Immanuel Kant: Life, Philosophy, and Key Works
Immanuel Kant
Biography
Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1724, Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and the son of a humble saddler. He was educated in Pietism at the University of Königsberg, where he was a theological student. He was also an alumnus of Martin Knutzen, who introduced him to the rationalist philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff and instilled in him an interest in natural science, particularly Newtonian mechanics.
The Idea of Enlightenment
For Kant, the Enlightenment is man’s exit from the minority, signifying the liberation of human beings. Kant argues that this release is a project that cannot be carried out in groups; it is a path forward for each person on their own, without outside influences.
Philosophy
Knowledge changes people’s lives because it addresses the core interests of human beings. These interests can be summarized in three main questions:
- What can I know?
- What should I do?
- What may I hope for?
These three questions can be further condensed into one: What is man?
Critique of Pure Reason
His approach is based mainly on the thought of four philosophers: Descartes, Hume, Newton, and Copernicus.
Criticism of the Powers of Knowledge
- The Sensitivity: Kant is required to examine carefully the powers of knowledge. Sensitivity, where everything is derived from the senses, is the ability to receive data to know and understand our environment.
- The Understanding: The capacity for abstraction that organizes data according to concepts, i.e., grouping according to a previously established order at the mental level.
- Reason: Kant defined reason as the higher faculty of knowledge, the force that promotes, proposes, and ensures that our mental-rational judgments are consistent.
A Priori Forms of Reason / Pure Ideas
These are concepts known a priori, pre-established, and accepted as true, which unify all ideas given, ensuring consistency with reality. They are expressed in three main ideas:
- World: All concepts and ideas of our external experience.
- Soul: Under this idea, the subjective phenomena of our inner experience are unified.
- God: The union between the experiences of both subjective and objective.
Critique of Practical Reason
Kant’s attitude to the problems facing metaphysics is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, he states that we do not know, nor can we know, the absolute (since human knowledge is limited to experience). But at the same time, he considers man a being endowed with reason, an unconditioned power, so that metaphysics is considered a natural need in humans. Reason is not only the instrument of knowledge but should also be incorporated into our daily lives. However, most of our decisions come from emotions and feelings, in which case reason is shifted into the background.
Critique of Judgment
The philosopher proposes his vision focused on a dual teleological determination: formal purpose, which is aesthetic and subjective, and objectively true purpose, which is organic. Kant introduces the concept of “genius,” which has the power of the spirit to “express the ineffable in the state of the soul in a certain representation, and make it universally communicable.”
Kant summarizes his ideas about genius in four precepts:
- First, genius is a talent for art and not science.
- Second, there is a necessary relationship between imagination and understanding.
- Third, genius is shown not in the prefixed order upon completion of the exposure of a given concept, but rather in the utterance or expression of aesthetic ideas, which represent the imagination in all its freedom without guidance from rules, yet in order to conform with a given concept.
- Fourth, the unintended purpose in the power of imagination, in accordance with understanding, presupposes a proportion and arrangement of these powers that cannot be produced by any obedience to rules, be they of science or mechanical imitation, but only by the nature of the subject.