II. The Moral Law

Kant assumed as his starting point that the world is really external to us and does not simply exist in our heads, and that knowledge about it is only to be attained through experience. His philosophical achievement was to be the examination of the conditions of experience, of the boundaries of our knowledge. But just this very examination became for him an incitement to surmount this barrier, and to discover an unknowable world, of which he actually knew that it was of quite another nature than the world of appearances, that it was completely timeless and spaceless, and therefore causeless as well.

But why this break-neck leap over the boundaries of knowledge which caused him to lose all firm ground under the feet? The ground could not be a logical one, since through this leap he landed in contradictions which nullified his own assumptions. It was a historical ground which awaked in him the need for the assumption of a supersensuous world – a need which he must satisfy at all price.

If, in the eighteenth century, France was a hundred years behind England, just so much was Germany behind France. If the English bourgeoisie no longer needed the materialism, since without it, and on religious grounds, they had got rid of the feudalist state and its church, the German bourgeoisie did not yet feel strong enough to take up openly the fight against the state and its church. They therefore withdrew in fear from the materialism. This came in the eighteenth century to Germany, just as to Russia, not as the philosophy of conflict but of pleasure, in a form suitable to the needs of the “enlightened” despotism. It grew at the princely courts, side by side with the narrowest orthodoxy. In the bourgeoisie there remained, however, even in its boldest and most independent pioneers, as a rule, some relic of Christian belief, from which they could not emancipate themselves.

That was bound to make the English philosophy appeal to German philosophers. In fact they had also a very great influence on Kant. I cannot remember ever to have found in his writings any mention of a French materialist of the eighteenth century. On the other hand he quoted with preference Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Locke, Hume, Berkeley and Priestley.

But between the German and English philosophy there was a great difference. The English philosophized at a time of great practical advance, of great practical struggles.

The practice captured their entire intellectual force; even their philosophy was entirely ruled by practical considerations. Their philosophers were greater in their achievements in economics, politics, natural science, than in philosophy.

The German thinkers found no practice which could prevent them from concentrating their entire mental power on the deepest and most abstract problems of science. They were therefore in this respect without their like outside of Germany. That was not founded on any race quality of the Germans, but on the circumstances of the time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the deepest philosophic thinkers were to be found in Italy, France, Holland, England, and not in Germany. The quiet that came over German political life in the century following the Thirty Years War first gave Germany the lead in Philosophy, just as Marx’s Capital had its origin in the period of reaction following on 1848.

Kant, despite his sympathy for the English, could not find satisfaction in their philosophy. He was just as critical towards it as towards materialism.

In both cases Ethics was bound to strike him as the weakest point. It seemed to him quite impossible to bring the moral law into a necessary connection with nature; that is, with the world of phenomena. Its explanation required another world, a timeless and spaceless world of pure spirit, a world of freedom in contrast to the world of appearances (phenomena) which is ruled by the necessary chain of cause and effect. On the other hand his Christian feelings, the outcome of a pious education, were bound to awaken the need for the recognition of a world in which God and immortality were possible. As Kant had to allow that God and immortality were completely superfluous in the world of our experience, he was obliged to look for a world “beyond” experience for them, and thus the spaceless and timeless world of things in themselves corresponded most completely to his needs.

Kant obtained the best proof for the existence of God and immortality in this world of the “beyond” from the moral laws. Thus we find with him, as with Plato, that the repudiation of the materialist explanation and the belief in a special world of spirits, or if it is preferred a world of spirit, lend each other mutual support and render it necessary.

How, however, did Kant manage to obtain farther insight into this spirit world? The critique of pure reason only allowed him to say of it, that it was timeless and spaceless. Now this spacelessness has to be filled up with a content. Even for that Kant has an idea.

