Kant: A Biography

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Summary: Dialectic of Illusion, and a Critique of Reason
Review: World history shows a crisis of the philosophical. In the wreckage of metaphpysical systems and the crash landing into modernism of the great religions, the rise of science in turn encounters a new dilemma in the one-dimensional flatland of empiricism. The visions of a ghostseer become a desert of empty reductionism, the world of the modern bedouin. At a critical turning point in history, we see the philosopher Kant attempting to discover the middle way between these extremes. This fine biography covers the full ground of Kant's adventure into the unknown, from the earliest period of his Pietist background to the close of his system at the time of the French Revolution. And a remarkable life it is, stretching the bow between the most ordinary existence and the most extraordinary flowering of the philosopher, as if his life were itself an 'idea for a universal history', for it becomes an echo and recursion of the whole endeavor of thought's evolution, even as it mutates into a new future. The mysterious stages of Kant's development, and his late yield of maturity are a riddle of contemplation in action, as we see an age passing in many thunders beside this quiet yet more fundamental revolution after which no philosophical endeavor will be the same. Indeed, even our most newly sanctified theories of evolution will soon reckon with this double whammy that haunts the rationalist metaphysician and the empiricist, for such theories contain purloined the hidden version of the dialectic of illusion that will reduce even such to rubble if they cannot find the real man of practical reason and ethical self-consciousness.