Governor of Russia’s Kaliningrad says German philosopher Immanuel Kant ‘directly tied’ to war in Ukraine
Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, said Monday that the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who spent his entire life in the region, has a “direct connection” to the war in Ukraine, according to the local outlet RuGrad.
Speaking at a conference in the town of Svetlogorsk, Alikhanov said it’s impossible to discuss “profound ideas” in Kaliningrad without mentioning Kant. “I want to show that Immanual Kant, who was born here nearly 300 years ago, has an almost direct relationship to the global chaos […] that we are facing now. Moreover, he has a direct connection to the military conflict in Ukraine,” the governor said.
According to Alikhanov, it was German philosophy, whose “godlessness and lack of higher values” began with Kant, that created the “sociocultural situation” that led, among other things, to the First World War.
Today, in 2024, we’re bold enough to assert that not only did the First World War begin with the work of Kant, but so did the current conflict in Ukraine. Here in Kaliningrad, we dare to propose — although we’re actually almost certain of it — that it was precisely in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals […] that the ethical, value-based foundations of the current conflict were established.
The governor went on to call Kant one of the “spiritual creators of the modern West,” saying that the “Western bloc, which was shaped by the U.S. in its own image,” is an “empire of lies.” Kant, he said, is referred to as the “father of almost everything” in the West, including freedom, the idea of the rule of law, liberalism, rationalism, and “even the idea of the European Union.”
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