Immanuel Kant and the ‘Hammer of Reason’
Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant
Alex Nemec / May 13 2021
(14 min read)
Introduction:
What is justice? What is goodness? What is morality? These may sound like fairly easy and straightforward questions; ones that if you were to ask any stranger on a street, they would most likely happily give you their account of any of these concepts, calmly claiming they got it all figured out. However, come with these questions to any ‘subject of the goddess Philosophy’ and you are likely to see them either refuse to talk to you or run away screaming (Try it, it is a fun activity for boring weekends!). The reason for this is simple: each of these questions forces hours-long discussions forces you down the same road as thousands before you walked only to lead you to a place called “I only know that I know nothing”. Consequently, philosophers started to lose hope in finding any particular answer to these age-old questions, and began to claim that there is no ‘goodness as such, justice as such, or morality as such’. It all depends on circumstances; depends on the effect of an action, and every time one tries to force these concepts out of the hands of God and keep them among human beings - tied to a fence as one would keep a horse for it to not run away - they slip away, like an eel out of the hands of a fisherman, and race back to their place outside of our reality; leaving behind a void in its place and clueless people of the earth with their shallow understanding of reality.
However, not every philosopher accepted the fate our capability of understanding was bound to suffer were we to simply accept our incapability to know as a fact. To its rescue came 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, with his work Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. This hero of the goddess of Philosophy, equivalent maybe only to demigods of ancient times (or psychopath, depends on how you look at it), came with the idea, that just as his contemporaries in sciences were able to establish laws of natural sciences such as in physics or chemistry, and bring us closer to the understanding of the natural world, he can surely do the same for morality, and bring us closer to the understanding of our actions and consequently, ourselves. In this work, I will explore how Kant, following the centuries-old struggle of philosophers walking the same road over and over again only to end up in its final station “I Know That I Know Nothing”, attempted the impossible, and that is to break the walls of this station, build a railway to God’s palace, and to finally, once and for all, claim the laws of morality for all rational beings of the universe and save us all from a fate of ignorance.
Socrates, the trailblazer:
To begin with, let us first take a look at the road that each philosopher who decided to concern himself with morality before (and arguably even after) Kant had to take while in search of answers, only to end up in the same place as all the others. I believe it is only appropriate to look at this road through the eyes of the person who was the first one to walk it – this person being the one and only, Socrates. For our purposes, one can take a look at basically any of his dialogues written by Plato; what is important is to grasp the essence of what Socrates was doing and saying, even when he might have not been always concerning himself with morality. Let's take for example a dialogue from the beginning of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates questions Cephalus about what the old man perceives and defines as justice. After Cephalus tells him his view of what is the greatest good that wealth has brought him, Socrates answers:
“A fine sentiment, Cephalus, but, speaking of this very thing itself, namely, justice, are we to say unconditionally that it is speaking the truth and paying whatever debts one has incurred? Or is doing these things sometimes unjust? I mean this sort of thing, for example, Everyone would surely agree that if a sane man lends weapons to a friend and then asks for them back when he is out of his mind, the friend shouldn’t return them, and wouldn’t be acting justly if he did. Nor should anyone be willing to tell the whole truth to someone who is out of his mind”
This section, as impressive as it may seem on the first look, gets even more impressive as one begins to dissect what Socrates is actually saying here. If we were to rephrase it in contemporary language and put it into general terms, we might arrive at something like this: Can we make this rule that you just mentioned into a universal law, which has to be always obeyed without any exception, by everyone, no matter the circumstances? If you can think of a circumstance or a situation where the answer is no, this cannot possibly be a universal law, and therefore consequently cannot be a rule that everyone, everywhere ought to act by all the time, and therefore the truth has to be somewhere else. And in a classic Socratic manner, we would finish this by ‘if this what you are saying is not true, the only thing you can know is true is that you do not know what the truth is and therefore you are led to say “I Know That I Know Nothing”. We have therefore completed the road and arrived at its final station.
Let there be Kant:
And this exactly where the hero of this story, Immanuel Kant, comes crashing down from the heavens with his hammer called “Reason” to smash down the walls of this station and to start working on the railway leading all the way to the universal understanding of morality. For the most part, I am sure that those of you who have read Kant’s work immediately saw the striking similarity of Socrates’ mode of reasoning and what Kant’s argumentation in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals more than two thousand years later (And for those who have not, well, I have no idea why you would read this work in the first place, but if you already got this far, do not worry, I will explain shortly). Despite this similarity, however, this work is concerned about how Kant managed to break these walls, not Socrates. So what exactly did Kant do to not run into the same problem as many before him? Let us take a look at a simple example of thievery.
If Socrates would stop you at a street and ask you: “Is it moral to steal?”, I dare to assume that the overwhelming majority of people would answer “no”. But what if he were to add “Would you say it can be considered moral to steal, if you are a father of a family of four children, your wife is dead, you are left homeless because with so many children you have no time to take a job, and you are stealing the bread from someone you know is a wealthy lord and it will not harm him in any way?” Again, I dare to assume that in this example, more often than not people would be inclined to say “yes”, while can we not say that essentially saving your children from starvation and doing no major harm in the process does not outweigh the immorality of the act of stealing? Therefore, if you answered "yes", you just arrived at the “I Know That I Know Nothing” station, while how can the same action be both moral and immoral? But, if you still answered no, welcome to the world of Kant’s morality.
Kant based his moral theory on quite a simple principle: rationality = morality. At the first glance, this might appear strange, after all, we are all rational beings, right? Would it therefore not mean that we should all be ‘moral’ by default? And yes, this is exactly right, we are all moral by default, however, as Kant points out, we like to make exceptions for ourselves.
