Kant in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 105

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Immanuel Kant is thought to be perhaps the greatest of all philosophers. And Kant did make, in the 18th Century, two great discoveries which engage us still today. Firstly, he founded the globally acknowledged ‘categorical imperative’ in moral philosophy; secondly, he became the first philosopher to succeed in answering that question as old as humanity of how knowledge arises in our brains. In his main work, the 1000-page “Critique of Pure Reason”, Kant analysed the working of Man’s thinking apparatus. He posed the critical question: what can a human being know with certainty and what can he not? His famous answer: Our reason can provide true and certain knowledge only of that which we have already perceived through our five senses (i.e. seen, heard, smelt, tasted, or touched). For this reason one cannot prove the existence of God, say, or really have “knowledge” of Him, because He is bodiless and imperceptible. Kant thus gave researchers, for the first time, a set of logical tools which was sensationally simple and yet quite perfect, and that still remains valid today and makes all scientific results achieved worldwide mutually comparable. Every theory, however good, had thenceforth to be proven in terms of actual sense-perceptions, for example through repeatable experiments. In his second main work, the Critique of Practical Reason, he tackled the equally ambitious question: ‘what is the right way for a human being to act?’ Is there a single valid standard for morally right action? Here too Kant provided a spectacular solution that is still passionately debated, globally, today. The book “Kant in 60 Minutes” explains both these major works of Kant’s in a lively way, using over eighty key passages from the works themselves and many examples. The final chapter on “what use Kant’s discovery is for us today” shows the enormous importance of his ideas for our personal lives and our society. The book forms part of the popular series “Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes”.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Kant’s Great Discovery

Kant’s Central Idea

What Can I Know? The

Critique of Pure Reason

The Dispute between Rationalists and Empiricists

Kant’s Brilliant Solution to the ‘Problem of Knowledge’

Space and Time

The Categories

The Categories on the Motorway

Knowledge as the Interplay of Sense-Perception and Thought

God is Not an Object of Knowledge

‘What Ought I To Do?’ The

Critique of Practical Reason

The Critique of Hedonism: The Pleasure Principle Knows No Morality

The Critique of Utilitarianism: Weighing Up ‘Benefit’ is Dangerous

The Critique of

‘Eudaemonism’:

Virtue Alone is Not Enough

The Critique of Legalism: Laws Can Be Unjust

The Categorical Imperative – The One True Moral Law

Duty and Free Will

What May I Hope? The Critique of Religion

Of What Use Is Kant’s Discovery for Us Today?

The Foundation of the Sciences

The Categorical Imperative – The Spur to Morality

Sustainability – the Maxim of the Modern Age

Enlightenment Never Ends - Sapere Aude!

Bibliographical References

Kant’s Great Discovery

Immanuel Kant is thought to be perhaps the greatest of all philosophers. And Kant did make, in the 18th Century, two great discoveries which engage us still today. Firstly, he founded the globally acknowledged ‘categorical imperative’ in moral philosophy; secondly, he became the first philosopher to succeed in answering that question as old as humanity of how knowledge arises in our brains. In his main work, the 1000-page Critique of Pure Reason, Kant analysed the working of Man’s thinking apparatus.

Kant was prompted to this analysis by noting that all philosophers before him had defended different views and had even arrived at knowledge-claims directly opposed to one another:

This was due, in Kant’s view, to an improper use of the faculty of reason. All human beings, indeed – and thus all philosophers, too – perceive the same reality. If philosophers, then, had arrived at conflicting opinions this was caused, Kant believed, by illusions and errors in thinking. So as not to fall himself into such errors, Kant decided, midway through his career, to refrain for a time from making any philosophical claims. For eleven years he published nothing: no book, no essay, not a single word – although in fact, as a university professor of philosophy, regular publication was expected of him. Instead, he withdrew, at age forty-six, into his study and began tenaciously to research the question of how exactly the apparatus of thinking functions and of how we should apply it if we are to arrive at error-free statements about reality. He critically examined what human beings can gain knowledge of by applying the faculty of reason and what they cannot gain knowledge of, since it lies outside the jurisdiction of this faculty. This was why Kant gave to his main work the title: Critique of Pure Reason.

The decisive question for Kant was always the single critical one: what can reason truly know with certainty and where does mere speculation begin?

He sought the answer to this question as if possessed. He got his servant to wake him up every morning at five with the words: “It is time!” Still in his nightgown, he worked for two hours at his writing desk before going to give his daily university lecture between seven and nine. Then he returned to his desk and wrote for the rest of the morning before taking his midday meal, exactly at noon, with friends. He forbade, however, discussion of philosophy during the meal, as he needed an hour’s distraction in order to continue to work with concentration through the afternoon. He was so punctual in taking, at five, his daily constitutional that it was said that the citizens of Königsberg set their clocks by him as he left his house with hat and walking stick. The evening hours he spent reading the works of other philosophers before retiring, with equal punctuality, at ten o’clock to bed. It was in this way that he confronted, day by day, month by month and year by year, tirelessly and with iron discipline, the key question: how does human reason function and what can human beings know by reason’s application?

