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.

Basic principles of Kant's philosophy

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 perception. 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".

Rudolf Steiner on Kant's Mission

Despite all Steiner's criticism of Kant's philsosophy, it must not be overlooked that there is also a positive statement from a quite different point of view: Kant had been inspired by an angel, and had the mission to provide the template to be fought against for Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, whose philosophy could not have existed without setting Kant aside.

This even applies not only to the intellectual upswing that these philosophers were able to take, but even more generally to the general development of culture:

„Kant was inspired by one of the Angeloi to assert in his works that there are limits to reason and that the powers of knowledge are limited to the physical-material. - Thus the striving for the spiritual is very subdued in our time, and it does not even occur to man how cowardly he is towards the spiritual worlds, and how his soul must thereby become more and more desolate. We are all dependent on the nuances of our present culture, on the commercial, industrial epoch in which we live, and we must never forget that we are in a time when materialism has reached its climax. But just as a rubber ball can only be squeezed to a certain point and then snapped apart again, so too the souls that have been constricted by materialism will unfold their wings anew. The greater the desolation of the soul, the stronger will be the reaction.“ (Lit.:GA 266c, p. 230)

„Therefore the good angels - strange as it may sound - had to inspire Kant to his "limits of knowledge", for with the materialistic culture that was to come, men lacked the courage to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, and so they remained entirely stuck in the physical world. But just as a rubber ball, squeezed to the utmost, bounces back, so also in the life of the soul this very thing will provoke a reaction, and then the courage of men will again want to turn to the conquest of the spiritual worlds.“ (Lit.:GA 266c, p. 207)

„The Angeloi have therefore inspired Kant to deny to men a possibility of cognition of the spiritual, so that the human soul-forces, pressed together like the rubber ball, may once spring up and seize the spiritual cognitions with all the stronger forces.“ (Lit.:GA 266c, p. 209)

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

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated. Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.