Interrupting Kant’s Dogmatic Slumber
Katherine Dunlop·
University of
Texas at Austin, USA
Review of: Anderson,
Abraham, Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber, New York,
Oxford University Press, 2020, 180+xxii, 978-0-19-009674-8
This book’s stated purpose is to “understand” Kant’s
claim, in his Preface to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, that
his “dogmatic slumber” was “interrupted” by “the objection of David Hume” (1,
quoting 4:260). The claim is challenging
to understand for several reasons. Before
Kant’s Critical turn, he had access to Hume’s Treatise only through secondhand
reports of its content and some translated excerpts; his discussion of Hume in
the first Critique is brief, unsympathetic, and appears marginal; and in
a letter of 1798, he credits the antinomy of pure reason with awakening him
from dogmatic slumber. Through
meticulous examination of relevant passages from Prolegomena, Anderson
shows how to resolve these problems, and sets both Hume’s view and Kant’s understanding
of it in the context of Enlightenment thought.
The point of departure for Anderson’s interpretation
is Norman Kemp Smith’s view (1923) that Kant was woken by Hume’s attack, which
Kemp Smith locates in the Treatise, on the principle that every event
has a cause. Anderson considerably
simplifies the biographical account by locating the attack that woke Kant in
the Enquiry (which appeared in German translation in 1755), and takes
its target to be the “rationalist principle of sufficient reason”. What makes this target rationalist is that it
is “supposed to be known by reason” and, crucially, that it is “not restricted
to experience” (xii). Hence, Anderson departs
from the tendency to identify the Second Analogy—which defends a causal
principle governing objects of experience—as Kant’s reply to Hume. Anderson holds, rather, that the effect of
Hume’s objection on Kant was, first, “securing his agreement, and stimulating him
to generalize Hume’s attack on metaphysics as a knowledge of supersensible
things” (86). On this reading, Kant
remains concerned with knowledge of things beyond experience where he disagrees
with Hume. Kant’s “motive in defending
the rational origin of the concept of cause”, against Hume’s impugning of its supposed
rational ancestry (4:257-8), “was to defend the possibility of using the
categories beyond experience against Hume’s attack on such use” (21; see also p.
87).
Anderson takes Kant to be especially concerned with
theological knowledge. On his reading of
Prolegomena’s Preface, “Kant depicts Hume’s attack on metaphysics as a
contribution to Enlightenment—the liberation of the mind, both public and
individual, from theological authority”, so that in the context of the Preface,
“’dogmatic slumber’ … involves subjection to theological illusion, a lack of
Enlightenment” (44). Attributing this
focus of concern to Kant, and to Hume, allows Anderson to resolve the second
and third of the above-mentioned difficulties.
First, Anderson holds that the publication (in 1779) and reception of
Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion made Kant leery of
acknowledging a debt to Hume in the Critique (50-53). But the appearance of the Garve-Feder
review of the Critique, which “associated Kant’s doctrine with Berkeley
and Hume, the two prominent targets of the common-sense philosophy”, “convinced
[Kant] that he had nothing to lose by forthrightness about his debt to Hume;
that on the contrary, the best way to secure a hearing for the Critique
was by throwing down the gauntlet to the commonsensists by acknowledging
himself the heir to” Hume (55; see also p. 64).
Second, Anderson takes up Lorne Falkenstein’s (1995) suggestion that Kant’s
awakening was a lengthy process. This allows
Anderson to reconcile Kant’s claim that Hume’s objection awakened him with the
textual evidence of the 1798 letter and Reflexion 5037, where Kant says
in regard to the antinomy that he received “great light” in 1769 (18:69). In particular, Anderson takes it that “Hume’s
critique of theology is distinct from, but gave rise to, the Antinomy that,
according to the letter [of 1798], first [irrevocably] woke Kant from dogmatic
slumber” (68).
It seems fair to say that a concern with theology does
not leap off the pages to which this book devotes its chapters: Kant’s Preface to Prolegomena (in Chapters
1 and 2); Hume’s discussion of causation in Section 4 of Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding (in Chapter 3) and Book I, Part 3, Chapter 3 of the Treatise
on Human Nature (in Chapter 4); and four passages from the first Critique
which Anderson regards as its “hidden spine” (in Chapter 5). But in fairness to Anderson, he finds signs of
a debt to Hume’s attack on theology within Kant’s texts, even while holding
that Kant had reason to obscure this debt (see, in addition to pp. 50-51, p. 83).
Some of these signs are clues left for a sufficiently
curious reader (in place of the direct acknowledgment that Kant wished to avoid). These include allusions, in Prolegomena’s
Preface, to Hume’s anti-theological “blow for Enlightenment” (44). Kant defends Hume against common-sense
philosophers by saying that “chisel and hammer may suffice to work a piece of
wood, but for etching one must use the etcher’s needle” (4:259). Anderson observes that “’chisel and hammer’
was an expression used to refer to the imposition of theological dogma”, citing
an example in Hume (44). Anderson
further links Kant’s reference to a poem by Horace which mentions “robbers”
(4:257n.) to Hume’s comparison, in Section 1 of the Enquiry, between
“robbers” and “those who make use of superstition to delude the multitude”
(47). These examples illustrate the
thorough consideration given to passing references and allusions.
