- Immanuel Kant was either the most boring man alive or a productivity genius. For over 40 years, Kant woke up at exactly 5:00 AM every single day. He wrote for precisely three hours, no more, no less. He went to work at the same university, ate lunch at the exact same restaurant, and spent every afternoon walking through the same park along the same path. He was so predictable that his neighbors joked that they could set their clocks by him. But here's something even crazier, Kant never once left his hometown. The ocean was an hour away, yet he never saw it. But here's the twist. Despite living what sounds, like the world's most monotonous life ever, Kant was one of the greatest thinkers in history, and one of the most influential people of the enlightenment. From a single room apartment, he shaped the modern world more profoundly than most kings, politicians, or generals ever have. If you live in a society that values democracy and individual rights, you can thank Immanuel Kant for that. He pioneered ideas like animal rights, and even proposed something like the United Nations, 150 years before it existed. His groundbreaking thoughts on space and time, directly inspired Albert Einstein, and Kant completely revolutionized moral philosophy, dismantling ideas that had guided Western civilization for thousands of years. And those ideas are still hotly debated today. So that's what I want to talk about, Kant's moral philosophy, and why it matters to you. My name is Mark Manson. I'm a three-time number one New York Times bestselling author, and I have a man crush on Immanuel Kant. And by the end of this video, I think you will too. Kant's moral philosophy is both unique and counterintuitive. Kant believed that for something to be good, it had to be universal. That is, it can't be right to do something in one situation and wrong to do it in another. If lying is wrong, it has to be wrong all the time. It has to be wrong when everyone does it, period. If it isn't always right or wrong, then it cannot be a valid ethical principle. Kant called these universalized ethical principles, categorical imperatives, rules to live by that are valid in all context, and every situation, and to every human being. Now, that's a tall order. Chances are any ethical principle you can come up with, you can easily imagine many exceptions to it. I can think of many situations where I think it would be morally correct to lie, I'm sure you can too, but Kant did not believe this. In fact, he spent much of his life attempting to come up with these categorical imperatives, these universal moral truths. Some of those attempts were quickly ripped to shreds by other philosophers. But one of them, in particular, has kind of stuck, and in all my years reading and studying philosophy, psychology, and other sciences, it's one of the most powerful statements, I've personally ever come across in my life. To Kant, the most scarce resource in the universe was consciousness, that is our ability to process information and act rationally in the world. To him, this is truly special, exceedingly special. For all we know, we are the only shot the universe has at intelligent self-organization. Therefore, we need to take it seriously, and therefore, rationality and protecting consciousness, must be the basis for all of our moral reasoning. Kant wrote that, "Without rationality, the universe would be a waste, in vain, and without purpose." To Kant's mind, without intelligence and the freedom to exercise that intelligence, we might as well all just be a bunch of rocks, nothing would really matter. Therefore, Kant believed that all morality must be derived from the protection and the promotion of rational consciousness. The question is, how do you do that? Well, this is where Kant's rule comes in, the one rule for life, and this is it. "Never treat a human as merely a means to an end, but always treat them as an end in and of themselves." So let's break this down. Clearly, much of this revolves around means and ends. So let's take a moment and make sure that we understand this. Let's say I'm hungry and I want a burrito. So I get in the car and drive to my favorite burrito spot, and order my usual double meat monster. That makes me also happy on a weekly basis. Now, in this situation, the burrito is my end goal. It's ultimately why I am doing everything else. It's why I'm getting in the car, driving, buying gas, and so on. All these things that I do to get the burrito are the means. I do the things that I must do in order to achieve my end, which is the burrito. Now, let's say you call a friend to find out how they're doing. Calling them is a means, finding out how they're doing is your end. If you leave a party early so you can wake up in the morning, leaving the party is the means. waking up early is your end. Means are things that we do conditionally. I don't want to get in my car to drive, but I want the burrito. So guess what? I end up driving. But an end is something that is desired for its own sake. Goddamn my thought (beeps) It's the motivating factor, behind our decisions and behaviors. If I only wanted to eat the burrito because my wife wanted a burrito and I wanna make her happy, then the burrito is no longer my end. It is now the means to an even greater end, making my wife happy. Now, if I only wanted to make my wife happy so I could hopefully get laid tonight, now my wife's happiness is a means to a greater end, sex. Now, likely the end of that example made you feel a little bit weird, and that's exactly what Kant is talking about. His argument held. His rule is that treating any human being as a means to some other end is the basis of all unethical behavior. So treating a burrito as a means to my wife's end is fine. I'm being a good husband, but if I treat my wife as a means to the end of sex, then I am now treating her as a means. And Kant would argue that is some shade of wrong, which brings us to the sponsor of this video, Grammarly. Grammarly takes difficult writing and makes it easy. Whether you're submitting a job application, writing a memo to your boss or publishing your work on the internet, Grammarly is like a patient writing coach and editor, always there to give you suggestions and feedback, and fix those annoying typos. Grammarly has been in the AI game for over 14 years, and there's a reason that they've stuck around for so long. Over 96% of their paying users say that it improves their writing dramatically. Personally, I've found all sorts of uses for Grammarly in my business, from writing social media captions to team memos, to brainstorming YouTube script ideas. Grammarly can anticipate your reader's questions and ask you to address them, before you even publish anything, and it can coach you on the proper tone to use depending on who you're writing to. So sign up, and upgrade the Grammarly Pro to level up your productivity. Use my link to get 20% off pro at grammarly.com/manson, and you can also click the link in the description. Kant's formulation checks all of the boxes that we would expect from a theory of morality, but it also goes way beyond common sense morality, like lying and violence, because here's something nobody thinks about. You can treat yourself as a means to an end as well. And when you start digging into that, Kant's rule kind of takes over everything. For