By |

Hate Noise? You Might Be a Genius

My silent writing retreat
Where I Wrote The German Greeks, surrounded by all the right sounds.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating

I am excruciatingly sensitive to noise. I always carry earplugs and sometimes fantasise about living in the middle of the woods or on top of a hill. If I were browsing property listings, the first word I’d search for would be ‘secluded’. Is the problem with me—or with the world?

As a misophone (‘hater of sounds’), I’m in pretty good company. Kant hated noise, as did Proust, Kafka, and Darwin—and even, ironically, Wagner. Kant is said to have moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster, while Proust lined his bedroom with cork.

Among all the great thinkers, none hated noise more openly or fervently than Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer and the Noisy Seamstress

In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.

Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.

Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus (‘The crone dies, the burden is lifted’). Moral of the story: Don’t make noise around philosophers.

Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad). Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. In May 1784, he penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the ‘stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail’ (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud ‘as fifty voices of other men’). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.

Schopenhauer on Noise

In his essay On Din and Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth-century equivalent of revving motorbikes, or those fart-can cars with modified exhausts): ‘Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.’ To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary and, worse than unnecessary, useless.

He goes on to link noise intolerance (misophonia, ‘the hatred of sound’) with intellect and creativity:

Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.

The Difference Between Sound and Noise

But not every sound is noise. The difference between sound and noise is not merely one of acoustics but also of perception. The sounds of nature, I find, are almost always more tolerable than those of man. Years ago, I toured Copenhagen Zoo—the only thing open on a Monday—and noted that the most disturbing cries came not from the animals but from the human children.

I enjoy birdsong, the burbling of a stream, or waves lapping or breaking on a shore, but not, say, an air conditioner humming (unless it is very hot outside), children crying, or people shouting or talking without saying anything useful, interesting, or amusing. If I believe that something is important, meaningful, or beautiful, the sound that it makes is much less likely to constitute noise. Noise, then, is whatever I don’t think is worth hearing. In the final analysis, it is whatever dissipates rather than concentrates my energies.

For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.

It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness. For anyone who has experienced it, deep concentration is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to occupy and numb their minds.

The Stoic Answer: Can We Rise Above the Noise?

Unlike Schopenhauer, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) sought not to eliminate noise but to rise above it. In his Letters to Lucilius, he claims to be living above a bustling Roman bathhouse, and paints a vivid picture of the soundscape: the grunts of the weightlifter, the slaps and pummelling of the masseur, the splashing of the enthusiast who bombs into the pool, the ceaseless chatter of the hair-plucker who makes his victims yell… ‘So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing!’

Despite the din, Seneca remains able to read and write, assuring Lucilius that ‘this racket means no more to me than the sound of waves or falling water.’

Still, he recognises that some noises are worse than others. Intermittent noises, he says, are more upsetting than steady ones. Spoken words are more distracting than mere sounds, in that they demand our attention: compared to speech, even the saw-sharpener is easier to bear. 

Yet Seneca is able to force his mind to concentrate and ‘keep it from straying to things outside itself’. More than that, he sees this as a test of his Stoicism, mental fortitude, and even virtue. Ultimately, he reasons, noise only disturbs us insofar as it resonates with our own emotional turmoil. If our mind is still, no amount of noise can unsettle it; but if our mind is angry or fearful, or burning with greed or envy, no amount of silence can still it: ‘For of what benefit is a quiet quarter or neighbourhood if our emotions are in an uproar?’

We tend to associate sleeping with resting. But unless we are able to still our mind by the use of reason, the night merely changes the form of our worries. Real tranquillity, in contrast, ‘is the state reached by a rational mind when it is at rest.’

I think there is a lot of truth in that. When overwhelmed by noise, I find it helpful to ask myself, ‘Is my annoyance more to do with me or my prejudices than with the noise itself?’ But I would contest that even if we are able to concentrate in a din, our concentration is less profound or complete than it would otherwise have been, and more wearing too.

Seneca concedes that, having tested ourselves, it is simpler to avoid the uproar, or block it out, just as Odysseus blocked his ears and had his men row faster to get past the Sirens. According to lore, the Sirens were fated to die if someone ever escaped their singing, and after Odysseus were never again seen or heard.

