The Combination Of Reason And Experience

The immortality of the soul was one of the three famous ideas of Kantian critical philosophy(the two other were the freedom of the will and the existence of God).Compared with the two other,the role of the immortality of the soul always remained obscure.The reason why this happened lied in two aspects:firstly,direct systematic accounts of the immortality were not so many in his works;secondly,the idea of immortality was regarded as an old religious doctrine and gradually forgotten today.Therefore,the meaning of his idea of immortality was not yet sufficiently revealed,either to the eintire Kantian philosophy,or to the realistic illustration to the secular society.In order to determine the position of the idea of immortality in his philosophy and figure out the reason why this modern world ignored the afterlife,we must have a distinct comprehension of his view of immortality.Our comprehension must begin in the dispute about the immortality between rationism and empiricism.This dispute constituted the basis of Kantian view of immortality.The rationalists claimed the soul was substance,simple in the space,identical in the time and finally immortal.However,the empiricists thought the soul as substance was only the aggregate of ideas or the succession of perceptions,therefore divisible in the space and diverse in the time.According to the empirical observation,the soul was exactly mortal.Two oppsite views had a deep effect on Kant.This showed in his pre-critical and critical periods.In his pre-critical youth(1747-1759),he was under the influence of Leibniz-Wolff school.At this time he had no doubt of the doctrine of the soul as substance and thought the soul could continue infinitely in the extension of time and space.After he read the works of empiricists,especially Hume(1760-1769),he started to reject the view of the soul as substance and the recognition of the immortality through the mysticism.But he accepted the rationalistic view about the immortality again,for example,the distinction between spirit and material,the intelletual determination of the afterlife and the argument of immortality of the soul based on the principle of life.This development of thought implied that he explored the immortality in different dimensions and the elements of reason and experience were not in a balanced combination.Consequently,the critical period marking the maturity of Kantian thought came.In this period,the elements of reason and experience were finally in a balanced combination.He eliminated the opposition between rationism and empiricism on the problem of immortality of the soul.This meant:he not only cancelled the rationalistic substantial provement of the soul,but also refuted the merely experiential determination of the soul.Furtherly,he accepted the substantiality,the simplicity and the personal identity of the soul,but only in a transcendental sense,not in a rationalistic realistic sense,because the reality of the features of the soul could not be proved by experience.Meanwile,if the features of the soul were only transcendental forms,then they must keep an distance with the tendency of empiricism to negate the transcendentality.Therefore,if the rationalistic provement of immortality based on the substantiality of the soul failed,then the experiential refutation of empiricism was also unsuccessful.In the domain of theoretical philosophy,the immortality remained only in a neutral transcendental possibility.Nobody could either approve or deny it.Since the dispute about the immortality in the speculative field was resultless,Kant must explore the immortality in the practical field.The transcendental personality he obtained in the elimination of the above-mentioned dispute had a great value,for this personality became moral in the practical field.From the moral law which firmly associated with the moral personality,he developed three kinds of argument of immortality:the argument of analogy,the arugument of the postulate of the highst good which was not compatible with the doctrine of freedom of the will and the arugument of the postulate of the highst good which was compatible with the doctrine of freedom of the will.The first argument was admired during Kant’s lifetime,but its theoretical persuasion was doubtful.The second argument appeared in the first Critique,but was abandoned by him because of its incompatibility with the doctrine of freedom of the will.The third argument was his most famous determination of immortality of the soul,i.e.the postulate of the infinite process of improving the good based on the completion of the moral law.This process must be understood from two dimensions:the endless progress in time and the oneness in eternity.Both dialectical unity constituted his total moral belief to the immortality of the soul.In Kantian theoretical philosophy,his dual objection to rationalism and empiricism on the problem of immortality was the core of his theory of self-conciousness;in his practical philosophy,he regarded the immortality as the only way to realize the moral perfection.So the immortality became one of two pillars of his system of the highst good(the other was the existence of God).However,his ultimate operation-taking the immortality as the transcendent moral belief,was not accepted by following classical german philosophers.They gradually tansformed the immortality as a transcendent belief to a secular history of self-conciousness.The fall of the idea of immortality inevitably occurred.However,a secular society lack of the transcendent dimension was full of crises.Kantian view of immortality of the soul provided a typical access from reason to belief.That was what the modern world could draw lessons from.