Kantianism

A doctrine can be described as sentimental not because it uses a symbolism of the feelings or because its language is more or less emotional, but because its point of departure is determined by a sentimental motive; indeed, it can happen that a doctrine founded on a particular aspect of reality does not try to avoid appeals to sentiment, whereas on the contrary, an illusory theory inspired by passion in its very axiom affects a rational or "icy" tone and displays an impeccable logic starting from its basic error; the "headless" character of this logic, however, will not escape the notice of those who know that logic has no validity except in virtue of the soundness — physical or metaphysical — of its foundation.

If we take the example of a doctrine in appearance completely intellectual and inaccessible to the emotions, namely Kantianism, considered as the archetype of theories seemingly divorced from all poetry, we shall have no difficulty in discovering that its starting point or "dogma" is reducible to a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason; it voices, therefore, a priori an instinctive revolt against truths which are rationally ungraspable and which are considered annoying on account of this very inaccessibility. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or "brilliant" if one wishes, but contrary to truth.

What is crucial in Kantianism is not its pro domo logic and its few very limited lucidities, but the altogether "irrational" desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of theintelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.

Negations on this scale are always accompanied by a sort of moral fault which makes them less excusable than if it were merely a question of intellectual narrowness: the Kantists, failing to understand "dogmatic metaphysics," do not notice the enormous disproportion between the intellectual and human greatness of those they label as "metaphysical dogmatists" and the illusions which they attribute to them.

Yet even if allowance be made for such a lack of understanding, it seems that any honest man ought to be sensitive, if only indirectly, to the human level of these "dogmatists" — what is evidence in metaphysics becomes "dogma" for those who do not understand it — and here is an extrinsic argument the extent of which cannot be neglected. Whereas the metaphysician intends to come back to the "first word" — the word of primordial Intellection — the modern philosopher on the contrary wishes to have the "last word"; thus Comte imagines that after two inferior stages — namely "theology" and "metaphysics" — finally comes the "positive" or "scientific" stage which gloriously reduces itself to the most outward and coarse experiences; it is the stage of the rise of industry which, in the eyes of the philosopher, marks the summit of progress and of civilization. Like the "criticism" of Kant, the "positivism" of Comte starts from a sentimental instinct which wants to destroy everything in order to renew everything in the sense of a desacralized and totally "humanist" and profane world.

 

In order to discredit faith and seduce believers, Kant does not hesitate to appeal to pride or vanity: whoever does not rely on reason alone is a "minor" who refuses to "grow up"; if men allow themselves to be led by "authorities" instead of "thinking for themselves," it is solely through laziness and cowardice, neither more nor less. A thinker who needs to make use of such means — which on the whole are demagogic — must indeed be short of serious arguments.

 

Avant-garde philosophy is properly an acephalous logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as "prejudice"; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect, it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious.(1)

 

For Kant, intellectual intuition — of which he does not understand the first word — is a fraudulent manipulation (Erschleichung), which throws a moral discredit onto all authentic intellectuality.

Poem # CXVI

"A demolisher of everything" is what one can call a fool
By the name of Kant, who believed that what he
Called intelligence or reason, was his own work

He thought he had discovered the limits of thought.

A consolation against the straw of such philosophers
Is that there are always flames in the fireplace.

Kantians will ask us to prove the existence of this way of knowing (intellection of archetypes); and herein is the first error, namely that only what can be proved de facto is knowledge; the second error, which immediately follows the first, is that a reality that one cannot prove — that is to say which one cannot make accessible to some artificial and ignorant mental demand — by reason of this apparent lack of proof, does not and cannot exist. Integral rationalism lacks intellectual objectivity as much as moral impartiality.(2)

Certain arguments against eternal life are thoroughly typical of the “concretist” perversion of the intelligence and the imagination: to exist, they say, is to measure oneself against limits; it is to conquer resistances and to produce something. They have evidently no conception of the possibility of an existence that is incorporated in active Immutability, or in immutable Activity and that lives by it; the touchstone of the real for the materialists is always gross experience coupled with the “hylic’s” lack of imagination; on this level of thought there is nothing but “boredom” to be seen in eternal life, which brings us to the monologue attributed metaphorically by Kant to the Divine Person who, in taking note of his eternity, would, so it is supposed, logically be obliged to raise the question of his own origin.

