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. Not Kant, not anyone else. Either drown in mysticism or fight for the primacy and absolutism of reason. 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!’