A GREAT GERMAN PHILOSOPHER.

 (COMPILED BY GEORGE BLACK.)

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was roused from his dogmatic slumbers by Hume. He saw that in carrying the principles of Locke and Berkeley to their logical consequences Hume had proved too much ; he had proved human experience to be untrustworthy and scientific law to be based on fictions. As this reductio ad absurdum follows the supposition that knowledge comes entirely from sense, Kant asks how things will stand if we suppose all knowledge of the data of sense to depend on the capacity of the subject for knowing. Hence arose his doctrine of the a priori conditions which make all experience possible. Experience has no meaning unless forms of intuition and categories of the understanding are conformed with sense.

 Now moral experience is only possible on the condition of a connecting principle (ex pressed in the word "ought ") which has nothing like itself in our sensible world, and could not be derived from any data of sense ; it is the principle that reason is an end and a law to itself and not governed by conditions of space, time and causality. Even the ordinary moral notions of men imply that there is " nothing absolutely good but a good will," a will which is simply reason, ignoring all consequences and desires, and fixing itself on good for the sake of good. Duty is the necessity of an act, the only motive of which is reverence for the law, and an act is in keeping with duty only when its maxim (or principle) could be willed to be universal law (or as he sometimes says, a universal law of Nature) without contradiction. The morality of an act concerns its form, not its matter. Pleasures are purely relative and accidental ; happiness is merely a general name for the satisfaction of desire. Whereas, morality deals with reason itself as sufficient for itself and opposed to all desires and pleasures which depend on an outside world. In other words, morality does not deal with happiness but with worthiness to be happy.  

Kant makes no distinction between pleasures that are high or low. Pleasures, as Epicurus rightly held, differ only in degree and not in kind. Going further than Butler, he thinks that the moral law must have might as well as right and will eventually govern the world. On his own first principles the world and moral law were defined as excluding one another — they were never fairly reconciled in one system. Oncken argues that Kant and Adam Smith were one in their conception of the absoluteness of the law of duty. But Smith's ethics are widely removed from the ascetic or stoical position of Kant.

 The law of reason, according to Kant, is to be realized by reason making the phenomenal world a type of the purely rational world. What are the relations of rational beings among the objects of the phenomenal world? Each of them, as rational, is end and law to himself : when brought into relation with each other they must " so act that humanity in the person of others, as well as in their own persons, shall be an end and never a means." Nevertheless, each must work out his own salvation, guided by the rule that his freedom (or his power to realize the law of duty in the world) shall not prevent another from having the same freedom. This is the first principle of Law or Right as distinguished from Morality. So act that your freedom shall not inconsistent with the freedom of another man. Law, therefore, relates not to the matter but to the form of what is willed. It concerns the outward action, not the motives of it ; and it is negative where morality is positive. In the sale of goods, the question of law is not whether each party to the act is benefited but whether each was free to make a bargain. Every action is legally right (as distinguished from morally good) if “ the maxim allows the freedom of each man's will to exist in harmony with the freedom of every other man's according to a universal law.” This is simply an application of his supreme canon of morality. He deduces from it the rightfulness of compelling one man to abstain from hindering the freedom of another man by a civil society organized to carry out the compulsion. Singularly enough he argues that civil society exists to secure the freedom not the happiness of its members. (Freedom being lessened by association and happiness increased, this seems a peculiar statement.) Liberty, equality and independence are only secured by civil society, by political government. Before its establishment men are under the law of Nature ; they may be socially brought together, but do not become a nation until they obtain a civil constitution — the " original contract." By this contract, omnes et singuli give up their wild freedom to secure the civil liberty secured by the State. Till this is done men are in a state of war — Hobbes is only wrong in saying that they are warring — and all rights of property or otherwise are merely provisional and till rights are secured there is no wealth. Kant does not mean that there was a social contract as a matter of history ; it is merely his way of stating that the rational basis of civil government is the will of all. The supreme legislative authority is the will of all — " all being mature persons and those whose personality is not bound up with that of others." The supreme executive and judicial powers once established no resistance to them is tolerable. Singularly enough, he believes also in Republicanism.

 As there is an original contract so there is an original common ownership of land as distinguished from a primitive common ownership. Civil government implies as a matter of logic a common ownership before, private ownership can begin. Right in anything is right to make private use of it, and this is a right which implies concurrence of others who agree with me in respecting mine while I respect theirs ; otherwise no one does me a wrong in dispossessing me. We have agreed to grant each other the same rights and that which we have thus allotted we must first have had collectively in our disposal. From this follows the States' right of taxing landowners and of preventing corporations and castes from perpetuating any use of land which may prove prejudicial to the public interest. But Kant, unlike Locke, does not deduce property from labor. In regard to land, he says that actual cultivation is not necessary to appropriation but rather implies an appropriation already made. A demand, however, that everyone should have property is involved in the statement that the power to give temporal benefits in the way of charity, depending as it does on gifts of fortune, is really due to the injustice of the Governments which created an inequality of wealth. But his State is regulative rather than socialistic. Nevertheless, Kant assisted to give the propulsion to socialistic thought.

