I’d just like to mention that Kant’s thinking really is quite fresh if you read him the right way.
Most of you are asking, in one way or another: is it really is worth the time to learn to read Kant? I can’t answer for you. I can’t even claim I’ve learned to ‘read’ Kant. Becuase there no magic perfect reading that you just ‘arrive’ at. It’s just transcendental empiricism – you have to become equal to the interpretation, you have to rise up to meet it.
Kant makes a lot of metaphysics seem extremely real and concrete. I suggest if you’re interested, then it’s worth it to give it a try and really study it. No pain, no gain: just remember Kant’s worthy. Don’t let him scare you off! It seems real ‘serious’ and ‘gloomy’ at first… but it’s really very joyous! Kant was one of those people whom philosophy made truly happy, and that’s probably the biggest compliment I could really say about him!
Trancendental empiricism is a vague excuse for not admitting one has no idea about physical/mental connections, complementations, etc. Spinoza did so much better. If only he had not labelled the whole God! Kant is not as fresh as my latest turd, which may be smelly, but is more vital!
I don’t like it when people say Kant’s philosophy is just the golden rule, because its not, and he does try to make that explicit. The golden rule says something like do as you would like to be done by, but what the moral law commands you to do has nothing at all to do with how you personally would want to be treated. Your desires to be treated well have nothing to do with anything.
Rather, when we make a moral judgement we can think of ourselves as putting forward a law that holds for all finite rational beings at all times and in all places. The ‘test’ of universalisation has nothing to do with taking your maxim and asking if you’d like a world where your maxim was a universal law, the reason why, to use Kant’s favourite example, you can’t make a maxim about always making false promises a law is more subtle than most people give Kant credit for. Yes, in such a world the institution of promising would be undermined, this consequence isn’t the problem, the problem is that in such a world you could not even will your maxim. You cannot will such a maxim as the maxim would have no content, as false promising is meaningless. The contradiction is not that you can’t achieve the ends you intend to achieve by making a false promise, it is that you can’t even will to.
For me Kant represents the most valiant attempt in philosophical history to reconcile the world of Newtonian science (utterly deterministic) with human freedom. Whatever people may say about Kant, his concept of transcendental freedom is a most wonderful thing. The thing about Kant is that I truly think he is wrong about almost everything, but he is usually wrong for a far more subtle reason than he is given credit for. His moral philosophy is particularly interesting, it is often viewed as a very strict, rigid system, and of course it is, but the fascinating thing is that he wants to keep the moral absolutes of theological morality but put them on a purely rational basis, utterly seperate from God. God is subject to the same moral commands we are (yes, yes there is all the stuff about God, especially in the 2nd critique but what is interesting is how little any of that is actually needed within Kant’s system - for example, in the 2nd Critique the only real value of God in terms of the main argument is to allow for the existence of the highest good, which is a concept seemingly introduced purely for the purpose of proving God’s existence!) Moreover, we may be subject to the moral law completely, but the law is one of reason and as such it is given to us by us - this is what autonomy means. We may be subject to the laws of reason, but we discover (I almost want to say create) and legislate onto ourselves (this is to do with the 2 types of freedom of the will, wille and wilkur) these laws.
I do find Kant’s work fascinating. For anyone starting on him I’d recommend starting with his moral philosophy, the Groundwork (incomprehensible 3rd section apart) is simple enough, and the Critique of Practical Reason isn’t overly complicated. For Kant moral philosophy is the big thing, and if you understand how that works then you are half way there. As for his style, of course its awful, but thats expected. I would like to note though that once you study Kant you become aware of just how difficult it is to explain his ideas in terms that aren’t his own. The real key to understanding Kant is to know the significance of key terms such as autonomy, transcendetal freedom, space and time etc.
Yes, I’ve learnt this much about Kant. It wasn’t long before I had to put the paper down and ask myself if I’m taking some of his terms, like “intuition”, “sensuous”, “analytic” vs. “synthetic”, “conceptions”, for granted. And the really frustrating thing is, for a lot of these terms, he doesn’t bother to formally define them but still goes on to use them in his own very narrow sense.
According to Kaufmann, one of Kant’s contemporaries, a voracious reader, notes that he tried a method for deciphering K.'s monster pararagraphs. The reader began by placing a finger at the end of each fully expressed thought and another finger at the end of the next one. He noted that he ran out of fingers before the paragraph ended. Now that’s more fingering than anybody should have to do in order to understand an idea as written.
Well, maybe it’s like Dickens said, that an idea is a ghost: you have to talk to it for a bit before it will explain itself.
This is a tip for Kant. Talk it out. His arguments are highly reasonable, only sometimes a bit unfamiliar. Believe it or not, anyone interested in expanding their cognitive horizons will find a joyous ally in Kant.
Why should anyone in century 21 want to decipher the bad writing of a philosopher who wanted only to wed philosophy and religion? It can’t be done without selling out philosophy to nonexistent absolutes. I’m glad some find Kant comfortable. I can’t. I’d have to be too nerdish to exist in contemporary society or among persons with diverse ideas in order to swallow such tripe.
Phenomena and noumena provide a false dichotomy fit only for philosophical chess games of win or lose according to whoever has the best strategy. In the real world these are aspects of the internal and external complements of survival.
Read a little current science ( You don’t even have to resort to Darwin’s black box.) and you will find Kant more vapor than substance.
That’s not really a very helpful point about Kant and science. Kant was quite well-versed on the science of his day, making significant contributions in mathematics, astronomy, physics, etc. He’s done as much to shape our modern moral and metaphyiscal worldview than just about any thinker you can imagine – he’s clearly in the pantheon with Hegel, Plato, Nietzsche, Descartes, etc. Kant was a world-class genius of the first rate. It’s funny for you to be denigrating him, and probably one of the most effective ways of ignoring his authority.
I mean, even contempt for Kant is just another opinion about Kant… If you really don’t care about Kant, then why get involved in a discussion about him?
Kant wanted to do a lot more than wed philosophy and religion. He wanted to wed the deterministic science of his day with a quite radical view of human freedom.
Criticising Kant through modern science isn’t exactly fair, of course it all sounds outdated now but he can hardly be held at fault for not incorporating the theory of relativity, or whatever! If you’re going to do that, well, we better forget about Aristotle too.
Read Kaufman’s trilogy, “Discovering the Mind”. The denigration was done long before I latched onto it. Read almost anything in Nietzsche, specifically, “Twilight of the Idols” or “The AntiChrist”. Smarter people than I have considered Kant out to lunch!!!
Of course you can! Just be aware that the path if full of nettles, which writers, more in tune with clarity than Kant was, attempt to disentangle. Nietzsche despised Kant, but you don’t have to take N’s critiques as personally valuable. Do your own read. What you find there may amount more to who you think you are than what you think Kant said. But isn’t that true of any reading? For me, nerds who haven’t really lived, espousing opinions about what living entails, produce irrelevant ideas.