Hi Vishal,
do not despair, it took me four years to read the Critique of Pure Reason. This book cannot be read like a novel, but only in stages, and between these stages you need long periods of reflection and spiritual growth.
I was 35 years old when I started reading CPR, in the meantime I had graduated from a physics college and read a lot of other things. I started reading Hegel at the age of 19 (Phenomenology of Spirit, the two Logics, Lectures, and a few other works), and by the age of 22 some people already considered me a Hegel specialist. I must have been 23 (I was a physics student) when I first tried to read Kant and couldn’t. I found it too cumbersome and tangled. I settled for reading other authors who had written about Kant. Well, at the age of 35 I said to myself that I should go back to Kant, that I cannot go through life without understanding this philosopher. This time, from the very first page, Kant was crystal clear to me. I felt like I was reading my own thoughts. It took me four years to finish the reading, though, because I had a small advertising firm (on which I and my whole family made a living) and I could only deal with Kant at night. I slept about four hours a day. But this intermittent reading, with detours to other authors, is good, because it gives you time to reflect and settle the ideas in your mind.
So, from my own experience with Kant, I can tell you four sure things :
1. There is a certain age for Kant. If you opened CPR at random and after a page or two you feel like you understood nothing, don’t despair, leave this reading for later and come back in five or ten years. For example, reading CPR in a few weeks, as a student, seems to me a useless torture. Better read some secondary literature.
2. In order for anyone to understand Kant, he must have a comparable philosophical and scientific background, that is, not only a vast knowledge of classical philosophy, but also a thorough knowledge of mathematics, logic, and physics. Kant’s so-called critical philosophy was intended to be, and indeed was, an epiphany of the entire philosophical tradition, from the old Greeks to his day.
3. Those who believe that they can enter Kant’s philosophy and understand something without a certain philosophical age (experience) and without the necessary scientific equipment, only by making a logical analysis of his philosophical jargon, are sorely mistaken. They will always stumble into all sorts of contradictions, without understanding what Kant meant.
4. It must never be overlooked that the main goal of the Kantian philosophical program was universal peace. In all our social conflicts (political, philosophical, religious, etc.) Kant saw in fact a quarrel of reason with itself. The old so-called “quarrel of the universals” was, in Kant’s view, a quarrel of our own faculties of knowledge.
Kantinomus Verlag 