The unknowable world of things in themselves becomes at least partly knowable directly one succeeds in getting hold of a thing in itself. And Kant finds this for us. It is the personality of man. I am for myself at once phenomenon and thing in itself. My pure reason is a thing in itself. As a part of the sensuous world I am subject to the chain of cause and effect, therefore to necessity; as a thing in itself I am free, that is, my actions are not determined by the causes of the world of the senses, but by the moral law dwelling within me, which springs from the pure reason and calls out to me not “Thou must,” but “Thou shalt.” This shall were an absurdity if there did not correspond to it, a can, if I were not free.

The moral freedom of man is certainly a complicated thing. It brings along with it certainly no less contradictions than the ideality of time and space. Since this freedom comes to expression in actions which belong to the world of phenomena, but as such fall into the chain of cause and effect, – they are necessary. The same actions are at the same time free and necessary. Besides this freedom arises in the timeless, intelligible world, while cause and effect always fall in a particular time. The same time-determined action has thus a time, as well as a cause in time.

But what is now the moral law, which from the world of things in themselves, the “world of the understanding, extends its working right into the world of appearances, the world of the “ senses,” and then subordinates itself? Since it springs from the world of the understanding its determining ground can only lie in he pure reason. It must be of a purely formal nature, because it must remain fully free from all relation to the world of the senses, which would at once involve a relation of cause and effect, a determining ground of the will which would at once annihilate its freedom. “ There is, however,” says Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason, “ besides the matter of the law, nothing further contained than the lawgiving form. Thus the law-giving form, so far as it is contained in the maxim, is the only thing that can constitute a determining ground of the free will.”

From that he draws the following Fundamental Law of the Pure Practical Reason.

“Act so that the maxim of thy action may be a principle of universal legislation.”

This principle is by no means startlingly new. It forms only the philosophic translation of the ancient precept, to do unto others as we would be done by. The only new thing is the declaration that this precept forms a revelation of an intelligible world; a revelation which with the greatest application of philosophic insight was to be discovered as a principle which applied not only for humanity, “but for all finite Beings who possess Reason and will, nay even including the Infinite Being as the highest intelligence.”

Unfortunately the proof for this law which applies even to the Supreme Intelligence shows a very serious flaw. It ought to be “independent of all conditions appertaining to the world of the senses,” but that is easier said than fulfilled. Just as little as it is possible with the air pump to create a completely airless space; just as it must always contain air, though it be in so refined degree, that it is no more to be recognized by us, in the same way we cannot possibly grasp a thought, which is independent of all conditions appertaining to the world of the senses. Even the moral law does not escape this fate.

The moral law already includes conditions which belong to the world of the senses. It is not a law of the “pure will” in itself, but a law of the control of my will when brought in contact with my fellow men. It assumes this; for me, however, these appearances are from the world of the senses.

And still more is assumed, however, by the conception of the moral law: “act so that the maxim of thy action may be a principle of universal legislation.” This assumes not only men outside of me, but also the wish that these fellow men should behave themselves in a particular manner. They are so to behave themselves as the moral law prescribes to me to act. Not only society but also a distinct form of social conditions is assumed as possible and desirable.

That in fact the need for such is concealed in the ground of his “practical reason” and determines his spaceless and timeless moral law, Kant himself betrays in his Critique of Practical Reason in a polemic against the deduction of the moral law from pleasure.

“It is therefore surprising that intelligent men could have thought of calling the desire for happiness a universal practical law on the ground that the desire is universal and therefore also the maxim by which everyone makes this desire determine his will.

“For, whereas, in other cases a universal law of nature makes everything harmonious, here, on the contrary, if we attribute to the maxim the universality of law the extreme opposite of harmony will follow, the greatest opposition and the complete distraction of the maxim itself and its purpose. For, in that case, the will of all has not one and the same object, but everyone has his own (his private welfare), which may accidentally accord with the purposes of others which are equally selfish, but it is far from sufficiency for a law, because the occasional exceptions which one is permitted to make are endless and cannot be definitely embraced in a universal rule. In this manner there results a harmony like a married couple bent on going to ruin. ‘O, marvellous harmony, what he wishes, she wished also,’ or like what is said of the pledge of Francis I, to the Emperor Charles V.: ‘What my brother Charles wishes, that I wish also’ (viz. Milan).”

