This year marks 300 years since Immanuel Kant was born. Among all those who want to pay tribute and interpret are Russia's Vladimir Putin and Germany's Olaf Scholz. The two have found themselves in an intellectual tug-of-war over the thinker. But who is right?
DN's Sandra Stiskalo gets to the bottom of the philosopher who drew up the guidelines for the modern public and the role of art in society.
On April 22 of this year, Vladimir Putin made a brazen attempt to get his hands on the Prussian thinker par excellence .
Already several years earlier, the cream of the international intelligentsia had been invited to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant in his hometown. In the 18th century it was called Königsberg, nowadays it belongs to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
But then in 2022 Russia decided to invade Ukraine, and the German Kant Society pulled out of the impending celebration.
The conference and festivities were held nonetheless. Vladimir Putin himself opened the events with a speech in which he justified the Russian fury through a purely acrobatic reinterpretation of Immanuel Kant's theories.
"His exhortation to use one's own understanding is highly relevant. For Russia, this means in practice that we allow ourselves to be guided by our national interests", said Vladimir Putin in front of the local students sent there. It was not the first time he tried to insert Immanuel Kant's pioneering thoughts into his own nationalist and imperialist narrative.
About 60 miles away, the top cap went for another world leader.
In a ballroom at the Kleiner Tiergarten, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences inaugurated the great Kant year, which in 2024 involves almost all German universities. Olaf Scholz gave the keynote address and took the opportunity to draw a red line.
"Kant was certainly not thinking of national interests when he answered the question: 'What is Enlightenment?' with 'Sapere aude. Have the courage to use your own common sense [...]'. Putin has no right whatsoever to invoke Kant. The categorical imperative is incompatible with war crimes," said the Chancellor.
- Unfortunately, I could not attend the celebration in Berlin, but I met Olaf Scholz in his office a week or so earlier and know that he has studied Immanuel Kant carefully. There are many things to complain about in Germany, but the intellectual level does not belong there, says Daniel Kehlmann in a video call from his apartment in Vienna.
Photo: TT
He is a German-Austrian writer. In his hit novel "The Measurement of the World", about two breakneck German scientists who set out to measure the world, he has the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss seek out a fictionalized and mildly demented Immanuel Kant in the hope of getting answers to his questions. The novel was published in 2005, shortly before that Daniel Kehlmann had abandoned a half-written thesis on Kant's theories on taste and aesthetics.
He contributes to the ongoing 300th anniversary with the new conversation book "Der bestirnte Himmel über mir" (The starry sky above me), which he wrote together with the philosopher Omri Boehm. It is a Kant quote, which continues with the words "... und das moralische Gesetz in mir".
- Kant identified two phenomena that have always filled man with awe. Partly the starry sky above her, partly the moral law within her. The first is not primarily about beauty but about the mathematically sublime, the eternal which makes man feel like no one in the physical world, yet does not annihilate or dominate him as an intellectual, moral being. In other words, Kant points out a dialectical and rather complicated relationship between heaven and morality, says Daniel Kehlmann.
How is it that a complicated 300-year-old philosopher lives on so strongly that in 2024 it even ignites a geopolitical tug-of-war about him?
- Immanuel Kant was a great universalist humanist. He wrote about mathematics, time, space and morality. He laid the foundations of our modern view of art, of the public, and he was also a pioneer philosopher of the idea of human rights. In addition, he is surprisingly quote-friendly. Politicians love to quote him.
Summarizing Kant's philosophy is not easy. The opposite applies to the biography.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in what was then Königsberg and in his thirties became a professor of logic and metaphysics. He led a settled and undramatic existence - it is said that the Königsberg residents set the clock according to his daily walks. Practically, he never left his East Prussian hometown, where he also died in 1804. On his tombstone, one can today read the inscription: "Prominent bourgeois, idealist philosopher".
- It is the old Eastern European reading of Kant. That is to say, he was distinguished, but a bourgeois brat. He did write about middle class, but it didn't quite mean the same thing in the 18th century as it does to us today.
So says Sven-Olov Wallenstein, professor of philosophy at Södertörn University. For the continental philosophy, in which he is active and which includes branches as widely separated as German idealism, phenomenology and existentialism, Immanuel Kant is absolutely central, not to say a premise.
