He was a visionary who inaugurated modernity. He changed the way people thought, encouraging them to reflect for themselves and question everything. The ideas of the philosopher who rejected dogma, who advocated the use of freedom in responsibility and the idea of common citizenship are back now that three centuries have passed since his birth.
We are experiencing a certain return to the past. Irrationality, fear, conspiracy theories, shadowy authoritarian figures and bloody wars reappear. Given this, there are no magic recipes, but we can listen again to those who wanted to emancipate us from fanaticism and act in the light of a common understanding. We can return to Kant.
The author of
Critique of Pure Reason
is one of the most influential philosophers of all time. He is cited, commented on and fought—especially from postmodernism—tirelessly. From the idea of universal and free education to the principle of moral and personal autonomy, from Habermas to Hannah Arendt, passing through Hegel, his work permeates almost everything. “Kant has surely influenced you even if he has not read it,” Goethe warned.
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The thinker who opened a path for us to be better citizens, born on April 22, 1724 in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad, in Russia), also promoted international law and the concept of a government organized in a federation of states, inspiring entities like the UN or the European Union. Now, in the current volatile context, his cosmopolitan and democratic ideas make sense again.
“With what is happening right now in the war in Ukraine or what Israel is doing in Gaza, what Kant wrote could not be more topical,” says Roberto R. Aramayo, professor at the CSIC Institute of Philosophy. Aramayo refers to
On Perpetual Peace
, Kant's essay published in 1795 that calls for the regulation of conflicts, emphasizing that no State should interfere by force in the government of another or that, in the event of war, they should not take carry out acts that make future peace impossible. “In these times, Kant is seen more as an icon than as a reference, because he is not going to offer us answers to our specific problems, but his work continues to challenge us today,” says Aramayo, one of the greatest experts on the work. from the Prussian and author of
Kant: Between morality and politics
(Alianza Editorial, 2018).
The so-called wise man of Königsberg should not be a saint of devotion among the authorities of Russia, Israel or China. He warned about the passion for power, the possible deceptions of “reasons of State” and wrote that “no particular will can be a legislator for a community.” Norbert Bilbeny, professor of Ethics at the University of Barcelona and author of
The Kant Whirlwind. Life, ideas and environment of the greatest philosopher of reason
(Ariel, 2024), he points out: "We are not yet in Europe or in the cosmopolitan and hospitable world that he conceived."
He published
Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason
and
Critique of Judgment
in the years 1781, 1787 and 1790, successively. In them, Kant proposes a total philosophy, a system of knowledge, moral and aesthetic, answering three key questions: what can I know, what can I do and what should I expect. In his first
Critique
he adds the previous philosophical currents, adds the axis of space and time, makes a
reset
and answers that knowledge is reached by combining empiricism with rationalism, that said knowledge is conditioned by the subject who wants to know and that there is things we cannot know; In the second he describes a common morality and ethics
a priori
of everything, a shared judgment that distances us from prejudices; and in the third he reveals the weight of art in the representation of the world.
“He was aware of the evil in humans, and warned that ethical conscience can stop it”
Norbert Bilbeny, professor of Ethics at the University of Barcelona
“One idea guides all history: that of law,” said the Prussian. It is “the right to have rights”, in the interpretation of the much-missed philosopher Javier Muguerza. From the table in his office in his home in Königsberg—under a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau addressing him from the wall—Kant gave a new push to the Enlightenment, expanding it toward a global revolution. Armed with a powdered wig, a quill, and an inkwell, The Wrecker, in the words of the writer Thomas de Quincey, proposes an “exit of man from his self-incurred immaturity”—as Kant wrote in his essay
What
is Enlightenment?
1784—.
They called him Manolito
He was a methodical man, from a humble family, influenced by his mother, a restless reader of upright conduct who affectionately called him Manelchen (Manolito). “An ethical atheist,” in the description of Aramayo, a thinker who saw favorably the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, a solitary worker who became sociable a few hours a day, when he invited groups of friends to eat, to drink wine and talk at home.
He always lived single, dedicated to his total philosophy project. As a student he revealed himself to be a marvel, but the death of his father forced him to leave the university and support his brothers. He was away from the academic circuits for almost a decade, serving as a tutor for children from rich families and as a librarian, until he resumed his studies thanks to the financial support of his shoemaker uncle.
He was also a hypnotic teacher for his increasingly numerous students, an intellectual who was already reading and writing every day at five in the morning. For years he taught more than 40 hours a week of Metaphysics, Geography, Ethics, Anthropology, Pedagogy, Mathematics, Latin or Mineralogy.
He received offers to work at the universities of Jena and Berlin, but chose not to leave his city, from where he universalized the ideals of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, forever redrawing the collective dimension of politics (although, a victim of his time, legitimized the exclusion of women in said dimension).
He was a hypochondriac of acceptable health, a man who on his afternoon walks breathed only through his nose for fear of catching cold and who, therefore, did not speak if he had company. A long-lived thinker who, with the ailments of age, when he realized that he always explained the same stories, he chose to write them down so as not to repeat them. At almost 80 years old, at one of those meals at his house, he confessed: “Gentlemen, I am old, weak and childish, and consequently you should treat me like a child.”
Against the no future
In his works he alludes to a world in constant construction, warning that when we talk about society as it is, we really highlight
what has been done to it
. Against the temptations of nihilism and
no future
, Kant urges us to act as if the world had a purpose, and this purpose was worthy and decent. In Kant, “working and collaborating communally and having clear moral obligations brings real hope for the future,” reflects Kate Moran, professor of philosophy at Brandeis University and author of
Kant's Ethics
(Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Kant illuminates: despite wars and violence, in his ideology it is reasonable to expect humanity to advance and achieve lasting peace. But to achieve this, it is a requirement to develop a republican constitutional State that regulates the common freedom of citizens, which guarantees the act of thinking for oneself, leaving “space for the internal freedom to act morally and well,” says Margit Ruffing, doctor. in Philosophy from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.
For Ruffing, Kantian work reflects that “the future will come, and there is no sensible reason not to work for a better world, but many reasons to do so.” But Kant was not an unredeemed optimist: “he was aware of the conflict and evil in humans, and warned that only knowledge and ethical conscience can stop them,” warns Bilbeny. The Prussian would be a pessimist with “an unwavering methodological optimism, based on the moral hope that our improvement can transform the future,” according to Aramayo.
But not everything is going to be tomorrow. For today, the thinker from Königsberg offers tools for daily coexistence, such as “the idea of being generous with others and implacable with ourselves,” as Muguerza wrote, or of acting as if the course of the world depended on us. “There is a lot to learn from him: to treat ourselves politely, to pay sincere attention to others, at work, at home or on the street,” says Professor Moran. They are small reverberations that outline a more humanized world. So, all is not lost. After rediscovering the philosopher's voice, a bit in the manner of Nathy Peluso and C. Tangana, it makes you want to sing “I was an atheist, but now I believe” (in Kant).
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