Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Philosophical Haiku

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

by Terence Green

Look without seeing
Know, yet comprehend nothing
From reason, duty

Immanuel Kant led a stupendously uneventful life. Born in Königsberg, then the capital of Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia), he never travelled more than forty miles from his birthplace. As a young man, he enrolled as a student at the University of Königsberg, and aside from a spell as a private tutor, he spent the rest of his career at the University. He was awoken by his valet every day at precisely the same hour, breakfasted every day at precisely the same hour, took his lunch at precisely the same hour, and went to bed each night at, you guessed it, precisely the same hour. His habits were so regular that people would set their watches according to his daily walk, as he passed by their windows. It’s little wonder that his works – considered by many of his readers as the most important philosophical corpus of the eighteenth century – all proceed with an exacting precision that quickly drains the will to live from many other readers. Still, if you can persist, the riches are many.

Kant was deeply interested in how we can know anything about the world. He argued that our senses and minds place severe limits on our knowledge. The world we perceive through our senses he called the phenomenal world. But our senses alone can never tell us all there is to know about the world (to take a modern example, our eyes do not see ultraviolet light), and so we can never know the ultimate truth of things. The world as it exists independently of our senses Kant called the noumenal world, which he thought we could know nothing about.

Kant was also interested in establishing a system of morality that would be universal. We all have reason, he said, and this forms the basis of a system of absolute (‘categorical’) duties that constitute morality. For instance (as he infamously argued), we have a duty never to lie, without exception. But what do you say if you’re hiding someone in your house and the secret police come looking for them?

For a man as unbendingly precise as Kant, the messy and unpredictable nature of actual life must have been intensely annoying.

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.