Monday morning words thankfully submitted by Stephen L. Hall.
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Last week I wrote of the subjective nature of the word “fair” and how the use os such a word is a misdirection of political discussions entirely because of the very subjective nature of the word itself. I thought that I might continue that thought a little more in depth than previously but Stew suggested that I “write about repercussions of making decisions based on feelings and emotions.” The ideas are not totally unrelated. It is because Immanuel Kant is the source of nearly all evil in the modern world.
No, I’m not rambling, though I can see how you might think that reading the previous paragraph. Transcendentalism introduces and promotes a subjective way of thinking above rationality and reason. Emotion, feelings and subjective personal experiences become more important than thought, reason, and empirical evidence.
Immanuel Kant was the philosopher who drove the transcendental movement while American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau gave the philosophy voice and popular appeal. It was Immanuel Kant who would influence pseudo-intellectuals in universities the world over.
It must not be denied that the transcendentalist movement had some positive as well as negative effects. “Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in social reform movements, especially anti-slavery and women’s rights.” Id.
“The Harvard-educated Emerson and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and examine their own religious assumptions against these scriptures. In their perspective, a loving God would not have led so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these scriptures, too. Truth, if it agreed with an individual’s intuition of truth, must be indeed truth.” Id.
The Transcendentalist were the forerunners of the progressive movement which would infect both the Democrat and the newly formed Republican parties. This new philosophy helped push a division within the Whig and the Democrat parties, dividing the Democrats between northern social reformers from the southern slave owners. It divided the abolitionists to separate from their coalition with businessmen and anti-Masons in the Whig party to form the Republican party.
It was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant which influenced people like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and John Stuart Mill who would in turn influence John Maynard Keynes. The idea that truth was subjective infected academia, and the cancer grew over the next two hundred years. Academics began to discount and dismiss reason and logic in favor of perspective and subjective “truth”.
Law schools followed graduating lawyers who would move away from “bright line” tests in favor of the far more subjective “weighing of factors” to be considered in decisions. Instead of determining how particular facts apply to an abstract rule, the law has often been transformed into a list of things a judge is to consider or weigh, particularly in administrative law.
It was this transcendentalism which created the divisions in our nation’s philosophy which persist to this day. On the left is a subjective view of reality, where the most important “truth” is an expression of individual experiences, perspectives, and feelings; on the right is an objective view of reality where the most important thing is to put together facts and evidence in an application of logical reasoning to come to a conclusion.
Credit must be acceded to those early “progressives” for calling attention to certain injustices which had embedded themselves in our society through religious dogma, traditions, and previous errors in reason. It is unquestionable that slavery is wrong, equality before the law is just, and corruption impoverishes the nation.
If the openness to foreign ideas and a willingness to question tradition for which the transcendentalists were known was the whole of the transcendental movement, then there would have only been good from the movement. However, the glorification and veneration of the subjective view of reality corrupted all of the good that the movement sought to accomplish.
As a personal view, I have always found that emotion is a good measure of establishing one’s goals, after all what is a goal but an expression of what one wants, and desire is always subjective. On the other hand, the method of attaining one’s goals ought to be an exercise in reason, a logical path to move one’s self closer to obtaining what they want.
However, a purely emotional, subjective view of reality leads one to such guiding perspectives as “by any means necessary” or “the ends justify the means”, by Malcolm X and Niccolo Machiavelli respectively. And when your ends justify your means, then any and all means are acceptable, no matter how immoral or illegal or irrational.
The “Social Justice Warriors” look at everything based on how it makes them feel. That is something everyone recognizes. But because they have so eschewed the employment of reason and logic, they seldom even recognize the difference between opinion and fact, or premise and conclusion, much less causation versus correlation.
It is the lack of objective reasoning which make the “progressive” so susceptible to what we would call brainwashing. A creature without reason is easily lead; it will follow the herd unthinkingly just wanting to be part of the group. What is often called “virtue signaling” is the acceptance of emotional assertions without thought or critical thinking.
It is not an accident that the “progressives” will accept any ridiculous assertion as long as one pretends it is an assertion of “equal rights” or “protecting the underdog” or fighting any traditional value, because they have been indoctrinated to feel an instant hatred against any remnant of the age of reason.
Emotional reactions being subjective and not objective, it is easy for leftist teachers and professors to convince children that believing the leftist faith is good while questioning the faith is bad. Denying any progressive cause is seen as a heresy of left, but they do not recognize it as such.
The problem with people who have been trained to be entirely subjective, who have never really learned objective reasoning skills, is that they are primitive mentally. Trying to reason with the typical leftist is like reasoning with a caveman, because it is emotional. Reality is to their way of thinking only what they believe it to be; the fact that your reality is different to them is no reason to change their perspective.
This is the true legacy of Immanuel Kant, the subjective reality, the unthinking man.
