Ock, I appreciate the compliment, but it's not generally considered kosher to copy an entire blog post. I'll forgive it this time, though.

I hope you take it as the compliment that it is meant to be. Great thoughts don't always spread out to a wide audience. Such was my intent - to increase the audience. Although you know as well as I that there is no guarantee that the audients will get it. Still, the shotgun method has its merits.

My essay was a personal expression of weariness, which we all feel from time to time. Tomorrow I may feel differently. But today I see young people behaving like old people and old people behaving like children. I'm not without hope. (See the latest Instapunk entry about the Little League World Series, titled Remembering Sport.) But I'm also not without a deep sense of foreboding.

I actually did stop by and read that today. Quite touching and inspiring.

You're always welcome to visit InstaPunk with your insights and questions. I'm too old to have the answers anymore, but I don't mind kicking the questions around

For all the neurons you've stimulated out of lethargy in my brain, I'd really just like to buy you lunch some day. No questions or answers needed. Seems the very least I could do.

Thanks for dropping by. I'm truly honored, and I'll make sure to ask you ahead of time if I can copy your post into another venue.

Be careful you don't strangle on your own condescension. You write a decent essay, but your manners are abominable.

And your argument in relation to Individualism is specious, at best.



The Enlightenment (along with the development of Capitalism) did not enhance the importance of the individual - the two together created
the individual. Legal personality is a nonsense without the concept of markets and contracts; contracts in particular are an impossibility without Right and Obligation, these concepts beginning their development in Hobbes's Leviathan and finding their most complete expression in Kant's work.

Now, why don't you patronise me a little. Let's all see that stupendous brain (of which you are obviously very, very proud) at work.

Simon, you'll probably have to take the battle to South Street (Instapunk). I doubt he'll be here too often. I was surprised he showed up in the first place.

On another note, would you expound for me on Kant's impact on individuality? From what I've read, though dressed as such, he seemed much more interested in establishing a universal maxim to which all individuals would be obligated to adhere to. And while I understand that concept, I don't necessarily agree that it enhances anything I would describe as "individual."

Perhaps he meant that the only way for there to be any chance of someone to become a "genuine" individual, he would have to give up certain hypothetical maxims for the betterment of all.

An increased push for social reform, however, - for me, at least - seems to discount that. For example, a man may say as a maxim "I'm going to dominate the widget market because I want a lot of money." The action would be dominating the market with personal desire as the motivation. But since dominating the widget market would clearly be financially harmful to other widget makers, Kant would see this as a maxim that could not be universal, and therefore should not be allowed. The problem with this, in my mind, is it dissuades the best widget makers from giving a damn about making the best widgets. So in my mind, Kant's categorical maxim ideal has a hole in it where what may seem to be a categorical maxim is actually just another hypothetical one based on subjective (and flawed) reasoning.

I'm interested in your take on this - and other things we can chat about over time. You seem to have a much broader knowledge of many things than I do, but I'll happily research various things you cite and try my best to put forth some thought in any words I respond as opposed to the standard reactions many give that are based on what their "heart thinks" as opposed to what their brains think. (Hearts thinking is one of my pet peeve phrases. Muscles can't think. )

It's difficult for me, too, but it's something I've always wanted to get into. When I read his response to Sigmazrn, I started researching Kant (haven't done Hobbes yet, as it was indicated Kant kind of encompassed what Hobbes had started, but I will)

I like to believe that I can take my own experience in life - whether it be reading books, watching people interact, watching the news, whatever, and then reason a way to some logical conclusion that syntesizes all of my experience and observation into something that applies on a broader scale and which is uniquely my own thought. But that's too ideal, really - especially when so many other guys, using that same premise, have done a lot of groundwork already. Not to mention that studying those guys gives some insight into the current events at the time they were kicking their ideas around, and sadly, history is another subject I have put off too long. And, after all, you can't escape being more than a Feces Machine, re that ancient article I wrote in my very first blogging days, without knowing what other thoughts have already been thought

Anyway, didn't intend to ramble on. In terms of discussing philosophers, I may not be much good to Simon, but I will put in the effort - time permitting. I'm due to go to sea for 45 days somewhere about the end of October. Told Mari I'd send her stuff to post on my blog for me

Shit...this whole thing should have been an email...haha.

Ciao, bella

Philosophy...

At one time the love of wisdom (philo = 'love' + sophos = 'wisdom' = 'philo-sopher' or 'lover of wisdom').

Now, commonly (and regretably), the love of one voice speaking.

Kant: first and by far the greatest Father of the European Enlightenment. Trying to follow the rigor of his thinking is like taking a bath in the coldest water imaginable. Alas (for the lovers of wisdom), it's also hysterically funny - because his every thought in the Critique of Pure Reason is inspired by terror; the terror induced in Europe by the events of the French Revolution, and experienced more keenly by Kant than by any other thinker then alive.

