Remembered why I love Kant

Hi,

years ago, one of the reasons for learning the Fraktur style of writing to be able to read the works of Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. (Beside Goethe, but he is in a league of his own.)

They have been the first to move from philosophy written in Latin to the one in German. Don't get me wrong, Latin is easy and I love it. Most of the words in my native language have their root in Latin and reading it, was most of the time easy. But German is different, especially as the above-mentioned, where they kept the Latin structure in their works, and used German wording.

German is a very strong language for thinking. In my field of work, when I have a difficult choice to make, I do my internal thinking in German. The structure helps the thinking process. If I would like to express feelings and be more social, I definitely switch to Romanian, as the Latin background, combined with Hungarian, German and Slavic languages, it gives a wide variety of feeling and emotions. Thinking is for me German, Feeling is Romanian. I kept it with capital letters, just to underline the importance of it.

Now back to Kant and his gorgeous essay called, What Is Enlightenment?. It is short, so fits to our daily form of short content, for a short attention span, but in it, it attacks this laziness of the thinking. As today was a lovely autumn afternoon, with 11°C, I took a glass of fine whisky from his motherland, Scotland, isn't it the proper country @tengolotodo for a whisky? I have some bottles from where I drink when I read, one being the Bruichladdich Black Art Edition 11, which is not a common whisky. I only share it with my wife and dad, and that is about it, as it is a whisky that needs to be enjoyed. Looking at the word enjoyed in English, I have to go back to the Romanian language, where the right would be a savura, like the French savouer which implies the feel of full sense of the flavours, of being in the moment of the taste and fully grasping it. Even German is better here, with genießen, but still away from the Romanian or French counterparts.

Again, back to Kant and this piece of thinking that puts, or at least shall put, some doubt in one's mind. It is about Enlightenment, and why most people don't have it, or don't reach it. Will summarize it for you, it is because of laziness and cowardice. We delegate our thinking and ration, and we forget that we are able ourselves to do it. We are losing our freedom, by staying lazy and coward. Not going into current politics with all the conspiracy things, by far from that. It is about the own shaping of the character, the freedom of its own soul. Thinking takes some braveness, according to Kant, and it is more simple just to delegate the thinking to others.

I would recommend reading it, preferably in German or Latin, but if not possible, also another language will do, even if it loses some symbolism behind the words. Let me know if you have read it, or which philosopher do you like and why.

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