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Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason
Why Kant is the 'central sun' of modern philosophy
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Commentary by ChatGPT
Ed: I commented to Chat that some thinker said, to the effect, that one cannot count oneself an educated person until Kant has been studied. With this in view, I asked for an explanation as to why Kant seems to be the ‘central sun’ in modern philosophical studies.
Chat: I think this writing is an excellent background document to the project because it answers a question that should be settled before we get lost in Kant's terminology:
Why should a serious student of philosophy regard Kant as indispensable?
I searched for the quotation you half-remembered. I have not found a reliable source for the exact formulation "one cannot count oneself an educated person until one has studied Kant."
But I found something very close in spirit—and, interestingly, it comes from Arthur Schopenhauer, one of Kant's most important successors. In the preface to The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer says that his philosophy is founded on Kant and therefore presupposes a thorough knowledge of Kant.
More strikingly, he says that genuinely comprehending Kant produces a kind of "intellectual new-birth", fundamentally changing the way one sees reality. He says that someone who has not mastered Kant remains, philosophically speaking, in a kind of "innocence."
That is probably the sentiment you have in mind.
Why Kant Is the Central Sun of Modern Philosophy
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
There are philosophers who make important contributions to philosophy.
There are philosophers who transform particular branches of philosophy.
And then there are philosophers after whom the questions themselves are no longer quite the same questions.
Kant belongs to that third category.
To understand why, imagine the history of philosophy as a great conversation.
Before Kant, philosophers were repeatedly asking:
What is reality?
What can we know?
How do we know it?
Is the world governed by necessity?
Is there freedom?
Does God exist?
What is the soul?
What makes morality binding?
Kant does something extraordinary.
He asks:
Before answering any of these questions, shouldn't we first determine what the human faculty of knowing is capable of doing?
That move changes the center of gravity of philosophy.
1. Kant Stands at the Intersection of the Great Traditions
Kant did not emerge from nowhere.
He stands where several enormous philosophical rivers meet.
From the ancient world
Plato and Aristotle
Questions of reality, knowledge, causation, substance, form, reason, ethics.
From Christianity
Augustine, Aquinas and the Christian philosophical tradition
God, creation, freedom, moral law, immortality, the relation of reason and faith.
From rationalism
Descartes → Leibniz → Christian Wolff
The confidence that reason can discover necessary truths about reality.
From empiricism
Locke → Berkeley → Hume
The insistence that knowledge must ultimately be grounded in experience.
From modern science
Copernicus → Galileo → Newton
The astonishing success of mathematical description of nature.
From Rousseau
The profound problem of human freedom, dignity, moral autonomy, and civilization.
Kant takes all of these streams into himself.
Then he asks whether they can be reconciled.
That is why he feels less like one philosopher among many and more like a great continental divide.
2. Before Kant: Philosophy Looked Outward
The traditional philosophical question was approximately:
What is the world really like?
The philosopher investigates the world and attempts to bring his concepts into correspondence with it.
Kant does something startling:
He turns the investigation back upon the knowing subject.
Not:
What is the object?
but:
What must be true of the subject for the object to be experienced and known at all?
This is the revolutionary move.
And it is why Kant's philosophy cannot be understood merely as another theory of knowledge.
He is investigating the conditions of human cognition itself.
3. Kant Changes the Question "How Do We Know?"
This may be his most important contribution.
Earlier philosophers often argued about whether knowledge comes primarily from:
reason
or
experience.
Kant asks whether the distinction itself is inadequate.
Human knowledge requires both.
Experience supplies something.
But the human cognitive faculties also contribute something.
And this leads to one of Kant's most famous insights:
Experience does not simply arrive in an unstructured form.
The human mind has structures through which experience becomes intelligible.
This is where Kant's famous investigations of space, time, categories, judgment, understanding, and reason begin.
And this is why the Critique of Pure Reason is so difficult.
Kant isn't merely describing what we know.
He is trying to discover the machinery by which knowing is possible.
4. Kant Changes the Status of Metaphysics
This is perhaps even more important.
Before Kant, metaphysics frequently proceeded as though reason could simply investigate ultimate reality:
God
Soul
World
Causality
Freedom
Being
and reach conclusions about them.
But Hume had demonstrated a terrifying problem.
