As a former student, Kant was more of a fright to me than an awakening. His work is as impossible to read as Kafka's, with the exception of his short stories! Yet both writers, each an eccentric of his era in his own way, appealed to me as people rather than winning me over through their work.
In M. Kühn's Kant: A Biography, I found several previously unknown facets of the Königsberg philosopher, who also dealt with topics that reach into our field of interest!
For instance, Kant pondered whether we might share this universe with other intelligent beings on distant planets. He raised the question of whether Christ's sacrifice extended to extraterrestrial life, or if he might have to undergo death again on other worlds. Furthermore, Kant ventured beyond acceptable theological boundaries by suggesting that our souls might continue their existence on one of those planets.
Speculating that the afterlife might be found on other planets remains popular today, and during certain hypnotic regressions, subjects have claimed exactly that!
Kant was also clearly interested in unusual celestial phenomena. For example, he published a review in the Königsberg scholarly and political newspapers of a book that provided a theory about a "fireball" that had appeared in the sky on July 23, 1762.
In his book Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant addressed, among other things, an incident involving Emanuel Swedenborg (a Swedish mystic, spirit-seer, mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer, and polymath) in which the latter experienced an astonishing "distant perception." Today, this would probably be described as a spontaneous form of "remote viewing"!
Kant wrote about this to his acquaintance Charlotte von Knobloch, noting that the event seemed to possess the strongest evidentiary weight of all, effectively removing any room for doubt.
It occurred in 1756 when Swedenborg arrived in Gothenburg from England. Mr. William Castel invited him to his home along with a group of fifteen people. Around six o'clock in the evening, Swedenborg went outside and returned to the parlor pale and alarmed.
He stated that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm and was spreading rapidly. Restless, he went outside frequently. He mentioned that a friend's house was already in ashes and his own home was in danger.
At eight o'clock, after going outside again, he joyfully exclaimed that, thank God, the fire had been extinguished just three doors down from his house!
On Tuesday morning, a royal courier arrived with a report of the fire that matched Swedenborg's account in every detail, confirming the fire had indeed been put out at eight o'clock [A. Zitelmann, "Just for Me to Be a Human Being – Immanuel Kant", p. 105ff].
According to "luftlinie.org", the distance between Gothenburg and Stockholm is 397.46 km!
It is also significant that Kant's philosophy reveals our limited ability to perceive what truly is—meaning, to observe actual reality—long before the "Matrix" film trilogy and the resulting "simulation theories."
Kant argued that we cannot perceive things as they are in themselves, but only as they appear to us. Consequently, we can never truly grasp what holds the world together at its core or what things are independent of our conceptual framework. We cannot even know who or what we ultimately are ourselves.
Kant claimed there is a transcendent ground that leads us to draw conclusions that do not follow from any sensory data available to us. We know as little about who we "really" are as we do about things in themselves. Kant readily admits that there seems to be a "second" self, meaning the self that experiences the appearance or the perception.
In fact, these thoughts can be applied quite well to the visitor phenomenon, where subjective aspects play a particularly large role and also reflect the respective culture and sociology! Thus, the witness is to be regarded as the "receiver" and the phenomenon as the "sender," with the "signal" being interpreted individually within the spirit of the times!
In 1785, Kant's essay "On the Volcanoes on the Moon" appeared, in which he participated in the scholarly debate over whether volcanism was responsible for the shape of our satellite or if other factors played a role.
Kant argued that planets and moons were originally liquid in their primal form, which also explained their spherical shape—meaning he was ahead of his time here as well! The science of his era was still striving to reconcile and harmonize God and the Bible with new discoveries...
Kant proposed the existence of a kind of ether or caloric matter that fills the entire universe and permeates all bodies equally. This ether or primal matter was therefore not subject to any change of location.
Furthermore, Kant wanted to demonstrate that the ether as a primal matter was not merely a hypothetical principle, but the original moving force. Without it, there would be neither objects of perception nor any experiences.
He used this ether to explain all other moving forces. It represents the ether as a hypostatized space that is all-pervading, all-moving, and permanent.
Translator's Note: This text was translated from German into English by Gemini, with the original book quotations paraphrased and integrated contextually!ʬ