Rand's notions of Kant and Hume


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Rand #1==> "I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's evil, because it's selfish." You got it from Kant."

Rand #2===> Man's goals, actions, choices and values—according to Kant—are to be determined irrationally, i.e., by faith.

GHS==> Kant said none of these things.

Me:

1. Rand is not specifying whether Kant said each of these things, but that they -come- from Kant. Either directly because whether he said it, it is implicit or an inference from his position. Or indirectly because his ideas led to a further wave of irrationalism or mysticism. When you read Rand, you realize that she often makes a statement that Y comes from X. But it's often across a long chain.

Example: Many good things in Western Civilization "come from Aristotle". But it doesn't mean he developed them all personally.

It would be a particularly uncharitable reading of Rand to assume she meant it that way.

2. With regard to my point about Rand and Peikoff understanding the history of philosophy in broad essentials, if Rand meant K himself was 'evil' as opposed to his ideas having an evil influence, that would be a failure of understanding. But not about philosophy, about psychology (the nature and scope of possible honest error). It would also be a failure by R to integrate the fact that Kant was a classical liberal.

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Rand #1==> "I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's evil, because it's selfish." You got it from Kant."

Rand #2===> Man's goals, actions, choices and values—according to Kant—are to be determined irrationally, i.e., by faith.

GHS==> Kant said none of these things.

Me:

1. Rand is not specifying whether Kant said each of these things, but that they -come- from Kant. Either directly because whether he said it, it is implicit or an inference from his position. Or indirectly because his ideas led to a further wave of irrationalism or mysticism. When you read Rand, you realize that she often makes a statement that Y comes from X. But it's often across a long chain.

Example: Many good things in Western Civilization "come from Aristotle". But it doesn't mean he developed them all personally.

It would be a particularly uncharitable reading of Rand to assume she meant it that way.

2. With regard to my point about Rand and Peikoff understanding the history of philosophy in broad essentials, if Rand meant K himself was 'evil' as opposed to his ideas having an evil influence, that would be a failure of understanding. But not about philosophy, about psychology (the nature and scope of possible honest error). It would also be a failure by R to integrate the fact that Kant was a classical liberal.

When Rand says "according to Kant," it is not uncharitable to assume that she meant what she said.

There are many instances where Rand directly attributes the above views explicitly to Kant. I don't want to waste time digging a lot of them out, but here are a couple examples:

"In modern history, the philosophy of Kant is a systematic rationalization of every major psychological vice." (AR Letter, vol. 3, no. 10)

It would be odd indeed to refer to a systematic rationalization if one is only referring to the (supposed) logical implications of Kant's ideas, or to their implicit underpinnings, or to their effects.

"Look at the writings of Kant, Dewey, Marcuse and their followers to see pure hatred—hatred of reason and of everything it implies: of intelligence, of ability, of achievement, of success, of self—confidence, of self-esteem, of every bright, happy, benevolent aspect of man." - The Comprachicos

Rand doesn't say "implicit" in the writings of Kant, nor does she say that a hatred of reason is somehow entailed by his ideas; no, she says "in the writings of Kant." So where in the writings of Kant do we find a "pure hatred of reason"?

There are many, many examples like this.

As OL readers know, I am disposed to give Rand sympathetic readings whenever possible. But this just isn't possible with most of her statements about Kant. Many are flat wrong or outrageously unfair, or both.

In the history of philosophy, Kant was Rand's idee fixe. I don't know how she came to have this obsession with Kant, but she treats him rather like she treats her highly stylized archetypes of Attila and the Witch Doctor in "For the New Intellectual" -- almost as if it didn't matter to her whether or not her representations of the real Kant were accurate.

Kant, for Rand, was more of an abstract noun than a concrete individual.

Ghs

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Kant, for Rand, was more of an abstract noun than a concrete individual.

Kant was for Rand the anti-Galt, like God needed the Devil as an anti-God. She needed a powerful and influential figure to represent Evil. None of the bad guys in her novel would do, as she made them deliberately weak and powerless, they're just local nobodies. Therefore she made Kant to her personal Devil, a mythological figure who was able to destroy philosophy even centuries later, being the origin of nazism, communism, mysticism and every other bad ism. She probably believed in her own fiction, just as she seemed to believe that Frank O'Connor was John Galt on strike. So she created her own version of the battle between God and the Devil, the battle between Rand and Kant.

