a collective delusion

"I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief". This is hardly a statement that a rationalist or a scientist would ever make. It looks much more like a statement written by a mysticist. It was written by Kant in the Preface to the Second Edition of The Critique of Pure Reason.

A few lines before he had expressed another of his puzzling thesis: "(...) we are indebted to a criticism which warns us of our unavoidable ignorance with regard to things in themselves, and establishes the necessary limitations of our theoretical cognition to mere phenomena".

Not only Kant amputates reason to make room for faith. He also explicitly states that human reason is not capable of knowing reality (noumena or things in themselves). It can only know its appearances (phenomena). For a man who is sometimes called the father of modern rationalism, the least that can be said is that he did not have human reason in very high regard.

According to Kant, the perception that men have of the world is never real, but only phenomenal. Perception takes place through certain categories of the mind (such as space and time) which are given a priori. It is this machinery of the mind that creates representations of things (phenomena), which are different from things in themselves (noumena). Phenomena are products of the human mind, not products of reality: "It is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes representation possible", writes Kant.

Thus, in the Kantian system, knowledge is a subjective experience as it originates in man's mind, not in reality itself. This is what makes Kant a subjectivist. The next question to ask is: How can I be sure that my knowledge is true? At this point, Kant's epistemology takes an unexpected collectivistic turn. Since the categories of the mind are common to all men, the truth of a judgement depends on the collective agreeing that it is true:

"The holding of a thing to be true is a phenomenon in our understanding which may rest on objective grounds, but requires, also, subjective causes in the mind of the person judging. If a judgement is valid for every rational being, then its ground is objectively sufficient, and it is termed a conviction. If, on the other hand, it has its grounds in the particular character of the subject, it is termed a persuasion.

Persuasion is a mere illusion, the ground of the judgement, which lies solely in the subject, being regarded as objective. Hence a judgement of this kind has only private validity - is only valid for the individual who judges, and the holding of a thing to be true in this way cannot be communicated. But truth depends upon agreement with the object, and consequently the judgement of all understandings, if true, must be in agreement with each other (consententia uni tertio consentiunt inter se). Conviction may, therefore, be distinguished from an external point of view, from persuasion, by the possibility of communicating it and by showing its validity for the reason of every man; for in this case the presumption, at least, arises that the agreement of all judgements with each other, in spite of the different characters of the individuals, rests upon the common ground of the agreement of each with the object, and thus the correctness of the judgement is established" (1) (bold mine).

Truth, says Kant, depends upon agreement with the object. However, since we can never know objects (noumena) but only representations of them (phenomena), I can never say on my own grounds that my judgement is true. I need the support of other people, concurring with my judgement, to declare it to be true. Thus, in Kant's view, the criterion of truth is switched from the objective to the collective. As Leonard Peikoff has pointed out "Kant ushered in an era of social subjectivism - the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality" (2). And since the agreement of all judgements that is the criterion of truth refers not to things in themselves (noumena), but only to their appearances (phenomena), it follows that, in the Kantian system, truth is a collective delusion.

(1) Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., p. 240.
(2) Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, N. York: The New American Library, 1982, p. 64.