Why Kant Still Matters

Beyond the Enlightenment Cliché

The New Yorker is an odd creature in contemporary media. While most magazines chase clicks with listicles and hot takes, it still publishes 5,000-word essays on dead German philosophers.

Adam Kirsch’s recent piece on Immanuel Kant—marking the philosopher’s 300th anniversary—exemplifies what might be called the magazine’s “adult education” mission: taking difficult ideas seriously, rendering them in beautiful prose, bringing them to public attention.

This is admirable and increasingly rare. In an age when “public intellectual” often means someone who tweets provocatively, The New Yorker reminds us that complex thinking deserves patient exposition.

But popularization has its dangers. Kirsch’s essay, for all its elegance, tends toward what such pieces often do: simplification, strategic omission, and a certain tidying up of messy contradictions.

Kant emerges as an Enlightenment hero, the champion of reason against superstition, the defender of human dignity and democratic values—a philosophical founding father for contemporary liberalism.

This isn’t wrong, exactly. But it’s incomplete in ways that matter. It makes Kant too comfortable, too easily appropriated, too much ours rather than genuinely other.

The real Kant—the one worth grappling with—is more unsettling. He’s simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary, visionary and blind, universal and parochial. His catastrophic failures on race and gender aren’t embarrassing footnotes but reveal deep problems with his entire project.

His austere rationalism excludes vast dimensions of human experience that the Romantics immediately recognized and we still struggle to reconcile.

And yet, paradoxically, his critical method remains indispensable precisely because it can be used to expose his own limitations.

So why does Kant still matter? Not because he provides ready-made answers to our questions—he doesn’t. Not because we should simply adopt his positions—we shouldn’t. He matters because he models what rigorous humanistic thinking looks like while simultaneously showing us where such thinking goes catastrophically wrong.

We need him as a partner in an ongoing conversation, not a sage with final truths. His greatest lesson may be one he didn’t intend: that even the most systematic self-examination can have profound blind spots, and recognizing this is the beginning of genuine critical thought.

The Revolutionary Who Never Left Home

Kant lived the most boring life imaginable. Born in Königsberg in 1724, he never traveled more than forty miles from the city, never married, maintained habits so regular that neighbors supposedly set their watches by his daily walks.

Yet this provincial bachelor produced some of the most destabilizing ideas in Western philosophy. How does someone so personally conventional become intellectually revolutionary?

Kirsch opens with a wonderful anecdote about Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish civil servant who claimed God appeared to him in a London tavern and spent the rest of his life conversing with angels.

The young Kant, then a junior professor, was fascinated—here was a respectable scientist claiming direct knowledge of the spirit world. Could it be true? Kant ordered Swedenborg’s books from London and waited for them “with longing.”

When he finally read them, his response was devastating: “the worst of all dreamers,” producing books “utterly empty of the last drop of reason.” The real source of Swedenborg’s visions, Kant joked, was probably indigestion.

But the episode wasn’t wasted time. It led Kant to a crucial insight: we must distinguish between what we can reliably know through experience and reason versus what we merely imagine or make up stories about. Metaphysics, he concluded, should be “the science of the boundaries of human reason.”

This is vintage Kant: taking something seriously enough to examine it rigorously, then using that examination to establish limits. It’s not simple debunking—he’s not just saying Swedenborg is a fraud. He’s asking a deeper question: What kinds of things can we hope to know at all? What are the conditions that make knowledge possible?

This becomes the transcendental method, Kant’s most enduring innovation.

Before we can know anything about the world, we must understand how knowledge itself works. Before we make metaphysical claims, we must examine the instruments of metaphysics—reason itself. It’s philosophy with no safety net, no divine guarantee, no appeal to authority beyond human cognitive capacity.

Reason must judge reason. Thinking must think about thinking.

Revolution #1: You Make the World You See

The first Critique (1781) makes a claim that still sounds radical: reality as we experience it is partly constructed by our minds. Space, time, and causality aren’t features of reality-in-itself but structures we impose on experience.

We can’t perceive anything except in space and time because space and time are the forms of our perception. We can’t experience events except as causally related because causality is a category through which we understand nature.

This sounds like relativism or skepticism—if we construct reality, how can we have objective knowledge? But Kant’s point is subtler. Within experience, we can have genuine, universal knowledge precisely because all humans share the same cognitive architecture.

Mathematics is necessarily true because it reflects the structure of our intuition. Natural laws are universal because they reflect categories of our understanding. Science is possible because nature, as we experience it, must conform to our cognitive structures.

This is Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in philosophy. Just as Copernicus explained celestial motions by making the Earth move rather than the heavens, Kant explains knowledge by making objects conform to mind rather than mind passively mirroring objects.

We don’t discover time and space in nature; we bring them to nature. We don’t learn causal laws from experience; we impose causal structure on experience, making it intelligible.

The implications are profound. It makes us simultaneously humble and confident.

Humble because we can never know ultimate reality, things-in-themselves, the world as it is independent of our experience. The deepest metaphysical questions—What is the soul? Does God exist? Do we have free will?—can’t be answered by theoretical reason because they exceed possible experience.

Confident because within the realm of experience, human knowledge achieves genuine universality and necessity.

This framework illuminates contemporary debates. Consider how we now understand social categories like race, gender, or money. They’re “constructed” in the sense that they depend on human practices and concepts, not natural kinds existing independently.

Yet they’re not arbitrary—they structure real experience, shape actual behavior, have causal power. Kant helps us see how something can be mind-dependent yet objective, culturally specific yet genuinely real within that culture.

Or consider artificial intelligence. If intelligence is structured by cognitive architecture—if there are specific ways that information must be organized to become knowledge—then AI systems with different architectures might literally inhabit different experiential worlds. They wouldn’t just think differently; they might impose different forms on data, generate different categories, “see” realities we can’t fully translate.

Kant makes us ask: What is intelligence beyond any particular cognitive structure?

But here we hit his first major limitation. Kant assumes one human mind, one cognitive structure, one set of forms and categories universal to the species. This enabled him to claim universality for his conclusions: space must be Euclidean (the only geometry he knew), causality must be deterministic (the only causation he recognized), time must be linear and irreversible (how else?).

We now know better. Non-Euclidean geometries are mathematically coherent and physically real. Quantum mechanics challenges deterministic causality. Different cultures structure time differently—cyclical versus linear, event-based versus clock-based.

Kant’s “universal” reason turns out to reflect specifically European, specifically eighteenth-century assumptions.

More troubling: Who counts as having this “universal” human reason? Kant’s answer, as we’ll see, effectively excluded women, non-Europeans, and the poor. His universalism masked a deep particularity—the perspective of educated European men presented as the perspective of “humanity as such.”

The Romantics saw this immediately. If mind constructs reality, why assume all minds construct it identically? Why not celebrate individual genius, cultural variation, imaginative freedom?

Kant wanted universal reason; Romanticism wanted creative plurality. Kant’s revolution opened doors he didn’t want opened.

Revolution #2: Morality Without God (But Just as Demanding)

If the first Critique limits what we can know, the second (1788) and the Groundwork (1785) establish what we can do—namely, be moral.

Kant’s move here is audacious: grounding ethics in reason alone, independent of religion, tradition, emotion, or consequences. The categorical imperative—act only on principles you could will everyone to follow—is supposed to be binding on all rational beings, period.

This is genuinely revolutionary. Morality becomes accessible to everyone (you don’t need revelation), egalitarian (reason is the same in all), uncompromising (duty is duty regardless of consequences), and human-centered (we’re ends in ourselves, not instruments for others’ purposes or God’s plan).

Kant secularizes ethics while making it just as demanding as religious morality—maybe more so.

The applications have been profound. Human rights law treats dignity as inherent, not granted by states or earned by merit. Medical ethics insists on informed consent because patients are autonomous agents, not bodies to be fixed by experts.

Democratic theory requires that citizens be treated as co-legislators, not subjects. Opposition to slavery, torture, and exploitation invokes the Kantian principle: persons are ends in themselves, never mere means.

