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Oh you haven’t heard that? At least here in Germany I sometimes feel it’s the only thing I hear about him now. People are quick to cancel - and to forget that the very universalism and belief in the dignity of all human beings that makes us condamn racism now, owes a lot to Kant. I will address this when I get to Kant’s positions on natural science. He was very interested in biological questions, such as the differences in skin colour etc. between various humans and their reasons. He did believe in the intellectual or cultural superiority of white people, yes. This was of course not based on personal experience, rather on the many voyage journals he read. Here he must indeed be criticized for just accepting what European travelers to America, Africa or Asia hat written about their people, instead of being more critical of it. However, it is important to note that this theoretical racism of his did not lead to him being a practical racist. Because to him a human has value as such, being smarter doesn’t make one more valuable. So he did criticize colonialism, even if he deemed other people inferior in capabilities that didn’t justify their subjugation to him.

Yes, correct translations are crucial. German philosophy has certainly been hindered and misunderstood a lot in parts due to bad translations. Some things unfortunately can hardly be translated properly - such as the word Aufklärung. But even with those that could be translated, it is not an easy task. It should be done by someone who knows that philosophy very well and actually understands what he is translating. Especially when it comes to a systematic thinker like Kant I’d also argue that it’s important to not just translate a single isolated text but rather to create one consistent translation for the whole. For example in Kant’s moral philosophy he says that humanity mustn’t be treated as a mere Mittel, but as a Zweck in itself. I think that’s usually translated as: not as a mere means to an end, but as an end in itself. And by itself that’s a decent translation, Zweck means end here. But then in his aesthetics he says we find things beautiful that are zweckmäßig in their form. And I think that has been translated as purposive. Which again, on its own is fine, Zweck means something like purpose, so zweckmäßig could mean purposive. But if you translate the Critique of Practical Reason and make Kant talk of an end in itself and then translate the Critique of the Power of Judgment and make him talk of purposiveness, the connection is lost. And the connection (as I will get into with the lectures starting in January) is not just a superficial and coincidental similarity of words but a quite important one. And don’t worry, I’m not in a rush. If I possess one virtue, patience might be it. Obscurity has its perks, as Nietzsche (who only really became famous posthumously or at least after his breakdown) observed. If you’re interested in aesthetics, my upcoming videos till the spring should be just perfect for you. Thank you also for sharing the result of your exercise! As it happens, I’m currently reading Arendt on the side a bit. Your categorization seems reasonable to me. I’m glad you found my videos! The situation can easily have a depressing effect, yes. I’d say it’s important, one, to have a “mentaly hygiene”. Being sad at other’s misery doesn’t help them, it only multiplies the misery in the world. I’d never advocate just ignoring the evil in the world. But just like we don’t have to stuff our stomach till it’s too much and we puke, we don’t have to stuff our soul either. We need to have a sense for when it says stop. Secondly, rather than focusing on everything that is bad, we should focus on what we can do. Just like Greta Thunberg was healed from her crippling depression and anxiety by taking action for the climate, just like I myself am a quite happy person, not because I’m happy with the world but because I am working to aufklär it, so taking some action and doing some change can be healthy for anyone.

Thank you! Well, I hope to be able to help in that search. For now it’s just the Kant videos but when I get around to it, I’ll also make translations of some videos that I already have up on my German channel, which express my own philosophy and talk about Aufklärung in general. I hope to help any seeker with those and all else I’ll do. I don’t know that channel. Personally I’d like to have a chat with @seekersofunity, though unfortunately he seems to be on hiatus for now. But generally, I’d be up for talking everywhere and to everyone, as long as there is honest interest and openness for Aufklärung.

When I was at university, it was called principle of charity. It has a lot in common with Kant’s sympathetic method which I discussed in another lecture, though I’d say that method goes deeper than mere generosity/charity. It is a important principle in the philosophy of justice that a state, even an imperfect one, is better than no state, therefore you can work on changing the imperfect laws, but should still obey them while they are in place. That was Socrates’ belief but also Kant’s, so I will discuss it further when I get to his theory of justice in the summer or so. However, there are limits to this, when the state is not just imperfect but truly worse than the lawless state of nature would be, something which after Kant Fichte developed further. I don’t think Turing had that same attitude as Socrates and accepted what was done to him. Nor would I ever claim that he should have. It was horrible and unjust. I just wanted to stress the point that we need to think rationally, i. e. in principles, not based on our sensations and sensitivities. Hence we shouldn’t oppose the law being applied to everyone, even a war hero, IF it is law, we should just oppose that law itself, if it is unjust. In fact, I could add that demanding exceptions is dangerous, as it may save individuals but ultimately justifies the general rule: Arendt recounts how a well-intentioned priest kept asking Eichmann to spare certain jews, on the grounds they were married to Germans, they had served Germany in WWI etc. - but that Eichmann actually felt justified in his killing of the jews by the fact that even this well-intentioned priest never protested against it on principal and in general but only against the killing of certain specific groups of jews.

I think your story is a good example for one of the core insights of Fichte: Our actions are not determined by our knowledge (and hence someone doing evil can’t be excused by not knowing better, i. e. nazis thinking they were doing the right thing), but rather our knowledge is determined by our actions (or our will to act in a certain way). The practical comes first, the theoretical second. Your coworker probably isn’t stupid; even if he might not be particularly smart, no one can be THAT stupid to not realize what they see with their own eyes. It’s that he wants to act in a certain way. For example a climate change denier might not want to change his lifestyle, to stop flying, stop eating meat etc. So they tell themselves they don’t have to cause there is no climate change, so as to silence their conscience. That’s why people are often deaf against facts and convincing them through arguments is hopeless. Because that would imply that someone actually WANTS to do the right thing and just needs to be better informed on what IS the right thing. But many don’t want to do what’s right, but rather what serves them, so they refuse to be informed. Which means that if we want to change them, we have to change their hearts first, not their intellects. If they become better people and their will changes, their intellect will accept new facts, we won’t even have to help much with that. - As for hope, eh I’m actually quite pessimistic when it comes to the climate. We have had many chances to change our societies and lifestyles in time, now we have run out of time and STILL we largely refuse to care. This topic should make the headlines daily and it should be the only thing that determines elections, there should be a massive cancel culture, ostracizing anyone who still promotes a lifestyle harming the environment as if he had promoted the most unthinkable atrocities etc. So theory I don’t have much hope, in practice I do however, by which I mean I act as if I had hope and I also feel cheerful and not depressed at all. That is because I am an idealist, not a materialist. I try to live with righteousness and honour, whether I succeed or not is secondary. If I fail, at least I can look myself in the eye while going down, which means I won’t have failed at all. Being aufkläred also means living in the present, not in the past or future. The future might turn out grim, then we’ll deal with that in the future, now it’s the present and we do here and now what we can. In the worst case scenario this whole civilization might crumble, but there would always be a few thousand or even few million survivors, so I would hope to do my part in preserving and passing done some wisdom from the old world to them, so that hopefully they’d build a more aufkläred new one instead of just repeating the old mistakes.

