Kant has long been my favorite philosopher, so I was excited for the chance to read the long and detailed biography by Manfred Kuehn. From a biographical perspective, Kant lived the quiet life of an academic. He was single his entire life, and did not produce any major works until his mid-50s. He started out as an adjunct professor and only became a full professor in his mid-40s. Throughout his career he spent much of his time lecturing for his students and working on his books and articles, while also enjoying a healthy social life with his close friends.
Intellectually, of course, he was a powerhouse. He produced three major critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgement. He produced a major work of moral philosophy, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. He produced an important work on the philosophy of religion, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Finally, he also produced a highly influential essay on how best to achieve world peace called Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.
His first major work was the Critique of Pure Reason. In this work, he attempts to answer the critical question of epistemology, "What can I know?" or perhaps more precisely, "What can I know a priori and in complete isolation from experience?" In this pivotal book, he rejects the idea that we can make substantive claims about the world independent of experience. In one of his key insights, he does see knowledge as having an a priori component, but this a priori component is based on the structure of our cognitive apparatus that provides an overall framework that allows us to understand our sensual experiences. These insights then into how the world works are not independent of our experiences but instead depend practically on the structure of our cognitive apparatus. This leads Kant to reject the traditional a priori proofs that were big at the time about the nature of the soul, the world as a whole, and about God, and causes him to conclude that even though we must assume that God exists in order to maintain a functioning moral framework, we cannot prove he exists.
This last theme is also taken up in his second major critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. In this book, he suggests that people can only achieve true freedom through the experience of morality, and that it is only when everyone lives morally that freedom begins to be enjoyed by society. Furthermore, happiness and morality do not always go together, so then the only way for society to achieve true freedom is to create this link between happiness and morality over the long run by assuming that God and immortality exists. It is only through these assumptions that the whole moral undertaking of society can succeed, and so therefore we must believe in their reality on this account.
In Kant's third critique, The Critique of Judgement, he spends the first part discussing the problem of aesthetics and details some ideas on the nature of beauty and the sublime, and in the second part discusses the problem of determining whether features of nature can be explained entirely through pure mechanical law. He argues that "All production in nature must be judged as being possible on mere mechanical law", and that this does not contradict the idea that "Some production of such things cannot be judged as possible on mere mechanical laws." In his view, each statement has a role in science, even though the second one should be used sparingly.
In Kant's primary work on moral philosophy, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he argues that moral behavior is not determined by consequences but instead by intentions, and a truly good will only acts in accordance with the categorical imperative which states that "I ought never to act in except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law." An act in accordance with this categorical imperative is one that is moral but only if done for the sake of duty and not for the sake of self interest. Many of our acts do appear moral but are in fact done out of self interest, and the only truly moral acts are the ones done for the sake of duty, which makes the intentions of the act the key feature of moral behavior.
Kant also produced a major book on religion called Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. In this book, he begins by acknowledging that humans are prone to evil, where even if we understand what the right thing to do is, we still often do what is wrong. This propensity however is not definitive and humans do have the capability for moral improvement. The question then is how to achieve this improvement. Kant believes it is irrelevant whether the temptation to do evil is within us or without us, and that the stories about Jesus help us understand our moral predicament but do not represent anything real outside of the moral lessons. Kant then goes on to address the question of the possibility for social progress, and the creation of an ideal society where human beings are motivated not by coercion from the state but by their own sense of virtue. In this sense, he believes that this can be achieved by a community motivated by a faith in God, but only in a purely moral sense and not based on the historical, revealed, or culturally based features of the church. In his view, it is this rationally based moral component of religious belief that is most important and that any service to God over and above "good life conduct" is "mere religious delusion and counterfeit service to God." This direct attack on the traditional religious functions of the church got Kant in trouble with the religiously oriented government to the point that he was eventually forced to refrain from commenting on religious matters entirely.
In a smaller essay, Kant described the possibility of achieving perpetual peace in world affairs in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Most famously, he argues that perpetual peace requires a republican or representative form of government that is consistent in many ways with what we know as democratic rule today. He also proposes that states follow certain rules that are supposed to regulate international relations like there should be no peace treaty with a secret reservation of material for another war and that states are not the kinds of things that can be acquired by other states. This article is still taught today as one of the early examples of arguments in favor of the notion that world peace can be achieved by making changes to the domestic political structures of countries around the world.
Kant then was extremely intellectually ambitious and made several tremendous contributions to philosophy that still resonate hundreds of years later. He was an enlightenment philosopher that believed reason could improve the lives of people over time. He greatly enhanced our understanding of epistemology by refuting the idea that reason separate from experience could inform us about how the world actually worked. He emphasized the importance of intentions in morality and how we really should act as if everything we did was actually a universal law. He emphasized the role of reason in religion and how it was morality that made religion important and not religion that made morality important. Finally, he set out a path about how world peace could be achieved over time by making reforms to our domestic political institutions.
By making these intellectual breakthroughs he laid out a path for social progress to follow, and many of these goals, dreams, and ideals he described over 200 years ago are now on their way to being achieved. For this he deserves to be celebrated, and thankfully he is still taught in colleges across the world today.
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