Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 50)

by Roger Scruton

can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of my own point of view?

Rationalism derives all claims to knowledge from the exercise of reason, and purports to give an absolute description of the world, uncontaminated by the experience of any observer. It is an attempt to give a God’s-eye view of reality. Empiricism argues that knowledge comes through experience alone; there is, therefore, no possibility of separating knowledge from the subjective condition of the knower.

Hume’s vision is in some measure the opposite of Leibniz’s. He denies the possibility of knowledge through reason, since reason cannot operate without ideas, and ideas are acquired only through the senses.

Neither experience nor reason is alone able to provide knowledge. The first provides content without form, the second form without content. Only in their synthesis is knowledge possible; hence there is no knowledge that does not bear the marks of reason and of experience together. Such knowledge is, however, genuine and objective. It transcends the point of view of the person who possesses it, and makes legitimate claims about an independent world. Nevertheless, it is impossible to know the world ‘as it is in itself’, independent of all perspective.

Experience contains within itself the features of space, time, and causality. Hence in describing my experience I am referring to an ordered perspective on an independent world.

Among true propositions, some are true independently of experience, and remain true however experience varies: these are the a priori truths. Others owe their truth to experience, and might have been false had experience been different: these are the a posteriori truths.

a priori truths are of two kinds, which he called ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’

An analytic truth is one like ‘All bachelors are unmarried’

whose truth is guaranteed by the meaning, and discovered through the analysis, of the...

A synthetic truth is one whose truth is not so derived but that, as Kant puts it, affirms something in the predicate that is n...

is a truth like ‘All bachelors are unfulfilled’, which (supposing it to be true) says something substantial about bachelors and does not merely reiterate the d...

The distinction between the analytic and the synthetic involved novel terminology, although similar distinctions can be found in earlier philosophers. Aquinas, inspired by Boethius, defines a ‘self-evident’ proposition as one in which the ‘predicate is contained in the notion of the subject’, and a similar idea is to be found in Leibniz. What is original, however, is Kant’s insistence that the two distinctions (between th...

First, in opposition to Hume, to show that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, and to offer examples of it. Secondly, in opposition to Leibniz, to demonstrate that ‘pure reason’ alone, operating outside the constraints placed on it by experience, leads only to illusion, so that there is no a priori knowledge of ‘things-in-themselves’.

Indeed, Kant goes further than most of his contemporaries in mounting, in Perpetual Peace (1795), the first systematic argument for a universal form of government – one that will transgress national boundaries and erase the arbitrary divisions among people that, in Kant’s view, are the true cause of hostilities between them. It is to Kant that the idea of a ‘league’ or ‘federation of nations’ is due; and Kant’s theory has been embodied in our modern structures of trans-national legislation.

The idea of such a hypothetical social contract, arrived at by a process of abstraction, has been revived in recent times by John Rawls, who uses it as a test for the just distribution of goods in a society. Kant was not interested in distributions, however, but only in laws, and, although he regarded all citizens as equal in their citizenship, and therefore in their rights and responsibilities, modern ideas of ‘social justice’ were remote from his concerns. Although Kant believed in equality under the law, and equal rights of citizenship, he believed this to be compatible with the greatest inequality in possessions (Common Saying, R. 75).