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The philosopher Immanuel Kant has written works with serious titles
containing terms full of promise, such as critique and
reason: a Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a Critique
of Practical Reason (1788), a Critique of (the Power of)
Judgment —"Urteilskraft" in the German original—
(1790), and a work entitled "Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen
Vernunft" (1793), with Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason as one of its (at least three) English translations.
These are the main ideas of reason Kant postulates: the existence
of God, the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul.
They are often simply referred to as "God, freedom and
immortality",
which is a risky simplification, especially because of what
freedom is supposed to refer to.
Between God and immortality it is the freedom of one person
or 'soul' to choose between good and evil, and in the company of 'God' it
would be naive, or plain foolishness, to assume that it is the
freedom to choose what you yourself believe to be good, or
evil, or both or neither.
To make matters worse, this freedom is not at all what we usually mean by
freedom: the freedom of one person or a group of persons
from oppression by another person or group of persons,
for example, on the basis of their religious ideology.
In the threesome God, immortality and a limited notion
of freedom to boot, the three are condemned to one another.
Thus, Kant's moral metaphysics demonstrates already how
awfully skewed it is in favor of monotheist religion.
Nonetheless, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
Kant did strongly criticize ritual, superstition and the church hierarchy,
but such criticism merely touches on the superficial and banal,
however great a social impact this aspect of religion may have.
It does not touch on the essence of religion, on what makes an ideology or
'denomination'
supernaturalist or
theocentrist,
whether theistic or atheistic.
What Kant offered us in the end was neither a thorough substantive
criticism of the Abrahamic worldview he intended to 'modernize' (and
refused categorically to abandon) nor a consistent sane rational
approach to age-old questions and matters.
In History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell
writes:
"[E]ver since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their
business to produce 'proofs' of immortality and the existence of God.
They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors ...
but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their
proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics
mystical, and to pretend that deep-seated prejudices were heaven-sent
intuitions."
Now, just as a baker may be anything in addition to being a baker (a
gardener, for instance, and a naturalist or believer), and a nurse
anything in addition to being a nurse (a swimmer, for instance, and a
supernaturalist or non-believer), so too a philosopher may be
anything in addition to being a philosopher; things which are, say,
'completely unrelated' to philosophy and things for which one obviously
needs some skills one will not as readily find in the average
non-philosopher.
There may be a fuzzy border between philosophy and (political, religious
or other types of) ideology, just like there is such a border between
philosophy and science, and between philosophy and the arts (literature
in particular).
however, trying to prove or disprove the truth of religious dogmas, or
trying to sell them to your readers or students in some other way, is
not a philosophical but an ideological occupation.
This is not to argue that a subject which plays a central or important
role in a particular religion could not be treated as a philosophical
subject (as well).
It depends on the kind of approach to that subject whether the philosopher
in question acts as a philosopher and not as an ideologue or something
else.
Thus, with respect to the subject of immortality, Kant started off as a
philosopher, albeit not one good enough to describe what this
immortality was supposed to mean (more or less
exactly).
Corliss Lamont puts it this way in The Illusion of
Immortality: "[Immanuel
Kant] concentrated on proving immortality as a postulate of the moral law
and wasted scarcely a word in describing it".
Yet, it was very honest and truly praiseworthy that Kant denied the
possibility of knowledge about immortality, because it was, and still
is, in itself a good and sound philosophical position to take.
But what did Immanuel do after he divorced Knowledge?
Immanuel rushed back to Church in order to marry Faith!
Sure, anyone has the moral right to marry any adult they love, but it
just is not an activity which brings philosophy to a climax.
What we see in Kant is a degeneration of his thought from
philosophy to a desperate attempt to save the effete and
normatively bankrupt ideology of his own place and time.
(When
i
do not use the personal pronouns 'e and 'er here to
refer to Kant as the the third person, but the masculine pronouns
he and his instead, it is because sex or gender is
inordinately, albeit spuriously, 'relevant' in 'er case for reasons which
should become clearer below.)
Immanuel did not only tell us that faith in immortality will have to be
substituted for knowledge of immortality, he was
eager to do so, which is an ideological position to take.
Faith in immortality is a leap in the dark which requires a religious or
similar support in the background.
The reason Kant gave for clinging to such a faith in the existence of
an afterlife was that 'the most scrupulous adherence to the laws of
morality cannot be expected to bring happiness into
connection with virtue'.
