Immanuel Kant 1724-1804
Immanuel Kant’s relevance to “The Machine” is extremely important. His theory that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not.” Seems like a valid position at face value. What Kant did was unveil a paradox in reason brilliantly but also delivered the keys of dialectic reasoning to Hegel.
Immanuel Kant would argue that God cannot effectively be proven and a fair argument would be that he doesn’t exist. This single belief that God doesn’t exist drives a wedge throughout all religions. Kant’s philosophy detached the faith based model of morality from the modern man or woman’s mind. Instead of looking to the heavens for reason they now looked in the mirror.
Kant is most known for trying to find a happy medium between empiricists and the rationalists. This process was the door opening to Hegel who saw a way to rationalize something with different positions in a thesis and antithesis. This thought would echo throughout the 20th and 21st century and would be the foundation crumbling enemy to faith based religions.
Kant also explained in his work “The Critique of Pure Reason” the ideas of “analytic-synthetic distinction”. To understand this I would best describe that an analytic is language that describes a fact. Synthetic would describe an opinion.
To further explain this I would like to tell you that 2 + 2 = 5. Go ahead tell me I am wrong. Well what if when you were learning math, your teacher told you that 2 + 2 = 5 and proved in some way mathematically that it was true. You would now believe me for life until proven otherwise through rigorous shifting of position. I can still remember when I learned left and right that the windows of my classroom were on the left and the door to the classroom was on the right. To this day when I think left and right I remember this. You may remember the forefinger and the thumb on your left hand creating an “L”. This anchor is the analytic. The synthetic is the memory.
Now imagine that I told you over and over that you were a racist…. Could that trigger the analytic if you revisited the periods of your life when you may have acted in a bigoted way even if you never intended. You may redefine your actions to prove this thing that cannot be proven by the accuser by proving you are in fact not a racist. This is the birth of Tolerance. Pretty powerful wouldn’t you say? Welcome to the birth of modern radicalism.