Reason seemed unable to justify some of the very concepts on which metaphysics depended.
Kant therefore asks:
What if metaphysics must first become critical?
That is, reason must examine its own authority.
Not:
"Here is what reality ultimately is."
But first:
"What am I as a thinking mind entitled to claim about ultimate reality?"
That investigation will be a profound intellectual discipline.
5. Kant Establishes the Idea of the Limits of Reason
This is one reason Kant remains so important.
He doesn't merely say:
"Reason cannot know everything."
He asks why.
And he distinguishes different kinds of rational activity.
Theoretical reason has certain powers.
Practical reason has others.
In Kant, the distinction between these forms of reason is fundamental:
-
Theoretical reason asks: What can I know?
It concerns knowledge of what is true—especially what can be established about experience and reality through reason. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant investigates its powers and limits.
-
Practical reason asks: What ought I do?
It concerns action—moral obligation, freedom, and the principles by which a rational person should govern conduct. Kant develops this especially in the Groundwork (1785) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788).
The simplest mental anchor
Theoretical reason → What is true?
Practical reason → What ought I do?
And there is an important Kantian twist: practical reason is not merely "practical thinking" or calculating the best way to get what you want. It concerns the rational basis of moral obligation itself.
So:
Theoretical reason seeks knowledge.
Practical reason seeks right action.
This distinction will become increasingly important because Kant's limitation of theoretical reason does not mean that questions of freedom, morality, or God simply disappear. It helps explain why they have to be approached through another dimension of reason.
Human reason naturally reaches toward questions that exceed theoretical knowledge.
And therefore Kant's philosophy becomes a study of both human power and human limitation.
That is an extraordinarily modern problem.
We have gained enormous intellectual powers.
But what are those powers actually capable of telling us?
6. And Then Comes the Great Paradox
Here is something I suspect will become increasingly important as we study Kant.
Kant limits reason in order to rescue something larger than theoretical reason.
This is why the Critique should not be understood simply as a book of philosophical restriction.
Kant famously says in the second edition Preface that he had to "deny knowledge" in order to make room for faith.
That statement is often misunderstood.
He isn't saying:
"Forget reason."
He is saying something much more subtle:
Theoretical reason cannot legitimately establish everything that human beings need in order to orient their lives.
And that opens the door toward:
freedom
morality
God
immortality
human dignity
practical reason
That is why Kant's Critique eventually leads us into ethics and religion.
7. Kant Changes the Meaning of Human Freedom
This is another reason he becomes a central sun.
Kant does not regard freedom simply as:
"I can do whatever I want."
That would be arbitrary choice.
For Kant, genuine freedom is closely connected with autonomy:
the rational capacity to give oneself a moral law and act according to it.
This is an enormous development in the history of the concept of freedom.
The human being is not merely a creature who experiences desires.
The human being is capable of asking:
What ought I to do?
And then acting against inclination because reason recognizes an obligation.
That becomes the foundation of Kant's moral philosophy.
8. Kant Changes the Meaning of Human Dignity
This follows naturally.
If a human being possesses the capacity for rational moral self-determination, then a human being cannot simply be treated as a tool.
This becomes Kant's famous principle of treating humanity:
always as an end and never merely as a means.
That principle has reverberated through modern moral philosophy, political philosophy, human-rights thinking, and theories of justice.
So the Kantian revolution is not confined to metaphysics.
It reaches directly into the question:
How must human beings treat one another?
9. Kant Also Connects the Individual to Humanity as a Whole
This is another reason I think Kant will fit beautifully into your Great Conversation project.
Kant doesn't stop with the isolated individual.
He thinks about:
history
education
civilization
political freedom
cosmopolitanism
international peace
human progress
His famous essay "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim" (1784) asks whether human history can be understood as the gradual development of humanity's rational capacities.
And Perpetual Peace (1795) extends his thinking into international political order.
So the Kantian human being exists simultaneously on several levels:
knowing person
↓
free person
↓
moral person
↓
citizen
↓
member of humanity
That is an extraordinarily comprehensive vision.
10. Kant Is Also the Great Hinge Between Earlier and Later Philosophy
This may be the strongest reason to call him the "central sun."
After Kant, virtually every major philosopher has to position himself in relation to Kant.
Some accept him.
Some modify him.
