Have You Even Read Kant?

I find philosophers' obsession with philosophy "in the original" to be weird.

Nobody would expect me to read Einstein, or Darwin, or Newton. I read modern formulations of those theories, which are not only more correct, but more clearly written. The original works are useful to understand the history of the thought, but nobody would imagine I don't understand relativity, evolution, or gravity just because I didn't read the original work.

Philosophy isn't science, and shouldn't be compared unfavorably just because of that. Philosophy is more akin to literature: it's a way of helping you get through your life, and the way it's expressed matters as much as the thought being expressed. That's true even for philosophers like Kant, who were working on epistemological issues that overlap with science.

But it's still weird to me that well-known philosophers get treated not like well-known fiction writers, but closer to scripture. To the degree that Kant was a philosopher of ideas, you can get those ideas perfectly well elsewhere. He himself was not the best expresser of those ideas, even when he was the one who originated them. There may well still be merit to reading him, but the question here implies that you're at fault if you haven't, and that's bogus.

Kant's contribution to western thought can be summed up as: "Morality without reference to (or in the absence of) God."