Such exquisite, beautiful writing. Professor Stock has that very rare, exceptional gift of producing prose so captivating, yet dense (because it’s articulating complex *stuff*) that it flatters the reader into feeling that he is following the argument, is master of all this complex stuff … until the essay is concluded. When the understanding vanishes, like water through cupped fingers. That’s not a criticism! Because her essay gave me a glimpse into a hall otherwise locked to my reason.
I did read Hume a long time ago and felt as depressed as Kant at his conclusion, that effect would struggle to infer cause. But when Professor Stock says “Faced with the creeping fear that there could be no free will in Newton’s mechanistic universe, Kant then leaned upon his own picture of the physical world as a realm of partly mind-constructed appearances, and placed the free, unmoved-yet-moving self safely in a separate realm beyond it” … is there a shade of Platonic thinking here? Realm of the pure forms, including the *self* (or only the self?) outside the cave?
Dr E C
10 days ago
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of using Kant’s thought against him, modern-day progressive academics did some thinking of their own?
Colorado UnHerd
11 days ago
This was a little esoteric for my wee brain, but I always learn from reading Kathleen Stock. To that end, I was willing to look up “demimondaine,” a delightful word, though I’ll have trouble working it into conversation. Conversely, I’ll decline to investigate Helga Varden’s “cisist,” which Merriam Webster does not recognize, and which I take to mean biased in favor of people who think their bodies are real.
Me and poor old Kant, guilty as charged. But then I was looking for something new to be guilty of (besides ending a sentence with a preposition, a crime I’ve just uncommitted).
“This was a little esoteric for my wee brain.”
I know what you mean, but, for me, the essay was an engaging introduction to the philosophy of Kant.
Maybe K. Stock will write an essay about Friedrich Nietzsche. People seem besotted with him nowadays but I can’t figure out why.
Just a quick pointer, but Nietzsche himself acknowledged (or exhorted, as was his way) any ‘followers’ to stop following and to start to think for themselves. This, as with much else in philsophical discourse – as KS points us towards – can be interpreted to demonstrate both a case and its opposite; for, if you follow Nietzsche’s injunction and try ‘thinking for yourself’ you’re still following!
I think that KS is guilty of being as esoteric here as Kant, even though her suggestions, for they are suggestions not arguments, are easy to follow, at a second read. We are led astray on the first by our own expectations of something other than the obvious from KS. In the end, it is only that a contextual study of Kant will show liberalism today to be more puritanical than conservatism during Kant’s day? That’s Kantian progressivism for you!
My best friend did his PhD on Kantian ethics, and in our circle he is affectionately known as “the Kant”.
Nik Jewell
11 days ago
I would describe myself broadly as a Kantian, both metaphysically and morally. I did my final-year dissertation on his Transcendental Aesthetic, and I am one of the few people to have read the first Critique cover to cover. Before I finished my PhD, my first teaching job was teaching the first Critique (an arduous and terrifying experience!).
I left the academy 18 years ago, fortunately before modern social justice thinking had taken hold and in my day nobody commented on Kant’s reactionary views, nor am I aware of modern attempts to rescue Kant from them. That was simply not the sort of philosophy people did in my day.
When I read Kehinde Andrews’ attack on the Enlightenment, singling out Kant in particular, in The New Age of Empire, I both learnt things about Kant I had never known and found myself utterly unmoved by Andrews’ stinging criticisms, achieved by judging him by 21st-century mores. Nor did I find any need to rescue Kant from his reactionary views. Context is everything here.
Exactly right. 20 ish years ago, in British universities at least, it was seen as _unacademic_ to take writers & thinkers out of their historical context. How I miss those (sane) days.
Mr Tyler
11 days ago
The Doc needs to check the Kantian defence of Nazism as delivered by the anti-hero of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones – roughly, to freely will the will of the Fuhrer as a universal law.
Paul MacDonnell
11 days ago
Kathleen Stock is always good.
AC Harper
11 days ago
In some sense one hand washes the other. Kant tried to explain the society he lived in by rational thought. Others, generations later, try to apply his rational thought to the society they live in.
