Insight Editions · No. 324
A History of Philosophy, Volume VI
From the French Enlightenment to Kant
Frederick Copleston
Frederick Copleston's sixth volume covers the eighteenth-century search for a science of man, from the French philosophes and Rousseau through the German Enlightenment to Kant's three Critiques.
A study guide to A History of Philosophy, Volume VI by Frederick Copleston. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page: The Architecture of Volume VI
1. The French Enlightenment and the Science of Man (Chapters I–IV): Against popular caricatures of the French Enlightenment as a mere destructive conspiracy against throne and altar, Copleston demonstrates that its positive programme was to extend Newtonian law-seeking and Lockean empiricism to human nature. Prepared by Pierre Bayle's separation of faith, reason, and morality and Fontenelle's secularization of myth, this "science of man" branched into Montesquieu's comparative sociology of law and separation of powers, Condillac's reduction of all cognitive faculties to "transformed sensations," Helvétius's utilitarian environmentalism, d'Alembert's positivism, Diderot's dynamic naturalism, the dogmatic materialism of La Mettrie, d'Holbach, and Cabanis, and the laissez-faire economics of Quesnay and Turgot. Rebelling against Parisian rationalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau diagnosed civilization and private property as the corruptors of natural man, grounded religion and conscience in inner feeling, and formulated the doctrine of the General Will—bequeathing moral autonomy to Kant and the organic State to Hegel.
2. The German Aufklärung and Its Critics (Chapters V–VII): In Germany, the Enlightenment began with Christian Thomasius's utilitarian empiricism and Lutheran Pietism before Christian Wolff forged a comprehensive academic rationalism (dividing metaphysics into Ontology, Rational Psychology, Cosmology, and Natural Theology), within which A. G. Baumgarten founded Aesthetics as the science of sensitive knowledge. Under Frederick the Great, French and British currents stimulated the deism of Reimarus, the aesthetic and metaphysical rationalism of Moses Mendelssohn, the dynamic historical revelation and Spinozistic leanings of Lessing, and the three-faculty psychology of Tetens. This rationalism was then challenged by Hamann's mystical philosophy of language, Herder's organic cultural historicism, and Jacobi's philosophy of immediate faith (Glaube).
3. The Rise of the Philosophy of History (Chapters VIII–IX): Departing from the theological history of St. Augustine and Bossuet, Giambattista Vico overturned Cartesianism with his principle verum ipsum factum ("the criterion of truth is to have made it"), proving that human history—decoded through language, myth, and "poetic wisdom" across the cyclical corsi e ricorsi of the Ages of Gods, Heroes, and Men—is more intelligible to man than physical Nature. In France and Germany, historical reflection moved from Voltaire's cultural historiography and Condorcet's ten epochs of indefinite secular progress to Herder's teleological unfolding of Humanität.
4. The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Chapters X–XVII): Awoken from his Leibniz-Wolffian dogmatic slumbers by Hume and the Leibniz-Clarke debate, Kant executed his Copernican Revolution across the three Critiques and the Opus Postumum: objects of experience must conform to the a priori forms of our Sensibility (Space and Time) and our Understanding (the 12 Categories). This synthetic activity grounds the necessary truth of mathematics and Newtonian physics for all phenomena, while exposing the fallacies of speculative metaphysics (the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Proofs of God) when applied to noumena—thereby limiting theoretical knowledge to make room for practical moral faith in Freedom, Immortality, and God under the Categorical Imperative, bridged by the aesthetic and teleological judgments of the Third Critique.
| Ch. | Chapter Title | One-Line Payload |
|---|---|---|
| Ch. I | The French Enlightenment (1) | How Bayle, Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Maupertuis, Voltaire, Vauvenargues, Condillac, and Helvétius applied Lockean empiricism and Newtonian synthesis to law, deism, passions, and sensationalist psychology. |
| Ch. II | The French Enlightenment (2) | The ideological crusade of the Encyclopédie (Diderot, d'Alembert), the materialism of La Mettrie, d'Holbach, and Cabanis, the biological continuity of Buffon, Boscovich's dynamic atomism, and Physiocratic economics (Quesnay, Turgot). |
| Ch. III | Rousseau (1) | Rousseau's critique of civilization and private property as the origin of inequality, the first appearance of the General Will, progressive taxation, and the philosophy of inner feeling and conscience in Émile. |
| Ch. IV | Rousseau (2) | The Social Contract: how the inalienable and indivisible sovereignty of the people transforms natural into civil and moral liberty, generating the paradox of being "forced to be free" and anticipating Kant and Hegel. |
| Ch. V | The German Enlightenment (1) | From Christian Thomasius's utilitarian empiricism and Pietism to Christian Wolff's grand scholastic-rationalist system and A. G. Baumgarten's founding of Aesthetics as the science of sensitive knowledge. |
| Ch. VI | The German Enlightenment (2) | The court of Frederick the Great, the deistic biblical criticism of Reimarus, Mendelssohn's aesthetic and metaphysical proofs, Lessing's dynamic historical revelation, Tetens's three-faculty psychology, and Pestalozzi's pedagogy. |
| Ch. VII | The Break with the Enlightenment | The anti-rationalist revolt: Hamann's mystical philosophy of poetic language and total personality, Herder's folk-culture historicism and linguistic critique of Kant, and Jacobi's leap of faith (Glaube) and intuitive reason (Vernunft). |
| Ch. VIII | Bossuet and Vico | The transition from St. Augustine and Bossuet's theological history to Giambattista Vico's anti-Cartesian verum-factum principle, "poetic wisdom," and the cyclical corsi e ricorsi of nations in the New Science. |
| Ch. IX | Voltaire to Herder | Voltaire's secular cultural historiography, Condorcet's ten epochs of indefinite human perfectibility, and Herder's Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind as the teleological unfolding of Humanität. |
| Ch. X | Kant (1): Life and Writings | Kant's life at Königsberg, his Newtonian cosmology (nebular hypothesis), his 1762–1768 pre-critical essays, his 1770 Inaugural Dissertation on Space/Time and sensibilia/intelligibilia, and his 1772 letter to Marcus Herz. |
| Ch. XI | Kant (2): Problems of First Critique | The crisis of metaphysics, the distinction between analytic and synthetic a priori judgments, the four critical questions, and the Copernican Revolution (objects conforming to our a priori cognitive structure). |
| Ch. XII | Kant (3): Scientific Knowledge | The Transcendental Aesthetic (Space and Time as pure intuitions grounding mathematics) and Transcendental Analytic (the 12 Categories, Transcendental Unity of Apperception, Schematism, Principles of pure physics, Phenomena vs. Noumena, and Refutation of Idealism). |
| Ch. XIII | Kant (4): Metaphysics Under Fire | The Transcendental Dialectic: how pure reason's search for the unconditioned generates the Paralogisms of the Soul, the Four Antinomies of the World, and the fallacies of the Ontological, Cosmological, and Design Proofs of God, leaving the Ideas a valid regulative ("as-if") use. |
| Ch. XIV | Kant (5): Morality and Religion | The unconditional Good Will, Duty vs. inclination, the five formulations of the Categorical Imperative, Autonomy, the Three Postulates of Practical Reason (Freedom, Immortality, God), Radical Evil, and religion as moral duty. |
| Ch. XV | Kant (6): Aesthetics & Teleology | The Critique of Judgment: Reflective Judgment as the bridge between Nature and Freedom; the Four Moments of the Beautiful, the Sublime, Genius and Aesthetical Ideas, Beauty as symbol of morality, organisms as self-organizing natural purposes, and Ethico-Theology. |
| Ch. XVI | Kant (7): Opus Postumum | Kant's final notes (1796–1803): mediating concepts of moving forces bridging metaphysics and physics, the self-positing construction of experience (Selbstsetzung), God immediately revealed in the Categorical Imperative, and Man as Person and Microcosm. |
| Ch. XVII | Concluding Review | Retrospective critique of Continental Rationalism (three refutations of deductive metaphysics), British Empiricism (refutation of Humean atomism), the "Is–Ought" question, Philosophy of History, Kant's legacy (Idealism vs. Positivism), and Being vs. Knowledge. |
The French Enlightenment (1): Reason, the Science of Man, and Its Rivals
1. The problem of identifying the Enlightenment
The familiar shorthand, an attack upon throne and altar, catches a genuine but incomplete aspect of the philosophes. Many opposed clerical authority and the use of religious orthodoxy to suppress intellectual discussion. Some repudiated revelation; a smaller set defended materialism and atheism. Yet their politics differed. Voltaire preferred enlightened royal protection of intellectual liberty to mass democracy; Montesquieu proposed institutional guarantees against arbitrary rule; and Helvétius pressed much harder for changes in legislation and education. To treat them all as deliberate architects of the French Revolution confuses consequences of their writings with their actual intentions (pp. 1–3).
Copleston therefore separates a negative task, criticism of superstition, intolerance and unsupported metaphysical systems, from a positive programme, construction of knowledge concerning people and society. From Locke the French thinkers borrowed the analysis of ideas through experience; from Newton they drew the model of law-seeking investigation that begins with observed phenomena. Neither influence requires the denial of reason or of synthesis. A successful synthesis must follow investigation, rather than begin with allegedly self-evident definitions from which the universe is deduced. In mathematics, freely constructed concepts may support strict deduction; in the natural and human sciences, empirical subject matter constrains the method.
This methodological turn supports several incompatible philosophical conclusions. D'Alembert's phenomenological reserve approximates positivism by restricting secure scientific assertions to observable relations; Voltaire and Maupertuis nevertheless argue for a Creator, and Condillac, despite explaining mental faculties through sensation, does not reject the soul. Copleston's distinction is important: the early development of psychology and physiological research cannot be identified without qualification with metaphysical materialism. Equally, the attempt to make morality understandable without appeals to revealed theology does not imply consensus concerning egoism, benevolence, utility, natural justice or divine sanction (pp. 3–6).
Institutionally, these investigations took place partly outside universities. The thinkers were historians, mathematicians, physicians, literary authors and travellers. Philosophy had not become an isolated academic speciality: experimental science, literary controversy, public education and practical reform interpenetrated. The central unity of the movement was a style of questioning rather than uniform answers.
For Copleston, eighteenth-century French philosophy is best understood as an attempt to extend empirical inquiry from the physical world to human psychological, moral and social life. Its antireligious polemics must be read within, not substituted for, that programme.
2. Pierre Bayle: criticism, theodicy, and moral independence from religion
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a Protestant who temporarily entered Catholicism and later lived in Rotterdam, wrote the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695–1697), which influenced both French and German readers. His dispute with the Calvinist Pierre Jurieu demonstrates that intolerance was not a Catholic monopoly. Bayle observed how parties in the debate over grace and free will, including Thomists, Jansenists, Calvinists and Molinists, could proclaim decisive differences even where doctrines were remarkably similar. The general lesson was methodological: a controversy may persist because of institutional loyalty, equivocation or prejudice rather than a significant disagreement in evidence (pp. 6–7).
His deeper scepticism concerns reason's competence to construct demonstrative metaphysics. Reason may refute an inadequate argument more effectively than it can establish a final theory. The proofs of God's existence remain contested; none removes the problem of evil by a rational reconciliation of omnipotence, goodness and actual suffering. Bayle acknowledged that Manichaean dualism seems to explain evil better than some orthodox reconciliations, but did not thereby endorse that metaphysics, which he also regarded as absurd. Similarly, a decisive demonstration of the soul's immortality had not been found. This is an argument about what reason can establish, not a proof that the disputed doctrines are false.
Bayle's faith and reason distinction is stronger than the assertion that religion exceeds reason without contradicting it. Religious propositions can appear positively repugnant to reason, making the act of accepting revelation difficult to assimilate to ordinary proof. Copleston notes the uncertainty about Bayle's sincerity when he extols the merit of faith in such circumstances. The practical implication, however, is clear: if metaphysical disputants cannot obtain rational certainty, toleration has a stronger claim than persecution in defence of purported certainty.
Bayle's other major separation is between religion and morality. Belief in postmortem reward and punishment is not a necessary psychological basis for honest conduct. Observed conduct does not reliably track professed creed. Bayle's use of the Sadducees and Pharisees, and his provocative possibility of an orderly society of atheists, introduces the autonomous moral agent. Later writers such as Diderot drew upon the Dictionary; Frederick the Great explicitly credited Bayle as an initiator of the intellectual campaign carried forward by the French Enlightenment (pp. 7–8).
What Bayle does not prove: that religious claims are false or that all believers behave badly. What he does dispute: that speculative proofs compel universal agreement, that religion is necessary for virtue, and that theological difference legitimates coercion.
3. Fontenelle: the history of explanation and the God of nature
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) became a celebrated interpreter of science for educated non-specialists. Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) popularized Cartesian astronomy; despite writing a eulogy of Newton in 1727, Fontenelle continued defending Cartesian vortices against Newtonian attraction, which he feared reintroduced an unexplained occult power. Later unpublished notes moved toward empiricism, holding that the material of ideas must ultimately be traced to sensations (pp. 8–9).
His discussions of the origin of fables and the history of oracles are more significant philosophically than his obsolete physics. Ancient people tried to understand the same world with less empirical information: myth was an explanation under informational poverty, not evidence that earlier minds possessed a wholly different intelligence. As tested knowledge grows, mythological explanations lose their work. Likewise, Fontenelle denied that pagan oracles had demonstrably been demonic or had ceased with the coming of Christ; such claims cannot establish a divine intervention without independent evidence.
Yet Fontenelle should not be classified as an atheist. His deism located evidence of God in the ordered system of nature rather than in particular historical revelation. This distinction between the God inferred from natural regularity and the God claimed by an organized religion recurs in Voltaire's work. Copleston notes that it is misleading to equate all French criticism of Christian apologetics with a rejection of deity itself.
4. Montesquieu: comparing laws without surrendering standards of justice
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) moved from the satire of Persian Letters (1721) and the history of Roman greatness and decline (1734) to the comprehensive Spirit of the Laws (1748), written over many years. The guiding question is not merely which statutes different societies happen to adopt, but why legal systems vary with government, custom, climate, economic conditions and the historical character of peoples. Copleston describes this as a comparative sociological inquiry and, because it seeks principles underlying historical differences, also a philosophy of history (pp. 9–15).
Montesquieu distinguishes the nature of a government, its structural form, from its principle, the prevailing human passion that makes that structure function. A republic can be democratic or aristocratic; monarchy governs through established fundamental laws and intermediate powers; despotism lacks those restraints. Virtue sustains a republic, honour a monarchy and fear a despotism. These categories are ideal types, not descriptions of every actual citizen in each regime. A republic does not necessarily contain virtuous citizens; rather, civic virtue is what its structure requires to operate well. A descriptive classification thus becomes a normative means of appraising legislative fitness.
| Form | Constitutional structure | Animating principle | Institutional risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Democratic republic | Whole people exercise supreme power | Civic virtue: willingness to serve common interests | Corruption of public spirit |
| Aristocratic republic | Part of the citizenry rules | Moderation and civic discipline within republican virtue | Entrenched exclusion |
| Monarchy | Prince bound by fundamental laws and intermediate bodies | Honour | Erosion of checks and lawful limits |
| Despotism | Ruler acts without stable constitutional restraint | Fear | Arbitrary personal command |
Society's circumstances matter, but not as an unavoidable fate. Climate may influence customs and passions without wholly determining conduct. A wise legislator can adapt laws to circumstances, and even counteract conditions that tend to produce bad effects. Copleston singles out two layers: empirical relations that help explain why a law arose, and operative ideals by which participants understand and seek to improve their polity.
Above all, Montesquieu is not a strict moral relativist. He acknowledges relations of justice antecedent to positive enactment and natural laws concerning humanity. If legal permission were the whole meaning of justice, it would be impossible to criticize a tyrannical law as unjust. His enthusiasm for political liberty is equally normative. He defines it as protected activity within known laws, not the permission to do whatever one happens to want.
In his famous account of England, legislative, executive and judicial powers should not be gathered in the same unchecked hands: different organs must be able to restrain abuses by the others. Copleston recognizes that Montesquieu's description of post-1688 Britain may overstate how completely its powers were separated, especially given parliamentary supremacy. But that criticism does not nullify the practical insight that independent judicial functions and restraints on executive discretion matter. Montesquieu wanted to reform France, not slavishly copy Britain or demand a violent revolution. His conclusions influenced constitutional thinking in America and France (pp. 13–15).
5. Maupertuis: Newtonian gravity, least action and the problem of matter
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) opposed Cartesian vortices, defended Newtonian gravitational science and led the 1736 expedition to Lapland to measure the length of a degree of latitude; its findings favoured Newton's prediction of an Earth flattened toward the poles. Serving as president of the Prussian Academy, he explored the conceptual foundations of mechanics in an Essay on Cosmology (1750) (pp. 15–18).
His treatment of force was partly psychological. Human beings first learn the term through the experienced exertion of effort and resistance. We transfer this term to bodies whose motions change, but must not suppose we have thereby discovered an invisible entity separate from observed mechanical effects. Nevertheless, Maupertuis defended a form of teleology: the principle of least action, previously foreshadowed in work on optics, suggested to him an economy in nature expressive of a wise Creator. Copleston sets his empirical restraint beside this theological reading rather than pretending the two are equivalent doctrines.
His System of Nature, originally published in Latin under the pseudonym Baumann, further complicated labels by ascribing elementary degrees of perception or sensibility to matter. Higher intellectual activity might arise when elementary units become organized; extension itself may be phenomenal. Diderot read this doctrine as providing a route to materialism, while Maupertuis resisted that conclusion. Copleston's judgment is deliberately qualified: aspects of the system contributed to materialist discussion, but its theory of matter and perception is too equivocal to classify without remainder as dogmatic materialism.
6. Voltaire: a deist critic who did not become a democrat
François-Marie Arouet, Voltaire (1694–1778), absorbed Locke, Newton and comparative English toleration during his visit to England (1726–1729). His work ranged from Philosophical Letters and writings on Newton to Candide (1759), Treatise on Tolerance (1763) and the Philosophical Dictionary (1764). He attacked clerical repression and Christian dogmas, but was consistently not an atheist. The order of the world argued for a supreme intelligence, particularly through the design analogy rather than a purely conceptual deduction of God's existence (pp. 18–24).
His theodicy changed. Earlier, influenced by cosmic optimism, he could argue that an individual misfortune might belong to a better universal arrangement. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, reflected in a poem and Candide, made such easy optimism intolerable. In later treatments, the eternal First Cause is related to an eternal or necessary world, with evil as an unavoidable accompaniment rather than a freely selected divine goal. This revision does not abolish Voltaire's deism; it changes how the dependence of the world upon God is interpreted.
On the soul, Voltaire increasingly treated claims about an independent immaterial substance as unnecessary hypotheses: reason by itself cannot settle what thinking ultimately consists in. His account of human freedom also moved from an early appeal to felt freedom toward a determinist account of volition. Motives determine what we will; liberty in the practical sense becomes the ability to do what one wills when no external obstacle prevents it. A free will independent of any motive appears to him unintelligible. Yet this did not make him reject a moral law: natural sympathies and the need to avoid injury allow for fundamental agreement even amid differences of custom.
Voltaire's political position must likewise be separated into components. He prized freedom of thought, expression and toleration, and supported judicial reform. But he distrusted popular rule, mocked Rousseau's egalitarianism, and hoped for benevolent enlightened monarchy. Thus his notion of progress was primarily scientific, literary, economic and intellectual rather than democratic. Copleston warns against attributing to Voltaire an intention to bring about the eventual Revolution simply because his writings helped unsettle old assumptions.
7. Vauvenargues: passions, genius and the complexity of virtue
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) died young after military service and ill health, leaving Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind (1746) and aphorisms. His three-part inquiry studies qualities of mind, passions and moral good and evil. The first distinguishes psychological characters and explains genius as the rare union of capacities, sustained activity and motivating passions, not simply an exceptional amount of intellect (pp. 24–28).
In the second part, pleasure and pain relate to felt perfection and imperfection; passions grow from the tension between perceived capacities and experienced needs. Human beings do not advance through cool intelligence alone: feeling motivates reflection and effort. The third part defines moral goodness through the welfare of society. Because different people pursue different sources of satisfaction, personal pleasure alone cannot ground a public norm. Virtue includes placing the common interest before private advantage. Vauvenargues nevertheless recognizes greatness of soul as a powerful drive capable of both admirable and destructive expression. A conqueror can exhibit greatness while acting viciously. The moral agent is rarely wholly good or bad; distinct excellences and failings may coexist. His outlook shows why the Enlightenment cannot be reduced to arid rationalism.
8. Condillac: a complete genetic account of mental functions
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780) adopted Locke's demand to trace complex ideas to experience but challenged the sufficiency of Locke's two sources, sensation and reflection. In the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), he stressed how signs and language stabilize ideas and allow comparison and reflection. In the Treatise on Systems (1749), he denied that the Cartesian and Spinozist procedure of beginning with definitions discovers the facts of nature. A legitimate system organizes phenomena that have first been observed. Analysis breaks the confused given into distinguishable elements; synthesis must reassemble what experience warrants (pp. 28–30).
The Treatise on Sensations (1754) tries something more ambitious: derive the functions of the mind themselves from a single source, sensation. Imagine a statue awakened first to the smell of a rose. When it experiences one smell exclusively, this is attention; the persistence of the impression becomes memory; awareness of a present scent beside a remembered scent yields comparison, and grasping their relation is judgment. A recalled pleasant sensation in contrast with an unpleasant present one elicits imagination, want and desire. As a desire becomes dominant it constitutes passion; when fulfillment is regarded as within the subject's power it becomes willing. Thus no autonomous stock of innate mental operations is simply taken for granted.
The experiment introduces additional senses but gives touch and movement a unique role in the idea of an external object. Sight, smell and hearing alone multiply experiential contents without establishing the distinction between self and external thing. In touching one's own body, the subject finds reciprocal modifications; touching a foreign object lacks that response. Movement and coordinated touch then teach the statue to locate a world independent of its sensations. Condillac revised his earlier account to place more emphasis on movement. He also moderated his earlier insistence that language makes all thought possible: rudimentary number and comparison precede signs, while signs make more developed intelligence possible (pp. 30–33).
His later exposition assigns a foundational role to felt uneasiness or need: appetite organizes attention and memory, rather than their development occurring through mechanical association alone. A deterministic reading may suggest itself, but Condillac explicitly considered freedom. And although his psychology influenced materialists, he accepted God and an immaterial soul as the enduring centre of mental acts. Moreover, the psychological genesis of our idea of external extension is not a proof that physical things are extended as they seem; Condillac deliberately leaves ultimate questions concerning their intrinsic constitution open (pp. 33–35).
Condillac's statue: ordered emergence of faculties. Sensation → focused attention → retained memory → comparison and judgment → desired and imagined states → passions and volition. The separate addition of touch plus movement provides the pathway to a distinction between self and external things. The experiment models a theory of psychological development; it does not demonstrate metaphysical materialism.
9. Helvétius: sensation, utility, education and power
Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) carried reduction further in On Mind (1758) and posthumous On Man (1772). Even judgment, he held, is perception of relations or differences among sensations; even generosity results from the discomfort a spectator feels at another's distress. Self-love and the desire for pleasure function as universal springs of conduct. Whether these explanations adequately describe moral motivation is an open objection, and Diderot explicitly criticized their levelling effect (pp. 35–38).
The norm of moral evaluation is nevertheless not private pleasure but public utility. Education can align personal motivation with social benefit by producing habits of sympathetic attention and cooperative conduct. Helvétius overstated the power of education in claiming that it makes us what we are, but he also saw why education is inseparable from institutions: privilege, clerical domination and despotic government obstruct civic improvement. Unlike Voltaire, he advocated more direct transformation of law and distribution, attacking extreme concentrations of wealth and arbitrary power. His vague natural religion subordinated theology to human happiness and moral welfare. Copleston's concluding judgment is double: the psychology is crude and often insufficiently argued, but the links among education, public virtue and institutional reform mark a major strand of the movement.
Do not equate the shared method with identical conclusions. Bayle is a sceptic about metaphysical proof; Fontenelle and Voltaire are deists; Montesquieu invokes natural justice; Maupertuis combines empirical mechanics with teleology; Condillac retains a spiritual soul; Helvétius advances a far-reaching psychology of interest. These differences are substantive to Copleston's history, not footnotes to a single materialist progression.
The chapter moves from critical reason to experimental inquiry and then to contested reductions of mind, virtue and politics. The shared achievement was to make human nature available to systematic argument and observation; the unsettled question was whether explaining conduct in natural terms also explains its normative authority.
The French Enlightenment (2): Encyclopedism, Naturalism, and Political Economy
1. The Encyclopédie as both a reference work and intellectual intervention
Inspired initially by a proposed translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, the French Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers became a vastly more ambitious undertaking under Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783). The first volume appeared in 1751, the second in 1752, and seven had appeared by 1757. Authorities repeatedly tried to stop publication because they associated it with challenges to established ecclesiastical and civil authority. D'Alembert left the editorship in 1758; Diderot continued to work under restrictions, ultimately bringing out the remaining ten text volumes together in 1765. Plates, supplements and indexes ultimately made a 35-volume first undertaking (pp. 39–40).
The work was not uniformly accurate or consistently organized. Articles varied in scholarship, editorial supervision was uneven, and the reader could not always locate concepts by the systematic rules familiar from modern reference works. Its historical importance lies less in perfect reference organization than in a public commitment to critical investigation and intellectual education. Even the diversity of its writers undermines the myth of one Encyclopedist creed: the deist Voltaire, the materialist d'Holbach, and reformers such as Montesquieu and Turgot could participate in the same project while advocating divergent accounts of nature and government.
The French Enlightenment's historically durable contribution was a programme of publicly accountable scientific and social inquiry, not agreement on whether the universe is ultimately material, spiritual or unknowable.
2. Diderot: an experimental thinker who resisted a final system
Diderot produced the Philosophical Thoughts (1746), the Letter on the Blind (1749), and Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (1754). His heterodox writings led to imprisonment at Vincennes in 1749; the Encyclopédie then absorbed much of his life. He travelled to St Petersburg in 1773, supported financially by Catherine II. His changing philosophy is itself a theme: an early deism that praised natural religion against mutually hostile historical religions gave way to atheistic attacks on religion and then to passages resembling naturalistic pantheism, in which nature is treated as a unified whole (pp. 40–43).
