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Contents

Introduction

Just because a thing is impossible, this doesn’t mean someone won’t try to do it. Kant not only tried but succeeded in achieving the impossible. After Hume had destroyed philosophy and any possibility of constructing a metaphysical system, Kant created the greatest metaphysical system of them all. His motive was to refute Hume, but fortunately he had read only Hume’s Inquiry into Human Understanding, not the more penetrating skepticism of his earlier Treatise of Human Nature. Had Kant read this, he might have produced no system. This would have been a great pity and would have left an entire generation of nineteenth-century German philosophy professors without jobs.

Kant’s system is like Newton’s idea of gravity. It’s not the final answer, but it’s close to how we still see the world. You won’t go far wrong if you look at the world Kant’s way. Hume’s philosophy is essentially simplistic: it reduces our philosophical condition to the barren rock of solipsism. Kant, building on the deceptive sands of error, created a wonderful sandcastle of such ingenuity and complexity that it can keep you happily absorbed with your bucket and spade for your entire vacation.

It’s difficult to know what to say about Kant’s life. He didn’t really have one (outside his head).

Immanuel Kant was born April 22, 1724, in the Baltic city of Königsberg, then the capital of the isolated German province of East Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia). Kant’s ancestors had emigrated from Scotland in the preceding century and may well have been related to the notorious seventeenth-century Scottish preacher Andrew Cant, who is said to have been the origin of the verb “to cant” with regard to the use of jargon – a family trait which was to reappear with a vengeance in the philosopher.

At the time of Kant’s birth East Prussia was recovering from the devastation of war and plague, which had reduced the population by over half. Kant grew up in an atmosphere of pious poverty. He was the fourth child of the family, which eventually included five sisters and one other brother. Kant’s Scottish father was a cutter of leather straps who jocularly claimed that he “could never make both ends meet” either at home or at work. Kant always remained respectful of his likable but financially harassed father, and as a child is said to have enjoyed watching him deftly cutting up pieces of leather for harnesses. Yet according to the philosophical psychologist Ben-Ami Scharfstein, in the light of his father’s dexterity “Kant’s great clumsiness with his hands is therefore noteworthy. ”