Kant and Neil Gaiman

Are we the baddies, Hans?

Are we the baddies, Hans?

This shall be the first post in my series about Kant. I’ve been writing drafts of articles about Kant for most of my free time during the past few days and then decided that there’s so much that can be said about everything wrong with Kant on every level that I could write dozens of articles that could all be way over the Substack length limit even without pictures.

A while back I was thinking about how Jack Kirby was the worst author ever and had no business writing stories. Whenever Stan Lee edited them, sure, some of his ideas could be good. Norse gods were actually aliens? OK, cool. Silver Surfer and Galactus? Neat. However, when Jack Kirby was allowed to write stuff, it basically had all the worst flaws of D&D 3.5’s expanded books or any other kind of overly pagan literature: Oh, hahaha, your character isn’t a god, so they can’t do anything. Also, the gods are these boring, overly predictable, childish, allegorical things with no depth. So in D&D’s Forgotten Realms you have the vapidness of Elminster and Mystra, etc. and all the “THE ARCANE” stuff and in Jack Kirby you have “COSMIC ENERGY BLASTS” which is frankly pretty comparable to the boringness of “ULTIMATE POWER” in Ed Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms being just really big “FIREBALL” spells with someone shouting Fireball or whatever. Neil Gaiman is basically that as an author plus trying to romanticize child abuse in e.g. Coraline. As one Internet commentor also said, he doesn’t write “hero’s journey stories,” and I generally find this the first sign someone is rationalizing being the bad guy.

A couple of days ago I made a mention with

Michael Newberry

that we really shouldn’t be basing psychological personality theories on Jung since Jung is really just an adaption of Kant. Jung literally said “Kant is my philosopher” at one point. A couple of days before then I was reading about the idea of the beautiful and sublime since I found another piece about aesthetics of Effective Altruism which led me to want to research the idea of the beautiful and sublime more since Effective Altruism was adopting the most boring aesthetics of all time, though considering Effective Altruism is the same as longtermism and one of the worst philosophies, this is probably for the better.

Aesthetics as Epistemic Humility

This whole idea “beautiful things are like food and flowers, because beauty shows something is useful” was immediately evocative of the idea of “the beautiful and sublime” to me, except it seems like these people essentially took Burke’s idea of the sublime being better and inverted it to say the sublime was actually bad. The thing is, Michael Newberry said Burke was probably being satirical in the first place, and I say even if he wasn’t, the idea of the sublime being better than the merely beautiful was around before Burke anyway, so saying that the beautiful is better would be a genetic fallacy, though the article above makes no mention of Burke or Kant or Schiller or any other kind of literature, it simply seems like this person was so inundated with the idea of beauty as being this small, petite, cutesy idea because they were picking up on “the beautiful and sublime” from the zeitgeist but not actually recognizing it.

Anyway, the reason this kind of pagan story is so boring is because it’s Kantian. Jung took his ideas from Kant and Kant’s whole thing was that he was abolishing knowledge to make room for faith. This is also not how any traditional religious thinker has ever thought of their religious beliefs, they have largely thought of their religious beliefs as being something they believe is objectively true about the world, not something that’s picked up Rorschach-like to try to impose arbitrary order on an unknowable world. Talk about other annoying authors when you bring up Alan Moore with his nihilistic “this is how superheroes would be in the real world!” idea. People still end up relating to Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, and the Comedian all the time just because they’re more optimistic than he is, even if they really shouldn’t and the reason the Watchman movie was also bad is just because no one wanted to adapt the source material anyway. People thought of Kant as being essentially an anti-religious thinker and made fun of him by calling their dogs Kant, which is perhaps calling him a cynic considering what cynic meant.