The account of mind also changes. Diderot took seriously Locke's conjecture that thought might be conferred on matter, and explored how intelligence varies with bodily organization in texts such as Conversation between d'Alembert and Diderot and D'Alembert's Dream (composed around 1769). Human and animal mentality need not be radically different in origin. He was influenced by Condillac but thought it insufficient to derive the faculties from sensations without asking for their physiological basis. At other moments, however, his conception of perceptive atoms resembles the panpsychist tendency associated with Leibniz. Copleston rightly rejects a forced yes-or-no classification of all Diderot's writings as materialist.
Underlying this mobility is a theory of inquiry: nature is heterogeneous, changing and open to investigation. The systematic philosopher risks mistaking a conceptual classification for reality. Observation may disclose new kinds of organisms and transformations that overturn an elegant theory. Diderot's occasional prediction that higher mathematics would soon be exhausted was mistaken; the larger point was that the natural world cannot be legislated into a theory merely because the theory is mathematically tidy. This approach helped stimulate reflection on biological development and the possible transformation of forms, though it must not be treated as a mature modern evolutionary theory.
His ethics also resists simple reduction. He defended benevolence, self-sacrifice and humanity, criticized purely selfish explanations of moral action, and praised creative artistic freedom. Critics claimed that physical determinism and ethical idealism could not coexist. Diderot's answer was that the origins of a faculty do not by themselves determine the worth of its uses. Whether thought arises from matter or independently of it does not settle what justice and injustice mean. A natural account of the human organism does not entail permission to neglect others. His moral outlook remained tied to human nature and welfare rather than to ascetic prescriptions or the authority of a church (pp. 42–44).
3. D'Alembert: phenomenal laws without ontological overclaiming
Jean le Rond d'Alembert, an important mathematician, formulated the principle bearing his name in his Treatise on Dynamics (1743) and contributed to fluid mechanics and mathematical analysis. His Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie and Elements of Philosophy (1759) treated the eighteenth century as a period in which all fields, from physics and trade to morals and religion, had become objects of analysis. He hailed Locke as a founder of scientific philosophy in the way Newton had transformed natural philosophy (pp. 44–47).
For d'Alembert, systematic science does more than accumulate facts. It relates observed phenomena under explanatory regularities. Yet we must distinguish an explanation by relations among empirically grounded properties from a purported deduction of the world from metaphysical essences, substances or occult qualities. The former can be tested; the latter frequently generates antinomies and endless dispute. Even the existence or ultimate nature of an external world may be accepted as practically inevitable without being established by pure philosophical demonstration. As a result he foreshadows methodological positivism, not a dogmatic doctrine that reality consists exclusively of matter.
His ethical arguments share the programme of independence from theology: inquiry should clarify duties to others and the compatibility of genuine individual welfare with the common good. He did not share the crudely mechanistic metaphysics of some of his allies. His restraint shows that empirical method and materialist ontology are independent propositions.
4. La Mettrie: bodily organization and the model of the human machine
The physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) investigated the links between fever, bodily changes and psychological states. His Natural History of the Soul (1745) and Man a Machine (1748) proposed that cognitive differences depend fundamentally on sensory powers, bodily organization and education. Cartesian mechanistic physiology should not, he thought, be limited to bodies while leaving thought in a protected, immaterial substance. The whole human organism must become a legitimate subject for natural investigation (pp. 47–49).
But La Mettrie's matter is not simply Descartes's passive extension. Organized matter possesses forms of internal motion and sensation, and its psychic capacities depend on structure. The analogy of a machine is useful but incomplete; La Mettrie also compared human life to a plant, underlining a continuity of natural forms. He saw no need to posit a separate spiritual soul. In religious matters he presented himself at times as an agnostic and was commonly regarded as an atheist. In ethics he celebrated pleasure in a manner that contrasted with Diderot's high ideals. This combination is distinctive to La Mettrie; it cannot be extrapolated to all empirical psychology.
5. D'Holbach: a determined universe and an explicitly atheistic politics
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) hosted the influential Parisian salon and published the System of Nature (1770) under a pseudonym. Rejecting Descartes's inactive homogeneous matter, he argued that motion belongs to the nature of matter, which exists in different configurations and obeys necessary laws. Attraction and repulsion underlie physical interactions; analogous tendencies appear in human life as love and hatred. The instinct for self-preservation motivates creatures, including people, without excluding social concern: rational self-interest can be served through cooperation (pp. 49–50).
D'Holbach's system is openly materialist, deterministic and atheistic. The regularity of nature demands no supermundane intelligence; religion, in his view, arose through ignorance, fear and the interests of rulers, and reinforces oppression. It should therefore give way to a rational organization of society. Yet his outspoken hostility to the ancien régime did not translate into support for insurrection: he warned that revolution might be worse than the system it displaced. Nor did all Enlightenment writers accept his theory. Voltaire criticized its atheism; Frederick the Great objected that its fierce moral reproaches sounded inconsistent with a doctrine of universal necessity; and Goethe later recoiled from the portrayal of nature as devoid of the living qualities he treasured.
Necessary explanation versus moral appraisal. D'Holbach holds all actions to be determined by the natural order but also reproaches individuals and institutions for oppression. The objection is not that determined conduct cannot change. It is that the theory needs to explain precisely how responsibility, criticism, deliberation and reform function inside a system that denies indeterminist choice.
6. Cabanis: the unity of physiological and psychological life
Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808), another physician, investigated the relations between bodily and moral life in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme. Some of his formulations, notably the comparison of thought's production by the brain with secretion by the liver, invited harsh criticism. Copleston warns that such slogans obscure the real gain: studying the reciprocal dependence of mental activity and organic process rather than resting content with purely verbal accounts of an immaterial mind (pp. 50–51).
Cabanis denied that his analysis of physiological conditions necessarily entailed metaphysical materialism and professed reserve concerning ultimate causes. Unlike Condillac's thought-experiment, in which an imaginary statue receives senses one by one, his physiological inquiry stresses that the senses operate as interdependent functions of a living organism. He also sought an ethics grounded in scientific understanding rather than theological sanction. Thus a dogmatic analogy about secretions and a fruitful programme of psychophysiological research should be assessed separately.
7. Natural history: Buffon, Robinet, Bonnet and classification
Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788), in the multi-volume Natural History begun in 1749, rejected the assumption that every science should imitate the deductive definition-driven form of mathematics. Botanists and zoologists confront independent natural objects rather than entities produced by stipulation. Their method must be observational, comparative and analogical. Generalizations arise by studying real similarities and differences; they remain revisable as new forms are discovered (pp. 51–53).
This epistemology bears upon species. Against rigid classificatory schemes, Buffon presented continuous gradations and similarities in nature. Class-names designate observed affinities; they are not transparent apprehensions of eternal essences. His emphasis on continuity helped make later evolutionary reflection possible, but Copleston carefully notes that Buffon did not teach the transformation of one species into another in the fully developed evolutionary sense. He imagined a divine archetype capable of diverse forms and a succession of creations as circumstances allowed.
Jean-Baptiste Robinet (1735–1820) envisaged a series that progressively realizes the vital functions of nutrition, growth and reproduction, culminating materially in humanity and potentially pointing beyond material organs to intelligence. But a single linear ladder of organisms has obvious explanatory limits. Charles Bonnet (1720–1793) considered a series with several main and subsidiary lines; Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811) used the analogy of a branching tree, while Buffon himself sometimes preferred a network. This progression from ladder to branching structure is not yet Darwinian descent, but illustrates a methodological struggle to fit biological variety rather than impose a preconceived taxonomy.
8. Boscovich: matter as an ordered field of attraction and repulsion
Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787), a Jesuit born at Ragusa, served as a mathematician, astronomer and for a period as director of optics at Paris. His Theory of Natural Philosophy (1758) reconceived atomism around point-like centres of force. If gravitational action occurs at a distance, bodies need not transfer all mechanical action by literal surface contact. Atoms can possess position and exert attraction or repulsion without occupying ordinary extended volumes as tiny hard balls (pp. 53–54).
Beyond a certain separation, attraction follows an inverse-square relation. At shorter intervals attraction and repulsion alternate under laws not yet completely determined; at very small separations repulsion rises without bound, making immediate contact impossible. Aggregates remain effectively impenetrable because of forces between constituents. Boscovich was not claiming that nothing exists except atoms; he proposed a mathematical theory of physical bodies compatible with his religious convictions. His presence in Copleston's chapter itself defeats an identification of Enlightenment science with anti-religious metaphysics.
9. The physiocrats: natural economic order, net product and the state
The physiocrats, a term coined by Dupont de Nemours, held that economic life has natural laws that government should learn and respect. Privileges, monopolies and arbitrary controls obstruct voluntary exchange and production. Their preference for laissez-faire, however, did not make most of them democrats: they often hoped for an enlightened monarch who would remove impediments to natural economic order (pp. 55–57).
François Quesnay (1694–1774), physician to Louis XV, elaborated the Tableau économique in 1758. His fundamental economic division distinguished genuinely productive agricultural labour, which yields a net excess over its costs, from trade and manufacture, which, though useful, merely change the form or ownership of existing wealth and were therefore labelled sterile. Because revenue ultimately depends on the agricultural net product, he favoured a land tax and the encouragement of productive cultivation. This reduction was controversial even within political economy: Adam Smith, who admired Quesnay, would not concede that industry and commerce were economically sterile.
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) combined theoretical economics with ambitious administration. As Controller-General from 1774, he sought economies, taxation reforms, the removal of privileges and freer grain trade. Opposition to taxing privileged orders and to wider schemes for education and poor relief contributed to his removal in 1776. Politically he pursued reform from within monarchy rather than violent revolution. His Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches appeared serially in 1769–1770 and separately in 1776 (pp. 56–57).
Turgot's philosophical contribution extends beyond economics. In his article on existence, what is given is an interrelated flux of phenomena, including the stable-enough group called the self. The question of what existence is in itself beyond the system of experiential relations lies outside certain knowledge. In his philosophy of history, humanity differs from animals because intellectual acquisitions can be passed on and enlarged over generations. He discerned religious, metaphysical and scientific stages of collective explanation, a schema anticipating Auguste Comte in the following century. More general laws of human advancement connect the scientific outlook with social and economic reform.
| Thinker / programme | What analysis explains | Limit or qualification |
|---|---|---|
| D'Alembert | Testable phenomenal relations | No deduction of ultimate essences |
| Diderot | Changing nature and organic development | Not one stable materialist doctrine |
| La Mettrie / Cabanis | Bodily bases of mental life | Physiology does not alone resolve all ontology |
| D'Holbach | Necessary motions in a material universe | Determinism and moral reproach need reconciliation |
| Buffon / Robinet / Bonnet | Continuity and classification of organisms | Chains and trees are not yet full evolutionary theory |
| Quesnay / Turgot | Economic regularity and institutional reform | Productivity and political assumptions disputed |
10. Copleston's conclusion: assess achievements separately from excesses
Copleston ends by warning against turning the outspoken attacks of Helvétius or d'Holbach into the essence of French philosophy. The most fruitful legacies are the growth of experimental psychology and biology, empirical social and political inquiry, and political economy. The overall enterprise made scientific forms of explanation impossible for later philosophers simply to ignore. Nineteenth-century idealists would attempt to integrate scientific, religious and metaphysical perspectives, not merely return to pre-Enlightenment authority. Whether such syntheses ultimately succeeded is another question. The historical point is that this programme deserved examination even by those who rejected particular Enlightenment attacks on metaphysics (p. 58).
Distinguish three theses: (1) mental states correlate with bodily states; (2) investigating those correlations is a productive research method; and (3) nothing exists except matter. Evidence for the first two does not by itself establish the third. Likewise the physiocrats' discovery of economic regularities does not prove Quesnay's special thesis that manufacturing produces no new value.
From Encyclopedism through physiology, natural history, force theory and economics, Chapter II records a common attempt to replace inherited assumptions with connected explanations of actual phenomena. Its enduring tension lies between epistemic modesty about what experiments warrant and metaphysical certainty that some Enlightenment writers tried to read into their results.
Rousseau (1): Civilization, Inequality, Conscience and the General Will
1. A life marked by dependency, friendship and philosophical estrangement
He met Voltaire and Diderot, contributed musical entries to the Encyclopédie and visited d'Holbach's salon. The Academy of Dijon offered a prize concerning the moral effects of arts and sciences; Rousseau's paradoxical negative answer won and appeared as the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences in 1750. His subsequent Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality appeared in 1755, as did his Encyclopédie article on political economy. In 1754 he returned temporarily to Geneva, formally rejoining Protestantism to regain citizenship. His quarrel with the philosophes deepened, especially as his sympathy with natural feeling and religion diverged from the salon culture around him.
At Montmorency (1756–1762), he wrote the Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre (1758), the novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762). The last two works provoked official condemnation and exile. In 1766 he travelled to England with David Hume, whose assistance was undone by suspicion and an acrimonious public dispute. Returning to France, he eventually lived quietly in Paris and died at Ermenonville on 2 July 1778. His autobiographical Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker appeared posthumously (pp. 60–62).
Copleston describes a temperament combining intense sensitivity, emotional imagination, intellectual ingenuity and a strong sense of persecution. The point of the biography is not to dismiss the philosophy as pathology. Rousseau's unusual combination of personal dependence and an ideal of independence helps explain why his works are relentlessly concerned with the corruption of sincerity by reputation, status and artificial needs.
2. The First Discourse: why cultural polish may conceal domination
In the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau opens by acknowledging human intellectual achievement but turns the expected celebration upside down. Learning and polite culture can adorn the chains that hold people subordinate. Civilized manners encourage people to conceal their real feelings behind uniform performance. They create rivalry in prestige while destroying confidence, openness, courage and attachment to one's community. Sciences and arts then function as the ornaments of an unequal order rather than proofs that its members are virtuous (pp. 62–63).
Rousseau's historical examples are provocative and often weak: he praises the austerity of Sparta over the cultivated society of Athens, draws favourable contrasts with early Persians and Germanic tribes, and depicts the loss of civic virtue in Greece and Rome as connected to luxury and learning. He argues that astronomy, rhetoric, geometry and physics often arose from superstition, ambition, avarice or idle curiosity. Thus arts can grow from vice and contribute to luxury, expensive misdirected education and dependence on public admiration. The noble aspiration to intellectual distinction becomes a substitute for moral excellence.
Copleston's objection is not that every example of corrupt cultural ambition is false. It is that Rousseau mistakes a genuine correlation or social symptom for a general causal law: improvements in scientific knowledge need not cause political or moral degeneration. The same discovery may be used destructively or beneficially; scholarly culture can become vanity but also provide public goods. Idealizing Sparta at the expense of Athens is poor historical evidence. Rousseau's rhetorical method was deliberately polemical; even he acknowledged its argumentative weaknesses. However, the work did puncture the Encyclopedist identification of scientific progress with progress in virtue (pp. 63–65).
The First Discourse should not be read as a settled command to abandon knowledge. Rousseau praises exceptional thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes and Newton while attacking unthinking intellectual fashion. More importantly, he was already contemplating systematic political institutions, later developed into The Social Contract. His enduring target was not human coexistence itself but a form of artificial and competitive civilization that weakens freedom and humanity.
Encyclopedist inference: more knowledge → better control of nature → greater social welfare → human progress. Rousseau's objection: knowledge and luxury can coexist with, and sometimes amplify, dependence, inequality, vanity and moral decline. The empirical question is not resolved by either slogan; it requires distinguishing technical achievement from moral and political ends.
3. The Second Discourse: why the state of nature is a hypothesis
Rousseau's question in the Discourse on Inequality is the origin of moral or political inequality, which differs from natural or physical inequality of strength, age and capacity. We cannot directly observe the earliest human condition, so Rousseau proposes a conditional reconstruction, stripping away institutions, learned wants, language and developed comparison. He does not pretend to be writing a reliable archaeological history; the model is meant to isolate what society contributes to an otherwise obscure development (pp. 65–66).
The reconstructed human being is relatively robust, concerned chiefly with immediate needs, and lacks settled work, permanent dwellings, written rules and a strongly developed sense of rank. Life is not automatically a war of all against all. Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau denies that the mere impulse to preserve oneself entails a standing desire to harm others. The primitive person has self-love as self-preservation (amour de soi) and an immediate natural pity when confronted with suffering. Because social comparison is limited, there is little fuel for vanity and retaliatory hostility. Strictly moral responsibility is not yet fully developed, but absence of mature moral concepts is not equivalent to vice (pp. 66–67).
Two faculties distinguish humanity from other animals. First is freedom, the experienced capacity to choose rather than simply follow an instinctive mechanism. Rousseau regards this as a sign of spiritual activity and rejects an exhaustive mechanical description of people. Second is perfectibility, the ability to develop new powers in changing circumstances. This faculty is morally ambivalent: it makes culture and practical advancement possible, yet also gives history the capacity to produce forms of dependence absent from the original condition.
The origin of language poses special difficulties. Rousseau begins with cries and gradually introduced signs, but recognizes a circular relation: abstract thought requires language, while conventional language seems already to require joint meanings and shared mental acts; similarly the establishment of society seems to presuppose speech, while the invention of speech presupposes society. He deliberately leaves the full transition unexplained. This is important because it prevents turning his conjectural beginning into a complete account of every developmental step (p. 67).
4. The production of inequality: property, labour and political authority
In the second part of the Discourse on Inequality, growing social cooperation helps people to accomplish tasks no isolated individual could manage. Repeated association generates habits, comparisons and expectations. Established families develop a more durable setting for status. The decisive economic turn comes with agriculture and metallurgy, which make landholding, specialization and a stable division of labour important. The person able to enclose land and persuade others to recognize its private ownership symbolizes the beginning of an institutional system in which property becomes publicly enforceable (pp. 68–69).
Property is not a single magical cause but the organizing hinge in a sequence: differences in possessions become socially salient; competition and dependence magnify them; the wealthy seek to protect their acquisitions; the poor are forced into unequal bargaining positions. Self-preservation becomes mixed with competitive self-regard (amour-propre), in which one's value depends upon the gaze of others. The original natural pity and simple self-regard are distorted by a society of comparison and scarcity. Unprotected possessions, the ambition of the rich and the resentment of the poor produce a new state of conflict.
The emergence of political society offers apparent relief. People agree to establish law and government to secure their interests, but this agreement may merely convert the advantage of the powerful into recognized right. The rich acquire legal security for what they have seized; the poor receive duties and restrictions while their dependence persists. For Rousseau, the original establishment of government is not identical to despotic tyranny. Despotism is a terminal corruption of government, not its initial form. When arbitrary power becomes absolute, subjects are made equal again only in the degraded sense that all are equally without rights (pp. 69–70).
Copleston stresses an objection associated with Charles Bonnet: if perfectibility is itself natural to humanity, why should social development be called unnatural? Rousseau's answer cannot be a fantasy of eliminating cities and returning to forests. He explicitly refuses a literal prescription to abolish civil society. The sharper problem is whether social progress can be redirected so that new capacities are compatible with genuine freedom and a just public order. The positive political theory of Rousseau's later work therefore corrects the impression that he simply condemns all society.
5. Political Economy: the first articulation of the general will
The Discourse on Political Economy, written around the time of the Second Discourse, supplies a theory of the State that is positive in purpose. Rousseau treats the political community as a moral entity possessing a general will directed toward preservation and the welfare of the whole and its members. Its right to legislate depends not upon one ruler's private interest but upon the common good. This will is the public standard of justice for members acting in relation to their State. Government is the executive or administrative servant of the lawgiving sovereign, not the source of that sovereign's authority (pp. 70–72).
A religious association, guild or party can also have a common will among its members. But relative to the wider political community, its will remains particular; what benefits a partial society can conflict with the good of all citizens. The duty of a citizen is therefore to bring private or factional purposes into alignment with the more inclusive common good. Rousseau regards this as an essential component of civic virtue and assigns public education an important role in cultivating it.
The critical distinction is that the general will is not identical with any actual vote. Even a whole assembly may be deceived or led by entrenched interests; its resolution then fails to express the public advantage. Rousseau's thesis that the general will tends toward the good is not the thesis that every declaration by an elected or assembled group is good. Copleston sees behind this assertion an older conception of natural moral law: the aspiration to the good is a fact of human nature that legislation ought to express, not create at will (pp. 72–73).
There is even a wider ethical horizon. The will of any individual State is particular in relation to the imagined great society of humankind, whose overarching standard would be natural right. This makes Rousseau's position more subtle than a theory according to which patriotic obedience settles every moral question. The good of the State itself is not automatically the ultimate good. But it also creates a difficult political problem: who judges when the public institution has failed to identify its own true interest?
6. Pity, conscience and the formation of virtue
Rousseau's moral psychology begins from the positive valuation of natural passions. It is misguided to try to extirpate every emotion; self-love makes survival and development possible. The task of moral education is to extend self-regard beyond the isolated person until it becomes concern for the needs of others. Pity, an instinctive response to suffering, precedes abstract moral proof and can become the basis of more reflective benevolence. Vice represents the distortion of the natural impulses through destructive social relationships, especially envy and the competitive multiplication of wants (pp. 73–77).
In Émile, especially the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau explains conscience as an immediate inner source of moral judgment. Reason helps people discern the good, but the affection for the good is not derived from argument alone. A person may know a rule and still lack the motivating impulse to act upon it. Conscience provides the lived apprehension of an obligation's moral force. This does not negate reasoning; it challenges an account in which logical inference suffices for moral life.
The language of feeling can refer both to an emotion such as pity and to an immediate awareness of evidence that is not itself an ordinary feeling of pleasure or pain. The Savoyard Vicar appeals to the ordered world to affirm a wise governing intelligence; he describes the existence of God, the freedom of willing and the value of the soul as supported by a deep inner conviction. Rousseau thereby breaks from materialist mechanism and from the assumption that religious conviction depends solely on ecclesiastical testimony or philosophical demonstrations.
Copleston traces the influence of this moral and religious sensibility on Kant, the revolt against over-systematized rationalism and even political religious expressions during the French Revolution. The influence is not one-dimensional: Rousseau's sentimental deism could also make a later return to forms of Christianity emotionally intelligible. The point is not that the feelings settle every controversy, but that they reveal a dimension of human self-understanding obscured by an exclusive focus on discursive calculation.
7. Three tensions that carry into the Social Contract
| Problem | Rousseau's affirmative claim | Question Copleston preserves |
|---|---|---|
| Perfectibility | Humans naturally develop capacities | If capacity development is natural, why is much of civilization corrupting? |
| General will | Political willing is oriented to a shared good | How can one identify the common good when voters are mistaken? |
| Natural moral law | Conscience orients persons toward justice | How can this coexist with law and coercion by the sovereign? |
| Freedom | Choice exceeds blind mechanical necessity | What happens to independence within compulsory civic association? |
| Progress | New capacities make improvement possible | What prevents their conversion into prestige, luxury and domination? |
These tensions show why Rousseau should not be filed simply under either a reactionary anti-Enlightenment or a rationalist political collectivism. His doubts about scientific progress do not abolish his confidence in education and legitimate institutions. His stress on feeling does not abolish reason. The nature of his achievement emerges when the criticism of existing civilization is juxtaposed with a constructive theory of what a free political community ought to be.
Keep Rousseau's hypothetical history hypothetical. No factual claim about the precise existence of a prelinguistic, solitary original human condition is established merely by its use in the argument. Likewise, the First Discourse's vivid examples do not demonstrate that science causes moral decline. Copleston's own reading is strongest where it distinguishes the diagnostic power of Rousseau's criticism from the weaknesses of his general historical proof.
Rousseau's deepest question is how capacities that could make people more human become the instruments of their subjection, and what moral and political institutions could restore freedom without abolishing common life. The answer requires his distinctive combination of natural pity, conscience, freedom, equality and the general will.
Rousseau (2): The Social Contract, Sovereignty, Law, Government and Freedom
1. The justification problem: force does not create a duty
The opening of the Social Contract (1762) contrasts human beings' natural claim to freedom with their actual political dependence. Rousseau immediately separates two questions: how people came to be governed and what makes government rightful. His object is the second. A ruler's capacity to compel conduct establishes the fact of power, not a moral duty to obey. Yielding to overwhelming force may be prudent, but prudence is not the same thing as obligation. Nor may inherited tradition or a supposed natural authority of one adult over other adults by itself justify an unlimited right to command (p. 80).
Rousseau therefore seeks convention or agreement as the ground of civil right. But a valid agreement must solve a special problem: how can people unite for their common preservation without replacing their original independence with personal slavery? His solution is an association in which each person gives himself to the whole body on equal terms. Because everybody makes the same commitment, no individual is subjected to the separate discretionary will of another individual. Each becomes an indivisible member of the corporate public person that the act brings into existence.
This resulting entity has several names according to the aspect considered: republic or body politic as a whole, State when passive, Sovereign when exercising its active lawgiving power, and a Power when related to similar states. The contracting persons collectively are the people; individually each is a citizen in sharing sovereignty and a subject in obeying the public laws (pp. 80–81). This vocabulary is essential: Rousseau's sovereign is not a king placed over the contracting parties, but the associated citizens considered as lawgivers.
2. Why Rousseau's contract differs from Hobbes's
Hobbes uses a covenant to escape insecurity and civil war by concentrating power in a sovereign whose authority stands apart from the contracting individuals. Sovereign government supplies the effective remedy for destructive conflict. Rousseau begins instead from the value of freedom: if a covenant merely creates another master, political membership remains a loss to be justified by security alone. He therefore makes the citizen body itself sovereign and assigns government only a subordinate role, to be established and organized after the community exists (pp. 81–82).
| Constitutive question | Hobbes | Rousseau |
|---|---|---|
| Primary difficulty | War, insecurity and rivalry | Legitimate authority compatible with freedom |
| Original covenant | Authorizes a sovereign outside the covenant | Forms a collective moral person identical with the associated citizens |
| Government | Central to solving political instability | Executive instrument created under popular sovereignty |
| Justification | Security and effective social cohesion | Civil and moral freedom through self-legislation |
| Danger | Overpowering political authority | Public will construed as absolute over persons |
Copleston emphasizes the change of tone between the early Discourses and the mature treatise. In the Discourse on Inequality, social development appears to create moral and political inequality; in the Social Contract, a rightly constituted association enables distinctively human intelligence, justice and freedom. This is not necessarily an outright logical contradiction: the Discourses diagnose actual corrupt society, while the treatise describes what political association ought to be. Yet it is a real change of emphasis that should be acknowledged rather than explained away (pp. 82–83).
