“Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us”:
“If a wind should rage in the guts, what matters is the direction it takes. If downwards, then the result is a fart; if upwards, an apparition or a heavenly inspiration.”
The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. In particular, Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind.
[I]t is impossible for us to ever know “things in themselves”—what Kant called “noumena.” We have access only to “phenomena”—the way things look to us, given the kind of mind we have. “What things may be in themselves, I know not and need not know, because a thing is never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon,” Kant insisted.
Ordinarily, we think of good will as a kind of emotion: a person of good will is happy when other people are happy. But, for Kant, emotion is irrelevant to morality. In fact, he believes that if you do the right thing because it makes you happy you don’t have a truly good will, because you are acting out of a kind of self-interest. The only thing that should determine how we act is a pure sense of duty. When a man “does [an] action without any inclination for the sake of duty alone, then for the first time his action has its genuine moral worth,” Kant writes.