Is Kant the Original 'Woke' Philosopher? - Current Events with Hicks and Tracinski -- November 2021

The Atlas Society Current Events Panel: Join Senior Scholar Dr. Stephen Hicks and Senior Fellow Robert Tracinski for a discussion on the surprising - but encouraging - Virginia election results, CRT and whether Immanuel Kant was the original "woke" philosopher. All this and more on the 79th episode of The Atlas Society Asks.

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Dr. Stephen Hicks
Twitter: @SRCHicks

Robert Tracinski
Twitter: @Tracinski

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[michaelpappie]

If I really wanted to punish someone, I would lock them in a room with the complete works of Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Thomas Aquinas and not let them out until they'd read them all! Now that's punishment! 😂

[ronpitcher]

It's always a treat hearing Stephen Hicks speak and break down complex subjects. He is one of few people who explains CRT in terms the rest of us can understand. Great conversation.

[johnbrown]

Great discussion as always. Thank you.

[mikeg]

There is no need for anyone else to work on defeating Kant’s thinking because he defeated himself with his own self-conflicting statements.

Kant stated that the phenomenal world is the world of earthly physical reality including man’s senses, perceptions, reason, and science. He said that this phenomenal world, as perceived by a man’s mind, is a distortion or misrepresentation of the real world. Kant contended that the distorting mechanism that prevents man from perceiving reality is man’s conceptual faculty itself. By his own rule, Kant’s statements must be considered invalid because he is also a man. According to his own rule, he is instructing all of us to never trust what Kant perceives and what Kant says. This is crazy talk from Kant.

Kant claimed that man’s knowledge lacks validity because man's consciousness possesses identity. He claimed that in order for knowledge to be valid, it must not be processed in any way by human consciousness. He said that only knowledge that is independent of perception and independent of human mental processing can be considered valid. Kant wants us to accept his own claim that perception and consciousness render knowledge invalid, after he used his own human perception and his own human consciousness to develop this idea and communicate it to us. He is trying to get away with telling all of us that Kant's own human knowledge is necessarily NOT valid, while simultaneously asking his reading audience to accept that Kant's own human knowledge should be accepted as valid by his audience. This is crazy talk from Kant.

Kant claimed that human knowledge will always remain subjective because it is not relevant to “things in themselves.” He said that real truth is unknowable because to know it a person would have to relate to reality directly without depending upon his conceptual mechanism. He said that everything is merely phenomenal that is relative and everything is relative that is an object with respect to a conscious subject. Kant must have known that his own claim is bogus because as a man he must include himself, which renders his “certainty” about his own idea meaningless. He wants to get away with making claims of his own while simultaneously claiming that no human may make any valid claims. This is crazy talk from Kant.

Kant claimed that identity, which itself is the essence of existence, invalidates consciousness. He said that any knowledge attained by a process of consciousness is inescapably subjective and therefore cannot match the facts of reality, because it is processed or altered knowledge. He said that whereas all consciousness is a relationship between a subject and an object, it follows that for a person to acquire knowledge of what is real, he would have to go outside of his consciousness, which he cannot do. Kant said that to know what is true a man would have to abandon his own nature (which is an absurd impossibility). He said that knowledge of true reality requires a consciousness not limited by any specific means of cognition (which is an absurd impossibility). This is the criterion or goal of Kant’s argument, and in this idea of his he holds that man may not know anything. But he is a man, so all readers of his works must necessarily consider Kant’s statements to be invalid. Kant is trying to get away with the idea that all humans cannot know anything, except Kant who magically bypasses his own rule. This is crazy talk from Kant.

Kant claimed that if consciousness possesses its own identity, then it cannot grasp the identity of anything external to it. Kant said that reason is powerless to deal with the fundamental metaphysical concerns of existence and that the world must always remain an unknowable world. Again, he is claiming knowledge about things, while simultaneously saying that he (as a fellow human) can never claim knowledge. This is crazy talk from Kant.

Kant said that man’s concepts form a collective delusion from which no human being can escape. In essence, Kant’s gimmick involved switching the collective for the objective when he advanced the idea of common mental categories collectively creating a phenomenal world. He also reassigned the validity of reason from its place in the objective world to the collective delusional world. Kant said that reality as perceived by man’s mind is a distortion, and he said that man’s mind is a distorting faculty. Then he goes on to make many claims of his own that implies he (as a fellow human) can somehow know things without distortion, while the rest of humanity remains incapable of pulling off this trick that only Kant can somehow perform. This is crazy talk from Kant.

Kant self-conflicts with his own rules in all of his pronouncements and conclusions, and each attempt that he makes to communicate his own points to his readers is an actual demonstration of the reverse of his own claims. All of Kant's materials contain the primary claim that man cannot use reason or conceptualization or human perception in order to know and understand themselves and their world. Each time that Kant makes these claims he then contradicts himself by presenting himself as a human man who somehow can escape his own rules as he asks his readers to accept that only Kant is able to know knowledge.

(I’ve only mentioned a handful of examples here. There are many hundreds of other self-defeating examples throughout Kant's own materials)

[albionicamerican]

It's funny to me that at least some Objectivists obsess over a philosopher most people never heard of who died in 1804. I have to think that Rand picked Kant as a safe target so that she could sound edgy and radical by denouncing him, but it wouldn't get her into trouble because no one in power has an investment in Kant's reputation. Otherwise, the Federal Government would have had the IRS audit her tax returns every year as a form of harassment, and it probably would have looked more deeply into her suspicious immigration story to see if there were grounds to revoke her American citizenship and deport her back to the Soviet Union.