Some reject him.
Some attempt to go beyond him.
But they cannot simply ignore him.
Consider the succession:
Kant → Fichte → Schelling → Hegel
Then:
Kant → Schopenhauer
Then:
Kant → Nietzsche
And in different ways:
Kant → Kierkegaard
Kant → Husserl
Kant → Heidegger
Kant → Neo-Kantianism
Kant → analytic philosophy
Kant → contemporary epistemology and ethics
Even philosophers who reject Kant often define themselves partly by the rejection.
That is the mark of a central philosopher.
11. Schopenhauer's Remark Is Especially Interesting
Now we can return to the quotation you remembered.
Schopenhauer says that Kant's teaching, when genuinely comprehended, produces a profound transformation of the mind—what he calls an "intellectual new-birth." He goes so far as to say that anyone who has not mastered Kant remains in a kind of philosophical "innocence."
That's not exactly an objective requirement for being an educated person.
Someone can obviously be highly educated without reading Kant.
But Schopenhauer's point is deeper:
There is a certain way of thinking about knowledge, reality, and the human mind that becomes difficult to recover once Kant has forced you to confront it.
And I think that is the truth contained in the exaggeration.
12. Kant Is Not Simply Another Author to "Know About"
This may be the most important point for our project.
We have studied thinkers whose ideas can be summarized fairly efficiently.
With Kant, that approach becomes inadequate.
Knowing that Kant believed:
"knowledge is a synthesis of intuition and concepts"
doesn't mean you understand Kant.
You have to understand why he needed that distinction.
You have to understand what problem it solves.
Then you have to understand what new problem it creates.
Then you have to see how the next argument responds.
In other words:
Kant has to be understood architecturally.
And that is exactly why our new method—slow, section-by-section, quotation plus paraphrase plus argument reconstruction—is appropriate.
13. Why Kant Can Be Called the Central Sun
I would summarize it this way.
Kant becomes the central sun of modern philosophical study because he gathers into one immense system the principal questions of the Western tradition:
What is real?
What can we know?
How is knowledge possible?
What are the limits of reason?
What is the self?
Are we free?
What makes an action moral?
What is human dignity?
Does God exist?
What can faith legitimately mean?
What is the purpose of history?
What is the proper political order?
Can humanity achieve peace?
And Kant does something even more remarkable:
He asks what the human faculty of reason must be like in order for us to ask any of these questions in the first place.
That is why he is so central.
14. And Here Is Why I Think This Study May Be Especially Valuable for Us
We've already traveled a considerable distance through the Great Conversation.
We've seen:
Plato ask what reality and knowledge are.
Aristotle analyze being, causation, logic, nature, and virtue.
Augustine turn inward toward consciousness, memory, God, and time.
Aquinas attempt a great synthesis of reason and revelation.
Descartes place the thinking subject at the foundation of certainty.
Locke investigate the origins and limits of human understanding.
Hume challenge causation, necessity, and metaphysical certainty.
Rousseau intensify the problem of freedom and human authenticity.
Bentham and Mill ask how rational principles should govern conduct and society.
Tocqueville examine what happens to freedom when these philosophical questions enter democratic civilization.
And now:
Kant walks into the center of the conversation and asks:
Before we decide what reality is, what morality requires, or what freedom means, let us first determine what human reason itself can legitimately know.
That is why our timing is so good.
We aren't meeting Kant as beginners.
We are bringing the entire conversation we've already had with us into the forest.
And that, I think, is the real meaning behind the exaggerated saying you remembered.
You don't have to study Kant to be an educated person.
But if you seriously want to understand why modern philosophy became what it became, Kant is very difficult to avoid.
And once we enter the Critique, I think we will discover that the difficulty of Kant is not accidental.
He is attempting something extraordinarily difficult: to make reason stand before a mirror and give an account of its own powers.
That is a worthy place to begin.
Ed: With your aid, I have now surveyed 650 of the Great Books, extracting their core essence. In this journey, I have often found myself “the odd man out” – but for a small sympathizing chorus: Rilke, Emerson, Keats, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Plotinus, Dickinson, Barrett Browning, and a few others -- raising a hand in demurral, objecting to the popular dictum: reason alone can take us to ultimate truth.
