Kant

by Paul A. Schons

originally published by the Germanic-American Institute in August, 1999

Germany has been called the land of poets and philosophers. Certainly one of the most influential of the philosophers was Immanuel Kant. Kant was a pivotal thinker who, over two centuries has continuously conditioned the way humans think, not only in Germany and Europe, but throughout the world. He was clearly the leading mind of the Enlightenment and clearly ranks with such thinkers as Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Descartes and Confucius among those thinkers who have set the patterns of how we humans understand ourselves and reality. Such thinkers seldom come to our thoughts in daily life, and most know nothing of them other than, perhaps, their names, but they are with us constantly, as they are the innovators who condition our very understanding of who we are and what the range of our potential might be.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) spent his entire life in a city on the remote eastern frontier of the German Empire. He never traveled more than a few miles from his hometown of Königsberg, a city which today is no longer in Germany but Russia. Even the name is only history, for the city is now called Kaliningrad. (Eastern Prussia was divided between Poland and Russia after World War II.)

Kant's life was unremarkable. Heinrich Heine (the poet, author of Die Lorelei) wrote of his life, "Die Lebensgeschichte des Immanuel Kant ist schwer zu beschreiben. Denn er hatte weder Leben noch Geschichte. (The life story of Immanuel Kant is hard to describe, for he had neither a life nor a story.) In describing the character of his daily life, Heine wrote, "Ich glaube nicht, daß die große Uhr der dortigen Kathedrale leidenschaftsloser und regelmäßiger ihr äußers Tagewerk vollbrachte, wie ihr Landsmann Immanuel Kant." (I don't think the great clock in the cathedral there went through its daily rounds with less excitement or more routinely than its countryman, Immanuel Kant.) It is said that the citizens of Königsberg set their clocks according to the position of the gray presence of Professor Kant on his daily walk down and back the same street every day. It is said that the only time he missed his walk at the exact same time was when he first discovered Rousseau's book, Emile, and became so engrossed that he forgot his walk. The street he walked daily at 3:30 is still called the "Philosophengang" (The Philosopher's Walk) in his memory.

The good citizens of Königsberg saw little more than the daily passing of a fairly typically bland and uninteresting professor from the Albertus University, a university which had been a part of their city since 1544. The role of university instructors in Prussia at that time was fairly restricted. They were expected to use standard textbooks in their teaching and to guide students through established and accepted patterns of reactions to the texts.

The academic community and Königsberg society knew Kant as a witty and lively individual who enjoyed active discussions of ideas at social gatherings. Visitors to the city were no doubt pleased at his intense curiosity concerning their travels and perspectives. In many respects that active mind of a man who never left the environs of Königsberg encountered human society and the world through books and through the insights and experiences of visitors to Königsberg. In this virtual fashion his mind roamed the known world and carefully examined, prodded and evaluated its very structure. These virtual travels were no less significant and, in the end, no less explosive than the physical travels and conclusions of Charles Darwin a generation later.

Professor Kant thought with the same precision that he took each timed step along the Philosophengang. At times he wrote in a mathematical style which lent his books all the excitement of the gray coat he wore on his daily walks. Yet students began to find his lectures innovative and invigorating. Those who read his books began to sense developing a new, exciting and challenging vision of the very nature of human understanding and human knowledge.

The university administration and the educational administrators of the state of Prussia, even the King, gradually began to recognize in Kant's published works a dangerous challenge to the comfortable equanimity of the Christianity and the order of society which they protected. Indeed, it was the age of the revolution and uncertainty and fear were spreading throughout Europe. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) appeared in the age of the rationalist, republican pamphlets of the American and French revolutions. Although Kant was known to be in sympathy with the French Revolution he was not regarded as a direct threat to the state. His works were seen, however, to be too radical for the Christianity of the times. In 1793 Kant was forbidden to lecture or write on any topic involving religion. None, however, recognized yet the full scope and challenge of his ideas.

As the non-threatening professor had walked so quietly through the streets of Königsberg, none who saw him had suspected that his mind was filled with the sparks and crackles of ideas which would develop an explosive power sufficient to propel the world into a new age.