Kant and the History of Reason

Abstract

Is rationalism compatible with the modern historical outlook? This is perhaps the most challenging problem left over by the rationalists of the Enlightenment to their modern successors. As a fair generalization it may be said, that the philosophers of the Age of Reason — starting with Descartes and following Plato — had seen reason as eternal, non-temporal, unbound by cultural and sociological factors. Even the limits of reason (when admitted) were to be understood sub specie aeternitatis. This led to viewing history as a contingent, empirical affair, having no rational import in itself. Whatever is Geschichte is thereby mere Historie. It consists in the simple accumulation (or recounting) of facts that, per se, neither disclose a rational pattern nor are relevant to the growth of rationality. Indeed, the very notion of growth in rationality could have, at best, only a quantitative but not a qualitative sense. Individual men could, indeed, become more rational, as they complied with the fixed and eternal norms of rationality which, as such, were independent of man’s actual thinking and practical attitudes. But only concrete rational beings belonged to the world of becoming, whereas reason itself was pure being. It was an eternal truth — immovable, an sich, and without change.