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From Kant to Aushwitz? Reply to Jewish

Thread ID: 10032 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-09-25

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TexasAnarch [OP]

2003-09-25 16:26 | User Profile

[B]Kant to Aushwitz ?[/B]

(Comment on anonymous on-line post “From Kant to Auschwitz” – downloaded from goole answer to “Was Kant anti-Semitic?” 9.24.03)

“Every encounter with the Holocaust ends with the same exasperated cry: how could they? How could people throw terrified babies into the flames of burning pits? Even more startling, more frightening, is that these Nazis did not see themselves as amoral barbarians but as moral agents acting within the moral code. Typically, that moral code was Kantian ethics.

Let me state in haste that I am not suggesting that Kantian ethics Justifies gas chambers. Of course it doesn't. A true and consistent Kantian could never condone Nazi degeneracy. Nevertheless-for, alas, there is a nevertheless-the roots of Auschwitz were nourished by a stream in Kantian morality. A substantive analogy is in order. Christianity does not justify gas chambers. Of course it doesn't. A true and consistent Christian could never condone the Nazi degeneracy. Nevertheless-for, alas there is a nevertheless-the roots of Auschwitz were nourished by a stream in Christianity. Coyness will not do here: Auschwitz would not have occurred without the mandate of a long history of Christian anti-semitism, nor would it have occurred without the mandate of an ethics which elevates duty above human compassion. In our attempts to comprehend a mentality capable of this horrifying evil, we typically emerge with not one but two portraits of the Nazi beast. One is the pathological sadist gruesomely exemplified by Treblinka's Ivan the Terrible. His is the viciousness of blood lust. Only his erect involvement in the torture of others can satisfy this Nazi's cruel inclinations. The other Nazi stood at a distance, his hands antiseptically free of blood stains as he went about his murderous calculations. This is the Nazi bureaucrat, represented by the likes of Adolf Eichmann.(l) The coldness of this Nazi chills in a wholly other manner.”

“The Nazis were not a lawless bunch. To the contrary. Theirs was an inflated sense of duty. They revered the law too much. The Nazis worshipped duty and denigrated empathy. One reads account after account of the Nazi determination to wipe out any residual human responses the executioners might have retained for their hapless victims. Concentration commandants spoke of the need to humiliate owners, for the less human they appear the easier it would be to fulfill the duty to exterminate them. The Nazis heralded the concept of duty when duty was not what mattered at all. "Do we have a duty not to torture small children?" This is a bizarre question. The answer, "Yes, we have a duty not to torture small children," is no less bizarre. To speak of duties in this manner and context approach a category mistake. To enlist a moral code of duty as the preventive factor here is simply frightening.

[B]Kant does not entail Auschwitz. That charge would be an outrageous calumny. But Kant leads to Auschwitz. He leads to other places as well-some heroic and ennobling. But any moral theory which begins by disregarding human sentiment, caring and sympathy, might well end in crematoria.[/B] In the legend, God takes hold of compassion and creates a world. In the twentieth century Nazis renounce compassion and almost destroy that world.”

[B]Response[/B]

The metaphysics of the Spirit as subjective condition of application of rational moral judgment is required to resolve the matter.  Any moral theory or practice that replaces reason-in-accord-with-Spirit by “sentiment, caring, and sympathy” (secular, or shared with Jewish sources) is already what Christians call “hell”, whether crematoria on earth results, or not. . Each individual case is up for separate vote of current emotions, rendering the very notion of rational application of the law impossible.  Law is law.  Passion is something else.

Kant’s morality as well as religion was within the limits of pure reason, so let Mr. WhineShine argue with that, and leave the great philosopher alone. Every subjective reference gets personalized in their favor, because objectivity refutes them.

