Immanuel Kant(metaphysics, wiki, forked, Proteus)
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Immanuel Kant (
April 22,
1724 -
February 12,
1804) was a
German philosopher, generally regarded as the last major philosopher of the
early modern period and, on anyone's account, one of history's most influential thinkers.
Kant is most famous for his highly articulated view, transcendental idealism(
1,
2), which states that reason applies its
innate forms and concepts to the raw sensory experience of the world, a world which would otherwise be completely unknowable, and further projects the knowlege gained to future experiences. Kant's philosophy of nature and human nature is one of the most important historical sources of the modern period, dominating much of the inquiries in
Science and
Philosophy to come.
Conceptual relativism thus dominated the intellectual life of the
20th century, though it is likely Kant himself would reject
relativism in its more radical contemporary forms. Kant is also well-known and very influential for his moral philosophy, and proposed the first modern theory of
solar system formation, known as the
Kant-Laplace hypothesis.
Life
Kant lived all of his life in Königsberg (now
Kaliningrad), never leaving environs of the city. He spent much of his youth as a solid but not spectacular student, living more off billiards than his writings.
He was of the rather curious conviction that a person did not have a firm direction in life until he was
39, when as a minor
metaphysician in a
Prussian University, a brief mid-life crisis ensued. We may credit this episode for some of his later work.
Kant was eventually a respected and competent university professor for his remaining years, although his writings before his late fifties would have gained him little historical notice. He lived a very regulated life, and the walks he took at 3:30
every afternoon were so punctual, local housewives would set their clocks by his passing. Despite this curious reputation he earned, he was considered a very sociable person, and regularly entertained guests over dinner, insisting that sociable company was good for his constitution.
Around
1770, when he was
46, Kant read the work of the
Scottish philosopher
David Hume. Hume was a fierce
empiricist, and scorned all metaphysics, systematically debunking the accepted thinking on the subject. His most famous thesis is that nothing in our experience can justify our assumption that "causal powers" inhere within things. For example, when one billiard ball strikes another, the second one
must move. Because things always have happened this way for us, we tend through "custom and habit" to assume they will; but we have no rational grounds for doing so.
Kant was profoundly troubled by this, which he said "woke him from his dogmatic slumber", though at the same time he found Hume's argument irrefutable and his conclusions unacceptable. For ten years, Kant published nothing, working quietly and dilligently on a grand new theory. In
1781, he released the massive "Critique of Pure Reason," arguably the most significant single book in modern philosophy.
In the first
Critique, Kant developed the transcendental argument, showing that, although we cannot known any necessary truths about the world,
as it is in itself, we are nonetheless constrained into perceiving and thinking about the world in certain preconfigured ways. However, we can know with certainty a great number of things about
the world as it appears to us. For example, every effect is connected with causes, that the appearances in space and time will obey the laws of geometry and arithmetic, and so on.
Over the next twenty-odd years until his death in
1804 Kant's output was unceasing. His edifice of Critical Philosophy was continued with the
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, the
Critique of Pure Practical Reason, and the
Critique of Judgement. Kant's works on "practical" reason argue for a cosmopolitan morality in the same way the first
Critique dealt with relative knowledge. The
Critique of Judgment dealt with the aesthetic use of mental powers which neither confer factual knowledge, nor determine us to action. Aesthetic judgment, of the beautiful and sublime, and teleological judgment, construing things as having purpose, is a critical component of Kantian Philosophy, already established in the first
Critique.
Shorter works, among them the
Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics,
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and the aforementioned
Metaphysics of Morals, serve as excellent introductions to the Kantian critical system, where the dense epistemological material of the first
Critique was put into application. Aside from these, Kant wrote a number of popular essays on history, politics, and the application of philosophy to life, including the influential
What is Enlightenment?.
At the time of his death, Kant was working on a series of ideas surrounding
mysticism which were theoretically complete, but lacking in finished prose. The incomplete manuscript was published as
Opus Postumum. Immanuel Kant died in
1804.
Kant's philosophy in general
Though he adopted the idea of a
critical philosophy, the primary purpose of which was to "critique", or come to grips with the limitations of our mental capacities, Kant was one of the greatest of system builders, pursuing the idea of the critique through studies of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. One famous citation, "...two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...the starry heavens above and the moral law within..."(CPPR), sums up his efforts: he wanted to explain in one systematic theory, based in transcendental idealism, support for the realms of morality and aesthetic judgement. Kant's most general aims were to establish a system by which individuality triumped over collectives, and where morality was based upon each of us realizing that others are individuals as well.
Kant was inspired by
Isaac Newton, whose theory of
physics, whereby natural forces humans cannot sense explain the movements of physical bodies, gave Kant a basis upon which to build his philosophy. Kant was also influenced by many other philosophers, incluing
Plato,
Aristotle,
Epicurus,
Descartes,
Berkeley, and as mentioned,
Hume, among others. His interest in science also led him to propose in
1755 that the solar system was created out of a gas cloud in which objects condensed due to gravity. This hypothesis is widely regarded as the first modern theory of solar system formation, and is the ancestor to current theories of stellar formation.
Metaphysics and Epistemology
Kant's most widely read, studied, and most influential book is the
Critique of Pure Reason weblink (
1781), which proceeds from a remarkably simple
thought experiment.
He said, try to imagine something that exists in no time and has no extent in space. The human mind cannot produce such an idea, therefore, time and space are fundamental forms of perception which exist as innate structures of the mind. Nothing can be perceived except through these forms, and the limits of physics are the limits of the fundamental structure of the mind.
