The Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers by Will Durant

Author:Will Durant
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy; Will Durant; Plato; Aristotle; Francis Bacon; Baruch Spinoza; Voltaire; Rousseau; Immanuel Kant; Hegel; Arthur Schopenhauer; Herbert Spencer; Friedrich Nietzsche; Henri Bergson; Benedetto Croce; Bertrand Russell; George Santayana; William James; John Dewey;

keep. I will enter on my so&rse, and nothing shall prevent tne from pursuing it.'* *

And so he persevered, through poverty and obscurity, sketching and writing and rewriting his magnum opus for almost fifteen years; finishing it only in 1781, when he was fifty-seven years old. Never did a man mature so slowly; and then again, never did a book so startle and upset the philosophic world.

HI. THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON 2

What is meant by this title? Critique is not precisely a criticism, but a critical analysis; Kant is not attacking "pure reason," except, at the end, to show its limitations; rather he hopes to show its possibility, and to exalt it above the impure knowledge which comes to us thtough the distorting channels of sense. For "pure" reason is to mean knowledge that does not come through our senses, but is independent of all sense experience; knowledge belonging to us by the inherent nature and structure of the mind.

At the very outset, then, Kant flings down a challenge to Locke and the English school: knowledge is not all derived from the senses. Hume thought he had shown that there is no soul, and no science; that our minds are but our ideas in procession and association; and our certainties but probabilities in perpetual danger of violation. These false conclusions, says Kant, are the result of false premises: you assume that all knowledge comes from "separate and distinct" sensations; naturally these cannot give you necessity, or in-

i Wallace, p. 100.

2 A word about what to read. Kant himself is hardly intelligible to the beginner, because his thought is insulated with a bizarre and intricate terminology (hence the paucity of direct quotation in this chapter). Perhaps the simplest introduction is Wallace's Kant, in the Blackwood Philosophical Classics. Heavier and more advanced is Paulsen's Immanuel Kant. Chamberlain's Iny> manuel Kant (2 vols.; New York, 1914) is interesting but erratic and digressive. A good criticism of Kant may be found in Schopenhauer's Wvrld *u Will and Idea; vol. ii, pp. 1-159. But caveat emptor.

variable sequences of which you may be forever certain; and naturally you must not expect to "see" your soul, even with the eyes of the internal sense. Let us grant that absolute certainty of knowledge is impossible if all knowledge comes from sensation, from an independent external world which owes us no promise of regularity of behavior. But what if we have knowledge that is independent of sense-experience^ knowledge whose truth is certain to us even before experience — a priori? Then absolute truth, and absolute science, would become possible, would it not? Is there such absolute knowledge? This is the problem of the first Critique. "My question is, what we can hope to achieve with reason, when all the material and assistance of experience are taken away." * The Critique becomes a detailed biology of thought, an examination of the origin and evolution of concepts, an analysis of the inherited structure of the mind. This, as Kant be^ lieves, is the entire problem of metaphysics.

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