Its like Hillary walking into a working class kitchen for the first time.
They’ve been shielded from even critical support of China and other AES for so long they literally, not figuratively, literally cannot process that people exist that have beliefs that aren’t Reddit Approved. They immediately assume it’s bots or wumao. Human beings can’t possibly hold these beliefs, so they must be Oriental hordes or actual robots.
There’s a little bit of metaphysics in Nietzsche, but what makes you call him a “metaphysical philosopher”? I struggle to think of any metaphysical statement from him that wasn’t just a rephrasing of Schopenhauer, which is fair enough since that wasn’t really what he was into as far as I know.
In any case, immense respect for successfully parsing Kant. I can only get the extremely easy texts like Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals
I call him a meta-physical philosopher because much of what he talks about is derivations of ethics and the nature of religion and God in relationship to those ethical categories. It’s arguably more tangential to metaphysics than metaphysics itself, but claims like ‘God is dead’ and the historical-socio-ethical reasoning behind that are incredibly metaphysical statements. However, you are correct that most of his actual metaphysical work is derived from an re-phrasing Schopenhauer, but I didn’t read any Schopenhauer until college, so I didn’t know that and at the time it blew my little freaking mind.
I will be honest, my preference is for Hume, as Kant is an enormous windbag, though tiny compared to Hegel. That said, you really should give ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ another go-around, it’s one of those seminal texts that will be constantly referenced in everything forever, and really makes up the majority of his and everyone’s groundwork for literally everything afterwards particularly liberalism. Regardless if or not you think he actually solved Hume’s is-ought pincer and problem of causality, it is basically impossible to understand why Kant leans so hard into deontology without reading it. But if you really want to piss people off, just read and retort with Hume, he is basically the philosophical linebacker for Western philosophy.
Thanks for explaining and I’ll take the bit about Critique into account.
Hume is easily one of my favorites too. Even when I think he’s being incredibly stupid (e.g. missing shade of blue) you really can see that he’s being genuine even about his faults, which is unusual among philosophers.
Of course, I enjoy (most of) Schopenhauer as well, but mainly the short essays he wrote as an afterthought to World as Will, like On the Vanity of Existence. I find the morbidness of it entertaining and there was a time that I was genuinely in one of the worst depressive episodes of my life and I read some of his works for the first time and howled with laughter. I can’t not bear some affection for his writing after that. It’s like a Kafka Comedy but where the protagonist is a metaphysicist who is just torturing himself with his own ideation, if that makes sense.
I totally understand that. I’ve always found the idea that Schopenhauer just forgot to eat and got cranky when he was writing sometimes to be very funny (which is an Existential comics bit). You might enjoy Kierkegaard then too, even if he does get a little preachy, he very much loves and hates his morose Christianity.