“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.”
- Immanuel Kant
Pause for a second and let that
quote wash across your synapses.
Trying to find ways to
reconcile ourselves
to our need for
self-transcendence
and our duty for moral reasoning
is at the epicenter of the
thinking mind’s existential angst.
Imanuel Kant possessed such a mind.
His ideas were so
progressive and potent
that he is considered a very central
figure in modern philosophy.
He is the philosopher that preceded
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
and produced an incredibly robust
set of doctrines and theories
that allowed the two to get inspired
and formulate their own ideas.
His interests were multifarious
and his philosophical repertoire
included areas like empiricism,
rationalism, reason, morality,
metaphysics, and aesthetics.
He was a very curious mind
that attempted to make sense
of the world around him
in the most plausible way.
People like Kant were rare.
Especially during the
times wherein he existed.
Back then religion was a strong
and dogmatic societal force,
enlightenment started to
pose a threat to morality,
and science was still
at an embryonic stage.
Yet, he considered it an
intellectual and moral obligation
to occupy himself with the big
questions of the human condition.
From reason and morality to
metaphysics and aesthetics,
the core of his belief system was the
fundamental idea of human autonomy
- How to unshackle ourselves from
our delusions and limitations,
cultivate self-awareness
and self-ownership
and eventually allow
humanity to move forward
with less distress and less conflict.
It takes a lot of
courage and audacity
to even scratch the
surface of such topics.
Kant not only scratched the
surface, but he “eroded” it
and went deeper than almost anyone.
Immanuel Kant was born April 22,
1724 in Königsberg, Prussia.
Today Königsberg has been renamed
Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.
His family was artisans of modest
means but never destitute.
As a child, Kant was sent to a
deeply religious Lutheran school
where he was subjected to an
intense soul-searching regime
that included the study of the Bible,
prayer, immersion in
religious practices,
and reliance on divine grace.
He reacted strongly against this
dogmatic and emotional approach
to personal development
and this was portrayed
throughout his life
via his extensive promulgation
of reason and human autonomy.
After school, he attended college
at the University of Königsberg,
known as the Albertina.
There, his curriculum
encompassed various courses
like mathematics, physics,
logic, ethics, and natural law.
He was exposed to various
philosophers and scientists
but his main influences were Wolff,
Leibniz, Newton, Aristotle,
Locke, and Hume.
Following his graduation, he worked
as a personal tutor for children,
to make ends meet,
and it wasn’t until 1754,
at the age of 30,
that he started to
lecture in Albertina.
Kant represents the archetype
of the quintessential scholar.
He was an avid reader
and an avid writer.
His devotion to his intellectual
work was so intense
that he spent 16 years teaching
as an unsalaried lecturer
and working since 1766 as a
sublibrarian to supplement his income.
Throughout this time he wrote numerous
books and essays on various topics,
but the year that stigmatized
his life was the year 1781
when he published his magnus opus,
the “Critique of Pure Reason.”
Kant spent many years in isolation
to finish this groundbreaking work.
The book wasn’t really recognized
upon its initial publication.
It was dense, difficult to understand
and full of contradictions.
But Kant worked hard to improve his
image and, in the upcoming years,
published a series of books
that clarified his theories
and established him
as one of the greatest
philosophers of all time.
He died in Königsberg on
the 12th of February 1804.
The “Critique of Pure Reason”
is a difficult book to read.
Kant uses intimidating vocabulary
in his attempt to create concepts
that haven’t been encountered before.
However, it is one of the most
profound books I have ever read.
First off, let’s start with
the use of the term “pure.”
This is very crucial because
Kant starts from a basis
where reason is stripped from
every scientific analysis
and relies only on what is
presupposed by the human mind,
or a priori knowledge as he calls it.
The motivation behind his
decision to delve into this idea
was the crisis of enlightenment
during his time.
Reason was the holy
grail of enlightenment,
since it motivated people
to think for themselves
and also to criticize
traditional authorities
like the church and the state.
But this paradigm shift engendered
different kinds of issues.
Reason alone is not a panacea.
Helping people thing for themselves
does not necessarily lead to progress.
Unaided reasoning encourages
fatalism, materialism,
debauchery, and even
authoritarianism.
Even when it came to
morality, enlightenment,
due to its support of science,
could not entirely justify free will,
since it is jeopardized by the
mechanistic laws of nature.
We must be free in order to choose
what is right over what is wrong,
because otherwise we cannot
be held responsible.
So, these mind-boggling
conundrums,
that gave rise to the intellectual
crisis of the Enlightenment,
led Kant to the inception of
the Critique of Pure Reason.
During Kant’s time,
a very dominant philosophical
school of thought was empiricism,
according to which,
knowledge derives from sensory
experience and experimentation;
that is we are born, we have
experiences, we measure data,
and our mind translates that
experience and data into knowledge.
In a nutshell, the mind is a
tabula rasa or a blank slate.
One of the main
proponents of this idea
was the great Scottish
philosopher David Hume.
Hume, based on empiricist ideals,
rejected causality and embraced
the idea of constant conjunction.
By causality we mean that every
event must have a cause.
Hume didn’t like the necessity
included in that statement.
When a billiard ball hits
another billiard ball,
you hear a sound and you see
the motion of the two balls.
There is a causal sequence,
but where in that causal sequence
did you perceive necessity?
You didn’t perceive it.
All you perceived was a succession of
changes in the state of the two balls.
We saw one event and then
another event in conjunction.
