The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Seligkowitz - Ernst Platner's wissenschaftliche Stellung zu Kant in Erkenntnisstheorie u. Moralphilosophie
Platner (1744-1818), Professor of Medicine and Philosophy in Leipsic, has been represented by Buhle and Zeller as a disciple of Leibniz. S. finds that this was indeed his attitude in the first edition (1776 and 1782) of the Philosophical Aphorisms. He defines metaphysics in this edition as "the study of the predicates which belong to real things, and the investigation of the true intellectual world by means of the fundamental conceptions of the possible and necessary." He held the Leibnizian doctrine of innate ideas and distinguished these from the ideas of sense, which he regarded as arising from the relation of the mind to outside things. The second edition (1784), however, already showed the influence of Kant's Kritik. According to this edition the chief problems of philosophy are: (1) What is the innermost essence of the world, or the only possible ground of our ideas of real things? (2) What is the only possible ground of our idea of the connection of cause and effect in so far as the world appears as a series in time? (3) What is the only possible ground of what we recognize as perfection and evil in the world? It was already clear to Platner that the principles of reason, as they manifest themselves to us in our theoretical thinking, cannot lead to knowledge of things in themselves. He confines himself in his investigations to our circle of ideas and the grounds of their connection. The third edition of the Aphorisms has undergone many changes which the author acknowledges are due to a study of Kant's writings. The only true philosophy is that which sets out, like Kant's, from an investigation of fundamental principles. Kant, however, often relapses into dogmatism in the construction of the system. Examples of this are his assertions that sense and understanding are separated from each other, that space and time are not objective as well as subjective. In his theory of knowledge P. begins with a critical investigation of the faculties of knowing, setting out from the realistic standpoint that there are things outside of us which, although unknown, are the causes of our ideas. He regards Kant's division of the knowing faculty into sensibility and understanding as without foundation. The same faculty which receives the impressions also elaborates and arranges them. He differs also from Kant in the distinction between understanding and reason. The former simply recognizes given perceptions as falling under conceptions; to form concepts and to connect them in judgments is the work of reason. His categories are not, any more than Kant's, derived from any principle, but picked up empirically. He holds fast to Leibniz's explanation of extension, which, however, he seeks to identify with Kant's doctrine of space. This latter is nothing more than Leibniz's subjective extension, and does not depend on the nature of things in themselves, but on our faculty of representation. In the case of time he grants that there is a distinction between the doctrines of Kant and Leibniz, for the latter maintained a real succession of changes in the world of things in themselves. While seeking with Kant the conditions of experience in the mind, he connects himself with Locke's empiricism in regarding the ground of the necessity of the forms of the understanding in things in themselves. He claims that we have the same right to employ the categories in a transcendent sphere as Kant has to apply them to objects of a possible experience. He will break down the distinction between knowing and thinking. In so far as the transcendent object is thought, in so far do we employ the categories as forms of an experience which is non-sensuous. He also stands opposed to Kant's doctrine of intelligible freedom, and urges that this system has not the slightest interest for morality. The Kantian proof for the objectivity of the categories seems to him invalid. Kant has not refuted Hume, and the ideas of association are just as deeply founded in the nature of the mind as the categories. In the first edition of his moral philosophy (published in 1782), he regarded happiness as the supreme principle of morality and the highest ground of the determination of the will. The common basis of all pleasant and unpleasant feelings he finds in the instinct to live. In his second edition he was much influenced by Kant's system, where he found developed, as he said, the ideas which had before only dimly suggested themselves to him. The highest moral law, which exists in independence of every empirical condition, he summed up in the formula: "Do that which thou seest should happen because of its agreement with reason." Kant's conception of the highest moral principle appeared to him not definite enough. In the critical philosophy, morality and happiness are separated from each other in order to determine which of the two is the absolute good. Morality, however, is not a good but a perfection. Good and perfection are two heterogeneous things, which are scarcely capable of comparison. Moral happiness, at which the moral instinct aims, is self-satisfaction, personal worth, and dignity, — full participation in the life of an intelligent moral being.