KANT, IMMANUEL (1724–1804)

KANT, IMMANUEL (1724–1804), German philosopher. Immanuel Kant was born 24 April 1724 in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in East Prussia. He attended a Pietist school and the University of Königsberg and in 1755, after six years as a private tutor, obtained a position at his university. Promoted to professor there in 1770, he taught and served in administrative posts until 1798 and died 12 February 1804.

CENTRAL IDEAS

Kant's predecessors had treated knowledge as beginning from data about the world that the mind passively receives from the senses or through immediate insight into eternal truths or ideas. Kant, by contrast, made the activity of the mind central both to the world as we live in it and to our knowledge of it.

Kant built his systematic theoretical philosophy around the idea that the world as we experience it does not exist independently of us. Our own minds, he argued, are responsible for its form and structure. This idea constituted his "Copernican revolution." Before Copernicus, astronomical data were explained by assuming that the sun revolves around the earth. Reversing this, Copernicus explained the data by taking the earth to revolve around the sun. Kant explained experience by denying that our knowledge conforms to objects, instead holding that objects in experience conform to our knowledge—to the way our mind necessarily works.

In moral philosophy Kant proposed an equally revolutionary idea. In morality, he held, we are not required to obey laws imposed by God or eternal moral principles or Platonic forms; instead we must understand morality as resting on a law that springs from our own practical rationality. We are "autonomous" because we legislate the moral law we are to obey. The form of the moral world results from the mind's activity.

These views were designed to protect scientific knowledge from skeptical attacks such as that of David Hume (1711–1776) and also to show how morality and responsibility could be preserved in a Newtonian deterministic universe. Kant's theoretical philosophy laid the foundations for the whole enterprise.

THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY

In the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of pure reason) Kant criticized his predecessors for not seeing that there is a deep difference between perceptual experiences and abstract concepts. The mind accepts the "percepts" that things outside it cause in it, but the mind itself imposes a framework of both time and space even on such given data. Concepts are rules by which the mind organizes percepts, and they show the mind's activity. The mind of any rational agent is equipped with several basic "categories," which are fundamental ways of organizing the data accepted through the senses. Nothing can be part of our experience, therefore, unless it is temporal and spatial and is organized by categories like those of continuing physical object and cause and effect. Percepts and concepts together yield the world as we live in it. The mind's structure explains how we can attain necessary truth in our knowledge of this world.

Kant allows that we can think of a thing as it is in itself (Ding an sich) outside experience—a noumenon—but insists that we can know only things as they are for us—as phenomena. Because percepts as well as concepts are necessary for knowledge, we cannot know anything at all about what goes beyond possible experience. Hence we cannot have answers, either positive or negative, to what were then the main questions of religion and metaphysics: Does God exist? Are we immortal? Are we free?

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

In the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785; Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals) and the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788; Critique of practical reason) Kant claimed that, in the practical realm, our desires are the counterpart to given sensory data in theoretical knowledge. But we are not causally determined to accept desires as giving us reasons to act. We are free because our will enables us to affirm or reject the claim of any desire to be a reason. Only what the will accepts is a reason to act. And the will, which Kant defines as practical reason, imposes its own forms prior to allowing a desire to count as a reason.

The forms the will imposes on desires include the master form, which is the moral law. As it applies to us, the moral law is an imperative or directive that cannot reasonably be flouted: it is the "categorical imperative." It tells us to act only on plans we could rationally allow everyone to act on. Hence morality, under the categorical imperative, would create a harmonious moral world out of desires that would naturally all too often lead us into conflict.

RELIGION

Because he denied that we could know anything that goes beyond experience, Kant seemed to his contemporaries to have eliminated all hope for a rational religion. But he said that he had destroyed knowledge to make room for faith. He tried to justify a religion safe from scientific criticism by arguing that the categorical imperative gives us practical or moral reason to believe in the essential religious tenets: God, freedom, and immortality. If few philosophers have been convinced by his moral arguments for God and immortality, many think that his account of freedom still has great appeal.

SIGNIFICANCE

Kant aimed to limit naturalism—the view that a single system of causation explains all human activity as well as all other events. To do so, he made philosophy the master discipline that sets boundaries to the cognitive claims of all other thinking. Science is the judge of beliefs about experience, but it can say nothing about claims concerning morality or religion, or (as Kant also argued) about aesthetic taste. His remarkable theory that the mind helps construct the world in which we live opened the way for the radical idealisms of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Kant's assertion of "the primacy of practical reason"—that practical reason can answer questions that theoretical reason cannot—was suggestive for the development of pragmatism. His moral philosophy has been and still is both widely used and hotly contested. Kant's work has had an influence on Western thought unsurpassed by that of any other modern philosopher.

See also Hume, David ; Moral Philosophy and Ethics ; Natural Law.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge, U.K., 1992–. Contains the best translations of Kant's works, from the early "pre-critical" writings through the Opus Postumum, and including extensive selections from student lecture notes.

Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. Vols. 1–27. Berlin, 1969–.

Secondary Sources

Guyer, Paul, ed. Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge, U.K., 1992. Contains articles covering most aspects of Kant's philosophy and a good bibliography.

Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge, U.K., 2001. Excellent scholarly bibliography.

J. B. Schneewind