Continue Exploring

I explore Schopenhauer and the German philosophers in The German Greeks, and Seneca and Stoicism in Stoic Stories.

You may also enjoy

Explore all German Philosophy essays

Explore all Stoicism essays

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

How Humanity Learned It Was Not the Center of Everything.

For centuries, the West rested on a stable psychological foundation, with human beings firmly at the center of a purposeful cosmos.

The geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy, in which the Sun, stars, and planets revolved around a fixed and unmoving Earth, did more than describe the heavens. It organised meaning. Humanity occupied a privileged position in creation, and the structure of the universe seemed to confirm it.

The Copernican Revolution shattered that certainty. Yet its significance was never merely astronomical. It was psychological. It obliged human beings to confront the unsettling possibility that we are not as central as we imagine.

That confrontation did not end with astronomy. Over the following centuries, humanity would endure a succession of intellectual revolutions, each removing another claim to exceptional status. The same drama may now be unfolding once again with artificial intelligence (AI).

Aristarchus of Samos

The parallels begin with resistance. Nearly eighteen centuries before Copernicus, Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the Earth moved around the Sun. Anaxagoras similarly suggested that the Sun was not a divine object but another celestial body. Yet neither transformed humanity’s understanding of itself.

The obstacle was not a lack of evidence alone. Human beings are not neutral observers of reality. We are psychologically invested in narratives that place us at the center of events, and we resist discoveries that threaten that position.

The same tendency shapes our response to AI. The possibility that machines might perform tasks once regarded as uniquely human has been dawning for decades. Yet many people continue to regard intelligence as an exclusively human possession. As with heliocentrism, the deepest resistance is not empirical but existential. What is at stake is not merely a theory of intelligence, but humanity’s place within it.

Copernicus and Tycho Brahe

When, in 1543, Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, he displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.

The first response was not acceptance but compromise. Tycho Brahe proposed a hybrid system in which the planets orbited the Sun while the Sun itself continued to orbit the Earth. The new evidence was accommodated without fully abandoning the old hierarchy.

We often respond to AI in a similar fashion. We describe it primarily as a tool, an assistant, or an extension of human agency. These descriptions are true in practical terms. Yet they may also serve a psychological function, allowing us to absorb the implications of machine intelligence without fundamentally reconsidering humanity’s place within the cognitive landscape.

Like Tycho’s system, such interpretations preserve the familiar hierarchy while making room for disruptive facts.

Johannes Kepler

Genuine revolutions require deeper adjustments.

Kepler provided one by replacing perfect circles with elliptical orbits governed by mathematical laws. This was more than a technical refinement. It represented the abandonment of a profound assumption: that reality must conform to human intuitions of beauty, symmetry, and perfection.

The universe no longer reflected what human beings wished to see. It followed impersonal principles.

We often anthropomorphise AI in the opposite direction, imagining it as a digital version of ourselves. Yet its operation is fundamentally unlike human thought. Contemporary AI systems identify patterns across immense quantities of data using methods that frequently defy human intuition. Their successes emerge not because they think as we do, but because they often do not.

Like Kepler’s ellipses, their effectiveness can be unsettling precisely because it does not conform to our expectations.

Galileo

Galileo’s telescope deepened the rupture.

Mountains on the Moon, moons orbiting Jupiter, and countless previously unseen stars revealed that the heavens were neither perfect nor organised exclusively around the Earth. The cosmos appeared populated by multiple centres, multiple systems, and multiple worlds.

Today, AI may be producing a comparable shift in our understanding of cognition. For centuries, language, reasoning, and creativity were treated as evidence of humanity’s unique status. Increasingly, these capacities appear capable of emerging in different substrates and systems.

This does not necessarily mean that machine intelligence and human intelligence are identical. Yet even the appearance of machine cognition exerts a decentring effect. It forces us to confront the possibility that intelligence may not be an exclusively human phenomenon.

Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno carried the implications of heliocentrism beyond anything Copernicus himself proposed.

He imagined an infinite universe populated by innumerable worlds. In such a cosmos, humanity lost not merely its central location but the very idea that any location could be central.

