Immanuel Kant and the moral law

Only in Russia…

You know Konigsberg is now Kaliningrad, right? Interesting bit of trivia. Kant’s lifelong home now has a significance for world affairs - due to its location in Europe, cut off from the rest of Russia - that it never had in his own lifetime.

 

Here it is, Kantianism in a nutshell. Flourishing like never before, in 2021. In the future, everyone will state upfront the transcendental intuitions which filter their specific experience of reality. The end of western civilization can be glimpsed in the lines below. Study them carefully. This is not a joke, this is very, very serious.

 

Good article on Kant as the grand architect of the modern mindset:


https://www.discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2021/11/18/was-kant-the-first-woke-philosopher/
Was Kant the First “Woke” Philosopher?

Kant set us on the path to today’s “woke” ideas by arguing that perceptions are more powerful than reality.

 

The author was just looking for clicks and apparently did not understand Kant’s first Critique or its historical context, the one time that he read it. The “dogmatic slumbers” from which Kant said he was awakened by Hume, were the rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz and his follower Christian Wolff. Go read Leibniz’s Monadology if you want a good sense of what Kant was referring to.

I am going to keep pointing this out until it sinks in: as anyone who has actually taken the time to read Kant knows, Kant’s entire philosophical project was based on the objectivity and universality of both natural and moral laws, and on the achievement and responsibility of the individual. Any theory of “group innocence” or “collective guilt” - which is what woke intersectionality amounts to - is completely antithetical to Kant’s whole philosophy and especially his ethics. Kant, and of course, Plato, are two of the best philosophers whose writings can be marshaled against Wokeism.

Furthermore, Wokeism is not even a philosophy; it is in fact a more sophisticated manifestation of the ancient sin of envy, and as such is a forthright, full-throated denial of all philosophy, logic, reason, right, and justice. It is simply sin repackaged, and to look for philosophical antecedents for it (of which there aren’t any) is to miss the point.