Kant in the 1760s

On April 22, 1764, Immanuel Kant turned 40 years old, reaching what would turn out to be the midpoint of his life. From his humble beginnings as the son of a father who was a harness maker and a mother who was a devoted Pietist, Kant had risen through school to graduate in philosophy from the University of Königsberg; and 1764 marked the year in which Kant was first offered a professorship, the highest honor of his academic guild. By the end of his life, forty years later, Kant had become the most influential philosopher in Europe. This influence was due primarily to a series of Critiques, the first of which – Kant's Critique of Pure Reason – was not published until 1781, when Kant was already 56 years old. In the wake of that “all-crushing” book, Kant developed a philosophical system to make sense of our understanding of the world and moral obligations, an a priori system within which pure reason held sway.

But in 1764 Kant was not offered a professorship in metaphysics or logic, but in rhetoric and poetry. In this year he published a short book – Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime – and an essay (“Maladies”), both written in a playful and entertaining style that one would expect from a teacher of rhetoric. He also published an elegant though more analytical Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality, conceived as a potential “Prize Essay” for the Berlin Academy.