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Paulsen's overview I think supports several of Rand's descriptions -- not "It's evil, because it's selfish...."

One more comment about this: Rand's interpretation conflicts with what Peikoff wrote in Chapter 4 of The Ominous Parallels, viz: "This does not mean that self-love in and by itself is evil, according to Kant; it is merely amoral."

("Nonmoral" would probably have been a better choice of words, but this is still an accurate characterization.)

Ghs

Just to be clear, I wonder if you're missing the "not" in the quote from me -- I wasn't saying that the brief passage from Paulsen supported that particular statement of Rand's. (I have no idea if anything else in Paulsen's book might have supported it.)

Ellen

Yes, I somehow skipped over the "not" when reading your remarks.

Ghs

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DF,

I agree about the role of Kant for Rand as a Satan figure, the colossal antithesis antagonist to her own philosophy. I've thought for years and years, since well before I moved East, that she'd magnified Kant to this polar-opposite role.

Nonetheless, she took awhile working up a full head of steam on the subject. Am I right that there's no mention of Kant at all (or of any other philosopher by name except Aristotle) in Atlas Shrugged?

Was the essay "For the New Intellectual" chronologically the first place where she got going in writing on Kant? (The question's addressed to anyone who can verify the answer, not just to you. I think you have the CD, however, and might be able to locate her first in-print mention of Kant.)

Ellen

Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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It's likely been a longer while since I read those works than it's been since you read them. My recollection of the original sources is very dim. However, what I think is the case (mostly from secondary sources) about Kant's attempt "to establish ethics on a rational foundation" is that the "rational foundation" in question is the "pure reason" of the noumenal world, where he locates the categorical imperative and free-will. If so, doesn't this amount to an act of faith, since we can't directly know the noumenal world?

Kant's categorical imperative is related to the noumenal world only via the presupposition of free will, which Kant ultimately viewed as an unknowable mystery. But this doesn't have anything to do with "faith" per se.

Ghs

I don't understand the last sentence. If free will is "an unknowable mystery" (located in the noumenal world, according to Kant, yes?), then how would this mystery be accessed except by "faith"? Maybe you're using "faith" more narrowly than I think Rand was using it -- as the alternate blanket category to rational cognition.

Ellen

PS: Glad to have the "not" cleared up. :)

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Nonetheless, she took awhile working up a full head of steam on the subject. Am I right that there's no mention of Kant at all (or of any other philosopher by name except Aristotle) in Atlas Shrugged?

I'm fairly sure Kant is not mentioned in AS. She does mention Plato (in the scene were Dagny talks with Dr. Akston in the valley), I can't remember any other real philosophers in the book (apart from Aristotle).

Was the essay "For the New Intellectual" chronologically the first place where she got going in writing on Kant? (The question's addressed to anyone who can verify the answer, not just to you. I think you have the CD, however, and might be able to locate her first in-print mention of Kant.)

I don't have such a CD, but I guess you're right, as far as official publications are concerned.

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Kant's categorical imperative is related to the noumenal world only via the presupposition of free will, which Kant ultimately viewed as an unknowable mystery. But this doesn't have anything to do with "faith" per se.

Ghs

I don't understand the last sentence. If free will is "an unknowable mystery" (located in the noumenal world, according to Kant, yes?), then how would this mystery be accessed except by "faith"? Maybe you're using "faith" more narrowly than I think Rand was using it -- as the alternate blanket category to rational cognition.

Ellen

PS: Glad to have the "not" cleared up. :)

My knowledge of Kant is passable, but I am by no means an authority on his philosophy. Moreover, many things I say about Kant are memories based on reading Kant many years ago.

My recollection is that Kant regarded free will as a necessary presupposition of moral judgments and actions. And since he regarded the role of moral judgments in human life as indisputable -- i.e., as something that cannot be dismissed as illusory. pointless, or without effect -- he concluded that free will must operate in the sphere of morality, even if we cannot reconcile it with the deterministic causation of the phenomenal (i.e., empirical) realm.

