Section 6

On the Foundation of Kantian Ethics.

Closely bound up with the imperative form of ethics, shown in §. 4 to beg the question, is a favorite conception of Kant's, which may be excused but cannot be accepted.—We sometimes see a physician who, having used a remedy with brilliant success, proceeds to prescribe it for almost every illness: I compare Kant to such a physician. By separating the a priori from the a posteriori in human knowledge, he made the most brilliant and consequential discovery of which metaphysics can boast. What wonder that he should now seek to apply this method and distinction everywhere? Thus ethics, too, is to consist of a pure part, that is, one knowable a priori, and an empirical part. He rejects the latter as inadmissible for establishing the foundation of ethics. To discover the former and present it separately is his purpose in the "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals," which is accordingly to be a science entirely a priori, in the same sense as his "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science." Thus this moral law, assumed in advance to exist without warrant, derivation, or proof, is also to be knowable a priori, independent of all inner as well as outer experience, "resting solely on concepts of pure reason; it is to be a synthetic proposition a priori" (Critique of Practical Reason, S. 56 of the fourth edition;—R., S. 142). Closely connected with this is the requirement that, like everything known a priori, it must be merely formal, and thus concern only the form, not the content, of actions.—Consider what that means!—He expressly adds (S. VI of the preface to the Groundwork;—R., S. 5) that it "must not be sought in human nature (the subjective), nor in the circumstances of the world (the objective)," and (in the same place, S. VII; R., S. 6) that "not the slightest thing may be borrowed here from knowledge of the human being, that is, from anthropology." He repeats (S. 59;—R., S. 52) "that one must not so much as entertain the thought of deriving the reality of one's moral principle from the particular constitution of human nature"; likewise (S. 60;—R., S. 52), that "anything derived from a particular natural predisposition of humanity, from certain feelings and inclinations, or even, if possible, from a particular tendency peculiar to human nature that need not necessarily hold for the will of every rational being," can furnish no foundation for the moral law. This proves beyond dispute that he does not present the alleged moral law as a fact of consciousness, something empirically demonstrable—as the philosophizers of more recent times, one and all, would like to make it out to be. As he rejects all inner experience, so he rejects all outer experience still more decisively, repudiating every empirical foundation of morality. Thus—and I ask that this be carefully noted—he does not base his moral principle on any demonstrable fact of consciousness, such as an inner predisposition, any more than on some objective relation between things in the external world. No! That would be an empirical foundation. Instead, pure concepts a priori, that is, concepts which as yet have no content whatever drawn from outer or inner experience, and are therefore mere shells without kernels, are to be the foundation of morality. Consider how much this means: human consciousness, together with the entire external world and all the experience and facts within them, has been pulled away from beneath our feet. We have nothing to stand on. But what are we to hold on to? A pair of wholly abstract concepts, still entirely devoid of substance, themselves suspended in midair. From these—indeed, strictly speaking, from the mere form of their combination into judgments—a law is to emerge, one that is to hold with so-called absolute necessity, and to have the power to bridle and curb the pressure of desires, the storm of passion, the gigantic force of egoism. We shall see about that.

Closely linked to this preconceived notion that the foundation of morality must possess a priori character and purity from everything empirical is a second favorite conception of Kant's: namely, since the moral principle to be established must be a synthetic proposition a priori, with merely formal content, and thus wholly a matter of pure reason, it is as such to hold not for human beings alone, but for all possible rational beings, and "for that reason alone"—thus incidentally and by accident—for human beings as well. For that is why it is based on pure reason, which knows nothing but itself and the principle of contradiction, rather than on any feeling. Here, then, this pure reason is not taken as a human faculty of knowledge, which is all it actually is; instead, it is hypostatized as something existing in its own right, without any warrant, and as a most pernicious example and precedent—as our present wretched philosophical age can testify. Yet this establishment of morality not for human beings as human beings, but for all rational beings as such, is so central a concern and so cherished a conception for Kant that he never tires of repeating it at every opportunity. Against this I maintain that we are never entitled to establish a genus given to us in only a single species. We could put absolutely nothing into its concept except what we had drawn from this one species; hence whatever we asserted of the genus would still have to be understood as applying only to the one species. Meanwhile, by unwarrantedly thinking away what belongs to this species in order to form the genus, we might have abolished precisely the condition that makes possible the remaining properties hypostatized as a genus. Just as we know intelligence in general only as a property of animal beings, and are therefore never entitled to think of it as existing apart from and independently of animal nature, so we know reason only as a property of the human race, and are absolutely not entitled to think of it as existing outside that race, or to establish a genus, "rational beings," distinct from its sole species, "human being"; still less are we entitled to lay down laws for such imaginary rational beings in the abstract. To speak of rational beings other than human beings is no different from speaking of heavy beings other than bodies. One cannot escape the suspicion that Kant was thinking a little of the dear little angels here, or at least counting on their help in persuading the reader. At any rate, this tacitly presupposes the rational soul, which, wholly distinct from the sentient soul and the vegetative soul, would remain after death and then be nothing more than rational. Yet in the Critique of Pure Reason he himself explicitly and at length put an end to this wholly transcendent hypostasis. Meanwhile, in Kantian ethics, especially in the Critique of Practical Reason, the thought that the inner and eternal essence of the human being consists in reason can always be seen hovering in the background. Here, where the matter arises only incidentally, I must content myself with merely asserting the opposite: namely, that reason, like the faculty of knowledge in general, is something secondary, something belonging to appearance, indeed something conditioned by the organism, whereas the true core, the sole metaphysical and therefore indestructible element in the human being, is the will.

Thus, wishing to transfer to practical philosophy the method he had applied with such success in theoretical philosophy, and accordingly to separate pure a priori knowledge from empirical a posteriori knowledge here as well, Kant assumed that, just as we know the laws of space, time, and causality a priori, so too, or at least in an analogous manner, the moral standard for our conduct is given to us before all experience and expresses itself as a categorical imperative, as an absolute ought. But what a world of difference there is between those theoretical cognitions a priori and this alleged moral law a priori! The former rest on their expressing the mere forms, that is, functions, of our intellect, through which alone we are capable of apprehending an objective world, and in which that world therefore must present itself. For this very reason those forms legislate absolutely for it, so that all experience must invariably conform to them exactly, just as everything I see through blue glass must appear blue. The latter, by contrast, is mocked by experience at every turn; indeed, according to Kant himself, experience leaves it doubtful whether it has ever actually conformed to this law even once. What utterly disparate things are brought together here under the concept of a priori character! Moreover, Kant overlooked the fact that, according to his own doctrine in theoretical philosophy, it is precisely the a priori character of the cognitions just mentioned, their independence of experience, that restricts them to mere appearance, that is, to the representation of the world in our heads, and entirely deprives them of all validity with regard to the essence in itself of things, that is, what exists independently of our apprehension. Accordingly, in practical philosophy too, his alleged moral law, if it arises a priori in our heads, would likewise have to be merely a form of appearance, leaving the essence in itself of things untouched. But this consequence would stand in the sharpest contradiction both to the matter itself and to Kant's views of it, since he consistently presents precisely the moral element in us as most intimately connected with the true essence in itself of things, indeed as directly reaching it (for example, Critique of Practical Reason, S. 175;—R., S. 228). In the Critique of Pure Reason, too, wherever the mysterious thing in itself emerges at all more distinctly, it reveals itself as the moral element in us, as will.—But he passed over this.

I showed in §. 4 that Kant simply took the imperative form of ethics, and thus the concepts of ought, law, and duty, from theological morality, while having to leave behind what alone gives those concepts force and meaning there. Yet to provide a foundation for these concepts nonetheless, he goes so far as to demand that the concept of duty itself should also be the ground of its fulfillment, and thus what obligates us. An action, he says (S. 11;—R., S. 18), has genuine moral worth only when it is done solely from duty and merely for the sake of duty, without any inclination toward it. The worth of character begins only when someone without sympathy in his heart, cold and indifferent to the sufferings of others, and not really born a friend of humanity, nevertheless bestows benefits merely for the sake of tiresome duty. This assertion, which outrages genuine moral feeling; this apotheosis of lovelessness, directly opposed to Christian moral teaching, which places love above all else and allows nothing to count without it (1 Corinthians, 13, 3); this tactless moral pedantry was satirized by Schiller in two apt epigrams entitled "Scruples of Conscience and Decision." Their immediate occasion seems to have been certain passages of the Critique of Practical Reason that belong entirely to the present discussion, for example, S. 150;—R., S. 211: "The disposition incumbent on a human being in obeying the moral law is to obey it from duty, not from voluntary affection, nor even from some endeavor gladly undertaken of one's own accord and without being commanded."—It must be commanded! What a slave morality! And in the same work, S. 213;—R., S. 257, we read "that feelings of compassion and tenderhearted sympathy would be burdensome even to right-minded people, because they would throw their considered maxims into confusion and thus produce the wish to be rid of them and subject to legislative reason alone." I confidently maintain that what opens the hand of the loveless benefactor described above (S. 11;—R., S. 18), indifferent to the sufferings of others—unless he has ulterior motives—can never be anything but slavish superstitious fear, whether he calls his fetish the "categorical imperative" or Fitzlipuzli.⁶ What else could move a hard heart but fear alone?

In keeping with the foregoing views, according to S. 13;—R., S. 19, the moral worth of an action is by no means to lie in the intention with which it was done, but in the maxim one followed. Against this I submit that the intention alone decides the moral worth or unworthiness of a deed, which is why the same deed can be reprehensible or praiseworthy according to its intention. Thus, whenever people discuss an action of any moral significance, everyone inquires into the intention and judges the action by this alone; conversely, everyone appeals to the intention alone to justify himself when he sees his action misconstrued, or to excuse himself when it has had a harmful outcome.

