# Did Kant Really Answer Hume?

Speaker: Reed Winegar
Course: Kant’s Three Questions
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/reed-winegar-did-kant-really-answer-hume
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/reed-winegar-did-kant-really-answer-hume/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8L_fR9f2Sg

When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL.

In this interview, Reed Winegar and Ergo Editorial Director Yuval Adler discuss the full arc of Kant's philosophical project across the three critiques. The conversation begins with Kant's response to Hume on causality, exploring how the Second Analogy attempts to ground objective temporal order through Kant's famous example of a boat. Winegar explains the transcendental deduction and Kant's argument that a unified self requires the ability to attach "I think" to any representation. The discussion moves to the limits of causal knowledge, the distinction between knowledge and opinion, and the question of who legislates the laws of nature. From there, the conversation turns to Kant's moral philosophy, including the categorical imperative, the famous murderer-at-the-door problem, and whether Kant's ethics simply restates Christianity. Winegar traces Kant's roots in Pietism while defending his philosophical independence. The interview closes with Kant's account of beauty and its role as a source for moral hope in the face of the "crooked timber of humanity".

Audience: Thank you, Reed, for doing this. And thank you for the lectures. I really enjoyed them. I particularly loved about the lectures the fact that we all got an overview of the Kantian project in the three critiques, and that's why my questions that I wanted to ask you now get a view of the whole somehow, which you gave, but more in conversational form. Before I do that, I have a few questions on the first critique. I'll go one by one, but something that I felt a challenge in understanding, the Kant's answer to Hume. Because in some sense, everybody said, okay, Kant answered Hume by showing that causality is not some psychological add-on to experience. It's somehow constitutive of experience being able to be objective. On the other hand, Kant, like Hume, agrees that we don't see necessity in experience. We always have limited experience and we, so in a sense, on every particular experience, I think Kant would agree we're in the Humean skeptical situation. No, he doesn't, right? Can you clarify, yes, we are justified using the category of cause, that's one thing to say. The other thing is to say, I can know that A is a cause of B. Those are two different things. In the latter case, Kant seems to be not helping us a lot.

## How Kant Answers Hume on Causality

Well, it seems to me that part of the question is, how does Kant understand what Hume's position is? And how does he understand the kinds of problems raised by Hume? So one way that Kant might be thinking about Hume is in terms of what's the origin of our notion of causation or of cause and effect. And Kant might very well be reading Hume in such a way that Kant thinks that what's the origin of our notion of cause and effect for Hume lies in the imagination on the basis of custom and habit.

We see certain patterns in nature over time. We come to associate those first events and those second events in our imagination. We come to project them into the future on the basis of the imagination. And Kant, on the other hand, does want the source of the notion of cause and effect to not be in the imagination, which he tends to put on the sensibility side of the human being, but rather to be something that comes from the intellect.

And you might wonder, well, okay, who cares? And one reason why Kant might care is even though he claims that we can't know about cause and effect beyond the bounds of experience, it's very important for him that we're able to think about cause and effect beyond the bounds of experience because things like free will or divine creation, which are of importance to him, these notions, even though he says that we can't know theoretically if these things are, he very much wants it to be that we can coherently think about them, and talk about them, and indeed, on his view, even believe in them, or in the case of freedom, sometimes he even goes further and says we can have a kind of practical knowledge of freedom, not theoretical knowledge, but a special practical knowledge.

He seems to think that it's important for our license in using the notion of cause and effect to be able to think of these things beyond experience, that cause and effect not just be a product of the imagination that belongs to sensibility, but rather belongs to the intellect and thus can be used beyond the limits of sensibility. Not, again, not for knowledge, but for a kind of thinking.

## A Prussian Hume: Two Critiques of Metaphysics

When Kant first wrote the first critique, one of his friends, they sometimes were friendly and sometimes more on the outs with one another, but overall friends that we might say, Hamann, rather than thinking of Kant primarily as providing a rejoinder to Hume, instead thought of Kant as a Prussian Hume, noting a lot of similarities in a way between the two.

And one thing that seems to be in the background there is that Hume was providing a certain kind of criticism of traditional metaphysics, and Kant is providing his own kind of criticism. Hume tends to say things like certain metaphysical notions are nonsense. Once we realize that they have their source in things like custom or habit or the imagination or the way that they arise in us, we can see that trying to talk about certain abstract metaphysical notions is something that we're just not able intelligibly to do.

And Kant wants to give a critique of metaphysics, but one that's not so much saying there's certain things that you can't intelligibly talk about or can't intelligibly think about, that it's total nonsense, but rather one focused on that these things are intelligible and coherent, but we can't know if they're the case.

And so on the one hand, it seems like the difference of opinion about the source of the notion of causation is tied to these two different kinds of criticisms of metaphysics. But of course, Kant also wants to reply to Hume by saying that this intellectual notion of cause and effect is one that's legitimate for experience, holds for experience that any change in time is such that it can be seen as resulting from a cause and effect relationship.

## The Second Analogy and the Problem of Induction

governed by some kind of law of nature. And so he makes this argument in various places, but most famously in the second analogy. And then there's a question of, well, what exactly has Kant shown or how much of an answer is this to someone like the more Humean kind of skeptic, as Kant's thinking of Hume in regards to causation? And if one's thinking that what Kant would need to provide in order to give an answer to Hume is something like a solution to the Humean problem of induction, then Kant doesn't give that argument.

Because if we're thinking of that argument in epistemological terms, "Oh, I've seen this happen, and I've seen this happen, and I've seen this happen, and now I'm licensed in projecting that the pattern is going to continue into the future," there's nothing in Kant's second analogy or elsewhere that provides something like a definitive solution to that kind of philosophical problem that Hume raises. But Kant seems to think that Hume's interest in the problem of induction is, in a way, really just a way of getting at the idea that there is, on Kant's apparent interpretation of Hume, no necessary connections in nature at all.

