Michael Onfray has this amusing photo of a copy of Kant’s Critiques with a disclaimer stamped on its title sheet:
“This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.”
(Thanks to John Gillis for the link.)
Seems like some goof named Stephen Dahl also made these red-circled points in previous comments. We must always evaluate writing — to some degree — in its time frame. However, this prelude given above is very “sick in the head.” Attitudes may moderate, but they remain the same, to wit, ethnicity and race, which established themselves after thousands of years of inbreeding, in three major groups: the Japhetic family (European, their languages extending from Indo-European), the Semitic family (Middle Eastern) and the Hamitic Family which moved to Africa in the main (“Ham” means “swarthy” in Hebrew). The Asiatic peoples are apparently an early hybrid of the European and the Semite and moved eastward. DNA will eventually trace these migrations. (Oh, “sorry” to some, that’s the earliest genealogy we have of mankind, in the Book of Genesis).
Most people choose to marry in their own background, and mixed marriages usually fail. The more the couple has in common (shall we start with genes?) the more likely they will remain together. However, this does not preclude the marriage of ANY two people genuinely in love. But “blood is thicker than water” and one does well to marry a “cousin.” (Note, the Bible taboo against incest was not official until Moses’ laws, indeed, Adam and Eve’s children intermarried, and Lot was debauched by his daughters and fathered children by them, and was not punished)
This kind of Bible thinking pervaded Kant’s time and the need for religion and faith doubtless made him include it in his metaphysic. Liberals of today delight in various samples of miscegenation, but it is really a Marxist ploy to debase all mankind from family structure into a nondescript proletariat. Pornographers also relish the idea that women of another “race” [a bad term, misleading] are more exciting than the girl next door. Marxism, with its anarchistic base, seeks to destroy everything before the “united” polyglot human people enter their totalitarian paradise. There is nothing “racist” about desiring the girl next door, and people in America, for example, practice segregation unofficially, whereas it was previously stipulated by law.
It may be Kant has caused widespread irrationality but if you see him as a know-it-all and let-me-tell-you Prussian (who else could have united the German principalities?) but it is preferable to the hippy-dippy mentality where we all take drugs, have group sex, wear flowers in our hair, and call it “Love”.
If you find my argument offensive, ask yourself if choosing a marriage mate isn’t a prime example of free will. We just had St. Patrick’s day, and isn’t it better that “those people” stick together, march in raucous parades, and sing “When Irish eyes are..” bloodshot?
QED
“OK, kiddies, here’s that section from Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ I promised I’d read to you!”
“Oh yaaaaaay!!!!”
“For example, this universal identity of the apperception of the manifold given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations and is possible only by means of the consciousness of this synthesis. For the empirical consciousness which accompanies different representations is in itself fragmentary and disunited, and without relation to the identity of the subject. This relation, then, does not exist because I accompany every representation with consciousness, but because I join one representation to another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. Consequently, only because I can connect a variety of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible that I can represent to myself the identity of consciousness in these representations; in other words, the analytical unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a synthetical unity.* The thought, “These representations given in intuition belong all of them to me,” is accordingly just the same as, “I unite them in one self-consciousness, or can at least so unite them”; and although this thought is not itself the consciousness of the synthesis of representations, it presupposes the possibility of it; that is to say, for the reason alone that I can comprehend the variety of my representations in one consciousness, do I call them my representations, for otherwise I must have as many-coloured and various a self as are the representations of which I am conscious. Synthetical unity of the manifold in intuitions, as given a priori, is therefore the foundation of the identity of apperception itself, which antecedes a priori all determinate thought. But the conjunction of representations into a conception is not to be found in objects themselves, nor can it be, as it were, borrowed from them and taken up into the understanding by perception, but it is on the contrary an operation of the understanding itself, which is nothing more than the faculty of conjoining a priori and of bringing the variety of given representations under the unity of apperception…”
Excuse my long-winded and didactic comments above, Ed, you just said what I meant to!
If philosophy ought to have been a guide for all men and women why is the prose of Kant, Hegel, et al so convoluted and obscure as to befuddle even fellow philosophers who have spent their entire professional lives studying it?
Reading Kant’s passage above it becomes clear why a poor cleaning woman in Alabama might want to take a pass on it and throw her lot with Jesus.
Mr. Dahl: I did? I see virtually all issues defined as racial as really cultural. A quick look at history ought to disabuse anyone of any notion of Aryan superiority.
Hey, Ed, I thought you were “Aryan” like me! To stick up for our own, let’s start Aryan history with the ancient Greeks (who were somewhat indebted to Babylonians, Egyptians), then to Rome and Westwards, in European circles (all presumably “Aryan”). Include England and you really have a cultural history second to none, and having produced MOST of the enlightened progress we know. OK, we have Arabic numerals, and owe various cultures a tidbit, but us “Aryans” have produced most science ‘n’ setch, with the Semitic peoples being the purveyors of religious values (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Can’t figger out why we didn’t invent that old boomerang, but I’ll betcha it was for lack o’ kangaroos!