On page 14;—R., S. 20, we finally receive the definition of the fundamental concept of all Kantian ethics, duty: it is "the necessity of an action from respect for the law."—But what is necessary happens and is inevitable; whereas actions from pure duty not only fail to occur in most cases, but Kant himself even admits, S. 25;—R., S. 28, that we have no certain examples at all of the disposition to act from pure duty; and on S. 26;—R., S. 29, "it is absolutely impossible through experience to establish with certainty a single case in which an action conforming to duty rested solely on the representation of duty"; likewise S. 28;—R., S. 30, and S. 49;—R., S. 50. In what sense, then, can necessity be ascribed to such an action? Since it is only fair always to interpret an author as favorably as possible, let us say he means that an action conforming to duty is objectively necessary but subjectively contingent. Yet precisely this is not as easy to conceive as to say: where is the object of this objective necessity, whose effect in objective reality fails to appear in most cases, and perhaps always? With all fairness of interpretation, I still cannot help saying that the expression "necessity of an action" in the definition is nothing but an artfully concealed, highly strained paraphrase of the word ought. This purpose becomes clearer still when we notice that the same definition uses the word respect where obedience was meant. For the note on S. 16;—R., S. 20, says: "Respect means merely the subordination of my will to a law. The immediate determination by the law, and the consciousness of it, is called respect." In what language? In German, what is described here is called obedience. But since the word respect cannot have been substituted so inappropriately for the word obedience without a reason, it must serve some purpose; and this is plainly none other than to obscure the descent of the imperative form and the concept of duty from theological morality. We saw above, similarly, that the expression necessity of an action, which takes the place of ought in so strained and clumsy a fashion, was chosen only because ought is precisely the language of the Decalogue. The foregoing definition, "Duty is the necessity of an action from respect for the law," would therefore read, in natural and undisguised language, that is, without a mask: "Duty means an action that ought to be done in obedience to a law."—That is "the poodle's core."

But now for the law, this final foundation stone of Kantian ethics! What is its content? And where is it written? This is the chief question. I note first that these are two questions: one concerns the principle, the other the foundation of ethics—two entirely different things, though they are usually, and sometimes perhaps deliberately, confused.

The principle, or supreme fundamental proposition, of an ethics is the shortest and most concise expression of the conduct it prescribes, or, if it had no imperative form, of the conduct to which it attributes genuine moral worth. It is therefore its direction toward virtue in general expressed in one proposition, and thus the what of virtue.—The foundation of an ethics, by contrast, is the why of virtue, the ground of that obligation, recommendation, or praise, whether this is sought in human nature, in the external circumstances of the world, or anywhere else. In ethics, as in all sciences, one should clearly distinguish the what from the why. Most writers on ethics, however, deliberately blur this distinction, probably because the what is so easy to state, while the why is so terribly difficult. Hence they gladly seek to compensate for poverty on the one side with riches on the other, and, by combining both in one proposition, to bring about a happy marriage of Penia (Poverty) with Poros (Resource). This usually happens by not stating the what, familiar to everyone, in its simplicity, but forcing it into an artificial formula from which it must first be inferred as the conclusion from given premises. The reader then feels as though he had learned not merely the matter itself, but also its ground. Most of the well-known moral principles readily bear this out. But since, in the following part, I do not intend to perform such tricks myself, but to proceed honestly—not to pass off the principle of ethics as its foundation at the same time, but to distinguish the two quite clearly—I will here and now reduce that what, that is, the principle, the fundamental proposition on whose content all writers on ethics are really agreed, however variously they clothe it, to the expression I consider the simplest and purest of all: Harm no one; rather, help everyone as much as you can. This is really the proposition that all moral teachers labor to establish: the common result of their very diverse deductions. It is the what for which the why is still being sought, the consequence for which the ground is demanded, and thus itself only the given, for which the sought-for answer is the problem of every ethics, as of the present prize question. The solution of this problem will provide the true foundation of ethics, sought for thousands of years like the philosopher's stone. That the given, the what, the principle, really finds its purest expression in the formula above is evident from the fact that this formula stands to every other moral principle as the conclusion to the premises, and thus as the point one actually wishes to reach. Every other moral principle must therefore be regarded as a paraphrase, an indirect or veiled expression, of that simple proposition. This applies, for example, even to the commonplace principle regarded as simple: What you do not want done to you, do not do to another⁷. Its deficiency—that it expresses only duties of justice, not duties of virtue—is easily remedied by repeating it without the two negatives. For then it too really means: Harm no one; rather, help everyone as much as you can. But it reaches this by a detour, thereby acquiring the appearance of having also supplied the real ground, the why, of that precept. This is not the case, since it by no means follows from my not wanting something done to me that I ought not to do it to others. The same applies to every principle or supreme fundamental proposition of morality put forward so far.

If we now return to our earlier question—what does the law say, obedience to which constitutes duty according to Kant, and on what is it founded?—we shall find that Kant too has closely bound the principle of morality to its foundation in a highly artificial manner. I now recall Kant's demand, considered at the outset, that the moral principle should be purely a priori and purely formal, indeed a synthetic proposition a priori, and therefore must have no material content and rest on nothing empirical whatever: neither on anything objective in the external world nor on anything subjective in consciousness, such as a feeling, inclination, or drive. Kant was clearly aware of the difficulty of this task, for on S. 60;—R., S. 53, he says: "Here we now see philosophy placed in a precarious position indeed, one that is supposed to be firm although it neither hangs from nor rests on anything in heaven or on earth." All the more eagerly, then, must we look forward to the solution of the task he has set himself, and await with curiosity how something is now to arise from nothing—that is, how laws of material human action are to take solid form out of purely a priori concepts, without any empirical or material content at all. As a symbol of this process we may take the chemical one through which solid sal ammoniac forms before our eyes from three invisible gases (nitrogen, hydrogen, chlorine), and thus in apparently empty space.—But I will present the process by which Kant solves this difficult task more clearly than he himself wished or was able to do. This may be all the more necessary since it seems seldom to have been properly understood. For almost all Kantians have fallen into the error of supposing that Kant directly presents the categorical imperative as a fact of consciousness. But then it would have an anthropological foundation, established through experience, albeit inner experience, and thus empirically—which runs directly counter to Kant's view and is repeatedly rejected by him. Accordingly, on S. 48;—R., S. 44, he says that "it cannot be determined empirically whether any such categorical imperative exists at all"; and likewise on S. 49;—R., S. 45, that "the possibility of the categorical imperative must be investigated entirely a priori, since here we do not have the advantage of its actuality being given in experience." Yet already his first disciple, Reinhold, is caught in this error, saying in his "Contributions to a Survey of Philosophy at the Beginning of the 19th Century," issue 2, S. 21: "Kant assumes the moral law as an immediately certain fact, as an original fact of moral consciousness." But had Kant wished to establish the categorical imperative as a fact of consciousness, and thus empirically, he would not have failed at least to demonstrate it as such. Yet nothing of the kind is found anywhere. To my knowledge, the categorical imperative makes its first appearance in the Critique of Pure Reason (S. 802 of the first and S. 830 of the fifth edition), where it appears entirely out of the blue, unannounced and connected with the preceding sentence only by a wholly unwarranted "therefore." It is first formally introduced in the "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals," to which we are here giving particular attention, and introduced entirely by an a priori route, through a deduction from concepts. By contrast, a "Formula of Concord for Critical Philosophy" in the fifth issue of Reinhold's journal just mentioned, so important for critical philosophy, even advances the following proposition on S. 122: "We distinguish moral self-consciousness from the experience with which it is connected in human consciousness as an original fact beyond which no knowledge can go; and by that self-consciousness we understand the immediate consciousness of duty, that is, of the necessity of adopting the will's conformity to law, independent of pleasure and displeasure, as the incentive and guiding standard of acts of will."—There indeed we would have "a substantial proposition, yes, and one that really posits something." (Schiller.)

But seriously: into what an impudent begging of the question do we see Kant's moral law grown here! If this were true, ethics would indeed have a foundation of incomparable solidity, and no prize questions would be needed to encourage the search for it. But then the greatest wonder would also be that such a fact of consciousness had been discovered so late, while for thousands of years people had been earnestly and laboriously seeking a foundation for morality. How Kant himself gave occasion for the error censured here I shall show below. One might nevertheless wonder at the unchallenged reign of such a fundamental error among the Kantians. Yet while writing countless books about Kant's philosophy, they did not even notice the disfigurement suffered by the Critique of Pure Reason in its second edition, which made it an incoherent, self-contradictory book. This has only now come to light and has, I think, been explained entirely correctly in Rosenkranz's preface to the second volume of the collected edition of Kant's works. We must remember that, for many scholars, incessant teaching from the lectern and in print leaves little time for thorough learning. "By teaching I learn" is not unconditionally true; rather, one might sometimes parody it: "By always teaching I learn nothing." There is even some justification for what Diderot puts into the mouth of Rameau's nephew: "And these teachers—do you think they will understand the sciences they teach? Nonsense, my dear sir, nonsense. If they possessed enough knowledge to teach them, they would not teach them."—"And why?"—"They would have spent their lives studying them." (Goethe's translation, S. 104.)—Lichtenberg too says: "I have noticed this often before: the professionals frequently do not know the best of it." But as for the public—to return to Kantian morality—most people, provided only that the result accords with their moral feelings, immediately assume that its derivation must be sound. If it looks difficult, they will not probe it deeply, but rely in this on the people "in the field."

Kant's grounding of his moral law is therefore by no means its empirical demonstration as a fact of consciousness, nor an appeal to moral feeling, nor a begging of the question under the fashionable, imposing name of an "absolute postulate." Rather, it is a very subtle process of thought, which he presents to us twice, S. 17 and 51;—R., S. 22 and 46, and of which the following is a clarified account.

Since Kant, in disdaining all empirical incentives of the will, has removed in advance as empirical everything objective and everything subjective on which a law for it could be founded, nothing remains to him as the matter of this law but its own form. This, however, is merely lawfulness. But lawfulness consists in holding for everyone, and thus in universal validity. This, then, becomes the matter. Consequently, the content of the law is nothing other than its own universal validity. Accordingly, it will read: "Act only on the maxim that you can at the same time will to become a universal law for all rational beings."—This, then, is Kant's actual grounding of the moral principle, so generally misunderstood, and thus the foundation of his entire ethics.—Compare also Critique of Practical Reason, S. 61;—R., S. 147, the end of note 1.—I offer my sincere admiration for the great ingenuity with which Kant has performed this feat, but continue my earnest examination by the standard of truth. I merely note further, with a view to taking it up again later, that reason, when and insofar as it carries out the particular reasoning just set forth, receives the name practical reason. The categorical imperative of practical reason, however, is the law that results from the process of thought described. Thus practical reason is by no means, as most people, and already Fichte, regarded it, a special faculty that cannot be traced further back, a hidden quality, a kind of instinct for morality resembling Hutcheson's moral sense. Rather, it is—as Kant also says in the preface, S. XII;—R., S. 8, and often enough elsewhere—one and the same as theoretical reason: it is precisely theoretical reason itself insofar as it carries out the process of thought described. For Fichte calls Kant's categorical imperative an absolute postulate (Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge, Tübingen 1802, S. 240, note). This is the modern euphemistic expression for begging the question, and this is how he himself consistently understood the categorical imperative; he is therefore also caught in the error censured above.

