant says that the first way to see if a maxim conforms with reason to see whether it's moral or not is to ask whether it could become a universal law without any contradictions kant asks would it be logically possible for everyone to do this if it was universalized is there a contradiction in conception take breaking a promise then ask if everyone broke promises when they wished what would it mean to promise in the first place nothing the institution of promising itself would break down wouldn't function would become untrustworthy there's a contradiction in conception james pfizer writes that if such deceit were followed universally then the whole institution of promising would be undermined and i could not make my promise to begin with or take stealing if everyone stole from each other whenever they wished then the idea of any personal property at all would become meaningless and in cheating the institution whether it's the institution of the rules of a card game or the procedure of an exam at school the expectations and the rules that govern the activity would fall apart and become pointless once everyone starts cheating if when universalizing maxim we get a contradiction in conception then kant says we have a perfect duty not to do it but we should also ask whether the maxim is something i could rationally will for myself and for others some things do not contradict themselves when universalized but are still clearly intolerable he writes the rule of judgment under laws of pure practical reason is this ask yourself whether if the action you propose were to take place by a law of the nature of which you were yourself a part you could indeed regard it as possible through your will take laziness for example or not helping someone in need they don't contradict themselves when universalized but they don't aid reason in pursuing ends if everyone did it can't sees that we all need aid sometimes so a world where no one helped each other would obviously be a bad one one more inhospitable to reason itself pfizer says that two types of contradictions emerge one an internal contradiction with the proposed universal rule and the other a contradiction between the proposed universal rule and another rational obligation that treats reason as an end in itself [Music] the next formulation of the categorical imperative is to ask whether we're treating people as people with goals themselves he says act in such a way that you treat humanity whether in your own person or in the person of any other never merely as he means to an end but always at the same time as an end this means that not only should we avoid manipulating using and blocking that freedom in others but that even more than this we should actively pursue aiding it in others we should not only avoid treating people as instruments for our own gains but we should find ways of helping them in achieving their ends because that's what we'd rationally will for ourselves and that's what furthers and expands rationality in total to take one example in asking whether i should help someone in need not only should we pursue it if we see someone is in need but we should actively seek it out if we can within a balancing of our other responsibilities and our own rational life plans and goals because it will help them achieve their own goals their own ends as humans and if everyone did it it would help us achieve our own goals and our own ends ourselves finally we should ask whether we are seeing that every rational being must act as if he were by his maxims at all times a law-giving member of the universal kingdom of ends in short this means thinking about whether if everyone was rational everyone followed each other's moral laws if everyone respected each other the maxims would all hang together think about traffic lights i have a maxim to stop or go at a certain time if everyone cheated the traffic lights then the traffic lights would be pointless and this all hangs together and my stopping or going hangs together with traffic coming the other way the maxim fits the maxim of the pedestrian to wait patiently for their turn to cross our moral ideas in other words should be symmetrical so as to be universalizable otherwise there would be chaos alan wood writes that rational beings constitute a realm to the extent that their ends form a system in which these ends are not only mutually consistent but also harmonious and reciprocally supportive well in writing these works around the time of the french revolution at the onset of the truly modern world at the end of the enlightenment immanuel kant changed everything for example goya writes that kant's idea that humanity must be treated as an end in itself and never merely as a means has gained wide acceptance in modern moral thought and philosophy and while the liberal consequences of this have had a huge effect on our politics the question has to be asked has its implications been fully realized do we treat each other as ends not as means he was immediately immeasurably and inimitably influential the idea of focusing on that relationship between experience and conceptual thinking started a revolution in philosophy known as german idealism that led to thinkers like hegel and marx much of the modern intellectual world and modern politics too and in many ways he began to put an end to many of the intellectual arguments that defined the enlightenment this was because for many kant had proven that you couldn't get beyond immediate experience and thought any grand theories that tried to disprove or prove god say or whether there was a beginning to time were in their very nature pointless and graspable in this sense he was a very conservative figure carefully attending to the matters at hand but also strangely a very radical one we can all think for and guide ourselves but once you've been to the top of the mountain once you've got a glimpse of pure reason been convinced of your own truly your own powers of rational thought of applying careful categorization to the world of recognizing qualities counting carefully where and in what ways those qualities are found you'll notice you doing this everywhere in ideas and objects in facts and feelings in relationships philosophies pursuits passions and products how we judge in what ways we understand how we reason through the world well it's everything [Music] if you're interested in learning more about can't please make sure to check the sources in the description i've added a few comments and listed them in the order i think they should be read to understand him because well he is a difficult thinker so have a look at that and if you want to support me in making more videos like this like all these wonderful people do then please head over to patreon where you can chuck us just a dollar per video and you get access to scripts and the discord server and all the rest of it thank you so much i've really enjoyed making this one see you next time

Channel: Then & Now

Views: 529,227

Keywords: kant, immanuel kant, philosophy, introduction, critique of pure reason, groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, ethics, categorical imperative, understanding kant, transcendental idealism, david hume, empiricism, rationalism, history of philosophy, a priori, immanuel kant documentary, immanuel kant lecture

Id: DbjZEDR5EXI

Length: 71min 8sec (4268 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022