 

Reason, then, to the extent that it is artificially divorced from the Intellect, engenders individualism and arbitrariness. This is exactly what happens in the case of someone like Kant, who is a rationalist even while rejecting “dogmatic rationalism”; while the latter is doubtless rationalism, the Kantian critical philosophy is even more deserving of the name, indeed it is the very acme of rationalism.

As is well known this critical philosophy looks upon metaphysics, not as the science of the Absolute and of the true nature of things, but as the “science of the limits of human reason’,, this reason (Vernunft) being identified with intelligence pure and simple, an utterly contradictory axiom, for in terms of what can the intelligence limit itself, seeing that by its very nature it is in principle unlimited or it is nothing? And if the intelligence as such is limited, what guarantee do we have that its operations, including those of critical philosophy, are valid?

For an intellectual limit is a wall of which one has no awareness. One cannot therefore have it both ways: either the intelligence by definition comprises a principle of illimitability or liberty, whatever be the degree of its actualization, in which case there is no call to attribute limits to it with an arbitrariness that is all the more inexcusable in that the power of a particular individual intelligence (or mode of intelligence) is not necessarily a criterion for the appraisal of intelligence as such; or else, on the contrary, the intelligence comprises, likewise by definition, a principle of limitation or constraint, in which case it no longer admits of any certitude and cannot function any differently from the intelligence of animals, with the result that all pretension to a “critical philosophy” is vain.

If the normal functioning of the intelligence has to be subjected to a critique, then the criticizing consciousness has to be subjected to a critique in its turn by asking, “what is it that thinks?” and so forth—a play of mirrors whose very inconclusiveness demonstrates its absurdity, proved moreover in advance by the very nature of cognition. A thought is “dogmatist,” or else it is nothing; a thought that is “criticist” is in contradiction with its own existence. A subject who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting; and this is just what has happened to critical philosophy, swept away in its turn, and through its own fault, by existentialism in all its forms.

 

According to the sensationalists, all knowledge originates in sensorial experience; theologians hasten to add that this applies only to man’s “natural” capacity for knowledge—a comment that does not render the above opinion any the less debatable—whereas the extreme sensationalists go so far as to maintain that human knowledge can have no other source than the experience in question: which merely proves that they themselves have no access to any suprasensory knowledge and are unaware of the fact that the suprasensible can be the object of a genuine perception and hence of a concrete experience.

Thus, it is upon an intellectual infirmity that these thinkers build their systems, without their appearing to be in the least impressed by the fact that countless men as intelligent as themselves (to put it mildly) have thought otherwise than they do. How, for example, did a man like Kant explain to himself the fact that his thesis, so immensely important for humankind, if it were true, was unknown to all the peoples of the world and had not been discovered by a single sage, and how did he account for the fact that men of the highest abilities labored under lifelong illusions (in his eyes) which were totally incompatible with those abilities—even founding religions, producing sanctity, and creating civilizations? Surely the least one might ask of a “great thinker” is a little imagination.

 

Apart from the forms of sensory knowledge, Kant admits the categories, regarded by him as innate principles of cognition; these he divides into four groups inspired by Aristotle,(1) while at the same time subjectivizing the Aristotelian notion of category. He develops in his own way the peripatetic categories that he accepts while discarding others, without realizing that, regardless of Aristotelianism, the highest and most important of the categories have eluded his grasp.(2) The categories are a priori independent of all experience since they are innate; Kant recognized this, yet he considered that they were capable of being “explored” by a process he called “transcendental investigation.” But how will one ever grasp the pure subject who explores and who investigates?

Another feature of this suicidal rationalism is the following: we are asked to believe that knowledge, thus reduced to a combination of sensory experiences and the innate categories, shows us things such as they appear to be and not such as they are; as if the inherent nature of things did not pierce through their appearances, given that the whole point of knowledge is the perception of a thing-in-itself—an aseity—failing which the very notion of perception would not exist.