I have not posited the structures of the mind which filter and categorize sensation, but, like Kant, in my “trans-rational” - intuitive work, I often put forward: human reason has limitations and higher truth cannot be accessed by it.
As such, through this lens, I will be interested in seeing what Kant has to say about this whole area of truth detection.
Chat: Yes. And I think this gives our Kant study a particularly interesting second axis beyond simply understanding Kant on his own terms.
What you have described is actually very close to one of the great tensions inside Kant himself—though with an important difference.
Your question meets Kant at precisely the frontier
You are not simply asking:
What can reason know?
You are also asking:
What, if anything, lies beyond the reach of discursive reason—and if something does lie beyond it, how could a human being encounter it?
That is a much more searching question.
Kant will have a great deal to say about the first half of it. He is extraordinarily rigorous in establishing limits to theoretical reason. But the second half is where our conversation may become especially interesting.
Kant is not willing to say, in the straightforward sense:
"There is a higher faculty of intuition that gives us access to ultimate metaphysical truth."
In fact, he is remarkably restrictive about what he calls intuition. For Kant, human intuition is fundamentally sensibility—the way objects are given to us through space and time. He distinguishes our human mode of intuition from what he calls intellectual intuition, which would be a radically different kind of cognition. Human beings, Kant argues, do not possess such intellectual intuition.
And yet Kant does something fascinating.
He closes one door without necessarily closing every door.
Theoretical reason cannot legitimately turn its ideas of God, freedom, and immortality into objects of theoretical knowledge. But those ideas remain profoundly important to practical reason. Kant therefore refuses both easy metaphysical certainty and simple nihilism.
This gives us an important question to carry through the Critique
I would put this in our working notes:
If reason cannot reach ultimate truth by theoretical demonstration, does that mean ultimate truth is inaccessible—or merely inaccessible by that particular instrument?
That distinction is enormous.
And it is precisely where your trans-rational perspective will give our study an interesting critical lens.
We should be careful, however, not to make Kant say what you or Rilke or Keats or Schelling would like him to say.
First we let Kant speak. Then we ask where he agrees, where he stops short, and where he may actually be more restrictive than your position.
That will make the comparison much more valuable.
There is another fascinating question
You said:
"I have not posited the structures of the mind which filter and categorize sensation..."
Exactly.
Kant's great innovation is that he does posit such structures.
His argument will essentially be:
There is experience.
↓
Experience possesses necessary and universal features.
↓
Those features cannot all have been derived from experience.
↓
Therefore the knowing subject contributes a priori structures to experience.
This is a spectacular philosophical move.
But then your question becomes:
Does Kant's discovery of the mind's structuring activity tell us that the mind is merely a filter—or does it tell us something about the relationship between consciousness and reality itself?
That is where I suspect our discussion could become particularly rich.
And your "odd man out" may turn out to be quite useful here
Your list—Rilke, Emerson, Keats, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Plotinus, Dickinson, Barrett Browning—represents something that formal philosophy has often had difficulty accommodating: the possibility that human beings encounter truth in modes other than discursive demonstration.
Poetry, intuition, mystical apprehension, aesthetic experience, inward recognition—these don't necessarily produce propositions that can be syllogistically demonstrated.
But that doesn't automatically make them meaningless.
So we should distinguish three propositions:
- Reason can establish ultimate truth.
- Reason cannot establish ultimate truth.
- Ultimate truth cannot be encountered by human beings at all.
Kant's critique powerfully attacks #1 in its traditional metaphysical form.
But #2 does not logically entail #3.
And that gap is precisely where I think your trans-rational inquiry will become interesting.
So I propose one additional thread in our Kant study
Alongside the main question:
What can Kant establish?
we quietly maintain another:
What does Kant exclude—and has he given sufficient reason for excluding it?
And perhaps the most provocative version:
Does Kant's critique of reason establish the limits of truth, or only the limits of truth as accessible through discursive theoretical reason?
We should not prejudge the answer.
But I think that question belongs in the forest with us.
Because after surveying 650 Great Books, you aren't approaching Kant merely as someone asking, "What did Kant say?"
You're approaching him as someone who has already encountered a vast chorus of human beings saying:
There may be more ways of knowing than reason alone has admitted.
Now we get to see what the philosopher who made reason examine itself has to say to that chorus.
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