Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 – February 12, 1804) was a German philosopher and scientist (astrophysics, mathematics, geography, anthropology) from Prussia, generally regarded as one of Western society's and modern Europe's most influential thinkers and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment. Kant defined the Enlightenment, in his prize-winning essay What is Enlightenment?, as an age shaped by the motto, "Dare to know". This involved thinking autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. Kant had a decisive impact on the Romantic and Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for 20th century philosophers.

The two interconnected foundations of what Kant called his "critical philosophy", of the "Copernican revolution" he claimed to have wrought in philosophy, were his epistemology (or theory of knowledge) of transcendental idealism and his moral philosophy of the autonomy of reason. These placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds respectively.

With regard to knowledge, Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science could never be accounted for merely by the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions. It was instead the product of the rule-based activity of "synthesis". This consisted of conceptual unification and integration carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on perceptions within space and time, which in turn are also mental structures.

Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are products of the mind in its interaction with what lies outside of mind (the "thing-in-itself"). The latter can never be known except through the forms that the mind imposes upon it.

With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather only in a good will. A good will is one that acts in accordance with universal moral laws that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. These laws obligate her or him to treat other human beings as ends rather than as means to an end.

These Kantian ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless his theses that the mind itself makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge (and that knowledge is therefore subject to limits which cannot be overcome), that morality is rooted in human freedom acting autonomously according to rational moral principles, and that philosophy involves self-critical activity irrevocably reshaped philosophy.

Biography

Immanuel Kant was born, lived and died in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, a city which today is Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave of that name; his father was a German craftsman. His parents baptized him as Emanuel Kant, which he later, after learning Hebrew, changed to Immanuel. He spent much of his youth as a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Contrary to the dour image of him promoted by early biographers, Kant as a young man was quite gregarious and enjoyed attending social events about town. He also regularly invited guests over for dinner, insisting that company and laughter were good for his constitution. It was only after befriending the English merchant Joseph Green, who instilled in Kant a respect for living according to strictly observed maxims of behaviour, that Kant began living a very regulated life: according to some stories neighbours would set their clocks according to the time Green and Kant finished their daily get-togethers.

A biography of Kant by Manfred Kuehn even suggests that Kant was philosophically inspired by Green, who not only introduced him to the philosophy of David Hume, but whose personal habits may have influenced Kant in formulating his idea of the categorical imperative. Another influential view about the introduction of the works of Hume to Kant and other German philosophers, which finds its clearest expression in the works of Frederick C. Beiser, is that it was Johann Georg Hamann who brought Hume's views to Germany.

For the remainder of his life Kant remained unmarried and owned only one piece of art in his household, advocating the absence of passion in favour of logic. He never left Prussia and rarely stepped outside his own home town. He was a respected and competent university professor for most of his life, although he was in his late fifties before he did anything that would bring him historical repute.

He entered the local university in 1740, and studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutsen, a rationalist who was familiar with the developments of British philosophy and science. Knutsen introduced Kant to the new mathematics of Sir Isaac Newton and, in 1746, Kant wrote a paper on measurement, reflecting Leibniz's influence.

In 1755, he became a private lecturer at the University, and while there published "Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals", where he examined the problem of having a logical system of philosophy that connected with the world of natural philosophy, a concern typical of the period. In this paper, he proposed what later become known as the Kant-Laplace theory of planetary formation, wherein the planets formed from rotating protoplanetary discs of gas (see solar nebula).

Kant was also the first recorded scholar to postulate (as is true) that some of the faint nebulae one can see with a small telescope (or in one case, with the naked eye) were external galaxies or, as he called them, island universes. Kant's prescient remarks on island universes.

In 1763, he wrote The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence, which questioned the ontological argument for God put forward by Saint Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. René Descartes put forward a similar argument in the Fifth Meditation. Despite questioning this argument however, Kant in this piece defends a modified form of rational theology, which he subsequently rejected in his Critical work.

In 1766, he was appointed Second Librarian of the Royal Library, a prestigious government position. In 1770, he became a full professor at Königsberg. It was after this time that Hume's works began to have serious impact on his understanding of metaphysics though there is considerable evidence he had read Hume earlier and that it was only the breakdown of an early attempt at constructing a rationalist metaphysics that led him to see Hume's contribution to philosophy as decisive.

Hume was fiercely empirical, scorned all metaphysics, and systematically debunked great quantities of it. His most famous thesis is that nothing in our experience can justify the assumption that there are "causal powers" inherent in things — that, for example, when one billiard ball strikes another, the second must move. Kant found Hume's conclusions unacceptable. "I wilfully admit that it was David Hume that woke me from my dogmatic slumber", he would later write.

