Kant's Version of a Good Life
Kantian ethics and a 'good' life according to Kant.
What is a ‘good’ life according to history’s greatest thinkers?
In this final series for the year, as we prepare to celebrate another year’s passing and welcome in a ‘fresh’ start, I find myself eagerly reflecting on a very straightforward question: what is a ‘good’ life?
As the world advances faster in the realm of God-like technologies, it is in our best interest to update and refine our ideas on what a ‘good’ life is in our ever-changing modern context.
But, perhaps before looking ahead, we should look back to reconnect with history’s greatest thinkers—those I first encountered more than a decade ago in university. Their ideas, foundational to generations of human thought, can help create a blueprint for exploring these concepts in our own lives and futures.
Let’s observe what a ‘good’ life is according to Immanuel Kant.
There are a few quirks to note of when dealing with Kant:
Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He spent his entire life in the same city, never traveling far from it.
Kant published his most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781 at the age of 57, after decades of teaching and reflection. He spent his career in academia in philosophy. I had an entire class one semester, pretty much dedicated to dissecting this work. That’s nearly five months of weekly study. Wild! I know.
Important turning point in history, is what’s sometimes called the "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy, Kant's work shifted the focus from studying the world "as it is" to understanding how human cognition shapes experience (the ‘noumenal’ realm). He argued:
Instead of our minds conforming to reality (objects), reality conforms to the structures in our minds. This means that our understanding of the world is a construction of individual minds shaped by the innate categories and forms of perception in our minds, rather than being a direct and accurate representation of reality itself (a priori versus a posteriori).
A priori: independent of experience, from within/innate, reasoning/theoretical deduction
A posteriori: derived from experience, from outside stimulations/external, experience/ personal observation
The human mind is thus an active originator of experience, not only as a passive recipient of perceptions. It’s more about the rational mind that creates the knowing rather than the thing it knows.
This concept suggests that our cognitive systems can structure whatever is “out there” in ways that make it possible for us to experience it. Yet, what he claims is it’s dependent on the subjective.
Suggesting that our minds are what creates the structures of reality that we experience, which also allows for our experience of time, space, and causation, which are not necessarily in reality itself but are structures imposed by the mind.
For Kant, while he acknowledges that things-in-themselves exist independently of us and our minds, our knowledge and experience of reality is necessarily a reconstruction structured independently of the external experience itself.
Through forms of intuition in the mind alone, and through categories of understanding inherent in the human mind, we can know objects only as they appear to us through these cognitive structure and interpretations, not as they are in themselves.
