Aristotle vs. Kant on Epistemology and Ethics

Lecture 3 is on Aristotle versus Kant on Epistemology and Ethics. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were, to my mind, the three most original and important philosophers who ever lived. There are no new Socrateses, no new Platos, and no new Aristotles in our world today. In fact, there is not a single living philosopher who I think will be called one of the great ones, let's say one of the hundred greatest philosophers who ever lived a hundred years from now, and certainly not a thousand years from now. I rate Augustine and Aquinas as even greater than Plato and Aristotle, but that is not because they were more original, but because they were more complete, mainly because they were theologians as well as philosophers. Their faith enriched their reason. I see Augustine as a Plato who met Christ, and Aquinas as an Aristotle who met Christ. Plato was Socrates' student, and Aristotle was Plato's student. There seems to be something that brings great minds together in time and place. Perhaps it's a kind of inherent spiritual gravity, or perhaps it's divine providence, or most likely both. I will begin with a paradox about Aristotle, an apparent contradiction between two points, two pieces of data. Point number one is that Aristotle had something reasonable to say about nearly everything sayable. The medievals called him simply the philosopher. He is the West's version of Confucius, the philosopher of common sense. On almost every issue, most other philosophers say things that contradict common sense, usually in opposite ways, while Aristotle almost always stands firmly in the middle, in the golden mean between two opposite extremes. It's almost a fault. He is moderate to excess, fanatically anti-fanatical, unreasonably reasonable. He made some significant mistakes, but they were mainly in what today we call the physical and biological sciences rather than in philosophy. Point number two of our paradox is that the common sense of this philosopher is very uncommon. When I teach the history of philosophy to freshmen in college, I always find that they score worse on my tests and quizzes about Aristotle than on those from any other philosopher. I'm amazed that they understand complex and muddled and questionable philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger and Derrida better than they understand Aristotle. I also find that many great modern philosophers either neglect Aristotle or trash him or misunderstand him more than they do any other philosopher. Many of those who do know him, like Bacon and Hobbes, are positively allergic to him and hate him with a passion. I was puzzled over this apparent contradiction, the contradiction between Aristotle's rationality and common sense on the one hand and his unpopularity to the modern mind on the other hand, until I realized that maybe that's not a contradiction at all. Maybe it's precisely his common sense that appears so unthinkable to the typically modern mind, both in its simple, uneducated form in college freshmen and in its sophisticated, educated form in modern philosophers. Our modern students have the greatest difficulty in understanding or believing common sense because our modern philosophies have percolated down to them through our modern culture. This uncommon common sense is found both in Aristotle's theoretical and practical philosophies, both in his worldview and in his life view, both in his metaphysics and cosmology and epistemology on the one hand and in his ethics and politics on the other hand. I want to look at his worldview first and then his life view. First his metaphysics and then his ethics, since metaphysics is the foundation for ethics, for metaphysics is about what is and ethics is about what ought to be. The primary metaphysical concept in Aristotle that moderns find so hard to understand or accept is the concept of form, which means not external visible shape, but internal essence or essential nature, and more specifically the idea that one of the dimensions of every form or nature is its natural end or purpose, which philosophers call its teleology after the Greek word telos, the word for end or purpose. This is the concept of a cosmic order, a cosmic design that we find in the thought of every great culture and every great language in past history. It's called the rita in Hindu philosophy, the dao in Chinese philosophy, the logos in Greek philosophy. So why is our modern western culture the first and only culture in history to ignore or deny this great idea? There are probably a number of reasons, but one is surely that our one spectacularly successful achievement is modern science and its child technology, and the idea of an objectively real purpose, a natural end in everything, is a concept science has dropped because it is inexact and unmeasurable. Scientific definition is by measurement and quantity, not by quality or essence or nature, and that's what Aristotle called the form. This idea of design is also not empirically verifiable. What size and shape and color is it, that's empirically verifiable. But design is a philosophical idea, not a scientific idea. It cannot be dealt with by the scientific method, which resides only on exact quantitative measurement and empirical observation. Of course, the assumption that modern science is the only reliable knowledge is not a scientific assumption. It's not science, it's