Is anyone out there studying any Immanuel Kant? I'm interested in hearing what you think of him in relation to Orthodox thought and philosophy.
Serious comments please....I need to explain myself (from an Orthodox view point) in class.... thanks
KANT AND ORTHODOXY
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Aristokles
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Re: KANT AND ORTHODOXY
LIUDMILLA wrote:Is anyone out there studying any Immanuel Kant? I'm interested in hearing what you think of him in relation to Orthodox thought and philosophy.
Serious comments please....I need to explain myself (from an Orthodox view point) in class.... thanks
How much time do we have to ponder this? And is this to be a written or oral presentation in class?
Demetri
I have this week and next week. We are actually only studying his Perpetual Peace essays and not his whole works although it is of interest to me generally.
This is a political theorist class but we hit all the philosophy too. Kant is supposed to have influence many thinkers with his writings, including some "Orthodox" ones. We do Hegel next, followed by Marx and the Neitzsche and someone called Habermas. These guys influenced so much of western thought and I can't help but wonder how an Orthodox person would present an opposing or answering position.
Kant had some (for lack of a better word) interesting "ideas", strange but interesting.
Kant for Liudmilla
Liudmilla:
I do not know a great deal about Kant right off the top of my head (even though I am supposedly a student of Philosophy), but I can give you a couple of words to describe Kant and hopefully it will be enough.
First of all, Kant represents the epitome of what is called German Idealism. Now, I haven't the patience for boring text, so I take Kant by Fichte through Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer of the Victorian era whose writing style is much, much more to my enjoyment... But I digress.
As you study and think about Kant, try to realize that his ideas, though bordering on the poetic and intuitive, are of an essentially nihilistic design. When one compares "enlightenment" era idealism with the classical ideas that are familiar to us Orthodox Christians, one begins to see basic anxiety of someone like Kant. Namely, that the old ways are inadequate. The idea works something like this:
The TRUTH in its cosmic and transcendental absoluteness, is like a straight line. But the human STORY for that TRUTH works something like a zig-zag through, or corkscrew around it. (Now pay attention here) So the perception from human experience is that the TRUTH inasmuch as we can know it, is ALWAYS CHANGING as we, through time, rock back and forth across that zig-zag or spiral through that corkscrew, always trying to hug the corners to be near that straight and TRUE line.
What does this mean for Orthodoxy? It means that while our faith was at one time relevant, it has, through failure to change, departed more and more from TRUTH through time.
If this post did not get to you in time, I am sorry. And if your professor says of the above account, "not exactly," I am sorry about that too. But, if I'm wrong, perhaps its only that am closer to the TRUTH! Ha, ha. But you see what confusion such sophistry brings.
Sincerely:
Joseph
Having studied all three of Kant's Critiques, including a brief survey of his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, in summary, Kant does not believe we can have any knowledge or experience of God. We cannot have any experience of God because we cannot have any experience of the "essence" (noumena) of empirical objects (which, of course, God is not). But neither can we have access to God through reason because, though Reason posits God as a necessary hypothesis, Reason cannot prove God's existence.
In Religion, Kant notes that all of the empirical history and moral insights, must be universalized and made to fit within human Reason.
I do not have my Kant near to hand (I'm at work), so I do not now have references. If you need them, though, I can try to get them for you.
In short, though I am only an inquirer into Orthodoxy, it would seem to me that Kant is quite far from Orthodoxy.
