Happy Birthday to Kant, the First Postmodernist

22 Apr, 2024

For Kant's birthday, someone reposted this disastrously dumb 2021 column by Washington Post Opinion columnist Marc Thiessen (one of the top opinion-makers in America I guess?), which cites the Princeton historian Allen Guelzo¹ to blame Kant for wokeness:

Critical race theory, Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.

But the critique of reason ended up justifying “ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations — things like race, nationality, class,” he says. Critical theory thus helped spawn totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century such as Marxism and Nazism, which taught that all human relationships are relationships of power between an oppressor class and an oppressed class. For the Marxists, the bourgeoisie were the oppressors. For the Nazis, the Jews were the oppressors. And today, in 21st century America, critical race theory teaches that Whites are the oppressors.

Kant is here held up as a counter-Enlightenment opponent of reason, who gave birth to all subsequent irrationalisms, including Marxism, Nazism, and Jim Crow (I do think saying this is in the neighborhood of Holocaust denial). Kant's "theory of being critical of reason" lent strength to totalitarians because it means you don't have to analyze things in terms of reasons, you can always just ask cui bono instead.²

Those with a glancing familiarity with Kant will understand that Guelzo's summary gets his views almost exactly backwards. Kant was not a critic of the Enlightenment but a cheerleader for it, notably in his essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Kant loved reason, and believed that reason must shape our lives. Famously "the moral law within" -- a law that binds every one of us only because we are reasoners -- was for Kant the only topic whose wonder could compete with that of nature, the "starry skies above."

Guelzo is manifestly familiar with the title of Kant's great work, The Critique of Pure Reason, but he may not have looked inside. The project of the Critique is not to dethrone and replace reason, but to complete it by applying its own scrutiny to itself. To securely ground what we know, we need to understand our reason -- the faculty by which we know. We need to understand its nature and limits. If reason itself is able to comprehend itself in this way, only then is our reasoning rationally stable. On the contrary, if reason applied to itself casts itself into doubt, then all reasoning is undermined. Kant's Critique is ultimately an affirmation of reason because it aims to show that reason can give an account of itself that explains how successful reasoning is possible.

Guelzo doesn't actually use the term "postmodernism" in his discussion but it reminds me of a more widespread error: that of regarding critical reflexiveness in general as a signature of the postmodern, even though it is much older and really universal. In the Critique and the later works it inspired, we're applying reason's critical scrutiny to itself -- for Guelzo, to do this is to basically abolish reason and truth and live in the world of power instead. And in the modern commentarial imaginary, that's what "postmodernism" is. People similarly label as postmodernist fiction that is self-referential or meta-textual -- fiction that is reflexive about its fictional status -- even though again this theme is ancient.³ I don't think this is just a mistake of historical periodization. It's also a failure to recognize what careful thinkers in various traditions have recognized for thousands of years -- that part of the work of reason is to understand its own possibility. Critical reflection is not a late-arriving rebellion against reason but a requirement that comes from reason itself.