03.11.08

More on Kantian ethics

Posted in religion, Philosophy at 6:46 pm by nemo

James comments on Kantian Ethics 101.

James said,

March 11, 2008 at 1:13 pm
“Even if we back away from Kant’s strict thinking, we are left with the acute nature of his stylized analysis which uncovers something deep that Buddhists must confront as the barrier of ‘desire’ blocks the deeper man. ”

How so?

Actually, I think you are doing a doubletake here, since associating Buddhism with Kantian ethics is counterintuitive, and in many ways quite false. Many yogis and self-styled esoteric spiritual types (consider Gurdjieff or Crowley) are quite hoitytoidy and consider themselves quite beyond mere ethics for mortals, it seems. Crowley almost seems to produce a demonic mockery of the Kantian discourse on will. Who gets the last laugh?
My point was merely that where a ‘Buddhist’ would use meditation to generate consciousness in the friction between the desire body and some higher aspect of himself, an active ethical self-realization after the manner of Kant would produce essentially the same effect, at least in theory (what a difficult discipline), a point long lost in Christian religious churches but historically present in some orthodox monastic traditions, and certainly in many sufistic traditions. Study the Pietist movement(s) in the mainline of Protestantism (kant’s background, which he rejected, but which influenced his ethical cast of mind), and you see something like attempts at active spiritual practice, too often resulting in cultic confusions, but nonetheless the closest humble Christians come to the world of meditation.

But, perhaps, your head-scratching ‘how so’ is right. We can’t really equate such different things. I will say, again, that the strangely arrogant stance of many who consider themselves esoteric spiritual wonders toward the spiritual commoners in exoteric religion gets a bit tiresome in my book. The ordinar religionist may be in a hopeless muddle, but who isn’t, the ethical void of many high-priced gurus (high priced whores) simply shows the way they have sold their will for the ‘cheap success’ of high octane self-consciousness.
There is an important clue to such types: most wouldn’t be intelligent enough to grasp Kantian thinking, and hide behind their ‘higher consciousness’ with pompous bluff.
I am no fan of that especial devil Gurdjieff, but he at least pointed to the fact that the ‘path of will’ stands beyond the paths of the yogis. Well, maybe, but who has found that way? It is a latent evolutionary possibility that none of us has the wit to realize.
Actually, it is always with us, and always has been, in the default, or defunct, format of Christianity (or Islam, etc…). The beings in this path are on this path by a technicality of logic, but everything after that is the daily turnover of their ‘original sins’.
See my point, and don’t take that the wrong way. We can condescend, and reject, Christianity, and perhaps with good reason, but it’s worth going to see a AA meeting, a congress of ‘hopeless cases’, real drunks, sitting through their ‘path of will’ that has no ‘will’ whatsoever, but perhaps some possibility of ‘repentance’ or redemption (both decayed terms of the path of ‘will’). This goes a long way toward explaining our difficulty with something like Christianity as we mature and wish to move beyond it (and we should be free to do so).

Anyway Kantian ethics is like an apparition out of the blue. Note that it is a gesture of philosophy, an abstraction. It may be of no practical use!? Kant insists on the significance of ‘ordinary moral understanding’ and claims no more than to try and clarify the basis of what is already present in the most ordinary of men (a species character, as it were), but subject to confusions and blights on its inherent vitality as an aspect of human nature.

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