The Socratic Method Today Student-Centered and Transformative Teaching in Political Science

Similarly, in a footnote on faith and reason in theCritique of Judgment, Kant suggests that
Christianity is a kind of midwife to reason:

But this is not the only case where this wondrous religion has in the greatest simplicity of its

statement enriched philosophy with far more determinate and pure concepts of morality than

philosophy itself had until then been able to supply, but which, once they are there, reason

sanctionsfreelyand accepts as concepts that it surely could and should itself have hit upon and

introduced.^16

Thus, much like Plato, Kant seems to be claiming that experience can enable us to recognize ideas
that are in themselves not derivable from experience, thus suggesting that our ideas have another,
transcendent source.
Such a claim is at odds with Kant’s theoretical epistemology. But then Kant himself admits at one
point that his agreement with Plato is not confined to the practical:

But it is not only where human reason exhibits genuine causality, and where ideas are operative

causes (of actions and their objects), namely, in the moral sphere, but also in regard to nature

itself, that Plato rightly discerns clear proofs of an origin from ideas. A plant, an animal, the

orderly arrangement of the cosmos–presumably therefore the entire natural world–clearly

show that they are possible only according to ideas, and that though no single creature in the

conditions of its individual existence coincides with the idea of what is most perfect in its kind–

just as little as does any human being with the idea of humanity, which he yet carries in his soul

as the archetype of his actions–these ideas are none the less completely determined in the

Supreme Understanding, each as an individual and each as unchangeable, and are the original

causes of things. But only the totality of things, in their interconnection as constituting the

universe, is completely adequate to the idea.^17

Presumably, Kant would maintain that this idea is regulative rather than constitutive, i.e., a sub-
jective idea by which we bring order to our experiences, rather than an objective piece of knowledge
of reality in itself. But he adds immediately following the passage just quoted,

If we set aside the exaggerations in Plato’s method of expression, the philosopher’s spiritual

flight from the ectypal mode of reflecting upon the physical world-order to the architectonic

ordering of it according to ends, that is, according to ideas, is an enterprise which calls for

respect and imitation.^18

Taking this with other statements Kant makes about interpreting Plato, it appears that Kant is
hinting at the possibility of an alternate reading of Plato that would bring their positions closer
together, even as he insists on the epistemological distinction between them. As he writes of Plato’s
use of the term“recollection”:

I shall not engage here in any literary enquiry into the meaning which this illustrious

philosopher attached to the expression. I need only remark that it is by no means unusual, upon

comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed in regard to his subject, whether in

ordinary conversation or in writing, to find that we understand him better than he has

understood himself. As he has sometimes spoken, or even thought, in opposition to his own

intention.^19

Shortly thereafter, while noting that Plato spoke of ideas in the fields of“speculative knowledge”
and mathematics, Kant adds in a note,

The Socratic Method in Plato and Kant 65