kant rand good evil

I know, at times, I do. And I suspect that is why, at one point in my life, I called myself a Christian, an Objectivist, a Marxist, a Communist, a democratic socialist etc.

Always searching for a way to “escape freedom” by situating it in the Whole Truth.

Now I call myself a nihilist. But I can’t figure out a way to make that anything other than a very fractured and fragmented “truth”. It breeds ambiguity and ambivalence.

But once those become valued traits and argued for, the same problem can develop. One can streamline this and (try to) be consistent and judge others as not being consistent with your idealized ambivalence, fragmentation and complexity.

Intra-psychically it can also function to judge yourself when you feel there is one truth, one right answer - at least in some situation - and want to stifle that.

But most importantly any model can function like this.

At a meta level, for example dealing with epistemology, there is likely to be just as much certainty and unity (as goals). We can’t know this or that as THE TRUTH because THE TRUTH ABOUT EPISTEMOLOGY is…

Similar meta-shoulds arise in ethics also.

Yes, minds that are subject to cognitive dissonance and the cherry-picking of reality they turn to as solution. As Moreno points out: it requires a brutal suppression -at least in certain forms.

Ans as I have pointed out: it’s not the hypocrite you have to worry about, it’s the one that is perfectly consistent with themselves. And there are 2 approaches to this: the moral absolutist that must “brutally suppress” errant impulses by keeping their focus on the behaviors of others; or the sociopathic that sidesteps suppression by putting self indulgence above all else, much like Rand who can easily afford to be consistent. But even a sociopath must cherry-pick in order to justify their ideology: for instance, by focusing on the competitive aspect of nature.

To the extent that any dasein can truly understand his or her own motivation, I don’t think that I do idealize these traits. On the contrary, I am no less ambiguous and ambivalent about them. Sometimes I want the ambiguity and sometimes I want the coherent whole. But always the sense of feeling profoundly “broken”.

Regarding Good and Evil [and regarding “I”] I don’t see the glass either half full or half empty—I see it falling to the floor and then shattered into a thousand pieces.

And now that I do I wonder: Is there an argument [philosophical or otherwise] that can help to put me back together again?

I am, after all, running out of time.

I would think, then, that defending a position and labeling other positions as problematic should be problematic. I don’t see this as the case with you. It still seems like you think other people are wrong. (I realize personalities get into this and this is ad hom to the extent I am focusing on you, but I can’t think of paradigms outside of conrete lived personalities, otherwise they are just a bunch of floating ideals.)

To whatever extent such a philosophy is idealized there is distance from life and self. But as a practical observation of the self, it is a must.

My anwer to this, for myself, has been to work outward, not to look at myself objectively or try to. What do I want, what do I seem to really believe?

Let’s take that second question. I think many people try to figure out what they should believe. I think that ends up just creating splits in the self - where some dominant part decides what the whole self should believe. I do not want permanent splits which both the rationalists and the religionists both assume MUST be the permanent state, always holding emotions, desires, irrationality and sin at bay. Keeping control of the inner horse.

So I try to find out what I am and believe and develop the relations between the parts, by allowing as much expression as possible, to see if they can first minimally work together - after screaming about all they have gone through and hate and want and fear - and hopefully, further down the line, integrate, when what seem like dichotemies turn out to be false ones.

When you draw two over-lapping circles and label the left hand one ‘good’ and the right hand one ‘evil’, your over-lapping area should be labeled ‘human.’ Good becomes the absence of Evil and Evil is the absence of Good–total opposites. But the overlapping area is a mixture of both. Rand was a relativist; Kant got caught up in his idealism, but waffled when he tried to apply his ideas to humanity, as I read him. There is nothing in being human that’s ideal. The ideal is an ephemeral that can be sought after and never really found.

For me, what’s moral is just that. Have you ever been in a situation where you have a choice between doing or not doing? You can say to yourself, why shouldn’t I do it–everyone else does–or no one would think any less of me if I did it–or whatever reason you give yourself. Or you can not do it, because to do it would change your ‘you.’ That’s what morality means, imm. If you feel so strongly that, by doing something you feel is immoral, and that it would irrevocably change the ‘you that is you,’ then you shouldn’t do it–you’ve made the choice that’s right for you.

