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Immanuel Kant vs. Israel

Reader comment on item: Immanuel Kant vs. Israel

Submitted by Morry Markovitz (United States), Aug 19, 2010 at 01:49

The irony is that it was the (moral) philosophy of Immanuel Kant which underlay Naziism and the holocaust, and now Kant's (political) philosophy is being offered as the basis for objecting to Israel as a solution to the holocaust -- which Kant's philosophy had led to.

The problem is Immanuel Kant, creator of the most vicious, anti-life, anti-human, anti-reason philosophy in human history. He was the man behind the "old paradigm," and he's the man behind the new one, too.

There is much confusion about and very little apparent ability to see to the root causes of the holocaust. "How could it happen" intellectuals STILL ask, perplexed, "in the land of the poets and philosophers?" Well, the answer is that it happened in Germany precisely BECAUSE Germany was the land of poets & philosophers -- and because their pre-eminent philosophy was Kant's ultra-vicious one.

The longer I live the more demoralized I get about the chances of finding real intelligence amongst our species anywhere outside the fields of hard science, mathematics, and engineering. I studied physics in a top-ranked college but took a philosophy course (in what was then a top-ranked philosophy dept) taught by one of Kant's multitude of professional admirers. I've read philosophy on my own, and am a self-educated (thank god!) economist Yes, world-renowned "professional" philosophers -- including the professor who taught the course I took -- laud the alleged genius of Kant. And yes, he actually was a genius -- at misleading our pea-brained intellectuals into thinking he, Kant, had said something that made sense. In fact Kant's genius consisted exclusively in his ability to fool our intellectual dumkopfs into accepting trivia and self-contradiction as profound insight.

I can't write a treatise here, but Kant's philosophy is thoroughly self-contradictory. It COMPLETELY invalidates itself. Kant is essentially a Platonist, who has attached a huge and superfluous inventory of Rube-Goldberg-style bells & whistles to Plato's arbitrary, unsupported imaginations and hypotheses about other worlds than our reality. (So yes, we have Kant the super-mystic touted as the champion of pure reason -- just what we might logically expect from those who consider contradictions to be proofs.) Kant is, however -- far more than Plato -- facile with obfuscatory language and "reasoning" that is so lengthy and tortured and involved that it appears to be perceptive and insightful to superficial mentalities, which unfortunately seem to be so common amongst our philosophical intellectuals. Kant is basically Plato using 5-syllable words where 1 syllable would do nicely, and his creative brilliance in applying this technique to philosophical discourse has duly impressed the impressionable philosophers of the modern era. But when you step back from Kant's whiz-bangs and eye-stunning color wheels and linguistic fireworks, mazes, and magic shows, you realize that the entire edifice, every bit of it, ultimately rests on unsupported assumptions and assertions, from which Kant then uses ultra-lengthy chains of "reasoning" to arrive at his conclusions -- after traveling so far from those assumptions that it's almost impossible to remember there is nothing but very thin ice to support them. They are in essence often the same conclusions reached by others who preceded Kant, via much simpler, more direct, and equally erroneous reasoning, but Kant's conclusions seem different and they seem more solidly proven after Kant's Wal-Mart-sized warehouse of flim-flammng language. He is a master at creating the patently FALSE impression that he has so exhaustively covered the subject, his conclusions must be correct and unassailable. Yes, the "sub plots" or digressing arguments, are often logical and self-consistent, but they do not rigorously connect with the assumptions at their roots or with the conclusions Kant asserts they imply. And it takes so long to arrive at his conclusions, and the path is such a maze of dizzying verbiage, that by the time you've navigated it you've lost sight of the fact that -- despite the multitude of pristinely logical digressions -- EVERY BIT OF IT still ultimately depends for its validity on the flimsy arbitrary foundations you've long forgotten. All it takes is a modest breeze to topple his skyscraper into dust, yet he's lauded as one of history's great philosophers -- for having succeeded in building such a tall skyscraper on such thin ice. Perhaps it's more accurate to say he's built a perfume factory with a garbage dump for its foundation. The mindless intellectuals of modern times breathe its aroma and -- reminiscent of the villagers in the tale of the Emperor and His Clothes -- find themselves unable to say "it stinks." Pity the poor human race, if these are our only intellectuals.

