Robert Taylor

Philosophy 1000
Spring 2016

Comparing and Contrasting: Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant

Rene Descartes was born into a respected family in Touraine, a French

province. His mother died a year after he was born, and Descartes believed
that he shared the same frail body as his mother. His father was a prominent
lawyer, but was pulled from home for months at a time due to his profession.
When Descartes was nine, he was sent to Jesuit College at La Fleche. While
at Jesuit, he studied Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Philosophy, Liberal Arts, and
History. Both his physical weakness and his mental strengths were cared for.
After completing Jesuit College, he went to the University of Poitiers,
where he earned his degrees in civil and canon law. When Descartes was
twenty-two, the Thirty Years War erupted, and he enlisted into the army of
the Prince of Nassau, then later the army of the Duke of Bavaria. It is
unknown whether he ever actually saw combat.
On November 10, 1619, Descartes had his revelation that led to his
creation of Rationalism. I remained the whole day shut up alone in a stoveheated room, he wrote, Where I had complete leisure to occupy my
thoughts. He had three dreams the next night, in one he heard a loud clap
of thunder, which he believed was the Spirit of Truth descending to take

possession of him. Descartes believed he had been divinely encouraged to

establish a universal method of reasoning, based on mathematics. If
followed closely enough, there principals would grant absolute truths.
These principals created the Rationalism movement. Rationalism is
an epistemological position in which reason is said to be the primary source
of all knowledge. Rationalists believe that abstract reasoning can produce
undeniable, absolute truths about the whole of reality. Many of these truths
can be discovered without observation. These are called priori, or innate
ideas. Descartes stands as the father of modern philosophy and the original
archetype of the modern rationalist.
According to the coherence of theory of truth, new ideas are
evaluated in terms of rational consistency and in relation to established
truths. Once fundamental truths are established, the rationalist use a
deductive logic based method to test more complex ideas. Descartes
believed that a mathematic method was the only way to discover the truth
about the universe. Natural reason, also known as common sense, according
to Descartes, is the ability to think that is found in all normal humans. He
believed that the talent for refined thinking was inside of everyone
regardless of special education or divine revelation. In an effort to base his
philosophy on a certain foundation, Descartes discovered methodic doubt.
This is the Cartesian strategy of deliberately doubting everything it is
possible to doubt in the least degree so that what remains will be known with
absolute certainty.

In order to find an indubitable starting point for his philosophy,

Descartes hoped to use skepticism to establish complete certainty.
Descartes begins by asking if it is rationally possible to doubt everything.
Descartes rejects sense knowledge as a foundation for certainty. He also
rejects the external physical world because it is possible that the whole world
could be an elaborate mental construct or hallucination.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724, in what is now Kaliningrad. His
parents were devout members of a fundamental Protestant sect known as
Pietism. When Kant was Eight, he was sent to an exceptionally strict Pietistic
school. Later in life, Kant would say he resented to schools heavy emphasis
on theology, but never lost regard for his righteousness and moral severity.
When he was Sixteen, Kant entered the University of Konigsberg. He refused
an offer to become a Lutheran minister upon graduating, choosing instead to
continue his studies. Over the next nine years he supported himself by
tutoring, until he received the equivalent of a doctorate degree. He then
became a Pricatdozet, which is a private teacher whose salary is paid for
directly by his students. He was hired as a professor of logic and
metaphysics at the age of forty-six.
For the most part, Kant lived an unextraordinary life, and it is believed
he never traveled more than sixty miles from his birthplace. He did however
write many pieces of literature. He later admitted that he deliberately left
out illustrative examples in his work, because that were already massive.

Some of Kants works include Critique of Pure Reason and Perpetual Peace: A
Philosophical Sketch.
Kant turned to an analysis on how knowledge is possible. He posited
that an underlying structure imposed by the mind and the perceptions is
encounters. For this perspective, Kant was known as a formalist. He
theorized that neither reason nor sensation by itself can give us a full
knowledge of the world. Instead, knowledge is the result of the interaction
between both mind and sensations.
Descartes had understood the importance of the scientific method, but
had not fully understand that the method is both empirical and rational,
according to Kant. Kant proposed a critical reexamination of metaphysics,
stating that Metaphysics, as distinct from science, is an attempt to acquire
and systemize knowledge derived by reason, not experience. His new view
on metaphysics was called Critical Philosophy, and it was Kants effort to
assess the limits of pure reason. That is reason unadulterated by
experience. This was also paired with Pure knowledge, which is knowledge
not derived from the senses.
According to Kant, our knowledge is formed from our actual
experiences and the minds faculties of judgement. If this theory is correct,
then we can know reality only as it is organized by human understanding.
How we experience the world was called phenomenal reality, and the term
for how we perceive reality independently is known as noumenal reality. We

may view these distinctions as human reality and pure reality. We can never
experience pure reality, but we can know that our minds dont just invent the
world. We can only experience what our human faculty is capable of
processing. To bridge the gap between phenomenal and noumenal worlds,
Kant identified three transcendental ideas: self, cosmos, and God. Kant
defined cosmos as a unity of experience by merging all events into a single
totality. Although that idea helps us organize and frame our experiences, we
cannot prove its existence.
Using the distinction between his phenomenal and noumenal worlds,
Kant proposed that it is possible to be both unfree and free in those worlds,
respectively. We have a phenomenal self that falls under the laws of nature
and a noumenal self that is free from those laws. This means we are free
and morally responsible even though we are free from the scientific view of
life. However we cannot experience this freedom, only think of it.
Kant also proposed Theoretical reason, which states a function of
reason is confined to the empirical, phenomenal world. We also use practical
reason, which is a moral function of reason that produces religious feelings
and intuitions based on knowledge of moral conduct. Kant used the practical
reason to account for the fact that we do not act on impulses and desires
alone. Kant insisted that morality was entirely a matter of reason and will,
not as a matter of consequence or action. Put another way, morality is a
matter of motives. Kants moral philosophy is his attempt to distinguish
morally proper maxims and motives from morally unacceptable ones. Kant

states that our moral duty does not serve our desires, but overpowers them
instead.
Descartes and Kant both understand the importance of using our
instincts and natural feelings to understand that universe. Descartes,
however relied only on using math and the actual ability to prove something,
as opposed to accepting why something just is. Kant himself still believed in
a God, and that even if our world isnt real, we make it real by perceiving it.
Kants view of the cosmos is something that the Skeptic Descartes would
have never accepted. Kant viewed Descartes view of problematic idealism
as incorrect. He felt like Descartes never took into the account that you have
to know the unknowable in a way in which you have to understand you are in
a place and time in space, which is something that Descartes ideas didnt
account for. Kant argued that your body could know things without reasoned
reflection. Kant says that in order to have an accurate reference point to
time, you could not use yourself as the reference but had to use the essence
of something rather than yourself.
Kants and Descartes views were relatively similar. To me it just seems
that Kant took it a different direction in the way of listening to what your
body instinctually knows, as opposed to Descartes who stood much more
behind having to have something proved into existence rather than your
body just knowing what the essence of something is.