… so the story starts with Kant who is to us philosophers what Swinburne the poet said the sea was, the great grey mother of us all. — Robert Brandom, Self-Consciousness and Freedom.
Beyond the baccalauréat and everything that remains of it in all
the circles where this diploma is a certificate of culture, Kant is, so to speak,
in all the programs and on all the juries of philosophy. Whether we follow
him or distance ourselves from him, Kant is the norm.
One would therefore have to (an imperative that appears to me to be
dictated here although I dictate it) question and displace this norm, if possible and if that is thinkable, if thinking demands it. But to question the
laws and determinisms that have put such a privilege in place, one still has
to read Kant, turn toward him, thematize the phenomenon of his authority, and thus super-canonize him. — Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? 1
In Germany, where there has been a revival of interest in Kant, during the past twenty years, reading the “Critique” has come to take rank, so to speak, as one of the liberal professions. There are learned men who, in all appearance, do nothing else. The habit is dangerously fascinating. The Kant devotee never knows when to stop. — Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy2
Logic’s path from Kant to Hegel is also a path from Hegel back to Kant… Kant’s critical spirit, which philosophy cannot afford to lose, must also be a spirit that criticises even Hegel. — Tanabe Hajime, Logic’s Path from Kant to Hegel3
Swann, coming to the rescue of Mme de Guermantes, would say to her after the highness had gone: “After all she’s not such a bad woman; really, she has quite a sense of humor. Good Lord, I don’t suppose for a moment that she has mastered
the Critique of Pure Reason; still, she is not unpleasant.” — Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Kant is generally understood to have executed the transcendental critique from a place that lies between rationalism and empiricism. However, upon reading his strangely self-deprecating Dreams of a Visionary Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics, one finds it impossible to say that he was simply thinking from a place between these two poles. Instead, it is the “parallax” between positions that acts. Kant, too, performed a critical oscillation: He continuously confronted the dominant empiricism within rationalism. The Kantian critique exists within this movement itself. The transcendental critique is not some kind of stable third position. It cannot exist without a transversal and transpositional movement. It is for this reason that I have chosen to name the dynamic critiques of Kant and Marx—which are both transcendental and transversal—”transcritique”. — Kojin Karatani, Transcritique
I have begun with Kant because it is Kant that philosophy first attains knowledge of one of the most important dialectical oppositions - between empiricism and totality, between form and content - and because kant was the first to set out this oppositon in all its starkness and to place it at the centre of his philosophical system. — Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant
Kant invented the conception of morality as autonomy. — J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy
Thus, I am acquainted with the writings of great men who have distinguished themselves in metaphysics during this time, the works of Lambert, Tetens, Platnner and even the all-destroyer [alles-zermalmer] Kant, only from insufficient reports of my friends and from learned reviews that are rarely more instructive. — Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours
It all begins with Kant, with his idea of the transcendental constitution of reality. In a way, one can claim that it is only with this idea of Kant’s that philosophy reached its own terrain: prior to Kant, philosophy was ultimately perceived as a general science of Being as such, as a description of the universal structure of entire reality, with no qualitative difference from particular sciences. It was Kant who introduced the difference between ontic reality and its ontological horizon, the a priori network of categories which determines how we understand reality, what appears to us as reality. From here, previous philosophy is readable not as the most general positive knowledge of reality, but in its hermeneutic core, as the description of the historically predominant “disclosure of Being,” as Heidegger would have put it. — Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing
Considered after Duchamp, the Kantian Idea of the supersensible, or his sensus communis, states that it is a requirement of reason that anyone be endowed, de jure if not de facto, with the faculty of making art. — Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp
And now gentlemen,
A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
As base and finale too for all metaphysics.
(So to the students the old professor,
At the close of his crowded course.)
Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,
Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having
studied long,
I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems,
See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,
Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land. — Walt Whitman, The Base of All Metaphysics
The history of Western philosophy after Kant is just that: philosophy “after Kant”—in Kant’s shadow, inspired by Kant, in response to Kant, in reaction to Kant. — Richard Schacht, The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy
I should point out that in this work I make frequent references to the Kantian philosophy (which to many might seem superfluous) because, whatever might be said here or elsewhere of its distinctive character or of particular parts of its exposition, it constitutes the foundation and the starting point of the new German philosophy, and this is a merit of which it can boast undiminished by whatever fault may be found in it. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic
… it is this project — reason’s examination of its own possibility and the attendant controversies over the nature of the object of such a study and the right implications to draw from it — that sets the agenda for an extraordinary flurry of philosophical activity in a brief fifty-year period, much of which also set the agenda for a good deal of nineteenth-and twentieth-century philosophy.
… Kant was unique in that he invented in effect a new task for philosophy and so a new way to justify claims about the world (synthetic judgements) that were not grounded in experience, were a priori.
