A Kantian Interlude

I ask: What is given to us in the Kant's preface to the Critique of Pure Reason? It is a gift that we must tread carefully with, because to apprehend its fullness, taking its strict care and vivid hopes as personal principals, we may evidence symptoms of an unseemly lack of convention.

To move inward, to move critically inward, is the most begrudging and dangerous movement a woman (or man) can make. For all the personal rewards it offers, not only will this movement end up as a thankless effort for which one will gain many enemies, but it will be a task through which the glib and effortless speech of the many will grow more and more grotesque as our fatiguing project pushes onwards, personal conviction after personal conviction being dragged out from each of their hiding-hovels and put to judgement. We may think of it as the beginning of modernity because it forfeits all glory, and puts humanity in an aesthetic relation to itself - that is, we endeavour on a task for our own sake and only so that it reaches the heights of a self-potential.

While I have been simultaneously reading Deleuze's critique of the Critique in his Difference and Repetition, Kant's shortcomings in doing away with an unreal "image of thought" does little to disturb the great respect I feel for this sincerest of endeavours. This respect, as I have just described it, would easily seem to apply to a great number of people in which self-reflection appears to be an upstanding virtue. Painted in such colours - as a pioneer of only the most rigorously discovered truth - Kant would have no opposition, but then my earlier statements about the danger of his task are unfounded.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where not only is the whole text, the whole unread text, taken for granted, but even the admirable intentions stated in Kant's small 40 page preface (both 1st and 2nd editions) go widely unaccounted for and ignored. The internet in general (sites such as wikipedia in specific) and a culture well acclimated to mass communication has generated people who seem thoroughly unafraid of hearsay. Direct quotations often fare no better because they are easily fitted to the context of someone's personal intentions rather than with the author's. Though I don't think there is anything wrong with quoting for a meaning that the original author may have never thought of because of his historical era, we must refrain from haphazardly drawing a phrase out of a context which we have no understanding nor familiarity with, even to the degree that we would quote the author as being in favour of something she or he would likely fervently reject (or vice versa).

Suddenly we find ourselves with supposed scholars all schools of thought who have read nothing but scattered summaries and references. A phenomenon may even occur where some interpretation of a historical figure is strengthened and reinforced in the popular mind while, simultaneously, the interpretation of a smaller group of those who read and truly think about the figure grows in another direction.

The gap of knowledge between the educated and the uneducated has been obscene in its wideness throughout history - the graver issue in the modern era is that the ignorant now believe themselves possessed of the same degree and calibre of knowledge as the educated. (I hope it is known that I do not refer merely to schooling, in which a great number of the aforementioned ignorant participate just the same, but of genuine thoughtfulness) "Descartes' famous suggestion that good sense (the capacity for thought) is of all things in the world the mot equally distributed rests upon no more than an old saying, since it amounts to reminding us that men are prepared to complain of lack of memory, imagination or even hearing, but they always find themselves well served with regard to intelligence or thought."