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  Kant’s book is noteworthy for its bold attempt to provide a purely mechanical account of the origin of the universe, as is done by contemporary physicists. It is also famous for containing one of the first contemporary formulations of the nebular hypothesis of the solar system’s origins – the idea that the solar system was formed by a primitive cloud of matter that coalesced through the action of elementary forces. Prior to Kant, the Swedish scientist, philosopher and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) advanced a similar nebular hypothesis in 1734, two decades earlier, although Kant is often given credit for having first imagined the idea.

  Coincidentally, 1755 was also the year of the devastating Lisbon earthquake, which did much to fuel the problem of how a benevolent God could allow such disasters. Kant immediately wrote three articles about the earthquake, describing it in a manner consistent with his nebular hypothesis as an event due to natural causes. With respect to evil, Kant’s view is that we are in no position to judge the overall morality of these kinds of event. He notes that building cities on earthquake-susceptible land is a human decision, and that perhaps the horrors of the earthquake will motivate people towards the good end of refraining from violence when the choice is indeed in their hands, such as in decisions to wage war.

  More fundamental than his discussions of the nebular hypothesis and the nature of earthquakes is the general role of scientific thought in Kant’s philosophy. It can be said that his philosophy is one written by a morally conscious scientist – primarily an astronomer and geophysicist – who is fascinated by the presence and operation of natural laws. As mentioned, Kant rejects emotional solutions to philosophical problems in favour of purely rule-oriented solutions that are universally applicable, and as rock-solid as the natural laws. To appreciate the importance of natural law in his thought, note how Kant describes the supreme idea of morality in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). He takes natural law as the paradigm for other disciplines, stating within the sphere of morality, ‘Act as though the maxim of your action were, by your will, to become a universal law of nature’ (Section Two).

  Often overshadowed by the Critique of Pure Reason and the works that followed thereafter, Kant’s early writings show that he was an astronomer at heart, enamoured of the starry skies and their attendant natural laws of operation. This is a key to understanding the consistently rule-oriented disposition of his philosophy that finds its expression in a series of complementary clusters of law-like principles. We see this exemplified in a familiar quotation from the conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason: ‘Two things fill the mind with always new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and more steadily one thinks about them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’.

  Key idea: Laws of nature

  Kant respected the idea that nature operates predictably according to a set of universal laws. Underlying not only his discussions of physical phenomena such as earthquakes and the origin of the solar system, the idea of natural law also inspires his model for moral action.

  Let us return to Kant’s life. In 1755, now aged 31, Kant came back to Königsberg, gave public lectures, presented his written work to the university, published an impressive amount of his writings, received his doctorate, and consequently received authorization to work as a private teacher, a Privatdozent, unsalaried. This allowed him to make a living from the students who paid their fees per lecture. Kant’s lecturing duties were time-and-energy consuming, and kept him busy, financially challenged, and in a bit of a purgatory for the next several years. Often motivated by student demand, he taught a variety of courses, such as anthropology, logic, mechanics, metaphysics, moral philosophy, physical geography, physics and mathematics (arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry).

  It took Kant 15 years to secure a salaried position as a professor at the university, which he finally achieved in 1770, having had in the meantime to take up a supplementary position as a librarian. It is not as if he was unsuccessful or disrespected: he received offers of professorships of philosophy in other cities, and was popular as a teacher. Kant was simply not interested in leaving Königsberg, where he had established himself socially, and where he had a keen eye on a professorship in philosophy. He thus proceeded patiently.

  In 1770 Kant gave his Inaugural Lecture as a new professor, and in light of his history of impressively productive scholarship, it is easy to imagine that he would have continued writing and publishing as before. What happened, though, is that Kant began to rework his ideas very quietly over the next eleven years, without having any work go into print. The result was the epoch-making work with which we will begin the study of his philosophy, the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, which he revised for a second edition in 1787.

  Kant’s main preoccupation is with understanding the relationship between science and morality. This interest did not radically change, but his approach to resolving the tension between the two eventually assumed a more dramatic form. As historians of Kant’s philosophical development describe it, the Critique of Pure Reason marks the beginning of a second major period in Kant’s writings, called the ‘critical’ period, which contrasts with the ‘pre-critical’ period of his predominantly scientific writings. In his efforts to reconcile natural science – understood as a thoroughly mechanical vision of the world, potentially atheistic and amoral – with human freedom, morality and theism, Kant became critical of our ability to know anything determinate about metaphysical truth, or, in other words, the way things are in themselves. We will see exactly why in later chapters.

  As occurs with many historically influential works, the Critique of Pure Reason was at first neither well understood nor appreciated for the groundbreaking work that it was. Within two years of its publication, Kant accordingly composed a shorter, more accessible rendition of the work, entitled Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that Will be Able to Come Forward as a Science (1783). The title suggests to everyone, one could say, to ‘please read this book (and the Critique of Pure Reason) before engaging in traditional metaphysical speculation’.

