Here's a hand out I am sharing with my History of Philosophy students today. It's an attempt--I hope not vain--to trace the lineaments of Kant's influence in post-Kantian philosophy, on both the continent and the English-speaking world. I'd be curious what my philosophical peers think of this generalization, as broad and liable to exceptions and fine-tuning as I admit it is. Poke away at it, my friends!
-sdl
* * *Kant’s Heritage
What happened after Kant, as a result of Kant?
Stephen D. Lake, Ph.D.
Here’s a broad generalization about the history of philosophy after Kant: Kant’s project of a critical transcendental philosophy split up along the two sides of the English channel. If in Kant the transcendental philosophy was to be critical, and critique transcendental, we might interpret the subsequent history as a severing of the transcendental from the critical, and vice versa. We defined transcendental critique as the project of finding in the pure structures of consciousness (subjectivity) the universal and necessary conditions of possible experience (and, later, of possible ethical judgments, etc.). I associated transcendental with aspect of subjectivity, rooted in the pure structures of consciousness, while the critical has more to do with the aspects of universality and necessity. For Kant, of course, the two went hand-in-hand and cannot be separated. But in the subsequent history, there is a tendency to separate what he put together.
So here’s my broad generalization: The transcendental strain took root in continental Europe through German Idealism, while the critical side came to characterize 19th century positivism (very influential in France), then logical positivism and its off-spring analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world.
Continental philosophy explored deeply the universal capacities of the transcendental subject—the implicit metaphysical basis for Kant’s own project. They took the aspect of human subjectivity and sought in it a principle for completing, much like Descartes, a entire philosophical system. Even if the transcendental was often interpreted more historically and culturally than psychologically in many German Idealists, their efforts still rested on Kant’s remarkable discovery of the transcendental structures of our consciousness. German Idealists like Hegel talk about self-conscious spirit (Geist) as the transcendental structure of reason, alive and at work in human history. The idea is that self-consciousness is itself an emergent force at work in the world, not just in you or me but in the cosmos as such. So instead of reaching for a transcendent origin of rationality, idealists spoke of the immanent, transcendental nature of consciousness as a systemic force at work in the world.
Eventually, in the phenomenological movement of the twentieth century (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others), the effort was to give a pure analysis of consciousness from within, purified of metaphysical prejudices. The phenomenological method is to bracket metaphysical assumptions and return, merely, to “the things themselves!” (Husserl). With the anti-metaphysical side of phenomenology, there is, yes, a return of the more critical side of Kant. Phenomenology was the most dominant contemporary influence in continental philosophy.
An element of Kantian-type criticism, however, can be discerned in the tradition of English-speaking philosophy with its emphasis on epistemological limits and scientific rigor. That eventually gave rise to logical positivism. Positivism claims that only those statements which have a basis in fact (or can be logically extrapolated from fact) are rationally justified. All other statements are mere emotive speech. As such, most of metaphysics is reduced to expressions of human emotion, not a rational account of reality. Positivism is a form of scientism, and many of Kant’s bolder statements, limiting of metaphysics to the realm of “possible experience,” look and feel very scientistic, very positivistic, indeed. More specifically, analytic philosophy’s demands for precision and clarity in linguistic and conceptual analysis were a part of a larger effort to discern the logic of our beliefs—and their limits.
Eventually, and somewhat ironically, analytic philosophers have returned to metaphysics. Today, it is alive and well. But it is purified, you might say, of a lot of metaphysical extravagance and excess. Analytic metaphysics still adheres to a critical stricture (of sorts) of a rigorous philosophy of language. So even if, for instance, we cannot sense ‘God’ with the five senses (Kant’s critical standard of ‘possible experience’) and His actual existence is not capable of proof, we must elucidate our language about God to see, first and foremost, what we mean by the term ‘God.’ Then we seek to justify whether a religious believer is entitled to use language about God. In a way, this is not unlike Kant’s approach to the existence of God beyond the Critique of Pure Reason. He seeks to give a practical and teleological meaning to the concept of God, since we cannot prove God’s existence directly through pure theoretical reason.
