Someone characterised Critical Theory as being Post-Kantian just as it was Post-Marxist (confusingly claiming that it was Post-Kantian because it came after Kant), but also claimed there was a strong link between the first two.
Some of Kant's ideas inspired critical theory, but mostly he was opposed to what the project has become and indeed some later philosophers linked to Critical Theory criticised his ideas:
"Kant himself is significant as a philosopher who defends the principles of Enlightened reason against scepticism. He argues for the validity of the knowledge accrued by the natural sciences, but also for the possibility of reason legislating for both individual moral action and the constitutional structure of the state and its relations to other states. Kant’s critical philosophy inspired as much criticism as admiration in the tradition of critique that followed him...
One of Kant’s most productive moves is his analytical distinction between different mental powers, especially theoretical understanding and reason. The former relies on scientific rationality to gain understanding of the natural world of objects which can then be mastered technologically, while the latter is a version of Kant’s practical reason which deliberates about the ends and purposes of instrumental action. Kant’s philosophical system aims at mediation between these two forms of reason, warning about the overextension of either into the domain of the other. Subsequent thinkers, especially Weber and the Frankfurt theorists, have reformulated that distinction as one between two different types of rationality. As a result, Kant’s basic moral principles of respect for persons and autonomy underlie much of the substance of the critical tradition.
Kant also explains how humans can be understood from the perspectives of both scientific rationality, as natural objects, and moral reasoning, as free subjects. In spite of Kant’s attempt to mediate these two incompatible perspectives, a good deal of critical thought has been dedicated to asserting the latter in face of the former, especially when the methods of the natural sciences have been deployed in the domain of the human sciences... While Kant’s first critique aims to establish the validity of natural scientific knowledge, his philosophy, including the problems it fails to solve, has inspired critical thinkers to ground the knowledge gained by the human sciences.
Kant’s sustained attention to aesthetics and judgement has also had its impact on the tradition of critique. According to Kant’s tripartite division of what Weber calls value spheres, aesthetic production and appreciation do not serve the purposes of theoretical understanding and the moral reasoning. Accordingly, in a sense which is highlighted by modernist sensibilities, art is autotelic, meaning that it gives its end to itself. In a world dominated by instrumental reason and administration, certain forms of art can thus be valued by Adorno as a privileged area of freedom indicating utopian possibilities...
Kant’s critical philosophy is presented as a system. His main works were his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of Judgement (1790). In turn, they analyse the capacities and limits of human mental powers, called faculties, of theoretical or scientific understanding, moral reason and both aesthetic and teleological judgement (meaning judgement about ends or purposes). They are critical in that in each case Kant assesses how far our faculties can take us in answer to the questions: ‘What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?’1 Theoretical understanding gives us empirically-based, objective knowledge of nature, as established by Newtonian mechanistic physics, but not of ‘things in themselves’ beyond our experience, or of metaphysical entities such as the soul or God. Reason gives us a universally binding moral law, obedience to which constitutes freedom. Each of the first two critiques is immensely significant in itself, but it is the third which systematises Kant’s philosophy in that judgement mediates between understanding and reason, indicating a finality or purpose to the world according to which we can be both objects under the laws of nature and free subjects of the moral law.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an answer to the question: what can we know?, but also a rebuttal of both Hume’s empiricism and Leibniz’s rationalism. Kant wished to avoid the contemporary philosophical orthodoxy of dogmatic rationalism represented by Leibniz and Wolff, according to which all true knowledge is derived from the exercise of reason, following innate principles which are known to be true independent of experience. Our subjective knowledge of objects is guaranteed by a divine harmony of the universe between ideas and things, which can be known by understanding the innate principles, and which in turn give us knowledge of metaphysical concepts such as the soul and God. Kant held that such metaphysical speculation was beyond the reach of human understanding, leading instead to a series of antinomies, meaning apparent philosophical paradoxes based on pairs of false assumptions. When pure reason proceeds on the basis of unempirical ideas, it is being used illegitimately.
At the same time, Kant did hold that if used legitimately, the ideas of reason lead to objective knowledge...
In order to justify objective knowledge, Kant argues that it requires a synthesis of reason and experience, of that which we know a priori beyond experience and that which we know from experience. The main difficulty is in establishing the first part... Kant argues that we can know certain things by reasoning beyond experience, such as that every event has a cause, because such concepts are presupposed by or are conditions of possibility of experience and knowledge. Kant characterises his method for arriving at these conditions as transcendental deduction, because we must transcend our experience to deduce what makes it possible. These presuppositions come in two forms. First, space and time are a priori intuitions of perception, meaning that we can only experience objects as existing in space and time, though we cannot know space and time through our experience. Second, there are twelve a priori categories or concepts of understanding, which are present in our understanding before experience, such as the notion of causality, or that objects exist as substance. These concepts give form to our thoughts about experience in a way that makes our sense impressions intelligible to us. The link between sense-perceptions represented as intuitions in time and space and concepts, and hence between empirical experience and reason that transcends experience, is made by the imagination, which is another faculty that schematises by relating a diversity of sense-perceptions to concepts. The faculty of understanding legislates over reason and imagination to establish a determinate accord between the faculties.
