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An introduction to Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

In 1755, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) became a Privatdozent, or non-stipendiary lecturer, making a living by charging students for his lectures and giving private tuition. His students joked that he could cover for the entire philosophy faculty—which at the time included everything except the three “higher” faculties of theology, law, and medicine. He became a star lecturer, reputed for his wit, dry humour, and poker face.

When he lectured, Kant was, according to a contemporary account, “all things to all men.” He stood at a diminutive five foot two (1.57m), with blond hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. Despite his slender build, flat and narrow chest, and “slight corkscrew twist”, he was described as attractive. According to his own account, his flat and narrow chest left “little room for the movement of the heart and lungs”, contributing to his delicate constitution, predisposition to hypochondria, and sedentary, regimented lifestyle.

Kant compensated for his physical frailties by being a sharp dresser. He took inspiration from nature for matching colours. Thus, in middle age, he often wore a yellow waistcoat with a brown tailcoat trimmed with gold braid. In public and in company, he sported a powdered wig, even after it had fallen out of fashion. As late as 1791, his friend and follower Joachim Christian Friedrich Schulz described him as having “the look of a good, honest watchmaker who has gone into retirement”.

From 1766, Kant derived a modest but regular income as sub-librarian of the university. From 1768 to 1777, he rented two rooms in the house of the publisher and bookseller Johann Jakob Kanter. In this period, his student Johann Gottfried Herder described him as “the most urbane fellow in the world”. He moved in the city’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours.

Kant never considered himself quite rich enough to take a wife. He twice considered marriage, first to a “beautiful widow” and, much later, to a “pretty Westphalian girl”, but in each case prevaricated for so long that the ladies ended up marrying otherwise. Although he never married, Kant defended the institution of marriage, which he prosaically defined as “the union of two persons of different sexes for lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes”.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative

Kant is famous, among other things, for trying to put morality onto a rational basis, that is, for trying to make morality objective and “categorical” rather than subjective and arbitrary. His core ethical principle is the Categorical Imperative, according to which we should only obey those moral laws that we could consistently and rationally will as universal laws. This might be restated as, “Always act such that the maxim of your action can at the same time be upheld as a universal law.”

The Categorical Imperative is similar to the much older Golden Rule of the Bible and Indian Mahabharata, according to which we should treat others as we would ourselves wish to be treated. But whereas the Golden Rule is based on personal desire, which is subjective (I might, for example, be a masochist, or be willing to tolerate some mistreatment), the Categorical Imperative is based on reason, which is objective.

Hypothetical imperatives are practical rules for achieving a desired outcome, for example, “If you want to lose weight, you should watch what you eat.’ If you do not desire a particular outcome, you do not need to follow the rules. In this much, hypothetical imperatives are conditional and contingent. In contrast, Categorical Imperatives are universal moral commands that bind everyone regardless of their aims, for example, “Do not lie”, “Do not steal”, “Do not commit suicide”.

Hypothetical imperatives answer to the lower faculty of desire, which aims at pleasure. Categorical Imperatives answer to the higher faculty of will, which functions rationally and autonomously by following the laws which it legislates for itself, regardless of consequences or personal feelings. For Kant, true moral actions must be motivated by duty, not some desired outcome. Thus, Kantian ethics are sometimes described as deontological, or duty-based (Greek, deon, “duty”), and contrasted with consequentialism (for example, utilitarianism), which is outcome-based. For Kant, moral systems based on outcomes or desires operate on hypothetical imperatives, not true moral law.

Kant furnishes some examples to flesh out the bones of the Categorical Imperative. Imagine a person in financial need who borrows money and promises to pay it back, knowing full well that they never will. If this action were universalised, promises of repayment would no longer be believed and the practice of lending would end. Kant also points out that abusing the lender in this way reduces a dignified being with ends of his own to a mere means-to-an-end.

The universalizability formulation is only the first formulation the Categorical Imperative. The second formulation is the humanity formulation, or end-in-itself formulation: “Act always treating humanity, in yourself and others, as an end and never merely as a means.” 

When Is It Moral to Have Sex?

