|
Once upon a time, there was a law- and duty-mad philosopher of purely
theocentric reason whose name will forever remain a four-letter word.
He —sex being relevant here— was and continued to be
considered the greatest of modern thinkers by religious idealists and
their parroting friends.
Here are a few things Mr K*nt, the man in question, ejaculated with
regard to what he proclaimed the most serious moral issue:
"It is an unnatural vice, which by its form (the attitude embodied in it)
seems to surpass even self-murder in its viciousness."
"The thought of it stirs up an aversion from this thought to such an
extent that we consider it indecent even to call this vice by its proper
name."
"It is an unnatural vice which degrades one's own person beneath the
beasts."
"Such an unnatural use (and so misuse) of one's sexual power is a
violation of duty to oneself and, indeed, one which is contrary
to morality in the highest degree."
"The agent thus uses his sexual power for mere animal pleasure,
without regard for its purpose." []
What the hell was this philosopher, while, as usual,
studiously staring at his church steeple, pontificating on?
On masturbation; or, to be precise, single-handed masturbation by
boys and men — 'carnal self-defilement', as he and his lot had so
keenly christened it!
Mr K*nt, who, as far as we know, was 'never defiled with women' himself,
may aptly be called "a jerk" on account of these heinous or hilarious
ideas,
alth
this nonphilosophical label may come to some as an inconsistency of
register and to others as a shock.[]
Nothing in the world being as immoral as masturbation in **nt, and
extramarital sex being compared to cannibalism to boot, it is a
legitimate question to ask what this lifeless theoretician thought about
real killing. The answer is, not surprisingly, that it definitely
was not killing as such which was this thinker's concern. Little did he
care about the murder of live children whose parents were not legally
married. The ethicist we are talking about claimed that a child born out
of wedlock did not have any moral status whatsoever, and might be killed
by its mother as she pleased, regardless of its health:[]
"A child born into the world outside marriage is outside the law ..., and
consequently it is also outside the protection of the law." []
The following pronouncement refers to killing by the state and the
murderer to be killed is obviously not a parent who has murdered
'er child only because it was 'illegitimate':
"[Someone who] has committed a murder must die. ... ...
Even if a civil society were to dissolve itself by common agreement of all
its members ... the last murderer remaining in prison must first be
executed, so that ... the bloodguilt [of his actions] will not be fixed on
the people because they failed to insist on carrying out the
punishment ... ." []
Did not Mr K*nt teach that every man was to be regarded as an end in
itself? Yes, he did. That is, 'every man of his kind'.
Firstly, there are those who do not happen to be of the right species:
"Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an
end. That end is man. Our duties towards animals are merely duties
towards humanity." []
Secondly, there are those who do not happen to have his position in human
society. []
Here Mr K*nt was a defender of unadulterated capitalism when he
claimed that only people with property should be considered citizens, and
that wage earners have no right to vote. (And by property he
certainly did not mean what people morally own, as distinct from
what they may, perhaps, legally own.) There are not only those who do not
have Mr K*nt's weighty position in society, there are also those who do not
have a position of such weight in the family:
"Children and adult people other than the Master of the House can be used
as things, without infringing upon their personalities, as means
to an end." []
And, thirdly, there are those who happen to be girls or women. In **nt a
woman is beautiful, regardless of her appearance, and that certainly
needs no further angling for compliments, one would say.
But, unfortunately, as elsewhere, **nt cannot be eaten
in part here, the **nt story has to be swallowed whole.
And the whole story is that woman may be beautiful, man is sublime in Mr
K*nt's system (as sublime as —would you believe it?—
war).
In the end anything philosophized and said is always meant to support the
conclusion that:
"There is a natural superiority of man over woman, on which his right to
be in command is based." []
Woe to 'him' who creeps
thr
this critical philosopher's serpent-windings on the nonuse of persons as
means and on the so-called 'equality' of men and women!