When Adolph Eichmann had been captured and brought to Israel to be tried for his war crimes as a Nazi, he claimed that he had acted morally. That he deserved respect and accolades, not punishment. That it was a terrible thing to have to exterminate so many people, but that he'd had the tremendous moral backbone to "force" himself to do it, claiming EXTREME moral virfue for withstanding such horrors in order to stick to what he knew was a moral necessity. Yes, exterminating human beings en masse is a dirty job, but someone has to do it when it's the will of the majority, which of course is the ONLY moral standard, as Kant has proven. The race and the species and the majority had willed that the jews and other "inferiors" or "undesirables" be eliminated for the grandeur and benefit and improvement of the species -- ie, the surviving majority.

This collectivist view of the source of morality was straight Kantianism. Whether Eichmann was rationalizing, lying, or telling the truth makes no difference, because even if he were telling the absolute truth about his own motivations, THAT would still be the greatest of possible horrors. Anyone who consistently accepted the moral philosophy of Kant would have had to do exactly as Eichmann did in the situation he found himself. Per Kant, Eichmann's moral imperative was to do exactly what he did do. Kant told Eichmann and every other man that his own judgement and feelings and perceptions and conclusions and evaluations and sensibilities were invalid, untrustworthy, deceiving and worthless for the purpose of deciding either how to act, or what was right and wrong. Only the collective will, as deciphered by unspecified annointed authority, could decide such moral issues. So, to follow Kant and be a true saint of Kant's morality, Eichmann or anyone else would have had to fight against any and all of his own moral beliefs or feelings or conclusions whenever they differed from the will of the collective, as explained by the authorities the collective had appointed. The harder it is to suspend one's own judgement and overcome one's personal sense of moral repugnance, the more virtuous one is, according to Kant. The infamous "I was only following orders" is just vernacular for "I was an iconic example of the perfectly moral man, according to the great philosopher Kant." Per the next paragraph, Kant's epistemology amounted to the invalidation of man's mind and of reason. So -- although Kant never said it explicitly -- there is no escape from the logical conclusion that the ideal moral specimen under Kant's philosophy is a robot programmed to follow orders.

The idea now, of a multi-national world order as the ideal, is obviously sympatico with this same creed. It will accomplish the same evils, or worse. Both "paradigms" are the logical offshoots of Kant's "reason-refuting reasoning." [That's one of his philosophy's self-contradictions -- he uses reasoning to prove the unreliability/invalidity of reason. He also relies on the validity of sensory input to prove the invalidity of the senses. Ad infinitum. Basically, Kant uses his mind to teach us that the mind is incapable of acquiring knowledge, and asks us to learn from him why we are incapable of learning anything -- so that we will come away improved by the certain knowledge that nothing can be known with certainty. Kant's is the most self-contradictory and the most evil philosophy in all history. It denies men the essential defining trait of the human species: a conceptual, reasoning mind that is competent to know reality. Logically then, Kant reduces man to the state of an animal by removing his reasoning capacity (lower than animals actually, since animals which are devoid of reasoning power are at least provided with instinct and reflexes, which man still lacks in the Kantian universe). If I were religious, I would say the devil could not have devised a more potent intellectual poison for men's minds.]

We had an age of reason and a renaissance and an enlightenment . . . and an industrial revolution which was the practical result of the revolutionary new ideas of natural rights, and the rights of man -- the individual rights of every human. The USA was the consequence -- a heaven on earth by history's prior standards, and that is probably an understatement. The collectivists of the state and of religion demanded a re-match. They have been fighting ever since to regain their Big Brother authoritarian dream in one form or another, ever since the USA threw their various, nefarious systems into the trash bins where they'd always belonged. Kant became their intellectual leader, their trainer for the re-match, and their savior. He refashioned collectivist thinking into a mind-twisting scam of a philosophy to hoodwink the self-appointed "intellectuals" of academia, et al, and from it emerged the Prussian invention of the welfare state, Socialism, communism, fascism, naziism, progressivism, eugenics, gas ovens, genocide, and more. From Sir Thomas Aquinas to the English philosphers (John Locke, et al), had come the end of dark ages, mysticism, and brute force as the rulers of man's life on earth, and the beginning of individual freedom and of the American revolution. What Kant did was to re-package the collectivist thought of old in spanking new modern garb, and it was passed through security by the intelligentsia, who live by the deep wisdom that clothes make the man. For much more than a century, Kant has been the secret WMD of the collectivists in their intellectual battle to re-take the ground they had lost to liberty, prosperity, individualism, the sacred value of every individual life, and human rights.

