A JOURNEY TO KANT'S IDEAL KINGDOM OF ENDS
Three Cheers for Raymond Blakney Reason's Reign in the Kingdom of Ends
The Kingdom of "As If" The Metamorphosis of the Kingdom of Ends
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Kant, Immanuel. An Immanuel Kant Reader. Trans. and Ed., with Commentary by Raymond B. Blakney. New York: Harper, 1960. Ursinus College Library: 193.2/K135i.
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Raymond Blakney's reader-friendly translation of Kant, together with his readable commentary, made this the first Kant text I have read with any pleasure.
It is not just that he translated better than others. He deliberately set out to help his readers understand Kant by allowing himself some liberties in translating procedure. He refreshingly said how in his Prospectus:
It is my belief that good translation requires imagination and is creative writing.
It is unworthy of the craft to pass on opacity in the original text, word by word. Of course, in clearing up an apparently meaningless sentence, the translator may substitute his own thoughts for Kant's but if the translation is generally consistent, there will be a minimum of counterfeit in it. (xii)
Owing to this approach, Blakney enabled me finally to get past the eye-glazing opacity of Kant. I have not tried to run down Blakney's reputation among scholars (he has doubtless retired from the field); for my money, he's great, forty years afterward. He succeeded in leading me to the gate of Kant's ideal Kingdom of Ends.
This was an important pilgrimage for me. Recent readings of postmodern ideas aroused an appetite to visit at first hand the pillars of modernism--the pillars that postmodern thinking undercuts.
Reading Blakney's Kant was like tracking down the shadows of modernism in my own mind. Ever since student years, I have remembered somebody saying that we all are Kantians; lacking a forthright reading of Kant, however, I have never understood fully why. Cheers again for Raymond Blakney. He gave me at least the impression that I could see Kantian figures of thought where only shadows were before.
End of "Three Cheers for Raymond Blakney"
Go to Reason's Reign in the Kingdom of Ends
Reason's Reign in the Kingdom of Ends
My journey to Kant's Kingdom of Ends led me to the source of a staple of the modern mind. In that ideal kingdom, I found the shining idea that human beings possess the faculty to understand universal meanings.
Kant's affirmation of the rational categories of the human mind came at the climax of the Enlightenment, toward the end of the eighteenth century. Visiting the kingdom as it was at that moment, I saw the power of his idea renewing the Enlightenment's purchase of human reason. I saw the force of his argument revalidating it for another century and a half. And I felt the impulse to credit him for the contribution he made to those of us who found it more or less intact when we studied in the mid-twentieth century.
To be a Kantian, I saw now, was to have a mind that wanted to be a subject in his Kingdom of Ends.
Kant placed the legislative foundations of the kingdom squarely in the people. He went even further: he placed its very possibility in their power to will the right thing. The kingdom would come into being, Kant said, when the people in it freely willed to make their personal rules as if simultaneously these rules were universal law to all other rational beings. (194) The people were rational beings who could "see their own personal rules as universal legislation." (190)
The familiar, shining idea in this Kantian kingdom thus rested on the pre-established nature of the human mind. It did not begin with having experiences in the natural world. Reason reigned. Will was its prime minister. Blakney's rendering of the imperative toward morality did not exactly read like a page from Thomas Jefferson's revolutionary pen; but the kinship between Kant and Jefferson as voices of Enlightenment seems clear. I preserve the following text from the Kingdom of Ends the way America preserves the text of the Declaration of Independence. It is foundational:
What then justifies the lofty claims of virtue or high moral-mindedness? They secure to each rational being a share in the lawgiving of the kingdom of ends, making him eligible in it. His own nature destined him to enter this kingdom, for he was born an end in himself. He is free under nature's laws because he obeys only those he makes himself, and his rules of behavior became general laws [in accordance with the categorical imperative]. For law sets the worth of everything, but it requires dignity for that function. That is, it must have unconditional, incomparable worth, such that the word 'respect' is the only possible expression of a rational being's attitude when he thinks of it. Autonomy then is the basis of human dignity, indeed of the dignity of every rational creature. (192)
Rational beings themselves, Kant said, can discover universal laws in themselves as a consequence of their willing. That is, the inhabitants of the ideal kingdom gain access to moral law not from their experience but from the idea in their minds of "moral perfection, developed by reasoning abstractly and in advance." (178)
I recognized this as a trait of the modern mind, whatever fashion it wished to wear. Some modern minds pursued ends as expressed in Art, others in Symbol or Myth. I think I could see them all as Kantian--all, underneath the varieties of modern diversity, continuing to reflect the absolute ideal of humankind as an end in itself. This familiar idea still was shining through the world picture I gained from my studies in liberal humanism halfway through the twentieth century. Now I thought that I could see a little better than before how Kantian the influences were on the landscape of my mind.