And if Kant's thinking that what's really key to Hume's view is that there's no necessary connections at all, then he thinks that arguments like the second analogy suffice to show that no, there are going to be necessary connections in nature. We can then make our best guesses about which laws of nature there are, our best guesses for which necessary connections there are in nature. But we have this a priori, on his view, guarantee that there will be these necessary connections, and therefore we can make our best guesses about which regularities, et cetera, that we observe they are.

Now, there's an interpretation of Hume that goes under the heading The New Hume. It's not so new now, but in the day. Which sees Hume as less skeptical about the existence of necessary connections in nature, but more skeptical about our ability to know them. And if one interprets Hume in that sort of way, then the difference between Kant and Hume might diminish even further. And that maybe they would both be willing to agree there's necessary connections in nature. But we're not able to just know which of the patterns or regularities we observe at the end of the day really count as laws of nature. The best we can do is, for Kant, make our best guesses. But why is it guesses?

Audience: Why is it guesses? Isn't it the point in Kant that we actually give structure to experience somehow?

## Categories, Particular Laws, and the Third Critique

Yes and no. He thinks that we give structure to experience at a very general level. So when he has these 12 categories in the first critique that are giving structure to experience, he's understanding these as extremely general. So we say that everything is subject to cause and effect, but that doesn't tell us anything about which specific laws of nature there are, which specific kinds of cause and effect relations there are. It's an extremely general claim.

And so that's why in the third critique, he thinks it's important that we introduce this further notion, this presupposition that when we observe nature and we're confronted with detailed particular experiences, that nature will have the structure or regularity that we'll be able to further organize it, using empirical concepts that we come up with and that we'll be able to further organize it, according to our guesses of what particular laws hold in nature, our guesses about which observed regularities are in fact laws of nature. And so he doesn't think by any stretch of the imagination that it's guaranteed that we'll be able to provide thoroughgoing structure to everything that we encounter in the world.

We have to, on his view, we have to approach nature or approach our scientific inquiry into nature with this presupposition or in the spirit that things are, at the end of the day, going to be amenable to our way of thinking, are going to be such that we're going to be able to come up with empirical concepts for them and organize them and come up with a system of laws, our guesses of what the laws are, that we take to constitute governing them. But none of that's guaranteed. The only thing that's guaranteed for him is this very broad claim that for every change in nature, there's some necessary connection between the cause and effect that results in the change. But that's so very broad.

Audience: But if you take this claim that time is a form of intuition, it's a subjective condition, it's an extremely radical claim if you take it literally, because it means that it seems like he's saying that the manifold of whatever sensations that we get is not temporally ordered. So are we ordering it? And if we're ordering it, why aren't we creating the law?

## The Boat and House: Objective Temporal Order

Audience: Or put another way, he gives in the second analogy this famous example of the boat and the house. The house, I look at it from right to left, I see sensations in some way. The after, one after another is not necessary. I could look at it the other way. The boat, it's downstream. There is one way, and he says, "What makes it objective is that we connect it with the cause, and then it becomes this after this objectively." But why can't I, in that sense, also arrange the house sensations objectively according to a cause? You know what I'm saying? Like, why, sometimes he speak like this, the stuff comes with some structure that has to be amenable to our very general principles, and sometimes he seems to speak like we are the ones giving it, in the Copernican revolution, we are the one giving it structure. So that's what I'm trying to understand.

Yeah. I think that the boat and house example that he gives, we should think of these as illustrations of a more general kind of point. And what they're supposed to be illustrating is that sometimes with two representations, sometimes it'll be the case in order for there to be an objective order of time that one of them needs to count as representing something that was in fact first and the other one is representing something that was objectively speaking second.

Audience: Second, in fact, or what does that mean, in fact?

Object, that can count as intersubjectively valid, that it counts as first or counts as second. One way of going there. The boat example then illustrates this Kantian notion that for there to be an objective timeline, an objective order of time in the sense of intersubjectively valid order of time, that it's going to, at the end of the day, rely on the notion of cause and effect, where the cause is what has to be prior to the effect, so that we know that this event counts as intersubjectively, it's intersubjectively valid and for this event to count as the first one, the other one to count as the second.

But there's a further question or puzzle here, which is, well, Kant, is your example presupposing that we know what the laws, particular laws of nature are, that we know what the laws are that govern boats and wind and sails and water, et cetera. And so that's why I say that we might want to think of it as an illustration, because one view would be that for Kant, we don't know in a really strong sense of knowledge, we don't know what particular laws of nature hold for the most part. We have very good scientific hypotheses or guesses of what particular laws of nature hold and in everyday talk, we might say that we know what the laws of nature are, but it's not that we have some sort of certainty for him for a large variety of the particular laws of nature.

So you could imagine someone saying, "Kant, you don't know what the laws are that are governing this boat. You don't know which event should intersubjectively count as first or count as second." And some commentators on Kant, who think that, yeah, we don't know the particular laws of nature on Kant's view in a really strong sense, might be happy to go that way and say that true, what we know is that there is some objective timeline, and then we make our best guesses about what the laws of nature are. And on the basis of our best guesses what the laws of nature are, make our best guesses about which event is the intersubjectively first and which event should count as the intersubjectively second.

Audience: When you said there is an objective timeline meaning on the level of phenomena, don't we arrange time in phenomena because it's a sub, I mean, is stuff giving to us on a timeline or are we imposing a timeline?

## Knowledge, Opinion, and Certainty

To put it crudely, I take it that we're imposing it, that it's a question of which event should count as intersubjectively valid, and the criterion for which event should count as intersubjectively valid is in relation to the notion of cause and effect, which is something that we're bringing to the table. In order for us to intersubjectively agree on which event was first and which event was second, then there needs to be an agreement on what we take the particular laws governing the changes that we're observing to be. And so it's only if we have knowledge of those particular laws or take ourselves to have intersubjectively agreement on what the particular laws are, that we can then have this intersubjective agreement on which event counts as first and which event counts as second.

But obviously, if we're not able to have something like really high-grade knowledge, like certainty about what particular laws hold, then there's always going to be a bit of a skeptical risk that what we're assigning as first or assigning as second, some other group of people with other scientific hypotheses or maybe future people with more advanced science maybe would disagree with us on which would count as first and which would count as second.

He does think there's a very limited set of particular laws that we're able to derive from the categories by just introducing this really basic empirical concept of matter. And so in a book called *The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science*, you get him deriving just a couple of laws, some of which are very similar to Newton's laws of motion. But he's very clear that he does not think that this small set of laws is in any way exhaustive of all the different particular laws of nature. He's very clear, for example, that we're not able to arrive with that same kind of certainty on his view at chemical laws.

And so it seems like the vast majority of the particular laws are not like the ones in the metaphysical foundations. Rather, things that just have to be guessed at, our best scientific hypotheses on the basis of our interactions with the world and on the experiments that we perform, et cetera. But if you were trying to arrange events just on the basis of those laws and the metaphysical foundations of natural science, then in that case, he seems to think that you would be able to know that these laws hold and all know that and all agree, therefore, that that's correct and that that event was first and that event was second, if those are the only laws that are taken to be relevant to the situation.

## Limits of Causal Knowledge: The Bread Example

To put it bluntly, when you give the example of, what was it? I eat bread, it makes me not hungry. Hume would be skeptical that you can know that. Kant would also be skeptical that you can know that. He's going to say, "Look, maybe it's true, maybe not. I can't know. Look, I'm not even going to help you know that." I'm saying if you use the notion of cause, it's warranted, but you still can't know because it's always based on a limited number of experiments. You don't see the necessity. The cause is something you add. And as we say, nature has to somehow play along with this.

It's not like I arrange it, so it works. It's, I'm not arranging it. I just know that by adding causality, I'm not just playing some kind of psychological fool's game. I'm doing something that we'll talk in a second why it's important, but that's it. I'm not helping you, I'm not getting you out of a skeptical situation vis-a-vis all these kind of statements.

Yeah. I'm sympathetic to that view. Some other people might want to try to find resources for giving something stronger in response to Hume. But no, I think at the end of the day that something like this is correct. We should though note that we're using the term knowledge, and I think we're using it loosely, the way that just everyday conversation. Kant himself has these notions of knowledge and opinion and mere persuasion, and there's some debate about what exactly he means when he talks about knowledge in terms of his.

Sometimes in some passages, when he talks about knowledge, he says it requires certainty. And that's a way of using the word knowledge that isn't one that when I say I know there's a, I don't know, a firetruck around the corner or something like that. Am I certain? I don't know. So if Kant is using knowledge just for this really high-grade kind of knowledge, like certainty, then there's things that fall below that, that he would call opinion. But to say it's opinion doesn't mean to totally dismiss it. Any probabilistic, for example, judgment that's not reaching certainty there seems like it would be opinion, right, on his ways of using these terms, as *meinung* is the German word.

Kant might very well think that, yeah, we don't know. We're not certain that when I eat the bread, it's going to nourish me. But I have the opinion that it's going to nourish me. And I have some good reasons for holding to that opinion, but those reasons are not, at the end of the day, determinative. They don't guarantee that the bread's going to nourish me when I eat it. But that seems to me like a pretty reasonable view to hold, that, yeah, the next time I eat bread, do I know with certainty that it's going to nourish me? No, of course not. Maybe it's poisoned. Who knows? But I certainly have in Kant's language opinion that it's going to nourish me.

Some people think that for Kant knowledge, Kantian knowledge, there's some passages where he says it requires certainty. There's other passages where it's less clear. So there are some people who want to lean on other passages and say that knowledge for Kant doesn't require certainty, but it requires a really high degree of evidence, and then opinion requires a certain, particular level of evidence, not as much as knowledge, but some and sufficient amount. But anyways, there's just a question about when Kant's saying what we can know or can't know doesn't necessarily automatically match onto the way that we use the word knowledge in everyday language.

## The Transcendental Deduction and Unity of Self

Audience: So we both agree that what Kant answers Hume, at least, he's saying, so causality, we're taking causality specifically, this is about other categories, is something that is not a subjective addendum to experience. It's what makes it possible for experience to be objective, and for knowledge, or intersubjective or objective or whatever. And he has an argument that I don't think you touched on in the lecture, and I'd love for you to touch on it now, about a perception, which I found fascinating, about the possibility of having the I think, or the unity of the I think over all our experiences, has to do with this ability to apply these categories to experience. So maybe you can quickly give a sense of that argument.

Yeah. Part of the reason why I didn't touch on it is less because it's not central and rather because of how central it is, because there's so many different interpretations and approaches given the central place that it has in the first critique, that it's very difficult to talk about it without getting into pitched battles with...

Audience: I know that's why between us right now, just...

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Kant himself says that the deduction, the transcendental deduction, which is the argument you're referring to, is what took him the most labor, right? Was the most difficult part of the *Critique of Pure Reason* for him. So what he's trying to do in the transcendental deduction, it seems, is he's trying to give a global argument for the claim that the twelve a priori categories count as valid for experience. So all of experience can be seen as governed or structured by these twelve a priori categories.

Some people, I'll just note, think that he doesn't need the deduction, that the deduction aims to provide this global argument, but that later arguments, like the second analogy, for example, they don't give a global argument that all the categories apply to experience, but they give more localized arguments for each of the individual categories, like the category of cause and effect for the second analogy, the category of substance and accident for the first analogy, et cetera. And if those individual arguments go through, then maybe he doesn't need the deduction argument at all. That's one approach that some people have taken. But he seems to think he needs the deduction argument, and that it's important for the overall project, even if things like the second analogy are taken to spell things out further.

