From metaphysical exploration to real-world care

From metaphysical exploration to real-world care

— Written on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Kant's birth

Author: Xie Dikun (Chair Professor, School of Philosophy, Chinese University)

Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) famous quote "The starry sky above me and the moral law that dwells in my heart" has been providing wisdom and enlightenment to the spiritual world of the world for more than 200 years. As a famous philosopher, Kant is deeply admired by people, but there is great controversy in the academic community about how Kant's critical philosophical system has shifted from the initial study of the typical metaphysical theme of "what can people know" to the pursuit of happiness of caring for human life and proposing "what can people hope for".

In fact, as long as we carefully read Kant's three major critiques, especially his Critique of Judgment, we can accurately realize that it is his work that communicates the first two critiques (Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason) that makes Kant's philosophy finally fall from the initial transcendental study to the empirical study of respect for human dignity and the pursuit of human happiness.

One

In the first critique (Critique of Pure Reason), Kant focused on theoretical philosophy centered on epistemological issues, while in the second critique (Critique of Practical Reason) he discussed practical philosophy with morality and ethics at its core. In his view, the former makes theoretical knowledge possible according to the innate laws of nature, while the latter makes practical philosophy possible according to the dictates of free will, and philosophy is thus divided into two fields, namely, theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy. However, Kant saw very clearly that in his critical philosophy there was a huge gulf between these two fields, and that these two different fields did not form a unity. This is because they are based on two different core concepts, the former on the basis of the concept of nature, which has its object in intuition, and which obeys the necessary law of causality; The latter is based on the concept of freedom, which cannot be visualized intuitively, and emphasizes the moral choices that people make in real life. Thus, even in the Critique of Pure Reason, the concepts of nature and freedom can coexist in the same subject without contradiction, but natural necessity and free will exist as opposites of the law after all. In the Critique of Practical Reason, the concept of freedom should make the moral ends it proposes a reality in the sensual world, and if there is no trace of the sensual life based on the concept of freedom, then man who is subject to the laws of nature will never be aware of his right to freedom and the moral laws that must be obeyed. Obviously, these two philosophical principles lack a unified idea in explaining the empirical objects of the world, and their effects on the perceptual world are mutually restrictive.

Kant had a clear understanding of the inherent contradictions in his philosophical system, so he clearly stated in the third critique ("Critique of Judgment") that man's appreciative ability not only plays a role in the scope of life practice, but also has its own unique innate principles in transcendental philosophy. Here, through the study of man's aesthetic ability, Kant found that man, as a subject, always makes judgments based on the form of an object's purposiveness. Man is both a natural person and obeys the laws of nature, and at the same time he is a free man with free will and the ability to make his own choices, and this dual identity of man makes free will and the role it plays must have an impact on the natural world. In this way, man, while making the moral law and its purpose based on the concept of freedom a reality in the sensual world, must also assume that the natural world has a certain purposefulness. Kant thus asserts that the judgment possessed by human beings is in fact equivalent to a bridge from the natural person to the free man, which promotes the sensibility of people's inner moral emotions according to a certain special emotion that the natural person personally feels, and thus demonstrates the laws of the moral world, so that the judgment can assume the heavy responsibility of communicating the two fields of theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy. The rationale here is that "the legitimacy of the natural form is at least consistent with the possibility of advancing the end in nature, according to the law of freedom." Thus, for Kant, this intermediary link between theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy must be undertaken only by judgment, which may be a purely subjective principle in terms of judgment itself, but it is after all based on human activity, and human activity is inseparable from the perceptual world, so the judgment made by man must also play a role in the perceptual world. Therefore, judgment, with its unique intermediary position, can remove the barrier between theoretical reason and practical reason, and unify the inevitable laws of nature and the free will of man.

Kant's pioneering practice of separating nature and freedom first and then unifying them, highlighting the position and role of judgment between theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, not only played a crucial role in his own completion of the critical philosophical system, but also had important enlightening significance for Schelling's philosophy of the same and Hegel's dialectic of the unity of opposites.

Two

If Kant's first two critiques explored metaphysical issues, then the Critique of Judgment is significantly different from them, beginning to shift from metaphysics to the study of human beings in reality, especially the study of human emotions, and combining it with the construction of aesthetics, which constitutes a distinctive feature of the Third Critique.

Kant made it clear here that the reason why the criticism of judgment is divided into the criticism of aesthetic judgment and the criticism of teleological judgment is that aesthetic judgment is understood as judging the subjective fitness for purpose through people's pleasure and unpleasant emotions, and the teleological judgment is understood as judging the fitness of objective nature through intellect and reason. That is to say, the core of the object of aesthetic research is human emotion, and only through the analysis of emotion can human emotion be combined with the purposefulness of the world, and then human well-being can be promoted. On the one hand, Kant admits that the beautiful attracts people, the sublime moves people, because aesthetic judgment involves a certain objective form of the object of judgment that corresponds to certain mental functions of people, so that people feel the pleasure of subjectivity in subjective feelings. On the other hand, Kant emphasized that the pleasure brought by aesthetic appreciation is a pleasure without interest, interest, and intention, so that aesthetics does not and does not emerge with any definite purpose.

