TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM OF GERMANY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................... 3
RELATION TO JURISPRUDENCE................................................................................... 4
INTERPRETATION BY OTHER THINKERS.......................................................................6
FURTHER STUDY IN PRESENT TIMES...........................................................................8
CONCLUTION............................................................................................................ 10
BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................... 11

Annexure: Synopsis to the Term Paper towards fulfillment of the assessment in the subject Of
jurisprudence-1

INTRODUCTION

Transcendental idealism is a doctrine given by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the
18th century. He describes it as the doctrine that everything intuited in space and time, and
therefore all objects of any experience possible to us are nothing but appearances, that is mere
representations which, in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings or as
series of alternatives, have no independent existence outside our thoughts. If our intuition is
removed none of the objects will exist and even space and time shall disappear.
Kant introduces transcendental idealism in the part of the Critique called the Transcendental
Aesthetic, and scholars generally agree that for Kant transcendental idealism encompasses at
least the following claims:

In some sense, human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves.

Space and time are not things in themselves, or determinations of things in themselves
that would remain if one abstracted from all subjective conditions of human intuition.

Space and time are nothing other than the subjective forms of human sensible intuition.

Space and time are empirically real, which means that everything that can come before
us externally as an object is in both space and time, and that our internal intuitions of
ourselves are in time

Kantian Idealism held that there was a Moral Law within people that shapes their impressions
and that there was a set of innate principles with reference to which the mind gives form to its
perceptions and interprets life experiences. Kant was sure that he had effected a "Copernican
Revolution," persuasively suggesting that is the representation that makes the object possible
rather than the object that makes the representation possible. Kant said there were experiences
that could be acquired through "intuitions of the mind;" he referred to the "native spontaneity of
the human mind." This introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather

than a passive recipient. It also leaves the way dramatically open for the mind to be viewed as a
creative, intuitive, and interpreting organism rather that a reactive and logical machine.

RELATION TO JURISPRUDENCE

Fundamental to Kants ethical and jurisprudential reasoning is the premise that all moral
concepts have their basis wholly in a priori thought, which they can be arrived at by reason
alone, without reference to experience or recourse to intuition of rules alleged immanent in
experience. Human beings, furthermore, are free agents whose actions are determined by aims
that they are at liberty to select. From such premises Kant deduced the nature of an ideal law, in
which is implicit a theory or criterion of justice. This ideal law comprises the conditions under
which all members of society can enjoy the maximum freedom from subjection to the arbitrary
will of others.
But Kants supposedly a priori concepts are in fact as transcendental as anything natural lawyers
have offered. Kant gave a set of fundamental overall principles which guide along a path of
action in accordance with surrounding circumstances. The substance of this ethical postulate is
Kants famous Categorical imperative. It is categorical as distinguished from a hypothetical
imperative which says: if you want this, do that. The categorical imperative commands: do
this without any regard to any particular end to which you may or may not be inclined.
He gave three formulations:
1. Act only on the principle whereby you can at the same time will that this maxim should
become a universal law.
2. So act as to treat humanity,whether in your own person or in that of any other, in every
case as an end withal, never as a means only.

3. Always so act that the will could regard itself at the same time as making universal law
through its own maxim.1
His imperative is the basis of moral as well as legal philosophy. Morality and legal fields are
distinct. Morality is a matter of the internal motives of the individual. Legality is a matter of
action in conformity with external standards set by the law. Thus it is not the principle but the
kind of command issuing from the common principle which distinguishes law from morality. It
must be emphasized that Kants legal philosophy is entirely a theory of what the law that ought
to be. A discrepancy between the law that is and the law that ought to be is not discussed. His is
the legal philosophy of a philosopher, not of a lawyer.
He has defined law as:
Law is the totality of the conditions under which the arbitrary will of one can co-exist
with the arbitrary preference of another according to general law of freedom.
This is the way in which man as a rational being can achieve harmony of all beings and things
with each other under a principle of reason. It is in accordance with the principle of freedom that
an individual should act in such a way that he leaves it open to all others. T follows from kants
sharp distinction between morality and law that compulsion is essential to law and a right is
characterized by the power to compel.2
According to him, the law which does not meet this end is necessarily invalid, and the one which
meets is right. Freedom in law means freedom from arbitrary subjection to another, and law is
the complex totality of conditions under which maximum freedom is possible for all. To this end
a separation of powers in necessary to prevent the emergence of a despotic regime, and the sole
function of the state is to ensure the observance of law. He urged that individuals should not be
used as a the means to an end, since he is an end himself. And he should retire from the society if
his free will would involve him in wrongdoing.3 If a persons actions can co-exist with the
freedom of all other persons according to a general law, then whoever prevents that person from
1 DAVID BROOKE, Q&A JURISPRUDENCE <books.google.co.in/books?isbn=1135242011>
2 W.FRIEDMANN, LEGAL THEORY 157-61 (5d ed. 2002)
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taking those actions is doing him injustice. Law carries a right to coerce him who seeks to
interfere with it. Rights and duties are of much importance in Kants system of law. Kant divides
rights into natural rights and private right; innate right and acquired right. Natural right is said to
rest upon pure rational principles a priori; private right is from the will of a legislature. Innate
right belongs to all persons by Nature and independent of all juridical acts of experience;
acquired right is that which is founded on juridical acts. Every person has a right to pursue his
own happiness as long as it does not interfere with the liberty of others.
Kants scheme of duty is to live honestly, not to harm another and to give every man his due.
Nobody should be made a means for another to achieve an objective. Not even under necessity,
any person should wrong to another person. Punishment is imposed because the offender has
committed a crime and not merely to further the good of civil society or to reform the criminal.
Crimes against the state may be pardoned but not crimes against the individuals. The offender
must receive punishment according to the crime he has done. He defines state as a contract
among individuals, by which they surrender a large element of their external freedom, which is
resumed later when they become members of a commonwealth. The united will of the people
then forms the sole legislative power; the united will can not commit injustice to individuals.
Only universal will armed with absolute power can give security to all. This transfer of power
Kant bases on the social contract, which is to him not an historical fact but an idea of reason. The
social contract is so sacred that there is an absolute duty to obey the existing legislative power.
Rebellion is never justified for kant, although he is no authoritarian, but considers a republican
and representative state is the ideal. Only the united will of all can institute legislation. Kant
thinks that law is just only when it is at least possible that the whole population should agree to
it. He favours separation of power and free speech, and is opposed to the privileges of birth, an
established Church and autonomy of corporations. The function of the state is for kant is that of
protector and guardian of law. The state while enacting the legislations should interfere least with
the citizens but ensure their rights.

