192 Kant: A Biographythe understanding were thus for Kant of the utmost importance for evalu¬
ating the reality of things.
He thought that by means of the pure principles we could think a pri¬
mordial being that would allow us to evaluate all derivative beings. It would
be a model, form, or paradigm of which all other things were just imper¬
fect copies.I7 This paradigm was "noumenal perfection," which came in two
senses, namely, "perfection either in the theoretical sense or in the practi¬
cal sense. In the former sense it is the Supreme Being, GOD; in the latter
sense it is MORAL PERFECTION. Moral philosophy, therefore, insofar
as it furnishes the first principles of judgment, is cognised by the pure under¬
standing and belongs only to pure philosophy."^18 Accordingly, moral prin¬
ciples were intellectual. This meant that they concerned things in them¬
selves or noumena and that they belonged among the formal principles of
the mundus intelligibilis. Moral concepts could therefore not be reduced to
sensibility. It would be impossible for us to obtain these concepts by ana¬
lyzing sensations. Wolff's mistaken acceptance of the continuity thesis had
led him away from realizing this origin of moral concepts in the pure in¬
tellect. He thus undermined the "noblest enterprise of antiquity." Kant,
by contrast, hoped to show that moral philosophy insofar as it "is cognised
by the pure understanding and belongs only to pure philosophy" is objec¬
tive. It does not in any way depend upon the subjective conditions of sen¬
sibility, and it is firmly grounded in certain knowledge claims that are "al¬
together exempt from the universal condition of externally, namely spatially,
sensible things." It was for this reason that he thought we must pursue "a pure
metaphysics without any admixture of the sensible." These ideas were the
origins of Kant's idealism, and they were essentially Platonic.^19
The purely rational or intellectual concepts were "connate" to the pure
intellect. They were "abstracted by attention to its actions at the occasion
of experience from laws inborn in the mind." They "never enter into
sensual representations as parts of it." Therefore, they could not possibly
be abstracted from these sensual representations, but had to come from
the intellect alone. Kant mentioned as examples of such concepts not just
"possibility, existence, necessity, substance, cause ... with their opposites
and correlates," but also "moral concepts" in general, and the liperfectio
noumenon" in particular.
The "perfectio noumenon" in its theoretical sense "is the Supreme Being,
God" and in its moral sense, "moral perfection." While he concentrated in
the Inaugural Dissertation on the theoretical sense of the perfectio noumenon,
he did point out that "moral philosophy, so far as it supplies first principles