All that effort, that discipline - and all to quiet the beating of a heart more timid than that of any mouse. Poor Kant.

Now Hobbes... there was a man. The great difference between the two lies not in any encompassing of Hobbes work by Kant (the two could not be more fundamentally opposed, and I shall happily deal with that at greater length later) but in the nature of their relation to reason and the different uses they found for it.

I love Hobbes. The only truly honest philosopher that's ever lived.

More later, and probably in an article rather than a response here.

Alrighty. This is a ramble, not a coherent response to anything mentioned in this thread. However, neither is it off topic.

I wrote my final essay for my Master's Degree on the topic of the relationship of thought between the work of Michel Foucault and Hobbes's theory of civility. And the bulk of the work for the introduction to my (never-to-be-completed) Doctoral thesis dealt with Kant. The Introduction was over twenty thousand words.

I'm bragging now. Sue me.

I was equally impressed by both Hobbes and Kant, though for different reasons. Part of the reason I like Hobbes is that he writes philosophy like others write poetry. The language he uses (17th century English) is beautiful. Kant is dry as dust and hideously technical. An example. His shortest book (and by far and away the seminal text of the European Enlightenment and one of the greatest works of European philosophy) is called 'Prologomena to any future Metaphysic' by which he meant 'Introduction to a theory of reason'.

One of the great failures of European philosophy is the divorce of its language from anything readily recognizable by the man of common intellect and common education. Philosophy doesn't have to be unintelligible. It doesn't have to use words that the average intelligence, shaped by an average education, can understand.

Kant is a prime example of that failure. He wanted to describe the basic structures of human experience that give rise to a trustworthy faculty termed reason. Trustworthy because it could describe the real. Reality, political reality in particular, was an an issue of the most extreme importance in Kant's day, because of the death of the Ancien Regime in France at the hands of the Revolutionaries, and because of the appearance in the Revolution's aftermath of the Terror, the slaughter of Aristocrats and other Enemies of the Revolution under Robespierre - the first great campaign of political murder in Europe's history, a campaign motivated by nothing but ideology.

Ideology. What an abused word that is. Nowadays everyone has an ideology. The term has, however, a very precise meaning within political philosophy, a meaning provided by one of the most potent (and least read, least well known) thinkers of the 20th century, Erich Voegelin.

Voegelin's family fled Germany in the very early days of the Nazi regime. He taught for many years at the University of Louisiana. His great preoccupation was the nature of political terror, the function of ideology in politics and in wider society. An ideology is any structure of ideas that takes the place, and serves the same function as, a religious faith. In most cases, a political ideology (especially in the 20th century) exalts the State; but it can just as readily be associated with what's been called the 'cult of personality' (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot). Whatever the central focus, such a structure provides an unarguable defence for any act committed in its interest. Faith justifies all. And apostasy is the worst of all crimes.

Hence Kant's terror at the news of the Revolution and its horrors. Ideas could now overthrow the World and its Order (and there is a large and largely unspoken connection in Kant's work as a whole between Order and Reason). And since Kant was very much dependant financially on the patronage of the State there was also a very real and personal link between Kant's own well being and that of the well being of political Order generally.

Hobbes was a very different thinker. Where Kant wanted to establish fundamental principles that would determine the nature of reason beforehand (so that he could immunize reason from the evil effects of religious enthusiasm and personal interest) Hobbes looked to the common realities of human experience to tell him what reason was. Kant climbed an enormous hierarchy of philosophical principles to attain to his conclusions. Hobbes looked at himself and the men around him, and the recent experience of the English Civil War, and concluded that men in general are pernicious beasts that must, for their own good, be restrained.

Kant decided beforehand that reason establishes order, and set out to prove it beyond dispute. Hobbes decided beforehand that reason serves the passions, and that passion is reason's master. Since passion is purely capricious, and as likely to bring about general ruin as general order, passion had to be compelled. That, in the final analysis, can only be done through fear: fear of a greater and more far reaching Power than that possessed by any individual or any combination of individuals less than that combination which establishes the Sovereign.

Sovereignty. Legitimacy. Right. Obligation. Those are all Hobbes's themes and concerns. Kant wanted to establish Reason as the foundation of Order because reason could (Kant hoped to prove) discern what was right. Hobbes set out to establish a political Order that could encompass any concept of reason - so long as that concept could recognise and accept a legitimate Sovereign.

I think you're smart enough to see how, out of these two sets of philosophical ambitions, and their effects, something called an 'individual' could come to be. And it's my firm conviction that Hobbes and Kant together created the foundational thoughts on which our entire contemporary culture rests.

And now I'm going to play space-captains and kill shit for awhile.

An after-thought. Why is my Doctorate never-to-be-completed? Because I came to hate every word of it. I'd sooner kill myself than finish it.

Grrrrrrrr. That should be 'can't'.