The first and most direct objection to this foundation Kant has given morality is that such an origin for a moral law within us is impossible: it presupposes that a human being would quite spontaneously conceive the idea of looking and asking for a law for his will, to which that will would have to submit and conform. Yet this cannot possibly occur to him of its own accord, but at most only after some other moral incentive—positively effective, real, and as such making itself known of its own accord, acting upon him unbidden, indeed pressing in upon him—had supplied the first impulse and occasion. But anything of this kind would conflict with Kant's assumption that the process of thought described above is itself supposed to be the origin of all moral concepts, the first vital impulse of morality. So long, then, as this is not the case, since by hypothesis there is no moral incentive other than the process of thought set out above, egoism alone remains the guiding rule of human action, following the law of motivation. That is, in every individual case, the particular motives, entirely empirical and egoistic, determine human action alone and undisturbed. For on this assumption there is nothing to prompt a person, and no reason whatever why it should occur to him to ask after a law that would restrict his willing and to which he would have to subject it, let alone to investigate and ponder over such a law—which alone would first make it possible for him to arrive at the peculiar train of thought of the foregoing reflection. It makes no difference here what degree of clarity one wishes to assign to Kant's reflective process, or whether one would prefer to tone it down into a merely dimly felt deliberation. No alteration on this point affects the fundamental truths that nothing comes from nothing and that an effect requires a cause. The moral incentive, like every motive that moves the will, must absolutely be something that makes itself known of its own accord, and therefore acts positively, and is consequently real. And since, for human beings, only what is empirical, or at least presupposed as possibly existing empirically, has reality, the moral incentive must in fact be empirical, and as such make itself known unbidden, come to us without waiting for us to inquire after it, press in upon us of its own accord—and with such force that it can at least possibly overcome the opposing egoistic motives, powerful as giants. For morality concerns human beings' actual conduct, not the building of houses of cards a priori, whose results no one would heed amid the gravity and urgency of life, and whose effect against the storm of the passions would therefore be that of an enema syringe against a conflagration. I have already mentioned that Kant regards it as a great merit of his moral law that it rests solely on abstract, pure concepts a priori, hence on pure reason, and is thereby valid not merely for human beings but for all rational beings as such. We must regret all the more that pure, abstract concepts a priori, without real content and without any empirical foundation whatever, can never set human beings, at least, in motion; of other rational beings I cannot speak. The second defect in Kant's foundation of morality is therefore its lack of real content. This has hitherto escaped notice because probably very few of those who have celebrated and propagated Kant's morality have ever thoroughly understood its actual foundation, clearly set out above. The second defect, then, is a complete lack of reality and consequently of any possible efficacy. It hangs in the air, a cobweb of the subtlest and emptiest concepts, resting on nothing, and therefore able to support nothing and move nothing. And yet Kant has loaded it with a burden of infinite weight: the presupposition of freedom of the will.

Despite his repeatedly expressed conviction that freedom cannot possibly occur in human actions, that theoretically not even its possibility can be understood (Critique of Practical Reason, S. 168;—R., S. 223), and that, given exact knowledge of a person's character and of all the motives acting upon him, his conduct could be calculated as certainly and precisely as a lunar eclipse (in the same work, S. 177;—R., S. 230), freedom is nevertheless assumed, if only in idea and as a postulate, solely on the credit of this foundation of morality that hangs so unsupported in the air, through the famous inference: "You can, because you ought." But once we have clearly recognized that something does not and cannot exist, what good is any amount of postulating? Rather, we should reject that on which the postulate rests, because it is an impossible presupposition, following the rule that the inference from impossibility to nonexistence is valid, and by a proof by contradiction—which here would overthrow the categorical imperative. Instead, one false doctrine is built upon another.

Kant himself must secretly have been aware of the inadequacy of a foundation of morality consisting solely of a few entirely abstract and empty concepts. For in the Critique of Practical Reason, where, as I have said, his procedure is already less rigorous and methodical overall, and the fame he has now won has made him bolder, the foundation of ethics very gradually changes its nature, almost forgets that it is a mere web of combinations of abstract concepts, and seems to aspire to something more substantial. Thus, for example, in that work, S. 81;—R., S. 163, "the moral law" is "as it were a fact of pure reason." What are we to make of this strange expression? Everywhere else, the factual is contrasted with what can be known through pure reason.—Likewise, in the same work, S. 83;—R., S. 164, there is talk of "a reason that determines the will immediately," and so on.—Here we should remember that in the Groundwork he expressly and repeatedly rejects any anthropological grounding, any demonstration of the categorical imperative as a fact of consciousness, because it would be empirical.—Yet, emboldened by such incidental remarks, Kant's successors went much farther down this path. Fichte (System of Ethics, S. 49) warns outright "that we should not allow ourselves to be tempted to explain further the consciousness that we have duties, or to seek to derive it from grounds outside itself, because this would impair the dignity and absoluteness of the law." A fine excuse!—And then, in the same work, S. 66, he says that "the principle of morality is a thought grounded in the intellectual intuitive perception of the absolute activity of intelligence, and is pure intelligence's immediate concept of itself." What phrases a windbag like this uses to conceal his helplessness!—Anyone wishing to see how completely the Kantians gradually forgot and ignored Kant's original grounding and derivation of the moral law should consult a very readable essay in Reinhold's Contributions to a Survey of Philosophy at the Beginning of the 19th Century, issue 2, 1801. There, S. 105 and 106, it is asserted "that in Kantian philosophy autonomy (which is one with the categorical imperative) is a fact of consciousness and cannot be traced back to anything further, since it makes itself known through an immediate consciousness."—In that case it would have an anthropological, hence empirical, foundation, contrary to Kant's explicit and repeated declarations.—Nevertheless, in the same work, S. 108, we read: "Both in the practical philosophy of criticism and in the whole of purified or higher transcendental philosophy, autonomy is that which grounds itself and supplies a ground, which is neither capable of nor in need of any further grounding, the absolutely original, the true and certain through itself, the primal truth, the prior in the highest sense, the absolute principle.—Anyone, therefore, who suspects, demands, or seeks a ground for this autonomy outside itself—of him the Kantian school must believe either that he lacks moral consciousness⁸ or that he misconstrues it in speculation through false fundamental concepts. The Fichte-Schelling school declares him afflicted with that lack of spirit which makes a person incapable of philosophizing and constitutes the character of the unholy rabble and sluggish cattle—or, as Schelling puts it more gently, of the profane crowd and the sluggish herd." Everyone can feel what the truth of a doctrine must amount to when people seek to extort assent to it with such trump cards. Yet it is from the respect these inspired that we must explain the truly childlike credulity with which the Kantians accepted the categorical imperative and thereafter treated it as an established fact. For since disputing a theoretical assertion could here readily be confused with moral depravity, everyone, even if he discerned little of the categorical imperative in his own consciousness, preferred to keep quiet about it, secretly supposing that in others it must be more strongly developed and emerge more distinctly. For no one gladly turns the inside of his conscience outward.

Thus, increasingly, practical reason with its categorical imperative appears in the Kantian school as a hyperphysical fact, as a Delphic temple in the human mind, from whose dark sanctuary oracles infallibly announce—not, unfortunately, what will happen, but at least what ought to happen. Once assumed—or rather smuggled in and wrung out by sheer defiance—this immediacy of practical reason was later unfortunately transferred to theoretical reason as well, especially since Kant himself had often said that the two were, after all, one and the same reason (for example, Preface, S. XII;—R., S. 8). For once it had been conceded that in practical matters there was a reason issuing decrees from the prophetic tripod, it was a very short step to grant the same privilege to its sister—indeed, strictly speaking, its consubstantial sister—theoretical reason, and to declare it equally free of intermediate authority. The advantage of this was as immeasurable as it was obvious. Now all the sham philosophers and fantasists, led by J. H. Jacobi, the denouncer of atheists, streamed toward this little door that had unexpectedly opened for them, to bring their trifles to market, or at least to rescue their favorite pieces from the old inheritance that Kant's doctrine threatened to grind to dust.—Just as in an individual's life a single youthful misstep often ruins the whole course of life, so Kant's one false assumption of a practical reason equipped with entirely transcendent credentials and deciding, like the highest courts of appeal, "without grounds," had the consequence that doctrines utterly foreign to the rigorous, sober critical philosophy sprang from it: doctrines of a reason that at first merely had a faint "presentiment" of the "supersensible," then distinctly "apprehended" it, and finally even "intellectually intuited" it in person. Any fantasist could now pass off his dreams as this reason's "absolute" pronouncements and revelations—that is, pronouncements delivered from the prophetic tripod. This new privilege was conscientiously exploited. Here, then, lies the origin of that philosophical method which appeared immediately after Kant's doctrine and consists in mystifying, overawing, deceiving, throwing dust in people's eyes, and windbaggery, whose era the history of philosophy will one day list under the title "Period of Dishonesty." For the character of honesty, of investigating in company with the reader, which marks the writings of all earlier philosophers, has vanished here: the sham philosopher of this age seeks not to instruct his reader but to befool him; every page bears witness to it. Fichte and Schelling shine as the heroes of this period, but finally so does Hegel, the clumsy, witless charlatan, wholly unworthy even of them and standing far below these men of talent. The chorus was supplied by all manner of professors of philosophy who, with solemn faces, told their public stories about the Infinite, the Absolute, and many other things of which they could know absolutely nothing.

