Immanuel Kant: Difference between revisions

'''Kant''' sets out to save metaphysics, but his prospects are bleak. He is dealing with two terminal schools - the "absolute despotism" of Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics and the "nomadic tribes" of skepticism.<ref>"At first, her government, under the administration of the dogmatists, was an absolute despotism. But, as the legislative continued to show traces of the ancient barbaric rule, her empire gradually broke up, and intestine wars introduced the reign of anarchy; while the sceptics, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organized themselves into civil communities. But their number was, very happily, small; and thus they could not entirely put a stop to the exertions of those who persisted in raising new edifices, although on no settled or uniform plan. In recent times the hope dawned upon us of seeing those disputes settled, and the legitimacy of her claims established by a kind of physiology of the human understanding—that of the celebrated Locke. But it was found that—although it was affirmed that this so-called queen could not refer her descent to any higher source than that of common experience, a circumstance which necessarily brought suspicion on her claims—as this genealogy was incorrect, she persisted in the advancement of her claims to sovereignty. Thus metaphysics necessarily fell back into the antiquated and rotten constitution of dogmatism, and again became obnoxious to the contempt from which efforts had been made to save it. At present, as all methods, according to the general persuasion, have been tried in vain, there reigns nought but weariness and complete indifferentism—the mother of chaos and night in the scientific world, but at the same time the source of, or at least the prelude to, the re-creation and reinstallation of a science, when it has fallen into confusion, obscurity, and disuse from ill directed effort." (CPR, preface) </ref> Both of these tendencies had by his time collapsed into nihilism. Empiricism, taken to its extreme by David Hume, reduced men to animals and thought to conditioning. Consistent and thoroughgoing Rationalism on the other hand could only lead to Spinozist pantheism, as Jacobi famously argued. In his ''Philosophy of History'' Hegel defended Spinoza from charges of atheism - on the contrary "with him there is too much God," in fact there is no such thing as the finite and "all this that we know as the world has been cast into the abyss of the one identity." What these have in common is the denial of human freedom, which Kant set out to save and would later describe as the "cornerstone" of his entire system.