And since Kant was very much dependant financially on the patronage of the State there was also a very real and personal link between Kant's own well being and that of the well being of political Order generally.

Well that certainly brings up an interesting question. Did he say what he said for the sake of the state or for the sake of himself.

Kant wanted to establish Reason as the foundation of Order because reason could (Kant hoped to prove) discern what was right.

But he kind of shot himself in the foot philosophically, didn't he? Because wasn't he also the guy that believed that the only way a thing you did was good was if you did it from a belief that it was your "duty" and that you achieved no benefit from it?

Neither Hobbes nor Kant seem very objective about things. They both seem caught up, and understandably so, with what's going on around them. The first just looked around and began his philosophy on a gut belief (based on what you said) and the other tried to bring order to reason while making sure he didn't lose his paycheck. I would think that a solid philosophy would need to put current events aside.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the only way these two could give rise to being an individual would be them demonstrating what one is not. What am I missing here?

Actually, you aren't missing much.

There was never a time when either Hobbes or Kant sat down and said to themselves 'let's make an individual'. Hobbes's chief concern was Sovereignty. He was born in the year of the Spanish Armada that sailed against England, and he lived through the English Civil War. Questions of who rules and on what basis were his chief concern. But in the process he established a framework of right and legitimacy that centered on the actions of bodies in motion.

Although at least a third of the Leviathan is devoted to questions of religion, the religion in question is very peculiar having nothing to do with salvation or redemption and everything to do with appetite and will. God is no more than the Greatest Will. Humans are no more than individual 'atomes' driven by the last appetite (whether fear or desire) that moves them.

He talks about the individual in the sense of these right-bearing atomes (though in a very peculiar way, unrecognisable to any of today's liberals) as making contracts with each other; of personation (which is the concept necessary before the idea of legal personality - in the sense of an economic entity such as a business - can make sense). These are all ideas which are at the foundation of our present society and without which 'individuals' and 'individualism' don't make sense.

Kant, on the other hand, turned his attention to reason and to its location, both in the State and in the individual. But the individual and the State alike are both necessary as bearers of his concept of reason; they are necessary to make reason manifest in the world, so that they are functions of reason, rather than reason simply being a faculty of either the individual or the State.

The French Revolution proved to Kant that there was nothing to be relied upon in either the Medieval tradition of feudalism, with its ethic of hierarchical obligations descending from God, to the King, to the Nobility, to the Serfs; or in the religious impulse that had given rise to the social organization of the Catholic Church, that could guarantee Order and Peace. He determined to find some faculty in Man that would enable him to perceive what was right to do in any situation which confronted him (the 'categorical imperative' of his philosophy which is occasionally referred to as 'duty').

I'm too drunk at this moment to remember the formulation of the categorical imperative, and too lazy to google it and find out again. If you're interested, check it out for yourself and tell me if you think I'm wrong. But it became apparent, through this formulation, that the seat of reason was not in God-given appointment to a Representative Individual (ie, the King, as in Louis XIV's famous line "L'État, c'est moi"), nor in religious revelation, nor in the God-given faculty of natural perception (from which descends that branch of philosophy and jurisprudential thinking called 'Natural Law') but in a faculty that had an independent existence in every man.

Poor Kant. He had no idea what a rod he was making for the back of future generations. If every man is really and truly capable of perceiving what is right to do in any given situation, independent of both Government and Church (which is the logical outcome of Kant's thought) then far from establishing a criterion of conduct which is conducive to peace and good order, what Kant actually did, utterly against his own most sincere intention, was to licence each man as his own Authority to interpret the world, and his conduct in the world, as he saw fit.

Without Kant, the plethora of ideologies in which we now move and have our being, and our complete confusion as to which is 'right', is a cultural and psychological impossibility. Without ever intending to do so, Kant gave birth to a world which, in its rage and confusion, he could never have imagined.

Hobbes, on the other hand, would in all probability, feel quite at home in our time. The Nation State, which his work justifies and supports, is alive and well. No new characteristic has developed in the character of Man with which he was not completely familiar. I think that the only thing that would surprize him is our insistence that there is something called 'international law' to which Nation States are bound and which serves as a moral compass to regulate the behaviour between them.

He'd laugh himself sick at the thought. And as proof of the ground of his humor he'd point to the United Nations.

But first he'd make the observation that, without a Sovereign to enforce law then 'law' does not exist, except as a convenient fiction by which 'international lawyers' are licensed to fleece the fools who listen to them.

The UN is a joke that we should either cry over, or laugh ourselves to death at. It's nothing more than a debating chamber in which the Permanent Members of the Security Council debate among themselves how best to carve up the world according to their current interests, the other members being nothing more than 'voices off', signifying nothing.

As I said, in a sense you missed nothing - because there is in neither Kant nor hobbes some particular phase of thought which identifies the moment when something called an 'individual' came into existence.

But without either of them, we could not recognise the world in which we live, nor the way in which it works.