The generosity of Reason.

 

 

In a sense though, Kant ends up in the redraft of the first critique with his tongue in his cheek. For he knows something. He knows that h has discovered a maxim or  principle which can escape the trap of time he has created. This Is of course the Kantian imperative.

The imperative is frequently miss understood (by Kant a much as every one else) as a finished rule, which stands up and alone across time. An yet, given its freedom from context, and difficulty define in the positive it is far more than that. Rather it is surely better to say that to is creative principle, which transcends every one place or time or even universe.  Is then less a rule, a track in which we ought to be caught 9we are always free to ignore it after all0,a and more a shadow in whose life we are, and whose meaning we flesh out. The principle then is that which is able to create in our minds as a thought, and create is such a way that they thought is not ours alone – I is a thought that can belong to any thinking things ( so is not merely human). More than that hi thought is not tied o time. It does not then belong to the  one universe, all other thoughts in all other universes, and all other hegels or Marvin the paranoid android would agree with me: I catch all  (and am caught) in its creativity. Kant therefore in hi conception of desire holds out that true, rational desires outstrips all universes. They are the magic carpet between worlds.

 Moreover is surely a mistake to absolutely define the imperative as such The imperative falls on the world from outside, and impels reason to behave is a certain way, a behaviour that is of course utterly productive and useful. Fine, that bit is easy. And yet exactly what that fall into the world form an outside is in a sense is, is clearly complex. The imperative itself defies space and time and therefore particular definition. It does not really work like that. It falls then into the mind, and the mind distils it is a maxim now, and acts of that maxim It then feels it understands in that action all that that maxim is And yet a another time the  same maxim might force a human at once not the act the same way (quite) and yet to do so in the knowledge that even as they differ they are flowing the same maxim,. Or to but it differently the creativity do external reason with falls fro otherwise as pure thought in the mind is such that I must surely transcend not emery occasions but also abstractions. At every one time we will think we know what it is to follow such a series of rules, and yet exactly how hose rules operate each time may shift (in a world of evolving property where dos stealing being/ stealing  thought as one own  a time stealing? What is the creativity in tribute bands say/?We feel then in our currant formation of every rule that his is the best version yet, or the one that is the most advanced or even that it is the only one that we can believe, all the while we must acknowledge for he imperative demands that we d, that what it is not so fixed. Went we think it se wee the link, and we see the possibility of how, in context beyond our knowledge other things appear, and yet what those thinks are remains itself hidden.

Tat is it is h joy of reason, and its power that it infers always world in does not yet no of, and yet sees within the logic of its time. It then feels the rift, beyond the forms and materials it uses to create those forms, Any one reasons, any one maxim is then bound to is series of law and rules, and abstraction, in the form of hidden assumptions about what one is, o even words (which encourage abstractions). It only becomes a true categorical imperative then it shores itself of its own abstractive tangibles (the tools that create the ability to abstract),a dry resonated beyond them. Reason therefore enfolds the space beyond it, that unpacks the tools that allowed that reason to function in the fist place The imperative I the royal road to this place. And yet, of course as to be here is to stand beyond every human one cannot directly reach such a point, All one does is think a thought from the outside, and then allow it or be forced to allow it to dance off beyond one, dance beyond the abstraction, and revel in the crises cross of times beyond our ken, time the thought is equally at hoe within. It is no wonder then that Kant found it so very hard to define the categorical imperative.

 In a sense that is normal and natural. That Kant finds it so hard to define one. Or better ht it is easy to define an imperative in the domain of a false positive; for example one might think that it was positive to allow for the idea that one human can in the name of their own desire take stuff. He world is after all mine(or at least my idea, my perception, Why not then say that as it is I alone have rights to be what I am, and do what I can. I a have the rights *as  feel my stength0. But at this point of course the imperative sweeps into the thought. This very conception of myself  or even of my rights is not mine it insist. I everyone followed blending the conception of themselves in this manner, then that conception would collapse. No rights would exist (and no propriety) and the entire edifice would collapse.

The imperative therefore take false positive, that is little folds of stolen thought an borrowed perceptions, and reveals in their limitations the impossibility of using such element, be they perception or conception to build a world. The world is not simply ours, the imperative says, or better thought is never merely thought, and we need to remember this fact. In particular we need to remember that our categories and our thoughts are not really our own at all. Not to steal is to attempt to think in the light of this knowledge, a knowledge hat ought to aim to transcend engage as much as occasion. A language which taking maths as its model ought to attempt (as maths does often0 to transcend the very figures and initial abstraction that allow it. Reason and the imperative is the hand book of creation and interaction, the hand book to sand beyond every mind, or any thought. The abstraction beyond every reality.