It is demoralizing to listen, over and over, to modern day intellectuals (especially in Europe) who revere Kant and who pontificate with what they regard as profundity. They know they are profound thinkers, because they've so completely steeped and submerged themselves -- all the way up to the very tops of their mental toes -- in the polluted trivia of the Kantian shallows. I'll say it again and end here: Pity the poor human race.

Submitting....

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Reader comments (113) on this item

Title Commenter Date Thread
1"Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe" (OSCE) 57 countries) [386 words]RobertSep 30, 2022 11:32286982
1Cooperation by Coercion - Following When True Leadership is Usurped for Reasons of Ambitions of Empire [84 words]M ToveyOct 1, 2022 16:31286982
1New World Order and the United Nations. [382 words]RobertSep 30, 2022 07:45286975
Current American Dollar Currency Demonstrates Changes in American Governance from Constitutionalist to Bureaucratic Authoritarian [321 words]M ToveySep 30, 2022 15:53286975
1Let Muslims disambiguate among their subdivisions [169 words]PrashantApr 2, 2021 14:32265259
2Prashant! What is Judaism and Christianity? [87 words]RobertSep 29, 2022 15:09265259
Judeo-Christianity in A More Basic Covenant Testament [210 words]M ToveySep 29, 2022 21:36265259
1My view of Judaism and Christianity (and Islam) [199 words]PrashantSep 30, 2022 13:48265259
5It's simple: Israel used to be the land of kibbutzes and socialism [43 words]Base MavenSep 26, 2010 04:16178702
1religión e historia [242 words]luciano tantoSep 13, 2010 10:11178196
1Reminds me of this quote, from Solzhenitsyn... [225 words]The Sanity InspectorSep 10, 2010 12:16178002
1Kant...Shmant! [274 words]RoqueSep 2, 2010 00:29177577
Paradigm Shifts [178 words]RobertAug 31, 2010 19:00177514
Wrong [11 words]Abu NudnikOct 5, 2010 14:03177514
1Re: Paradigm shift [82 words]Robert VillegasOct 5, 2010 19:04177514
3Kant? A puppet of the Jesuit Order [2141 words]alessandro alboreAug 31, 2010 15:06177508
coo-coo, coo-coo, coo-coo, coo-coo [8 words]Abu NudnikOct 5, 2010 13:58177508
Aged 55, Count Wladimir Ledochowski? [15 words]DDec 24, 2021 13:39177508
2The Left, David, and Goliath. [189 words]LynnAug 30, 2010 09:49177456
IV Reich is behind us, TRUE Jews, true gentiles [251 words]alessandro alboreAug 29, 2010 19:01177434
the GOST Nation [2006 words]alessandro alboreAug 29, 2010 07:36177417
Open your eyes, everybody [908 words]alessandro alboreAug 29, 2010 07:06177415
Here is a similar assessment. [23 words]ITZIGAug 29, 2010 04:15177414
Kant vs Israel [97 words]Amo FuchsAug 27, 2010 04:32177347
Location, Location, Location [52 words]
w/response from Daniel Pipes
CalebAug 25, 2010 14:06177268
Utopia is nowhere! On Mr. Pipes´ addendum dated August 17 concerning the Left. [213 words]Isaac HaskiyaAug 25, 2010 12:06177265
1I do agree [54 words]VladimirAug 25, 2010 10:12177262
5Anti-Israel polemics are rooting for the UN as the new emerging power structure as opposed to nation states. [428 words]TarnowAug 24, 2010 09:44177197
I dissent from Hazony's view [102 words]Peter HerzAug 23, 2010 22:01177173
over-sophistication [119 words]yuval Brandstetter MDAug 23, 2010 10:46177143
American means freedom from or for Religion [41 words]RONAug 24, 2010 00:23177143
