Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant
Born	22 April 1724 Königsberg, Prussia
Died	12 February 1804 Königsberg, East Prussia
School tradition	Idealism Empiricism
Nationality	German

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher, widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern European history. He is the central figure of German classical idealist philosophy, a current that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and that expressed, in the realm of abstract thought, the contradictory social position of the German bourgeoisie during a period when it was economically weak, politically fragmented, and unwilling to follow the path of revolutionary rupture that had been taken by the French bourgeoisie in 1789. Engels criticized Kant's concept of a "thing-in-itself" which had no internal contradictions. However, Kant's work Perpetual Peace criticized British and French slavery and shared some views with the Jacobins.

Kant proposed philosophical dualism and tried to unite rationalism and empiricism by saying the material and ideal worlds both exist independently of each other. He said that humans can never fully understand the material world because of their subjective viewpoint and can only investigate the world in terms of quantity, quality, necessity, and other metaphysical categories.

Biography

Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Königsberg, a city in the duchy of Prussia (today Kaliningrad, in the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia). He came from a modest craftsman's family. His father was a harness-maker, and the household was shaped by a strict Protestant piety of the Pietist variety, which emphasized personal conscience, inner moral discipline, and a sense of duty. These early influences left a lasting mark on Kant's ethical thinking.

Kant attended the Collegium Fridericianum, a Pietist school, from the age of eight, and in 1740 enrolled at the University of Königsberg (the Albertina). He studied philosophy, mathematics, natural science, and theology. After graduating in 1745, he was unable to immediately secure a university post and spent nearly a decade working as a private tutor in the households of local gentry and landowners which was a common fate for educated men of modest background in the Germany of his day.

In 1755, Kant returned to the university and defended two dissertations that qualified him as a Privatdozent, an unsalaried lecturer who earned his living from student fees. One of these, titled A New Explanation of the Fundamental Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge, laid some early groundwork for the philosophical problems he would later pursue. During the long wait for a paid professorial chair, Kant also served as an assistant librarian at the Royal Palace Library. This patient, unrewarded period of intellectual labor lasted fifteen years.

In 1770, Kant at last defended his inaugural dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Intelligible and Sensible World, and was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg, a post he held until 1797. His teaching was broad: he lectured on metaphysics and logic, mathematics, mechanics, physics, physical geography, anthropology, and the general history of nature. He was reportedly a popular and lively instructor in his younger years. He never married and, except for a brief early period as a tutor, never left the region of Königsberg. He died there on February 12, 1804.

Teachings

Unlike France and England, Germany had no unified national state in the eighteenth century. It was a patchwork of hundreds of small principalities, duchies, and church territories, still largely governed by feudal relations and dominated by the landowning Junker class. The bourgeoisie was weak, commercially underdeveloped, and politically timid. It had neither the social weight nor the political courage to mount the kind of revolutionary challenge to the old order that the French bourgeoisie launched in 1789.

While the French Enlightenment in the work of Diderot, Holbach, Helvétius, and others had developed a thoroughgoing materialism, a theory of knowledge grounded in sensory experience, a secular ethics of human interest and well-being, and a barely concealed atheism, the German bourgeoisie could not adopt such an openly revolutionary worldview. It needed a philosophy that would express its intellectual aspirations without directly confronting the feudal and religious powers on which it still partly depended. The result, in the realm of philosophy, was idealism, a retreat from the radical conclusions of materialism into a more cautious, compromise-laden system.

Kant's philosophy is precisely this. As Lenin described it, Kant's system is fundamentally "a reconciliation of materialism with idealism, a compromise between the two, a combination of heterogeneous, opposing philosophical trends in a single system" - Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, vol. 14, p. 184.

On one hand, Kant accepts that something external to us, the "thing-in-itself" (Ding an sich), exists and that it produces impressions on our senses. This is a concession to materialism. On the other side, he insists that this thing-in-itself is forever unknowable, lying beyond the reach of human reason, a conclusion that opens the door to idealism, fideism, and religious faith. N. G. Chernyshevsky stated: Kant invented his "forms" in order to defend free will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God against the materialists against Diderot and his circle.

Natural Science

Scholars conventionally divide Kant's intellectual career into two major phases. The first period runs from the beginning of his career to approximately the end of the 1760s. During this time, Kant was principally occupied with questions of natural science, cosmogony, and physical theory. His interests were largely materialistic and empirical in orientation. The dominant influence on his scientific thinking was Newton's mechanics.

