Depending on your perspective, Immanuel Kant was either the most boring person on the planet or a productivity hacker’s wet dream. For over 40 years, he woke up every morning at 5:00 AM and wrote for exactly three hours. He would then lecture at the same university for exactly four hours. He followed that up with lunch at the same restaurant each day. Then, in the afternoon, he would go on an extended walk through the same park, on the same route, leaving and returning home at the exact same time. Every day.
Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg, Prussia. I mean that literally. He never left the city. Despite the sea being an hour away, he never saw it.1
Kant was efficiency personified. He was so mechanical in his habits that his neighbors joked they could tune their clocks based on when he left his apartment each day. He would leave for his daily walk at 3:30 PM, have dinner with the same friend every evening, and return home to finish work and go to bed at exactly 10:00 PM.
It’s easy for us to scoff at a guy like this. What a dweeb. Seriously, get a life, dude.
But Kant was one of the most important and influential thinkers in modern history. He did more to steer the world from his single-room apartment in Prussia than most kings and armies ever did before and since.2
If you’re living in a democratic society that protects individual rights, you have Kant to partially thank for that. He was the first person to ever envision a global governing body that could guarantee peace across much of the world. He described space/time in such a way that it inspired Einstein’s discovery of relativity.3 He came up with the idea that animals could potentially have rights,4 invented the philosophy of aesthetics and beauty, and resolved a 200-year philosophical debate in the span of a couple hundred pages. He reinvented moral philosophy, from top to bottom, overthrowing ideas that had been the basis of western civilization since Aristotle.
Kant was an intellectual badass. If brains had balls, Kant’s would have been made out of steel and walked funny. His ideas, particularly about ethics, are still discussed and debated in thousands of universities today.
And that’s what I want to talk about: Kant’s moral philosophy, and why it matters.
Now, I know what you’re saying. Really, Mark? Moral philosophy? Who fucking cares, man? Show me shiny sunset inspirational quotes and cat pics.
Well, that, right there, is moral philosophy. Any time you say, “Who cares?” or “What’s the big deal?” you’re essentially questioning the value of something. Is it worth your time and attention? Is it better/worse than something else? These are all questions of value, they all fall under the umbrella of moral philosophy
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