Even the paltry witticism that because the word "Vernunft" ("reason") comes from "Vernehmen" ("apprehending"), it means that reason is a faculty for apprehending that so-called "supersensible" (Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land), had to serve as a stepping-stone to this prophethood of reason. The notion met with boundless applause and was incessantly repeated in Germany for 30 years with unspeakable satisfaction, indeed made the cornerstone of philosophical systems—although it is plain that "Vernunft" does indeed come from "Vernehmen", but only because it gives human beings the advantage over animals of not merely hearing but also apprehending: not, however, what goes on in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, but what one rational person says to another. This is apprehended by the other, and the capacity to do so is called reason. Thus have all peoples, all ages, and all languages understood the concept of reason: as the faculty of universal, abstract, nonperceptual representations, called concepts, which are designated and fixed by words. This faculty alone is what human beings really possess beyond animals. For these abstract representations, concepts—that is, collective representations of many individual things—make language possible; through language, thinking proper; through thinking, consciousness not merely of the present, which animals too possess, but of the past and future as such; and through this in turn, distinct recollection, reflection, foresight, intention, the planned cooperation of many, the state, trades, arts, sciences, religions, and philosophies—in short, everything that so strikingly distinguishes human life from animal life. For animals there are only perceptual representations and therefore only perceptual motives: the dependence of their acts of will on motives is consequently obvious. This dependence is no less present in human beings, and motives move them too, given their individual characters, with the strictest necessity. Yet these motives are mostly not perceptual but abstract representations—that is, concepts, thoughts, which are nevertheless the result of earlier intuitive perceptions, hence of influences acting on them from outside. But this gives human beings a relative freedom, namely in comparison with animals. For they are determined not, like animals, by their perceptually given, present surroundings, but by their thoughts, drawn from earlier experiences or received through instruction. Hence the motive that moves them too with necessity is not before the spectator's eyes together with the deed: they carry it around in their heads. This gives not only their conduct and activity as a whole, but even all their movements, a character visibly different from those of animals: they are drawn, as it were, by finer, invisible threads. Hence all their movements bear the stamp of deliberateness and intention, giving them an appearance of independence that visibly distinguishes them from those of animals. Yet all these great differences depend entirely on the capacity for abstract representations, concepts. This capacity, therefore, is the essence of reason, that is, of the faculty distinguishing human beings, called the rational faculty, the reasoning faculty, reason, reason, discourse, reason, reason, discourse of reason.—But if I am asked what, in contrast, understanding—mind, intellect, understanding, understanding—is, I say: it is the cognitive faculty that animals also possess, though to varying degrees, and we possess to the highest degree; namely, the immediate consciousness, preceding all experience, of the law of causality, which constitutes the very form of understanding and in which its entire essence consists. On it depends, first of all, intuitive perception of the external world. For the senses by themselves are capable only of sensation, which is far from being intuitive perception, but is merely its material: the mind sees and the mind hears; all else is deaf and blind (mind sees, mind hears; the rest is deaf and blind). Intuitive perception arises when we immediately refer the sensation of the sense organs to its cause, which, through precisely this act of intelligence, presents itself as an external object in space, our form of intuitive perception. This proves that we are conscious of the law of causality a priori and that it does not come from experience, since experience itself, presupposing intuitive perception, becomes possible only through that law. In the perfection of this entirely immediate apprehension of causal relations lies all superiority of understanding, all cleverness, sagacity, penetration, and acuteness: for it underlies all knowledge of the connections between things, in the widest sense of the word. Its acuity and accuracy make one person stronger in understanding, cleverer, shrewder than another. By contrast, the person called rational in every age has been one who lets himself be guided not by perceptual impressions but by thoughts and concepts, and therefore always proceeds with deliberation, consistency, and reflection. Such conduct is everywhere called rational conduct. Yet it by no means implies integrity and human kindness. On the contrary, we can proceed with the utmost rationality, hence deliberately, reflectively, consistently, according to plan and method, while following the most selfish, unjust, even depraved maxims. Hence before Kant it never occurred to anyone to identify just, virtuous, and noble conduct with rational conduct: the two were perfectly well distinguished and kept separate. The one rests on the manner of motivation, the other on the difference between fundamental maxims. Only according to Kant, since virtue is supposed to spring from pure reason, are virtuous and rational one and the same—in defiance of the usage of all peoples, which is not accidental but the work of universal human knowledge and is therefore concordant. Rational and vicious can very well be combined; indeed, only through their combination do great, far-reaching crimes become possible. Likewise, irrational and noble can very well coexist: for example, when today I give a person in need what I myself will need tomorrow even more urgently than he does; when I let myself be carried away into giving a sufferer the sum my creditor is waiting for; and in very many other cases.

But, as I have said, this elevation of reason into the source of all virtue—resting on the assertion that, as practical reason, it oracularly issues unconditional imperatives purely a priori, and combined with the false explanation of theoretical reason advanced in the Critique of Pure Reason, that it is a faculty essentially directed toward the unconditioned, which takes shape in three alleged ideas (whose impossibility the understanding at the same time recognizes a priori)—led the babbling philosophers, with Jacobi at their head, through the example it offered for imitation in its faults, to their reason that immediately apprehends the "supersensible," and to the absurd assertion that reason is a faculty essentially designed for things beyond all experience, hence for metaphysics, and immediately and intuitively knows the ultimate grounds of all things and all existence, the supersensible, the Absolute, the Deity, and so forth.—Had people been willing to use their reason instead of deifying it, such assertions should long ago have been met by the simple observation that if human beings, by virtue of a special organ for solving the riddle of the world, constituting their reason, carried within themselves an innate metaphysics needing only development, there would have to be as complete agreement among them about the objects of metaphysics as about the truths of arithmetic and geometry. It would then be quite impossible for a great number of fundamentally different religions and an even greater number of fundamentally different philosophical systems to exist on earth. Rather, anyone who differed from the rest in religious or philosophical views would at once have to be regarded as someone not quite right in the head.—The following simple observation should have been no less compelling. If we discovered a species of ape that intentionally made itself tools for fighting, building, or some other use, we would immediately grant it reason. Yet when we find savage peoples without any metaphysics or religion, as such peoples do exist, it does not occur to us to deny them reason on that account. Through his critique, Kant confined to its limits the reason that proves its alleged supersensible knowledge; but Jacobi's reason that immediately apprehends the supersensible he would truly have found beneath all criticism. Meanwhile, a reason of this kind, exempt from intermediate authority, is still being foisted on innocent young men at the universities.

Note.

If we wish to get to the very bottom of the assumption of practical reason, we must trace its genealogy a little farther back. We then find that it descends from a doctrine that Kant himself thoroughly refuted, but which nevertheless secretly, indeed without his own awareness, underlies his assumption of practical reason with its imperatives and autonomy, as a reminiscence of an earlier way of thinking. This is rational psychology, according to which a human being is composed of two entirely heterogeneous substances, the material body and the immaterial soul. Plato was the first to establish this dogma formally and attempt to prove it as an objective truth. Descartes, however, brought it to the summit of perfection and pushed it to its extreme by giving it the most precise elaboration and scientific rigor. Yet this very development brought its falsity to light, which was successively demonstrated by Spinoza, Locke, and Kant. By Spinoza—whose philosophy consists chiefly in refuting his teacher's twofold dualism—when, in direct and explicit opposition to Descartes's two substances, he made this his principal proposition: thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, comprehended now under one attribute, now under the other. By Locke, when he contested innate ideas, derived all knowledge from sensory knowledge, and taught that it was not impossible for matter to think. By Kant, through the critique of rational psychology as it stands in the first edition. On the other side, however, Leibniz and Wolff championed the bad cause: this earned Leibniz the undeserved honor of being compared to the great Plato, so utterly different from him. This is not the place to elaborate all this. Now, according to this rational psychology, the soul was originally and essentially a knowing being, and only as a consequence of this also a willing one. Depending on whether, in these fundamental activities, it acted purely on its own and unmixed with the body, or in conjunction with it, the soul had a higher and a lower faculty of cognition, and likewise a higher and lower faculty of will. In the higher faculty, the immaterial soul acted entirely on its own, without the body's cooperation: here it was pure intellect, dealing solely with representations belonging to it alone, hence not sensory at all but purely spiritual, and with acts of will of the same kind, all of which were supposed to contain nothing sensory, since that originated in the body.⁹ Here it knew nothing but pure abstractions, universals, innate concepts, eternal truths, and the like. Accordingly, its willing too stood solely under the influence of such purely spiritual representations. By contrast, the lower faculty of cognition and will was the work of the soul acting in conjunction with the body and its organs and closely bound to them, but thereby impaired in its purely spiritual efficacy. This was supposed to include all intuitively perceptual cognition, which accordingly was supposed to be obscure and confused, while abstract cognition, consisting of abstracted concepts, was supposed to be distinct! The will determined by such sensorially conditioned cognition was the lower and generally bad one: for to it belonged willing guided by sensory stimulation, while the other was pure willing, guided by pure reason and belonging to the immaterial soul alone. The Cartesian De la Forge developed this doctrine most clearly in his Treatise on the Human Mind. There, c. 23, he says: It is only one and the same will that is called sensitive appetite when it is aroused by judgments formed as a consequence of the perceptions of the senses, and that is called rational appetite when the mind forms judgments concerning its own ideas, independently of the confused thoughts of the senses that are the causes of its inclinations.———What gave occasion for these two different propensities of the will to be taken for two different appetites is that very often one opposes the other, because the purpose the mind builds upon its own perceptions does not always agree with the thoughts suggested to the mind by the disposition of the body, through which it is often compelled to will one thing while its reason makes it desire another.—From the dimly conscious reminiscence of such views ultimately comes Kant's doctrine of the autonomy of the will, which, as the voice of pure practical reason, legislates for all rational beings as such and recognizes only formal determining grounds, in contrast to the material ones, which alone determine the lower faculty of desire, opposed by the higher.

Incidentally, this whole view, first given a properly systematic presentation by Descartes, can already be found in Aristotle, who sets it out clearly enough in On the Soul, I, 1. Even Plato had already prepared the way for it and hinted at it in the Phaedo (S. 188 and 189, Bip.).—As a consequence of its Cartesian systematization and consolidation, however, a hundred years later we find it grown quite bold, pushed to its extreme, and thereby led toward disillusionment. Thus Muratori's On the Power of the Imagination, cap. 1–4 and 13, offers us a summary of the view then prevailing. Here imagination, whose function is the entire intuitive perception of the external world on the data of the senses, is a purely material, bodily, cerebral organ—the lower cognitive faculty—and the immaterial soul is left only thinking, reflecting, and deciding.—But this makes the matter distinctly questionable, and people must have felt it. For if matter is capable of the highly complicated apprehension of the world in intuitive perception, it is impossible to see why it should not also be capable of abstraction from that intuitive perception, and thereby of everything else. Clearly, abstraction is nothing more than dropping the determinations unnecessary to the purpose at hand, hence the individual and specific differences: for example, when I disregard what is peculiar to the sheep, the ox, the deer, the camel, and so on, and thus arrive at the concept of a ruminant. In this operation the representations lose their perceptual character, and precisely as merely abstract, nonperceptual representations—concepts—now need the word in order to be fixed and handled in consciousness.—For all this, however, we still see Kant under the lingering influence of that old doctrine when he establishes his practical reason with its imperatives.