This is an empirical claim which may have fitted Kant's purpose, but which
is not one to be made by someone who is a total nonentity in the
field.
(One may be reminded that Kant, in his whole life on Earth,
never traveled farther than some 145 km from Königsberg, now
Kaliningrad, but, of course, this fact does not prove anything
either.)
What a philosopher as philosopher may point out is that some people
labeled virtuous have led a very happy life when they die, some a
very unhappy life, and the others, if not all, anything in between.
Not so Kant, because he needed the irrational claim for an existence which
is for every 'rational being' prolonged to infinity.
Yet, an infinite prolongation of one's existence does not in itself
guarantee an infinitely happy afterlife.
But there entered Kant's very own Deus ex Machina: 'a rational Being who
has all power'
and who secures the happiness which the nature of His —in the
Abrahamic religions the Supreme Being is 'intrinsically' a member of the
superior sex— human underlings demanded.
Kant only needed faith in immortality (a non-argument, because it does not
even involve reason) as an 'argument' for the existence of his Abrahamic
god.
On top of this, Kant's 'perfect harmony between happiness and virtue in
the beyond'
looks like no more than the equality between
extremist eudaimonism —the more
happiness the better ad infinitum— and an equally extremist
idea of virtue itself or the production of it —the more effort
virtue entails the better ad infinitum.
Kant was right, however, in rejecting the purely intellectual
(ontological, cosmological and physico-theological) 'proofs' of
the existence of a Creator (and not just an Architect) named "God", among
others, by arguing that existence is not a predicate.
But his own argument from human individual immortality was at least as
bad.
Mind you, the (transcendental) idealist Kant was not thinking
of a philosophical product of reasoning like
'ideal immortality'
(the idea of a certain quality in life and thought which is 'eternal',
that is, independent of time and the continued existence of the
individual), or 'influential immortality' (the idea
of an unending effect of one's life on the beliefs, attitudes and actions
of the surviving ones and successive generations).
When Kant died a natural death in the year 1804 of the
Christianist Era, he died, as far as publicly known,
childless.
(The young Immanuel, however, was not too dry a stick.
On the contrary, sometimes he could not find his way back home because he
was too inebriated.)
Therefore he lost his chance of biological immortality, but, in a sober
mood, Kant must have realized that in a two-sex species that form of
immortality peters out mercilessly in a, let's assume, unending
succession of negative-exponential powers of two (½, ¼, 1/8,
1/16, and so forth).
It is from the perspective of influential immortality that Kant
definitely did not die yet.
Up to this day, a great many people think the world of this man, perhaps,
even this person, and put him on a pedestal at a height out of all
proportion to his systematic-philosophical importance.
He will always be remembered and revered as part of (Judeo-)Christianist
or general Abrahamic history for as long as that history will be
remembered, but apart from that?
Kant's categorical imperative in itself does not require any faith in the
supernatural,
altho the term imperative suggests an authority-, if not
god-centered, worldview.
Imperative or 'principle', it failed to shed light on the real principle
at work.
(Some have later appealed to an alternative principle of universalization,
but such a principle is no more than a relevance principle turned upside
down.)
A challenging aspect of Kant's transcendental idealism is that
he claimed that in order to be able to experience anything we first
need fundamental organizing principles of thought, such as space, time
and causality.
(Kant's idealism is 'transcendental' in that knowledge is said
to transcend mere sensory evidence, in that it requires an
understanding of how the mind processes this sensory evidence.)
Unfortunately, whereas Hume's empiricist
conception of human experience tends to be that of a child that
never grows up into an adult person, Kant's alternative
conception and point of departure is that of an adult person
—in his case, man— who was never a child.
The skeptic Hume rejected the principle of induction and would
like to have stopped each and every child from starting to apply it to
what it observes and experiences.
Kant, on the other hand, could not think of anything else than some
organizer having been put into each and every adult before starting to
experience anything, but that is not how experience and its
translation into propositions start in real, temporal life.
We are not born as adults, and once we stay alive we cannot
and do not require a 1000‰ certain knowledge of our
surroundings in order to be able and to be willing to stay alive.
(No one can be literally 1000‰ sure either that there once existed
a German philosopher by the name Emanuel Kant, let alone one by the name
of Immanuel Kant, or vice versa!)