And so his big kind of suggestion here, I think, can be illustrated in the following sort of way. So just imagine you're panning across this room, right? And so, this is an illustration, but you're seeing this little bit of stuff, then you're seeing this bit of stuff, and then you're seeing this bit of stuff, and then this bit of stuff. And what you have to do in order to have an experience of the room, right, is you have to bring all these bits of stuff together. Or in Kant's language, you have to synthesize these different representations. The representation of over here and over here and over here and over here.

What Kant argues is that there's only so many ways in which representations can be joined together. There's only so many ways in which synthesis can happen. And anything that we're experiencing is going to be given to us in space and time. And so we want to think about the different ways in which space and time, our a priori intuitions of space and time in which everything else is given, can be synthesized, can be joined together.

In effect, what he argues is that in order for me to have the notion of a unified self, right, that there has to be the ability for me to attach the notion of I think to any of the different representations that are presented. So if there was this representation and there was this representation, but I wasn't able to say, "I think this one," and, "I think that one," then it wouldn't be the case that they could count as integrated into a single overall experience. And I myself then wouldn't really be fully integrated, because there would be this bit of me having this sense presentation and this bit of me with this representation, but I wouldn't be combining them together and seeing them both as my representations. And so Kant's view then is that it needs to be the case that for any representation that I'm aware of, I need to be able to attach an I think to it. I need to be able to say it's a representation that belongs to me. I need to be able to ascribe it to myself.

And then he seems to want to make this argument that in ascribing all these representations to myself, I am in effect synthesizing them with one another. I'm bundling them together. I'm claiming that they're all representations that belong to me, to this individual I. And in bundling them together, I am bundling them together according to the limited sets of ways in which representations can be bundled together, can, in his language, be synthesized.

And those ways in which the representations can be synthesized when we're talking about the manifolds of space and time, and really time is the one that he's focused on, because he says that anything that's in space, that we represent in space, we also represent in time, because time is a form of inner sense, and anything that's represented in outer sense, we're representing it, and that's an inner sense. And so anyways, his basic suggestion then is that I need to be able to ascribe all these representations of the manifold of time to a single subject so that they can count as integrated, and that is synthesizing them with one another. And so that has to take place according to this limited set of rules of synthesis, and the rules of synthesis for time get called the categories. And so all of time, everything that we experience in time is synthesized according to the categories, and therefore the categories are woven into, we might say, our overall experience, because the overall experience emerges from this process of synthesis, this structuring, that takes place by means of the categories on Kant's view.

## The Self as Activity vs. Object

But can I say that the point is that if there wasn't this structuring that works, that's consistent, that's happening, that ties it all together, I wouldn't be able to be a self. I'd just be like this diffused, I don't know, chunks of experiences that wouldn't cohere to a self because of. So it's not just there's a self and there's structuring here. The structuring also makes the self be a coherent oneness or something.

Yeah. I was dancing around this a little bit because it's contested. One way of going is to think that in this process of synthesis, the self itself gets constructed. That the self isn't an entity that is joining these different representations together, but rather when the representations are joined together, then one thing that emerges is the self.

Audience: Right, that counts as the self that. The unity.

Yeah. That possesses all of these different intuitions. Another approach is to think that the self, it does somehow count as a bit more original or primary, and that the self ascribes these different representations to itself and is involved in this act of doing this. And doesn't it emerge from those acts of synthesis, but counts as being present and engaging in these acts of synthesis. Or think that, well, maybe there's some sort of transcendental self that's different from the empirical self that is engaged in these acts of synthesis, but then the empirical self emerges from.

Audience: Yeah, the synthesis.

And again, it's just really hard to say here what the best approach or interpretation is because there are so many different people taking various approaches to the argument, and the argument, I think at the end of the day it's fair to say for many people remains opaque, that Kant maybe never found the way to really express what it was that he was trying to get at here.

Audience: Yeah. I'm actually very sympathetic to this latter part you said. It's like the empirical self emerges.

Audience: Yeah, from the. 'Cause I think it's like when you're dreaming and when it's just a bunch of. And when you wake up, you kind of you cohere the world and yourself at the same time. It's like otherwise, it's like, I actually buy that argument, and I think it's a very interesting argument, that the unity of the self needs a, it synthesizes unity of the world, and therefore, because we have unity of the self, we can actually say the unity of the world is a condition of possibility for me to be some kind of empirical self. And I think that's an interesting. I don't know. I'm very sympathetic to that.

Yeah. That's an approach. There's one line of thought that you find in some post-Kantian readers of Kant, which doesn't necessarily break, isn't always indicative that it is what Kant himself was getting at, is a distinction between notions of self as activity and self as some kind of object. And that maybe there's a transcendental self understood as a kind of activity, like this activity of synthesis. That activity of synthesis then gives rise to a coherent experience and then gives rise to another self, a self as the object that I experience. So when I observe myself and experience myself as a certain kind of thing, then perhaps that's something that has emerged from this more primordial set of acts, from a self that shouldn't be seen as an object, but rather as activity.

Kant, when he talks about the self in a lot of different ways, he doesn't seem to me to want the moral self to be something that emerges from some process of synthesis. It is supposed to be something more primary. But what's the really key aspect of the moral self? Well, it's its activity. So this seems to be one strain of the notion of self in Kant, is the relationship to some kind of spontaneity, some kind of activity, for these notions of the self. But then there can be further notions of the self, like myself as an object that I in somehow at sense observe or experience. And we might see that notion of the self as something that emerges from the processes of these activities.

The dream case, I do think that it's a little bit different just in that I think that when I wake up from a dream and I'm trying to relate my different experiences together and be like, "Was that real or not?" It's like me in time thinking it through and deciding what to connect or what doesn't connect. And I take it that for Kant, these activities that are responsible for synthesizing the temporal manifold are not themselves activities taking place in time. So I think there's a little bit of a difference there.