[B]Elaboration[/B]

Kant’s moral theory is continuous with, fashioned from the same metaphysical  cloth, as his Critique of Pure Reason.  The latter showed that the concept of a transcendent God leads to antinomies:  space and time cannot be taken as closed/limited “objectively” (as if “God” “created” “them”, as previously believed – the pre-Copernican view)..  If these were objective magnitudes, it would be possible to prove both that there must, and cannot, be infinitely divisible and extensible.  Reason, therefore, would be inapplicable to reality. But reason is not inapplicable to reality:  science deals with laws of mathematical formulation, as illustrated in the star’s movements, and by the combining proportions of elements according to atomic weights (among others known to Kant in 1775).  The principle of universality of causation (nothing happens without a cause), plus probability theory (formulated in mathematical terms by Alfred Lord Keynes) supplied  modern science with its enduring epistemic foundations.

The notion of The Transcendental (as unity of apperception)  replaced what “God” means, in objective terms (=for reason).  One is communicating the presupposition of the unity of personal, psychologically-conditioned experience when uttering “God”, with classical intent (the All-containing; Father; Son, Creator-agent, Providence, Self-Presence, Interactive with humans in the inner side of life). We cannot speak “His name”, nor even write letters spelling anything without, ourselves, bringing to bear the requisite subjective conditions.  No more than one can walk through a forest playing the ace of spades to trump moss.  It can’t add up any other way than linguistically – through a crazy semiotic connection between games and designated objects.   One intellectual absurdity commonly practiced in Kant’s time, as now, is assuming that if words or letters can be strung together to get what is called “someone’s vote”, they have actual cognitive content worth dialoging and dialecticizing over.  Enter German Idealism, and post-Hegelian Jews.  It’s the beginning of stupidity, followed up by psychosis.

This critique of what “God” communicates cuts across not only the Jewish presumption (that “YHWH” can be taken as any sort of bona fide designator), but the traditional Catholic, as well.  There are so such things as “proofs for the existence of God”, as Notre Dame theologians like to predicate on.  That is a string of words for other strings of words, all turning around the presupposed use of one – “God” (-Is “One”, of course!, they might say, since “God” stands for everything —identifying what “One” stand for with what “God” stands for.  But then “one’ no longer stands for a number!)  Kant’s critical standpoint requires any concept of totality or completion to be considered as a projection of the person’s intention.  It would be nice if we, or a priest, or somebody, could tap right into Mr. Almighty’s skull, or whatever, just by uttering sounds, or paying someone else to utter them for us.  But that couldn’t really be the way it works. Even if we were “created in His image.”  “His image” is just a grammatical tricky, by pretending to reverse perspectives, to re-establish the pre-Copernican “transcendent” representation. (The construction Sigmund Freud later called “an illusion”).  Kant is, in fact, the Protestant philosopher par excellence, since the metaphysical re-location of the apriori – that which is brought to, rather than objectively observed in, perception – requires each speaker to assume responsibility for their own predications, as an individual.  This is what Protestantism is about. The truths regarding one’s eternal salvation are required to be acquired by each one, themselves.  Baptism at birth doesn’t get it. A living response to The Word, (“gospel”),  inwardly prompted by the grace of the Christ Spirit bestowed on the disciples at Pentecost (Acts 2.1f).is required.  It doesn’t make any difference whether Kant would have thought that consciously; it is the metaphysics behind what he did think.

It cannot be said that Kant’s system left philosophy with a fully satisfactory account of reality, however.  In a way, he leaves the old Cartesian mind-body dichotomy still intact, with “the mind” having spread itself over against the body as a dialectical  dinge an sich.  There is that word again; also, the beginning of the philosophical quandary of  German Idealism.  The solution wasn’t to somehow lump the transcendental and transcendent together in the same lard-bucket, and start dishing out “dialectical” puree, as mostly followed from Hegel.  Hegel’s Logic , as formal philosophy, indecipherable, unteachable, unassimilated by any students except Marx’s materialistic adaptation (!), finding root outside Germany by 1900 only in FH. Bradley and T.H. Greene.  The rigorous work in formal logic of the sort Kant mastered from Aristotle, developed into quantification theory, begun by G. Frege, on the continent, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein in England.  The distinction between the subject and predicate of any simple sentence intended to be true or false was formally clarified for the first time in the history of philosophy, and with it, disappeared propositions about The Monad, The Dyad, Being-As-Such, and (shudder) Monotheism.  Except as conversation starters.