The significance of Bruno’s vision was philosophical as much as astronomical. If there are countless worlds, then no single perspective can claim cosmic privilege.

Today, something similar may be occurring in our conception of intelligence. The traditional hierarchy that places human cognition at the apex of all thinking systems is giving way to a more distributed landscape of minds, algorithms, networks, and machine systems.

The challenge is not simply that machines perform cognitive tasks. It is that intelligence itself may be a broader and more varied phenomenon than previously imagined.

Newton

By the time of Newton, cosmological decentring was largely complete. 

Heaven and Earth were unified within a single system of mathematical relationships. The same laws that governed orbiting planets governed falling apples. Reality no longer revolved around human purposes but operated according to indifferent principles.

Just as Newton dissolved the distinction between the terrestrial and celestial realms, AI may be eroding the distinction between human and machine cognition. Capacities once regarded as uniquely human increasingly appear to be manifestations of more general informational processes.

Yet human psychology has not evolved nearly as quickly as human knowledge. We remain creatures who seek significance, narrative, and reassurance. Newton himself devoted enormous energy to alchemy and theology.

The desire for meaning survived the collapse of geocentrism. It survived Darwin and Freud as well. It will survive the rise of AI.

Nietzsche

After the Copernican Revolution, meaning could no longer be derived from occupying a privileged position in the cosmos. Meaning had to be created rather than discovered.

Now, we may have to learn this lesson anew. If intelligence is not uniquely human, then our value cannot rest on exclusivity. It must rest on how we choose to live, create, relate, and act within a reality that no longer upholds our physical and mental centrality.

The Copernican Revolution was the beginning of a long psychological transition: from a world organised around humanity to a world that simply is. The AI Revolution is simply the next stage in that journey.

Nietzsche would have recognised this moment. Copernicus removed humanity from the center of the cosmos; AI is removing it from the center of intelligence. Nietzsche argued that maturity begins when we stop demanding a privileged place in reality and instead create meaning for ourselves.

The question raised by AI is therefore not whether we remain special, but whether we can flourish without being the center of everything.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

By |

800 Pages in One Simple Essay

Immanuel Kant, the Becker portrait
Immanuel Kant, shortly before isolating himself for ten years to excogitate the Critique of Pure Reason.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most important—and difficult—books ever written. Its central idea is surprisingly simple: the mind does not merely observe the world, but helps to shape the world as we experience it.

In 1781, after a decade of introspection, Immanuel Kant published a book so difficult that even leading philosophers struggled to finish it. Kant’s friend and rival Moses Mendelssohn described the Critique of Pure Reason as a ‘nerve-juice consuming book’. Yet, buried within its more than 800 pages is one of the most influential ideas in the history of thought—an idea that Kant himself compared to the revolution begun by Copernicus in astronomy.

Previously, everyone believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Copernicus (1473-1543) turned the tables by asking how it would be if, instead, the Earth revolved around the Sun. Kant believed that human thought itself required a similar reinvention. It had always been assumed that human knowledge must conform to the world, that the human mind was just a passive observer. But what if it was the other way round? What if it was the world that needed to conform to the structures of the human mind?

Why Kant’s Revolution Was Needed

Since Descartes (1596-1650), a debate had been dominating philosophy. On one side stood the rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who believed that the senses were deceptive and that reason was the only secure source of knowledge. On the other side stood the empiricists, especially Locke and Hume, who argued that the mind starts as a blank slate and that all knowledge is founded in sense experience.

Hume (1711-1776) pushed the empiricist position to its logical conclusion, which is that there are only two kinds of human knowledge: ‘matters of fact’, which are founded in observation, and ‘relations of ideas’, such as logic and mathematics, which are true by definition. Anything that is neither—including God, the soul, and free will—belongs to the realm of illusion and speculation.

This scepticism deeply troubled Kant. Hume’s position undermined many of the concepts on which science and social life depend, not least causation. We assume that causes produce effects, but never—according to Hume—observe causality itself: all we do is observe one event regularly following another. Kant fully acknowledged his debt to Hume: ‘I freely confess: it was the objection [to the principle of cause and effect] of David Hume that first … interrupted my dogmatic slumber…’

The Synthetic à Priori

Kant’s response was to seek a new foundation for knowledge, based on a distinction between different kinds of judgement.

