“Act only according to that maxim whereby
you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
Immanuel Kant, in Grounding for the
Metaphysics of Morals, 1785
Or, to put Kant’s categorical imperative in
contemporary language: “Do
the right thing!”
Just do it!
Don’t think, don’t hesitate, don’t wonder whether or not you will benefit from
doing “the right thing,” because if you think or wonder, then your action will
be impure – nay, immoral! – and won't make you a moral person. It might be
praiseworthy by others, but the esteem you might be held in by them should not
be a primary consideration. The thought should never enter your mind.
If you hesitate, that means you were thinking.
Thinking is not allowed.
In fact, your wanting to be a moral person by doing
“the right thing” will also disqualify you from being a moral person. To be a
moral person, your doing “the right thing” must be scoured of all personal
interest, it must be eminently and literally disinterested, expecting no kudos, no laurels, and not even
personal satisfaction for having “done good.” When and if you see the “right
thing” to do, you must know it somehow beforehand –– that it is a priori the “right thing to do” – and
take action and just do it.
If “doing the right thing” means leaping trance-like
off a bridge without a Bungee, so be it. Others will mourn your passing, and
reflect on how moral a person you were. You did your duty.
So, if you’ve ever wondered why Europe is
committing suicide by allowing itself to be invaded by hundreds
of thousands of Muslims and other “asylum seekers” or “refugees” from the
pestholes of the planet – in fact, by inviting
them to swarm over hills, dales, and borders to infest their countries with
their “culturally enriching” primitive practices and behavior – the answer lies
in understanding Immanuel
Kant’s philosophy of selflessness and self-sacrifice and its death-grip on
Western leaders and Western culture. The ostensive morality is altruism; the
underlying morality is Kant’s nihilistic code of “just doing it” because it is
“good,” even should one’s own consequent death or the extinction of one’s
country be a certainty. No thought is
required, necessary, or desired. Only a feeling
that action is the “right thing to do.” To Kant, a feeling is a tool of
cognition, a sense organ.
One supposes that “doing the right thing” like a
robot would elevate one to sainthood, just as Islamic jihadists “do the right
thing,” as commanded by the Koran, and
kill themselves while killing others, to achieve “martyrdom.”
We know, say the political leaders and champions of
enforced multiculturalism, that by allowing these barbarians to settle in our
countries, it will change the identities, character, and nature of our
countries beyond recognition, repair, and reclamation, but we must do it, because to not do it would be inexcusably immoral. Those
political leaders, of course, will expect their indigenous citizenry to “do the
right thing” in the most disinterested and tolerant manner, even while they
foot the bill for their own conquest and are exposed to the criminal depredations
of the barbarians. If they resist, they can be called “Islamophobic,” “racist”
and “bigoted.” Ordinary citizens thus can be shamed into submission.
These same political leaders would never think to
accuse the barbarians of racism, bigotry, intolerance, and a proclivity towards
crime.
On the other end of the bookshelf are Kant’s two
ponderous Critiques.
The ultimate test in a refutation of Kant’s noumenal
and phenomenal worlds, on the other
hand, is to ask whether or not any sentence or statement in either of his Critiques or in his Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals is exempt from the
distortions he claims are inherent in his phenomenal thesis. How can one know, when he writes, for
example, that “the
moral strength of a human being's will [is] in fulfilling his duty,’
he is stating just that, when in reality – or in the reality of his noumenal
world – it might be actually a recipe for bouillabaisse or beef stew or
instructions on how to repair a carburetor? Are printed words exempt from his
phenomenal rule? Are Kant’s books exceptions to his own rules? And if we cannot
know the “real” meaning of his printed assertions – if what we read in print is
merely a distorted rendition of some ethereal, crystalline entity somewhere out
there beyond our ken – then what can we know? Was Kant’s quill “real”? The ink?
The paper? Or were they merely distortions of what they “really” were beyond
even his perception?
Have these questions ever occur to Kant? Has they
ever occurred to any of his champions and teachers in academia? For if Kant’s
works aren’t exempt from the
conditions governed by his noumenal and phenomenal thesis, then his works are
all gibberish, what is being communicated via our distorting senses is rubbish.
And if his works are exempt from his
rules, then Kant was some kind of savant who, like Mohammad, received his
knowledge of the noumenal world magically from the Transcendental angel Gabbo
the Verbose who visited the caves of Königsberg, Prussia. Or perhaps Kant was a
space alien from that alternate, noumenal universe sent here to confuse the
human race.