Thus pleasure is not to be a maxim which can serve as a principle of universal legislation, and that because it can call forth social disharmonies. The moral law has thus to create a harmonious society, and such must be possible, otherwise it would be absurd to wish to create it.

The Kantian moral law assumes thus, in the first place, a harmonious society as desirable and as possible. But it also assumes that the moral law is the means to create such a society, that this result can be achieved through a rule which the individual sets to himself. We see how thoroughly Kant was deceived, when he thought that his moral law was independent from all conditions appertaining to the world of sense, and that it formed thus a principle which would apply to all timeless and spaceless spirits, including God Almighty himself.

In reality Kant’s moral law is the result of very concrete social needs. Naturally, since it springs from the wish for a harmonious society, it is possible to deduce from it the ideal of a harmonious society and thus it has been possible to stamp Kant as a founder of Socialism. Cohen repeats this again also in his latest work Ethics of the Pure Will (Ethik des reinen Willens) 1905. In reality, however, Kant is far farther removed from Socialism than the French materialism of the eighteenth century. While according to these the Moral Law was determined by the condition of the state and society, so that the reform of morality rendered in the first place necessary the reform of the State and Society, and so the fight against immorality widened itself into a fight against the ruling powers; according to Kant the society which exists in time and space is determined by a moral law standing outside of time and space, which directs its commands to the individual not the society. Is the morality of the individual imperfect, one must not lay the blame for that on the State and Society, but in the fact that man is not entirely angel, but half animal and consequently always being drawn down by his animal nature, against which he can only fight through the raising and the purifying of his own inner man. The individual must improve himself if the Society is to be improved.

It is clear that Socialism takes peculiar forms if we look on Kant as its founder. This peculiarity will be in no way diminished when we observe the farther development of the moral law by him. From the moral law springs the consciousness of Personality, and the dignity of man, and the phrase: “Act so, that you, as well in your own person as in the person of every other, at all times look on man as end, and never simply as a means.”

“ In those words,” says Cohen (pp. 303-4) “is the deepest and most far-reaching sense of the categoric imperative brought to expression; they contain the moral programme of the new time and the entire future world history. The idea of the final (or end) advantage of Humanity becomes thereby transformed into the idea of Socialism, by which every man is defined as a final end, as an end in itself.”

The programme of the “entire future world history” is conceived in somewhat narrow fashion. The “timeless moral law, that man ought to be an end, and at no time simply a means, has itself only an “end” in a society in which men are used by other men simply as means to their ends. In a communist society, this possibility disappears and with that goes the necessity of the Kantian Programme for the “entire future world history.” What becomes then of this? We have then in the future either no Socialism, or no world history to expect.

The Kantian Moral Law was a protest against the very concrete feudal society with its personal relations of dependency. The would-be “socialist” principle which fixes the Personality and Worth of men is accordingly just as consistent with Liberalism or Anarchism as with Socialism, and contains, in no greater degree any new idea than the one already quoted, of the universal legislation. It amounts to the philosophical formula for the idea of “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity” already then developed by Rousseau, and which, moreover, was to be found in primitive Christianity. The only thing Kantian, even here, is simply the mere form in which this principle is proved.

The dignity of Personality is namely derived from the fact, that it is a part of a super-sensuous world, that as a moral being it stands outside nature and over nature. Personality is “Freedom and Independence from the mechanism of the entire nature,” so that “the person as belonging to the world of sense is subordinate to its own personality, so far as it belongs to the world of intelligence.” Thus it is not then to be wondered if man, as belonging to both worlds, is obliged to look on his own being with regard to its second and highest qualification, not otherwise than with respect and to conceive the greatest respect for the laws of the same. With that we would be happily arrived again at the primitive Christian argument for the equality of all men, which necessarily arises from the fact that we are all children of God.