Soooo…
Immanual Kant made a remarkable contribution to Western Philosophy, as I understand it, by basically saying “if our minds are a passive, blank slate, how could we possibly make ANY sense of the objective phenomena that confronts our consiousness unless something ACTIVE exists in our minds prior to this experience of our confronting of the objective phenomena?”
Now, he created a bunch of arbitrary catagories to go with his prognosis, but the idea behind his prognosis was by no means arbitrary. If there is not a active, potent “something” (catagory) pre-existing in our balls, then objective phenomena (the egg) can not be “known” (think of the biblical understanding of that word)
There must, therefore, be something in the mind with the power to “fertilize”, so to speak, the objective phenomena and make it intelligible for us (such as an embryo, fetus, child). But we can never know this “egg in itself” because the moment the sperm “understands it” the egg (thing in itself) is understood only through libido that projected the sperm out into the egg in the first place. So basically, we see only the form that the sperm has given to the egg and never the egg-in-itself.
Am I horribly off the mark with Kant or am I on to something here? Thoughts?
I haven’t read kant, but there are a few comments i’d like to make about this post:
your paragraph about his ideas on the blank slate…i’d agree with that. i don’t think too many people anymore actually believe that babies are born with a proper, complete BLANK slate, though, so idk who that argument would really matter to anyway.
the next two paragraphs don’t seem to have anything to do with the first one…not that i can see. i don’t see the logical connection between there being no blank slate, and mentally fertilizing eggs.
the language used in those two paragraphs is pretty unclear. it’s not really clear what you’re saying about reality. at first i thought that you were saying that in order for sperm to fertilize an egg, the man has to be conscious of his fertilizing power or something, but now i’m not so sure. on the second read, it just looks mostly like gibberish to me. can you try to translate it into regular english? sans all the metaphors? (ie everything in quotes)
Your interpretation of Kant seems reasonable, but you haven’t reduced it to sexuality so much as tacked on an analogy to human reproduction. It’s not an analogy that makes things any clearer to me, quite the reverse - I think your straightforward explanation was much better.