3.4 From Kant To Feuerbach
Last modified 06/07/2008
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Hegel can be a confusing thinker unless seen in the context of German classical
philosophy as a whole. Then the appearance of Kant (and Rousseau) at the moment
of the great divide stands out as the equal generator of leftist considerations.
We have but to consider the implications of Kant's ethical deliberations on the
categorical imperative in the sense of a 'kingdoms of ends' to find that stolid
Protestant devotional a drastic revolutionary by the force of unwitting logic
alone. In any case, his system of transcendental idealism is the right starting
point for discussions of the enigma of the eonic effect and its operation on
different levels of action. And unmatched is Kant's formulation of the riddle of
human freedom in the context of Newtonian causal scientism. The subsequent
episodes of Hegelianism are hard pressed to transcend the problems indicated in
that starting point. Whatever the case, the rough and ready match of Newtonian
foundations to a projected discourse on the noumenal character of freedom in
relation to its temporal manifestation finds in the eonic model a match of
dynamics to the facts that should lead us to reconsider the gyrations between
idealism and materialism that tear apart the generation of the socialist birth
which ends with the Marxist embrace of an inadequate Feuerbachian termination of
Hegelianism. Kant is the classic liberal at his most classic and echoes a logic
of republicanism that will surface in perfect concert at the Great Divide. Kant
is also a reminder that the fate of modernity is bound up in the need to
complete or transcend the initial phase of the Protestant Reformation, whose
structural position in the modern transition gives it a sturdiness that will
rival anything the left might hope to produce as it is allied with the late
decay of modernist philosophy into technological scientism. Hegel well
understood this crucial positioning of the Protest Reformation, and its
fulfillment in philosophical modernism is a fitting endgame to the convulsion of
Axial religions confronting the modern transition. That the Reformation finds
one completion in the wake of Hegel and another in the brilliant recasting of
ancient sutras in Schopenhauer and still another in the wake of the left is a
useful insight into the integrated nature of the modern transition, and we might
consider the Kantian deliberations on the issues of 'religion in the light of
reason' and see that its cascading exemplars must include the almost religious
character of the arising left, bequeathed the tasks of equalization so evident
in the momentum of the Axial religions, soon to become theocratic churches
coopting the basic thrust of religion formation with the religious ideologies of
elite statism.
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