Sublime

“Knowledge is a fine thing quite capable of ruling a man,” Socrates says. “If he can distinguish good from evil, nothing will force him to act otherwise than as knowledge dictates, since wisdom is all the reinforcement he needs.”

In the end, then, Kant’s knowledge (which he thought enabled him to rescue science and mathematics from skepticism) is not a knowledge of the real world. It is a knowledge of its own structure, a knowledge of the categories that it imposes on experience. It is therefore in an important sense tautological. It is the knowledge of Aristotle’s Prime Mo

freedom of thought and correctness of thought,

Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Virtue Ethics tell us that we already know how to live, that the formula for how to do so is simply a matter of cleaning up the bodily command, or cleaning up the kinship command, or of looking to the best ways in which the people around us have found to satisfy both at the same time.

Immanuel Kant, the extraordinary Enlightenment philosopher, had laid down the thought that we could never come to know the real world which exists beyond our perceptions. Rational enquiry, he said, could never provide the path to understanding ‘objective’ reality, because the most our minds can do is set about organising and considering the world t

Kant les désignera sous l’expression de « règne des fins » (c’est-à-dire un monde construit autant qu’il est possible par et pour les actions libres et désintéressées des individus). Son principe suprême, c’est le respect d’autrui qui est la chose la moins naturelle du monde et qui suppose un effort sur soi, une volonté qui s’arrache aux penchants