While according to Mr K*nt every man of a privileged class should be
regarded as an end in himself, his 'categorical imperative' seems to
be of a much nobler nature:
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will
that it should become a universal law." []
We must not lie, because we could not want everyone to lie, especially not
to us. And we must not steal, because we could not want everyone to steal,
especially not what belongs to us. And we must not kill, because we could
not want everyone to kill, especially not to kill us. So far, so good. But
Mr K*nt also concludes that it is wrong to borrow money, because we could
not want everyone to borrow money, as there would be no-one left to lend
it. He does not conclude that he himself should never have become a
philosopher, for no person in 'er right mind could want everyone to
spend all 'er time philosophizing, at least not in the manner of a
childless agent or nonagent of the K*ntian strain. So long as descriptions
of conditions and actions are not categorized on the basis of their
relevancy, the categorical imperative can be bent in any way the
question-begger wishes.
Mr K*nt also advocated a federation of free states, bound together by a
covenant forbidding that sublime thing, war, which seems to be a most
respectable proposal in favor of that beautiful thing, peace.
However, when he argued that the civil constitution of these states ought
to be 'republican', he only meant that the executive and the legislative
branches were to remain separate. In his eyes a perfect government was
easiest to get under a monarchy, after which Mr K*nt's proposal boils
down to a world federation of monarchies bound by an agreement in which
free royal families solemnly promise, on behalf of their humble servants,
never to cramp each other's styles.
Now, Mr K*nt may have been a little enlightened thinker writing in
defense of exclusivist ideas and practices, but aren't there parts of
philosophy which are hardly or not at all prone to such ideological bias?
What did Mr K*nt say about logic, for instance?
"For about two-and-a-half thousand years logic has not gained much in
extent, as indeed its nature forbids that it should. Ancient philosophy
has omitted no essential point of the understanding; we have only to
become more accurate, methodical and orderly." []
Logic as it basically had always been for two-and-a-half millenniums would
be final in this distinguished philosopher's opinion; as final as his own
denominational creed had always been for virtually the same number of years.
But we now know that the new developments in logic and
were only to start after **nt had gone the way of all flesh.
He himself contributed nothing at all to logic, and nothing essentially new
to denominationalism.
Where he attacked unfounded theological speculations critically, he
maintained unfounded monotheist preconceptions unquestioningly.
Woe be unto the philosopher who claims to have been awakened from his
dogmatic slumbers, for his awakening may only be a fake! After some
impressive juggling with genuine philosophy Mr K*nt was bound to reason
himself back into the ideological straitjacket of
religion.
What he conjures out of an empty hat will enchant every coreligionist:
"The existence of God, the freedom of the will, and the immortality of
the soul are all necessary presuppositions of moral
thought." []
"God, freedom, and immortality are the three ideas of reason."
"Only Providence can insure justice, i.e. happiness proportional to
virtue, and has evidently not insured it in this life.
Therefore there is a God and a future life." []
It comes as no surprise at all that Mr K*nt discovered that his own brand
of miserotic and sexist, monarchist and capitalist monotheism was the only
morally perfect
.
It does come as a little bit of a surprise, however, that later
philosophers who were not of that brand (such as agnostics and atheists)
kept going off in a swoon for **nt as well.
But alas, also philosophers are susceptible to contagious diseases.
Once the conservative worship of a character has become common practice, it
is also hard for them to keep themselves aloof from where the reaction is.
To resist the temptation to have intercourse with philosophical beings who
are honored or praised out of proportion because of their service to
exclusivist, supernaturalist or other such institutions requires a tough
constitution and, without the intercourse, probably some recourse to
masturbation now and then. []
37 aSWW
TWOSCORE YEARS AND ONE LATER
For an update on this 'law- and duty-mad philosopher of purely
reason' see my paper
Will Kant be immortal?
In general, a philosopher's private life is no one's business,
neither the supposedly 'bad' things which may be used to
demonize the person and to vilify a part or all of
work nor the supposedly 'good' things which may be used to
idolize, if not deify, that person and make a part or all of 'er work
fashionable for equally improper reasons.
