Dyck, Corey W.

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Corey W. DyckReview essayPaul Guyer’s, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response toHume (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)Kant is quite explicit regarding the influence that David Hume exercisedon his thought, admitting that it was Hume who interrupted his ‘dog-matic slumber’. Kant’s commentators have sometimes interpreted thisconfession in a rather strong sense, as implying namely that Kant con-ceived his own critical philosophy as a direct rebuttal of Hume’s varioussceptical challenges. So, Lewis White Beck and Henry Allison take Kant’sSecond Analogy to rebut Hume’s challenge to a general causal principle,and Robert Paul Wolff and Patricia Kitcher spot a Humean target inKant’s account of mental activity and defence of the unity of the self.This position is not universally held as some scholars, most notably EricWatkins, have argued that careful attention to the historical context inwhich Kant’s first Critique is embedded exposes the belief that Humewas Kant’s direct or primary target as itself a piece of philosophicaldogmatism. Paul Guyer’s latest collection, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste:Kant’s Response to Hume, is an attempt to moderate this discussion.Guyer’s suggestion is the modest, and indeed typically Kantian, one, thatKant’s texts should only be read as if they were responses to Hume,without making any historical claim of influence. While this thesis israther cautious, the payoff is that it permits Guyer to engage in a farmore ambitious analysis, leading him in the five essays contained in thisvolume to consider not only Kant’s account of causality and generaltheory of knowledge, but also his practical philosophy, aesthetics andteleology in light of Hume.This widening of scope is evident in the first chapter, where Guyeroutlines a general reading of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophywhich places a philosophical premium on the refutation of scepticism.PSCPHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 35 no 5 • pp. 613–619Copyright © The Author(s), 2009.Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navhttp://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/019145370910342906 Dyck 103429  18/3/09  10:06 am  Page 613Guyer stresses, however, that scepticism as Kant understood it must bedistinguished from the current preoccupation with Cartesian external-world and moral scepticism. The scepticism that would have been ofinterest to Kant, according to Guyer, is commonsensical rather thanphilosophically motivated. In particular, Guyer distinguishes Pyrrhonianscepticism, associated with that doubt arising from the conflict of twocontradictory but equally well-supported claims, and Humean scepticism,by which is understood a doubt regarding the first principles of theoryand practice. Kant’s first Critique on one hand, and his Groundworkand second Critique on the other, are then considered with these distinctchallenges in mind. Since the former is also covered in the second chapter,I will limit myself to a summary of Guyer’s reading of Kant’s responseto moral scepticism. In responding to the Humean sceptic about thefoundation of moral principles, Kant first shows that the principle ofmorality (the categorical imperative) lies implicit in both common moralunderstanding and philosophical treatments of morality. Second, Kantdemonstrates that this principle must ultimately have its source in reasonrather than experience inasmuch as our consciousness of the a priorilaw of morality requires an efficacious faculty of reason. Regarding thePyrrhonian challenge, posed in the Third Antinomy as well as in theDialectic in the second Critique, Guyer argues that Kant’s transcenden-tal idealism is intended as the solution: in the former case, the distinctionbetween things as they appear and as they are in themselves allows usto admit without contradiction the respective claims of necessity andfreedom, and in the latter case it permits a resolution of the competingunconditioned claims of virtue and happiness in the doctrine of thehighest good by warranting our belief in God and the immortality ofthe soul.In the second and third chapters, Guyer looks more closely at Kant’sarguments in the first Critique (and the Introductions of the Critique ofJudgment) in a Humean context. He thus considers Kant’s responses toHume’s discussions of our idea of cause and beliefs regarding it (ch. 2)and our ideas and beliefs regarding objects and the self (ch. 3). Guyeradmits that an initial survey of the texts produces a sense of a lack of fitbetween Hume’s questions and Kant’s replies, but a