And yet Kant has a caveat or implication, Imperatives are true for every renaming thing in so are as they are reasoning. The is then a particular initial at least, impact on human within such reason. We find it difficult to find the point at which a cat or a shrimp reason and man not wonderful at seeing angles or aliens, and yet my fellow humans there are minds I feel I know. The initial paths of shared thoughts, that is thought pointer abstraction that infolds other humans as well as me must be my started for reasoning. I think with my fellow humans. I grasp at a word into heir light and through their life. To think a rule, is then to make the correct first gesture. As I create a rule locate  myself in relation to a whole sequence of different thought and feelings.. To be light footed enough o do this, is then to imagine myself an emptying thinking  thing. That is I  imagine myself in between space, and yet the is really intertwining: I imagine that myself as empty consciousness or as what  fellow humans grasp. On this path to abstraction, I them with thought with my fellow humans, to wrap up the imperative in easy bite sized particle of thinking.

How lose can I do it/

Where else could I trap a principle but in the thoughts of my fellow humans? As maths transcends one, an yet needs it o begging counting, so reason need n initial thought or move beyond this one person and into inter personal space. Once their the flood gates are of course open, a den one can tumble into thoughts between connects and ultimately in between worlds: As true is the next or the last of the otherworld as this. As true for a God as for us.

 \indeed so powerful is this space, the othering of matter, that one needs o hypothesize a Go to allow one to return to reality. Or o put it better, the in-between space is open and endlessly tumbling. Imperative arise within it, and move between and across it with gay abandon. The direction it moves is endless therefore abstract and into though. The role of God is the same role of time. It is God that ensures that whatever lands are endlessly produced in this abstraction, then these lands, these slices of reason and abstract tools of reason (the assumptions that allowed us to grasp it) not only work together but also could be applied in the world, The rethought itself is eternally creative, and yet as part of that creation lies the idea that every one slice ought to be good, and only God can ensure that. God becomes then a real proposition of reasons: God is what allows the reality of each point once one has stepped beyond the conforming worlds of this space and time. Gods is what allows those other specific worlds their power in this world. That is that allows the fact that one has tumbles beyond this world to matter, as this beyond is then in God divine eye made to oscillate  in that.

N this of course the practical god of Kant is a good liebnizian. The difference is that where the monad remains in the one universe while it has the ability to transcend many,- other Admas0 and do so in the name of morality (and reality); the Kantian human actually in the name of morality moves beyond every universe, and any orbit. The Kantian Human is then the movement beyond the one world, and as such really does think like God. But  God retains the original power of the Leibniz creatrix, the power to breed whatever rather realties there are back into this (or other ) words. God remain the gateway into ethereal and moral world. The point that the two meet: God is then the reason why this world here and now can still be moral; the world would then (possibly) still exist without such a God, but we do be locked within the one dreary, predictable and causal dependent orbit. It I God and the reasons that allows us to escape dreary old cause and effect,  and allows pl reason to discover those thoughts that lie beyond any one series of worlds or being.

This of course then opens the final question not needs to grasp. Exactly how he wonders can one envisage this world in itself and through perception? It is clear that the very orbit of this world is beyond us. N I very power it must forever move into an orbit end our nature. Is in a sense that which cannot be directly perceived, that beauty that eludes perception s such. It is at his point of course the third critique leads its hand. On the one hand particular things become as if they were crated in morality. That is their beauty becomes something that understanding is always on the cusp of transfixing and yet which escape all conception. It poses the double the journey towards is the double journey of morality and the imperative. Not only does it show you or transport you into the world of the beyond of perception, the world where morality lies, but also it shows you or gives you the tools to think of the elusive nature of much morality All reasons flows as beautify flows. It is a moving thread, which uses the apparent chain of cause and effect  to create something other and yet  together  with time. Beauty then might revels reasons place, and might dispose the mind to be beautiful,  and yet its real power in is that it allows the mind the tools to gasp its own thinking power. hat is it own ability to elude reality as such and to move beyond this or that plane. The beauty f the lily, which is beyond e then becomes the engine the abstraction, the unit, in which I grasp at the idea morality (as one is the until unit of counting). But in the unit of moralility as it needs o be fixed in a world as such.

