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Kant was a terrible writer. He was honest enough to admit it, and gracious enough to publish his longing for the elegance and clarity of style with which two of his contemporaries — David Hume and Moses Mendelssohn — were born. Kant knew The Critique of Pure Reason was a problem, and his later attempts to revise or summarize it only made things worse. Still, the book is the single greatest work of modern philosophy, and has but one rival — Plato's Republic — in the history of thought. It's not only general readers who are put off by its clumsy, sluggish writing; most university courses spend so much time on the first half that they stop before reaching what Kant said was the point.
So I've taken a quote that many readers never get to, but it shows the Critique at its heart. The book seeks to determine what it means to be real. Unlike many contemporary philosophers, Kant wasn't interested in skeptical puzzles. For him, what is real and what is not was a matter of great moral and political import. The Enlightenment contested the reality of superstitions: Though witches were no longer burned in the 18th century, you could still be sent to jail for denying the reality of demons in free-thinking Holland. Other superstitions were less dramatic but more dangerous: As long as people believed that poverty and illness were God's punishment for one sin or another, they were unlikely to explore ways of eliminating them.
Conservative authorities, on the other hand, scornfully denied principles the Enlightenment held dear. Give up feudal tradition for abstract ideals of universal justice? All men created equal? Surely anyone with a bit of real-life experience could see that such a claim is not only not self-evident, it isn't even true.
Such examples show why it was important for the Critique to distinguish what is true from what ought to be true. Kant thought the gap between what reality is and what it should be will never disappear. But while he's the only philosopher who insisted that reason and reality are utterly different, he's also the only one who gave both equal time. He thought this is what it means to be grown-up — a stance that is tense, sometimes tragic, and thoroughly modern. Much easier to believe whatever your government tells you, like young children believe their parents. Or — the postmodern solution — to conclude, like adolescents, that because some claims to moral and political authority turn out to be false or specious, they never have substance at all.
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Maturity, for Kant, is not resignation, the stance usually intended when someone is told to be realistic. It isn't childish to work for a world in which ideals of perfect justice would be realized (though it would be childish to swallow the claim that we're already there). Nothing you do in your lifetime will take you all the way to the ideal; but if you confine your efforts to cynical headshaking, you will never get anywhere at all.
As long as your ideas of what is possible are limited by your ideas of what is actual, no other idea has a chance. We've all heard the claim that this or that reform would be very nice in theory, but the hard data on human nature shows it won't work in practice. Kant found the claim stale in the 18th century, for he turned those empiricist claims upside down. Of course, ideas of reason conflict with the claims of experience. That's how ideas work. Ideals are not to be measured by whether they conform to reality; reality is judged by whether it lives up to experience. If enough of us work to make it do so, it will.
It's not hard to recall how many bits of reality have changed in my lifetime. Forget about the Internet; I grew up in a world where black and white children couldn't swim in the same lakes, and girls planned to be secretaries or housewives. Even in the most hopeful moments of the 1960s, the idea that the world could be riveted on the current U.S. presidential election would have been dismissed as utterly utopian. Despite some ugly moments, what we're now watching is a triumph of idealism. It wasn't Barack Obama, but Immanuel Kant, who first insisted on the audacity of hope.
Will slogging your way through the Critique give you a foolproof way of deciding what's real? Kant doesn't give recipes; the principle of Enlightenment is to think for yourself. Work your way through this book (a good guide is helpful) and you'll be better equipped to do so, for you will have learned to hone and sharpen your own judgment. Judgment, says the Critique, is just what fools don't have, whether they are scholars or saddle-makers. But though anyone can fail to think for herself, anyone can learn it. There's no better place than Kant to begin.
Susan Neiman is director of the Einstein Forum in Germany, and author of "Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists".
Next week: Pride and Prejudice.