more careful analysisreveals that Kant does offer answers, albeit incomplete.1 Beginning withchapter 2, Guyer boils Hume’s questions regarding causation down tothe following three: (1) What is the content of the idea of causation, ornecessary connection? (2) What is the basis for our belief in the generalcausal principle that every event has some cause? And (3) what is thebasis for our particular causal beliefs or inferences? Hume offers hisown answers to these questions. In the Treatise of Human Nature andthe Enquiry concerning Human Understanding he claims that the basisfor particular causal beliefs is not a demonstrative inference, since that614Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (5)06 Dyck 103429  18/3/09  10:06 am  Page 614is undermined by his challenge to the rationality of induction; insteadthey are the result of that customary disposition formed by repeatedobservation of the appearance of one object following the other, theimpression of which (in accordance with the copy-principle) is the contentof the idea of causation. Neither of these two answers constitutes agenuinely sceptical conclusion, but Hume’s conclusion regarding ourbelief in the general causal principle (broached only in the Treatise) does,since as wide as our past observation might be, it will never provideexperience of every kind of event and thus never supply sufficient warrantfor the principle. Guyer takes Kant to offer more or less convincingalternatives to Hume on all three questions, but accuses him of avoidingHume’s fundamental challenge to the rationality of induction. In the(Metaphysical and) Transcendental Deduction, and Schematism chapter,Guyer takes Kant to show that the ‘content’ of the concept of causalityis the a priori logical function of hypothetical judgement (and that itrequires the pure forms of intuition in order to be applied). Kant’sSecond Analogy then rebuts Hume’s sceptical conclusion regarding thegeneral causal principle by proving that the cognition of an event is onlypossible if the succession of (our perceptions of) states of an object canbe shown to follow in a determined order by being subsumed undersome causal law; thus, every event must have a cause. Both of theseanswers, however, depend upon our knowledge of particular causal laws,and thus an answer to Hume’s third question. According to Guyer thisis found only in the Introductions to the third Critique, in the idea of asystem of nature that regulates our investigation and makes possible thediscovery of empirical laws, though Guyer claims that this is not aresponse to Hume so much as a concession of his essential point that,ultimately, we can only assume that nature conforms to the laws we framefor it. In any case, through all this, Kant leaves Hume’s fundamentalchallenge to the rationality of induction untouched.In chapter 3, Guyer turns to Kant’s claims to have ‘generalized’(cf. AA 04.260) Hume’s problem regarding causation, which is taken tomean the extension of the challenge to ideas of, and beliefs regarding,external objects and the self. Guyer points out that Hume had alreadypresented his objections in an appropriately general form in the Treatise,evidently unbeknown to Kant. Yet, even assuming that Kant intendedthis by his claim to have generalized Hume’s problem (which is notobvious), there is good reason to think that he had at least a second-hand knowledge of the relevant sections through Hamann’s SokratischeDenkwürdigkeiten of 1759.2 In any case, Guyer finds the same argu-mentative structure in Kant’s response to Hume’s account of the contentof the idea of, and our beliefs regarding, persisting objects. For Kant,the content is once again taken to be an a priori logical function of (cate-gorical) judgement, and the justification for our beliefs in persisting615Dyck: Review essay06 Dyck 103429  18/3/09  10:06 am  Page 615objects found in the principle of the First Analogy (and ultimately theRefutation of Idealism in B). Finally, Kant addresses Hume’s worriesthat we cannot form a genuine idea of the self or have empirical cogni-tion of its continued existence. Rather than being rooted in a particularlogical function, the idea of the self has as its content the I think, andwhile Kant shares Hume’s doubts about the possibility of cognizing, forinstance, the simplicity of the self (as reflected in the Paralogisms), Kantnonetheless allows for cognition of the successive states of the empiricalself (in the Refutation, and a series of later Reflexionen).Chapters 4 and 5 turn to a consideration of Kant’s practical worksand the third Critique, though Guyer is now as interested in drawingattention to the common premises as in pointing out the different