It really makes no difference how you’ve internalized those values, or who or what instilled them into you (I used the word ‘into’ deliberately,) the morality is there. There’s no ambiguity or ambivalence.

Over self-analysis is as detrimental to health as is no self-analysis. There is no ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’–except to you.

I do and I don’t. But that is the nature of a subjunctive point of view. These profoundly personal reactions to others and the world I live in are always tentative to me. Ever fluid and ever subject to the ever changing mental, emotional and psychological states we experience. Ever subject, in turn, to contingency, chance and change “out in the world”.

We can then go farther and discuss the extent to which embracing a problematic point of view is equally problematic. But that just takes us deeper into Wittgensteins’s reservations about the use of language “out in the world”—the things it can and cannot encompass.

But this will always unfold within the confines of the problematic and profoundly personal assumptions discussed above. I don’t see how we can escape this in any realistic sense. There are just too many variables that come together over the years to make “you” “you” that are 1] beyond your grasp 2] beyond your understanding or 3] beyond your control.

And they are rooted not in the world, but in a particular world, parts of which are always understood only subjectively.

But, from my perspective, the “dominant part” [the “inner horse”] is still dasein. And it has to decide over and over and over again what is true because it is true and what is true only because “I” think it is true. And that can often become particularly problematic.

What on earth does this mean though?

How do you make this applicable when confronted with someone who views the left, the right and the overlpping center of the circle quite differently than you?

Rand and Kant – each in their own way – relentlessly pursued Reason in order to situate Virtue [or the Ideal] in all the right places. Kant, however, grasped the futility of this without God.

And any situation where you ask yourself, “should I do something or should I do nothing, and, if something, should I do this or should I do that?” will always, ultimately, be an existential, subjunctive leap to what you construe intuitively as most reflecting that “ring of truth”.

Well, anyway, that is how “I” do it.

And feelings are, after all, no less rooted in dasein.

And if you feel no ambiguity or ambivalence here then somehow you have managed to convince yourself there is no need to. And I have not. I always feel pulled in conflicting directions.

In any event, there is really no way you could ever demonstrate that there is “no ambiguity or ambivalence.”

But more power to you if you are actually able to believe that.

But that just begs the question: How does one determine that their self-analysis is over or under that which is deterimental to their health?

And if should and shouldn’t are personal, fine. But what happens when they smash into the personal assessments of others? Not only is the personal often political but the political itself is invariably rooted out in a particular world viewed from many fiercely conflicted ways.

And, again, for this particular dasein [me], that breeds ambiguity and ambivalence.

But ambiguity and ambivalence are crucial components of human freedom. At least the kind rooted in democracy and the rule of law.

From, Immanuel Kant: Ayn Rand’s Intellectual Enemy

by Edward W. Younkins:

[b]Hume alleged that experience does not give us necessity or mustness. He said that things are contingently true, but that they could be otherwise. We can imagine them being different than what we have experienced in the past. Just because something occurred in a certain way in the past does not mean that it has to occur in the same way in the future. We cannot say with certainty that there are objects, identity, causality, order, and other laws of reality. Hume’s conclusion was that we are forced to be skeptics. Science is thus destroyed at its foundation because science deals with causal connections.

David Hume had contended that neither inductive nor deductive reasoning can supply men with real, certain, and necessary knowledge. He asserted that he has never seen “causality” nor experienced “self” or “consciousness.” According to Hume, men merely experience a fleeting flow of sensations and feelings. He also observed that the apparent existence of something did not guarantee that it would be there an instant later. Hume thus surmised that consciousness was limited to the perceptual level of awareness.

Desiring to refute Hume’s conclusions, Kant searched for the perceptual manifestation of necessity. In order to avoid the conclusions reached by Hume, it was essential for Kant to build a formidable philosophical structure.[/b]

Again, it seems to me that, with respect to either natural science or human ethics, mere mortals are not able to demonstrate epistemologically a clear distinction between correlation and causality. Ah, but it also seems abundantly manifest [at least to me] that science comes a lot closer to it than deontologists.