Few properly investigate the generational gap. It’s usually simplified into a list of technological changes or political developments ‘since then’. But ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ People really had a different set of attitudes, they lived different lives.
So my question is – if Kant was magically or technologically reborn in the present would he still hold the same philosophy or would it be modified by the new circumstances he found himself in?
Tyler Durden
11 days ago
Kant has been reclaimed by the Left as supporting the French revolution and therefore being an anti-Enlightenment philosopher who would get on with Foucault.
But he would have hated the woke progressives today. His philosophy connected Christian ethics with the aesthetic and rational structures of human thought, and did so by cutting away the edicts of the Bible or any Cartesian metaphysical manoeuvres.
In contrast, the Left today simply go along with the principles of this or church of Satan- Anton LaVey’s church in San Francisco, to give you one. They are also theistic but take their metaphysics to be justified by radical Islam.
Jeff Cunningham
11 days ago
Am I the only person who _hates_ those interspersed giant-font article quotes that keep interrupting the flow of these articles?
Well, hate is a strong word but I do go along with your sentiment. These interruptions are maybe even more egregious when the article concerns a difficult subject.
Especially since when you are reading the article, you have generally just read them.
Presumably the intention is to attract eyeballs. But a single one at the top might work better.
Yes, but not as much as I hate the advertising that has just started to appear throughout the articles. Always disappointing when you also pay a subscription.
Alex Lekas
11 days ago
we are better off going back to the extremely rich source material directly, and trying to see it in its proper historical context — for better or worse. There is no need to mess around with any quasi-religious new adaptions.
Good luck with that. The foundation of the social justice warrior is to judge every person and event of the past and indict the person and event for failing to live by 2024 standards. For every period of enlightenment, there is a corresponding dark age. People can make their own determination as to which we are currently in.
David Morley
11 days ago
An amusing piece, but it gives no hint of why Kant might be considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of all time.
Also, aren’t these more recent thinkers simply making reference to Kant because he is considered to be one of the big guns in philosophy? Previously they did the same with Heidegger – in spite of his nazi associations.
And could this be because their ideas simply don’t stand up on their own – so they need a big prop!
0 0
9 days ago
Kant established the test of universalisability in all domains of philosophical critique. To point out that can be used to interrogate his own background underlines the power of this achievement as well as the limitations of his predilections.
Those who’d lay claim to Kant’s heritage today would do well to remember that. Exposing the specious universality of. Eurocentric presuppositions is a Kantian thing to do. Identity politics of any kind is something else.
Samantha Stevens
9 days ago
Took me straight back to epistemology sophomore year at Fordham. Thank you Dr Stock. Always a pleasure. The phrase Categorical Imperative has popped in my head though the meaning is now musty.
Christopher Chantrill
9 days ago
I’m a fan of Sen. Iselin, and he says make it Real Simple.
So, for me, Kant means that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances.
So all our knowledge is theorizing about appearances. I say that Kant points directly to Einstein, do not pass go.
But then Schopenhauer said that things-in-themselves is wrong. It’s probably just thing-in-itself.
Think about it. If we can’t know things-in-themselves then we cannot know if we are talking about things or thing.
And Popper said that a scientific theory — a narrative about things-in-themselves — is good until “falsified.”
E.g., Newtonian mechanics is good until falsified by relativity and quantum mechanics.
That’s all folks!
C Ross
4 days ago
Well, Kant is the best of a bad modern bunch and provides an extraordinarily elegant attempt to save the enlightenment and the extraordinary inelegant mechanical philosophy of the early moderns. There is much for the kids to learn from him (especially his clever representation of Cicero’s scepticism and Stoicism in ethics and his attempt to produce a secularised Christianity). However, if time is short and initiative lacking, it would be best they go round Kant and his neo-Hellenism, back to Aristotle, the various Platonisms and the presocratics.Much healthier, deeper, saner, wiser, all round.
