I feel changed today as if I am in a different psychological zip code, as if I am in a melodramatic Dickens novel. Any moment I will run into Fagin and The Artful Dodger and I'd better watch out. As if I am in a back alley or a seedy bowling alley, as if someone will try to pick my pocket at any time. I'm on alert.

 This thinking led Kant to a more pessimistic conclusion than Copernicus’s. Whereas humanity did eventually arrive at a correct understanding of the solar system, it is impossible for us to ever know “things in themselves”—what Kant called “noumena.” We have access only to “phenomena”—the way things look to us, given the kind of mind we have. “What things may be in themselves, I know not and need not know, because a thing is never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon,” Kant insisted.

This is an “unsettling” message, Willaschek writes: “It seems to rob all the things around us of their solidity, so to speak, and to transform them into mere figments of our imagination.” In fact, Kant didn’t intend to make us doubt the evidence of our senses. Instead, he reasoned, it is because all human beings experience the world through the same categories of time and space that scientific knowledge is possible. Science claims to deal with the world only as we perceive it, not as it is “in itself,” and to that extent it is completely reliable. Anyone who measures an object in free fall in a vacuum will find that it accelerates at thirty-two feet per second squared; we don’t have to worry that this is a “figment of our imagination.”

But Kant’s theory of knowledge poses a serious problem for any kind of religion or philosophy that claims to tell us about ultimate truths and eternal essences, such as God. If our minds are unable to reach beyond the limits of time and space, then metaphysical knowledge is a contradiction in terms. “The notion of a Supreme Being is in many respects a highly useful idea,” Kant granted, but it is only an idea. “It is incapable of enlarging our cognition with regard to the existence of things.”

Is it possible to live a meaningful existence in the absence of God and other absolute truths? This would become the central question for modern Western thought, and it was Kant who first posed it in all its complexity. The answer he offered was actually more hopeful than those of many writers who came after him. He believed that it was possible to live a good and moral life while accepting the boundaries of our understanding. But he was certain that, in philosophy as in astronomy, the “discovery of our deficiencies must produce a great change in the determination of the aims of human reason.”

Such a revolutionary ambition was fitting for a philosopher who did his most important work in the age of the American and French Revolutions. Yet in his personal life Kant was the opposite of rebellious. Willaschek organizes his book around themes—with chapters devoted to Kant’s ideas on education, revolution, wit, science, and even extraterrestrials (he believed that they must exist)—rather than chronologically, mainly because Kant’s biography is terrifically dull.

-Adam Kirsch in The New Yorker

 

Kant: A Revolution in Thinking Hardcover – September 16, 2025 

by  Marcus Willaschek  (Author), Peter Lewis  (Translator)

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A foremost Kant expert takes us on a lively tour through the revolutionary ideas of the founder of modern philosophy.

Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively influenced both intellectual history and twentieth-century politics, shaping everything from the German Constitution to the United Nations Charter.

Renowned philosopher Marcus Willaschek explains why, three centuries after Kant’s birth, his reflections on democracy, beauty, nature, morality, and the limits of human knowledge remain so profoundly relevant. Weaving biographical and historical context together with exposition of key ideas, Willaschek emphasizes three central features of Kant’s theory and method. First, Kant combines seemingly incompatible positions to show how their insights can be reconciled. Second, he demonstrates that it is not only human thinking that must adjust to the realities of the world; the world must also be fitted to the structures of our thinking. Finally, he overcomes the traditional opposition between thought and action by putting theory at the service of practice.

In Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, even readers having no prior acquaintance with Kant’s ideas or with philosophy generally will find an adroit introduction to the Prussian polymath’s oeuvre, beginning with his political arguments, expanding to his moral theory, and finally moving to his more abstract considerations of natural science, epistemology, and metaphysics. Along the way, Kant himself emerges from beneath his famed works, revealing a magnetic personality, a clever ironist, and a man deeply engaged with his contemporary world.

