present section, reflection on his discussions of Plato’s philosophy suggest that he comes much
closer to Plato, especially in the field of practical philosophy, than one might initially expect. He
agrees with Plato that the person is not exhaustively contained within empirical reality, and this
remains a crucial step in Kant’s historical context (and our own) toward resisting the reductionist
tendencies in modern thinkers such as Hume (who Kant famously regarded as an important foil and
influence).
Kant acknowledges his debt to Plato in theCritique of Pure Reasonwhen he acknowledges
appropriating Plato’s language of“ideas”to label his own conception of the“transcendental ideas.”
In the course of this discussion, Kant highlights what he takes to be the important difference
between their respective positions as he offers his own account of the meaning of recollection in
Plato:
Plato made use of the expression“idea”in such a way as quite evidently to have meant by it
something which not only can never be borrowed from the senses but far surpasses even the
concepts of the understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), inasmuch as in
experience nothing is ever to be met with that is coincident with it. For Plato ideas are
archetypes of the things themselves, and not, in the manner of the categories, merely keys
to possible experiences. In his view they have issued from highest reason, and from that source
have come to be shared in by human reason, which, however, is now no longer in its original
state, but is constrained laboriously to recall, by a process of reminiscence (which is named
philosophy), the old ideas, now very much obscured.^8As the passage suggests, Kant rejects the claim that ideas correspond to a reality beyond human
reason, or, more specifically, he rejects the claim that we can know that they correspond to a reality
beyond human reason. For example, in Kant’s account, we cannot know whether God exists, but we
do know that we have an idea of God. Thus, we do not arrive at an idea of God by“remembering”a
prior knowledge of God. Rather, our reason“produces”the idea of God when it applies its natural
desire for the unconditionedto“the highest condition of the possibility of all that can be thought (the
being of all beings).”^9 This leaves open the possibility that our ideas might or might not correspond
to reality as it is in itself, a question on which Kant insists we must remain agnostic (at least from a
theoretical perspective).
Despite this distinction between remembering and producing the ideas, Kant and Plato still
agree that we have ideas that transcend any and all empirical examples, thus suggesting that they
are not derivative of experience. Kant also seems to agree with Plato that reason has an“erotic”
quality insofar as it needs or desires ideas that transcend empirical reality.^10 As Kant notes with
approval:
Plato very well realized that our faculty of knowledge feels a much higher need than merely to
spell out appearances according to a synthetic unity, in order to be able to read them as
experience. He knew that our reason naturally exalts itself to modes of knowledge which so far
transcend the bounds of experience that no given empirical object can ever coincide with them,
but which must none the less be recognized as having their own reality, and which are by no
means mere fictions of the brain.^11Thus, for Kant, as for Plato,reason naturally strives toward transcendent knowledge. The difference
between them is on the question of whether it can successfully arrive at this knowledge. Kant
answers in the negative, but his own words suggest that he has difficulty resting with this answer.
For, if the ideas“have[e] their own reality”and are not“mere fictions of the brain,”but do not
correspond to reality as it is in itself, then what is their status? It is not clear that the difference
between Plato and Kant is as stark as so far presented.
The Socratic Method in Plato and Kant 63