Kant: A Biography [Paperback]

To most persons Kant's philosophical writings are unreadable and are to be avoided, Paul-Heinz Koesters, author of "Deutschland deine Denker" called "The Critique of Pure Reason" the most complicated book of World Literature. Kant the man has been caricatured as an anti-social celibate pedant who lived his life with mechanical accuracy. This much needed full length Biography of Immanuel Kant is well-researched, well-documented and well-written, and goes a long way to removing these erroneous assumptions.

Kuehn, Professor of Philosophy at Marburg, Germany, begins by outlining a history of Kant Biographies, starting with the three biographers who knew Kant personally, Borowski, Jachmann and Wasianski. He concludes with Stuckenberg (1882) and Vorländer (1924), the last true biographers of Kant, making an excellent case that a full length Biography was much needed. He is correct in the assessment that Kant's correspondence is one of the best, yet underutilized sources. His thesis is to prove how Kant's intellectual path is more closely connected with biographical details of his life as has been previously assumed, and how Kant's life was much more diverse and more full of human contact. In this Kuehn succeeds well.

In nine remarkably even Chapters, both in paginal and chronological length, Kant's Life and work are discussed together. This is very difficult to do, and requires someone who is knowledgable in Philosophy and whi is also a good writer, which Kuehn obviously is. He makes a series of excellent observations, documenting them amply with the 1,656 Footnotes. I will only mention a few here because of space limitations: Kuehn writes correctly that though Kant was much influenced by the values of his parents, his Philosophy was not influenced by Pietism. Also correct is the contention that Königsberg was by no means the out of the way provincial town it has been portrayed to be. On the contrary, Kant had much contact with persons of many cultural backgrounds and social standing, and the University of Königsberg was more advanced than other German Universities of the time. Of great interest are the descriptions of University life, of Kant's lecturing style, and his relationships with students. It seems that Kant was also gregarious and sought after in society. He was witty, well mannered and by all accounts an excellent conversationalist. He was not a recluse at all. Not having a house of his own until the age of fifty-nine, he ate in pubs for over thirty years. Of great interest is also the variety of friendships he had, with students, with the English Merchants Green and Motherby, and with the Novelist von Hippel, to name a few. Especially Kant's early life was far from methodical.

Interspresed with all of this biographical information are carefully written discussions of all of Kant's writings, and his philosophical development. By putting these into the context with Kant the man, they are much easier to understand. The discussion of the writing of the "Critique of Pure Reason" and the desciption of the book itself, its Philosophy, is the most readable and easiest to understand account I have ever read. Truly well done, as this can also serve as a useful introduction to Kant's Philosophy. The thesis here is that Kant's Critical Philosophy was not the result of a sudden inspiration, as has been pointed out elsewhere, but the result of many years of methodical work. Kuehn also correctly identifies some of Kant's misguided work, for example, "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime".

The criticisms I have of this book are errors in quotations, for example of Kant's correspondence and citations from the Critique of Pure Reason and of the misuse of apostrophies in German. These seem to be proofreading errors. In addition, there are many excellent illustrations of Kant, his contemporaries and of Königsberg available (see Uwe Schultz "Immanuel Kant in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten"), thus the choice of the eleven mostly second rate illustrations by Cambridge University Press seems unfortunate. It would also have been most helpful to see fascimiles of Kant's handwriting which are fascinating to see. Finally, the Bibliography is one only of "Works Cited". It could have been more complete.

These criticisms aside, the Biography is very well done. It is surely accessible to persons not having a background in Philosophy. I believe that most readers will be pleasantly surprised that the life of Kant was not boring at all, especially in the way it is presented by Manfred Kuehn. I recommend this book very highly. Anyone wanting further biographical information on Kant is welcome to contact me.

A student of Enlightenment philosophy for more than forty years, I have previously read three full biographies and numerous biographical essays on the great Koenigsberg professor; none came close to the quality and thoroughness of Kuehn's book. It is an important contribution to the history of the Enlightenment thought and western philosophy, and a just tribute to one of our great philosophers. As a bonus, it is beautifully written.

Even for those among us who have read and taught Kant, Manfred Kuehn's biography opens up a much richer portrayal of his many-sided genius and of his sensitivity to the external conditions of social and political life, not only in his native Konigsberg but in the global arena. At the same time, Kuehn carefully dissects many of the false views of Kant, especially around the issues of religion. We find that Kant not only firmly rejected the pietism from which he had (reluctantly) come, but that he was open to Freemasonry and something like a post-Christian universal religion. Ironically, the establishment of Freemasonry (which carried its own dogmatism concerning revelation) as a submerged perspective during the rule of his censor, King Willhelm II, caused him to withold some of his manuscripts until after the King's death in 1797. These manuscripts were published soon after. Kuehn gives a lively account of Kant's intense social life and of his flexibility during the Russian occupation of Konigsberg. This is fully consistent with Kant's anti-nationalism and healthy bias toward cosmopolitanism. Kuehn's discussions about Kant's sexuality are, however, a bit prissy and tend to give him credit for an asexual existence, even if he did fall in love more than once. He does succeed in at least putting pressure on the view that Kant was a mysogynist. Kuehn more or less dismisses any serious psychoanalytic reading of the motives behind Kant's drive for formal a priori constructions, thereby limiting his reach into Kant's real inner life. His exegesis of almost all of the writings is very traditional, although Kuehn takes great care to examine the false readings of Kant's contemporaries--seeing envy where it intervened in many of those readings. Since I came of age by reading Heidegger's daring probe into Kant's first "Critique," I find some of his readings a bit shop-worn. However, for the beginning student, and for all of us who can always use a good refresher course, his exegesis is solid and helpful. Kuehn's exegesis of Kant's moral theory is especially rich and insightful. Kuehn's very subtle analysis of Kant's political theories shows that Kant was quite liberal for his age and that he even provided room for a sexual pleasure principle outside of reproduction (but always within marriage of course). In particular, I was intrigued by his analysis of Kant's "Opus postumum," which some write off as a pastiche of a man way past his powers. Kuehn is open to the prospect that Kant was really trying to say something daring and new in this "work," even if it sounded more like Fichte than the Kant of the critiques (he makes one mistake when he attributes the English language edition to Eckart Forster and Stanley Rosen, rather than to Forster and Michael Rosen). In the "Opus" Kant uses a novel version of the subjectivity argument to posit an ether, known through our inner sense (a priori?) of motion as projected outward (a bit like Schopenhauer's argument for the priority of the Will). The ether is held to be the ground of all of the material things of the world, as well as of the self. Like the reviewer (above) from "Publishers Weekly" I find too many repetitions in the text as well as too much energy spent on describing bit players. However, my overall conclusion is that this is a labor of love that must be honored in intent and achievment. Manfred Kuehn has done something that no one else has done, namely, to bring more fully to life one of the great (almost pure) minds of the European trajectory in philosophy.