Thus Kant, as I recall, said that we can have moral certainty about freedom of the will. It may be that this moral certainty involves "faith" to some extent -- I just don't know for sure -- but that's not what I was thinking of when I said, in an unfortunately vague manner, "But this doesn't have anything to do with "faith" per se." Rather, I was thinking of the original point about ethics and values. These, for Kant, fall within the domain of reason, not faith. Kant is very clear about this.

Ghs

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I don't have such a CD [...].

How do you find quotes from the novels so quickly then? You're often super-fast in providing a quote of some particular scene or issue which has been mentioned from the novels. Do you have a sort of "photographic" memory of where to find the quotes? Just curious, this question being really off the track of the subject.

Ellen

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Ellen,

There is no mention of Kant in AS.

The earliest mention of Kant by Rand that I can find on the CD-ROM appears in a letter to John Hospers (April 17, 1960).

This letter responds to a letter that Hospers wrote after listening to one of Rand's radio broadcasts: "I was pleased that you heard my last radio broadcast, but I am puzzled by your comments on it." Later, Rand says:

"I did not caricature Kant. Nobody can do that.'

Thus Rand obviously mentioned Kant in her radio broadcast.

Ghs

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The earliest mention of Kant by Rand that I can find on the CD-ROM appears in a letter to John Hospers (April 17, 1960).

Does the CD-ROM include all the material from the Letters volume?

What I'm specifically wondering is if there's no mention of Kant in Rand's letters to Isabel Paterson.

Thanks for the info.

Ellen

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Ellen,

There is no mention of Kant in AS.

The earliest mention of Kant by Rand that I can find on the CD-ROM appears in a letter to John Hospers (April 17, 1960).

This letter responds to a letter that Hospers wrote after listening to one of Rand's radio broadcasts: "I was pleased that you heard my last radio broadcast, but I am puzzled by your comments on it." Later, Rand says:

"I did not caricature Kant. Nobody can do that.'

Thus Rand obviously mentioned Kant in her radio broadcast.

Ghs

Ellen,

In the same letter to Hospers mentioned above, Rand writes:

"If you care to discuss [logical positivism], we would have to start with a discussion of Kant—since logical positivism is his epistemological descendant. I am sure you gathered from my speech at Brooklyn College that it is Kant that I am challenging, at his very root and base. I do not believe that modern philosophy can be discussed without reaching an understanding on Kant."

I'm a little confused by Rand's reference to her speech at Brooklyn College. Is this the "radio broadcast" on which Hospers was commenting?

Btw, it is a travesty that John's letters to Rand were not included in Letters of Ayn Rand. Among other things, the specifics of his allegation that Rand caricatured Kant would have made for very interesting reading.

A note of explanation for those who may not have read the Letters: John Hospers agreed to provide copies to the editor, Michael Berliner, but John was not pleased (to say the least) that his side of the discussion would be excluded. John therefore insisted, as a condition of providing copies, that a note be included in the book. In reads, in part:

"You rightly have a great interest in reproducing everything that Ayn said; and you have no particular interest in whatever it was that I said, either to initiate a discussion or to respond to her. The result is that my thoughts just don't appear in these pages—not that you wanted them to, of course. But sometimes I thought that Ayn had not correctly apprehended a point I had made, and her summary of what I said sometimes did not reproduce what I really did say. Whether what I said was mistaken or not is beside the point here; I was often more interested in clarifying a point than in presenting it for acceptance. I am afraid the reader who read what Ayn wrote to me, and not what I wrote to her, would gather that I was a bloody fool. I daresay that in some ways I was, yet not so much as one would get the impression of from the letters. The trouble is, from her letters one gets only one side of a dialogue. And that isn't quite fair, is it?"

No, John, that isn't quite fair, but that's ARI. <_<

Ghs

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The earliest mention of Kant by Rand that I can find on the CD-ROM appears in a letter to John Hospers (April 17, 1960).

Does the CD-ROM include all the material from the Letters volume?

What I'm specifically wondering is if there's no mention of Kant in Rand's letters to Isabel Paterson.

Thanks for the info.

Ellen

The CD-ROM version of the Letters is the same as the published version. No hits come up for Kant in Rand's letters to Paterson.

Ghs

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Ellen,

There is no mention of Kant in AS.