And yet, there are exceptions, for example, when a
philosopher spreads pathological ideas
which are bound to negatively affect the private lives of other men or
people to the extent that others (will) take that
philosopher seriously.
Then the reader or listener may start wondering
what went wrong with the thinker in question in the past.
Immanuel Kant is such a psychological case when
it concerns his pronouncements on sexuality
and women in particular.
It is indeed easy to come up with several aspects of
Immanuel's private life which may have made him go so
terribly awry from a
normative-philosophical perspective. []
However, when looking for an explanation of Kant's sublime loss of
balance in the erotic and sexual fields, one must keep in mind, that what
is the cause and what is the effect is not always perfectly clear:
Kant may not have thought the way Immanuel lived his life; instead,
Immanuel may have lived the way Kant thought he ought to live.
But any view of Kant's pronouncements on
sexuality and women not being
pathological may come at a high price.
What it could amount to in the end is that Kant's reason was one of
utility, that they were made by him because they were in
line with the Bible and would as such appeal to the multitude who
consider it a holy book and expect, in the main, their own
monotheistic view to be expressed and their
ideology to be supported.
In such an explanation it is not the
calculating Kant who was sick, it is the one or more
writers of the sexist and/or erotophobic passages in
the Bible who were sick then.
Granted that in many a case it is the lack of wish which is the
parent to the thought, there may be several 'reasons'
for Kant's pathological fear of such a thing as male
masturbation.
One is that he took the Bible literally, together
with its androcentrist ignorance of what corresponds
with the botanical difference between pollen and seed
in the human animal.
His following the Bible would not have been hard at all in this
matter if he had always been impotent anyhow; or, if he had
become impotent because he had already passed the 'three score
years and ten' before 'weakness overtakes us and we shall be
chastened'.
(The latter means that with his physical power he lost all sense of
proportion, unless he had had a convenient lack
of such a sense from the very beginning.)
Another reason might be that Kant too believed that it
would make him go blind, but this is probably too banal a myth
for a man his stature.
Here i would like to adduce a third possible reason:
Kant feared that masturbation would make him go
mortal!
After you have read
Will Kant be immortal? you may
understand why something that is 'contrary to morality
in the highest degree' disturbs the balance, not of nature, but
in his 'proof' of the existence of a bodyless Being by
the name of God.
The reasoning may be circular, but
ultimately it was Christian-Abrahamic ideology which
counted in Kant, not philosophy.
78 aSWW
NOTES
1
This article is not suitable reading for those who, like the philosopher
in question, while old enough, cannot handle sexual or erotic matters with
the same equanimity (or enjoyment) as other natural and cultural
phenomena.
It was written in the 37th year after the end of the Second World War and
published on the Internet, on TRINPsite, 18 years later (in 55 aSWW).
At the end of the 59th year it was moved to MVVM-site, the present site.
In 71 aSWW it was moved to the present location.
(This latter change of location from the old /En/ directory to the new
/Tong/ThL/ directory —in which Tong stands for Tongue,
that is, Language, and ThL for
This Language— was part of
a general policy and had nothing to do with the content of the paper
itself.)
2
Quoted from Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of The
Metaphysic of Morals, pp. 87-9, translated with an Introduction and
Notes by Mary J. Gregor, Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Row, NY, 1964.
3
About 34 years after writing this paper i came across an article in Free
Inquiry (June/July 2016, Vol. 36, No.4, p.36-38) entitled "God the
Concept" by Carol Delaney, a specialist in cultural and social
anthropology.
Delaney delved into the Biblical-Koranic story of Abraham's near-sacrifice
of his son Isaac and writes:
Only men were thought to have seed; they were imagined as the
procreators, doing on the human level what God had done on the
divine.
Women ... were assimilated to what God had created [and] imagined as
either the fertile or [the] barren soil in which the seed was planted.
In the androcentrist Abrahamic mythology and tradition semen is equated
with seed which contains, as it were, the whole child, not just half
of its genetic material, whereas in plant terms the human male produces
only pollen, not seed.