In the Critique, Kant refers explicitly to
Hume’s “undermining” of “the persuasion” that “the insight of [human] reason is
adequate for the assertion and determinate concept of a highest being”
(A745/B773), and speaks two pages later of “dialectical debate” as giving rise
to “a mature critique” (A747/B775).
Following Dieter-Jürgen Löwisch (1964), Anderson sees Kant as here
“tying” the “crystallization of his own critical philosophy to Hume’s critique
of theology” (67). Anderson proceeds to
argue that the role of the publication of Hume’s Dialogues in
“precipitating” the first Critique is explained by the supposition “that
what first interrupted Kant’s dogmatic slumber was the critique of theology
that was at the heart of Hume’s attack on metaphysics in the Enquiry”,
stimulating Kant to develop the view that he finally brought forth when the Dialogues
“present[ed] a dazzling sequel” (68; see also p. 70).
Anderson argues that “it will be more plausible to
take my reading of Kant as accurate” if “my reading of Kant’s description [of
Hume’s attack on metaphysics] can match that description with the actual
argument of the Enquiry—in other words, if it turns out that the
understanding of Hume I ascribe to Kant is true” (82). This approach yields a detailed, if narrowly
focused, interpretation of Hume which deserves some comment. Since Anderson takes Kant to follow Hume in
objecting to metaphysics—understood as knowledge of “what Kant calls objects of
the pure understanding or noumena” as distinct from “objects of experience”
(xiv; see also p. 103)—this argumentative strategy requires Anderson to attribute
the distinction between these two kinds of objects to Hume. I would have welcomed more explanation of what
resources Hume can use to draw this distinction, and in what terms.
Kant’s discussion of Hume in the Prolegomena’s
Preface has been taken as evidence (perhaps most notably in Strawson 1989) for
a skeptical realist (“New Hume”) reading of Hume on causation. Anderson does not take up this issue in his (avowedly
selective) treatment of the secondary literature, which strikes me as a missed
opportunity for clarification. There are
some indications that Anderson takes Hume to deny only (rational or a priori)
knowledge of causation, not the intelligibility of a rationalist understanding
of causation, which would make Hume more of a skeptical realist. Speaking for Kant, Anderson takes Hume to
deny only “that we could know through pure concepts and merely a priori that
there was a necessary connection between the existences of different things”,
not that such connections exist or can exist, or that our thought of them is
coherent (22). Similarly, Anderson says
he does “not think Hume claims to have refuted the truth of [the rationalist]
principle [of sufficient reason]; rather, he only rejects it as a … principle
of human knowledge”; accordingly, he does “not think that Hume holds that any
event can exist without any other”, but only that Hume “denies that we can know
causal necessity a priori” (110).
But in his account of Kant’s claim that Hume regarded concepts of reason
as “mere fictions”, Anderson claims Kant is right that for Hume “any attempt to
think [a necessary] connection that goes beyond constant conjunction and habit
is a mere fiction” (90). This implies
not merely that Aristotelian or early modern conceptions of necessary
connections are fictions (as Anderson claims on p. 91 that Hume has
shown)—which might be perfectly intelligible even if nothing real falls under
them—but that they cannot even be thought of by us. This stronger construal of Hume’s objection would
be more traditional (“Old Hume”).
However we are to understand Hume’s attitude toward
the rationalist understanding of cause, Anderson makes clear that he takes Hume
to reject only the application of causal notions to items beyond experience.
Anderson holds that for Kant, the “origin of the concept of cause … will
determine the range of its application” (xiv, n.8; see also p. 82), and
the same goes for causal principles, for both Kant and Hume. This collapses the question of whether causal
thinking originates in the understanding or in imagination into the question of
whether it has application beyond experience.
Accordingly, Anderson’s main objection to identifying the Second Analogy
as Kant’s reply to Hume is that because the “law of understanding” Kant defends
there applies only to objects of experience, Hume never rejects it. On the contrary, this causal principle “was …
heartily embraced by Hume, though not, of course, as ‘a law of the
understanding’” (7). At this juncture, I
found myself unconvinced by Anderson’s considerable and impressive efforts to
show that Hume rejects only the extra-experiential use of causal notions. It
seems to me that more is at stake in Kant’s and Hume’s dispute over the
concept’s origin than just the scope of its application. For even within the bounds of experience, it
seems that for Kant our causal thought and its associated principle involve a
kind of necessity that is made possible by the concept’s rational origin, and
which Hume cannot admit. But even if there is more at stake, Anderson deserves much
credit for detailing the importance that the issue of the concept’s scope of
application had for Hume, and for those who would align their views with or
distance them from his.
References
Falkenstein, Lorne.
(1995), “The Great Light of 1769—A Humean Awakening? Comments on Lothar Kreimendahl’s Account of
Hume’s Influence on Kant”. Archiv für
Geschichte der Philosophie, no. 77, pp. 63-79.
Kemp Smith, Norman.
(1923), Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Macmillan and
Co., Great Britain.
Löwisch, Dieter-Jürgen. (1964), Immanuel Kant und David Hume’s Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion, Universität Bonn, Germany.
Strawson, Galen.
(1989), The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume,
Oxford University Press, Great Britain.