I had feared that the term ‘passions’ might be interpreted like this, even as I replaced it in other instances with ‘energies’ which should make it clear that I an referring to a more general category than mere sensibility. I mean the basic life force.
It is not (objectively) good that reason relies on energy, it is merely fact.
Therefore, philosophical reason must engage this admittedly daunting and even terrifying difficulty of the passions including all their obscurity and violence before it can engage the subject of reason.
But as I have discovered, the passions aren’t nearly as dreadful as they are made out to be by the champions of reason-a-priori. In fact it is the passions that include love, and reason which is unbound by love as it can choose any passion as its logical ground, as its axiomatic value. In the passions is com-passion, however irrational it would often seem to the merely calculating mind. It is the passions that value being, of self and of others, and reason can only accomodate the valuing of others if these loving passions are strong enough.
Therefore I laud Kants passions, because they drove him to imagine that reason in itself would give birth to similar appreciation as he felt in his heart. But he was misled, as loftily as a man can be perhaps… but from Kant there follows not any effective moral command, only a rhetorical, aesthetically pleasing one. To be effective in commanding integrity of action and compassion, which are Kants axiomatic values, we have to dig deeper than he did and confront those plasmic forces beneath the surface, and discover that they, the passions, from sensible emotions to the raw unconscious energies, are themselves valuing.
There is no indifference to nature. All is love, in a sense, but most of it is blind love. The path to a lofty hearted politics of power is the process of illuminating love to iself. This path is a poetic, creative one, not one of system building. It is the process of awakening.
For human consciousness to become aware of its own lofty ground and nature, this is the moral imperative and the purification of reason.