And, however “formidable” Kant’s “philosophical structure”, it still rests ultimately on words defining and defending other words. The words [at least some very, very important ones] don’t/won’t/can’t point to anything that can be precisely correlated [as in cause and effect] with the material laws of nature. They are speaking of things nestled in the noumena: the unknowable.

In other words, the deepest mystery still lies in the exact nature of a human mind able to think these things. If it even has a “nature” at all.

“How does one determine that their self-analysis is over or under that which is deterimental to their health?”

By looking at what their self-analysis does or has done, for them. Does your self-analysis lead you to a clearer picture of yourself–your dasein–or has it led you into more confusion? Does all your reading of the conflicting views of philosophy and philosophers given you real insight into yourself, or has it led to more confusion?

“And if should and shouldn’t are personal, fine. But what happens when they smash into the personal assessments of others? Not only is the personal often political but the political itself is invariably rooted out in a particular world viewed from many fiercely conflicted ways.”

That’s true–but so what?

Let’s talk a bit about the abortion “issue,” for a minute or twelve. As a man, you’re not ever going to be faced with pregnancy–wanted or not–the result of rape, incest, or stupidity, or not. Given that, what’s the issue for you? You think abortion is immoral–so do I. But I wouldn’t bomb an ‘abortion clinic’ or shoot a doctor, or withhold funding used for breast exams at PP, as a result. I’m not a Christ figure. The SCOTUS didn’t rule on morality, it ruled on the a woman’s right to privacy under the XIV Amendment. That’s all. The case and the subsequent decision was most probably heavily influenced by the AMA, although the SCOTUS is supposedly PAC proof. The decision saved the lives of both doctors and women.

Abortion has been around for thousands of years. Look it up! Read about how women endangered themselves with herbal medicines and intrusive ‘devices’ in order to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Who are you or I to judge what others might do simply because we feel it’s immoral?

Then there are those things you disagree with such as corporate farming. That wasn’t the word you used, but it’s close.–Industrialized farming? I, too, object to industrialized farming. for a hell of a lot of reasons. The US feeds much of the world. Doing so means industrialized farming may have resulted in making a lot of the world guinea pigs to test genetically altered or engineered food. But industrialized farming is still feeding the world and we eat the same foods. We even eat more harmful foods when what we eat is ‘processed.’

"And, again, for this particular dasein [me], that breeds ambiguity and ambivalence.

But ambiguity and ambivalence are crucial components of human freedom. At least the kind rooted in democracy and the rule of law."

What exactly are you saying here. The “Rule of Law” is based on precedence. Our Democracy is modified to balance a ‘rule by majority.’

I got really steamed today when I read that our Legislature is considering banning anyone under 18 from using tanning beds! Good Lord. Is that what people are concerned with?

Law is a kind of infrastructural technology that, even though arbitrary by virtue of its being a human construct, serves as an objective anchor to the more subjective nature of human judgment. This can be seen, for instance, in the way certain laws are enforced such as marihuana laws where it is technically illegal, but is often tolerated.

In an unspoken sense, laws are created to counter-balance ambiguity and ambivalence while not shutting them out, to act as a stay against angst while leaving wiggle-room for the uncertainties that come with being free.

Immanuel Kant: Ayn Rand’s Intellectual Enemy:

by Edward W. Younkins

[b]For Kant, analytical truths are logical and can be validated independent of experience. These propositions are a priori and non-empirical. On the other hand, he said that synthetic propositions or truths are empirical, a posteriori, and dependent upon experience in order to be validated. Kant contended that analytic propositions provide no information about reality and that synthetic ones are factual but are uncertain, unprovable, and contingent.

According to Rand, there is no basis upon which to differentiate analytic propositions from synthetic ones. Her theory of concepts undermines Kant’s idea of an analytic-synthetic dichotomy. For Rand, concepts express classifications of observed existents according to their relationship to other observed entities. Rand explains that a concept refers to the actual existents which it integrates including all their characteristics currently known and those not yet known. She argued that concepts subsume all of the attributes of the existents to which they refer and not simply the ones included in the definition. Her objective theory of concepts is the tool she used to abrogate Kant’s analytic-synthetic dichotomy.[/b]

Consider the words above. Now consider the words above attached to a discussion of or a debate about the rationality [and thus the morality] of military conscription.

