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.
