Immanuel Kant - Father of the Irrational

Submitted by Paul Saunders (United States), Feb 15, 2005 at 12:08

The four shifts Dr. Pipes names are all evolutionary developments from the original attack on reason by Immanuel Kant, 18th century philosopher. The evolution of Kant-Hegel-Marx gave us the modern era butchery by the communists. The evolution of Kant-Hegel-Schopenhauer-Nietzche gave us the modern era butchery by the Nazis.

The evolution of the universities from Lockean "Enlightenment liberalism" in the 19th century to Kantian postmodern leftist nihilism and multiculturalism in the 20th century has created the shift of anti-semitism from the uneducated right in the 19th century to the university left in the 20th century.

This same Kantian intellectual shift has caused in the postmodern universities the conflation of anti-semitism and anti-Americanism. Enlightenment liberalism of the past would not tolerate anti-semitism in the secular university, therefore, it had to exist in Christian religious institutions. However, today the Christian religious institutions have mellowed and become accepting of Judaism while the postmodern secular universities are breeding anti-semitic, anti-American fanatics. This Kantian postmodern intellectual movement explains both the "religious to secular" shift and the "Christian to Muslim" shift because both are created in the universities as they spin out the last consequences consistent with Kant's initial assault on Reason.

The antidote to the Kantian irrationalism of postmodern universities is a rebirth of reason (a renaissance) with a full scale assault on Kantian irrationalism. Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand created a systematic philosophy of reason, Objectivism, and began the assault on Kant. Dr. Leonard Peikoff captured her philosophy in the book "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand". The shifts in irrationalism that Dr. Pipes noted are interesting, but the goal is the erasure of irrationalism. To achieve that goal reason must again be embraced in the universities which requires that Kant be driven out.

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