6 More correctly Huitzilopochtli, a Mexican deity.

7 Hugo Grotius traces it back to Emperor Severus.

8 Just as I thought! When they have nothing reasonable left to reply,They promptly shift it into your conscience.Schiller.

9 Pure intellection is intellection concerned with no bodily images. Cart., Medit., p. 188.

On the Foundation of Kant's Ethics.

The imperative form of ethics, which §. 4. showed to assume what it must prove, is closely tied to one of Kant's favorite ideas. We can excuse this idea, but we cannot accept it.—Sometimes a doctor uses a treatment with brilliant success and then starts prescribing it for almost every illness. I compare Kant to that doctor. By separating what we know independently of experience from what we know through experience, he made the most brilliant and far-reaching discovery that metaphysics can claim. No wonder he then tried to use this method and distinction everywhere. So ethics, too, is to have a pure part, knowable independently of experience, and an empirical part. He rejects the latter as inadmissible for establishing the basis of ethics. His aim in the "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" is to find the former and present it separately. This is therefore meant to be a science wholly independent of experience, in the same sense as his "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science." Thus the moral law, whose existence he has already assumed without justification, deduction, or proof, is also to be knowable independently of experience. It is to be independent of all inner and outer experience, "based solely on concepts of pure reason; it is to be a synthetic proposition knowable independently of experience" (Critique of Practical Reason, S. 56 of the fourth edition;—R., S. 142). Closely connected with this is the requirement that it be merely formal, like everything known independently of experience. It must therefore concern only the form of actions, not their content.—Think what this means!—He expressly adds (S. VI of the preface to the Groundwork;—R., S. 5) that it "must not be sought in human nature (the subjective), or in the circumstances of the world (the objective)." And he says (same place, S. VII; R., S. 6) that "not the slightest thing may be borrowed here from knowledge of human beings, that is, from anthropology." He repeats (S. 59;—R., S. 52) "that we must never think of trying to derive the reality of our moral principle from the particular character of human nature." Likewise (S. 60;—R., S. 52), nothing can provide a basis for the moral law if it is derived from "anything peculiar to humanity's natural constitution, from certain feelings and tendencies, or even, if possible, from some particular bent belonging to human nature that would not necessarily apply to the will of every rational being." This proves beyond dispute that he does not present the supposed moral law as a fact of consciousness, something that can be shown empirically to exist. Yet that is what all the philosophical dabblers of recent times would like to make it out to be. He rejects all inner experience, and rejects all outer experience still more firmly, ruling out every empirical basis for morality. Please note this carefully: he does not base his moral principle on any demonstrable fact of consciousness, such as an inner disposition. Nor does he base it on any objective relation between things in the outside world. No! That would be an empirical basis. Instead, morality is to rest on pure concepts independent of experience. These are concepts that still have no content at all from either outer or inner experience. They are empty shells without a kernel. Consider how much this means. Human consciousness and the whole outside world, with all the experience and facts they contain, have been pulled out from under our feet. We have nothing to stand on. What can we hold on to? A couple of completely abstract concepts, still entirely without substance, which also hang in midair. From these—or rather, merely from the form in which they are combined into judgments—a law is supposed to emerge. This law is supposed to hold with so-called absolute necessity and have the power to put a bridle and bit on the pressure of desires, the storm of passion, and the gigantic force of egoism. Let us see whether it can.

This preconceived idea—that the basis of morality absolutely requires independence from experience and freedom from everything empirical—is closely connected with a second favorite idea of Kant's. The moral principle he is to establish must be a synthetic proposition independent of experience, with merely formal content, and thus entirely a matter of pure reason. As such, it is to apply not just to human beings, but to all possible rational beings. It is to apply to human beings "only for that reason," incidentally and by accident. That is why it rests on pure reason, which knows nothing but itself and the principle of noncontradiction, rather than on any feeling. Here, then, pure reason is not taken as a human power of knowing, which is all it really is. Instead, it is treated as something that exists on its own. There is no justification for this, and it sets a most harmful example and precedent, as our present miserable age of philosophy can show. Yet setting up morality not for human beings as human beings, but for all rational beings as such, is so central and dear to Kant that he never tires of repeating it whenever he can. Against this I say that we are never entitled to set up a genus when we know only a single species of it. We could put nothing into the concept of that genus except what we had taken from this one species. Anything we said about the genus would therefore still have to be understood as applying only to the one species. Meanwhile, to form the genus, we would have unjustifiably thought away features belonging to this species. In doing so, we might have removed the very condition that makes the remaining properties possible—the properties we then treat as a genus existing on its own. We know intelligence in general only as a property of animals. We are therefore never entitled to think of it as existing apart from and independently of animal nature. In the same way, we know reason only as a property of the human species. We have absolutely no right to think of it as existing outside that species, or to set up a genus called "rational beings" distinct from its only species, "human beings." Still less are we entitled to make laws for such imaginary rational beings considered in the abstract. Talking about rational beings other than humans is like talking about beings with weight other than bodies. We cannot help suspecting that Kant was thinking a little of the dear little angels, or at least counting on their help in convincing the reader. In any case, this silently assumes a rational soul, quite distinct from the sensing soul and the vegetative soul, that would remain after death and would then be nothing but rational. Yet he himself had expressly and thoroughly put an end to this entirely transcendent assumption of a thing's existence in the Critique of Pure Reason. Still, throughout Kant's ethics, especially in the Critique of Practical Reason, the idea always hovers in the background that the inner and eternal nature of human beings consists in reason. Since this subject comes up here only in passing, I must limit myself to simply asserting the opposite. Reason, like the power of knowing in general, is something secondary. It belongs to appearance and is, indeed, conditioned by the organism. The true core of a human being, the only metaphysical and therefore indestructible element, is their will.

Kant wanted to transfer to practical philosophy the method he had used so successfully in theoretical philosophy. Here, too, he wanted to separate pure knowledge independent of experience from empirical knowledge gained through experience. He therefore assumed that, just as we know the laws of space, time, and causality independently of experience, we are also given a moral guide for our actions before all experience, or at least in some similar way. This guide was to express itself as a categorical imperative, an absolute ought. But what an enormous difference there is between these two things! On one side are those kinds of theoretical knowledge independent of experience. They rest on expressing the mere forms—that is, functions—of our intellect. Only through these can we grasp an objective world, so the world must present itself in these forms. That is precisely why these forms lay down absolute laws for it. Every experience must always conform to them exactly, just as everything I see through blue glass must appear blue. On the other side is this supposed moral law independent of experience. Experience mocks it at every turn. Indeed, according to Kant himself, experience leaves it doubtful whether it has ever actually conformed to that law even once. What utterly different things are being brought together under the concept of independence from experience! Kant also overlooked a consequence of his own teaching in theoretical philosophy. The very independence from experience of the kinds of knowledge just mentioned restricts them to mere appearance: the representation of the world in our heads. It completely deprives them of any validity concerning the nature of things in themselves, what exists independently of our way of grasping it. Accordingly, in practical philosophy too, his supposed moral law, if it arises in our heads independently of experience, would have to be merely a form of appearance. It would leave the nature of things in themselves untouched. But this consequence would flatly contradict both the subject itself and Kant's views about it. Throughout his work—for instance, Critique of Practical Reason, S. 175;—R., S. 228—he presents the moral element in us as most closely connected with the true nature of things in themselves, indeed as bearing directly on it. And in the Critique of Pure Reason, wherever the mysterious thing in itself comes into somewhat clearer view, it reveals itself as the moral element in us, as will.—But he brushed this aside.

In §. 4 I showed that Kant simply took the imperative form of ethics, and thus the concepts of ought, law, and duty, from theological morality. Yet he had to leave behind what alone gives these concepts force and meaning there. To give them a basis nonetheless, he goes so far as to demand that the concept of duty itself must also be the reason for fulfilling it, and thus the binding force. An action, he says (S. 11;—R., S. 18), has genuine moral worth only when it is done solely from duty, and merely for the sake of duty, without any inclination to do it. A person's character begins to have worth only when they do good merely for the sake of tiresome duty, with no sympathy in their heart, cold and indifferent to others' suffering, and not naturally inclined to human kindness. This claim outrages genuine moral feeling. It glorifies the absence of love and directly opposes Christian moral teaching, which places love above everything and counts nothing without it (1. Corinthians, 13, 3). Schiller mocked this tactless moral pedantry in two apt epigrams headed "Scruples of Conscience and Decision." Their immediate occasion seems to have been some passages in the Critique of Practical Reason that fit this subject exactly. For example, S. 150;—R., S. 211: "The attitude required of a human being in following the moral law is to follow it from duty, not from freely chosen affection, or even from an effort not commanded, gladly undertaken of one's own accord."—It has to be commanded! What a morality for slaves! Then, in the same work, S. 213;—R., S. 257, we read "that feelings of compassion and tenderhearted sympathy would be troublesome even to right-minded people, because they would confuse their carefully considered maxims and so produce the wish to be rid of these feelings and subject to lawgiving reason alone." I confidently maintain that what opens the hand of the loveless benefactor described above (S. 11;—R., S. 18), indifferent to other people's suffering, can never be anything but slavish superstitious fear—unless he has ulterior motives. It makes no difference whether he calls his fetish "categorical imperative" or Fitzlipuzli.⁶ What else could move a hard heart but fear?

In keeping with these views, S. 13;—R., S. 19, says that an action's moral worth is not to lie at all in the intention with which it was done, but in the maxim followed. Against this I ask the reader to consider that intention alone decides an action's moral worth or lack of worth. The same action can therefore deserve blame or praise, depending on its intention. That is also why, whenever people discuss an action of any moral importance, everyone asks about the intention and judges the action by that alone. On the other side, people also appeal to their intention alone to justify themselves when they see their action misinterpreted, or to excuse themselves when it has had harmful results.

