What Is Wrong With Immanuel Kant's Philosophy?

A Final Word on Kant

In offering and defending his low estimate of pure reason as incapable of achieving certitude (apart from the mysterious judgments which are synthetic a priori) Kant appeals to his so-called "antinomies" or "contradictions." He holds that when pure reason tries to apply the categories in the abstract realm of logical inference (whereas its business is to pour findings through fixed molds) it gets beyond itself and comes a cropper. It finds that it can prove, with equal facility, things directly opposed. Thus, he says, it can prove that space is finite, and also infinite; it can prove matter divisible and indivisible; it can prove human freedom existent and nonexistent; it can prove that God is necessary and also non-necessary.

In all this, and in the examples offered in proof of it, Kant is entirely gratuitous and sophistical. Besides, he stands self-condemned in using logical reasoning to establish the fact that logical reasoning is useless.

We merely mention the "antinomies" because we discern in them an element of materialism in the heart of an idealistic theory. This materialism was to appear in full form in later philosophies which took inspiration, at least in part, from the doctrines of Immanuel Kant.

Kant's philosophy is fundamentally wrong and is one of the major contributors to the intellectual insanity which we see today.