Immanuel Kant

(1724-1804)
Kant was born in Knigsberg; he spent his life there; he died there. At the age of
forty-six, Kant received an appointment as a professor of logic and metaphysics
at his alma mater the University of Knigsberg. His famous claim: "Though our
knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises out of
experience." A philosophical classic is his work Critique of Pure Reason
wherein he asserts that our perceptual apparatus is capable of ordering senseimpressions into intelligible unities, which, while in themselves cannot be proven,
we are led to conclude through "pure reason," that intelligible unities, such as
God, freedom, and immortality, do exist; and that the formation of such
intelligible unities are practical necessities for one's life. An admirer of Rousseau,
Kant's work gave rise to the Idealist school (Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer).
Kant was of the view that while the existence of God could not be proven, we
ought to come to a belief in God's existence by way of "logical understanding."
Kant concluded that this world was not sufficient in itself, that an external
power, which he identified with God, was a regulative necessity; and that God
was a requisite for morality, it gives meaning to our life here on earth. The
existence of God was, for Kant, but one of three postulates of morality, the other
two being freedom of the will, and immortality of the soul. These moral axioms,
unprovable as they are, existed for Kant simply because they were the sine qua
non of the moral life. (So much for the notion that morality is something that
arises from our own character, from our own intelligence: - I would argue that
the acceptance of an external, all powerful being reduces us to mere servants;
and, thus, there is no need for morals, there is but only the need to obey.)
Kant would not categorize himself as a "dualist," such as was Plato (one who
believes that there is a world beyond the material world that we perceive, one
that places the soul or mind of a human in this other world, that the soul or mind
is a non-material entity), he took a more extreme step; none of reality exists;
reality and all that is in it, including human beings are part of this other world,
all part of a dream world (see Schopenhauer).
To those who cannot accept such a speculative and theoretical philosophy as
Kant's might, however, through his writings obtain an insight into the workings
of the real universe in which we live. I quote from Paul Johnson's book, The
Birth of the Modern:
"The 18th century had failed to solve the problem of how heat, light,
magnetism and electrical power fitted into the laws of motion and
attraction Isaac Newton had set out in his Principia (1687). But Immanuel
Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and still more in his
Metaphisical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), had produced an
inspirational insight. He was concerned not so much with science as with
God. Was there a duality, of spirit and matter? Newton had been
concerned only with matter -- and with the advance of science, this
pointed to a materialistic world and led to atheism. Kant wanted to bridge

the gulf between spirit and matter and harmonize the physical and moral
laws. As he saw it, space and time were purely mental intuitions which
made our grasp of external reality possible. The substance of thing-initself, Ding an sich, was hidden from human reason -- reality was
perceived, rather than led an independent existence. We perceive reality
only through the forces, of attraction and repulsion, which work in space.
Hence Kant dismissed the dualism of spirit and matter, replacing it by
forces. The universe consisted, then, not of matter but of forces.
Electricity, magnetism or any other observable effects were governed by
laws of attraction and repulsion within a unified theory of forces, all of
which were convertible into one another.
"It is doubtful if the physical scientists could have proceeded as fast as
they did in the early 19th century without this essentially metaphysical
intuition.
"...
"Coleridge explored the Kantian insight: 'The universe was a cosmic
web', as he put it, 'woven by God and held together by the crossed strands
of attractive and repulsive forces.' All forms of energy must be
convertible; they were also indestructible. 'What,' he wrote to Tom Poole,
' what if the vital force which I sent from my arm into the stone as I flung
it in the air and skimmed it upon the water - what if even that did not
perish?' Coleridge had thus stumbled upon what was to become the
Principle of Conservation of Energy.
"...
"Volta's discovery that the source of electric power was contact between
two metals in a solution enabled him to build his pile [battery] in 1800.
"...
"The next stage was to put to the practical test the quasi-metaphysical
concept of Kant and Coleridge that the world was governed by forces
which were fundamentally indivisible and indestructible, based upon the
principle of attraction and repulsion, of which electricity and magnetism
were expressions. The Danish scientist Hans-Christian Orsted had been
working on Kant's notions for 20 years, and by winter 1819-20, he was
able to describe the workings of electromagnetism, or the magnetic field."
(Johnson, pp. 551-3.)