Word: kant
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Since long before Isaiah prophesied that nations would beat their swords into plowshares, men of good will have dreamed the noble dream of disarmament and everlasting peace. Great thinkers and artists-Kant and Rousseau, Goya and Daumier-have preached it in their works. During the interval between the two World Wars, it even seemed at times that the ancient dream was at last approaching fulfillment...
...reason as his only absolute." Firmly convinced that her own one absolute is reason, Author Rand has gone so far as to boast: "I have never had an emotion that I couldn't account for." Less fortunate people, she suggested last week at Yale, can blame Immanuel Kant. Just when faith was on the wane, and self-interest had a foot in the door, he "saved the morality of altruism" with his duty-setting "categorical imperatives." It was he who bred the mental worm that makes modern men "equate self-interest with evil," that makes businessmen afraid to admit...
About the turn of the century, a popular song among Japanese students had a refrain that ran "dekansho, dekansho." It was shorthand for "Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer." In the early 1950s, the hit refrain was "chiiku dansu" i.e., dancing "cheek to cheek." In symbolic miniature, the two songs reflect two staggering cultural encounters between Japan and the West. Clam-shut to the outside world for centuries, Japan was pried open by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 and avidly, if erratically, soaked up Western thought and technology. In 1945, the vanquished paid the victors the sincere, if at times embarrassing, flattery...
They have brought together Lichtenberg's observations and witticisms written over a period covering roughly 35 years of his life, from 1764 to 1799. During most of this period, Lichtenberg resided at Gottingen University, as a professor of mathematics and astronomy. Only Kant stayed at home longer than Lichtenberg; both men being somewhat alike in their appreciation of the virtues of the middle-class life. Lichtenberg, however, was no timid professor. One of the most appealing things about him is his interest and enthusiasm over the minor occurrences in his life. A simple rain storm was as apt to inspire...
...apparent from these quotations from The Lichtenberg Reader, Lichtenberg was a master of the aphorism. Although he produced nothing else in the realm of great literature, his amazing skill at combining a sharp wit with deep insights was enough to endear him to his great contemporaries, Goethe and Kant. Later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Lichtenberg was even more valued by such greats as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard who saw in him evidence of their own existential approach to philosophy. That Lichtenberg was in many ways ahead of his time is true, for in a time of rampant Enlightenment rationalism...