Surprise and Shock

 The surprise and shock that so many people have registered at the photographs of Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House—soon to be replaced by his own ostentatious and overscaled ballroom—is itself, in a way, surprising and shocking. On the long list of Trumpian depredations, the rushed demolition might seem a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence, and the open perversion of law, to gasp in outrage at the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar might seem oddly misjudged.

And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but that the book of its buildings is the most enduring. The faith in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romance of modernity caught in the Eiffel Tower’s lattice of iron—these are not ideas imposed on buildings but ideals that the buildings themselves express, more lastingly than words can. Among them, not least, is the modest, egoless ideal of democratic tradition captured so perfectly in such American monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, which shows not a hero but a man, seated, in grave contemplation.

The same restrained values of democracy have always marked the White House—a stately house, but not an imperial one. It is “the people’s house,” but it has also, historically, been a family house, with family quarters and a family scale. It’s a little place, by the standards of monarchy, and blessedly so: fitting for a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a brief time, and at the people’s pleasure. As Ronald Reagan said, after a victory more decisive than Trump could ever dream of, the President is merely a temporary resident, holding the keys for a fixed term. That was the beauty of it.

-Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker

 I take a total conflict as opposed to a consensus view of American history. The benefit is that I am not surprised by the state of the country now. Neither the naive liberal view nor the racist conservative view is acceptable. The realist view is complex and beyond common understanding.

 Friends,

The only upside to living through this dark time is it pushes us to rethink and perhaps totally remake things we once thought immutable.

Like the Democratic Party.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the current Democratic Party is dysfunctional if not dead.

Better dysfunctional than a fascist cult like the Trump Republican Party. But if there were ever a time when America needed a strong, vibrant Democratic Party, it’s now. And we don’t have one.

The brightest light in the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old member of the New York State Assembly who has a good chance of being elected the next mayor of New York City when New Yorkers go to the polls a week from Tuesday. (Early voting is already underway.)

Mamdani is talking about what matters to most voters: the cost living. He says New York should be affordable for everyone.

He’s addressing the problems New Yorkers discuss over their kitchen tables. He’s not debating “Trumpism” or “capitalism” or even “Democratic socialism.” He’s not offering a typical Democratic “10-point plan” with refundable tax credits that no one understands.

He’s proposing a few easy-to-understand things: free buses, free child care, a four-year rent freeze for some 2 million residents, and a $30 minimum wage. He’s aiming to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the 1930s — fix it.

You may not agree with all his proposals, but they’re understandable. And if they don’t work, I expect that, like FDR, he’ll try something else.

The clincher for me is that he’s inspiring a new generation of young people. He’s got them excited about politics. My 17-year-old granddaughter is spending her weekends knocking on doors for him, as are her friends.

Name a Republican politician who’s inspiring young people. Hell, I have a hard time coming up with a Republican politician since Teddy Roosevelt who has inspired young people.

You don’t have to reach too far back in history to find Democratic politicians who have inspired young people. Bernie Sanders (technically an independent) and AOC. Barack Obama. (I was inspired in my youth by Bobby Kennedy — the real Bobby Kennedy — and Senator Eugene McCarthy.)

And Zohran.

What do all of them have in common? They’re authentic. They’re passionate. They care about real people. They want to make America fairer. They advocate practical solutions that people can understand.

Nonetheless, Mamdani is horrifying the leaders of the Democratic Party. Chuck Schumer hasn't endorsed him. Hakeem Jeffries finally (and reluctantly) gave an endorsement months after Mamdani's primary victory. Hillary Clinton has endorsed Andrew Cuomo, who’s spending what are likely to be the last days of his political career indulging in the kind of racist, Islamophobic attacks we’d expect from Trump.

Meanwhile, the editorial board of The New York Times counsels “moderation,” urging Democratic candidates to move to the “center.” Tell me: Where’s the center between democracy and fascism, and why would anyone want to go there?

