Critiquing Kant

that science will study what we observe—the phenomenal world only. As a result, science cannot find “Truth.” All we can claim to know, according to Kant, “ha[s] no independent existence outside our thoughts” since all we observe are appearances or representations. What is left of our view of the noumenal or “real” world must, then, be left to faith and religion.

Now that we have spent some time looking at Kant’s ideas and how we have arrived at some of the prevailing ideas upon which postmodernism depends, we can also present a few objections to these arguments.

One of the strongest claims of Kant and postmodernism outlined above is the idea that each of us generates a subjective reality. Our senses only access a generated, phenomenal world. In other words, awareness must be unmediated in orderto be awareness of the real and the true. We might wonder, in response, why our organs of consciousness would be obstacles to the awareness of reality?

The second key argument, which did not originate from Kant, affirmed that universality (the idea of ultimate facts) and necessity (in logic, ideas can only be true or false, such as Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle) are not found in reality. Another name given to this problem was the problem of induction (the inference of a general law from particularinstances), which was argued extensively by Scottish philosopher David Hume. The problem was that in creating concepts, such as the nature of a copper atom, we cannot hope to test the behavior of all the copper atoms in the universe in order to be sure we have found the “universal” characteristics of copper. Instead, we find a convergence

by testing a certain number and infer that it will hold for the unobserved copper out there. Thus, universality is only a creation of the human mind. The question is, can we induce certain knowledge? Hume’s essential argument is that the (limited) empirical cannot justify a universal.

These arguments would be unearthed centuries later as a pillar of postmodernism. While we can read in Kant a defense of consistency and principles, and we can certainly point to pre-modernists thinkers who denied all knowledge or had subordinated reason to faith, Kant at least places reason on a certain (phenomenal—of this world)) plane where it may operate on the basis of consistency only. Postmodernists took these arguments to the next step: consistency cannot claim any truth; it is just rules of a game. But what game are we playing? This leaves open a great deal of cultures, politics, and ways of life that must go uncriticized as right or wrong, as long as they are “consistent.”

Kant is different and is considered such an important philosopher due to the far-reaching conclusions of his ideas. A great many “skeptics” in intellectual history have raised important questions about the certainty and dependability of our senses. We might see a mirage—the fact of illusions or distortions might question if what we are seeing is true. But these types of problems do not question the basis of knowledge. Kant’s arguments do. They put reason and reality on separate planes—never to cross. Kant has been the greatest threat to what realists call the “correspondence” theory of truth, where sense data correspond to what is real. Instead, Kant argued for what became known as the “coherence” theory of truth, where truth is internal consistency only. This leaves open what package of

truths, or what logic, however internally consistent, one adheres to.

Following his death in the early 19th century, Kant’s work led to a century of dominance of German philosophy. Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel—all major 19th century German philosophers—would be cited by 20th century French philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida, and American philosopher Rorty, but German philosophy would also continue in the influential work of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Two main post-Kantian branches emerged in the 19th century have been summarized below:

In the next chapter, we will see how reason continued its post-Kantian collapse, namely from the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was particularly inspired by Hegel.