Kant’s rigid application of the Categorical Imperative led him to condemn many actions and behaviours that are no longer generally condemned, such as suicide out of world-weariness, homosexuality, and masturbation. He referred to homosexual acts and masturbation as “unnatural vices” on the basis that the natural purpose of sex and the reproductive organs is procreation. Marriage, he argued, is the only morally permissible context for sexual relations. But for those unable or unwilling to wait, sex is preferable to masturbation. Masturbation transgresses the natural order, sex, only the civil order.

What has aged a lot better is Kant’s insight that, during sex, one turns the other into an object of gratification, a means to an end rather than an end-in-himself or end-in-herself. This is only permissible if, in return, one makes oneself into an object of gratification for the benefit of the other. Marriage, on the other hand, is a unique union in which two people mutually surrender their bodies and selves to create a united whole.

For us, the take-home message is: Kant never had sex or even masturbated. 

Jokes aside, Kant grew into, and arguably remains, the supreme moral authority in the Western World. For better or worse, what he thought and how he thought remains part of our mental makeup.

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And how Leibniz stumbled upon the unconscious.

Gottfried Leibniz

For Aristotle (384-322 BCE), all living things had a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals also had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul. As a result, medieval theologians and philosophers debated whether humans had a plurality of souls.

To pluralists such as Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-1279), the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls were distinct entities stacked within the human body. For Kilwardby, this served to explain how Christ’s body remained holy in the tomb after his human soul had departed.

The pluralists were fiercely opposed by unitists such as St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who argued that a person with multiple souls would be no more than a bundle of parts, rather than a single, unified substance. For a short time after his death, Aquinas’s single soul “heresy” was banned in Paris and Oxford. Following centuries of debate, the unitist view, of course, came to prevail.

Descartes’s Daughter

The philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) completely changed the conversation. To uphold his dualism of mind and body and defend the immortality of the human soul, Descartes argued that only humans (and higher beings such as angels) possessed both a physical body and an immaterial soul. Being the source of thought and reason, this immaterial soul qualified human beings for things like heaven and eternal life. All other living things—plants and animals—were soulless, and functioned like complex machines.

Animals, claimed Descartes, are mere automata, whose functions “follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.” For Descartes, it is not only that animals do not reason, but also that they do not feel, perceive, or sense. Clearly, he did not have a cat. According to lore, he once threw a cat out of a window to demonstrate that the poor thing lacked consciousness. 

Although French, Descartes spent the greater part of his adult life in the relative safety of the Dutch Republic. There, he met a servant called Helena, who became the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Francine (b. 1635), whom he passed off as his niece. When Francine died, aged five, of scarlet fever, he called it the greatest sorrow of his life—even stating that it was not unmanly to cry. Later, a legend arose that he constructed an automaton in Francine’s likeness.

How Leibniz Stumbled Upon the Unconscious

In the early 1700s, the polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) investigated and documented a famous “talking dog” in the village of Zeitz, Saxony. He concluded that the dog was not in fact “talking,” but merely echoing the sounds of his master.

Even so, Leibniz rejected Descartes’s idea of animals as soulless machines. Relying heavily on the Aristotelian concept of entelechy (the vital force that drives an organism), he returned their sensitive soul to the animals. Still, animals lack a rational soul, and act purely empirically, that is, on the basis of experience. Instead of reasoning or calculating, they merely associate ideas—as do we, most of the time. It is not all that often that we actually reason, and some of us, it seems, never do.

Whereas Aristotle had made self-nutrition the fundamental characteristic of living things, Leibniz opted for perception and appetition. Leibniz distinguished between perception and its heightened form, apperception, that is, conscious perception. In bare monads, perception is diffuse and unconscious, but in animals and humans, it is conscious and focused. Bare monads, which ground inanimate bodies, are as in a deep sleep or stupor, and unconscious of their perceptions.

For Leibniz, humans, when unconscious or in a deep sleep, are as bare monads. That a loud noise can rouse us from a deep sleep indicates that, even then, we are perceiving, though unaware of doing so.

