Sunday, January 23, 2005 10:44 AM Right thinking then is that which shall join the Christian and the Muslim with all men, even with those who profess no belief i any God.

Right thinking is where we begin. And first even there is with a critique of right thinking in general, namely that there is a right thinking.

We begin by dreaming up something called the object of experience. We simply dream this up by means of the imagination in conjunction with the form of right thinking in general. By means of this dream of ours we are able to conduct experiments to confirm the reality of the object of our dream, and we find it in Hume’s elusive object of experience. With him and by means of right thinking we are taken by the apparent coincidence of size of hand and distance from the eye and conduct an experiment to determine in fact that the hand gets smaller as it gets further away, even as a a finger splits as it approaches the nose. These things are intriguing to us because of the categorical make up of the mind, of right thinking in general. We are intrigued by coincidence because our minds are poised to make a connection, for that is what right thinking is, making connections. We conduct experiments which enable us to recognize the most fundamental experience of human existence, namely that what we see is not a thing on its own, but rather is a relationship between the thing and the eye, and so that what we see is actually in us, and not out in the space and time in which we see it. It is out there as a spectacle of the eye and so in the space and time in which it appears, but that space and time are merely within us. This is right thinking talking. That space and time are in us as our own projections, like the cube that arises out of the straight lines connected on a piece of paper.

And so right thinking leads us to discover the object of experience, and how it is that Hume could have discovered that his table did not get smaller at a distance,, but only appeared to, something out of the bounds of his own system of knowledge (and driving him into “academic skepticism.”)

Now right thinking can go further and dream up other objects, e.g., God and the soul and free will. This is easy enough to do. But unlike the objects of experience these ideas can never be given to us in an empirical way, and so they remain merely subject to right thinking in general.

Well now what do we know about right thinking? that we make connections by means of it in our understanding of things given in an experience, but can we make connections concerning things in general, things which are not subject to conditions of time and space (which right thinking teaches us is only in us, in our looking, and only imagined to exist independently of this our looking). Things like the soul and free will and God.

Here is the problem that arises in right thinking on these objects of pure thought, since no object of experience can be given, it is right to think about them in two entirely different ways. On the one hand you can continue to think of them as though they continued in a single existence with what has already been experienced. On the other hand you can think of them in their totality, as given, and thus as things independent of time and space and all conditions of a look-see.

Now if you continue to look at them as a singularity with present experience then for any begining of a causality, for example, there will be a precedent, and so on without exception.

But if you look for the totality of what is given in the present month, you must necessarily attach a a beginging, and so that would be a causality which was unconditioned.


But that makes for a contradiction. And so it seems that right thinking leads to contradiction. The solution lies in the concept of the thing on its own. This was dreamed up in this fashion: all things are connected. The most fundamental premise of the human mind. All things are connected. By virtue of this premise we suspect and search out the object of experience. But what we have actually done is this. We have taken this empty concept of a thing on its own and have begun stuffing into it all our sensations and we have in this a container, as it were, in which to bind touch and sight and smell, etc., and make them the unified senses of a single viewer and thinker. Now this is all that right thinking is about, namely a connection of all things which can ever be experienced by the human being, e.g., force and divisibility, etc., at least this is the concern for experience.

But this empty concept remains as precedent to all that experience teaches us about it, and therefore is subject to additional “stuffings” if we wish. For example, we can think of this thing on its own that it is an intelligible being and indeed is a free being and a member of an intelligible realm of free beings. Nothing hinders us from dreaming up this object and we can go on and on with our fictions, for we can indeed say anything we wish to of this thing as long as it is a consistent thought and as long as it does not contradict experience. And it does not contradict experience to say, for example, that a leaf is a free being who acts in accordance with principles of its own choosing and one of those is to let go of a branch whenever the temperate reaches thus and thus and the wind is of a certain strength. That is perfectly compatible with everything that science knows about a leave. It is of utterly no benefit to science, and the most that can be said is that it is a consistent thought and it does not contradict science.

And so here is the position of science about the man of experience. It is natural for the human to develop certain ideas and be taken by them so much as to act in accordance with them. One such idea was the object of experience which leads to science. Another idea is a person is a citizen of some state. Another idea is that of Locke’s “glass man”, a man who thinks he is made out of glass. Another idea is that of freedom and moral impetus. All of these people are thinking about themselves and acting in accordance with that thinking. This man thinks he is an American and acts like it. That man thinks he is made of glass and studiously avoids physical shock. That man thinks he is free and acts accordingly, even to the extent of having a bad conscience when he knows he has acted contrary to his idea.

