Re: Re: shirtless helots & neo-asceticism

[JKSCHW@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 00-02-13 00:28:27 EST, you write:

<< What matters for Kant is Law, not pleasures; and if the happiness (=
 pleasures) of the people come into contradiction with Law, it is Law that
 takes precedence.  What philosophy can be more ascetic - and more
 anti-revolutionary - than Kant's?
  >>

No one would mistake Kant for a hedonist. In his essay on "occupation," he
says that "the pleasures of life do not fill our time but leave it empty" and
he recommends activity as opposed to mere enjoyment. However, he is a fan of
happiness. "Without occupation a man cannot live happily." His view is that a
life of productive activity that engages the mind and body is better than one
of passive enjoyment; play is better than idleness, for in play "we at least
sustain our energies."  The real enemy is laziness, not pleasure. He thinks
that the businessman who goes to theater after a hard day's work  is more
pleased and contented than if he had nothing to do but to go to the theater.
He does not say that we should not go to the theater.

His view here sounds a great ldeal like Marx's, or perhaps rather vice versa.

In his essay on the sexual impulse, Kant sounds startlingly feminist. "When a
person loves another purely from sexual desire," then "good will, affection,
promoting the happiness of others, and finding joy in their happiness" does
not enter into it, "sexual love makes the loved on an object of appetite; as
soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts
away a lemon that has been sucked dry." But sexual love, he says, "can be
combined with human love." IHe rejects the attitude a man has towardsa woman
as a mere sexual object, from that perspective, "the fact taht she is a human
being is of no concern to the man, only her sex is the object of his
desires."

This is not the voice of a joyless prig who renounces pleasure and delight or
would subordinate us all to a grim law. It sounds like the voice of a
sensible, decent person who acknowledges the proper place of pleasure,
including sexual desire. Antirevolutionary? I think not.

--jks