"All-Crushing" Critic of Metaphysics 265global skepticism concerning "objective truth." Universal skepticism for
Kant is — at best — a hasty conclusion founded upon metaphysical skepti¬
cism. Therefore, it needs no response. All he had to do was to justify a pri¬
ori synthetic judgments in a different way, not by reason, but by some
other cognitive faculty.
Furthermore, Kant did not see Hume as denying the truth of necessary
synthetic judgments, but only as denying a certain way of justifying them.
If Hume had not admitted the presence of any kind of necessity in the
causal relation, Kant would have begged Hume's question, and those who
claim that Kant misunderstood Hume's intentions and that he thus mis¬
construed his task would be correct. Again, Kant is correct. Hume admit¬
ted that our complex idea of causality does indeed contain the idea of
necessity. In fact, the account given in the Prolegomena so closely follows
Hume's analysis of causality in the Treatise, Book I, Part III, section III,
"Why a Cause Is Always Necessary," one might be tempted to assume that
Kant had access to a "defective copy" of Hume's Treatise (and he might
well have had such access, as Hamann owned the entire book and some¬
times lent it to Green).^64 It is thus clear that Kant thought he needed to
give only a limited answer to Hume.
Kant's ultimate concerns were moral, and perhaps even religious. Ac¬
cepting the validity of the empiricist approach to science and to the growth
of knowledge, Kant wanted to save morality from becoming too naturalistic
and too relativistic. He wanted to show that even in the absence of knowl¬
edge of absolute reality, morality has a claim on us that is itself absolute
and incontrovertible. It is this moral claim on us that elevates us above the
beasts. It shows us to be rational in the way that Plato had insisted that we
are rational. The Critique and the Prolegomena showed not only why Plato's
own approach was wrong, but also why the Humean approach, if properly
understood, was not as inimical to a more rationalistic outlook as many had
supposed until then. A healthy dose of skepticism injected into idealism
was just what was needed to show that while we have a higher purpose, we
cannot know what Plato thought we could know. In a footnote reminiscent
of his sarcasm in the Dreams, Kant finds that
High towers and metaphysically great men resembling them, round both of which
there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos of ex¬
perience; and the word transcendental... does not signify something passing beyond
all experience but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply
to make knowledge of experience possible.^65