Kant Quotes

“Especially to be avoided is approaching Kant's life in a spirit of hero worship or hagiography -- as though our interest in a philosopher's thoughts is, or ought to be, proportional to our admiration for the thinker as a human being. If there have been any true saints or heroes among important figures in the history of philosophy, we would do well to entirely ignore their heroism and saintliness in studying their philosophical thoughts. It is unhealthy and completely unphilosophical to venerate philosophers of the past as gurus at whose feet we should sit in order to absorb their wisdom. Such an attitude toward any other person, whether living or dead, betrays a contemptible slavishness of mind that is incompatible with doing philosophy at all. In holding this opinion, I am, incidentally, also being a good Kantian, since Kant regarded the practice of those who set others up as models for imitation as morally corrupt, tending sooner to produce either self-contempt or envy than virtue. But that is all the more reason to apply Kant's view on this matter to Kant himself. Even the view itself should be given no credit at all just because Kant held it, but should be held only because experience shows it to be true -- and true even about Kant himself.”
― Allen W. Wood, Kant

“What is most remarkable about the philosophy of Kant, in my opinion, is the wide range of topics on which his thoughts repay careful study. In so many areas -- not only in metaphysics but also in natural science, history, morality, and critique of taste -- he seems to have gone to the root of the matter, and at least raised for us the fundamental issues, whether or not we decide in the end that what he said about them is correct. In his brief, five-page essay on the question "What is Enlightenment?" for example, he locates the essence of enlightenment not in learning or the cultivation of our intellectual powers but in the courage and resolve to think for oneself, to emancipate oneself from tradition, prejudice, and every form of authority that offers us the comfort and security of letting someone else do our thinking for us. Kant's essay enables us to see that the issues raised by the challenge of the Enlightenment are still just as much with us as they were in the eighteenth century.”
― Allen W. Wood, Kant