For the next 10 years, he worked on the architecture of his own philosophy. In 1781, he released the Critique of Pure Reason, one of the most influential, widely cited, and widely disputed works in Western philosophy. He followed this with Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, then in 1788, the Critique of Practical Reason and in 1790, the Critique of Judgment. The effect was immediate in the German-speaking world, with readership including Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

But the attention was far from universally approving: on the contrary, almost every aspect of his writing was attacked and criticized fiercely, particularly his ideas on categories, the place of free will and determinism, and whether we can have knowledge of external reality. His early critics included Johann Schaumann, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Hermann Pistorius. Pistorius' criticisms were particularly influential and are still cited today.

Immanuel Kant (after Friedrich Hagemanns Gipsbüste in 1801)

The Critique of Practical Reason dealt with morality, or action, in the same way that the first Critique dealt with knowledge, and the Critique of Judgement dealt with the various uses of our mental powers that neither confer factual knowledge nor determine us to action, such as aesthetic judgement, for example of the beautiful and sublime, and teleological judgment, that is, construing things as having "purposes". As Kant understood them, aesthetic and teleological judgment connected our moral and empirical judgments to one another, unifying his system. Two shorter works, the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics and the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals treated the same matter as the first and second critiques respectively, in a more cursory form — assuming the answer and working backward, so to speak. They serve as his introductions to the critical system.

The epistemological material of the first Critique was put into application in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science; the ethical dictums of the second were put into practice in Metaphysics of Morals. His work on moral philosophy is best known for its formulation of a basic tenet of ethics, sometimes falsely assumed to be an extension of the Golden Rule, which Kant called the categorical imperative: "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Kant also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, politics, and the application of philosophy to life. When he died in 1804, he was working on an incomplete manuscript that has been published as Opus Postumum.

His tomb and its pillared enclosure outside the cathedral in Königsberg is one of the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered East Prussia in 1945. A replica of a statue of Kant that stood in front of the university was donated by a German entity in 1991 and placed on the original pediment. Near his tomb is the following inscription in Russian and German, taken from the "Conclusion" of his Critique of Practical Reason [5:161-2]:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and perseveringly my thinking engages itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

The Critique of Pure Reason

Main Article Critique of Pure Reason

The Critiques were a series of works which outlined Kant's philosophy and metaphysics, the most famous and influential of these is still Critique of Pure Reason. The main focus of the CPR is on epistemology, logic and metaphysics.

Kant's moral philosophy

Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1] (1785), Critique of Practical Reason [2] (1788]), and Metaphysics of Morals [3] (1798).

Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the Categorical Imperative, from which all other moral obligations are generated. He believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world (e.g., what would make us happy). Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies to all and only rational agents.

A categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; that is, it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires. (Contrast this with hypothetical imperative.) Kant's categorical imperative was formulated in three ways, which he believed to be roughly equivalent (although many commentators do not):

The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) says: "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature."

The second formulation (Formula of Humanity) says: "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means."

The third formulation (Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two. It says that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as legislating universal laws through our maxims. We may think of ourselves as such autonomous legislators only insofar as we follow our own laws.

Example of the first formulation:

The most popular interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test." An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of volition" — that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalizability test has five steps:

Find the agent's maxim.
Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim.
Decide whether any contradictions, or irrationalities, arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim.
If a contradiction or irrationality arises, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.
If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and in some instances required.

There are two types of contradiction that Kant thinks may arise with impermissible maxims. The first type he calls "contradictions in conception." Kant uses the example of a false promise to illustrate this. His imagined agent has the maxim: "I am going to lie so that someone will lend me money, because I am in need." Kant argues that universalizing this maxim would lead to a contradiction — that is, if everyone were to follow this maxim, and were to lie whenever in need, promises would mean nothing. So it would be contradictory or irrational in the possible world to make a false promise to secure money, since your promise would simply be laughed at. Thus, acting on such a maxim in the real world is impermissible, which means we have a duty not to make false promises just to satisfy our needs. Incidentally, Kant believed that any maxim involving lying would lead to a contradiction, leading to his commitment to the view that we have a perfect (i.e. inviolable) duty not to lie.

The second type of contradiction Kant calls "contradictions in will," which arise when a universalized maxim would contradict something the agent would have to will as a rational being. Kant's example involves a self-reliant person who thinks everybody should mind their own business, and thus acts on the maxim: "Don't help others." In the imagined world where this is universalized, Kant thinks that this would necessarily contradict something any rational agent must will, namely that if one is in great need and could easily be helped by another, as a rational being he would have to will that the other person help him — but this universalized maxim contradicts that, thus leading to a contradiction in will, and showing that the policy, "Don't help others" is impermissible.

