
Reading Kant isn’t just hard—it’s soul-sucking. It’s like trying to make sense of a drunk stranger’s ramblings at a bar, only the stranger is dead, German, and possibly a genius. You sit there, staring at his words, thinking, Am I stupid, or is this man just messing with me?
The truth? It’s a little of both.
1. Sentences Longer Than Your Will to Live
Kant doesn’t just write. He unleashes. His sentences pour out like a busted fire hydrant, soaking you in a flood of words you didn’t ask for and can’t escape.
They twist and turn like a snake that’s had one too many at the bar, slithering through dense thickets of commas, over jagged cliffs of semicolons, and into endless tunnels of parentheses that lead to nowhere.
You start reading, full of hope, thinking maybe this one will be different.
But three lines in, you’re lost. By the fifth line, your head hurts. By the time you reach the end—if you even do—you’re not sure what you just read or why you even started.
Was it about the thing-in-itself? Or something about reason?
Who knows? The subject and the predicate got divorced somewhere around line three, and you were stuck with custody of the fragments.
And that period you’ve been waiting for, the one that’s supposed to save you?
It finally shows up after 200 words, panting and out of breath, as if it barely survived the journey itself.
By then, you’ve forgotten the beginning, the middle, and whatever semblance of meaning the sentence was supposed to have.
All you’re left with is a vague sense of intellectual defeat and the urge to drink.
Author | Average Sentence Length |
---|---|
Dr. Seuss | 10 words |
Ernest Hemingway | 15 words |
Kant | Who even knows? Forever. |
2. He Invents Words Like a Madman
Kant decided the German language wasn’t enough for him. No, that wasn’t big enough, bold enough, complicated enough to house the wild mess of ideas bouncing around in his head.
So he started building his own. He grabbed the German dictionary by the throat, ripped out a few pages, and stuffed it with Frankensteinian monsters like Ding-an-sich (the thing-in-itself) and Transcendental Idealism.
These weren’t just words—they were philosophical landmines.
You’d step on one, and boom—your brain was scattered across five dimensions of abstract thought.
It’s not just reading; it’s a DIY survival kit for the mind. You’re left trying to piece it all together, like you’re assembling a bookshelf from Ikea, except the instructions are written in 18th-century German, half the parts are missing, and there’s a note at the bottom that says, Good luck, idiot.
And just when you think you’ve figured out what a noumenon is, Kant throws in another curveball—a new term, more horrifying than the last.
Now you’re juggling phenomena, a priori judgments, and pure reason, while Kant stands in the corner, smirking, saying, If you don’t get it, that’s on you. It’s not a conversation; it’s a verbal hostage situation.
3. Overwriting as an Extreme Sport
Here’s how normal people explain things:
- The cat is on the roof.
Here’s how Kant explains it:
- “The feline organism, as apprehended through the sensory faculties in conjunction with the empirical framework, is presently situated upon the architectural structure’s uppermost plane.”
He’s not just verbose. He’s militant about it. You want to scream, “Just say it, man!” but he won’t. He’s too busy gilding the lily with words like “a priori” and “phenomena.”
4. You’re Not His Target Audience
Kant wasn’t writing for you. Or me. Or anyone who has to eat, breathe, and sleep in the real world.
He wasn’t interested in making his ideas clear to the butcher, the baker, or even the professor down the hall who just wants to understand the basics.
No, Kant was aiming his words at a tiny, elite circle of 18th-century philosophers—the kind of people who already had half a library of Latin and Greek texts memorized and probably thought a good time involved debating the metaphysical implications of a tree falling in a forest.
For Kant, the rest of us weren’t just unimportant; we were irrelevant. His books weren’t written for mortals.
They were written for an intellectual aristocracy that already spoke his convoluted dialect of philosophical gibberish.
You? You’re the guy outside the velvet rope, pressing your nose against the glass, watching the party unfold but never understanding the jokes.
The rest of us? We’re just collateral damage in his war against simplicity.
He didn’t just ignore clarity; he buried it, set it on fire, and danced on its ashes. And if you dare to ask, What the hell is he even saying? the answer you’ll get is silence—or worse, another 300-page volume explaining why the question was flawed in the first place.
Audience | Writing Style |
---|---|
Academics in 1781 | Cryptic, dense, and jargon-heavy |
Modern readers with Google Translate | Absolutely screwed |
5. Periods? Who Needs Those?
Imagine reading a sentence that runs so long you feel like you’ve aged five years by the time it ends.
That’s Kant. He doesn’t believe in stopping. It’s like he thought periods were for cowards and decided his philosophy deserved an Olympic marathon of syntax instead.
6. The Art of Overexplaining Nothing
Kant doesn’t tell you what time it is. He explains clocks, time itself, and your ability to perceive either. He unpacks every little detail until you’re drowning in a sea of theoretical minutiae.
He sometimes forgets to connect it back to his point. You’re left holding a thousand little puzzle pieces with no picture to guide you.
7. Complex Ideas Thrown at You Like a Fastball
When Kant’s not busy overexplaining, he’s underexplaining. He drops bombshells like “The noumenal world is unknowable” and just moves on. No warning, no breakdown, just a philosophical sucker punch to the gut.
8. Lost in Translation
Kant’s writing is already a nightmare in German—dense, winding, stuffed with enough jargon to make a legal contract look breezy.
But when you translate it into English, the nightmare doesn’t end. It mutates. Subtle nuances get lost in the shuffle, delicate meanings fall through the cracks, and suddenly you’re not just lost—you’re stranded in a philosophical wasteland.
Take a sentence in German, already bloated with commas and overstuffed with words like Ding-an-sich or Erkenntnis. Now, shove it through the linguistic meat grinder of translation.
What comes out the other side isn’t just clunky—it’s mangled. Half the meaning doesn’t make it across the border, and what does is wearing the wrong hat and a fake mustache.
You sit there, staring at the page, trying to decode it, wondering if Kant is saying what you think he’s saying—or something completely different. Is this about perception? Reason? Some cosmic joke? You don’t know. You can’t know. The translator probably doesn’t know either.
It’s like being handed a treasure map, but the X marking the spot has been smudged into a Rorschach test. Maybe it’s a mountain. Maybe it’s a rabbit. Maybe it’s Kant himself, sitting in the corner, laughing at you for even trying.
9. His Ideas Are an Obstacle Course
Let’s give Kant some credit. The man was wrestling with big questions: How do we know what we know? What are the limits of reason? These aren’t exactly light topics. His philosophy is like an intricate labyrinth, and if you don’t take the right turns, you’re stuck wandering forever.
10. Kant vs. Clarity: A One-Sided Battle
At the end of the day, Kant didn’t care about being clear. He cared about being right. He believed in precision over accessibility, even if that meant losing 99% of his audience along the way. He wrote for posterity, not for popularity.
Conclusion
Reading Kant is like climbing Everest without a map, a guide, or oxygen. Every step feels like a mistake. Every sentence feels like a trap. By the time you reach the top—or at least think you do—you’re not sure whether to celebrate or cry.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe Kant wanted to weed out the casual readers, the dabblers, the ones who weren’t willing to suffer for knowledge.
Maybe he wanted you to earn it—every insight, every revelation, every damn comma.
Or maybe he just sucked at writing.
Either way, you close the book, exhausted, enlightened, and maybe a little insane.
And just when you think it’s over—when you’ve made it through the storm—you realize something terrifying:
You’re starting to like it.
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