AHC: Immanuel Kant becomes '60s counterculture folk hero.

He's a nerdy guy who talks about the importance of the individual. Plus, there's some intellectual heft in understanding (parts of) his writings. I think his respect of the individual is more of a left-wing approach.

But it is a real challenge elevating a guy in popularity who lived from 1724-1804, to the point where his picture is worn on T-shirts.

Kant said, treat a person always at least in part as an end in himself or herself, and never purely as a means. And most famously he extended this to a situation where a maniac with a hatchet comes to the door asking if so-and-so is in the house. Kant said that you still can't lie to the person. (although I wonder if a super hero type lie is permissible!)

Apparently, ol' Immanuel was really against rebellion.

So, Bonus Points if this helps '60s youngsters better understood their elders. Not that it tempers the radicalism, but rather that it helps lift it to a higher game.
 
Interestingly, Ayn Rand, who didn't seem to understand Kant well at all, thought that his philosophy was the ancestral source of the hippie counterculture(as well as fascism, socialism, Communism, and any other form of "collectivism"). She even called him "the first hippie".

So, maybe if her hatred of the guy becomes the party-line on the right, left-wingers might take him up as a hero, just because conservatives hate him.

And one point...

He's a nerdy guy who talks about the importance of the individual.

Well, I think the 60s counterculture, at least as its remembered in the popular iconsciousness, was more about builidng community, rather than stressing the importance of the lone individual. The idealization of the rebellious individual is more of a 1950s "beatnik" sort of thing, though granted there are certainly ideological and historical overlaps between the two worldviews.
 
There's some case to be made that Immanuel Kant and Ayn Rand were both on the Aspergers-Autism Spectrum. Maybe she recognized certain traits in him that she had in herself.

Or, perhaps similar in other ways. And then, people do often end up disliking someone a lot like themselves.
 
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Here's a speech Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave in Chicago in 1965:

https://books.google.com/books?id=8bJ8SrMf9-wC&pg=PA93&lpg=PA93&dq=%22civil+rights+movement%22+%22Immanuel+Kant%22+%22Martin+Luther+King%22&source=bl&ots=ixKxiAGPje&sig=2O137jmF8jvspn7HEJQw-h_zoD0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwii4Puf8YvLAhUmmoMKHSs2DjIQ6AEIPDAG#v=onepage&q=%22civil%20rights%20movement%22%20%22Immanuel%20Kant%22%20%22Martin%20Luther%20King%22&f=false

Immanuel Kant said in one formulation of the categorical imperative that "all men must be treated as ends and never as mere means." The tragedy of segregation is that it treats men as means rather than ends, and thereby reduces them to things rather than persons. To use the words of the late Martin Buber, segregation substitutes an "I-It" relationship for the "I-Thou" relationship.
Although I think MLK did talk a lot more about Martin Buber than about Immanuel Kant.

And yes, Immanuel Kant does have this wide open green fields approach of treating every human being as important. But then again, I think he was really against rebellion, and he was staunchly in favor of capital punishment. Ol' Immanuel was a traditionalist in many ways.

But he would be a heck of an interesting person for the young people in the '60s in favor of big change to grapple with.
 
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I feel like he's a better fit for the Nineties, to be honest. Sixties counterculture wasn't really about individualism, in my opinion.
 
I agree that he'd be a better fit for the Nineties, but I like the point-counterpoint aspect of the Sixties. I think most of the young people in the Sixties would say they believe in both community and the individual. Now, some of the more theory-focused and political might overreach, but that's where you come back to the interplay of ideas.
 
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