On S. 14;—R., S. 20, we finally receive the definition of duty, the basic concept of Kant's whole ethics. It is "the necessity of an action out of respect for the law."—But what is necessary happens and cannot fail to happen. Actions done from pure duty, by contrast, usually do not happen at all. Kant himself even admits, S. 25;—R., S. 28, that we have no reliable examples at all of an attitude of acting from pure duty. And on S. 26;—R., S. 29, he says, "It is utterly impossible to establish with certainty through experience a single case in which an action conforming to duty rested solely on the representation of duty." The same is said on S. 28;—R., S. 30, and S. 49;—R., S. 50. In what sense, then, can such an action be called necessary? Since it is only fair always to interpret an author as favorably as possible, let us say he means that an action conforming to duty is objectively necessary but subjectively contingent. Yet this is much easier to say than to think through. Where is the object of this objective necessity, whose effect in objective reality usually—and perhaps always—fails to occur? However fairly I interpret it, I cannot help saying that the definition's phrase "necessity of an action" is nothing but an artificially concealed and very strained way of saying ought. This intention becomes clearer when we notice that the same definition uses the word respect where obedience was meant. The note on S. 16;—R., S. 20, says: "Respect means only the subordination of my will to a law. The will's direct determination by the law, and the consciousness of this, is called respect." In what language? In German, what is described here is called obedience. The word respect cannot have been put so inappropriately in place of obedience for no reason. It must serve some purpose. Clearly, that purpose can only be to conceal the origin of the imperative form and the concept of duty in theological morality. We have already seen that the phrase necessity of an action, which takes the place of ought so awkwardly and unnaturally, was chosen only because ought is precisely the language of the Ten Commandments. The definition above, "Duty is the necessity of an action out of respect for the law," would therefore read as follows in natural, undisguised language—that is, without its mask: "Duty means an action that ought to be done out of obedience to a law."—That is "what lies at the poodle's core."

But now, the law, this final foundation stone of Kant's ethics! What does it say? And where is it written? This is the main question. First, I point out that these are two questions. One concerns the principle of ethics, the other its foundation. These are two quite different things, though they are usually confused, sometimes perhaps deliberately.

The principle, or highest basic rule, of a system of ethics is the shortest and clearest statement of the way of acting it prescribes. Or, if it has no imperative form, it states the way of acting to which it gives genuine moral worth. It is thus that system's instruction for virtue in general, expressed in one proposition: the what of virtue.—The foundation of a system of ethics, on the other hand, is the why of virtue. It is the reason for that obligation, recommendation, or praise, whether we seek it in human nature, in the external conditions of the world, or anywhere else. In ethics, as in all sciences, we should clearly distinguish the what from the why. Most writers on ethics deliberately blur this distinction instead. Probably this is because the what is so easy to state, while the why is so terribly difficult. So they like to make up for poverty on one side with wealth on the other. By combining both in one proposition, they try to arrange a happy marriage between Penia (Poverty) and Poros (Resource). Usually they do this by not stating the what, which everyone knows, in its simple form. Instead, they force it into an artificial formula from which it must first be inferred as the conclusion from given premises. The reader then feels that they have learned not only the fact but also the reason for it. Most familiar moral principles readily show that this is so. In the next part, however, I do not intend to perform such tricks. I mean to proceed honestly, not to pass off the principle of ethics as its foundation at the same time, but to separate the two quite clearly. So I will state that what—the principle, the basic rule—right here in what I consider its simplest and purest form. All writers on ethics really agree on its content, however differently they dress it up: Harm no one; rather, help everyone as much as you can. This is really the proposition that all moral teachers struggle to justify. It is the common result of their very different deductions. It is the what for which the why is still being sought, the consequence for which we demand the reason. It is therefore only what is given. What must be found in relation to it is the problem of every system of ethics, as well as of the present prize question. Solving this problem will provide the true foundation of ethics, which people have sought for thousands of years, like the philosophers' stone. The formula above really is the purest expression of what is given, the what, the principle. We can see this because it stands in relation to every other moral principle as a conclusion stands to its premises: it is what we are actually trying to reach. Every other moral principle must therefore be seen as a roundabout, indirect, or veiled expression of that simple proposition. This holds even, for example, for the commonplace basic rule considered so simple: What you do not want done to you, do not do to anyone else⁷. Its shortcoming is that it expresses only duties of justice, not duties of virtue. This is easily remedied by repeating it with both negatives removed. For then it, too, really means: Harm no one; rather, help everyone as much as you can. But it gets there by a detour. This gives it the appearance of also having supplied the actual reason, the why, for that instruction. It has not done so. The fact that I do not want something done to me in no way implies that I ought not to do it to others. The same holds for every principle or highest basic rule of morality put forward so far.

Let us now return to our question above. What does the law say, the law whose observance constitutes duty according to Kant? And what is it based on?—We will find that Kant, too, has very artfully tied the principle of morality closely to its foundation. Recall his demand, considered at the beginning, that the moral principle must be wholly independent of experience and purely formal—indeed, a synthetic proposition knowable independently of experience. It must therefore have no material content and may rest on nothing empirical. That means neither anything objective in the outside world nor anything subjective in consciousness, such as any feeling, inclination, or drive. Kant was clearly aware of the difficulty of this task. On S. 60;—R., S. 53, he says: "Here we see philosophy placed in a precarious position indeed. It is supposed to stand firm, although it hangs from nothing and rests on nothing in heaven or on earth." We must therefore look forward all the more eagerly to his solution of the task he has set himself. We wait to see how something is to come from nothing: how laws for concrete human action are to take concrete form out of concepts wholly independent of experience, with no empirical or material content at all. We can take as a symbol of this process the chemical process in which three invisible gases—nitrogen, hydrogen, and chlorine—produce solid ammonium chloride before our eyes in an apparently empty space.—But I will set out the process by which Kant solves this difficult task more clearly than he himself wished or was able to do. This seems all the more necessary because the process rarely seems to have been properly understood. Almost all Kantians have fallen into the error of thinking that Kant presents the categorical imperative directly as a fact of consciousness. But then it would have an anthropological basis, resting on experience, even if inner experience, and thus on an empirical basis. This runs directly against Kant's view, and he repeatedly rejects it. Thus he says on S. 48;—R., S. 44, "It cannot be established empirically whether there is any such categorical imperative at all." And on S. 49;—R., S. 45: "The possibility of the categorical imperative must be investigated wholly independently of experience, since we do not have the advantage here of its actuality being given in experience." Yet his very first student, Reinhold, was already caught in this error. In his "Contributions to a Survey of Philosophy at the Beginning of the 19th Century," issue 2, S. 21, he says: "Kant accepts the moral law as an immediately certain fact, as an original fact of moral consciousness." But if Kant had wanted to establish the categorical imperative as a fact of consciousness, and thus empirically, he would not have failed at least to show that it was such a fact. Nothing of the kind appears anywhere. To my knowledge, the categorical imperative first appears in the Critique of Pure Reason (S. 802 of the first and S. 830 of the fifth edition). It arrives there all at once, unannounced, connected with the preceding proposition only by a completely unjustified "therefore." It is first formally introduced in the "Foundation for the Metaphysics of Morals," the work we are examining in particular here. And it is introduced entirely by a route independent of experience, through a deduction from concepts. By contrast, the "Formula of Agreement for Critical Philosophy," in the fifth issue of Reinhold's journal just mentioned, so important for critical philosophy, even puts forward the following proposition on S. 122: "We distinguish moral self-awareness from the experience with which it is connected in human consciousness as an original fact, beyond which no knowledge can go. By this self-awareness we mean the immediate consciousness of duty: that is, of the necessity of adopting the will's conformity to law, independent of pleasure and displeasure, as the incentive and guide for acts of will."—There we would indeed have "a substantial statement—yes, one that really states something too." (Schiller.)

But seriously: what an outrageous assumption of the very thing to be proved Kant's moral law has grown into here! If this were true, ethics would indeed have a foundation of unmatched solidity. There would be no need for prize questions to encourage the search for it. But then the greatest marvel would be that such a fact of consciousness was discovered so late, while people had been eagerly and laboriously searching for a basis of morality for thousands of years. I will show further on how Kant himself gave rise to the error criticized here. Still, we might wonder how such a fundamental error could rule unchallenged among the Kantians. Yet while writing countless books on Kant's philosophy, they did not even notice the damage done to the Critique of Pure Reason in its second edition. That damage made it an incoherent book that contradicts itself. Only now has this come to light, and it has been explained, quite correctly in my view, in Rosenkranz's preface to the second volume of the collected edition of Kant's works. We must remember that many scholars are left little time for thorough learning by their constant teaching from the lectern and in print. "I learn by teaching" is not unconditionally true. Sometimes we might rather parody it: "By always teaching, I learn nothing." There is even some justification for what Diderot has Rameau's nephew say: "And these teachers—do you really think they will understand the sciences they teach? Nonsense, my dear sir, nonsense. If they had enough knowledge to teach them, they would not teach them."—"And why?"—"They would have spent their lives studying them." (Goethe's translation, S. 104.)—Lichtenberg, too, says: "I have noticed this several times: the professionals often do not know the best things." But to return to Kantian morality and the public: most people immediately assume that a conclusion has been correctly derived, as long as it agrees with their moral feelings. If the derivation looks difficult, they will not go deeply into it. They will leave that to the "specialists."

Kant's way of establishing his moral law is therefore not an empirical demonstration of it as a fact of consciousness, nor an appeal to moral feeling, nor an assumption of what must be proved under the grand modern name of an "absolute postulate." Instead, it is a very subtle thought process, which he presents twice, on S. 17 and 51;—R., S. 22 and 46. The following sets it out more clearly.

Kant rejected every empirical incentive of the will. In doing so, he ruled out in advance, as empirical, everything objective and everything subjective on which a law for the will might be based. So nothing is left to provide the substance of this law except its own form. This form is simply its character as a law. Its character as a law consists in applying to everyone, and thus in universal validity. This, then, becomes its substance. Consequently, the law's content is nothing but its universal validity itself. It will therefore say: "Act only on a maxim that you can at the same time will to become a universal law for all rational beings."—This, then, is the actual grounding of Kant's moral principle, so widely misunderstood, and thus the foundation of his entire ethics.—Compare also the end of note 1 in the Critique of Practical Reason, S. 61;—R., S. 147.—I sincerely admire the great ingenuity with which Kant performed this feat. But I continue my serious examination by the standard of truth. I will add just one point here, to return to it later: reason, when and insofar as it carries out the specific line of reasoning just explained, receives the name practical reason. The categorical imperative of practical reason is the law that results from this thought process. Practical reason is therefore not, as most people—including Fichte early on—have thought, a special faculty that cannot be traced back any further, a hidden quality, a kind of moral instinct resembling Hutcheson's moral sense. Rather, it is one and the same as theoretical reason, as Kant says in the preface, S. XII;—R., S. 8, and often enough elsewhere. It is theoretical reason itself insofar as it carries out the thought process explained above. Fichte calls Kant's categorical imperative an absolute postulate (Foundation of the Entire Theory of Science, Tübingen 1802, S. 240, note). This is the modern, prettifying expression for assuming what must be proved. And that is how he himself consistently understood the categorical imperative, so he too falls under the error criticized above.

