The Kantian Shop Floor

Cedar Eighteen Months Later

 A clearer explanation of yesterday's ramble through the thorns of Schlegel's contribution to my struggle with Conservative Norms, Mind and Society is clearly required. You can't just claim "Livelihood" is sacred, "Standard of Living" is profane and then proceed to have a sulk about Henry the Eighth's rape of the Monasteries without first offering a contextual framework to what Can Bobby has taken to calling "Our Kantian Shop floor."

 What is a Kantian Shop floor?

 Kant is described as a Transcendental Idealist. He was a Prussian Mr. Enlightenment. His argument at the end of 1700's was that because we are reasonable creatures we can think in a way that most other animals can't and as a result we do not have to live lives dominated by reflex reactions, our thoughts move in less instinctual and more deliberative ways. He also had a Critique of Pure Reason, which argued that in us, reason wasn't the answer to everything, even though our thought patterns were structured and reason was more profound than a substitute for instinct, reason could not answer every question, rather it was the way we creatures who possessed reason went about answering questions.

 Then one day an Evolutionary Psychologist said, "OK chaps! This is easy! Jealousy is all about how our males dutifully protect the purity of their genetic contribution to the future of our species." The enlightened's answer to that is "Bull Crap Sinbad!" And  I have argued that if you want to fight about the point blank error in Sinbad's happy go lucky approach to academic funding then you might be retarded.

 A "Kantian Shop Floor" reflects an understanding of us people that better aligns with a transcendental view of the human being that views us people in the way that the Stoics might, as opposed to the transactional view of the human being that views us as the hedonist might. And here the Stoics reflect an understanding of boundaries as preserving the ultimate happiness of the sacred. Hedonists may be jolly good fun but their boundlessness reflects the ultimate hangover of the profane. 

 In our exploration of Schlegel's transition from a Romanticism that saw the liberation of the body and the mind as a prime objective to a form of Romanticism that viewed white Catholic Nationalism as central to the release of the German Folk from the chains of foreign oppression and a return to a predestined purity of purpose, we hit on an understanding of the Sacred and the Profane which has shaken both Baxter and I to what remains of our yellow core.

 In an effort to recenter ourselves we had micro-waved cheese on toast and dreamed of beer, cigarettes, dancing girls and deep fried potato sandwiches smothered in salt and vinegar. 

Stoic Resignation or Transcendental Rebellion

Decor

 On any of the more vibrant Symbolic Orders of meaning, sacred and profane are both old hats. "Livelihood" is sacred. "Standard of Living" is profane. "Livelihood," implies an economy that values status and security. "Standard of Living," implies an economy of growth and income. As such you'd have to be retarded not to grasp that an ever improving profane is impossible but an ever improving sacred is possible. Go ahead, kick me to the curb, tell me I'm wrong, sack the monastery, sell the lead from the roof.

Boffing the Pool Boy

A Pool

 The argument from Kant is that because we people are reasonable we have a transcendental nature that enables us to transcend what the Enlightenment might have called "The Phenomenal Realm," but which Sociobiologists, evolutionary Psychiatrists, washing powder manufacturers and the Epstein Class would call "Biological Programming."

 In this area of "Boffing the Pool Boy" we have talked about how boundaries are a necessary reality for the "Sacred." It's always worth  having a look at Enlightenment ideas about the place the word "Sacred" has on the Symbolic Order. The enlightened argument was that everything in the world has either a Price or a Dignity. Something has a "Price" if it can be replaced by an equivalent. If something's irreplaceable then it has a "Dignity" and it's meaning ventures into the meanings of "Sacred."

 In Pool Boy Language, when you look at the face and don't see meat, instead see a person, the Pool Boy becomes "Sacred." The jealous other might vehemently disagree and in their demand for an obedience to boundaries request the death penalty but that still doesn't prevent the enlightened from seeing the Pool Boy as  creature capable of transcending biology from possessing "Dignity"and being "Sacred."

 The question goes this way : is an infidelity a breach of contract, a "Price" problem, or is it a desecration of the sacred, a "Dignity" problem. The answer cannot escape the emotion of jealousy, which as an emotion may be thought of as a transcendental creature screaming for the loss of an irreplaceable "Dignity." Or a transactional creature screaming for an adequate recompense that will replace what's been lost.

 Of the two, it should be pretty obvious where the Epstein Class has chosen to belong, and in my view no accident they all seem to be rich and famous.

Give Kant a Chance'

Foxglove

 Yesterday we risked an emotional breakdown by mentioning and then using a sociobiologist description of the origins of jealousy in us hominids to explore the difficulties Schlegel had in his attempt to emancipate the flesh in his personal life and in his novel, Lucinde. Yesterday was an uncomfortable and frustrating experience.

 So let's get this straight. Three to four million years ago at the moment when our hominids and chimpanzees went their separate ways, the men of the creature that became us people started getting bigger and more aggressive and our children started taking longer and longer to leave the nest to fend for themselves. Even back then, apparently the males of our species spent a lot of time obsessing on their Paternal line. If a chap had to put a lot of time and money into rearing a child, even if that child only had one leg, that child had better be his and not the Pool Boy's, or whatever. It wasn't just boys, the girls too had to spend valuable time raising children and the prospect of losing a prime source of food and protection inclined girls toward aggressive behaviors whenever hubby's eye wandered. Sociobiologists seem to be stuck in the 1950's and have of course unashamedly concluded that one of the results of this dramatic biological change to tall men short women was the emergence of jealousy in us people. Worth remembering that only 10 to 12 thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture, a change that was accompanied by increased stratification, property rights, accumulations of inheritable wealth in our expanding societies and monotheistic linear thinking that produces such abominations as triadic thought processes that demand the discovery, or invention, of a cohesive whole on the straight line that sociobiologists and the frail lust after.

 The obvious question is this : What would Kant say to the hubris of sociobiologists?

 He'd stamp his Lutheran foot, he'd say "F-that" and remind these inheritors of the enlightenment that the existence of an internal law does not mean biology, it points to something beyond the biology of an animal reaction to the visual of someone else boffing the girlfriend and  suggests we people put value on things that are much more than simply useful.

 Go ahead, say mean things about Kant's almost complete absence of a personal life, he was no Schopenhauer, but in my world the best reason to read and try to understand Kant, is the fluidity he demands from the Ten Commandment-esque quality of Newtonian mathematics, and the consequent attempts to find certainty in most cathedrals of learning that's led to us people becoming either commodities for, or the playthings of, an oligarchic class of sub-par hominids more closely related to the pre-ape Old World Monkeys such as the Olive Baboon, than is comfortable.

 We all know that Immanuel Kant might have had the odd glass of Port, thought beer a source of "taciturn fantasies and impolite behaviors," but otherwise he was a life long bachelor preferring the routine of a disciplined intellectual life to anything remotely resembling the patter of tiny feet. His views on marriage and sex was to advise a legally binding contract that maintained mutual respect rather than allowing individuals to be treated as mere objects.

 And Oh Yes! We're talking about who to blame for the disappearance of the enlightenment.