Kantianism and Taoism

• Immanuel Kant lived 80 years of his entire life in a Baltic city of Koenigsberg. His philosophy was thus influenced by the lifestyle of that city. Koenigsberg with its two large lagoons used to play as a haven for the ships travelling in the Baltic Sea. It was like Venice for the Mediterranean world.

  Many people with different backgrounds and with different ideas came to the same place and attempted to find a common ground for all. This is what Kant is all about.

  1. Click here for my webpage dedicated to Kant's Koenigsberg now called Kaliningrad.

  2. Click here for my Kant page.

• China, after the ice age, started as a collection of many isolated population pockets. Those people from the isolated areas came to the banks of the Yellow River to construct their civilization. Since they could not communicate, they started drawing pictures. This is how their Chinese characters were developed. They also attempted to communicate by singing. This is why spoken Chinese has tones.

  How about different ideas? They divided those many different ideas into two groups. This is how they developed the concept of Yang (plus) and Ying (minus). Then they believed in the harmony between Yang and Ying to make this world to work.

  China is a very interesting country. Click here for my China page.

Let us next look at this picture.

• These days, every country has its own democracy. Some of them work well and some do not. It is generally agreed that the American democracy works well. This is largely due to its two-party system. The United States is a new country. Many different people with different lifestyles came to this new land and constructed a country. This process is not different from the way China was constructed some years ago. Indeed, from the political system of the United States, we can find out how the concept of Yang and Ying was developed in ancient China.

  While we have to find one true thing (Ding-an-Sich) in Kantian world, we place those many different ideas into two opposing groups in the world of Taoism. Then it is easier to find a common ground for the two.

• We then need Hegel to solve the problem. This is known as the Hegelian synthesis.

The following figure will illustrate what I said above.
• Click here for Einstein's Philosophy of Physics.

• Click here for his home page.
  
• His Einstein page.