At the beginning of his career as a philosopher, Kant joined the rationalists who, unlike the empiricists, held that knowledge and truth come from reason, not from observation and experience. He had reached upper middle age before, as he himself put it, he was awakened from his "dogmatic slumber" after reading the British philosopher David Hume. The reevaluation of the nature of knowledge gave rise to the "Critique of Pure Reason", the first of Immanuel Kant's three so-called Critiques.
Photo: TT
Kant admitted there that the world of the senses shapes human thinking, but at the same time claimed that knowledge of this world is dependent on concepts that are built into her - in all people - from the beginning.
It is also in this context that he first mentions the thing in itself , a term that put grills in the heads of countless philosophy students. When Sven-Olov Wallenstein teaches about Kant's theory of knowledge, he therefore usually avoids mentioning the concept at all. It just complicates it.
- The thing itself is very misunderstood. What Kant means is that there are propositions that are independent of actual reality. Perhaps the most famous example is "7 + 5 = 12". We do not need to add seven and five apples to be able to state that the result is twelve apples. We just know it, it is a given in time and space. To understand and identify those propositions is – according to Kant – the task of philosophy.
Is that right then? I mean, does he manage to identify those phrases?
- Much that Kant wrote was tied to the science of his time, especially to Newton, from whom physics has moved far away over time. But the idea that the natural sciences do not exhaust everything that can be said about reality, but that there is an overarching rationality, I think he is right about that, says Sven-Olov Wallenstein.
Something that has proven to be more difficult for subsequent thinkers to come up with is what Olaf Scholz referred to in his speech. Namely the categorical imperative.
It is Kant's moral principle, his rule of life if you will, which can be summed up in the commandment: Always act so that your action can be elevated to a general law.
At the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche condemned the maxim as "moral fanaticism" and with customary sarcasm called Kant the "most conceptually deformed cripple who ever lived".
- The categorical imperative has simply unreasonable consequences. Most people think that it is good to lie sometimes, to protect someone for example, that is if the consequences are good. But Kant does not allow that, because the lie cannot be elevated to general law. For him, morality cannot have any exceptions, it is categorical, says Sven-Olov Wallenstein.
Although the work that he was most interested in, and also translated into Swedish, is "Critique of Discernment", also known as the third Critique. Here Immanuel Kant deals with the sublime, taste and aesthetics, and how these differ.
What is beauty? And what does it mean to make an aesthetic judgment? Kant asked himself. His answer laid the foundation for the modern concept of art and, by extension, also for the role of culture in society, as we know it today.
Daniel Kehlmann also spent several years studying and writing about the Kantian aesthetic theory. The thesis was never finished, but that had nothing to do with a lack of interest in the subject, quite the opposite.
- I perceived and still perceive it as Kant solving the problems of art. It is extremely fascinating. My abandonment of philosophy was not about that, but about the realization that I lack the intellectual rigor required to develop a theory of my own. I simply had no original contribution to philosophy, but in the literary field I saw such a chance, he says.
For Immanuel Kant, aesthetic judgment, unlike more general statements of taste, has a transcendental prerequisite. Here, a concrete example may possibly be in order. If someone says celery is good, and you counter that it's disgusting, usually nothing happens. The discussion does not take place. In that respect, the taste, as they say, is like the bake. It does not apply to aesthetic or artistic expression.
- With art and literature, it is more complicated because there are ideas behind them, and different interests live in the ideas. Anyone who engages in an artistic work feels that others should see and think the same as themselves. If I think a novel is great and you say it's lousy, we almost automatically start putting forward different arguments and interpretations to try to convince the other person of our position. We would never do that with celery, says Daniel Kehlmann.
Is this what Kant is referring to when he talks about the autonomy of art?
- Yes, art has a special position because literature, theater and music give birth to an endless conversation that we conduct in public. These conversations and debates also form the basis of how we conduct politics today. It's no small thing.
Sven-Olov Wallenstein agrees with that.
- Kant is one of the first to talk about die Öffentlichkeit - the public. It is not enough, as Putin said in his speech, to think for oneself. It can lead to pure madness! You also have to present your thoughts, have them tested and criticized in public. That is what, according to Kant, is enlightenment.
Sven-Olov Wallenstein was one of those who received an invitation to celebrate and talk about Immanuel Kant in Kaliningrad on his 300th birthday in April this year. He didn't go there. In fact, almost all representatives from the free world were absent from the event.
- What Putin said was just an abuse of Kant, because Putin defends neither the public nor the enlightenment. Olaf Scholz is of course right!
Read more texts by Sandra Stiskalo
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