| | I certainly don't have too much common ground with Lindsay on this one, folks! ;-) I sort of wonder what planet he lives on. Linz writes:
We've had this discussion before, & I want to say again: to aver that Kant or any other thinker was "the most evil person in history" is nonsensical. It's ARI hysteria, born of slavish devotion to the foolish notion that Ayn Rand never said anything foolish. No-one criticizes AR (or ARI) more than I do, but in this case I think Rand was right. As far as I can tell, Kant attacks reality and reason more and better than anyone in human history. He quitely but deftly slams the validity/accuracy of the senses and the thinking processes wantonly, and with unequalled and diabolical cleverness.
Kant's heretofore winning technique, I guess, is he successfully gulls the rubes with his laughably anfractuous style and pointlessly sequipedalian verbiage. He knows full well no-one of intelligence or virtue is going to waste their precious existence on the thankless yoeman's task and singularly unrewarding "labor of love" of refuting his tedious, empty, worthless pretentions and fatuosities. The moral of this story is just write long, hard, boring, and tricky enough and you automatically win. People have lives to lead and so they contemptuosly quit the intellectual field of play and leave you the last man standing.
But make no mistake, people: Kant's cant cuts the ground out from under us and turns all of existence into quavering jello. We don't know and can't think anything. His impact is insideous, pernicious, almost infinitely subtle, and virtually secret -- but overwhelmingly powerful.
I wonder if Lindsay is aware that he's badly contradicting his own thesis at the October, 2003 Philadelphia SOLO conference? [It would help if this was available as a formal essay, by the way.] He reported there that the key to his own conversion to Objectivism was a highly annoying, irritating friend repeatedly insisting to him that "a chair is a chair" and that "A is A" etc. Kant is the plain simple truth "all-destroyer" and "A is not A" world champion.
We all know what she was driving at ... but to insist that Kant was *literally* the most evil man in history?!
I truly don't know what she was "driving at." I assume she meant what she said. If there's another point to grasp here I'd like to know what it is.
Kant strikes me as the foremost proponent of unreason and the most formidable destroyer of the human mind and confidence in the human thinking process ever. He is the great underminer and undercutter of Western Civilization. Kant does indeed lay the foundation for infinite mischief and stupendous evil. Silly twit goofball losers like Hitler and weakling random thug mediocrities like Stalin couldn't harm a fly without him.
Thinkers don't force anyone to agree with them. Thinkers whose ideas had bad consequences didn't usually (if ever) intend them; usually (if not always) they intended the reverse.
This all seems so naive, speculative, and false. Ultra-smart thinkers like Kant almost certainly know what they're doing. Rand said as much. They know what the consequences of their words are. They also know that virtually the totality of humanity is in the classic position of "knowing no evil, they fear none." Humanity is terribly vulnerable here and it's up to somebody of strong mind to refute Kant -- or he wins.
At some point, most of the commentary on this issue shows a considerable lack of understanding of the power and results of ideas. It badly underestimates the power of philosophy itself. No-one seems to grasp that, as Rand put it, "ideas matter."
And what else is true based on the above reading of the history of ideas, I wonder? Was Aristotle just some guy who wrote really boring, unhelpful, irrelevant stuff about metaphysics, epistemology, and logic which we all knew already? Did he actually accomplish very little -- just use reason (which is so lame -- and even cheating a bit) to point out the obvious? Was it all just various common sense notions which no-one ever doubted or was ignorant of in the first place? Was it all just ideas and concepts that can never be doubted or lost -- even with a hundred Kants in charge? I find the Linz Theory of Intellectualism passing strange...
There's so much evidence against the above viewpoint. I guess I'll just end by pointing out that without the pseudo-philosophers and anti-reasonists Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, etc. religion wouln't have even a broken leg to stand on. At minimum, 99% of their power would be vitiated and the events of 9/11 would be confined to unsellable science fiction.
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