Thursday, August 5, 2021

Kant

Immanuel Kant wrote Critique of Pure Reason. Here's one thing I can say for sure about that book: it's way more intellectually demanding than Kim Kardashian's Critique of Duck Face Selfies. Kant has a style of communication that is not very Kardshianesque. If you read all of Kant's books, you'll end up with two primary conclusions. (1) "I'm not sure what Kant said." And (2) "I am sure Kant spent 9324 pages saying whatever he said." Kant wrote a dozen confusing 700 page books instead of writing one understandable 63 page book in which he makes statements like, "...And, to make a long story short, my moral philosophy is that people shouldn't act like buttheads. Okay. And now let me talk about how you can't know the thing-in-itself. This is gonna take about 15 sentences, and it's gonna be very easy to understand." 

Kant's writing style is not that easy to understand. That being said, I would highly recommend reading Kant's 9324 pages and mastering the fine points of his philosophy. If you do, you'll be able to integrate it all into most of your day-to-day activities. 

Here's a fantastic example. Suppose you're ordering breakfast at IHOP. There's a Kantian way to do it, and there's a non-Kantian way to do it. Let me describe the Kantian way. Tell your waiter the following: "The manifold content of the meal can be given ostentatiously in an early consumptionary period which is merely palatal and copasetic--in other words, it delivers an abundance of qualities that, conjunctionally speaking, categorically makes pretences towards being rooty and tooty; and the form of this can exist a priori in the faculty of the batter, without being anything else but the mode in which the pancakes are stacked perpendicular to the handkerchief. This meal cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of the fresh and fruity sensuous intuition, for it is a multi angular, omni group juxtaposition of starch and sugar dominant sustenance materials, with the wheat based (as qualitative) complex carbohydrates and the general appellation of maple syrup, originated by the maple tree itself, in an act (homo homini lupus) of purely spontaneous syrup generation, modulating the salivary reaction of the man seated at table 23 (tabula rasa). But the conception of conjunction includes, besides the conception of breakfast sine qua non, ameliorates the 'I think, therefore I am,' but quagulates the 'I eat huevos rancheros, therefore I pass gas in Spanish.' The language of the flatulence has no pertinence to the nationality of the breakfast order, distinguishing it from empirical notions of allegorical sophistry, which relates to the use of Frosted Flakes as part of a balanced but wholly intuitive breakfast. A tiger, when not in a cereal commercial, is neither verbally expressive nor non-carnivorous. This breakfast, then, is, given a state of credo quia absurdum, and, having been attended to the consumptionary qualities of the person in question, will elucidate the manifold synthesis of the foundation anteceding the antecedent if approbated by the Corn Flakes rooster." 

At that point, after the waiter stares at you for a few seconds, tell him, "Don't you get what I'm saying? It should be obvious to any intelligent and educated person that I'm ordering two slices of French toast and three scrambled eggs."