Immanuel Kant and the moral law

For those of you who are philosophically inclined, what do you think about Immanuel Kant as the guy who put the nail in the coffin of moral law, and natural law? The Western civilization has been on a downhill ever since. I think Kant may be the most evil philosopher in history, for what he has done. But what do you think? To me, this picture captures it all:

 

I think that nail was put in there before Kant. I would say all the errors started to really creep in during the Enlightenment

 

I do not think that is a fair assessment.

 

I'm not sure it's possible to be more wrong than this assessment is. Describing the sun as cold would be more accurate than this is.

It is difficult to imagine an ethical proposition of greater nobility than the "Humanity" formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative:

 

The down fall of the west is a multi fauceted problem. The Elites were already growing boarded and wanting to create a new world before WWI but the West was probably mortally wounded somewhere in the fields of France and then WWII just basically pulled the plug on it. After two devastating wars the whole reason behind the civilization was called into question

 

The man literally signalled the end of confidence in reason and logic. After him you rarely hear it being said that man can know reality. There was no longer talk of objective knowledge after him. And he killed moral law in human history, as per above.

Even if he did coin some sort one-off ethical maxim, that wouldn't be able to outweigh all the damage he's done.

It is difficult to imagine an ethical proposition of greater nobility than the "Humanity" formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative:[/QUOTE]
Why is that noble?

Things only have merit and value within a larger framework of ideas. Kant never proposed a larger framework for his ethics. It's just a random statement. He never defines why one should do it. What one will gain from it. Why it is right. So I don't see any reasons why I should do it, what I will gain from it, or why it is right.

Moral law ethics, virtue ethics, all those I know exactly why I should do, and hence I follow them. But the meaningless Kantian ethic, has never produced a moral people, or even one moral person. Arbitrary things produce arbitrary results.

 

The only way anyone could make these kinds of sweeping, overgeneralized statements is if one hasn’t devoted the time and effort it takes to seriously study Kant’s thought. Kant’s literary output was voluminous. Do you really think a silly meme and a few blanket statements from amateurs on an internet forum could possibly do it justice? I don’t study these things in order to tear down what I’ve studied or to trivialize the insights of great thinkers, and I’m not going to entertain a discussion about it with someone that doesn’t love the subject for its own sake.

 

I mean a meme is just a funny summary, it's not a sustained argument obviously, and wasn't meant to be.

But I don't think that the charges I laid at Kant's feet are at all arguable: Kant proposed the noumenal realm (ie. actual reality), which can never be known. Right? All we know are the 'phenomena', thus in one fell swoop he cut the entire Western tradition of objective knowledge, objective certainty, so that now all we have are beliefs, no one really knows anymore. That's our debt to Kant.

Or take the Categorial Imperative, which you called a noble ethical maxim. Kant was an inheritor of a majestic Western tradition of virtue ethics, and natural law, natural rights. All the things we have enshrined in our Declaration and Constitution. Why do you think people don't accept or believe those things anymore? Because Kant was the first to cut them off at the kneecaps. His Categorical Imperative is firmly opposed to the tradition of virtue ethics. After Kant, there is no tradition of virtue ethics in Western philosophy.

As for him as a great thinker: so was Marx; so was Hitler's Mein Kampf. These are evil works, but greatly influential. So to me 'great thinker' is not a sign of admiration. Just because someone was influential doesn't yet tell me whether they influenced for good or for ill. Kant because he eviscerated the entire Western tradition of objective knowledge, virtue ethics, etc, certainly that makes him a great thinker, but a great thinker in the camp or Marx, rather than in the camp of Aristotle.

 

Your summary is almost miraculously devoid of a single accurate statement about Kant. Aside from being a science enthusiast and a believer in God and objective morality, Kant saw his purpose in writing the first Critique as saving the possibility of objective knowledge from post-Humean reductionistic skepticism, as he made clear in the Preface to the second edition:

Kant’s greatness as a thinker lies not merely in his influence but also in the fact that he made genuine breakthroughs in epistemology and ethics, such that after Kant it was not feasible to simply return to a pre-Kantian position, as even Thomists like F.C. Copleston recognized decades ago. Kant’s most important critic in the 20th century was Bertrand Russell, but I don’t see anyone here quoting him. Einstein on the other hand saw Kant especially reflected in his own scientific work. This notion that Kant was somehow anti-science or anti-objective is bogus. Only simple ignorance could explain such statements.