Yes, you know where this is going.

As soon as the words above are not aimed entirely at defining and defending other words – “analytically” “theoretically” “conceptually” “essentially” – and are enscounced instead in defining and defending actual historical interactions relating to the documented use of military conscription, the meaning starts to wobble and the inevitable equivocation [or, for Randians, outright verbal brawls] commense.

Here, for example, is Rand’s own “metaphysical” take on conscription:

[b]Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right–the right to life–and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom–then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?[/b]

Now, certainly, this can be defended as a reasonable argument about the draft. And, in many important respects, I share it myself. But the manner in which it is expressed leads one to believe there cannot possibly be an equally reasonable argument made in defense of conscription.

And, more importantly, it makes the crucial assumption that the relationship between the individual and the community, the individual and the state, is an inherent one. In other words, a relationship that can, in fact, be known objectively.

But can it?

Throughout human history, the actual relationship between “I” and “we” has always been complex, convoluted and contradictory; and ever embedded in contingency, chance and change. Think of the role the draft played in the American Civil War; or in defeating the Nazis and fascism; or the manner in which it is perceived by most in the state of Israel. In the course of human history, the relationship between means and ends [as with the one between “I” and “we”] has never one that can be calculated…mathematically?

For example, in Frances Fitzgerald’s book, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, I was struck by her references to indigenous peoples in that part of the world who did not even have the word “I” in their vocabulary at all. They were enculturated as children to think of themselves soley in the context of “we”—the village, the indigenous tribe they belonged to.

Was this objectively irrational, immoral. Is this something that can be demonstrated philosophically?

In my view, there is no philosophical argument – not analytic, not synthetic, not metaphysical – that can be broached such that the meaning of “conscription” used in a philosophy of ethics is the equivalent of the actual empirical facts accumulateed to demonstrate unequivoally whether a particular state has, in fact, engaged in the act of conscription morally. We can be analytically and synthetically sound in arguing about the existence of conscription because we defined what that word means. But that is not the same thing as concluding an essential, objective moral value can be derived from this.

They are [qualitatively] two very different kind of arguments, in my view.

And as much as Younkins wants to demonstrate how Rand might approach a behavior like military conscription differently from Kant [as a rational moral value], they really approach them the same. Namely, they assume [each in their own way] there is a way to link conceptual arguments to arguments “in reality” such that they are [philosophically] indistinguishable.

What is our moral duty as a citizen here? Can this be calculated?

Then you are a radical exception, even amongst those who claim this. My opinions have changed over time, but slowly, very slowly. I see people who entertain other ideas - I think that is the perfect word for it, given the double entendre - but that this entertaining goes on without much change for long periods of time. But perhaps you really are this exception. I obviously can’t know. But then other people who are not making claims openly about their potential for change may also change over time, perhaps even just as quickly. I have not experienced the claim of an open mind or changing flowlike mental process to correlate with actual increased potential for change.

We can then go farther and discuss the extent to which embracing a problematic point of view is equally problematic. But that just takes us deeper into Wittgensteins’s reservations about the use of language “out in the world”—the things it can and cannot encompass.

I don’t see how looking outward and thinking one should not come from inside out avoids this. What it does avoid is becoming more of a unity. One gets good at jailing the subjective self with another self claiming to be more objective and open.

But, from my perspective, the “dominant part” [the “inner horse”] is still dasein. And it has to decide over and over and over again what is true because it is true and what is true only because “I” think it is true. And that can often become particularly problematic.
[/quote]
I don’t see any avoiding this. I don’t think keeping a split and giving some ‘claims to be more objective’ part of the mind the power prevents this from happening, given that this part is also subjective and guided by forces it does not know about.

Generally, we change our minds about “I” when 1] we come upon a new way in which to think about the acquisition of identity and 2] when circumstances in our lives change dramatically, forcing us to reevaluate many things.

