KANT MADE SIMPLE. PART I.

Coming now to philosophy proper, which became Kant’s preoccupation in his later years, and on account of which he achieved everlasting fame (as I said before, I wish he were better honored as a great scientist and a humanitarian political philosopher), it is so impossibly complicated to start with, so heavily complicated in fact, that, had it been easier to read and comprehend, its fatal flaws could instantly have been exposed.

This reminds me of a little personal experience, when, as a student of Moscow University, I was defending my solution to a humongous mathematical problem, to the scourge of all students, Yuri Shikhanovich, who loved torturing his victims with such impossibly difficult problems, until, after many hours, even days, they would finally recognize their pathetic worthlessness, and accept a passing grade from him as a gift from heaven. In my case, I managed, through my inspired solution, to complicate the problem to such an extent, that Shikhanovich was no longer able to follow my line, and, as soon as I presented him with my shaky and thoroughly illegitimate quod erat demonstrandum, he nervously awarded me with the extreme rarity, an A, and dismissed me with an honest admission that, even if my solution was wrong, as he strongly suspected, I still get the top mark from him for its construction.

I think that this personal anecdote goes straight to the heart of Kant’s philosophy, making its complicated appraisal plain and simple. To use Shikhanovich’s words, as a general theory, it must have been false, but it deserved the highest praise for its construction!

So, here is my general comment on Kant, on other great philosophers, and on philosophy in general.--- The greatness of the greatest philosophers, like Kant, is not in their success at creating valid general theories, in which task they all somehow tend to fail rather miserably, but in asking the right questions that go into the depth of concepts.

Nietzsche argues, in Mixed Opinions and Maxims (201).

 

“Philosophers’ error. The philosopher supposes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure; but posterity finds its value in the stone which he used for building and which is used many more times after that, for building better. Thus, it finds value in the fact that the structure can be destroyed and nevertheless retains value as building material.”

Which coincides with my thought expressed on numerous occasions, including the one above, about Kant, that the greatness of philosophers is not in building general theories and not in answering general questions, but in creating a world of inquiry (remember that in every created world the truth resides not according to fact, but only according to the method, and remains to be the truth as long as it stays within its boundaries and does not intrude into any other created reality), where general questions can be raised to be answered in specific applications by the contemporaries or by the succeeding generations. Here is by the way a new turn to the old thought of mine: concepts are questions and answers are applications!

Another line of thinking is the difference between original thinkers and scientists, which was developed in my comments on one of the larger sections of Nietzsche’s Jenseits. Free thinkers are always more random, less knowledgeable, and extremely disorganized. The other kind have excellent grades in wherever the free thinkers have failed, but Nietzsche brands them as mediocre minds and mediocre spirits.

Needless to say, we will be taking a closer look at Kant’s bogus, but priceless, epistemological labor, in our very next entry, and at his peculiar treatment of space and time, in the one after that, but for the remainder of the present entry we shall deal with such aspects of his philosophy, which do not even need to be “made simple” because they are simple enough to understand and appreciate. They are Kant’s ethics and political philosophy.

End of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.