To speak of a knowledge that is incapable of adequation is a contradiction in terms, disproved moreover by experience at every level of the knowable; in short, it is absurd to deduce from the obvious fact that our knowledge cannot become totally identified with its objects—at least when these objects are relative5—that all speculations on the aseity of things are “empty and vain” (leer und nichtig). To turn this dictatorial conclusion into an argument against metaphysical “dogmatism,” so far from unmasking the latter, serves only to demonstrate the emptiness and vanity of critical philosophy, thus causing the argument to rebound upon itself.

All the hopeless pedantic of this philosophy becomes glaringly apparent in the notion of “sophistications”: this is the name it gives to reasoning which are devoid of “empirical premises,” and which enable us to infer something of which (so it appears) we have no idea—as, for example, when we infer the reality of God from the existence of the world or the qualities it manifests.

The philosopher, who in other respects displays so little of the poet, does nevertheless have enough poetic imagination to describe conclusions of this kind as “sophistical mirages” (sophistische Blendwerke); that a reasoning might simply be the logical and provisional description of an intellectual evidence, and that its function might be the actualization of this evidence, in itself supralogical, apparently never crosses the minds of pure logicians.

 

Perhaps the following reflections will involve some repetition of things that have already been said, but no matter. From the exclusive standpoint of a logician the metaphysical doctrines of the Universe will be open to two reproaches: first, that as attempts at an explanation they are naïve, and second, that the attempts have been undertaken without previous investigation of our faculties of knowledge.

The first reproach is based on the totally false hypothesis that a metaphysical doctrine is a logical attempt at an explanation; the second reproach, which stems from Kant, amounts to flagrant nonsense, for if there is nothing to prove our intelligence is capable of adequation—in that case, what is intelligence?—there is likewise nothing to prove that the intelligence expressing this doubt is competent to doubt, and so forth. If the optic nerve has to be examined in order to be sure that vision is real, it will likewise be necessary to examine that which examines the optic nerve, an absurdity which proves in its own indirect way that knowledge of suprasensible things is intuitive and cannot be other than intuitive.

Moreover, since philosophy by definition could never limit itself to the description of phenomena available to common observation, it is forced to admit, in good logic at least, the intuitive and supralogical character of the faculty of knowledge which it claims to possess. Logic, in other words, is perfectly consistent only when exceeding itself.

 

For Kant, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle.

 

There remains the experimental or mystical proof of God. While admitting that logically and in the absence of a doctrine, it proves nothing to anyone who has not undergone the unitive experience, nonetheless there is no justification for concluding that because it is incommunicable it must be false; this was the error of Kant, who moreover gave the name of “theurgy” to this direct experience of the Divine Substance.

The mystical proof of the Divinity belongs to the order of extrinsic arguments and carries the weight of the latter: the unanimous witness of the sages and the saints, over the whole surface of the globe and throughout the ages, is a sign or a criterion which no man of good faith can despise, short of asserting that the human species has neither intelligence nor dignity; and if it possesses neither the one nor the other, if truth has never been within its grasp, then neither can it hope to discover truth when in extremis.

The idea of the absurdity both of the world and of man, supposing this to be true, would remain inaccessible to us; in other words, if modern man is so intelligent, ancient man cannot have been so stupid. Much more is implied in this simple reflection than might appear at first sight. Consequently, before putting aside the mystical or experimental proof as unacceptable from the outset, one should not forget to ask oneself what kind of men have invoked it. There can be no common measure between the intellectual and moral worth of the greatest of the contemplatives and the absurdity that their illusion would imply, were it nothing but that.

If we have to choose between some encyclopedist or other and Jesus, it is Jesus whom we choose; we would also of course choose some infinitely lesser figure, but we cannot fail to choose the side where Jesus is to be found. In connection with the questions raised by the mystical proof and, at the other extreme, by the assurance displayed by negators of the supernatural—who deny others any right to a similar assurance without having access to their elements of certainty—we would say that the fact that the contemplative may find it impossible to furnish proof of his knowledge in no wise proves the nonexistence of that knowledge, any more than the spiritual unawareness of the rationalist does away with the falseness of his denials.

As we have already remarked, the fact that a madman does not know that he is mad is obviously no proof to the contrary, just as, inversely, the fact that a man of sound mind cannot prove to a madman that his mind is sound in no way proves it to be unsound. These are almost truisms, but their sense is too often missed by philosophers as well as by men of lesser pretensions.