Kant’s life work was nothing other than a head-on confrontation with an ancient problem: is the world best described by nature or nurture? Contingency or necessity? 1 And remember: his answer was given without the benefit of Darwin. Darwin, who gave us the most satisfying synthesis to date of this ancient dialectic, thanks –in part—to Kant’s titanic struggle with the hitherto indissoluble lexicon of western philosophy. Is it at all surprising that, following Kant, we see the birth of all that we call the social sciences? The study of nature in nurture? Contingency in necessity? That we turned our attention once again to the classic dialectic of enlightenment, calling it instead the new reason of living and of life?
1 “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to us by nature, or in what other way?”
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