The same way that my earlier illustration of like I look here and then here and then here and then here, I said it's just an illustration because it's also a little misleading, in that it's sort of saying like I have this first in time and then this second in time and then that in time. But it seems rather that things are like the temporal manifold here of intuition is being given as an atemporal way, and then it's being synthesized. Yeah. Again, that's the hard place for me in

## Who Legislates the Laws of Nature?

Audience: Kant, and that's what we were before. On the one hand, I see, okay, I relate to things as A after B, let's say, like hunger and eating and whatever. What was it? And feeling full, or what was your example? But suddenly I thought it's a rule, I thought it's a law, and then it's not a law. But what contradicts me? The order of what? The things in themself. Phenomena doesn't have this temporal order. It doesn't have causal order. How can phenomena fail me here? It seems that we are the ones. I'm going back to the previous point. We are the ones. The manifold is not giving time, so you can't say that that contradicts me. It doesn't have a causal law of itself that I hit or miss because I bring the cause. So what is it that suddenly tells me, "No, you thought there's a law here, and there isn't. You're wrong." What is it that resists me? What is to play along? Sometimes Kant talks about nature being amenable to our activities, but is it?

I have a version of your same question, but I think of it in more technical Kantian terms. On the one hand, there's this sense that the human understanding plays a role in legislating the law of nature, legislating cause and effect, in our experience. But on the other hand, there's various passages where Kant is talking about laws of nature, and he seems sometimes to put forward a view that particular laws of nature depend on particular metaphysical natures, like the nature of particular types of things, like the nature of this type of stone or the nature of air.

Audience: Mm-hmm.

Or these kinds of Aristotelian sounding natures of things. Sometimes he talks about the particular laws of nature as something that we're supposed to be thinking of as grounded on this intuitive understanding that accounts for their necessity. And how exactly the more anthropocentric view of the human mind bestowing, the intellect, specifically human intellect, bestowing some kind of necessity onto events in the world is supposed to hook up with these seemingly less anthropocentric views that there's natures underlying what appears to us that are responsible for how things behave, or that there's some divine intuitive understanding that counts as bestowing necessity onto the particular laws is something that I wish Kant had said a lot more about, because he says very little, and it's not entirely clear how they hook up.

You might think that, look, if the intuitive understanding is being thought of as legislating all the particular laws of nature, and now all the particular laws of nature are what they are because the intuitive understanding legislated them, what's left for me to do? Or if I am doing something that's adding necessity to the picture, how is that necessity interacting with the necessity the intuitive understanding has already put into nature?

Audience: Yeah.

And some people, and I would prefer not to go this way. Some people, as a result, have argued that the third critique, where Kant comes to thematize this notion of this intuitive understanding underlying the laws of nature, have seen the third critique as post-critical, as representing a kind of turn away from some of the core commitments of the first critique, and is grounding the unity of nature more on the idea of some kind of divine mind than on the notion of the human mind or the human intellect.

And so in terms of understanding Kant's position, I actually think that that's an interesting set of questions or problems. I'm not myself at this stage tempted to say the third critique is post-critical, but I can see why some people have been inclined to wanting to say that sort of thing. Because I think that the question that you're bringing up is a version of that. It's basically, look, if I have legislated the laws of nature, or if I have legislated what's a cause and what's an effect, then why aren't there just total guarantees about what's gonna happen? Didn't I just make all the structure?

Audience: Mm-hmm.

And Kant does seem to want to play a more delicate but also difficult balancing game of, yeah, I've given some structure, but not all of it. And then you do get challenging interpretive and philosophical questions about how does the aspect of structure that I'm alleged to have put into the mix relate to the further notion of, well, even just the totally empirical stuff needs to be presupposed as structured, and there needs to be presupposed some source of that structure.

Audience: Yeah. Is there not overdetermination or something?

Exactly, so.

Audience: Two different sources of structure.

And yeah, I think those are good questions, but I don't think they're ones that the answer screams off the page what exactly it is.

Audience: Yeah, yeah. It's obvious that it's gonna be, that's the hard place in philosophy always.

## Things in Themselves and Empirical Truth

Audience: So it's not just for Kant? In terms of the thing in itself, you talked in the course about the realm of phenomena and the realm of things in themselves. And a general question would be, if we are restricting what we know to phenomena, are there complaints that Kant gave up on truth? Because in truth, we actually want to know about things how they are in themselves and not how we see them in some ways. Would some, is there, I think Nietzsche was talking about there being something Platonic about the Kantian thing in itself as this realm that's beyond our ken. Of course, not the realm of ideas or whatever, but it's still like a world behind the world. And in what sense Kant saved truth from skepticism, or in what sense he maybe gave up on truth in kind of the more of knowing how reality is?

There's various interpretations of transcendental idealism, but one class of interpretations usually gets called the metaphysical interpretations, and it seems to me the core thread to the metaphysical interpretations is they say that there are things in themselves, they're some way, but we can't know what way. And so let me just work with that interpretation because I think it's the interpretation that someone like Nietzsche seems to have in mind. It's the one that maybe feels a bit more Platonic in a way because it has a distinction between the realm of experience and the realm of things themselves. The way in Plato, there's this distinction between the realm of becoming and the realm of being where the forms are.

Kant very much says that we're not able to have knowledge of things in themselves. And one might worry, with the kind of objection you're discussing, that this cuts us off from the truth. And that anything that Kant wants to say about what he calls empirical reality or things in space and time as empirically real is only real or true by courtesy or something like that. It's not real truth. Why not just say it's this illusion that we're caught up in rather than something real or true?

It seems to me that for Kant, he definitely wants to say that there's a lot that we can't know about things in themselves. But it oftentimes seems like he doesn't want to totally cut off all knowledge, the way we might use the word knowledge, about things in themselves. So on the metaphysical interpretation, usually he's taken to think that we know that there are things in themselves. So that limited bit of knowledge that we know that they're not spatial and not temporal, so we have that bit of knowledge. And he oftentimes seems to indicate that they're subject to the law of non-contradiction, so we have that bit of knowledge. But all of this knowledge is somehow still pretty minimal, or not fully substantive, because it's not giving us something like positive knowledge of what things in themselves are like or what their character is or something like that.

