The A Priori Fallacy of Kant

Dialectics was the most important part of Socrates’ philosophy, of which the Socratic dialogue is the only part that is understood by academics. Its most important parts are the metaphysical principles that he established, such as:

• the immortality of the soul and its reincarnation
• the pantheist God (Brahma) as the source of all souls
• the superiority of the metaphysical over the physical
• and so on

Nowadays, dialectics seems to be understood to be an exercise in logic, without any reference to metaphysical truths, God, or problem-solving. The culprit is the 19th century, specifically the German philosophers led by Kant who established a corrupted version of a priori knowledge.

The Error in Kant’s Definition

Like most philosophers, Kant divides all knowledge as experiential (a posteriori), and non-experiential (a priori). Traditionally:

• a priori means ‘before experience’
  • Omniscience, prediction, prophecy, and intuition all fall under this, because you know something in advance before it actually happens
• a posteriori means ‘after experience’
  • This is how we normally know things – by experiencing them, either directly (as in seeing things) or indirectly (as in education or someone else telling you what they saw or know)

However, he makes a very subtle but corrupting addition that a priori knowledge is that not experienced by onself, but may be experienced by others.

So Kant’s “a priori knowledge” is really “a-posteriori-knowledge-from-others”.

It would be calling a man who has decided to become a female as a ‘woman’ just because that’s how he wants to be seen. But the word ‘woman’ does not really match the man’s nature and is false or a sophistry.

Fallacies and lies do not support themselves and need to be supported by other fallacies in a chain. Kant supports the a priori fallacy by adding the idea of pure and impure a priori.

This makes something non-empirical as somewhat empirical. Refering to our man-woman example, this is like calling the man as an ‘impure woman’ instead of calling him as a man.

So What’s the Big Deal?

The problem is that it corrupts the definition of knowledge and facts by mixing it, like mixed fruit, with opinions and beliefs:

• knowledge and facts are demonstrative and real
• opinions and beliefs may or may not be real

To solve this non-problem, academics had to create “Epistemology” which is supposed to re-separate fact from opinion. This then adds unnecessary effort when the whole problem could have been avoided by not mixing up fact and opinion in the first place.

Academics and intellectuals would then create courses on useless epistemology to give employment to themselves.

The original tool to split fact from opinion is called dialectics and already was doing its job just fine, simply by accepting arguments that can offer proofs. Nowadays, this is seen in peer-reviews. Notice how Kant even tries to destroy the intellectually-democratic tool of dialectics:

When a person reviews your research paper, it is true that that person is showing the content of his cognitions, and none of yours. It is true that this allows him to oppose your own assertions and cognitions. But such steps are essential to creating knowledge, or separating fact from fiction.

It is used to make sure that your observations are also observed by other people and are not arbitrary*.

Let’s Get Technical

Normally, what Kant calls impure a priori knowledge is called a posteriori knowledge from memory.

But this memory would destroy his idea of transendence. And so, he disregards memory and instead places the fact or idea within the metaphysical soul itself.

If each soul were a laptop, then Kant’s system would force all laptops to save everything to a cloud server, as the Transcendental Memory, instead of to its own local memory.

In such a case, the laptop is a ‘thin-client’ and is a mere extension of the cloud server and not an independent computer.

• Its new data comes a posteriori from its keyboard and mic
• Its old data comes a priori from the cloud server itself (which matches Kant’s definition)

Instead of the laptop doing the normal logic and processing of its old data and ideas, it would be done by the Transcendent cloud server and merely fed down to the laptop. The powerful server would then have more resources to do its own kind of Transcendent Analysis and Transcendent Logic that is superior to the logic of the tiny laptop.

But this is what Theology and organized religions do.

Kant is like an overeager software developer who invents and documents a lot of useless schemas and counterintuitive definitions to create his own transcendent virtual universe confined only by his fallacy of time. As such, he has no proposition on multiverses, teleportation, nor time travel.

A person who is sensitive to sophistry can see this scientific-sounding dogma being planted by Kant. This is obvious is his arbitrary defintion of goodness in his “categorical imperative”:

Thus, Kant ends up defning good and bad arbitrarily according to his whim, just as the Church defined it as they liked.

What theologians call ‘God’, Kant calls Pure Reason. Both God and Pure Reason need no experiential proof, and there is no room for debate or dialectics regarding them. Both Theology and Pure Reason have no practical use since their meat is in the abstract or theoretical dimension only.

Both theolgians and epistemologists gain revenue by selling books and a fee or tithe from its believers or students as college debt. Theologians were then known as mendicant scholars, just as epistemologists are known as philosophers flipping burgers.

Kant’s smart-sounding words draw in unthinking students just as the authoritative theological assertions drew in the weak-minded.

In contrast, in the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, the good is defined as the common interest. This common interest can only be known by getting all the a posteriori perceptions of pleasure and pain of all entities throughout space and time.

To know what is good or evil, the enlightened system gets the opinions of everyone, even criminals and terrorists, so that the flow or the Tao of all feelings and perceptions can be known. A compromise can then be created to bring back harmony as dharma.

Kant bypasses the perceptions of entities and goes directly to Providence, leading to arbitrariness. He would support the willpower of a good country invading a bad country to impose its version of goodness, as proven in his essay called Groundwork and Perpetual Peace.

Together with Nietzsche, it helps explain why Germany kept on invading countries in WWI and WWII under the idea of spreading its Nazi-goodness to inferior races, by sheer willpower.

In terms of practicality, Kantianism’s main rival, Objectivism, is superior simply because its meat is in the physical dimension as material objectives. It’s easy to see objectivist-philosophers being rich economists, bankers, and CEOs. Even Marxist-philosophers (dialectical-materialists) sometimes become national leaders. But who has ever heard of a Kantian president or world leader?