This happened to me specifically while serving in the U.S. Army. In 1970 I was stationed at Song Be, South Vietnam. I went over there a rather devout Christian and came back home a rather rabid atheist. I was also introduced to, among others, Ayn Rand, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Albert Camus, Simone ded Beauvoir and Martin Heidegger. That’s what can happen to “I” when you are in a war and the Army is bursting at the seams with inscripted draftees.

This might make me an exception of course but it illustrates my point about dasein. And, as dasein, “what do I want?” and “what do I believe?” is an ever subjunctive work in progress. It’s just that some lives are more eventful than others.

From Immanuel Kant: Ayn Rand’s Intellectual Enemy:

by Edward W. Younkins

[b]Kant attempted to demonstrate that the world that we experience is not the real world. The real world does not include our species concepts of space, time, entity, causality, and so on. He contended that the phenomenal world of appearances that we experience is metaphysically inferior to the noumenal world of true reality. The noumenal world is the world of things in themselves, higher truth, and real reality.

Kant explains that the phenomenal world is the world of earthly physical reality including man’s senses, perceptions, reason, and science. This phenomenal world, as perceived by a man’s mind, is a distortion or misrepresentation of the real world. Kant contends that the distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty itself. He argued that that what the human mind perceives and conceives the world to be is not the world as it really is but rather as it appears to a specifically structured human reasoning faculty.[/b]

What is the real world?

Imagine the universe without a mind to imagine it. Either a Devine mind or the mind of mere mortal.

Mere mortals here or on any other planet harboring intelligent life forms.

What would “the real world”, “the real universe” be then?

This may, perhaps, be considerably more enigmatic then, say, any of us can imagine?

Without conscious minds it would seem matter will unfold based on the immutable laws of existence itself. There would be no point of view to render a future other than as it must inevitably unfold based on the mindless, mechanistic nature of space, time, energy and matter itself.

So, what are philosophers like Kant and Rand contending—that the mind of man is somehow different from all the other matter? Are they suggesting our minds are able to grasp The Real World such that we know what it is and are able to judge human behavior as being – rationally, ethically – in accordance with some fundamental, metaphysical relationship between Good and Evil? Between the transient phenomenal and the eternal noumenal reality?

This all seems rather presumptuous, doesn’t it?

I’d be more inclined to accept this argument though if either one of them had been able to denote – phenomenally? noumenally? --what mind is.

And, again, as soon as you impregnate their moral philosophies with real behaviors, the inevitable explosions begin.

The a posteriori explosions, for example.

Immanuel Kant: Ayn Rand’s Intellectual Enemy
by Edward W. Younkins

[b]Kant laments the fact that a person can only perceive and comprehend things through his own consciousness. He also explains that men are limited to a consciousness of a particular nature which perceives and conceives through particular means. For Kant, man’s knowledge lacks validity because his consciousness possesses identity. According to Kant, knowledge, to be valid, must not be processed in any way of consciousness. Kant’s criterion for truth is to perceive “things in themselves” unprocessed by any consciousness. For Kant only knowledge independent of perception is valid. Unfortunately, such knowledge is impossible!

He argues that human knowledge is subjective because it is not relevant to “things in themselves.” Real truth is unknowable because to know it a person would have to relate to reality directly without depending upon his conceptual mechanism. For Kant, the real is the object “in itself” out of all relation to a subject.[/b]

For Kant, man’s knowledge lacks validity because his consciousness possesses identity.

Yes, I like the way Younkins puts this. Identity being something I have always been fascinated with.

But what in the world can he possibly mean by “validity” here? Is there a way to know for certain when a “consciousness” is or is not “valid”? Is that anything like an “authentic” consciousness the existentialists clamor for?

All of us possess an identity. We start acquiring it on the day we are born. And to varying degrees we all end up feeling [self-consciously] that our “sense of self” is valid.

After all, how valid does it really have to be in order to interact with others from day to day to day?

In fact, for the great preponderance of us, the notion of “validity” [as a philosophical component of our lives] never enters into our interactions at all. And why should it? We have long ago subsumed our identity in the necessities inherent in culture, experience, relationships.

In other words, in the plethora of pursuits we all engage in the course of living our lives.

