Immanuel Kantthe clockwork conscience

Königsberg, on the Baltic. He lectured there for over forty years on logic, metaphysics, anthropology and — for decades — physical geography, a subject he taught entirely out of books and travellers' reports, describing places he would never go. The story that neighbours set their clocks by his afternoon walk is almost certainly tidier than the man was.

He published almost nothing of consequence until he was fifty-seven. Then, after a decade of near-silence, came the Critique of Pure Reason, and inside another decade the two Critiques that complete it. The first was so hard to read that he wrote a shorter book explaining it, then went back and rewrote the original — which tells you roughly how the first edition had landed.

The argument that outlasted everything else is the categorical imperative: act only on a rule you could will everyone to follow. It is a test rather than a commandment, and it is deliberately empty of content, which is both why it has been enlisted to justify almost anything and why no serious moral philosopher since has been able to walk past it.

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Immanuel Kant