Adrian Moore is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. One of his main interests is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which is the focus of his book Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy (Routledge, 2003). Among his other publications are: The Infinite (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2019); Points of View (OUP, 1997); and The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (CUP, 2012). He co-edits the journal MIND.
Can you summarize some of Kant’s main points or important contributions?
Kant was very concerned with the whole question of what it is to be a human being. In Anthropology, he specifies four questions that are at the heart of philosophy: What can I know? What am I to do? What may I hope? And then the fourth is a kind of amalgam of the other three: What is man? He was very concerned with the nature of our humanity.
Kant is famous for thinking that when we view the world around us, we ourselves make a very fundamental contribution to how it appears. It’s a little bit like going around with rose tinted spectacles on all the time. Everything that you looked at would have a kind of rosy hue. But what’s really striking about Kant’s view is just how much he thinks is part of the spectacle. It’s not just the colors of things. He thinks that even space and time are part of our spectacles; there’s a human element even in the spatial and temporal structure of reality, and that things in themselves, to use a Kantian phrase, are not spatial or temporal.
The second striking thing is he insists that we can never take our spectacles off. Kant says that we’re never going to be able to know what the underlying reality is like. We’re never going to be able to know what things are in themselves. We’re only ever seeing them in this distinctive human way.
Does that defeat the scientific goal of being objective then?
Kant was quite hospitable to the sciences, the natural sciences, the psychological sciences, and the social sciences. He argued at great length that he was doing a lot to vindicate them. When you’re doing science, whatever kind of science you’re doing, you’re investigating how things appear through the spectacles. We can’t take the spectacles off, and we can’t look at things in themselves. But Kant says that that’s no problem as far as science is concerned, because that’s not something that science is trying to do. Science is concerned with the world of space and time. However, there will be a difference between good science and bad science. You can investigate this world and arrive at a good view of what it’s like, or you could screw up and you could investigate the world and arrive at a bad view of what it was like.
What are Kant’s views on religion?
The one-word answer is “complicated.” There are people that think that Kant is a card-carrying Christian, who subscribes to most of the doctrines of Christianity. Then there are people who think that Kant is an atheist.
Similarly with Ernest Becker, people question if he was disparaging of religion, or if he thought religion was an important way to cope with death and meaning.
Kant says things like, “We can have faith that there’s a God and this goes beyond science. But the fact that it goes beyond science doesn’t stop us from having such a faith if we want to, and we can live our lives according to that faith.” But other people reading Kant will say, “That’s not really the point. He’s saying the most that you can have is this sort of wishful thinking that there might be a God out there beyond the world of space and time.” You get these two extreme reactions from people that read Kant but everyone’s going to agree that he does think that God would lie outside space time, and ultimately, if there’s any justification for having religious belief, in Kant’s view, it’s going to be because it helps us to live more morally.
When the question arises, what are we most fundamentally, you’ve got to think in terms of the underlying reality…your rationality is more important than your animality.
What was Kant’s answer to his question “What is man?”
He thinks we’re sort of a hybrid being because we’re the ones wearing the spectacles, and yet part of what we see when we look through the spectacles is ourselves. We’re both in the world of space and time, and we’re outside the world of space and time. Here I am in the United Kingdom. We are having this conversation in the 21st century. There’s Kant, living in the 18th century. We are ourselves spatial and temporal, but we’re also part of the underlying reality. When the question arises, what are we most fundamentally, you’ve got to think in terms of the underlying reality. At that level, we’re beings that have free will. We can choose to live our lives in certain ways. We can make rational decisions about how to live or we can go wrong and make irrational decisions about how to live. In a way he thinks that’s more important than anything spatial or temporal; your rationality is more important than your animality. We’re rational animals. But we’re unlike cats and dogs because of this rationality. He will say that rationality is part of how we really are in ourselves, whereas the animality is just a question of how we appear through the spectacles.