3. Three liberties, lawful property, and the citizen's two capacities
The compact transforms rather than simply abolishes liberty. Natural liberty is the unregulated ability to pursue what one can take and keep by strength; civil liberty is action within laws expressing the common political will. Property changes from mere possession or forcible occupation into a legally recognized claim protected by the public order. Rousseau then adds moral liberty: mastery of oneself by obeying a law one has a part in prescribing, rather than being moved solely by immediate appetite (pp. 82–84).
The ideal is thus neither total licence nor passive obedience to a ruler. To be a citizen is to participate in the source of law; to be a subject is to receive law's binding force. This duality is meant to reconcile individual freedom with public authority. It is credible only if the distinction between a genuinely common law and the arbitrary command of a separate power can be maintained. Under despotism, even the formal language of citizenship cannot prevent the association from becoming degrading.
The conventional theory raises problems of continuity. Why should an initial generation's promise bind its descendants? Rousseau does not offer a full separate theory of intergenerational consent. He maintains that the sovereign people can unanimously abolish even the compact itself and suggests that individuals may ordinarily recover natural independence by leaving their country, though flight to escape obligations in a crisis may rightly be punished. Copleston reads the corporate body's continuing existence as the implied answer to the problem of membership changes; the underlying philosophical problem is not entirely solved (p. 84).
4. Popular sovereignty: inalienable, indivisible, and not representable
Because sovereignty consists in the exercise of the general will, it cannot be transferred. An agent can receive power to execute decisions, but cannot receive the people's very act of willing as if it were a transferable object. This explains Rousseau's hostility to a parliament that claims an independent right to make binding laws without popular ratification. Deputies may act as commissioners or stewards; they cannot replace the sovereign people as the ultimate author of law. Rousseau criticizes the English for enjoying the act of electing representatives while thereafter failing to remain continuously self-governing (p. 85).
Sovereignty is also indivisible. One cannot split the general will into rival supreme wills without losing its generality. Accordingly the legislative activity of the people must be distinguished from the executive operations of ministers. The executive is no portion of sovereign will: it exercises entrusted powers with respect to particular people and matters. Sovereignty therefore persists with the people regardless of whether the administration is monarchical, aristocratic or democratic.
Rousseau's exceptional Legislator, typified by figures such as Lycurgus and Solon, is not a sovereign legislating by personal command. This founder proposes a system of institutions and educates a people toward recognizing its common good. The role exposes a circularity: people must possess enough civic understanding to accept good laws, while good laws themselves are needed to form citizens capable of reliable public judgment. Rousseau invokes founding wisdom to interrupt the circle; the problem of how its authority is validated remains.
5. The general will versus the will of all
The defining distinction is between the general will, directed toward common interest, and the will of all, an aggregation of private interests. The word general describes first the object of willing, what is good for members in their capacity as participants in one society, and then also the subject of willing, the associated citizen body. The general will is said to be invariably oriented to the public advantage; it does not follow that the people invariably perceive that advantage. A popular assembly can enact a law damaging the common good if its deliberation is misinformed or captured by private interests (pp. 85–87).
Copleston exposes a philosophical ambiguity. If the general will is defined as willing the common good, then its infallibility may amount merely to saying that a will for the common good is for the common good. Yet if it is a real agency over and above the citizens' particular wills, the theory owes an account of that agency's ontological standing. Another alternative is that it means ordinary individual wills considered in their shared natural orientation toward human well-being. But that latter proposal pushes Rousseau toward saying that persons are naturally social, which seems difficult to reconcile with his solitary hypothetical original condition (pp. 87–88).
In practice the popular will must be expressed through institutions, and Rousseau proposes conditions that allow private errors to cancel rather than coalesce: adequate information, citizens' independent judgment and resistance to factions. Organized partial groups can make their own special interest appear to be the public interest. A single dominant party may convert what should be a general vote into the submission of a whole society to a particular bloc. Rousseau accordingly opposes partial associations and warns that rival religious authority may divide civic allegiance (pp. 88–89).
Under favourable conditions Rousseau claims that majority voting will disclose the general will. The original social pact requires unanimous acceptance; subsequent political questions bind even the minority, with matters of greater seriousness calling for a greater approximation to unanimity. Copleston refuses to pass over the large inference. Even free, informed, independently voting citizens may choose an objectively harmful policy. What guarantees that their numerical aggregation yields the correct public interest? Rousseau's theory needs more explanation than its appeal to the natural goodness of the will appears to supply (pp. 89–90).
6. Moral freedom and the paradox of being forced to be free
Rousseau's freedom problem emerges sharply when a citizen is required to obey a law he opposed. Membership of a political society necessarily subjects one to sanctions for unlawful acts, yet Rousseau also wishes to claim that the association increases freedom. His solution distinguishes the dissenting citizen's current private preference from what he allegedly really wills as member of the sovereign. The general will expresses the public good that his higher civic self must want; the coercion imposed by public law restores him to his proper freedom rather than merely overriding his preference (pp. 90–91).
Copleston finds the paradox dangerous. A person required against his will to obey a state command is undergoing compulsion, whatever value the law serves. If freedom is redefined to include a condition of coercion, the favourable moral associations of the word can be used to disguise the fact of force. Revolutionary rhetoric that called a coercive government the despotism of liberty illustrates the political risk. Copleston does not say Rousseau wished to endorse terror or tyranny. Rather, Rousseau's sincere attempt to justify a self-governing commonwealth created a vocabulary later susceptible to misuse (pp. 91–93).
One possible reconstruction is less paradoxical: everyone must accept reasonable limits on individual caprice if they are to enjoy civil order and mutually protected freedom. This would defend law because its benefits outweigh some losses of immediate choice, not because coercion magically becomes noncoercion. Rousseau resists an ordinary utilitarian calculation, however, because he wants the association to be a realization of autonomy, not simply a bargain exchanging freedom for security. The real tension is between his ideal of self-legislation and actual dissent under majority rule.
The fact that a majority wins does not itself prove the minority has misidentified the common good. Rousseau sometimes appears to assume exactly this, though elsewhere he allows a popular body to be mistaken. Any sound interpretation must preserve both claims and acknowledge their unresolved tension.
7. Government: the minister of the sovereign
Rousseau distinguishes the will that determines action from the power that executes it. The political counterpart is the difference between sovereign legislation, concerned with general rules, and government, which applies rules to particular persons and circumstances. A prince or set of magistrates therefore receives a commission, not an equal party's contract of sovereignty. The people may retain, alter or withdraw that commission; Rousseau imagines periodic assemblies at which citizens separately decide whether to keep the current form of government and whether to retain current administrators (p. 93).
The government has its own corporate attachments, personnel and instinct for institutional preservation. These create a structural danger: the agent charged with executing the people's will may cultivate a particular governmental will and begin ruling for itself. There would then be a rightful sovereign, the people, and a merely effective sovereign, the entrenched administration. Rousseau regards the latter as a corruption of the body politic, not a normal or legitimate exercise of authority (pp. 93–94).
He recognizes democratic, aristocratic and monarchical forms of executive organization and rejects one universal recipe for all peoples. Very small states are more suited to democratic forms; states of moderate size may prefer aristocratic administration; larger states tend toward monarchy. Genuine direct democracy, in which everyone administers as well as legislates, would require almost superhuman perfection, so Rousseau does not simply assume it is always practicable. Appointing a small number of wise administrators may serve the public, but only if they actually govern for the common interest rather than their own.
Every constitution is subject to degeneration. Rousseau likens the body politic to a living organism: birth already brings the possibility of decay. Good legal design and clear differentiation of powers can postpone corruption, but not abolish every historical contingency. He favors small civic republics, especially the model of Geneva and the Greek city-state, because frequent assembly, comparatively moderate inequalities and common attachments make civic solidarity more possible. He knows that small states may be vulnerable and considers federations. Copleston emphasizes that the enduring point is popular sovereignty and government accountable to the people, not a literal plan to carve every great state into diminutive republics (pp. 94–95).
8. Two later philosophical directions: Kant and Hegel
Copleston finds more lasting philosophy in the general will than in the historical fiction of an original contract. Its first possible development leads toward Kantian autonomy: the higher rational will prescribes laws the lower impulsive nature ought to follow. Rousseau's claim that true freedom consists in obeying a law one gives oneself anticipates the Kantian distinction between autonomous obligation and the slavery of appetite. But Rousseau gives feeling and natural conscience a role that cannot be simply identified with Kant's pure practical reason (pp. 95–97).
The second development leads toward Hegel's organic conception of political life: the State is more than an aggregate of bargaining individuals, and its institutions express a historical common will. Hegel rejected contract as the foundation of the State but credited Rousseau with assigning will a central place. In large states Rousseau's direct popular assembly is impractical, and any purported interpretation of national will carries dangers. It may be misappropriated by a self-declared infallible leader; alternatively it may be read as a historically developing ideal imperfectly grasped by institutions and therefore always open to revision and criticism (pp. 97–98).
9. What Rousseau leaves unresolved
His political ideas cannot be reduced to totalitarianism without disregarding his insistence on conscience, moral law and the people's authority to dismiss rulers. Yet neither can all authoritarian implications be dismissed as hostile misreadings. The source of moral right shifts in his exposition. At times he treats natural law and individual conscience as higher standards for judging legislation. At other times the sovereign public decision seems to confer moral standing upon conduct. If conscience and public law diverge, which has final authority? Rousseau never resolves this in a fully consistent account (pp. 98–99).
Copleston likens the problem of cultivating virtuous citizens through just institutions to a dilemma already encountered by Plato: a sound state needs good citizens, but citizens need sound formation by the state. Rousseau's Legislator tries to bridge that problem. Likewise, a law can be validly enacted and still fail to serve the public good, so no realistic political system can dispense with fallible criticism. Rousseau's compelling legacy is to have made the relation between personal freedom and collective self-government a lasting philosophical problem, rather than to have settled its institutional answer.
| Doctrine | Intended safeguard | Unresolved risk |
|---|---|---|
| Inalienable sovereignty | Rule remains answerable to the people | Direct ratification becomes difficult at scale |
| General will | Laws concern common interests | No independently certain method of identifying public good |
| Independent citizens | Prevents captured factional judgment | Suppressing associations can itself destroy liberty |
| Civil religion | Common civic allegiance | Religious pluralism and conscience may be constrained |
| Subordinate government | Executives answer to lawgivers | Administrative interests can become a rival source of power |
| Moral freedom | Self-legislation rather than appetite | Coercion can be renamed freedom |
Rousseau's most durable insight is that political legitimacy is not exhausted by effective government: a free people must in some real sense be authors of the laws to which they are subject. His greatest difficulty is to explain how this authorship remains authentic when opinion is divided, institutions are large and governing officials possess independent interests.
Chapter IV connects consent, collective personhood, popular sovereignty, general law, civic and moral liberty, and executive accountability. It also tracks the objections: the impossibility of guaranteeing that majority votes express the common good, the ambiguity of enforced freedom, and the conflict between moral conscience and a political body claiming to speak for every citizen's deeper will.
The German Enlightenment (1): Thomasius, Christian Wolff, and the Founding of Aesthetics
The German Enlightenment (Aufklärung) unfolded in two contrasting early phases: first, the anti-metaphysical, utilitarian, and pietist-influenced empiricism of Christian Thomasius; second, the comprehensive academic rationalism of Christian Wolff, who systematized Leibniz and late Scholasticism into a university orthodoxy and whose disciple Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten established aesthetics as an independent philosophical science.
1. Christian Thomasius: Utilitarian Empiricism, Pietism, and Natural Law
The first phase of the German Aufklärung is represented by Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), son of Jakob Thomasius (who had been one of Leibniz’s teachers) and a pioneer in lecturing in German rather than Latin at Leipzig and Halle. As a young man, Thomasius praised French philosophy over German academic pedantry, attacking the university “learned” philosophy—especially Aristotelianism and Scholasticism—for presupposing that the end of rational reflection is the contemplation of abstract truth for its own sake. For Thomasius, the value of philosophy lies solely in its utility: its capacity to promote the common good and individual temporal well-being.
- Empiricist Epistemology (Einleitung zur Vernunftlehre and Ausübung der Vernunftlehre, both 1691): Rejecting innate ideas and the mathematical-deductive method championed by Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708) in his Medicina mentis (under the influence of Descartes and Spinoza), Thomasius insisted that all natural knowledge depends on the senses. Whatever is too small to affect the senses is unknowable; whatever is too great (such as the nature of the First Cause, whose existence we know from sense-objects) exceeds human capacity. Healthy common sense avoids both sceptical paralysis and metaphysical speculation.
- Protestant Bourgeois Ethos and Pietism: Historians rightly link Thomasius’s utilitarianism to the rise of the post-mediaeval middle class (“bourgeois” philosophy) and the secularized prolongation of the Protestant Reformation: God is served in ordinary social life rather than monastic contemplation, and since Luther denied reason’s competence in theology, philosophy is restricted to ethics, social organization, and law. Unlike the French philosophes, Thomasius was deeply religious and associated with Lutheran Pietism (founded at the end of the seventeenth century to infuse personal devotional interiority into the Lutheran Church), which shared his hostility to Scholastic metaphysics.
- The Metamorphosis of His Ethics (Einleitung zur Sittenlehre, 1692; Ausübung der Sittenlehre, 1696): In the Einleitung, Thomasius declared that man’s highest good is tranquillity of soul, pointed out by reason; because man is only truly man in society, tranquillity requires rational love and self-sacrifice for the common good, generating a common will. Yet in the Ausübung (1696), Pietism triumphed: Thomasius reproached himself for thinking man could achieve natural morality by his own power, declaring that the human will is enslaved to three base drives (wealth, honour, and pleasure), that unaided human choice produces only sin, and that divine grace alone can rescue man from moral powerlessness.
- Jurisprudence and the Three Principles of Happy Life: In his early Institutionum jurisprudentiae divinae libri tres (1688), Thomasius followed the jurist Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694). In his more independent Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium ex sensu communi deducta (1705), he returned to a rational natural law severed from theology. Analysing man psychologically, he identified three fundamental drives: (1) the desire to live as long and happily as possible, (2) the instinctive recoil from death and pain, and (3) the desire for property and mastery. Without rational control, these drives produce a natural state of war and peace tending always to war. Reason remedies this by securing the longest and happiest life through three distinct normative spheres:
2. Christian Wolff: The Systematization of Rationalism
The second phase of the German Aufklärung was dominated by Christian Wolff (1679–1754), who completely reversed Thomasius’s anti-metaphysical pietism by restoring academic School metaphysics and thoroughgoing rationalism. Born at Breslau, Wolff lectured at Leipzig before his notes on Tschirnhaus’s Medicina mentis won Leibniz’s recommendation for the chair of mathematics at Halle (1706). At Halle, Wolff’s rationalism provoked fierce hostility from his Pietist colleagues (led by Joachim Lange), who accused him of godless determinism and persuaded King Frederick William I in 1723 to strip him of his chair and order him to leave Prussia within 48 hours under pain of death. Welcomed at Marburg, Wolff became a national hero; upon the accession of Frederick II (the Great) in 1740, he was triumphantly recalled to Halle, ennobled, and dominated German universities until the rise of Kant. His German works regularly began with the title Vernünftige Gedanken von… (Rational Ideas of God, the World and the Soul of Man, 1719), while his vast Latin treatises formed the Philosophia rationalis.
- Deductive Method and Essentialism: While acknowledging that empirical sciences require experience and induction (yielding Leibniz’s contingent truths of fact as opposed to necessary truths of reason), Wolff held that the ideal philosophical method is deductive. The highest ontological and logical law is the principle of non-contradiction, from which Wolff claimed to deduce the principle of sufficient reason. Because every substance exemplifies a definable essence, Wolff defined philosophy as “the science of all possible things, how and why they are possible”—a possible thing being whatever involves no contradiction. In his Ontologia (1729), Wolff explicitly praised the Scholastics, especially Francisco Suárez, though as Étienne Gilson notes (Being and Some Philosophers, 1952), Wolff’s reduction of being to possible essence reflects the “essentialism” of Duns Scotus and Suárez rather than the “existentialism” of St. Thomas Aquinas.
- Division of Metaphysics: Following Aristotle’s division into theoretical and practical philosophy, and adopting the term “ontology” (prepared by the Cartesian Clauberg’s “ontosophy”, 1622–1665, and used by Jean-Baptiste Duhamel, 1624–1706), Wolff divided metaphysics into: (1) General Metaphysics (Ontology), and (2) Special Metaphysics, subdivided into Rational Psychology (soul), Rational Cosmology (world), and Natural Theology (God).
- Substantial Atoms, Soul, and Pre-Established Harmony: Avoiding the word “monad,” Wolff taught that material bodies are phenomenal aggregates of unextended, imperceptible simple substances (“metaphysical atoms”), no two of which are alike; extension is phenomenal. The human soul is a simple substance immediately evident in self-consciousness; its fundamental active power is the power of representation, of which knowing and desiring are manifestations. Soul and body do not interact directly, but correspond via a pre-established harmony arranged by God.
- Theodicy and Proofs of God: Wolff’s principal proof is cosmological (from the contingent, machine-like world to the divine will as its sufficient reason, which itself has its sufficient reason in the attractive power of the best), supplemented by the ontological argument. Following Leibniz’s theodicy, he distinguished metaphysical, physical, and moral evil: God created a world in which evil is possible in order to be acknowledged, honoured, and praised by rational man.
- Ethics of Perfection, State Paternalism, and the Society of Nations: Rejecting Pietist moral powerlessness, Wolff grounded ethics in the natural law of self-perfection: “Do that which makes yourself and your condition, and the condition of others, more perfect; omit that which makes them more imperfect.” Because the will always chooses sub specie boni and is free from bodily compulsion (thanks to pre-established harmony), moral virtue depends on intellectual education forming clear ideas of man’s vocation—including external goods, hard work, art, and philosophy—as an endless, unceasing striving toward perfection (anticipating Kant). All men are born with equal duties and therefore equal natural rights. The State rests on a contract to promote human perfection, justifying wide paternalistic government supervision over physical and spiritual welfare. Finally, in his Jus Gentium (1750, Prolegomena, 2), Wolff declared that nations are free persons in a state of nature whom nature compels by presumed consent to form a supreme international State (civitas maxima), where the “voluntary law of nations” (jus gentium voluntarium, which Wolff oddly classed under positive law alongside stipulative and customary law, while critiquing Grotius) is determined by what the majority of “more civilized nations” approve when following right reason.
3. Followers and Opponents of Wolff: Baumgarten’s Aesthetics and Crusius
Wolff’s system was propagated by disciples including Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750), who coined the term “Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy” (Dilucidationes philosophicae, 1725); Ludwig Philipp Thümmig (1697–1728), expelled from Halle with Wolff; Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) (Erste Gründe der gesamten Weltweisheit, 1733); and Martin Knutzen (1713–1751), professor at Königsberg from 1734 and Kant’s teacher, who combined Pietism with Wolffian rationalism (Philosophical Proof of the Truth of the Christian Religion, 1740), introduced Kant to Newtonian science, and rejected pre-established harmony in favour of real efficient causality (physical influx).
Baumgarten and the Birth of German Aesthetics: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), professor at Frankfurt on the Oder whose Metaphysica (1740) Kant used as a lecture text, coined the term “aesthetics” in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735) and systematized it in his two-volume Aesthetica (1750–1758). Because Wolff had focused exclusively on the “higher faculties” of distinct conceptual thought, he omitted art and beauty. Baumgarten filled this gap by establishing aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical discipline: the science of sensitive knowledge (gnoseologia inferior), the art of the “analogue of reason,” and the perfection of sense-knowledge as such, which is beauty (Aesthetica, §§ 1, 14).
Baumgarten saw that aesthetic intuition cannot be dismissed as failed logical thinking; it possesses its own inner law—an “analogue of reason”—that bridges the gulf between abstract universal logic and concrete individual sensory richness. In poetry (“the perfect language of sense”, Meditations, § 9), words remain saturated with immediate sensory content and evoke vivid intuitions possessing the “life of knowledge” (vita cognitionis). Although Benedetto Croce (Aesthetic, p. 218) judged Baumgarten’s work still covered with the mould of antiquity and intellectualism (aesthetics condenda rather than condita), Baumgarten’s doctrines—popularized at Halle by Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777) in Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften (1748–1750)—sparked a massive wave of German aesthetic theory (boasted of by J. Koller in 1799).
Among Wolff’s opponents, besides the Pietist Joachim Lange (1670–1744): * Andreas Rüdiger (1673–1731): Lecturing at Halle and Leipzig, Rüdiger attacked the application of the mathematical method to philosophy: mathematics deals with the possible, whereas philosophy deals with the actual and must build on empirical sense-perception and self-consciousness. He also rejected pre-established harmony, holding that the soul is extended and interacts physically with the body. * Christian August Crusius (1715–1775): Professor of philosophy and theology at Leipzig (greatly respected by Kant), Crusius attacked Leibniz-Wolffian optimism, determinism, and pre-established harmony in the name of human free will. Criticizing Wolff’s use of the principle of sufficient reason, Crusius substituted a fundamental principle of his own: “what cannot be thought is false, and what cannot be thought of as false is true” (applying it to argue that since the non-existence of the world is thinkable, the world was created by God), from which he derived three principles: contradiction, inseparables (things that cannot be thought separately cannot exist separately), and incompatibles (things that cannot be thought conjoined cannot exist conjoined).
The German Enlightenment (2): Frederick the Great, Reimarus, Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Tetens
In the later phase of the German Aufklärung, French and British influences penetrated German thought—symbolized by Frederick the Great and the “popular philosophers”—giving rise to the deistic biblical criticism of Reimarus, the aesthetic and metaphysical rationalism of Moses Mendelssohn, the dynamic religious and historical vision of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the empirical-rational psychology of Johann Nikolaus Tetens, and the social pedagogy of Basedow and Pestalozzi.
1. Frederick the Great and the “Popular Philosophers”
While the Wolffian school brought belief, morals, politics, and taste before the impersonal bar of academic reason, the later Aufklärung absorbed French and British thought, symbolized by Frederick the Great (1712–1786). Educated in French, Frederick reinstated Wolff at Halle in 1740, enforced broad religious toleration (even refusing to publish Pope Clement XIV’s 1773 Bull suppressing the Jesuits in Prussia so as not to lose their schools), hosted Voltaire, Maupertuis, and La Mettrie at Potsdam, and promoted lectures on Locke at Halle. A freethinking deist inclined to Bayle’s scepticism, the “philosopher of Sans-Souci” venerated the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius: in his Essai sur l’amour-propre envisagé comme principe de la morale (1770), he argued that self-love is satisfied only through virtue, and in his Antimachiavell (1740) he famously declared that the prince is the first servant of his people, proving his sincerity through impartial judicial reform, elementary education, and the reorganization of the Prussian Academy.
Alongside Frederick, the “popular philosophers” (Popularphilosophen) purveyed Enlightenment ideas to the educated public: Christian Garve (1742–1798) translated Ferguson, Paley, and Adam Smith; Friedrich Justus Riedel (1742–1785) compiled aesthetic theories (Theory of the Fine Arts and Sciences, 1767); Christian Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) edited influential self-supporting literary journals (Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, 1757–1758; Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759–1765; Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, 1765–1805); and the poet Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) translated 22 plays of Shakespeare and wrote the philosophical novel Agathon (1766).
2. Deism and Rational Religion: Reimarus and Moses Mendelssohn
Stimulated by English deism (John Toland had visited Hanover and Berlin early in the century, and Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation was translated into German in 1741), German deism found its chief spokesman in Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at the Hamburg Gymnasium. In his published works (Abhandlungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion, 1754; Vernunftlehre, 1756; and a 1760 study on animal instincts), Reimarus attacked materialistic mechanism and defended teleological theism. Secretly, however, he composed his radical Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God), portions of which Lessing published anonymously in 1774–1777 as the famous Wolfenbüttel Fragments (with further excerpts appearing in 1786 under the pseudonym C. A. E. Schmidt and in 1850–1852). Reimarus argued that the causally interconnected mechanical system of the universe is God’s sole revelation; supernatural revelations and miracles are human inventions unworthy of a wise Creator who achieves His ends through universal natural laws.
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the revered Jewish philosopher, friend of Lessing, and correspondent of Kant, combined Popularphilosophie with original contributions to aesthetics, metaphysics, and political toleration: * Autonomy of the Aesthetic Faculty: In 1755, Mendelssohn and Lessing co-authored the satirical essay Pope a Metaphysician! (Pope ein Metaphysiker!), mocking the Prussian Academy’s prize competition (instigated by Maupertuis to strike at Leibniz) on Alexander Pope’s alleged philosophical system: poetry and metaphysics are fundamentally distinct. In his Letters on Sensations (Briefe über die Empfindungen, 1755, Letter 5) and Morgenstunden (1785, ch. 7), Mendelssohn distinguished between the “heavenly Venus” (logical adequacy of concepts) and the “earthly Venus” (beauty). Aesthetic contemplation is neither cognitive analysis nor appetitive desire, but “calm pleasure” without possession, grounded in a third distinct mental power between cognition and desire: the “faculty of approval” (Billigungsvermögen). * Natural Theology and Immortality: In Morning Hours (Morgenstunden, 1785), Mendelssohn defended the Wolffian cosmological and ontological proofs of God (pure possibility is incompatible with the most perfect Being). In Phaedo or on the Immortality of the Soul (Phädon, 1767), he modernized Plato, arguing that the soul cannot waste away or relapse into nothingness because God’s wisdom and goodness cannot frustrate the soul’s innate, unending drive toward self-perfection. * Freedom of Conscience: Neither the State nor any religious body has the right to coerce belief; the State is concerned solely with actions, and universal toleration is the ideal (excluding only those who seek to destroy toleration).
3. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Dynamic Truth, Historical Revelation, and Aesthetics
Although best known as a dramatist and critic, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) gave unified literary expression to the Aufklärung while transcending its static rationalism toward nineteenth-century idealism. His play Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise, 1779) dramatized the ideal of religious toleration.
- Critique of Both Orthodox Bibliolatry and Rationalist Deism: Although Lessing published Reimarus’s Wolfenbüttel Fragments (1774–1777) and pioneered higher biblical criticism, he rejected Reimarus’s view that natural religion can be strictly demonstrated by theoretical proofs while positive religions are mere priestly frauds. Religious faith rests on inner experience and is validated by its moral fruits: the Christian way of life existed before the Gospels or New Testament canon were written, and historical-critical attacks on biblical texts cannot touch its inner moral truth.
