it is difficult for me adequately to express my loathing for immanuel kant, whom i think had a disastrous effect on the style and substance of philosophy. i'm teaching through the prolegomena right now. here are the sorts of claims i regard as being as close to the opposite of everything i believe as anything can be. also i regard them as...insane and as a devastating reflections on the personality of those who believed them: "The highest legislation of nature must lie in ourselves." "The understanding does not derive its laws from, but rather prescribes them to nature." we must defend our basic concepts "not by deriving them from experience, but rather by deriving experience from them." etc.really, kant thinks we make the universe. i wonder whether chipmunks think they make the universe.
seriously, say you ran into a dude on the corner who was asserting that he made the universe by imposing space and time on it from the resources of his own sensibility. it wouldn't surprise you, but you might hope that there's a bed in a treatment facility, or some sort of medication. don't even get me started on the ethics, or his basic picture of what a person is, currently in revival in the work of christine korsgaard or susan wolf, for example. i don't know what they're writing about, but it is definitely not human beings.
after kant, people associated profundity with extreme murk and elaborate jargon, and it got even worse in schelling and hegel, etc. kant is a monster of ego, and he is a monster of species-ego: he thinks we make the world and he has figured it out. all that gets worse too. even now, every kant-influenced thinker starts with a contrast between humans and animals that is just: why are we so much amazingly better? i think we are still struggling to emerge from these toils, believe it or not. i'd describe phenomenology and pragmatism, for example, as ways of trying to emerge from the kantian disaster, while still being way too trapped in its presumptions.
