Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (* 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, Prussia; † 12 February 1804 ibid.) was a German philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment and the founder of the philosophy of German Idealism. The philosophical current that arose in his succession is known as Kantianism or, in the 2nd half of the 19th century, as Neo-Kantianism.

With his work, Kant sought to mediate between rationalism, as represented in his time by Wolff-Leibnizian philosophy in Germany, and the English empiricism of David Hume. A major conclusion was that speculative metaphysics about God is without truth content."Concepts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind". This double aspect of cognition was presented by Kant, as by no one before him, with such tremendous conclusiveness that since then one can no longer imagine cognition as being composed of these two sides, concept and view. This was a heavy blow to metaphysicians who believed that they could make statements about God without seeing the essence of God, only with conceptual methods (proofs of God). A side effect was that, insofar as Kant understood perception as sensual perception, his philosophy also set insurmountable limits to knowledge, insofar as the spiritual, God, could not be the object of knowledge because it was not sensual, but only the object of faith.

Moreover, Kant presupposed that perception did not grasp the object itself, but only its appearance, while the object itself was set as an unknowable thing in itself as the cause of the appearance. Goethe was already outraged by this view and argued against it: "Do not look for anything behind the phenomena. They themselves are the teaching".

See also

• Immanuel Kant - Article in the English Wikipedia

Literature

• Dietrich Rapp: TATORT Erkenntnisgrenze: Die Kritik Rudolf Steiners an Immanuel Kant, Menon-Verlag 2012, ISBN 978-3921132487
• Rudolf Steiner: Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden, Band III: 1913 und 1914; 1920 – 1923, GA 266/3 (1998), ISBN 3-7274-2663-2 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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