Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724-12 February 1804) was a German philosopher considered a central figure in modern philosophy. Kant argued that the Human Mind creates the structure of Experience, that Reason is the source of Morality, that the nature of art, beauty, and taste arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment, that space and time are forms of our sensibility, and that the World as it is "in-itself" is independent of our concepts of it.
Politically, Kant was one of the earliest exponents of the idea that Perpetual Peace could be secured through Universal Democracy and International Cooperation. He believed that this will be the eventual outcome of Universal History, although it is not Rationally Planned.
The exact nature of Kant's religious ideas is a subject of heated philosophical dispute. His father was A German harness maker from Memel, at that time Prussia's most North Eastern City (now in Lithuania). The Kants got their name from the Village of Kant'Waggen and were of Curonian origin.
The Curonians were a Baltic Tribe living on the shores of the Baltic Sea in what is now the Western parts of Latvia and Lithuania from the 5th to the 16th centuries, when they merged with other Baltic Tribes. The Curonians were known as fierce warriors, excellent sailors and pirates. They were involved in several wars and alliances with Swed'Ish, Dan'Ish, and Ice'Land Vikings. During that period they were the most restless and the richest of all the Balts. Curonians were a especially cultic people, worshiping a variety of entities and their sacred animal, the Horse. In 1075CE Adam of Bremen described the Curonians as the World famous diviners: "... gold is plentiful there, horses are of the best.
All the houses are full of soothsayers, diviners, and necromancers, who are arrayed in monastic habit. Oracular responses are sought there from all parts of the World, especially by Spaniards and Greeks." It was common for the Curonians to carry out joint raids and campaigns together with Estonians.
There are many sources that mention the Curonians in the 13th century, when they were involved in the Northern Crusades. The descendants of the Curonian nobility, athough downgraded to peasant status, and its lands were gradually assimilated into the nascent Lithuanian nation and ceased to be known as a distinct society by the 16th century.
Youn Kant was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Scripture. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary. His mother was also born in Konigs'Berg, Prussia to a father from Nuremberg. She died young at the age of 40 when Kant was 13 years old. Kant was the 4th of 9 children (4 of them reached adulthood). Baptized "Emanuel," he changed his name to "Immanuel" after learning Hebrew. Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms says that Kant lived a very strict, solitary, and disciplined life. Neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married.
Kant attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated in 1740, at the age of 16. The Collegium was the first Private Pietist school not to be affiliated with a Parish Church. Alumni were known as Friderizianer. The school consisted of a Latin school, a German school, and a boarding school often used by foreign students. It also contained a Wooden Tower utilized as an observatory and a small church in service until 1853. Then Kant enrolled at the University of Konigs'Berg, where he spent his whole career. Kant never travelled more than 16 kilometers (9.9 mi) from his hometown his whole life. His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his routine and went back to it in 1754.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind."
The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a darkened tent. The retina cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from the outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data.
In the Scriptural example of Eve being deceived by Satan we can see how Eve's mind was occupied by the forces of the physical world taking the infinite to a finite World moved by space and time, with no chance to go back by itself.
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightement?" he defined the Enlightement as an age shaped by the Latin motto "Dare to be Wise."Kant maintained that we ought to think autonomously and free of the dictate of external and worldly authorities.
Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's Presence personally. He explained:
"All the preparations of Reason, therefore, in what we called pure philosophy, are in reality directed to those 3 problems only: God, the soul, and freedom. However, these 3 elements in themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually. Moreover, in a collective relational context; namely, to know "what ought to be done": if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with reference to the highest aims of life, we see that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise provision was really, in the constitution of our reason, directed to moral interests only."
The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for "Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but happiness does not, unless it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in an intelligible World only under a wise author and ruler. Reason compels us to admit such a ruler, together with life in such a World, which we must consider as future life, or else all moral laws are to be considered as idle dreams ... "
Kant claimed to have created a "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy : -a sense of uprootedness within cosmology. -a way of representing the path of Reason and Enlightenment. -mistrust of common sense as a guide to Truth. -a World-picture based on scientific laws rather than narratives.
These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral Worlds. The 2 Worlds are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access or comprehend the whole Creation in itself. Also Kant argued that the Rational Order of the World as known by science was not just the accidental accumulation of sense perceptions. The external World provides the things that we sense, but it is our mind that processes this information and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience the objects. The concepts of the Mind (Understanding) and the perception or intuitions that collect and store information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by Comprehension. Without the concepts, perception are nondescript; without the perceptions, concepts are meaningless -thus the famous statement, "Thoughts without content are empty, Intuitions (perceptions) without concepts are blind."
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