Immanuel Kant

Born: 1724

Died: 1804, at the age of 79

Country of origin: Prussia (Now in Germany)

• Areas of focus:      
  
  
• Major Books written by Immanuel Kant:
  
  
  • "The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence" (1763)
    
  • "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" (1764)
    
  • "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781)
    
  • "Critique of Practical Reason" (1788)
    
  • "Critique of Judgment" (1790)
    
  • "Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone" (1793)
    
  
  
• Cocktail summary of Immanuel Kant's main ideas:
  
  
  Immanuel Kant represents the redemption of Western Philosophy. The intellectual project begun by Rene Descartes in the 17th century - to build a system of certain knowledge around personal consciousness and perception - had basically come to a dead-end about 150 years later with the Scottish philosopher David Hume, in the mid 18th Century. With Hume, Philosophy stood at the edge of a black hole of uncertainty, and certainty was the foundation on which Western Philosophy had tried to stand since the Renaissance. Few philosophers were interested in closing the book on the past 150 years and all becoming mystics.
  
  During this span of time, Philosophy had existed in 2 basic forms - Rationalism and Empiricism. Rationalism, which was associated mostly with Germany and France, focused on "pure ideas", like metaphysics and questions of God: ideas that lay beyond the reach of the 5 senses. Empiricism, which was associated mostly with the Anglo-Saxon (English-speaking) world, focused on knowledge gained from experience and the 5 senses. It was sort of like the difference between theory and practice.
  
  Theory/Rationalism deals with entities like numbers and all of the mathematical relationships between numbers. While we can count things in nature using our 5 senses, most of the elegant relationships and patterns between numbers are discovered by the discipline of Rational thinking. Newton didn't just count apples to discover his theories about gravity, he spent a lot of time thinking about numbers.
  
  Practice/Empiricism deals with the real world of the 5 senses, and relies more on experience to find knowledge. Theories about geology, for instance, require looking at rocks and studying maps. It doesn't rely on thinking about idealized rocks independent of using a shovel.
  
  David Hume had argued that all knowledge that all humans have ever attained has come only through experience. There is no such thing as a naked idea, spawned purely from the mind with no reference-point to our 5 senses. All ideas are received from "outside" somewhere, he argued. And more importantly, it is *only* the sensory-input that we receive. We never truly know anything in its true essence, only what our senses stimulate us with. For instance, we can see a flower, and touch it and smell it and taste it and perhaps hear it, but we never truly apprehend its essential flower-ness. We only ever deal with sensory input, not true essence.
  
  Therefore, Hume argued, we have no basis for ideas like cause-and-effect, because this is something that lays outside of our direct experience. We may observe that blowing on a candle snuffs out the flame, but that's all we see: in order to be truly consistent, we can never determine that one action actually causes the reaction, only that we observe one action following the other. We can only collect observations and sensory-input, never make claims about what lies behind them, because we never truly experience them. We are nothing but a "bundle of perceptions", he argued.
  
  Since Immanuel Kant was a good German he was reared in the Rationalist camp and spent a lot of time thinking about supposedly pure ideas. But then one day he read Hume's arguments and was hit by a flash of inspiration that Hume was right. (This was his way-over-quoted claim that reading Hume had awoken him from his "dogmatic slumbers"). Kant realized that Hume had pointed out a very serious problem with Philosophy at the time. Metaphysics had long operated on the assumption that our understanding of reality needs to correspond itself with objective facts outside of ourselves. But if all knowledge comes from experience, and we can never move beyond a bundle of sensory-input, then we can never know a single metaphysical fact. All we can ever know are sounds and smells and sights. Philosophers might as well stop bothering with such navel-pondering issues like metaphysics and religion and science, and just pack it up and become talk-show hosts.
  
  So Kant set about to respond to Hume's arguments, in order to see if there was any way out of his quandary. It wasn't easy, and it took Kant years of pondering, but he eventually came to the conclusion that Hume only had it half-right. Yes, we do receive all knowledge from experience, but we don't approach it as a blank slate. The human mind, Kant argued, is basically pre-wired to make sense of experience. We don't just correspond our understanding to external reality, but instead this external reality corresponds itself to our perception. This is the exact opposite of the traditional approach to metaphysics.
  