“[..] if we weighed everything from one and the same point of view, namely that of reason, then we would encounter a contradiction in our own will, namely that objectively a certain principle should be necessary as a universal law and yet subjectively that it should not be universally valid, but rather that it should admit of exceptions”
So, let us now look at the example of thievery through Kant’s eyes. We begin at the question “Is stealing moral?”, and once again we answer “no”, but this time with the addition of “because it is irrational”. What does that change? Short answer – everything; Long answer (Kant’s answer): Stealing is immoral because it is irrational, while we have to first ask ourselves a question – Would I be content if this maxim (in this case stealing) would become a universal law, therefore, everyone would be allowed to steal? This time, however, unlike in the case of Socrates, the only way how to answer this is “no”, because of the irrationality and impossibility of the answer “yes”. What I mean by that is – if stealing would become a universal law and therefore everyone would be allowed to steal, property would cease to exist, as you can only steal something which is not yours. But if everyone is allowed to steal, nobody can actually own anything, and consequently, everything in the world is simply ‘up for grabs’ – the act of stealing itself would become impossible. Therefore stealing is never moral; we just simply make an exception for ourselves.
By this simple, yet genial step of having to apply whatever action (other than the necessary ones, such as breathing or drinking water) we want to do universally, we finally understand why Kant came with his hammer “Reason” to break down the station of “I Know That I Know Nothing” where Socrates brought us. In the dialogue from the Republic above, we can see that Socrates was not far from bringing this hammer to destroy the station himself. He too used the formula of asking whether we can make this action into a universal law or unconditional truth, however, he failed to see that the answer can never vary – either it can be applied to everyone, or it cannot, and if it cannot it is immoral and therefore irrational. This is why instead of using the hammer to destroy the station, he helped to build it, and thanks to him, it stood tall for thousands of years.
Railway to God:
Now that station is destroyed, or in other words, thanks to Kant we have acquired the tool to determine the morality or goodness of any given action, only one last thing is left for us to do – to observe how Kant built a railway to God, in order to acquire for us, all rational beings of the universe, the knowledge of what is good in itself, without any qualification, any condition, and without looking at consequences that it brings about – something which is truly moral and good for itself.
Some of us might automatically start thinking about the ancient virtues of the soul, these being wisdom, courage, moderation and justice; others might imagine wealth, pleasure, or power. And what about happiness? That ought to be good in itself, right? Well, Kant argues that none of these is actually good for themselves because they are all missing something. Let us take for example wisdom. As a wise individual, you can lead people to greatness, always have the best solution for every situation in mind, and know everything there is to know. However, what happens if you were to use your wisdom to cause harm, let's say for personal profit? Does it not follow that a wise person can do way more evil than an average individual? Or what about courage? Surely there is no immorality possible simply by the virtue of being courageous. But what about a “courageous thief“? Would the courage not help him perform the crime way better than if he were a coward? You might now say okay, I see your point, but what about happiness itself. There is simply no way happiness can be somehow bad. But what becomes of happiness in times of war? Can you still consider happiness as being good when you are killing other people and being happy about it? Or in a situation of the death of someone close to you? Would it be good for you to be happy then? What this aims to show is that as Kant argues, none of these attributes is good without qualification; they are missing something which gives them their supposed goodness. And this something, as Kant writes, is good will.
“There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world, or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will.”
Only good will comes good without qualification: it is good and moral in itself, and it makes all of the above-mentioned qualities good. Nothing, not even the consequences of whatever was done in good will adds or subtracts from its value, as if one were to look at its consequences to determine its value, he or she would already be looking somewhere else than on the good will itself. What is necessary for acting in good will according to Kant, is to act from duty – meaning that you will not only, for example, help people when your life is good and when you are content and healthy, but you will continue helping them even if your life turns sour and you will feel like helping others is the last thing you want to do – you will be acting strictly from duty, in good will. What makes good will good for itself, is that even if it will end up having a bad effect, or no effect at all, it does not change the goodness, the morality of the action; it does not change the value of you acting in good will. This is what Kant found after finishing his railway to God, good will, running around in his gardens, and Kant - as a good hunter he surely was - catching it and not letting it slip through his fingers, and dragging it back to his train, back to our world, for all of us, rational beings of the universe, to see.
Conclusion:
Kant, like every other philosopher concerning himself with morality, took the same road which Socrates started walking long before Kant was even born. However, when Kant came to the end of this road, to the station of “I Know That I Know Nothing”, unlike the others who simply turned around and went back to where they came from, or the ones who decided to build additional rooms and to fix holes left in it by the passage of time, or occasional vandals, he decided that this is not enough. With the help of his faithful hammer “Reason” which others used to improve the building he levelled the whole building to the ground, and in its place started building railway tracks, leading all the way to the Palace of God himself. Once there, Kant found what he came for – the good will itself – the only good thing in the whole universe which is good and moral without qualification. He brought it back to our world, and unlike those unskilled fishermen before him with their slippery laws of morality, always escaping away from our world, he did not let it slip through his fingers. He held it firmly, just like Heracles held the Nemean Lion, until it stopped moving and twitching, and then called all of us to see his gift for us, our salvation from ignorance, and the cure for the seemingly inevitable twisted fate of the limit of understanding itself.
References
Kant, I., Wood, A. W., & Schneewind, J. B. (2002). Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Plato., Grube, G. M. A., & Reeve, C. D. C. (1992). Republic. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co
