Summary Of Kant

’s Life Essay, Research Paper

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) spent all of his life in K.nigsberg, a

small German town on the Baltic Sea in East Prussia. (After World War II,

Germany’s border was pushed west, so K.nigsberg is now called

Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.) At the age of fifty-five, Kant appeared to

be a washout. He had taught at K.nigsberg University for over twenty

years, yet had not published any works of significance.

During the last twenty-five years of his life, however, Kant left a

mark on the history of philosophy that is rivaled only by 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: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) for the philosophy of

mind; the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) for moral philosophy; and

the Critique of Judgment (1790) for aesthetics, the philosophy of art.

The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals was published in

1785, just before the Critique of Practical Reason. It is essentially a short

introduction to the argument presented in the second Critique. In order to

understand what Kant is up to in this book, it is useful to know something

about Kant’s other works and about the intellectual climate of his time.

Kant lived and wrote during a period in European intellectual history

called the “Enlightenment.” Stretching from the mid-seventeenth century to

the early nineteenth, this period produced the ideas about human rights and

democracy that inspired the French and American revolutions. (Some other

major figures of the Enlightenment were Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and

Leibniz.)

The characteristic quality of the Enlightenment was an immense

confidence in “reason”–that is, in humanity’s ability to solve problems

through logical analysis. The central metaphor of the Enlightenment was a

notion of the light of reason dispelling the darkness of mythology and

misunderstanding. Enlightenment thinkers like Kant felt that history had

placed them in the unique position of being able to provide clear reasons

and arguments for their beliefs. The ideas of earlier generations, they

thought, had been determined by myths and traditions; their own ideas were

based on reason. (According to this way of thinking, the French monarchy’s

claims to power were based on tradition; reason prescribed a republican

government like that created by the revolution.)

Kant’s philosophical goal was to use logical analysis to understand

reason itself. Before we go about analyzing our world, Kant argued, we

must understand the mental tools we will be using. In the Critique of Pure

Reason Kant set about developing a comprehensive picture of how our

mind–our “reason”– receives and processes information.

Kant later said that the great Scottish philosopher David Hume

(1711-76) had inspired him to undertake this project. Hume, Kant said,

awoke him from an intellectual “slumber.” The idea that so inspired Kant

was Hume’s analysis of cause-and-effect relationships. When we talk about

events in the world, Hume noted, we say that one thing “causes” another.

But nothing in our perceptions tells us that anything causes anything else. All

we know from our perceptions is that certain events regularly occur

immediately after certain other events. “Causation” is a concept that we

employ to make sense of why certain events regularly follow certain other

events.

Kant took Hume’s idea and went one step further. Causation, Kant

argues, is not just an idea that we employ to make sense of our

perceptions. It is a concept that we cannot help but employ. We don’t sit

around watching events and then develop an idea of causation on the basis

of what we see. When we see a baseball break a window, for instance, we

don’t need to have seen balls break windows before to say that the ball

“caused” the window to break; causation is an idea that we automatically

bring to bear on the situation. Kant argued that causation and a number of

other basic ideas–time and space, for instance–are hardwired, as it were,

into our minds. Anytime we try to understand what we see, we cannot help

but think in terms of causes and effects.

Kant’s argument with Hume may seem like hairsplitting, but it has

huge implications. If our picture of the world is structured by concepts that

are hardwired into our minds, then we can’t know anything about how the

world “really” is. The world we know about is developed by combining

sensory data (”appearances” or “phenomena,” as Kant called them) with

fundamental concepts of reason (causation, etc.). We don’t know anything

about the “things-in- themselves” from which sensory data emanates. This

recognition that our understanding of the world may have as much to do

with our minds as with the world has been calle

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