Immanuel Kant: the story on HearLore

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was born Emanuel Kant on the 22nd of April 1724 in Königsberg, Prussia, into a family of Lutheran faith that would shape his rigid worldview. His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a harness-maker from Memel, while his mother, Anna Regina Reuter, hailed from Königsberg with roots in Nuremberg. The Kant household was steeped in Pietist values, emphasizing religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible, which resulted in an early education that was strict, punitive, and heavily focused on Latin and religious instruction rather than mathematics or science. Kant was the fourth of nine children, though only six reached adulthood, and he would later change the spelling of his name from Emanuel to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. His life became so famously orderly that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks, a routine so precise that it became a local legend. Despite his reputation for isolation, Kant was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author before he began his major philosophical works, and he considered marriage twice, first to a widow and then to a Westphalian girl, but waited too long both times to act. His early education at the Collegium Fridericianum prepared him for the University of Königsberg, where he enrolled at the age of 16 in 1740 and would remain for the rest of his professional life. Under the tutelage of Martin Knutzen, a rationalist familiar with British philosophy, Kant was introduced to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton and dissuaded from the theory of pre-established harmony, which Knutzen dismissed as the pillow for the lazy mind. When Kant's father suffered a stroke and died in 1746, Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748 to work as a private tutor in the surrounding towns, though he continued his scholarly research and published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, in 1749. He returned to Königsberg in August 1754, and by 1755, he received a license to lecture at the university, beginning a career that would span decades and cover a vast array of subjects from mathematics and physics to logic and metaphysics.

The Scientific Pioneer

Before he became the titan of moral philosophy, Kant was a significant contributor to the natural sciences, making discoveries that would later be recognized as foundational to modern astronomy and geology. In 1754, while contemplating a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down the Earth's spin and eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The following year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heavens, where he laid out the nebular hypothesis. Kant deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula, and correctly theorized that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant nebulae might be other galaxies, opening new horizons for astronomy by extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms. His scientific contributions were not limited to astronomy; in 1756, he published three papers on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, offering one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. Although his theory involving shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases was inaccurate, it was a significant step forward in understanding geological phenomena. Kant also laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force in his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, and he began lecturing on geography in 1757, making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography became one of his most popular lecturing topics, and in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of his lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. These scientific works, though often overshadowed by his later philosophical achievements, demonstrated his ability to apply reason to the physical world and set the stage for his eventual turn toward pure philosophy.

When and where was Immanuel Kant born?

Immanuel Kant was born Emanuel Kant on the 22nd of April 1724 in Königsberg, Prussia. He was born into a family of Lutheran faith that would shape his rigid worldview.

What scientific theories did Immanuel Kant develop?

Immanuel Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis in his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heavens, where he theorized that the Solar System formed from a large cloud of gas. He also argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down the Earth's spin and suggested that other distant nebulae might be other galaxies.

Which work awakened Immanuel Kant from his dogmatic slumber?

The Scottish philosopher David Hume awakened Immanuel Kant from a dogmatic slumber with his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature. Hume argued that people know the mind only through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions, which led Kant to question the reality of ideas such as causality and morality.

What are the three formulations of the categorical imperative by Immanuel Kant?

Immanuel Kant provides three formulations for the categorical imperative: the formula of universal law, the formula of humanity as end in itself, and the formula of autonomy. These imperatives are morally binding because of the categorical form of their maxims, and rational agents cannot opt out of them.

When did Immanuel Kant die and where is his mausoleum located?

Immanuel Kant died at Königsberg on the 12th of February 1804. His mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia, and was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and finished in 1924.

The Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber

At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, yet he was on the verge of a profound intellectual crisis that would redefine the course of Western thought. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that in his 1770 inaugural dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine sensory knowledge with reasoned knowledge, two processes that were related but had very different mechanisms. It was the Scottish philosopher David Hume who awakened Kant from a dogmatic slumber in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume, in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature, had argued that people know the mind only through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions, and that ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems by isolating himself from the world and resisting friends' attempts to bring him out of his seclusion. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason, printed by his longtime publisher Johann Friedrich Hartknoch. In this work, Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience, and drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution by proposing that worldly objects can be intuited a priori, meaning that intuition is distinct from objective reality. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style that disappointed many of his readers upon its initial publication. His former student Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism by itself, while Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder faulted the Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. The density of the work made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a tough nut to crack, obscured by all this heavy gossamer. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views, and his reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works including the 1784 essay Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? and the 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

