“What can I know? What should I know? What may I hope for? What is the human being?” are four questions the German philosopher Immanuel Kant asked around the year 1800. Those questions, considered essential to human existence, were recently incorporated into an art project produced by the German artist, Roland Kreuzer. It consisted of displaying the questions in seven different languages against a yellow background and posting them throughout Beirut, including AUB campus, then holding a related symposium on October 13 at Masrah al Madinah in Beirut. The rotating art project, known as the “Weltfragen” or questions to people, also took place in various European cities, with Beirut as the first Middle Eastern city to be included. It was financed by the Foreign Office of Germany, the Heinrich Böel Foundation, Siemens IT Company, Züblin Construction Company, and Saphir Computer Company, with the “ideological help” of the Goethe Institute and Kunst ist gut eV, an assisting association that has been founded to support art projects. Along with a number of intellectuals from universities in Lebanon, AUB Assistant Professor of Philosophy Richard C. Dean participated in the “Weltfragen” symposium. On his part, Dean posed a fifth possible Kantian question: “What will I do?” He explained how “the non-moral question ‘what will I do now?’ is more fundamental to Kant’s philosophy than the moral sense of ‘What should I do?’” He added that the reason why ‘What will I do?’ is more basic than ‘What should I do?’ is because “we are absolutely and unavoidably stuck with the question itself. We can not help but ask it, and it turns out that the fact that we cannot avoid this question tells us that we should think whether there’s any answer at all to ‘What should I do?’” Professor Dean proceeded to explain “how Kant thinks being stuck with the question ‘what will I do?’ leads to the conclusion that moral questions have an answer.” He does that by showing first that we cannot avoid engaging in the activity of deciding what to do; subsequently he shows that according to Kant we have freedom to choose between different choices. Finally, according to Professor Dean, Kant would say that “if you accept the idea of free choice, you also must think that moral principles apply to you.”
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