失意莫灰心，得意不忘形。
Sancho tells Don Quijote: “Don’t die, Señor; your grace should take my advice and live for many years, because the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that.”
“I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose,” Cervantes famously wrote.
slow reading: read together and three pages at a time
杜甫诗选
LOTR
Don Quixote
音乐剧《悲惨世界》Les Misérables
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes
There’s a grief that can’t be spoken
There’s a pain goes on and on
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone
Here they talked of revolution
Here it was they lit the flame
Here they sang about “tomorrow”
And tomorrow never came
From the table in the corner
They could see a world reborn
And they rose with voices ringing
And I can hear them now
The very words that they had sung
Became their last communion
On the lonely barricade at dawn
Kant on wiki
this fundamental distinction between appearance and reality and we’ve talked about Kant’s constant concern with the exercise of reason and what we can and can’t do through a proper exercise of reason. And this idea that we’re fundamentally rational beings yet also limited in various ways, which itself shows up in this distinction between appearance and reality: that’s an idea that dominates the whole of Kant’s work.
the concept of object
the categories:
| quantity | quality | relation | modality |
|---|---|---|---|
| universal (all), particular (some), singular (one) | is or are reality, negation, limited | inherence, causality, reciprocity | possibility, existence, necessity |
Fichte - Schelling - Hegel, and Schopenhauer
That Enlightenment was man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. That immaturity was not using the reason we are endowed with.
So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. This is from Kant’s The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. This line was said by Terry Pratchett in another way: “And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” Here I think “things” are just another name of “means” instead of “ends”. Each person is an end in themselves. That is Kant’s categorical imperative because comparing to emotion, love, empathy and others, reason is an unconditional constant. “The rule of judgement under laws of pure practical reason is this: ask yourself whether, if the action you propose were to take place by a law of the nature of which you were yourself a part, you could indeed regard it as possible through your will.”
P. Guyer: Kant’s idea that humanity must be treated as an end in itself and never merely as a means has gained wide acceptance in modern moral thought and philosophy.
The Enlightenment had brought with it a sort of scientific rationality that thoroughly destabilized older presumptions about values and truth. There wasn’t a clear way out of this destabilization. Philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Hobbes had cast doubt on our ability to have any kind of ultimate meaning and values. So Kant’s philosophy attempted to solve a rather large problem: how can we know anything or value anything when science and reason have eliminated appeals to the Church and monarchy as our ideological foundations? Are we left with pure skepticism?
Kant created a system of philosophy based on Enlightenment-style capital-R Reason which spanned ethics, politics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Kant gave us radically new ways to understand the foundations of knowledge, the foundations of values, and the foundations of history, and all of it was eloquently tied together. Kant gave us a way to have Enlightenment reason without giving up objective truth and ethics.
Hegel built on and altered Kant’s philosophy of history and rationality to devise his own system of philosophy and advance the notion of “dialectics,” or how historical ideas clash and result in new ideas. Hegel in turn inspired many others, most famously Marx.
Kant’s ethics and political philosophy is the largest influence of John Rawls’ political philosophy, for example, which has itself revolutionized how the Anglo-American world thinks about politics and ethics. Martha Nussbaum’s pathbreaking work in ethics and Christine Korsgaard’s work on the foundations of normativity are thoroughly Kantian.
references
book: Onora O’Neil, Constructions of Reason: explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, 1989
book: Kant’s Philosophical Revolution: A Short Guide to the Critique of Pure Reason (June 2020) by Yirmiyahu Yovel
book: The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, by Lea Ypi (2021 Oxford Univ. Press)
book: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction (Oct. 12 2006) by Jill Vance Buroker (in Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts, 16 books)
book: The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Sept 2018) by Peter Strawson, 1966.
book: Kant, by Paul Guyer, 2006
book: Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (March 2004) by Henry E. Allison
book: Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (March 1999), by Sebastian Gardner
book: Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-49644-6.
book: Kant: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton, 1981
Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 2. By Jean-Paul Sartre
book: Cambridge Companion to Kant,
book: Cambridge Companion to Kand and Modern Philosophy
book: Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
book: Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Understanding, Sebastian Rödl, 2012
Group A: Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.
Group B: Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.
post-Kant: Pinkard’s German Philosophy 1760-1860
post-Kant: Reading Hegel: The Introductions