Now, who might be wanting to start up, or re-start up just such conversations?

Well, historians, certainly.  On past authors, they will dwell forever, it only varies in how many do it on whom.

And the anti-transcendentalists.  Now, regarding Catholicism, I do not know whether or at what points its dogmatic teachings are incompatible with transcendentalism.  If not, then it is “theologically committed”, to use its grammar, to deny what Kantians can rightfully claim to have established, with no reason except “commitment” to the dogmatic formulations. And to “word magic” (=taking

the formulations to mean something apart from the one using them). This accompanies superstition, idolatry, and paternalistic (top-down) authority theory. I say theory, because the 30 years war, ending 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, established with blood, for all time, that whoever says “God” as source of authority over others does not speak the language of reality, but of their own unconscious fantasies. And if one lets them, they damn sure will speak that grammar, as Tom Paine, among others, pointed out forcefully. (He was a “power comes from the people” guy – flows from the bottom up, not vice versa.) No transcendent “God” was recognized by the U.S. constitution – even if the signers were still using the old intention. Jefferson, with the deists, certainly didn’t. Here on earth its God schmod to whoever brings it up. Hard to imagine some visitor laying out God’s will to George Washington telling him how to vote. But Catholics can be citizens, and not change philosophy, so long as allegiance to a higher authority above American law is not recognized. (It is not clear that of FBI Moscow spy Hanssen.understood this; it is to be suspected he was a triple agent, a go-between for the Vatican.)

     And the Jews.  They are stuck with this Father – YHWH thing, grafted onto Mesopotamian Marduk/Ra religion.  Muslims point out that such a “deity” could hardly have sex organs, like daddy’s, so this Jewish idea of a monotheistic male creator who called for Father Abraham to sacrifice Isaac has to be some kind of psychotic material working itself out in some kind of personal/material matrix, other than Creator of the Universe, Mr. Almighty God, Himself, taking a direct interest in Ab’s penis and reproductive potential. That is a pretty heavy narrative to bear up under for  4000 years.  Jesus surely thought to mercifully end it, if possible, by his life teaching and death.

“You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie he speaks from his own resources, but he is a lie and the father of it.” John 8.44. (addressing the Jews of his day)

This brings the discussion back to Kant, and Auschwitz. The author of the above-quoted passage evidently links Kant’s formalism in ethics – the categorical imperative, applied to acts by “maxims” formulated in general terms, as required by a moral judgment in accord with reason – to “just doing my duty” justification of atrocities, as charged against Rudolf Eichman.. But that situation wasn’t the fault of Kantian analysis of morality. No army could operate under the maxim “let every field commander make up whatever law they want, according to how they feel about the effects of carrying out an order.” On the other hand, Vietnam led to Lt. Calley, which I regard as mindless killing, and wrong. So there is a middle ground, requiring a judgment one must make in fear and trembling. Being able to make which requires a living, present will, as opposed to a beat-down, authority-fearing “terminators”, is what I grew up believing distinguished U.S. soldiers from German, even realizing it is partly an illusion. Still believe it is right, and that the slobbering fool Reagan betrayed it by paying mercenaries to kill their own people in Nicaragua, in the name of America.

Sid Thomas, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York at Binghamton (emeritus) Author of “Jesus and Kant: an Attempt to Reconcile Two Points of View on Moral Judgment”, published in Mind, British journal of philosophy, 1970 Prepared especially for Original Dissent forum, in deep appreciation for the quality and level of American discourse provided.

iwannabeanarchy

2003-09-25 17:09 | User Profile

Is sympathy really so much better than duty? What if one simply doesn't feel sympathy for Jews, but only for other Germans? Kant does say we have a duty not to murder. How is this any less of a restriction than claiming we need to feel sympathy for all humans?

