Immanuel Kant: Transcendental Idealism

Describing Kant's philosophy and its impact on Western thought would be impossible in a short space (that is, anything less than 500 pages). This outline sketches of some of his ideas which influenced the thought of Coleridge, and eventually the Transcendentalists.

According to Kant, an individual's total knowledge resulted from more than his sensory experiences. People also have intellectual knowledge, or something in their cognitive faculty which innately perceives facts such as necessity, or causality, or universality. Kant claimed that one must use this intellectual knowledge (which he would come to call the Reason) to seek out the universal laws of Being and prove their viability; thereby constructing moral laws in accordance with God. A faith in God and mankind's freedom is part of the innate intellectual knowledge any individual possesses.

Kant's theory of consciousness (stated initially in Critique of Pure Reason (1781)) posited what he referred to as a "Copernican revolution": the mind does not passively receive objects of knowledge (whether sense perceptions or statements like "Everything that happens has a cause"); instead, the universe, or an individual's perception of it, invariably conforms to the way one's cognitive faculty works. In short, the "givens" of Reason (ideas like cause-and-effect) are structures of consciousness that people "think into" the world -- they are not "in reality" itself. Reason is the function which seeks to unify universal laws perceived by the intellect to one principle. Kant termed this process "transcendental" because it transcends basic sensory perception and experiences and the Understanding, which synthesizes sensory perceptions to create more complex awareness (for example, not just "darkness," but "it is dark, therefore there is no light at the moment.") So, Kant establishes the distinction between Reason and Understanding subsequently used by Coleridge, Emerson, and Bronson Alcott, and defines Reason as the faculty which uses something innate in an individual which can attempt to discover a unity to the universal laws which transcend mankind.

Kant made a further distinction about the individual self, distinguishing between the facet of man which is a part of the phenomenal (or physical) world, and the noumenal self, which stands "beyond the world" as its active source. The phenomenal self is subject to the same laws as the rest of nature and so is not free; the noumenal self, standing beyond nature, is therefore free of its laws and instead lives by the Categorical Imperative: "one should act as if he could will that his action become a universal law."

Kant's discussion of the teleology of nature (explanation of the purpose of nature's existence) in the Critique of Judgement (1790) may also have influenced Emerson. Nature exists, claims Kant, to embody the superhuman consciousness underlying the universe; this superhuman consciousness manifests itself in the universal laws seen in nature. In other words, nature is the creation or result of a superhuman consciousness which is itself the source of the unity embracing those universal laws. Therefore, the purposiveness of nature (i.e., the fact that nature has a purpose) is, like causality, necessity, universality, an innate object of knowledge in man's Reasoning faculty -- one's awareness of nature's teleology shapes his knowledge of the world. Again, one cannot "prove" the unity underlying nature through empirical exploration because that fact transcends sensory experience -- it is known by a part of the mind (i.e., Reason) which deals with innate ideas. Humans can never "know" or comprehend the unity from which universal statements and laws come; however, intellectual capacity is programmed (to use a modern metaphor) to act as if one could discover all universals and so isolate this unity. Finally, as nature is a manifestation of the immaterial world which lies beyond one's understanding, so art is also an expression of the values of that world; art, like nature, should be explored in our search for the universal laws which are an expression of the superhuman consciousness. Schelling would extend the ramifications of this conception of art's importance.

Sources:

Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy (Vol. VI)

Jere Surber, "A Schematic Outline of the Development of German Idealism"