3 RWM DIAS, JURISPRUDENCE 475-76 (5d ed. 1994)

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INTERPRETATION BY OTHER THINKERS

It is thus not surprising that later thinkers, such as Johann Fichte, Kants idealist successor, had
little difficulty in putting the new Kantian wine into natural-law bottles.
The 20th century saw a fresh attempt at the Kantian approach in the work of the German legal
philosopher Rudolf Stammler. Adopting the Kantian position that knowledge is independent of
sensory experience, Stammler set out to discover pre-experiential categories, or pure forms, of
thinking about law. Stammler arrived at a social ideal of a community of free-willing men, an
ideal that he claimed to have universal validity because of its supposed a priori basis. Having
thus arrived at a pure ideal of society, untainted by empirical content deriving from sense
perception, he felt able to formulate equally pure principles for just law that would regulate his
ideal society. Stammlers pure idea of society comprised the harmony of individual and common
purposes: his pure idea of just law thus comprised those principles conducive to such harmony
the mutual respect of individuals for each others purposes and the participation of all in the
achievement of the common purposes.
The different stream of idealism flowing from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels philosophy of
history was fed into jurisprudence by Josef Kohler, Stammlers close predecessor in that subject
at the University of Berlin. His work is still another effort to relate social facts and the norms of
justice by exposing the immanence of values in factsin civilization in Kohlers case.
In perspective, these idealisms, despite their formal or philosophical antagonism to rationalism
and natural-law thinking, seem to have reinforced in the age of the Industrial Revolution the
individualist and libertarian trends that natural law had built up successively against medieval
church and empire, the shackles of medieval social, political, and economic organization, and
18th-century despotism.
In America, James Marsh published an American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection.
This book, which almost single-handedly laid the ground work for the New
England Transcendentalism movement, fused the material and the spiritual, and advanced the
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crucial distinction between the Reason and the Understanding.

Soon afterward, Frederic Henry Hedge, a Unitarian minister equally conversant with German
thought, wrote for that denomination's journal, The Christian Examiner, a laudatory article on
Coleridge that Hedge claimed was "the first word, so far as I know, which any American had
uttered in respectful recognition of the claims of Transcendentalism." This article made a very
great impression on Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called it "a living leaping Logos."
A detailed statement of Emerson's subsequent beliefs appeared in his first book, Nature (1836).
The volume received little notice, but it has come to be regarded as Emerson's most original and
significant work, offering the essence of his philosophy of transcendentalism. Emerson had two
major volumes of essays published in the 1840s. The following quote is gleaned from Emerson's
essay "The Transcendentalist" (1842)4.

"What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism... It is well known to most of

my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name Transcendental from the use
of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke,
which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience
of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms,
which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were
intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary
profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in
Europe and America, to that extent that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is
popularly called at the present day Transcendental."