The spermatozoa have the function of pollen grains: to join the female part
of the plant to create a seed.
(The Latin word semen also means seed and its use is
therefore equally antiscientific gibberish.
Sperm is a better word, yet etymologically not clean either.)
With the spurious equation of semen and seed in mind the god of the Bible
seems to be doing nothing wrong by addressing Abraham exclusively, for it
is his child.
Abraham's wife Sarah, the vessel of his seed (but in actual fact only his
pollen), is not asked anything.
It may explain why Kant, a philosopher in the Christianist tradition, is so
pathologically disturbed about boys or men spoiling their 'seed', which, in
this tradition, is made to look like spoiling or killing 'complete'
children.
That is, Kant's ancient Christian view of sexuality may explain his totally
unrestrained bad feelings about masculine masturbation but formally
not the thoughts in his text quoted above, in which he compares
masturbation to suicide, not to infanticide!
4
Where else do we find this undisguised contempt for children born of
parents who are not married?
Let us return to the Biblical-Koranic tale of Abraham's sacrifice (note 3
above) and see what more Carol Delaney has to tell us:
Isaac was not Abraham's only son.
His firstborn, Ismail, was conceived by Hagar, who was not his wife.
Thus, marriage was the bond that legitimized a child.
Perhaps, marriage was the bond that legitimized a child, by definition one
might argue (unlike Delaney); it remains an egregious lie to tell people
that Isaac was Abraham's only son, even if merely in fiction.
And much worse it is to treat that child as nonexisting, as the god of
the Bible does; and much, much worse to keep it outside the protection of
the legal law or, what is atrocious, the moral law, as Immanuel Kant does.
However, Kant's treatment of so-called 'illegimate' children, combined with
the view of semen as an end product (like the seeds rather than the pollen
of plants) containing a human being in itself, explains why he cannot
compare masculine masturbation to infanticide, because there would be
nothing wrong about at least unmarried men killing their 'children',
definitely not when they are still in a seminal stage.
So, Kant must fabricate a resemblance with suicide, rather than
infanticide, to rationalize his and his coreligionists' onanophobia.
5
Quoted from Capital Punishment by Hugo Adam Bedau, p.174, in
T.Regan (ed.), Matters of Life and Death, Random House, NY, 1980,
pp.148-182.
Note 8 on p.180 attributes this statement to Immanuel Kant in The
Metaphysical Elements of Justice (1797), tr. John Ladd, p.106.
6
Quoted from Capital Punishment by Hugo Adam Bedau, p.153, in
T.Regan (ed.), Matters of Life and Death, Random House, NY, 1980,
pp.148-182.
Note 4 on p.180 attributes this statement to Immanuel Kant in The
Metaphysical Elements of Justice (1797), tr. John Ladd, p.102.
7
Quoted in Animals and the Value of Life by P. Singer, in
Lectures on Ethics, Harper & Row, NY, 1963, pp.239-40.
8
I apologize.
This sentence should have read Secondly, there are those who do not
happen to be of the right race. before turning from Kant's speciesist
opinions to his owner-and-master the-rest-is-chattel opinions (which will
then become the third point) and his sexist opinions (the fourth point on
this abominable list).
But more than three decades ago, while writing this paper, i had not yet
heard of Kant's unadulterated racism.
Nonetheless, it need not surprise anyone familiar with how exclusivist
thoughts, sentiments and actions lend one another support.
Well-known and infamous is Kant's judgment of one particular black person:
"This man was black from head to toes and this is a clear proof that what
he said was stupid" (quoted in Eze, E.C., Ed., Modern Western Philosophy
and African Colonialism, African Philosophy: An Anthology,
Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1998, p.215).
I will not go further into the details of Kant's racial exclusivism
— others have done this long before me.
See, for example, Ryan Very's Kant's Racism, 11/21/12, which can be
retrieved from www.academia.edu (copy-past
www.academia.edu/1802951/Kants_Racism).
It is a good thing that the author confronts the excuse that Kant was
'a product of his time' (p.6) with the fact that that there were other
philosophers in Kant's own time who argued against racism (p.7).
