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ОглавлениеKant asked four questions with a cosmopolitan purpose
Kant’s order for a philosophy with a cosmopolitan purpose: Before the modern European philosophy, which originated in the epoch of the Enlightenment, there was already the Chinese, the Indian, the Oriental, and the Greek philosophy as well as the Catholic religion as philosophy of the feudal Middle Ages in Europe. Accordingly, philosophy deals with an unmanageable number of topics. How can a selection be made from this abundance, how can an order, how can a red thread look like, which structures the philosophical explorations of Gramsci meaningfully? A reading of the relevant passages in Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks” revealed that Gramsci himself chose a classical order. Gramsci took this order in philosophy from Kant’s work; it is formed by four questions. These questions are:
1. What can I know?
2. What should I do?
3. What can I hope for?
4. What is man?20
The meaning of these questions will be briefly sketched below to give readers a somewhat expanded idea of what philosophy means in this book. Kant intended these four questions to describe “the field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan meaning.”21
With the concept “cosmopolitan,” Kant contrasted a bourgeois world order, conceived by him, with the declining feudal world in the late 18th century. Kant elaborated his Enlightenment philosophy based on these four questions as an alternative to the philosophy that prevailed in feudal society. His answers to these questions capture man as a being who has the potential to think and act independently as a rational being, as a citizen of the world and a democrat who, together with all other citizens, gives himself his own laws and thus his dignity.
These questions and their attempted solutions indeed comprise the innermost core of philosophy: The German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) wrote in 1941 on the topicality of Kant’s questions: “These questions and their attempted solutions indeed comprise the innermost core of philosophy, its interest in the essential possibilities of man in the midst of the misery of real existence.”22 By focusing on these 4 questions, the discussion of other philosophical questions and methods is not meant to be disparaged. Generalizing, however, it can be said that every philosophy of historical standing has answered these four questions in one way or another, directly or indirectly. The reasoning for the fact that just these 4 questions have to be in the foreground in a historical consideration of man, as well as the exposition of their inner architecture, will run through the whole chapter “Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800”.
What can I know?
The question “What can I know?” breaks down into four topics:
1. Into epistemology with the question of how knowledge is gained,
2. the philosophy of science with the question, how is scientific research conducted and how is the character of its results to be determined,
3. the philosophy of religion with the question, what can I know about God, and
4. the philosophy of history with question, what can I know about human history.
Epistemology: How is knowledge gained? The philosophical field of epistemology refers to the prerequisites, conditions, and possibilities of humans to gain knowledge and to condense it into knowledge. The basic questions are: What is knowledge and how does it come about? Linked to this are further questions: How does man think? How are the phenomena of the external world processed in human consciousness? How do theoretical insights become practical knowledge? What is the truth of the acquired knowledge? Are there eternal or absolute truths? In epistemology, starting from the feudal Middle Ages through the Enlightenment up to Kant, Hegel, and Marx and his successors, different currents developed, which will be presented in the following. At the center of Kant’s epistemology was the “Copernican Revolution”, i.e. the replacement of religious ideas about the conditions in nature by concepts of reason. From this, Kant developed his doctrine of the concept, based on the premise that all knowledge requires a concept.
The philosophy of science: How is scientific research conducted and how is the character of its results to be determined? From the various currents in epistemology developed quite different conceptions of how scientific research is conducted. Is the work of God recognized, are the recognized laws taken from nature, or does scientific research consist of reasonable constructions, the content of which is verified by the phenomena of the world. A distinctive feature of Gramsci’s philosophy lies in the fact that he links the prevailing epistemology in each case with a scientific worldview. With a scientific worldview, a picture of the Earth in the universe is drawn, in which the scientific knowledge of humankind is summarized. Gramsci discusses a total of four different worldviews: The religiously influenced Ptolemaic worldview of the late Middle Ages, the mechanical worldview of Isaac Newton, which is considered a scientific breakthrough in the epoch of Enlightenment, a mechanistic worldview that became dominant in the 2nd half of the 19th century, and the relativistic worldview that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and is associated with the name Albert Einstein. The study of scientific worldviews, their formation, and the transition from one worldview to the next results in a theory about theories and is today called the philosophy of science.
The philosophy of religion: What Can I Know About God? From the wide field of the philosophy of religion, only Kant’s central epistemological question will be singled out here; it is: “Is God?”23 Kant proved that all the then current proofs of God’s existence were untenable. He further stated that God could not be proved even in the appearances of the world. The results of his investigation into the existence of God and Christian dogmatics led to a critique of religion and especially of Christian denominations.
