Immanuel Kant

And what of values? Counter-enlightenment thinkers, like 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, were concerned about the erosion of traditional values in selfsacrifice, community spirit, and duty. Science, with its idea of allowing individuals to generate knowledge, naturally led to political individualism, where the happiness of an individual is his moral right to pursue. What would happen to religious concepts such as predestination when education, science, and technology allow any person to set their own goals and create their own destiny? It is a far cry from the idea of “for King and country.” To pre-modernists past and present, the Enlightenment movement and science in general was promoting amoral, godless, arrogant, pitiless, and spiritless human life.

With that context in mind, let us look more closely at the most important Counter-Enlightenment thinker: Immanuel Kant. Recall that pro-reason intellectuals are looking to gain ground in the culture by defending realist accounts of perception, concepts, and logic. Kant, more than any other, buttressed pre-modernist ideas against the Enlightenment, laid the groundwork for continued pre-modernist thought in the form of irrationalism and idealist metaphysics in modern times, and provided the epistemological backdoor for postmodernist thought.

Kant is conventionally considered a defender of reason: he favored science, promoted consistency in ethics, and set out a regulative framework for reason and principles to guide thinking. However, Kant also (in)famously disconnected reason from reality, which decidedly places him as against realist epistemology. Kant argued that we can never

know reality “as it is.” Since our senses or instruments necessarily have a nature, each sense distorts reality into the type of information that sense produces. Human eyes “see” a reality that is different from what a cat sees, for example. One can understand how this idea leads to the perspectivedominant paradigm paramount in postmodernism, where ultimate truth or “Truth” is impossible due to everything being a perspective, an opinion. One can trace the origins of the postmodern idea of “my truth” to Kant, since promoting one perspective over another is merely a power claim.

Kant set up metaphysics into two separate parts, which is why he is typically categorized as an idealist. He termed true, “real” reality the noumenal world (a world of ideals), and what our senses (and therefore science) are limited to he called the phenomenal world (i.e. that which is perceptible by the senses or through immediate experience). Religion, then, not reason, was the governor of the nature of the noumenal world. Reason was powerless there, severely limiting its scope to the phenomenal perceivable world, which disabled its objectivity. This idea troubled rationalists and empiricists alike, who both agreed on the importance of human reason and its need to be connected to reality to be objective so it may render Truth.

Traditionally, there were two existing arguments made to suggest our senses produce only internal or personal accounts of reality, rather than objective accounts. The first was to argue that what we reason about is only the internal sense data we receive, not the object itself. In other words, sense-perception is like an unavoidable mirage or simulation—it gets in the way of our connection to reality and does not enable us to access reality directly. The second traditional argument against the possibility of an objective

reality was based on the variety of individual accounts of objects due to peculiarities with individuals’ sense-perception. If one person views an object as red and another as pink, what is the “real” color? Perception then is like a subjective “taste,” and we are stuck reasoning about those subjective accounts rather than the object itself.

Kant pooled these traditional critiques into his own analysis, but also absorbed the views of the prevailing rationalist and empiricist realists. Realists argue that knowledge must be objective to be called knowledge and that reality has a nature and exists independent of human consciousness. Kant, in response, proposed a dilemma: there are only two possibilities to connect our concepts to the real objects they mean to represent, either 1) “the object alone must make the representation possible,” or 2) the reverse, where representation alone makes the object.

In the first scenario, the observer of the object has nothing to do with the process’ reality; the object merely imprints itself into our minds. The consequence of this view would mean that the equipment of the senses are receivers only—including the brain. Traditionally, this view is called naïve realism, which assumes observers are “identity-less” or without a nature. Instead, Kant argued the mind has a nature, and it must shape the knower’s awareness. Therefore, Kant embraced the second option, representation alone makes the object, effectively abandoning objectivity for subjectivity.

It also meant that ideas in logic, like necessity and universality, are not features of reality, but features we have imposed on our sense of reality. Logic is a social construct used to make reality communicable to others. This permits science to operate based on objective standards if we accept