Julian Wuerth, Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xvi + 349 Pps., $99.00.
Julian Wuerth is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, havig received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Wuerth’s recent publications include “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (CUP, 2010) and as co-editor Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics (CUP, 2011). In this book Julian Wuerth offers a radically new interpretation of Kants theories of mind, action, and ethics. In what follows, I will briefly delineate how he does this.
Whatever difficulties there may be in following Kant’s philosophy, Wuerth says, it turns out that they do not owe to his philosophy being hopelessly mindboggling, but rather to they owe to it being a well thought-out system. Nevertheless, only an extensive and elusive familiarity with the system of thought as a whole will reveal how it works together as a systematic whole. But if Kant’s system of thought is structured around an account of the self as something possessing many powers, what is this “something” with the powers? The traditional interpretation of Kant’s account of the soul holds that because Kant rejects the rationalist psychologists’ conclusion of the soul’s substantiality, he thereby rejects any ontological conclusion about the soul. But, as Wuerth points out, this leaves us with the problem of how to account for Kant’s ascription of powers to the soul. Chapters 1 through 5 of this text, thus, consider a wide variety of Kant’s recorded thought from the two decades before and the two decades after he published the Critique, which are relevant to Kant’s ontology of the soul, his metaphysics and epistemology, and his critique of the rational psychologist’s views. In contrast to the traditional interpretation of Kant’s account of the self, these materials picture Kant consistently holding to a notion that the soul is a simple, noumenal substance in an ontological sense. Thus, Wuerth posits that Kant in no way reduces the soul to mere mental states. This understanding of the soul as one that is a noumenal substance coheres with his advocation of the soul having powers.
A focused study of these central aspects of his philosophical doctrine – the ontology of the soul, transcendental idealism, and the rejection of the rational psychologist’s position, reveals new things about each of them, including their mutual compatibility. For example, Kant rejects the view that the soul’s substantiality and simplicity imply the soul’s permanence, incorruptibility, and immortality, with him opting instead for a view of the soul being a simple substance able to ground mental states. Chapters 1 through 5 therefore provide needed background for the discussion in chapter six of the mind’s system of powers.
More pointedly, chapter 1 discusses Patricia Kitcher’s influential 1990 study of Kant’s theory of Mind entitled Kant’s Transcendental Psychology, where she argues for a functionalist interpretation of Kant’s theory of mind that reduces it to its representations and its connections. Wuerth shows that she, along with Andrew Brook (1994) who argues the same thing, limit their analyses to just one work in Kant’s oeuvre: the Critique of Pure Reason. In other sources of material, however, we find Kant on a trajectory that is anything but functionalist with respect to the mind. In chapter 2, the conversation turns to Kant’s arguments for the soul’s substantiality and simplicity. Herein, Wuerth again challenges Kitcher’s analysis as laid out in her functionalist account, arguing that Kant held that our disparate representations can only be united to create thoughts and personal identity if they are modifications of the same simple, underlying substance.
Chapter 3 argues that Kant has the relevant epistemological tenets of his system in place by at least 1770, when he argues for the existence of pure forms of intuition of space and time, which render phenomenal our sensible inputs. Also, by this time, Kant argues for the discursive nature of our understanding insomuch as our knowledge requires both concepts and phenomenal intuition. In chapter 4, Wuerth focuses on Kant’s relation to rational psychology in the 1760s and 1770s, and draws connections between his assessment of various tenets of existing rational psychology and his pre-Critique development of arguments that would appear therein. Chapter 5 examines Kant’s ontology of the soul, his related epistemology, and his rejection of rational psychology, as expressed in his recorded thought from the 1781 Critique onward, through the late 1790s. Herein, Wuerth argues that where Kant earlier described an immediate consciousness that we have of ourselves as a substantiale and distinguished this from our consciousness of our phenomenal predicates in inner sense, he later refers to the former consciousness as our pure apperception and to the latter as our empirical apperception.
Chapter 6 is, in many ways, key to the book’s argument. Having established Kant’s ontology and epistemology regarding the self in the first five chapters, this one turns to Kant’s understanding of the powers of self. The goal of this chapter is to provide a map of these powers as Kant understands them, as well as of their interrelations. The chapter first broaches the discussion of why Kant rarely explicitly discusses the faculties of mind, even though the mind is ever-present in his philosophy. Consulting Kant’s recorded thought from the two decades previous to the Critique, and the two decades following the Critique, Wuerth stipulates that in order to understand Kant’s mature philosophy, we must understand its systematicity as structured by our mental powers, in particular by the “three powers of mind”: the faculty of cognition, the faculty of feeling pleasure or displeasure, and the faculty of desire. This sixth chapter maps these powers of the mind, wherein Wuerth considers Kant’s extensive taxonomy of powers, the interrelatedness of these powers, Kant’s grouping of these powers, and his technical terminology of these powers. While mapping the broad outline of Kant’s account of mental powers, this chapter also maps the broader outline of Kant’s philosophy, noting the tight connection between Kant’s system of mental powers and his overall system of thought. This sixth chapter considers all of Kant’s relevant recorded thought: his published major and minor works, his correspondences, his personal notes, his drafts of works, and his students’ note of his lectures. As such, this allows us to avoid isolationist readings of its parts.
Finally, chapters 7 through 9 analyze central doctrines that pertain to the remaining two faculties of mind, the faculty of feeling and the faculty of desire. In particular, these chapters examine Kant’s theory of action and his ethics. According to prominent commentator’s constructivist view of Kant’s ethics, self-consciousness brings not only a reflective distance on mental states, but also a complete affective distance. At such a distance, sensibility is nothing for us, and thus sensibility cannot supply us with grounds for self-conscious choice. These three chapters argue that in addition to being problematic as a philosophical position, this constructivist interpretation of Kant’s theory of action and ethics is mistaken as an interpretation of his philosophy as a whole.
In sum, Kant grounded his philosophy in his positive theory of the mind, which remains, however, an enigma two centuries later. Wuerth’s original interpretation of Kant’s theory of mind references a wider range of Kant’s recorded thought than many previous interpretations, revealing in part an evolution in Kant’s thought in the decades before and after his 1781 Critique. This title is a hefty read, no doubt, but I recommend it to those who have interests in Kant’s philosophy, and also to those who possess interests in philosophy of mind more broadly.
Bradford McCall
Holy Apostles College and Seminary