Kant Quotes

“Still, it might have been the cheese that caused Kant’s “sickness” – at least indirectly. The excitement over the forbidden food might have raised his blood pressure and brought on the stroke.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“craving for a sandwich with grated dry English cheese (cheddar), which Wasianski considered bad for him. On October 7, he ate, against Wasianski’s advice, a large quantity of it: He for the first time made an exception in his customary approval and acceptance of my suggestion.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“When this bird came late one year, he said: “It must still be very cold in the Apennines,” wishing the bird good weather for its homecoming.149 In 1803 the bird did not come back. Kant was sad and complained, “My little birdie is not coming.”150”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Other problems, such as a complete lack of teeth, constipation, difficulty in urinating, and loss of the sense of smell and taste, made life more and more burdensome. During the winter he frequently complained how tiresome life had become and expressed his wish to die. “He was of no use to the world and he did not know what to do with himself.”148”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Meanwhile, things did not go well at home. Lampe had begun too take advantage of the “weakness” of his master. He became more quarrelsome, obtained unreasonable favors, did not do his job, was frequently drunk, and exhibited a certain kind of “brutality.”140 Wasianski talked to Lampe, who promised to improve but got worse. In January 1802 Kant reported to Wasianski: “Lampe has done such wrong to me that I am ashamed to say what it was.”141 Wasianski saw to it that Lampe, the servant who had been with Kant for forty years, was dismissed in the very same month. He received a yearly pension, under the condition that neither he nor any of the relatives were ever to bother Kant again.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“By August 1801, a friend wrote that Kant was able “only at singular moments to write down his thoughts on philosophical matters.”137 Often he fell asleep in his chair, slipped out of it, and fell to the ground. Having fallen, he could not get up. He calmly lay where he fell and waited until someone helped him up. It is not clear how often this happened, until Wasianski provided him with an armchair that prevented him from falling. He still read in bed. Three times, his nightcap caught fire. Kant stamped out the fire with his feet. Wasianski provided him with a bottle of water by his bed, and changed the design of his nightcap. He also instructed him to read at a greater distance from the candle. Wasianski now had to attend to Kant several times a day.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Gradually, all the regularities that had given order to Kant’s life changed. Though he still got up at 5:00 A.M., he began to go to bed earlier. His walks now no longer took him far away from his house. He was frail. Theoretician that he still was, he developed a peculiar way of walking, trying to make his feet hit the ground by a perpendicular motion; he began to stomp. His reason was the belief that walking in a flat-footed way would maximize resistance and thus prevent him from falling. But he fell anyway. To”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“What justifies the view that man is the end of nature? Morality. Only human beings are autonomous. Only they are capable of unconditional legislation, which is an end “to which all of nature is teleologically subordinated.”80”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant’s idea of autonomy, which he also calls the “supreme principle of morality” and which is therefore the principle that the Groundwork sets out to establish, amounts to the claim that we, as rational beings, are a law unto ourselves, or that we are free to give ourselves our own laws.48 To be sure, the laws we give”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“that is, a will which has motives “that are represented completely a priori by reason alone,” and not with human volition, which is characterized by empirically based motives.40”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“In rejecting “honor,” Kant also implicitly rejects one of the fundamental principles of the society he lives in. The distinction of different estates has no moral relevance. As moral agents we are all equal. Any attempt to defend or justify social differences by appealing to morals must be rejected as well. The conservative status quo must be challenged. In the context of Prussia of 1785, these views must be called revolutionary.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Ciceronian ethics that remains founded on common life, expressed by such concepts of honor (honestas), faithfulness (fides), fellowship (societas), and seemliness (decorum), is too superficial and unphilosophical for Kant.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Thus Richard Rorty contends that we should set Kant aside as part of the larger task of moving beyond “the notions of ‘foundations of knowledge’ and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic.”55 Since, for him, Kant is also the very ideal of an antiskeptical philosopher, Rorty takes his own view to be necessarily “anti-Kantian.” Rorty is trying to persuade us that a “post-Kantian” culture is possible and desirable, and he would like us to “see philosophy neither as achieving success by ‘answering the skeptic,’ nor as rendered nugatory by realizing that there is no skeptical case to be answered.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“While we cannot know what is beyond experience, we can still think it. In fact, Kant claims that we must think about such things, and that reason itself forces us to do so.