Kant was a German protestant who was famous for believing that if anyone used their God given reasoning of situations then everyone would come to the same conclusion to a situation. I think that as an entire Journalism class we used our God given reasoning to conclude that Kant along with his rival Hegel were two of the most complicated men if the history of philosopher. However, there points to Kant’s philosophy that I did understand proved to be significant to western philosophy therefore I should at least justify them with a space on the blog.
I get the feeling that Kant didn’t believe in the idea of uniqueness as along with the universalisation of reason, Kant also believed that if one person did something, everyone else would have to. For example if someone were to have an abortion then everyone else would have to. It’s clear that Kant wants the world’s population to be a herd of sheep.
One of these sheep is Hegel, another German philosopher. The reason behind my possibly harsh judgement of him is when I did understand Hegel, (although this was rare as even Bertrand Russell describe him as the ‘single most difficult philosopher to understand’) I was also seemingly hearing an echo of what I just battled through with Kant.
Although Hegel did manage to get something which can be considered as his – the Hegelian Dialect. This is the idea the there are three dialectic states of development:
1. Thesis: an intellectual proposition
2. Antithesis: a negation of the thesis, a reaction to the proposition
3. Synthesis: solves the conflict between 1 and 2 by reconciling their common truths and forming a new proposition
We studied further theories from both philosophers such as Kant’s categorical imperative, priori/posteriori and his take on realism and from Hegel, his idea on thought and progress. However, I did struggle with both philosophers and their theories and this is my understanding of them both.
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