Kant pondered in this way – with a patience that is almost inconceivable for us today – for eleven long years before he finally gave his answer to the world. It was worthy of the long effort. His Critique of Pure Reason became a sensation. Once its difficult content had been grasped, the book became famous all over the world and it is still considered to be the most important work of philosophy ever written. But it also got Kant into trouble with the Church. For the result of his labours was one very hard for believers to accept. The critical investigation of the human thinking apparatus (or, as Kant put it, of ‘pure reason’) forces us to conclude that our capacity for knowledge is very limited. Our reason, Kant contends, can provide true and certain knowledge only of that which we have already perceived through our five senses (i.e. seen, heard, smelt, tasted, or touched). Nobody can arrive at a truly sure and reliable knowledge of an object merely by thinking and meditating upon it if he has never perceived this object through his senses. God counts, for Kant, among this class of objects that cannot be known, since He can never become the object of an ‘intuition’. (This term – ‘Anschauung’ in Kant’s German – was used rather differently in Kant’s day than in ours. Today intuition has an almost metaphysical connotation (‘female intuition’ etc), but in Kant’s day it meant perception through sight and the other physical senses. For this reason, we shall, below, mostly use ‘sense-perception’ to render it into English.) Although we use the word ‘God’, no one has ever seen Him. God, consequently, is initially only an abstract thought or, as Kant puts it, an ‘empty concept’:

This was why Kant rejected all philosophical proofs of God’s existence as unscientific, although such proofs were widespread in his day. Neither God nor the Devil nor life after death can, Kant concluded, possibly be known or proven by reason. Such conclusions, of course, earned him the enmity of the established churches. The devout Prussian king Frederick William II strictly forbade him to teach or disseminate these views on God and religion. For many years, no professor in Prussia was allowed to lecture on Kant’s critical writings about religion.

But the service that Kant did the natural sciences with his ‘critique of knowledge’ was truly inestimable. He gave researchers, for the first time, a set of logical tools which was sensationally simple and yet quite perfect, and that still remains valid today and makes all scientific results achieved worldwide mutually comparable. Every theory, Kant argued, however good, must be proven in terms of actual sense-perceptions, for example through repeatable experiments. Only when so proven can it count as true knowledge. Thus began that triumphant progress of the natural sciences and technology which still continues today. Research results could now be checked, compared and further developed worldwide, since all researchers employed the same epistemologically-guaranteed method, namely, Kant’s. By being the first to answer the epistemological question: ‘What can I know?’ Kant prepared the ground for the great global flowering of scientific endeavour.

But this was by no means all. In his second major work, the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant tackles what is perhaps an even more important question for mankind:

Life is not just about investigating and knowing the world but above all about behaving rightly in it and doing good, not evil. But what is good and what is evil? How ought one to behave? Is there a way of acting which is generally and equally right for all human beings?

Kant succeeded in developing a sensational answer also to this question: the so-called ‘categorical imperative’. Still today, two hundred years after Kant formulated it, millions of school and university students all over the world learn this maxim of moral action. The contrast between the vastness of Kant’s influence on the world and the modesty of the life he lived is striking. It is said that he never once left the area of his small native city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). A contemporary biographer relates that he only once ventured a few miles, by horse-drawn coach, outside the city limits in order to visit a friend. But the unusually late homecoming proved such a disturbance to his daily routine that he resolved never to indulge in such ‘adventures’ again and to devote himself exclusively to his studies. Women had absolutely no place in his life. He considered them to be a waste of time and a potential distraction from higher things. When questioned about his lifelong bachelorhood he would say:

Kant really had only one pleasure: thought – and the indulgence he permitted himself here was boundless. Both his contemporaries and many later thinkers have noted with amusement the almost compulsive quality that Kant brought to ‘the simple life’. But the incontestable fact remains that this obsessive self-discipline yielded the most significant and enduring ethical vision that mankind has ever produced: the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is timeless and modern above all because Kant proposed here, for the first time, a principle for right action based exclusively on reason and not, as in earlier times, on a belief in good and evil per se.

With Kant there entered an entirely new kind of thinking into the history of philosophy and of mankind: namely, critical thinking. Kant, we may say, was perhaps the most consistent representative of the Enlightenment inasmuch as he urged people to self-critically examine all their own claims to knowledge and to thoroughly free themselves from all the apparent knowledge handed down to them by tradition:

(The Cambridge Edition of Kant’s writings uses the rather old-fashioned term ‘minority’ here as a translation of Kant’s Unmuendigkeit. The term does not refer to a ‘minority’ in the sense opposed to a ‘majority’ but rather to the condition of being a minor, or being a child subject to tutelage).

Kant’s Central Idea

What Can I Know?

The Critique of Pure Reason

Kant once stated in one of his philosophical lectures that there are, in philosophy, really only four questions of any true importance: ‘what can I know?’; ‘what ought I to do?’; ‘what may I hope?’; and ‘what is Man?’ He engaged above all with the first two of these four questions.

The fundamental question of what a human being can know is investigated by Kant in his mighty thousand-page masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason. As in the case of ‘intuition’, we should take note of a change in the meaning of the word ‘critique’ between Kant’s day and ours. Today, ‘critique’ implies a negative judgment; but Kant uses it rather in the original sense of the Greek word it comes from: ‘krinein’, which means ‘investigate’ or ‘examine’. He wants to investigate what pure reason can and cannot do. He compares this critical examination to a court trial at which reason is at the same time prosecutor and accused, inasmuch as it is (self-)compelled to examine, (self-)critically, its own capacities. Kant believed such a rigorous ‘trial’ to be, after two thousand years of philosophy, long overdue; the philosophers’ centuries-old discussion about truth was threatening, he thought, to sink into contradictions and chaos and the age itself now demanded that