Yes, thank you for adding that. I didn’t mean to go into existentialism more extensively here in this Kant lecture, just point out the point of connection but also divergence. I think you are right when it comes to Heidegger (though I don’t claim to be an expert on him, and it has been quite a few years since I last read him). I’d also never underestimate the fact that Arendt, who certainly didn’t reject life but in all her thinking sought to affirm it, was drawn to him. I didn’t mean to claim he was without any merit. (Though I do believe if one truly understands a deeper, more aufkläred philosophy, particularly Fichte, those existentialists, even where they are right, don’t have much to offer anymore.) But you also mention the issue with this sort of freedom: It is not a moral one (as Heidegger’s own actions attest), making it ultimately another senseless abyss.

I might some day. Not in the near future. I could of course do a shorter one video lecture or something. But there’s already a great number of those around. What I want to do is be thorough. So I want to read a thinker completely and then talk about him in full. I’ve now done this for Kant. At the moment I’m reading all of Nietzsche’s works, so I’m planning to do videos on him next. But this is sort of a life-long project, I don’t plan to stop, so we’ll see how many thinkers I manage to cover. The one who truly built on Kant and completed Kant was Fichte. With Schelling there came the turning away from Kant. Schopenhauer and Hegel are both influenced by him, to be sure, but neither stays true to Kant. Though in Hegel’s defence, he says as much and doesn’t claim to be the one true Kantian as Schopenhauer arrogantly does while at the same time dismissing Kant’s most important insights. Schopenhauer is immensely overrated. I wouldn’t advise studying him if one is interested in philosophy or aufklärung as such. He has historical importance because of his influence on Nietzsche, and one might also study him to understand modernity’s turning away from aufklärung, but one can neither learn thinking nor living from him. If you go to my lectures on what metaphysics and wisdom are to Kant, I talk about how the philosopher can be understood as a speculative metaphysician or as a wise law-giver of reason (preferably being grounded in metaphysics). Well, Schopenhauer, like Locke, is completely empiricist and without a speculative bone in his body, he also didn’t learn any critical self-reflection from Kant, so his whole claim to have found the thing in itself to be will is quite embarrassing. But he also wasn’t wise, not in his personal life (being a resentful, petty choleric) and not in his writings (where he doesn’t talk about how the world should be, but rather just concludes that it shouldn’t be and that we ought to run from it). Aufklärung is about affirming, about saying yes to life, while he teaches the opposite. Kant actually wanted something (namely to preserve freedom and reason in the empirical life, saving natural science and decent lawful conduct), so did Hegel (namely conciliation and redemption), Schopenhauer mainly just turns his grievances and resentments into a philosophy. But one has no right to philosophize if one has not first risen above those.

​​@@Jonathan.Ivo.Loewer I appreciate the response Jon.😅,I plan to read Nietzsche after I conclude with Schopenhauer. So your prospective projects already have a guaranteed viewer in me🙌. Hope to support monetarily as well. But I disagree that Schopenhauer is overrated, the opposite might be true. All I knew of Schopenhauer was his misogynistic work on women😅instead of the synthesis of Platonic Kantian Buddhist metaphysics. I don't understand why wasn't Schopenhauer given title of father of existentialism over Kierkegaard? Also Schopenhauer reinforced Plato's doctrine that that the object of philosophy primarily was about contemplation of the "unchangeable and ever permanent, not that which now is thus and then otherwise" Once u substitute the Will for God/Absolute being, his philosophy is no different from Schelling and Kant though, he just removed the theistic tendencies of the ontotheology of the time. However some have argued Schopenhauer falls more into Spinozism with Buddhist characteristics than Kantianism. Do you agree?

@@naledimyabi2686 I appreciate that. Though you’ll probably get around to reading Nietzsche before I start talking about him here. There are still many Kant lectures to come and I also want to be as thorough in reading Nietzsche first as I was with Kant. If you only heard about Schopenhauer being a misogynist, yes I understand how he might seem underrated to you. I have a strong distaste for thinkers being dismissed on such superficial grounds, instead of on the content of their thinking. But I don’t find that is usually done with Schopenhauer. On the contrary, I find his character is usually taken into account too little and excused too lightly, when actually it tells you a lot about his philosophy. How does he claim to know the whole world is will? Kant shows beyond a doubt the thing in itself cannot be cognized; for that reason alone anyone who claims to have done so can not be considered a Kantian. Schopenhauer’s claim is: Well, all other things I only know as appearances (or representations, to use Schopenhauer’s language, but his language is philosophically sloppy, he should say appearance because everything, including thoughts, including that will of his, is a representation; just like he should say drive and not will, because will would imply reason and consciousness), however myself I know as appearance but also, inwardly, as will. Now, let’s put aside the issue that, even if we accepted that argument, Schopenhauer would only have proved that HE is, as an appearance, Schopenhauer, as a thing in itself, will; he has no reason to conclude the same is true for all other beings, he doesn’t even have a reason to assume there ARE other beings and that they aren’t just part of his mind. But even when it comes to only him, the argument is so superficial that it almost makes you wonder if he has ever read Kant at all: Consider my lectures on sensuality and time and space as forms of viewing as well as the one on apperception. Kant is very clear that we have an outer AND an inner sense. Through the inner sense we find ourselves, our psyche, the object of empirical psychology. However it is still a sense, and sensuality is always receptive, it never gives you the thing in itself but just, like the outer sense, an appearance. So Kant would have replied to Schopenhauer: Yes, you APPEAR to yourself as will inwardly, just like outwardly you APPEAR as a body, but that doesn’t mean the body as a thing in itself is will, rather both the body and the will are appearances and you don’t know what they are in themselves. That’s why I am saying Schopenhauer is dogmatic and not critical at all, he just assumes to have “found” the thing in itself, without first asking: what would be the condition of the possibility of finding it? If he had done the latter, he’d have realized the condition can never be met, the thing in itself, by its very definition, cannot be in my consciousness, or else it would be the thing for me and not the thing in itself. But to come back to my original point about Schopenhauer’s character: Well, HE finds HIMSELF to be will. It’s an error to assume that says anything about the world at large, but it certainly says a lot about Schopenhauer himself: He was a guy of strong drives, always wanting and always suffering and getting angry when he didn’t get what he wanted. (And at some point in the World as Will and Representation he makes it clear in barely veiled terms that it is mostly sexual desire he is talking about, this “will” we find inside of us, driving us, we don’t find in our head or even heart so much as rather in a much lower region). Schopenhauer should have aufkläred himself first, should have learned to deal with disappointment and to rise above his petty self, i. e. he should have become wise before trying to philosophize. Instead he did the most unphilosophical thing possible: He turned his personal issues and grievances into a worldview. Making him a philodoxer, not a philosopher, different from the common person (because every unaufkläred person is such a philodoxer) in degree but not ultimately in quality. The synthesis of Kant, Buddhism and Plato is something Schopenhauer claims, but I don’t see him actually doing it. Kant he clearly didn’t understand. And he throws out Kant’s most important insights: In theoretical philosophy that the thing in itself is unknowable, in practical philosophy that reason is practical. It is easy to synthesize a thing with something else if you first strip that thing of its very core and only retain its name. A synthesis with Buddhism he couldn’t do, because Buddhism wasn’t known at that time; it’s not like Schopenhauer studied original workings in Sanskrit extensively, there were only translations or summaries of selected works available, it wasn’t yet possible to understand Buddhism properly at that time in Europe. And from Plato I don’t find that much in Schopenhauer, apart from some conception of forms. I suppose there is merit in thinking of Schopenhauer as an existentialist of sorts. Though I wouldn’t consider him nor Kierkegaard its father; I’d say you can find its first seeds at least in Pascal already. He might have reinforced that speculative philosophy deals with the unchangeable being, but so did Fichte before him. And in either case, it’s not a new thought, as you rightly point out. One could characterize him as a sort of pantheist, though he himself rejected that label. But I think it misses the point. Pandiabolism would be a more apt description. Which leads me to the conclusion and to my main point: Today there is the unfortunate tendency to not consider form and content as one when it comes to understanding a philosophy, but to separate them from one another. That’s why there is a certain trend to lump in thinkers like Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer together. Don’t they all have an Absolute? Don’t they all focus on the supersensual being of which the sensual world is just a shadow? Don’t the all in some way say that everything is one? Well it’s like saying the totalitarian and he who believes in rule of law are the same, because they both want the state to have absolute power, to be a leviathan nobody can oppose; yes, but the totalitarian wants that power to be above the law, the other wants it to serve and enforce rational law. Spinoza believes in a God of reason and since nature is God, that means nature is rational. Schopenhauer believes NOT in a God at all, if his will is a god, it is the god Jaldabaoth, it is the blind and evil demiurge of gnosticism. His will is not reason, it is unreason, therefore, since nature is the will, nature is irrational. Hence his pessimism. You see, my project is not merely to talk about some philosophers. I am a philosopher myself, not a historian of philosophy. My project is aufklärung. All philosophy is ultimately about aufklärung. I consider it the biggest achievement of Kant’s that he turned towards the practical. And Fichte is the most important philosopher to me because he built on that and insisted always on the primacy of the practical over the theoretical: I judge a philosophy not by a certain structure - does it talk about some sort of unity, some sort of “panism” or about duality and some sort of “multiplism” - I judge it rather by whether it affirms or negatives life, whether it is rationalistic or arationalistic. After Kant there is a split in what I call positive and negative philosophy: Those who affirm life and want to embrace and shape it and create something, like Fichte or Nietzsche, and those who, like Schopenhauer and the existentialists, believe life to ultimately be pointless and suffer from the fact that some cruel fate forced them to be alive. Nietzsche would say: Theirs is a philosophy for weaklings; because life might BE pointless indeed, but only a weakling would despair over that, someone strong would MAKE it have a point.

​​​@@Jonathan.Ivo.LoewerAppreciate the thorough response bro. I will be anticipating those projects 🙌. You completely destroyed my favourite philosopher😢💔😅. I've heard a little about him prior to Bernardo Kastrup but it was Bernardo who made me look up Schopenhauer's metaphysics in "Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics" where he tries to rehabilitate the German thinker. Where he reaffirms the notion that the physical world is just the outer appearance of the the inner essence of the cosmos. But that inner essence of the universe is itself volition, mind, just without the screen of perception which constituted of space and time. But how can you say he's dogmatic and doesn't have a speculative bone in his body but at same time say he didn't cling to Kantian dogmatism enough when he posited will as thing-in-itself. Maybe I am completely misunderstood you. However, another thing I truly like about Schopenhauer is his citation and giving credit to the Upanishads and other Eastern philosophies not just buddism. Perhaps he misunderstood those texts but the humility to acknowledge a school of philosophy more ancient than the Greeks is admirable. I think ultimately Schopenhauer is attempting to eliminate suffering like the Buddha and he's truly one of the first Western philosophers to put Existence on trial. To acknowledge that our individual lives might not necessary be About us. Like an apple blossom, when a single apple thinks it exists for itself and seeks to prolong itself. He also does prescribes for the individual insights on how to mitigate suffering and that companion is the basis of morality because we're ultimately one. The will is the only non-thing that exists and has no ground and we're merely individuated manifestations of it. Without the underlying will, to Schopenhauer, the appearances are indistinguishable from empty dreams or ghostly visions. Therefore my Dunning-Kruger effect wants me to concur with Schopenhauer that the phenomenonal world emerges in the consciousness of each subject, human or animal, these appearances are only possible by being preformed in in the temporal & spatial understanding as intuitive perception, so time, space and (casualty)exist before any possible experience. So to Schopenhauer, similar or Kant, the understanding comes prior and conditions the world we perceive as physical, in itself it is will, and as representation, physical reality, which is totally dependent upon the subject. Kant shouldn't have abandoned this initial position from his first Critique, where he says "if you remove the thinking subject, the physical world must disappear along with it."

@@naledimyabi2686 Not sure where your last reply went. These days TH-cam seems to make some comments under my videos disappear... Anyways, I'll answer, even if the post I'm answering is gone: Well often you’ll hear about a dichotomy between materialism and idealism, where materialism is understood as believing only in crude matter and idealism is understood in believing in some “inner essence of the cosmos” that is somehow spiritual. I follow Fichte in deeming that sort of idealism to ultimately still be materialism. If you believe in some “material”, some “being”, some “thing”, you may call it matter or spirit or will or whatever, you still believe that first there IS something and only second is it somehow thought. Fichte, as a transcendental idealist, would insist: Knowledge comes first. We don’t know what is, but there is what we know. There first is consciousness, knowing, and through that there is being, i. e. that which is known. It’s not being that thinks, it’s thinking that, for lack of a better word, bes. (Mind you, Schopenhauer has studied with Fichte, as much as he hates on him, and he has read Kant, as little as he understands him, so I’m not saying everything Schopenhauer says is wrong, but what’s right about him can usually be found in those two too, much more thoroughly and philosophically. So yes, our individual lives are not about us - but that’s hardly a new insight of Schopenhauer’s, you’ll find that expressed in Fichte in a much deeper way and it has been known by Spinoza before and arguably has been a core christic teaching always. Likewise I’d agree that the phaenomenal world is only in consciousness - but not in the consciousness of the individual, because the individual itself is only in consciousness; see my lecture on the apperception. Nor do we have any reason to believe it emerges in the minds of animals which have no self-consciousness. And yes, without the thinking subject there would not be a world (though the opposite is also true, as Fichte would stress: without an object there would not be a thinking subject, no I without a Not-I), but Schopenhauer really exaggerates the importance of the changes Kant made to the Critique of Pure reason.)

It is a mouse actually! And it represents aufklärung. Two reasons: The baron von Rochow (a German aufklärer from around the same time as Kant who in particular worked for an aufkläring pedagogy for all people of all levels of society) at one point wrote: Reason is like a mighty lion tangled up in a net of prejudice, it needs a mouse to come along and gnaw at that net to set it free; he wanted to be that mouse and so do I. (The thumbnail of my video on why I don’t translate the word aufklärung actually shows the illustration von Rochow drew.) Aufklärung is based in courage and is ultimately about life-affirmation, embracing and saying yes to life, about being an active perpetrator instead of a self-pitying and defeatist victim. The mouse represents that to me, as it is not particularly powerful, cannot defend itself, is hunted by cats, owls, foxes, pretty far down on the food chain, yet it keeps on living, cheerfully running around and nibbling its cheese or nuts, always resilient, never giving up on life.

Thank you. And no. I studied here at the Freie Universität Berlin, but I never wanted to pursue an academic career. At the university nowadays, there is no philosophy, there is history and philology of philosophy. I am however a philosopher, even when I do history of philosophy, as in these Kant lectures, that history is not an end in itself but a means to the end of Aufklärung. And I don’t believe that at the current academy there is much space for philosophy (see my lecture on Kant and the conflict of faculties). So I prefer being an independent teacher and author.

I’d say the same is true for the German “Erleuchtung”; it would be perceived as very arrogant and silly to call oneself erleuchtet. But Erleuchtung and Aufklärung are not the same thing, hence a lot is lost when both get translated as enlightenment.

Kant is not implying the power of judgment is more autonomous than intellect or reason. All three are autonomous in their respective fields: The intellect in nature, the power of judgment to pleasure (when it comes to beauty) and reason in morality. Such considerations as yours are indeed very important, especially when it comes to such central terms - but they can only really be done in regards to an author’s original language, otherwise you’re interpreting not the author but the translator. And in this case it’s the translation. In German he says Urteilskraft, which literally means judgment power. I find that often in English it gets translated as simply judgment (there are editions called “Critique of judgment”), which is disliked, because judgment is just Urteil in German. I found that there is also the translation power of judgment, so I went with that one. I suppose the translator went with that because this genitive of attribute is more common in English. While it WOULD be possible to make a similar construction and say Kraft des Urteilens in German, Kant never does so and it would sound a bit unnecessarily pompous. In English it’s the other way around, it’s not so common to just slap words together and create composita like in German (for example you’d also say ministry of finance, where in German we’d say Finanzministerium). Reason and intellect, Vernunft and Verstand, simply are regular German words which existed long before Kant. So is the word Urteil, but again, that means judgment, as in the judge pronouncing a judgment, or the verb urteilen, which means to judge. But there is no distinctive word for the intellectual faculty which does the judging. In such cases Kant goes with -kraft. Like speaking of Urteilskraft or also of Einbildungskraft (power of imagination). Kraft literally means power or strength or force. Like you could call someone strong kräftig (the correspondig adjective). However it is also used in science to describe forces of nature. For example we call gravity Schwerkraft (literally heavy power or heavy force).

Oh I am actually happy about people sharing their sentiments and additional anecdotes. Anything that adds substance. It is just a mere “great video!” or “this video sucks!” which I believe doesn’t belong into a comment section but rather a private message. Unfortunately this sort of rashness and arrogance is way too common. Many seem to be so sure to know so much better than some of the greatest minds of history. It’s why I find Kant’s critical method, which I discuss in its own video, so important: You have to actually explain how, according to you, someone went wrong and how something wrong could seem right to him, otherwise you have no reason to be assured that it isn’t you who’s wrong. Aufklärung starts when people criticize themselves instead of others, but especially in this age they are very quick to criticize and condemn everything that doesn’t fit the prejudices and ideologies of the day, never stopping to worry about whether they too might get treated similarly in a future age. But it boggles me most when in cases like the one you describe, the philosophers even point out possible issues and misunderstandings that could arise (thereby also showing a great understanding and critical distance from their own work, being able to see it with an outsider’s eyes), but still it isn’t taken seriously.

