IMMANUEL KANT PART-1

 Last time I wrote about Voltaire. The next stop can only be Immanuel Kant.

Kant was a revolutionary philosopher. But his revolution was in the way we think of; a revolution in philosophy. This is also known as the Kantian revolution.

At one time people thought that the sun revolved around the earth.  When Copernicus came along in the 15^th century he totally revolutionized this thinking by postulating that it is the earth that revolved around the sun.

In philosophy, the contribution of Kant is akin to that of Copernicus in Astronomy. Till the time of Kant   people believed that the mind perceives the external world as it was present through our sensory organs. Kant exactly reversed this. He said that the external world is visible to us in the way the mind wills it. That means the mind itself dictates how the external world is to be perceived and it is in the structure of our mind to dictate it so.

We have seen different philosophers who were brought up and lived a different way of life, each with his own story. Kant’s life is the simplest life of them all and there is nothing much to narrate about it. He was born at Konigsberg in Prussia in the year 1724, and died in the same town in 1804. In the 80 years of his life he did not travel beyond 65 kilometers from Konigsberg.  

The ancestors of Kant were from Scotland. They migrated to Germany and settled down there. They belong to the Pietistic branch of the German Protestants. His father was a maker of saddles for horses. By the time Kant was 22 years old both his parents died. Their family was very poor. Of the 9 siblings of Kant only 5 survived.

In his 8^th year Kant joined a Pietist school. The education and religion taught there only made him averse to Christianity. He joined the University of Konigsberg in his 16^th year. He studied Philosophy, Physics, Geometry, Algebra, Psychology, Astronomy and Logic there. Since his father could not fund his education, he gave tuitions to his less able classmates to get along.

After completing his education, for 9 years he worked as a servant in the houses of the wealthy for some time and as a tutor to their children. After that he joined the University once again and obtained a Doctorate and joined the faculty as a lecturer in Physics. After sometime he became a professor in Philosophy, Logic and Mathematics at the University from 1770 to 1779.    

Kant looked pretty inconsequential and below par. He was just 5 feet in height, his chest was flat and he had a paunch. One of his shoulders was crooked. This of course is only his appearance. The moment he opened his mouth and started speaking people forgot all about his looks. He was a great conversationalist and was fond of humor. Even the hardest of things, he explained in such a way that it is easily and well understood. With his simple language, oratory and vast knowledge his students forgot themselves in his class. Kant never married for obvious reasons. Which girl would ever prefer to marry him with his endowed looks? 

Kant was meticulous and precise in his habits. He did everything at the allocated time each day without any deviation from the allotted time. He got up at 5 AM in the morning and followed the precise routine up till the time he went to bed at 10 PM in the night.

When he went out for a walk everyday at 3 PM in the afternoon it seems he was so precise that people used to set their clocks based on his walkt. He used to walk in the Limetree Avenue in Konigsberg which was later called the philosophers walk because he walked there. It seems Kant did not deviate from this habit for a single day in 30 years. He was very careful with his health and protected it to the utmost.  

Kant never bothered about women, and neither did he like music or poetry. Surprisingly, although one of his subjects at the University was Philosophy, he never bothered to read the history of philosophy, but he digested Leibnitz, Wolf, Voltaire and Rousseau. He read extensively on British philosophy and literature and also about the theories of Newton.

Despite not moving out of Konigsberg he loved Geography. He never bothered about politics but welcomed the French Revolution with all his heart.

Surprisingly Kant started his intellectual life not as a philosopher but as a scientist. He wrote books on Physics, Astronomy, Geology and Anthropology.   

If not as a philosopher, his name would have been etched in history as a scientist. He propounded the “Nebular Hypothesis” in 1755 that explained the formation of Sun and the planets. This hypothesis says that Sun and the planets have formed by the coalescing of matter out of a great gaseous cloud. At that time no one even bothered about this hypothesis. In 1796, Laplace himself propounded the same hypothesis with mathematical proof. Even today this Nebular Hypothesis is accepted by a large number of scientists and astronomers. When it was found later that Kant propounded the same thing earlier, in the honor of both of them it is called the Kant-Laplace theory.  

Kant slowly journeyed from Physics to Metaphysics.

John Locke said matter and mind both exist. Berkeley said there is no matter and only mind existed. Then Hume hopped in and said neither mind nor matter exist and what exists are mere mental states. Voltaire said reason is the ultimate but for Rousseau it was feeling that counts. Many philosophers said many things but ultimately what is the truth?

