i8o Kant: A Biographyhe had not been able to arrive at a position that he could accept as the truth.
He goes on to say in the same letter that
since we have been separated, I have allowed in many parts room for other views. While
my attention has been directed at recognizing the true end and the limits of human
abilities and inclinations, I believe that insofar as morals are concerned, I have finally
succeeded to a large extent. I now work on a metaphysics of morals. And I imagine that
I can indicate the obvious and fruitful principles as well as the method which viable at¬
tempts must follow in this kind of knowledge, even if they are often useless.^138
So while he believed that he had reached more secure ground in ethics, he
was far from being certain even in this field. His approach was character¬
ized by a great deal of skeptical reserve.
Kant never was a convinced skeptic, but he was in some ways skeptical
about his very enterprise. It may therefore prove useful to make clearer
what kind of skepticism Kant had assimilated. If we define skepticism as
a "thesis or claim concerning some group of statements, namely, that each
of the members is doubtful in some way and to some degree," and if we
take different disciplines to consist of such groups or sets of statements, then
we can differentiate between epistemological, ethical, religious, and meta¬
physical skepticism.^139 Each one of these skepticisms is "local" to some
discipline, and does not necessarily involve the kind of "global" doubt that
is usually attributed to the skeptic. Indeed, some forms of skepticism might
not even cover an entire discipline, but could be restricted to a subset of
claims within a discipline. Different forms of skepticism may also vary in
accordance with the strength of their doubt. Thus an epistemological skep¬
tic may doubt whether we, in fact, know whether certain kinds of claims
are true, or he may doubt whether it is possible in principle to know the truth
of a certain kind of claim. Kant's musings of 1768 show he was a skeptic
about philosophical and especially metaphysical claims. He may even have
come close to being a global skeptic about metaphysics, not being "at¬
tached" to anything. However, his skepticism does not appear to have been
one of great strength, for he was not convinced that metaphysics is im¬
possible in principle, but rather that, as a matter of fact, the true meta¬
physical system had not yet been discovered. His skepticism regarding the
theoretical parts of metaphysics was stronger than that regarding the meta¬
physics of morals. While not doubting the possibility of scientific knowledge
and the validity of moral claims, he was uneasy about the metaphysical ac¬
counts given of these matters. This uneasiness can be described as a form
of metaphysical skepticism, or as a skepticism concerning the method fol¬
lowed in metaphysics.^140