Even though Kant cuts us off from knowledge of the positive significant character of things in themselves, he doesn't seem to want to cut us off from them entirely because he does want to argue that we have various grounds for believing in certain positive characterizations of the realm of things in themselves. So he thinks that we have moral grounds for believing that God exists as a member of this realm of things in themselves. And then he elaborates from there into a specific conception of God as a being who has created all these other finite things in themselves. And there's some kind of supersensible order that holds amongst all of these finite things in themselves as the result of God and God's activity and God's understanding.

And so the way that we have a positive characterization of the things in themselves, and one that Kant at the end of the day thinks people should accept and believe in, belief for him is a kind of firm conviction. Once you have a firm conviction that such is the case on these moral grounds. So there is a picture of what the supersensible realm is like. It's just not a picture that is offered to us on the basis of theoretical justifications, rather than or straightforwardly to argumentative theoretical justifications. Rather it's a picture offered from these practical justifications, or every now and then Kant talks about theoretical reasons for belief, which I think I talked about a bit in the lectures.

And so I guess it depends on what one wants to count as access to the truth. If you're thinking that the only legitimate kind of access is philosophical argumentation or observation, or something that's theoretical in those senses, then yeah, he cuts us off. But if one had, if one was a pragmatist, one wouldn't say that. One would say, "No, no, no. The notion of what should count as true is somehow relative to certain pragmatic considerations." Kant's not a straightforward pragmatist, but you could see him as saying, "Well, what counts as true for us relies on these moral considerations," and that leads us to a specific picture of what the realm of things in themselves should be thought of as.

Now, there's some characterization of the supersensible reality or the things in themselves as one way or another. Does this turn all of empirical experience into an illusion where it doesn't really make sense to say it's true that there's a table in the room because what's true are all these non-spatial, non-temporal things in themselves. And one could decide to use the word true that way or to use the term real that way. But I think that Kant in talking about a notion of empirical truth or empirical reality is noting that you don't have to use the word truth that way. You don't have to use the word truth such that things that are empirically real or empirically true end up just counting as illusion.

And there's a certain, we might think, there's a certain value in talking about empirical truth or things as empirically real. There are certain relations that we routinely encounter and others that we don't, and there seems some value in saying that it's true that this is a general pattern in nature. It's true that there's a table in the room for me here as a spatial and temporal being, because if I stand up and start walking that way, I'm going to bump into it. And if we just dismiss all talk of everything in space and time as illusion, then it seems to me at least that we're missing out on tracking these relevant and important features of the lives as we ourselves are leading them.

Audience: Well, you have to accept the Kantian thing that space and time are just subjective conditions of experience and not of things in itself. And that's a big, that's, once you accept that, you're already in the, you drank the Kant Kool-Aid, and it's like, okay.

## Is the Categorical Imperative Just Christianity?

And staying with Nietzsche, let's move to the second critique. You give us a few lectures about the Kantian practical reason, about the categorical imperative, and Nietzsche's, and the categorical imperative as you presented it is there's this demand to universality. You even derive it from, it has to be autonomous and universal and empty, right? There's something very formal about it. And Nietzsche would say, "No, this whole demand for universality is just imposing my will on everybody, that it's actually very Christian, very egalitarian, very modern European notion. It's not some kind of something that comes out of reason purely and as such." And I'm assuming the people today say stuff like that about Kant.

There's two ways of understanding the claim that Kant's ethics is Christian, the way that Nietzsche claims. And one way, and I think this is the one that Nietzsche has in mind, is that what's really primary in Kant's mind or the driver of his views is the Christian tradition. And then he just comes up with some arguments that are sort of window dressing for the latent Christianity. Another view would be that Kant comes up with various philosophical arguments, and then they either do or don't align with elements of the Christian tradition. But the arguments are not produced as such, sort of like a rationalization of the Christian worldview or something like that. Rather, he just comes up with them, and then to some extent they align or don't align with the Christian tradition.

And I think that a lot of Kant's own self-portrayal falls much more into that second camp than the first one. So I think at the end of the day, there are affinities between Kant's philosophy and the Christian tradition, and I don't think he wants to deny that. I do think he would want to deny that the justification for the ethical views is somehow the Christian tradition rather than just the philosophical arguments that he takes himself to give.

So the place where he discusses the relationship between his moral philosophy and Christianity in most detail is the book *Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason*. And what he in general aims to do there is he aims to examine the extent to which the teachings of Christianity align with his ethical principles. And there's various aspects of the religious tradition of Christianity that Kant is happy to reject because he takes them to be counter to the true ethics, right? The Kantian ethics, the ethics that he thinks he's demonstrated.

## Pietism, Culture, and Philosophical Independence

One prominent example is the example of the binding of Isaac. Kant just insists that it would be immoral for anyone to ask a father to kill their son the way in the story Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice Isaac. Because that would be immoral, Kant says we can just reject that, jettison it. And so it's not the case that he is trying to give a rationalization of every aspect of religious tradition that he was raised in or anything like that. In that case, rather, he's happy to assess the religious tradition according to what he thinks are these principles that he's arrived at on the basis of argument.

He was raised in a particular Christian tradition, namely in the German Pietist tradition. And he's actually very critical a lot of the time about aspects of Pietism, and especially their emphasis on this really intense emotional conversion experience, for instance. And so again, this is a place where he's not necessarily drawing from that tradition, but rather on philosophical grounds being critical of that tradition. I guess there's of course just a further question, is any philosopher immune to some level of influence from the culture or tradition in which they were raised and in which they lived? And one might be skeptical that anybody is totally immune.

And so someone like Nietzsche might be right if the claim was limited a bit more to, there's certain aspects of Kant's philosophy that are maybe a little bit influenced by the tradition in which he was raised. So, for example, Kant gets a lot of flack for being so against lying. But there's various passages where he indicates that what's characteristic of Satan in the Bible, in the character of the snake in the Garden of Eden, is that he's a liar. So one might think that there's a way in which this kind of strong identification of Satan with lying and that as a sort of paradigm kind of evil maybe influences a bit the degree to which he talks about lying or uses lying as an example or mentions lying as though it's a paradigm case of something immoral or bad.