Now at the same time it is conceivable that the man really is an American and that the man really is made of glass and that the man really is free, but science remains right in treating each as a man who thinks he is an American and made of glass and free, for each will act in accordance with his own laws, the man who is actually free will, of course, act exactly like a man who thinks that he is free, and this latter is the object of science. And so it is possible to reconcile the two reasonable ways of considering man, as an object of experience, and then, as a thing on his own. The only thing gain then in right thinking is that freedom is not incompatible with the object of experience when it is realized that freedom pertains to a thing on its own and not to the object of experience.

And so what we have learned about right thinking is this: we gain the object of experience and thus experience itself, and we can the ability to think freedom, though not to recognize it as an object of experience. This is the extent of right thinking with regard to knowledge and the things of science. Natural theology is extraneous to science and is right thinking itself focused on existence in general, which can never be an object of experience. We can only think of the soul as a unity in time and thus as subject to conditions of time in terms of any existence. I.e., while the soul continues through objective time between the awakenings of its subjective time (in its looking at the iner sense), it cannot be said that it continues through all time, for it could begin in subjective time and then also end in it. The most that can be said is that it is possible. Freedom is compatible with natural necessity as explain above. God is the idea of rationality itself,personified in a deity, and thus is merely an idea of the ultimate in rationality. Nothing really to go on in terms of what humans really desire to know above all else: immortality, freedom and God.

11:33 AM Now we are ready to consider right thinking from a practical standpoint in telling us not what we know, for that is covered above in speculative reasoning, but rather, given what we know, what we ought to do. What the smart man will do.

First of all we need to establish the meaning of “ought to do.” This is what the smart man will do given the information available and the conditions of a choice. We ought to use our heads and figure things out and make smart decisions. These are of two sorts, imperatives of skill and imperatives of prudence. The first tell us to maximize and balance and engage in efficiency in all actions. The second tell us to take the future in to consideration and balance choices for the sake of enduring happiness and advantage. Reason itself creates these two categories for practical application and shows itself efficacious in both respects. They are self evident.

Right thinking can also produce the categorical imperative, the command without reference to any goal to be accomplished like a house or happiness. Right thinking dreams up an intelligible realm and peoples it with free beings and derives a law which is as binding as those people as the laws of nature are binding on the things of nature. These laws are such as these: the maxim of an person must be capability of universality as as law. The rational nature is an end in itself, and no rational being is a means to another like an object. Each member of the free realm issues his own laws himself in the context of the first two, and so speaks as a sovereign who is also subject to his own law (like the English monarchs). And so it is in this wise that right thinking is able to devise the laws of freedom and, as said, they are as binding on the people of that free (as of yet merely imagined) realm as humans are to the laws of nature. And so right thinking is capable of proclaiming law in general, be it the laws of nature or the laws of a free realm. And this is the source of the categorical imperative.

Now we have establish that right thinking can produce a law of freedom, and we also will recognize that all humans think of themselves as free, for each uses reason to determine actions and considers that reasoning to be free of determination of any kind. Freedom them belongs to us by virtue of our presupposition of reasoning, and the moral law is the law of free people, and so this law is binding on humans.

But this is not thinking rightly, for all we have done is to come up with a circle involving two sides of one coin. We dream up freedom in order to justify the moral law. And then, when we claim our freedom, we want to be bound to that law. We want the moral law to be valid and so we dream up freedom, and then having dreamed up freedom we see that the moral law is valid.

In what way could such a thing as a moral law be of interest to a being who knows himself only as a sensitive being of experience? How can such an imperative, based on a trumped up concept, be of interest to a human? We will find that we have to take an interest in this law because we find that we have respect for this law. But that comes later. Now all we want to do is to establish the conditions such that something like respect could be possible.

We take the route of the two fold again. We imagine an intelligible being, as described above, and we take our understanding and our reasoning about things to describe activities belonging to that intelligible being, and we use that as a means for thinking of ourselves not only as beings of sense but as intelligible beings who are encumbered with sensations. We imagine the thing on its own to be free in additional to its ability to make an impression on us through our senses. It is then in this way that we come to see how such a thing as a categorical imperative could be possible, by us imagining ourselves as members of an intelligible realm at the same time, but in a different context, that we do as a being of sense. That becomes our soul, as it were, or the evidence of our soul (but not adequate for the purpose of right thinking in the speculative arena). We have not proven the reality of the categorical imperative, but only shown the conditions necessary for its reality. Earlier we proved that it was possible to think freedom in conjunction with the necessity of nature; and so this is no impediment.

12:01 PM In Practical Reason we will establish first that pure reason is indeed practical, and then we will critique the practical capacity in general, and show in what way reason can be practical.

I think this general critique is summed up in the objects of practical reason where we see that reason uses its goals to determine the good or evil of actions and also where it uses the moral law to determine good or evil absolutely. And so reason is practical in supplying the objects of the action, i.e., where the actions are means (for for which reason a subjectively dependent goal must be supplied), and in the case of the moral action, the object is provided a priori, which is not the case with the objects of skill and of prudence, the hypothetical imperatives.