The philosophy of history: what can I know about human history? The philosophy of history does not refer to individual events, processes and results in human history. The question “What can I know?” is aimed at the whole of human history, at the major epochs and epoch transitions in history. Philosophies of history can be divided into two parts: Into a part that justifies the criteria for the data to be collected, arranged, and studied in history. From this results the historiography. The second part consists of an interpretation of the established data. Are progress or regression recognizable tendencies in human history, is mankind treading water, or can only chaos – without pattern or tendency – be established? Kant, Hegel, and Marx each developed their own philosophy of history. The best known is that of Marx, who wrote in the “Communist Manifesto” in 1848: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”24 After the philosophies of history of Kant and Hegel have been introduced to the readers, the content of the classical German philosophy in Marx’s philosophy of history can be uncovered as well as the innovations he made can be worked out. After this work is done, the transformations that Marx’s materialist conception of history underwent in the work of his companion Engels, in the German Social Democratic Party philosopher Kautsky, and the Russian Marxists can be noted. Gramsci’s philosophy of history follows the Kant-Hegel-Marx line and contains a strict rejection of the determinism of that variant of historical materialism which, based on the remarks of Engels and Lenin, prevailed in the Soviet Union and from there became a world-historical power.
What should I do?
From the ethics of bourgeois society, Kant developed the political philosophy of the democratic republic: With the question “What shall I do?“, the field of ethics is entered in philosophy. Kant used the German term “Sittlichkeit”, which is no longer in use today, instead of ethics. In the following, ethics, i.e. morality in Kant’s non-religious sense, is not understood as the discussion of individual moral or legal norms that the individual should follow. Rather, the ethical discussion centers on the question of the nature of the social order from which individual moral norms and state laws emerge. Based on the “Copernican Revolution,” Kant examined the question of how to determine the ethical relations between people in bourgeois society. If they are relations between equal rational individuals and no longer those between master and servant, then it follows that norms and laws no longer arise and become valid through the religiously based dictates of a feudal monarchy, but through legislation in the democratic republic. Kant’s doctrine of the ethics of bourgeois society thus becomes political philosophy, that is, the philosophical justification of a new social procedure through which bourgeois freedom is given a framework and democratically legitimized general laws can come into being.
Kant formulated a series of demands on rationally acting people, which he called imperatives: Even before the French Revolution, Kant outlined an ethics of civil society that had developed over several centuries in Europe, especially in urban life. Based on his epistemology, Kant reasoned in his ethics that every human being had, in principle, the capacity to think and act rationally. In Kant’s ethics, the mutual recognition of human beings as rational beings who set their own ends formed the basis of human and civil rights and universal suffrage, which were later demanded by the French revolutionaries. In his rational law variant of the Enlightenment, Kant developed an ethics that contained a series of duties that individuals must fulfill if they are to act rationally. Kant referred to the call to act in a particular way as an imperative. An imperative is the concentrated form of a response to the question “What shall I do?” The individual, endowed in Kant’s ethics with consciousness, with the capacity to judge and to self-determine his actions, is placed at the center of the invocation. The culmination in a whole series of imperatives was Kant’s so-called categorical imperative.
Kant and Marx are among the very few philosophers who formulated imperatives: There are only a few authors in the history of philosophy who gave an answer to the question “What should I do?” in the form of imperatives. Kant and Marx formulated such imperatives. In the sections on the epistemology of Kant and Hegel, it will be seen that classical German philosophy established the existence of an individual consciousness and the freedom of the will. An individual consciousness capable of independent judgment and thereby of action guided by reason is the prerequisite for an imperative that appeals to individuals to make any sense at all. An appeal to a being that is in any case controlled by others would be a useless undertaking. Having outlined the content and meaning of Kant’s and Marx’s imperatives, Chapter 5, “The Categorical Imperatives of Kant and Marx,” explores the question of the relationship between Kant’s imperatives and Marx’s imperative appeals. Do they contradict each other or are they even mutually exclusive? Or do Marx’s imperatives presuppose the realization of Kant’s categorical imperative? For the ethics of a philosophy, Gramsci used the expression “philosophy with a corresponding norm of behavior” in the “Prison Notebooks.” This is one of his key concepts; it refers to the embedding of imperatives in a coherent set of answers to all four of Kant’s questions.
What can I hope for?