scientism. There is no way to prove by the scientific method that all proof must be by the scientific method. So that scientism is really self-contradictory. It's self-eliminating. It's like sola scriptura, the protestant principle that scripture alone has religious authority, which is also self-contradictory because that's not in scripture. You can't prove by scripture alone that all proof must be by scripture alone. And the same is true about science. You can't prove by science alone that all proof must be by science alone. Turning to Aristotle's practical or ethical or moral philosophy, I think that the primary Aristotelian principle here is that modern philosophers do not understand or accept what's traditionally called the natural moral law. The law that moral precepts are objective and absolute and unchangeable, that morality is not about values but about laws and not man-made laws. It's called the natural law to distinguish it from the laws that come from God alone by divine revelation and from the laws that come from man alone by human creation. The natural law comes from the very nature of things, especially the nature of man. It's called the natural law for two reasons, because it's based on human nature and its natural end, and because everyone knows it by nature, not just by cultural conditioning and education, but by a kind of natural innate universal conscience. It's innate in mankind and universal in all men, like language itself, as distinct from a particular language. We're all born with the capacity to speak, but we're not born knowing how to speak any particular man-made language. That capacity is not man-made. It's made for man but not made by man. It's innate. This most basic and commonsensical ethical idea that Aristotle teaches more clearly and consistently and commonsensically than any other pre-Christian philosopher is the idea that is today most uncommon, most denied or ignored or misunderstood by our educators, both formal and informal. It is the most controversial moral principle in our culture, but it was the least controversial and most obvious and common foundation and starting point for nearly all pre-modern cultures and philosophies. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was only a few sophists and skeptics that denied it. It's the foundation of an ethics that is neither just a set of abstract rules on the one hand, nor a set of so-called values that are really only subjective feelings or desires or preferences on the other hand, but a real law. The word values is a modern word. It has a comfortable, subjective, squishy sort of sound, like the Pillsbury Doughboy. On the other hand, law sounds hard and sharp and clear and non-negotiable and uncomfortable, especially to lawbreakers, and most especially to lawbreakers who deny that they are lawbreakers. There is no such thing as a subjective law, but there can be such a thing as subjective values. I think that central idea is the main reason why typically modern philosophers and their students dislike Aristotle. For instance, like all cultures before 1930, Aristotle judged contraception to be unnatural and therefore immoral. We've done a general overview of Aristotle's worldview and life view, or theoretical and practical philosophy. Now let's turn to some of the specific, more distinctive details. Let's begin with his logic. Aristotle wrote the world's first logic textbook. It was the first theoretical analysis of the structure of deductive and inductive reasoning, which had first been practiced by Socrates, who wrote nothing, and then exemplified in print in Plato's Socratic dialogues. Aristotle discovered the common patterns of valid and invalid argument in these dialogues. And here is a big picture summary of Aristotle's logic. There are three logical questions that we need to ask of any idea in order to evaluate it logically, because there are three acts of the human mind that produce three different kinds of ideas. The three acts of the mind are first conception, or simple apprehension, or understanding the meaning of a term. Then second, judgment, judging the truth or falsity of a proposition, which combines two terms, a subject term and a predicate term. And then third, evaluating the validity of an argument, which is a claim to prove the truth of one proposition, a conclusion, by the argument from premises other propositions. Aristotle discovered and formulated the rules for doing that for the first time. So the three questions are, first, what your terms mean, what are you talking about? Second, whether the propositions are true that you use as your premises or reasons. And third, why they prove your conclusion, whether it logically follows from your premises or your assumptions. Aristotle first formulated the criteria, the rules for answering those three questions. The questions of what and whether and why. Are your terms clear? Are your premises true? And is your reasoning valid? Aristotelian logic, which until the 20th century was the only logic, has almost disappeared today in the face of symbolic logic or mathematical logic, which is a quantitative logic. Partly because it makes the philosophical assumption that there is quality as well as quantity, that there is meaning in terms, especially universal terms, which according to nominalism can only be invented names or nomina, not realities. Nominalism asserts that all universal terms like man or red