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Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World
By Stephen Trombley Atlantic Books Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Stephen Trombley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84887-823-5
CHAPTER 1
Immanuel Kant
22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804
German philosopher who is the central figure in modern thought; his critical philosophy synthesized religious belief and human autonomy and influenced all areas of philosophical investigation, from mathematics to aesthetics.
During the academic year 1927–8 the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University under the title Process and Reality. In those lectures he famously declared: 'The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.' A more accurate characterization of modern European philosophy might be that it consists of a series of footnotes to Kant. There is no area of modern philosophy – from mathematical logic to phenomenology – that Kant does not touch. All who follow in his footsteps must, at some turn in their careers, define themselves as for or against Kantian positions. Modern thought begins with Kant. If Plato introduced the eternal themes of philosophical inquiry and Aristotle (384–322 BC) devised the first philosophical system, Kant built the most comprehensive and detailed system of philosophy since the scientific revolution. His work poses questions that continue to grip the imaginations of philosophers today. His influence is felt in every area of philosophy and spills over into other disciplines as diverse as law and astronomy.
Man's coming of age
In 1784 Kant addressed the issue of God and post-Enlightenment man in his essay 'An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' In it he asked, what is the present role of church and state authority in relation to individual freedom; what role should religious and secular authorities play in the lives of citizens? In his reply, Kant gave a succinct summary of his highly complex and systematic philosophy, which is ultimately concerned with the question of human freedom: 'Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.' He went on to summarize his entire philosophy of knowledge and freedom thus: 'Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians.'
Knowledge and freedom
The problems of knowledge and freedom go hand in hand for Kant. They also raised the most profound philosophical questions for him: if, through knowledge, we discover rules or laws that govern the natural world, how can man be free – are man's actions not governed by the rules of cause and effect? Might they even be predetermined? In working through these questions, Kant published three major treatises: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; he made important revisions for the second edition of 1787), Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of Judgement (1790).
In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant attempts to provide a foundation for the laws of science, while at the same time establishing the human subject as a rational agent characterized by free will. In the Critique of Practical Reason he argues that man's free will, though it can be proven theoretically, only actually follows from our own consciousness of it emanating from within ourselves. It is our consciousness that binds us to moral law, and our knowledge of moral law is not imposed from outside by God or any other agent. In the Critique of Judgement Kant concerns himself with aesthetic judgements and teleological questions, such as 'What is the purpose of natural organisms or systems?' In doing so, he leaves the door open for theological and ethical inquiry. For instance, what role does God play in the world?
Any one of these three treatises would be considered a lifetime's achievement for a philosopher, but Kant published many more titles, ranging from early treatises on the natural sciences (particularly astronomy) to works on the philosophy of history and aesthetics.
Kant's 'Copernican turn'
Kant was born in modest circumstances in Königsberg, East Prussia, but nevertheless had a very good education prior to entering the university there at the age of sixteen. By then Kant had absorbed the key texts of Greek philosophy, as well as Latin history and poetry for amusement. His was a strict Pietist upbringing, and while the central element of his philosophical legacy was to make man the centre of our world, he still reserved a place for God in man's world.
Kant's contribution to Western thought was the philosophical equivalent of Nicolaus Copernicus's demonstration that the sun, not the Earth, is the centre of our solar system. Kant's assertion that man was the maker of his world was as shocking to his contemporaries as the heliocentric theory was to Copernicus's, and it is often referred to as his 'Copernican turn'. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued that space, time and causal relations have no existence apart from our minds which perceive them.
Kant's insistence on the role of man in making his own world and on self-reliance rather than the consolations of religion may be a response to the early deaths of his mother (when he was thirteen) and his father (when he was twenty-two). Kant's mother Regina had encouraged his curiosity, exploring the world on long walks with him and explaining things to the best of her ability. Kant told his student and friend Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann (1767–1843): 'I will never forget my mother, for she implanted and nurtured in me the first germ of goodness; she opened my heart to the impressions of nature; she awakened and furthered my concepts, and her doctrines have had a continual and beneficial influence in my life'. Perhaps Kant's belief in man as the maker of his world and his sense of self-reliance encouraged in him the quality of persistence. He constantly modified and updated his thinking, so that each of the three Critiques is a further development of his thought.
After graduating from the University of Königsberg, where he studied philosophy and physics, Kant worked as a private tutor. He did not obtain a university teaching post until he was thirty-one, and then taught an astonishing range and number of courses, including mineralogy, anthropology, moral philosophy, natural law, geography, natural theology, logic, pedagogy, mathematics, physics and metaphysics. He only did this because he was in straightened circumstances and needed the money: under the system that then prevailed, university teachers were paid by the number of students that subscribed to their lectures. He was only appointed to a professorship (in logic and metaphysics) in 1770, when he was forty-one.
War and poverty
In the early 1760s Königsberg was under Russian occupation during the Seven Years' War. Life was tough economically and to make ends meet Kant took on a second job as a sub-librarian of the natural history collection in the Royal Library. He also took in lodgers and was forced to sell books from his library to make ends meet. But as the world changed around him, Kant remained a man of habit and reliability. His schedule of daily walks, said the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), was so reliable that the residents of Königsberg set their clocks by him.
