beginning of a kant thread

The collapse, the forgetting, the erasure of the human limit happens inside what Sartre called ‘human reality’; and it happens outside. This is a strange story, a dialectical mystery. For as the world became the object of universal history, and the human limit to the control of the world was removed, inside the human reality of the self, this operation – which consisted, if one were to put it in a single phrase, of removing Nemesis as the guardian and definer of a limit – produced strange fruit. Human reality becomes the human product. And this human product, now given the project of becoming happy and promoting the happy society, loses the old objects and landmarks, the old directions, the old orientation, the old walks in the dark, the old migrations. The human reality becomes free, and uses its freedom to become the human product.

Of course, this is a story recorded in a whole literature that makes weep weep weep sounds over the human product. Oh, that we had another ending to universal history, a few more tropes.

But as we have been looking at the process by which beast becomes beast, thing thing, the flight a fault, the hunter a judge, the butcher a jury, it is time to turn to the subject: in particular, Kant’s notion of this subject as an end, living in a kingdom of ends. I’ve pointed out that the subject as the Greek hero can run about buck naked, as long as he is made of marble and runs with that Ruhe – that rest – for which Winckelmann celebrates him - but that the modern man who takes off his vestments is sucked into the logic that has kept him in plates of veal and chicken, has put the fork and knife in his hands, a logic that has a lot to say about the poor forked flesh, although it seems to turn and twist and give us different answers at different times. If we looked, for instance, at English novels between Castle Crotchet and Jude the Obscure, how many undressing scenes would \we find? I’d guess very few, in spite of coats buttoned and unbuttoned, hats put on and taken off, gloves ditto, the difficult task of taking off mudsplashed boots, and all the eating and drinking that Dickens characters and Thackeray’s undergo – never to stumble to a jakes in our sight. Why? That’s a question we should pin up to the board.

There are certainly other paths to the Castle, other ways of reading the Critique of Practical Reason, but I want to start a thread that reads it with, on the side, this social logic that whips the cattle and tortures the bear and chops the head of M. le coq. I have an instinct that tells me somehow, on this path, I will touch – hands out in the dark, hand understanding always my witch’s guide – upon a certain set of rules that concern the clothed and the naked, although never allowing us to predict with absolute certainty what is allowed and when. And that in turn will give me clues to this particular moment in the building of the Artificial Paradise.