Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes - Volume 1

Plato, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Hegel

Walther Ziegler

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783741241451
• eBook ISBN:
  9783741268366
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 1" comprises the five books, already published as separate volumes, "Plato in 60 Minutes", "Rousseau in 60 Minutes", "Smith in 60 Minutes", "Kant in 60 Minutes", and "Hegel in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the ideas of each thinker makes it easy for the reader to acquaint him- or herself with the great questions of our lives. Because every philosopher who has achieved global fame has posed the "question of meaning": what is it that holds, at the most essential level, the world together? There have emerged here a range of very different answers. In Plato, for example, the "Idea of the Good" is that to which we need to open our souls; in Rousseau, it is rather only in our own original nature that we need to trust; in Adam Smith, it is in self-interest, which spurs on each individual and is finally transformed, by an "invisible hand", into the common good; in Kant it is the application of Reason which frees us and makes us capable of extraordinary moral actions; and in Hegel, finally, everything is held together by the dialectical self-development of the World-Spirit, which drives onward from epoch to epoch through the deeds of individuals and of nations until it has finally reached its great goal. In other words, the meaning of the world and thus of our own lives remains, among philosophers, a topic of great controversy. One thing, though, is sure: each of these five thinkers struck, from his own perspective, one brilliant spark out of that complex crystal that is the truth.

Walther Ziegler

Kant

in 60 Minutes

Translated by

Alexander Reynolds

Contents

• Kant’s Great Discovery
• Kant’s Central Idea
  • What Can I Know? The Critique of Pure Reason
  • The Dispute between Rationalists and Empiricists
  • Kant’s Brilliant Solution to the ‘Problem of Knowledge’
  • Space and Time
  • The Categories
  • The Categories on the Motorway
  • Knowledge as the Interplay of Sense-Perception and Thought
  • God is Not an Object of Knowledge
  • ‘What Ought I To Do?’ The Critique of Practical Reason
  • The Critique of Hedonism: The Pleasure Principle Knows No Morality
  • The Critique of Utilitarianism: Weighing Up ‘Benefit’ is Dangerous
  • The Critique of ‘Eudaemonism’: Virtue Alone is Not Enough
  • The Critique of Legalism: Laws Can Be Unjust
  • The Categorical Imperative – The One True Moral Law
  • Duty and Free Will
  • What May I Hope? The Critique of Religion
• Of What Use Is Kant’s Discovery for Us Today?
  • The Foundation of the Sciences
  • The Categorical Imperative – The Spur to Morality
  • Sustainability – the Maxim of the Modern Age
  • Enlightenment Never Ends - Sapere Aude!
• Bibliographical References

Kant’s Great Discovery

Immanuel Kant is thought to be perhaps the greatest of all philosophers. And Kant did make, in the 18th Century, two great discoveries which engage us still today. Firstly, he founded the globally acknowledged ‘categorical imperative’ in moral philosophy; secondly, he became the first philosopher to succeed in answering that question as old as humanity of how knowledge arises in our brains. In his main work, the 1000-page Critique of Pure Reason, Kant analysed the working of Man’s thinking apparatus.

Kant was prompted to this analysis by noting that all philosophers before him had defended different views and had even arrived at knowledge-claims directly opposed to one another:

This was due, in Kant’s view, to an improper use of the faculty of reason. All human beings, indeed – and thus all philosophers, too – perceive the same reality. If philosophers, then, had arrived at conflicting opinions this was caused, Kant believed, by illusions and errors in thinking. So as not to fall himself into such errors, Kant decided, midway through his career, to refrain for a time from making any philosophical claims. For eleven years he published nothing: no book, no essay, not a single word – although in fact, as a university professor of philosophy, regular publication was expected of him. Instead, he withdrew, at age forty-six, into his study and began tenaciously to research the question of how exactly the apparatus of thinking functions and of how we should apply it if we are to arrive at error-free statements about reality. He critically examined what human beings can gain knowledge of by applying the faculty of reason and what they cannot gain knowledge of, since it lies outside the jurisdiction of this faculty. This was why Kant gave to his main work the title: Critique of Pure Reason.

The decisive question for Kant was always the single critical one: what can reason truly know with certainty and where does mere speculation begin?