CRITICISM
Transcendental idealism has been contented to be too abstract to provide a firm foundation for
behavior to be evaluated as good or bad. Ordinary people cannot live according to the categorical
imperative. Acts are conditioned by time place and background and it difficult to consider a
4 http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/transcendentalism/emerson/idealism_kant.html last visited 24-08-2014
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universal rule of conduct. Inflexibility in rules could lead to difficulties in practice where two
principles clash.
Kants idealism is categorized as directionless by some because of there is no criteria to judge
the consequences of the actions by the people.5
Transcendental idealism makes its problem just those eternal truths (principle of contradiction,
principle of sufficient reason) that serve as the foundation of every such dogmatic structure,
investigates their origin, and then finds this to be in man's head. Here they spring from the forms
properly belonging to it, which it carries in itself for the purpose of perceiving and apprehending
the objective world. Thus here in the brain is the quarry furnishing the material for that proud,
dogmatic structure. Now because the critical philosophy, in order to reach this result, had to
go beyond the eternal truths, on which all the previous dogmatism was based, so as to make
these truths themselves the subject of investigation, it became transcendental philosophy. From
this it follows also that the objective world as we know it does not belong to the true being of
things-in-themselves, but is its mere phenomenon, conditioned by those very forms that lie a
priori in the human intellect (i.e., the brain); hence the world cannot contain anything but
phenomena.6

FURTHER STUDY IN PRESENT TIMES

Kant-inspired transcendental arguments against skepticism about the external world were
developed with vigor in the mid-twentieth century, notably by P. F. Strawson, most famously in
his Kantian reflections in The Bounds of Sense (1966), Barry Stroud, in his 1968 article
Transcendental Arguments, Robert Stern, Mark Sacks, Brueckner etc have reinterpreted and
are inspired by, Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Strawson gave the idea that from a premise
about self-consciousness, we can infer that the subject must conceptualize her experience so as to
feature a distinction between the subjective route of his experience and the objective world
through which it is a route, where the experience of the objective world consists in a rulegoverned order of representations. There Stroud contends that these arguments feature reasoning
5 DAVID BROOKE, Q&A JURISPRUDENCE <books.google.co.in/books?isbn=1135242011>
6 The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, Appendix: "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy"
8

from some aspect of experience or knowledge to the claim that the contested feature of the
external world in fact exists. In each case the existence of the external feature will not be a
necessary condition of the aspect of experience or knowledge in question, for a belief about the
external feature would always suffice. Stern advances a conception of this kind of argument on
which it addresses a skeptic who questions whether certain beliefs cohere with others in one's set,
as opposed to a skeptic who questions whether certain beliefs are true. Sacks argues that it arises
because of a tension between the coherentist theory of justification and the realist
correspondence theory of truth that the external world skeptic presupposes. One might respond,
he points out, by accepting a coherence theory of truth as well, but this would be to adopt a
version of idealism. An important criticism of Stroud's proposed sort of modest transcendental
argument is raised by Brueckner (1996). Brueckner addresses the fit between the claim that
certain non-skeptical beliefs are invulnerable in Stroud's sense, and the admission that they might
not be true. More precisely, he challenges the claim that one can simultaneously affirm the
following two principles, each gleaned from Stroud. Ie. If we attribute beliefs to speakers (if we
believe that they have beliefs with determinate contents), then we must also believe that there is
an independent world of enduring objects with which they interact and although we believe
many things about a world independent of us and our experiences, none of those beliefs is
true. Thus different persons give different views and analysis which may conflict with each other.
Despite these sorts of challenges, the aspiration to forge transcendental arguments with
considerable anti-skeptical force has not waned. Qassim Cassam (1999), Sacks (2000), and Stern
(2000), for example, have developed creative and nuanced versions of transcendental arguments
designed to negotiate the type of problem Stroud has pressed.7

CONCLUTION
The transcendental idealism of germany, given by Immanual Kant basically says that for
everything that exists in space and time, there has to be a priori knowledge with the person
perceiving the object. Physical existence is dependent on knowledge of individuals which exists
by experience. Kant has also put up his views on rights and duties and punishment through this
7 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental/#RefIde last visited on 24-08-2014
9

idea, which give the view that no person should become a means to someones end. The
punishment given must be in proportion to the crime commited. This concept is very well
applicable in present day legal system which aims at protecting the rights of every person, arising
due to the duty of another. The concepts given by Kant are of fundamental importance to the
development of jurisprudence and its concept. The philosophy has been criticized as being
impractical and directionless and absurd. However it justifies the existence of objects beyond
space and time, such as existence of god, moral, rights, duties, on the basis of which our legal
system is based on. These ethoses have to come from within an individual and exist because
people know that they are correct. The philosophy of transcendental idealism has been
interpreted by different thinkers and scholars in different ways. Even modern scholars have
presented their versions of the philosophy. But its fundamental importance is in the field of
jurisprudence. The concept of acting in a way such that if it becomes a social norm then it is
acceptable to the society, is the basic way to understand how the relation between rights and
duties works.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
RWM DIAS, JURISPRUDENCE
DAVID BROOKE, Q&A JURISPRUDENCE
W.FRIEDMANN, LEGAL THEORY
WEBLINKS

Immanuel Kant (Rohlf, Michael, "Immanuel Kant", The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy (Summer 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental/#RefIde last visited on 24-08-

2014
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/transcendentalism/emerson/idealism_kant.html
last visited 24-08-2014

ARTICLES

The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, Appendix: "Criticism of the Kantian
Philosophy"

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