>It's one thing to be Kant in the eighteenth century; it's another thing to
do a Kant near the end of the twentieth century.<
reading kant is not necessarily "doing a kant", is it? only if we want to find masters would we expect them to always be always right, to have to conform to every principle we hold dear. which is another way of saying that we would like ourselves to be regarded as masters instead of those we accuse others of revering... but i digress, only to point out that there seems to be some insistence that reading kant as a strict defense of the bourgeoisie is what kant is. i'd suspect that if any serious liberals sat down to read kant today, they'd likely be radicalised by the experience rather than relaxed and comfortable with the world. if rorty and other pragmatists want to dispense with the kantian moment of liberalism at the end of the twentieth century, then i hardly think we should encourage them to do so, partly because kant was a radical liberalism then, and in relation to liberal pragmatism, looks like a radical liberalism now.
reading kant to see the ways in which the antinomies are both suspended and apparently solved by way of things like transcendental apperception, the ways in which formal rules are emptied of content only to have to be refilled again at certain well-defined points, is to come face to face with the limit-points and ideological pressures of liberalism, as dennis has been suggesting. on the one hand, a critique of feudal contents functioning as absolutes, on the other hand, a fear of the masses; on the one hand, an embrace of the formalism of money as the shattering of feudal absolutes and contents, on the other hand, a relegation of determination to a terrain which stands in for the merchants and bankers, which somehow are credited with holding circulation together and making it possible. even that account barely does justice to kant. without kant, there would be no sense of immanent critique in western philosophy; without kant, no hegelian system as a explicit response to kantian instability...
without kant, no sense of why the market continues to be regarded as the terrain of freedom and why it continues to be (in entirely kantian terms) counterposed to the state -- whether that be by vulgar liberals who think of the state as bad, or by vulgar marxists who think it embodies the good. without kant, the ubiquity of that false antinomy would not have been a subject of discussion or reference in hegel and marx.
i'd say there's a lot of reasons to read kant, not least because the relationship between circulation and production, formal rules and substantive contents, citizenship and subjectivity, continues to be the index of liberalism's internal tension and ideological failure, as well as the priveliged mode of its reassertion and the determination of points beyond which it cannot go. without kant, no critique of liberalism. without kant, the contradictions of liberalism would not be unbearable. which is why, referring to jim h.'s post, engels makes the homage, and why it's possible for malik to say that the "tension between a profound belief in equality and the social limits on its articulation ... has been central to the modern discourse of race", including the historical spur of anti-racism.
btw, neo-kantianism refers i would think specifically to the split between the marburg and heidelberg schools over whether values should be given priority over validity or vice versa, and this was one way of stabilising the tensions within kant on one side or the other of the antinomies of reason. and that might be a good way to think about the various readings of marx (eg, cohen), which emphasise one side or the other of what should be a dialectical account, or rather, any account which likes to offer solutions to the movement of the categories within theory as if they are real solutions to real movement rather than adventures of a conceited and yet uncomfortable reason. are we beyond (reading) kant? only in the sense that kant is also, despite himself and also because he is a more rigorous liberal than most, beyond kant.
Angela _________