According to Very, however, 'not all is lost for Kant' (p.8), even if we
allow this philosopher to be the recipient of some severe criticism:
There is a way out of the paradox [of a moral philosopher making immoral
claims] that ... is overlooked in the literature.
It does not involve ignoring Kant’s racism, explaining it away, justifying
it, or even condemning him for it, but simply acknowledging it.
It does not involve distinguishing among his writings, but distinguishing
among his claims. ... ...
Kant’s bad claims may reflect poorly on his general philosophical
aptitude, but they do not mean that all of his claims are wrong.
If Kant's bad claims were confined to his racial stereotypes, not all might
be lost, indeed, but my paper above shows that Kant, as soon as he leaves
the Universal Way and gets specific, makes plenty of immoral blunders and
that this person's theoretical shortcomings are not far less to boot.
And then i have not even mentioned racism in the paper above; and then i
have not even mentioned the
yet, which exhaustively treats of both deontology, among which Kantian
ethics, and consequentialism, among which utilitarianism, and finds them
both too simplistic and lacking in relevance in a very special sense.
True, from Kant's shortcomings and blunders it cannot and must not be
argued that all the writings by Kant (a group egoist from head to toes) are
stupid, but the accumulation of nonsense is certainly enough reason to
forget about the honor, even the praise, to start with.
Stupid are those who idolize and defend Kant
thr
thick and thin, unless, of course, they are the beneficiaries of his
obnoxious ideas.
9
Quoted from Eigentumstheorien von Grotius bis Kant by B.Brandt,
1974, p.195.
10
Metaphysik der Sitten, section 26, p.83.
11
Immanuel Kant (1993) [1785]. Grounding for the Metaphysics of
Morals, translated by James W. Ellington (3rd ed.). Hackett. p.30.
12
Quoted from Logic, Introduction, section ii; and Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics, Logic, p.128.
13
From Mackie, Ethics, p.203.
14
From Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p.682.
15
Considering The Philosopher Whose Name Will Forever Remain ... a
historical paper —pun intended— i have only added these notes
to the original document, with one exception.
The sole thing i altered in the text itself concerns the very last
sentence: for clarity's sake i inserted the phrase without the
intercourse and with this insertion i now found probably more
realistic than the perhaps of the original.
16
In his whole life on Earth, Immanuel Kant never traveled farther than some
145 km from Königsberg, now Kaliningrad.
He never married (what could not have been but a woman in his days), was
never engaged, and did, as far as publicly known, not have
any sexual or erotic contact with any woman.
Kant had the same man-servant until he dismissed him after about
forty years of service.
Since, according to Kant, animals do not have a (rational) will
and 'therefore' exist merely as a means to an end, it should come as
no surprise that the dog and the cat in his house were not his but his
female cook's.
(Ever met a cat without a will?)
Among Immanuel's friends there was one in particular whom he
would see after his daily walk the rest of the afternoon, and whose
death after a friendship of at least twenty-three years was a
great blow to him.
(The animal with the rational will is reported to not
have taken any evening meals anymore until his own death,
eighteen years later.)
Whereas a healthy man has an early morning erection, Kant had an
early pipe of tobacco each morning, of which the bowl
became larger and larger in the course of time.
Of what 'provokes the desire but takes away the
performance' (as Shakespeare has the porter describe it in
Macbeth) Kant also had had so much sometimes, or more
often, that he could not find his way back to his castle on the ground in
his very own Prussia.
The fact that this man claimed that solo sex —unlike
smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol!—
is an unnatural vice, that social sex outside
marriage amounts to cannibalism and that sex
inside marriage is like leasing one's sexual
organs to each other strongly suggests that he never had any
sexual experience worth remembering with
himself, with another man or with a woman.
(Nor any experience with using his body for earning
money as a laborer.)
Or, if so, in spite of all his hangups, then one may assume
that, unfortunately, the experience had not been
sufficiently pleasant.
|
