My Favourite Philosopher
What is the meaning of life? Different people have different ideas about the meaning of life and different goals of development. Some people live for pleasure and happiness, some for money, honour, and popularity, while some other people think life is meaningful when there are struggles and challenges.
However, we all need to make our own meaning of life. Some people try to make their own meaning of life by accepting conventional views given by traditional authorities, but some other people want to make their meaning of life by their own reasoning. They always want to use their own reasoning for their point of view in the world.
For that kind of people, philosophy becomes a very helpful subject. As I was born with questions, philosophy became one of the subjects I love since I was an early teenager. The more I understand and know about philosophy, the more I want to learn about it, and the bigger my respect for philosophers. Among many famous philosophers, Immanuel Kant is the philosopher that I admire the most.
Immanuel Kant is a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers.
Nothing remarkably portrayed about his life, that alone became his most remarkable story ever told. Kant was born in a Prussian-German family of Lutheran Protestants in East Prussia. His education was strict, punitive, disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction in mathematics and science. Kant apparently lived a very strict and disciplined life; it was said that neighbours would set their clocks by his daily walk. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life. He was a popular teacher and successful author even before starting his major philosophical works. It is not perfect to say about Kant without telling about his notable ideas. He is so famous that the history of western philosophy is divided into two parts, time before Kant and time after Kant.
Kant’s famous works are the critique of pure reason, the critique of practical reason, and the critique of judgment. Before Kant, there were battles of debates between rationalists and empiricists. Rationalists believed that the use of reason, rather than experience, leads to knowledge of objects in the world. Empiricists believed that knowledge comes from our experience of objects in the world rather than our reason. Kant tried to combine empiricism and rationalism. Kant’s philosophy, called transcendental idealism, states that both reason and experience are necessary to understand the world. In his famous work, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that our experience of the world involves two elements. The first element is what he calls sensibility, and the direct acquaintances are called intuition. The second element is what Kant calls the understanding, our ability to have and use concepts. Each of these two elements has, in turn, two sides. In the context of sensibility, there is an intuition of a particular thing in space and time, for example, a book, and the intuition of space and time, as such, is the acquaintance with what space and time are like in general. In understanding, there is the concept of some type of thing, for example, books, and the concept of a thing, for example, substance.
A concept, such as substance defines what it means to be a thing rather than defining some type of thing as a book. The intuition of a book and the concept of a book are empirical. The intuition of space and time and the concept of substance are a priori, meaning that they are known independently of any experience.
Nevertheless, Kant is one of the greatest and most influential philosophers in the world. Before Kant, empiricists such as John Locke emphasized what Kant termed sensibility, but rationalists such as Rene Descartes emphasized understanding. Kant argued that our experience of the world always involves both. After Kant, German philosophy, in particular, progressed rapidly. The idealists Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Hegel all took Kant’s thought in a new direction and, in their turn, influenced the whole 19th-century thought, from Romanticism to Marxism. The fact that Kant locates the “priori” even within our intuition of the world is important for 20th-century phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Kant’s work also remains an important reference point for contemporary philosophers today, especially in the branches of metaphysics and epistemology. Last but not least, if we must choose only one of the philosophers who is the greatest in the history of philosophy, Immanuel Kant must be chosen.