or mortal or justice or triangle or goodness or truth or beauty are only names or nomina, that what Aristotle inherited from Plato and brought down from a heaven of Platonic ideas to the earth of concrete things, what he called universal forms, are only man-made words, not objective realities. We make them, they do not make us. In other words, what Socrates sought in all his dialogues, which was always the real nature of things, especially goodness, and what Plato taught was the absolute reality, goodness itself. And what Aristotle said were the essential forms of concrete things. All this is a myth. For nominalism, there are no such universals or forms. And if there were, we could not know them. And if we could, we could not rightly use language to communicate them. Those are the three theses of Gorgias the Sophist, denying the three meanings of the Greek word logos. Nominalism and its current child deconstructionism invades against logocentrism. It is logophobic. And if Christ is the logos, it is Christophobic. Aristotle's theory of knowing or epistemology follows from his metaphysics because it also centers on this notion of forms or universals, which we come to know by abstracting them from particular instances of them. For instance, we abstract a common human nature from our experience of many diverse individual human beings. Or we abstract the essence of justice from examples of just people, just habits, just actions, just laws, and just societies. This is induction or inductive abstraction, moving from particulars to universals. Once we have the universal, we can deduce particular instances from it. For instance, if all justice is profitable by its essential nature for both individual souls and states, as Plato tried to prove in the Republic, then it must be profitable for me too, and for America too. This act of detecting the universal in the particular, the form in the matter, is a kind of mental x-ray of the appearances to find the central skeletal structure that holds all of the visible flesh together. Aristotle's epistemology joins the body with the mind, the senses with the reason, the upstairs, so to speak, with the downstairs, or the top of the mountain, where you see its oneness with the many things spread out to make its many different parts and sides. Aristotle says that human knowing works in four steps, beginning at the bottom with sense observation of many different concrete particulars. We learn by experience. Aristotle is a soft empiricist. He says that all our knowledge begins with sense experience, but it is not confined to it, as is claimed by the hard empiricists like David Hume. The second step is climbing the mountain to its single top by abstracting the common form or essential nature from its many different instances. For instance, after experiencing many human beings, we know something about human nature, which they all have in common. The third step is distinguishing the essential and necessary from the accidental among those common features that we have abstracted from experience. For instance, a rational mind and an animal body are essential to humanity, but a particular race or a particular language or gender or ideology is not. Finally, the fourth step is on the basis of that understanding of the universal essence and reasoning from it to particular applications of it, we go back down the mountain to deduce particular conclusions from our universal premises. The second step, abstractive induction, is the way up to the essential form, and the fourth step, deductive reasoning, is the way down from it. Seeing the concrete instances of it is the first step, and seeing the abstract universal form of it is the third step. For example, first we observe many men die. Then we formulate the universal proposition all men die by inductive reasoning. Then we understand that this is essential, not accidental, and thus finally we can deduce that we too must die. Thus Aristotle gives us a complete circle, top and bottom, combining senses and mind, body and soul, and this is not done either by an epistemology of mere empiricism, which trusts only sensation, or by an epistemology of mere rationalism, which trusts only pure reason, because neither of those two epistemologies has the bridge between them that is the abstraction of the universal form from the particular material instances of it. This pattern of both and instead of either or is found in all of Aristotle's thinking. That's why he's so commonsensical. For instance, he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist about human nature. We are not vicious, selfish animals, which the state needs to tame by fear and force, as Machiavelli and Hobbes say, nor are we innately saintly innocents who are victimized and corrupted by oppressive systems and institutions, as both Rousseau and Marx say. But we are all full of impulses to both vice and virtue, to both selfishness and unselfishness, both folly and wisdom, both injustice and justice. And these impulses need to be trained and directed by reason to create virtues or good habits and to root out vices or bad habits. Aristotle gives us a wealth of practical detail about the various virtues and vices. Another Aristotelian both and is his theory of hylomorphism, which means both matter and form. That is the heart of his metaphysics. Forms for Aristotle are not separate beings, as in Plato, nor are they only subjective concepts and