Consider contemporary AI ethics. When should we treat something as having moral status rather than being merely a tool? A Kantian answer: when it’s capable of autonomous rational agency, of setting its own ends and following moral law. Current AI systems, no matter how sophisticated, lack this. They’re programmed to serve human purposes.

But if we ever develop genuinely autonomous AI—systems that set their own goals and act from principles rather than just executing algorithms—our moral obligations would change radically.

Or consider how we’re treated by technology companies. Are we users (autonomous agents choosing how to engage) or products (attention-sources to be monetized)? When algorithms manipulate our behavior, predict our actions, shape our preferences without our knowledge, they treat us as mere means.

From a Kantian perspective, these systems must be transparent—we should understand how decisions are made. They must be contestable—we should be able to challenge them. And they must respect our capacity to make informed choices rather than simply manipulating our behavior.

But Kant’s ethics has serious problems that go beyond mere impracticality.

First, the rigor. Kant infamously argued you can’t lie even to save someone from a murderer. If a killer asks where your friend is hiding, you must tell the truth because lying is always wrong, period.

This isn’t pragmatic compromise about extreme cases. It reveals something disturbing: Kant’s ethics seems more concerned with logical consistency than actual human welfare. When rationalism produces absurdity, perhaps rationalism is the problem.

Second, the coldness. Kant says acting from love or compassion has no moral worth—only action from duty counts. Help someone because you care about them? That’s not truly moral; you’re just satisfying your own inclinations.

True morality requires doing the right thing purely because reason demands it, regardless of your feelings. But this makes ethics bizarrely inhuman. Isn’t there something wrong with a parent who feeds their child purely from duty, feeling no affection?

Kant’s rationalism can’t account for care, relationship, emotional connection—what contemporary ethics calls “ethics of care,” developed particularly by feminist philosophers rejecting precisely this coldness.

Third, the formalism. Does the categorical imperative actually generate determinate moral rules? You can universalize “always keep promises” but also “keep promises except to non-family members” or “keep promises unless breaking them prevents greater harm.”

The formula seems too empty to resolve real moral disagreement. People of good faith, reasoning carefully, reach opposite conclusions about abortion, euthanasia, economic justice. Telling them to “act only on universalizable maxims” doesn’t help.

Fourth, the individualism. Kant focuses on individual agents making choices. But much injustice operates through structures, systems, institutions that shape which choices are available. He has no account of ideology (how “rational” thinking can serve power), false consciousness (how people internalize oppression), or structural violence (how systems harm without anyone intending harm).

His ethics addresses saints and sinners but not how racism, sexism, and economic exploitation operate through ordinary people following ordinary rules.

The deeper problem: Kant wants morality to be purely rational, but humans are embodied, emotional, socially embedded creatures. His ethics asks us to abstract from everything particular about ourselves—our relationships, attachments, cultural contexts, feelings—to reach pure practical reason.

Is this moral purity or moral impoverishment? The Romantics thought the latter. So do many contemporary philosophers.

Revolution #3: The Critical Method That Exceeds Itself

But here’s where Kant becomes most valuable: his method survives the failure of his specific doctrines. The transcendental turn—asking what makes experience or judgment possible, examining the conditions rather than just the contents of thought—remains indispensable.

This is what distinguishes critical thinking from mere opinion-holding.

Before asserting what’s true, ask: What am I assuming? What are the limits of this claim? What perspective am I occupying? What method am I using, and what can that method show versus what it must miss?

This reflexive turn makes inquiry genuinely self-aware rather than naively dogmatic.

Contemporary academic practice employs this constantly, often without recognizing the source.

Scientists practice methodological naturalism—bracketing certain questions as beyond their scope while rigorously investigating others.

Historians acknowledge interpretive frameworks while striving for evidence-based conclusions.

Literary critics practice metacriticism—examining assumptions underlying different interpretive approaches.

All are Kantian: defining boundaries, examining conditions of possibility, maintaining rigor while acknowledging limits.

