300 years of Kant: Immanuel Kant: What can or should we know?

In March 1801, a 23-year-old college dropout wrote to his fiancée from Berlin. A thought shook him “so deeply, so painfully” that he can no longer work. His “highest goal” in life is now lost. “We cannot decide whether what we call truth is really truth, or whether it just seems that way to us.” He explains what he means with a parable: “If all people had green glasses instead of eyes,” then All objects should appear green to people. They don’t know whether the objects are actually green. Worse, they don’t even suspect that that property is their ingredient. It’s the same with thinking.

In every experience the ways in which people perceive things are included. They are subject to the laws of space, time and causality. The trick now is that thinking does not create these laws from nature, but from itself, without being part of nature. German philosophers called this “pure reason.” If the mind of nature dictates its own rules, then reality itself remains hidden from us outside of our heads. The result is that knowledge and truth fall apart – this plagued the then still unknown Heinrich von Kleist, including in his poetry. Responsible for this was the philosopher Immanuel Kant, born 300 years ago on April 22, 1724 in Königsberg, today’s Kaliningrad.

Harassed by freedom

Around 1800, Kant’s writings had been bothering the thinking and poetic vassals of the petty German princes and Prussia for three decades. Under the influence of the upheavals in Western Europe and America, Kant provided an ideological alphabet for the superiority of capitalist modernity for the political demands of the bourgeois class. The natural sciences showed us how to do it. Kant only had to translate it for man’s new relationship to the world.

On the one hand, Kant reckoned with the old metaphysics, according to which everything in the universe received its absolute truth through the guarantee of God, according to the idyll of the feudal fiefdom. Deduction through reason took the place of God’s Word. On the other hand, since the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), it became impossible to pursue philosophy scientifically unless people and the logical conditions of their cognitive ability were also taken into account.

In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus discovered through logical deductions that it was not the sun that revolved around the earth, but that the earth revolved around the sun. This is also how Kant argued: Objects do not revolve around people, it is the other way around: people revolve around objects. He behaves relative to them. He has to move around them, rethink his approach, but above all constantly test his knowledge, since objects like the sun exist independently of man and are not identical to how he perceives them. Only then are general statements possible.

Since then, man as a subject of knowledge has been irrefutable. But that also meant that precisely because of this, people are the subject of freedom. This was a significant step forward in terms of theoretical history. After that, however, things went downhill for Kant.

Kant regrets that because of freedom, people are “bothered by questions” that they cannot ignore, “but cannot answer either.” Either “everything in the world” is subject to natural laws, which makes freedom impossible, or freedom is possible, but which calls natural laws into question. According to Kant, there are good reasons for both positions. So he claims that freedom is an abstract idea. The sensible people would have to orient themselves towards it, even if freedom cannot be concretely realized. But what is left of freedom then?

This contradiction sparked the protests of his successors. German idealism was born.

Know, do, hope

When it comes to freedom, everything is at stake. Sooner or later the revolution will assert its demands. But if the revolution fails to materialize due to political disunity and economic backwardness, as was the case during Kant’s lifetime in Germany, the philosopher comes onto the scene who achieves the feat of a “revolution of the way of thinking”: a storm on the categories of thought. This is a contradiction in terms, but it is logical. Anyone who cannot change traditional conditions because the emerging class does not yet know its tasks is thinking about the fragility of previous ideas.

But unlike the French Enlightenment thinkers, whose thoughts urged the storming of a state prison, Kant developed a system of self-flagellation in the name of reason. This made him more far-sighted. His advice was ancient, just re-disguised: You can know, but not too much. You should do it, but not too much. You can hope, but not too much. The human being? Nothing more than crooked wood that doesn’t become straight. Reason commands humility.

Kant’s philosophy reflected the Faustian division of the bourgeois into democrats and private owners, into human rights activists and colonialists, into freedom preachers and exploiters. The bourgeois subject was able to come to terms with his Janus-faced tragedy. To this day, Kant promises spiritual comfort between the “starry sky above me and (the) moral law within me.”

But reason is more cunning than Kant. Anyone who thinks about the conditions of knowledge before they want to know is already in the flow of the cognitive process. Anyone who establishes the limits of knowledge immediately goes beyond them. Anyone who fences in freedom with rigid tables of categories because it conflicts with the material conditions of the world paves the way for dialectics. Anyone who disparages dialectics as the “logic of appearances” must confront GWF Hegel’s contradictory thinking. And anyone who puts forward the “thing in itself” in order to remain silent about class society is tormented by his own consciousness, which from the outset has the “curse in itself” of being “afflicted” with matter, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made clear . People don’t just think, through work they intervene in objects, thereby changing their consciousness at the same time.

There Auditor

Kant’s philosophy repeatedly sought connection with the working class. A breakthrough came with Eduard Bernstein’s revision. At the end of his “Prerequisites of Socialism” (1899), the SPD theorist not coincidentally sends Kant forward as an expert in order to throw Marx out of Marxism with the “Hegelian Dialectic.” He believed that socialism would evolve from capitalism, so this political one-way street with no final destination led the mass left party straight into the dead end of war credits in 1914.

With the same intention of breaking revolutionary peaks of social progress, Kant is still praised at universities for having shown the limits of knowledge. As if the theory of relativity, quantum physics, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fascism, the moon landing, the attempts at socialist construction, the algorithm-driven production techniques, the replication of the sun through nuclear fusion, the shattered earth in the Capitalocene and the multipolarization of the world had never existed.

More than once in 300 years the working class heated the green lenses to the melting point in order to shape others for sharper vision. What remains of Kant today is pure ideology, reminiscent of the chief auditor of bourgeois society.