This brings us to the question: how can this aesthetic based on personal feelings be universal?

Kant's explanation of this not only has the basic principles of critical philosophy, but also highlights the compatibility of these basic principles with the empirical world. First of all, he borrowed the way of thinking of innate comprehensive judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason, pointing out that each subject judges an object as beautiful, not only saying that beauty is an attribute of this object, but also that the subject attaches his own pleasure to this object, so here is a combination of subjective imagination and objective appearance, and comprehensive judgment plays a leading role here. Secondly, aesthetic judgment is different from logical judgment, and the purpose of aesthetics is to pursue pure beauty. Aesthetics not only has the opportunity of "quality", but also the opportunity of "quantity", that is, "beauty is the kind of feeling that can cause pleasure without concept", and the opportunity of this "quantity" is that human beings have a common sense of aesthetics, which makes people's feelings of beauty have a universal conduction, rather than being limited to certain individuals. This is the so-called people with the same mind, the same heart and the same reason, Kant thus highlights the fact that aesthetics takes place in the empirical world, and speaks of the commonality and universality of "beauty and beauty". Finally, the aesthetic commonality makes people realize that happiness is not only an individual's perceptual intuition, but also a basis for reflection. The pleasure caused by aesthetics is not only based on the universal combination of reflection and the appearance of objects in general, but also requires the premise of the mutual compatibility between the subjective conditions of each subject. From a reflective point of view, the form of the object should correspond to people's subjective purposes. In this way, Kant not only combined the simple aesthetic with people's expectation of a better world, but also made his transcendental philosophy have the purposive nature of empirical content. It is in this sense that aesthetics have a "purposeless purposefulness".

Kant clearly admitted that this "purposeless purposefulness" of human aesthetic activity has an obvious normative role, and even if it does not play a normative role, it plays a guiding and regulating role in the thinking and behavior of the world with the "idea" it pursues. Although the pure aesthetic and sublime sense are presented in a perceptual form, it is impossible to achieve complete compatibility with the rational concept, but precisely because they are presented in a perceptual form, on the contrary, they appear vigorous and more likely to move people's hearts, so that people's hearts will be prompted to leave the simple sensibility and the pure natural purposefulness because of this reflective aesthetic emotion and sublime emotion, and strive to pursue and realize the concept of higher purposefulness.

Through the combination of the concept of beauty pursued by man and the purposiveness, Kant linked the two practical behaviors of people, aesthetics and virtue. Originally, the two were different, the former was motivated by free interest, while the latter had to be subject to objective social laws. Kant pointed out here that although man must obey the laws of nature because of his natural nature, he also has free will, and takes the ultimate goal he sets as an unswerving and lifelong goal, which is the rational mission of man as a human being. It is in this sense that Kant uttered the wise saying, "Beauty is the symbol of moral goodness", which requires that people not only pursue the beauty and happiness of the empirical world, but also have moral obligations to others, and that a person's value will be universally respected only if he realizes that the sublime is the transcendence of sensual pleasures.

Three

Kant's pursuit of happiness in human society is of course not only a combination of aesthetics and morality, but also analyzed, criticized and expected the politics, international relations, human consciousness, and culture of European society at that time, showing direct concern for the real society.

Compared to his previously published essay What is Enlightenment, Kant's analysis of reality in the Critique of Judgment is more direct. He did not just say that "enlightenment is the free exercise of human reason", but bluntly said, "liberation from superstition is called enlightenment". In his view, superstition is more harmful than ordinary prejudice, it blinds people, lacks the spirit of independent thinking and the courage to make rational judgments, reason is therefore confused by lies and rumors, and people are even lured into arbitrary fanaticism, so it is the most important mission of reason to accept enlightenment and change this way of thinking.

In view of the fact that Europe was in the midst of a millennium of great changes, and people were prone to lose faith and pursue material comforts one-sidedly, Kant made it clear that if people only measured the value of life by what they enjoyed, then the value of life to us would drop to zero. Our life is not a means to the end of material happiness, and there is nothing left for life other than the value of life that we ourselves have given to ourselves. Thus we strive to move towards moral goodness, which not only makes us purposefully independent of nature, but also makes nature fit to our purposes only under such conditions. Kant thus meaningfully states that although the most benevolent nature from the outside proposes the purpose of happiness for our species, if we blindly pursue the happiness of the senses, then true happiness will not be realized in the natural system of the earth.

Of course, as a thinker in the 18th century, Kant did not reach the level of consciousness to use philosophical theories to transform the world, he only hoped to improve people's cultural accomplishment through education, and negate people's desires through beautiful art and knowledge, so as to awaken and strengthen people's spiritual power, so that people have the ability to make free choices, and feel a kind of adaptability hidden in people's hearts to pursue higher goals. Kant's shift from metaphysics to the study of the real world not only played a positive role in Germany's classical philosophy, but also had a profound impact on modern philosophy to get rid of the shackles of metaphysics and actively participate in the transformation of real society.

Guangming Daily (2024-08-05 15th edition)

Source: Guangming Net-Guangming Daily