17.05.2020

It's funny that all the attempts to somehow prepare for reading Kant really gave me little.
It's all very interesting. But the experience of reading the text of the Critique of Pure Reason itself turned out to be unrelated to all this for me personally. 
This is some kind of very specific reading. I would compare it with my own reading of the Bible, when suddenly you find yourself inside the knowledge
that permeates everything around, all holidays, calendars, superstitions and worldviews. But inside you have the feeling of a cozy locked room. 
As if there is no connection with the external life.
To be honest, it is difficult for me to write about my impression of reading "Criticism", because the whole point of what I read is
how much the recorded impressions are unable to reveal at least some essence. The state when words are superfluous,
when the quoted quotations drive into heresy of incorrect interpretations. And I just want to sit and feel this beauty of the idea itself.
I'll try to formulate it anyway, so that it doesn't look like empty talk. Although I obviously do not have enough words to convey some of my states.
I feel like there's a lot of peace in me. How much I think, worry, grieve, rejoice in what does not come from me.
How much my inner world depends on what is happening in me. One of the most hurtful feelings is the loss of this sense of significance for the world.
And basically it goes through emotions that I can't get out of. Such a trap of psychology, when you reflect on your feelings,
justify them, justify what you should feel, and so on. It's all some kind of endless whirlpool, which is intellectually very expensive, 
but in the end, you're still there inside.
And there is a feeling of numbness, which in the end is also only a feeling.
And then it turned out to be enough to feel your independence in contact with the world. Reading Kant made it possible to suddenly feel how simple it could be.
I am and the world is, and through me the world is given to me. And everything. You can feel anything, but this ontological sense of self is enough for being.
I am not only a person, not only a person, but I am a subject at the moment of perception of the world, and this is enough.
And that's where the whole context around Kant's reading made sense. Everything that seemed annoying and unnecessary.
For example, the main failure seemed to be a video on YouTube with the title "how to read Kant's philosophical texts", where Wikipedia retold for a long and tedious time about writing these texts. But there was the simplest fact that I kept this text in my head for 12 years, and wrote it instantly. I really like
that the process of intellectual effort is somewhat similar, like the inspiration of artists or the mood of athletes. It is not enough to learn or be able to, but something arises and the effect of illumination, the effect of embracing the immensity, is obtained.
Or here I watched the play "Kant" at the Moscow theater, containing cute provincial conversations that reflected big philosophical problems
The most serious approach of preparation was the reading of Hume, with detailed proof that causality can only be hidden in empirical knowledge.

20.05.2020

At the heart of everything, it seems, is the desire to understand the causes of everything. To know everything is to understand the reasons. 
But it is easy to make a mistake, because consistency is not causality. And this. Causality turns out to be our way of thinking, our way of contemplating and understanding reality. Understanding turns out to be the ability to guess the cause and predict, anticipate the consequences. 
And this turns out to be a certain trap of consciousness, because fixated on this very causality, we very often discard the essential important in what we observe. We write off what happened to the most obvious reason, and ignore the important, but more hidden one.
I really liked the image from Kant's book about how to weigh smoke. The answer is simple: weigh the firewood before the fire and the ashes after.
All the rest in the form of smoke went into the air. I see a certain helplessness in this witty answer: we can't really weigh the smoke,
but we can weigh what we can touch. So we can know nature by the remains of firewood, and we will not be able to grab every smoky particle and put it on the scales. So with emotions and big ideas, we are dealing only with ashes, which are only a shadow of big things.

Indeed, his natural abilities are not so much the application of them according to his talents and inclinations, but mainly the moral law in him – to such an extent they surpass any benefit and benefit that he could derive from them in earthly life, that the moral law teaches us to value above all even the simple consciousness of the honesty of his way of thinking, although this does not give any advantages or even a shadow of glory to posterity, and a person feels internally called to ensure that, neglecting many benefits, prepare yourself by your behavior in this world to become a citizen of the better world that he has in mind.