Kant proclaimed that Hume’s thought has awoken him from his philosophical dogmatic slumber. How can anyone say that mind does not exist? It irrefutably exists because if there is no mind then how do we understand the world? In fact it is the mind that dictates how the world is to be understood.

Kant had written 3 books to expound his thought. The first was the “Critique of Pure Reason”, then the “Critique of Practical reason” and finally the “Critique of Judgment”. His first book was the most important and it is the foundation for all his philosophy.

Now Kant’s thinking is extremely hard to understand, but he makes it even harder to understand it by the way he writes. His theory is like a tunnel with innumerable turns with the walls closing in on itself. We do not know where we will begin and where we will end up. He never tells anything directly but puts it forth in an abstruse manner. He tells the same thing in different places and sometimes he states the opposite of what he said earlier. What he can say in 1 line, he stretches up to 10 pages.

Before publication, Kant sent the manuscript of his book “Critique of Pure Reason” to one contemporary philosopher for his comments. That man was supposed to have returned the book after sometime stating that he had gone through half of the book and feared insanity if he went on with it. Kant’s works being so difficult to understand attracted many commentaries later.  

The commentators say once a person goes into the subject matter of the book after getting through the confusing language and style, then one can see the beautiful edifice of Kant’s philosophy.

Philosophy before Kant was different and after him it is totally different. He changed the thinking of philosophy and influenced the later philosophers like Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Henry Bergson, Henry James and Jean Paul Sartre etc.  In western philosophy his place is beside Aristotle and Plato themselves.

Kant said Man is an end in himself. An individual should never be used as a tool for anything else. He has a free will and it is his inner reasoning alone that defines his ethics.  

If a person is by nature is good and does good things with his nature then they need not be considered ethical. Unless he knows what is his duty (like our Gita), then decides that it is what he should do by his free will and acts it only then the thing can be called ethical.

Whatever one believes to be the Universal ethic, one has to act by that ethic. He named it the “Categorical Imperative” which is the undeniable duty which has to be enacted. As per this an individual cannot have one ethic for himself and another for others. Only then, one agrees to the equality of all men and their freedom. 

In his “Critique of Pure Reason” what he meant by critique was analysis. Pure is used to denote reason without any experience (a priori). So what he meant by the title was analysis of a priori knowledge without any experience.  

Kant wanted to synthesize the various discordant philosophies previous to him. At that time there are two strains in Western philosophy. The first one is rationalism of the likes of Descartes and the second one is the Empiricism of the likes of Locke.

As per Rationalism, just by sensory experiences certain and absolute knowledge cannot be obtained and that is available only through reasoning. It says there are certain innate ideas in the mind which makes us analyze the sensory experiences and enable us to arrive at absolute knowledge.

Empiricists reject this view. Locke said all the knowledge we have is only through experiences and there are no innate ideas. That for an infant the mind is like a blank slate (tabula rasa) and later only through sensory experience ideas arise.

Therefore Locke totally rejects any a priori knowledge which the rationalists maintain and says that there is no knowledge before sensory experiences.  

And thence, Hume took this Empiricism to its logical conclusion. He says, it is true that we get knowledge only through perception but such knowledge cannot be either absolute or universal. We perceive because of sensory organs that deliver sensations in a particular order and we get knowledge, but it is not necessary that the knowledge so gotten is absolute. Therefore it is impossible for man to have certain and absolute knowledge. This led Empiricism to Skepticism.

Now the challenge that lay before Kant is how to synthesize these two contrarian philosophies. He tried to find a solution to that.

Kant said Rationalists made one mistake. Yes, it is true that innate ideas exist before sensory perception, but the rationalists have neglected the part sensory perception plays in knowledge because despite a priori knowledge being there only sensory experience begins the way to knowledge.

Kant then says the Empiricists made another mistake. They neglected the part played by the mind in the sensations obtained that led to knowledge. As Hume said it is true that it is impossible to obtain absolute knowledge from sensory perception, but that does not mean there is no absolute knowledge at all. Why should not be there knowledge beyond our sensory perception? Why should such knowledge not be absolute and certain? These are the questions that are raised by Kant on his way.  

He said the mistake committed by the Empiricists is that they restricted our understanding merely to sensory perception. By sensory perception we know that a thing is there. But why it should be like that and not as another is something beyond us. However much we analyse perception we can never arrive at absoluteness and universality. It is beyond our way of thinking.