The earliest mention of Kant by Rand that I can find on the CD-ROM appears in a letter to John Hospers (April 17, 1960).

This letter responds to a letter that Hospers wrote after listening to one of Rand's radio broadcasts: "I was pleased that you heard my last radio broadcast, but I am puzzled by your comments on it." Later, Rand says:

"I did not caricature Kant. Nobody can do that.'

Thus Rand obviously mentioned Kant in her radio broadcast.

Ghs

Ellen,

In the same letter to Hospers mentioned above, Rand writes:

"If you care to discuss [logical positivism], we would have to start with a discussion of Kant—since logical positivism is his epistemological descendant. I am sure you gathered from my speech at Brooklyn College that it is Kant that I am challenging, at his very root and base. I do not believe that modern philosophy can be discussed without reaching an understanding on Kant."

I'm a little confused by Rand's reference to her speech at Brooklyn College. Is this the "radio broadcast" on which Hospers was commenting?

According to Hospers' "Memoir: Conversations With Ayn Rand," published in the July and September 1990 issues of Liberty, "It was April 1960" when he met her at the talk at Brooklyn College. He says that the talk was "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World."

Maybe there was a radio broadcast in the same time frame which Hospers also heard.

Ellen

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Trying to piece together the dates re Hospers and Rand. The letter you cite, George, is dated April 17, 1960. Thus it can't have been long after Hospers attended a lecture at NBI, assuming that the chronology Hospers reports in his Liberty "Memoir" is correct.

Hospers starts the Liberty 1990 "Memoir" with how he met Rand. "It was April 1960," he said, as quoted previously (from pg. 23, July 1990 Liberty).

After describing that first meeting with her -- he and she went to lunch and talked for hours following her talk at Brooklyn College -- he continues:

We agreed to meet again at some unspecified future date. Meanwhile, I bought a copy of Atlas Shrugged and started to work through it. I would teach till mid-afternoon, work on my book [Human Conduct] most of the evening, and read Atlas as long as I could before retiring in the wee hours. I was so excited by it that only a great resolve to go against my inclinations, and an unwillingness to be sleepy that next day, kept me from reading it straight through.

About two weeks went by. I had finished Atlas (comments on it below). I received in the mail an invitation to attend one of the NBI lectures, the one in a series of 20 on aesthetics. I accepted gladly.

It was probably the wrong lecture for me to begin with. Had I been asked to attend, for example, the economics lecture, I would have found it a revelation. Economics was virgin territory for me then. But aesthetics was the area where I had done most of my work, including my doctoral dissertation (later published as a book entitled Meaning and Truth in the Arts). I found a lot to criticize in the lecture, even though I found myself in general agreement with principal points in Rand's aesthetic.

[He discusses some details.]

After the lecture, I was invited to Ayn's apartment. Nathan and Barbara were there for awhile, but when they left Ayn noticed my copy of Atlas. [....]

[....]

It was after 2 a.m. [when he left], and we agreed to meet again at her apartment two weeks later.

He doesn't mention anything about hearing a radio broadcast during this period. (Going from memory, I don't think he mentions his hearing any radio broadcast of hers -- I'd have to re-read the whole thing to be sure. At any rate, if it was a radio broadcast he wrote to her about in early April 1960, it would have had to have been one he heard soon after he met her.)

Ellen

Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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How do you find quotes from the novels so quickly then? You're often super-fast in providing a quote of some particular scene or issue which has been mentioned from the novels. Do you have a sort of "photographic" memory of where to find the quotes? Just curious, this question being really off the track of the subject.

I've in general no photographic memory (I've for example always had problems with learning single words in a foreign language, and I'm not good at mental arithmetic) although I can sometimes remember complete sentences I've read long ago. I once came upon a children's book I'd read when I was about 6 years old and I checked some passages I remembered, my memory turned out to be practically word perfect. And it helps of course if you've read a book many times... Further it's also a question of intelligent searching. For example, I recalled vaguely that Plato was mentioned in AS. The places to look for would be were some general discourse about philosophy is given. An obvious example is the infamous speech, but I remembered that there mostly if not exclusively the term "your teachers" was used. But I remembered also the discussions in the valley with Dr. Akston, so I looked there, and lo and behold: Plato came up...

