Kant for Kids

Kant for kids? “The mind reels,” Michael Dirda says. You might as well imagine Einstein for babies. At first blush, such a project sounds foolish, if only given Kant’s reputation for opacity. “Only Immanuel Kant’s famously difficult Critique of Pure Reason registers a more challenging readability score than Facebook’s privacy policy,” writes Kevin Litman-Navarro in a New York Times essay about the inscrutability of tech and media privacy policies.

Kant himself planned to write a book to popularize Newton. Johann Hamann warned Kant in a 1759 letter: “A philosophical book for children would have to appear as simple-minded, foolish and tasteless as a divine book for human beings. Now examine yourself to see whether you have the heart to be the author [of such a] book.” After reading the letter, Kant ghosted Hamann.

More than 150 years later, Salomo Friedländer, a philosopher smitten for most of his adult life with Kant’s work, decided to write a succinct work for young people to become versed in Kant. It would avoid Kantian jargon or philosophical obfuscations. Kant for Kids came out in 1924, while Hitler was in jail and the dystopian film The City Without Jews had its premiere. It served as a sort of “catechism” that would make Reason a religion. Call it Kantholicism. “It would be comical to assume that the moral actor always has to first think theoretically,” Friedländer writes. “Morality is inherent in us organically. But its abstract formula should be imprinted on schoolchildren.”

Friedländer structured Kant for Kids around three basic questions: What should we do? For what may we hope? What can we know? In Volume 15 of Friedländer’s Collected Writings (2014) edited by scholar Detlef Thiel, Kant for Kids runs to 75 pages of breezy German. Friedländer’s Kant is the Kant of Marx, who championed “the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being.”

Friedländer appreciated children as equals to adults, and did so with Edward Gorey-like flair. According to Walter Benjamin, Friedländer “discovered the grotesque, cruel, grim side of children’s life.” In an essay about children’s toys, Benjamin quotes Friedländer:

If children are ever to grow up into first-rate people, they must not be spared the sight of anything human. Their innocence instinctively ensures that the necessary boundaries are not crossed; and later, when these boundaries are gradually extended, new experiences will encounter minds that have been prepared. The fact that little children laugh at everything, even the negative sides of life, is a glorious extension of radiant cheerfulness into all spheres of life . . . My children would not like to be without their guillotines and gallows, at the very least.

Friedländer believed that “mature youths” could read Kant for Kids directly, but younger people might need a mediator to respond to puzzling bits with salient, clarifying examples from contemporary life. The book sparked interest in a few quarters, attracting the attention of the first Newbery Award winner, Hendrik Willem van Loom, who corresponded with Friedländer in 1933 requesting an English translation. However, an Anglophone version of Kant for Kids didn’t come about until the 1960s when a distant relative, Hans Peter Zade, translated it. Unfortunately, a dozen publishers rejected Zade’s translation, and it rests now in the German literary archive in Marbach.

Friedländer ought to have expected an energetic response for Kant for Kids, according to Thiel. Famed Neo-Kantian philosopher Herman Cohen insisted prior to World War I that Kant remain the bedrock of German culture and humanism. The quintessential figures of German intellectual life for over a century through World War II were Goethe and Kant. It’s no accident that Hannah Arendt reveals in Eichmann in Jerusalem that Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, under police examination after his arrest, “declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty.” It’s unlikely that Eichmann, about 18 when Kant for Kids was published, learned his Kant from Kant for Kids. If he had, he might have made a show of the fact at his trial, since the Nazis had placed Friedländer on the list of “forbidden authors.”

A section of Kant for Kids accrues an unintended valence in the National Socialist context. “Who is our truest guide [Führer] on the way to truth?” The youthful readers of Friedländer’s catechism are instructed to reply: “Immanuel Kant!” Compare that to Arendt’s citation of Hans Franck’s 1942 categorical imperative shaped for the Third Reich: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.”