Kant thought that the science of the time was undermining religion, but as always, we know that only happens when people have a bad idea of science in the first place. Kant didn’t even believe in science, Kant believed that the supposed inability of science to understand the world meant that science and art should be separated, science had to stop and be replaced with some ridiculous version of religion that was basically religious hypocrisy formalized, and that true genius could only apply to art, which had to be epitomized by being as senseless as possible in the fashion of vomiting paint on a canvas and then killing yourself and maybe some other people in order to capture the idea that the real world was unknowable. Kant, figure of “the Enlightenment,” was the inspiration of Heinrich von Kleist, who is generally associated with “Romantic irrationalism.” Kant was the original 1984-style thinker, saying that irrationalism was reason, ugliness was “sublime,” freedom was slavery (look up Schiller’s theory of tragedy,) and more. Even though I’m not an objectivist, it’s very patently obvious that Kant inspired Hitler and all Kant’s claims to “liberalism” were just Newspeak doublethink that Mises fell for and Ayn Rand did a good job rejecting even if I think she makes other errors in her own philosophy. We know Ayn Rand’s philosophy at least doesn’t lead to Nazism, it leads to billionaires leaving society to collapse while they go and raise chickens instead of being as productive as they could, sure, but it doesn’t lead to Hitler. Speaking of which, of course Hitler wanted to go to art school while being a huge fan of Kant, do people forget that Kant’s whole thing was largely discussing the philosophy of aesthetics? He also did Edward Bernay’s schtick before Edward Bernays was ever born, heck, before Freud was even a gleam in his mother’s imaginary castration-anxiety-fantasy phallus.

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful - Wikipedia

Immanuel Kant critiqued Burke for not understanding the causes of the mental effects that occur in the experience of the beautiful or the sublime. According to Kant, Burke merely gathered data so that some future thinker could explain them.

To make psychological observations, as Burke did in his treatise on the beautiful and the sublime, thus to assemble material for the systematic connection of empirical rules in the future without aiming to understand them, is probably the sole true duty of empirical psychology, which can hardly even aspire to rank as a philosophical science.

— Immanuel Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, X.^[1]

Kant thought of his philosophy as, in his own words, empirical psychology, and since most people didn’t read philosophy books, Schiller was his executor, writing plays that survived for centuries. It’s also a myth that Goethe and Schiller were just best friends forever, all the literature I’ve read and the primary sources I’ve found depicts them hating each other’s personalities and writing. This seems like a proverbial case of people trying to add poison to the food to get people to consume it since generally no one wants to self-knowingly consume poison. Since Goethe is more like an antidote than anything in my opinion and people find Schiller and Kant too boring to read even if they take the idea that they’re just liberal and rationalist at face value I think people are largely insulated from the effects.

The reason Goethe is largely an antidote is Goethe as well as Schelling took Kant’s idea that the mind can’t perceive reality independently of itself and went like yes, that’s true, but there’s still an objective reality which the mind has access to and this means reality on some level is mindlike. This is also where Goethe would be put at odds with Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, since Goethe very clearly believed in God and said things like “God conceals Himself, but not to everyone” while Ayn Rand’s philosophy was largely a philosophy of atheism to the point many people consider it an anti-Christian philosophy akin to Nietzscheanism more than a political ideology. Goethe as well as some other anti-Kantian idealists, who I think Kant would consider to be “empirical idealists” since he called his philosophy “transcendental idealism and empirical realism as opposed to transcendental realism and empirical idealism,” all very much seemed to think reality was something in the mind of God as well, but was also, you know, actually real. Additionally, Kant wrote that he didn’t believe there would be “a Newton of the grass blade” and generally put down science, both by saying there were certain things it was never able to know, and by saying real genius could only be artistic and not scientific. Goethe, Schelling, etc. as well as da Vinci, Shakespeare, and most other beloved writers, musicians, painters, and artists in general could hardly be more antithetical, both by portraying stories where either the good guys win, or the lack of good guys in some stories means it’s a cautionary tale but not something to be emulated, and using science prolifically.

This is also quite appropriate in light of the recent Olympics scandal that opened with a parody of the Last Supper by da Vinci. Yes, it was a reference to a painting of the feast of Dionysus, which itself was a parody of the Last Supper. It seems significant not only that it was about religion, but that the specific example was the polymath who was famous for anatomy and engineering vs. someone whose agenda was clearly just anti-Christian (whatever you may think of Christianity or any other religion) devolving and aping him. Seeing as even many people who weren’t Christian vocally disliked the ceremony, I think my assessment is correct.