Some statements, such as, ‘All bachelors are unmarried men’, are analytic, in that their truth is contained within the meanings of the words themselves. Other statements, such as, ‘The cat is on the mat’, are synthetic, in that they carry new information. Most of the claims that we make are synthetic, because, unless you’re a pedant like me, new information about the world is a lot more useful and interesting than tautologising.

Kant also distinguished between knowledge that is à priori (acquired independently of sense experience) and knowledge that is à posteriori (acquired from sense experience).

Whereas analytic truths are à priori, synthetic truths are à posteriori. But could some synthetic truths be à priori? If so, we could learn something genuinely new about the world independently of sense experience.

Kant believed that mathematics, geometry, and, indeed, causation are prime examples of synthetic à priori knowledge.

But how could reason alone provide us with new knowledge, independently of sense experience?

Kant’s Categories and the Active Mind

Kant’s answer was revolutionary. The human mind is not a passive recipient of information, but actively shapes experience.

The mind possesses built-in structures that organise raw sense data. Among these ‘categories of understanding’ are concepts such as causality, substance, unity, plurality, and necessity.

Whenever we experience the world, these categories are already at work. They are not learned from experience; rather, they make experience possible in the first place. They package raw sense data into forms that are graspable to the human mind. If, as per Hume, we never observe causality, this is because causality is a feature of the human mind.

The same is true also of space and time, which are not features of the world, but ‘forms of intuition’ by which the human mind organises sense experience. Space is the framework by which we perceive external objects. Time is the framework by which we order events and mental states.

That space, time, and causation are in the mind does not make them subjective fantasies. Because all humans share these cognitive structures, they provide a common framework for objective experience. Simply put, there is, for a human being, no other way of seeing the world.

And here lies the price of Kant’s solution: the same structures that make knowledge possible also place limits upon what we can know—for we can only know what it is possible for a human to know.

The Limits of Metaphysics According to Kant

So here we have it. The mind does not conform to an independently structured world; rather, the world as we experience it conforms to the structures of the mind. Thus, we can know some things about the world by knowing about our mind. This is what underlies and enables the synthetic à priori. This is, in other words, what makes it possible for reason, working outside of sense experience, to arrive at new knowledge.

Causation and mathematics arise from the very conditions that make human experience possible. But the flipside is that we cannot know what lies outside of human experience. We cannot know how the world is in itself. Unlike the phenomenal world of human experience, this noumenal world is closed to reason, science, and knowledge.

Thus, metaphysical questions about God, the soul, and freedom are outside the scope of human knowledge. Kant may have rescued causation from Hume and the empiricists, but he did not rescue God (although, later, he defended belief in God on moral grounds). He acquired the nickname ‘the All-Crusher’ because he seemed to have demolished centuries of metaphysical speculation about God, the soul, and free will, which, he thought, were outside the scope of human knowledge.

The Antinomies of Pure Reason

Whenever reason attempts to venture into the realm of metaphysics, it becomes entangled in contradictions. Kant demonstrated this through four specific ‘antinomies of pure reason’, that is, contradictions that reason falls into when trying to understand ultimate reality.

Here is my own example of an antinomy of pure reason. After more than two thousand years of debate, there is still no consensus on who made the stronger case: Heraclitus, in arguing that the universe is in constant, perpetual flux (thesis), or Parmenides in arguing that it is in fact a single, static, unchanging, and eternal whole (antithesis).

Reason, Kant noticed, can construct persuasive arguments on both sides. The resulting conflicts reveal not the failure of reason but the danger of taking it beyond its proper domain. Plato demonstrated something similar in the Parmenides, though less explicitly than Kant.

The Legacy of the Critique of Pure Reason

Unlike the German idealists whom he inspired (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel…), Kant did not go so far as to claim that the mind creates reality, only that the world as it appears to us is structured through the forms and categories of human cognition.

