ABSTRACT
The foregoing historical excursions were intended to show the rise of the new scientific approach which superseded scholastic philosophy and its conception of reason and rationality. Instead of disinterested philosophical speculation, modern scientific reason powered by novel mathematical innovations and the experimental method was geared ultimately to practical purposes. Not only philosophy but also the status of theology as a viable worldview was challenged. The isolation of the divine from the emergent scientific interests was already implicitly present, as noted before, in the Cartesian epistemology. The dualistic two-world theory of reality had pervaded intellectual history from Plato down to Luther, but it was the Cartesian division between the divine and the human as the epistemological stand that proved decisive for the breakthrough of modernity. That original division was now focused as the duality between mind and body. This picture, where mind inhabited the infinite, transcendental, and free realm of Ideas and body was subordinated to the orders of the phenomenal world was reflected again in Immanuel Kant’s formulation of the dual nature of the human being: as the inhabitant of the determinate, knowable world of Erscheinungen in space and time and as the free moral agent of the invisible, indeterminate, and unknowable world of Dinge an sich (Kant, 1978, p. 53). The basic dilemma already hovering above the Cartesian conceptions resurfaced in Kant’s metaphorical ponderings in the conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason: how to combine the laws
of the ‘starry heavens’ with the demands of moral law. The human is the irreconcilable double manifestation as an animal creation (“als ein tierisches Geschöpf”) composed temporarily of celestial dust and as a personality who is disembedded from the animality and the constraints of sensual reality by the recognition of the infinite and free Intelligenz, whose main instance the moral law is (Kant, 1984, pp. 253-254). The Kantian project, with its three Critiques, may be conceived in its entirety as an effort to understand reason and Intelligenz beyond their merely instrumental uses Kant might already have anticipated in the powerfully rising profile of the natural sciences. But the difficulties involved in the attempt to conceive reason and rationality in more comprehensive terms derived initially from the structure of his reasoning, where the transcendental preconditions of morality (“die absolute Spontaneität der Freiheit”; Kant, 1984, p. 81; p. 159) were analogous to the a priori conditions of knowledge of outer reality; because, in practice, this structural decision was based, conceivably, on a dream of the “sicheren Gang der Wissenschaften” also in the realm of moral study-as in Locke. The moral equivalent of the thought categories-the Categorical Imperative: “Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne” (Kant, 1984, p. 53)—would function rather as a formal test of the moral principles, “als die oberste Bedingung aller Maximen” (p. 53), we already have than as a genuine source of those principles. Thus determination of the transcendental conditions for the moral world remained elusive and uninformative:
We cannot, therefore, know morality; we can only by a priori reasoning arrive at the conclusion that it must exist logically as a corrective to the determinate world, as a source of values. At this point [Kant’s] philosophy becomes most controversial, since his moral theory is one in which we are obliged to recognize a moral law and to strive towards its imperatives even though we cannot know it. Indeed, by definition, the moral law cannot be known; if it were, it would be part of the external, determinate order. The problem as Kant posed it is virtually insoluble; either the separate moral realm must be affirmed or else morality must be accepted as part of the determinate world, with the inevitable consequence that it has no absolute value. (Bowen, 1981, p. 211)
KANT ON EDUCATION
The philosophical controversy between the determinate and free order of moral reality also shaped in some respect Kant’s theory of education. He was firmly convinced that “the greatest and most difficult problem to which man can devote himself is the problem of education” (Kant, 1991, p. 11). Related more specifically to the moral aspects of education he was pondering:
One of the greatest problems of education is how to unite submission to the necessary restraint with the child’s capability of exercising his free will-for restraint is necessary. How am I to develop the sense of freedom in spite of the restraint? I am to accustom my pupil to endure the restraint of his freedom, and at the same time I am to guide him to use his freedom aright. Without this all education is merely mechanical, and the child, when his education is over, will never be able to make a proper use of his freedom. He should be made to feel early the inevitable opposition of society, that he may learn how difficult it is to support himself, to endure privation, and to acquire those things which are necessary to make him independent. (pp. 27-28)
These words have proved prophetic; they comprise many keys to an understanding of modern education (and, for that matter, also the context of its postmodern critique): the dilemma between the regulation of behavior and individual freedom; the same dualistic problematique at societal level: the sharply liberalistic focus on the individual struggle against society; and the partly “mechanical” nature of modern education and schooling.
