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 ...
Kant also understood, and coined the term, “Categorical Imperative” that there are things that are right, that must be done, even if you do not understand them or want to believe them.
The very opposite of Woke
“The Enlightenment didn’t just give us Locke. It also gave us Hobbes.”
And Marx and Machiavelli!
“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.”
This is absurd to the max!!
He uses reason (logic) to make the case that reason is no good.
This is stupidity of the highest order. It is also the foundation of the cancer of postmodernism which has taken over the universities and is now metastasizing in the rest of society.
The Enlightenment lasted for some time and included people who one might consider to be anti-Enlightenment. Thinkers who went deeply into Enlightenment thinking sometimes came out on the other side.
“Kant set us on the path to today’s “woke” ideas by arguing that perceptions are more powerful than reality”
That’s only true when one fails to perceive reality. And that usually comes at a high cost.
Sooner than later reality will get it’s revenge, and when it does it won’t be pretty.
I hear the footsteps of “the Gods of the copybook headings”.
“As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
Gramsci.
Wokeism is a form of nonsense. The focus should not be on how is it nonsense... which is pretty evident to every rational person... but on why people accept it.
Take Joy Behar, a “nice” liberal who spouts the nonsense. Why does she accept and support it? Because she gets a WHOPPING, H-U-G-E, BIG, PAY-CHECK to spout insanity. And she gets to go to swank liberal parties and pose with the cognoscenti and Illuminati, even though she has a grade 10 education. This means in her mind she’s made it! She’s fulfilled the American Dream (by hating the American Dream). And now the trick is to keep her masters happy! Which just means telling more lies, and spouting more nonsense till the cows come home. (Sigh) The media are pretty well all like this! There is no moral core because that will get in the way of their ambitions and money making.
Why do “normal” people accept and spout wokeism? Because, like Joy, they have no moral core (they’re ambitious) or they are just plain stupid. Academics usually accept it because they are ambitious and fearful... fearful of falling out with the rest of the woke faculty by not going with the trend. The worse thing you can do to a liberal is ostracize him. Cowardly/fearful and/or ambitious... viola... the Woke.
So forget Kant if you want to correct this problem.
I’m well aware of the development of ideological crapfest that is socialism.
Marxist lawfare was a reference to Critical Legal Theory. Marxist racism to Critical Race Theory.
But I think often people focus on Kant to too much of the exclusion of a cultural movement to reject the Gospel and replace it with man’s wisdom of which he was just one voice. This same emerging tradition did not lead directly to the American Revolution (our Founders actually rejected the idea of disposing of common law in favor of administrative laws) but it did lead to the French Revolution.
As for Marx himself, secure as a pampered kept man in a prosperous industrialized Britain, he stamped his name on a fetid ideology that he did not really create. Ultimately, despite his fairy tale about statelessness arguably designed to pull in the weak minded, it seems to me that Marxism was to Marx really about replacing the old elites and the industrialists with putterers like Marx, who created nothing but busied themselves with everything and assured themselves, as their ideological heirs still assure themselves, that they are fit to make it work.
With Cultural Marxism (Critical Theory) one of these corrupt souls finally realized Marx’s Revolution of the proletariat wasn’t going to happen — it wasn’t the first time BTW, as the Italian Fascist came to the same conclusion and broke with Marxism … but that’s another story — so the idea then became to use the already well advanced infiltration of various societies’ institutions to capture those institutions, especially education.
Here Kant could be easily made into a Useful Idiot after the fact, and I think he was. He was someone not disagreeable to far too many people in the West that could be used to lure them onboard … after all, it is really Marxism that is the perfect opiate of elites and masses alike for it gives a semblance of even salvationists zeal with none of that messy repentance guff.
They’d say he was for White Supremacy.
Of course the Woke describe everything from good grammar or math skills to having more trees in your yard as that too….
Did Kant figure out how to cross all the bridges in Koenigsburg once without having to cross any of them a second time?
Euler proved that it can’t be done.
Wake up! Understanding Enlightenment in Buddhism
Buddhism came before Kant
According to Wikipedia, he suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage while discussing the planet Uranus (six months after its discovery).
You can say that Kant or Hegel or whoever was wrong, but we still live in their world, because they saw some weaknesses or faults in earlier ways of thinking, and built on what earlier thinkers had left them, trying to bolster the weak spots or fill in the empty places -- and adding new mistakes of ther own for us to correct.
Tracinski thought Biden would be a moderate caretaker president, so maybe he isn’t the best judge of what to do with Kant.
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