In his early career, Kant made genuine contributions to natural science. In 1754 he published a short work on the question of tidal friction specifically, whether the gravitational interaction between the Moon and the Earth might be slowing the Earth's rotation. He argued that it could, and that this had observable effects on the length of the day. This was a scientifically productive idea, anticipating by more than a century the later confirmation of tidal deceleration.

The following year, 1755, Kant published his most important scientific work: Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens) In this work, he proposed a cosmogonic hypothesis. He argued that the solar system had not been created in its present form but had developed historically from an original diffuse mass of matter. Under the influence of attractive and repulsive forces derived from Newton's physics this primordial mass had begun to rotate, condensed into whirling clumps, and heated by friction until it gave rise to the Sun, the planets, and their satellites. He even speculated about the existence of other solar systems throughout the universe and about the eventual destruction and rebirth of cosmic systems over vast stretches of time.

He stated that God was at the beginning of the process, arguing that the divine hand had originally endowed matter with its forces and it is impossible to explain the emergence of "even one blade of grass or caterpillar" through purely natural physical causes.

This was an important contribution to human knowledge. Engels noted that Kant's historical approach to the origin of the solar system breached the previously dominant metaphysical view of nature, the idea of a static, created cosmos whose present arrangement was fixed from the beginning. By introducing history and development into cosmology, Kant anticipated what would later become a cornerstone of dialectical materialism: the understanding of nature as a process.

Fifty years after Kant's work, the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace independently developed a similar hypothesis and provided it with a more rigorous mathematical foundation. The combined theory became known as the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis, and it remained the dominant theory of solar system formation well into the twentieth century, when more sophisticated versions of the same basic framework,  gravitational collapse and accretion from a rotating gas-and-dust cloud continued to inform cosmological research.

Critical Philosophy

From 1770 onward, Kant turned to what he called his "critical" philosophy, a sustained attempt to define the powers and limits of human reason. This project produced his three major works: the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment. He also published Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals as shorter companion works.

Kant accepts that all knowledge begins with sensory experience. Things outside us, the things-in-themselves affect our sense organs and produce sensations in us.. Kant then argues that the raw material of sensation is not itself knowledge. For experience to become genuine knowledge, it must be organized and structured by the mind itself. The mind imposes on raw sensation a set of forms and categories space, time, causality, substance, and others that are not derived from experience but are built into the structure of human understanding before experience begins. These are the "a priori" (prior to experience) forms and categories.

"When Kant assumes that something outside us, a thing-in-itself, corresponds to our ideas, he is a materialist. When he declares this thing-in-itself to be unknowable, transcendental, other-sided, he is an idealist."

— Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

Kant's moral philosophy is set out most fully in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. Its central concept is the "categorical imperative"  a principle that Kant believes underlies all genuine moral obligation and takes several related formulations, the most famous of which is: ‘’Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’’

An action has moral worth not because it produces good outcomes but because it is done out of pure duty, in accordance with reason alone, without any admixture of desire, interest, or emotion. The demand for pure duty and good will, divorced from any connection to human need, interest, or social life.

Kant argues that aesthetic judgments about beauty are neither purely subjective nor purely objective but occupy a middle ground: they claim universal assent while remaining independent of any concept or interest. The experience of beauty, for Kant, involves a free play of the imagination and the understanding that produces a kind of disinterested pleasure. Aesthetics is centered on form and disinterested contemplation rather than the content of art or its connection to social life stands in contrast to the "rudiments of realistic aesthetics" that were developing among the French materialists.

Immanuel Kant’s philosophy reflects that the German bourgeoisie of the late eighteenth century was caught between its recognition of the power of natural science and its need to preserve religion as a social glue and a defense against the more radical conclusions of Enlightenment thought. Kant gave them exactly what they needed: a philosophy that validated scientific inquiry within a carefully bounded domain, while simultaneously walling off a domain of faith and practical reason that science could never touch.

"I had to limit the scope of knowledge, in order to make room for faith." - Immanuel Kant, the Critique of Pure Reason.

Works

• New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (1755)

• Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755)

• The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763)

• Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764)

• Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766)

• The Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (1770)

• Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2nd ed. 1787)

• Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783)

• Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785)

• Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

• Critique of Judgment (1790)

• Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793)

• Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)

• The Metaphysics of Morals (1797)