Thoughts on a dead guy

I picked up my copy of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals the other day and started reading the first section, which is entitled "Transition from common rational to philosophic moral cognition." It's a funny book. Not intentionally, of course, but Immanuel Kant's writings are amusing because when you read a sentence, you can understand the meaning of every single word he put down, but when you string them all together, they're incomprehensible. Or, you start out reading and totally get it, but by the time you get to the end of the sentence you no longer have any idea what Kant was talking about. For instance: "We have, then, to explicate the concept of a will that is to be esteemed in itself and that is good apart from any further purpose, as it already dwells in natural sound understanding and needs not so much to be taught as only to be clarified--this concept that always takes first place in estimating the total worth of our actions and constitutes the condition of all the rest."

Now that I look at that, though, it's not such a good example. If you understood that on the first try, raise your hand. Hmmm. That's what I thought. Here's a better one: "No subtle reflection is required to make the following remark, and one may assume that the commonest understanding can make it, though in its own way, by an obscure discrimination of judgment which it calls feeling: that all representations which come to us involuntarily (as do those of the senses) enable us to cognize objects only as they affect us and we remain ignorant of what they may be in themselves so that, as regards representations of this kind, even with the most strenuous attentiveness and distinctness that the understanding can ever bring to them we can achieve only cognition of appearances, never of things in themselves." HA! I defy you, even with the most strenuous attentiveness and distinctness that the understanding can ever bring to you, to fully comprehend that sentence on the first try. Did your eyes start to glaze over?

Anyway, so I picked up this book and started reading it again, and wondered, wow, did I actually understand this back then? My transcript says I did. My diploma agrees. My brain balks. I hate to think that I'm getting dumber as I get older, but that's sure what it looks like. I can only hope it's because I passed significant portions of intelligence on to Abby. But if that's true, I better not have any more kids, or I may not even be left with two brain cells to rub together.