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Philosophy 1: Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel

So I've discovered something about Kant that is worth knowing if you have any interest in trying to mountain climb the Critiques. It was pointed out in a Bryan Magee BBC interview concerning him.

Kant is famously impenetrable. He is one of the most difficult writers, let alone philosophers, to read, perhaps only being less opaque than Heidegger. In the interview the other philosopher notes two things about the Critique of Pure Reason in particular and Kant in general. Kant was already quite old when he started writing it, and he literally wrote like he was running out of time. He was terrified he would die before finishing it so his first goal wasn't clarity or style, it was just getting everything on paper.

The second thing he notes is Kant was writing in German at a time when there was no model for academic German writing. Every significant German intellectual before him had written in Latin. So Kant was not just inventing new terminology, he was also inventing how to write about intellectual matters in general in German.

The ironic thing is Kant's lectures had the reputation of being clear, very engaging and actually funny. So my discovery was reading his Prefaces to the 1781 and 1787 editions. These, written afterwards with some leisure, and with an eye to drawing the reader's interest and good will, are clear as a bell and if not a laugh riot at least congenial and even a little teasing. The Kant I read behind them was, more than anything else, just a nice man. All the "architectonics" (Kant's own terminology about his style, which is a nice preview of the Deep Hurting of reading him) is displaced by a conversational style -- serious, but modest and above all kind-hearted. This is the guy after all who made politics moral by grounding it in human freedom.

So, anyway, if you ever try to read CPR, and I recommend trying it at least because it is staggering genius that maybe only three or four other books in history are, read the prefaces first because I think you will like the author. My translations were by F. Max Muller in 1881 and they are fresh and completely natural even for today's language, which is a miracle if you read much Victoriana.
 
I've been working retail for the last few months. This experience helps me understand Sartre and the old Existentialists more than any class.
 
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I have two objections to that chart.

(1) Kant belong much higher. People misunderstand him, he was not some standbearer for the Prussian state. Dude is the creator of our modern conception of freedom. Have some respect.

(2) Rand should not be on the list. She isn't a philosopher, she's a dime store demagogue.
 
MissThundercat said:
Trying to get into Sartre and not sure where to begin.
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Existentialism is a Humanism. It's a very short lecture. It covers his basic ideas. He is remarkably not dickish (I mean for him).

I actually think every person should read it once. I think it's one of the most telling statements about the 20th century -- you can pretty much extrapolate 80% of 20th century intellectual history from it.

The other good thing is it made EVERYBODY -- Marxists, existentialists, Christians, conservatives, Positivists, social activists, and academics -- absolutely furious. Sartre really knew how to pose for the cameras but here, for once, he's just brutally honest, and nobody wanted to have their ox gored that way.
 
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“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.” ― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
 
MissThundercat said:
“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.” ― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
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Beautiful quote.
 
MissThundercat said:
Tillich is worth looking into.
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He and Niebuhr are interesting. It's terrible but there just aren't many intelligent writers of faith. Even when otherwise intelligent people like Lewis and Chesterton write on faith they become weak-minded and ill-willed. Since Tolstoy died the number of genuine Christian intellectuals is in the single digits.

But Tillich and Niebuhr had interesting things to say. Yes, they are fighting a rearguard action with a hypothesis as threadbare as astrology, but that doesn't mean they can't be inventive and useful, and we should not ignore a tool that works so well with the naive, but instead revive it as a tool to detoxify or at least control them.

Ignoring it for the last hundred years has only allowed the bad people to dominate and wield it as a weapon.
 
Tillich, Niebuhr, and Bonhoeffer are the ones we need now.

Instead of Max Lucado, Rick Warren, and *gestures wildly at all of Christendom.*
 
In the light of Pride month, I find this quote from Sartre most appropriate:

"We can each be any d-mn thing we want, which is more than any of us dare to imagine."
 
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