- History as Progressive Divine Revelation (The Education of the Human Race / Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, 1780): “What education is to the individual human being, that revelation is to the whole human race” (§ 1). Revelation is the continuous, historical unfolding of human reason through three great pedagogical stages:
- Stage 1: Childhood (The Old Testament): Primitive Israel is educated like a child through immediate sensible rewards and terrestrial punishments under a national God (§ 17).
- Stage 2: Boyhood / Youth (The New Testament): Christ introduces nobler motives—immortality of the soul and eternal reward and punishment in the hereafter—and reveals God as the universal Father requiring inner purity of heart. Christian dogmas (such as the Trinity and Original Sin), far from being mere superstitions, contain rational truths in symbolic form that stimulate human reason to mature.
- Stage 3: Manhood (The Age of the New, Eternal Gospel): Both the Old and New Testaments are Elementarbücher (elementary primers) pointing toward a third age (§ 86) when man, fully autonomous, will do good purely for the sake of the good, without requiring terrestrial or celestial rewards. To allow individuals to participate in this unending moral education, Lessing even suggested palingenesis or reincarnation (§§ 94–98).
- The Pantheism Controversy (Pantheismusstreit) and Spinozism: In 1783, F. H. Jacobi wrote to Mendelssohn revealing that shortly before his death, Lessing had confessed to being a follower of Spinoza (“Hen kai Pan”—One and All), saying orthodox concepts of a transcendent deity were no longer of use to him. Shocked (since Jacobi equated Spinozism with fatalistic atheism), Jacobi published his correspondence with Mendelssohn in 1785 after Mendelssohn attacked him in Morgenstunden, drawing Herder and Goethe into the fray (both of whom defended Spinoza against the charge of atheism). As Lessing’s short essay On the Reality of Things outside God shows, he conceived the world as an immanent, deterministic system within the divine Being (“ideas of contingent things in God are contingent ideas”), while infusing his dynamic, developmental vision of history into this pantheistic framework.
- Aesthetic Theory (Laokoon, 1766; Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767–1769): Taking Winckelmann’s (1717–1768) remark on the Vatican Laocoön statue and Virgil’s Aeneid as his starting point in Laokoon, Lessing analysed how the specific medium of each art determines its laws: formative art (sculpture and painting) employs coexisting signs in space to represent bodies and ideal corporeal beauty, whereas poetry employs successive signs in time to represent human actions and the life of the soul (condemning pictorial-descriptive poetry). In the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, he declared Aristotle’s Poetics “as much an infallible work as the Elements of Euclid”, attacking French classical drama for fetishizing the artificial unities of time and place (which would exclude Shakespeare) at the expense of the sole essential law: unity of action, whereby tragedy purifies the passions of pity (literal compassion) and fear (self-regarding fear of similar misfortune) to ennoble man morally.
4. Empirical-Rational Psychology and Pedagogy: Tetens, von Creuz, Basedow, and Pestalozzi
The Aufklärung laid the foundations for German psychology and educational theory: * Johann Nikolaus Tetens (1736–1807): Professor at Kiel and later official in Copenhagen, Tetens mediated between British empiricism and Continental rationalism in his two-volume Philosophical Essays on Human Nature and Its Development (Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung, 1777). While defending metaphysics and proofs of God in his 1760–1775 treatises, he insisted that scientific psychology must begin with empirical introspection of psychical phenomena before framing metaphysical hypotheses about the soul (which is never intuited immediately in itself, only in its activities). Crucially, Tetens established the threefold classification of mental faculties later adopted by Kant: (1) Understanding (thinking and image-production), (2) Will (self-activity producing changes), and (3) Feeling (receptivity and modifiability), suggesting they may reduce to a single fundamental power capable of progressive perfectibility. * Karl Kasimir von Creuz (1724–1770): In his Essay on the Soul (1753), von Creuz mediated between Leibniz’s simple monad and Hume’s bundle of perceptions: the soul is not a point-like ego without extension, yet its parts are inseparable, distinguishing it from divisible matter and supporting its immortality. * Johann Bernhard Basedow (1723–1790) and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827): Stimulated by Rousseau’s Émile (and Comenius’s Great Didactic, 1592–1671) while rejecting Rousseau’s anti-civilizational pessimism, Basedow published his four-volume Elementarwerk (1774), designing a “natural” education to form patriotic citizens for the common good. The great Swiss educator Pestalozzi, who profoundly shaped the German Volksschulen (elementary schools), stressed moral and intellectual education rooted in the family and rural community as the primary instrument of social reform.
The Break with the Enlightenment: Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi
In the second half of the eighteenth century, three thinkers rebelled against the analytical abstraction and arid rationalism of the Aufklärung as well as the new critical philosophy of Kant: Johann Georg Hamann (“the Magus of the North”) championed mystical faith, the total personality, and the divine origin of poetic language; Johann Gottfried Herder pioneered organic cultural historicism, folk-poetry, and linguistic philosophy; and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi opposed Spinozistic determinism and Kantian phenomenalism with a philosophy of immediate faith and intuitive reason (Vernunft).
1. Johann Georg Hamann: The “Magus of the North”
Born in Königsberg, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) was an unstable, tormented personality who underwent a profound evangelical conversion through reading the Bible in London and became the friend of Kant, Herder, and Jacobi. Where Wolff stood for clear, distinct ideas and deductive systems, Hamann wrote in cryptic, mystical, oracular fragments that earned him the title “the Wizard (or Magus) of the North,” viewing the discursive rationalism of the Enlightenment as the power of the devil rather than divine reason.
- Language, Poetry, and Genius as Divine Revelation: In Aesthetics in a Nutshell (Aesthetica in nuce, contained in Crusades of a Philologist, 1762), Hamann declared that poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. Primitive men spoke in sensations, passions, and images. Every phenomenon of Nature was originally a sign, symbol, and living word of God, and human language arose as a natural response to this divine communication. Great poets like Homer and Shakespeare created not by applying rational rules, but by genius—and the genius is a prophet inspired by God (whereas great scientists, working merely by discursive reason, cannot be called geniuses).
- History as Mystical Exegesis: Just as the true sense of Scripture is revealed by the Holy Spirit to the prayerful believer rather than the rationalist critic, human history is a mystical commentary on the self-expression of the divine Logos (a view that influenced Herder and, when transposed into speculative rationalism, Hegel—though Hamann was disconcerted by Herder’s use of profane scientific methods).
- The Total Personality and the Metacritique of Kant: As Goethe observed (Dichtung und Wahrheit, III, 12), Hamann’s root principle was that everything man undertakes, by word or deed, must spring from the total, united powers of the personality. Enlightenment rationalists falsely hypostatized “the reason,” splitting one function from the living human whole. In his Metacritique on the Purism of Pure Reason (begun in 1781 against Kant’s first Critique and used by Herder), Hamann attacked Kant’s artificial dichotomies between reason, understanding, and sensibility, and between form and matter: there is no separate entity called “pure reason,” only one concrete human organism reasoning and speaking in and through language.
2. Johann Gottfried Herder: Language, Folk-Culture, and Organic Historicism
Born at Mohrungen in East Prussia, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) studied at Königsberg (1762–1764), where he attended Kant’s lectures (who introduced him to Rousseau and Hume) and befriended Hamann. Ordained a Lutheran clergyman at Riga (1765), he travelled in 1769 to Nantes and Paris, meeting the young Goethe at Strasbourg (1770–1771) and inspiring the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement. After serving as court preacher at Bückeburg (1771–1776), he became General Superintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar (1776–1803).
| Period & Major Works | Central Philosophical, Linguistic & Cultural Themes |
|---|---|
| 1. Early Aesthetic & Linguistic Works (1766–1771) • Fragments on Recent German Literature (1766–1767) • Critical Forests (Kritische Wälder, 1769) • Travel Diary (1769) • Treatise on the Origin of Language (1771, Berlin Academy prize) |
• Four Ages of Language (Fragments): (1) Childhood (cries of passion/feeling), (2) Youth (poetic age, song and poetry united), (3) Manhood (rise of prose alongside poetry), (4) Old Age (philosophical/scientific age: pedantic accuracy sacrifices life and richness). Against J. G. Sulzer (1720–1779) and French imitators, German poetry must grow from national folk-poetry. • Critique of Faculty Psychology (Critical Forests): Extends Lessing’s Laokoon; attacks F. J. Riedel’s (1767) three static faculties (common sense, conscience, taste) derived from J. G. Darjes (1714–1791) and Crusius. Aesthetics must integrate psychology into comparative cultural history. • Natural Origin of Language (Treatise, 1771): Rejects both Hamann’s supernatural divine origin and Enlightenment mechanical “invention”; language is coeval and natural to man’s reflective consciousness (Besonnenheit). |
| 2. Break with the Enlightenment (1771–1778) • Of German Nature and Art (1773, essays on Ossian & Shakespeare) • Another Philosophy of History (1774) • Of the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778) |
• Attack on Enlightenment Complacency (1774): Dismisses Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz as poetic fictions (calling Berkeley’s poetry greater). Ironizes the 18th century as senility (sublime maxims with weakened noble impulses, invisible class slavery in Europe, exporting vices abroad). • Pluralistic Historicism: Rejects judging all past ages as mere steps toward 18th-century rationalism: “Each nation carries within itself its own centre of happiness, just as every sphere has its own centre of gravity.” • Psychophysiological Unity (1778): Declares “no psychology is possible which is not physiology at every step,” animated by an organic vital force. |
| 3. Weimar Synthesis & Anti-Kantian Polemics (1784–1803) • Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (4 parts, 1784–1791) • Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–1797) • Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason (1799) • Kalligone (1800); Adrastea (1800–1804) |
• Realization of Humanität: All science, art, and institutions exist to develop man’s innate potentiality for humanity (Humanität)—not a super-species (Superman), but balanced human perfection. • Linguistic Critique of Kant (Metacritique, 1799; Kalligone, 1800): Attacks Kant’s Critiques as verbal jugglery and faculty-splitting. Mathematical propositions are “identical” (tautologies), not synthetic a priori; space and time are not a priori forms; thinking is inward speaking, and reason does not exist apart from language. |
3. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: The Philosophy of Faith and Intuitive Reason
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), who became president of the Academy of Sciences at Munich, was the quintessential philosopher of faith (Glaubensphilosoph). Insisting that his writings sprang from personal inner experience rather than academic system-building, Jacobi precipitated the Pantheism Controversy (1785) by arguing that Spinoza’s philosophy is the only rigorous, logically consistent system of demonstrative reason—and that it necessarily ends in deterministic monism and atheism.
- The Impotence of Discursive Reason (Verstand): Because demonstrative reason operates solely by linking conditioned to conditioned in a causal-logical chain, it can never rise to an unconditioned, transcendent, personal Creator. Every attempt to demonstrate God’s existence metaphysically reduces God to a conditioned link in the world-system, inevitably culminating in Spinozism (a charge Jacobi later levelled against Schelling as well).
- Immediate Faith (Glaube) and Higher Intuitive Reason (Vernunft): To escape Spinozistic fatalism, we must take a salto mortale (mortal leap) into faith (Glaube), which is an affair of the heart (Gemüt). Praising Hume for exposing the pretensions of speculative metaphysics, Jacobi argued that just as we do not prove the existence of external material objects in sense-perception but enjoy an immediate sensory intuition of real things, so we enjoy an immediate spiritual intuition of supersensible reality (God, freedom, and moral value). In his later writings, Jacobi termed this organ of spiritual intuition higher or intuitive reason (Vernunft), in contrast to the discursive understanding (Verstand). If we try to drag the light of Vernunft into the conceptual machinery of Verstand, the light vanishes.
- Critique of Kant and the Thing-in-Itself: While welcoming Kant’s limitation of scientific knowledge to sense-experience as clearing room for faith, Jacobi rejected Kant’s practical postulates (replacing immediate faith with indirect moral inference), Kant’s ethical formalism (replacing immediate moral intuition with the empty Categorical Imperative), and Kant’s phenomenalism. Above all, Jacobi formulated the famous dilemma of the Kantian thing-in-itself (Ding an sich): “Without the presupposition [of the thing-in-itself] I could not enter into the Kantian system, and with this presupposition I could not remain in it”—because affirming that things-in-themselves affect our senses applies the category of causality outside phenomena, directly violating Kant’s own critical restriction.
The Dialectical Pendulum of Faith vs. Speculative Reason: Copleston notes a striking historical parallel: just as Hamann and Jacobi rebelled in the late eighteenth century against the arid rationalism of the Aufklärung and the formalism of Kant in the name of personal faith and immediate existence, so Søren Kierkegaard rebelled in the nineteenth century against the all-engulfing speculative idealism of Hegel. While Hegel rightly saw that philosophy must seek to comprehend religious experience rather than leave faith and reason in an unmediated dichotomy, the recurrent protests of Hamann, Jacobi, and Kierkegaard prove that any rationalism which swallows up individual personality and faith inevitably provokes an existentialist counter-revolt.
The Rise of the Philosophy of History (1): Bossuet and Giambattista Vico
While Greek philosophy—dominated by Platonic immutable being and Stoic cosmic cycles—never developed a philosophy of linear historical progress, Jewish and Christian theology introduced a teleological vision of universal history, culminating in St. Augustine and Bossuet. The decisive transition to an autonomous, philosophical science of history was achieved by the Italian genius Giambattista Vico (1688–1744), whose verum-factum principle and New Science overturned Cartesianism and decoded the poetic wisdom and cyclical laws of human nations.
1. Classical Antiquity, Christianity, and Bossuet’s Theological History
In the Poetics (1451b, 5–8), Aristotle famously remarked that poetry is “something more philosophical and of graver import than history,” because poetry deals with universals whereas history merely narrates particular, contingent facts. Although Plato and Aristotle (Politics) made empirical generalizations about constitutional revolutions, and Thucydides wrote masterly political history, the Greeks never elaborated a philosophy of history as a progressive movement toward a goal achieved in and through history. Stoicism viewed cosmic history as an endless series of identical cyclical returns, while Platonism and Plotinus (Enneads, III, 2) belittled historical events as mere transient scenes on a stage compared to the soul’s interior return to unchanging spiritual reality.
The conception of history as a linear, progressive teleological development toward an ultimate goal originated in Jewish and Christian thought—grounded in the doctrines of Creation, Divine Providence, the Messias, the Incarnation, the Church, and Eschatology. Its supreme patristic expression was St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei (City of God, see Vol. II, pp. 85–89), which interpreted universal history through the struggle of the two cities within a total “Christian wisdom” that did not systematically separate theology from philosophy.
In the seventeenth century, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), Bishop of Condom and later of Meaux, renewed Augustine’s theological vision in his Discourse on Universal History (Discours sur l’histoire universelle, 1681), written for the Dauphin. Bossuet declared that “religion and political government are the two points on which human affairs turn” (Dessein général). He divided the work into three parts: 1. Part I: The Twelve Epochs and Seven Ages of the World: From Adam (Creation), Noah (Deluge), Abraham, Moses (Written Law), the taking of Troy, Solomon (Temple), Romulus (Rome), Cyrus (restoration of the Jews), Scipio (conquest of Carthage), the Birth of Jesus Christ (ushering in the seventh and final age of the world), Constantine (peace of the Church), to Charlemagne (establishment of the new Christian empire). India and China are omitted altogether, and Oriental empires enter solely through their contact with the Jewish people. 2. Part II: The Continuity of Religion: An apologetic demonstration that Christianity is the consummation of divine revelation, and the Catholic Church a “perpetual miracle and a striking testimony to the changelessness of the counsels of God” (II, 13). 3. Part III: The Rise and Fall of Empires: Bossuet operates on two distinct causal levels: (a) the historical level of particular secondary causes, which the historian investigates to explain why Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome rose and fell; and (b) the theological level of Divine Providence, which uses those empires—often contrary to the conscious intentions of princes—to chastise, protect, or prepare for the people of God and the Church (III, 1, 7): “There is no human power which does not serve, despite itself, other designs than its own: God alone knows how to reduce all to His will.”
2. Giambattista Vico: Anti-Cartesianism and the Verum-Factum Principle
While seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century scholarship amassed vast historical archives—such as Leibniz’s history of the House of Brunswick and Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s (1672–1750) Rerum italicarum scriptores and history of the House of Este—the true founder of the philosophy of history was Giambattista Vico (1688–1744), professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples from 1699 to 1741 (failing in 1723 to win the higher-paid chair of civil law).
In his 1708 inaugural lecture (De nostri temporis studiorum ratione) and his treatise On the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, 1710), Vico launched a frontal assault on Descartes and the universal pretension of the mathematical method: * Refutation of the Cogito and Clear & Distinct Ideas: Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum cannot refute scepticism because it expresses merely an unreflecting psychological consciousness (conscientia) of one’s own existence, not scientific knowledge (scientia) of the causes of one’s being. Nor is clarity and distinctness of idea a universal criterion of truth. * The Principle Verum Ipsum Factum (Opere, I, 136): “The rule and criterion of truth is to have made it.” True scientific knowledge (scientia) consists in knowing the genetic causes or elements by which a thing is made, so that the true (verum) and the made (factum) are convertible. * God alone possesses full scientia of physical Nature, because God created Nature ex nihilo. * Mathematics (Geometry and Arithmetic) is completely clear and demonstrable to man only because mathematical entities are unreal mental fictions which man himself constructs out of points and units. * In Physics, because man did not make physical Nature existentially, we achieve scientific knowledge only in so far as we cognitively remake or imitate Nature through the experimental method. * Reversal of the Cartesian Hierarchy of Sciences: Consequently, the human sciences which Descartes despised—history, poetry, myth, language, law, and politics—are actually more intelligible and more scientific for man than physical Nature, because the civil world of history and society has been made by men themselves, and its principles can therefore be rediscovered within the modifications of the human mind!
3. Vico’s New Science (1725–1744): Corsi e Ricorsi and Poetic Wisdom
In his masterpiece, Principles of a New Science concerning the Common Nature of the Nations (Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, 1st ed. 1725; 2nd ed. 1730; 3rd ed. 1744), Vico synthesized the influences of “four authors” named in his Autobiography (pp. 138, 155): Plato (contemplating man as he should be: eternal ideal law), Tacitus (contemplating man as he is: empirical historical fact), Francis Bacon (uniting ideal and empirical in the inductive method of the Novum Organum), and Hugo Grotius (integrating universal natural law with philology and the history of the three learned languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin).
- Critique of the Rationalist Social Contract (“Conceit of Scholars”): Vico attacked Hobbes, Grotius, and Pufendorf for committing the “conceit of scholars”—projecting their own reflective, philosophical rationality back onto primitive men and imagining that beast-like vagrants drew up a rational social contract. Setting aside sacred Jewish history, Vico allowed a lapse of time after the Flood during which Gentile races degenerated into lawless, bestial giants wandering the earth.
- The Three Ages of the Ideal Eternal History (Corsi e Ricorsi): Every Gentile nation traverses an “ideal eternal history” through three successive mentalities and social stages, where religion, law, custom, language, and economics form an organic cultural unity:
- The Age of the Gods (“State of the Families” — Man as Sense): Driven into caves by fear of thunder and lightning (perceived as the wrath of the sky-god), vagrants establish settled families founded on three universal principles: religion, solemn marriage, and burial of the dead. The father is king, priest, and judge.
- The Age of the Heroes (“Heroic States” — Man as Poetic Imagination): Weak vagrants seeking protection are taken in by settled families as serfs (famuli). When serfs rebel, the fathers of families unite into an aristocratic patrician order against the plebeians, founding “heroic states” where all rights and auspices belong to the nobles.
- The Age of Men (Democratic Republics & Constitutional Monarchies — Man as Reflective Reason): Plebeians gradually win legal recognition of their marriages, property, citizenship, and eligibility for office. Human dignity as a rational being is recognized, and laws become humane and tolerant. Yet this stage carries the seeds of its own dissolution: barren philosophical intellectualism and sceptical criticism corrode the religious faith that originally bound society together, breeding egoism, licence, and civic disintegration until society collapses into a second barbarism.
- Non-Fatalistic Recurrence (Ricorsi): After the collapse of the Roman Empire, a new cycle (ricorso) began: early Christianity inaugurated a new Age of the Gods, the feudal Middle Ages a new Age of Heroes, and the seventeenth century a new Age of Men. Crucially, Vico’s cycles are not fatalistic repetitions of identical particular events (as in Stoicism), nor do they reduce Christianity to a mere relative myth; what recurs is the formal spiral of human mentalities (from sense through imagination to reason), allowing for genuine historical progress across cycles.
- Poetic Wisdom and the Discovery of the True Homer (Book III): Primitive myths and laws were neither deliberate priestly impostures nor allegorical wrappers for esoteric philosophical truths; they were the spontaneous expression of “poetic wisdom” (sapienza poetica), governed by a logic of imagination and feeling (universali fantastici or “poetic characters”). In Book III (On the Discovery of the True Homer), Vico argued that Zeus and Achilles are imaginative archetypes, and that the Homeric poems are the collective, spontaneous literary deposit of the Greek people during their heroic age, providing the philological key to reconstructing ancient law and custom.
- Immanent Providence (“Heterogony of Ends”): History is made by men, yet guided by Divine Providence operating immanently through natural human passions and free choices rather than miraculous interventions: men intend selfish ends, yet their actions produce a higher social order they never foresaw (Opere, IV, 2, 164): patricians meant to abuse their power over serfs, and inadvertently created cities and popular freedom.
- Delayed Reception:Largely neglected in the eighteenth century—though Montesquieu probably encountered the New Science while travelling in Italy in 1728, Goethe lent it to Jacobi after visiting Naples in 1787 (who passed it to Coleridge, Theory of Life, 1816), and Jules Michelet translated it into French in 1827/1835—Vico came into his own in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through Rosmini, Gioberti, Spaventa, and above all Benedetto Croce.
The Rise of the Philosophy of History (2): Voltaire, Condorcet, Lessing, and Herder
While the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is often accused of being “unhistorical” for judging all past epochs by the standard of Parisian rationalism, it simultaneously broadened historiography from dynastic battles to the history of human civilization (Voltaire) and formulated the secular theory of indefinite human progress (Condorcet), culminating in Herder’s monumental synthesis of teleological natural history, cultural pluralism, and the unfolding of Humanität.
1. The Enlightenment Mentality and Voltaire’s Cultural Historiography
The common charge that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was “unhistorical” does not mean that the period produced no major historians—witness Montesquieu (Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans, 1734), Voltaire (History of Charles XII, 1731; Age of Louis XIV, 1751), David Hume, and Edward Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–1781)—nor that it restricted history to wars and diplomacy. On the contrary, writers like Charles Pinot Duclos (History of Louis XI, 1745; Considerations on the Manners of This Century, 1750) and Voltaire pioneered social and cultural historiography, focusing on the manners, customs, laws, arts, and sciences of peoples. Rather, the Enlightenment was “unhistorical” in treating the eighteenth-century Age of Reason as an absolute standard of judgment, using history polemically to glorify les philosophes, and dismissing the Middle Ages as a period of uniform darkness without sympathetic understanding of pre-Renaissance mentalities.
In his Essai sur les mœurs (An Essay on General History and on the Manners and Spirit of Nations from Charlemagne up to Our Days, written 1740–1749, published 1756), Voltaire professed to continue Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History from Charlemagne onwards, though in fact he began much earlier with China, India, Persia, Arabia, and the rise of Islam. To the 1769 edition of the Essai, he prefixed his Philosophie de l’histoire (1765), first introducing the term “philosophy of history.”
- Elimination of Divine Providence: Where Bossuet unified all history around God’s providential dealings with Israel and the Christian Church, Voltaire completely banished supernatural explanations, miracles, and divine teleology. To write history “as a philosopher” (en philosophe) meant stripping away fables, legends, and the oracles of Delphi (Remarques sur l’histoire).
- Weaknesses of Voltaire’s Approach: Despising the pre-Renaissance world, Voltaire declared that ancient history mixes a few truths with a thousand lies (Nouvelles considérations sur l’histoire), that the world of the ancient Jews has no relevance for modern conduct, and that serious historical study need only begin at the end of the fifteenth century when Europe changed its aspect. Unlike Turgot or Condorcet, he formulated no law of historical development.
- Enduring Contributions: First, Voltaire shifted history from court chronicles and battles (“I no more know the French and the Saracens by the battle of Charles Martel than I know the Tartars and the Turks by the victory which Tamerlane won over Bajazet”) to the social history of civilization: family life, arts, industries, laws, and morals (Esprit des mœurs, ch. 69). Second, he expanded the geographical canvas of universal history beyond Europe and the Mediterranean to include the Far East (China and India), the Islamic world, and the Americas.
2. Condorcet: The Ten Epochs and Indefinite Human Perfectibility
While Turgot had already outlined the positivist law of the three stages (see Chapter II, § 5), the most ardent late-eighteenth-century apostle of linear progress was Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794). A brilliant mathematician who won d’Alembert’s esteem at age twenty-two with a treatise on the integral calculus, Condorcet contributed to the Encyclopédie, was elected to the Academy of Sciences (1769) and the French Academy (1782), published an important Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Decisions (1785; enlarged 1804), and wrote biographies of Turgot (1786) and Voltaire (1787).
An enthusiastic democrat and republican during the French Revolution, Condorcet presented a plan for State secularist scientific education to the Legislative Assembly in 1792 and served in the Convention. However, his independent mind doomed him: he criticized the Jacobin constitution in favour of his own Girondist draft, opposed the death penalty, and denounced the arrest of the Girondists by the Mountain (Robespierre, Marat, and Danton). Declared an outlaw, he hid in the house of Madame Vernet in Paris, where—in the very shadow of the guillotine—he composed his optimistic manifesto, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, 1794). Fleeing Madame Vernet’s house to spare her life, he was captured and died in a prison cell at Bourg-la-Reine (1794).
| Epoch | Stage of Human Development in Condorcet’s Esquisse (1794) |
|---|---|
| Epoch 1 (Conjectural) | Men emerge from barbarism into tribal groups of hunters and fishers, recognizing family ties and using rudimentary language. |
| Epoch 2 (Conjectural) | Pastoral stage: domestication of animals, emergence of rudimentary arts, but also the appearance of inequality and slavery. |
| Epoch 3 (Conjectural) | Agricultural stage: settled tillage of the soil and division of labour; closes with the invention of alphabetic writing, marking the transition to recorded history. |
| Epoch 4 | The rise of Greek civilization, philosophy, and science (marred by the judicial murder of Socrates by priestly intolerance). |
| Epoch 5 | Roman civilization: the development of jurisprudence and the unification of the Mediterranean world until the triumph of Christianity. |
| Epoch 6 | Early Middle Ages: the darkness of feudalism and theological superstition down to the period of the Crusades. |
| Epoch 7 | Later Middle Ages: gradual revival of learning and towns, closing with the decisive invention of printing. |
| Epoch 8 | The Renaissance to Descartes: the liberation of inquiry through printing, the scientific revolution, and the new turn given to philosophy by Descartes. |
| Epoch 9 | From Descartes to the French Revolution of 1789: Newton’s discovery of the true system of Nature; Locke’s opening-up of the science of human nature; and the discovery of the true system of society by Turgot, Rousseau, and Richard Price. |
| Epoch 10 (The Future) | Indefinite Future Progress along three axes: (1) equality between nations, (2) equality between classes within each nation (freedom and equal rights, not mathematical levelling), and (3) the indefinite physical, intellectual, and moral improvement of individuals through secular scientific education, technical science, medicine, and mathematics. |
Attribution of all past violence and misery to the bad institutions forged by kings and priests allowed Condorcet to maintain unbounded optimism: once political reform and scientific education break the chains of monarchy and religion, no limits can be set in advance to human perfectibility.
