Book Review: His Father Spelled It 'Cant'

I have recently been dabbling once again in the ingestion of philosophical classics. Lugging my gargantuan intellect through the labyrinthine works of the German giant, Immanuel Kant, has brought me to this conclusion: I wish he was still alive so I could tell him to get over himself. What audacious disrespect Kant showed for those who had philosophised before him, by disregarding the established terms of metaphysics and creating his own, intractable terminology. Did he never pause to consider his predecessors? Did he think that the Greeks, early Medieval thinkers, and Scholastics slogged through dense philosophical problems and laboured during drastically less stable times just to have their terminology disregarded by some snotty-nosed, university-residing, dilettante (Kant hardly ever left his home town of Königsberg, yet thought himself eligible to teach geography), who no doubt took the printing press and more relaxed censorship for granted?

Kant must have been one of those terrible people who never listen to other interlocutors in a conversation. We can imagine him apathetically sifting through philosophical classics, muttering the incantations of an uninterested listener. “Yeah. Yeah. Sure.” he says nonchalantly to Aristotle’s Metaphysics; “Hmm. Yeah, Very good.” he assures Descartes’s Meditations with a bored voice, paying attention only to the sentences forming in his mind.

Hume provoked him enough to write his Critique of Pure Reason, a provocation Kant refers to as being awoken from his “dogmatic slumbers”. If Kant was honest, however, he would have told us that the Scotsman awoke him from his mid-conversational slumbers. Hume, Leibniz, and other empiricists and rationalists may have formed the backdrop to Kant’s philosophy, but, while he may have stooped to reference them, he wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying. He slipped into dialogue with his predecessors, with the philosophical equivalent of a disingenuous ‘As you were saying…’ and then proceeded on a merry tangent of his own fashioning.

Events took a turn for the worse with the completion of his second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. With the spectacular success of his first Critique, Kant created another monstrosity, a sequel, as though philosophical works were Hollywood movies. By this time, he had fallen madly in love with the sound of his own voice. Having rejected any arguments for the existence of God in his first Critique, Kant then presents us with a dire argument for believing in God in his second. Over the course of the two books, Kant dismisses that God can be inferred by the need for a first cause in the chain of events in our universe, rejects the notion of God as the supporting structure of existence itself, and argues against the suggestion that God can be inferred from the seemly ordered design of the universe. What does he replace these ideas with? In short: God exists because I, as a good person, deserve him to exist, so he can reward me. What incredibly mediocre nonsense! It’s obvious that Kant wasn’t listening to the complex arguments being posited, assuming them to be inferior to his own, allowing him to gargle out something so simplistic and lame that it boarders on the level of New Age philosophy. If Kant was able to give credence or credit to anyone but himself, he would have quickly realised that the game had moved on to a more advanced level.

Kant’s third Critique pertains to aesthetics. I will spare both myself and my readers any suffering, by avoiding details in explaining this work. By now you have surmised, as I have long since surmised, that Herr Kant was a dilettantish, opinionated lowlife. Having suffered his careless ramblings on epistemology and ethics, nobody wants to know his thoughts on what is beautiful and artistic. One can imagine that even a naked John Lennon would cringe at such drivel.

I would usually encourage you to read a primary source to verify my interpretation, but in this instance I warn you to keep a safe distance away. A mere glance the table of contents of The Critique of Pure Reason is enough to make your brain drip out your ears. It’s a dense briar patch of esoteric terms, aligned in to sentences that mangle any attempt at comprehension (e.g. The Principal of Synthetic Unity of Apperception is the Highest Principal of All Employment of the Understanding).

I sincerely doubt that anyone has actually read any of Kant’s three Critiques, especially the first one. No doubt, through tedious conversations with and excruciating lectures from the author himself, students apprehended a gist of the philosophical mammoths, and this has survived to inform our modern interpretation. The Critiques remain unread, and academics, trapped in web of fear and deceit, pretend to have conquered them. In the silent, self-regulating conspiracy, they suspect they are not alone in their lies, but fear bringing the problem into the open. And how could they anyway? Nobody is qualified to give an exegesis. Translator have undoubtedly translated word by word and (where Kant was merciful) sentence by sentence. One suspects that if you ran passages of Kant’s work through the context-free Google Translate, you would get virtually the same text that we find in our translated editions of his books.

In 1804, Kant passed away. Alas, I cannot even visit his tomb in Königsberg, to tell him in a gentle, whispering voice to get over himself, as his remains were stolen in 1950. It hardly seems a worthwhile theft. Kant’s dense skull must have weighed a ton (as evidenced by the portraits of his bowing head). The only things of less value have decayed from existence; his interconnected ears and his sentence mangling brain.