In the words of Ed Hudgins – the interviewer in the article you linked me to: “Shermer isn’t an Objectivist but considers himself friendly to the philosophy.” (http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6605)

That is fine and I would say the same about me. I hope you understand thaough, that judging from the fact that you made this wrong claim about the relatively easy case of Shermer, I would need very strong arguments now to convince me of your claims about Kant being correct. But since you do not feel it is a good investment of your time I will not press you for it.

I can show it to you that Kant is anti-reason and anti-science using his own words, without Rand’s help. But I believe my time is better spent on more productive matters.

By all means read “Critique of Pure Reason”. I recommend the Cambridge combined first and second edition, edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. It has lots of background information and some commentary too. You will need all of that and more. Try A “Kant Dictionary” by Howard Caygill.

And when reading them keep in mind that words are not ideas. Words are only labels for ideas. If Kant says he supports Vernunft (”reason”) and Ayn Rand says she supports reason, do not assume they mean the same thing. In this case, they definitely don’t. They have about as much relation to each other as a quadraplegic has to an Olympic runner.

She has the same tendency in her prose. It is just not an accurate representation of reality.

Kant – essentially – restated Platonism in enlightenment terms. In doing so he said that reason will only ever be able to approximate actual reality – that reason is useless, is put in his mouth by Rand/Peikoff’s who believe(d) in universal absolutes beyond first principles. It is never ever said by him in any way shape or form. It is Rand’s absolutism which invalidates her philosophy and turned it into a cult (http://www.2think.org/02_2_she.shtml).

As she said herself:

“I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.”

Her problem was that she thought herself unerring not only in her axioms, but in her conclusions which elevated her conclusions unjustly to eternally valid givens. The very idea of an error in reason, once an issue was thought out by her, was seen as an impossibility. Here she was clearly and tragically wrong.

As to which of the two to follow, Kant’s basic guideline on human behavior is that man should do whatever makes him suffer. Even the act of self-sacrifice is rendered amoral if it is done with any personal motivation whatsoever, even if that motivation is the desire to be moral.

Duty, according to Kant, is the only proper motivation, and duty inherently means doing that which you strongly desire not to do. The stronger your desire not to do something, the more moral you are for doing it. Morality = Frustration.

BTW, there is one thing that you have to understand when you say that Ayn Rand has said that Kant said X (that being whatever Kant said). When Ayn Rand says that Kant says something, she is giving it to you in clear-cut, essential terms. If you have read any Kant you’d quickly find that nothing Kant said was ever stated as clearly as Ayn Rand has made it.

This is not to say that Ayn Rand was ever wrong about Kant, far from it, she was dead on. But Kant buried the actual progressions, reasonings, deductions and conclusions of his philosophy under such pounds of intestinal verbiage, you simply have to read it to get any sense of it.

Yes, he did say what I claimed he said. But, you have to dig it up yourself if you really want to know what he actually said. It is more of a culmination of his philosophy, and it starts in his metaphysics, and ends in the horrific ethics.

–Start Quote–
My reasons as to why I choose to be rationally selfish instead of merely rational is because the Immanuel Kant’s redefinition of altruism used by Christians destroyed the best years of my life.
–End Quote–

I said it. Rand does explain why she chose to redefine selfishness in the introduction to “Virtue of Selfishness”