names, as in nominalism, but they are the forms of material things. Forms like humanness and redness and justice are objectively real. Aristotle gave Plato's forms a new earthly address. The same tenant moved to another house, a more earthly house. If all humans died, human nature would still exist for Plato, but not for Aristotle. If all triangular things in the universe disappeared, the laws of trigonometry would still be true for Plato, but not for Aristotle, because if no triangular things existed, there would be nothing for the rules about triangles to be true of. Now, that's an important difference between Plato and Aristotle, but their agreement is much more important than their difference. Nominalism, which denies the objective reality of universal forms entirely, departs from both Plato and Aristotle far more than they depart from each other. The relation between Plato and Aristotle is like the relation between Protestantism and Catholicism. They disagree about some very important things, such as the authority of the church and Christ's real presence in the Eucharist, but they agree about even more important things, about the reality of God and the divinity of Christ. The difference between them is relatively small compared to the difference between either of them in atheism. Similarly, the difference between Plato and Aristotle is small compared with the difference between either of them and the typically modern mind. Aristotle is Plato-tweaked. For Aristotle, matter and form are not beings, but principles of a being, aspects of a being. Aristotle's name for concrete individual beings or entities is substances, as that which stands under substans, accidents or qualities, to unify them. The same person is happy one moment and sad the next. The same leaf is green in September and yellow in October. This distinction between the substance or essence and the accidents or the changeable properties or characteristics is one of the most important and essential philosophical distinctions in common sense sanity, which is increasingly uncommon today. I think it is significant that the only two essential Catholic dogmas that depend on secular philosophical categories and are framed by them, in fact the two most essential ones of all, concerning the very center of the Catholic religion, Christ himself, are the two that depend on this Aristotelian category of substance. First, that Christ is consubstantial with God the Father, homoousion in Greek, the same in being, essence, essential nature or substance. And second, that in the Eucharist it is the very substance that changes from bread and wine to Christ's body and blood, transubstantiation. Another example of one of the most practical and useful theoretical ideas in the history of human thought is Aristotle's theory of the four causes, which is at the heart of his cosmology or philosophy of nature. It's a classification of the four and only four possible questions, or rather kinds of questions, that anyone can ever ask about anything, and therefore a classification of the four and only four possible answers or kinds of answers or explanations. The Greek word translated causes here, aetia, means something much broader than our current use of that word. In Aristotle's metaphysics, a cause is any real factor that makes a thing or event to be what it is. Thus, in Aristotle's epistemology, it is a rational explanation of something or an event. Two of the four causes are intrinsic, or within the thing, to be explained. They are its matter and its form, or its material cause and its formal cause. And the other two are extrinsic or outside it. They are its origin and its natural end, or good or fulfillment. Aristotle called these two causes, respectively, the efficient cause and the final cause. This classification is extremely useful in writing essays. If you can give all four causes of your subject, you have a complete explanation of it. The formal cause is simply the essential form, what makes a rose to be a rose rather than a tulip, or a triangle rather than a square, or a man rather than a god. The material cause is what it is made from or made out of. What potentiality is it the actualization of? For instance, you can make a desk out of wood, or out of metal, or out of plastic, and you can make the plastic into a desk, or a statue, or a pipe. If the formal cause is what it is made into, and the material cause is what it is made out of, the efficient cause is what it is made by. The immediate efficient cause of you is your parents and their sexual intercourse. The efficient cause of sunlight is the sun. The efficient cause of a book is its author. The efficient cause is what we almost always mean by cause nowadays. The final cause is what it is made for, its natural end or goal, that which by its nature it moves towards. Puppies become dogs and kittens become cats. Aristotle called that the final cause, not because it is always final in time, but because it is final in purpose. Aristotle believed that purposes, or goals, or ends are not merely subjective and psychological goals and purposes in our minds, but also that there are natural ends in everything's movement and behavior. Fire by nature heats and rises, and heavy objects by nature fall, and seeds by nature grow into plants. The metaphysics of final ends, or teleology, grounds Aristotle's ethics. Man's supreme good, or end, or perfection is the most important