3. Lessing and Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of History
Whereas Condorcet viewed progress as liberation from religion, Lessing in Germany (The Education of the Human Race, 1780; see Chapter VI, § 3) viewed history as a progressive divine revelation educating mankind toward autonomous moral perfection. A far more comprehensive, organic philosophy of history was elaborated by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) in his four-part masterpiece, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–1791; a projected fifth part was never written), modestly described by its author as “stones for a building which only centuries can finish” (Preface, Suphan ed., XIII, p. 6).
- Part I (Books I–V): Cosmic Environment, Teleological Hierarchy, and the Spiritual Soul: Starting with the physical cosmos and the geological history of the earth, Herder traces an ascending pyramid of organic species animated by a single genetic vital force (corresponding to Aristotle’s entelechy), which manifests itself in ever-increasing differentiation of function up to man at the apex. Without teaching Darwinian transformism, Herder stresses man’s continuity with lower life-forms and his unique upright posture: man is “organized for” reason, freedom, religion, and Humanität (humanity) (XIII, pp. 102, 162). As instinct weakens in man, arbitrary will (caprice) and the possibility of error increase, requiring man to learn reason and freedom. Against Enlightenment theories that fear invented the gods, Herder insists that fear invents nothing, but merely awakens the understanding to make a spontaneous, justified inference from visible phenomena to an invisible Cause (XIII, p. 162). Clarifying his earlier behaviouristic-sounding 1778 essay, Herder explicitly affirms the immateriality and immortality of the human soul (Bk. V): the mind connects ideas by an internal psychological energy of attraction and repulsion, using the brain as an artist uses a tool (XIII, pp. 182–183).
- Part II (Books VI–X): Defence of Primitive Cultures and Polemic Against Kant’s Statism: Tracing the natural evolution of the family into the clan, tribe (elected leader), and hereditary monarchy, Herder attacks the Enlightenment contempt for primitive peoples, insisting they possessed rich cultures and genuine happiness. Simultaneously, he launches an indirect counter-attack against Immanuel Kant—who had published a critical review of Part I of the Ideas alongside his own Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). Where Kant treated all earlier generations as mere stepping-stones toward the rational modern State and declared that man is an animal who needs a “lord” (master) to force him to obey, Herder retorted that in great modern states “hundreds must go hungry so that one can strut and wallow in luxury” (XIII, p. 340), and inverted Kant’s dictum: “The man who needs a lord is an animal; as soon as he becomes a human being he no longer needs a lord” (XIII, p. 383; censors forced Herder to omit his even sharper remark that the best ruler is one who makes rulers unnecessary).
- Parts III–IV (Books XI–XX): Cultural Cycles, Equilibrium, and Ethnic Pluralism: Surveying recorded history from China, India, Egypt, Israel, Phoenicia, Greece, and Rome (Part III) through the Middle Ages up to 1500 (Part IV, highlighting the indispensable role of Christianity, economic factors in the Crusades, and technical inventions), Herder formulates his law of cultural organisms: the historian must judge every people impartially and dispassionately, “like the Creator of our race” (XIV, p. 85). Every national culture is an organic whole whose peak is reached when its living active forces are in equilibrium around its centre of gravity (exemplified by Greece); inevitably the centre of gravity shifts and decline follows (as Rome’s militaristic environment predetermined both its imperial expansion and its fatal imbalance).
Herder’s “Nationalism” vs. Nazi Race-Theory and the Tension in His System: Copleston refutes Nazi attempts to co-opt Herder as a prophet of German racial supremacy: Herder condemned the Teutonic Knights’ aggression against eastern Slavic neighbours, hated imperialism and militarism (holding that Rome’s conquests destroyed its own ethnic stability), rejected anti-Semitism, and envisioned all nations as a harmonious family contributing equally to Humanität. Philosophically, however, Copleston notes an unresolved tension in Herder between: (1) his empirical historicism and cultural relativism (which rejects teleological final causes in history, XIV, p. 202), and (2) his metaphysical-religious faith in the inevitable realization of Humanität—where he asserts that “anything which can happen within the limits of given national, temporal and spatial circumstances, does happen” (XIV, p. 144) and that all destructive forces must ultimately yield to conserving forces (XIV, p. 213), while in his later Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–1797, XVII, p. 138, where he also uses the Hegelian term Weltgeist / world-spirit) he warns that without unceasing formative education man would sink back into bestiality.
Kant (1): Life, Character, Pre-Critical Writings, and the Dissertation of 1770
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) lived an outwardly uneventful life as a professor at Königsberg, yet his intellectual evolution accomplished the greatest revolution in modern philosophy. Starting from Newtonian physics and the Leibniz-Wolffian school, Kant was progressively driven by Hume’s critique of causality and the Leibniz-Clarke debate on space and time to abandon dogmatic metaphysics—moving through his 1762–1766 essays and his 1770 Inaugural Dissertation to the conception of the Critical Philosophy.
1. Kant’s Life, Character, and Academic Career
Born at Königsberg in East Prussia on April 22, 1724, the son of a saddler, Immanuel Kant was raised at home and at the Collegium Fridericianum (1732–1740) in the spirit of Lutheran Pietism—retaining a lifelong respect for sincere moral piety while reacting sharply against forced external devotional observances. Entering the University of Königsberg in 1740, he studied under Martin Knutzen (who introduced him to both Wolffian metaphysics and Newtonian physics). After serving as a family tutor in East Prussia (1747–1755), Kant took his doctorate and qualified as Privatdozent (lecturer) in 1755. Passed over for Knutzen’s vacant chair in 1756 and declining chairs of poetry (1764) and at Jena (1769), he served as assistant royal librarian (1766–1772) until he was finally appointed Ordinary Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg in March 1770, lecturing until 1796 and dying on February 12, 1804.
- Daily Routine and Character: Never travelling outside East Prussia, Kant was nevertheless a warm, sociable host who always entertained guests at his prolonged midday meal and astonished visitors with his knowledge of world geography and politics (sympathizing with the American War of Independence and the early ideals of the French Revolution). During his professorial years, his famous daily schedule was invariable: rising shortly before 5:00 a.m. for tea, a pipe, and meditation; preparing lectures from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m.; lecturing from 7:00 or 8:00 to 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. (using Wolffian textbooks like Baumgarten’s Metaphysics as required by regulations, but lecturing with wit, independence, and a constant aim to teach students “to think for themselves and stand on their own feet”); writing until his midday dinner; taking his famous one-hour afternoon walk; and reading until retiring at 10:00 p.m.
- Collision with Prussian Censorship (1792–1794): Only once did Kant clash with political authority. In 1792, Part I of his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone passed the Berlin censor, but Part II was rejected for attacking biblical theology. Kant had the complete four-part book approved by the theological faculty of Königsberg and the philosophical faculty of Jena and published it in 1793. In 1794, King Frederick William II (successor to Frederick the Great) sent Kant a royal rescript accusing him of distorting Scripture and threatening penalties. Kant declined to retract his convictions, but as “Your Majesty’s most loyal subject” promised to refrain from all further public lectures or writings on religion—considering himself bound by this pledge only until Frederick William II’s death, after which he published The Conflict of the Faculties (1798).
2. Scientific Writings and the Pre-Critical Period (1755–1768)
While some historians divide Kant’s development into three periods (a scientific period up to 1755/56, a pre-critical philosophical period in the 1760s, and the critical period from 1770/81), Copleston prefers the traditional twofold division (Pre-Critical vs. Critical), noting that Kant never abandoned Newtonian physics, which remained the permanent bedrock of his problematic: how to reconcile the deterministic world of Newtonian science with the world of moral freedom and religious faith.
- 1754–1755 (Newtonian Cosmology & First Metaphysics): Publishes essays on the earth’s axial rotation and ageing (1754), his doctoral dissertation On Fire (De igne, 1755), his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755, anticipating the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis of the mechanical origin of the solar system), and his habilitation treatise Nova dilucidatio (1755, already criticizing Leibniz and Wolff on sufficient reason).
- 1762–1763 (Critique of Formal Logic & Traditional Theodicy): Publishes The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762), The Only Possible Ground for a Demonstration of God’s Existence (late 1762), and Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Quantities into Philosophy (1763, distinguishing real opposition of forces from logical contradiction).
- 1764 (Contrast of Mathematical and Metaphysical Method): Publishes his Berlin Academy prize essay Enquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals (second to Mendelssohn) and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.
- 1766–1768 (Sceptical Crisis & Absolute Space): Publishes Dreams of a Ghost-Seer explained by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766, on Swedenborg) and his essay on Directions in Space (1768, defending Euler’s Newtonian absolute space via incongruent counterparts).
Key Arguments of the 1762–1768 Pre-Critical Works
- The Only Possible Ground for a Demonstration of God’s Existence (1762; W., II, pp. 66, 154–163): Calling metaphysics “a dark ocean without shore and without lighthouses,” Kant classifies all possible proofs of God into four types: two a priori from the concept of the possible (either from possibility as ground to God’s existence as consequence, or from possibility as consequence to God’s existence as ground), and two a posteriori from the existent (either from contingent things to a First Cause and then to its attributes, or directly to both existence and attributes).
- He rejects the Ontological Argument (St. Anselm, Descartes, Leibniz) because existence is not a predicate.
- He rejects the Wolffian Cosmological Argument because it cannot prove that a first cause must possess the attributes of God.
- He praises the Teleological / Design Argument, but notes it proves at most a divine Architect shaping pre-existing matter, not a Creator.
- Kant’s Own Proof (from Possibility as Consequence to God as Ground): While there is no logical contradiction in denying all existence, we cannot deny internal possibility without abolishing thought itself; yet possibility presupposes an actual, existent material ground—an one, simple, immutable, eternal, spiritual Being (God) (a proof reminiscent of Duns Scotus and Leibniz’s argument from eternal truths).
- Enquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals (1764; W., II, pp. 277–300): Kant draws a sharp methodological contrast between mathematics and metaphysics:
- Mathematics proceeds synthetically: It constructs its concepts arbitrarily through definitions (e.g., a polygon or cone has no pre-given concept prior to its definition) and examines them in concrete visible signs.
- Metaphysics proceeds analytically: It starts with confused concepts already given in experience (such as time or desire) and seeks to clarify them by comparing instances. Hence in mathematics we begin with definitions; in metaphysics we end with them (if we ever reach them at all). Metaphysics must abandon the imitation of geometry and adopt Newton’s method: starting from certain inner experiences and searching for general laws. In ethics, influenced by Hutcheson and British moralists, Kant notes that while the faculty of representing truth is knowledge, that of perceiving the good is feeling, and distinguishes problematical necessity (means to an end) from legal necessity (unconditional moral obligation), while noting that the formal rule “Do the most perfect thing possible for you” requires material first principles.
- Dreams of a Ghost-Seer explained by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766; W., II, pp. 329–373): Prompted by the visions of Immanuel Swedenborg (Arcana coelestia), Kant juxtaposed a satirical “fragment of esoteric philosophy” with a medical-psychological “fragment of vulgar philosophy” to ask whether the airy castles of dogmatic metaphysicians (who claim rational knowledge of spiritual substances) have any better foundation than Swedenborg’s ghost-visions. Clearly influenced by Hume, Kant declared that causal relations cannot be reduced to logical implication and can be known only through sense-experience. Metaphysics cannot transcend experience to know spiritual beings; if it is to be scientific at all, metaphysics must become “the science of the limits of human reason” (W., II, p. 369). Moreover, morality does not depend on speculative proofs of immortality; rather, “moral faith” grounds the hope of a future world on the virtuous soul (W., II, p. 373).
- The Essay on Space (1768; W., II, pp. 378–383): Developing Leonhard Euler’s (1707–1783) ideas (via the paradox of incongruent counterparts like left and right hands), Kant argued against Leibniz that absolute space possesses a reality of its own independent of matter, while already hinting that it is a fundamental concept making external perception possible.
3. The Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 and the Birth of the Critical Problem
Two publications of Leibniz’s works profoundly affected Kant: the New Essays concerning the Human Understanding (1765) and Dutens’s edition (1768) containing the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. Convinced that Leibniz was right against Newton and Clarke that space and time cannot be absolute real things or properties of things-in-themselves without generating antinomies, yet rejecting Leibniz’s view that space and time are merely confused conceptual representations (which would destroy the apodictic certainty of geometry), Kant presented his breakthrough in his Latin inaugural dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, 1770).
Form: Space and Time as subjective pure intuitions (singular concepts) co-ordinating sensations.
• Logical Use of the Intellect reflects on appearances (apparentiae) to organize empirical experience (experientia).
• Dogmatic Use: Conceives a perfect Noumenon—God in the theoretical sphere, Moral Perfection in the practical sphere (siding with Plato against Epicurus and Shaftesbury).
• Critical (Elenctic) Use: Prevents principles of sensibility (e.g., “whatever exists, exists in space and time”) from contaminating metaphysics.
The 1772 Letter to Marcus Herz and the Conception of the Critiques
In September 1770, Kant wrote to J. H. Lambert of his plan to develop a negative propaedeutic science (“general phenomenology”) preceding metaphysics, and in June 1771 he wrote to his former pupil Marcus Herz that he was writing a work entitled The Bounds of Sensibility and Reason covering metaphysics, morals, and taste.
In his famous letter to Marcus Herz of February 21, 1772 (W., X, pp. 129–135), Kant formulated the decisive problem that gave birth to the Critique of Pure Reason: how can pure a priori concepts of the understanding refer to objects if they are neither caused by objects nor create their objects? * In the 1770 Dissertation, sensitive representations posed no problem because our sensibility is passively affected by objects; conversely, an archetypal divine intellect creates its objects by thinking them. * But the pure concepts of the human understanding (such as substance and cause) are neither abstracted a posteriori from sense-experience nor creative of things-in-themselves. How, then, can objects necessarily conform to concepts spun out of the mind’s own inner nature? * Rejecting recourse to a Deus ex machina—such as Plato’s pre-natal intuition of the divine, Malebranche’s vision in God, or Crusius’s pre-established implanted rules—Kant spent the next nine years (1772–1781) working out his solution: abandoning the 1770 thesis that pure concepts of the understanding give us knowledge of things as they are in themselves (sicuti sunt), and recognizing instead that the categories have as their sole cognitive function the further a priori synthesis of the data of sense intuition to constitute phenomenal objects of experience. * Although Kant optimistically told Herz in 1772 that he would publish the first part of his Critique of Pure Reason within three months, the complexity of the problem required eleven years of “silent decade” labour (1770–1781) before he hastily assembled the manuscript in four or five months. Thereafter his masterpieces appeared in rapid succession: * 1781: Critique of Pure Reason (1st edition, A). * 1783: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. * 1784: Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View. * 1785: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten). * 1786: Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science. * 1787: Critique of Pure Reason (2nd edition, B). * 1788: Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft). * 1790: Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft). * 1791: On the Failure of All Philosophical Attempts at a Theodicy. * 1793: Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone. * 1795: On Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden). * 1797: Metaphysics of Morals (Part I: Theory of Right; Part II: Theory of Virtue). * 1920 (Posthumous): Kants Opus Postumum (edited by Erich Adickes).
Kant (2): The Problems of the First Critique and the Copernican Revolution
Summoning metaphysics before the tribunal of pure reason to explain why it has remained a battlefield of endless disputes while mathematics and physics have achieved the sure path of science, Kant reduces the problem of pure reason to one fundamental question: “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” To solve it, he proposes his Copernican Revolution—that objects must conform to our a priori cognitive structure rather than our knowledge conforming to objects-in-themselves—thus securing Newtonian science against Hume’s scepticism while limiting theoretical knowledge to phenomena in order to make room for moral faith.
1. The General Problem of Metaphysics and the Tribunal of Pure Reason
In the Prefaces to the first (A, 1781) and second (B, 1787) editions of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Foreword to the Prolegomena (1783), Kant contrasts the plight of metaphysics with the triumph of mathematics and natural science. Once hailed as the “queen of all the sciences” on account of its supreme objects—God, freedom, and immortality (A, viii; Prol., 4)—metaphysics has fallen into disrepute and indifference because, unlike Euclid or physics, it has never found the “sure path of a science” (B, xv), remaining a battleground of endless, inconclusive controversies.
This modern indifference is a sign of mature judgment refusing to accept illusory pseudo-science. It must be met by a critical investigation (Kritik) of the faculty of pure reason itself (A, xii)—summoning reason before its own tribunal to determine “what and how much can understanding and reason know, apart from all experience?” (A, xvii). Against dogmatism—defined as “the dogmatic procedure of pure reason, without previous criticism of its own powers” (B, xxxv), of which Christian Wolff was “the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers” (B, xxxvi)—Kant’s transcendental inquiry examines not the empirical psychological conditions of individual minds, but the pure, universal a priori conditions of human knowledge as such (B, 25).
- Critical Philosophy as Propaedeutic vs. Part of Metaphysics: Strictly speaking, the Critique is the preparation (propaedeutic) for metaphysics; in a wider sense, all pure a priori philosophy (including the Critique) is called metaphysics.
- Transcendental Metaphysics of Nature and Morals (Valid Science): The systematic exposition of the whole body of valid a priori philosophical knowledge—realized in Kant’s own Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (1786) and Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
- Metaphysics as a Natural Disposition (Naturanlage): The human mind’s ineradicable, natural impulse to raise ultimate questions transcending experience (God, freedom, immortality). This is actual and therefore possible.
- Dogmatic / Speculative Metaphysics as a Science of the Supersensible: The pretension to attain demonstrated theoretical knowledge of trans-phenomenal realities (God and the soul). This is illusory and impossible.
2. A Priori vs. A Posteriori and Analytic vs. Synthetic Judgments
Kant opens the Introduction to the second edition with the famous declaration: “That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt… But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience” (B, 1). While all knowledge is temporally occasioned by sense-impressions, pure a priori knowledge is knowledge wholly independent of all experience whatsoever (not merely relatively a priori to a particular event, like knowing from past experience that a house will collapse if its foundations are undermined, B, 2–3).
Agreeing with David Hume—who famously “first interrupted my dogmatic slumbers and gave an entirely new direction to my inquiries in the field of speculative philosophy” (Prol., Foreword)—that pure experience can never yield strict necessity or universality (induction yields only assumed, comparative generality), Kant concludes that necessity and strict universality are the two infallible, inseparable criteria of a priori knowledge (B, 4). Against Hume’s psychological reduction of causal necessity to custom and habit, Kant insists that a priori knowledge is an undeniable fact: we find it in every proposition of mathematics and in the common understanding’s judgment that every change must have a cause (B, 4–5).
To formulate the precise problem of a priori knowledge, Kant classifies all judgments along two intersecting axes (B, 10–14; A, 6–10):
| Judgment Type | Definition & Criterion of Truth | Epistemological Status & Kantian Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Analytic (Explicative / Erläuterungsurteile) | The predicate is already contained (at least covertly) in the concept of the subject . Grounded solely in the Principle of Non-Contradiction; all analytic judgments are a priori. | Clarifies concepts without extending knowledge of reality. • Example: “All bodies are extended” (extension is part of the definition of body; “Analytic a posteriori” is a contradiction in terms). |
| 2. Synthetic a posteriori (Empirical Ampliative) | The predicate lies outside the concept of the subject , adding new information (ampliative / Erweiterungsurteile), and the connection is known contingently through sense-experience. | Extends knowledge empirically; universality is merely comparative/inductive. • Example: “All bodies are heavy” (weight is not contained in the mere concept of an extended body; known by experience). |
| 3. Synthetic a priori (Pure Ampliative) | The predicate is not contained in the concept of the subject (cannot be deduced by mere analysis), yet is connected with with strict necessity and universality, independent of experience. | Extends knowledge of reality a priori. • Mathematics: “7 + 5 = 12”; “A straight line between two points is the shortest” (B, 14–16). • Pure Physics: “In all changes of the material world the quantity of matter remains unchanged”; “Everything which happens has its cause” (B, 13, 17). • Metaphysics (Aim): “The world must have a first beginning” (B, 18). |
3. The Four Divisions of the Problem and the Copernican Revolution
Because synthetic a priori judgments are both ampliative and necessary, the entire critical problem of pure reason is summed up in the general question: “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” (B, 19). Dividing this question according to the disciplines involved, Kant formulates four specific questions (B, 20–22): 1. How is pure mathematics possible? (Actual science → we ask how it is possible). 2. How is pure natural science (pure physics) possible? (Actual science → we ask how it is possible). 3. How is metaphysics, as a natural disposition, possible? (Actual disposition → we ask how it arises). 4. How is metaphysics, as a science, possible? (Doubtful claim → we ask whether it is possible).
Kant’s Copernican Revolution (B, xvi–xviii): If we assume that all our knowledge must conform to objects-in-themselves, we can never explain how we can know anything about objects a priori (as Hume proved). Just as Copernicus, failing to explain celestial movements on the assumption that the starry host revolves around a stationary spectator, tried the hypothesis that the spectator revolves while the stars remain at rest—and just as Galileo and Torricelli revolutionized physics by approaching Nature not as a passive pupil in leading-strings, but as an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer questions framed according to reason’s own plan (B, xii–xiv)—so in metaphysics we must adopt a new hypothesis: objects, to be known as objects of experience, must conform to the a priori structure of our faculty of knowledge (both our sensibility and our understanding).
Kant illustrates his Copernican Revolution with the analogy of a man born with permanently attached red-tinted spectacles: he does not create the things he sees according to their existence (he is not a divine Creator), yet nothing can ever enter his field of vision as an object except as red, enabling him to know a priori and with strict necessity that every object he will ever see in possible experience will be red. Similarly, because the human subject possesses a constant a priori structure of sensibility (space and time) and understanding (the categories, such as causality), nothing can ever be given and thought as an object of human experience except as conforming to these a priori forms—simultaneously justifying the universal validity of mathematics and Newtonian physics for all possible experience while restricting theoretical knowledge to appearances (phenomena) and excluding knowledge of things-in-themselves (noumena).
4. Sensibility, Understanding, Reason, and the Structure of the First Critique
Human knowledge springs from two fundamental faculties (perhaps rooted in a common, unknown source): Sensibility (Sinnlichkeit), through which objects are given to us in sense intuition (already synthesized in the a priori forms of space and time), and Understanding (Verstand), through which those given objects are thought under pure a priori concepts (categories, B, 29; A, 15). A third faculty (or higher use of intellect), Reason (Vernunft) in the narrow sense, seeks to unify the judgments of the understanding under unconditioned principles (Transcendental Ideas of the Soul, the World, and God), which have a valid regulative function for science but generate dialectical illusions when used constitutively to claim knowledge beyond experience.
Finally, Copleston emphasizes that the first Critique must never be read in isolation from Kant’s total philosophy: by proving that the deterministic categories of science apply solely to phenomena and can neither prove nor disprove God, freedom, and immortality in the noumenal sphere, Kant strikes a blow at the root of materialism, fatalism, and atheism, fulfilling his famous declaration in the second-edition Preface: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” (B, xxx).
Kant (3): Scientific Knowledge — The Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic
In the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic, Kant constructs his positive theory of mathematical and scientific knowledge. Objects are given through the a priori forms of sensibility (Space and Time) and thought through the twelve a priori Categories of the Understanding—justified by the Transcendental Unity of Apperception, mediated temporally by the Schematism of the Imagination, and articulated in the Synthetic A Priori Principles that ground Newtonian physics while restricting all theoretical cognition to phenomena as opposed to noumena.
1. The Transcendental Aesthetic: Space, Time, and Mathematics
Our knowledge can relate immediately to objects only by means of an intuition (Anschauung), which in man (unlike God’s archetypal intellectual intuition) is always sensuous, requiring that our sensibility (Sinnlichkeit)—our capacity for receiving representations (Vorstellungen) by being affected by objects—be stimulated (B, 33; A, 19). The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation is sensation (Empfindung), and the undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance (Erscheinung) (distinguished in A, 248 from a phenomenon, which is an appearance thought as an object under the unity of the categories, though Kant often uses the terms interchangeably). Within every appearance we must distinguish (B, 34; A, 20): * The Matter of Appearance: That which corresponds to sensation (given a posteriori). * The Form of Appearance: That which enables the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations (which cannot itself be sensation, and must therefore lie ready a priori in the mind as a pure form of sensibility).
By isolating sensibility from all concepts of the understanding and then abstracting all empirical sensation, we discover two pure a priori forms of sensibility (pure intuitions): Space (the a priori form of outer sense, by which we represent objects as outside us and outside one another) and Time (the a priori form of inner sense, by which we intuit our own internal states in succession or simultaneity—and, because all representations whatsoever, even of outer objects, are determinations of the mind belonging to our inner state, Time is the immediate condition of all inner appearances and the mediate condition of all outer appearances, making it the a priori formal condition of all appearances whatsoever, B, 50; A, 34).
Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions of Space and Time (B, 37–49)
- The Metaphysical Exposition (proving Space and Time are a priori Intuitions, not Empirical or General Concepts):
- Not Empirical Concepts (a posteriori): I cannot abstract the ideas of space and time from experienced spatial or temporal relations, because I cannot perceive things as outside me or simultaneous/successive except by already presupposing space and time as their foundation.
- Necessary A Priori Representations: We can easily think away all objects from space and all events from time, but we can never think away space and time themselves; they are the necessary conditions of the possibility of appearances.
