On Jul 13, 10:41 am, chazwin <chazwy... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
On Jul 12, 7:41 pm, Just Me <jpd... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:

Anyone who knows his Kant at first hand, recognizes all this for a
complete failure to comprehend the most fundamental elements of what
the great man had to say.

I think you are overplaying your hand here. Everyone who had the
pleasure to know Kant at first hand are all long dead.

There you see? A wonderful example of empirical data in form of a
statistical average lifespan, is here to fool us into thinking we know
something, quite necessarily and absolutely, whereas conversely, a
reliance on Pure Reason would have allowed for a person of my greatly
advanced age of 284 (going on 285); my place of birth on July 20, 1724
at Königsberg, Germany, where I was pleased, right along with the rest
of my fellow townsfolk, to have always the correct time, due to how we
set our clocks, not according to any position of the sun and stars,
but of Herr Kant, as he came walking by our houses at precisely the
same time every day!

Otherwise you are correct to say this hideous essay is a complete
misconception of Kant and his works.

But have you seen the post of "Immortalist" containing text from Will
Durant's book? It's really the first and only account at second hand
I've seen of the Critique of Pure Reason, that agrees entirely with
my own first hand impressions got upon my many walks with the man, as
we were often given to meet and then cross every one of the Seven
Bridges of Königsberg during course of a pleasant peripatetic tête-à-
tête.

Or, if the weather was being a dirty bitch, it was not unusual to
encounter Kant over Liebfraumilch and kippers, of a crisp winter's eve
down in the warm womb of the Jolly Fraulein Lagerkeller, where toward
the turn of the century, we were often heard to tearfully lament the
Terror that had come of our earlier enthusiasm for the French
Revolution--for we had both formerly been of the happy, progressive
opinion that a society which places Reason on the throne of God, can
only have served to reveal who God really was, all along.

Boy, were we wrong!

In any case, whatever may be the opinion of skeptics concerning a
"popularizer" like Durant, even at that, he certainly has Bertrand
Russell beat, back of the hand down to the burning coals in the
ashtray, when it comes to his crumby, wimpy account of Kant in
"History of Western Philosophy" which is nothing but the usual
superficial scuttlebutt that gets handed down from lectern to
student's notes and back to lectern again, with barely a glance given
to the texts, at first hand.

And the result? As may be seen from the first post in this thread, it
has been not at all to produce, for the academy (nor anyone else), the
least insight into Kantian metaphysics but an absurd slander instead,
that would make of the man no more than a forerunner of purely
solipsistic Husserlian/Heideggerian phenomenalism. It certainly goes
to show how poorly understood the phenomena/noumena dichotomy has
always been--even that his whole philosophy should be boiled down to a
standard conception of it that is so cluelessly empty, and wrong.

And the tragedy is, so long as the true import of Kant's work in
Categorical Logic, as it decidedly is an extension and refinement of
the *Organon* of Aristotle; as it continues to be slandered and thus
unrecognized for the precisely tuned logical instrument it is, the
panacea of AI will continue to elude the efforts of software
engineers, who given the impetus to access this which is in Kant's
terms, "metaphysical science"--why! Wouldn't they be today far
advanced along the way toward realizing this perfectly attainable
dream?

Scott Peck was to psychology what Immanuel Kant
was to Western philosophy. In the same way as Kant
had used philosophy, after a blossoming during
Enlightenment and Romanticism, to affectuate a
return to the Protestant dogmas that philosophy had
sought to replace, so did Peck use psychology, after its
psychoanalitic beginnings in early 20th century and its
existential humanistic blossoming in 1960s and 1970s,
to affectuate a return to religious dogmas that
psychology had struggled to overcome.

The philosophy of Kant - and the psychology of Peck -
employed a device referred to by Mortimer Adler as
suicidal epistemologizing and suicidal psychologizing.
Kant claimed that the imperfection of human perception
meant that it was only capable of apprehending the
phenomenal (apparent) instead of the noumenal (the
true); he also claimed that beauty was relative, illusory
and insignificant ("in the eye"). With these claims he
trivialized and denigrated both science and art. In
creating in public mind the suspicion of both empirical
and intuitive modes of cognition, practiced respectively
by Enlightenment and Romanticism, he destroyed both
Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the same manner
did Peck, through his contributions, place in the public
mind contempt for and denigration of both reason and
passion, equating the first with Cartesian logic that was
inadequate to describe his experience of synchronicities,
and claiming the second an invalid basis for either
relationship or meaningful interaction. The result has
been contempt and invalidation of both reason and
passion and the destruction, first by philosophy then by
psychology, of both aspects of humankind.