Thank you. I am glad you liked it! I was looking forward to this one. I am glad I can finally refer back to it, whenever Kant’s architectonic will come up from now on, because there will be many more examples of his usage of the table of categories in future videos. Thank you for the great anecdote! - Though somewhere in the multiverse there must be a universe where he walked out thrice even! On a more serious note: I am not a physicist and I am mindful not to be what Kant calls an egoist of science (see my lecture What is wisdom?) who talks about a field he has no expertise in. But from what little I know about the current issues and debates in physics, it seems to me it might profit from physicists taking note of one of Kant’s key insights. And from this anecdote, it seems that Dr. Chandra did: That thoughts without viewing are empty. We always need both, the intellect and sensuality. Our concepts alone cannot only not be proven to be real, we can’t even know if they are possible, unless we relate them at least indirectly to something that can be experienced and observed. Kant did away with empty speculative metaphysics to make room for natural science, he didn’t foresee natural science too (at least parts of it) turning into empty speculation.

Not just the Critiques, but all of Kant's philosophy. I read all 29 volumes of his collected writings in order to create a comprehensive and also thorough overview of his whole system. In a few months a book of mine on Kant will be published (though only in German for now unfortunately), but I'll also keep doing these lectures till I have covered all of Kant's thoughts. Which will probably take till 2026, as I'll only be done covering his theoretical philosophy by the end of this year.

What exactly do you have in mind? A book explaining Kant’s whole philosophy I have already written, though not published yet (it will be published in several parts, the first one in May, however only in German for now unfortunately). Or do you have a proper commentary in mind, close to the actual text, explaining it bit by bit? While certainly a worthwhile endeavor, I don’t plan on writing one. I’m working on several projects already. But depending on what you have in mind and how much work it might be, I might always be interested. You and anyone else who wants to can always contact me through my website.

Thanks for the feedback! It's too late now for this video, but I'll keep it in mind for the future and see that maybe I post such overviews more often during the videos.

It is indeed shameful, how silent most alleged philosophers are about the evil in this world. Alleged philosophers, because apart from being shameful, it is also very telling - it goes to show that they are public blabberers and academic philodoxers, but not philosophers. But this can be judged by their reaction or rather non-reaction to many issues - here where I live we have nazis on the rise and I don’t see the regular philodoxers or philosophologists caring much about that, let alone being self-critical about their role in things getting to this point; not to mention how they don’t fight the biggest evil of our age or even of all ages, the ongoing climate and ecological destruction. However, a true philosopher will be principled. Reason is the faculty of principles. And this is what Aufklärung is all about: Having a firm principle that governs all your actions and judgments in ALL cases. It is the exact opposite of having double standards and being hypocritical, something which only happens when you don’t let reason govern your actions and judgments but rather your base desires, your ideologies, your prejudices etc. Unfortunately, the muhammedan world’s single-minded obsession with this one - undoubtedly terrible - war, as if it was the only evil in the current world, reeks of the opposite of being principled. Yes, a philosopher will lead in the fight against this war. But he will also lead in the fight against all other wars and oppression. Where is the outrage, I wonder, over the murderous and genocidal actions of Turkey against the Kurds? Where is the outrage over the displacement of millions in Sudan? Where is the outrage over the Syrian despot slaughtering his own people for over a decade now? Where is the outrage over the Saudi usurpers bringing nothing but destruction and suffering to Yemen (not to mention the atrocities their soldiers commit at the border against refugees from Yemen or Arica - murdering innocents, forcing men at gunpoint to rape young girls etc.)? Where is the outrage over Chinese internment camps for Uyghurs? Where is the outrage over the case of the Rohingya, considered by the UN to be the most hunted and oppressed minority on earth? And all of these cases directly concern fellow Muhammedans; of course someone who is not merely muhammedan, but Muslim would care about all brothers in humanity equally. So why is there so much silence about the ongoing exploitation and slavery all around the world? As well as about the ongoing ecocide, which is basically an indirect genocide, as it will contribute to more suffering and death than all genocides of history together? Something that most Muhammedans, thanks to the gross and completely unislamic materialism that is so widespread amongst them (the younger men mostly caring only about driving a new Lamborghini and getting hair transplants in Turkey, completely ignorant, it seems, of the Qu’ranic parable of the garden), actively contribute to (though of course the main contributers and culprits are still the western nations). This is not whataboutism, rather it is an invitation to Aufklärung: which starts with self-reflection and ends with a more holistic view. And, once again, with principles. The closest thing to a philosopher in the world sense the public has had in recent years (that is, a parrhesiastes and prophet) has been Greta Thunberg. I suggest turning to her to find an example of following principles. She nowdays is outspoken against Israel’s actions, for which she now gets accused of antisemitism, but which, as is very plain to every non-partisan and non-ideological observer, is done out of true conviction. But unlike the general public with its superficiality and very short-lived memory I also still remember how in 2022 she refused attending COP in Egypt because of its despotic regime. The same Muhammedans who nowdays celebrate her for her stance on Gaza, back then accused her of criticizing Egypt and not Israel (obviously quite ridiculous, when it was Egypt and not Israel hosting the COP). A good example of how SHE equally denounces everything she judges to be a violation of human rights, while others are stuck in their ideologies and the double standards that will come with it. As a philosopher, or even just an aufkläred person, my principle is simple: Radical, absolute and totally uncompromising regard for humanity. In specific circumstances that may demand specific actions against specific crimes. But in general, what the philosopher will do is try and spread this exactly principle. Because if even just 10% of humankind made this their principle, it would mean an end to all wars and crimes against humanity. I don’t know a better way to be at the forefront of stopping ALL genocides and wars. It is the way all prophets have gone, be it Jesus when telling people to love their neighbor and even their enemy, be it Muhammed when teaching people that killing one person is like killing all of humanity.

Yes, I tend to do the same, listening to lectures while cooking or doing other chores. I’m glad you’re enjoying them and taking something away from them, even though I have no experience talking in English and it shows. I do not have the direct experience you have in this matter, that is correct. But I am not ignorant about the things going on in the world. I know the catholic church protects child rapists, I know of the despotism of the mullahs in Iran, I know the unhinged American evangelicals and so on. And you are right, people need to speak out against such things. The church and the state need to be separated, that was an important demand of the age of aufklärung, including of Kant (I will get to that in future lectures). Even when they don’t meddle in politics too much, one may still be critical of church, priesthoods, “institutionalised religion”. The difference between church and religion is another topic I will eventually address in these Kant lectures, though even from what I published so far you can see how Kant was critical of the role of the clergy and insisted that in religion, like in justice and medicine people have to think for themselves and not just be ruled over by scholars and experts (see my lecture on the conflict of the faculties). Here my point was another however: That you should not strawman but steelman a position, that you must not try to “win” a debate and therefore go for the most stupid or evil interpretation that can possibly be made of the other position, but rather you should try to strengthen it as much as possible, even to help it and find better arguments for it than the people actually holding that position. For only if you can refute the strongest possible argument and not just the weakest one in favour of a certain position may you be convinced that that position is wrong. When it comes to religion in particular, it is often attacked by these “new atheists” who tend to be incredibly superficial, arationalistic and misologistic. And often their arguments boil down to pretending that religion is whatever some evangelicals or salafists believe or preach and that everyone who isn’t a fundamentalist and extremist is simply not truly religious but rather cherry picking (when in truth no one cherry picks more than fundamentalists - and than the atheist fundamentalists who pretend that these fundamentalists alone are serious about religion). My point is: If someone wants to refute religion, they don’t need to refute some televangelist preacher or some TH-cam salafist, they need to refute the likes of Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Ibn Arabi, Rumi, Maimonides or Kant or Fichte. Otherwise it would be like someone claiming all biology is nonsense because of some crude race theories of the 19th century or claiming that all medicine is wrong and arguing that point by only going after some new age quack healers. It’s intellectually lazy and dishonest. And that alone was my point. Also, on another note: A central point of my own philosophy is the importance of what I call posture. Aufklärung is a posture. And so is its opposite. People give too much credit to believes, doctrines, ideologies etc. They are mostly just the superstructure. I don’t deny the many crimes and horrors done either in the name of religion or by people claiming to be religious. But there are just as many, if not more, crimes and horrors committed not in the name of religion. The two great despotic regimes threatening world peace the most right now, Russia and China, do not claim to be religious regimes like Iran (though in Russia there is a mutual support between the regime and the clergy to be sure, in China clergy doesn’t play any role at all though). And the Ukraine war is not propagated to be a religious war. Neither did the regimes of Hitler or Stalin claim to be religious or were run by clergy. My point is not whataboutism here nor is it to weigh some crimes against others. My point is that what truly matters is posture. It would be wrong to believe that everything would be fine if people just became atheists. It would be equally wrong to believe that everything would be fine if people just became followers of this or that faith. I consider this focus on one or another particular belief to be one of today’s major issues: People will claim that “Islam” or “religion” altogether or “conservatism” or “wokeness” or whatever is the issue and if that particular belief could just be defeated, all would be well. At best that makes you waste your energy fighting one particular symptom, leaving the other symptoms and leaving the root of the illness be. At worst it blinds you against your own issues and your own unaufklärtness, because you’re not looking at people’s (including your own) behaviour, character, manner of dealing with life, ethos, i. e. their posture, but just at what team they’re in. That is exactly why I work towards aufklärung. I don’t want to fight a particular belief or ideology people hold, I want them to transform their posture. As Kant said (speaking about the state and the political sphere, but it can easily be used as an analogy for the individual): A revolution and violent overturn of one particular government can free from some personal despotism, but it won’t bring about a change in the manner of thinking and therefore in the way of governing. If you managed to talk a corrupt, selfish believer into atheism, he’d stop justifying his corrupt, selfish actions with religion, but he’d still act in a corrupt, selfish manner, probably finding other justifications even. Transform him into a righteous, selfless person instead and he will be righteous and selfless regardless of his beliefs - and if certain beliefs are by their nature at odds with being righteous and selfless, you won’t have to talk him out of them anymore, he’ll now be disgusted by them and see their error by himself and let go of them. - All of that is not the point of this particular video, but it is central to what aufklärung actually means and I want to address it further in the future.

@@Jonathan.Ivo.Loewer You make all good points, well written too. We English-only speakers don't have the appreciation that comes from reading the original text. I am frustrated with bad translations although I must say the scholarship has improved recently. Yes, your point about "new atheists" is a valid one here. Your "posture" is a purely Kantian-style response when faced with unfavorable options. You want none of the above and go to the root of the problem. In the same manner, I want to step back from looking at individual acts to mass effects. From Kant's microscopic investigation to Hegel's wide-angle lens for the spirit of the times. The topic is religious violence. Violence in the name of religion is a subject I brought up last time not for comparing whose violence is worse but why have violence at all? I bring it up because religion in Kant's context is built on the very social infrastructure (politics, economics, government, education, etc.) that the religious are hell-bent on dismantling. For example, freedom of speech is used to spread hate. Freedom of association is used to form exclusionary groups. Economic freedom is used to amass wealth to fight in courts against secular causes, such as equal rights for women and minorities. Here, in my country they use the monies to stop the underprivileged from voting and participating in normal secular activities a free society guarantees. Religions loathe modernity yet have no qualms exploiting secular technology and scientific advancements to wreck havoc on the innocent. The most vivid example is of course crashing planes into buildings on 9/11. Less vivid examples include denial of medications for pregnant women in the name of religion, denial of birth control medications, removal of classic books from public libraries, and so forth. They're acting not from fear of any apostate ideas, but out of spite. In recent years, this cancer, in the name of religion, has metastasized. It is now commonplace for a neo-Nazi candidate to get elected just by supporting any one of the religious causes: guns, anti-abortion, anti-vaccination, and strangely enough, death penalty. Priests promoting guns and death. They are also the prime movers when it comes to egging the military to use force. Think about that. In the neighborhood where I now live, there's a recreational bike path for children and adults that is very popular on days the weather permits. Sometimes it is the only outdoor exercise we get during the long winters. But recently a religious group complained that young women in bike shorts riding on that bike path violates their religious freedoms. They want the bike path shutdown or ban women from riding bikes because it makes them uncomfortable. That bike path has been in existence for over 70 years. The religious group moved into this area last year, shortly before they began harassing. This is not a pinpoint tweaking of editorial content so some religious folks are not offended by cartoons. This is culture war at a mass scale, everywhere all the time. This war is waged in workplaces, schools, governments, hospitals, commerce, and the military. One elected senator withheld military promotions because a base commander approved a female soldier to seek medical services for a miscarriage. The so-called religious have weaponized liberal societies. The collateral damage in the name of religious freedom has now reached untenable levels. Atheists are not the only victims of this grotesque mass violence. The majority of the affected I would guess are the religious themselves. Most victims are, in any case, ordinary folk living their ordinary lives with no desire to contest Aquinas or challenge the Pope. I am wondering why in the name of religion does this sort of incessant violence become normal, acceptable, and ubiquitous? Aren't religions supposed to inoculate or moderate against such excessive human tendencies? Why do religions fail so miserably? How would a pietist like Kant respond?