- Pure Intuitions (Singular), Not Discursive General Concepts: A general concept (like “horse”) is contained in its many particular instances, whereas particular spaces and times are carved out only by introducing limitations within the single, unique, all-embracing Space and Time. Moreover, the parts of space coexist ad infinitum within one intuition, rather than being subsumed under a general concept.
- The Transcendental Exposition (showing how Synthetic A Priori Knowledge in Mathematics and Mechanics flows from this Theory):
- How Pure Mathematics is Possible: Against Leibniz, pure geometry and arithmetic are not analytic, but synthetic a priori sciences that proceed constructionally in a priori intuition (e.g., constructing a triangle in pure spatial intuition, or adding units successively in pure temporal intuition for ). And against Plato (who postulated an intellectual intuition of subsistent mathematical objects), geometry’s synthetic a priori propositions necessarily apply with absolute precision to all objects of the physical world only because Euclidean Space is the subjective a priori form of our outer sense, through which alone any external object can ever appear to us (Prol., § 13, remark 1; B, 40–41). Similarly, the a priori intuition of Time grounds the synthetic a priori science of general mechanics (motion and change).
- Formula of Space and Time: Space and time are empirically real (every object of possible human experience is necessarily spatial and temporal; they are not illusions) but transcendentally ideal (they are nothing at all if we abstract from the subjective conditions of human sense intuition and attribute them to things-in-themselves, B, 44, 52). (Copleston notes that the nineteenth-century development of non-Euclidean geometries and Hilbert’s axiomatics—showing that Euclidean space is not the sole constructible or physically applicable geometry—has rendered Kant’s identification of spatial intuition with Euclidean geometry untenable as it stands, even though Kant admitted in B, 268 that a figure enclosed by two straight lines is not logically self-contradictory, only unconstructible in intuition.)
2. The Transcendental Analytic (1): The Clue to the Categories
Turning from sensibility to the Understanding (Verstand)—the spontaneous power of thinking the data of sense intuition by means of concepts—Kant states his famous principle of their indispensable co-operation: “Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind” (B, 75; A, 51). Unlike formal logic, which abstracts from all content of knowledge, Transcendental Logic investigates the origin, scope, and objective validity of the pure a priori concepts of the understanding (Transcendental Analytic) and exposes their illusory misuse beyond experience (Transcendental Dialectic, B, 80–88).
In the Metaphysical Deduction (“Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding”, B, 91–116), Kant avoids Aristotle’s haphazard list of categories by deducing the complete table of pure concepts (Categories or praedicamenta, from which subsidiary a priori concepts called predicables can be derived) from a single principle: to think is to judge, and to judge is to unify representations. Therefore, there must be precisely as many pure a priori synthesizing concepts (Categories) of the understanding as there are logical functions of unity in all possible types of judgment (twelve in all, arranged in four triads, where the third category in each triad arises from the combination of the second with the first—an anticipation of Hegel’s triadic dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, B, 110):
(ii) Particular
(iii) Singular
(ii) Plurality
(iii) Totality (Plurality as Unity)
Number (successive addition of homogeneous units in time).
“All intuitions are extensive magnitudes” (justifies application of pure mathematics to all phenomena).
(v) Negative
(vi) Infinite
(v) Negation
(vi) Limitation (Reality + Negation)
Continuous and uniform production of degrees of reality (sensation) in time from to a given magnitude.
“In all appearances, the real that is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude, that is, a degree.”
(viii) Hypothetical
(ix) Disjunctive
(viii) Causality & Dependence (Cause & Effect)
(ix) Community (Reciprocity / Interaction)
(vii) Permanence of the real in time.
(viii) Regular Succession of the manifold according to a rule.
(ix) Coexistence of determinations of substances according to a rule.
1st Analogy: In all change of appearances substance is permanent, and its quantum in Nature neither increases nor diminishes.
2nd Analogy: All changes take place according to the law of connection of cause and effect.
3rd Analogy: All substances, so far as perceived as coexistent in space, are in thoroughgoing reciprocal interaction.
(xi) Assertoric
(xii) Apodictic
(xi) Existence – Non-Existence
(xii) Necessity – Contingency
(x) Agreement with conditions of time in general.
(xi) Existence at a determinate time.
(xii) Existence of an object at all times.
1. What agrees with the formal conditions of experience (intuition & concepts) is possible.
2. What is connected with the material conditions of experience (sensation) is real (actual).
3. That whose connection with the actual is determined according to general conditions of experience exists necessarily (hypothetical causal necessity).
3. The Transcendental Analytic (2): Deduction, Schematism, and Principles
(i) The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories (B, 129–169)
Whereas space and time need no special deduction because no appearance can be given without them, the Categories belong to pure thought, raising the crucial question of quid juris (Transcendental Deduction = Justification): what justifies our applying subjective a priori concepts of the understanding to the objects given in sense intuition?
Kant’s argument in the second edition (B) hinges on the Transcendental Unity of Apperception: 1. Synthesis as the Act of Understanding (B, 129–130): A mere disconnected stream of sense-impressions is not knowledge of an object. Senses give a manifold, but all combination (Verbindung / conjunctio) or synthesis of a manifold into a unified object is an active, spontaneous operation of the understanding. 2. The “I Think” and Pure Apperception (B, 131–135): For diverse representations to be synthesized into one object of knowledge for me, they must all belong to one identical self-consciousness. “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me” (B, 131–132). Unlike empirical apperception (our fragmentary, changing introspective awareness of passing mental states), this pure or transcendental unity of apperception is the supreme, permanent a priori condition of all possible experience (refuting Hume’s dissolution of the self into a mere bundle of perceptions without a unifying subject). 3. Objective Validity of the Categories (B, 137–143): An object is defined as “that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united” (B, 137). Because the manifold of sense intuition can be brought under the necessary synthetic unity of apperception only by means of the synthesizing functions of judgment, and because the Categories are nothing else than these very functions of judgment applied to the manifold of intuition (B, 143), no object can ever be thought or known in experience except through the application of the Categories. Thus, the Categories have necessary objective validity for all objects of possible sense-experience—and for nothing else (B, 146–147).
(ii) The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding (B, 176–187)
How can pure, non-sensuous Categories be applied to heterogeneous sensuous intuitions? There must be a mediating third term (tertium quid) that is intellectual (universal and a priori) on the one side and sensuous on the other. Kant finds this mediator in the Transcendental Schema, produced by the productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) as an a priori transcendental determination of Time (B, 177–178). Because Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances (inner and outer), a rule of the imagination determining time according to a category (a Schema, distinguished from a particular concrete mental image just as the general rule for constructing triangles or the number five ..... is distinct from a particular drawing, B, 179–180) mediates the subsumption of appearances under the Categories (see Column 4 of the master table above). (While N. Kemp Smith argues that the Schemata are actually the delayed definitions of the Categories themselves, Copleston notes that Kant attributes a minimal logical meaning to the unschematized pure category—e.g., pure Substance as “something that can be thought only as subject, never as predicate”—even though only the schematized category yields determinate knowledge of objects, B, 186–187.)
(iii) Synthetic A Priori Principles and How Pure Natural Science is Possible
From the twelve schematized Categories flow the Synthetic A Priori Principles of the Pure Understanding (see Column 5 of the master table above), which answer Kant’s second fundamental question: “How is pure natural science possible?” (Prol., § 23). Because “Nature” is the sum total of all objects of possible experience, and because objects of experience are constituted as such only by being synthesized under the a priori principles of the understanding (such as the conservation of substance and universal causal determinism), the understanding does not draw its a priori laws from Nature, but prescribes them to Nature (Prol., § 36). Against Hume’s reduction of the uniformity of Nature to subjective custom (and modern counterparts like Bertrand Russell’s biological-psychological “postulates of scientific inference” in Human Knowledge, 1948), Kant provides an a priori justification of the foundations of Newtonian physics.
4. Phenomena and Noumena, and the Refutation of Idealism
From the Transcendental Analytic follows Kant’s crucial limitation of all human theoretical knowledge to phenomena as opposed to noumena (things-in-themselves) (B, 294–315; A, 235–260):
- Noumenon in the Negative Sense (Legitimate Limiting Concept / Grenzbegriff): A thing considered simply in so far as it is not an object of our sensuous intuition, abstracting from our spatio-temporal mode of intuiting it (coupled in the first edition, A, 250–253, with the “transcendental object = X”, the completely indeterminate correlate of appearances). This negative concept is indispensable to prevent sensibility from claiming that appearances exhaust all reality and to leave open a space for moral faith, while simultaneously limiting the understanding by reminding it that its categories cannot know things-in-themselves (B, 311–312).
- Noumenon in the Positive Sense (Excluded from Theoretical Knowledge): An intelligibile considered as the positive object of a non-sensuous, intellectual intuition. Because human beings possess no faculty of intellectual intuition whatsoever, we cannot know the positive possibility or determinate nature of any noumenon in this sense.
Finally, in the second edition (B, 274–279), Kant inserted his Refutation of Idealism to distinguish his transcendental (or formal/critical) idealism from empirical (or material) idealism, which he divides into: 1. Dogmatic Idealism (attributed to Berkeley): Holds that space and all spatial objects are impossible in themselves and are mere imaginary illusions. Kant replies that the Transcendental Aesthetic has already refuted this by proving that space is an a priori form of sensibility possessing full empirical reality. 2. Problematic Idealism (attributed to Descartes): Holds that only one empirical assertion (“I am”) is indubitably certain, while the existence of external objects in space is doubtful and must be inferred. Kant turns the tables on Descartes by proving that “inner experience in general is possible only through outer experience in general” (B, 278–279): * Proof: I am empirically conscious of my own existence as determined in time (as a succession of inner states). * All determination of time-succession presupposes something permanent in perception against which change is measured. * This permanent cannot be an intuition within my empirical self (since my inner representations are precisely the fleeting states that require a permanent substrate to be determined in time; B, 275). * Conclusion: Therefore, perception of this permanent is possible only through an actual, existing thing outside me in space, not a mere representation of a thing outside me. Immediate consciousness of external spatial objects is a necessary condition of my mediated empirical consciousness of myself in time (B, 276; hallucinations and dreams are merely imaginative reproductions of prior real outer perceptions).
Kant (4): Metaphysics Under Fire — The Transcendental Dialectic
1. The Origin and Deduction of the Transcendental Ideas of Pure Reason
Whereas the Understanding (Verstand) synthesizes phenomena directly by means of its twelve Categories, Pure Reason (Vernunft in the narrow sense) is the faculty of mediate (syllogistic) inference, which takes the conditioned concepts and judgments of the understanding and seeks to unify them under higher principles (B, 355–366). By a natural logical maxim, reason ascends the chain of prosyllogisms (e.g., All men are mortal ← All animals are mortal ← etc.) seeking complete systematic unity. However, when reason transforms this logical maxim (to seek the unconditioned) into an objective principle of pure reason—assuming that “if the conditioned is given, the entire sum of conditions, and consequently the absolutely unconditioned, is also given” (B, 364)—it oversteps the bounds of experience and generates “transcendental illusion” (eine Logik des Scheins, B, 349).
Just as Kant deduced the twelve Categories from the logical forms of judgment, he deduces the three classes of Transcendental Ideas of Pure Reason from the three forms of syllogistic inference (corresponding to the three categories of Relation) and the three most general relations of representations (B, 379–396):
2. The Paralogisms of Rational Psychology (The Soul)
Rational Psychology (as in Descartes and Wolff) claims to prove a priori from the sole text “I think” (B, 401; A, 343)—without any empirical admixture—that the human soul is: (1) an immaterial substance, (2) simple (indivisible/incorruptible), (3) numerically identical across time (person), and (4) standing in relation to possible objects in space (immortality).
Kant shows that this entire pseudo-science rests on a Transcendental Paralogism—a formal logical fallacy of four terms (quaternio terminorum / sophisma figurae dictionis) (B, 410–411; A, 348): * Major Premiss: “That which cannot be thought otherwise than as subject does not exist otherwise than as subject, and is therefore substance.” * Minor Premiss: “Now a thinking being, considered merely as such, cannot be thought otherwise than as subject.” * Conclusion: “Therefore it exists only as such, that is, as a substance.”
Why the Paralogism Fails (B, 411–412):
The middle term (“that which cannot be thought otherwise than as subject”) is used in two completely different senses. In the major premiss, it refers to an object in general (including an object given in intuition), to which the schematized category of substance (permanence in time) can legitimately apply. In the minor premiss, it refers solely to the pure logical subject of self-consciousness (the transcendental ego of the “I think”), which is the formal condition of all thought and is never given as an object of intuition. As Kant might say with Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 5.632), the transcendental subject does not belong to the world, but is a limit of the world. Because we have no permanent intuition of the pure ego, we cannot apply the category of substance to prove theoretically that the soul is a simple, immortal substance—though by keeping the real self in the noumenal sphere, Kant simultaneously defeats materialism and preserves the possibility of moral freedom.3. The Four Antinomies of Speculative Cosmology (The World)
When pure reason attempts to think the World as the unconditioned totality of phenomenal series in Speculative Cosmology, it falls into Four Antinomies, where both the Thesis (representing dogmatic rationalism: Leibniz-Wolff) and the Antithesis (representing dogmatic empiricism) can be proved by logically valid reductio ad absurdum arguments (B, 454–489)—proving that both sides rest on the false presupposition that the phenomenal world is a thing-in-itself:
World’s Extent in Time & Space
• Proof: (a) If no beginning, an infinite temporal series has already elapsed and been completed up to now, which is impossible (same argument as St. Bonaventure). (b) An infinite spatial whole cannot be synthesized in finite time.
• Proof: (a) A beginning presupposes an empty time before the world in which nothing could distinguish coming-to-be from non-existence. (b) A finite world would stand in relation to empty space (nothing), which is impossible.
Space and time are not properties of things-in-themselves, but forms of sensibility. The world is neither a finite nor an infinite given whole in itself; there is only an indefinite empirical regress (in indefinitum).
Divisibility of Composite Substances
• Proof: If we think away all composition (a contingent relation) and no simple parts remain, nothing at all remains, contradicting the existence of substance (Leibnizian monads).
• Proof: Every composite substance occupies space, and every part of it must occupy a space; since space is infinitely divisible, every part is composite and nothing extended can be simple.
Phenomenal bodies in space are divisible ad infinitum in experience, but are not composed of a given infinite number of parts in themselves, nor of phenomenal simple monads.
Freedom vs. Natural Causality
• Proof: If all causality is determined by an antecedent cause, there is never a first beginning or sufficient cause of any series, violating the law of causality.
• Proof: A spontaneous, uncaused act of freedom would have no causal connection with the preceding state of the cause, destroying the universal causal law of time-succession and the unity of experience.
The Antithesis is true of phenomena (all events in space and time are causally determined). The Thesis may be true of noumena (the same agent, as a thing-in-itself outside time, may exercise free causality whose effects appear in the phenomenal series).
Existence of an Absolutely Necessary Being
• Proof: The conditioned series of changes in time presupposes a complete series of conditions up to an unconditioned, absolutely necessary being (which must be in the world or be its temporal cause).
• Proof: No member of the temporal series can be uncaused, nor can the whole series be necessary if every member is contingent; yet a cause outside the world would have to begin to act in time, placing it inside the phenomenal world.
The Antithesis is true within the phenomenal world (every phenomenal existent is contingent). The Thesis may be true if the necessary being is a purely intelligible noumenon entirely outside the spatio-temporal series.
4. The Transcendental Ideal and the Impossibility of Proving God’s Existence
Ascending by disjunctive syllogisms, pure reason forms the Transcendental Ideal (Prototypon transcendentale, B, 599–611): first conceiving the sum total of all possible predicates, then objectifying it as the most real Being (Ens realissimum) and most perfect Being (Ens perfectissimum), hypostatizing it as a single individual substance, and finally personifying it as the God of theism (B, 611 n.). Kant contends that speculative reason has only three possible ways of trying to prove God’s existence (B, 618–619)—the Ontological, the Cosmological, and the Physico-Theological (Design) proofs—and that all three are fallacious (B, 620–658):
- Critique of the Ontological Argument (B, 620–630): This argument claims that because the concept of the most perfect/real Being (Ens realissimum) includes all reality, it includes existence; hence denying its existence is self-contradictory. Kant replies:
First, logical absence of contradiction in a concept does not prove the real (positive) possibility of the object.
Second, if I suppress the predicate while retaining the subject, a contradiction arises; “but if I suppress the subject together with the predicate, no contradiction arises; for there is nothing left that could be contradicted” (B, 622–623).
Third, every existential proposition is synthetic, never analytic (B, 626). Putting existence into the definition of a concept beforehand is a mere verbal tautology that begs the question.
Fourth, “Being [existence] is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves” (B, 626). A hundred real thalers contain not the least coin more in conceptual content than a hundred possible thalers; otherwise my concept would not express the object. Trying to become richer in knowledge of existence from mere ideas is like a merchant trying to increase his wealth by adding noughts to his cash-account (B, 630). 2. Critique of the Cosmological Argument (B, 631–648): Stated in its Leibnizian form (“If anything exists, an absolutely necessary being must also exist. Now I, at least, exist. Therefore an absolutely necessary being exists”), this argument commits a nest of dialectical fallacies: (a) it misuses the category of causality to pass beyond the sensible world; (b) it illegitimately assumes the completion of an infinite empirical series; and (c) to identify the indeterminate “necessary being” with God, it asserts that only the Ens realissimum satisfies the concept of a necessary being—which, by conversion, asserts that the concept of the Ens realissimum entails necessary existence, thereby relapsing covertly into the refuted Ontological Argument! (In a critical note, Copleston challenges Kant’s claim that the cosmological argument necessarily relapses into the ontological argument: if—contra Kant’s premisses—an a posteriori argument has already established the actual existence of a necessary being, then examining what attributes are compatible with necessary existence is not deducing existence from a mere concept of possibility, as the ontological proof does.) 3. Critique of the Physico-Theological (Design) Argument (B, 648–658): While always treating this oldest, clearest proof with deep respect as a preparation for faith, Kant shows that: (a) it illegitimately applies phenomenal causality beyond experience; (b) because the arrangement of means to ends in Nature is treated as contingent to matter, the proof can at most establish an Architect of the world limited by the material he shapes, never a Creator of the world according to its substance (B, 655); and (c) to bridge the gap from a finite or indeterminate Architect to an infinite, all-sufficient Creator, the argument must fall back on the Cosmological Proof, which in turn falls back on the Ontological Proof.
5. Regulative Use of the Ideas, “As-If” Philosophy, and Meaning
Although the three Transcendental Ideas have no constitutive use (they give no theoretical knowledge of objects), they cannot be intrinsically faulty because they spring from the very nature of our reason (B, 697). Their true, legitimate, and immanent employment is regulative (B, 670–696): just as the understanding unites the manifold of sense under concepts, reason unites the empirical operations of the understanding into a systematic whole by using the Ideas as heuristic principles (a philosophy of As-If, as Hans Vaihinger later termed it): * In Psychology: We must connect all inner psychical phenomena as if (als ob) the mind were a simple, permanent substance (B, 700). * In Cosmology: We must pursue the causal chain of natural phenomena as if the series were endlessly inexhaustible, never stopping at any alleged absolute boundary (B, 700, 713). * In Natural Science / Theology: We must investigate the order of Nature as if it were the systematic unity of an all-wise Creator (B, 700–701).
Finally, against modern logical positivists who claim Kant proved metaphysics to be meaningless nonsense, Copleston shows that while a few passages (B, 707) reflect the strand in Kant that treats unschematized categories as mere empty logical functions, Kant’s dominant, representative position is that the Ideas of God, freedom, and the soul are logically consistent, meaningful thoughts (symbolic conceptions of the unknown)—and that while speculative natural theology cannot prove God’s existence, it performs the vital negative service of banishing atheism, materialism, and anthropomorphism, purifying our concept of God for moral theology (B, 667–668).
Kant (5): Morality and Religion — The Categorical Imperative and the Practical Postulates
1. Kant’s Aim: Pure Ethics vs. Applied Anthropology
Just as Kant took Newtonian science as a given fact and isolated its a priori conditions, so he takes common moral consciousness—the awareness of unconditional moral obligation (“ought”)—as a fact and seeks its a priori source in Pure Practical Reason (Groundwork, Preface; W., IV, pp. 389–392). Ultimately there is only one and the same Reason (G., p. 391), distinguished solely in its application: whereas theoretical reason knows objects given from outside, practical reason (which Kant identifies with the rational Will) is concerned with determining the will to produce objects (moral choices and actions) in accordance with its own a priori law (Pr.R., pp. 29–30).
Kant sharply divides moral philosophy into: 1. The Metaphysics of Morals (Pure Ethics): Investigates the supreme a priori principle of morality and the nature of obligation as valid for all rational beings as such (not merely men), completely free from all empirical psychology or anthropology (G., p. 389; criticizing Wolff for mixing a priori and empirical elements). 2. Practical / Moral Anthropology (Applied Ethics): Studies the empirical conditions of human nature that help or hinder the execution of moral laws (such as moral education). (Copleston notes a tension in Kant: even in the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, Kant admits we must take some account of human nature to exhibit concrete duties, and precepts like “Thou shalt not lie” or “Thou shalt not commit adultery” presuppose empirical human conditions such as speech, bodies, and marriage.)
2. The Good Will, Duty vs. Inclination, and Reverence for Law
Kant opens Part I of the Groundwork with his celebrated sentence: “It is impossible to conceive of anything in the world, or indeed out of it, which can be called good without qualification, save only a good will” (G., p. 393; Abb., p. 9). Mental talents (intelligence, wit, judgment), traits of temperament (courage, perseverance), and gifts of fortune (wealth, power, health, and even happiness) can all become extremely bad and mischievous if the will that uses them is not good. Moreover, a good will is good not because of the external results it achieves or its fitness for attaining some proposed end, but solely by virtue of its volition—that is, it is intrinsically good in itself (G., p. 394).
To clarify what makes a finite will good in itself (since God’s “holy will” is necessarily in accord with reason and experiences no constraint or obligation), Kant analyses the concept of Duty (Pflicht) through three propositions (G., pp. 397–401): 1. Acting For the Sake of Duty (aus Pflicht) vs. Acting Merely In Accordance with Duty (pflichtmäßig): A action has genuine moral worth only when it is performed for the sake of duty, not from self-interest or natural inclination (Neigung).
Example 1 (Prudential Honesty): A tradesman who never overcharges his customers acts in accordance with duty, but if he does so merely because honesty is good for business, his action has no inner moral worth.
Example 2 (Preserving Life): Preserving one’s life is a duty, but almost everyone has a strong natural inclination to do so; such anxious self-care has no moral worth. Only when an unfortunate man, crushed by hopeless grief and wishing for death, preserves his life without loving it—solely from duty—does his maxim possess moral worth (G., pp. 397–398).
Example 3 (Beneficence): A naturally sympathetic philanthropist who spreads joy out of warm-hearted inclination performs an action that is “proper and lovable,” but it lacks true moral worth unless performed from duty (as when a man whose own mind is clouded by sorrow tears himself out of dead insensibility to help others purely for duty’s sake, G., pp. 398–399). Similarly, the Gospel command to love our neighbour commands practical love (beneficence from duty), not pathological love (emotional affection, which cannot be commanded). (Copleston notes that while Kant did not mean to claim that hating one’s duty makes one more virtuous—as Schiller’s famous epigram lampooned him—his rigoristic desire to isolate pure duty creates the unfortunate impression that moral worth increases as natural inclination decreases.) 2. Moral Worth Lies in the Agent’s Formal Maxim, Not in the Expected Result: An action done from duty derives its moral worth not from the purpose to be attained by it, but from the maxim (subjective principle of volition) by which it is determined—specifically, a formal a priori maxim of obeying universal law, as opposed to a material a posteriori maxim based on desired consequences (G., pp. 399–400). 3. Duty as the Necessity of Acting Out of Reverence for the Law: “Duty is the necessity of acting out of reverence (Achtung) for the law” (G., p. 400). Because all particular material incentives and desired results have been stripped away from the will, nothing remains to determine the good will save the universal conformity of actions to law as such (G., p. 402).
3. The Categorical Imperative and Its Five Formulations
Because human beings possess sensuous desires and inclinations alongside reason, the objective principles of morality (principles) do not automatically coincide with our subjective principles of volition (maxims). Consequently, for any finite imperfect will, the objective moral law appears as a command expressed by an “ought” (Sollen), the formula of which is an Imperative (G., p. 413). Kant distinguishes three kinds of imperatives (G., pp. 414–417):
Although Kant states that there is only one Categorical Imperative, he presents five distinct formulations (grouped into three main formulas in G., p. 436) to bring the idea of reason closer to intuition and feeling:
Kant’s Five Formulations of the Categorical Imperative (Groundwork, Part II):
- Formula I (Universal Law): “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (G., p. 421; Abb., p. 38).
- Formula Ia (Universal Law of Nature): “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature” (G., p. 421; Abb., p. 39; cf. Pr.R., 122).
- Formula II (Humanity / Rational Nature as an End in Itself): Grounded in the postulate that rational beings (persons, as opposed to non-rational things) have absolute intrinsic worth (dignity, not a relative market price): “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other, always at the same time as an end, and never merely as a means” (G., p. 429; Abb., p. 47).
- Formula III (Autonomy of the Universally Legislating Will): The will is not merely subject to the law, but so subject that it must be regarded as giving the law to itself: “So act that your will can regard itself at the same time as making universal law through its maxim” (G., p. 434; cf. Pr.R., 54).
- Formula IIIa (The Kingdom of Ends / Reich der Zwecke): Conceiving a systematic union of rational beings under common self-imposed laws (both as legislating members and, in God’s case, as independent sovereign head / Oberhaupt): “So act as if you were through your maxims always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends” (G., pp. 433–438).
