From: rwbrigg@srv.PacBell.COM (Rick Briggs)
Subject: Re: Obj/Exist
Reply-To: rwbrigg@srv.PacBell.COM
Organization: Pacific * Bell
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 21:55:07 GMT

In article 7GH@umassd.edu, pmsc13sg@UMASSD.EDU (Stephen Grossman) writes:

>   Kant is a different case. He denies Existence not in the name of a
>fantasy but of nothing; he denies it in the name of a dimension that is, by his
>own insistent statement, unknowable to man and inconceivable. The mind, he says,
>is cut off not merely from some aspects of "things in themselves," but from
>everything real; any cognitive faculty is cut off because it has a nature, any
>nature....
>    Occasional fig leaves aside, Kant offewrs humanity no alternative to the
>realm of that which is, and no reward for renouncing it. He is the first
>philosopher in history to reject reality, thought, and values, not for the sake
>of some "higher" version of them, but for the sake of the rejection. The power
>in behalf of which his genius speaks is not "pure reason," but pure destruction.

Kant declared the ideality of time & space, and discussed the boundaries of
what we can know intellectually.  He did this (apart from his ludicrous views
on morality) in a dispassionate way, seeking the truth.  This approach contrasts
strongly with the whine above, in which the writer is merely trying to prove
what he already believes.  In the period in which Kant wrote,  there was no shortage
of dogma and declarations of truth; why criticize Kant for that which is his greatest 
merit -- curtailment of wild speculation (referred to above as 'pure destruction').

>    The result of Plato's approach was a form of adoration. The result of Kant,
>in Ayn Rand's words, was 'hatred of the good for being the good.' The hatred
>took shape in the culture of nihilism.

what?

>    Modernist intellectuals are comparable to a psychopath who murders for
>kicks. They seek the thrill of the new; and the new, to them, is the negative.
>The new is obliteration. obliteration of the essential in every field; they have
>no interest in anything to take its place. Thus the uniqueness of the century
>behind us: philosophy gleefully rid of system-building, education based on the
>theory that cognition is harmful, science boasted of its inability to
>understand, art which expelled beauty, literature which flaunted antiheroes,
>language 'liberated' from syntax, verse 'free' of meter, nonrepresentational
>painting, atonal music, unconscious psychology, deconstruction in literary
>criticism, indeterminacy as the new depth inphysics, incompleteness as the
>revelation in mathematics-a void everywhere that wassa acclaimed by the
>avant-garde with a metaphysical chuckle....
>    In a Kantian reality, nothing else was possible....

This has nothing to do with a Kantian reality.  You can cry all you want, but
you won't get rid of quantum uncertainty, chaos, or non-computable functions.
Too bad the universe isn't the way you want it.

>    Kant is dead in academic philosophy: the subject has effectively expired
>under his tutelage. He is dead among the intellectuals, whose world-view is
>disillusionment (they call it the 'end of ideology'). He is dead in the realm of
>art, where nihilism, with little left to defy, is turning into its inevitable
>product: nihil (this is now being called 'minimalism' and 'postmodernism')....
>    The collapse of a negative, however, is not a postive. The atrophy of a
>vicious version of unreason is not the adoption of reason. If men fail to
>discover living ideas, they will keep moving by the guidance of dead ones; they
>will keep following, by inertia, the principles they have already
>institutionalized.
>    

Kant is certainly not as well-known and respected as Ayn Rand is, I guess.