The transcendental ego
Despite the fact that Kant included in the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason (1787) a chapter entitled 'The Refutation of Idealism', the central concept of his philosophy remains the doctrine of transcendental idealism. By this Kant does not mean idealism in the sense of George Berkeley (1685–1753), who did not believe that matter exists – Berkeley's theory was famously criticized by Samuel Johnson (1709–84), who kicked a stone and exclaimed: 'I refute it thus!' Nor does Kant follow René Descartes' (1596–1650) brand of problematic idealism, which argues that the only existence we can prove by immediate experience is our own.
Kant argues that the transcendental ego (his concept of the human self) imposes categories upon sense impressions and thus constructs knowledge of them. He summarized this position in his last work, the Opus Postumum (1804), by saying that man 'creates the elements of knowledge of the world himself, a priori, from which he, as, at the same time, an inhabitant of the world, constructs a world-vision in the idea'. What this means, in essence, is that the elements of knowledge, the categories by which we understand the world, exist a priori, which is to say, without reference to experience. A priori knowledge is in us, as a given. So, Kant argues in the Critique of Pure Reason, 'We are perfectly justified in maintaining that only what is within ourselves can be immediately and directly perceived, and that only my own existence can be the object of a mere perception.'
As a consequence of this, 'the existence of a real object outside me can never be given immediately and directly in perception, but can only be added in thought to the perception, which is a modification of the internal sense, and thus inferred as its external cause.' Kant argues that we never actually perceive external things, but only infer their existence, although external objects are the proximate cause of the inference of their existence. So, Kant's transcendental idealism differs from that of Berkeley or Descartes. It is also, Kant reminds his critics, not an absurd, contrarian worldview. 'It must not be supposed,' he writes in the Critique of Pure Reason, 'that an idealist is someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses; all he does is to deny that they are known by immediate and direct perception.'
Categorical imperative
Kant's concern with questions of knowledge and freedom naturally led him to ethics and the ultimate question: 'What is the right thing to do?' Kant rejected the utilitarian ethics of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which hold that actions resulting in the greatest amount of happiness (Bentham's 'hedonistic calculus') for the largest number of people are good actions. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Kant argued against utilitarianism by proposing that if we allow our behaviour to be governed by utilitarian motives, then we might value other people in the light of what 'good' they can be used for – that is to say, treating them as means to an end, rather than ends in themselves. He also objected to the doctrine of moral absolutism, which holds that there are absolute standards of conduct resulting in 'right' and 'wrong' behaviour, regardless of context. Kant's reply to utilitarianism and moral absolutism was to develop the categorical imperative, a rule by which man should act ethically: 'Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.' The categorical imperative is well illustrated by the famous 'is/ought' distinction in ethics. For Kant, our ethical behaviour ('ought') should not necessarily follow from a particular state of affairs ('is'). Our sense of ethical duty should never include what is impossible for us to do; in this way, 'ought' implies 'can'. Kant's deontological ethics are a can-do affair: if I ought to do such-and-such, then it is logically possible for me to do it; and therefore, I can do it.
Kant as scientist
If Kant had never written his three great treatises, nor any of his other important works, such as the 'Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics' (1783), Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) or Metaphysics of Morals (1797), he would have found a place in the history of science for his development of the Kant-Laplace theory to describe the formation of the universe. One only mentions this to make the point that Kant's influence is to be felt everywhere in modern thought. In his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755) he theorized that our solar system formed as a result of a rotating nebula, whose gravitational force compressed it into a spinning disk, throwing off the Sun and the planets. Kant's theory was largely ignored in his lifetime. Then in 1796 the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) developed a similar theory, quite independently of Kant's work. Later scientists, noticing Kant's precedent, called it the Kant-Laplace hypothesis. It is the basis for the generally accepted nebular hypothesis that scientists use today to explain the formation of the solar system. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant said: 'Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.' These words are carved on his tombstone.
Kant's legacy
Kant represents the culmination, the perfection, of the Enlightenment. In Kant all traces of religious, medieval thinking are cast aside and man is placed at the forefront of his own situation. His freedom extends from his perception of himself as an autonomous agent; and from this understanding flows his role as a political actor and ethical being. With his theory of transcendental idealism Kant demonstrated how man makes his world; how knowledge and experience do not exist apart from him, but by and through him. His importance and influence cannot be overestimated.
Experience is without doubt the first product that our understanding brings forth ... Nevertheless it is far from the only field to which our understanding can be restricted. It tells us, to be sure, what is, but never that it must necessarily be thus and not otherwise. For that very reason it gives us no true universality, and reason, which is so desirous of this kind of cognitions, is more stimulated than satisfied by it. Now such universal cognitions, which at the same time have the character of inner necessity, must be clear and certain for themselves, independently of experience, hence one calls them a priori cognitions: whereas that which is merely borrowed from experience is, as it is put, cognized only a posteriori, or empirically.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)
(trans. Paul Guyer, 1998)
Ancient philosophy adopted an entirely inappropriate standpoint towards the human being in the world, for it made it into a machine in it, which as such had to be entirely dependent on the world or on external things and circumstances; it thus made the human being into an all but merely passive part of the world. Now the critique of reason has appeared and determined the human being to a thoroughly active place in the world. The human being itself is the original creator of all its representations and concepts and ought to be the sole author of all its actions.
Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), trans.
Mary J. Gregor, 1992
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World by Stephen Trombley. Copyright © 2012 Stephen Trombley. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
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