Immanuel Kant

And I was fascinated.

And not to mention, you know, philosophers like Kant.

Not that I can now tell you what Kant actually meant because I was sitting with the text although it was Hebrew and I was like, I'm reading the same sentence now 10 times.

But I did get some things.

So, yeah, of course, to be exposed to art and to philosophy and this, I started connecting all kinds of things.

My front was prepossessing, as fronts go, and my pockets empty.

I had in recollection a thought I once entertained of writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer.

Not that they are reconcilable, of course, but the room offered for scientific satire.

I waved my hand impatiently and he broke off.

Chapter 13 German Speculations on Progress 1.

The philosophical views current in Germany during the period in which the psychology of Locke was in fashion in France and before the genius of Kant opened a new path were based on the system of Leibniz.

We might therefore expect to find a theory of progress developed there parallel to the development in France though resting on different principles.

For Leibniz, as we saw, provided in his cosmic optimism a basis for the doctrine of human progress and he had himself incidentally pointed to it.

It was only towards the close of the period, which is commonly known as the Age of Illumination, that progress came to the front and it is interesting to observe the reason.

Wolf was the leading successor and interpreter of Leibniz.

He constrained that thinker's ideas into a compact logical system which swayed Germany till Kant swept it away.

In such cases it usually happens that some striking doctrines and tendencies of the master are accentuated and enforced while others are suffered to drop out of sight.

The French eighteenth-century philosophers did exactly the same with regard to the phenomenon of the spiritual world.

In their writings, one never meets with such metaphysical statements as are found, say, in Kant.

Kant, as is well known, explained the moral sense of man by a categorical imperative, which might at the same time be considered desirable as a universal law.

note kant's version of the ethical maxim do unto others as you would have them do unto you reads act only on that maxim whereby their cants at the same time will that it should become a universal law translator but in this dictum every word imperative categorical law universal is a vague verbal substitute for the material fact which is to be explained the french encyclopaediast on the contrary endeavoured to explain just as their english predecessors had done whence came the ideas of good and evil to man without substituting a word for the missing conception as goethe put it they took the living man as he is they studied him and found as did hutchinson in seventeen twenty five and after him adam smith in his best work the theory of moral sentiments that is the moral sentiments have developed in man from the feeling of pity sympathy through his ability to put himself in another's place from the fact that we almost feel pain and grow indignant when a child is beaten in our presence from simple observations of common facts like these they gradually attain to the broadest generalisations in this manner they actually did explain the complex moral sense by facts more simple and did not substitute for moral facts well known to and understand by us obscure terms like the categorical imperative or universal law which do not explain anything the merit of such a treatment is self-evident instead of the inspiration from above and as superhuman miraculous origin of the moral sense they dealt with the feelings of pity of sympathy derived by man through experience and inheritance and subsequently perfected by further observation of social life when the thinkers of the eighteenth century turned from the realm of the stars and physical phenomena to the world of chemical changes or from physics and chemistry to the study of plants and animals or from botany and zoology to the development of economical and political forms of social life and to religions among men they never thought of changing their method of investigation.

To all branches of knowledge, they applied the same inductive method, and nowhere, not even in the domain of moral concepts, did they come upon any point where this method proved inadequate.

The risk of dehumanization, of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means, is an ancient and ever new temptation that today takes on a technical guise." Instead, we should strive for the possibility of building together, of transforming diversity into a resource, and of making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity." By this account, it is the church and not the fortress of secularization that most respect and safeguard the greatest variety of human experience.

Now, there are familiar Kantian grounds for this insistence on treating others as ends, not means.

But there's also, behind and before Kant, the medieval notion of multiplicity as valuable in and of itself.

I still remember my teen discovery in Arthur Lovejoy's work that an angel may be preferable to a rock, yet nonetheless a rock and an angel are preferable to two angels.

The risk of dehumanization, of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means, is an ancient and ever new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.'" Instead, we should strive for the possibility of building together, of transforming diversity into a resource, and of making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity." By this account, it is the church and not the fortress of secularization that most respect and safeguard the greatest variety of human experience.

Now, there are familiar Kantian grounds for this insistence on treating others as ends, not means.

But there's also, behind and before Kant, the medieval notion of multiplicity as valuable in and of itself.

I still remember my teen discovery in Arthur Lovejoy's work that an angel may be preferable to a rock, yet nonetheless a rock and an angel are preferable to two angels.

Instead, we should strive for the possibility of building together, of transforming diversity into a resource, and of making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity." By this account, it is the church and not the fortress of secularization that most respect and safeguard the greatest variety of human experience.

Now, there are familiar Kantian grounds for this insistence on treating others as ends, not means.

But there's also, behind and before Kant, the medieval notion of multiplicity as valuable in and of itself.

I still remember my teen discovery in Arthur Lovejoy's work that an angel may be preferable to a rock, yet nonetheless a rock and an angel are preferable to two angels.

Some things are always right, some things are always wrong regardless of circumstances.

Immanuel Kant is a great example of this kind of ethical practice in that, along with a lot of other things, he argued that lying or deceiving somebody is always wrong and always ethically unjustified.

This is an example of what he calls the categorical imperative, which is the idea that specific commands or moral laws must always be followed regardless of extenuating circumstances.

Now, as you can imagine, something like, say, never lie could become a problem and could actually lead to moral situations that cause harm to other people such as, for example, let's say you have to house your cousin Megan who has just come in from out of state for a medical procedure and that medical procedure is currently illegal in their home state.