Emanuel Kant's philosophical contributions and legacy

Emanuel Kant's

The Work of Kant and His Influence in History and Western Thought

The eighteenth century stands as the birthplace of the modern world. Influenced by the scientific advancements in astronomy and gravity in the seventeenth century and in art and literature in the sixteenth century, the eighteenth century sought to fuse together all the improvements in human thought and wisdom so as to construct and create a new era in human history. This era would be guided by human reason, moral agency, and common sense. Today the eighteenth century is known as the age of Enlightenment because it was just that: an age of awakening and of obtaining a new understanding of the natural world. Thinkers like Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Berkeley all contributed to an international, extra-cultural effort to make possible the pursuit of all of acquirable knowledge. Using his faculties for reason and logic, man could unlock untold knowledge and secrets of the physical realm and then harness that knowledge in order to use it to his ends. This was also the time of the birth of universal concepts of human rights, fraternity, and dignity. It becomes difficult to identify precisely one individual from the eighteenth century who can be accurately claimed to be the most important, the most significant. Without a doubt a contender for the position exists in the person of Immanuel Kant. His philosophy and writings have had a profound influence on epistemology, metaphysics, modern notions of international relations and politics, and Western philosophy in general.

It is important to understand the specific era in which Kant lived and wrote. He conceived and wrote the vast majority of his works during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Arguably Kant's greatest contribution lay in the field of epistemology. This concerns the nature, truth, and reliability of human knowledge. It further concerns the way in which humans derive that knowledge from the world. He developed a theory of moral autonomy and freedom which sought, in some ways, to harmonize two of the major philosophical schools which preceded him and his thought. Kant divided the realm of reality into "a noumenal realm of freedom from a realm of appearance understood as the phenomenal sphere of determinism and natural causality." He further divided the individual self "into an undetermined being-in-itself, real and noumenal, and a determined, phenomenal self located in the realm of appearance in whose empirically grounded consciousness alone lie diversity of perception and feeling" (Elshtain 1981, 207). These dichotomies very much formed the ideological basis of Kant's thought systems. Thus in nature there is both choice and certain determinism. For the individual, there is the world of self-reflection, thought, and reason which can, with perseverance, overcome the deterministic demands of the body like hunger, fear, sexual urges, and pain. These latter phenomena may have specific effects, but not necessarily.

The main two schools of philosophical thought that Kant sought to reconcile and overcome were rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism sought to understand human knowledge as largely being the product of the a priori human capacity for reason. With his reasoning faculties, man could come to understand anything in the world. Two or more propositions could be compared to see which was the wiser. A basic part of reason then was the comparison of ideas and concepts. Men like Spinoza and Leibniz are often associated with this school. Spinoza wrote that "[T]he mind has greater power over the emotions and is less subject thereto, in so far as it understands all things as necessary" (Robinson 1986, 267). Physical stimuli were nothing compared to a well-developed mind. Empiricism placed the emphasis on the physical world and experience. By interacting with things and gaining experiential knowledge man can derive wisdom and achieve enlightenment. Locke, a famous empiricist, is known for his concept of the tabula rasa, or blank slate. The human mind is born devoid of knowledge which it slowly acquires through "experience." In response to this claim, Leibniz stated that "one thing can be said to have an experience and such a thing must be a mind somehow prepared to have experiences of a given sort" (Robinson 1986, 273). David Hume criticized the rationalist pursuit of "eternal truths." He stressed the subjectivity of experience as being preponderant. It was into this milieu that Kant sought to launch his philosophy. Kant's thought posited that humans are thinking subjects first and foremost. Thus the "free and noumenal self" existed largely independent of the phenomenal, empirical self. Reason can exist on its own to some extent but must contend with an inevitable exposure to the physical, empirically-based world (Elshtain 1981, 207-208). Human existence is the interaction then of these two aspects of the self. Kant thus sought to transcend the rationalist-empiricist antagonism.

Kant wrote and published prolifically. His principle work in epistemology, and arguably his most famous and influential one, was Critique of Pure Reason. Building on the aforementioned, the Critique forwarded "an argument for transcendental idealism" as being twofold: existing in space-time and also existing in the rational mind (Gardner 2002, 215). This mostly pertained to what is called theoretical reason; that is purely mind-based thought. In Critique of Practical Reason Kant took his ideas from his previous work and applied them to real life. From the realm of thought, man had to apply his knowledge to actual life. This began to have a political and cultural impact because it sought to understand how truths for the part of life which involved an interaction with other people were derived and formulated (Gardner 2002, 216-217). His ideas all had a profound influence on the development of nineteenth century German Idealism and Romanticism. These latter two movements came about to some extent as reactions to the Universalist and empiricist/rationalist tendencies of the eighteenth century. German Idealism, particularly that of Hegel, stressed the importance of ideas with respect to the physical, material world. The driving force behind human history and progress has been ideas and not physical realities or necessities. "German idealism is value-driven" (Gardner 2002, 213). Those values come from ideas that are the product of human reason and free will. Kant was in some ways the progenitor of this proposition. German idealism, however, grew away from Kant's emphasis of the self and sought a more systematic and "organic" approach to ideas.