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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) | |
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German philosopher, professor of logic and metaphysics, whose masterpiece, The Critique of Pure Reason, appeared in 1781 and then in a substantially revised edition in 1787. The work was an answer to Descartes's skepticism about knowledge. Kant's aim was to make philosophy, for the first time, truly scientific, but his jargon made his central writings nearly impossible for the uninitiated to understand. Even professional philosophers have had problems with Kant. A.J. Ayer (1910-1989), the writer of Language, Truth and Logic, tells that he read The Critique on a ship bound for the Gold Coast. After a sunstroke, he fully grasped Kant's work in a state of epiphany, but once he had recovered he had lost the insight. "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." (from Citique of Practical Reason, 1799) Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg (Kaliningrad), which then was the eastern part of Prussia. His father was a poor but respected saddler, whose strict pietistic Protestantism made a lasting impression upon Kant. He attended the Collegium Fridericianum, and at the age of 16 Kant entered the University of Köningsberg. He studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics, and attended lectures in theology. When his father died in 1746, Kant's financial situation became difficult. His mother had died nine years earlier. From 1747 to 1754 he served as a private tutor in various provincial households. He was penniless but found much time for scientific research. In 1755 appeared his General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens, which argued that the system of heavenly bodies could have developed from an unformed nebula. Kant received his doctor's degree for the work On Fire, and was appointed a lecturer at the university. Kant taught logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, natural theology, anthropology, as well as mathematics, physics, and physical geography. In 1756 he wrote on the earthquake in Lisbon, which his great French contemporary Voltaire dealt in the satirical story Candide (1759). After Kant had unsuccessfully applied in 1758 for professorship, he wrote an essay on optimism. In 1766 he worked as an assistant-librarian in the royal palace. He declined the offers of professorship at the universities of Erlangen and Jena, and eventually in 1770 Kant was appointed professor of logic and metaphysics at Köningsberg. His inaugural dissertation was On the Forms and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World. Kant was a dean of the faculties six times and rector of the university twice before retiring. During this period he published Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790). Outside the walls of the university Rousseau published Confessions (1781), Goethe wrote Faust, and the French Revolution abolished absolute monarchy. Kant never left his home town to see the world outside his study. He believed in his own rational thinking, and did not consider traveling necessary to solve the problems of philosophy. However, Kant was not withdrawn until late in life. He enjoyed conversation and was very interested in the accounts of travellers. His lectures on geography and anthropology were popular. According to an anecdote, Kant's life habits were so regular, that people used to set their clocks by him as the philosopher passed their houses on his daily walk - the only time when the schedule changed was when Kant read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, and forgot the walk. Kant held his last lecture in 1796. He died on February 12, 1804. Kant's output was large but he produced his most important works, the three Critiques, late in life. His attempts to establish an objective basis for aesthetic judgments have influenced later art criticism. In Critique of Judgment he argued that aesthetic judgments do not depend on any property - such as beauty - of the object. Kant's famous contribution to moral philosophy is the principle "act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should to become a universal law." In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant wanted to prove, that although our knowledge is derived from experience, it is possible to have knowledge of objects in advance of experience. The key question is how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? An a priori knowledge is knowledge which is independent of all experience. A priori proposition is one that can be known to be true, or false, without reference to experience, except so far as experience is necessary for understanding its terms. - An analytic truth can be deduced from the definition of its terms, and a synthetic truth cannot be so deduced. Such propositions as 'All bodies are extended in space' or 'All husbands are male' are analytical, because the ideas of extension and maleness are already contained in those of 'body' and 'male'. Analytical propositions are not dependent on experience for their validations; if true they are necessary true a priori. On the other hand, 'Some bodies are heavy' is synthetic, since the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in the subject idea. Synthetic propositions are always contingent; any such proposition is capable of being true or false. Its truth could be known only a posteriori, after it had received validation from experience. An a posteriori knowledge is derived from experience. A posteriori preposition can be known to be true, or false, only by reference to how, as a matter of contingent fact, things have been, are, or will be. 