Ever since the inception of human inquiry, there has been no
short supply of radicals and lunatics attempting to pass off their
whim-begotten absurdities as truth and profound insight. There are relatively
few philosophers however, who could have been considered not just insane, but
genuinely wicked. Among them, I would include both the political philosopher
Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant. While Marx’s atrocious political philosophy has already been addressed in a previous post, his evil cannot be overstated. Any
historical instance in which Marx’s political philosophy was put into practice
resulted in catastrophe and woe. Because all individuals share a natural
tendency towards self-interest, communism, as envisioned by Marx is a physical
and epistemological impossibility.
However poisonous Marx’s philosophy, it pales in comparison
to the heinous vomit spewed forth by the likes of Immanuel Kant. Arguably, Kant
was the most despicable figure in all of human history; his philosophy was shot
through with a twisted, spiteful hatred and his heart was an aggregate of
rotten flesh upon which maggots gnawed and in which evil festered. A
consideration of the way Kant lived would stand testament to his hatred of
mankind and of life in general. He never left the town in which he was born
(modern-day Kalingrad, Russia), and lived a dreadfully complacent
lifestyle—following the same rigid schedule every day until he finally died in
an advanced state of dementia at the age of 79. Having never truly experienced
anything to warrant the slightest of interest, his writings betray the
convoluted thoughts of a mind corroded by solitude and a bitter intensity of
spite for his fellow man.
In his book Groundwork
for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant defined his quintessential theory called The Categorical Imperative. The theory conjectures that an action
is only considered moral if it could be set as a universal law for all humanity
to follow. According to Kant, the consequences of an action are irrelevant; it
is only the actor’s intention that determines an act’s ethical validity, not
its outcome. Because all human beings act in respect to independent moral maxims (that
which an individual holds as his own moral values), he believed that it is
immoral to use another human being as a means to our own ends. To anyone with a
modicum of intellect, the glaring lunacy of the categorical imperative should
be self-evident.
Just in case it is not, consider the following thought-experiment. You are teleported back in time to 1970’s Illinois and the infamous
serial killer John Wayne Gacy is standing right in front of you. You have a gun
in your hand. Given a priori
knowledge of the depraved crimes he will commit, it would seem like a
justifiable act to kill Gacy and thus prevent his future murders from taking place.
However, if you were to apply Kant’s Categorical Imperative, killing Gacy,
Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Justin Bieber, or any other psychopathic monster would
be wrong only because the act of murder could not be safely set as a universal
law for all human beings to follow. Because killing John Wayne Gacy would be
using him as a means to an end, Kant would have rather let him pursue his
killing spree. The sheer lunacy of this logic should be obvious.
An adherence to the categorical imperative as a way of life
would lead to the corrosion of individuality. Kant’s philosophy envisions a
world in which all men are enslaved to one another—nobody would ever rise above
a state of blind, castrated complacency in fear of using another human as a
means rather than an end. Immanuel Kant’s philosophy epitomizes human
stagnation in a moral sense, while Marx’s epitomized it in an economic sense.
Both were vile and despicable and would best be disregarded altogether from the
realm of legitimate philosophical discourse.
