Immanuel Kant
Kant was the most boring person to have ever lived. He walked the same way at the same time every day. He was a decent student and never married. He died quietly with no barbarians in sight.
He is also probably the most important philosopher after Aristotle. Though his ideas are hundreds of years old, they are still perfectly tenable as a working philosophy. They are also nearly impossible to understand.
Kant wrote two huge books. Then he wrote two small books to make the big books more clear. The small books are just as bad—just shorter. Still, nobody now reads the big books; the small books are plenty hard enough.
Kant was a metaphysician and ethicist. His ideas are related, and his metaphysics are spectacular.
Ethics is concerned with finding a rule to govern all of our actions. Epicurus and Marcus Aurelius had many rules. Aristotle had a few. Kant and Mill (who we will read later), have one rule, and only one rule.
They have one rule for a simple reason: a single rule never contradicts itself. Multiple rules lead to ethical dilemmas. Take, for instance, the rules of Lo Piccolo, the boss of bosses of the Sicilian Mafia. He was captured with a list of ten commandments for Mafiosi. Here are two: ‘Always be available for Cosa Nostra, even if your wife is about to give birth’, and ‘Wives must be treated with respect’. Well, these are good rules, but they clearly conflict. Having only one ethical rule would avoid this—at the cost of simplification.
Be forewarned. Kant is hard to read. I’ve done my best to make him easier in my decoding, but I’ve mangled his ideas even more than I generally do. Be cautious.
