Immanuel Kant: Life, Philosophy, and Historical Impact

Kant's Life in Historical Context

Kant lived in Prussia during the reign of Frederick the Great, the "philosopher king," whose form of government was enlightened despotism - "everything for the people, without the people" - with its promotion of social reforms. Internationally, momentous historical events occurred, such as the independence of the United States and its Constitution's proclamation, and the French Revolution (1789) - and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which are the basis of the modern liberal sociocultural democratic framework. Socially, a crisis occurred between the aristocratic and hierarchical class society of the Old Regime and the triumphant bourgeoisie of the French Revolution. These were the main actors in the economy, which was experiencing the Industrial Revolution and a demographic revolution, and less mediated in the agricultural field. In the cultural field, the ornate and courtly Rococo art gave way to classicism. In music, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven stood out. In literature, Goya and Goethe. In painting and science, the gigantic figure of Newton stood out, whom Kant took as a model of scientific knowledge.

Philosophical Framework

The philosophical context in which Kant developed his philosophy is the Enlightenment, characterized by absolute trust in reason and the desire that the light of reason enlighten men and women. This enlightened reason is tolerant, secular, autonomous, critical, and analytical, and provides permanent progress and happiness. For Kant, the essence of the Enlightenment is "Sapere Aude" - dare to think - and it represents the age of majority of humanity. The two major philosophical currents are rationalism and empiricism, which held different versions of human knowledge:

• Whereas the rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff...) based all knowledge on principles of reason from innate ideas,
• Empiricism (Locke, Hume...) maintained that the origin, validity, and limit of knowledge is experience.

Kant, educated in rationalism but sensitive to the arguments of empiricism, synthesized the two streams in his transcendental philosophy.

Influences:

a) Within the field of knowledge, it is necessary to point out these influences:

1. The rationalist tradition represented by Wolff, conceiving philosophy as purely rational knowledge, which must start from first principles without experience.
2. The empiricist tradition: the reading of Hume, the great critic of rationalism.
3. Newton: Kant posed that modern science is a synthesis of experience (which provides scattered facts) and reason (which, according to necessary laws, joins them). For Kant, all knowledge will also be the union of a substance - which is pure diversity - and a form - which is a priori.

b) In the moral realm, highlight the influence of Pietism, in which he was educated, and which manifests itself in rigorous morality, as well as the figure of Rousseau and enthusiasm for moral autonomy, the idea of morality as purity of intention, and in his assessment of the spiritual dignity of man.