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.
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