MORE ON KANT Or let me put it another way: Science evolved to require operationa

MORE ON KANT

Or let me put it another way:

Science evolved to require operational definitions in the proposition of evidence and theory. The purpose of empirical argument is to make it extremely difficult to err, bias or deceive.

Philosophy by contrast is an extremely useful means of deception by analogy, loading, framing, overloading, suggestion. Kant invented a new means of conducting the same deception that was possible under babylonian-judeo-christian mysticism, by rational means, and in doing so created the most successful series of rationalists and pseudoscientists the world has ever known.

So, if we are to say, we gained enlightenment, we have to ask, whether Kant’s invention of a new means of deceit – one that persists today – was in fact “enlightening”. Or whether, like the other counter-enlightenment figures, he was merely inventing an alternative means of deceit, even more sophisticated than that of Abraham and Zoroaster.

So by such standards, he was a member of the enlightenment period, he was a liberal in the classical (upper middle class) sense, but not in the modern proletarian sense, and he was not enlightened in any sense other than replacing mysticism with rationalism.

The germans were right about the nature of man, and the anglos were wrong about the nature of man. The British were right that common law and empiricism were critical defenses against deceit and abuse, and the germans were wrong that rational philosophy could replace the church. (Which is why the European right still fails.) The jewish philosophers were both wrong about the nature of man AND wrong about the adoption of german rationalism as justification for the preservation of separatism.

Unfortunately, everyone was insufficiently correct.

And because of Marx and Keynes, we are starting to seriously pay for it.