ABSTRACT
KANT STANDS at one of the great dividing points in the history of ethics. For perhaps the majority of later philosophical writers, including many who are self-consciously antiKantian, ethics is defined as a subject in Kantian terms. For many who have never heard of philosophy, let alone of Kant, morality is roughly what Kant said it was. Why this is so can only be suggested when what Kant said has been understood. But at the outset we have to note one very general point about Kant. He was in one sense both a typical and supreme representative of the Enlightenment; typical because of his belief in the power of courageous reasoning and in the effectiveness of the reform of institutions (when all states are republics there will be no more war); supreme because in what he thought he either solved the recurrent problems of the Enlightenment or reformulated them in a much more fruitful way. The greatest example of this is his synthesis of those two idols of the Enlightenment, Newton’s physics and the empiricism of Helvétius and Hume, in the Critique of Pure Reason. The empiricists had argued that we have rational grounds for belief in nothing beyond what our senses have already encountered; Newton’s physics offered us laws applicable to all events in space and time. How to reconcile them? We can, Kant argues, be assured a priori that all our experience will turn out to be law governed and to be law governed after the manner of Newtonian causality, not because of the character of the external world, but because of the character of the concepts through which we grasp that world. Experience is not a mere passive reception of impressions; it is the active grasping and comprehension of perceptions, and without the concepts and categories by means of which we order and understand perceptions, it would be formless and meaningless. “Concepts without perceptions are empty; perceptions without concepts are blind.”