@@vp4744 Yes with philosophy reading it in the original is quite important and makes a big difference. Of course it differs from philosopher to philosopher. In some cases it’s more important than in others. Half of Nietzsche’s philosophy is in his style for example, I don’t see how anyone could get any grasp of what he’s about in another language but German. In Kant’s case the style is not as important, but certain specific terms very much are. Some sentences are almost untranslatable. Like his famous definition of Aufklärung as “Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit”, it’s the “exit of man from”, fair enough, but what is “selbstverschuldet”? Self-imposed? Not quite. “Schuld” is “guilt” or “responsibility” or “debt”, it is “self-guilty”, “self-responsible”, meaning you have yourself to blame for your “Unmündigkeit” - and what is that? I find it translated as immaturity, nonage, tutelage, guardianship… It’s a legal term really, meaning you can’t take care or assume responsibility for yourself, children are unmündig while their parents still are their legal guardians, there is also Straf(punishment)mündigkeit coming with a certain age when you can be legally punished for breaking the law… There is no good way of translating the sentence into English really. I’m lucky having grown up with a language that allows me access to many important philosophers in the original. But when in the future I read and explain others as thoroughly as Kant I’d like to read them in their original only, including the non-German ones.

Anyways, I agree with looking at the bigger picture (though I would always argue that there is no mass as such, it is only made up of - very much unaufkläred - individuals). I just deny that “religious violence” is the bigger picture. Thinking in boxes and beliefs and not in postures only prevents one from seeing the actual bigger issue because one focuses on only one instance of it. Like the left during metoo focused on bosses abusing their power at the workplace for sexual harassment. Well the same boss making an inappropriate comment about a female employee probably also bullies and regularly shouts at and belittles a male employee. But that gets overlooked because it doesn’t concern feminists and doesn’t fit into the box of “sexism”. Well maybe the issue isn’t a “sexist” belief of that boss, maybe the actual issue is his posture of disregard (and a society that breeds this disregard in children and allows people like that to rise to the top). Or right now here in my country there is a mass hysteria about knife stabbings done by refugees. To be sure, some refugee just stabbed three people in the name of Deash. But the right is so fixated on immigrants and refugees and “Islam” being the issue, they completely ignore that recently some German guy stabbed a random person to get back at his ex and took another person hostage. The most common name in the police statistics of knife stabbers here in Berlin is not Ali or Hassan it’s Christian. Maybe here too we should focus more of what makes certain young men, they may justify it with “Islam” or not run amok, why they are raised to have no impulse control or frustration tolerance. And likewise I’d repeat to you that if you fixate on “religious violence” you’d end up ignoring the violence committed by Russia in Ukraine or by China against its own people etc., ignoring that evil and violence and oppression can happen with or without alleged religion being used as justification. For example the things you describe - freedom of speech used to spread hate, freedom of association used to form exclusionary groups etc. - sound very familiar. Here nazis and nazi sympathizers are very much on the rise. But religion plays no part in their rhetoric. In fact they are strongest in the East of Germany, which after 40 years of GDR state atheism is largely atheist. We must abstract from what is accidental and specific to certain countries and situations to find what is common and general and therefore at the heart of the problem. I think you make a very important point when saying these people act out of pure spite. Wilhelm Reich, who is now largely forgotten but whom I consider the most important disciple of Freud, much more important to Aufklärung than the likes of Adler or Jung, who also was the first psychologist to take the nazis seriously and published his “Mass psychology of Fascism” as early as 1933, termed it emotional plague (and, like you, linked it to cancer) in his book “Murder of Christ”. Jesus Christ to him represents life and the embracing of life and joy and pleasure. People who (usually from early childhood on) have been disconnected from life, who fear and hate life and joy and pleasure can’t tolerate someone like this, they instinctively seek to murder him. They kill and hunt down Jesus und Socrates and Bruno (also eventually Reich himself), they try to crush life in every child anew. Hitler and Stalin and all the others to him are agents of the emotional plague. The important thing is: They USE certain ideologies or faiths, they may claim to act in the interest of “Germany” or “the working class” or “God” or whatever, and they’re not lying consciously, they believe this. But in reality their unconscious drives are entirely destructive, they don’t want to create anything, not even something bad, they just want to destroy life. Their results are proof enough: Hitler left Germany in ruins, unconsciously he never wanted a great and strong Germany, he just wanted to cause death and destruction. Same reason right-wingers nowdays deny the climate crisis or denied Covid. Racism or nationalism can’t explain this, rationally you’d expect a racist and nationalist to keep out and deport immigrants but to still very much want his own people to live in a functioning climate. But these people don’t want to benefit even their own, that’s just the superstructure and rationalization, what they want is destroy life and cause havoc. But you also say religions loath modernity. And here I want to advice to be careful: Aufklärung is about clarity, it’s in the word. We nowadays tend to often use words that, if we think about it, are not clear concepts in our mind, but rather very vague aggregates of imaginations and feelings. Often we use words like “religion” or “modernity” thinking that we know what they mean, but really we just heard them constantly be used by other people (who also just think they know what they mean) and just repeat them in a vaguely similar context. “Religion” and “modernity” both are such words. They are, to reappropriate the language of psychoanalysis, overdetermined. For example, I probably also loath modernity. It is after all the age that brought the most destruction, death and horror and that now is in the process of destroying our very basis of life. Now, my loathing of modernity is not some primitive conservatism, I want to go forward, not backward. I also know I take the word here in another way than you did. But that is exactly my point: These words are so vague, usually anyone can think whatever he wants about them. When it comes to religion (and I will get into that a bit when I get to Kant’s philosophy of religion), there are so many aspects usually just thrown together and subsumed under that word: actual religion is a posture, but now the phenomena of cult (which can happen in secular contexts like state or sports), church, belief, superstition etc. are usually uncritically mixed into it. If aufklärung is to happen, we society would have to become more mindful of and more clear of the concepts and words it uses.

