Kant was sort of a dumbass

When you think about it, he did a lot of harm when he split so-called noumena off from phenomena and threw up a wall between them, claiming with a straight face that on the one hand we can never ever know a noumena (unless it "becomes phenomena" through the invention of microscopes, lol) or even if noumena exist, while on the other hand saying life only has meaning because we act as if noumena exist-- "God", morality and freedom and all that.

So basically Kant decided to eternally mystify the deeper dimensions of human consciousness and meaning, saying we can't know them or even if they exist but also saying we need to just act as if they exist... and he literally believed this was philosophy. Yeah, he doesn't actually believe in philosophy. Hegel is infinitely superior, since Hegel just laughs at Kant for doing all this.

Kant did do some nice work refining some concepts and terms, he made philosophical language a little more possibly precise going forward in the future, so that's nice. Kant was a true genius who lived just before his time-- he lived and died before Darwin, which is a massive tragedy. He didn't know how humans (could be) related everything else non-human, and he was living at a time when the whole nonsense of "empiricism versus rationalism" was taken seriously. Poor guy.


My limited experience with women philosophers seems to indicate they have a strongly natural affinity for Kant's type of 'philosophy'. Of course that could just be generalizing.

According to this girl I know and am talking to sometimes, Hegel misunderstood Kant because Hegel thought you could relate subject and object, or that there is no noumena/phenomena distinction... lol. She claimed that Kant relates noumena to phenomena but she's hasn't shown me how yet. She is actually really a smart person, with a rare passion for thinking for its own sake and for exploring ideas objectively. She also doesn't like feminism very much, so she is clearly noble.

The problem with Kant and why I want to relate this to "female philosophizing" even though I risk an ugly generalization here, is that he/they try to have it both ways: we can't know X, or even if X, but we also must act in terms of X or in terms of the assumption of X's existing. What gets thrown into the categorical basket of the X? God, freedom, morality, anything we can't presently "see" but apparently "means something". So when you analyze Kantian method you realize it doesn't actually believe in the possibility and potential of thinking... which explains why in CPR Kant uses intricate possibly philosophical language to basically just talk about sense perception and some epistemology. It all pretty much reduces to the perceptibly, physical "what we can see" and the reason for this is that Kant takes an inward glance at his own thinking and decided to understand and define this thinking in terms of that glance he took, as pure image. "If I can't see it then it doesn't exist" is the very strange logic used by Kant to dismiss the very possibility of philosophy itself, namely "metaphysics" ("ontology"). Analytic philosophy comes from this, but I guess even this is just a daemonic polarization revealing a certain excess-range. Not that Kant would have been capable of understanding that, of course. Too bad he wasn't born about 50 years later.

To be absolutely clear about Kant:

He lived before Darwin. He did not know about the evolution of species, or natural selection, much less about genetics.

This seems to have defined him.

Capable wrote:

To be absolutely clear about Kant:

He lived before Darwin. He did not know about the evolution of species, or natural selection, much less about genetics.

This seems to have defined him.

Seems to me you are saying he didn't "know" anything.

(I have never read him so I can't pass judgement.)

They couldn't have known about evolution of species and natural selection before Darwin. Imagine not knowing that, you have no concept at all that a human uses to be an ape, that all life used to be a different species... you would intuitively think everything was separate, you might, if you were a philosopher, even come up with the idea there is an absolute ontological or epistemological divide separating things, called "phenomena and noumena"... lol.

Yeah, you are correct. I can't fault folks for not knowing things before they learned things.

Sisyphus wrote:

Yeah, you are correct.  I can't fault folks for not knowing things before they learned things.

Right, I'm not faulting Kant at all. As I said, he was a genius who happened to be born about 50 years before his proper time.

I wish I could have read him as he is referenced by many people. It's just that the first work of his that I pick up in the prelude he stated something like, "You must accept everything I say or you cannot accept any of it." I put the book down and never have been inspired to try again.

Sisyphus wrote:

I wish I could have read him as he is referenced by many people.  It's just that the first work of his that I pick up in the prelude he stated something like, "You must accept everything I say or you cannot accept any of it."  I put the book down and never have been inspired to try again.

Haha, yeah.

Second formulation of the CI holds up, namely that we must always treat people as ends rather than as means. This is rational in the highest sense.

What about the first formulation of CI? "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law".

This also holds, but only if we have a properly deep understanding of what "act" means, namely what we are doing and how/why we are doing it. I think most people get confused at this point, and even Kant doesn't seem to have been deep enough for his own idea here.

The act must be universalizable in the way Kant talked about in the first CI, but this universalization includes the reasons behind the act, its causes and its effects; it does not simply include the simplistic view of the act itself in isolation, as if reasons as causes and effects did not apply. The easy example is lying: for Kant, lying is always bad, regardless of the reasons (causes and effects of a specific act of lying), but this is only because he isn't thinking deep enough into what it means to lie and why we might lie. The formalization of "lie" as "speak an untruth" blinds Kant and prevents him from seeing that there are hierarchies of values within the good, within reason itself, and at times it may be necessary to speak an untruth in order to act in accordance with a value that is higher up within the hierarchy than is the value of speaking the truth in general (formal condition).

It is indeed rational (true) that it is good to speak the truth and bad to speak the untruth. But this is the general formulation, a formal condition, and does not admit of specific contexts as reasons (causes and effects), which means that this formulation actually cuts out the act in question from the universe and sets it upon an examination table, attempting to dissect it and pass judgment. This is going to lead to errors since the act has been taken out of the universe, and is now seen artificially in isolation.

Is it wrong to lie to the Nazis that of course you do not have any Jewish people hiding in your basement, or must we with Kant say that you must be honest and tell the Nazis that there are indeed Jewish people hiding in the basement, but then add that of course it is wrong for the Nazis to kill them? Does Kant really expect the Nazis to be convinced of this truth?

Here is the deeper formulation of the first CI, the one that Kant should have said:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law in terms of the reasons for the act, its known causes and effects, being in accordance with reason itself as with the good, in the greatest sense of being deliberately in accordance with the highest possible value given all various values relevant to the act itself and to the context of the act.

I've still not been inspired to read him.

Kant makes the common mistake, rather sublimely idiotic but no less common, of approaching morality through semantic reason, which is, as we now know all too well, a function of a mans value-systems and structures.

Reading Kant is like watching a cat chase its tail, but less fun, as Kant seems not to have any fun doing it.

Kants argument:

-There is absolute morality, because I am called "Emmanuel" and I say so.
-This morality is what I want it to be.
-Reason is only reason if it amounts in this morality.
-Let us discover what kind of string of words suggests that we end up at this morality.
-Blah, blah. Therefore: morality = "blah".

Morality is based on reason, on our ability to understand rational principles that give access to greater truths, more comprehensive and consistent scopes of understanding reality. This is as close to "absolute" as morality gets, namely the fact that as such and such sort of beings we participate in this rational capacity capable of understanding certain logical conditions and necessities.

Because we are this sort of being that we are, we are able to understand something like the principle of commensurability namely "you are like me, why I desire or want is also the case for you", which leads to understanding that another is alike to ourselves, which leads to the understanding that certain desires and wants/needs are larger than simply "for ourselves". "Do unto others as we wish done to ourselves" flows from this.

And the principle that suffering is bad, generally speaking, all things considered, and that because this is true for us it is also true for other beings that are sufficiently alike to us. Again, these are just basic and irrefutable rational ideas, facts, which act as the basis of morality.

Kant tries to articulate these in a sufficient and necessary manner, but yes it can be argued he doesn't go far enough. Yet the attempt is noble.