I took Intro to Modern Philosophy with one of the top Kant scholars in the world, and when we got to Kant the professor warned us that he was a brilliant thinker but a terrible writer. He shared the old philosophical cliche, "Hume wrote about complex ideas simply, Kant wrote about simple ideas complexly."

And yet to this day I suspect that Kant got a lot right, or at least set the terms of debate for hundreds of years. The reason why his writing is so obtuse is because he is grappling with a rigorous approach to concepts that are intuitively simple but entirely unexamined by most people.

For example, I was trying to make my way through just the intro of a Critique of Judgment and I already encountered an idea so blindingly obvious and yet never really examined. Kant set up a dialectic between two ideas that people all believe but never really examine together:

1) Matters of taste are subjective and there is no reason to argue about them. People like what they like and you can't question that.

2) People argue about matters of taste as if their lives depended on.

I wish I had the time and focus to really try to read through this book, but I know I don't. Still, even getting a glimpse at what was going on in that guy's mind is gratifying.

That tracks. Language is a kind of technology, that evolves to adapt to new uses. A simple elegant python program that fits on a slide might have taken tens of thousands of lines of obtuse fortran.

Yep, and Kant's writing in many ways is like early compiler design. Painful. Necessary. And built at a time when the cognitive architecture didn’t yet have shortcuts. He was writing in metaphysical FORTRAN.