'Every change has a cause', expresses a judgment which is strictly necessary and universal. 'All bodies are heavy' is simply a generalization to which no exception have been observed. Accoding to Hume, all significant propositions must be either (i) synthetic and a posteriori or (ii) analytic and a priori. But Kant stated that there is a third category, namely synthetic a priori. Kant firmly believed that there is an independent reality outside the world of all possible experience, calling this the world of the noumenal, the world of things as they are in themselves, and of reality as it is in itself. The world of phenomena was the world of things as they appears to us - the directly known world of actual experience. Kant saw that there are two sources of human knowledge: sensibility and understanding. He suggested, that the way in which we perceive, identify, and reflect upon objects might have itself a form or structure which in some ways moulds or contributes to our experience. According to Kant, all that our senses and understanding contribute to knowledge is preconditioned by the 'forms of our sensibility' (space and time) and by the 'categories of our understanding' that are not learned from experience, but enable us to make sense of our experience. Among them are space, time, quantity, quality, relation, modality, and their subforms. These concepts are essential if any creature is going to be able to make judgments about his experience. The twelve categories form a sort of minimum conceptual apparatus for making sense of the world. We experience objects though the mental, sensory and other apparatus that we have for doing so. What we experience can come to us wholly and solely in terms of the forms and modes and categories mediated by that apparatus. What appear to us as the objects of our experience are being produced for us by our experiencing apparatus, we cannot apprehend objects without the intermediacy of our sensory and mental apparatus. But we don't synthesize reality, make it up, it exists independently of us, and because reality exists independently of all possible experience it remains permanently hidden. Thus Kant's conclusion was, that cognition is restricted to the realm of phenomena. We can know nothing which cannot be given through our senses. Within these limitations we may have valid empirical knowledge, and a cognition a priori of the universal conditions which make nature itself and a science of nature possible. Kant believed that Newton had proved beyond any possibility of doubt, that what happens within this world is governed entirely by scientific laws. But without experience there can be no empirical world. "What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exists in themselves, but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them - a mode which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being, though, certainly, by every human being. With this alone have we any concern." (from Critique of Pure Reason) Especially Kant's philosophy of religion arose strong reaction, but the younger generation saw Kant as their intellectual leader. Jena soon became the center on Kantian idealism, with such representatives as Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer wrote: "Kant's teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it. This change is so great that it may be regarded as an intellectual rebirth. It alone is capable of really moving the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect... In consequence of this, the mind undergoes a fundamental undeceiving, and thereafter looks at things in another light." From Schopenhauer Kant's influence continued to Nietzsche and through him to modern existentialism; another line of succession went to Wittgenstein and through him to modern analytic philosophy. Third line goes to science-based rationalism and Popper, who once remarked: "It was through Schopenhauer that I understood Kant." For further reading: The Categorical Imperative by H.J. Paton (1947); Kantian Ethics by A.E. Teale (1951); Kant's Theory of Knowlwdge by G. Bird (1962); The Bounds of Sense by P.F. Strawson (1966); Kant's Analytic by J. Bennett (1966); by P.M.S. Hacker (1972); Kant's Dialectic by J. Bennett (1974); Kant by R. Walker (1979); Kant's Theory of Mind by K. Ameriks (1982): Kant's Transcendental Idealaism by H. Allison (1983); The Coherence of Kant's Doctrine of Freedom by Bernard Carnois (1987); A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by Norman Kemp Smith (1991); The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. by Paul Guyer (1992); The Genesis of Kant's Citique of Judgment by John H. Zammito (1992); Essays on Kant's Political Philosophy by Howard Lloyd Williams (1992); Cognition and Eros by Robin May Schott (1993); The Embodiment of Reason by Susan Meld Shell (1996); A Commentary of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason by Lewis White Beck (1996); Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. by Robin May Schott (1997); Agent-Centered Morality: An Aristotelian Alternative to Kantian Internalism by George W. Harris (1999); The Categorical Imperative by Herbert J. Paton (1999) - In Finnish: Kantilta on suomeksi julkaistu mm. Siveysopilliset pääteokset. - See also: Arthur Schopenhauer, Emanuel Swedenborg, Dashiell Hammett Selected works:
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