On the other, the same critique defined then how needs  grasp God's guarantee to the world. God allows morality to return from its orbit and fill on the world. He cannot of course every do this directly It must rather be as big journey as the moral is a journey. What God reveals then to the world is an order beyond humanity, and order ands a series of purposes, which its move and develop, and which are always bottomless. At every one point their is an order, and yet elsewhere there is also anther order, and then yet another Everywhere is ‘purpose that I or bits of order, and movements. The world then in the Name of God sings with the same song as morality does. The world of intricate ordering and many define levels.

 But more that this its is the world of emerging purpose. God as Teleology cannot directly act in the world, but rather purpose is revealed across it. Intricate and random actions reveal as pattern beyond them. r better they create beyond abstraction and beyond their simple interaction a series of links and loops, a series on imperative beyond every one statement of what they are. This ordering in the world, then elects (in the name of its logic) the ordering or reasons, that similarly moves beyond the one series of moves and creates an order beyond one domain of morality The ordering of the world, the drive of the world to create order, and flight of reasons across many orders are then given together in God’s purpose. The world moves towards reasons as reason moves off, moves between worlds. Gods is then the name of the bending on he world into the deepening pit of reasons, Reasons moves of, and the world plays catch up: God becomes then endless bender of the world into the point of abstraction (Kant develops this other space this infinite ideal space, beyond every bound, into which matter reality tumbles and with which it must conform in the notes of metaphysical foundations).

 

The imperative is therefore simply miss understood as a single point or even as a rule. It is rather  the thought kit for a journey beyond all universes, a journey beyond any event. And yet Kant is not (quite) finishes with this yet. He gives us a thought beyond events, and beyond any one tedious series (or even an infinite set0 of universes: A thought beyond all conceivable, and yet he also allows the event as such it. That s he knows that here is no point timing this been is one does not also create events that are real as well. Events need their own principle , their own beyond, for Reasons to double or differently transcend. Than is hey need their own sublime.

 

The sublime is of course all together odd.  In itself, and Deleuze notes it poses an event that transcends ones ability to comprehend it. The faculties are then sent spinning this way and that reason which they cannot grasp or master. What breaks down at such a point  is apparently ones very ability to hold time as a continua within ones mind. The past becomes shattered by the flight to the future, and the mind is opened up to an eternal difference that is beyond continuum, and beyond or other than unity. It is then delighted and terrified in equal measure, as it is forced to regard the limited nature of its own continua in the face of actual eruptive reasons. If can neither finish or even start its understanding, in the face of such difference. It then operates in the knowledge that what it records in itself, and though itself is wrong. Or better only relates to the faculty doing the recording It has no actual power to represent the world as such, and the sublime event as the sublime event itself endless defies all easy thought or any comprehension.

 On the face of it this is then a very direct collapse I the nature of the continuum. Here is difference as such emerging, and  becoming problematic foe the mind. Reason init rawest and must problematic form. And to a degree his is absolutely the case. And yet this reason is clearly very different in its relation to the continuum. On the one and, what breaks the continua is not man and heir relationship to Good, but an vent. It is then its otherness, it being beyond the world that breaks thought and makes it different or problematic or otherwise. The individual is then placed absolutely beyond the difference process. The effect then of the sublime is to (here one owes such a debt to Deleuze) pull reality of events outside reality of the mind. The events themselves transcend the one world or mind or even universe. They are the things beyond the world. The native of myriad other universes, and other types of word. They are the sublime. We are then  what jangles around inside the one world, grasping about trying to make sense of it all and yet only able to grasps brief and faltering continue; That I we are that which is within the world as a slice of time – it the slice of time, in the slices for time we create. The contrast with the beautiful, and the imperative behind it, is then marked. Te imperative and the beautiful are the magic carpets that allow us to oscillated in God’s name between times. We become then our own othered process. The sublime, in contrast tags us down a peg, an makes us feel our finitude, our own mortality in the one universe.

 Secondly, and building on from this, the logic of the sublime is that that they break through as the othering of continua. We feel dread, and beauty, and fear, as our mind safely floats above its own failure , its own inability to master or to grasp the world. We feel then the emotions of the sublime, we call upon them, in a sense o make good our lose, or at least o address it. The feeling ‘contains’ or express the sublime (which ultimately begin in a feeling). That is it expresses or contains within and through itself, the feeling of our broken nature than the sublime produced with in; the feeling that the continua we create are actually caught up by an elsewhere. This feeling, is then that which takes on the power or role of the containing function (much as God did). As we have it, ads we are in the delighted dread of the sublime, we know that we are somewhere different, somewhere difficult, somewhere beyond continua as such, and typed all the same still caught within the mind. That is caught up in the mechanics of perception, and the being of this world. There is then in this feeling(and its valditudarian desire for safety), the locating of a self within the world. That is the sublime has as a condition (our safety in a world that appears awesomely destructive).  It therefore in a sense operates in the check making of our action Difference is their as long as we are defined only in relation to it, and in or through in actions. The actual world of action then becomes poleaxed within a passive synthetic that renders actual actions (events) beyond ourselves We are their mere passive witness of this side of creation. The risk is of course that the  passivity which Kant argues is necessary for holding the sublime in the mind, spreads though a mind, bleeding into our actions, and potentially devalue them. A passive systemic is f itself valueless.: And is one cannot be a part of event as such went were exactly is one and ones action in the world?