Example of the second formulation:

If I steal a book from you, I am treating you as a means only (to obtain a book). If I ask to have your book, I am respecting your right to say no, and am thereby treating you as an end-in-yourself, not as a means to an end. However, if I only ask you to be perceived by you as a nice person and to induce you to do things for me in the future, then again I am treating you as a means only.

Kant applied his categorical imperative to the issue of suicide in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, writing that:

[I]f a man is reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes and feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life, he should ask himself a question. He should inquire whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is: From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction. It is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self-love can become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; hence the maxim cannot possibly exist as a universal law of nature, and consequently would be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of all duty.

The theory that we have universal duties, which hold despite one's own inclinations or the desire to pursue one's own happiness instead, is known as deontological ethics. Kant is often cited as the most important source of this strand of ethical theory; in particular, of the theory of conduct, also known as the theory of obligation.

Kant and Agnosticism

The formulation of Kant’s agnosticism is expressed in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason where he enumerates and defends the antinomies of pure reason. The antinomies are contrary propositions where the affirmation of either one or the other will invariably lead to a contradiction. In particular, if one assumes either the position that space and time are finite, or the contrary position that space and time are infinite, one will encounter a contradiction because it requires knowledge for which there is no experience and transgresses the limits of reason.

A second antinomy, which involves the synthetic a priori proposition of Kant’s Transcendental Logic "Every event has a cause", precludes one from asserting a first cause of the totality. While one may experience one event as caused by another event, and so on, one cannot use this to assert that there must be a cause for the universe, that is, the First Cause. Nor can one use the experience of causality to assume that there is no beginning. Either assumption requires knowledge that is not within the realm of experience, and transgresses the limits of reason.

This is considered in philosophy as the classic expression of the agnostic viewpoint, where knowledge of God is impossible and to assert the existence or non-existence of a deity while assigning it with intelligible qualities is to claim knowledge for which one has no experience, and in the transgression of the limits to reason encounter contradiction. However, in the Critique of Practical Reason, and in the third paragraph of the Logic, Kant stipulated that one must postulate God in order to make sense of moral experience. The impact of this was that Kantian and non-Kantian writers of the nineteenth century who professed no knowledge of God still claimed that the agnostic position was compatible with a religious commitment as a practical way of life.

Influence

Kant's most powerful and revolutionary effect on philosophy, which changed forever its meaning, modes of thinking, and language(s), was not "positive" in the sense of producing specific assertions about the world that have become accepted truths, as in the positive sciences. Rather it was "negative" in the sense of restricting the areas about which such knowledge was possible — by making philosophy "critical" and self-critical. Kant's idea of "critique" was to examine the legitimate scope of the mind or of knowledge.

In this regard the "critique of pure reason", which was also the title of his most important work (see below and Critique of Pure Reason), meant examining what certain and legitimate knowledge human beings could arrive at simply by thinking about things independently of experience and perception, with his conclusion being: not very much. Prior to Kant, the entire mode of functioning of most philosophy was drawing conclusions about the nature of the universe, of God, or of the soul simply by logical thinking about them, by what seemed to make sense through "a priori" thinking, i.e. thinking on purely logical grounds. For this sort of thinking it must be the case that God or the universe is this way or that way, because it makes sense logically.

But, in the history of philosophy, for every philosophical theory that God or the universe or the mind must be one way, some philosopher arrived at another theory stating that it must be precisely the opposite way. Kant called this unproductive, unresolvable, back-and-forth, dogmatic thinking the "dialectic of pure reason". That is, it was an inevitable consequence of trying to arrive at knowledge on purely logical grounds independently of experience or of scientific knowledge based on the evidence of the senses.

For Kant, this entire style of pursuing knowledge was bankrupt and must be abandoned. According to Kant, philosophy must henceforth operate within the narrow "limits of pure reason" and recognize that most positive knowledge could come only through the sciences based on sense perception and not through metaphysics, which was about things of which we could never have direct sense perception.

Some important philosophers and schools of thought, such as German Idealism, neo-Thomists and other theologically oriented philosophers, and Heidegger's "fundamental ontology" have refused to accept the limitations that Kant imposed upon philosophy and attempted to come up with new metaphysical systems about "the Absolute", "God", or "Being" , although even these philosophers have generally tried doing so by taking Kant into account. Over-all, however, post-Kantian philosophy has never been able to return to the style of thinking, arguing, and asserting conclusions that characterized philosophy before him.