conclu-sions. In chapter 4, the familiar meta-ethical differences between Humeand Kant are set aside and their respective accounts of moral determin-ation compared. The result is an unexpected agreement on three points:(1) the internalist claim that a moral principle must be capable of moti-vating action, (2) the claim that change in moral behaviour is possiblethrough modification of passions and natural desires, and (3) that themotivational force of morality is ultimately founded in a conception ofthe good life in terms of self-mastery rather than slavery to passion andinclination. That there is agreement on the first claim is perhaps leastsurprising. Hume shows that he endorses it in his denial that reason,whether operating in causal inference or in determining the agreementof our ideas, is capable of influencing the will; Kant also adheres to it,though he allows that practical reason can motivate by means of moralfeeling. Regarding the second claim, Hume contends that change inunwelcome behaviour is possible, or at least more likely, through modi-fication of our passions rather than through the appeal to reason. Thisis initially less obvious in Kant’s case, but the importance Kant laterascribes to the particular moral feelings of benevolence and self-esteem(in the Metaphysics of Morals) suggests that he is interested in the modi-fication, rather than the complete humbling, of self-conceit. This leadsto a more complex, and intriguing, analysis of moral determination: thestrength of the general moral feeling, caused by the moral law, leads usto cultivate these particular moral feelings which are in fact the proxi-mate causes of our actions. That Hume and Kant agree on the thirdpoint of comparison, however, is much less obvious. Relying on sparseevidence from minor sources, Guyer argues that Hume thought of thegood life in terms of the tranquillity that results from the mastery, ratherthan extirpation, of our passions. To show that Kant endorses the idealof self-mastery as the ultimate source of the motivating force of themoral law, and for which reason provides the means, Guyer draws aparallel between Kant’s pre-critical and critical lectures on ethics andanthropology. Kant had earlier proceeded on the basis of a fact of our616Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (5)06 Dyck 103429  18/3/09  10:06 am  Page 616psychology, namely, that we abhor servitude, to argue that freedom isonly possible when a rule of consistency among the principles of our,and others’, actions is adopted. In the later works, Kant is thought toreplace the psychological premise with a normative one to the effect thatfreedom is the sole condition of moral value, the means of realizingwhich is provided by the law of reason, though Guyer (after rejectingChristine Korsgaard’s apparently sympathetic account of the uncon-ditional value of the freedom of choice) is hard-pressed to offer muchevidence for this.Finally, Guyer turns to an analysis of the key themes of the thirdCritique – the accounts of systematicity in the Introductions, judgementsof taste in the Analytic of the Beautiful, and teleological judgements –in light of Hume’s various challenges. The first was already discussed inchapter 2, so I will proceed directly to the latter two. In the single workhe devoted to aesthetic matters, the brief essay ‘Of the Standard ofTaste’, Hume claims that lacking firm precepts for judging beauty, theconsensus among critics, achieved over time and in ideal conditions,constitutes a (suitably empirical) standard of taste. While Kant rejectsHume’s conclusion, he nonetheless accepts his formulation of the funda-mental problem, namely, accounting for the universality of judgementsof taste without relying on determinate concepts. This is reflected inKant’s strategy in the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’, where Kant offers thephilosophical basis of our ordinary practices in making judgements oftaste. Kant thus identifies such judgements as both synthetic and a prioriand he attempts the deduction of their validity, first by, tracing ourpleasure in beautiful objects to the free play of our cognitive powersand, second, by showing that these cognitive powers necessarily operatein the same way in everyone. Guyer spots a weakness in Kant’s case forthe latter claim, however, since he seems to assume simply that indi-viduals with the same powers cannot have divergent aesthetic responses;still, Kant’s account is considered an improvement on Hume’s at leastinsofar as it is flexible enough to distinguish various species of beautywithout losing sight of their common origin. Guyer then considers Kant’s‘Critique of Teleological Power of Judgment’ as a reply to