However, to quote from a book
review that questions the inclusion of Kant as a champion of freedom and
reason, citing Kant’s purpose to save religion and a codified submission to all
things mystical, I wrote:
Religion
was what he wanted to save from the onslaught of reason. He appropriated the
term “reason” and then proceeded to eviscerate it of all meaning in two
brain-stultifying Critiques….
Kant’s Critiques – of Pure Reason and of Judgment – are what he is best known for, and through those
works Kant has had a profoundly pernicious and deadly influence on the course
of philosophy and politics in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Immanuel Kant was a malevolent leprechaun who
offered man a pot of lead coated with arsenic.
Robert Spencer of Jihad
Watch asks: “Meanwhile, no one is bothering even to ask, much less answer,
one central question: why is it incumbent upon Europe to have to absorb all
these refugees?”
Spencer identifies
what Europe’s political leaders refuse to see.
Approximately
104,460 asylum seekers arrived in Germany during the month of August, setting a
new record. That makes 413,535 registered refugees and migrants coming to
Germany in 2015 so far. The country expects a total of around 800,000 people to
seek asylum in Germany this year. And that’s just Germany. The entire continent
of Europe is being inundated with refugees at a rate unprecedented in world
history. This is no longer just a “refugee crisis.” This is a hijrah.
Hijrah,
or jihad by emigration, is, according
to Islamic tradition, the migration or journey of Muhammad and his followers
from Mecca to Yathrib, later renamed by him to Medina, in the year 622 CE. It
was after the hijrah that Muhammad for the first time became not just a
preacher of religious ideas, but a political and military leader. That was what
occasioned his new “revelations” exhorting his followers to commit violence
against unbelievers. Significantly, the Islamic calendar counts the hijrah, not
Muhammad’s birth or the occasion of his first “revelation,” as the beginning of
Islam, implying that Islam is not fully itself without a political and military
component.
To
emigrate in the cause of Allah – that is, to move to a new land in order to
bring Islam there, is considered in Islam to be a highly meritorious act. “And
whoever emigrates for the cause of Allah will find on the earth many locations
and abundance,” says the Qur’an. “And whoever leaves his home as an emigrant to
Allah and His Messenger and then death overtakes him, his reward has already
become incumbent upon Allah. And Allah is ever Forgiving and Merciful.” (4:100)
Why is it incumbent upon Europe to have to absorb
all these refugees? Because Europe is the captive of Kant’s categorical
imperatives, that’s why. According to Kantian ethics, it is indeed incumbent
upon Europe to “do the right thing” and welcome
its colonizers, its destroyers, its conquerors. It’s the altruistic thing to
do. How could anyone question altruism? Viewing the scale of rapes, murders, harassment,
welfare costs, and destruction wrought by the barbarians in all these countries
as mere “phenomenal” phenomena – critics
of Islam and Muslims offer a “distorted” view of thing, don’t you know? They’re
just Nazis – Kantian-bred political leaders see instead a kind of noumenal
Nirvana of cultural “diversity” for having done their “duty.”
In closing, I cede the floor to Ayn Rand, who, in
her essay, “For
the New Intellectual,” explains what Kant really means by duty and his
whole mare’s nest of non sequiturs.
The
arch-advocate of “duty” is Immanuel Kant; he went so much farther than other
theorists that they seem innocently benevolent by comparison. “Duty,” he holds,
is the only standard of virtue; but virtue is not its own reward: if a reward
is involved, it is no longer virtue. The only moral motivation, he holds, is
devotion to duty for duty’s sake; only an action motivated exclusively by such
devotion is a moral action (i.e., an action performed without any concern for
“inclination” [desire] or self-interest)….“
She quotes directly from the horse’s mouth:
“It
is a duty to preserve one’s life, and moreover everyone has a direct
inclination to do so. But for that reason the often anxious care which most men
take of it has no intrinsic worth, and the maxim of doing so has no moral
import. They preserve their lives according to duty, but not from duty. But if
adversities and hopeless sorrow completely take away the relish for life, if an
unfortunate man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or
dejected over his fate and wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without
loving it and from neither inclination nor fear but from duty—then his maxim
has a moral import” (Immanuel Kant, Foundations
of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. R. P. Wolff, New York, Bobbs-Merrill,
1969, pp. 16–17).
While you may love life, Islamists love death, as
they so often claim, and they are willing to be “moral men” – by Kant’s measure
– and live long enough to kill you, and entire Western nations.
They just “love” doing it.
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