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THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT: COUNTERING KANT (3)

The present is a series of essays on the roots of modern European political philosophy. These ideas shaped many states on the continent, determined the nature of their Governments, and defined the role of the people as subjects of the state. The result is a distinct European culture that since the Enlightenment, has been working towards the destruction of its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots. In this installment, Immanuel Kant.

Continued from The Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau's Ravages (2)

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Often erroneously classified as a hero of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his mindset is entirely antithetical to the values of the era that preceded him: he is the archetypal protagonist of the reactionary, feudal Teutonic order. Kant's Platonist subjectivist view on reality opened the door to the acceptance of contradiction in logic, that only came to full fruition under his follower, G.W.F. Hegel (more in the next episode) and his student, Karl Marx.

But Kant laid the groundwork for the full blown subjectivism in epistemology we see today displayed in popular culture to the point that the very existence of objectivity itself is under attack. The media's disdain for objectivity goes so far, they do not even make the effort anymore. 

Kant was also the father of the theme that is well developed in our era: the concept of the whole of mankind as one universal order under a One World Government. We could say Kant was the founder of internationalism (multi-lateralism, or globalism). This baton taken up by G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx after him, as well as the founding fathers of the League of Nations, the United Nations and the European Union.

Kant's ethics program is a corrosive form of morality that demands self denial to the point of self immolation. There is nothing scientific about Kant; his perceived logic is a parlor trick that nevertheless to this day is very influencial in academia and (pseudo) intellectual circles. 

The revered Kant's hidden agenda is revealed by the fundamental intellectual dishonesty by which he legitimized his sophistry, declaring that it was "necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith". The end justifies the means! 

His 'trick' was to stretch reason beyond the limits of common sense and context. He then used the absurd result to discredit reason. It's a classic strawman. It culminated in his magnum opus, "Critique of Pure Reason". The Postmodernists have made it their own, applying it in the present discourse to their heart's content. 

Kant was an austere Lutheran Pietist in the Protestant tradition of Plato and St. Augustine's Just War Theory. Nevertheless, he was great admirer of the fundamental secularist, Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The individual to him represented little more than a miserable sinner in need of a strong master, only good as cannon fodder in the wars of his age, so that hopefully the wretch might emerge as a higher moral being. Needless to say the chances of that were very slim indeed.

The Hidden Plan

Kant foresaw a teleological progress towards an end-game by means of strife, war and discord culminating in world peace under a global Government, an international and cosmopolitan federation of states, awaiting the Day of Judgment. According to Kant this brings mankind as a species collectively to an ethically evolved order. This is the Hidden Plan of Nature, according to Kant. He was however more honest then today's postmodernists, admitting that his vision might in the end lead to the greatest tyranny imaginable.

While the thinkers of the Enlightenment expanded on the idea as laid out in the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) of free peoples in independent, sovereign national states, the philosophers based on Rousseau, Hegel and Marx propagated 'ideal societies', replacing God in the center of the Universe with the state, now synonymous with totalitarian dystopias.

In the course of this reactionary period the tenets of the Enlightenment were abandoned and replaced with philosophical principles reflecting anti reason: Realism made way for Idea-lism; collectivism replaced individualism; intuition and passions were adopted as sources of knowledge, rather than reason and experience; social theories replaced the Classical Liberal theories. This marks the shift from the Aristotelian principles of the Renaissance, to the Platonic world view, a development that had already set in with Protestantism. 

The Incarcerated Mind

While today's postmodernists are mostly virulent atheists, they are at root adept followers of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, faithfully subscribing to their most irrational tenets. Plato's mind versus body dualism, reflecting the macro and microcosm of heaven and earth tends to identify the mind with the soul, giving rise to visualizing the mind as non-physical pure substance, distinct from the physical organs and brain. Rather then thinking of them as tools to knowledge, this led to a view that the senses and the brain are obstacles to knowledge rather than tools to it, obstructing the mind from external reality.

Moreover, some sensorial imperfections (color blindness, for example) in some people, induced Kant to declare the senses entirely unsound tools to acquire knowledge. To clarify the Kantian position on the separation of the mind from reality Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks in "Explaining Postmodernism" makes a feminist analogy: "to support Kant is to say that women are absolutely autonomous and free to do as they please, as long as it is within the confines of the kitchen"; Kant imprisons the mind in the skull and isolates it from reality.

Thought creates reality

It is ironic that the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment, who sought to prevent the Godless, spiritless and amoral future that was supposed to be the result of reason and individualism, have brought about precisely that by Kant's subjectivism and his imprisonment of the mind. The Universe becomes unknowable. Radical Skepticism with as final outcome, rationalism as the result. Hicks: 
 
"Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one enters a different philosophical universe altogether."  
 
Present day postmodernists repeat after Kant that 'the' truth as an objective thing in itself, does not exist. This statement's  first victim is morality itself. This conclusion is supported by Classical Liberalism, that rested on embedding itself within Protestant Christianity, and did not formulate an objective grounding of morality itself. Later Skeptics drove a stake through the heart of an objective moral program and a knowable Universe. 

Kant also held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa: as by magic, thought has become the source of reality, instead of reality providing the mind with information. This marks the infamous shift from objectivism to subjectivism culminating in the madness we see today in intellectual circles. 

It begs the question, if I die overnight, will the sun rise tomorrow? It sparked Einstein asking the question: "Do you really believe that the universe does not exist when you are not watching it?

Idea-lism

Thomist (referring to St. Thomas of Aquinas, who put the Roman Catholic Church on Aristotelian footing in the 13th Century) physicist Anthony Rizzi in "Science before Science: a Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century" laments Kant's now codified Idea-lism. It is...

"... the default declared position in academia and in nearly all other environments. Kant's success is partly explained by his tying his philosophical system to Newtonian physics [which he wanted to] have a certainty that it did not have. However, Kant thought that one could not know the thing itself."

(...) Kant and Kantians múst say, "Kant doesn't know anything about anything." Such is always the end of the matter when one forgets that all knowledge in man comes through the senses. We non-Kantians can be simultaneously more accurate and kinder; we can say, "The foundational principles of Kant's philosophical system were wrong, but still he knew a lot of other things."

 This enthusiasm is at once tempered by a footnote:

"Many attribute to Kant a developed skill in physics. Physisist and renowned philosopher and historian of science, Fr. Stanley Jaki has shown that Kant's knowledge and ability in physics was minimal (though Kant considered himself another Newton) (...) the book [Universal Natural History] is a storehouse of inaccuracies, contradictions and amateurism and plain fancy."

Rizzi nails the central mistake perpetrated by Kant and other rationalists: immaterial Beings of Reason (for example negative numbers, zero) are tools by which we know things; they are not what we know! 

Free Download of Stephen Hicks primer on Postmodernism (PDF)

Up next: in Part 4: "Heckling Hegel": "Hegel's theme was the state. Freedom is not God-given as the followers of the Enlightenment held, but a privilege granted by the state".

First posted on Politeia on March 3, 2008 and subsequently on PomoNews.

In this series of the Counter Enlightenment




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