High in the mountain peaks and deep within the caves lived the wild tribe of Cyclopes—creatures who knew no justice, immeasurably arrogant, and forever leaning on the gods. They neither sowed nor tilled the earth with their hands. Each ruled alone over his women and children, caring nothing for anyone else.
Driven by powerful winds across the deep, dark sea, the Achaeans sailed from Troy and sought refuge in the land of the Cyclopes. “Fear the gods, my friend,” they pleaded. “We seek shelter. Zeus himself protects travelers who beg for help—he is the god of hospitality and guides worthy guests.” But the Cyclopes bared their teeth in scorn: “We Cyclopes care nothing for Zeus the Aegis-bearer nor for any eternal gods, for we are far stronger than they. I will spare neither you nor your trembling companions. I shall do whatever I please!”
He lifted a massive boulder and sealed the entrance to his cave—so heavy that twenty-two wagons could not have moved it. Like a mountain lion, he prepared to tear them apart and swallow them whole, leaving neither flesh nor entrails nor bone behind.
In his early years, the young philosopher Kant was drawn to the ideas of rationalism. Inspired by Newton and other leading thinkers of the Scientific Revolution, Kant believed that they demonstrated the power of reason to uncover the fundamental laws of the universe.
According to Kantian epistemology, while the senses reveal only the surface of things, reason is capable of grasping the true nature of reality. “Among mathematicians, historians, natural scientists, philologists, and linguists,” Kant writes, “a Cyclops is the scholar who, though learned in all these fields, considers any philosophical reflection upon them unnecessary.” Kant soon raised a crucial question: is knowledge alone sufficient, or does it require something more to possess real value?
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines philosophy as the science that relates all knowledge to the essential aims of human reason. The philosopher, therefore, is not a virtuoso of intellect but the legislator of human reason. Using Kant’s own terms, the “multitude of knowledge” he describes is not true knowledge but cyclopean scholarship. It consists of concepts accumulated without reaching genuine understanding—because genuine understanding requires reason to become self-aware and to enter into a transcendental reflection upon itself.
“What makes cyclopean scholarship cyclopean is not its strength,” notes Frederick Paulsen, “but the fact that it has only one eye—immense in scale, yet limited in perspective.” The task of philosophy, according to Kant, is to give us a second eye. “This second eye is the self-knowledge of human reason, without which we cannot properly judge the extent of our knowledge.”
Kant criticizes the familiar type of scholar who lacks humanity and therefore “does not judge correctly and trusts too much in his own powers.” Max Weber and other philosophers describe this phenomenon under various names, but Kant identifies it as the Cyclops. This one-eyed giant from Book Nine of Homer’s Odyssey, he adds, “needs another eye in order to view his subject from the standpoint of other human beings.” This necessary second eye—the very thing cyclopean scholars lack—is what “brings humanity to the sciences,” enabling human reason to make proper use of its historical and anthropological understanding. The one-eyed scholar must therefore develop a sense of humanity by cultivating a “broad consideration of ways of thinking”—that is, the transcendental.
The essential message of the quotation is that one-eyed scholars must acquire a broader, more humanistic manner of thinking—one that Kant elsewhere calls “philosophy in a cosmopolitan sense” and “the science of the ultimate ends of human reason.” This cosmopolitan philosophy gives knowledge intrinsic worth and lends value to all other sciences.
But philosophy in this fundamental cosmopolitan and humanistic sense is necessarily empirical and historical as well. It requires awareness of the norms uniquely rooted in human nature—norms that guide us toward our essential aims. In other words, it is what Kant himself calls the secular understanding of philosophy, grounded in moral anthropology, through which we learn about the fate of our species and the ultimate goals of human reason.
And to avoid the fate of the Cyclops—whose eye is burned when Odysseus drives a blazing stake into it—scholars in every discipline must cultivate this empirically informed second eye of true philosophy. Only then will their knowledge possess genuine inner value.