Truth and Ethics in Immanuel Kant and St

Notre Dame Seminary

Truth and Goodness in Immanuel Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas

A Paper Submitted to Doctor James Jacobs

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Philosophy 004,

Survey of Epistemology and Ontology

Department of Philosophy

Stephen P. Hidalgo

New Orleans, Louisiana

May 10, 2004

Truth and Goodness in Immanuel Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas

Immanuel Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas account for the existence of truth in sharply contrasting ways. Kant locates all truth inside the mind, as a pure product of reason, operating by means of rational categories. Although Kant acknowledges that all knowledge originates in the intuition of the senses, the intelligibility of sense experience he attributes to innate forms of apperception and to categories inherent to the mind. The innate categories shape the “phenomena” of sensible being, and Kant claims nothing can be known or proved about the “noumena,” the presumed world external to the mind.[1] Aquinas agrees that all knowledge comes through the senses, but disagrees with Kant in arguing that categorical qualities do not originate in the mind but inhere in the objects themselves, either essentially (determinate of their mode of being) or accidentally (changeable without loss of essence by the object).[2] Aquinas further agrees with Kant that all the knowledge derived from sense experience is knowledge of the essence of things only insofar as it is understood by reason, and thus sense experience is insufficient to constitute knowledge by itself.[3] But Aquinas defines knowledge as conformity by the mind to things as they really are, and thus believes the external world is knowable by the mind, both in the essences of things (what they are) and in the act of being (that they are).[4] Moreover, for Aquinas, entities are related to each other analogously according to their modes of being, since being is a quality that all existent things share. Thus, being in general is knowable systematically according to a language of existential analogy.[5] Kant, in contrast, begins with the assumption that metaphysics is invalid as knowledge and that the universe is fundamentally unknowable except through the way our experience of it is shaped by the categories through which the human mind reasons about it. The two views of truth have divergent consequences for ethics. Aquinas’ philosophy produces a tradition of moral clarity that endures to the present, while the philosophy of Kant leads ultimately to the cultural relativism and moral skepticism that are widespread in the modern world.

For Immanuel Kant, truth is accessible to the mind only because it derives from rational categories already in the mind. Although knowledge begins in the senses, Kant claims, “besides what is given to the sensuous intuition, special concepts must yet be superadded—concepts which have their origin wholly a priori in the pure understanding, and under which every perception must be first of all subsumed and then by their means changed into experience.”[6] The sources of such synthetic a priori concepts are categories inherent in reason, and Kant supplies a table of such categories, including in it: Unity (measure), Plurality (magnitude), Totality (whole), Reality, Negation, Limitation, Substance, Cause, Community, Possibility, Existence, and Necessity.[7] Thus, the understanding of any perceived thing as a whole entity, or as having an independent material existence, or as being caused by anything, or as itself the cause of anything has its origin in rational categories in the mind and is not traceable to any essential quality or state of being that can be attributed to the thing in itself, according to Kant. Moreover, even the most basic intuitions pertinent to experience—space and time—are for Kant innate forms of apperception, inherent in rational perception: “how are space, time, and that which fills both—the object of sensation—possible generally? The answer is: By means of the constitution of our sensibility, according to which it is in its own way affected by objects which are in themselves unknown to it and totally distinct from those appearances.”[8] In one sense, we can never know anything about the object as it might be independent of our experience of it, although we attribute existence to things insofar as they appeal to us through an intelligibility supplied by the mind.

Moreover, Kant holds that “the Supreme Being is quite inscrutable and even unthinkable in any definite way as to what it is in itself.”[9] For Kant, God is known anthropomorphically, only by attributing to the Supreme Being human faculties such as reason and will, faculties which we can never know God to possess, since God is not an object of sense experience. Kant revealed in some of his last writings that he understood God to be only an apprehension innate to the human mind: “God is not a being outside me, but merely a thought in me. God is the morally practical self-legislative reason. Therefore only a God in me, about me, and over me.”[10] In ruling out the possibility of knowing God as a being outside of oneself, Kant rules out the possibility of metaphysics as a body of knowledge by which practical knowledge and the sciences may be unified into an adequate knowledge of the universe as a whole. Even the full scope of human faculties is not included in what determines knowledge. Kant affords very little role to the passions in the pursuit of knowledge, since perfect rationality, which determines truth for Kant, has little to do with what one desires. Kant’s concept of truth is finally limited to what is determined by and contained in the human intellect.