The first and most direct objection to Kant's basis for morality is this. A moral law cannot originate in us in this way. That would require a person to come up, entirely on their own, with the idea of looking and asking around for a law that their will must obey and submit to. This cannot possibly occur to someone on its own. At most, it could occur after some other moral incentive had given the first push and prompted the inquiry. That incentive would have to be real and actively effective. It would have to make itself known, act on the person uninvited, and even force itself on them. But this would contradict Kant's assumption. According to him, the thought process described above is itself supposed to be the origin of all moral concepts, the first heartbeat of morality. So long as such an incentive is not present—so long as, by hypothesis, there is no moral incentive besides the thought process described—egoism alone guides human conduct, following the law of motivation. In other words, in every individual case, the motives operating at the time, which are entirely empirical and egoistic, determine the person's actions on their own and without interference. On this assumption, nothing prompts the person to ask about a law that would limit their willing and to which they would have to submit it. There is no reason why this should even occur to them. Still less is there a reason to investigate and puzzle over such a law. Yet only this could lead them into the peculiar train of thought in the reflection above. It makes no difference how clearly we suppose Kant's reflective process takes place. We might want to reduce it to a consideration that is only dimly felt. But no such change affects these basic truths: nothing comes from nothing, and an effect requires a cause. Like every motive that moves the will, the moral incentive absolutely must make itself known of its own accord. It must therefore act positively and consequently be real. For a human being, only what is empirical—or at least assumed to exist as something possibly empirical—has reality. So the moral incentive must in fact be empirical. As such, it must announce itself uninvited and come to us without waiting for us to ask about it. It must force itself on us, with enough power at least possibly to overcome the tremendously strong egoistic motives opposed to it. Morality concerns people's actual conduct, not houses of cards built prior to experience. No one would pay any attention to the results of such constructions amid life's serious demands and pressures. Against the storm of the passions, their effect would be that of an enema syringe against a raging fire. I have already mentioned that Kant considers it a great merit of his moral law that it rests solely on abstract, pure concepts prior to experience, and thus on pure reason. This supposedly makes it valid not just for human beings but for all rational beings as such. We must regret all the more that pure, abstract concepts prior to experience, without real content or any kind of empirical basis, can never move human beings, at least. I cannot speak for other rational beings. So the second defect in Kant's basis for morality is its lack of real content. This has gone unnoticed until now. Probably very few of those who celebrated and promoted Kant's morality ever clearly understood its actual foundation, as set out plainly above. The second defect, then, is a complete lack of reality, and therefore of any possible effectiveness. It hangs in the air like a spiderweb of the subtlest and emptiest concepts. It rests on nothing, and so can support nothing and move nothing. Yet Kant has loaded it with an infinitely heavy burden: the assumption of freedom of the will.

Kant repeatedly states his conviction that freedom can have absolutely no place in human actions. He says that, in theory, we cannot even see how it could be possible (Critique of Practical Reason, S. 168;—R., S. 223). He also says that, given exact knowledge of a person's character and all the motives acting on them, we could calculate their conduct as certainly and precisely as a lunar eclipse (same work, S. 177;—R., S. 230). Despite this, freedom is assumed, though only in idea and as a postulate, solely on the credit of this moral foundation that hangs so completely in the air. This happens through the famous inference: "You can, because you ought to." But once we have clearly understood that something does not and cannot exist, what good does all this postulating do? Rather, we should reject what the postulate rests on, because it makes an impossible assumption. The rule is that the inference from impossibility to nonexistence is valid. A proof by contradiction would therefore overturn the categorical imperative here. Instead, one false doctrine is built on another.

Kant himself must privately have realized how inadequate a moral foundation made up of a few entirely abstract and empty concepts was. In the Critique of Practical Reason, the basis of ethics gradually changes its nature. As I said, Kant already proceeds less rigorously and methodically in that book, and his newly won fame has made him bolder. This basis almost forgets that it is merely a web of combined abstract concepts, and seems to want to become more substantial. For example, at S. 81;—R., S. 163, "the moral law" is "as it were, a fact of pure reason." What are we supposed to make of this strange expression? Everywhere else, what is factual is contrasted with what can be known through pure reason.—Likewise, at S. 83;—R., S. 164 of the same work, he speaks of "a reason that determines the will directly," and so on.—We should remember here that in the Groundwork he expressly and repeatedly rejects every anthropological foundation and every attempt to establish the categorical imperative as a fact of consciousness. Such a foundation, he says, would be empirical.—Yet casual remarks like these encouraged Kant's followers to go much further down this road. Fichte (System of Ethics, S. 49) expressly warns "that we should not let ourselves be tempted to explain further our awareness that we have duties, or try to derive it from grounds outside itself, because this would detract from the dignity and absoluteness of the law." What a fine excuse!—Then, at S. 66 of the same work, he says that "the principle of morality is a thought founded on the intellectual intuitive perception of the absolute activity of intelligence, and is pure intelligence's direct concept of itself." What phrases a windbag uses to hide his helplessness!—Anyone who wants to see how completely the Kantians gradually forgot and ignored Kant's original foundation and derivation of the moral law should consult a very readable essay in Reinhold's Contributions to a Survey of Philosophy at the Beginning of the 19th Century, issue 2, 1801. At S. 105 and 106, it claims "that in Kantian philosophy autonomy—which is one and the same as the categorical imperative—is a fact of consciousness and cannot be traced back to anything further, since it announces itself through an immediate consciousness."—Then it would have an anthropological, and therefore empirical, foundation. This contradicts Kant's express and repeated declarations.—Nevertheless, at S. 108 of the same work we are told: "Both in the practical philosophy of criticism and in the whole of purified or higher transcendental philosophy, autonomy is what grounds itself and supplies a ground. It neither can nor needs to be grounded further. It is the absolutely original, what is true and certain through itself, the primal truth, what comes first in the highest sense, the absolute principle.—So if anyone suspects, demands, or seeks a ground for this autonomy outside itself, the Kantian school must believe either that they lack moral consciousness⁸, or that in their speculations they misunderstand it through false basic concepts. The Fichte-Schelling school declares that they suffer from the lack of intellect that makes a person incapable of philosophy. This is what characterizes the unholy rabble and the lazy cattle—or, as Schelling puts it more gently, the uninitiated crowd and the sluggish herd." Everyone can sense what the truth of a doctrine must amount to when such trump cards are used to force its acceptance. Still, we must explain the truly childlike faith with which the Kantians accepted the categorical imperative, and thereafter treated it as settled fact, by the respect these inspired. Disputing a theoretical claim here could easily be confused with moral wickedness. So even if someone noticed little of the categorical imperative in their own consciousness, they preferred to say nothing about it. They privately believed it must be more developed and appear more clearly in other people. No one likes turning the inside of their conscience outward.

In the Kantian school, practical reason and its categorical imperative thus appear increasingly as a fact beyond the physical world. They are a temple of Delphi in the human mind. From its dark inner sanctuary, oracular sayings announce without fail—not, unfortunately, what will happen, but what ought to happen. Once this direct authority of practical reason had been accepted—or rather slipped in and forced on people—it was unfortunately transferred to theoretical reason as well. Kant himself had often said that the two were, after all, one and the same reason (for example, Preface, S. XII;—R., S. 8). Once people had admitted that in practical matters there was a reason issuing pronouncements from an oracle's tripod, the next step was close at hand. They could grant the same privilege to its sister, or indeed to its partner in the very same substance, theoretical reason. They could declare it, like practical reason, answerable only to the emperor. The advantage was as enormous as it was obvious. Now all the would-be philosophers and fantasists, led by J. H. Jacobi, the denouncer of atheists, rushed to this little doorway that had unexpectedly opened for them. They came to bring their little wares to market, or at least to rescue their favorite items from the old inheritance that Kant's doctrine threatened to crush.—In an individual's life, one youthful misstep often ruins the whole course of life. Kant's single false assumption of a practical reason equipped with entirely transcendent credentials and handing down decisions "without grounds," like the highest courts of appeal, had a similar result. From his rigorous, sober critical philosophy there sprang doctrines utterly foreign to it. These taught a reason that first only faintly "had an inkling of" the "supersensible," then clearly "apprehended" it, and finally even "perceived it intellectually and intuitively" in person. Any fantasist could now pass off his daydreams as its "absolute" pronouncements and revelations—that is, as declarations issued from an oracle's tripod. This new privilege was thoroughly exploited. Here, then, is the origin of the philosophical method that appeared immediately after Kant's doctrine. It consists in mystifying, overawing, deceiving, throwing sand in people's eyes, and blustering. The history of philosophy will one day list its era under the heading "Period of Dishonesty." The character of honesty, of investigating together with the reader, which marks the writings of all earlier philosophers, has vanished here. The would-be philosopher of this period does not want to teach his reader, but to fool him. Every page bears witness to this. Fichte and Schelling shine as this period's heroes. Finally there is also Hegel, a clumsy, witless charlatan, entirely unworthy even of them and far beneath these talented men. The chorus was supplied by all sorts of philosophy professors. With serious faces, they told their audiences about the infinite, the absolute, and many other things of which they could know absolutely nothing.