Fortunately I don't remember everything I read, that enables me to enjoy more than once many books I have (it happens often that I run out of new books, so I have to fall back on my existing stock, my problem is that I read too fast), although it becomes more difficult with multiple readings in the course of time. I realize that I must have read many of my books more than once, sometimes up to a dozen times and in some cases even more.

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DF, so it's pretty much a combination of logical surmise and general memory of the course of the novels that lets you find things so quickly. I'd thought you had the CD-ROM. (Interesting the way different people remember things, and what they remember. I've often, for instance, noticed differences between what and how Larry remembers and what and how I remember. But...not to digress further....)

Ellen

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In order to avoid making a complete fool of myself on this thread, I've been rereading a few things by and about Kant. I found the following summary of Kant's categorical imperative to be especially enlightening.

G.J. Warnock, "Kant," in A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. D.J. O'Connor (Free Press, 1964), p. 310.

...Kant's problem was that of seeking to exhibit moral behavior and rational behavior as being one and the same.

It might well be held that what a rational being is committed to as such is the avoidance of inconsistency. No statement, no theory, no argument, no practical policy can be rationally acceptable if it is inconsistent. So it is not surprising that Kant's various formulations of the supreme principle of morality [i.e., the categorical imperative] all amount to a demand for consistency in practice and principles. Those principles of conduct which I propose for myself can be rationally accepted only if I can, first, without inconsistency, also apply them in assessing the conduct of others, and, second, if they are such that they could be adopted without inconsistency by any (and therefore by all) such beings as I am. And this is exactly what is involved in the notion of the "kingdom of ends." Those principles of conduct can be rationally -- that is, consistently -- adopted which are such that every member of the community of rational beings could apply them in his own practice and employ them also in judging the practice of all the rest; such principles alone can "enter into a possible universal legislation" and thus be accepted by all without conflict arising.

This interpretation is a far cry, to say the least, from Rand's (and Peikoff's) take on Kant's categorical imperative.

Ghs

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Here's a relevant passage from Passion. I was looking to see if Barbara gave the date of the talk at Brooklyn College where Hospers and Rand met. No date given. However...

pp. 323-24, The Passion of Ayn Rand

[The unbracketed ellipsis is in the original. The quotes from AR I assume are from Barbara's interviews of Ayn in preparation for the biographical essay in Who Is Ayn Rand?.]

It was in writing the introductory essay to For the New Intellectual that Ayn discovered a fact which she found startling: that "nonfiction is my natural way of functioning. I enjoy the actual writing itself. I have difficulties and organizational problems, but it's an enormous pleasure to me even when it's difficult." She began speaking of writing an ambitious, full-length book on epistemology, on the Objectivist theory of knowledge, presenting her view of the nature, source and validation of concepts, and she began making personal notes on what she envisioned as a project which would take several years. In her notes, she stated:

"Aristotle established the right metaphysics by establishing the law of identity--which was all that was necessary (plus the identification of the fact that only concretes exist). But he destroyed his metaphysics by his cosmology--by the whole nonsense of the 'moving spheres,' 'the immovable mover,' teleology, etc.

"The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology--the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge. It is the base of all other sciences and the one necessary for man because man is a being of volitional consciousness--a being who has to discover, not only the content of his knowledge, but also the means by which he is to acquire knowledge....All the fantastic irrationalities of philosophical metaphysics have been the result of epistemological errors, fallacies, or corruptions."

While writing Atlas Shrugged, she had thought that the philosophical material contained in Galt's speech "was all a rational man needed to guide him." She had believed that another philosopher could one day write a fully detailed nonfiction presentation of Objectivism from that material. "The thought of doing it myself was paralyzing to me," she said. "I had no interest in writing for people of lesser intelligence, there would be nothing in it for me. But as I began watching the state of the culture and reading essays on modern philosophy, I began to see that what I took as almost self-evident was not that at all. I began to see that the kind of issues not explicitly covered in Atlas, such as my theory of universals, were much more enormous departures from today's thinking than I had imagined. The magnitude of what needs to be done has become real to me--and I've become interested in it. I've become an intellectual detective, cutting through the nonsense of modern philosophy to find the basic error. I've begun to see that in writing on epistemology, I will be engaged in a crusade for reason, my top value, and that does inspire me."

