Kant

[James02]

Definitely had problems.  Her big problem was that she couldn't see that the denial of Original Sin leads to socialism.  Original Sin was staring her in the face (Atlas Shrugged), but she couldn't make the connection.

There is a telling anecdote.  In a draft version, James Taggert had a scene where he went to confession.  She cut it because she said it wasn't plausible that he would go to confession. She brushed against Faith a few times, just didn't make it.  To bad.

But she loved Aristotle, and she hated the likes of Kant and Hegel.  Give her props for that.

I think I like dealing with agnostics and Jews (especially to convert them) then with liberal Catholics.  The former are sincere.  The Jews aren't until they get to know you.  Then they are shockingly sincere.

[Norbert]

Definitely had problems.  Her big problem was that she couldn't see that the denial of Original Sin leads to socialism.  Original Sin was staring her in the face (Atlas Shrugged), but she couldn't make the connection.

There is a telling anecdote.  In a draft version, James Taggert had a scene where he went to confession.  She cut it because she said it wasn't plausible that he would go to confession. She brushed against Faith a few times, just didn't make it.  To bad.

But she loved Aristotle, and she hated the likes of Kant and Hegel.  Give her props for that.

I think I like dealing with agnostics and Jews (especially to convert them) then with liberal Catholics.  The former are sincere.  The Jews aren't until they get to know you.  Then they are shockingly sincere.

It saddens me as an avid rand reader (less so now that I am out of the woods of deism) that she obviously never made it to faith.

But if one analyzes Kant, it is clear that his philosophy is not only anti life as rand saw it but more (i would argue much more) anti-Catholic than even Rand's assumptions on organized religion rooted in her empiricism-based definition of "reason".

[dnu]

Kant was pretty much influenced by Aristotle.  One of the things I remember most about Kant from my Intro to Philosophy class was his "contemplative imperative."  In short, in light of Aristotles definition of man as "rational animal," Kants CI was "Act only upon that maxim which at that time you could will it to become universal law."  In english (Kant was an awful writer), that means take action "a," universalize it, and see if society could function. 

Let's take murder for example.  We "universalize" murder so that every person on earth commits a murder...obviously, a society in which everyone is killing everyone could not exist, therefore, we can ascertain through human reason (remember Aristotle said man is "rational animal") that murder is immoral without the necessity of a God, relgion, etc. 

The same could be said for abortion, if every mother aborts, no babies born, this is bad for society
The same could be said for birth control, masturbation, lying, stealing, and the list goes on, and on, and on, and on...

So basically, to repeat what I and several others have already said, Kant was of the opinion that man could be moral without God, religion, etc. by using objective human reason. 

[Marc]

One of the things I remember most about Kant from my Intro to Philosophy class was his "contemplative imperative."

I think you mean Categorical Imperative.

[dnu]

One of the things I remember most about Kant from my Intro to Philosophy class was his "contemplative imperative."

I think you mean Categorical Imperative.

Woops, thank you Marc.

Categorical Imperative is correct.

[Pomprincess]

Kant is interesting and cool "Seek not the favor of the multitude," he says. "It is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of the few, and number not the voices but weigh them." That's one of my favourite quotes by Kant...he reminds me of Viggo Mortensen whenever I hear about Kant...and that is a quote Viggo stated in one of his interviews. That quote is deep...I like how it says to not search to find favor with a lot of people and to just be happy and basically go with what a few people tell you and not the whole world in terms of them favoring you because of something.

[Pilgrim]

Kant is interesting and cool "Seek not the favor of the multitude," he says. "It is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of the few, and number not the voices but weigh them."

Plato has Socrates say essentially the same thing in Crito, so the sentiment was hardly new in Kan't time. 

[Joseph11]

Kant probably was cool.  Personally.

But he caused modern philosophers to turn Aristotle into, basically, nothing more than a laughingstock.

