The Only Use

Immanuel Kant
in
The Great Gatsby
(Edited)

There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour.
p. 88.4

Kant = famous Enlightenment philosopher who criticized proofs of God, but believed God's existence should be assumed (1724-1804)

Definitions:

(1) (Immanuel Kant)
German Enlightenment philosopher who argued that our minds shape how we experience the world and that true morality must follow a strict inner duty (the categorical imperative) (1724–1804)

Key Ideas

Bridging Reason and Experience: Kant tried to settle the long debate between rationalists (who trusted pure reason) and empiricists (who trusted sensory experience). He argued that experience gives us the raw material of knowledge, while the mind organizes it to make universal knowledge (like mathematics) possible.

Limits of Knowledge: In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant concluded that we cannot know reality as it truly is. We can only know things as they appear to us through our mind's filter.

Ethics: The Moral Law: Kant's ethics centered on the Categorical Imperative—an unconditional moral command to act only on principles we would want everyone to follow, and always treat people as ends in themselves, not just as means to an end.

Moral Faith: Kant rejected proofs of God's existence, but argued that moral reason pushes to accept God, free will, and afterlife as real in a practical sense, even though they remain matters of faith rather than knowledge.
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
Much less commonly, Kant can refer to other people, places, and things with that name.