Karl Ameriks raises the question: What has been the fate of "autonomy" since Kant first problematized it in his Critical Philosophy? This collection of essays, which forms a unified whole, gives Ameriks’ s take on both the reception of Kant-especially on the concept of autonomy-by his earliest readers and critics, and on the effect of that reception on present day issues in philosophy. In short, Ameriks argues that a misrepresentation of Kant’s intentions and metaphysics is responsible for what has become for us our postmodern condition. However, Ameriks also suggests that Kantian metaphysics (and its absolute autonomy)–properly understood–turns out not to be necessary for the moral and epistemological autonomy that is the centerpiece of Kant’s philosophy. In the end, compatiblism–the idea that free will and determinism can be reconciled–would do justice to the strong autonomy for which Kant wishes to argue.
Ameriks begins his tale by pointing out something of an intellectual mystery. How did Kant’s first readers come to think that they were fulfilling and completing Kant’s work, when Kant himself explicitly rejected their understanding of his philosophy?

In order to examine this mystery, we need to recap what was so revolutionary in Kant’s thought. It may be said that all Western philosophy prior to Kant set itself the task of finding out the truth about the cosmos. This task took for granted that the world was "out there," waiting to be discovered by human thought. And human thought was conceived to be like a beacon–"the natural light of reason"–that illuminated what is such that it could be understood. The idea was for thought to conform itself to the way the world is in itself, whether humans were pondering it or not. As Aristotle put it, the knower was to become in some sense the known.

Let’s call this conception of philosophy the "Human Being as Explorer" version. Liken this version of philosophy to that of astronomy in the Ptolemaic view. In the center of the universe was the earth, and everything revolved around it. And didn’t common sense-the senses-confirm this? I am standing still on the earth, and the sun is revolving around us-you can "prove" this by simply looking at things.

But along comes Copernicus, and he turns everything inside out! As it turns out, the earth is not at the center of the universe, and everything is not revolving around it. As it turns out, the sun is at the center of our solar system, and we revolve around it, instead. This discovery revolutionized astronomy and forever changed the way we see ourselves in the cosmos. Here is the important point to remember, though: nothing really looks different! I still sense that I am standing still and that the sun is revolving around me, only now I understand that to be an optical illusion, a consequence of my relative location to the earth and the sun.

Kant effected a "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy. In the same way as Copernicus took something out of the center of attention–the earth–and substituted something else–the sun–so Kant takes something out of the center of philosophical attention and replaces it with something else. In philosophy’s case, the center of attention had been the "world" around which our thoughts revolved. But for Kant, it was not the "world" but Reason which is at the center of philosophy! The only way we can apprehend what is is by means of the mechanism we happen to have to apprehend it-namely, Reason. It is no longer a matter of Reason conforming to the world; rather, our faculty of Reason determines how the world appears to us. Reason is not conceived as a beacon illuminating the darkness, but as in some sense a "cookie cutter" that brings shape to vagueness, the ambiguity, the chaos of unapprehended "reality."

This is Kant’s Critical Philosophy. The word "critical" here means "to show the limits of." Kant, by arguing that Reason determines how the "world" appears, is setting limits on what rational beings can know. We can know and study the phenomena, how things appear, but we cannot know the noumena, or how things are in-themselves. We can only know how things are to us; how they might be to beings unlike us, we can never know. Let’s call this version of (critical) philosophy the "Reason as Maker" concept.

And this leads us to the notion of autonomy. Literally, autonomy means "giving oneself the law." It is contrasted with heteronomy, or "getting the law from something other." In the "Human Being as Explorer" version of philosophy, the law, the determination of how things are, come from the things themselves. The law of the cosmos is out there waiting for us to discover it. This applies to both physical laws-the laws of nature-and ethical laws as well, a point we will return to shortly.

For Kant, the laws of the cosmos come not from an uninterpreted universe of things "out there," but from the structure of reason, i.e., "in here." This is a crucial point: for Kant, it is reason which gives the law to itself, but it is not human nature, not human being, not even human thought that gives the law. The law holds good for any rational being. As humans are not purely rational beings, but are mixed with physicality and emotions, humans can’t just decide (with much success, anyway) what the laws of nature are. We cannot just decide how mathematics works or that gravity is optional. The laws of nature are laws for us. But it is reason that determines them.

We who are seeking personal psychological growth and spiritual integration have a very different understanding of autonomy. We mean by it that we are unencumbered by psychological or spiritual constraints to growth or healing not of our own making. We strive, in some ways-at some stages of maturity-to be a "law unto ourselves." We know that this can be healthy or harmful, though, in the sense we are talking about. A discussion of autonomy in a psychological or sociological sense is vitally important, but beyond the scope of this review.

