Abstract

Kant has been the target of innumerable objections, and yet his thought involves correct scientific aperçus, as well as viable ethical ideas, which are increasingly embraced in the Global Village. Kant's critical philosophy involves profound puzzles. In the first Critique, a spatial force field is identified as an a priori and yet material condition of experience . In the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Good Will is of singular but odd importance , and the Categorical Imperative has a noumenal, yet comprehensible status, and involves two starkly different "versions" . To solve these puzzles requires us to unify and contextualize Kant. The critical philosophy is a piece of a larger philosophical whole—the ideas Kant advanced before and after the 1780s. Kant's overall thought needs to be understood as a product of the pantheist Enlightenment, which was shaped by the Confucian Classics. In the first section, I paint a portrait of Kant's thing in itself. I speculate that it is an interactive bond of forces in space, governing nature; and I contend that this structural-dynamic perspective may not only unify Kant's insights but also supply an ontological narrative that integrates scientific knowledge today. In the second section, I interpret the historical record. I argue that the structural-dynamic perspective was a driving idea of the early Enlightenment; that this idea arrived from China through the Rites Controversy; and that this idea, mediated by others, informed Kant. In the third section, I examine Kant's first book, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces . I argue that this exotic idea is the core of his theory of dynamics, and that the key features of his theory of dynamics withstood the test of time