 

Oh goodie, so you're actually prepared to defend Immanuel Kant. Let's go ahead and play this out then.

While being "a believer in God", it was Kant who actually ended the immemorial component of Western philosophy that we can have objective knowledge of God. He systematically went through each and every proof for God's existence and showed that they were inadequate. He concluded that we can't actually know that God exists in any objective sense. Yes?

As I show, he never argued for an objective morality. Indeed he didn't know anything like objective knowledge existed (the correspondence of mind to reality). What he proposed was "inter-subjective ethics", where all of us should adopt these ethical maxims which have no foundation, but if we adopt them at the same time we'll live better. In other words Immanuel Kant is the father of subjective ethics in the history of Western philosophy.

Okay then, you can defeat me in two simple yes/no statements:

1. Objectivity deals with reality rather than appearances: yes / no
2. Kant said that reality, in itself, is unknowable: yes / no

The answers of course are Yes, and Yes. But maybe you'll have other answers?

Oh also, Kant in his discourse on paralogisms, also showed that logic itself, the very logic that humans think by, cannot be defended. Thus your boy Immanuel Kant guillotined the Western tradition of logic and syllogism. Here is a good lecture by philosopher Dan Robinson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePh0SvAu1Lc

Well we certainly agree on that. Which is why he's one of the most evil thinkers in the history of Western philosophy.

 

Keep 2 things in mind here:
1. I'm not a Kantian;
2. The main thing I'm objecting to in your depiction of Kant is that Kant was "evil", an assertion that is simply laughable.
With those 2 caveats, here we go:

A. Arguments for God's Existence
Kant believed that his Critical philosophy showed that the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments all had fundamental flaws, and that none of those arguments can terminate in certain knowledge of the existence of God:
a. The cosmological argument attempts to apply the principle of causality beyond the empirical world of space and time (while the definition of a causal relationship is "the regular following of one event after another", i.e., causality is inherently time-bound);
b. The ontological argument mistakes "existence" for a property;
c. The teleological argument, if successful, terminates in an Original Designer, rather than an Omnipotent Creator. Kant was most sympathetic to the teleological argument, which returns to play a critical - no pun intended - role in the third Critique. However, the teleological argument has far less force today than it did in Kant's day, as much of modern science has successfully dispensed with reliance upon teleology as having explanatory value for the processes we find in nature, certainly in the case of evolution.

Kant did believe that he argued successfully in his second Critique that one ought to believe in God (as well as in the freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul), on the basis of morality, and that this allowed Reason to reach into the noumenal realm from the practical rather than the theoretical faculty.

B. Objective Morality
Kant taught in the Groundwork and in the second Critique that the binding and universal nature of morality is inherent in the nature of Reason itself, and is inescapable for any being that possesses Reason. His arguments for why this is so are probably the most profound part of Kant's philosophical project, and I can't hope to do it justice here. Anyone interested in ethics should take the time to read the Groundwork.

C. Knowledge of the External World
Since Kant taught that the external world has two aspects - the "appearance" and the "thing-in-itself" - to contrast "reality" with "appearance" is a false dichotomy. What Kant did deny (e.g., in his response to the Garve-Feder Review) is that all we know are our own (mental) representations. Although the mind plays a role in actively constructing the external world, what we know, according to Kant, are the ordinary, real world objects in space and time, and that this is genuine knowledge, not imagination. That being said, Kant's language gives rise to certain difficulties of interpretation, which gave rise to competing interpretations in his own lifetime. I can't begin to hope to cover all those issues here.

D. Logic
Kant certainly did not "guillotine" logic or the syllogism. That would be news to anyone who has spent any time reading his works.

Like I said, I'm not in the habit of discussing these things with people who don't love philosophy for its own sake, but in true Kantian fashion I felt I had a moral obligation to defend Kant's character from gross misrepresentation. That duty is now fulfilled, and I'm not terribly interested in discussing it further. Anyone who actually takes the time to read and understand Kant - even if they end up disagreeing with him, as I do on a number of issues - will come away from the experience with the recognition that he was truly one of the greatest philosophers, in the very best of senses.

 

Just to note, you haven't disputed any of the things I said. You've accepted that Kant forms a kind of watershed in Western philosophy, where everything after him is fundamentally different from everything before him. Today we are living in a Kantian, post-Kantian world, that's how much he's altered everything that Western man used to think.