In his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), Leibniz wrote:

… even though our senses are related to everything, it is impossible for our soul to attend to everything in particular; that is why our confused sensations are the result of a truly infinite variety of perceptions. This is almost like the confused murmur coming from the innumerable set of breaking waves heard by those who approach the seashore…

In other words, there are two levels of consciousness, one where we register stimuli, and the other where the most salient of these stimuli, or the mean of these stimuli, are brought to our conscious attention. This notion of petites perceptions (“small perceptions”, or unconscious perceptions) anticipates Schopenhauer and Freud.

Humans, unlike animals, are able to reflect upon their perceptions to derive the notions of the “I” or self, and of God. This sort of meta-reflection (“reflection upon reflection”) calls to mind Aristotle’s description, in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, of the activity of God, which, he says, consists in “a thinking upon thinking”. It is this notion, or meta-notion, of the self, subsisting through time, that makes us moral beings, and susceptible to punishment and reward.

By returning their soul to the animals, Leibniz had to explain how their minds worked without relying on conscious reason. In so doing, he shattered the Cartesian assumption that mind and consciousness are the same, effectively discovering the unconscious mind. In his own words, “the difference between intelligent substances and substances that have no intelligence at all is just as great as the difference between a mirror and someone who sees.”

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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And why ours may be the best of all possible worlds.

Gottfried Leibniz

For Aristotle (384-322 BCE), all living things had a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals also had a sensitive soul; and humans, on Why does the world exist? Or to put it another way, why is there something rather than nothing? This ultimate mystery in philosophy and physics has been called the “Fundamental Question of Metaphysics.”

First, it might be that the question itself is misguided. “Nothing” is a human abstraction used to describe the absence of specific entities. The concept cannot be extended to all reality. If there truly was “nothing,” then nothing could ever exist, which contradicts the brute fact that we are here to pose the question.

Already in the fifth century BCE, the pre-Socratic Parmenides of Elea argued that one cannot speak or think of “nothing.” To think of anything at all, it must in some sense exist or pre-exist. Logically, something cannot come out of nothing, or nothing out of something. If there is something, there cannot have been nothing, and vice versa.

Quantum Physics and the Multiverse

When we try to imagine nothingness, we find that we cannot. In our mind’s eye, there is still, for example, light and space. “Nothing” could be a non-descript state, lacking the laws and properties enabling it to maintain itself. Thus, “nothing” would be an unstable state, and bound to collapse into “something.” Existence, perhaps, is more stable than non-existence—with complex existence being most stable of all.

Many physicists tell us that an absolute vacuum is likely impossible. Quantum fields constantly fluctuate, creating energy and particles out of what we perceive as empty space. What we perceive as empty space is really a bubbling “foam” in which virtual particles and fields constantly flicker in and out of existence. The hypothesis that “nature abhors a vacuum” [horror vacui] is attributed already to Aristotle.

Some theories go so far as to suggest a multiverse in which every possible world naturally exists, making our universe just one of many. It so happens that our universe is one that, at least in our localised area, is full of interesting things, like moons, roses, starfish, wine, and talking monkeys like me.

Still, a quantum field is something. Quantum physics merely explains how to get “something from something,” rather than “something from absolute nothing.” Also, quantum physics presupposes the laws of quantum physics, without being able to account for their origin. Maybe that’s all that existence, or minimal existence, entails: simply a set of laws, or mathematics.

Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) built his entire metaphysical system of monads on just two fundamental principles of reasoning: namely, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.

  • The principle of non-contradiction states that a proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true; therefore, if one is true, the other must be false, and vice versa.
  • The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or cause, even when those reasons cannot be known to us. There are no brute facts.

Leibniz thought that the ontological argument for the existence of God, according to which the very concept of God as a supremely perfect being entails his existence, is incomplete, since it proves only that the perfect being exists if he is possible.

