Introduction

Immanuel Kant represents the high watermark of Enlightenment ambition—a philosopher who sought not merely to ask questions, but to create permanent scaffolding for truth, knowledge, and morality. His system is elegant in its internal consistency: the phenomenal world is knowable through structured intuition; the noumenal world, though forever beyond our grasp, can still anchor our moral duties. Autonomy, for Kant, is the foundation of dignity Reason is the tool that rescues humanity from superstition, impulse, and heteronomy.

Fracturism emerges centuries later, after the cathedrals of reason have cracked, their foundations eroded by war, ecological collapse, algorithmic capitalism, and the psychological fragmentation of postmodern life. It does not argue that Kant was wrong per se—it argues that he was building in a more vstable time. Where Kant posits structures, Fracturism sees fractures. Where he designs for universality, Fracturism designs for collapse. In this way, their shared project—human dignity through internal authorship—mutates under pressurecinto two radically different philosophies.