Posted on 11/18/2021 8:31:05 AM PST by Mr.Unique
Kant set us on the path to today’s “woke” ideas by arguing that perceptions are more powerful than reality
Was Immanuel Kant the first “woke” philosopher?
Recently, a column by Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post presented an argument that the 18th-century German philosopher is the ultimate source of critical race theory and the contemporary racial politics that goes along with it. As Thiessen writes,
Critical race theory, [Princeton historian Allen] Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to—and rejection of—the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.But the critique of reason ended up justifying “ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations—things like race, nationality, class,” he says. Critical theory thus helped spawn totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century such as Marxism and Nazism, which taught that all human relationships are relationships of power between an oppressor class and an oppressed class. For the Marxists, the bourgeoisie were the oppressors. For the Nazis, the Jews were the oppressors. And today, in 21st century America, critical race theory teaches that white are the oppressors.
This is largely correct, but for the most part it is explained poorly, giving a lot of big conclusions without spelling out the basis for them. So, this claim came in for a lot of criticism—naturally from all the people who got their degrees in law and, more recently, epidemiology from Twitter University and who, with surprising speed for such an unwieldy tome, have now read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.”
(Excerpt) Read more at discoursemagazine.com ...
I Kant say what I think.........................
Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ‘ya ‘bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, after half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
And Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And René Descartes was a drunken fart: ‘I drink, therefore I am.’
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9SqQNgDrgg
Sartre was smartre.
I think Kant understood that there is an underlying reality that exists independent of human perception. The woke seem to have the puerile notion that reality is whatever they perceive or feel it to be.
Well, this certainly explains food court riots, Chuck E Cheese fist fights and Waffle House 3 AM brawls.
Critical: applying reason to understand … this is NOT how the Woke operate.
Critical: applying emotions to tear apart … this is what the Woke are and do.
No need to insult Kant needlessly by comparing him to the turds of Marxist lawfare and Marxist racism,
That’s what I came here for.
Yes, if he believed perceptions are more powerful than realities then, yes, he was the first Wokester and probably did a lot of damage in his day.
I dunno...I’m swinging between Foucault and Santayana......................
You’re only Jung once...................
No, it was Plato. Read the Greek text of The Symposium carefully, and see what you think.
An argument can be made that Descartes and Hume and Kant were logical extensions of the Enlightenment and not some abberation. Libertarians are OK with the latest discoveries of science which tell us not only that we can't believe our lying eyes, but also that reality appears to be quite illogical what with things like electrons sometimes acting like particles and sometimes like waves. But they are not Okay with the latest developments in philosophy. Seems like cherry picking to me. The Enlightenment didn't just give us Locke. It also gave us Hobbes.
Christians were saying God must exist because nature seems too complex to be an accident. The atheists best retort at the time was to say that we don't know if what we see is real or if we're even real ourselves (it might be all a dream). They said it over & over & over to make it seem like the "settled science" of their day.
Descartes' simple saying blew them out of the water. "I think therefore I am" says we know we exist by the fact that we even have thoughts to begin with. All the Darwinists today who claim their part of the modern day enlightenment want you to forget that true enlightenment begins with opening up to the awareness of God and telling atheists to take the red pill.
Exactly. Its a similar misunderstanding that causes people to get relativism from the Theory of Relativity or weird new age philosophies from Quantum Field Theory.
Lol. Those are pretty good!
The emphasis on cultural Marxism began with the theories of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist. Gramsci observed that for Communism to succeed, it must first subvert the culture. Lenin and Trotsky succeeded by brute force and military conquest. The arrival of the Frankfurt School professors from Germany in the 1930s was a key point in the spread of cultural Marxism in this country. Gradually. the old school class based Marxists were replaced by the cultural Marxists, who looked at race and later, gender and sexual orientation as the basis for the dialectic, white, male, or straight thesis vs. nonwhite, female, or deviant antithesis. Since the end of World War II, this has been the modus operandi of the Left. In the last 75 years, these theories have spread from the academic world into almost every aspect of American life.
I’ve been listening to a lot of lectures on Kant and his followers. I first heard about his concept of thesis + antithesis = synthesis and realized it was worthless.
Unless both the thesis and antithesis are equally good, the synthesis will lead to a downward spiral with each new synthesis.
Maybe more importantly, this is just a way to generate a new thought without engaging in actual original thought. That is the key difference between the enlightenment and the counter enlightenment which Kant started. If you read the enlightenment philosophers, scientists and thinkers, they have a lot of original thought. They are creative, they are productive and seek ways to increase all sorts of productivity. The counter enlightenment merely wanted to return to a feudal state, with them in charge.
I’ve also been watching a lot of Jordan Peterson lectures on the Big 5 personality traits. Generally intelligent people are also creative and vice versa. However, the two traits are not bound together.
I have known a few people with dazzling intelligence who could not think an original thought to save their souls. And, I have known highly creative people who are as dumb as a bag of hammers.
I think with the German philosophers, we are dealing with high IQ people who have zero creativity. Just like the woke today, only because the philosophy has deteriorated so far, they are not only lacking in creativity, but today’s critical theory scholars are also stupid. . .I mean truly inferior intellects, not just average.
He tried to counter this extreme skepticism by claiming that a good God would not deceive us so, and then offering some proofs for God's existence. However no one thought much of his proofs and so we were left with his radical skepticism.
Descartes gave philosophy a new start. All of the amazing philosophy developed earlier was thrown in a dumpster called "Scholasticism" and denigrated as petty theologians trying to figure out how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
The Enlightenment was the beginning of the nihilism that was spawned by the radical skepticism of Descartes and Hume. Those who pretend that the Western World could or would have stopped at Locke and Adam Smith and Burke are just fooling themselves.
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