  Kant enthusiastically conceived of his Critique as a work with a mission: it was a peacemaking effort, trying to end once and for all, the wars among those who believed that they held, either as philosophic or religious texts, the true metaphysics, whether it happened to be theist, atheist or neutral. His position – argued at impressively detailed length – is that answers to ultimate questions are forever beyond human reach, and that philosophical and religious wars are therefore idle.

  Spotlight: Kant’s Copernican Revolution

  Kant describes his work in the Critique of Pure Reason as a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in philosophy, comparing his philosophy to how Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) revolutionized our understanding of the solar system by replacing a commonly believed ‘geocentric’ (earth-centred) model with an alternative ‘heliocentric’ (sun-centred) model: ‘finding that he could not make sufficient progress by assuming that all the heavenly bodies revolved round the spectator, he thought that he might have better success by reversing the process, and having the spectator revolve, while the stars remained at rest’ (Bxvi). Celestial objects may look as if they are moving of their own accord, but we are the ones who are moving, spinning around on a carousel, so to speak. The object’s shifting appearance is a reflection of our own activity.

  Similarly, it is still commonly believed the ordinary objects that we perceive as, for instance, being brown, square and 15 feet away, appear as such because that is part of their intrinsic and objective character. Kant’s idea, however, is that an object’s being brown, square and 15 feet away, is primarily due to our own mental movement, or mental contribution to the situation. Here again, the object’s appearance is a reflection of our own activity.

  After the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s productiveness returned to its earlier, pre-critical period levels. Two years after the Prolegomena appeared, he published the Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and within another two years, a revision of the Critique for a second edition. A year later, he published a ‘second’ critique, the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), enhancing and systematizing his work on morality. Two years later, he set forth a ‘third’ critique on aesthetics and purposes inherent in nature, the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790).

  At this point, Kant was 66 years old, maintaining his health by living intelligently and temperately according to a strict schedule that included a daily walk in the late afternoon for exercise. He continued teaching for another six years until 1796, when he retired. At age 69 he published Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793), which had the effect of turning the government censorship office against him. The book was judged to be insufficiently respectful of Christianity and Kant received a written warning not to publish further on religious subjects. Frederick the Great, who had died a decade before, had left the throne to his less tolerant nephew, Frederick William II, whose ministers were then in charge of censorship. When Frederick William II died in 1797, Kant published in the same year The Metaphysics of Morals, which completed his moral theory, and 1798, his final two works, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and The Conflict of the Faculties.

  With his mental abilities slowly fading, Kant lived another six years, until he passed away on 12 February 1804 at the age of 79. When Kant died, the world was already moving into a new age. In that year, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of France, and Thomas Jefferson was elected President of the United States for a second term. Abraham Lincoln would be born exactly five years later to the day, in 1809.

  Dig Deeper

  Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, tr. James Haden (Yale University Press, 1981)

  Arsenij Gulya, Immanuel Kant and His Life and Thought, tr. M. Despalatovic (Boston: Birkhauser, 1987)

  Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

  J. H. W. Stuckenberg, The Life of Immanuel Kant (London: Macmillan, 1882)

  Study questions

  1 What is Pietism, and what role did it play in Kant’s life?

  2 What were the main subjects Kant studied as a high school student? Why did these studies become important in Kant’s later life as a professor?

  3 Why is scientific thinking, and especially Newtonian physics and astronomy, important for understanding Kant’s philosophy?

  4 What is the nebular hypothesis? Was Kant the first person to formulate this hypothesis?

  5 What was Kant’s view on the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755?

  6 What is the difference between Kant’s ‘critical’ period and his ‘pre-critical’ period?

  7 What are the titles and respective subject matters of Kant’s three Critiques?

  8 The main question in Kant’s philosophy concerns reconciling the tension between which two disciplines?

  9 In what sense is Kant’s central work, the Critique of Pure Reason, an effort at peacemaking?

  10 Did the government censors ever condemn any of Kant’s books?

  2

  Kant’s way of thinking and arguing

  In this chapter, we will see how Kant’s philosophizing rests squarely upon the discipline of Aristotelian logic and the assumption that humans are essentially rational beings. We will also see how he analyses ordinary objects into a set of fundamental dimensions – spatio-temporal, sensory and conceptual – and how he reveals the underlying presuppositions for any given subject by asking the probing question, How is it possible?

  1 Aristotelian logic and the elementary judgement, S is P

  When composing a philosophy, it is natural to search for a reliable foundation upon which to build it. The stronger the foundation, the better the result will be. A reason for seeking a solid foundation concerns a certain feature of truth, which is that truth is linked with stability. It has been traditionally and naturally thought that the more permanent something is, the truer it is. Truth is something one can hold on to, and it makes more sense to hold on to a rock, than to a puff of smoke.