The Last Supper

The Feast of Dionysus

Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a famous anatomical study by da Vinci

No Newton of the Grass Blade: On the impossibility of scientific genius in Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” – Footnotes2Plato

In preparation for a lecture on mind and nature in German Idealism, I’m working my way through Kant’s third of three critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Prior to this sitting, I’ve only ever spent time with small sections of this text. For example, sections 75 and 76 in the second part on teleological judgment were major catalysts driving my earliest attempts to counter mechanistic biology by replacing it with an alternative theory of organism (for example, this essay written between 2008 and 2009). At that point, I had paid almost no attention to the first part on aesthetic judgment. Having read over that part twice now in the past few weeks, I realize that I had not fully understood what was at stake in Kant’s attempt to articulate a critical philosophy of biology, i.e., a transcendental study of life itself. The key take away for me was Kant’s denial of scientific genius. Only artists, and especially poets, can be considered geniuses. A genius is nature appearing in the form of the human being giving the rule to art. A genius is someone who, without following explicit rules and so according to a method mysterious even to themselves, is able to give artistic expression to the formative forces of nature. Without the slightest contrivance, as though they emerged merely from the free play of the imagination, genius is able to produce beautiful works that, for those with cultivated taste at least, are suggestive of supersensible ideas and cosmic intelligences.

But the notion of a scientific genius is a contradiction in terms, since for Kant natural science presupposes the lawful system of categories imposed universally upon our experience of nature by the understanding. Science produces conceptually determinant knowledge about nature, principally in the form of synthetic a priori logical and mathematical constructions (which if they cannot be known a priori are sorted according to the sieve of experiment). If a scientist cannot tell you with precision exactly how she came to know what she knows, then she doesn’t know anything. Knowledge production is always such that anyone with sufficient training should be able to grasp it and to reproduce it. Artistic genius, however, cannot be taught. Its products remain forever beyond the reach of mere skill or education. Artistic geniuses gain aesthetic insight into nature, but fail to provide any scientific knowledge of nature. Scientists, according to Kant, can catch no cognitive sight (i.e., they have no intellectual intuition) of the hidden cause of nature’s self-organizing processes.

“It is quite certain,” writes Kant,

“that we can never adequately come to know the organized beings and their internal possibility in accordance with merely mechanical principles of nature, let alone explain them; and indeed this is so certain that we can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans even to make such an attempt or to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered; rather, we must absolutely deny this insight to human beings” (section 75).

Additionally, Goethe and Schelling seemed to have taken up this challenge in diametric opposition to Kant, since, in addition to Goethe saying that human beings possessed intuition which Kant denied and there was indeed some kind of perception separate from the senses and proving this by creating the whole RGBW/CYMK color theory used today (red, green, blue, and white as additive primary colors and cyan, yellow, magenta, and black as subtractive) even if people have definitely bastardized this idea by calling themselves “intuitive empaths” to just promote clearly-fraudulent fortune teller cons in many cases, Goethe became the preeminent biologist of that time with his theories of morphology, typology, etc. and discovered the human intermaxillary bone, something which, along with the theory of evolution that Schelling really originally formalized in its modern form (there were versions before his but his is the most obviously identifiable as the origin of “the modern synthesis” and not Charles Darwin’s or Erasmus Darwin’s, the latter of which Schelling explicitly rejected, the former of which is… just Schelling’s theory plus natural selection, which was not considered all that central to evolution even during Darwin’s lifetime, much less if you ask any actual biologist rather than pseudoscientific ideologue alive today, literally just use the phrase “the modern synthesis” and you will have firsthand experience with everything I say) is generally mistakenly attributed to Darwin.

eoht.info/page/Goethe on evolution

Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution.pdf (uchicago.edu)

