Immanuel Kant

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Immanuel Kant

1724-1804

Idealist philosopher

Education and Career. Few thinkers have exerted so great an influence on the modern world as Immanuel Kant, a child of the Enlightenment who challenged the limits of pure reason. The son of a pietistic craftsman, Kant was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). In school he studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, as well as mathematics and theology. At sixteen he entered the University of Konigsberg, where he studied for seven years, developing his interests in science and philosophy. Following the death of his father in 1746, financial hardship forced him to leave the university without earning a degree. He found employment as a private tutor in the family of a pastor in the Reformed Church and in his spare time continued to study and work on a dissertation. At age thirty-one, he returned to the university, successfully defended his dissertation, and was awarded his degree. For the next fifteen years, he worked in the library and taught science and mathematics as an unsalaried lecturer who was paid for his services directly by his students. In 1770, at the age of forty-six, he was appointed to a regular chair of logic and metaphysics at the University of Konigsberg, where he spent the next twenty-seven years teaching and writing his most significant philosophical works. Kant was a short, frail man with a deformed right shoulder, but he experienced good health until his later years. After retiring from his teaching duties in 1797, he continued to live and to write in Konigsberg, until his death in 1804.

Intellectual Influences. In addition to the intellectual influences of his pietistic religious up bringing, the young Kant was affected by, but remained largely unimpressed with, the popular philosophies of his day: Cartesian Rationalism and Empiricism. Before reading Empiricist David Hume (1711-1776), Kant had accepted the prevailing eighteenth-century philosophies that embraced sense experience as the basis of metaphysical truth and asserted the ability of the rational mind to deduce the known from the unknown. After discovering Hume’s criticisms of these Rationalist ideas, however, Kant announced that he was awakened from his “dogmatic slumber.” If Hume were correct, he decided, the study of metaphysics—the division of philosophy concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being—was a worthless venture. Kant therefore devoted the remainder of his career to building a critical philosophy that could counter Hume’s skeptical arguments and restore the validity of metaphysical reasoning. In 1781 Kant published his influential Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), in which he addressed “What can be known?”—the fundamental question of epistemology, the philosophical study of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge. Kant called this exploration into human knowledge a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy because it offered a radically different approach to the accepted way of dealing with sense data. According to Kant, one must no longer assume that “knowledge must conform to objects” instead, he argued, “objects must conform to our knowledge.” Kant meant that the starting point of knowledge is not external objects internally known to humans by sense data received passively by the mind; rather, the starting point is the human mind, which actively imprints pure forms (categories) on the sense data and thus makes sense of what one knows as objects.

Kantian “Structures” and “Categories.” Like the Empiricists before him, Kant rejected the Cartesian concept of innate ideas. Yet, unlike the Empiricists, who considered the newborn mind a “blank slate” that achieved all its knowledge through the senses, Kant insisted there are two universal structures of the mind (time and space) and twelve categories (including such concepts as causality and existence) that are not perceived via the senses. The mind uses these structures and categories to organize the data received by the senses. Without these mental concepts, Kant argued, nothing is thinkable: sense data without the universal structures of time and space and without categories such as causality and existence are chaotic and unintelligible noise. Thus, Kant drew a distinction between the reality a person experiences and reality itself. Human knowledge does not involve knowing the essence of things; rather it involves knowing things as one’s mind can grasp them. Insisting that there was no such thing as pure objective knowledge, Kant rejected the objective certainty of the Cartesians and Empiricists as mere illusions.

Religious Implications. The religious ramifications of this argument were profound. Since existence cannot be derived from experience but is instead a necessary, yet undemonstrable, category of the mind, there is no way to prove the existence of God or the human soul. Similarly, the mind cannot really conceive of the concept of eternity (the absence of time) because the concept of time is one of the universal structures of the human mind. In these statements Kant was not denying the existence of God, the soul, or immortality; he was denying that they could be known through reason. Consequently, he wrote, the traditional, rational arguments of theology for the existence of God should not be viewed as conclusive proofs but rather as speculative reasoning. Although Kant has often been suspected of agnosticism, this conclusion is not validated in his writings. In the preface to the second, 1787 edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant stated that he “found it necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith.” That is, he demolished the arguments for the proof of the existence of God, not to destroy belief in God but to make belief possible. The same logic that demonstrates the inability of reason to prove God’s existence also proves the invalidity of the counterassertion that God does not exist. To Kant, reason did not lead to atheism.

Critique of Practical Reason. In a response to the criticisms directed at his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant wrote Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788; Critique of Practical Reason), a work that addressed not the epistemological question “What can we know?” but the ethical question “What ought we to do?” Kant argued that while pure reason cannot prove God’s existence, the idea of God is necessary in order to systematize knowledge. Kant insisted that the idea of God is not invented; instead it comes to all rational beings through practical reason, not pure reason. To Kant, practical reason is that sense of moral obligation that all humans are capable of feeling. Kant calls this inner voice of conscience the “categorical imperative.” By categorical he meant “universal” (it applies to all humanity), and imperative means “nonoptional command.” Kant argued that because humans can choose to obey the categorical imperative, they are free beings; that since the highest perfection that can be attained in this life is only partial, immortality must exist; and that since the idea of moral law is within all rational beings, a lawgiver who embodies the perfection implied by that moral law must exist. God is that morally perfected lawgiver. Hence, Kant insisted that the moral nature of humanity testifies to the existence of a divine reality, immortality, and human freedom. Kant’s ethical theory rests on three insights. 1) An action has moral worth if it is done for the sake of duty. That is, one should act not for self-gain or even for altruistic reasons such as pity or compassion; one should act because it is the right thing to do and pay no regard to the consequences of one’s action. 2) An action is morally correct if it is an appropriate action for all humans at all times. That is, what is fair for one is fair for all because moral law applies universally without exceptions. 3) Humans should act morally toward other humans, respecting them as autonomous beings who deserve the right to think and act for themselves and never treating another person as a means to an end.

Kant’s Legacy. Kant influenced modern thought in a variety of ways. His works fostered the development of the tradition known as philosophical Idealism, which was advanced by Johann Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Kant also provided insights that informed the theological thinking of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Moreover, his argument that there is no purely objective knowledg and that one has to deal with the world not as it is but as it appears has led to many modern theories in fields ranging from the physical sciences to psychology and literary studies.