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 later, 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.

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 and progress, and atheism.

For all their deep differences, what united the proponents of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung in German, les Lumières in French), from Hume to Kant and Voltaire to 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.

Kant, the European Union, and the United Nations

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.

Thus, Kant is sometimes considered, and ought to be better known as, the spiritual father of both the European Union and the United Nations.

Kant’s teleological view of history influenced Hegel, who made a lot more out of it.

By |

Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship, and How it Differed from Aristotle’s.

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 Gottfriend 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 to the early death of a close friend, the dissolute Johann Daniel Funk, together with 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 solder, 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.

At three, after lunch, Kant would take his daily constitutional around Königsberg. He would walk 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 Pure 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 a lot 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 in 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, 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.

Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship

Joseph Green was the closest friend that Kant ever had. Green had 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 like, 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 men 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.

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

By |

Immanuel Kant on the Perception of Space and Time.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, which is regarded as one of the most difficult books ever written, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argues that space and time are not features of the world-in-itself but forms of intuition inherent in our faculty of sense.

In short, space and time are mind-dependent matrices for organising sense experience. Space is the pure form of “outer sense” by which we perceive objects as external and spatially arranged. Time is the pure form of “inner sense” by which we order our mental states. Because space is a form of intuition and not a property of the world-in-itself, we are able to identify its structures à priori, independently of sense experience, as when geometrising.

Kant’s Amazing Insight

There is such a thing in nature as handedness, or chirality. For instance, in most people, the hair whorl on the crown spirals clockwise, from left to right. Hops wind clockwise, beans anticlockwise. Most snails coil clockwise, though a few species are predominantly or exclusively sinistral. Many molecules exist in both right- and left-handed variants. With thalidomide, it is only the S-enantiomer that leads to birth defects.

Kant had the amazing insight that no amount of verbal description can capture the difference between “incongruent counterparts” such as your right and left hand. What distinguishes the two can only be grasped through sensible intuition, which is tied to a conscious, embodied being’s subjective frame of reference.

Kant used this analysis of incongruent counterparts to bolster his argument that “space in general does not belong to the properties or relations of things in themselves.” 

The Mysterious World-in-Itself

Space and time are like the irremovable spectacles through which the human mind sees the world, and without which it would not be able to see it. Thus, as far as humans are concerned, space and time are not subjective but objective, insofar as they are “built-in” and common to all. If you are human, there is simply no other way of seeing the world.

This notion that objectivity is based on inter-subjectivity is one of Kant’s most important principles, underlying not only his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, but also his ethics and aesthetics. For instance, when making ethical decisions, we ought to abstract from our contingent circumstances and reason like any and every rational mind. When making ethical decisions, we seek to become everybody—to become pure mind or pure reason, like God.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, if space and time are not features of the world-in-itself, what remains of an object, say, a tree or a table, outside of space and time? For Kant, the nature of the “thing-in-itself” [German, das Ding an sich, or noumenon] is entirely beyond the bounds of human knowledge. All we can say—contra Bishop Berkeley, who held that things are nothing more than perceptions in the mind—is that it exists in some form or other.

Could Kant Be Right?

A criticism of Kant’s position is that we ourselves are objects in the world: our very existence and make-up presuppose space and time—which are therefore not “of the mind.”

Kant’s response is that human beings have a dual status. The phenomenal self is indeed a part of the phenomenal world. But the “I think” that makes experience and self-consciousness possible is not. This so-called noumenal self is the source of rationality and morality, and, because it stands outside of nature and contingency, of freedom as well. Our dual status is how we can still be morally free and responsible in an otherwise determined universe.

Kant thought of space as Euclidean. The later development of general relativity and non-Euclidean geometries, with their implication that space is not uniform, undermined Kant’s notion of space as an intuition—even though the human intuition of space might still be Euclidean.

Kant arrived at his radical position in seeking to bridge rationalism and empiricism and explain how synthetic à priori knowledge might be possible, that is, explain how we might possess universal, necessary knowledge about the world (or, at least, the phenomenal world) that is more than just definitionally true. By showing that the mind actively shapes how we experience reality, Kant synthesised rationalism and empiricism into a completely new framework called transcendental idealism.

Philosophy tends to answer one conundrum with an even bigger one—which happens, however, to be partially or accidentally insightful. “Conundrum” is a humorous mock-Latin word coined by 17th-century Oxford students seeking to lighten their load.

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

By |

An introduction to Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

In 1755, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) became a Privatdozent, or non-stipendiary lecturer, making a living by charging students for his lectures and giving private tuition. His students joked that he could cover for the entire philosophy faculty—which at the time included everything except the three “higher” faculties of theology, law, and medicine. He became a star lecturer, reputed for his wit, dry humour, and poker face.

