Questioning Your Deepest Convictions: The Kantian Revolution

Creativity is often spoken of as if it were some kind of supernatural force—something as mysterious as fate or karma or public opinion. Here, creativity blesses a bitter, alcoholic painter. There, it’s a lazy, aristocratic mathematician with bad breath. Over there, it’s a hard-working, nose-to-the-grindstone banker who writes poetry in her spare time. It seems that you can never know when or for whom that obscure realm beyond the everyday, the realm of genius, will be opened.

But, consider this: around 1770, a Prussian academic named Immanuel Kant set to work on a disturbing problem that had arisen in the field of philosophy. Kant was a strange man who lived a life so rigorously self-controlled that there are actual accounts of his neighbors literally setting their clocks by his regular walks through town. Up to that point, his career had been remarkable only for its failure to produce anything even remotely remarkable.

What set this odd, mediocre little man to work was an old problem cast in a new and troubling light by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. In 1739, Hume wrote a little-read but influential work that argued—convincingly—that knowledge of the world is impossible, and that what we often think we know is, at best, nothing more than a guess based on past experiences.

The majority of philosophers, like the majority of the rest of us, don’t like to think that people don’t actually know things: It makes them nervous. And Kant was no different, so he set out to disprove Hume’s paradox.

But when he started thinking about the problem of knowledge, he could find no way into it. There was no path through the dense thicket of logic it presented. Other philosophers had tried and failed what Kant was attempting.

But Hume couldn’t just be right, Kant thought. If he was, then science became a delusion; philosophy became impossible; even morality and religion, in Kant’s mind, were meaningless. The difficulty of the task was great, but Kant was determined to unlock the door to genius.

The process was long, laborious. Kant struggled, doubted himself, and then struggled on. After having published 23 texts in the previous 20 years, this prolific writer’s output simply stopped. For eleven years—a period that became known as his “silent decade”—Kant didn’t publish a single new philosophical work.

But saying nothing should never be confused with having nothing to say. Kant had had a breakthrough, but it was crucial that he follow it through to its logical end. So, he gave up all other intellectual pursuits to focus exclusively on the task at hand, following a rigorous, self-imposed schedule of study, thought, and writing. When he broke his silence in 1781, he published The Critique of Pure Reason—his 800-page masterpiece—an intellectual achievement so original and revolutionary that it continues to have a profound influence on the way we understand the world even today.

In that work, Kant realized that the problem with Hume’s paradox was not with its logic. The argument itself was irrefutable. Instead, the problem was with its concepts. When philosophers talk about concepts, they aren’t just talking about words. Words, in a way, just point to something. Concepts, however, are like little bundles of meaning.

“Death” (for a somber example) is just a word signifying the end of a life. The concept of death, on the other hand, is a pretty complicated thing. If I’m an atheist physicist, my concept of death is very different from that of a deeply devout Presbyterian.

What Kant realized was that certain of Hume’s concepts—like “mind,” “world,” and “experience”—were inherently problematic. No matter how you looked at them, they always led to the same dead end for knowledge. Making such a claim was no small feat. Hume wasn’t just misusing normal concepts. He was using the same concepts in the very same ways as thinkers for hundreds of years before him; he was using the same concepts in the very same ways as normal people on the street. What was at issue was what we all mean when we say some of the most commonplace things about reality. This was a radical solution that required a complete revision of our normal understanding of how things work. Kant called this breakthrough his “Copernican Revolution.”

When the great astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus began to study the heavens, the accepted wisdom was that the earth was the center of the universe. But with this model, all kinds of inconsistencies in data arose. No matter how you crunched the numbers, things kept coming out wrong. So, Copernicus simply flipped the model, put the sun at the center, and noticed that things started to make sense. Suddenly, he could make highly reliable mathematical predictions of the movements of stars, planets, comets. Everything just started coming out right.

Kant’s move was of the same kind. He argued that knowledge is not something we passively receive from the world; instead, the mind, in a way, picks what it receives. Learning something about the world, then, implies learning something about the mind. The two become inseparable. Like Copernicus, Kant was saying that philosophers had simply been working with the wrong model.

They had understood these fundamental things—the mind, the world, experience, knowledge—in ways that simply had to be wrong. What was needed was a new model, a fundamental and radical shift in the way they thought. Once this was done, once the Copernican Revolution was proposed, suddenly things started to make sense. Knowledge, it seemed, was possible after all, but only if reality was thought of in this wholly new way.

It’s crucial to understand that Kant’s Copernican Revolution was certainly a work of genius. It was a true break with run-of-the-mill thinking, absolutely shattering the normalcy of the everyday. But it is just as crucial to recognize that there is nothing supernatural about Kant’s achievement. He wasn’t struck by lightning; no divine intervention occurred. In the end, three things made it possible:

He fully understood the problem at hand. Kant was deeply committed to his subject. Finding a solution to the problem of knowledge was something Kant felt himself compelled to accomplish. He felt it as a duty, as a necessity, and necessity, as they say, really is the mother of invention.

Kant was aware that to solve a problem one must first be a student of the problem. And being a student of a problem means understanding the range of solutions that have already been attempted as well as fully grasping why those attempts failed. By doing so, Kant was able to see that certain patterns dominated the thinking of his day (and had dominated thinking for hundreds of years). He realized that it wasn’t through any failure of reasoning or imagination that philosophers prior to him hadn’t succeeded in answering Hume’s challenge: They had failed because they were too deeply entrenched in these well-worn paths of thought.

And most importantly, Kant’s solution was made possible by what can best be described as a sort of attitude. He put himself in the mindset of accepting the simple possibility that everyone (Kant included) might be wrong about all kinds of things—that maybe we are all, all of us, wrong about everything. For this to happen, Kant had to be willing, fully and deeply willing, to find out that even his own most deeply held beliefs were mistaken.

“If you want to create something truly new, you must learn to first embrace the possibility that everything that you think you know, is deeply and fundamentally wrong.”

There’s a lesson to be learned here for those of us looking for ways to break new ground in our endeavors. The Copernican Revolution is the ultimate example of innovation, of deeply disruptive thinking. But it was only possible because Kant had already overturned his own everyday thinking. What this means is that the act of sheer creativity that was his solution was not the source of disrupted thinking; it was the product of it.

Those of us who read Kant—like viewers of a truly great new painting or the first consumers of a cutting-edge product—experience this creative newness as a kind of break with our normal world and assume that it comes from a mind that isn’t like ours at all. But this is a mistake.

What the Copernican Revolution shows us is that we can all be innovators. Innovators are commonly described as people who believe nothing is impossible. This is literally true. For any creator to produce the experience of newness, he or she must have already adopted the kind of attitude that says, “All that I think I know may be utterly mistaken.” And anyone can do this.

If you want to create something truly new, you must learn to first embrace the possibility that everything—that is, everything—that you think, whether it’s about the world or about art or about music or your customers or business, is deeply and fundamentally wrong. This is scary; it’s true. Questioning your deepest convictions is a sign of great strength (despite what some politicians might suggest). But, if you are able to make this switch in attitude, great things can happen. As Kant’s Copernican Revolution shows, you become open to true innovation, true problem solving, even true self-knowledge. Only by opening your beliefs up to the most radical revision is deep creativity possible.

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