Even this feeble play on words had to serve as a step toward that prophetic role of reason: since the German word "Vernunft," reason, comes from "Vernehmen," apprehending, it supposedly means that reason is a faculty for apprehending the so-called "supersensible" (Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, cloud-cuckoo-land). The idea met with boundless applause. For 30 years it was constantly repeated in Germany with unspeakable satisfaction, and even made the cornerstone of philosophical systems. Yet the truth is obvious. "Vernunft," reason, does indeed come from "Vernehmen," apprehending. But this is only because it gives human beings an advantage over animals: they can not only hear but also apprehend. What they apprehend is not what goes on in cloud-cuckoo-land, but what one rational person says to another. The other person apprehends this, and the ability to do so is called reason. This is how all peoples, all ages, and all languages have understood the concept of reason: as the capacity for general, abstract representations that are not intuitively perceived. These are called concepts, and words identify them and hold them in place. This capacity alone is the real advantage human beings have over animals. These abstract representations, or concepts, bring many individual things together. They make language possible, and through language, thinking in the proper sense. Through thinking they make possible an awareness not just of the present, which animals also have, but of the past and the future as such. This in turn makes possible clear memory, reflection, foresight, intention, the planned cooperation of many people, the state, trades, arts, sciences, religions, and philosophies—in short, everything that makes human life so strikingly different from animal life. An animal has only representations given in intuitive perception, and therefore only motives given in intuitive perception. This makes the dependence of its acts of will on motives obvious. Human acts depend on motives no less. Given a person's individual character, motives move them with the strictest necessity too. But these motives are usually not representations given in intuitive perception. They are abstract representations: concepts and thoughts. These, however, result from earlier intuitive perceptions, and therefore from outside influences on the person. This gives a human being a relative freedom, namely in comparison with an animal. Unlike the animal, the person is not determined by their present surroundings as given in intuitive perception, but by their thoughts, drawn from past experiences or acquired through instruction. So the motive that moves them by necessity is not visible to an observer alongside the action. The person carries it around in their head. This gives not only their conduct as a whole, but even all their movements, a character visibly different from an animal's. It is as though finer, invisible threads were pulling them. All their movements therefore bear the stamp of deliberation and intention. This gives them an appearance of independence that visibly distinguishes them from animal movements. Yet all these great differences depend entirely on the capacity for abstract representations, or concepts. This capacity, then, is the essential feature of reason: the faculty that distinguishes human beings, called the rational faculty, the reasoning faculty, reason, reason, reasoning, reason, reason, discourse of reason.—But if someone asks me what, by contrast, understanding—mind, intellect, understanding, understanding—is, I answer as follows. It is the cognitive faculty that animals also possess, though in different degrees, and that we possess to the highest degree. It is the immediate awareness, preceding all experience, of the law of causality. This law constitutes the very form of understanding and its entire essence. Above all, intuitive perception of the external world depends on it. By themselves, the senses are capable only of sensation. This is a long way from intuitive perception: it is merely the material for it. The mind sees and the mind hears; everything else is deaf and blind (the mind sees, the mind hears; everything else is deaf and blind). Intuitive perception arises when we immediately relate the sensation in our sense organs to its cause. Through this very act of intelligence, that cause presents itself as an external object in space, our form of intuitive perception. This itself proves that we are conscious of the law of causality prior to experience, and that it does not come from experience. Experience itself presupposes intuitive perception, and so becomes possible only through this law. Every superiority of understanding, all cleverness, insight, penetration, and discernment, consists in the perfection of this entirely immediate grasp of causal relations. That grasp underlies all knowledge of the connections between things, in the broadest sense of the word. Its sharpness and accuracy make one person better at understanding, cleverer, and more cunning than another. By contrast, people in all ages have called someone rational if they let thoughts and concepts, rather than impressions of intuitive perception, guide them, and therefore always proceed thoughtfully, consistently, and reflectively. Such conduct is everywhere called rational conduct. But this in no way implies honesty and human kindness. Someone can proceed with the greatest rationality—that is, thoughtfully, reflectively, consistently, systematically, and according to a plan—while following the most selfish, unjust, and even wicked maxims. So before Kant, it never occurred to anyone to identify just, virtuous, and noble conduct with rational conduct. People clearly distinguished the two and kept them separate. One rests on the kind of motivation, the other on differences in basic maxims. Only for Kant, because virtue was supposed to arise from pure reason, are virtuous and rational one and the same. This defies the usage of all peoples. Their usage is not accidental, but the product of shared human knowledge, and therefore agrees across peoples. Rationality and vice are perfectly compatible. Indeed, only their combination makes great, far-reaching crimes possible. Irrationality and generosity are equally compatible. For example, I might give someone in need something today that I myself will need still more urgently tomorrow. Or I might let myself be carried away and give someone in distress the sum my creditor is waiting for. There are very many such cases.

As I said, reason was raised to the position of the source of all virtue. This rested on the claim that, as practical reason, it issues unconditional imperatives like an oracle, entirely prior to experience. Alongside this stood the false account of theoretical reason given in the Critique of Pure Reason. It described reason as a faculty essentially directed toward the unconditioned, which takes the form of three alleged ideas. At the same time, understanding was said to recognize, prior to experience, the impossibility of this unconditioned. As a model whose faults invited imitation, this combination led the babbling philosophers, headed by Jacobi, to their reason that directly apprehends the "supersensible." It also led them to the absurd claim that reason is a faculty essentially designed for things beyond all experience, and thus for metaphysics. Supposedly, it knows directly and intuitively the ultimate grounds of all things and all existence, the supersensible, the absolute, the deity, and other such things.—Had people wanted to use their reason instead of worshiping it, a simple observation should long ago have countered these claims. Suppose human beings possessed a special organ for solving the riddle of the world, and this organ constituted their reason. Suppose they therefore carried within themselves an innate metaphysics that needed only to develop. Then people would have to agree as completely about the subjects of metaphysics as they do about the truths of arithmetic and geometry. It would be quite impossible for the earth to contain a large number of fundamentally different religions and an even larger number of fundamentally different philosophical systems. Instead, anyone whose religious or philosophical views differed from everyone else's would immediately have to be regarded as someone not quite right in the head.—The following simple observation should have been equally unavoidable. If we discovered a species of ape that deliberately made tools for fighting, building, or some other use, we would immediately credit it with reason. Yet when we find savage peoples without any metaphysics or religion—and such peoples exist—it does not occur to us to deny them reason on that account. Through his critique, Kant confined to its limits the reason that proves its supposed supersensible knowledge. But he would surely have considered Jacobi's reason, which directly apprehends the supersensible, beneath all criticism. Meanwhile, the universities still foist such a reason, answerable only to the emperor, on innocent young men.

Note.

If we want to get to the very bottom of the assumption of practical reason, we must trace its family tree a little further back. We find that it descends from a doctrine that Kant himself thoroughly refuted. Nevertheless, as a remnant of earlier ways of thinking, it secretly underlies his assumption of a practical reason with its imperatives and autonomy, without even his knowing it. This doctrine is rational psychology. According to it, a human being is composed of two completely different kinds of substance: a material body and an immaterial soul. Plato was the first to set out this dogma formally and try to prove it as an objective truth. But Descartes brought it to its full development and its extreme point by working it out with the greatest precision and scientific rigor. That very achievement, however, exposed its falsity, which was successively demonstrated by Spinoza, Locke, and Kant. Spinoza, whose philosophy chiefly consists in refuting his teacher's double dualism, made this his main proposition in direct and explicit opposition to Descartes' two substances: "Thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, understood now under one attribute, now under the other." Locke denied innate ideas, derived all knowledge from sensory knowledge, and taught that it was not impossible for matter to think. Kant refuted it through the critique of rational psychology as it appears in the first edition. On the other side, Leibniz and Wolff championed the bad cause. This earned Leibniz the undeserved honor of being compared with the great Plato, who was so unlike him. This is not the place to explain all this in detail. According to this rational psychology, the soul was originally and essentially a knowing being, and only as a consequence of this also a willing being. It had a higher and a lower faculty of knowledge, and likewise a higher and a lower faculty of will. This depended on whether, in these basic activities, it acted purely on its own, unmixed with the body, or in conjunction with it. In the higher faculty, the immaterial soul acted entirely on its own, without the body's cooperation. There it was pure intellect. It dealt only with representations belonging to itself alone, and therefore not sensory at all but purely mental, and with acts of will of the same kind. None of these contained anything sensory, since that would come from the body.⁹ Here it knew nothing but pure abstractions, universals, innate concepts, eternal truths, and the like. Accordingly, its willing was influenced only by such purely mental representations. The lower faculty of knowledge and will, by contrast, was the work of the soul acting together with the body and its organs and closely joined to them. This impaired its purely mental activity. All knowing through intuitive perception was supposed to belong here and therefore to be obscure and confused. Abstract knowing, by contrast, consisting of abstracted concepts, was supposed to be clear! The will determined by such sensory knowledge was the lower and mostly bad will, since its willing was guided by sensory stimulation. The other willing was pure, guided by pure reason, and belonged to the immaterial soul alone. The Cartesian De la Forge worked this doctrine out most clearly in his Treatise on the Human Mind. At c. 23 he says: "It is only one and the same will that is called sensory appetite when it is aroused by judgments formed as a consequence of sensory perceptions, and is called rational appetite when the mind forms judgments about its own ideas independently of the confused sensory thoughts that cause its inclinations.———What led people to take these two different tendencies of the will for two different appetites is that one very often opposes the other. The intention that the mind builds upon its own perceptions does not always agree with the thoughts suggested to the mind by the body's condition. This condition often forces it to will one thing while its reason makes it desire another."—Ultimately, Kant's doctrine of the autonomy of the will comes from a dimly conscious memory of such views. As the voice of pure practical reason, this autonomy legislates for all rational beings as such and recognizes only formal determining grounds. These contrast with material grounds, which alone determine the lower faculty of desire, while the higher faculty opposes it.

In fact, this whole view, first presented in a properly systematic way by Descartes, can already be found in Aristotle. He states it clearly enough in On the Soul, I, 1. Even Plato had prepared the way for it and hinted at it in the Phaedo (S. 188 and 189, Bip.).—But because Descartes systematized and consolidated it, we find a hundred years later that the view has become quite bold. It has been pushed to its extreme, and precisely for that reason brought toward disillusionment. Muratori's On the Power of Imagination, cap. 1–4 and 13, offers a summary of the view then current. There imagination, whose function is the entire intuitive perception of the external world on the basis of sensory data, is a purely material, bodily, cerebral organ: the lower cognitive faculty. Only thinking, reflecting, and deciding are left to the immaterial soul.—But this plainly makes the matter questionable, and people must have felt it. If matter is capable of grasping the world through intuitive perception, a process so complex, then why should it not also be capable of abstracting from that perception, and therefore of everything else? Abstraction is clearly nothing more than dropping the features not needed for the purpose at hand: the differences between individuals and species. For example, I set aside what is peculiar to the sheep, the ox, the deer, the camel, and so on, and arrive at the concept of a ruminant. In this operation, representations lose their character as intuitive perceptions. As merely abstract representations that are not intuitively perceived—as concepts—they now need words so that they can be held in consciousness and used.—Despite all this, we still see Kant under the lingering influence of that old doctrine when he sets up his practical reason with its imperatives.

6 More correctly, Huitzilopochtli, a Mexican deity.

7 Hugo Grotius traces it back to Emperor Severus.

8 Just as I thought! When they have nothing sensible left to say in reply,They quickly shove it into your conscience.Schiller.

9 Pure thought is thought that is not concerned with any bodily images. Cart., Medit., p. 188.