4. Kant's Philosophical Development

While the empirical sciences seek to fathom and explain the context in the world of given objects and to explain the relationships between the individual empirical phenomena, philosophy sets out to explain the given in its entirety itself, to show how the finite, the limited, is connected to the infinite, the unlimited. For the empirical scientist, the world of phenomena is a foundation on which he thinks he stands firmly, but he does not venture to ask further questions about it. The philosopher, however, seeing the conditionality of this foundation, unhinges it in order to rebuild it and let it emerge from the only unchanging and absolute. What the human mind unconsciously created in an earlier period becomes its object in a later one. The inner becomes an outer for it and as such it is taken up and endowed with new life. Whenever the old is taken as an object and given new breath, then the human mind has reached a new level.

When minds inspired by old ideas are awakened and infuse new life into them, a new epoch in human history has begun. The longer ideas reproduce without the infusion of fresh life, the more rigid they become; they appear to be alive, but they are dead. This was the state of German culture in all its branches at the beginning of the last century. But then the time came when a new ray of sunshine warmed the frozen world and new life sprouted everywhere. In the realm of the beautiful there arose a Lessing, a Herder, a Goethe, a Schiller; in philosophy there was a Kant.

In 1746, the death of his father deprived him of the necessary funds to continue his university studies, and he was forced to leave the university. He left by publishing a treatise that already foreshadowed his ingenuity: “On the True Estimation of the Living Forces of Nature”.

Through the spirited [illegible word] Martin Knutzen, who introduced him to Newton, the studies on this great man were the immediate cause of the cited writing. Now he became a private tutor and remained in this position for nine years until he had sufficient material means to be able to pursue his career as an academic teacher. In 1755, he earned the degree of Magister with his treatise “A New Illumination of the First Principles of All Metaphysical Knowledge,” and at the same time he began his beneficial academic work as a private lecturer.

In the aforementioned treatise, he now presents himself to us fully as a philosopher. Although he still starts from the Leibniz-Wolffian direction, he is already standing completely independently, declaring the ontological proof of the existence of God to be fraudulent, showing the impossibility of assuming that a simple being could have the reason for its change within itself.

In 1762, he proves that the four syllogistic figures [two unreadable words] of contemporary philosophy are only false subtleties.

In 1763, he attempts to introduce negative quantities into world wisdom.

1764 he shows that if philosophy is to be more than a dead skeleton of the active and living world view, and correspond to reality, it must emulate the mathematical method, for this is the view that corresponds to reality [and is more true to life].

In 1766, in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, he regards old metaphysics as nothing more than a form of enthusiasm, which he equates with the musings of Swedenborg, who was well known at the time.

In 1768, he also broke with Leibniz's assumption that space is nothing but the relationship between things that are next to each other; he attributed to it an independent and original significance.

And so the dilapidated house of old metaphysics was demolished piece by piece, and David Hume's skeptical investigations had left a deep impression.

Not as fast as in his inner philosophical views, he progressed in his external career. He had to remain a private lecturer for 15 years. His circumstances were not brilliant; this is proved by the fact that the only coat was so worn out that his friends would have bought him a new one if he had agreed. He had been proposed for a full professorship since 1756. But the then seven-year war was an obstacle to his aspirations. Only in 1762 was he offered a full professorship in poetry.

Those who have had even a small amount of contact with Kantian intellectual products will hardly be surprised when they hear that the philosopher turned down a position in which he would have had the obligation to [illegible word] all possible daily phenomena in the field of poetry, to make occasional poems and the like. He was proposed for a position that was next to be filled. And so he was brought to the royal castle in 1766 as a sub-librarian with an annual salary of - 62 thalers.

Meanwhile, however, his seeds had also found more fertile soil here and there in the rest of Germany, and in November 1769 he was called to Erlangen and in January 1770 to Jena. Already determined to accept the latter appointment, in March 1770 the long-awaited opportunity arose for him to take up the post of full professor in his native Königsberg; he became a full professor of logic and metaphysics.

In August 1770, he then [emerged] with the treatise “On the Principles of the Sensual and the Intellectual World” and in this, the transformation had already taken place, the old dogmatic philosophy was concluded and the foundation for the critical one was laid. Here it is already clearly stated that the conditions under which things can appear to us cannot at the same time provide the conditions of the possibility of things in themselves. And now he sets to work on the most famous of all philosophical works, the work by which he made himself immortal, the “Critique of Pure Reason”.

In February 1772, he writes to Herz in Berlin, the man who, in defense of the aforementioned essay, replied that he hoped to finish his work in three months.

In Nov. 1776, he does not think he will be finished by Easter, and he believes he will have to work all summer long; the systematic development presents enormous difficulties.

In Aug. 1777, he hopes to be finished by winter, and in August of the following year, he speaks of a handbook of metaphysics that is to be published by him soon. However, it is not until 1781 that the work appears under the title “Critique of Pure Reason”.

This was

not a critique of books and systems, but [the] of reason in general, in view of all knowledge to which it may aspire independently of all experience, and thus the decision of the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general and the determination of both the sources and the scope and limits of the same, all from principles

given. Wormy dogmatism, together with destructive skepticism, was thrown overboard, mere groping under mere concepts abandoned, the whole world view placed on different feet. Until then, it had been assumed that

all our knowledge must conform to the objects; but all attempts to determine a priori something through concepts by which our knowledge would be expanded came to nothing under this assumption.

Kant tried

therefore tried to see whether we would not get better results in the tasks of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must be based on our knowledge, which [so] better agrees with the desired possibility [of] knowledge of the same a priori, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. The situation here is similar to that of Copernicus's first thoughts, who, [after not much success in explaining the movements in the heavens when he assumed that the whole starry sky rotated around the observer, tried to see if he might not be more successful if he made the observer rotate and left the stars at rest. In metaphysics, we can now try a similar approach with regard to the perception of objects. If perception had to conform to the nature of objects, then I do not see how we can know anything about it a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the nature of our faculty of perception, then I can well imagine this possibility.

[breaks off]