47 pages • 1 hour read
Immanuel KantCritique of Practical Reason
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1788A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Philosophical Context: Rationalism
Much of Immanuel Kant’s work is a response to the philosophical debate between rationalism and empiricism, which characterized much of Enlightenment philosophy in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The rationalist view, which was arguably first articulated by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, is that people are born already having certain concepts and ideas. Further, Plato would argue that what people know through abstract and logical reasoning and intuition is superior to any knowledge gained through experience of the bodily senses alone. In the modern era, it was the view reasserted by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650)—famous for his dictum, “I think therefore I am”—and further developed by the Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Liebniz (1646-1716).
While Descartes’s rationalism became popular among scholars and philosophers in continental Europe, the rival empirical school of thought was developing in Britain. Early proponents of empiricism included Francis Bacon (1561-1626), John Locke (1632-1704), and David Hume (1711-1776). Empiricists argued that knowledge is only truly gained through observation and direct experience. Hume argued for a particularly radical understanding of empiricism. He suggested that relationships of cause and effect can never truly be known, since causation cannot be experienced directly through the senses (for example, we cannot know for sure that a beach ball will always float in the water through our senses alone, we can only assume it will happen through “custom,” meaning that we know it has happened numerous times before). In his 1783 book Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant claims that it was Hume’s deconstruction of cause and effect that woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”: Hume inspired Kant to try to form in his own work a compromise between rationalism and empiricism. Kant did this by basing much of his philosophy on a proposed third way of gaining knowledge: through synthetic a priori judgments, which understand an object or an idea through both sensory experience and by preexisting or intuitive knowledge of that object’s attributes and the categories it fits into (for example, “the sum of the interior angles of all triangles will add up to 180 degrees” or “cats are not plants”).
Historical Context: The Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant was a product of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that took place in the Western world from roughly the late 17th century to the end of the 18th century. Historians continue to debate the many causes of the Enlightenment. In the Renaissance, European thinkers rediscovered knowledge from the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Islamic worlds. The development of the printing press led to growing literacy rates. Colonialism meant that Europe began to learn of new cultures and lands in the Americas and East Asia. The Protestant Reformation led to the decline of the unified Catholic Church that previously controlled much of Europe’s intellectual activity. Wealthier and more centralized governments like that of France under King Louis XIV invested in universities and academies, which further spread sponsorship of scholars, writers, and scientists beyond just the royal courts, nobles, and the Catholic Church that had traditionally given intellectuals their livelihoods. The ideas of the Enlightenment were further helped along by an extensive network of intellectuals and their sponsors who kept in contact through letters (called “the Republic of Letters”), the emergence of literary and scientific journals, and meetings at coffeehouses, salons, and Masonic lodges.
While there were important variations especially along the lines of language and nation, the Enlightenment was characterized by the questioning of tradition; the rejection of superstition and what was termed “religious enthusiasm”; ideas like personal liberty, freedom of speech, and religious tolerance; and a confidence that new rational knowledge could be used to improve people’s lives and society at large. In a 1784 essay titled “What Is Enlightenment?,” Kant himself answered the question with, “Have courage to use your own understanding!” (Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” trans. Ted Humphrey, Hackett Publishing, 1992).
Still, some intellectuals, including Kant, were concerned with the growing religious skepticism of the Enlightenment. There were many prominent Enlightenment figures, like the Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753), who were devout Christians and wrote arguments in defense of their faith. However, a number of Enlightenment philosophers like John Toland (1670-1722) in Ireland and Voltaire (1694-1778) in France were Deists who believed in the existence of God but did not believe that God intervened in human affairs. One famous German-French Enlightenment philosopher, the Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789), openly advocated for atheism.
The growing skepticism had a couple of foundations. One was the philosophical writings of Baruch Spinoza, who held that God and Nature were one and the same and challenged the view that the Bible was divinely inspired. The other was the popularity of empiricism, which by focusing on sensory experience undermined arguments for unseeable or metaphysical ideas like God and an afterlife. This led Hume’s critics to call him an atheist (in reality, he is probably best classified as an agnostic). Kant’s philosophy is very much shaped by his own determination to remain true to the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment while still defending metaphysical beliefs.
Cultural Context: Sentimentalism
By the second half of the 18th century, a cultural trend called sentimentalism became widespread. It was based around the concept of sensibility, which held that people learned about social relationships and morality through emotional experiences. This trend was interlinked with two popular views among Enlightenment intellectuals across Europe. The first was the idea that the 18th century was a “century of happiness” and that achieving happiness was the goal of human existence. The second concept underpinning sentimentalism was philosophical empiricism itself, which seemed to prove that just as sensory experience led to knowledge and ideas, emotional experience led to the formation of social bonds and the sense of morality.
Such ideas were extremely popular not only among intellectuals, but also among the general public. They were promoted especially through novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761). Such literature tried to invoke the readers’ feelings with characters whose emotions led them to moral redemption and acts of virtue. The popularity of such ideas is why Kant is concerned with questions of happiness, emotion, and morality throughout Critique of Practical Reason.
Related Titles
By Immanuel Kant
