I have no great respect for Kant.

In his most benevolent role, this famous philosopher features as the pun-pair with ‘can’t’ in highbrow dad jokes that aren’t funny out of context. In his more famous position, Immanuel Kant stands among the halls of philosophy as one of the Greats- a rank down from Plato and Aristotle, but in the league of men like Descartes, Hegel, and Hume. The man has had an undoubted impact. We ought therefore to get a basic grip on what he actually thought- and how absurd he actually is, when the brass tacks are exposed to view.

(I have no great respect for Kant- less than I have for Hume, that’s for certain.)

The problem Kant sought to solve was the great dilemma facing European epistemology in the Enlightenment and its aftermath: how do we know? Rationalism and empiricism were the two great schools of thought here, the bifurcation running across the philosophers of those centuries (as realism-nominalism-conceptualism ran across medieval philosophy). Rationalism posited that men could use their innate reason, starting from that mere basis of reason, to understand the entirety of reality; empiricism posited that men could perceive the world through their senses, by which means they could understand all things. Each had a fatal problem.

Rationalism’s problem was the connection between man’s reason and the exterior world. Why should what I reason to within my head correspond to an outer reality? Leibniz’s answer was that we all hallucinate the same thing, complete with sensations, despite our complete inability to perceive anything; Descartes never managed (for all he might have claimed success) to show that reality couldn’t be an illusion. All reason can guarantee, even viewed ideally and assumed flawless, is that it is self-consistent. Rationalism said thought could perceive all reality, but it couldn’t be sure reality matched thought.

Empiricism, by contrast, never managed to explain how perception related to thought. How do I get from sense-perceptions to categorized reality? David Hume, an empiricist, considered this problem rather exhaustively (exhaustingly- I’ve read him) and came to some bare-bones conclusions, conclusions not themselves very well supported. Hume, moreover, decided that metaphysics were pointless and advised burning all books on it. The problem is simple: logic isn’t sensorily perceived. In a world where perception is the only foundation for knowledge, therefore, logic has no basis (remember: you can’t use logic to derive logic from perception, as that makes logic as fundamental as its purported foundation).

Kant came along and had an answer. Reality matched thought, he said, and thought could validly categorize reality. Why? Because categories in the mind provided structure to perception.

Uh.

Empiricism’s problem: we can’t show how perception justifies categories and relationships. Kant’s solution: your mind makes them up.

Rationalism’s problem: we can’t show that reality matches reason. Kant’s solution: your mind makes up reason and imposes it on everything you see.

In other words, Kant’s brilliant solution was to combine the problems of both while solving neither. So why did he get so famous? In large part, it is because people desperately want an excuse not to rely on God, on faith in Him, and Kant provided an excuse. That Kant in particular got famous doubtless rises from innumerable historical particulars, ‘coincidences,’ not to mention God’s choice, but one advantage he does present: he’s an utter pain to read. He’s hard to read, and therefore the reader, with the barest pinch of inattention, will often see what he wants, at least to some extent. Moreover, people tend to assume the inexplicable is either nonsense or brilliant. It’s nonsense if we don’t want it to be true; it’s brilliant if we do want it to be true. Kant’s dense verbiage and lack of simplicity can easily be denominated as brilliance- and its obduracy to inspection then makes it hard to show false, hard indeed to convince the other of that falsity.

God bless.