I Simply Kant *Rawls Away*

I regret absolutely nothing.

I'm going to be 100% honest: I've never gotten a headache from reading before, but cramming-ahem, reading Rawls, Kant and Habermas all in the same day made my brain cry, if only because of the massively overwhelming amount of information I managed to glean from all those pages. Of course, since hindsight is always 20/20, I've already realized that maybe it wasn't a good idea to read them back-to-back. 

So, instead of launching into a wall of text and discuss all three of them at the same time, I'll take things nice and slowly, and talk about them a little each. 

First up is Kant. Oh, boy. This guy is really something else. I wouldn't go as far as to say I didn't enjoy the Kant readings, but I also wouldn't say that I did. The readings left me...well, 'indifferent'. That's a good word. I think it's because Kant relies so heavily on objectivity in his philosophy, whereas I'm more prone to siding with the subjective aspects of any type of reasoning. Mostly because I like to hope the world actually has those elusive 'gray areas'. Kant's black-and-white view was hard for me to swallow, really, because for example, if a child came up to me and asked me if Santa was real, I'd tell them he was. Definitely. Absolutely, no doubt in my mind. Kant is that person that ruins everybody's day by telling that child that Santa isn't real, and unleashes the apocalypse upon us all in doing so. 

Thus why although I'm still only mid-way through the full scope of Rawls' readings, I think I almost agree with him more, or at least, with certain aspects of his views. I'm interested in what Rawls has to drill into my thick skull, anyway, even if some of his ideas have a distinct socialist aroma to them. I also noticed that if I squinted hard enough, there were some similarities between Rawls and Kant, in that Kant's Metaphysics of Morals and Rawls' Justice as Fairness have the same idea in that society needs to catch the 12:15 morality train to ethical principle town. 

And as I said above, while I find some of Rawls' points interesting, some of what he says still rubs me the wrong way. The idea of living in a society without biases sounds similar to what Karl Marx founded his principles on, but history has shown that every time a 'utopia' pops up, they typically don't last long for some reason or another. That reason usually being that biases make an unwelcome appearance and crash the whole party.

In any event, although I don't have much else to say about him now, I'll be sure to continue reading (and possibly re-reading) and come back to add anymore ideas that might strike me. 

Now, Habermas. Habermas made my brain explode. Of course, I wouldn't go so far as to say the Habermas readings were on the same difficulty level as string theory, but when I tried to read either one, I think my synapses shocked themselves. But then, we discussed the readings in class, which helped clear up a lot of the confusion I felt after reading it all on my lonesome. As we discussed the stages Habermas talks about in the readings, I actually found myself remembering the exact moments when I myself hit those stages. 

Out of the three, I think I ended up getting the most out of Habermas's readings, especially after our light-shedding discussions about them in class.