This anti-Kantian line of argument is a sad joke. It is garbage from the caring-sharing brigad who replace an interest in truth with feelings of hatred for white males.

iwannabeanarchy

2003-09-27 17:39 | User Profile

I don't agree that Kant's ethics is particularly weak. Also, Kant does not try to prove that God exists, only that we ought to believe in God.

However, back to the main point: the relation of Kantian thought to Nazism. Just as Kant did not lead to Nazim, so to is it not fair to say that it is particular incompatible with Nazism, aside from Kant's condmenation of the murder of innocents. That is the sticking point. If the Nazi's had merely expelled the Jews, they might have claims to be good Kantian. But since they murdered them, any such is rather tenuous at best.

Speaking about humanity in the abstract and believing in the racial superiority of one's own race is not necessarily problematic. If one believs that one's race is the prime exemplar of humanity, then this makes perfect sense. One might derive this sort of thought from Kant, Hegel, etc. However, they wanted to emphasize that the other races would 'die a nature death,' to quote Hitler's view of the fate of Christianity. Or as the Nazi Heidegger would later say, one must 'wait for Being.' The Nazi leadership was overly aggressive from the perspective of the philosophical German community.

[QUOTE=AntiYuppie]The influence of Kantian ethics on the National Socialist worldview is actually quite minimal. In Nazi writings one hears much about the primacy of the Will and nothing about the "categorical imperative." If anything, Kant's Categorical Imperative is simply "do unto others" dressed in metaphysical language, and as such anathema to NS ideology in many ways. For one thing, the categorical imperative is quite universalist and speaks of humanity in the abstract irrespective of nationality and race. Nowhere in the Critique of Practical Reason is "duty" restricted to members of the German nation or even to European peoples. The fact that those with the Judaeo-Leftist mindset chose to attack Kant of all people is simply another aspect of the "bash the dead white males" syndrome.

As an aside, I will add that I consider Kant's ethics to be the weakest part of his philosophy. In his epistemology he adopted a truly scientific position of letting logic take him to any conclusion, however unpleasant (such as his Three Antinomies of Pure Reason, which demolished the most commonly invoked arguments for the existence of God), while in his ethics he simply constructed a huge metaphysical edifice around the results which he wanted. His proof of the existence of God by virtue of the categorical imperative is actually a good deal more circular than any of the proofs he refuted in his earlier writings.[/QUOTE]

TexasAnarch

2003-09-29 04:46 | User Profile

To AY. Yes.

I have come to appreciate, even from your post, and going back to Fichte (whose work as psychosemiotics is closest to my own of any; perhaps, in the tradition of German Idealism):

The historic/metaphysical role played by actual German spirit, coming together after kicking out the French, to give birth to the idea of The National Idea”: (1807 address to the nation)

“Love that is truly love, and not a mere transitory lust, never clings to what is transient; only in the eternal does it awaken and become kindled, and there alone does it rest. Man is not able to love even himself unless he conceives himself as eternal; apart from that he cannot even respect, much less approve, of himself. Still less can he love anything outside himself without taking it up into the eternity of his faith and of his soul and binding it thereto. He who does not first regard himself as eternal has in him no love of any kind, and, moreover, cannot love a fatherland, a thing which for him does not exist. He who regards his invisible life as eternal, but not his visible life as similarly eternal, may perhaps have a heaven and therein a fatherland, but here below he has no fatherland, for this, too, is regarded only in the image of eternity---eternity visible and made sensuous, and for this reason also he is unable to love his fatherland. If none has been handed down to such a man, he is to be pitied. But he to whom a fatherland has been handed down, and in whose soul heaven and earth, visible and invisible meet and mingle, and thus, and only thus, create a true and enduring heaven---such a man fights to the last drop of his blood to hand on the precious possession unimpaired to his posterity.

