The debate about what Kant “really meant” (Does anyone really care?) seems unimportant in comparison with Peikoff’s “bottom line.”

Skip ahead to Chapter Sixteen: “What’s Next?”  Peikoff’s prophecy: Religious totalitarianism in America within 50 years. 

In other words, Peikoff says Ayn Rand was wrong to predict Objectivism’s ultimate triumph.  (Recall her optimism about the the future as expressed in her PLAYBOY interview: Whenever men have been free, the most rational philosophy has won out.)

This also means that Ayn Rand’s number one disciple has declared that she will ultimately fail in her attempt to rescue America from its contradictory ethical/philosophical foundation.  (Now, you know how much she would appreciate hearing him say that.  OMG.  Branden got a slap in the face.  I doubt Leonard would get off that easily.  )

Atlas Shrugged will prove to be futile.  The American sense of life will die from religious asphyxiation.

And Peikoff wonders what Ayn Rand would think about his theory.  Yeah.  Right.

I will continue to read his book, but I sincerely doubt that 200 pages of “sound, inductive theorizing” is going to make such a preposterous notion look any more reasonable than it does right now.

... step that he took to overcome the conclusions reached by Hume that he found repugnant. ... It was to establish Euclidean geometry and traditional arithmetic as sciences that not only have certitude, but also contain truths that are applicable to the world of our experience. It was to give the same status to Newtonian physics. ... This elaborate machinery invented by Kant enabled him to think that he had succeeded in establishing and explaining the certitude and incorrigibility of Euclidean geometry, simply arithmetic, and Newtonian physics.

In almost every case, the trouble has consisted in the fact that later thinkers tried to avoid the consequences without correcting the errors or mistakes that generated them.

Thank God for my deficiency of courage! If I had approached her and had gotten her phone number, then her boyfriend -- upon discovering that I was hitting on her -- might have beaten me up something fierce. It sure saved the day, me not having the courage to approach that pretty woman and all!

In future installments, . . . I plan to discuss Kant’s metaphysics in its delimitations, guidance, and unifying structure for physics of Kant’s time and for physics and psychophysics in the nineteenth century. The philosophies of science of Kant’s descendants, the Neo-Kantians and logical positivists, will be set out.

Dewey . . . is not saying that Germany’s marvelous advances in science, industry, and the military were caused by Kant. He means, rather, “that Kant detected and formulated the direction in which the German genius was moving, . . . [and] that his formulation has furnished a banner and a conscious creed which in solid and definite fashion has intensified and deepened the work actually undertaken” (GPP 28-29).

Concerning advances made by German scientists, that last statement by Dewey floats vaguely near the truth in the case of biology to the 1840’s (Lenoir 1982; Richards 2002, 229–61, 309–12, 407–9, 427–30, 488–91; Richards 2008, 31–36, 120–22, 459–60). However, what influence Kant had on German biology in the nineteenth century was mainly on account of his general characterization of organism life and his characterization of biological understanding in Critique of Judgment. His characterization of teleological judgments as strictly regulative (virtually hypothetical and immutably so), a doctrine well suited to his critical and transcendental idealism, was immediately pushed aside by German biologists. They took Kant’s teleological judgment to be essential in their advancing discipline, but they took teleology to be, in one form or another, a governing principle really operating in the physical domain of life, independently of our requirements for scientific explanation.

Advances in German science were not on account of Kant’s particular form of idealism and his situation of science within it. In the case of chemistry and physics, in Germany after Kant, his doctrines sometimes furnished “a banner and a conscious creed,” but it is not the case that they “intensified and deepened the work actually undertaken.”
. . .

Dewey is on the right track in stressing the repercussions of the obsessive a priori in Kant’s philosophy. I should say, however, that it is not plausible that the rational organization of concepts for research by the great German physicists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in accord with the a priori gloss Kant attempted in his pretentious rewrite of Newtonian mechanics in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786). Helmholtz, Mach, Einstein, and other luminaries of physical science had their particular stands on Kant. But Kant’s claim of the a priori nature of such things as the principle of inertia was silliness to them as it is to us. In his elegant text on mechanics, Hertz (1899) gave steady supplication to the Kantian a priori character of the kinematical prerequisites of dynamics, but he really had reverted to the pre-Kantian notion of the a priori. Although Hertz took what we would now call Galilean kinematics to be insusceptible to empirical test for correctness, he maintained that its value or worth hangs on whether the dynamics in which it is used coincides with experience. There is no such vulnerability to experience for Kant’s a priori principles of dynamics. In stark contrast to Kant, Hertz regarded the principle of inertia, his Fundamental Law of dynamics, to be “inferred from experience” (1899, 144). . . .