And here’s the beautiful irony: Kant’s critical method enables us to see his own failures. Feminist philosophers use Kantian tools to show how his supposedly neutral reason is actually gendered. Critical race theorists employ transcendental questions to reveal how “universal” principles reflect particular power relations. Postcolonial thinkers ask about conditions that made European philosophy present itself as philosophy-as-such.

The method is better than Kant’s use of it.

The Catastrophic Failures: When Universal Reason Isn’t

Now we must confront the ugliness directly. Kant didn’t just make mistakes about race and gender—he wrote appalling things. In lectures on anthropology and geography (published works, not private letters), he characterized non-European peoples as lacking full rational development.

He claimed Native Americans were incapable of civilization, that Africans were inherently servile, that only Europeans achieved true culture.

He argued women were incapable of abstract philosophy, suited by nature for domestic concerns rather than intellectual life. He seemed to restrict active citizenship to property-owning men.

The easy response: he was a man of his time, we should judge ideas not prejudices, everyone was racist then. Reject this. First, not everyone was equally prejudiced—some contemporaries were more progressive.

Second and more important, these aren’t incidental errors separable from his philosophy. They reveal a structural problem: his “universal” reason was actually particular reason—specifically, the reason of educated European men—universalized.

Here’s the contradiction: Kant claims reason is universal, the same in all humans, grounding equal dignity. But then he suggests some peoples haven’t fully developed rational capacity. This isn’t sloppy thinking; it’s false universalism—presenting one particular perspective as the perspective of humanity as such.

When Kant describes the “human” cognitive structure, he’s actually describing how he (and people like him) think, then projecting it onto everyone.

This has profound implications. It means we must suspect all claims to neutrality, all invocations of “view from nowhere,” all appeals to “simple rationality.” Not because reason doesn’t exist or all perspectives are equally valid, but because reason is always exercised by particular embodied beings in specific social locations.

The unmarked category—”people,” “humanity,” “reason”—conceals whose perspective is being universalized.

Feminist philosophers showed this brilliantly. Kant’s ethics valorizes traits coded masculine (abstract principle, emotional detachment, universalism, autonomy) while devaluing traits coded feminine (care, emotional connection, attention to particularity, relationships).

His “pure” reason turns out to be gendered reason. The supposedly impartial moral agent—the rational calculator of universalizable maxims—looks suspiciously like an independent man of property, not a mother caring for children or a worker dependent on others for survival.

Postcolonial theorists extend this. Kant’s cosmopolitanism imagined a world ordered by European principles, with European nations leading others toward enlightenment. His “hospitality” meant Europeans could visit anywhere, but others needed permission to enter Europe.

His opposition to colonialism coexisted with racist anthropology that justified European superiority. The “rational” international order reflected imperial interests.

But here’s the dialectical twist that makes Kant valuable despite these failures: his critical method, properly applied, exposes these very problems. The categorical imperative, taken seriously, condemns arbitrary exclusions. Transcendental examination reveals hidden assumptions. Demand for universal principles that all can accept rules out false universalisms.

Kant gave us the tools to criticize Kant.

This is why his failures are instructive rather than merely embarrassing. They show that even systematic, rigorous, self-critical thinking can go badly wrong when thinkers don’t examine their own social position, don’t include diverse voices, don’t test “universal” principles against actual human diversity.

The lesson: critical thinking must be applied reflexively, especially to the critic. We’re never done examining, never beyond needing to question ourselves.

What Kant Can’t Handle: Everything the Romantics Knew

The Romantics saw immediately what Kant’s rationalism excluded. His philosophy is systematic, comprehensive, and rigorous—but it achieves this by abstracting from vast dimensions of experience: the embodied feel of life, emotional depth, aesthetic immediacy, historical particularity, individual genius, religious mystery, traditional wisdom, communal belonging.

Wordsworth captured it perfectly: “We murder to dissect.” Kant’s analysis explains how experience is structured but can’t convey what it’s like to actually experience. He analyzes beauty but can’t make you feel it. He defines duty but can’t move you to be moral. His philosophy is like an anatomical drawing—accurate but lifeless.

The Romantic rebellion took many forms. Herder insisted culture and history shape reason; there’s no universal rationality but rather forms of thought embedded in particular peoples and traditions.

