Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg, a small German town on the Baltic Sea in East Prussia. (After World War II, Germany's border was pushed west, so Königsberg is now called Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.) He was the son of a poor saddle-maker, but because of his evident intelligence he was sent to university. After receiving a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Königsberg.

At the age of fifty-five, Kant had published much work on the natural sciences, taught at Königsberg University for over twenty years—where he lectured on a variety of topics including cosmology and anthropology, as well as philosophy—and achieved a good reputation in German literary circles. During the last twenty-five years of his life, however, Kant's philosophical work placed him firmly in the company of such towering giants as Plato and Aristotle. Kant's three major works are often considered to be the starting points for different branches of modern philosophy: Critique of Pure Reason (1781) for the philosophy of mind; Critique of Practical Reason (1788) for moral philosophy; and Critique of Judgment (1790) for aesthetics, the philosophy of art. Kant continued to think and write well into his old age, and he was at work on a fourth Critique at the time of his death in 1804.

Kant lived an exceptionally quiet, uneventful, regular life, never marrying or traveling far from Konigsberg. His sedentary, routine life has often been the source of derision from his critics. Allegedly, the housewives of Königsberg set their clocks every day of his professional life by his daily walk—except for one day when, in his engrossment with Jean Jacque Rousseau's novel Emile, he forgot the walk. On the other hand, Kant's heavy academic workload, moderate income, and weak health may go some ways towards explaining his uneventful life, and perhaps it is simply true that for him his intellectual adventures were adventures enough. We do know that he was quite sociable and also that he took great interest in the latest sciences, which should go some ways toward dispelling the image of Kant as bloodless and interested only in his own abstractions.

It has been suggested that Kant was affected by his upbringing as a Pietist, a Lutheran revivalist sect that emphasized moral self-examination over dogma and ritual. One possible sign of this upbringing lies in his understanding of moral worth, which depends on the inner reason the person has for an action rather than on the effects or appearance of the action. Another sign of his upbringing lies in his understanding of religion; although Kant rejects most of the traditional Christian system with its anthropomorphic God and its accompanying rituals, he still regards himself as having saved all worthwhile features of religion.

The religion Kant justifies in the Critique of Practical Reason provides a God who guarantees that moral dutifulness will lead to good, but nothing else. He includes nothing about Christ, nothing about God's will, nothing about the efficacy of prayer. None of this is ruled out, but neither is it promised.

Popular pages: Critique of Practical Reason