What is Your Philosophy? - By Toad
What say you? Speak up. Especially if you believe in something super-irrational, like science.
"In Rostov-on-Don, a provincial city in the south of Russia, two men had an argument in a supermarket. There's no footage of it, but we can imagine the scene. The squeaky lino floors, the tinny sound of pop music. The strip-lighting, buzzing as it casts a dreary mundane pallor on the rows of produce, scrubs the shadows from the faces of the disputants, and eventually drains all color from the flecks of blood. The other shoppers look on first in exasperation, then in horror: the argument devolves into a fistfight until its frenzy reaches a point where one man pulls out a gun and fires several bullets into the other's head. So it goes. What's brought this dull event to the world's attention is the fact that the two men were reportedly arguing about Kant.
If anything, transcendental idealism handily lends itself to a certain kind of will to destruction. Like most very clever people, Kant had something of a nasty smug streak. In his What is Enlightenment?, he describes the unenlightened condition of humanity as a 'self-imposed nonage': if other people are stupid, lazy, and cowardly, it's only their own fault; leaders and tyrants only channel this mass stupidity rather than imposing it. This is why he can write that 'freedom need not cause the least worry concerning public order or the unity of the community.' Against those who try to stifle argument, Kant proposes the dictum 'argue as much as you like - but obey!' Enlightened argument can only proceed towards a singular truth, and if a ruler is himself enlightened, then any argument that challenges his rule is by definition invalid, with no place in a liberated discourse. Kant's enlightenment admits no contradiction. There's a very short line from his veneration of Frederick's Prussia to a man being shot in the head in a Russian supermarket. The shooter was applying the categorical imperative perfectly: if everyone who dares to be so clearly and obstinately wrong about philosophy gets a bullet to the head, then proper reasoned argument can begin, to the benefit of all humanity."
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