Why People Like Kant – and Why They’re Wrong

I finally understand why some people like Immanuel Kant’s ideas. His Critique of Pure Reason is indecipherable, so I’ve been wondering for a while why anyone in their right mind would appreciate it. How can you appreciate something you don’t understand?

Reading Ayn Rand, founder of Objectivism, I’ve learned many things. And I’ve finally learned the reason. To understand Kant’s influence, consider the historical background. He became influential when, in the wake of the renaissance, it looked like reason might win the age-old battle against faith and force. But Kant did not want reason to win over faith. Instead, he wanted peace between the two; he wanted them to coexist. So he assigned the material world to science, the moral world to “the heart”; and he demoted philosophy to the role of arbiter between the two, explains Rand. He effectively separated science and morality. This separation laid the groundwork for later developments such as scientists building nuclear weapons for Soviet Russia and horoscopes being broadcast over television. Overall, Kant significantly contributed to the corruption of reason in favor of faith and mysticism in the past ~200 years since his death.

In other words, Kant’s ideas have had a terrible effect on the world. Why did they ever have a chance to begin with? Rand cites Friedrich Paulsen, a “devoted Kantian”. He published his book Immanuel Kant, His Life and Doctrine in 1898, roughly 100 years after Kant published his critiques:

There is indeed no doubt that the great influence which Kant exerted upon his age was due just to the fact that he appeared as a deliverer from unendurable suspense. The old view regarding the claims of the feelings and the understanding on reality had been more and more called in question during the second half of the eighteenth century. . . . Science seemed to demand the renunciation of the old faith. On the other hand, the heart still clung to it. . . . Kant showed a way of escape from the dilemma. His philosophy made it possible to be at once a candid thinker and an honest man of faith. For that, thousands of hearts have thanked him with passionate devotion.

A “man of faith” cannot be “honest” because there is no honesty without reason, aka truth-seeking. Nor could such a man be a “candid thinker” because faith, by definition, is the negation of critical thought. There’s a more fitting name for a man of faith: he’s a fool.

Consider the key objectivist insight that reason and faith cannot be mixed (which is why the “suspense” is “unendurable”); that any attempt to mix them anyway automatically favors faith over reason. So by demoting philosophy to the role of arbiter between the two, Kant castrated philosophy. But he seemed to make it possible to have your cake and eat it, too. And that’s why people liked him, and still like him. He absolved them from the responsibility of choosing between faith and reason, between ignorance and knowledge – and from the guilt they felt for not having made the choice.

Nobody can make that fundamental, existential choice for you. Nobody can absolve you from it. Not Kant, not anyone else. Either drown in mysticism or fight for the primacy and absolutism of reason. A rational man considers this fight in his interest and does not want to be absolved. Mysticism can only win by default – if you prefer not to think about whether to think or not to think, you’ve already chosen the former. Reason, on the other hand, can only win by a sustained effort. The age-old conflict between knowledge and faith ends either in death or in a resounding, uncompromising, unconditional victory for reason.

To be sure, most people are not familiar with the backstory or with Kant, but they don’t need to be to appreciate him. They can simply absorb their evasions from their cultural background, which Kant has molded:

No, most people do not know Kant’s theories, nor care. What they do know is that their teachers and intellectual leaders have some deep, tricky justification—the trickier, the better—for the net result of all such theories, which the average person welcomes: “Be rational, except when you don’t feel like it.”

Consider what could have been if Kant’s ideas never had. Consider what people accidentally confess when they admit to appreciating them. It’s like they’re flashing a warning sign: ‘Danger! I’m irrational! Stay away!’

Update: Somebody recommended I quote Kant to substantiate my criticisms of him. Fair enough – I’ve criticized Rand in the past for not quoting Kant enough in her criticisms. How hypocritical of me!

On the separation of science (the “doctrine of nature”) and morals:

[…] the doctrine of morality asserts its place and the doctrine of nature its own […]

On making room for faith at the expense of reason (note the last sentence in particular):

[…] I cannot even assume God, freedom and immortality for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason unless I simultaneously deprive speculative reason of its pretension to extravagant insights; because in order to attain to such insights, speculative reason would have to help itself to principles that in fact reach only to objects of possible experience, and which, if they were to be applied to what cannot be an object of experience, then they would always actually transform it into an appearance, and thus declare all practical extension of pure reason to be impossible. Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith; […]

If this passage seems difficult to read, that’s because it is. One of the problems with Kant, as pointed out by Rand, is that his ‘reasoning’, his leading up to conclusions, is purposely complex and confusing whereas his conclusions are crystal clear. That’s the reason the last sentence is relatively easy to understand but the previous ones are hard to parse. This approach leaves his readers (his victims) totally confused but also convinced that he must be right. What you need to come away with here is that he thinks reason is limited and you must make room for faith, ie unreason. (We will ignore that he somehow tried to reason his way to that position…)

On mediating between reason (the “sensible”) and unreason (the “supersensible”):

An immense gulf is fixed between the domains of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the supersensible ... and no transition by means of the theoretical use of reason between them is possible. ... [So] there must after all be a basis uniting [Kant’s emphasis] the sensible and the supersensible (CJ, 176).

Here, Kant admits in print that the mediation between reason and unreason cannot itself be done by reason (which is true).

Consider also that Paulsen was a fan of Kant’s yet accidentally utters damning criticism that he thinks is praise. That’s why Rand describes Paulsen as “an honest commentator— in the sense that he does not try to disguise what he is saying […]” (ibid., pp. 104-105, superfluous space in the original).

All that said, I am not an expert on Kant. If you think I or Rand misrepresent him, do point it out in the comments.