The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

pattern for us to recognise. We have to trust to our own resources, that is, to our creative powers of understanding: we have to devise a new pattern for the solution of that problem, which implies a new course of action. And that, adapting Kant’s terminology, we may call a synthetic a priori judgement.

What has just been said with regard to personal responsibility has its direct applications in practical ethics. If the conduct of our lives is regulated entirely by the traditional answers to traditional problems, we are unconsciously reasoning like this: ‘If I want to live on good terms with the people I am surrounded by, and they think in such and such a way, I have got to behave accordingly, that is, to do what the rest of them do, without asking any questions.’ This is what Kant would have called a hypothetical moral imperative, because it bases the morality of an action on its effectiveness in achieving some further end. And we can see for ourselves even today some of the tragic consequences of accepting uncritically certain hypothetical imperatives—from the gas chambers to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth is that there is nothing genuinely moral about this passive attitude of merely choosing to avoid the risks of standing out against the majority of those around us, or of bringing ourselves into conflict with society. But suppose that we were to see a fresh problem with fresh eyes, to create a new pattern for the solution of some new problem whose implications had not yet been properly thought out? That would be a very different matter; and would have the quality ofasynthetic a priori judgement. Discoveries of such a character as this may compel us to stand out against the majority of the people in our society when they have not yet the eyes to see what to us seems quite clear; again, we may be obliged to go against some opinion current among those whose interest is not to see how things really stand. If so, we shall not be able to adopt that line of unconscious reasoning that we were speaking about just now; we shall not be able to act according to expediency, as opportunists do and people concerned only to avoid risks, but shall have to act in such a way as to be faithful to this new truth that we have discovered for ourselves. In this way we shall be faithful indeed to ourselves, in so far as we are genuine, authentic persons, and act in a manner that Kant called categorically imperative, which means in accordance with an obligation that