That is, the sublime might well render the continuum problematic, in one sense, and yet it does o only to overwhelm and partially confirm it. He rind is rendered into a passive synthetic beyond everything. In this synthetic it continuum remains they are (all he exciting stuff happens elsewhere). The risk here (and Deleuze would reject that for himself at least), that hr mind as such them remains locked in the one world, the sealed passive monad. It does not grasp the comet trails Deleuze wants it to  –and does not directly ride events to other worlds. It is merely in the here and now.

This danger is mad all he more likely as the mind to house the sublime within it creates feelings of awe and wonder, fear, and smugness These feeling then take on the guise of continuum. They give the mind its own sealed in nature – it own ability to be within the one thing  . That is they allow it to create around the event a whisk that  is difference, and yet renders that difference powerless (the third synthetic becomes then its passive an meaningless0. The challenge Deleuze actual represents, that I allow a difference a non Kantian thought – one that ill make the individual as the active elements in an event (and so not a person) on the comet ride is lost.

Or to u it another way – kant muffs the sublime. He defies well enough,  and yet then does not allow that the events itself is differing us, and jangling across the mind, is taking one always to some other world, other monsters other temples. The continuum in is passivity is allowed to much power. And yet this muff is almost the natural response to the Deleuze style critique. The problem of exactly how an event (and the concepts that eventually house it) first within a body is a real one, and a difficult one. Exactly, after all how does an individual become an event in themselves? In what sense is a life or a period in a life n event? S it really like the throwing o a coin, a storm or the creation o the world (all other moment of individualization). Here the problem is not that one cannot breed an individuality that links them all together, but rather that one can – but them one has to still face down he problem of is this it? That is is this all that difference does? Are events ad myself as an event the only action one has? And if so how is my body a part of the event of my events? Ht is how do m being an event reflect ask into everything else I am/if that merely yet another outside event, or do I need something other? Or put  it another way – is it really good enough merely to have one difference for the outside. Does that not make a nonsense of the inside: which becomes inside as outsize and then eventually slips into being on the outside. This difference in difference lies on of Kant's strengths. I might mean that he cannot easily hollow out the event as such, and yet it does mean that he managed to create a magic carpet within my mind, the imperative allows one to directly travel in the mind between the worlds.

 

 

Kant creates n a sense a double break for the mind  and two ways to approach difference. One might b in the categorical imperative, and face than problem of the abyss of knowing what one is talking about. He imperatives power lies in being light footed. It is eternal, because its formation devolve and change.  Understand myself in its showman yet this shadowing is within a m – it in. It might never be understood within a slice of continuity, and yet the process manifest itself across these slices. That is in the beauty whose nature is not their as such and cannot be gasped, and through  divinity who is nowhere (and not a part in any world). The alternative, the sublime on the other hand has reference to something utterly beyond a me, and yet which does not allow the journeying out of the one universe. I posses a concept that I can only respond to by jumping of its back, and allowing it to take me into an elsewhere, into a difference.

That is Kant's legacy is surely that there are at least two paths for being different within. And yet this of course leads one to a further problem is this all there is -  are their other paths  a problem the next part turns to in earnest.

 More than this, one might wonder if there are at least two other ways to be different. There is the difference that come within  me from outside, and yet which makes by utterly different (form myself). I become then as a mind at least a problem for empiricism – a problem of how one builds a should with the world from that which one finds in oneself from elsewhere. But and the same time, as long as being with the world (in the imperative) I clearly need also to be in the world. That is I need o work out a theory of actions that operate in the world and to allow that world to be different from me, and make a difference to me (actions then that remains  active and yet elude consciousness). There appears then at least initially to be four (im)pre forms of middling. Those that reckon with events, hose at reckon with morality, those that loop into empiricism (and oneself as the holder of others), and those who were understood as myself as making a difference. He four form the themes of the next part of this work.