 Of money he says that its nominal definition is — something whose only use is to be exchanged for something else, which implies that a mutual gain is intended. " A medium of trade, in itself it has no value in contrast to a thing, as a commodity, which has value and is related to the wants of another man, but it represents all commodities. The value of commodities is direct ; they satisfy wants. The value of money is indirect; it is a useful medium." This to my mind is only partially true. There are two kinds of money. The weakness of gold, as a mere medium, lies in the fact that it is also a marketable valuable commodity. The weakness of paper money, as a mere medium for exchanging values, is that though it may accomplish its office, that, nevertheless, the seller of a commodity may in return receive a document, professing to represent value, which has no value behind it and which, though exchangeable for goods, is built upon a system of credit erected on bogus values which every ten years or so is shaken to its very foundations but which society, blind to its dangers though startled for the time, still endures and sanctions. To my mind the only legitimate basis for money, which should in itself be valueless, is the deposit of easily liquefied commodities. This is to some extent also Kant's opinion, for he states that the thing which is to be Money must itself have cost labor to produce, in order that it may be equivalent to the labor by which the commodities have been acquired. Otherwise, it were easier to get money than goods and there would be more money than goods in the market to be sold. The sellers would give more labor than the buyers. Industry and wealth would decay. Bank notes and assignats, he argues, are not money, for they cost no labor, and only circulate so long as their supposed basis of hard cash is not needed or not found to be fictitious. Kant does not see that there is no need that money should in itself represent labor, that it is only necessary that it should be an unmistakable guarantee of performed socially necessary labor. The vast labor expended in producing a value in bullion in order that it may be the token of other values, the go between them, must be wasted. A carefully appraised value, duly guaranteed by State valuators, would be more faithfully represented by credit notes on the State Bank.

 Except in this particular, Kant does not extensively analyse any economical phase. His emphasis on the element of Labor may be due to his study of the first part of Adam Smith's book.

Trade to Kant is one of the chief means of securing Permanent Peace among the nations. The spirit of trade is inconsistent with war and, sooner or later, it lays hold on a nation. Meantime, Britain, in her lust for markets, partly disproves his contention by forcing savage nations on pain of annihilation and dispossession to lay hold of the spirit of trade sooner than their own wants impel them. His remark is here appropriate, that : " Nature by the mechanism of motives that are non-moral, secures a result (peace) demanded by morality."

 When people say " the best constitution is that in which the laws and not men have supreme power," they admit that the true objective reality is an idea. The idea logically involves in it permanent peace. Peoples, like individuals, should come out of the state of Nature (Nature never makes man a citizen) and form an International Commonwealth. Nature has shut men up on a finite globe with limited lands to inhabit nations have the right of offering mutual commerce and intercourse, which implies a possible union under general laws. Practical reason or morality postulates this union, and we must work towards the best constitution to carry it out — perhaps the Republicanism of all States, collected and severally.

 Kant argues also that though the human will is free, its phenomena are under natural law. Law governs the results of human actions quite apart from the intention of its agents. Since men are guided neither by instinct nor by mere reason, history is not perfectly systematic ; but still Kant gathers certain intentions of nature with regard to man. They may be thus stated : —

(1) All human capacities are destined to be developed.

(2) The rational or intellectual capacities are to be fully developed in the race not the individual. A step may be good for the race (e.g., from Paradise to Freedom) that is bad for the individual. 

(3) Nature wills that the individual shall choose and make his own happiness. No one else can do it. Nature, in short, provides for the race and the individual provides for himself.

(4) Antagonism is Nature's chief means of developing human capacities. Man has social tendencies because in society he feels that his powers are developed, but he also has tendencies to solitary life and isolation from others for rest and quietness. " Man wills harmony ; and Nature for the sake of the race wills discord." Nevertheless, Nature herself wills an ultimate harmony. Therefore :

(5) The greatest problem of the race is to found such a civil society as will realize law everywhere.

(6) This problem will be the last solved, so crooked is the wood out of which we are carved.

(7) Its solution depends on the possibility of an orderly relation of States one to another. All wars may be regarded as experiments in that direction.

(8) That is the end to which Nature is working in human history — it is the state of things in which all human powers will be developed. Out of these considerations comes the thought that: "A man's chief concern should be to fill his place in creation fitly and learn to be really a man." 

Kant, like Herder, regards development as organic. Between organized bodies and the State there is an analogy ; every member of the body politic should be at once means and ends at once helping to hold up the State and dependent on the whole for support. But this idea of organic evolution goes beyond physical science; it is a metaphysical notion, implying the notion of the unity of all organic forces. This wide conception science would reject. Physical science is bound to explain by mechanical principles and experience. Experience tells us how things are and have been, but does not tell us that they cannot be otherwise in the future.

 Rousseau had no such optimistic views. Kant says " Rousseau proceeds synthetically and begins with the natural man ; I proceed analytically and begin with the civilized man." The bare idea of the organic development of human powers planted by Kant and Herder in German philosophy and seemingly remote from economics, was of great importance to that study. Kant's chief works are his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) ; the Metaphysics of Ethics (1786) ; Critique of Practical Reason (1788) ; Natural Rights (1796) ; and Rechtslehre (1796).

Worker (Wagga, NSW : 1892 - 1913), Saturday 1 March 1902, page 2