example, think about laziness. Kant believed that we all have a moral imperative to do the best that we can at all times. He argued, "You should do your best because anything less is to treat ourselves as a means rather than an end." When you're sitting on the toilet scrolling TikTok for the 28th time, you're treating your mind and your attention as a mere pleasure receptacle. You are not maximizing the potential of your consciousness. In fact, you are using your consciousness as a means to stimulate your emotional ends. "This is not only bad," Kant would argue, "But it is unethical." You are actively violating yourself. Now, what about addiction? Well, believe it or not, Kant wasn't a total party pooper. He enjoyed some wine with his lunch and he smoked the pipe, but only at the same time each morning, and only one bowl of tobacco. Kant was not anti-fun necessarily, what he was against though was a compulsive escapism. He wrote that using alcohol and other means of escaping one's own life was unethical because it requires you to use your rational mind and freedom as a means to some other end, in this case, getting really fucked up. Here's another example, seeking too much approval. Now, seeking approval is natural, but people pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think or feel. - With all due respect, Les Grossman did not bought the jungle (beeps) - The jungle. - Exactly. - So right there, you're already treating yourself as a means rather than an end, but it gets worse. Because if you alter your speech or behavior in order to make others like you, then you are also treating them as a means to your end. You are altering and manipulating their perceptions of you in order to garner a pleasant response from them. Kant would undoubtedly argue that this is unethical on both counts, which is kind of crazy because people pleasing, is like a pretty innocuous thing. Kant believed that, generally, it is impossible to know whether a person deserves to be happy or suffer, because you can never truly know what their intentions and aims were when they acted. Similarly, even if you should make others happy, there's no way to precisely know how to make them happy. You do not know what their feelings are or their values or their expectations. You do not know the implications that your actions are gonna have on them. On top of that, what actually constitutes suffering or happiness in most non-extreme situations, is completely unclear. Your divorce may cause you incredible pain today, but in a year, it may be the best thing that ever happened to you. You may relish the joy of celebration with friends, but maybe it's distracting you from pursuing something that would prevent even future suffering. Therefore, Kant argued, "The only logical way to improve the world is through improving ourselves." This is because the only thing that we can truly experience with any certainty is ourselves. Kant defines self-improvement as developing the ability to adhere to his one rule, the categorical imperative, and he saw self-improvement as a duty, an undebatable obligation put on us all. To Kant, the reward and punishment for not following one's duty was not in heaven or hell, but in the life that one created for oneself. Adherence to morality produces not only a better life for yourself, but a better life for all of those around you. Similarly, failure to adhere to morality would produce unnecessary suffering, not just for yourself, but also for those around you. - I'm finished. - Kant's rule therefore has a kind of ripple effect. Your improved ability to be honest with yourself, will increase how honest you are with others, and your honesty with others will influence them to become more honest with themselves, which in turn helps other people's lives, and so on and so forth. This is true for all aspects of Kant's rule. Whether it's honesty, productivity, charity or consent, Kant's rule, once adopted by enough people, will generate a snowball effect in the world, enacting more positive change, than any calculated policy or institution. Kant intuitively understood that there is a fundamental link, between our respect for ourselves and our respect for the world. The way we interact with our own psyche is the template by which we apply our interactions with others, and little progress can be made, until we've made progress with ourselves. Kant would argue that telling ourselves that we are worthless and awful is just as wrong as telling others that they're worthless and awful. Lying to ourselves is just as unethical as lying to others. Harming ourselves is just as repugnant as harming others. Self-love and self-care are, therefore, not something you learn about or practice. They're something that you are ethically called on to cultivate within yourself, even if they are all that you have left. For most of my young life, I vaguely agreed with the items we've discussed here. Don't lie, stand up for yourself, stop compulsive behaviors, improve yourself, yada yada. But I pursued them for practical and transactional reasons. I pursued them as means because I thought that they would make me more likable, more successful, more wanted, more envied. Meanwhile, the more I worked at it, the emptier I felt. My discovery of Kant was an epiphany, and only 80 pages, Kant swept away decades worth of assumptions and beliefs. He showed me that what you actually do doesn't matter as much as the purpose behind doing it. And until you find the right purpose, you haven't found much of anything at all. It's worth noting that Kant wasn't always a humdrum, or routine-obsessed dork. He wasn't always the mayor of Boresville. In fact, Kant's younger years, he was a bit of a party hound as well. He'd stay up late drinking wine into the night, and playing cards with his friends. He'd sleep late and eat too much, and host big parties. It wasn't until he turned 40 that he dropped it all, and developed the routine he later made famous. He said that, "He developed this routine at 40, because he realized the moral implications of his actions, and decided that he would no longer allow himself to waste the precious time or energy his consciousness had left." Kant called this developing character, AKA, building a life designed, around maximizing your own potential. He believed most people can't develop true character, until they reach middle age, because until then, you're still too seduced by the fancies and whims of the world, blown this way and that, from excitement to despair and back again. We're too obsessed with accumulating more means and are oblivious to the ends that drive us. To develop character, a person must master their own actions and master themselves. And while a few of us can accomplish that in a lifetime, Kant believe that's something that we each have a duty to work towards. In fact, he believed it was the only thing to work towards, so, will you work towards it? All right, guys, thank you for watching. If Kant's rule got you thinking about how to live your life with more intention and integrity, then you will definitely wanna check out what conclusions I came to when I turned 40 in this video called "The 40 Harsh Truths that I Wish I Knew in my 20s." And that video, I break down the lessons that have shaped my life and help me become who I am today. Hope you'll check it out. I'll see you there.