Like Rousseau often erroneously categorised as part of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant ((1724-1804)) in his mindset is entirely
subjectivist: in his Second Preface of the first "Critique of Pure Reason" he writes that he found it "necessary to deny
knowledge in order to make room for faith," hardly the words of a scientific thinker. Needless to say that his subsequent
philosophical findings supported subjectivism.
Kant was an austere Lutheran Pietist and a great admirer of Rousseau''s. The individual to him represented little more than a miserable sinner in need of a strong master, only good as canon-fodder to teach him some morals.
Kant foresees in a teleological progress towards an end-game by means of strive, war and discord. This causes man as a species - Kant''s operative unit - to grow to a more ethically evolved order. The process will ultimately culminate in a world government, an international and cosmopolitan federation of states, pending the coming of the Day of Judgment. This is the Hidden Plan of Nature, according to Kant. Unlike his postmodern counterparts Kant displays a sense in realism in fearing that the universal state of peace would be an even greater threat than the old, chaotic world order. Such a power monopoly might well become "the most horrible despotism."
Once a trinity - body, mind, and soul - only the mind and body dualism survived. Perhaps because it reflects so well the macro and microcosm, male and female, thesis and antithesis, reason and emotions, yin and yang, male and female, matter and anti-matter, heaven and earth, the divine and nature. Man''s microcosm appears to be mirroring the dualistic conflict in the universe. This tends to identify the mind with the soul, giving rise to visualizing the mind as non-physical pure substance, distinct from the physical organs and brain. Rather then thinking of them as tools to knowledge, this leads us to view the senses and the brain as obstacles, standing in the way between the mind and reality.
Moreover, some sensorial imperfections (colour blindness, for example) in some people induced Kant, in a gesture typical for the movement, to declare the senses unsound tools to knowledge overall. To illustrate the Kantian position on the separation of the mind from reality, Hicks makes a feminist analogy: to support Kant is to state that women are absolutely autonomous and free to do as they please, as long as it is within the confines of the kitchen; Kant imprisons the mind in the skull and isolates it from the real world.
Irony strikes once more! The Counter-Enlighteners, who sought to prevent the godless, spiritless and amoral future that would be the result of reason and individualism, have brought about precisely that by Kant''s imprisonment of the mind. Hicks: "Once reason is in principle severed from reality, one enters a different philosophical universe altogether." As if that was not enough surreality for one Counter philosopher, Kant also held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa.
Defying the postmodern false dichotomy of reason versus religion, Catholics do not think of their faith as ''against reason'' or irrational. This is perhaps because the Scholastic Thomas of Aquinas (details) built an exciting philosophical system based on sensorial knowledge and Aristotlerianism.
Thomist Anthony Rizzi in "Science before Science: a Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century" laments Kant''s now codified Idealism, "the default declared position in academia and in nearly all other environments. Kant''s success is partly explained by his tying his philosphical system to Newtonian physics <... which he wanted to> have a certainty that it did not have. However, Kant thought that one could not know the thing itself (...) Kant and Kantians múst say, "Kant doesn''t know anything about anything." Such is always the end of the matter when one forgets that all knowledge in man comes through the senses. We non-Kantians can be simultaneously more accurate and kinder; we can say, "The foundational principles of Kant''s philosophical system were wrong, but still he knew a lot of other things." This enthusiasm is at once tempered by a footnote: "Many attribute to Kant a developed skill in physics. Physisist and renowned philosopher and historian of science, Fr. Stanley Jaki has shown that Kant''s knowledge and ability in physics was minimal (though Kant considered himself another Newton) (...) the book
is a storehouse of inaccuracies, contradictions and amateurism and plain fancy." What else is new in subjectivism?