—Curt, Thanks for doing this. I would appreciate it if you could expand upon your criticism of Kant and what exactly he got wrong (and what he got right if anything). What is the problem with Critique of Pure Reason?—
I think anyone can read wikipedia and understand the philosophical criticisms of Kant. I think most of us understand that there are problems of internal consistency, and of obscurantism, that allow him to reason from vague generalizations to specifics, and then to claim that a priori and a posteriori are different classes of knowledge rahter than the apriori is but a special case of the universal epistemological sequence we mistakenly call empiricism but is reducible to the sequence: free association, question, hypothesis, theory, law.
Secondly, He did this in order to sew doubt. (which was Rand’s criticism). He wanted to sew doubt in order to attack empiricism.
Thirdly, He was seeking a way to preserve germanic christianity in rational post-mystical terms as a means of AVOIDING the challenge posed by empiricism – and the vast literary nonsense that constittutes german (continental) philosophy is evidence of the damage he has done. And the use of his work by generations of pseudoscientists that followed him (Marx and Freud, Mises and Rothbard, The Frankfurt School, the posmodernists, and just about every other miscreant group of pseudo intellectuals) each took his verbal obscurantism as a method of overloading, suggestino, and deceit, to new heights, producing in the end, what we call, political correctness (outright lying), and the total destruction of social science under an ocean of postmodern pseudorational and pseudoscientific analogistic babble.
So is his categorical imperative incorrect? No. But he is the inventor of pseudorationalism as a substitute for mysticism. As such it is his TECHNIQUE that is nothing but an enormous justificationary network designed to preserve church, monarchy, and state, order using pseudo-rational rather than mystical speech, out of fear that individual sovereignty and empirical analysis would threaten that order.
Kant was a very bright man who created the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. And while the authors of the bomb rependted, and so have their followers, kant and his followers revel in the ongoing damage he has done.
If you read the European Right, the reason they fail is they are stuck in kant’s restatement of christianity – still servants of nonsense, appealing to emotion using the pretense of reason, rather than appealing to reason regardless of emotional response.
Because that’s what science means: cleansed of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute