Posted by Paul Goodman on July 24, 19100 at 22:07:26:
In Reply to: ???? You don't like Kant much, do you? posted by Mark Nenstein on May 10, 19100 at 19:22:23:
After the Scottish Enlightenment produced the steam engine and David Hume, Immanuel Kant had to grow up in Germany and bring it all to a crashing halt. The fundamental psoition of the Enlightenment was empericism against wishful thinking. Kant, especially in his essays on "Perpetual Peace" jettisons that approach and makes the claim that "if Hume is right, then I can do whatever I want." So the disciplined urges of Western man from the age of Chivalry and Courtesy and one might even say before Civilization were relaxed. The result (which I cannot pin on Kant alone) was the Romantic Reaction which thrived and threw Europe into a cataclysmic turmoil until 1945.
I would have prefered Kant kept his mouth shut because in Prussia there was nobody capable of paying attention to the fact that he was a Skeptic in philosophy and the blight of German Idealism in the Universities was able to weasel its way out of the stranglehold of Hume. MOreover Kant's style and sophistry is the antithesis of Hume's candor and ease. "Das in sich" and all the arguments used to bolster the duelism of experience and reality paved the way for Hegel's mystical notions of Spirit, the conception of the state as an "organic" entity, and the slight refinement after Darwin to consider the state a biological or racial entity. Thus Hitler, whom everyone mistakenly ociates with Nietzsche, finds his roots in the Scholasticism and endless word-games of the German Universities and School Men. Any intellectual worth his or her salt after Hume (or one could say after Gautama Buddah) understands that we can never "know" with absolute certainty, anything. Should our attitude then be to "make do"? If that is a utilitarian argument, we can't be sure it will work. If it is an aesthetic argument, its a question of politics and the ability to influence men. Promoting Kant as a Great Philosopher may pay the bills for some professors, but it only confuses and demoralizes the students or leads them to enthusiasms and absurdities.
READ THE GREAT BOOKS
TERM PAPERS, RESEARCH PAPERS, ESSAYS