Kant sees the source of moral authority in its being self-legislated. Here again, though, autonomy in ethics does not mean that the moral law is just anything any human or group of humans says it is. Moral "law" in that case would not be self-legislative. The moral law comes to us with almost the same strength and force of a law of nature-but not quite. We feel compulsion to obey (or feel pangs of conscience when we do not), but we do not automatically obey (as we do "obey," say, the law of gravity). Autonomy here means that the moral law does not come to us from human nature, from God, or from political life, for then it would not be self-legislative. The moral law comes from the structure of reason alone. We are not solely rational, but we are essentially so. If we were purely rational beings, we would obey moral law like laws of nature. But as we are "mixed," we feel the imperative of the moral law. For Kant, we could have a situation in which it would be beneficial for every human being to act, if in that situation, in the same way, yet everyone would be morally wrong. For instance, telling a lie to get out of the clutches of a captor: The lie might help you escape, but a lie is still what it is, i.e., immoral. Expedience and morality are not the same thing.

This is the reading of autonomy that Ameriks supports. He refers to it as "moderate," as "metaphysical, but not absolute."

Ameriks focuses in this book on the immediate reception of Kant, particularly on Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel. These thinkers took themselves to be improving and completing Kant’s critical philosophy, but Kant himself-in the case of the earliest of these philosophers-explicitly repudiated their readings of his own work. Perhaps the most interesting contribution to Kantian studies Ameriks makes here is his analysis of Reinhold’s transformation of Kant’s ideas and the generally unrecognized influence Reinhold has had on subsequent philosophy.

Reinhold was a partisan of the Enlightenment, whose ideals of democracy and anticlericalism Reinhold ardently supported. Further, he believed that philosophy had to be systematic and scientific, based on a fundamental principle (for him, the fact of consciousness). He believed that Kant’s idea of the thing-in-itself posed a threat to the Enlightenment values that Kant himself shared. Reinhold held that so long as the impossibility of knowing the thing-in-itself remained undemonstrated, attempts would continue to be made to say something about it. Such speculation about the thing-in-itself would take the form of "mystical and authoritarian references to the spiritual realm" and would neither be systematic nor scientific. But if all knowledge of the thing-in-itself could be shown to be impossible, then the power of priests and gurus would be rendered inoperative.

Thus Reinhold held Kant’s project to have ultimately failed. As Ameriks puts it, Kant argued that our theoretical way of knowing is such that we have a capacity for knowing only certain kinds of features, and there are or may be or must be other features that remain unknown in that way (but may be knowable in other ways), i.e., the thing-in-itself. Reinhold, according to Ameriks, confuses knowable with representable to consciousness and then argues that since the thing-in-itself is unrepresentable it is therefore unknowable. This is Reinhold’s "short" argument to the unknowability of the thing-in-itself, as opposed to Kant’s long argument to transcendental idealism. Ameriks argues that this "short" argument is not really an argument at all, but a solution-by-definition to Reinhold’s perceived problem: The knowable is representable, and "thing-in-itself" simply means "not representable." One can see how Reinhold’s leads directly to absolute idealism.

The irony of Reinhold’s "short" argument is that its drive to foundational, systematic philosophy in the service of libertarian autonomy actually undercuts any theoretical underpinning or grounding for the autonomous subject. From this, it is not difficult to trace the path from Reinhold to the post-philosophical, anti-metaphysical, anti-systematic postmodernity of today.

Ameriks continues his story of the misunderstanding of Kant’s actually moderate notions with discussions of Fichte and Hegel. Ameriks’s philosophical conclusions are that Reinhold and Fichte replaced controversial elements of Kant’s philosophy with even more vague, more ambitious, less defensible substitutes. Both Kant and Reinhold and Fichte were proponents of libertarian autonomy, but Kant makes a better attempt at grounding that autonomy. That attempt, however, has many problems of its own, and Ameriks sees Hegel as providing a consistent alternative to Kant with his (Hegel’s) non-libertarian conception autonomy. However, Ameriks says that Hegel still has more in common with the anti-metaphysical monistic views of Reinhold and Fichte than he does with Kant on the issue. Ameriks’s own view is that Kant could have accepted a version of compatiblism that reconciles a non-absolute version of autonomy with the theoretical determinism of the laws of physics.

Ameriks’s philosophical and historical sleuthing in Kant and the Fate of Autonomy is first-rate. This is a well-reasoned, well-written book that, while not meant as an introduction to Kantian critical philosophy and German Idealism, would certainly serve that purpose for an interested reader.

Categories: Philosophical