“Just Do It!”—Kant and the Immigration “Crisis” Edward Cline
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/
A gnomish little man from the 18th century is the author of so many bad things, including Europe’s current invasion of “immigrants,” who claim a right to infest the countries they settle in. But, who’s fault is it, really? The gnome’s, or those who believe what he said?
“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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Edward Cline
Williamsburg, VA
September 2015
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Links:
Rand on Kant from Lexicon:
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/kant,_immanuel.html
Kant on ethics:
http://ethics13.blogspot.com/2012/10/blog-post.html
Guardian article on European voluntary suicide:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/sep/05/refugee-crisis-austrians-greet-thousands-off-hungarian-buses-live-updates?CMP=ema_565
Kant’s categorical imperative
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
Groundwork of Morals UNC link:
http://www.unc.edu/~gsmunc/phil22/Kantsum.pdf
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/
…by obeying that Kantian categorical imperative to “do good” by the “asylum seekers.”
Greenfield article on boots on faces
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/260029/imagine-progressive-boot-stamping-human-face-daniel-greenfield
I have sent the link to this article to a wide circle of correspondents with the caveat: “This is a depressing but necessary read.” Daniel explains the purpose of the left’s nihilism in no-holds-barred terms. It explains in its essentials why bakers and court clerks are fined and/or jailed for not catering to gay couples, why cops are being randomly murdered or attacked, why Obama is simply attacking the whole country with his Muslim and Mexican immigration hordes. Obama is the trend-setter and exemplar ringleader in the current wave of nihilism, murders, rapes, and destruction of the good for being the good. Nihilism knows no reason or reasoning. It exists for its own sake. The way to fight it is to plant one’s own boot in its face, forever and forever.
Gates of Vienna riots on Lesbos
Angela Merkel forces immigrants on Germans
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/03/german-immigration-numbers-soar-as-angela-merkels-popularity-dips/
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/28/angela-merkel-david-cameron-migrant-cap
The end of France New York Times
Spencer Jihad Watch on immigrants
or
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260019/hijrah-europe-robert-spencer
Quotation from Classical Liberalism review:
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2015/09/review-classical-liberalism-primer.html
Emma Thompson on immigration
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3221243/Britain-RACIST-not-taking-refugees-claims-Hollywood-star-Emma-Thompson.html
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