You point out yourself how these people support guns and the death penalty. Isn’t that proof enough that they are not religious? This is not a cheap no-true-Scotsman argument (because you can’t claim, whoever hasn’t trait X that you associate with Scotsman is no Scotsman, but you can very well claim that someone who is from Gambia instead of Scotland is no Scotsman), the point is: Jesus very clearly says “Whoever is without sin cast the first stone” when confronted with the death penalty in the New Testament. He preaches turning the other cheek, loving even your enemy. What makes you possibly think the people you are talking about are religious or christian? It seems to me there is only their claim. Well, if someone claimed to be nice or smart but treated you like shit or did lots of dumb things, would you then say “man, nice people are real assholes/smart people are complete idiots?”, no, rather you’d say his claims are wrong and he’s not nice or smart at all. So if someone claims to be religious and then acts like a fascist, why judge that religions are violent and fascist and not rather that this person is not religious? This too is about aufklärung: We must learn to think for ourselves in this regard too. We must not just unquestioningly take up words as they are used or appropriated, we must use them as reason itself demands them to be used. For example I refuse to call physicians doctors. A doctor is a learned teacher of learning, a scholar spreading his scholarship. Regular physicians hardly are scholars (doctus), they certainly aren’t teachers of scholarship (doctors). I am a doctor, despite never bothering to make a PhD, so are certain other serious educators here on TH-cam. (There is a great little speech by Fichte, given on the occasion of giving the title of doctor to a number of people in his capacity as first elected rector of the Berlin university, where he says: only yourself can make yourself a doctor, no university can MAKE doctors, it can only recognize those who already are and it is guilty if it doesn’t.) There is much evil done in the name of religion, no doubt (but also good, there are also the Martin Luther Kings and Etty Hillesums and Amadou Bambas). There has also been done so much evil in the name of equality by the communists or in the name of patriotism by nationalists or in the name of civilization by colonizers. Fichte once remarked, rightfully I think, that no good thing, no sublime and divine idea has not been tainted and used for more evil than good. The issue is man himself. There is often this desire to find an evil that would just have to go for everything to be fine; if people just let go of the wrong idea, the wrong ideology, of religion, everything would be fine - that’s what many believe (just disagreeing considerably on what that “wrong” idea is). But my point, the reason I try to promote aufklärung, i. e. a posture, an ethos, a way of approaching life, instead of trying to convert or deconvert people to or from any belief, be it atheism or a certain faith or some ideology or whatever, the reason for that is: As long as people themselves are bad, they will manage to twist and abuse any idea or creed. It’s no different from technology: As soon as humans can split the atom, they create nuclear bombs, as soon as they have the steam engine they ruin the environment, as soon as they invent the internet they start spreading fake news. It would be easy to blame a specific technology and think the world would be better if it had never been invented, just like it would be easy to blame religion and think the world would be better without it. But take all technology from people and they will still beat each other to death with sticks and rocks, take all religion, they will still oppress each other. (This, by the way, is not to be misunderstood as a stance of relativism towards all believes. I’m not saying they don’t matter at all. Or that they are all equal. There certainly are some that can be abused and others that don’t just get abused but are inherently bad. But what I am saying is that we must not overemphasize what people believe but rather focus on how they act. Because the one great insight of Fichte is: Our actions don’t flow out of our beliefs, rather we choose our beliefs based on how we want to act.) Kant was not a pietist, I want to stress that. His parents were. And he kept having a lifelong respect for the good sides of pietism, for the honest pietists like his parents (while detesting all superstition and obscurantism veiled by false piety). The ethics of pietism certainly stayed with him all his life in a way. But in other ways he later was very far removed from pietism, namely from the pietist’s attempt to connect with God and feel this connection, which he strongly disagreed with, like anything he considered enthusiasm (Schwärmerei). But anyways, I will address this when I eventually get to Kants philosophy of religion. In brief: He distinguishes actual religion (the religion of right-doing) from paganism (the religion of favour-seeking). Paganism to him is not polytheism or non-Christianity or whatever, it is any belief in a God that cares about something else than your morality (like how much you prayed, whether you went to church etc.). To him the issue is what comes first: Religion or morality? If you come to believe in God first, it must be a God who is just a very powerful and very terrible being, you want to get on his good side and may do all sorts of non-moral or even immoral superstitious things like praying, fasting, killing infidels to win his favour. If morality comes first and you come to believe in God through moral reasons alone, you necessarily believe in a God who cares only for your morality, not for who joined the right club or abstained from the right food etc. He very much wanted children to not receive any religious schooling or education before having formed clear moral principles, but to rather be raised to be good people first and foremost.

Did I say convicted somewhere? Yes to be sure, it should be convinced. Thank you for pointing that out. Probably not the only error. When speaking English I could probably do with a script haha

I will talk about this further in future lectures. But the faculty of thinking (Denkungsvermögen) is made up of intellect in the closer sense (Verstand), power of judgment (Urteilskraft) and reason (Vernunft). Now, the faculty of thinking as a whole is also called intellect (Verstand) by him, at times also reason (Vernunft). I mostly go with faculty of thinking in my lectures because it's least confusing, since the names intellect and reason can both mean the whole or just a part of it. But Kant himself uses the name intellect for the whole most of the time, faculty of thinking and reason are used more rarely to denote the whole.