Since Kant’s time, developments in modern physics, particularly non-Euclidean geometry and Einstein’s theory of relativity, have challenged some of Kant’s specific claims about space. But his central insight continues to shape philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

We do not simply discover the world. We actively shape the way it appears to us. This was Kant’s Copernican revolution: the insight that knowledge is not merely a mirror of reality but the outcome of a dynamic interaction between the mind and the world. By redefining the relationship between human beings and experience, Kant transformed philosophy as profoundly as Copernicus transformed astronomy.

Continue Exploring

To explore Kant’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.

You may also enjoy

Explore all German Philosophy essays

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

Kant’s Legacy: Free Speech and Individual Rights

In 1783, two years after the publication of his masterpiece, The Critique of Pure Reason, the 59-year-old Immanuel Kant could finally afford to buy himself a house. A wall had to be knocked down to create a lecture room, since lectures in those days were not held on university premises but in private rooms, often in the lecturer’s lodgings.

A year after purchasing his house, Kant published an essay in response to a question posed by the Revered Johann Zöllner in a German periodical. The reactionary reverend had asked against the liberals: “What is enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as what is truth, should be answered before one begins to enlighten! And still I have never found it answered!”

Kant’s Famous Essay: What is Enlightenment?

Kant published his response, entitled, Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment, in his preferred outlet, the Berlin Monthly. The short, thousand-word piece remains widely read, and is especially remembered for its first paragraph:

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. Sapere aude [Dare to Know! Dare to be Wise!] “Have the courage to use your own understanding!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.

Kant goes on to advance free speech, “the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters”, as the prerequisite of progress and enlightenment, and praises his king, Frederick the Great, “a shining example”, for having granted it to him and other Prussian subjects.

What All Enlightenment Thinkers Had in Common

In 1754, following the success of his First Discourse and his one-act opera, Le Devin du village, Rousseau returned to Geneva and converted back from Catholicism to Calvinism (a form of Protestantism). But in private, he embraced a personal, natural religion, or “religion of the heart,” which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilization, set him apart from other Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Voltaire, who championed reason, progress, and atheism.

For all their deep differences, what united the proponents of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung in German, les Lumières in French), from Hume and Voltaire to Kant and Rousseau, was a faith in reason as the source of knowledge and authority, and a commitment to applying reason to challenge superstition, dogma, and absolute authority and achieve human progress.

The Impact of the Enlightenment on Modern Democracy

Enlightenment concepts and principles such as government by consent, the separation of church and state, and individual rights and freedoms including religious freedom and free speech are at the heart of the modern democracies that, much better than any other system of government, guarantee our security, liberty, and prosperity—and, dare I say, dignity.

In his essay, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, published in the same year as What is Enlightenment, Kant argues that history is a teleological process (a process with an end or goal) tending to the full expression of human rationality and morality, manifested by the establishment of a perfectly just and stable constitution within states (initially, European states), which come together to form a federation, or league of nations, to secure universal individual freedoms and perpetual peace. In 1795, Kant followed up his essay with a much more substantial book entitled, Toward Perpetual Peace.

Thus, although better known for his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, Kant is sometimes regarded as the intellectual father of both the European Union and the United Nations, and, more generally, of the rules-based international order.

It’s fair to say, he merited the house that he bought, which, ironically, was bombed and destroyed in the Second World War.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

By |

Getting to the Real Immanuel Kant

A young Immanuel Kant (the Becker portrait)
Without communication, love does not exist; without respect, it does not endure. —Immanuel Kant

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Immanuel Kant is often remembered as the driest of philosophers: austere, methodical, and so punctual that the people of Königsberg supposedly set their clocks by his daily walk. Yet beneath the formidable reputation lay a surprisingly warm and personable man. His greatest transformation came not through philosophy, but through friendship.

In his youth and middle age, the sharply dressed Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) moved in Königsberg’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours. In this period, his student Johann Gottfried Herder described him as ‘the most urbane fellow in the world.’

But when Kant turned forty, he underwent a midlife transformation. He quite literally sobered up, abandoning carefree carousing for the disciplined life of the mind. This profound change owed as much to the early death of a close friend, the dissolute Johann Daniel Funk, as to the making of a new friend, the English merchant Joseph Green, who lived by the clock.

Kant essentially adopted Green’s modus vivendi.

