Philosophy’s longest sentence: Kant over Kierkegaard

Alert philosophical reader Matthias Brinkman found this latest winner in the revived contest: What is the longest sentence ever written by a philosopher? It’s a 438-word behemoth from Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason—that’s in the original German, but it becomes 489 words in this rough English translation:

“How mystical enthusiasms in the life of hermits and monks and the glorification of the sanctity of the celibate state made a large number of people useless to the world; how the alleged miracles connected with this oppressed the people with heavy chains of blind superstition; how, with a hierarchy imposing itself on free people, the terrible voice of orthodoxy arose from the mouths of presumptuous, solely appointed interpreters of the Scriptures and divided the Christian world into bitter factions because of religious opinions (for which, unless one calls upon pure reason as the interpreter, there is absolutely no general agreement to be found); as in the East, where the state itself, in a ridiculous manner, concerned itself with the religious statutes of the priests and clergy, instead of keeping them within the narrow limits of a mere teaching profession (from which they are always inclined to pass into a ruling one), how, I say, this state finally inevitably had to become a prey to foreign enemies, who finally put an end to its dominant faith; as in the West, where faith has established its own throne, independent of secular power, the civil order, together with the sciences (which sustain it), were shattered and rendered powerless by an assumed representative of God; how both Christian parts of the world were attacked by barbarians, like plants and animals which, close to their dissolution by a disease, attract destructive insects to complete them; how in the latter case that spiritual leader ruled and chastised kings like children with the magic rod of his threatened ban, inciting them to foreign wars that depopulated another part of the world (the Crusades), to hostility among themselves, to rebellion of the subjects against their superiors and to bloodthirsty hatred against their fellow-members of the same general so-called Christianity who think differently; how the roots of this discord, which even now is only prevented from violent outbreaks by political interests, lie hidden in the principle of a despotically commanding church belief and still gives rise to fears of similar events:—this history of Christianity (which, insofar as it was to be based on a belief in history, could not have turned out any differently), if one takes it as a picture at a glance, could well justify the exclamation: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum! if it were not still clear enough from its foundation that its true first intention was none other than to introduce a pure religious belief about which there can be no conflicting opinions, and that all that turmoil by which the human race has been and is still being divided stems only from the fact that through a bad tendency of human nature, what was initially intended to serve to introduce the latter, namely, to win the nation accustomed to the old historical belief for the new one through its own prejudices, was subsequently made the foundation of a universal world religion.”

Thus, our current top philosopher-word-marathon champions are:

1. Kant: 489 words. 2. Kierkegaard: 330 words. 3. Locke: 309 words. 4. Aristotle: 188 words. 5. Kant again: 174 words. (Also: 163 words.) 6. Bentham: 164 words.
7. Mill: 161 words.

Related: Kant’s “Copernican” revolution of rejecting objectivity for subjectivity and limiting reason to make room for faith — in the Philosophers, Explained series.