But I don't think that Kant took his reasons for being against lying to be that it's associated with the figure of Satan, or he thinks he's given an argument for this categorical imperative, and it follows from this categorical imperative. It works well as an example. If everybody lies, then it doesn't work. That's why it's such a nice example for the categorical imperative line.

## The Murderer at the Door: Can You Ever Lie?

The prohibition on lying, obviously people talk about a ton. But it's sometimes seen as one of the more almost morally fanatical points in Kant. I want to talk about that. Because he's very clear, even if the murderer comes to the door and is asking, "Is your friend in the house?" you can't lie for him to the murderer because the categorical imperative is categorical, which means it holds in all circumstances. And so it holds even in this circumstance, and I don't know that I have anything truly novel or interesting to say, but I'll just note a couple of points that people sometimes attend to in talking about this example.

Kant does draw distinctions between lying and just not disclosing information, or saying things that are literally true but maybe the person's going to take them in a certain way. And so he's definitely opposed to straight out lying. But he doesn't think that you have to tell the murderer at the door everything. Or you can say things that are literally true but somehow might lead the person to do something else.

And then the other thing that seems core to his position here that's maybe a little more interesting, I don't know if it's going to be fully satisfying to a lot of people, but nevertheless, I think one can to an extent see what he's getting at, is he seems to draw a distinction between a known harm and a potential harm. And if you lie to the murderer at the door, then you're doing something that you know is wrong. And so there's this guaranteed harm. And will there be a guaranteed benefit to the lying?

And Kant himself thinks no. He thinks that the world is such that it's always subject to contingencies and all sorts of random stuff. Maybe you've lied to the murderer and have said that your friend's not at the house, so the murderer is going to go on his way, but unbeknownst to you, your friend has climbed out a window and is in the street, and so the murderer encounters him. And so part of Kant's position here seems to be in this example, in general, you shouldn't do something that you know is bad for the sake of speculative benefits or speculative gains.

And as a general rule of life, as a rule of thumb, that's not a maybe terrible principle. There's obviously a question of at what point do the potential harms or potential benefits become so large that it's worth the risk? And Kant seems to say never. And that might be where we want to push back. But I think that there's nevertheless a grain of truth to the notion that we shouldn't just go around willy-nilly committing immoral actions that we know we've done, and we know we've done something bad, for what are really speculative sorts of benefits. And that it's really easy for people to get in the habit of rationalizing or justifying bad actions by appealing to speculative benefits.

## Reason as Master or Servant?

And I think we should be cautious about that overly. One thing Kant's very worried about in his moral philosophy is people rationalizing their bad behaviors. So in the groundwork, what he says in the beginning is that we all kind of already know what's right and what's wrong. Anybody with healthy human understanding already basically knows what they should do or shouldn't do. But people are really good at rationalizing their bad behaviors.

And Kant indicates he's going to try to philosophically elucidate this and justify the categorical imperative, so it can stand really clear. And it's going to make it much harder for people to justify their bad behaviors because it's just so clear now what it is that they're supposed to do. And I think that this general worry that he has, that people have a tendency to rationalize their bad actions, is something that he's very. I mean, obviously people do this a lot, and he seems to have a pretty good point. And I think he's right that there's always going to be a danger to somebody committing a known harm for speculative benefits, because there's always going to be this risk that really they're just rationalizing what they want to do, saying, "Oh, it's going to maybe lead to these good things."

Audience: I told you there's something about, I thought about, because this fanaticism of, yeah, I have to tell them, "Don't lie ever," you know? There's something that people criticize. It looks ridiculous in some sense. But then I thought, when you, let's say, use reason right now, when I argue politically with people, for example, I see how reason is in the service of something else. Their attunement, how they're brought up. Some people brought up to be for something, some people brought up to be against something. Then their reason kind of justifies it. Reason seems to be, it's very hard to encounter in the world that we live in, people working purely out of reason. I mean, pure reason. You always feel actually, especially in political arguments, that reason is a tool, but it serves higher masters like my upbringing, my education, the set of values that I hold, unarticulated, my Freudian id. I don't know what it is, but. And maybe for reason to be the master like Kant wants in some sense, that's part of the Kantian project, that reason is not just a tool for other things. It has to be that fanatical. That was my thought.

Yeah. Maybe a way of putting the idea is that if what's primary is something at the end of the day like cultural commitments or unconscious desires or whatever, and reason, then what's its place? If those are what's really primary, then reason at the end of the day is just going to have, we might think it's a function of justifying those or rationalizing those or something along those lines. So what would it really be for a reason to not just be like a slave to desire or a slave to passion or to cultural commitments or whatever?

And you might think that, well, if it's not going to be subordinate to those, then there's always going to be a chance of it coming into some type of conflict with any of those. And that if reason's really, for Kant, what's going to be primary here, there's always going to be this notion that following it might require you to sacrifice a lot or give up on a lot. And if you were really going to be committed to it, then you would need to be in a way prepared to give up on all sorts of non-rational goods for the sake of reason.

## Moral Law, Happiness, and the Need for God

And at a certain point, that could maybe start to look a little fanatical.

Audience: Because there's all sorts of non-rational goods in the sense of goods that aren't stemming from reason, that are, that people take to be really integral to their lives. And this commitment to reason then might sometimes lead Kant looking like almost like a fanatical, could it almost seem like at times like a defense of a fanatical kind of asceticism? Like you just got to give up on everything sensible, right? For the sake of reason.

