individual human life

Few modern philosophers have contributed so much to devalue individual human life as Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, man cannot reach truth by his own means. His knowledge is subjective and made up of mere persuasions. It is the crowd which sanctions what is true and what is false. Compared to the crowd each man is a nobody.

Kant destroyed the idea of a man's personality. According to his philosophy, your views about truth and the world have the same value as those of anybody else - that is, they have no (objective) value at all. Do not search for truth within yourself because you will not find it. The life of the spirit is an illusion which Kant himself ridiculed in his book Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Truth lies outside yourself and with the crowd.

Kant's philosophy of knowledge leads to the idea of an impersonal God. God never illuminates you, He only illuminates the crowd. There is no truth in you which does not exist in everybody else. Your death does not represent a great loss to humanity because we are still left with many millions of people like you. It is not a surprise that following in Kant's steps it was in Germany that were produced the two ideologies - communism and nazism - which over the last hundred years killed people by the millions.

This philosophy is in sharp contrast with Catholic doctrine. Here, man can reach truth by his own means - reason and faith. The Catholic God is thus a personal God, He does illuminate you, and this makes you different from everybody else. Your death represents an irreplaceable loss because your life is unique, therefore valuable.

The difference between the two philosophies can be seen imagining a father with many children. In Kant's view the father only cares for the group whereas in the Catholic view the father cares for each one of his children individually. If one of them dies, this is a great loss according to the Catholic view because the father lost a unique child among all of his children. In the Kantian view the father does not experience a great loss at all - he just lost one among the many children of his.