Culture | Great philosophers

Meet Mr Green

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KANT: A BIOGRAPHY.

By Manfred Kuehn.

Cambridge University Press; 566 pages; $34.95 and £24.95


IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804) never set foot outside his native East Prussia. For all but a few years of his long, uneventful life he lived and taught in the Baltic port of Königsberg. Yet no philosopher since Aristotle has exercised such influence. Kant's thought transformed how the modern world approached enduring problems in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. “The Critique of Pure Reason” ranks among the most important works of philosophy ever written; it is still one of the most difficult. Lord Macaulay, a great English historian, was exasperated to discover that he could not understand a word of it.

Kant was one of the first thinkers to concentrate on philosophy alone, and the difficulty of his writing arises partly from a deliberate attempt to professionalise the subject and give it the rigour of experimental science. Yet his true originality went far deeper. Kant sought to reconcile two dominant but conflicting traditions: the rationalism of Descartes and the sceptical empiricism of Hume. Our experience of the outside world is never bare, Kant argued, but comes, as it were, ready clothed in thought; yet thought about an objective world is itself necessarily limited by the range of possible experience. The result, if true, was to throw humanity back on its own cognitive resources. God, the soul, immortality became hypotheses, things in themselves were inaccessible to human perception, and certainty was possible only within the limits dictated by the apparatus of human thought. The entire structure of metaphysics and theology seemed to totter under the rigour of Kantian criticism. Even though his intention had not been to subvert religion or the state, he was dubbed der Alleszermalmer, the “all-crusher”. Yet the instrument of his critical philosophy was not the blunt hammer of a Nordic god, but the clarifying precision of systematic thought.

That precision is famously reflected in the folk memory of the philosopher, partly based on early biographers who knew him only in old age, which depicts him as a pedantic, solitary, slightly absurd bachelor whose entire life was run according to inflexible rules and whose habits were as regular as clockwork. This “machine man” derives from the popular image of Kantian ethics, which is founded on the metaphysical concept of the categorical imperative. Formulations of this moral principle vary. Sometimes Kant says: “Act as if your maxims were to serve at the same time as a universal law.” Alternatively he emphasises the importance of treating others “always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” The categorical imperative was easily vulgarised: into a duty to humanity in general rather than to anybody in particular, and more sinisterly into the elevation of race, class or any other collective above the individual. Kant's most famous passage evokes “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”, the existence of which, unlike that of God, is not conjectural. Though a man of the Enlightenment, Kant also believed, however, that humanity had a natural propensity to “radical evil”.

Manfred Kuehn's excellent new life is the first substantial biography of Kant since Germany's historical catastrophe, and the figure who emerges is not the familiar caricature of a withdrawn Prussian professor. The young Kant overcame his humble origins to become an elegant man-about-town. Oddly, Mr Kuehn glosses over the fact, evident from his portraits, that Kant was pigeon-breasted and slightly hunchbacked. His gregariousness is thus all the more striking, and Mr Kuehn goes so far as to say that conversational dialogue was of decisive importance to his thought: “His critical philosophy,” he writes, “is an expression of this form of life.”

Indeed, it is fascinating to learn from Mr Kuehn's account how large a debt Kant owed to his daily talks with a scholarly English merchant, Joseph Green, of Green, Motherby & Co. It was under Green's influence that the dandy developed into the ascetic, devoted to duty and with a missionary zeal to rescue philosophy from the entropy of scepticism. Green it was who spent every afternoon conversing with Kant until seven o'clock sharp (neighbours set their watches by the moment at which the professor emerged from their conclave), Green who shared his hero-worship of Hume and Rousseau, Green who showed Kant how to live his life according to strictly applied maxims, Green who guided Kant's modest investments, Green with whom he often dozed off as they smoked their pipes together. “Green's effect on Kant cannot be overestimated,” concludes Mr Kuehn.

So the greatest German philosopher was also, we learn, a great Anglophile. He was, in this respect, not untypical of Frederick the Great's Prussia, and especially of the Hanseatic ports. The combination of English commerce and German intellect was evidently unbeatable. During the years of Anglo-German enmity, Joseph Green was forgotten. Today, it would be a splendid gesture for the many German firms in London to commemorate the unknown Englishman who helped Kant to greatness and thereby made Germany a home of philosophy for the next two centuries.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Meet Mr Green"

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