The Roots of Unreason

Plato asserted that objective reality (the ideas) – the permanent and unchangeable ideal world – could be known through mystic insight and relegated empirical data to the unstable and illusory world of consciousness. A similar worldview, though rather implicit, vague and vulgarized than philosophically explicit, can be found in most world religions, including Christianity. For his part, Kant claimed that objective reality (noumena in his terminology) was not knowable and that only the world of phenomena (consciousness) could be known. Hegel scrapped the noumena and kept the protean and illusory phenomenal world (the Geist, the mind, consciousness), implying that nothing else exists. Marx left most of Hegel’s principles intact and only renamed the Geist to matter, yielding to the materialist fashion of the time.