Kant: A Revolution in Thinking by Marcus Willaschek
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Kant: A Revolution in Thinking
By Marcus Willaschek
Translated by Peter Lewis
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2025
German academic Marcus Willaschek’s study of the philosopher Immanuel Kant does two things superbly. Firstly, it situates him within his age. Secondly, it exhaustively draws out aspects of his thought that are timely today. Above all, it is a book that makes this elusive genius, often caricatured as an archetypal academic, cloistered from the real world, into a flesh-and-blood creature. Willaschek’s Kant is a dynamic lecturer, a generous dinner-party host and a witty teller of jokes. He is also all-too-human – a racist and a sexist, who often failed to live up to the lofty moral standards he demanded in his philosophy, but whose thought retains its lessons for our own time. As Willaschek himself says, his faults should not ‘blind us to Kant’s great achievements or distract us from the deeply humane spirit that distinguishes most of his work’, an attitude that the woke inquisitors of our time may want to ponder.
This book is part biography and part commentary on Kant’s work. It is organised thematically rather than chronologically, and divided into five main parts, each of which looks at a key aspect of his thought. Willaschek begins with his thoughts on politics, then his writings on morality and human relationships, then his attitude towards man’s relationship with the natural world and on the nature of being human, concluding with the most abstract and most famous aspect of his thought – his metaphysics, encapsulated in his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Willaschek explains that this ‘makes for an easier entry into Kant’s thinking, gradually introducing the reader to the more abstract realms of his philosophy. It also allows each chapter to be read quite independently from the others.’
There is a Kant for everybody. Humanitarian pacifists and scholars of international relations can read his considerations on ‘perpetual peace’, which he deemed the ‘highest political good’. His anti-utilitarian reasoning for this, in which ‘it is not human suffering or well-being that are the decisive factors in ethics, but solely the dignity of human beings’, will sit ill with those who see global conflicts as primarily a matter of casualty figures and the hunger, privation and misery that result therefrom, rather than some abstract conception of human dignity. Those who despair at the way contemporary political divisions have poisoned human relationships can take heart in the fruitful intellectual friendship he enjoyed with the great Jewish scholar of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn. Alas, ‘The fact that some of his best friends were Jews did not, it seems, stop Kant from buying in uncritically to anti-Semitic prejudices’, a reminder that even a philosophical titan like Kant can have feet of clay.
Concerns about the noxious impact social media is having on the political understanding of the citizenry are discussed intelligently in the chapter called ‘Enlightenment And Its Dialectic’. There, Kant’s emphasis on individuals having the courage to think for themselves as a precursor to becoming enlightened is counterposed against a bleak post-modern reality - of individuals swallowing misinformation and conspiracy theories. Scrutinising Kant’s claims, Willaschek argues for how to make his vision a reality: ‘There are therefore further prerequisites for enlightenment beyond press freedom, such as a pluralistic media landscape and a readership that is not merely “courageous” but also sufficiently well educated.’
Kant’s doctrine of the categorical imperative, by which we commit ourselves to acting in accordance with a moral maxim regardless of circumstances, is given a searching (and searing) examination. The sobering story of Kant’s Austrian disciple Maria von Herbert, whose devotion to the categorical imperative led her to sabotage her engagement to her fiancé when she confessed that she had told a white lie, is an instructive testimony to the limits of Kant’s iron-clad morality. Willaschek cleverly probes its weaknesses and insists, against Kant, that any application of the categorical imperative ‘always happens in specific situations where certain features are of particular moral relevance and others are not, and therefore calls for sound judgment and discernment.’
Willaschek sprinkles the book with humorous anecdotes from, and barbed observations about, Kant’s own life. He credits Kant for his dedication to achieving a global moral order whilst refusing to leave his home city of Königsberg, writing that Kant was happy to contribute to this ‘Just as long as he was not required to travel there in person.’ Elsewhere, we are told that his treatment of Maria von Herbert, which included passing on her anguished letters to a third party, ‘shows that the categorical imperative wasn’t always of the greatest help to him either in reaching the right decision.’ With this book, Willaschek has humanised a man often dismissed as an odd hermit and a plodding pedant and given new life to his contentious philosophy.
Aaron Kyereh-Mireku is a writer and reviewer living in London.