Yeah. And I think there's two things to say there, and one thing to say is there are various places where Kant says that somebody would be a fool to give up, to obey the moral law in a way that required them to totally give up on a promise of happiness. And this seems to be one of the lines of thought sort of undergirding his views regarding belief in God and the highest good, that if you obeyed the moral law, but obeying the moral law required you to jettison all hope of happiness, then there would be something foolish about that. Or at one point he indicates the moral law would be fantastic, fantastic in the sense of fanatical, to ask you to do this.

And so if you follow that line of thought in Kant, then you might think that, yeah, for Kant, the moral law is extremely demanding. It is potentially going to require one to make large sacrifices to their happiness, et cetera. But Kant himself in a way thinks that you'd be foolish to obey a law that was that fanatical, that required you to make such significant sacrifices, unless at the end of the day you believed in the existence of God and believed that you would ultimately get the happiness that you merited for your strong commitment or what other people might call fanatical commitment to that moral principle.

And if one's less inclined to accept that belief in something like the course of justice in the world or something like that, then one might be less inclined to think that anyone who wasn't a fool would remain committed to that moral law the way that Kant himself suggests we should. And so there might be a way, this goes back to the Nietzsche point. There might be a little bit of a way in which one might sort of see an aspect of the Christian influence on Kant here, that he's willing to have this really strong categorical moral law that might require some sacrifices, but only within a context where there's also this belief in God, where things are ultimately going to be set right for one, and one isn't really having to obey the moral law in a way that's totally abandoning any promise of happiness, for his view.

## Beauty as a Sign of Moral Hope

Which brings us to the third critique and to what may I hope for, and to this remarkable idea in Kant that beauty, I always love it outside of the Kantian system, that beauty somehow gives us an inclination that the moral, or an indication or the hope, I don't know how to express it exactly, you'll help me, that the moral sphere and the natural sphere somehow can be in accord.

Here's why I find it remarkable, because for me, outside of this, I always thought that beauty is in competition with ethics. That beauty is the other to ethics. There's the famous, I think in *Lolita*, Nabokov has this, and I found it. Nabokov has this famous formulation, this little two lines that he says, "The moral sense in mortals is the duty we have to pay for the mortal sense of beauty." That morality is a duty on beauty, that morality is the other to beauty. Beauty, there's something arbitrary, even violent about it. There's something unfair about it. Morality is somehow.

And Kant says it, and in a way it's the opposite. It's beauty gives an indication that our morality has hope. We can hope that our morality will align with happiness or something. I don't know. I find this remarkable.

There's a really long story about the relationship between morality and beauty. So obviously there's places where they seem pitted against one another in the philosophical tradition. So just think of Plato's *Republic*, and we're gonna ban the poets. Because they're gonna mislead us, cause us to act unjustly, or they'll get our passions all fired up, and we'll act in unjust ways. So we're just gonna kick them out of the city.

But then there's also in the late ancient and medieval periods a lot of discussion of divine beauty or this kind of intellectual beauty, or this beauty of God known through the intellect. And so all of this filters in a way into the early modern period. And during the early modern period there starts to be more of an emphasis on a kind of positive relationship between beauty in this, not in the overly refined sense of this intellectual beauty, but just natural beauty, beautiful objects around us. A more of a sense of a positive connection between that type of beauty, sensible beauty, and morality.

And so one major figure here is the Earl of Shaftesbury, in the British context in the early part of the eighteenth century, who's an extremely influential writer at the time, who draws a lot of connections between appreciation of natural beauty and our sense for beauty and our sense for morality and the connections between them. And this has a huge influence on various philosophers, including a lot of philosophers in the Scottish tradition. So someone like Francis Hutcheson, this important Scottish philosopher of the period, he writes a book where he argues that we have this sense for beauty and also this sense for morality, and he tries to use the fact we have this sense for beauty to help make it seem more reasonable to claim we have a special sense for morality. And so then you start to have these moral sense theorists, and there's a lot of connections in the tradition between notions of a sense for beauty and a sense for morality, and these aren't being seen as pitted against one another.

## Natural Beauty and the Crooked Timber of Humanity

They're rather taken a bit in the same ballpark with one another. There's a kind of affinity between them. And so Kant seems in many ways to pick up on this current that's there in the time, and to want to find his own way of talking about some kind of positive connection between beauty and morality. Now, that's not to say that the thought of beauty and morality as being opposed to one another is totally absent in the eighteenth century by any means. That's there too.

And in Kant himself, you'll get him being very critical of certain kinds of aesthetic virtuosos. He seems to have in mind people who are presenting themselves as these refined connoisseurs, and the judgments they're making about artworks are really just ways of trying to get honor for themselves, or to seem cool or whatever it is. Like the movie critic who isn't really trying to assess the movies, but is striking a certain kind of pose. That never happens today. No.

And so there is this line of thought as well. Kant thinks that beauty and morality are more prone to coming apart or maybe even at times opposing one another in the case of human art and human society and human interactions. And as such, he puts a big emphasis on natural beauty and the relationship between our appreciation of natural beauty and morality. And so he himself thinks that the appreciation of natural beauty gives a kind of indication, as we talked about in the lectures, that doesn't guarantee, but gives a kind of indication, that nature might, at the end of the day, be a realm that is a sort of realm in which moral ends can be realized. There might be some kind of alignment between the world of nature and the world of morality.

And beauty, again, doesn't provide any guarantee, but provides, natural beauty, a kind of resource for taking a kind of hope or a kind of encouragement that it need not be the case that all of our moral aims will ultimately be futile, or pointless or come to nothing, that there can be an agreement between the two.

And it seems like when he's talking about nature here, nature agreeing with morality, he's talking about nature in two registers. One is just the natural world out there. And the other one is human nature. And I think that the human nature aspect is especially interesting or worth emphasizing in a way because Kant's just very worried that when we look at the course of human history, it just seems like human beings are depraved. And it's just a constant litany of horrible wars and terrible misdeeds throughout the course of human history. And so he'll talk about the crooked timber of humanity, drawing from religious language. And I think that it's really important for him to be able to find some kind of encouragement that human nature is not itself at the end of the day inevitably opposed to the moral demands.