3:00 PM And so here the case is the provision of the object, whether it comes from the senses, in which case skill and prudence can deal with it, or whether it is provided by the moral law itself. And so ultimately the objects of practical reason are good and evil, understood in two distinct meanings, the one, more a weal and woe, stresses the goodness of a means to some pleasure, and the other a good and evil understood in terms of the moral law, which is an absolute good and evil, and independently of any goal to be desired or not, il.e., it is good or evil on its own, as a thing on its own. I.e., the action considered as an effect from a freely acting rational being.

And so the object of practical reason is the attainment of good in the subjective sense as a pursuit of personal happiness, but also the good in the objective sense, as transcending the self and encompassing it as a thing of intrinsic value along with all others.

And so as expected the ideal of practical reason as the objective and purpose of the moral law is the maximum of this object good, both in the happiness and in the moral senses and indeed by virtue of happiness being a function of virtue. It is to this that we aim as practical beings, and pure reason supplies the worthy element to this equation by the imposition of a worthiness to happiness as the condition of happiness.

It is a maximization of this object of good and evil, especially in its moral sense, but also in the sense of happiness, only that the latter is a function of the former. It is called the Highest Good accessible to rational creatures in the human mode. It is a promise of perfection in virtue along with utter happiness commensurate to that. This is not just an ideal, but indeed a practical ideal, one that can be conceived of as being attainable by striving for moral perfection first and personal happiness second. We know from our own freedom that we can be perfect, and so we have that as our goal anyway. Here we see the moral law as justified by the conveyance of a purpose (which it, as all rational acts, must have), namely the perfection in the act now being determined. We know that this is a practical goal and that we can finally attain to perfection, at least by infinite approximation. And so indeed the Highest Good is a practical goal. Thus we are necessitated, in order to justify the moral law by reference to a purpose, we assume that we shall have a continued existence where striving toward perfection is furthered and strengthened.

With regard to the pursuit of happiness, this will forever be illusive and difficult, especially when people look out to possibilities of a continued existence in some other dimension. And so we do not have an expectation of finding the utter happiness that belongs to virtue, our intended goal by virtue of the Highest Good being the object of the compelling moral law, at least not in this life, and so we have to expect our happiness to be provided from elsewhere. And for this we finally come to the God that has so alluded us in our quest via right thinking. We need this God for the great Judgment Day when justice is demonstrated in its ultimate purity. It is He Who shall provide our happiness, in whatever degree justice demands, which shall be our enduring happiness, whatever its degree.

[For wild example: an evil man is allowed by God to decide whether to go off and spend eternity entirely alone (for no one will want to be with him) or to change into the out appearance of an animal who is allowed to roam about heaven, without desiring any more than to lick itself occasionally and to be petted by the citizens. That would be a just verdict which had been tenderized by mercy. You can take on the mentality of a dog or a cat or you can go off alone forever. It is your call.]

3:21 PM Now this brings us quickly to right thinking about a religion. Right thinking has led us to a recognition of our own freedom through the respect we have for the moral law (per pure reason itself).

Well when we think rightly about religion we know that we will be in pursuit of a lofty goal, namely the love of the moral law, the ideal of any rational religion. That we come to love it and to prefer it over self. That the gist of the religion be that in order to be pleasing to God, the purveyor of all happiness, we must be virtuous and strive to do good. This must be the upshot and ultimate practical result. There can be embroidery but the result on earth must be a love of the moral law. Furthermore, since we cannot tell how much God is willing to do on our behalf in our hope for moral righteousness it is a necessary component of a religion that the participant be expected to strive in utter sincerity in pursuit of that goal, and then only then begin to hope that if anything is still lacking that this will be made up for in some, even if very mysterious, way.

Now it seems that the moral religion has appeared only once in human history and that was the gentile Christian preached by Saint Paul, the one who was “without law of any kind, whatsoever.” But since it is still alive in the scriptures and in public dissemination it can be said to be alive today as the core of the present day Christian religion, the moral core. And so in that sense, once released, the idea is always with us.

4:38 PM Now I begin to muse and wonder. How does the Muslim deal with Abraham? Is it simply beyond question to think that someone would hesitate a second if he knew for sure that God had told him to do something. No one could deny compliance to any one. But then what is the status now?

If Islam is a moral religion, it will say to all adherents that it is impossible that God could command you to do anything which you know to be against the law of your species. God will never command that. That can never be inferred by any scripture or group of scriptures by any interpretation. And so if you think that you have been called by God in some way or another to commit a crime against your species, you are sadly mistaken and will pay for that on the Day of Judgment.