I studied the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in college fifty years ago, and though I haven’t read much of Kant since then, I remain a Kantian. And this calls for some explaining.
I came to Kant late, but in a big way. In the spring semester of my senior year, while reading Joyce’s Ulysses and a number of other novels for a modern literature seminar, I arranged with some friends – fellow philosophy majors – for a special Kant seminar, led by one of our professors. The professor, subsequently a longtime friend, agreed to take it on, and we met in his studio office a dozen or so times that spring to read the great philosopher. Not all his works, which would have been impossible, but most of the major “first” critique – the Critique of Pure Reason – and also the “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics” a kind of prequel to the the former massive tome.
I had read Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” in an ethics class a few years earlier, but that difficult work didn’t really open up Kant’s worldview to me. The Critique of Pure Reason did – and it was a worldview I shared.
Ever since, I’ve considered myself a Kantian, even if I couldn’t name all of the twelve Kantian categories or much of the nuts and bolts. What I discovered was that, if I couldn’t play Kant by ear, I could hum his ideas – and so, for that matter, could anyone else with a head for philosophy.
Kant’s prose, especially in the first Critique (the others are the Critique of Practical Reason, about morals, and the Critique of Judgment, about aesthetics) is extremely difficult to penetrate. For some people, that’s a deal-breaker. Only Hegel, in my experience, is harder to read. But I found that if you start with some philosophical curiosity and penetrate the work just enough, the broader outlines come into view. You recognize its power, which invariably can be reduced, simplified, and stated in more accessible terms.
That is what drew me to Kant: the sense that a deeply compelling, common-sensical view of the world lay semi-hidden within the dense thickets of his prose.
That Kant himself didn’t do himself is (and here I understate) regrettable. Even philosopher lament his extremely turgid and abstract style (but what is philosophy if it isn’t abstract? Something to share with your bartender.) Yet he managed to join the select pantheon of truly great and original philosophers.
All great philosophers are, by definition, somehow original; but true originality in the field is rare, and there are only so many ways to achieve it. That is why a dozen or so philosophers stand head and shoulders above all the rest: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein, and a few others of your choosing.)
So, what is the Kantian “tune,” the core of common sense inside his intimidating symphonic oeuvre? First, it is his total focus on reason – on clear distinctions and connections and rules for thinking, although these are never succinctly defined. They come through the prose as if by osmosis, rather than in select statements that one can quote. Second, just as important, there is the implicit acknowledgement in Kant’s rationalism that empiricism – the rival view of knowledge that focuses on sense perception – is not wrong, but simply inadequate. As ultra-rationalist as it is, Kant’s theory explains how we process sense perceptions, not how we can learn or know without them. So it is really a grand synthesis of the rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza with the empiricism of Locke, Hume, and others.
There’s another way of describing my Kantian leaning, but I think it’s really a different perspective on that implicit synthesis. It can be explained in non-Kantian language as follows: we have certain capacities for reason in our minds, which we all more or less share, although some of us have more interest or capacity in that regard. And we interpret the world around us, processing our sense data using those rational faculties. But it is not a simple interface. And at heart, that interface of reason and experience is what Kant is all about.
In fact, the best way to understand him is to imagine or postulate a third space between the mind and the world. In that intermediate realm, one can understand the Kantian magic as taking place: the blending of reason and sense data that leads to what we call knowledge of the world. It’s all about the fact that they invariably blend, and how exactly they blend.
This is of course a very simplified, schematic overlay on Kant’s theory of the mind-and-the-world. But I don’t think it’s misleading; and to understand such a theory is – almost necessarily –- to simplify it, identifying its essential features. The same goes for Plato, Hegel, Marx, and all the rest. We learn, ultimately, by simplifying, and then re-complicating.
I could say more about Kant’s theory, but it might lead me astray. For example, his idea of synthetic a priori truth – truths that are both necessary and empirical rather than merely logical -- is one of the most fascinating parts of his oeuvre. What is universally true of the world of human experience? It depends, in part, on how we define “necessary” and “the world” – and that’s not just splitting hairs. But I can’t be my father’s father. I can’t fly without the help of machines; I can’t live forever. These are a few of the universal truths of experience, the third intermediate category between what is logically or mathematically true and what is empirically true in the here-and-now.
Another thing is true for me. The post-Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy of Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein, and others has much to offer; but I don’t think any of it is irreconcilable with holding on to the essential Kantian framework, where reason and experience relax their dichotomy and play – endlessly – with one another.
I also read Hegel and Marx in college, and found them profoundly interesting. Much later in life, I finally discovered Wittgenstein, whose later (posthumous) work has enchanted me. But in no case did I feel I had to give up humming the Kantian tune. It’s an anthem for intellectual clarity and precision, for the analytic distinctions and connections we need to make – and the connections that distinctions obscure, and vice-versa – that form and illuminate a critical mind.