You've also agreed that post-Kant, it is impossible to prove God's existence. You've tacitly accepted that virtue ethics is now ended. And in other threads you also dismiss the validity of natural law despite its central role in Nazi trials and Martin Luther King Jr -- that's probably because you agree with me that Kant executed natural law.

So he's the great executioner who killed proofs for God, virtue ethics, natural law -- all cardinal bulwarks of Western philosophy up to that time (and of America itself I might add).

As far as knowledge of reality, you seem to quibble on Kant's noumenal realm, but according to Dan Robinson and Arthur Holmes (famous historians of philosophy), and pretty much every expert on Kant, it's not very complicated: the noumenal realm is "reality-in-itself", and because of Kant, it must be accepted today that our minds are incapable of ever attaining it.

So you're agreeing with me that Kant ended everything before him, ended all of Western philosophy that preceded him. Your only counter-point seems to be, how dare I badmouth a thinker whom so many mild-mannered people seem to like. But I don't care about being mild-manner, as you have seen. I care about the truth.

We are living in the detritus of the wreckage of what once used to be Western civilization. I come for war. The time for civility is over.

 

I reject the premise. People have been saying Western Civilisation is "on the downhill" since time immemorial. To Gibbon it all started going downhill when Rome adopted Christianity as the official religion! To you, the time of Gibbon (contemporaneous with Kant) is civilisation at its zenith.

I don't think the West has been on the decline since Kant, I think it has improved meaningfully. Sure, when we examine specific periods and specific events it goes up and down, and there's a lot to regret about the state of moral decay today, but generally speaking we're trending upwards overall. If we want to limit the merits of civilisation to just morality the easiest example is slavery - an absolute indisputable moral travesty that is corrected post-Kant.

 

Heinrich Heine, a summary of Kant's impact, writing in 1834:


"If Kant had not beheaded theology, then Robespierre may not have beheaded a king."

--

"The life-history of Immanuel Kant is difficult to write, for he had neither a life nor a history. He lived a mechanical, orderly, almost abstract, bachelor life, in a quiet little side-street of Königsberg, an old city near the north-east boundary of Germany...

"What a strange contrast between the outer life of the man and his destructive, world-convulsing thoughts! Had the citizens of Königsberg surmised the whole significance of these thoughts, they would have felt a more profound awe in the presence of this man than in that of an executioner, who merely slays human beings. But the good people saw in him nothing but a professor of philosophy; and when at the fixed hour he sauntered by, they nodded a friendly greeting, and regulated their watches.

"But if Immanuel Kant, that arch-destroyer in the realms of thought, far surpassed Maximilian Robespierre in terrorism, yet he had certain points of resemblance to the latter that invite a comparison of the two men."

https://www.stephenhicks.org/2014/11/19/heine-on-kant-and-robespierre-as-terrorists/

 

Hyperbole in translation often makes rather bad history. You’re essentially trying to convict Kant of a thought crime, post mortem. Not even the Inquisition went that far. It also robs subsequent generations of any agency. Although I’m not aware of anyone who committed atrocities in Kant’s name, if such had occurred, the responsibility would have been theirs alone, not Kant’s. We do not have the right to place the blame for others’ bad acts on an academic philosopher who was simply fulfilling his role in the university without malice.

 

I’m just saying that Kant laid the foundations of what’s wrong in modern western thinking. It’s pretty much agreed upon in the academic literature:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/11/danger-critical-race-theory/

 

The article is behind a paywall. It’s hard to know what to make of that quote without more context. However, given that Kant’s ethical theory was uncompromisingly individualistic, it’s very difficult to see a logical link between that, and an ideology that assigns collective rewards and punishments on the basis of group membership. That’s simply not what Kant taught.

Kant was also clear that morality is derived solely from the nature of reason itself, and not from any empirical circumstances experienced by a moral actor. He returns to that point again and again throughout his writings. Neither the empirical preconditions nor the empirical effects of an action determine the morality of that action according to Kant, only the nature of the act itself. So, that a group a specific individual belongs to may have included members who suffered injustices in the past on the basis of their group membership, would be no basis to impose a new set of injustices on members of a different group today. According to Kant, all people are subject to the same moral obligations regardless of their background or their material circumstances. If he were alive today he would be one of CRT’s fiercest critics, consistently with his own ethical writings.

There is plenty to critique in Kant’s thought - no pun intended - but being a plausible source of CRT isn’t one of them.

 

I agree with you that CRT goes against some of the things Kant said, but it is also undeniable that it is extremely compatible with other things he said, and indeed exists only because of them.