Kant’s impact was the most important by far, and by 1830 German philosophy had experienced a number of great Kantian aftershocks. Remarkably, almost everyone of importance in the debates, apart from the parties of metaphysics, faith, and common sense, seemed to profess philosophizing “in the Kantian spirit,” but their variations of Kantian themes were so radical that they amounted to some jujitsu attempt to use Kant against himself. — Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath
It is true that we arrive at contradictions when we describe the perceived world. And it is also true that if there were such a thing as a non-contradictory thought, it would exclude the whole of perception as a simple appearance. But the question is precisely to know whether there is such a thing as logically coherent thought or thought in the pure state. This is the question Kant asked himself… One of Kant’s discoveries, whose consequences we have not yet fully grasped, is that all our experience of the world is throughout a tissue of concepts which lead to irreducible contradictions if we attempt to take them in an absolute sense or transfer them into pure being. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception4
In this context, and crudely translated, this means that Kant opens up the possibility of romanticism. — Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute
Segregation stands diametrically opposed to the principle of the sacredness of human personality. It debases personality. Immanuel Kant said in one formulation of the Categorical Imperative that “all men must be treated as ends and never as mere means.” The tragedy of segregation is that it treats men as means rather than ends, and thereby reduces them to things rather than persons. — Martin Luther King Jr., The Ethical Demands for Integration
This is what I mean when I say that there has been a revolution, and that the world has been turned inside out. The real is no longer the good. For us, reality is something hard, something which resists reason and value, something which is recalcitrant to form.
If the real and the good are no longer one, value must find its way into the world somehow. Form must be imposed on the world of matter. This is the work of art, the work of obligation, and it brings us back to Kant. And this is what we should expect. For it was Kant who completed the revolution, when he said that reason — which is form — isn’t in the world, but is something we impose upon it. The ethics of autonomy is the only one consistent with the metaphysics of the modern world, and the ethics of autonomy is an ethics of obligation.
And Nietzsche was right when he warned the enemies of obligation not to think of it lightly because it was born in pain and ugliness. Obligation is what makes us human. Or anyway, so I will argue. — Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity
With the laying of the ground for metaphysics put in this way, however, Kant is brought immediately into the dialogue with Aristotle and Plato. Ontology now becomes a problem for the first time. With that, the first and deepest shock wave strikes the structure of traditional metaphysics. — Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
As we have seen, truth is not a simple notion. The idea that truth is a passive copy of what is “really” (mind-independently, discourse-independently) “there” has collapsed under the critiques of Kant, Wittgenstein, and other philosophers even if it continues to have a deep hold on our thinking. — Hilary Putnam, Fact and Value
If I am right, Kant should get the credit for being the first person to note that contradictions of the kind we are discussing are, in some sense, inherent in the limits of thought. If I am wrong, the credit merely goes to someone else. — Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought
The question at the core of the present book found its first formulation in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and has known a spectacular revival in recent analytic philosophy of language and mind: What is self-consciousness, and in what ways does it relate to our use, in language and in thought, of the first-person pronoun ‘I’? — Béatrice Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine
What a strange contrast between the outward life of the man and his destructive, world-crushing thoughts! Truly, if the citizens of Königsberg had had any premonition of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt a far more terrifying dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, an executioner who merely executes people. But the good folk saw in him nothing but a professor of philosophy, and as he passed by at his customary hour, they gave him a friendly greeting and perhaps set their watches by him.
If, however, Immanuel Kant, the arch-destroyer in the realm of ideas, far surpassed Maximilian Robespierre in terrorism, yet he possessed many similarities with the latter which invite comparison of the two men. In the first place, we find in both the same stubborn, keen, unpoetic, sober integrity. We also find in both the same talent for suspicion, only that the one directs his suspicion toward ideas and calls it criticism, while the other applies it to people and entitles it republican virtue. But both represented in the highest degree the type of the provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god. And they gave the correct weight! — Heinrich Heine, The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany5
...it seems to me that the trumpeting central insight of Kant's practical philosophy is his perception of the metaphysical implications to which any such (acceptance of the existence of freedom) commits us. What seems to me the inescapable fact that I and others sometimes have free choice - even that alone - forces me at the level of argument to the conclusion that an important part of total reality is independent of scientific law. - Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher6
Men generally are beginning to be conscious that true and serious philosophy still stands where Kant left it. At any rate, I cannot see that between Kant and myself anything has been done in philosophy; therefore I regard myself as his immediate successor. — Arthur Schopenhauer, Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy7
If you have any quotes you would like to add, let me know!
Thanks to Stella Sandford for the reference she provided via email, where I saw it in her essay Kant’s Legacy.
Thanks to Simon Lee for the reference.
Thanks, again, to Simon Lee.
From “Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception” by Sebastian Gardner.
Thanks to Joseph Albernaz for the reference.
Thanks to Charles Justice in the comments for the reference.
Simon, again.
"...it seems to me that the trumpeting central insight of Kant's practical philosophy is his perception of the metaphysical implications to which any such (acceptance of the existence of freedom) commits us. What seems to me the inescapable fact that I and others sometimes have free choice - even that alone - forces me at the level of argument to the conclusion that an important part of total reality is independent of scientific law." - Bryan Magee, "Confessions of a Philosopher".