In truth, the Times’s so-called “moderate center” is code for corporate Democrats using gobs of money to pursue culturally conservative “swing” voters — which is what the Democratic Party has been doing for decades.

This is part of the reason America got Donald Trump. Corporate Democrats took the party away from its real mission — to lift up the working class and lower-middle class and help the poor. Instead, they pushed for globalization, privatization, and the deregulation of Wall Street. They became Republican-Lite.

In 2016 and again in 2024, working and lower-middle class voters saw this and opted for a squalid real estate developer who at least sounded like he was on their side. He wasn’t and still isn’t — he’s on the side of the billionaires to whom he gave two whopping tax cuts. But if the choice is between someone who sounds like he’s on your side and someone who sounds like a traditional politician, guess who wins?

Trump also fed voters red-meat cultural populism — blaming their problems on immigrants, Latinos, Black people, transgender people, bureaucrats, and “coastal elites.” Democrats gave voters incomprehensible 10-point plans.

The Times tries to buttress its argument that Democrats should move to the “center” by citing Democrats who won election last year in places Trump also won.

But that argument is bunk. Democrats won in these places by imitating Trump. One mocked the term “Latinx” and was hawkish on immigration. Two wanted to crack down harder on illegal immigration. Two others emphasized crime and public safety. Another bragged about taking on federal bureaucrats.

This isn’t the way forward for Democrats. Red-meat cultural populism doesn’t fill hungry bellies or pay impatient landlords or help with utility bills.

Mamdani poses a particular threat to New York’s corporate Democrats because he wants to tax the wealthy to pay for his plan to make New York more affordable to people who aren’t wealthy.

He aims to generate $9 billion in new tax revenue by raising taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents and businesses. He’s calling for a 2 percent tax on incomes over $1 million, which would produce $4 billion in tax revenue. He wants to increase the state’s corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent to match New Jersey’s, generating about $5 billion annually.

He’s right. The wealthy have never been as wealthy as they are now, while the tax rate they pay hasn’t been as low in living memory.

Inequalities of income and wealth are at record levels. A handful of billionaires now control almost every facet of the United States government and the U.S. economy.

Even as the stock market continues to hit new highs, working-class and lower-middle-class families across America are getting shafted. Wages are nearly stagnant, prices are rising. Monopolies control food processing, housing, technology, oil and gas.

The time is made for the Democrats. If the party stands for anything, it should be the growing needs of the bottom 90 percent — for affordable groceries, housing, and child care. For higher wages and better working conditions. For paid family leave. For busting up monopolies that keep prices high. For making it easier to form and join labor unions.

Pay for this by raising taxes on the wealthy. Get big money out of politics.

This dark time should wake us up to the bankruptcy of the corporate Democratic Party.

It should mark the birth of the people’s Democratic Party. Zohran and others like him are its future.

What do you think?

-Robert Reich

 First, obviously, are the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Call them 1a and 1b, because I believe they have different motivations. The Republicans in the House and the Senate are mostly just tiny cowards who fear Trump, a possible primary challenger from the right, and most of all the MAGA base. The video clips that I hope they play over and over in future high school civics classes, assuming these thugs can’t fully erase our democracy, will be the ones of GOP legislators scurrying for the elevators as they deny having knowledge of Trump’s latest assault. Against stern competition, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the tiniest coward of them all, is the most pathetic exemplar of this: “I’m not gonna comment on something I haven’t read, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he told reporters this week when they asked him about the DOJ bribe.

The six conservatives on the Supreme Court, in contrast, aren’t cowards. They know what they’re doing, and they have no voters to fear. We must assume that they are consciously creating the America they want. That’s most true of the two deepest reactionaries, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. But to varying degrees, it’s true of the other four conservatives, John Roberts very much included. The record they are leaving behind of these terse, barely explained pro-Trump shadow docket decisions will be their legacy—of shame, if we manage to restore democracy after Trump, or of glory, if we descend into a Hunger Games society.

-Michael Tomasky in The New Republic