The Copernican Revolution in Thought

The core of Kant's philosophical project was to answer the question of how synthetic judgments a priori are possible, a claim that would allow him to push back against Hume's skepticism about causation and metaphysical knowledge. Kant made a distinction between two sources of knowledge: cognitions a priori, which are independent of all experience and even of all the impressions of the senses, and cognitions a posteriori, which have their sources in experience. He also distinguished between analytic judgments, in which the predicate concept is contained in the subject concept, and synthetic judgments, in which the predicate concept is not contained in the subject concept. While philosophers such as David Hume believed that only synthetic judgments based on experience were possible, Kant argued that synthetic a priori knowledge exists, particularly in mathematics and natural science. He claimed that the statement 7 plus 5 equals 12 is a result not contained in the concepts of seven, five, and the addition operation, and he assumed the burden of providing a philosophical proof that we have a priori knowledge in mathematics, the natural sciences, and metaphysics. Kant's basic strategy was to argue that some intuitions and concepts are pure, meaning they are contributed entirely by the mind, independent of anything empirical. Knowledge generated on this basis, under certain conditions, can be synthetic a priori, a insight known as Kant's Copernican revolution. He argued that human beings only experience and know phenomenal appearances, not independent things-in-themselves, because space and time are nothing but the subjective forms of intuition that we ourselves contribute to experience. Although Kant said that space and time are transcendentally ideal, he also claimed that they are empirically real, meaning that everything that can come before us externally as an object is in both space and time, and that our internal intuitions of ourselves are in time. This doctrine of transcendental idealism was designed to distinguish his position from the subjective idealism of George Berkeley, and it laid the first stone in Kant's constructive theory of knowledge. The second half of the Critique, the transcendental dialectic, argued that many of the claims of traditional rationalist metaphysics violate the criteria he had established, and that human reason, without being moved by the mere vanity of knowing it all, inexorably pushes on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason. Kant compared reason to the light dove, in free flight cutting through the air, the resistance of which it feels, and argued that without epistemic friction, there can be no knowledge.

The Architecture of Morality

Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three major works: the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785, the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, and the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797. 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 is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity, understood as rational agency and represented through oneself as well as others, as an end in itself rather than merely as means to other ends the individual might hold. Kant is known for his theory that all moral obligation is grounded in what he calls the categorical imperative, which is derived from the concept of duty. He argues that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, and that to act on the moral law has no other motive than worthiness to be happy. Kant makes a distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives, with the former binding rational agents regardless of their desires and the latter obeyed only to satisfy contingent desires. He provides three formulations for the categorical imperative: the formula of universal law, which states that one should act only in accordance with that maxim through which one at the same time can will that it become a universal law; the formula of humanity as end in itself, which commands that one should act so that one uses humanity, as much in one's own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means; and the formula of autonomy, which presents the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law. These imperatives are morally binding because of the categorical form of their maxims, rather than contingent facts about an agent, and we cannot opt out of the categorical imperative because we cannot opt out of being rational agents. The Doctrine of Virtue, the second part of the Metaphysics of Morals, provides a very different account of ordinary moral reasoning than the one suggested by the Groundwork, being concerned with duties of virtue or ends that are at the same time duties, including our own perfection and the happiness of others.

The Politics of Peace and Law

Kant's political philosophy was centered on the idea of a world of constitutional republics and international organization, which he believed were necessary conditions for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. In his work Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for achieving this goal, including a world of constitutional republics and a federation of states. His classical republican theory was extended in the Doctrine of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, published in 1797, which addresses duties according to law and is concerned only with protecting the external freedom of individuals. Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic, describing the process as natural rather than rational. He stated that democracy in the strict sense of the word is necessarily a despotism because it establishes an executive power in which all decide for and, if need be, against one, so that all, who are nevertheless not all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom. Kant opposed direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty, and he distinguished three forms of government, namely democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, with mixed government as the most ideal form of it. He believed in republican ideals and forms of governance, and rule of law brought on by them, and his political thought can be summarized as a doctrine of the state based upon the law and of eternal peace. The basic political idea is that each person's entitlement to be his or her own master is only consistent with the entitlements of others if public legal institutions are in place, and he formulated the universal principle of right to reflect this. Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life, and the state is defined as the union of men under law.

The Controversial Legacy

Kant's legacy is complicated by his promotion of scientific racism for much of his career, although he altered his views on the subject in the last decade of his life. His cosmopolitan reputation is called into question by these views, which stood in stark contrast to his universalist moral philosophy. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory, and their exact nature remains in dispute, with some interpreters seeing him as hostile to religion in general and to Christianity in particular, while others argue that he was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief. In his book Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality, and Christianity to ethics, and he directed his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations at those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism were external ritual, superstition, and a hierarchical church order, which he saw as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's death at Königsberg on the 12th of February 1804 was marked by the utterance of the words Es ist gut, meaning It is good, before he passed away. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum, and his body was transferred to a new burial spot where his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a high and broad forehead. His mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia, and was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and finished in 1924, in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they captured the city, and into the 21st century, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. The University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings, and in 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia, a politically-charged issue due to the residents having mixed feelings about its German past.