For one thing, it might be argued that Kant’s own attitude toward the imperative “Dare to Know!” was complex. In a famous passage toward the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant tells us that he was setting limits to reason in order to make room for faith. Exactly what Kant meant by this . . . what to call it? this admission? this boast? this concession? Well, whatever Kant meant by his invocation of faith, it has been an abiding matter of debate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Kant’s “critical philosophy” is itself a monument of Enlightenment thought, as much in its implied commendation of the “critical attitude” as as in the specific philosophical bureaucracy he recommends.
I’m glad you wrote this paragraph, Mr. Kimball, because it contains the explanation of why you manage to get just about everything exactly backwards.
But let I wrote a comment longer than the original article, I’ll just address this one question: What did Kant mean when he said he was “setting limits” — or “denying knowledge” in some translations I’ve heard quoted — in order to make room for faith?
Why, he meant what he said.
He saw that the Enlightenment, in unleashing the power of man’s reasoning mind, was eventually going to discover that reason IS man’s moral sense, that it is how men could discover not only what IS, but what OUGHT to be. As a man of faith, he had a profound emotional fear of that possibility.
He decided to do something about it…. and he did. Far from being a “hero” of the Enlightenment, Kant is its murderer. Contrary to your assertion, he did not “discover” the limits of reason; he invented them. He did the deed by constructing a system of philosophy whose primary goal was constrain reason, to concoct such constraints as if they were a discovery, in order to pass off the idea that reason is “limited” to the so-called “phenomenal” realm of the physical world — and therefore excluded from the “noumenal” realm where such things as morality and spirituality are to be found. The goal was to rationalize the walling off of the “higher” questions, such as morality, from reason, preserving it for the arbitrary dictates of faith — all done in a sufficiently complex manner to enable his like-minded contemporaries to stop moving down the road of Enlightenment without being seen as the emotionalistic reactionaries they were.
For the Enlightenment thinkers of his day, while no doubt groundbreaking intellects, were nonetheless apprehensive about the logical implications of where Enlightenment thought was going. They could see, even as they were moving towards this discovery, that if they continued on this road, reason would not only displace religion in the realm of explaining the natural world as it was doing before their eyes, but would someday do the same in the spiritual one also. Reason would become not only man’s means of discovering what is, but what ought to be.
As men of reason, they were logically beholden to go down that road. But as men of faith, they groundlessly feared that they would lose morality as such, including all spiritual values. They implicitly grasped that a rational morality would be egoistic in its outlook, a notion they despised. They were thusly emotionally predisposed to avoid going down that road, if they could… if someone could just provide a sufficiently well-crafted, plausible rationalization for turning away from that path, for keeping a preserve for the arbitrary in the human mind — they would abort the Enlightenment.
Kant gave it to them, and they did precisely that.
It was Kant who “proved” the limits of reason, thereby stopping the fulfillment of the Enlightenment and saving religion. It was Kant who specifically prevented men from discovering that reason and morality were not discontinuous. That error right there, an error he deliberately sought to entrench, was all he was after.
That is the Kantian Fallacy. What are its fruits, then? What did this Fallacy do to Western thought? It led to everything described in this article, from Richard Rorty and his ilk, to your suggestion, straight ouf of the Dark Ages who feared rational inquiry lest it anger supernatural forces arrayed against us, that we should not question the origins of laws and sausages. It is what shaped our modern age and made it what it is.
If one accepts Kant’s concept of “limited reason”, there are only two ways to go.
The first outgrowth of the Kantain fallacy was the rejection of Kant’s noumenal realm (correctly) as arbitrary, made-up BS which does not exist. Unfortunately, given the Fallacy, this logically lead to the conclusion that since morality is not amenable to reason, then it is not real. Or it’s subjective. Or it’s mere social convention. In all cases, it is arbitrary. This is the line of thinking that we now know as the Left, that includes Richard Rorty among its products. Beholden to its Kantian heritage, this is the movement that no longer values reason, but instead prattles on about “critical thinking”.
Of course, the problem with this line of thinking, is that men need to think about the future. They need to determine which of all the alternatives facing them, are the right ones. They need to look at what is, in order to know what ought to be. Ironically, it is reason that tells us that we need morality, but people stuck in Kant’ box operate on the unquestioned assumption that “critical thinking” is reason… so they conclude, if reason can’t do the job of giving us the “big picture” and tell us what we ought to do, then we need something else in addition to it.
Well, the only “something else” to reason, as Kant knew, is faith — i.e. arbitrary, made-up things. This second branch of post-Kantian thought is the one he wished to see — one that admits into the mind things shich “critical thinking” rejects, but otherwise supplie no alternative guidance. This is the modern, neo-medievalist line of thinking championed by conservatism and the religious faiths. Sharing with the Left the unchallenged assumption that reason is just “critical thinking”, they simply accept that there are things outside its domain — such as morality — which are only accessible to faith.
Both of these “sides” are outgrowths of the same common error — the Kantian Fallacy, the idea that reason is limited, and cannot speak to morality.
It is Kant who reserved the realm of morality for primitive, magical “thinking”, giving rise to the commonly observed paradox between man’s advanced technology versus his primitive (altruist) morality. It is Kant who is ultimately responsible for the unprecedented modern spectacle of advanced technology being used for primitive ends. He is the one who set us upon the path which in all likelihood will culminate with the possession of nuclear weapons by primitive men of faith whose culture hasn’t changed in 1400 years.
When that happens, will you still be sitting here and telling us, Mr. Kimball, not to let in the light of reason to shine upon *their* magical thinking? Will you still be suggesting that we should follow the advice of Otto von Bismarck, the political ancestor of Adolf Hitler?
Had you gone ahead and suggested that we are indeed a society of Kantians, that would have been the only profound thing you got right. For in what other kind of society could you expect to get away with writing as long and erudite an article as this, brazenly counselling us not to leave our eyes open for too long — as if this were never written:
“A “straw man” is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous construction as Kant’s system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man’s ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human consciousness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant’s robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason. — Ayn Rand, from Philosophy: Who Needs It “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” p64
“Dare to know” would be an appropriate slogan for us to resurrect, in the name of reason — by that I mean the genuine, unlimited reason, not Kant’s crippled substitute.