Hume’s criti-cism of the argument from design in the Dialogues. Guyer stresses thatHume only takes issue with the inference to a perfect creator withoutcontesting the naturalness and usefulness of teleological inferencesgenerally. Once this is conceded, we can see a familiar structure in Kant’sresponse: he agrees with Hume that such judgements are important andeven irresistible, but disputes his empirical account of their origin. So,based on the need for explanations of organisms as products of design(rather than merely mechanically), Kant claims that we ought to employthe idea of an intelligent design for the whole of nature, not in compe-tition with, but parallel to, mechanical explanation by means of the617Dyck: Review essay06 Dyck 103429  18/3/09  10:06 am  Page 617distinction between appearances and things in themselves. Viewing natureteleologically as well as mechanically will lead us to expand the scopeof mechanical explanation (as mechanical explanations are sought forphenomena explained previously only teleologically) on the one hand,and on the other it underwrites the investigation of the end of natureitself, the only plausible candidate for which is the human qua moralbeing.As Guyer makes clear in the Introduction, the thread that connectsthese five, otherwise self-standing essays is the contention that readingKant’s texts as if they were responses to Hume is ‘fruitful’ (7) or ‘illu-minating’ (8), and that it even elucidates ‘Kant’s deepest philosophicalassumptions and ambitions’ (9). That Guyer achieves the former is, tomy mind, indisputable. He is certainly correct to warn as he does in theintroduction of the philosophical cost of removing Hume from Kant’scross-hairs altogether: ‘Hume raised more serious concerns about causal-ity than had been raised by Leibniz’s fanciful monadology . . . [and]Hume’s concerns required a far more powerful and general solutionthan Sulzer or Tetens had offered’ (17). However, that Guyer succeedsin showing that this reading elucidates Kant’s deepest philosophicalassumptions is less clear. For Guyer, the doctrine of transcendentalidealism, which Kant claims ‘runs through my entire work’ (AA 04.374),evidently plays no part in his response to Hume, at least not in thetheoretical and practical contexts. Instead, Kant’s distinction betweenappearances and things in themselves is thought to be urged against thePyrrhonian sceptic in the first Critique, and the similarities Guyer cata-logues between Hume’s and Kant’s practical philosophies are limited to‘the phenomenal level’, and thus are quite independent of the defenceof the freedom of the will that so underpins Kant’s moral thought. Thisruns both ways, however, as Hume’s central challenge to the rationalityof induction, as Guyer stresses, goes completely unnoticed by Kant. Thisis hardly news to Guyer – in fact he views the alleged separability oftranscendental idealism from the argument of the Analytic as a virtue –but what it suggests is that Kant’s and Hume’s deepest philosophicalassumptions and ambitions were not necessarily those they happened toshare with one another.Philosophy Department, University of Western Ontario, Canada618Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (5)PSC06 Dyck 103429  18/3/09  10:06 am  Page 618Note1 It bears noting that Guyer does not consider the discussions of causationin Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, with which Kant wasfamiliar through the (selective) translation of J. G. Hamann finished in 1780.Though not adding much in the way of detail, the Dialogues present theseresults in a context Kant would certainly have found appealing: among thepassages Hamann supplies is Philo’s discussion of the misuse of the idea ofcause beyond experience (cf. Sämtliche Werke, vol. III, ed. Josef Nadler[Vienna: Verlag Herder, 1951], pp. 255–6).2 Strikingly, Hamann reports in a letter to Jacobi (27 April 1787) that ‘[i]chwar von Hume voll wie ich die Sokr. Denkw. schrieb. . . . Unser eigenDasein und die Existenz aller Dinge ausser uns muss geglaubt und kannauf keine andere Art bewiesen werden’ (quoted in J. O’Flaherty, Hamann’sSocratic Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary [Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967], p. 200; see also pp. 166–8 forspecific mention of Hume in this context).619Dyck: Review essay06 Dyck 103429  18/3/09  10:06 am  Page 61906 Dyck 103429  18/3/09  10:06 am  Page 620

Review essay: Paul Guyer's, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)

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Review essay: Paul Guyer's, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume

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