ethical question. Man fits into this pattern of ends by also having a natural end or perfection that fulfills his nature, both physically and spiritually. Aristotle called this eudaimonia, which means beatitude, or blessedness. It means perfection, physical and spiritual, objectively and subjectively. Eudaimonia is usually mistranslated happiness, which to the typically shallow modern mind is purely subjective and purely emotional. No one today ever says to another person, you think you're happy, but you're really not. But that's what Aristotle would say to a tyrant who enjoyed torturing his victims. And no one ever says, you think you're not happy, but you really are. But that's what Aristotle or any other wise pagan would say to Job, who is suffering, but by his suffering, learning wisdom and the virtue of humility, which makes him more perfectly and more completely human and fulfills his real needs, even though not his conscious wants. So Aristotle would not have regarded the question, why do the righteous suffer, as an unanswerable mystery or as a threat to faith in a just and wise order in the universe, even though he did not believe in the personal God behind it, who providentially designed and supervised that order for us. In his ethics, Aristotle inherited the notion of the four cardinal virtues from Plato, prudence or practical wisdom for the reason and fortitude or courage for the will, which Plato called the spirited part, and moderation or self-control for the appetites and justice for the right order of all three, the right relations among the three powers of the soul internally, and also among different individuals in society externally, and among the natural classes in the state, which perform the natural functions in the state, the wise lawmakers and the courageous law enforcers and the self controlled and moderate law obeyers, although Aristotle did not confine and distinguish these classes as rigidly as Plato did in the Republic. And Aristotle added also about a dozen more virtues to Plato's four. This was not a disagreement, but an addition onto Plato's foundation. He did, however, disagree with Plato's idea that to know the true good is necessarily to choose it. Because Plato believed that, he believed that learning moral wisdom, having true education, is sufficient to produce all the other virtues. Aristotle said more commonsensically that knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for moral virtue. Intellectual virtues come from education alone, but moral virtues come by practice, by repetition, which constructs good moral habits and thus good moral character. We must not only know the good with the mind, but also choose it with the will and implement it in training and ordering our passions and our actions. Here too, on the practical level, just as on the theoretical level with the forms, Aristotle brought Plato down to earth a bit. It was a modification, not a rejection. It was an addition, not a subtraction. Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas later used and modified Aristotle by addition, not subtraction, in many ways, most obviously by adding God and the theological virtues as our final end. Many modern philosophers disagree with Aristotle by simply subtracting from him and moving more in the direction of skepticism and the sophists in various degrees. That's negative. But the modern philosopher who most seriously challenged Aristotle with a new positive philosophy, both in epistemology and ethics, is Kant. Aristotle and Kant are probably the two most serious options in ethics and also in epistemology because both try to avoid both skepticism and dogmatism and both try to avoid both empiricism and rationalism. Let's look at the central disagreement between these two, first in epistemology and then in ethics. But to understand the disagreements between Aristotle and Kant, we should first begin with their more basic agreements. In epistemology, Kant, like Aristotle, repudiated both simple rationalism and simple empiricism. He called rationalism dogmatic or uncritical and he called empiricism skeptical and he saw Hume's profound and pervasive skepticism as the logical result of a mere empiricism and terribly destructive. So he tried to formulate a new epistemology to answer that, but he did not return to Aristotle, mainly because he was a nominalist and did not believe in that central notion of essential forms or universals and our ability to know them. Kant called his epistemology the Copernican revolution in philosophy. Copernicus gave us a new absolute, not the earth but the sun, and he reversed the relationship between the two. The earth's position is relative to the sun, not the sun's position relative to the earth. Kant did the same reversal for the relationship between the subject and the object, man and truth, knower and known. Instead of receiving and discovering the truth, Kant said that we create it, we make it, we form it, we structure it. So truth is the conformity of things to thought, not thought to things, for Kant. What we think is science or discovery is really art or creation. Of course, we don't create the matter of the world, but we do create all its form, according to Kant. And we do this in three ways. First, in the world of the senses, we do not discover the two forms of all sense perception, the two sensory universals, namely space and time. We do not abstract these forms from