ABSTRACT
Style is the mirror of a mind. Immanuel Kant's is anything but a harmless eccentricity. What is pernicious about its bloodlessness, its lack of vitality and spontaneity, is that it is the language of self-deception. Kant's is not the language or a free spirit like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who preferred the ceaseless fight for truth to the possession of it and who had the strength to live without absolute truth. Kant could not get himself to let go. His language is the language of a constipated casuist who is afraid of letting go of a sentence; he goes on and on, adding clauses, often past the point where they can be construed. Kant himself suggested, and it has been widely believed, that his language was the price he paid for being scientific, but in fact it cloaks a lack of rigor.