A contributing influence in Ayn's decision to write nonfiction, she said, was her discussions of philosophy with John Hospers [...].

Ellen

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In response to the story recounted by Neil, I don't believe for one minute that Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was in Ayn Rand's personal library.

Bob Mayhew would surely have wanted to include Rand's reactions to Kant in his compilation of marginalia.

And weren't some of Rand's books auctioned off some years ago? No Kant volumes were included in the listings that I saw.

As for John Hospers' recollections of Rand's speech on "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," didn't she take that speech on the lecture circuit for a while, giving it on multiple occasions in 1960 and 1961? It could be that she gave it at Brooklyn College and Hospers later remembered a broadcast from a different occasion (such as the presentation at Purdue University that is now for sale at the Ayn Rand Bookstore).

Robert Campbell

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Holy crap! I'm not a Rand scholar by any means but this is one message I got from her. Isn't it ironic that this author is saying it about Kant whom Rand seemed to despise?

...Kant's problem was that of seeking to exhibit moral behavior and rational behavior as being one and the same.
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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy==> "A large part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind’s access only to the empirical realm of space and time."

If you take Peikoff's wonderful History of Philosophy courses (most of you haven't), this is exactly the point he lays out in, if I recall, well over an hour...and thus in greater detail than you will find by combing the Q&A's.

Taking these courses -- two series of twelve lecture courses, one course on Ancient Philosophy, one on Modern Philosophy -- lets you see the Objectivist view of the history of ideas in full context. It also allows qualification of too sweeping statements (such as presenting the idea that a thinker's philosophy may have changed across his life - which is point P sometimes doesn't have time to make outside of the great length of these courses.) It is sometimes stated too tersely even by R and P "standing on one leg" in short answer sessions: As I often point out, to give someone a charitable reading, you look for their most careful and detailed formulations -- where they deal with something in the most thoughtful or extended manner.

(I really wish P had transcribed those goddamn lectures for sale! It would have helped a lot of people get past a lot of confusion. And really understand the history of philosophy better. It can be tricky.)

Kant believed there were two worlds, the *noumenal* world - which is real reality --- and the *phenomenal* world, the world 'as processed' by out filters, our categories...which is the only world we know. Reason is thus funamentally severed from reality, in the sense of being able to know it, to have fundamental certainty.

That's why the conclusion George gets from reading the ethics ==> "I have read all three of Kant's major works on ethics: Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and the Fundamental Principles (or Foundations or Groundwork) of the Metaphysics of Morals. The whole point of these works is to establish ethics on a rational foundation" ---- is off base.

Reason has already been cut off at the knees in the Critique of Pure Reason [which is what the IEP is referring to above]. Don't be fooled by K's use of the word 'reason' or a 'rational foundation' with regard to ethics or anything else. What he means by 'reason', if you grasp what he has said in CPR, is not at all what an Oist or an Aristotelian would mean.

Edited by Philip Coates
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Kant believed there were two worlds, the *noumenal* world - which is real reality --- and the *phenomenal* world, the world 'as processed' by out filters, our categories...which is the only world we know. Reason is thus funamentally severed from reality, in the sense of being able to know it, to have fundamental certainty.

I'm not a philosopher and tend to avoid these detailed arcane discussions, but how could Kant even know the "noumenal" world exists? Nature designed our minds and bodies so we don't bump into too many things and can live long enough to reproduce. Humans don't need Kant; we need science which shares with Objectivism the epistemology and metaphysics. In ethics, integrity, which is part and parcel with rational self interest which is also the connection--rational--between epistemology and ethics all subsumed to individualism because group think is no think.

--Brant

edit: after reading George's following posts I should state, "Kant as represented by Phil."

Edited by Brant Gaede
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Holy crap! I'm not a Rand scholar by any means but this is one message I got from her. Isn't it ironic that this author is saying it about Kant whom Rand seemed to despise?

...Kant's problem was that of seeking to exhibit moral behavior and rational behavior as being one and the same.

Please make proper use of the quote feature so we can click on it. In this case I found it in Ghs's post 44.

--Brant

Edited by Brant Gaede
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