Difficulties in representation of Immanuel Kant’s image and ideas on the Internet
摘要
Immanuel Kant’s image and ideas have long been part of Russian Internet culture. At the same time, attempts to modernize Kant face both objective and subjective difficulties. These difficulties lead to the emergence, dissemination, and reproduction of inaccurate information about the philosopher. Among objective factors, I refer to the existence of gaps in the study of Kant’s biography, the scarcity of iconography, and the complexity of the language of his writings. Subjective factors include the incompetence of the creators and distributors of thematic content, weak skills of information hygiene, poor knowledge of the laws of information dissemination on the Internet, and excessive trust in large language models. To demonstrate the validity of this statement, I undertook a case study using content-analysis methods. The subject of the study is the reflection of Kant’s image and ideas in the Russian segment of the Internet in 2024. I also gave examples of the most common groups of content and the mistakes associated with these four common groups: biography and iconography, philosophy through the prism of aphorisms, humor, and naming. In addition, I considered individual cases that characterize the peculiarities of users’ perception of content related to Kant. These examples merely illustrate some general tendencies in the representation of Kant’s image and ideas on the internet. In turn, in the Discussion section, I discuss those fundamental problems, a particular manifestation of which was the distortion of perception of Kant’s image and ideas on the internet. Among these problems are the cultural crisis, the loss of the ability to turn to transcendental reflection, Internet infantilism, and others. Finally, I draw a conclusion about what to do with the negative tendencies I have highlighted in this article.