Making sense of Kant

"The vocabulary and the history of the period in which an author works constitute the whole within which his texts must be understood with all their peculiarities" (432). -Schleiermacher

Kant is a headache to read.  His subject-matter is difficult, his reasoning is often unclear, and his style is...dense.  I do not pretend to be an expert on Kant.  I think even most experts don't pretend to be experts on Kant.  However, what IS nice about Kant is that he's systematic and rigorous.  He might be more technical than other difficult thinkers, such as Hegel, but ultimately Kant is usually very explicit about what he believes.  What's not always clear about Kant is why he believes the things that he does.

Basically, there are two factors going on, here; these are what I was getting at in my introduction.  First, there's the fact that Kant is very moderate (employing a lot of common-sense principles).  Second, there's the backstory.

The latter is pretty crucial to understanding Kant.  Core 250 is pretty good at establishing what happened, but I'd like to try and connect things.  First, here's a really short history of intellectual thought.  It's pretty bare-bones, but for now, that's all we really need.  Bear with me:

1. Pre-Socratic
1. Heraclitus: believed that the world was made up of fire (representing "change," or "strife").  Any permanence was merely an illusion constituted by two equal forces working in opposition.
2. Parmenides: gave a rational argument showing that change was impossible.  Most people know people through his student, Zeno (the guy with all the paradoxes: e.g. Achilles and the Tortoise).  Just about everyone was convinced by these arguments.
2. Ancient
1. Plato: the first great synthesizer.  Took Heraclitus's notion of change and synthesized it with Parmenides's notion of permanence.  Parmenides's "reality" became the world of the Forms (the world of Being, which was unchanging, permanent, ideal) and Heraclitus's "reality" became the material world (the world of Becoming, which was changing, impermanent, and flawed).
2. Aristotle: took (what was now) Plato's concept of the Form and took it out of the heavens, where he placed it "within" particular things.  Hence the "universal in the particular."
3. Hellenistic
1. Pseudo-Longinus: developed the first concept of the sublime
2. Pyrrho: a skeptic.  In particular, he was skeptical of the dogmatism of the Acadamy and other schools of the period.
4. Medieval
1. Plotinus: developed neo-Platonism, which is basically Plato + God and a bunch of mystic crap.  For real.  Quick backstory: Plato's Acadamy was shut down in 529 AD by the emperor Justinian, basically so Justinian could collect an 800-year-old endowment ($$$).  What that meant was that Plato (and Aristotle too, for other reasons) only survived through their ideas, rather than their works, for about 600 years.  So the early medievals got a lot of their Plato through people like Plotinus.  Later medievals, like Maimonides and Aquinas, had renewed access to a lot of ancient texts.
2. Augustine: neo-Platonist turned Christian.  Influenced Aquinas.
3. Maimonides: applied some of Aristotle's terminology to literary criticism (for example, the Aristotelian concept of genus and species, p. 168, second paragraph).  He's important here because of his influence upon Aquinas.
4. Aquinas: Aristotle + Jesus.  The second of the great synthesizers.  Proposed a notion of authorial intent.
5. John Duns Scotus: was a realist, meaning that he believed in universal.  Scotus engaged in a pretty furious metaphysical debate with William of Ockham (a nominalist, meaning that he didn't believe in universals).  Scotus lost, badly.  After this argument, people pretty much came to the conclusion that metaphysics had become too dense, convoluted, and unpractical.  Philosophers after this point focused more on ethics and the sciences.
5. Renaissance - Europe received a surge of ancient texts, resulting in a revival of the ancients.
1. Montaigne: a skeptic heavily influenced by Pyrrho
6. Modern
1.  Francis Bacon: was annoyed with the authority that ancient texts had, and also hated the debate about universals (see: Scotus/Ockham).  He wanted a science, and most importantly, he wanted a pragmatic, or useful, science.
2. Descartes: a dualist who wanted to establish knowledge or certainty (i.e. mathematical certainty), particularly the sciences, but in philosophy, as well.  That's why he was so intent on doubting everything that could be doubted: he really wanted to find something he could be certain of.  What he found was "cogito ergo sum," or "I think, therefore, I exist."  From there, Descartes tried to prove God's existence, as well as the existence of an external reality.
3. Berkley/Locke/Hume: British empiricists.  Britain was characterized by empiricist philosophers; the mainland ("continental") was characterized by rationalist philosophers.  Rationalists use reason as a source of rationalization or justification, while empiricists use experience.  Hume especially is going to react against the dualism of Descartes, as well as the claims to certainty that Descartes makes.
4. Leibniz/Spinoza: Continental rationalists
5. Edmund Burke: developed Longinus's concept of the sublime
6. Kant: the third great synthesizer.  What Plato had done with Heraclitus/Parmenides, Kant did with the British empiricists and continental rationalists: he basically just crammed them together.  Kant postulated that there were two worlds: the noumenal world (made up of "things-in-themselves") and the phenomenal world (made up of our sense-data). This is basically the same thing as Plato, with one important difference: Kant believes that the external (noumenal) world is utterly unknowable.  This is a huge contrast to Plato, who believed the external (Form) world to be the source of all knowledge.