matter. Rather, we impose these two forms onto matter, like imposing cookie cutters onto cookie batter. Thus, we create physical order. Of course, this is unconscious rather than conscious. Second, we do the same thing in our logical thinking, where we impose our logical categories or universal forms, such as cause and effect, substance and accident, necessity and contingency, onto everything that we can think. These categories or forms of all logical thinking are not in nature, but only in our thinking about nature. Remember, Kant is a nominalist. He denies that we can know real universal forms. Third, we do the same projecting and creating and active unconscious structuring in our metaphysical thinking with what Kant calls our three ideas of pure reason, namely the concepts of a single world or universe to know, the concept of a single self to know it, and the concept of a single God to unify both the world and the self. Kant insists that we do not know that these things are objectively real, because we simply cannot know things in themselves or objective reality. All we can know are appearances, or how reality must appear to us when it is filtered through these three sets of categories, like light filtered through stained glass. All the color comes from the glass, and the glass is in us, like contact lenses that we can't take off. The Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz isn't really green at all. Dorothy is wearing green contact lenses. Thus, in Kant's epistemology, truth is subjective in the sense that its order, its structure, is man-made. It is not subjective in the sense that it is arbitrary or individual or freely chosen. There is no alternative. It is all necessary and universal, common to all persons. But there are no objective universals. There are only subjective universals. We cannot think in any other way. It's as if we live in a shared dream, and we can never know what is outside of that dream. We, not God, created the world. Not that we created its matter, but that we created its form. So this is nominalism with a vengeance. It is also far more skeptical than even the skepticism of the sophist or Hume. Kant tried to answer Hume and his hard empiricism, which limited our knowledge to sensation, which doesn't give us universality or necessity or certainty, but at least Hume granted us some merely probable knowledge of objective reality through our senses. Whereas for Kant, all the information on all the messages in all the bottles that we read are what we have written ourselves. Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy is thus a radically new epistemology, in a sense even farther from Aristotle's common sense than either rationalism or skepticism. But it seems to be not only false but self-contradictory because it asserts that this is the way it really is, that we really cannot know the way it really is, that it is an objective truth that we cannot know objective truth, that all messages in the bottle are only what we ourselves have written rather than truth coming to us from something or somebody else. But that is also only a message in the bottle, a message that we ourselves have written, and it is only a truth that comes from us rather than to us. Put more simply, the self-contradiction in Kant's Copernican revolution is this. If we can't know anything about things in themselves or objective reality, how can we know that it even exists? Kant tries to limit thought to the subjective, but in order to draw a limit or border to anything, we have to think both sides of the border. So in order to limit the thinkable, we have to think the unthinkable. I think all forms of skepticism are self-contradictory. Is it true that there is no truth? Is it certain that there is no certainty? Is it an objective truth that truth is not objective? Is it an absolute truth that there are no absolutes? Is it universally true that there are no universals? Is it infallible that there is no infallibility? Is it merely probable that there is only probability? Is it reliable knowledge that all our knowledge is unreliable? Is it proved by the scientific method that there is no truth except the scientific method, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum? I think if you don't break the grips of the python of skepticism right from the beginning, you never will. The snake will just squeeze you tighter and tighter into itself every time you move. Now let's turn to Kant's ethics and its fundamental difference from Aristotle's traditional and commonsensical ethics. Aristotle's ethics is a virtue ethics. Moral good and evil consist primarily in habits that are good, moral virtues, and evil, moral vices. The collection of habits constitutes one's moral character. For Aristotle, the most important moral good is to be a good person, not just to obey the moral laws. Kant's epistemology, the epistemology of the Copernican Revolution in philosophy, prevents him from claiming to know things in themselves or objective reality. And his nominalism prevents him from believing that universals like human nature even exist in objective reality. And so Kant's ethics is an ethics of rules or laws rather than virtues and character. Kant's ethics is traditional insofar as it asserts a moral absolute, essentially the golden rule, as our absolute duty and our universal obligation. That is his first formulation of the single most basic principle of ethics, what he