Philosophy’s longest sentences, Part 2
Here is my second contribution to the contest.
Edging out John Stuart Mill’s 161-word effort is the following from Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals:
“And then nothing can protect us against a complete falling away from our Ideas of duty, or can preserve in the soul a grounded reverence for its law, except the clear conviction that even if there never have been actions springing from such pure sources, the question at issue here is not whether this or that has happened; that, on the contrary, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that consequently actions of which the world has perhaps hitherto given no example—actions whose practicability might well be doubted by those who rest everything on experience—are nevertheless commanded unrelentingly by reason; and that, for instance, although up to now there may have existed no loyal friend, pure loyalty in friendship can be no less required from every man, inasmuch as this duty, prior to all experience, is contained as duty in general in the Idea of a reason which determines the will by a priori grounds.” (407-408; or pp. 75-76 of the H. J. Paton translation [New York: Harper & Row, 1964])
That’s 163 unrelentingly-commanded words. It is your duty to count them to ascertain my veracity.
Tags: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant, Mill
Somehow I wonder if that sentence is even worth muddling through…I never had a very high opinion of Kant, and I don’t think any better of him after attempting to read that sentence.
Didn’t Kant write in German.
Or a very close facsimile.