He sought the answer to this question as if possessed. He got his servant to wake him up every morning at five with the words: “It is time!” Still in his nightgown, he worked for two hours at his writing desk before going to give his daily university lecture between seven and nine. Then he returned to his desk and wrote for the rest of the morning before taking his midday meal, exactly at noon, with friends. He forbade, however, discussion of philosophy during the meal, as he needed an hour’s distraction in order to continue to work with concentration through the afternoon. He was so punctual in taking, at five, his daily constitutional that it was said that the citizens of Königsberg set their clocks by him as he left his house with hat and walking stick. The evening hours he spent reading the works of other philosophers before retiring, with equal punctuality, at ten o’clock to bed. It was in this way that he confronted, day by day, month by month and year by year, tirelessly and with iron discipline, the key question: how does human reason function and what can human beings know by reason’s application?

Kant pondered in this way – with a patience that is almost inconceivable for us today – for eleven long years before he finally gave his answer to the world. It was worthy of the long effort. His Critique of Pure Reason became a sensation. Once its difficult content had been grasped, the book became famous all over the world and it is still considered to be the most important work of philosophy ever written. But it also got Kant into trouble with the Church. For the result of his labours was one very hard for believers to accept. The critical investigation of the human thinking apparatus (or, as Kant put it, of ‘pure reason’) forces us to conclude that our capacity for knowledge is very limited. Our reason, Kant contends, can provide true and certain knowledge only of that which we have already perceived through our five senses (i.e. seen, heard, smelt, tasted, or touched). Nobody can arrive at a truly sure and reliable knowledge of an object merely by thinking and meditating upon it if he has never perceived this object through his senses. God counts, for Kant, among this class of objects that cannot be known, since He can never become the object of an ‘intuition’. (This term – ‘Anschauung’ in Kant’s German – was used rather differently in Kant’s day than in ours. Today intuition has an almost metaphysical connotation (‘female intuition’ etc), but in Kant’s day it meant perception through sight and the other physical senses. For this reason, we shall, below, mostly use ‘sense-perception’ to render it into English.) Although we use the word ‘God’, no one has ever seen Him. God, consequently, is initially only an abstract thought or, as Kant puts it, an ‘empty concept’:

This was why Kant rejected all philosophical proofs of God’s existence as unscientific, although such proofs were widespread in his day. Neither God nor the Devil nor life after death can, Kant concluded, possibly be known or proven by reason. Such conclusions, of course, earned him the enmity of the established churches. The devout Prussian king Frederick William II strictly forbade him to teach or disseminate these views on God and religion. For many years, no professor in Prussia was allowed to lecture on Kant’s critical writings about religion.

But the service that Kant did the natural sciences with his ‘critique of knowledge’ was truly inestimable. He gave researchers, for the first time, a set of logical tools which was sensationally simple and yet quite perfect, and that still remains valid today and makes all scientific results achieved worldwide mutually comparable. Every theory, Kant argued, however good, must be proven in terms of actual sense-perceptions, for example through repeatable experiments. Only when so proven can it count as true knowledge. Thus began that triumphant progress of the natural sciences and technology which still continues today. Research results could now be checked, compared and further developed worldwide, since all researchers employed the same epistemologically-guaranteed method, namely, Kant’s. By being the first to answer the epistemological question: ‘What can I know?’ Kant prepared the ground for the great global flowering of scientific endeavour.

But this was by no means all. In his second major work, the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant tackles what is perhaps an even more important question for mankind:

Life is not just about investigating and knowing the world but above all about behaving rightly in it and doing good, not evil. But what is good and what is evil? How ought one to behave? Is there a way of acting which is generally and equally right for all human beings?

Kant succeeded in developing a sensational answer also to this question: the so-called ‘categorical imperative’. Still today, two hundred years after Kant formulated it, millions of school and university students all over the world learn this maxim of moral action. The contrast between the vastness of Kant’s influence on the world and the modesty of the life he lived is striking. It is said that he never once left the area of his small native city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). A contempo...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Plato in 60 Minutes: Walther Ziegler
• Rousseau in 60 Minutes: Walther Ziegler
• Smith in 60 Minutes: Walther Ziegler
• Kant in 60 Minutes: Walther Ziegler
• Hegel in 60 Minutes: Walther Ziegler
• Already published in the same series
• Coming soon in the same series
• The author
• Copyright