Not every work of art needs to be some sort of scientific illustration, but scientific illustrations, especially of biology, are far and away the most anti-Kantian thing that has ever existed, and the basis by which traditional art was learned back before it was abstractified due to silly notions during the Cold War which Michael Newberry talks about extensively on his blog that I think you should at least kind of read a little of. (On that note, I don’t think I would oppose abstract art per se, since abstract art and nonrepresentational art are not always synonymous, but if someone’s complaining about abstract art I still know what they mean. As Michael Newberry himself said, “abstraction” is incorrectly used as a euphemism for things that technically aren’t abstracted from anything at all in the first place. Looking at a zebra and drawing stripes separately, my example not his, is an abstraction; vomiting on a canvas is just pointless and gross.) The ability to make a realistic painting with good anatomy of people or animals or plants, or to use perspective, or color theory, biochemistry (the same kinds of oils you want in your paintings are the same ones you want in your diet because they’re the ones that form chains with each other, that’s why linseed oil is preferred, because of the omega-3s,) and just to be scientific in general implies being able to make these purely-scientific studies anyway, in addition to adding psychology on top of those. Scientific art in general is the least Kantian thing imaginable, even when it’s not so explicitly scientific.

Yes, that would be the difference between abstraction and vomiting on a canvas.

By Kant’s own definition the only thing that’s not an idealist philosophy is essentially Paul Churchland’s eliminative materialism, though I do think that kind of philosophy is very much a kneejerk reaction to Kantianism since many people who didn’t rebut Kant at all just decided to become insane since hey, the mind has no access to the noumenal, so maybe madness is the noumenal. Hence nihilistic art, the idea of the mad artist, people like Hitler, Jung, and Nietzsche deciding to worship gods of madness, etc. Heinrich von Kleist was the first of these, despite all the self-proclaimed Enlightenment thinkers wanting to associate him with Romantic irrationalism. No, Kleist was the direct disciple of Kant and this cannot be contested based on firsthand sources where he writes about this at length, Kant is simply an irrationalist who claims the mantle of reason in a Big Brother 1984-esque fashion, which should be unsurprising since Kant was the favored philosopher of Hitler and was about as influential on the Soviets since, even if they’re mostly associated with Marx and Hegel, Marx and Hegel were mostly Kantians and Schiller was quite popular in early Russian literature was well, which anyone who’s read Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground should know. “Freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength” is sort of a satirical summary of Kant since it’s too on the nose, but that’s literally Kant’s entire philosophy.

Kant, Immanuel—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Cultural Collapse: From Puccini to John Cage

In this ideology of gods which I think is largely lifted from Jung, you can see the idea that the “apparent” (read: real) world doesn’t matter at all, and I think this destroys Jack Kirby’s comics, Neil Gaiman’s books, and almost everything else. Heck, you can even see it in Coraline itself, with how abuse is portrayed with there being a “real mother” who Coraline is supposed to just accept (and not want to change or anything) even though she’s clearly portrayed as being originally neglectful and over time increasingly abusive, while the “other mother” looks nice originally but turns into an obviously evil witch over time. This is just the rationalization of abuse. Also, I’ve read that in the novel, as opposed to the movie (I didn’t like the movie all that much and had no time for the novel) Coraline is actually being led by the cat to become the next witch after she kills the original witch, and that really obviously seems like it’s about the cycles of abuse being perpetuated.

No one is convinced by Jack Kirby’s Kantian, as well as Jungian and rather Gnostic, idea that Wonder Woman only lives in the phenomenal world where horrible things like evolution give us mutants that Disney kept trying to cancel making movies about because evolution doesn’t exist in Kantian Gnostic formalized-religious-hypocrisyland, so we should all prefer to read his story about Big Barda, who lives in the noumenal world where everyone is 1000 miles tall and an obvious unsubtle allegory, and every generic human concept is literally Eternal-ized despite the fact there’s no reason these things would even be constant on hominin Earth society never mind across all the cosmos. This just seems like a silly attempt to sell his narcissistic badly-written stories. And Neil Gaiman is the same, except instead of creating the negative comic book geek stereotype that exists even in the age of Avengers and Batman movies and people knowing that not everyone who likes comics is like that, Neil Gaiman got actually accepted by supposedly highbrow intellectuals for the longest time.