"Hence, the noble-minded man will be active and effective, and will sacrifice himself for his people. Life merely as such, the mere continuance of changing existence, has in any case never had any value for him, he has wished for it only as the source of what is permanent. But this permanence is promised to him only by the continuous and independent existence of his nation. In order to save his nation he must be ready even to die that it may live, and that he may live in it the only life for which he has ever wished. So it has always been, although it has not always been expressed in such general terms and so clearly as we express it here.”

[B]Comment[/B]
We only develop individuality by relating to the Not-I, on the inner side, of the larger containing national group unity.

This would illustrate how Morality gives way, as the actual inner determinant of action-in-freedom, to Will, in the specific historical situation, in order To Be.

That is compatible with Kant’s ethics, incidentally, as I expect you observe (as if anything could be incompatible with the form of reason – as opposed to being something different).

Metaphysically, the debt accrues.  It could be said that the Pure Will of “German” actually created the idea of “freedom” as Spirit.

“Freedom to them meant just this: remaining Germans and continuing to settle their own affairs, independently and in accordance with the original spirit of their race, going on with their development in accordance with the same spirit, and propagating this independence in their posterity. All those blessings which the Romans offered them meant slavery to them because then they would have to become something that was not German, they would have to become half-Roman. They assumed as a matter of course that every man would rather die than become half a Roman, and that a true German could only want to live in order to be, and to remain, just a German and to bring up his children as Germans.”

It seems to me that one could say this, from the standpoint of the transcendental philosophy:  the Actual Will, aroused by the Spirit in the blood of the people, coming together through their language, cultural heritage and genius, actually created the empirical conditions it has been found are necessary for unity of consciousness:  dass Ich..  This would be what was missing in both British empiricism and French Rationalism.  What Kant called the apriori synthesis – of subject and predicates  that are non-identical; imposed on, not derived from, the objective manifold(s), but necessarily applicable, in the manner of space and time to all empirical judgments – is built into the full-spectrum logic of possible representation (the depth-psychological structure of language), as Fichte also noted in his 1806 address :

[B]Metaphysical Importance of Native Language[/B]

“The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. Such a whole, if it wishes to absorb and mingle with itself any other people of different descent and language, cannot do so without itself becoming confused, in the beginning at any rate, and violently disturbing the even progress of its culture. From this internal boundary, which is drawn by the spiritual nature of man himself, the marking of the external boundary by dwelling place results as a consequence; and in the natural view of things it is not because men dwell between certain mountains and rivers that they are a people, but, on the contrary, men dwell together-and, if their luck has so arranged it, are protected by rivers and mountains-because they were a people already by a law of nature which is much higher.

Thus was the German nation placed-sufficiently united within itself by a common language and a common way of thinking, and sharply enough severed from the other peoples-in the middle of Europe, as a wall to divide races not akin ....”

America actually inherited the spirit of its I/We reference group from these European sources. It is not their rival so much as their son, and the off-spring is now in dire need of parental Will to establish and purify OUR nation-race, so that we can have a Will of our own, as Hitler gave Germany.

But they* have taken the Spirit out of the language. Again, as Fichte said:

“Only in the invisible qualities of nations, which are hidden from their own eyes-qualities as the means whereby these nations remain in touch with the source of original life-only therein is to be found the guarantee of their present and future worth, virtue, and merit. If these qualities are dulled by admixture and worn away by friction, the flatness that results will bring about a separation from spiritual nature, and this in its turn will cause all men to~be fused together in their uniform and collective destruction.”

kamui

2003-12-11 16:22 | User Profile

hey there...i'm wondering if that "sphere of parmenides" was ever finished...although these ramblings seem sound as well all the best kamui