person
Immanuel Kant
Kant
also: Кант
German philosopher (1724-1804), the towering figure of Enlightenment philosophy. Absurdly credited with a topical joke about Russian press censorship, the incongruity between name and content being the entire point.
Reading notes
- The Duel §750 Kant
Immanuel Kant, invoked by von Koren as the kind of philosopher one should not retreat to for evasive explanations instead of looking hard facts in the eye.
- The Christmas Tree §31 Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German Enlightenment philosopher, named here as a byword for the weightiest, most serious philosophical reading -- part of a comic library nobody but a secondhand dealer wants.
- Philosophical Definitions of Life §9 Kant
Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher -- absurdly credited with a topical newspaper-censorship joke ('a second warning' being the tsarist press-law penalty preceding suspension), nothing like his actual philosophy.
- Lights §40 the difference between the brain of Kant and the brain of a fly
Immanuel Kant stands here as shorthand for the highest reach of human intellect, deliberately reduced by Ananyev's youthful nihilism to the same insignificance as an insect's -- one of several instances in his confession (see also loc 30, on Shakespeare and Darwin) where a towering cultural or scientific name is invoked only to be leveled by the logic of universal meaninglessness.