Both of course are wrong in all aspects. Reason is not
limited to Cartesian dogmatism, and the intellectual and
scientific pursuits, in higher physics, anthropology, and
more advanced psychological studies, have uncovered
knowledge that entirely exceeds Cartesian dogmatisms
and its brainchildren - skepticism, behaviorism, logical
positivism, and similar abominations. Beauty has been
shown scientifically to exist both in absolute and in
relative forms. As for romantic passion, it has been at
the root of the best marriages I've ever seen - marriages
that produced wholesome families, meaningful and
lasting love between partners, beautiful and intelligent
and accomplished children, and are still going strong 50
or 60 years down the road. In taking the stances that
they did, Kant and Peck thus became destructive of
both the intellectual and the passionate aspects of man -
and destructive of all the greatness and progress and
richness of life that these two aspects have produced.
And in pursuit of their dogmas, was created a character
that is essentially necrophilic (death-seeking) and
seeks to destroy, in its relations, policies, thoughts and
activities, all that creates and affirms and adds to life.

In both cases, a pursuit that produced great
improvement for many and at multiple levels was
effectively destroyed by being used against its own
foundations. With Kant, philosophy had destroyed itself -
both Enlightenment philosophy that made possible
Western science and Western democracy, and
Romantic philosophy that made possible the world's
greatest literature, cultural blossoming and richest
interpersonal experience and relations - by claiming the
mechanism for both to be imperfect or trivial. With
Peck, so did psychology, in both its analytical and its
humanistic aspect - by trivializing and denigrating the
aspects of human being to which it spoke and which
it worked to describe. And the pursuits that have given
the Western world its greatest accomplishments -
democracy, science, innovation, freedom, great
literature and art, understanding of nature, civil and
human rights, meaningful and beautiful relationships
between men and women, and humanistic life-affirming
values that went to a great length to make most of both
accomplishment and experience - were subverted by
the pursuit that had conceptualized them being used to
destroy its own foundations. And in both cases, the
result was an imposition, against a flourishing of life
through affirmation of passion and intellect, of orders
and character that were fundamentally anti-life.

The Victorianism that followed Kant, like the three
decades that followed Peck, were contemptuous of both
intellect and passion - contemptuous as such of the life-
enhancing and life-affirming aspects of humanity. It is a
mentality that by its own nature can only lend to
systemic violence, oppression, and war against both
feeling and intellect, which lead directly to abusive,
controlling and systematically destructive mental,
emotional and relational habits in people who are a part
of that mentality. But furthermore still it leads to destruction
of all that thought and feeling make possible: science,
democracy, freedom, ingenuity, innovaton, human rights,
beauty, compassion, art, love, vitality, and every meaningful
form of improvement in people's lives. This, of course, has
been the essential character of both the Victorian era and its
more contemporary equivalent. And just as Kant and Peck
came to believe that the source of evil was hubris - which
their followers use to damn both reason and passon and
people who affirmed, cultivated and benefited from both -
so has the far greater hubris of their own mentality made
apparent itself in its values and its effects.