For example, this idea that our mind is perpetually stuck within the world of appearances means that we can't actually ever get to 'true truth itself'. All of humanity walks around in this inescapable bubble. He argued that the categories of time, space, relation, are not real, but mental. 'Time' is not something that exists out there, but something our minds impose on the world. Space also, isn't a real category, but a mental filter imposed by our minds on reality. So, to reiterate, according to Kant humanity walks through the world wearing this thick and heavy set of filters. It is impossible for us to ever take these filters off and see reality for itself. And it's impossible for us to verify whether our mental thoughts actually correspond to that reality. We are inescapably enslaved to this filter. That was his solution of synthetic a priori and the 'copernican revolution'.

So then, what his followers did with this model was simply develop it further. Okay, humanity walks around with these inescapable filters. But that's a bit too universal, isn't it? Who's to say that people don't have different filters. You walk around with one set of inescapable filters, and I walk around with another. In effect we can't really communicate with each other (except by equivocation).

That is the origin of critical theory, as formulated by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s. Indeed the very title, 'critical theory', is but a continuation of the 'critical project' initiated by Kant himself (Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, etc).

So then, fine, once critical theory is accepted, people developed it further.

If you have your set of filters, and I have my set of filters, communication wouldn't be possible. But it is possible, people communicate with each other. Except they seem to communicate best within their group. And they struggle to communicate with people outside their groups. Black people have their own language that doesn't always translate into 'white language'. That was the argument made by Derrick Bell. He went on to formulate what would become called the critical race theory. Simply the next generation of critical theory.

The basic principle of CRT (all fed by Kant's system of categories and synthetic a priori), is that the black people have 'their' knowledge, their 'truth', and white people have 'their' knowledge and their 'truth'. It is wrong for one to impose 'their truth' on the other. And that's what CRT is today. A simple consequence of Kant's ideas from the 1790s.

If you read Derrick Bell, he profusely cites the ideas of Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and other thinkers of the Frankfurt School (which created 'critical theory'). And if you read Horkheimer, Marcuse and others, they profusely cite Kant, Hegel, and Marx.

The genealogy then is:
'the critical project' (Kant) -> 'critical theory' (Horkheimer) -> 'critical race theory' (Bell)

 

The Transcendental Aesthetic is one of the most obscure and problematic parts of Kant’s entire Critical Project. I don’t think Kant succeeded in demonstrating that space and time are objective and yet a priori and imposed on perceptions by the mind. Something can be both a priori in the mind and exist independently of our minds if the universe is just inherently spatiotemporal. Kant’s theory also doesn’t explain why we experience things the way we do, like why timeless things-in-themselves like lightning and thunder would be causally simultaneous yet temporally successive (an example I borrowed from Bertrand Russell). That being said, I do think Kant succeeded with his antinomies in showing that applying empirical concepts like substantiality and causality to atemporal objects cannot be rationally justified. So, his critique of rationalist metaphysics is still largely a success even if his Transcendental Aesthetic at the beginning of the 1st Critique doesn't hold up.

Kant himself was also clear in his published defenses of the Critique that he was intending to preserve the objectivity of knowledge. What led him down the rabbit hole that is the Transcendental Aesthetic was in part, I think, a 17th cent. view of knowledge as something certain, if not apodictic. Once that view gave way in the 19th cent. to the scientific understanding of knowledge as provisional, and of the laws of nature as statistical rather than strictly deterministic, the need to suppose things-in-themselves to preserve the objectivity of appearances evaporated. His theory might have looked much different if only he had lived a few decades later.

Kant produced a total philosophy, not just an epistemology. I think CRT is wrong to focus on the metaphysical implications of his theoretical works while ignoring the equally metaphysical implications of his practical philosophy. While Kant did hold that "reality" is a combination of perceptions (Kant called them "intuition") and a priori concepts that are put together (synthesized) by the mind, Kant also held that both the perceived objects and the a priori concepts were common to all human beings for reasons of parsimony. So the subjective element can't be explanatory of different points of view if the "filters" are all the same, i.e., we all experience things as being in space and time, and all our concepts derive from the Categories of the Understanding. That's where differences in memory, ability, and imagination, among other things, come in. And since all those things are derived in part empirically rather than from reason alone, they can't be the proper basis of moral action, at least according to Kant. CRT may claim part of its heritage from Kant but I think it's a bogus claim on their part.

 

Well, at least somebody out there takes philosophy seriously