Friedrich Schlegel used irony and fragments to suggest truths that resist systematic capture. Friedrich Schleiermacher defined religion as feeling of absolute dependence, not rational theology. Samuel Taylor Coleridge celebrated imagination as creative synthesis exceeding mechanical rule-following.

All were responding to Kant’s bloodless rationalism.

And they had a point. Scientific explanation doesn’t exhaust meaning—knowing the brain chemistry of love doesn’t capture what love is. Some truths are better shown than argued. Literature, music, visual art communicate what philosophy can’t.

Systematic philosophy can become self-enclosed, losing touch with the life it purports to explain. Universal principles can steamroll valuable differences. Reason needs supplementing by imagination, intuition, emotion, tradition.

But Romantics could go too far. Celebrating genius risks justifying irrationalism. Valuing feeling over reason enables manipulation. Emphasizing particularity undermines shared standards. Mystical intuition can’t be criticized or corrected. Rejecting systematic thought risks incoherence.

We need both: Kantian rigor and Romantic richness, systematic thinking and imaginative expression, universal principles and particular experiences. The opposition isn’t absolute; it’s creative tension.

Contemporary struggles reflect this—science versus humanities, data-driven policy versus narrative understanding, algorithmic optimization versus human meaning. We haven’t resolved what Kant and the Romantics fought about; we’re still fighting it.

Why He Still Matters: The Unfinished Project

So what do we do with Kant? We can’t simply be Kantians—too narrow, too rationalistic, too blind to his own particularity. But we can’t simply reject him either—we still need critical method, universal principles, systematic thinking, and cosmopolitan vision.

The way forward is to use Kantian tools to go beyond Kant. Apply his critical method more thoroughly than he did—examining not just “reason” but whose reason, reason from which social position, reason serving which interests.

Expand his cosmopolitanism beyond European assumptions—genuinely seeking principles all can accept through inclusive dialogue, not imposing one culture’s norms.

Supplement his rationalism with Romantic insights about emotion, embodiment, imagination, and tradition.

Include the voices he excluded. Build more comprehensive frameworks while acknowledging their incompleteness.

Kant’s critical method is valuable precisely because we can turn it on itself. He taught us to ask “What assumptions am I making? What are the limits of my thinking?” But we can ask the same questions about Kant. What was he taking for granted? Why could he see certain things so clearly while remaining completely blind to others?

If we apply his own method to his work, we start to understand what truly universal reason would require—and it looks different from what Kant imagined.

Kant’s idea that every person has inherent dignity—not because God says so, but because we’re rational beings—still provides the philosophical foundation for human rights. We just need to be more inclusive than Kant was about who deserves that dignity and what it means in practice.

His vision of nations cooperating through law rather than force matters more than ever as we confront climate change and other problems that cross borders.

And his ambition to connect different fields of knowledge—showing how science, ethics, art, and politics fit together without collapsing into each other—offers a model for how we might bridge today’s fragmented academic disciplines and cultural divides.

But we learn as much from his failures: how false universalism operates, how power shapes rationality, how systematic thought can have blind spots, why diverse perspectives aren’t supplements to reason but conditions for it.

Kant believed in Enlightenment as perpetual process, not final achievement. “Sapere aude!“—dare to know—means continuous critical examination, not resting in certainty.

His greatest lesson may be that we’re never done thinking, never finished examining, never beyond needing to question ourselves.

That’s why he still matters: not because he got everything right, but because he showed us what it looks like to keep trying to get it right, to build comprehensive systems while acknowledging limits, to pursue universal principles while remaining open to revision.

He models rigorous humanistic thinking at its best and worst—which makes him the philosopher we need precisely because we can’t fully accept him.

The New Yorker‘s essay presents a tidier Kant, one more easily celebrated. But the messy Kant—brilliant and blind, systematic and self-contradicting, universal and parochial—is more valuable.

Kant’s not a monument to venerate but a partner in an ongoing conversation, still teaching us to think critically, still showing us where critical thinking fails, still challenging us to do better than he did.

Three hundred years later, that challenge hasn’t lost its force.