273 definitions
The book's index
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
173 concepts · 273 definitions
- accountability1
- action2
- actor2
- afterlife1
- amor mundi1
- appearance1
- approbation2
- bad man1
- beautiful5
- beauty3
- beginning1
- being alive1
- blade of grass1
- body1
- bonapartism1
- care for the world1
- categorical imperative2
- cave1
- citizen1
- common sense1
- communicability2
- communication2
- conscience1
- consistency1
- constitution2
- coup1
- courage1
- critical thinking4
- critical thought2
- criticism1
- critique4
- critique of pure reason1
- crystal1
- defeated cause1
- disagreement1
- discord1
- disinterested delight1
- disinterestedness2
- dog1
- dogmatism1
- doxa1
- empathy1
- end of history2
- enlarged mentality1
- enlarged thought1
- enlargement of the mind1
- enlightenment1
- enthusiasm1
- equality1
- erudition1
- event1
- evil3
- example2
- exemplary validity3
- existence1
- expulsion from Paradise1
Judgment (n.) is taste at a distance: by removing the object into representation, one gains the uninvolvedness needed to weigh it at its proper worth.
Judgment (n.) can never compel agreement, as 'two and two are four' does; one can only woo or court the agreement of everyone else.
Judgment (n.) in art works by a silent sense that lets everyone tell right from wrong without any knowledge of art — marvelously little difference between learned and ignorant in judging, the greatest in making.
Judgment (n.) is not practical reason: reason lays down the law and speaks in imperatives, while judgment arises from a merely contemplative pleasure, an inactive delight.
Taste (n.) is where egoism is overcome; we become 'considerate,' surrendering our private conditions for the sake of others.
Taste (n.) senses the particular qua particular: what the eye sees shares its properties with other objects, but what the tongue tastes is unique.
Taste (n.) is the surprising sense on which judgment of right and wrong came to be modeled — of all the senses the most private and incommunicable.
Taste (n.) is the discipline of genius, ranked above it even though without genius there would be nothing to judge.
War (n.) prepares cosmopolitan peace by its very meaninglessness: sheer exhaustion will impose what neither reason nor good will could achieve.
War (n.) is not so incurably bad as the deadness of a universal monarchy.
War (n.) is two drunkards bludgeoning each other in a china shop — and the onlooker who admires their courage forgets the china shop, the world.
War (n.) has something sublime in it for the spectator, while a long peace breeds a commercial spirit, low selfishness, cowardice and effeminacy.
Progress (n.) is against human dignity: dignity demands each of us be seen in our particularity, reflecting mankind without comparison and independent of time.
Progress (n.) as a standard for judging history reverses the old principle that a story's meaning reveals itself only at its end: what matters now is the horizon it opens.
Progress (n.) is a melancholy notion — the eighteenth century's ruling idea: each condition stays an evil compared with the better one ahead, so infinite advance is an unending series of evils.
Progress (n.) is an escape from the particular, meaningless in itself, to the universal from which it borrows its meaning.
A Spectator (n.) may applaud with near-enthusiasm what, as an actor, he would be forbidden to do: Kant condemned the very action whose results he affirmed.
A Spectator (n.) exists only in the plural: not involved in the act, but always involved with fellow spectators.
A Spectator (n.) is the one not engaged in the game who follows it with wishful, passionate participation — and it was from this seat that Kant judged the French Revolution.
Spectator (n.) of the French Revolution, uninvolved yet involved with one another, made the event at home in the history of mankind and thus for all future action.
History (n.) in which mankind keeps advancing toward virtue and relapsing into vice is a drama that becomes a farce; the actors may not tire of it, for they are fools, but the spectator does.
History (n.) is the pseudo-divinity of the modern age, from which we must win back our dignity — not by denying its importance but its right to be the final judge.
History (n.) is not stories or deeds but the secret ruse of nature that makes the species progress behind the backs of its individuals.
History (n.) without progress offers the spectator only regress, which would bring despair, or eternal sameness, which would bore us to death.
The Beautiful (n.) interests us only in society: a man abandoned on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person.
The Beautiful (n.) has as its true opposite not the ugly but that which excites disgust.
Beautiful (n.) is an end in itself because all its possible meaning is contained within itself — unlike a story, whose meaning comes only at dusk.
The Beautiful (n.) is what pleases in the mere act of judging it; what pleases merely in perception is gratifying, not beautiful.
Truth (n.) as dogmatists and skeptics both conceive it excludes all other truths by definition — perhaps it is this concept that is wrong.
Truth (n.) in philosophy lacks the general validity of a repeatable experiment; what it must have instead is general communicability.
Truth (n.) is what I can communicate.
Truth (n.) is something finite men may have a notion of, to regulate their minds, without being capable of possessing it.
Critique (n.) after Kant could mean either the establishment of critical thinking or the destruction, in thought, of whatever it seizes upon.
Critique (n.) joined theory to practice for Marx but not for Kant: the theoretical dismantling of the old regime followed by its practical destruction.
Critique (n.) is negative the way the police are: its business is only to prevent violence, so that each may pursue his vocation in peace.
Critique (n.) is a new way of thinking, not a preparation for a new doctrine; the system-building that followed it was only another dogmatism.
Philosophy (n.) must be capable of popularity; if not, it probably hides nonsense under a fog of seeming sophistication.
Philosophy (n.) in the young Hegel is esoteric, not made for the mob — common sense turned upside down.
Philosophy (n.) as 'learning how to die' is the vulgarized Roman version of the Phaedo — and un-Greek, since in Rome philosophy was for the old, in Greece for the young.
Philosophy (n.) alone lets men enjoy themselves independently, without the help or presence of others.