All of us have to start somewhere. Most of us don't just get good overnight. We push forward, work through the pain, and, after procrastinating for days, we do the thing. Back in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant didn't just come up with a revolution in philosophy out of the blue. No, no. It took him time to get there.

Today's meme touches on Kant's dogmatic slumber, and how it affected the most famous parts of his body of work.

From Humble Beginnings 

Born in the smaller Prussian town of Königsberg (now called Kaliningrad, taken by Russia after fallout of World War II) in 1724, Emanuel Kant was the son of two rigidly pious Lutheran parents, his father a harness-maker. He was one of nine siblings, six of whom made it to adulthood.

Coming from a large religious family, he was educated in a strict manner, with piety and order at the forefront of his lessons. This early instruction, many scholars have argued, likely became influential in the anxious precision of his later scholarly work, even as he abandoned most of the trappings of the Lutheran faith.

Studying at university, Kant (who changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel because who doesn’t love a glow up?), soon had to return to his hometown to help tend to his family after the death of his father. Returning to a rather uneventful location somewhat hindered the pace of Kant’s studies. He took on private tutoring jobs for the nearby wealthy while working on his own work as a side hustle.

In one such tutoring position, he met the glamorous Countess Caroline von Keyserlingk, the wife of a noble family in the region. As told in the wonderful book, Lovers of Philosophy by Warren Ward, though the Countess was married with the children Kant was teaching, the two hit it off in a sort of romantic friendship which would last for the rest of the Countess’s life.

But lovesick tutoring of the minor nobility wasn’t going to cut it for Kant. He took himself back to the University of Königsberg, where he would eventually earn his PhD and teach.

Such Slumber. So Dogmatic. Wow.

During Kant’s time as a grad student, he was encouraged to reject certain antiquated notions, such as idealism, the idea that we cannot for certain know from perception. We can’t truly know things outside of ourselves. In the mid-18th century it fell out of vogue.

Just like many students, Kant undoubtedly looked up to the expertise of his mentors and those before him. He continued his tutoring side hustle, keeping a roof over his head as he worked hard on his education. Here, he was introduced to the work of the Scottish skeptic, David Hume.

As an academic, Kant presented on scientific matters, writing and lecturing on gravity and geography, among other things. An underrated polymath, he wrote extensively on the natural world around him. His contributions in these fields were not small, mind you. But they would be eclipsed by his later philosophical work.

It was not a bad life to lead, for sure. Kant had the academic clout and skills that brought all the scholars to the yard (or the quad, I guess). But philosophically, his work was pretty darn good, but not, perhaps, as great as he wanted it to be. He wrote on the existence of God, argued against mystic and professional weirdo Emanuel Swedenborg, and played around in ethics to great success.

But something was missing.

When Book-Throwing Rage Wakes You Up

Though Kant was doing just fine from a professional standpoint, something kept eating at him. He thought again and again of his readings of David Hume. Hume, a practical skeptic and noted atheist, argued that empirical experiences are the sum of human experience. That there is nothing outside what we gather from our senses, and that cause and effect as we imagine it is totally not a thing.

Hume was really not into metaphysics and trashed the study over and over in his body of work. One of his most important frustrations with the metaphysical lay in the fact that, since we can’t perceive outside of our experiences, we can’t really link cause to effect. We imagine patterns from what we experience, but honestly? We just place patterns where there are probably none.

For years, Kant considered these ideas, as well as those who held fast to them. It’s the 18th century here and the practice of what we would later call “hard sciences” was very much a thing people loved to do, so it was no wonder the empiricism of Hume caught on like a viral meme.

This just frankly began to infuriate Kant. He snapped his Hume book shut and lifted his head, narrowing his eyes and muttering a nasty little phrase about the Scotsman (probably in German).

“Imma prove him wrong,” he growled to no one in particular, and also probably in German.

Awake, Alive and Critiquing

So it was that, in his late 40s, Immanuel Kant, son of a harness-maker, former tutor to the rich and slightly famous, and stolid university professor, embarked on the career defining move of his life. He locked himself inside his rooms and wrote. And what he came up with was iconic.

When he emerged in 1781, he brought with him the most epic of manuscripts. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, who had simmered at Hume’s idea that we can’t connect our perceived experience to our internal rationality, finally made his refutation of this, and then some.

In The Critique of Pure Reason, the first of a series of Critiques, Kant argues that, not only do we gather information from what we experience (a posteriori) in order to understand the world around us, but we also have within us a sort of intuition that exists outside of, or before (a priori) our lived experience. Such things that live within us and outside of our experiences include morality and causality, among other things. This became the frame for Kant's "transcendental realism."

This chunky book became the definitive work of what Kant himself would call his “Copernican Revolution” of philosophy. It would link the world of things experienced and the metaphysical world that exists outside of it. And it would be the backbone of his categorical imperative, which would be debated by great thinkers and haunt philosophy ethics classes for centuries to come.

Time for a Nap!

Kant’s work was pivotal for the modern period of philosophy. His work in metaphysics and ethics would remain influential and hotly debated well into the 21st century. He’s been antagonized in the work of French librarian and sometime philosopher Georges Bataille. He’s been referenced in the work of current fan favorite philosopher Slavoj Žižek. And his categorical imperative was cleverly refuted by recently-departed Alisdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, a pivotal work in ethics in its own right.

By the end of his life, Kant had become something of a Königsberg celebrity. Living strictly and having never married, there is a legend that claims that people could set their clocks to his daily walks, paced at the same time every day, without fail.

He taught at the university where he had spent all his life studying. In the end, he stayed home, at least physically. In 1804, the esteemed professor and philosopher took his final nap, leaving behind a legacy that would shake the foundations of Western thought, and prove that you can build a big name later on in life.

The Dogmatic Slumbers of a Contemporary Age

The story of Kant’s life, while hardly a pristine one (as his views on race and personal instances of sexism are pretty problematic), is in some respects a tale which can teach us a few things, if we decide not to nap in class.

While Kant was doing just fine in his professional life as a professor for so many years, he could never be content with this. And while part of that might be an ego issue (let’s be real here), another part rested, perhaps, in an ideal. That we can progress in our lives, even if not in the ways that we at first expected, that there can be something bigger and better on the horizon if we put in the work.

In addition, Kant did not achieve his philosophical greatness (especially according to him) until the age of nearly 50. He had spent years in a sort of dormant period before he finally penned his magnum opus. In a world that values youth and puts expiration dates on greatness, this is a ray of hope for those of us who, because of life difficulties or other factors, have been late in our own blossoming. You still have time to do the things you have longed to do.

But Kant’s own admission to being in a dogmatic slumber reinforces a central tenet of philosophy as a practice: don’t rest in dogma. Think! Don’t assume something to be true because a supposed authority told you so. Don’t unquestioningly accept the common view. Consider it, question it. Then act in your own way.