[EcceQuamBonum]

My experience with ol' Immanuel is limited to the Groundwork and sections from his Critique of Judgment, so I will make only a feeble (and potentially deeply misinformed) essay against his philosophy.  What we essentially find in his ethics and aesthetics is an Enlightenment rationalism ignorant of its own limitations, a metaphysics that overprivileges human reason such that it becomes itself inhumane.  I think dnu is right to point to the influence of Aristotle; however, whereas Aristotelian ethics are a form of virtue ethics in which the path to eudaimonia depends at least partially on the moral agent, on the Kantian view any intelligible moral imperative must bind equally on all legislators within the universal "Kingdom of Ends." 

Such a deontological system attempts to decontextualize moral decision-making, bracketing it off from human emotion and all other subsidiary motivations.  An action whose fundamental motivation is anything other than rationally deduced duty is morally unintelligible (Kant terms these "hypothetical imperatives," for they cannot bind on all legislators within the Kingdom of Ends).  I have real problems with this conception of moral agency because it is fundamentally flawed from a psychological and anthropological standpoint.  We do not--indeed, I would posit, cannot--reason within a vacuum; we cannot sequester our rational capacity off from the other faculties of our mind.  In some ways this is almost an old Platonic dualism creeping back in, for Kant would have us believe that the mind can approach something resembling a priori deduction without enlisting sense experience, emotion, etc.  In response to this, I would point to St. Thomas Aquinas' argument that "even an alteration from vice to virtue or from ignorance to knowledge affects the intellective part only indirectly, while the transformation is directly in the sensitive part" (Q. XXVI de Veritate art. 3, ad 12m); that is to say, sense experience is the very foundation of our knowledge, and all ethical reasoning is intrinsically a posteriori to some extent.

Likewise, for Kant the only intelligible aesthetic judgment is the indifferent judgment, which is once again unmediated by emotional response.  Kant argues that my judgment of an object as beautiful should obey an aesthetic principle similar to the categorical imperative of his ethics:  namely, any aesthetic judgment could theoretically be submitted to the judgment of all purely rational agent-legislators who could ratify and universalize my own particular judgment.  Therefore, the "beautiful" is no longer a transcendental virtue containing both an intellective and an emotional component, but it is a function solely of human reason.  And just as any ethical decision should remain unpolluted by base emotional motivations, so, too, should the aesthetic judgment avoid both emotional response and potential moral utility.  Gone is the Horatian standard of dulce et utile.  A "purposive purposelessness" characterizes the beautiful object--art purely for its own sake.  I think this ends only in the dehumanization of critical judgment.

In both instances I find that the problem inheres in Kant's desire to undermine the notion of transcendence.*  He wishes to develop a metaphysics in which human reason is coterminous with the real; whatever cannot be contained within human reason is simply unintelligible.  However, in attempting to make human reason the highest good, Kant ends up dehumanizing us.  We are not brains in a jar.  We are sentient beings enmeshed in a world that demands emotional and spiritual response. 

Anyway, that's my best attempt at outlining my problems with Kant.  I am clearly no expert on Kant, and neither am I a particularly astute philosopher, so I more than welcome the corrections of someone who knows better than I!


*For a much more lucid account of the way in which Kant seeks to destroy the concept of transcendence, I would commend the highly learned account that Fr. Johnathan Robinson gives in his The Mass and Modernity (San Francisco:  Ignatius, 2005).

[paxvobiscum23]

I was required to write an exit essay in my English Composition and Rhetoric class last week. The topic was, "Are human being more naturally inclined towards good or evil". I was actually able to make a logical, reasoned argument in favor of neither and recieved a passing grade on the essay. I knew nothing of Immanual Kant prior to preparing for this essay and while I have no intentions of conducting an in-depth study of his philosophy, I can appreciate many of the points he made in his writings. I can't say that I believe human beings are naturally neutral, between good and evil; but I do believe we are as much a product of the choices we have made in favor of one or the other, as much as anything else.