When he lectured, Kant was, according to a contemporary account, “all things to all men.” He stood at a diminutive five foot two (1.57m), with blond hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. Despite his slender build, flat and narrow chest, and “slight corkscrew twist”, he was described as attractive. According to his own account, his flat and narrow chest left “little room for the movement of the heart and lungs”, contributing to his delicate constitution, predisposition to hypochondria, and sedentary, regimented lifestyle.

Kant compensated for his physical frailties by being a sharp dresser. He took inspiration from nature for matching colours. Thus, in middle age, he often wore a yellow waistcoat with a brown tailcoat trimmed with gold braid. In public and in company, he sported a powdered wig, even after it had fallen out of fashion. As late as 1791, his friend and follower Joachim Christian Friedrich Schulz described him as having “the look of a good, honest watchmaker who has gone into retirement”.

From 1766, Kant derived a modest but regular income as sub-librarian of the university. From 1768 to 1777, he rented two rooms in the house of the publisher and bookseller Johann Jakob Kanter. In this period, his student Johann Gottfried Herder described him as “the most urbane fellow in the world”. He moved in the city’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours.

Kant never considered himself quite rich enough to take a wife. He twice considered marriage, first to a “beautiful widow” and, much later, to a “pretty Westphalian girl”, but in each case prevaricated for so long that the ladies ended up marrying otherwise. Although he never married, Kant defended the institution of marriage, which he prosaically defined as “the union of two persons of different sexes for lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes”.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative

Kant is famous, among other things, for trying to put morality onto a rational basis, that is, for trying to make morality objective and “categorical” rather than subjective and arbitrary. His core ethical principle is the Categorical Imperative, according to which we should only obey those moral laws that we could consistently and rationally will as universal laws. This might be restated as, “Always act such that the maxim of your action can at the same time be upheld as a universal law.”

The Categorical Imperative is similar to the much older Golden Rule of the Bible and Indian Mahabharata, according to which we should treat others as we would ourselves wish to be treated. But whereas the Golden Rule is based on personal desire, which is subjective (I might, for example, be a masochist, or be willing to tolerate some mistreatment), the Categorical Imperative is based on reason, which is objective.

Hypothetical imperatives are practical rules for achieving a desired outcome, for example, “If you want to lose weight, you should watch what you eat.’ If you do not desire a particular outcome, you do not need to follow the rules. In this much, hypothetical imperatives are conditional and contingent. In contrast, Categorical Imperatives are universal moral commands that bind everyone regardless of their aims, for example, “Do not lie”, “Do not steal”, “Do not commit suicide”.

Hypothetical imperatives answer to the lower faculty of desire, which aims at pleasure. Categorical Imperatives answer to the higher faculty of will, which functions rationally and autonomously by following the laws which it legislates for itself, regardless of consequences or personal feelings. For Kant, true moral actions must be motivated by duty, not some desired outcome. Thus, Kantian ethics are sometimes described as deontological, or duty-based (Greek, deon, “duty”), and contrasted with consequentialism (for example, utilitarianism), which is outcome-based. For Kant, moral systems based on outcomes or desires operate on hypothetical imperatives, not true moral law.

Kant furnishes some examples to flesh out the bones of the Categorical Imperative. Imagine a person in financial need who borrows money and promises to pay it back, knowing full well that they never will. If this action were universalised, promises of repayment would no longer be believed and the practice of lending would end. Kant also points out that abusing the lender in this way reduces a dignified being with ends of his own to a mere means-to-an-end.

The universalizability formulation is only the first formulation the Categorical Imperative. The second formulation is the humanity formulation, or end-in-itself formulation: “Act always treating humanity, in yourself and others, as an end and never merely as a means.” 

When Is It Moral to Have Sex?

Kant’s rigid application of the Categorical Imperative led him to condemn many actions and behaviours that are no longer generally condemned, such as suicide out of world-weariness, homosexuality, and masturbation. He referred to homosexual acts and masturbation as “unnatural vices” on the basis that the natural purpose of sex and the reproductive organs is procreation. Marriage, he argued, is the only morally permissible context for sexual relations. But for those unable or unwilling to wait, sex is preferable to masturbation. Masturbation transgresses the natural order, sex, only the civil order.

What has aged a lot better is Kant’s insight that, during sex, one turns the other into an object of gratification, a means to an end rather than an end-in-himself or end-in-herself. This is only permissible if, in return, one makes oneself into an object of gratification for the benefit of the other. Marriage, on the other hand, is a unique union in which two people mutually surrender their bodies and selves to create a united whole.

