Thus spake Friedrich:
![kant_50x64 kant_50x64](https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/kant_50x64.jpg)
“Kant’s joke. — Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.”
Nietzsche, *The Gay Science*, section 193)
By “popular prejudice” Nietzsche means beliefs in God, freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul, all of which Kant defends.
![gs-100x119 gs-100x119](https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/gs-100x119.gif)
(Nietzsche’s title reminds me of an anecdote told by my colleague in political science, Jules Gleicher, who said that when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s he learned the hard way that reading The Gay Science while riding public transportation was not advisable.)
![](https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/PhEx-Outro.jpg)
(See also my episodes on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals in the Philosophers, Explained series.)