[embedded content]The grinning mug on the right of the YouTube Fox News screen above is Allen C. Guelzo, a historian of the Civil War and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Guelzo is also a purveyor of a bizarre theory that Immanuel Kant was the progenitor of critical theory, critical race theory, Marxism, Jim Crow, and "every dictatorship in between":But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in America, and I think that's really because critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There
Topics:
Sandwichman considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
Matias Vernengo writes Elon Musk (& Vivek Ramaswamy) on hardship, because he knows so much about it
Lars Pålsson Syll writes Klas Eklunds ‘Vår ekonomi’ — lärobok med stora brister
New Economics Foundation writes We need more than a tax on the super rich to deliver climate and economic justice
Robert Vienneau writes Profits Not Explained By Merit, Increased Risk, Increased Ability To Compete, Etc.
But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in America, and I think that's really because critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason, and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory. The problem was that critical theory got away. It instead justified ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations -- things like race, nationality, class -- and they gave us Karl Marx and Jim Crow and every dictatorship in between, that's especially true about race.
Although he is a university professor who has published several books, Guelzo's claims about Kant and critical race theory are not scholarship. They were not explicitly represented as scholarship. There is, however, an insinuation of scholarship that flows from their packaging. The commentator is presented as a scholar and is backed by a wall of books. His thoughts are presented in mellifluous, modulated tones, as if he is giving a lecture. He talks about a philosopher from the eighteenth century that only an academic would talk about.
[Royce] ...did not want Absolute pragmatism to lapse into the usual caricature of idealism, which made ideas into nothing more than objects of idle contemplation; ideas always contain, at their core, an intention to act. And he separated his notion of the Absolute from Scottish realism, Romantic mysticism, and even some aspects of Kant.
The result of romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life; some degree of increased rational self-understanding. This was very far from the intentions of the romantics. But at the same time — and to this extent the romantic doctrine is true — they are the persons who most strongly emphasised the unpredictability of all human activities. They were hoist with their own petard. Aiming at one thing, they produced, fortunately for us all, almost the exact opposite.
Kant hated romanticism. He detested every form of extravagance, fantasy, what he called Schwärmerei, any form of exaggeration, mysticism, vagueness, confusion. Nevertheless, he is justly regarded as one of the fathers of romanticism — in which there is a certain irony. ...
Kant was an admirer of the sciences. He had a precise and extremely lucid mind: he wrote obscurely but seldom imprecisely. He was a distinguished scientist himself (he was a cosmologist); he believed in scientific principles perhaps more deeply than in any others; he regarded it as his life's task to explain the foundations of scientific logic and scientific method. He disliked everything that was rhapsodical or confused in any respect. He liked logic and he liked rigour. ... But if he is in any respect the father of romanticism, it is not as a critic of the sciences, nor of course as a scientist himself, but specifically in his moral philosophy.Kant was virtually intoxicated by the idea of human freedom.
...nor does Berlin ever exactly repeat himself, even when he is ostensibly recapitulating discussions that have appeared elsewhere, which means that one needs to read all his discussions of a topic to be sure that one has squeezed out every drop of what he (not always consistently) has to say about it.
The need to calculate and weigh and compromise, and adjust and test and experiment, and make mistakes and never reach certain answers or guarantees for rational action, must irritate those who seek for clear and final solutions, and yearn for unity and symmetry, and all-embracing answers. Nevertheless it seems to me the inescapable task of those who, with Kant, believe that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made."
The liberty that they seek to realise, and the world as they conceive it, seems to me, in comparison with that of the absolutists, more rational, more humane and more nearly realisable, because they alone are compatible with what most human beings have found the facts to be.
No more rigorous moralist than Immanuel Kant has ever lived, but even he said, in a moment of illumination, 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.' To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity. We can only do what we can: but that we must do, against difficulties.
The final irony of Guelzo's objection to Kant, critical theory and critical race theory is that it is utterly, profoundly unreasonable. Even in his scholarly work, Guelzo makes the inexcusable first-year undergraduate error of assuming (because it is convenient to his hypothesis) that a brief passage from a 1952 lecture by a famous philosopher is the last word -- or even Berlin's last word -- on the relationship between Kant, the Enlightenment, romanticism, and irrationalism.
In his subsequent political pronouncements, Guelzo compounds his display of incomprehension with leaps of illogic such as "[t]he problem was that critical theory got away." Critical theory "got away"? Was this like a bank robbery with a "get-away" car waiting outside? Was critical theory some wild beast that escaped from the zoo?
"There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason," Guelzo explained Kant's thinking, "and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory." There is an example of word play by someone who knows nothing of the substance or context of the words he is playing with. Whatever its merits or faults, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason did not contain the seed that, according to one account by Berlin, spawned romanticism. That honour went to his moral philosophy.
As for the "hence" that generated "critical theory" from "a theory being critical of reason," they do both contain the words "critical" and "theory." So what? As I have discussed here, Thorstein Veblen pioneered the use of the word "obsolescence" in sociology and economics. In 1928, J. George Frederick coined the term "progressive obsolescence" to refer to a strategy of accelerating the turn-over of consumer goods. Is progressive obsolescence, then, a "subset" of Veblen's critique of conspicuous consumption? If so, that would have to be demonstrated and not deduced from the use of the same words.
In his role as Heritage Foundation "Visiting Scholar," Guelzo doesn't have to demonstrate anything. He doesn't need to show you any stinking badges. All he needs to do is go on Fox News or an American Enterprise Institute podcast and make assertions that can then be repeated ad nauseum by conservative columnists and commentators until they blend seamlessly into the propaganda wallpaper that the right-wing audience can assimilate as expert-verified reality.