Hume’s central argument was that
the future is not obligated
to mimic the past
and that there is no reason to believe
in metaphysical, pre-existing knowledge.
Kant himself has stated
that by reading David Hume,
he was awakened from
his dogmatic slumbers,
meaning that he gave him a different
perspective to look at the world.
However, the idea of constant
conjunction bothered Kant,
who, after intense thinking, came
up with the following revelation:
In order to support the idea
of constant conjunction,
you need to presuppose the
existence of time and space.
So there needs to be some pre-existing
knowledge there after all.
This is called Kant’s Copernican
revolution in philosophy,
for Kant managed to
achieve something akin
to what Copernicus
achieved with astronomy
when he questioned
the assumption
that the earth is the
center of the solar system
and claimed that the sun
is the center instead.
So, Kant postulated
that some concepts,
like time, space, or numbers,
are built in our operational
system “so to speak.”
Our brains are hardwired
to perceive time and space
without the need to
understand them.
He called these concepts,
synthetic a priori concepts.
The synthetic a priori concepts
form the basis for his
transcendental argument.
As Kant states: “I call all
knowledge *transcendental*
which deals not so
much with objects
as with our manner of
knowing objects insofar
as this manner is to be
possible *a priori*.
A system of such concepts would be
called *transcendental philosophy*.”
Synthetic a priori concepts
are concepts whose truth
is known independently
of any experience of the world.
He uses the term
transcendental because
the knowledge we have
for these truths
goes beyond our empirical
understanding of the world.
The reason it was important for
Kant to make this statement
was because he wanted to
emphasize the distinction
between the phenomenal
and the noumenal world.
The phenomenal world is the world
as we experience and perceive it.
The noumenal world is the
world as it really is,
independent of
anybody’s experience.
It was very crucial of Kant
to make that distinction
for it laid the groundwork for
his ideas about morality,
belief in God, freedom,
and immortality.
For Kant, morality constituted a central
notion in the human experience.
Especially in an age where
most moral judgments
originated from
religious dogmas,
Kant attempted to find a way to
somehow merge morality with reason
in his monumental work “Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals.”
In order to do that,
he viewed morality through
the prism of what he called
“categorical imperatives.”
Categorical means absolute,
something unambiguously
explicit and direct.
Imperative means something
crucial or of vital importance.
Kant’s terms might seem a bit
indecipherable at first,
but, in that case, using
a term with such gravity
puts more emphasis on the importance
of how we should view morality.
Categorical imperatives
are our moral obligations
and Kant believed that they
derived from pure reason.
You don’t need to have a religion
to tell you what is right
and what is wrong.
You can use your intellect to
figure that out by yourself.
So, Kant came up with
different formulations
of the categorical
imperative in order to
elucidate his stream of reasoning.
In his first formulation he states:
"Act only according to that maxim
whereby you can at
the same time will
that it should become
a universal law."
Before acting, one
should ask oneself,
“what’s the maxim of my action?”
In other words,
how do I act as if my behavior
or action can be universalized
and how do I add more clarity to the
intent behind everything that I do?
This is a great thought experiment
that can lead one to the proper
evaluation of his or her actions.
Before you do something morally
questionable, ask yourself:
“would I want that act to be espoused
by every soul on this planet?”
In his second formulation he states:
“Act in such a way that
you treat humanity,
whether in your own person or
in the person of any other,
never merely as a means to an end,
but always at the
same time as an end.”
Here he tries to raise awareness
of how the way we
treat each other
impacts our understanding
of morality.
A means to an end means a thing that
is not valued or important in itself
but it is useful in
achieving an aim.
When you meet someone and instead of
identifying the humanity in them,
you try to exploit them, benefit
from them, or just use them,
then you treat them as means.
Instead, he suggests that
we should identify that
each human is a peculiar
idiosyncratic figure
and we should treat them
always as ends in themselves.
In another formulation he states:
“Act according to maxims of a
universally legislating member
of a merely possible
kingdom of ends.”
Here Kant discusses his vison
for the future of societies -
a future predicated on value
and dignity as he writes:
“In the kingdom of ends everything
has either value or dignity.
Whatever has a value can be replaced
by something else which is equivalent;
whatever, on the other
hand, is above all value,
and therefore admits of no
equivalent, has a dignity.”
The kingdom of ends
is an imaginary state
whose laws protect
individual autonomy.
In this kingdom, morality is not just
a matter of how individuals behave,
but it forms the foundation
of a healthy society.
Of course there will be people that
will view Kant’s ideas as utopian,
unrealistic, or inapplicable
on a global scale.
And they are right.
Some people will always succumb
to their irrationality
and be victims to
their own delusions.
However, attempting to
understand Kant’s ideas
is refreshing for the human mind
and they constitute a
worth-pursuing step
towards the redefinition of
our vision for humanity.
Right before his last
breath, Kant uttered
"Es ist gut (It is good)."
Wittgenstein, in a
similar fashion, uttered
“tell them I had a wonderful life.”
That is a similar pattern
between philosophers.
They dedicate their lives
to the search for meaning
and, in the end, they experience
relief after their journey finishes.
They try hard.
Facing harsh criticism.
Occupying themselves with topics
so dear to the human condition
but also so challenging
for the human cognition.
It is a personal responsibility for all
of us not only to respect their work,
but also to try to understand
them, even to some degree.
Just for the sake of
showing appreciation.
Just for the sake of injecting a
little bit more meaning to our lives.
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Take care, see you soon,
Adrian out.
