Kant is wrong

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GUEST BIO:
Yaron Brook is an objectivist. Yoram Hazony is a national conservative. This is a conversation and debate about national conservatism vs individualism.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[gkloner]

Don't get hung up on semantics. Kant is among of the greatest philosophers in western history. To suggest that he is destructive to the enlightenment is an embarrassment. He does not divorce reality from experience. Experience is reality --a posteriori. The genius of Kant is he showed that the mind and its categories of reason play an active role in the construction of reality. In the Kantian paradigm he separated the realm of knowledge from the realm of faith. The rational from the non rational. Kant was and is the embodiment of reason and reason is at the core of the enlightenment.

[nousowl]

As an academic philosopher with quite a bit of experience with Kant, just no.

[hiramabiff]

Actually disgusting, shouldn't even be a clip for someone to digest such an incredulous statement with no legitimate evidence to substantiate the claim that Kant is wrong.

[michaelcriger]

I don't have any idea who this speaker is, but he seems to fundamentally misunderstand Kant.

[aswinunni]

Get someone like Bernardo Kastrup or an actual Kantian to talk about Kant's philosophy rather than someone who gives out blanket statements such as these. Ofcourse it's clickbait but we expect better from you Lex.

[ExistentialBall]

2:04
“You can’t have pure ‘Reason.’”
Boy, you’re not gonna believe this.

[EddieHongisrandom]

Plato and Kant were of the most destructive?!?!?! Idk if i can stand behind a statement like that

[hyperreal]

At least we got Ayn Rand vs Kant Epic Rap Battle

[borisbadinoff]

I'm not Kant literate, but Brook seems pretty lightweight. Kant built the foundations on which Western civilization was able to develop value-based societies without reference to some god, revelation or scriptures. And the statement that "Kant is wrong" (or Brook's Kant-bashing) is meaningless, as a more appropriate question from an academic standpoint is whether Kant "was" wrong in his time.

That being said, not sure we've been able to use the tools he bequeathed us. It seems that the US (and quite a number of European countries) still need a healthy dose of Kant when looking at all the conversation and debates on religion and faith, starting with the topic of whether moral standards can be grounded in reason, and thus be articulated in law and achieved in society without the quixotic oversight of an invented greater authority. Looking at this from France, it's clearly still work in progress.

Seeing how a society founded by zealots and bursting at the seams with religious beliefs of all stripes can come to believe at a massive scale some of the craziest ideas could be indicative that, not only "Kant was sooo right", but in fact "We need Kant." And these are my suggestions for the the title of the follow-up episode.

Now, I'll grant you that, even if Kant freed us, his sentences were just too damn long. So much that not a single one could fit within a tweet. However, "Kant is wrong" seems to be the right length for our times. :-)

[Havre_Chithra]

He divorces reason from reality? No... no no no... So wrong. Reality, the only one that matters, is our experience qua human beings, which is structured by certain universal categories -- and whatever knowledge we have is about this reality and thus any and all knowledge we may have must adhere to the laws of these universal categories.

[KlockedQQ]

Lol 😂 these two, “we’re empiricist’s!” Kant, “let me show you how to blend empiricism with rationalism.” This guy, “Kant is destructive to philosophical thought!”

[dxk]

Kant is generally a good philospher. I do not agree with this.

[bierdlll]

I don't have very deep knowledge of Kant. But it's enough to tell that this guy has zero understanding of Kant's ideas.

[rjd]

He obviously has not the faintest idea about what Kant is really about. Yes, Kant did not write much about history, he was more concerned about science, ethics, art and how to make the world more pieceful. Nobody can deal with everything. And about history Hegel said enough later.

[quinnyp]

Brook made two different claims there but passed them off as the same. He first says that we can "abstract" truths from the past which may or may not be universal (the hope, I'm guessing, is that their historical reality gives them more force). He then says that we learn morality through engaging with the past and learning more and more about it. Those are two different claims.

The act of the historian is different from that of the preacher/prophet/moralist. One can be an excellent historian who constructs narratives from a given set of archaic findings while also having no moral compass. In fact, a historian guided in his research by strictly his moral compass is likely liable to leave out historical realities (think of any culture that would done something repugnant to contemporary North-American views - so all of them, pretty much). Thus the very act of writing history and the act of extracting morals from history are simply two different activities.

Last, we can also ask: how do we extract the principles from history? Upon what criteria do we base these abstractions? I must assume that Brook will, at this point, become either a rationalist himself or he will appeal to his own experiences of what he has taken to be moral - but those experiences are formed within an alternative historical space to the history he studies, and he therefore never should have appealed to the history in the first place.

In short, this is stupid.

[johannpopper]

Kant argued that he found one very specific limitation on the use of rational speech for our current human form of life -- that metaphysical propositions made purely from a standpoint within physics qua physics are a category error. Or, in other words, that one cannot put into words that which transcends possible experience on a day to day basis, and therefore, it is precisely only on an empirical basis that religion can be judged constructive or destructive. I'm not sure what angle of interpretation lands one to extrapolate Kant's purpose to be a complete separation of reason from reality. Moreover, I don't think any modern neuroscientific approach (that Kant laid the groundwork for) could admit of a genuine distinction between rationalism and empiricism, since we derive knowledge from the senses a posteriori as well as from the a priori structures of language and logic that categorize inputs as such, and so on. However, I will watch the entire interview next. Very interesting.

If I were to critique Kant, it would be precisely on the basis that he was too rationalistic, and insufficiently empirical in his social judgements. Specifically, his essay 'What is Enlightenment?' bespeaks a total lack of appreciation for brain inequality, and thus the material world we inhabit. Kant wanted to believe, religiously, that nature is telling us a more optimistic story than it really is. But then, paradoxically, our ability to improve our circumstances via the will to construction is a more optimistic story than any Eden after all.

[jorgeshss]

Ask him if he has ever read kant..i honestly doubt it. He lacks the capacity to read proper philosophy

[joeyjoe]

Continuing the bold Objectivist tradition of criticizing philosophical figures that you never understood in the first place. Embarrassing.

[mustang]

Kant divorces reason from reality. He divorces reason from history. He divorces reason from experience.
Who agrees with Yaron's general assessment?

[jarrodyuki]

kant is the destroyer of the enlightenment. reason and the pursuit of happiness are the only things we have.