Such exquisite, beautiful writing. Professor Stock has that very rare, exceptional gift of producing prose so captivating, yet dense (because it’s articulating complex *stuff*) that it flatters the reader into feeling that he is following the argument, is master of all this complex stuff … until the essay is concluded. When the understanding vanishes, like water through cupped fingers. That’s not a criticism! Because her essay gave me a glimpse into a hall otherwise locked to my reason.
I did read Hume a long time ago and felt as depressed as Kant at his conclusion, that effect would struggle to infer cause. But when Professor Stock says “Faced with the creeping fear that there could be no free will in Newton’s mechanistic universe, Kant then leaned upon his own picture of the physical world as a realm of partly mind-constructed appearances, and placed the free, unmoved-yet-moving self safely in a separate realm beyond it” … is there a shade of Platonic thinking here? Realm of the pure forms, including the *self* (or only the self?) outside the cave?
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of using Kant’s thought against him, modern-day progressive academics did some thinking of their own?
This was a little esoteric for my wee brain, but I always learn from reading Kathleen Stock. To that end, I was willing to look up “demimondaine,” a delightful word, though I’ll have trouble working it into conversation. Conversely, I’ll decline to investigate Helga Varden’s “cisist,” which Merriam Webster does not recognize, and which I take to mean biased in favor of people who think their bodies are real.
Me and poor old Kant, guilty as charged. But then I was looking for something new to be guilty of (besides ending a sentence with a preposition, a crime I’ve just uncommitted).
I believe that “cisist” simply means to do something; it’s what you’re supposed to stop doing when you get a “cease and decisist” letter.
Whatever it means, it’s a godawful ugly word.
I think that is it’s point.
“This was a little esoteric for my wee brain.”
I know what you mean, but, for me, the essay was an engaging introduction to the philosophy of Kant.
Maybe K. Stock will write an essay about Friedrich Nietzsche. People seem besotted with him nowadays but I can’t figure out why.
Just a quick pointer, but Nietzsche himself acknowledged (or exhorted, as was his way) any ‘followers’ to stop following and to start to think for themselves. This, as with much else in philsophical discourse – as KS points us towards – can be interpreted to demonstrate both a case and its opposite; for, if you follow Nietzsche’s injunction and try ‘thinking for yourself’ you’re still following!
He’s not the messiah he’s just a very naughty boy
Ha ha. Good point.
I think that KS is guilty of being as esoteric here as Kant, even though her suggestions, for they are suggestions not arguments, are easy to follow, at a second read. We are led astray on the first by our own expectations of something other than the obvious from KS. In the end, it is only that a contextual study of Kant will show liberalism today to be more puritanical than conservatism during Kant’s day? That’s Kantian progressivism for you!
perhaps more “morally rigid” would be better. Polyamorous orgies don’t sound especially puritanical – not even if they become compulsory.
I would say “amorally rigid”. No?
in the good old days it could have been philistinism! 🙂
A Demimondaine is a resident of the demi-monde
Ultimately it boils down to this: are you an Immanuel Kant, or an Immanuel Kan?
How about an Immanuel Khan?
I struggled with this. I am more of a Carry On Emmanuel level thinker.
Who is this Kant?
My best friend did his PhD on Kantian ethics, and in our circle he is affectionately known as “the Kant”.
I would describe myself broadly as a Kantian, both metaphysically and morally. I did my final-year dissertation on his Transcendental Aesthetic, and I am one of the few people to have read the first Critique cover to cover. Before I finished my PhD, my first teaching job was teaching the first Critique (an arduous and terrifying experience!).
I left the academy 18 years ago, fortunately before modern social justice thinking had taken hold and in my day nobody commented on Kant’s reactionary views, nor am I aware of modern attempts to rescue Kant from them. That was simply not the sort of philosophy people did in my day.
When I read Kehinde Andrews’ attack on the Enlightenment, singling out Kant in particular, in The New Age of Empire, I both learnt things about Kant I had never known and found myself utterly unmoved by Andrews’ stinging criticisms, achieved by judging him by 21st-century mores. Nor did I find any need to rescue Kant from his reactionary views. Context is everything here.
Thank you!
