It has often been my misfortune, when I attempt to clarify a matter, particularly when I think that an idea or person has been misquoted (either deliberately or innocently), misunderstood (either deliberately or innocently), or misrepresented (again, either deliberately or innocently), that I am accused of defending or supporting the idea or person who has been misquoted, misunderstood, or misrepresented. Indeed, not too long ago I attempted the thankless task — on the Facebook page of an acquaintance — to do just that with respect to some claims made there about Donald Trump. The attacks on me came instantly and intemperately. In the end, my acquaintance called me an “Always Trumper,” even though he knew that I had been a free-market anarchist for nearly 50 years, even though he knew that I had never voted for any presidential candidate, and even though he knew that I had frequently — and to him personally by e-mail — stated what my object was in replying to the claims being made on his Facebook page.

I do not imagine that I am always right when I attempt these clarifications, or even that my attempts are always so clear as to require no further response to one who may honestly not understand what I have said; but even when I am wrong, surely so much as a moment’s thought would suggest that my efforts do not make me a supporter of the idea or person at issue. But that particular fact seems somehow elusive to many readers, from which I conclude that the skill of reading is falling on hard times.

I am about to discuss some famous words of Immanuel Kant, which I insist have sometimes been misunderstood. Given my experience, I hardly expect to escape being called a defender of Kant, but no reader should expect any response from me on that score; I have no patience with readers who will not take me at my word and I leave them to refresh their reading skills with the appropriate Elson-Gray readers.

The passage, from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, is this: “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”

That, at least, is the Kemp-Smith translation (St. Martin’s Press, 1965; Macmillan, 1929; bxxx, by the standard citing protocols for Kant). It is the translation from which Leonard Peikoff quotes in The Ominous Parallels (Stein and Day, 1982 (hardback); New American Library, 1982 (paperback)).

George Smith, who makes use of it in his book The Case against God, and who depends heavily on Rand and Objectivism for philosophical points, is apparently using the Watson translation (John Watson, The Philosophy of Kant, As Contained in Extracts from His Own Writings, Macmillan and Co., 1888) when he quotes Kant thus: “Immanuel Kant wrote that he ‘found it necessary to deny knowledge of God ... in order find a place for faith.’” That ellipsis, by the way, replaces the words “freedom, and immortality.”

Those quotations help explain the vehemence of Ayn Rand whenever she discussed Immanuel Kant. Conjoin them, if you will, to her definition of “faith,” as found in Nathaniel Branden’s “Basic Principles of Objectivism” course (given under her auspices): “Faith is the acceptance of an idea without evidence or proof, without sensory evidence or logical demonstration.” Or consider Peikoff’s definition: “‘Faith’ designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof.” Substitute those definitions for the word “faith” where it occurs in the Kant quotations I have supplied, and you get the idea.

A number of people have written that Rand misunderstood Kant at any number of points, from history to epistemology. That is not my concern here. I suspect, from my own reading of Kant in my philosophy courses at Indiana University, that she is essentially correct in her criticisms of him. The problem with this passage comes in the matter of context. In this case, determine, if you will, to read the Second Preface (from which the famous quotation comes), to get the context of the remark. If you are able to make any sense of it and its assertions and arguments, you are a better man than I.

What I am able to make sense of, however, is this: David Hume’s discussion of the nature of knowledge greatly disturbed Kant. He understood that if Hume was right, virtually no useful knowledge was possible. His Critique of Pure Reason was his effort to save what he could, and to that end he constructed tortured arguments and concepts named with exotic technical terms that simply have no meaning in English, and probably no other language. (I challenge anyone to infer what the phrase transcendental aesthetic means on the basis of a study of the words or their meaning.) In particular, he aimed at supplying a “synthetic a priori” basis for science, and it is at that point that I began to wonder what role “faith,” in the Objectivist sense, could possibly play.

And then I read the Müller translation (Anchor Books, 1966): “I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.”

The German word Kemp-Smith and Watson translated as “faith,” and Müller as “belief,” is der Glaube, which can mean faith (probably in Martin Luther’s, and, for that matter, Rand’s, sense) or belief, or even false ideas, as in the expression lass ihn bei seinem Glauben! (”Leave him to his own illusions!”).

Modern philosophers are wont to define knowledge as “justified, true belief,” and in that sense, the division between belief and knowledge (but not faith and knowledge) becomes almost nonexistent. (I do not, by the way, accept that definition.)

James Kiefer has already discussed at length certain misunderstandings in Branden’s lectures concerning “faith.” I think, however, that he was a little hard on Branden. I am very much familiar with the definition Branden and Rand give to “faith.” Throughout all my years as a young atheist, I encountered it over and over whenever I discussed the existence of God with my peers, most of whom were Protestants, and in some cases Pentecostal or charismatic Protestants. These days I sometimes enjoy listening to Protestant radio programming, and many of the preachers continue to use the term in much the same sense as Rand and Branden. And it is not unusual for Catholics, if not St. Thomas Aquinas, to use the term in that same sense.

This is not to fault Kiefer’s discussion, which fills a needed lacuna in most people’s understanding of what faith is and how theologians have understood it. After all, it is held by Catholic theology to be one of the Seven Virtues, and must therefore bear some relation to the will. One priest of my acquaintance, asked to define “faith,” said that it was “doing what you know to be right, and believing what you know to be true.”

By that definition, there can surely be nothing wrong with faith, and it should be obvious that it is not what Immanuel Kant was talking about. It is also not what Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Leonard Peikoff, or any other bearer of the Objectivist torch is talking about.

I note in passing that “believing what you know to be true” — just like “doing what you know to be right” — is not always as easy to do as it sounds. Believing what one knows to be true, too, is a matter of full focus and engages the will.

As with “sacrifice” (q.v. here), Rand’s discussion of faith, in her sense, is helpful to a young mind negotiating the rapids of modern society and, in most cases, the demands of his parents, to say nothing of drawing attention to the calamities it has visited upon all of society. She has taught us many useful things about faith, and for that we must be grateful to her. Our error would be in thinking that she taught us all there was to know about the word and its romps through philosophy.