Unlike Kant, St. Thomas Aquinas postulates “the radical intelligibility of all real being, without arbitrary qualification or a priori limitation.”[11] For Aquinas, the truth includes authentic knowledge of being outside of the mind, so that “mind and being are correlative to each other, made for each other, open by nature to each other, as the two great complementary poles of the universe.”[12] Moreover, although the intelligibility of the universe is implicit in the human act of knowing,[13] Aquinas also derives the existence of truth external to the mind from the necessary ability of God the Creator to know his creation: “Natural things are said to be true in so far as they express the likeness of the species that are in the divine mind. For a stone is called true, which possesses the nature proper to a stone, according to the preconception in the divine intellect. Thus, then, truth resides primarily in the intellect, and secondarily in things according as they are related to the intellect as their principle. . . . The definition that Truth is the equation of thought and thing is applicable to it under either aspect.”[14] Aquinas contradicts Kant’s claim that knowledge is the product of “species” (forms or categories or innate ideas) already in the mind, appealing to Aristotle, who, “speaking of the intellect, says (De Anima iii.4) that it is like a tablet on which nothing is written. . . . [and therefore that] the intellect by which the soul understands has no innate species, but is at first in potentiality to all such species.”[15] Consequently the human mind must know only with reference to some intelligible object external to itself.

Moreover, the human mind can come to know the totality of being in all its parts, relatable one to another by analogy, constructing a cosmology that accounts for the unity and differentiation of being, whereas Kant denied the validity of any such knowledge since it is beyond the limits of what can be supplied by direct experience. Aquinas also differs with Kant’s theory of truth in that desire is an important part of knowledge, in Aquinas’ estimation, as he endorsed “the radical dynamism of the human mind toward the fullness of being as true.”[16] As Karol Wojtyla (later to become Pope John Paul II) pointed out, Kant rules out any such dynamism to knowledge by his “attempt to free reason from all possible dependence . . . on feelings and on the whole sensory phenomenal world,”[17] and by his insistence upon “examining the activity of practical reason in isolation, and then later adding the ‘activity’ of the will to it from without.”[18] In contrast, Aquinas asserts, “The will and the intellect mutually include one another: for the intellect understands the will, and the will wills the intellect to understand. So then, among things directed to the object of the will, are comprised those things that belong to the intellect; and conversely.”[19] Thus for Aquinas, the desire to know is inseparable in practice from the application of any rational criterion determining knowledge. Also, as knowledge fulfills the teleology of the mind in its drive to know the truth of being, so by analogy the universe is directed purposefully toward achieving the good as determined by the will of God, its Creator. Aquinas holds, therefore, the perfection of being can be sought and known by the mind, in the microcosm of human nature, as humans fulfill their rational nature through activity and the pursuit of knowledge motivated by a desire for the perfect good, and also in the macrocosm, the universe and its source as the totality of being, as humans can come to know God as the author and purpose of all good that exists.

For both Aquinas and Kant, the rational pursuit of truth is of critical importance for determining what is an ethical action. But they differ in their characterization of the moral will and in the relationship they posit between the will and reason, and consequently there is a great difference in their approach to ethics. Aquinas postulates will and reason—the desire for good and the knowledge of truth—as integrally bound together in a process of moral choice in which the first motion of the will is desire. Specifically, the will is first directed by the desire for good, beginning with the desire to know the truth of being perfectly, which manifests itself in reason first as an achieved self-perception or identity oriented toward the good, and second as the primordial conscience, which has an infallible grasp of principles of right and wrong according to reason’s perception of the demands of natural law.[20] Reason continues to interact with the will, manifest as desire, in a process of acquiring and applying prudence, or practical wisdom, through striving for understanding, considering options, consenting to a value, judging the right course of action, and choosing, commanding, and executing the proper act.[21] Although one must discriminate among a range of motives, at no point is the process of moral choice separated from desire as a potentially important indicator of the good. Of the orientation of the will by desire, Aquinas says, “From the fact, then, that the true is a kind of good, it follows that the good is prior in the order of things desirable, but not that it is prior absolutely.”[22] The intellect (reason) apprehends the good in a general sense infallibly through the conscience, but by a defect of desire one can be led to choose a good less than the perfect good. The intellect is oriented first toward transcendental qualities that are metaphysically defined in terms of the general act of being: “Now the intellect apprehends primarily being itself; secondly, it apprehends that it understands being; and thirdly, it apprehends that it desires being. Hence the idea of being is first, that of truth second, and the idea of good third.”[23] As the drive to know and attain being in its perfection is primary to the soul, the will desires the truth that is in what is good, while the intellect is drawn to the goodness of what is perfectly true. In the integral process of moral choice, for Aquinas, one cannot separate reason and will (except to distinguish them by abstraction as contained one in the other), nor can one alienate desire from the process of moral choice.