1This analysis is true in the case of left thinkers and intellectuals [42 words]Yael F.Aug 22, 2010 06:52177085
3Oversophistication. [60 words]Menchem ChazanAug 21, 2010 15:03177049
Oversimplification [4 words]PenstarrsAug 26, 2010 21:19177049
8The flaw in Hazony's thesis [400 words]Alex SafianAug 21, 2010 12:15177045
1"Immanuel Kant vs. Israel" [203 words]norine krasnogorAug 20, 2010 22:47177034
2KANT VS. ISRAEL [281 words]RafiAug 20, 2010 16:54177024
Paradigm shift not worth a dime [137 words]BernieAug 19, 2010 17:05176987
Cosmopolis by Stephen Toulmin [19 words]Hillel S.Aug 19, 2010 16:41176986
1putting Kuhn and Kant in some context [374 words]mythAug 19, 2010 09:54176971
6Immanuel Kant vs. Israel [1785 words]Morry MarkovitzAug 19, 2010 01:49176950
Immanuel Kant vs. Israel [40 words]Morry MarkovitzAug 22, 2010 03:40176950
1some recent facts about the national idea [189 words]mythAug 22, 2010 06:28176950
Kant vs Israel [142 words]Morry MarkovitzAug 22, 2010 23:05176950
Kant vs Israel [489 words]Morry MarkovitzAug 22, 2010 23:33176950
my response to "some recent facts about the national idea" [183 words]Morry MarkovitzAug 24, 2010 00:17176950
almost contentless [90 words]mythAug 24, 2010 12:29176950
4Science, facts, truth [391 words]MorryAug 26, 2010 19:19176950
4Science, facts, truth #2 [1866 words]MorryAug 26, 2010 19:24176950
"myth" is right: fact and truth are not the same [79 words]Abu NudnikOct 5, 2010 14:23176950
Don't be too hard on Kant [276 words]Peter HerzDec 18, 2010 22:02176950
Immanuel Kant vs. Israel , reply to Peter Herz's reply [2267 words]Morry MarkovitzDec 20, 2010 02:21176950
Rejoinder to a pecksniffian [133 words]Honoring TeachersJun 7, 2011 02:41176950
Hatred of Israel [228 words]Ilbert PhillipsAug 19, 2010 00:43176947
don't accept the hazony thesis [67 words]paulAug 18, 2010 15:44176910
1Paradigm here, paradigm there, paradigm everywhere. [235 words]Isaac HaskiyaAug 18, 2010 14:03176901
4Fort Apache, The Middle East. [472 words]Cherif El-AyoutyAug 18, 2010 05:27176884
8Fort Europe [211 words]Bert TateAug 21, 2010 05:04176884
It´s not shifting deelings towards the national state, but new realities [152 words]Lars NielsenAug 18, 2010 05:10176882
3Israel a victim of the paradigm shift dieses [150 words]Prakash KhatiwalaAug 18, 2010 01:31176878
12Yoram Hazony's thesis is probably not correct [333 words]RajeevAug 17, 2010 23:55176877
Great Minds Think Alike [103 words]Stuart FaginAug 17, 2010 23:53176876
Jew hatred to be precise [78 words]Anne JulienneAug 18, 2010 16:55176876
Now I understand [38 words]John W. McGinleyAug 17, 2010 22:33176873
A victim of our own success [98 words]Shepard BarbashAug 17, 2010 22:08176870
What's the difference? [170 words]Yoel LernerAug 17, 2010 21:39176868
2Kant's Revolution [285 words]J KourlasAug 17, 2010 21:28176867
Revolution under Kant and under Islam [229 words]Anne JulienneAug 18, 2010 17:42176867
3Kant as "the founder of the counter-Enlightenment" in the light of his essay "What is Enlightement" [444 words]IanusAug 19, 2010 16:16176867
Kant's not so universal universalism [348 words]Elliott A GreenAug 20, 2010 09:03176867
Comment on Green's Critique of Kant [167 words]J KourlasAug 21, 2010 21:23176867
Read the book [41 words]J KourlasAug 21, 2010 22:02176867
3Reading Kant's Perpetual Peace [418 words]J KourlasAug 22, 2010 09:18176867