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“The subject matters of the dialectic are, accordingly, far from being entirely useless. They have to do with fundamental questions that are unavoidable for us. Kant believed that they are expressions of deep “interests” of reason that cannot simply be dismissed. Metaphysical speculation is as inevitable for us as breathing. These questions concern the forms of reason – what Kant calls the “transcendental ideas.” The ideas, which are for Kant restricted to God, freedom, and immortality, do not afford any kind of knowledge beyond that which is possible through space and time and the categories”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant tries to show that rational psychology, philosophical cosmology, and rational theology are doomed to failure, at least if understood as purely theoretical enterprises.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant claimed, as we have already seen, that he wrote the Critique within a period of four to five months, “as if in flight.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“When he published his Critique, he was fifty-seven, and he would live almost another twenty-three years.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Hypochondria remained a problem for Kant until his death. But whereas he had to worry about heart palpitations during his earlier years, he now was more anxious about the state of his bowels, as can be seen from one of”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“His daily schedule then looked something like this. He got up at 5:00 A.M. His servant Martin Lampe, who worked for him from at least 1762 until 1802, would wake him.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“To introduce by means of it the sources of all the sciences that are concerned with morals, with the ability of commerce, and the method of educating and ruling human beings, or all that is practical. In this discipline I will, then, be more concerned to seek out the phenomena and their laws than the first principles of the possibility of modifying human nature itself.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“This change was connected to moral considerations and to a new theory of space and time.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant’s thought underwent a radical change when he came to believe that reason and sensation cannot be understood as continuous. In the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 there was no longer any continuity or bridge between sensation and reason. He then saw the two faculties as radically discontinuous, and therefore he argued that the earlier approach could not possibly work. It was this break that defined the difference between Kant’s precritical view on ethics and his critical view. The rejection of the continuity thesis marked the end of Kant’s search for fixed points in human nature, and the beginning of his search for them in pure reason.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“As Moses Mendelssohn noted at the occasion of a review of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: The theory of human sensations and passions has in more recent times made the greatest progress, since the other parts of philosophy no longer seem to advance very much. Our neighbors, and especially the English, precede us with philosophical observations of nature, and we follow them with our rational inferences; and if it were to go on like this, namely that our neighbors observe and we explain, we may hope that we will achieve in time a complete theory of sensation.152 What was needed, he thought, was a Universal Theory of Thinking and Sensation; such a theory would cover sensation and thinking in theoretical, moral, and aesthetic contexts.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“The works of Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and almost every other British philosopher of note were full of problems that needed solutions and observations that needed to be explained, if German philosophy of the traditional sort was to succeed. Most of these problems seemed to have to do with the analysis of sensation in theoretical, moral, and aesthetic contexts. Central among all of these was the problem of a “moral sense.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“This would mean that Kant’s friendship with Green dates back to the summer of 1765. This much is sure, that by 1766 they were close friends; and at least from that time on Kant was a constant and very regular visitor at Green’s house. Kant’s regularity was probably – at least at first – due more to Green’s punctuality than to that of Kant, for it was said that the neighbors could set their clocks in accordance with the time at which Kant left Green’s house in the evening: at seven o’clock the visit was over.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“The universe is infinite in space and time. If this was not enough to raise eyebrows in Königsberg, Kant went on to speculate that we are not the only inhabitants of this universe but that there is intelligent life on other planets. Though Kant did not raise the question whether Christ died for extraterrestrials as well, or whether perhaps he had to die on other planets again, it would have been a question uppermost in the minds of most of his readers in Königsberg. When Kant imagined that it might be possible that our soul continued to live on one of these other planets,”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“One might call eighteenth-century Königsberg “multicultural,” at least in the sense that it was made up of many different peoples. Apart from a large contingent of Lithuanians and other inhabitants from the Baltic region, there were Mennonites who had come to Königsberg from Holland in the sixteenth century, as well as Huguenots who had found refuge in Königsberg. They continued to speak French among themselves, went to their own church, and had their own institutions and businesses. There were many Poles, some Russians, many people from other countries around the Baltic Sea; there was a significant Jewish community, and a number of Dutch and English merchants.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kinder, Küche, Kirche” really did define the lives of women to a large extent.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“With its emphasis on lay priesthood, individual Bible study, and a community of the faithful, Pietism wasin tune with the values of the members of the guild.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography