4 AUGUST 2001, Page 34

A stay-at-home explorer

Jane O'Grady

KANT by Manfred Kuehn CUP, £24.95, pp. 576, ISBN 0521497043 Aphilosophical theory, said Nietzsche, is the personal confession of its author, and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir'. There is often a piquant mix which you get with Nietzsche himself, Hume, even grandiloquent Hegel, in which the reader struggling with impersonal abstractions simultaneously has a strangely intimate sense of their originator struggling to formulate them. But not, surely, in the case of one of the greatest of philosophers, Immanuel Kant. 'De nobis ipsis silemus' (About ourselves we are silent') begins the epigraph from Francis Bacon with which Kant prefaces the Critique of Pure Reason. He seems to have excluded himself as much as possible from his stodgily written

texts, or to have put all of himself into them, having pared his life to the minimum for work. He had always tried to be autonomous and self-dependent, he told one of his contemporary biographers, so that he 'could live for himself and his duty, and not for others'.

Many philosophers of his era had public and adventurous lives. Descartes was for a time a soldier, and fought a duel. To avoid religious persecution, he sought exile, as did Locke and Hobbes for their political heresies. Berkeley travelled to Rhode Island to educate the American Indians. Hume, who was refused professorships on account of his alleged atheism, lived in France for a time, held political office and embarked on an (aborted) naval offensive. But it is not surprising that there has been no new biography of Kant for 50 years. Born in 1724 into a poor, pious family (his father was a harness-maker), he never travelled more than a few miles from his birthplace, the Prussian town of Konigsberg, where he was educated, held a sequence of professorships and wrote his books. He did once earn a reprimand from the censor for politically inexpedient views but hastily placated him. He was a great supporter of the French Revolution, yet argued that citizens had no right to rebellion (the French he exempted on the casuistical grounds that Louis XVI had abdicated). Manfred Kuehn downplays the traditional stories of Kant's rigid punctuality, but can do little to redeem his reputation as a dry old stick. The fussy elegance of his costume and occasional jokes about farting hardly conflict with it. Nor do billiard-playing and dinner-parties, an obsession with his bowels and health, and dismissive views on marriage and women. No sex of any description has been unearthed.

Kuehn has a difficult task, particularly as Kant left no very personal records, and has to be reconstructed from the comments of his friends and fellow-Konigsbergers. He can never be a fully fleshed character, but Kuehn gives excellent accounts of his philosophy, including the 'pre-critical writings' (those that precede the critical philosophy begun in middle age), in which Kant wrote on many topics, including geography, mete orology, astronomy, physics, anthropology and mathematics, and went through a whole gamut of philosophical positions. He originally believed, like Hume, that feeling was the wellspring of morality, although ultimately of course he is famous for the view that moral choice is a matter of consistent reasoning and an action only good if done for the sake of duty. To feel sympathy, love, compunction is a lucky bonus, he argued, and without any moral worth whatever. Indicatively, the handouts he made to his socially outstripped siblings were dutiful but reluctant, and his relations with them reserved and infrequent. In general he seems to have lacked emotion, which, Nietzsche might have said, was not merely consonant with his philosophical theories but their genesis.

Yet this sort of psychologising is to trivialise the philosopher who achieved such grandeur in epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy and aesthetics, and who reconciled the confusions of his predecessors. Many previous philosophers had contradicted themselves by claiming that what we actually perceive are mental images of the physical things outside us, and yet also claiming that we can know how truly and accurately the images represent those outside things. Hume, taking seriously the impossibility of such comparison, had argued that, although we ineluctably believe in continuous selves, enduring physical objects, and cause and effect, our beliefs have no rational justification. But Kant argued that, for experience to be possible at all, it must come, not in raw discrete globules which we subsequently configure into sense, but structured in advance. We necessarily perceive causally linked objects under the aegis of time and space.

Kant is almost saying something similar to Nietzsche, although much more profound — that we cannot view the world impersonally, or divorce the subjective from the objective, but have to invest it with our own categories. Yet since the subjectivity he invokes is homogenous, the same for all human beings, ultimately his theory does aspire to the impersonal and objective. Kant believed that `to compose character is our duty'. But his self-creation was not the florid Romantic sort. He strove to create a self, which, like the moral agent in his philosophy, was just a standard pinpoint of reason. Impossible of course, even if he largely divested himself of emotion. Shreds of pinched idiosyncrasy still cling to this man of trapped wind and inferior origins. The Kant of Kuehn's portrait is both touching and irritating, but do we need a biography of him? Does it matter what he was like? If `no man is a hero to his own valet', this is perhaps, as Hegel said. 'not because the former is no hero, but because the latter is a valet'. The trouble with biographies is that, however wellintentioned, they turn us all into valets of the petty-minded type.