Kant’s Philosophy: The Contradictions of a Human’s Life

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Looking back into the history of mankind, one can say that Kant was a genius of a man. Or was he insane? He created four proofs to the fact that God does not exist – and then he created the fifth one, proving the opposite. He turned human nature upside down to see if there is something hidden within it.

He was the most outrageous philosopher of ancient times, and there has been no one to compare to him since then.

However, the things that are of the greatest interest for modern philosophers, modern people, and their modern problems are one of the contradictions of a human’s life.

They are not numerous, Kant himself counted four of them. He called them moments, as if to emphasize the frailty of a man’s life and its being rather an existence than a life. Combined together, they create a philosophic pattern of a human’s life and show that some things exist beyond the reach of our imagination and understanding.

The first one is the moment of disinterested interest. The ancient sorcerer was good at making oxymorons.

What underlay the concept was the idea of the man longing for beauty even without the desire to own the beautiful thing. Kant practically explained a man’s urge for arts and artworks, creating them and observing them, indulging in “tasting” the beauty and appreciating it. As he put it in his book,

One must not be in the least prepossessed in favour of the real existence of the thing, but must preserve complete indifference in this respect, in order to play the part of judge in matters of taste. (33)

Speaking about the second notion that the philosopher suggests, the moment of free necessity, I would like to say that the philosopher meant basically a habit. There are certain things that we do without asking ourselves whether we want it or not because such a question does not even occur to us because the answer seems obvious. Actually, we are free to do this particular thing, because we are willing and we know this is right, but this is an obligatory thing as well, a kind of a law that is in our blood.

Kant’s example of this phenomenon sounds like that:

However, this necessity is of a special kind. It is not a theoretically objective necessity – such as would let us cognize a priori that everyone will feel this delight in the object that is called beautiful by me. Not yet is it a practical necessity, in which case, thanks to concepts of pure rational will in which free agents are supplied with a rule, this delight is the necessary consequence of an objective law… (61)

Thus, the unnecessary necessity is the idea of the subjective perception of reality and subjective measure of beauty.

The next moment I would like to dwell upon is the moment of the subjective universality.

The moment of subjective universality shows that a man is subdued to a feeling that his idea of beauty is the only right one, and that everyone should think the way this person does and admire the same things. The egoistic feeling can be explained psychologically, and that is what Kant doing when stating the following:

…This is the case when it requires the subjective universality, i.e., the concurrence of every one, albeit the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, but only one of pleasure or displeasure in a given object, i.e. an assumption of a subjective finality that has a thoroughgoing validity for every one, and which, since the judgment is one of taste, is not to be grounded upon any concept of the thing. (102)

And, finally, I would like to ponder the moment that Kant called the moment of purposeless purposiveness. That might sound rather abstract, but there are some points that I would like to draw your attention to.

The clue about this idea is that when passing his judgment to a work of art, a critic should not take into account whether the item has a purpose or not. Art itself has no purpose, so there is no use trying to make it sensible and reasonable, or vice versa. As long as the art exists for the sake of itself, it remains an art and it is beautiful. But from the very moment it starts expressing some ideas and be of some use for people, it is no art. Sometimes it is translated as “final without end”, so both names are possible.

To put it in Kant’s own words, the very concept that underlies these words is the following:

In the suggestive aggregation of units requisite for the representation of magnitudes, the imagination of itself advances ad infinitum without let or hindrance-understanding, however, conducting it by means of concepts of number for which the former must supply the schema. this procedure belongs to the logical estimation of magnitude, and, as such, is doubtlessly something objectively final according to the concept of an end (as all measurement is), but it is not anything which for the aesthetic judgment id final or pleasing. (76)

Trying to penetrate the concept of beauty, Kant was aiming at cognizing the world. He was aiming at the nature of people and the world, with its harmony and well-balanced elements. As you understand what makes things seem beautiful, you start understanding what a man I made of. And that can make you closer to the secret of life and death, as well as the secret of the universe. Kant got closer to it than anyone ever had, and, I’m afraid, ever will have. Such is the world, mysterious and silent.

Works Cited

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Trans. Meredith J. Creed. New York, NY: Forgotten Books, 1973. Print.

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Kant’s Philosophy: The Contradictions of a Human’s Life

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