Another aspect of the accord between our faculties is that it is presupposed by self-conscious experience. It is another precondition of knowledge that sense-intuitions must allow for the application of the categories, which also means that if the world is comprehensible it must appear to conform to the categories and their schematisation as laws of nature, such as Newtonian physics. This deduction of a priori principles is subjective rather than objective, because it refers to the perspective of human subjects. It is also the grounds for Kant’s Copernican revolution, according to which the condition of possibility of objective knowledge is that physical objects must conform with our cognitive powers, not vice versa. Yet this does raise the problem that Kant seems to presuppose a similar harmony between a priori truths, or the ideas of reason, and the world, or between the capacities of the knower and the nature of the known, as the one asserted by dogmatic rationalists. His justification for the accord of the faculties with each other and the world does not come until his third Critique.
The knowledge gained by our cognitive faculties is one of phenomena, or physical objects as appearances, rather than noumena, or things in themselves. Kant does not mean that reality is hidden from us behind mere appearances, but that we cannot aspire to knowledge of the world which is conceived apart from the perspective of the knower...
Kant also sees much value in reason’s positing questions beyond theoretical understanding, such as: what caused the world to exist? First, it demonstrates the limits of our cognitive power, because we cannot answer the question. Second, by pushing us to think about the world as a totality, reason provides us with a regulative principle, or a correct hypothesis, according to which we think of the world as subject to universal and necessary laws. By presupposing a systematic unity of nature, reason symbolises the accord between the content of particular phenomena and the ideas of reason. Kant’s interest is not only in establishing the illegitimacy of the use of reason beyond certain limits as a way to justify natural science and debunk metaphysical speculation, but also to establish the legitimacy of reason’s interest beyond the phenomenal world.
Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason is so called because it is about the application of reason to action or practice. Our faculty of desire often operates according to natural causes such as instincts, desires or feelings, allowing our will to be determined by heteronomous, or external influences. In that case, reason is, as Hume put it, the slave of passion, for our cognitive powers are limited to figuring out instrumentally the best means to achieve our ends, not what our ends or goals ought to be. But humans are not merely objects governed by the laws of nature...
The idea of freedom as obedience to a law one makes for oneself, or autonomy, came from Rousseau, who was a key influence on Kant. Autonomy is also a question of maturity, an ability to abstract away from one’s personal desires, interests and tastes as well as the opinions of others. If one thinks as oneself only as a rational agent, as free and unconditioned, reason will compel one to embrace duty in the form of ‘categorical imperatives’, which are rules that all rational beings must obey without exception, in order to be true to their nature as autonomous beings. In this Critique, Kant does not have to prove that objective moral principles are true, but that they are what rational beings must think when they think about universal and necessary principles.
There are two basic formulations of the categorical imperative, the first of which is: ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law.’... The second formulation is called the practical imperative: ‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.’...
The notion of reason and freedom as ends in themselves also indicates a way out of the key problem for Kant’s system. How can freedom be possible in a causally determined world? How can we humans be both noumena and phenomena? How can the practical knowledge we have of freedom be reconciled with the theoretical knowledge we have of nature?...
Kant’s full answer to the problem comes in his third Critique, but in his discussion of practical reason he suggests that the realisation of moral good presupposes an accord between nature and freedom, such that the ‘ought’ of the categorical imperative implies that it can be fulfilled...
To complete his philosophical system by establishing a link between freedom and nature, Kant needs his third Critique of Judgement: ‘the family of our higher cognitive powers also includes a mediating link between understanding and reason. This is judgement.’6 In particular, this Critique focuses on reflective judgement of which there are two kinds, aesthetic and teleological, of which the first kind can be about either beauty or sublimity. As well as dealing with judgement, the third Critique also covers another faculty, namely the feeling of pleasure or displeasure which lies between our cognitive faculty and our faculty of desire. Just as each of those faculties has a higher form, respectively theoretical understanding and reason, so does feeling, in the form of judgement. Similarly, Kant is concerned to establish a synthetic a priori of aesthetic taste, or a justification for the possibility of aesthetic judgement.
The problem, characterised as the antinomy of taste, is that aesthetic judgement involves both feelings related directly to subjective experience, not conceptual thought, and judgement, for which we give reasons and claim universal assent. Aesthetic pleasure, claims Kant, presupposes that others ought to agree that ‘this rose is beautiful’, or that there is a subjectively universal ‘common sense’ of beauty. The point is not that we should all recognise the same property of beauty in objects, but that we can all share the same feeling. To feel beauty, Kant says we make a disinterested judgement, which means that our feeling of pleasure may not be empirically determined as sensory satisfaction or what feels agreeable to an individual, as in ‘this rose smells beautiful’. Rather, we take delight in the accord of nature’s beauty with our disinterested pleasure. Aesthetic judgement is free of all individual inclination in the same way that practical reasoning is, which is why we expect universal assent. Already we can see one way in which, for Kant, beauty is a symbol of the good, because we make aesthetic and moral judgements from the same disinterested position.