For us, the take-home message is: Kant never had sex or even masturbated. 

Jokes aside, Kant grew into, and arguably remains, the supreme moral authority in the Western World. For better or worse, what he thought and how he thought remains part of our mental makeup.

By |

And how Leibniz stumbled upon the unconscious.

Gottfried Leibniz

For Aristotle (384-322 BCE), all living things had a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals also had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul. As a result, medieval theologians and philosophers debated whether humans had a plurality of souls.

To pluralists such as Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-1279), the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls were distinct entities stacked within the human body. For Kilwardby, this served to explain how Christ’s body remained holy in the tomb after his human soul had departed.

The pluralists were fiercely opposed by unitists such as St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who argued that a person with multiple souls would be no more than a bundle of parts, rather than a single, unified substance. For a short time after his death, Aquinas’s single soul “heresy” was banned in Paris and Oxford. Following centuries of debate, the unitist view, of course, came to prevail.

Descartes’s Daughter

The philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) completely changed the conversation. To uphold his dualism of mind and body and defend the immortality of the human soul, Descartes argued that only humans (and higher beings such as angels) possessed both a physical body and an immaterial soul. Being the source of thought and reason, this immaterial soul qualified human beings for things like heaven and eternal life. All other living things—plants and animals—were soulless, and functioned like complex machines.

Animals, claimed Descartes, are mere automata, whose functions “follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.” For Descartes, it is not only that animals do not reason, but also that they do not feel, perceive, or sense. Clearly, he did not have a cat. According to lore, he once threw a cat out of a window to demonstrate that the poor thing lacked consciousness. 

Although French, Descartes spent the greater part of his adult life in the relative safety of the Dutch Republic. There, he met a servant called Helena, who became the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Francine (b. 1635), whom he passed off as his niece. When Francine died, aged five, of scarlet fever, he called it the greatest sorrow of his life—even stating that it was not unmanly to cry. Later, a legend arose that he constructed an automaton in Francine’s likeness.

How Leibniz Stumbled Upon the Unconscious

In the early 1700s, the polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) investigated and documented a famous “talking dog” in the village of Zeitz, Saxony. He concluded that the dog was not in fact “talking,” but merely echoing the sounds of his master.

Even so, Leibniz rejected Descartes’s idea of animals as soulless machines. Relying heavily on the Aristotelian concept of entelechy (the vital force that drives an organism), he returned their sensitive soul to the animals. Still, animals lack a rational soul, and act purely empirically, that is, on the basis of experience. Instead of reasoning or calculating, they merely associate ideas—as do we, most of the time. It is not all that often that we actually reason, and some of us, it seems, never do.

Whereas Aristotle had made self-nutrition the fundamental characteristic of living things, Leibniz opted for perception and appetition. Leibniz distinguished between perception and its heightened form, apperception, that is, conscious perception. In bare monads, perception is diffuse and unconscious, but in animals and humans, it is conscious and focused. Bare monads, which ground inanimate bodies, are as in a deep sleep or stupor, and unconscious of their perceptions.

For Leibniz, humans, when unconscious or in a deep sleep, are as bare monads. That a loud noise can rouse us from a deep sleep indicates that, even then, we are perceiving, though unaware of doing so.

In his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), Leibniz wrote:

… even though our senses are related to everything, it is impossible for our soul to attend to everything in particular; that is why our confused sensations are the result of a truly infinite variety of perceptions. This is almost like the confused murmur coming from the innumerable set of breaking waves heard by those who approach the seashore…

In other words, there are two levels of consciousness, one where we register stimuli, and the other where the most salient of these stimuli, or the mean of these stimuli, are brought to our conscious attention. This notion of petites perceptions (“small perceptions”, or unconscious perceptions) anticipates Schopenhauer and Freud.

Humans, unlike animals, are able to reflect upon their perceptions to derive the notions of the “I” or self, and of God. This sort of meta-reflection (“reflection upon reflection”) calls to mind Aristotle’s description, in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, of the activity of God, which, he says, consists in “a thinking upon thinking”. It is this notion, or meta-notion, of the self, subsisting through time, that makes us moral beings, and susceptible to punishment and reward.

By returning their soul to the animals, Leibniz had to explain how their minds worked without relying on conscious reason. In so doing, he shattered the Cartesian assumption that mind and consciousness are the same, effectively discovering the unconscious mind. In his own words, “the difference between intelligent substances and substances that have no intelligence at all is just as great as the difference between a mirror and someone who sees.”

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