Journal of July 7, 2005

Thursday, July 7, 2005 6:17 PM

To be added to the musing on the Third Antinomy.

My thinking may now be clearer. Science takes the human as its object and along with the human comes his rational nature, and the fact that it is his rational nature to dream up ideas (and that is really all that pure reason does anyway, dream up ideas) and is then so taken by these ideas that he ends up acting them out.

An example, for example, is the notion of the American state. This is really nothing more than an idea,, albeit a practical idea, and people act out this idea. Obviously this could change. Hitler certainly planned to convey an entirely different idea of what was going on in the world and he knew his Germans would act it out, if they would only believe in him. Ideas are the stuff that the world is made of. Jesus calls upon the world to accept his idea of God and his salvation and to act them out in their daily lives. Many people act accordingly.

And so science takes this human being with all the trappings of his rationality and he is then studied as any other object and he is know as any other object of experience and science, under the fundamental presupposition that everything he or any object of science ever does is determined by a prior state, i.e., is under necessitation as a nature. There are no events which are uncaused in time.

OK. That’s settled. But now let’s look inside this human as he uses his rationality and there we find, just as described, that he dreams up ideas and then acts them out. He dreams up the idea of his own freedom,, for example, and he just acts that out, doing what he does in the consciousness of his rational freedom, namely that the actions which he reasons out are actually to be implemented, and otherwise they would not be considered at all. And so this man is conscious of his own freedom in his actions.

Now to explain the possibility of this duality in conception, we appeal again to the specter and the thing on its own. The human is a spectral object of science and everything he does is totally explicable in terms of earlier conditions and predicable (given perfect information), and at the same time this human, now as a thing on his own, is able to make his determination in the utter freedom by means of principles and in the full anticipation of accepting the conclusion, and that is precisely what a free person would do.

The solution then is this: Science is dealing with an object which thinks that it is free and seeks to act that out. And this object, in his own consciousness, is aware of actually making a free choice. And so then we have one and the same event with two different causalities, the one of nature and the other in perfect freedom (in its rationality towards actions). This does not prove freedom or even its possibility, but merely that there is no contradiction with science. The free man would act spectrally as a determined object who thinks that he is free and acts out that idea in a rational way.

Now anticipating the respect granted the moral law we can move on to the Highest Good which is not very clear to me at all, and not to many.

the practical goal is to have all people live according to the moral law. Accordingly all impetus to the contrary must be suppressed. This sort of thing happens if people take their mind off their duty, which is clear to them, and begin to wonder about the point of duty. What is the point of duty? What are we accomplishing with duty driven actions?

An action must aim at something, or else it can be considered as inane and even ludicrous. So what it is that the moral action is aiming at? The only that it could be the purpose of the moral action is the existence of the Highest Good. Here morality is supreme, but it is not the only good, for it has to be completed in the happiness of rational beings in accordance with their moral deservings. It is not enough for the human just to be able to bring about the moral world, for he sees the injustice of a state where the unjust prosper. And so he requires with the moral law the expression that it is the measure of the worthiness of happiness, and so this latter, happiness, is seen as necessary to complete the purpose of the moral act.

And so the only way that a depletion of moral fervor can be avoided is by having a purpose to the moral act which consists of two human elements, his morality and his happiness, and where the latter arises in proportion to his morality, and not vice verse.

Now the highest good for the individual, with respect to its moral element, consists in moral perfection itself, and that then is a practical goal. he is engaged in a practical endeavor of attaining to moral perfection. But this is impossible in life; hence a longer life after this life. A necessary postulation of reason in order to achieve to the practical usage of the Highest Good in encouraging moral fervor toward the final goal of a moral world.

And since the happiness necessary for this to be a practical goal, this highest good, is not possible with nature as such, it is necessary that there be a supreme moral judge who has power over all nature, and this is God, the final necessary postulation of pure reason in its practical employment of providing for moral fervor in a circumspect world.

Hence then a need for religion with regard to this God, i.e., how we should act toward this God.

The evil of men is proven by the same proof of their freedom. They pause not only to consider an act of self destruction but also to ponder doing an evil act. This willingness to ponder doing an evil act is the evil nature that man presently possesses. This leads here and there to the most morally repugnant actions. It is the basis of the evil in humans.

the good news is that this is a natural use of our own freedom, and which is irresistible in appeal, but which for all that is still voluntary and something that we can change in a minute.

But we have to not only want to but to deal alone with a world which naturally uses its freedom as just described, and so where there is a severe damper on candor and it is very difficult not to compromise, especially since it is one’s natural state, a very appealing choice.

More later.