A new book about Kant: not imperative, but interesting reading
Kant: A Revolution in Thinking by Marcus Willaschek (Harvard University Press, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
Kant: A Revolution in Thinking bridges the gap between biography and introductory philosophy textbook. Readers learn about Kant’s life, including a bit about the meals he hosted, his appreciation for Rousseau, and his relationships with some of his servants. But we do not go as deep as a traditional biography. We receive no new or special insights into why Kant dramatically made his life more austere around age 40. We learn about his closest friends, but we hear relatively little about their exchanges or mutual influence. This book is not all about Kant’s life. As the subtitle suggests, it is all about his thinking.
This book touches on nearly all Kant’s areas of interest. In many chapters, it bears resemblance to the “short introduction” books about philosophers that are so helpful. Chapters cover Kant’s categorical imperative, his conception of perpetual peace, his understanding of reason, his metaphysics, and more. Readers unfamiliar with Kant will come away from this book with a solid grounding in Kantian ideas. Willaschek points out Kant’s weaknesses—philosophical and cultural—but emphasizes the ways in which Kant’s writing is much richer than a catalog of period errors. In most cases, Willaschek argues that Kant’s failures, such as anti-Semitism, were also a failure to uphold his own values as stated in his work.
In Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, Willaschek considers Kant’s life to be interpretable around three revolutions: personal, philosophical, and political. This is what takes it beyond the “short introduction” books. Willaschek integrates relevant context and the kind of details that do not make into a philosophy primer. For most of his life, Kant was a university lecturer whose income came from the fees men paid to attend his lectures. He was also a renter for most of his life. He remained unmarried because he lacked the needed income when he was young and had lost interest in marriage by the time he could afford it. Though he died well off, his life choices were shaped by his economic circumstances. Some of his best known work was related to his hopes for securing a position, much like Heidegger’s Being and Time related to promotion.
We are about a quarter millennium away from the Enlightenment, far enough to see some things more clearly and others less clearly. It is evident now that while not everyone agrees with Kant, he is a figure with lasting significance. He greatly influenced many of the philosophers who followed him. The twentieth century was not very kind to Kant’s categorical imperative, but that century and our own make more clear what is at stake in the kind of near-utopian hope Kant had for the political future. His vision of perpetual peace would safeguard “the rights and freedoms of the individual through the rule or law and a republican constitution; the common good through a system of (state-protected and -regulated) free trade; and states’ rights and peace through a world peace order in the form of a league of nations” (23). That may seem less possible but also even more desirable now than it did in his own time.
Both Kant and the 2024 book The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days, by Michael Kempe, demonstrate the centrality of correspondence in the Enlightenment. Leibniz traveled, but almost no one he met could keep up with his intellect and wide-ranging interests. He built an extended community for himself through correspondence. Kant spent most of his life in Königsberg, but he was connected to the outside world through letters. Not only did philosophes personally benefit from letters, these letters helped form the public sphere. As Willaschek reminds readers, “Letters that were not of a purely private nature were often passed on to others, read out loud, and copied in order that their content might reach multiple addresses. Books were an investment that only wealthy people could afford” (35). These exchanges helped shape the Enlightenment and stimulate all kinds of thinking.
We have no exact equivalent today. Correspondence now is much more private and publishing is also very different in nature. This is significant because, as Willaschek explains Kant’s perspective, “Although enlightenment remains a process for each individual to engage in, it can only reliably happen in the context of a public sphere—a community of authors and readers open to all interested parties” (39). Our closest equivalent to the old model of open intellectual exchange and connection between minds far apart and not always personally acquainted may be Substack. The Enlightenment preached the value of reason, but it also demonstrated the human need for reasoning together. If the Substack platform can assist with that, it can become very significant.
Kant: A Revolution in Thinking is an excellent introduction to Kant and his ideas for those who have long been curious or those whose knowledge of Kant has dwindled to catchphrases. While it covers everything from automatons and aesthetics to empiricism to the ways in which we can apprehend the laws of nature, it does so without being dry or overly encyclopedic. Devoted Kantians and professional philosophers will likely not find much new here, but they may find a book that they will enjoy gifting to others.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
