> Read Kant, but
>don't do a Kant.
I think I know what you mean, but is there not a sense in which we all 'do a Kant' when we respect others as persons.
Those who criticise Kant (or Jefferson) for failing to live up to the principles of equality that they enunciated do not understand that their criticisms are wholly parasitic upon those very principles.
Objections:
1 Kant was just formalising a social reality. Of course he was, but he was the one that did.
2 (Hegel's and Marx's) that a universal law can describe a sectional interest. Of course it can. But we can't go beyond Kant except by paying homage to the principle of universality he coined.
There's no great need necessarily to read Kant today (except perhaps to differentiate Kant's achievements to the degenerate neo-Kantian school, which, through phenomenology still has an influence in today's philosophy see Lucien Goldmann's 'Immanuel Kant'). But we are all doing a Kant, right here and now on this discussion list.
And what about the consequences of ditching Kant. Like this author:
'Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking ... contain the risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sudden ageing?' (xxxi) And who could it be who is so keen to keep young people away from Kant? Why, it's the neo-Nazi Peter Sloterdijk.
But then the Nazis always had a problem with Kant, whose status as a German commanded international respect, but whose emphasis upon liberty was a problem. Despite successive attempts to control the Kant Society the Nazis could not bring any of its members with them and had eventually to impose a wholly bogus Kant society from on high (meanwhile Husserl organised an emigre Kant society from the exiled members of the original one (in Farias, Heidegger and Nazism).
The Nazi philosopher Heidegger, of course, was hostile to Kant. In Being and Time he attacks Kant's idea of the subject (p204-6). In The lectures published as The History of the Concept of Time he attacks 'dogmatic Kantianism' as a backward step. -- Jim heartfield