And to what extent does this involve understanding “things in themselves”? Instead, we go about the business of acquiring a practical familiarity with the actual teeming relationships themselves. Relationships revolving around family, friendship, love, sex…work, subsistence…art…entertainment, sports, play…consumption.

It is really astonishing how much of human existence goes on without the slightest need for these conceptual “truths”.

And human knowledge is always more or less “subjective”. And, in my view, it is the relationship between this and the extent to which we can ever be fully conscious of ourselves as either subject or object that should be the most important focus of those philosophers who explore the relationship between rational thought, virtue and behavior.

Younkins, of course, is just setting Kant up. And, so, in a similiar manner, I will set him up.

Immanuel Kant: Ayn Rand’s Intellectual Enemy

by Edward W. Younkins

Kant maintains that identity, which itself is the essence of existence, invalidates consciousness. Any knowledge attained by a process of consciousness is inescapably subjective and therefore cannot match the facts of reality, because it is processed or altered knowledge. Whereas all consciousness is a relationship between a subject and an object, it follows that for a person to acquire a knowledge of what is real, he would have to go outside of his consciousness. To know what is true a man would have to abandon his own nature, which is an absurd impossibility. In order to know true reality requires a consciousness not limited by any specific means of cognition. This is the criterion or goal of Kant’s argument.

I don’t know if what Younkins maintains Rand maintains Kant maintains about human identity is true. But I do know it is rather supercilious indeed to express it as, “the essence of existence” which “invalidates consciousness”.

What on earth does that mean?

And what on earth does it mean to speak of consciousness as being “inescapably subjective” and incapable of “match[ing] the facts of reality”?

With respect to what particular human interactions?

Consciousness and identity are thrust upon us [at birth] by evolution and by the manner in which we are indoctrinated as a child in internalize a sense of self and a sense of meaning about the world around us.

However:

Some of what is biologically predisposed in each consciousness at birth is able to be shaped and molded dramatically by the inevitable contact with “environmental factors”.

And much of what we are brainwashed to accept as children about ourselves and the world around is, in turn, reshaped and remolded dramatically as we become older and gain a greater sense of individual autonomy.

Thus the far more interesting question is that, given this, what can we truly differeniate as “subjective” and “objective” when we speak of the crucial relationship between “in my head” and “out in the world”?

What can we know about it…factually, actually…using both the inductive and deductive faculties of mind?

Where both Rand and Kant stumble, in my view, is in imagining their own minds actually accomplished this – knew what is in fact true and what in fact is not true – with respect to the ever fluid and dynamic relationship between moral philosophy and human behavior.

Indeed, in this respect, both Rand and Kant are just run of the mill rationalists.

To wit:

“mverhaegh” from, Ayn Rand and Kant 70, at the HubPages internet site:

…[Rand] specifically disliked the Categorical Imperative. And yet her own rationalism and principles of respect for liberty so often remind people of the Categorical Imperative. She was certainly very “categorical” in many of her judgments, and there is some type of connection to Kant’s moral thinking.

The “type of connection” being the frame of mind that speaks of moral interactions between daseins as a chemist might speak of material interactions between elements. Just with or without a “transcending” point of view.

Perhaps Kant means that intuitive knowledge is valid because it’s arrived at without using rationality or reasoning–something Rand would abhor, but something that goes along with the Categorical Imperative. Once intuitive knowledge is subjected to ‘reason,’ it’s no longer ‘valid’ because it’s gone through the mind of the reasoner. Since the reasoner’s consciousness is his identity and each identity is different, each person’s knowledge is different. Kant was looking for a metaphysical basis for morality rather than a physical basis–or a basis based on reason.

To go a bit into Jung’s Collective Unconscious, wherein “…there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.” To me, that means it’s apart from our individual unconscious minds where are made up so much of forgotten memories and/or experiences. Our individual unconscious, again, differs from identity to identity.

Kant–philosophers in general–isn’t interested in a ‘how-to’ book on inter/intra-personal relationships; how often do you start your day thinking, “I’m going to base my day on what I’ve learned from Schopenhauer,” for example. Besides, there’s no universal ‘validity’ in philosophy, just as there’s no necessary or universally accepted ‘truth’ arrived at through a ‘valid’ logical argument.

