Immanuel Kant
From Philosopedia
Kant, Immanuel (22 April 1724 - 12 February 1804)
Kant’s critique of the proofs of God later contributed to forms of atheism. Although hardly a non-believer, Kant did disturb believers with his view that man and God are on the same level, and that our desire to please God is “a servile and pathological urge.” As for God, who will always remain unknown, “We can no more extend our stock of theoretical insight by mere ideas, than a merchant can better his position by adding a few noughts to his cash account.”
Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft was added to the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading in 1827.
Zuckerstätter mentions that although Kant’s “critical philosophy” is a complex synthesis of rationalist dogmatism and empiricist skepticism, Kant remained a believer. Also, he held with Plato that the mind will continue to exist after death, without any body.
Paul Edwards on Kant
Paul Edwards, evaluating Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) called it one of the most profound systematic books ever written by a philosopher. Kant believed that by his theory of knowledge he had effected a kind of "Copernican revolution." Just as Copernicus showed that the sun and not the earth is the central body of the planetary system , so Kant thought he had shown that a great deal of what we take to be features of objective reality - e.g., space and time and causality - are really in some sense manufactured by the human mind. In ethics Kant was an extreme rationalist maintaining that moral principles are objectively valid commands of the apriori reason. An action, according to him, has moral worth only if it is done from a sense of duty and never because it has been inspired by utilitarian considerations. In religion and politics Kant was a liberal. He favored the American Revolution and also the French Revolution in its earlier, less violent stages. He was one of the very first advocates of international government as a means of preventing wars. He had some difficulties with the Prussian King over his lack of religious orthodoxy. In his days Kant was preoccupied with physics and in his A General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) he anticipated the nebular hypothesis of the origin of planetary systems.
Other Critiques of Kant's Work
Ironically, his Religion Within the Bounds of Pure (i.e. Mere) Reason (1792—1794) indicates disbelief in every one of the standing Christian dogmas: Creation, Fall, Salvation, Miracles, and the supernatural basis of morals. Singing in the churches, he pronounced, was mere bawling. Prayer, whether public or private, was a form of superstition in that it addressed an unseen world: “To kneel or prostrate himself on the earth, even for the purpose of symbolizing to himself reverence for a heavenly object, is unworthy of man.”
In ethics, he was an extreme rationalist, holding that moral principles are objectively valid commands of the a priori reason. Like Plato, observes John M. Robertson, Kant is finally occupied in discussing the “right fictions” for didactic purposes and ends “by sacrificing intellectual morality to what seems to him social security.”
Joseph McCabe called Kant “the ablest of the German philosophers,” adding that he “did good service in showing that the scholastic philosophy which still dominated Europe was purely subjective (in other words, word-spinning), but his own theory soon died, and his ethical philosophy almost gave back to mysticism what he had taken away. He mistook the analysis of the puritanical mind of an old bachelor (himself) for a study of the moral sense generally and concluded that its ‘categorical imperative’ implied a God as law-given and a future life as a reward. He thus became a non-Christian theist and in his third chief work disowned all supernatural religion.”
“Kant is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate,” Bertrand Russell wrote in his History of Western Philosophy (1945). “His philosophy allowed an appeal to the heart against the cold dictates of theoretical reason. In Kant . . . the subjectivist tendency that begins with Descartes was carried to new extremes. There is an emphasis upon mind as opposed to matter, which leads in the end to the assertion that only mind exists.”
His Final Days
Eventually, Kant's hearing and sight began to fail. It is possible he suffered from Alzheimer's disease, displaying the classic symptoms of the malady - short-term memory loss and the inability to recognize relatives and close friends. His health and mind deteriorated steadily until his death on 12 February 1804. Although he had wished for a simple funeral, he lay in state for sixteen days. Then twenty-four students served as pallbearers, followed by thousands of citizens including the entire officer corps of the garrison. At the cathedral the procession was received by the university senate, after which Kant was buried in the north wall of the the cathedral.
(See entry for Gay Philosophers).
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