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods TV show even got canceled less than halfway through, which is unsurprising since the plot to American Gods is literally just that them kids are worshipping TV and Internet instead of Odin and Aphrodite, which is absolutely ridiculous and, for something based on “depth psychology,” rather psychologically shallow (as if a Kantian saying the opposite thing of reality should ever surprise anyone.) Does Neil Gaiman really think TV and Internet are primal psychological forces motivating people rather than greed, novelty, ego, neglect, and all the other psychological forces that would lead people to create those things, profit on them, and possibly spend too much of their lives in front of them? Then, this is the guy who wrote Coraline about how sympathetic child abusers are and how you should just love dysfunctional relationships but the abused are doomed to become the abusers always, he’s not a nice guy. Why is anyone surprised at the fact that someone whose story ideology is literally Nazism, who associates with the likes of Amanda Palmer and Russell Brand, and who justifies all sorts of child abuse and other dark things while writing stories without heroes because he’s just rationalizing being the bad guy to himself is crazy and evil just like Hitler, who famously just wanted to be a painter but always had propagandistic goals?

Additionally,

Stephanie Molchan

has said on one of my articles that she thinks the biggest problem with the education system today is that the sciences and humanities have been separated and people are forced to specialize too early and everything I learn only makes me concur even more than I did then. We have fallen a long way from Einstein playing his violin to Elon Musk and his fictional alter-ego Elon Musk seemingly not even knowing a pop song like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which I’m sure I’ve annoyed everyone by singing over and over both in my apartment and while walking around outside for the past few days while writing about Kant. It’s only fitting that the philosopher of Nazism and a Jewish singer-songwriter should be so opposed. Considering a lot of what Elongated Muskrat wants his brain chip for is to listen to music in his head, I think maybe he should stop that and just learn some more music theory and practice music so he can play songs in his head using only his mind like Music Charles Xavier or whatever he wants to be, though I’m sure he would think Leonard Cohen is Music Magneto since Chippy is truly the Henry Ford of our time. Fun fact, I used to not want an iPod because I could already hear songs in my head if I wanted since I practiced music and could remember how songs sounded really easily. Elon’s new nickname is going to be Music Magneto since he apparently doesn’t have the power to listen to music in his head, and additionally, he’s immune to the idea of having taste in music since apparently he runs around humming “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” though this is because of his dense skull, not because he created an anti-music helmet. Musiceto. That doesn’t flow so much but it’ll work for now.

The idea that STEM and the arts or humanities should be separate is thoroughly Kantian. Comte’s positivism, which is the most popular philosophy though luckily less popular than STEM researchers and students not having a philosophy at all, is directly attributable to Kant. Like all Kantians, Comte also ended up in the nuthouse, so don’t be a positivist, play your violin like Einstein. I used to think my getting into an arts school first and later playing my cello too much when I graduated from that one where we had drawing classes all the time to a school with mandatory music education was a distraction that kept me out of advanced STEM schools and later Ivy League schools, but now I think that if anything I didn’t have nearly enough arts education compared to what would be optimal, not ending up in a specialized STEM school was a good thing, and not going to an Ivy League school while Claudine Gay and her friends were there was also a good thing, so I am exactly where I need to be at this moment in time even if I didn’t used to understand that at all.

Auguste Comte (1824)

I have always regarded Immanuel Kant not only as a very powerful thinker, but as the metaphysical father of the philosophy of positivism … undoubtedly the greatest and most positive advance that I have made following in the footsteps of Kant is the discovery of the evolution of human ideas according to the law of three stages, namely the theological, metaphysical and scientific phases: The Kantian philosophy in my opinion is the very basis of the three stages of positivism.¹

WORKS CITED

…

See finally: “The personal life of Comte had many unhappy aspects. He was twice committed to an insane asylum … John Stuart Mill was one of Comte’s principal sponsors, helping him to remain solvent, write, and spread his cult. The positive philosophy was a reaction to the speculative phase that developed in philosophy after Kant.”

