Reconstructing Kant

Even an eight year old child understands what Kant is on about – so Kant believes. Common sense intuition tells us that there’s a difference between what we’d like to do and what we ought to do – between our feelings and our duty – what we should do. So why do we find Kant so hard?

For example, what do you feel like doing when you come in from school? The answer is, you probably want to put your feet up in front of the television, wait for a meal to appear on your lap, and forget about school, people, morality. But you also sense that you ought to do differently, you should help prepare a meal, do some homework, avoid the television, because doing these things builds a better world, a better and happier family. So you decide, you choose to be helpful, you make a conscious choice of will, and so do your own little bit to build that better world.

Kant argues we can all understand this. We can all understand that there exists as an idea, the idea of a better world. And their exists as an idea, the idea that I‘m free (autonomous is the word he uses) to make my own choices to make that better world come about. The better world he calls the summum bonum and the contribution I make he explains as universalising my action to establish a duty – something I should do no matter what I feel. The ideas that we construct, the ideas of freedom and the summum bonum or greatest good, are constructions of the human mind – they are what he calls noumena or things in themselves (not subject to sense impressions, feelings, or the normal activity of cause and effect). Read more to hyperlink to a three minute clip that explains the same idea so fundamental to Kant’s ethics….

One way of thinking about this is the phrase “there’s more to reality than meets the eye”. The world out there, which we experience, is the phenomenal world, but the way we look at it, interpret it and “see” it is part of the noumenal world. As human beings we live in two worlds at the same time. Don’t be fooled, says Kant into believing you are less than you are – we humans are made like angels, capable of understanding a reality behind the apparent reality of our senses, and we actually participate in that reality every time we make a moral choice – a free choice to follow the idea of duty rather than pleasure. For a scientific experiment which demonstrates the same idea, of a constructed reality, made up by our minds, click here and meditate on the Ames Room illusion – we can’t see the Ames room because we impose on our sense data the idea that a room has to have parallel sides.

So what we actually “see” is a dwarf shaking hands with a giant! And no, this doesn’t involve mirrors!

Kant is fundamentally opposed to utilitarian ethics which reduces morality to desires and the pursuit of happiness as an end. these are phenomena, they belong to the phenomenal world of cause and effect,a nd if we just follow desires and feelings we will never be free.

No, rather than this, Kant sees morality grounded in a shared understanding of the world of ideas, what he calls noumena, rather than our shared experience of feelings, and desires, what he calls phenomena.

Want to get an A grade? Why not get a copy of my book exploring Kant and Natural Law theory – both requiring more than a textbook treatment to really understand them – this new series is pitched “just right”.

Also, why not click here and trace Kant’s logic for yourself in a brilliant explanation.

http://www.uri.edu/personal/szunjic/philos/grwork.htm

Image: The Shipwreck, Hayward Gallery, Newcastle © Peter Baron