In this way, Kant was correct in asserting that he had brought about a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. According to Kant, Copernicus's revolution in the understanding of the cosmos lay in taking the position of the observer into account. This explained why it looks as though the sun revolves around the earth even though in reality the earth revolves around the sun. Taking the observer's position into account prevents the unaware projection of the observer's perception or point of view onto the picture of the universe.

Kant saw his own Copernican revolution in philosophy, analogously, as consisting in taking the position of the knower into account and thereby preventing the unaware projection of the knower's way of thinking ("pure reason") onto the philosophical map of reality. According to Kant, it was philosophers unawarely doing this that had created the illusions of metaphyisics that dominated the prior history of philosophy. Kant saw this revolution, in turn, as being part of "Enlightenment" (as conceived of in the Age of Enlightenment) and the creation of an enlightened citizenry and society freed from dogmatism and irrational authority.

Reference in Popular Culture

Kant is referenced in Matrix Comics Vol.2 in December 2004 in a story by Kate Andrews called "I Kant". The story features the character of The Kid being lead by Morpheus through the Jump Program in an attempt to learn to leap from buildings to buildings successfully. Kant's ideas on the ideas of perception creating the nature of space and reality are apparent as the story deals with The Kid being taught to let go of the mental construct of the world that he has formed and be able to bend these physical laws within the Matrix's simulated reality.

The significance of this modern day reference to Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic is that while Kant is one of the most widely discussed philosophers, he is also one of the least read yet widely read about. This often results in misunderstandings of his philosophy where the Transcendental Deduction is ignored and it becomes confused with idealism and solipsism.

Works and links to texts, in English and German

(1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie Des Himmels [4])
(1762) Introduction to Logic and the Mistaken Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (Logik and of Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren)
(1763) The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence (Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes)
(1764) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
(1770) Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis)
(1781) Critique of Pure Reason [5] (Kritik der reinen Vernunft [6])
(1783) An Answer To The Question: 'What Is Enlightenment?' (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? [7])
(1783) Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics [8] (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
(1784) Idea For A Universal History With A Cosmopolitan Purpose (Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht)
(1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
(1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
(1788) Critique of Practical Reason [9] (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft [10])
(1790) Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft [11])
(1790) The Science of Right [12]
(1793) Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
(1795) Perpetual Peace [13] (Zum ewigen Frieden [14])
(1797) The Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten)
(1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
(1798) The Contest of Faculties [15] (Der Streit der Fakultäten [16])
(1800) Logic (Logik)
(1803) On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik [17])
(1804) Opus Postumum
(More German works at Wikisource)
(More German works at Project Gutenberg)
(More English works at The University of Adelaide Library)

References and Further reading

Any suggestion of further reading on Kant has to take cognizance of the fact that his work has dominated philosophy like no other figure after him. Nevertheless, several guideposts can be made out. In Germany, the most important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism which he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P.F. Strawson's "The Bounds of Sense" (1969) largely determined the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America, but his positions have been challenged by a number of recent thinkers including Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, and Béatrice Longuenesse. This body of work has begun to lessen the divide between academic interpretations of Kant in the English speaking world and in Europe. John Rawls' Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, is particularly useful in its investigation of Kant's moral philosophy within the vicissitudes of ethical systems from Hume to Leibniz to Hegel. More recently, Gary Banham has published a key interpretation of Kant's practical philosophy that has corrected exclusive focus on the categorical imperative in favour of an inclusive comprehension of right and virtue. John McDowell is perhaps the most important contemporary analytic philosopher who explicitly builds upon Kantian themes. Howard Caygill's dictionary of Kantian terms is an excellent guide to the overall terrain of the influence and nature of Kant's concepts.

Allison, Henry. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Yale University Press, 2004.
Banham, Gary. Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Broad C. D. Kant: An Introduction CUP 1978.
Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary Blackwell, 1995.
Gram, Moltke S. The Transcendental Turn: The Foundation of Kant's Idealism. Gainesville : University Presses of Florida, 1984.
Guyer, Paul. The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge University Press, 1992
Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge, 1996.
Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton University Press, 1998.
McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Mohanty, J.N. and Robert W. Shahan. eds. Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Pippin, Robert. Idealism as Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Pinkard, Terry. German philosophy, 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, 2002.
Proceedings of the International Kant Congresses. Several Congresses (numbered) edited by various publishers are also available.
Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, 2000.
Strawson, P.F. The Bounds of Sense: an essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1989.
Brigitte Sassen (2000), ed., Kant's Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy
Robert Paul Wolff, Kant's theory of mental activity: A commentary on the transcendental analytic of the Critique of pure reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963)
Robert Paul Wolff, The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (New York: HarperCollins, 1974). ISBN 0061317926

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