Imanuels Kants, bibliotēka un Rietumu racionālisms
Authors:   Latvijas Universitāte, Kūlis Rihards 
Published: September 2023

The library and book trade as a field of work and a space of intellectual existence occupy a prominent place in Kant’s life. In addition to his teaching work at the University of Königsberg, Kant worked for several years as assistant librarian at Königsberg Palace. For a time, Kant lived in the house of the book publisher I. F. Kanter, which had become a prominent gathering place for intellectuals and at the same time a kind of book repository with library features. Here, one listened to the latest ideas, learned about the latest books and exchanged them. For Kant, as for most Western intellectuals, the library was an integral part of life and work. However, if we perceive the library as a specifically developed and sustained form of Western culture, Kant’s relationship to the library can be seen in a much broader and more fundamental sense. In this case, the features of librarism permeate the whole of Kant’s philosophy. Kant’s philosophy can be seen as a library that is as orderly and rational as possible, in which every shelf or drawer has its own and essentially indispensable place. Kant’s philosophy is not a burst of aphorisms or a repository of clever thoughts, but a collection of carefully worked out and argued insights. Kant, on the basis of Western rationality, builds a grand philosophical system in which, like a well-organised and centuries-old library, one could search for and find answers to questions of human relevance. One might think that, in the course of historical development, a relationship (a mutual influence) has been realised between the library as a specific and universal form of Western cultural organisation and Western philosophy as a whole. Similar structures can be seen in the organisation of intellectual life, philosophy and the library. A defining feature of Western rationalism: to see the principles of the world’s structure and existence from the origins, the first principles. The world can only be understood and interpreted by grasping it as a whole. The world as a whole is a grand universal library. Kant’s philosophy, too, in its very essence, claims to be such a grand and infinitely expandable universal library. It is founded, as Kant intended, on unchanging fundamental principles. In this article, the author tries to outline essentially only two themes: 1) Kant, Western rationalism and the attempt of classical philosophy and the library to grasp the world comprehensively and as a whole. In this vision, the author talks about Kant’s librarism. It would not be impossible to speak of the librarism of Hegel or Schelling, for example. But certainly not Pascal’s librarianship; 2) The infinity of the library (universal library) and the finitude of human life; the thing-in-itself as the limit mark of the human world and the longing for the infinite in Kant’s philosophy. Biblioteca universalis as a spiritual phenomenon has collapsed. Its place has been taken by vast repositories of information, which, of course, play an outstanding role in the development of technical civilisation. However, I would like to think that modern society would also benefit, if it were able to combine the idea of Kantian universalism, Biblioteca universalis, and information repositories in its vision and understanding of the world.