Kant’s Daily Routine, and How It Helped Him

For the rest of his productive life, Kant employed a retired soldier, Martin Lampe, to wake him up at precisely five-to-five every morning. Lampe would stride into his master’s bedroom and cry out, “Herr Professor, the time is come!” Or in German, Herr Professor, es ist Zeit!

Kant worked at his desk in his nightclothes until his lectures began at seven. At eleven, he would change back into nightclothes and return to his desk. The working day effectively ended at one, when he would take lunch in company in a public inn or restaurant. Lunch would end at three with a round of manufactured jokes—in the belief that laughter was good for digestion and broader health.

After lunch, Kant would take his daily constitutional around Königsberg. He walked alone, from fear that outdoor conversation would lead him to breathe through the mouth. He often wound up at Green’s, with whom he liked to discuss Hume and Rousseau. It is said that the housewives of Königsberg would set their timepieces by the time—seven sharp—at which he left Green’s house.

By automating trivial daily decisions, Kant’s rigid daily routine freed his mind to focus purely on philosophy. It’s because of Kant that I have six of the same shirt.

Kant’s Jokes and Philosophy of Laughter

What kind of jokes did Kant tell after lunch? Some of his jokes have come down to us in his writing. For instance: A man tried to arrange a solemn funeral for a rich relative, but failed in the task: ‘The more I paid my mourners, the merrier they looked.’ A merchant sailed back from India with his fortune, but, in a violent storm, had to throw all his cargo overboard. This upset him so much that his wig turned grey overnight.

Laughter, Kant thought, “is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.” The mind is deceived into tensing up, but with the deception revealed suddenly relaxes, leading to laughter, which mimics the motions of the mind and is extremely health-giving. Kant never laughed at his own jokes, but always kept a straight face.

In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant quoted Voltaire in saying that Heaven had given us two comforts against life’s hardships, hope and sleep—before suggesting that Voltaire ‘could have added laughter’.

The Death of Joseph Green

In 1786, Joseph Green died, deeply affecting Kant, who thereafter became much more housebound.

After a suitable period of mourning, Kant recruited a female cook and began hosting protracted lunches aimed at stimulating the play of thoughts. To this end, he gathered guests from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, believing that the ideal number of guests lay somewhere between that of the Graces and the Muses (three and nine). All topics great and small were on the table. Philosophy was allowed but not dogmatism, for fear that it would interrupt the convivial flow of ideas.

As well as wine (another of God’s comforts), Kant had a taste for Königsberger Klopse (meatballs in a creamy white sauce with capers), Teltow turnips (an heirloom turnip from the Berlin-Brandenburg region), roast beef, cod, and, as a condiment for the above, English mustard, which he mixed himself in the belief that his special mix protected against senescence.

Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship

Joseph Green was the closest friend that Kant ever had. Green inspired Kant’s routine and became his philosophical sounding board. Kant allegedly discussed every single sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason with Green before publishing it in 1781.

In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant ended his discussion of character traits just as, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ended his discussion of the same: with an analysis of friendship.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle made much of the idea of ‘perfect friendship’, which, he thought, is only possible between people of reason and virtue. He famously described a perfect friend as ‘another self’—later paraphrased by Diogenes Laertius as ‘a single soul dwelling in two bodies.’

Kant deemed ‘perfect friendship’ an ideal that in practice cannot be attained. But in striving for it, we might nonetheless arrive at ‘moral friendship’, in which two persons feel able to disclose their secret thoughts and feelings to each other. Moral friendship requires a savant mélange of love and respect, love for bringing two people together, and respect for not driving them apart by infringing upon their dignity and autonomy.

From his own experience, Kant came to believe that most people cannot develop their true character until middle age, when they might undergo a ‘rebirth’. At twenty, we are no more than the product of our upbringing and environment. At thirty, we are still reliant on the judgement and approval of others. Only at forty are we confident enough (or perhaps tired enough) to become who we truly are.

Continue Exploring

Kant’s philosophy cannot be fully understood in isolation. The German Greeks places him within the great tradition of German philosophy, from Leibniz through Hegel and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche—revealing how these thinkers transformed the legacy of ancient Greece.

You may also enjoy

Explore all German Philosophy essays

Explore all Emotions essays