Exactly right. 20 ish years ago, in British universities at least, it was seen as _unacademic_ to take writers & thinkers out of their historical context. How I miss those (sane) days.
The Doc needs to check the Kantian defence of Nazism as delivered by the anti-hero of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones – roughly, to freely will the will of the Fuhrer as a universal law.
Kathleen Stock is always good.
In some sense one hand washes the other. Kant tried to explain the society he lived in by rational thought. Others, generations later, try to apply his rational thought to the society they live in.
Few properly investigate the generational gap. It’s usually simplified into a list of technological changes or political developments ‘since then’. But ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ People really had a different set of attitudes, they lived different lives.
So my question is – if Kant was magically or technologically reborn in the present would he still hold the same philosophy or would it be modified by the new circumstances he found himself in?
Kant has been reclaimed by the Left as supporting the French revolution and therefore being an anti-Enlightenment philosopher who would get on with Foucault.
But he would have hated the woke progressives today. His philosophy connected Christian ethics with the aesthetic and rational structures of human thought, and did so by cutting away the edicts of the Bible or any Cartesian metaphysical manoeuvres.
In contrast, the Left today simply go along with the principles of this or church of Satan- Anton LaVey’s church in San Francisco, to give you one. They are also theistic but take their metaphysics to be justified by radical Islam.
Am I the only person who _hates_ those interspersed giant-font article quotes that keep interrupting the flow of these articles?
Well, hate is a strong word but I do go along with your sentiment. These interruptions are maybe even more egregious when the article concerns a difficult subject.
Especially since when you are reading the article, you have generally just read them.
Presumably the intention is to attract eyeballs. But a single one at the top might work better.
Yes, but not as much as I hate the advertising that has just started to appear throughout the articles. Always disappointing when you also pay a subscription.
we are better off going back to the extremely rich source material directly, and trying to see it in its proper historical context — for better or worse. There is no need to mess around with any quasi-religious new adaptions.
Good luck with that. The foundation of the social justice warrior is to judge every person and event of the past and indict the person and event for failing to live by 2024 standards. For every period of enlightenment, there is a corresponding dark age. People can make their own determination as to which we are currently in.
An amusing piece, but it gives no hint of why Kant might be considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of all time.
Also, aren’t these more recent thinkers simply making reference to Kant because he is considered to be one of the big guns in philosophy? Previously they did the same with Heidegger – in spite of his nazi associations.
And could this be because their ideas simply don’t stand up on their own – so they need a big prop!
Kant established the test of universalisability in all domains of philosophical critique. To point out that can be used to interrogate his own background underlines the power of this achievement as well as the limitations of his predilections.
Those who’d lay claim to Kant’s heritage today would do well to remember that. Exposing the specious universality of. Eurocentric presuppositions is a Kantian thing to do. Identity politics of any kind is something else.
Took me straight back to epistemology sophomore year at Fordham. Thank you Dr Stock. Always a pleasure. The phrase Categorical Imperative has popped in my head though the meaning is now musty.
I’m a fan of Sen. Iselin, and he says make it Real Simple.
So, for me, Kant means that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances.
So all our knowledge is theorizing about appearances. I say that Kant points directly to Einstein, do not pass go.
But then Schopenhauer said that things-in-themselves is wrong. It’s probably just thing-in-itself.
Think about it. If we can’t know things-in-themselves then we cannot know if we are talking about things or thing.
And Popper said that a scientific theory — a narrative about things-in-themselves — is good until “falsified.”
E.g., Newtonian mechanics is good until falsified by relativity and quantum mechanics.
That’s all folks!
Well, Kant is the best of a bad modern bunch and provides an extraordinarily elegant attempt to save the enlightenment and the extraordinary inelegant mechanical philosophy of the early moderns. There is much for the kids to learn from him (especially his clever representation of Cicero’s scepticism and Stoicism in ethics and his attempt to produce a secularised Christianity). However, if time is short and initiative lacking, it would be best they go round Kant and his neo-Hellenism, back to Aristotle, the various Platonisms and the presocratics.Much healthier, deeper, saner, wiser, all round.