Chapter 6
The Formula of Humanity
Depending on your perspective, the philosopher Immanuel Kant was either
the most boring person who ever lived or a productivity hacker’s wet dream.
For forty years he woke up every morning at five o’clock and wrote for
exactly three hours. He would then lecture at the same university for exactly
four hours, and then eat lunch at the same restaurant every day. Then, in the
afternoon, he would go on an extended walk through the same park, on the
same route, leaving and returning home at the exact same time. He did this for
forty years. Every. Single. Day.^1
Kant was efficiency personified. He was so mechanical in his habits, that
his neighbors joked that they could set their clocks by when he left his
apartment. He would depart for his daily walk at three thirty in the afternoon,
have dinner with the same friend most evenings, and after working some
more, would go to bed at exactly ten every night.
Despite sounding like a colossal bore, Kant was one of the most important
and influential thinkers in world history. And from his single-room apartment
in Königsberg, Prussia, he did more to steer the world than most kings,
presidents, prime ministers, or generals before and since.
If you’re living in a democratic society that protects individual freedoms,
you have Kant partially to thank for that. He was one of the first to argue that
all people have an inherent dignity that must be regarded and respected.^2 He
was the first person ever to envision a global governing body that could
guarantee peace across much of the world (an idea that would eventually
inspire the formation of the United Nations).^3 His descriptions of how we
perceive space and time would later help inspire Einstein’s discovery of the
theory of relativity.^4 He was one of the first to suggest the possibility of
animal rights.^5 He reinvented the philosophy of aesthetics and beauty.^6 He
resolved the two-hundred-year-old philosophical debate between rationalism
and empiricism in the span of a couple of hundred pages.^7 And as if all that
weren’t enough, he reinvented moral philosophy, from top to bottom,
overthrowing ideas that had been the basis of Western civilization since
Aristotle.^8