Kant, Immanuel (1724—1804)
German philosopher, one of the most influential thinkers of all time. His influence is so great, European philosophy is generally divided into pre-Kantian and post-Kantian schools of thought. Outside of philosophy, Kant’s essays on the sublime and the meaning of Enlightenment have been hugely influential in setting the agenda for research in aesthetics. Kant was born in Königsberg, then the capital of Prussia, but now a Russian exclave---it was renamed Kaliningrad at the end of World War II when the city was occupied by Soviet forces. Even by the standards of his own time, Kant was extremely unworldly: he never travelled more than 100 miles from his hometown, and almost his entire professional life was spent as a university academic. In 1781 he published Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), translated as Critique of Pure Reason (1929), the work which established him as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Kant himself described the work as producing the philosophical equivalent of the so-called Copernican Revolution because it reversed the usual assumption that the apprehension of empirical sense-data necessarily precedes the production of the concepts we assign to them. Critique of Pure Reason, or the First Critique, as it is usually known because it was followed by two further critiques, sought to overcome what Kant saw as the problem of the empiricism David Hume’s scepticism concerning causation. He agreed with Hume that it is impossible to prove that every event has a cause by power of experience, but disagreed with him that one should thereby abandon the general principle that every event has a cause. Kant’s solution is to divide the psychical apparatus in two: on the one side there are ‘intuitions’, the perceptions of given sense data, and on the other side there are categories and concepts (such as space and time), the universal laws of the mind. His rationale is that we could not describe the world in a variety of different ways if we did not have concepts that enable us to see it differently too. But even more importantly, Kant argued that even when a specific cause is not perceptible we nonetheless know that it must exist and that necessity is sufficient to found knowledge. Kant describes the process of attaining knowledge as judgement and identifies three stages in its composition: first there is the apprehension of something that affects the mind, then the imagination reproduces it in the mind, and thirdly it is recognized by the mind which assigns it a concept. Judgement is the application of the rules of understanding to intuitions. These rules are said to be ‘transcendental’ by Kant because they function as conditions of possibility for knowledge. In the subsequent Second and Third Critiques, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), translated as Critique of Practical Reason (1909), and Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), translated as The Critique of Judgement (1952), Kant turned his attention to aesthetic, moral, and political questions. Such is the force of these later works Kant is regarded by many readers as fundamentally a moral philosopher. As a moral philosopher, Kant is austere and uncompromising: the only act that is unconditionally good in his view is one that is done selflessly out of a sense of duty and for the sake of duty. Acting out of duty deprives the will (or what after Freud, Anna we would call the ego) of an object of desire, meaning that the act is carried out in accordance with universal law rather than for personal gain. His ethics are developed on the principle that they must not presuppose a specific object or will, but must always reflect universal laws, or what Kant called the ‘categorical imperative’, which is a law that any rational being would recognize as valid without exception in all imaginable situations. Further Reading: H. E. Allison Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (1983). P. Guyer Kant (2006).