Confession time: I’ve been meaning to complete Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for a while now, and it’s just word salad mostly. A priori blah blah blah but for heaven’s sake don’t clarify, just keep a’rollin’.

I feel like both Kant and people attempting to explain him are unnecessarily hiding the ball through opaque language, which quite frankly reminds me of law school classes. [As soon as I took a bar prep course where they made concepts super clear, I had the same thought many do, “why didn’t they just teach it this way to begin with?” The answer is apparently that they need to build a curve for grading, so they’re not teaching it the best way for a student’s understanding but rather for ease of class evaluation.]

Similarly I suspect Kant was never that motivated to have people understand him as much as he wanted to set the bar that “you need to be this tall to ride” at a tall height. I get it, you’ll probably be all the rage at academic parties where you want to be snooty and deep.

Or it’s not autism-friendly, as my wife says. I don’t know. I hate giving up, but I just might.