  Kant's argument is basically that sensory-input is like static and our minds are like TV-tuners, focusing the static into something coherent: we are the TV remote-controls of the universe. He argued that all humans perceive experience in one of several "categories" of perception, such as Quantity, Relation, Unity, and Plurality and these basically act as filters through which the mind passes all sensory input and creates order out of them. Without these categories, sensory input is simply like the static seen on a TV's unused UHF-channels. These categories operate in our minds "a priori" ("prior to experience") and serve as the other half of knowledge: knowledge is made up of 50% sensory-input and 50% categorical processing. So instead of the outside world revealing itself to us, we are the ones who reveal its order. David Hume and his fellow Empiricists were only looking at half of the picture, staring at the static without picking up their TV remote-controls.
  
  Kant called this reversal of philosophical method "the second Copernican Revolution", since our minds no longer correspond its perceptions to an external reality, rather the external reality corresponds to the categories we apply to it. This meant that there was a role after all for Metaphysics and Religion, but within certain contexts. He argued that there are 2 different kinds of knowledge - Phenomenal (knowledge gained via the senses) and Noumenal (the nature of reality itself, "behind" the senses, invisible to our sensory knowledge) - and each type of knowledge is dealt with according to different criteria. He spelled out the boundaries of the 2 kinds of knowledge in his so-called "Three Critiques", in which he meticulously delineated the boundaries within which Reason can consistently operate, and the boundaries outside of which he argued that morality and religious faith should operate.
  
  His first Critique was "Critique of Pure Reason", which is famous for being perhaps the most difficult Philosophy book ever written. Reading through it, and truly following it, is enough to make anyone's eyes glaze over. But it's main purpose was to figure out the boundaries of one of the 2 kinds of knowledge - Phenomenal knowledge - which deals with knowledge gained from experience, such as perceptions that can be verified by science and experiment. In this book, he argues that the human mind perceives all knowledge via a small number of categories, along with the 2 intuitions of space and time. These are pre-conditions of all experience that we perceive and we know how to use these categories independent of experience.
  
  His second Critique was "Critique of Practical Reason", which deals with the second kind of knowledge, "Noumenal" knowledge. This is knowledge of reality addressed by speculative metaphysics and pure reason, basically the realm of opinion, which can't be fully verified by science and the senses, such as Ethics and Religion. The most famous argument in this book is his idea for a truly universal Ethic, common to all traditions, faiths, and culture: his "Categorical Imperative". This is his argument that the one ethical principle that all people can agree on should be to "Act as if the principle of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature". Sort of like the dictum "Do unto others as you would have done unto you."
  
  His third Critique was "Critique of Judgment", which deals with theories of Art and Aesthetics. In this book he argued for a new approach to qualifying the artistic experience, arguing that beauty is not a quality inherent in any object but is subject to the viewer's relative experience. Kant argued that questions of beauty and creativity are independent of questions of objective knowledge or morality. Art exists on its own grounds, independent of its traditional role as a tool for illustrating some ideal or moral. Art exists for Art's sake.
  
  With Kant, Philosophy was essentially re-born, and stepped back from the black hole of uncertainty that Hume had led it to. It also began the modern era of relative knowledge, with more and more knowledge loosing its objective status and being relegated to relativistic, statistical uncertainty, even with regards to science. "Pure Reason" has lost ground to "Practical Reason", with certainty harder to find in the modern world. But Kant's primary contribution to the history of ideas is his argument that we are not blank slates, but are in fact the agents that create order out of the chaotic world of perception.
  
  
  
• Immanuel Kant praised & criticized:
  
  
  • Kant has been praised for finding a rational way out of the dead-end that Philosophy had been led to by Empiricism. He was the first person to realize that the human mind isn't a passive, blank slate to which experiences stick, like fly-paper waiting for flies to stick to it. It is, in fact, the mind that organizes and makes sense of experience, and it was Kant who first suggested this. His legacy also rests on isolating those subjects to which Rationalist Philosophy can most consistently address, but he has also been criticized for this.
    