AUGUSTE COMTE AND KANT: POSITIVISM AND KANTIANISM | by AMERICAN IDEALISM | Medium

Edit: A brief apology to Elon Musk: it’s not true that he’s “completely immune to music” even if he doesn’t know as much about it as even I do, much less a professional musician. There are still things that really annoy me about Elon Musk but I’m willing to forgive him on the condition that he’s, you know, willing to repent of making all this fake Neuralink and xAI and whatever and pretending to know about things he clearly doesn’t know anything about, and that his idea of genetic purity is “Hitler!” and not “I need to keep the genes that I’m studying pure because of how genes are collected and microorganisms like to contaminate everything with their genes, the only genetic purity I want is 100% pure tardigrade genes after all,” though to be fair that’s a great joke in a context that isn’t painting Elon in a false light. He’s not anti-aesthetic, as

Rachel Haywire

pointed out and I saw firsthand when I was visiting X.com (even if he’s wearing his Satanist costume around and writing Rupi Kaur poetry, hey, it’s a start, and a start is good even if there’s a temptation to be like “dude, that’s cringe” just when people like me and many others are annoyed at him) and he’s not Antisemitic/Hitler. He’s not even all that close to being Sheldon Cooper even if he’s very much been riding the wave of the public wanting intelligent people to be these autistic people who are solely focused on hard sciences and Elon Musk fitting the mold.

Now the wave is crashing on him and I especially shouldn’t kick him when he’s down. There is still very much a condition that Elon has to stop pretending he knows about things he obviously doesn’t for me to really forgive him, but that still doesn’t warrant my false comments on him just because I’m still annoyed at him and he still hasn’t recanted acting this way after all. If he doesn’t recant acting that way he’s going to lose everything and that’s pretty obvious at this point, but I don’t want him to lose everything. After all, my tardigrade genes and biomimicry AIs and other things I want to work on that, incidentally, he would probably really like if he could just put his ego aside and let someone else be the leader of that aren’t going to take me to Mars all on their own and I really want to go to Mars too, and he’s still one of the only people who’s being really optimistic about the future even if that sadly seems to be being mixed too much with his overinflated ego and that’s harming him now. Aside from the not-at-all-minor issue of his abusive father making him feel entitled to everything, just because he has money, he can’t go like “I’m totally Iron Man, I’m also Doctor Strange, and the longtermist stuff makes me Thanos, so of course I’m Charles Xavier, because I’m all the smart people, I’m the same as optimism in the future!”

He is not, and I hope he can understand that one of the whole points of superheroes is, you know, that they’re basically all on teams, even Superman, and David Bowie “Heroes” is about how we can be heroes, not just Elon all by himself thinking the world is dumber than him just because he picked the one really obvious thing to specialize in and got praise from that while those of us who are more like the Xaviers of the world are just back here not being so recognized going on speeches about Schelling creating the modern theory of evolution and Alexander von Humboldt (hey, that can be shorted to Xander if Elon wants any more X names for his kids or projects) and Goethe because what’s keeping people who like these things that are a bit less flashy than rockets out is the inherently un-flashiness combined with, well, politics, which I think someone like Elon who’s autistic and also just not historically interested in politics will be blind to even if the ego is definitely still a problem too in my opinion, so there are a couple of things getting mixed and only one of them is really the poison and it’s not purely that the Iron Man suit is flashier than mind stuff, and I’m not going to laugh at the fact that he really wants an Iron Man suit because to a large extent that’s perfectly reasonable even if it wouldn’t work the same way in real life, there’s what semioticists and evolutionary biologists would call a costly signal from me if there ever were one. The reusable rockets are a good idea which I can recognize even at my most annoyed with this guy, and anyone else who tries to work on them will at best be starting from way behind the point he’s at even if he’s spent his whole life on those things. Some other things like Teslas are genuinely a good idea. So I hope for his sake and the sake of everyone who’s still optimistic for the future he can stop letting his ego hurt him, and even if he doesn’t, it doesn’t help me to keep mocking him.