Such an extreme warping of Enlightenment ideas about knowledge is a bit like saying that the Catholic Church has just got to stop pushing its radical atheist agenda on us. The last thing the Enlightenment aimed to do was overthrow the very idea of intellectual and moral authorities. Rather, it was about insisting that any authority must be established by arguments that can be evaluated by others exercising their cognitive capacities—the antithesis of subjectivism. The Enlightenment thinkers set out to engage in precisely that endeavor; far from leaving it to every person to invent the wheel for himself, they wrote with the aim of earning their own authority.

Crawford assigns Immanuel Kant a major role in the grand theft perpetrated by the thinkers whom he accuses of entrapping us in our unanchored inner selves, inattentive to all else, and so rendered helpless captives of advertisers, technocrats, and manipulators of all kinds. (These manipulators, by the way, must be paying us quite assiduous attention in order to know how to work us so well. How, I wonder, have they escaped Kant’s baleful influence? And have they thereby achieved their better selves?) According to Crawford, Kant was so desperate to keep his will autonomous, unchecked by all the things that might condition it—which amounted to everything and everyone not identical with himself—that he consigned them all to a quasi-existence of ghostly abstractions. “Kant’s metaphysics of freedom is at the very core of our modern understanding of how we relate to the world beyond our heads,” Crawford writes. Kant’s free will, in other words, was purchased for the whopping price of dissociation from our material and social environment, and we’re all paying that price. Well, not all of us, but we who aren’t marching in Crawford’s parade of manually skilled workers and practiced athletes, or riding out the narcissistic age astride a motorcycle. They’re the few who escape the distracted blur to which Kant condemned us.

Yet if, as Crawford admonishes us, carefully training our attention on more than the surface of things is a moral necessity, then Crawford indicts himself. Instead of offering a few cherry-picked quotes, he might have paused to take a closer look at Kant’s categorical imperative—the centerpiece of his moral reasoning. Kant formulated the tenet in two ways. The first is that you must act only according to a moral law that you could universalize as a law for all others—a way of ensuring that you aren’t giving undue weight to your own interests, and at the same time a means of forcing you to hold yourself accountable to others. The second is that others must be viewed as ends in themselves, never as means to an end. Does that sound like the thinking of a man determined to let nothing obstruct his personal will? Does it sound like a worldview that has paved the way for our oblivion to the reality of others as we grope about in our daze? For Kant, it is the structure of morality that is autonomous, unconditioned by any facts external to itself. But that structure exists outside our heads, accessible to each of us through the exercise of our powers of thought—under guidance, of course, from Kant.