Manfred Kühn > Quotes

“craving for a sandwich with grated dry English cheese (cheddar), which Wasianski considered bad for him. On October 7, he ate, against Wasianski’s advice, a large quantity of it: He for the first time made an exception in his customary approval and acceptance of my suggestion.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“For children it is mainly lying that is to be avoided, for “lying makes human beings the object of general contempt and it tends to rob the child of his self-respect,” something everyone should have.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Meanwhile, things did not go well at home. Lampe had begun too take advantage of the “weakness” of his master. He became more quarrelsome, obtained unreasonable favors, did not do his job, was frequently drunk, and exhibited a certain kind of “brutality.”140 Wasianski talked to Lampe, who promised to improve but got worse. In January 1802 Kant reported to Wasianski: “Lampe has done such wrong to me that I am ashamed to say what it was.”141 Wasianski saw to it that Lampe, the servant who had been with Kant for forty years, was dismissed in the very same month. He received a yearly pension, under the condition that neither he nor any of the relatives were ever to bother Kant again.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“To introduce by means of it the sources of all the sciences that are concerned with morals, with the ability of commerce, and the method of educating and ruling human beings, or all that is practical. In this discipline I will, then, be more concerned to seek out the phenomena and their laws than the first principles of the possibility of modifying human nature itself.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant’s thought underwent a radical change when he came to believe that reason and sensation cannot be understood as continuous. In the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 there was no longer any continuity or bridge between sensation and reason. He then saw the two faculties as radically discontinuous, and therefore he argued that the earlier approach could not possibly work. It was this break that defined the difference between Kant’s precritical view on ethics and his critical view. The rejection of the continuity thesis marked the end of Kant’s search for fixed points in human nature, and the beginning of his search for them in pure reason.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant also identified idle desires with wishing and active desire with willing, and he seemed to think that one of the problems of his contemporaries was the confusion between the two.
People read novels and allow themselves to become subject to passionate yearnings and be preoccupied by ‘true ideals’ that get in the way of active desires.”
― Manfred Kuehn

“The works of Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and almost every other British philosopher of note were full of problems that needed solutions and observations that needed to be explained, if German philosophy of the traditional sort was to succeed. Most of these problems seemed to have to do with the analysis of sensation in theoretical, moral, and aesthetic contexts. Central among all of these was the problem of a “moral sense.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“A good character may not make us happy, but it does make us worthy of happiness (XXV 1174). He also maintains that people of character have an inner worth, while people of talent have a market value (XXV 1174), and emphasizes that this worth is created by the person himself. Most importantly, however, he claims that character ‘consists in the basic characteristic [GrundAnlage] of the will’ (XXV 1174).”
― Manfred Kuehn