    Kant has been criticized for cementing into place a sort of schizophrenic approach to knowledge within all subsequent Philosophy. Prior to Kant all knowledge was considered as falling under a common set of criteria, but after Kant we now have 2 sets of criteria: one set for the world of the senses and another set for the world of intuition - knowledge versus faith - with far too much of what was previously assumed to be certain knowledge pushed into the latter category.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Immanuel Kant:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation:
    Kant was raised in a devoutly Pietist Lutheran household, which stressed the importance of an austere, yet emotionally intense, personal religious experience of redemption, the importance of personal moral duty, as well as the importance of the "invisible Church" of all believers, as opposed to any one particular church institution. This environment produced in Kant an attitude of an extremely private faith, which he rarely expressed publicly during his adult life. He attended the Pietist University of Königsberg but grew bored with religious instruction, falling victim to the seductive influence of Philosophy instead. He never attended any church as an adult, and was often criticized for trying to argue away religious faith through his Rationalist critiques.
    
    Some have suggested that his second critique, the "Critique of Practical Reason", may have been an attempt to respond to this criticism weighed against his first Critique, with his second Critique making room for religious faith outside of rigorous Rationalism. Since abstract issues such as God lay outside of the ability of being proven by the 5 senses, religion had been pushed outside of Kant's "Phenomenal" realm of knowledge. But he made room for it in the "Noumenal" realm of knowledge, since religious faith, he argued, required a different set of intellectual criteria from science.
    
    Despite his efforts at not appearing hostile to religion, Kant received a letter of reprimand from the King of Prussia in 1794, warning him against using his ideas "for the distortion and debasing of many principal and basic teachings of Holy Scripture and of Christianity." He was "encouraged" to avoid speaking publicly about religion, with the warning that "otherwise you can unfailingly expect, on continued recalcitrance, unpleasant consequences." Since no one messed with the King, Kant decided to never again speak or write about religious issues, but he did continue to speak about morality. For the rest of his life, his religious views remained a mystery to the public.
    
    
  • Due to his critiques, Kant was nicknamed the "Alleszelmalmer", "the man who crushes everything".
    
    
  • Kant was probably the shortest philosopher in history, standing less than 5 feet tall. His head was said to resemble a pumpkin on a stick, being unusually large for his diminutive body. While he was an intellectual giant, he was a pip-squeak in real life.
    
    
  • Kant wasn't much of a traveler. He never ventured further than 50 miles away from his home in Königsberg during his entire life. Why travel when there's so much thinking to do?
    
    
  • Kant was a bit of a late bloomer, waiting till he was 57 years old before publishing his first significant book, the Critique of Pure Reason. Some great ideas take time to germinate before taking shape.
    
    
  • Kant was obsessed with keeping his stockings pulled up straight on his legs, since no philosopher can be taken seriously with loose stockings. He solved this problem by tying strings to the upper edges of both stockings and pulling them tightly up through the bottoms of his pockets and attaching them to small boxes with springs that he kept there. So his pockets basically kept his socks pulled up straight. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of philosophers regarding avoiding wardrobe malfunctions.
    
    
  • Kant was the first person to suggest that the Solar System may have formed by the collapse of a dust-cloud in space, with the center of the cloud igniting into a star and the left-over clumps of crud forming the planets. He first came up with this idea in 1755, and it is now the generally accepted model used by most astronomers, with some later modifications to the idea by the French mathematician Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace. The theory is appropriately called the "Kant-Laplace Theory".
    
    
  • Kant believed in only breathing through his nose while outside. He said that breathing through the mouth was how people catch the Cold. Therefore he never spoke to anyone who approached him while he walked outdoors, since he never opened his mouth, and speaking through one's nose is a bit difficult.
    
