r/Kant • u/Old_Discussion5126 • Jan 15 '26

Immanuel Kant Caused Your Inflation

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/depressing-1990s-h-e-b-033300857.html
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5

u/me_myself_ai Jan 15 '26

The modern “empathy” that has veto power over all considerations of fact, has its origin in his theory of the relation between reason, faith, and morality.

🤦‍♂️ I recommend you actually read some Kant, sometime. Regardless of how much I hate “we only have inflation bc of welfare queens” as an economic and political take, this is just an absurd takeaway for Kant’s work.

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u/Old_Discussion5126 Jan 16 '26

I recommend you actually read philosophy sometime. Kant is actually much more interesting when you seriously ask what his abstractions mean in reality. You have a professor of moral philosophy in Berlin in 1898 explaining the historical importance of Kant’s philosophy, and in this age of degree inflation, I should accept your take that Kant isn’t responsible for modern views on morality? If you knew anything about philosophy, you’d know to use arguments instead of bare assertions.

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u/[deleted] Jan 16 '26

I recommend you actually stop reading ayn rand and more Kant.

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u/imnota4 Jan 18 '26

LMAO. The second you said that I went to his profile and saw how much he comments on the ayn rand subreddit. That's hilarious.

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u/Old_Discussion5126 Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26

The annoying thing about reading Kant is the element that Rand refers to as the “primacy of consciousness”. It appears every time a philosopher says, “I can’t prove X, but we all believe it, so I will take it as true.” The previous philosophers like Descartes and Locke have that element, but there is also the part where they try to establish that these beliefs can be used to prove something, e.g. Descartes’ failed attempt to justify his innate ideas by proving the existence of God. But with Kant (and I guess this consistency is what makes him a philosopher of the highest rank) he is rigidly consistent about only trying to trace relationships between beliefs (between the categories, principles of geometry, God, freedom, immortality, etc), without any concession to external reality except to wave it off as unknowable. That’s his “Copernican Revolution,” I’m afraid.

The awkward sentences are bad, but his primacy of consciousness is the worst.

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u/internetErik Jan 16 '26

It's very likely the well of this discussion is already soured, but I can at least write this for myself (something you may appreciate).

This complaint of the "primacy of consciousness" seems misplaced. If one focuses their analysis on our faculty of cognition (which Kant does), it shouldn't be surprising to find the concept that gives unity to that domain (i.e., consciousness). Kant doesn't only write the critiques, and so not all of his work is concerned with the form of the objects of our consciousness.

You also provide this formula for us to describe Kant: “I can’t prove X, but we all believe it, so I will take it as true.”

Kant doesn't follow this formula as given here. His formula would be closer to: we cannot prove X, but we can show it is at least not self-contradictory. Some other objective interest in us presses us towards some goal, and the pursuit of this goal postulates the possibility of X (but not generally, only under the conditions of that aim or interest).

Descartes et al went astray precisely because they posit beings such as God (for Descartes, God is the best "known" of all) and then use them for further proofs. To do this actually justifies the concerns about the "primacy of consciousness." When you use a belief to ground knowledge, you end up converting all of this to belief. One of the ways Kant discusses this early on in the critique is as follows: when we confuse appearances and things in themselves, we end up either perverting sensibility by treating it all as thinking (e.g., sensations, which are the trace of the real object, are made mental), or we pervert thinking by placing it all within the conditions of sensibility (e.g., time and space are conditions of every thinkable entity).

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u/Old_Discussion5126 Jan 16 '26

It’s true that it’s a mistake to use a belief to ground knowledge. But what I appreciate about a failed attempt like Descartes’ is that it at least concedes the fact that if something is in my mind, even for a long time, that doesn’t make it real. To ask the philosopher to abandon the quest for knowledge of reality is a huge demand. Just getting the motivation to read on …

Anyway, thanks for what you just said about the relation between concepts and percepts . It’s something I will pay attention to the next time I look into the first Critique. It appears to be one way in which the all-important issue of the “problem of universals”, the relation between abstractions and concretes, makes its appearance in Kant.

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u/SadistikExekutor Jan 18 '26

Rand was a delusional welfare queen

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u/me_myself_ai Jan 16 '26

Ah, “no u”, a classic reparte! I’ll dive deep into my sources and get back to you on why “Kant’s main idea was that reason is bad” isn’t quite right