calls the categorical imperative. He formulates it this way, act only according to that maxim or practical principle whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law for all to obey. In other words, do unto others what you will them to do unto you. His second formulation of that same principle is more distinctively modern because it focuses on the intrinsic worth and dignity of each individual person. It is that every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will. Therefore, act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means. Now, these are indeed excellent moral principles. The first exalts each individual to equality with the rest of the human race, and the second exalts the human race that is persons above everything else in the temporal universe. They are necessary but not sufficient for a complete morality, for they do not define every moral good. For instance, celibacy or military service may be a moral good for some, but not for all. But they do define every moral evil. Every morally evil act violates one or both of these two rules. They're not complete because they regulate only how to treat each other, not our individual character or the question of the summum bonum or greatest good in the sense of the final end or purpose or goal of human life. Kant is skeptical about that. They're like sailing orders that tell a fleet of ships how to cooperate, but not how to stay healthy in ship shape individually, and above all, they don't tell the ships what is the mission of fleet, why it's sailing at all. But then Kant goes on to a third formulation of what he calls the categorical imperative that exalts man even, it seems, above God. He says, in effect, that it is we, not God, who will this rule into being. In his Ethics, just as in his Epistemology, Kant substitutes creation for discovery. His words are these, always so act that the will could regard itself at the same time as making universal moral law through its own maxim. The third formulation of the principle is the idea of the will of every rational being as a will that legislates universal law. Kant writes that this autonomy of the will is the property that the will has of being a law unto itself. But this principle really lessens morality rather than exalting it, for if the moral good is not discovered and received, but created and willed into being, then there is no ground for reverence or gratitude or piety towards this good, and there is no room for surrender to God's will, which is the essence of holiness or sanctity. Kant is a humanist. He is not an atheist, but the relation between man and God for Kant is not worship or adoration or obedience to God's will. Kant calls that heteronomy or conformity to the other, and he rejects it, insisting instead on the autonomy of the human will. At the last judgment, Kant expects to see man, not God, on the throne. What is common to Kant's new epistemology and Kant's new ethic is that both substitute activity for receptivity in the two powers of the human soul, the mind in epistemology and the will in ethics. Kant says that what we think is discovery is really creation, both of the order in the universe and of the order in morality. We, not God, created both the natural order in the world and the moral order in human life. He has man replacing God in both Genesis 1 and Exodus 20. Aristotle was a pagan, and Kant was a kind of maverick modernist Christian. He viewed Jesus as the ideal ethical teacher, though not the divine savior from sin. Yet Aristotle justifies wonder and worship, awe and adoration, gratitude and obedience, whereas Kant glorifies human freedom and creativity. Kant grew up as a pietist. That was the name for a Protestant sect, something like the Amish, the Mennonites, or the Puritans. But piety in the theological sense, piety toward God, has a harder time finding any home in Kant's thought than in the thought of pagan Aristotle. St. Thomas built a great structure of Christian theology on Aristotelian human foundations. I do not think he would have found it possible to build on Kantian foundations. Yet Kant does supply Christians with a profoundly central idea in ethics that is not in Aristotle or in any pagan, the principle that every single human person, every rational and moral being, is an end in himself and not a means to any other end, and therefore demands respect rather than merely being used as an instrument. All people are ends, not means, therefore to be loved rather than used. St. Pope John Paul II made that a central principle of his anthropology and his ethics. It's significant that Aristotle, like all pagans, took for granted that slavery is natural, saying that some men were born to be slaves. Slavery was definitively abolished only in modern times because the notion of human freedom, not just political freedom but moral freedom, was deepened by humanists like Kant as well as by Christians like the popes who condemned slavery long before Lincoln and Wilberforce and excommunicated the practitioners of the slave trade in the new world. Christianity agreed with secular humanism here for a reason secular humanists did not have, that every man is a child of God and created in God's own image, and therefore it is in the very nature of man to be free, to have free will. Kant overdoes human freedom and virtually divinizes it, but Aristotle ignores it, and neither of these two errors excuses the other one.