Some, such as Rebecca Hanf, friend of Ernst Marcus, the philosopher who claimed to have resurrected Kant, recognized that Friedländer’s Kant for Kids could counter the Nazi appropriation of Kant and realign him with egalitarianism and anti-fascist politics. The book attracted enthusiasts during and immediately after the National Socialist period, including US military intelligence officer Kurt Stransky, who planned in 1945 to use it with 500 German prisoners deemed to be hostile to the Nazis. The prisoners housed near Cherbourg, France, were to be trained as officials in the post-war bureaucracy. Unfortunately, documentation about the outcome of Stansky’s plan is not readily available.

It’s unlikely an English version of Kant for Kids would be as successful as a contemporary pop philosophy book like Sophie’s World. Thiel notes that Friedländer has largely been forgotten, despite having published 13 books during a 30-year period beginning in 1906. Friedländer viewed himself as an amalgam of Kant and Charlie Chaplin. That unusual hybridity has been a contributing factor in Friedländer’s absence from contemporary Kant scholarship. When I contacted Christine Korsgaard, the leading Anglophone Kant expert, she responded with admirable candor: “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about Friedländer.”

A Kant comprehensible to kids undermines the picture of Kant as the pinnacle of the philosophical profession. If one doesn’t require a priestly caste to interpret the great thinker for the masses, what’s a Kant scholar to do? Kantholicism could be expected to resist reformation. Like Louis Althusser’s Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, written in the 1970s, Friedländer’s Kant for Kids contradicts the opposition of philosophers and non-philosophers, fulfilling Kant’s directive that individuals behave, not as defenders of professional territory, but as cosmopolitans.

Nevertheless, I found receptiveness to the idea of Kant being taught to children mixed among Kantian philosophers. For example, the notion irked Kant scholar Allen Wood. “In the abstract, the idea of making philosophy, and Kant’s philosophy, more widely available and more widely studied is an appealing one. If it were possible, I would sign on in a heartbeat. But when I see what it leads to when people try to do this, I very quickly lose patience and become downright angry.” Wood maintains a healthy respect for how quickly things can go wrong in any encounter with Kant’s work. “Kant is a difficult philosopher to understand and easy for many to misunderstand,” Wood says. “Professional philosophers often don’t understand Kant. Even Kant scholars often get him wrong. I am not kidding when I tell my classes that the first 50 times I read the Groundwork, I did not understand it at all.”

By contrast, Kantian moral philosopher Jens Timmermann says, “I often give [Kant for Kids] to Kantian friends and their children as a present. I first stumbled across it when I bought the boxed set of Olms ‘burnt books,’ of which Friedländer is the first volume.” Timmermann is married to Kate Moran, a Kant scholar at Brandeis University. Timmermann believes that Kant would have welcomed Kant for Kids: “Kant himself thought children around the age of 10 could be taught his ethics—or, rather, be encouraged to discover a priori principles and their application for themselves. The standard case is that of the boy confronted with a bullying Henry VIII in the Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Practical Reason (V 156–7).” To vivify his point, Timmermann shared a photograph (see above) of his wife with one of their children (around one year old) in her lap. Before them is an open copy of Kant’s Groundwork, and the child is eyeballing the German side of the facing-page translation.

Not to undo the charm of the photograph, but to shift the perspective about the audience for Friedländer’s book, we might want to consider the case made by German philosopher Odo Marquard, who proposes the usual division between kids and adults calls for revision. In his “The Age of Unworldliness?,” he argues that we must acknowledge a “modern impairment” to the process of growing up. “I call it tachogenic unworldliness because it is a result of the accelerated speed with which reality changes in modern times,” Marquard writes. “Since, nowadays, what is familiar becomes obsolete at a faster and faster rate . . . the world becomes foreign to us, and we become unworldly. Modern grown-ups become childlike. People no longer grow up.” In an age when adults are also kids, Kant for Kids turns into a book for almost everyone.

Photograph courtesy of Jens Timmermann

Bruce J. Krajewski

Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender's Kant for Children (forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).