response about Kant's Judeophobia [65 words]Elliott A GreenAug 22, 2010 17:48176867
1Doubts as "dogmatic slumber" [123 words]IanusAug 22, 2010 18:05176867
1Kant's "single ruler" paradigm [336 words]Anne JulienneAug 22, 2010 21:45176867
4Death to Israel Isn't a Theory [316 words]HistoryscoperAug 17, 2010 21:22176866
3Mohammed vs. Israel , not Kant ! [121 words]IanusAug 18, 2010 18:38176866
3Yoram Hazony is not so smart [233 words]yonatan silvermanAug 17, 2010 21:21176865
Yonatan silverman on Yoram Hazony [69 words]efraim CarlsenMar 4, 2013 15:12176865
Myopic Paradigm [140 words]Marilyn AbramovitzAug 17, 2010 20:30176861
Explanation [14 words]DennisWojciakAug 17, 2010 19:57176857
3Israel vs. Kant - Following the True Paradigm - Israel is Not Immune - But Will Recover [816 words]M. ToveyAug 17, 2010 19:33176854
If the truth be known ... [25 words]Anne JulienneAug 17, 2010 20:17176854
one thing always seems left out [78 words]NoraAug 18, 2010 04:49176854
3One thing is sure [201 words]Solomon TaraganoAug 18, 2010 11:33176854
Shape Shifting Paradigms Always Leave Out One Thing - Truth [409 words]M. ToveyAug 18, 2010 17:36176854
Perpetual Peace in Human Terms Cannot Compare to the Peace That Passes All 'Human' Understanding. [27 words]M. ToveyAug 18, 2010 18:09176854
1One Thing Even More Sure [867 words]M. ToveyAug 23, 2010 12:29176854
Irony - The More Things Seem to Change- the More They Seem the Same [168 words]M ToveyMar 31, 2021 20:01176854
Let us double check Biden's executive orders. [55 words]PrashantApr 1, 2021 19:15176854
Exectuve Decisions - Whose Orders Should Be Observed - The Holy or Unholy [225 words]M ToveyApr 4, 2021 15:49176854
New 'Paradigm': You've Got to Be Kidding! [448 words]JoeAug 17, 2010 18:57176851
Ironic [78 words]Abu NudnikAug 17, 2010 18:38176850
4But something central is Overlooked [687 words]Ron ThompsonAug 17, 2010 18:27176849
1the new pardigm [469 words]gingersnapAug 17, 2010 20:34176849
1The new paradigm doesn't explain enough [221 words]Erich WiegerAug 17, 2010 18:12176847
1Why the anti-Israel hostility? [90 words]TarnowAug 17, 2010 17:29176845
1Kant and Kuhn misunderstood [145 words]Anne JulienneAug 17, 2010 17:26176844
Can't Use Kant to Describe Israel's Dilemma with the World Governments [388 words]M. ToveyAug 19, 2010 18:56176844
Nation states don't need supra-national entities to control themselves [44 words]Abu NudnikOct 5, 2010 14:15176844
What's Holding Us Back? [119 words]Kim BruceAug 17, 2010 17:20176843
Kant's antisemitism [75 words]Paul Lawrence RoseAug 17, 2010 17:06176842
2Kant's antisemitism ? [192 words]IanusAug 18, 2010 15:41176842
Kant and German Antisemitism [144 words]PLRoseAug 27, 2010 21:04176842
3Is criticizing Judaism or Jews ipso facto anti-Semitism ? [429 words]IanusAug 30, 2010 10:31176842
1DEJA VU in 2010.... how frightening [178 words]saraAug 30, 2010 17:15176842
Interesting point of view [71 words]Mike ShapiroAug 17, 2010 17:06176841
2Kant and Islam [105 words]Anne JulienneAug 17, 2010 19:46176841
4Avraham Burg - don't waste your proverbial ink on him. [198 words]Yehuda, Ottawa, CanadaAug 17, 2010 17:00176840
1burg [60 words]solemnmanAug 18, 2010 05:15176840
1Burg - utter scum [86 words]EliyahuAug 23, 2010 04:57176840
burg has no principles [63 words]EliyahuAug 23, 2010 05:01176840

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