End of Reason's Reign in the Kingdom of Ends
A second characteristic of the Kingdom of Ends that I found familiar was this: it was not actual. Kant called it an "ideal" kingdom. It remained so because he saw rational human beings living in a mind world and a world of sense (experience) at the same time. The two were not commensurate.
He said that the pure categories of the mind world would always lead persons who were free to will the right thing. They would follow personal rules as if they were actually living in the Kingdom of Ends. This would make their personal rules general laws for all others--even though this was a sheer act of personal will and not an actual necessity in an actual domain.
However, the world of sense operated not by general laws of reason but by empirical causes and effects. This posed the ultimately "insoluble problem" for Kant. He decided that we could never know how the ideal world of mind could be a motive of human action in an empirical world. (200)
While we do not understand the practical, unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, we do understand its incomprehensibility, which is all anyone can reasonably expect of the philosophy which pushes its principles to the very limits of human reason. (200)
This incomprehensibility, the final wall beyond which reason could not penetrate, rang familiarly in my ears. Kant's ideal Kingdom of Ends was ultimately to be wished for, by force of will, but never to be won in this world. Here was the enduring mystery lurking in the restless adventure of modernism. It enticed the modern imagination to seek for an ever-elusive understanding of human ends. Now I could see it as the other Kantian component of my 1950s education.
On one hand, then, Blakney's Kant held out the power of rational beings to find universal law; but on the other hand he drew a limit on the power of rational beings fully to actualize his Kingdom of Ends. Speculative reasoning, he said, "fails absolutely to show that an original Being, the Godhead, exists, or to give any assurance that the soul is immortal." (278) When he said that these were matters of faith, beyond the power of reason and experience, Kant completed the scene he was creating for the drama of modernism.
End of The Kingdom of "As If"
The Metamorphosis of the Kingdom of Ends
In the end the Kant I found in Blakney, like the two-headed god Janus, looked in opposite directions at the same time. He looked back with support for the Enlightenment's rule of reason. Looking ahead, he glimpsed a new world in which universal law would move from the mind to the will. The power of imagination--supported by faith--would take precedence over the power of the reasoning mind to connect to ends. Kant's discovery--that reason's power was limited in practical experience--would open the way to that shift.
Here is the way the story of Blakney's Kant came out for me:
Kant asserted the rule of reason in the Kingdom of Ends. He found its driving power in the freedom of the individual human will. Then he found that reason could not extend to everything. That prevented the Kingdom of Ends from ever coming into actual being. The Enlightenment world was never going to be more than an "as if" world. It could never be; it could only be an object of hope. The final things--God, immortality, human freedom itself--could only be matters of faith, not knowledge.
Kant's project seemed to me to prepare the way for the subjectivist and irrational motives that came to the fore in western culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kant himself seemed to undercut his own affirmation of the rule of reason. He allowed the Romantic vision to emerge. There, the source of morality became the will itself, supplanting the categories of reason, found to be limited. In that vision, universal truth resided in the individual's will or feeling. A universal morality based on reason became less persuasive. It became more attractive to seek a universal order without rational categories--ultimately, to seek the macrocosm in the microcosm of an individual will.
The Kingdom of Ends based on reason metamorphosed into a Kingdom of Ends based on the non-rational powers of human beings.
Beyond this Romantic vision, waiting to happen in the distant twentieth century, I think I could see the modern and then the postmodern projects.
Kant's thinking, then, failed to prevent persons after him from saying that they could situate the Kingdom of Ends within themselves. It could be whatever they believed it should be. We cannot blame Kant for the political and social excesses that followed from this belief. Yet, we can see how his thinking was not powerful enough to be a bulwark against them.
And now the western world continues to cope. We continue to talk about ideas that will enable us to survive. Are we all still Kantians? One thinker, Kelley L. Ross (1996), tells us that "much of philosophy in the Twentieth Century has been ill conceived knock-offs of Kant's theory." He goes on:
The idea that the mind produces the world it knows conspicuously turns up in Wittgenstein's theory of language and now with tedious, endless repetition in "post-modern" theories that see all reality as "socially constructed" on the basis of no more than "power" relationships (ultimately derived from the Marxist notion of ideological "superstructures" to class and economic relations.) These all produce a fundamental paradox that was avoided by Kant, for they are all relativistic and subjectivist denials that knowledge even exists, which nevertheless maintain that this circumstance is a fact that can be known and demonstrated with some certainty.
Some postmodern theorists do not deserve Ross's harsh attack, I think. Still, he usefully testifies to the connection between the contemporary postmodern quest and Kant--even if some make the connection because they misunderstand what Kant meant. Perhaps if they got their Kant from Blakney, they would understand better. Three cheers for Raymond Blakney!
End of The Metamorphosis of the Kingdom of Ends
End of Essay
14 June
1999 Copyright © 1999 Richard
P. Richter