The German Enlightenment

In the provincial Prussian city of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant took a walk every afternoon at the same time — so reliably that neighbors reportedly set their clocks by him. Then he went home and wrote philosophy that restructured the Western mind. His Critique of Pure Reason attempted nothing less than settling the question of what human beings can actually know. He never left Königsberg.

His friend Johann Georg Hamann thought reason was overrated and said so, loudly, in prose so dense it required a commentary. Johann Gottfried Herder invented the idea of culture as something nations possess — a concept that would shape everything from Romanticism to nationalism to modern anthropology. Three men in one cold city, arguing about what it means to be human.