Video transcription

After his dispute with Aristotle, a contest that ended in Aristotle's conspicuous victory and in a cultural predominance that would last for more than a millennium, Plato must now confront a new and formidable adversary: Immanuel Kant.

The two diverge over the status of empirical thought, the kind of thought that arises from our encounter with the Phenomenon. For Plato, empirical thinking draws consciousness away from truth; for Kant, by contrast, empiricism is the only path by which Philosophy might become a genuine science.

If these two positions seem irreconcilable, in this chapter we shall show that their divergence can be recomposed, just as the Part may be recomposed within the Whole. For despite his initial premises, Kant ultimately meets Plato precisely when his thought passes from the “subjective” to the “objective”, that is, when it becomes Pure Reason, a sheer mirroring of the Forms of the Intelligible World which the individual mind contains in potency.

To make this claim intelligible, we must step back and return to Kant's cultural horizon. When Platonism, in the Enlightenment, is pushed to the margins of the academy, and becomes a matter for theologians and esotericists, a problem arises: how are we to distinguish the rational core of Metaphysics from the fantastic accretions of those who exploited its obscurity in order to build arbitrary systems or to boast of “supersensible knowledge”?

In keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment, Kant insists that in knowledge nothing is so sacrosanct as to be exempt from rightful criticism: “Our age is, in the fullest sense, an age of criticism to which everything must submit. Religion, on the ground of its holiness, and Law, on the ground of its majesty, seek to withdraw themselves from it. Yet, in so doing, they invite a just suspicion and cannot lay claim to that unconditional esteem which Reason grants only to what has been able to withstand its free and public examination.”

On these premises, Kant develops a system governed by a stringent criterion of validation. He is driven by the urgency to rid Philosophy of so-called “intellectual Metaphysics”, Metaphysics not anchored in sensible data, such as those of Wolff and Leibniz, but also, and above all, of mystical fantasies passed off as “metaphysical intuitions”.

A striking example is provided by the visions of the seer Emanuel Swedenborg, on which Kant comments in a letter to Moses Mendelssohn dated the 8th of April 1766: “As to the opinion I have expressed regarding the value of Metaphysics in general, my words may, here and there, have lacked sufficient caution and qualification. Yet I cannot conceal my repugnance, and even a certain hatred, towards the swollen arrogance of those hefty volumes filled with what are nowadays peddled as ‘intuitions’. I am fully convinced that the path they have taken is entirely mistaken, and that the methods currently in vogue will increase, to a disproportionate degree, the amount of folly and error in the world. I am very far from regarding Metaphysics itself, considered objectively, as trivial or superfluous. For some time now, I have resolved to reconsider its nature and its proper place among the disciplines of human knowledge, and I am convinced that upon Metaphysics depends the true and lasting welfare of humankind. Swedenborg's waking dreams are an example of how far one may go in philosophical fabrication, without any impediment, in the absence of data. If we set aside for a moment arguments about divine purposes and ask whether it is ever possible to attain knowledge of the nature of the soul through our experience, we shall then see, whether ‘birth’, ‘life’ and ‘death’, in the metaphysical sense, are things we may ever hope to comprehend by means of Reason. Here we must decide whether there are not, indeed, boundaries imposed upon us by the limits of our Reason, or rather by the limits of experience, which alone contains the data for our Reason.”

Here we see expressed, with clarity, Kant's conviction that Metaphysics arises from the mind's elaboration of sensible data, that is, from an origin “from below”, purely human.

And yet Kant remains persuaded of the importance of Metaphysics, to the point of exclaiming: “Metaphysics is true, authentic Philosophy.” Our age is an age of criticism, and we shall see what will emerge from the critical efforts of our time with regard to Philosophy, and in particular to Metaphysics.”

But what are the features that distinguish the “dogmatic Metaphysics” that precedes him from the “critical Metaphysics” Kant is about to construct? Dogmatic Metaphysics had, until then, claimed the right to produce assertions about an alleged reality situated beyond the sensible dimension, arriving thereby at arbitrary definitions concerning themes such as ‘God’, the ‘Soul’ and the ‘Cosmos’.

Kant rejects such assertions, because they can neither be verified nor refuted. His “Critical” or Transcendental Metaphysics will instead concern itself not with what lies beyond experience, but with the study of the conditions of possibility of experience itself, and, in particular, with the fundamental structures of human knowledge, such as Space, Time and the Categories of the understanding.

Kant conceives Metaphysics as a genuine formal “science of Reason”. He believes that, to restore its lost dignity, one must first purge the discipline of arbitrary, irrational and theological contents, and then refound it upon unassailable criteria.

As he writes in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: “There has always been, and there will always be in the future, a Metaphysics. Critique is the necessary preparation for the development of a well-grounded Metaphysics as a science that must be treated according to the most rigorous systematic requirements.”

To put this resolve into practice, however, is far from straightforward. Kant conceives a project for reconstructing the discipline: a first, destructive part carried out in The Critique of Pure Reason and a second part devoted to the reconstruction of a system whose pillars are the Tables of Categories.

The outlines of this project emerge in the Prolegomena: “Wearied at once by Dogmatism, which teaches us nothing, and by Scepticism, which promises us nothing, not even the tranquillity of a legitimate ignorance, driven by the urgency of a kind of knowledge we cannot in any way dispense with, and disheartened, by experience, with that knowledge we believe we possess, we cannot but propose to ourselves a critical question, by whose solution we shall regulate our future course, and ask: ‘Is Metaphysics, in general, possible?’”

The Metaphysics Kant will propose is purged of every transcendent element, and by transcendent Kant means precisely the Platonic Idea-Form. We must not forget, however, that Kant, following Aristotle, can only misconstrue the true nature of Plato's intelligible entities.

To designate these intelligible entities, Kant will coin a negative term: Noumenon. And the antithesis between Noumenon and Phenomenon will be the central theme of our next video. “To the Principle!”