"Kant's redefinition of reason and his rehabilitation of conscience marked a high point in the intellectual reaction against dominant rationalism." Critically examine.

Answer:

Immanuel Kant both completed and criticised the Enlightenment. By setting limits to what pure reason can know and by restoring conscience and moral duty to the centre of philosophy, he marked the culmination of the age and the beginning of the reaction against its confidence.

The redefinition of reason

• The Critique of Pure Reason argued that reason cannot know things as they are in themselves.
• The mind imposes its own categories of space, time and causality on experience.
• Metaphysical questions about God, freedom and immortality lie beyond theoretical proof.
• This set firm limits to the pretensions of dogmatic rationalism.

The rehabilitation of conscience

• The Critique of Practical Reason grounded morality in the moral law within.
• The categorical imperative required one to act only on a universalisable maxim.
• God, freedom and immortality returned as postulates of practical, not theoretical, reason.
• He famously said he had denied knowledge in order to make room for faith.

Assessment

• He remained an Enlightenment figure, defining it as humanity's release from self-imposed tutelage.
• Yet by limiting reason he opened the way for Romanticism and German Idealism.
• His moral philosophy restored the dignity of the individual conscience.

Wider influence

• Fichte, Schelling and Hegel developed German Idealism from his starting point.
• His idea of perpetual peace influenced later internationalist thought.
• The dignity of the person as an end in itself entered modern rights doctrine.

The statement is thus well-founded. As historians of philosophy observe, Kant was at once the Enlightenment's greatest exponent and its most rigorous critic, for in circumscribing what reason could prove while exalting what conscience commands, he marked the point at which the age of reason began to turn towards the age of feeling.