In 1697, he wrote a short treatise, On the Ultimate Origin of Things, in which he supplements the ontological argument with a “cosmological argument” founded on the principle of sufficient reason, according to which the cause of the cosmos, which consists in a contingent series of dependent causes, can only be a first, necessary, or uncaused cause.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

But that there is a God, or First Cause, does not explain why this entity created the world. Thus, in On the Ultimate Origin of Things, Leibniz also asks why there is something rather than nothing—and replies, rather poetically: because good and beautiful things demand to exist.

…since something rather than nothing exists, there is a certain urge for existence or (so to speak) a straining toward existence in possible things or in possibility or essence itself; in a word, essence in and of itself strives for existence. Furthermore, it follows from this that all possibles, that is, everything that expresses essence or possible reality, strive with equal right for existence in proportion to the amount of essence or reality or the degree of perfection they contain, for perfection is nothing but the amount of essence. From this it is obvious that of the infinite combinations of possibilities and possible series, the one that exists is the one through which the most essence or possibility is brought into existence…

Leibniz used this line of thought to bolster his argument that ours is the best of all possible worlds, with moons, roses, starfish, wine, and talking monkeys like you.

Whenever we are able to imagine something good and beautiful, we, too, conspire to bring that thing into existence.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Theodicy: Leibniz’s Answer to the Problem of Evil.

Many people who have heard of Leibniz first heard of him through Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759), in which Leibniz is caricatured as the deluded Dr Pangloss, “the greatest philosopher of the Holy Empire”—a parody that is a hard to get past. In so far as Leibniz is remembered, it is for holding, in the words of Voltaire, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.

Unlike his predecessors Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz received a university education in philosophy, even though, in his day, university philosophy amounted to little more than Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism. In April 1661, at the age of fourteen, he enrolled at Leipzig University to study liberal arts. Five years later, in 1666, Altdorf University granted him a doctorate in law, along with the offer of a professorship. However, he declined the professorship, deeming, perhaps, that a university might not be the best place for an original thinker.

Still, Leibniz now had a licence to practise law. Later, in the Theodicy (1710), he would pose as God’s own attorney—to defend God against the charge of having introduced evil into the world. “Theodicy”, a word that he himself coined, derives from the Greek for “vindication of God”.

The Problem of Evil

In 1755, nearly forty years after Leibniz’s death, Lisbon suffered a magnitude 9 earthquake, sparking fires that led to greater devastation than the earthquake itself. Voltaire has Candide crawling through charred ruins, saying to himself, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be like?”

This so-called problem, or paradox, of evil has the pedigree of antiquity, having been attributed by Lactantius (d. 325 CE) to Epicurus (d. 270 BCE): God either wishes to take away evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not wish to. In the first instance, he is less than omnipotent; in the second, less than benevolent.

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume eloquently restated the problem:

Epicurus’ old questions remain unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Leibniz’s Response

In the Theodicy, Leibniz’s response to the Problem of Evil is that God, having created the best of all possible worlds, that is, the one that is simplest in theories while being richest in phenomena, does not cause evil but permits it for the greater good. Evil results indirectly or accidentally from the absence of good. Because God did not create evil, evil is not a substance and has no proper existence. What from our limited perspective appears to be evil in fact contributes to the greater goodness of Creation, like shadows in a painting which bring out its colours, or discordant notes in a piece of music which contribute to its richness.

Leibniz distinguishes between three forms of evil:

  • Metaphysical evil, which is the necessary imperfection or limitation in creation—since created things are not God, and if they could be perfect, would collapse back into God.
  • Natural evil, which is pain and suffering, and a consequence of metaphysical evil.
  • Moral evil, which arises from the poorly exercised free will of rational minds, and leads to natural evil.

God could have created a world without minds. But though such a world would have been free from moral and natural evil, it would not have been the best of possible worlds.

Man’s Role

What’s more, the world, in man, carries within itself the potential for its own optimization. We can work, first, to improve ourselves, and, then, to improve the world and reduce suffering. If asked, what is the meaning of life, Leibniz would reply, “To perfect God’s creation!”

Schopenhauer, that paradigm of a pessimist, riffing on Leibniz, would remark that ours is the worst of all possible worlds.

And if it were any worse, it wouldn’t exist at all—a hypothesis that humanity seems keen to test.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.