In both cases, just as Kant used philosophy, and Peck
used psychology, to destroy the ages of reason and
passion, so have the concepts they brought in to
replace them convicted the orders that they had
ushered in. The Protestant morals that were used and
then hideously misused to sustain the dark night of
Victorianism were in the end employed themselves to
convict as morally damnable an order that consigned
the bulk of the people in it to colonization, child labor,
brutality, squalor, suffocating formalism, hysterical
prudery, internecine warfare, disconnection from life
both within and without, and brutal, cruel, degrading,
unforgiving existence. Likewise the concept of
responsibility that was used and then hideously
misused for the last three decades is now making
apparent the irresponsibility of suffocating innovation in
energy sector to keep alive the stranglehold of oil
cartels, giving taxpayer subsidies to beef industry that
takes 10 times as much biomass to produce a burger
than the vegetable industry to produce an equivalent
amount of grain, consuming 4,000 calories a day and
driving SUVs while millions are dying because of
disastrous climatic events caused by ecosystemic
destruction and accumulation of CO2 emissions in the
atmosphere, destroying with no thought for the future or
for what made them possible the natural treasures that
man cannot conceivably recreate, and ladening the
future generations with trillions of dollars in debt, amid
collapsing family incomes, in order to pay for an
economic stimulus that never came. By applying at the
collective level the characteristic that is demanded of
the individual, is seen the corruption of the arrangement
itself. Victorian moralism was rightfully used to show
the moral wrongness of the Victorian order; and the
more modern-day responsibility is likewise making
apparent the irresponsibility of the present one.

And just as personality psychology has been used and
hideously misused in the period following Peck to target
people who thought or felt differently from the social or
communal entities of place and time, whatever the
character of these entities or their intent or the actual
substance of their beliefs and behaviors, so has it been
used by others, rightly or wrongly, to describe business,
politics, religion, psychology, media, and even the
Western civilization, as possessing a psychopathic and
predatory character. The same concept is now used by
me to describe any communal or social entity that seeks
unlimited power over the minds, beliefs, personalities
and lives of the people within it - and then seeks to
impose itself on others.

To believe that an unofficial organ of power, that unlike
official organs of power in a constitutional democracy is
not subject to check and balance and official
accountability, is somehow less prone to corruption and
wrong and abuses of power than official organs of
power, is ridiculous. Such an entity becomes law,
reality and sanity unto itself and therefore is capable of
the worst forms of corruption and systemic crime. And
in countries where the power of official organs is
checked and balanced and made to accord with
constitution and bill of rights, but for some or another
reason the power of unofficial organs is not subjected to
similar scrutiny and is thus used to commit most
horrendous abuses and most illegal abominations
against the people within them and without them, these
entities not only can be seen as unconstitutional, but in
fact should be seen themselves as possessing the
worst of these disorders.

The sociopathic character that does not recognize law,
is the character of the community or the social network
that becomes law unto itself and thus not only
perpetuates and then covers up systemic crime while
totally controlling the people within it, but also
commands of people inside of them unconditional
loyalty regardless of scale of their crimes against
people both inside and without. And it is these
entities, not the people they demonize, that are the true
danger not only to democracy, but to humankind as it
exists at this time and as it stands to exist in the
foreseeable future. The crimes and coverups of small
towns, gangs, old-boy networks, cults, Islamists,
Jehovah's Witnesses, paramilitary organizations, and
corrupt networks and operations in medicine, law,
police, courts, psychiatry, and politics, are a far graver
threat to rule of law than are the works of any number of
axe murderers - and they affect people's lives to a far
greater extent.

The same can be likewise ...

read more »

On Jul 13, 4:09 pm, Malrassic Park <malen... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:56:41 -0700 (PDT), Just Me <jpd... at (no spam) gmail.com

And the tragedy is, so long as the true import of Kant's work in
Categorical Logic, being decidedly an extension and refinement of
the *Organon* of Aristotle; as it continues to be slandered and thus
unrecognized for the precisely tuned logical instrument it is, the
panacea of AI will continue to elude the efforts of software
engineers, who given the impetus to access this which is in Kant's
terms, "metaphysical science"--why! Wouldn't they be today far
advanced along the way toward realizing this perfectly attainable
dream?

That's what I meant to say.

Glad to hear it. Next time that happens, do please just go on ahead
and say it to save my fingers from all this walking when they could
have been out for a pleasant Sunday stroll through the Yellow Pages,
looking for somebody who still knows how to fix funky G*d d at (no spam) mn four
barrel Rochester carburator?

" If I had remembered that the name 'Galt' appears
in one of her books, I would have chosen a different
name for my character."

Stephen R. Donaldson, "Gradual Interview"

Poor Ayn. She just can't get no respect.

Scott Peck was to psychology what Immanuel Kant
was to Western philosophy.