  The great philosopher, Plato, appreciated this feature of truth, and having noticed that even rocks crumble away, he imagined a truer dimension beyond space and time that does not fade, and that is absolutely unchanging. This realm simply ‘is’ – it is the realm of ‘Being’ – and it never ‘becomes’ anything different. Many people would locate God – a being that the Bible records as having said appropriately to Moses, ‘I am that I am’ – in this otherworldly realm of truth.

  Now although Kant was a theist, he was not exactly a follower of Plato. He nonetheless took from Plato an idea to ground his philosophy. This is the thought that in contrast to physical things which change, concepts are more stable and more reliable, and hence more true – or at least certain concepts are.

  Consider how one can draw a set of circles in the sand along the seashore and watch these circles wash away in minutes. Contrast how the geometrical definition of a circle – the set of points on a given flat surface that are equidistant from a given point – does not change at all. The definition has been there for eternity. In Plato’s mind, the definition of a circle is thereby more true than any physical circle that exists in space and time. Plato held the concept of a circle to be truer than any particular circle that one might perceive here or there, whether it is in the shape of a full moon, a dish, or the wheel of a bicycle. This idea that certain concepts are more basic than – one could even say ‘prior to’ – physical things will help us understand Kant.

  Key idea: Truth as stability

  We rely on what is true, and insofar as we rely upon it, we assume that truth is stable. Absolute truth would consequently be totally reliable and completely secure, and as such, it would be unchanging. Kant searches for the truth of human knowledge, and discovers it in the fixed forms of our mental structure.

  Plato, along with his magnificent student, Aristotle, lived at a time and in a city with a long heritage of legal debate. Many talented lawyers lived in ancient Athens, and it was common to hear them argue over this or that case in the public forum, or agora, where the seat of government and law courts were located. When these lawyers argued a case, they had a variety of winning techniques at their disposal – they could, for instance, appeal to the jury’s emotions or they could impress them with the established authority of their witnesses – but the ability to think logically was at the centre of their discipline.

  We owe it to Aristotle’s genius for having showed us exactly how and why arguments can ‘sound right’, even though their contents can be false or silly. One could say the following, which although odd, still rings logically true:

  1 All cats are good singers.

  2 All good singers have sharp teeth.

  3 Therefore, all cats have sharp teeth.

  Similarly, one could argue:

  1 If moo, then doo.

  2 If doo then goo.

  3 Therefore, if moo, then goo.

  Here is another example, where the contents are all true:

  1 Immanuel Kant is a human being.

  2 All human beings have a sense of humour.

  3 Therefore, Immanuel Kant has a sense of humour.

  The logical sequences in these examples ‘sound right’ for a reason that has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of what is being asserted. They sound right because the forms of the sequences make sense. If the premises happen to be true, then a true conclusion automatically follows. The forms are valid because they are ‘truth preserving’, one could say.

  To display these logical forms more clearly, Aristotle substituted for the conceptual contents, merely letters that can stand for any subject matter at all. The above three arguments accordingly transform into:

  1 All As are Bs.

  2 All Bs have P.

  3 Therefore, all As have P.

  1 If A, then B.

  2 If B, then C.

  3 Therefore, if A, then C.

  1 S is a T.

>   2 All Ts have P.

  3 Therefore, S has P.

  Aristotle discovered and developed the idea of displaying an argument’s logical form, and he wrote at great length about various kinds of argument forms, setting out their different structures in detail. His logical studies have become central to philosophy ever since.

  Now in Kant’s time, Aristotelian logic was respected as a better-than-rock-solid subject. This is why Kant based his philosophy on Aristotelian logic, stating the following in the preface to the second edition (1787) of his Critique of Pure Reason:

  … since Aristotle, logic has not had to retrace a single step, unless we choose to consider as improvements the removal of some unnecessary subtleties, or the clearer definition of its matter, both of which refer to the elegance rather than to the solidity of the science. It is remarkable also, that to the present day, it has not been able to make one step in advance, so that, to all appearance, it may be considered as completed and perfect.

  (Bviii)

  The logical foundations of Kant’s philosophy are in fact less complicated than the examples above. They are simple, because Kant wants to identify the elementary bits of knowledge that we have, and he finds nothing more elementary than when we think to ourselves in daily experience, ‘the sky is blue’, or ‘the sound is loud’, or ‘the table is hard’. These are basic judgements, as we merely take note that there is the blue sky, or a loud sound or a hard table.

  If we express this kind of elementary judgement as a logical form, there is some thing (e.g., the sky, a sound, or a table) that has some quality (e.g., is blue, loud or hard). Using Aristotle’s style, we can refer to the thing as S (for ‘subject’) and the quality as P (for ‘property’ which is another word for ‘quality’).