Kant’s Four Concrete Illustrations of the Categorical Imperative (G., pp. 421–424, 429–430) Kant tests four maxims (divided into perfect/strict duties vs. imperfect/meritorious duties, toward oneself vs. others): 1. Suicide (Perfect Duty to Oneself): A man reduced to hopeless despair asks if he may shorten his life out of self-love. Universalized as a law of nature, a system where the very feeling (self-love) whose special office is to impel the furtherance of life is used to destroy life contradicts itself and could not exist as a system of nature; under Formula II, the suicide uses his own person as a mere means to maintain a tolerable state of feeling up to the end of life. 2. False Promises / Borrowing Money Without Intention to Repay (Perfect Duty to Others): Universalizing the maxim of escaping financial distress by making a lying promise logically contradicts itself, for it would make promises impossible and universally distrusted; under Formula II, it uses the defrauded lender as a mere means without his consent. 3. Neglecting Natural Talents for Idleness and Pleasure (Imperfect Duty to Oneself): While a world where men let their talents rust (like the South Sea Islanders) involves no internal logical contradiction, a rational being cannot will that this become a universal law of nature, because as a rational being he necessarily wills that all his faculties be developed; under Formula II, it fails to harmonize with the advancement of humanity as an end in itself. 4. Refusing to Help Others in Distress (Imperfect Duty to Others): While the human race could subsist if no one helped anyone else, a prosperous man cannot will such a universal law without his will contradicting itself, since many situations may arise in which he himself needs the love and sympathy of others, which by such a law sprung from his own will he would rob himself of all hope of obtaining. (Note: Under Formula II in On Perpetual Peace, 1795, Kant also condemns aggressive wars and standing armies as using men as mere instruments/machines in the hands of the State.)
Autonomy vs. Heteronomy of the Will Kant declares that the Autonomy of the Will is the sole principle of all moral laws, whereas Heteronomy—making the will depend on any object or impulse outside its own universal legislative form—is the source of all spurious ethical theories and destroys moral obligation (G., pp. 440–441; Pr.R., p. 58). In the Critique of Practical Reason (Pr.R., p. 69; Abb., p. 129), he classifies and rejects all six types of heteronomous ethics: * Subjective / Empirical Heteronomy: External: (1) Education (Montaigne), (2) Civil Constitution (Mandeville); Internal: (3) Physical Feeling / Pleasure (Epicurus), (4) Moral Feeling / Moral Sense (Hutcheson). * Objective / Rationalist Heteronomy: Internal: (5) Ontological Perfection (the Stoics and Wolff); External: (6) The Will of God (Crusius and theological moralists—since even to obey God’s will morally, we must first autonomously judge that we ought to obey it).
4. Freedom and the Three Postulates of Pure Practical Reason
How is the Categorical Imperative—a synthetic a priori practical proposition—possible (G., Part III, pp. 446–463)? The “third term” that connects the unconditional “ought” with the finite rational will is the positive Idea of Freedom (Autonomy). As a member of the sensible/phenomenal world, man’s actions are subject to natural causal laws (heteronomy); as a member of the intelligible/noumenal world, his pure will is autonomous. Had man belonged solely to the intelligible world, all his actions would always conform to autonomy; because he belongs to both worlds at once, the law of his intelligible will presents itself to his sensible nature as a categorical “ought” (G., p. 454).
In the Critique of Practical Reason (Dialectic), Kant develops his complete moral metaphysics around the three Postulates of Pure Practical Reason—theoretical propositions not demonstrable by speculative reason, but inseparably attached to an a priori unconditional practical law (Pr.R., p. 220; Abb., p. 218):
- Postulate 1: Freedom (Pr.R., pp. 167–175): “I ought” implies “I can.” To save freedom alongside universal natural determinism, Kant assigns natural necessity to man’s existence as appearance in time, and freedom to the very same subject as a thing-in-itself (noumenon) not subject to time-conditions—a position confirmed by the testimony of conscience, which feels moral guilt for past unlawful acts regardless of temporal causal antecedents (Pr.R., p. 175). 2. The Summum Bonum (Complete Good) and Its Antinomy (Pr.R., pp. 198–215): Practical reason seeks the unconditioned totality of its object, the Summum Bonum. While Virtue is the supreme good (the unconditioned condition: worthiness to be happy), the complete/perfect good requires Happiness proportioned to Virtue. Against both the Epicureans (who reduced virtue to the pursuit of happiness) and the Stoics (who claimed that consciousness of virtue is already happiness), Kant insists that virtue and happiness are two heterogeneous elements connected synthetically a priori (virtue as cause, happiness as effect). Because in the sensible world virtue does not necessarily produce happiness, an Antinomy of Practical Reason arises, which is resolved only if man exists also in a supersensible world where the Summum Bonum can be realized through Immortality and God. 3. Postulate 2: Immortality of the Soul (Pr.R., pp. 220–223): The moral law commands the first element of the Summum Bonum: Holiness (the complete accordance of will and disposition with the moral law). Because no finite rational being in the sensible world is capable of holiness at any moment of its existence, this command can be fulfilled only in an endless progress (in infinitum) toward holiness, which presupposes the unending duration of the existence and personality of the same rational being (Immortality). 4. Postulate 3: The Existence of God (Pr.R., pp. 224–237): The second element of the Summum Bonum requires that happiness be apportioned in exact proportion to morality (virtue). Because man,though acting in the world, is not the cause of physical Nature and cannot make Nature harmonize with his moral worthiness, we must postulate a Cause of the whole of Nature distinct from Nature who possesses intelligence and will, omniscience (to know our innermost moral dispositions), omnipotence (to proportion happiness to worthiness), and holiness—namely God. 5. Primacy of Practical Reason (Pr.R., pp. 215–218, 240–255): Because pure reason is ultimately one, when practical reason offers theoretical propositions (the three postulates) inseparably bound up with its a priori law, practical reason holds the primacy, and speculative reason must accept them and think them consistently via the categories (extending our knowledge from a practical point of view, Pr.R., p. 240, without giving us theoretical intuition of supersensible objects).
5. Kant on Religion: Radical Evil and the Invisible Church
In the Critique of Practical Reason (Pr.R., p. 233) and Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793), Kant defines religion as “the recognition of all our duties as divine commands” (Rel., p. 153)—not as arbitrary sanctions of an alien will, but because only through harmony with God’s morally perfect and omnipotent will can we hope to attain the Summum Bonum.
- Radical Evil in Human Nature (Religion, Part I): Against Enlightenment optimism (Rousseau) that man is naturally good, and against extreme Protestant orthodoxy that man’s nature is wholly corrupt, Kant rationalizes the dogma of Original Sin as a radical, innate propensity (Hang) in human nature to invert the moral order of incentives—subordinating the moral law to self-love in our fundamental maxims, through an intelligible, non-temporal act of free choice that cannot be further explained. * The Moral Struggle, the Church, and Rejection of Cultic Worship (Parts II–IV): Moral regeneration requires a “revolution in disposition” toward the ideal of moral perfection personified in Christ. Visible historical churches, creeds, and Scriptures are valuable only as temporary vehicles approximating the universal Invisible Church (the ethical commonwealth of all men united under the laws of virtue). Dismissing prayer, mysticism, and external ritual, Kant declares: “Everything which, apart from a moral way of life, man believes himself capable of doing to please God is mere religious delusion and spurious worship of God” (Rel., p. 170; G.-H., p. 158).
Kant (6): Aesthetics and Teleology — The Critique of Judgment
1. The Mediating Function of Reflective Judgment
In the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant surveys the architecture of his system. Between the sensible realm of the concept of Nature (legislated by the Understanding) and the supersensible realm of the concept of Freedom (legislated by Reason) lies a vast gulf. Yet the world of freedom ought to have an influence on the world of Nature (since moral ends must be realized in the sensible world), which requires that Nature be thinkable as harmonious with ends (J., xx; Bd., p. 13). Kant finds the mediating link in the faculty of Judgment (Urteilskraft), which correlates with the middle mental power of Feeling of Pleasure and Displeasure (J., lviii; Bd., p. 41):
Kant defines Judgment in general as the power of thinking the particular as contained under the universal (J., xxv; Bd., p. 16), and divides it into two kinds: * Determinant Judgment: The universal (rule, principle, or law, such as the Categories) is already given a priori, and judgment merely subsumes the particular under it. * Reflective Judgment: Only the empirical particular is given, and judgment must find the universal for it (J., xxvi). To unify the vast, contingent multiplicity of particular empirical laws into a coherent system of science, Reflective Judgment must be guided by its own a priori transcendental heuristic principle: the Principle of the Formal Purposiveness (Finality) of Nature—representing Nature as if (als ob) an understanding other than ours had adapted its empirical laws to our cognitive faculties (J., xxvii–xxviii; giving rise to maxims like “Nature takes the shortest way” and “Nature makes no leaps”).
This purposiveness of Nature can be represented in two ways (J., xlviii–lii; Bd., pp. 34–37): 1. Subjective / Formal Purposiveness (The Aesthetic Judgment): The accordance of the form of an object with the free interplay of our cognitive faculties (imagination and understanding) prior to any concept, experienced in a feeling of pleasure (Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgment). 2. Objective / Material Purposiveness (The Teleological Judgment): The accordance of the form of an existing natural thing with a concept of what the thing is meant to be (an end or purpose of Nature, Naturzweck, Part II: Critique of Teleological Judgment).
2. The Analytic of the Beautiful: The Four Moments of Taste
In the Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant analyses the Judgment of Taste (Geschmacksurteil)—the judgment that pronounces an object beautiful—across Four Moments correlated with the four classes of Categories (J., 3–68; Bd., pp. 45–96):
3. The Analytic of the Sublime, Deduction of Taste, Fine Art, and Genius
Following Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756)—while transcending Burke’s merely empirical-physiological treatment—Kant contrasts the Beautiful with the Sublime (das Erhabene) (J., 74–113; Bd., pp. 99–132): * Beautiful vs. Sublime: Beauty concerns bounded form (quality), involves a harmonious play of imagination and understanding, and produces a quiet, positive joy compatible with charm (Reiz). The Sublime is occasioned by formlessness or limitlessness represented as a totality (quantity), does violence to the imagination while bringing it into accord with the Ideas of Reason, excludes charm, and produces wonder, awe, and emotion (Rührung)—a momentary checking followed by a more powerful outflow of vital force (J., 43, 75–77). * Sublimity Resides in the Human Mind, Not in Nature: Strictly speaking, natural objects (such as the storm-tossed ocean) cannot be called sublime; they merely occasion the feeling of the sublimity of our own supersensible vocation and reason (J., 77–78). Kant divides the sublime into:
The Mathematical Sublime (referred to Cognition): “That which is absolutely great” or “that in comparison with which all else is small” (J., 80, 84; e.g., St. Peter’s in Rome, the starry heavens), where imagination’s failure to comprehend infinity awakens the Idea of the supersensible in Reason.
The Dynamical Sublime (referred to Desire): Experienced when we behold the terrifying physical might of Nature (volcanoes, hurricanes, waterfalls) from a safe vantage-point (a qualification that provoked Schopenhauer’s sarcasm), awakening consciousness of our moral superiority as free noumenal persons over all physical power of Nature (J., 104–109).
- Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments (J., 131–150): Whereas the sublime needs no deduction because it refers directly to our own inner sentiments, pure judgments of taste claim universal validity about the form of an object. Kant justifies this claim by showing that aesthetic pleasure rests solely on the formal subjective conditions of judgment (the harmony of imagination and understanding), which we are entitled to presuppose as identical in all men because without them cognition and representations could not be universally communicated. * Fine Art, Genius, and Aesthetical Ideas (J., 173–203): Fine art (schöne Kunst) must appear as free from the constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of Nature, even though we know it is art (J., 179). Because its rules cannot be reduced to determinate concepts, fine art is possible only as the product of Genius—defined as “the innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which Nature gives the rule to art” (J., 181; Bd., p. 188). Genius is characterized by originality (opposed to imitation, though requiring academic training and taste), exemplary products, and Spirit (Geist)—the animating faculty of presenting Aesthetical Ideas, which are representations of the imagination that occasion much thought without any determinate concept or language ever being adequate to them (the exact counterpart of a Rational Idea, which is a concept to which no intuition is adequate, J., 192–194). * Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment and Beauty as Symbol of Morality (J., 232–264): Kant resolves the Antinomy of Taste (Thesis: Taste is not based on concepts, else we could prove it; Antithesis: Taste is based on concepts, else we could not claim universal assent) by showing that the Thesis denies determinate concepts of the understanding, while the Antithesis affirms an indeterminate concept of Reason—namely the supersensible substrate of humanity and Nature (J., 234–237). Finally, in § 59 (J., 254–260; Bd., pp. 248–253), Kant concludes that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good” because both please immediately, disinterestedly, in a harmony of freedom with law, and universally—allowing taste to mediate the transition from sense-enjoyment to moral feeling.
4. The Critique of Teleological Judgment: Organisms, Mechanism, and Ethico-Theology
In Part II of the Critique of Judgment, Kant distinguishes four kinds of finality: (1) subjective formal (aesthetic beauty), (2) objective formal (geometrical figures like the circle solving multiple problems, J., 272), (3) subjective material (human artifacts), and (4) objective material finality in Nature. He further subdivides natural finality into relative / external finality (e.g., grass existing for cows or reindeer for Eskimos, which is purely hypothetical since no study of Nature proves that Eskimos must live in the far north, J., 280–284) and internal finality, which is realized in organized beings (organisms).
Definition of an Organism as a Natural Purpose (Naturzweck, J., 286–296):
“A thing exists as a natural purpose if it is (although in a double sense) both cause and effect of itself” (J., 286; e.g., a tree reproduces its species, produces itself by growth/assimilation, and its leaves and branches reciprocally maintain each other). Unlike a machine such as a watch—where parts exist for one another through an external artificer and possess only moving power (bewegende Kraft)—an organism is a self-organizing being possessing an intrinsic formative power (bildende Kraft) in which every part is reciprocally both end (purpose) and means (instrument/organ): “An organized product of Nature is one in which everything is reciprocally end and means” (J., 295–296; Bd., pp. 280–281).The Antinomy of Teleological Judgment (J., 313–363):
First Maxim (Thesis): “All production of material things and their forms must be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws.”
Second Maxim (Antithesis): “Some products of material Nature cannot be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws (their judging requires a quite different law of causality, namely that of final causes).”
Resolution: If turned into constitutive principles of objects in themselves, these statements contradict each other. As regulative maxims of reflective judgment, however, they are entirely compatible: the scientist must push mechanistic explanation as far as he possibly can, while recognizing that for human discursive understanding “it is absurd for men even to entertain any thought of soaina day seeing a Newton arise who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no design has ordered” (J., 338; Bd., p. 312). While Epicurean chance, Spinozistic fatalism, and hylozoism fail to explain finality, theism provides the only intelligible regulative concept for our reflection, and mechanism and teleology may ultimately be united in the unknowable supersensible substrate of Nature. * From Physico-Theology to Ethico-Theology (J., 398–483): Once again, physical teleology can at most suggest an artistic understanding (Kunstverstand) for scattered ends, not a Creator of supreme wisdom (Weisheit) (J., 408–410). To find the final end (Endzweck) of creation, we must ask for what end the world itself exists. “Without man the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose… But it is only as a moral being that we recognize man as the purpose of creation” (J., 410, 413; Bd., pp. 370, 372). Thus Ethico-Theology completes the critical edifice, grounding practical faith (habitus) in a wise, omnipotent Moral Author of the universe.
Kant (7): Remarks on the Opus Postumum
1. The Transition from the Metaphysics of Nature to Physics
In his Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science (1786), Kant had treated matter a priori simply as “the movable in space” (das Bewegliche im Raum, W., XXI, p. 526). Empirical Physics, however, investigates the systematic laws of the moving forces of matter as given in experience (W., XXII, p. 497). In the Opus Postumum (W., Vols. XXI–XXII), Kant insists that passing directly from pure metaphysics of Nature to empirical physics without a bridge would be an illegitimate leap (Sprung) rather than a lawful transition (gesetzmäßiger Übergang, W., XXI, pp. 525–526).
Because physics is a systematic science rather than a haphazard heap of observations—and because “from empirical intuition we can take nothing out for physics except what we ourselves have put into it” (W., XXII, p. 323)—we require a “schematism of the faculty of judgment for the moving forces of matter” (W., XXI, p. 291). This bridge is provided by mediating concepts (Zwischenbegriffe) of the moving forces of matter (such as attraction, repulsion, and the all-pervading caloric/ether), classified a priori according to the four classes of Categories (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Modality), which anticipate problematically the possible types of moving forces in Nature and guide empirical verification.
2. Transcendental Philosophy and the Self-Positing Construction of Experience
In the course of working out this transition, Kant expands his inquiry into a grand restatement of Transcendental Philosophy as the complete system of the Ideas of Pure Reason, made possible through the positing of three objects: God, the World, and Man in the world as subject to the principle of duty (W., XXI, pp. 77–82, 104). * God and the World as Correlative Ideas: Transcendental philosophy culminates in the two mutually related Ideas of God (the totality of supersensible, noumenal reality) and the World (the totality of sensible, phenomenal reality), which together form the Universe (universum) (W., XXI, pp. 20–22, 150). Each contains a maximum (“there is one God and one World”), and their relation is not co-ordination but subordination: entia non coordinata, sed subordinata (W., XXII, p. 62). * The Self-Positing Subject (Selbstsetzung): In striking passages that anticipate or echo Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794), Kant describes the construction of experience as a continuous process of self-positing, self-making, and self-constituting by the thinking subject: “The first act of reason is consciousness” (W., XXI, p. 105; “cogito, sum: it should not run, ergo”). Space and time are primitive, self-made products of the imagination; the subject posits itself as empirical object and affects itself through the moving forces of matter; and we are, subjectively, “self-creators (Selbstschöpfer) of the objects we think” (W., XXI, p. 21). * Status of the Thing-in-Itself: In several notes, Kant describes the thing-in-itself (Noumenon) as “not a real thing”, “not an existing reality, but merely a principle”, a “thought-thing (Gedankending / ens rationis) in the representation of which the subject posits itself” (W., XXII, pp. 24, 34, 36–37). Yet in other notes, he reaffirms the classic doctrine of the first Critique: the thing-in-itself is a necessary cogitabile correlative to appearance, and “if we take the world as appearance, it proves precisely the existence (Dasein) of something which is not appearance” (W., XXI, p. 440; XXII, p. 23). Copleston concludes that while Kant went a long way toward answering his idealist critics by showing how his system could accommodate the valid elements of Fichte’s transcendental idealism, he never definitively abandoned the realistic strand of his thought.
3. The Immediate Moral Presence of God and Man as Microcosm
In the final fascicles of the Opus Postumum, Kant seeks a more immediate transition from the moral consciousness to belief in God than the roundabout postulate of the Summum Bonum in the second Critique:
God in the Second Critique (1788) vs. God in the Opus Postumum (1796–1803):
- Second Critique (Mediated Inference via the Summum Bonum): The moral law commands us to promote the Summum Bonum (virtue + proportioned happiness); since man does not control physical Nature, we inferentially postulate God as the external Author of Nature who harmonizes happiness with virtue.
- Opus Postumum (Immediate Presence in the Categorical Imperative): Kant drops the detour through happiness and the Summum Bonum. The Categorical Imperative itself is immediately experienced as the voice of a personal, obligation-imposing Legislator: “In the moral-practical reason lies the categorical imperative to regard all human duties as divine commands” (W., XXI, p. 12); “To see all in God. The categorical imperative” (XXI, p. 15). Formulating a moral analogue to the Ontological Argument, Kant writes: “The mere Idea of God is at the same time a postulate of His existence. To think Him and to believe in Him is an identical proposition” (W., XXII, p. 109; cf. p. 62). While some notes call God an ens rationis (meaning God cannot be proved as an external phenomenal substance), Copleston judges that Kant retained his personal belief in a real, personal God known immediately in and through the awareness of moral obligation.
Finally, Man stands at the centre of the Opus Postumum as the mediating copula (subject, predicate, and copula) who synthesizes the two supreme Ideas of God and the World into one proposition (W., XXI, pp. 34–37). Having a foot in both spheres—as a living corporeal being (animal) in space and time subject to natural causality, and as a free, self-conscious moral spirit (a Person) in the noumenal sphere who determines phenomena through freedom (W., XXI, pp. 18, 42, 50, 61)—Man is the Microcosm who thinks the Macrocosm.
Concluding Review: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Philosophy in Retrospect
1. Philosophy and Extra-Philosophical Influences
Opening his retrospective across Volumes IV–VI, Copleston notes that while philosophy possesses an internal historical continuity, it never develops in a vacuum. Extra-philosophical cultural factors shape philosophy in three principal ways: 1. Models of Method: The triumph of Renaissance mathematics inspired Descartes and Spinoza to model philosophy on mathematical deduction; Newtonian experimental physics provided the methodological model for Hume; and modern hypothetico-deductive physics inspires contemporary attempts to treat metaphysics as wide-scale empirical hypotheses. 2. Thematic Emphasis: Theology (“queen of the sciences”) shaped mediaeval Scholasticism; the nineteenth-century rise of historical science shaped Hegel; economic industrialization shaped Marxism; evolutionary biology and psychology shaped Bergson; and the transition from classical to quantum/relativity physics shaped Whitehead. 3. Formulation of Perennial Problems: A perennial problem like the relation of soul and body was framed in mechanical-interactionist terms in the seventeenth century, and in psychophysiological or linguistic terms in later centuries. Recognizing these historical influences is a matter of empirical fact and does not commit us to historical relativism: we can still judge the objective truth or falsity of a philosopher’s propositions independently of their historical genesis.
2. Critique of Pure Continental Rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz)
Constructing the “ideal type” of pre-Kantian Continental Rationalism (approximated most closely by Spinoza, since Descartes started from the finite Cogito and refused to deduce the world from God, while Leibniz separated contingent truths of fact governed by the principle of the best from necessary truths of reason governed by non-contradiction), Copleston identifies its core ambition: to reconstruct the objective system of existent reality a priori from the resources of the mind alone by a deductive method analogous to pure mathematics—assimilating the causal relation to logical implication, postulating virtually innate ideas, and relying on the Ontological Argument to bridge the gap from essence/possibility to the existence of the ultimate Being.
Copleston’s Three Dogmatic Refutations of Deductive Rationalism:
While rejecting innate ideas via Ockham’s razor and Locke’s critique—yet defending against empiricists the existence of synthetic a priori metaphysical principles (such as “everything which comes into being does so through the agency of an extrinsic cause”, grounded not in Kantian subjective forms, but in an intellectual insight into the objective intelligible structure of being occasioned by sense-experience)—Copleston proves that a purely deductive metaphysics of existent reality is impossible on three counts:
- No Deduction of Existence from Non-Existential Premisses: From premisses that state what must necessarily be true of anything if there is anything (general ontology), we can never logically deduce that anything actually exists; we remain within the sphere of possibility.
- No Deduction of Contingent Facts from Necessary Truths: From necessary ontological propositions we can deduce only necessary propositions, never the contingent empirical truths of chemistry, botany, or medicine (knowing that every contingent thing has a cause cannot deduce the specific cause of lung cancer).
- No Deduction of Finite Beings from the Infinite Being: Even if we start with an existential proposition affirming the Infinite Being (God), we cannot deduce the existence of finite beings. If “Infinite Being” is defined monistically as an infinite collection of finite beings, the question is begged tautologically; if God is distinct and self-sufficient, creation adds nothing to His perfection and cannot be deduced as a logical or metaphysical necessity of the divine nature.
While Continental Rationalism failed in its dream of assimilating philosophy to pure deductive mathematics, it left enduring legacies: Spinoza’s analysis of the feeling of freedom as ignorance of determining causes anticipated depth psychology, and Leibniz’s characteristica universalis pioneered modern symbolic logic and linguistic analysis.
3. Critique of British Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume)
Unlike pre-Kantian rationalism, British Empiricism—especially in its radical culmination in David Hume, who sought to apply the experimental method of Newton to the “science of man”—remains a living force in contemporary analytical and positivist philosophy. Copleston evaluates Humean empiricism under two main heads:
- Reductive Analysis and the Fallacy of Epistemological Atomism: Going far beyond Locke and Berkeley, Hume practised radical reductive analysis based on the working assumption that the ultimate constituents of human experience are atomic, discrete, separate “impressions” (and their faint copies, “ideas”). Copleston argues that this atomization of experience confuses the abstract products of reflective analysis with the concrete original datum of experience (in which subject, act of perceiving, and object are given together). Its fatal flaw is exposed in Hume’s own analysis of the self: having dissolved the mind into a mere bundle of discrete perceptions, Hume is forced to attribute our belief in personal identity to a “propensity to imagine something substantial connecting the perceptions”—yet a bundle of perceptions has no subject that could possess such a propensity! Hume’s own candid confession of perplexity in the Appendix to the Treatise proves that phenomenalistic atomism (including modern theories that minds and tables are “logical constructions” out of sense-data, which lead to solipsism or unattached sense-data) is untenable. 2. Logical Dichotomy of Propositions and the Elimination of Metaphysics: Hume’s division between relations of ideas (demonstrative, analytic tautologies) and matters of fact (contingent, synthetic a posteriori empirical hypotheses, where the contrary is always conceivable) anticipates modern logical positivism, where metaphysical statements are dismissed as meaningless or merely “emotive” (matching Hume’s own reduction of moral judgments to feelings of approbation or disapprobation). Against this dichotomy, Copleston argues that while there is no verbal contradiction in saying “X begins to exist and has no cause” on the superficial level of ordinary linguistic usage, a deeper metaphysical insight into being reveals an objective necessary connection (synthetic a priori in a non-Kantian, realist sense).
4. The Enlightenment Science of Man and the “Is–Ought” Question
Surveying the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Condillac, Helvétius, Montesquieu, Rousseau, the Physiocrats, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot), Copleston characterizes its shift from the seventeenth century as a transition from the atmosphere of deduction to that of induction. While les philosophes harboured their own uncritical dogmas (viewing the Middle Ages as pure darkness and assuming that scientific knowledge automatically produces moral virtue), and while their treatment of religion was often superficial (presenting the comical spectacle in d’Holbach and Cabanis of man as thinking subject reducing himself to a purely material object), they championed the enduring Western ideals of freedom of thought and religious toleration and established the autonomous sciences of man (psychology, sociology, economics).
Behind the Enlightenment’s polemical separation of ethics from theology and metaphysics, Copleston identifies a profound, permanent philosophical problem first formulated with crystal clarity by David Hume (Treatise, III, 1, 1, Selby-Bigge, p. 469): how can an “ought” or “ought not” statement ever be logically deduced from an “is” or “is not” statement of fact? Whether a moralist appeals to theological facts (“God created us, therefore we ought to obey Him”) or to anthropological facts about human nature, any valid teleological ethics (which Copleston himself favours, holding that the concept of the good is primary and “ought” must be interpreted in function of the good) must explicitly face and answer Hume’s question.