“What can I hope for?” is a question in the philosophy of history and discusses a future of humanity that can emerge from human action: In epistemology, the philosophy of history discusses the question: what can I know about human history in retrospect? The question “What may I hope?” is also a part of the philosophy of history, but reflects on developments that may arise in the future of humanity. Kant’s third question does not refer to any utopian states or religious hopes in divine intervention in human history. In this third question, the answers to the questions “What can I know?” and “What should I do?” are drawn together and considered under the following question: “if I now do what I ought, what may I hope for as then?”25 The answer to the question thus understood, “What may I hope?” aims at the rational individual’s accounting, under his or her respective time-bound presuppositions, for the possible outcomes that result from his or her actions according to the imperatives. Philosophies in which human history is predestined by God, nature, or other forces beyond the agency of human beings cannot pose the question of the prospects of one’s own actions at all, or only in a limited way. Deterministic philosophies of history, for example, claim that a result that is already laid out in history can only be helped to a breakthrough.
The question “What may I hope for?” is the invitation to give oneself an account of the possibilities and perspectives of one’s own actions: In Kant’s posing of the question already lies a principled antithesis to any kind of historical determinism and fatalism. Gramsci adopts such a perspective on human history. For Kant, the hope that is linked to one’s own action refers to the overcoming of feudal society through the establishment of democratic republics. For Marx, acting in accordance with his imperatives points to the perspective of transition to a global socialist society. The question “What may I hope for?” is the call to account for oneself in a conflict of social forces – that is, on principally uncertain terrain – about the possibilities, the limits, and the perspectives of one’s own actions.
What is man?
For Kant, the question “What is man?” refers to what man, as a freely acting being, can make of himself: Kant’s fourth question is “What is man?” Anthropology, the science of man, also asks this question. This science deals with the biology, physiology, and psychology of man. Kant determined the difference between anthropology and philosophy in his late work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” of 1798 as follows: “The physiological knowledge of man goes to the study of what nature makes of man, the pragmatic to what he makes, or can and should make, of himself as a freely acting being.”26 Kant’s fourth question thus foregrounded the historical and moral consideration of man. Gramsci shares this starting point, which is essential to an understanding of the fourth question. “Philosophy cannot be reduced to a naturalistic ‘anthropology,’ that is, the unity of the human species is not given in the form of the ‘biological’ nature of man …”27
Kant explained the philosophical content of the fourth question by stating that “the first three questions relate to the last.”28 Built into Kant’s architecture of the four questions is that the answers to the first three questions already contain the most important elements of an answer to the fourth question. Thus, any philosophy, insofar as it has answered the first three questions, should also have ready an answer to Kant’s “pragmatic” question, “What is man?”
“What is man?” becomes the question about the essence of man: Kant’s fourth question can be transformed into the question “What is the essence of man?” The question of the essence of man and the answers given to it form a fork in the road at which philosophy divides into two fundamentally different currents. More precisely, the question is: Is the essence of man historically fixed, that is, unchangeable in time, or is it subject to historical change? One of the two currents has its starting point in the determination of a natural or spiritual substrate such as “race,” descent, genes, blood, or religion, soul, culture, and develops from this a largely unchanging nature of man throughout all historical epochs. The other current is prominently represented by Kant and, in his wake, by Hegel and Marx. According to Kant, the freely acting human being unfolds his powers in the process of historical development: his essence cannot be fixed. Therefore, for Kant, man remained a thing-in-itself, unknowable in principle, which determines itself through its reason under the condition of freedom. Despite this principled determination, Kant recognized something specific in the everyday mind of people in his time, and this is what his entire Enlightenment philosophy stands for: after modern natural science prepared the end of feudal society and man was able to recognize the laws recognized in nature as his own and no longer as those of a god, man, according to Kant, should be able to live under reasonable laws, that is, under his own laws in the democratic republic. For Hegel, too, the history of man is the history of the production of his being and thus a process determined by freedom. In Hegel’s philosophy, man brings forth his essence through his ever-changing concepts and the representational activity guided by them. Hegel’s concise short version is: “What man does, that he is,”29 or man is what he does.
In reality, the human being is the ensemble of self-created social conditions: Marx, in his “6th Thesis on Feuerbach” in 1845, answered the question of the essence of man as follows: “But human essence is not an abstraction inherent in the single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.”30 Marx conceives the essence of man as the ensemble, as an accumulation of social relations, which man himself has created. The essence of man is established in a process in which this essence can always be determined only temporarily in reflection on the self-created relations. The essence of man, then, is what men do and have done and through what they have produced themselves and their relations. In this answer of Marx to Kant’s fourth question, in a certain way, the heritage of classical German philosophy is already summarized in Marx’s philosophy. This connection, in which the Kant-Hegel-Marx philosophical line is expressed in a first approximation, will be shown in the following. In the “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci was not only concerned with the reconstruction of this line, but he sketched the first outlines of a philosophy that explicitly conceives of the active individual as a process of self-creation and as the linking center of his relations, and consequently elevates a non-abstract, non-arbitrary will to the basis of philosophy.31 The position formulated by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Gramsci is contrasted with those religions, which determine the nature of man as a non-changeable creature of God, as well as those philosophies, which divide humankind into different groups of natural beings, which compete with each other and ultimately remain subject to a “struggle for survival”.
