“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance
from another.” - Immanuel Kant
Born into an era of newly emerging scientific understanding and individual autonomy,
going on to play a crucial role in the intellectual maturation of the modern world,
and synthesizing new understandings of human knowledge and morality, 18th century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant is one of the most consequential thinkers of modern history.
Kant was born in 1724 in what was, at the time, Konigsberg, East Prussia—what is now Kaliningrad,
Russia. He was born into a very modest, strict, religious family,
the fourth oldest of nine children. In young adulthood, Kant attended the University
of Königsberg, where he soon became interested in the natural sciences, mathematics, and philosophy.
As his exposure to the recent achievements of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment
increasingly revealed to him the emerging power of human reason and independent thinking, Kant became
critical of his religious upbringing—and religious and political authority in general. He observed
the modern world shifting alongside him, away from blind faith in religious and political authority,
and into secular, independent, rational thinking. However, Kant, having seen
and understood the value of religion in the lives of the people he had known, and having
appreciated and respected how it promoted ethical behavior and good conduct, he worried about the
consequences of humanity shifting away from it. Kant saw humanity at a juncture in which it was
now mature enough to leave home, but not mature enough to know how to live well on its own.
During and following his education, Kant published many works dealing with topics
related to metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, politics, and aesthetics, focusing his life’s
work on helping facilitate the western world’s successful transition into a new enlightened age.
In his masterwork, Critique of Pure Reason, as well as throughout several of his other works,
Kant attempted to do this by examining current conceptions of knowledge and reality,
synthesizing new models of understanding, and defining reason as the ultimate source of good.
Kant wrote:
Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness
of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded
as grounds of exemption from the examination of this tribunal. But, if they are exempted,
they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect,
which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.
Ultimately, Kant’s work attempted to provide a framework for understanding how we come to
understand the world and how and why we ought to behave in a certain way in relation to it.
Put differently, he sought to answer how we take in the chaos of the natural world,
distill it within us into order, into meaning, and into ethical behavior.
Kant was not trying to destroy what religion had historically provided, but rather,
he sought to augment and replenish it for the conditions of the modern age.
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant discusses the process through which he believes we come to
acquire knowledge. At the time, there were two primary schools of thought. Empiricism
and rationalism. Empiricists argued that all knowledge is derived from our sense
experiences. Rationalists argued that knowledge is chiefly arrived at through reason. Kant,
however, found himself somewhere in between the two, believing that knowledge is derived from a
particular combination of our sense experiences and our faculty for reason, all facilitated by a
framework of a priori conditions. He famously wrote, “Thoughts without content are empty,
intuitions without concepts are blind.” In other words, we need input data to process,
but we also we need a priori conditions to process that data in order to output any meaning. When
referring to a priori conditions here, this simply means something that is acquired independently of
experience. In relation to the mind and knowledge, Kant defined these as space, time, reason,
and self-consciousness. We need space and time to discern external experiences, we need reason
to process experiences into representations, or ideas, and we need consistent self-consciousness,
or identify, in order to unify the process from a fixed position. These all must exist first,
before experience or observation, for there to be any experiences or observations at all.
Kant writes: [Self-consciousness]
does not yet come about by my accompanying each representation with consciousness, but rather by
my adding one representation to the other and being conscious of their synthesis. Therefore
it is only because I can combine a manifold of given representations in one consciousness that
it is possible for me to represent the identity of the consciousness in these representations.
Ultimately, Kant arrives at a sort of synthesis of empiricism and rationalism in which a certain
limited kind of knowledge about the world can be attained uniquely through human reason. Kant
wrote, “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with
reason. There is nothing higher than reason.” As a result of this, Kant believed that knowledge
about how we ought to act in the world also comes from reason. To be moral as a rational being,
for Kant, is to act rationally. Kant centers his entire ethical theory on
perhaps one of his most famous philosophical concepts, the categorical imperative.
In its original formulation, Kant describes it with the following: "Act only according to that
maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” In other words,
if you would not will everyone else to do the same thing you’re doing, it is an unethical act.
We can determine this by asking ourselves if the whole world committed the act, would the world no
longer function, or at the very least be worse for you? If yes, to act in such a way, you are
contradicting and harming yourself. For example, if everyone committed theft, you would become a
victim of theft, and the world would become dysfunctional. Thus, no rational person could
see it right to steal, and to act otherwise breaks moral law, like breaking the laws of mathematics.
All of this of course is a sort of formal reconstruction of the golden rule: do unto others
as you would have them do unto you. Kant attempts to take this further, however, by grounding it in
a secular philosophical system that showcases, essentially, that being immoral does not make
rational sense and that determinations of what is moral can be concluded from reason alone.
Of course, all this leads to some potential problems. What happens when the apparently
more rational thing to do goes against categorical imperatives? What happens when someone can cause
more harm, or allow more harm, by strictly abiding by rigid moral principles? What if,
for example, you stole a weapon from someone to prevent them from harming a group of people
whom they were about to attack with it? Is this immoral simply because you broke the
moral principle of not stealing? Is it not more rational, though, to steel the weapon than to
commit rigidly to the moral principle of never stealing? People who might follow the ethical
theory known as utilitarianism would argue that it is more rational and moral to steal the weapon,
making moral laws flexible to situations. Moreover, in a much broader sense,
what are moral determinations objectively even based on using reason? Human prosperity? But
is not human prosperity subjective? How can we base an objective ethical system
in something that is entirely dependent on human subjectivity? Are we even truly rational
beings? How can we ground our process of thinking in something outside our process of thinking? For
what reason do we have other than reason itself to follow reason? Reason seems like the highest order
of cognition, of understanding, but does that sufficiently ground it in anything objective;
in anything fixed or rigid? Reason itself seems to be only defensible through circular reasoning.
Ultimately, although Kant got some things wrong and left some things unresolved,
he got some crucial things right. And perhaps more importantly, he helped reveal new problems in need
of resolving and getting right. He directly inspired subsequent revolutionary thinkers
like Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, and so many more, influencing
virtually all of western thinking in general still to do this day. He helped lead and contribute to
mankind’s courageous, still-occurring step out from the shelter of its youth and into the world
as thinking things in desperate search for a new, better, independent condition of life;
a new chapter; a new place to call home. Wherever it comes from, whatever it is,
we have seemingly all been given something that compels us to understand, to organize,
to live well, and to find reasons to treat others with kindness so as to allow them to do the same.
Throughout history, we have tried so many times in so many ways, whether through the nurturing
of kinship in primitive times, through religions, through reason, through science. Through it all,
we have yet to fully understand where morality comes from, if it is objective or real outside
of us, and how to define and explain it, if it is. But yet, in every age and every day, though messy
and deeply flawed, somehow the world continues to function. And every day, the vast majority
of us attempt to treat those we encounter, those we know, those we love with kindness.
And perhaps that’s real enough. In the words of Kant, “Two things
fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely
the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”