An ethical philosophy of life presented in its main outlinesAdler, Felix
Religion
An ethical philosophy of life presented in its main outlines
Adler, Felix
Ethics; Philosophy, Modern
In attempting to approach the task of building up a world-view based
on ethical experience, it became unavoidable to consider the method
by which the approach might be made, and for this purpose to contrast
the methods of science and the methods of ethics. Science, as we have
seen, collects its bricks and builds its house by composition. Science
analyzes phenomena into units, which it then combines. The mystery is
how science can achieve certainty in respect to certain phenomena of
nature without previous knowledge of the whole of nature. Kant’s answer
is that there is partial congruity between the mental functions and the
data that come to us from the unknown. Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_
faces in two directions. It expels the older metaphysics which assumed
that the empirical world is rational throughout, or rationalizable, and
which thence argued the existence of the unconditioned as necessarily
implied in the existence of the conditioned, and of a first cause as
actually implied in the chain of causes and effects. Kant contends
that there is an irrational element, namely, bare juxtaposition
(part outside part), and bare sequence (part before and after part),
while the logical or rational relation implies that the part is to
be conceived as implicit in the whole. Juxtaposition and sequence,
therefore, can never be completely rationalized. On the other hand,
Kant undertakes to prove that whatever of reality we know is traceable
to the projection of the rational factor upon the irrational. One
might even say that, according to Kant, the mind itself produces the
irrational factor, since the intuitions of space and time are according
to him, functions of the mind itself—the mind setting up a manifold so
constituted as to receive sense impressions. At any rate the capital
point to which we were led up was that science puts her foot on _terra
firma_ in a restricted area, without reference to what lies beyond,
while if we are to proceed in ethics at all, we must begin with some
ideal plan of the whole, since in ethics we are not interpreting a
foreign nature, but act upon natures similar to our own; and since,
in the case of conduct, there is no such partial concurrence of
the rational and irrational as in physics, no one of the so-called
moral modes of behavior being moral when taken separately. Hence the
conclusion that there is no possibility of establishing the conception
of worth unless we have some ideal of the whole in which and in
relation to which the incomparable worthwhileness of a human being can
be made good.
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