On the meaning of the 4 questions as self-reflection on oneself and society: The various answers given to Kant’s four questions are examined in the following along the historical and philosophical development. With the help of this ordering in time, not only the development of classical German philosophy towards Marx can be worked out. Early bourgeois philosophies, such as that of Spinoza from the 17th century, philosophies that emerged in the 19th century under the influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, or the philosophy of the Soviet Union in the 20th century become comprehensible in their central content and their answers can be compared with each other. The systematic connection between the 4 questions, which has just been hinted at, will become increasingly apparent in the course of the investigation. This is especially true for epistemology as a basic discipline, because the Marx that Gramsci makes visible cannot be understood without Kant’s constructive philosophical contribution to epistemology. The 4 questions have a very special meaning in epistemological terms, because the object under investigation is man himself and this object is at the same time subject. The philosophically thinking human being is urged to recognize himself as part of the object and in it at the same time as an acting subject. The subject is to become clear about his/her possibilities of gaining knowledge; he/she is to examine whether the imperatives presented have validity, he/she is to place him/herself in the movement of humanity in the past and present and to reflect on what concrete possibilities of action are available to implement the principles and goals he/she recognizes as valid in social life.
20 Kant already formulated the first three questions in the “Critique of Pure Reason”. Kant, 1781, Critique of Pure Reason, Works vol. 4, 1977, p. 677. He added the fourth question in his Logic. Kant, 1800, Immanuel Kant’s Logic – a Handbook on Lectures, ed. by Gottlob Jäsche, Verlag Friedrich Nicolovius, Danzig, 1800. Reprinted in Immanuel Kant, Schriften zur Metaphysik und Logik, vol. 2, Kant works vol. 6, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 189, Frankfurt am Main, quoting from the 4th edition of 1982, p. 448. Hereafter referred to as Kant, 1800, Immanuel Kant’s Logic – a Handbook to Lectures, Jäsche Logic. See the section on “1800 – Kant’s Lectures for Logic.”
21 Kant, 1800, Immanuel Kant’s Logic – A Handbook on Lectures, Jäsche Logic, p. 447
22 Marcuse, 1941, Reason and Revolution, Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1972, p. 281
23 Kant, 1800, Immanuel Kant’s Logic – A Handbook on Lectures, Jäsche Logic, p. 676
24 Marx/Engels, 1848, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, MEW 4, p. 462
25 Kant, 1783, Critique of Pure Reason, vol. 2, p. 676 In Kant, 1800, Immanuel Kant’s Logic – A Handbook on Lectures, German Edition, Jäsche Logic, p. 448, Jäsche interprets Kant to mean that the third question is answered by religion. Here Kant’s own formulation from the “Critique of Pure Reason” is followed, because this formed the basis for his philosophy of history.
26 Kant, 1798, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Preface, German Edition, Kant works, vol. 12, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, vol. 2, p. 399
27 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, German Edition, vol. 4, issue 7, § 35, p. 890
28 Kant, 1800, Immanuel Kant’s Logic – A Handbook on Lectures, German Edition, Jäsche Logic, p. 448
29 Hegel, 1817, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, vol. 1, Hegel works, vol. 8, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main, 3rd edition, 1992, § 140, p. 277 addition. This thought is fundamental for Hegel. In the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Hegel works, vol. 3, Frankfurt a. M. 1979, p. 242/3), he had already stated: “The true being of man is rather his deed; in it individuality is real, and it is it which sublates the meant in its two sides. Once the meant as a bodily resting being; the individuality presents itself rather in the act as the negative being, which is only insofar as it sublates being.”
30 Marx, 1845, Theses on Feuerbach, MEW 3, p. 533. In Engels’ version, because it is easier to understand in relation to this thesis in an unproblematic way. Already in 1844, Marx had formulated: For “man that is not an abstract being squatting outside the world. Man that is the world of man, state, society.” (Marx, 1844, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, MEW 1, p. 378)
31 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 59, p. 1472