Kant’s ethics, in contrast, conclude that reason works most effectively in the absence of desire, that the truth is known disinterestedly by reason apart from will, and that once one acquires disinterested knowledge, the will follows the dictates of practical reason. Only by following the lead of disinterested reason, according to Kant, can the will achieve freedom from the determinism of nature which dictates desire according to one’s irrational needs.[24] Kant postulates, in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, “Inasmuch as reason has been imparted to us as a practical faculty, . . . its true function must be to produce a will which is not merely good as a means to some further end, but is good in itself.”[25] It is clear that Kant means to say that the perfect good is a product of reason acting on the will, and not (as Aquinas and his metaphysics hold) that good is apprehended as a quality existent outside of the human mind, one of God’s attributes, for instance, or the teleological goal of human existence. Kant, in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, held, “The understanding does not derive its laws (a priori) from, but prescribes them to, nature.”[26] Elsewhere, too, Kant made autonomous human reason the source of all law determining will in its proper moral exercise: “A person is subject to no other laws than those which he (either alone or jointly with others) gives to himself.”[27] And further he urges, “Act externally in such a manner that the free exercise of thy Will may be able to coexist with the freedom of all others, according to a universal Law.”[28] Kant’s ethics implied a re-conception of the natural law as the product only of human reason, a concept which dominated theories of law during the nineteenth century and influenced the dominant theories of positive law in the twentieth century. An instance of Kant’s influence is seen in the Neo-Kantian philosophy of law of Rudolf Stammler (1856-1938). Stammler’s definition of natural law is merely his concept of formal law, a “conditioning and determining form of social life” with historically changing contents.[29] The standard of moral choice under this theory of law appealed to a social ideal, and thus neo-Kantianism became a vehicle of social and cultural relativism.[30]

Clearly the understandings of truth held by Immanuel Kant and by St. Thomas Aquinas differ most significantly in that Aquinas locates truth, and by extension the standard of ethics, in realities that exist outside of the human mind and that Kant makes the human faculty of reason the total determiner of what is truth, and, by extension, of what is ethical. Aquinas’ first principles are derived from a transcendental concept of the truth of Being, having its origin in God—perfect, self-existent being and perfect Good. In place of the discarded transcendental qualities of metaphysics, Kant offers the autonomy of reason as a first principle of truth and the source of a pure will. Where Aquinas explains ethical choice as the integral action of reason and will, moved by the desire for the good, and informed by natural law that derives from Eternal Law, Kant separates reason and will, and makes disinterested reason the only standard of ethical choice, effected by a will set free from the limitations of desire. Historically, the consequences of these two schools of epistemology and ethics are easily distinguishable. Where Thomistic ethics produced an objective standard of morality that has endured as a part of Catholic tradition, Kant’s deontology has led to a cultural relativism that still sustains the moral confusion of the modern era.

Works Cited

Clarke, W. Norris, S. J. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics.

Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

Gilson, Etienne. The Unity of Philosophical Experience. New York: Scribner’s, 1937.

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated James W.

Ellington. 3^rd ed. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1993.

---. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Translated Paul Carus. Revised and

Introduction by Lewis White Beck. New York: Macmillan/Library of the Liberal

Arts, 1950. Reprinted in Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann, eds., 807-878.

Philosophic Classics: From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey:

Pearson, 2003.

Pieper, Josef. Living the Truth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989.

Rommen, Heinrich A. The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and

Philosophy. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998.

St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. In Peter Kreeft, ed. Summa of the Summa.

San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990.

Wojtyla, Karol. “In Search of the Basis of Perfectionism in Ethics.” Person and

Community: Selected Essays. Translated by Theresa Sandok, O.S.M. Catholic

Thought from Lublin. Vol. 4. Andrew W. Woznicki, general ed. New York:

Peter Lang, 1993.

---. “On the Directive or Subservient Role of Reason in Ethics.” Person and

Community: Selected Essays. Translated by Theresa Sandok, O.S.M. Catholic

Thought from Lublin. Vol. 4. Andrew W. Woznicki, general ed. New York:

Peter Lang, 1993.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Translated Paul Carus, Revised and Introduction by Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan/Library of the Liberal Arts, 1950), Reprinted in Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann, eds., 807-878, Philosophic Classics: From Plato to Derrida, (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson, 2003), 830.

[2] Clarke, W. Norris, S.J., The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 130-131.

[3] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.84.6, in Peter Kreeft, ed., Summa of the Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 315-316.

[10] Immanuel Kant, Opus Posthumum, quoted in Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribner’s, 1937), 239.

[14] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.16.1, in Kreeft, ed., 144-145.

[15] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.84.3, in Kreeft, ed., 305-306.

[16] Clarke, 14-15. Clarke acknowledges this idea as Bernard Lonergan’s reading of Aquinas.

[17] Karol Wojtyla, “On the Directive or Subservient Role of Reason in Ethics,” Person and Community: Selected Essays, translated by Theresa Sandok, O.S.M., Catholic Thought from Lublin, vol. 4, Andrew W. Woznicki, general ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 69.

[19] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.16.4, in Kreeft, ed., 146.

[20] Josef Pieper, Living the Truth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 155.

[22] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.16.4, in Kreeft, ed., 146.

[24] Karol Wojtyla, “In Search of the Basis of Perfectionism in Ethics,” Person and Community: Selected Essays, translated by Theresa Sandok, O.S.M., Catholic Thought from Lublin, vol. 4, Andrew W. Woznicki, general ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 50.

[25] Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Translated James W. Ellington, 3^rd ed. (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 9.

[26] Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 842.

[27] Immanuel Kant, Introduction to the Metaphysicsof Morals, IV, 24, quoted in Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 89.

[28] Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law. An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right, quoted in Rommen, 88.

[29] Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 119-121.

[30] W. Norris Clarke, S.J., The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 12.