Dewey’s 1915 effort to find philosophical roots of Germany’s disastrous attitudes and behavior in the sharp differences between the critical philosophy of Kant and his own philosophy of pragmatic experimentalism (or empiricism) goes overboard. Dewey thinks dangerous “the mental habitudes generated by attachment to a priori categories” (GPP 40), dangerous that “no moral, social, or political question is adequately discussed in Germany until the matter in hand has been properly deduced from an exhaustive determination of its fundamental Begriff [concept] or Wesen [essence]. Or if the material is too obviously empirical to allow of such deduction, it must at least be placed under its appropriate rational form” (GPP 41–42). It is plain that “the whole modern liberal social and political movement has allied itself with philosophical empiricism” (GPP 44). Think of Locke or Mill. “A hierarchically ordered and sub-ordered State will feel an affinity for a philosophy of fixed categories, while a flexible democratic society will, in its crude empiricism, exhibit loose ends” (GPP 44).

It might be argued—and this may be an underground assumption of Dewey’s—that Kant saved rationalism and idealism in Germany, by his original and influential reform of them together with his mighty counter to empiricism and materialism. It is plausible that without Kant’s critical and transcendental idealism, the idealisms of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel would not have come about. Nevertheless, I expect these three men would have made philosophies, even had Kant never existed. Without Kant, these three might well have made new ways in philosophy, and it is reasonable to suppose they would have sprung their creations not from the empirical tradition in Germany (Sassen 2000; Kuehn 1987), but from the Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition. Then too, it is plausible that these three would have had the relations they did have to the Romantic movement in Germany. Goethe and Schiller were happening, Kant or no. Goethe was a realist, not an idealist. He put spirit into nature and that nature into man. Goethe’s only reliance on Kant was in biology, and like the other German biologists, unlike Kant, he took teleology to be in nature. The German enlightenment, the fideist reactions to it, and the German romantic movements in the arts and philosophy, would have happened without Kant.

It is true that Kant’s a priori elements yield a grand organized structure of the phenomenal world. But it is not a resulting organization any more grand and unified than was taught by Kant’s contemporaries such as the Leibnizians Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Eberhard or than would be taught by a Thomist philosopher anywhere in the world. . . .
. . .
More important than systematic character in philosophy, whether a priori or entirely grounded by experience, would be Kant’s refashioning of the concept of the a priori. William Tait (1992) has argued persuasively: for Leibniz and Plato the a priori discipline of geometry had been the study of a type of structure whose truths hold independently of whether that structure is exemplified in the physical world; for Kant a truth of geometry is a priori true of the physical world. This facilitates casting the fundamental organization of the phenomenal world as issuing from something deep inside mind.

Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel inherit and transform the Kantian a priori power of structuring the world, for use in their various editions of idealism, their various versions of Innerlichkeit. Dewey claims that “the Germans, more readily than other peoples, can withdraw themselves from the exigencies and contingencies of life into a region of Innerlichkeit [inwardness, or subjectivity; profoundness]” (GPP 46). We shall evaluate this claim in the sequel.

Greatest within any possible importance of Kant’s a priori for the historical nightmare of the Great War is the role of the a priori in Kant’s renovation and central placement of duty in his ethics. That ethical realm, in Kant’s picture, is the realm of inner rational being. It is shielded from fundamental bases in the phenomenal world, outer and inner, by Kant having rendered the basic form of the phenomenal world fixed a priori by the sentient subject and by having free will completely compatible with the phenomenal world even while accepting that no free will is possible in the phenomenal world alone. The fact of free will is a testimony of the existence of the noumenal world, a touch of it within the rational self.

The Critical philosophy [Kant’s philosophy], though it bears a seeming resemblance to skepticism, must not be confused with it. Skepticism is an ancient view-point that has come and gone repeatedly in the West, mainly on the fringes of philosophy; it has never defined any period of Western culture.

The skeptic holds that knowledge of reality is impossible to man, a conclusion that leads him to retire from intellectual pursuits, except to act as a gadfly exposing the illusions of other men. . . .

On every fundamental integrative issue, such a viewpoint clashes with Kant’s. The skeptic seeks to gain knowledge of reality, then bewails the failure of his quest; Kant scorns the very attempt, rejecting reality because it is reality. The skeptic prizes the awareness of facts, but they elude him; Kant rejects awareness because it is awareness. The skeptic would welcome the discovery of connections among things, but cannot find any; to Kant, integration is the cognitive villain because it is integration. (37)

But Kant’s claim of the a priori nature of such things as the principle of inertia was silliness to them as it is to us. In his elegant text on mechanics, Hertz (1899) gave steady supplication to the Kantian a priori character of the kinematical prerequisites of dynamics, but he really had reverted to the pre-Kantian notion of the a priori. Although Hertz took what we would now call Galilean kinematics to be insusceptible to empirical test for correctness, he maintained that its value or worth hangs on whether the dynamics in which it is used coincides with experience. There is no such vulnerability to experience for Kant’s a priori principles of dynamics. In stark contrast to Kant, Hertz regarded the principle of inertia, his Fundamental Law of dynamics, to be “inferred from experience” (1899, 144). . . .