A summer hand in hand with Kant

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This summer except of some daily excursions, I didn't leave Athens... It was the first summer of my entire life that I didn't go for vacations actually. I am not feeling bad about it since I had some good reasons for not going on holidays but there were some days that I really missed being somewhere else without doing absolutely ANYTHING.

However I took advantage of the situation to do other things.. To read more, to work more, to set new goals and work towards them. One could tell "ok you could have done all these after coming back from your dreamy holidays you idiot". Yeah sure. But sometimes even 5 days off can kick you out of a "routine" you need to put in order. Immanuel Kant is a good example for that. What? Immanuel Kant?! What the hell he has to do with your "boring" summer? Let me tell you what I mean by that...

As I have mentioned in a previous post, travelling and new experiences play a major role in shaping one's self, opening our horizons etc etc... Well Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher who is a central figure in modern philosophy, is the person that proves this wrong.

I don't know whether he was a control freak or his strict program was a part of a conscious frame of mind that led to success. I don't know if he was the most boring person on earth or the most productive person ever lived!

For over 40 years, he used to wake up every morning at 5:00 AM and write for exactly three hours. He would then lecture at the same university for exactly four hours. He continued with lunch at the same restaurant each day. Then, in the afternoon, he would go on an long walk through the same park, on the same route, leaving and returning home at the exact same time. Every single day he had the same routine!

Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg, Prussia. Literally his whole life! He never left the city. He didn't even see the sea that was one hour away. Yet he managed to be one of the most important and influential thinkers in modern history!

His ideas about space and time inspired Einstein's discovery of relativity. He invented the philosophy of aesthetics. He reinvented moral philosophy, overthrowing ideas that were the basis of western civilisation since Aristotle. In fact Kant's moral philosophy is unique. He believed that for something to be good, it has to be universal. Meaning that one thing can't be right under certain circumstances and wrong in another situation. A valid ethical principle is either always right or always wrong.

What is interesting here is that Kant wasn’t always a routine-obsessed dork. In fact, in his younger years, he would stay up late drinking wine and playing cards with his friends. He’d sleep late, eat too much and had what we call a "normal" life. He dropped it all and developed his routine at his 40's, when he decided that he would no longer allow himself to waste the precious time and energy his consciousness had left.

This is what he called “developing character”. He claimed though that the true character cannot be achieved till someone reaches the middle age. Until then we are more or less seduced by the fancies of life and we balance between excitement and despair.

So I may have not reached middle age yet, but this summer I noticed that some true dedication and a certain routine can really work wonders in a matter of productivity. Of course I'm not ready to "sacrifice" yet the carefree and careless side of life in order to stick to a strict routine. To be honest I'm not sure if I ever be able to become -or even need to become- such an obsessive control freak in order to "succeed". What I know though is that he was absolutely right that by building a life designed around maximising your own potential can bring the best results.