So, why did Kant think the way that he did?  Basically: he was responding to the empiricists, who were responding to the dualism of Descartes, who was responding to the skepticism of Montaigne, who was responding to Pyrrho, who was responding to the Academics, who were responding to Plato.

And Kant was also responding to Burke, who was responding to Pseudo-Longinus, who was responding to Plato.

And Montaigne was ultimately responding to Scotus/Ockham, who were responding to Aquinas, who was responding to Aristotle, who was responding to Plato.

And Aquinas was also responding to Maimonides, who was responding to Aristotle, who was responding to Plato.  Not to mention that Aquinas was ALSO responding to Augustine, who was responding to Plotinus, who was responding to Plato.

And so on.

My point is that philosophy is a conversation.*  These thinkers are speaking and responding to one another.  All of them have biases, friends, and enemies.  Once you look at what those are, even someone like Kant becomes relatively transparent.  You could memorize how he defined things like "gratification" until you were blue in the face; however, even then, you'd really only get a rote understanding of what he thought, rather than why.  Go back to Aristotle, go back to Aquinas, go back to Descartes, and especially go back to Plato. From there, trace the threads of conversation, and you'll have a pretty good idea of why Kant (or anyone else, for that matter) thought the way that they did.

If you can remember the backstory, you've got half of Kant, and you could do the same for any other thinker.  Then just keep in mind his tendency toward moderation and common sense: really, very little of Kant is, conceptually speaking, shocking or radical.  It's mostly just common sense dressed up in difficult (but precise) language.  Finally, remember his preferences for the a priori, reason, and freedom (autonomy).  Honestly, if you do that, you'll be able to anticipate, rather than memorize, what Kant would say on just about anything, even outside of aesthetics.

For example, if you wanted to know his position on animal rights, just go back to the principles.  Here's the argument, laid out according to the terms above:

1. Human beings should be treated as autonomous ends-in-themselves, and never as means, due to the fact that they are rational creatures
2. Animals are not rational creatures, therefore they could be used as means
3. However, as Kant says in a later treatise, "he who treats animals cruelly soon becomes hard in his dealings with men."  In other words, mistreating animals would not only result in us abusing the autonomy of others, but of ourselves, as well, as we would lose our capacities for dealing justly with men.
4. So, we should treat animals well, even though they have no intrinsic rights per se.

Here, Kant saying something pretty reasonable (animals should be treated well).  While his reasoning behind  his premises seems strange, they make a lot of sense when you consider his overall system (i.e. preference for rationality, etc.).  Learn the system, apply the backstory when necessary, and you'll be able to anticipate, rather than have to memorize, the vast majority of what Kant--or any other thinker--actually thinks.  Do that, and the facts, definitions, and terminology will follow.


*My illustrious roommate Jesse Javana has similarly suggested that "philosophy is a giant, age-old thread on Reddit."  If that's the case, then Socrates is the O.T. (Original Troll).