Kant's walk etc.

LISTEN. “I am struggling for words — this is crazy. It is just utterly irresponsible,” says one medical ethicist about Drumpf's "don't be afraid of COVID" tweet. That's the one norm he's established and never flouts. When crazy becomes normal, how do we stay sane? 

What would Kant say?

Kant's life was pretty dull, his routines rigid. See The Last Days of Immanuel Kant for cinematic documentation of this. "It follows the famously abstemious and abstruse philosopher as he’s anticipating his death, yet it’s a physical comedy filled with neo-slapstick intimacy." It's funny, and broadly affectionate.  The depiction of his vaunted daily walks, at snail's pace, is hard for a peripatetic like me to watch. My pal the Kantian in Carolina was offended by it, but I find it an ingratiating portrait of an eccentric for whom the excitement of life was almost entirely about thinking. I wouldn't want to have lived that life myself, nor do I much like reading its results. But I'm glad someone did. 

Kant really needed a dog, though. Schopenhauer at least had his poodles, one Atman after another. 

His philosophy, though, shook things up and enticed admiring competitors and successors to challenge his biggest caution: don't try to describe reality-in-itself. Don't forget: everything we know comes with a built-in point of view, a perspective rooted in the knowers' categories of mind. 

I shouldn't have gone looking for that film on YouTube just now, the rabbit hole is hard to resist. Did you know that Joacquin Phoenix taught Kant? Like Chidi in the Good Place? "The wave returns to the ocean... Whenever you're ready, just walk through."

Ready or not...

Was Kant's metaphysic of mind-as-projector of categories (quantity, quality, relation, modality... plurality, reality, cause & effect, possibility...) and of space and time the Copernican revolutionary breakthrough he and his acolytes thought? For Hegel and Schopenhauer it didn't break on through to the other side, the noumenal view from nowhere. That was a deficiency, they thought. But was it ever even a possibility? My biggest concern about Kant's metaphysics is that if he's right we might never get to make first contact with ET (whose categories and resulting "conceptual scheme" might be too alien to know)...

We'll also consider Kant's ethics, and Bentham's. Of course we should help people when we feel sorry for them. There's nothing wrong with that, and much right. But Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon?

How about the Experience Machine? We've already got one, haven't we? And when the holo-deck comes along we'll find out how the experiment really turns out.

If wisdom and understanding come only at a "later stage" of history, Hegel, in twilight, is philosophy worth doing now? At dawn? It's the very best time to do it, in my experience, rght before our daily morning dog walk. That's when Geist is most real for me. But my geist is probably not yours, or "ours"... Anyway, the great rational optimist and cynical pessimist are ultimately (like us all) in the same boat. "Shipwreck is a permanent possibility," said William James...

Schopenhauer on Hegel: “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”

Schopenhauer's Will still seems wildly speculative and idiosyncratic, to me, truly a projection of the philosopher's personal temperament. But it shows that pessimists are people too. I don't think it shows the value of asceticism, though, as "the ideal way to cope with existence." But as always, to each their own.

In Fantasyland we're invted to wonder if the film industry narrowed the perceived distance between fantasy and reality and acts like a drug. I'll ask Older Daughter about that. And about online videogaming.

Also, advertising. It's manipulative and misleading, it engenders false desires and a confusion about what will make us happy. Or, you can do what I've been doing for decades, ever since I went to Radio Shack and purchased a little device that screwed into the back of the tee-vee. That was before hand-held remote controls, kids. But muting the noise, I've found, enhances the day-to-day quality of my life like almost nothing else.

And: Wells's War of the Worlds, our infatuation with celebrity, and celebrities. Suburban nostalgia and racism. LA and South Florida as fantasylands. Confucius Institutes. Should there be a Western Philosophy Institute in China? The difference between harmony and conformity, compliance, sameness, and uniformity. Would we have a more eastern attitude about harmony and cosmic order in the west if Heraclitus (and Hegel) had "won out" over Plato? 225 Kant's Enlightenment "maturity"... Parents who try "to maintain their authority over their children after those children have grown up"? 231 People who are "beyond care" and have "given up"? 235  "Yin/yang"/// "picking yin"? 239 (Keep it clean please.)
Is the Confucian principle of quan anti-Kantian? 243 How about the African concept of ubuntu? 246