“The father demanded work and sincerity – the mother demanded holiness as well.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“child’s duties are only the common duties towards oneself and others.” At this point, they consist mainly in cleanliness and frugality,”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Ciceronian ethics that remains founded on common life, expressed by such concepts of honor (honestas), faithfulness (fides), fellowship (societas), and seemliness (decorum), is too superficial and unphilosophical for Kant.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Therefore, it is perhaps best to listen to Kant on what the best moral education of young children involves, and to take this as a clue to what he learned from his own parents. In his so-called Lectures on Pedagogy he differentiates between a physical education that is based on discipline and a moral education that is based on maxims. The former does not allow children to think, it simply trains them. Moral education is based on maxims. In it, he thinks, “everything is lost when it is founded on examples, threats, punishment,”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Thus Richard Rorty contends that we should set Kant aside as part of the larger task of moving beyond “the notions of ‘foundations of knowledge’ and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic.”55 Since, for him, Kant is also the very ideal of an antiskeptical philosopher, Rorty takes his own view to be necessarily “anti-Kantian.” Rorty is trying to persuade us that a “post-Kantian” culture is possible and desirable, and he would like us to “see philosophy neither as achieving success by ‘answering the skeptic,’ nor as rendered nugatory by realizing that there is no skeptical case to be answered.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Accordingly, he was baptized “Emanuel.” He would later change it to “Immanuel,” thinking that this was a more faithful rendition of the original Hebrew. “Emanuel” or “Immanuel” means “God is with him.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant claimed, as we have already seen, that he wrote the Critique within a period of four to five months, “as if in flight.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“When he published his Critique, he was fifty-seven, and he would live almost another twenty-three years.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“What justifies the view that man is the end of nature? Morality. Only human beings are autonomous. Only they are capable of unconditional legislation, which is an end “to which all of nature is teleologically subordinated.”80”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Other problems, such as a complete lack of teeth, constipation, difficulty in urinating, and loss of the sense of smell and taste, made life more and more burdensome. During the winter he frequently complained how tiresome life had become and expressed his wish to die. “He was of no use to the world and he did not know what to do with himself.”148”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“One might call eighteenth-century Königsberg “multicultural,” at least in the sense that it was made up of many different peoples. Apart from a large contingent of Lithuanians and other inhabitants from the Baltic region, there were Mennonites who had come to Königsberg from Holland in the sixteenth century, as well as Huguenots who had found refuge in Königsberg. They continued to speak French among themselves, went to their own church, and had their own institutions and businesses. There were many Poles, some Russians, many people from other countries around the Baltic Sea; there was a significant Jewish community, and a number of Dutch and English merchants.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“This ethos was characterized more by a proud independence from king and lord, a spirit of self-determination and self-sufficiency (even under the most adverse circumstances) than it was by submissiveness and obedience to higher authority.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“This change was connected to moral considerations and to a new theory of space and time.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“As Moses Mendelssohn noted at the occasion of a review of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: The theory of human sensations and passions has in more recent times made the greatest progress, since the other parts of philosophy no longer seem to advance very much. Our neighbors, and especially the English, precede us with philosophical observations of nature, and we follow them with our rational inferences; and if it were to go on like this, namely that our neighbors observe and we explain, we may hope that we will achieve in time a complete theory of sensation.152 What was needed, he thought, was a Universal Theory of Thinking and Sensation; such a theory would cover sensation and thinking in theoretical, moral, and aesthetic contexts.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant finds that the ‘virtue of the heart’ is central and emphasizes the role of the understanding and concepts at the expense of inclinations and feelings, Gellert argues that the understanding and feeling coincide with one another. It is our task to cultivate our feelings so that they become true moral feelings.”
― Manfred Kuehn

“that is, a will which has motives “that are represented completely a priori by reason alone,” and not with human volition, which is characterized by empirically based motives.40”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“His daily schedule then looked something like this. He got up at 5:00 A.M. His servant Martin Lampe, who worked for him from at least 1762 until 1802, would wake him.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“This would mean that Kant’s friendship with Green dates back to the summer of 1765. This much is sure, that by 1766 they were close friends; and at least from that time on Kant was a constant and very regular visitor at Green’s house. Kant’s regularity was probably – at least at first – due more to Green’s punctuality than to that of Kant, for it was said that the neighbors could set their clocks in accordance with the time at which Kant left Green’s house in the evening: at seven o’clock the visit was over.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“The universe is infinite in space and time. If this was not enough to raise eyebrows in Königsberg, Kant went on to speculate that we are not the only inhabitants of this universe but that there is intelligent life on other planets. Though Kant did not raise the question whether Christ died for extraterrestrials as well, or whether perhaps he had to die on other planets again, it would have been a question uppermost in the minds of most of his readers in Königsberg. When Kant imagined that it might be possible that our soul continued to live on one of these other planets,”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Indeed, it might persuade them to desert. Frederick William I went so far as to prohibit Wolffian doctrines from being taught.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“During the two hundred years since Kant’s death, not many full biographical treatments of Kant have been written. Though a recent bibliography of works on Kant’s life takes up 23 pages and lists 483 titles, most of these concern minutiae that are of little interest even to those most keenly intrigued by Kant’s philosophy.56 Rolf George finds in a recent review of Kant”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography

“Kant tries to show that rational psychology, philosophical cosmology, and rational theology are doomed to failure, at least if understood as purely theoretical enterprises.”
― Manfred Kühn, Kant: A Biography