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appearances, is limited to describing a surface world of man’s own creation and says nothing about things as they really are.
    Must men then resign themselves to a total skepticism? No, says Kant, there is one means of piercing the barrier between man and existence. Since reason, logic, and science are denied access to reality, the door is now open for men to approach reality by a different, nonrational method. The door is now open to faith. Taking their cue from their needs, men can properly believe (for instance, in God and in an after-life), even though they cannot prove the truth of their beliefs. And no matter how powerful the rational argument against their faith, that argument can always be dismissed out-of-hand : one need merely remind its advocate that rational knowledge and rational concepts are applicable only to the world of appearances, not to reality.
    In a word, reason having been silenced, the way is cleared once more for an orgy of mystic fantasy. (The name of this orgy, the philosophic term for the nineteenth-century intellectuals’ revolt against reason and the Enlightenment, is: romanticism.) “I have,” writes Kant, “therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” 4
    Kant also found it necessary to deny happiness, in order to make room for duty. The essence of moral virtue, he says, is selflessness—selfless, lifelong obedience to duty, without any expectation of reward, and regardless of how much it might make one suffer.
    Kant’s attack on reason, this world, and man’s happiness was the decisive turning point. As the main line of modern philosophy rapidly absorbed his basic tenets, the last elements of the Aristotelian approach were abandoned, particularly in Germany. Philosophers turned as a group to variants of Platonism, this time an extreme, militant Platonism, a Platonism shorn of its last vestiges of respect for reason.
    It is Kant who made possible the sudden mushrooming of the Platonic collectivism in the modern world, and especially in Germany. Kant is not a full-fledged statist, but a philosopher’s political views, to the extent that they contradict the essentials of his system, have little historical significance. Kant accepts certain elements of individualism, not because of his basic approach, but in spite of it, as a legacy of the Enlightenment period in which he lived. This merely suggests that Kant did not grasp the political implications of his own metaphysics and epistemology.
    His heirs, however, did. A line of German romanticist philosophers followed Kant in the nineteenth century, each claiming to be his true follower, each avid for a reality beyond this world and a means of knowledge beyond reason, each contributing his share to the growth of an impassioned collectivism that poisoned the intellectual atmosphere of Germany. The most famous of these men, the most influential, the ruling figure of nineteenth-century philosophy, was Hegel.
    Hegel is a post-Kantian Platonist. Taking full advantage of the anti-Aristotelianism sanctioned by Kant, Hegel launches an attack on the root principles of Aristotle’s philosophy: on the principles of Aristotelian logic (which even Kant had not dared to challenge directly). Reality, declares Hegel, is inherently contradictory; it is a systematic progression of colliding contradictions organized in triads of thesis, antithesis, synthesis—and men must think accordingly. They should not strive for old-fashioned, “static” consistency. They should not be “limited” by the “one-sided” Aristotelian view that every existent has a specific identity, that things are what they are, that A is A. On the contrary, they owe their ultimate allegiance to a higher principle: the principle of the “identity of opposites,” the principle that things are not what they are, that A is non-A.
    Hegel describes the above as a new conception of “reason,” and as a new, “dialectic” logic.
    On its basis he