Also, we judge beauty without applying concepts, so that what we have in mind is not the concept of the rose but our intuition, or perception, of the rose. In aesthetic judgement imagination is freed from concepts, that is to say, from the task of bringing concepts to bear on experience, as when we understand, ‘that red and green thing is a rose’. Moreover, aesthetic judgement entails a free, undetermined accord between the faculties. Judgements of beauty always concern singular perceptions, such as of the colour and shape of a red rose. Yet, the imagination still brings concepts to bear on experience, but in a free and undetermined way. Another way to put this is that the faculty of judgement has an indeterminate concept which serves as its a priori principle, in parallel to the principle of ‘lawfulness’, or the systematic unity of nature, for the faculty of understanding, and ‘final purpose’, or the realisation of freedom in the ‘kingdom of ends’ for the faculty of reason...
For the most part, Kant considers beauty only in relation to nature, rather than art. He explains that pure judgements can be made only about free beauty in contrast to beauty that is fixed by the concept of a thing’s purpose. All fine art involves the concept of a purpose, in that the artist has a purpose in creating it, though genius can animate fine art by creating a second nature. Kant thus prefers to focus on pure aesthetic judgements, but his focus on nature also fits his philosophical system better, because it allows him to argue that aesthetic judgement is universal because of its accord with nature’s formal or subjective purposiveness. Judgements of beauty also relate to nature’s real or objective purposiveness, which, according to Kant, should properly be the subject of teleological judgement...
The aesthetic idea of harmony and unity thus leads us to the idea that nature and humans have a ‘suprasensible purpose’, a purpose which is an end in itself...
Kant and Contemporary Critical Theory
Kant’s critical philosophy is more than ample fodder for criticism by contemporary theorists, though some find his philosophical method and system productive as much for its failures as its successes. As a leading Enlightenment philosopher, Kant is often attacked from various postmodern perspectives for the alleged transgressions of modern thought. Most notably, Rorty regards Kant as the arch-foundationalist philosopher, the architect of philosophy that attempts to ground valid claims to knowledge and to rule out invalid claims. Bauman also picks up on Kant’s terminology of reason as legislator, criticising him for asserting the authority of intellectuals to provide universal standards of truth, morality and taste in alliance with modern state rulers in a joint effort to establish modernity as a fundamentally ordered social and political system. Yet, Kant brings reason before its own tribunal, disallowing illegitimate uses of it by debunking dogmatic rationalism. Kant is clearly concerned with the limits of theoretical understanding and the necessity of both moral reason and reflective judgement which cannot be grounded epistemologically. Kant’s political theory of constitutional republicanism and world peace might best characterised as a framework to make morality and autonomy possible on a public scale, and is certainly not an attempt to apply a scientific understanding of causality in the natural world to society.
Kant is also criticised by some feminists for positing what they take to be male-centred norms and values of the self and reason as universal, a criticism which is reinforced by Kant’s view that women are not capable of maturity in the sense of moral autonomy. Gilligan’s feminist ‘ethic of care’ is posited as a contrast to a Kantian ‘ethics of justice’, which, allegedly, is based on a model of moral development reflecting the experience of boys but not girls. Kant is one of many male Enlightenment philosophers whose work is subject to a feminist debate about whether such bias is inherent to his philosophy, such that the notion of rational being cannot be applied to women, or whether his chauvinist opinions can be edited out to produce a gender-neutral philosophy.
Several other key contemporary theorists have critical relationships with Kant which begin from the premise that Kant’s philosophy fails as a system to achieve grounding or validate judgements. Habermas follows the tripartite structure of Kant’s critical philosophy by analysing the different bases for validity claims in three value spheres: cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical and aesthetic expressive. However, he rejects Kant’s notion of transcendental reason, instead proposing a pragmatically based communicative reason which must be presupposed for communication through speech to be meaningful. Lyotard focuses on what he takes to be Kant’s impossible attempt to bridge theoretical understanding and practical reason through judgement, which he interprets as a particular instance of the impossibility of a universal discourse that rules over heterogeneous discourses or ‘phrase regimes’. For Lyotard the incommensurable difference and agonistic contestation between discourses and social groups, rather than universality, is the principle of justice. Lyotard also highlights Kant’s aesthetic of the sublime as that which resists representation by totalising discourse. If Lyotard has a postmodern Kant, Foucault’s attitude is more ambivalent. On the one hand, he regards Kant’s philosophy as the epitome of modern thought which is trapped in anthropological slumber, unable to extricate itself from fundamental antinomies such as between man’s empirical existence and transcendent reason. On the other hand, he credits Kant with an admirable philosophical ethos of critique of modernity as analysis and reflection on limits. But in a Nietzschean twist, Foucault historicises Kant’s analysis of a priori conditions of knowledge, denying that they are universal and necessary and suggesting that limits be transgressed rather than regarded as necessary conditions. Kant’s influence on contemporary critical theory remains considerable, either as a target of criticism or as inspiration for critical philosophy"
--- Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) / Jon Simons in From Kant to Lévi-Strauss: The Background to Contemporary Critical Theory / ed. Jon Simons