What is the difference then between having an intuitive sense that something happened and an intuitive sense that what did happen is immoral?

The difference is that it can [usually] be determined if in fact it happened but not if in fact [morally] it ought not to have happened. And what becomes conditioned subconsciously is also rooted in dasein. If you live your life embedded in a family and a neighborhood and a community and a culture and a historical era where abortion is deemed to be a profoundly immoral behavior chances are your mental, emotional and psychological reactions to it will become fused.

Beyond reason it will just seem natural that one must never choose abortion.

Jung’s “collective unconsciousness” then becomes no less embodied in one’s reaction to it than the “collective consciousness” that is passed down from generation to generation.

Where then does Kant fit in here? There has to be – philosophically – a standard by which to finally judge this beyond intuition. A standard rooted in reason and logic and epistemologically sound knowledge. If we don’t concoct something analogous to a “how-to” manual for reasoning toward right rather than wrong behaviors aren’t we basically left with either God or survival of the fittest?

The “social contract” must be predicated on that which is deemed the most rational assumptions about human behavior. Otherwise we are left with – what? – more or less intelligent hunches, gut feelings or renditions of commonsense and tradition?

But this is my point: that reason is only effective up to a point here. And whether from the perspective of either Kant or Rand. We must demand that folks be reasonable but we must recognize the irony inherent in making such demands.

imabiguous wrote:
What is the difference then between having an intuitive sense that something happened and an intuitive sense that what did happen is immoral?

The difference is that it can [usually] be determined if in fact it happened but not if in fact [morally] it ought not to have happened. And what becomes conditioned subconsciously is also rooted in dasein. If you live your life embedded in a family and a neighborhood and a community and a culture and a historical era where abortion is deemed to be a profoundly immoral behavior chances are your mental, emotional and psychological reactions to it will become fused.

I’m afraid we’re talking about two different things: I’ve suggested a meaning for Kantian ‘valid’ knowledge and given my definition of intuitive knowledge in so doing; you’re going on about the morality/immorality of abortion. I don’t understand leap.

Beyond reason it will just seem natural that one must never choose abortion.

Only if you can’t give a “reason” for believing that. You can say abortion is immoral because you think it is, but that’s rather circular, isn’t it? Or you can say that somewhere, deep inside of you, you have the feeling it is. If you then go on to try to define your feeling and can’t, then isn’t it a perception based on intuition?-- or intuitive knowledge?

Jung’s “collective unconsciousness” then becomes no less embodied in one’s reaction to it than the “collective consciousness” that is passed down from generation to generation.

The collective unconscious is different from the collective conscious because it isn’t passed down as lore or culture from generation to generation. It’s something that’s formed in the developing prenatal mind. I’ll give you the example given to me. At some time in pre-history, primitive man experienced a flood which could have been caused by abnormal rainfall that swelled the rivers and led to mass destruction. This kind of flood appears in the very early Gilgamesh poetry (2100-2000 BC), in the Gilgamesh Epic, and in the Bible. There are several other “myths” that may be based on actual occurrences that have been long forgotten but that are still a part our primitive ‘mind.’ These occurrences are our collective unconscious.

Where then does Kant fit in here? There has to be – philosophically – a standard by which to finally judge this beyond intuition. A standard rooted in reason and logic and epistemologically sound knowledge. If we don’t concoct something analogous to a “how-to” manual for reasoning toward right rather than wrong behaviors aren’t we basically left with either God or survival of the fittest?

Why does there have to be a “standard”? As for Kant, I think I was asking you how he fit in–it’s your OP and it was your post to which I was replying.

The “social contract” must be predicated on that which is deemed the most rational assumptions about human behavior. Otherwise we are left with – what? – more or less intelligent hunches, gut feelings or renditions of commonsense and tradition?

But this is my point: that reason is only effective up to a point here. And whether from the perspective of either Kant or Rand. We must demand that folks be reasonable but we must recognize the irony inherent in making such demands.

Again, why must there be a ‘social contract’ that makes ‘demands?’ And who or what is going to put those demands into a set of rules? Should it be the often oppressive “rule of the majority” or the often equally oppressive “rule of the minority?”