For Kant, the fundamental structure of the mind is like the
innate ideas of Descartes, or
a priori knowledge of things within space and time. Since the mind must possess these categories in order to be able to understand the buzzing mass of raw, uninterpreted sensory experience which presents itself to our consciousness, Kant wed the then traditional concepts of
Rationalism and
Empiricism. This union removed objective
reality, which Kant called the
noumenal world, or a
noumena, from the arena of human perception. Everything we perceive, according to Kant, is filtered through the forms of space and time, and we can never "know" the real world. That is, we can never develop knowledge about things-in-themselves, such as trees or books, or even larger concepts like "Self", "World" or "God".
Kant thus discovered the "scandal of philosophy", that one cannot decide what the proper terms for a metaphysical system are until one has defined the field of perception, but one cannot define the field of perception until defining the limits of physics first, and thus deciding on the proper terms for a metaphysical system. Kant's works are full of such conundrum's.
Moral Philosophy
Kant developed his moral philosophy in three principal works, the basis of which was already present in the first
Critque:
Kant is probably best known for a single, general moral obligation, he explained all other moral obligations would have: the
Categorical Imperative. The categorical imperative, generally speaking, is an unconditional obligation, an obligation we have regardless of our will or desires to fulfill it, which is in contrast with a
hypothetical imperative, or an imperative which depends upon our will. Our moral duties to others are derived from the categorical imperative, which can be formulated in three ways.
- The first formulation (the Formula of Universal Law) says: "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law."
- The second formulation (the 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 (the Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the previous 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.
For examples and counter-examples, the first formulation could be summarized as: If I wish to steal, and I can will it so that everyone could steal, then stealing is a moral obligation. The second: If I steal a book from you, I am treating you merely as a means to get a book. If I ask to have your book, I am respecting your humanity, or ability of rational thought. And the third: there are universal duties which hold despite our subjective, merely hypothetical, imperatives, and to fulfill our inclinations or happiness instead of these duties, is known as
deontological ethics.. Kant is often cited as the most important source of this
theory of conduct, also known as a
theory of obligation. What is remarkable for the time, is that Kant strongly limited the class of actions to be considered in moral terms. So, murder is an action to be considered in moral terms, but wearing dark clothes is not.
Aesthetics and Teleology
Kant's moral theory leads directly into his theory of aesthetics and teleology, allowing for the full expression of subjectivity. His theories on these topics can found in many of his works, but principally in the
Critique of Judgement, where the Kantian system is completed.
Because reason is constrained to what it can perceive and what
a priori concepts it can bring to bear on that perception, and because one's moral law is limited to those actions which can be sanctioned for all, Kant's theory on the beautiful and sublime opened up a whole new path of expression for reason. It is the awe one feels at looking up at a starry sky, or surveying a vast open beach, which dominates reason. Without this component, the Kantian critical system would not have been complete, and even in the first
Critique, Kant argued, in the solution to the Antinomies, that supporting human freedom was the key to his entire transcendental project.
It is human freedom which allows for aesthetic beauty, and the awe of the sublime. Without it, we could not feel such emotions, because the properties are not present in the things-themselves. This leads us to the construction of the causes for things, and ultimately, to the supreme cause of all things. Reasoning about that supreme cause gives us the same awe as the starry skies, in Kant's view, and was the basis for the citation noted above, that nothing so filled Kant with awe as "the starry heaven above and the moral law within."
Further Reading
The amount of literature on Kant is ever-growing.
Often, the best places to start are the introductions of his translated works. Modern translations usually suggest a variety of secondary literature, the purpose of which is both to explain and to interpret Kant's philosophy.
For an example, see
Christine Korsgaard's introduction to Mary Gregor's translation of the Groundwork, which not only provides a concise overview of Kant's moral philosophy, but also places his ethics within the framework of the larger critical system.
One of the best pieces of secondary literature on Kant's moral philosophy is a work by Korsgaard called "Creating the Kingdom of Ends".
In this collection of essays, Korsgaard attempts to organize Kant's ethics into a coherent interpretation that may respond adequately to the modern defenders of ethical systems contrary with Kant's, such as
Aristotle's,
Hume's, and
Hegel's.
Another good starting point of investigation is
John Rawls' book of published lecture notes, titled "Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy". The work is particularly useful in its investigation of Kant's moral philosophy within the vicissitudes of ethical systems from
Hume to
Leibniz to Hegel.
Two other important scholars of Kant are
Henry Allison and
Onora O'Neill. Both authors have written books about Kant's moral philosophy.
However, these are only suggestions. Due to the vast nature of
Kantian texts, there is still disagreement over how to read Kant, and any one text alone is usually insufficient to achieve a balanced view.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Gilles Deleuze,
Michel Foucault, and
Jacques Derrida, among
many others, have all written books or essays on Kant, and in many respects, these types of resources should be considered primary, of the secondary sources. Much of the confusion surrounding Kant's theories has come from decades of Anglo-American Academic texts, striving to expound Kant through the prism of the "Analytic style".
German texts on the Internet
(Kant himself)
(More at
Project Gutenberg)
English translations on the Internet
Other external links
Some content adapted from the Wikinfo article "Immanuel_Kant" under the GNU Free Documentation License.
(last updated by Proteus, 8:21pm EDT - Tue, Apr 03 2007)