According to Kant, arithmetic propositions would be
synthetic and involve a reference to time, an erroneous idea to which
Frege put an end by proving that mathematics in general is an extension
of deductive logic.
Kant was also so rash and wrong, during his this-worldly life, as to argue
that Euclidean geometry was 'synthetically a priori' and the only
geometry conceivable.
Geometry would be known a priori, even tho synthetic, that is, not
deducible from logic alone.
(As a result the great mathematician Gauss dared not publish 'er results,
afraid of 'the howling of the Boethians', that is, the Kantians who would
not allow an alternative geometry.)
In a paper of which the beginning dates back more than 50 years, and which
i published on the internet under the title
The philosopher whose name will forever
remain ... 23 years ago, i have given numerous examples
of what Mr Kant possessed and professed.
They range from male masturbation being 'contrary to morality in the
highest degree'
to things like 'a child born outside marriage is outside the
law ... and might be killed by its mother as she pleased';
and like 'animals are merely as a means to ... man';
and like 'children and adult people other than the Master of the House can
be used as things' —surprise, surprise, by the Master of the
House—;
and like 'there is a natural superiority of man over woman, on which his
right to be in command is based'.
Since in the time of Mr Kant, the Christian eighteenth and (the
first five years of) the nineteenth centuries, there were no robots
and articial intelligence programs yet, the above statements must have
been produced by a human being.
What a deranged mind it was, however, that committed the
Metaphysics of Morals (1797) and the Metaphysical Elements of
Justice (1797), in which the above pathological passages occur, to paper.
An extenuating circumstance may only be that the titles of these two
books contain neither the term critique nor the term reason.
But then again, one of them contains the very word moral(s)!
We may expect that with Kant's philosophical shortcomings
fully exposed and the immorality in his ideological writings no longer
hushed up, explained away or taken for granted, his afterlife will only
become shorter and shorter.
Once a(nother) proof of the immorality Kant's writings lead up to is not
needed anymore, Kant's 'proofs' of immortality and of the irrelevant
existence of his god will also become of lesser and lesser weight.
Immanuel Kant will then be reduced to what 'e deserves, with or without
ideal remains of immortality; of influential immortality, that is.
| * |
Unless its capitalization follows a general rule, i spell the
first-person singular pronoun in
This Language
with a small i, as i do not consider myself a God, a
Supreme Being or anything else of that Ilk.
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| ** |
Where a choice between spellings does not depend on the
application of a morphological rule, i prefer to use the most
phonematic ('phonetic'), or the least unphonematic, variant.
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78.MNE
NOTES
1
Used nonpejoratively, ideology is a common denominator
for all religious and nonreligious worldviews, political
and other doctrines;
a 'denomination' is (the name of) a comprehensive ideology, that is,
a religion or a naturalistic worldview;
theocentrism refers to a worldview's being
god-centered instead of norm-centered.
(I just follow the
Model of
Neutral-Inclusivity here.)
Theocentrism starts from the primacy of
god(s) and/or
demon(s), rather than that of norms and
values.
From a theist or atheist perspective the
(non)existence of a god is relevant,
from a norm-centered one it is not.
2 Bertrand Russell,
History of Western Philosophy, George Allen & Unwin Ltd,
London, 1961, p.789.
3 Corliss Lamont, The Illusion
of Immortality, With an introduction by John Dewey,
Philosophical Library, New York, 1959, Third Edition,
p.132.
4 Ibid., p.162. In these
pages Lamont discusses Kant's Critique of Practical Reason,
Bk. II, Ch.2.
5 Ibid., p.163.
6 Ibid., p.164.
7 I use the word extremist,
not in some colloquial sense such as terrorist, but in the
sense of preoccupied with what is extremely positive and/or
extremely negative. This is the catenical sense of the word
as discussed and technically defined in the
Model of
Neutral-Inclusivity.
8 See Lamont, op. cit.,
p.23, for ideal or 'Platonic', material or 'chemical',
biological or 'plasmic' and social or 'influential'
immortality.
9 See Kant's Epistemology
in Having Trouble With Kant? Peter Rickman says you’re not the
only one. Available at
https://philosophynow.org/[ ]issues/86/[
]Having_Trouble_With_Kant.
10 See Russell, op. cit.,
p.784.
11 Ibid., p.686.
12 Available at
https://www.mvvm.net/[ ]Tong/ThL/Note/[ ]PhilName.HTM.
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