    
  • Kant was famous for being a highly-evolved hypochondriac. Whenever he read about a new disease he was convinced he had it. While he was perfectly healthy throughout his adult life, he was paranoid about any bodily fluid. He dreaded sweating, and panicked if he saw the slightest bead of perspiration anywhere on his body. He always kept his study well-heated, but never his bedroom, even in the dead of winter. A colleague once described his appearance as "drier than dust. His person was small, and possibly a more meager, arid, parched anatomy of a man has not appeared upon this earth." (Kant's friends didn't sugar-coat their opinions of him).
    
    
  • Kant kept to himself a lot, and never even met with any of his siblings throughout his adult life. He sent money regularly to his 5 sisters, but never saw them. His one brother he totally ignored. A family man he wasn't.
    
    
  • Kant lived alone with a servant named Lampe, who was known for being a thorough grump. He would wake Kant up every morning at 4:55 AM exactly, by marching into his bedroom and announcing "Herr Professor, the time is come!"
    
    
  • Romance appears to have been totally alien to the tiny philosopher. He apparently pondered proposing to 2 different women during his life, but he took so long making up his mind that both women ended up marrying other people and moving out of town. Kant felt that matrimony would only serve as a distraction from his intellectual pursuits.
    
    
  • Kant kept a very rigorous schedule every day, taking a walk outside at exactly the same time every single day of his adult life. His neighbors claimed they could set their clocks by his walks, since he emerged from his house every day at 3:00 PM for his daily constitutional. He walked the same route every day of the year, regardless of weather, and his route through his neighborhood in Königsberg (modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia) is still called Philosophengang - "The Philosopher's Walk". Supposedly he only deviated from this schedule once, the day he read in the paper of the French Revolution. His neighbors were stunned by that one Kant-less afternoon.
    
    
  • Prussia and Königsberg no longer exist. The kingdom of Prussia later became a state within the German Empire in the 1870's, and then was dissolved after World War II. The eastern part of former Prussia was partitioned between the Soviet Union and Poland, with the northern half of the area becoming an island-colony of Russia within the borders of Poland. Most of the German residents were expelled from the area and the region was renamed "Kaliningrad", in honor of Ivanovich Kalinin, the then-current President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet Union. It was long a super-secret enclave from which most people were forbidden to travel, in which lots of super-secret Soviet military projects took place.
    
    After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990's and the true independence of Poland from Moscow, the so-called "Kaliningrad Oblast" became an orphan within Western Europe, squished between Poland and Lithuania. Unlike other former-Soviet towns, the area has not reverted back to its original German name, since this might imply that it should belong to Germany. Some have suggested that it be named "Kantgrad", after its most famous son Immanuel Kant, but since he was German and not Russian this idea hasn't gone over very well.
    
    
  • Kant thought that there were 2 very bad habits that everyone should avoid: reading novels and listening to music. He thought that reading novels weakened the memory and listening to music would make men effeminate. Kant had mastered the art of repressing his emotions, and he was bothered by the power of music to stir his long-dormant emotions, so he encouraged his students to avoid music, even though he himself regularly attended concerts.
    
    
  • In his later years, Kant exhibited signs that would now be considered those of schizophrenia. He reported feeling pressure on his brain, and became convinced that electricity in the air was responsible for disease in cats.
    
    
  • Kant died as a result of complications of cerebral arteriosclerosis.
    
    
    
• Quotes:
  
  
  • Regarding his avoidance of any close friendship: "Friendship is a restriction of favorable sentiments to a single subject, and is very pleasant to him towards whom they are directed, but also a proof that generality and goodwill are lacking."
    
    
  • "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge to make room for faith."
    
    
  • "Act as if the principle of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature."
    
    
  • "That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt. But although our knowledge originates with experience, it does not all arise out of experience."
    
    
  • "All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason."
    
    
  • "Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck."
    
    
  • "Human reason is by nature architectonic."
    
    
  • "Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."
    
    
  • "Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another."
    
    
  • "In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so."
    
    
  • "The death of dogma is the birth of morality."
    
    
  • "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
    
    
  • "Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild."
    
    
    
  
  
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