“Two things fill me with wonder: the starry skies above me and the moral law within” (Immanuel Kant)
“So act that the maxim of your action can be willed as a universal law for all humanity” (Immanuel Kant)
“Treat people not just as means to an end, but also as an end in themselves” (Immanuel Kant)
”Morality, by presupposing freedom, shows that our freedom is real; all other motives enslave us” (Immanuel Kant)
- Immanuel Kant believed that human experience could be divided between two realms, the realm of ideas and the realm of experience and that morality came from the realm of ideas. He thought that God, angels and human beings shared in the realm of ideas or the Noumenal world which was there to be discovered by our reason.
- The way we look at morality is structured by the human mind, which is able to understand some things a priori, before any use of our five senses, using practical reason.
- The second realm is the realm of the observable and of experience, which Kant calls the phenomenal realm. This part of the human experience can be felt, touched, seen, smelt, and heard. It includes our emotions, too, which Immanuel Kant continually contrasts with our reason.
- Humans access both realms: the Noumenal and the phenomenal. But morality takes its absolute authority from the Noumenal world and is derived A Priori. It is then proved to be true or false by being applied to the world of experience the synthetic.
- The phenomenal world is subject to order and patterns on what we observe A Posteriori.
- The Noumenal world is subject to practical reason imposing order and patterns on what we deduce by a priori abstraction. (removing emotions or desires from the process)