5. The Philosophy of History: Critique of Method vs. Cosmic Patterns
Reviewing the rise of the Philosophy of History (Bossuet, Vico, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condorcet, Lessing, Herder), Copleston distinguishes three levels of inquiry: 1. Meta-Historical Critique of Method: Analysing the nature of historical fact, interpretation, imaginative reconstruction, and norms of selection. This is an unquestionably legitimate philosophical discipline. 2. Empirical Search for Loose Cultural Patterns/Cycles: As in Vico and Montesquieu; this is legitimate provided it respects human freedom (rejecting fatalistic “iron laws”) and is tested by empirical evidence—though one may ask whether valid broad generalizations do not belong simply to the historian rather than requiring a separate “philosopher of history.” 3. A Priori Teleological Schemes of Universal History: Whether overtly theological (St. Augustine, Bossuet), overtly metaphysical (Hegel), or covertly value-laden (Condorcet). Copleston concludes that while a theology of history is valid within the strict limits of divine revelation (though it permits no specific predictions of secular events), a purely secular philosophical science of the total teleological plot of history is a dubious enterprise that either states truisms or forces empirical data into a preconceived bed.
6. Immanuel Kant’s Critical Synthesis and Its Twofold Legacy
Evaluating Immanuel Kant, Copleston rejects the superficial cliché that Kant’s system is a mere “conflation” of Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism. Rather, Kant’s system is an original triumph over both (a synthesis only in Hegel’s sense of Aufhebung, transforming and transcending both antitheses), driven by his pervasive aim: reconciling the deterministic world of Newtonian physics with the moral world of human freedom and religious faith.
| Philosophical Stream | How It Developed Out of the Internal Tensions of Kant’s System |
|---|---|
| 1. German Speculative Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) | Exploited the tension between Kant’s constructivist subjectivism and the Thing-in-Itself (Ding an sich). Since affirming the thing-in-itself as the external cause of sensation violates Kant’s restriction of causality to phenomena, Fichte eliminated the thing-in-itself as a superfluous monstrosity—transforming Kant’s Transcendental Ego (which for Kant was a finite logical condition of experience) into an Infinite Creative Subject / Absolute Spirit that posits both finite subjects and objects, turning epistemology back into full-blown Idealist Metaphysics. |
| 2. Neo-Kantianism & Positivism (Mid-19th Century to Logical Positivism) | Raising the cry “Back to Kant!” against Hegelian metaphysics, Neo-Kantians stressed Kant as the methodical analyst of the a priori conditions of science and morals. Positivists went further: arguing that since Kant’s categories have meaning only within sense-experience, talk of noumenal reality is meaningless, reducing Kant’s practical faith to mere “emotive” significance and treating Kant as a halfway house to radical positivism. |
| 3. Thomistic / Critical Realism (Copleston’s Assessment) | Rejects the dilemma of choosing between Idealism and Positivism by questioning Kant’s Copernican Revolution at its root. While praising Kant’s permanent insights—such as the Transcendental Unity of Apperception against Humean atomism—Realism holds that the mind does not construct phenomenal objects out of sense-data, but apprehends real things in their objective intelligible being, grounding metaphysical principles in objective insight rather than subjective a priori forms. |
7. Mediaeval vs. Modern Philosophy: Being vs. Knowledge
Finally, Copleston examines the common generalization that mediaeval philosophy was concerned with the problem of Being, whereas modern philosophy has been concerned with the problem of Knowledge (Epistemology). Qualifiedly, the generalization cannot be pressed too far: mediaevals like Nicholas of Autrecourt (“the mediaeval Hume”) wrote critical epistemology, while moderns like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz constructed grand metaphysics of Being (and even Kant subordinated his critique of knowledge to his three great questions of human destiny: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for?).
Nevertheless, the generalization captures a profound historical shift explained by two decisive factors: 1. Direct Realism vs. the “Screen of Ideas” (Representationalism): Mediaeval philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas held a direct realist theory of perception: we directly perceive trees, tables, and men, not our own mental representations, and the intellect penetrates their objective intelligible being. Once Descartes and Locke treated “ideas” as the immediate objects of perception and thought—placing a representative screen between the mind and external reality—the epistemological question (“How can we know that our ideas correspond to extramental things?”) inevitably usurped first place in philosophy. 2. Cognitive Conformity vs. Mental Construction of the World: Whereas the mediaeval metaphysician viewed the mind as conforming itself to the objective structure of reality, Hume and Kant depicted the empirical world as a mental or logical construction standing between the knowing subject and things-in-themselves—pushing epistemology to the forefront of modern philosophy and setting the stage for the nineteenth-century transition from Kantian criticism to German Idealism (recounted in Volume VII).
Master Takeaways, Mental Models, and Cast of Thinkers
1. Twenty-Four Master Takeaways
- The Positive "Science of Man" Behind Enlightenment Polemics (Ch. I–II, XVII): The French Enlightenment was not a mere negative assault on throne and altar; its constructive core was applying Newton's empirical law-seeking and Locke's genetic psychology to build an autonomous science of human nature—laying the foundations for modern psychology, comparative sociology, and economics.
- Montesquieu's Institutional Checks and Sociological Relativism (Ch. I): In De l'esprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu proved that positive laws are relative to a society's climate, economy, and governmental "principle" (Virtue in republics, Honour in monarchies, Fear in despotisms), while establishing that political liberty requires the institutional separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers.
- Rousseau's General Will and Its Dual Legacy in Kant and Hegel (Ch. III–IV): By distinguishing the Will of All (sum of selfish private interests) from the infallible General Will (which wills the common good and constitutes each citizen's true autonomous will), Rousseau simultaneously bequeathed the autonomous moral will to Kant and the organic moral State (along with the totalitarian danger of forcing dissenters "to be free") to Hegel.
- Vico's Verum-Factum Principle Overturns Cartesianism (Ch. VIII): Against Descartes' elevation of mathematics and physics over historical studies, Giambattista Vico (1710/1725) demonstrated that "the criterion of truth is to have made it": mathematics is transparent only because man constructs its fictional entities, whereas human history, language, myth, and law—being real worlds made by men—are more genuinely intelligible to man than physical Nature (which God alone made).
- Kant's Copernican Revolution Secures Science by Limiting It to Phenomena (Ch. XI–XIII): To rescue Newtonian physics and mathematics from Hume's sceptical empiricism, Kant inverted epistemology: objects of experience must conform to the a priori forms of our Sensibility (Space and Time) and Understanding (the 12 Categories). This guarantees universal and necessary synthetic a priori laws across all possible experience (phenomena), while proving that theoretical reason can never know things-in-themselves (noumena).
- The Primacy of Practical Reason and the Three Moral Postulates (Ch. XIV–XVI): By exposing the fallacies of dogmatic metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant "denied knowledge in order to make room for faith." Through the unconditional Categorical Imperative of Pure Practical Reason, man recognizes his noumenal Freedom and is rationally warranted in postulating Immortality (for endless progress toward holiness) and God (to harmonize happiness with moral worth in the Summum Bonum), while Reflective Judgment (beauty and organic teleology) bridges the gulf between Nature and Freedom.
- Bayle's Separation of Faith, Reason, and Morality (Ch. I): In his Dictionnaire (1695–1697), Pierre Bayle argued that all metaphysical proofs of God and Theodicy collapse before the problem of evil, placed faith in the non-rational realm, and first asserted that a moral society composed entirely of atheists is possible.
- Condillac's "Transformed Sensations" and Voluntaristic Inquiétude (Ch. I): Using his Statue Analogy (1754), Condillac eliminated Locke's separate faculty of reflection, deriving attention, memory, comparison, judgment, and will from sensation alone driven by uneasiness (*inquiétude* / felt need), while showing that touch + movement alone generates the judgment of an external world.
- Helvétius's Utilitarian Environmentalism (Ch. I): Helvétius (1758/1772) reduced all human motivation to corporeal self-love (pleasure/pain), defined virtue as public utility, and asserted that since all minds are born equal, "education and legislation can do all."
- D'Alembert's Proto-Positivism vs. Diderot's Dynamic Pan-Psychism (Ch. II): While d'Alembert restricted philosophy to correlating observable phenomena without occult essences, Diderot moved from deism through atheism to a dynamic, evolutionary naturalistic pantheism in which sensitivity belongs to all matter.
- The Self-Refutation of Dogmatic Materialism (Ch. II): The materialism of La Mettrie (*Man a Machine*, 1748), d'Holbach (*System of Nature*, 1770), and Cabanis (*"the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile"*) contradicts itself both ethically (blaming priests and kings in a strictly determined universe) and epistemologically (reducing truth-claims to mere physiological secretions).
- Boscovich's Dynamic Point-Atomism (Ch. II): In 1758, the Jesuit mathematician Roger Boscovich replaced extended solid corpuscles with unextended centres of force that attract as $1/d^2$ at large distances and repel to infinity as $d \to 0$, proving that physical contact between atoms is impossible.
- Physiocratic Laissez-Faire and Turgot's Law of the Three Stages (Ch. II): Quesnay (1758) argued that only agriculture yields a *produit net* and counselled non-interference (*laissez-faire*) with natural economic laws, while Turgot (1750) formulated the Theological → Metaphysical → Scientific law of historical progress eighty years before Comte.
- Thomasius's Three Spheres of Natural Law, Politics, and Ethics (Ch. V): Christian Thomasius (1705) distinguished enforceable Justice (*Justum*) (not doing to others what you would not have done to you), Decency (*Decorum* / Politics) (doing to others what you wish done to you), and Virtue (*Honestum* / Ethics) (doing to yourself what you wish others to do to themselves).
- Wolff's Essentialist Rationalism and the Society of Nations (Ch. V): Christian Wolff defined philosophy as the science of all possible things deduced from non-contradiction and sufficient reason, canonicalized the fourfold division of metaphysics, and proposed a supreme international State (**civitas maxima) governed by the voluntary law of nations**.
- Baumgarten and Mendelssohn on the Autonomy of Aesthetics (Ch. V–VI): Baumgarten (1735/1750) established aesthetics as the science of sensitive knowledge and the "analogue of reason," while Mendelssohn (1755) isolated the disinterested "faculty of approval" between cognition and desire—directly preparing Kant's *Critique of Judgment*.
- Lessing's Dynamic Truth and Progressive Revelation (Ch. VI): Lessing (*Education of the Human Race*, 1780) reinterpreted positive religions as pedagogical stages educating mankind from Old Testament temporal sanctions and New Testament eternal rewards toward a third age of autonomous moral goodness for its own sake.
- Hamann, Herder, and the Linguistic Critique of Pure Reason (Ch. VII, IX): Hamann and Herder attacked Kant's *Critique* for splitting the living human personality into abstract faculties and ignoring language: for Herder, thinking is inward speaking, mathematical propositions are tautologies, and every national culture possesses its own organic centre of happiness toward the realization of *Humanität*.
- Jacobi's Dilemma of the Kantian Thing-in-Itself (Ch. VII): F. H. Jacobi demonstrated that one cannot enter Kant's system without presupposing the thing-in-itself as the cause of sense-impressions, yet one cannot remain in Kant's system with that presupposition because Kant restricts the category of causality to phenomena alone.
- Kant's Transcendental Unity of Apperception Refutes Humean Atomism (Ch. XII): Against Hume's bundle-theory of the self, Kant proved in the *Transcendental Deduction* that no connected experience or object is possible unless the identical *"I think"* can accompany all representations, requiring synthesis through the 12 Categories schematized in Time.
- Kant's Refutation of Idealism Turns Descartes Upside Down (Ch. XII): In B, 274–279, Kant proved that empirical consciousness of my own inner states in time presupposes something permanent in perception, which can only be an actual spatial object outside me—meaning that immediate consciousness of the external world is required for mediated self-consciousness.
- The Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Refutation of the Ontological Proof (Ch. XIII): Kant showed that Rational Psychology commits a four-term fallacy by confusing the logical subject (*"I think"*) with an intuited substance; that Cosmology's Mathematical Antinomies are both false while its Dynamical Antinomies (Freedom and Necessary Being) may both be true across the現象/noumena divide; and that the Ontological Proof fails because existence is not a real predicate.
- Aesthetic Purposiveness Without Purpose and Organisms as Self-Organizing (Ch. XV): In the Third *Critique*, Kant defined beauty as disinterested, universally communicable purposiveness without a concept of purpose, genius as the faculty of Aesthetical Ideas, and an organism (*Naturzweck*) as a self-organizing being in which every part is reciprocally both cause and effect (end and means) of the whole.
- Copleston's Realist Critique of Rationalism, Empiricism, and Kant (Ch. XVII): In his *Concluding Review*, Copleston proves that deductive rationalism cannot deduce existence from possibility or finite beings from God; that Humean empiricism mistakes abstract sense-data for concrete experience; and that the modern obsession with epistemology over ontology arose from the Cartesian-Lockean error of treating "ideas" as a representative screen between the mind and real being.
2. Master Table of Frameworks & Mental Models
| Framework / Model | Originator & Work | What It Says (Core Mechanism) | When to Use It |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nature vs. Principle of Government & Separation of Powers | Montesquieu De l'esprit des lois (1748) |
Distinguishes constitutional structure (nature) from motivating passion (principle: Virtue, Honour, Fear), and divides Legislative, Executive, and Judicial powers as mutual checks. | Designing institutional governance, constitutional checks, and socio-legal analysis. |
| The Statue Analogy & Transformed Sensations | Condillac Treatise on Sensations (1754) |
Reconstructs all cognitive and volitional operations (attention, memory, comparison, judgment, desire, will) from single sense-inputs driven by inquiétude (felt need). | Bottom-up cognitive modelling, agent perception architecture, and minimal-input learning. |
| Law of the Three Stages | Turgot (1750) Sorbonne Discourses |
Human thought advances through three phases: (1) Religious (anthropomorphic deities), (2) Metaphysical (abstract essences), and (3) Scientific (mathematical-empirical correlations). | Analysing the evolution of scientific paradigms and secularization of knowledge. |
| The General Will vs. The Will of All | Rousseau Social Contract (1762) |
The Will of All is the mere sum of selfish private and factional interests; the General Will is the sovereign people's uncorrupted rational orientation toward the universal common good. | Evaluating democratic deliberation, factional capture, and public-interest alignment. |
| Justum, Decorum, and Honestum | Thomasius Fundamenta juris naturae (1705) |
Triad of social norms: Justum (Law: do not harm others = external peace), Decorum (Politics: do good to others = social harmony), Honestum (Ethics: inner self-respect = peace of soul). | Distinguishing enforceable legal compliance from civic etiquette and personal moral ethics. |
| The Verum-Factum Principle & Corsi e Ricorsi | Giambattista Vico De antiquissima (1710); New Science (1725) |
We truly know only what we make (verum = factum); hence human history is more intelligible than physical Nature, moving in spirals through the Ages of Gods (Sense), Heroes (Imagination), and Men (Reason). | Epistemology of social sciences, cultural cycle forecasting, and decoding myth/language. |
| Analytic vs. Synthetic & A Priori vs. A Posteriori | Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87) |
Analytic a priori judgments unpack definitions; Synthetic a posteriori judgments report contingent facts; Synthetic a priori judgments amplify knowledge with strict necessity and universality. | Auditing the logical status of foundational axioms, scientific laws, and metaphysical claims. |
| The Copernican Revolution & 12 Categories | Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87) |
Objects of experience are constituted by the mind's a priori forms of Sensibility (Space/Time) and Understanding (12 Categories) under the Transcendental Unity of Apperception, mediated by temporal Schemata. | Epistemological architecture, ontology design, and distinguishing model-imposed structure from raw data. |
| Constitutive vs. Regulative ("As-If") Principles | Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason (Dialectic) |
Constitutive principles (Categories) determine objects of experience; Regulative Ideas (Soul, World, God) give no knowledge of objects, but serve as indispensable heuristic maxims to unify science. | Separating verifiable operational models from heuristic research programmes. |
| The Five Formulations of the Categorical Imperative | Immanuel Kant Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) |
Tests moral maxims by: (1) Universal Law, (1a) Law of Nature, (2) Treating Humanity (Persons) as an End in Itself, never merely as a means, (3) Autonomy of the Will, and (3a) the Kingdom of Ends. | Deontological ethics, human-rights guardrails, and AI/enterprise governance alignment. |
| Determinant vs. Reflective Judgment & Naturzweck | Immanuel Kant Critique of Judgment (1790) |
Determinant judgment subsumes particulars under given universals; Reflective judgment ascends from particulars to universals via a priori Purposiveness (aesthetic taste and self-organizing organisms). | Aesthetic criticism, systems biology (autopoiesis), and bridging mechanistic and teleological models. |
- Thomistic Direct Realism as the Ultimate Yardstick (Ch. XII, XIII, XVII): Copleston consistently evaluates modern epistemology against the benchmark of St. Thomas Aquinas's direct realism and existential metaphysics (citing Étienne Gilson). While his critique of Humean sense-datum atomism and Cartesian-Lockean representationalism ("the screen of ideas") is powerful and aligns closely with post-Wittgensteinian analytical philosophy, his defence of non-Kantian synthetic a priori metaphysical principles (e.g., that contingent coming-to-be self-evidently requires an extrinsic cause) relies on an appeal to an "intellectual insight into the objective intelligible structure of being" that neither Humean empiricists nor Kantians would grant.
- Underestimation of Symbolic Logic and Non-Euclidean Physics in Kant's Legacy: While Copleston rightly notes that non-Euclidean geometry and Russell's Principia Mathematica challenged Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, his treatment of eighteenth-century philosophy of science focuses primarily on classical metaphysics rather than the formal mathematical mechanics of Euler, Lagrange, and d'Alembert.
- Theology vs. Philosophy of History (Ch. VIII, IX, XVII): Copleston's scepticism toward any secular philosophy of history (holding that between empirical historiography and a revelation-based theology of history there is no room for a scientific philosophical plot of universal history) is a salutary antidote to Hegelian and Marxist determinism, though it arguably underplays the heuristic value of macro-sociological models initiated by Vico, Montesquieu, and Herder.
3. Who's Who in Volume VI (Cast of Thinkers)
| Thinker & Dates | Movement / Role | Key Works & Decisive Philosophical Contributions |
|---|---|---|
| Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) |
French Precursor / Sceptic | Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–97). Arsenal of Enlightenment scepticism; attacked metaphysical proofs and theodicy via the problem of evil; separated faith from reason and morality from religion (society of atheists possible). |
| Fontenelle (1657–1757) |
French Popularizer of Science | Plurality of Worlds (1686); Origin of Fables; History of Oracles. Secretary of Academy of Sciences; defended Cartesian vortices vs. Newton; showed myths originated as primitive intellectual explanations displaced by science. |
| Montesquieu (1689–1755) |
French Political Philosopher | Persian Letters (1721); Spirit of Laws (1748). Pioneer of comparative sociology of law; typology of Republic (Virtue), Monarchy (Honour), Despotism (Fear); climatic relativism; separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. |
| Maupertuis (1698–1759) |
French Scientist & Philosopher | Essay on Cosmology (1750); System of Nature (1751). Confirmed Earth's polar flattening in Lapland (1736); phenomenalist analysis of force; teleological Principle of Least Action; hylozoistic attribution of elementary perception to particles. |
| Voltaire (F. M. Arouet) (1694–1778) |
French Literary Leader / Deist | Philosophical Letters (1734); Philosophy of Newton (1738); Essai sur les mœurs (1756); Candide (1759); Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Championed Newtonian theism (watchmaker argument), civil toleration, and enlightened despotism; shifted after 1755 Lisbon earthquake to pessimistic necessary creation and strict psychological determinism. |
| Vauvenargues (1715–1747) |
French Moralist | Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind (1746); Maxims. Exalted the primacy of the passions, social utility as the norm of virtue, and morally ambivalent "greatness of soul" (anticipating Nietzsche). |
| Condillac (1715–1780) |
French Sensationalist | Essay on Origin of Human Knowledge (1746); Treatise on Systems (1749); Treatise on Sensations (1754). Derived all mental faculties as "transformed sensations" via the Statue Analogy and inquiétude, while retaining an immaterial soul. |
| Helvétius (1715–1771) |
French Utilitarian | De l'esprit (1758); De l'homme (1772). Reduced judging to perceiving and all motives to egoistic pleasure/pain; defined virtue as public utility; proclaimed equality of minds and omnipotence of education and legislation. |
| Denis Diderot (1713–1784) |
Co-Editor of Encyclopédie | Letter on the Blind (1749); Interpretation of Nature (1754); D'Alembert's Dream (1769); Chief Editor of Encyclopédie (1751–80). Evolved from deism to atheism and evolutionary, pan-psychist naturalistic pantheism combined with ethical idealism. |
| Jean d'Alembert (1717–1783) |
Mathematician & Positivist | Treatise on Dynamics (1743); Preliminary Discourse to Encyclopédie (1751); Elements of Philosophy (1759). Formulated d'Alembert's principle and partial differential calculus; forerunner of positivism (abstaining from trans-phenomenal metaphysics). |
| La Mettrie, d'Holbach & Cabanis | French Materialists | La Mettrie (1709–51, L'homme machine, 1748); d'Holbach (1723–89, Système de la nature, 1770); Cabanis (1757–1808, Rapports du physique et du moral, 1802). Reduced man and thought to self-moving matter and physiological brain-secretions. |
| Buffon, Robinet & Bonnet | Natural Historians | Buffon (1707–88, Natural History, 1749–88); Robinet (1735–1820); Bonnet (1720–93). Replaced rigid Linnaean classifications with a continuous chain or branching network of organic species. |
| R. J. Boscovich, S.J. (1711–1787) |
Physicist & Mathematician | Theoria philosophiae naturalis (1758). Formulated dynamic atomism: unextended point-atoms with distance-dependent attraction/repulsion ($F \to \infty$ as $d \to 0$), eliminating physical contact. |
| Quesnay & Turgot | Physiocrats / Economists | Quesnay (1694–1774, Tableau économique, 1758: land as sole source of net product, laissez-faire); Turgot (1727–81: Finance Minister, positivist phenomenology, and Law of the Three Stages of history). |
| J.-J. Rousseau (1712–1778) |
Political & Moral Philosopher | First Discourse (1750); Origin of Inequality (1755); Political Economy (1755); Émile & Social Contract (1762). Critiqued civilization and property; distinguished amour de soi from amour-propre; grounded religion in inner feeling; formulated popular sovereignty and the General Will. |
| Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) |
German Empiricist & Jurist | Vernunftlehre (1691); Sittenlehre (1692/96); Fundamenta juris naturae (1705). Initiated German Aufklärung; combined utilitarian empiricism and Pietism; distinguished Justum, Decorum, and Honestum. |
| Christian Wolff (1679–1754) |
German Rationalist | Vernünftige Gedanken (1719f.); Philosophia rationalis; Ontologia (1729); Jus Gentium (1750). Systematized Leibniz and late Scholasticism; defined philosophy as science of the possible; ethics of self-perfection; international civitas maxima. |
| A. G. Baumgarten (1714–1762) |
Founder of Aesthetics | Meditations on Poetry (1735); Metaphysica (1740); Aesthetica (1750–58). Coined "aesthetics" as the science of sensitive knowledge (gnoseologia inferior) and the "analogue of reason." |
| Reimarus, Mendelssohn & Lessing | High German Aufklärung | Reimarus (1694–1768: Wolfenbüttel Fragments); Mendelssohn (1729–86: Phädon, 1767; Morgenstunden, 1785); Lessing (1729–81: Laokoon, 1766; Nathan the Wise, 1779; Education of the Human Race, 1780: dynamic truth & progressive revelation). |
| Tetens, Hamann, Herder & Jacobi | Psychologist & Counter-Enlightenment | Tetens (1736–1807: 3 faculties of Understanding, Will, Feeling); Hamann (1730–88: "Magus of the North," poetic language as revelation); Herder (1744–1803: Ideas, 1784–91, cultural historicism, Humanität, Metacritique of Kant); Jacobi (1743–1819: Glaube/Vernunft vs. Spinozism & Kant's thing-in-itself). |
| Bossuet, Vico & Condorcet | Philosophers of History | Bossuet (1627–1704: Universal History, 1681); Giambattista Vico (1688–1744: New Science, 1725–44, verum-factum, poetic wisdom, corsi e ricorsi); Condorcet (1743–94: Esquisse, 1794, ten epochs of indefinite progress). |
| Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) |
Founder of Critical Philosophy | Dissertation (1770); Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87); Prolegomena (1783); Groundwork (1785); Critique of Practical Reason (1788); Critique of Judgment (1790); Religion (1793); Opus Postumum. Executed the Copernican Revolution across science, ethics, aesthetics, and teleology. |
4. Connect It: Practitioner Links to AI, Enterprise Architecture, and Governance
- 1. AI & Cognitive Architecture (Kant's Schematism vs. Condillac's Bottom-Up Sensationalism): The central debate in modern AI between pure end-to-end connectionist learning (deep neural networks ingesting raw tokens/pixels) and neuro-symbolic / world-model architectures directly replays the clash between Condillac/Hume and Kant. As Kant proved in the Transcendental Deduction and Schematism (Ch. XII), raw sensory manifolds are "blind" without prior inductive biases and structural priors (spatio-temporal embeddings, causal-relational graphs, and object-permanence invariants), while Herder's Metacritique (Ch. VII)—that "thinking is inward speaking" and reason is inseparable from language—Directly anticipates Large Language Models (LLMs).
- 2. Enterprise Architecture & Domain Modelling (Constitutive Categories vs. Regulative Heuristics): In enterprise data and ontology engineering, architects frequently confuse constitutive domain rules (hard schema constraints and transactional invariants that define what can exist as a valid business object in the system, corresponding to Kant's Transcendental Analytic) with regulative strategic heuristics (target-state enterprise architectures and asymptotic optimization goals, corresponding to Kant's Transcendental Ideas in the Dialectic). Applying Kant's distinction prevents architects from reifying heuristic target-models into rigid database schemas (the architectural equivalent of transcendental illusion).
- 3. Banking, Risk & Institutional Governance (Montesquieu's Separation of Powers vs. Rousseau's Factional Capture): Modern financial risk governance—specifically the Three Lines of Defence model in banking (1st Line: Executive Business Operations; 2nd Line: Independent Risk & Compliance Rule-Setting; 3rd Line: Independent Internal Audit Adjudication)—is a direct institutional implementation of Montesquieu's separation of powers (Ch. I), designed to prevent operational despotism. Conversely, Rousseau's analysis of how partial factions (*volontés particulières*) capture regulatory assemblies at the expense of the public good (Ch. III–IV) provides the foundational model for analysing regulatory capture and aligning fiduciary incentives with systemic stability.
About this book
A History of Philosophy, Volume VI: From the French Enlightenment to Kant by Frederick Copleston, 1960. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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